New Food Data Widget

Just a quick post here to point you to the right where you will find a new (on this site) widget which will retrieve nutrition data on most foods. For some time I have been using this site but just now found and installed the widget.

No-Knead Bread - What To Bake It In

Hooray for No Knead Bread. We’re hooked here and this bread has become our staple. We haven’t bought a loaf of bread since Christmas. Sarah and I have both had a hand in it and have baked over 30 loaves of bread, most of them one at a time. Here’s what we’ve learned.

• It’s hard to make a mistake.
• Rising times are very flexible. We’ve let it rise as little as 10 hours, and as long as 30 hours (when we forgot it).
• Because the dough was so sticky we had problems when we tried to wrap it in a towel. Couldn’t get it unstuck so we began just dumping the dough out of the bowl onto a floured board and covering it with plastic wrap. Worked fine.
• We’ve only thrown one loaf away and that was the one that stuck to a pot that was the innards of an old crock-pot. Just couldn’t get it out without busting it all up. The problem was that the pot was scored on the bottom and hard to get completely clean.
• The baking container doesn't need to be as big as we thought. We found an old bowl in a thrift shop that works great. (On the left in the picture) The inside diameter at the top is 9 inches and it is about 6 inches deep. Lid came from the thrift shop too. Just the other day found a second pot at the thrift shop. It’s the one on the right, a bit smaller but works fine. Bowls were five dollars apiece. Makes sense to me to cook a very basic, inexpensive bread in a very basic, inexpensive pot.
  

Happy bread baking. So simple, yet better than you can buy almost anywhere.

Here is a link to our original No-Knead Bread Post

How To Be A Great Cook

Want to be a great cook? You need three magic ingredients:

1. Olive Oil
2. Garlic
3. Onions

That's it! You're on your way.

Heat up that skillet. (Make it non-stick skillet and save your some grief) Pour in a little olive oil, add some chopped or smashed garlic (several cloves not the whole bulb, unless of course there are vampires hovering) and throw in a fistful of chopped onion. Sauté just long enough to fill the house with that wonderful bouquet of garlic and olive oil and you’re on your way to a great quick entrée and a great reputation as a cook.

Now add chicken breast, cubed, strips, or whole pieces. Brown both sides then lower the heat and cook gently for a few minutes. Get the skillet off the heat just a soon as chicken is barely cooked through while it is still tender and juicy. Season with pepper a tiny bit of salt if you can afford it. Serve with a dash of a good barbecue sauce.

Or when that great bouquet fills the kitchen, add sliced and diced vegetables, zucchini, yellow squash, carrots, broccoli, tomatoes, whatever, you can find in the fridge. Put the stuff that takes longer, like carrots, in first or add them as very small pieces or slivers that will cook quickly. Quit cooking while there is still a bit of crunch in some of the veggies. Serve your sautéed veggies over rice, brown of course, unless like me you sometimes still yearn for that plain and quick white stuff. For a real treat dribble a bit of Thai Peanut Sauce on top.

Make a spaghetti sauce starting with the three magic ingredients. Add tomatoes, mushrooms, something to spice things up (red pepper flakes or chili oil or jalapeños or green chilies) and you’ve done it again.

So their you have it, culinary magic. Use your imagination. Experiment. Have a good time. Let me know how it turns out.

Notes on the Art of Baking Bread

Bread makes itself, by your kindness, with your help, with imagination streaming through you, with dough under hand, you are breadmaking itself, which is why breadmaking is so fulfilling and rewarding.

Breadmaking is basically not a complicated process. Mix some flour with enough water to form a dough, adding a touch of salt perhaps; shape it, bake, the result is bread in its simplest, most fundamental form: dense, coarse, crusty, robust, spirited, earthy.

From the opening pages of The Tassajara Bread Book

Of the several bread books that I own the Tassajara Bread Book is my favorite. I like the approach, the recipes are simple, the instructions are detailed and well illustrated. And it is easy to move on and improvise once one gets a grip on the basic bread.

Bread is really very basic. We’ve found that we can even make a no-knead bread with just flour, water, and a bit of salt and a tiny bit of yeast. And that bread is so popular that there are hundreds of posts on the internet every day about this one simple recipe.

And in my own experience I’ve found that bread making is easily learned, and the process of making bread is fairly forgiving. I don’t measure much. With very little experience you’ll find that you can just measure the water and the yeast, and of course the salt, and then add flour until the dough looks right and feels right. I pay little attention to the kind of yeast I use. I just keep it refrigerated and try to use it within a couple of months from its purchase. I live in the mountains at 8000 ft but don’t even think about any adjustments for altitude. I just watch the bread rise and when it looks right I bake it. I have also found that bread will rise in fairly cool environments, our house seldom gets to more than 70° F inside, and bread rises just fine.

If you are looking for some help learning how to knead bread there is a pretty good illustrated tutorial on the Internet called How to Knead Bread Dough

For me baking is not a hobby nor an avocation, it is simply a way of getting good healthy bread on the table. But I do enjoy the process. I like kneading bread. I like the aroma in the house as bread is rising and baking. And I can seldom wait to slice off the end of that loaf and butter up a slice.

And for those of us who are fighting the sodium battle every day it is really nice to have a great piece of bread with less that half of the sodium of the breads that we can find on the shelves of the supermarkets and bakeries.

Happy Baking

Soda Bread Link

Check out the comment on the No-Knead Low Sodium Bread post. Our commenter really liked the bread and immediately went to work to come up with a way to accelerate the process. And on that same author's blog, Carpe Diem, you can find a soda bread recipe. (A bit more sodium in this one, probably about 170mg per slice.) I was in Ireland last march and decided that soda bread is a staple there, second only to Guiness.

Cut Sodium with a Power Juicer

I love pitchmen. You know, the guys who stand up on a platform and demonstrate the wonders of slicers and dicers. They make it look so easy to slice those tomatoes, turn that potato into french fries, and saw right through those packages of frozen spinach.

The guy on the TV who sells the knives is really good. Even though I knew better I bought $45 dollars worth of knives. The pitch was great, the knives were . . . well, hardly worth the money. But there were a lot of them.

And then there is the Jack LaLanne Power Juicer, which sells for about a hundred dollars on TV. Bought that too. And I like it! It really does work just like they show it on TV. It has a chute big enough to pop in a medium size tomato or an apple. It instantly turns celery, carrots, whatever you dump in, into juice and pulp. Drop in a couple of tomatoes, a stalk of celery, and a carrot and you have a great veggie drink. Now spice it up with a dash or two of your favorite hot sauce and you have a veggie drink that competes with that canned spicy V-8 I used to drink. The difference is that 5.5 ounces of V-8, has 290 mg of sodium. (50 mg of sodium/ounce). Your fresh Jack LaLanne Power Juicer drink, about 8 ounces has 100mg of sodium (12 mg of sodium/ounce).

Slight problem with the juicer, that Jack didn’t seem to know about, is that it is a bit awkward to clean. You have to take it apart and scoop out the pulp from several different parts. It’s going to take you at least 10 minutes of steady work to get the thing clean and dry. So far, seems worth it to me.

If you are shopping for a juicer, I’d recommend this one, if you can handle the somewhat tedious cleaning routine. Shouldn’t cost over a hundred dollars. If you have access to Costco, buy it there. ($99) If you don’t like it they will take it back no questions asked.

Finding a Good Kitchen Scale

If you are serious about following a low sodium diet you will need to keep track of your daily sodium intake. A good kitchen scale will make tracking easier and more accurate. If you are shopping for a scale here’s what you need to find:

• A scale with a digital readout.
• A scale that switches easily from ounces to grams.
• A scale that allows you put a container on the scale and then reset to zero.
• A scale that comes with its own removable easy to clean container.

I am using a Salter electronic kitchen scale that I’ve had for almost 3 years. It has all of the above features and is still using the original battery. I think I paid about $40 dollars for it.