I was baking baguettes today — still am, actually — but I was doing stretch-and-folds on the old silicone baking mat when it finally came apart. 80% hydration baguette dough was too much for it. In its defense, it has been falling apart for some time now. It all started when I rolled out pasta dough on it and cut it into noodles with a pizza wheel; the wheel was sharper than I realized and left big gashes in the silicone baking mat.
At first it still worked, but eventually silicone fatigue got the better of it and a big piece came out; I had planned for a while to head to the mill to get baking supplies, especially a mat, but today, when I am working from home and the mat fell apart into five or more unusable pieces, I realized it was now or never.
So I went, and noticed right off that, since the last time I had been there, they had expanded the shop by about 100% so now instead of being tiny it is small. And the lovely mill lady was there along with her lovely daughters, which was bad news as I have no sales resistance against them when they are alone and sure enough they ganged up on me today.
Everything unraveled immediately, all of my fiscal resolve, when one of them asked me, Can I help you find anything? And I replied, yes, in fact, I am looking for a silicone baking mat thing, have you got anything like that?
To which she answered, In fact we do. And sure enough, they had silicone baking mats that were far nicer than my old one, with circles of various diameters and in the margins various units of measurement and their conversions, not to mention, haptically, a very sexy texture.
Oh excellent, I said, I ruined my last one cutting noodles on it.
Oh! She said. Then, immediately, by the way we have noodle machines.
Oh, I said. I have always wanted a noodle machine. But I’ll have to think about it.
But of course we all knew by then, I wasn’t leaving that shop without a noodle machine.
I picked out a few flours (all-purpose wheat flour, baguette flour mix, rye and rye whole grain, and what the online dictionary translates as rye scrap, or, in other words, crudely ground rye.
Then the mother explained the differences between three noodle machines they had (price and finish – the stainless-steel was the cheapest, the copper the most expensive, in between they had a red one. Otherwise they are identical, she said. Just pick whatever matches your kitchen best. You don’t put it away, you leave it on the counter.
If you don’t have a cat that pisses on everything you might leave it on the counter, I didn’t reply.
I asked her to explain the stainless steel model to me.
By the way we have a set with additional rollers that make spaghetti and ravioli, she said.
Oh, I absolutely need that, I said.
I looked at spice mixes in between but most of them contained anise, and some of my bread customers hate anise. Then I found the mill’s own spice mix, which costs twice as much but does not contain anise, and added a can of that to my pile.
How do you wash the noodle machine? I asked.
You let it dry out and clean it with a stiff-bristled brush, by no means are you to put it into water, was the answer.
It sounded almost like an admonition in a fairy tale, shortly before the peasant’s son embarks on a heroic journey on account of he put the noodle machine into a sink full of water after slicing the heirloom silicone baking mat into horizontal strips.
Any special brush, I asked.
I use one I found in my husband’s shop, she said.
Ok I have a brush at home.
I sighed, but gee. Hm. Phony reluctance so as not to look too eager.
It’s the Christmas season. It’s a nice present.
Yeah, for myself. I am the noodle maker in my house.
Sure, why not? She said. And your wife will be eating the noodles. It’s a present for both of you.
And we *were* in Piedmont in October and loved it, I said, tipping the scales for her and putting myself out of my misery.
See there you go, she said.
When I got home I carried the flour into the house.
Oh by the way I got *us* a pasta machine, I said.
Hm, said Alpha.
Yeah I’ve really been wanting one since we were in Piedmont, that was such a nice trip.
Hm, she said.
One has to clean them with a stiff-bristled brush; by no means is one to submerge them, or even get them wet.
Hm, my wife said.
Tag Archives: cooking
Silicone baking mat
Christmas, day 1 minus 2
So tomorrow being 24 December, which is when we open presents here (stockings on 25 12) we all went in to quarantine 10 days ago so the kids could safely come over for the holidays and I was the lucky one who got to drive to their place and pick them up and drill 2 holes into Gamma’s concrete wall so she could hang a thing on her wall and drive them out to our place, on the way back telling them about my speeding ticket, “right about here where the speed limit changes from 130 (kmh) to 100 and I am always a little late slowing down; there’s no radar box around here so I assume they were right up on the overpass there, where that police car is now with the radar gun sticking out the window…” (checks speedometer, which unsurprisingly reads 120 in the 100 zone) “oh, man…” and then more stories about all the other new radar box traps we have been blundering into lately to the point where we are going to apply for a subscription; meanwhile my wife Alpha has apparently drawn the short straw and has to stay home and deal with making corn bread stuffing for the turkey we postponed from our canceled Thanksgiving (alas, the farmer said, he gained no weight between Thanksgiving, when he got his reprieve, and now — would you, I thought, seeing your friends slaughtered and knowing it was only a matter of time?) and dealing with the water filter man who was coming to sterilize our water filter after all the you-know-what backed up into the room where it is, and maybe touched it, and maybe contaminated all our drinking water pipes or whatever, as well as the rotorooter men who were coming over to investigate what caused the backup. When I got home with the girls the water filter man was practically already gone (he was fully gone when we got back from getting our covid tests (negative) at the doctor), and the rotorooter men were far, far jollier than you would expect rotorooter men to be. Friendly, happy young men.
Apparently someone had been flushing damp wipe cloths? I am translating but that’s what they’re called here? Feuchttücher? Which we don’t flush and rarely use and when we do use them (usually to wipe up cat pee) we certainly don’t flush them, we put them in the garbage and if we did flush them we’d flush them singly, single solitary cloths one by one so they could travel through the pipes easily rather than clumping and stopping everything else to the point that you get the Christmas fireworks we did. Waterworks. Whatever.
Oh and another thing, said the happy rotorooter men, you have a burst pipe too.
The boss rotorooter man is going to come over and see if it needs to be fixed, or if it’s only a minor burst. Apparently there are burst sewer pipes that are a real big deal, and others you can live with.
Is it nice to have the kids over? Just as nice as we expected, and we had high expectations. Presents are wrapped, I’ll make some mashed potatoes for tomorrow later today, and mix up some baking powder biscuits (taking into account the fact that Austrian baking powder is weaker than American baking powder, so you need more if you’re using an American recipe, and I’m using a Betty Crocker recipe) to be baked tomorrow, and getting some sourdough and pre-dough started to sit overnight so I can… watch it rise too long and lose heart and start to sag while the turkey monopolizes the oven, then the biscuits… maybe I should think about this a little… maybe I’ll postpone the sourdough a day…
Happy holidays, anyway, to those who celebrate holidays.
Posted in Familie, Metamorphosism
Tags: baking, christmas, cooking, holidays, rotorooter, sewage, sewer problems
Tinnitus hack
My tinnitus sounded like screaming mice yesterday.
My wife and I went for a hike in the woods before it rained and only got a little lost.
I ate a slice of bread when we got home.
Hey, that’s moldy, said my wife.
I spit it out but had already swallowed some.
It was whole-grain bread I had baked; it was sort of grayish anyway so the mold didn’t stand out.
I had a bad stomach ache. I don’t know if it was bc of the mold, but that’s my guess. It felt like all the other times I’ve poisoned myself.
I slept on the sofa in case it was not the mold but rather something contagious.
The cats liked that.
Today I feel better.
My wife cooked borscht, with a beet from our garden. It was good.
It’s a gray old day outside.
Posted in Das Gehirn, Familie, Metamorphosism
Tags: borscht, bread, cooking, food poisoning, hiking, mold, tinnitus
Mig’s Blackened Rorshach Chicken
(Note to self: prior to cooking experiments, make sure at least one camera in the house is charged)
I told Brian I was going to barbecue for Mother’s Day and he suggested whole chicken with a Greek yogurt/lemon marinade. He suggested deboning the chicken which was interesting, although very simple after watching the instructional Jacques Pepin video.
Note: this dish required no substitution for a change.
Note 2: actually, it did. I substituted an ancient Japanese paring knife we got at a dime store in Tokyo once for a new chicken-deboning-knife I failed to buy last Friday as planned because I had to work on my lunch break. The paring knife worked well, it looks roughly like a deboning knife anyhow, and being of rather soft steel it sharpens up easily.
Instructions: Buy ingredients: 1 organic chicken, enough Greek yogurt (or regular plain yogurt). A lemon. Garlic. Make marinade according to the recipe, more or less, with all the other spices. The paprika, for example, works really nicely. I also added some herbs from the garden.
Bone chicken according to the video. heads up: if you watch the video while cooking, figure out a way to pause and unpause it without getting raw chicken on your keyboard. You will feel the urge to talk in a Hannibal Lector voice while deboning the chicken, and CSI jokes will go through your head, and you will wonder if this is what the turkeys Boeing shoots at its planes from cannons to test the windshields end up looking like. This will pass.
Your chicken is boned in no time! That wasn’t so bad! Less than a minute, according to Jacques Pepin, maybe a little longer for people like me. Maybe quite a bit longer, in fact, although it’s not as bad as I imagined, because I wisely locked the cats (AKA my four best friends, when I’m deboning chicken) out of the kitchen.
Marinate the chicken overnight. I covered it in the marinade sauce, folded it up like a shirt, and packed it into a tupperware container and refrigerated it.
Do something useful with the carcass. I failed to do this, and felt bad about it afterwards.
I could have given it to the cats to fight over in the yard but what would the neighbors say?
They would say, What are you, an extra from the Hunger Games?
Anyway.
Grill your chicken the following day. I started at 9.30 in the morning, lighting the coals etc. because there was a lot of stuff to grill: various vegetables, mushrooms, pineapple (slices with vanilla sugar sprinkled over them), sausages because this is Austria, and the chicken, and I wanted to be done in time.
Everything was done in time. Around 11.30, in fact, everything was warming in the oven waiting for the guests (my wife’s parents).
Here is how the chicken went: I grill stuff in aluminum grilling uh tray things. Put the chicken spread out, like an unfolded shirt a chicken skeleton had just shed because it was covered in yogurt marinade, in the largest, round aluminum tray. It sizzled away. Skin-side down for starters. No idea if this was a good idea or if it matters. Turned it after a while when the first side looked a little brown. In all, it cooked for over an hour.
I stood there most of the time and watched it cook, because I was afraid a cat would steal it if I went into the house. When you stare at a flat chicken long enough, it begins to look like a Rorshach blot, and you find yourself saying, in Sigmund Freud’s voice, “So, Mr. Living, tell me what you see in this chicken?”
And you give him the answer, in your own voice, telling him something you think will make you sound sane.
It takes the leg meat longer to cook than the rest, so I ended up removing the legs and letting them cook longer. The chicken was getting fairly dark. Like, black in places. But that always happens when I barbecue. I folded up the chicken and put it in the oven in the kitchen to stay warm. Then I went back out to guard the drumsticks. Of course they were engulfed in flames when I got back out, because all the marinade and oil/fat that had collected beneath the chicken in the tray was suddenly exposed to air when I removed the chicken and ignited as soon as I turned my back.
The flames were about 3′ high. I managed to rescue the drumsticks somewhat.
Carved up the chicken and it looked fine. It was much-praised by the guests. Two people remarked how moist the chicken was. The marinade did taste good. Vegetables (marinated just with olive oil or teriyaki sauce) were good. I was too tired by then to enjoy it much, and I thought the chicken was actually a little bit dry, but maybe I’m just paranoid about dry chicken. It would be great if I could find a way to cook chicken sufficiently without burning the outside.
Will take pictures next time, Scout’s honor.
Posted in Das Gehirn, Familie, Metamorphosism
WTF should i cook for dinner?
AKA Mig’s Chicken Marsala Madeira
Chances are you have at some point asked yourself, WTF should I cook for dinner. Of course, in these days of social media, you ask that question of your Facebook friends.
At least I did a while ago. Brian suggested Chicken Marsala, which I elected to try because I was in the mood for Indian food. To prepare, I read the wikipedia article.
Turns out it is not an Indian dish. That would be Chicken Tika Masala. Honest mistake.
According to Wikipedia, Marsala is a fortified wine, like port, which is reduced to make the sauce. For me, using largely American or Anglo-Saxon recipes in Austria, cooking has become a process of substitution. I must cook everything from scratch (actually, I also prefer to do that). Nearly every recipe I cook I find myself required to substitute at least one ingredient.
In this case, it was the Marsala, which was not available at my local supermarket. They had an okay shelf of fortified wines, but no Marsala. So I got a bottle of Madeira wine. Got chicken breasts, mushrooms, peppers, shallots, zucchini. Went home and cooked.
Brian has stated before that recipies are often inaccurate, especially cooking times, so I used the wikipedia article instead of a recipe. An ideal recipe would tell you roughly how long it takes to cook something, but it would tell you how to tell when something was finished, rather than tell you exactly how long to cook it.
Brian has become my new cooking mentor, if you haven’t noticed.
I rolled the chicken breasts (with skin, deboned) in flour and sauteed them. I understand sautee to mean fry fairly hot in a fair amount of oil. The skin/coating got nice and crisp. I cut into one breast to make sure it was done (good thing, as it wasn’t done yet). When they were done I removed them and put them in an oven to stay warm, and sauteed sliced shallots, mushrooms and zucchini for a while, then got impatient and added some of the wine and some chicken stock (this concentrate you can get) and cooked until the sauce looked reduced.
Then I served it with the chicken and it was quite popular.
My verdict: working from a wikipedia article instead of a recipe works, at least for a simple dish such as this. I don’t think I added enough wine (more sauce would have been nice) and I should have reduced it a little more. But it tasted great. Chicken was a little dry, otherwise tasty and attractive. I wonder what went wrong there – what causes dry chicken? The zucchini were a mistake (I sliced them into roughly 2″ rectangular slices) – they were soft and mushy before anything else was cooked. Should have added them at the end. Substituting Madeira for Marsala was no problem (maybe Marsala tastes totally awesome and I would change my mind if I tried it, who knows).
The next time I’ll take pictures.
Posted in Das Gehirn, Familie, Metamorphosism
Tags: chicken marsala, cooking, madeira, wtf should I cook for dinner