Puffs and Pastries

After yesterday's wine tasting at The Wine Source, I stumbled (kidding) my way back to my car (damn meters...). Just as I was about to get in, I noticed a delicious smell. It was coming from Puffs and Pastries. I haven't had an occasion to go in, so I did. Very small former rowhouse with a couple of tables and chairs on the porch, converted into a little bakery. They were almost ready to close, but still had some good looking food. There was a large plate of massive, still-warm chocolate chip cookies. Since this was Hampden, I was expecting them to go for about six or seven bucks a pop. I'm talkin' cookies that are larger than DVD's here - about the size of one of those old 45's I used to buy in the late 80's (oh boy, now I'm dating myself). I was shocked to see the ridiculously reasonable price of $1.75! The merchant happily informedme, in no uncertain terms, that they only use butter - no shortening. And it tastes like it. What a wonderful cookie! And of course it ruined my dinner, but I brought some to my sister's house for her to taste. I was going that way anyway. I don't remember Cathy's reaction. She seemed to like it. I sure as hell did! Now how have I missed this place all this time?

50 of the World's Best Food Blogs

Courtesy of the London Times Online, a list of some of the world's best blogs about food. I like the diplomatic way they don't just say "the 50 best of the world" because each has his or her own faves. Their #1: Orangette, whose blogger appears to be on a book tour. Since I have precious time to look at anything online anymore (grad school over and semi-normal blogging again in just 6 1/2 weeks!) I am unfamiliar with most of the blogs. I did notice Adam "Amateur Gourmet" Roberts coming in at #41 though (congrats Adam!). Nothing in the Baltimore area got on the list from what I can see - but they did say this was 50 of the best, not the 50 best. Not plugging my own, since I've had no time to write anything lately, but there are a few local blogs .I'd put on that list.

My First Soju

Deceptively smooth, like a vodka, and deceptively strong, also like a vodka. Eric & Alan and our friend Patrick all did the foursome at Jong Kak last night for a belated birthday present. I finally ordered the $12 bottle of soju. Since the guys hate sake - and pretty much any rice-based alcohol - they were a little, um, unenthusiastic about sharing it. But they did try some.

If you don't like sake (I love sake, so I'm not one to ask), don't pass on the soju. It's good. But watch out, because this isn't a buzz that just hits you full force. Three and a half shots of soju will hit you very gradually until you don't know where it came from. Just don't drive anywhere for a while!

Kitchen Experiments: Popping Sorghum

Note: I started this post a few months ago. I was inspired by Andrew Zimmern and the elusive idea of itty bitty popcorn. I just got swept up in stuff I had to get done, uploading the photos became a bother, and there you go. I've finally gotten around to posting it.

- - - - -

Ever since Andrew Zimmern stuffed his face with freshly-popped sorghum kernels in his Ethiopia installment of Bizarre Foods, I have been eager to try doing this myself. If you've never heard of this: apparently, whole sorghum can pop in much the same way that whole popcorn can. The problem: it's not that easy to find pop sorghum in the US, even in such a centrally located area as Baltimore.

In my internet research, I have found out a few interesting recipes and factoids:

• Pop sorghum is very popular as a snack in many parts of East Africa and South Asia. In India, it's called jawar (also spelled jowar).
• You can pop sorghum in a few different ways, both reminiscent to how you pop popcorn. You can either heat about 5 mL (a little less than 1/2 teaspoon) of oil, heated in a covered pot until it's smoking, and then add about 50 g (3 T + 1 tsp) of sorghum seeds until fully popped. Some recipes call for shaking the pot, others don't. The other way to do it is to dump about a cup of sorghum seeds into a hot air popper.
• Apparently, not all types of whole sorghum work for popping. One scientific article - and my own experimentation - showed that some strains of sorghum don't really pop at all. Or perhaps it's the way mine was packaged.

Experiment: Popping Sorghum
Needed:

• sorghum, whole
• covered pot
• covered pan
  
• cooking oil (vegetable or canola)
• hot air popper

Pre-Experiment: finding whole sorghum
Note that not all "whole sorghum" is "pop sorghum". Also note that most "sorghum" sold in this area is in powdered, flour form. The Natural Market in Timonium carries four score varieties of Shiloh Farms products, but their Sorghum Grain is not one of them. Whole Foods doesn't even know what I'm talking about. The only place I could find it was at - you guessed it - H-Mart. Surprisingly, they had one and only one provider, Choripdong. Theirs is vacuum packed. I don't know if that affects anything or not.

Experiment 1: Popping sorghum in a pan
Zimmern's experience with pop sorghum had him watching Ethiopian women popping it on a large, hot surface, with all the little popped kernels flying up and down as they burst open. My omelette pan, which I bought in a fit of Julia Childish omelette-making hysteria, looked like it would fit the bill. I tried putting a little oil in the pan and once it was hot, pour in about 1/4 cup of whole sorghum.

After shaking it vigorously, I got a bunch of toasted grains of sorghum. Nothing popped.

At all.

Experiment 2a: Popping sorghum in a pot (while still)

My next experiment involved trying to pop the sorghum in a pot much like popcorn used to be popped. This recipe from the ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) website is similar to many that explain how to pop sorghum in this fashion:

Pop sorghum

Ingredients:
50g sorghum grain
5ml cooking oil

Method:

1. Heat the cooking oil in a covered container (pot) until smoking hot.
2. Add the sorghum grain and leave to pop at low heat until all grain is popped.

Initially, I would have shaken it. But since the recipe specifically calls for you to leave it alone, I did. After following these directions to a tee - twice - the results were just not pretty. And the whole apartment smelled of burnt sorghum for two days.

Experiment 2b: Popping sorghum in a pot (while shaking)

Since leaving it alone didn't work, I resorted to shaking it the next time, covered. I still used the same amounts of oil and sorghum - 50 g (a little under 1/4 cup) of whole sorghum added to 5 mL (not sure how that translates, but I found something with milliliters on it to measure it out) of smoking vegetable oil, then shaken vigorously.

The results were almost as bad. They would have been as bad had I not gotten about three or four kernels of sorghum popped. Success? Not when you consider that there are hundreds of sorghum kernels in one quarter cup.

Experiment 3: Popping sorghum in a hot air popper

My last trick was to try it with a hot air popper. I did remember reading about one blogger, Loztnausten, and her attempt to pop sorghum on her blog Everything Free Eating, which sees how you can eat while eliminating whole food groups (an intriguing concept for a blog). She recommended using more sorghum kernels than popcorn kernels - if the recipe called for 1/2 cup of popcorn, add 3.4 of sorghum, since it's so tiny that you'll need more just to keep it in place. I may have remembered the advice, but not the measurement, as I think I put in at most 1/2 a cup (thinking I had upped it from 1/4).

So, I dumped about a half cup of sorghum into the popper, most of which came flying violently back out at me, spraying all over my countertop. What's worse, almost none of it had popped. But this technique did yield the most popped kernels of all - about twenty or thirty, but again, out of literally hundreds. It also didn't help that I had to keep stopping it to re-add many of the kernels that flew out at me.

Was the experiment necessary?

Imagine my surprise when I stopped by the Punjab grocery by the Waverly Farmers' Market, looking for a different variety of pop sorghum - or jowar, only to find a big-ass bag of already popped jowar!


My jaw dropped, as it seemed that all of my work was for nothing, since this nice big bag of already-popped sorghum was sitting right in front of me. I asked one gentleman who works there where I could find the unpopped variety (Punjab doesn't sell it). He suggested H-Mart ("the place on Route 40"), where I got this seemingly unpoppable Korean variety, and then maybe some other Indian groceries, or even a Latin market. Plus, in the back of my mind I was thinking an Ethiopian or African grocer might have it, so I will have to stop in one of those places to see for myself. So this experiment is already half-way done. Next step: to try other varieties of sorghum, to see if it's just this variety that doesn't pop well, or if I just don't know what the hell I'm doing.

I have no clue when I will get around to that. For now, I'll just eat the already-popped stuff.

Irish Soda Bread - from a Machine!

During the last big snow I posted about the delicious Irish soda bread that I had made. I was going to make some this past weekend, too. i have gotten into the habit of baking bread every Sunday. I couldn't because I didn't have any buttermilk on hand, and I wanted to use it for this recipe.

So where did I get this recipe? Here, from the ChefMom website. It doesn't use a lot of ingredients, but unlike most I have seen (which probably work better with a timer than this one does), it uses liquid buttermilk. It also has raisins and caraway seeds. I am surprised to find out just how "traditional" our version of "Irish soda bread" actually is. As they report on Bread-Maker.net, traditional - authentic - Irish soda bread doesn't have raisins. Why would it? Most Irish would have been peasants that could barely afford anything like raisins. Ditto the caraway seeds, I assume. In fact, yeast was even a once-in-a-while luxury. So what went into traditional Irish soda bread? The author (Where's his name? He doesn't publish his name?) says:

The only ingredients found in the basic Irish Soda Bread eaten by the Irish for the last 150 years are baking soda, flour, salt and soured milk. That’s it. These days buttermilk is more common than soured milk, which is frankly a pain to purchase and inadvisable to make on you own, but other than that any substitutions make the word “Traditional” false advertising.

Yup. Soured milk. Makes sense, considering we're talking peasant food here. And since most Irish-Americans (like myself) are descended from those very same peasants, why not make it with those ingredients?

I smell a project on the horizon...

Victory Gardens? Hmmm, now THAT'S an idea...

I'm surprised at how many food articles one can find on political websites. Take the Huffington Post, for example. This site founded by former "also-ran during the 2003 California recall" Arianna Huffington occasionally posts things about food, usually tied somehow to politics. Buried somewhere under a tidbit about the First Lady's plan to promote healthy eating is a post about fighting the recession the Greatest Generation way: by starting your own Victory Garden! The crop to start out with: strawberries. This is a phenomenon that has been going on for a while now. Look what I found just by Googling "modern victory garden" just now! My ex-landlords, who up and moved from Redlands, CA, to somewhere off the Great Cherokee Lake in Oklahoma have a gorgeous garden growing on their lovely lakefront property. And since I have more land than the typical apartment renter in Baltimore City, I think I may have to try this. The Dallas News did a story explaining how.

Random Thoughts...

Just things that have popped in my mind lately.

* Char really is the un-salmon!

* Two-egg yellow cake is not that much better with buttermilk. Though it may have just been the recipe.

* If Chick-Fil-A really is a Christian business, shouldn't it just be serving fish on Fridays?

* Speaking of which: I hate to admit it, but the Fish Filet from McDonald's is kind of satisfying.

* And the sugar-free cupcakes from Ms. Desserts aren't bad at all!

* Tastykake's sugar-free cupcakes, on the other hand... bleeeeeeeeh.

* God, I could go for Ethiopian right about now. Or maybe tomorrow.

In like a lion...

The good news: I get to stay home today on account of the snow, which has blanketed everything from Biloxi to Bangor.

The bad news: A meeting I needed to go to, and have carefully carved into my schedule for the semester, is now rescheduled for next week, when I have no time to do it. But since I have to do it anyway... well, y'all get the picture.

So I spent last night making Irish soda bread! In my bread maker! From scratch!


As I awoke to this blindingly white scene outside my kitchen window...


...I decided to forgo the customary bowl of cereal or dehydrated kimchee-flavored noodles andhad a slice with a French omelette, Julia-style.


The stuff next to it is habanero salsa. Now let's hope this snow doesn't mess up the rest of my schedule for the week.