Lavazza: Qualità Oro

Bought this because I liked that other Lavazza.  With a name like "Qualità Oro", I expected some high quality coffee, but sadly, it did not meet the exacting standards I set out for it.  Lavazza's website claims that this blend is "a selection of the finest 100% Arabica coffees from Central America and the African highlands" and lists it first among its selection of coffee blends.  So why didn't I like it?

• Weaker flavour compared to the "Caffè Espresso" blend: I prefer my coffee tasty, not tasting like it's a bit watered down.  Lavazza's website gives it a 4/5 for "Intensity"; Caffè Espresso had gotten a 5/5 for that one.  Was this part of the issue?  Perhaps...
• Price: rather more expensive than the espresso blend, and to make matters worse, the price listed on the shelf did not match the price it scanned for at checkout.
• The most egregious offense: for whatever reason, it was effectively a decaf coffee, and when it's 6.45 AM, that is most definitely not what I'm looking for.

Verdict: would not buy again.

Qualità oro? More like, qualità piombo, I'd say.

Slow cooker tapioca pudding

I wanted to make some tapioca pudding.  However, as the minute tapioca at Kroger was selling for an exorbitant price, I decided to get a bag of tapioca pearls for $0.99 at the Chinese grocery store.  I found a good recipe and went to work.

My notes:

• This really could not have been easier: mix ingredients; turn on slow cooker.  Not too difficult.  It didn't even require soaking the tapioca pearls beforehand.
• A few of the reviewers at AllRecipes mentioned that the eggs were more for texture rather than taste.  I'd probably only use one egg next time instead of two.
• The recipe didn't call for vanilla but I threw some in.  It probably ended up being somewhere between 1 1/2 and 2 teaspoons since I just used whatever we had left in the bottle.
• Our slow cooker doesn't have a "medium" setting; it has "high", "low", "simmer", and "warm".  So I set it for 1.5 hours on high, then turned it to low for about 15 minutes, after which I thought that was too much heat and set it to simmer for the last hour of cooking.  This seemed far under the time that recipe said the pudding would take, but it seemed to be nicely thickened at this point, and based on evidence it didn't seem to be getting any thicker with the longer cooking.  Rather than risk it burning, I just turned off the heat.
• If anything, I'd reduce the sugar a bit, maybe to half cup; 2/3 cup seems a bit excessive.
• I used nonstick spray on the liner of the slow cooker.  I don't know if this helped, but I certainly didn't want to find out how fun cleanup would be without it.

Definitely a recipe I'd try again.

Delicious!

Cloverleaf rolls v3.0

This recipe for cloverleaf rolls even says in its title that they are "fantastic".  This, unfortunately, was not my experience with them.  From an imbalance of liquid and dry ingredients to a lower yield, this was not anywhere near as good of an experience as I'd had on Wednesday with making cloverleaf rolls.

My notes:

• The recipe calls for 3 1/2 cups of flour, but I ended up using a little more than 4 cups, and even then I did not really get a dough, but more of a stiff batter.  I didn't want to add more flour because of a dire warning in the recipe about flour amount.  Maybe this was a mistake on my part.

Cake batter?

• There was a lot of liquid in this recipe: 3/4 c. water to dissolve the yeast, 1 c. milk, 1/4 c. melted butter, and 1 egg.  By contrast, the recipe I used on Wednesday only used a little over 1 c. milk, 1 egg, and 6 (not melted) tablespoons of butter.  Maybe this is why I should have added more flour.
• However, it did seem like a good idea to dissolve the yeast in what amounted to sugar water.  Get the yeast to really start eating before it even got to the flour, right?
• Because of the point at which I'd stopped adding flour, I ended up with what was essentially a thick batter, but a batter with gluten (there was definitely gluten forming in this stuff).  By the time I finished dividing the dough into 12 muffin cups, I felt like one of those people in the commercials for the faucets that you only need to hit with your wrist to get to turn on.  I had anticipated this and had, against my environmental science bachelor's degree, turned on the water before I started dealing with the dough.

Before 2nd rising: they look like biscuits, or something.  There was no way this stuff was going to be formed into any other shape than 'blob'.

After 2nd rising: at least they look more like rolls, now. 

They may not be "cloverleaf" rolls, but they turned out to be rolls nonetheless.

These turned out to be more like brioche: soft, buttery, sort of eggy, a little sweet.  This would have been great had I been going for something like a brioche (which, honestly, had been next on my list of breads to try), but this did not make for good cloverleaf roll dough.  The recipe had promised 12 large cloverleaf rolls, but I ended up with 12 comparatively smaller brioche.  So, this turned out to be not so bad of a result as I had thought at the start; I might keep the recipe around for brioche, but then I might just find a recipe that specifically says that it's for making brioche!

Lavazza: Caffè Espresso

I have one of these coffee pots:

The Bialetti Moka Pot.

It was a great pickup and it's already saved me a lot of trips to the coffee shop.  I only wish I'd found out about these in college!

I drink coffee every weekday and the moka pot gives me two mornings' worth of coffee, so I end up using this 2-3 times each week; the day-old stuff isn't nearly as tasty as the fresh, but it's no less effective.  Since the time that I bought this back in September, I've been trying out different brands of coffee, so I figured I should start keeping track of which brands work out and which...not so much.

Lavazza Caffè Espresso

This Lavazza passed the test: not so strong as to be bitter but certainly flavourful.  Only too late did I realize that all of the info about the coffee itself is on the side of the can, but that info is also at Lavazza's website.  It's a medium roast suitable for all coffee makers but optimized for espresso makers--the moka pot is technically not an espresso maker, but the coffee still seems to work just fine.

Verdict: would buy again.

Cloverleaf rolls v2.0

After the cloverleaf fiasco of earlier this month, I found four new recipes online and resolved to try each of them.  We tried one of those this evening, the results of which far exceeded my expectations.

Extended Narrative
The recipe calls for "1 cup plus 2 Tablespoons milk", which conveniently measured out to about 250 mL.  Huzzah for the metric system, right?

We also don't keep bread flour; the recipe calls for 4 cups of that.  I started out with 3 cups of all purpose flour and added just under 1 more cup during the mixing process.  The dough ended up being slightly sticky but not unlike our pizza dough, so I figured it was all right.

I was so excited about how things were turning out, even early on in the process, that I took way more photos than I usually do.

The stand mixer with dough hooks once again came through for us.

The recipe said something about running the stand mixer for 6 minutes; I probably came in at around that amount of time after having added that last cup of flour rather gradually.

I made sure to punch down the dough after the first rising which was not specified in the recipe.

When the time came to shape these I realized that this was a lot of dough.  Fortunately, I'd purchased a 12-muffin tin after the last experiment with these rolls, which worked out very well and had a nonstick coating to boot; as an experiment, I only sprayed half of the cups with nonstick spray.  The dough for most of the rolls filled the muffin cups (unlike last time).  I didn't bother to coat these with melted butter, mostly because I didn't feel like putting in that extra effort.

All cozy-like.  Rolls on the right are in the zone of nonstick spray, while the rolls on the left  are the control group.  As it turned out, there was no difference (statistically significant or otherwise) between the two halves of the batch.

Being somewhat paranoid, I set the timer for 30 minutes for the second rising, while the recipe called for 45 minutes. When the timer went off I realized that this would actually work out well as I still had to preheat the oven (our oven takes a while and there's no telling where it might be at any given point in the preheating process).  Here's the result of the second rising:

WHOA.

Rather different from that first time, eh?

These got baked for 14 minutes rather than the specified 15-20 minutes.

NOM.

About five minutes after this photo was taken, that roll on the top right was gone.  Soft, rich, and buttery; if there were any modification I'd make to the recipe, I'd probably add slightly more sugar--but that's really just trying to find something to have to change.  The recipe was fairly quick (edit: I should say that the active part of the recipe was fairly quick; obviously there was an hour and a half there where I didn't have to do much!); it didn't require a lot of ingredients; and it was pretty foolproof even for someone like me, inexperienced as I am (was?) with yeast breads.

Of course, I'd still like to try the other cloverleaf roll recipes that I'd found, but this is going to be hard to beat--but was it only because of the first failure that this success seemed so great?

The finished cloverleaf roll.  Look at that crumb.