I have been having an off week in the kitchen. Monday I tried to make a mini batch of some pulled noodles (think flat round udon noodles) for a hot pot I was to make the next day. I ended up with something that no mater how much you boiled it tasted like chewy paste. (could have used lower protein flour and made them thinner)
Tuesday I was making cranberry-apple crisp and forgot to add sugar to the topping. A little syrup made it passable, but I have been making that for breakfast close to once a week for years.
Yesterday it looks like my sourdough starter* died on me so now I have a ball of dough in the refrigerator awaiting some sort of leavening to be introduced.
No real disasters, but defiantly not one of my better weeks.
My wife ruined a pot roast on Sunday. I’m going to show her, from start to finish what to do with one of those things one day. The roast was still in the freezer Sunday morning when she said that she was going to marinate it for dinner. OK. Then when she cooked it, I am fairly certian, (I never entered the kitchen), OK, I am sure, she never added moisture. The next day, she said we’d have hot roast beef sandwiches. I thought OK, the gravy will help. I figured she’d slice the roast and warm it in the gravy. She heated up the roast and gravy seperately.
A few days ago one of my roommates was boiling eggs and apparently forgot about them. I heard a few loud pops and went out to discover exploded eggs on the stove in a pot with no water. And the room was filled with smoke.
Making chicken soup one day, I decided that paprika was going to be just the thing. I grabbed the little red box, opened it, and dumped out into the soup a hefty mound of black pepper.
Some fresh chopped cilantro would take care of that. My black pepper comes as these little “bb” sized round thingys I have to put them in a grinder to get powdered pepper. A couple of weeks ago I poured milk into the sugar bowl one morning thinking I was pouring it into my tea.
One of my most memorable and disagreeable episodes involved a microwave oven and cashews. I tried “toasting” raw cashews in the microwave. I walked away for just a moment (well.. ok, several moments.. anyway, too many moments). When I opened up the oven, the smoke that poured out was really dense and awful smelling ! I rushed to open every door and window in the house trying to clear it. Yechh !
I once tried roasting chestnuts in the oven and forgot to slit the shells first.
“Hmm, what was that pop,” sez I. “Don’t know,” sez my SO, and she opens the oven to investigate. A few seconds later we’re running from the kitchen in terror, chased by volleys of gooey chestnut bombs.
I don’t remember how long it took us to clean up. Probably as long as it took my parents after the great “exploding cajeta” incident when I was a kid.
Better to be defiant about it than to curl up, depressed, like a blob of inactive sourdough.
As for the sourdough: I neglected my starter for too long and it was nearly dead. I revived it in this way: First I poured off the black water (“Hooch”) and replaced it with an equal amount of clean tap water, which I stirred in. Then I removed a single tablespoon of starter, mixed it with a tablespoon of flour (mine is whole wheat) and a tablespoon of warm water, and left it in a covered bowl in the warmest spot of the kitchen for about 12 hours. It had a couple bubbles by then, but only a couple – just enough to show that something was still alive, but barely. I kept feeding it every 12 hours (which doubled the volume as I added flour and water), and by the time it reached about 3-4 cups of starter it was getting reasonably bubbly after 12 hours. I made a batch of bread and put the rest of the rejuvenated starter back in the fridge. I’m trying to get back into using it every week now, which is the schedule it was accustomed to before I got too overwhelmed with life last fall. Some flavor has been sacrificed; it isn’t as sour as it used to be. However, I made some nice sweet-and-sourdough raisin bread out of it which was surprisingly good, but I shouldn’t talk about that here because I considered it a success.
I am always experimenting. Usually my experiments work out, so I made the mistake of trying one out at a Unitarian Universalist dinner party. I noticed that raw flax seeds tasted like pecans. A made a pie replacing an equal amount of pecans with flax seed. The seeds floated to the top of the pie and got rather crunchy toasty. While the flavor and texture might have worked in another context, it was not at all pecan like or an aesthetic triumph. One person was impressed by it and though her family would love it. Her family was in for an interesting gastronomic experience.
I eat peanut butter with cinnamon in it and an apple everyday for breakfast and the cinnamon container looks exactly like the sweet mesquite seasoning container.
All else aside, did you find learning the mechanics of it difficult? I’ve always thought that would be a good skill to have, but it seems like it would take years to master (and who has to eat your lesser attempts in the meantime?).
The version of “pulled noodles” was more like a flat round noodle, not a long thin style noodle. Different flour and a different technique. I made the noodle with some success and was able to make an eatable noodle, but nothing I’d serve to guests. I’ll stick to rolling out egg noodles if I need to make a noodle dish, and I’ll stick to buying things like udon and rice noodles.
At least my starter dough is alive again…
…guess that means that HDSarah and I are now both necromancers.
I love me some udon. Never made it, but the real Washoku deal (homemade) is rolled out and cut, not pulled. I was checking out some recipes, and it seems like the main thing is simplicity itself. Abridged version: just white wheat flour (I would err on the side of unbleached bread flour for the gluten content and least processing), water, and salt; you have to let the dough rest for @ a half hour; then you knead the daylights out of it. Harumi Kurihara suggests putting the dough in a gallon ziplock bag and doing the kneading on the floor with your (unshod) feet as the dough is stiff, but she’s a tiny slip of a thing, so if you’re a big strong guy this may not be an issue. Take it out of the bag, fold it over, and do it about 3 more times. Then roll it out 1/8" thick, roll the slab up for cutting ease and cut into 1/8’’ wide strips and shake 'em out. They only take a couple of minutes to cook into those wonderful fat ropes of noodly goodness.
I searched around trying to find out how they made the round-profiled udon, but it must be a commercial trade secret or probably something less exotic, like extrusion. Pulling definitely didn’t come up. Udon are supposed to have some body to them and be just a tad chewy, so I’m just guessing, but don’t think you could get the right texture for them by the pulling method.
With bread flour I was erring on the side of higher gluten content, actually. If you want low gluten content, then you want cake flour. I don’t make Asian-style noodles, so I don’t know what’s best. I do recall one udon recipe mentioning that any wheat flour ought to do, which strikes me as counterintuitive, but it it’s true, that’s pretty handy, then. I wonder how whole wheat would turn out.
Yep, I understand gluten levels and still don’t understand why cake flour seems to be better for pulling long noodles. Frankly, it’s counter intuitive to me.
Udon is pretty simple and doesn’t require much work. Mix, wait, roll, cut, boil. I bet udon would be great using whole wheat, in which case it would be worth making since I doubt that you can buy it that way.
It looks like I am making hotpot for dinner this week…
Back in my college days, it was my turn to cook for my three other housemates one evening. I thought I’d impress them all by preparing stuffed green peppers. Oh they looked delish! But no one told me you were supposed to brown the beef BEFORE stuffing it into the peppers and sticking them in the oven. YUK!
