Adventures with Bread, part 94

Rye bread, again…

You know how it is. There’s a recipe on the flour bag, and you think you’ll try it out. Well, you know, rye bread is tasty…

Cotswold Flour’s Rye Bread recipe.

Last night, I made the poolish, and it was lovely and frothy by morning. I got the mighty Kenwood Chef out, with its dough hook, and followed the recipe carefully, all the way up to the bit telling me to prove it for 1.5 to 2 hours. After an hour, I found this situation…

Almost invisible bread tin, with dough rising madly, and flopping over the sides of the tin.

Underneath this over-excited dough, you can just about see the bread tin.

That’s a pretty standard sized loaf tin, but it makes a change for a rye dough to rise so well. I scooped as much of it up as I could, and put it all in a bigger tin, which I put in the oven before I remembered to take a picture.

The same amount of dough, in a bigger, shallower tin, in the oven.

Baking begins…

Then it was time to take the spaniels for their first walk of the day. Luckily, I didn’t meet anyone, and was back in time to remove the tin from the oven, and see what I had created.

The result of 40 minutes in the oven, at 220°C

This is called the “crumb shot”. Pretty good crumb, if you ask me.

And there’s the result. I buttered the slice, and ate it, in the interests of science. It has a good flavour, and I’m looking forward to the rest of it, over the next couple of days. I can’t help thinking I should have had some pastrami ready to go on it…

Tofu squeezing

Tofu – a thing you need to know…

I tried cooking tofu several times, and was often very disappointed by the way it just broke up, and fell apart, when I tried. The results I got were nothing like the lovely illustrations people put by their recipes. Instead of pert, bouncy cubes of tofu, all I got was mush…

It tasted fine, sure, but something was wrong…

There’s something they don’t tell you in those recipes, and it’s this. Tofu is basically ground up soybeans, and water. Actually, quite an astonishing amount of water! There are several grades of tofu, and the ones labelled “extra firm” have less water. Less, sure, but still a lot. You want to know how much? Look!

I treated myself to a tofu press from eBay, ignoring the ones with a wimpy little spring to do the pressing. It came with a piece of cheesecloth to wrap the tofu block in, which I did, but I had to find a usable weight. I did try balancing cans on top of the press, but eventually, I found my wife already had a suitable weight for the job…

Tofu in a press with a 6Kg weight on it and a jug with the water that squeezed out of the block.
Those standard size boxes of tofu contain over 175ml of water! Get it out, and you can cut the tofu into cubes, marinate it in something tasty, which will soak right into where the water used to be, and fry them without them falling apart. Instead, they crisp up nicely on the outside, and more importantly, they stay together as cubes.

Update: It turns out there’s at least one brand of extra firm tofu that isn’t full of water. It’s this one…

Cauldron Extra Firm Tofu Package

Duck and Mushroom ramen.

Well, it’s what I made from the remains of the Sunday dinner duck, with the addition of some fancy mushrooms, home-made naruto and more.

There’s no helpful tip, or anything like that, with this post, so you really shouldn’t

Can you cook Whitebait in an air fryer?

I just asked Google for the answer to this, and was annoyed to find that not only did there not seem to be an online answer, but there were an irritatingly large number of websites that posed the question, and then answered an entirely different one.

I gave up looking, and instead carried out a scientific experiment…

Here are some frozen little fishes…

Basically, I just heated the air fryer to its maximum, nominally 200°C, and threw the fishes in.

Five minutes seemed like a good guess for a cooking time. They were a bit underdone.

I set the timer for another five minutes, but pulled the fish out after four minutes, as I could hear some of them popping!

Cooked Whitebait fresh from the air fryer

Here are five of them, nice and crispy on the outside, just before I ate them with tartare sauce.

So, now you know…

You CAN cook whitebait in an air fryer.

Was this useful?

Proper Bechamel Sauce.

We keep an index book of recipes that we like, and rely on. It has several entries for Bechamel sauce, but only one of them can be the best.

There’s one in “The DIY Cook”, by Tim Hayward, and he’s really, really good, and so is his sauce…

There’s another, in Rick Stein’s “Secret France”, and do you know what? He’s really good as well, and the photography in his recent books is at pure genius level…

There are several other recipes…

But my favourite recipe for Bechamel Sauce is in an oldie but goodie, “Mediterranean Cooking” by Hilaire Walden. Fans, you are in luck. It’s still available, on Amazon, and it’s really cheap. This is so good that I haven’t bothered to see if Nigella does a good one. I bet she does, though…

So…

A pint of milk
¹⁄4 of an onion
A chopped up carrot
A fair bit of parsley
At least one bay leaf
50g of unsalted butter
25g of plain flour
2 large eggs, beaten
Salt and pepper, if you like

Bung the milk in a pan, with the onion, carrot, parsley, and bay, bring it gently to a boil, cover it, and turn off the heat. Beat the eggs in a jug, or some container you prefer.

Let those sit for 15 minutes, while you do this in another pan. Melt the butter, stir in the flour, and let it cook for about a minute. A lot of cookery books tell you to cook it until it smells “biscuity”. I’ve never detected that smell from butter and flour, but if you can, that’s your guideline. I can’t smell saffron, let alone biscuity, so I ignore that instruction, and stir it until it is smooth.

Next, strain the milk into it, and throw the stuff in the strainer away, unless you can think of some arcane use for it.

Simmer the mixture for about five minutes, then take it off the heat, stir it like fury, while pouring in the beaten eggs as slowly as you can, tip it on top of your already partly cooked moussaka, or whatever other dish you are improving, and finish cooking it…

A Foodie Book Review

The thing is…

…when I started blogging, ooh, ages ago, it was going to be a food blog. And about computers. But suddenly, politics got a bit too intrusive in our lives, and I ended up writing quite a lot about the dreadful crooks who were messing up everything for everyone.

Don’t panic! I am not going to stop lambasting the criminal gang who have hijacked our country, and dragged us unwillingly out of the EU. [Yes, I can justify that claim, and probably will quite soon.]

But… but there are a lot of really good food blogs, mostly about restaurants I couldn’t afford to eat in, even if I wanted to eat their rather too fancy food. And how do you even begin to compete with Jay Rayner’s restaurant reviews, especially the magnificent ones where he really dislikes both the restaurant and the food?

Loaf Story
A Love Letter to Bread

And then, he only went and started writing about cookery books, a while before I had come up with the idea, and doing it really well, the monster. However, there’s this book that I chose as a birthday present for myself…

You know how some books are so good that you keep reading bits out to the significant other in the room? This book has so many bits like that, that the ordinary bits are hard to find.

It’s by Tim Hayward, whose “Food DIY” was the inspiration for a lot of my early blog posts about things like home made charcuterie. It’s a book with recipes, not a recipe book.

You might think that a book based on bread, with sections on toast, sandwiches, and various bread-based concoctions would be a bit ordinary. I took this to bed, to read myself to sleep. Bad mistake. I was laughing my head off for hours, fascinated also by the interesting footnotes. Yes, this book has footnotes. The author reveals his opinions about many food items that people have firm opinions on, like Marmite, salad cream – has to be Heinz, but he tells you how to make your own, baked beans – must be Heinz, and not the low fat, sugar, salt version. I suppose the fact that I agree with him on all these things explains in part why I think this is a truly great book.

Weird stuff in recipes, part 94.

Weird.

“After boiling for six to six and a half minutes, she cools them under cold water, peels, then fries in a pan filled a third of the way up with 160C sunflower oil (if you don’t have a thermometer, drop in a cube of bread and it should turn golden in 25-30 seconds).”

No. If you don’t have a thermometer, get a thermometer. They’re not expensive. Standing there, timing cubes of bread until one turns “golden” in the right time is silly.

How not to make a Twitter poll.

A Question of Saffron

Something or other reminded me recently that I can’t seem to detect the smell or taste of saffron. A lot of people love it, and write passionately about it. They’ve smelled it being brought to them even before the waiter came through the kitchen door. They say they’ve had it explode in their mouth. And I have missed out…

I wondered whether it was just me, or a fairly common thing, to be unable to smell and taste saffron, so I made a Twitter poll.

It was worded very poorly. To be fair to myself, at the time, I didn’t think about it at all carefully. The result was that it didn’t work the way I had expected.

A lot of people thought this was a question about whether saffron is wonderful, whether it is over-priced, or any of several possible interpretations. What I should have actually asked was “Can you smell and taste saffron”. Like this…

Of course, this isn’t good enough, either, as it discriminates against people who want to say that they can’t afford saffron, or have never heard of it. But the worst thing is, all we can tell from the result of the original poll is that about half the people who saw the poll, and answered it,

like the smell of saffron

and about half of them

think it is too expensive.

which actually tells us nothing at all about how many people can detect the taste and smell of saffron, and how many cannot.

Conclusion

Polls. We see lots of them quoted, and they are mostly about politics, and are supposed to let us know how people think about things that matter rather a lot more than whether one can detect saffron.

And a lot of those polls are even less well designed than mine. Some are even designed to make people draw the wrong conclusion, and it’s not easy to tell which ones those are, is it?

Marmalade

Marmalade.
I was never all that happy with the previous batch of marmalade I made in 2014. I thought it had been boiled too much, as it was quite a dark colour, and recently, I noticed that what I thought was the last jar was getting quite low.* There are only a couple of weeks of the year when the right oranges for marmalade making are in the shops, and last week I found some in Tesco. I grabbed the last Kilo.

In case you don’t know, proper marmalade is made with Seville oranges, named after the part of Spain where they are grown. These oranges are a bitter variety, full of pips. You wouldn’t want to eat them, or drink the juice. If you use ordinary oranges, you will end up with some sort of orange jam, that may well be very pleasant, but it won’t be marmalade.

If you are not near enough to Spain to have them in the shops, and want to make marmalade, look for something too bitter to enjoy, with unbelievable numbers of pips. The pips are more important than you might think, as they are full of the pectin that makes the marmalade set.

As well as a Kilo of oranges, you will need two Kilos of granulated sugar, and two lemons. I don’t know why Tesco is only stocking foreign sugar, but local shops like Spar and the Co-op do have British sugar, made from beet. [It may have something to do with a certain government minister who used to be high up in that foreign sugar company.]

Ingredients.

1 Kg Seville oranges

2 lemons

2 Kg granulated sugar

500 ml water

These are Seville oranges; look at those pips!

The method.

You will need a pressure cooker for this recipe. There are other recipes involving boiling things for hours, and I’m sure they work pretty much as well as this one does, but we have a pressure cooker, and it saves quite a lot of time. Cut the oranges in half, squeeze them with one of those glass juice squeezing things, which I completely forgot to take a picture of. Put the juice, and the peels in the pressure cooker. Add the juice of two lemons, but not their peels. The lemon pips can go in with the orange pips.

I used a plastic strainer to stop the pips going in. There tend to be pips still hiding in the peels, but that can be sorted out at a later stage. The pips get wrapped in a nice open weave cloth, such as cheese-cloth, muslin, or whatever you have handy that seems reasonable to use in cooking. Now add 500 ml of water. The picture on the left is the contents of the pressure cooker before boiling.

And here’s a picture of the contents of the pressure cooker after ten minutes of boiling at full pressure, followed by allowing them to cool naturally to room temperature. Notice that the pith of the oranges is cooked, and very much softer than before.

Transfer the juices to your preserving pan. It’s nice if you have a big copper plated pan for this, but we use a big old Teflon saucepan. Hooked onto the side, is our old sugar thermometer.

Now you need to squeeze the pips into the pan, until they… no, just squeeze them until you don’t think you will get any more out of them. Squeezing pips until they squeak turns out to be really difficult. Only politicians can do it.

Throw the bag of pips away once you have got as much as you can from it. The pips supply pectin, which is what makes the marmalade set nicely.

Now, chop up the peels to your preferred size chunks. Some people like very fine pieces of peel, while I quite like big chunks. I’ve cut these ones to a medium size, as my wife prefers them small. Notice that this is when you remove the pips that have been cunningly hiding in the peels.

Put the chopped up peels in the pan with the juice, and bring them to the boil.

Tip in the two Kilograms of sugar, and stir until it is properly dissolved. Keep heating, and keep stirring. You need to raise the temperature to 105°C.

Warning! Hot, concentrated sugar solution holds much more heat than mere boiling water, and if you splash this on yourself it will burn you badly.

That old sugar thermometer is no longer doing its job properly! It was showing something a bit below 105°C, but I thought the marmalade was looking ready, so I checked it with a cheap electronic thermometer, and as you can see, the marmalade was done! If I had heated it until the old thermometer said it was done, I would have had another batch of over-boiled marmalade.

There are all sorts of ways to test whether your marmalade is going to set, including cold saucers in the fridge, with a splash of marmalade on, but I don’t think this recipe can avoid setting, if you follow it properly, and make sure you get it to the magic 105°C.

All that remains to do is put it in clean jars. Dishwashers are the best way to clean jam jars. If you don’t have one, you’ll have to boil them up in some suitable manner. Below, you see my results. It’s very much better looking, and tasting, than the previous batch.

* I found another jar of the old, dark stuff. I threw the contents away.

Cretan Loukanika – Part 1

We went on holiday for a fortnight in Crete, this year. As ever, I loved the food, and brought back a recipe book. It’s not without its problems. I keep meaning to finish a scathing article on the many things recipe books get wrong, but don’t hold your breath for me to get that done!

Loukanika are also called village sausages, and the authentic ones in tavernas vary a lot from place to place. I tried to make some before, using a recipe that involved lots of orange zest and paprika, but wasn’t really convinced they were anything like the Greek ones we had eaten.

Here’s a good example of a problematic recipe! For a start, there’s no clue as to how much pepper, cumin, and salt to use. And the method completely forgets to put the pork in… But we can cope with minor problems like that!

I had 1400g of pork shoulder, and ran it through the mincer. They may have meant the sort of malt vinegar that gets put on chips, for all I know, but I made a mixture of red wine vinegar, sherry vinegar, and a splash of balsamic. I used 700g of it, and I can tell you now, that turns out to be about twice as much as is actually necessary. As the vinegar seemed to be intended to cure the meat, I only used 30g of salt. Using the cooking skill known as guesswork, I ground up 20g of black pepper corns, and added 50g of dried cumin. It smelled about right, I felt.

Into the fridge it went, for six days, during which I obtained about forty yards of pig casings, from a UK company called Breck Casings. If you are not in the UK, you should be able to find a supplier easily enough with Google.

When it came to time to stuff the casings, it was obvious the mixture was far too wet, and I used a sieve to attempt to dry it out a bit. Even then, it was a struggle, with vinegar dripping from various parts of the mincer as I worked.

Still, the resulting fourteen sausages looked reasonable. They are tied with butchers’ string like that so that they would hang easily over the wire at the top of my large smoking dustbin. You might not be able to see it, but most of the sausages are linked together by unfilled bits of casing.

We had no cedar wood sawdust, and there was no obvious online source that wasn’t asking for absurd amounts of money, so I used oak. You can see I added some herbs, as the recipe suggests, thyme, sage and some very nice Lesbian oregano. The smoker, in case you are wondering, is called a Pro-Q, and it does a very good job.

Here are the sausages, hung up in the smoker (galvanised dustbin) yesterday evening, with the smoke just starting. A few hours later, vinegar dripped on the sawdust and put it out.

I’ve reloaded the Pro-Q and lit it up again, with the bin tilted so that any further drips miss the sawdust. Once they are smoked, I will be able to report on whether they are more authentic than the previous batch.