Well, Friday was full of surprises. I have actually been back to the Truman chips burger place a couple of times this year, but didn't get the chips. I noticed that the staff there had also changed (possibly due to a new year at uni?) and so I figured it was over, and the Truman chips mystery would remain unsolved.
Albert and I take turns to buy each other lunch, and given the stress of the past couple of weeks, Albert was really hankering for a chance to eat some junk food and unload. As I hadn't been there in a while, I suggested the Truman chips place. So we walked there, arrived at approximately 11:50am, and I placed my usual order. Albert then placed his, and paid for both of ours together, as it was his turn. We waited around, and then go our bags with burgers. As I was getting the burgers, the cashier specifically pointed out, "This one is yours", which I thought she was doing just to make it clear which was which (as we had ordered different types of burgers). However, on opening the bag, I saw it! The Truman chips. There was the usual Truman chips bag inside the larger burger bag!
The last Friday of the month means it's casual Friday, and my exception to my new year's resolution to wear business clothes at work. So my new theory is that there is something about wearing casual clothes that triggers Truman chips. Maybe I look poor? Maybe I look like a uni student and they feel sympathetic? I don't know, but Intern Daniel says it's time for more experiments! However, Alison has asked me to be a bridesmaid in her wedding, so I don't know if I can handle eating burgers every week. =/
Sunday, 29 May 2016
Sunday, 15 May 2016
Food Mimic - Apple Strudel
Cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things.
- My Favourite Things, The Sound of Music
I've always wanted to eat one of these, ever since hearing the song My Favourite Things, even though I had no idea what a strudel was. We finally had the chance to order apple strudel in Berlin, but unfortunately, it came with nuts. Here's the one we had in Berlin.
I'd pretty much forgotten about it until a fateful kitchen meeting. The person who came up to me saying he was going to try making croissants (not the one I competed against in the croissant bake off, a different person) mentioned that he always wanted to try making apple strudel. He described it as such a complex pastry, which tributed also said after I told him about making croissants. So that settled it. My next project would be apple strudel.
But before I get into that, there's the slight tangent of the Case of the Mysterious Strudel Guy. I said before that people I had never spoken before were suddenly coming up to me and talking about food, and such was the Strudel Guy. I had no idea what his name was, or even which team be was in, I swear I had never seen him before. And yet, as I was browsing through some photos of a work event 3 years ago, there he was! So began the hunt to track down the name of the Strudel Guy. Given who he was sitting with at the event, I had a fair idea of which team he was in, so I asked my mole in that team (one of the new grads), who had no clue who he was. Well, that was a bit strange, I was so sure he was in that team.
I began passing that photo around to the people I was close to, asking if any of them knew who he was. Not a single hit. With the pretense of getting a glass of water from the kitchen, I wandered around the floor trying to find out where he sat. Bingo! Unfortunately, he did not have a name plate on his desk, but I did manage to work out that my original assumption was correct, that he was in the team I thought he was in. So I knew where he sat, but I still didn't know his name. The case had to be put on hold, because unlike how it sounds in my blog, I actually do do work while at work, and that takes priority. I was so absorbed in work, that I forgot that I still had that picture of Strudel Guy open, with a giant red circle around it.
One of the testers came up to me, "Why do you have a picture of (Strudel Guy's real name) circled?" And thus, the mystery was solved. I am the greatest detective.
OK, back to the strudel.
I didn't want to cheat and use pre-made pastry, so I skipped any recipe titled "Easy Apple Strudel". I settled on this one, as the author said it came from her grandmother's cookbook: http://www.lilvienna.com/original-viennese-apple-strudel/ and has lots of handy photos.
Ingredients
For the strudel dough
1/3 cup lukewarm water (80 ml / 80 g)
1 tablespoon + ½ teaspoon neutral tasting vegetable oil (15 g)
½ teaspoon vinegar (or lemon juice)
1/8 teaspoon table salt or fine sea salt
145 g bread flour (1 cup) (substitute with all purpose flour)
½ teaspoon vegetable oil for brushing the dough
flour for dusting
For the filling
3 tablespoons unsalted butter (40 g)
2/3 cups fine bread crumbs (80 g)
5 tablespoons granulated sugar (65 g)
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
4 tablespoons raisins (50 g)
3 tablespoons rum or lukewarm water for soaking the raisins
2 lbs sweet-tart apples (e.g. MacIntosh) (900 g) (I used Jazz apples. and they worked very well)
1 tablespoon lemon juice
2 tablespoons melted butter for brushing the dough (divided)
confectioner’s sugar for dusting
whipped cream for serving (optional)
Start with the dough. Mix the water, oil, vinegar / juice and salt. Add half the flour and mix again. Slowly begin adding flour until it becomes not-sticky enough to knead. Lightly flour a flat surface / pastry mat and knead for about 10 minutes. The recipe says to throw the dough onto your surface a few times while kneading to help gluten development. I don't know about the gluten part, but throwing the dough feels good!
You can already start to feel how stretchy the dough is! Once it starts getting smooth, fold over the edges underneath it to make it into a ball, put it back into the bowl, and brush with oil. Cover with plastic wrap and leave in a warm place for 1 hour. Note: As there is no yeast, there will be no rising, so don't panic!
Move on to the filling. In a small pan, melt the butter and add the breadcrumbs. Toast until the breadcrumbs go golden brown. Enjoy the smell of toasted buttery bread crumbs. Remove from heat and allow to cool.
As that cools, mix the sugar and cinnamon, then mix that into the breadcrumb mixture.
Soak the raisins in water.
Skin, core and quarter the apples. For each quarter, cut into slices about 3-4mm thick. Add lemon juice to the apple slices, to stop them going too brown.
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.
Once the dough is ready, lightly flour your surface and roll it out until it's about 30cm wide (flour the top of the dough, too. Don't worry too much about the shape now.
The original recipe says to lightly flour a tablecloth and transfer the dough there, but we don't have a tablecloth, and I'd be worried about the food safety of our bedsheets (I've seen enough episodes of CSI....), so I used a couple of sheets of baking paper instead. Start stretching the dough out with the backs of your hands. This part is actually super fun, I was surprised at how elastic the dough was!
Warning: I should add that there is a very real danger that a wild husband will appear and want to act like Captain Falcon and Strudel Punch your dough while it is in the vulnerable state. A stern reminder that doing so will result in no strudel is enough to stop this.
Try and stretch it into a long rectangle. Mine was too wide, which became a problem as you'll see later, so try to make it as long as you can!
Once it's quite thin, gently stretch it so that you do have something that resembles a rectangle. The recipe says to cut off the thick ends, but I didn't and I'll explain in a bit.
Look how thin it is!
Melt half the remaining butter, and brush it on half of your dough. Spread the breadcrumb mixture on the other half, leaving about a 3cm edge. Drain the raisins and mix with the apples, then put it on top of the bread crumb mixture.
Fold up the edges on the top and button. With the help of the baking paper, start to gently roll up the dough, starting on the apple end.
I found some leaked out from the side, but I was able to stretch the thick dough at the end to help hold it back in. Mine is kinda wrinkly, but if you can get it smooth, then your strudel will come out prettier!
Gently transfer to your baking tray. Because mine was so wide, it didn't fit on the tray, and I had to curve it, but as I was sliding it across, it broke, and all the filling fell out. :( I kinda tucked it back underneath. Brush with the remaining melted butter, and bake for 30 minutes.
It looks ugly, but tastes delicious!
Dust with icing sugar, and serve with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.
I'm going to leave some on Strudel Guy's desk tomorrow morning as a surprise. Which means I need to get up super early to whip some cream.
Saturday, 14 May 2016
Matcha Turtle Melon Pan
Another YouTube inspired cooking adventure. Just so that nobody can accuse me of sabotage (not looking at anybody named redbeanpork in particular), here's the video that I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z0e-GKJA10. It's from the Cooking With Dog YouTube channel. After watching that video, I did a bit more searching for melon pan recipes, and came across this turtle shaped melon pan recipe: http://cookpad.com/recipe/267544 (it's in Japanese, but you can use Google translate on the page). I'm still a bit sour about my failed anpanda, so I really wanted to try making a cute looking dessert again.
I did try it last week, and had a competition with redbeanpork, but I think both of us failed. However, I did get an adorable photo:
There's just something so cute about a turtle on its back. Am I a terrible person?
The problem with the first batch was that I found it a bit dry. I took the recipe from the cookpad website, but used matcha powder instead of green food colouring, and I think it really dried out the cookie dough. Also, I was playing Dota while the dough was proofing, and it ended up proofing for too long, so that dried out, too. Did not make the same mistake the second time!
Here's the recipe:
Ingredients
Cookie Dough
100g unsalted butter (at room temp)
70g sugar
1 egg (at room temp)
180g plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp matcha powder (or you can use vanilla extract instead, if you don't like matcha, just add green food colouring also, to get the green coloured shell)
27g white chocolate (only if using matcha)
(extra sugar for coating the back of the turtle shells)
Bread
300g bread flour
4g dry yeast
150ml milk
24g sugar
4g salt
30g unsalted butter (room temp)
1 egg
I used black sesame seeds for the eyes, but you can draw them on, or use dark chocolate, or raisins.
Method
Start with the cookie dough first. Put the butter in a medium sized bowl. Start creaming it with a whisk. Then slowly add the sugar and continue creaming until it turns a pale colour. Beat the egg in another bowl. Add a third of the egg to the butter-sugar mix, and cream until mixed. Another third of egg, cream, third of egg, cream. You don't want to add the egg all at once, or your cream will separate. Add the matcha powder / vanilla + food colouring. Mix to combine. Melt the white chocolate and mix in.
Add the flour and baking powder and mix with a spoon / spatula. Put the mixture onto some plastic wrap, shape into a log, and put in the fridge to cool.
For the bread, heat up the milk so that it is warm (not boiling hot!). I chucked it in the microwave for 30s. Add the yeast and stir so that the yeast is submerged.
Mix together the flour, sugar, salt in a bowl. Beat the egg in another bowl, and pour in with the dry ingredients. Mix to combine. Add the milky-yeasty mixture and combine.
Lightly flour a flat surface / pastry mat. Put the dough out and knead it, adding extra flour if too sticky (but try to avoid adding so much flour that the dough becomes dry). It should still be a little sticky, but not so sticky that you can't knead it.
After about 5 minutes, starting pulling the dough (I think this is meant to make the gluten stretch). By pulling, I mean grab the ball of dough and pull it apart like an accordion, so that it stretches out (I found having one hand pull up, while the other hand pulls down is easier, as you have gravity helping). Then fold it back together into a ball-like shape, and pull it out in the other direction. Keep doing that for a few minutes, if it gets too sticky to handle, just start kneading it again until it gets a bit smoother.
Flatten the dough into a square, and put the butter on top. Then roll up the dough with the butter, and knead until the butter is combined (this part is messy!). Use a dough scraper / spatula to help keep it all combined. Then continue with the kneading, and pulling.
Once your dough passes the windowpane test, knead it together until smooth, then fold over the edges so that you get a ball. Put the ball in a bowl, cover with a damp cloth, and leave to proof for 30 minutes. Do not go and play a game of Dota.
Once the proofing is done, flatten the dough, then do a business letter fold, rotate 90 degrees, then do another business letter fold.Divide up the dough. Mine ended up weighing 600g, so I cut off 100g for the head / legs, and divided up the final 500g into 10 pieces.
For each of the 10 pieces that will be the body, flatten, and do the business letter fold, rotate 90 degrees, second BL fold, fold over the egdes to make it a ball and put in a tray, seam side down. Leave in a warm place to proof, covered with a damp cloth.
While the body is proofing, start making the heads, legs, and tails with the dough you cut off earlier.
Doesn't really need to be a work of art, but you'll need 1 head, 4 legs and 1 tail per turtle.
I learned from my anpanda. Have a plate with a bit of milk to dip the body parts it to make it easier to attach. Put the extra sugar in a small bowl. Preheat oven to 170 degrees Celcius.
Get the cookie dough out, and start making the shells. In my first attempt, I rolled all the dough into balls, and flattened them. DO NOT DO THIS! The dough will dry out.
Instead, roll them out as you need them.
I happen to have scone cutters at home, so I used them the second time.
Once you have your shell, grab one of the bodies, turn it upside down (so the seam is on top) and put the shell on top. Try and get the shell to "stick" to the body as closely as possible.
Then, roll the shell in the bowl of sugar, and with a knife, gently cut lines into the shell, start with parallel lines, then rotate 45 degrees and do another set of lines. You don't want to cut too deeply, or might cut through the dough.
Transfer to the tray you are baking on, and dip the head, legs and tail into a bit of milk before attaching. If using black sesame seeds for the eyes, I found dipping that in milk helped it stick, too.
Bake for 16 minutes, our oven doesn't heat evenly, so I rotated them after 8 minutes.
They do tend to expand a bit, so make sure they have room! The one on the left is after baking, the one on the right is before baking.
I did try just pulling out the head, legs and tail, but I found the end result looked a bit more dopey.
Also, here's what happens when you cut too deeply. See the broken shells? :(
I did try it last week, and had a competition with redbeanpork, but I think both of us failed. However, I did get an adorable photo:
There's just something so cute about a turtle on its back. Am I a terrible person?
The problem with the first batch was that I found it a bit dry. I took the recipe from the cookpad website, but used matcha powder instead of green food colouring, and I think it really dried out the cookie dough. Also, I was playing Dota while the dough was proofing, and it ended up proofing for too long, so that dried out, too. Did not make the same mistake the second time!
Here's the recipe:
Ingredients
Cookie Dough
100g unsalted butter (at room temp)
70g sugar
1 egg (at room temp)
180g plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp matcha powder (or you can use vanilla extract instead, if you don't like matcha, just add green food colouring also, to get the green coloured shell)
27g white chocolate (only if using matcha)
(extra sugar for coating the back of the turtle shells)
Bread
300g bread flour
4g dry yeast
150ml milk
24g sugar
4g salt
30g unsalted butter (room temp)
1 egg
I used black sesame seeds for the eyes, but you can draw them on, or use dark chocolate, or raisins.
Method
Start with the cookie dough first. Put the butter in a medium sized bowl. Start creaming it with a whisk. Then slowly add the sugar and continue creaming until it turns a pale colour. Beat the egg in another bowl. Add a third of the egg to the butter-sugar mix, and cream until mixed. Another third of egg, cream, third of egg, cream. You don't want to add the egg all at once, or your cream will separate. Add the matcha powder / vanilla + food colouring. Mix to combine. Melt the white chocolate and mix in.
Add the flour and baking powder and mix with a spoon / spatula. Put the mixture onto some plastic wrap, shape into a log, and put in the fridge to cool.
For the bread, heat up the milk so that it is warm (not boiling hot!). I chucked it in the microwave for 30s. Add the yeast and stir so that the yeast is submerged.
Mix together the flour, sugar, salt in a bowl. Beat the egg in another bowl, and pour in with the dry ingredients. Mix to combine. Add the milky-yeasty mixture and combine.
Lightly flour a flat surface / pastry mat. Put the dough out and knead it, adding extra flour if too sticky (but try to avoid adding so much flour that the dough becomes dry). It should still be a little sticky, but not so sticky that you can't knead it.
After about 5 minutes, starting pulling the dough (I think this is meant to make the gluten stretch). By pulling, I mean grab the ball of dough and pull it apart like an accordion, so that it stretches out (I found having one hand pull up, while the other hand pulls down is easier, as you have gravity helping). Then fold it back together into a ball-like shape, and pull it out in the other direction. Keep doing that for a few minutes, if it gets too sticky to handle, just start kneading it again until it gets a bit smoother.
Flatten the dough into a square, and put the butter on top. Then roll up the dough with the butter, and knead until the butter is combined (this part is messy!). Use a dough scraper / spatula to help keep it all combined. Then continue with the kneading, and pulling.
Once your dough passes the windowpane test, knead it together until smooth, then fold over the edges so that you get a ball. Put the ball in a bowl, cover with a damp cloth, and leave to proof for 30 minutes. Do not go and play a game of Dota.
Once the proofing is done, flatten the dough, then do a business letter fold, rotate 90 degrees, then do another business letter fold.Divide up the dough. Mine ended up weighing 600g, so I cut off 100g for the head / legs, and divided up the final 500g into 10 pieces.
For each of the 10 pieces that will be the body, flatten, and do the business letter fold, rotate 90 degrees, second BL fold, fold over the egdes to make it a ball and put in a tray, seam side down. Leave in a warm place to proof, covered with a damp cloth.
While the body is proofing, start making the heads, legs, and tails with the dough you cut off earlier.
Doesn't really need to be a work of art, but you'll need 1 head, 4 legs and 1 tail per turtle.
I learned from my anpanda. Have a plate with a bit of milk to dip the body parts it to make it easier to attach. Put the extra sugar in a small bowl. Preheat oven to 170 degrees Celcius.
Get the cookie dough out, and start making the shells. In my first attempt, I rolled all the dough into balls, and flattened them. DO NOT DO THIS! The dough will dry out.
Instead, roll them out as you need them.
I happen to have scone cutters at home, so I used them the second time.
Once you have your shell, grab one of the bodies, turn it upside down (so the seam is on top) and put the shell on top. Try and get the shell to "stick" to the body as closely as possible.
Then, roll the shell in the bowl of sugar, and with a knife, gently cut lines into the shell, start with parallel lines, then rotate 45 degrees and do another set of lines. You don't want to cut too deeply, or might cut through the dough.
Transfer to the tray you are baking on, and dip the head, legs and tail into a bit of milk before attaching. If using black sesame seeds for the eyes, I found dipping that in milk helped it stick, too.
Bake for 16 minutes, our oven doesn't heat evenly, so I rotated them after 8 minutes.
They do tend to expand a bit, so make sure they have room! The one on the left is after baking, the one on the right is before baking.
I did try just pulling out the head, legs and tail, but I found the end result looked a bit more dopey.
Also, here's what happens when you cut too deeply. See the broken shells? :(
Monday, 9 May 2016
Croissant Bake Off!!!
There's a Russian guy on my team at work who is also an early starter. He, and another Russian guy both meet up in the mornings for coffee, and I love hearing them speak. He asked me if I was interested in learning Russian, and I told him about my challenge to learn French. It turns out that he also speaks a bit of French (this guy is pretty amazing, he speaks Russian, Ukrainian, English, French and German, though only elementary level for the last two), so I repeated the few phrases that I knew at the time. I didn't realise that Michael, a French guy who works on the same floor, was standing behind me. He corrected my pronunciation, and I explained that I was learning French.
It was nice having a conversation partner - especially one who didn't go easy on me at all. He had no idea what I had already learned (which wasn't much), and yet all of his responses were complex French sentences. He never explained anything unless I asked, which was nice, as it gave me a chance to figure things out on my own, and cement those memories in my head.
I felt a bit bad that the conversation was always so one-sided, due to my very limited French, so I suggested we have one conversation in English. He asked what I was planning to do on the weekend, and I mentioned the bread (anpan) I was going to make for redbeanpork (funnily, as I was making them, I kept calling them redbeakpork buns, instead of redbean buns, and MrFodder commented that I really was making them for redbeanpork). I asked if he baked, and he replied that at his last job, people kept asking if he could bake bread, just because he was French. He got so sick of it, that he ended up learning how to bake bread. I.... don't entirely understand the logic of that, but hey, I'm always happy to meet new bakers.
He said he wanted to try one of the anpan, so I brought one to work to give to him. He said it wasn't bad, and that I should try French bread. I showed him my horrible first attempt at croissant, and he said that his first attempt at croissants weren't that great either. Then he suggested we have a croissant bake off. The winner would have the honour of being the best croissant baker on the floor.
A bit of background is required here. Every now and again, we'd have some sort of baking fundraiser in the office. People on the floor would bring in something for morning tea, and people could vote on which was the best. Cindy's carrot cake always won. No matter what I tried, I couldn't beat her. I'm not sure why, but we haven't done anything like that in a while. Cindy, and all of the other talented bakers have left the floor, or the company altogether, and sadly, I feel like it's just me left. So if there was another morning tea, I'd win by default.
I also felt like it was really important to learn to bake something pretty, because one day, I'd have to bake something for our kids to take to school for whatever random fundraising thing was required, and I'd be competing with all the other mothers, who have probably also spent years refining the art of royal icing. Not people who make dumpy Santa Claus gingerbread that looks like this:
So I have been craving some sort of cooking thing at work for a long time. Not that not having these morning teas has ever stopped me from bringing food to work. I think the people on my team have learned that if there's a container of baked goods sitting on the shared food table, it's probably from me.
One of the benefits of having lots of software testers on your team is that they're really good at writing test plans. One of them volunteered to write a croissant bake-off test plan, which set out 5 criteria: aroma, texture, taste, appearance and artistic interpretation (I made her add the last category, because I felt like it was the only one I could win).
The plan was that we'd bring in croissants on Monday, put them on plates labelled A and B (so that nobody would know who made which ones), leave out scoring sheets for people to grade the croissants, and tally the results at the end.
Those were the two plates of croissants. Can you guess which one was mine?
Mine were on plate A, and I managed to win 7-0, although each of the scores were quite close. I felt like I had an advantage though, as I had help from tributed's dad, who gave me lots of tips:
It was nice having a conversation partner - especially one who didn't go easy on me at all. He had no idea what I had already learned (which wasn't much), and yet all of his responses were complex French sentences. He never explained anything unless I asked, which was nice, as it gave me a chance to figure things out on my own, and cement those memories in my head.
I felt a bit bad that the conversation was always so one-sided, due to my very limited French, so I suggested we have one conversation in English. He asked what I was planning to do on the weekend, and I mentioned the bread (anpan) I was going to make for redbeanpork (funnily, as I was making them, I kept calling them redbeakpork buns, instead of redbean buns, and MrFodder commented that I really was making them for redbeanpork). I asked if he baked, and he replied that at his last job, people kept asking if he could bake bread, just because he was French. He got so sick of it, that he ended up learning how to bake bread. I.... don't entirely understand the logic of that, but hey, I'm always happy to meet new bakers.
He said he wanted to try one of the anpan, so I brought one to work to give to him. He said it wasn't bad, and that I should try French bread. I showed him my horrible first attempt at croissant, and he said that his first attempt at croissants weren't that great either. Then he suggested we have a croissant bake off. The winner would have the honour of being the best croissant baker on the floor.
A bit of background is required here. Every now and again, we'd have some sort of baking fundraiser in the office. People on the floor would bring in something for morning tea, and people could vote on which was the best. Cindy's carrot cake always won. No matter what I tried, I couldn't beat her. I'm not sure why, but we haven't done anything like that in a while. Cindy, and all of the other talented bakers have left the floor, or the company altogether, and sadly, I feel like it's just me left. So if there was another morning tea, I'd win by default.
I also felt like it was really important to learn to bake something pretty, because one day, I'd have to bake something for our kids to take to school for whatever random fundraising thing was required, and I'd be competing with all the other mothers, who have probably also spent years refining the art of royal icing. Not people who make dumpy Santa Claus gingerbread that looks like this:
So I have been craving some sort of cooking thing at work for a long time. Not that not having these morning teas has ever stopped me from bringing food to work. I think the people on my team have learned that if there's a container of baked goods sitting on the shared food table, it's probably from me.
One of the benefits of having lots of software testers on your team is that they're really good at writing test plans. One of them volunteered to write a croissant bake-off test plan, which set out 5 criteria: aroma, texture, taste, appearance and artistic interpretation (I made her add the last category, because I felt like it was the only one I could win).
The plan was that we'd bring in croissants on Monday, put them on plates labelled A and B (so that nobody would know who made which ones), leave out scoring sheets for people to grade the croissants, and tally the results at the end.
Those were the two plates of croissants. Can you guess which one was mine?
Mine were on plate A, and I managed to win 7-0, although each of the scores were quite close. I felt like I had an advantage though, as I had help from tributed's dad, who gave me lots of tips:
- roll out your dough quickly, don't worry so much about getting it perfect, because your butter will warm up too much in the meantime
- after cutting the dough into triangles, use a rolling pin or your hands to stretch it out a bit more so it's thinner
- when rolling up the croissants, roll it tightly, otherwise they'll break open while baking
- let it proof for at least 3 hours before baking
Then I had help from redbeanpork and MrFodder, who picked out the prettiest ones to take into the office. Lastly, I had the help from the super giant aluminium rolling pin that I bought as part of my retail therapy when I thought I had failed the Java exam. I was able to put the rolling pin in the fridge between turns, so that meant the dough was kept cooler for longer.
Michael was very gracious about the outcome, and has now challenge me to a brioche bake-off, and we have suckered in someone else from his team. I wonder if the happy French man from the video will be proud of my next attempt at brioche. I hope I'll do better next time.
Oh! And Intern Daniel, who is Italian, has challenged me to a pasta cook off. We always joke that I'm the better Italian than he is, and he's the better Chinese person. He even calls me gweilo sometimes. Grad Daniel (also Italian) wanted me to make tiramisù, but when I asked him if he was also challenging me, he said no, he just wanted tiramisù, :(
Another interest thing that has come out of the bake off is that there are people on my floor who have never spoken to me before, and now they're coming up to me and telling me that they want to try making croissants, or suggesting things that I should try next. It feels a bit weird, as I'm not really used to people coming up to talk to me, but it feels nice to have something to talk to with other people on my floor. A part of me is hoping that as word of this spreads, I'll be challenged to make more and more different things, and I'll have a good excuse to broaden my cooking repertoire.
Sunday, 8 May 2016
Food Mimic: Brioche
I'm going to start this post with a photo of the brioche I made, because it always picks the first photo for the thumbnail, and I don't want to give people the mistaken impression that I made the one that we had in Paris.
So spoilers, here it is:
This is it, the video that launched my desire to learn French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d9eUgVhRn8. I was looking for a video on how to make brioche, as I figured I should do something with all that leftover butter after making croissants. I really didn't want to go to a lot of effort making those individual brioche rolls like this:
Especially after the marathon effort of making two batches of croissants. So I tried to find a loaf-style recipe. At the time I opened the video, the extent of my French vocabulary consisted of: merci (thank you), bonsoir (good afternoon, I learned that from Olek), and boisson (drink). Needless to say, I used the YouTube subtitle auto-translate option, which had such gems as:
But I think the happiness of the man was just so engaging, and I ended up watching the video all the way through, even though I didn't really understand what he was saying half the time (though I could guess a decent amount from the context). Crazily, I then decided to use his recipe anyway, which you can find here: http://www.enviedebienmanger.fr/fiche-recette/recette-brioche-pur-beurre
I can attempt to translate it, but I'm mostly guessing from the video, and I think maybe you'd be better off with Google translate. T_T
Note: This recipe makes 2 loaves!
Ingredients
250 butter (the good stuff, 82+% fat), plus you'll also need some butter to grease your loaf pan
500g bread flour
100g sugar
1 egg yolk
10ml milk
18g fresh yeast (which is about 6g of dry yeast)
4 eggs
12g + 1 pinch of salt (he made some crack about being from Brittany when he added the salt, but I don't know what that means)
Mix the yeast in with the egg yolk and 100g of the flour with a chopstick. If you are using dry yeast, you'll need to let it sit in some warm water first to activate it. Pour the rest of the flour in, and let it rise at room temp until the yeast bursts through the flour (about 15-30 mins).
Transfer to your dough mixer, add the 4 eggs, sugar and salt. Start at a slow speed, then increase to the next speed. Slowly add the butter. The dough should be elastic and come away from the edge.
Cover with a damp cloth, and allow to rise for 2 hours.
Take the dough out of the bowl and stretch it out, so it's like a long rectangle. Fold it over in thirds like a business letter. Rotate 90 degrees and do another business letter fold.
Place it in a bowl / tray and cover with plastic wrap. Chill in the fridge for at least 8 hours.
Take out the dough, and cut in half. Put the other half back in the fridge to be used for your second loaf.
Roll the dough out into a rectangle, and do the business letter fold again. Then rotate 90 degrees and repeat. Try it a third time, if the dough isn't too tough. If the dough is tough, stop here.
Roll it out into a rectangle, then roll it up and cut into pieces. Grease your loaf pan, and put the pieces in the pan in two rows.
You can see how lazy I was feeling, as I didn't even bother to do the folds and rolling, and just broke my dough into 8 pieces and rolled them up.
Leave to proof in a warm place until they've risen to the top of the loaf pan (can take 2-4 hours).
Preheat your oven to 180 degrees.
For the egg wash, mix an egg yolk with 1.5ml of water, and a bit of salt. Coat your dough (try to cover as much as possible, as you want that lovely brown colour).
Bake for 40 minutes.
Cool on a rack before eating.
------------
As you can see, mine was a disaster. I didn't know that the dough was meant to be sticky, so I kept adding flour to make it less sticky. The end result was that my dough was super heavy. If you look at the crumb in the picture of mine, you'll see that there are huge crumbs, like you'd find in muffins. Not at all what you want to see in bread, especially a light bread like a brioche!
Total disaster. :(
Lesson learned: listen to the happy French dude.
Speaking of, I was getting a bit bored of Duolingo, so I had a look at some of the other language learning apps in the Google Play store, and came across Memrise - www.memrise.com. There is a free and a paid version, and I've been pretty happy with the free one so far. The idea is that you have these "mems" that are images you use to help you remember new words. I just like that it actually teaches you things, unlike Duolingo where a lot of the time, you have to try and figure out the rules for yourself. A few of the comments say it should be used alongside Duolingo, and I tried it for a while, but it ended up being too time consuming to keep both up.
I've been using Memrise for a couple of months, and I felt like I understood a lot more of the video this time around.
So spoilers, here it is:
This is it, the video that launched my desire to learn French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d9eUgVhRn8. I was looking for a video on how to make brioche, as I figured I should do something with all that leftover butter after making croissants. I really didn't want to go to a lot of effort making those individual brioche rolls like this:
Especially after the marathon effort of making two batches of croissants. So I tried to find a loaf-style recipe. At the time I opened the video, the extent of my French vocabulary consisted of: merci (thank you), bonsoir (good afternoon, I learned that from Olek), and boisson (drink). Needless to say, I used the YouTube subtitle auto-translate option, which had such gems as:
I can attempt to translate it, but I'm mostly guessing from the video, and I think maybe you'd be better off with Google translate. T_T
Note: This recipe makes 2 loaves!
Ingredients
250 butter (the good stuff, 82+% fat), plus you'll also need some butter to grease your loaf pan
500g bread flour
100g sugar
1 egg yolk
10ml milk
18g fresh yeast (which is about 6g of dry yeast)
4 eggs
12g + 1 pinch of salt (he made some crack about being from Brittany when he added the salt, but I don't know what that means)
Mix the yeast in with the egg yolk and 100g of the flour with a chopstick. If you are using dry yeast, you'll need to let it sit in some warm water first to activate it. Pour the rest of the flour in, and let it rise at room temp until the yeast bursts through the flour (about 15-30 mins).
Transfer to your dough mixer, add the 4 eggs, sugar and salt. Start at a slow speed, then increase to the next speed. Slowly add the butter. The dough should be elastic and come away from the edge.
Cover with a damp cloth, and allow to rise for 2 hours.
Take the dough out of the bowl and stretch it out, so it's like a long rectangle. Fold it over in thirds like a business letter. Rotate 90 degrees and do another business letter fold.
Place it in a bowl / tray and cover with plastic wrap. Chill in the fridge for at least 8 hours.
Take out the dough, and cut in half. Put the other half back in the fridge to be used for your second loaf.
Roll the dough out into a rectangle, and do the business letter fold again. Then rotate 90 degrees and repeat. Try it a third time, if the dough isn't too tough. If the dough is tough, stop here.
Roll it out into a rectangle, then roll it up and cut into pieces. Grease your loaf pan, and put the pieces in the pan in two rows.
Leave to proof in a warm place until they've risen to the top of the loaf pan (can take 2-4 hours).
Preheat your oven to 180 degrees.
For the egg wash, mix an egg yolk with 1.5ml of water, and a bit of salt. Coat your dough (try to cover as much as possible, as you want that lovely brown colour).
Bake for 40 minutes.
Cool on a rack before eating.
------------
As you can see, mine was a disaster. I didn't know that the dough was meant to be sticky, so I kept adding flour to make it less sticky. The end result was that my dough was super heavy. If you look at the crumb in the picture of mine, you'll see that there are huge crumbs, like you'd find in muffins. Not at all what you want to see in bread, especially a light bread like a brioche!
Total disaster. :(
Lesson learned: listen to the happy French dude.
Speaking of, I was getting a bit bored of Duolingo, so I had a look at some of the other language learning apps in the Google Play store, and came across Memrise - www.memrise.com. There is a free and a paid version, and I've been pretty happy with the free one so far. The idea is that you have these "mems" that are images you use to help you remember new words. I just like that it actually teaches you things, unlike Duolingo where a lot of the time, you have to try and figure out the rules for yourself. A few of the comments say it should be used alongside Duolingo, and I tried it for a while, but it ended up being too time consuming to keep both up.
I've been using Memrise for a couple of months, and I felt like I understood a lot more of the video this time around.
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