ATK Rice pudding

ATK has done it again. I modified the recipe a bit. It makes a bigger batch, but is just as tasty.

Rice Pudding

1½ cups medium grain rice
3 cups boiling water
1 tsp salt
1 cup sugar

3 cups cream
4 cups skim milk
or
3½ cups half-and-half
3½ cups whole milk

flavorings of your choice

combine rice, salt and water in a larger pot than you think you need. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer and cover for 15 minutes.

Add dairy and sugar, return to a boil and simmer for 30 minutes uncovered, stirring occasionally. After 30 minutes, continue to simmer for 15 more minutes, stirring more frequently to avoid scorching. Continue until the pudding can hold a wooden spoon standing straight up.

For flavorings, I like vanilla and cinnamon. There are a plethora of other options, including rose water, raisins, pistachio, walnuts, almonds.....

Adventures in bad marketing

Saw this ad on the side of a Samtrans bus today:



Now, I can't read Hindi, but I can't possibly imagine what this text might say that would be a reasonable attempt to market beef to Hindus.

Either that, or McDonald's is implying that there is no beef on their dollar menu (never mind there is a prominent picture of a double-cheeseburger in the ad). This is, in fact, the case in India - the McDonalds' there serve mostly chicken sandwiches, I am told. But this is Redwood City, not New Delhi.

Either way, it seems like dumb marketing to me.

Chocolate Chip Cookies, the final word

My favorite two cooking shows are America's Test Kitchen and Good Eats. I love them both because they really take a proper scientifically educational tack. What I mean by that is that they do more than tell you how to do something, but they show you why you should take their advice. They both do this by taking a dish we all know, and may not be entirely fond of, and prepare it, all the while explaining why they do it the way they do.

It's particularly interesting when both shows cover the same topic, as they recently (or in the case of Good Eats, not so recently) did for one of the quintessentially american dessert recipes of all times: The Chocolate Chip (aka Toll House) cookie. This recipe was made famous by the Nestlé company, which printed the recipe on the back of every bag of chocolate chips they've sold since the end of the pleistocene.

I grew up with these cookies. My mother used to bake them and mail them to me in care packages when I was at summer camp. And they were good. But I never had particularly high standards for them.

What changed my mind was the Good Eats episode, "Three Chips for Sister Marsha," where he took the original recipe and demonstrated how to tweak the recipe to send it in three different directions, resulting in caky cookies, thin crispy cookies, or - my favorite - chewy cookies.

I've been making Alton's Chewy recipe for years now, with great success. Until a few days ago, I figured it was the last word on the subject. But I just watched the latest episode of ATK, called "The Cookie Jar," where they made chewy toll house cookies.

So now we have my two favorite cooking authorities weighing in on the same subject. Let's compare and contrast.

Alton specified bread flour, ATK was content with AP. Alton used the customary 2 and 1/4 cups, ATK reduced it to a cup and 3/4.
Alton replaced the 2nd egg white with 2 tbsp of milk. ATK simply omitted it.
ATK doubled the vanilla quotient. Alton left that alone.
While Alton melted the butter, ATK went to the extra trouble of actually browning it.
ATK used 14 oz of butter - 10 browned and 4 added whole to cool - Alton stuck with 16 (two sticks).
ATK used 3/4 cup of brown sugar and half a cup of white. Alton used 1 and 1/4 cups of brown and 1/4 cup of white.
ATK used 1/2 tsp of baking soda, Alton stuck with 1 tsp.

Rather than go to the ATK website and print out the recipe or try to use the pause button and get the ingredients, I decided to simply use the same Alton "chewy" recipe I've been using all along, but to brown 3/4 of the butter first, cooling it with the remaining butter before combining the result with the sugar. I also let them cool on the pan (as ATK suggested) rather than moving them straight to a plate to cool.

The other ATK recommendation concerned the chips. They recommended Ghirardelli bitter-sweet chips, rather than the Netslé milk chocolate chips I usually buy.

So how did they turn out?

I'm very happy with them. I actually think that the change to the bittersweet chips made the biggest difference. The cookies have a powerful chocolate flavor that they never really had before. Cooling them on the pan crisped up the bottoms, giving them a sort of half crunch, half chew consistency that is nice. I think the chocolate flavor of the chips overwhelms whatever other differences there may have been in the batter, but Scarlet disagrees with me there - perhaps my palate isn't discriminating enough.

Ordinary ergonomics

I'm continually astonished by the poor ergonomics of every day items. It's as if people don't actually try the things they create and put into the marketplace.

Today's example, believe it or not, is Betty Crocker's Dark Chocolate brownie mix.

If you've been living in a cave your entire life, I'll briefly describe this product. It's a box with a pouch of powder, and a second pouch of chocolate syrup inside. You mix the powder with a measured amount of water, vegetable oil, and eggs; pour it into a pan; throw it in the oven and bake until done. The result: a pan of brownies.

So what ergonomic issues could I be talking about? Well, the box has the instructions on the back. The instructions include the amounts of the ingredients you need to add to the mix, the temperature of the oven and the baking time.

That's pretty important information. In particular, the amount of water and oil you need to add is a particularly important piece of information, I'd guess.

So why the hell is that information in the smallest font on the box?! The font showing that you need to use ½ cup of oil is positively miniscule. So small that it's actually hard to tell whether it says ½ or ⅓ cup. Hell, it may even be hard to see the difference in your browser on this page, depending on your setup.

So, what? Could they not spare the extra few micrograms of ink?!

Fantastic pork/chicken recipe

ATK gets credit for this. They had an episode on this week with a recipe for crunchy baked pork chops. I adapted the recipe for skinless, boneless chicken breasts (which are, more or less, equivalent to boneless pork chops). You take 4 pieces of bread (I used sourdough) and run them through a food processor to make crumbs. Toss them with a couple tablespoons of oil and spread them on a cookie sheet and toast them for 15 minutes or so at 375.

Meanwhile, take two egg whites and add a teaspoon of mustard, or so, and a couple tablespoons of flour. Whisk all that together. Set out another few tablespoons of flour in a dish.

When the crumbs are done toasting, add a couple tablespoons of some sort of spice rub (we used curry-cumin, but lemon pepper or poultry seasoning would also work) and a couple tablespoons of grated parmigiana (let the crumbs cool a bit before doing this so the cheese doesn't melt) and a couple tablespoons of parsley. Mix it all up and put it in a flat bowl.

Pat the chicken dry, dredge it in the flour, then the egg wash/batter mix, then coat it with crumbs. You really want to pack the crumbs on to make a substantial coating.

Bake for 20 minutes at 425, or until internal temperature is 160 (for chicken. For pork, 150).

An amusing recipe

My wife Scarlet sent me this link. We haven't tried it yet, but just the post amused me greatly. It reminds me of those crappy pyrotechnic "snakes" that we used to get to celebrate Federal Occupation Day when we were kids.

Thanksgiving Turkey Fry

We fried our turkey again. This time, the event was transmitted to the K6BEN ATV repeater for anyone who wanted to tune it in. Scarlet used our digital camera to capture the drop and retrieval operation.

Statistical stupidity

ABC News recently had a video on My Yahoo that had the "worst" foods purported to be good for you (alas, I don't have a deep link to the video). First on the list of diet soda. The silly woman said that those who drink diet soda are heavier than those who don't, so you shouldn't drink diet soda.

Uh, newsflash: You've got the cause and the effect backwards there. People who are heavy drink diet soda because they know they're heavy. The ones who aren't heavy drink whatever the hell they want because whatever they're doing is working for them (or at least isn't a problem).

It's like saying bariatric surgery causes obesity because only obese people have it done.

Turkey Frying - Safety First

We're going to fry our turkey again this year. I don't think I'd have ever even considered it until I saw Alton Brown's "Turkey Derrick."

When you consider the turkey frying act, it is fraught with danger. You have a tank of propane about 4 feet away from the culinary equivalent of a rocket engine, atop which you've placed 4-6 gallons of peanut oil which you have heated to about 300° Fahrenheit (150° Celsius for you foreigners), into which you're going to drop 16 pounds of room temperature, damp meat. I don't know about you, but I don't really want to be too close when that happens.

I don't yet have a picture of this year's festivities, but here's a picture from last year.



As you can see, the rope allows you full vertical control of the poultry from a safe distance. And, of course, if you're going to fry a turkey, please keep a fire extinguisher handy. The house you save will likely be your own.

Bread machine bread recipe

A slight variation on Alton Brown's bread recipe from Good Eats episode Dr. Strangeloaf:

1 pound bread flour
10 ounces water
2 tsp sugar
2 tsp salt
1 tsp instant yeast

Measuring the flour by weight is the key.

Add to bread machine pan in the right order (water flour, sugar, salt, yeast).

Use 1½ pound white cycle.