Kitchen Gadget 11. Non-stick Sheets

A long time ago, back when this Kitchen Gadgets series was in its infancy, we talked about pizza. We mentioned in passing that we use non-stick sheets to stop our pizza sticking to its baking tray. It might have been a fleeting reference but the truth is that we have a growing collection of these sheets and we love them. We use them nigh on constantly.

You might then ask why it has taken us so long to give them a post of their own. The truth is that we use them in so many small little ways that it's been hard to think of a recipe to give you that highlights just how useful they are.

You see we baked biscuits on them and popped one in our roasting tin for sweet buns. We've used them for breadsticks and for collecting fresh pasta. The more I looked them more I saw them lurking in the background of bake after bake, blog post after blog post, they are the unsung heroes in our kitchen.

So, here's just one more recipe that we use a non-stick sheet for: Stollen.

Stollen
This is Joe's modified version of Delia's stollen recipe. We use our bread machine to make the dough and then plait the stollen and marzipan into three strands as this disperses the marzipan throughout the stollen - not just in the middle. Unorthodox, but tasty!

7g Dried Yeast
350g Strong White Bread Flour
50g Caster Sugar
1/4tsp Salt
110g Butter
1 Egg
150ml Milk
Zest of 1/2 Lemon

200g Dried Fruit and Nuts, approximately (use what you have around):
 - 100g Sultanas
 - 25g Glace Cherries
 - 25g Mixed Peel
 - 25g Apricots
 - 25g Flaked Almonds

200g Marzipan


1. Put all the ingredients, minus the fruit/nuts and the marzipan, in a bread machine on a dough cycle. Once finished mix in the fruit/nuts.

2. Split the dough into three equal pieces and then roll these into three sausages of equal length and thicknesses.

3. Flatten the sausages and tweak if needed to make them the same.

4. Roll out lengths of marzipan approximately a fingers width in diameter and lay them along your dough stopping 5cm short of each end.

5. Wrap each length of dough around the marzipan to re-form them into sausages.

6. Plait the three strands taking care not to stretch the dough as you do so (it will want to stretch!). Once you've finished plaiting tuck the ends of the plait under and transfer to baking sheet lined with a non-stick sheet.

Ours turned out to be a little long for the tray...

7. Leave to rise again (until doubled in size if you can be that patient).

8. Bake at 170C fan for around 30mins or until the top is golden and the bread sounds cooked (hollow when tapped - normal bread making rules apply).

9. Transfer the stollen on its non-stick sheet to a wire rack and allow to cool.

10. Once cool turn over and the sheet should just peel away.

11. Enjoy with a cup of tea!

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Kitchen Gadget 10. Kenwood Chef

Earlier this year we wrote a post about the accessories that we use with our Kenwood Chef and the time has finally come to talk about the main beast!

Afforded pride of place on our worktop since it was given to us as a wedding present we've used this for all sorts over the years. Before we got a bread machine this was our main workhorse for kneading our bread; now it has a slightly easier life but is still called on to whip up cakes, pastry, scones, profiteroles or whatever tickles our fancy.

It's great for those jobs where a longer period of effort is needed. Such as the constant whipping needed for a good meringue...

Italian Meringue

4 Egg Whites
160g Sugar
160ml Water

1. Using the Kenwood, whisk the egg whites into a soft peak.

2. Meanwhile, dissolve the sugar in the water over a high heat. Once dissolved, continue to cook the sugar syrup over a medium heat until it reaches 121C.

3. After bringing the sugar up to temperature turn the mixer speed up to high and slowly pour the sugar syrup into the egg whites.

4. When all the sugar has been incorporated turn the mixer down to a medium speed and keep whisking until the meringue is back to room temperature. You should now have a lovely glossy meringue ready to use however you like; though if I could make a suggestion, perhaps to top off Joe's Strawberry Layered Cake.

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Kitchen Gadget 9. Apple Peeler/Corer/Slicer

Picture the scene. It's a beautiful autumn day. The sun is shining, the tree's are golden, your apple tree is full to bursting with ripe fruit. You carefully pick as many as you can, but you know that these apples are not keepers. No matter how nicely you pack them they just will not survive being stored for long. Instead you need to process them, eat some now, freeze some for later, maybe make chutneys and other preserves with the rest.

You get the picture? You're standing in your kitchen faced with a mound of apples and they all need dealing with. Every single one. Luckily, someone else has been here first - enter the Apple Peeler Corer Slicer. Simply skewer an apple on the prongs,

turn the handle,

and out comes an apple ready for cooking. Magic.

Apple Crumble
A simple recipe, but one that plays an important part in our repertoire. We use equal quantities of the main ingredients mostly because it makes it simple to remember. 

For the crumble:
120g Plain Flour
120g Porridge Oats
120g Butter
120g Sugar*

plus:
~700g stewed apple, sweetened to taste

*I've not specified type of sugar here as we use a different combination every time. We always start with granulated and then decide to swap out part of it for soft brown or muscavado, or whatever we fancy and have in the cupboard.

1. Pop all the crumble ingredients in a food processor and mix until, well, crumbly. Alternatively rub the butter into the flour until it resembles breadcrumbs and then stir through the sugar and oats.

2. Place the stewed fruit in the bottom of a casserole dish. Top with the crumble mix and even off.

3. Place in the oven at 180C for 25-30 mins, or until the fruit is bubbling and the topping is golden. Serve hot with custard or ice cream or cream or yoghurt...

Once you've tried this once it's a great recipe for experimenting and using up odds and ends. In the crumble photographed here I added a handful of raspberries into the apple, a large teaspoon of ground ginger into the crumble mixture and a sprinkling of demerara across the top for a little added crunch. How will you make yours?

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Kitchen Gadget 8. Thermometer

Being scientists at heart we love lots of gadgets that make cooking more predictable, and this is definitely one of them. The food thermometer. Again, a very simple piece of kit, we bought ours from ebay for the princely sum of £3 and it gets used several times a week, though often this is as an upgrade to the little finger method of testing our reheated dinner is hot enough. It's been called in to service for everything from sugar syrups and caramels to checking BBQ food is safe and meats are cooked to perfection.

As an aside; when we're on our own we tend to cook enough for four people and eat the same thing for two nights. An odd habit but we've found it tends to be a little cheaper and means we only cook from scratch every other day - we both work full time and as much as we love cooking we also like getting home and not having to cook. Popping something in the oven to warm up is therefore an everyday occurrence (no microwave - about the only gadget we don't own).

Back to the topic at hand; on occasion we use our thermometer for slightly more technical things than reheats. This week we had roast pork and did just that.

Roasting with a Thermometer

Temperature has a very predictable effect on meat, be it a joint, fillet, or whole bird and you can use this knowledge to aid you in your cooking. Knowing the temperature of the centre of your meat will tell you all you need to know about its current state and should mean that you can go through the whole cooking process without needing to cut it open and check the colour.

The same temperatures apply to all meats - though what is considered a safe temperature varies. There are many references to what each temperature means for the proteins in the meat you are cooking, and we won't attempt to match that level of detail here - instead, we've put together a quick guide to the temperatures we refer to most.

McGee on Food and Cooking by Harold McGee has plenty to say on the subject!

How well done is my red meat?
55C - Medium Rare
60C - Medium
70C - Well Done
90C - Falling apart
Don't forget that these are the maximum temperatures in the middle - a big roast will climb a few degrees whilst resting (up to 10 for a particularly large joint) so if you want your roast beef perfectly cooked pull it out a few degrees early.

What's safe for other meats?
60-70C will kill most bacteria depending on how long the meat is held at that temperature, but over 65 is a safe bet. You also need to make sure you are measuring the thickest part of the meat - the outer section will be much hotter but it is the minimum temperature in the meat that matters. 90C in the middle will have it falling to pieces so long as it is still moist - 90C and baked dry will be like leather!

What does the Food Standards Agency have to say about this?
If we have any doubt about the quality of the meat we always go for food standards agency levels. Sausages, regular burgers, reheating things that have been in the fridge too long etc all get this treatment. I'm sure many chefs would point out that the best ways of cooking things wouldn't always hit these guidelines though! They recommend achieving one of 60C for 45 mins, 65C for 10 mins, 70C for 2 mins, 75C for 30secs or 80C for 6s.

We work on the 80C and it's dead rule - gives a bit of leeway for error of temperature reading. It is also a great target for most BBQ foods - its surprising how paranoid we have become about burning our sausages and chicken to a crisp before declaring it cooked but a quick stabbing with the temperature probe can ensure the food comes off cooked but still juicy and tender.


Roast Pork

The joint was seasoned and sat in an oven at 180C. After around 45mins it registered 49C, not cooked yet.

40mins later it had reached 72C. This is now cooked and safe to eat but not quite what we were aiming for on this occasion.

Finally we reached 88C - plenty enough to clear 90C after resting. This joint could bake to falling apart temperature as it had a good layer of fat on it to keep it moist.  After being covered in foil for 15 mins it was ready for carving. Being only a small joint 15 minutes was plenty of resting time and allowed it to rise the last couple of degrees. We tend to leave big joints 20-30 minutes to rest.

Perfect.

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The Great Swift Bake Off: Round 6 - Picnic Pies

This round of the Great Swift Bake Off it is time for hot water pastry. This dough is a bit of an odd beast - no chilling it in the fridge and if it gets too cold it goes very stiff and is impossible to work. Conversely too hot and it slumps and rips the moment you handle it.

I wanted to be a bit different from the standard pork based affair and spent ages scratching around through recipes before deciding to make something up from scratch. I seemed to be in an Italian mood when planning so those flavours can be seen running through the dish.

Joe's Italian Picnic Pie
Pasticcio di bolognese in crosta di Beppe

Ingredients:

• 3 large chicken breasts
• 500g beef mince
• 3 yellow and 3 green peppers
• 800g baby plum tomatoes
• Thyme
• Rosemary
• 3 cloves garlic
• 2 onions
• Salt
• Pepper
• Paprika
• Cumin
• Chilli powder
• 2 tbsp green pesto
• Gelling agent (pectin or agar)
• Egg white to glaze

for the pastry (based on this recipe from gourmet dough):

• 500g plain flour
• 100g butter
• 90g lard
• 200ml water

Halve the tomatoes and throw them in a roasting tin with thyme, rosemary, salt, pepper and a little oil 

De-seed and quarter the peppers, spreading them on a baking sheet. Bake all the veg in a low oven (150C) for 2-3 hours until soft and wrinkly. This is to try and remove some of the moisture so don't worry if it looks a bit leathery!

Slice the chicken breasts accross the breast into slabs about 1 cm (3/8") thick, season and brown off in a pan. Again this should drive down the moisture content.

Finely dice the onion and garlic before frying it off with 1tsp each of paprika, cumin, chilli powder and a little salt & pepper. Add it to the minced beef. I fried the beef off for a test batch but for the final pie I left it unfried to give a denser block of meat. This did leave more moisture and I had to drain the pie a couple of times during cooking...

When the veg is almost ready melt the fat in the water and bring to just simmering. Pour onto the flour and work together.

Turn out the dough and knead it lightly. You should be able to work with it quite warm.

Leave to cool a little. I found my dough was far too pliable until it was below 45 degrees. Line a loaf tin with greaseproof paper. Once the dough is cool enough to work with (if you roll it out can you lift the sheet without it tearing in two)  roll and line the tin, reserving enough for the lid.

The cooked tomatoes are now all a bit wrinkly! You can see how much moisture they have lost.

And the peppers are a touch flacid too. 

Assemble!

Bake for 2 hrs at 150 degrees, draining as needed. Before it finishes baking make up the pesto gel - mix up your gelling agent stronger than the instructions, stir through pesto and keep hot until the pie comes out the oven. Pour the gel in through the steam vent using a funnel. Cool and serve.

The final entries (mine is on the left)

I managed to come joint first this round. People seemed to have very split reactions though - those expecting pork pie seemed disappointed by the Mediterranean pie!

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Elderflower Champagne

On such a beautiful sunny weekend it seemed a shame not to get out into the hills around us. It was too warm to go hiking far though so instead we decided to go for more of a stroll and do some foraging. We returned home with a bag of elderflower heads ready for turning into elderflower champagne.

A lot of the best heads were out of reach for me - so I left Joe to it and took charge of the camera instead!

To make Elderflower Champagne you will need:

1 UK Gallon of Water

1.5 lbs Sugar

2 Tbsp's White Wine Vinegar

2 Lemons (sliced)

6 Elderflower heads

Start by boiling the water, sugar and vinegar to dissolve the sugar and to sterilise it all. Leave this to cool until blood temperature.

Just the task for our large grocers scales

While waiting for the liquid to cool remove the elderflowers from the stalks. Some stalk is okay as you will strain this later - but get rid of most of it.

Once the liquid has cooled add the lemons and the elderflowers and leave to steep for 3 days.

Once the three days is up strain the liquid and decant into bottles or a brewing barrel and leave to ferment for 6 weeks. Leave some space at the top for the gasses to expand.

And that's all there is to it. Joe decanted ours into a barrel last night, and we'll have to hope it works because Joe never does things by halves. 

Yes, that's nearly five gallons of elderflower champagne!

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Kitchen Gadget 4. Hand Blender

Happy New Year! I hope you all had fun, relaxing Christmases and ate lots of good food. I know we certainly did. We also put our heads together over the break to come up with a few challenges and series for the blog this year, but we'll be sharing those with you as we go along. For now we're diving straight into 2014 with the next in our series of Kitchen Gadgets.

This month we're taking a little look at our hand blender. This is a gadget that has survived since Joe's days as a student. You'd think that by now we'd have bigger better gadgets for any jobs this might do, but the truth is that it's small, nimble and easy to wash up and that means that it still gets regular use.

It's useful for blending soups without taking them out of the pan they're cooking in and blitzing stale bread into breadcrumbs, but mostly we use it for whizzing up a batter. Be it for pancakes or Yorkshire Puddings this little stick is just really handy!

Toad "in" the Hole
Serves 2 hungry people.

A twist on a classic, we prefer our yorkshires crispy so tend to cook the Toad and the Hole separately. We make no claims that we're the expert on this, but the Yorkshire Puddings seem to come out consistently well risen so we thought we'd share our recipe, which has been cobbled together over the years from a few different places.

For the Yorkshires:
110g plain flour
200ml milk
2 eggs
Pinch salt
Mixed herbs

Plus:
Sausages for two.
Vegetables of your choice. We roasted some potatoes, sweet potato and carrots to go with our Toad.

Preheat the oven to 220C.

1. Measure out all the ingredients for the Yorkshire Puddings into a pot and blend until well combined. Leave to sit for a few minutes.

2. Put a few ml of cooking oil into each dimple of a deep muffin tin, this should be just enough to cover the bottom of each dimple.

3. Put the sausages and the oiled tray into the preheated oven.

4. After 5 mins the oil should be hot enough for the batter. The trick to Yorkshire Puddings is to get the batter into hot fat and the whole lot back into the oven quickly.

Pull the tray out of the oven and sit it on the open oven door to try and retain the heat. Pour the batter into each dimple until it is 2/3 full. This mixture makes 9-10 puddings in our tin. You'll know this is going well when you hear a hot sizzling sound as the batter hits the oil.

5. Quickly return the tray to the hot oven. Bake the sausages and the Yorkshire Puddings for about 20 mins or until the Yorkshires are well risen and golden brown. Try to resist the urge to open the oven to check on them for at least the first 10 mins!

6. Once cooked serve with gravy and your vegetable of choice. Enjoy.

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