JANUARY 2011
Sunday 2011.1.30
Potato Day
But first: Happy Chinese New Year. I've been waiting for months to do today's recipe and video upload. This coming Thursday, February 3rd, is Chinese New Year. The year of the rabbit. I have no Chinese lineage. My mother was Italian and my father was everything else—well, almost everything else.
I learned, sort of, to make dumplings from my Chinese friend's wife. They are from Dalien, China and his wife is a fantastic cook. When they lived here in town, each Chinese New Year I was usually invited to their home for dumplings. We would eat nothing but dumplings until we couldn't eat any more. it was a real exercise in gluttony. There is a cultural explanation for all this over-indulgence. According to Chinese tradition each dumpling is a little packet of good luck. The more you eat on Chinese New Year, the more good luck you will have during the coming year. They think they are doing you a favor by stuffing you to the gills with dumplings. However, his wife doesn't share any of her recipes, which would be my idea of a real favor. I had to figure out her Chinese dumplings on my own, and I did.
Now for Potato Day: If you've spent any time looking at my Minute Meals page you're familiar with my process for portioning and putting food in the freezer to be eaten another day. When it comes to mashed potatoes, I usually put up a goodly store. Sometimes I buy the 20-pound bag of potatoes at the warehouse store and peel, boil, mash, and portion the whole bag. My largest cooking pot, my stock pot, is ony large enough to boil half the potatoes. So it is usually takes about three hours to put up all those potatoes. The advantage is that I won't need to do potatoes again for months.
Yesterday I did instant potatoes. There is a brand of potatoes that I like because the ingredients are simply potatoes, butter, milk, and sea salt. No perservatives or other chemicals. The only concern is that if I stir them too much they get gummy. I put up 26 servings in the freezer. That sould last me several weeks. I added a picture and some explanation to the Minute Meals page today, should you be interested.
As for Chinese New Year, a friend and I made dumplings today and ate enough to be satisfied without walking away from the table in pain. We're a little early, but I can't cook on Thursday because I'll be preparing for a visitor from Spokane, Washington. He'll spend a couple days before driving back northward again. I'm along his circular route of regular visits when he wants to get out of cold Spokane for a while. It has been unseasonably warm here in SoCal, and hopefully the weather will hold.
And, finally, there is another reason why I made Chinese dumplings today: I promised a friend that I would make them when my most popular YouTube video, Mascarpone Cheese, reaches 1,000 views. It accomplished that number today. We celebrated.
Wednesday 2011.1.26
First Ya Gotta Make a Roux
I never knew making roux could be so entertaining and amusing. I first brought up the subject of roux when I mentioned I wanted to devote some time and space to Kitchen Basics. One fan who was raised in America's Deep South shared some useful background information. One tidbit I enjoyed was how the making of roux entered into the vernacular of the people. It went something like this:
"Did you get your money back on that computer that didn't work?"
"Well, hon, you know how it is. First ya gotta make a roux."
"Oooo-eeee! It took all day?"
I like people's stories. They are lived history, as compared to the stuff you read in books.
My first exposure to roux was in an Italian cooking course. It was used to make a béchamel sauce and it was okay. I liked the nutmeg, but loading it up with a lot of garlic didn't make much sense. I know how people love garlic. I see them on Emeril Live! (which I rarely watch now). They applaud three things: Garlic, booze, and hot sauce. I like to think of those ingredients as the non-cook's mirepoix. Bam!
In class we made a white lasagna with the béchamel and it was okay. We used non-cook pasta sheets. What can I say? The class was taught by a cook who runs her own catering business. Reducing time and effort increases profit. While some of the recipes were far from gourmet, there was enough information to adjust those recipes up to a level at which I wouldn't be embarrassed to serve them to friends.
I have never cooked roux to the dark stage. I made all four colors last night—white, blond, brown, and dark. An interesting thing happens when you cook roux to a dark color: You also burn the wooden spoon. I used a bamboo wok spatula to keep turning the mixture in the skillet (stainless steel—I know enough to protect my nonstick skillets from burning out at high heat) and the bamboo is as dark as the roux. I haven't tasted it yet to see if it has a toasted bamboo flavor.
So, I now have four ramekins of different color roux on my kitchen counter. What's next? Béchamel, velouté, and espagnole sauces. As for that really dark roux, we keep looking at each other, but we haven't come to an understanding yet. I'm looking into Cajun shrimp stew.
Sunday 2011.1.23
Some People Who Write Recipes Should be Boiled in Their Own Béchamel and Buried With a Stake of Rosemary Through Their Heart.
I'll start off by warning you that this is going to be a diatribe.
One of my more intelligent fans suggested I look into creating a regional recipe and video for a popular cake made in America's Deep South around Lent. It's called a King Cake. Being born and raised in New England, I never heard of King Cake. I thus headed onto the Internet to do my research and, once again, I was appalled at the recipes. So far I found six. Five of them don't even mention whether the cups of flour are sifted or scooped. One says "sifted" and then varies the amount by a cup—"4½ to 5½ cups sifted flour." Don't any of these writers bake!?!?
Baking is chemistry. It is so much like chemistry that many professional bakers do not refer to their instructions as recipes; they call them formulas. To be even more precise, the formula is the list of ingredients and their measurements. The instructions for assembling the ingredients is called the method of preparation, or MOP. Procedures in baking are so similar across many baked items that professional bakers often don't even use a MOP. They just keep a printed version of their formula and do the preparation from memory.
If the word formula doesn't hint at anything, let me be more precise. Anything yet? Maybe I need to be more accurate. If you worked in a laboratory and your boss asked you for a compound of Acetylsalicyic Acid, you wouldn't just start throwing chemicals into a beaker randomly. You'd measure accurately. Actually, if you really knew your chemistry you'd hand your boss some aspirin. The point is: Chemistry requires precision. So does baking.
I learned this the hard way when I first started making bread. I bought my first bread pans before I entered college. I still have those bread pans and I still use them. My first loaves were, well, like bagel bread—dense and heavy. I couldn't understand why my bread wouldn't rise to a light and fluffy texture. It was Julia Child who set me straight. In one of her French Chef episodes on WGBH, Boston she demonstrated the difference between sifted flour and scooped flour.
Although I cover this in my recipe for making white bread, I'll go over the basics here. A cup of sifted flour (sifting flour into a measuring cup until it overflows and then scraping the excess off the top with a knife) weighs around 4½ ounces. A cup of scooped flour (plunging a cup into a four container and then scraping the excess off) weighs around 5½ ounces. (If you really want to experiment, try these measurements many times. The sifted flour can end up being as light as 4 ounces and the scooped flour can weigh as much as 6 ounces. The average will be about 4½ and 5½ ounces respectively.)
My bread failed because I was using 6 cups of scooped flour rather than sifted flour. 6 cups scooped is about equal to 7 cups sifted. My bread dough had too much flour in it.
Ergo: When I see a bread or other baking recipe in which there is no mention of the flour being sifted or scooped, I throw my hands up in disgust and shout profanities at the writer. Well, that might be a little extreme. I actually just assume "sifted" because you can always work in a little more flour if needed. The baked goods recipes/formulas I admire the most are those that list the flour by weight in addition to or instead of by volume.
And that, my friends, concludes this diatribe.
Wednesday 2011.1.19
Good News
No, excellent news: YouTube upgraded their upload limit for "selected" accounts that have shown a history of compliance with YouTube's copyright policies. As I personally own the copyright of all the videos I upload, I am well within YouTube's policy. Therefore, I can now upload longer videos. At the moment there does not appear to be any time limit for the upgraded accounts, although we are still held to the 2GB file size limit. Okay by me. I don't plan to abuse the new freedom. How many times do you need to watch me fold a pot sticker? 20? 30? 50 times? Demonstrating the technique once or twice should be enough.
This upgrade couldn't come at a better time. One of the reasons I uploaded my video and PDF of Clarifying Butter this past weekend is because I plan to upload my video and PDF of Chicken and Spinach Pie on Sunday. The recipe makes use of clarified butter. It is, well, a little complicated and the video just doesn't fit within the 15-minute limit. Although complicated, it is worth the effort. This is one of the most-requested meals I make. Lest you balk at the word spinach, have no fear. I hate spinach, but it is an excellent ingredient when incorporated into a dish in which it plays a minor role.
If the truth be known, some of the videos initially end up at well above 15 minutes and then I do as much cutting as I dare do to bring them down to the limit. The full-length videos get posted to the alt.binaries cooking newsgroups on Usenet. I'll still post to Usenet, but it's good to know the visitors to this site can now view the full videos as well.
One of my favorite clips that was lost when I cut the How to Bone a Chicken video down was my White Trash Martini video clip. I was even asked about that clip by a fan who wanted to see it on YouTube. I might just restore it now.
So, stay tuned. Future videos will likely be more informative.
Sunday 2011.1.16
King Solomon's Mind
(There is probably a pun in there somewhere, but I won't venture it.)
King Solomon's mind comes to mind because of something he supposedly once said, or wrote. "There is nothing new under the sun," Ecc. 1:9. In King Solomon's day maybe that was the antiquitous way of saying, "Been there, done that." (There is supposedly no such word as antiquitous, even though it was used in a Huffington Post reference to bedrock. It's such a good pseudoword though.)
That expression, "There is nothing new under the sun," always comes to mind when I think I might have invented something in the kitchen. You can get even deeper and wonder which came first, the food or the thing that eats it? Who ate the first egg? What made someone look at the thing that came out of a chicken's bottom and think, "I wonder if I can eat that"? Was it universally accepted? Or were his friends dividing up his goods amongst themselves, expecting the worst? Anyway, I digress, which is so easy to do when one waxes philosophical.
Yesterday I made pain de mie with one thought in mind: French bread topped with strawberries and whipped cream. If you don't know pain de mie, it's a bread that is baked in a closed metal box. It's French, uses a pullman pan, and it is supposedly the bread they use for sandwiches. Because it cannot rise with a rounded top like typical loaf bread it is denser than the bread you buy in the grocery store, but not as dense as a bagel. If you were planning a High Tea here in the USA you might use pain de mie to make the thin sandwiches served on your best china. Because of its density the bread holds up better for those little sandwiches, certainly much better than the grocery store nonsense that passes for white bread.
The bread making went perfectly, video and all. With much anticipation I waited for it to cool before slicing. I then carved two thick slices, swamped them in a mixture of egg and milk, and fried the slices in butter until lightly browned. Topped with a big spoon of strawberries and a large dollop of freshly made whipped cream, it was every bit as delicious as I expected it to be. Eric, my camera guy, came over and I made some for him. He agreed. It is delicious.
I wouldn't even suggest that I invented it, as "There is nothing new under the sun." It has probably already been made at least a gazillion times. Nevertheless, it was new for me. And it brings out one important point that I appreciate about my mind. I can assembled flavors in my mind and when I actually build the thing for real, it tastes exactly the way I thought it would taste.
As for the video and recipe, I plan to post them as we get into strawberry season, which in this area is some time around April or May. Look for it.
Wednesday 2011.1.12
Video
The amount of positive feedback on the YouTube videos has been encouraging and gratifying. The success is mostly due to my friend Eric because he owns the camera and he taught me how to use it. YouTube doesn't do justice to the videos. They are shot in 720p and encoded to DVD format (.VOB) before being encoded again to XviD (.AVI). Okay, that's all the boring technical stuff.
I think I mentioned in a previous blog that I do all the editing myself, assembling the usuable portions of each clip into the finished video, trying to keep the final length within the 15-minute limit imposed by YouTube. I encode to DVD for friends who might want a burned DVD for their own cooking library.
The less encouraging news is that my time with this camera is limited. I doubt I'll have access to it after spring.
It has been a good learning experience. When I first brought up the subject of buying my own video camera Eric warned me that it would be an expensive experiment. There was much wisdom in that warning. Having had his camera to play with while he was away for the holidays gave me ample opportunity to experiment for free (well, maybe for the cost of some homemade biscotti).
Now I am spoiled rotten. It is such a pleasure having Eric's camera. Buying one of my own will not be easy. I have the money, but do you know how many flat panel TVs I could buy with the money I'll spend on one camera? And I'm talking about the big 60-inch TVs. Knowing what I now know, I couldn't possibly condescend to using some junior-level camcorder that, at its highest setting, is maybe able to record at 320x240. Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration.
Are the videos really necessary? Not really. Most recipes are nothing more than a list of ingredients followed by a paragraph or two of procedures. My recipe PDFs, with their step-by-step photographs, go well beyond the necessary. But I am as addicted to being in front of the camera as Eric is addicted to my almond biscotti. Addictions are expensive.
I have my camera picked out. I did my research. I even downloaded the user's manual. Unless I accidentally poison myself with some of my own biscotti between now and then, I'll probably part with my money some time in April or May. I'll post a picture if and when the baby arrives.
Sunday 2011.1.9
A Very Productive Holiday Break
A very productive time comes to an end. My friend Eric has been in Oregon since before Christmas, leaving his camera with me. I've been making my own videos whenever I feel like working in front of the camera. Friday evening I finished encoding the Homemade Chicken Soup video, a follow-up to last week's Homemade Chicken Stock. He gets back into town soon and he will very likely pick up his camera shortly afterward. It has been a great experience, and a worthwhile experiment. My success at doing videos on my own means I will very likely purchase my own video camera soon.
Not all has been blissful in the beginning of the new year. A tooth that has been a problem since I banged my chin on a table when I was a teenager abscessed yet again. It has had two root canals and two crowns. This time it came out. A bone graft was put in place. It needs three months to heal, and then I'll get an implant that will hopefully last me for the remainder of my life. Meanwhile I have a temporary "dental flipper" thing that fills the gap in my lower front teeth. My challenge is to talk clearly when in front of the camera with the flipper in place. My S's don't sound quite right.
One video that was a lot of fun to make, and eat, was my homemade chocolate ice cream. It's easy if you have the ice cream maker. I'll post that video when the weather starts to warm up.
Winter is settling in here in Southern California. I grew up in Connecticut and I don't miss the cold and the snow at all. I love California and I have no plans to live anywhere else.
Let's see, what else is planned? I am going to continue my project of basic cooking skills. Next will likely be a video on how to clarify butter. That will be followed by a video on using clarified butter to make my Chicken and Spinach Pie. I want to do a basic marinara video, followed by homemade spaghetti (pasta from scratch) and meatballs. Chinese New Year is on February 3rd this year (the year of the rabbit) and therefore I'll have to make Chinese Dumplings (pot stickers). The video is already done, as is the recipe PDF. And I'd like to spend more time on bread before spring.
That is one of the satisfying and exciting things about cooking. You can never run out of ideas.
Wednesday 2011.1.5
I Love Books
I've always loved books (although in later years I turned to ebooks to save space). When it comes to cooking, there are cookbooks and there are textbooks. I like them both. Cookbooks give me ideas. In Lorenza De'Medici's cookbook, The Renaissance of Italian Cooking (1989, Ballentine Books), there is a beautiful photograph of Artichoke Pie on page 37. Artichoke Pie? The recipe doesn't entice me. The picture, however, made me want to create something that looks that good, but tastes as good as my mind wants it to. So I set about creating my recipe for Chicken and Spinach Pie, which will appear on this web site soon.
Textbooks tell me the facts that I might never get from a cookbook. There are three kinds of egg washes for baking, each producing a different finish: The egg-white wash results in pale browning. A whole-egg wash produces more browning and more shine. The yolks-only wash causes the darkest browning and the most shine. Adding salt to break down the egg? Prepare the wash the night before and store in the refrigerator. The salt needs time to work. Here's another one: Refrigerating bread accelerates the staling process by up to six times. You don't typically find gems like these in everyday cookbooks. Now I know why I always refrigerate my homemade bread. I use it only to make moring toast and I like it firm.
I wish I didn't need to work to pay my bills. (Any billionaires out there willing to part with some big ones?) Better yet, I wish I could go to work and just read my books at my desk. There is never enough time. There was once a time when I thought, "If I could live forever, I would want to live in a library—a big one." Even if you could read every book in the library in, say, several hundred years, you could start all over again because you probably wouldn't remember what you had read before.
A friend of mine receives great bookstore coupons in his email—40% off, sometimes 50% off. He forwards them to me and I go shopping. Lately I bought some baking textbooks. Great stuff. Did you know that many bakers don't use the term recipe? The prefer formula, which makes sense because baking is more chemistry than cooking. In baking, like chemistry, precision is important.
As I continue to learn, hopefully I can share some valuable tidbits of knowledge with you. Some of the most important knowledge, of course, is the information that helps you avert a disaster in the kitchen. I once saw a recipe for something called Chicken Gizzard Custard Pie. A better name might have been Chicken Giblet Quiche. The original recipe called for ½ cup dry sherry. That didn't seem right, but I tried it anyway. The pie was inedible. The most important point is that my mind said, "Uh-uh, that ain't right," when I first read the recipe. That's the kind of knowledge I'm talking about. We can learn it from experience, but it's good to learn from books too.
Sunday 2011.1.2
Getting Down to Basics
I sure have plenty of chicken stock. At its peak my freezer had 36 individually frozen cups of stock stored in ziplock bags. I'm already down to 32. I love homemade chicken soup in winter and I eat it often.
Winter seems like a good time to settle back and work on basic kitchen skills. We made it through the holidays. I stuffed and roasted a goose. I made custard pie. I baked Italian Christmas cookies. Most of us did our fair share of holiday cooking and baking—although, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, I wasn't called upon this year to cook anything for the holidays, neither Christmas, nor New Year's. (I made Almond Biscotti for a friend for Thankgiving.)
Some might find the basics a little boring. The fancy dishes get all the attention. In one week my Roast Stuffed Goose recipe was downloaded more times than any other recipe in a single month. I've got some fancy things planned—for example, my famous Chicken Spinach Pie. For the best crust in that recipe you need to know how to clarify butter. People have requested my recipe for my homemade chicken soup and risotto. For the best soup and risotto you need homemade chicken stock. I already posted my Pasta Fagioli (Pasta Fazool) recipe, in which I showed how to make a vegetable stock. One friend wants me to make brown stock. Ugh. Veal bones are so expensive and where do you find them? I'm not friends with any butchers in this town. And what's a good Italian dinner without homemade marinara sauce?
Again, winter seems like the perfect time to step back and focus on basic cooking. Other than maybe a birthday or anniversary, we won't be called upon to cook anything special until summertime barbecues and picnics (for which I already have my Finger Lickin' Chicken recipe written, photographed, and videoed). So this week I decided to post my recipe and video for homemade Chicken Stock. Stock is the foundation for so many recipes. I have a velouté sauce planned, which is sort of like a Béchamel sauce, but it uses chicken stock rather than milk as the liquid. I'll also write and video risotto. And maybe I'll even talk to the butcher and ask him/her to special order some veal bones for me.
I also want to return to bread a few times because winter is the best time to use the oven, even here in sunny Southern California (it's cold and raining today). I made bread yesterday. How about Pain de Mie?
Anyway, that gives you some ideas of what I have planned for the first few months of 2011.