Krentebrood; yummy cooking disasters
Krentebrood
We did the cooking for the New Year's Eve gathering last year (erm, I guess that's the right way of putting the year reference). It received excellent notice from ukelele among others; alas, I feel sort of bad as I'd hoped to post this before she had vastly more important things to occupy her attention.
This is a traditional Dutch recipe, and one I absolutely love. I hybridized recipes from 3 sources to come up with the ones I use (a Dutch kook boek from the 50's I think, Beard on Bread, and the Koekbrood recipe in Everybody Eats Well in Belgium). There's a bread machine version, which is the one I've usually been making the last couple of years. This time desireearmfeldt convinced me to make it by hand; her claim is it doesn't take much more effort, and you get two loaves. As it turned out it was a bit recalcitrant this time, and I had a horrific time kneading. I'll give the recipe the way you should make it (meaning the way I've made it painlessly in the past, and not the painful way I did it this time).
For two loaves, we use 7-8c flour, 2c currants (1 package), 2c milk, 3+t yeast, 3/4c sugar, 1 1/2t salt, 8T butter, 3 eggs (I actually used leftover egg yolks and eyeballed this time). A small amount of beaten egg is set aside and mixed with water to make an egg wash for later.
I made a sponge with a few cups of flour, the milk (heated in microwave), and the sugar, plus the yeast. Let this work for a while. Then add eggs, salt, flour (reserving some), and floured currants (my mistake: heeding the recipe and adding them after the first rise, which is nigh-impossible as the dough becomes too glutenous to integrate them). Finally, knead in the molten butter. If you're hard kore, you can try to work in the unmelted butter; bread flour makes this nearly impossible, though. And you can put the butter in earlier without noticable impact (cookbooks' claims to the contrary; this isn't pastry, you goofs!).
Treat as you would white bread: Knead, rise, punch down and shape into two loaves, rise again. Brush loaves with egg wash just before baking; this gives the crust its excellent texture and finish and is absolutely essential. You can do loaves loose (as I do) or in bread pans (I feel this doesn't take best advantage of the egg wash). Bake at 375-400F 30-35min. Cool before slicing. Hey goofs: cutting bread while it's still hot in the middle may be satisfying, but it totally wrecks the bread as it causes it to collapse and turn chewy!
For bread machine, use half the ingredients (4c flour is the canonical "large" loaf in our machine). I melt the butter in the microwave along with about half the milk, then add half the milk and dissolve the yeast and sugar into it. I beat in the eggs and put in the machine. I flour the currants and set them aside. The rest of the flour and the salt goes into the bread machine, and I start things up on a standard white cycle.
Near the end of the first knead, you'll need to add the currants (I had to look up timings in the machine manual). If you add them at the start they get shredded. Our machine has a "fruit and nut compartment", but annoyingly this is waay too small for the purpose.
Just before the "bake" cycle, you need to open the machine and brush the loaf with egg wash. This can be tricky (esp as the machine preheats and this cools it a bit). Work quickly and as thoroughly as you can.
Oh, and obviously you can't set this one up the night before and have the bread machine run at 5AM. Not a good idea with an eggy/milky dough anyway, I should think.
Pasta a la Ratatouille, with bonus smoke alarm
desireearmfeldt complains that ratatouille always ends up soggifying the eggplant before it becomes properly soft and smooth. The Gourmet Cookbook has a version which separately cooks the various components, then adds the softened eggplant to a slow-cooked tomato sauce near the end. I decided to do my meaty pasta-sauce variation on Ratatouille using the baked pasta sauce theme from previous posts.
The idea is simple: In a pot on the stove, make a tomato sauce with 3 sauteed onions, a couple of sauteed peppers, 3 cans of crushed tomato, basil, and parsley. Important: no salt! This slow cooked to about half its original volume with the lid slightly cocked.
Meanwhile, I took our ginormous casserole and coated the bottom with olive oil. Then put in a whole mess of fresh thyme and rosemary, and a teaspoon or so of fennel seeds. I cut up 2 eggplants and salted them, then left them in a colander in a sink. I cut up 3 oversized zucchini (ratatouille deals with oversized zucchini well, which is good because they're inferior in most recipes) and put them in the bottom of the casserole. On top of that, the eggplant. Finally, the peeled cloves from an entire head of garlic.
Uh oh. The giant casserole is full, and I haven't put the sausage in yet. Into the 400F oven it goes for half an hour.
Then I took it out and added a sliced pound of sweet italian sausage. Out of room again! Into the oven for half an hour. Then there's enough room for the sliced pound of hot italian sausage. Finally I add a cup of TJ's red plonk.
Several hours later it turns out the casserole is quite soupy. The eggplant texture is lovely; I left it on top of the zukes so it could roast before it boiled. But now it's given up most of its liquid.
The plan at this point is to add the tomato sauce to the casserole and cook together for half an hour or so. Carrying out this plan turns out to be a massive strategic blunder. The casserole is full of soggy liquid, and it starts spilling all over the inside of the oven.
A number of failed saving throws against oven mess follow; I do at least pull off baking sheet mitigation, but the oven fills with thick smoke from the spills. This fills the apartment and sets off the smoke detectors.
Eventually I get enough liquid out to put into a separate pot and cook down on the stove. This is massively labor-intensive, though, as it involves letting the casserole settle and periodically fishing as much liquid out as possible. Plus I dirty another pot, and there is tomato sauce coating the stove and oven. I just finished cleaning those, darnit!
The correct thing to do in this situation: Transfer cooking liquid from casserole to tomato sauce. Cook this down a whole bunch (probably on high heat). Then consolidate the whole deal back into the casserole. No extra pots, much less kitchen mess, no smoke alarms requiring open windows on a cold day.
We had this with Barilla low-carb high-fiber pasta. I get this for the fiber; I couldn't care less about the low carbs. But it's pretty tasty if you get it cooked just right (not true of all the "healthy" pastas out there).
And I'm happy to say that nothing burned actually ended up in dinner; the result was quite tasty.
Oh yes, why season the sauce and the veggies separately? This was mostly based on a judgement call about which herbs would fare best in saucepan vs braising. I wanted the veggies to be as seasoned as possible, but feel that basil and parsley don't like that treatment so much.
We did the cooking for the New Year's Eve gathering last year (erm, I guess that's the right way of putting the year reference). It received excellent notice from ukelele among others; alas, I feel sort of bad as I'd hoped to post this before she had vastly more important things to occupy her attention.
This is a traditional Dutch recipe, and one I absolutely love. I hybridized recipes from 3 sources to come up with the ones I use (a Dutch kook boek from the 50's I think, Beard on Bread, and the Koekbrood recipe in Everybody Eats Well in Belgium). There's a bread machine version, which is the one I've usually been making the last couple of years. This time desireearmfeldt convinced me to make it by hand; her claim is it doesn't take much more effort, and you get two loaves. As it turned out it was a bit recalcitrant this time, and I had a horrific time kneading. I'll give the recipe the way you should make it (meaning the way I've made it painlessly in the past, and not the painful way I did it this time).
For two loaves, we use 7-8c flour, 2c currants (1 package), 2c milk, 3+t yeast, 3/4c sugar, 1 1/2t salt, 8T butter, 3 eggs (I actually used leftover egg yolks and eyeballed this time). A small amount of beaten egg is set aside and mixed with water to make an egg wash for later.
I made a sponge with a few cups of flour, the milk (heated in microwave), and the sugar, plus the yeast. Let this work for a while. Then add eggs, salt, flour (reserving some), and floured currants (my mistake: heeding the recipe and adding them after the first rise, which is nigh-impossible as the dough becomes too glutenous to integrate them). Finally, knead in the molten butter. If you're hard kore, you can try to work in the unmelted butter; bread flour makes this nearly impossible, though. And you can put the butter in earlier without noticable impact (cookbooks' claims to the contrary; this isn't pastry, you goofs!).
Treat as you would white bread: Knead, rise, punch down and shape into two loaves, rise again. Brush loaves with egg wash just before baking; this gives the crust its excellent texture and finish and is absolutely essential. You can do loaves loose (as I do) or in bread pans (I feel this doesn't take best advantage of the egg wash). Bake at 375-400F 30-35min. Cool before slicing. Hey goofs: cutting bread while it's still hot in the middle may be satisfying, but it totally wrecks the bread as it causes it to collapse and turn chewy!
For bread machine, use half the ingredients (4c flour is the canonical "large" loaf in our machine). I melt the butter in the microwave along with about half the milk, then add half the milk and dissolve the yeast and sugar into it. I beat in the eggs and put in the machine. I flour the currants and set them aside. The rest of the flour and the salt goes into the bread machine, and I start things up on a standard white cycle.
Near the end of the first knead, you'll need to add the currants (I had to look up timings in the machine manual). If you add them at the start they get shredded. Our machine has a "fruit and nut compartment", but annoyingly this is waay too small for the purpose.
Just before the "bake" cycle, you need to open the machine and brush the loaf with egg wash. This can be tricky (esp as the machine preheats and this cools it a bit). Work quickly and as thoroughly as you can.
Oh, and obviously you can't set this one up the night before and have the bread machine run at 5AM. Not a good idea with an eggy/milky dough anyway, I should think.
Pasta a la Ratatouille, with bonus smoke alarm
desireearmfeldt complains that ratatouille always ends up soggifying the eggplant before it becomes properly soft and smooth. The Gourmet Cookbook has a version which separately cooks the various components, then adds the softened eggplant to a slow-cooked tomato sauce near the end. I decided to do my meaty pasta-sauce variation on Ratatouille using the baked pasta sauce theme from previous posts.
The idea is simple: In a pot on the stove, make a tomato sauce with 3 sauteed onions, a couple of sauteed peppers, 3 cans of crushed tomato, basil, and parsley. Important: no salt! This slow cooked to about half its original volume with the lid slightly cocked.
Meanwhile, I took our ginormous casserole and coated the bottom with olive oil. Then put in a whole mess of fresh thyme and rosemary, and a teaspoon or so of fennel seeds. I cut up 2 eggplants and salted them, then left them in a colander in a sink. I cut up 3 oversized zucchini (ratatouille deals with oversized zucchini well, which is good because they're inferior in most recipes) and put them in the bottom of the casserole. On top of that, the eggplant. Finally, the peeled cloves from an entire head of garlic.
Uh oh. The giant casserole is full, and I haven't put the sausage in yet. Into the 400F oven it goes for half an hour.
Then I took it out and added a sliced pound of sweet italian sausage. Out of room again! Into the oven for half an hour. Then there's enough room for the sliced pound of hot italian sausage. Finally I add a cup of TJ's red plonk.
Several hours later it turns out the casserole is quite soupy. The eggplant texture is lovely; I left it on top of the zukes so it could roast before it boiled. But now it's given up most of its liquid.
The plan at this point is to add the tomato sauce to the casserole and cook together for half an hour or so. Carrying out this plan turns out to be a massive strategic blunder. The casserole is full of soggy liquid, and it starts spilling all over the inside of the oven.
A number of failed saving throws against oven mess follow; I do at least pull off baking sheet mitigation, but the oven fills with thick smoke from the spills. This fills the apartment and sets off the smoke detectors.
Eventually I get enough liquid out to put into a separate pot and cook down on the stove. This is massively labor-intensive, though, as it involves letting the casserole settle and periodically fishing as much liquid out as possible. Plus I dirty another pot, and there is tomato sauce coating the stove and oven. I just finished cleaning those, darnit!
The correct thing to do in this situation: Transfer cooking liquid from casserole to tomato sauce. Cook this down a whole bunch (probably on high heat). Then consolidate the whole deal back into the casserole. No extra pots, much less kitchen mess, no smoke alarms requiring open windows on a cold day.
We had this with Barilla low-carb high-fiber pasta. I get this for the fiber; I couldn't care less about the low carbs. But it's pretty tasty if you get it cooked just right (not true of all the "healthy" pastas out there).
And I'm happy to say that nothing burned actually ended up in dinner; the result was quite tasty.
Oh yes, why season the sauce and the veggies separately? This was mostly based on a judgement call about which herbs would fare best in saucepan vs braising. I wanted the veggies to be as seasoned as possible, but feel that basil and parsley don't like that treatment so much.