cteavin
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Posts posted by cteavin
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I live in Japan. I often have a 'living' breakfast of miso soup, natto with kim-chi over brown rice and green tea. (living because those foods are all fermented.)
Natto and kimchi? I've never thought or heard of that combination. I don't think I'd be able to do it for breakfast, because my students would complain too much. :lol:
Brown rice is a fermented food?
Maybe FOR fermented foods.
At one of my favorite izakaya's they serve natto, maguro, kim-chi and raw egg mixed together and served in a dish before the meal. It's really good. When I was seriously into body building I often ate it for dinner. Yeah, natto really goes well with kim-chi. Punish your students a bit.
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Thanks for merging my thread. I didn't know there was a topic.
In reading over the other threads I was surprised no one talks about cocoa and roasted cauliflower. It was reading about the possibility that got me interested. Has anyone here tried it, yet? Yesterday, half the florets I put in the over were coated in coco butter and half of those had a drizzle of sugar. Those with sugar really went well with raw cacao nibs. I'd like to know if anyone else has done any experimenting along these lines.
Cheers
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I try to brush the oil directly on the florets themselves - they seem to need it more than the stems do. What kind of oil are you using?
I made one batch with canola oil and a second batch with cocoa butter. Both had a good flavor.
I was thinking I had done something wrong because the tips were drying out but it seems to be just their nature. Is that right? What I was hoping to do is puree a batch for cream of cauliflower soup. I might just trim the dry bits and see how that works. Who knows, they might make a nice garnish.
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If you're talking about warm or cold infusing flavors into the cream by adding what you want to infuse, heating (or not), removing the infusion item and rechilling the cream (if heated), yes, it whips just fine. I can't vouch for everything but everything I've tried has worked. If you want to fold in puree and aren't opposed to a tiny amount of gelatin just whip the cream, mix the hydrated gelatin into the puree and fold it in. More of a mousse than a whipped cream but it works fine. I did a honey carrot mousse and a buttered peas mousse that way with no problems. Minus the gelatin (or some other stabilizer), it won't hold up too long with the puree folded in. As for adding the puree then whipping, I haven't tried it.
That's good news Thank you
How much gelatin would you recommend and should I mix it in before I begin to whip it or after I've begun to whip the cream?
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I pan roasted some cauliflower this evening and the results were delicious but a little dry. Specifically, the flower part was dry. The center and the stem were moist. I did oil each pice before putting in the oven. I was thinking of covering the next batch with a leaf of aluminum foil, do you think that would help?
On an aside, having heard that roasted cauliflower is a flavor match with cocoa I tried several pieces with 'raw' cacao bean -- and it was good. Real good. I'm going to be looking into this some more.
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I just read this thread and had a couple of questions of my own about whipping cream.
If I want to infuse a savory flavor into the cream would it be best to start with a higher cream, say 45% and "thin it out" or should I risk heating it? I'm a little wary of mathematics (high school trauma) and don't really know how to about gauging how much water to add to equal X percent of cream fat for the whipping.
I'd also like to know if it's feasible to whip a small about of vegetable puree into whipped cream and have it be stable. If it's doable is there a ratio of puree to cream I should be aware of or any special methods you can suggest? I really want to make a light and fluffy vegetable flavored cream to fill cream puffs or pipe onto frico.
Cheers,
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Tea
in Coffee & Tea
I was brought up with this well worn maxim: milk for tea; cream for coffee. Tea meant any black tea. For green teas and herbals I always drink it straight but a lot of friends prefer them with honey.
On an aside, in Hong Kong they have a drink that's half black tea, half coffee -- and it's delicious. I drink that with milk.
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I finally have time to become more active here at e-gullet. Trust me, I have lots of questions. 453,411 to be exact.
One of those great and grand experiments of the kitchen I've always wanted to try is the Frozen Florida created by Nicholas Kurti at the end of the 60's. It just sounds so cool. Has anyone here ever attempted it? Does anyone have any suggestions on how to go about preparing using a modern microwave? Flavorwise is it worth attempting? I'd love to know.
Cheers,
steven
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I'm enjoying a pot of White Tea from Taiwan.
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Having just put my own breakfast dishes in the sink and then looking at this post I feel I've been deprived my whole like. (lol)
I live in Japan. I often have a 'living' breakfast of miso soup, natto with kim-chi over brown rice and green tea. (living because those foods are all fermented.)
Corn ice cream and celery root sauce? That's bloody brilliant. Hope the kids never log on here.
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I love living in Japan. The only two things I miss are good ol Mexican chilies and bleached flour. (sigh) I'll settle for a the flour.
I was looking through the Home Buyers Club this afternoon and they have 5lb bags of Gold Medal AP flour for about 900 yen per page. It makes me ill because I know how much it really costs. Before I place an order I thought I'd check here and see if anyone knew of a place in Japan (or China or Korea or wherever) where I could get bleached cake and AP flour. Also, I really want to give my new Rose L. B. book a workout and to do that I need Wondra flour. I'm tempted to get a group of people together to have a couple of cases shipped over from the states. Would anyone be interested in that?
Cheers,
Steven
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Success!
I can kick myself for not taking a photo but essentially you can make a genoise with honey. The batches I made with 50 grams of flour were much more moist but there was no true grain to the cake. It was more like the webbing you might find inside a cream puff. This cake still has a "skin" but much, much, much thinner. I've tried a piece with and without. With this top crust it gives the sensation that the cake is dryer than it is. I then peeled off this crust and could see a beautiful crumb underneath that is very moist.
It's not really presentation ready but it's good enough that I can start thinking ways to make this into a proper dessert. Still, I'm going to make another batch later with less flour and maybe another with 100 grams of flour and three eggs measured to 180 grams to see what changes.
I should add to anyone who might want to bake this that I'm in Japan so I'm limited to UNBLEACHED flour.
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Ciao.
I just dug through some of my historical Italian reference books, and couldn't find any recipe that approximated the honey cake recipe above.
Albeit none of my books are Lazio or Roman specific.
I did find numerous references to torta di farro though, and farro could be translated as spelt, but.... it's for the whole grain and not flour.
Cteavin, I'm curious, why did you assume a duck egg instead of a chicken egg?
-Judith
Hi Judith, thanks for looking in your reference books.
Duck eggs is really a shorthand for 'other than chicken'. It's been a long time but in civics classes once upon a time I remember learning that the Romans bread all types of birds and that eggs were scarce by modern standards being most plentiful in spring (I believe). In other 'classic' recipes they prefer duck eggs saying the yolk is larger and fat content higher, so I wrote duck.
@Blether, I'm going to find a copy of that book and order it tonight. It sounds right up my alley.
I'm baking a new version as I type. Since one large egg here is 60 grams I've used 2 whole eggs plus 3 egg yolks (bleeding off a little white) to measure 180 grams hoping to lessen the amount of liquid in the batter, I've also doubled the flour and changed it to AP. We'll see. The batter reached ribbon stage much faster than before.
If this works, I'll make another version with chocolate. If it doesn't work I'll try again with less honey, perhaps a 50/50 split of sugar to honey to see what that does. It's nice to have such simple pleasures.
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What kind of troubles have you been having?
What percentage of cocoa does the chocolate you're using have and are you adding either butter, shortening or wax to it before you dip?
Are you tempering the chocolate or just melting it?
Is what you're dipping room temperature or cold?
and
Are you dipping with forks, literally by hand or by some other means?
All of this will affect the finished product.
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I'm most interested in how anybody decided on what texture is most "authentic" for this recipe.
As for the hand-beating...I remember a little old Chinese lady beating eggs for cake for an hour by hand. To her way of thinking, that wasn't an intolerable burden, that was just the way you made cake...
It's impossible to have a perfect reproduction. The types of flours have literally evolved, how poultry is raised today yields eggs with slightly different chemical structures, etc. A true food historian would have to be well versed in the region and do a lot of educated guessing. I think the closer you get to our modern period the better the chances of having a more "authentic" product which is one of the reasons why I love the work the people at Goode Cookery have done. For me, I look to the past for inspiration. My feeling is that people today rely to much on formula and too little on their senses: even variations in the amount of sunshine will cause slight variations in the final wheat berries that we use in the various flours around the planet, so a recipe that worked in the 70's in America with bleached flour will produce a different result than the soft unbleached wheat we get in Japan -- but it takes a lot of practice to get that kind of feel for cooking. Still, I think it's a worthy goal.
The honey cake is interesting for a couple of reasons. The proportion of the ingredients, the use of honey in place of sugar, the spelt flour. It makes me think about how I can play with the texture of cake.
I tried this recipe https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/potcw/Roman+Honey+Cakes
last spring.
The amount of flour is significantly greater.
I have several reproductions of old cookbooks and one noted that the honey most often used in baking in classical Rome was boiled and skimmed prior to inclusion in most recipes to remove any residual wax or other bits and pieces that may have been in the raw honey.
This does change the hydration effect of honey. Even though I used processed honey, I did boil it for a couple of minutes then allowed it to cool prior to mixing it into the beaten eggs.
Another honey cake, I think it was made with barley, required cooking the barley meal first to make a sort of porridge prior to adding the remaining ingredients. The batter was baked in molds that produced a design on the cake, probably made from terracotta clay.
I'm going to have to order one of those books. I have a pretty good collection myself.
I've read that boiling the honey now is unnecessary but do you think it changed your results? I like the idea of using barely but I'd guess there'd be little or no rise. Was it yeasted?
I was playing with a "breakfast cake" this summer that used corn meal in the batter. The texture was too corse and dry for me so I switched to quinoa and increased the BP. The grains swelled and added a nice bite. The extra nutrition felt fight for a breakfast cake. I've thought about using wheat berries but maybe barley would be good, too.
I baked two versions with regular cake flour yesterday with similar results. The cake as smoother on the palate and a little more bland; I'm guessing one of the properties of a lot of honey in baking is a skin.
It's Saturday here. I bake or not to bake, that is the question.
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I'm following this topic with interest. Is the genoise idea part of the recipes you're using as a basis for your experimentation ? Is it the suthentic old-time approach ? (Helenjp suggested recently that it's possible to make genoise by hand, but I'm still not sure I believe her
).If she can beat the eggs by hand she can defend herself in any situation with the guns she must have.
The original recipe only says to combine the ingredients and who ever translated the recipe, I'm assuming from experience in that era and regions cooking style, said to beat vigorously by hand. The eggs leaven the cake, so it made sense to me to try it first in the style of a genoise. I was also curious to see what would happen.
Theresa might be right about separating the eggs. If I whip air into the yolks and honey and then add the flour and might lighten it enough to keep the egg whites from deflating. But what about developing the gluten in the flour (by beating) to help support the structure?
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From what I've seen from those two websites and the actual text from online copies of the original work proportions are not specifically noted; however, I've seen the proportions noted in the recipe in many different places. Is it a case of copy and paste? Perhaps, but whatever the case they intend for their to be a higher ratio of honey to flour and honey to egg.
My best guess is that in the original recipes they would have used duck eggs. If chicken eggs were used they would have been "free-range", so I'm positive their yolk/white ratio would be different. I would guess that the person who remade the recipe took that into account. Still, I'm going to increase the number of yolks the next time I make it.
As for the cake, it is definitely nothing like a pudding. What I made had a moist yellow-orange webbing that reminded me of popovers. My best guess is the the acid in the abundance of honey sets the eggs. I wish it set the proteins faster so as to keep the height. About taste, because I'm playing now I'm using very cheep honey. The flavors are not coming through. When I get a good cake going I'm thinking either cardamon and rose or citrus zest would be good pairings for the honey but you're right about it being a good showcase for a pure honey flavor.
One final thought, would I be able to cut baking time if I reduced the moisture in the egg whites by 'aging' them for a few day outside their shells?
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Hi,
I've long been a fan of using old recipes, mostly from medieval Europe but this time I've gone a bit further back with the help of two websites (web links posted at the bottom). It is impossible to recreate the recipes because the quality and types of flour, eggs, and honey are very different but I'd still like to pull a decent cake from the idea. In fact, yesterday made this cake twice and the first version, the pure reproduction, was delicious but presentation was terrible.
The recipe is:
3 eggs
200 grams honey
50 grams spelt flour
for the first batter I whipped the eggs and honey just as I would for a genoise. I heated the mixture then beat it on high for 2 minutes the medium for 10 more minutes until it was cool and reached the ribbon stage. The volume of the batter was excellent. I baked it for 45 minutes and in the oven it had a beautiful dome. Unfortunately it fell after I removed it from the oven. Later, I saw that the part of the cake that formed the dome became a brown skin I could peel off to reveal a delectable, moist cake. Really, it was very good. I then remade the cake adding in 50 grams of almond flour hoping to give it structure without adding in extra protein. It maintained more of it's height and it had a nice bite but it the topmost part was dry and there was still a "skin" though it was more firmly attached to the cake.
I would love to bake fifty variations to see what I come up with but that's not really possible. I was hoping some people here could suggest some ways to help the cake keep it's height while keeping honey as the main sugar.
I was thinking to change the method of beating; use a larger, shallower pan; using a flour with a higher protein content. What do you all think?
Thank you much,
steven
http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/roman/fetch-recipe.php?rid=roman-honey-cakes
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Ah, this site is back online.
I love to cook. Coming from Los Angeles the goal was low fat, low carb, low sugar and as densely packed with nutrition as you could get. That's my base. Even the restaurants in L.A. follow those tenants; it wasn't until I started to travel that I tasted foods, like Creme Brule, as they were intended and only after I started making the real thing side by side the knock off that I understood how great the differences were. Still, I do get some satisfaction in playing with a recipe and finding variations that work (for me) and that's kind of where my hobby is today: I try as best I can to master the original then I cut this and add that to see the results.
As for katakuriko, I learned from books by RLB, Paul Healy, Shirley Corriher, and other, about adjusting the protein content with starches and it's a tremendous success. One of the best recipes from The Cake Bible is RLB's crepes using only corn starch. Brilliant every time. I wish I had the space for a 10K bag of flour! As it is, I keep about ten different flours in my pantry for a couple of kilos of this and a few kilos of that.
And in the U.S., bleached is the norm. Sugar, I superfine it in the food processor but I use different "cuts" depending on the baked good, for example large grains are excellent on the outside of a sugar cookie for decoration or inside to help limit spread.
Do you -- or does anyone -- have a Japanese baking book or author they can recommend? Kanji isn't really an issue.
Finally, @ helenjp, since you asked about books, I strongly recommend Bakewise and Cookwise. I just bought a book about Japanese seasonal cooking called 英語で売る和食 as a primer. Not bad as I never cook Japanese food. I've long had someone in my life that prefers to do the 和食。 ；)
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Hi,
I love to experiment in the kitchen. What I'm looking to test are pastries and cakes with high ratios of graham flour and/ bean flours mixed with gluten powder to (hopefully) make up for the difference with the decrease in the protein from wheat flour.
I'm doing the research now before I start testing recipes and wanted to know if anyone has tried this or something similar and ask what the results were. Also, if anyone has any knowledge to pass down, I'm all eyes (as this is all reading).
Cheers,
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First of all, let me say that this is my first post here and I'm hoping to become an active member as I love to cook and learn about cooking.
I'm a long term resident of Japan and I've been getting deeper and deeper into baking over the past couple of years, starting with French (thank you Julia Child) and now going westward. Long story short, I'm really good with stream risen cakes like genoise or the flourless and meringue based cakes but I've not been able to make a decent high ratio cake. Then I found out why: Japan doesn't sell bleached flours; the flour I've been using is unbleached whereas the recipes were written for bleached.
If you don't know about Kate Flour, I'll suggest you look it up on the web. Kate is an inspiration. A hobby cook, she discovered a technique for mimicking the properties of bleached flour.
I'm curious if anyone here, living in Japan, has tried Kate Flour or if they've found a way to get bleached flour. I'd also love to hear what kind of pastries and cakes people are baking and where they're getting their recipes and where they're buying their flour and other baking ingredients. Myself, I use Tomizawa-san and sometimes order online through Rakuten.
Cheers,
Steven
Food-related quirks and neuroses
in Food Traditions & Culture
Posted
I don't know that this really qualifies as a neuroses but it drives me up the wall when well meaning raw food enthusists, vegans and vegetarians MISname foods.
I love trying new dishes and I was totally interested by the title, "healthy raw food brownie" to find nothing brownie like inside -- and with all the sugar from the dried fruits, I question "healthy", too. Also, if someone choses to be a vegetarian then why call it "chicken"? I love vegetarian food but if it's from a bean don't call it beef. (lol) And isn't an apple pie supposed to baked? Raw apple pie on sprouted nut crust. Hmmm.