try a new recipe once a month

I still haven’t perfected the biscuits. They may be my downfall.

In March I made two pies: one a Tollhouse Pie recipe from a friend, and one just off the cuff—homemade chocolate pudding minus some of the liquid, homemade whipped cream, and some nuts on top in a pie shell. So you could say March was pie month. I may have another pie month, saaay… around November? ;D

I’m going to try the biscuits some more (I collected a ton of recipes from a group I’m in), but what I really want to get to this month is gnocchi. I’ve never had it but I want to try it. And soon—pasta from scratch. I thought about trying it with lasagna first, but thinking now I may keep it to just some pasta and sauce for a first go. Keep it simple.

I’m thinking of trying baked or pan cooked cheese sticks this week. I’ve never done well with deep frying them and I’m not a big fan of deep fried foods anyway.

Since I couldn’t do biscuits again until I got to the store to get more baking powder, I went ahead and did the pretzels one more time, trying a third recipe. One of the Good Eats episodes on my TiVo was Pretzels!

These ended up more or less a combination of everything, and I think as perfect as I can get them. I learned the reason they’re not “perfect” is that I’m unwilling to do a lye soak (I’m just not that extreme). That’s a big relief! I thought I was doing things wrong within the methods I was using.

I also learned there is a very fine line in the baking soda bath between not-enough-time-to-brown and gooey-in-a-bad-way. One recipe said over a minute on each side, another said 30 seconds altogether! I found that for me, using a frying pan large enough to hold five cups of water (with 1/3 cup of baking soda), which is my largest at the moment, 23 seconds on each side was pretty much the line. 15 seconds wasn’t nearly long enough, and 26 was when it started absorbing water. If you’re very observant you can see it start to puff—just take a couple seconds off of that for the next.

Some might prefer an egg wash for shine, but I still prefer the butter as a salt-attachment device. I also prefer just using kosher salt to buying pretzel salt, since I prefer less salt in general.

The half-and-half wheat and white, while reducing some of the flour seems a good combo. The recipe I ended up with called for 4.5 cups of AP flour, and I did 2 cups each of AP and WW.

I really ended up with several great recipes out of this—both the straight-to-baking edition and the boiled-in-baking-soda version, and the straight white and the more nuanced whole wheat mixture variations. Any are better than the frozen supermarket and fast food versions, though probably inferior to a good pretzel stand pretzel (I’ve never had one of those). Not to mention additional applications such as pretzel hot dogs for the husband or cheese filled pretzels for me.

I haven’t made pretzels again just yet. We were on vacation and I think I’m just pretzel’d out. They are so close to perfect and I got two recipes out of the experiment, so I will probably do one last post on those the next time I’m in the mood to make them.

Not to mention, it’s February—literally, time to move on!

Today was my first try with biscuits. They came out okay. Yummy inside, a little hard on the outside, and not enough rise.

Next try: new baking powder (my current can is at least 2 years old), using a pastry cutter instead of my fingers, letting the dough refrigerate overnight, and turning the oven temp down to 425. I’m also pondering just rolling them once and then cutting a grid, instead of doing circles. The reworked dough is never going to be as good, and I haven’t thought of a reason (yet) that square would be inferior to round beyond tradition.

Flour ratio is sorted to get some whole grains in. It’s getting there, but I think I rolled them too thickly. They’re very yummy, but still a bit weird in texture. One more go really ought to do it.

(I have tried a ton of other recipes in the meantime, but I’m staying focused here at 43things at the moment.)

I did this a little over a week ago, but the baked pretzels came out excellent the second time. So, so good, though not very pretzel-y except in shape. (See picture.)

So I moved on to boiling them. They did, indeed, come out more pretzel-y boiled, but I think I didn’t let it boil enough before I started putting them in and the water cooled down too fast. I did finally figure out to put them in face down so they wouldn’t get smooshed during the flipping. I’ll retry the boiling soon, then on to getting them more nutritious.

Now that the knitting thing is well underway (though I’m not marking it done until I finish a sweater), I’m ready to really start this one.

That I got a stand mixer as a gift from husband helps a lot.

More than making a new recipe once a month, I’d like to really perfect them. I really want to focus on baking, since that seems to be my kryptonite any more. I want to get our staples down. For this month I’m doing soft pretzels. Probably a weird thing to start out with, but I sometimes live on the frozen supermarket ones, and I’d much rather have something home baked and organic, and, eventually, more nutritious as I try to get the whole grain ratio right.

I gave it a first shot last night, and I accidentally put the egg into the batter when I was dumping in all my ingredients. Oops. And I put on the salt right after the egg wash, instead of letting it cook a bit, first To be honest, the salt thing wasn’t a problem. However, next time my plan is to opt for butter rather than egg wash and see how that goes. And I so need a brush. Finger brushing the second coat of wash meant a bit of toasting of the fingers. Two coats of butter are going to be the same problem.

They still taste good (really good, actually), but they weren’t very pretzel-y. More like a roll dough, thanks to the egg. If switching egg wash to butter and not dumping the egg in… time to look for a different recipe.

I did get the shaping down once I got to the last one, which is a bonus, since after the first two I despaired ever making them look less like elephants and little old men than pretzels!

I’m planning for a second try on Saturday in case I run out of flour and need to send Shawn out for some. Maybe I’ll start making half batches for all this testing… save some money and whatnot. Though I’m enjoying eating the final results. ;)

This seems like the natural progression of my “learn to cook” goal. Now that I have some basics down, I want to expand my library.