My food mill and I

Today I used my brand spanking new food mill for the first time. Set me back 20 bucks at Kitchen Kapers, but it was worth it. Today's dinner was pizza night, which is quite a spectacle in our house. Kids decorating their own pizza's, while I spend (elapsed time) the whole day making sauce and pizza dough. Since I never roasted tomatoes for the sauce (just skinned and deseeded), my pizza sauce was always orange instead of the dark red color required for pizza sauce. And NO, I do not pull a Sandra Lee on pizza sauce. Ever read the ingredients list?

Anyway, the food mill performed beautifully.
Here's the scoop on roasted tomato sauce:

Ingredients:

• 20 Roma tomatoes, cut in half
• 2 onions, sliced
• 3 cloves on garlic, finely minced
• olive oil (I used half olive oil, half basil oil)
• dried oregano and thyme (or fresh)
• salt and pepper to taste

Methods:

1. Put the tomatoes on a baking sheet and season well with herbs, salt and pepper
2. Sprinkle the onions and garlic over the tomato halves
3. Drizzle olive oil over the tomatoes. I used in total about 1/4 cup of olive oil
4. Park in a 325 degree oven for about 2 hours until the tomatoes start to get dry
5. Up the temperature to 425 and roast another 20 minutes until nicely browned
6. Run the whole thing through your food mill until it's completely milled; when there's nothing but dry skin left in the food mill
7. Add about 1/8 cup of white wine and reduce on medium heat until you have a nice thick sauce.

Ideal for pizza or as Pomodoro sauce over pasta.

Korean tofu soup

Korea: centuries of cooking tradition influences by the Japanese and Chinese cuisine. Where pickling is mainstay and spice-intolerance equals slow death by starvation. Everything culminates into Kimchee.

Utter the word Kimchee only with respect and reverence, like a mantra; iIt is that important. Making it well requires a long bloodline of master picklers; it’s not for the faint of heart.

I did some research. It required stone pots half buried in snow covered frozen gardens after it was brined with salt for days. So, skip homemade kimchee for dinner tonight; ain’t gonna happen…

 

I get such a Sandra Lee feeling; I fail miserably at my own home cooking. I dread going to the Korean store to get me some pickled manna. But I admit defeat. Kimchee is for other people to make; I am just too white…

 

My poor family has been eating Korean beef soups for the last couple of weeks. They are so sick of it, that there was open revolt last night when I made beef soup again. But I getting the hang of it, finally.  It starts with stock: I made mine in the pressure cooker to speed up the process: Pork bones,  Garlic cloves, dried shitake mushrooms, carrots, scallions, soy bean sprouts, parsley, bay leaves and thyme

After 2 hours in the pressure cooker, the stock is amazing. Making this stock is already worth the effort; use this at will.

 

The soup is a mixture of the stock with scallions, garlic, tofu, more soy bean sprouts, Korean red pepper and thinly sliced flank steak. It’s a complete meal by itself. Let cook until very happy and serve piping hot. Nothing better on a cold winter night to warm you with a good soup.

 

Eat with kimchee, either cooked in the soup or on the side and rice.

 

 

Home made bread

I used to be the supermarket bread type. Whatever was easy to grab and not too expensive, I would buy, toast it up with some cheese and that was the extend of my bread eating. Mind you, I come from a country where a “bread meal” is served twice a day, so I would go through a lot of cheap and awful bread just to keep the machine going.  Forgive me Lord, for I have sinned.

But our years living in France have opened my eyes and I have seen the bread. Moist interior, crunchy crust, rich in flavor, stale in a couple of hours; classic baguette.  Since coming back to the US, I have tried many supermarkets and bakeries for the best bread. Results were mixed. Italian Bread from Wegmans is very good and now the default bread in our household. But at $ 2.25 per loaf quite pricy. Considering it cost 20 cents in materials to make, and knowing  I do not part with my money very easily, makes me wonder about an alternative solution.

Like every budding amateur chef, I have ventured into making my own bread. Just 4 ingredients: flour, yeast, water and salt. Simple, No? I have tried almost every recipe available, and a variety of techniques and methods.  Up until very recently the results were OK. The bread is eatable, but missing something; the peanut gallery just does not eat it.

Click here to see how to make bread

A short list of things I tried:

•  double rising,
•  blooming the yeast,
• steam filled oven,
• adding sugar to the yeast/water mixture to kick start the blooming,
• spraying the crust with water to add extra crunch

In short, close enough for jazz, but this is an artisanal  process, so simply not good enough.

Then somebody whispered biga in my ear. Oh Biga, oh starter,  where have you been all this time? A biga is a starter, a very wet mixture of a scant amount of yeast and equal parts of water and flour, taken from the ingredients, which has been fermented for at least 6 hours. The biga is what gives the bread its rich and slightly sour taste.  Now we’re cooking with gasoline! We are really making bread now.

Biga

•  ¾ tea spoon dry yeast
•  6 ounces (by weight) water
•  6 ounces (by weight) flour

Mix together in a bowl until you have a wet batter-like consistency. Cover bowl with plastic wrap, and walk away for at least 6 hours.

After the biga is all fermented happy, transfer to the working bowl of your bread mixer, or roll up your sleeves and get ready for kneading

Add to the biga

• 10 ounces (by weight) flour
• 4 ounces (by weight) water
• 1 teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon yeast

 Mix for 20 minutes until you have bread dough, stretchy like elastic bands, and does not break apart. Drop the dough in a bowl, coat with a little bit of olive oil (prevents dough from sticking to the bowl) and let it rise for at least 1½ hours until the dough has doubled or tripled in size.

Punch air out of the dough; form loaves; cut incisions on the top and let rise until at least double in size. 

Cook in a 500 degree oven for 8-10 minutes, spraying the top with water a couple of times to get an extra crunchy crust.