SMBC Season 1 Finale - Homemade Pasta

All good things must come to an end.

Move aside Epic Meal Time, this has to be the most epic video of pasta making you've ever seen.

This is SMBC time and we're making pasta from scratch. The Shok's bringing along a few of his mates and we're going to rock Blue Boar R top floor kitchen with some serious dough rolling. Wholemeal style.

There are no bacon strips in here.

Starting with 800 g strong flour (high protein content for pasta), 8 eggs and salt, we smash it all together into a proper dough. Easy as pie. Or pasta. PC can't find regular pasta flour so he goes for strong wholemeal flour instead. It's good for you.

Homage to Xinmei at Pudding Pie Lane

We're rolling Rick Astley style because we're students and never gonna give up. Who needs a rolling pin when you have empty wine bottles? In Cambridge, there are always empty wine bottles. And empty port bottles. And empty sherry bottles. And empty gin bottles. But gin bottles aren't cylindrical, and so would be bad for rolling dough.

When the wine bottle is useless, we throw it out the window. Defenestration is the only way to dispose of wine bottles. Then the dough goes through our brand spanking new pasta roller, increasing the settings until it's the right thickness.

Then we cut the dough like a boss. Are we finished? Think again. We cut the dough once more, this time with the pasta roller. Like a boss.

This is pasta madness.

It only takes a few minutes to boil as fresh pasta cooks quicker than the dry stuff. In the mean time, we blitz a ton of basil, extra virgin olive oil, parmesan, pine nuts and garlic into submission for a smooth pesto. We also heat through some passata for extra variety.

But wait, I bet you didn't see this coming.

It's the motherquacking Italian flag... buon appetito.

Next time on Epic SMBC, we roast a pig on a bonfire.

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If you were wondering why there hasn't been an SMBC in quite a while, it's because with the new academic year, the three of us (PC, Hangman and The Shok) have moved into separate housing...! OK so it's only like 3 minutes walk between all of us. We'll do something again soon!

SMBC #7 - Homemade Pizza

After the ridiculous excesses of our previous SMBC, M&M decided that it would be a fantastic idea if we all made him pizza all made pizza together from scratch. As our usual kitchen didn't have an oven, we packed our things and headed to the communal BA kitchen to bake up a storm.

Going on a recipe from PC's mum, the pizza dough was made by mixing:
- 600 g flour
- 1 cup milk
- 1/2 cup lukewarm water
- 3 tbsp olive oil
- 1 sachet of dried yeast (or cube of fresh yeast if available)
- salt

Disclaimer: PC says this isn't the traditional Italian recipe for pizza dough - the real thing has a specific type of flour and no milk... apparently you can google it.

Once the dough has risen, it can be rolled out and shaped to your hearts desire.

We tried two different methods after this:
- either baking the bases first, then adding the toppings and rebaking, or
- adding the toppings to the raw bases and baking all at once
The first resulted in a crispier lighter base, but the second is easier, so I can't recommend one over the other.

Baking the pizzas bases first really makes them puff up, almost like lebanese pita bread.

The tomato sauce was simply a mix of tinned tomatoes, lots of garlic, rosemary, oregano, olive oil, salt and pepper.

Our collection of toppings included traditional ingredients like mozarella, basil, olives, red onion and peppers capsicum, as well as some less typical ingredients such as tuna, feta cheese and (heaven forbid) sweet corn.

Baked until brown, then best eaten immediately! Few things are better than melted mozzarella straight from the oven...

Here are some mugshots from the pizza gallery:

The old favourite, the margerhita.

A few more toppings: olives, zucchini, capsicum, red onion, capers.

Tuna. Is that weird?

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We haven't had an SMBC post in ages - we actually did this quite a while ago, plus one other thing that I'm going to post up next in a back-to-back of SMBC posts! And this next one is going to be the last SMBC for the academic year 2010-2011, so don't miss it! (especially the awesome video in the next one, courtesy of M&M...)

SMBC #6 - Asia - Epic Sushi Night

This is the second part of our SMBC quest to make something from every continent. You can check out the first installment here!

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You're waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away.

It was a few weeks ago during SMBC when M&M planted a simple idea into our heads:
"Make sushi."

An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. The smallest seed of an idea grew and drove us mad...

...well mad enough such that PC and M&M found themselves sprinting to Tesco at 4:45pm for one piece of raw salmon, whilst I found myself buying half a kilo of flying fish roe. Not an everyday occurrence.

Fish roe within a sushi within a Trinity gyp room? Three layers... that's too unstable!

Three hours later and the result? 83 pieces of awesome sushi (not including everything we ate along the way). But not only your regular maki-zushi...

But also prawn and tobiko ship sushi, inari-zushi...

You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.

Plus some nigiri-zushi, 5 bowls of miso soup, green tea and a few butter-soy and miso yaki-onigiri for good measure:

But hold on, this kind of food can't be possible in a Trinity gyp room...

Paradox.

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Sushi Madness

Sushi is actually pretty easy to make. I hope this blog post is proof of that! Really top notch sushi however requires skill though... and really fresh ingredients. If you ever get the chance, go eat chirashi sushi at Tsukiji Fish Markets in Tokyo. Mind-blowingly amazing stuff.

Before anything else, I highly suggest reading my favourite Japanese website Just Hungry where I got a lot of my information from, and my favourite Youtube channel Cooking with Dog (where I got the inari-zushi from).

Ok, so to make this:

we need to start with this:

It looks like a lot of specialist ingredients that you wouldn't normally have in the kitchen but for the basic sushi, you only need a few of these:

Seaweed (nori) - Thin crisp sheets of green goodness. It tends to go soft and discoloured if you store it for too long though.

Japanese rice - Not the same as regular supermarket rice, this is a specific variety which tends to be a little sticky. Good for all sorts of Japanese dishes, not just sushi.

Rice vinegar - Combined with sugar and salt, you mix it into the rice to make it actual sushi rice. They also commonly sell pre-mixed sushi vinegar (which is what we bought)

Soy sauce and wasabi - self-explanatory?

Bamboo mat - For rolling the sushi up. Basically a bunch of sticks tied together with string.

The Rice...

Sometimes you just have to work with what you're given...

Given that rice is the main ingredient, good sushi starts with good rice. For full detail, see this thorough description, but a couple of important points:

- Make sure you wash the rice properly several times before use... you don't want gluey mush at the bottom of the rice-cooker/pot
- After it has cooked and absorbed all the water and rested, put it out onto a large (I mean large) plate - the rice needs to be fanned whilst the sushi vinegar is added and the rice is mixed in a cutting motion. We used 3 plates and a makeshift fan...
- Once done, cover the rice with plastic wrap so that it doesn't dry out

We ended up using a whole kilo of rice. Hard to say how much water we needed or how much vinegar.  Follow the instructions on the packet of rice (if they exist), and as for the vinegar, keep tasting the rice until it tastes nice!

The Fillings...

Left: Prawn, mayo and tobiko ; Right: Tuna, mayo, spring onion and shichimi spice

In addition to the regular stuff like strips of cucumber, avocado, carrot, and salmon, we also made a couple of fillings for the ship-style sushi.

Option 1: Mix together flying fish roe (tobiko), Japanese mayonnaise and chopped up bits of cooked prawns.
Option 2: Combine canned tuna with mayo, salt and pepper, Japanese "shichimi" mix and chopped spring onion.

Rock 'n Roll...

The picture below is nowhere near a perfect example, but it roughly goes like this:
- Place seaweed on mat, shiny side down
- Lay out a reasonably thin layer of rice over the seaweed, leaving a strip of bare seaweed at the top
- Place ingredients in a row closer to the bottom
- Roll away from you towards the top
- Cut the roll into bite sized pieces

The Other Stuff...

Firstly the miso soup (I've written briefly about this before here):
- Soak kelp aka kombu and bonito shavings in water for ~30 mins
- Bring to the boil, remove kelp, and strain away the bonito shavings through a sieve, squeezing out the liquid
- Place miso in a ladle, add a bit of hot broth to ladle and mix around until miso breaks up evenly, then add it back to the pot. This just helps to avoid the miso clumping and not mixing properly. Don't boil the miso!
- Add cubes of silken tofu and top with spring onion!

Next the inari-zushi (See this video! Ok, so the filling we had wasn't the right thing, but oh well):
- Halve fried tofu skin pouches, then sit in boiling water for 5 mins. Gets rid of the oilyness...
- Squeeze out excess liquid, then boil in a dashi (kombu and bonito) stock with sugar, mirin and soy sauce until the tofu absorbs the stock.
Now they are ready to stuff with rice and whatever else you like!

Onigiri are perfect if you have leftover rice! Basically you just shape the rice into triangles... and for yaki-onigiri, you can fry them with butter and soy, or coat the sides with miso and fry. Yum!

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Gosh, that was a long post. Anyway, we had a fantastic sushi feast whilst watching Wall-E! After getting beaten into submission by sushi, M&M swore he couldn't even look at sushi for at least a week... two days later, and who brings in takeaway sushi for dinner?

Haha, big thanks to M&M anyway for making that awesome video!

Oh and apologies to anyone who hasn't seen Inception...

Around the World in 7 Posts: Part I - Africa (SMBC #5)

Welcome back to another post in the SMBC series. This time we thought we'd try something a little different, so we've started an SMBC subseries: Around the World in 7 Posts! Each post will feature a dish from one of the seven continents. And starting from our evolutionary beginnings, our first post features Africa.

The dish chosen was Chicken Yassa. Here's what Wikipedia had to say about it:

Yassa is a spicy marinated dish prepared with poultry or fish. Originally Senegambian , yassa has become popular throughout West Africa.

And if that explanation was too vague, here is a photo of the dish:

We started with these ingredients:

Ingredients:
7 Chicken Thighs/Drumsticks
3 lemons
6 cloves of garlic
4 onions
black pepper
white pepper
dried chilli flakes
2 tablespoons of mustard
groundnut/peanut oil
nutmeg
vegetable stock
couscous


To prepare the chicken:

• We marinated the chicken for 1.5 hours first before frying. Pretty much all the ingredients went into the marinade: onions (coarsely chopped), garlic (crushed), lemon juice, black pepper, white pepper, dried chilli flakes, 2 tablespoons of dijon mustard, and a generous drizzle of groundnut oil.
• Oh, we also added some nutmeg and a cube of vegetable stock.
• Mix everything thoroughly with the chicken.
• Fry the chicken until golden brown. Also fry/cook the onion-marinade-mixture in a separate pan until the sauce has been sufficiently reduced. Finally, combine both the chicken and the onion mixture into one pan and heat for a while. Here's the story in photos:
• We served the chicken yassa with couscous, which was incredibly easy to prepare:
• And there you have it! Stay tuned for the next post in this subseries where we sample the cuisine from another (as of yet, undecided) continent!
  

SMBC #4: Pseudo Pancakes Part 2 - Kaiserschmarrn

A loooong time ago we promised here that there would be a second post to explain the phenomenon that random people would stop at our kitchen window to try our food creation. Well, it finally digitalised…

The dish in question is called “Kaiserschmarrn”, a simple but delicious Austrian dish made with pancake batter and combined with the subtle sweet-sour taste of home-made cranberry jam. Even though this popular dish is sweet, it is often eaten as a main course for dinner. Its name is a bizarre combination of the German word for emperor, “Kaiser”, and the word “Schmarrn”, which means nonsense or rubbish in the Viennese dialect. While it is confirmed that Schmarrn is a simple poor-mans-dish, first mentioned in a document in the 16^th century, there are many different legends on the origins of its noble sibling, the Kaiserschmarrn.

The Kaiserschmarrn was most probably invented at the court of the Austrian emperor Franz Josef I (1830–1916). According to one legend, this delicious dish was created in 1854 for the emperor's wife, duchess Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie of Bavaria, commonly known as Sissi. Obsessed with maintaining a thin waistline, Sissi directed the royal chef to prepare only light desserts for her, much to the consternation and annoyance of her husband who loved pastry. Upon being presented with the chef’s confection, she found it too rich and refused to eat it. With a smile Franz Josef tried to safe the situation and replied, “Now let me see what "Schmarrn" our chef has cooked up”. It apparently met his approval as he finished his and even his wife's serving. Thereafter, the dessert was called Kaiserschmarrn across the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Lets now come to the preparation of the Kaiserschmarrn. On the internet one can find many complicated procedures involving baking in an oven and subsequent glazing with caramelised sugar, but this recipe is really simple. For four portions you will need:

• 2 tablespoons of butter
• 4 eggs
• 4 tablespoons of sugar
• a pinch of salt
• 120 g of flour
• about ¼ litre of milk
• raisins at pleasure
• 1 packet of vanilla sugar
• some good cranberry (or plum) jam
• icing sugar

Destroy it! The pancake is torn into bite-sized pieces.

And here is the preparation:

1. Separate the yolks from the egg white. Whisk the yolks with the milk, the salt, the sugar and the packet of vanilla sugar. Add the flour and give it a good mix to obtain a smooth batter. Finally add the raisins. 
2. Whip the egg white till it is nice and firm. Carefully stir it in the prepared batter. Don’t overdo it, too much stirring lets all the small air bubbles escape from the batter.
3. Melt a little butter is a non-sticky pan and pour in some batter. The Kaiserschmarrn has to be quite thick, about double the thickness of a pancake. Bake the Schmarrn on small heat till it is golden brown on the bottom, then turn and bake till the other side is ready. The finished pancake is brown and crisp on the outside and still relatively soft inside.
4. At the end comes the fun part: use your pancake turner to tear the pancake to bite-size pieces, giving the Kaiserschmarrn its characteristic shape. Finally melt a small piece of butter to the pan and toss the pieces of Kaiserschmarrn in it.  
5. Serve the Kaiserschmarrn on a large flat plate, strewn with icing sugar and a few spoon-full of cranberry jam to the side. Traditionally this dish is served with a glass of cold milk. 
   

PS: Don’t worry if the Kaiserschmarrn doesn’t turn out perfect the first time. Some say even good cooks struggle with the preparation of this seemingly simple dish, they don’t know how to make it good and fluffy. Kaiserschmarrn is a dish that is often served in alpine huts, a typical mountain food. And up in the mountains they really know how to make a good Kaiserschmarrn! 

SMBC #4 - Pseudo-pancakes Part 1 - Okonomiyaki!

Shrove Tuesday aka Pancake Day was this week, so we thought we'd do a pseudo-pancake themed SMBC! Here's Part 1 about Okonomiyaki, with Part 2 about Kaiserschmarrn coming soon =)

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How do you describe okonomiyaki (お好み焼き) to the uninitiated? It's like a pizza, but the toppings are inside? A pancake which is savoury? Does it even matter?

Okonomiyaki is often literally translated from Japanese to mean grilled (yaki) as you like it (okonomi), and its home is Osaka as one of the many delicious creations from the Kansai region. The Hiroshima region also has its own style of okonomiyaki which is layered and has soba noodles in it. Yum.

Given the incredibly sorry state of Japanese food in Cambridge *cough cough Teri-aki cough Wagamama*, there was no chance I'd be able to satisfy my okonomiyaki cravings dining out, so the only thing to do was to make it!

There are a million recipes for okonomiyaki which have pretty much the same basic ingredients but in widely varying proportions. We decided to very loosely follow this recipe by Maki from Just Hungry (my favourite Japanese food website!)

Ingredients:	Optional Fillings and Toppings:
70 g grated Japanese yam** 4 medium eggs 1 to 1 1/2 cups plain flour some dashi stock** 1/3 of a Chinese cabbage pinch of baking powder a stem of spring onion	thin strips of pork belly** kimchi Kewpie mayonnaise** Okonomiyaki sauce** Dried bonito shavings**

There are lots of ** stars! I'll try to explain stuff as we go through =P

About the ingredients:
I'm going to go through this relatively briefly... you can read all about it in detail at Just Hungry.

Grated Japanese yam... it's known by several different names in Japan: tororo, nagaimo, yamaimo, it's all the right stuff, but it's not the same as regular yam. I had a hard time finding it in shops, so all I could manage was this frozen yam already grated from Seoul Plaza on Mill Rd.
There are lots of recipes without yam, but according to Maki the yam is critical for the wonderful moist bitey texture. I've yet to do the control experiment without the yam to see if this is true, but I'll believe it for now.

*Update*: I tried the recipe again replacing the yam with cornflour and it turned out way too heavy and dense. Conclusion - grated yam is definitely necessary for a good okonomiyaki.

Dashi stock is the basis of so much Japanese cuisine. It's usually made by soaking and heating dried kelp (konbu) and bonito shavings (katsuobushi) in water. Full of umami. Problem is, bonito shavings are really expensive outside of Japan, so I only used kelp, which is totally not the same but whatever. You can also buy instant stock powder, although I have an irrational disliking for it.

Okonomiyaki sauce tastes kinda like BBQ sauce or brown sauce or HP sauce, but not exactly. Japanese mayo is thicker and sweeter than regular mayo, and once again Maki has a recipe for it =) I'll try it one day.

As I mentioned before, bonito shavings are expensive. Usually you top okonomiyaki with the shavings and the rising steam makes the shavings "dance". We decided just to substitute it for furikake which is used as a rice flavouring/topping in Japanese cuisine. This one contains dried seaweed, fish flakes, sesame seeds and other goodies.

Kimchi is Korean pickled cabbage. Delicious. I hear it's very hard to make it right yourself though, and can go rotten and stinky if you try.

Top Left: Cheapo dashi stock ; Top Right: Regular batter ; Bottom: Kimchi batter

Procedure:

0. Make dashi stock. Usually you'd soak kelp and bonito shavings in water for a while (30 mins at least) then just bring to the boil and strain out the shavings and kelp. My poor man's stock was just kelp soaking in hot water for 5 minutes...

1. Combine grated yam, eggs, flour, baking powder in a bowl and splash in enough dashi stock to get a nice not-too-runny consistency. We only ended up using maybe 20 mL it seems. If it's too watery, add more flour. If it doesn't bind, add another egg...
Protip: You can make impromptu miso soup with the remaining dashi stock by simply adding miso paste. You could go all out with some tofu cubes and spring onion too.

2. Slice the cabbage into small strips and add as much as you like provided there's enough batter still to combine everything. Add chopped spring onion.

3. Mix in any fillings you like except raw meats. We made a plain one, and a kimchi one. Mochi works really well. Fried batter bits called tenkasu are awesome. Really, anything goes here.

4. Add a small amount of oil to frying pan over medium heat and add the batter and flatten out. Layer pork belly slices on top. We couldn't find any decent pork belly slices so we resorted to pancetta which is really too fatty and strongly flavouring. Oh well, still tastes awesome.

5. Check when golden brown and flip! Put a lid over it to let it cook through for a few minutes, then it's ready to be sauced up.

6. Top with okonomiyaki sauce and mayonnaise, followed by bonito shavings or some furikake.

This seriously tastes like what you get in Japan... just crisp on the outside but still with enough gooey bite on the inside. So so good. Must do this again.

Here's a preview of Part 2... something so delicious that people are coming through our window to eat it??

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On a serious note, our thoughts are with everyone in Japan dealing with the aftermath of the earthquake a few days ago. Please give them your support in whatever way you can.

SMBC #3: Greek Week

Welcome back to the third edition of SMBC. This belated post (we had this for lunch Saturday before last) documents our exciting venture into Greek cuisine. We were helped by our Greek friend, Chef K, who came armed with several recipes in her native tongue. And while they were all Greek to us, under her instruction, our kitchen was transformed into the very definition of efficiency (or a close approximation of).

A quick google search of Greek Cuisine revealed the following interesting fact: The Greeks did not only give us Pythagoras, Archimedes, Euclid, Socrates, and Plato, but also Archestratos - the author of the very first cookbook! So we will now follow in Archestratos' footsteps and write down what we did.

We made a quartet of Mezes (Greek for appetiser/starter) and finished it off with a traditional Greek dessert of yoghurt, honey, and walnuts. The four mezes that we made were:

• Meze for drunk people*
• Kolokythokeftedes**
• Halloumi wrapped in red pepper with lemon & chilli
• Greek salad

*I assure you that none of us were drunk whilst making this.
** We had great fun trying to pronounce this word!

These were the ingredients that we started with:

Mezze for Drunk People:	Kolokythokeftedes:	Halloumi in red pepper:
450g diced pork half a mug of red wine 1 mug of creamed tomatoes 1 teaspoon of mustard ginger garlic oregano allspice	500g of courgettes 1 onion 150g feta cheese 200g melba toast 2 cloves of garlic mint salt pepper flour olive oil for frying	Red pepper 100g block halloumi cheese 1 red chilli olives oregano half a lemon

Greek Salad:

Dessert:

cucumber tomatoes capers feta cheese

Greek yoghurt, honey, and walnuts!

Meze for Drunk People

• Put the 450g of diced pork into a large bowl. Mix in a teaspoon of mustard and add some sliced ginger and crushed garlic (to taste).
• Fry the pork, adding the red wine a little at a time and allowing it to evaporate.
• Finally add the mug of creamed tomatoes and flavour with oregano and allspice.
  

Kolokythokeftedes
This roughly translates into Courgettes/Zucchini "Meatballs". Here's what we did:

• Grate 500g of courgettes and then drain the juice from them.
• Add one chopped onion and two cloves of garlic (crushed) to the courgettes.
• Crumble in 150g of feta cheese.
• Crush 200g of melba toast into a (relatively) fine powder and add it to the mixture. (With our limited kitchen facilities, we crushed the melba toast using a glass and several plastic bags)
• Crumble in some dried mint. Add salt and pepper to taste as well as 4-5 teaspoons of olive oil.
• Use the mixture to make many small balls. Cover them with flour then fry in olive oil.

Halloumi in red pepper

• First, roast the red peppers until they are fairly soft. (We used our microwave to do this - apparently it has an oven setting!) Make a long cut down the side of each pepper and open them out. Trim around the tops and bottoms so that you get one flat piece.
• Slice the halloumi into several thick pieces.
• Juice half a lemon, chop some chilli and olives.

• Place a slice of halloumi in the centre of each piece of red pepper. Sprinkle the lemon juice, the chilli and the olives over the cheese. Add oregano to taste.
• Roll the red pepper around the cheese and secure it in place with a cocktail stick.
• Finally, grill the peppers for about 5 minutes on both sides until the cheese starts to soften. (Apparently our microwave has a grill setting too!)

Greek Salad

• Basically just throw chopped cucumber, tomatoes, and olives into a bowl, add cubes of feta cheese, capers and you're done! (Add salt and pepper and dress with olive oil too if you like)
  

And here we have our four mezes all together!

Dessert

• Greek yoghurt + walnuts +honey =

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Hope you enjoyed The Shok's debut on Hungry the Ate. Have a good recipe idea for SMBC? Let us know!