Success: Bread

FINALLY. It still wasn't anything fantastic, but it WAS bread.


My oven is still absolute crap, so of course the tops got a little burnt, even with a tin foil cover. "Your oven: is it bigger than a breadbox?" No, that's why I can't evenly bake anything. With the bread rising half an inch from the top of the oven, that's what you're gonna get no matter what you do.


One thing that's floored me in this whole process is that nobody makes handmade bread anymore. Finding a decent recipe that doesn't call for a bread machine at one point is like finding a needle in a haystack. I was lucky enough to finally unearth some at allrecipes.com. I used this recipe.


The big difference this time was kneading. Kneading kneading kneading. Ten relentless minutes. I also made sure I was adding enough flour. Something just kept feeling wrong when I would stick to the recipes and I figured there was some innate understanding among the recipe writers that I hadn't been grasping. My process wasn't working like all the videos I'd seen of people kneading bread dough. The dough wasn't dynamic. I was covered in flour but not in the productive way. The dough was sticky. So I floured the bejeebies out of the dough and went to town being all confident and violent like bakers I'd seen before.

Also, it seemed to make a difference letting the yeast sit in the sugar and water to foam up for 5-10 minutes. Later, I also let the mixed bread dough sit long enough. I'd heard things about letting dough rest in order for the gluten to develop, and I'd been doing that, but apparently not for long enough. Once I felt the difference in elasticity between dough that was ready and dough that wasn't, it really drove the point home. Furthermore, I've recently read things about how some people leave their dough overnight and I can vaguely remember back to the old fast food pizza place I worked at in college and how the managers there too would set the dough out overnight. I think a lot of that had to do with thawing the pre-frozen dough, but there could be something to that still.

And something about all this worked. Other than my issues with baking the loaves evenly, the crumb grain was good and the finished product was neither too wet or too dry. It looked like bread. It tasted like bread. I made bread. Finally.

And another success I had, though not very impressive, was with these whole wheat pancakes. Wheat-y, butter-y, and reminiscent of the North American South, they're less like the cakey pancakes I'm accustomed to and more like griddle cakes or flapjacks. One cannot deny their deliciousness. In fact, they were we good I didn't even get any pictures before they disappeared! Pancakes aren't different, but it was only my second recipe using wheat flour and I'm a little touched by its success.

I'd promised myself not to attempt it until I thought there was a chance I could succeed, but I think I'm actually ready to experiment with the honey oat wheat bread I've been itching for >:D

Success: Poached Eggs

Don't ask me why I've never made or even eaten a poached egg before yesterday. I have no good excuse! It's just never come up.

 

I'm going on vacation tomorrow, but last weekend I accidentally bought an extra dozen eggs thinking I'd forgotten to buy some, and then I only ended up using a third of what I thought I'd use. In short, I didn't touch either of the new cartons and had 24 eggs to eat in 4 days. I'm doing some baking with some of them, but it's been quite an egg frenzy otherwise. When scouring the internet for ways to get rid of eggs, I stumbled across someone who said, "Experiment. Use it as an opportunity for the kids try things they'd probably fail at." But wait, who says it has to just be the kids? I fail all the time! What a grand opportunity to try poaching an egg.

 

I found this recipe, coincidentally, which helped me use up other things in my fridge I had to get rid of. http://www.google.co.jp/search?q=monburan&rls=com.microsoft:ja:IE-SearchBox&oe=UTF-8&rlz=1I7TSHB_en&redir_esc=&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&hl=ja&tab=wi&biw=1259&bih=627 I subbed in nattou for the tofu and regular rice for the black rice. It was pretty good with some extra ponzu and mustard.

 

And most importantly, the eggs turned out! I used the method where you strain part of the egg white off to reduce flyaway. My strainer is deep, so I broke a yolk or two but it was all right, I had eggs to spare, right? I also put a splash of vinegar into my water to firm up the whites. I did try the vortex method for the first egg, where you spin the water around to make a whirlpool before you slide the egg in. I forgot about it after that, but come to think of it my first egg came out perfectly and the rest were a little more variable. I'd recommend trying the vortex, if for nothing else but the cool name. I'd also recommend putting the egg into the water as slowly and completely as you can - with my last egg the yolk accidentally slipped in first which separated it from the whites and made the whites fly away all over. I still managed to maintain the yolk and get all the whites in a clump when I was finished, but it was pretty sloppy looking.

 

I decided that I like poaching eggs. I don't usually like raw yolk much but when poaching you can make a partially done yolk, which actually brings it to the perfect consistency in my eyes! 2 minutes for runny, 4 minutes for hard. Not exactly rocket science! Obviously there's not as much flavor as other egg preparation methods that use a ton of butter or oil, but it's enough fun just eating a pillow-y poached egg that I think I will continue doing it! I should try the Japanese "Onsen Tamago" ("Hot Spring Eggs"), a form of slow poached egg. Apparently the whites stay fluffier and the yolks get custardy because you cook it slowly in luke-warm water for a good half an hour. They key is maintaining the temperature though, so maybe I'll wait until I get back to my cooking thermometer in the US before I try it.

 

I didn't think to take any pictures, but my eggs looked just like any other poached eggs (go me!) Instead, I leave you with this: http://www.iloveegg.com/egg_english.htm

Success: Lemon Curd

This condiment actually created quite the existential crisis for me.

When looking for a good lemon curd recipe I stumbled across both an Alton Brown recipe and a Shirley Corriher recipe...AND THEY WERE DIFFERENT! NooOOOoooo!

Recipes are different all the time, you say? How is this a crisis? Well, Alton Brown was my original foodie idol. I felt like he could do no wrong with his science and dependable explanations of How Food Works. He became quite the icon for me in my formative cooking years, especially having been the first to take the role of "chef I could really trust." Such a nice contrast to the Rachel Rays of the world! (yeugh.) But time passes and Alton's been kinda quiet the last few years.

And then Shirley Corriher came along, practicing the same logic and science approach that made me fall in love with Alton Brown. As a biochemist and Vanderbilt Alum, her book, Bakewise, treats everyday recipes with a methodical play-by-play problem solving approach. She knocked me off my feet. She's been my Deity of the Dish since I discovered her last fall.

But now, these two giants meet? The differences were subtle, but how can techniques differ between two people who are both renowned for always having science on their sides? O.O

How could I decide whose recipe to follow? Well, it was easy actually. I went with laziness. Corriher follows what she calls the "5, 4, no 3, 2, 1" method for lemon curd. 5 egg yolks, 4 lemons (plus zest), no 3, 2 cups of sugar, and 1 stick of butter. Dump it all in a sauce pan and double boil it. Bam. Put plastic wrap directly on the surface of the curd so no air touches it as it cools. Finished.

I left in the lemon zest because I thought it gave it a rustic touch. Perhaps someday I'll try to strain it off. The yolk-only nature of this recipe meant my lemon curd came out gooey, sticky, and beautifully yellow. Two cups of sugar and enough lemons also meant VERY flavorful. I'm sure there are people who will prefer using the whole egg and not quite as much sugar and lemon, but I've always preferred flavors that punch you in the face. It's definitely more dessert-y than breakfast-saucy (we make up words in this blog now, don't worry about it).

Alton Brown's recipe is mostly the same, just it calls for one less cup of sugar. It's his methodology, however, that varies a little. He wants you to start by just whisking the egg yolks and sugar in a cool bowl until smooth, then later you add the citrus (with enough cold water to get you to 1/3 cup if your lemons don't give you that much juice), and only after all that is finished do you put it over heat. The cooking time and done-ness test is about the same as Corriher's. Then another major twist is that you add the butter only after it's finished and has been taken off the heat. Again, it finishes with plastic wrap directly on the surface.

It makes sense to me to mix things in an ordinal fashion like Brown does, I like methods to madness...but like I said, I was just too lazy. Perhaps next time around I'll give it a try, even though I enjoyed corriher's recipe so much and I think it's a winner. I owe this to my first love, right? 

Fail: Rice Flour Bread

F-f-f-f-f-fail! Capital F.

There were multiple elements of absolute fail here. I tried to make a Japanese recipe for rice flour muffins, which I won't even include because it was such a flop. It was a simple recipe that called for nothing more than rice flour, baking powder, yogurt, honey, beans, and soy milk. Which, in hindsight, does actually sound terrible - but the picture looked nice and I just wanted it to work so badly!!

I imagine maybe it flopped because I used blueberry instead of sweet beans like the recipe called for, but I don't know. I don't feel like blueberries would make the recipe *that* much wetter. I also used more blueberries than the amount of beans it called for, but that also shouldn't have had such a severe effect. The muffins were completely unset in the center, even though I baked them for about triple the baking time it called for. I used foil cups, but my friends have had success with that so I doubt that was the problem.

Also, they were gritty (ew!) which I chalk up to the chalkiness (haha!) of the rice flour. I don't even know if I'm using the right kind of rice flour, maybe that's the problem. And I don't know what it is about these frozen blueberries I bought, but even though they were still frozen when I put them in the dough and even though I coated them with flour first, they STILL bled all over the place instantaneously. I can only imagine that this brand of frozen blueberries is totally loaded up with artificial coloring. Needless to say, pretty gross overall. They even tasted like baking powder, on top of everything. This may have been my biggest fail since coming to Japan.

The thing I hate most is that I spent over $5 on a handful of frozen blueberries, so you bet your ass I plucked out and ate each blueberry before throwing the muffins away! (But I digress, this blog is about my cooking trials, not my self-destructive quirks).

I had enough ingredients left over and enough frustration to fuel another baking attempt. This time I tried making a loaf instead of muffins, and with a little less liquid and raisins - something drier - rather than blueberries. I added too much vanilla, which was my first mistake, but it was also still fairly underdone and therefore tasted pretty bad. The top also got super crispy and began to split even though the center was underdone. The tricky thing was, my tester came out dry when I put it in, so rice flour must just not stick to things. This attempt was definitely more edible than the last, but still a grand failure I wouldn't serve to anyone. Well, at least this one was edible (to me only) when I toasted it.

Maybe I'll try a yeast bread with rice flour yet, but I'm giving up on the rice flour quick breads. I would not be surprised if such things were just not meant to be based on the contrast between the chalky gluten-free nature of rice flour and the moist richness of a quick bread. So much for my dream of becoming the patron saint of gluten-free baking!!

Success: Quiche

Since the days of pie crust obsession I've been meaning to make a quiche. In fact, ever since my trip to America back in December I've been carrying around my pie crust recipe in my day-planner at the ready lol (Yes, I've been carrying a pie crust recipe for 5 months...) I'd had a lot of luck with this recipe before, though usually I sub out 2 tablespoons of shortening for butter, to give it browning and flavor, and I've learned that in my house 5 T is always too much water so I go for 4 T.

 

I'd been meaning to try the Shirley O. Corriher approach to crust making where, rather than cutting the fats into crumbs, one rolls them out into flakes. This intuitively makes a lot more sense in terms of what you're going for with flakey pie crusts! To do this, you mix together the dry ingredients, then add small chunks of shortening to the bowl, mixing them so they're well-coated, then you freeze all of it for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, pull it back out and just dump the contents of the bowl out onto a floured surface and roll it out as-is with a rolling pin. This will result in longer, flour-coated, fats forming a dough. Scrape it all back up and freeze it again, this time for 5 minutes. Repeat this process about 3 times until you have fats like flaking paint. Freeze the dough for 10 minutes, then add the liquids per usual. When you've got a good dough, freeze it in a plastic-wrapped bowl for 30 minutes before rolling it out for your pie.

 

I really liked this method in general, because I felt like when my dough got too wide or too irregular I could just fold it in half and roll it out again, since the goal was to mix it by flattening it, thus eliminating the stress of turning out a winning sheet on the first attempt without over-working the dough. I will admit, however, that I misread the directions and added the liquid at the beginning by mistake. All the same, I still ended up with a flakier crust than usual using this method. I can only imagine how flakey it is when you do it properly. An important part of having a tender, flakey, pie crust is to get the fats covered in flour first, and to keep the fats in chunks so when they melt they create air pockets. Cutting the fats with a pastry cutter will give you a much more blended final product, thus killing the pockets.

 

When I made this crust for Thanksgiving something happened - maybe I overheated it? - and the crust melted, thus losing its design and falling off the plate and onto the bottom of the oven. This time, I increased the flour I used while rolling out the dough, which seemed to help. It was still pretty greasy, but not nearly as much and the scalloped edge held its shape in the final pie. Of course, after shaping the raw dough I let it rest in the fridge for 10 minutes, and then I did a blind bake with it too, since I didn't want my crust to end up soggy from the egg filling. For some reason, however, my pie crusts still have a lumpy appearance after I bake them. I should figure out how to prevent that. It gives it a homemade look and it's okay I guess, but so many pie crusts I see are smooth, flakey-looking, and beautiful. I'd like mine to be that way, too.

 

For the filling, it just so happened that I'd bought a fancy cheese from the international grocery for everyday eating, not knowing that the emmental I bought is a kind of swiss. I decided it was better to bake with it and it was quite good in my quiche lorraine. I pretty much stuck to the recipe, except that I added mushrooms (treated myself to button mushrooms, as I thought Japanese mushrooms would have too much flavor and overpower the dish) and I sauteed the mushrooms and onion a little prior to baking. I also layered tomato slices on top before baking to add some color and appeal. I really, really loved the cayenne pepper in this recipe. It was not enough to make it spicy, but just enough to give it a little something extra. Using Hokkaido's plain milk, it made quite a rich egg filling that gave me pause when I first took a bite, especially paired with my beloved crust.

 

 

I think my pie plates are a little shallow, however. Every time I make a pie my crust ends up way too thick and way too high and I always have way too much filling. It was really delicious biting into such a thick crust, but it seems a little wrong. My biggest problem, however, was when I noticed a low side on my crust that had come from the blind bake AFTER I poured the filling. At first it was fine, but as the liquid settled it began gushing out the side of the crust and all over the counter top! After enough raw egg mix had spewed out in a scene reminiscent of something from I Love Lucy, I was finally able to get into the refrigerator and pull out some bread crumbs to dam it. That worked, thank god, and I poured the excess egg filling into a small pan to make a little breakfast frittata for the following morning. Yum!

 

 

All's well that ends well, though. I think I learn more about pie methodology every time I do it, and every time I also get better at making it look pretty. I was a little put out, however, that nobody noticed my lunch the day I brought my adorable little quiche to work, and yet on the day I brought a disgusting-looking dumpling soup I managed to attract a small crowd of onlookers. Maybe I'll just have to make another quiche!

Success: Peanut Butter Cookies

After all the heinousness of breads and cakes and tuile cookies, just making something as simple and sure as peanut butter cookies was a major relief.

 

I still had leftover peanut butter mousse and whipped cream from the tuile cups, so I decided to whip up some peanut butter cookies to decorate. My first attempt at the candy balls had failed - I tried to add shortening as an afterthought, stupid - but of course I couldn't throw it away. I never throw something away if it's made of food! So I added a little of this and a little of that and baked them until they became some intentionally delicately flavored peanut butter cookie boats to complement my mousse. Let me say, I am pretty proud of myself for having learned so much about sweets that I can now do such things.

 

 

They were much prettier before I added the candy balls, but hey, you can't ignore deliciousness. It couldn't be avoided.

 

Then, the very next day, the International Club sprung it on me that the following day would be our recruitment party for new freshmen. THANKS FOR THE WARNING, KIDS! We were having a snack party, so I decided to whip up something easy and unique. How about peanut butter cookies? They'd be transportable, they'd stretch a long way, and they'd be a rare flavor for Japan. Settled.

 

Easy as it was, I'd never made peanut butter cookies before - What? There are other things I like more. Anyway, that's why I decided to give it some thought. I dug through a bunch of recipes, weighing the merits of their ingredients, and settled on this one.  My mom always made rather short peanut butter cookies, so I altered the recipe to half butter, half shortening. When I realized I only had half as much peanut butter as I needed, I also changed the recipe to half peanut butter, half nutella! It was a subtle change, but it was as delicious as one would expect! I also added a dash of salt and sprinkled the tops with sugar.

 

 

They turned out really well and I made them small, so I had something like 130 cookies! Enough for International Club, enough for English Conversation Class, AND enough for my Yosakoi Dance Troupe...And enough for me to snack on the burned ones. Burned ones? Yes. My stupid oven-range from hell gets so hot in the center of the pan that it couldn't NOT burn the middle cookies. Well, I'm ashamed to admit it took me quite a few batches before I realized I should just NOT PUT COOKIES IN THE CENTER OF THE COOKIE SHEET. Problem solved! It was hard not doing that though, since my small oven meant I made about 10+ waves of cookies as it was. Thank god the cooking time wasn't very long.

 

Success: Chocolate Chantilly, Meh: Tuile Cookie Cups

This baby step toward fanciness all started with a gimmick and a goal.

A friend had recommended the chantilly recipe a few months back, so when I found these tuile cookie cups it just seemed like a nice, classy, pairing. Besides, I wasn't about to spend 1200 yen on a tiny pack of strawberries and in a tiny block of cream cheese to make the recommended filling in the tuile cup recipe. There are just some things you don't try in Japan out of financial responsibility.

I made the cookies the night before (first half of the recipe only). While the technique was complicated enough to cause me some stress (you know me, I often fear the unknown), I was surprised to find that it really was a simple recipe once you got the hang of it. I also knew I wanted to make lemon curd the next week, so having a bunch of egg yolks leftover to throw in my fridge was a happy coincidence.

A tuile cookie is a French egg white cookie that bakes soft and hardens as it cools, which creates a lot of possibility for 3D shapes like edible spoons and bowls. The goal this time was cups, so I inverted and greased up a bunch of my conical coffee mugs and set to work. Having nothing but my small oven-range from hell, I could only make two cookies at a time. I was afraid they wouldn't come off the pan, so I baked them on parchment paper. I imagine a silpat would be perfect (but I don't have one). One of the recipe reviewers said she liked hers thicker and it made them keep their shape better, so I erred on the side of thickness. Another said that overcooking them also helped. I aimed for that too.

Spreading the batter was a bit difficult, especially spreading it so the edges were attractive and just as thick as the middles, but I learned that with this recipe all you need is a little confidence. Don't be afraid to push the batter around. Don't be afraid to pull the cookies off the tray. The dough is more resilient than it looks and unless it's really under-baked the cookies come up like crepes. They're hot, but it's not so hard to throw them on the back of the cup and make some pleats before they set. Additionally, after they've cooled they pop right off the mold as long as you've applied enough grease. At the end I tried experimenting with scalloped edges and such, but unfortunately I just couldn't do it. I'll try again if I make them again, but I make no promise of success.

I made a batch of the cookies and then realized it was so easy and I had enough ingredients, so making another batch just made sense. They kind of had a consistency like fortune cookies - but mine were not as crisp. They did, however, taste excellent! Overall I was quite pleased with everything about them except for the texture. I've never had a tuile cookie before, so I'm not sure how they're supposed to be, but they look short and hard in pictures, and yet mine were super chewy. In other words, I think I did something wrong.

I used the chantilly recipe for the chocolate layer, which produced a very dark and rich mousse, being nothing but 70% cacao chocolate, a few tablespoons of sugar, and water. The preparation of it seems to go against everything you've ever heard about chocolate, but it's easy if you truly do understand how to temper chocolate. This is also one of those times you buy blocks of real chocolate instead of chocolate bars or coating chocolate (there is a difference, read up), and of course, you follow the recipe EXACTLY.

I was terrified to be working with real chocolate at first (expensive for mistakes and I do not have a proper double boiler!) but I've read enough about chocolate and the recipe was good, so I pushed through it. I had a moment of panic when my mixture started getting grainy and I thought it might seize, but it turned out it just wasn't done tempering yet, in another instant the molecules snapped into "form V" and made me a beautiful mousse that not only set, but stayed set, and piped beautifully! It's a true keeper for my recipe file! My dad, who loves dark chocolate, will love this.

I knew I wasn't going to have enough chantilly to fill the cups properly, so I also made a peanut butter mousse by hybridding a few shitty recipes together to make a good one. I figured I'd made enough things from scratch, so I could cut some corners and not make this mousse from eggs and all that craziness. I whisked together 1/2 cup peanut butter, 1 1/4 cups milk, and a teaspoon of vanilla until blended. Then I added 1 small package of instant vanilla pudding and whisked it until it was smooth (and super thick). Finally, I delicately folded in just under half of the bowl of whipped cream I'd prepared from 1 small carton of whipping cream sweetened with powdered sugar. 

Finally, I made peanut butter ball dough from peanut butter, milk powder, a smidge of honey, and powdered sugar. All the pieces prepared, it was time to put it together. I piped the mousses into the cup and garnished with peanut butter balls, a sliced-up piece of peanut butter chocolate candy, and a dusting of cocoa.  

 

The flavors matched even better than I thought, particularly in terms of bitterness/sweetness ratios. Clearly, I've learned enough that my intuition is getting pretty good! After making this, I couldn't help but feel like I'd leveled up a bit!

Success: Cake Pops

I can't remember anymore what inspired me to do this, even though it was only two weeks ago. For some reason I just really got it in my head that I needed to make a banana rum cake. I think it may have stemmed from something as simple as having overripe bananas and wanting to seize the opportunity. From there, of course the natural inclination was to throw rum on it. I mean, c'mon, that's just what one does with bananas.

After sorting through many a cake recipe, I settled on this banana rum cake (minus the pecans, I tend to omit any non-essential nut from my recipes). I didn't have a yellow cake mix on hand but I did have a french vanilla one. I worried it might be a little too sweet to use, but heck, there's more than one way to skin a cat (though it worked fine in my recipe in the end, I wouldn't recommend using french vanilla cake mix to skin a cat).

With the rum not being cooked in the frosting, of course it gave it a strong-ish alcohol flavor that may not fit all palettes, but I made the cake for a party full of wild young English teachers so I wasn't too concerned. In my opinion (read: the opinion of a flavor-lover and a lush) the alcohol balance was perfect. You could really taste it and enjoy it, but it didn't have a deathly bite.

I got a bit creative from here, as I started by baking them in mini bundt cake pans. I was a little annoyed at first because the only mini pans I had featured autumnal 3D designs on the top, but it was easy enough to cut them off and flip them over to use the domed bottom as a top. Voila, instant adorableness!

This is where my product split off in 3 ways. 1) As-is, 2) whipped cream chocolate pudding, and 3) cake pops.


1) I was surprised with some last minute presents, so to say thank you I just wrapped a couple up and sent them home with some Japanese friends.


2) I wanted to thank another of my adult students for a really big favor, partially why I made the cakes to begin with, but since the cake was already so sweet and the frosting was even sweeter, I knew I couldn't go ahead with my plan to give them fully decorated to a Japanese man who doesn't like sweets. Instead I whipped up some cream and some chocolate pudding and made these.

#3) The cake pops. Though it killed me to smash up such cute little cakes, I knew I'd just eat them if I left them lying around. I could get two birds with one stone by making them into cake pops - another concept cross off the experiments list and an easier way to share them with others. I added a little salt to the frosting to cut the sweetness the best I could and mashed the cake and frosting together in a painfully delicious mess of sugary joy. In the end, after having given away a few of the cakes, I had a bit too much frosting in the cake to frosting ratio, but I could still make them into balls and after freezing them they held their shape long enough to set. Even dipped in the warm chocolate I only lost a few to them dropping off their sticks (next time I'll try to find skewers without a sharp tip that constantly threatens to pierce through). Dipped in the chocolate and drizzled with white chocolate, the whole banana rum sugar sweetness deal turned out all right, too!

It was fun too, being able to play with the white chocolate designs on top. Of course there's a million and one shapes and gimmicks to make cake pops in, but simple, classic, truffle designs lend a certain beauty and grace to a cake pop if you want to keep it classy. I look forward to experimenting with shapes in the future and have drawn some out in my sweets notebok, but I think for now my favorite is just the classic spiral.


Topped off with tiny little bags from the 100 yen shop they were perfectly portable and sharable, the perfect thing to bring to my friend's birthday party out in the the big city pubs. My only regret was how easy it was for me to snack on the failed pops! I think I ate something like 10 of them before I'd realized what I'd done lol

In news of frazzled crossovers between my laziness and my constant shortage on time, I did end up bagging them while the white chocolate was still wet. It made things a little shmeery, but not as bad as it could have been. I'm not too bent out of shape about it lol I also learned that the underlying shape is really important when dipping. If you want those perfectly round balls you best get a melon baller. I kind of liked the homemade look of these. Though I whipped them out super quickly, everyone still said how beautiful they were, which just goes to show that if you drizzle anything with chocolate the inexactness of it stops mattering lol

Success: Seafood

My mom hates anything that comes from the oceans, rivers, and lakes. I take that back, she may like Shamu, but you can't eat him so it doesn't help me. It's this reason why I never learned how to cook any kind of fish or seafood.

After coming to Japan I played with some fish recipes. I still don't feel like my fish dishes taste professional, but I can clean them (sloppily) and I've got some good salt rubs and juices in my corner so I can whip up a decent fish if I need to. Recently, however, it occurred to me that I enjoy other seafoods as well and my not understanding them at all is a big waste of the pile of chewy beasts and shelled things sitting in my grocery store! Though to be honest, I think what's scarier than preparing them is just figuring out how to buy them. I'm really not accustomed to grabbing whole animals from a bin and presenting them to a cashier. You must put them in plastic bags somehow, right?

I don't know. In the meantime I keep going for the pre-wrapped special sales.

I love raw scallop sushi, so I started with a scallop recipe, searing them in a simple garlic butter sauce and serving them with corn grits. Turns out I did a pretty good job but, like lobster, cooked scallops are a little rich for me. I have no richness limit for sweets, but for seafood it's different. I won't rush to make them again, especially because they're expensive, but I still think I did it right.

Next task was clams - what the hell, right? Just because it's in a shell doesn't mean you have to be a pro to cook it. I spent a good while on wikipedia first, researching the different kinds of clams. It was mildly useful but mostly just for fun and curiosity (the geek in me comes out). I'm known for devoting entire afternoons to reading about specific foods and cross referencing what I've learned in Japanese to what I already knew in English. (Speaking of which, I was super shocked and psyched to learn that the thing I'd been so familiar with here in Japan, "tsubu," was actually what we know as "conch" in English. Furthermore, though we hear so much about conch shells, it hadn't occured to me that a conch was a form of snail and that you could eat the creatures that came from a conch shell! Oh the wonder of knowledge! I've been eating snails that come out of those beautiful shells children try to listen to on the beach.)

Anyway, the clams were a wonderfully successful endeavor for me, if for no other reason than how fun and easy it is to cook them! Put them in a pan with a little water for steaming and POPPOPPOP they snap open after a few minutes, signifying that they're done. It was like I could do no wrong while cooking this dish! Even from the very beginning. I was worried initially, they say to throw away the clams that don't close because they've been dead too long, so I figured I'd be throwing away a good deal of the ones I'd bought because so many of them were open. They're so still, I thought, so they MUST be dead. BUT when I tapped them, each one of them closed! It was mystically exciting in an eerie kind of way lol

I absolutely loved this recipe with asari (little neck clams). They make their own salty juices as they cook, so the leftovers were great in soup as well :D  It was wonderfully salty and sweet (and easy!), especially paired with this other very Japanese spinach dish.

 

Maybe I'll make a gumbo or seafood soup someday soon, I think it'd turn out really well on account of all the fresh seafood available here. I'll probably put it off though, because those things are usually such a mishmosh of differents seafoods and it'd be a pain to cook and buy them in the right amounts for one person.

 My final adventure - octopus. I could've gotten a cutlet but I figured there was something cheeky and seemingly inedible about buying the tentacle - so of course that's what I went with. I had a good time playing with it and taking pictures of it before preparing it, for no other reason than to freak out my friends. I'd never had the experience of touching an octopus that hadn't already been sliced up as sashimi or cooked. Feeling the suckers and how, rubbery it appears, their skin is actually quite rough and flexible over the tendons and fibers and such. And they're actually kind of pretty, what with the purple-y red color.

I'd been sitting on this recipe for octopus, served up with spinach in a miso sauce, but it just called for boiled octopus. It didn't say how to boil it! I did a lot of research online and found varying opinions on how to keep octopus from being chewy. Add lemon juice, don't add lemon juice, add salt, don't add salt. Boil it fast. Bake it slow. Boil it with a wine cork in the water. What??

Finally I found a review which seemed relatively informed and scientific. What I did was I blanched the (unbrined - baked octopus is salty enough) octopus arm for 30 seconds in boiling water, then baked it dry in a 200F oven for two hours (the original recipe called for 4-5 hours but my arm was small so it was ok). Like the clams, octopus makes its own juices - juices that are surprisingly rich and sweet and that you'd NEVER want to waste, so you boil them down into a concentrate. What makes it even better is that the juice comes out a vibrant pink, it looks as good as it tastes! I did a regular boil for a small piece of the octopus as the "control group" to my experiment, and even though I didn't overboil it, it was still not nearly as tender as the octopus that had been blanched and baked. I'd highly recommend that method if you've got the time.

Anecdotally, I was surprised to find my favorite part of the sliced octopus was the suckers! They have as light satisfying crunch to them when baked. The miso sauce was delectable, I'd readily make it again, even as a sauce for other things.

RECIPE
ほうれんそうとたこの酢味噌和え
Spinach and Octopus in Miso-Mustard Vinegar


100g     spinach
100g     boiled octopus


miso-mustard sauce
60g     white miso
1 t      yellow mustard
1 t      sugar
1 T     vinegar
1 T     mirin


1) Blanch spinach in boiling water for about 30 seconds, then cut into 2 cm strips.
2) Cut boiled octopus into 5mm width slices.
3) To make miso-mustard sauce: mix white miso, sugar and yellow mustard, add mirin and vinegar. Mix well.
4) Dry the spinach and octopus, spread sauce on plate and arrange spinach and octopus.

So now what? I'm not sure what else I could make from here, as far as the "little known seafood" category goes, short of making my own tsubu - which is usually just grilled with some sake and butter - not overly complex. I already eat squid quite regularly and it's not so hard to prepare. These three seafoods were pretty much at the top of the list. Still, I've been so successful, I think I will continue the search for chewy beasts and shelled things to dominate.

Failure: Bread

White bread: the bane of my existence. There are even people with little baking skill who can make bread. So what's wrong with me?

I've been making quick breads for ages, but I've only made handmade yeast bread 4 times now - the first time being about two months ago. I've tried a bunch of different recipes, and they've always been edible every time but still not at all company worthy. It's hard enough just finding handmade bread recipes these days, as it seems to be the consensus that doing it with a bread machine is the way to go, and everybody else who triumphs without a bread machine has some special professional grade mixer and/or oven. STILL, I refuse to believe it's impossible. I've seen it done!

For my first attempt I used a recipe for baguettes from one of my favorite books, Bakewise by Shirley O. Corriher. I love the book, but I shouldn't have tried this recipe in my current situation. It was full of strange little techniques I couldn't do here and special ingredients I could get here (Vitamin C tablets to help the rise??), so in the end what I made was a "no knead bread" without the ingredients that made it "no knead." I couldn't shape it at all. What's probably more comical was that my drafty (shitty) apartment was too cold for it to rise well, so I put it close to the heater which only succeeded it melting it initially, and then baking the surface after. Well, I stuck it in the oven anyway and it came out edible, but incredibly crumbly.

For my second attempt I used a new recipe instead, something simpler, and let the bread rise in the oven on its lowest setting instead of in the open air. I kneaded it a bit more than before. It looked passable as bread but was still pretty crumbly, though fortunately less so than the first attempt (it was much easier to cut it this time haha) but there still wasn't enough kneading. I think my problem is that I lose my nerve to continue kneading because my dough is so sticky and therefore I can never get it to actually be "kneaded" so much as "clumped." I would guess my deal is that I don't add enough flour in the kneading process because it never looks like the doughs people knead in bread-making videos.

Attempt #2

For my third attempt I wanted to spice things up. I had an amazing recipe for salmon burgers and a hankering for an pan (sweet bean paste filled buns), so I made this recipe, filling half with sweet bean paste and leaving half alone for burger buns:

I'd learned some lessons. 1) Let it rise in the oven and 2) KNEAD THE SHIT OUT OF IT. I still don't think I added quite enough flour, the dough wasn't perfect and I did more stirring than kneading, but I was actually able to make roll shapes, which is clearly an improvement. The ones I'd filled with bean paste were a little inconsistent, thinner in some places, thicker in others (gotta work on wrapping technique!), but neither of the buns were nearly as crumbly as my last few attempts. I would consider this third attempt a pseudo success. It's definitely the closest I've come to success anyway. MAYBE when I try this particular recipe again I'll actually end up with something decent.

For my fourth bread, I said, "Eff this, I'm going to cheat," and decided to make this Irish soda bread. No yeast, but it looks like a yeast bread and that's good enough, right? UNFORTUNATELY, although it was super fast and super easy, it seems my baking soda was dead! It didn't rise well in the baking process and became quite dense in the center. Even when I try to cheat, I am foiled. I like undercooked bread though, not gonna lie, so I still managed to eat half the loaf in one sitting.

THEN even after all this, I ended up with a whole new breed of fail. I tried a pizza crust. Pizza crust should be the easiest one, right? I mean, I used to make pizzas at the carry out restaurant I worked in my freshman year of college. We didn't make the dough from scratch but I knew a thing or two about how to set and bake it!

Well, this is where lazy me struck again. I was making this recipe for Tex Mex Pizza, but given the price of bran cereal here I just went with the toppings of that recipe on this crust instead. Now, I know that if you put too much on a pizza it wouldn't bake properly and it will be too wet. Particularly if you're using a thick layer of beans instead of tomato sauce...but I really wanted a shit ton of vegetables... so I did it anyway. The dough spread well into the pan. I pricked it and docked it as I should, then covered it with the goods and began to bake it. Well, as you'd imagine, it took forever and was still pretty underdone so I just kept on baking it (more than double the recipe time!). I succeeded in cooking it thoroughly, against all odds, but in the end it was more of a pizza muffin than a pizza crust. It was really light and fluffy, probably on account of all the moisture, and it wasn't chewy at all (but at least it wasn't crumbly!).

Apparently I'm learning things after all this failure, so if I could just apply them all at once I might actually be okay next time. For now, my bread-making life is such a comedy of errors and laziness. I've since been heartened, however, as I realized I was unintentionally using 8% protein flour instead of 13%. That makes a pretty big difference to the formation of gluten networks, and so I think I may have more luck next time around just by changing the flour (no matter how I screw up this time!).

It's been a humbling experience to say the least.

Meh: A Year in Various Desserts

"Meh" is a little harsh maybe, but nicely done desserts with flaws in taste or ugly desserts with great taste are not what I'd consider a success. What these things all have in common is that I made them at the beginning of my baking career and they need to be improved. Fortunately they were decent recipes at heart, so after everything I've learned it would probably be easy to make them perfectly the second time around.

These two desserts I kind of impressed myself with. It was before I'd learned how to use my microwave's oven feature, so I made them in a tiny little open flame fish grill. Chocolate bread pudding with icing and chocolate sauce on the left. Iced banana bread on the right. I honestly can't remember where I got the recipes. The bread pudding was pretty good and the banana bread was all right, but they were not that attractive and that's precisely why I'm including them in the blog. Also when your banana bread is a little gray, it is not appealing. These products embody my mantra: "If it looks like crap, it needs to taste fantastic...but then you've gotta up your game because there's no excuse for it to look like crap to begin with." Apparently I need a catchier mantra.What these sweets need is a gimmick. 

These brownies, however, aren't doing so bad for their gimmick! Brownies with chocolate frosting and chocolate covered cherries. This was part of my "how the hell do you make good chocolate frosting" phase and they came right before the chocolate frosted cakes in the "Success: A Year of Cakes" post. They were pretty good, though the frosting was more chocolate than butter cream, and the brownies were very cake-like and a little dry. I think next time I would put sour cream or something in it and make it super fudgey. Brownies, in my opinion should be really moist and gooey. But considering it was my first attempt at brownies from scratch and they didn't taste like one's first brownies from scratch, it's still a win. I believe I used this recipe but with cocoa substituted for the baking chocolate and a combination of white and brown sugars. I suspect baking chocolate would've made it less dry as well.



Finally, these suckers I made from a mix (lol "suckers," I made a pun!), but I'm including them because they were made in my adorable little mini madeleine pans. Of course, they pans are a bitch to clean, but they're so cute I'll probably bring them back to America with me. I torted them and put a layer of Nutella and a thin layer of hardened chocolate in between to give it some texture. They came out a little crumbly, so I think a denser cake would do better in this mold next time.

Success: A Year in Japanese Dinners

I cook dinner for myself every night, so in order to keep the blog elite-ish I'm going to try and avoid stir frys and other "easy" dinners no matter how delicious they are. Still, I decided to include these dinners just because they're the first Japanese things I ever made and I got the recipes from my Japanese cookbooks. Part of the accomplishment here is just figuring out how to read the recipes in Japanese. I don't have a problem reading them now, I've learned a lot of the vocabulary and grammar patterns used so that I almost never have to look anything up anymore when I see a new recipe, but trust me when I say my first few months of using Japanese cookbooks generated a lot of self esteem.

This first recipe highlights exactly how delicious something simple can be. It's pork and shimeji mushroom stir fry. When you're finished however, you drop it over raw cabbage and mix it up with a tablespoon of mayo. It makes something so delicious and so simple. The recipe is from Orange Page Cooking magazine.

(serves one person, 247 calories)

1 pack      shimeji mushrooms

100 g        pork, sliced

120 g        cabbage

1/2 tsp      grated ginger puree

1 T each   sugar, sake, soy sauce

black pepper, sesame oil, mayonnaise

1. Break apart shimeji. Shred the cabbage and place in a bowl off to the side. Cut pork into 1-2 cm pieces and pepper it to your liking. In a small bowl, mix together sugar, sake, and soy sauce.

2. Heat some sesame oil in a frying pan over medium heat. Add ginger and pork. When the pork begins to change colors, add the shimeji and the bowl of sugar/sake/soy sauce. When everything is cooked, turn off the heat and add a dollop of mayonnaise to the pan. Mix well. Serve the contents of the pan over the cabbage.

From there, even though the recipe doesn't say to do so, I like to mix the cabbage up, it ends up cooking it ever so slightly with residual heat.

The second dish I wish I had labored to take a better picture of. It looks ugly as hell but was actually quite delicious. Pork meatballs, bean sprouts, onions, and eggplant stir fried in a sauce of equal parts miso and soy sauce, with some sugar for sweetness. I made this recipe up based on fancy versions of it that I've had in restaurants. Go me! Not that it's hard, most sauces in Japan are some mixture of soy sauce, miso, sake, mirin and/or sugar. It did, however, take a few tries to cut the saltiness of the miso.

Finally, chili shrimp with tofu (ebi chiri as it's so commonly called here). Chili sauce shrimp and tofu thickened with corn starch. It was surprisingly zippy and satisfying.

(Serves one person, 255 calories)

150 g      shrimp, peeled and deveined

150 g      momen tofu

1/4 of an onion

one clove garlic

a small ginger root

1/2 tsp spicy toubanjian sauce

ketchup, sugar, sake, soy sauce, salt, flour, vinegar, and vegetable oil

1. Cut tofu into 1.5 cm blocks. Peel and mince ginger, garlic, and onion. In a small bowl, mix 1/2 cup water, two tablespoons of ketchup, two teaspoons of sugar, 1 tsp of vinegar, 1 tsp soy sauce, and 1/4 tsp salt. In another small bowl mix 1 tablespoon of water and 1 teaspoon of flour and mix well.

2. Put shrimp in a bowl with 1 teaspoon of sake and add salt to your liking. Next add 1 tablespoon of flour and coat. Heat a tablespoon of oil in a frying pan over medium heat and add the shrimp. Cook for 30 seconds. Remove it from the pan when it's finished.

3. After the shrimp is removed, add onion, ginger, garlic, and cook over medium-low heat. When you can start to smell the ingredients cooking, add the toubanjian along with the ketchup sauce you made in step 1.  Mix well, add tofu, and cook 1-2 minutes. Add the flour mixture from step 1 and stir. When the sauce begins to thicken, put the shrimp back into the pan and cook everything together for an additional minute.

Success: Scones

Scones are one of my simple pleasures in life. I like their mouth feel more than the mouth feel of muffins and I enjoy the range of sweet and savory flavors they come in. My specialty is oat and raisin scones - they come out perfectly every time and I could eat the whole batch in one sitting, especially warmed or toasted with butter.

I thought I should branch out from this though and therefore decided to make some lemon scones, since I' had never made oat-less scones before. They were a bit cakey and spread to be super huge, so typical improvising me quickly cut them into stars, whipped up some homemade cream and instant pudding, then garnished with strawberries to make them into a dessert for my friends and I on the night before our 10K race. Dusted with powdered sugar, they got my seal of approval. When in doubt: make it a strawberry shortcake.

Another attempt at a new flavor of scone came nearly a year later (I'd made other scones since they just weren't anything to write home about). I used this recipe for double orange scones.

The orange butter was absolutely to die for. Maybe the scones could've been a little shorter, but they were still quite good. I left the oranges out to dry for a bit, because I used fresh oranges and knew just how much water they'd be adding to the recipe. I could probably cut the liquid back even further than I did. It was also my first time using wheat flour! (very exciting). They were rather pretty with the orange zest specks and the browning of the butter, though I'll be the first to admit that I usually make my scones too wet and so the shape gets a little "meh." I'll work on it, I promise.

I still need to try my hand at some savory scones. I've got a few garlic and cheese recipes dog eared for fun. Maybe next week.

Success: Pumpkin

I have a lot of luck with pumpkin in this country. It's like I can do no wrong. I guess pumpkin is a pretty easy thing to begin with, but Japanese pumpkins are sooooo delicious. I hope I can still find them when I return to the U.S.!

One of my big fancy successes last fall was these pumpkin sage balls with balsamic creme fraiche.

In Japan I made pumpkin puree from scratch, which gave it noticeably more flavor than when I tried it in the States over Christmas vacation using canned pumpkin. I've used it with both fresh sage and dried sage, with similar results. I wasn't able to master the fried leaves thing (totally burned them), but it doesn't really need it anyway. The balls are deliciously simple and the dipping sauce is so good I could eat it with a spoon (okay, so I did eat it with a spoon). The sourness of the sour cream really gives body to it and compliments the sourness of the balsamic so well.

As the picture indicates, they make a great salad, especially with the dipping sauce.

Success: A Year in Cakes

I made this chocolate cake with chocolate and raspberry icing as a going away present for my favorite lunch lady. I was proud of myself for making my own chocolate frosting (from cocoa, not from chocolate blocks) and the raspberry frosting was really good, but I'm afraid it probably got pretty sweet for her Japanese palette. I never heard what she thought about it, but I think even some Americans would've found it too sweet, so it's a safe bet. Design wise, it's classic but well-executed well enough, I think. I really liked the contrast between the pink and brown.

My next two cakes I think mark my "leveling up" in cake making. I played around with inverting chocolate and vanilla to create a color contrast. The first was a French vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream. I got to practice my wilton rose and ball techniques, and for the first time tried my hand at cornelli lace. Admittedly cornelli lace needs a smaller tip on the pastry bag.

For the second cake I was mostly using up the extra frosting so that's why it's so close to a repeat. The inner layer of ganache filling was mixed with nutella to spice things up a bit, but otherwise the flavors are identical. I tried an antique geometric style decoration but I lack the perfect hand for geometry, and something about my buttercream recipe is lacking the professional smoothness and crustiness you need to get really nice looking lines.

Someday I'll figure out how to make that crisp Italian buttercream you see in the fancypants bakeries. I can't speak for how it tastes, since I've never actually eaten one, though I suspect the smoothness have something to do with meringue powder.

Failure: A Year in Cakes

My first cake here in Japan - and also my first homemade cake entirely from scratch - was this "spider" I made for a Japanese Halloween party. It doesn't have enough legs, so technically it's a crab, but shit, I ran out of cake and I ran out of space!

It tasted okay, I guess, fairly bland and really dense. I didn't use cake flour and I baked it in my crazy Japanese top-heating-only microwave oven thing. It wasn't what I wanted, but at the last minute I got the idea to whip up some fondue and dipping the bits in chocolate made it okay.

This was a boston cream pie I made for a "congratulations" party after my students took a special English test. I over-did it on the cream decorations because I was late and just kind of started applying it in a rush without any kind of plan. I cheated and used instant pudding for the center and Dove chocolates for garnishes.

The homemade ganache and cream turned out *really* well, but it was a hot day so once I took it out of the fridge it began to sweat like mad. I was so upset! I knew a boston cream pie wasn't a good idea in August, but I wanted to impress my students and I knew the Japanese palette prefers desserts that are less sweet than what I usually make. I took a risk and failed.

These are excellent lessons for me in terms of what happens when I don't give myself enough time or make a plan in advance. I really need to just focus, but it wouldn't hurt to devote more time to studying dessert design and presentation.

Success: Mushroom Pie

Shortly after the obsession with empanadas I decided to test out what else I could do with pie crusts. Thus, the mushroom pie was born. I used a typical mushroom pie recipe - bacon, cream sauce, mushrooms - over my awesome new flakey pie crust.

Filling: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Mushroom-Pie/Detail.aspx

The biggest change I made was to use Japanese mushrooms instead of "normal" ones. Shimeiji, maitake, and shiitake. It was good, but these tend to be really yeasty, flavorful, mushrooms, so combined with the fatty crust it got pretty rich, pretty fast. The cream sauce didn't help. 

For that reason I wouldn't do it exactly that way again. Still, it was also my first lattice crust and the crust came out super flakey, and for that reason I'd consider it a success.

Success: Empanadas

Somehow I didn't get a picture of these. It's probably just as well considering the cinnamon in the crust makes them kind of grayish brown. Maybe I'll consider making them with wheat flour in the future, it'll make them chewier but maybe also a little more rustic.

 

I was pretty proud of myself for this, as one of my first from scratch super challenges. I experimented with a new pie crust recipe (to great success) and developed my own spiced pumpkin filling with a secret ingredient - orange juice. Of course, they come with a spot of homemade whipped cream on the side. Even people who don't like pies approved of this recipe and fell in love with them (my mother, mainly, who bellyached a bunch before I made them because she doesn't get so excited about pumpkin or mini pies. I won her over!).

 

I think it'll be one of my specialties into the future, even though it's labor intensive. I'm looking into getting a special brand I can burn into the crust, since cutting fun shaped holes in the top may lead to spillage. If I can't get a branding iron, I may just cut some extra crust to form a 3D layered design. I'll continue playing with crust-making techniques, eventually choosing between flakey and cakey. Right now it tends to be that the first few are flakey and the last few are cakey, as the re-rolled and re-rolled dough becomes overworked.