Uses for Sourdough

Part of the care and maintenance of R, my sourdough starter, involves throwing out a bit of it with each weekly flour-and-water feeding.  It's necessary:  gets rid of some of the waste products that the yeast and bacteria generate, and stops the starter from taking over its jar, and from there my fridge, and from there the world.

But it seems kind of wasteful to me to just toss it.  So I've been looking around for ways to cook with it, short of whipping up a whole loaf of bread.

King Arthur Flour has been the source of a whole bunch of inspiration on that front.  I've made sourdough waffles a couple of times and a batch of very tasty crackers.

By the way, I learned a long time ago from Alton Brown that if you've got a pasta machine, it's by far the easiest way to roll dough to any arbitrary thinness you want, and so is great for making crackers.

Most recently I whipped up a batch of popovers.  I always assumed you needed a proper popover pan to make them, and I bet they would've been prettier with one.  But, jeez, popovers are insanely easy to make.  And check them out.  They literally popped over.  The King Arthur Flour recipe made a half dozen, perfect for me to eat for breakfast for a week, with various sweet or savory toppings.

Check them out a whole pile of oddly-shaped baked deliciousness.

I've certainly seen popovers that were more perfectly hollow on the inside, but I'm not complaining.  Definitely light and puffy and slightly eggy and tangy.  My only regret is that I didn't realize how easy popovers were to make a long time ago.  I'm going to have a batch ready next time people come over for brunch, and (assuming they haven't read this) impress the heck out of them.

Classy Local Brunch

My first full day during my Hawaiian holiday visit, mom and I met some friends of the family for brunch at the Kings View Diner in Kapa'au.  Good place, I recommend it if for some reason your travles take you through my hometown someday.

This is the Kings View's spam, egg, and cheese croissant sandwich. I have a native (by birth anyway) Hawaiian's deep affection for spam, although I don't eat it very much nowadays. And the sheer incongruity of spam on a croissant made this choice a no-brainer for me.  However, I've realized too late that this photo is a failure, because you can barely see the spam.  On future brunches there I will think more carefully and open the croissant before snapping the picture.

For the record, it was absolutely delicious.

Avocado Toast Pilgrimage

Spring is busily springing at the Cloisters, one of my favorite places in New York (and, therefore, the world).  I made a pilgrimage there on Saturday (19 March) to enjoy everything slowly turning green again, and to see their spectacular exhibit of luxury playing cards.

Now that's a death card.  Yowza!

Post-pilgrimage I wasn't exactly feeling like Death in terms of emaciated hunger, but I was a little peckish, so I stopped into the nearby New Leaf Cafe in Fort Tryon Park for a bit of refreshment.  Only to discover that just about the only thing they had that wasn't their prix fixe ginormous brunch was avocado toast.

Like a lot of people, I have a knee-jerk reaction against avocado toast.  It's too...easy, you know?  Avocado. Toast. Done. Too much of an obvious crowd pleaser, too. It's 2016, I want my food to challenge me! I can make avocado toast, for crying out loud.  Why eat it at a restaurant? Those sorts of sentiments.

And yet, and yet.  Avocado toast is so good.  Sometimes it is exactly the right thing.  And this moment, feeling serene and spring-like and art-inspired, was one of those times.  My only regret is I opted to go for a cappuccino rather than alcohol.  A bloody mary and the avocado toast would truly have been food of the gods.

Still, three cheers for avocado toast, judiciously, in small doses, at the right moments.

Maffles!

While on my annual pilgrimage back to the land of my birth (the island of Hawai'i) over Christmas I had the great good fortune to stumble upon the latest in local hybrid Eastern-Western baking concepts, the maffle.  Maffle mix seems is basically just sweetened mochi flour with maybe some leavening in it--add milk, egg, and oil and you get a very thick batter, really more of a dough.

The recipe calls for piecing out the dough and rolling each chunk in sugar before throwing it in a waffle iron, which results in something that's crunchy and caramelized on the outside, and chewy and glutinous on the inside.  And delicious all the way around.

Dominic Ansel gets all the credit for the cronut, and I have to confess a few years ago I made a savory waffle with chickpea flour and called it the fawafel and felt very proud of myself.  But maffles are truly a yummy stroke of genius.  I bought a package back from Hawai'i with me (and one to give to my neighbors) but I will definitely be asking mom to send more.

Cinnamon Rolls From Scratch

I'm pretty good at bread at this point but I rarely branch off into other types of yeasty baked goods.  But yesterday for brunch I adapted King Arthur Flour’s sticky bun recipe to make no-knead cinnamon rolls.  Sticky buns usually seem like overkill to me-- too much of a good thing.  But I love a good cinnamon roll.

Indeed, I have many happy memories of those Pillsbury in-an-exploding-tube things from my childhood...what did I know then? 

Anyway, this was a very easy recipe, they were delicious (especially paired with a little dry Prosecco), and I will definitely be making them again.

I topped them with a little improvised icing--the basic confectioner’s sugar/half and half mix, flavored using a gift from my pastry-chef sister, fiori di sicilia, a wonderful, but very potent, extract combining citrus and vanilla.  For something I made up on the spot, it really worked well!

Whole-Wheat Pancakes REALLY From Scratch

Cooks Illustrated Magazine.  I love it dearly, have been a subscriber for well over a decade now.  But I'd be the first to admit that they publish ridiculously fussy recipes on a regular basis. For every life-changing "almost no-knead bread" recipe, there are three that are more along the lines of 48 hours of prep to make french fries.  And even the almost no-knead bread recipe decided you should knead it just a bit.

The latest case in point is the whole-wheat pancakes recipe in the last issue.  On the surface, it's pretty reasonable--the article talks about how bran and other stuff in whole-wheat flour breaks up gluten, making for a more forgiving pancake batter that you can beat the heck out of and still have good results.  But the punchline is that whole wheat flour also develops off-flavors far faster than white flour, since the bran and other stuff oxidizes pretty quickly.  Therefore, says Cooks, you should make your own flour, by finding wheat berries and blitzing them in a blender for 3 minutes, and then make the pancake batter from there.

"Right," thought I.  "That's insane.  Make your own flour...  Crazy Cooks Illustrated, I'll never do that."

So, today I did.  First off, I made a buttermilk substitute, since buttermilk is not something I use much at all.  (Add lemon juice to regular milk and let it sit a bit, it gets thick, slightly sour, and acidic).

Next, here are the wheat berries, looking pretty un-flour-like.  Organic hard winter wheat, from Whole Foods.  Cheap in their bulk foods section. 

But, sure enough, a thorough blitzing (3 minutes' worth) and it looked pretty flour-like. 

The rest of the batter gets made right in the blender, and is pretty straightforward, even easy--though I was a bit concerned during a lengthy blend of the flour and the buttermilk that the nice vortex that was supposed to form was more a solid glob, and the motor was starting to smell seriously overtaxed.

And here's the finished product in all it's pancake-y glory.  The thing that irritates me about Cook's Illustrated is not that they're fussy so much as they are so often correct in their fussiness.  These were delicious, and not all that much more work than ordinary pancakes would be.  And I can say I made flour this weekend. 

Brunch at the Met

Met a friend of mine from Columbia who also likes to eat. Our plan on a fairly flamingly hot July day was to go see "Flaming June," temporarily on exhibit at the Frick Collection, then head up to the Met Members Dining Room for a decadent brunch, followed by a turn around the museum. First off, here's June just in case you don't know her.  What a color!

I love the Member Dining Room. The Member-ness of it gives an air of exclusivity (I remember when it was the TRUSTEES Dining Room and members were only allowed in the summer...)  and makes me feel like I'm putting my membership (mom gifts it to me for my birthday every year) to good use.

The vibe is very 70s, lots of wood panelling, but a need for a refresh is incredibly easy to forgive when you get ushered to the Panglossian best of all possible tables and feel like all of Central Park is your own private garden.

The service was excellent, the food delicious, the company fun, and, it can't be said often enough, that view...

Started with a bloody mary and a basket of excellent assorted bread (Cleopatra's needle in the background).
















Moved on to a blue crab salad with a bit of mango and a dollop of avocado puree--and a fried strip of plantain, which I assume makes it all seem terribly exotic to the blue-haired matrons who dominate the Met patron-base.








Then I went for eggs benedict (with salmon and spinach) which I admit is an awfully tame choice, but sometimes the classic brunch dish is just the thing.

And I finished with a slice of almond tart, with a little panna cotta to keep it company. To me, even more than day-drinking, day-desserting is a sure sign of decadence.

Felt pretty much like June herself after that meal--very ready to nap a hot afternoon away. Thankfully John Singer Sargent's portraits and some mind-blowing art from Decca in India kept us on our feet.

Eggs With Everything Good

Brunch yesterday was Ottolenghi’s (of course) recipe for baked eggs with ground lamb and pine nuts and tomatoes and cilantro and yogurt sauce and an amazing array of spices. 

Really, this is probably the most beautiful dish that’s ever come out of my kitchen.

And that’s saying something.

Sous Vide Poached Eggs: A Revelation

I made sous vide-style “poached eggs” for the third or fourth time over the weekend and have had a revelation:  eggs this way (which are actually very softly soft boiled) are sort of gross, and definitely not worth the time.

While I'm not a Creationist, eggs seem almost tailor-made by some higher power to be ideal for poaching.  The proteins in the white require a higher temperature to set than the proteins in the yolk, so cooking at a high heat from outside to inside works really well--pay attention to timing, and the egg takes care of itself.

But sous vide-ing them messes with this miracle of food.  Cooking at all one temperature--the right temperature to make a great yolk--ensures that the whites stay liquid and, by my standards, kind of nasty.

I have a buddy who says I'm wrong, that using ChefSteps's exhaustively researched egg calculator will yield the poached perfection I'm missing today. But look at SeriousEats, which I highly respect, but which says the best way to get a sous vide poached egg is to sous vide it, and then poach it. 

Contrast that with Alton Brown’s recipe for perfect poached eggs, which highlights and celebrates the miracle:  foolproof, five minutes, and the eggs are truly perfect (by my definition of perfection), with firm whites and soft gooshy golden yolks.

I guess if I had to make a bunch of poached-style eggs for a recipe, maybe whipping out the immersion circulator would be justified.  But, lesson learned, I’m going to stick to the old-fashioned way if I’m poaching some eggs for a weekend benedict for one.

Frothed Eggs at Buvette

Lunch with my friend Laura today at Buvette in the Village, a totally charming place where, among other things, they make scrambled eggs via the unique technique of frothing them with an espresso machine pressurized steam frother.

Genius!

They’re exactly as light as you’d expect, perfectly cooked, and terrific with smoked salmon, a dollop of creme fraiche, caper berries and some great bread.