The Cocoanut

The Tragic Lasagna

Akki — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 11:09:32 +0000

My competence as a cook was called into question today when my lasagna went awry. I’ve always been a bit fearful of dishes with layers, whether its baklava, potato gratin or sponge layer cakes. If you screw up one layer, chances are the other three layers won’t come out too flash either, so you end up with a dish that is three times as bad as the original.

The pasta layers were thick and dry at the edges, not at all the silky tender sheets I’d expected. The bolognaise sauce was dry and severely lacking in tomato flavor. The béchamel sauce, which I’d hoped would be the star of the dish turned out bland and tasted thoroughly of flour. If flour could be made into a cream-like consistency, it would taste like my hideous béchamel sauce. Even the fresh parsley was overpowering, its herbal airiness aggressively punching through the awkward tag-team combo of Bland Bechamel and the Bolognaise from Hell.

To cleanse my mouth of the aftertaste of what could very well be the most tragically unappetizing lasagna in the southern hemisphere, I rushed to the pantry – a humongous floor-to-ceiling dietary first-aid kit – and got myself a bar of chocolate I saved for emergency situations such as this one. My cooking skills may be questionable, but I can take comfort in the fact that, at least for now, my shopping skills remain intact.

How Many Different Olive Oils Do You Have?

Akki — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 10:30:40 +0000

I’m currently reading Trading Up, a book by Michael J. Silverstein and Neil Fiske from the Boston Consulting Group on how companies create demand for new luxury goods – from chocolate, grocery items, cars, fashion – which are within reach of the aspiring middle classes.

The rapidly burgeoning gourmet food industry is one obvious example of how the trading up phenomenon is gaining ground among consumers. I remember being quite enchanted walking along the aisles admiring the beautifully packaged food and ingredients on display. However, I find that the more I cook, the less interested I am in these gourmet offerings, opting instead for the more-bang-for-my-buck philosophy of home cooking.

What went wrong? Have I become old or am I just poorer? Well, although both of those options are quite accurate, I think the real reason for this disinterest is that these cute gourmet items, kept in small packaging to increase profit margins, are not very practical for the home cook. They may be invaluable for the hobby cook for whom cooking is an indulgent pleasure, but for the home cook whose daily sustenance depends on him cooking, these items are at best, nice to look at, and not much else.

I’ve got nothing against clever marketers. I admire their tenacity in studying our spending habits and emotional levels to create those products we never knew we wanted. Nonetheless, I can’t help but harbour a sense of mistrust towards the marketers, and over the years I’ve developed a hobby of outsmarting the marketers by doing the exact opposite of what they predict I would do.

So instead of buying a bottle of dukkah-infused extra virgin olive oil, which apparently is quite essential to the modern kitchen, I instead walk across the street to Mediterranean Wholesalers on Sydney Road – hardly a bastion of fashionable shopping – and got myself the cheapest bottle of olive oil. Cheap olive oil? Are you sure? Well it looks like extra virgin olive oil, it smells like extra virgin olive oil, and it tastes like extra virgin olive oil, so it must be extra virgin olive oil…right?

I once stumbled upon an article by a prominent foodie who suggested olive oil is a bit like wine, with different tastes and nuances to suit different food, and that we should all stock a few different types of olive oil at home. At the supermarket, there are olive oils that are marketed as best suited for seafood, vegetables, stir fries, meat and pasta. Are we really supposed to get all these different types of olive oil for each dish? I doubt home cooks in the Mediterranean would stock up different kinds of oil in their pantry, and if they do, well good on them for having so much shelf space.

The Devil Crumbles Like A Cookie

Akki — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 13:38:44 +0000

As I sit here I take time to ponder how different life would’ve been had I not given in to temptation and finished the ten remaining cookies from the batch I made last night. There would be no consequences to worry about, no rush to go to the gym to reclaim my fitness, no feeling of shame. More importantly, there would still be cookies for me to eat for breakfast tomorrow.

I’ve always believed that if the devil was edible, he’d be an Oreo. Sadly, culinary religious education wasn’t seen as important to parents, so children grew up without the fear of cookie instilled in them. Now look what happened.

Of course it would be unfair for me to put the blame squarely on my parents. As an adult, I should be able to distinguish between right and wrong, between saturated fat and unsaturated fat, what has sugar and what hasn’t.

But life is a little more complicated than that. Some of us are greedier than others. And the devil is kindest to those who are greediest. I can easily resist candy, and with lots of willpower I can defeat the temptation of ice cream, even on a sweltering summer day. But show me a cookie and I surrender.

Going Ga-Ga Over Guacamole

Akki — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 07:36:02 +0000

What is it with me and dips? My continuing fixation with dips naturally leads to guacamole, which I think sits up there alongside hummus, tzatziki and possibly peanut satay dip as the all-star players of the global dip team (if such a team exists).

I, like most Malaysians got my first taste of guacamole courtesy of the Tex-Mex chains like TGI Fridays or Chilis, where the dip is served alongside nachos baked with bits of chicken and cheese. I remember really loving the food there – sizzling steak with cheesy mashed potatoes, chocolate milkshake, brownies with hot fudge sauce – ohh the brownies! American food is so comforting.

Once I was at a lunch buffet where they had a cheese platter, with an assortment of crackers and a bowl of guacamole, its luscious green somewhat highlighting its awkward sole presence among the assortment of yellow-tinged cheese and crackers. Whatever, I wasn’t about to debate the geopolitics of dishes, and scooped a greedy portion into my plate. I then did what any greedy buffet customer would, and slathered the guacamole judiciously on to my crackers. The next two seconds produced the most intensely painful sub-atomic explosion through my nasal cavities as I belatedly realized I had just spread hazardous amounts of wasabi on my innocent crackers.

Guacamole

2 large ripe avocados
2 tablespoons lime juice, or to taste
1 tomato, seeded and finely diced
1 tablespoon olive oil
about 2 tablespoon’s worth of finely chopped spring onions
1 garlic clove, crushed
½ teaspoon ground cumin
½ teaspoon paprika or chili powder, for that little bit of heat

Put the avocado and lime juice in a large bowl and mash. Stir in the rest of the ingredients and season with salt and pepper.

Easy Hummus and Spicy Lentil Dip

Akki — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 12:12:55 +0000

One of life’s greatest pleasures lies in the simple act of dipping. Whether it’s strawberries dunked in chocolate or hot salty chips into mayo, there’s an exquisitely comforting feeling in witnessing a body of food being extracted from a pool of viscous dip, the thick emulsion clinging on to dear life.

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.

Honey Mustard & Herb Marinade

Akki — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:30:59 +0000

I’m not a big fan of mustard on its own, but when partnered with honey, I’m haplessly addicted to the intense savory flavor that develops. To replicate the pleasure of restaurant dining at home, I usually take the easy way out and purchase one of those pre-mixed supermarket marinades. To be honest I’ve never been left satisfied with these products, but laziness got the better of me. Whether it’s BBQ, satay or honey mustard, the supermarket version seems to have this unnatural, sweet acidic taste that distracts the palette from experiencing the other flavors. This particular taste takes away the pungency of the BBQ, the nuttiness of the satay sauce and inflicts a piercing sweetness that is both sickly and annoying to the honey mustard marinade.

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.

Simple Milk Bread

Akki — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 12:40:08 +0000

After my first attempt in bread making, I was left yearning to bake another loaf, one that I could truly be proud of, not one whose existence I had to justify by using my inexperience as an excuse.

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
1 ¼ 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.

The Cookie Crumbles

Akki — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 12:09:29 +0000

After my last ramble on cookies, it dawned upon me that I’ve never actually made cookies, so since 2008 is the Year of the First-Time Dishes, I decided to bake my inaugural batch of cookies, joining the ranks of the inaugural roast chicken, white loaf and banana cake.

Among cookie connoisseurs, better known as Cookie Monsters, their manna from heaven can be broadly classified into two – the crispy thin, and the thick and chewy. The recipe I use gives delightfully fragile, wafer-thin discs of cookies studded with choc chips. Some people prefer the thick and chewy variety which is the most common type sold in the supermarkets and cafes, but I personally like my home made cookies thin. This way I get to eat more without feeling too guilty. The perfect, crunchy cookies, in my opinion, have got to be Famous Amos.

The recipe below is an easy, 15-minutes tops, idiot-proof guide that turns out about 20 or so cookies. It keeps well frozen, so you can shape it into a log and keep it in cling wrap for emergency use. As they say, a cookie a day…keeps depression at bay.

Choc Chip Cookies

120 g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
90 g butter
120 g caster sugar
50 g brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla essence
160 g choc chips or to taste

1. Preheat a 180ºC oven. Grease 2-3 baking trays, or just use baking paper.
2. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into a small bowl and set aside.
3. With an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugars together. Initially the butter and sugar will find it hard to incorporate, so what I do is press the sugar and butter into each other with my fingers, and once they’ve incorporated I cream it with the mixer. Beat in the egg and vanilla.
4. Add the flour mixture and beat well with the mixer on low speed.
5. Stir in the choc chips and mix well into the dough
6. Drop teaspoonfuls of the mixture onto the baking trays, spacing them 2-5 cm apart. The biscuit will expand and flatten on its own during baking, so there’s no real need to flatten or shape them into perfect circles. Unless you really want to.
7. Bake until golden brown, about 10-12 minutes. Transfer the biscuits to a wire rack and let cool.

The Cookie Conservative

Akki — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 13:54:03 +0000

It’s halfway through my university summer break and I’m finding it difficult to cope with the deluge of free time that comes with it. My hopes of working with a steel company as part of their Vacation Work Program was dashed when I failed to make it through to the final stage, and I’m reluctant to go back to retail after moving up the ladder, so to speak, as a private tutor.

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.

A Taste Of The Year Ahead

Akki — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 09:23:17 +0000

To begin the year on a fresh note, I decided to bake my first ever white bread. It all seemed rather straightforward, add water to the flour and yeast mixture, knead the dough – a task which I delegated to the mixer – and let it prove.

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