Ingredients!

This is going to make a pretty simple dough. Mix everything in a bowl until it comes together, turn out on a floured surface and knead until the dough is smooth. About 3 minutes. Let the dough rest while you mix the filling.

The filling is pork, garlic, chives, salt, pepper and sesame oil (it adds a little spice). I'm not listing values here, or in the ingredients section because I just eyeballed it.

Chop all of that finely, and mix it with ground pork.

 You can also beat in an egg. It will help it stay together, and add a little flavor.

Halve the dough, and roll it out.

Once it's rolled out, cut the dough into squares.

It's important that they be square. Some of these weren't, and I couldn't fold them properly.

As you can see. These take some practice and finesse. All of these came out fine, in the end, but I wouldn't want to serve them at a party without more practice. Ideally, you want to fold the wonton in half diagonally, so it makes a triangle. Then fold the two side points together so the wonton is hugging itself.

Drop the wontons in hot oil, a steamer, or boiling water or broth.

When they're done, serve them with your favorite soup, noodles, or salad.

Ingredients:

1 egg

2 cups (250 grams) all purpose flour

1/3 cup (75 grams) water

1/2 tsp (a pinch) salt

Ground pork

pepper

Sesame Oil

Chives

Garlic

Ginger

Procedure:

1. Mix the flour, egg, salt, and water together in a bowl

2. Stir until everything comes together

3. Turn out on to a floured surface and knead until smooth

4. Let sit for 10 minutes

5. Halve and roll out the dough.

6. Cut it into squares, and fill with your favorite filling.

7. Fold the wonton diagonally, and pinch together. You may need to use egg wash.

8. Fold the two side points around the filling. 

9. Steam, fry, or boil until done.

Roughly one year has passed, and I have, on average, made one dish per week that people normally think of as something that you purchase, but instead can be made at home, From Scratch. More often than not, the dishes that we made here at A Year From Scratch have been pretty simple to do. Not all of them have been easy, and not all of them have been successful, but it's been great getting a feel for just what is involved in making your life one with more things in it made From Scratch than bought from the store.

My favorites, by and large, have been the Utility Ingredients. Things you (usually) wouldn't eat on their own, but are added to another dish to make it better: mayonnaise, chili powder, creme fraiche, and so on. Little fuss, high flavor, and something that gets added into all of the things that you make throughout the year.

For my final recipe, I've decided to go with something French, to bookend with my French post. It's not quite as simple, but it's not all that difficult. In a rare move, this item requires a piece of equipment that, frankly, you're probably not going to use for anything else. Yes, a unitasker. Oh, if you're concerned you could make some chocolate truffles or jello in it or something. Maybe some fancy ice cubes, or soap. But really, it's a madeleine pan, and it's for making madeleines.

At the coffee chain Starbucks, which you may have heard of if you live in a big city, most of the pastries are fairly dismal. The one thing they make that isn't so bad is the madeleines. So, if you're desperate, get those. But, better yet, you should just make some at home, like so.

If you don't have nut allergies, start with 1/4 cup of almonds:

and process in a food processor:

Take the sugar and eggs and mix in a stand mixer:

For a couple of seconds until you realize that not only is your beater blade making a weird squeaking noise that it's never made before, but frankly this is entirely the wrong blade for this anyways and you should be using the whisk attachement:

Whip until it doubles in volume, essentially loses all the yellow color, and forms a nice stream of egg-mixture for a few seconds after you lift the beater out of the mixture. This is the ribbon stage, and is pretty standard way to mix eggs and sugar.

Once that's done, take your almonds, salt, and flour (or just salt and flour if you  didn't want almonds)

Combine together, pour into the egg mixture, and fold…

(notice the color of the egg mixture compared with a couple of pictures up) …until combined. Folding, incidentally, means that rather than stirring, which will likely develop more gluten than you want, you take a spatula or similar and draw a J from the center of the bowl, down, and to the left. You rotate the bowl 90 degrees and repeat. It should take you about 10 iterations of that until the mixture looks like:

Take your melted butter…

…add the butter into the batter, along with some extract…

…and stir to combine. Cover and refrigerate for at least an hour, though you can cool it overnight if you want. Which, incidentally, makes it a really good dish for brunches.

Once the batter is chilled, preheat your oven to 375°F and prepare your madeline pan with a flour/fat mixture, either in spray or homemade form:

Yes, you need it even with the silicone baking pan (that is as much a note to myself as to you. I made the mistake once of thinking the silicone would release properly. It did not).

You'll probably need to stir the batter a bit to make sure the butter is mixed in well. Then use a disher to add the batter to the pan:

Cook for  11-15 minutes, until it looks like

a golden brown and delicious treat, especially around the edges. Let cool for a couple of minutes in the pan, then transfer to a cooling rack. Once they are cooled, share and enjoy.

Thank you for joining us for our year-long journey through making foods From Scratch, whether it was every week (on average), or even if you only looked at a recipe or two. We do have the entire archive available on the web site, including all of the dishes we did and our run of podcasts as well.

Madeleines

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup almonds, finely chopped (optional)
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 3 eggs
• 3/4 cup of flour
• pinch of salt
• 5 tbsp unsalted butter, melted
• 1/2 tsp of almond extract or 1 tsp of vanilla extract

Directions

1. Whip the eggs and the sugar together until the color is almost gone, it doubles in volume, and reaches the "ribbon stage"
2. Combine the salt, flour, and almonds together, pour into the egg mixture, and fold until combined.
3. Add the melted butter and extract, stir to combine.
4. Refrigerate for 1 hour or overnight.
5. Preheat the oven to 375°F.
6. Put batter into prepared madeleine pan and bake for 11-15 minutes, until golden brown and delicious.

Makes 18 Madeleines.

Other people have secret barbecue sauce recipes that consist of adding some grape jelly, cola, or bourbon to a store-bought barbecue sauce. While there is nothing wrong with customizing an existing sauce to your needs, you lose some things by doing it this way. Aside from all of the usual problems with processed foods (preservatives, inferior ingredients, too much salt, and so on), you are at the whims of the manufacturer. If that sauce changes its formula or stops being sold, your secret recipe is gone.

At A Year From Scratch, we don't like to simply customize an existing product, nor do we like keeping secrets. For you, I have made a barbecue sauce, and more importantly, a method for creating a barbecue sauce of your very own. I hope you share your sauce with others, but I know how some people get with barbecue.

The great thing about a barbecue sauce is that it is, in this case, essentially a tomato sauce, of the kind you can make without a recipe. To that end, I didn't use a recipe when I made this one. I just picked a bunch of ingredients I thought would taste good and added them into the normal tomato sauce. What I got was not a barbecue sauce that you'd really point to and say, "Kansas," "North Carolina," or what-have-you. Melanie thinks it's a lot closer to a Mexican or a South American style barbecue sauce.

You start with some vegetables. I used carrots, celery, onion, chiles, and garlic. The important thing is a base of aromatic vegetables that will go well with your other ingredients. You're likely to want some spice in there, but how much is up to you.

Clean and dice all the veg:

And set aside your other ingredients:

That looks like some whole tomatoes, a leftover, frozen chipotle chile in adobo sauce from when I made chili, some chili powder, cocoa powder, liquid smoke (you can make this from scratch, but I never have), sorghum molasses, and bourbon.

Next comes the soffrito. This is also known as a "sweat", and in Italian it means "softly fried." The idea is that you want to cook your vegetables over lowish heat to get their cell structures to weaken and to release flavorful juices, but without changing the flavor with the maillard reactions. The best way to do this is to add your harder to cook vegetables first, followed in turn by the next hardest to cook, and so on. You can get recommendations for what to cook in which order for standard ingredients (carrots, then celery, then onion, then garlic, for example), but you can also get a feel for the vegetable by determining how dense it is and how tight the cellular structure is. If it's hard to bend and it's heavy, it'll probably take longer to cook.

Start with the carrots and the chiles. I would add some salt at this step to help soften the structure:

Cook for a bit, add the celery:

Cook for a bit, add the onions, add a bit more salt:

Cook for a bit, and finally add the garlic:

Once your garlic has softened a bit, add everything else, and simmer for an hour or so, covered.

When the flavors are working together fairly well, understanding that it the flavors won't be final until you've pureed, reduce down the sauce for a bit. You don't want it as thick as ketchup, but you want it a bit thicker than standard tomato sauce.

Now puree, either with a stick blender or with a regular blender. If you have time, let it cool off first.

Taste, and make any adjustments that you feel are worthwhile. Then put over some tasty food, and enjoy.

If you want something a bit more traditional, try working from the ketchup recipe and modify from their to suit your tastes. My ketchup was pretty close to a barbecue sauce as it was, so it wouldn't take much to bring it the rest of the way.

South American Style Barbecue Sauce

Ingredients

• 2 carrots, diced
• 3 celery sticks, diced
• 1/2 large onion, diced
• 3 chiles, seeded and diced,
• 2 cloves of garlic, diced
• 2, 28-oz cans of whole tomatoes
• 1/4 cup bourbon
• 1 scant tsp liquid smoke
• 1/2 cup molasses, sorghum if you have it
• 2 tbsp cocoa
• 4 tbsp vinegar
• 1 ancho chile in adobo sauce

Directions

1. Soffrito the carrots, celery, onion, chiles, and garlic.
2. Add the rest of the ingredients
3. Simmer for 1 hour, covered
4. Remove cover, simmer to reduce buy 1/4
5. Blend with regular or immersion blender.
6. Salt to taste

I was disappointed. It was a weak, weak horseradish sauce. I had to strain just to detect hints of horseradish. It made me sad. I made uncomplimentary remarks about the chef's daring and sense of adventure. I may have called the chef some derogatory names that indicated a general lack of intestinal fortitude. And, most importantly, I was left wanting good horseradish sauce.

Fortunately, horseradish sauce is pretty darned easy to make, in theory. There are two steps: preparing the horseradish and mixing it with the base.

Making horseradish is much like making mustard, because they use the same source for their heat. A good mustard, horseradish, or wasabi will, on touching the roof of your mouth, pierce straight through the brain with its heat. It's a very different experience than capsaicin, which is responsible for the heat in chiles.

So to process horseradish, you start with the root:

Peel the root

Grate your horseradish

You could have instead cubed your horseradish and used a food processor to grate it. I didn't need that much, though, and didn't really feel like cleaning the food processor.

Combine your horseradish with water, and wait up to 15 minutes. The longer you wait, the hotter the horseradish should be. When it reaches the desired heat, add in some vinegar (or citrus juice, or some other acid) to stop the reaction which generates the heat.

Combine with your base. Generally, you use sour cream, but I made a batch of creme fraiche instead, because why not?

Don't forget the salt!

Enjoy with the traditional roast beef. Or, if your Whole Foods doesn't understand the difference when you order it, the corned beef that they actually give you.

Unfortunately, after all was said and done, the horseradish sauce was pretty weak. I tried a couple of batches, but I suspect that the quality and/or freshness of my horseradish root was not what it needed to be. The technique is solid and simple, though, so I will search through different stores to find a good supplier of horseradish. And I will apologize to the unnamed and unknown chef whom I maligned, even though that person never knew. Perhaps ingredients in Pittsburgh were as weak as they are in Charlottesville. Perhaps spring horseradish is not as good as winter horseradish. I will search until I find the answer.

This dough is in some ways very similar to other doughs we've made in the past year. In other ways, it's very different. It is a yeast dough, with the main components being water, yeast, and flour. But we've also got a lot of fat, some egg, and the dough is fried, instead of being baked.

Being by putting your yeast in warm water. Then melt your some shortening. It's pretty easy to do this in in the milk you'll be using later. It won't mix with the milk, but it will make it easier to pour into the dough.

Once it's melted, let it cool off a little, so as not to kill the yeast. Pour the milk-shortening into the yeast and water, in the bowl of a stand mixer. Add in 1/2 of the flour, an egg, sugar, salt, and nutmeg. Beat until everything is well combined. Add the rest of the flour and keep on beating. Once it starts to thicken, switch to the dough hook and knead until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl. It will be a soft dough.

Cover the dough, and let it double in size.

Turn out the dough on a floured surface, roll it out and cut out the donuts.

Feel free to make center holes. I didn't have a cookie cutter that was small enough.

Fry the donuts, a couple at a time, a minute per side.

Move the donuts to a drying rack to drain off any excess oil, and top with a little powdered sugar.

Ingredients:

3/4 cup milk

1/6 cup vegetable shortening

1 package instant yeast

1 egg, beaten

1/3 cup warm water

1/4 c sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg

12 ounces AP flour

Frying oil

Procedure:

1. Let the yeast dissolve in the warm water

2. Melt the shortening in the milk, then let cool.

3. Mix everything but half the flour in a stand mixer, and beat until well mixed.

4. Add the other half of the flour and mix well again.

5. Switch to the dough hook and knead until the dough pulls away from the side of the bowl.

6. Transfer to an oiled bowl, cover, and let double in size.

7. Roll out the dough and cut your donuts out.

8. Fry in 360F oil for 1 minute on each size.

9. Drain of oil and cover with confectioner's sugar, or glaze.

Before you make your choux, grate up some cheese (cheddar and parmesan here) and measure up your spices (in this case, the King Arthur Flour recommended dry mustard, chile powder, black pepper, and paprika):

Make a batch of the pate a choux, and take it to the point just after mixing in all of the eggs:

Now stir in the cheese and spices. Prepare your pans and pastry bag just as before, and preheat your oven to 425°F. You'll want to use a pretty wide pastry tip for this, unless you did a good job grating up the cheese. If you have cheese hunks in there that are larger than your pastry tip, then you'll have to stop every so often to clear out the tip with a fork or skewer. So you know.

You have a couple of options on shapes. You can do the same puff shape we did with the profiteroles, or you can make a more rectangular shape.

If you're making the rectangular shape, it's probably a good idea to do a double-thick version, especially if you want to make a really, really long cheese straw.

What you don't want to do is to put both cheese puffs and cheese straws on the same pan, as you see in the photo above. They cook at different rates based on their surface area-to-volume ratio, so you will be unhappy with the results if you try that. You can do short straws and long straws at the same time without any trouble, though, because while one is longer than the other, they have essentially the same shape exposed to the oven, so they'll cook at essentially the same rate.

You'll also note that you don't need a pastry tip, you could just cut a corner off of a zip-top bag and do it that way. If you have a star-shaped pastry tip, though, you can get the wavy lines on the surface of the sticks.

If you are baking cheese puffs, then bake for 15 minutes, reduce the temperature to 350°F, and bake for another 10-15 minutes. You want them to look golden brown and delicious. When they are ready, turn the oven off, open the door a crack, and let them sit in the oven for 10 minutes or so until they look dry.

If you are baking them as straws, bake at about 15 minutes at 425°F, then turn off the oven, open the door a crack, and let them sit like that for 5 or so minutes. When you are done, you should have something like:

These are very tasty, and you will almost certainly eat them all up immediately. It is safest if you have friends around to help you eat them, as this makes a lot of cheese puffs.

Oh, and if this isn't enough spicy, cheesy goodness for you, well, you can fry them instead. It's pretty standard frying behavior, so check out making potato chips for tips on that. Heat up a good frying oil to 350°F and drop spoonfulls of the batter into the oil. Don't overcrowd the pan. These will float, so you'll need to flip them when they are brown on one side. When it's brown on the other side (and this should take 5-10 minutes for both sides combined), then remove with a spider or similar. Let cool on paper towels or, as is standard whenever we fry, use a jelly-roll pan, line the bottom with paper towels, and put a cooling rack upside down on top of it. Let the fried puffs cool on that, and enjoy.

Peel a couple of pounds of potatoes.

Chop the potatoes into medium sized chunks, and rinse to get rid of the extra starch.

Fry up these for about 4 minutes, or until they just get golden.

Throw the fried potatoes into a food processor to get a very fine chop. 

Add a little sugar, corn starch, salt, pepper, and seasonings of your choice (maybe even bacon), and toss.

Form into tots using your hands, and fry for another 4 minutes. Behold the glory.

Ingredients:

2 pounds of potatoes, russet or other good frying potatoes

1 tablespoon of corn starch

1/2 tsp sugar

salt and pepper, to taste

Procedure:

1. Peel and chop the potatoes into large chunks

2. Fry the potatoes for about 4 minutes, or until they're just golden

3. Throw the potatoes in a food processor batches. Chopping finely.

4. Season with salt, pepper, and add corn starch as a binder.

5. Form the potatoes into tots.

6. Fry for another 4 minutes, or until golden and crispy.

As batters go, this is a fairly simply thing to throw together. It's not quite as fussy as muffins, certainly it's easier than the creaming method, though perhaps not by much.

Weigh/measure out your ingredients. Incidentally, this is an extra large batch because we were making more than one thing today with this batter.

Combine the butter, water, and salt,

and heat until the butter is melted and the mixture is boiling.

Dump in the flour

Stir for about five minutes

Until it forms a nice ball

You can do this next bit by hand, but I prefer to use the mixer. Mix in your eggs one at a time:

Mixing after each until thoroughly combined. Once you're done with the last egg, the mixture should be nice and glossy.

That's it for making the choux paste. If you are continuing on with profiteroles, read on. If you are making something else with the paste, it'll probably be similar, but details will differ.

Preheat your oven to 400°F.

Prep your pastry bag (or zip-top bag with a hole cut out of the corner), and set up a baking sheet with some sort of non-stick system set up (either a nonstick pan, or a piece of parchment paper / silicone baking sheet, or you can lightly butter the bottom of the pan).

Fill your pastry bag

And form your puffs. You're looking at something like a 1" sphere, slightly taller than wide. You can form them by drawing a spiral, or you can place your tip next to the surface and just form a single blob.

Incidentally, if you don't have pastry tips, feel free to use a couple of spoons to make your shapes.

If you have tips sticking up at the top, wet a finger and smooth them down.

Bake at 400°F for 10 minutes, then reduce the heat to 350°F and bake for 25 more minutes until they look like

Take them out of the oven, poke each with a skewer to let steam escape, and let cool.

Cut in half

Add a scoop of ice cream to the bottom half, top with the top half, and drizzle with chocolate syrup. Enjoy!

Pate a Choux

Ingredients

• 1 cup water
• 8 Tablespoons (1 stick) butter
• 1/8 tsp Salt
• 4.5 oz AP Flour
• 4 Eggs

Directions

1. Heat the butter, along with the water and salt, over medium-high heat until the water boils and the butter melts.
2. Add the flour and stir until the mixture holds together and forms a ball. This should take 5 minutes, give or take.
3. In an electric mixer, or by hand if your are so inclined, add eggs one at a time and beat until each is fully incorporated.
4. Shape and bake immediately according to the final recipe.

Profiteroles

Ingredients

• Pate a Choux
• Ice Cream
• Chocolate Syrup

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400°F
2. Pipe Pate a Choux onto a piece of parchment paper or silicone baking mat (or a lightly buttered baking sheet) in roughly 2-in by 2-in mounds.
3. Bake for 10 minutes, reduce heat to 350 and bake for another 25 minutes until they are light, fluffy, golden brown, and hollow.
4. Poke each with a skewer to let steam escape and let cool.
5. Cut in half, fill one half with ice cream, cap with other half.
6. Drizzle with chocolate sauce.

In this mixture we've got salt, pepper, chili powder, cumin, and garlic powder. Paprika and mustard powder are also very common ingredients in a dry rub.

I mixed up the spices and seasonings, and added brown sugar and espresso salt. The brown sugar is normal in dry rubs, the espresso salt was to give some added depth.

Apply the dry rub to ribs or spare ribs, and cook via your favorite method. Due to a stunning lack of both spare time and slow cooker, I threw it in the oven for about 90 minutes at 300 F.

The result was one of the best spare ribs I've ever had. It was bananas.

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons kosher salt

1 tablespoon cumin

1 tablespoon ground pepper

1 tablespoon powdered garlic

1 tablespoon chili powder

1 tablespoon brown sugar

1/2 tablespoon espresso salt

Procedure:

1. Mix all the seasonings and spices, and apply to meat.

2. Cook meat.