Why Make It?

People post recipes that usually lead with claims like lower cost, more natural ingredients, fewer preservatives, or other health perks. We’re skipping that because our focus lies elsewhere. What we wanted was to be able to create things from scratch and tailor them to what we liked. As a result, like our bread recipe, we wanted a place to put the instructions so we could find them. That is what this blog post is. 

Our Peanut Butter Can Be Any Nut Butter

We may be talking about peanut butter, but technically, you can make your version with different nuts. It is the same process. We don’t only use peanuts in ours because we want a different depth of flavor. As an aside, the US does have standards for when to call something a spread or a butter. The tl;dr is here, and the more extended version is here. After making and eating a lot of nut butters, I am not a fan of these categorizations. 

Why aren’t we fans? Because we break nut butters into three types that don’t come from factories.

• First, you’ll find the basic grind at many local supermarkets. It’s usually just nuts, coarse, and in our experience, nearly impossible to spread.
• Then there’s the ultra-smooth kind—more like a sauce or jelly—that comes from high-oil nuts (or added oil) and long processing times.
• We want something in between: butter that spreads easily but still holds some firmness and texture—not as firm or creamy as Jif or Skippy. We appreciate those for what they are, but they lack the depth of flavor and homemade texture we’re after.

 It’s About the Oil Content

The final texture of nut butters comes down to how long you process them and how much oil the nuts contain. Raw ingredients aren’t always consistent—peanuts, for example, vary greatly. There are several types of peanuts and different methods for roasting them. Since peanuts are a crop, their characteristics depend on where and how they grow. That means oil content and texture can differ from batch to batch.

Our recipe uses a standard roasted, non-salted supermarket bulk peanut. We also add a bit of pecans to add depth of flavor. Want less oil? Use a dry-roasted peanut with no salt added for your peanut butter. Want to roast your own? Maybe try Alton Brown’s idea in his recipe.  

The important thing is that familiarity creates success. Once you have tried something and found something you like, realize that changing the nuts can impact how oily the peanut butter is, impacting the final consistency. 

Texture is About Time

This will sound like a Captain Obvious comment, but the longer you process the peanuts, the smoother the result. What is not so obvious is that you raise the heat level as you process. If you want silky, you can process the peanuts until they release their oil and become liquified. 

When you process under 10 minutes, you will not usually see the separation. Processing means pulsing your food processor for 1 minute, then letting it rest for 1 minute. Why do this? It’s about heat. You are slowly raising the temperature of the peanuts through friction. Based on our empirical evidence, once you hit 12-14 minutes of processing, your mix will liquify. For us, that isn’t simply about time; it happens at around 120℉-130℉.  

Here is the progression over time of the peanut butter as it goes from thick to a creamy sauce.

Chunky as it first comes together.

Blended similar to buying fresh ground in a store.

Creamy as the nuts release their fat.

Why is that important? If you want thick peanut butter at room temperature, you may not want to process it as long. If you want it to be thin and spreadable, you may need to keep it in the fridge to firm up. In the latter case, you don’t want to add more than a teaspoon of oil until you have completed processing to dial in the right consistency for your needs.

Hedging Your Bets

In terms of having it get too thin once it separates, you can hedge your bets and take out some insurance using a stabilizer like guar gum. Many people have issues with an additive that stabilizes or alters food chemically. Hear us out on this one first before saying ‘t’ain’t natural to be using that’

Guar gum, made from guar beans, is a natural thickener like corn starch or arrowroot powder. The key difference is that it thickens without heat, which makes it ideal for recipes that don’t involve cooking, like peanut butter or fermented hot sauces. You can read more about it here.

Some individuals are sensitive to guar gum just like those sensitive to soy, nuts, milk, whey, or other food intolerances. However, guar gum is also a common ingredient in the food world, so you are probably already consuming it if you have had something as familiar as a pint of Ben & Jerry’s (or others) Ice Cream. We aren’t picking on them, but we use them to show how common the usage is.

Storage

Our recipe creates an easily spreadable peanut butter. The oil (fat) is drawn out of the nuts into a suspension to make it spreadable, which makes it a bit unstable. Depending on your kitchen, at room temperature, it may be too thin for you, and due to the instability, it may allow the oil to separate. We recommend storing it in the fridge after making it to allow it to thicken and solidify. This may take up to 12 hours. We would rather keep it in the refrigerator than add any shelf stabilizer to it.

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Smooth Peanut Butter

A recipe for a smooth Peanut or an 'Any' nut butter.

Keyword Bread, Condiment, Sandwich, Sauce, Side

Prep Time 10 minutes minutes

Processing Time 20 minutes minutes

Total Time 30 minutes minutes

Equipment

• 1 Food Processor
• 1 Spatula

Ingredients

• 12 oz Roasted Peanuts
• 2 oz Roasted Pecans You can use all peanuts but this will create a different depth of flavor.
• 2 tsp Kosher Salt Use more or less to your liking.
• 1 tsp Peanut Oil You may need more based on the oil content of your nuts.
• 3 tbsp Honey Use more or less to your liking.
• 1/2 tsp Guar Gum Optional

Instructions

• Gather all ingredients before you start.
• Place all dry ingredients in a Food Processor
• Process for 1 minute, let rest for 1 minute. We are using this to process / rest interval to control how we raise the temperature.
• Process for 1 minute as you drizzle in the oil and honey mix, then rest for 1 minute.
• Sample flavor and adjust salt and honey to taste.
• Continue to process for 1 minute / rest 1 minute 8-10 more times.
• The temperature should slowly come up to 120-130 Fahrenheit.
• At this point, you should have a major consistency change as the fats liquify. If not, continue to pulse/rest a few more times until you see it seperate.
• Add oil to adjust the consistency to liking.
• Place in jar and set in fridge to firm up. It may take up to 12 hours to fully solidify.

Wrapping Up

This post provides the basics for making a simple homemade creamy peanut or nut recipe. You can experiment with nuts, sweeteners, and consistency to tailor the recipe to your liking. For example, walnuts and maple syrup create a great nut butter with a different flavor profile to spread on apple slices in the fall.

The post How To Make Peanut Butter first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Flashback to Where We Started

We started to cook for ourselves over eating out to help us handle our calorie budget through portions over serving size. It was also a way to lower costs as we started to break out of the economies of convenience. As we made our bread, yogurt, and crackers, we found things didn’t taste the same. Over time, we found our food more to our liking than what we purchased or ate when out.

Was it better? Is homemade better? That is subjective because it is a judgment based on personal taste. We noticed most food we bought or ate out was significantly more salty and/or sweet. We eventually had to limit our eating or purchase of pre-packaged food because we started not to like them. 

Nope, We’re Not Haters

We are not here to discuss whether homemade food is better than factory food. There are so many different ways to compare the two that it is hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison. This is not a post about ultra-processed food vs. farm-to-table organics. We won’t examine how food is wasted through the supply chain. 

The reality is, I still love myself some Taco Bell once in a while. Big Macs are a great treat once every six months. You can’t tell me Taco Bell tastes like genuine Mexican or Tex-Mex cuisine. I don’t consider a Big Mac to taste like any real hamburger, homemade or not. They are both delightful nonetheless. We will treat fast food or large restaurant chains as factory food, even when they produce it fresh in-store or in restaurants. We will get to why in a bit.

Factory vs Home

The fundamental difference between factory food and homemade food lies in their goals and production methods.

Factory food aims to maximize sales by appealing to the broadest audience. Producers must ensure the food stays as consistent as possible. That means every frozen pizza, box of crackers, and block of cheddar must meet specific standards. Even fast-food restaurants must maintain these standards. For example, a Whopper in California should taste the same as one in Kentucky.

Factory food producers must use consistent ingredients in their production lines. When you buy frozen fries, the producers have selected potatoes of a specific variety, size, and water content to ensure a uniform product. Additionally, many factories use machines and processes that home cooks lack. These machines enable instant freezing and more consistent deep frying. It doesn’t stop there. They also have tools and packaging for less spoilage by using, for example, things such as nitrogen gas in a bag of chips.

Home cooking is about tailoring food to your specifications. That means creating something for you, by you. For example, you may prefer spicier or sweeter food than the general public likes, so you tailor your cooking to your palate. You often need to work with inconsistent seasonal ingredients as a home cook. You generally prepare food without highly specialized equipment designed for one specific dish. For example, you may have an ice cream machine; however, it can’t create the same overrun as a commercial machine. 

By definition, home cooking can’t taste 100% the same as factory food because of these reasons.

How We All Got Here

Over time, we have shifted from an agrarian to an industrialized society. If you were an early pioneer or homesteader, you often cooked simple meals based on what you produced. As we moved into larger populations living in cities, this changed. People in cities didn’t have room for a garden and chickens, so they had to seek out local vendors. This was part of the tradeoff of working long hours in a factory versus homesteading. 

As we progressed post-WWII into a level of affluence combined with leisure, we entered a time where convenience and consistency became key. We had abundance, were traveling more, and let’s face it, cooking three hot meals a day plus goodies isn’t easy. In a family at that time, that job was usually the work of one person: the woman. Convenience, or factory food, was part of her emancipation. This was where things like TV dinners and pre-packaged meals gained ground over home cooking. 

Fast food, another form of factory food, was born then. It came from travelers’ need for consistency. The age of the motor car and family road trips began with the construction of the interstate highway system. People wanted to trust what they ate and stayed, so many companies like McDonald’s, White Castle, and Howard Johnson catered to that need. 

Changing Over

Because home-cooked foods aren’t the same as factory foods, they will taste different. Learning to store and reheat foods becomes essential to make the best use of them and reduce the time we spend cooking. There is also a period of adjustment to the change of taste. Here’s the strange part: once you become used to what you make, factory foods taste very strange. Why?

By cooking at home, you tailor your food to your tastes, not the larger populations. Remember that factory foods are created through a rigorous series of consumer testing. That testing decides what foods have the broadest appeal to sell. Making anything for a large population or least common denominator can’t be polarizing in any one direction. It can’t be excessively sweet, spicy, salty, etc. It also has to be a certain level of these to be liked by many. 

For example, we cut out a lot of salt from our diet. We didn’t go to zero; we just dialed it back. As we changed, we found that eating out or purchasing something was much more salty than we had remembered. Our tastes had adapted to what we produced rather than what others liked. We realized that the more we made at home, the less we liked out. Your tastes adapt. That wasn’t an overnight thing; it took time. 

But Why?

Food isn’t just about consuming nutrients. When we eat things that taste good, our brain releases dopamine. Factory food companies design their products to trigger this response, and they prove it through consumer testing. We promised not to preach, but the reality is that ultra-high-processed food deliberately aims to do this. People often see home cooking as made with love, but love doesn’t always win—at least not at first.

We Didn’t Go Cold Turkey

For us, breaking with factory food meant rewiring our brains in how we thought about food and the rewards our brains got from eating it. To switch, we found ways of approximating factory foods but with our twist and customized to our liking. We had fried fish and fried chicken, made our egg rolls, and even katsu chicken. They were experiments. Even our bread recipe tries to approximate a local loaf we used to buy in the store. 

As we tailored our food to our needs, we found when we had to purchase something or eat out, we were less satisfied. The food was more expensive, saltier, or too sweet, or something that was becoming less familiar. We had essentially rewired our brains to enjoy what we produced over what was created for mass consumption. 

However, we will never produce a Big Mac or a crunchy Taco Bell taco. Those are still basic treats for once every few months. But now, those tastes and the rewards from them are different. They have become substitutes for times when we travel and need something consistent if we can’t bring our food. 

Wrapping Up

In this post, we discussed why homemade and factory foods taste different. It is tough to produce that ‘factory taste’ at home. Instead of trying to imitate, you can create for yourself what rewards you and helps you meet your dietary goals. Factory foods have a purpose, as do homemade foods. We don’t believe that making everything from scratch scales in the modern world. Still, by investing a little time in learning, you can create food tailored to your needs over the general population.  

The post Why Homemade Makes Food So Unique? first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Bread Seems Problematic

Baking bread seems to be a challenging task for many people. There are many variables, such as yeast, moisture levels, gluten creation, and lack of gluten creation, all of which contribute to bread not being simple. If you follow some recipes, you must learn a new language with words like autolyze, punch down, and window pane. Worse, several sites feature extravagantly decorated bread that resembles art more than food.

Well, bully for them! That is not us. We have busy lives, need sandwiches or toast, and want something made by hand. That is where this bread recipe came from. This bread does take time, but much of that time is not active, meaning you can walk away. This is also a ‘no-knead’ bread, meaning it doesn’t require a lot of hand or machine work to knead the dough. 

Source callout. This was someone else’s recipe we modified. We wanted a base bread that had the benefits of both bread flour’s gluten and whole wheat nutrition. Next, we prefered a moister bread than the original recipe so we added butter to the mix. We also like a taller loaf for sandwiches, which requires adjustments to the amount of ingredients, pan size, and cook time. Finally, the original recipe had two problematic flaws that some people struggled with, which we simplified and will address.

Many recipe sites provide pictures and videos of the step-by-step process for making something. We won’t do that. Why? Because we feel it buries the most critical steps in a lot of noise. Breaking with tradition, we will provide you with some pointers on the essential steps and key considerations that will help you break this recipe. Also, if you haven’t read it, here is our guide to fixing bread.

First, we are using a less typical 9 x 5 x 3 pan size. We wanted a bigger loaf for larger slices. One of the primary keys to making bread is ensuring the correct pan size. If the pan is too small, the bread will not be supported and will have too much ‘muffin top’. Using a pan that is too large, the bread will not produce the shape we associate with sandwich bread because it cannot rise over the rim.

• Always measure flour by weight or a spoon-and-level method. This is where the issue of having too wet or too dry dough can arise. No matter what you do, every recipe is going to be off based on the unidity of your kitchen. This is why we prefer to show a picture of what a hydrated dough looks like rather than simplify this further.
• Proof your yeast in warm water to ensure it is alive. While some yeast don’t technically need this, it is simple.
• Warm water is defined as 105°F-110°F, which is slightly above body temperature. Yeast dies if the water is too high above that level, and they won’t create lift if it is too low below that level.

Here is what proofing yeast looks like. Good yeast will foam in under a minute when mixed in warm water. 

Water Content

To achieve good bread, you must balance the water content with the structure. This is especially tricky in no-knead breads. Because flours contain moisture, and eyeballing measuring cups full of water is not 100% accurate, you need to tune your dough. If the dough is too sticky, fold in a tablespoon of flour. If the dough is too dry, it won’t rise in the oven, so add a tablespoon of water. You want to see a shaggy dough like this. 

Doubling 

Because yeast bread is made with living organisims, the times in this recipe are approximate. Yeast is unfeeling and cannot be forced to work faster; they do not care about your schedule or timeline. To achieve a good rise in dough, you must allow the yeast to do its work, which takes time. We can encourage them to work faster through warm conditions. For example, we proof the bread in a room at 78°F. If your kitchen is 67°F, it will take more time. If it is 82°F, it will take less time. 

Shaping

 After your bulk or first rise, you shape the dough and place it into a greased and floured pan. You must pull and stretch the dough instead of simply rolling it out like a pie crust. By stretching and folding, the air bubbles are distributed more evenly, resulting in a better rise and a more even crumb. Dusting the dough with flour before the second rise will also help keep the bread from sticking to the tea towel or plastic covering it. 

Now let’s make some bread!

Here is our recipe for a straightforward, simple, yet tasty homemade bread. Remember, being succesful will come down the following points.

• Make sure your yeast is alive.
• Make sure your water is 105-110F
• Adjust the mositure levels based on your kitchen and its humidyt.
• Give the yeast time to do their job.
• Use all the times as guidelines and not hard and fast rules.

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Simple ‘No Knead’ Basic Sandwich Loaf

A basic recipe that is easy to follow and fairly foolproof.

Cuisine American

Keyword Bread

Prep Time 30 minutes minutes

Cook Time 25 minutes minutes

Resting Time 5 hours hours

Total Time 5 hours hours 55 minutes minutes

Servings 12 Slices

Author Pete

Equipment

• 1 Bread Pan 9x5x3
• 1 Bowl
• 1 Bowl Scrapper
• 1 Spatula
• 1 Dish Towel, moistened (or greased plastic wrap)
• Measuring Cups and Spoons
• 1 Dusting wand (handy if you bake a lot but not 100% necessary)
• 1 Digital Thermometer with a fine tip (the best way to check for doneness but not 100% necessary).
• 1 Whisk

Ingredients

• 2 cups bread flour Use the 'spoon and level' technique to fill cup.
• 2 cups whole wheat
• 2 1/4 tsp instant yeast or one packet
• 2 tsp fine salt
• 2 ½ tsp sugar
• 2 cups warm water (at 105-110F)
• 2 tbsp melted butter (cooled to room temp)
• Additional AP or bread flour (for adjusting dough and dusting surfaces)
• 1 tsp canola oil to grease pan (or nuetral flavored oil)

Instructions

• Gather the ingredients.
• In a large mixing bowl, combine flour yeast, salt and sugar.
• Use a whisk or spoon to blend well.
• In a small bowl combine water, butter (or oil).
• Slowly add wet ingredients into dry while mixing Use the bowl scraper (or spatuala) to fold dough onto itself until combined.
• Note: Water content of the flour varies. If the dough is too sticky, dust with small amounts of flour until it becomes workable by hand. If it is too dry, add a teaspoon of water. See photo of shaggy dough above as a guide to correct moisture level
• Cover the bowl with moistened dish towel or greased plastic wrap and set it in a draft-free place to rise for 4 hours.
• When dough has doubled in size, grease a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan with oil then dust with flour.
• Scrape the dough out onto a well-floured surface.
• With floured hands, shape the dough into a rough rectangle about 9 inches by 12 inches.
• Note: You may still need to adjust moisture level here. The dough should be workable without sticking to floured hands.
• Note: This bread doesn't need to be ‘punched down’ like others. Minimize the amount of time you work it to retain as much of the air bubbles as possible.
• Make 2 folds. With the short side facing you, fold 1/3 twards the middle. Fold the other third on top of the previous fold. Pinch seams
• Gently roll into round log and press to make it the square shape of the pan.
• Drop it into the prepared pan and gently push down and into corners to make it even.
• Dust top of loaf with flour
• Cover the pan loosely with a moistened dish towel, and set in a draft-free place for 1 hour, or until it is approximately double in size.
• About 45 minutes before the loaf is done rising, heat the oven to 425F.
• Remove the dish towel and dust the risen loaf with a little more flour.
• Place pan in middle rack of oven.
• Bake the loaf for 25 minutes, until it's a deep golden brown and sounds hollow when tapped. You are looking for an internal temp of 200-205F.
• Note: All ovens cook slightly differently. Use 25 minutes as a guide to start checking for being done. You may need 5-10 minutes more cook time.
• Note: These temps and times are at sea level. You may need adjust your cooking times and temps for your area.
• Remove from the oven and rest for 5 minutes
• Use a dish towel to turn out onto a cooling rack.
• Cool completely (2-3 hours) before slicing.

Wrapping up

We hope this bread works out for you as well as it did for us and that it makes bread more approachable. It doesn’t take rocket science to produce a good loaf. Once you have it set up, you can add to and modify it to fit your needs. You could add seeds for an extra crunch or raisins, cinnamon, and extra sugar for a sweeter dessert bread. The idea is to get something to work and then iterate over it to tune it to your needs. 

The post How To Make A Simple Loaf Of Bread first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

A Tale of Two Leavenings

What makes bread rise is pretty simple. It is a mix of expanding gases and how much structure, traditionally gluten, has been developed in the bread. Not enough gases or gluten, and bread doesn’t rise. Oddly enough, too much gas may allow the bread to rise, but more like a balloon than having a great crumb. This is how Choux pastry works, which is a terrible dough for bread. On the other hand, too much gluten and the air can’t create enough pressure to lift the dough.

 Leavened bread is any bread that rises via a leavening agent. In an over-simplification, we will say there are two types of leavening that produce the proper gases to help the dough rise; chemical and yeast. We use the term gases to cover everything from steam to carbon dioxide. Let’s take this one definition further. Chemically leavened breads are generally classified as quick breads. Examples of quick breads are pancakes, muffins, and banana bread. 

Yeast breads are those that are leavened by way of critters and a byproduct of their binge eating. Yeast consumes sugar and turns starch into sugar to consume it next. The byproduct of their consumption is alcohol, carbon dioxide, and organic acids. That yeast may come in several forms, but it is all basically critters having a big ol’ party that makes your bread rise. 

But Chemicals Are Bad!

Ok, yes, we know, the word chemical scares people. The word chemical, in our context here, is not some crazy concoction made by some multinational conglomerate bent on world destruction by way of your GI tract. Chemical leavening is the natural reaction of things like acids and bases that create expanding gases in the same way a school science project volcano does. If you use baking soda and baking powder, you are making a chemical leavened bread. 

When Chemical Leavening Goes Wrong

Quick breads and other chemically leavened items generally are a bit more foolproof than getting yeast breads to rise. If you are following a known good recipe, and things don’t work out, it is probably something simple that went wrong. Since this is not a post on how to create a recipe using these two, for brevity, we will focus on what usually goes wrong.

• Old ingredients that have degraded. Baking powder and baking soda have a shelf life and can break down over time. To test them:
  • Place a small amount of baking soda in a bowl and add vinegar. If it fizzes, it is good, otherwise replace it.
  • Put hot water in a small bowl and add baking powder to it. If it fizzes, it is good, otherwise replace it. 
• Improper mixing, especially over mixing of can cause quick breads to not rise. When mixed too much, gluten forms and keeps the gases from creating lift. Pancakes are notorious for having this problem so leave some small lumps please. 
• You added or substituted something that threw off the chemical balance. Remember chemical leavening has to be a balance of acid and base to work right. If you use buttermilk over whole milk, you have changed the chemical composition of the recipe.

Yeast, The Beast

You can write a lot about yeast. Many of our most loved foods come from their digestive antics. Yeast are what create leavened bread and alcohol. This is a post about fixing things, not the yeast themselves. To do that, we need to understand a little but not a lot about them. 

Ask someone how many types of yeast there are and you will get mixed answers because they are used in so many different ways and some have brand-specific names.  To keep it simple, we will try and limit it to those used in making dough. Each type of yeast has specific qualities, which you can read about from people who know more than us. Starters such as sourdough or Bittman, are also created by yeast. They are a living, breathing, set of active critters that can be called up to help bread rise. 

Unless they are dead, or asleep, or…, or…, and yes, that is the challenge with yeast. They are somewhat temperamental and need to be alive and active or they are of no use. They also need to be treated right, or they won’t produce well like any other people who work for you. Most of the time bread doesn’t rise, it is because our little bubble makers have been done wrong. We will get to why that can happen without you knowing you did anything wrong.

The Primary Reasons Breads Fall Flat

We won’t try and give every reason bread can fail to rise, but we can cover the major reasons for it. We will explain why, and how to avoid it the next time. Here are some likely culprits.

• The yeast you used is not active or dead.
• There isn’t enough or there is too much gluten or structure in the dough.
• You didn’t let it rise long enough.
• As with yeast problems, the starter isn’t ready even though it bubbles.

These are all the core issues for bread not rising. Let’s examine each one.

In Active or Dead Yeast

This is probably the number one reason bread doesn’t rise. Yeast are a bit finicky. They may need to be woken up to work, which is known as proofing the yeast. You need to know which type of yeast you are using to know if they must be woken up first before use. Once you know that, you can look at the type and application and do a quick Google search. 

Regardless, we always proof our yeast or at least check some of it if it has been sitting, no matter which type we use. It is easy to check it is alive by putting a ¼ of a teaspoon of it in warm water to make sure it creates bubbles after a 2-3 minutes or so. Warm water brings us to the other finicky side of yeast, temperatures, and chemicals. 

What is warm water? Warm is a subjective term. Warm water means any range from 95℉ to 115℉ depending on yeast type. At 120F yeast starts dying. Think about that for a minute. Our bodies are roughly 98.6F. The difference between what is ‘warm’ to us and dead yeast is not very big. This is why we use a thermometer to check our water temps. 

Also remember that in certain areas of the world, the water supply has chemicals such as chlorine specifically designed to kill all bugs, not just bad ones. If you are having continuing problems, it may be time to look at that as a possibility. This can be fixed, usually, by using distilled or filtered water. We make bread with tap water all the time, but others aren’t always so lucky. 

Gluten and Dough Structure

Bread requires structure, which is generally formed by gluten, to trap air bubbles to allow it to rise. If not enough gluten is present, the dough won’t have enough structure to rise. If too much gluten is present, the dough also can’t rise since the air and gas pressure can’t push or pull the structure around. 

Let’s face it, most recipes also use all sorts of strange things for a definition of how bread dough should feel. It makes it hard for people new to bread making to understand when enough is enough when kneading bread. To fix this, for many breads, you can use what is known as a window pane test to get an idea of where you’re at. While this doesn’t work for all bread types, it is a good gauge to use as you teach yourself how much is enough. 

 It Didn’t Rise Enough

Yes, yeast is fickle. We have established that. It turns out they have their own schedule. Many bread recipes will tell you to allow it to rise for some stated time or until it doubles in size, or a combination of both. Time, in recipes, is a guideline not a reality. Even the idea of the bread doubling in size is technically a suggestion. 

 How much rise you can have and how fast it can happen are directly related to how active your yeast is and how much gas they can produce. That is directly related to how much food is available to them, and the temperature they are at. Simply put, yeast work faster the warmer they are up until a point. That doesn’t mean you want them going all out either. The best range for a dough rise is generally 75℉-78℉.

To improve your odds of success, it is best to do a poke test on the dough rather than simply wait and hope. When you do a poke test, you get a realistic idea of just how much rise has happened and how much the yeast has inflated the dough. This is the same way we may test a bike tire or beach ball for how inflated it is. 

Starter Didn’t Start It

A challenge that arises when using a starter is that you also have to know when that starter is ready. Just because a starter is producing bubbles doesn’t mean it is a gung ho colony of yeast ready for a mission. We realized this as we started doing sourdough. Our first loaf was dense enough to be hardtack. 

When you are just starting with some of these new items, you may not understand how bubbly that bubbly should be. Of course, again, most recipes will tell you ‘doubled in size’ for both starter and bread. That is a hard lesson to learn in both the amount of time and the ingredients wasted. 

A helpful solution for this is what is called a float test. A float test is placing a small bit of a starter into water to see if it floats. This test gives you some assurance that the starter is not only mature enough, but is at peak production before it falls back onto itself. 

Wrapping Up

Many things can go wrong in creating bread. In this post we have addressed many of the big ones. Even if these are not 100% full proof for every situation, they give you some tools to start digging into the problem. If you use them, they can help you methodically eliminate much of the noise from “What did I do wrong?”. For each item you know works with certainty, you can feel more secure in your abilities. All of this can also help reduce the wasted time and ingredients you have spent precious time and money on. 

The post It’s Easy To Fix Problems With Bread first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Background

Many of us have heard the story of the Earl of Sandwich and his gambling that spawned the sandwich. It was bread and beef, but that is what it is today? What about the submarine, grinder, hot dog, or burrito? It turns out both the FDA and USDA  govern the definition of sandwich. Not only do they govern it, some states have their take on it. Stranger still, or maybe not, it varies from country to country with groups like the British Sandwich Association or BSA. 

All of this seems more of something to keep lawyers busy than anything to do with food. That makes it an interesting sidebar but not something that helps us. Let’s use this information to set context that we will be considering only a case of a closed sandwich rather than anything else.  What is a closed sandwich? We will call it two or more pieces of bread that contain filling between them.

Callout, You do You

We are looking to learn how we can create a perfect sandwich, and what it means to us. We are not telling people to not go out and make the sloppiest sandwich known to humanity. The same goes for restaurants that serve sandwiches or burgers the size of someone’s head. It’s not our jam but we dig others may like it. You do you. This is also why we will leave the recipes for sandwiches to someone like Alton Brown and other chefs. It was his show that spawned the idea behind the post. We wanted to dig a bit further than he did. 

Why? Who Cares?

As usual, we are doing this as much as a thought experiment for us as much as we are for others to ponder. When I order a sandwich, I don’t want to receive something that I can’t eat without a bib or knife and fork. Worse still, when I bite into a sandwich I don’t want the fillings to be shot out of the other side. In both cases, if I have to use a fork and knife to eat it, it is not a sandwich. It just feels like bad craftsmanship and a waste of food. Ok, I will step down from my soapbox now.

Still, why does that matter to others? It is very simple to us. The entire point of a sandwich was to be able to carry on something while using a single hand to eat with. Whether you fish, play cards, read during lunch, or any of a myriad of other activities, the purpose of a sandwich was to only occupy a single clean hand to consume nutrition without utensils.   

Combine that thought with the want of good food and there is the reason for why. We’re good with a baloney and cheese sandwich sometimes. Other times, not so much. A grilled cheese sandwich can be sublime in the same way a tuna sandwich can be. Where things get more complicated is, say a chicken salad on wheat. 

What makes or breaks most meals is water content. A good cook knows how to manipulate the water content of food to create something more than just palatable but enjoyable. Here is why water, and manipulating it, is so important. 

Water boils at sea level at 212℉. If you want moisture in your food, you can’t raise the temperature over that number or the food will start to dry. When water is present in food, cooking it initially produces steam, which prevents creating a crust as you would for, say, toast.  As heat penetrates the food, the outer layers’ temperatures go up and caramelization or browning via the Maillard reaction starts. The real trick is to make everything from moist fried chicken to toast to a seared yet juicy burger is about balancing water evaporation as the food cooks.

This balance of wet and dry, soft and hard drives the mouthfeel of what we are eating. In fried chicken, you get the crunchy crust around the juicy meat. In a seared burger, you taste a bit of the char with the still moist meat. With toast, we end up with a crisp caramelized surface with, depending on slice thickness, a soft center. It is in that balance where basic nutrition becomes great food.

The Balance of Structure with Wet and Dry 

Sandwiches need the same manipulation of wet and dry as any other type of food. Additionally, sandwiches must provide a structure which makes them a little more complicated. It’s this relationship that can make or break a good sandwich. Let’s put down some axioms to help us form a sandwich construction rubric.

First Axiom: The harder the bread, the more pressure exerted on the contents when bitten, but the less moisture will impact it.

Second Axiom: The softer the bread, the easier it is to bite, but it’s much more susceptible to falling apart by getting soggy with wet ingredients. 

Third Axiom: For a sandwich to stay together, the layers must provide enough friction against each other to keep the sandwich from sliding apart.

Fourth Axiom: A sandwich is not a bread bowl or bowl of any type so it should not hold ingredients that need that level of containment.

Let’s dig in a bit more on all of these.

The Big 3 

Our first axiom is about dealing with hard bread and/or toasted bread. The harder the crust of a sandwich is, the more bite pressure it takes to get through it. That pressure is then transferred to the filling of the sandwich. That is great if we have a deli-meat and cheese sandwich, which creates a flat structure.

If we add avocado on that sandwich or use that bread to make a toasted tuna fish, the results won’t be great. In sandwiches, softer ingredients don’t always play well with harder ingredients and are usually ejected from the sandwich, onto you. We need to balance how much give is left in the bread to allow it to contain the ingredients when bitten.

In the second axiom, we know that when we add wet ingredients to soft bread, it can become, well, soup, not bread. By using a firmer crust or a light toasting, we create a barrier to that moisture destroying our bread. When we toast it too much, we may, however, run into our first axiom. This can be counteracted by a thicker slice of bread, which creates a cushion for the bite pressure. 

The third axiom is no different than building a house or a high rise. When we consider a building, each level higher we go, we must make sure it is structurally sound. That means hard and soft textures need to work together to create a cohesive structure, or things will eject from the sandwich. You have probably witnessed this in action if you have ever eaten a burger with lots of sauce and leaf lettuce. If the lettuce was shredded, it would hold in place rather than make a slip and slide.

The Big Bowl

At another time in our history, people used trenchers instead of more refined service items. Yes, your bread was your utensils, bowl, etc. That is great. In the modern world, we see that a deep dish pizza is not a sandwich. Sandwiches are a form of service ware to hold your fillings. Up to a point that is fine. Where it becomes problematic is in trying to make a sandwich with items that don’t belong. Thick salsas, cherry tomatoes, olives, etc. can destroy the structure of a sandwich quickly. 

Let’s talk about types of chicken sandwiches to make the point. If you are preparing a chicken salad sandwich with lovely big chunks of chicken in slippery mayo, it will be better in a bowl than between bread. Why? Unless the bread slice is thick enough and soft enough to deform into a bowl, the ingredients will fall out.  Let’s change that to pulled chicken in BBQ sauce. If it is piled high and heavily sauced, nothing will hold it. Fry that chicken breast and you will have no problem.

Cheese as Binding Container

When it comes to hot sandwiches, cheese can do you a structural favor. By placing the cheese over all the other ingredients and melting it, you in essence, create a shell around those ingredients. This results in a sandwich that will hold tougher despite some of the axioms we have discussed. 

Wrapping Up

We discussed aspects of sandwich making to set up a rubric for more success than failures. This thought experiment hopefully helps others think through how to make tweaks to how they look at sandwiches. We also discussed why they aren’t as simple as two slices of bread and some meat or vegetables. With a bit of thinking, a simple sandwich can be elevated to a one-hand buffet over just a midnight snack. 

The post A Guide To Better Sandwiches first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Just Nuke It! 

When at work I have never seen anyone in the company kitchen use anything but 100% power to nuke to oblivion whatever it was they were heating. This was my standard operation of a microwave as well. You select Add a Minute, or whatever time you need, hit go, and wait. After the time elapses, it beeps, and you open the door. If it is hot enough you pull it out and if not you repeat the steps until done. There isn’t a lot of magic there. 

Time and multiple attempts have convinced me that the popcorn setting on microwaves never produces good popcorn. In my opinion, the button needs to be labeled Destroy Popcorn. Let’s face it, you would think there wasn’t that much variation between companies in a standard bag of microwave popcorn but there is. For us using the bag’s advice of listening until popping slows was a far better method than the popcorn button.

Just a quick review of the basics of how a microwave works. If you want to get into the details of how a microwave works you can read about that in depth on other sites. A microwave uses a magnetron to excite water molecules. The more agitated the water gets, the more the heat it produces. The thermal limit of water at sea level is 212℉ before it turns into steam. This upper limit is why microwaves can’t brown food via the Maillard Reaction.   

The key technology used here is the magnetron. The microwave is rated by its power. It is simple enough to understand, that the more power, the faster it can heat food. How fast it heats food has positives and surprisingly some negatives. More power is fine, however, too much power isn’t great at times. It turns out too much power can lead to some overheating with messy results.  

Last, no matter what a manufacturer tells you, a microwave can’t roast or air fry. If the manufacturer states it can do those things, you are buying a hybrid with two separate machines built in. If you do some homework you will see it is simply a traditional oven with a microwave. A magnetron can only excite water not create convection or conduction via the dry heat needed for those cooking types. It is not simply not possible for a magnetron to roast or air fry.

Popcorn, Defrost and Vegetables, Oh My!

If you are like us, then you probably have only played around with all the presets, like popcorn. Let’s face it: We use a microwave to save time. What saves time? Full power!! True as that is, it is generally at the cost of something else. But first, about those preset buttons. 

In an attempt to apply the right power and time to provide the proper heating of your food, manufacturers create those preset buttons. Most microwaves do this through a set of mathematical equations by approximating how much water and mass the food has. With that approximation, the microwave then decides, based on its power output, how much time and power to use. Great because we all know exactly how much our frozen leftover lasagna weighs! No, most of us probably don’t unless we are dialed into how it was made, for what calorie budget, and the portion sizes we cut it into. 

Higher-end microwaves may use humidity, infrared, and sound to monitor cooking.  Oddly enough, popcorn seems to have driven a lot of this innovation.  If you have ever overcooked popcorn in a microwave, you understand why it is so critical not to have that happen. When popcorn is cooked too long in a microwave it will turn to a tar-like material and also produce an acrid smoke and smell. It can be so bad that you may need to replace your microwave. I know this from personal experience.

It’s Not Just About Water, Power, and Time 

All presets and management of cooking in a microwave is still about balancing power and time to increase the temperature of the food through the excitement of water. You will also read that they excite the molecules of fat and sugar. Realize those are mostly composed of water hence why we say water not all three. The last important key is the mass of the food. This is why you will see presets such as defrost by weight or bag size for popcorn. 

In these cases, the microwave adjusts the power and time to make sure it slowly raises the temperature of the food. Why slowly? If you have melted cold butter in a microwave and had it explode you know the reason. The cooking of the food is based on how deep the microwaves penetrate the food, where the water is in the food, and how much water is in the food.

Microwaves actually can only penetrate from one to one and a half inches. That means in small pieces of food they cook from the inside out whereas in large they cook from the outside in. In the case of outside in, the interior is done by conduction from the hot part of the food, not the microwave. This is why it is easy to overcook the outside of food and still have a cold center. 

A Pair of Examples

For example, butter has a lot of water and is small. The microwave cooks the melted butter inside out. As the butter superheats the water flashes to steam at 212F which expands rapidly creating an explosion. If you have made this mistake then you know what it is like to clean butter out of every nook and cranny in your microwave. 

My nemesis, Lasagna, is on the opposite side of the reheating problem. For us, frozen lasagna is a block of high-moisture frozen food usually stored in a plastic container. It is large enough that it cooks from the outside in. In the past, we would nuke this at high power. As a result of that reheating process, the outside bits got hot enough to destroy plastic containers. 

Back to the Presets

We still shy away from presets and here is why. I want to understand how my food is being cooked so I can use that in other places. If you have a microwave at work that is 800 watts it is not going to behave like your home microwave of 1000 watts. Our guesses and experiences were the ones in our work environment that didn’t have all the bells and whistles as well.   

When we started to understand how to use the microwave more effectively, we wanted to be able to use that knowledge and adapt to other microwaves. Since nothing is standardized we can’t hope the two machines are the same including their presets. Overall though, I am pretty sure we can get close to home if we simply use the same power settings and only change the amount of time we cook.

All Things in Moderation

Since moderation of power and time was key we started our experiments. As with the article on reheating, it doesn’t mean there is going to be an easy button or simple answer. After researching a bit we found Whirlpool puts out a pretty good list to explain power levels, foods, and how they go together.

But turning down the power means cooking longer, correct? It can, however, be more of a trade-off. By turning down the power, and increasing time, we get more predictable cooking times. This leads to being able to walk away from the machine rather than babysit it. For example, for our serving size of Lasagna, we can put it on for 10 minutes at 50% power and walk away. In our previous cooking style, we would microwave for a minute, wait 30 seconds, and repeat until cooked through. That left us babysitting our food for 7 or 8 minutes. 

This is not the case in popcorn which I don’t trust. For me, no matter the preset, sensor, or other dark arts, I babysit it. There are some items like this where full power and babysitting are needed. I will wait until I hear that popping slow down before I stop it. 

Wrapping Up 

In this post, we discussed some ways to use a microwave more successfully. By moderating power and temp you can achieve better cooking and reheating of food. By not using presets you also learn how to adapt to other microwaves that you use. These two points make the microwave an even more powerful tool in the kitchen.

The post How To Make Good Use of a Microwave first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

This post is a work in progress with the intent that we cover what is working for us. It is one step in cataloging all of our staples so that we can understand how to optimize our storage space, time spent cooking, and economies of scale in making purchases. This is part of a larger list I wanted when we first started cooking around how to stock a pantry. Since all our searches came up with nothing that spoke to us or our style and calorie budget, we decided to make our own. 

The ‘plan’ we originally came up with was ambitious. We wanted to be able to bake any time we wanted and only go to the store every other week. We also wanted a way to make sure we had items that were shelf stable or had a decent shelf life in the fridge so we didn’t waste food. Why have such lofty goals? It was an experiment to see how off-grid we could live when we retired as well as how much food we could make ourselves.

We also bought items such as cake flour and mixes even though I believe I have made two cakes in my life. While I thought it would be worth trying I had to force myself to make a sheet cake just to use the mix which was a year past its use-by date. When we started our journey in baking, we could make our own baked goods to create the proper portion sizes for our limited calorie budget. It wasn’t that the mix didn’t allow it, but rather we realized we enjoyed cookies, dessert bread, and homemade candy over cakes. 

We realized though, if we hadn’t started this big, we wouldn’t have figured anything out. By investing money into ingredients we forced ourselves to use things rather than waste them. As a result of the forcing function, we learned what we liked, what we didn’t, how much we could make ourselves, what we couldn’t, etc. 

Where We Landed

It turns out it took fewer one-offs for baking than we thought which was an outcome of a couple of things. First, most of what we needed to bake with we used for general cooking anyway such as AP flour, canola oil, and eggs. We hadn’t sat down and realized how few extra items it took until we started tracking our staples for everyday meals.

We also started to realize that bread is simply water, flour, yeast, and salt prepared in different ways and found America’s Test Kitchen Book ‘Everyday Bread’ is a good read on why.  You only need a couple of types of procedures such as the creaming method to create different cookies as well. We also learned that if we wanted chocolate chip cookies we only needed a handful of ingredients to make multiple types. When we switched to oatmeal the next week, again, only a couple of ingredients changed. 

Further, what we think of as ingredients of baked goods can be used in many other things which makes them more general staples. For example, you may make chocolate cherry cookies or whole wheat bread with pepita and sesame seeds for an extra crunch. Would we consider the dried cherries and pepitas as baking staples? Not at all, because we use them to dress up a boring salad or even coleslaw.

Here is a list of items we keep on hand that play a role in not only baking but are staples for other types of cooking. This is not an inclusive list of all items we keep but rather the ones needed for most of our baked goods.

• Flours and Dry Goods
  • AP Flour
  • Cornstarch (Sometimes called Cornflour) 
  • Buttermilk Powder
  • Corn Meal
  • Old Fashioned Oats
  • Baking Soda
  • Unsweetened Cocoa Powder
• Oils and Fats
  • Canola Oil
  • Olive Oil
  • Butter
• Dairy and Eggs
  • Whole Milk
  • Eggs
• Sugars
  • Light Brown
  • Dark Brown
  • White
  • Molasses 
• Salts
  • Kosher
  • Sea
  • Non-Iodized Table
• Nuts, Seeds and Dried Fruits
  • Raisins
  • Cherries
  • Cranberries
  • Walnuts
  • Pepitas 
  • Sunflour
  • Peanut Butter
• Canned goods
  • Pumpkin
• Spices and Extracts
  • Ginger
  • Cinnamon 
  • Allspice
  • Clove
  • Cayenne 
  • Vanilla 

Baking Staples Add-ons

It turned out, that for us to bake a large percentage of additional items we only need the additional items below. Again, this is not inclusive but they are our most used items to produce roughly 80% of what we make.

• Flours and Dry Goods
  • Bread Flour
  • Whole Wheat Flour
  • Baking Powder
  • Instant Yeast
• Dairy and Eggs
  • Heavy Cream
• Sugars
  • Confectioners (Powdered Sugar)
• Inclusions
  • Semi-sweet Chocolate Chips
  • Butterscotch Chips
• Seasonings and Extracts
  • Everything Bagel (EBS)
  • Poultry
  • Mint Extract
• Starters
  • Whole Wheat Bittman Bread
  • Sourdough which right now is in progress. 

From the Broad To Specific

When we started to catalog, we saw obvious patterns occur. The patterns we found were a group of items that applied to all cooking and a separate list of baking staples. This helped us understand what we needed to cook, and then add baking which is an important distinction for us. After making recipes that had multiple exotic ingredients that led to waste we wanted to learn what needed and could reuse over and over. 

First, we will look at Everything Bagel Seasoning (EBS) and canned pumpkin. We only use EBS for making bagels or bread. That’s fine since it has a long shelf life and is fairly inexpensive so we don’t mind storing the one-off. While many only use canned pumpkin for pies, we use it more often for Pumpkin Spice Sloppy Joes, making soap, pumpkin soup, pumpkin bread, etc. Yes, there are a lot of uses for it so we keep it on hand even though it may sit for a while, it is a visual reminder to mix things up. 

Yeast and baking powder are a different set of examples. You can not create many baked items without them. If you want leavened baked goods, at least for most recipes to work, you need them. You won’t need them if you aren’t baking. There is no reason to buy and store them then especially since yeast has a somewhat short life expectancy. 

This post discussed some of our mistakes and realizations on our journey. From that, we have given a starter list of ingredients that are used by many in general cooking. We have also added on a minimum, for our tastes and recipes, a set of additional items for making baked goods. With a little observation and forethought, we believe it becomes easier to avoid wasting space, time, and money on ingredients used only once a year or so. 

The post Important Staples You Need To Bake first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

Limiting Scope

This post will kick off a series of other more specific posts. Unfortunately, we feel you could write an article per type of food on how to reheat it. That is problematic time-wise and doesn’t run the steel thread of understanding the processes so others can self-help. It also doesn’t take into account a person’s individual calorie budget and serving sizes. We will get to how those change the art of re-heating. 

The Basics

For brevity let’s limit our discussion to some simple ideas that we can expand on later. We would assert that most of our cooking falls into 2 main ways of transferring heat:

• Convection is the transfer of heat from the air to the food such as happens in an oven.
• Conduction is transferring heat to the food by direct contact between the heat source and the food.

  We would also add there are only two ways of applying heat to cook food.

• Dry methods where the cooking process does not rely on a large amount of liquid to transfer heat. These, in our definition, are methods such as sauteing or roasting.
• Wet methods where the primary transfer is based on liquid such as water or oil. This type of cooking is how boiling, frying, and microwaving work.

Mix and Match

Almost all the food you cook will be a mix of these elements. Most cooking is about water management and reaching a safe temperature for the food. Taking that ride from raw to done imparts flavors and textures that please us such as caramelization via the Maillard Reaction. We may concentrate flavors via reductions of water as well such as in, well, a reduction. This method also applies to items like chicken stock or jams.

Where the confusion arises is that most things we cook are hybrids of the four bullet points above. What we want to do is understand what the outcome from our methods produces to reheat it. Did our cooking create something that needs to be reheated vs a dry method or a wet method? This begs the question do we reheat it through convection or conduction?

Hybrid Examples 

Let’s examine two hybrids, lasagna, and fried fish, to understand what we are discussing in terms of methods vs outcomes. We found it easy to ruin both lasagna and fried fish if reheated incorrectly. When we think of lasagna we see it as a dry convection method. For fried fish, it is usually a wet conduction method. The output is a bit different though.

We would classify lasagna as a wet method like a stew. Why such a weird idea? Lasagna cooks by method provided by its water content even though the heat is powered by dry convection. It is the same process that happens when making a casserole or braising meat. Dry heat in an oven raises the temperature of the fluid in the lasagna to cook it through boiling and/or steaming. A microwave is a wet conduction method as it uses the water in the food to heat it. Practically speaking a microwave steams or boils food from the inside out. That makes lasagna a perfect candidate to reheat in a microwave. 

Have you ever tried to microwave fried fish or fries? They turn out pretty nasty in our opinion but why? They are both technically cooked as wet methods of conducting cooking. The outcome of frying food is to drive most of the moisture out of the exterior of the food and create a crust locking moisture in. If that moisture is then released as steam, you get soggy fries and fish. What does a microwave do, well, it produces steam. That is why those foods need dry convection heat to reheat them

Two Other Variables

There are two other variables in our reheating discussion. They are the concepts of thermal capacity and safety. Most of us want to reheat food to preserve its original quality. In concept our matrix of methods above accounts for most items. Thermal capacity and food safety get in the way of that at times so we will set up how to deal with them here. First, let’s identify them

• The USDA states that all leftovers should be reheated to 165℉ to be considered safe.
• The surface-to-mass ratio of the food dictates how much thermal capacity it has and how long heating it thoroughly will take.

The first thing you will notice is that 165℉ is above what some foods are initially cooked to. Let’s talk about that one a little more in-depth

Is It Done?

The USDA has to deal with a broad population which means groups like the very old very young and everyone in between. That means they must put out safety information that others may not suit all. They also must account for all different parts of the food chain from the field where the cow is raised to re-heating leftover roast. That is a lot of places for bad things to happen and bugs to grow.

To us, if a steak is over 135℉ it is overcooked. That is us, not others. We sometimes go as low as 125F for a roast. That is what you will find many people consider rare and is a common way of cooking it.  Personally, fish over 145℉-150℉, unless deep fried where we don’t notice, is overdone. Won’t reheating leftovers push it past the point we like it? That being our pre-packaged hamburger and chicken is getting pushed to 165℉ because we can’t trust it.

We take a ‘let’s be reasonable’ approach and use the USDA as guidelines. We buy food from known sources. When we prep and cook, we have a clean kitchen that gets cleaned regularly. We store food in the fridge or freezer properly. Nothing gets left in the zone for long unless it is intentional. Simply put, we don’t take a lot of chances so we can cook to whatever temperature we are comfortable with. You need to do you, but when you push the temps up, you aren’t re-heating, you are re-cooking. 

Mass to Surface Area

This is one of the most misunderstood variables and one of the most important in heating. Here are the two axioms to know

• The larger something is, the more time it takes to cook. 
• How fast it absorbs heat is directly related to its surface area where it contacts the heat. 

One caveat to that is the microwave but let’s stick to the general for now. Based on these two axioms, we want to reheat food up to temp as quickly as possible without re-cooking it. What isn’t obvious is that it creates conditions where we want to use the lowest heat possible so we don’t overcook the outer part of the food before the interior reaches temp. 

Important Temps to Know

One last piece of the reheating puzzle is two important temperatures. At sea level water boils and turns to steam at 212℉. The Maillard Reaction, or browning of food begins at anywhere from 280℉ to 330℉. Depending on what sugars are present, caramelization follows the Maillard reaction. Eventually, you end up in the burnt stage of Pyrolysis which, in short form, means burnt. 

Why are these temps important? They are important to know so we get what we want from reheating. Do we care about a crust? Then we don’t want to create steam via a wet method. What if we want to raise the temp of something without further browning? In that case, we want to stay under 280℉ 

Back to the Examples

Our serving size of lasagna has a high mass-to-surface ratio. To cook it without further caramelizing, we need to reheat it at a low temp. Because we don’t want to overcook the outside before the inside is warm, we want to take our time but we also want to eat. That is a perfect case for a slow-wet method of cooking so we boil it correct? No, but close.

A microwave, when used correctly, provides a wet method of cooking that steams the lasagna from the inside out. Oddly enough, as water is removed from tomato sauce it is capable of creating a temperature higher than the boiling point of water. Those temps can cause caramelization and overcooking to occur. Yes, we have burned lasagna and melted plastic in a microwave when not careful. For that reason, we want to slowly heat our food at 212℉. For our portion size of 4-6 oz, that usually means a microwave on half power for 10 minutes in a lightly sealed container to hold in the steam.

Our fish is the exact opposite as they are usually high surface-to-mass pieces. We add it to a preheated toaster oven that is running at 275℉ degrees for approximately 10 minutes. This low dry heat helps preserve the crust without causing more browning. The fish is small enough it heats quickly without being over cooked. 

Wrapping up

In this post, we have discussed some of the basic physics and chemistry involved in cooking. By recognizing how the food was created, and what it has become, you can decide how to reheat it. Truly, no one wants to eat leftovers that don’t feel close to the original food they were. If we can get them close, we can save ourselves time and energy in making one-off meals. We can also control how much we waste when we overcook.

The post How To Better Reheat Leftover food first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.

It’s not Scary, it’s Fun with Science!

Ok, we admit the words physics and chemistry can scare people. Let’s not go there. Why? Because if you are already producing your food by way of cooking, canning, drying, etc. you already understand physics and chemistry even though you may not realize it fully yet. This is what we started to learn.

The first-place cooking made sense to me in Alton Brown’s show Good Eats. The show was intentionally quirky and campy however it taught scientific methodologies that could be applied across the cooking spectrum. The more I learned, the more I started researching cooking as a science. Digging further we would read books such as 

• ‘On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen’
• ‘The Science of Cooking: Every Question Answered to Perfect Your Cooking’
• ‘The Food Lab’
• ‘Fat, Salt, Acid, Heat’

With these and many more learnings, we realized good food was one part ingredients, one part physics, one part chemistry,y and one part the arts.  Let’s talk about why that is the case and why it matters. 

This post introduces the idea of understanding chemistry and physics in cooking. That is a big topic that has many different concepts. As a result, as with other early posts, we will introduce the broad idea here and the why behind it. As our experiments and learning continue, we will refer back to this in those sub-topics

Repeatable Results Come From Understanding

In another post, we discussed how to read a recipe. We will expand on it here. When you follow a recipe you are following a process. Almost anyone can do that successfully if the recipe is perfect and you follow everything exactly. That is what great cooks do. How many times has that worked for most people? Empirically our guess is not as often as most would like but why?

You can learn terms and watch videos but what is generally left out is the process going on. Why do we cook some items at an oven temperature of 300℉ and others at 400℉? Have you ever noticed that your cookies may come out differently if baked on a silicone mat rather than a piece of parchment paper? Both of those are due to a mix of chemistry and physics and you can use that to your advantage.

You Still Don’t Need Algebra 

We aren’t suggesting that everyone read the Principia Mathematica and learn Calculus to make a PB&J sandwich. What we are suggesting is trying to get an idea of why something you are making will help you be better at making it. It can also help you avoid mistakes and learn to fix things when they go bad. 

By knowing what processes are at work you can read a recipe for mistakes. You can also catch yourself making them. In the case of cookies, we mentioned, it is about heat transfer. Silicone does not transfer heat as readily as the parchment paper. In the case of cookies based on the creaming butter and sugar, the silicone version will cook slower, melt and expand more, and be slightly denser than the ones done on parchment paper. 

Chemistry in our context is any process where two or more ingredients interact to create something new. Physics is any physical process that changes the state of the food to create something new. Let’s talk about balloons and bread, for example.

When making a quick bread you are creating air through chemical leavening. Depending on the PH of the dough you will most likely use double-acting baking powder and/or baking soda to the dough. When you do this you will create a chemical reaction that produces gases and water. Those gases and steam from the water lift and create air pockets in your dough to allow it to rise. They need physics to come along to help though.

Thermal transfer from the oven to the bread will be the catalyst for those gases. The baking powder and soda need heat to break down. By cooking the bread at a specific temperature and pan size, you control how the dough sets. The mixture of the two will create the bread’s mouthfeel and crumb. 

Who Cares?

I have been on countless social media groups and forums where someone will ask for help. The questions are similar to “Why didn’t my bread rise?” or “Why did my jerky get too dry?”. My least favorite question I always see asked, “Is it Safe?!?” referring to something canned or fermented.  All of those questions really can only be answered by chemistry and physics. 

Knowing a little bit of science will also go a long way. Are you making an emulsion and did it break? By emulsion we mean, a salad dressing, gravy, cheese sauce, chocolate, or any other type of food that has fat or oil suspended in water. By break, we mean separate, became lumpy, didn’t mix right, seized, etc. If you think of it as a simple emulsion you can learn how to avoid breaking it and fixing it if it does break. That’s science at work!

A Couple Tips

Anyone can learn to cook and make good-tasting food. We have learned that doing it consistently and learning the why and how of a recipe’s steps will make you better at it. Here are the two things we ask whenever we read a recipe

• What chemistry is taking place at each recipe step so we know where things can go wrong and avoid them? 
• What physics is happening to the food during each step of the recipe with the same idea of avoiding errors?

It’s Still Art But It’s Backed By Science

Making something taste good, that is visually appealing, that has great contrasting textures and mouthfeel that someone wants to eat is an art. It is an art that uses science. By being curious about the science aspect, our knowledge grew much more quickly. We found that we had fewer dishes turn out bad and less food waste. Our increased knowledge let us then experiment with more confidence giving us a broader range of things we made.

Wrapping Up

In this post, we discussed why food is one part art, one part chemistry, and one part physics. We also gave examples of how knowing that can help us all be better cooks. If we arm ourselves with a little curiosity our knowledge will help us create connections to avoid mishaps and be more confident. By learning the science behind cooking we get to start focusing much more on the art of cooking which is where, for many, the real enjoyment of making something is. 

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A Little History:

As with all things food, the flour tortilla’s origin is somewhat contested. While corn tortillas aren’t as disputed as corn originated in Mexico, flour and its uses are a little harder to trace. Some believe these came from Mexico, and some think of them as Tex-Mex. There is even some idea that they are by-products of Catholic, Jewish, and Moorish immigration in the Northern Mexico / SW US area. 

Do we care where it came from? Probably not but it’s fun to ruminate on its origin stories.  Even more interesting is that all of the above cultures and religions have some form of unleavened bread or flatbread. The tortilla is one of those breads that can be either or. What does that make it? That makes it a great stand-in for other breads!

The Calorie Budget Conscience And Consistent

We won’t argue that mass-produced tortillas are great. That said, we also won’t make the argument that mass-produced bread is great. Mass-produced tortillas are simply practical and predictable. There are times when that wins out over homemade especially when considering pantry staples.

For most of our items, we use Mission flour Fajita Tortillas because they are the best! Not exactly. We use them because they are ubiquitous, inexpensive, consistent, and have a decent shelf life. No matter the grocery store, we can generally find them.  They are 110 calories a piece. This is perfect for our calorie budget. By the time we get done adding toppings and or other ingredients, their meal comes in at around 200-250 calories per tortilla-based item. 

But What Can You Do With Them?

You could write an entire book on using tortillas other than in Tex-Mex and Mexican dishes. They can be substituted for just about any flat or unleavened bread. We use them for everything from our Doritos to pizzas. We don’t have time for a book so instead we will focus on cooking styles and examples. 

The Out Of Package

• Wraps of meats, cheese, and veggies.
• Folded sandwiches.
• A side for soups and chilis. 

The Baked Flat

• In impromptu personal pizza using pizza sauce, cheese, and other toppings.
• The above folded for a calzone.
• Covered with olive oil,  garlic, rosemary, and sea salt like Focaccia. 
• Covered with buttered, garlic and zaatar similar to Naan.
• Spiced with seasonings, cut into wedges, and baked like Dorritos.
• Spiced with sugar and cinnamon and butter like cinnamon toast. 

The Baked Or Microwaved Rolled

• Meat and cheese wraps to create melts.  
• Mini-calzones and pizza rolls. 
• Breakfast roll-ups with eggs, meat, and veggies.

A note on cooking methods. Baking and frying them will create a crispy tortilla. The higher the heat, the more likely it is to brown or burn. Microwaves will cook them but will create a chewier result. This is also why they are so versatile to have around. You can be creative with textures by simply changing the heating method.

And yes you can deep fry them, pan fry them, and even fill them with seafood. They are a blank slate. That is the point. If we keep frozen chicken, ham, cheddar, mozzarella, salami, pizza sauce, and some basic spices, we can easily make multiple combinations of food. They also give us more flexibility so we can easily use up leftovers creatively. And one more point, they freeze well if you put wax paper between them before freezing.

Here are the wins

• Save money by using one basic staple that is cheap in multiple ways.
• Always have a starch on hand for when you need something impromptu.
• Give them a purpose past Taco Tuesday where there are usually some left over. 
• Save time as many of the above take no time to make. 

What? No Recipes? 

No, we aren’t providing them because in many ways they already exist. Ok, maybe one for the Doritos. The goal of this post is really to call attention to how a single staple can create so many different meals. There are very talented people out there who I use the recipes of all the time. When it comes to the ingredient list, we may substitute a tortilla on hand for one of the recipe’s ingredients. That is why we focused on getting information on how to simplify things like meal planning and cooking. 

In this specific case, we also feel like each of the items discussed is a formula. The actual ingredients you use are based on your taste. If you like cheesy pesto pizzas tortillas instead of pepperoni and red sauce, you do you. And let’s face it, this is not a meal item that is going to be on the next Iron Chef America. This is a meal item to simplify making food within a calorie and time budget.

Wrapping Up

In this post, we discussed how useful the tortilla can be as a staple in the kitchen. By keeping these types of basic, blank canvas staples around, you give yourself meal flexibility. With that flexibility also comes calorie consistency and time savings. This simple example is how we started to recognize what we need to keep on hand and really, what we didn’t to avoid eating out more often.

The post Get More Out Of A Simple Tortilla first appeared on Simplified Living Lab.