Tag: Cook’s Illustrated

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Making bread again, if you can stand it

In the past I have used the Julia Child recipe/method, as well as the Cook’s Complicated, er, Illustrated recipe/method, also that Irish guy Patrick Ryan and more recently I’ve been using the Slovak, Ethan Chlebowski’s YouTube video and recipe/method. I got to thinking about their respective recipes and decided to compare them. So I made a list converting everything into grams so I could be comparing apples to apples. And if you think that that exercise didn’t nearly break my head open, you are mistaken, numbers ugh—even with a computer doing the work. They are all different in their methods and in their recipes. And by that I mean quantities of every component is completely different in each recipe and the methods are wildly different.

So I decided to make my own bastard loaf. Two ingredients from the Cook’s Complicated, diastatic malt which makes the bread brown more deeply (and I happen to have a pound of it and you only use a teaspoon at a time) and a quarter cup of whole wheat sifted to remove bran. I essentially used the Slovak recipe which is the wettest dough but not so different from Julia and I used Julia’s salt quantity and I let it sit in the refrigerator for 2 days which is sort of the Irish guy’s deal. But I think they’d all agree that giving the dough a long cold rise really creates flavor. Or maybe I was creating monster. And it turned out I was!

But it was not the one I might have imagined. I try never to get angry or in any event express myself in anger. Really, anger is useless and so I try to remain as calm as I can when things aren’t working out (Which is not to say I won’t succumb occasionally to hysterical frustration). This, however, was not one of those remaining-calm occasions. As I may have mentioned before, when you have as foul a mouth as I do there is absolutely nothing you can scream in anger that feels equivalent to the situation since I use all those bad words all the time in circumstances not nearly as dire as this.

I was able to get one unblemished loaf out of this fiasco. And even the ones that weren’t prefect were pretty damn good. And home made butter for chrissake.

A recipe follows. I don’t want to put myself up there with the gods of bread I’ve mentioned here but for me this worked better than any of their recipes/methods and to be honest, I just want to have this as a record since I often gasbag on about how fabulous this or that is and then I don’t write the recipe down and it is then lost to the ages.

My French bread recipe/method

500 gr Flour (includes 1/4 cup of whole wheat flour sifted to remove the larger bran)

12 gr Salt

1 packet Yeast

1 tsp Diastatic malt

370 gr Warm water

Add the yeast and a tablespoon or so of flour to the water, mix and let sit

Add the malt and salt to the flour and mix. When the water has formed bubbles of yeast, add and mix the water into the flour. Probably I should have used my hands but I used a wooden spoon. Cover with a towel, not goddam plastic, and let rest 15-20 minutes

—As an aside here I have come to realize that the timing of stuff is super flexible. It’ll be fine but longer is better. Until it sticks to the goddam baking sheet, that is.

At this point I emptied all of it onto the counter and did a little kneading just to incorporate all of the flour and I put the dough in a clean bowl. Cover (I used a silicon cover thing) and let rest for a half hour.

Now comes the gluten production. Take a corner and stretch and fold, make a quarter turn and repeat, do this 4 times total then cover and let rest 25 minutes and repeat 3 times resting between each stretching session.

Now it goes into the refrigerator covered (I will admit to using plastic wrap here, which I reused later) for 48 hours. This seems like overkill but I dunno. I think you gotta do this. You may need to bop this down if it’s getting too big for its britches…I mean bowl.

After that you have to let the dough come to room temp or 65 degrees. I used a thermometer to temp it and it took over 3 hours to do this (Of course it was -5 outside)

When it’s reached 65 degrees you portion it out and shape the loaves. I put mine on that miserable bread pan to which my bread bonded. I had floured it but next time I will spray Pam on it or use parchment strips. Now it needs another long, say 1.5-2 hour rise. I covered it with that same plastic and a linen towel.

Preheat the oven to 475, or 450 on convection. I have aluminum pans with lava rock into which I pour boiling water so the interior of the oven is steamy. And then I cut the loaves and spray them with water like you use when you iron. Oh, like you iron.

Put the loaves in the oven and after 5 minutes turn them around and spray them again. Bake for an additional 15-20 minutes. And then pry them off the pan and let them rest for at least 2 hours.

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I am so sorry Julia

Can you ever forgive me?

I have tried about 40 different ways of making French bread but somehow I never thought to ask Julia Child. She was there all the time. And it was the perfect loaf (almost). Cook’s Complicated indeed. Paul Hollywood, whatever. How did I not come to her first?

That I have not thought to try her recipe and method is astonishing in that I have all of her cookbooks, watch and rewatch her shows. I have read the books she wrote, the letters she wrote (collected in book form), the books written about her. I dream that I meet her and for some reason always thought I would meet her in real life. That did not happen. And I imagine I will not meet Jacques Pepin either. I am sure we’d have been friends. Julia and/or Jacques, I’m not fussy. Well, I am fussy but not about that.

The bread I made was easy enough. Relied on visuals rather than specific times and she explains things in an easy to understand way. It really came out nicely with a crispy crackly crunch like French  bread but the interior, called “the crumb,” was too dense. Not light and airy enough. It was delicious but just a bit off the mark crumb-wise.

There actually are some people I call “the Crumb” but we won’t get into that now.

You can watch her video here. I miss her.




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Gateau au pommes

Apple cake for my French class. This is an apple batter cake that is relatively simple recipe, well, it’s relatively simple for Cook’s Complicated, er, Illustrated. (Actually it is from Milk Street but that’s Christopher Kimball and it’s all the same, Cook’s Country, Cook’s complicated, er Illustrated, America’s Test Kitchen, whatever). 

The cake is supposed to be served with crème fraîche. 

I believe that it is possible to buy crème fraîche in the grocery store for slightly more than a half a week’s salary so I decided instead to make it myself. It is stunningly easy. One cup of cream and 2 TBS of buttermilk at room temp uncovered for 12 hours or something. 

Letting milk or cream stand out at room temperature overnight goes completely against my nature but I did it and it was amazing. It turned thick and tangy and it was perfect on the cake.



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Bolognese on the fly

Someone left a platter of Italian meats at my house. While that sort of thing is great while you’re quaffing wine and eating cheese with friends, this isn’t something I’d be eating on my own. I’m not such a fan of prosciutto anyway, but there was also dried beef which has a distinctly perfumey taste (ditto on the fan thing) and some sausages of unknown variety but pretty salami-like. I decided to chop it all up and make spaghetti. While I don’t like prosciutto so much like it is, cooked I am fine with it.

So I went with Bolognese. I usually use porchetta when I make it (Cook’s Complicated, er, Illustrated, says mortadella and pancetta but I think porchetta is much better) and frankly, once this version of sauce was done I really couldn’t taste a difference at all. I gave some to my friend Karen and she was very enthusiastic about it without knowing I had compromised the recipe. 

The thing is, what really makes this different and delicious, warm and comforting, is the use of sage rather than oregano and thyme, and the mystical chicken liver which transforms the sauce from pedestrian to sublime. No one would ever know it’s there but would miss it if it weren’t.

OK, OK. I know. There were mushrooms in it and, yes, that is so not bolognese. Jeez.




Posted on

Bolognese on the fly

Someone left a platter of Italian meats at my house. While that sort of thing is great while you’re quaffing wine and eating cheese with friends, this isn’t something I’d be eating on my own. I’m not such a fan of prosciutto anyway, but there was also dried beef which has a distinctly perfumey taste (ditto on the fan thing) and some sausages of unknown variety but pretty salami-like. I decided to chop it all up and make spaghetti. While I don’t like prosciutto so much like it is, cooked I am fine with it.

So I went with Bolognese. I usually use porchetta when I make it (Cook’s Complicated, er, Illustrated, says mortadella and pancetta but I think porchetta is much better) and frankly, once this version of sauce was done I really couldn’t taste a difference at all. I gave some to my friend Karen and she was very enthusiastic about it without knowing I had compromised the recipe. 

The thing is, what really makes this different and delicious, warm and comforting, is the use of sage rather than oregano and thyme, and the mystical chicken liver which transforms the sauce from pedestrian to sublime. No one would ever know it’s there but would miss it if it weren’t.

OK, OK. I know. There were mushrooms in it and, yes, that is so not bolognese. Jeez.




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Pork for a party

My birthday rolled around and I had a party. Having just watched an episode of Cooked in which Michael Pollan describes the joys of eating a farm raised pig, I decided to go all out and buy some from my local butcher Bavette although I knew it was going to be pretty costly. But A.) I wanted good pork. B.) Organic. C.) Farm raised happy pigs. As Michael Pollan says, the pig that has a great life with just one bad day. I can be OK with that.

So I got 20 pounds of boneless, trimmed pork shoulder. I marinated it for 24 hours as Cook’s Complicated, er, Illustrated, suggests you do for pork pernil, a Puerto Rican specialty dish that features onions, garlic, cumin, oregano and chopped cilantro. Only I wasn’t making pork pernil. I was making something, oh, let’s say, Mexicanish.

After the meat marinated for 24 hours, I charred it on the grill and then slow roasted uncovered at 200 degrees for I don’t really know how long. The meat gave up it’s liquid that then evaporated in the pan leaving a caramelized delicious thick pan sauce. While the meat cooled I de-fatted the juice and then made a gravy that I poured over the meat which I had sliced when it was cold. And then I slow roasted it again at 200 degrees for another, I am not sure how long, maybe 2 hours.

It was fabulous. I don’t know if it was the pork or the method but I didn’t taste any garlic, onions, oregano, and certainly not cilantro. It was delicious but it was roast pork delicious not pork pernil delicious. Served with tortillas and some sides…I’ll get to that.



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It’s not about the bread

I made bread for Easter. It was my assignment. I could have bought some but I have a psychotic need to make things difficult for myself in many ways, most of them not involving cooking at all. In reality making bread is not all that hard but it’s a process, and it’s baking, so there’s the automatic stress that is involved with anything that requires precision ingredients, timing, and cooking, or, more particularly, baking. Grandma did it without measuring and probably without a clock, just sayin’.

But that’s not the point. The Cook’s Complicated, er, Illustrated instructions call for letting the dough rise “loosely covered with plastic wrap.” Or in an oiled bowl “tightly covered with plastic wrap.” And “inside a clean plastic garbage bag” at various stages of the complex procedure. What the hell did Grandma do before there was plastic? Why can’t people just put a bowl over it, as I did, or use these silicone cover things that are infinitely reusable? OK, most people don’t have these which is too bad because they are awesome, but there are plenty of other ways to cover rising dough and I am not sure why we need to use anything disposable when making bread. And while I realize that not using a few scraps of plastic wrap is not going to solve the world’s plastic waste problem, you have to start at some point because this is where we already are and it ain’t getting better. (This website is positively sobering but also hopeful.)

As it happened, the baguette turned out to be tiny but there was enough other food at Easter dinner that no one mentioned it. Grandma would have.




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Steak tacos

Another experiment with America’s Test Kitchen (Cook’s Complicated, er, Illustrated, Cook’s Country, Christopher Kimball, whatever). Steak tacos although I wasn’t looking to make them, I am always interested in making them. Or anything edible really, well not anything with anchovies.

If I were going to the store to get steak for tacos, I would always be unclear on whether to use flank steak or strip steak or God knows what, I think their other suggestion was something called a tri-tip whatever the hell that is. And for the life of me, although I probably have seen this show and/or recipe 10 times I would be unable to remember what they suggest when I am presented with the choice at the store.

This time, though, I was presented with the meat first. I stopped at Bavette, my local, organic, blah blah and they had strip steak and it was about $20 a pound cheaper (seriously) than the other options. So I got it thinking, oh you know, I’ll just make whatever comes up when I google strip steak. Then I went googled it and the ATK strip steak taco recipe came right up.

The process wasn’t difficult, in fact, all you have to do is let the steak sit with salt and cumin on it for an hour and then grill. I can’t get my grill to be as raging hot as they get theirs, but then, they are able to reduce liquids in a fraction of the time it takes me, so I just got my grill as hot as possible and threw them on.

I don’t know if it was the meat itself, or the (what I thought was a very small amount of) process, but it was excellent. I mean really-good-I’ll-do-it-again excellent.


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Some Asian-ish beef stuff

Another recipe I co-opted from Cook’s Complicated, er, Illustrated, well, actually America’s Test Kitchen, so it will undoubtedly show up in the magazine, is called Chinese beef. Whatever. Chinese food needs a Chinese name in my book. It was supposed to use boneless short ribs but I had already purchased the beef, organic, humanely raised stew meat (I was at Whole Foods, it was there, I bought it) and I really didn’t have any idea what I was going to do with it and then I watched TV. That just sucks me in.

The braising liquid is simple enough to throw together and the meat just gets plopped into it and then into the oven. The difference is that short ribs end up falling apart and this meat, whatever it was, became little cubes of toughness even after 3 hours at 300 degrees.

After the braising you remove the meat, then strain out the ginger, garlic and scallions and reduce the liquid to a syrup. This takes 30 seconds. Not really, it took like 45 minutes. (I don’t know how they seem to do reduce liquids by half in 4 minutes as they do on all cooking shows.) Add the meat back into the pan and voila: Wel hong gai guy or char su beef. Whatever.

At some point it all tastes the same once you add hoisin sauce. It was good, tough, but good.



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The secret of pasta alla norma

I don’t exactly love eggplant. I more tolerate it than like it. But somehow I love pasta alla norma—eggplant, tomatoes, olives and capers. Requested as the final meal by the Royal Indian Mounted Food Police before his departure for Belgium, home of Indian food, I made it and retired the coffee filters I used to absorb the moisture from the eggplant in the microwave. It’s a good trick. The eggplant doesn’t disintegrate quite as easily once it’s been microwaved for 10 minutes (with a rest at 5 to move things around). And they’re microwaved on coffee filters.

I’m not sure why they need to be coffee filters as opposed to say, paper towel, but Cook’s Complicated, er, Illustrated is very explicit about it. I’ve used these for at least 2 years. They looked it and have been retired. I’m not sure if they feel bad about not having achieved their goal in life, filtering coffee, but they had a good run.

The meal was excellent.