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Thursday, March 22, 2012

Growing Season?

Looking out the window I see, for the first time all year, a winter wonderland. The yard is white, the car is frosted over, and there is no blue sky in sight. And it's the third day of Spring.

I started my seeds several weeks ago, and they have taken off, reaching what seems to me - the first-time gardener - about their limit in their confined little plastic incubators. What to do? The kids are big enough to play outside, but our current lovely Oregon Spring would kill them.

Fingers crossed for sunny weather.





Wednesday, March 21, 2012

The Wisdom of the Japanese Loaf

This was only my second attempt to make a cinnamon raisin bread, so it seems a bit unfair that I have been given the perfect recipe, a method that avoids all the pitfalls so common to the swirled loaf: wide airy gaps in the finished product, spilling filling, dry boring bread. But given to me it was (thanks, Mom!), and here it is:


I should include a photo of the inside as well, as that was where the real magic lay: a slightly sweet dough with a fine tender crumb, no gaps in sight, filling intact and flavorful. But you'll have to take my word for it.

The bread itself is a version of the traditional Japanese white bread called shokupan. It calls for a high-gluten flour, milk powder, and an egg, but most importantly a lot of kneading and even more rising (four 45-minute intervals). It's not a process that can or should be rushed, but the result is worth it. Toasted with a smear of butter, it puts those other cinnamon swirl breads to shame.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Beer O'Clock

I don't know why, as my interest in wine has grown over the past several years, a curiosity about beer never developed. It took my recent adventures in home fermentations to even open the door to home brewing, a door that, gladly, I don't think will close for quite some time.


As a first effort we decided to go with something straightforward, with a nice malt-hop balance, a drink that would - if successful - be easily recognizable as beer. I realized fairly early into the process why I had never been interested in it before. Unlike wine which, under the right serendipitous conditions, would be made in nature with no human intervention (e.g. a bunch of grapes falls to the ground and gets wedged between some rocks. It is unreachable by bugs or birds, shaded from weather extremes, and the ambient yeasts that are all around us go to town on the sweet berries); unlike that, beer is not a wild fermentation; that is, it requires a process - malting - by which certain starches in a grain are converted into certain sugars which are then available for fermentation. So from the beginning there is an extra human step with beer.




In theory, that could be the only added step. One could ferment using natural, wild yeasts (as they do for "sour" beers). But in the home brewing reality, there are many other possible points of intervention. You can buy hop pellets and malt syrup, and, if you are using store-bought yeast, you have to aggressively sanitize anything that comes near your beer.




It is all of these points of intervention, each a movement away from raw materials available in nature, that I find off-putting. That being said, I know a lot more about wine than I do about beer, so I may be oversimplifying the situation. Also, the craziness of sterilizing to kill everything and then inoculating with something in particular and then struggling to keep that store-bought thing as the only active critter in the mix while trying to kill all the other natural critters, is a process that happens all the time in the commercial wine world. So there's that.




Anyway, however you look at it, the magic is the fermentation, and it's fascinating to watch take place right in your kitchen. I'm thinking the fermentation period is over now, so I'll taste tomorrow, and then probably go ahead and bottle it. And then we'll brew again.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Meatless in the Mideast

I have, for a long time now, questioned my right to eat meat. If I do not, or could not, kill an animal, what gives me the right to eat one? For that matter, what gives me the right to kill one? This question being at varying depths below the surface of my daily diet, for years I have quietly ignored the dissonance as I dive into a pile of bacon or a dry-aged bone-in ribeye. I have also often rationalized it as a professional necessity: what kind of cook would I be if I didn't know as much as I could about meat?

Well, I finally did something about it. This year, for ten weeks now, we have been trying not so much to be Vegetarians (daunting as it sounds), but to start the process of changing our eating habits: less meat, more grains, more vegetables. We still eat fish, and I won't say that as springtime rolls around I won't be grilling burgers, but a shift is underway. We'll see where it takes us.

For now, though, a Middle Eastern extravaganza that satisfies both the palate and the conscience: first, my take on something I never thought I would even be in the same room with: the veggie burger. I coooked some chick peas and mashed them up with onions, garlic, spices and fresh herbs, a little bit of egg and some ground oats: grilled falafel for the burger lover. 



Next a salad of grilled vegetables, charred and sweet, with oregano and chives. A cooling yogurt (yes, homemade) condiment studded with cucumber and redolent of fresh mint.


And a good ol' fashioned tabbouleh: steamed bulghur with loads of chopped parsley, lots of lemon juice, and plenty of olive oil.


Where's the beef? Tonight, who cares?

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Ginger Beer

I currently have a handful of bubbly ferments going around the house: sauerkraut in the garage, vinegar in the kitchen, yogurt in the fridge, and, as of about ten minutes ago, ginger beer in a swing top bottle on the bar.

The liquid in the bottle was a murky gray, with a few inches of sludgy yellow minced ginger on the bottom. There were occasional bubbles meandering their way to the surface, but all in all, it didn't exactly inspire confidence in the success of this particular experiment.

Nevertheless, I had read that it should take about 48 hours to get enough of a ferment going to produce sufficient carbon dioxide to carbonate the drink, while still leaving a bit of sugar for sweetness. As it appeared to be moving along sluggishly, if at all, I kept it out in the relatively warm living room air an extra day. But after 72 hours I figured if it's going to happen at all, it already has. So, with nary a preamble to the excited crowd (Sarah and Zorro) before me, and fully expecting a dud of an opening, I popped the swing top.

It was difficult for me to gauge the apex of the geyser of yellow froth from my proximity to it, but it must have come to within inches of the ceiling. I looked down and saw a hardwood floor, shining wet and (maybe I shouldn't have left it unfiltered?) covered in ginger and foam. A messy clean-up? Absolutely. But who cares: it worked!

When it finally came time to taste it, still in my sticky socks and wet corduroys, it was a delight: dry as a bone, full of ginger punch, and - no surprise here - prickly with carbonation.

Friday, March 2, 2012

This Week in Pasta

Although the Pacific Northwest is justifiably famous for its natural abundance, an easily foraged cornucopia of wild fruits, herbs, roots, and fungi, I took the easy way out and bought a half-pound of Black Trumpet mushrooms at the farmers' market.


After a fairly tedious process of washing them, splitting them open, and removing the pine needles from their center stalks, I took the tough bases and simmered them in water for a stock, and set the Trumpets aside while I made the pasta.

For the filling I grabbed some cheap button and crimini mushrooms from the store, chopped them up fine and roasted them with garlic and plenty of salt, and then mixed in some sauteed spinach, ricotta cheese, and lemon juice.

The tangy and salty pop of the filling was tamed by the rich, earthy, almost black broth redolent of a funky forest floor after the rain, reduced and enriched with a pat of butter. With the Trumpets sauteed and scattered on top, and a $1 farmers' market white truffle shaved over that, it was mushroom on mushroom coated in mushroom and filled with, you guessed it, mushroom.