Dave's Bit Bucket

Friday June 09, 2006

Adventures in Bachelor Cookery, part 8: The Domestic Teppan?

While I'm more than happy with my wok, I've always looked with considerable admiration on (and enjoyed the food prepared by) Oriental cooks who manage to do the whole slice-and-dice-and-fry thing of a huge range of ingredients on a Teppan. A good teppan-fried yaki udon is, in my humble opinion, one of the finest dishes known to Man.

So, I figured I'd see what I could do in terms of preparing and cooking on a Teppan at home.

I own a reasonable gas-fired barbecue; this has a hexagonally-pierced plate of cast iron below which are a bunch of stones intended to replicate the reflux behaviour of charcoal briquettes, and also a flat cast-iron plate which sits next to it, on which folk are supposed to cook veg or other things which do not require reflux of meat juices.

A proper Teppan is a flat (or very slightly concave) cast iron or stainless steel plate.

So, I put two and two together.

I picked up the flat cast iron plate from my barbecue, brought it into my kitchen, and planted it down on my hob over the two largest gas burners (the plate being maybe 1 by 2 feet in size). I then went to Tesco, and bought a selection of veg and a pre-cooked seafood cocktail of prawns, mussels and calamari.

I finely chopped the veg in the Magimix (noting with particular appreciation the amount of mayhem it can unleash on carrots when the julienne slicing blade is fitted), and cranked the intensity of the burners underneath the homebrew Teppan up to maximum. I prefer my veg crunchy, so the seafood went on first for maybe 3 minutes - shortly to be followed by a pack of Amoy Singapore Noodles (which I had found in Tesco by accident - suffice to say, I happen to be particularly fond of Singapore noodles). This got chopped, stirred, and generally thrown around with wild abandon until it was time to chuck the veg on. A good splash of Soy and Mirin got thrown on for good measure, too.

A few minutes of fun with spatulas later, and dinner was done. For once, it came out very well first time, although I suspect the simplicitly of the "non-recipe" and the ready availability of many of the ingredients in a ready-prepped state saved my bacon. For the record, I usually manage to get things to taste good the second time I try to make them :-).

About the only problem I had was that a proper Teppan is large, and the plate from my barbecue was perhaps a bit small for the purpose; I did have quite a bit of trouble with "losing food over the edge".

Actually, divvying up was also a bit of a hassle; tipping a wok-ful of dinner onto a plate is a lot easier than picking piles of dinner up off a Teppan with spatulas and dumping them on the plate that way.

It might be time to invest in a medium sheet of stainless steel and some very thick gloves...

(2006-06-09 09:24:16.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Adventures in Bachelor Cookery, part 7: Dawn of the Magimix

After deciding to start experimenting moderately seriously with cookery, I figured - maybe foolhardily - that I might not actually be getting too bad at it; although, as you've seen, I do cheat a lot.

So, a while back (OK, major food blogging latency) I went a little bit mad and treated myself to a Magimix 3100 Compact.

I've had some major fun with it, so far - while it comes with an thoroughly eyebrow-raising recipe book which I really should take a more serious look at, I think it's fair to say that I've not made anything which remotely resembles anything in the book yet :-). Probably, other than the recipe below, the main thing it will do for me is to increase both the range and arbitrariness of my soups - I don't think I'm quite ready to start baking yet, for instance.

FWIW, here's the (honest) story of the day I bought it...

After lugging the thing home - a Magimix is NOT light - I took an inventory of the contents of the (suitcase-sized) box and decided to put it through some of its paces. I started by fitting the grating disc, and grabbed the most obvious gratable substance out of the fridge that I had to hand. As I'm a cheese-fiend almost of the magnitude of Wallace, the substance in question was a lump of Cathedral City cheddar.

I found myself, after maybe 8 seconds of testing, with a bowl partly full of remarkably efficiently-grated fairly serious cheddar.

Now what?

There's only one good thing I could immediately think of when it came to cooking with grated cheese, and that was a Swiss Roesti. Granted, such things are supposed to be cooked with Gruyere, but I figured it might work reasonably well with a serious cheddar.

I chucked some baby new potatoes I had going spare (washed, skins still on to keep the best of the flavour) into the Magimix and grated them too. Again, 8 seconds later, the main bowl had a big bunch of well-grated potato in it. I mixed the potato and the cheese up.

I peeled a big bunch of garlic, sliced it as finely as I could with the Bloody Big Knife, put some tinfoil in my grill pan, mixed everything up some more and spread it out on the pan, and then thought "OK, so I've got a serious proto-Roesti here, I just need to bake it well. What can I think of which will go well with it?"

It took maybe an hour for the lightbulb to go on over my head. When it did, I went straight off to Tesco's (again).

I came back with a pack of a couple of rib-eye steaks and a loaf of regular sliced white bread. Oh, and some Chablis to be consumed with dinner, and some beer to be consumed while cooking :-).

I put a couple of slices of bread in my toaster and toasted them until they were on the dark side of golden brown. I then tore the slices up, put the results in the Magimix's mini-bowl, and used the small knife to obliterate them into coarse breadcumbs.

I then took one of the steaks, trimmed the excess fat off it with the Bloody Great Knife, and cut it coarsely into cubes. I put the cubes in the big bowl of the Magimix, and used the main knife to obliterate them. Seriously, it's necessary to get the meat down to the consistency of warm plasticene for the purposes of what I'm up to, here.

(note to self - a Magimix would be awesome for doing Steak Tartare, but I need both very, very serious steak for the purpose and a good recipe in terms of getting the herb balance right... have to look at the recipes linked above)

So, I got to the point of having a small dish full of coarse breadcrumbs and a big bowl containing some raw meat paste. What's next?

Take a big round dinner plate, apply a uniform (as best as you can) layer of breadcrumbs to it.

Press the raw meat paste onto the breadcrumbs by hand, trying to overlap handfuls as best you can to give the overall entity some structural integrity. Keep the meat layer fairly thin if you can, though.

Crank the oven up to maximum heat (about 230 degrees C), put the Roesti in. Cook for 50 minutes.

Wait an appropriate time before doing the mad thing below. This is a good time to have a beer.

Grab your biggest frying pan, add just a little oil, heat the thing up until the oil is smoking.

Slide the meat-and-breadcrumb composite off the plate into the frying pan. Sprinkle the rest of the breadcrumbs on to the top of the meat, press them hard onto the top surface of the meat with a wooden or plastic spatula, making sure the top surface is well covered.

Fry for 3 minutes.

Flip the whole composite over. If things break up, rescue and flip fragments with a (wooden) spatula as best you can.

Fry for 3 more minutes.

Transfer to your plate, add an appropriate portion of suitably-cooked Roesti on the side. Season with freshly-ground black pepper and freshly-squeezed lemon juice. Pour a big glass of dry white wine to drink with it.

If you haven't made the initial commitment of preparing a Roesti, the resulting steak dish actually works better with a light salad drizzled with sesame oil, and / or a potato salad comprising skin-on baby new potatoes with a sesame oil and whole-grain mustard sauce.

Granted, what you get is not Wiener Schnitzel. I'm a big fan of Wiener Schnitzel and have had (probably) the definitive Wiener Schnitzel at Figlmueller in Vienna after presenting at RSA Europe last year, so I know for sure just how good Wiener Schnitzel can get :-).

However, as "Englischer Ledigmaenner Schnitzel", what I got was surprisingly good :-).

(2006-06-09 09:15:35.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Adventures in Bachelor Cookery, part 6: Arbitrary Soup

As a bachelor and would-be cook, a problem I always face is that of leftover ingredients; especially veg. As PJ put it, "everything seems to come in Economy SIze, Family Size or Holy Roman Empire Size", and that includes the packs of veg I get from Tesco's - there's just too much in there to chuck into a meal for one, unless I want to be eating the same dish for 3 days running (which I do with Green Chicken Curry - funnily enough, it tastes best the day after I cook it, so there has to be a significant marinading effect involved).

I hate throwing food away, so I find a much better solution to be to chuck everything left over into a soup a couple of days before its "Best Before" date comes up. After munching myself stupid on a serious curry for a couple of days (accompanied with Generic Fried Rice cooked daily), it probably does my metabolism good to wind down with a nice light soup for a day or two, anyway :-).

I have two approaches for soups, one of which can be considered cheating while the other can be considered really cheating. I either put a thin but flavoursome broth together from stock concentrates (1 pint of water, 2 vegetable stock cubes, either 1 or 2 sachets of miso paste to taste) and chuck stuff into it, or crack a tin of an appropriate "base" soup and chuck stuff into that.

If you're in "really cheating" mode, Tesco own-brand chicken and sweetcorn soup is a great base to begin with. Add soy and chillis (or chilli soy, if you have a bottle of Yee Kum Kee's finest to hand) and peppers towards the end of heating to turn this stuff into a basic-but-good hot and savoury soup - especially if you also coarsely chop a few spring onions on the bias and mix them in once the soup is heated up and has been poured into bowls. Crunchy :-).

You can also go so far as to dilute this soup a bit (no more than 5% by volume with water) and add a few straight-to-wok thread noodles to this mix if you want to (don't bother cooking them, the hot soup will do that for you), and / or some finely-chopped white cabbage. If you want to go down the cabbage route, adding a good splash of Mirin helps, too.

Much the same goes for the "slightly less cheating" soup, as based on stock cubes, miso and (by my preference, anyway) Mirin. Even noodles can work in there, provided they're finer in cross-section than Udon. A trick I figured out, as distinct from what I do with curry, is to slice the veg more finely - particularly, the baby corn works better if it gets sliced across the axis rather than along it.

Heat the stock up until it just starts to steam, chuck all the rest of the ingredients in, and then turn the heat down a little bit and cook for maybe 4 minutes so the veg stays crispy. After that, dish up and you're done. Put coarsely-chopped spring onions on top, add maybe a little parsley, and you have a nice light meal. If you're including noodles, and if they are of the "straight to wok" variety, just chuck them in at the end of cooking - the soup will cook them through in a couple of minutes when everything is off the heat.

A final word - when it comes to soups and what you put in them, wield a light hand with the chillis. I overdid it the first time, and it hurt!

(2006-06-09 08:56:35.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Adventures in Bachelor Cookery, part 5: Thai Green Chicken Curry

It's been ages since I've written-up any cookery experiments here. This doesn't mean I've stopped experimenting with cooking, I've just been up past my eyes in customer-facing projects and stuff related to other milieus, including a bunch of radical security research which I'm not prepared to blog here quite yet - specifically, because I need to be sure I've not missed something incredibly obvious, and if I haven't, then the patents need to be filed first :-).

Nonetheless...

Having done a bunch of Japanese (or "Occidental pseudo-Japanese with pretensions" ) cooking courtesy of the Wagamama cookbook and my own imagination, I decided to branch out a little.

I really love Thai Green Chicken Curry. Also, having enjoyed eating fairly regularly in The Wrestlers in Cambridge for years (the landlord married a Thai lass, and she does most of the cooking) I suspect - just a little bit - that I've picked up one or two tricks. Nam Pla Prik, as discussed in Part 4, is one of them :-).

Anyway, on to the curry. This will do for either a smallish dinner party, or up to three days for a hungry bachelor...

Roughly slice a couple of chicken breasts, having trimmed the fat off first. You don't need to get particularly large quantities of chicken, a little meat goes a long way in these recipes. Put the pieces on a big plate, so they don't stick together.

Chop a couple of good-sized peppers up fairly finely - I tend to go for one red, one green.

Slice a generous handful of baby corn once lengthwise, grab a handful of mangetout.

Peel (via whichever mechanism you choose - I got an excellent tip from Alec which involves a flexible plastic tube...) and finely chop as many cloves of garlic as you see fit. I like garlic, so I tend to put 5 or 6 cloves in.

Also, peel (Bloody Big Knife being needed here) a piece of ginger root about the size of your thumb plus 25%, and finely slice.

Grab some bamboo shoots - Amoy do some very good ones, tinned. Pop a can of these, and wash them out.

I'm a big fan of shiitake mushrooms, so a bunch of these get fairly coarsely chopped too.

Grab some beanshoots too - a good fistful. Tesco do them bagged and fresh, and they work just fine.

I'm still pretty new to cooking, so as I'm looking at a plethora of ingredients here, I'd like to mention how on Earth I manage to marshal them all. Tesco sell little Tupperware-ish dishes - square plastic containers about 5 inches on a side, with lids which I never use - for 35 pence each. I really don't think I could do without them, and they are wonderful for lining ingredients up. I have 8 of them, just to be on the safe side, and stack each of them full of freshly-prepped and sliced ingredients before bringing them to within easy arm's reach of my hob just before I crank the burners up :-).

Oil your wok, and (hey, you know the drill now) whack it on a cranked-up burner until the oil starts smoking. Be sure to start your extractor fan and / or open your kitchen windows before the next bit, or you'll find your home's fire alarms going off.

The chicken goes in first. Stir it up vigorously, searing it off until all the sides of all the meat are blanched white.

Add a little (less than .25 pint) of water.

Chuck the garlic and ginger in.

Bring everything to the boil; let it roll on the boil for maybe a minute, stirring hard so things don't stick.

Here's where I really cheat horribly, again. Tesco do an excellent Thai curry paste range, called "Thai Taste". Pop a pot of the green curry variety from this range, and pile a couple or three of very heaped tablespoonfuls in. The stuff will keep in the fridge for a month. I've since bought sufficient kit to produce my own pastes (another entry on my experiments will happen here another time), but this stuff does nicely.

Let everything heat up and roll for a couple of minutes, again, while stirring madly.

Add a whole big can of coconut milk. Believe me, when it comes to cooking Thai curries, coconut milk is the one ingredient you cannot skimp on - I've tried, and what comes out is Not Good. My local Tesco stocks "Bart" coconut milk, and that does very nicely.

This is a good time at which to start cooking your Generic Fried Rice, to go with the curry.

Turn the heat on the curry down to a gentle simmer. Pay attention to the rice for a few minutes, until you have the lid on the rice pan with the heat down. The curry will happily survive the experience.

Chuck the rest of the veg in the curry at intervals of a couple of minutes, starting with the corn, following with the beanshoots, the peppers next, the mangetout next, mushrooms after that, and ending with the beansprouts as the rice cooks. If the beansprouts are in the mix on the burner for more than 2 minutes, you've got it wrong; in fact, it's perfectly reasonable to throw the raw beanshoots on the top when you divvy up onto the plate(s).

Turn the heat off under the curry. Do "the egg thing" with the Generic Fried Rice and finish it off.

Divvy everything up.

Add Nam Pla Prik as a table condiment, to taste.

The choice of what to serve drinks-wise with this is fairly moot. A dry white wine is conventional, but as a tip of the hat to The Wrestlers, I tend to go with a couple of bottles of Old Speckled Hen :-).

(2006-06-09 08:53:31.0) Permalink Comments [0]