Week Sauce

Project 18: You cannot touch the MANGO! - Mango/Strawberry Freezer Jam

2011-08-06T17:17:00.001-07:00

I've never made jam before. I like jam. Two problems with a common solution!

Actually, I don't eat a lot of jam. If I'm going to eat a peanut butter sandwich, I usually choose creamed honey to go on it. However, last year a friend of mine who wins lots of awards at county fairs for her jam making skills hooked me up with a variety pack of home-made jams. I realized then that it was store-bought jam that was really inferior to honey, and that there might be a place in my heart for good jam.

So I've been planning on trying my hand at some jam making. It just so happened that my wife was planning on doing the same thing as a fun activity for the little blonde one, so, again, two problems with one solution!

Kendra had decided on making mango jam. This surprised me since we've never bought mangos before in our lives. But I was game, so we set some time aside and I started cutting them up.

Cutting mangos up sucks. They have a big teardrop shaped pit in the middle, but it's not like a peach pit, where you can tear it out at some point. You have to carefully cut all the way around the mango pit instead. Bleah. It's also HUGE. After peeling and pitting, I was surprised how little mango there was in our mangos. Also, they were kind of weird mangos. They weren't green and round, they were kind of yellow and pear shaped.

Once the mangos were cut up, my daughter went to town pounding them with a potato masher. It's so great to watch her get interested in cooking and helping out!

This is not fancy cooked jam. This is freezer jam, and it's made with a box of pectin, and basically from the box instructions. However, jam is a somewhat tricky thing because of how pectin interacts with fruits, etc. You need the amounts to be close to what the instructions ask for or else your jam won't set, for example.

After we mushed all the mangos we found that we didn't really have as much as the recipe required, so my wife suggested that we make up the difference with strawberries. That actually sounded pretty good, so we got some out and started mashing them, too!

Then we added the sugar, lemon juice, and pectin,mixed it up, and let it sit for a while to make sure they incorporated properly.

Since it was freezer jam, that was about it. We put it in Tupperware and some went in the fridge and the rest into the freezer!

Results: Good! It's got a very nice balance of flavors with mango and strawberry. I can recommend it if you like those flavors at all. I'd eat more of it, but, as you'll see in the next post, my jam adventures continued quickly!

Project 17: Another smooshed sandwich!

2011-07-07T23:18:00.000-07:00

I actually did this project back in May, but didn't get around to posting it. Shame on me!

The concept was pretty simple; repeat the experiment I had already done, but with a twist. A couple of weeks after I did my shooter, a friend of mine had entirely independently made a shooter sandwich and posted about it, but he made it with breakfast food. Since I love breakfast meats and eggs, I decided to riff on his design and see if it might turn out better than the steak one.

I started, as before, with a nice loaf of bread. I got it at a little bakery in Seattle, and it was delicious! I hollowed it out and put in a thick layer of thick cut pepper bacon. I *accidently* made too much bacon, so I had to eat the extra. Woe is me!

The next layer was scrambled eggs. I cooked them with some cheddar cheese for extra goodness and they came out very well. The black bits are from cooking them in some of the bacon fat.

My friend was a little fancier with his eggs and went with what was basically a spinach and gruyere cheese omelet. That sounds tasty, but I honestly don't think that kind of delicate taste is going to stand up very well to pepper bacon and the next ingredient.

Sausage! This is just plain old crumbled pork sausage. YUM! (a bit blurry, though.)

Then it was time to cap it, wrap it, and crush it! The final result was:

Results - Great! Much better than the steak. It was basically a real foody version of a standard breakfast sandwich. All the flavors worked well together, and the tasty bread was a hit! If only I can get my bread to come out like that... I liked having both the sausage and the bacon in this. They have different flavors that obviously go well together. The cheese in the eggs came through, as well.

I will definitely consider making more of these for special occasions; maybe for camping or a road trip!

Back in the Saddle!

2011-07-07T22:46:00.000-07:00

Hello, all!

It's been a busy couple of months for cooking. I've been just generally really busy and haven't had the time or energy to devote to my lofty goal of a new recipe every week. This makes me sad, but it is what it is.

However, I will still be cooking and posting what I get up to here! In fact, I have a bit of a backlog already, so let's get to it!

Project 16: You say Potato... Latke!

2011-04-24T19:26:00.000-07:00

Welcome back! Given that I'm behind my "recipe a week" schedule, I'm changing the format to be by "project." I'm still committed to doing at least 52 new recipes this year, but this month is CRAZY, and the crazy might continue, so I'll fit them in when I can.

That said, let's talk about spuds! I'm a big fan. I just can't get enough of any relation to deadly nightshade! They are especially delicious fried! In that spirit I decided to try to make potato pancakes. I've tried before with mashed potatoes with bad results. I may try that again at some point, but in the spirit of trying new things I started doing research on various types of potato pancakes, and came across latkes. I found a recipe that seemed simple and delicious, and it was off to the store! (I also picked up some stuff for a couple other projects... stay tuned!)

Potatos, onions, and some sour cream. No problem!

Following the recipe, I grated the potatoes and put them in water. Then drained them and mixed in the onion. Next was the towel!

I was surprised at how well the towel technique worked. It didn't just remove the water the potatoes were soaking in, it also make the potatoes dryer in general, so they fried better.

I mixed in the single egg. I read a few other recipes that required more eggs but they almost all had comments about how "eggy" they ended up being. As it turned out, one egg was plenty. The latkes held together well.

The recipe calls for using "two tablespoons" of the mixture, but I guesstimated. I used a large spoon and heaped it on. I dumped it into the skillet which contained about 1/4 cup of olive oil. That was about the perfect amount for two latkes to cook easily. I could have fit more, but I wanted to make sure they were separated. Over the course of cooking them all I added about another full 3/8 cup of oil. After dumping I pressed them down into more of a cake, but not too thin. You want them to have enough of a "weave"to help it all hold together.

I cooked them over medium heat after first taking the pan up to medium high. Cooking for about 5 minutes browned one side, after which I flipped them and cooked the other side for about the same amount of time. That was about perfect for this size. Then I took them out and set them on paper towels to dry.

This one was the first. Later ones were a little more cooked and crispy, but this gives a good idea of what they are like.

Results: Delicious! A+++ Will make again!

Plain, they are pretty much hash browns (which I love) but only the crispiest parts of the hash browns (which I love.) They have a nice onion flavor which you can sometimes get in good hashbrown places (which I love.) The olive oil also gives them a slightly different flavor, which I liked.

I also tried them with the traditional topping of sour cream. It tasted a lot like a good potato chip with some French onion dip. In other word, delicious!

I did not go so far as to try them with applesauce (another traditional topping,) but that was largely because I was enjoying them the other ways so much, and because I didn't have any.

I was very sorely tempted to try them with ketchup and hot sauce, though. Maybe next time.

I will be making these again, for sure, soon.

There's been a delay!

2011-04-21T10:12:00.000-07:00

Hello! As you may have noticed (or not,) I didn't post a recipe from last week. That's because my life got turned up to 11 recently. I'm crazy busy with work, family, and other things. I hate that excuse. Cooking doesn't really take that long, but research, shopping, and cooking sometimes does.

Rest assured that I will do everything I can to catch up! (Although this is Easter Weekend, so who knows what I'll get to.)

Week 15: Harry's Weekend Treat: Butterbeer Cupcakes

2011-04-09T23:36:00.000-07:00

I seem to be on a roll with the desserts lately and this week was no exception. However, I decided I needed to step up my game a notch or two, so instead of simply mixing some ingredients, I went all out with trying my hand at the delicate art of cupcake making!

Not that difficult you say? How about a cupcake with homemade buttercream frosting?! Still not enough? How about home made ganache as well? Injected into the cupcake!? Now how much would you pay?

Not only all of that, but it's even themed! It's based on the butterbeer that they serve at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando, Florida. I've never been, but I'm a huge Harry Potter fan, so cupcakes based on a fictional drink that they serve at a theme park has to be good!

I saw this recipe on boingboing.net or maybe neatorama. It sounded tasty and I liked the idea of injecting butterscotch into the heart of the cupcake for a bit of extra kick. Plus, I want to practice my icing skills. Win-win!

All of the ingredients were easy to find in the local store, so it was just a matter of making it!

It seemed like the biggest time sink would be waiting for the ganache to cool, so I started with that. It's dead simple. Pour a bag of butterscotch chips into a double boiler with a cup of heavy cream and heat it and stir until it's all mixed together. My only recommendation might be to cut back on the cream or use more chips because my sauce came out very thin. The blogger said it would, but even thinner than I thought it should. I had some issues later because of it.

Then, while that was cooling I started making the cupcake batter (after turning on the oven to pre-heat.) I mixed the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt with some help from an adorable little blonde girl. Making fluffy butter by beating it rapidly is always fun. Then adding the two sugars, followed by the eggs is old hat by now.

Butter flavoring is a bit of a surprise. I didn't even know they made such a thing. I must try it on popcorn later.

The recipe calls for "alternating" the buttermilk, cream soda, and flour mixture. I'm not at all sure what that means so I faked it. I cut both of the wet ingredients into two parts and then added them in turn with flour in between each. It seemed to work fine.

Once it was all together, I spooned it into paper cupcake cups and put it in the 350 degree oven.

It filled about 14 regular cupcake cups and 4 mini-cupcake cups. I baked it for 15 minutes and checked, but it wasn't quite ready. It took about 18 minutes total in my oven.

While they were baking I made the frosting. Yum! Butter, butterscotch, vanilla, butter flavoring, and almost a pound of powdered sugar. I say again, Yum! I didn't end up using a full pound of powdered sugar. I was probably about a cup short of that when the frosting looked and tasted right to me. I had my wife try it and she said "It tastes like canned frosting." I may have said something unkind at that point. I don't really recall. In any case, I disagree. It did kind of remind me of canned frosting right after I made it, but after it had sat a little while it actually got much better. Maybe it needed to rest like a steak.

I next used a plastic condiment bottle as suggested in the recipe to inject some extra butterscotch into the heart of the cupcakes. This is one of the places that I think showed that my ganache was too thin. It worked perfectly fine, but in the end the liquid just got absorbed by the cupcake. I was expecting more of a little butterscotch syrup ball in the middle and was somewhat disappointed. I may try it next time with more of a syrup.

I used a strange little device that looked like an accordion to frost these. It worked well, but only held enough frosting for two cakes at a time and was a pain to reload. Next time I'll use a bag. They look funny but I got some good icing practice in.

Then I put some more of the ganache on top as a decoration. Here is where the thinness really hurt. I made pretty spirals and shapes that dissolved into puddles almost instantly. Thicker would have been better.

Result: YUM! The cake part came out good, but the frosting is amazing! Possibly because of the combination of cake and frosting, but amazing in any case. The ganache in the middle doesn't add much in my opinion. I definitely think it's a nice change from chocolate or vanilla cupcakes and will probably make them again for a party or something. I recommend them highly!

Week 14: Double Stuff Stuffed Cookies

2011-04-07T21:07:00.000-07:00

I'm behind on the blogging, but up to date on the cooking. Although, really, this latest entry is hardly much of that. When I decided to do it, I thought it might be more challenging or come out a lot different. But this is going to be a short one!

In any case, the project this week was a double stuff Oreo inside a chocolate chip cookie. That's the place I first saw them, but if you Google it you will find them everywhere. It certainly sounded like something that might be interesting to do. I've made odd things like deep fried McDonald's cheeseburgers (tasty) which come out quite unlike you would expect, and I was hoping that there would be some of that magic cooking effect here.

So I got all the stuff to make chocolate chip cookies and I got some double stuff Oreos. Everyone knows how to make the cookie dough, I'm sure.

The only bit that is even slightly interesting is wrapping up the Oreo in dough. The first batch I used too much dough and the cookies spread like crazy. For the second I used just barely enough to coat the Oreo and they came out much more compact.

Results: Interesting. I like them, but I'm not sure I like them more than the individual components. The tastes do blend together well, but almost too well. You almost have to think about it to notice it's not just a chocolate chip cookie, but if you do think about it, the flavor is more complex.

OK, enough of this easy stuff. I'm going to have to get more creative this week.

Week 13: Meat! - Shooter Sandwich

2011-03-30T23:42:00.000-07:00

The internet is a great font of ideas. Most of them are rubbish, but sometimes a gem comes through. I was surfing one of my favorite sites and came across the recipe for a sandwich that sounded crazy and delicious; the Shooter.

Not only did the site have directions for how to make it, but it had beautiful step by step pictures as well. How could I go wrong?

As usual I went overboard to get the best ingredients I could. If I'm going to make it, I'm going to make it the best I can. That way if it's fantastic I can try pulling back a bit and seeing if it's still good, and if I don't like it then there's a good chance that it wont get better with worse ingredients and I can leave it be.

I went to the butcher at the Pike Place Market and got two lovely rib eye steaks. They looked so good I almost felt bad that I was going to put them in a sandwich... almost. While I was there I got some shallots and mushrooms at one of the vegetable stands. I opted to stick to the recipe and use standard white mushrooms rather than branch out for more flavorful brands. I figured the meat didn't need any competition.

I made my own bread to start with. I'm starting to dial in on the proper way to make it. I've been trying to nail down their "scoop and sweep" method for measuring flour, but my dough always ends up too thick, so I know it's not working well. I need to figure out the proper weight of flour (ala Alton.) You can't go much wrong measuring by weight. This time, though, it worked pretty well. My bread did not end up as dense as it often is. Besides, you have to scoop it out! The biggest problem is that the bread wasn't big enough. Next time I'd do it a bit bigger.

I cooked the shallots and mushrooms with three cloves of garlic in about 2 TBS of butter. I cooked them until there wasn't much extra liquid left in the pan, but not until they were sticking to it. It takes a while, so patience is key.

Then I cooked the steaks. Normally I use a combination stovetop/oven method to cook steaks, but here I wasn't going to be as picky. The recipe just calls for stovetop, so I did that.

The picture doesn't do much justice to the process, but the next one is great. Once the steaks were done, I put one of them in the hollowed out bread, straight from the pan.

I spooned on the mushrooms and shallots.

Added THE SECOND STEAK! Sorry... any recipe with TWO steaks gets me a bit excited. I put creamy horseradish sauce on and some brown mustard in the top. It didn't fit very well, so I had to trim a few pieces off. I disposed of them properly.

Then I sealed the whole thing up in wax paper and aluminum foil.

I put it in the cupboard and put a breadboard, several heavy glass pans, and two sacks of flower on top of it as a press. Then I left it over night. This is the part of the recipe that somewhat worries me. Leaving cooked meat out over night seems dangerous to someone brought up to fear germs. Still, it was wrapped up in three layers of wax paper and two of foil, so probably no harm.

The next day I pulled it out and cut it up.

Results: Honestly, I wasn't that impressed. Each of the parts tasted great on their own, but they just didn't come together for me. It could easily be a problem with the ratios of bread to steak to filling, and I might try again with more steak per bite and more horseradish. It might have been the bread, too. The middle pieces I pulled out were tasty enough, but I don't think my oven was cooking hot enough and I'm not sure this was the perfect bread for this sandwich. I may just get a loaf of good bread from a good bakery if I try again.

Overall I'm left with a feeling like I should have just eaten the steaks with the mushrooms and shallots on the side and bread with butter instead of going to all this trouble.

Oh, well.. they can't all work out perfectly. :)

Week 12: Naan Better! - Naan Bread

2011-03-20T23:59:00.000-07:00

This week is a quick one. I just got back from vacation and didn't have my usual time to research and shop. However, I've had an desire since I made Butter Chicken to make some Naan Bread to go with it. We already had dinner plans for the evening, however, so I wouldn't be making the chicken, just the bread.

For my research this time, I turned to my trusty Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day book, which just happens to have a recipe! Really, though, it has more of a "method." Traditional Naan is cooked on the inside of a tandoori oven, which i don't happen to own. Artisan Bread, however, suggests using a cast iron skillet. I've needed a new one of those for a while, so I didn't mind buying one!

The recipe starts by using one of their standard doughs. I approve of this since it makes a ton of dough and I can go through the whole week baking loaves, whether or not this works out. It might be better to find a specific dough recipe, but this will work for an experiment like this.

The only ingredient I didn't have was ghee. It's a clarified butter used in Indian Cooking. In fact, it was recommended for Butter Chicken, but I didn't manage to find any. This time, though, I found some at the local Indian grocery. It wasn't in the dairy section. It was on a shelf. Apparently clarified butter doesn't need refrigeration.

I used the standard "boule" recipe from the book.

3 cups warm water

1.5 TBS yeast

1.5 TBS Kosher salt

6.5 cups flour

Mix it and let it sit for two hours. Then tear off a chunk.

I rolled it out to about 1/8th inch thick and set the cast iron skillet on the stove on high.

I added the ghee to the pan, spread it out, and then tossed in the dough. I turned the stove down to medium, and covered it to keep the steam and heat in and let it cook for about 3 minutes before flipping it.

Then I cooked it on the other side until the edges were all done. It was about another 3.5 minutes.

Tada!

It sure looks like naan!

Results: Mediocre. Don't get me wrong, the bread was tasty, but I wouldn't call it "naan." It was more like an unsweetened pancake, or something. There were hints of the correct flavor and texture, but not enough.

I think the big problem was probably the dough. It's bread dough and so I got bread with some ghee flavoring. I need to track down an actual naan recipe and see if there is a difference. It might also have been a bit thick, but not by much.

On the plus side I now have enough dough for several good loaves!

Week 11: Candyland 2: The Revenge - Popcorn Cake!

2011-03-13T09:38:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy week, sandwiched between two trips out of town, so I decided to do something fun and new if not terribly ambitious. While wandering through the interwebs I happened upon the perfect thing, a Popcorn Cake!

Honestly, I'm not sure what to say about the process. I used Pop Secret Butter popcorn and got a great yield from the two bags. I noticed while making it that it says right on the bag "Do not use the 'popcorn' button on your microwave." I was amused, but followed the advice and it worked perfectly. No more "popcorn" button for me!

I added the M&Ms and pretzel sticks.

I melted the butter, added in the marshmallows and cooked it until it was one delicious mass.

I mixed it all together. You really have to make sure you get it mixed well. Pockets of molten marshmallow like to hide on the bottom.

I didn't use a bunt cake pan since I don't have one and didn't want to buy one just for this. I just spread it out like rice crispy treats, and left it to cool.

Verdict: Delicious, of course. It was like a giant popcorn ball! I liked the addition of chocolate and pretzels as well. It gives it a good variety of flavors and textures, especially because the popcorn tends to soften. The M&Ms are little bursts of surprise flavor as you chew.

If I ever do it again I'll use a different kind of popcorn, though. This one was fine, but I'd prefer it to be even saltier to contrast with the sweet more. Maybe I'll use leftover popcorn from the movie theater!

Week 10: Candyland - Caramels

2011-03-06T22:51:00.000-08:00

It's a busy time for me, so I'm sitting back a bit and trying some of the "easier" recipes I've been wanting to do. With that in mind my latest creation was making caramels from scratch. I love caramels, even cheap ones, but I especially love buttery, expensive caramels. They really aren't that difficult to make yourself, but they do have a couple of pitfalls to watch out for.

I didn't have to do much research because I'd already seen a recipe for caramels on a food blog I like to follow; Not So Humble Pie. A Seattle based mom who makes food so delicious looking and decadent, it's like food porn. You should go check it out. There's always something good.

In any case, she made caramels from scratch and gave very precise instructions including how to avoid common problems. Her recipe is fairly simple, but time consuming.

First up, was getting a new thermometer. I have a candy thermometer, but it's old and I'm not sure how good it really is, so I decided to upgrade to a fancier one. I bought one at Sur Le Table at Pike Place. It's horrible. I mean, it works, but not very well. You have to try to get as much of the stem in whatever you want to measure as you can to get an accurate reading, which means holding it in your hand at an angle and waiting for it to climb to the correct temperature. Bleah. I'll have to investigate some others for next time.

The only difficult item in the recipe was the heavy cream. You can get it at any grocery, but not if you want the really heartstoppingly bad for you variety she suggests. And even that wasn't too bad since there's a dairy outlet in Pike Place. They had several brands to choose from with ~40% fat content. I went with the cheapest, and it worked great.

I decided since this was my first batch, I wasn't going to make salted caramels. I wanted to see what they are like on their own, first.

I did exactly as the recipe said. I mixed the sugar, karo (prevents sugar from recrystallizing,) salt, and half of the cream. I brought it to a boil, stirring constantly, and it did take a while. About 10 minutes as I recall.

I didn't really let the boil get going and that might have been a mistake. Everything turned out in the end, but it took a lot longer than is should of. Every time I added some of the cold cream the temperature dropped below boiling and so I had to wait until it climbed back up again. So it was; pour, wait, pour, wait. Eventually it got it all in and the mix didn't seem the worse for dancing on the edge of boiling the whole time.

The butter went in well, but took some stirring to incorporate properly. Then I let the whole thing boil. This is where the new thermometer really blew. I'd check the temp every five minutes or so, and it would take at least two more minutes to get a good reading. In the end I really had to go with my gut. You can kind of tell by watching when it's getting close because it starts looking a lot like caramel. It took about 45 minutes for me, but my old stove was dying on me, so who knows how long a real stove would take. I would trust her recipe.

I ended up using an 8 by 13 pan instead of 9 by 9. So the caramels are slightly thinner, but that's fine. I didn't coat the entire bottom with paper and didn't do a very thorough job buttering the paper. Those were both mistakes and unless you like eating paper or scraping caramel out of a pan, learn from them.

Result: AMAZING. These little balls of joy are so good. Rich, buttery, but with a really great caramel taste. They are like candy crack to me. I want to eat them all. I scraped the cooking pan clean (not when I poured) and chewed off the leavings on the spatula. I will definitely be making these again, much to my waistline's chagrin.

Week 9: Let's Get This Pizza Party Started!

2011-02-26T14:00:00.000-08:00

After creating my tomato sauce last week, I was somewhat disheartened about making pizza. Plus there are the issues with my oven. We bought a replacement oven that was supposed to be delivered on Thursday, but now looks like it will be delivered next Saturday. Go Best Buy! (on the plus side they knocked a bunch off the price for our "inconvenience."

In any case, I was going to make caramels this weekend, since the oven is down. However we've discovered a work around. We can still use the broiler, even if the normal heating element is dead. It heats the oven perfectly, so long as we put something between it and the food to prevent direct heat. TA-DA! Problem solved. And since I still have my sauce and a batch of bread dough in the fridge, making the pizza after all seemed reasonable.

The dough I'm using is the Olive dough from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. If you don't own this book and have any interest in baking bread, go get it now! It's amazing. Really. It's so much easier to make bread this way. No kneading, little proofing, it stores in the fridge for a week. I can't sing enough praises for it. You basically make a batch and then whenever you feel like it, you cut some off and bake it. And it's delicious, light, fluffy... yum!

I made the batch when I made the sauce last week but I haven't gotten to use any of it because of the oven. With our work-around, though, I figured it would be fine.

There really wasn't much to it.

I prepped my ingredients first since one key to pizza is to bring it all together as quickly as possible. You don't want the dough sitting around while you're shredding cheese. The cheese was whole milk mozzarella from a cheese shop at the Pike Place Market. They also sold pepperoni there for some reason, but it looked good and so that's what I used. It was a quality sausage and had to be peeled first. Then I cut as thin of a set of slices as I could.

I got out the dough and rolled it flat to about 1/8 inch. It was pretty easy to work with, especially coming from the fridge. My daughter loved helping me roll it out, too, so bonus points there!

I spread my sauce out over the middle. I used a pretty thin layer, but made sure it covered everything to within about an inch from the edge.

Then a thick layer of cheese, topped by a grid of pepperoni. It was pretty awesome looking.

Now I ran into a problem, though. I don't have a pizza peel. I did all the work on the bread board, and transferring it to the oven was interesting. In the oven I used a set of uncoated terra cotta floor tiles I picked up for just such an occasion at Home Depot. Transferring a large flat pizza from a breadboard to the grid of 6 tiles was challenging, but I got it done without too much warping.

I cooked it for 8 minutes before checking on it to make sure it was cooking evenly, which it was. I left it in for another couple minutes then slid it out onto a cookie sheet to cool (so the cheese could set.)

Here's the final result:

And it tasted DELICIOUS! I was shocked at how good it is, especially considering all the obstacles I had to overcome to make it. The sauce, week old dough, the oven of doom, no peel... It's a wonder this ever happened.

The sauce was a pleasant surprise. It may have gotten a little better over the the week in the fridge, but really I think that even though I don't think it's awesome, it suits the pizza very well. What flavor it does have is complimentary to the other ingredients.

The dough performed as advertised. My biggest concern was that usually when dough is in the fridge for a week, you're tearing hunks off to make bread during that time so the top is always fresh, but this dough had simply sat there. Well, I tore off the top layer and used what was underneath and it was perfect. It was thick and chewy, but in a good way. Not like over-kneaded bread, just like pizza.

The work-around for the stove worked perfectly. There was a slight bit of scorching of some cheese, but that's all. The stones did their part as well.

Other than the corned beef, this is probably my greatest victory, especially with the obstacles. They just make it taste even sweeter. I can't wait to try again with a sauce I'm happier with. That will just make it even better.

Hmm... I should probably still do those caramels. The 40% milkfat cream I bought won't last forever...

Week 8: Possible Fail! Tomato Sauce

2011-02-20T23:19:00.000-08:00

My plan was to make a pizza from scratch using homemade sauce, homemade crust, and quality ingredients. That is unlikely to get completed in a timely fashion, as I'll explain in a bit, but I'm holding the fallback position of homemade tomato sauce for week 8, although that's not going well, either.

My research uncovered a plethora of homemade pizza sauces, each slightly different from the others. Some use fresh tomatoes, others prefer canned, or for the really simple ones, tomato sauce.

Being an ambitious type, I searched for ones with fresh tomatoes. I like to do things right! I found one that I liked, except that it didn't contain all the spices I wanted, so I decided to add them! Here is the one I ended up with:

10 roma tomatoes
1 large onion
2 T Olive oil
2 T butter
2 small carrots
5 cloves garlic
1/4 c fresh basil
1/8 c fresh oregano
1/4 tsp italian seasoning
1/4 tsp celery salt
1/4 cup red wine
2 T tomato paste

I chose romas because they generally have a good flavor and are more likely to be fresher than others in the middle of winter. At least that was my theory. I picked up 5 or so at the Pike Place Market, figuring those would be the freshest, but had to get 5 more at the grocery store to round out the recipe when I decided not to halve it as I'd originally planned.

I blanched the tomatoes to get the skins off and then squeezed out all the seeds. I then pureed 8 of them and chopped the other two up roughly. This was per the instructions on the recipe I was following. In hindsight, since my final goal was pizza sauce, I should have just pureed them all, but it's not a huge difference.

I cooked the onion, carrot and garlic in the olive oil and butter for about 5 minutes to soften them. Then I added the tomatoes and everything else except the paste. The original recipe called for two celery stalks to cook in the sauce and get removed at the end, but I substituted a bit of celery salt instead.

I brought it to a boil and then reduced it to low, covered it, and let it simmer for 2 hours, stirring occasionally. One thing I noticed was that it was not the brilliant red I usually associate with tomato sauce. It was kind of orange, but the romas had looked fairly pale (although I grabbed the reddest I could find) so I didn't think too much of it.

After two hours I put in the tomato paste and set it to simmer for another 2 hours. It cooked down fairly well, although it sort of ended up looking like a stew more than a sauce. Once it was done, I let it cool and tossed it in the food processor to puree it smooth.

So here's the first part of the possible fail. I'm not sure I like how it came out at all. It doesn't taste disgusting, but it's not what I was hoping for, either. It's kind of bland, and the flavors that are in it don't taste right. I believe my problem is the tomatoes, which is of course the majority of the sauce. It's the middle of winter, and the tomatoes are clearly from hothouses and from storage, so they don't have the flavor of summer tomatoes at all. Honestly, canned sauce is probably better than what I made.

So, I'm not really sure what to do. My plan was for pizza, and maybe this sauce will be just fine, but I was hoping for so much more.

Now we come to the second possible fail; my oven. It has been slowly dying for a very long time. It's temperatures are so far off I have to use a separate thermometer to check when it gets to the right one. Half the burners don't work. But today the oven decided to stop working. I was still able to make the sauce just fine, but I obviously can't make a pizza until I get a new stove. We'll go shopping tomorrow, but we'll have to wait for a new one to get delivered and such before I can do any baking.

I may try the sauce on pasta. If so, I'll report back, but I don't have high hopes.

I'll definitely try again in the summer with good tomatoes, or possibly try one of the recipes that use canned tomatoes so I can still get on with a pizza.

Week 7: Working My Tamales Off

2011-02-12T20:45:00.000-08:00

For those who may have wondered why I posted about purchasing lard and what purpose I intended with it, ponder no farther, for it was to make TAMALES! I've always wondered how to create those little corny pockets of meaty goodness, and what better time than Week 7 to try my hand at them. How much work could they possibly be?

It turns out the answer is "A LOT." Now, they weren't "corned beef" difficult, or anything, but there's a lot of assembly line work as well as two cooking process and ingredient preparation. On the plus side, you can make a ton of them and freeze them or bring them to a party, or what have you.

I had no idea how they were actually made other than that you wrapped them in corn husks at some point in the process. My first step, as always, was the research. Google turned up a lot of recipes and I browsed them quickly for general information, such as the fact that you steam them! I also quickly found that Alton Brown has made them, and looked up his recipe. It looked pretty good, except for a few small things.

First, it is for a large number of tamales (4-5 dozen.) That's not really a big problem, as I can just halve it.

Second, it's for HOT tamales. I have no problem with that, but as I've said here before, my wife isn't big on spices. So I'll have to adjust it.

Last, his is for shredded beef tamales. In general, I don't like shredded beef. There is something about the texture I don't care for. I wanted to make ground beef tamales.

I looked around for ground beef tamale recipes and picked up some good tips, but in general they didn't have good spice profiles. I really liked all the various spices in Alton's recipe; smoked paprika, garlic powder, cumin. Most of the ones I found on the web didn't go much beyond chili powder. I also liked Alton's masa recipe.

In the end I went with a Frankenstein creation; mostly Alton's recipe, but with a lot of my own ideas. I used Alton's masa recipe and his spice list, but with ground beef, which required a lot of different cooking methods.

Here's what my recipe looks like:

1 tbs chili powder
1 tbs kosher salt
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp onion powder
1 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon freshly ground cumin seed
1 pounds hamburger
2 tbs vegetable oil
1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced

For the wrappers:

2 dozen dried corn husks

For the cornmeal dough:

1 pounds masa, approximately 3 cups
1 tablespoons kosher salt
1/2 tablespoon baking powder
4 ounces lard, approximately 1/2 cup
2 cups beef broth

Shopping was fun. There are a number of good Mexican groceries in my area. I stopped at the one in Pike Place first and bought the husks, masa (limed cornmeal,) and the lard (the glorious lard!) I have never worked with any of these as ingredients before so I was pretty excited; especially for the lard. There's something naughty about using such a fattening ingredient in these modern "healthy eating" times. I felt the same way about all the butter and cream in the butter chicken, and now I was buying LARD! I also picked up the smoked paprika and the cumin seeds from Market Spice.

Also on the agenda was buying a new steamer. I bought one years ago to make rice, but it was pretty cheap and has long needed replacement. A quick trip to Bed, Bath, and Beyond set me up with a nice 8 quart pot with a steamer inset. I love buying cooking equipment!

Winco supplied me with everything else I needed, as always. In fact, it turned out that I could have picked up the masa, husks, and lard there as well. Good to know the next time I need them!

Early this morning I started with the husks. I filled a mixing bowl with warm water and put the husks in. I used a wide one, since the husks are pretty big. I then put another, smaller mixing bowl on top of them with some water in it to hold them down. You want them submerged if possible so the whole husk re-hydrates.

Then we took our daughter to see Tangled. She was fascinated and sat through the whole thing. That's a pretty good accomplishment for a two year old. I really liked it, as well. Disney still hasn't lost a step.

When we got back, I started in on the real work. Since I was switching from shredded to ground beef, I had greatly reduced my cooking time. Essentially, my plan was to make a kind of taco meat to fill the tamales with, using a modification of Alton's recipe. If you compare my recipe above with Alton's you'll see that in general I used about a third of what he did. That's both because I was only cooking half the amount of meat, and also because I wasn't going to be doing such a long cooking process that needed to penetrate a roast.

I started by cooking the onions and garlic in a bit of vegetable oil, just until they softened. Then I threw in the pound of ground beef and the spices. I cooked it for about 5-10 minutes; until I was sure it was well cooked, but still moist.

While it was cooking, I started on the masa. I mixed the masa with the salt and baking powder, and then mixed the lard in with my hands. It works really well, I must say. Then I poured in the beef broth. Alton's recipe calls for using the remaining fluid from boiling the beef, but since I wasn't doing that step I used about a cup of beef broth and a cup of water as a replacement.

Some of the recipes online described the finished dough as being similar to thick mashed potatoes, and so that is what I was going for. It turned out very close.

Now began the mass production part of the recipe. You have to roll up the tamales one at a time, and each one takes a bit of time. It was a learning process, and the last ones I made were far superior to the first ones I made. Hopefully I can pass this knowledge on to you.

I found a site that had pictures of the entire process. I followed it precisely, but incorrectly at first. Looking at the pictures it's hard to get a good sense of scale. As it turns out, the husks are not uniform in size. I started with one of the larger ones I had and filled to the same proportions as the ones in the pictures. Also, my impression in general was that tamales were fairly large, say the size of a fat enchilada. This had created some confusion in my mind when I read all these recipes that promised 6 dozen tamales. That seemed like a massive amount of food.

It is also fairly difficult to tell from the pictures how thick of a layer of masa to put on the husk. I had some measurements from Alton's recipe of using about 2 tablespoons, which helped me to hone in on the proper amount eventually. However, the first few tamales I made ended up being about twice as big as all the rest of them, and they had pretty think "shells." They cooked up just fine, though.

So my advice from experience here is to follow the suggested amounts. Use about 2 tablespoons of dough and about a tablespoon of filling. Spread it pretty thin, too. It will fluff up a bit during cooking. You want to make sure that you can wrap the dough all the way around the filling. The picture above is the first one I made. I quickly learned as well to push the dough out all the way to the edge on one side. It makes rolling it up so much easier. You want to leave a gap at the bottom, though.

It's quite a job to roll up all the tamales. I only ended up with about 18 in all, and I can't imaging doing 6 dozen. Luckily I had some help!

The rolled tamales were placed carefully upright in the colander insert for the pot. There's a smaller steamer insert, but it's pretty short, so I just kept the water level down and used the pasta insert.

In order to make sure they all stayed upright, I ended up using the extra husks I'd already soaked. I folded them up and filled the space.

I brought the water to a boil and then turned it down. Every half hour I checked on them and added some water to the pot. It took about an hour and a half until I decided they looked done. I removed on and let it cool for 5 minutes before unwrapping it. The masa was nice and firm, so I declared the batch done!

Result: Pretty good. The texture was perfect. The meat turned out well. There's plenty of flavor here, but they still seem bland to me for some reason; like something's missing. I added sour cream and hot sauce to mine and that brought them up quite a bit. I think, though, that something like enchilada sauce would have been just about perfect. They also would have gone well with a side of something. Maybe some beans or cheese. Here's a gratuitous picture of my daughter enjoying hers, though.

I'm glad I did this, of course, but I don't know if I'll do it again any time soon. It might be good party food, though, and if I can zero in on some other flavors it would be much improved. If I do it again, I'll make a sauce and try a different meat.

But it's no butter chicken...

Week 6: Build Me Up, Butter Chicken

2011-02-06T00:09:00.000-08:00

As I threatened when I made Chicken Tikka Masala, I decided to try my hand at Butter Chicken. Fair Warning: just reading this post may cause you to gain weight. In fact, just overhearing someone mention it is good for a couple ounces... My doctor is not going to be pleased.

My research for this dish was very confusing. It turns out that there are a lot of ways to make butter chicken. That's somewhat normal for cooking, I guess, but these were very different recipes. Also, there was some confusion as to what constituted "butter chicken." Some sites insisted that it and tikka masala were the same thing, for example. Because of all of this I thought my best plan was to go with a simple version of the dish and then I could use that as a base for experimentation the next time I try it. I still wanted one that at least claimed to taste like the butter chicken you find at restaurants, since that's the flavor I have so far liked. I eventually settled on this one. I mean, if you're going to make butter chicken, you might as do it with an emphasis on "butter," right?

The recipe is fairly simple. It only calls for two real spices (or spice blends.) I already had the garam masala from the tikka masala. I just had to track down the tandoori masala and stop by the grocery, and I was set. The tandoori masala is a little tricky. The local indian market had many boxes labeled "Tandoori Barbecue Masala" which might be the same thing, but I did find one bottle simply labelled Tandoori Masala.

There's a lot of cooking here, but nothing too complex. As is my new habit, I did as much of the prep ahead of time as possible. I diced the onion and fresh garlic, made sure the tomato sauce was open and ready, and defrosted the chicken. I used about 3 tablespoons of butter in the pan for the onions and garlic and got them going.

While they were cooking I started on the sauce. Two sticks of butter (minus the 3 tbs for the onions,) one 15oz can of tomato sauce, and 3 cups of whipping cream. It was just decadent and beautiful to see it all in its fatty glory melting and mixing together.

I didn't use cayenne pepper since I had a bunch of red pepper powder left over from the tikka masala. I also only put in about 3/4 teaspoon in deference to my wife. However, the final product had no real bite to it, so I could have gone "full bore" with it and will next time.

I cut up the chicken and tossed it in oil and tandoori masala and put it in the oven to bake for 12 minutes. I have to admit I was highly dubious about how this was going to turn out. Normally for a dish like this I would have quickly stir fried them, but I have to admit I was wrong. The little cubes came out perfect and a nice bright red from the masala.

When I put the chicken in the oven, the onions had just finished. Caramelized onions smell so good. And they're so tasty I was hard put to not just eat them right there. But I kept to it and tossed them in the sauce. I can't really tell you what the sauce would have tasted like without them, but they did not make it taste onion-y, and I think they added a couple of nice notes of sweetness and a little smoke.

Once the chicken was done, in it went, and I let the whole thing simmer while the rice was cooking. I got a bit of a late start with the rice, but it didn't upset me too much because more simmering can't be anything but good for a sauce like this. I made brown basmati rice. Truth be told I overcooked it a bit trying to get a good dry rice for the dish. It tasted fine, but was a little crunchy.

How did it turn out? It's got two sticks of butter and three cups of heavy cream. It was delicious!

Seriously, though, it was better than I feared it would be. I intended it as an experiment and a base to build on, but it was really good as is, and not just because it can clog your arteries by smell alone. My only disappointments were that the masala taste, while evident, was a bit more subtle than I would have liked, and the heat was totally non-existent. Next time I'll definitely turn up both spices a notch or two. I'll probably also start to experiment with the butter and heavy cream. Maybe replace some with yogurt or half and half, and see what that does. However, it was definitely delicious and I will be working it into the normal food rotation around here very soon.

Week 5! Let's Pad Thai One On!

2011-01-29T23:15:00.000-08:00

I cut it a bit close last week as far as getting a new recipe done so I thought I'd get a jump on week 5.

Last week I did Indian which I like, but I decided to do Thai this week, which I LOVE. It's my favorite type of food. I love Thai curries so much that I almost have to dislike other curries by comparison. I would drink red curry from a glass. I would use peanut sauce as a condiment. I feel like I need to join Tom Kha Gai Anonymous. I think you get the point.

I long ago learned to make red curry chicken, and make it well (or so I'm told.) I would make it a lot more often if Kendra liked spicy food more. But it's the only Thai dish I've made. I was somewhat shocked to realize that myself,, and decided to fix that problem immediately by making one of my favorite dishes, Pad Thai.

First, of course, was the research. I remembered that Alton Brown had done Pad Thai so I went there first. Now, I worship the man; truly I do. But his recipe had a few too many experimental elements to it and I was looking for a traditional dish to start from. Next time I might get a bit more tricky. I quickly found one that looked better for my purposes. It had a couple problems such as my wanting to make chicken pad thai, not shrimp, and there were a couple of ingredients I wasn't familiar with, but it was a solid base to build on.

I rounded up the family this morning and took them out to dim sum (possibly my second favorite type of food) at the Great Wall Mall, which has a Ranch 99 store. If you haven't been to one, it's an Asian grocery, and a really good one. You can get lots of things there that you'd be hard pressed to get even in other Asian groceries. They have live tanks full of exotic eating fish. A full produce department with fruits you don't see on this continent much. I really recommend it. The only ingredient I had any problem with was the tamarind, and that was just because the only thing they had labeled itself as a "sour soup base." However it really didn't have anything in it beside tamarind, so I got it, and it ended up working fine.

The recipe was for 2-3 servings. I knew I'd be serving at least three adults and my daughter, so I decided to double the recipe. I think the flavors were just fine with that, but cooking twice as much was a bit difficult.

Pad thai is a noodle stir fry, and the one thing you have to do when making a stir fry is get all the ingredients together ahead of time. It's just too fast to do prep while things are sizzling in a wok on high. So I was very careful to try to get as much done ahead of time as possible. I put the noodles in some water, but kept an eye on the time. I cut up the tofu and the chives and set them aside. I got the bean sprouts clean and minced the garlic. Ranch 99 didn't have any shallots, so I gave them a pass and didn't really notice their absence in the final product. I cut up the chicken and got it ready to go, and got all my sauces out.

I hadn't gotten any peanuts, but we did have a big can of Planter's Deluxe Nuts which contained peanuts, so I improvised and use them. I chopped them up and threw them into the hot oil as the first step... and promptly burned them. They cooked VERY fast. They didn't even seem to brown, just straight to very dark brown. I scooped them out as best I could, but decided to carry on with the same oil since it seemed to be fine and carried a peanut flavor, but not a burned one.

Since I was using chicken instead of shrimp, I had to modify the recipe a bit. It would have to be cooked a lot longer than the shrimp, so once I had cleaned out the burned peanuts, I threw it into the pot. Well, that's what I should have done and what I planned to do. What I really did was started making the recipe the way it was written down and forgot all about my forethought with the chicken.

I cooked the garlic and the tofu to a nice brown and had just tossed in the noodles when I remembered my brilliant "cook the chicken first" plan. I briefly considered starting everything over again, but decided, instead, to see what I could do with what I had (especially because I didn't have any more rice noodles.) So I took the contents of the wok and dumped them into a bowl and proceeded to cook the chicken. Once it was done, I tossed the noodles, tofu, and garlic back into the wok. It seemed to work just fine, probably because the noodles hadn't really cooked the first time.

This is where the problem with a double batch cropped up, though. That many noodles are not only hard to stir, but incredibly difficult to mix with other ingredients. My spatula was useless, so I switched to a spaghetti ladle with all those nice prongs around the edge to pull the noodles apart. That made things much easier.

I added the tamarind, sugar, and fish sauce. I left the chili pepper out in deference to my wife and hadn't found any preserved turnip at the store, although I hadn't looked very hard. I have no experience with it as an ingredient and wasn't sure what it would add.

I mixed it and then moved the mass to the side for the eggs. Eggs in a wok are difficult. They stick a lot, but I managed to keep them going pretty well with constant stirring until they were mostly cooked and then mixed them in.

I added the sprouts and chives and cooked it a bit more to soften them, and then it was done. It looked perfect to me. I've never used Chinese chives before, and was a bit concerned about them, but they looked perfect in the dish.

The results: very good! I am very very pleased with how it all turned out. After using so many new ingredients, I was prepared for a disaster, but instead I got pad thai! It tasted right and had all the right textures. My noodles came out perfect! The sprouts still had just enough crunch, and the chicken melted in my mouth.

There were a couple of negatives. First, it was a little bit oily. Not much, but I noticed it. I blame that on my mistake with the chicken, though. I had to toss in a bit more oil to cook it. Second, the flavors were a bit mild. I don't know if the tamarind was weak or what, but I know I'll use more next time. It needs a bit more of that vinegar-y flavor.

Overall, though, a rousing success even though I left out a number of the ingredients. But, then again, that's what cooking is all about; experimenting to make it taste the way you want. I'll definitely be cooking this again and maybe next time I'll try the shallot and the turnip!

Hakuna Matata... wait, no... Tikka Masala

2011-01-27T22:52:00.000-08:00

For this week's experiment, Joely-Poly, we've got a little temptress we like to call "Chicken Tikka Masala." (If you got that reference, +10 geek points.)

I've been thinking hard about what to make next. So hard that the weekend passed me by and I found myself in a very busy work week. I normally get home from work after 6pm which doesn't leave a lot of time for me to whip something up, especially when I'm famished. So I tossed around a lot of ideas like starting some home made sauerkraut, or repeating the steel cut oats experiment. Then a friend of mine posted a link to a recipe he'd found for a slow cooker version of Chicken Tikka Masala and suddenly I had a plan!

There's a lot of Indian food that I love and a lot of it I don't. I would hip check an old lady out of the way to get the last bits of butter chicken and naan at a buffet (Note: this is hyperbole and no old ladies were harmed in the writing of this blog.) I'm very partial to the yellow creamy vegetable stuff, deep fried vegetables, and a few other dishes. After that things tend to go rapidly downhill into tolerable-land. I find most Indian curries to be ok, and I can see why others love them, but they aren't my thing. Chicken tikka masala falls into that middle ground for me. The creamier it is and the more like butter chicken the better I like it. I figured that it would be a really good idea to try to make it for myself and see how much I liked it then. Plus, since it was a slow cooker version, I could whip it up in the morning, go to work, and it would be done when I got home!

The first step was a trip to World Spice Market at the Pike Place Market. This is a different store from Market Spice where I went to get all the ingredients for Corned Beef (which just keeps getting more delicious as time passes.) I needed a specific spice mix called garam masala and Market Spice didn't list it, but World Spice Market did. They also carried everything else I needed, including a mortar and pestle. I love getting fresh spices. It's a couple days later now and my car still smells wonderful just from having them in there for a day.

I stopped at the grocery store on the way home and grabbed the rest of the things I needed. Do you know how tough it is to find full fat plain yogurt? There were several different kinds of low fat or no fat plain yogurts, and a bunch of different full fat flavors other than plain. Eventually I settled on plain greek yogurt even though I had to buy a big tub of it.

When I got home I went to work on the first part of the recipe, the chicken marinade. I don't have a huge crock pot so I was making a half recipe which can be a bit annoying when you're dealing with things like "one inch ginger" but I muddled through. Grating the ginger and garlic made the best smell! I coated the chicken and put the whole thing in the fridge overnight.

The next morning I started in on the second half. Blanching the tomatoes was easy and a technique I'll remember. Because I knew I'd be serving this to my wife who is not fond of anything that has the word "pepper" attached to it, I decided not to use the chilies the recipe called for. The chili powder and black pepper would be plenty for any light-weights. I also cut out the almonds since they were optional and I thought there was already enough going on in this dish.

The onions I used were particularly pungent and my eyes teared up immediately. That happened over and over, even after all the other ingredients were mixed together. I was a bit worried that it might end up dominating the flavor, but it didn't.

I threw it all into the food processor and let it go for 10 minutes or so, checking and scraping as I went. It didn't change much over the last couple minutes so I called it good, added the tomatoes for a few pulses and tossed the whole shebang into the crock pot along with the marinated chicken. The marinade was so thick that not adding it wasn't really an option as it was firmly coating the pieces. Besides I wanted all the creaminess the yogurt could add. I gave it all a good stir, turned it on high, and left for work.

Fast forward to the evening. I got home and the house smelled great! The tikka masala had separated a bit after bubbling all day but a quick stir recombined it. Our roommate had made some nice dry rice to serve it over and we were ready to go.

I liked it. I didn't LOVE it, but I liked it. It wasn't as creamy as I wanted it and there was a bit more of the kind of flavors Indian curry has than I wanted, but overall it was quite tasty. It smells intoxicating from all teh wonderful spices in it. The flavors were very complex and layered, which I really did enjoy. I'd get bits of all the different spice flavors at different points while eating each bite. It had just enough bite to notice without being "hot," as well.

The others seemed to enjoy it, even my 2 year old who I'd figured would not eat in on appearance alone, but I think the smells got to her. I think that anyone who really likes strong Indian flavors and especially Indian curries would really love this dish.

This dish does require a bit of time and work to make. Blanching the tomatoes, chopping onions, peeling and grating ginger and garlic, marinating overnight. Nothing's really hard, but it is intensive.

As for me, though, next time I try cooking Indian food, it's going to be BUTTER CHICKEN!

11 days later: Corned Beef

2011-01-18T23:28:00.000-08:00

I was busy last night so I let it sit in the brine for an extra day. When I got home from work today I pulled it out and started the last step; the boiling!

I dumped the brine and rinsed the beef off thoroughly in cold water. Then I tossed it in a large pot, added an onion, carrot, and celery and filled it with water to one inch above the top of the meat. I set it on high until it boiled, and then reduced the heat to low and let it simmer for three hours.

After three hours I checked the temperature of the meat (plenty,) then fished it out and put it on a cooling rack.

Not the best picture I know, but actually looks pretty correct. The meat is kind of grey on the outside, which is hardly surprising after eleven days in a bag of brine and boiling for three hours. The real surprise was inside.

It's kind of a pretty light pink! My research on saltpeter had mentioned that this is one of the reasons to use it, but I used so little of it I didn't expect much. I'm very pleasantly surprised. It also appears to be reddening more as it cools.

Of course the big question is "how did it turn out?" I've very pleased to say that the experiment was a success! The meat came out very tender and has a very good flavor. The flavor isn't fully uniform. The edge piece are more delicately flavored than the interior, but that's to be expected in such a large piece of meat that has had so much done to it. The only negative I would put out there is that it is a bit greasy. I'll give some thought about how to fix that next time. Maybe a closer trim of the fat? It will be perfect for sandwiches, though. I'm sure there is a delicious Reuben in my future soon!

Was it worth it? Yes. It wasn't really that hard to make overall. The worst part was losing access to my deli drawer for 11 days. It also required a lot of spices I don't normally have sitting around and am not sure what else to do with except make it again! Then again, with this blog, I'm sure I can come up with something else as well.

Week 3: Paul Peterson prepares a pack of pickled pepper poppers!

2011-01-15T17:50:00.000-08:00

I love jalapeño poppers. Seriously. I would live on them and buffalo wings if I could. But I've never made them, so here we go!

First, I did my research. I browsed some of the 98237987 recipes for them on the internet, grabbing tips and tricks and general guidelines, but in the end I made up my own recipe based on all I read. It's actually two recipes since I decided to experiment a bit.

9-10 whole jalapeño peppers (see below)
8 oz. cream cheese
1 cup finely grated cheddar cheese
1.2 cup flour
2 cups buttermilk
2 cups breadcrumbs
hot oil

The experimental part has to do with the jalapeños. Most of the recipes I found were pretty straightforward regarding the peppers. There were variations based on whether you cut them in half before stuffing them, but they agreed about getting them fresh and de-seeding them. A couple advised blanching them to soften them a bit. However, one recipe I ran across suggested that instead of using fresh peppers you should use pickled peppers because they're already soft and have a lot of flavor.

I decided to try both! I bought four fresh jalapenos and a can of pickled whole ones.

I prepped the fresh peppers first. I cut the tops off, then cut them in half and pulled out all the seeds and membranes. I know the power of peppers so I wore gloves the entire time I was handling the peppers to make sure I didn't get any juice on my hands and transfer it anyplace else. The pickled peppers Paul Peterson prepared are on the left. The fresh are on the right.

I blanched the fresh ones in boiling water for a couple minutes to soften them up, which seemed to work very well for the final product.

The next step was the cheese. I read a lot of fancy recipes for spices and such to mix into it, but for my first try I just went with cream cheese and finely grated cheddar. (Side note, this stuff is delicious on Triskets as well, as my lack of leftover cheese shows.)

It doesn't look like a lot, but it stuffed 18 half peppers with some left over for crackers, so unless you're making a ton, this will do.

I spooned the mixture into the half peppers. Well, really I wrapped the half peppers around a cylinder of cheese. The cheese should be a mound above the edge of the shells.

I even went back and put more in some of them until they all looked properly full.

The next step is the coating. I started by rolling each of the peppers in flour to give the coating something to hang onto. Then it was into the buttermilk followed by breadcrumbs. Once each of them had a coat on it, I put the plate into the fridge for 5-10 minutes. This lets the buttermilk absorb into the breadcrumbs and form more of a paste than just wet crumbs. It will help it all stick together. The fridge just helps the cheese stay more solid. After the wait, I put them all through the buttermilk and crumbs again before another stint in the cooler.

I heated my oil to 350 degrees and that seemed to work perfectly. I dropped them in two or three at a time depending on how big they were. I cooked the fresh peppers first since I had the most hope for them and wanted to try them immediately. Then I cooked the pickled peppers. I let the fryer climb back up to 350 between each batch as well.

I cooked them for about 2 minutes on one side then flipped them over and cooked them for about another 2 minutes or until they changed color to a darker brown. I put them on a paper towel to dry and cool and then tried them!

Let's start with the fresh pepper as I did. The first bite was delicious, but surprisingly mild. I got a lot of cream cheese and cheddar flavors with a pepper flavor that reminded me more of green peppers than jalapeños. The coating wasn't too greasy and had a some flavor. As I finished it, though, my elation faded and I realized that it was actually kind of bland and could have done with some salt at the very least. It also had almost no kick to it, which was quite disappointing. I could definitely recommend them, though, as a good party food for anyone who doesn't like a lot of kick (assuming adding salt.)

The pickled peppers were an entirely different story. They had plenty of kick! The cream cheese and cheddar still came through, but there was definitely the strong taste and heat you get from jalapeños on nachos, for example. It could still use some salt, but it was otherwise pretty much what I was hoping for from the beginning. If anything it was a bit hot, but only because it overwhelmed the other flavors. When I make them for myself, this is definitely the way I'm going to go.

Overall, I'd rate this a huge success. I'm incredibly pleased with the way both peppers came out as it gives me options for making them for myself and others. Next time I'll add some salt to the breadcrumbs, and I may start experimenting with adding stuff to the cheese (maybe bacon!) I might use a bit less than half a pickled pepper or use more cheese next time to help balance the flavors a bit better. I love these just the way they are, but my roommate suggested making dipping sauce, so I could work on that as well.

Small Update: Corned Beef

2011-01-13T23:00:00.001-08:00

Day 6 and the corned beef is fine. It looks a little different in the bag, but it's hard to explain how so, and pictures don't pick it up very well. The meat looks like it's cooking, I guess. In any case, only 4 days to go!

Oh, and the bag leaks. Bleah.

Update: The leak was worse than I thought. I cleaned it when I got home and then checked again before bed to see that a noticeable amount of liquid again. So I got out a new bag and transferred the whole thing. I hope I didn't screw up some delicate balance thing in there.

Quick Sauce: Update on Current Projects

2011-01-09T22:07:00.000-08:00

The corned beef is coming along nicely, which is to say it's been sitting quietly in it's bag of brine for two days now. It's appearance looks normal to me, so not much to say except I don't seem to have screwed anything up too badly yet. The bag has a very small leak somewhere (probably in the top) as I keep finding liquid in the tray with it. At the rate it's leaking, though, it's in no danger of anything major happening before the beef is done.

The jerky is both good and bad. Good in that it tastes awesome! Totally yummy! Bad however in that I made a rookie mistake with it. I was in a hurry when I cut it and forgot to turn it against the grain. This wouldn't be a huge problem with the roasts I generally use for jerky, but with a brisket it makes it incredibly tough to chew. It's on the edge of inedible for most people, I would imagine, but I don't mind a little exercise as I eat. I just can't eat much of it at a time. Ah, well, lesson learned. Next brisket jerky will be cut properly.

Extra Credit: Jerky

2011-01-09T11:01:00.000-08:00

I'm going to call these kinds of post "Extra Credit" because they don't push my goal of cooking new things, but they are cooking projects that are more advanced than "empty packet into bowl and microwave."

I decided to make the extra brisket into jerky. There are two ways that I make jerky at the moment. The first is with a very quick, intense marinade and the second is with a longer soak. Since we were going to be gone for the day yesterday I did a long soak. The marinade is pretty easy:

2/3 cup soy sauce
2/3 cup Worcestershire sauce
1 TBS Garlic Powder
1 TBS Onion Powder
1 tsp liquid smoke

I like jerky so much that a few years ago I bought a meat slicer. So I used that to slice the brisket into roughly 1/8th inch thick slices. Then I tossed it all into a ziploc and put it into the fridge.

We were gone longer than I thought we would be, so it got an extra long soak. I hope it doesn't turn out too salty, but it probably wont bother me too much if it is. I am a fan of salt.

It's still spinning in the dehydrator for the rest of the day, so I'll let you all know how it turns out and update the condition of the corned beef later today.

A Brisket, a Tasket: Corned Beef

2011-01-07T23:59:00.000-08:00

As with all new resolutions I want to start strong and so I decided to tackle something that I've wanted to do for a long time; I'm going to make corned beef from scratch! It's not terribly difficult, really. Meat + brine + time + slow cooking = corned beef. But it takes a lot of ingredients and a lot of patience, so I'm not too surprised more people don't do it, or that I haven't done it yet.

Side note: I'm not really sure how to count this in my "recipe a week" total since I'm starting it this week, but it's not going to be done for 10 days or so. I guess I'll count it for this week just in case I don't get something else done. :)

My first step was research! I have seen the Good Eats episode where Alton makes corned beef, so I figured I'd start with his recipe. As you can see there are quite a few ingredients that you probably don't just keep on your shelf. That's another reason more of this tasty dish doesn't get made, I'm sure. Luckily I not only live near Seattle, but walk right by the Pike Place market every day on the way from my bus to my office. There are not one, but two very good spice stores in the vicinity. (I'm getting the hang of these blogging tricks!)

The one ingredient I wasn't sure about was saltpeter, and sure enough, neither place listed it on their website, so I tried to track some down. You can order it over the internet, but I did some more research and learned exactly what it does, which is basically makes the meat stay pink. It guards against bacteria as well, but in this day and age it's not nearly as important. Still, I like pink corned beef so I eventually settled on a bit of a compromise. There is a substance called Prague Powder #1 that is used extensively in curing meats, especially for "fast" cures like corned beef. It contains a low dosage of sodium nitrite mixed with salt. I picked some of that up to replace the saltpeter. It is stuff that you should be very careful cooking with, though, so I looked up a lot of recipes that use it for corned beef and adjusted mine to use it (and erred on the side of caution, even then.)

The biggest hassle in the whole production was getting a 2 gallon ziploc bag. Most grocery stores only carry up to the 1 gallon size. I was thinking that I might have to either order them online or visit a real restaurant supply store to pick them up, but luckily some research turned up a possible alternative; hardware stores. Many such stores carry canning and curing supplies which include large plastic bags. A few calls quickly found them at my local store. Yay!

The first step was purchasing the meat. There's a nice butcher shop in Pike Place where they were happy to sell me a nice brisket, and trim it for me as a bonus.

Yummy!

Right next door to the butcher shop is Market Spice, so I chose them for all my spice needs and got everything I needed (as well as some vanilla beans and some new tea!)

As small as they are, this represents enough spices to make a dozen corned beefs. I'm doubtful of that happening soon.

The brine was very simple. I heated water with brown sugar, salt, and prague powder until it all was incorporated. Then I took it off the heat and added the spices. The recipe says differently but I'm following what Alton did on the show.

I let it stew there for about 20 minutes while the the liquid cooled (stirring occassionally.) Then I added in the 2 pounds of ice. When I first saw the recipe I thought it called for 2 bags of ice, so that's what I bought. They are 7 pounds each and so 12 pounds of ice is now sitting in my camping cooler. Maybe I'll make ice cream...

I stirred until the ice melted and checked that the water had cooled down to below room temperature. Then I put the brisket in one of my giant ziplocs and used a teacup to scoop the brine in on top of it before pouring the last of it in. I squeezed out all of the air that I could (pretty much all of it, actually) and now the whole thing is taking up my entire deli drawer in the refrigerator.

It's a little hard to see in the pictures, but there's a nice thin layer of brine over the top of the meat. None of it is pressed up against the bag, so it's all brining.

Well, that's about it for now. I will be turning the brisket over every night for the next 10 nights. I'll either cook it on the 10th or 11th night (since it will be a Monday or a Tuesday.) I'll post occasional updates till then and one for the actual cooking so you know how the story ends.

Audience Participation: The brisket I got was actually about 6.5 pounds and was too long to fit into the bag. I cut it down to size and considered stuffing the whole thing in the bag, but the recipe calls for 4 to 5 pounds and I prefer to not mess with that on my first try, so now I've got about 2 pounds of brisket sitting in my fridge. My default choice would be to make jerky out of it since I love jerky. I've done it many times before.

Any other suggestions on what to do with it?

A Tale of Two Oats - My Attempts at Steel Cut Oats

2011-01-02T12:59:00.000-08:00

Last night I tried to make Steel Cut Oats. For those who are unfamiliar, a quick overview: standard oatmeal is made by rolling and flattening the oats. This makes it cook very fast but also robs it of some of it's flavor. Steel cut oats are just chopped up oats. They take longer to cook, but still have all the good stuff in them.

I've been intrigued by them since watching the Good Eats episode that featured them as an overnight recipe. Toss them in a crock pot overnight and have delicious oatmeal for breakfast! So that's what I tried.

Alton's recipe is fairly simple:

1 cup Steel Cut Oats
1 cup dried Cranberries
1 cup dried Figs
4 cups Water
1/2 cup Half and Half

I had everything ready to go last night except the figs. I haven't really had much of a taste for figs since I read about the "wasp situation" I warn you now that reading it might swear you off Newtons.

I put it all together in the crock pot before I went to sleep and turned it on Low. Simple, right?

Well, I woke up in the middle of the night. I decided to go and stir the oats to help it a bit with even cooking, and to take a taste. Actually it was pretty good, but VERY cranberry-y. In fact it was a little TOO much cranberry flavor. I think it might have been better with some fig flavor to add complexity, so my bad for letting my fears override the recipe!

In any case, it was pretty clear that 3 1/2 hours of cooking on low was more than enough to cook the oats completely and infuse them with the flavor of the cranberries.

I turned off the crock pot and emptied the oats into another bowl and put them into the fridge for the morning. Then I had another idea. Kendra hadn't been all that wild about the cranberry idea. She prefers maple and brown sugar on her oatmeal. So, I decided that since I still had half the night to cook, I'd try a plain batch that could be flavored in the morning. I put all the ingredients into the crock pot and went back to bed.

The more astute of you will immediately see the problem with cooking in the middle of the night. I did NOT just say "I put all the ingredients into the crock pot, turned it on, and went back to bed." Sigh.

I got up this morning, threw out the stuff in the crock pot and spooned up a big bowl of cranberry steel cut oats. It was ok, but still much too much cranberry flavor. The texture was nice and there was a good nutty undertone. Kendra tried some but retained her dislike of fruit in her oatmeal and declined to eat a bowl. My daughter took a test bite and decided that pancakes were more to her taste, so I ended up making them. Our roommate did eat a bowl, though, and pronounced it ok, which I agree with.

Well, I did meet my goal. I cooked something I've never cooked before. The result wasn't fantastic, but that was more the fault of the cranberries than the oats. I tend to agree with Kendra that it might work out with maple and brown sugar. I plan to try again sometime soon.

Quick Start

2011-01-01T23:13:00.000-08:00

I'll be posting something slightly more ambitious tomorrow, but I did, in fact, make something today that I've never made before: Egg Salad.

The primary reason I've never made egg salad before is that I used to hate it. Well, to be clear I should say that I hated every egg salad sandwich I'd ever eaten for the majority of my life. But as I've gotten older my tastes have changed and although I would hardly call egg salad a "favorite" of mine, it can be quite tasty.

The reason I made it today, though, was both in regards to my goal of trying to make new things, and a matter of convenience. You see, in the process of making one of her fabulous lunches for our daughter (you can read all about it at http://bitingmyhand.blogspot.com/) my wife made some hard boiled eggs, and there were a couple of extras. So, I decided to try my hand at egg salad. I first checked to see what Alton Brown had to say on the subject.

Side Note: You will hear a lot about Alton Brown on this blog over the course of the next year. He is a hero of mine, a great chef and food scientist. Many of the recipes I will be trying will be ripped directly from Good Eats or any of his books. I'm currently reading Good Eats: the Early Years, so expect some of my first efforts to come from there!

Alton does not appear to have an egg salad recipe, which is just as well, since he'd assuredly want some spices I don't have handy to make it perfect. So I googled "Simple Egg Salad" and up popped a very simple recipe:

6 hard boiled eggs
3 TBS Mayo
1 TBS Mustard
1 TBS Relish
Salt to taste

Well, I only had two eggs but some quick math reduced the ingredients nicely and I whipped up a batch. It was pretty darn yummy.

OK, so it's about one step more complex than making popcorn in the microwave, but that's not the point, really. I'd never made it before, now I have, and I liked the result. A++. Would make again.

If you want to be dazzled, stick around. I do have some big plans this year.

Also, it's kind of a freebie, because my actual planned food to make this week for the first time is steel cut oats. I'm about to put them to cook overnight as we speak. Stay tuned!