Recently in Cooking Category

My previous attempt at making homemade chocolate milk used cocoa powder. But I recently had the bright idea to melt a dark chocolate bar and pour that into the milk. So I calculated that 10 grams of a chocolate bar would be equivalent to two tablespoons of cocoa powder. I melted it in a glass cup. mixed in 60 grams of agave nectar, and poured it into some whole milk. Unfortunately, something was very wrong. It tasted pretty weak. So I melted in 30 more grams with not much of a change. You could tell what was wrong when the milk was poured out. There were still large clumps of chocolate left at the bottom.

So I tried again. This time I bought some Texas Daily Harvest Milk at Monument's market. And I switched to using a 99% dark chocolate baking bar. But, instead of melting the chocolate in a microwave and then pouring it into milk, I melted it on the stove with milk. The recipe follows:

Pour off 230 grams of milk to create space for the new ingredients. Melt 60 grams of 99% dark chocolate along with 240 grams of milk in a pot on the stove over medium heat. Stir constantly and watch that the milk does not come to a boil. When the chocolate has melted completely, add 120 grams of agave nectar and 4 grams of salt (as another test of a theory). Place the mixture in a blender and mix it on medium for 5 minutes (just to be extra sure). Pour the mixture back into the milk and chill until cold.

This time it is more homogenized. Not completely as some particles will settle down to the bottom. Still not sure if the salt is a good thing or a bad thing...

Here is my current setup for food photography using small camera flashes. Each stand is built from:

• LumiQuest ProMax SoftBox III (35.95)
• Canon Speedlite 580EX II Flash (404.95)
• Pocket Wizard AC7 RF HardShield (35.00)
• Pocket Wizard FlexTT5 Transceiver For Canon TTL Flashes and Digital SLR Cameras (229.00)
• Manfrotto 026 Swivel Lite-Tite Umbrella Adapter (33.10)
• Manfrotto 5991B Nano Black Light Stand 6.2' (56.50)

The camera taking the picture is a Canon EOS 7D. On it, sitting on the hot-shoe, is a Pocket Wizard MiniTT1. And, sitting on the hot-shoe above that, is a Pocket Wizard AC3 Zone Controller.

I tried recreating another of my favorite Agua Frescas from the local Mexican Ice Cream store. I bought some "Concentrate Cooking Tamarind" from the Asian section at H.E.B.. I then diluted it with water and added some raw Blue Agave nectar. But it tasted horrible! Very earthy and gritty. Hrm. Maybe next time I'll try straining it through a lot of cheese cloth...

I came across this recipe from Serious Eats and had to try it. The baking soda had some sort of chemical reaction to the onions and quickly broke down the cellular structure. I wonder why.

Once I had the oniony paste, I then caramelized some sliced onions the old fashioned way. And I toasted some jalapeno cheese bread in the toaster with a slice of Monterrey pepper jack cheese on top. I also opened up a box of chicken broth. I then combined all of the previous into the finished product. Mmmm... It was pretty tasty!

I wanted to take a picture of the bas-relief Ziploc logo. Since I am used to taking pictures of food with a flash, I whipped them out. However, capturing the minute detail is hard. Especially when you cannot see the results immediately. How does changing the angle of the light affect the image, or the camera positioning, or the light levels? This process takes time. Which was enough to allow for condensation to mar the smooth surface of the caramel. So I put the caramel back in the refrigerator and took a time out.

When I went back to it, I used my large, diffused led bank. Now I had real-time feedback as I moved the subject around the camera. So, for a time-constrained image use some bright, and constant, lighting.

I bought some new lights recently. Two ePhoto 1000 LED 5500K Professional Video Studio Portrait LED Light Panel Lighting Light Panel. My kitchen is rather dark. Its not next to windows for natural lighting. So it relies on fluorescent lighting. Which is okay for normal use. But not nearly bright enough for video. I tried out three halogen work lights from Home Depot. These are pretty cheap. You can work around the yellow-brown tint. But they put out a lot of heat.

LED lights are the wave of the future. They use less electricity and they run cool. The only problem is with the light balance. But that will become less of a problem as the technology progresses.

This time around, I decided to not talk as I was cooking. And I just recorded the background noises. This meant I had to wait for the refrigerator to stop cooling and turn off the air conditioner.

Now I had to write a dialog and record that track separately. Unfortunately, I forgot to turn off the computer's speaker while I was watching the video and speaking my lines. And I caught an instant messaging beep at the end. I also didn't bother with timing out the lines and fitting them to what I was doing on the video. Sigh, this gets complicated rather quickly.

Cooking Caramel from Mark Hamzy on Vimeo.

This recipe is for a quick version of caramel sauce. Instead of using white sugar, you use dark brown sugar. The molasses is what you would normally get when you caramelize the sugar. You also mix the cream in with the sugar and just cook off the water without burning the sugar and milk solids. So I wanted to show you what stages the liquid goes through as the water slowly cooks off. Keep in mind that it will snowball towards the end. Water keeps the temperature pegged at the boiling point until it boils off. Once the water is gone, it will offer no protection and the sugar (and other solids) will quickly heat up.

When sugar syrup is heated, it goes through the following stages (which is how it acts when it is cooled back down in ice water.

Given how easy it is to make my lemon-lime aid, I thought I would see if I could replicate another favorite drink of mine: the agua fresca at La Selva Mexican Ice Cream store.

I took some pineapple chunks and blended it in water until smooth. The result was really thick and cloudy. Not at all smooth and clear. Straining it off helped out a little. But I think that I need a gravy strainer for this. Or maybe a siphon.

I also made some caramelized simple syrup to sweeten it with. I really have to come up with an easier way to make this. Basically, you take a cup of sugar and put it in a pan. Dry. And heat it up until it turns light brown. Take it off the heat and pour in a cup of water. The problem is that the browned sugar is 340 degrees and solidifies when the water is poured in. You have to mix it around until the candy sugar melts. Which takes a long time and a lot of work. I think it would be easier to just use dark brown sugar in a cup of water and boil it a little bit to break down the sugar.

I do like the effect that the two speedlites had on the picture. It really darkened down the foreground and background.

My new camera, the 7D, can take HD videos. Since I like food photography, I wanted to see how food videography would work. And are there a whole new set of issues. While a flash works well for a picture, a video needs constant light. And a lot of it at that. Halogen lights are cheap, but they are hot and need color correction. The next problem is syncing an external audio recorder with the video footage. The onboard audio microphone is minimalistic and is not good enough for a clean source. I now understand why clapper-boards are used. You need a quick and clear sound pulse to match against an obvious video event. I had to make due with clapping my hands. I also had to learn Adobe Premiere CS5 and Adobe After Effects CS5. Which are really complicated programs.

Cooking Video first test from Mark Hamzy on Vimeo.

For my first video, I decided to make butter. Which turned out to be surprisingly easy! I was shocked how simple it is to turn cream into butter. Just pour whipping cream into a blender, and blend it until it breaks. The only difficult part is trying to squeeze out any remaining liquid from the clumps of butter. And the leftover water (containing whey and small clumps of cream), called buttermilk, tastes pretty good.

I really should have made this before.

Making Butter from Mark Hamzy on Vimeo.

I have bought a number of cookbooks over the past year. They are:

• Good Eats: The Early Years
• Bakewise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking with Over 200 Magnificent Recipes
• Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods
• Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking
• Under Pressure
• Alinea

Unfortunately, they have remained on my breakfast table instead of residing in the bookshelf. I am now motivated to place them where they belong. However, the bookshelf is already full. So books must be kicked out.

The cookbooks are (top shelf):

• Central Market Cooks
• I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking
• I'm Just Here for More Food: Food x Mixing + Heat = Baking
• Cookwise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealed
• What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained
• The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore
• Think Like a Chef
• The Perfect Recipe: Getting It Right Every Time : Making Our Favorite Dishes the Absolute Best They Can Be
• How to Cook Without a Book: Recipes and Techniques Every Cook Should Know by Heart
• The Minimalist Cooks at Home: Recipes That Give You More Flavor from Fewer Ingredients in Less Time
• The Minimalist Cooks Dinner
• The New Elegant but Easy Cookbook
• The Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook
• On Rice: 60 Fast and Easy Toppings That Make the Meal
• Splendid Soups: Recipes and Master Techniques for Making the World's Best Soups
• Essentials of Cooking
• Vegetables
• Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making
• The Soup Peddler's Slow & Difficult Soups: Recipes And Reveries
• Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking
• Classic Home Cooking
• Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book With Test Kitchen Tips
• La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange: The Original Companion for French Home Cooking
• Book Of Perserves
• Vegan Recipes

(middle shelf):

• The first ever un-edited & un-tested Hatch chile pepper recipe book
• Mexico One Plate At A Time
• Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen: Capturing the Vibrant flavors of a World-Class Cuisine
• 30-Minute Meals
• Veggie Meals: Rachael Ray's 30-Minute Meals
• Sweet Simplicity: Jacques Pepin's Fruit Desserts (Pepin, Jacques)
• The Cake Mix Doctor
• Better Homes and Gardens Cookies Cookies Cookies Any-Day Treats/Christmastime Treats
• Betty Crocker's Ultimate Cookie Book
• The Pizza Gourmet: Simple Recipes for Spectacular Pizza
• Classic Sourdoughs: A Home Baker's Handbook
• Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery: Recipes for the Connoisseur
• Breaking Bread With Father Dominic
• Breaking Bread with Father Dominic 2
• The Book of Miso Soup (Quick & Easy Series)
• Classic Rice Cookbook
• Washoku: Recipes From The Japanese Home Kitchen
• The Japanese Kitchen
• Harumi's Japanese Cooking
• Healthy Noodles
• A First Book of Japanese Cooking
• Sushi Making at Home
• Easy Japanese Pickling in Five Minutes to One Day: 101 Full-Color Recipes for Authentic Tsukemono
• The Book of Tofu: Protein Source of the Future...Now!
• The Book of Miso: Savory, High-Protein Seasoning
• Easy Family Recipes from a Chinese-American Childhood (Knopf Cooks American Series)
• The Cuisines of Asia: Nine Great Oriental Cuisines by Technique
• The Curry Book: Memorable Flavors and Irresistible Recipes From Around the World
• 660 Curries
• Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey Through Southeast Asia

Our group at work got together and held a pot-luck picnic at Emma Long Metropolitan Park. I decided to make a cold, black bean salad. It was pretty easy to make and turned out tasty. I cooked the beans and diced the remaining ingredients. It was a mixture of beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, and mangoes. Unfortunately, only a tiny bit was actually eaten by people. I kept a couple of meals worth for me. But threw out 95% of it because it sat out all day. Oh well, I guess I won't go to the effort to make something from scratch again...

I came across this recipe from SmittenKitchen about an easy way to make biscuits and I had to try it. There are just five ingredients (well four if you don't top it off with melted butter). You sift together flour, salt, and baking powder and then mix in heavy cream. The only problem that I have with this recipe is that it doesn't mix smoothly or evenly. At least when I tried it by hand with a spatula. I'll have to try it on a stand mixer the next time.

The first time I made this, I just plopped down the dough onto a pan, sliced it with a knife and then put it into the oven. Unfortunately, it is not easy for the steam to escape using this method. The cooked biscuits are easy to stick in the freezer and the reheat later in a toaster oven.

The next time I tried freezing the raw dough after I cut out a circle and topped it with melted butter.

You place a single frozen biscuit in a preheated toaster oven set to 350 and cook for 10-15 minutes. And it comes out like this! Which is best topped by sorghum syrup.

These biscuits are extremely tender. Perhaps too tender. I think you need to mix the batter more to encourage development of gluten.

After watching Alton Brown's Live And Let Diet episode, I had to modify my grilled tuna melt sandwich. This time I used H.E.B.'s Jalapeno Cheese bread, Boar's Head Monterey Pepper Jack Cheese, King Oscar Finest Brisling Sardines, and Hass Avocados. It turned out to be quite decadent. Definitely comfort food!

Lately, I have been on a black bean mission with my cooking experiments. I have tried a more vegetarian version by substituting gelatin or pectin as the thickening agent instead of beef bones (I never got around to trying Lieber's Unflavored Jel). But it just doesn't work as well. So, for this attempt, I went back to my old standby oxtails. However, I did try adding smoked paprika. This did not make the beans better in my opinion. You couldn't really notice the paprika note and I did not like the bright red tint either.

Back to umami though which is the real point of this recipe. The first interesting blog mention of umami that I came across was umami salt. However, I didn't act immediately upon it. It percolated in the far recesses of my mind for a while.

I started to research lists of foods high in umami. One version lists bonito and kombu among others. This made me think of the fundamental Japanese soup stock, dashi. Since it is a mild broth, I thought it would be perfect as a base for cooking the black beans. The next easy umami thing to add is shiitake mushrooms that are ground into a fine powder.

When one of my cooking blogs that I read posted about extracting the best flavor of kombu here, the tipping point was finally reached! I researched the kombu highest in glutamic acid. However, you need good luck in finding specialized types in Austin. I did find Hidaka Kombu in Asahi Imports. Also, here is an interesting article on kombu.

I made another discovery about cooking beans as well! Soaking and cooking them in hard water will not soften them fully. Here is an article which talks about the problem. I suggest using distilled water to both soak and cook in.

So, the recipe follows:

Dissolve 3 heaping tablespoons of Kosher salt in 7 cups of distilled water. Sort one pound of black beans for any rocks, broken or discolored beans. Soak the beans overnight.

Cook 14 grams of Hidaka Kombu and 14 grams of dried bonito shavings (Katsuobushi) in 6 cups of distilled water simmering at 65 degrees Celsius (149 degrees Fahrenheit) for one hour. Strain.

Rinse hydrated beans well and put into the dashi stock. Grind 15 grams of shiitake mushrooms into a fine powder with a clean coffee grinder. Add two bay leaves, 5 cloves of minced garlic, 1 tablespoon of onion powder, tablespoon ground black peppercorns, 1/2 teaspoon of Wright's Liquid Hickory Smoke, and 2 pounds of beef oxtails. Cook, covered, in an oven set to 275 degrees for 1:30:00. Remove oxtails and bay leaves. Add smoked salt to taste.

Smoked Ham, stuffing, sweet potatoes, and cranberry sauce are all Fall items to me. And I can't really name Spring, Summer, or Winter items either.

Lately, I have been using Indian side dishes, packed in foil pouches, and stored in the pantry to compliment mixed frozen vegetables. Each of those boxes cost 2 dollars for 2 servings. And the Indian grocery store/restaurant that I go to, Teji's, has a selection of more than twenty of them.

At H.E.B., I buy bags of four frozen vegetables for around a dollar a piece: green peas, sweet corn, crinkle cut carrots, and broccoli & cauliflower. I can get 7 or 8 servings from them.

$12.50 for 8 meals is pretty darn cheap. There are 143 calories from the vegetables and an average of 145 calories from the side dish (a low of 80 to a high of 208).

Sigh. I forgot the lettuce at the store. But I wasn't going to let that stop me from using the bacon in a sandwich.

I didn't spend much time futzing around with the picture. But, looking at it afterwards, I know that I could have done better. The top of the bacon could have used a low angle, oblique flash to bring out the 3D texture.

Two swings, two misses. But at least the sandwich still tasted good...

With a new method of cooking beans, I needed to raise them up a level. One of the things that I like about Rudy's beans is the extra flavor they add to a bowl of plain, frozen vegetables. So I decided to try adding some meat to the picture. And I went with an unknown meat as well: two and a half pounds of ox tails. I knew that I need to braise the beef to turn the tough connective tissue, collagen, into gelatin. Since I was already cooking the beans in a low oven, I had the perfect environment to braise.

The first step was to brown the meat in a dutch oven. I then poured water half way up the meat, covered the pot, and put it into a 250 degree oven for two hours and forty-five minutes. After that, I added the rinsed beans and placed them back into the oven for an hour and a half. Then removed them and placed them in the refrigerator to cool down.

The first thing that I noticed after removing them from the refrigerator, was that there no condensation on the top of the container. I first that that the layer of fat might have been responsible. But when I scraped off the solidified fat, I noticed that the rest of the liquid was jelly-like. Apparently, there was no free water to condense.

For the next time, I am going to try a vegetarian version. I would add apples for the pectin, a little bit of molasses, liquid smoke, smoked paprika, and chipotle.

Lately, I have been experiment cooking basic black beans. I was intrigued with a recipe from America's Test Kitchen. It involved performing two things that I haven't tried before (at least with beans). These were brining and cooking in the oven. And the recipe is as follows:

Remove any stones or ugly beans from a one pound bag of black beans. Soak them overnight (unrefrigerated) in four quarts of water with three tablespoons of salt added (dissolved of course).

Discard the water and rinse the beans thoroughly a couple of times to remove the salt. Cooking beans in salted water will toughen the skins. However, beans soaked in salted water will help create a creamy texture.

Put the beans in a pan and cover them with water. Add sliced garlic, a couple of bay leaves, oregano, onion powder, and some chopped pancetta. Bring the water up to a simmer. And then place the covered pan into an oven set to 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Cook the beans for an hour.

The beans came out great! The next time I am going to try cooking some meat in there. The temperature is perfect for converting collagen into gelatin. I think a pound of Ox tails would work well.

One of the first drinks that I started to make was iced tea. The amount of sugar in Coke/Pepsi was getting to be too much for me. So I started to look for an alternative. Iced tea sweetened with some lemon juice and agave nectar did the trick. I like the convenience of Celestial Seasonings tea bags. And I found four flavors that I liked at HEB (Mandarin Orange Spice, Black Cherry Berry, Raspberry Zinger, and Wild Berry Zinger). Unfortunately, once I find something that I like, stores stop carrying them. Luckily for me, Amazon does carry those flavors. So I buy a case of each and it lasts me for about a year.

It is not that hard to make. I fill by teapot full of water and bring it to a boil. I then take eight bags of tea and steep them in the water for 6 minutes (actually, you can forget about them and let them steep longer than that without any harm). While the water is coming up to a boil and/or steeping in the tea, I squeeze the juice of three lemons into a clean 64 ounce plastic container. I then pour in 100 grams of organic raw blue agave nectar. I fill the bottle about half way with cold water and wait for the tea to finish steeping. When it is done, I port the tea in and fill it up to the top with cold water and place it in the refrigerator for when I need it (and for it to chill back down).

A hundred grams of agave sweetener in a 64 ounce bottle works out to be 36 calories per 8 ounce serving (10 grams of carbohydrates).

I experimented and tried making some tea that Yoga Yoga serves after class. They helpfully provide the recipe here. I have copied it down here just in case it might disappear.

• 2 quarts water
• 15 whole cloves
• 20 black peppercorns
• 3 sticks of cinnamon
• 20 whole cardamon pods (split the pods first)
• 8 ginger slices (1/4" thick, no need to peel)
• 1/2 teaspoon black tea leaves (we use decaf)

Bring 2 quarts of water to a boil in a 3-4 quart pot. Add cloves and boil for one minute. Next, add cardamon, peppercorns, cinnamon, and fresh ginger root. Cover and boil for at least 30 minutes. For best flavor, cover and simmer for 2 to 3 hours! When ready, remove from heat, add black tea and let cool. Strain tea. When ready to drink, add soy or dairy milk and sweeten to taste with agave nectar.

Thumbs up! It is pretty spicy! And you have to give it bonus points for using peppercorns.