Experiments with Food
Jan. 31st, 2010 09:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oakenguyExperiment 1: My wife got a food dehydrator. It's a necessary component of her plan to get healthier by eating as much raw, vegan, gluten-free food as possible. I wish her luck. For me, this new purchase means one thing only: JERKY.
Right now my first attempt, some bulgogi beef from Trader Joes, is in hour 5 of its 8-15 hour cycle (the recipe book times are pretty vague, I've noticed). After that, I've got some chicken soaking up a nice souvlaki marinade for experiment 1a. Once I see how that goes, it's salmon time. And then, meat on STICKS. Oh yes.
Experiment 2: Last week I wanted to make a dessert for a friend who was having a birthday. I'd managed to obtain the fact that he liked cream cheese frosting, no problem there, but what to put it on? And then I remembered two important facts.
Fact the First: I'd just encountered a recipe for a Southern dessert called a Coca-Cola cake;
Fact the Second: My friend, like myself and perhaps another .01% of the world's population, loves a soda called Moxie. (For the uninitiated, Moxie is like a cross between Doctor Pepper, root beer, and cough syrup. With a teeny-tiny bit of birch bark and anise mixed in. Not many sodas have layers of aftertastes like Moxie does; to my knowledge nothing else has afterSMELLS.)
So, thought I, could I replace the coca-cola in the cake recipe with Moxie? Yes, yes I could. It was a Learning Experience.
To my surprise, the Moxie was by no means the challenging part of the recipe. In fact, (future Iron Chef contestants may want to jot this down) if you stir Moxie and butter together and let it boil, it REALLY dilutes the Moxie flavor.
No no, the real challenge was that the recipe called for mini-marshmallows in the batter. (I checked two other recipes and they all agreed; it's not coca-cola cake without mini-marshmallows). The recipe had warned me to expect a thin batter; what it hadn't prepared me for was that mini-marshmallows FLOAT on the top of the batter. Float and then eventually melt and spread in the oven, but not evenly, making the toothpick test almost impossible because your results will vary wildly depending on whether you're poking a marshmallow or dry area.
Plus, when you take it out of the oven it looks like this:
Honestly, I've never been so happy to frost a cake.
And yet, I was pretty pleased with the end result--it had a density like fudge and a little bit of a kick like gingerbread. It makes me ponder how other sodas would work. And that makes me remember the diner up in Harvard Square with 19 varieties of root beer. Hmm. Hmmmmmm.
Right now my first attempt, some bulgogi beef from Trader Joes, is in hour 5 of its 8-15 hour cycle (the recipe book times are pretty vague, I've noticed). After that, I've got some chicken soaking up a nice souvlaki marinade for experiment 1a. Once I see how that goes, it's salmon time. And then, meat on STICKS. Oh yes.
Experiment 2: Last week I wanted to make a dessert for a friend who was having a birthday. I'd managed to obtain the fact that he liked cream cheese frosting, no problem there, but what to put it on? And then I remembered two important facts.
Fact the First: I'd just encountered a recipe for a Southern dessert called a Coca-Cola cake;
Fact the Second: My friend, like myself and perhaps another .01% of the world's population, loves a soda called Moxie. (For the uninitiated, Moxie is like a cross between Doctor Pepper, root beer, and cough syrup. With a teeny-tiny bit of birch bark and anise mixed in. Not many sodas have layers of aftertastes like Moxie does; to my knowledge nothing else has afterSMELLS.)
So, thought I, could I replace the coca-cola in the cake recipe with Moxie? Yes, yes I could. It was a Learning Experience.
To my surprise, the Moxie was by no means the challenging part of the recipe. In fact, (future Iron Chef contestants may want to jot this down) if you stir Moxie and butter together and let it boil, it REALLY dilutes the Moxie flavor.
No no, the real challenge was that the recipe called for mini-marshmallows in the batter. (I checked two other recipes and they all agreed; it's not coca-cola cake without mini-marshmallows). The recipe had warned me to expect a thin batter; what it hadn't prepared me for was that mini-marshmallows FLOAT on the top of the batter. Float and then eventually melt and spread in the oven, but not evenly, making the toothpick test almost impossible because your results will vary wildly depending on whether you're poking a marshmallow or dry area.
Plus, when you take it out of the oven it looks like this:
Honestly, I've never been so happy to frost a cake.
And yet, I was pretty pleased with the end result--it had a density like fudge and a little bit of a kick like gingerbread. It makes me ponder how other sodas would work. And that makes me remember the diner up in Harvard Square with 19 varieties of root beer. Hmm. Hmmmmmm.
