Sweet Pea Journey

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Tagged: home made

Cooking

Home Made No Knead Bread

This recipe is super easy. I have made it a few times, every time it came out really fragrant, super chewy and satisfying.

No kneed bread

When you cut into the crust, you could hear the crunch, and the air pockets inside are just phenomenal. Who knew making this bread is so simple, and literally have no work involved? All you need is some patience and planning one day ahead.

cut no kneed bread

Ingredients:

  • 3 cups of all purpose flour
  • 1/4 tsp yeast
  • 1/2 TBSP salt
  • 1 3/4 cup water

Method:

Full disclaimer, this bread takes 2 days to make. Think of it this way, instead of sweating your butt off kneading the dough, time is working for you.

The day before eating the bread, combine all ingredients in a large bowl until well mixed. The mixture will be very shaggy, sticky, it will be a mess. Don’t worry, that’s how it is supposed to be. Just make sure there is no dry flour anywhere, including at the bottom of the bowl.

shaggy dough

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and forget about it on the counter top for the next 12 to 18 hours. Don’t stick it into the fridge, unless you want to wait even longer.

When the dough is ready, the plastic will poof up slightly and once you open the plastic, you can really smell the lovely yeast. Preheat the oven with a nice heavy bottom pot (the lid should be oven proof too) such as a dutch oven to 425F.

Prepare a large piece of parchment paper, sprinkle with flour.

Lightly sprinkle the top and the sides of the very sticky dough with flour and carefully, use well greased hands to scrape the dough out of the bowl and onto the prepared parchment paper. Shape the dough mess into a rough ball shape. Cover with a clean kitchen towel and rest, while the oven pre-heats to temperature.

Once the oven reaches temperature, take out the pot very carefully, lid off. Pick up the parchment paper with dough and carefully drop the whole thing into the pot, parchment paper too. Bring the pot with lid on, back into the oven and bake for 30 minutes. Then take the lid off the pot and bake for another 15 to 20 minutes until the bread is golden brown on top.

Remove the bread by lifting the parchment paper out of the dutch oven, let it cool and serve.

Cooking

Home Made Basic White Bread

With current COVID-19 situation, we try to limit our trips to the grocery store as much as possible. But bread is one of those things, you can’t store them for too long, and you have random cravings for them. So, I rolled up my sleeves and started making home made basic bread. These turned out super easy and frankly, taste way better than store bought breads.

Heads up, this recipe makes 2 loaves. You will need 2 9×5 in loaf pans (slightly smaller or bigger is not an issue). But literally one of the loaves will be consumed within 30 minutes after the breads are done baking, so you pretty much don’t need to cut the recipe in half.

bread

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups of luke warm water (110-120F)
  • 2/3 cups of white sugar
  • 1 1/2 TBSP yeast
  • 6 cups of all purpose flour
  • 1 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1/4 butter melted

Method:

Dissolve sugar in warm water, sprinkle in yeast and mix well. Let the mixture stand for about 5 minutes or until the yeast foams up.

In your stand mixer bowl, add flour, mix in salt and pour in melted butter. Pour the yeast water into the flour. Use a dough hook and let the mixer go for about 5 to 10 minutes, or until the dough pulls away from the bowl. The dough will be quite tacky and sticky. Do not add in any additional flour, that will make your bread tough.

mix dough

In the picture above, I reserved some flour from the 6 cups and used a standard paddle. But I made these breads so many times in the past several weeks, I realized there is no need to reserve any flour, or dirty the paddle. All flour go in at once and go straight to a dough hook works just fine.

Once the dough pulls away from the bowl, lightly dust a clean work surface and kneed the dough for a few minutes until a smooth ball forms. Grease the inside of a large bowl. Put dough ball into the bowl, move it around so the bottom of the dough ball is well greased. Then flip the dough ball over and cover the bowl with a plastic wrap or clean damp kitchen towl.

1st rise covered

Keep the bowl at a warm and draft free place, such as near the stove or in the oven. I put the bowl into the oven, and turned on the oven light without turning on the oven. This slight heat from the light bulb actually helps speed up the rising process. About 30 minutes later, the dough is ready for next step.

Punch the dough down to release the trapped gas in the dough, take the dough out, and kneed for a few minutes on the clean work surface. Divide the dough into equal 2 parts. Kneed each half and shape them into loaves. You can achieve this by rolling out the dough like a pizza crust. Then fold two sides and roll the dough up into a log. Again, this step is what I figured out along the practice process. The following pictures were taken at the very first attempt of making these breads. So the logs were not very good looking.

2nd rise

Let the loaves rise again using the plastic wraps or damp towel and leave them in the lit oven for about 20 minutes. They shall poof up like baked breads.

Take the breads out of the oven, pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees and bake these breads for about 25 to 30 minutes until the top is golden brown and the bottom sounds hollow when you tap on them.

bread in pan

Here is another tip, once the breads are baked, take them out of the loaf pans immediately and let them cool on wire racks, do not let the loaf sit in the pans to cool, otherwise the bottom will get soggy and soft.

cooling

Slice them up and serve with PB&J, simple butter spread, cream cheese and honey, avocado… the choices are endless.

Cooking

First Attempt Beans and Cheese Pupusa

I made these today, just had to try them. Also, just because it’s Sunday.

In order to find the right ingredients and make it Mexican way, I actually went to Fiesta and asked two ladies. With 75% English and 25% Spanish translated into English by the 8-year-old boy who was with them, I think I got it down.

 

Ingredients:

Maseca , about 2 cups

pinch of salt

Luke warm water, about 2 cups – I did not measure masa or water, totally did it by the feel of the dough, like a pro!

1 can of refried beans, yep, I used the canned stuff, I have not packed down the skills for charro beans yet.

1/2 cup of shredded cheddar cheese, only because I did not have any mozzarella on hand like I thought I did

 

Method:

I poured some masa into a large bowl along with the salt, with one hand in masa, luke warm water in a cup in the other hand, I slowly poured water into masa, and mixed it by hand. Masa absorbs quite a bit of water, but be patient, and mix masa and water until it forms a rather wet dough.

Cover with a clean kitchen towel and let it rest for a few minutes. In the mean time, take out a heavy bottom pan, or flat griddle. I used my trusty cast iron pan. I opened the can of refried beans, put some cheese into a bow and set up my work station.

Once the masa is rested, heat up the pan on medium low heat, lightly grease the pan. Take a baseball size dough and form a hollow disk in one hand, patting with the fingers of the other hand. I am right-handed, so the hollow disk was in my left hand, I used my right hand to help shape it. Put a pinch of cheese in the center of the disk, followed by a tsp of refried beans. Close the disc up by curling the disc and meet the edges on top of the filling carefully and form a ball again. Patch it up with excess dough from the ball or from the bowl. Then carefully flatten the masa ball with filling back into a thicker disc. Be careful not to pat too hard, otherwise the filling may spill out.

Lay the disc onto the pan, and fry 3-4 minutes per side, or until it’s golden brown and the edges of the pupusa is cooked through, as well as the centers.

This is great on its own, or a side dish with harrisa chicken and veggie bake. Enjoy!

 

Cooking

Chinese Wontons

Yes, these are the authentic Chinese wontons. Nope, they are not the fried tortilla strips in a bag you get from a fast food chain restaurant. And guess what, they are super easy to make, you should try it too!

Ingredients:

1 lb ground pork (you can use super lean, lean, regular, any type you like)

1 inch worth of ginger root, don’t worry about peeling, freeze ahead of time if you can

2 green onions, green part and white part

2 eggs

salt, pepper and chicken bullion powder to taste

1 package of store bought wonton wrappers (I like super thin type, it will say on the packaging, can be found in refrigerated area or frozen area, better yet, check out your local Asian market!)

You will also need a large clean surface to store the wontons. I normally use my cutting board, baking sheet or pizza pan. And I normally make a large quantity, so I choose the pans that fit my freezer. I freeze my wontons on the pans over night, and bag them the next day for a quick and easy wonton meal any time.

How to make wontons:

Take out the frozen wonton wrappers from the freezer, leave them in the packaging, on the counter to defrost, or leave them in the fridge over night to defrost. Do not microwave or heat it up, the wrappers will stick together and you might as well make meatball soup instead.

Dump all ingredients into a mixing bowl, doesn’t matter the sequence, just dump them all in. Please don’t mind my not so clean bowl in the picture, I only remembered to take pictures after I ran out of fillings, so the picture was second batch fillings.

Use a spoon, a fork or a pair of chopsticks (if you feel extra Asian today), mix the filling mixture vigorously in either clockwise or counter-clockwise direction for a good 5 minutes. This is the workout session for me for the day. Normally I would be able to feel the upper body muscles that I didn’t know I had. Take breaks if you need to, I certainly took a bunch breaks. Use a standup mixture if you have one, especially if you are making a large portion of wontons. One thing to keep in mind, when mixing the filling, keep it in one direction. This one directional thing is quite serious, if you ask people selling wontons in my hometown farmer’s market. They say it helps the filling to be soft and it will melt in your mouth.

This is the time to take the wrappers out of the packaging. Use your thumb and index finger to grab the entire stack of wrappers in the middle, shake it to loosen up the stack of wrappers over the sink, you will have some loose flour falling off, that’s fine. Notice in the picture below, I have the stack of wrappers fanned out all pretty on the cutting board. This is easy to do, and it helps when you need to grab one wrapper at a time, because most wrappers would be offset a tiny bit and already separated, but not exposed with a large surface to dry out. What I did was after shaking the stack, I put them on the cutting board, firmly pressing down the stack with the palm of my hand and turned my hand clockwise. You can use either hand, turn either direction. It may take a bit practice to feel the right pressure to apply. If too firm, you can press the wrappers together more, and they won’t fan out, if not firm enough, only the top layer of wrappers will fan out. Another essential for wonton making, a glass of your favorite drink. I got one there shown in the picture too!

Making the wonton is actually quite easy, probably a lot easier than you think. There are multiple ways of making wontons. I do not mean any method is better than others, but I am showing you how wontons are made in my home town. They look like sailor hats.

Grab a wrapper and lay in one hand, grab roughly 1/2 tbsp of filling and put in the center of wrapper. Fold wrapper over towards yourself, offset a bit, so it’s not a perfect rectangle, it will make the wonton look prettier in the end. Dab some water at one corner on the fold, lift middle finger up a bit and push the “meatball center” up a tiny bit, bring the 2 corners on the fold together, with the corner with water on the bottom, pinch the corners together, water will act like glue. Viola! Your first wonton is done! Now based on how your wonton turned out, you can adjust filling portion, add a bit more water on the corner or put on less.

Here is a video of how I made my wontons.

 

Common things to adjust:

Filling portion. Always start with less filling, you really can’t mess up with tiny bit of filling. It’s a good practice. Worst case, you can consider your first ever wonton a cross between flat noodle and wontons. There really is no right or wrong on the filling portion.

Wonton wrapper cracks, this is because the wrappers are dried out. The cracked wrapper you might as well toss it out, not much you could do to fix that. But the rest of the wrappers, you can lay a damp piece of paper towel over the stack for a while, or keep it on until you need another wrapper. I work pretty fast, so I don’t do this. If you are practicing making wontons, you can do this to your wrapper stacks, so you are not under pressure and feel like you are on a timed cooking show.