Poaching Chicken is Handy (and Tasty!!)

Hello! We've been on a small break from writing due to some company visiting from colder climates and other such things. So we're finally sitting down to write about some of the better things we've cooked over the past few weeks.

One night a couple weeks ago we were craving some chicken tacos. We wanted to figure out the best way to make good chicken taco meat, so we decided to try poaching.  I've always been turned off by the word "poach" because it makes me think of boiling and bland, but it turns out it's the opposite of bland!  The chicken actually comes out juicy and flavorful.  Since poaching allows you to be creative with the flavors that go into the chicken, we could easily apply it to making some flavorful chicken for our tacos.

To start we placed the chicken in a pot (we used breasts with the bone in and skinned, but it could be any pieces). We then added whatever amount of left over chicken stock we had in the fridge, and then enough water to cover the chicken. You can use just water for poaching, but it's better to use stock to infuse more flavors into the chicken. We also threw in some liquid from a can of tomatoes that we drained since we were going to use the tomatoes later in the tacos.  We also threw in some garlic, onion, celery, oregano, red pepper, salt, and pepper. Basically, you can throw in whatever spices, herbs or aromatics you wish to flavor your chicken with. It's probably a good idea to use flavors in the poaching liquid to go along with the theme of the meal.

We brought it to a boil and then quickly turned it down to a simmer ( and covered the pot. We left it at a slow simmer for about 12 minutes  (10-15 minutes or so depending on the amount and thickness of the chicken... though it could be much longer if you have a few pounds of chicken in there).  After the simmer, we turned off the burner, and left the chicken in the poaching liquid for another 10-15 minutes before taking it out to cool. This allows the chicken to soak up all those good juices and flavors while it finishes cooking.  You can then use the chicken in recipes that require cooked chicken (like tacos) or eat it on its own (on a salad, yum).

We then sauteed some onions and tomatoes along with some seasoning in a fry pan. After the onions softened and browned a little, we tossed in our poached chicken and had ourselves some delicious chicken tacos topped with fresh chopped avocado. Yum!

From Kitchen Assays

Operation: Chocolate Chip Cookie

Over the past several months I have been making random batches of chocolate cookies in my seemingly never ending quest to make the perfect chewy chocolate chip cookie. I have tried a few different recipes mixing and matching ingredients to find that perfect combination to get a nice chewy consistency. I'm talking about a nice brown, crispy outside and chewy-gooey inside that melts in your mouth. I've gotten close, but none of the recipes that claim to produce these chewy cookies are up to par with my expectations. Don't get me wrong, they make delicious cookies, but so far I've gotten a lot of cookies that have a crispy outside and an almost cake-like consistency on the inside. So as part of my ongoing baking experiments I will try to perfect the recipe (at least in my mind). Is it possible? I hope so!

So far the main recipes I've used are Alton Brown's recipe for chewy cookies and the Big Chewy chocolate chip cookie recipe from America's Test Kitchen's family cookbook.

One of the main differences I've noticed between different recipes is the butter. Not necessarily the amount, but how it is incorporated into the cookie batter. Some recipes call for softened butter, while others recommend melted butter. Butter, is a fat (of course) and it is used in cookie recipes to add moisture, flavor (mmm butter), and a golden brown and delicious color. If you incorporate solid butter (even if creamed) into the batter, it will melt while baking causing the cookie to spread. However, if you melt the butter prior to incorporating it into the batter, the cookie won't flatten out into greasy disks in the oven, and they'll maintain a nice, thick body which is what we're going for!

From Kitchen Assays

Another thing I've noticed with my cookies is the type of color you can achieve by varying the brown sugar as well as the amount of time you spend creaming the egg mixture with the sugars and vanilla. For this latest recipe I used dark brown sugar instead of light brown sugar and got a more golden brown color to my cookies as opposed to a lighter looking cookie (which I've had in the past). The dark brown sugar will also increase the moisture (which should lead to a chewier texture) in the cookie. I also feel that if you stop creaming the egg (plus butter and sugar) mixture as soon as it starts to turn lighter brown (which it will if you cream it for longer than a minute) you can preserve this nicer (in my opinion) color to your cookie.

For my latest batch of cookies I substituted bread flour for all-purpose flour (and used melted buttered instead of softened) and used the Test Kitchen recipe once again. I feel like the slightly heavier flour made the flavor and consistency a bit better than my previous batch of cookies. From what I've read about flour, I've learned that unbleached flour should not retain as much moisture as bleached all-purpose flour and would therefore have a stiffer consistency within the cookie (less cake-like). Also, bread flour has a higher protein content, and so it has the potential to form more gluten... which should lead to chewiness! That seems to be the case with my cookies; yet we're still getting a tiny hint of cakiness in them.

I have other variables I'd like to play with in my future attempts:

Mixing Method: After doing a little more research, (I enjoy Alton Brown's baking book) I've learned that the real goal of the creaming method (which is to cream the butter and sugars together until light and fluffy before mixing in the dry ingredients) is to aerate the batter. The method introduces many evenly micro-sized bubbles into the batter leading to light, fluffy, and cake-like batters. Which sounds wonderful for a cake, but not so great if we're trying to make a chewy cookie! Instead, I'd like to try "The Muffin Method." The muffin method is just throwing everything in the bowl at once (dry and wet ingredients) and mixing until just combined (even leaving some lumps). Hopefully this will create the texture we want.

Salt: The basic recipe that I've been using calls for about a 1/2 tsp of salt. Though, when doing some research on other cookie recipes I've found that 1 1/2 tsp of salt with a smaller amount of flour will do (check this recipe out from the NY Times). I feel my cookies need a little more salt. In fact, sprinkling a bit of salt on the tops of the dough balls before baking seems to really enhance their flavor. It may sound odd, but we tried it last night, and they were pretty delicious! The goal isn't to make the cookie taste salty, but for the salt to enhance the overall taste of the cookie.

Oats: I'd like to try to add crushed or ground oats into the mixture. I don't want to make an oatmeal cookie, but I am looking to add some of that crispy, crunchy texture. I have had cookies that have feature oats (or some sort of bran) in them and they were delicious. I just need to figure out the proper proportion of dry ingredients to wet (perhaps in weighing the ingredients I could do this...luckily I just purchased a nice new kitchen scale).

Pudding: I'd like to try to add pudding mix to the batter. In the past, I've made pudding cookies that melt in your mouth. If I could apply that same concept to my chewy chocolate chip cookie without making them too moist and crumbly, we could have a winner! Pudding cookies themselves tend to fall apart easily and are really soft...but perhaps just a small amount of pudding in the batter would work in our case.

Butter: Perhaps with the butter we could try half melted and half solid to get an in-between affect. It would keep the outside crisp and perhaps the inside less cake-like. It's worth experimenting with.

So I think the next plan of attack is to try to alter the mixing method and up the salt to a full teaspoon before altering anything else...I feel like the ingredient list is pretty solid. We'll be sure to update with our latest results as soon as we're done with our small break from eating cookies every day!

Crossing Over to the Healthy Side

Since it's the new year and all, we decided we should try to cook a little healthier every now and then (not that our cooking is completely unhealthy, but it's good to be conscious of what we're eating). We had a productive day of hiking and decided that going home to eat leftover pizza (as awesome as that is) would ruin our active day. So we randomly thought of making some sort of vegetarian fajitas. At the store we picked up some eggplant, bell peppers, an onion, some firm tofu and tortillas. Tofu! Yes, tofu. I have never really cooked it before, but I've ordered it in restaurants. Greg thought eggplant would be a good choice because it's a more "meaty" vegetable. We hoped the combination of the two would replace the need for chicken or steak (if not in taste but in satiation).

Before cooking the tofu we decided to squeeze out the extra water by placing it between two paper towels weighed down by a baking sheet with a couple of bottles of beer on top. We hoped that this would help the tofu absorb the marinade better.

After looking through various fajita/Latin marinade recipes, we came up with our own recipe (for half a package of tofu and half an eggplant cut into strips):

1 orange (approximately 1/3-1/2 cup)
1/4 cup tequila
1 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoons ground cumin
2 smashed cloves garlic
1/4 cup chopped yellow onion
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp red pepper
1 tsp oregano
1.5 tbs olive oil
1 tsp salt

We combined the above ingredients and poured them in a zip lock bag with the tofu and eggplant slices for a couple of hours to marinate.

After about two hours, we chopped up the peppers and threw them in our new nonstick skillet along with the marinated veggies and tofu on medium-high heat for about 10 minutes until browned. It took a little while to cook the liquid out of the vegetables and tofu, but after about 5 minutes the mixture started to brown and smell good. I was pleasantly surprised that it actually smelled like we were cooking fajitas (which was a good sign for our marinade concoction)!

From Kitchen Assays

Meanwhile, I had to cook up our tortillas before serving. We like to buy the uncooked flour tortillas for tacos and fajitas because they seem to have a fresher flavor (plus it's fun to cook them). That's one of the good things about living in San Diego-- I don't think the uncooked tortillas are available everywhere. All you have to do is stick them in a pan until they start to puff up and then flip them over. It usually only takes about a minute on a pre-heated pan (you'll see some nice brown marks on the bubbles)

From Kitchen Assays

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In less than 15 minutes we had some yummy fajitas to eat.

From Kitchen Assays

I'd say overall our experiment came out quite well. We thought the flavor was pretty good--nice cinnamon notes and a good bite. If we had to critique it, we felt like there was a little too much "squishy" from both the eggplant and the tofu and not enough firm or chewy. Maybe next time we'll limit the recipe to just the tofu or the eggplant. It might be nice to try to add some crisped potatoes (either by baking them or throwing them in the pan before all the other ingredients), or some other veggie. It would also be good to try other flavor combinations like lime juice instead of lemon juice (which we would have preferred to use, but didn't have any on hand). All in all, the fajitas turned out really nicely, and we're looking forward to working on the parameter of this experiment again!

A New Year for Good Foods!

Happy New Year!  My boyfriend Greg and I decided to start this blog to keep track of our cooking adventures and experiments. What a perfect time to start it! We both have a science background, so naturally our nerdiness comes out in our thought processes in the kitchen. We like to do a lot of research and planning before attacking a recipe just to make sure we get the best results possible. Our aim is to talk about the tasty things we cook, and to share some photos and tips to coincide with the recipes.

To kick off the new year, we made some yummy treats to celebrate with our friends.  To start off our night we decided to cook what I call "cheese puffs,"but are more formally known as gougeres.  We found the recipe in Mark Bittman's book 'The Best Recipes in the World'. We felt like the recipe sounded tasty and cheesy enough to fill our New Year's eve appetizer needs.  They only took about a half hour to make, but as a bonus you get a good arm work out from the cheese you have to grate (it builds character).

I started off by grating some fresh Gruyere cheese with our new KitchenAid box grater--we just picked it up for pretty cheap at ROSS (win)!   We got our cheeses for this recipe at Trader Joe's--they seem to have a good and reasonably priced cheese selection.  In my opinion, the Gruyere cheese made all the difference in this recipe; its unique flavor really stood out in the final product. We went with the young aged (6 months) Gruyere cheese instead of the extra fancy cave aged Gruyere cheese which was double the price (maybe when we're rich).  I also grated up some dry parmesan cheese as a complement to the moist Gruyere cheese (the mixture smelled lovely).

From Kitchen Assays

Meanwhile, Greg worked on the dough mixture for the puffs, which consists of basic all-purpose flour, salt, and a half stick of butter.  He heated the water, butter, and salt in a saucepan and brought it to a boil on medium heat. Then he added the flour all at once, stirring constantly until the dough mixture separated from the walls of the pan (approximately 3 minutes).  He put the batter into the stand mixer and started mixing it on low.  He then added eggs, one at a time. Each time an egg was added the dough separated slightly but came back together after a minute.  The final step was to incorporate the grated cheeses.  After that we had a nice easy dough to work with and spooned small balls (about 2 inches in diameter) onto a baking sheet.

From Kitchen Assays

Gougere batter (pre-cheese)

We then placed them in a 425 degree oven for around 12 minutes (until tops were golden brown) and tested the inside. It was still a little doughy in the middle so we put them back in for another 3 minutes (about 15 total). Note: We feel like we should have rounded the puffs into well-formed balls because they didn't puff up evenly and looked a bit messy. This didn't affect the taste though.

From Kitchen Assays

Little puffs in the oven

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Finished goodness!

They looked and smelled wonderful! We immediately took a knife and slit the top of each one to help the moisture escape so they would stay crispy. I'm not sure whether it was necessary, but it was a tip we had read in the book The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters (for a similar recipe). They were warm and delicious, and I probably ate about 10. They tasted like gourmet Cheeze-its. A big hit!

On to the main course! We found an awesome and simple way to make pan pizzas using regular nine inch cake pans thanks to the PBS show America's Test Kitchen.  We've made these a couple times now, but we've added our own twists to make them tastier and somewhat healthier than your typical pepperoni and sausage pizzas.

We started by making the dough. First, we combined the flour, yeast and salt in the stand mixer with the dough hook attachment. Then, we added the sugar, skim milk and olive oil (for some fatty flavor that the skim milk lacks) all at once turning the speed up to medium low. Starting slow is good, otherwise the milk just splatters everywhere.  The dough is finished when you can pull it off the dough hook and it's nice and taught. It will be a little bit sticky, but it shouldn't be wet. We then formed it into a ball in our hands, placed it in a greased glass bowl, and put it in a warm oven to proof for about 30 minutes.  Unfortunately, our yeast decided to give us a hard time. The dough just didn't want to rise. I took it out and kneaded it a little bit more before returning it to the warmth of the oven--but even after 15 more minutes we had no rising. I figured there must be something wrong with the yeast. We gave the dough making another go; this time warming the milk, and "blooming" the yeast in the warm mik. This dough seemed to rise faster, but still not as fast as we were expecting (based on our previous experiences). Maybe Trader Joe's dry active yeast is no good... Maybe we bought the wrong kind yeast? Not sure.  Eventually both doughs rose, so we put one in the fridge to use the next day.

I then made a sauce that contained a mixture of Trader Joe's basic pizza sauce with slices of canned whole plum tomatoes.  I thought the canned tomatoes would be a better choice than fresh tomatoes since tomatoes are not in season right now and I find that winter tomatoes are mealy and bland. It was a good choice. The canned tomatoes were sweet and delicious!

From Kitchen Assays

Dough and bad lighting.

After dividing the risen dough ball in half, I rolled out the dough with a rolling pin part way then draped the dough over my fingers to let gravity shape it to the proper size. I then placed the dough into the cake pans which were already heavily coated with olive oil.  To build the pizza Greg and I like to put down baby spinach before we put the sauce. It makes the spinach wilt into the sauce so it's almost like it's not even there when you eat it. Not that we don't like spinach, it's just a texture preference on our pizza. After the spinach and sauce, we sprinkled about a cup of fresh grated whole milk mozzarella on each pie, some precooked chicken, and fresh cut mushrooms. Finally, we topped the pizzas with a sprinkle of shredded parmesan. We popped them in the 400 degree oven for around 30 minutes (the time varies depending on how monstrous your topping pile gets).

From Kitchen Assays

It looked and smelled marvelous!

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The crust is so crispy and chewy (in a good way)!  It was the perfect feast to bring in the new year with! These are probably the best homemade pizza's we've made. They're so easy to make too. I'm sure we'll keep tweaking the recipe, and trying other topping combinations as well. (In the past, we've topped the pizza with grilled ground turkey, and put artichoke hearts on them as well.)

Well, that's a start with our cooking experiments. We hope to keep updating every time we make something new and exciting! Stay tuned.