Dark Chocolate Spaghetti 7/18/11

When Julie and I went to Maker Faire a few months ago, we were drawn to 2 demonstrations of molecular gastronomy, a new technique for cooking and looking at food that explores the science behind it. For example, one demonstration was of carrot juice caviar, made by mixing the carrot juice with calcium lactate and using a eyedropper to drip it into a bath of sodium alginate, where it solidifies. Neat stuff.

For graduation, Julie and her family got me a nice molecular gastronomy kit to try some of these things on our own. It came along with a DVD with demonstrations of various ways to use the tools and substances, which mostly involve changing the form of foods: turn ketchup and mustard into little balls, make foam out of garlic, etc. The footage is very chic as well, with no voiceover, an upbeat, jazzy soundtrack, and perfectly clean and careful execution.

Since I happen to have a large slab of dark chocolate lying around, we decided to try one recipe to make dark chocolate spaghetti. It's exactly what it sounds like: dark chocolate in the shape of spaghetti.

The first step in making it is to melt the dark chocolate and combine it with agar, a substance similar to gelatin (or jello). Once it's boiling and mixed, it gets poured out into another container where it begins to take shape.

Using a syringe, we forced the dark chocolate mixture into tubing, which was then suspended in an ice bath to cool it down. This step ended up being particularly fun and not too difficult.



The real trick came with getting it out. After it cools for a bit, you use the syringe again to force air through the tubing, which pushes the dark chocolate out the other end. Or so the video led us to believe.

There were some issues. First, the dark chocolate didn't form a perfect vacuum or wasn't completely solid, so when the air was forced in (with great effort), it would create a bubble alongside the chocolate instead. When it did come out, it did so very suddenly in one big push, though that would often cause the dark chocolate to fracture as well.

And it was accompanied by the squeezing sound as all the air got through, so I understand why the video had music playing over instead. To summarize, brown semi-solid coming out, accompanied with sound. It was very appetizing.

Even so, we managed to get a couple good, long strands out before the bulk of the chocolate in our container began to solidify. We tried to microwave it and give it a second chance, but there was no luck there, either. In the end, there was much wreckage.

But enough successes. We took the best strands, draped them over some strawberries and graham crackers, then put some whipped cream on top. It was yummy.

Julie the Pie Maker 7/10/11

As Holly mentioned, 7 of us went berry picking last weekend and each ended up with somewhere between 3 and 4 pounds of olallieberries. Similar to blackberries, olallieberries are a cross between two other types of berries that I also had never heard of before but are also in the same blackberry-type family. They're longer than blackberries and a little less sweet and more tart. With so many berries ripening at the same time, however, Julie and I decided to put it all into a pie.

Before this summer, I hadn't made a pie on my own ever before. I had certainly helped and watched my mom make a few apple pies when I was growing up, but since I had never had a pie pan over the past 4 years, I never had a chance to figure it out. Given how infrequently my family made pies, I didn't think I was missing much. I was better-educated in making cookies and stir-frys instead.

Julie, however, apparently participated in much more pie making when she was growing up. When we made a blueberry cream pie a few weeks ago, she expertly rolled out the crust to the right size without any tearing, a feat that she replicated again for this pie. And since her parents had grown blackberries in their garden, this pie was right up her alley. She asked her mom for the recipe for both the crust and filling, neither of which we had any difficulty with. Then came assembling.

One nifty trick I had learned from my mom was to roll out the pastry on a piece of wax paper (and in my family, wax paper doesn't come from a roll; it comes from an opened breakfast cereal bag), place the pan over the dough, then just flip it over. With that, the bottom crust is done, along with all of my ability in pie assembling. An unfortunate truth about pies in my family is the top crust. It often turns out fine, but it does end up puffed up far higher than filling, which settles. Julie the pie maker, however, had just the solution: the lattice.

I'm sure you've seen it, and if you haven't, there's a picture below. Instead of the solid crust, there are strips of pastry woven together, forming a loose mat, and frankly, it looks hard. Julie had mentioned before we started that we were planning on doing this, and to me, that sounded like a mess waiting to happen. She seemed confident, though, and I was more than happy to let her lead.

First, she rolled out the top crust into a circle, like the bottom crust. Then, using a sharp knife, she cut strips of the dough all the way across. Starting from the middle, we took the longest strip, laid it across the middle of the pie, then did it again in the other direction. Whenever 2 strips crossed, we just lifted the strips as needed to weave them together. With the leftover strips, we reinforced the outside crust, which was then protected with a tin foil shield to avoid burning it. After a little milk brushed for browning and sugar sprinkled on top, into the oven it went. About 40 minutes later, we had this:

Just about every step of assembly went exactly as planned, and the pie came out baked pretty much perfectly. The lattice held together, and the shield kept away all of the burnt spots.

After we let it cool a bit, we each cut ourselves a slice, pairing it with some vanilla ice cream. Were we more patient, you might not see the liquid run into the gap in the picture in the upper left, but it was worth it. The ice cream and olallieberry pie blended together very nicely: tart olallieberries against sweet vanilla, warm filling against the frozen treat, and flaky crust against the smooth cream.

Using olallieberries worked quite well, I think, as the sugar added to pies means that the berries themselves don't need to be that sweet. At the risk of lowering the pies of my past, this was probably the best pie I had ever had homemade. Years of practice and experience really pay off, especially when it was someone else's.

Living up to this blog's name (7/4/11)

With 4 years of experience, I think we've mostly gotten past the humbler beginnings. Mostly. Except for this 4th.

On the weekends, Julie and I swing back and forth a lot on our choices for meals. On the one hand, weekends are lazy, and there tend to be a lot of leftovers from potlucks. On the other, weekends are a full day to do longer cooking projects. On the 4th of July (an honorary weekend day), we decided to go for it and do some baking. I found what seemed like a nice recipe for rosemary and olive oil rolls and began to put it together.

A single summer of maybe 5ish efforts at bread baking isn't a tremendous amount of experience, but seeing the recipes gave me the first red flag when it had only 3 cups of flour in it. Having packed twice that much bread flour into a loaf before, I was a little skeptical, and when the dough got to 3 cups, it wasn't even close to being ready. Not wanting to deviate from the recipe too much, I added in 3 tbsp more of flour, at which point it looked more lifelike. Still trusting the recipe, I turned it out onto a floured surface, floured my hands, put my hands in the dough and got this

I have worked with brownie and cookie dough that held together better than this! Julie furiously fed me more and more flour, and every time I worried that we would put in too much and throw off the ratio, the dough would stick more. We ended up adding at least another cup of flour, and probably a lot more than that.

Eventually, I got past my dough-webbed fingers and managed to get it into a ball and be done with kneading. The next few steps went smoothly, and we popped them in the oven for their 20-25 minutes while we prepared our red, white, and blue salad.

About 10 minutes later, we saw something steamy or smoky coming from one of the burners. At first, I was worried that I had turned one of the surface units on, and various containers were sitting there. Seeing as that didn't appear to be the case, I just assumed that it was steam from the oven. When it didn't stop, I took Julie's advice and peeked inside the oven.

I have never smoked any meats before, but I have been at barbecues and camp fires. I didn't realize it from the surface units, but smoke is smoke, and when there isn't supposed to be smoke, dinner probably isn't going to turn out well. I quickly took them out, and after Julie and I managed to start airing out the kitchen with a fan and open windows, we saw the perfectly blackened bottoms of the rolls.

In retrospect, if we were going to screw up the baking process, this was a pretty good way to do it. Since the bottom was completely blackened and crispy, the tops pulled right off, and we got warm roll tops out of it.

Recipe makers are just as fallible as anyone else, but I think this truly the first big disaster that I have had. The pumpkin pancake recipe didn't quite get the consistency correct, but this recipe was just wrong. I realize the recipe says to bake "... or until golden brown," and maybe the oven here isn't perfect, but there's a big difference between 10 and 20 minutes.

Had the recipe worked, they would have been nice dinner rolls, but nothing special. The rosemary and olive oil ended up being mostly lost and far too subtle to make it work. Rejected.

Still, Julie had the idea for and put together a nice red, white, and blue salad composed of spinach, strawberries (red), blueberries (blue), feta cheese (white), onions (more white), and some leftover balsamic vinaigrette. In retrospect, the green from the spinach gives us red, white, blue, and green, which could basically be any flag in the world. Consider us open-minded in celebrating the 4th of July.

California Melts

As an avocado aficionado, I couldn't wait to have a meal with avocados in the spotlight. Kevin suggested California melts as a good way to use up some extra bread and cheese we had, as well as something that wouldn't overpower the avocados. In addition to the avocado, we used whole wheat bread and Muenster cheese from Trader Joe's, and a delicious heirloom tomato from the farmer's market.

I thought the heirloom tomato was far better than anything we had gotten from the grocery store, but Kevin didn't seem to notice a difference in the taste test we did. I'd like to say that it's my refined palate, but I'm probably just more used to tasting heirloom tomatoes, since my parents grow them in our garden.

We used a cute little pan left for us to use by Kevin's subletters. I was pretty worried about flipping the sandwich, but the tiny pan had little room around the edges for stuff to slide around. The cheese melted nicely, as well, which also helped to cement things together. Yum.

1 Fish, 2 Fish, Steamed Fish, Fried Fish (6/29/11 - 6/30/11)

For almost a year now, Julie has been raving about her dad's maple plank salmon, sometimes done with fish fresh from Pike's Place market in Seattle and hand-carried on a plane to be eaten at home. For just as long, I have been raving about the steamed fish my mom prepares. In its best form, she steams a white fish, then pours oil, garlic, ginger, and soy sauce over the top for a very traditional Chinese steamed fish. So fish was bound to happen.

It was bound to happen in spite of my current diet (note that I said it was "loose" before) and that I can't remember having ever prepared fish before. Since Julie was equally untrained, we decided that we might develop our fish cooking skills on cheaper fish before really being able to enjoy good cuts. At the beginning of the week, we picked up frozen sockeye fillets at Trader Joe's with plans to use them later on.

I forgot to take pictures of the first effort, but since we had nothing in mind for the salmon, I asked my mom for her recipe for preparing salmon in my favorite style. I can remember as far back as 3rd grade, one of my mom's standard dinner recipes was tin-foil Chinese salmon. In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense since it's pretty easy to prepare, and there's no reason to get fancy when you have a kid like me who loves it.

Tin-Foil Chinese salmon
~8oz salmon fillet (the weight isn't too important; just cook more or less)
1 or 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 small hunk of ginger, minced
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp oil (veggie works fine)

1. Preheat oven to 400F. (my mom always used the toaster oven)
2. Wash the salmon fillet and pat dry so that it isn't so fishy. Place in a piece of tin foil large enough to wrap it.
3. Spread the garlic and ginger over the top of the salmon. Pour the soy sauce and oil over that.
4. Take the long ends of the tin foil, pull them together ("hot-dog style"), then roll together the ends to seal. Roll up both of the far ends so that it's a complete seal. Place into another pan or sheet.
5. Stick it in the oven for 10-14 minutes, or until you can "smell the garlic".
6. Pull it out, let it sit, then transfer the tin foil over to another plate, and unwrap. Serve with steamed (white) rice and steamed veggies.

Thinking over the recipe now, it really is exactly the same recipe as for a legit Chinese steamed fish, except with the tin foil as an easier method of preparation. Unfortunately, I was unaware of how dark sockeye is, and without much experience cooking salmon, I stuck it back into the oven twice, thinking it was still too pink. The result was a little chewy, but otherwise the exact deliciousness that reminds me of possibly the second most regular dinner I ate growing up, next to Chinese stir-fry. And given how much I like it, I think it's probably the meal from which I have derived the most total enjoyment in my life. Paired with some cooked spinach and carrots and white rice, the meal came together quite nicely.


So Wednesday, scheduled as "salmon" on the whiteboard on my fridge, went well enough, and since Thursday had no label and the package came with 2 fillets, our destiny was pretty set. Having already done a steamed fish, we wanted to do something very different. While watching a New York Times video about baking pizza from one of my new favorite internet video stars, Melissa Clark, I saw a link for salmon from Mark Bittman, the Minimalist, on a simple pan-fry method. We mimicked his method as best we could from my pantry and got a simple dry rub put together from cumin, paprika, and fresh cilantro.

Fried as directed, it went pretty quickly, with the major snafu being that when I flipped, the rub had already burned a bit. The final result was good: the salmon was cooked pretty much perfectly, and the flavor of the dry rub came together pretty well from our haphazard substitutes.

There were a few lessons, though. First, paprika burns fast: this site seems to confirm my suspicion about what happened. I'm not quite sure how I would've gotten around that, other than perhaps to flip sooner. Even so, I could still taste the paprika lightly, and the aroma was great. Second, the fresh cilantro didn't do much. In its fresh form, it probably would've worked better as a garnish.

I'm super-psyched about this particular recipe, however, as I think it'll be a great learning tool. The cooking method is reliable and a good skill to have. The real magic, however, comes in the customizability of the rub, and trying different things will help us figure out what spices matter. A tip Julie got about learning to cook was to try food before and after adding ingredients to see what the effect is. What's nice about this rub is that we can get 2-3 stages of a rub by applying it at different mix-in points for ingredients, with several strips to compare bite-by-bite.

The big lesson this time was about cumin: cumin is really good. I have used it in various cooking before, but just as part of a recipe. This time, the simple rub and its resistance to the pan-frying process made its flavor very strong, which I liked.

Julie enjoyed the salmon-cooked spinach-rice mix/pairing so much, we decided to do it again. To try something different again, though, Julie sauteed the spinach with some onions and garlic, and it was a very nice complete to the salmon. It was a very simple meal with some pretty nice results and a good look at how the same base of ingredients (salmon, spinach, and rice) can turn out vastly different meals by changing the spices and preparation method.