Pita Pita

This had been something I had wanted to try for a while.  The recipe is from Le Cordon Bleu's Pâtisserie & baking foundations: classic recipes (2012), p. 344-345.  We baked these on the pizza stone, similar to the naan.  This experiment met with mixed success - some pitas came out amazing (see below) but others came out really thin and thus crispy.  The formula for success seemed to be having to roll the pita several times (adding flour each time) and keeping them smaller.  The larger pitas that didn't get as much flour added stretched too much in my hands and that is how they got so thin.  Therefor, next time I will just add more flour to the dough as I'm making it and be sure to roll them out with lots of flour on the counter.

Unbaked pitas as I was rolling them out.

This first pita came out decently well.

We took a piece "so that you could see inside"...

Perfect pita!!!  It eventually deflated but left an awesome pocket.

Verdict:  will definitely make again with the above noted lessons learned.

Creamy Chicken and Dumplings

On day recently as I was cleaning out the mixing bowl from making pizza dough, I mixed some water with the excess flour and decided to try the raw dough that formed.  I enjoyed it so much that I decided to make a dumpling dish without looking at a recipe.  Chicken was the easiest thing to add, and it quickly became a creamy chicken and dumpling thing.  I started by cooking the chicken with some chicken broth.  Then, I added some dumplings made from the following dough  (inspired by pizza dough):

• 1 cup flour
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• olive oil (I didn't measure)
• ~ 1/3 cup of water - I just added water until I had the dough consistency I wanted

Once the dumplings started cooking, Caroline added some cream and sour cream we had in the fridge to complete the dish.

Result:  a pretty tasty dish, though the dumplings were quite dense.  Next time, I might think about making them with milk, or possibly smaller.  I don't know - I still have to think about how to make them less dense.  This is something I'll probably try again, but I won't subject Caroline to my experiments without trying them first myself.

Dumplings just added.

Cooking along with cream added.

Bowl o' food!

Naan

This flat-bread is one of the tastiest parts of Indian cuisine - at least in our opinion.  We got our recipe from Joy of Cooking (p. 608).  Overall the recipe isn't too difficult, if but a bit time consuming (though not nearly as much as the challah).  Note time!

Notes:

• Rising - the constant struggle with our winter baking.  Our apartment just doesn't seem to be warm enough to get dough to rise without warming the liquid first (the recipe called for the yogurt to be room temperature).  However, this did not seem to affect the result much.
• Baking is pretty easy, and quick.  The recipe called for us to preheat our pizza/baking stone for 45 minutes at 475 degrees F (!!!).  We did not do that - we just let the stone preheat with the oven to 475 and then put the rolled out dough on the stone.  The recipe called for 5-6 minutes of baking, and we cut that down to about 4 minutes for the second batch, as the first was quite brown.  Next time we'd consider lowering the temperature to get a less brown and softer bread.

Result:  delicious warm and relatively soft flat-bread.  Would make again!  (I love putting that comment - and it seems to be the theme lately.)

Pictures!

A couple of pieces on the pizza stone.

Completely out of the oven.

You can see a piece taken out - and thus the inside.  It was pretty good, just probably not bake it so much next time.

Mousse au chocolat

Among its many great photos, our fabulous French cookbook has a recipe for chocolate mousse or, as it says, "mousse au chocolat".  It didn't look too difficult, and I even got to try out a new cooking technique.  The results were tasty (chocolate and whipped cream: where could you go wrong?), but the texture was a little airier than I usually associate with chocolate mousse.

Our notes:

• Not owning a double boiler, I used the standard substitute of a small mixing bowl set on top of a saucepan of simmering water.  This was the first time I'd tried using any kind of double boiler technique, and it worked great; the chocolate melted nice and smooth.  In terms of the recipe, I'd melt the butter along with the chocolate next time; adding the butter after taking the melted chocolate off the heat (as the recipe instructed) seemed to lower the chocolate's temperature too quickly.  Next time I'd probably add the butter when the chocolate is almost completely melted but still on the heat.

Worked great.

• The recipe called for the egg whites to be beaten until "firm and glossy".  Unfortunately for me, this led to a much foamier mousse than I'd been expecting (I've never been a big fan of meringue anything), and the overall texture was not that smooth--too much air in the structure.  So next time, I'd probably experiment to see if beating the egg whites to soft peaks would offer a smoother texture to the finished product than stiff peaks.

Almost meringue.

• Despite using bittersweet chocolate (Ghirardelli), the mousse still tasted oversweet.  It seems like the added sugar in the recipe acts partly as a stabilizer, so next time I'll try using something more than 60% cocoa!

Chocolate mousse, before refrigeration.

• The recipe said to transfer the mousse into molds before refrigerating, but I don't think the mousse, prepared as the recipe directs, would be able to set in what I think of as a mold, even if the molds were bigger than the ice cube trays that we tried using.  Perhaps it meant to just divide it into individual serving cups, or perhaps I just didn't make it right!

Festive. Sadly, the mousse as produced by this recipe doesn't hold a shape at all, so we were not able to get Block M servings of chocolate mousse.

• Interestingly, this mousse had a richer taste and smoother texture after a few days in the refrigerator.  I don't know if this is good practice or not, to make something on one day to eat a few days later.

Verdict: a recipe to try again, but with a few modifications, and maybe after trying other chocolate mousse recipes.

Chocolate mousse, after refrigeration. The presentation would probably have been a little better had we owned a pastry bag and related kitchen gear.

Le Cordon Bleu's Pâtisserie & baking foundations: classic recipes (2012), p. 176-177
Writeup background music: Muse, The 2nd Law (2012); we saw them in concert in Detroit this past Saturday and now I can't stop listening to their music.

illy: for moka pots

illy makes a coffee specially ground for use in moka pots.  In short, this is delicious: strong enough to not taste watered down, but not overstrong; very smooth; and finely ground enough for the moka pot.  An excellent standard!