The Cocoanut

I love eating those old school Mediterranean dips, hummus, baba ghanouj, tzatziki, with dry, rye crispbreads. Some people enjoy them with raw carrot or celery matchsticks, due to personal taste or purely for health benefits, but I find the individual flavours of the veggies quite distracting. In order to fully appreciate the nuttiness of hummus or the velvety, roast eggplant smokiness of baba ghanouj, the nondescript neutrality offered by bread, or crispbread, is best.

I’m not sure if it’s inflation or agflation, the current phenomenon of sharply rising food prices, but dips at the supermarket these days are really expensive (or am I just poorer?)

In any case, I won’t allow my addiction to dips to bring me to the brink of financial insolvency, so I’ve resorted to making them at home instead. Dips from pulses like chickpeas, lentils and broad beans are very convenient to make, as you could just buy them already tinned. Of course, you could also soak them overnight and cook them for a further 2 hours, but that would kinda cancel out the Convenience factor.

Essentially, dips are a combination of 3 things, the body, which consists of the main ingredient; seasoning like salt, spices or herbs; and fats like oil and tahini (sesame paste), which flavours and loosens the dip. In the hummus recipe below, I’ve excluded tahini simply because I don’t have it at home, but the result is no less tasty.

Hummus in a jiffy
Serves 4 or 1 if you’re me

1x 400g tinned chickpeas, drained, washed, and loose skins discarded if you can be bothered (I hate the skins, so I don’t mind the extra effort)
½ tsp ground cumin, chili powder
1 clove garlic, crushed
juice of 1 lemon
olive oil
salt

Mash the chickpeas thoroughly, add the seasonings according to taste, then finish it off with a few lugs of olive oil and stir until you get a consistent paste. In one version I added 2 tsp of mayo just to experiment, and I found the dip had a more consistent texture, although I’m not sure if the same result could be achieved simply by adding more olive oil!

Spicy Lentil dip,also in a jiffy

1x 400g tinned lentils, drained and washed
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
a small piece of ginger, about 1 cm, grated or finely chopped
½ tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp ground cumin, ground coriander
1 tablespoon tomato paste

Heat some oil in a frying pan, and sauté the onion, garlic and ginger until the onion is soft. Add the turmeric, cumin, coriander and lentils and cook, stirring, until fragrant. Add the tomato paste and continue stirring. Take off the heat, and mash the whole thing until it becomes a paste. Add some olive oil to loosen, and season with salt and pepper if need be.

Not being able to tolerate such disservice to the eating experience any longer, I decided to make my own marinade. It can’t be that hard. And I found out, it isn’t. All I needed was confidence to adjust the seasoning until I found a taste to my liking. I used the recipe below to marinade about 500g of chicken pieces, poked with a fork so the flavors penetrate deeper, and then baked in the oven at 200º C for about 35-40 minutes. It can easily be doubled as you see fit.

Honey Mustard & Herb Marinade (adequately seasons 500g of meat)

1 tbsp Dijon mustard
1 tbsp honey
1 clove garlic, crushed
a pinch of herbs, such as dried parsley, basil or thyme
salt and pepper to taste
a few drops of oil

Combine the ingredients and rub all over the chicken pieces, leave for a few hours and bake in the oven when you feel hungry.

For some reason, I wanted this bread to evoke memories of Malaysia, to the point where it would serve as a tribute to my mum and grandma, both of whom really enjoy the pleasure of soft, white bread. Southeast Asians have a propensity for soft, fluffy buns, so to replicate this texture I used a recipe for a simple milk loaf and tweaked the instructions to make it even simpler (who can be bothered with hard work these days?). The use of milk instead of water would provide a comforting tenderness to the bread which is the main goal of my second bread-making attempt.

Unlike my first bread, whose crust was thick and leathery, and whose crumb had layers of unmixed flour and tasted of excess yeast, this bread turned out very well. The crumb was dense and spongy, outlined by a perfectly formed, thin crust. The delicate, soft crumb brought back memories of eating pandan chiffon cake, a popular treat in Malaysia that simply consists of pandan flavoured sponge cake, its light airiness uplifted by the fragrant pandan aroma. To replicate this childhood experience of mine, onto a thick slice of the freshly baked milk loaf I smeared a dollop of pandan kaya, a Malaysian custard sweetened with palm sugar, with pandan juice added for aroma.

When toasted, the crumb maintains a good semblance of its fluffiness, but it is the crust that undergoes a most spectacular transformation, from an anonymous outer boundary to this light, crispy, almost fragile, brown layer that simply shatters upon the first bite.

Simple Milk Loaf

500 g plain white flour*
350g milk (I used skim milk)
20 g honey, about a tablespoon-and-a-bit’s worth
25g warm melted butter
1 x 7g sachet instant dried yeast
1¼ tsp salt

In a large bowl, whisk the yeast with the milk and honey. Add the flour and salt, and combine until you get a soft, sticky dough. Pour over the warm melted butter, and mix this into the dough. Knead the dough for 10 minutes, or if you have an electric mixer like me, you can use that instead. Simply attach a dough hook and let it do all the work for you, around 7-10 minutes.

Leave the dough in the bowl for an hour to proof. After an hour has passed, punch down the dough to release all the carbon dioxide. Transfer the dough to a loaf tin, and let it proof for another hour. The dough will rise again to about twice its size, and this time you want all that gas inside to remain. At this stage, I like to brush the top of the dough with water and sprinkle poppy seeds. This is entirely optional, and I only did it because I happen to have a jar of poppy seeds in the pantry.

Set the oven to 210ºC, and when hot enough carefully place the dough into the oven and bake for 15 minutes, then lower the heat to 180ºC and bake for another 25-30 minutes, or until the top of the loaf is dark brown. Remove from the tin, and leave to cool on a wire rack.

*I used all purpose flour, because that’s what I had at home. However, you might want to try using strong white flour or bread flour, which are more glutinous and will ‘jump’ over the top of the tin much more than normal flour.

I find that when I’m totally jobless, I nurse my sorrows of unemployment by continuously munching on biscuits and cookies. Now before you start calling me dirty names like ‘emotional eater’ or ‘cookie monster’, let me just make it clear that I’m not an emotional eater, OK? I just happen to enjoy eating Oreos because they make me happy. The only beef I have with Oreos is that they get stuck in the crevices of my teeth and leave a long-lasting stain that makes it look like I’ve just eaten soil.

Some people, who have more time than me, have invented myriad ways to consume an Oreo. They twist and separate the two chocolate biscuit disks, and scrape the white crème filling with their front teeth. I prefer my Oreo as a duo of black disks and white crème, and I don’t think I’d enjoy the sugary white paste on its own. That’s a bit like eating mayo without chips. Decadent and indulgent yes, but disgustingly so. Call me a cookie conservative, a ‘Reo Republican if you must, but that’s how I feel these cookies should be eaten.

Since I’m currently in Australia, I like to follow the local customs. As they say, when in Czechoslovakia, do as the Czechoslovakians do. When in Oz, eat Tim Tams. A Tim Tam is a biscuit composed of two layers of chocolate malted biscuit, separated by a light chocolate filling and coated with a thin layer of chocolate. A bit of chocolate overkill if you ask me, but that’s how they like it Down Under. The malted biscuit gives the illusion of lightness in these Tim Tams. This can be a good thing, because you can eat a lot of it without feeling full. This can also be a bad thing, because you can eat a lot of it without feeling full.

Some “creative” types have developed an imaginative (read:devious) way of enjoying a Tim Tam by biting the ends off and sucking a beverage through the biscuits. Called the Tim Tam Slam, it’s like having a drink through a straw, except that the straw is edible. Again, you can call me an old fashioned conservative, but I prefer my Tim Tam as is, by biting it from front to back, the way its Manufacturer intended it to be eaten.

However, my all-time favourite cookie would have to be the Famous Amos. These are a relative new-comer to the Australian cookie landscape, but have been a longstanding junk food icon in Malaysia. Famous Amos is perhaps unique among its cookie compadres in that, at least in both Australia and Malaysia, it is sold through stand-alone cookie boutiques rather than at the supermarket.

Little did I realise I was quite unprepared for the foolish sense of excitement which overcame me upon seeing the bread inflate and double in size during the proving process. It’s like the bread was alive! (Well, it kind of is, since yeast is a living organism). This foolish thrill would later cost the bread its fully-developed flavour, as I, in my haste, started punching the bread, ridding it of air and preparing it for the second proving process, before the first one was even through.

The finished product had the visual appearance of bread, but in taste it was quite deformed. The crust was thick and chewy, while the crumb was a little too salty and had a lingering aftertaste which I suspect is due to excess yeast, a result of rushing the fermentation process during proving.

Far from being disappointed, it spurred me to do some research on perfecting the art of bread-making. If I’m going to take this first bread as an indication of the year that lies ahead, it’s not that it will be marked by over-salted failures, but rather by exciting discoveries into an art that promises unbounded potential and many happy-tummy memories