Speaking of hearty brown bread...

as I did in passing near the end of my last post, I baked a loaf recently. It's just the second half of the batch of batter bread dough I made last month, but I baked it with a substantially different technique and got substantially better results, although, to be honest, I'm not sure why.

If you just re-read that first post or if you've got an exceptionally good memory, you'll recall that the batter bread was made without kneading which naturally resulted in a soft, crumbly texture from the lack of gluten. Since then I've given some thought to the matter and I wondered if I could adapt techniques used for other low-gluten breads made from batters like cornbread.

I've only recently started freezing dough so I'm not sure of the most appropriate way to get it ready for baking. What I've been doing is defrosting in the refrigerator overnight, putting the dough into a loaf pan in the morning and letting it sit, lightly covered, on the counter until I get home from work to give it enough time to come up to room temperature and then rise.

This time, instead of a loaf pan, I used an 8x8 inch baking pan. This dough, I figured, would be loose enough to spread out. I neglected to take a 'before' picture, so you'll just have to imagine a sizable lump of what looks rather like clay in the center of the pan. Here's the 'after' picture. The dough spread out nicely and rose to just about exactly fill the pan. There was a bit of a rise above in the middle, but the dough stuck to the parchment paper I used to cover it so it deflated a little when I removed it.

I was hoping for one of our usual summer afternoon thunderstorms to keep the room humid and blot out the sun, but it was a bright dry day and the dough crusted over in the oven-like heat of my kitchen. That, no doubt, hampered the rise, but this dough didn't have the structure to hold itself up very far anyway. I spritzed the top with water and olive oil to soften it up before baking.

Instead of the wacky baking method in the original recipe, I used a more standard cornbread/cake method of baking it at 350 degrees until a knife inserted in the center came out clean. It took about 40 minutes. There wasn't any extra rise in the oven; In fact it looks like it shrunk a little and the top crusted over hard.





On the other hand, take a look at the texture inside--dense and bubbly with a bit of chew. Even the crunchy barley bits softened pleasantly. Miles better than the texture I got from this same dough last time. Maybe I accidentally used the no-knead method and got gluten to form just by leaving a loose dough to sit?

I'd experiment more, but all this rigmarole hardly seems worth the effort if the point is to simulate a loaf properly made in the first place. Might be a good way to salvage a poorly kneaded loaf, but then so is kneading. Maybe I'll just write this off as a one time thing unless you guys see some practical upshot of all this.

Migas con huevos, Chinese-style

I was digging around the back of my freezer looking for a quick lunch when I came across the remnants of a pack of frozen scallion pancakes I don't remember buying.
You know scallion pancakes; they're a mainstay of good dim sum and Chinese appetizers from lousy hole-in-the-wall Chinese places. As dim sum, they're usually light, flaky and utterly lacking in character or interest. Get them at a hole-in-the-wall and they're heavy, greasy and sit like a lump in your stomach--just the thing for absorbing alcohol at 3 in the morning. Out of the freezer, they're closer to the latter version, but add an egg and meat of some sort and they're a passable meal. Unfortunately, the last of mine had been smashed into pieces.

I've posted about Spanish-style migas a couple times here, but there's also Mexican-style that instead of using bread crumbs as the base starch uses torn-up corn tortillas. This could work.

I'll be cooking this in my flat-bottomed wok (which is pretty similar to a traditional migas pan), so it's going to be a quick process and I've got to get everything I'm adding prepped before I start. Chopped onion and green pepper work in both Mexican and Chinese cuisine. I can spare a handful of beansprouts (the rest are going into an Indonesian salad I'll post about later), and some bay scallops and shredded pork should work as proteins. And finally, a couple eggs. Spanish-style migas drops a fried egg on top, but Mexican-style mixes everything into scrambled eggs. That seems more appropriate.

The cooking went pretty quickly. The first thing was to heat up oil in the flat-bottomed wok and fry the scallion pancake pieces up crisp. Once they were nearly done, I added the onion and pepper and let them soften before adding the bean sprouts, scallops and pork. Once the scallops were cooked (no more than a minute), I added a drizzle of soy sauce and two beaten eggs. I stirred constantly until the eggs were just set and then everything leaves the pan. In the bowl, the dish is finished off with chili oil and a squeeze of lemon to brighten things up. And there it is:


It's a bit unsightly I'll admit. It would look better with more eggs. My egg to bread ratio is low for Mexican-style and high for Spanish-style migas. I would have gone with more, but this is already a hearty serving and the scallion pancake is likely go flabby in leftovers. Right now, though, the crisp-chewy pancake and differently-crisp bean sprouts with the still firm onion and pepper and the soft eggs and pork gives a lot of textural interest to each forkful. As for flavor, each component adds its own character, but the eggs pull the disparate elements together. The scallion pancake in particular adds a lot that rice wouldn't. This is really a lot better than it has any business being. It's a nice hearty brunch; I'm glad I tried it.

It seems to me that Mexican and Chinese are two cuisines particularly well suited for the bowl full of mixed bread and eggs plus flavorings dish concept. You could make an American breakfast version with French toast, maybe. Can you guys think of any other versions that might work?

Butter poached shrimp, new potatoes and pearl onions

It should tell you how far awry my cooking went today that none of those four ingredients were in the recipe I was making. Also, that recipe was for ice cream.

The original idea here was to a) use the last of the CSA celery and b) make a new ice cream flavor since I hadn't in a while. Put those two together and you get, first, celery ice cream--which might work as a component in a savory dish--second, celery and peanut butter ice cream--a natural sweet pairing that is interesting but presents textural issues--and third, celery-infused peanut butter ice cream with raisins--an ice cream version of ants on a log (ants in a bog maybe?).

Peanut butter ice cream recipes aren't hard to find, but how to infuse the celery flavor? I don't want to cook it as I want the raw flavor so I can't use the usual infusion method. But I figure celery is mostly water; if I run it through the food processor it should break down into mush easily enough. And with supermarket celery I think it would have worked. CSA celery is different though, much more dense. I processed it with a little milk and just got a bowlful of celery shards.

Plan B: add all the milk and cream and process the celery until everything turns green and it's fairly smooth. Strain out the big chunks and there you go. I give it a few pulses and things are indeed turning green, but there's not a lot of celery flavor getting into the liquid. I figure a couple minutes processing should get everything good and combined and add in the celery leaves for good measure. But when I check the progress I find the tiny bits of celery encased in a mass of creamy gunk--I've churned the cream into butter. I thought making butter was supposed to be a lot harder than that. The cream was ultrapasturized; Isn't that supposed to stop it from separating quite so easily?

So, the ice cream is ruined. I fish the solids out of what I suppose is now celery-colored skim milk and ponder what to do with them. Nobody wants celery-flavored butter so I'm going to have to get them apart. I can do something like distilation. Just like water and alcohol boil at different temperatures allowing their separation, butter and celery melt at different temperatures and that should let me separate them.

I want to use gentle heat so I put it in a double boiler. It works, sort of, but a lot of the milk solids are stuck to the celery and aren't going anywhere. In that case, I may as well skip the gentle heat, simmer it for a while and try to clarify it. When you simmer plain butter, the milk solids turn brown and sink to the bottom leaving clarified butter on top; maybe these milk solids will be able to drag the celery down with them. I simmer for ten minutes and I can start to see some clarification around the edges, but no browning. Close enough, I scoop it into a cheesecloth-lined strainer and squeeze out the liquids.

Here's the result.

Still not quite clear, but at least it isn't green. It does taste of celery so, hey, at least I finally managed to infuse some flavor. While it hardened in the refrigerator I considered what to do with it and came up with butter poaching. Looking at what I've got around the house to poach, I first thought of salmon, which isn't bad with celery, but I only found one proper butter-poached salmon recipe on the web and lots of butter-poached shellfish, so I'm going to go with the wisdom of crowds on this one.

I melted the butter back down, added a blorp of white wine, the juice of half a lemon, salt, pepper and a good pinch of a Parisian herb blend, mixed well to emulsify and brought it to a bare simmer and backed off the heat a little to keep the cooking to a poach. In went the smallest of my CSA red potatoes, the larger ones quartered to match the smallest in size. They simmered (as the heat crept up on me) for 10 minutes before I added the still-mostly-frozen onions. Twenty more minutes of semi-simmering got them done and then I dropped the heat down a little more before adding, still in their shells, the three shrimp I had left in the house. They only needed three minutes poaching. Everyone out of the pool and kept warm while I turned up the heat and cooked down the liquid into a sauce for four more minutes. I finished off the sauce with some capers and poured it over top.


Not bad at all. A hint of celery comes through in the sauce and works with its tart and rich flavors. The potatoes are creamy, the onions squish like they should and the shrimp are done just right and, with the lemon and butter sauce, are plenty tasty. All in all, a pretty good salvage job for a failed ice cream.

CSA week 11 - Thai braised cabbage

I said yesterday that I wanted to add fish sauce to the New Irish braised cabbage so today I did. I wanted to make it a proper main dish so there was actually a bit more to it than that.

I started by steaming a couple of Chinese sausages and marinating four extra large shrimp in a mixture of fish sauce, lime juice, sambal oelek and cilantro. Normally, I'd add ginger and sugar but those are all already there in the cabbage so I left them out.

Once the sausage was cooked (about 15 minutes), I sliced them up along with a red hot pepper, a bit of shallot I had left over, a couple cloves of garlic and some more cilantro.

I heated up some oil in a wok, added the pepper and shallot, stir fried until they turned fragrant and added the sausage. That got a minute before I added the shrimp, holding back the marinade. That got another minute before I added most of the cabbage (about half of what I made yesterday), the marinade and a bit more fish sauce.

That I cooked for a couple minutes longer trying to boil away all that liquid. I didn't quite manage it, but I did cook it down quite a bit. I finished it off with the rest of the cilantro and some ground roasted peanuts. If I was smart I would have held those off to garnish each serving so I could get a beauty shot, but I mixed them in while it was all still in the wok instead. Ah well.

Not the prettiest of dishes, but I think it turned out well. I didn't measure the fish sauce so I got a bit lucky that I did successfully manage to balance the ginger and the sweetness of the browned cabbage without overwhelming either. That new more whole combination acts as the background with the bits of chili, shrimp and sausage to the fore in different amounts in each bite. So there are a variety of interesting flavors and textures going on, but the cabbage and ginger aren't lost at all just now they're part of the team instead of just sitting out there on their own.

I'm starting to make a habit out of salvaging screwed up recipes. I'm going to have to create a tag for that.

CSA week eight - Eggplant casserole rehabilitated

No point in wasting good food or even food that isn't so good I figure so I wanted to see if I could salvage my unpleasantly heavy eggplant casserole.

The process was hindered somewhat by the casserole already being assembled and cooked. It would have been nice to be able to disassemble the casserole into its component parts. Failing that I decided to chop it up into little squares, dump them into a bowl and mash it all up into a big pile of eggplanty, sausagey, cheesy glunk.


Then I boiled up nine whole wheat lasagne noodles and made a simple tomato sauce spiked with the fresh oregano and thyme from this weeks CSA share, red pepper flakes plus a good dose of red wine vinegar for some acidity to cut through all the oil. I also wanted to add some greens so I prepared the komatsuna and turnip leaves along with some baby spinach I had in the fridge. I didn't want to add any more fat so I wilted them in the pasta water instead of in a pan. Should have added the zucchini too? Nah.



Everything went into the baking dish in the standard way: a layer of tomato sauce, a layer of noodles, half the glunk, half the greens, more sauce, more noodles, the rest of the glunk, the rest of the greens, the final three noodles, the rest of the sauce and a bit of leftover cheese and some fresh grated Parmesan.



And into a 400 degree oven for 20 minutes to get it all melty and bubbling again.




The result is a substantial improvement. There's no indication that the dish had a previous incarnation. The over-powerful cheese is now nicely balanced with the other flavors and textures. It's just a passable but undistinguished lasagne. But that sure beats a barely edible casserole.

CSA week three - Hibiscus sorbet

I was confused by the paragraph about hibiscus in last weeks newsletter but I didn't know I was until I did some more reading. Margie (or whoever wrote it) said that the calyxes were the outside flower parts so I went looking for ways to use the flowers.

The amounts on the recipes didn't make sense, but that turned out to be because they were talking about dried flowers without saying so. The real clue that something was off was the accompanying pictures. Hibiscus flowers look nothing like what we have.

I did a little more digging and found pictures that did match. Calyxes are sometimes called flowers but they're something else entirely. That plasticy sphere in the middle is a seed pod and the fleshy petals surrounding it are something halfway between a fruit and a pine cone.

Because the calyxes are so much more substantial than the flowers they're rather more culinarily versatile. According to Fruits of Warm Climates by Julia Morton (who used to be the director of the Morton Collectanea here at U Miami) "They may be merely chopped and added to fruit salads. In Africa, they are frequently cooked as a side-dish eaten with pulverized peanuts. For stewing as sauce or filling for tarts or pies, they may be left intact, if tender, and cooked with sugar." The flavor and texture of the stewed calyxes, she says, are hard to distinguish from cranberry sauce.

That put me in mind of this post on the I Shot the Chef blog for shortbread bar cookies using leftover cranberry sauce which I thought would be fun to try. Obviously from the subject line of this post I failed, but that's how I started out.

The problem was that I didn't know how much water to use when stewing the amount of hibiscus I had. Two cups seemed reasonable, but I forgot that, unlike cranberries, hibiscus calyxes don't have any pectin in them. The water was going to get a lot of flavor, but it wasn't going to thicken up into jam. So I got my stewed hibiscus, but I didn't want to waste all that flavor in the water. And when I've got flavored water with bits of something-kind-of-like-fruit floating in it, I'm thinking sorbet.

Ingredients:
1 CSA share hibiscus calyxes, seed pods removed
2 cups water
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 Tablespoon light rum
1 Tablespoon lime juice
1/4 teaspoon fresh grated ginger
1/4 teaspoon dried mint leaves
pinch salt


1. Roughly chop the calyxes and add to boiling water. Simmer for around five minutes and add the sugar. Simmer until the mixture gets a syrupy texture. I honestly wasn't paying attention so I don't know how long it took. Twenty minutes maybe?



2. Cool for a half hour and flavor with perhaps too many other ingredients. I think I'd leave out the mint and vanilla next time and boost up the ginger until there was some notable spiciness.

3. Cool in the refrigerator, churn, ripen in the freezer and scoop it up.


There's been an odd flavor change now that the sorbet has ripened. When the mix was warm, refrigerated and even right out of the churn it, as advertised, tasted a lot like cranberries: sweet and tart with intriguing floral notes (rounded out by all the other stuff I added) and I liked it a lot. But fully frozen both of those prominent aspects are weakened allowing the perfume that lingered around the edges to become the primary flavor and, unfortunately, it's rather bitter. But at least it's definitely hibiscus and not cranberries. I was worried it would go the other way and it would just taste like just another tart berry sorbet.

There are textural issues too as I didn't blend the mix long enough and it's full little chunks of calces. That can be OK for an ice cream, but sorbets should be perfectly smooth. I don't think anyone's going to be eating this--nobody's eating the black sapote sherbet and that's actually really good--so I'll probably melt it down, run it through the blender again, strain it out, boil it down to a syrup and use it to make cocktails with ginger ale and rum.

You, on the other hand, need to stew yours up, serve them with peanuts, and tell me how it goes.

CSA week three - lard bread pudding

The lard bread I baked last Friday was on the fast track to stales-ville so I figured I'd better use it quick. I considered making some really weird french toast, but settled on a savory bread pudding that would let me rectify my mistake of not putting in nearly enough salami or cheese.

It's a pretty simple procedure that I've discussed before. First, I sauteed up onions, mushrooms, a squash from the CSA along with a good handful of salami bits. Then I layered slices of the bread (I left out the step of buttering the slices since they were already chock full of fat.), layers of the sauteed mix and layers of sliced provolone and grated Parmesan and Romano cheese, ladling over an egg/milk as I went along.


I packed the 8"x8" baking dish pretty good so I wasn't able to get a spoon to get the extra eggy mix out so I could baste it as it soaked. That meant that, after a half hour at 375, the bottom layer came out mushy, the center layer the targetted custardy texture and the top toasty crisp. Two out of three's not bad.

I should have used a bit more vegetables for balance, but otherwise a good result. The addition of the Parmesan and Romano brings some complexity of flavor to the cheesiness and the fine-ground salametti I switched to since I ran out of the salami I used in the bread was an improvement. And my spell-checker recognizes salametti. Huh. And the squash (which made up the bulk of the vegetables) matched well with provolone and salami which is not something you'd necessarily predict.

I'll have to make a bread pudding with a less rustic bread one of these days to see if I can make something a little more refined out of it.

Escabeche redeemed

This is my follow-up report on my attempt to make a palatable escabeche. You may recall (or you may have clicked on that link, or possibly scrolled down to my previous post) that my attempt at this dish earlier this week didn't work out because I used the wrong fish. Nothing wrong with the brine, though, so I tossed the mahi I used and fried up a smelt and set it to soaking. That's the before picture to the right and the after picture below. The difference in color isn't from the lighting, the brine seems to have bleached the browned flour coating.


It's had three days to pickle so it's time to pull it out and see what's what. The far less mild flavor of the smelt, compared to the mahi, lets it stand up against the pickling brine, and the oily texture means it absorbs less as well. The flavor balance is now much better. The experience is fish enhanced by the spicy vinegary sauce rather than the sauce with some chewy chunks of vaguely fish-flavored stuff. The flour coating, of course, can't retain its crispness after absorbing moisture from the brine. But the smelt's bones stay crisp which adds a lot of texture to the dish. It's, overall, pretty darn good. So that was a classic Spanish-style preparation. Now I want to try the Cuban version I also found with the olives, capers and cider vinegar.

Rehabilitating bad ice cream

Yesterday, I decided that the icy texture of my most recent ice cream would not do (despite half the batch already being eaten). The problem, as you may recall, was that the coffee swirls froze in big ice crystals despite my chemical attempt to control their texture. (I'll have to check the ingredient list on commercial ice creams with swirls to see what they use. My guess is guar gum.)

The solution was to melt the ice cream down and then gently heat it just a bit more to melt the gelatin. That didn't quite get all of it so I ran it through the blender to mechanically reduce the remaining globs.

Then I chilled it and churned it and there you go. I also boosted the cardamom as its flavor was getting lost. With the gelatin distributed throughout, the mix thickened very quickly. Not much air got churned in so I lost a lot of volume, but the texture right out of the churn was lovely. Ripening has made it lump of particularly tasty concrete, but a few minutes at room temperature should solve that easily enough.

There isn't a whole lot to go around so I'm not making an e-mail announcement that the revised version is now available. Only the coworkers who promptly read new blog posts will have a chance to try it.