Daz in the Kitchen: July 2014

Thursday, July 31, 2014

Making butter and buttermilk scones ... all done in the Thermomix!!

The Thermomix is indeed a rather marvelous machine and the more I use it, the more I love it. There just doesn't seem to be much it can't do ... okay, it can't bake and it can't slow cook, but short of that ... it can do most things.

One weekend, a little while ago, I got very ambitious and adventurous. I decided that I wanted to make my own butter and also then use the buttermilk resulting from that to make buttermilk scones ... why waste? It was an ambitious day, because I also made my own jam and whipped cream in the Thermomix but that's for another post on another day.

I looked around the interwebz for recipes for butter and found this marvelous YouTube video with instructions on how to make butter. I watched the video several times to get a good grasp of it, as I was rather nervous about the whole butter making thing, and also found a written recipe that I was able to print out and follow. I can't remember precisely where I found the original recipe as I do not have it written down (I'm sorry!!) but here it is anyway.

RECIPE for butter:

Ingredients:

600g pure cream (not thickened cream!!)

Instructions:

Insert the butterfly and measure in the cream:

600g pure cream (make sure it's pure cream - thickened cream may not work)

Whip on speed 4 until it separates into butter and buttermilk. It will start to bump around, so stay near your machine and turn it off after a couple of seconds of 'bumping'. It usually takes only a minute or two, but I have had older cream take up to 5 minutes.

Strain the buttermilk by pouring it through the strainer/rice basket into a bowl. Squeeze the butter well with the spatula (against the side of the bowl) to get out as much of the buttermilk as you can. The buttermilk is lovely to bake with in scones, breads, cakes and pancakes (if you can have dairy), so don't throw it out!

Remove the butterfly from the bowl and pour about 500g icy cold water over the butter. Mix it on speed 4 for a few seconds to rinse it. Strain the water off into the sink, pressing the butter against the side of the bowl with the spatula and pouring through the strainer/rice basket again. The butter needs to be rinsed twice, or until the water is clear. If you leave any buttermilk in the butter, it will turn sour more quickly.

Give the butter a good squeeze to get rid of any remaining water. This can be done with the spatula, squeezing the butter against the side of the bowl; or you can wrap a piece of muslin around the butter and squeeze it; or you can just use your hands.

Now make sure the bowl is empty, and weigh the butter back in so you know how much you have. Then add in that much oil and water.

Eg: If you end up with 300g of butter, add 300g of oil and 300g of water. Also add a little salt if you like. I add a bit less than a teaspoon of salt to this amount of butter, oil and water.

macadamia oil (or olive oil if you like the taste)

filtered water

sea salt/himalayan salt (opt.)

Insert the butterfly, and whip the butter, oil, water and salt on speed 4 for about 20 seconds, or until well combined. Pour into a container and keep in the fridge.

(You do pour it into the container as it is quite a thick liquidy consistency when done, but it does set once it's been in the fridge.)

The butter turned out very well and very smooth. As you can see from the picture, it made two decent sized containers of butter. The butter lasted me about a month in the fridge. Do be careful with the butter and use it up quickly if you can, since it has no preservatives in it, it doesn't last as long as store bought butter.

I didn't put enough salt into the butter, so it was a bit bland. I was being very conservative as I was worried that I would over salt, but I didn't. So just be sure that you check the taste with the amount of salt you add in! You might need to adjust it somewhat.

Also, the macadamia nut oil is very mild, so it doesn't have much flavor at all. If you wanted something a bit more robust in flavor, try olive oil instead.

Next time, I plan on making some garlic and herb butter.

After making the butter, there was a fair bit of buttermilk leftover that resulted from making the butter. Instead of pouring it away, I dug up a recipe for making buttermilk scones and planned for us to have a Devonshire Tea. There was exactly the right amount of buttermilk from the butter for this scone recipe ... lucky me!

Here is the RECIPE that I used for the scones:

Ingredients:

300 grams Self Raising Flour

20 grams raw sugar

1 pinch salt

60 grams Butter, Chilled and cut in cubes

200 grams buttermilk

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 200 degrees (fanforced). Line a baking tray with baking paper.

Place self raising flour, sugar, salt and butter in to TM bowl. 10 seconds/speed 6 or until it resembles breadcrumbs.

Add buttermilk into mixing bowl -1 minute/knead setting or until dough comes together. Lightly flour the bench top and empty the dough out.

Work the dough until it comes together and roll out to about 3cm thick. Use a glass or round cookie cutter to cut out circles around 4cm and place on prepared trays, touching each other. Repeating this until all dough has been used up.

Lightly brush some milk onto top of scones.

Bake for approx 12 minutes or until golden brown. (more like 20 minutes)

Makes 7 regular sized scones

The scones were very easy to make and tasted wonderful. I am definitely doing this again, but if I don't have buttermilk from recently made butter, I will just buy the buttermilk.

If you do make these, be sure to post pictures for me to see either on Instagram or on my Daz In The Kitchen Facebook page.

I would love to hear from you!!

© This work is copyrighted to Invest-Ex and Destiny's Fortunes Pty Ltd

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Friday, July 25, 2014

Frosty Wendy's chocolate shake ... in the Thermomix

Every now and then (these days more often than not) The Boy has been finding recipes off Facebook and suggesting that I try them.

Most recently, he found this chocolate shake recipe, which I made in the Thermomix. If you don't have a Thermomix, just do it in a blender, but make sure that your blender can blend ice.

We tried this out one very hot Summer's day (and I'm only now posting about it! ... well, it's Summer in the Northern Hemisphere!) and it totally hit the spot.

Here's the really simple recipe:

Ingredients:

3/4 cup / 225g Almond Milk
about 25 ice cubes
1/2 tsp / 2.5g Vanilla
1-2 Tbsp / 20g unsweetened Cocoa powder
1 Banana
2 tsp / 10g brown sugar (optional)

Instructions:

Add everything into Thermomix, blend on speed 8 until smooth

This turned out to be very tasty and quite a dark chocolate shake cos I used a dark chocolate (are they all dark? I don't know!!) cocoa powder.

Of course, if you don't have a Thermomix, a blender will work just as well, just make sure your blender will blend ice cubes.

I hope you enjoy this. If you make this, please post pictures for me and tag me on either Instagram or Twitter. :-)

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Slow cooked braised garlic chicken

I've done a lot of slow cooked beef recently, so this week, I decided to slow cook chicken instead.

I once again delved into my Essentials of Slow Cooking cookbook and looked for a chicken recipe.

The first recipe I came across was the slow cooked braised garlic chicken dish and the second one was a chicken and sausage gumbo. I don't have a lot of ingredients in the fridge right now as we haven't done much of a shop and we weren't planning a huge shop this weekend, so I went with the recipe that sounded tasty and had the fewest ingredients. This was the braised garlic chicken. :-)

Here's the recipe for it:

Ingredients:

8 pieces chicken thigh, deboned

Salt and pepper

2 tablespoons canola oil

4 heads of garlic, separated into cloves, unpeeled **

1/4 cup dry white wine

1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme

** Note:
Four whole heads of garlic might sound like a lot, but as it cooks, the garlic mellows and thickens, adding depth of flavor to the pan juices that are served over the chicken. There is no need to peel the garlic since it will be softened after cooking and then strained. The pulp of the cooked garlic imparts a wonderful flavor and helps thicken the sauce.

Instructions:

Season the chicken all over with salt and pepper. In a large frying pan over medium-high heat, warm the canola oil. Working in batches if necessary, add the chicken and cook, turning until well browned, 7 - 10 minutes. Remove from pan and set aside.

Pour off all but 2 tablespoons of fat in the pan. Add the garlic cloves and saute over medium-high heat until lightly browned, about 3 minutes. Pour in the wine and deglaze the pan, stirring and scraping the brown bits on the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon.

Transfer the chicken to a slow cooker. Sprinkle with thyme and add the garlic mixture. Cover and cook until the chicken is tender and opaque throughout, 3 hours on the low heat setting.

Transfer the chicken to a platter and cover loosely with aluminium foil to keep warm. Set a fine mesh sieve over the saucepan and strain the pan juices. Press on the garlic cloves to extract as much liquid and pulp as possible. Bring to a simmer over medium-high heat and season to taste with salt and pepper. Transfer the chicken to a warmed platter and top with the sauce. Serve at once.

So I pretty much followed the instructions (cooking-wise), since it was pretty straight forward. The whole sauteing the garlic with the peel still on was a bit odd but I did it anyway. It did brown up quite nicely.

I did do something a little different with the chicken. The Boy does not like bone in his meat, so I used chicken thighs instead and used 6 chicken thighs halved. This will give us 4 meals, or 2 serves for dinner, so we will eat one serve for dinner tonight and have the rest for leftovers later in the week.

I also coated the chicken in flour as well as salt and pepper, since the flour will thicken the sauce as it cooks.

I think because I used chicken thighs, there wasn't the juices or fat that the recipe talked about, so I compensated with chicken stock for sauce, and added 2 cups of chicken stock, which just covered the chicken in the pot. I decided that 2 cups was a decent amount of sauce and it would thicken up into a nice sauce while it cooks.

I cooked mine in a slow cooker, but since I always slow cook in the oven, my slow cooking method was to put everything into a Dutch oven, then bring it to a boil and put it into the oven to slow cook for 3 hours at 120°C.

While cooking, the skins of the garlic came off for most of the garlic, so I fished them out of the pot as I checked on it intermittently. As such, there was only 1 or 2 garlic that I needed to remove the peel from.

Instead of straining the garlic through a sieve, I just mushed it up in the pot with a wooden spoon.

After slow cooking the chicken for 3 hours, the sauce had cooked down quite a bit, so after I took out the chicken to get to the garlic, I also added back 1.5 cups of stock to the pot to get more liquid in the pot and the dish.

Once I got the stock into the pot, I put the chicken back into the pot and brought it back to a boil and simmered for about 10 minutes just to thicken the sauce back up again.

This turned out to be an extremely tasty dish. Not garlicky at all, surprisingly, considering how much garlic was used. Just a very mellow and rich flavor. We had it over quinoa and a side salad. Uber tasty!!!

© This work is copyrighted to Invest-Ex and Destiny's Fortunes Pty Ltd

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Thursday, July 10, 2014

Awesome carrot cake muffins ... in the Thermomix

I came across this recipe for carrot muffins a long time ago and it said it's "awesome" so it must be good, right? :-p

Anyhow, I was in the mood to bake today (my version of baking!!) and decided that carrot muffins were the way to go.

I have converted the recipe to make in the Thermomix because that's pretty much how I do all my baking, but if you don't have a Thermomix, then by all means just use the original recipe. It's very simple to do.

It's also looked like a very simple recipe, which is just the sort of recipe that I need.

Here's the converted recipe:

Ingredients:

1 cup raisins
2 cups warm water
2 cups all purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
4 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
3/4 cup brown sugar
3 cups shredded carrots (about 4 small carrots)
1 jar Betty Crocker vanilla cream frosting

Instructions:

Combine raisins and water in a small bowl. Let soak for 15 minutes. Drain raisins of water, discard water, set raisins aside.
Grate carrots in Thermomix, speed 5 for 7 seconds - you want the carrots to still be quite chunky but small chunks, use your judgement about the size! Remove from Thermomix.
Put eggs, oil and brown sugar into the Thermomix. Speed 7 for 5 seconds.
Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon into Thermomix. Speed 7 for 5 seconds. Make sure it is mixed well. If not, give it another 3 seconds.
Put in carrots and drained raisins. Reverse speed 7 for 15 seconds. Open lid, stir mix things around and make sure all the carrots and raisins are mixed through the batter. Reverse speed 7 for 20 seconds to make sure it is thoroughly mixed through.
Preheat oven to 160°C.
Spray muffin tray with oil. Pour mixture into muffin tray and bake for 30 minutes or until muffins are ready (they should come out clean when you stick a knife in it).
Repeat baking until all batter is gone.
Let muffins cool for 30 minutes and then frost the muffins with the vanilla cream frosting.

Let me just say that this recipe is super simple, :-) which fits right into my criteria of being easy to make. If you have been following me for any length of time, you will know that my baking skills are very limited, and so far has been limited to banana bread muffins and zucchini muffins. I'm pleased to have this to add to my very small repertoire.

I didn't have any raisins but had some sultanas in the pantry, so I used those instead.

I might have ended up with 4 cups of carrots instead of 3 because I was not sure of the quantity and used too many carrots.

The apartment smelled absolutely amazing while baking this. I could smell the cinnamon in particular.

I couldn't wait the full 30 minutes because I was so anxious to try it, so I only waited about 3 minutes, but that was for only 1 of the muffins that I just had to try immediately while it was still warm out of the oven. I love trying muffins while they are still warm out of the oven.

And the verdict? Delicious!!! The muffins were so light and fluffy and really tasty. They were great with the frosting too.