Cooking Thread~ Recipes & Things

Instinctually, I feel that this isn't dangerous at all. That since it smells and looks good, it would be a good idea to stick my finger in and lick it. Intellectually, I know that that part of my brain is an ooking monkey from the jungles of Africa who has never seen so much as a bell pepper in its life, and whose primary contribution to modern society is convincing people ghosts are real.


Off to the Pain Chamber you go.

 

My day usually starts with a muffin or some pop tarts. Pancakes or bacon and eggs are great and all, but often I wake up not fully functional. Plus, I'm pretty sure the cereal in my cupboard is alive at this point.
So! Since eating a single pastry is generally neither healthy or filling, what is there to do? Well, apparently there's bran muffins.
Rather than being made from just the starch of a grain, they have plenty of bran, the fibrous coating of the grain, in them. It's apparently healthy, filling, and a great source of dietary fiber.
Unfortunately, it ALSO tends to be pretty dry, since bran is hard to get wet. Well, I'm not going to settle for dry muffins.
First off, we need the most important ingredient:

Bran. Traditionally, bran muffins are made with wheat bran, full of water insoluble fiber. Wheat bran, however, is bland and unappealing, so we're using oat bran instead. Much more soluble fiber than insoluble, tastes better, and easier to find.
But, then we run the risk of making a big oatmeal cookie, and oatmeal cookies are chocolate chip's grosser cousin. To avoid that, and to make a later step faster, I'm sticking it in the ol' spice grinder.

Why, you ask, do I call this a spice grinder when it is clearly a coffee grinder? Well, the coffee I prefer to drink comes in trays of bottles, and a good coffee grinder is a good spice grinder. As far as I'm concerned, most anything that advertises itself as a spice grinder is just a more expensive coffee grinder.

Now I've got two cups of oat bran ground up, and to that I'm adding an equal amount of buttermilk and two tablespoons of molasses. This is to avoid that whole 'dry muffin' thing; by soaking up this much liquid, it should stay nice and moist.

Next, the dry ingredients! A cup of sugar, two and a half cups whole wheat flour, two and a half teaspoons of baking powder (in retrospect, this part should have been baking soda. Oops!), a teaspoon of salt, and plenty of milk chocolate chips, stirred together well. Hey, it's still a muffin after all, it's not like we're making a salad. I fibbed about not using wheat bran, by the way; whole wheat flour generally has a healthy amount of wheat bran, and with this we get the best of both worlds.

After a while, the bran soaked up all the liquid and pretty much became oatmeal; this got tossed into the dry ingredients, along with two eggs and half a cup of oil.

Uh oh! I may have underestimated the dangers of substituting whole wheat flour for white. At a guess, the germ and bran soak up more water, just like the oat bran, threatening to turn the whole thing into dough.
At times like this, I remember the words of my father on the subject of pancake; if it's too thick, add more milk.

After emptying the rest of my carton (maybe a quarter of a cup?), adding plenty of regular whole milk, and another teaspoon and a half of baking powder, the dough turned back into a batter. At a guess, I'd say I added an extra cup of liquid.

Trayed. I had enough left for maybe a few more muffins, but like the bourgeois fuck I am, rather than having my butler have his butler have a third muffin pan airlifted to me, I tossed away the extra batter.
Sixteen minutes in a 350 degree oven later:


Despite my oopsie on the baking soda, these turned out pretty nice. Pleasantly sweet, moist, and a little chewy.

 

A little while back, I made some tonkotsu ramen from scratch, but I haven't actually gotten around to compiling all my pictures of the making together until now.

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I made the ramen from a couple of recipes. The first was Kenji's broth recipe, which necessitates a whole lot of chopped up trotters (and a chicken carcass to mellow out the pigginess). Personal note, they were softer than I thought they would be.

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A lot of blood and gunk came out after an overnight soak, but even after dumping the water I could tell just by looking that there was plenty more left.

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So I blanched them and dumped them in the sink.

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After a nice scrubbing and chopsticking, the bones were as clean as an unused whistle.

It quickly became clear when I tried to add my leeks that my biggest pot was too small for this endeavor, so ran out in my pajamas to purchase the single shittiest cooking vessel I've ever owned.

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It'll do.

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Everybody into the pool, fatback, water, vegetables charred and uncharred.

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A few hours of boiling later, the fatback was the consistency of jello and bleeding liquid lard. It got banished to the refrigerator, while the rest of the broth remained to boil all night and morning. This is the only thing I've ever made that I've just turned the heat down to low overnight instead of just being done with at least one component.

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With even the toughest ingredients losing cohesion, it was finally time to start reducing.

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Of course, it's fairly difficult to tell how much three quarts is without measuring, especially when half the pot is full of bone shards and leek paste.

Once I was reasonably satisfied, I strained it a few times, chopped up and reintroduced the earlier banished lard block, and emulsified the broth with my stick blender.

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Nice and creamy, perfect to chill into a weird porcine mousse.

Broth, however, is not the only component of ramen. Next we need a tare; in my case, I'm using the tare from Ramen_Lord's recipe.

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Niboshi, AKA dried baby anchovies.

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Gutting them took a while, though it wasn't too hard. They smell shockingly similar to fish food.

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Kombu, rehydrated, after way too much of an ordeal. I need to find a store that sells a better brand, because the only brand of kombu at the asian supermarket I got this from doubles as low grit sandpaper. When one has to filter their kombu water multiple times to get all the sand out, something has gone wrong.

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Added the kombu water to some katsuobushi, tried to keep it at 176 degrees, which is a bitch and a half when one does not have a sous vide machine.

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The dashi, strained.

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Soy sauce, sake, and mirin, mixed and heated, glimmering like an oil slick in the mid day sun. When everything came together, shoyu tare was born.

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Chashu, cooked according to Kenji's recipe, chilled, and sliced thin.

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egg

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The gang's all here. As much as I'd like to use fresh, fresh ramen noodles that I know for sure are decent are hard to come by in this city, even at the asian grocery stores.

Now for the assembly.

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Tare.

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Broth and noodles.

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Toppings.

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The assembled bowl, in different lighting.

This is amazing. The purest of porky goodness, throughout the whole bowl. Like someone took a slow smoked pork butt or fall off the bone ribs and liquefied it. The egg, though, I could take or leave. Maybe I didn't marinate it long enough? The pieces freeze well too; the broth absolutely will not fall out of emulsion, even after a month of freezing and a reheat from a block of ziploc'd pig-ice.