As promised, here is a post on baking at high altitude. Baking, unlike most cooking, is chemistry. You have to get the proportions right, and there's not much room for error. Ideally, you'd do everything by weight, but if you use measuring cups you have to level them off with a knife. There's also not much room for improvisation, and many people don't like that aspect of baking. I do, because if you get everything right, you know what you're going to get. I don't make my own recipes, but it's easy to follow the ones that I use. Since the air pressure is lower at high altitude, the chemical processes that occur are affected, so there are certain changes you have to make. I use the King Arthur Flour Guide, and just go with the changes they advise. I've not had a problem. My only caveat would be that with cookies, just use the lowest cooking time listed, and then check in. Remember, you can always cook things for longer, but you can't uncook them.
Here is a loaf of banana bread that I made this weekend, using the guide. It was very, very moist (mostly because I undercooked it slightly; I didn't have a toothpick to test for doneness so I went by sight).
I used a Mark Bittman recipe from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, although I modified it slightly. His calls for coconut or other dried fruit, but whenever I see that in a recipe I mentally replace it with chocolate chips. He also calls for nuts, but Carl doesn't like them. For add-ins like nuts, chocolate chips, etc. you can add however much you'd like. I also added cinnamon. Ingredients listed have not been adjusted for altitude.
Ingredients
8 Tbsps (1 stick) butter
1.5 cups all-purpose flour
0.5 cup whole-wheat flour
1 tsp salt (n.b. Despite what I said above about having to be incredibly precise or your baked goods won't come out correctly, I generally don't put as much salt in as most recipes call for. For this, I used slightly under a teaspoon)
1.5 tsps baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon (probably could have upped this amount, as it wasn't very cinnamon-y)
0.75 cup sugar
2 eggs
3 very ripe bananas
1 tsp vanilla extract
1.25 cups chocolate chips
Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease your loaf pan.
Mix together the dry ingredients. With a hand mixer, a whisk, or in the food processor, cream the butter and beat in the eggs and bananas. Stir this mixture into the dry ingredients; stir just enough to combine (it’s okay if there are lumps). Gently fold in the vanilla and the chocolate chips.
Pour batter into pan, and bake for 45-60 minutes. Test with a toothpick to make sure it comes out clean (although the undercooked bread was still tasty). Let cool for 10-15 minutes, and then pop it out of the pan.
Unless you're a professional chef, you're oven is probably not properly calibrated. Rather than spend a lot of money to get that checked, you can spend $10 and get an oven thermometer. This post is brought to you by the turkey debacle from Thanksgiving, 2008, when we couldn't figure out why the turkey still wasn't finished cooking. I didn't have an oven thermometer at that time. Turns out, when I was living in Irvine, the oven in my condo ran about 50 degrees cool, which meant that if I wanted it at 350F, I'd have to set it to 400F. My oven thermometer helped me figure this out. Mine just hangs on the rack, and I can check it when I'm using the oven and adjust accordingly. Very useful.
Boulder is 5,430 feet above sea level, so the air is pretty thin. This means all sorts of interesting things happen. I get winded walking up the stairs, and even when it's cold out, if the sun is shining it still feels decently warm. It also means that cooking is affected, since the lower air pressure means that water boils at a lower temperature. There are also consequences for baking, which I'll discuss in a later post. Since water boils at a lower temperature, most things take longer to cook then you would expect. For things like pasta, it's pretty easy to get it right, since you can just taste it every so often. Other things, though, are not so easy. I tried to make a hard boiled egg last night. I boiled the water, put the egg in, and let it sit. Mark Bittman recommends letting it sit for 10 minutes for a perfect hard-boiled egg. Knowing that it would take longer, I kept it in for 13 minutes, and still got a not-quite hard boiled egg. So, if you ever find yourself at altitude, just keep in mind that everything will take longer than you expect it to.
The first time I ever encountered a pressure cooker I was in graduate school. So I was at least 22 years old. I suppose I had heard of them before, but I had no idea what they looked like, or how they really worked. I was at my grandmother's house for one of our "Monday Night Dinners," and I tried to open the lid on a pot to see what was in it. Both my grandmother and my uncle started yelling, "Don't open that!" And since then, I've been mildly afraid of the pressure cooker. Despite knowing this, my mom decided to buy me one for Christmas. Monday night, we forgot to soak beans overnight to put in the slow cooker (a Hannukkah present which I'm sure will be discussed). I decided to soak them during the day, and then use the pressure cooker. I read all about how to use the pressure cooker on the internet, and read the directions that came with the pressure cooker thoroughly. That was a bit difficult, since they were poorly translated from German (Keep non-adults and persons away from the pressure cooker). I also have an electric stove, so according to the internet, you have to get it up to pressure on one cooktop on high and then transfer it to another on low, since electric stoves don't change temperature easily (electric stoves are the worst). From start to finish, the whole process took about 30 minutes (not including the soaking). It took a few minutes to get up to pressure, then I kept it on the heat for ~10 minutes, and then 10-15 minutes for it to decompress. The results were pretty good, but I don't think they were consistent. Most of the beans were soft, although there a were a few that I thought were on the firm side. Maybe a few more minutes on heat? Other things to try in the future: steel cut oats and risotto.
This is a quick, easy, delicious recipe from my childhood friend's mother.
Ingredients
1 lb ground chicken (ground chicken is sometimes difficult to find; you can ask the butcher to grind it for you)
lots of garlic
1 red onion
1 red pepper
1 bunch long beans, diced (make sure that they're not sad and limp looking. If you have an Asian grocery store nearby, they probably have good bunches)
1/2 bunch cilantro, leaves primarily, chopped (I don't care for cilantro, so I usually leave it out if I make it myself)
lime juice (1-2 limes)
nampla (fish sauce) to taste
Chop onion, red pepper, and garlic. Stir fry until soft. Add ground chicken. Cook until no longer pink. Add the diced long beans. Cook about 1-2 minutes until soft. Add cilantro, lime juice, and nampla.
If you don't already follow David Lebovitz's food blog, you definitely should. His recipes are great and his writing is funny. Sometimes his tales from traveling make me a bit jealous, but they're always packed with photos of delicious foods, so it works out. This summer I read a post by David Lebovitz about homemade yogurt that encouraged me to try making it one more time. I had tried making homemade yogurt in the past and those "yogurts" ranged from abysmal failures to things that tasted good, but had textures so unusual that we just couldn't make ourselves eat them no matter how hard we tried. One of them almost needed to be cut with a knife if you wanted to take a bite!
Peaches with homemade yogurt and homemade granola. Makes you miss summer doesn't it?
I used his recipe and created my first truly successful batch of yogurt in June, and since then I've made 21 other batches. Only two of those have failed, and the successes have been really great. The only downside is that now we are hooked - none of the commercial yogurts seem quite good enough, and they're all monstrously expensive compared to homemade yogurt, which only costs about $0.25 per pound.
I've made a few minor tweaks to his recipe, but the recipe that I've been using is not complicated. Since David Lebovitz's post gives plenty of detail, and I'm mostly just a fanboy giving him a shout-out, I'm not going to give very complicated instructions here:
Sterilize some glass containers with boiling water
Heat milk to 180 degrees F
Cool milk to 120 degrees F
Add 1/4 C yogurt per 4 C of milk. This is your starter culture.
Put milk/yogurt mixture into jars and keep them warm for about 10 hours, then refrigerate them.
Pretty simple, right? You don't need much in terms of special equipment, just a pot, thermometer, some jars, and a cooler. Other folks use different methods to keep the milk warm during step #5, but I've found that a cooler lined with beach towels works and is the most simple and reliable method. One of my terrible failures in the past involved using the oven to keep the milk warm...
I took some pictures and a movie during my last batch and they're below. Since I usually make one gallon batches nowadays, this is probably a bigger batch than you might want to try as your first shot at yogurt. I've tried using expensive organic milk (about $6 per gallon) and the cheap milk from King Soopers (which is from CO) and from Safeway (both about $2 per gallon). I really couldn't tell a difference between the two of them. My Seattle self is condemning me as an environment-ruining selfish jerk right now, but oh well! While you're figuring out which milk to buy, I should mention that we tried using skim milk or 2% a few times, but the texture was always a little strange, even when we added things like powdered milk (which, by the way, is expensive and makes homemade yogurt a bit less economical, if you choose to use it). Using whole milk results in a pleasing texture and flavor and is definitely worth trying.
Canning jars full of hot water. I put a couple of these in the cooler while the milk is cooking to warm up the cooler.
Heating milk
Cooling milk in an ice bath
The yogurt starter culture just before mixing into the milk! I like to mix it in with an immersion blender so that there aren't lumps. If this is your first batch, your starter culture is probably a commercial yogurt. I used Brown Cow Nonfat Vanilla as my starter culture because I liked its texture. Choose any yogurt that you think has a good texture and use a fresh container so that it has a higher number of living yogurt bacteria. After that first batch you can just use some of the yogurt from a previous batch as your starter, like I'm doing in the picture above. Your texture probably won't be the same as the commercial yogurt because basically all of them add thickeners like gelatin, pectin, guar gum, etc. that you probably won't use.
Adding milk to jars. In the middle of the video you'll see me spooning the froth out of the jars to make room for a little more milk, but you don't have to do this. I mostly remove the froth so that I can fit the maximum amount of milk into the minimum number of jars - after all, our refrigerator is already too full :-)
Cooler full of milk (soon to be yogurt!). The longer you let it ferment inside the cooler, the thicker the texture and tarter the flavor will be. I usually set a timer for 10 or 12 hours so that I don't forget and leave it in overnight. If you do that on accident, I think your yogurt would be fine, although it might be a bit more tart than most folks like...
You can strain your yogurt too if you prefer greek yogurt! I found this cheap plastic strainer at the local Mexican grocery store and it works great! If you don't have a strainer like this you can use a towel. We like to stir flavorings in to our strained yogurt - cinnamon, honey, vanilla, fruit, etc. Strained yogurt is also a great addition to lots of sauces and dressings, and when you make it at home like this it is practically free compared to the commercial equivalent!
So, I wrote a lot more than I meant to, but if you have any unanswered questions about the process let me know. Also, if you try making yogurt like this let me know how it goes!
I think I've mentioned this, but it is squash season. That's basically all you can get at the Boulder Farmer's Market at this point in the season. And while I like squash, sometimes you need to do something different with it. Enter spaghetti squash with shrimp scampi.
Ingredients Spaghetti Squash
Shrimp (number of shrimp depends on the size)
Cherry Tomatoes, halved
Garlic
Butter/Olive oil
Lemon
Artichoke hearts (optional)
Parmesan Cheese
First, roast your spaghetti squash. Pre-heat the oven to 425-450 degrees F. Poke some holes in it with a knife and stick the whole thing in the oven on a baking sheet covered in tinfoil and let it roast for about an hour. The skin should be easy to pierce when it's done. Take it out, cut it in half, and fork out the insides so that it looks like noodles.
To make the shrimp scampi, sautee your shrimp in garlic and butter (I also added some olive oil) until they turn pink. When they're done, remove from the heat, and squeeze the juice of your lemon over the shrimp. Toss the squash and tomatoes in with the shrimp and the sauce. You can also add the artichoke hearts now, if you're using them. It's now ready to eat. Add lots of Parmesan cheese, and you have a squash dish that isn't too squash-y. We had it with a side of crusty bread, but this dish is Paleo (if you use olive oil instead of butter)/Gluten free without it.
