Category: Food

Cabbage in sweet and sour sauce

A friend in California has been asking for my recipe for cabbage in red sweet and sour sauce. Rather than typing something into an email, I thought I’d take some photos and blog it. James-Michael used to frequently request this dish back in San Francisco. For years, we never lived far apart, and we kept up the tradition of Sunday night supper. Many is the time I rode my scooter in a cold fog over Twin Peaks to cook at his apartment. More often I cooked at my apartment, and James-Michael had the more important task of selecting the after-supper DVDs.

Those of you who are more experienced cooks, please excuse the detail. This is a tutorial for James-Michael, who is still a novice cook. As I’ve mentioned before, I rarely follow recipes exactly. Rather, I read recipes for the concept and then run with it.

This concept came from a recipe that was included with my Aeternum pressure cooker, made in Italy, which I bought in the 1970s. The original recipe was for a whole cabbage, with the stalk excavated, stuffed with Italian sausage. Though I used to make the stuffed version, with vegetarian stuffings, for years I’ve mostly just used plain cabbage, cut in half and with the stalk removed. You can make it in a pressure cooker (especially if the cabbage is whole and stuffed), but you can also use a covered pot.

1. I’d suggest starting with a smallish head of cabbage. Remove the outer leaves and wash it. You also need a nice, strong onion. By the way, I bought this cabbage at Whole Foods. It’s organic and was grown in Watauga County, a mountain county not too far to the west of here.

2. Cut the cabbage in halves. Cut out the stalk. Chop the onion coarsely.

3. Cook the onion gently in a tablespoon or so of olive oil. No need to brown it. Just cook it until it’s soft and translucent.

4. Add about one and a half cups of water. Bring the water to a boil. Add about a tablespoon of sugar. I use raw sugar. Also add about three tablespoons of vinegar, some salt, and some pepper. Add two or three tablespoons of tomato paste or ketchup, enough to give the sauce a nice red color. Optional: add a small handful of raisins.

5. I don’t think this dish would come out right without the celery seed. Use about half a teaspoon, or a little more if you like.

6. When all these ingredients have been added to the sauce, boil the sauce gently for a few minutes. Then put in the cabbage. Ladle the sauce over the cabbage. Cover the pot and let it simmer gently for about an hour. Every 10 minutes or so, lift the lid and ladle more sauce over the cabbage. Test the cabbage with a fork to see if it is becoming tender. When the cabbage is tender, consider how much sauce you have. If there’s too much sauce, and it’s watery, then after the cabbage is tender remove the lid, turn up the heat, and boil off some of the water. If at any point while the cabbage is cooking the amount of sauce gets too low, add a little water. Half the art of cooking is getting the sauce right. You want it to be concentrated and savory, never watery.

Here’s your virtual supper! I served the cabbage with pinto beans and rice. To make the rice, I chopped some raw nuts in a blender, then browned the nuts lightly in a pan. When the nuts were browned, I added the rice and stirred in a spoonful of the cabbage sauce to moisten it. Then, at the table, I spooned some cabbage sauce over the rice.

I bought the crock at a junk shop in Madison for 99 cents.

I’m sure I would have experimented with sourdough years ago, were it not for the fact that, while I was working, I didn’t have much time for baking. Plus, I lived in San Francisco for 17 years. Baking sourdough bread at home in San Francisco would seem a bit odd, since the city is full of good sourdough bread.

As a nerd, I could never be content to just blindly follow some directions and end up (hopefully) with sourdough bread. I need to understand what’s going on. As usual, Wikipedia supplies the fundamentals. Because I’ve made homemade sauerkraut, all the concepts are familiar to me. Even experienced sourdough makers often seem to think that what makes sourdough is just yeast. But it’s more complicated than that. Wikipedia explains that sourdough is a symbiotic combination of yeast and lactobacillus. Now we’re getting somewhere…

Yeast is a fungus. It eats sugar, and the useful byproducts of this metabolism are carbon dioxide and alcohol. When we bake with yeast, the carbon dioxide bubbles cause the bread to rise, and the alcohol is baked off.

Lactobacillus is an anaerobic bacteria. It eats sugar and produces lactic acid. Lactic acid is a food preservative. It’s what makes sauerkraut.

In sourdough, the lactobacillus feed mostly on the metabolic byproducts of the yeast. The lactic acid produced by the lactobacillus gives sourdough bread its sour taste. It’s the same process that makes sauerkraut sour. The lactic acid has another important effect in the sourdough starter, which can sit at room temperature for weeks without rotting. The lactic acid lowers the pH of the concoction. This acidity prevents unwanted bacteria from growing. This is the same principle that makes vinegar a preservative, and it’s what keeps bad bacteria out of sauerkraut.

And now we can see why most recipes for making your own sourdough starter start with pineapple juice. The acidity of the pineapple juice keeps the bad bacteria from growing until the starter is mature enough to produce enough lactic acid to do the job. Then we can use water.

So where do the yeast and lactobacillus come from to inoculate the starter? They’re all around us, especially on the grains of wheat.

If you’d like to make a sourdough starter, I’d suggest Googling around for recipes. Read several recipes. I’m using this one, more or less.

I’ll post more photos as the process continues. It may take up to two weeks before I’m ready to make sourdough bread.

Not much to see yet

I bought an iron skillet only three weeks ago, but it has already become my favorite pan for baking. Whether it’s biscuits, cornbread, or rolls, the iron pan produces the most even baking and the best crusts, both top and bottom.

Today’s rolls contained both cashews and soy flour. I continue with my experiments to try to produce a truly good bread with the lowest glycemic index possible. Just using whole wheat flour, of course, is better than white flour. But I don’t regard whole wheat alone as a true glycemic-friendly food.

Some of my experiments have involved brans, both wheat bran and oat bran. Bran, though, makes a coarse, not very tasty bread. I’ve also tried flax seed meal. But there’s something about the consistency of the flax seed that detracts from a really satisfying bread-eating experience.

One way to lower the glycemic index of bread is to add protein. For today’s bread, I whizzed in a blender half a cup of cashews in a cup and a quarter of water. I added a little more than a quarter of a cup of soy flour, then enough whole wheat flour to make the dough. It was pretty darn good bread.

There are some low-cost iron skillets from China on the market, but I’m sure you’d be much happier with an American-made skillet from Lodge.

The rolls always fall out of the iron skillet clean as a whistle.

The best popovers, to be sure, are made with white flour. They’re light, buttery, and crisp around the edges. But it’s possible to make perfectly decent whole wheat popovers. I use the austere popover recipe from the 1943 wartime edition of Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking. Rombauer includes several variations on popovers in this edition, including the standard light and poppy version. The whole-wheat wartime recipe uses one egg, a cup of flour, and a cup of milk. Soy milk works fine. Yep, they’ll rise, if you beat the egg well enough. When they’re done, be sure to prick them with a knife or fork to let the steam out.

Gnocci with toasted walnuts, tempeh, and mushrooms. This is a very meaty dish … hard to believe that it’s vegan.

For those days in which you walk in circles in the kitchen trying to think of something a little different to cook, consider gnocci.

Gnocci, I believe, are considered tricky to make. I don’t think so. Any cook who is experienced working with dough will understand making gnocci. If you Google, you’ll find lots of tips and recipes from the experts, which I am not. However, I do strongly believe that you don’t need egg in the dough. Just two ingredients — potato and flour — work fine.

Gnocci are usually boiled. They also can be browned in oil, which is how I made gnocci today. Sweet potato gnocci particularly like to be browned in oil, I think, because the sugar in the potatoes gives the gnocci skins a nice, chewy texture.

The dough: nothing but sweet potatoes and whole wheat flour

Sliced and forked

Sizzlin’