More Pizza Making

 
 
I fixed the soggy crust by placing more of the cheese on the perimeter of the pizza and cut the pieces into smaller chunks. Great pizza with Creminelli's piccante salami.

- jmb

Bagel Progress

I just made a batch with my new high gluten flour. They still aren't quite right, but they still taste great and are looking great.






- jmb

Pizza Making

My $1.38 satillo tile only lasted two times (and then cracked into 5 pieces) but the quality of my pizzas is definitely on the rise.

wild oregano, from Calabria - secret ingredient

- jmb

Someone Has Been In The Pudding

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Egg Salad with Fennel

We had some extra fennel and some hard-boiled eggs that were meant to be deviled, but I lacked the motivation, so we decided to make egg salad and I found the Egg Salad with Fennel and Lemon on Epicurious. Nice find, and I made only a couple small changes.

8 large eggs
1 garlic clove
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest
2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1/2 fennel bulb, finely chopped

- jmb

Marinated Goat Cheese

I did a little experiment with Anne Willan's marinated goat cheese recipe (Country Cooking of France) and used walnut oil for one batch and olive oil for the other.






The walnut oil had a subtler taste and a higher melting point so it didn't coagulate in the fridge like the olive oil kept doing, but I prefer the flavored olive oil to the walnut when making salads to accompany the cheese.






What a delicious experiment.

- jmb

Jerk

My other brother and sister-in-law, also knowing that I like cooking, gave me a copy of Jerk from Jamaica for my birthday. I imagine that here is a hidden message in the prevalence of Jerk in the book, but I'll let it slide since the food looks so good. I read the whole book in one day and immediately wanted to start cooking. As jerk is a whole new world to me I had to get some new spices (and we still haven't stocked up since the move) and therefore chose a recipe which required the least hunting/gathering (busy week at work and I feel lazy).

I went with pork loin stuffed with plantains. The preparation is very simple - butterfly the loin, make a dry rub with the spices (I used my mortar and pestle, but all the spices can be bought pre-ground too), season the meat overnight, then stuff and cook.

This recipe gave me my first chance to tie a boneless roast, which didn't turn out half bad (thanks Ad Hoc at Home for the picture tutorial). My primary concern in cooking the loin was the temperature. I usually do 250 degrees for a couple hours, but this recipe called for 350 for just over an hour. I was concerned the pork would be dry, but it turned out great (maybe because of the plantains?).



For my taste, the meat was a bit over-seasoned (maybe I'll cut back on the ginger?) but everyone else liked it and it was definitely and exotic blend of flavors that I enjoyed and never would have mixed on my own. We rounded out the meal with some sweet potato fries (that use the same dry seasoning as the roast) and a salad. For the next adventure in Jerk, I'm firing up the grill.


- jmb

Happy Birthday to Me (and Raelene!)

My birthday was yesterday and my brother and sister-in-law brought me a great gift (which contemporaneously is also a belated gift for Raelene's birthday).  Apparently they walked into Williams-Sonoma and said "They like to cook.  They have French and Italian on lock-down. Go!"  And the folks at Williams-Sonoma came up with a Tunisian Tagine, a bottle of Apricot Tagine sauce, and a Mediterranean cookbook.  I'd never heard of a tagine, but I've been craving curry and an expanded Mediterranean diet so I busted  it out for dinner.  Keller (courtesy of ad hoc) makes a 10-piece cut chicken look way easier than it was, but dinner turned out great.  Thanks!

So good I want to go downstairs and get more right now.

-jmb

Pastrami Coma with a side of Bagel

We recently discoved Weiss Deli via yelp and Raelene took me there for my birthday.  They cure their own meat, make their own bagels, etc - sounds like my kind of place!  The whitefish salad was a new experience for me, and save the last bite, which tasted way too fishy, was pretty good. 

You'll see Raelene's Reuben in the background, but that's only because it was big enough to have its own gravitational field, which is quite an acheivement considering that I couldn't fit my sandwhich in my mouth it was so big.  Last time that happend I was 5 (I think) and my Mamaw bought me a Big Mac instead of a Happy Meal.  The pastrami was delicious (as were the pickles and bagels [and maybe I should use alternating caps and italics to express that deliciousness, but I have a moral opjection to such things, so I'll rely on the descriptiveness of deliciousness] - the pickled tomato was a little much, but that may be because I wasn't expecting it to be pickled) but I ate way too much. 

Next time I'm going with the half sandwhich and soup combo, that way I can remain awake.

-jmb

The New Rotisserie

Today was the inaugural use of the rotisserie. It's only taken me two months to get it attached but I finally made time for it and brined a chicken for the occasion.

I made up my own brine to use the extra fresh thyme I had on hand, using Ruhlman's salt to water ratio as my starting point (check out his Charcuterie - one of my favorite cook books).

Thyme Brine:
1 gallon water
1 cup kosher salt (I use Morton's)
1/2 cup torbado (raw cane sugar - regular sugar will work fine too, I just wanted to experiment)
1 clove of garlic (cut in half and crush a little)
1 lemon (cut in half and squeeze some juice into the water)
3T peppercorns (lightly crushed in mortar and pestle)
1/2oz. Fresh thyme (just toss the sprigs in whole).

To make the brine you add all the ingredients together, bring the water to a boil, and stir until the sugar and salt dissolve, then chill completely. Once the brine is cold you can add the chicken and return to the fridge. My chicken weighed 3.9 pounds and I brined it for 9 hours. After the chicken was done brining I rinsed it thoroughly and placed it, uncovered, on a drying rack and then back into the beer fridge in the garage (Newcastle!) to help the skin form a nice pellicle (this apparently makes the skin taste better).

I pulled the chicken out a couple hours before cooking so that it could assume room temperature and brushed it with clarified butter just before I put it on the rotisserie. I had the grill set to half power but the bird was still cooking too fast so I turned it down to its lowest setting after about 25 minutes. After 50 minutes the bird was registering 165 degrees so I took it off and, after letting it rest for 20 minutes cut it up. It was perfectly cooked.

Next time I will cook with the BBQ on its lowest setting, just to prolong the cooking process, but all in all I'm really happy with how this turned out. Now all I need is a big paper bag full of French fries and dinner will be complete (a pleasant memory from our times in Sicily)

- jmb

Je cherche une boulangerie -Vol. 2

Sometimes I can be really dumb.

This is my second attempt making French bread. I again followed Reinhart's classic French bread recipe. I wasn't really happy with the taste last time so I let the dough sit in the fridge for three days instead of overnight (his recipe says you can do up to four). I also bought a couple towels just to use for shaping bread and that helped the loaves stay the right shape even though I still had the same difficulty shaping them.

The recipe requires a blast of steam as the loaves first enter the oven, and not having an extra metal pan on hand I decided to use an extra Pyrex casserole dish that promptly exploded in the oven when I started putting water in. I was smart enough to take safety precautions (thanks undergrad chemistry studies) but not smart enough to think that even though the water was near boiling that the temperature difference between the Pyrex and the water was nearly 250 degrees (another reason I switched from biochem to political philosophy). Needless to say, I freed up some space in the cupboard where that Pyrex used to be and ended up using a spray bottle to wet the loaves after I put them in (which was not an ineffective method - definitely somewhere between exploding glass and using a professional grade metal pan).

As for the bread, it's far from French, and I need to work on my scoring skills. It's too heavy to be a baguette and the crust is coming out too thick. But that doesn't mean it's bad - far from it. It's pretty close to the bread we had in Sicily, and with a little work and some sesame seeds I'm pretty sure I can use it to recreate the wonderful flavor of pane palermitano. But it's not French bread because the dough is just too dense, so I'll come back to this to try and make some pane palermitano but I'm going to have to find another recipe to try to sate my cravings for authentic baguettes.

- jmb

Fresh Pretzels, Going Fast

I made pretzels for the first time today, courtesy of Reinhart's Artisan Bread Every Day.

I think I'd like to try something with some sourdough flavor, and a thicker crust, but all the same they are delicious with mustard and I'd be happy to make the recipe again.  I definitely need to work on shaping and I'd stick with my sel gris or bourbon smoked sea salt as toppings.

-jmb

**useful note: the next morning we found that the pretzels were a bit gummy because we put them in a ziploc bag to keep them fresh.  Apparently they do better just sitting out on the counter.  Plus they are yummy and don't last long in the wild.