savory

Simplicity is Relative, Sourdough Crackers

~ mary_m ~ 1 Comment

February’s cookbook club book was Plenty*. I have several friends who adore this book and I looked forward to exploring it and perhaps expanding my kitchen toolkit to include more Middle Eastern flavors and techniques. As it turned out, however, this was not the right book for me. Plenty is chock full of delicious recipes, and those recipes are chock full of somewhat precise and complicated techniques along with not-so familiar (to me) ingredients. What it is not chock full of, however, is unifying theory or process explanations which would lead me into the recipes themselves. For something I’m not already familiar with, I definitely prefer more prose about why and how to do things, what’s integral and what can be simplified, etc. To expand my Middle Eastern influenced toolkit, I’m going to need a different book.**

The recipe I choose to make, Saffron Tagliatelle with Spiced Butter, was beautiful and delicious, but also gave me hours of grief when my dough was too wet and my pasta roller clearly did not have the same capacity for which the recipe was written. I’m glad I tried it. When I make pasta again, however, I’ll follow some combination of Alice Water’s advice, my brilliant spouse’s advice, and this article on Serious Eats (which seems to agree, on the whole, with my spouse and Alice Waters) and I’ll leave Plenty on the shelf.

Then, after spending way too much time muttering under my breath about complicated recipes being barriers to home cooks, I decided to make something simple. And I did! And it was delicious! And I realized that while it was simple to me, recipes that start with a cup of sourdough starter and involve rolling dough thin enough for crackers, aren’t necessarily simple to others. I may have some work to do on walking my talk. Nevertheless, if you happen to have some sourdough starter and a silicon baking mat or two, these are great!***

Simple Sourdough Crackers

  • 1 cup sourdough starter
  • 1/4 cup olive oil (or ghee or lard or coconut oil or …), plus more for brushing
  • 1 cup (or more) whole wheat flour
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • coarse salt for sprinkling

Mix starter, oil, flour, and salt together, adding more flour until a relatively stuff dough forms. Knead lightly (for a minute or two) in the bowl, then cover with plastic wrap and let rest for ~8 hours (up to 24 is probably fine).

Preheat oven to 350º.

Divide dough into two halves*** and shape each roughly into a rectangle. Place the rectangle on asilicon baking mat or sheet of parchment and roll thin, covering as much of the mat or parchment as possible while remaining within the confines of what will fit on your baking sheet. (I kept the plastic wrap on top of the dough to keep my rolling pin from sticking without adding more flour.) Repeat with the other half.

Brush the dough with a bit more olive oil and sprinkle with coarse salt. Using a bench scraper or spatula****, cut the dough into cracker-sized***** rectangles. You don’t need to separate the pieces. The dough will put apart slightly while baking so you have separate crackers in the end.

Bake at 350º, for 15 to 20 minutes, just until golden brown. Open the oven door a crack, but leave the baking sheets in for another 15 or more minutes while the crackers crisp up. 

*yes, I am just finishing a write-up of something that happened in February. Sorry.

**maybe it’s Zahav? I haven’t given up.

***I’ll post something more actually simple soon. I promise.

****if you’re using a standard half-sheet pan, aka a regular sized cookie sheet. if your pans are smaller, divide more!

*****don’t use an actual knife or a pastry cutter! It will cut your baking mat and that is sad.

******whatever size cracker you like.

 

Cookbook Club!

~ mary_m ~ 3 Comments

I feel I should be upfront here, and admit that I know I’m a few weeks behind in posting (according to my goal of posting once a week). You see I was gonna post about a dinner party, but then that didn’t happen*, and then I was gonna post a brownie recipe, but I’m still refining it,* and I was gonna post about the kitchen cure in January project, but I haven’t finished that either. Oh and I also still need to post the third scones recipe (and scones rambling) and that cool cheddar corn coins thing. Bother. So here I am, vowing to break the inertia and get back to posting. This will probably happen again.

That’s not what I was going to tell you about this week, however. This week I want to tell you about Cookbook Club! Late last year, I read this article on Serious Eats about cookbook clubs and started thinking. I got a handful of virtual raised hands from other local folks who would also be interested in such a thing and lo and behold, we actually started one.

(People cooked! It was great!)

Here’s the basic premise:

  • Select a cookbook (which we did via nominating and voting on Google Sheets)
  • Select a date and time
  • Everyone gets or borrows a copy of the cookbook and makes one dish from it
  • There’s a casual potluck at which everyone can try dishes, talk about the book, and generally have a good time
  • Do it again the next month

Here are some things that made it work well:

  • Everyone could decide their own comfort spot of what to cook. More experienced cooks choose something that would push their edges a little, or vowed to actually follow a recipe where we would generally riff on the idea but disregard the instructions. Less experienced cooks choose something more approachable and pushed the edge of “making things for a crowd of cook-type-people”. Those with more time used it; those with less time choose according to that limit.
  • It was a social gathering with a pre-built conversation starter. This, for the introverted and/or socially anxious among us, was awesome.
  • We kept it casual***. There was no pressure to have a dish perfectly plated or piping hot which greatly simplified logistics.
  • Rotating hosts. Next month is at someone else’s house. This takes the pressure off starting the whole thing in motion.

January’s book was Heartlandia, and I made fried chicken for the first time ever****. I probably won’t follow that exact recipe again; nevertheless, here’s what I learned:

  • Boneless chicken makes for a much easier eating experience and is totally worth it
  • Brining (2 days in advance) and buttermilk soaking (1 day in advance) the chicken yielded super moist and delicious chicken even for the pieces I overcooked
  • Shaking chicken in a paper bag to coat with seasoned flour will cause clouds of seasoned flour to drift down over a very large radius (and I probably won’t do that again)
  • Frying in a skillet works
  • Beef tallow makes for yummy fried things
  • I can fry chicken!*****

Next month, I’m making fresh pasta from Plenty, even though I habitually leave the pasta making to my spouse, and I can’t wait to taste what everyone else makes!

 

*The party did happen. It’s just the post that got lost in the sands of time. You all should definitely make Romesco though. It was so so good.

**Perils of food blogging! So many brownies! You have no idea!

***We kinda had to. We didn’t have enough chairs.

****Having grown up on Shake and Bake

*****Win!

Root Vegetable Pancakes (Which Are Kinda Latkes & Kinda Not)

~ mary_m ~ Leave a comment

Ah, November, when New England thoroughly enters the long, dark time of root vegetable season. We’ve still got Brussels Sprouts at the market, but we’re also seeing more & more radishes, beets, potatoes, parsnips, and turnips and less & less of anything else. (No one except me, in my family, will eat a beet. Parsnips are only slightly more popular.)

So… what’s a a nice person who tries to eat local & seasonal (at least some of the time) to do? Enter the root vegetable pancake, aka these-are-not-really-latkes. They’re tasty! They can count as an entree for Meatless Mondays! Best of all, you can slather them with apple sauce and sour cream.

Basic formula:

~2 lbs shredded root vegetables, such as potatoes, turnips, parsnips, or even beets if you’re not in my house. I generally include some onion, maybe one small onion for every two lbs. of total veg. People who don’t like turnips will be happier if you use at least 1 lb potato and save the weird stuff for the other 1 lb.

1 egg

1/4 cup flour

salt and pepper

chopped herbs if you feel like it

oil for frying

Basic method:

Shred the veggies, then place them in a flour sack dishtowel or piece of cheesecloth and sprinkle with some salt (~1 tsp). Let sit for a minute or two, then squeeze out any possible liquid by twisting the veg. in the towel over the sink or a bowl. Squeeze hard.

Mix the now drier veg. with the egg and flour. Add pepper and chopped herbs to taste.

Fry (in ~1/4 cup rounds) in olive oil (or bacon fat if you’re really not going to call them latkes) over medium heat until both sides are medium brown and crisp. Keep warm in a low oven while frying the rest.

Serve with sour cream and apple sauce. Celebrate that you actually remembered to use your turnips.

For much more thorough directions of almost exactly this same thing, check out Food52’s How to Make Latkes Without a Recipe.