Kitchenette

Note: I do not speak French. At all. Sure, I like to sound like I know what I’m talking about. A la carte. Au bon pain. L’homme mange.  The truth is, my knowledge of the French language is limited to what I have picked up from food-related items, American pop culture, and my favorite movie of all time, Amelie. However, just one whiff of this month’s Daring Baker challenge will have you and yours spouting off French as if you were a true Parisian.

Okay, not really. But it does smell good.

This month, the DB challenge was hosted by Mary at The Sour Dough and Sara at I Like to Cook. And before I forget, the complete (massively huge!) recipe can be found here and you can see what other DB’ers have done with their breads by checking out the blogroll here. Yes, my friends, it is Julia Child’s famous French bread recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume II.

Many of the Daring Bakers seemed to have approached this one with much fear and trepidation. Understandable, considering the recipe is so. flipping. long. and that it takes nearly an entire day to complete. However, I had the upper hand for this, my first DB challenge ever: I had made Julia’s recipe before. In fact, I do believe it was the first yeast bread I ever made, having just bought the fabulous book, The Way to Cook, also by Julia.

Yeast breads have never quite freaked me out the way they do some people. I guess I’ve always figured that, if all else fails, I’ll end up with something potentially resembling bread. Something that can at least make good croutons. Or dog biscuits. Whatev.

And so it began. With the exception of the initial mixing in the KitchenAid, I made the whole thing with my own two little hands. I had Mr. K firmly affixed to the laptop, reading the gargantuan recipe out loud as I went along. Here is the bread during the initial rest, just after all that kneading.

Here’s what is quickly becoming my favorite bread-related object (you know you’re addicted to food when you have a favorite bread-related object!). This is simply a clear plastic, food-safe bucket with quart/liter measurements marked on the side. Mr. K was at a food specialty store and mentioned that he’d been looking for one, and they just happened to have one in the back that they weren’t using. Score! Not only is this good for rising dough (note the straight sides), but you can mix up a giant batch of iced tea or lemonade or whatever. Plus, no need to pour in the 10.5 cups of water, since the measurements are already on the side of the bucket! We use a dry-erase marker on the side, which wipes off quite nicely.

Finally, here are the batards on the baking sheet, ready to go into the oven. I used a sort of hybrid between the regular recipe (in which you bake the loaves on the baking sheet the entire time) and the baker’s oven variation. I picked up this method from several recipes in The Bread Bible, which gives you all the benefits of the baker’s oven with none of the requisite physical coordination requirements of the dreaded baker’s peel. Follow the directions for the baker’s oven (preheat the baking stone, use the brick or ice cubes, etc. to create the steam, and so on), but begin by setting the baking sheet directly on top of the hot stone. At some point, the crust will have formed enough that you can slide the bread easily off the baking sheet and onto the hot stone itself - this is also a good time to rotate the loaves if they aren’t baking evenly.

It is torture to wait for this stuff to cool enough to eat. However, if Julia says the French never eat warm bread, then there will be no eating of the warm bread! C’est la vie! We did, however, spread it with lots of European butter and warm roasted garlic.  And for that, my friends, there are only three words to do this bread justice, and they are most certainly NOT French:

Nom. Nom. Nom.

Oh, Internets!  I have not abandoned you, I swear!!

I realize that I have gone nearly the entire month of February without a single post, and am fully aware that if it weren’t from my very talented husband and his giant sweet tooth, you would’ve been left with nothing.

And I am SORRY!

While you have all been delighting me with your recipes and photos and concoctions, I’ve been barely scraping by just keeping up with The Project, let alone photographing and blogging it.  I’ve been on antibiotics for the last month treating my never-ending sinus infection, and one unfortunate side effect is that I don’t want to eat.  At all.

We’ve managed to stay on top of things, though, and to date have created 63 of our 366 recipes for the year.  Go us!  I managed to photograph a few and am planning on posting them really soon, as March is nearly upon us!

I feel like a bit of a loser posting yet another soup recipe, but lest I remind you, it is still winter here in Chicago, which means soup is still (always) on the menu.  And besides, I felt sick, and the only thing that sounded good was a big bowl of CHEESE.

I wanted a smooth soup, so we broke out the boat motor (aka a hand blender) on this one.  It spewed orange soupiness everywhere, to the point where I am still finding little specks of it in places I never knew existed, but man was it good!  I think it would be equally tasty, though, if you skipped the pureeing and left the veggies in their chunky state.  We used a sharp white Cheddar cheese (the orange in the photo comes from the pureed carrots) and topped it with some croutons we had lying around because, again, sick and lazy is the name of the game.

In other news, my first Daring Baker post is scheduled to go up tomorrow, so I really need to get cracking on that.  Also, Mr. K and I are heading off just now to our first of four knife skills classes.  The ever-fabulous Mr. K signed us up at our local community college as a Christmas gift, and it is finally here!  We plan on sharing a few tips and whatnot on the blog, so stay tuned!

Cheddar Cheese Soup
Adapted from Joy of Cooking

6 tbs butter
1 c diced onions
1 c diced celery
3/4 c diced carrots
1/4 c all purpose flour
4 c poultry stock or broth
1 c heavy cream or half-and-half
2 c Cheddar, grated
1 tsp dry mustard

1. Melt butter in a soup pot or Dutch oven.  Add onions, celery, and carrots and cook until tender.
2. Sprinkle with flour and cook for 3-4 minutes until golden brown and fragrant.
3. Slowly whisk in chicken broth and bring to a boil, whisking constantly.  Reduce the heat and simmer for about 45 minutes.  Puree until smooth and return to a simmer.
4. Stir in heavy cream or half-and-half, Cheddar cheese, and dry mustard.  Reduce heat to low and stir until cheese is melted.  Do not let the soup boil - if it gets too hot, the cheese will separate or curdle.
5. Season to taste with Worcestershire, hot sauce, salt, pepper - whatever your heart desires!

Ah, cooking.

Certain things are just impossible to screw up. Spaghetti, for instance. Taste it. Is it crunchy? Taste it again. Drain, pour sauce, done.

Then there’s buttermilk fudge.

It’s a short list of ingredients - buttermilk, sugar (lots), butter and walnuts. The basic idea behind fudge is to create a very, very sugary liquid and boil it down so that when it cools, you have yourself a nice bar of sugary goodness. Oh, but the details.

When you first start to heat the buttermilk and sugar solution, it turns a fairly transparent milky white color as more of the sugar dissolves into the buttermilk. One of the ways to protect yourself should you get burned (sticky, 215° F liquid hurts!) is to keep a bowl of ice water nearby, just in case. That said, it’s not something to be terribly worried about, as the sugar mixture isn’t exactly sloshing around the whole time.

Regarding the soft ball stage

This stage of sugar doesn’t refer to the sport, but instead to how pliable the candy is once it cools. If you don’t have a candy thermometer, you can test the candy by dunking a teaspoon of syrup (carefully) in cold water and then rolling it between your fingers to see what form it takes. If you can form it into a soft, pliable ball, voila! Soft ball stage. For lots of details, click here.

The longer you simmer a sugar and liquid mixture, the more water boils out of it. The liquid will look the same from 210° F to 240° F - like a thin syrup - but as it cools and crystallizes, it takes on different forms depending on how much water boiled out from the mixture. If you heated the mixture to 230° F, it becomes something akin to caramel. At 235° F is the soft ball, fudgy stage. At 240° F, you enter the hard ball stage, at which point any hopes of fudge are lost to something resembling a thick, hard brittle. And thus, I was afraid to heat the mixture too much beyond the lower limit of the recipe’s target temperature.

The recipe specified 234° F as soft-ball stage. I managed to get it to 233.8° F and called it done. Oops. At this temperature, you get not fudge, but something akin to “sludge”.

In the classic style of “do as I say, not as I do”, I now offer a few tips to avoid “sludge”.

DO stir constantly for 35 minutes. The goal is to keep the fudge-to-be at the same temperature throughout, so let’s just call it a biceps workout.

DON’T be afraid of overheating the fudge if you have a digital thermometer. Obviously, if you’re testing for soft ball stage via the “dunk in water” method outlined above, this doesn’t apply to you. By having a digital thermometer, this uncertainty can be eliminated - and then the risk is in undercooking your fudge if you get nervous and jump ship. Heat the fudge to 235 or 236 - then you can be sure you’re firmly in the soft ball stage.

DO know your candy thermometer, especially if it is of the non-digital variety. Bring a pot of water to a rapid boil and stick the bulb/sensor of the thermometer into it. Does it read 212 degrees (assuming you are at sea level)? If not, you’ll need to take the difference into account when making any type of candy.

Buttermilk Candy
Adapted from the America’s Best Lost Recipes cookbook

2 cups low-fat buttermilk
4 cups sugar
4 tablespoons butter, cut into 4 pieces
1 1/2 cups walnuts or pecans, chopped

1. Line an 8-inch square pan baking pan with foil, leaving some excess over the sides. (You’ll pull the fudge out with the excess later.) Grease the foil.
2. Combine the sugar and buttermilk in a medium or large heavy-bottomed saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. (Be careful - buttermilk boils over in a hurry!)
3. Reduce heat to low and simmer, stirring constantly, until the mixture reaches the soft-ball stage on a candy thermometer, 234-240 degrees. This will take 35-40 minutes. At this point, the mixture will be milky, yet translucent. And very, very hot.
4. Off the heat, add the butter, mixing with a wooden spoon until the candy begins to thicken, about 5 minutes. Stir in the nuts until the mixture becomes difficult to stir, 3 minutes. Pour the mixture into the prepared pan and cool for at least 2 hours
5. Remove and cut into 1-inch squares. The candy will store for 2 weeks.

Welcome to the new site!! Or rather, the old site at the new address!

We are hoping that exciting things will be coming soon now that the jump over to the new domain is complete. Don’t forget to change your bookmarks and RSS feeds if that is how you navigate to our site.

A real post will be coming soon, we promise!

In my (Mr. K’s) opinion, our dutch oven is the best $39 I’ve spent on a kitchen appliance. Before I get to why, though, I should probably explain what one is to those of you who haven’t heard of it. And, why I ended up getting one for my wife for Christmas.

A Dutch oven is at its core a large, heavy pot. In the last Christmas season, the linked Dutch Oven was actually called a casserole. The best known ovens are made by Le Creuset, which makes a 7.25 quart Dutch Oven that retails for about $225. Since I didn’t really want to spend more on a Dutch oven than our stand mixer (which technically was a wedding present, but still), I picked up the 6.5 quart Tramontina at Wal-Mart - at the time, the only store selling it.

Dutch ovens are typically made of cast iron, but Tramontina, Le Creuset and other oven manufacturers now bake an enamel coating onto the cast iron. This is done for a couple of reasons - it’s easier to clean food off of an enamel surface, and baked enamel doesn’t require seasoning. With bare cast iron you have to season the oven (which pretty much means “bond fat to the cast iron by heating it up at high temperatures”) to prevent the pot from rusting, the food from tasting like iron, and to make the pot nonstick. (See here for more info.)

Dutch ovens can withstand temperatures of up to 800° F as the enamel is bonded to the cast iron. Compare this to your typical nonstick cookware, which is oven-safe to 450° or so (find out your cookware’s oven-safe temperature by going to the manufacturer’s website). The Tramontina Dutch oven is rated to 450° F (because of the plastic resin knob), but if the knob is replaced with a stainless steel knob, for all intents and purposes the Dutch oven becomes oven-safe to any temperature.

In addition to our pot being larger than the 4 quart stockpot we used to use, it’s also heavy. As in, 15 3/4 pounds heavy. Fill it with food, and it may very well be impossible to lift (work those biceps, people!). It is easily 3 times as heavy as the next heaviest pan we own. So what do we use it for?

1.) Soup and chowder. Enamel coatings don’t quite have the properties of non-stick coatings, so as a result you get those “brown bits” when browning meat in a Dutch oven. Those brown bits come in handy when you’re making soup, because that’s where all the flavor is!

2.) Frying meat. Okay folks, a little bit of high-school physics: cast iron holds its heat better than stainless steel. If you’re trying to fry chicken in a skillet, you’ll find that it takes a while for the oil to come back up to heat again after you drop in the chicken. That’s because the temperature of the oil drops when the chicken is added, and so does the temperature of the skillet. On the temperature rebound, nonstick pans and skillets are prone to reheating meat unevenly, possibly resulting in both undercooked and burnt meat.

When you toss chicken in a Dutch oven, the temperature of the oil drops, but the temperature of the Dutch oven does not. As a result, you get more even browning of your meat.

3.) Deep frying. Okay, I admit, I haven’t come up with something to deep fry yet… but four quarts of evenly-heated vegetable oil at 350° is good for something, right?

4.) Braising. A sufficiently large Dutch oven is big enough to hold a whole chicken. Combine that with a lid that weighs 2 pounds, and you find that nearly anything stews in its own juices very well.

5.) The infamous no-knead bread. You know the one…the one that everyone’s talking about. It calls for a “6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic)” - a.k.a. a Dutch oven!

Is it possible to cook without one of these? Sure. But if you get one, you’ll find that the flavor of your dishes will go up - and at $39, ($59 at Target, for whatever reason), it ends up being quite the deal.

Note from Kitchenette Jen:

Isn’t my husband adorable? Who else would be so crazy about a Dutch oven? I mean…seriously!

Mr. K is a huge kitchen gadget nerd, so expect his equipment reviews to become a regular thing around here. No one is paying us to say good things about any of these products (although, we’re not above selling out to the corporate machine…any takers? Anybody?)- we just happen to like them and use them a lot.

In the spirit of Dutch oven goodness, I bring you this recipe for Chicken Tortellini Soup. Mr. K and I visited the great state of Alaska last summer and were lucky enough to go on an all-day wildlife cruise. The first mate on the ship was in charge of preparing lunch, and he delivered the absolute most amazingly delicious chicken tortellini tomato soup I have ever had. I have been trying without success to recreate it ever since. This is the closest I have come so far, although it’s still miles away from the Alaska soup.

If anyone knows of a fabulous tomato-based tortellini soup recipe, send it my way!

Tortellini and Chicken Soup
From SparkRecipes

2 cloves garlic, minced
2 tsp olive oil
2 whole boneless skinless chicken breasts, cubed
1 pkg cheese tortellini
47 oz chicken broth (give or take, vegetable broth would work as well)
1 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes
1 pkg fresh baby spinach
1/4 c chopped fresh basil

1. Saute garlic in olive oil in large pot or Dutch oven until fragrant.

2. Add chicken broth and chicken. Bring to a boil and cook over medium heat for five minutes.

3. Add tortellini and cook per package directions.

4. Add tomatoes, spinach, and basil and cook until spinach is wilted. Serves 8.

This winter is making me crazy. Snow, melt. Snow, snow, melt. Snow, snow, snow, snow, melt, melt, snow. And so on.

Hi, my name is Jen, and I live in Chicago. And I am NOT very happy about it.

In the spirit of misdirected rage, I bring you this: my spit-in-the-face-of-Chicago-and- all-it’s-deep-dish-monstrously-overrated-pizza-glory. The truth is, I first made this pizza in an attempt to copy my favorite pizza from California Pizza Kitchen. However, they have since dropped it from the menu (oh, the horror!), so looks like I’m flying solo on this one.

In order to be abso-fabulous, this pizza requires five things: crust (duh), a butter sauce, chicken, cheese, and a potato. The rest is up to you - it’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure pizza!

And because this winter is wearing thin on my patience, hey look! A recipe!

Garlic Chicken & Potato Pizza
Adapted from the lonely recesses of my troubled mind (aka a Kitchenette original)

1. Choose your own crust! A few that I have enjoyed are here at Use Real Butter and here at Smitten Kitchen. I always ordered the whole wheat crust at CPK. Alternatively, use a premade crust or even one of those little tubes of pizza dough that come in a can if you’re feeling frisky (or brave!). Anyway, prepare your crust according to recipe instructions. Preheat the oven and partially bake the crust if desired.

2. Choose your own potato! I typically use a russet, but nearly anything will work - a smallish russet (or equivalent) will cover one pizza. Cook the potato however you like - I typically slice mine, drizzle some olive oil, salt, and pepper, and roast it at 350 for 45 minutes or so. You could also slice up some leftover baked potatoes or boil it. The point is to cook those taters until they’re almost, but not quite, done. They will finish cooking on the pizza.

3. Choose your own chicken! I’ve found one boneless-skinless chicken breast to be adequate. Roast it, grill it, poach it, whatever. This is also a great recipe for using up leftover chicken. Once it’s cooked, shred or cut it into bite-size pieces.

4. Choose your own cheese! Mozzarella is still my favorite for this pizza, but anything goes. It’s YOUR pizza.

5. The butter sauce: Okay, this one actually has rules, people. Melt 6 tbs butter and add 6 tbs olive oil. Once hot, add and saute 2 cloves of minced garlic (or more - the choice is yours!) until fragrant. Add 2 tbs white wine and mixed herbs to suit your palette - I love fresh rosemary and basil, but dried herbs work well, too. Simmer 15 minutes or until it’s a consistency you can live with. If you like a lemon-butter sauce similar to the CPK pizza, squeeze in lemon juice to taste.

6. Spread the butter sauce on the crust and top with remaining ingredients. Using your crust recipe as a guide for time and oven temperature, bake until the cheese is just beginning to brown on top and the crust is nice and golden.

7 . Now come over and shovel my driveway!