Beef and beans!

Today I decided to make something with green beans!

I first marinated the beef in soy sauce, corn starch, pepper, olive oil, and brown sugar. After I let it sit awhile, I sauteeded it with more oil and garlic. Cooking it half way, I took it out and started with the green beans. After cutting off the ends and cleaning the green beans, I also sauteeded them with oil and garlic. After they all had charred a little, I added a little water and salt and put the lid on in order to cook them a little more. I like them a bit crunchy, so I didn’t leave them to cook for long. Fully cooking the beef was next, I poured the half-cooked meat into the pan and covered the lid again. With a little corn starch, water, and oyster sauce I made a sauce-base to add in and let it cook….

And voila!

I shall take on this week’s “orange” challenge next.

-Chef BloO

boil ’em, mash ’em, stick ’em in a stew..

So for our very first week of secret ingredients (this is Iron Chef related after all) was going to be potatoes. Woo! I watched two episodes of Good Eats and skimmed a few recipes in preparation. Now, as a novice chef the sky should always be the limit when picking a dish. You know what they say about life starting at the end of your comfort zone..

Well, in an effort to end my rambling and “just get on with it”. I made mashed potatoes but did not take pictures. :(. But really with the type of mashed potatoes I made I’m sure it wouldn’t have been very thrilling anyway. Better luck next week!

Mini Spicy Garlic Knots!

So I’m always craving something spicy, and I simply love garlic bread, so I found myself looking at Garlic Knot Recipes for this week’s secret recipe, yeast.  Low and behold, I found this gem (http://whiteonricecouple.com/recipes/garlic-knots/).  It was a sign, this was going to be my first SASE Iron Chef dish.  And it didn’t come out too bad either!

Spicy Mini Garlic Knots!

So I set off in making them Thurs night, so I could bring them into work for Friday…but I realized the dough will take much longer to rise than I had planned, so I made the dough and just let it sit in the fridge.  This was probably the hardest part, and the only part I forgot to take pictures of.  I think I put too much yeast in, and I didn’t realize I was going to be using 5 and a half cups of flour.  So when I threw the ingredients together, it dawned on me that I could never knead this much dough at once.  So I was like, oh no worries, I’ll just split it into two pieces.  Can you believe, two pieces were still too large?  As I was working on a piece, I had to split it up again, thereby breaking the original into four quarters.  I’m still not sure if I kneaded correctly, or if it was enough, since as I was working on the second quarter piece, the half piece I had originally cut was now double its original size.  I didn’t know what to do, so I just cut it into halves again and repeated what I had done for the first half.  After one night in the fridge, it came out looking like this.

12 hours later…

To be honest, I wasn’t sure how it was supposed to look.  The only experiences I had with rising dough were a couple years ago at a friend’s house, where she had a hand mixer, and recently, looking at Virak’s pizza dough and Good Eat’s video.  And man, they didn’t look like this…  This looked like a Styrofoam ball, but was sticky to the touch.  But after setting it down onto the cutting board and getting some dough and oil on it, it looked like freshly bough pizza dough!

I’m terrible with dimensions and mentally sizing anything.  If I don’t have a ruler, you might as well not have given me the measures.  And yet…I have no ruler.  So at this point, I was just rolling the dough to be somewhat of a rectangular shape, or somewhat like bread sticks.  After multiple attempts, I finally achieved something like this.

Dough cuttin’

Quite frankly, I’m still not sure how I got it to look like that.  But it was good enough for me.  You can tell I tried to cut them about the same width, but did a poor job of such.  Oh well, I tried.  At this point, I almost just threw it into the oven, just made bread sticks, and called it a day.  But I was so close to my goal, for the sake of this post, I decided to just chug along.

The actual task of rolling them into knots was rather easy.  It was basically just tying a knot.  Initially, I was worried that the little knob on the ends would be too small and it would unravel in the oven, but at the same time I couldn’t stretch the dough too thin.  But it proved to be no problem in the oven!

Dough Knottin’

As you can tell, I had originally just tied em together and figured they’ll just be like Pillsbury’s Rolls.  But after a few, I decided to cut the dough in half  and  make mini knots!  They’re more bite size and its easier to watch how much you eat, as well as being adorable. So I just sat em on the paper and let them rise a little more.  I was actually pretty skeptical about this step, since I didn’t know if this dough would rise anymore, given how I had originally let it rise 8 more hours than intended, but the yeast is still hard at work, and when I was done knotting, I did notice that they had risen some more.  Time to throw these babies into the oven for 10 minutes!

Meanwhile, I got started on the most important part, the sauce.  The recipe called for a lot of olive oil and butter, so when I first made it, I was a little disgusted…I mean, look at it, that’s a lot of better and oil!  But not knowing anything, I just followed the recipe blindly.  I threw in some garlic hot sauce and sriracha, but I couldn’t get an accurate measure of flavor by just trying a small amount, so I had to wait for the knots to come out of the oven.

Spicy Sauce

And when they came out, oh man…took my breath away!  They’re beautiful!  Much better than I had imagined them…

Fresh Outta Oven

But I still had no idea for the flavor, so I took a little guy and coated it with the sauce with a brush.

A close up of a mini knot

Isn’t it cute?  It turned out okay, the sauce wasn’t bad.  I had to add some hot sauce, but overall, not too much change.  But now that I’ve tasted it, and know what to expect next time, I may use less oil and butter.  But at first, I was just amazed how I didn’t mess up as badly as I thought, but it turns out, after a little while, as they cool down a little, they soften up!  And that just makes these little guys heavenly!  I do have to admit, I gave up on trying to brush them, the garlic refused to stick and the oil just got everywhere, so I decided to just toss em.  Threw them all in a glass bowl and just shook em up.

And as you all have already seen, it came out beautifully!  I still have the other half in the fridge and I plan on making them on Sunday so I can bring them for my co-workers on Monday!  I’m excited, I hope they like them as well!

Thank guys for bearing with me the entire post, I know I am a little long-winded!  🙂

Until next week!

– Chef JKwong

Third Iteration!

Hello! First post in our SASE Chef blog! I recently got inspired to bake recently (by Chip), and have settled on bread! Bread is special because  it’s a part of pretty much every culture there is! All different types! The first bread I chose to tackle is the Jewish favorite “Challah,” which is pronounced Holla, like HOLLA AT YO BOY. Representing my hometown Cooper City!! Anyway, it is a bread that is commonly eaten Sabbath and other holidays. It is usually braided, but some variants do not braid it!

I do quite a bit of cooking, but this would be my first attempt ever at baking anything that is yeast based. I had no clue how to use yeast, but I bought 3/4 Oz for $2.50 at my local grocery store. I believe I screwed up my units and put 100C water rather than 100F and basically murdered all the yeast! I waited forever and it wouldn’t rise and I tried my hardest to save it by adding more yeast, but nothing happened. At last, I decided to bake it just because. After a few minutes in the oven, I started to get excited! It was rising! Well this was the final result. I cut a piece off while it was warm, it was soft but had no flavor. The next day it was rock hard, so I trashed it.

That yeast was still bothering me, luckily I had prepared and bought a pound of it off amazon, yes that is 16 oz. for the low price of $7! What a deal! This time I changed around the process and decided to make sure to keep my minions alive. The bread turned out okay, I was really proud of it at the time, but it didn’t taste all too great. It wasn’t sweet enough, although it did work out okay.

The Third Iteration. They say third time’s the charm right? I was determined to get EVERYTHING perfectly this time. I took things slowly, changed around my process, added an extra egg, and an extra tsp of  brown and white sugar. I also let the dough rise an extra time to bring it up to  a 3 hour prep time, but lessened the baking time. I also wanted to try a new braid, which looks wayyyyyyyyyyyyyy fancier. And in the end, it was worth it.  Everything turned out beautifully! JUST LOOK AT THAT SHINE! I gave a lot of it out during lunch, and people really enjoyed it.

Now, what culture or what type of bread should I try next?!

 

-Chef BloO