The past week had FAST meals going on. Scallops and couscous with some veggies, leftover lasagna, etc. Nice but nothing blogworthy. Today we decided to get some inspiration, shlep the kid for a 3 h round trip to Jungle Jim's and get some fun things to eat. Didn't get the oh so stinky Dorian though. Wasn't that bold.
webercam.com is largely a lab notebook of my adventures in cooking and amateur food science. Tonight I was invited by Jim of CMH Gourmand to attend the Pizza Grand Prix held at Wild Goose Creative and show off my cool toy, a modified grill that cooks pizzas. I had a blast. I love to share pizzas I make and gain feedback.
Hardly a well composed post, I just wanted to record some quick notes (I'll keep the post going a few days).
•I made a total of about 18 pizzas in 2 hours, 225 g crust each and mostly topped with Dei Fratelli crushed tomatoes, basil and mozzarella.
•Bethia brought some lovely ham from Thurns for a topping. Very nice. I snuck a few pieces of ham for myself too - thanks much Bethia.
•Lorence of Lorence's Kitchen brought some provolone and a nice mixture of sauteed mushrooms and shallots. It made great pizzas and Lorence was lucky that mixture made it to the pizza, it was very nice. I also enjoyed swapping parenting stories with him.
•Quantities: I only used about 2-3 lbs mozzarella (just BelGioso - a favorite commercial "fresh"), 1 28 oz can tomatoes (lightly salted), big bunch of chifonnade of basil, 9 lbs of dough [multiples of: water 400 g, flour 600 g, salt 12 g, olive oil 30 g, sugar 10 g].
•My contraption needs a good 40 minutes to come up to full temp (ca. 680-700°F).
•Karl of Wild Goose suggested lump as a fuel in between charcoal briquettes and wood in order to get another boost in temperature. Thanks Karl, I'll be trying this next time I get a shot (if my family's not too sick of my experiments).
•Jason gave me a Pumpkinhead Ale from Shipyard Brewing Co that I saved until all was shut down, put away and I was relaxed. I savored each and every mL. Thanks Jason.
•I got to speak to a co-owner of Surly Girl. Wow. I didn't even know it. How cool.
•Can you believe a French Ph.D. candidate was even present? How cool is that?
...
It's (Pizza) Grand Prix week! We're prepping the kettle for a very short road trip to the Wild Goose Creative (bicycle rack transporter and all). Last night I did a quick dry run to check out the fuel I'll be using while making Pizzas.
I ran my Firedome through a dry run to check the fuel, condition a new piece of clay and take some measurements. The dome ran for 3 hours at 600+ °F which was about the same temp as the clay surface. Great temperature uniformity. After the PGP, I'll be trying seasoned wood chunks to boost the temperature. For now, I'm ready. See you there.
When Sodexo serves mini corn dogs, she jumps at it. Kills me.
I like to bake whole grain breads, but often have problems. When I say whole grain, I don't want all rough milled flour, I want a significant fraction of the grain to be whole grain just hydrated to soften it. The biggest problem? I like my grainy bread to be for sandwhiches and enjoying with cheese; for that I prefer a boule shape. The inherent challenge with this shape and having whole grain in the ingredient list is often a doughy undercooked center. The whole grain retains so much moisture (which is great for shelf life), but it creates two different environments of cooking, the exterior and middle. Kind of like breast and thighs on chicken.
I tried a recipe I really liked recently. Inspired by Bittman's Food Matters (thanks Bethia!). I use more water than Bittman's recipe and let the grain steep for a long time prior to mixing to insure no crunchies in the final bread. I made this Sunday afternoon and it's still as good as the day it came out of the oven. This is a big deal for me. I like Frankie to have her bread from home and don't always have time to bake bread daily.
Cracked Wheat Bread
• In a bowl used for rising add:
Cracked wheat (coarse or fine), 1/2 C
Boiling water, 2.0 C
• Let sit until convenient (an hour or so, I let it sit all day).
• Add:
salt, 1.5 teaspoons
grain flours mix, 1/2 C (I have a tub of spelt, wheat and rye flour mixed)
unbleached white (need some structure), 2 Cups
vegetable oil, 2 tablespoon
dry yeast, 1/2 teaspoon
• Mix until the thing forms a ball and kind of knead with wooden spoon in bowl
• Let rise at least 12 hours.
• Form into a boule and let sit on parchment covered with a dry dishtowel for about 8 hours. The dough's not very sticky, typical of nice grainy doughs. Use a bit of flour to prevent any tackiness if you need while shaping.
• Slide into a 425°F oven; I cooked it on a sheet pan that preheated in the oven and toss a 1/4 cup of water into the bottom of the oven.
• Bake 45 minutes at 425°F, remove and let thoroughly cool.
Mac's been roasting beans using a nifty whirly pop popcorn maker. Kudos to you Mac. I love those things. Eager to jump in and be cool too, I turned to my $1.91 generic (thanks Volunteers of America!) popocorn popper to roast green coffee beans. I got the beans from Mediterranean Food Imports on Dodridge and N High (home of the only source of Merguez in Columbus) for $4/lb. The owner thinks they're from Brazil, but is not sure.
The question I had is: While coffee's roasting, do the stages of roasting, indicated by the casually tossed around term "cracking," correspond to detectable thermal transitions? Temperature profile to the rescue.
I popped 50 grams of green beans to the hopper, dangled my thermocouple into the headspace and let the baby rip for 15 minutes (a time based on some futzing around). Here's the profile:
Crestview (corner of Crestview and North High) is on my way home and my new favorite stop on the way home. It's a typical crammed Asian market and the value of it, I'm finding, is in the details.
The other day I had an itch to make a dish that was fast, used leftover freezer meat, and was healthy. Greens and grain is a biggie on our menus and I decided it would be greens, soba noodles and some of the vacuum wrapped, grilled pork loing that had occupied the freezer for months.
I ran in Crestview and had decided a simple, quick wilting bok choy would be a good green. I picked up one of the many types of greens there, my soba noodles, ginger and sprinted home to start a nice meal.
Turns out, my greens weren't bok choy but a more sturdy mustard-type green that took a bit longer to cook but pleasantly surprised us to be very tasty. The dish:
Into a mongo huge fry pan:
peanut and sesame oil, shaved garlic and ginger, sauted some sliced frozen pork loin, then tossed in greens, soy (2T) and 1/4 C water (the pork was grilled and had a lot of flavor), and let the greens steam a bit. While that was cooking, I cooked the soba in salted water for about 4-6 minutes, strained and tossed all to heat. Really fast, healthy and very satisfying.
Spend some time in Crestview's small produce area. It's got more than you might think.
I'm not paid as a scientist anymore, but I do enjoy the tools of the trade. My newest acquisition is an IR laser-guided thermometer. Just measures surface temps, but it's fun, and the cat loves it. I got it primarily for the firedome; I wanted to know how the temperature and uniformity of the clay cooking surface compared to the dome temperature. I also want to smuggle it into pizza places and check their oven temps. It stabilizes in about a 1/2 second and the range is -76°F to 1022°F. I wanted a higher temp unit, but this'll do for a while.
The other night I got to partake in a food blogger thingy at Wild Goose Creative and we were all supposed to bring an item for a potluck type spread. I usually make a traditionally topped focaccia for something like this because it travels well and is pretty good served at room temp.
This time I got a little crazy. I caramelized some onion, used some grated asiago on top and some Baleine coarse salt. When it was topped before cooking (1 Kg dough on a standard half sheet), it looked kind of bland and ... white. After cooking, the onion became crisped in places, the cheese melted and darkened and the whole thing came together more like a lightly topped pizza than a focaccia but I was quite happy with it. I think I'll make it again sometime.
(click image to visit the Wild Goose Creative's site)
Tonight I had the good fortune to:
a. be outside in Columbus after 8:00 pm
b. sit on a panel of food bloggers at the Wild Goose Creative on Summit.
A bunch of foodies talkin' food. Aside from being from Columbus, weber_cam doesn't have too much to do with the local thing, so I was grateful to be included. I also learned from Nick I should go to Michael's Goody Boy Drive-in for b'fast. Thanks for the tip Nick.
While there, I offered (as I often do) to give anyone interested a tutorial to make a baguette or focaccia and a few showed interest. To this end, we could do these tutorials in my kitchen OR in group mode at the rear of the WGC. If you're reading this, let me know your preference in the comments. If we go with the group, each could launch their bread prep every 20 minutes. This way we could all watch the lesson repeatedly - this helps when learning a process like this and also staggers us for oven use. A class could easily accommodate 4-5 individuals baking their own bread (more could be spectators). All you'd have to pay is a few hours time (a little slower than the two hours promised because more people). I think it'd be fun for a weekend afternoon.
To the staff and visitors at Wild Goose Creative - Thanks so much!!
ps, During the panel, I rambled. In a class I'd be more focused, and I can almost guarantee you'd go home with something nice to eat cooked in the WGC's own oven.
PS - Rosie got a nice recap of the event. Thanks Rosie.
I've been reading Hungry Monkey, a great book about a Dad cooking simple, but wonderful, dishes with his little girl. There's a pad thai recipe in it that takes a bit of work to make the tamarind extract, but once done, the dish goes together in a couple minutes.
Whenever I make a dish like this I like to have a lot of room in the pan so the food doesn't suck ALL the heat from the pan. So, I got this heavy aluminum pan at Wasserstrom. It's killer. About $50, but we'll have it for life.
Was doing a casual burger cookout the other night and decided to have a nice side of baked beans. Didn't have a ham hock or other appropriate pork product to stand in for the backbone of the classic Boston Baked beans.
I did, however, have some leftover home-cured pancetta (courtesy of Andrew). Perfect. A little mediterranean would play nice with the traditional dish. It was too late to do all the saute and stuff to get this, so in 10 minutes or so these babies were tossed on the stove, about 18 hours before the get together.
My easy baked beans
pancetta, ca. 100 g, coarse chop
great northerns, 1C (dry)
onion
garlic
dry mustard, Coleman's 1.5 t
pork fat, ca. 1T
parsley, 2T
brown sugar, 1T
ketchup, 1T
worcestershire, 1T
salt, 2t
pepper
water, 4C
Put in a cast iron dutch oven on smallest burner, covered, on lowest heat for 18 hours. Cooled and reheated for serving. Pretty amazing.
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