Monthly Archives: August 2015

CrummyCook

Slaw 3: Bobby Flay as Interpreted by the Madmen from Crummycook

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The Coleslaw Project takes its first steps.

Step 1 was to pick a starting recipe for baseline purposes.  For reasons discussed here I started with a Bobby Flay recipe.

Sadly, I improvised.  I didn’t have cabbage, just Napa cabbage.  And I inadvertently put in two tablespoons of dry (Colemans!) mustard instead of one.

Result? Nasal-passage cleansing coleslaw with not quite the right texture.

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Here’s how it looks.  Decent texture, but definitely not cabbage-based coleslaw.

The mayonnaise (home-made) was great.  You could taste it.

So coming up, try the recipe again, this time with the right ingredients.

(Debbie liked it despite the horseradish-esque “notes”.)

CrummyCook

Slaw Project 2: Mayonnaise

Phase 1 in the Slaw project seemed to be making my own mayonnaise.

Of course you could do store-bought, but, c’mon, I’m Crummycook, I can’t just do that.

So Debbie and I set out to make mayonnaise from scratch over the weekend.

Or I set out to do it and she helped, criticized, and encouraged.  All at once.

The core of mayonnaise is emulsification: you whip the oil into an emulsion with egg yolk (in some recipes) or whole egg (in others) and a bit of acid (lemon juice, vinegar, Whatever).  By dribbling the oil in slowly while you whisk (or blend) the heck out of it: mayonnaise.

First thing we tried was a Mark Bittman recipe for blender mayonnaise out of the “How to Cook Anything” cookbook.  Foolproof, he says.  Egg yolk, Dijon mustard, lemon juice.

Well, foolproof it might be, but this fool was not able to get it to work.  After whirling away for almost five minutes I had a yellow mess of oil, an encouraging garlic smell, and no emulsification.

So we read a bunch of stuff in our cookbooks and the ‘tubes about the vicissitudes of mayonnaise, and then tried again.

This time a recipe with a whole egg from The Joy of Cooking (this link is the closest I could find to it online).

Maybe it was the whole egg.  Maybe it was the room-temperature ingredients.  Maybe it was slower dribbling.  Maybe it was starting with a small bunch of stuff in a small(er) blender bowl.  In any case, it worked.

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Not a great photo, but you can see the pale yellow emulsion in the plastic container.  And it tasted great.

CrummyCook

Crummy Cook Takes on Coleslaw

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I’ve been working on half-sour pickles over the summer, having grown cucumbers for the first time against a sunny wall on the South face of our house.

But now it’s time to take on another challenge, and I’ve decided to try for coleslaw.

There’s a theme here.  Both half-sour pickles and coleslaw are:

  1. foods I love
  2. foods that are within my feeble powers to master (I hope!)
  3. foods that give pleasure to Debbie and others

So that’s where I’m going.

I’m not a fan of yuppie coleslaw.  I don’t like hincty ingredients: cabbage and carrot are fine, thank you very much.  And I don’t like too-sour or too-herbal or too-uncreamy coleslaw.

Now I don’t like coleslaw that’s a mayonnaise bath either, so there are some limits in the other direction.

For openers, I decided to make Bobby Flay’s  coleslaw recipe from Food Network.

Creamy Cole SlawI like Bobby Flay’s sensibility generally, as Food Network chefs go.  He’s not a total glutton, but he’s not a weird gourmet either.

I don’t (yet?) have the power to read a recipe and know how it’ll taste, but his recipe read as if it might taste pretty much as I like.  Or at least a good first approximation.

The fact that he calls the recipe “Creamy Coleslaw” gave me a little pause (like I said, I don’t want a bath of mayonnaise), but I think it’ll be a good start for my adventures.

He calls for sour cream, a couple of tablespoons.  I think that’ll sit OK with me.

So the first order of business will be to learn how to make homemade mayonnaise, and then we’ll start on the coleslaw caper.

CrummyCook

Crummycook Takes On Coleslaw

I’ve been working on half-sour pickles over the summer, having grown cucumbers for the first time against a sunny wall on the South face of our house.

But now it’s time to take on another challenge, and I’ve decided to try for coleslaw.

There’s a theme here.  Both half-sour pickles and coleslaw are:

  1. foods I love
  2. foods that are within my feeble powers to master (I hope!)
  3. foods that give pleasure to Debbie and others

So that’s where I’m going.

I’m not a fan of yuppie coleslaw.  I don’t like hincty ingredients: cabbage and carrot are fine, thank you very much.  And I don’t like too-sour or too-herbal or too-uncreamy coleslaw.

Now I don’t like coleslaw that’s a mayonnaise bath either, so there are some limits in the other direction.

For openers, I decided to make Bobby Flay’s  coleslaw recipe from Food Network.

Creamy Cole SlawI like Bobby Flay’s sensibility generally, as Food Network chefs go.  He’s not a total glutton, but he’s not a weird gourmet either.

I don’t (yet?) have the power to read a recipe and know how it’ll taste, but his recipe read as if it might taste pretty much as I like.  Or at least a good first approximation.

The fact that he calls the recipe “Creamy Coleslaw” gave me a little pause (like I said, I don’t want a bath of mayonnaise), but I think it’ll be a good start for my adventures.

He calls for sour cream, a couple of tablespoons.  I think that’ll sit OK with me.

So the first order of business will be to learn how to make homemade mayonnaise, and then we’ll start on the coleslaw caper.