CSA week six - Potstickers, part 1

Usually I put the non-English name in the subject line to foster a little suspense before you click through and find out what I'm talking about. Not this time, though. Potstickers are both a Japanese (gyoza) and Chinese (jiaozi) thing and my standard method of cobbling together recipe from a bunch of different ones gave me something with elements of both.

The "part 1" is because I decided to make my own wrappers and had some difficulty. It sounds easy enough: mix two cups flour with one cup boiling water (The hot water improves the dough's ductility.), knead briefly, roll out in the pasta machine that's been sitting in the back of a cabinet unused for the last five years and cut into 3" diameter circles. But that two to one flour/water ratio gave me an intractably sticky dough no matter how much more flour I added and now my pasta machine is all gunked up and it looks like it's going to be a pain in the butt to clean.

I should have known better, really. Using a new gadget never works right the first time out and that's just when a dough will decide to defy all laws of culinary science and do whatever it wants. Fine, I need to go to the Asian grocery to restock on ramen anyway; I'll pick up some ready-made gyoza wrappers (or wonton wrapper at least) and finish this up tomorrow.

But for now there's still the filling which turned out fine. I used:

3 cups cabbage, finely chopped
6 garlic chives, finely chopped
2 teaspoons ginger, minced
4 garlic cloves, minced

1/2 pound shrimp
1 pound pork
6 small dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked
3 Tablespoons light soy sauce
2 Tablespoons dry rice wine
1 Tablespoon sesame oil
1 large egg
salt and pepper to taste

I sprinkled the cabbage with salt and let it sit for 20 minutes to purge a bit of water. Otherwise the dumplings get soggy I understand. But I used too much salt and had to rinse it off so it may have added all of the water back in. But it looked like substantially less volume after I wrung it out, so maybe not.

Everything but the vegetables went into the food processor and got processed to a fairly smooth paste. Then I folded in the vegetables and put it into the refrigerator to firm up and be easier to work with.

One of the recipes I found suggested boiling a spoonful of the mix to check for seasoning before starting the wrapping. Pretty good idea; the wrapper dough has no salt so it's easy to underestimate the seasoning the filling requires. I ended up adding more salt, pepper and sesame oil and I'm still not sure I'm entirely happy with it.

So, that stays in the fridge until tomorrow. The dough I'm saving too--it may not want to be noodles, but maybe it'll make a decent loaf of bread. Right now, I have to order a pizza.

CSA week six - Cobb salad soup

I may have exaggerated a bit when I called this idea "clever" on Saturday. Really, once you've come up with the basic idea of creating soup versions of famous salads by mixing the dressings into lettuce soup and garnishing with the other salad components different varieties don't require a lot of imagination.

I'm not sure the original idea is all that clever either as a quick search on-line finds a few other people who independently came up with it. Either way, I made cobb salad soup today and here it is.

Traditionally, cobb salad should be made with iceberg lettuce, watercress, chickory and romaine which makes for a fairly bitter mix. I used the lettuce I've got: pei tsai and, um, assorted.

I kept the soup really simple since it would be getting a big flavor boost from the dressing. I just wilted a pound of lettuce in butter and olive oil, added two cups chicken stock and a cup of water and simmered for ten minutes. Once it had cooled I transferred it to my food processor, discovered that the liquid level was too high when it started pouring out over my work-table, transferred it to my blender, cleaned up the mess, and blended it to a not-too-smooth texture.

When I made the caesar salad soup I mixed in the dressing during the blending but the extra time it took to make sure I had everything well incorporated meant I blended the lettuce smoother than I really wanted. This time I mixed the dressing in by hand afterward.

Wikipedia, and some other references I checked agree that the original cobb salad dressing is:
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 teaspoons salt
3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/4 teaspoon dry English mustard
1 small clove garlic, finely minced
1/4 cup full-flavored olive oil
3/4 cup salad oil
plus up to a 1/4 cup water if the dressing seems too oily. I cut the recipe in half and left out the water since it's going into soup. Half was probably a little too much, but not by a lot.

And then there's the other components:
boiled chicken breast (I don't keep chicken breasts around so I steamed a thigh)
diced tomatoes
bits of bacon
diced avocado
chopped hard-cooked eggs (I prefer the slightly softer mollet)
crumbled Roquefort cheese
chopped chives
and some recipes include baby corn but I decided against it.

It's usually presented with each of the components in its own distinct sector of the plate on top of the lettuce. I tried that with the soup but half of them sank.

But, presentation aside, it's pretty darn good. The soup itself is light, fresh and tangy. And every spoonful has a different mixture of the garnishes with a unique combination of textures and flavors. The mildly tart creaminess of the Roquefort matches very well with the soup. I expected the bacon to be another stand-out, but the cool bite of a cube of tomato and the fattiness of the avocado and egg yolk are surprisingly good and overshadowed it.

Overall, a nice little dish but kind of a pain with all of those ingredients to prepare. I'd recommend it to any of you who have a sous chef to help out.

Advances in baking technique

I've been doing substantially more baking than I've posted about here--mainly French country loaves--and I think I've got a handle on the basics and am ready to start refining my methodology. I still haven't gotten the really airy crumb professional bakers get in those $5 loaves so I've been looking up tips that might improve matters in that direction. I recognize that my profound disinclination to knead wet loaves by hand is probably a limiting factor but I found some interesting tips, mostly from here that I want to give a try.

First off, I'm now measuring my ingredients by weight and aiming at specific levels of hydration that should give me predictable textures in the resulting dough. It doesn't actually work, but at least I'm limiting my variables so I can figure out why it's not working. For this loaf I'm using 450 grams of flour (including a quarter cup of whole wheat and a quarter cup of rye which is probably why it didn't work) and 270 grams of water aiming at 60% hydration. Obviously that's not a real hydration level; that's a "baker's percentage" that uses simple observables. Some recipes use volumes, but most agree we're talking about weights. Sixty percent is right at the dry limit for bread so why I got a wet slumpy dough, I dunno.

Next I changed the way I mix my flour and water together. I generally just dump everything in the mix and let it spin for a few seconds to get everything incorporated but there's a better way. You start with a wide shallow bowl, preferably a wooden one that's been used for mixing and rising dough for at least a generation, put in the water and then add the flour a handful at a time, stirring it in with wide sweeping spoon-stokes "whipping" the dough to develop the gluten. No, I don't know who I'm quoting there but the page I got it from had it in quotes so I presume it's baking jargon even though I don't see it anywhere else. Why developing the gluten now instead of five minutes from now during the kneading could possibly make any difference I don't know either. Maybe that whipping stretches out long strands of gluten that get wadded up during all of the punching and folding and such during kneading proper?

The yeast went into that mix too, but not the salt and not the old dough I kept from the previous loaf (which contains salt). Salt, I read, tightens gluten so you want to wait until you've kneaded a bit before incorporating it. And if you're going to stop in the middle of kneading you may as well go for a full autolyse--a twenty minute pause to let the flour absorb more water (although it seems a pause before any kneading would make more sense) and to let the gluten relax (although a pause after kneading and before forming into a loaf would make more sense). I just took a look around and most pages do the autolyse after mixing and before kneading, although if you use the whip method the distinction isn't a strong one. I found that the dough starting climbing the dough hook in the mixer almost immediately so I had plenty of gluten formed before I did any kneading at all.

One more thing that I've done for a few loaves now is to stretch and fold the dough instead of punching it down in between the first and second rise. This doesn't pop as many bubbles so it lets some grow larger. If you're making a sandwich bread punching would be better but I don't make sandwiches too often so that's not what I'm going for usually. I've just come across an interesting suggestion here to do 4-6 folds over the course of one long rise instead. I may try that next time. I do need to figure out a better place for that to happen, though. I've been using a deep plastic bucket but it's hard to get the dough out without deflating it unless I line it parchment paper which gets all crumpled up causing a different set of problems as I tranfer the dough. If I leave the dough freeform on a flat sheet of parchment paper it doesn't rise so much as spread. Maybe I need to get back to that wide shallow bowl I mentioned earlier to split the difference.

But that's next time; how did this loaf turn out? I think there's a small but noticable improvement in the crumb. I've had large holes before but this is the first time when I've had real cavities form. (Not that you can see them in the picture.) I think I'll keep the autolyse and the late incorporation of salt but ditch the whipping. That seems mainly a way of reducing kneading time by disguising some of it as mixing. But since it's a machine, not me, doing the mixing I don't care so much.

I'll get back to you on the multi-fold method and how that works.

CSA week five wrap-up, week six start-up

Last week's extra large share made for an extra busy week, but this share looks to be back to normal. Fine by me; my freezer's full up, I'm out of storage containers and I could really use a rest.

It's not that this week's share isn't substantial--that cabbage alone is enough for a few meals--it's more that this selection of vegetables is amenable to improvisation. Cabbage, parsley, chives, zucchini and tomatoes are all utility players. Even mizuna, as a mild light green, is a flexible ingredient. Of that list only cabbage came in a large enough amount to require real planning. Maybe I'll make sauerkraut or kim chee; I haven't used my clay cooker recently and it should make a suitable container.

The heirloom beans are a bit more of a challenge, but only because I haven't been in a beany mood recently. I still haven't used half the green beans from two shares ago and I threw out some old beans when those showed up. Eh, I'll do a stir fry; they'll make a fine stir fry.

As for the canistels, they're called eggfruit because, when they're ripe, their flesh has the color and texture of an egg custard. That makes ice cream the obvious thing both in general and for my history of ice cream experimentation. But I used it in smoothies last year so I want to try a savory application this time around. I don't really recall the flavor so I'll figure something out once they're ripe enough to sample.

Oh, nearly forgot the lettuce. Mine arrived damp and wilted so I'm going to skip right past the not-getting-around-to-making-salads stage this time and go straight to lettuce soup. I've got last week's pei tsai at around the right stage for that too. I was pretty happy with how the caesar salad soup I made last year turned out so I might try something clever this time around too. Maybe a cobb salad soup? It's complicated but I think I've got all the ingredients in the house right now.

CSA week five - Things not to do with grapefruit

I tried a couple interesting things with the grapefruit this week neither of which I thought were entirely successful, but you may like them better than I did so I thought I'd post them up for comments or at least as a warning.

First up, broiled grapefruit. I had never heard of this before I stumbled across a recipe a few days ago but the same simple recipe shows up for page after page if you Google for it so maybe it's just me. It's simple enough: just pre-slice a grapefruit half, cutting out the pithy bit in the middle and separating the flesh from the rind, top with a bit of butter and a bit of sugar (Brown sugar is popular. I tried vanilla sugar.) and maybe a bit of spice, and broil for five minutes until browned around the edges. Serve optionally topped with sliced fruit or, in one recipe I just found, a chicken liver.

It looks pretty good but I found that the broiling cooked all of the bitterness and most of the sourness out of the fruit and what's left just isn't terribly interesting. Why cook a grapefruit in a way that destroys all its grapefruitiness? If you don't like grapefruit, eat an orange. Have any of you had this and can explain the appeal to me?


And second, scallop and shrimp ceviche with grapefruit and avocado. In contrast with the first preparation, scallop, grapefruit and avocado is a pretty rare combination. I only had half a grapefruit left by now so I marinated the shrimp and scallops in lemon and lime juice before adding finely chopped cilantro, shallot and jalapeño, grated ginger and olive oil for another hour's marination. And then, just before serving, in goes the diced avocado and the grapefruit supremes. I added an ear's worth of CSA corn too which added some nice color. In this case the bitterness of the grapefruit overwhelmed and ruined a perfectly good ceviche. Maybe the author (Tina Jones, it says here) assumed I'd be using one of those new-fangled grapefruit with most of the bitter bred out or at least something less uncompromising than what we got. I'll try it again tomorrow; maybe a night in the refrigerator will mellow it out.

[Added tomorrow: No, it really didn't. I ended up tossing most of it.]

CSA week five - Swiss chard and turnip gratin

The lentil soup I made yesterday only used half my chard--most of my leaves and none of the stems--so I had enough to try out Sandrine's suggestion of a gratin. Well, not quite enough, but I planted one of the turnips we got back in week one and its leaves have grown so large it's been blocking light to other plants in my herb garden. A quick look on-line found turnip gratin recipes that were close cousins to the chard gratin recipes I found so it was easy enough to split the difference. I used as my base a chard gratin recipe from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters and a turnip gratin by chef Alain Passard as plagiarized and lightly modified by Joe DeSalazar on his blog here.

I didn't measure anything or pay close attention to the time so here's kind of a sketchy description of what I did.

Ingredients:
1/2 bunch chard, mostly stems
1 large turnip with half it's leaves (the rest having been previously sautéed in butter and olive oil with anchovies and capers and served over papparadelle), peeled
fresh breadcrumbs
melted butter
more butter
2 ounces pancetta
1/2 large onion, chopped
2 teaspoons flour
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup cream
2 to 4 ounces finely grated melty cheese (I used an edam-esque cheese called Amadeus)
seasonings to match your cheese (I used fresh thyme, pimenton and nutmeg. I've never used pimenton and nutmeg together before but it works. Thanks Joe.)

0. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

1. Separate the chard and turnip stems from the leaves. Wash everything and roughly chop. Chop the turnip bulb too.

2. Heat a big pot of water to a boil. Salt as if you were cooking pasta. Add stems and turnip bulb. Return to boil and simmer two minutes. Add leaves. Simmer three minutes more. Drain, cool and gently squeeze out any extra liquid.

3. Meanwhile, prepare a cup or two of fresh breadcrumbs, toss with melted butter, salt and other appropriate seasonings. Bake in 350 degree oven until golden and crisp, tossing regularly. Five to ten minutes.

4. Melt some more butter in that big pot. Add onion, pancetta and spices and cook over medium heat 5 minutes until onion turns translucent. Stir in green and heat through. Add flour and stir until it's all moistened. Add milk, cream and cheese. Stir until cheese is melted and cook for 5 more minutes. The sauce should be enough to coat but not excessive beyond that. After five minutes it should be slightly thickened. Check for seasoning.

5. Butter a medium baking dish and add the chard/turnip mixture. Dot with a bit more butter and cover with bread crumbs. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 to 30 minutes. There isn't enough sauce to visibly bubble when it's done, but you should be able to hear it.

Serve hot as it clots when it cools. This would probably make a good side dish with red meat as it's got a creamed spinach sort of vibe going, but I found it a little unsatisfying on its own. No big flavors here, but the flavorings I chose nicely compliment the mild vegetables without overpowering them. I can see how this could be easily jazzed up into a full-fledged casserole, but the chard and turnips would get lost so better to leave it as is and let it be a supporting player.

CSA week five - Lentil soup with swiss chard

I found a good number of regional variations on lentil soup with swiss chard--a kind of Italian version that includes sausage; a South Indian version that includes coconut milk, and rishta, the Middle Eastern version that I settled on.

I found a handful of rishta recipes on the web. I cobbled together my own version based primarily on this one but tweaked with some improvements and fixed so it actually works.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups green or brown lentils
6 cups cold water
1/4 cup olive oil
1/8 teaspoon ground cumin
1/8 teaspoon ground coriander
1 large onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
Approximately 2 cups broth of your choice (I used beef)
2 1/2 cups swiss chard leaves and tender stems, chopped
1/4 cup cilantro, chopped
1/4 cup parsley, chopped
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 cup uncooked egg noodles or small pasta. (I used ditalini)
salt and pepper to taste
1 egg per serving (not traditional as far as I saw, but really good)

Garnish:
lemon
Scallion, chopped
bread


Directions:

1. Wash lentils and place in dutch oven with the cold water. Bring to a boil over high heat, skimming if necessary, cover, lower heat and simmer gently for 10 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, heat olive oil on medium heat in an 8-inch cast iron pan (or some approximation). When oil is shimmery add onions. Cook on medium heat until caramelized to a deep brown. [I'm not very good at this, but the key seems to be a) not adding salt and b) not stirring too frequently.] When it's about ready, stir in garlic, cumin and coriander, cook for 30 seconds more and remove from heat. The cast iron will retain enough heat to burn the onions so don't wait too long and be ready to move on to the next step.

3. Transfer onions (along with the garlic and olive oil) to a blender. Add 1/2 to 1 cup of the lentil cooking liquid. Blend smooth and add to pot with lentils.

4. Also add the swiss chard, the broth and half of the parsley and cilantro. [The lentils should have absorbed around two cups of water so this will bring the total liquid back up to six cups.] Return to a gentle simmer and cook for another ten minutes.

5. Check lentils for doneness. If they're completely done add noodles, lemon juice and salt and pepper. [Any acid will severely slow lentils' absorption of water so they need to be at the texture you want before you add the lemon juice (or, if you decide to try the Italian recipe, the tomatoes). I know salt has the same effect on beans and whole grains. I don't know if it does it to lentils but I'm not taking any chances.] Cook for the recommended cooking time of your pasta plus a couple minutes because the soup is at a gentle simmer which is a bit low for cooking pasta.

6. When there is five minutes cooking time left, crack your eggs into the soup, turn the heat up a little, put the lid back on and cook for five minutes or until the eggs are poached to your liking. Or you could poach your eggs separately if you want.

7. Serve each bowl topped with parsley, cilantro and scallion and an egg along with a lemon wedge and some bread.



This is an earthy soup (particularly if you use beef broth) but the hints of spice give that deep flavor form and keep that earthiness from being muddy or am I taking the analogy too far? It's enriched by the addition of the egg and lightened by the chard and the bright herbal and citrus notes. It's homey but it's got a lot of layers to it. There's a lot of different textures going on too with the soft lentils, chewy pasta, not-quite-mushy-if-you-timed-things-right chard and crisp scallion. Maybe it could use a little hot pepper, but otherwise very nice indeed.