deviled eggs

Dick Thompson, a commenter here provided a link to Leslie Kelly's post on Al Dente about deviled eggs using Sriracha sauce and kimchi butter, two hot Asian ingredients. Kimchi butter, how very odd. Kimchi is cabbage. I wonder, how does that go into butter? Anyway, I can think of dozens of ways to kick up the heat for deviled eggs. Incidentally, this was one of my mother's signature dishes, when she cooked. She had a dish specifically to hold a few dozen egg halves with its own protective cover so it could be transported.

My mother dusted hers with mild paprika but that was only to impart red dots, very simple, nothing beyond that. This type was served recently at a Thanksgiving dinner. It was a little bit surprising to notice they were not immediately scarfed, due mostly to there being so much food, I think. I had a couple and they were fantastic. Because of Dick Thompson's heads up, all the while I was thinking, "what if they were, oomph, over the top?" So here goes.

These eggs were hard cooked straight from the refrigerator. Cold water well over the tops of the eggs. One tablespoon baking soda added to the water. Brought to a boil. In Denver, that's 200℉ / 93℃. Removed from heat immediately upon boiling. Heated for 15 minutes. Rinsed in ice water. The eggs were not punctured, and they did not crack while cooking.

To get the shell off: tap completely around shell. Break off a bit around the equator of the egg (if it were a globe which it is not). Work a teaspoon under the membrane of the chip. Let the shape of the spoon follow the shape of the egg directly underneath the shell chips held together by the membrane. Some eggs are easier than others. Sometimes the poles slip right off (if the egg were a globe which it's not).

* Step 1 make mayonnaise. I cannot overstate how fun this is. I spill out mayonnaise over a week old just so I can make more. This time I added sugar, and I must say, it made an excellent dressing on the lettuce. Two large egg yolks whipped completely. One half cup vegetable oil drizzled in while whipping, the oil added very slowly at first, then faster all the while whipping. Mustard, vinegar, and this time sugar, these by the teaspoon to your personal taste. Plus salt and pepper. Of course you can embellish however you wish, but this time I didn't. Just sugar.

* Tai curry heated in butter. Added to half the egg yolks along with chives and one teaspoon mayonnaise.

* One tablespoon chipotle in adobe along with one teaspoon mayonnaise.

I tried using a pastry bag to squish the mixture into the little holes in the cooked egg whites but I'm a total spaz with that thing so I abandoned it. Plus there wasn't enough to bother with it and the mixture not creamy enough. And the bag is plastic. I should throw it away.

100% of whole wheat bread

3rd attempt. No salt.

This is 100% of whole wheat grain milled at home. The grain is soft white Spring wheat of moderate protein value. It does not behave the exact same way as hard red Winter wheat, which I prefer.

I'm disappointed in 100% of whole wheat loaves because they simply do not rise in the way we expect when a considerable percentage of refined flour is included with the dough.

Having said that I must hasten to add this is among the most delicious bread I have ever tasted, and I do believe this is the bread of history. This is the bread pictured on the walls of numberless ancient Egyptian tombs in a wide variety of shapes. See Gardiner's hieroglyphic sign chart section X 1-8. (Incidentally, after 100 years of concurrence that first sign, the small semicircle that stands for the phonetic "t", it is finally being disputed as representing a small loaf of bread due to it usually being painted black when the walls are painted with a full palette of colors. It is now thought by some present-day experts to represent the primordial mound. Colors do mean something.) But this is all a little bit off the point, in'nit?

It's impossible for me to believe the ancients had any more success than I do in getting loaves to rise much more than this, given their mills were more rudimentary and their yeast cultures were no different. There is no way they could have kneaded the dough as thoroughly as I can do right here at home with a machine that can work far beyond what any person could do by hand. I'm saying throughout history right up to modern era, it was not possible to mill grain as finely or work the dough more thoroughly than I can do right here at home. That's my story, and I'm stickin' with it.

In fact I think damage to the teeth of ancient people shows that it was not uncommon for tiny stones to make their way into the dough, being abraded by the mill stones used to crush the grain, either huge ones or small home types. Can you imagine what a drag that must have been, and how coarse their standard bread must have been? I'm certain if they were presented with a loaf of, say, Wonder bread, they wouldn't even consider it to be bread at all.

I only got as far as I have because I didn't add salt. My second failure, pictured below, taught me that salt was retarding the progress of the yeast and bacteria. One way to avoid that is to add the salt later but that risks forgetting it altogether which I've done several times, and it deflates the loaves, which isn't usually a problem unless it took a day to rise the first time, in which case I'm reticent to start over.

Forlornly pondering the situation of dough suddenly stopping all progress caused me to have an insight related to aquariums. In the Takashi Amano style of heavily planted aquariums, CO₂ is introduced to the water along with powerful fluorescent lights above the tank. CO₂ can be sparged throughout the tank a couple of ways, one with a separate metal gas tank, another using a smaller plastic jar outside the aquarium that hold water and yeast fed with sugar connected with aquarium hose to the tank. In the second case baking soda is included to retard the yeast so that 1/4 teaspoon yeast feeds on 1 cup of sugar for nearly a month. That's what I was doing by adding salt with the flour for the final feeding of the dough. Duh. The tender delicate little yeasties didn't much care for that.

Even without salt, I almost didn't bake this salt-less loaf pictured above because it failed to rise to the top of the bread pans which would have doubled its size. It rose less than double. It rises fine as a wet sponge in a jar, but hardly rises at all as a dough with much more weight bearing down on it, flattening it. The yeast really does need a lot of liquid to multiply effectively. There was no oven-rise either as expected with refined flour loaves.

The loaf was not fermented either, save for the unusually long period it took to proof.

Still, I would be proud to serve this cut thinly as the base for small canapés. Its natural flavor is truly astounding, and I can imagine small sandwiches, cut thinly, of course. And that's without salt. Usually bread without salt is the most bland thing you can put in your mouth, but not so with these slices. Salt added to individual slices enhances the flavor even more.

Below are three trials of sourdough starter cultivated directly from grain. The first two used heat, the third one at room temperature. There was little activity for nearly twelve hours and finally, out of impatience I put the third one with the other two near the heat source and went to sleep. When I woke up, they were all active. The third one the most, so I discarded the other two and went with the strong one that started at room temperature.

I made dough from it. I added salt along with the last doubling of water and flour mixing to the consistency of dough. It failed. I threw it all out. Pondering the situation, it occurred to me that salt was probably arresting the yeast growth. I started again, the third time with no salt added to the dough. The result is pictured above.

heat

heat

room temp./heat

These were mentioned in an earlier post. The first two jars were discarded in favor of the third. The second trial failed due to salt, but the third culture, the one on the right, went on to a third trial that succeeded partially although it failed to rise satisfyingly.

These loaves were discarded due to failed rising. It seems salt is responsible.

egg salad breakfast with asparagus

Fixed! With cayenne, not pictured.

NAB, 12th in a series.

Hard-boiled eggs at altitude are little different from hard-boiled at sea level because they're not actually boiled. Therefore we must call them hard-cooked for now on.

Eggs cook at 180℉ / 82℃ no matter what the altitude. Anything above 200℉ / 93℃ is overkill. They tend to toughen when overcooked. The trick to technique is to cook them as little as possible as low as possible. Bring the water to a boil, then take the pot off the heat. The eggs continue to cook in the heated water. These jumbo sized eggs were cooked in hot water for 10 minutes at one mile elevation eggzakly. Sorry. The water temperature starting out was 200℉ / 93℃.

Start with room temperature eggs. Chill in ice water immediately. If you have difficulty pealing and for large batches, leave the eggs out of the refrigerator overnight which has the effect on peeling as does aging. Chill after cooking. Roll on counter to crack the shells into tiny bits. Start pealing around the equator then pull off the poles, if the eggs were globes which they're are not, they're eggs.

This is a subject so gravely important it appears early as page 89 in McGee's On Food and Cooking, the veritable chef's Bible on all matters scientific and the chief influence on such gastronomic luminaries as Heston Blumenthal to name but one of many others. The greenish gray discoloration that forms on the surface of hard-cooked yolks is a reaction between iron in the yolks and sulfur in the albumen. The reaction takes place at that interface between white and yolk because that is where the two come into contact. The reaction can be minimized by using fresh eggs, cooking as briefly as possible, and chilling immediately. See? The three things that go into great hard-cooked eggs.

* These hard-cooked eggs were pushed through a ricer using the plate with the largest holes. Clever, eh?

* A minimal amount of home-made mayonnaise was used, just enough to hold it together.

* Chives, diced onion, diced celery, cilantro.

* Asparagus steamed, in a proper steamer this time using one of those expanding metal steaming baskets for a scant five minutes.

* Asparagus dressed with olive oil / lime

* Two exceedingly thin 4 inch sourdough croutons, which actually would have made a nice sandwich had I used a little more mayonnaise with the egg for cohesion and had the bread been larger.

breakfast soufflé

New American Breakfast, 11th in a series. This time entirely French and adapted to suit our requirements, ingredients available to us, our equipment, our tastes, our own schedules. Thank you, France. We owe you so much, and while I'm on it, thank you for the statue too. It's lovely. Very popular.

The thing that the pictures do not show are the middle parts, because once you get going it's simply not possible to pick up the camera for every little thing. What? Do you imagine I have four hands?

* Vegetables heated in olive oil/butter, steamed with wine, cooked to soften, collapse, and release their liquid. We want them to do that now rather than when they're baked with the egg.

* Trois oeufs were used, les blancs separated from les jaunes into separate bowls. Les blancs whipped to stiff peaks bolstered with cream of tartar. Oh boy, I'm really into this now.

* A plain white sauce is prepared with a roux then tempered into the yolks. Discard the pan that cooked the sauce. The cooked vegetables are added to the yolks/sauce along with the grated cheese. The mise en place bowl is discarded, and the cheese bowl is discarded. Now we have two bowls along with the two baking bowls that are coated with butter and grated cheese.

In a good French novel, say Les Miserables for example, a lasso is cast around the principles and they're tugged together, as Hugo did so skillfully, so they finally all meet in one place. Likewise here is where the ingredients of the soufflé come together into one bowl, a portion of the whites are whipped into the yolks/sauce/vegetable/cheese mixture to lighten the contents of that bowl, the one that originally held the egg yolks, then that lightened mixture is folded back into the whipped egg whites. The messy sauce bowl is discarded to where the pan and other bowls went. Now you have one bowl with the puffy soufflé mixture and two smaller prepared baking bowls. It could have easily been one large straight-sided baking bowl. Spoon the fluffy mixture into the prepared baking bowls, discard the egg whites fluffy mixture bowl to where the other dishes went, and bake at 350℉ / 177℃ for 25 minutes or so.

I like to pretend I have a sou chef standing nearby to whom I hand off these vessels as they're used but in reality I put them in the sink and that's not nearly as romantic.

The baking dishes were prepared with butter and grated cheese as a first step. Doing that allows the egg mixture to rise up the walls as it bakes and it creates a wonderfully crispy cheese coating. To omit that step would be tragic. Look, we're pretending to be French over here today -- a bit of melodrama can be expected.

Salad with tart apple dressing

OMG! I dun gone and invented a salad dressing. I sure did.

Dressing

* Granny Smith apple
* olive oil
* Dejon
* coriander
* salt

Salad

* Variety baby lettuce, of which I still have a ton, possibly a few ounces.
* beefsteak tomato
* Hass avocado
* pecans
* trace of cumin powder
* S/P

I discovered the immersion blender is much better at processing an apple to mush in oil than a Cuisinart mini blender, which is just a noisy and annoying disappointment.

Know what I just now thought of? Since mustard is valued for its heat, then I could invent mustard with various flavors of chile peppers added.

* checks *

Damnit! Already invented.

Shirred eggs with vegetables.

Baked eggs, if you prefer.

NAB, 10th in a series, where old is new again and a refreshed appreciation for slow green vegetable carbohydrates is embraced by a whole new generation for their morning meal, in my mind.

The vegetables, mixed, your favorite, are prepared in advance with olive oil, butter, whatever fat suits you, steamed with wine to finish. Pressed into a ramekin or muffin tin to form a warm little nest along with cubed cheese. Room temperature eggs (warm them in water if they're cold) gently, tenderly, lovingly, plopped into the center of the nest. Covered with warm cream, heated for 12-15 minutes in 350℉ / 177℃ oven.

frittata

Started on stovetop, finished in oven.

NAB, 9th in a series, where the only thing actually new is an attitude toward breakfasts with their customary excess of starches, chiefly potatoes and grains. It is a new consciousness at the incipient stages of sweeping across the nation initiated by yours truly, my own humble self.

The good thing about these is they can be enjoyed with impunity at anytime throughout the day.

If you find yourself stuck at a restaurant with an inflexible menu you can try ordering a la carte a couple of eggs and a hamburger patty without any bun or toast or potatoes. If it must absolutely must come with those things then eat only the egg and the hamburger. You may find it very satisfying. Apart from what you're mum might have taught you, just because you're served something doesn't mean you have to eat it. And if you're still hungry after that, and if you really think about it you probably aren't, then go ahead and order something else that is not a starch. A little more expensive, yes, but it's your health that's of overriding concern here. That is if weight is a concern, then if I may suggest, do as thin people do.