Nostalgia Dinner

Apparently I get the urge to make Hong Shao Rou about once a year. This time I fried up the pork belly in caramelized sugar and oil and it really brought out the color and sweetness I remembered.

So along with the pot of porky coronary failure are the little side dishes.



Chinese broccoli. Steamed for about five minutes with a little garlic and then topped with oyster sauce. They have delicious crunchy stems and well. Sometimes you need veggies.



Braised eggs. Softboil eggs, peel carefully, and then tuck into the braising liquid of the pork. They get all brown and porky and delicious, and if you keep the braising temperature low enough, they don't get all chalky in the middle.


Bao! Because sometimes you need something to dip into the pork belly sauce or make a pork belly sammich.

I think the recipe I used was

1/2 c warm water
1 packet's equivalent of yeast
about a tablespoon of lump sugar
3/4 c milk
1 T butter
3 c flour (or enough flour to make a smooth dough)

combine warm water, yeast, sugar milk and butter. Let sit for 10 minutes. Mix in flour. Knead until smooth. Let rest for an hour and a half. Punch down. Let rise another hour. Form into little buns. place in steamer. Let proof for 15 minutes. Steam for 10 minutes. Eat.

I lay down moist paper towel and spray with pam in the steamer. Helps with the release. traditionally napa cabbage is used, but I didn't have any on hand.







Now have lunch for a few days, a little vat of cooking fat, and HI I THINK WE'RE BACK.

Figgy

Yesterday, I still had leftover potato water for additional breadmaking endeavors and I had some under-utilized dried figs in my pantry.   So those two things plus lots of flour and some soft butter, small handfuls of flaxseed, wheat germ, shakes of cinnamon/clove/nutmeg and a small heap of brown sugar equals:

Breakfast for the next few days!

I am really liking the King Arthur flour I bought (unbleached white whole wheat).  It was something of an impulse purchase but I think I may buy it again in the future.  It behaves a lot more like white flour than a whole wheat flour and you can't really pick out the wheat germ particules because of the finer grind.  I've been cutting it with some store-brand all-purpose flour as a way to make my 5-lb. bag last longer.

The thing I like about baking bread

The thing I like about baking bread is, after enough practice you can mess around with no recipe at all and still produce something tasty.  Bread is stupid easy, which I guess is why humans have been making and eating it for millenia.

This is kind of like ciabatta in that it was a very wet dough that produced a very flat loaf with a rather open internal structure, but seeing as how I have never taken the time to read a recipe for real ciabatta, I shall call it fauxbatta.

I made colcannon last night, so I saved the water left over from boiling the potatoes and used some of it to make this bread.  The water was already salted from potato-boiling, so I didn't add any salt to the bread dough.

The dough was mixed and kneaded and put in the fridge overnight, taken out in the morning and punched down, and then shaped, proofed, and baked after I got home from work.

I think I shall use it to soak up bits of stew.

Adventures in Sourdough Day 1

Meet Pistol


Inside this jar is a cup of warm water and a cup of all purpose flour. We're going to see what it does.



The bubbles aren't anything but air bubbles. I mixed it fairly vigorously in a vain attempt to incorporate as much oxygen as possible into the mixture. For now it's covered with a paper towel over the top and a rubberband.

I guess we'll see where this goes.

Challah part 2: breakfast for dinner

Okay so here's what we did to one of the challahs.  The other was savagely ripped apart while we were waiting for the final season of Lost to start.

We sliced our remaining challah loaf into thick 1-1.5" pieces and violated them like so:

Cutting a pocket

Stuffed with mascarpone + honey (used ghetto ziploc bag with corner cut off piping method)

Soaked in french toast custard (eggs + half&half) and put on new-to-us griddle pan.

While Emily took over the griddling, I prepped bananas foster:

banana-nana-fo-fana

Melting butter into cream and sugar, because y'know...it needed more fat.

Sadly there were no good pictures of me setting it on fire, but know this:  I mixed about a tablespoon of Everclear (the dregs from limoncello-making adventure) with some rum to make damn sure it caught.  Oh, such glorious flames.

Bow down before your god!

That sucker was $16 at Costco.  They got some alcohols for scary cheap.

There was bacon also

but not for long.

The mascarpone sort of melted into the bread, making it kind of bread-puddingy in the middle which was nice.  Next time (next time?) we will make the pockets in fresh pliable challah instead of semi-stale crumbly challah, and maybe also soak the bread longer in the custard.

We still have half a tub of mascarpone leftover.

Challah

Challah is delicious and no other justification is needed.  If you have not consumed challah in the past, you have been missing out and you should run to the nearest challah store and get some, or if you are a bit more patient, you should make it yourself.

Here is the recipe for delicious challah that you should make.

The best part about making bread, any bread, is that you can abuse the dough to fit your schedule.  Don't have all day to wait around for multiple risings?  Throw the dough in the fridge overnight after the first rise, then let it finish the next day.  

The same can be done with shaped loaves before proofing (the final rise).  It's awesome.  You can be lazy and still have awesome bread that amazes people.

These loaves in particular had one rise initially, were punched down, and put in the fridge overnight, then taken out the next morning for a second rise, then shaped, proofed, and baked.

Here is what it looked like when I did it for the third time in 2 months.  I suspect this is why everyone likes having me around.

So many lumps.

It was a two-step process to roll the dough into ropes, since the gluten structure was fairly developed.  I rolled each piece into a short cylinder, let it rest for a few minutes so the gluten would relax, then rolled them all into ropes for braiding.

It looks like a doughy octopus.

Braided...

And baked.

Next post I will relate to you the delicious fate of the challahs.