Donuts - With Yeast, Without Holes

Mmmm, donuts. They're delicious, they're available on every street corner in Massachusetts, and they're actually not tough to make.

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.

Quick Pickled Carrots

Most of what you see in the grocery store that is picked are cucumbers. There is a reason why pickled cucumbers are, in the American vocabulary, simply called "pickles". Still, if you look hard enough, you can find other vegetables that have been pickled, such as cauliflower, peppers, and carrots.

There are a couple of ways of pickling things. The first is a fermented pickle, where you let natural processes and time encourage a complex flavor. The other method is the quick pickle, where you mix all your flavorings together, heat them up, and have your snack ready in just a couple of days. I went for the latter for my first pickling experience.

I made a variation on Alton Brown's Firecrackers, which are spicy, sweet carrots. It turns out that all of my dried peppers on my pepper shelf in the pantry (I am not joking about the dried pepper shelf; it is next to the jam shelf) are relatively mild. Apparently I was out of dried hot peppers. Still, no reason not to continue on.

Start with the carrots, put into jars. The original recipe called for one big jar, but I just had little jars, so little jars it was.

Take your dried pepper or peppers

and if it's too large to put into the jar on its own, cut it up and divvy

Get your spices (mustard seed, crushed red pepper, and onion powder)…

Actually, those aren't red pepper flakes. I had run out of those, too. But I had lots of dried chiles, so I just grabbed some seeds and flakes from those. Crushed red pepper is just the skin and seeds of chiles that have been, yes, crushed. And I already had the skin, so I added some seeds for a little bit of heat.

Combine the salt, sugar, water, vinegar, and spices, and heat to boil for 4 minutes.

Put your canning funnel over the jar

and pour the hot liquid in.

Loosely cover  once it's cooled and let sit for 2-7 days. Ta-Dah!

These were tasty and sweet. All of the ingredients I had lying around, which is the best way when you are canning. Naturally, if you see some lovely full carrots in the grocery store or farmer's market, cut them up into sticks of whatever size you like best and preserve those instead of the lathed carrots.

Naturally, you can vary this recipe, even more than I did. Keep the amount of vinegar, salt, sugar, and water the same, and feel free to sub out the vegetables or especially the herbs and spices. There are recipes for quick pickled vegetables with just salt, but Ruhlman says to use a 3% (by weight) salt-to-water brine for your pickles, and things will be well.

Sweetened Condensed Milk

Sweetened condensed milk is a dangerous thing. Open a can and have a spoon handy, and you have a snack for the rest of the day. It's full of milk flavor, plenty sweet, and just plain tasty. It can also be used for non-snacking purposes, if you're into that sort of thing.

It's pretty simple to make your own sweetened condensed milk, and I used the recipe from Almost Bourdain as my base. My only real change, aside from being a bit loose with the measurements, was to use some of my stash of dried whole milk instead of dried skim milk.

Using the dried whole milk may not have been the best idea, but it's what I had, and that's kind of the point of making sweetened condensed milk; like brown sugar, you're probably not going to do much better than what you get from the store. Well, unless you're trying something special, but more on that in a bit. Sweetened condensed milk is going to store just about as long as powdered milk will, so chances are that, if you're making it, it's because you have one ingredient and not the other.

Now, if you're fancy, you could try some tricks with the sweetened condensed milk. To continue the brown butter kick I've been on since Ideas in Food started posting crazy things to do with brown butter, it occurs to me that the milk solids in the sweetened condensed milk could be browned before combining with the sugar. This is different from Dulce de Leche, I believe, because you wouldn't get any caramelization with the sugar.

In any case, making sweetened condensed milk is awfully simple.

Measure out your butter, water, and sugar:

Melt on your fancy new gas range (or whatever; I understand if you didn't just buy a new home mostly because it has gas):

Take the mixture off the heat. Measure out some milk solids:

Mix in 4 batches:

Until it's all smooth:

Or, in my case, until it was fully combined but a bit grainy. I tried adding some water to smooth it out. It helped some, but not enough. It was not creamy smooth as sweetened condensed milk should be. Probably using the whole milk powder didn't do me any favors here.

Even with the graininess, it was plenty tasty. It had the milky, sweet flavor. But better than from a can? Not really. Handy if you're in the right bind, and maybe more awesome if you brown the milk solids in the butter before adding the sugar and water, but that's an experiment for another day.

It should be mentioned that, the day after I had originally meant to do this post, Jenni Field, the Online Pastry Chef, did this herself. It's as if we have some sort of psychic food link. Spooky!

Tamagoyaki - Japanese Sweet Egg Omelet

One of the most overlooked items on the sushi restaurant menu is tomago. It's a wonderfully flavorful and sweet egg omelet, and when ordered as nigiri (on top of rice) can be one half or less than the cost of fish.

The ingredients here are pretty standard: eggs, salt, sugar, soy sauce, and the slightly less standard mirin. It's a japanese cooking rice wine. It should be available in any asian market. Start off by cracking the four eggs.

Add in two tablespoons of sugar, or 1/2 a tablespoon per egg if you're sizing the recipe down. 

Throw in 1 tablespoon each of soy sauce and mirin, and a couple of pinches of salt.

Make sure not to add too much liquid. If you do, the egg won't stick together. Now, take out a set of chop sticks and gently beat the mixture.

Again, over mixing can screw this up. Too much air will give you a fluffy omelet, which won't work. Heat up a pan with cooking oil. You'll want to keep either a brush and cooking oil, or a paper towel with cooking oil handy. You have to regularly re-oil the pan to avoid sticking.

Heat up the pan and pour between a third and a half of the eggs into the pan. Also, this is a tomago pan. They're hard to find locally, but pretty cheap online. It's not required, but it does make the cooking a lot easier.

Let the egg set almost completely, then fold it over on itself. Re-oil the pan, and then pour another 1/4 to 1/3 of the mixture.

Once it's mostly set, fold, oil, and pour.

That should be the last of your egg, so once this has mostly set, fold it over again, keep it on the stove for a minute, and then take it off. Let it cool for 15 or 20 minutes before you try to slice it.

Slice the tomago along the short egg at about a 45 degree angle. Discard the first slice, it will be oddly shaped and not at all pretty. Subsequent slices will look like this.

Follow last week's guide to making sushi rice, and this guide to forming nigiri, wrap with a belt of nori, and you'll get this.

Ingredients:

4 Eggs

2 Tablespoons Sugar

1 Tablespoon Soy Sauce

1 Tablespoon Mirin

2 pinches salt

Procedure:

1. Gently mix everything in bowl.

2. Heat up a pan with cooking oil.

3. Pour 1/3 to 1/2 of the mixture in the pan. Wait until it is mostly set, and fold over.

4. Re-oil the pan, and repeat step 3 with 1/4 to 1/3 of the mixture.

5. Repeat step 4.

6. Let the egg cook for another minute, then take it off the heat, and let cool.

7. Cut for use in nigiri, sushi rolls (maki) or fried rice. Seriously. Try it in fried rice.

Sushi Rice

I debated doing a series on sushi for a while. And then it struck me that sushi epitomizes the A Year From Scratch ethos. You can buy kits, you can buy it pre-made in the grocery store, but if you take the time to make it yourself, you'll save a lot of money, and you'll blow some lower price sushi restaurants out of the water.

First, and arguably the most important part of making good sushi, is making good sushi rice. You may have to play around with brands that are available in your area. But Kagayaki is my favorite brand (and I've tried a lot of brands). You're more likely to find a good sushi rice in an asian market than an american supermarket. Also, don't be afraid to ask someone there what the best rice is. They'll know. It may be slightly more expensive than the lower quality alternatives, but it's worth it.

Next. Get a rice cooker. Even if it's a $10 rice cooker from Wal-Mart, it's going to do a better job than trying to cook the rice on the stove. Follow the directions for cooking the rice regarding the ratio of rice to water. Good sushi rice is going to take about 1 cup of water per cup of sushi rice. The brand I use works out to 225 grams of water per 215 grams of sushi rice, but it one cup to one cup.

While the rice is cooking, mix up the sushi seasoning. You can buy it premade, but it's simple enough to throw together. Plus you can tweak it all you like. The basic ratio is 4 parts (by weight) rice vinegar, 1 part salt, and 1 part sugar. Stir until it's all dissolved, or at least until it doesn't dissolve anymore. You want to use about 1/4 cup of seasoning per cup of uncooked rice. It will seem like a lot, but the rice will absorb some as it cools.

Keep an eye on the rice cooker. As soon as the rice cooker clicks off (or switches to warm), take it out and start it cooling. If you don't, you're going to burn the rice. 

If you can, transfer the rice to a larger, flat bottomed container, stir the rice vinegar mixture into the rice and mix well, cooling the rice as you go.

This mixture actually serves two functions. First, it will season the rice. Secondly, it help prevent bacterial growth as the rice cools to room temperature. Adding fresh seasoning in the right proportions will easily add a lot of depth to your rice, and as a result, your rolls and nigiri.