Love is Pizza

When is food more than food?  When it comes in fun shapes!  American culture doesn't exactly put the greatest emphasis on presentation - except in magazines telling you how to get your kids to eat healthy food - but it sure adds a special touch.  

This year we celebrated Valentine's Day by eating at home.  We had heart-shaped egg sandwiches for breakfast, heart-shaped pizza for lunch, and spaghetti and meatballs for dinner - comfort food all the way!  And it really was food from the heart.  The bread and cheese were homemade, and the eggs, bacon and beef came from local farms.  We topped it off with a box of out-of-this-world artisan chocolates from Farmstead.  Now that's love.

Something Approaching the Best Mozzarella on Earth

Good mozzarella is expensive.  Even bad mozzarella is expensive.  Since I am a lover of good milk and good food, I invested in a cheesemaking kit to try making it myself.

Now that I have made one batch of mozzarella, I am glad to have purchased the kit even though I now know it is not really necessary.  It is self-contained and pretty cute, but not really cost-effective.  It would make a fantastic gift for an unsuspecting food-and-cheese-lover.  If you don't purchase the kit, such as if you already have a good thermometer, the essential mozzarella items can be purchased individually as follows: 

Thermometer: $5.95

Food-grade citric acid: $5.95

Rennet for 40 batches: $6.50 

Cheese salt (optional, included with kit): $2.95

Total: $21.35

Cost of kit (with shipping): $36

The kit also comes with butter muslin (for ricotta) and an instruction booklet.  The instructions are disappointingly vague at times.  The thermometer is just a plain, mercury-free rod with no clip - you have to hold it while taking the milk's temperature.  The kit also advertises itself as "30-minute," but it took me closer to an hour on my first try.

The first step in cheesemaking is to sterilize everything as best you can.  I washed everything with soap and water, but didn't do anything too special as I didn't feel I was relying so much on bacterial action for mozzarella as I would for yogurt.

Next I measured 1 gallon of farm-fresh cow's milk into a big stainless-steel pot.  In two separate cups, I dissolved a quarter of a rennet tablet in a quarter-cup of filtered water, and a teaspoon and a half (about 4 grams) of citric acid in a cup of filtered water.

I mixed the citric acid solution into the milk and heated the mixture to 90 F while stirring.  Once it hit 90, I added the rennet solution, stirring constantly for 30 seconds with an up-and-down motion.  Then I covered it and left it alone for five and a half minutes.  When I removed the cover, the milk looked completely unchanged, but when I touched it, it was solid like soft custard or tofu.  I think I should have let it set longer, because my whey was very milky.  

Next I cut the curds with a clean bread knife into roughly half-inch cubes.  This was probably the worst curd-cutting job in history, as they were all different shapes and lengths.

Then I strained the curds into a sieve that was just a bit too small. I kneaded the moisture out of the curds, pouring off (and saving) an enormous quantity of whey.

In another pot, I heated about a half-gallon of the whey to 180 F, poured it into a glass bowl off the heat, plunked the curd-ball into it, splashing hot whey everywhere, and started kneading the curds under water with my attractive yellow gloves.  The curds need to be around 130-135 F in order to stretch properly.  I never quite got it to stretch like taffy, as I was afraid of breaking it, but it got smooth and shiny as promised.  As with any recipe that says to add something while doing something else (i.e. add salt while kneading curds) I forgot to do it.  To compensate, I put the finished cheese into salty water in the refrigerator.

I tasted the curds right after kneading and they were rubbery, chalky and bland.  I was really disappointed and, after some online research, decided that I'd overcooked and over-kneaded the curds.  Until I tasted the mozzarella again this morning.  What a world of difference!  After a good night's rest, the cheese was supple, soft and creamy, flaking off into little layers when torn.  I could eat this with anything and can't wait until tomato & basil season.  In the meantime, I think I will incorporate it into my miso sandwiches.  

In the photo above, I am holding just one-half of the batch.  See how shiny it is!  This would cost $15-20 in a store and would have traveled much farther from cow to kitchen.  One gallon of milk produced just over 20 ounces of mozzarella.  I have heard ranges from just under to just over a pound, but this yield exceeded my expectations.  I used very local, very fresh milk (with very undamaged proteins), which I think accounts for the performance.  I have already used some of the surplus whey to cook rice and oatmeal and can't wait to use it to make bread.

Unidentified Flying Ovum

It's a bird!  It's a plane!  It's ... the tallest yolk I've ever seen, courtesy of a baby-blue Araucana egg from Zephyr Farm.  Delicious, too.

Best Yogurt Ever

The key to yogurt is maintaining the right temperature.  There are plenty of tricks out there - hot pads, crock pots, dehydrators, coolers packed with hot water bottles, various configurations of home ovens - but none of them worked for me.  My yogurt was inevitably chunky and bitter, and rather than fiddle with the techniques, I'd opt for the $3.50 organic yogurt at the store.  Enter the $15 Salton yogurt maker.

For a simple job, this baby is spot on.  All you have to do is heat the milk, cool it, add a culture, and let Salton do its magic.  

Another key to making quality cultured products is to sterilize all of your equipment so that no other bacteria are competing with the cultures you want to win.  The first time I made this yogurt, I sterilized all of my tools in a 450-F oven (I was making bread at the time) and the second time I just boiled them in the same pot I used later on to heat the milk.

I started with 1 quart of fresh, whole, non-homogenized milk.  I heated it to 210-F, then set the pan in a big bowl of cold water to cool it to 110-F.  The second time around, I accidentally let the milk boil, with no noticeable damage to quality in the finished product.  I used a regular candy/deep-fry thermometer for the measurements.    In a separate bowl I mixed 3 oz of Stonyfield plain yogurt with a little of the hot milk to thin it before stirring it gently into the big pot of milk.  It is important to thin the culture with milk so that it isn't necessary to stir the milk vigorously after adding it and to ensure that it is evenly distributed.  Finally I poured the warm, cultured milk into a glass mason jar, put it in the Salton and left it for eight hours.  Then I refrigerated it for at least two hours before opening it.  

This yogurt is like pudding!  It's thick, smooth, creamy and not too tart.  It's so thick it can stand up on its own.  The 8-hour yogurt was so mild in fact that I think I will try incubating it for 10 and 12 hours in the future to get a little more tang.  There's a heavenly cap of sour cream on top that's great spread on toast, since it's basically thin cream cheese.  Or eat it straight.

I have yet to see how the yogurt performs with successive generations of cultures.  The Salton manual says that the cultures only stay strong for about five batches, but other recipes suggest they'll last forever.  I suppose it's not the worst thing to have to shell out an extra dollar for every ten quarts of yogurt - especially yogurt this good.  This yogurt doesn't need a single thing - no sweeteners, no fruit, no granola - it's perfect as is.  I can't wait to use the whey to bake bread!

A Side of Beef from Stonyledge Farm

In the middle of December, Stephen and I brought home one-half of Steer 42.  

First, I would like to summarize my philosophy that leads me to eat "outside the box" (or, "outside the bun," to borrow a phrase from Taco Bell):

Food is basically the only thing I buy that becomes a part of me.  My bones, organs, muscles, skin, hair, blood - everything - started out on my plate.  If I were building a house, I wouldn't use poor-quality materials or cut corners to save time and money.  The raw materials that go into the animals I eat are just as important.

In nature, bovines eat grass.  For a few weeks of the year, they may eat the seed heads that sprout from the grass.  In industrial farms, cows eat chewing gum, "spent hens," bits of other animals, urea, stale candy, doughnuts and heat-treated garbage in addition to their main staple: commodity corn.  As the price of corn goes up, so does the amount of non-food "filler" in the feed.  A high-corn diet makes cows sick, so they receive antibiotics, plus hormones to make them grow faster.

While food quality is important to me, so is money.  With grass-fed beef starting at $8.00/lb at the farmers' market, I can hardly afford to have it regularly.  To cut costs but not quality, I purchased a whole side of organic grass-fed beef from a local farm, bringing the average cost per pound down to $4.80.  That's still high when you compare it to supermarket meat, but satisfies my concern for quality.

I began staking out the local food scene as soon as I found out we were moving to Rhode Island.  I built a spreadsheet of the farms I found, comparing products, prices and distances from Providence.  As I was a business major and a job seeker for quite a while, I have found that the mantra of "networking, networking, networking" thus drilled into my head also applies to sourcing local food.  I have e-mailed and visited many farms, and in the process learned about others, and so on.  Many were dead ends due to prices or locations, and that's all part of the search.  I found Stonyledge Farm via the Footsteps Farm website.  While organic certification isn't as important to me as overall farming practices (example: I would rather eat a non-organic grass-fed cow than an organic corn-fed cow),  I am delighted to add that Stonyledge is certified organic.

For beef, I decided on Stonyledge because they had the lowest prices.  In 2008, they charged $2.95/lb for hanging weight plus processing costs.  Hanging weight is the weight of the animal minus head, hide and organs.  After cutting, the actual meat you receive is usually projected to be 70% of hanging weight.  For us it was actually around 84% because I requested many bone-in cuts of meat as well as organs and bones.  The bones contain a lot of flavor!  From a hanging weight of 350 lbs, we brought home about 295 lbs of meat and peripherals.

Processing costs include a $65 slaughter fee for the whole animal ($32.50 for half) plus $0.93/lb to cut and cryovac the meat with a USDA label, description and weight on each package.

I started an email conversation with Belinda at Stonyledge in April.  I immediately got on their waiting list for a half-side of beef.  The terminology was confusing to me, because I was under the impression that a side of beef was half of the animal - which it is - and that a half-side was therefore a quarter - but no, it is actually still half.  Going back through the emails, I see that Belinda was clear about how much meat I was in for, but I didn't understand until the week of delivery.  Belinda has been extremely helpful with answering all of my questions.

The day before the slaughter, Belinda patiently walked me through the cut sheet, which I also didn't understand.  You do not need to know how many pounds are allotted to each cut (i.e. sirloin, ribeye, roasts), just specify how many pounds you want of each cut per package.  Since there are just two of us in this household, I requested the smallest possible number of items per package.  For example, our strip steaks are individually wrapped one to a package so I can thaw and cook just one at a time.  The largest packages of the regular meat were the chuck steaks, with the biggest weighing in at 4.71 pounds.  The most numerous were the ground beef packages, with 87 units averaging 1.21 pounds each.  Notice I wrote 'regular meat' in reference to the chuck steaks.  I also received, among the organs, an unlabeled item weighing five and a half pounds.  They were pretty sure it was a heart since it looked like the two other heart packages which weighed around two pounds each.  The important thing is that it was free!  Remember - organs weren't included in the hanging weight.

When we arrived at Stonyledge Farm, Ed showed us around while we waited for Belinda to arrive with the meat.  We were followed by a cooing flock of chickens as we met some pigs, calves, and a rebellious heifer that we helped corral back into the appropriate pen.

The meat arrived in five large boxes.  It was already frozen solid when we got it and remained so the whole way back to Providence.  

The box of organs was missing at the time of the first pickup.  This was the fault of the processing facility, not Stonyledge.   They had set the box with a different order and hadn't labeled it.  The facility also apparently did not give us the exact cuts we had asked for.  Belinda mentioned that they'd been having problems with this processor and might use a different one in the future.  I don't know the name of the processor.  I didn't remember what I'd asked for anyway and was very happy with the meat I received.  For example, they gave us semi-boneless ribeye instead of bone-in.  It was still fantastic.  With a quick sear on each side and ten minutes in a 425-F oven, those steaks just melt in your mouth.  Did I mention that grass-fed beef is also cleaner than factory-raised?  

They found the box of organs about a week later, and just yesterday I returned to Stonyledge Farm to pick it up.  I also bought some cuts of pork and two dozen eggs.  I'm waiting until Stephen gets back into town to try the pork, and the eggs have been terrific.

The beef cuts were distributed as follows, in pounds:

Ground Beef:  105.27

Stew Beef: 20.32

Bones: 16.8

Top Round: 16.75

Tenderloin: 3.95

Flank Steak: 1.71

Shoulder Steak: 11.87

Sirloin Tip: 10.15

Shanks: 13.93

Brisket: 7.52

Hanger: 1.04

Skirt: 0.96

Short Ribs: 9.93

Ribeye: 16.14

Chuck: 20.27

Sirloin: 9.67

NY Strip: 6.42

Liver: 4.96

Heart: 3.68

Tongue: 3.37

Mystery Organ: 5.54

Pig Liver (free): 4.52

I recommend having a 14-cubic-foot freezer for this amount of meat.  We plan to keep about a month's worth of meat in our regular freezer (the one attached to the refrigerator) so that we only have to open the chest freezer once a month.  It's a worthwhile investment if you plan to buy meat in bulk, or have a prolific garden, or both.

All of the meat has been fantastic so far.  Before now, I rarely cooked beef because of the expense and difficulty of finding good quality.  Some cuts, like the steaks, I had never prepared.  Grass-fed beef is extremely lean (comparable to skinless chicken breast, I've heard) so it gets dry and tough very easily.  I have been experimenting with a Jaccard meat tenderizer and find that it takes five or six passes to tenderize the good steaks.  Roasts and stew beef need to cook very slowly for at least three hours, after which they become perfectly al dente - neither mushy nor tough.  The Cook's Illustrated goulash recipe worked perfectly with the stew beef.  It required little more than onions and beef in a covered dish in a 300 degree oven for three hours.  One final word on cooking times: grass-fed beef is exceptionally high in omega-3 fats.  Omega-3s come from eating green things.  They tend to lose their health benefits when heated too long.  There isn't really a way around long, slow cooking for the tough roasts, but steaks and ground beef should be cooked as little as possible to preserve the Omega-3s.

Again, all of these cuts averaged to $4.80/lb.  Grass-fed ground beef tends to run around $6-8/lb and strays upwards of $20/lb for the nicer cuts.  Even "Naturally Raised" bones and organs at Whole Foods can cost $4-6/lb, and these animals usually have spent up to a third of their lives on feedlots (approved feedlots, but feedlots nonetheless).  Grain-finished beef quickly loses the nutritional benefits of grass-feeding.

Buying this amount of beef hasn't exactly saved us money, since we normally wouldn't buy the nicer cuts, but has rather allowed us to raise our standard of living for not as much money as it should cost.  I have bought some exciting heirloom beans with which to spread out the beef, and it should last us a few years.  It's a significant investment, and as far as health is concerned, a worthy one.

Symbiosis: What has Chocolate Hazelnut Ice Cream to do with Breakfast

This morning, I made two breakfast pitas, ten cups of granola and a quart of rich, dreamy chocolate-hazelnut ice cream that Stephen has since declared his favorite. All that and I still arrived early for my 9:30 interview downtown. 

Oddly enough, these three recipes are all related, starting with the ice cream. The recipe calls for steeping a cup and a half of precious hazelnuts in hot, sweet milk and then... discarding the nuts! And that's not all. As is typical of custard-based ice creams, it also calls for egg yolks only - so what to do with the whites?

Make omelettes and granola, that's what. Although I'm not intentionally a fan of the egg-white omelette (Nina Planck calls it a culinary abomination), I can consider it a whole food when we'll be eating the yolks later. So for breakfast we had homemade pitas stuffed with cooked egg whites, Dutch Gouda and local (Pat's Pastured) bacon.

As for the sweet, sticky hazelnut bits that had flavored the ice cream, they blended perfectly into a batch of granola. I would summarize my granola formula as "half an ounce of sweet and one-fifth of an ounce of fat per cup of stuff." My favorite sweeteners are equal parts honey and brown rice syrup. Honey is sweeter than brown rice syrup, while the latter is extra-crispy after baking. As for the fat, I use equal parts organic grass-fed butter and coconut oil. Both of these have a bad reputation for their saturated fat content, but when they come from non-industrial sources, I believe their health-promoting attributes far exceed the negatives. Now for the "stuff" I use oats, puffed brown rice, and nuts.

Today's recipe looked like this.

The stuff:

3 1/2 cups thick rolled oats

3 cups puffed brown rice

1 cup chopped walnuts

1 cup sunflower seeds

1 1/2 cups hazelnuts, roasted, chopped in a blender, then steeped in sweet milk during ice-cream-making process

The glue:

2.5 oz honey

2.5 oz brown rice syrup

1 oz coconut oil

1 oz butter

1 tsp salt

2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp Stevia powder

Preheat oven to 300 F. Toss the stuff together in a large (4 qt) bowl. In a small saucepan, combine the glue ingredients and bring to a gentle boil. Let it bubble for a minute to intensify the butter flavor. Pour the glue over the stuff, folding with a wide spatula until it's evenly distributed. Spread the sticky granola all over two large cookie sheets, using wet hands to push it down to a uniform thickness a half-inch deep all around.

Put the granola in the 300 F oven for about twenty minutes, then turn the heat off and leave the granola in the cooling oven for two hours [while I go to my interview]. After two hours, reheat the oven to 300 F. Remove the granola from the oven and stir it gently. If the granola has fused into a solid layer, use a metal spatula to break the pieces and flip them over. Return the granola to the oven for another 20 minutes at 300 F, then turn off the heat and wait another two hours. When the granola is completely cool, dry and crispy, store what is left [after I've been sneaking bites of it during the day] in an airtight container. I do not know if it will last more than a week at room temperature.

Last but not least, the cause of it all: Chocolate Hazelnut Ice Cream

1 1/2 cups hazelnuts

2 cups half-and-half (Rhody Fresh)

3/4 cup unrefined sugar (Sucanat)

1/4 tsp salt

1 cup cream (Butterworks Farm)

2.5 oz 60% dark chocolate chips (Ghirardelli)

4 egg yolks (Sunset View Pastures)

2 Tbs liquor (optional)

Toast the hazelnuts: Spread the nuts in a single layer on a baking sheet and toast them in a 300 F oven for seven to ten minutes. When you start to see the papery skins separating from the nutmeats, take them out of the oven and rub them briskly in a clean kitchen towel to remove most of the skins. Finely chop the nuts in a blender.

Warm the half-and-half, sugar and salt in a small saucepan until little bubbles appear around the edges.  Remove it from the heat, add the hazelnuts, then cover and let steep for an hour at room temperature.

Put the chocolate chips into a quart-sized (or larger) bowl.  Heat the cream just to boiling, then pour it over the chocolate chips, whisking until they melt into the cream.  

In a separate bowl, whisk the egg yolks together.

Strain the hazelnut-infused milk into a medium saucepan.  Squeeze as much liquid as possible out of the hazelnuts, then set the nuts aside for granola or cookies.  Reheat the milk, then pour it over the egg yolks, whisking constantly.  Pour the mixture back into the saucepan, stirring constantly over low heat until the mixture coats the back of a wooden spoon. Making a stovetop custard is sometimes tricky - if heated too quickly, the whole thing can curdle.  Some recommend using a double boiler, but I don't bother.  The point is to bring it just below a boil to cook the yolks without causing them to separate from the milk.  The end result should be a colloid.  It should be smooth and creamy, slightly thickened, but not like scrambled eggs. 

Pour the custard into the chocolate-cream, then add the vanilla and liquor (optional - if you like spiked ice cream).  I used Bailey's only because it was all we had, but Frangelico would have more appropriate. Alcohol does not freeze, so adding liquor helps homemade ice cream (which is notoriously hard) keep a softer texture after freezing.  Chill the custard in the refrigerator for at least four hours, then freeze in an ice cream maker according to manufacturer's instructions.

So there you have it - one wasteful recipe and two economical ones to pick up the pieces.  Even though the ingredients are extravagant, I consider this a nod to our culinarily thrifty forebears.

No-Frills Flatbread

Cooks Illustrated just ran an illuminating article about a bread called 'Pizza Bianca,' a sauceless, cheeseless flatbread that turned out to be the most practical bread recipe on earth. It is simple, inexpensive, flexible, and delicious. For weeks around our move, this was the only bread I made. We would cut it into squares for sandwiches, shape it into mini-rounds for personal pizzas, twist it into bread sticks, cube it for strata, make it with spelt, durum, red wheat, buckwheat... as bread recipes go, this one pays a big reward for a small effort.

One caveat: the first time I made it, it came out like shoe leather because I hadn't given it enough time to rise. It still tasted great, but the texture left something to be desired. Every batch after that, however, was perfect - crisp crust, soft bubbly crumb, ready when I needed it.

Another caveat: I have made this recipe with some buckwheat, but have not tried a 100% gluten-free version. This being a flatbread, it's conducive to GF-adaptation and I'd be curious to see how that turns out.

Here we go:
8 ounces sourdough starter (100% hydration)
11.5 ounces wheat flour, any kind
9.5 ounces water, filtered if you live in Philadelphia
1 1/4 (one and one-quarter) teaspoons salt
Oil for the proofing bowl
One overnight rest in the refrigerator
One 2-hour rise at room temperature
One 30-minute pre-bake rise

Mix everything together. No need to knead - just mix, plop in the oiled bowl, and toss it in the fridge overnight. It doesn't have to be "smooth and elastic;" one big sticky mess is just fine. An overnight rest is key to getting amazing flavor out of whole wheat. If you made the same recipe with the same flour, minus the overnight soak, it would taste suspiciously like cardboard. I think that is how whole wheat got a bad reputation.

At some point between the mixing and the baking, it's necessary to give the dough a two-hour rise, followed by a thirty-minute rise just before baking. Keep in mind that bread will rise more slowly when it's cold from the refrigerator and will need a little extra time to de-chill.

Sometimes I break up the two-hour rise into an hour in the morning before work and another hour after work, so that the bread will be ready in time for dinner. After the two-hour rise, I might also split the dough - some to bake now and some to save in the refrigerator for tomorrow or the next day. After three days in the refrigerator, the yeasts start to die, giving an off-flavor to the bread.

When you're ready to bake your proofed bread, preheat the oven to 450 F. If you have a baking stone, put that in the oven before preheating. Spread the dough on a baking sheet to a thickness of about half an inch. The dough should be so wet that it's just a matter of pouring it out and guiding it into a roughly rectangular shape or mini pizza rounds. If you want to cut the dough and save some to bake later, kitchen shears can do a neat job of this. Try not to pop too many of the air bubbles while shaping/cutting the dough. Let it rise thirty minutes while the oven preheats.

When the oven and dough are ready, put the dough into the oven and leave it alone for about fifteen minutes. Start checking after fifteen minutes, but don't pull the bread out of the oven until the crust is a rich brown and the bread sounds hollow when thumped. I'm sure many things are less appetizing than underbaked bread, but I don't want to go there.
Depending on thickness and hydration, this bread should take 15-25 minutes to bake at 450 F.
Once you master the basic technique, get creative!