Food – Page 44 – Into the Woods

On bread and bakeware

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.

Rehabilitating potatoes

I’ve written previously about how sweet potatoes have a lower glycemic index than white potatoes and are all around healthier than white potatoes. But lately I’ve become aware that there are things we can do to lower the glycemic insult of white potatoes.

If you Google around, you’ll find a number of sources that say that red potatoes are slightly less of a glycemic insult than white potatoes. But even better, when potatoes are cooked and then chilled in the refrigerator for 24 hours, the glycemic index goes down substantially. Boiled red potatoes, chilled and then eaten the next day, can have a glycemic reading as low as 56.

As I understand it, this is not simply because the potatoes are cold. It’s that, as the starch is chilled, the starch chemistry changes its structure so that it’s slower to digest. I believe this change persists even if the potatoes are reheated.

I keep seeing references to new types of low-glycemic potatoes developed by agricultural universities. But so far I have not been able to find a source of these potatoes, either as produce or as seed potatoes for planting.

Carolina church supper potato salad

Popovers

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.

Whole-wheat sweet-potato gnocci

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’

The coffee of yesteryear

Buffalo china cups, Victor mugs

Those enormous coffee mugs and gigantic paper coffee cups are symbols of the rat race. Once upon a time, it was understood that a cup of coffee was something to relax with and savor. The drinking vessels reflected that.

There is a science, of course, behind the new style and the old style of coffee drinking.

The science of the new style is simple: Get all the coffee you’re going to drink into a single vessel, and chug it fast while on the run. Still, it’s guaranteed that the first third of it will be too hot, and the last third will be too cold.

The science of the old style was much more complex and sophisticated. It required skill and attention from whoever was serving the coffee. The drinking vessels were made of heavy china. The cups absorbed heat from the first pouring of coffee, cooling it to a more drinkable temperature. Thereafter, there was the ritual of “warming up” the coffee, which required pouring more coffee at just the right time, before the cup was empty. This not only refilled the cup, it also brought the coffee back to the ideal temperature. This ritual was repeated until you’d had enough coffee. This is how the English serve — or at least used to serve — tea from a teapot.

To my lights, the ideal coffee mug was the mug made by the Victor Mug Company. This mug holds about 8 ounces when filled to the brim, or about 7 ounces when filled to a drinkable level. The ideal coffee cup was made by the Buffalo Pottery Company. These cups hold about 7 ounces when filled to the brim, and about 6 ounces when filled to a drinkable level. These mugs and cups were sold as restaurant china. They’re now collectable.

When looking for cups in the housewares section of a couple of chain stores, I was not terribly surprised to find that they don’t even carry cups and saucers anymore, and all the mugs are huge. eBay is the answer.

I really feel for the people who have to drink their coffee from huge vessels, on the run. Now that I’m retired, I drink coffee (well, a coffee substitute) the old-fashioned way. I used my large set of Victor mugs during my working years. But now I’ve slowed down to cups and saucers.

Potassium broth

Now that I’m back on the cold and snowy East Coast, I’m remembering how good it is to have an arsenal of warm drinks. How about a bit of old-fashioned broth?

It was from Jethro Kloss, in the hippy handbook Back to Eden, that I first heard about potassium broth. Kloss’ version of potassium broth included oats and bran to give the broth extra body. He frequently prescribed it for people who were sick and couldn’t handle solid food. If you Google for “potassium broth,” you’ll find many versions. They all involve fresh vegetables, peels and all, simmered for four hours or so and strained.

The broth I made today included a beet, a turnip, a couple of potatoes, some celery, onions, turnip leave stems, collard stems, and the outer leaves from a cabbage. It’s still simmering, but I think I will add some tomato paste to the broth after I’ve strained out the vegetables, to make it taste more like vegetable soup.

It seems a waste to strain the broth and discard the vegetables, but I’ll drink the electrolytes, and my chickens will be happy to get the pulp.

Biscuits vs. rolls

Biscuits and rolls are so similar, and yet so different. They’re not interchangeable. Who would want rolls and gravy and scrambled eggs?

There’s one way that rolls win hands down: they’re healthier. The shortening adds a lot of fat to biscuits, and the soda or baking powder is a big hidden source of sodium. Biscuits are quick, though.

Still, I think you can make perfectly decent rolls in 90 minutes or even a little less. Just let them rise once, in the baking pan. I think rolls have a better texture if they have no oil in the dough at all.

A foodified quandary

A Walmart avocado

When I lived in San Francisco, shopping at Walmart was unthinkable. All big box stores (or book stores) were scorned for a number of reasons, not least for what has happened to small, neighborhood merchants. But it also was easy to not shop at Walmart in San Francisco. I’d have had to drive way out into the suburbs to get to one, and there were so many other alternatives in the city. Heck, one day when I was in line at Borders book store on Union Square in San Francisco, Armistead Maupin was in the checkout line in front of me. It’s a fair question, and I don’t claim to have an answer: How far should we go to support local businesses when a big business has something better, for cheaper?

If we pay more for something when we could have gotten the same thing cheaper at Walmart, we’re basically making a donation to a business. Is that the best form of charity? I have my doubts.

In any case, here in the rural South, everything is different. There aren’t so many choices. And we don’t have big-city incomes to spend in better stores, even if there were lots of better stores. So I don’t know.

This winter I’ve bought avocados at Walmart, for $.99 to $1.08 each. Every one of them has been good and has ripened beautifully. Should I pay $2.39 each for avocados at a grocery store, half of which rot before they ripen or are stringy and dry?

I buy at Walmart only those things that seriously beat the competition. For another example, Walmart has the best deal in organic, unsweetened soy milk. That’s the best accommodation I’ve been able to come up with so far.

Beet curry

I paced in circles in the kitchen this evening, trying to figure out what I wanted for supper. Something over rice seemed appealing. I knew that I needed a heavy dose of garlic to try to fend off the cold I’m afraid I picked up on a trip to town last night. And I had some fresh beets from Whole Foods that needed to be used. So I made something up: beet curry. I didn’t Google for beet curry until after supper. It’s not unheard of, but I don’t think it’s common. But anything will curry.

I used a whole head of garlic. I blanched some almonds and chopped them a little in the blender so they’d soak up more flavor. I added tomato paste to thicken the sauce and deepen the red. I served it over Uncle Ben’s rice. Now, before you go and say something snobbish about Uncle Ben’s, keep in mind that it may have been Julia Child’s favorite rice. She called it “L’oncle Ben’s.” Uncle Ben’s is just parboiled rice. It also has a lower glycemic index than most rices.

Believe it or not, it was delicious. I already knew that beets like spices, and garlic, and tomatoes. You’d be surprised how good beets are when added to spaghetti sauce. Just dice the beets and add them to your regular spaghetti sauce, and simmer until the beets are tender. I realized while eating the beet curry that beets probably would like roasted peanuts. That will be a future experiment: coming up with something that includes beets, tomato sauce, garlic, and roasted peanuts or peanut butter. Some sort of lasagna, maybe?

From the red splatter in the kitchen you’d think I’d murdered a chicken, indoors. But this was a totally vegan dish.

Beets, almonds, minced garlic

Sautéing the almonds with the curry spices

Turnip greens

The grocery store in Walnut Cove had turnip greens this week for $1.29 a bunch. As Michael Pollan says, eat more leaves. Especially at a good price.

By the way, what you see on the countertop is what we around here would call a mess of greens. When I was in elementary school, a teacher once derided one of the children for saying “a mess of greens.” The teacher said that that was not proper. How sad. It is perfectly proper, but it does mark one’s dialect as Appalachian English. I have previously written about stigmatized dialects.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives an example of this usage from 1503: “You have very good strawberies at your gardayne in Holberne. I require you let us have a messe of them.”

Mess means a portion of food sufficient to make a dish. As I understood the term growing up, it particularly meant a portion of food brought from the garden. I never heard anyone talk about a mess of bacon.