Recipe Notes: December 2017

6 December 2017

Japanese Milk Bread

Recipe from Bread Illustrated, 2016, p.94

I have been trying different recipes for white sandwich bread over the last year or two. This is another, from the chapter on sandwich breads from the America's Test Kitchen book, Bread Illustrated. It uses a technique, tangzhong, that worked very well in the Test Kitchen's recipe for fluffy dinner rolls which I've written about already.

This bread took four hours to make, before cooling, but most of this time is hands off. The recipe includes two unique features. First is the use of tangzhong, a paste, with a consistency like pudding, made from flour and warm water. This incorporates additional water into the dough without making it difficult to shape leading to a more tender crumb. The shaping method is also special: the dough is rolled into a thin sheet and then rolled into two tight rolls that are then baked in a standard loaf pan. The dough bakes into tender, feathery sheets. The dough is enriched with milk, butter, and an egg.

This is good sandwich bread! For the time being, at least, this will be my go-to recipe for making a white sandwich bread. I will continue trying other recipes but I could happily stop here in my search. It has a great texture and flavor and keeps very well. It takes a little longer to make but the wait is worthwhile, especially since most of the waiting time is just that, waiting, rather than working. 

10 December 2017

Senate Navy Bean Soup

Recipe from Cook's Country, October 2014

I have long been searching for a good bean soup recipe, without notable success. I still buy Campbell's condensed bean with bacon soup, one of my favorites from childhood. I had read about Senate Navy Bean soup, and I had maybe even tried a version of it a long time ago. But I didn't think the Test Kitchen had a recipe until I am across this one recently.

The soup is quite simple with only a few ingredients. It took a little over two hours to prepare, not counting the time the beans were soaking, but much of this time is for the soup to simmer unattended.  Navy beans are hard to find so I used "small white beans" which, so far as I can tell, are very similar and maybe the same thing. These are soaked in salty water over night. In a Dutch oven, onion, celery, and salt are cooked in oil to soften the vegetables, some garlic is added, and this mixture is set aside. Water, ham hocks, and whole cloves are simmered for 45 minutes. Potatoes and the onion mixture are added and cooked until the potatoes are tender. The ham hocks are removed and the mixture in the Dutch oven is partially mashed with a potato masher. The meat is removed from the hocks and added into the soup. Finally, a little vinegar is added to the soup.

The final soup of good, not great but quite good. Diane had seconds, which is a good sign. Some of the meat was tough; I couldn't shred it with forks but had to use a knife to cut it. My initial impression was that it was salty but I think that was wrong. After some additional sampling I think I was fooled by the vinegar. The soup keeps well, which is good because there is a lot of it for just the two of us. It is worth making again.

17 December 2017

Spaghetti and Meatballs

Recipe from America's Test Kitchen, Season 2

It has been a while since we had a pasta dish and even longer since we had classic spaghetti and meatballs. We usually have spaghetti with a meat sauce or a marina sauce without meatballs. Our most recent spaghetti used a meatless meat sauce because our daughter and boyfriend, who are vegan, were visiting. I've only made meatballs a few times, so I went searching on the ATK web site for a recipe and chose one from many years ago.

According to the recipe it can be "on the table in under an hour". I didn't quite make it, I needed 75 minutes, but if I had started the pasta sooner it would have been close to an hour. There is nothing particularly complicated about the recipe. The meatballs are made by mixing together ground beef, a buttermilk/white bread panade (I used buttermilk that had been frozen), Parmesan cheese, parsley, egg yolk, garlic, salt, and pepper. I used 100% ground beef rather than the 3:1 beef:pork mixture, because what do you do with ¾-pound of leftover ground pork? I used a #24 disher to portion the meat mixture resulting in 13 meatballs. These were flat on one side and I rounded them off before putting them in a ¼-inch layer of hot oil to fry. The sauce is simple: crushed tomatoes, garlic, and basil plus the fond from the meatballs.

This recipe made for a nice dinner. Actually three nice dinners for the two of us. The meatballs are very tender with a lot of flavor. The sauce was good but, by design, very simple and with a good texture that clung to the pasta. I wasn't sure how tightly to pack "¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese" so that is a possible variable between my meatballs and what was intended. The recipe also did not specify how fatty the ground beef should be. The meatballs were perhaps a little too tender, they tended to fall apart. There was also the problem of discarding over 1½ cups of dirty frying oil. I would make this recipe again, though it would be nice if the meatballs held together a little better and if the sauce had more flavor.

Recipe Notes: November 2017

1 November 2017

Muffin Tin Doughnuts

Recipe from June 2013 Cook's Country

I like doughnuts. Best of all are homemade donuts, still warm from the fryer, crispy on the outside, soft and warm on the inside. (I wrote about this combination last month.) However, making fried doughnuts is a bit of a chore and they don't keep particularly well. It doesn't take long for moisture to move from the inside to the crust, ruining that crispy exterior. So the promise of good doughnuts without the work of frying was too hard to pass up.

These doughnuts should be called muffins: they are made in a muffin tin and the batter is created using the same technique that is used to make muffins. In one bowl the dry ingredients—flour, sugar, cornstarch, baking powder, salt, and freshly grated nutmeg—are whisked together. In a second bowl the wet ingredients—buttermilk, melted butter, eggs—are whisked together. The wet ingredients are added to the dry and stirred until just combined. The batter is scooped into muffin tins and baked. The finished doughnuts are then painted with melted butter (this recipe uses two sticks of butter) and coated with cinnamon sugar. Very straightforward and from start to finish in just over one hour. When the cold buttermilk was added to the melted butter it partially solidified but this didn't seem to affect the finished product. I found that a #24 scoop was too small to portion the batter among the 12 cups so next time I need to use a larger one.

The resulting doughnuts are quite good. They have a crispy, crunch exterior though not as crispy as fried donuts. They keep well in the freezer and after thawing and a short spin in the microwave are almost as good as when fresh. The crumb is tasty with a nice hint of nutmeg, though perhaps the crumb is a little heavy. For a quick homemade doughnut, these are quite good and easy to make.

13 November 2017

Buttermilk Waffles

Recipe for Classic Buttermilk Waffles from America's Test Kitchen

The problem using recipes that include buttermilk is having a lot of leftover buttermilk. The smaller size container is one quart and recipes usually call for one cup or so of buttermilk. Finding myself in that situation I tried some buttermilk waffles using a recipe from season 2 of America's Test Kitchen. (It was fun watching video of the show from all those years ago and seeing the familiar faces but much younger.)

Making the batter was straightforward: the dry ingredients (AP flour, cornmeal, salt, baking soda) are mixed in one bowl, the liquid (egg yolk, melted butter, buttermilk) in another, and egg whites are beaten in a third. The liquid ingredients are mixed into the dry before the whipped egg whites are folded in. These are then baked on a waffle iron. 

The resulting waffles are OK, but not as good as the yeasted waffles that I enjoy. The batter is very thick which makes it difficult to spread on the waffle iron. The outside of the waffles is not as crispy  as I like and having three dirty bowls to wash was a little much. I will say that these waffles seemed to be better as leftovers, warmed up in a toaster, than the yeasted waffles are.

23 November 2017

Apple Pandowdy

Recipe from Cook's Country, October 2016

This is a variation on apple pie that I made for our Thanksgiving for two. It is a skillet pie and has only a top crust. Part way through baking the crust is pressed down into the apple juices. These flow over the top of the curst and caramelize during the latter part of baking. This is "dowdying".

It took about three hours to make this dessert, not all of the time was hands on. The dough is made with all butter and a little sour cream, using the food processor to cut the flour and butter together. After chilling it is rolled out and cut into squares. The filling is made in a skillet (I used a 10" nonstick skillet) with apples, brown sugar, cinnamon, and apple cider, among other ingredients. The squares of crust are shingled onto the filling in the skillet, brushed with an egg wash and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, then baked. Part way through baking the pan is removed from the oven to dowdy the crust. 

Because it is a skillet pie the crust is much easier to make than with a conventional pie. It was a good skillet pie. We didn't eat it when it was still warm from the oven when it was probably at its best. The filling was well balanced, not too sweet and not too spicy. The crust, being just on the top, took a back seat to the filling but it was reasonably tender and also nicely seasoned. This is a good alternative to conventional apple pie.

23 November 2017

Roast Turkey Breast with Gravy

Recipe from Cook's Illustrated, November 2017

What do you do to have a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with only two people? Last year we roasted half of a turkey breast. This worked out well, despite missing dark meat. I made an all-purpose gravy which does not rely on any drippings from the meat. While is was passable it was not as good as gravy made with turkey rather than just vegetables and store-bought chicken broth. Thus it was exciting to see a new recipe this year for roast turkey breast and gravy. 

The recipe is for a whole turkey breast, including the back. I went to Whole Foods planning to buy that, but found they had half breasts and, separately, turkey backs. The half breast is a better size for us, and the back (which costs less than the breast) could be used for the gravy. The day before Thanksgiving I salted the turkey and put it in the refrigerator. I used the turkey back, following the recipe, to make turkey stock. This took about 1½ hours with browning the turkey and then simmering it with onion, carrots, celery, thyme sprigs, and a bay leaf. I cut the back in half and made the broth in a skillet. The finished broth was placed in the refrigerator with the turkey.

The next day, the turkey was placed in a skillet, brushed with butter and sprinkled with salt, then placed in a 325° oven to roast. When it reached 130° it was removed, the oven temperate was increased to 500°, and the turkey cooked to 160° The 3.2 pound half breast was done in under 90 minutes. While the turkey rested, the gravy was made. Flour was whisked into the drippings, then the pan was deglazed with some white wine. The turkey stock was added and the gravy simmered until thickened. Together it took about two hours to prepare the turkey and gravy.

More work went into preparing the gravy then roasting the turkey. But it was well worth it! The gravy was very good as was the turkey. Half a breast was just right for us, it made for a good meal plus a reasonable number of meals with the leftovers. I still miss having the dark meat, maybe someday I'll find a good recipe that solves this problem, too.