Poor tiger! I thought they were endangered!
In attempting to recreate my accidental best-ever seitan, my last batch had plenty of flavour but was much softer than intended. Iād already eaten quite a lot of that batch over the past couple of weeks when it suddenly occurred to me tonight that, with it being so soft, it could be a mince-like substitute if I simply broke it up into small pieces.
I then boiled up some pasta spirals with salt, sliced some mushrooms, fried the mushrooms and seitan together in red wine, and combined it all together on a plate with a little seasoning, and it was delicious!
Now Iām considering making soft seitan again for that specific purpose :ā)
We made a loaf of sourdough bread today. Yum! Thereās a bit of time involved with getting the starter going, but really pretty simple with not many ingredients ā and most of the time is just leaving something alone in a warm place and not forgetting about it the next day when you need to use it :ā)
Very nice with the hummus I just made, too.
Iāve just been kneading bread again. Now Iām typing this next to a cat who can still smell the dough on my hands (which Iāve washed) and keeps licking my fingers (which really tickles).
We canāt write more than three consecutive posts, so Iām editing this into my previous postā¦
Iām still keeping myself pretty much in permanent home-made hummus supply. Iām only posting about that again in case the following is useful to anyone who likes smoother hummusā¦
A while ago I confirmed (a) that removing chick pea shells definitely results in a smoother blend, and (b) thereās no way Iām doing that by hand (however many I removed one-by-one on that occasion was enough to confirm the outcome, but I canāt imagine I did more than half before getting too fed up to continue).
Yesterday I cooked the chickpeas in a large pot and, once they were done cooking, I grabbed an egg whisk and went to town on them for a minute. I then used a big slotted spoon to repeatedly sift through the liquid, and for quite a while I was extracting large clumps of dislodged shells, and very few of the shell contents. It was a very successful approach.
I think the large pot was a factor here ā the shells donāt float, but theyāre still lighter than the rest of the chickpea, so with everything beings whisked up they should tend to land on top of the heavier contents; and so with a large surface area you end up with a large quantity of them to easily scoop up in the spoon. If you get a few chickpeas as well, I found it was usually easy to tip them off the spoon without losing the shells with them.
I re-whisked a few times to get more, and certainly didnāt extract all the shells, but I ended up with way more than Iād expected to. (So many that I figured I can probably make something with them, so I put that bowl in the fridge.)
Donāt be alarmed if the hummus turns out thinner than you wanted ā a night in the fridge always firms it up a little.
Putting this in the food thread 
So these are called āMorgenbrƶtchenā (because they are freshbaked in the morning and you can have them for breakfast. They from a rather famous (hereabouts) German bread baking blog called Plƶtzblog or rather I learned it at a class he gave and this version is from his first baking book:
The ingredients:
- 180g wheat flourā550 (which is the normal flour I use for baking, but no self-raising flour!)
- 100g Durum Semolina or coarsely ground durum flour (this is also quite good in pizza dough and pasta)
- 110g rye flourā1150 which is the standard ādegreeā you get here. Whatever you can get will do.
- 150g Water
- 150g Milk
- 4g fresh bakerās yeast (if you canāt help it use dried)
- 8g salt
- 8g olive oil
The process
- Knead the dough first for 10 min on the lowest setting of your machine, then 5 min āfastā (which in his terms is usually the second setting)
- Cover and rest for 12 hours at 6-8Ā°C (fridge) ā overnight (Time Passes!!!)
- Then divide dough into 8 pieces and roll them into cylinders (or other forms if you know how, f.e. google ābrƶtchen rund schleifenā
- You can then cover the rolls in either whole-grain rye flour, poppy seed or sesame seedāboth very popular here.
- Rest the rolls for 45 minutes (more time!) putting the āclosureā of the cylinder on the bottom. 22Ā°C ā if it is wamer, per 5Ā° the time shortens by a third (I think). With some experience you can easily test with your finger if the dough is done, it should āspringā back smoothly when you press it.
- Put the rolls with the āclosureā on top on a tray and bake for 20 min (almost done!) at 230Ā°C with water vapor (if you have that kind of oven, if you donāt you could improvise with a pan filled with ālava stonesā that you heat up and then splash water on like a sauna)
- A pizza stone is alwasy useful for bread baking of any kind.
Let the rolls cool a couple minutes and eat directly. If you bake them a little shorter, they can be frozen and the baking finished upon thawing.
Does anyone know a good recipe for a non-tomato substitute for passata?
We make Pepperonata, which is a) nothing like passata and b) has some tomatoes in the recipe but you can easily not use them.
Put a lot of oil in a large frying pan. Gently fry some garlic, then add thinly sliced onion and thinly sliced red, yellow and orange pepper. Add chilli flakes and a pinch of sugar. Cook on a low heat until really soft.
Goes with everything and freezes well
Well I failed to play any games this weekend, but today I cooked up batches of hummus, seitan, and my current favourite vegan cheese recipe.
I put too much paprika in the hummus, but that was ok ā nowadays if I do a flavoured one I always start with a normal batch and put 50% of it into a container before flavouring the remainder, so I was able to ādiluteā the paprika batch afterwards, using the regular hummus.
Iāve been using chickpea flour instead of soy flour in the seitan recipe I use (seitan is largely made from gluten flour, but this recipe has a little soy flour too), but I hadnāt actually looked up soy flour substitutes until today. I learned that chickpea flour is an excellent substitute (fluked it), but also that almond flour is good. As I wind up with lots of almond meal from making almond milk, I just used some of that, and it seems to have turned out nicely, so thatās another win. I also think I have my proportions about right now for recreating my accidentally-better-than-the-recipe version. Maybe a little soft still, but really pretty good.
Didnāt make chia pancakes again though, darn it. Maybe if I write it here, itāll help me remember to make some next time.
Still failing to make pancakes, but got around to trying another simple thing that Iāve been meaning to try for ages which is scrambled tofu.
A cafe down the road from my office used to do an amazing scrambled tofu, for which I made regular visits. I will never understand why they took it off the menu. The closest thing to a replacement they were offering was āfineā but nothing remotely special, and so Iāve not been back since.
My attempt wasnāt as good as that; but it was good! It was essentially mushrooms fried at a high heat for 5 mins (they said in ācoconut butterā; I used some Olivani spread); then add the mushed-up mixture of soft tofu, a bit of salt and paprika, and a bunch of herbs (I just chucked in a bunch of dried mixed herbs, and dried basil), and cooked for another 10 mins or so at a medium heat. I added some sliced olives as well for a bit of extra tang. Served with avocado and salad. Over sourdough toast would have been delightful, if weād had any of that.
Simple and delicious. Will definitely be doing this one again.
More tofu scramble this weekend and, more importantly, I finally made those chia pancakes :ā) It took me a couple of attempts to get a good mixture, with yesterdayās being a bit of a failure, but todayās batch was really good! Just soy milk, ground chia seeds in a little water, and flour. I need to play more with the quantities to get a better mixture (Iām hoping I can get it thinner and cooking faster without it losing coherency or sticking to the pan), but they tasted really good once they were cooked through (very different taste to the egg-based pancakes I used to make, but still really good). Probably I can just mix the ground chia directly into the soy milk rather than pre-mixing in water to get a gelā¦ (and I think thatās what I used to do, but itās been quite a while. Iāll have to try that next time, though).
n.b. āFlax eggsā with ground flax seed (linseed) seem to be a better-known egg substitute for this kind of cooking, but I find that chia seeds gel significantly better than linseeds, so I feel itās a better option when it comes to binding a mixture together. Also, if you donāt have a spice grinder, you can use chia seeds whole and theyāre still very effective.
Sometimes I vent emotions through cooking and This was the results.
Iāve done like barbecue bacon wrapped chicken breasts before. Since I canāt do tomato, Iāve been doing a miso black garlic sauce recipe that Iām tinkering with. I used the cooking liquid from the zucchini that roasted underneath the bacon-wrapped center hand trimmed (myself) pork chops.
The zucchini had a really nice texture. I probably should have left them a little bigger, but I wanted to make sure that they had enough space underneath the wire rack.
The sauce has black garlic, honey, miso paste and chicken stock.
Ooh. That looks like an interesting combinationā¦
I leave myself flavor trails to follow for things to work.
I rubbed honey into the pork chops and used it in a little olive oil to bind the spices to it. I added the trimmed hunks of fat to the zucchini to any liquids would add to the sauce.
Made a similar sauce for my in-laws when they came to visit and that is exactly what my mother-in-law said.
Then my father-in-law poured the sauce all over his dinner and wolfed it down.
I made some more KƤsā SpƤtzle with some salad on the side. This is a really nice dish for the colder part of the year.
Lots of cheese and onions hidden in the SpƤtzle
Well this is definitely moving in the right direction. Today I used 2 tbsp of ground chia seed (twice as much as before) mixed directly into the other ingredients, and I used much more soy milk than last time to thin out the mixture, and they turned out great! Cooking time is down and much easier to gauge than before, so every pancake was delicious. This was my third batch, and the best so far.
Having a very thin spatula is proving crucial, though, as Iām still finding the mixture sticks at first and needs help to initially separate it from the pan (after which everything is fine). I have one of these which is doing the job nicely, but I donāt think any of the thicker silicone sorts would cope. (Maybe simply leaving it longer would be ok, but my instinct is to get it unstuck as quickly as possible.)
Iāll have to do some research and see if thereās something I can add to the mixture which would prevent this from happening.
Fat. Fat is what keeps stuff from sticking.
I made some hazelnut brownies this morning (no picture of the finished brownies, they were finished off before I got to take one).
We visited friends for a dinner of Zwiebelkuchen (basically a deep dish pizza with just onions and bacon as fillingāsimilar but totally not the same as a Quiche Lorraine) which is a very traditional fall thing which would normally be served with new wine. But new wine with all those onions gives you a terrible stomach ache so instead we had Cidre.
The brownies were dessert. 5 adults and 2 very hungry children finished the whole tray. Mostly the children did I think. They were at their sports games all day, so I guess we shouldnāt be surprised.
So today I had my work group over for a bbq. Didnāt try to encourage a board game session with the larger group, I was for a minute tempted to try a ten person blood o. The clocktower but felt some people would feel mugged by this.
I did however successfully bbq some brisket, burnt ends and taco el pastor.
It was very tasty despite having made waaaay too much.
There is no so thing as too much brisket.
At worst freeze the leftovers and it makes awesome chilli