Wholemeal Crank

I'll be a little bolder next time.

Just got an alert about this topic from the "from Gully's desk" header, so glad I saw that. I've been working with an almost daily cup of hot chocolate now for about two years, and playing with lots of variations. It is so satisfying that I am drinking a lot more chocolate than I am eating. My mostly daily cup is 1 cup skim milk (because that's what I keep at home), heated in the microwave for about 90 seconds full power 1 ounce 70% scharffenberger chocolate about 1/4 or 1/2 teaspoon of a 2:1 mix of 'hot' new mexico ground chili:cinnamon powder. I have posted more details along with my favorite flavor combinations here, including With chili and cinnamon With Thai lime and long pepper With Arabian Spices With Star Anise and Pink Pepper With Cassia buds, Orange and Cardamom With Mace, Star Anise, and Cinnamon With Coconut Curry With Basil and Long Pepper

Wanted to be sure I didn't end up with bitterness, figured too short was better than too long for the first infusion. And it was so nice that I went on from there.

First ever gyokuro today, gyokuro kin from my first order from denstea.com. 1 gram of leaf to 160 degree water, about 6 ounces in my little glass teapot, steeped 40", 60", about 90". 40"--sweet, mellow, almost no astringency or bitterness, also little aroma. 60"--similar, but can detect a little astringency, still very light aroma. 90"--losing the thick sweet sensation, this should be the last infusion--still quite nice, however. This is a wonderful way to start the day.

Still working through the japanese green teas, and this morning, my first gyokuro: there is a strong resemblance to the wonderful green oolongs I've been drinking recently. I will definitely be keeping some sencha or gyokuro in my regular tea rotation.

Thought I should add an update: I am trying a very simple glass kettle from Amazon. I wanted to see the water doing its thing, so I can learn what 160-180 degrees looks like, and I'm rarely putting the kettle on and leaving the room, so I don't miss the whistle. So far, it's nice, but if it has an unfortunately short lifespan in my kitchen, I will go for the simplex.

Better picture of how I dry them, laid over cooling racks, and with the baking pans inverted over them, so air circulates and all surfaces get dry. The bigger pastry mat just goes right over the top of the stack.

I have several volumes of the Time-Life Good Cook series, and find them excellent with clear photographs of some things that were otherwise confusing, and the back of the volumes have a quite wide variety of recipes from disparate sources. Unlike most of my other books, there is no one author's voice, but the recipes always work. I particularly use the Candy and the Cookie & cracker volumes, the latter being particularly useful as a source of cracker recipes--a topic that gets short shrift in most baking books.

Try, try, again.... 1 gram of the sencha fuka-midori in the 100mL gaiwan, with 160 degree water for 30 seconds, was much better. Still, more astringency/bitterness than in the bagged tea. Will be very curious to see whether this is the same mix of tea as in the bagged version or not--have sent an e-mail to inquire.

A little later, brewing some loose-leaf sencha fuka-midori, 2 grams in a 100mL gaiwan for 1 minute, it looked like dragonwell and brewed like it too--nutty, astringent, bitter, little of the sweetness that was so overwhelming from the teabag version. A second cup brewed for 30 seconds and diluted to about 5 ounces with water of the same temperature was much better, but now I get how tricky this is to do just right. Not sure if the first bagged sencha was a different tea, or just beginner's luck. Plus the bag packaging doesn't list the grams of tea, and it's broken up, so different infusion performance shouldn't be surprising.

After a particularly pleasing few cups to start the day, I am going to have to add some japanese green teas to my regular tea rotations. The roasted Bancha houjicha was not nearly as interesting as the sencha teabag in my sampler from denstea.com. I detected almost no bitterness, lots of sweet, and the liquor had a wonderful body. From what I'd been reading, I was expecting something more like a dragonwell, but this was much more to my taste, with hardly any bitterness.

After the cup of sencha, more from the sampler: sencha teabag from denstea.com, one teabag to about 5 oz of 160 degree water, for 60 seconds. Light yellow green liquor, delicately vegetal, sweet, nice!

Starting today with the Houjicha Gold Bancha from Denstea.com, brewed 2 grams in about 5 oz water just off the boil for 30 seconds. Toasty, quite nice that way, but a bit one-note on the toastiness.

Hm....I think I have done that at least once, but fortunately it was via a thrift shop so not a big outlay. I've also bought a cookbook for the 2nd time deliberately, when I got rid of one a bit too hastily, and had second thoughts. There is one I've been thinking about recently that I might just try to find used online again....

I more often drink tea by itself, or make it according to what tea I'm interested in drinking at the time. I've never deliberately paired it with food. If what I'm eating doesn't pair well with the tea I have ready, I drink water until the food is gone, then resume with the tea. I have noticed, no surprise, that almost any tea goes well with bland buttery cookies, but not all teas stand up well to strongly spiced curries. That's about as far as I've gotten.

Interesting description, but no idea what the tea is. Yesterday i finally got to the bottom of the fabulous 2007 sheng white bud pu-erh from norbutea.com. About 2 grams of tea brewed up to one quart with about six serial infusions for one quart of lovely tea, but a pint brewed later from the same leaves was starting to get a little thin. It goes so far, though, that I have only just finished my first sample and this was the first time I broke into my beeng (if that's the right term for this disk).

I am not surprised at my percentages--I know my collection has grown faster than I could make use of it in recent years because I'm cooking less often, but also working too much, and right now, it's easier for me to buy a new cookbook that I want to try rather than to get it from the library. I count those books as 'using for two or more recipes' if I used recipes from it twice or more; and liked those well enough to keep it. I have certainly gotten rid of books that I used twice or more but didn't enjoy (e.g., Lord Krishna's Cuisine); used twice or more but then I found another book in a similar area that I liked better--was more comprehensive, or more to my current tastes (e.g., Classic Italian Cooking); or that I took a key technique from that I now apply to recipes from other books (Best Bread Ever). Others are kept for recipes that I know so well that I rarely go back to the primary volume, but still, if I got one or more recipes out of it with such value, it's worth keeping in hopes there will be more I like as much (More than Minestrone). I also consider a book a success and worth keeping even if I virtually never follow a recipe precisely, but do open it, read it, and get inspired to make a variation on that. I'm defining 'following a recipe' here as needing to review the ingredient list or order of steps in preparation, but even with baking, I almost never follow the recipes precisely as written. I do have a grain mill to mill my own whole wheat flour, and I do not have any cookbook written as 'start with 300 grams of hard white wheat berries and 150 grams of soft white wheat berries and 6 long peppercorns, coarsely crushed'--save the recipes I write down myself in my own book or post to my web site. If that was for a recipe that called for 3 cups of all purpose flour for a loaf of bread, I'd consider that following the recipe and give the cookbook credit. I always refer back to Flatbreads and Flavors for my favorite Chickpea and Onion Stew, but usually play with the vegetable component by what's in season, and double the spices, but still would have trouble getting it right without having the written recipe in front of me. That's using the book too. I also give credit to those sources of the recipes that I have memorized and follow more or less precisely but never have to open the book anymore. I do live now in a house with capacious cabinets, but even when in small apartments I put up bookcases as pantries to keep a good stock of grains, beans, seeds, spices, dried fruits, home canned stocks, and abundant cooking equipment on hand.

Home again and looking at the actual cookbooks on the shelf: 53 books used for at least two different recipes 44 books used one recipe or haven't yet used (on probation) 4 books used for just one recipe but many times for that one recipe (I would consider these to have earned a permanent spot on the shelf) 19 books purchased primarily for reference/background; some have recipes but that's not why I bought them and 3 books of my own recipe clippings and handwritten recipes, each used many, many times, for a total of 123. So 1/3 of the books on the shelves, but almost half of the 'recipe books' haven't yet been really used; of those, I'd bet at least half make it for the long term, but others will be dumped when I need the space and finally admit that I just don't like the stuff in them, and others will stay until bumped off by something else covering the same ground but that I like better.

Green jasmine tea from Peets, and even with taking the tea bags and hot water separate to better control the brewing I still overdid it and it is unpleasantly bitter, sigh. Tea on the road is so often frustrating.

Big red robe wuyi oolong. Enjoying the shift between the three teas I picked for this trip better than the every day same I did last time. Roasted oolong to floral oolong to smoky puerh. And will return tomorrow all ready for some green tea adventures with the novice sampler of Japanese teas I got from dens tea.

can't understand how you do this: I'd either have a chronically burnt tongue from drinking before the tea cools, or be drinking bitter, oversteeped tea. Cor am I missing something?

Bakewise was a disappointment for me because it seemed to emphasize texture over flavor, exemplarized by one recipe that combined butter, shortening, and oil, purporting to thus gain the benefits of each inthe final result, without any recognition of how 'diluting' the butter this way compromises flavor. If I want a Twinkie, I'll buy a Twinkie; when baking myself, I want better than storebought, not a reproduction of the blandest grocery-store-bakery junk. Another major disappointment was Lord Krishna's Cuisine by Yamuna Devi. It won the IACP award and was gigantic and so expensive--the most expensive I had ever bought. It just had to be good, because it was a collection of vegetarian recipes from a culture with a very strong tradition of vegetarianism, so I anticipated time-tested recipes that would not simply be adaptations of meat-based recipes with substitutions for the meat. But after trying four or five recipes, from different chapters, all of which just seemed off--dry, flat, just not satisfying--I looked at the introduction for the first time, in which she noted that garlic and onions were considered unhealthful in the tradition from which she drew the recipes. D'Oh! I had to acknowledge that it was not the book for me, and gave it away to my father with a warning about this peculiarity. He enjoyed reading it, but I don't think he ever made many recipes from it either.

$100? EEEK! Are most cookbooks in Australia quite expensive? That's more than the price of all but the super fanciest coffee-table picture books with recipes here in the US....

I have not tried anything labelled 'green oolong' from Ten Ren, but have adored their Pouchong, which is a very light, floral, hay-like oolong, but though the liquor color is a green-tinted gold, the tea has little other resemblance to a straight green tea. I've enjoyed their less expensive third grade quite a bit. And I suspect your tannin is my astringent, although it might also be my bitterness. I like a little astringency from time to time but not bitterness.

Decant from the gaiwan. You tilt the lid just a little bit to allow the tea to be poured off quickly--how much depends on the size of the tea leaves that you want to be retained in the gaiway--then pick it up and drain into another cup, holding the gaiwan with fingers over the lid and the base in one hand. I was thoroughly unimpressed by a restaurant that served us tea as loose leaves plus hot water in gaiwan-shaped cups with no lids and nothing to decant it into--oversteeping, burnt tongues, and eating tea leaves are all definitely no fun!