Pizza experiment

Today I made a double recipe of pizza dough. This should be good for four pizzas total. I was hungry today, so I made one of them for supper, but as usual I put the rest in the fridge where it will stay until I use it. From casual reading of the Joy of Cooking, I believe this to be a variant of a sponge starter. Either way it takes bland dough to great dough!

As for the experiment I was doing today. The hurdle I am trying to overcome is the dough not rising as much as I would like while it is cooking. It is still fluffed up, but.... not as much as I want. I hit on my potential solution while talking to a friend about frozen pizza and the "rising crust pizza" came to mind. I instantly saw a potential solution, that is, to use chemical leaveners to supplement the yeast. I added 1 tablespoon of baking powder to my double recipe.

However, I unfortunately changed two things in my recipe by accident and botched the execution. I forgot the addition of 4 tablespoons of oil (I used to use olive oil, but now am working with butter) to the dough. As for how I botched the baking powder experiment, I forgot to add it to the dough before kneading it. I had finished when I remembered, so I quickly kneaded in a tablespoon. This means that it is probably poorly distributed and is not a good indication of whether I need to increase or decrease the amount added to the recipe.

All in all, the pizza I made tonight tasted great, and there is enough for leftovers for tommorows lunch.

Apple Cider Preparation

It's that time of the year again, though the dry hot year has reduced the number and size of apples I am collecting this year, I am still making Apple Cider. To make up for the lean year, I have acquired access to another apple tree. A friend of mine bought a house with an apple tree, and they have no way of using all of the apples. Enter me, the friendly neighborhood apple acquirer-er. All for the low cost of two Apple pies (which admittedly I had to talk them into, they were just happy to have some one to take their apples!)

As this was a leaner year and the apples are smaller, I am hoping, that the flavours of the apples will be more intense (though that isn't based on empirical evidence, its just a hope. One that I hope pans out)

Work begins this weekend. I am hoping to have finished collecting apples by Friday from my other sources. Saturday morning I hope to strip mine the new tree, and by the afternoon I hope to be smelting the apples into apple pulp (not to be confused with apple sauce, I wring all the juice out!) and apple cider.

This year I hope to make some Spiced Apple Cider, and as usual, can it all to be enjoyed throughout the coming year.

Fun Fact: Apparently, from my searching of the Inter-Webs, Apple Cider is just unrefined, unstrained and/or unpasteurized apple juice. From here, the Cider undergoes one of the following pathways. Sold as Apple Cider (which has a shorter life span if it is true Cider), it can also be spiced with cinnamon, cloves, or other seasonal spices for Spiced Apple Cider, it can be fermented for Mulled Apple Cider, or as the bulk of it goes, refined into Apple Juice. The refining typically pasteurizes it, but most importantly it removes all of the floating bits, leaving the crisp, golden colour that we are used to seeing.

Reheated Lasagna lunch

I recently made a vegetarian lasagna (I like meat as much as the next person, but I've had lots of good meat Lasagnas, but never a great one, while I have hat lots of great meatless ones). Nothing special, I tried a few new things and it turned out really well. Probably one of the best ones I've made recently. But those are trivial details compared to how I have discovered how to reheat it for lunches!

My problem was that, Lasagna, doesn't do very well in the microwave for reheating (or at least mine doesn't). It gets soggy and for some reason the cheese doesn't melt, it runs. It still tasted great, but reheated Lasagna is never the same as fresh cooked. Some foods do well reserved, Pizza can be reserved cold or reheated and lose very little of the original "wham, this is good!" This really bothered me, and I wasn't fully enjoying the meal, or at least as much as I could. So, as I had a few lunches that I could experiment with, I did some experiments.

At work I have access to a toaster oven, which does all of the typical toaster oven functions. Toasts, broils and goes up to 450 ºF. But fortunately, it is not located in the lunch room where I eat (rather it is relatively close to my desk, which is where I don't eat, but rather where I work before eating), and the containers that I transport the food to work are plastic, which unfortunatly means that for that "just melted" cheese taste, I need to get some of that freshly melted plastic taste and smell.

My solution? I lined my container with foil! Now don't think I shoved the plastic container wrapped in foil into the toaster oven, 'cause that would be stupid. I would have melted plastic on my foil enclosing my Lasagna, not a tasty combination. I instead removed the foil liner with the Lasagna in it, and placed that in the toaster oven near my desk for 15-20 minutes. I initially tried 350 ºF, but quickly found out that that was too high of a heat and some of the cheese started charring a little ( I noticed it before the charring led to a bad taste, which, is a fine line between good tasting charred and bad tasting burnt). I then turned the temperature down to 200 ºF and let it sit there until I was ready to go for lunch. I grabbed the foil out of the oven and back into the plastic container and headed up to the lunch room.

When I started to eat the Lasagna, it was like eating it straight out of the oven again, there were crispy parts, a nice browning on the cheese, the layers were well heated and not soggy. I was in reheated lunch heaven.

The problem with this in general is that, I am lucky enough to have a toaster oven conveniently close to me that I can shove food in before I go for lunch. So I can keep a semi-close eye on it while I work before going for lunch. I imagine for most people that this isn't the case. For those of you out in Internet land that only have the toaster oven in the lunch room, or worse yet, only a microwave. The only thing I can say is, I'm sorry for your loss, but if you can solve the reheating problem, then I would be more than happy to hear from you.

Funeral Potatoes

There are very few meals that I seem to gorge myself on. The two that come to mind are my mothers Honey Garlic Ribs on Rice (something I have no problem making on my own) and her Funeral Potatoes. My aunts and make them just as well as my mother, but every time I try to make them, even following the same recipe, I fall very short of the mark.

Now I know what your thinking, Funeral Potatoes? What am I doing eating this on a semi-regular basis? Well, a long story short, I've heard this dish called by a number of names, but Funeral Potatoes is what I call it because I liked the name. No I'm not morbid or anything, I just thought it to be a fun name to give to something I enjoy so much. My Aunts and mother all call it a potatoe casserole, but whatever you call it, it is delicious!

All it really is, is hashbrowns in a cheese sauce with buttered cornflakes crushed on top.

You would think that something so simple sounding could be made by anyone! But apparently I am not in that grouping.

Either way, whenever I visit my family and Funeral Potatoes make an appearance on the dinner table, I either finish them all off (which is harder to do now that my Mom has been making more for the meal), or I end up taking a doggy bag home with me. They aren't as good when reheated for a lunch, but they still get ranked really high up on the list of favorite lunches.

Perogies

My mom used to make perogies when I was younger, but as my brother, sister and I grew, I assume we ate more and more and my Mom ended up not making them anymore. The store bought ones were ok and I lived on them for years thinking they were pretty good, that is until I tried some of my Aunts. For years after I could still remember the authentic taste, but I never tried to make any for fear that the task would be too big of an undertaking.

Well, that ended today, when my room mate, his girlfriend and his mother all came by to make Perogies for a Christmas party. It took us a few hours, but we were able to get a total of roughly 13 dozen made!

We used a biscuit cutter to cut out rounds of the dough we had made.

The potatoe and onion mixture was conveniently rolled into balls so that it would be easier to work with.

Behold, my creations! Oh and everyone else helped... This photo was taken long before we were finished, so imagine this but many more.

How to Crack an Egg - Revisited

In response to a post I made awhile back, about how to crack an egg. I have received some comments about how it does not work as I explained. How egg shell still manages to get into the bowl. Thinking about this has made me consider some points. The first being, "did I describe the procedure differently than I actually perform it?", the next being "Or maybe I'm just superbly gifted at cracking eggs!".

Well I analyzed what I had written and compared it with what I do. The two I believe are still compatible, so my problem became, how to I articulate my words to better describe the act of cracking an egg. I've tried words, heck I've tried pictures, which as we all know is worth a thousand words AND is a fact. This led me to the next logical format, video. So, "Behold, my creations!"

 

First, let me apologize for the stuttering sound in the videos, that is the auto focus doing its bit to be annoying. During the making of the videos, I went through several takes. The problem was not with the actual cracking of the eggs, but rather with holding a video camera AND cracking an egg with both hands, all without the aid of a tripod... I spent way too much time focusing on the camera and not what I was doing in the first two videos and the performance looked terribly amateur, especially since I forgot to turn it off and recorded some extra footage in the first one. The third video was a progression away from that and more towards actually paying attention to what I was doing. The last video (also the only video I'm willing to admit exists, the others are fakes, honestly...) I paid attention entirely to the egg. The theme across all of the videos though, is that of the seven eggs I cracked, not one left any shells in the bowl.

Juicing Citrus Fruit

In the past I have heard that microwaving a citrus fruit before juicing would allow you to get more juice out of it. After a little research, I found a plausible explanation for this, the microwaves break down the cell membranes so that the juices are able to flow more freely. I accepted this as fact until I read elsewhere that warming the fruit in the oven for a few minutes would have the same effect.

This made me suspicious, maybe it wasn't the breaking down of the cell walls, but rather, just the heat was somehow releasing the juices. All of this started to make me think, the information on the internet was sketchy, only claiming I would get more juice, never how it worked or even how much more I would get.

At this point, I realized that I would be hard pressed to discover how it worked on my own, so that question is still somewhat of a mystery to me. However, testing to see how much more juice I could get was a very easy and simple process.

For the purposes of this experiment I did not try the oven method, only because the information I could find on it said it took a few minutes, where as the microwave would take a few seconds. As such, if the microwave method worked, I would never bother with the oven method, only because it takes so much longer.

 For this experiment, I gathered two fine citrus specimens (I had planned on adding a Grapefruit and Lime to the line up, but I didn't really want their juices). I am going to talk about the steps I took on the Lemon, they were the same for the Orange, I just didn't photo document it.

 I tried to split the Lemon lengthwise so that each half weighed exactly the same. I came pretty close on the Lemon and almost exactly on the Orange, so I believe it is safe to say I succeeded. I then subjected one half of the Lemon to 10 seconds on Hi in the microwave. I haven't tested with other powers and time spans. I may do this in the future, but I have no plans to do so. The other half I did nothing too.

I don't have a citrus fruit juicer, so I used the next best thing, the back side of a spoon to juice both halves into pre-weighed custard cups. Using the tare option of my scale, I was able to measure the weight difference between the juice/pulp/seeds of each method. I then strained the juice and measured it separately. The results are shown below.

Lemon

Initial Weight of the full Lemon = 172 g

Microwaved half weighed = 79 g, the Juice and Pulp weighed = 30 g, the Juice alone weighed = 24 g

Traditional half weighed = 92 g, the Juice and Pulp weighed = 33 g, the Juice alone weighed = 22 g

 

Orange

Initial Weight of the full Orange = 188 g

Microwaved half weighed = 93 g, the Juice and Pulp weighed = 52 g, the Juice alone weighed = 18 g

Traditional half weighed = 94 g, the Juice and Pulp weighed = 52, the Juice alone weighed = 13 g

 

To break it down, when I Microwaved the Lemon, I was able to get 30.3% by weight as juice, compared to 23.9% when juiced with nothing special done to it. That is an improvement of 6.4% of juice from a Lemon, by microwaving the Lemon for only 10 seconds. Again, I haven't tried other power levels or time spans, so it may get better, or it may get worse. All I can say is that for a Lemon placed in a microwave for 10 seconds on Hi, you can expect to see a 6.4% increase in the volume of juice produced.

As for the Orange, the Microwaved half came out to 19.4% juice and the Traditional method produced 13.8%. Again a net benefit, albeit only a 5.6% increase. As I mentioned with the Lemons, all we can conclude is that you can get more juice my microwaving on Hi for 10 seconds.

The next logical step would be to test multiple power levels and time spans to determine the optimal time and power level to get the most juice from the citrus fruits. You would need multiple samples at each level to create a proper statistical model for this to work. This is my science disclaimer.

 

On another note, from the small sample I had, I noticed that the juice weighed 1 gram per 1 milliliter roughly.