Before you begin

Before you begin – soy sauce

Soy Sauce. Not so very long ago you could simply buy a bottle of ‘soya sauce’. There were, in fact two other sauces available, produced by Conimex and called ‘bentang ketjap manis’ and ‘bentang ketjap asin’. You did not have to be a genius to work out that ‘manis’ meant ‘sweet’ and ‘asin’ meant ‘salty’. I am not sure that it occurred to any of us that bentang ketjap was simply Indonesian soy sauce and that sweet and salty were two preferred Indonesian varieties. The point I am making is that each country in Asia has its own version of soy sauce made from soy beans. They are not interchangeable. Using bentang ketjap manis in Japanese cooking instead of Japanese shoyu is absolutely unthinkable. Chinese soy sauce is not a convenient catch all for all other Asian countries’ versions of soy sauce, although I found Korean soy very similar to Chinese soy in some cases, and more like Japanese shoyu in others. Not surprising, I suppose when you consider where Korea is situated.

The problem is further complicated by the fact that every Asian country has different kinds of soy sauce. China, Korea, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam all have dark and light soy sauces. Those of Thailand and Vietnam are fairly interchangeable, as are those of China and Korea. I am not sure about Malaysia. Geok uses Chinese soy sauce, but then her parents were Chinese. I suspect that many Malays use a soy sauce similar to that used by the Indonesians, in which case the two main kinds are sweet and salty, rather than light and dark.

As a general rule, use light soy sauce with seafood, poultry and white meats, dark soy sauce when cooking red meat.

Pate brisee

For years this has been the recipe I reach for whenever a savoury pastry shell is called for. 

Pate brisee (broken pastry) gives a slightly flaky crust without a strong individual taste, which makes it perfect for savoury flans, pies and quiches.  

These quantities make enough for one 25cm diameter quiche, or 20 tartlet moulds, each 5 cm in diameter and 1cm deep

100g chilled butter
225g plain flour
1 egg yolk
3 tablespoons cold water
1 tablespoon oil
Pinch of salt

Cut the chilled butter into small pieces and put the butter into a mixing bowl with the flour and the salt. Using a fork, or two knives, work the butter into the flour until the mixture has the texture of oatmeal.

Beat the egg yolk with the cold water and add the oil. Make a well in the centre of the flour and butter mixture and pour in the oil. Mix with a fork, then use your hands to form the dough into a ball.

If using a food processor, place the flour and salt into the bowl and add butter cut into small pieces. Using the metal blade, process until the mixture has the texture of oatmeal.

Beat egg yolk with the cold water, and add the oil. With the processor switched on, add the egg mixture through the feed tube, processing until the mixture forms a ball around the blade. Switch off immediately.

Wrap the pastry in waxed paper and refrigerate until firm…at least 20 minutes. This mixture will keep for weeks in the freezer.

If recipe specifies that a pastry shell be ‘blind baked’ before filling, follow the instructions in ‘Blind Baking a Pastry Tart Shell’ in this section.

Soy sauce

Soy Sauce. Not so very long ago you could simply buy a bottle of ‘soya sauce’. There were, in fact two other sauces available, produced by Conimex and called ‘bentang ketjap manis’ and ‘bentang ketjap asin’. You did not have to be a genius to work out that ‘manis’ meant ‘sweet’ and ‘asin’ meant ‘salty’. I am not sure that it occurred to any of us that bentang ketjap was simply Indonesian soy sauce and that sweet and salty were two preferred Indonesian varieties.

The point I am making is that each country in Asia has its own version of soy sauce made from soy beans. They are not interchangeable. Using bentang ketjap manis in Japanese cooking instead of Japanese shoyu is absolutely unthinkable. Chinese soy sauce is not a convenient catch all for all other Asian countries’ versions of soy sauce, although I found Korean soy very similar to Chinese soy in some cases, and more like Japanese shoyu in others. Not surprising, I suppose when you consider where Korea is situated.

The problem is further complicated by the fact that every Asian country has different kinds of soy sauce. China, Korea, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam all have dark and light soy sauces. Those of Thailand and Vietnam are fairly interchangeable, as are those of China and Korea. I am not sure about Malaysia. Geok uses Chinese soy sauce, but then her parents were Chinese. I suspect that many Malays use a soy sauce similar to that used by the Indonesians, in which case the two main kinds are sweet and salty, rather than light and dark.

 As a general rule, use light soy sauce with seafood, poultry and white meats, dark soy sauce when cooking red meat.

Before you begin: Pastry – a what’s what

I was sitting down having a cup of coffee and discussing recipes with Elly Hartland recently, when she asked me if I had made Philip Johnson’s goat’s cheese and leek pie. I asked her what was so special about it. “The pastry,” she said, “is so different. It isn’t a shortcrust pastry. It is an olive oil pastry. It’s flaky.”

“Pate brisee,” I thought, my heart dropping to my shoes, “uses olive oil.” I use it all the time and have always called it shortcrust pastry. But of course, it isn’t really shortcrust pastry at all! All those recipes are wrong!

Well, as it turned out, the goat’s cheese pie pastry isn’t even pate brisee; it is made entirely with olive oil and I don’t care for it much at all. But I was left with the fact that pate brisee is not shortcrust pastry.

Way back when you were all in kindergarten or pre-school, Simone Beck came to Brisbane for a series of cooking demonstrations and to promote her book ‘Simca’s Cuisine’. Simone Beck is best known, not for ‘Simca’s Cuisine’, but for co-authoring that two volume bible ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’. We were all very aware of her legendary importance in the world of haute cuisine and were suitably riveted. She made mushroom tartlets (Quichettes aux champignons).  They were delicious and became my stand-by recipe for many years, as you can see if you look at the state of p232 of ‘Simca’s Cuisine’. Pate brisee “A”, she grandly informed us, and Pate brisee “B”, are to be used for ALL savoury dishes. Obediently, I complied. Pate brisee “A” was fine by me; I have never tried “B”, which substitutes white wine for the water and a whole egg for the egg yolk. Perhaps I should.  She says the wine creates an interesting saveur.

Naturally, I then abandoned Nanya’s sweet shortcrust pastry for Simone Beck’s Pate sucree.

The funny thing about that day is that I swear Elly was with me. Obviously I was more impressed than she was!

Well, I have altered all those recipes, or I think I have.  Fortunately dessert tarts weren’t affected. Where, in savoury tarts, pies or quiches it once said ‘Shortcrust pastry’, it now should read ‘Pate brisee, shortcrust pastry or sour cream pastry’. I apologise.

Elly still doesn’t know that she ruined my day.

Before you begin: Flour facts

That flours ain’t flours has been forcibly brought home to me recently and in my endeavours to find out more, I have discovered that the mere housewife who does not want to buy her flour in 20kg bags is very poorly catered for, particularly in Queensland.

IMG_2678Flour is the ground meal from wheat and other grains including rye, barley, oats, corn and rice.  All have been used to make bread for thousands of years and until the latter part of the 19th century, all grains were milled between heavy millstones, which ground the whole grain. These days, flour, especially wheat flour, is milled using high-speed metal rollers. These rollers extract the outer husk (bran) of the wheat and the germ (the plant’s embryo), leaving just the central part of the seed, the endosperm. The bran and the germ can be returned to the flour to give wholemeal flour.

White flour is made from the endosperm only and it is this endosperm that contains all the gluten-forming proteins. Flours with different gluten levels are made from different varieties of wheat. Strong plain flour is milled from so-called ‘hard’ wheat varieties with a high gluten level. ‘Soft’ wheat varieties have a low gluten level and the flour milled from them is far more ‘tender’ than that milled from ‘hard’ wheat.

Strong flour is sometimes referred to as baker’s flour or bread flour, although this is not strictly true, as there are stronger flours than that needed to make bread. However, the extra protein is particularly important in bread making. The kneading of the dough develops the gluten network necessary to trap the gas given off by the yeast. The trapped carbon dioxide stretches the gluten fibres further and the dough rises. This gluten web sets during cooking and a firm well-aerated bread is produced. If there is insufficient gluten in the flour, the gluten network cannot be established and the rising does not take place. The extra protein in strong flour also helps the flour absorb more fat and liquid without the mixture ‘splitting’. Strong flour can contain as much as 15% gluten, whereas baker’s flour usually contains around 11 – 12%.

In America soft flour is widely sold as ‘cake flour’. In Australia we are not so lucky. Self-raising flour is (supposedly) soft flour with baking powder (a chemical leaven) added. The baking powder takes the place of the gluten, giving self-raising flour the tender properties of soft flour with the rising properties of strong flour. However there is so little difference between the gluten levels in plain and self-raising flour in Australia there is no point at all in buying self-raising flour.

Plain white flour is sometimes known as ‘all purpose flour’. It is a mixture of hard and soft flours, the proportions in which they are mixed determining the gluten level of the flour. This varies quite significantly from brand to brand. It is a ‘compromise’ flour, being neither really suitable for bread making with too low a gluten level, nor for good cake making with too high a gluten level.

Wholemeal flour, despite common belief, is neither ‘less refined’ nor ‘less processed’ than plain flour. It is processed to white flour and in most cases, the bran only (not the germ) is mixed back into the flour. Similarly, ‘stone ground’ flour (which, I am assured by one of Defiance’s ex-millers, is not, and never has been stone ground) is processed to plain flour and some bran is added. Such flours have more dietary fibre than white flour and are less white in appearance. They are better for you, but ‘less processed’ they are not. Because of the presence of the bran, the gluten content (in grams per 100grams of flour) of such bread is lowered. Breads made with such flours will naturally be heavier.

The most common misconception regarding flour is that most flour is bleached. Bleaching is a process in which a chlorine gas is passed through the flour at some stage of the milling process to whiten it. Most, if not all flour sold in Australia is unbleached. One home economist from Allied Defiance even went so far as to tell me it was illegal to bleach flour and has been for thirty years. Some mills do still bleach flour but it appears that they do this largely for export to Asia where snow-white flour is considered superior.

No flour mill in Australia produces bleached flour for the domestic supermarket market, so if you are buying flour from the local shop you can be confident it is unbleached.  White flour actually whitens naturally with age.

So can you get away with just one ‘all purpose’ flour in your pantry? Well, in theory, yes, provided you have the necessary additives. If you are making bread or pizzas you will need gluten flour to increase the gluten content of plain flour (of which more later). If you want to make cakes or scones, you can convert plain flour to self-raising flour by adding baking powder. In fact, if the baking powder is added just before baking it is more effective and the cream of tartar is less likely to leave a bitter taste in the flour as it can, especially if the flour is old.

Can you get away with just baker’s flour in your pantry? Again, in theory, yes. Maggie Beer seems to manage it brilliantly, though I am told that unless she has an extremely deft touch with her blender, her cakes may be just a tiny bit heavier than necessary, and even a little chewy.

Alternatively, you can convert plain flour to baker’s flour by adding 3 teaspoons of gluten flour to every 500g of plain flour. (Or 1 teaspoon of gluten flour to 1 cup of plain flour.) Note that gluten flour is NOT baker’s flour. It is gluten extracted from the flour during the milling process. It has a protein content of 69.5g per 100g of flour. (Compare this with 12g per 100g flour for Defiance brand baker’s flour.) Gluten flour is sometimes available in the health food section of supermarkets and usually from health food shops.

If you wish to convert baker’s flour to plain flour, you simply use less. For every cup of plain flour you wish to use, fill a cup with baker’s flour and then remove 1 tablespoon. Proceed as if you were using plain flour.

To convert plain flour to self-raising flour, add 4 level teaspoons (a teaspoon measure is more accurate than a teaspoon) to every 250g of plain flour and sift together twice to ensure they are blended.

As for me…   Well, I suppose I will continue to buy 5kg bags of baker’s flour just for making pizzas and souffles. Who knows, perhaps one day I will make bread? I will continue to have a jar of gluten flour in the cupboard just in case my baker’s flour has too many moths in it to be usable. I will continue to buy Defiance brand plain flour out of some misplaced loyalty to Defiance flour which now belongs to a multinational company and because it has a nice middle-of-the-road gluten content of 10.8%.

I will not be buying self-raising flour, but will now add baking powder to plain flour when I want to make a cake or bake scones. I may even buy some White Wings brand plain flour because it has a gluten content of only 9.6% and therefore should be better for cakes than Defiance plain flour.

Oh! I nearly forgot the wholemeal flour which I use for some biscuits, the oatmeal and the fine oatmeal, the ground rice and rice flour, the Italian ground rice and the cornflour for Chinese cooking and of course the Fielder’s wheaten cornflour for other things. Perhaps I should get some rye flour?

………

It is now late 2008, and I am very pleased to say that a new flour brand has recently appeared on the shelves of some of our bigger supermarkets. This is Anchor brand “Lighthouse” special purpose flour. There are two plain flours: Cake, Biscuit and Pastry flour with a gluten content of 8.5g per 100g, and Bread and Pizza flour with a gluten content of 11.0g per 100g. Whilst the latter is not quite as strong as Defiance’s baker’s flour at 12.0g per 100g, it does come in 1kg packs, not 5kg ones like Defiance’s. (Even stored in plastic tubs, my baker’s flour always ended up full of moths before I could get even half way through it.)  However, I have already made twice-cooked gruyere cheese soufflés with the Anchor Bread and Pizza flour, and they were wonderful and didn’t even threaten to split!

Even better still, Anchor brand “Lighthouse” self raising flour has a gluten content of 8.2g per 100g making it a true “cake’ flour. (Compare this with both Defiance and White Wings self raising flours at 9.5g per 100g.) Needless to say, I am changing my allegiance from Defiance to Anchor, (and go back to using self raising flour), even if it means that I have to go to Coles or Woolworths to get them!

But, do I use soft or strong plain flour for gravy, for fish and other batters, or do I continue to buy a middle of the road plain flour for just these everyday eventualities? Oh dear!

As I sit here….

As I sit here thinking about recipes and food generally, all sorts of things keep popping into my head. I think, ‘I wonder if they realise that?’  So I thought that I had better start writing them down. No doubt there are dozens more that I haven’t thought of as well.

Before you begin – Oils

Oil. Think carefully about which oil to use in a recipe. In 1997, canola oil was considered to be the best oil to use health-wise. Cooking oils all contain saturated fats, mono-unsaturated fats and poly – unsaturated fats in varying proportions. Canola oil (and Grapeseed oil) has the biggest proportion of ‘good’ fats and the lowest proportion of ‘bad’ fats. In addition it also contains Omega 3 fatty acids, usually found in fish. These Omega 3 acids prevent the blood from clotting and are therefore considered very important in preventing heart disease. They are also important in reducing inflammation in some kinds of arthritis, in preventing asthma, in the development of the brain and in maintaining a healthy retina of the eye.

Less than a year later, some experts were saying that olive oil was the healthiest way to cook. To hedge my bets, I tend to cook with both…canola or grapseed oil for general cooking, seafood and Asian food, olive oil for all Mediterranean-style cooking. I still prefer the flavour (or rather the lack of it) of grape seed oil for fish cooking, and because grape seed oil rates fairly highly on the scale of ‘good oils’, I will still use it for cooking fish.

Ironically, however, in 2004 it was announced that vegetable oils, and in particular, canola oil was responsible for causing macular degeneration of the eye and was causing blindness in quite young people. So you can use butter and die of heart disease or use vegetable oil and go blind!

Once upon a time, I used peanut oil almost exclusively, and always for Asian cooking. These days I won’t even have it in the pantry. The incidence of peanut allergies has risen so dramatically over the last few decades that it is just not worth it.

Even the tiniest amount of peanut oil served to a person with a peanut allergy could result in death and I am just not prepared to take that risk.

I still use butter for some cooking. I cannot make a bechamel sauce without it, try as I might. I use butter for cooking liver as butter gives liver a better colour.

Just a word about olive oil. The flavour of olive oil is completely foreign to all Asian countries with the exception of Macau. (Macanese cuisine is a unique blend of Chinese and Portuguese cooking.) Most Asian cuisines use peanut (but see above) or sunflower oil. Canola oil is fine too. In Asian cooking the oil is simply a cooking medium; in Mediterranean cooking the flavour of the olive oil is important. Never use olive oil when preparing an Asian dish.

Olive oil is made by pressing the olives a number of times. The best oil comes from the first pressing. This is called ‘Extra Virgin’, and the oil produced is usually a fairly deep green. The second pressing produces ‘Virgin’ Olive oil, which is slightly lighter in colour. The third produces ‘Classic’ or ‘Classico’, which is usually a fairly deep gold in colour. Then come the final pressings producing ‘Light’ and ‘Extra Light’ Olive Oil. These are generally despised by the true Italian and Provencal cooks, but for our tastes, they are less overpowering than the earlier pressings. All are pure oil and all contain the same amount of fat. It is a flavour choice, not a health choice. Extra virgin olive oil contains the same amount of fat as extra light olive oil.

It is a myth that adding oil to the water when cooking pasta stops the pasta from sticking. All it does is inhibit the ability of the pasta sauce from adhering to the pasta.