Honey Part-Wheat Bread

I think I have hit upon a good sandwich bread that takes my bread machine can be trusted to make on its own.
The goal was to create something soft and spongey, since my husband does not like dense/cakey whole wheat bread.  I think using 1/3 whole wheat gives a good taste without compromising texture.

A lot of the ratios are basically ripped off from On Food and Cooking, but with honey replacing sugar, and the yeast dialed back because in my bread machine it kept over-rising and collapsing.

1. 300ml warm (37C) water
2. 300g bread flour
3. 150g whole wheat flour
4. 1.5tspn salt (9g)
5. 2 and 1/8 tspn yeast
6. 1 tbspn honey 
7. 1 tbspn veg. oil

Throw everything into a bread machine and bake it on WHITE/BASIC (it will over-rise and the collapse on a wheat/extended rise setting).  This is a 1.5lb/750g loaf.  Also, it is imperative to check the dough ball after 10min which you want to have a smooth and moist texture that is only slightly tacky and holds shape.  The second time I made this I needed to add almost 1/4 cup extra flour due to humidity.

Random Calorie note:  This loaf has something like 1900 calories in it (mostly all from flour) which makes me wonder how store bread can be like 90cal/slice.

Slow Cooker Sous Vide NY Strip

As you may remember from my Ribs post, I have been experimenting with using my slow cooker as a high-maintenance sous vide device.  My previous experiments have focused on long cooks that take advantage of the probe feature on my Hamilton Beach model (it will switch from low or high to warm when the probe hits a temp you enter between 140 and 190F) and the fact that when switched to "warm" with the lid on, the cooker maintains a temp right around 170F.

This time I tried to cook a strip steak to exactly medium rare (130F to 135F) over a period of just an hour, and without using the probe (since it doesn't kick in until 140).  It worked very well, and here are the steps to try at home:

1. I pre-seared the refrigerator cold steaks in a tiny bit of butter for ~30sec a side.  This gives them the malliard-reaction flavor, and On Food and Cooking suggests it can help with killing bacteria, since most bacteria are on meat's surface
1. This is a good point to mention that a lot of people worry about low-temp cooking and bacterial growth.  130F is enough to kill bacteria, but the time required is debatable.  I ignored this issue because my theory was that a medium rare steak cooked on high heat is at 130F in the middle for something like 1minute, but this may not be correct.\
2. Put the steaks in a quart zip lock bag and got out most but not all of the air (because I am not very good at that part)
3. Then I filled my slow cooker 1/2 way with tepid water and put it on "high", with a thermometer in the water, before slowly pouring in boiling water.  Basically I mixed boiling and tepid water until i got a temperature of ~120F
4. At this point I added the bagged steaks to the bath, put on the lid, and set my thermometer to alarm at 133F.
5. When the alarm went off (which took ~20min) I switched the slow cooker to warm, removed the lid, and set a timer for 30min.
6. Checking in 5 minutes, I saw the temp had fallen to 128F, so I put it on high and replaced the lid.
7. In 2 more minutes it was at 131 and climbing, so I just took the lid off, but left it on high.
8. This seemed to stabilize, though I continued to check.
9. After the 30min was up, I took out the bad and let it rest 10min before slicing

The steak was a perfect medium rare (author's note:  After re-reading OF&C, I believe my steak only reached rare, as the red juices had been expelled from the meat, but it was still somewhat translucent.) across the entire width and very juicy.  I liked this, but to my husband it tasted "raw" (most trad. cooked steaks have a gradient of doneness that effects texture)

This procedure was much more time consuming than the ribs which had a wide temperature window, but if you're in the kitchen prepping other food anyway, it isn't too bad.  I would certainly recommend it as a way to taste a sous vide steak without shelling out a lot of money.  For fun, you can also do a version where you hold it at 130-135F for 2+ hours, which dries it out more but breaks down the muscle fibers.  This is I think the more classic method (maybe someone can comment on this) but I find it a bit textureless and dry.

Sadly, I do not have a good photo, but I will update the post with one next time I do this.  :-(

Healthy Banana Ice Cream

This is the first in a series of forays into developing some easy recipes for ice-cream that is not actively unhealthy. . . .

• 1 cup milk ( My intention was to use 2%, but I accidentally grabbed skim from the fridge)
• 2 medium frozen bananas (the liquid level rose to 1.75cups)
• 2tspn vanilla
• 2tbspn sugar

I blended everything with an immersion blender and the volume went from 1.75C to 2.25C, meaning there was a lot of aeration.  I then poured the mix right into my ice cream maker, and it further almost doubled in volume during churning.  

So I ended up with 4 cups of ice cream, that is maybe 50% air.  With minimal sugar, low (or in this case, no) fat, and a serving of fruit.  My rough count of the calories is 400cal for the whole thing assuming I had used 2%.

Taste:

Very light and fluffy

Strong banana flavor

Some ice crystals noticeable

Good with cocoa nibs on top

For next time:

Use 2% milk for some fat content

Add cocoa for a chocolate-banana flavor and to further disrupt ice formation.

Upcoming flavors:

Strawberry

Peanut Butter

(almost vegetarian) Lasagna

I used my second batch of Fresh Pasta to make Lasagna.  First let me say that my "brilliant" plan to try and make a more "authentic" fresh pasta using 1/2 bread flour instead of 100% semolina flour resulted in me losing 2 hours of my life.  The dough had this extra spring that meant it took the length of an entire film to roll it out, and the process involved me pushing down with my entire weight on the rolling pin.  So from this point on, it's 100% semolina flour for me.

3 eggs of pasta yielded enough for a 2 layer lasagna.  The process is exactly the same as the other page, but I stored it in a bag in the freezer with extra semolina flour in-between each layer at the end, and never boiled it.

The rest of this recipe is very un-exact. . .

I took 3 yellow onions and a bag of mushrooms (this is a very technical term for something like 1.5-2lbs, aka what I shoved in a bag at Whole Foods).  Dropped them in my food processor on slice and then cooked them down with butter, salt, and pepper.

Next I sliced and cooked 6 zucchini and ~8 carrots, in the same fashion, but for less time.

At this point I added the sliced meat of 4 boned chicken thighs, which ended up being a completely irrelevant amount of meat.  Finding the chicken in this lasagna is like hunting for the baby in a King Cake.

Everything was mixed together in a bowl, with 1.5 jars of tomato sauce and dried oregano and basil.

Finally in my roasting pan I layered noodles (uncooked), skim milk ricotta (a thin layer -- I used 1 container in my 2 layer lasagna), and ~1inch of the veggie/sauce/meat mix.  Atop the last layer of noodles I put a thin film of sauce (i had been scooping the veggie mix with a slotted spoon) and then covered it with Ramano cheese before baking at 375 for 1 hour.

Why Romano you ask?  Because you can buy something like 3lbs of Romano cheese for $10 at Costco in a big block and I was out of mozzarella.  Handy kitchen tip:  When refrigerated Romano is put through the shredder on a food processor you get shredded cheese, but when frozen Romano is put through the same shredder you get finely ground cheese.  In this way you can imitate both types of high-end Parmesan at like 1/10th the price.

Here is a photo:

P.S. this feels like my most surly post to date.