Save Your Fork… There’s Pie

Last week, mt friend Drew posted a link to Mark Bittman’s column in the New York Times about a bread recipe that required very little yeast and almost no kneading. The secret, according to Bittman, was to let it sit for a good 18 hours, letting the yeast do all the work in creating the gluten.

Anyone who’s been around these parts for a while knows of my ongoing struggle with bread. I gave up for years because I couldn’t get anything close to the heavenly stuff that came out of my Grandmother’s oven. So I was game to try Bittman’s recipe, but sceptical.

I had the loaf in the oven this afternoon when I came across a post about the bread on the Live Journal food porn community. Like everyone over there, my bread turned out fantastic, although it was not without its problems.

No-Knead Bread

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
¼ teaspoon instant yeast
1¼ teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.

1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes. While the dough was workable, it was really very wet, and threatened to become a culinary horror story that oozed all over my kitchen.

3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger. The instructions to form the dough into a ball make me laugh - while I got enough flour worked in that it quit oozing, it was certainly flatter than this when I came back to put it in the oven.

4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

Yay, bread! But wait, there’s one more photo.

Peruse those instructions again. There’s no mention anywhere of greasing the baking pan. A greased pan is standard with every bread recipe I’ve ever seen, even breads that contain oil as an ingredient.

Maybe the folks on Food Porn had the foresight to grease the pan anyway, certainly almost everyone who replied to the original post about the No-Knead Bread seems to have used the published recipe only as a guideline, but if you were following the recipe to the letter, undoubtedly, you got a really nice loaf of bread cemented to the inside of a really nice (expensive) pot.

Conclusion - the bread is absolutely brilliant, and I’ll definitely make it again and again. It’s got a gorgeous crust (created from leaving the pot covered for the first half hour of baking) and a beautiful lacy crumb. Other than the bit of oozing at the folding stage, it was relatively easy to handle. But next time, I’m going to remember to grease the damn pan!!!

The Grunt is a traditional Acadian dish, made originally by French settlers in a stew pot over an open hearth. The name “Grunt” comes from the burbling sound of the stewed blueberries as they boil. Note that the dumplings will get soft and fluffy, but as they are steamed, will not brown. If you want browned pastry, make a cobbler in the oven, but call it a cobbler, and not a grunt. There’s nothing more disappointing that sitting down to an order of Blueberry Grunt at a restaurant only to discover that someone has baked the thing. And don’t let me catch any of you using canned blueberry pie filling in this recipe, as I’ve seen suggested out there on the Intarweb. Fresh or frozen blueberries only!

Every family in Atlantic Canada has their own blueberry grunt recipe, which is really pretty much just blueberries, sugar and water with sweet dumplings. This recipe comes from Traditional Recipes of Atlantic Canada, which I believe my father collected for me, section by section, from the local gas station, back when gas stations still sold promotional collectibles.

The cinnamon and lemon zest are my additions to jazz up the flavour. The Grunt is meant to be a dessert, but we eat it mostly for breakfast.

Blueberry Grunt

1 quart blueberries
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
zest of 1 lemon, finely grated
1/2 tsp cinnamon

1-1/2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1 Tbsp butter or margarine
2/3 cup milk (soy milk works fine here)

In a large saucepan, heat blueberries, lemon zest, cinnamon, water and sugar slowly until blueberries begin to soften, then bring to a boil. Simmer gently (5 minutes) while making dumplings.

Sift together flour, baking powder, salt and sugar. Cut in butter and add enough milk to make a soft dough.

Drop dumpling dough, by the tablespoonful, into the pot onto the hot berries (makes approximately 10 dumplings). Cover tightly and cook 15 minutes without raising the lid. I mean it, hands off the lid! Dumplings will double in size.

Serve hot, spooning sauce over the dumplings. Top with cream, ice cream or yogurt.

A version of this post originally appeared on FitFare, part of the Well Fed Network.

I’m sure they must be terribly alluring. Those colorful bins of sweetened treats, the cute workers in their pyjamas to ring up your order. Even the sneaking knowledge that you’re getting away with something, by ordering up a bowl of your favourite childhood breakfast cereal instead of something more, well… grown up.

But here’s the deal. Cereal companies are corporations. They have a duty to their stockholders to expand their market share every quarter. Which means cereal companies have to come up with new and innovative ways to get all of us to eat more cereal. In recent years, someone clued in to the fact that cereal is comfort food for many people, and started marketing it as a tasty snack designed to replace the chips, pretzels and ice cream we used to eat.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? After all, cereal is good for you.

Not so fast. Because most pre-packaged, pre-sweetened cereal is no better than eating a pile of cookies or a slice of cake. According to nutritionist Marion Nestle in her latest book What to Eat:

Breakfast cereals are supposed to be good for you, and the relatively unprocessed ones still are, but most are now so thoroughly processed and sugared and filled with additives that they might as well be cookies.

Most cereals are low in fibre, and high in sugar, sodium and artificial colors, flavors and preservatives. Oh, yeah, and calories. Maybe not quite so many calories as a big bowl of ice cream, but if you’re eating cereal three or four times a day, especially if you’re eating it as a snack, you might find those comfy pyjama pants getting a little snug.

MIT researcher Judith Wurtman said people often crave cereal when they are feeling depressed or anxious. Wurtman discovered that when people stop eating carbohydrates, their brains stop regulating serotonin, a chemical in the brain involved in elevating mood and suppressing appetite.

The need to make more serotonin is felt, and it’s felt in the form of a craving for carbohydrates,” said Wurtman.

The problem, she said, is that some cravers eat cereal without paying attention to how much they have consumed, leading to weight gain.

The recent trend in cereal restaurants now has people eating cereal not just at home, but at school and at the office. The underground shopping PATH in downtown Toronto boasts a restaurant called The Cereal Bar (similar in concept to the Cereality chain) and at all times of day, well-suited executives can be seen heading to their offices carrying little bowls of cereal and containers of milk. It all seems a little bit odd, doesn’t it? After all, those crazy frosted sugar-coated cereals are meant for kids. Aren’t they?

There are some theories that the sweet colorful cereal is appealing to adults because of our tendency to want to stay kids forever. Rejuveniles have spurred the current food trend towards fancy cupcakes, and may well be behind the resurgence of the bowl of cereal, as food companies play on our desire for something fun and bright and exciting, as well as our longing for the comfort food of our childhood.

Health experts advise that cereals should be chosen for their nutritional value, and most of the cereals being purchased from fast-food cereal restaurants lean towards the colored, frosted varieties. The inner cheapskate in me balks at the trend as well. If someone really wants to eat cereal at the office, how hard can it be to buy a box or two at the supermarket and then fill a tupperware container before heading out for the day? Last I checked, milk of all varieties comes in small cartons, or tetrapaks, and can also be brought from home if necessary.

In some ways, I find the cereal restaurant trend even more insidious than standard fast food (speaking of which – how long will it be before at least one of the fast-food chains jumps on the cereal bandwagon?). Burger chains pull at a lot of emotional strings to get us to associate their food with good memories, but for most adults, cereal has a built-in allure all of its own. That’s good news for cereal manufacturers and cereal restaurants, but not such great news for consumers wallets - or their waistlines.

This post originally appeared on Growers and Grocers, part of The Well Fed Network.

I’m a week behind on this news, but I only found out about it last night when I tried to order crab cakes in a pub.

Turns out, crab from Indonesia, packaged for a Canadian company called Phillips has been recalled due to a risk of botulism.

This applies mostly to canned crab sold at the wholesale level, although crab cakes from Thrifty Foods have voluntarily been recalled.

What it makes me wonder is why Canadian companies are buying Indonesian crab in the first place. Of all the species we’ve overfished in Canadian waters, crab is not (yet) one of them. There’s plenty of the stuff and most crab or crab cakes sold at retail (such as the President’s Choice brand) are from Canada’s east coast. Yet another example of free trade gone awry (what do you want to bet almost no one in Indonesia can afford crab meat?) and another reason to check the labels and make a point of buying products that are at least vaguely local.

I had a plan to make actual Halloween cupcakes for Halloween or to revisit the glory that was the graveyard cake I made a few years back, but I got lazy, and busy, and instead decided to just go with gingerbread. Because just about everyone loves gingerbread, and it’s one of those flavours that really evokes autumn. And given that the batch actually lasted until a couple of days ago, I’m kind of glad I went with gingerbread, otherwise I’d have been faced with cupcakes covered in gummi worms and candy corn and black frosting.

This recipe is from the cooking bible, the one cookbook that everyone should own (yes, even moreso than The Joy of Cooking); the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. Yeah, I know I make the occasional derogatory comment about the “Better Homes and Gardens crowd”, but this is a straightforward collection that I would recommend to anyone. My only complaint is that they sometimes list ingredients such as water in the body of the text, which can be easy to miss if you’re not following closely.

Gingerbread

1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
3/4 tsp ground cinnamon
3/4 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup shortening (I use non-hydrogenated margarine)
1/2 cup light molasses
1 egg
1/2 cup water

Preheat oven to 350′F.

In a bowl, combine flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger, baking powder, and baking soda. Add shortening, molasses, egg and water. Beat until combined, then for two minutes more.

Pour into a greased and floured 8″ pan. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean. Serves 9.

For cupcakes - pour batter into muffin tins. Bake for 25 minutes and then check for doneness as above. Serves 12.

Orange Frosting

I kind of make this up as I go, adding more sugar until I get the right consistency, so all measurements are approximate.

1 cup powdered sugar
2 Tbsp softened butter
grated rind of 1 orange
the juice of 1 orange or enough to make a spreadable consistency

Blend sugar, butter, juice and rind until smooth and thick, adding more sugar as necessary to create a spreadable product.

We spent Saturday in the darkened confines of Innis Town Hall, a theatre on the U of T campus, watching films from the Planet in Focus film fest. It was a very foodie day with very foodie films.

The morning started off with the organic pancake breakfast prepared by Real Food for Real Kids. For $10 you got two hemp pancakes with organic maple syrup, organic green salad with organic brie, fresh fruit, breads made from the ovens at Dufferin Grove Park, plus a selection of organic jams and hemp spreads. And of course organic fair trade coffee and Happy Planet juice. The price included a free travel coffee mug, and the juices retail for $1.99 each, so it was not only delicious, but a really good deal.

A Fallen Maple
The first film was called A Fallen Maple and looked at one family’s issue with lead content in the maple syrup produced on their farm. Turns out, while the maple syrup industry is highly regulated in Quebec and Vermont, in Ontario, this is not the case, and small family producers using older equipment often have problems with lead in their syrup. The only solution is to replace the entire production system, which, for this family, would have cost in excess of $100,000. The kicker is that the woman running the farm, one of the few women maple syrup producers in Ontario, had voluntarily agree to test the province’s “Best Practices” system, only to discover that they actually caused higher levels of lead in her syrup than she would have had otherwise. The maple syrup production, which had been in the family for generations, had to be shut down because they couldn’t afford to upgrade the equipment.

Ripe For Change
Film number two was a look at agricultural practices in California, from the factory farms destroying the land to the revolution spearheaded by farmers and restaurateurs such as David Masumoto and Alice Waters. Touching on issues such as migrant workers rights and patent issues, as well as the fight against companies like Monsanto when their product contaminates non-GMO crops, this was a really interesting look at the food revolution, particularly now as organics are set to become huge as chains like Wal-Mart open up the market.

Trashin’ the Big Apple
This was a small, low-budget film exploring the garbage created by the city of New York and what happens to it on its journey from plate to landfill and the problems that occur when we dump so much compostable material in landfills. There is a “how to” section on creating a indoor worm-composting bin, but from the perspective of someone who did worm composting and found it fraught with problems, it’s not really very informative. Definitely an impetus for all big cities to look at city-wide composting solutions, however, particularly for apartment buildings.

Buffet: All You Can Eat Las Vegas
Who among us, upon visiting Las Vegas, hasn’t stood in awe at the sheer quantity of food on the typical casino buffet? From the factory-style processing of food as it arrives at the casino kitchens to the attitudes of the diners (take some of everything and throw away what you don’t like!) to the end destination for the tonnes of garbage created by the excess and waste (a pig farm where the pigs are fed a slop of ground-up scraps which undoubtedly includes other pork products – what’s the porcine version of BSE??), this film tracks your typical buffet meal from beginning to end. Having been to a Vegas buffet, this film scared me the most out of everything I saw on Saturday, because it showed the raw human greed and gluttony close up – people took three, even four plates piled with food, and either ate it all, which was scary and terribly disgusting, or threw most of it away, which was just sad. In fact, Buffet seems to say more about the sociological issues inherent in our society than it did about the food itself, particularly about how we as a society don’t even think about the waste that our vices create.

Grow Your Resistance
My least favourite of the six food flicks, mostly because of the style as opposed to the content. Following three Swedish “freegan” feminist dumpster divers as they search supermarket dumpsters for edible food, the film delves more into the political issues of food waste. The girls also grow a lot of their own food, but the focus of the film is on what they find in the dumpsters. Technically, it’s dark and grainy (most dumpster diving is done at night) and the translation is a bit hard to follow in places.

A Hell of Fishing
Stop eating fish! Filmmaker Vincent Bruno discovers that after northern countries have stripped their own waters close to bare of edible fish and shellfish over the past few decades, we are now doing the same to southern waters. Free trade agreements hurt the southern countries even more, and in countries like Senegal, trawlers from the north have removed all but the smallest of fishes from the shores, forcing the Senegalese to replace the fish used in their national dish with an inferior product – any that exists gets shipped to Europe!

The following article was originally written in early July 2006, but I thought it was appropriate to repost here now given the recent fuss about banning trans-fats in NYC. If New York pushes the ban through, it’s expected that other cities will follow, particularly if the ruling forces fast food restaurants to change their food preparation practices to fall in line with the decision. Here in Canada, we’ve been talking about the issue a lot, but no one seems to want to make the first move until a precedent has been set elsewhere first. Which is typically Canadian, I guess.

Canadians may soon be limiting their intake of trans fats, whether they like it or not.

Recent federal task force recommendations indicate that trans fat consumption should be limited. As consumers have little control over the ingredients that go into pre-packaged or restaurant food, the recommendations would be primarily directed towards food manufacturers and the restaurant industry.

Trans fats, which occur naturally in meat and dairy products, can be created in vegetable oils by the process of hydrogenation. Hydrogenated oils have a longer shelf life and are often used in processed foods such as cookies, pastries and potato chips.

The task force recommended a maximum of no more than 5% trans fats in all processed foods and restaurant meals. This would remove the majority of industrially produced trans fats in processed food - currently some baked goods have trans fats up to 45% of the total fat in the product - and would prove beneficial for both heart and cholesterol issues in many individuals. According to the CBC:

The limits are meant to cut average daily intake to less than one per cent of total fat, as recommended by the World Health Organization.

The recommendations are consistent with Canada’s nutrition labels, the types of products available and the eating habits of Canadians, said committee co-chair Mary L’Abbé, of Health Canada’s nutritional sciences branch. The limits would apply to all products sold in Canada, including those made in the U.S., she said.

Conversion to healthier fats could prove difficult for some businesses, particularly small restaurants, so the task force has suggested a two-year timeline for implementation. The recommendations must still be approved by the Canadian federal government, but if passed, Canadians would soon see changes to their favourite foods, and hopefully to their overall health.

Frequently Asked Questions About Trans Fats

This article was originally posted to FitFare, part of the WellFed Network.

Followers of the ol’ Save Your Fork journal will remember that I recently discovered I can eat small quantities of cheese again after suffering from dairy allergies for years. This has led to more and more experimentation in terms of trying new cheeses. We always come home with the favourites; the Mimolette, the Brie de Meaux; but we’ve also started trying new stuff. During a recent trip to St. Lawrence Market, we stumbled upon a whole display of artisinal Canadian cheeses, mostly from Quebec, but also from New Brunswick and even Manitoba. The problem with the market though, is there are so many smells, it’s often hard to zero in one one. And the cheese was too cold, so you couldn’t really get a good nose on it.

After we got everything home, there were a few cheeses that were a little more “feety” than we had anticipated. Double-wrapping the stuff didn’t put a dent in the stink. Finally we broke down and put it all in a Tupperware container. And then, a few days later, when I could take no more, I sent off Greg to Beer Geek night with the smelliest of the lot.

Which is why I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why my kitchen stunk like something had died in there. I mean, I literally pulled out the fridge and stove, thinking some food had gotten under there, or maybe a mouse, even though mice in a concrete apartment building seems improbable. I wrapped up the big bag of dogfood, thinking that was the source. I scrubbed down the cupboard where the garbage resides, I took apart the burners of the stove.

Nothing.

Then we figured out that the stink seemed to occur in conjunction with the fridge door being opened, even thought the inside of the fridge itself didn’t smell bad. I pulled everything out, looking for some blue furry dead hunk of zucchini, or some slimy green onions. And then I opened the cheese container.

Nothing was bad. Much of what was there was still in the original wrapping. It was just really, really stinky cheese. Really, really stinky. And this wasn’t even the stuff we considered to be feety when we brought it home!

So now we’ve got to eat the damn stuff so our kitchen will stop smelling like a Chinatown Durianfruit display on a hot summer afternoon.