Wontons

This is my fifty-second post for A Year From Scratch. We're going to keep on with the site, just at a slower pace. This is one a few recipes that's been on the list of projects since the very beginning, but that we just hadn't gotten too. Pity. It was pretty easy.

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.

Raw Cookie Dough

Oh, raw cookie dough. Friend to the impatient and recently-heartbroken, cookie dough traditionally carries a bit of a risk. Cookies generally have raw eggs in them, and improperly handled eggs can carry salmonella. If the dough is made with the expectation of being cooked, or if accidents happen, then the cookie dough can be contaminated. Some people like the element of danger, but most people would prefer to enjoy their snacks without risking disease and illness.

Fortunately, you can make cookie dough without the eggs, thus saving yourself from potential doom. And even though it's not a name-brand, you can totally get the Pillsbury Cookie Dough Theme (note: not an official jingle, but all kinds of awesome) stuck in your head while you're making and eating it.

Now, we've covered raw cookie dough before in the post on Ice Cream, but I had a couple of things I wanted to try, so I figured I'd revisit it.

By and large, making the cookie dough is easy. Melted butter, sugar, brown sugar, salt, flour, vanilla, and milk. Mix the sugars and butter, add in the liquids and salt, and sift in some flour. Very simple. Still, why stop there? We need some more flavor in this, and I decided to go with three modifications to the basic recipe, which I adapted from the Cupcake Friday Project's Cookie Dough Cupcakes.

First, we brown the butter. Because why use normal butter when we can brown the milk solids. I could have gone farther with this and added in some more milk solids, but I decided to go with the base. To brown the butter, start with the basic step of melting the butter.

Then you keep it going, until the milk solids brown.

One of the side effects of this is that you're losing the water from the butter, as the water will boil out before the solids brown. So we get to add a bit more liquid to the recipe.

The second change I made is that I did not want to use normal brown sugar. Instead, I used all regular sugar and added in some sorghum molasses, cause I could. If you don't have fancy molasses, feel free to use regular brown sugar. But I figure, why not go all out?

Finally, instead of using a little bit of regular vanilla extract, I used a lot of my AYFS Spiced Rum Vanilla Extract. After combining as described above, then adding in some chocolate chips, you get cookie dough.

Overall, the changes all contributed to better flavor. I'm not sure it's quite as good as dangerous cookie dough, but it's pretty close. Maybe the element of danger is part of the enjoyment, or maybe eggs are vital to the flavoring. Maybe there's not enough salt. I haven't decided. Next time, I'm going to take half of the butter and, instead of browning the butter, I'm going to make a roux. out of it. This will eliminate much of the raw flour flavor and add some extra depth. Or we could use toasted flour as these Squeeze Cookies from Chocolate & Zucchini do. Toasting the flour limits gluten formation, but we're not really concerned about gluten, so we can probably get by.

Of course, you could just make the Nestle Toll-House Cookie recipe using pasteurized eggs, and you'll have a perfectly lovely and reasonably safe raw cookie dough, but if you are immune compromised or are very young or very old, you might want to play it safe and use a recipe like this. And, if you're not going to cook the dough, I think the changes I've made will improve the raw cookie dough even so.

Raw Cookie Dough

Ingredients

1/2 cup unsalted butter, browned

1/4 tsp. salt

3/4 cup sugar

1/3 cup molasses

3 Tbl. milk

1 Tbl. vanilla extract

1 cup flour

1/2 cup chocolate chips

Directions

Combine the butter, sugar, and molasses, and stir to combine.

Add in the liquids and salt, and stir to combine.

Slowly add in the flour, stirring.

Stir in the chocolate chips.

Graham Crackers (And S'Mores)

To make authentic graham crackers you should use graham flour. The trick there would be to find graham flour. Seriously, it's super hard. Whole wheat pastry flour will make a good substitute. All that being said, this was a great recipe and I just used regular run of the mill all-purpose flour.

Start out with 7 tablespoons of butter, frozen if you have a large food processor, or chilled if you don't.

Mix flour, brown sugar, salt, and baking soda in a bowl. 

If you've got a food processor you could just pulse that, and then throw in the butter, and continue to pulse until you've got a coarse mixture.

If you don't have a gigantic food processor, cut the butter into the mixture using your favorite method (knives, fingers, forks, pastry cutter, but please don't mix and match).

In a separate bowl, mix honey, milk and vanilla extract. It will look a little gross.

Add the mixture to the dough, and pulse or mix until it comes together. Form it into a disk and chill.

You may have to adjust the amounts (given below) to get the right consistency. My dough was a little on the dry side, but worked out in the end. 

Mix up some cinnamon sugar for a topping.

Halve the dough and roll it out to about 1/8" thick, and cut it into rectangles.

If you want to be authentic, you'd cut all the way through for some, and just go partly through others. This, it turns out, is a lot of work, and they don't always hold together when you try to take them off the counter top.

Place the soon-to-be crackers on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, cover with as much topping as you like, and bake for about 20 minutes in a 350 degree oven.

Once then come out, let them cool off, then sandwich some of last week's marshmallow and some chocolate between your homemade graham crackers.

Ingredients:

2.5 cups graham, whole wheat pastry, or all purpose flour

1 cup brown sugar

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp kosher salt

7 tablespoons butter, cubed and chilled or frozen

1/3 cup honey

5 tablespoons of milk

2 tablespoons vanilla extract

3 tablespoons of sugar (for the topping)

1 teaspoon of cinnamon (also for the topping)

Procedure:

1. Mix the flour, salt, baking soda, and brown sugar (in a bowl or food processor)

2. Add the butter until you've got a coarse mixture (again, do it in a bowl or food processor)

3. In a separate bowl, mix the honey, milk, and vanilla extract.

4. Add the wet mixture to the dry (you guessed it, in a bowl or food processor)

5. Mix the dough until it comes together and form into a disk and chill.

6. Preheat the oven to 350.

7. Split the dough in two, and roll it out to 1/8" thick. Cut the crackers into the desired shape.

8. Place on parchment paper, top with the cinnamon sugar mixture and bake for 20 minutes.

Tater Tots - A Discourse In Failure

Coming from a background in the hard sciences, I sometimes wondered why there weren't publications dedicated to failure. A negative result can often be as important as a positive result, it's just not as exciting. Plus, you can learn a lot from a negative result, and you could even avoid someone else's.

This is a negative result.

Tater Tots were one of the earlier recipes I wanted to do. But they're complicated, so I put it off. I finally decided to try it during one of the Northeast blizzards.

Here was my idea. Take whole potatoes, chop them up very small and par-boil them, bind with a little flour and egg, fry and salt.

The result looked like this.

Looks pretty good. A little irregular, but they could easily pass as homemade tater tots. Here's the problem. They tasted awful.

Here's the procedure I used.

Peel two whole potatoes.

Brunoise, the potatotes, and either save the ends for another use, or discard them.

Par-boil (partially cook them in boiling water) then drain.

Now whip up an egg with a little flour to thicken, and then drop a spoonful of the potato in the egg to bind it into a tater-tot like shape.

Fry it in hot oil until brown and crispy, and then salt as soon as you take it out.

The result was dense, eggy, and chewy. Not the light, fluffy, crispy and salty tater tots we know and love.

Some thoughts as to what went wrong: I didn't fry them twice. You often see fries fried twice. Once to make a fluffy inside, once to crisp the outside. I used too much egg to bind it, hence the eggy flavor. I also probably cut the potato too big, which meant that there was more room for egg between pieces of potato. 

I hope we all took something away from this, not the least of which is that anyone can make a recipe that falls flat on its face.

Flour Tortillas

Tortillas, especially flour tortillas, used to be these odd things that came in plastic bags and were really good at wrapping pretty much anything. Eggs, rice, meat and cheese. But they're another thing that once you take the time to make it, it's pretty easy. 

Start with flour, salt, and baking powder. Wisk it all together to distribute the ingredients evenly.

Next, add in some water, and mix until the dough comes together.

Like all doughs, turn it out to a floured surface and knead it until it is smooth. Then cover and let it rest.

Time to whip out the tortilla press. You can also use a rolling pin. Break off a small piece of dough. The smaller the piece the thinner the tortilla will be. But this will take a few tries to get right.

This, for instance, is way too much dough. If you press it, you get a slightly too thick tortilla.

When you lift up the press the dough will start to contract. It's gluten. There's nothing you can do about it. Believe me, I've tried. Just hold your horses.

Put just a little oil in a pan and warm it up. Before you put the tortilla in, give it a stretch. The gluten will have relaxed by now and you can thin it out some more by hand before you cook it. It will only need to cook for a minute or so on each side. Just until it gets some color.

 Fill with whatever you choose and enjoy.

Ingredients:

4 cups flour

1 tsp salt

2 tsps baking powder

2 tablespoons of shortening

12 ounces of water

Procedure:

1. Combine the dry ingredients and mix to evenly distribute.

2. Add the water and shortening, and mix into a dough.

3. Turn it out and knead it until its smooth.

4. Let the dough rest, then break it in to small balls for pressing or rolling.

5. Press or roll them out.

6. Cook the tortillas for about a minute on each side in a pan over medium heat.