JUNE 2012
Wednesday 2012.6.27
Hacking a Recipe
Looking through several recipes for the same food, such as cake recipes, to understand the formula that makes a recipe work is what I describe as hacking a recipe. True hacking has excellent pedigree.
Back in the early days of computers "hacking" was not a malevolent, mischievous practice. Hackers would read through line after line of computer program source code, trying to understand how a program actually worked. I was, for a short time, a hacker.
I worked in a university bookstore and we had just purchased a bookstore inventory operating system for the mainframe computer. The software needed to be configured. Although I had no computer experience at the time (it was 1983), I had evidently demonstrated something promissing to the systems administrator and he therefore gave me first crack at it.
I took home a modem with a dumb terminal and each evening I would log into the mainframe and read line after line of source code. Understandably, none of it made any sense, at first. There were dozens of subroutines with cryptic names like TEXT.36.B. However, the light kept getting brighter. One evening I discovered TEXT.BP and as soon as I saw the name I knew I had found the holy grail because many subroutines made reference to it. I knew this would be the backbone to the whole system. "BP" must refer to "basic program" (although the program was not written in BASIC). Sure enough, as I read through TEXT.BP I could see how it branched to many of the subroutines I had read earlier. I then worked back up through the subroutines I'd read previously and began configuring the software for our store.
A few weeks later I was flown to the central offices of the software vendor for further training, much of which was really simple stuff for beginners. I spent most of my time questioning the programmers to fill in the holes in my understanding. When I returned home the systems administrator took me aside and asked me what happened with the programmers. I told him about my week's experience and then, curious, I asked why he wanted to know. "Because they gave you full developer rights over their software. I don't even have that level of access." He had administrator rights, which was still high up in the hierarchy. My "developer rights" put me in the highest echelon. I could write source code and encode it to object code, creating custom subroutines for our store's needs. The software became mine and within a few weeks the bookstore was fully operational on the new inventory system.
I wish I could say I have as much success with recipes. Some are really difficult, especially when they show a picture that looks nothing like the food you end up with. Sometimes I prepare a recipe several times before I solve its problems. A recent example was a crème brûlée recipe I saw in a restaurant trade journal. The original recipe didn't work and after making many changes through half a dozen preparations, I ended up with an excellent dessert that, although still a custard, was very different from the original concept.
But for me, that's part of the fun of cooking—forcing success. It's also one reason why I write and photograph my recipes the way I do. I think cooks shouldn't need to hack a recipe to make it work. Just follow directions and get the same successful results, every time.
Sunday 2012.6.24
Playing With My Food
A friend made an astute observation this week. "You work harder now that you are retired than you did when you had a job." He's right. When I had a job I was very careful to protect the boundaries, not accepting more responsibilities unless they came with a pay raise (which was never the case).
Now that I am no longer employed, or now that I am "gainfully unemployed," as I like to say, I use most of the time pursuing my leisure interests, which is cooking, writing recipes, and shooting the photography and video, all for this web site.
I've worked through most of the easy recipes, the ones I've made repeatedly down through the years. I can prepare them without thinking about it. I've cooked hundreds of egg rolls in my time; so doing them for this web site was almost effortless. Now I am delving into the unknown, experiment with recipes with which I have little or no familiarity.
Then there is the issue of wanting the finished product to be more than just the standard food for which there are hundreds, if not thousands, of similar recipes on the Internet. What can I do to set my recipes apart?
This week I played with custard, crème caramel, otherwise known as flan, and crème brülée. Custard is fairly easy. Just make sure the formula is correct and bake it in the oven. It requires a little more care, such as the use of a water bath (or bain marie). In one of my cooking textbooks crème caramel is one of the first recipes because it is easy enough to make to be considered appropriate for "beginners."
If you're familiar with caramelizing sugar you know that one procedure involves making a simple syrup with water and sugar and then cooking it until the water evaporates and the sugar starts to turn a golden color. Why use water? How about rum? I did a search on the Internet to see if there were instructions for caramelizing sugar with rum. I'm sure there must be at least a few recipes, but I found none. Nonetheless, I experimented in the kitchen and the outcome was excellent.
Having prepared a praline when making the gâteat Paris-Brest a few weeks ago, I wondered where I might also use praline. I made it with almonds this time and after the flan custards were plated I spooned a generous layer of praline on top. It made for a delightful dessert.
It was a lot of work, more work than I did when I had a job. I prepared custards five times this week, giving away as much as I could. I don't think of it as hard work, though. I think of it as playing with food. It's fun.
The recipe and the video for the Almond-Rum Praline Flan will be published here in coming weeks. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Wednesday 2012.6.20
Summer Begins Today
Today is the first day of summer and the day with the longest period of sunshine. This is the time of year when I really think in earnest about summer foods. I've already done focaccias cooked outdoors on a neighbor's backyard grill, which he converted into a pizza oven. And I've also made ice cream at least once so far this season. I will be posting my recipe and video for Vanilla Chai Ice Cream in coming weeks.
I still use my kitchen oven, but I look for excuses not to bake, or I'll scan the weather forecast for cooler days when the oven's heat might not be so offensive. Speaking of heat, this week I cleaned the swamp box cooler again (otherwise known as an evaporative cooler). I used it a few weeks ago, but I gave it another cleaning, and added a little bleach to the water, in preparation for warmer days to come. We had one hot and dry spell a few weeks ago. The temperatures climbed into the upper 80s and the humidity was under 20%—perfect evaporative cooler weather. When I checked the output temperature of the cooler it was down to 70°F. I was very comfortable.
Another cold dessert I worked on was Almond Praline Custard. Today I am making it again to get a few more photographs and record a couple pick-up video clips to complete the project before I can published a recipe PDF here and put a video on YouTube.
I'm not a cold sandwich person, but back in New England we had sandwiches we called grinders. Out here in California they are most often called subs and I've seen the terms hero and hoagie used on the East Coast. When I first moved out of my parents' house at the age of 18 I lived in Norwich, Connecticut. I rented rooms in a house just up the street and around the corner from an excellent little mom-and-pop grinder shop. In winter when it was cold I usually ate the meatball grinder because it was served hot. In summer it was usually just a plain grinder, which was made with Genoa or cotto salami, provolone cheese, iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, and plenty of olive oil. It has long been a goal of mine to do a video of the classic grinder. Maybe this summer.
I also need to think about picnic foods. I'm not a BBQ kind of guy, but I usually do well when packing something to bring to an outdoor gathering. In three weeks it will be the Fourth of July here in the USA. Fireworks are launched from a park nearby and we can see them from here in the trailer park. Already there is talk of a gathering of neighbors to share food and wine while anticipating the evening's fireworks.
And, finally, speaking of wine, a friend emailed me to say he drank the last bottle of wine he purchased during his last visit down here in SoCal. He lives up in Oregon, but he is partial to some of our wines. The local warehouse store sells some fairly decent syrahs and one in particular is our favorite. My friend's last syrah was a 2009, which reminded me that I had hidden away some wines a few years ago (hidden from a former friend who really enjoyed drinking my wines, when he could). I dug out three bottles of 2007 syrah, which had been lying on their sides in a cool and dark space, undisturbed for a few years. It looks like I'll have something with which to celebrate the first anniversary of my retirement.
Sunday 2012.6.17
Got Cookbooks?
I know of people who collect cookbooks. I probably would too, if I had room to store them. I have only one bookshelf on which I keep my cookbooks, about three dozen of them, where they share space with a few cooking textbooks and a couple of food encyclopedias. Mobile homes are not known for vast storage spaces.
Welcome to the Digital Age
It took me a while to accept the digital revolution. I kept my film camera and lenses until Kodachrome 64, my all-time favorite film, was no longer available. (It was actually still available long after there was nowhere to have the film developed. Go figure.) Having switched to a digital SLR, I'll never go back to film. I love my camera.
There are treasure troves of resources out there in the digital cosmos that are just waiting to be plundered. The trick is to know where to look and have the tools and knowledge to mine the resources. I don't reveal my sources or my abilities because I tried teaching several friends to reap the bounties and the result was only perplexity and frustration. Some things are better left alone.
One of my finds was a set of over 300 cookbooks in EPUB format. I like this format because it is used by my Barnes and Noble NookColor ebook tablet. I also have EPUB software on my computers, which enables me to search these books for key words. For example: I was trying to research custards, flans, and crème brûlées. Looking through my books is not an arduous task, but having 300+ cookbooks on a single CD makes the job much easier. It's also fun.
There seem to be an infinite number of recipes out there. I know that isn't exactly true. The world's population is finite, as are books, etc., but the sheer volume seems infinite. I could never research them all in one lifetime. Nonetheless, having so many recipes easily available, including those available on the Internet, makes research so much easier.
Looking through recipes also gets the creative side of my brain working. Some of the recipes on my web site were created from scratch, some are modifications of recipes I've seen. I think the most enjoyable cooking projects are those in which I start with an idea but no recipe. Then I work through the possible ingredients, adjusting proportions, and finally move to the kitchen for testing. This computer-to-kitchen process is very satisfying.
Thankfully I have the resources, something neither my mother nor grandmother ever had. I might not have vast storage space in this mobile home, but blank CDs and DVDs can hold a huge quantity of digital cookbooks.
Wednesday 2012.6.13
When Recipes Go Bad
I'm publishing my Wednesday blog later than usual today because I've been working on a troublesome recipe. I've experimented with problematic recipes before. The two that come to mind are Genovese Savory Pastries and Gâteau Paris-Brest. The second one was the more surprising because it came from Cook's Illustrated magazine. America's Test Kitchen usually turns out perfect recipes, but I could not get my Paris-Brest to look like theirs until I made many changes to the formula and method of preparation (MOP).
For the past few days I've been working on a crème brûlée recipe that is made with pears. The recipe appeared in a restaurant trade journal. These are magazines that are only distributed to businesses and industries. You don't see trade journals in the magazine rack at your local grocery store. I had two problems with the recipe: The formula included corn starch, which seemed unusual for this type of custard, and the MOP yielded a dessert that looked nothing like the picture. I had the same problem with the same magazine's recipe for Sticky Toffee Pudding, which I corrected and renamed Toffee Date Cake.
In most cases I can solve the problems with a recipe and, in some cases, make a better product than the original. In the case of this crème brûlée, I don't think it can be saved.
What happens when you combine fruit with sugar? Maceration. The fruit yields juices, which is excellent when you want strawberries and syrup. However, when you want the sugar to remain dry so that you can caramelize it with a torch, as in crème brûlée, you don't want maceration. The juice dissolves the sugar. It seems like the MOP of the recipe combines two conflicting scientific processes, like adding dry ice to a warm liquid to dilute it. It just ain't gonna happen.
So this pear crème brûlée recipe won't appear here on my web site. I have standards. Crème brûlée is simply too classic a recipe to tamper with. And this causes some concern for another recipe in the magazine. Should I attempt chocolate chip cookies that uses a praline made with peanuts and caramelized sugar? If I were experimenting with smoked salmon at $14 per pound I might be reticent. Chocolate chip cookie ingredients are not that expensive. So I'll give it a try. What's the worst that could happen?
I rarely give up on a recipe. I baked and discarded 14 pastry rings before I came up with a perfect Gâteau Paris-Brest, but pear crème brûlée is beyond redemption.
Sunday 2012.6.10
Pizza Party
We made fools of ourselves on Wednesday. The pizza dough recipe Eric gave me—no knead 18-hour dough—makes enough for six pizzas if you stretch the dough rather thin. Thick crust enthusiasts might get two to three pizzas from the dough. We made six different kinds: Pepperoni and Italian sausage, meatball, chicken and pesto, classic Pizza Magherita, vegan, and one focaccia. On most of the pizzas we used imported Italian buffala mozzarella, which is made with water buffalo milk rather than the cows' milk used here in the USA.
The dough was started on Tuesday and we began prepping ingredients Wednesday morning at 11:00. We finished making pizzas at about 7:30 that evening. Most of the time was used to prepare ingredients—onions to be caramelized, mushrooms to sauté, salami to be broiled, etc. Then, of course, another huge portion of time was used up by shifting the video camera and framing each shot.
[One amusing tale: As mentioned earlier, I had used my camera in a friend's backyard to video focaccia baking in his pizza oven. The remote control with which I operate my camera when in front of the lens stopped working. I tried changing the battery. Nothing. The following day I tried to navigate through Sony's labyrinthine web site to learn where to ship the remote or the camera to be repaired/replaced under the warranty. I wasn't sure if the remote was bad or the camera's IR sensor circuitry was the problem.
Doing a little analysis on my own, I pulled out a learning remote control I no longer use for my home theater system to see if it would detect a signal from the camera's remote. Nothing. I decided to switch batteries again and that's when I noticed the battery was upside down. Inserted the correct way, everything works fine. My only hypothesis is that the pizza oven grill, which had been behind me, radiated so much heat—the thermometer pegged at 850°F—it interfered with the infrared signal coming from the remote. On the plus side: I programmed the learning remote with all the functions I typically use to run the camera. Now I have two functional remote controls for my video camera.]
As for the pizzas, we sat at the table, looking like a couple of idiots, staring down at six pizzas. Maybe you know two guys who can eat six 10-inch pizzas, but I don't. We sampled from each and rated them. The meatball was the worst. The pepperoni and Italian sausage pizza tied with the vegan pizza for best in show, with the Pizza Magherita coming in at a close second.
Eric took most of the leftovers home. It took me four hours to clean the kitchen the following day.
Wednesday 2012.6.6
Moving Out—For an Afternoon
On Monday I hauled all my camera equipment to the neighbor's (David's) backyard to bake focaccia in his Weber grill. He has an attachment that converts the grill into a pizza oven. With the right combination of briquettes and oak, the oven will reach a temperature in excess of 850°F (454°C).
I made the dough during the morning and the afternoon was set aside for baking. The grill heats up quickly. Initially there was a comical volume of smoke. It made for a fun clip in the video. Another amusing incident was the weather. Typical in Southern California along the coast this time of year is what we call June Gloom. A marine layer, which is a low layer of clouds and fog, hugs the coast. Sometimes the sun doesn't appear all day. I can drive less than 10 miles over the mountains and be in glorious sunshine. Halfway through one clip the sun suddenly appeared, forcing me to stop the shoot, take a new white balance, and adjust the gain before continuing.
We baked and sampled three different focaccias. All were made with the same cheeses, Gruyère and Romano, along with olive oil, sea salt, and freshly ground black pepper. For each focaccia I used a different meat: Prosciutto, Capacolla, or Calabrese salami. I was amazed not only at how quickly each focaccia cooked—2 to 3 minutes—but also the flavor and texture of the crust. Perfectly crisp and brown on the bottom with the flavor of a wood-fired pizza oven. Delicious!
The day was supposed to be a test run for making pizzas today. But the video turned out well enough to share on YouTube. I did make a few mistakes. I've never used my camera outdoors; so I completely forgot about the neutral density filters. Exposure was difficult to get right. I also never use the camera's viewfinder in my home. I use the little LCD screen. Outdoors, that made focusing very difficult. Had I thought to use the viewfinder, the focus would have been a lot better. Some of the clips are a little fuzzy, but overall the video turned out well enough to shift today's pizza plans indoors instead. We'll be doing the pizzas this afternoon.
Eric came up with the idea for these pizzas, having made them himself for his own family. He suggested I do them for this web site. I suggested he make them in front of the camera as a visiting cook. The afternoon should be fun. This will be the first time I'll let someone else do the cooking for one of my videos.
One final note: When I unpacked my gear later, everything had an aroma of wood smoke.
Sunday 2012.6.3
Ahh, Life!
Sometimes it amazes me how much I enjoy life. When I was studying for my master's degree in counseling psychology, one of the academic requirements was to be engaged in counseling as a client. This was in addition to the required number of intern hours to be fulfilled as a practicing therapist in a clinical setting. To receive therapy we needed to present with some sort of clinical issue; so I chose depression because I had been struggling with some periodic lows during that time of my life.
Besides my therapist, who was very good, I read some books by Robert Johnson. One point I remember is the importance—for a man—of engaging in a career change when we reach mid-life. We devote ourselves to our education, then our marriage mate and our children, paying off cars and a mortgage, paying for the kids' education, and then we're done. We reach a second level of consciousness expansion (the first being in adolescence) and suddenly we question life a little differently. That's a good time to step back, look at ourselves, our jobs, our pursuits, our goals and accomplishments, from a wider perspective. Many men seek a career change. (And some buy a red sports car, wear glittering jewelry and a shirt unbuttoned halfway to their naval, and chase pretty young women who are well stacked.)
When I reached mid-life I advanced my education, but I kept the same career because I was well on my way to a comfortable retirement. However, during those final years as an employee, I planned my retirement pursuits. One of them is this web site.
People bugged me for years to publish my recipes. Many wanted me to write a cookbook. I've written and published two books. Writing a book can take a year or more and consume a few hours every evening. It's fun, but it's a long, slow, slog to the finish line. From start to finish, from getting a domain name to publishing my web site with a hosting service, only took about 3 months. That's better and easier than writing a book.
People ask me about building a web site. I started with some software I was able to use through my job. I did a lot of work from home and the IT people let me install the software on my home computers. Even though I am retired, I still use the software. I suppose, technically, that ain't right, but I can rationalize almost anything. I'm using an old version. Three newer versions have been released in recent years. So I'm not denying anyone a living by using old software that is no longer available.
I didn't know what I was doing when I started creating a web site plan. I knew nothing about the software. Borders, book, open to page 1. Along with the exercises in the book, I used my ideas for a web site and followed the directions. When I had a web site, I closed the book.
All this comes to mind because I am nearing my first anniversary of retirement. I haven't planned a celebration yet, but I've been thinking about how much I enjoy my life in retirement. I have my web site and my videos to keep me active. I really enjoy the creative process of writing new recipes, or at least modifying published ones to make them better (for my tastes). I garden some, like you're supposed to do in retirement, and I walk to the store now rather than drive or ride my bike. There's no hurry to get there quickly.
So, life is still good. One friend said she envies me because I have an occupation to keep me mentally and physically active for many years into retirement. I think she's right.