The Munchies Blog

About a year ago, a recipe for No-Knead Bread published in the New York Times made its rounds through the foodblogs. I’m usually quite skeptical about these fads, but I did go and have a look at the recipe after reading so much praise about it. The bread is baked in an ovenproof saucepan, which I didn’t have at that time. So I put it aside but never quite forgot about it. Especially here in New Zealand, where it’s so difficult to get hold of nice bread, the promise of doing almost no work and getting something that nice as a result is just too good! One thing that did bother me though was that the bread is yeast-based. I generally prefer sourdough breads. So even when my flatmate bought a nice set of stainless-steel ovenproof saucepans about half a year ago, I didn’t try out the bread recipe.

Yesterday we had pizza for dinner. I used our two-years-past-its-use-by-date dried yeast (Edmond’s activated yeast, to be precise) that my flatmate kept telling me was still perfectly ok to use. I once did use it for a recipe (I don’t remember what it was), which ended in disaster. Since I suspected that some difference between German and NZ yeast might have been to blame, I stuck to my Edmond’s cookbook for the pizza base. And it turned out fairly nice.

Thus encouraged, I decided to finally try my luck with the no-knead bread. I used a variation of the original recipe and changed it further by using oat bran instead of flour to coat the tea towel.

And the result? Oh yum. Just like promised, a nice brown crunchy crust with soft, chewy interior and really great taste. It even almost satisfies my craving for German Brötchen (bread rolls, to give a completely inadequate translation).

Have a look:

Fresh out of the oven.

A bit later when it had cooled down: cut open.

And I even found a recipe for a sourdough version. So I’m going to order some 150-year-old sourdough starter and hope it’ll make it past the biosecurity watchdogs.

The other day, I had a good reason for baking a cake. Somehow, I didn’t really feel like chocolate (still not quite sure how that could happen, but nevermind…). We did, however, have lots of nice sprayfree lemons in the fridge. So I decided on lemon, passionfruit and preferably white chocolate for the flavours. A quick search led me to this recipe. Here is the result:

I followed the recipe exactly, with the one exception that I used preserved passionfruit (it’s not exactly passionfruit season right now). I could only find preserves that had sugar added, so I left out the sugar in the passionfruit topping.

I was very happy with the result. I think this was the first time that I managed to make a nice fluffy sponge cake. Now I just need to practise cutting sponges in half horizontally and piping pretty chocolate lace thingies :)

The other day, I discovered a new chocolate brand in a shop in Bochum: shokomonk (German website, but they have an English leaflet in the download section).

Shokomonk makes chocolate bars (50g each) in quite a lot of nice varieties: white chocolate crisp, coconut, raspberry, poppyseeds, or blueberry; milk chocolate with caramel, peanuts, walnuts, or small waffle pieces; dark chocoloate with jalapeños, orange, ginger, latte macchiato or peppermint.

So far, Andreas and I have tried the white chocolate with blueberries (delicious, but too sweet for Andreas’s taste) and the milk chocolate with caramel (both of us didn’t really like it). But I like the concept and I’m quite sure I’m going to try some more of their chocolate bars :)

Last week, I signed up for DFssgF 1, the German version of Euro Blogging by Post. I’d already given up hope that my parcel would arrive today — and then the doorbell rang and a neighbor delivered a parcel for me :) I was at home all day, so I guess the parcel delivery guy got scared away by all the scaffolding around the house and didn’t even try to deliver it directly.

Anyways, back to the parcel. Unfortunately, all I know about the sender is that he’s someone called Jens, and that he’s from Bonn. I had kindof expected to find the link to the sender’s blog inside the parcel… There’s one thing I can guess about Jens though: he seems to like Korean food.

At least, that’s what I got: a weird mixture of probably even weirder Korean food. Me, who’s definitely sceptical about Asian food! Oh well, that’s a chance to try out something new, I guess ;) And Andreas is quite happy.

The contents are (on the picture, clockwise starting from top left):

• Roasted Seasoned Laver.
• A can of Sweet Cinnamon Punch (on the side of the can, it says “Expired Date Prints On The Bottom”)
• Two tinfoil-wrapped, erm, rice rolls wrapped in seaweed? Or something? Seriously, I don’t have a clue about this stuff.
• A bowl of instant noodles. Without a single word I understand on the packaging (well, except for “bowl noodles”). And a picture that promises something like chilli peppers and something red as the flavor. Hmmm. I guess I’ll give this one to Andreas and watch from a safe distance…
• A very pink package with miniature chocolate-filled cookies. They’re nice. And all gone already :)
• A package with, hm, chocolate-covered cookie sticks, or something. The ingredient list says “wheat flour, sugar”. No mention of chocolate. They look good too, though.

Well, thanks a lot Jens! I think you would have made me even happier by sending me at least some instructions on what to do with the food though… Additional thanks go to Rosa for organising the whole thing and to Svenja for mentioning DFssgF in her blog.

For a round-up of DFssgF 1, go here.

Oh, and one more thing: I’ve been told that this blog entry doesn’t sound too enthusiastic. I’m sorry — I managed to catch a bad cold and find it fairly difficult to write cheerful things while my head feels like it’s wrapped in several layers of wool… I’m definitely happy about the parcel!

And another update: the sender is this Jens.

I just signed up for DFssgF 1 (”Deutsche Foodblogger schicken sich gegenseitig Fresspakete”), a German version of Euro Blogging by Post. That means that in a few days I’ll get the address of a fellow German foodblogger — and then I’ll have to come up with a few nice things to put into a parcel and send off to him/her. Of course, I will get a similar parcel in return. Whee, food surprises ;)

I just found a not-quite-serious Periodic Table of Desserts — “A Scientific and Rigorous approach to patisserie — in Full Color”.

That page also has links to flavor wheels to describe the taste of several foods and drinks, for example beer, wine, coffee, cheese, chocolate and, of all things, maple products.

On a related note: I just added Cooking for Engineers to our link section. The recipes there are written in a fairly “scientific” way, with pictures of the ingredients as well as of the finished food. One special thing on the site is the special tabular recipe layout (”patent pending”). This is difficult to describe, so head over and check it out, for example on today’s “Recipe File of the Day”, Simple Tiramisu.