Pullman Loaf Sandwich Bread

I got Irene a couple Pullman Loaf pans for making square cross-section bread, very fancy. I have adjusted my go-to recipe from Peter Reinhart's "Bread Bakers Apprentice" to fit. The recipe that came with the Pullman tin uses about 600 g AP Flour, so I'll scale my recipe to that.  Here, I'm doubling Reinhart's White Bread Variation 2 that I always use, omitting the sugar which IMHO makes it too sweet. It should barely fit in my KA mixer which I regularly use for 1Kg flour batches, and fill our 2 Pullmans or 4 standard glass/metal loaf pans.

8 1/2 C     38 oz   1100 g  100%  Flour
    1 Tbs  0.8 oz     22 g    2%  Salt, kosher
    2 tsp  0.3 oz     6 g   1.1%  Yeast
    2        4 oz    115 g   11%  Eggs, large or extra large
  1/2 C      4 oz    115 g   11%  Extra Virgin Olive Oil
    3 C     24 oz    680 g   62%  Milk, skim, whole, or butter work

Instead of the EVOO you can use melted butter or even bacon fat (!); I've used skim and whole milk, but water makes for a boring bread.  
The eggs and milk make this about a 70% hydration dough.

You can add the dry ingredients to the mixer and combine, and separately combine the liquids and drizzle in, or you can simply dump them all in at once -- all work fine. 
Knead 10 minutes, separate into two rising buckets, and rise covered about 2 hours until doubled.
Shape and place each into 2 lightly oiled Pullman tins, or split again and add to 4 standard loaf tins. 

Rise covered again for 1-2 hours until doubled, or until the dough is almost at the top of the Pullman tin; for Pullmans, slide the lids on.
Bake in preheated oven 30 minutes at 325F, slide off Pullman lids and bake another 30 minutes.
Remove from pans and let cool on a rack so it doesn't steam.

Pull-Apart Dinner Rolls

I've been jonesing for these staples of my childhood (always store-bought) and used a recipe from King Arthur Flour which turned out pretty well. I used their cups and measured the grams and milliliters recorded here so it will be easier for me to repeat.

3 1/2 C    535 g  Flour, King Arthur all purpose
    2 tsp    7 g  Yeast
  1/4 C     16 g  Potato Flakes (instant mashed potatoes)
    3 Tbs   18 g  Nonfat Dry Milk
    1 Tbs   16 g  Sugar
1 1/2 tsp   12 g  Salt, Kosher
    4 Tbs   55 g  Butter, melted
  2/3 C    160 ml Water, luke warm
  1/2 C    120 ml Milk, whole, luke warm

Mix all ingredients and knead 10 minutes. I had to add extra water to get a soft smooth dough, but it was still more stiff than my usual enriched bread dough.
Rise in covered bowl or bucket 60-90 minutes until doubled.
Divide into 16 pieces, and roll each into a ball.
Place 8 each into 2 8-inch round cake tins; I used an angel food tin with the center post taking up some of the space.

Cover and rise another 60-90 minutes until doubled and rolls begin to touch.
Bake at 325F convection for about 35 minutes until well browned.
Brush with additional melted butter, let rest a minute to absorb, and tip out onto cooling rack.

Gricia: simple but challenging -- pasta, guanciale, pecorino

Gricia is a rewarding Roman dish with just three ingredients; it's a challenge to develop the creamy sauce.

Rigatoni, guancial, pecorino -- that's all you need

Like cacio e pepe, it's a surprisingly simple Roman dish with minimalist ingredients -- just pasta, guancial (cured pork jowl with assertive piggy flavor), and pecorino (sheep) cheese.  (Cacio is even more austere, dispensing with the guanciale). The pasta is the star, and needs to provide enough starch to bind the fat from the guanciale into a creamy sauce, so use a good one pressed through bronze dies. Likewise, use good quality pecorino, since it brings the sharp sheep cheese edge.

We knew we needed the starch released by the pasta, so we used the minimum amount of water we could to boil the pasta, a technique espoused for any starch-thickened sauce by Serious Eats.  This pasta took about twice what commercial pasta requires, about 20 minutes, to get to al dente -- plenty of time to work on the guanciale and emulsion. Finish off heat or the cheese will separate or clump rather than form a creamy sauce.

You may not need to salt your pasta water if your guanciale is very salty; realize that any salt in the pasta water will be concentrated by boiling and a second reduction in the emulsion. 

In Barcelona, we get 100 g packages of guanciale at Bon Breu; it's got lots of fat. Aldi has "Mancini" brand Rigatoni in 500 g bags that is die-cut and has enough starch to to create a good emulsion with the fat. Proportions below are based convenient quantities of these.

For 2 dinner portions:

166 g / 6   ounce Rigatoni, extruded through brass dies
100 g / 3.5 ounce Guanciale, sliced thin
 60 g / 2   ounce Pecorino Cheese, grated very fine (half for sauce, half for serving)

Slice the Guanciale thin into strips or match sticks.
Add a bit of Olive Oil to a pan and sauté Guanciale to render fat; I find a skillet is easier to toss the emulsion than a high-sided pan used in these photos.

Guanciale, a bit of oil, and starchy pasta water forming emulsion

Cook the Rigatoni in a minimal amount of water so you can collect the starch that's thrown off; ours took 20 minutes.
As the pasta cooks, transfer some of the starchy water into the fat, oil and guanciale, and swirl to start creating the emulsion for the sauce.
Continue like this until the pasta is al dente; your emulsion should start looking like a credible but small sauce.

Minimal water (barely covering pasta) ensures plenty of starch

Add the pasta to the pan with the emulsion, I use a slotted spoon and know the extra water is just what I need.
Crank up the heat on the emulsion, you should hear some sizzling.
Swirl and flip the pan to agitate the emulsion, building the sauce.

Flip it, flip it good!

You may want to add more of the now-highly-starchy water to the pan to build more sauce.
Continue until the sauce is a little thick, coating the pasta.

Off heat, grind some black pepper and drizzle in half the grated cheese, a bit at a time, swirl, and drizzle, repeat until you've used all half the cheese; it should merging with the sauce, and you don't need much cheese.

Finish with pepper, cheese in multiple additions

Swirl and toss well with each addition of cheese to form sauce

Serve immediately, garnished with the remaining cheese.

Same cocktail, 3 different Fernets

"OK, Google: What kind of cocktails can I make with Fernet?"

Jelínek, Branca, Vallet

We'd recently acquired 3 different kinds of Fernet, the dark, bitter, brooding herbaceous liquor: classic Branca from Italy, Jelínek from the Czech Republic, and Vallet from Mexico.

In response to our demands of the phone, Google helpfully suggested this recipe:

1.5 ounce Fernet
1.5 ounce Gin
1 ounce Sweet Vermouth
dash or Orange Bitters

We willingly complied, making the same cocktail with different Fernets. They looked different and tasted very different.

My favorite was the one with Jelínek, whose sweet edge made for a comfortable cocktail, with a pleasant sweetness balanced by appropriate bitterness. Irene's preference was for the Vallet version, whose darker moods expressed hints of Cardamom, but I found too murky.  Interestingly, neither of us chose the one with the ür-Fernet, Branca: it retained its ferocious bitterness, but with the dilution by gin it evinced more complexity than we usually experience when drinking it neat or on a single rock.

When we do this again, I'd keep the same proportions for the Jelínek, but back out the Fernet in the Branca and Vallet versions.

Pears poached sous vide with ginger

I saw this quick post on Aki and Alex's blog, and it sounded easy and seasonal. Ginger and pear is a good combination. We served it with Point Reyes blue cheese, candied walnuts and port.

2 Bartlett Pears
1 thumb-sized piece of fresh Ginger

2 small slices intense Blue Cheese like Point Reyes
2 small handfuls candied Walnuts

Peel the pears then slice in half (extra points if you can retain a slice of stem in each half); add to sous vide bag.
Grate ginger to extract juice, retaining the fiber; add to bag.
Seal bag, cook sous vide at 83C/180F for 1 hour; chill and fridge until ready to serve.

Pull out the pear halves and put each on a plate.
Top with a bit of the Blue Cheese, garnish with candied Walnuts.
Serve with port.

Bacalao with Idiazábal cream sauce; spinach, pine nuts, prunes

We had this combination of bacalao and Idiazábal cheese -- a surprising combination -- at Restaurant Fonda in the opulent Hotel España in Barcelona; its stuck with me, so we tried to recreate it. Turned out well, but we have some work ahead of us if we're going to have the finesse their chef had.

I searched for this combination of ingredients and it turns out it's not uncommon; we based our dinner on these two recipes, both of which used the classic combination of spinach with pine nuts as a base. The substitution of prunes for typical white raisins was a welcome addition.

2 x 130 g Bacalao loins, without bones, desalted over night in water
    100 g Olive Oil, frozen
1 clove   Garlic, sliced thin
1         Chili pepper, sliced

 25 g Idiazábal cheese
 30 g Cream, heavy, 40% fat

100 g Olive Oil
      Salt
 20 g Pine Nuts
 50 g Prunes, sliced
300 g Spinach

Freeze the Olive Oil so it won't get sucked into the vacuum sealer, add it with the Bacalao loins,  Garlic and Chili in a sous vide bag and cook 20 minutes at 55C/135F. Hold until ready to plate.

Grate the Idiazábal cheese fine and add to Cream, heat very gently until melted together.

Toast the Nuts in Oil and Salt until starting to brown, add Prunes and sautee a little, then add Spinach and cook down. Hold until ready to Plate.

Open the bag and strain the liquid from the Bacalao.
Plate the Spinach mixture, lay on the Bacalao loins, then sauce with the cheese cream, and garnish with the cooked chili and garlic (warning: the garlic will be fierce, as it's not really cooked).
Serve.

This worked pretty well: the spinach base was a classic combination, the bacalao stood up to the cheese sauce. Next time, however, we might want to take more care of the cheese sauce as it had a grainy texture -- this might have been due to too-quick heating, or maybe I just need to strain it (although that will be difficult with such a thick intense sauce).

Fideuà #2: Squid, Ham, Spaghettini

For a more traditional Fideuà than before, we broke up spaghettini. Using liquid from cooking octopus gave it a fantastic depth and richness. This improvised dinner was short on measurement but long on taste.

The finished dish

I used 225 g / 8 ounces spaghettini we had on hand. To break it into short pieces, I put them into a large ziptop bag, rested this on a towel, and whacked it about every 5 cm / 2 inch with the back of a cleaver. This worked pretty well: good breakage and no pasta sprayed across the kitchen.

Spaghettini, mostly broken into short pieces

We like the Catalan habit of combining shellfish and pork, so I used squid tentacles and some ham cut into fork-friendly pieces. The protein probably added up to 225 g / 8 ounces.

Mis en place by the side of the BBQ

I knew I wanted to toast the spaghettini but figured it would be finicky to remove from our paella pan later, so I started sautéing everything else first. Olive oil is traditional but I had some lovely bacon fat lying around that would amp the ham flavor. In a paella pan on the barbecue, I first sautéed a diced onion, several shaved cloves of garlic, and some diced small tomatoes from the garden. I then added the ham and squid. My fire wasn't as hot as I expected, so rather than browning well, the veggies and squid released a fair amount of liquid: this turned out to be a good thing. I pulled out the solids and poured the flavorful liquid into separate bowls.

Next, I added some more bacon fat and my broken spaghettini. I stirred this around until it started browning a bit, and getting a little aromatic. I used this opportunity to further break the now-fragile strands into smaller pieces with my stirring spatula.

Pan roasting the noodles in bacon fat

I then added the reserved liquid and maybe a cup of juice we'd saved when we cooked octopus sous vide; it was enriched with some roasted red pepper liquid from the previous cooking and had a great aroma.  This cooked a while until the spaghettini started becoming pliable, at which time I added back the meat and veggies, and topped with a gremolata of minced orange peel and parsley. It smelled divine.  When the spaghettini was al dente, I added a sprig of rosemary, covered with foil, and let it rest enough for the pasta to finish cooking.

For service, we portioned it out and topped with a fiercely garlicky toum (my new favorite condiment) and a squirt of lemon juice. It was pretty excellent.

Served with toum and lemon juice

There were some strands of spaghettini that didn get completely cooked; I expect that they were so long that they never got immersed in the broth.  I recall the fideuàs I've had around Barcelona had a slight crunch to the noodles, perhaps they finish over a very hot flame to develop a crust, a socarrat; maybe they finish under a broiler to crisp the top. We'll work on these next time.

Toum: fiery garlic sauce (without eggs)

This crazy intense garlic sauce is like a mayonnaise or aioli but contains no eggs which are typically used to emulsify those classics.  It's become a staple in our kitchen, good on paella, potatoes, vegetables, grilled octopus, and shockingly good on pizza. It's easy to make in a food processor.

A strong stable emulsion, without any egg

We had squid with a fiery garlic sauce that was blindingly white at a small Sicilian place, Caffe Sport, in San Francisco decades ago; that flavor and color have stuck with me to this day. We've tried to create it with various aioli in Catalan, Spanish, and French styles. The French ones use egg, which gave a yellow color and diluted the flavor; Jose Andres does the classic Spanish prep, crushing garlic in a mortar and pestle and adding oil drop-by-drop; we've tried it, only to have it break when we finished 30 minutes later.

We found a Lebanese garlic sauce called "Toum" that sounded right: lots of garlic, plus oil, salt and a bit of lemon juice -- no egg.  We whipped one up based on the Serious Eats recipe, which was similar to many others we found.  Garlic is whizzed in a food processor with some salt to break it down, releasing the juices that contain the weak emulsifier, then oil is added very very slowly to establish the emulsion, then alternate lemon juice and oil to finish. 

When you've finished the sauce, don't be tempted to add (say) more lemon juice and whiz it up again: the emulsion will break when you turn on the processor.  The garlic should be fresh: old or frozen or processed won't set up as a stable emulsion. You can rescue it by whizzing an egg in the empty processor then drizzling in the broken Toum, and it will taste fine: but it's cheating with the egg, and doesn't have quite the pure garlic burn: it's an aioli. 

The flavor is a bit shocking right after making it, but it softens with time. We keep it in the fridge but it might be stable without refrigeration: unlike eggs in mayo, none of Toum's ingredients requires being chilled. We've substituted Sherry Vinegar for the Lemon and it came out very well for a Spanish dish we were serving. 

Makes almost 500 ml [16 ounces] of sauce. 

 75 g   2.5 oz   Garlic heads, peeled (see technique below)
  6 g     1 tsp  Kosher Salt
 30 ml    2 Tbs  Lemon Juice
350 ml  1.5 C    Oil, Canola (neutral flavored)

Ingredients assembled

Put the garlic heads into a metal mixing bowl and cover with another. Shake violently: the heads will break apart, the paper will start separating; pull out the peeled cloves and repeat a couple times until all coves are peeled. This takes just a few minutes.

Garlic after first shake in mixing bowls

Add Garlic and Salt to food processor and process to break down garlic and release internal emulsifiers as much as possible; you may want to scrape down the sides a bit.

Garlic (lots of it) and coarse Salt to break it down

Drizzle the Lemon Juice in so that it provides liquid to turn the garlic into more of a paste consistency, scrape down once or twice; it should be mostly mush, with some garlic bits.

Not quite broken-down enough yet, scrape and process a bit more

Slowly drizzle in the Oil -- my processor top has a feed tube with a small hole that releases a slow drizzle for just this kind of operation; the sauce should start turning into a rich emulsion in a minute or two, you can hear the change in texture, but I run it for a few minutes and don't bother scraping down during this process.

A thing of beauty: thick and fluffy, and very smelly :-)

Scrape out into serving or storage containers. 
Do try it at its freshest, it's an eye-opener. :-)

In Barcelona with only a mini-chopper

We don't have a food processor here, only a stick blender with a mini-chopper bowl, so we make a smaller batch. Most annoyingly, we can't drizzle the oil through a feed tube, but have to process, open, add a bit of oil, repeat, repeat; it works.  Both The Mediterranean Dish and Serious Eats add the Lemon early to help blend the Garlic and prevent breaking the sauce. Comments in Serious Eats suggest having all ingredients cold to prevent breaking but I haven't tried that yet.

This makes about 300 ml of sauce.

  1 head   Garlic, cloves separated and peeled

  3 g      Salt

  1 whole  Juice from Lemon

200 ml     Oil, Sunflower (or mix of oils)

In the bowl of a mini chopper, process the Garlic with Salt; open and push the chunks to the bottom of the bowl and repeat until it's as mushed as it will get.

Add the Lemon Juice and repeat processing until smooth.

Add a tiny bit of Oil and process.

Repeat until all the Oil is used; you can add larger quantities after the emulsion sets up, but don't rush or it will break; this may take 10 minutes or so.

You should have a fairly fluffy mayonnaise-like sauce.

Fideuà de Ravalistan

Fideuà is a Valencian dish similar to paella but made with pasta. We used thin Pakistani pasta and added Lebanese Toum garlic sauce for a cross-cultural dish as vibrant as El Raval in Barcelona.

This was thrown together with things we had on hand. We started with a  sofrito of onions, padron peppers, and red bell pepper.

We added super-thin roasted Pakistani pasta; apparently the pasta is used as a breakfast during Ramadan.

We broke it up a bit and added fish stock sufficient to cook. We stirred in some corvina fish we'd cooked before the sofrito, and some peas. To finish, we added dollops of Toum, and insanely garlicky mayonaise-like sauce where the only emulsifier is the garlic (no egg).

It was authentic in only in spirit, and tasted great -- bold, rich, and filling -- there were no left-overs.

Creamy Peanut Pralines a la Shirley Corriher

These pralines came out well, with a firm, caramel-like texture, rather than a grainy sugar toothache. We substituted dry roasted peanuts for the pecans and almonds Shirley Corriher uses for Creamy Pralines from her book Cookwise in order to fit a dinner theme we're working on.

As Shirley says, the corn syrup slows the crystallization, but requires a slightly higher temperature to set firmly. Since the peanuts were already roasted and salted, we didn't roast them with butter and salt like she does. I've converted her imperial volume measurements to metric to make it easier for us to reproduce.

250 g  Dry Roasted Peanuts (2 C)

 25 g  Butter (2 Tbs)

235 g  Light Brown Sugar (1 C packed)

155 g  Granulated White Sugar (3/4 C)

 80 ml Light Corn Syrup (1/3 C)

120 ml Canned Evaporated Milk (1/2 C)

  5 ml Vanilla Extract (1 tsp)

Set out two Silpat nonstick sheets, or lightly oiled foil or parchment.

Bring all ingredients except Vanilla to boil, and continue to heat until mixture reaches 115C/240F.

Remove from heat and let rest 5 minutes (our temperature dropped to 105C/221F); add Vanilla.

Stir with a stiff spatula for about 4 minutes until the mixture thickens noticeably, including the center. 

Immediately spoon out onto the Silpats in heaping tablespoon sized dollops. A #70 disher worked well, until the mixture in the pot became too thick as it cooled; I switched to pairs of spoons to scoop out then slide the mixture off the spoon. You might want two people doing this to work more rapidly, one on each Silpat.

Let sit until solid.

Octopus Terrine #2

In Octopus Terrine #1, we added gelatin to capture the juices from the cooked octopus, but we didn't like the texture. This time, we used large legs, strained the juice and wrap the octopus tightly to let it set in its own gel.

We found large Spanish octopus at a restaurant supply store for under $7/pound, usually we see $10/pound and up. It was a good sized beast, costing $55, and we used 4 legs for this. We added  the legs to a sous vide bag with about 1/4 red bell pepper, diced fine; a touch of pimenton; some lemon zest; a little salt and black pepper. Like before, we cooked this at 77C for 5 hours, which is what Chef Steps recommends for "silky but tender".

When done, we strained off the liquid (it makes for an excellent risotto), and were left with legs that were much smaller than they went in; we lost at least 50% by weight. Alternating thick and thin ends of legs, we wrapped them tightly as a cylinder in cling film, then rolled to twist the film as tight as possible. It rested overnight in the fridge to let the internal gel bind the whole thing together.

When we took it out, it was a bit more lumpy -- less cylindrical -- than ideal. As we cut it with a very sharp thin knife, the terrine started coming apart. The texture was excellent, tender but not mushy, a little bounce, and the taste was very enjoyable.

Next time, I'd season and cook the same, but try to find a better way to compress the terrine. Do I really need a spring loaded terrine press like these?

 

Mint Julep with Nitrous Oxide Cavitation

We use nitrous oxide cavitation to release the mint flavors without bruising or cooking, which would cause the mint to turn an unappealing brown and have some off flavors. I first heard of it from Dave Arnold (cited in Serious Eats); I borrowed the same technique to make a mint simple syrup from Gina Chersavani.

500 g White Sugar
500 ml Water
20 g Mint Leaves

500 ml Bourbon
20 g Mint Leaves

Heat the Sugar in the Water to dissolve, then let this simple syrup cool.
Using equal proportions by weight makes for a slightly sweeter simple syrup than doing it by volume (cups).
Put 500 ml simple syrup into an Isi whipped cream siphon with 20 g Mint Leaves;
charge with one Nitrous Oxide capsule and agitate for a couple minutes.
Release pressure, strain into container.

Put the Bourbon and its 20 g Mint Leaves into the empty Isi, charge with one Nitrous capsule, agitate for a couple minutes, release pressure, and strain into 750 ml bottle

Add 150 ml of the minty simple syrup and mix. Retain the extra syrup for other drinks.

To serve, pour a healthy shot over crushed ice.

I used mint from our garden and it's not as intense as some, so next time I'd bump up the mint in both the syrup and bourbon.

Spanakopita

Greek spinach pies, Spanakopita, make great portable party pies! Spinach, feta, egg, filo dough and butter are about all you need.
 
This recipe is based on Jeff Smith's book The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines: China, Greece, Rome. You can make this with fresh Spinach (after cooking it, squeezing dry, then chopping finely) but I haven't noticed any degradation using frozen. Don't use too much parsley or it can taste grassy. We like making small triangular ones, folded like paper footballs from grade school. If your filo is thick, you can cut the large sheets in half; if it's thin, you'll use the whole sheet, folding it over lengthwise before filling. This is a job best done as a team: one butters and cuts the sheets, the other fills and rolls.

 20 ounces Spinach, frozen, chipped, defrosted, squeezed dry
  4        Eggs
  8 ounces Feta Cheese, crumbled
  1 bunch  Green Onions, chopped
1/4 cup    Parsley, chopped
1/4 cup    Fresh Dill, chopped (or 1 Tbs dried dill)
           Lemon Zest, finely grated (microplane) from one lemon
           Lemon Juice, from half lemon
  4 cloves Garlic, crushed

salt and white pepper to taste (unless your feta is very salty)

  1 pound  Filo Dough, frozen, defrosted over night in the fridge
  1 pound  Butter, melted

Combine the ingredients for the filling (everything but the filo and butter) in a mixing bowl. The filo we got was fairly thick (#7), with 14 sheets to the pound, so we used a half-sheet for each pastry, cutting each in half before buttering, folding in half, then buttering the top. Lay the sheet on a cutting board or something so it doesn't stick. Cover the rest of the filo so it doesn't dry out and get brittle.
   

I'm an engineer, so I wanted to use all the filling evenly. I split the bowl in two, then divided each lump into four, then when filling, I used a third of each lump: 3 * 4 * 2 gave 24 pastries. If you're not so fussy, place about 1 tablespoon filling near the bottom center of the buttered filo strips.

 

Fold the bottom corner up diagonally to form a triangle, then fold the triangle over and over on itself until you reach the end of the sheet. Brush lightly with butter so it doesn't burn. Place on an elevated rack so air can get underneath, if possible, and place that on a cookie sheet.

     
Repeat until filo and filling are gone. If you're clever, both will run out at the same time. Bake at 375F convection, or 400 F conventional, for 25 - 30 minutes or until they're light golden brown. Let cool so you don't burn yourself, but serve warm.

St. Pats 2018: Sous vide Corned Beef, Potatoes Au Gratin, Roasted Cabbage

Cooking corned beef sous vide is no-fuss and you can vary the time/temperature for different textures, from steak-like to shreddy.

We got a store-cured brisket before St. Patricks day and pressed in the seasoning from the supplied packet.

We vac-bagged it and cooked for 48 hours at 60C/140F and it held its texture enough to slice cleanly.

We wanted something more rich and "wet" than roasted or mashed potatoes, so we made potatoes au gratin: thinly slice then cook potatoes with garlic in milk until soft, add cream, then pour into casserole and broil until browned. Easy and yummy.

Instead of the usual insipid flabby, floppy, watery cabbage, we cut this little head into wedges, anointed with a good oil, and roasted in the same oven the potatoes were broiling in. This developed a really pleasant crunch to the outer leaves.

Sous Vide Octopus with Tuom White Garlic Sauce

Cooking octopus loses 2/3 of its weight; sous vide captures the liquid. Fiercely garlicky Toum is a barely stable emulsion that can break easily. These are notes on prep and how to do better next time.

Octopus

We had a 500g pack of 3 small octopi, human hand sized, from a Korean supermarket. We knew we would lose a lot of the weight to liquid in the cooking, so we cooked them sealed in a bag, sous vide, to capture the tasty liquid (it's great for making things like risotto, and has enough gelatin that it sets up like a good stock when chilled).  We added just a bit of pepper, lemon peel, and a bay leaf, and cooked 5 hours at 75C.

We ended up with 180g of octopus, so just over 1/3 of the original weight. I  probably should have done a more thorough job of rinsing the gelatinous skin off, but with beasts this small, it was difficult. For service, I cut the tentacles apart and flashed in a skillet with a bit of olive oil.

The texture was OK, tender but not mushy. I think for this size octopus, I might cook lower or shorter to give more bite. These beasts didn't have much flavor.

Next time, we'll hit a restaurant supply store for big octopi -- for texture and presentation. They can run $10/pound, so if you lose 2/3, that's $30/pound by the time it hits your plate!

Toum

We had squid with a fiery garlic sauce that was blindingly white at a small Sicilian place, Caffe Sport, in San Francisco decades ago; that flavor and color have stuck with me to this day. We've tried to create it with various aioli in Catalan, Spanish, and French styles. The French ones use egg, which gave a yellow color and diluted the flavor; Jose Andres does the classic Spanish prep, crushing garlic in a mortar and pestle and adding oil drop-by-drop; we've tried it, only to have it break when we finished 30 minutes later.

We found a Lebanese garlic sauce called "Toum" that sounded right: lots of garlic, plus oil, salt and a bit of lemon juice -- no egg.  We whipped one up based on the Serious Eats recipe, which was similar to many others we found.  Garlic is whizzed in a food processor with some salt to break it down, releasing the juices that contain the weak emulsifier, then oil is added very very slowly to establish the emulsion, then alternate lemon juice and oil to finish. 

We whizzed 2.5 ounces peeled garlic cloves (1.5 heads) with about 1 teaspoon salt, and scraped down the sides periodically to ensure breakdown. This volume was really too small for a full-sized processor so I added 2 teaspoons of the lemon juice and 2 teaspoons of water to provide more volume; finally, it seemed to be a good mush.  Then I dribbled neutral Canola oil very very slowly and watched the emulsion form. I kept adding, and it built very nicely; the total was 1.5 Cups of oil.  I tasted it and was shocked at how very "hot", like chile pepper hot, this was; not for the faint of heart!

Then I destroyed it. 

I thought it could use a bit more salt and lemon, so added a tad of each. When I whizzed it to combine, I immediately heard the sloshing of liquid -- I'd broken the emulsion.  Irene said you can't add anything and process after the emulsion is formed, so next time I won't. Either add all the flavorings at the beginning, or perhaps gently fold in additional seasoning.

We rescued it by whizzing an egg, then drizzling in the broken Toum, and it worked with the octopus and patatas bravas we had for dinner. This made it an aioli rather than Toum.

Next time, don't screw with it.  It makes quite a bit, considering how powerful it is, but the egg-free authentic version will keep for  a month in the fridge.  A dollop on paella, fideuà, steak, or myriad other things will certainly pump up the flavor!

Sous Vide Polenta

Making polenta in a sous vide bag is easy, it just requires a bit of time and the occasional massaging of the mixture. It's a forgiving recipe: it won't overcook, it won't burn, and you don't have to hover over it with your Italian grandmother's wooden spoon.

While we've made polenta many times on the stove top, we've found it convenient to make a large batch using sous vide. You can use almost any liquid -- water, milk, stock; we used skim milk here because we wanted some flavor but not too much richness. The butter and rosemary are optional but tasty.

We made it recently with 900 g Milk, and it was a bit more dense than we'd like: it would set up well if cooled to make a slab to fry, but we wanted it a bit more loose as a base for wild mushrooms; we've increased the liquid here.

This makes enough for 12 as a side dish. It's also easy to transport in the bag: wrapped in a towel in a cooler it will retain the heat for a couple hours.

 200 g Corn meal, coarse
1000 g Milk, skim (or whole, or stock, or water)
  50 g Butter
  20 g Salt
   3 g Fresh Rosemary, minced fine

Combine everything in a sous vide bag and seal. Cook for 2 hours at 85C.  Once it starts setting up, massage the bag to break up lumps every 10-15 minutes; wrap in a towel -- it's hot.

Give it a final massage before serving to ensure it's smooth. Snip off a corner of the bag and squirt onto a serving platter.

Bagels à la Peter Reinhart

We make bagels with All Purpose and add Gluten to give strength, and
boil in an alkali water to give the crust sheen. This recipe is based on Peter Reinhart's in The Bread Baker's Apprentice; we've converted his cups and ounces to grams for easier and more reliable measuring.

The first time we made them, we used only All Purpose flour and the interior was too tender. Rather than buying Bread or High Gluten flour, we add Vital Wheat Gluten here to bring up the protein; we may need to tweak the amount over time.  If you have Bread or High Gluten Flour, use it, replacing both the regular flour and Gluten here. The dough will be quite dense and will give your stand mixer a workout -- my 325W Kitchenaid KSM5 struggled and smelled hot after the knead, and the bowl barely contained the dough.

We boil the bagels in an alkali water solution using sodium carbonate to give them the characteristic outer surface traditionally obtained with food grade lye. Harold McGee came up with the technique of baking the baking soda to create sodium carbonate: bake it for 1 hour at 135C/275F.  If you don't feel like doing that, just use regular baking soda (sodium bicarbonate).

Sponge

  4 g  Instant Yeast
515 g  All Purpose Flour
 50 g  Vital Wheat Gluten
600 ml Water


Dough

  2 g  Instant Yeast
500 g  All Purpose Flour
 20 g  Salt
 10 g  Malt Powder (or 15 g Brown Sugar)

Finish

 35 g  Sodium Carbonate

Sponge: combine Yeast and Flours, add water, whisk until it becomes a smooth pancake-like batter. Cover and rise at room temperature, about 2 hours, until very foamy and bubbly; it should double in size and collapse if the bowl is tapped on a countertop.

Dough: Add to the sponge the additional Yeast, stir, then add the Flour, Salt and Malt. Mix with dough hook until it forms a ball. Knead 6 minutes by machine, or 10 minutes by hand. It should feel satiny and pliable but not tacky.

Divide the dough into 16 pieces, about 100 g each, and form into tight balls. Cover with damp towel and allow to rest 20 minutes.

Line 2 sheet pans with parchment and mist with spray oil.

Shape bagels by poking a hole in the center of each roll and enlarging it to be about 6 cm. Place shaped pieces 5 cm apart on parchment pans.  Mist lightly with spray oil and cover loosely with cling film. Let sit at room temperature for 20 minutes.

Check to see if bagels are ready to be retarded using the "float test". Fill a bowl with cool water, place a test bagel in and it should float within 10 seconds. If it does not float, return to tray and try again every 10 minutes until it floats. 

Place in fridge, covered lightly with film and retard overnight.

The next day, preheat oven to 250C/475F convection.

Bring large, wide pot of water (I used 1.5 L) to a boil and add the Sodium Carbonate or Baking Soda; do NOT use a Calphalon-style anodized pan, the Carbonate will destroy the anodization. Remove bagels from fridge and boil, starting presentation side (top) down first so after you flip them, you can place the bottom on the sheet plan. They should float within 10 seconds; boil each side for 1-2 minutes, more time gives a more chewy bagel.

Sprinkle the parchment with coarse cornmeal and place each boiled bagel back -- they will have puffed up. Top the bagels with salt, seeds, etc.

Bake 10 minutes until bagels turn light golden brown.