Chocolate italian ices

 This had been planned to be Hot Cocoa Gelato, but once I tasted the product and felt the texture on my tongue, I realized what I'd made. This is exactly the same as the chocolate Italian ices from the corner pizziaria of my youth. So my failure was a success; there's no bad data, right?

You will need:

1. 1/4 cup cocoa powder

2. 1/2 cup sugar

3. 1/3 cup boiling water

4. Pinch salt

5. 4 cups whole milk

Mix the cocoa, sugar, and salt in a sauceman, then add boiling water and whisk until combined. Heat saucepan over medium heat, stirring constantly, until it begins to boil. Add the milk and continue to whisk until hot. I have a gelato maker with a built-in refrigeration unit, so I added the hot mixture and turned it on. If you don't, I'd suggest refrigerating the mixture overnight and then skim off the top and add to your ice cream maker. Incidentally, chilled hot cocoa is delicious.

Cooking in the Time of Covid

Scrap-Stuffed Peppers. So named because I made them from scraps around the house that weren't enough to do anything with on their own.

You will need:

1. 6 bell peppers
2. 1 bag (~2 cups?) frozen riced cauliflower from Costco
3. 3 stalks celery
4. 2 x 1/2 inch smoked porkchops
5. 4 x ~3" diameter tomatoes
6. 1/2 large onion
7. ~1 carrot worth of baby carrots

Start heating a large pot of salted water to boil. Cut the tops off of your bell peppers. Empty out the seeds. Reserve the tops, and put the cup-portion aside.

Cut the main meaty portion off of the smoked porkchops. Assuming your chops have bones, put the bones into a pot with 1 cup water, heat over a medium heat, cover tightly. Cut the meat small, not being afraid to shred it in the process.Put the shredded meat into a large mixing bowl.

Finely dice your half onion, celery, and carrot and add to the meat in the mixing bowl. Cut each tomato into 6-8 wedges (don't stress about this, they're going to cook down, we just want lots of surface area).

Finely dice the bell pepper tops and add to the mixing bowl.

By now the pot of water is probably boiling. Add the hollowed peppers to the boiling water. These will take twenty minutes or so to cook, but give them a poke every few minutes. You don't want them completely soft, there should be a little bit of give when you poke them. Once done, gently pull them out of the hot water and set aside to cool.

Check the pork chop bones. Once the water has boiled down to a half cup, add another half cup to bring it back up to a cup and let it boil down a second time to a half cup. Remove and discard the bones and add the cauliflower, then cover while heating for five minutes. After five minutes, stir the pot, then re-cover. Keep stirring every few minutes until the cauliflower is hot and partially cooked. Then remove from heat and dump the pot into the mixing bowl.

With all the ingredients in the mixing bowl, gentle mix everything together. In a large pan, add a few tablespoons of olive oil and heat on a medium heat. Once the oil begins to smoke slightly, dump the contents of the mixing bowl into the large pan. Stir to prevent anything from getting stuck to the bottom of the pan. Cover tightly and start building your add-in flavorings.

This is really up to you, and it is going to need to reflect the ingredients you have. Pork and brassica always invite sharp flavors, so in a bowl I combined some wasabi, a squirt of sriracha, some cooking sherry, a generous amount of worcestershire sauce, a dash of soy sauce, then whisked it all together. I also took sprigs of fresh rosemary and parsley from my garden, minced them finely and added them in as well. This add-in was dumped into the pan with the food and stirred together so everything would have a chance to meld. A crack of black pepper and some sweet hungarian paprika are added as well, and the pan was covered tightly.

Start pre-heating the oven to 350 degrees.

Every once in a while, open the cover and stir the contents. We have added a lot of liquid, and many of the vegetables will release fluids as they cook. Keep cooking over a medium heat. This will cook the vegetables, let the flavors mingle, slowly drive off the moisture. Carefully adjust for taste, remembering that as the moisture is driven off, the flavor will intensify. By the time all the moisture is gone (roughly a half hour to an hour) all the vegetables are cooked, the bell peppers have cooled, and you are ready to move on the the next step.

Place the peppers upright in a cassarole dish. Using a large spoon, start stuffing the peppers with the filling mix from the pan. If any of the peppers have split, that's okay, they'll taste the same. One of my peppers completely fell in half, and I just lay both parts down and poured filling in the middle. It ended up tasting great, nobody cares. Nobody. Cares.

Place the stuffed peppers in the now hot oven. After 50 minutes, take out, and they should be done and crispy, but there's one last thing. Sprinkle shredded mozarella on top. Place back in the hot oven for 10 for minutes. Remove from oven and serve immediately.

I have been trying to find new uses for things around the kitchen, trying to eat a bit healthier, and I also have all these little bits and bobs that were never enough on their own to do anything with, so I decided to try to find a way to combine them. The result was shockingly delicious. Light, tasty, filling, pretty diet friendly, also pretty oxalate-friendly. It balances vegetables with a little protein and fat, packs enough flavor to punch you in the tongue, and I enjoyed it greatly. I think it really worked because I embraced what ingredients were there, rather than trying to pretend the cauliflower was rice and the pork was beef and using the same spicing. I would much rather work with the ingredients I have and make something delicious than worry about how exactly I am recreating a different dish. But then, that's me, you may prefer differently.

Pan-"roasted" brussels sprouts

This is a great recipe that allows you to use scraps and ends scattered around the pantry. I had three raw sweet italian sausages that needed to be cooked. Maybe you have some bacon, who knows? Use what you have on hand.

I sliced up three raw sweet italian sausages and sauteed them in a frying pan until browned, then added one large diced onion, cooking until soft, deglaze with a dash of chicken stock, then setting aside.

While they cook, take a pound or two of brussels sprouts (you'll need to estimate the amount) and trim the end, then half lengthwise. Place facedown in a cold, dry frying pan. Fill the entire pan with facedown brussels sprouts- if you have a big pan, you may be able to fit more than a pound. It may be wiser to trim and add the sprouts to the pan as you go you so do not accidentally process too many. Drizzle a few tablespoons of olive oil over the brussels sprouts, crack some salt and pepper over, then cover and heat over a medium-high heat for five minutes. After those five minutes, remove the cover and continue to cook two to three more minutes.

As the brussels sprouts cook, dice one bell pepper (or two smaller peppers- something spicy might be nice), juice and zest a lemon, salt, pepper, sweet hungarian paprika, and a teaspoon of dijon mustard. Combine in a bowl. 

Once the brussels sprouts are done, turn off the heat and add the bell pepper sauce, a generous sprinkle of freshly grated parmesan cheese, and quickly toss together with a wooden spoon. Add the sausages and onions and stir together. Serve immediately. If you need a starch, serve over white rice, but if you are watching your carbs you can enjoy by itself. At the end of it all, made two large bowls worth, but if you have some rice or another starch, can easily spread over multiple meals.

Waffles

I know there are a lot of recipes out there for waffles, and there is that Waffles of Insane Deliciousness recipe you find left, right, and center on the web these days. This is the recipe I have used for many years now which gives me waffles that are crispy on the outside, tender in the middle, and absolutely delicious.

Ingredients
3/4 cup bleached all purpose flour
1/4 cup cornstarch
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
3/4 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup milk
6 Tbsp butter
1 large egg
1 Tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Melt the butter over a low heat until just melted then set aside- you want it completely liquid without being hot.

Combine the flour, corn starch, salt, baking powder, baking soda in a large bowl. No need to sift, but go ahead if you feel like you have to.

Separate the egg yolk from the egg white. Combine the egg yolk, milk, and butter milk. Whip the egg white until soft peaks have formed, then add the sugar and vanilla and continue to whip until stiffened.

Add the butter to the dry ingredients, then add the milk mixture to the dry ingredients. Rapidly mix with a whisk until it is just homogenous. It doesn't have to be absolutely lump-free, but should be close. Make sure you do this in a large bowl because you want to do it rapidly. The longer you whisk, the tougher the resultant waffles will be.

A dollop at a time, fold the egg white into the batter using a soft rubber spatula. Again, don't worry about lumps too much, but you don't want giant chunks. Use a soft spatula- I have found it is less likely to destroy the egg white.

If you want to make a batch and serve all at once, have an oven pre-heated to 200 and lay the waffles inside in a single layer and they'll be crispy and warm for service.

If you want a slightly different taste, use almond extract instead of vanilla- you get more of a nutty taste which compliments the browning flavor of the waffle.

I don't bother to grease the waffle iron because there is a fair amount of butter in the recipe.  Your waffle iron may vary.

Beef Jerky

~1/2 cup Kikomon Low sodium soy sauce
1 tsp dijon
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp horseradish
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp sriracha

Look, here's the thing with home made beef jerky. No matter what you do, it's going to taste delicious. So if you look at my ingredients and think something sounds terrible, then swap it for something else. Try using a teriyaki sauce or a barbeque sauce. Maybe you like a hotter jerky or a sweeter jerky, so add more hot peppers or some honey. You really can't go wrong with the ingredients.

Where you do go wrong is with the meat itself. You want a very lean cut of meat- london broil, top round, something like that. Buy whichever is on sale. Now trim off all of the fat.

Normally when eating meat, you want to cut against the grain. You get a more tender bite of meat when you do so. For my jerky, I prefer to cut with the grain. Cutting against the grain gives a more crumbly jerky, while cutting with the grain gives a harder, chewier jerky. There is no right answer here, it's really a question of whether you prefer more tender jerky, or a jerky that gives your jaw a workout.

New York Bagels

I love bagels. A good bagel is everything I want in bread. A dense chew, a crispy skin, flavors and toppings galore. And yet it is a true nightmare to find them anymore, even in New York where everything is increasingly made mass-produced and quickly because with rent the way it is, nobody can afford to do things slowly anymore. The profit margin is simply too thin.

So I decided to make my own. This took research from old cookbooks, looking into the science, experimentation, and even finding an old amateur home move made in the 70's by a man who wanted everybody to know his love for bagels and actually got one of the ubiquitous bagel bakeries in Brooklyn to walk him through all the steps of how they made bagels.


This recipe will make 12 medium or 8 large bagels. I use it to make 8 large bagels and will refer to it accordingly. Note that this makes bagels with a lot of chew. If you like fluffier bagels, skip adding the gluten and use AP flour. If you are taking the time to make this from scratch, you make it how you like it and don't let anybody judge you for how you like it.

You will need:

• 1 pack or 3/4 teaspoon instant yeast
• 1 teaspoon salt (use a humble inexpensive kind, bagels are a proletariat bread)
• 1 3/4 cup cold water
• 4 cups flour. You can use bleached white all purpose flour and it will turn out okay (fluffy, but okay). If you want it to be really the right consistency though, use high gluten flour. I use King Arthur High Gluten Flour (also known as King Arthur's Sir Lancelot Flour, so named because it is the finest and mightiest of their flours. Seriously.)
• 8 teaspoons vital wheat gluten. You will want at least 1 tablespoon per cup flour for lower gluten flours.
• Malt syrup
• Cornmeal.
• Toppings (optional): coarse salt, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, dried onion, dried garlic, whatever. For Everything Bagels mix equal parts onion, sesame seed, and poppy seed.
• baking soda or potassium bicarbonate

Sieve flour, salt, vital wheal gluten into bowl of stand mixer with a dough hook. Add 1 teaspoon salt.

If you have instant yeast, you can add it directly into the flour. If instead you have Active Dry Yeast, wait to add it because the recipe changes slightly: Add a pack of yeast to 1/4 cup warm water along with a teaspoon sugar, then stir to dissolve and set aside. If after ten minutes it is not frothy, your yeast is dead and you need to stop cooking, throw it out, and get new yeast. Be sure to change the amount of water added later to 1 1/2 cups instead of 1 3/4 cups so that it balances out.


Turn stand mixer on the lowest speed.

Add ~3 tablespoons (a generous couple of glugs) malt syrup to 1 cup cold water and stir to dissolve.

If you used the Active Dry Yeast, now is the time to add it. Rinse the cup with the yeast mixture out with the water/malt syrup mixture in order to get all the yeast, adding the water to the flour a little bit at a time.

The first cup of water (with the malt syrup) can be added pretty quickly. Add the last half cup or 3/4 cup very slowly- you are looking for a very shaggy consistency where it just comes together into a shaggy ball. Then add a tiny amount more water and leave the machine to continue to work the dough. The shagginess should go away after a minute to two and the dough come together. The last few tablespoons added in the end should make the dough slide around in the bowl, and that is okay, it is how you know it is the right amount.

This is a very dry, dense dough. It is very sensitive to water content; if you add too much water, the texture will be affected. Continue to work the dough for a few more minutes until you are certain that the moisture has worked its way through. Baking is sensitive to a lot of things like the kitchen's temperature and humidity, so you may need to add a little more or a little less water, which is why you are adding the final half cup a little bit at a time.

Remove the bowl and set aside, covered, for ten minutes. This gives the gluten time to form, chemicals to break down, wheat granules time to absorb moisture, etc.

Put the bowl back and knead again for another 2-3 minutes. Take the lump of dough out and cut into 8 equal pieces. Cover and leave on the countertop for ten minutes.

While the dough is rising, take out a baking sheet. Make sure that you have a shelf in your refrigerator large enough (and cleared) to accommodate the sheet. Sprinkle the sheet generously with cornmeal.

Roll a dough piece into a ball shape by pressing a flat palm firmly against it and rolling- you may see the dough having twisted around and forming a navel (or even a second one on the bottom) as you do so. If you do, congratulations, you are doing well! As you roll, you will feel the dough tighten under your hand- you are bringing the dough together and adding strain to the structure, which helps develop the chew.

You should feel the dough as quite silky, dense, tough. Flatten out and roll out with a rolling pin. You don't need to go too crazy with this, you are looking for 5 mm or under (a little under 1/4 inch). Flip it over and re-roll as needed. Set the rolling pin aside and roll one edge all the way to the other side into a nice, tight cylinder- like a rolled up newspaper. Roll it back and forth a couple of times until it is ~8 inches or so long. Twist the dough cylinder a couple of times, like wringing out a towel.

If you have small hands, use all four fingers for this next step. If you have huge hands like me, use the forefinger, middle, and ring finger. Form the twisted cylinder into a ring with the ends overlapping one another. Classically you do this by wrapping the cylinder around your fingers and rolling the two ends together.  Place rolled bagel dough onto the baking sheet with cornmeal.

Many instructions will tell you to just punch a hole through the middle of the dough ball with your thumb and stretch it out. I have seen arguments back and forth about whether or not this is proper. I don't do it, because the Bagelmen of old didn't, and they did it long and often enough to have tried doing that, and they didn't.

You want to be pretty quick about these last couple of steps so that the bagels are all in place before they have a chance to dry out. The speed comes with practice, so do not be afraid to have some plastic wrap you can drape over the dough as you roll out more bagels. Good bagels do not have a huge hole, and the dough in this shape wants to retract into a smaller form. With the dough in your hand you can gently squeeze the dough to encourage that retraction and make the hole smaller. Do not go crazy with this; between rising, boiling, and baking much of the hole will fill in so don't worry about it too too much.

Repeat process until all eight bagels have been made. Cover pan with plastic wrap and set aside ten minutes, then place in refrigerator overnight.

The next day:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Take the sheetpan out of the fridge and set on your countertop to warm a little before boiling.

Bagels removed from fridge

Prep a stockpot of water to boil. Add a generous glug or two malt syrup and a tablespoon either baking soda or (if you have it) potassium bicarbonate. As you will see from the results below, this gave a lovely textured skin with great browning and flavor.

Experiments with changing active ingredients in the boiling water. 

From left to right- sugar, baking soda, plain water, and malt syrup.

There are a million different suggestions for what to add to the water. I experimented with a bunch:

Just water: Did not brown brilliantly, skin was thin. Slight sweetness to the dough.

Sugar: Bland and dull. Tasted like something from a supermarket.

Baking soda: Great browning, skin texture good. Nice flavor.

Malt syrup: Browning okay, skin texture great with a little crisp to it. Nice flavor.

Vinegar: Did not brown well. Stank up kitchen. No particular taste.

Baking soda and malt syrup: Very nice. Good browning, great skin texture, nice flavor.

Potassium bicarbonate: Great browning, more intense than baking soda, skin texture too soft. Great flavor.

Calcium carbonate: Almost inedible. Pale white with a tinge of brown in spots, the calcium carbonate somehow deposited a visible layer over the whole bagel (and on the bottom of the pot too!). Unpleasant skin, flavor was doughy.

Potassium bicarbonate and malt syrup: The winner for me, which is lucky since I have to cut my sodium. Great skin, great browning, great flavor, a real winner. That said, it is almost exactly the same as baking soda and malt syrup, to the point that there may be variations like the dough and the temperature and such influencing the test, as these are very close.

Sodium hydroxide probably works beautifully, but I have to watch my sodium. If you decide to handle lye in your kitchen, you are responsible for handling it safely. I do not condone its use for most people. I am a professional chemist and have been trained in the safe handling of hazardous chemicals, while you probably have not. You have been warned.

I do not have a huge stockpot, so I can only boil two or three bagels at a time. Take two bagels from the sheet and drop them into the boiling water. Do not worry about the cornmeal, most or all of it should come off in the boiling water. After thirty seconds, flip the bagels. After another thirty seconds, remove to cooling rack. Repeat until all eight bagels are on the cooling rack.

Bagels post-boil. Note the color change compared to when taken from the fridge.

If you are going to add toppings, now is one of the two times to do it.

Place cooling rack onto a new sheet pan, then place in the hot oven. After 3 minutes, remove the rack and baking sheet from the oven. Take the bagels off of the cooling rack and flip them over onto the baking sheet; the top skin will have begun to dry and harden.

The gel layer that forms on the outside of the bagel after being boiled will act like a glue and attach the bagel to whatever surface it is on. By flipping it, you use the already dried skin as the contact layer, so that it does not stick. If you wait more than three minutes, the bagels will stick to the wire rack and be more difficult to remove, potentially ruining the skin.

If you are going to add toppings, this is the second time to do it. Sprinkle the toppings on top of the bagels (now it is actually the top of the bagel). Stick the baking sheet with the bagels back into the oven. Continue to bake for 10 minutes, flip the bagels, bake for another 10 minutes. Remove from oven, then remove bagels to cooling rack.

 

Final Product

Some notes:

• That's a lot of work just for 8 bagels, and my fridge is big- is there a way to scale this up and maybe make a double batch? 
• Yes and no. Yes, the recipe does at least double. However, the trouble is the time it takes to roll out each bagel. When there are only 8, the bagels are not sitting out on your counter for very long before going into the fridge. When there are 16, this time becomes significant, and the earlier rolled bagels will overprove. If you have more than one person rolling the dough together, you can get away with this. If you are doing this by yourself, I would instead suggest two batches instead.
• As an aside, I have a professional series kitchen aid stand mixer with all metal gears. This was a very deliberate purchase. I have owned this stand mixer for ten years. When I doubled the recipe, for the first time I could smell the motor overheating, and it shut itself off from it. I had read of the automatic overheating shutoff, but never actually seen it. If you double this recipe, make sure your equipment can handle it.

• Is there a way to make these ahead of time?
• Absolutely! Make the bagels all the way through baking them for the initial 3 minutes to tighten the skin. Then take the bagels and stick them into freezer bags and freeze them. When you are ready to cook them, place on baking sheet, frozen, and stick them into a 400 degree oven for 20 minutes, flip, then 5 more minutes. This is also a good way to prepare large batches of them ahead of time (see previous question)- 8 bagel batches are much easier to handle, and you can just make a bunch of them and freeze them, so you have freshly baked bagels anytime!

• Eight bagels! How can I possibly eat so many all at once? How do I prevent them from going stale?
• After the bagels have cooled, they are best enjoyed within two or three hours. If you will not eat them within that time, place into freezer bag and freeze. You can microwave on high for 30-45 seconds if you have a powerful microwave, or a full minute if you have a puny microwave like me. 

Chicken Pot Pie dumplings

Ingredients:
Asparagus, 1 kilo
Milk: ~1 cup
Flour: 2 tablespoons
Fat: 1-2 tablespoons
Chicken: ~1 breast, cooked.
1 large onion.

Snap your asparagus to get rid of the woody part. Dump into boiling water for 5 minutes, sample for doneness, then drain and set aside. The asparagus should be tender (not soft) and sweet. This cooks the asparagus and removes excess oxalate.

Dice your onion medium-fine and saute with a little PAM for ~5 minutes, enough that they soften and sweeten.

I had some chicken schmaltz handy (if you don't, you should start collecting it), but you can use butter. To a small saucepot, add the fat and a sieved 1-2 tablespoons flour. We want that rich, creamy interior from a pot pie. If you do not have schmaltz, you will want to add some chicken stock to give the sauce a rich chicken-y flavor. If you do have schmaltz, you may want to as well. Add the milk, stirring. You want a fairly thick sauce, so that it helps glue everything together. I would have made a veloute, but discovered that I had no stock.

Chop chicken into small pieces.

Combine asparagus, sauce, chicken, onion. Salt and pepper to taste, then fold with a rubber spatula.

Fill dumplings as usual. Steam. I have not found that this particularly benefits from frying, though it does not do it any harm either.