Hot cheese bread: grip it and rip it! | King Arthur Flour - Bakers’ Banter: “

If you’re a yeast bread baker, you know that different loaves provoke different visceral responses. There are sandwich loaves, golden brown and perfectly domed, that seem almost too beautiful to cut into. And there’s country sourdough bread, whose occasional lack of beauty is made up for by its enticing aroma. Focaccia begs you to cut it into squares and dip it in seasoned olive oil; a baguette makes you bend down and listen to it ‘singing’ as it cools.

But one response all homemade yeast breads invoke in common: they all say RIP INTO ME RIGHT NOW.

Hot-from-the-oven bread envelops your house with a yeasty aura of warmth and comfort. But it’s not enough to simply enjoy the aroma of bread, or to admire it as it cools. Though you’re cautioned not to cut into a hot sandwich loaf, lest your precipitous cut turn it gummy (and yes, if you cut oven-hot bread, that does happ”

(Via Slashfood.)

Must…make…bread. Wow.

Seasonal Ingredient Map: “Epicurious has created a handy, interactive map of seasonal produce by state. Select a month, hover over a state, and a list of in-season ingredients is displayed with links to the ingredient descriptions and recipes….

I was looking for one of these a couple of years ago, and this one seems pretty good. It does a little grouping, I’ve noticed: when it says that this month is good for spinach in Virginia, it really means leafy greens in general (we get quite a bit of kale, mustard greens, and the like as well). With that minor quibble, it’s a lovely tool.

I am actively working to become in tune with seasonality, and we are attempting the noble goal of eating a family’s share of CSA vegetables between the two of us (and whichever guests we happen to have over). While this tool won’t change much by way of what we do, it will be nice to know what to expect when, and hopefully reinforce the memories of which point of the season we get which fruits and vegetables.

(Via Required Eating.)

There’s this web site called twitter. It’s at twitter.com. The purpose of it is to allow people to basically say what they’re up to in 140 characters or less. It also let’s you get an idea of what various people you’re interested in are doing. Not a site for complex philosophy, but it’s good to give you an idea of what’s happening in various people’s lives.

I’m on twitter as thefoodgeek, and various people interested in food follow what I say. One of these, called snitty, asked, “I can cook and bake, but not very creatively. Is there a book that will teach me some general theories that I can apply.” Now, there are simple answers to questions like that, and there are complex answers. The simple answer, I.e. The one I could give in 140 characters, was, “Alton Brown’s books, and Shirley O’Corriher’s Cookwise. However, the question is very interesting, so I figured it might be nice to explore it a bit here.

I’m not a terribly creative cook. I occasionally do some creative things, but I’m not that interested in the creativity, yet. I’m more on the path myself, so I figured I’d share what my path is, so people can follow, ignore, or avoid the path, as you see fit.

When I was younger, I experimented more with the cooking. Part of that is because I was a bachelor, and there’s a certain, oh, lack of concern about the way things have to be when you’re a bachelor. If you decide that perhaps peanut butter will go with hot dogs, you cook up a hot dog, slather some peanut butter on the bun, and see what you’ve created. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it does not.

This is a path many cooks take, some more successfully than others. Psychologists say that one of the big differences between people and animals is that people have this big section of the brain whose job is to pretend that what you’re imagining may happen in the future is actually happening, so you can react to it and accept or reject the plan depending on if you believe the outcome will be favorable or not.

The intuitive path is to engage this portion of your brain, and figure that’s enough to get you going. “I like eggs on my cheese, so what if I mixed the egg and cheese before I cook it, so the cheese will be all nicely melted in the eggy goodness?” If you’ve ever tried it, you know that the answer is, “The egg won’t set properly, and you’ll have this really nasty sort of not-quite-custard thing.” So sometimes you can predict well, and sometimes you can’t. People with a lot of talent at these predictions can go on to make great chefs.

So, what if you aren’t so good at that prediction? All is not lost. Logic can save the day in instances like these. Logic, practice, and experience.

The first step is to learn all of the basics. Learn what happens when you take some food and cook it various ways. Grilled meat, steamed vegetables, roasted vegetables, steamed meat, macerated fruits, baked bread, steamed bread, steamed and baked bread, broiled meat, pasta with a simple sauce, etc. Don’t do a fancy recipe, just get a decent example of whatever it is you’re cooking, and do the minimum that you can in order to cook it properly, so you can understand what it tastes like as well as the essential methods that get you to that point.

The next step is to try a variation or two on some of these recipes. This is more important with baking than it is with cooking, because there’s more controllable chemistry going on in baking, which you can mess up by being incautious. But still, see what a small or large variation of your favorite recipe might do.
After that, or during that process, I like to try to find out what’s really going on when I do things. This ingredient is thickening the sauce, but only when it hits a temperature near boiling. This ingredient is preventing the eggs from curdling. This ingredient and technique keeps the dough from becoming too tough.

The above steps are your foundation. If you are serious about what you’re doing, or maybe not even all that serious but with enough talent to make up for it, then you should be a great cook. You should be able to follow recipes and ready to ignore parts of the process because you know there’s a better way to do it, whether you’re right or not. However, that hasn’t quite gotten us to creative.
There are many paths to creativity. Many people see creativity as an inborn process that uses your instincts to see what you can do to make the world a more interesting place. It’s an interesting theory, but it’s not terribly useful for us. It’s a descriptive theory, to explain why creative people are creative: “Because they are.”

If someone wants to take the next step, how to become creative if creativity is an inborn talent, generally the suggestion is to either do creative things (learn to paint, write a book), or to hang out with creative people and hope it soaks in.
On the other hand, you could look at creativity from the practical perspective: creativity is introducing other people to something they’ve not had a chance to experience. This perspective ignores the origin issue and gets to the effect. This perspective implies that there’s a mechanical process that can get you started on the path to creativity.

So, from a practical perspective, you have a number of options. Flavor pairings. Texture combinations. Deconstruction. Reconstruction. Desperation. Stealing. Baconizing. All of these are perfectly good tools for the creative process.

Flavor pairings. You have some strawberries. You know that strawberries goes well with cilantro, because you’ve read on some web site that strawberry and coriander go well together. Cilantro is often used in Tex-Mex food, such as salsa. Therefore, you may think, I could make a strawberry “salsa”. Find something to replace the onion, such as fennel. Maybe sneak in some balsamic vinegar. Maybe a chile or two for heat. Perhaps, instead of a corn chip, you use a madeleine as your salsa transportation device. Could be you’d want to try to make a taco with this, so you have to find a substitute for the meat. Or don’t, and use a meat that could handle the strawberry salsa. Maybe duck. Who knows?

That’s what flavor pairings do for you. You could start with a simple use, such as adding cilantro to your strawberry shortcakes to see what happens, but if you let it run away with you, you can make something crazy. Could be crazy-good, could be crazy-bad. If you’re willing to play, then you can find out. But don’t let one bad diversion keep you from trying.

Texture combinations. Mixing crunchy with smooth is a classic method of livening up a food stuff. Creme brulée works on this principal, as does putting potato chips on a roast beef sandwich. Oh, don’t try to tell me you’ve never tried it. In any case, take something smooth, and add crunch to it. Or vice versa.

Chocolate pudding. Smooth and creamy. Add something crunchy to it. Puffed rice cereal is one option (yes, I’m talking Rice Krispies®) would be quick and safe. But ginger goes well with chocolate. How about crystalized ginger? That gives flavor and texture. Maybe the pudding is too smooth to handle that, so you could try some crushed up oreos. Or toasted brioche.

Deconstruction and reconstruction. These are fun ones, and not too terribly difficult to try out. You say to yourself, “Hey, let’s pick a food and deconstruct it.” So, what if we tried…caesar salad. Great. You have lettuce, egg, anchovies, garlic, bread, parmesan cheese. Maybe some other stuff. Okay, the idea behind it is to have the anchovies (properly from the Worcestershire Sauce) provide some umami, egg providing a medium for flavor and for binding, garlic croutons for crunch, and parmesan cheese for favor. Oh, and the lettuce for, well, being lettuce. There we go, deconstructed. We could arrange for a dish to be somehow like this, but we could instead reconstruct it in a benign or a startling manner. Let’s swing towards startling.

Make some parmesan cheese crisps. Before they cool, roll them into tubes. Take an anchovy, dip in in flour then an egg wash, then garlic breadcrumbs. Fry it. Dash a little Worcestershire Sauce on it for good measure. Wrap it in lettuce, stuff into the parmesan crisp. Win your quick fire challenge.

Desperation. This is the favorite of college students and bachelors. You haven’t eaten in 18 hours. You have some pasta, some ranch dressing, and some bread. Toast the bread, pile some pasta in, add a dash of ranch, and watch Dr. Atkins scream at you from the spirit realm for the creation.

Not everything made in desperation has to be disgusting, of course. But you’re more likely to eat a mediocre-to-disgusting desperation dish than you are a badly executed flavor pairing dish. See what works from that, and what doesn’t. Salvage as best you can. What you’ll find from the pasta sandwich is that the warm and crispy toast sets off the squishy pasta well (as discussed above). Perhaps a warm pasta salad with croutons would be a better takeaway. Or a bruschetta pasta salad. Probably not so much to be done with the ranch dressing, despite what the Hidden Valley people want you to believe.

Stealing. Nigella Lawson has this fantastic Crab-Avocado Asian salad. Turn that into Asian Crab Cake Sandwich with Avocado. Steal, modify slightly, and introduce it to people who haven’t heard of it. Because, again, it’s not necessarily about making something that the world has never seen or tasted before, though that’s fun, too. It’s about being able to do something that you and your dinner guests haven’t done before.

Part of stealing is finding out what others are doing. Read books. Go to web sites.

• Khymos.
• Food Pairing. If you figure out how to use Food Pairing, let me know. I have some theories, but I’m not absolutely convinced yet that I know how it works.
• News for Curious Cooks
• Ideas in Food

Naturally, feel free to post more links in the comments if you have some.

Add bacon. Seriously. Everyone knows that everything goes better with bacon. Take a food that’s never seen bacon (to your knowledge, because it’s been done before, but still). Figure out how bacon would work with it. The larger exercise is taking a limited playing field (i.e. Must go with bacon) and turning it into a challenge. The best way to be creative is not to give yourself an unlimited playing field. That just leads to option paralysis (writer’s block). The best way is to force an artificial limit, and try to work within that (Iron Chef).

It’s possible to become a more creative cook. There are plenty of techniques. Combine that with a good foundation in understanding the inner workings of food, or at least the outer working of food, then you can do amazing things in the kitchen.

I was making my wife’s usual morning latte yesterday, as is my custom (yes, she is spoiled). After making a certain number of lattes, one starts to play around with the process. In my case, I’m slowly learning to make designs in the coffee. Oh, not well, I assure you, but designs nevertheless.

There’s a coffee shop down the street that will make the beautiful fern pattern in the latte, and you’re loathe to put in sugar and stir, much less drink it. And yet, I both stir and drink, so it can’t be that beautiful. Still, I feel a little guilty.

I cannot make any patterns like that, certainly not with that kind of repeatability. However, yesterday I made an image of a phoenix rising from the coffee grounds. If you turned the image upside down (relative to the base of the image, not so that the coffee pours out), the negative space looked like a Peep. Yes, I really am that good.

Today, I decided to do something much simpler, and just made an ordinary Peep. It wasn’t hard, just jiggle the foam in the right way, and voila!

“But Brian,” you cry out, “you said you weren’t very good! How do you do these amazing things? All I get are ferns, or images of the Virgin Mary.” There’s a secret that you can learn from people who make balloon animals. The important thing, they say, is not to announce your balloon intentions to the child beforehand. If you say, “I’m going to make you a cat”, then twist the balloons all up, they’ll be like, “no, that’s deformed rabbit.” However, if you make the balloon animal, annotating it along the way, and say, “So, what does that look like?” They’ll say, “That’s the best giraffe I’ve ever seen!” You’ll know you were trying for the Fierce Lion, but the kids won’t. So they’ll be happy, and you’ll be a little more bitter inside, wondering why you are still paying those loans on the art college you went to.

Coffee art, for the beginner, is just like that. Push the foam a little this way, a little that way, and look at it like you would clouds. If you can spot a design easily, say, “Look what I’ve made!” If not, don’t worry about it.

Eventually, perhaps I’ll get a degree of control with the whole process, and can make ferns all day long. But I think I’ll prefer a bit of balloon artistry to a fern, even if I do become skilled. After all, most of the fun is in the interpretation.

I believe we’ve touched briefly upon Dinner: Impossible on the podcast before. I quite enjoyed the first few episodes, with its reality-tv-like challenges, but presumably with a proven chef at the helm etc.

As time went on, I ditched its Season Pass from the Tivo, because the challenges didn’t really become more interesting, and the more I saw of Robert, the less charismatic he became. The best part of the show was trying to figure out exactly what the producers said to the people who were Bob’s primary contact to get them to feel comfortable giving the man grief.

“Okay, now ignore the fact that he’s got a neck bigger than your thigh, is 2 feet taller than you, and that he’s carrying a knife that could go through you and your closest friends if you were all standing one-in-front-of-the-other. He’s a pussycat; he really is. Besides, we have people standing by with Tasers, and he knows it, so it’s cool. So, what I need you to do right now is to say that the bread that he’s making right now is about as weak, and you’ll want to use these exact words, is about as weak as his mother was last night after she thanked you for the best time she’s had since the 60s. No, no, I swear, we do this all the time. It’s good natured ribbing, and we’re very quick with the tasers.”
Something like that, I’d imagine.

In any case, Robby’s going through a bit of trouble. According to the St. Petersburg Times (the one in Florida, not the one in Russia), Chef Bob has made a few things up about his past career. Cooking for Queens and Presidents? Not so much. I mean, kinda, if you squint, it looks a little like it, but not actually, you know, being the Chef in charge, as one might imagine. Being a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order would be really cool, if it were true. Not just any Knight, mind you, but the highest level of Knight. The Super-Knight, if you will.

The St. Pete Times asked around and did some interviewing, and all of their comments are available in the links. For my part, I can’t be bothered to call people up about a controversy that’s months old, so I did the easy bit of research. The bit that even the Food Network could have done with no trouble, had they been of a mind.

If you check his résumé, you’ll note that there’s a bit on there that says, “Recipient of the James Beard Award, 2005-2006.” It’s right at the top of the Awards and Honors section. So I went to the James Beard web site and did a search for Irvine. There’s nothing. I check for Alton Brown, just to make sure the search works, and I see that he won an award for his first cookbook and was nominated for at least one more. You could check this yourself, but the James Beard folk just modified their web site , and now the award search is broken. It should be up soon, though. Well, I say soon, but it’s been down for weeks now, so maybe not.

So, if I were a proper reporter, I’d call up the James Beard folks and ask if they had any idea what he meant. I mean, after all, it’s possible that he was working at some restaurant where he was executive chef, and the restaurant won the award, or something like that. Something where he may have won the award, but not had his name attached to it. I’ve done much the same. But on my resume, when it says that I won the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences award, it mentions the year and the name of the product that I worked on that won the award, which is conveniently listed in the list of projects section of the resume. That makes it easy to verify.

However, I’m not a reporter, so it’s all gossip gossip gossip gossip gossip gossip gossip.

In any case, The Food Network has decided to go with someone else for the next season of Dinner: Impossible, and they’ve pulled his bio from the site. Interestingly, there’s been a fan-backlash, with people saying they don’t care how much he lied, they like him on the show. They’ve even started an Internet Petition to bring him back, because, you know, internet petitions work. People will post to comments on articles about his lies and complain that people are being mean to him. And, yes, we are being mean to him, but that’s what he gets. Not necessarily what he gets for lying, though that’s part of it. That’s what he gets for being famous.

There are upsides and downsides to fame, and one of the down sides is that people are going to examine what you have said. If something seems suspicious, they’ll pounce. And if it seems as if everything that you said in order to get your Big Break was a tissue of fibs, then people are not only going to find out and tell other people, they’re going to delight in doing so. That’s one of the reasons that Alton Brown is obsessively cautious about what he does by way of sponsorship. It’s why Anthony Bourdain can be a rude, fowl-mouthed, and generally unpleasant person, but not have the sorts of troubles that Irvine has: because he’s genuinely rude, fowl-mouthed, and unpleasant. You know what you’re going to get going in with Bourdain, and he certainly delivers.

So the upside of it is that Iron Chef New Guy, Michael Simon, apparently has some time in his schedule between appearances on Iron Chef, so he’ll be taking over the helm. I’m not convinced that this is entirely proper behavior for an Iron Chef, but hey, it’s better than posing for cheesecake photos.

Ingredients:

Directions:
1. Melt the butter in your pressure cooker
2. Sweat the Celery, Onion, Carrots, and salt until the onion becomes translucent
3. In a heavy pan, brown the pork and beef cubes over high heat and in the peanut oil
4. Add pork and beef to the pressure cooker
5. Deglaze the heavy pan with part of the wine, then pour that and the rest of the wine into the pressure cooker
6. Add water to cover all ingredients in pressure cooker
7. Put Rosemary, Sage, Thyme, and Cumin Seeds into a tea ball and submerge in Pressure Cooker
8. Bring to a boil
9. Remove tea ball with tongs
10. Add Garlic Powder, Onion Powder, Herbes du Provence, Nutmeg, Garlic, Tomatoes, and Mushrooms to Pressure Cooker, and bring back to a boil
11. Cover and, following directions for your pressure cooker, cook for 25 minutes
12. Remove cover (following directions) and add Wondra Flour or Corn Starch to thicken.
13. Boil for one minute
14. Serve and enjoy

(Serves 6)

Okay, after having endless problems with Drupal (the lastest being that comments weren’t posting, so sorry if you posted and it was lost), I’ve switched to WordPress. I’m not keen to change blogging software after this, so feel free to make an account and comment or what have you to show me that things do work the way I expect.

Along with this, all the RSS feeds that were from the drupal site are different. The RSS feeds from feedburner are okay, and should remain that way, so I recommend subscribing to those. I am still trying to figure out how to redirect default feeds to the feedburner feeds, which would be nice. Also, I should probably try to make a feed that alerts those subscribed to the old feeds to subscribe to the new ones. Woo.

Fingers crossed on having to do less webmastering and more content creation. It’s not worked so far, but that’s mostly because I’ve been setting the site up for the first time. Once that’s done, I should be fine. If I don’t tinker too much. Which I tend to do.

I’m also trying out Disqus for comments. We’ll see how that works.

I’ve done an actual interview. Woo! Okay, it was a single question, and I didn’t record it or anything, but I takes what I gots.

I was at Thursday’s taping of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! which will be airing today with special “Not My Job” guest Neil Patrick Harris. They tell us at the beginning that if you stick around through the re-takes, then you get to participate in the Q&A afterwards.

When the time came, I raised my hand and, as I was in my new Threadless Shirt which was a pretty intense green, I was easy to spot, I was called upon. “I have a question for Mo. How do you keep getting to judge Iron Chef America?” At this point, someone in the back of the audience “woo!”s. I realized that the initial question could be interpreted one of two ways, so I clarified with, “Because that does seem like the best side job ever.”

Mo told us first that he always writes a thank you note, which would doom me as I am terrible about writing thank you notes. It’s shameful, really. But he went on to say that whenever he is going to judge, he always starves himself that day, especially if Iron Chef Batali is cooking, as Mo would eat a brick if Batali cooked it, because it would be so tasty. So he always clears his plate, licking it if necessary. Whereas the other judges will often only eat a tiny bit of the food that they’re given. He thinks that is his secret.

Unfortunately, that didn’t help with my secret agenda, figuring out how I could judge Iron Chef America. So, for now, it looks like the answer is that I will have to figure out how to Freeze Hell or graft useful wings on a pig or something first. Sigh.

I haven’t made the kind of site that I originally intended to make a couple of years ago. I believe it’s time for a re-creation, with a wider range of content type. Let’s see what the next couple of months brings us, shall we?

Baking pan conversions…yay!: ”
Have you ever run into this problem? You find a great cake recipe, but you don’t have the size of cake pan that it calls for. Or you want to try that cake batter in an odd shaped cake pan. Well here is one way to solve this quandary. Check out the cake pan conversion chart over at allrecipes.com.

The chart is pretty extensive. The only problem is that it only lists conventional sizes of cake pans. This is offset by the fact that it also gives volume amounts for each size. So if you are using an odd shaped cake pan, you should be able to determine how much batter you’ll need for it.”

(Via Slashfood.)