School Finals

 Finals and other projects have kept me from posting. I'll be back posting soon!! When I get back I might re-concept everything into something I can do long term.

Sour Dough Starter (or learning to feed and care for your mother)

After making a few batches of No Knead bread, I want to venture out to something more adventurous. I set my focus on Sour Dough.

First I would need a starter. You could just buy a starter. Google 'sourdough starter' and you can find many store willing to sell you one.  You can even get a free sourdough starter that can trace its roots to 1847 by just sending them a self addressed stamped envelope ( I will be trying this soon).  But I decided to make my own.

 After a little research I settled on King Arthur Flour's method involving:
2 Cups of Flour
1 Cup of water
1 tablespoon of sugar

Mix all the ingredients in a large sterilized jar and cover with a clean cloth.

      
I used an olive jar I picked up at a bar and I sterilized it in boiling water.   This jar worked alright, something with a wider mouth would have been better for stirring though.

In a couple of days it should start bubbling and smelling sour.After 3-4 days if it isn't bubbling and smelling sour or starts to mold, throw it away and try again. If it is bubbling and smells sour and yeasty, put it into a container to refrigerate.

  Caring for your sourdough starter is easy. Just feed her by stirring in about 50% of her volume a 2 to 1 ratio of flour and water every two weeks.Then put back in the refrigerator.  If the container gets too full offer some to your friends and neighbors or just throw some away.


My mother after her most recent feeding.

Easy Bread Making

A loaf of spongy sliced bread cost around $3. And it is so disappointing...

When I have the time and the mood is right I like to make my own bread. It isn't very hard. It just takes the right equipment, ingredients. patients and practice.

Making bread yourself is also really cheap. 5 pounds of all purpose flour cost $1.69. I bought 2 pounds of yeast on Amazon.com for less than $10.  The only really expensive thing I use is my Le Creuset enamelware dutch oven that I bought on Ebay 8 years ago for $75 dollars.

Side notes: I would not buy yeast in 2 pound bags again-- 2 pounds of yeast is way more than I can use in a year. A half pound would be ideal for my needs I just haven't found it like this as of yet.
 But even with the 2 pound pack I'm still saving money; The 3 pack of individual packets you see at the grocery store is really over priced-- I think it cost around $2 last time I bought them.



The first recipe I tried was New York Times published Jim Lahey recipe.  It really makes a great loaf of bread for little work. The big down side is that start to finish can be around 20 hours.  I found making the dough right before bed works best. Letting it proof over night and all the next day so that when I come home from my night classes I can do the shaping and final proofing and then the baking.

Recipe Notes:

• I've found that adding 1/4 teaspoon more salt made the bread even better
• My apartment's kitchen is kind of cold overnight during winter and spring making the rise time of the dough longer. To aid the yeast I found that if I put the covered dough in my gas oven the heat from the pilot light makes it a good proofing box. 

Next bread: Sourdough

Grown Up Ramen Noodles with Broccoli and Poached Egg

Confessional time:

I've ate white truffles that cost $1000 a pound and enjoyed them.

And,


 I also enjoyed Maruchan ramen noodles that cost about 20 cents for a pack.

I have always liked ramen noodles! There I said it. It felt almost dirty to admit it.


Ramen, a staple of poor college students for decades can be purchased by the case through Amazon.com's subscribe and save program for $4.69 for 24 packs.

There are two major down sides to these wonderful noodles:

1. There is enough salt in that flavor packet to send your blood pressure to the moon
2. Your significant other/friends will look down on you for eating them after your older than 30.

Solution:
Mark Bittman's Egg Noodles with Soy Broth  modified to:

2 cups water
~ a cup of chopped broccoli
~2 tablespoons Trader Joe's low sodium soy sauce ($2.99 at TJ's , or sub other low sodium soy sauce)
~1 tablespoon Ketchup (using Trader Joe's organic ketchup $1.99)
squirt of sriracha

Boil all the above. Add ramen noodles, cook until done. Remove noodles from broth and put noodles into a bowl. Keeping broth in the pan, lower heat to a simmer.  Crack one egg in the broth and poach. When your egg is done (whites solid/ yolk still runny but hot-- about 2 minutes)  remove egg from broth with a slotted spoon.  If your fancy you can keep that spoon in one hand while pouring the broth over the noodles with your other hand-- then top with the egg.












Now you can enjoy ramen with less fear!!
Total cost if you have all the ingredients <$1

Updating Project

In the next couple of days I'll be adding a lot of things that I should have been doing over the last few months.

Soba Noodles

Soba Noodles

Not long after I started this project I found surfing food sites salivating over pictures of food .  These cravings came from the burn out of really only eating brown rice with steamed veggies and pasta for about the first month.  Late one night while looking around I found myself reading about soba noodles.
I read that it takes three years to learn how to make them!  I lol'ed--buckwheat flour+water-->3 years?

That weekend I found myself at Natural Land with my girlfriend who shops there for her groceries. While she does her thing, I just wonder the store... Then I noticed--- BUCKWHEAT FLOUR!!! and it was only $5.

When I got home, I started the recipe search for my noodles.

I found a good walk through and basic recipe here:
http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-soba-step-by-step,0,4162417.photogallery
Basically
4 Parts Buckwheat flour
1 Part Wheat Flour
2 Parts water

Mix,roll, cut, and cook. 3 years???

First thing I noticed is how Play-doh like the dough felt, not at all like fresh pasta--like how I would have thought prior to making.  But unlike Play-doh this either dried out fast or changed from over-mixing and started crumbling.
   I added more water and mixed it further which seem to help until after rolling out the dough and folding it to cut the noodles it started crumbling again. I'm not sure if my problems were from dryness or the lack of gluten in buckwheat.  Other recipes I read afterward have more wheat flour (around 1 part wheat to 2 parts buckwheat) for the elasticity the gluten provides.

 Cutting my dough that was crumbling on the folds into thin traditional soba width noodles was a challenge. I had to cut them to about  the size of udon to keep then together.  You can see in the picture my noodles were too wide :(   They also were too short from breaking from falling apart at the folds while cutting.

I threw what I had into a pot of boiling water to cook.  Luckily, they didn't fall apart in the water! Testing  noodles along the way the tasted done after about 5 minutes.

I ate them immediately after draining them with some Trade Joe's low sodium soy sauce and Siracha.

 The Results

  My noodles were nothing like my fantasy noodles I wanted!!  I only used about 1/5 of my buckwheat (which means they only cost me $1 to make) so I have plenty to try again soon. I'll post more results from those experiments.

 

A video of a real soba master:

His Buckwheat is really white compared to what I have.

Starting Invetory

My inventory prior to the date doesn't count. I get to use all of those products with documentation.

Items I currently have of note:

• Bulk Loose leaf teas: Currently have ~1/2 # Earl Grey, ~1# Herbal Cranberry Orange , 1# African Rooibos and assorted bagged teas.
• 2# coffee
• Spices
• Lentils red and green, other dried legumes
• 3 quarts chicken broth and a whole poached chicken less a leg and thigh
• Cauliflower, Brussels Sprouts, String Beans
• 3# brown rice and other assorted rices in small quantities