The Munchies Blog

Not much text required, really: I made bagels (following Anne’s recipe, with 350g high grade flour and 150g organic wholemeal flour) twice in the last week. They’re great. With and without sesame.

I first tried out this recipe two years ago and it was quite a failure. Back then I mistreated the yeast (I think) and didn’t pre-heat the oven. So the failure was entirely my own fault…

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.

This is what I made for dinner tonight (I’m sorry there’s no picture; my flatmates came home just when dinner was done and we immediately started eating).

Red Rice and Tuna Baskets

• 3 sheets flaky pastry, frozen (they’re about 30×30cm here)
• 3 handful red thai rice (normal rice probably works just as well)
• 1 can tuna in spring water (185g)
• 1 onion
• 1 handful chives, cut into small pieces with a pair of scissors
• 2 handful grated cheese (I used colby, but cheddar or gouda would work as well)
• 2 large eggs

Take the pastry sheets out of the freezer and spread out on the kitchen bench to defrost. Cover with clean tea towels if you have a non-trustworthy cat. Pre-heat the oven to 200 C.

Grease a standard muffin tray with some butter.

Boil the rice in salted water until soft.

Chop the onion into small pieces and fry in a little bit of olive oil together with the tuna until the onions are soft.

Cut the pastry sheets into quarters and put each piece into one hole in the muffin tray so that it lines the walls. Some parts of the pastry, especially the corners, will stick out.
When the rice is done, drain it well and put it into a medium-sized bowl. Add the onion and tuna, the chives, the grated cheese and the eggs. Season with salt, black and white pepper and smoked paprika (I used La Chinata spicy).

Spoon the filling into the pastry baskets and bake for about 20 minutes or until the pastry starts to get brown and the filling looks set. Leave to cool for a few minutes before eating.

I’m quite happy with this food and I’m pretty sure this is what I’ll bring to the next potluck dinner.

It’s still blueberry season here in New Zealand — but you have to be a bit careful, some varieties are not really nice.

The other day, I made blueberry clafoutis, a recipe I’d wanted to try out for ages.

I didn’t change much from the original, but here is a translation.

Blueberry Clafoutis

• 500g blueberries
• 3 eggs
• 50g icing sugar
• 4 tablespoons standard flour
• 100ml milk
• 100ml cream — or just double the amount of milk
• pinch of salt
• butter for greasing the baking dish
• icing sugar for dusting

Pre-heat oven to 220°C.

Grease an ovenproof dish and put the berries in.

Beat the eggs together with the icing sugar until frothy, then add flour, milk, cream and the pinch of salt.

Pour mixture over berries and bake about 35 minutes. Let cool down slightly and dust with icing sugar.

I was a bit confused when I got the ingredients out of the pantry, so I overlooked the icing sugar. I used caster sugar instead, which seems to work just as well. I used 200ml of milk as the cream… well, let’s not talk about this.

Altogether, I liked the clafoutis. But I think I prefer more substantial cakes.

I felt like baking the other day, so I made chocolate crinkle cookies from a recipe at Anne’s Food.

It feels a bit strange to make them: most of the moisture comes from melted chocolate and butter, and they have to stand in the fridge overnight. Then you form small balls, roll them in icing sugar, and put them on a cookie sheet — almost like baking chocolate truffles…

The cookies look very good (I was actually quite impressed — I have this unfortunate tendency to mess up things that are supposed to look good, but this time things went really well). I’m not that happy with the taste though. It feels like something’s missing. Maybe it’s because they do look a bit like christmas cookies, but there isn’t even any cinnamon or something in there. I think next time I’ll try adding some chopped almonds or something.

I think it was in one of my baking books that I first read about the concept of a pound cake: Use the weight of the eggs to measure out equal amounts of butter, sugar and flour. Back in the old days, when people had proper kitchen scales and so on, the eggs were simply used instead of the usual metal weights. In German, this batter is sometimes also called “Eischwerteig” — with “Ei” meaning egg, “schwer” heavy and “Teig” batter or dough.

The cookbook said that nowadays, use of rising agents like baking powder allowed for “better” proportions of ingredients, or something. I was still fairly curious, and seeing a recipe on Fool for Food (in German) convinced me to give it a try. Claudia (and I) used some amaretto for flavoring the cake. Well, I really like it (very moist and much nicer than my usual “I feel like baking” cakes), but I guess one shouldn’t be scared of greasy food…

Almond Pound Cake

• some eggs — 4 seems to be usual; I used 3, at room temperature
• butter, at room temperature
• sugar
• flour
• about 40ml of amaretto (could be more, I think)
• pinch of salt (which I forgot)

Weigh the eggs (still in their shells), measure out the same amount of butter, sugar and flour. Apparently it’s really important that all ingredients have the same temperature.

And now everything depends on the order the ingredients are added — and it’s very important to beat them properly.
Beat butter and sugar with a balloon whisk for 3-4 minutes. Yes, this is hard work in the beginning.

Beat in one egg at a time, always stir until it’s completely mixed in.

Add the amaretto and stir it in completely.

Fold in the flour. No more stirring afterwards.

Pour in greased(!) cake tin and let rest for 45 minutes. Bake in pre-heated oven at about 150°C/300°F for about 45 minutes (Claudia’s recipe says 180°C, but our convection oven seems to need lower temperatures).

In case you haven’t greased the cake tin: get someone to use brute force to get the cake out of the tin… (Not fun, this part.)

If you insist on decorating things: mix some icing sugar with a splash of amaretto. Cover cake with mixture. Sprinkle over some almond slivers.

When I tried out the recipe for a chocolate and pear cake in Linda Collister’s “Backen mit Schokolade” (the English original is Chocolate Baking) last Christmas, I realised that a good recipe is more than just a recipe for good food. A good recipe is one that you can follow without constantly reading ahead — one that takes the planning/scheduling overhead away from you. Bad recipes tell you to do things in an order that doesn’t make sense. Or they cheat by calling for things like “4 large eggs, separated” — instead of telling you to separate the eggs at a time in the recipe “flow” where it makes sense.

The chocolate and pear cake is really nice, but the recipe… well, isn’t. I haven’t managed to optimise it yet, but I’ll post it here with the modifications I made today.

Recipe: Chocolate and Pear Cake

Base:

• 180 g all-purpose flour
• 110 g cold butter, diced
• 30 g brown sugar
• 1 egg yolk
• 2-4 Tbsp ice water

Sieve flour into a bowl, add the butter. Work with your fingertips (much easier than fighting with the food processor) until crumbs form. Add sugar, egg yolk and water. Now the recipe says to use a knife with a rounded tip to make the mixture into a dough. It also says to start with 1 Tbsp ice water and add a bit more if the dough stays too dry. Well, this kind of dough always stays too dry when I do it. That doesn’t really matter though. Just mix things a bit more and try to get a bit larger crumbs.

Make a ball out of the dough (well, if you can get the crumbs to stick together, that is), wrap in foil and refrigerate for some 20 minutes.

Get rid of all the stuff hiding out in the oven. Put a baking tray on the oven floor. The oven needs to be preheated to 200°C — do it now or, if you want to save energy, wait a bit with that. Find a springform, about 23 cm in diameter.

Filling:

• 125 g bittersweet chocolate, broken into pieces
• 125 g butter
• 90 g brown sugar
• 4 large eggs
• 125 g ground almonds
• 2-3 drops almond essence (I guess a little splash of Amaretto would work just as well)
• pinch of salt
• 2 ripe, medium-sized pears (preferably Williams Christ)

Put an ovenproof bowl in a saucepan with water. Put chocolate into bowl. Heat (not boil) the water so that the chocolate melts.

Meanwhile, separate the eggs. Beat the egg whites together with the salt (hint from one of my aunts: much easier if you also add a Tbsp cold water) until soft peaks form. Set aside. (My reason for doing that now is that I only have one bowl that I can use together with the food processor. After setting aside the egg white stuff, I can clean and reuse that bowl.)

Check that nothing bad is happening with the chocolate. And if you haven’t started to preheat the oven yet, better do it now. Take the dough out of the fridge and put it into the springform. Flatten it out and stretch it a bit so that it covers the bottom and goes up at the sides, about 2-3 cm high. Now it’s probably time to take the chocolate off the stove.

Whisk the butter (which should be fairly soft — either put it in the microwave for a very (!) short time, or reuse the chocolate saucepan), add the sugar. The recipe says that this should become thick and creamy. Well, doesn’t happen when I do it. Just ignore the recipe and gradually whisk in the egg yolks. Stir in the chocolate, then add the almonds and the almond essence or amaretto. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

Pour the filling onto the base and make the surface look pretty.

Peel the pears, cut them in half and get rid of all the stuff you wouldn’t want to eat (if the pears are ripe enough, a teaspoon can be very helpful for this task). Slice thinly, but don’t cut all the way through — the slices should stay connected at the top (look at the picture, that makes things much clearer). Spread out onto the filling in a decorative way.

Set the springform onto the hot baking tray and bake for 15 minutes (still at 200°C). After that time, turn down the heat to 180°C and bake for some 10 more minutes — until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Carefully get rid of the side part of the springform. Serve the cake warm or cold. The recipe suggests to serve it with crème fraîche or vanilla ice cream. Whipped cream also works well (and I’m a bit sceptical about the crème fraîche).

According to the recipe, the cake tastes even better the next day (even though it won’t look as pretty).

Note: It’s important to use ripe pears. Or to equip people with knives.

Just a quick picture upload, really: Yesterday I tried out the recipe for quiche with red capsicum (aka bell pepper) and feta cheese from basic baking — I’m not posting the recipe itself because I didn’t change anything compared to the original.

I actually didn’t really like it yesterday, but I’d made enough for two days and today it was quite nice. It wasn’t the best of ideas to use the cheap feta cheese though.

After reading a posting on Chocolate & Zucchini about a cookie baking mix that is sold in glass jars, layered up like those “colored sand in a pictureframe” things, I decided that this would make a good present.

The cookie recipe I used is this one (I basically used the first one from allrecipes.com that looked okay and didn’t ask for raisins or anything like that).

Of course I had to try the cookie recipe first. What a good opportunity for my new cookie jar (from IKEA). I just fear they won’t last long — I really like them. Andreas doesn’t, though (”too much salt, too much butter”). But maybe that’s a good thing ;)

I don’t know if it’s actually going to work out with making cookies from this mix. After all, the original recipe says to mix the butter with the sugar first and add the other ingredients afterwards. But I guess with a food processor that doesn’t matter too much.

If I ever hear what happened to the jar I gave away, I’ll write about it.

I’d seen a biscotti recipe on Cooking for Engineers a while ago, but I didn’t feel like trying it out. One problem is that it’s difficult to get hold of untreated oranges here, and in addition to that I’m not too fond of aniseed. When I stumbled over a recipe for Chocolate Biscotti a few days ago, I decided to give it a try. “Everything’s good if it’s made of chocolate”, after all ;)

I followed the recipe, with one exception: I didn’t have much time when I made them, so I baked the slices standing upright, thus saving the “flip slices over and bake for another 20 minutes” step. The biscotti were fairly nice, but I think I made the slices too thick (about 1.5 cm, should be 1 cm). As I used the food processor to mix the dough, I might have overmixed it a bit (I hadn’t seen the warning about that on Cooking for Engineers until it was too late). I’m definitely going to make them again, but then I’ll add almonds or walnuts to the dough. Chocolate is nice, but the biscotti would be even better with a bit of texture variation, I think.