It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here - long enough that I had forgotten my password - and I’m starting to feel like I might be wasting a small portion of the internet. To remedy the obvious fact that I have nothing interesting to say, I’ve decided to start tracking my current hobby, which is cooking.
Some of the images are cut off a little. This is the internet’s fault, not mine. I will work on the layout.
I would say that baking is particularly grabbing my interest, so there may be a focus on that particular aspect of the culinary universe. I’ve started small with simple French breads, with the occasional batch of pretzel bites (more on this later) and a semi-successful batch of sourdough starter filling in the gaps. I also have been baking cookies on a fairly regular basis.
There is something pleasant about thinking “I would like to put a cookie in my mouth” and then having a fuckton of warm, fresh cookies in a reasonably short time and without having to go to the store. Yesterday I decided to experiment and used some mascarpone cheese in a batch of chocolate chip cookies, which was a happy success. On Saturday I made cookies with mini peppermint patties.
My baking appreciation started about 6 months ago when I had a craving for those cheddar cheese biscuits they serve at Red Lobster. By no means a pinnacle of culinary excellence and unfortunately requiring a trip to Red Lobster, they seemed like they would be hard to reproduce with my basic skillset. After less than a minute on the internet, I came across this recipe:
- 2 cups Bisquick
- 2/3 cup milk
- 2/3 cup grated cheddar cheese
Combine well in a large bowl, avoiding overmixing. Spoon into large globs onto a baking sheet. Bake at 400 for about 10 minutes. Meanwhile, combine about 1/4 cup butter with a large pinch of garlic salt over low heat. Brush over the biscuits when they come out of the oven and remove the biscuits to a cooling rack.
My first attempt turned out pretty close to what I was expecting - a product that looked similar to the target at a glance, but had some major flaws. The bottoms were burnt, the insides were undercooked and the tops were blackened slightly. I could see that I needed to make some modifications, and I now had a ton of Bisquick to play with.
I tried using a Pyrex casserole to keep the bottoms from burning, and it worked. I made them slightly smaller and mixed the less, and they came out fully cooked. I lowered the temperature slightly and paid more attention while they cooked and they came out golden brown on top. And I added some dried parsley to the butter/garlic mixture and got some much needed color.
This process took about a month, but I enjoyed the experimenting and the fact that I could eat whatever I made. It took me another month to realize I had to start working out - at least a little - to offset this. I’ve been running at least a mile about 5 days a week, which also made me happy I stopped smoking (13 months ago already!).
Before I got too carried away, I attempted to make an alfredo sauce specifically for dipping biscuits in. My entire concept of something as ubiquitous as alfredo sauce was shattered when I did some research. It turns out that what I had always called alfredo was most definitely a sauce in its own right, but was not actually what I thought it was. True alfredo sauce is made from butter, cream, parmesan cheese, white pepper and nutmeg, all mixed directly over hot pasta. Fake alfredo sauce is what’s called a Mornay sauce - bechamel with cheese, which is itself a roux with milk or cream, and that is butter and flour cooked together as a thickening agent.
I decided that it was important to understand these things so that I could ask for help when I needed it, without sounding like too much of a moron.
I had to make actual food to go with my chain restaurant knockoff biscuits, so I started cooking more and eating more meals at home. At this point in time I eat out less than once every two weeks, and as a side-effect, I’m much more aware of what I eat and my portions have become much more realistic. This is a nice bonus.
Before I post any pictures, I’ll be very clear that I repeatedly use similar ingredients and techniques, and I have only one set of plates that I consider “nice”. You will frequently see onions, potatoes, cucumber salads, the same black plates and a lot of throwaway side dishes throughout all of my food related posts. In order to get better and learn, I have to repeat a lot of things, make minor corrections or variations, and try again.
Here is a shot of one of my cheddar cheese biscuits, at what was probably the peak of biscuit making:
Actually, the little pile of shit next to the biscuit was a pretty tasty item itself. I chopped up a bunch of vegetables, grilled some shrimp, and marinated the whole deal in lime juice, vinegar and olive oil. I called it a shrimp ceviche. I think the coolest part was that I served it in a peeled tomato (which was a son of a bitch):
I imagine the observant reader will also spot a glass of whiskey (The Glenlivet Nadurra, in this case) in many pictures.
Random ceviche experiment aside, I still wasn’t producing actual meals. That would change because I was starting to get sick of biscuits.
At first I focused on steaks, and dabbled a bit in sauces. My early achievement was something I referred to simply as steak an potatoes. It was based around a reduction of chicken stock and red wine vinegar prepared in the same pan in which the steak was cooked. The sauce contained a lot of butter as well. My love of shallots probably started here too.
My first attempt turned out extremely good as a steak, but not very impressive as a meal. However, the sauce itself was incredible and asked to be soaked up by some sort of bread. I don’t recall saying this post would be done in strictly chronological order, so here’s the first and last versions of my steak and potatoes separated by several months. I’ll fill in the gaps later.
Salted cucumber and pan fried potatoes. I don’t think I even par-cooked the taters, so they were probably raw in the middle.
A few attempts later, I made a much better overall meal, and even took a chance with some interesting plating:
I served it on a cutting board, to myself, just for fun. The dinner roll there is one of my early ones, but I recall it being part of a pretty good batch. The potatoes are fully cooked, crispy, and topped with diced proscuitto. The sauce isn’t quite as prominent, and the pointless diced cucumber pile is gone.
While I was working on learning to cook a good steak, I also made my first loaf of bread:
I was immediately interested in baking bread. It turned out great, and it was only my first attempt. I suddenly felt a little embarrassed by my earlier enthusiasm for biscuits from a box.
While the bread turned out excellent in its own right, I really wanted to make a loaf of rustic ciabatta. I liked the idea of huge, uneven bubbles and a chewier texture. I soon learned that the secret was a very wet or slack dough, which came with a recommendation of a stand mixer. I could think of plenty of things to do with a stand mixer, and when I found an amazing deal on a KitchenAid Professional 600, I had to grab it.
The mixer made ciabatta a walk-away experience. I made my first loaf entirely by weight and was careful to follow the directions exactly. What I got was a pretty nice loaf, but it was lacking the huge bubbles I was expecting. It would take me months to get it right, making adjustments to the moisture content, type of flour and the proofing environment as I went. Switching to a high quality unbleached bread flour helped quite a bit (King Arthur, specifically), as the dough needs some serious gluten to hold any shape whatsoever.
Here is a shot of ciabatta number 1:
And a picture of its guts:
I ended up making a few loaves for a small party and people liked them, so I kept at it.
I also used ciabatta as an accompaniment to my first attempt at roast chicken. I brined the chicken carefully, roasted it carefully and carved it carefully, all resulting in what might have been the best chicken I will ever have. I haven’t tried again because I don’t think it’ll be as good. Huge success.
The starch was provided by some mashed potatoes I made using a play on a twice baked potato. The potatoes were boiled as usual for soon-to-be-mashed tubers, but I then roasted them in the oven with olive oil until they were crispy, and then pan fried them with garlic. Once mashed, the skin on potatoes were mixed with cream and European style butter (higher fat content). They were fucking ridiculous.
Oh yeah, and the gravy was great too. I am so proud of this meal, and it’s a shame that nobody ever saw it.
Not too long after the chicken experiment, I decided to make some seared tuna. I love seared tuna at Japanese restaurants, and it seems simple enough. My first try wasn’t bad, but it’s pretty obvious that the fish wasn’t really the type that got good grades in “looking good raw” school.
This time served with Jameson. As you can see, it’s very pale, and also sitting on top of way, way too many noodles.
I picked up a rice cooker (I have never been good at cooking rice), and the ingredients needed to make peoprly seasoned sushi rice. Before I tried the tuna again, I went for a sushi-bar staple:
The lack of variety in my plates is probably pretty obvious by now. You don’t have to eat the plate so I consider it slightly less important. Anyway, they looked and tasted like sushi shrimp, albeit slightly rough around the edges. I was happy enough to move on to tuna #2:
It was clearly a modified version of my previous tuna dish, but this time with much happier looking fish and a bed of sushi rice. The (pretentiously applied) sauce is a miso/ginger/soy reduction.
I’m getting pretty sick of typing but already resized and uploaded some additional images, so I’ll just post them with short descriptions:
Breaking in my new grill pan with a ribeye. Believe it or not, I got sick of the ribeye cut and moved on to the flat iron. Easily my favorite cut right now, flat iron steaks are reasonably priced, extremely tender and almost devoid of large fat deposits. This is a pleasant change compared to the giant ring of fat on a rib eye. Here’s a flat iron with some garlic and cayenne bread stick action:
Eventually I’ll go through a bean/chili phase, but what you see there is from a can. The steak is topped with some crumbled feta.
On a whim one day, my roommate suggested I make pretzels. I had a pre-ferment (flour, yeast, water left to bubble and develop for a while) that I didn’t have a plan for, and that was perfect. It turns out pretzels are very easy to make, aside from the shaping part. I fucked them up pretty bad, but they tasted great. I made a batch of pretzel bites and have made a shitload of them since. They are great for parties (with a cheese dipping sauce).
Bagels are a procedural cousin of pretzels, so I will be attempting them soon. I also tried stuffing pretzels with cheese, which worked pretty well.
Here’s a shot of chicken tacos, and I will offer no further explanation:
And finally, here is a cameraphone shot of my barbeque chicken from tonight. I resurrected the old biscuit recipe (part of the inspiration for posting this tonight), but replaced the cheddar with pepper-jack. The beans are from a can again, but everything else is fresh. The image quality is terrible, and in fact the food itself wasn’t anything mind-blowing. The only interesting part of this, I think, is that the image is tagged with my exact GPS coordinates at the time I took the picture.
(You are looking at, clockwise from the lower left, a napa cabbage salad with fresh mozzarella and a light vinaigrette, pepper-jack “lobster” biscuit, chili con carne, potato and onion fry with 4 kinds of pepper, and a chicken breast brined with brown sugar and dried chilis and basted with Sweet Baby Ray’s barbeque sauce)
This post is meant to be an introduction to what I intend to focus in regards to this website. As such, it should help catch up to where I am right now, in anticipation of posts oriented toward specific food items in the near future. I will mix what I’ve learned with occasional how-to posts and recipes. Soon I should be able to document my experiences with home-made sourdough starters, and maybe I’ll finally expand my cookie making skills with help from my brand new copy of the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion.
Thanks for reading!
