James Starmer – Food

There has been a lot written about no knead bread at this point so I’m not really going to get into the history and details. I got the basic recipe here and it’s just the base recipe from this book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking.

I have a lot of trouble baking bread. I don’t know if it’s some kind of bread A.D.D., but going through all of the steps to create a perfect traditional loaf of bread kind of has me stumped. After trying this recipe (I only did a half for my first two attempts) I’m a firm believer in this style of baking bread.

Just a few last thoughts, For the buns I removed slightly large than golf ball sized chunks and shaped them into little boules. The steam part might seem a little weird but it’s really what is going to produce the perfect crust. And let me reiterate, the steam part is dangerous, be careful. In the bread bible aka Bread Bakers Apprentice goes into a lot more detail about the whole steam process and they suggest opening the oven and spraying the sides of the oven at 30 second intervals to really get a lot of steam going.

Now what should you do with these fine buns? I did end up smearing some honey butter on one of them but my favorite was this little bacon sandwich.

Here is a video showing how to shape the bread

I didn’t followSandra Lee’s recipe that uses “beef sandwich slices” aka steak-umms aka beef spam. I decided that this one on epicurious was a little more legit.

I loosely followed the epicurious version. I didn’t blanch the scallions. I didn’t use flank steak, I used a crappy cheap cut that was already sliced and fairly mangled. I mangled it more with a wooden hammer too try to get an even 1/16″. I didn’t tie it up with a string, I just hoped that the searing would hold it in place and it did.

Overall the feeling that I get from this recipe is that it’s pretty open to interpretation. It’s really just marinaded meat wrapped around a vegetable. I saw a lot of recipes for where the meat is wrapped around asparagus and a few where mini-negimaki were made appetizer style. So I think this is a good basic recipe that will hopefully inspire some more clever uses of meat wrapped around vegetables, but please refrain from using steak-umms, it’s just wrong.

Whenever I make mashed potatoes I usually try to make a little more than I need just so that I can have enough left overs to make these pancakes the next morning. Adding flour or something to thicken up the batter can be a necessary evil because it’s impossible to say how dry or wet the mashed potatoes are. I made two batches of pancakes from two different sets of mashed potatoes. The first set were perfect, cup of mash and two eggs, no flour needed. The second set used some overly wet mashed potatoes. I decided to try thickening it up with corn meal. Lesson learned, they didn’t taste like corn bread they tasted like crap.

When I was growing up my family almost moved to New Mexico. We took a lot of trips there to look at houses and see the sights. Of all the food we had, the one thing that I remember was sopaipillas and what really sticks out is that they were usually served with honey butter. Most of the recipes that I’ve seen floating around for sopaipillas either dust them with sugar and serve them with honey, but they never mention honey butter! They’re missing the best part!

Sopaipillas are good, but honey butter is great! For one thing, it solves the age old problem of honey on toast. Make a piece of toast, butter it up, drizzle some honey on it, take a bite and all of the honey runs off the toast. Now with honey butter, problem solved. Thank you honey butter!

One last thought, the honey to butter ratio is really flexible, I haven’t made this stuff since I was a kid and I just guessed at a ratio and it tasted great. I think next time I’d probably try a 1-1 ratio.

If you don’t get the title then please go and watch this.

I have two huge basil plants in my back yard. As the first frost creeps closer, the time line for using it all up gets shorter, so I needed a recipe that uses basil by the fist full. This is another one of those recipes that you really just eyeball. If you want it more garlicy add more, if you want it more basily add more of that.

You could throw all of this into a food processor, but you’ll come out with a really gross looking paste so I really recommend chopping this by hand. I use a mezzaluna, it keeps all of the bits in the central bowl area, the blade is sharp enough that the weight of the knife can do most of the cutting and the end result has individual bits of the primary ingredients instead of a singular green goop. If you have a ton of basil you can make up a huge batch of this stuff. I’ve heard of people putting it into ice cube trays to keep it over the winter. Personally I don’t know about the ice cube tray thing, with this much garlic I can’t imagine that you’ll be able to get the taste out of the tray afterward. It should last for a few weeks or months in your fridge if it’s thoroughly mixed/covered with olive oil.

I had the best intentions to make butternut squash ravioli today, but as dinner crept closer I just wasn’t going to get it done. I had a pot of stock that I started earlier in the day so I figured I could turn the squash puree into soup. The soup was good even if it wasn’t as sweet as my wife likes it. Her favorite butternut squash soup recipe is really heavy on the apples. While this might not take the title of “favorite” soup recipe it was pretty easy and didn’t require a blender.

Last couple of thoughts: I split this recipe in two because I still think that the puree could make a really good filling for ravioli on it’s own. The measurements are kind of vague for these recipes because I really just eyeballed most of it. I bought a squash and cut it up. That yielded about a pound when peeled and chopped. When I got to the soup stage I would have liked double the amount of puree, that’s why I said 2 lbs. in the recipe. So, I think this is a good recipe for people who like a flexibility in what they’re cooking.

Pawpaws are native to the eastern US and in my opinion almost completely unknown. I guess this is due the fact that the pawpaw “does not store or ship well” ^[1]. I have lived in Maryland all my life and I am fortunate enough to have great memories of picking and eating pawpaws along the C&O canal.

Their texture is close to a banana or maybe a papaya. Their taste is unique and for me I can only say they taste like a pawpaw. They look like a mango and usually have black spots that make them look like they’re covered in mold.

Searching for recipes on the internet is a disappointment due to their relative obscurity. But wikipedia says, “In many recipes calling for bananas, pawpaw can be used with volumetric equivalency”. It’s a fairly labor intensive process to get the maximum amount of pulp from a pawpaw. The biggest issue with getting the pulp is the seeds.

The seeds have a thick membrane around them that clings to the pulp so if you want to get the most out of your pawpaw you are going to have to get that membrane off of the seeds. I peeled mine by hand the skin is really thin and if the pawpaw is ripe it comes off easily. I guess most of my pawpaws were technically unripe because they were fairly green but they tasted ripe so I just used them anyway.

Normally you can walk around a grove of pawpaw trees and find ripe ones hanging from a tree. We cheated a little bit. When my mother would spot a tree with some in it I would give it a shake and wait for a hail of pawpaws to fall to the ground. Hind sight being what it is I probably should have had some head gear because these things are heavy and some of the really unripe ones are hard as a rock. But I was lucky and didn’t get a pawpaw to the skull.

*Disclaimer: I made this recipe up. I can’t attest to the “safety” of this recipe because canning with untested recipes could possibly lead to spoilage. So if you are a little freaked out, you can always freeze or store in the fridge for a couple of months with relative safety.

Thoughts on the jam: It really didn’t hold that unique pawpaw flavor well. It tasted good, but it really just tasted like “jam”. I have a few pawpaws left over that still need to ripen a bit so I’m hoping that I can get enough out of them to mix some jam and fresh pawpaws to whip up some pawpaw ice cream.

I have fond memories of baum kuchen from a trip to Germany my family took when I was a kid. It translates to “tree cake” in english. It’s cooked in a special machine with a spit where layer upon layer of batter is cooked into a cake with concentric circles like a tree. It’s covered in a hard chocolate shell. It’s the best cake I’ve ever had.

My sister Anika has tried to replicate baum kuchen with her baum kuchen spitzen. Honestly she has had much better results than I have, I should have asked her for her recipe before setting out on my own. But I did get a layered effect and I think my mini cakes look pretty cool, even if they don’t really taste like true baum kuchen. But honestly I don’t think you are going to get true baum kuchen at home unless you can get that crazy spit cooker thing. Here is the base recipe that I used.

This is the icing that I used but I don’t think I’d use it again, it was just too rich and it didn’t set as hard as I would have liked but I’ll post it for reference.

They’re really just doughnut holes covered in tang icing and dipped in astronaut ice cream, but I think that warrants a weird name. I used this doughnut recipe. I probably got 50+ holes out of it. And all of the pictures were taken by my wife Rachel.

The initial steps with the yeast is a little weird, I’ve never really seen it done that way, but the doughnuts puffed up like they were supposed to, so I can’t really complain.

Toasted sandwiches are awesome. Also known as toasties or jaffles depending on where you are from. They’re like a hot pocket that doesn’t taste like total crap. I’ve wanted to make a waffle sandwich for a while now. I finally bit the bullet and borrowed my mom’s sandwich toaster. It’s an early 90′s contraption that we used now and again growing up but since then has been collecting dust in a corner of the pantry. The concept is pretty simple, make a toasted sandwich with waffles instead of bread.

Waffles. A few years ago my brother and sister in law bought me a waffle iron and I went through a half a dozen recipes before finding what I consider the best all around recipe. I know, I know, it’s Emeril. I don’t hate him, I just think his catch phrase is weak. I have dozens that I use when I’m cooking that are much better like the classic “fuck” or “shit” or “eh”. I don’t think those would fly on TV though. I can totally imagine Emeril brushing his teeth with some crest or what ever he is hocking at the time and yelling, “Fucking Shit! that’s some good toothpaste”. Ok, I’m rambling. One thing about these waffles, if you want them to look pretty, eat them fast because as they degas their steaminess they tend to get a little floppy. But we’re going to cook them again so who gives a shit. Bam.

*My, brother asked for a review of the taste. They tasted great. I think I would probably pour a little syrup into the bacon egg and cheese one next time before cooking it. I would also try under cooking the waffles a little bit because they didn’t fuse as well as I would have hoped.