Banana Bread

Somehow the entire summer's slipped away, and I haven't blogged anything... or baked anything either! So I decided to bake a banana bread cause we had some bananas that were starting to hang around a little too long. I was intending to use the last 2 very ripe bananas, but Kathy decided to eat one, not realizing I was going to bake them. I was left with just one banana.

Anyways, I looked around the internet looking for a quick banana bread recipe, and generally they are like this:

350 degree preheated oven

dry stuff:

• 2 cups of flour
• 1 cup sugar
• a teaspoon each of baking power, baking soda, cinnamon
• half a teaspoon of nutmeg.

wet stuff:

• 2 eggs
• teaspoon of vanilla to make the eggs more pleasant
  
• half cup of butter (I used veg oil instead of butter)
• 2-3 very ripe bananas on the verge of fermenting into banana liquor.
  

Mix all the dry stuff in one bowl, mix all the wet stuff in a second bowl, then add the dry to the wet, and mix them all. I have this vague recollection that I'm not supposed to over-mix it or it becomes like chewing rubber. Put this in an oiled baking pan in the oven and let it bake. Typical time is about 45 minutes. Check with a toothpick or a chopstick lanced through it's heart, if anything sticks to your stick, it's not ready, bake for another 5-10 minutes.

Since I was short a couple of bananas, I just added a little extra oil and some water to shore up the moisture content, I didn't really measure. I probably didn't add enough.

Here's some pics of the end result:

after baking for an HOUR

Shiny...

I think I need a smaller pan or a bigger recipe, stuff always looks kind of flat coming out of it.

Looks good, tastes good, but a little bit on the dry side cause of the missing banana. Blah!

Salt & Pepper Shakers

These are on every table in the cafeteria at work, and are absolutely cute.

Sent wirelessly from my BlackBerry.

Peeling a Kiwi

Where the spoon fits

Given that peeling Kiwis is not something I commonly do, I didn't know exactly how to do it. I always knew it was with a spoon, but I didn't know what else was involved. So I cut the Kiwi lengthwise in half, and then the ends off. I wedged the spoon between the skin and the flesh and scraped the flesh out, worked out okay. I guess I should have checked the hundreds of how-to instructions that are available on the net, but when you're already up to your elbows with kitchen stuff, its hard to clean up and then go look it up. :P

What a curvaceous beauty!

Kiwis and more kiwis

P.s. the white stem part in the middle is hard to eat. :P

How much sugar is in a can of Canada Dry?

I bought a case of ginger ale on sale today, and while drinking one just now, I read the label on the side. It said it has 34 grams of sugar in it. It occurred to me that I didn't really know how much "34 grams of sugar" actually was, so I measured it out on a scale. Amazing.

That's a heck of a lot of sugar isn't it?

For you coffee and tea drinkers, that's roughly 8.5 packets of sugar, assuming an average 4 gram sugar packet.

That's actually lower than a Coke at about 40g (10 packets of sugar) as googled on the net.

There's blogs out there that have lots of pictures showing how much sugar is in food, such as this one:
http://www.sugarstacks.com

Check it out and shock yourselves. :D

Allen.

Gingerbread Cookies

Did you know that savoury spicy taste in gingerbread is not ginger? it's the ground cloves that give it that distinctly sharp taste.

How do I know? I am guessing this because I made a batch of gingerbread cookies without the cloves and the distinct taste is missing. :P

I'll have to make another batch when I have ground cloves, to confirm this guess.

Allen.

Bagels Nom Nom Nom

We went to the supermarket in the afternoon today, but we'd neglected to get a bag of bagels. Since I didn't feel like going out to another market, I decided to make some at home.

I dug up a nice recipe at The Hub that didn't require anything particularly special. Just 6 common ingredients, no milk or eggs or anything fancy. It was interesting cause I'd never made bagels before, and the whole idea of boiling the dough first before baking was weird to say the least.

I didn't measure exactly according to recipe - I added a cup of oat bran since we had some around, and went up to ~ 2 cups of water to compensate. I also added a sprinkling of sesame seeds as well.

Here's the basic recipe:

4 cups flour
1 tbsp sugar
2 tsp salt
1 tbsp oil
2 tsp instant yeast
1.5 cups warm water.

Put all the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl. Poke a dent in the middle and put the oil in there.
Then add the water a bit at a time, making the dough in the middle of your dry ingredients, adding more water to soak up more flour from the sides into your dough. Once most of the flour in in your dough, turn it out onto your clean countertop. Knead till you're happy with it, about ten minutes or so. Let it relax for about 20 minutes after.

Divide the dough into 8 pieces and roll them into cylinders about twice the width of your hand. Loop each piece around and press the ends together in a doughnut shape. Or you can roll it into a long snake and cut off pieces as needed for the bagel loops. Let them rise for a bit, maybe 15 minutes. For me, by the time I had done the last one, the first one was ready to be boiled.

Boil some water in a pot and drop in your bagels, a few at a time, don't crowd them. I did them 3 at once. I left them in the boiling water for about a minute and a half, then flipped them over to boil for the same. I scooped them out and dropped them on an oiled baking sheet to wait for the the next batch to be boiled.
Once all that is done, put them in an oven preheated to 425 Fahrenheit till they're a colour you're happy with. For me it was about 25 minutes uninterrupted baking time.

Anyways, here are the results, they turned out pretty nicely!

All the dry ingredients plus oil in the middle.

The dough divided into 8 pieces, you can see the oat bran specks

I tried several ways - punched down and not punched down, poked-hole (left) and looped snakes (right)

Rising in the warm oven

Boiling the bagels! So weird.

The bagels, all wrinkly after they'd been boiled

Back into the oven at 425 - with sesame on top

After 25 minutes of baking - wrinkly no longer

On the cooling rack - all done!

End notes: I like the way the looped-snake style bagels look nicer than the poked-hole ones. (You can see the poked-hole ones in the upper left, and second from the left in the bottom row) They have the same nice and chewy texture when eaten though. The punched down bagels dont have big air bubbles inside.

Allen.

Hamburgers

I whipped these up pretty quickly while I was watching TV from the kitchen. We had some ground beef and I felt like having hamburgers, so I minced up a couple of onions and mixed it with the beef, plus some cornstarch and soy sauce that was around. I added some ginger powder - it takes the gross smell from the beef away without having bits of ginger in the meat (I dont like biting into pieces of ginger in food). I heard there is a trick to mixing ground meat - you have to stir it in ONE direction, it helps make it stickier faster instead of crumbling. I don't really know but it's what I hear.

The buns were the first googled recipe I clicked on that didn't require milk (cause I didn't have any milk at the time), and I didn't make exact measurements of the ingredients. I didn't expect them to look so nice. I wonder which recipe it was? I suppose I can find it again if I needed it.

The recipe needed one egg and one egg yolk for the egg wash, so I took out two eggs. I separated one yolk into a bowl, and added the extra egg white to the recipe.

I think I've figured out how to make a proper egg wash now. (dont laugh) After I had the whole yolk by itself in a bowl, I popped it and pulled out the skin that covered it. The remaining yolk was just the nice and smooth liquid portion inside, and once mixed with about a tablespoonful of water, looked proper at last, and worked beautifully when brushed onto the risen dough. How come recipes never tell you this stuff? Maybe I am just reading the wrong recipes.

Likewise with the sesame seeds - the recipes I've seen all say to roll your bun in the seeds, but they are not that easy to handle and lift. I experimented by sprinkling sesame on some, and spreading it on with a rub of my hand with others - I think I got better results from rubbing than sprinkling.

Anyway after I grilled the hamburgers and sliced the buns, the end result was really nice. It's too bad we didnt have any lettuce around, it would have been picture-perfect if I added some lettuce and a couple slices of tomato. Kathy and I gobbled these burgers up right quick, stopping only to take a quick snapshot first on her suggestion. We ate these with ketchup, mustard, and pickles. There is a plate of broccoli that you see the corner of, slightly off to the side. Yes, really, it's there, honest.

Maybe I should have cleaned up the crumbs first, but I was too anxious to start eating

Here are the others staying warm in the oven

Bread FAIL

I made a batch of standard french roll dough and brought it over to my mother's place to bake, figuring I'd show her how I can bake bread. Wow, it went badly. First, the dough sitting in the car for the 2nd rise did so over 4 hours in cold temperatures, and I didn't let it warm up to room temperature. I just cut it like usual and formed the baugette shapes. The oven at my mom's seems to be hotter, so I over baked it too. The end result were some weird twisted burnt shapes that exploded along the side. I was pretty annoyed about it. The end result is - don't change variables and expect the end result not to change too.

Allen.

what the heck happened?

eeeewwwwww =(

Kill me now... oh, you did, thank you

Even my yeast starter experiments looked better than that - here is the latest one for comparison:

Shaping a Baguette

I had to look this up on the net... it seems that what you do is basically punch down your risen dough, fold it into a big square and cut it into 3 strips. Then fold them over a few times, and hide the cut areas' seams on the bottom.

Forming them wasn't as easy as I expected... Here's a couple of pictures - first a good one, and then another where you'll see where I didn't get one of the seams on the bottom properly.

Allen.

Looks pretty decent, though the recipe is a bit fluffy for a baguette.
That cut portion on top is toasted and became my breakfast, haha.

Flip it around though, and you'll see the baguette in the front is not right at all, the seam was supposed to be on the bottom to avoid this. The other ones are fine though.

Burst seam, oh noes!

How do I cook these?!

Well, I do know I am supposed to stir fry these rice cake slices, probably with some julienned pork and some napa, but I don't know if any preparation work goes into them before they hit the wok.

We bought them from a Korean supermarket from their fresh section - they are rubbery and not soft, so I'm wondering if they are meant to be cooked as is, or if we have to do something else, like soak them, or boil them.

Going to have to experiment a bit.

Allen.

edit - okay, Kathy said they boiled nicely in soup and softened right up. That's a relief!

Baking with the starter

I did another batch of those French rolls - this time I tried used the starter that I'd made instead of dry packaged yeast. The starter displaces some of the flour and some of the water, and I had to figure out just how much I was replacing, involving some guess work.

So I added 2 cups of the starter, and took out 1 cup of flour and 1 cup of water. It kneaded pretty wet, and I ended adding the excluded cup of flour back in. If I were to do this again, I would take out all 1.5 cups of the water and just use the liquid from the starter.

The kneaded dough took twice as long to rise at both stages - I don't know if I should attribute that to the excess water or the quality of the starter. I didn't take any pictures during the process but I did take a shot of the end result.

not as pretty this time, oh well

The bread had a hint of sourness, but I guess that's to be expected since I used sourdough starter instructions. Kathy says she doesn't notice any sour flavour at all.

It's probably because I've been re-mixing in the clear alcohol-smelling liquid that comes out on top of the starter as instructed. (The liquid is called hooch.) I wonder if I can minimize that sour taste if I get rid of the hooch instead of mixing it back in.

I was a little worried at first about if it was just plain "gone bad" but I ate half a bun last night, and I didn't end up in the hospital. I ate another one in the morning after toasting and it was not too bad either... Toasted and buttered it was actually pretty good.


Allen.

Baking misadventure on the weekend.

We have this old 5lb sack of cake & pastry flour in the pantry that has been there forever. I think we bought it by mistake one day. Anyways, we tried making some bread rolls out of it this weekend and the results were pretty bad - the flour wouldn't knead nicely and wouldn't rise properly, and then after baking they were dense, crumbling little bricks. Actually it reminded me a little bit of biscuits, so maybe I'll try a biscuit recipe on them instead tonight when I get home. Biscuits are supposed to be crumbly right?

Where are the bubbles?

I also tried making a yeast starter out of the cake flour and an old mostly-used jar of dry yeast - old as in years past it's stamped date, but it is just yeast after all. The only thing that would mean is that there is less live yeast and you won't get the expected amount of rising activity from it. But drop it in a starter and maintain it for a few days, it should become a viable yeast culture again right? There were a lot of recipes on the net about yeast starters, they basically all said the same thing - once started, they are virtually unkillable. Every so often, get rid of some of it somehow (bake with it or toss it out), and feed the remainder with some water and flour to make it it's original size again. Once a day if you leave it out, once a week if you refrigerate it. I will find out how it goes soon enough, if it works I wont need to buy yeast any more, haha.

We did pick up some unbleached all purpose flour so we could do some actual, successful baking as well: I made a batch of nice looking rolls, using the same recipe that the cake flour failed miserably with. What a difference the right flour makes. I used the recipe from here. The best part of this recipe is that there is no milk or eggs in it, cause we are always missing either eggs or milk.


Allen.

French Bread Rolls to Die For

Here it is in the oven
Here they're starting to brown
Here they are shortly before devouring

edit - the biscuit idea was edible but did not look too pretty - white as a sheet of paper even though fully cooked. I tried browning the top with the broil mode but it browned skipping the 'golden' part entirely.

This photo somehow looks better than the actual biscuits on the counter