From Word To Word

I went to the market this morning and came home to a warm kitchen, which, considering the temperature outside and the lack of insulation in my house, was quite remarkable.   My wife was baking her favourite cold-rise sweet dinner rolls for the dinner we are attending tonight, and she was preparing our bread for the week also, a Swedish rye bread that she was trying for the first time.  My mother-in-law was in the kitchen too, simmering the stock for a chicken soup intended for our church’s soup luncheon tomorrow, so I put the groceries away amid the smells of rising dough and soup stock, and then I had the chance to add to them, beginning my own soup for tomorrow, potato and bacon and green onion and parmesan and cream cheese, and I put the pear pies in to bake, and I remembered, once again, that there is nothing like a warm kitchen in winter.

I first began roasting coffee three years ago.  My mother-in-law bought me a roaster for Christmas, and after I was finally able to source a regular supply of green beans, I fell in love, not only with the taste, but also with the addition to my morning coffee ritual.

The problem was that the roaster was a little delicate for life in our house.  It made very nice coffee, and it also had a basket to catch the chaff, a reasonable timing system, and a cooling phase for after the roasting was complete, but the roaster itself always seemed to be breaking.  The chaff basket was a bit top heavy, so the glass container beneath it would sometimes tip, and it broke twice and had to be replaced at a tidy sum.  Then the element burnt out for no reason that I could figure, except maybe that our kitchen is plenty cold on a winter morning and the element may have had too extreme a temperature change.  When I looked into the substantial cost of replacing the element and then added in the cost of replacing the glass holders occasionally, it was more than the price of a new roaster, so I thought that I would take a look at some other roasters that were hopefully a bit more durable.  What I discovered, however, was that a special roaster is not at all necessary to roasting your own coffee.  Not only are there several stove top methods, all of which seem to require a bit of practise, but there is also the standard air popcorn popper, which makes very good coffee with only a little practice, and which has been my primary way of roasting coffee ever since, something like a year now.

Besides making very good coffee, an air popcorn popper is relatively cheap, fairly durable, and widely available.  Even good quality poppers can be purchased for under fifty dollars new, and they can often be found in thrift stores for next to nothing.  They do not have a chaff basket, or a timer, or a cooling cycle, of course, but a large bowl in front of the spout will do to catch the chaff, and the time will depend on the temperature and your preference anyway, and air cooled beans taste no different than machine cooled beans, so the poppers have the advantage of the roasters in almost every way I can think.  Besides, while I am certainly the sort of foodie who delights in preparing things at home, I am not the sort of foodie who expresses this delight mostly through acquiring specialty gadgets, and the popper lets me use something that I have already and lets me hack it for use in ways that it was never intended, all which pleases me very much.

Now, if you are interested in learning to roast your own coffee this way, which is an interest that many people have expressed to me in the last year, the process is fairly simple.  First, you need to acquire an air popper if you do not have one already.  Pretty much any air popper will do, but it does need to be an air popper rather than one of the mechanical poppers out there, because the beans need the air flow.  The only other thing to keep in mind is that a higher wattage is probably better than a lower one, which may be another reason to try a thrift store where you might find one of the old high power, low efficiency, unbreakable units that they used to sell back in the day.

You will then need to find some green beans.  This is not a simple thing here in Guelph.  Though we do have several places that roast their own green beans, and though they can sometimes be badgered into selling some of them, none of these retailers sell green beans as a regular part of their business, which can be a bit frustrating.  There are several options for ordering beans from Toronto, like The Green Beanery and Merchants of Green Coffee, but the closest and most customer friendly source I have found is Eco Coffee in Kitchener.  I use them almost exclusively, and I have never been disappointed.

Once you have your beans, fill the hopper of the air popper up to whatever its regular capacity would be for popcorn kernels.  Avoid the temptation to fill it too full, because the beans need to circulate freely.  Replace the lid, place a bowl under the spout, and turn on the popper.  The roasting time will be highly variable, not only because of air temperature and humidity, but because everyone likes their coffee roasted differently, so never just set a timer and walk away from the popper.  Instead, do whatever else needs to be done in the kitchen and keep an ear on what the popper is doing, because the progress of roasting will be much more evident to the ear than to the eye.

After a few minutes you should begin to hear a distinct popping or crackling sound.  This is called first crack, and it is the sound of the thin outer skins of the beans popping.  About this time you should begin to see these skins, delicate, light brown husks, come floating out of the popper into the bowl, as the beans rub the skins off each other and the air blows them out of the hopper.  These husks will be few at first, then there will be a bunch of them at the same time, and then they will dwindle again, much the same as popcorn pops, and once most of the husks are spent, the beans will be ready for those who like a light roast.

After a few minutes more, during which there should be very little sound, the cracking will  begin again.  This, logically enough, is called second crack, and those who like a medium roast should stop roasting just when they hear the first of these cracks.  The second crack is caused by the centre part of the bean, where it used to attach to the cherry, popping off as the bean expands.  These bits look like little black discs, and they will soon come floating out of the popper as well, slowly at first, then rapidly, and then slowly once more.  Once the second crack is complete, the beans will be ready for those who like a dark roast.

Of course, there are those of us who like our beans darker even than a dark roast, who prefer a French roast or even better, and we will need to keep roasting for a few minutes even past the second crack stage, until the beans start to look very shiny and oily.  At this point, you may even see a bit of a haze begin to emerge from the popper, like when oil is heated in an empty pan, which is essentially the case as the coffee bean oil hits its smoke point on the side of the popper.  This is a good sign that the beans will be dark enough to satisfy even those with the most bitter palettes.

At whatever stage you think your beans are done, you should empty them from the hopper immediately, so that the beans on the outside are not left against the hot metal.  Dump them into a bowl and leave them to cool.  Ideally, they should sit for several hours, but I generally wait only until they are air temperature before grinding them and making that first perfect cup of coffee.

This may seem like a lot of work for your java, but if you turn the roaster on first thing in the morning and leave it to roast while you prepare the rest of your breakfast, the sound and the smell make for an anticipatory experience that more than pays for the time it takes.  I highly recommend at least trying the experiment, and I will even volunteer my assistance if any of you need some help with your first attempt.  It will only cost you a cup of your freshly roasted coffee.

After Halloween last year, I wrote about my frustration with the commercialization of the holiday and my intention to make our celebrations a little more community friendly this year.

In the event, I discovered that making caramel in large quantities can be a touchy business, either staying too thin and sliding of the apples or becoming too thick and clumping everywhere, which meant that they were certainly not the prettiest caramel apples, even if they tasted quite good, a fact that I tested more than once. The apple cider was also not quite up to standard, since I was unable to find the time to get some apricot brandy from the liquor store.

Even so, things went very well. We gave away by far the better part of sixty apples and a similar number of apple ciders, and many people, especially the parents, seemed genuinely delighted. I had to encourage several of the adults to leave the apples for the children and to content themselves with cider, and the oldest among them sometimes became quite nostalgic.

It was a real pleasure for me, despite the cold, to sit on the porch and see the excitement of the children and the surprise of the adults, to have people stay long enough to drink a cup of cider rather than just take a few candies and leave, to have the holiday be something more, even if only a little more, than a commercial candy exchange.

Now I just have to perfect the art of making caramel before Halloween comes around again.

As of last night, our house has now switched stoves from electric to gas.

This may not seem like an event of much significance to some of you, but a gas stove is one of the many odd and domestic things that I tend to romanticize.  It is not only that gas stoves are superior for cooking, which they are for many reasons, I assure you.  It is also that gas stoves are associated for me with some of the happiest times in my life.  The sounds of the starter clicking and of the soft pop as the flame catches and of the whisper of the burning element all return me to the cool of early summer mornings at the camp on Manitoulin Island, to dinners prepared in the first home that my wife and I ever owned together, to the kitchens at Camp Hermosa bustling around me as I drink my coffee in the corner. There is something more tactile about gas stoves, something more comforting, more reassuring, more homely, at least for me. Perhaps it is that a gas stove can still be seen and heard to be burning something, to be still related somehow, however distantly, to the fire of the hearth, to times and places, not so distant, even now, when cooking meant working around the family fire, the family hearth.

Of course, I could very well be making much more of this than I should, but I am very glad, even so, to be cooking with gas once more.

I have this flour mill, have had it for several years now, ever since my Grandmother Hill decided that she was too old to be grinding her own flour anymore.  She told me that it was “a very good grinder, a very good grinder, do you hear?” and she made me promise that I would never sell it or give it away, so it has been sitting in my basement, unused, for more than half a decade.

That was, of course, until I went to visit Loonsong Garden a few weekends ago and had a chance to learn a little bit about how grain is grown and about how flour is ground.  So, when I got home, I went into the basement and dug out the mill to see whether it was a stone grinder, which it is, and which is good.  I spent a little time playing with it  and then sent an email to Loonsong about getting a little whole grain for experimentation.

Yesterday, the owner of Loonsong came by my house unexpectedly, dropping some flour off for a friend of mine.  He took a look at my mill, and it turns out that my Grandmother was quite right, as she has so often been.  Not only does it use stones to grind the flour, which is good for all sorts of reasons, but it is an older model, so it is built far more solidly than anything available to the public now and is geared more slowly, so the flour does not overheat as it is being ground.  In other words, it is far too good a machine to be rusting in my basement, so I may be compelled to add flour grinding to my weekly activities.  It also means that anyone who has grain that needs to be ground, and I know that there are countless of you out there, is very welcome to come and use it, so long as I can have a slice of any bread that you bake.

As my children have already posted, our family visited Loonsong Garden while we were on Manitoulin Island this past weekend.  Loonsong is a farm that grows organic cereal crops and grinds whole flours.  It also grows vegetables for a local Community Shared Agriculture program.  My mother first introduced us to Loonsong at Christmas, when she brought us four of their flours as a Christmas gift.  My wife, who has begun breadmaking much more seriously, has really enjoyed using them, particularly the Red Fife Wheat flour, which has a really beautiful flavour.

Red Fife, as the owners of Loonsong will tell you, has a story of its own that is well worth telling.  Myth has it that Red Fife began as a single hat full of grain sent on to Canada from Glasgow, and that the whole first crop was destroyed by rust except for a single plant that must have been an accidental hybrid of some sort, and that this single plant was the parent of all Red Fife grown today.  It was robust enough to thrive in the sometimes difficult Canadian climate, resistant to rust, and did not require nitrogen rich soil to grow, so it was used to breed many new variations.  These newer strains and other wheat varieties were often bred for higher yields, however, so the original Red Fife was gradually replaced, until there was little of its seed remaining.  Only in the last thirty years or so has it become used more widely again, especially by organic farmers for whom its resistance to rust and ability to grow without chemical fertilizers are highly desirable, despite its relatively low yields.

The flour that Loonsong makes from Red Fife is also distinct from commercial flours in that it is truly whole grain.  Most flours include only the endosperm, the carbohydrate heavy part of the wheat seed that provides nutrition for the growing wheat germ until it can grow leaves and photosynthesize for itself.  Commercial whole grain flours include the bran, the outer coating of the seed, which adds needed roughage but not much nutritive value to the flour.  Loonsong’s flours, however, include literally the whole wheat seed: the endosperm, the bran, and the germ.  The benfit of this is that the flour contains the many nutritious oils and proteins of the germ, but at the cost of a shorter shelf life, since these oils will make the flour go rancid more quickly, so whole flours do need to be refrigerated

Loonsong’s whole grain Red Fife flour is really beautiful.  It is far more nutritious than most flours, and it is delicious, with a flavour that is mildly suggestive of nuts.  It also makes great bread, though it is too heavy to be used in most bread machines.  It works best in old-fashioned recipes, since many of these recipes were made with hand ground whole flours in mind.  The following is one that we have been enjoying lately:

Jaya’s Bread

Mix 2 cups of stone ground whole wheat flour, 2 cups of rye flour, and 2 cups of unbleached white flour.

Warm 1 pint of buttermilk and 1 cup of water to about 30 degrees Celsius.  Stir in 2 tablespoons of brown sugar, 1 tablespoon of dark molasses, and a dash of salt.  Stir in 2 rounded tablespoons of dry yeast and let it proof.

Gradually add 4 cups of the  flour to the wet ingredients to form a stiff batter.  Add 3/4 cups of melted lard or shortening and knead until the dough is smooth.  Let the dough rise to about double its size.

Knead in the remainder of the flour.  Let the dough rise until roughly double its size.  If the dough is too sticky, add unbleached white flour until it reaches a good consistency, as much as 4 cups.

Beat the dough down and divide it into three parts.  Shape each part into a loaf and place in a loaf pan.  Let the loaves rise to about double their size.

Bake at 350 degrees Celsius for about an hour.  Remove the loaves from the pans and let them stand until cool.

The result is a heavy, nutty, whole wheat bead that is great for almost any purpose, but best, at least in my opinion, when sliced thickly, toasted lightly, and eaten with nothing but butter.

If you would like to know more about Loonsong and their products, you can phone them at <705-368-0460> or email them at <loonsong@vianet.ca>

I have just had another request for my Bev Stroganov recipe, so rather than keep writing it for people individually, I thought I might just post it here where I can direct people as I have need.  This is one of those recipes that I first made when I still lived in my parents’ home and have been experimenting ever since.  I very rarely make it exactly the same twice, but the following is the gist of the dish.

Bev Stroganov

Make a paste with three tablespoons of ground mustard, three or more teaspoons of ground pepper, two teaspoons of sugar, a pinch of salt, and a little water.  The paste should be wet enough that it is smooth but dry enough not to be runny.  You can experiment with different varieties of mustard here, but I would recommend that you use preground mustard or use an electric grinder rather than a mortar and pestle for your whole mustard, just to be sure the mustard is ground finely enough to make a good paste.  Let this paste rest at room temperature.

Thinly slice four or five cups of yellow onions into rings.  Thinly slice a pound or so of mushrooms.  I use brown mushrooms most often, but I have used shitake and oyster mushrooms also, so experiment as you like.

Take a two or three pound fillet of beef.  Cut it first across the fillet into rounds that are about a quarter inch thick.  Then cut each round into quarter inch strips, this time cutting with the grain.  This process will make strips of beef that will be tender and easy to chew.  If you cut the stripe so that they go with the grain with both cuts, you will just get long bits of whole muscle that will be much less tender.

Heat a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil in a heavy skillet over very high heat.  Wait until the oil begins to haze over the pan.  Add the mushrooms and onions, then immediately reduce the heat to low.  Cook for twenty or thirty minutes, stirring occasionally, until the vegetable have softened, then drain them through a sieve and set aside.

Heat two or three more tablespoons of oil in the skillet over high heat until the oil is hor but not smoking.  Add just enough meat to cover the bottom of the skillet and brown it, then transfer the meat to a bowl and set it aside.  Repeat this process until all the meat has been browned.  Stir in the mustard paste.  When it is well combined, stir in four cups of sour cream.  Cover the mixture and cook until the sauce is well heated.  Taste the mixture and add mustard, salt, and pepper as necessary.

Serve over egg noodles or, if you want to be a little more authentic, over thinly sliced and very crisp French fried potatoes.

My sister-in-law was over yesterday morning, and she commented on the dried orange zest that I was adding to a recipe, wanting to know where I had purchased it.  Now, it is certainly possible to buy dried orange peel at many bulk food stores, and I have done so myself, but this was zest that I had dried myself, something that shocked her a little.  She had always just tossed her orange peels, and the process of zesting and drying that much peel seemed onerous to her, which is fair.  Our conversation got me thinking, however, about the leavings of things that I used to throw away but now use regularly in my cooking, and I thought that I might list them here, first, to share something of my own kitchen practices, and second, to solicit ideas about any other leavings that I could be using in my cooking.

1.  I zest and dry the peels of any citrus that I will not be using immediately: orange, lemon, lime, even grapefruit when I have it in the house, which is infrequently.  I add these things to desserts and to curries and to stirfries, and I use them as toppings for things like puddings and custards and icecream, and I sometimes add them to some jams and preserves.

2.  I strip and dry the tops of carrots, which can be added to soups and stews to provide carrot flavour without actually using carrots.  They are also great in making soup stock.  You can even steam them with butter and lemon and eat them as a green vegetable, though my family does not exactly love this.

3.  I dry and grind stale bread into bread crumbs for breading meat and using as toppings on casseroles and whatnot.

4.  I save the leavings of certain vegetables for making soup stock: carrot and onion and celery, certainly, but also sweet peppers, garlic, broccoli, mushrooms, anything that is not too starchy.

What other leavings could I be using?

I was asked to bring a dessert to a potluck party tonight, a farewell gathering for friends  of ours who will soon be heading to Chile.  I decided to make one of childhood favourites, Oranje Cooke.  It is a recipe that our family learned in the Dutch church that we attended when I was a child, and the recipe in my book claims to be from the kitchen of Tina DeVries, a woman I vaguely remember, so I never questioned my family lore about the dish, though much of it now seems to me a little questionable.  We were always told that Oranje Cooke was Dutch for Orange Cake, which may well be true, but it raised the question of why the recipe does not actually have any oranges in it.  This was because, we were told, the name of the dish actually refers to the colour orange as a symbol of Holland’s royal family, which descends from Willem van Oranje, or William of Orange.  Again, this explanation seems plausible enough, only the icing that was put on this cake, every time I can remember eating it, whether it was made by my own family of one of the Dutch ladies from the church, was pink.  There was no explanation at all for this inconsistency.

So, today, as I got the recipe out of my book for perhaps the fiftieth time, and as I wondered about why there should be pink icing on an orange cake for the fiftieth time also, I decided to answer this question once and for all.  Unfortunately, the internet solved nothing.  I can find no results for Oranje Cooke recipes that look anything like mine, no results that are even without oranges.  A search for Dutch Spice Cake, which I think more accurately describes the dish, returns any number of recipes, some more or less like mine, but none very similar, and none that specify pink icing, or even orange icing for that matter.

All of this makes me feel much better about the fact that I have been alterring the recipe as long as I have been making it for myself.  Despite all the reasons that I was given as a child, I grate orange rind into it, and I make the icing orange as well.

Oranje Cooke

Mix together, in a very large bowl, a pound of shortening, four eggs, three cups of brown sugar, and a teasponn of vanilla.  Stir in a tablespoon of anise seed, two or three tablespoons of grated orange rind, and about two teaspoons each, more or less depending on your taste, of ground cinnamon, ground nutmeg, ground allspice, ground cloves, and baking powder.  Stir in four cups of flour, which should produce a heavy, sticky dough.  Press the dough about half an inch thick into an edged cookie pan.  Bake it for ten minutes or so in a 450 degree oven.  Let it cool, then spread it it with orange (or pink) butter icing.  Cut it into squares, and enjoy.

Yesterday was a milestone in the long running battle I have been waging to find a satisfactory system for organizing my spices.  The history of this battle will probably not interest you, but I will share it anyway.

It begins with my realization, quite early in my cooking career, that the little bags or bottles in which spices are usually sold have almost no value as storage containers.  The bags are unsealed, continually falling over, inconvenient to handle, and difficult to sort through.  The little jars are sealable and stable, but they are too small for spoons and fingers, unstackable, and not easy to refill.

So, I invested in a number of plastic containers made for the purpose of holding spices.  They had a lid on each side: one for shaking and one for spoons.  They came in sets of twelve, and I bought two sets, so I had enough for what I wanted at the time.  I quickly realized, however, that these were too small for things like cinnamon sticks and whole nutmeg and had too small an opening for me to use my fingers, which is my preferred way of measuring.  There were soon also too few of them for my growing collection and I could not find any more of them.  There were other similar containers available, but they were unmatched, and I will confess that this disturbed the obsessive compulsive part of my personality to a completely unreasonable degree.

My next attempt, one that worked well enough for many years, was simply to use the little plastic containers from the bulk food stores where I was buying many of my spices anyway.  They had tops wide enough for even the biggest spoons and fingers.  They came in one cup, two cup, and four cup sizes.  They were stackable.  They were cheap.  There were also virtually infinite quantities of them, which was important as my collection approached a hundred spices and teas and other sundries.  I still had some reservations about them, however.  The seals were not great, so the spices tended to age too quickly, and they were not very strong, so the lids were always splitting and needing to be replaced.  Still, I had methods for dealing with any spices that really needed a strong seal, and the arrangement was quite functional.

This Christmas, however, my mother gave me several boxes of glass cannisters in two cup and four cup sizes.  The seals were very good.  The tops were a little narrower than the bulk store containers but still very functional.  I decided to make the shift.  Unfortunately, though she gave me more than a dozen of the large containers and several dozen of the small, these quantities did not even approach the needs of my collection.  So, I had her tell me where they had been purchased, and I called every outlet in the area, eventually finding a place that had enough stock for me to buy an entire  case of the larger canisters and three cases of the smaller ones.  I then spent the better part of yesterday afternoon transferring and labeling everything.  The results were much to my satisfaction.

The upper shelf has the four cup canisters, two deep and fifteen wide, and they hold the beans and nuts and dried fruit and whatnot.  The lower shelf has the two cup cannisters, three deep and two high and fifteen wide, and they hold the spices proper, loosely organized, with ground spices behind their whole counterparts and the less frequently used items well at the back.  The shelf to the side has my twenty odd teas and infusions.  There is even, in reserve, a whole case of the two cup cannisters in the basement, to account for breakage and additions to the collection. Everything is in its place, and there is a place for everything.

I am well pleased.