CAT | Recipes
Grant and Norah like the movie Ratatouille and mentioned that they’d like to try it sometime. So, I spent several hours one evening making the recipe from the movie, Confit Byaldi, by Thomas Keller of The French Laundry.
It’s a very procedural recipe, requiring a decent investment of time to roast peppers, create endless thin slices of produce and collate said produce. The end product looked great and tasted pretty good. The kids tried a bite and decided that it was more fun to see it on the TV than to taste it in person.
Oh well, I had fun making the dish.
Peppers for the piperade.
First, the piperade went down. Then the endless slices of veggies.
The finished dish.
Before I left for my CISSP prep class earlier this month, I saw cheap heavy cream at the grocery store. Cheap, as in 50 cents a quart cheap. I had always wanted to make butter at home one day, so I figured that the cheap cream was a sign and we bought a few cartons.
We used the KitchenAid to make our butter. Here’s what we did:
Here is what we started with: 3 quarts of heavy cream and a mixer.
Using the whisk attachment on the mixer, we whipped the cream to a stiff peaks state and then kept an eye on the bowl as the mixture started to “break” into small butter globules and buttermilk.
After pouring off the buttermilk, this is what was left. At this point, the is still quite a bit of liquid in the butter. If left alone, that liquid will so sour and ruin the butter. The easiest way to remove the liquid in question is to fill the bowl with cold water and knead the butter until the water runs clear. I had to replace the water in the bowl several times before this happened.
At this point, my hands were getting tired from all the kneading.
Since we wanted to use this butter for eating/cooking, we added the appropriate amount of salt (1/4 teaspoon table salt for every 4 ounces of butter) and portioned it into 8 ounce “sticks”.
We wrapped our freshly made butter in wax paper and stashed it in the deep freeze.
We also froze the buttermilk (after straining any errant butter globules out) and have used it to make some killer pancakes in the weeks since.
For our $1.50 purchase of cream, we got 8 sticks (2 lbs) of butter and a quart of buttermilk. Score!
I highly recommend doing this at least once! The resulting butter is great and tastes marvelous on homemade bread or anything else you use butter for.
I’ve been baking most of the bread we eat for awhile now. I thought I’d share the recipe in case anyone else is looking for a decent white bread loaf, good for sandwiches and toast. This is a perfect partner for your homemade butter!
I’ve been trying different recipes and taking the best ideas from each and have come up with what I think is a pretty good recipe and technique. Hope you enjoy it!
This recipe produces a bread with a dense crumb, which means that it stales slowly and slices evenly – excellent for sandwiches and toast.
The second rise noted below makes all the difference – it does add an hour to the total time, but I think it’s worth it!
Recipe:
4.5 tsp (2 packages) active dry yeast
1/4 cup warm water, in a small bowl
6-7 cups bread flour (you can also use 1/3 whole wheat if desired)
1 cup water
1 cup milk
1/4 cup sugar
2-4 tablespoons butter / margarine
1 tablespoon salt
Instructions:
1. Sprinkle the yeast into the warm water, 1 tbsp sugar and stir gently. Leave it alone for about ten minutes, until the yeast is nice and bubbly.
2. Meanwhile, warm the milk, water and butter. Add the sugar and salt and stir to dissolve completely.
3. Put two cups of the flour into the mixing bowl of your stand mixer. Add the milk mixture and stir thoroughly, then add the yeast mixture.
4. Add four cups of flour to the bowl and turn the mixer on ‘low’. Watch the dough – you want that ‘elastic ball’, one that begins to pull cleanly away from the bowl. Cleanly as in, “there is more dough staying with the ball than clinging to the sides of the bowl”. Add flour in quarter-cup increments until you see this. The amount of flour you need is going to change from season to season. On rainy days, you might need more than on dry days.
5. Once you’ve got that elastic ball thing going, let the stand mixer knead it for 7-10 minutes. Turn it out into a rising bucket or a greased bowl and flip the dough over to coat the top.
6. If using a bowl, put a clean towel over it and let it rise for about an hour in a warm place. I often use my oven – I turn it on for 1 minute then turn it off and set the dough in there to rise.
7. After an hour, turn it out of the bowl/bucket, knead it a few times, then put it back in the bucket/bowl and leave it alone for thirty minutes to an hour – until it has doubled again.
8. Turn your oven on to 425 while you shape your loaves. Punch down the dough and cut it in half. Make a rectangle out of each half, then roll it up like a jelly roll, pinch the ends and tuck them under.
9. Then put it into a greased loaf pan, cover with a damp towel and let rise for between 20 and 30 minutes. When they’ve risen up over the edges of your pans – but before they are ‘blossoming’ up over the top – slip them into the 425 degree oven and set the timer for ten minutes.
10. In ten minutes, turn the oven temperature down to 350 and set the timer for another 20 minutes. They should be getting nice and dark on top, and sound hollow when you tap the tops of them.
11. Let them cool in their pans for about five minutes, then pull them out of the pans and set them on wire racks to cool the rest of the way.
12. Enjoy with your homemade butter!
Notes:
You can skip that ‘knead and let rise again’ step if you’re short on time – but I find that it helps quite a bit.
