Challah Revisited: Babka

My first few attempts at challah were surprisingly easy and successful. The recipe yields two loaves. And while I could easily eat both before they go stale, I decided to experiment with the dough. Babka seemed the natural successor to challah… the sweet, yeasty dough with chocolate swirls in the middle. Martha Stewart has a recipe that uses butter and milk. I made it once and for such a complicated recipe it was disappointing. Zabaar’s makes the best babka I’ve eaten and it’s dairy free. It seems like a logical step that challah enriched with eggs and oil would be as suitable substitute for sweet dough enriched with butter and milk.

I switched out the recipe for the dough, but otherwise used Martha’s technique.

I blended bittersweet chocolate with butter, sugar and flour. I rolled out the dough to ½ inch thick rectangle and sprinkled the chocolate mix on top. I rolled up the dough like a jelly-roll and folded it until it fit into a loaf pan.

I sprinkled the dough with a streusel topping of flour, sugar, butter and cinnamon.


Voila! Babka!

Adventures in Smoking

Welcome to my journey of culinary exploration. What started as a way to incorporate more bacon into my diet, ended in a discovery of a new taste sensation!

It all started with a post by Canary Girl. She wrote about bacon mayonnaise: mayonnaise made with rendered bacon fat instead of the usual vegetable oil. I was beside myself with the genius of this idea. But as I thought about it, the logistics seemed somewhat challenging. Bacon grease solidifies at room temperature which would make it seemingly difficult to emulsify into mayo. The really beauty of the idea, my thought- process continued, is the smoky, salty fat. So if I made “smoked” oil, then I could make mayo without bacon – and have a recipe that my non-pork eating friends would like.

Given my history of setting fires in other people’s kitchen, smoking oil wasn’t one of my better ideas. This is what I did… I lit a charcoal fire (yes, that’s right, open flame) in the Weber grill on the patio. When the embers started to fade, I threw on soaked wood chips. I put the grate on, and on the side without the flame, I put on a pot of canola oil. Oh, and as long as I was smoking, I put a second pan with home grown chilies and more oil. Thank goodness I’m still here to tell the tale, because I could have created a massive fire. But I didn’t and I ended up with some smoky oil and chilies.

With the oil, I made mayonnaise. Unfortunately, it tasted like the bottom of an ashtray. It probably would have been better with equal parts regular oil and smoked oil. As I recounted my tale to my neighbors they mentioned yet another brilliant idea: popcorn in bacon fat! And so the culinary journey continued…….

I rendered bacon over low heat – wanting to release the fat without crisping the bacon.

When enough fat coated the bottom of the pan, I added the corn kernels. While the corn popped, the bacon continued to crisp. After 10 minutes, I had fluffy popcorn mixed with crispy bacon bits. A quick toss with salt… The bacon flavor was good, but very subtle – I had used three slices for 1 cup of popcorn. Next time, I will need to use more bacon.
Since I also had the smoked chili oil, I decided to pop corn in that. Now THAT was delicious. Surprisingly smoky and unexpectedly spicy, it was a great success for pre-dinner cocktail snacks. Thanks to Canary Girl for inspiring this journey!

Cultivating Creativity: Peachy Mamas

I spoke with Brett (from Even' Star Farm) this morning and the Peachy Mama are producing incredible amounts. It's no wonder, he says, he planted 800 seedlings. CSA subscribers will be getting a pint or two in their weekly boxes, and he'll sell the rest at the Chevy Chase Farmers' Market on Saturday and to his wholesale restaurant customers. Peachy Mamas are sweet peppers that look like habaneros, but have no heat. They have a wonderful floraly aroma.

I've received several inquiries for recipes. While I don't have recipes, per se, I can offer you these suggestions:

• My favorite preparation is to slice the peppers and then saute them in (canola) oil until their soft. A slight brown is fine, but not much more than that. Season with salt. The peppers make a delightful hors d'ouevre served with crackers. I served them this way for Farm Share Thursday.
• I also mix them in tuna salad along with the standard mayonnise, celery and scallions. Brett also suggests mixing them in egg salad.
• Grapeseed Bistro makes a peachy-mama jelly, in the style of red pepper jelly and serves it with Grilled Chicken livers. This would also work well with grilled swordfish or halibut.
• Peachy Mamas pair beautifully with corn and okra. I put them in a succotash.
• Mixed with rice, they perk up the standard side dish.
• Make a relish with roasted peachy mamas mixed with olive oil, pinenuts and raisins. Season with salt and pepper, and perhaps a little balsamic.

Peachy Mama Jelly
2 cups diced peachy mamas
1/2 teaspoon dried hot red-pepper flakes
1 tablespoons pectin
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup white-wine vinegar
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1/4 teaspoon salt

Combine all ingredients, except pectin in a stainless steel pot. Bring to a boil, stirring frequently. Simmer for 5 minutes. Add pectin, stirring constantly, and continue cooking for 5 minutes over medium heat.

You can refrigerate for a week, or can according to the directions here.

Happy Experimenting! If you have some interesting recipes, I'd love to hear them too!

Kohlrabi – Cultivating Creativity

On a regular basis, I browse the supermarket aisles looking for inspiration for dinner. I’m hoping the mix of unrealized cravings and fresh produce will elicit a creative flash. More often than not, my plan fails and I usually fall back on a few standby’s: Clay-pot Chicken with Chinese Sausage and Mushrooms, Fish Tacos with Chipotle Slaw or Chicken Piccata with Spicy, Garlic Broccoli (yes, I cook this way on an idle Tuesday night). If you’re like me, the produce aisle (and the fish and meat counters, too) tends to look the same after a while… and I glaze over the unfamiliar or uninteresting like kohlrabi or jicama.

I only recently tried kohlrabi for the first time… at a Yoga Retreat in Costa Rica. I waxed on about its virtues here, so I won’t repeat myself now. I decided to grow some in my garden this year. Because Kohlrabi is so little known, though, it’s hard to find a recipe for it. And with my kohlrabi finally ready for harvest, my research has reached fever pitch. My two vegetarian cookbooks, Greens and Vegetarian Planet, have nary a reference. The old standby: Time-Life Cookbooks had a few.

I like to think of myself as a creative chef, but it’s hard to come up with ideas without a frame of reference. For example, I know tomatoes and basil work well, so I can season a ricotta filling for squash blossoms or cannolonis with basil and serve with a tomato ragout, toss pasta with fresh tomatoes and pesto, or serve beef with a tomato sauce dotted with basil. You get the idea: the same two ingredients in various configurations. This summer, I’ve eaten kohlrabi twice in restaurants: at Oleana in a cucumber slaw served with fried oysters and at No. 9 Park, pureed and served with beef and chanterelles. Though the texture is different than zucchini (with no seeds in the middle) the flavor profiles seem to marry well as they are paired together in many recipes, or kohlrabi is used in a recipe where I might expect zucchini:

- Zucchini – Kohlrabi Gratin
- Kohlrabi Apple Slaw
- Kohlrabi and Carrots
- Kohlrabi Squash Empanadas
- Kohlrabi stuffed with Dill and Sour Cream

Bear with me in this train of thought…. Kohlrabi and zucchini seem to substitute well for each other… my stuffing recipe for stuffed zucchini also works well as moussaka filling… kohlrabi works well in gratin…. So I’ve come up with these ideas:

- Kohlrabi Moussaka
- Parmesan Breaded Kohlrabi with Tomato Sauce (think: eggplant parmesan, or zucchini fries)
- Roasted Kohlrabi tossed with Mint and Bacon (a side dish for trout, char or halibut)

General Gau's Chicken: The Man Behind the Myth

Jennifer 8. Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, describes Chinese Cuisine in America as “the biggest culinary joke played by one culture on another.” General Gau’s chicken tops that list in that it appears on nearly every Chinese menu in the US as a chef specialty. While the General was real – a soldier from the Hunan region in China – his chicken is wholly an American invention. The dish varies from restaurant to restaurant, but the theme is consistent: crispy fried chunks of chicken tossed in a sweet and spicy sauce. Despite its inauthentic origins, it’s still a personal favorite.

My favorite Chinese cookbook, The Chinese Kitchen, by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo features a recipe that continues to receive rave reviews from my dinner guests. The sauce is nicely balanced, not overly sweet, and fragrant with ginger and chilies. My continual challenge – which most restaurants mastered – is frying the chicken nuggets so they stay crunchy after they’ve been tossed in the sauce. The chicken, marinated in egg and corn starch, is dusted with more corn starch just before frying. I’ve experimented with the oil temperature, twice frying and even trying to caramelize the sauce, to no avail.

When I was in China a few years ago on a summer internship from business school, I broke away on several occasions to take cooking lessons. The top technique on my list was learning how to get the crispy chicken nuggets even after they were tossed in sauce. My cooking instructor in Beijing happily obliged me.

The first secret is in the corn starch. He used “wet” corn starch. To make wet corn starch: combine ½ cup of corn starch with enough water to make a slurry, about ½ cup. Let the mix sit for at least ½ hour until the water and starch separate. Pour off all the excess water. What you’re left with is the wet corn starch. It’s slightly chalky, but dissolves into liquid when you run your fingers through it. It is this mixture that he tossed the chicken cubes in before frying.

The second secret, which really isn’t as critical as the first, is in cooking the sauce. The sauce must be reduced until almost all the water has evaporated. It is then reconstituted with a little oil.

4 chicken thighs, cut into cubes
½ teaspoon salt
1 egg
2 tbs dry corn starch
2 ½ tablespoons dark soy sauce
2 tablespoons hoisin
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon white vinegar
1 ½ teaspoons Shao-Hsing Wine
½ cup wet corn starch
3 cups plain oil
1 teaspoon chopped garlic
1 tablespoon chopped ginger
8 small dried chilies
1 bunch scallions, cut into rings.

Marinate chicken with salt, egg and corn starch for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, make the sauce by combining the soy sauce, hoisin, sugar, vinegar and wine.

In a large pot, heat the oil to 350F. Toss the chicken in the wet corn starch and then add to the hot oil. Cook until crispy, about 5 minutes.

While the chicken is frying, heat a large skillet over high heat. Add 1 tbs. of frying oil to the pan. Add ginger, garlic, scallions and chilies and cook until aromatic.

When chicken is crispy drain and add to ginger mix. Pour in sauce and reduce.

Serve over rice with steamed broccoli.

Adventures in Sweet Potatoes

Four Burgers opened up just a month ago in Central Square with the mission of serving high quality, simply prepared burgers and fries. In this modern era of eco-friendly dining, they do the right thing by composting, recycling, and serving ingredients with known provenance. The net result, for the most part, is fabulous: Juicy, meaty burgers with flavorful toppings and fries that taste like potatoes.

There’s been a small hiccup in the business—and that has been the sweet potato fries. While most would agree that anything fried and salted is better, these fries suffer in that they never get really crispy. Short of coating them with a non-organic/unnatural substance (as many lesser burger joints do), the options are somewhat limited. The composition of the sweet potatoes creates a layered challenge with sugar, starch and water issues at play.

Food science research leaves a gaping hole in this domain. For regular potatoes, culinary experiments have yielded the best technique… first soaking the potatoes in water to rinse some of the excess starch, cooking the potatoes a first time in 325F oil and then a second cooking in 375F oil to crisp them. Intermediate refrigeration between frying further alters the starches which better enables a crispy fry. Researchers have discovered that Idaho potatoes are the best variety, and farmers have refined the genetics to consistently produce a fail-safe potato. What works for regular fried potatoes does not translate to sweet potatoes because of the starch, sugar and water content. And while there are a few sweet potato varieties out there (White Hamon) that are better suited, they are not mass marketed, leaving the small restaurateur to experiment with the readily available varieties.

The starch issue is a complicated one… And after researching in Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, I discover this is more complicated than I can address with chain starches and branch starches and the chemical reactions of both.

The water and sugar contents pose a more straight-forward challenge. As we know, moisture is the enemy of crispy [[Think about meringues on a humid day or fried eggplant]]. In order to get “watery” foods crispy, we must first batter them to prevent the moisture from seeping out and soggying the crust. Sweet potatoes get crispy in tempura batter because they are sufficiently coated. Alternatively, in the case of regular potatoes, the minimal water evaporates before the fry crisps up – creating a fry with long-lasting crispiness. This is when the challenge of the sugar content kicks in: Sugar begins to caramelize about at 334F and starts turning bitter at 363F. This narrow window limits the opportunity for the sweet potato fry to rid itself of excess moisture and get crispy.

Armed with this (somewhat limited) knowledge base, Michael B. (owner of Four Burgers) and I entered the kitchen to begin experimenting. Our baseline was a sweet potato fry that was cooked in 350F oil until golden brown and soft in the middle. The fry was mildly crispy straight out of the oil, but quickly turned limp. The first wave of experiments involved coating the raw fries with a type of starch that would help absorb moisture and increase the starches that would crispy up the fries. We tried corn, wheat and potato starches. And with a nod to the tempura batter, we also made a mix of corn and wheat flours. The best yield was the corn starch. Straight out of the fryer, the potato was crispier than the original, but soon met a similar fate of limpness – though the crisp to limp time gap was greater. Other starches provided minimal improvement. The biggest complaint was that the floury coating took away from the flavor and “Mouth feel” of the potatoes.

The second round of experiments involved drying the potato first before frying. First, we “par-” fried the potatoes the way regular fries are. This seemed to produce a crispy fry but we soon realized that this extra step was minimal better than the baseline, and not worth the effort.

Par-Baking the potatoes yielded the best result. The potatoes dried out with a gentle heat. Unlike the fryer, the drying process did not brown (i.e. caramelize the sugars in) the potatoes. By the time we put them in the fryer, they crisped up quickly and stayed crispy.

Special thanks to Michael B. and his staff for allowing me to play in their kitchen! Stop by, have a burger and fries and let me know what you think!

Four Burgers

I probably like a good burger more than the average person. With proper cooking and simple seasoning, little else is needed to achieve burger nirvana. You can imagine my excitement when “Four Burgers” opened in Central Square. The name suggested a simplicity to the offerings, which could either be very good (a juicy burger with a salty, meaty flavor), or very bad (that would require a post-cooking bath in ketchup and salt to make up for where the kitchen failed). The menu lets you know that the meat is of high quality – purchased from the same farm as Grill 23. In the back of the dining room are bins labeled from composting and recycling. Even with a friendly price point ($6.50 per burger, $10 average check with fries and a drink), you know that this will be a fresh, high quality experience.

The four burgers: salmon, beef, veggie or turkey, come on either whole wheat or white buns. The beef is a classic – no fancy condiments, just simple pickles, lettuce and tomatoes. The romaine lettuce is shredded so it fits nicely inside the bun, without over-expanding the sandwich which would have made the burger difficult to eat. The burger was cooked perfectly to our specifications, which sadly is a rare feat for most joints.

The turkey plays off the traditional Thanksgiving (autumnal flavors). Apple bits are folded into the meat, yielding a slightly sweet and crunchy texture. The burger was cooked perfectly – 95% on the grill, 5% from residual heat – the patty was moist and tender. The apple bits would have compensated well if the burger was overcooked, but oddly, in this case it was superfluous. The cranberry chutney was bright and was a nice diversion from the standard ketchup. My only complaint was that as we head into the heat of summer – I want to think of summer flavors and would have preferred a more seasonal flavor.

The sweet potato French fries posed an interesting culinary challenge. While they tasted like sweet potatoes with a lovely enhancement of salt, they were a bit limp. In speaking with the owner (Michael B. of Paramount and 21^st Amendment fame) he agreed. He noted that the only crispy sweet potato fries come frozen from Sysco and are sprayed with some food-like substance. If you go naturally, as Four Burgers does, the fries won’t get that fast-food crispy.

Four Burgers is not alone in its quest to naturally achieve crispy sweet potato fries. A little research shows that no one has yet to find a solution (and publish it on-line).

In thinking about the problem… regular French fries typically use Idaho potatoes – a high starch, low protein, and lower water tuber. You never see Yukon gold fries, and certainly not red bliss. The starch content is low (which has its benefits for other preparations…) but does not yield a crispy fry. What makes the potato oxidize quickly also produces a crispy fry. (also thinking about potato latkes, they get crispiest when you squeeze all the water out of them)

Michael B. and I decided to do a little experimenting in the kitchen. With a nod to Chinese cooking, we tossed the sweet potatoes in a dusting of corn-starch. They fries stayed crisp longer, but soon met the same limpy fate of the original batch. I think we were on the right track, and I bet potato starch would be worth a try. In thinking of the crisp tempura batter, a blend of flours – in that case corn starch and wheat flour, might also work.

For sure, you'll find me back there again. But I might wander back into the kitchen to play around with sweet potato fries in a quest to perfect burger nirvana. Stay tuned for more culinary experimentations…