Author: N

We made popovers, an airy, eggy baked item. Although I like them a lot, I’d never realized how easy they are to make!

Popover Recipe

6 eggs

2 cups (480 mL) milk

6 Tbs (90 g) butter, melted

2 cups (240 g) flour, sifted

1 tsp (5 g) salt

1. Generously butter whatever you’re baking in. The original recipe (from Betty Crocker?) calls for ten 1/2-cup (120-mL) ramekins.
2. Whisk together eggs, milk, and melted butter until frothy. Gradually beat liquid into flour and salt until mixture is smooth.
3. Spoon batter into baking containers until three-quarters full. If using separate containers, put on baking sheet for ease. Place in oven preheated to 425°F (220°C). Reduce heat to 375°F (190°C). Bake about 30 min.

Substitutions: I substituted whole wheat pastry flour for the flour. Because popovers are leavened by eggs and don’t require gluten, basically any type of flour should work.

It was one of those nights where we had a bunch of leftovers that don’t fit well together. Fortunately, we were able to pull everything together by making tortillas!

I found this seemingly legit recipe. Tortillas are really easy in concept. The dough is made from ground corn, traditionally nixtamalized to improve nutrition, and water. The tortillas are formed by pressing, then briefly heated in a skillet.

Unfortunately, there were some difficulties. I pressed the tortillas flat using a Pyrex square baking dish, so each tortilla had a faint “Pyrex” emblazoned on it. It took a surprising amount of force to press the tortillas, and they were still too thick to cook properly. I see the benefit of a special press. We had to cook the tortillas longer than called for to cook through, but doing this caused the outside to be crispy, rather than soft and flexible.

Making tortillas used up our masa (one of the goals!), so this may not happen again anytime soon.

We made gochujang a while ago. I added more salt to the top to discourage mold, although there hasn’t been any.

The top layer of gochujang is a little drier, and is starting to get that maroon color. It’s been about a month since we made the gochujang, but it hasn’t seemed to ferment yet. No bubbles, no change in smell. It seems very well preserved. I guess I’ll just leave it out until we need it. It can mature for a few more months.

You’re supposed to put gochujang in the sun every day to discourage mold. Unfortunately we don’t have a balcony and nothing is allowed in the public walkway. So for a while (until I decided it wasn’t doing anything), I put it just in front of the door with the door cracked open. That way it is technically inside, but still in the sunlight for a few hours.

Our landlord contacted us the other night. Apparently another tenant has been complaining about a “horrible”-smelling (it doesn’t smell like anything) red paste outside our door. The tenant is also apparently thinks this means that we have bed bugs………..

Edit: J was all het up over it. He took it to mean that the neighbors think we’re dirty, and went on a cleaning binge. And now the shower’s super clean!

Last Saturday, we tried to go to a Japanese-English language meetup (they serve takoyaki afterwards). Because it’s in the far-away city of Cupertino, we decided to make a full day of it and spend time at museums in the area. Unfortunately, it turned out that we had gotten the date wrong and the meetup wasn’t happening… ;_; Ummmm

But the trip was totally worth it! We did lots of other exciting things.

The first planned activity was the Cupertino Historical Society. It’s a very small museum inside the Cupertino community center. Turns out that it’s free (although J left a donation), which is always nice. Afterwards we wandered around the park behind the community center. We ate our box lunches while gazing out over the pond. I believe I had leftover pasta and split peas.

Fortuitously, Cupertino was having it’s community-wide garage sale last Saturday! I love garage sales!!

J and I went to several together, and I went to several more alone (while J attempted to attend the language meetup).

I got:

and the aforementioned waffle iron. All these were from a single jackpot sale! A middle-aged man and his parents were cleaning out the parents’ home, so most of the items were mid-century (hence the waffle iron). There was also lots of old tupperware, many other cookie and fruitcake tins (reminds me of my family!), old electronics, etc.

 

While I was going to garage sales, J got dinner and boba.

We went to Sprouts and Whole Foods afterwards. Sprouts has some weird bulk items, like chocolate-covered honeycomb. Surely people don’t eat the honeycomb. Isn’t it made of beeswax??

After-afterwards we got bread at Paris Baguette, a Korean bakery chain.

Neither J nor I really drinks alcohol. We use it, in the form of mirin and sake, for cooking. So I’ve been thinking of trying to make sake. A similar process is used to make rice vinegar.

Generally speaking, sake is made by fermenting rice. Amylase is used to break down the starches in cooked rice into simple sugars. Yeast ferments the sugars into alcohol. Then there are a few filtration steps, to remove the half-digested rice chunks and clarify the liquid.

More specifically, the amylase is provided by koji (Aspergillus oryzae, used as well for soy sauce, miso, makgeolli, shouchuu, etc) in modern sake production. The yeast is a specific cultivated variety or varieties. The sake is clarified using activated charcoal. This is the best article I’ve found describing in detail how to make sake. Here’s another that might be easier to follow.

However I’m not interested in “proper” technique. I especially don’t want a fussy recipe where I have to buy things. I’d rather use materials I have on hand or that are available for free (like wild yeast).

So, there are less exacting traditional techniques that can be used. The amylase can be provided by saliva, as in the production of kuchikamizake (as seen in Kimi no Na wa). And the yeast can be wild, as in sourdough. I also suspect that you can use barley malt (leftover from making gochujang) for the amylase. After all, it’s used in other alcoholic beverages.

So, I’ll probably do some low-volume experiments with kuchikamizake, barley malt, and koji, of which I have a very small amount. We’ll see how it goes!

When friend S was over for kimchi making, we started talking about other foods we could make. It seems like there’s the most collective interest in vinegar and in alcohol. ( I’d like to make hard cheeses in the future as well.) So I embarked on some initial vinegar experiments!

According to this source, all you need to do is inoculate an alcoholic liquid with acetic acid-producing bacteria. Some other sites suggested adding sugar, to provide easier-to-access food. You can get the bacteria from unpasteurized vinegar (e.g. Braggs brand), but I figured I would try inoculating with kimchi juice, since it’s sour. I’m not sure what acid is in kimchi. Some of it is lactic acid, but there might be acetic acid as well.

So I mixed together some kimchi juice (1 part), a pinch of sugar, and sake (5 parts) in a little glass jar. I guess I’ll just let it sit and see what happens. I wonder if the sake is too alcoholic. It’s surely possible to kill off all the bacteria.

I also discovered a vinegar subreddit (I’m not even surprised at this point). If you just looked at this, you’d think that everybody’s making their own vinegar!