Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

Fresh Vietnamese spring rolls

Friday, April 25th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

Normally spring rolls is something with extreme amounts of fat and the hassle of deep frying them, so it was quite a refreshing change when I stumbled across fresh Vietnamese spring rolls on Haalo’s blog Cook (almost) anything at least once. Since these spring rolls require rice paper I had to find a small specialty store in central Copenhagen where I was able to buy it, fairly cheap taking into account how many spring rolls we have been able to make with it.

Each sheet is very thin but rather rigid and to be able to roll it, you dip it for a few seconds in tepid to warm water and then place it on a damp towel, add the ingredients and roll it up nicely.

Keeping with Haalo’s recipe, we added steamed chicken, spring onions, lettuce, coriander and vermicelli noodles, although I think the original fresh Vietnamese spring rolls are made with minced pork, but nevermind this. The spring rolls were slightly rubbery, which the lettuce offset nicely, and they were excellent as a fresh, different appetiser. We will definitely be using this again.

Tags: appetisers, Cooking, vietnam

Molten chocolate cake

Friday, April 25th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

I have to admit that we are cake lovers. In particular chocolate cakes seem to vanish almost as quickly as they are baked. Really, one would not have guessed from looking at this blog, right? So I was immediately hooked when I was browsing food blogs and saw that the Tuesdays with Dorie food blogger group was baking Molten chocolate cake. Once I actually found this, the week had passed and everyone had posted their molten chocolate cake results, and a couple of them including the recipe, so I had my wife pick up some fancy muffin forms for baking, and off I went.

The recipe is actually very straightforward and the cake is basically an underbaked cake. With that in mind I used pasteurised eggs to avoid any fun moments due to salmonella. The cake came out exactly as I had intended:

As to the taste… what a disappointment. Even with the light, slightly acidic and fresh taste of pineapple, I will be no fan of this underbaked, pasty cake anytime soon.

Tags: baking, cake, chocolate

Pizza ai funghi e prosciutto

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

Pizza is, without a doubt, one of the most forgiving meals to make. Almost no matter what you put on it, people simply love this piece of dough. Of course, there are a few people who misunderstands the whole pizza concept and put bananas and stuff on them. That is just a plain frightening concept. Now, at its core, the pizza is ‘just’ another yeast dough, much like bread, although it is a somewhat more dense dough than most bread doughs I usually bake. In fact, a single pizza, normally serving four (but in our family 1½), is made of just that little ball of dough. This is what it looks after a good three hours of fermentation.

After beating the dough down and rolling it out, we get the much loved round pizza napolitana shape.

Ok, so perhaps my shaping skills are not the best, but it came out round-ish. This is our able foundation for anything pizza, whether it be napolitana or calzone, and it is ready to receive our chosen filling. For my dinner I had chosen a traditional mushroom pizza, pizza ai funghi, and this mean a nicely cooked tomato sauce with mushrooms, garlic (I went a bit overboard here since I am down with a nasty virus) and onions. This you, of course, smear across the pizza prior to baking it. It is very important to have let the tomato sauce mixture cook for a while so you get a lot of the excess water out of it as you’ll have a wet dough mess once you take your pizza out of the oven otherwise.

And presto, after a good bake you get a lovely pizza. Now, as I was rather short on mushrooms (we had used quite a few more than I had anticipated for our mushroom risotto the day before), I added some lovely prosciutto to the pizza after it had baked. Adding prosciutto after the bake ensures that the ham does not get as hard and rubbery as sole leather.

Those Italians really hit it well on figuring out a good all-purpose dinner subject that works with pretty much anything you’ve got left over in your cupboards. Amazing.

That’s all there is to making a lovely pizza from the contents of your cupboard. I hereby name this Pizza ai funghi e prosciutto. (That does sound quite a lot better than pizza with mushrooms and ham, does it not?) Buon appetito.

Tags: baking, pizza

Parisian daily bread and pear-marzipan tart

Sunday, April 6th, 2008 | Cooking | No Comments

Today it happened again. I was out of bread by breakfast and rapidly growing hungry, so things needed to move rapidly in order to get lunch at a time that might just serve as a probable time for lunch. Fear not, the day before I had been skimming through Daniel Leader’s Local Breads and had seen the recipe for Parisian daily bread, in which he states that ‘There’s nothing like tearing into a warm baguette, fresh from your oven, just a couple of hours after you decide to bake.’ Now that sounds great, I can shave off several hours from Hamelman’s French bread recipe, I thought!

So, today comes around and I start reading the recipe… rest for 20 minutes, mix for 10 minutes, ferment for 45 minutes, ferment again for 45 minutes, proof for 40 minutes, bake for 20 minutes… this seems oddly above a couple of hours to me, but it still saves me a couple of hours to Hamelman’s recipe. After kneading the dough on the machine, it is supposed to receive a bit of more kneading on an unfloured desk, but even after kneading it for a bit more than 10 minutes on my mixer, it was extremely sticky and nowhere near ‘springy’. It took quite a bit more flour than the recipe called for to get it even remotely possibly to knead by hand.

So after a good three hour preparation and bake, and twenty minutes of cooling to settle everything in the bread, I was well past lunch time (oops), but nevertheless, fresh bread from the oven is good pretty much no matter what. It is quite a decent bread, but if you have two or three extra hours, the French bread recipe from Hamelman’s book beats this hands-down. Hamelman’s bread is much more of a savory bread that you can use for any kind of meat or vegetable, whereas Leader’s Parisian daily bread is more comfort food-ish—going nicely with butter, jam or cheese, but not so well with meat or vegetables. Its crumb is also a lot more dense than Hamelman’s French bread, and a bit too much on the salty side for my tastes.

As an afternoon cake, my wife wanted to surprise me with a lovely pear and marzipan tart (I simply adore marzipan in any shape and kind. I can eat it by the kilo in its raw form!), but once the alarm sounded for it to be done and it was being taken out of the oven, I hear a large crash, which mean I should rush into the kitchen, usually. Suffice to say, the cake did not really look like the lovely cake with pears lined up symmetrically and the batter spread carefully. It looked rather much like this…

It was quite decent, despite this accident, though.

Tags: baking, bread, cake, dessert, marzipan, white bread

French bread, take two

Friday, April 4th, 2008 | Cooking | 1 Comment

It is one thing to make a good bread once, but making it consistently is the goal here. Of course, my old statistics professor would tell me that two samples is a horrible basis for any form of statistic, but let us ignore that for a bit (I used to doze off in her classes anyway, not the most riveting topic).

I attempted Hamelman’s straight dough French bread recipe again yesterday, but got started a bit late due to work. The dough is a bit on the sticky side and my mixer has a bit of strouble actually kneading it properly so I have to after-knead it a bit more, which tends to be a bit annoying since it means that you have to use slightly too much flour when you shape the breads, leaving flour residue on the bread once you bake it, and this residue will generate some grayish streaks on the bread. It does not detract from the flavour, it just isn’t so pretty.

I would have shot some photos of the crumb as well, but once the bread was ready and had cooled just the slightest bit it was past 8 pm. Word of advice: Never get between a pregnant woman and her dinner. Ever. It’s scary!

The crumb was somewhat denser than the last time I made it, a fact that I attribute to my somewhat failed attempt at making steam in the oven. The ice cubes did not even remotely fizzle when I threw them in a pan with hot water. Also a baking hearth would probably aid tremendously, but I think I get decent results from the metal baking pans I have now. I will have to do some more trial and error, but the breads rose nicely, even after being put in the oven, however they did not develop the hallmark very crispy crust that the French bread in our local bakeries have. It was still an extremely tasty bread, though.

To serve for dinner we made a series of bruschetta-inspired breads, although we might have aberrated a bit from the traditional Italian recipes. A slice of bread with fried mushroom and parsley, with hard-boiled eggs and tomatos, with coarsely chopped tomatos, finely chopped garlic, whole leaves of basil and a bit of extra virgin olive oil served with a slice of serrano ham (we did not have any prosciutto handy to stay in the Italian cuisine). Gorgeous dinner if I have to say so myself.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread