More Mac & Cheese

When I first got my sodium citrate from Modernist Pantry, I tried one of the Modernist at Home mac & cheese recipes, Test 1. It was OK but the kids preferred the way I usually make mac & cheese. The lesson I took away from that batch was the technique of adding sodium citrate and blending the cheese while it melts definitely works and makes a beautiful sauce.

Test 2 in the sodium citrate trials was taking the ingredients of my standard no-boil mac & cheese, mixing the sauce together including some sodium citrate, and baking. I don't have a photo. It was decent although not as good as the original. The cheese didn't break but the finished cheese sauce was a little pasty.

Test 3 in the trials was the best yet. (I should probably note that the brand of cheese and the amount of cheese remains a constant in these trials. In fact, the ingredients in Test 2 and Test 3 are basically identical with the exception that I didn't weigh anything in Test 3 - I just winged it. Weeknight meal, science be damned.)  Here's the Test 3 recipe which is a slight adaptation of this New York Times recipe (the creamy one).

Preheat the oven to 375. Put 1 cup of cottage cheese and 2 cups of milk in a bowl (don't skimp too much on the fat content, this batch used 4% cottage cheese and skim milk, if there is no fat, the sauce will definitely break). Add a pinch of Coleman's dried mustard, 1/4 teaspoon of sodium citrate and then whir it up with a stick blender. I suppose you could use a regular blender, but I don't have one. Reserve a handful of 1 pound of grated cheddar (I've been using Cabot Hunter's Sharp) and mix the rest into the liquid. Add half a pound of uncooked elbows and stir to combine. Pour the mess into a greased 9x9 dish and cover with foil. Bake at 375 degrees for half an hour. Remove the foil, stir it up, top with the remaining cheese and bake for another half an hour uncovered. Dun. To make life easier, I put the 9x9 dish on a cookie sheet.

Test 3 was quite delicious and devoured rather quickly. In the past. the cheddar would break and get a little oily. It didn't this time. When you cut into it, the cheese kind of oozed out in a sauce. I tried to capture the cheese ooze (which tastes better than it sounds) to the left of the spoon in the picture. Want to confuse a kid - stop them from taking a scoop of mac & cheese so you can snap a photo.

I still haven't gotten to the more complicated mac & cheese recipe in Modernist at Home. The holidays, travel and everyone being sick have put that dish on hold. That will be test 4. One of these days I'll get to it.

No Rise Pizza

I gave the Wrise I got form the Modernist Pantry a try last night. Not as successful as the sodium citrate, but possibly another work in progress. The time it took from beginning to pull the ingredients for the dough to the time we were cleaning up after dinner was less than two hours. The recipe gets some points for not having to plan ahead. Alas, I did not get the rise I wanted out of the crust. Still tasty, but the crust never really rose in the oven. Here's the recipe I followed.

I started by getting all the ingredients together. Weighed out the flour.

Popped the cork on the champagne. Poured it into a regular juice glass. Pretty classy. I took a sip and while I may be classy, I'm not a champagne guy.

Kosher salt

Wheat gluten

Wrise

 Honey

And then it all went together. Sorry this isn't a thrilling read.

Here's the dough ball after being kneaded for 5 minutes, rested for 10 minutes, and then kneaded again for another 5 minutes. And by kneading, I mean the mixer going with the bread hook. The champagne added a yeasty aroma to the dough. More acidic than a yeasted dough, but yeasty if that makes any sense.

Here's pizza number 1 just before baking. I should have spun it around differently. This was a little too exciting to get on the pizza steel in the oven. Didn't snap a picture but I changed the oven setup a little too. The pizza steel was in the middle of a 550 degree oven and the old pizza stone was on the rack above it. Reverting back to using the steel and broiler might help the top brown and the dough rise a little more.

Not terrible. Bottom came out better than last time. But the pizza is about as thick as when I put it in the oven.

Pie number two ready for the oven.

Here it is cooked. I actually got a little bubble out of this pie. If I could get that bubble all over, we'd be onto something.

Overall flavor of the finished pizza was OK. The crust needed more rise. Not the great pizza, but there is significantly worse out there. The recipe gets points for speed, no slow overnight or 3 day rise. The crust has potential but it isn't there yet. At least not in my kitchen. Maybe more Wrise would help or going back to using the broiler or maybe even breaking out the Firedome. There wasn't any pizza leftover. Not sure if that could be used as an indication of quality or more of an indicator of my oldest daughter's return health. She didn't really eat much last week.

A modern take on Mac and Cheese

Gave the sodium citrate a whirl earlier tonight with pretty good results. A work in progress and an idea I think is worth pursuing.  Here's a link to the MDRN KTCHN video about sodium citrate.

My daughter Allison's favorite Mac & Cheese recipe comes form a New York Times food section recipe and I use Cabot Seriously Sharp in it so that's what went with today. I grated the brick of cheese and weighed it. The recipe is based on percentages so I calculated the appropriate amount of sodium citrate (4% of the weight of the cheese - I figure it isn't a trade secret the recipe is here) and weighed that out.

Next, I got the scaled amount of water (93% of the weight of the cheese) in a pan and heated it up. Added the salt and gave a stir to dissolve. I added small amounts of cheese to the simmering salt water and whirred a stick blender around. Once the cheese seemed to be liquified, I added another pinch of shredded cheddar. More whirring. At first, the sauce looked very watery and I thought there was no way it would thicken. But about halfway through the cheese, it started to look like sauce. And when I was done, I couldn't believe how smooth the sauce was.

I couldn't swipe a line on the spatula, lick my finger clean, then swipe my finger on my phone fast enough to get that classic picture where you use your finger to make a line on the back of the spoon (I think it is called nappe, but I'm not sure). I tried twice and then gave up. It was dinner time and four other things were going on...but the picture was there for me to take.  I boiled some elbow noodles and tossed them in the sauce. Dinner is served.

I thought it came out pretty good. Cooked in this method, I think I would choose a different cheese next time. And that's the work in progress part. The texture of the cheese sauce is great but the flavor would be better with a different cheese. The method lookis like it will take any cheese and turn it into a smooth sauce.The cookbook has a longer, baked mac and cheese recipe that I will have to try. I told the kids maybe next week for that one.

I also stopped by All Star on the way home today. The answer to my "what champagne or sparkling white wine do you recommend to use in a pizza dough" question is a split of Freixenet Cordon Negro Brut. Never heard of it but I'm not a champagne guy. Maybe pop the cork Friday night.

Modernist Pantry Delivery

Forget Christmas, my box of Modernist Pantry stuff came today. They put their own strip sticker on the flat rate postage box. Here's one end of the sticker...

And here's the other...

Cute right? The package also included a semi-personalized card with a phone number, contact info and an offer to help with the ingredients I had bought. The store owner's business card was in there too. In case you were wondering,  Mr. Andersen's card weighed in at 1.47 grams.

The sharpie on the counter was a hefty 8.60 grams.

If I could find my little 10 gram calibration weight, I could check the scale. But that little weight has been AWOL since the kitchen counter project started. I could tell you exactly where it was last January.  I'm not sure what day, but sometime this week I'm trying out the easier mac & cheese recipe. I've got some traveling this week, not sure I'll get the pizza dough in. That requires a stop at All Star where I will get to ask a wine guy another weird question. Last time it was, "I'm looking for an inexpensive white to use in a dry cured Italian salami." This time is will be, "I'm looking for an inexpensive sparkling white or champagne to use in a yeast-free pizza dough." If they had a nickel for every time they got asked that...

Modernist Pantry

I've continued buying food related stuff. And I've completely rationalized the expense because I plan to share what I cook with the family. So it isn't really just stuff for me. It's stuff for us.

The latest toys are coming from the Modernist Pantry. It's a store that was created to distribute all of the hard to find ingredients for some Modernist recipes. Looking for some sodium alginate to caviar shaped spheres of a liquid? They've got it. The nice thing about the store is that they also sell things in quantities so the home cook can play around with buying 5 pounds of a product to use 2 tablespoons of it in a recipe.

The thing I really wanted after flipping through Modernist at Home was sodium citrate. It is salt of citric acid. And apparently if you dissolve some in water and then slowly blend in cheese you will have a very stable cheese sauce that won't break. The mac and cheese recipe looks great. See, it's a gift for everyone.

I'm also looking forward to playing with Wrise. Wrise is very fine baking powder that has been encapsulated in a gel. When you mix it in a dough, nothing happens. Once you heat the dough, the gel melts and you get a quick rise in the oven. I got it to try this pizza recipe that uses champagne or sparkling white wine and Wrise instead of yeast. If it works well, I won't always have to make pizza dough a day or two in advance. I'll be able to make the dough while the oven heats up. Pizza, another gift for everyone.

Since I was shopping, I picked up some Ultra-Sperse 3 too. This is a super fine tapioca powder that can be used as a thickener. It's also gluten free. I'm going to try it in gravy to see how it compares to the sweet rice flour.

Still feeling generous, I bought a scale that can measure these ingredients accurately. They had one that could measure tenths of grams, but for an extra $5, you can upgrade to the one that measures hundredths of grams. I also got these little anti-static cups so all the measured ingredient comes out of the bowl after you measure it. They were only a buck and as a first time buyer, the shipping was free. It would have been wasteful not to buy them too. You know, for the kids.

Bolognese Sauce

I'm really enjoying the new pressure cooker toy. Modernist at home had a pressure cooker Bolognese sauce. It was decent but a work in progress. I think with some tweaking the source could be better. I had never used porcini mushroom powder (just dried porcini turned into dust in a spice grinder) and I definitely liked that. This recipe called for all pork. I think a mixture of pork and veal would be better. Maybe even sneak some pancetta in there. Can't go wrong with pancetta. Definitely a decent sauce in about an hour but I think it will be better next time. I think I want to drop about 15 minutes off the cooking time. Too much of a rush for pictures tonight. I'll get those next time too.

Later this week I'm going to try a rump roast in the pressure cooker. I've never gotten one of the rump roasts from our steers to come out well. The best so far was grinding it into summer sausage. I hope the pressure cooker does the trick to make a decent pot roast although I'm not sure pressure can help these cuts. I'm thawing the shanks too. I'm going to try to make a pho broth with those.

I'm also going to order some supplies from the Modernist Pantry. There's a pizza dough and a cheese melting technique that must be tried. Someone should probably take away my credit card.