Tag: recipe

Also, Bread

I’ve never actually made bread before (I’ve made pie crust, and baked a couple of cakes, but not much baking in general). So I decided I wanted italian bread tonight.

To me, that means a white bread, somewhat freeform loaves (but tending more towards oval than circular). A tight, somewhat chewy crumb. And fairly heavy crust, though thinner and less crunchy than “French bread”.

I started from this basic recipe.

On first making it, I ended up using about 2 ¾ cups of flour. I may have left the dough slightly too moist, but not disastrously. I had to scrape it down off the sides of the bowl and off the dough hook of the mixer a couple of times, which Pamela says is normal. I didn’t feel it had risen enough in half an hour, so I gave it another half hour, and then punched it down. Rising was in the lower oven on the “proof” setting, I didn’t measure the actual temperature, but it felt reasonable.

I didn’t do anything to emphasize the crust, no basting, no pizza stone, no water pan in the oven.

Ingredients

1 envelope (¼ oz.) active dry yeast

1 tsp sugar

1 cup warm water (100° – 110°)

2 to 3 cups bread flour (I used unbleached general purpose)

2 TBS olive oil

1 tsp salt

Procedure

Combine yeast, sugar, 1 cup warm water in mixer bowl. Let stand 5 minutes (and check for yeast activity).

Add 2 cups flour, oil and salt to bowl. Beat on low (I used the lowest speed on our KitchenAid) with dough hook for 1 minute.

Gradually add up to 1 cup additional flour until dough leaves sides of bowl and polls together (dough goes through a “shaggy” stage in here). With our mixer we have to push flour into the dough hook some. Add flour until the dough is the “right” consistency, which is soft and smooth, not wet, sticky, or overly dry with a rough surface.

Increase speed to medium and beat 5 minutes (I used the second-lowest speed).

Get dough off hook and make a ball in the bottom of the bowl. Cover this closely with plastic and let rise 30 minutes in a draft-free place at about 85° (I used the bottom oven on the “proof” setting). Let rise for 30 minutes or until doubled in bulk (I ended up giving it an hour), then punch down.

Start oven preheating to 400°.
Punch down and let stand 10 minutes (I put it back in the oven under plastic).

Take dough from bowl (it may have been a bit too moist, it tried to stick just a bit) and place on lightly floured surface. Form into loaf, about 12 inches long.

Place dough on lightly greased cookie sheet

Make 3 ¼” deep scores across the top with sharp knife to let the steam out (mine had kind of crude slashes, the dough tended to stick to the knife; and steam blew out one side of the loaf).

Bake at 400° for 16 minutes or until golden brown. Should make a nice hollow sound when rapped on the bottom. (I ended up at about 20 minutes).

Cool on wire rack.

Slice and eat!

Analysis

I liked the way the bread texture came out. The crust is too thin; it even looks wrong from outside. Taste is tolerable (at least when fresh). This kind of tastes like what I think of as good bread machine results, i.e. mediocre, but fresh bread is always good.

Next time I want to try something to increase the crust, maybe painting it with water.

Mediocre Texas Chili

I’m starting the process of working up what I think of as a “Texas” chili recipe — beef, no beans, no tomato so far.

1.5 lb chili-cut (or very coarse grind) beef
1 medium onion, chopped medium
3 T vegetable oil
3 T minced garlic
2 bay leaves
1 T ground ancho chile
1 T ground guajillo chile
2 t ground arbol chile
2 t ground cumin seed
3 T oregano leaf
1/2 t ground black pepper
2 cups beef stock, bouillon, or just water,
or some beer, or something
2 T masa harina
3 T water

Heat oil in dutch oven or other big enough container. Brown beef, then add onion, garlic, and herbs and spices. Cook 5 minutes, stirring constantly.

Add the two cups of liquid, bring to a boil, and reduce to simmer. Let simmer for a couple of hours. Remove bay leaves.

Mix masa harina with water until smooth, add to chili, and stir well.  Cook for 5 or 10 minutes, and serve.

I added a small amount of salt, which I think was too much, hence no salt listed above.  Use your judgment.  More cumin is probably a good idea, and using whole seed rather than ground will probably help.

I would rate the hotness of this batch at low medium, which is a wide band.

It tasted nice enough, but it wasn’t really “there” yet, and I’m not sure what to change next.

Chicken Pot Pie

One of the guilty pleasures of my childhood; the frozen version.  I haven’t had much experience with any other; the one I particularly remember was the Boston Market one, which was too sweet and too bland and generally not like the real thing.

I’ve been meaning to do this for over  a year, but finally actually made my first try at it today. It was successful beyond my wildest dreams—tasted exactly right, and yet contained only actual food ingredients (well, perhaps something nasty in the commercial crust or the bouillon).

Based on the Pillsbury Classic Chicken Pot Pie recipe; what I record here is what I actually did, as best I remember.

Pre-heat oven to 425°.

Cut two chicken breasts into ¾” or so cubes, and sauté gently until firm. Add 1 ¾ cups frozen peas and at least get the frost off them. This is too much meat, I think. And a mix of vegetables might be more interesting, although Lydy doesn’t want carrots in it.  But I think carrots would be good, and they’re certainly traditional. I drew the line at collard greens or cauliflower, though.

Mince one medium onion (recipe calls for 1/3 cup, so this is more than called for).

Melt 1/3 cup butter over medium heat, and sauté the onions a couple of minutes, until transparent.

Gradually add 1/3 cup all-purpose flour, with ½ tsp salt, 25 turns of fresh-ground pepper, and ¼ tsp or so each of thyme and sage.  Oh, and maybe 1/8 tsp of celery seed. Anyway, add this stuff gradually into the butter and onions.  Then add 1¾ cups chicken stock (I used Knorr bouillon) and ½ cup milk, still gradually and while stirring. I found this made a fairly glutinous mixture.

I used commercial crusts (top and bottom), and a 10-inch pie plate (recipe was for 9-inch, but I had extra meat and no shortage of other stuff). Put bottom crust in pie pan, then dump meat and veggies in, then pour the sauce over them. Finally, put on the top crust, seal the edges, and cut vents for the steam. Bake 20 to 30 minutes or until the crust is golden brown. If your crust / oven requires it, cover the edges for the last 15 minutes to avoid over-browning.  Let sit at least 5 minutes (I waited 10, and it was still essentially impossible to get a piece out as one piece) before cutting and serving.

Makes perhaps 6 reasonable servings. Total elapsed time was about 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Thoughts for the future: might be better to put a cookie sheet under the pie plate (less cleanup inside the oven). I had a bit too much filling even for a 10-inch pan, so one big breast is plenty (original recipe calls for 2½ cups shredded chicken). Maybe try with leftover turkey / turkey broth after Thanksgiving or Christmas. I wonder if finding containers to make single-serving portions is worth it? That would resolve the serving issue, but would require making my own crust.

Apologies to anybody who has trouble reading this due to my playing with the typography (accent in “sauté”, and fractions).

Pancakes

Finally started taking action on the problem of not getting enough pancakes in my life.  As it turned out, this required a last-minute trip to the store, since the amount of soy milk in the house was inadequate.

I did a batch of vegan whole-wheat pancakes that were okay (better than today’s batch, as I remember it) a long time ago, but don’t seem to have said anything or recorded the recipe.

Last two pancakes in the batch

I don’t like “fluffy” pancakes.  I like something closer to crêpes.

The recipe as I made it today:

1 cup white flour
1T sugar
1.5T baking powder
1/8t salt
1C unsweetened soy milk
2T vegetable oil

Mix, cook on medium hot  griddle, probably greased.  Makes 2 servings.

These came out kind of okay, though a bit thick, a bit tough, and a bit flavorless (I thought they lacked salt).

For next time, I plan to add something like 1/8 cup soy milk, and take the baking powder down to 1T.  (The original recipe actually called for 2T, I reduced it before making this batch.)

Turns out baking powder has huge amounts of sodium in it, when used in this kind of quantity.  Today’s recipe had 42% of the allowable sodium intake for a normal diet.

In the long run I’ll play with grains, I think, and maybe play with vegan egg-replacer.  I’m looking for a more rubbery, less cardboard, kind of a texture.  More oil might be involved too.  I’m trying to limit the number of things I change at once for a few iterations; though I suppose I may eventually give up this recipe entirely.

I could give up the vegan route, and work  on normal pancakes.  But that leaves Pamela out, which seems like it shouldn’t be my first choice.

450° Oven

Tonight I tried a technique that I got from Lynn on The Splendid Table last weekend (while I was driving around town alone; that’s when the radio is on). She gave it in response to a college student who liked to cook and wanted a new technique (he started with stir fry, as did I).

Worked great.

It’s one of those general ideas that can be applied millions of ways.  If I understood right, the name comes from the fact that the oven temperature is really the only thing that holds true across the whole range of things you can do with it.

Here’s what I did:

Slice about 3/4lb of pork and marinate in lemon juice, olive oil, red wine, a couple of cloves of garlic, and rosemary.  Oh, and a good squirt of oriental pepper sauce.

Preheat oven to 450°.

Peel and slice one sweet potato pretty thin (3/16 kinda).

Cut one red and one green peppers into strips.

Cut two onions so they fall apart into strips.

Cut one yellow zucchini into 1/4inch-plus slices.

Dump the veggies into a pan as big as will fit (in area; doesn’t need to be deep).  Or two.  Pour on some olive oil, quite a lot of oregano, some basil, salt, and pepper.  Mix a bit.  Dump the meat and marinade over it, and get the meat spread out.

Put in oven until done.  Was about 50 minutes this time.

We ate it wrapped in burrito-scale tortillas; sort of Italian burritos.

Lydy and I voted it a success, but there were some leftovers anyway.