Experiment: No Knead Bread

Making bread always seems like a difficult task. It usually calls for kneading the dough for multiple times and then you need to let the dough rest for a few times. With everyone’s busy schedule, who has time to make bread for scratch? Well, with the no knead bread recipe, first published by the New York Times, you can let time do the hard work for you. All you need to do is to stir the ingredients together and to bake the dough. Even a four year old can probably make this bread.

Jim Lahey’s No Knead Bread

Ingredients:
3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
1 5/8 cups water

Directions:

Step 1: Prepare the Dough
1. In a large bowl, combine flour, yeast and salt.
2. Add water and stir everything until blended. Dough will be sticky.
3. Cover bowl with plastic wrap.
4. Let the dough rest for 12-18 hours in a warm room.

The dough will look like this after 12 hours:

Step 2: Work on the Dough
1. Remove the dough from the bowl and put it on a work surface that is slightly covered with flour.
2. Quickly shape the sticky dough into a ball.
3. Cover the dough with a cotton towel and let if rise for about 2 hours.
4. When the dough is ready, it will be more than double in size.

The dough will looks like this after 2 hours:

Step 3: Bake the Dough
1. Half an hour before the dough is ready, preheat oven to 450F.
2. Put a heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats.
3. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven
4. Turn dough over into pot.
5. Shake pan if dough is unevenly distributed.
6. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes.
7. Remove lid and bake another 15-30 minutes, until load is beautifully browned.
8. Cool on a rack.

* Note: Make sure you don’t put your hot ceramic pot or Pyrex pot onto a cold surface. The shock might crack the pot. Unfortunately, it happened to me when I was doing a chemistry experiment long time ago.

The resulting bread doesn’t look too amazing but it tastes pretty good. The crust is very fragrant and the inside is soft and fluffy. This recipe doesn’t take a lot of work but the result is surprisingly good. I will definitely make it again but I think I will bake the bread for the full 30 minutes to make the crust crispier.

You can also checkout this video posted by the New York Times:

Happy Vernal Equinox!

Today is the official beginning of spring. Even though it is a bit smoggy but the sunset is still very beautiful!

Searching for Toronto a la Cart

I have read an article in the National Post regarding the Toronto a la Cart project yesterday. It reminds me of the fond memories that I have for the street vendors back in Hong Kong. I just love the spicy curry fish balls, stinky tofu, mini pancakes, roasted chestnuts and yam that I used to get on the street when I was small. Today is a little bit chilly compared to the past few days. However, the slightly cold temperature wouldn’t soften my determination of finding the Toronto a la Cart. With a food adventure on my mind, I took a short walk to Nathan Philips Square during lunch time. Little did I know that I forgot to read the fine print, “…will begin selling their wares by the long weekend in May”.

The Toronto a la Cart project has been going on for more than a year. The provincial Health Minister has been talking about relaxing the law that forbids anything other than pre-cooked sausages and hot dogs being served on the streets since July, 2007. And yesterday, they had only managed to announce the 8 lucky vendors that would be allowed to sell food on the street. Selling street food is not exactly rocket science. Many Asian countries have them. Even our big brother, the United States, has them on the busy downtown streets in Manhattan. How come it has taken so long in Toronto? While I understand food safety is a serious issue, can we just get inspector to make sure their food hygiene is up to the standard. It shouldn’t be much different than inspecting a real restaurant. Moreover, a uniform branding is definitely not necessary. Personally, I think this is a marketing agency’s cash grab. Why can’t we let the vendors have a little bit of room for their personal flair?

While I was at Nathan Philips Square, I did notice the fries and hotdog truck that parked on the street had a huge sign for shish kebab kubideh. After looking at the menu more closely, I found that the item was nowhere to be seen on the long list of food. I wonder if you need to say a secret password to order that item. This truck gives me an excellent idea. If existing trucks are capable of selling food other than hotdogs, we can just build more of those instead of spending so much consulting money on developing the Toronto a la Cart project. I have seen a few of these trucks in the city. There are a few in the University of Toronto area that sell Chinese lunch boxes and there is also another in the Korean Town that sells roasted chestnuts. The truck model would certainly work better in Toronto because of the harsh winter weather that we have. A small cart would not be able to keep the vendor warm during winter. While trucks do take up more space, we can just designate certain area for these food trucks just like what we are currently doing anyways. Regardless, I do hope these vendors would be successful in their new business and I am looking forward to try their exciting offerings!

Sushi Manners 101

Like most customers in a Japanese restaurant, the first thing I do after I have got a seat is to rub the chopsticks together in order to get rid of the splinters. Little did I know that is actually impolite since it seems to suggest the restaurant’s utensils are low quality.

My friend found this article on thestar.com regarding sushi etiquette. It has a neat video demonstrating how to do it right and there are some helpful diagrams to help you remember the simple steps.

In general, you should:

• Use pickled ginger between pieces of raw fish to cleanse the palate.
• Eat nigiri (bundle of rice topped with raw fish) with your fingers.
• Dip nigiri fish-side down into a small amount of soy sauce.
• Eat nigiri fish-side down so you can taste the flavours in the correct order.

And you should void doing the following:

• Don’t put a pile of pickled ginger on top of your sushi.
• Don’t use chopsticks while eating nigiri (but it is alright for maki and sashimi).
• Don’t dip the rice-side of the nigiri into the soy sauce.
• Don’t eat it rice-side down.
• Don’t rub chopsticks together. It is better to remove the splinters with your fingers).
• Don’t leave chopsticks standing straight up in a bowl of rice since it resembles incents that are burnt during funerals.

I am happy to follow most of the rules in order to get an authentic sushi experience but I think I will leave out eating nigiri with my hands. Sushi rice tends to be a bit sticky. Eating with my hands would mean spreading the stickiness to everything on the table. Definitely not a very pretty sight! The chopstick rubbing addiction is probably a bit difficult to kick as well. One of the commentators on the Star has mentioned, “Better to rub them than swallow a splinter”, and I totally agree with him. In order to get rid of the splinter problem, maybe it’s time for the Japanese restaurants to switch to reusable chopsticks. After all, it is a more environmentally friendly option and it will probably save money for the restaurants in the long run.

Mission: Crispy Chocolate Chip Cookies

While most people refer chewy chocolate chip cookies, my family prefers the crispy kind. There are not a lot of choices for crispy chocolate chip cookies. Most gourmet bakeries tend to sell the more chewy kind. Therefore, most of the time, we just get the ones from President Choice. They are one of my favourite afterschool snacks but I still find that something is missing from these readymade cookies. While the cookies are crispy, you can never get that fresh out of the oven feeling.

I did a search online and found Anna Olson’s recipe for chocolate chip cookies. The original recipe is intended for chewy-centred cookies but I have modified it based on her recommendations for making crispier cookies.

Anna Olson’s Chocolate Chip Cookies (Crispy Version)

Ingredients:
¾ cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup brown sugar
¼ cup granulated sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
8 oz (224g) bittersweet chocolate, cut into chunks

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350F.
2. Cream together butter and sugars until smooth. Add egg and vanilla and blend in.
3. Stir in flour, baking powder and salt. Stir in chocolate chunks.
4. Drop by tablespoons onto a greased baking sheet and bake for around 15 minutes, until golden brown around the edges.

*She recommends adding 2 tablespoons of cornstarch and replacing the baking powder with baking soda if you prefer more chewy cookies. The baking time can also be reduced to around 8-10 minutes in order to get more cakey cookies.

The recipe is rather simple and it produces great results. I have made chocolate chip cookies a few times before using different recipes but they tend to be very cakey (kind of like an elaborated muffin top). However, this recipe definitely gives me the kind of cookies that I enjoy. These tips will help you along the way if you are a crispy cookie lover like me.

Tips for Making Crispy Cookies:

• Don’t add water to the dough even though it might appears to be really dry. Just use your hands to knead them together.
• When shaping the cookies, use the back of the spoon to make the cookies a little flatter. Thinner cookies tend to be crispier.
• Bake the cookies for a little bit longer but make sure you get them out before they get burnt.

Happy Baking!

A Lazy Day for Book Reading

There are only a couple of days before the official beginning of spring (March 21). Various house plants at my home are already hinting the good news by blossoming beautifully. The red amaryllis is really lovely at the moment. How I adore the deep red coloured petals. They remind me of the first amaryllis that my father brought home when we were still living in Hong Kong. Maybe I was much smaller and shorter back then; but in my memory, it always had monstrous huge flowers that were as big as my head.

The temperature is still a bit chilly outside but the fabulous weather makes it a very good time to relax in the living room with a cup of coffee and to finish some reading that I have been putting off for so long. Over the weekend, I was able to finish up the book club reader, “Under the Net” by Iris Murdoch and 2 volumes of the Moomin graphic novels. I even got a head start on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories”.

“Under the Net” is a surprisingly funny novel. Even a slow reader like me could smoothly finish up the novel in a couple of days. It will tell you how much I enjoyed reading the book. The story is filled with unexpected twists and turns, and it seldom leaves me feeling bored. In some ways that it makes me feel that I am in the middle of a TV drama with all the chaotic events that happened in the book. Some of the things that the protagonist did might sound silly and unreasonable at times but the author saved the novel by throwing in some philosophical questions in there to keep the book on the ground. I enjoyed this book as a pure love story and it also offers me some curious questions to think about.

In some point of the novel, the protagonist held the following conversation with his seemingly philosophical friend:

Hugo: “The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.”

Jake: “What would happen if one were to speak the truth? Would it be possible?”

Hugo: “I know myself, that when I really speak the truth the words fall from my mouth absolutely dead, and I see complete blankness in the face of the other person.”

Jake: “So we never communicate?”

Hugo: “Well, I suppose actions don’t lie.”

In some ways, I agree with Hugo that the purest truth actually resides in our mind instead of speech or in any other written form. Once it is written out, it’s no longer the truth since we often process it and make it as socially acceptable as possible. The original meaning might be all gone after all the polishing. He believed that instead of using a flowery language, we should probably communicate via action since “actions don’t lie”. I wish this book is a required reading for our fellow politicians. Instead of spending so much money on self promotion, maybe some real action will help Canadians to put more faith in the government?