There are no step-by-step photos, as the recipe takes only minutes to make.

Serve with crusty bread (here whole wheat) and it’s a brilliant meal.

For those who might not be so familiar with Grandma’s writing, it says this (transcribed precisely):

“Olli Bulla”

4 c. buttermilk

1/4 tsp. salt

1 tsp soda

1/2 tsp Baking Powder

2 or 3 eggs

1/2 cup w. sugar

5 cup flour or whats needed to make (sic)

Have your lard in a fryer & drop a tbspoon

over

at a time. fry until nice & brown. Turn them unless they turn themselves.

Eat! Good

I know this is a cooking blog, but anyone who knew my grandmother will be able to see her personality, and her famous writing style shining through. But this is a cooking blog, so some notes on how I interpreted this to try and make the recipe for the first time ever.

I made a half-recipe and still was standing over the fryer for more than an hour. I used soured milk (milk with one tablespoon of lemon juice per cup) instead of buttermilk, because in England the buttermilk is not the same as in the US. Even halfing the recipe I used two small eggs, again because they are nothing like American jumbos. I have no idea how much flour I used to try and get a consistency that seemed to work, it is really a tricky one. Too much flour and you don’t get the right fluffy consistency, so I only added as much as I needed to get good doughnuts. I also added 3/4 c. currants and 1/2 c. raisins because, although she doesn’t say it on the recipe card, there were always fruit inside. I dropped the dough into the oil using a disher, and kept the oil in my fryer at a relatively low temperature (175C) to make sure they cooked through before getting too brown.

Interestingly enough, her recipe deviates quite a bit from a similar recipe online, which is yeast-leavened instead of baking powder leavened. As much as I love to bake bread, I’m quite happy with this version and would not try the yeasty alternative. And they are waiting for their icing sugar dusting until Thursday night, when I host my annual Christmas party. That was the excuse that led me to try the recipe for the first time myself. And I will not admit how many I ate fresh out of the fryer in the course of cooking them. Hey, they have fruit in them. Totally healthy treat. (And Mer, the Dutch purists online say don’t use milk, use beer. So you’re sorted.)

The whole thing started a few months ago, when I had dinner in the cheap-and-cheerful British High Street restaurant “Cafe Rouge“. This is a British impression of a typical French neighborhood cafe, and having been to France and eaten in a number of these, I have to admit that I quite like this British interpretation. The menu is more varied than the typical French cafe, and the food is high quality. It’s a frequent destination for snacks and wine when I meet a good friend of mine after work. I was, on the occasion of record, having more than just snacks, and I decided to try the cheese soufflé, which was new on the menu at the time. It was served with a nice salad and I figured it made sense that I try something that contains two of my favorite foods (eggs and cheese) and that, for some reason, I had never tried before. I absolutely loved it. Then a few months passed and nothing happened.

A few weeks ago, I found myself back in Cafe Rouge and ended up having the cheese soufflé again, and this is when the obsession started. I figured I had to be able to do this, and as I really didn’t know much about soufflés in general, this would be a good opportunity to learn. I went to my local kitchen store and bought a single-serving soufflé pan, did some internet research, and found a base recipe to riff on. I have now made this three Saturdays in a row, and have slightly tweaked and modified the recipe each time since the first. I am not yet ready to declare absolute victory, but then again, perhaps with this dish I will just continue to work on it for a while since it really is the perfect Saturday brunch. The photos are straight out of the oven when the lofty heights are greatest, but in general I tend to eat it with a little rocket/arugula salad.

Attempt 1 spilled out over the dish, as a result of following the recipe to the letter. Two egg whites to one egg yoke just added too much volume, not to mention wasting a perfectly good egg yoke. Good lesson to learn.

Attempt 2 was not the perfect texture inside, it was cooked all the way through but was a little moist for my tastes. It was also the least lofty of my three attempts to date, but still tasted good.

Attempt 3 was this morning. I decided that since I had reduced the egg whites from 2 to 1 in the last iteration, I needed to reduce the milk and cheese to 1/4 cup from 1/3 cup. I did so, and somehow managed to get a really fluffy and wonderful soufflé. My best to date, although I’ll probably keep tweaking. And I really, really want to add chives. And play with the cheeses. So more soufflé experimentation to come. But for now, I leave you with the best result to date.

Deep frying has not been very popular in the age of fat-free diets and the like, but anyone who knows much about frying is aware that if you fry with good technique, very little of the oil remains on the finished food: if the frying only boils out the water in the food, the oil can’t sink into the food itself and it can be crispy and still reasonably healthy. If you have access to America’s Food Network, the show Good Eats with Alton Brown had a fantastic episode on precisely this subject; the show generally handles the science of cooking and thus is one of my favorites.

But I digress from my main point. Pooris. I first became acquainted with the general idea when I found a very authentic vegetarian Indian restaurant in Northeast Minneapolis (sadly it is no longer there or I would give a shout out) and they had as one of their specialties of the house the Indian street food classic “Chana Batura” or chickpea and tomato curry with a fried puffy bread. You eat this by scooping up the curry in pieces of the bread and it is one of the most delicious things I have ever tasted.

Trying to recreate this dish has been a small obsession for me in the last few years. I have spent far more time on the chickpea curry than on the bread, which seemed too difficult and regardless the chickpea curry was quite good when coupled with naan bread, which is quite easy to make and also readily available to buy. But with the new fryer, I’ve been playing with the steam-leavened puffy poori bread and I think I have it about down now.

The ingredients are simple: water and chapati flour, which is a whole-wheat flour available in Indian grocers as well as in many other places, such as the world food section of my local Tesco store. I have also played with using typical grocery store whole wheat flour and it worked acceptably without being as good as the results obtained with the chapati flour. The dough could not be more simple, whatever measure of flour you use, add just enough water to bring it together into a dough that is not sticky. Knead and then set aside covered for a bit (I make it early and put it in a plastic zip-top baggie to rest while I’m cooking whatever else I am making). Divide into small portions, roll into balls about an inch in diameter and no more. Flatten them into a patty between your hands, and then lightly set in additional flour on both sides and roll out until flat and thin, maybe 2 mm or so.

The secret is in the cooking technique, and this is where I just do not have enough hands to take photos of the process. Slide a single rolled-out disc into hot oil (I use 190 C on my deep fryer with canola oil) so as it keeps flat. After a few seconds it will float to the top, and you HAVE to flip it over for this to work–I use a metal slotted spoon. Then the key: hold the spoon down on the disc so the thing stays in the oil and it will start to puff up. Keep the pressure on with the spoon as it blows up with air in the centre and tries to escape and cook it for a bit, I can’t gage the timings but it is more tens of seconds than minutes, then flip it over (now puffed up like a balloon) and again keep the pressure on with a spoon to keep it cooking mostly under the oil. Once the spoon end touching the bread sounds “crispy” on both sides, it’s done and I pull each out and drain them on a cookie/baking rack with paper towels underneath, flipping each over to make sure oil does not pool on either side. You can only cook one at a time but it only takes a minute or two for each, so it’s relatively quick overall. The frying technique takes practice but is really so simple, and my success rate is now about 75%–the rest of the time I do something silly and the thing folds over and does not puff, or something. I start with about 75-100 g flour for just me, to make sure that I’ll have enough to eat (2-3 pooris max) even with mistakes.

Here are a few photos of the finished product, first in its puffed state with my beloved chickpea curry topped with fresh cilantro and served with greek yogurt since the chickpeas are quite spicy:

A second application of this excellent bread occurred to me this week, since chickpeas are good in a curry but also excellent ground up as falafels. So here is tonight’s dinner, along with a zoomed in view of the falafel served in a half poori with mandolin-cut carrots and cucumbers and a yogurt-lime-cilantro sauce (as in those things just mixed up, no recipe needed). And since I had the mandolin out, I also made sweet potato chips, which are yet another reason why my new fryer is my favorite toy.

]]> http://chanceofcrabcakes.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/pooris/feed/ 0 notfromaroundhere unnamed OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA falafel Sunday dinner http://chanceofcrabcakes.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/on-eggs/ http://chanceofcrabcakes.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/on-eggs/#comments Thu, 24 Feb 2011 22:29:07 +0000 notfromaroundhere http://chanceofcrabcakes.wordpress.com/?p=161 Continue reading →]]> Something strange happened this week. I became obsessed with poached eggs.

I was raised in a household where eggs were always cooked to well-done. Scrambled eggs would have dark brown patches and large, solid curds. That was sort of the only way we ever really ate eggs.

When I was married (I’ve been divorced nearly ten years) my ex-husband introduced me to the idea of fried eggs, which I had not had much as a kid. My ex really liked eggs sunny-side up, which I found to be appalling and disgusting to the point that I could not stand to watch him eat them on toast, smearing the yolk around. I’ve sent eggs back on I don’t know how many occasions for being a little too undercooked for my tastes. My how times have changed.

I think the change started when I was in Sydney a couple of years ago. I had ordered room service breakfast because I was getting ready to do the Sydney Harbor Bridge climb so scrambled eggs and toast sounded ideal. The eggs came and they were scrambled but they were not like what I was used to–these were small curds and very wet. I gritted my teeth and put some salt and pepper on them and ate them–no way was I going to not eat costly room service breakfast and I really needed the protein. And I surprised myself by liking them. Hmmm. Didn’t think much of it.

Fast forward to last spring, when I was in Brighton on the UK coast and staying at a hotel where breakfast was included in the price of the room, and could be delivered a la room service for a £5 tray charge. The scrambled eggs were like those in Sydney and I absolutely loved them. Making scrambled eggs like that became an obsession. (The best instructions I found were hilariously enough from British cook Delia Smith. I guess my conversion from having American tastebuds to British ones continues…) I think I have it down now, and I make these slightly runny, small-curd scrambled eggs, frequently on the weekend.

Fast forward to Monday, when I went to dinner at a reasonably snazzy place in town. They had a few good-looking fish dishes and I ordered a sea bass fillet and my dinner companion ordered a fish cake served with a poached egg on top. I mentioned that I could never eat that and my companion challenged me to try it. So I did. And I loved it.

I have to admit, this was not the first time I’d thought about poached eggs in recent months. I’ve been watching a lot of cooking shows recently (on my iPad, as I don’t have a telly) and they do poached eggs quite a bit in snazzy cooking. And sometimes really interesting things like poached quail eggs. So I had been fantasizing about trying to do it even before I realized that I might like to eat it. I’m a scientist, so I am fascinated by the technical aspects of cooking, so this is not as strange as it might sound. But now I knew I liked poached eggs, much to my surprise, so I decided to dive in and really invest in poaching.

I bought a set of these “poachpods” yesterday and went to town. They really do make it easy for a complete novice like me to poach an egg to perfection (and no one is paying me to say this nor did I get anything for free–I bought them and loved them so I’m sharing. Can you tell I’m a bit defensive about the recent trend in “sponsored blog posts”?) I made salmon fishcakes with some leftover cooked fillets I had in the ‘fridge (using the basic crabcake principle, but with some pureed sweet potatoes and freeze dried chives added to the mix, and some crushed tortilla chips as the dry ingredient). I topped that with a few dabs of hollandaise sauce (sadly from a jar, rather than home-made, but this was a weeknight foodie adventure!) and the poached egg. Absolutely fabulous. Although I realized after the fact I should have gotten my real camera out rather than taking phone photos…

I cook until browned before I add the mushrooms, chestnuts or baby bells (i.e. criminis) where 3/4 are roughly chopped and 1/4 are finely chopped.

I cook until they are browned and then add wine. Best case is to add Marsala wine or tawny port; without either of these red wine of good quality will work.

I add flour to make a non-traditional non-roux.

I add stock and let it simmer down and thicken both due to the flour present and the boiling off of water.

Once it has thickened and boiled down, I add a few spoons of creme fraiche or sour cream.

After stirring and heating, it is clearly perfect.

I serve over noodles (traditional in my family) or rice (traditional in British pubs I’ve been to).

You might notice, I not once said to add salt and pepper, This is a dish so flavorful and intrinsically good that neither is needed. Unusual, but nice for the cooking portfolio.

My first experiment was, however, born of a mistake: the last time I bought a bag of frozen shrimp, I bought the cooked kind.  These are obviously inferior, because it’s hard to cook them in anything without them ending up overcooked.  I also suspect – and this is based on unscientific, entirely empirical evidence – that they get freezer burn faster.  No happy little shells to protect their pink bodies.  So I’ve soldiered my way through most of the bag, but I could not face the last dozen and a half.  I remembered having pickled shrimp at someone’s house once, though, so I started thinking that might be a solution.  I read a bunch of recipes, but they all talked about some sort of purchased “pickling spice,” which I have no real desire to own.

Instead, I put the frozen shrimp in a bowl, doused them with rice vinegar, added some sugar and (a little less) salt, and then a healthy few shakes of Old Bay.  With some thinly sliced onions to top it off, the whole mixture went in the fridge for about six hours (i.e. until dinner time).  By then, I had some lovely-tasting-but-admittedly-not-so-pickled shrimp:

Today, riding high on yesterday’s success with the shrimp, I got excited about a new recipe for vegetarian chili with peanut butter added as a thickening agent.  Normally, I roast fresh pumpkin until mashable and then add it to chili for a sweet-savory thickener, but this was intriguing.

Having no real need to make as much as the recipe called for, not owning a pot anywhere near big enough to hold four cans of beans and three of tomatoes, and lacking several ingredients (especially spices), I made my own adjusted version:  I started with a half of a large yellow onion chopped up and a couple chopped cloves of garlic, sauteed in about two tablespoons of olive oil.  Then, I added a chopped up green pepper, sauteed a bit more, then added one 15 oz can of diced tomatoes and a 6 oz. can of tomato paste.  I seasoned with salt, pepper, and generous amounts of ground chili and cumin (and, because I was too lazy to deal with a jalapeno pepper, a dash of Sriracha).   Then one cup of vegetable broth (I use “Better than Bouillon” and add hot water) and a generous rubber scrapper full of creamy peanut butter.  I mixed it all up until smooth, then added two cans of black beans (drained) and about a third of a bag of frozen corn. And waited for the whole mess to boil again.

Okay, it may not look fabulous, but that’s my crappy photography, because oh my was it good:

It didn’t need anything else (like cheese or sour cream, which I don’t eat, or rice, which the original recipe suggested) – it was tasty and filling as is.  One suggestion, though: maybe don’t pair the peanut butter chili with the leftover pickled shrimp.  Ergh.

Finely grate parmesan (the good stuff) into a bowl. The “recipe” I found recommended a very fine microplane grater, which is what I did use.

Sprinkle about one tablespoon of shreds into a round biscuit ring/cookie cutter on a baking tray lined with parchment or nonstick foil. Here’s where I amuse myself: I had no plain round rings so I had to use my Mickey Mouse with scotch tape forming little barriers at the ears. And don’t push the cheese down to mush it together, lightly move it to the ring edges without pressing.

Bake.

Now here’s the tricky part. Time and temperature. I saw different recommended temperatures on different websites, and as far as I can tell from having done this, the time is rather not the best way to judge done-ness. I baked at 180C, and they were done when they stopped bubbling and just started to turn brown. This was not, as far as I can tell, a fixed number of minutes. And more minutes than the 8-10 in the recipe I had (taking them out at 10 minutes they were still bubbling and were chewy and oily and most certainly not crispy.

Voila! Store in a tightly-sealing container to keep them crispy.

I diced some banana shallots and cooked them in oil with an onion (also diced) until softened. I then added some chopped carrots. (I would have added chopped celery but my corner store had none and I was in no mood to walk to the local supermarket!) I de-glazed with white wine and added all of my shellfish bits and enough water to cover them. I tossed in some sage leaves that I had leftover from a previous experiment (ricotta gnocchi with sage-brown butter sauce) and of course seasoned it all with salt and pepper. I also squirted in a few doses of tomato paste, which to my wonder and delight comes in a toothpaste tube instead of a can here in Britain, and thus allows for occasional use in small quantities. I left the thing to simmer for about 2 hours. Here’s the thing mostly cooked down:

I drained it, leaving me with a strainer full of bits and a pan of thick stock.

Now here is the part when I invoke Martha Stewart. I did not eat any of it that night, but put it dutifully into ice-cube trays for future cooking use.

Future cooking use really hit a high point about a week later, when I bought some more fresh langoustines from the local market and decided to make bisque. Again I chopped some shallots and cooked them to brown, adding the langoustine tails cut into pieces part-way through the browning. I reduced with wine and then added 8 cubes of the stock, and cooked it a bit. I then (and here’s the guilty part) added a few large spoons of creme fraiche and warmed it to make the creamy bisque.

Our story has a happy ending, however, for the dairy-free contingent. I was at dinner last night and ordered a lobster bisque, and received a thick and rich soup, completely un-creamy, with a side dish of garlic aioli. Stirring the aioli into the soup reproduced the mouth-feel of my craime fraiche version, so I know now that I can make my langoustine bisque from home-made stock for my sis when she comes to visit in January.