Let them eat bread

It's easy to forget what we are capable of. Life, work, situations become too comfortable and we let ourselves give up just a little bit. It's easy to become content with not reaching our full potential. I know what this feels like and it's hard to motivate yourself to combat it.

Today I will concentrate on the things I love. Those things that inspire me, those things I look forward to, that I take pride in and that I find pleasure in.

Enjoying a quiet coffee alone with the paper, the Wednesday Life section of the Globe and Mail (it's the food issue) and its Saturday Style section. Sleeping in, waking early to a day off and no scheduled plans, feeding my brothers, feeding my friends, feeding Roland. Watching seedlings grow, sketching garden plans, planning supper, getting to watch Oprah in the middle of the day. Spending Saturday morning at our Farmer's Market, cooking and baking.

Baking is so satisfying. A meeting of science and creativity. Careful and precise measurements, chemical reactions that make dough rise, pastry flake and crumb moist. Honing a feel for baking is an accomplishment. Reaching a point where you can tell how dense, tender, glutenous and flaky pie pastry will turn out just by the way it feels when it's raw in your hands is enlightening. At least it was to me.

Every time I bake a pie I feel good. Each time I take bread out of the oven, lean in close to hear it cracking, whispering to me that it's perfect, I feel total satisfaction.This bread recipe is the easiest thing in the world. You might not even believe how easy it is, until you try it. Even if you know absolutely nothing about baking, you're going to succeed with this recipe. It results in a perfectly crusty loaf of sourdough bread, with a toothsome, tender crumb. It's the best way to start my week and a helpful reminder that simple things make me happy, comforted and remind me who I am and where I can go.

This recipe has appeared many times on-line. It is Jim Lahey founder of The Sullivan Street Bakery in New York City's no-knead bread recipe. Jeffery Steingarten wrote about it in Vogue Magazine, Mark Bittman introduced the world to this recipe in the New York Times. I am going to share it with you here, at buddinggourmand.

This loaf of bread is a miracle because it requires no kneading. It does, however, require time and patience.

The Basic No-Knead Bread Recipe from Jim Lahey

3 cups bread flour (you can substitute whole wheat or rye, I usually use a combination of whole wheat and white bread flour)
1 1/4 teaspoon table salt
1/4 teaspoon instant or other active dry yeast
1 1/3 cup cool water
wheat bran, cornmeal or additional flour for dusting

You will also need:
parchment paper
dutch oven or heavy lidded pot (4 1/2 - 5 1/2 quart)
clean tea towel
large bowl and wooden spoon

Combine the flour, salt and yeast in a bowl. Add the water and mix until you have a sticky, shaggy dough. It should be very sticky - if it's not, add a little more water until it is. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it sit at room temperature, out of direct sunlight, until the surface is dotted with bubbles and the dough has more than doubled in size. The dough will sit for 12 - 18 hours. I usually do this step in the evening, leaving it to rest over night, so that I can bake the loaf the next morning.

Once the bread has sat for its 12 - 18 hours, doubled in size and bubbled (this is the first fermentation), generously flour a work surface and scrape the bread dough onto the surface. This dough will be quite sticky, it will cling to the bowl. This is correct; do not add more flour to the dough. Lift the edges of the dough towards the centre shaping the dough into a round.

Flour a large square of parchment paper. Gently life the dough and place on the parchment paper seam side down. Dust generously with more flour and cover loosely with the clean tea towel. Leave the dough to rise another hour to two hours in a warm spot until it has doubled in size and springs back when poked.

Half an hour before you think the dough has finished it's second rise (I usually poke the dough after an hour, if it doesn't bounce back quickly I leave it for another half hour and then move onto this step) preheat your oven to 475 degrees F with the rack in the lower third position and place the covered (lidded) heavy pot in the centre of the rack. Leave the pot in the oven to heat up (about half an hour).

Using oven mitts, carefully remove the pot from the oven and uncover it. Take the tea towel off the dough, lightly dust again with some flour and quickly invert the dough into the pot - be careful! That pot is hot! Cover the pot and return it to the oven. Bake for 30 minutes.

Remove the lid and continue baking until the bread is a deep chestnut or golden brown (but not burnt), anywhere from 15 min to half an hour. Use pot holders to carefully lift the bread out of the pot and let it rest on a cooling rack. Listen to it happily crack and tear into it after it has cooled at least an hour.

Beer vs. Wine

St Veronus hosted its first beer vs wine paired dinner this week. The winner: beer.


Described as the "Ultimate Pairing Dinner", this night was a chance to pit beer and wine, notorious enemies, against each other in a battle of the palate. Which would make a better pair for lobster, steak tartar, duck and lemon mousse? Who would reign supreme amongst beverages? Each course was paired with a wine and beer and the guests chose the best food match of the two. It was a close call - beer won by 8 votes total, taking two of the four courses. Wine, also a winner of two of the four courses, just came short overall and must now wallow in its total failure.

First course:
Butter poached lobster on barley risotto cake with garlic-mushroom duxelle and arugula

While the dish as a whole was delicious, the bold flavours of the barley, duxelle and arugula overtook the delicate lobster. A challenge to pair, the winner of this round was wine: a Riesling Kabinet. Duvel, a top fermented big bodied pale ale, lost to the off-dry white, which maintained its sweetness when enjoyed with the barley and the lobster. The Duvel became a little bitter when paired with the dish.

Second course:
Steak tartar (yum)

Freshly minced tenderloin mixed with cornichon, white onion and raw egg. Dressed with crostini, fried caper, and a tamarind-anchovy gastrique. This dish was dynamite! The flavours sang... tender delicate beef uplifted by crunchy bold onion, sweet & sour cornichon and that tangy gastrique boasting an uncanny similarity to Worcestershire or HP sauce... meat's guilty pleasures.


Wine: a Portuguese tempranillo. Beer: Rodenbach Grand Cru - a sour brown beer. The beer was by far the winner. The sourness of the ale complemented the gastrique - a flavour match. The irony-metallic qualities of the raw beef brought out the minerality of the beer. And while the beer is mouth-puckeringly flavourful, a great foil for the sour-tangy brightness of the dish, it did not overpower the tender raw meat.

Main course:
Duck confit with cranberry jus, mashed parsnip and candied yam

Wonderful duck confit. Skin not as crispy as I may have liked, but the meat was tender - pulled away from the bone with ease - completely moist and flavourful, its gamey qualities still present, but delicate. This was a hard one to call. The wine: 13th Street Gamay Noir from Niagara. The beer: Aventinus Dopplebok. So close. Gamay is a perfect match for duck. The cherried flavours of the wine complemented the jus and were a great match for the candied yam. But the beer - earthy and fruity - was too great a match with duck's gaminess. By a small margin, beer wins this round, however, that fantastic duck was the true winner...

Dessert:

Lemon mousse with white chocolate creme anglaise and coconut tuile

Decadence. Light, creamy and refreshing. A real tough pair with beer. The beer: Blanche de Chambly. Just not a match. The wine: botrytis affected Chenin Blanc from the Loire Valley. The dessert wine was an obvious winner, with its citrusy sweetness.


A great night of great food, great debate and discussion, and great company. Looking forward to the next beer dinner.

Kung Hei Fat Choy

Last Thursday marked the beginning of the Lunar New Year. As celebrations around the world start winding down, I give you my first try at one of my favourite Cantonese-style dishes, Soy Sauce Chicken.


It's not fancy, or complicated. It's just great comfort food and one of my favourite things to eat.

Traditionally, a whole chicken is braised in soy sauce and spices. It sits sometimes for hours in this mixture, the soy sauce steeping into the meat. The skin glistens with sticky sweet soy sauce-y goodness and the meat becomes tender and flavourful. It's served with my hands-down favourite condiment, ginger and scallion sauce. The dish requires some work and some time, which I sorta found out too late, but is worth it. I believe I made one of the best soy sauce chickens I've ever had...


I was making this dish for two - Roland and myself. What I had was a five pound bird. A little large for two. So, untraditionally, I broke the chicken down, deciding to braise both breasts and one thigh and turning the rest of the carcass into stock. This actually contributed to a better overall product... I'll explain later.

First step is to create the braising liquid. Soy sauce, water, sugar, ginger, garlic, scallion, cinnamon stick, star anise, cooking wine, pepper. This boils and cooks before the chicken is added to the pot. This sauce smells divine. Lightly sweet, rich and aromatic - the cinnamon and star anise filled the kitchen with warm, spicy goodness.


The chicken cooks for about 40 minutes in the hot liquid and then sits, preferably for a few hours, in the braising sauce so it can penetrate deep into the meat...


The chicken is served sliced, with this great, zippy sauce of ginger and scallions. Minced ginger and scallions combine with salt, hot oil and a little chicken stock to create this addiction-forming sauce. It's sweet and tangy, salty, savoury, umami packed... it's a good thing.


If I had followed the recipe exactly, and let my chicken brew, we probably would have been eating dried out chunks of meat. I can see a whole chicken really benefiting from a long dip in the soy sauce, but nothing good was going to come of letting my smaller pieces of meat, off the bone, sit in this piping hot liquid for hours. Short on time, I sped through the last part of the recipe, removing the chicken pieces after about 20 minutes. The meat wasn't yet dried out, and had absorbed enough flavour. As an added bonus, it was bone and cartilage free. Traditionally the dish is served sliced with a heavy cleaver, each piece of meat sitting on its piece of jagged bone - one of my lesser favourite aspects of Soy Sauce Chicken. We enjoyed this dish with some ginger, garlic, chicken stock-steamed Chinese broccoli and rice. Happy New Year.


Bee Yin Low has a great recipe on Rasa Malaysia - an excellent source for Asian food recipes. I modified her recipe for our Soy Sauce Chicken dinner.

Can we start over?

I really mean this: I am not the girl who cries wolf.

I'm starting over this time. For real.

This is the beginning.

Don't even read anything posted before this post (well, read if you'd like to... some of it is worthwhile).

Guangzhou

Being obsessed with food and eating, a trip to the Far East seemed sure to prove gastronomically euphoric. We visited Hong Kong, Guangzhou in the Guangdong province of China, and Bangkok. We had a great time and ate some delicious food, but I have to admit, at times I became so engrossed in what I was consuming I forgot to snap photos. I'd get caught up in a blind binge rage and couldn't stop myself long enough to photograph the goods. For any dish there isn't a photo, I do have a great description... hope that's acceptable.

The first best things we ate were dumplings in Guangzhou. Perfectly chewy without being doughy and filled with the tastiest mix of minced pork and green onions. These things are outrageously addictive. You can enjoy them steamed or fried at 3RMB for 10. That's about $0.50. You can become very pleasantly full for $1.50.

These dumplings, served at a little hole in the wall around the corner from our friends, Graham and Jane (whom we were staying with while in Guangzhou), are prepped in the street. Huge handfuls of green onions are diced curb side with a giant cleaver on a make-shift butcher-style block. At a table inside the little restaurant the pork & onion mixture is carefully rolled by hand into each perfect bundle. Outside the dumplings are steaming, waiting to be enjoyed. They are taken to the back to be deep friend into crisp, golden bites. They are served with smooth & runny peanut sauce to which you can add some zingy chili.

We also enjoyed a plate of Hunan style "fries" (I'll call them, because I don't know their official name). Julienne potato blanched and flash fried with chili, rice wine vinegar, green onion and carrot. It's spicy and sour and I need to learn how to make it at home.

Would you like to hear about the most delicious Tum Yum soup I've ever had or our seven-course fresh seafood lunch next?

Am I a bad blogger?

I apologize to all my fans (that means you, Roland). I do not blog enough to deserve a blog.

Turning over a new leaf - I promise this time!

The tomatoes have been processed and sealed in mason jars that now sit comfortably in the kitchen. I picked, chopped, cooked, milled and canned pounds of tomatoes. I am almost an old hand at it now.

We've used the puree to make the sweetest cream of tomato soup you can imagine and fresh tangy pasta sauce. I cannot express the great difference fresh or freshly canned tomatoes make. Yes, I see nothing wrong with a grocery store tin of crushed, diced, whole or pureed tomato, but comparing it to your own, freshly picked and canned tomato puree is impossible. Our fresh tomatoes, even in their preserved form, are so sweet! So bright! So delicious... if you haven't already, get yourself a tomato patch and can some tomatoes next summer.

Eating Out

So, here I am again. Apologizing for infrequent writing and zero footage of my cooking or eating adventures.

I also realize that I've actually neglected to write about my eating adventures, of which there are many. I love to eat. I love to eat out. And I love Hoof Cafe and Black Hoof in Toronto.

I had been to the Hoof Cafe and enjoyed a most decadent brunch of toast, roasted bone marrow, fragrant vanilla-rhubarb jam, charcuterie and pig tails & grits. I will remember that meal for a long time, mostly because I enjoyed it with one of my favourite people, Yani Kong, but definitely because it was so gosh-darn delish. Melt in your mouth salami, creamy & gooey marrow, to-die-for jam and the best grits I have ever had in my life. I am a grit believer because of the Hoof Cafe.

Hoof Cafe opened after it's parent restaurant, Black Hoof. The incredible popularity of Black Hoof led to the opening of the Cafe across the street, intended, I believe, to serve as a holding tank for patient diners waiting for a coveted table at the no-reservation-policy Black Hoof. After enjoying lovely meals at each location I am tempted to say that the Hoof Cafe does more than serve as a comfortable (and tasty) place to wait in line... it may be better than it's original, the Black Hoof.

On Saturday Roland and I dined at Black Hoof. We waited about half an hour on a very rainy night for a table. The staff were incredibly lovely. They made us feel very wanted and were appropriately apologetic for our wait. Unfortunately, Hoof Cafe was closed for a two week summer holiday (I understand the Black Hoof will close for the same holiday later this week), so we couldn't even have a delicious cocktail of house-infused liqueurs & fresh ingredients that the Hoof Cafe is so well known for. There were no free seats at the bar either, so we waited under the awning until graced with a table.

I started with a cocktail called Violet Gin Sour - a pretty sweet and sour flip of gin, violet syrup, lemon lime and egg white. We started with charcuterie, perhaps what the Hoofs are best known for - that, and their brilliant use of off-cuts. Beautiful smoked duck breast salami, fluffy creamy duck liver mouse, duck liver pressed pate, horse mortadella, chorizo, fennel-spiced salami and at least three other variations I can't remember. Served with hearty house-made crusty bread, tangy grainy mustard and house pickles. The meat was, once again, melt-in-your-mouth delicious. We followed our platter with crispy pig tail salad and sweetbread with peas & chanterelles.

Crispy crackling-like pieces of pork topped a salad of radish, greens, lovage and buttermilk dressing. The dressing was good, but something I think I could pull off at home. The vegetables were fresh, seasonal and crisp and the pork was fantastic. Perfect summer shelled peas and meaty chanterelles may have been the stars of the sweetbreads dish. The sweetbreads (which is what we call the thymus gland) were cooked well; creamy and tender. But those beautifully cooked peas! They really made the dish for me... that and the tasty jus pooled around the whole thing.

Cheese was the last thing we indulged in. A well curated board representing British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec paired with house-made fruit compotes and more of that crusty bread.

The meal was really good, but it wasn't the best meal I've had. It might not make it into my top ten (however, the Hoof Cafe brunch does), but it was worth the wait.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the Black Hoof is the fact that the cooks are working out of an open kitchen no larger than my (relatively small) washroom and with a run-of-the-mill domestic electric stove. Given these conditions, that meal was remarkable.

It occurs to me that my blog needs some photos... and that I need to write more.

It's hard to think of something worth while to post on a regular basis.

As we come to the sticky middle of the summer, I'm looking forward to the tomatoes. Those little plants that we started from seed in our living room window are nearly as tall as I am. We're waiting patiently to see what colour each tomato ripens to. This year we bought a mixed packet of heirloom seeds and I have no idea what is planted where. The anticipation is amazing!

For my next Pearl Magazine article I'll be writing about canning and preserving. Two things so new to me, but activities I'm hoping to become an old hand at. Going to attempt a quick pickle over the next week or two, and I will photo document the event.

Visions of pepper jellies, ketcup, jam and crisp & tangy vegetables...