Category: Food

Oh, yum.

When we made these crackers/cookies last fall, we couldn’t follow the recipe exactly because we had no measuring implements. This time, we measured well but fiddled with the ingredients, added a few new seeds and spices, and treated the dough differently… and lo que la diferencia! This produces an almost flaky, flavorful, tender cracker which can accompany a soft white cheese, or be eaten alone, by the handful.

Let’s start with Sumita’s original recipe, which is basically as follows:

• 1C seeded whole wheat flour
• 1C whole wheat flour
• 1/2C wheat bran
• 2 Tbsp cumin seeds, roasted & broken
• 1 Tbsp capsicum / pepper flakes
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp sugar
• 1 Tbsp oil
• 1/2 c of milk

Because we wanted to add another layer of flavor, we used our Sadie (who is, of course, our sourdough starter) to jump start this dough — a cup and a half of the sour flour, yeast and water mix was added to the two cups of flour. Because Sadie provided moisture, we subtracted the milk. We also measured the salt this time (!) and dusted about a eighth of a teaspoon over the whole batch before baking.

Brown and yellow mustard seeds, celery seed, and eight caraway seeds were added to our spices, and ground along with the dry-fried cumin. (Dry frying seed spices can really allow the essential oils to more thoroughly suffuse, and really makes the flavor and fragrance of spices more intense.) The biggest difference in the crackers, though, is how we treated the dough. We rolled it out, spritzed it with olive oil, and folded it as if we were making pastry.

After docking, slicing, and baking, this folding method showed itself to be really successful. The texture of the crackers was at first dense and chewy, then lightened into crispy on the outside and slightly chewy inside, as they cooled. The pepper and cumin came together perfectly,and created a really flavorful, tender cracker that we had a hard time not snacking on for the rest of the afternoon. If you prefer black pepper to capsicum or cayenne, it’s an easy switch to do a coarse grind and add it to the mix. Because these crackers were originally described as cookies, we will one day experiment with using dried and fresh ground ginger and black pepper with a bit of sugar sprinkled on top to create a different kind of pfefferkuchen, or pepper cookie. The possibilities are endless…

No matter how much we might like the light crunch of a saltine, the taste is bland as chewing white paper compared to the seasoned and spicy punch of cumin crackers. You can use them as flat bread, and or use a biscuit cutter and make them in large rounds, or other shapes. Whatever you choose, you’ve got to try these!

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Last weekend we amused ourselves once again by making another dish in tandem with Haalo in Australia! She made a gorgeous Blood Orange Marmalade, and we made marmalade with clementines. We decided to post ours a little later because we wanted to fiddle with the ingredients. A week later, and we’re still not quite satisfied with the recipe, so we’ll just talk about it in general terms.

Marmalades are, in essence, only made of three things: fruit. Sugar. Water. Most recipes call for the about five cups of juice and five cups of sugar. If you can’t get that from the clementines you have, make sure you have some on hand, because clementines are not the most strongly flavored of the citrus fruits — their flavor is gently sweet, and the bitter punch is in the rind.

We thought of adding cranberries to ours; Ming Tsai has a master recipe wherein he adds julienned ginger and Thai bird chilies … mmmmm! However, those options we decided are for our next batch. This time, we were doing enough of an experiment with our marmalade — instead of using the full amount of sugar to guarantee it gelling, we wanted to experiment with agar.

Agar has many names, and you most likely first encountered it in high school biology, in the form of a petri dish. It’s a seaweed derived gelatin substitute, and can make a fully non-animal product jello-type of dish. It can also make rubber balls! It’s easy to use too much agar and have a food product turn inedible and disgustingly chewy, thus the experimental nature of our marmalade!

Using Haalo’s handy guide to removing citrus sections from pith, we set aside the plump orange sections to be added at the very end. We started small, with about two tablespoons of agar for our 3/4 c. of juice and 1/4 c. of lemon juice with a half cup of sugar. (Please note, this is NOT the equal ratio of sugar and juice which you would need to make traditional marmalade! If you try it like this without a gelling agent like pectin, it won’t set, but you’ll have a lovely syrup.) It turned out that it was too little agar; boiling produced a gorgeous, clear orange slurry which would not set. We ended up returning our saucepan to the heat and using a half-cup of agar powder, all told, and had a moment of sheer panic when it stiffened up. We needn’t have feared — agar works hot, and our marmalade’s consistency changed only a very little when it was cool.

Because traditional marmalade isn’t that stiff — it’s not jam, after all — we left it in a soft set. The flavor of the clementines was slightly overwhelmed by the more robust lemon juice — which was a bummer, next time we’ll use orange, maybe? — but the lovely julienned rinds provided the traditionally bitter marmalade flavor. Because we added the agar, we didn’t cook the mixture as long, and it is a much brighter, lighter color that other marmalades we have made.

The texture of this marmalade is …really interesting — It has a silky, chunky, jelly-like mouth feel, yet it will not go runny — when heated, and it retains its color and chunkiness. We imagine that biting into a fruit-filled pastry using this marmalade will be a very different experience, and we look forward to using it in baking.

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Gorgeous, isn’t it?

As the on-again off-again Glasgow Summer had decided to give us a few days of showers and a good bit of a chill, we have had the good fortune to get hold of one of these strange vegetables. It’s a relative of broccoli … but is far more geometric and interesting to look at, and has a far more timid taste for being part of the brassica bunch. We’ve had Romanesco before, and everybody either says to oven-roast them and then add a cream sauce, or to steam them and add a cheese sauce. We concluded from this that what they lack is flavor and fat, so we figured that makes them a good candidate for a soup.

Into the pot went an onion, chopped, some olive oil, and some smoked torula yeast. While the onions were browning, we chopped up two small potatoes and the romanesco. Into the pot they went with a cube of bouillon, some garlic powder, and some water. And that’s it, really. The whole thing boiled for about half an hour, and then met up with the immersion blender.

To finish, we crumbled in a bit of sharp cheddar, and with a few crackers to the side we had a complete meal. If we’d had any on hand (this was one of those “between grocery trips” dishes), we would have added julienned fresh herbs, maybe a bit of sour cream or yogurt, or a few slivered chives, for visual interest. The finished soup was very light, and fairly low-fat, but definitely satisfying, with a smooth, creamy mouth-feel, which gave us the idea that we’d had something richer. It filled the bill for one of those “five a day” requirements veggies and some of our fiber requirement as well (particularly when eaten with Ryvita crackers).

A dietitian once told us that a person needs two pounds of food to feel full — so the heavy liquids of soups and stews are a DOUBLY welcome addition to chilly days.

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A few weeks ago the Daring Bakers had us making a Danish Braid. Well, it’s stuck with us (on our waistlines as well as in our sweet-teeth, I’m sure). Rather than follow the exacting recipe over at KellyPea’s blog, I just … well, kinda winged it.

To begin with, this is a sourdough thing, because when you have a sourdough starter, you use it. So, Sadie came out of the fridge in the morning, to spend some time getting warmed up and having some cheap food (we’ve ended up switching her to white flour, due to having run out of whole wheat a few batches ago). When she was good and warm and bubbly, I mixed her up with some plain flour & separated a bit out to go back into the fridge. I then added some 8-grain flour from the Flour Bin and gave everything a good kneading.

With everything well on its way to being bread (sans salt and yeast), I let the dough rest for a bit. Meanwhile, I’d been boiling some whole oats in non-chlorinated water. I drained off 1 cup of the water, strained out the oats (about 2 cups, cooked), and let these cool for a bit. When the oat water was cooled down to only quite warm I added it to the dough, along with 1 Tbsp yeast and 1.5 tsp salt. I then brought the whole volume of dough back to a dough consistency by kneading and adding more of the 8-grain flour.

At this point, the dough was just pretty much basic dough. So, I separated out about 1/3 of the dough, to become the Danish. To the rest I added my whole oats, along with an extra 1/2 tsp of salt (it should have been probably a whole tsp, tasting it later). The oat-loaves got kneaded until they felt right, thrown into two loaf pans to rise, and eventually made it into the oven.

To the 1/3 which had been saved from the oats, I added 1 tsp Garam Masala, the guts of a vanilla bean, and about 1/2 Cup granulated sugar. I then rolled it out flat, put some Benecol spread upon 2/3 of it, folded it over, and repeated the spread and the folding once more. (Note that there was no waiting in there, nor any refrigeration of the dough. Note, also, that it was just straight spread, no worrying with mixing it with flour or anything.) I then rolled it out to about the right size, placed it on a baking sheet, filled it with far more par-cooked apples than I would have thought it could handle, and did the whole braiding thing with it.

The four leftover corners each got a square of dark chocolate and became miniature Danish. The lot of them got to sit out on the stovetop while the loaves were baking.

So, what’s the verdict, on doing this without following any of the rules?

• I think that the chilling of the dough might have made this flakier … but we’re not worried with it, because we’re not really into all that flakiness.
• The amount of “butter” was reduced enough as well, so that we can eat this and not feel as if we’re eating a really high-calorie dish.
• I think that the biggest improvement to the whole thing would have been to have added a bit more cinnamon and ginger to the apples (ingredients: apples, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg), and perhaps a bit of sugar.
• If I’d added some of the vanilla bean to the apples, as well as to the dough, it might have been an improvement, simply in terms of marrying the flavors together, but that’s just a bit of fine-tuning.
• The rising of the dough might have been better if I’d let things rise before adding the filling, as I feel that the bottom didn’t rise enough, so was a bit too dense.
• The payoff to this method is largely that the refrigerator simply has no role in this method, nor does waiting for hours for the dough to chill.

Perhaps next time we’ll try things a bit differently. We’ll see – but at least this version we feel that we can eat!

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