An Asian Style Dinner

I've still got some things to cover, the garden, Rose's birthday, maybe even Sticky Fingers. But right now I need to cover last night's dinner.

Last night's menu:

• Asian Style Noodles
• Asian Style Salmon
• Glazed Lemon Yogurt Cake with Blueberry Sauce

I watch a lot of Food Network. Though all of the shows aren't as good as they used to be but there are still a few really good ones. I'm actually a big fan of Barefoot Contessa. I think Ina Garten is one of the most natural personalities on the network. She really seems like she could be the cook next door. On a certain level I think she's even sexy. Her stuff is actually pretty simple though I have learned that she has steps and ingredients on her show that she doesn't include in her written recipes. Good to know. It's rare that I ever see a show where I want to copy the entire meal presented but this time her meal looked like a perfect combination.

Why is it that my garlic never looks as good as the garlic they get on TV?

This turned out to be a great meal. I would say the dishes are Thai inspired without the heat. That was a little disappointing, I'd have preferred it if the noodles were spicy but that can be fixed next time. I would definitely be willing to serve this to company, especially for my more persnickety friends who don't eat beef or pork. Bah!

All of the ingredients were easy for me to find here in the sticks so you shouldn't have a problem. I was not in the mood to multitask so I took the whole day to make the entire meal, but if you multitask you can whip all of this up fairly quickly, especially the noodles and salmon. Just remember to plan on the 15 minutes for the salmon to marinate and the 15 minutes for the salmon to rest after cooking. Oh yeah, this can all be served room temperature or even cold. That could come in handy.

On the noodles, I guess if you can buy toasted sesame seeds, go that route. I was able to easily toast mine in our new toaster oven. It was quick and easy, just be sure to watch them as you can quickly burn them. I had used up the fresh ginger I had on the salmon marinade so I substituted an 1/8 teaspoon of ground ginger. It probably wasn't as strong as using fresh ginger but it didn't hurt. Not being a fan of bell peppers, I left them out. Your choice. At the grocery I hesitated when buying the sugar snap peas almost buying snow peas instead. I like snow peas more and besides, they are "more" Asian. Then I thought about buying an eight ounce package of each. In the end I went with the snap peas. The peas I buy you can microwave in the bag so that's the cooking method I used. The snap peas were tasty.

The salmon came out great. I have very few fish dishes so it was good to add one to the repertoire. Again the ingredients were easy to find. I was surprised that my grocery didn't carry the ubiquitous squeeze bottle of Sriracha which I was going to buy for the chile paste. I think I remember that was what Ina Garten used on the show and I remember my friend's crazy half Asian-something ex-wife cooking with it so it seemed like the right stuff to get. Instead I found some Sriracha sauce from Ka-Me. The panko bread crumbs were supposed to form a crusty crispy layer. Mine did not so I suppose if you don't have any panko on hand, just use regular bread crumbs.

The lemon cake is very lemony, very good. I'm sure that is from using real lemons. It is so good that you don't need to make the blueberry sauce but blueberries and lemons go so well together it's a nice added touch. This is the first time I have used yogurt as a cooking ingredient I think. The recipe called for whole-milk yogurt. Try to find some. We've brainwashed ourselves over time that we can only have low-fat or fat-free yogurt or somehow we are going to die of clogged arteries. Do you realize how much yogurt you would have to eat for that to be an issue? And the truth is the whole-milk yogurt is actually probably healthier for you. Since I have some plain yogurt left over, maybe this is my excuse for finally getting around to making some homemade yogurt. It was the covered on Alton Brown a few nights ago. An omen? I did not have any vanilla sugar on hand. Since it takes several weeks for the vanilla beans to permeate through the sugar it wasn't something I could just whip up. But this was a wet application for the vanilla sugar so I used a 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract to one cup of sugar and I think that was fine. My blueberry sauce was not thick like it was on TV but it still tasted good. I put it in a squeeze bottle for Dinah to take to work with the left overs.

Let Them Eat Cake!

Today's project was birthday cake. I decided to bite the bullet and make it from scratch. I don't think I have ever done that before. I also used the opportunity to explore several techniques. In the end I broke my strictest engineering rule, change only one variable at a time, too many times to count starting with making the cake from scratch.

I chose chocolate-chocolate chip with chocolate frosting. Because it's my favorite. This morning I picked up a few ingredients for the adventure. I looked for superfine sugar at the grocery. I know what this is, pastry chefs use it. It dissolves very fast. It is not the same as powdered sugar or confectioners sugar as that has a tiny amount of corn starch to prevent caking. Every bag at the grocery said superfine or extra fine so I knew that couldn't be the stuff. But I have worked with this before. I just weighed out 12.25 ounces per the cookbook instructions, then rounded it to 350 grams because I like that number better. Dumped it into my food processor and spun it until it started dusting out the top.

Aside: If you don't have a food processor, get one. I have no idea how I ever lived without one. I never would have bought one myself but we received it as a wedding gift and I bet I use it on average three times per week. They are awesome!

I then creamed that sugar with the butter, salt, etc.

While at the grocery I picked up some organic pastry flour. My cookbook cautioned against using pastry flour for cakes saying it results in a tender smaller crumb but also a more crumbly cake. So I went 50/50 with all purpose flour. I weighed it out, 8.5 ounces per the recipe and then rounded it to 250 grams. Then I weighed up 2.25 ounces of cocoa powder per my recipe and then rounded that to 65 grams because that is a nicer number too. I dumped both the flour and cocoa powder into the food processor and sent them on a whirl. This was a new technique I wanted to try. Using the food processor on the flour and cocoa aerated them, sifted them and homogenized them. Something I picked up from watching Good Eats on TV.

For the milk portion I used part of the "buttermilk" I saved from yesterday's butter experiment. It tastes just like whole milk. Hopefully it will be extra tasty in the cake.

My cookbook strongly encourages you to grease and flour your pans. Dammit if I could find my round pans. So I pulled out a 9 x 13 and buttered it instead of using the suggested vegetable shortening. Another new variable, or two! Floured it and then I decided to spread a thin layer of cake batter on the bottom of the pan before I added the chocolate chips. My thought was that this would help prevent all of the chips from settling to the bottom while baking. Who knows? I did a blend of milk chocolate and semi-sweet chocolate chips, maybe ten ounces worth. I tossed them in flour to try to prevent them from sticking together and clumping when I add them. I read about doing that with fruit once so I thought I'd try it. Probably gratuitous and unnecessary.

The cake seemed to bake well. Took maybe 45 minutes though. I'm not sure if the center ever really finished. I used a tooth pick of course but it is tough to tell the difference between cake batter sticking to the toothpick or melted chocolate chip. I tried to check with my temperature probe, looking for 209 degrees but it sucked for that purpose. I really need to get my fancy instant read thermometer. Unfortunately one corner broke off in the pan when I stripped it onto my cooling rack. I think I glued it back in place with a little frosting well enough. I was tempted to cut the cake in half and stack it to make a two layer cake, squaring off the edges. But the whole cake was fragile. I tried to put it on a plastic board and it started to crack and tear. I managed to invert it back onto a cutting board with minimal damage. Not the board I wanted to use.

I'm not convinced on using cocoa for chocolate flavor for cakes. I had the same reservation after making brownies. No surprise, this is the same recipe I modified for brownies. I find the cocoa is a little too bittersweet and little too unchocolatey for my tastes. I need to find another form, either real chocolate or perhaps Dutch cocoa.

I made a chocolate butter cream frosting using a four ounce bar of Ghirardelli semi-sweet chocolate, chopping it up in my food processor and then melting it in a double boiler. Since the bulk of frosting is powdered sugar I opted for semi-sweet chocolate to balance the sweetness from the sugar. I spun the sugar in my food processor to sift it before adding it to the butter and vanilla creaming in my stand mixer. The recipe called for 1-1.5 pounds of powdered sugar added in two batches. I did two 225 gram batches. A nice pretty number. Again I used the buttermilk left over from yesterday, finishing it up. I used a trick from watching Ina Garten and placed strips of parchment paper under the edges of the cake before I started frosting it. After frosting you slide the strips out leaving a clean edge. It almost worked perfectly expect for the broken corner pulled out with the paper! I think I repaired it well enough.

I tried piping a fancy border around the top edge of the cake but I didn't have the correct tip so it didn't come out as nice as I had envisioned. I started to add a bead around the base but it really looked bad so I scraped it off. We had some left over red icing from Rose's cookie making and I used that for the script. I think it is the best handwriting I have ever had!

So here is my cake and my icing too:

On Brownies

As I mentioned before, I thought I should attempt to make some home made brownies as the first step to approximating my favorite of brownies, Duncan Hines. I did so yesterday. But before I get to that, as an aside, if you didn't know, there really was a Duncan Hines. Before WWII, Mr. Hines would travel around eating at different restaurants and developed a rating system and a guidebook. His ratings were very coveted by restaurant owners. I believe this predates the more well known Michelin system or Zagat rating. It was later on in the 50s when he decided to get into the packaged food products for the busy American housewife. Anyway...

I followed a recipe from my The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion: The All-Purpose Baking Cookbook. This book rocks. I highly recommend owning it. I got rave reviews from Dinah and Dinah's coworkers for these brownies but I did not like them.

What do I love about Duncan Hines brownies? They are:

1. Flaky on top.
2. Moist.
   
3. Chewy.
4. Fudge-like (I think the same as chewy actually).
5. Oily on the bottom (yes this is important).

The homemade brownies were definitely chewy but they were not flaky on top nor did they have the oily bottom. Looking at the ingredients, I am thinking that this recipe will not be a good base to build on. So let's do a recipe comparison of the main ingredients to see if we can find the secret. I don't have a box of Duncan Hines on hand but I can make some educated guesses as to what the ingredients are. The earliest credited fudge brownie is the Lowney Brownie from 1912.

Lowney	Duncan Hines	King Arthur
1 cup of sugar	sugar	2 1/2 cups of sugar + 1/3 cup of corn syrup
1/2 cup of flour	flour	1 1/3 cups of flour
2 squares of chocolate	cocoa powder	6 ounces of chocolate
1 stick of butter	1/4 cup of water + 1/3 cup of oil	1 1/2 sticks of butter
2 eggs	1 egg	5 eggs

Two quick notes, the Lowney Recipe is not proportional and I accidentally used 6 eggs when I made mine yesterday but I don't think that had any affect on my disappointment.

So the key difference appear to me to be in the fat content and type added and the emulsifiers content, i.e., eggs. It seems that fewer eggs equals more chewy (Duncan Hines' directions say to add two eggs for cake like brownies). So I'll carry that info forward for future experimentation.

The butter versus oil content is very interesting. It makes we wonder about how long the Duncan Hines mix has been around. Follow me on a short diversion. The cake mix that we are all most familiar with is the butter cake. The butter cake uses butter, flour, sugar, eggs and maybe baking powder. In the 1920s a guy named Harry Baker developed a cake called the chiffon cake. His secret was the use of oil as a fat instead of butter. Hmmm..... Chiffon cakes need egg whites to be whipped full of air for the cake to have body. That's not done with brownies. I'm not a food historian or even a food expert but it seems to me then that brownies then lie in a family of cakes in between butter cakes and chiffon cakes, a marriage of the two. By the way, Mr. Baker sold his secret recipe to General Mills/Betty Crocker after WWII and the rest is history. (I learned all of the watching Good Eats one day).

So I think the next step is to take a basic chocolate butter cake recipe, limit the egg portion of the recipe and replace the fat addition with oil. I haven't figured out the water role but maybe that is to rehydrate the cocoa powder.

Stay tuned.