Corduroy Orange

Believe it or not, I’m still reheating Thanksgiving…

Leftover leftovers:
Turkey Polenta Cakes, served with salsa and guacamole

Cranberry Sauce is another element of Thanksgiving Dinner that deserves the personal touch of being homemade.  For years I have followed my mother’s recipe for a cranberry jelly, which is good, but is difficult to get just right and if undercooked, never really gels and goes to the table as a cranberry syrup that tends to be ignored.

This year, I decided to go off-recipe and create my own.  A couple of elements that I decided were crucial: it should be easy to execute, capture the tartness of the cranberries, and have some body to it.  If I hit those points, I reasoned, it would be a garnish that would make its way onto everyone’s plate.

The bowl was empty at the end of the first meal of leftovers.

I’ll admit that some of Angstrom’s culinary proclivities are not ordinary for a two-and-a-half-year-old, but the little man was responsible, I think, for polishing off about a third of this sauce. He was such a fan of it that I actually didn’t get to eat quite as much of it as I would have liked to, so I am going to have to make another batch soon… maybe for Christmas; this recipe would also go quite nicely with ham.

Happy Thanksgiving!

You may have noticed that another year has come and gone without me being invited to share my Thanksgiving tips on NPR.  I can’t say that I blame them.  I don’t have a book or a TV show, and it’s not like I’ve got a publicist or a manager booking high profile appearances for me.  So what makes me think I might deserve an invitation to appear on All Things Considered?  Because this pie is just the start of the meal.

Revolutionary Roasted Mushroom Pumpkin Pie capitalizes on the savory aspects of pumpkin and elevates your Thanksgiving appetizer course to a new level.

Revolutionary Roasted Mushroom Pumpkin Pie
A New Classic is Born in this Savory Appetizer Pie

• 2 cups prepared pumpkin
• 1 1/2 cups mixed roasted mushrooms seasoned with spices and rosemary (see note at end of recipe)
• 3 eggs
• 12 oz evaporated goat milk
• 4 oz cow milk
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 1 tsp ginger
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• black pepper to taste
• homemade crust for a one crust pie (see note at end of recipe)

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F
2. Beat the eggs with the salt and spices.
3. Add the evaporated goat milk and the cow milk, stir to combine.
4. Stir in the prepared pumpkin and the roasted mushrooms.
5. Roll out the pie crust, drape into a 9-inch pie pan. Pour pumpkin mixture into crust. Bake at 450 for the first 10 minutes. Reduce heat to 350 and bake for another 40-45 minutes or until the filling has mostly set (it should have puffed up slightly, have a thicker, jelled consistency, and be dull in color except for the very center of the pie).
6. Let cool to room temperature on a rack before covering and refrigerating. Optional garnish: serve with lightly salted whipped cream

Please share this page with everyone you know (especially if you know Steve Inskeep and Robert Siegel). Just be certain to give me credit—I don’t want to hear Nigella Lawson giving this recipe over the air!

Several years ago, when I was still working in a restaurant where I occasionally had a shift baking, I did pretty well at maintaining a sourdough starter.  Then, and it’s tough to remember the exact sequence of events, but I think that breaking my leg was somehow involved, I killed the yeast.  Found it one day submerged in a pool of pink slime.  I can’t say I was really devastated, or even surprised.  I’d gotten off track with my starter, hadn’t even glanced at it in well nigh a month at that point.

Still, it was nice to be able to whip up bread with nothing but flour, water, and salt.

I’ve been maintaining a new starter for about a month now.  It was a gift from Brett (of the chocolate sourdough fame) and it has been pretty easy to maintain.  So far, at least.  And I’ve made some fantastic bread and an amazing pizza crust from the resulting dough.

It’s often been said that baking is a science and one must rigorously follow formulae to get the desired result.  I disagree.  If I were to have rigorously followed the formula for pain au levain that I used as a starting point for my dough making, I’d have come up with a ‘dough’ that more closely resembled a puddle.  “Resist the temptation to add more flour,” the recipe said, “this dough should be quite soft.”  I’m quite content to have ignored that bit of advice.

A couple of batches of bread feeling out the consistency under my belt, I decided to take more careful stock of the measurements.  Perhaps get a formula of my own that is somewhat replicable.  No idea if this will work for you, but it seems to do the trick for me.

Basic Sourdough Formula

• 38 ounces (by weight) fed starter
• 3 lb unbleached all purpose flour
• 25 oz water
• 2 Tbl kosher salt
• 4 oz additional flour

1. Your starter should have been fed within the last 2-6 hours.  You should have measured out about 12 oz of it and returned it to its home in a glass canning jar in the fridge.  The 38 remaining ounces are enough to make about 3 loaves of bread and 2 pizzas.  If that’s more bread than you want, give some of it away, or discard some of the starter and reduce proportionately the remaining ingredients.
2. Use cold water, preferably water that has had several hours to sit since having come from the tap, so that the chlorine included in most tap water will have had a chance to dissipate.  Or use bottled water if you must, but from a waste reduction standpoint, I would highly encourage against that.  Heat the water to 100 degrees F.
3. Combine the water and the starter.  Add the flour and mix.  Cover with a clean dishcloth and let sit about 30 minutes.
4. Mix the salt into the dough by kneading it on a heavily floured surface (that’s what the additional 4 oz of flour are for).  Don’t put all 4 oz down at once.  Start with about 1/3 of it and add more as needed.  When you have a dough that is smooth, elastic, and only a little bit sticky, return it to the bowl, cover it with the dish cloth, and let it rise for an hour or two.
5. Gently deflate the dough by separating it from the side of the bowl and pushing down on it gently.  Cover with plastic wrap and put in the refrigerator overnight, or up to 3 days.
6. Remove from the fridge.  Divide into portions and let sit at room temperature to warm back up.
7. For pizza:
   1. Grease the bottoms of two standard half sheet trays.  Stretch the dough by hand to cover most of the area.
   2. Spread with sauce, sprinkle with cheese, and add the toppings of your choice.
   3. Bake in a preheated 450 degree F oven for about 30 minutes or until done.
8. For bread:
   1. Shape loaves.  Let proof for about 30 minutes to an hour.
   2. Heat cast iron pans flipped upside down in a 400 degree F oven, plus a small cast iron pan rightside up at the very bottom.
   3. When the bread has proofed, transfer it to the hot cast iron pan bottoms.  If doing two loaves on the same pan, allow adequate space so that they don’t grow together in the oven.  Should that happen, the parts that are ‘kissing’ will still be doughy when everything else is done.
   4. Pour some water into the rightside up pan and also scatter some on the floor of the oven.  A huge cloud of steam will result.  Close the oven door quickly to keep it contained.  Watch out for steam burns!
   5. Set the timer for 20 minutes.  When it rings, remove the pan of water from the oven.  Steam for the first 20 minutes will help to produce a beautiful crust, but you need dry heat to finish it.  Set the timer for another 20 minutes.
   6. The bread is done when golden brown with a crackling crust and it sounds hollow when thumped from beneath.  Remove it to a rack to cool.

If you want to know how to start a sourdough starter, there are plenty of great resources that you can find to guide you.  Strange but true culinary school tidbit… when I was in the baking rotation of culinary school, the sourdough recipe they taught involved no starter.  Instead, they added pickle juice to the dough to give it tang.  I was incensed.  “That’s not a real sourdough!” I protested.  The chef instructor said, “wait til you taste the bread.  That dough really is sour!”

Pshaw!

Giant Eagle has “locked in” lots of prices until January 3.

Is it just me, or does that seem like a promise to raise prices on January 4?

My friend Brett has been making lots of bread.  His chocolate sourdough was the inspiration for one of the most delightful french toasts I’ve ever made.

Here’s the photographic proof to verify my allegation that the folks at Breyer’s are telling a falsehood when they describe frozen dairy dessert as being made with ‘many of the same high-quality ingredients’ as their ice cream, ‘including fresh milk, cream, and sugar.’

I’m sure their lawyers will tell you that the phrase “many of the same” and the presence of milk, cream, and sugar in the frozen dairy dessert means that they are not lying.  But as anyone even remotely schooled in logic and rhetoric can tell you, there are two types of lies: lies of omission and lies of comission.

The phrasing of Breyer’s claim is intentionally designed to gloss over the addition of corn syrup into the formula.  Also to gloss over the addition of mono- and di-glycerides, guar gum, carob bean gum, and carrageenan.  Basically, more emulsifiers and thickeners to disguise the lower-quality ingredients, resulting in a different texture and an overall cheaper (read: not worth buying) product.

Click on the small picture for a full-sized photo.

Breyer’s is no longer ice cream.

Breyer’s now manufactures “Frozen Dairy Dessert.”  According to their website,

The thing is, what Breyer’s does not acknowledge in this description is that a side-by-side comparison of the ingredients in like flavors from before and after the switch, their frozen dairy dessert is partially sweetened by corn syrup, whereas their ice cream was sweetened only with real sugar.

Again, from the Breyer’s website:

Okay, so
1) the frozen dairy dessert has a somewhat slimy texture (even before I discovered the labeling switch, my immediate reaction to the box of Rocky Road I purchased was that there was something off with the contents) and
2) I don’t want less fat with my ice cream. If I wanted less fat, I wouldn’t be eating ice cream, now would I? Don’t go effing with my dessert formulae in the name of better health and then swap out real sugar for a processed alternative sweetener and then lie about it!

Again, official propaganda from Breyers:

My revision:

Except that by Nothing, I definitely mean something good.

The name for this dish is a side effect of asking a 2-year-old what he thinks a new dish should be called. 

I guess it shows that Angstrom has a sense of humor, though, because the second time I made it, he laughed every time I told him that I was putting Nothing in the oven and giving him Nothing on a plate.  Rory suggested I ought to give this dish a different name, but I sort of agree with Angstrom: Nothing is a funny name for something to be called.

I got some church lady pierogies this week and brought them home to cook.  I always cook lots of vegetables to go with them.  This week, it was onions, garlic, mushrooms, hot pepper, and bell peppers.  My copper-bottomed stainless steel was out and handy, so I used it.

I got about halfway through adding the vegetables into the pan and realized that it was getting a bit crowded, so I grabbed my ceramic-lined cast iron off of the pot rack (the only cast iron that hangs—the rest sit in the cupboard being so heavy that they’ve bowed the cupboard floor.  Whenever we get around to redoing the kitchen, we’re going to have to install a specially reinforced cupboard with custom-built organizational slots to accommodate my collection).  I fired up the heat under that pan and transferred about half of what was in the stainless pan to the new one once it got hot.

Even though my stainless pan was over the so-called ‘power burner’ on my stove, and even though I actually had more gas burning under it than I did my cast iron pan, the vegetables in the stainless pan were cooking but not taking on any color while the ones in the cast iron pan were taking on a beautiful caramel hue.  I wound up doing multiple transfers/ retransfers between the two pans to get all of the veg to caramleize properly.

My Standard Pierogie Vegetable Mix Recipe

Slice onions, garlic, mushrooms and peppers.  Add about a half stick of butter to a hot pan.  Once it has mostly melted, put the onions into the pan along with a pinch of salt and black pepper to taste.  Cook over mediumish heat, stirring about once a minute.  Once the onions have softened and are starting to brown, add the garlic.  Cook for 1-3 minutes until it starts to brown.  Add the mushrooms and cook, stirring occasionally, until they have shrunk and taken on some color.  (if your pan is getting too full, divide between two pans).  Add the peppers and cook until they have softened.

One-pan instructions

Remove the cooked vegetables to a plate to hold.  Add the other half stick of butter to the pan.  Brown the pierogies in the butter, flipping just once.  When the pierogies have browned, return the vegetables tot he pan.  optional: Add chicken or vegetable stock and reduce over high heat to a sauce.

Two-pan instructions:

Put all of the vegetables in one of the pans.  Add chicken stock and reduce over medium-high heat to a sauce.  Meanwhile, add the other half stick of butter to the now-empty pan.  Brown the pierogies in here, flipping only once.  When they are browned, transfer them to the vegetable-filled pan, arranging them in an attractive radiating star pattern across the top of the pan for family-style service.