cooking – Dan Q

Wood-Fired

This week I’m at Three Rings‘ annual “3Camp” event. Owing to Some Plot, we had a gap in the cooking rota, and, seeing that there was a pizza oven in the back garden, I figured… I can make a couple of dozen pizzas to feed everyone, right?

Dan, a white man with a ponytail of blue hair and a goatee beard, uses his hands to gather a huge pile of flour on a marble worksurface in a spacious kitchen. — Step one, as previously-indicated, was to make a *lot* of dough.

There was no mixing bowl large enough to accommodate the 4.5kg of flour so I just dumped it onto a surface, added some salt and sugar, made a well in the middle, and introduced my oil, water and rehydrated yeast right into the middle of it.

Minus a few minor spills, it broadly worked as a technique.

A small wood fire burns inside an outdoor brick pizza oven. — We weren’t able to find the woodpile at the house we’re staying at, so I eventually had to seek a volunteer to go ~~and forage~~ to B&Q to buy a couple of sacks of wood. I can’t wait to hear our treasurer’s response to this unusual expenses claim!

After an initial rise I knocked-back the dough and separated it into balls, and got started on building the fire.

I own a small, portable Ooni pizza oven that’s fired by woodchips, and I find it pretty challenging to use. It eats fuel pretty quickly and loses heat through its thin walls just as fast, and so it’s hard to maintain a consistent temperature while simultaneously maintaining the supply of wood and cooking pizza.

This brick-built oven, though, was a different kind of beast.

The same brick pizza oven, now seen from a few steps back with its chimney and base visible. — Compared to my small metal oven, this brick oven took a *lot* longer – on the region of an hour – to get up to temperature… but once hot, it maintained the heat much better.

I set up a prep station nearby and had Three Rings volunteers “build their own” pizzas: stretching or rolling the dough, adding sauce and cheese and other toppings, etc. And then I rotated them through the oven, up to two at a time.

My arms were already tired from the workout of hand-kneading the enormous pile of dough, and it was hot and tiring work to keep making, moving, and turning pizzas… but it was also… amazingly fun.

As the pizzas started to come out, Three Rings volunteers did too, gathering around the fire pit and in the covered dining areas of the garden, glasses in hand, to enjoy freshly-baked hot slices of crispy pizza, while they talked about volunteering, history, the future, and a diversity of other random topics beside (space travel, politics, music, teaching…).

Awesome.

So yeah… now I really want to build a brick pizza oven of my very own.

Obviously I’ve got other priorities right now (like having somewhere to live following the house-wrecking flood), but maybe that’s something I could look at in a future year.

A crispy, misshapen, slightly charred pepperoni and mushroom pizza on a paper plate. — The first pizza out of the oven was probably the ugliest, but it was also the one I remembered to photograph.

3Camp remains an annual tradition that I love dearly: the camaraderie, the doing-good-in-the-world, the opportunity to work alongside so many kind and talented volunteers, the chance to play with exciting technology, and whole experience… but the pizzas on the penultimate evening have got to go down as a special highlight this year.

Note #28647

There was no mixing bowl in the house large enough to make enough pizza dough to feed all of the Three Rings volunteers present at this year’s 3Camp, so I just had to pour out all the ingredients onto the surface and work from there.

Eject Toast

Most-often when a toaster has a ‘cancel’ button it’s simply labelled ‘cancel’, ‘stop’, or with a cross. But this week, I discovered a toaster that uses the ‘eject’ icon – like you’d find on a VHS tape recorder – on its button.

At first I thought this was an unusual user interface choice, but I’m coming around to it. It feels like a more-accurate and skeuomorphic representation of what actually happens than a cross suggests.

But the existence of toasters like this one does necessarily mean that, some day, some Gen Alpha will see a tape deck in, like, a museum or something, and will say ‘hey, that’s cute: the button you press to pop the tape out is the same as the one you use to pop your toast out’.

Chapattidilla

Wanted a quesadilla. Didn’t have any tortillas, so substituted chapattis.

It went… only okay. The earthiness of the chapatti pairs with mature cheese less-well than the cornflour-sweetness of a tortilla does.

I tried it, so you don’t have to!

Note #27806

I asked the younger child to “help” me calculate how much Yorkshire pudding batter to make for this Christmas dinner.

“Well,” he began, “I’m going to want FIVE Yorkshire puddings, soo…”

Hot Boxes

I’d never put much thought into it before but a slow cooker is basically the opposite of an air frier.

They’re both relatively small (compared to an oven) hot boxes for cooking food. But an air frier uses the small space to contain as much energy as possible in thir vicinity of the food, while the slow cooker aims to maintain as low a temperature as possible until the food finally cooks itself out of boredom.

Anyway, this is going to be pulled pork in like 8-10 hours. 😋

Quesapizza-pizza

A quesapizza is a quesadilla, but made using pizza ingredients: not just cheese, but also a tomato sauce and maybe some toppings.

A quesapizza-pizza is a pizza… constructed using a quesapizza as its base. Quick to make and pretty delicious, it’s among my go-to working lunches.

The one you see above (and in the YouTube version of this video) is topped with a baked egg and chilli flakes. It might not be everybody’s idea of a great quesapizza-pizza, but I love mopping up the remainder of the egg yolk with the thick-stuffed cheese and tomato wraps. Mmm!

The Blind Piemaker

Ruth bought me a copy of The Adventure Challenge: Couples Edition, which is… well, it’s basically a book of 50 curious and unusual ideas for date activities. This week, for the first time, we gave it a go.

Open book showing a scratch-off panel, whose contents read: Find your favonte pie recipe and gather the ingredients. Blindfold your partner. Now, guide them through the process of making a pie. No instructive sentences are allowed, you can only guide them with your hands. (Don't say "pick this up" or 'drop that", find a different way to communicate - only through touch). You can only touch your blindfolded partner's hands or body - NOTHING ELSE (ingredients, utensils, dishes, etc). IMPORTANT: this challenge works best when you follow these instructions as strictly as possible. — Each activity is hidden behind a scratch-off panel, and you’re instructed not to scratch them off until you’re committed to following-through with whatever’s on the other side. Only the title and a few hints around it provide a clue as to what you’ll actually be *doing* on your date.

As a result, we spent this date night… baking a pie!

The book is written by Americans, but that wasn’t going to stop us from making a savoury pie. Of course, “bake a pie” isn’t much of a challenge by itself, which is why the book stipulates that:

One partner makes the pie, but is blindfolded. They can’t see what they’re doing.
The other partner guides them through doing so, but without giving verbal instructions (this is an exercise in touch, control, and nonverbal communication).

Dan, wearing a black t-shirt, smiles as he takes a selfie. Alongside him Ruth, wearing a purple jumper, adjusts a grey blindfold to cover her eyes. — I was surprised when Ruth offered to be the blindfoldee: I’d figured that with her greater experience of pie-making and my greater experience of doing-what-I’m-told, that’d be the smarter way around.

We used this recipe for “mini creamy mushroom pies”. We chose to interpret the brief as permitting pre-prep to be done in accordance with the ingredients list: e.g. because the ingredients list says “1 egg, beaten”, we were allowed to break and beat the egg first, before blindfolding up.

This was a smart choice (breaking an egg while blindfolded, even under close direction, would probably have been especially stress-inducing!).

Dan takes a selfie showing himself, smiling, and Ruth, wearing a blindfold and balling up pastry on a wooden worksurface. — I’d do it again but the other way around, honestly, just to experience both sides! `#JustSwitchThings`

I really enjoyed this experience. It forced us into doing something different on date night (we have developed a bit of a pattern, as folks are wont to do), stretched our comfort zones, and left us with tasty tasty pies to each afterwards. That’s a win-win-win, in my book.

Plus, communication is sexy, and so anything that makes you practice your coupley-communication-skills is fundamentally hot and therefore a great date night activity.

Plate containing four beautifully-browned but slightly lopsided pies, held in a woman's hands. — Our pies may have been wonky-looking, but they were also delicious.

So yeah: we’ll probably be trying some of the other ideas in the book, when the time comes.

Some of the categories are pretty curious, and I’m already wondering what other couples we know that’d be brave enough to join us for the “double date” chapter: four challenges for which you need a second dyad to hang out with? (I’m, like… 90% sure it’s not going to be swinging. So if we know you and you’d like to volunteer yourselves, go ahead!)

Frogs in a Hollow pt 2

This evening I used leftover cocktail sausages to make teeny-tiny toads-in-the-hole (my kids say they should be called frogs-in-the-dip).

It worked out pretty well.

Micro-recipe:

1. Bake cocktail sausages (or veggie sausages, pictured) until barely done.
2. Meanwhile, make a batter (per every 6 sausages: use 50ml milk, 50g plain flour, 1 egg, pinch of salt).
3. Remove sausages from oven, then turn up to 220C.
4. Put a teaspoon of a high-temperature oil (e.g. vegetable, sunflower) into each pit of a cake/muffin tin, return to oven until almost at smoke point.
5. Add a sausage or two to each pit and return to the oven for a couple of minutes to come back up to temperature.
6. Add batter to each pit. It ought to sizzle when it hits the oil, if it’s hot enough. Return to the oven.
7. Remove when puffed-up and crisp. Serve with gravy and your favourite comfort food accompaniments.

Frogs in a Hollow pt 1

Got the ratio of chipolatas to bacon wrong for your Christmas pigs-in-blankets and now have more cocktail sausages than you know what to do with? No, just me?

Here’s my planned solution, anyway – teeny tiny toads-in-the-hole! (Toad-in-the-holes?) Let’s see how it works out…

Cooking with Wine

TFW a recipe calls for a glass of wine but you can’t get the cork back in the bottle so you just have to drink the rest of it.

Ah well, what’s a chef to do? 🤷🍷

Quesapizza Lunch

After a morning of optimising a nonprofit’s reverse proxy configuration, I feel like I’ve earned my lunch! Four cheese, mushroom and jalapeño quesapizzas, mmm…

A Pressure Cooker for Tea

Duration 5:15

Podcast Version

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I’m not a tea-drinker¹. But while making a cuppa for Ruth this morning, a thought occurred to me and I can’t for a moment believe that I’m the first person to think of it:

What about a pressure-cooker, but for tea?²

Hear me out.

It’s been stressed how important it is that the water used to brew the tea is 100℃, or close to it possible. That’s the boiling point of water at sea level, so you can’t really boil your kettle hotter than that or else the water runs away to pursue a new life as a cloud.

That temperature is needed to extract the flavours, apparently³. And that’s why you can’t get a good cup of tea at high altitudes, I’m told: by the time you’re 3000 metres above sea level, water boils at around 90℃ and most British people wilt at their inability to make a decent cuppa⁴.

It’s a question of pressure, right? Increase the pressure, and you increase the boiling point, allowing water to reach a higher temperature before it stops being a liquid and starts being a gas. Sooo… let’s invent something!

I’m thinking a container about the size of a medium-sized Thermos flask or a large keep-cup – you need thick walls to hold pressure, obviously – with a safety valve and a heating element, like a tiny version of a modern pressure cooker. The top half acts as the lid, and contains a compartment into which you put your teabag or loose leaves (optionally in an infuser). After being configured from the front panel, the water gets heated to a specified temperature – which can be above the ambient boiling point of water owing to the pressurisation – at which point the tea is released from the upper half. The temperature is maintained for a specified amount of time and then the user is notified so they can release the pressure, open the top, lift out the inner cup, remove the teabag, and enjoy their beverage.

This isn’t just about filling the niche market of “dissatisfied high-altitude tea drinkers”. Such a device would also be suitable for other folks who want a controlled tea experience. You could have it run on a timer and make you tea at a particular time, like a teasmade. You can set the temperature lower for a controlled brew of e.g. green tea at 70℃. But there’s one other question that a device like this might have the capacity to answer:

What is the ideal temperature for making black tea?

We’re told that it’s 100℃, but that’s probably an assumption based on the fact that that’s as hot as your kettle can get water to go, on account of physics. But if tea is bad when it’s brewed at 90℃ and good when it’s brewed at 100℃… maybe it’s even better when it’s brewed at 110℃!

A modern pressure cooker can easily maintain a liquid water temperature of 120℃, enabling excellent extraction of flavour into water (this is why a pressure cooker makes such excellent stock).

A mug of tea held by the handle. — It’s possible that the perfect cup of tea *hasn’t been invented yet*, owing to limitations in the boiling point of water.

I’m not the person to answer this question, because, as I said: I’m not a tea drinker. But surely somebody’s tried this⁵? It shouldn’t be too hard to retrofit a pressure cooker lid with a sealed compartment that releases, even if it’s just on a timer, to deposit some tea into some superheated water?

Because maybe, just maybe, superheated water makes better tea. And if so, there’s a possible market for my proposed device.

Footnotes

¹ I probably ought to be careful confessing to that or they’ll strip my British citizenship.

² Don’t worry, I know better than to suggest air-frying a cup of ta. What kind of nutter would do that?

³ Again, please not that I’m not a tea-drinker so I’m not really qualified to comment on the flavour of tea at all, let alone tea that’s been brewed at too-low a temperature.

⁴ Some high-altitude tea drinkers swear by switching from black tea to green tea, white tea, or oolong, which apparently release their aromatics at lower temperatures. But it feels like science, not compromise, ought to be the solution to this problem.

⁵ I can’t find the person who’s already tried this, if they exist, but maybe they’re out there somewhere?

Sarson’s

Do you think the 80s/90s advertisement campaign for Sarson’s vinegar – “Don’t say vinegar, say Sarson’s” – ever worked?

Like: have you ever heard anybody ask you to “pass the Sarson’s”?

Scottish-Mexican Fusion Cookery

I swear I’m onto something with this idea: Scottish-Mexican fusion cookery. Hear me out.

It started on the last day of our trip to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2012 when, in an effort to use up our self-catering supplies, JTA suggested (he later claimed this should have been taken as a joke) haggis tacos. Ruth and I ate a whole bunch of them and they were great.

A hand holds a crisp taco containing haggis, mashed potato, rocket, and a blob of sour cream. In the background, JTA can be seen eating his dinner in a more-conventional way: off a plate. There are glasses of wine on the table. — It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good: if I did it again, it’d be haggis and clapshot with a thick whisky sauce… all in a taco.

In Scotland last week (while I wasn’t climbing mountains and thinking of my father), Ruth and I came up with our second bit of Scottish-Mexican fusion food: tattie scone quesadillas. Just sandwich some cheese and anything else you like between tattie scones and gently fry in butter.

A pair of tattie scone quesadillas sizzling in a pan. — These were delicious as they were, but I think there’d be mileage in slicing them into thin fingers and serving them with a moderately spicy salsa, as a dip.

We’re definitely onto something. But what to try next? How about…

Bean chilli stovies?
Arroz con pollo on oatcakes?
Carnitas and refried beans in a bridie?
Huevos rancheros with lorne sausage sandwiched between the tortilla and the eggs?
Kedgeree fajitas? (I’m not entirely convinced by this one)
Rumbledethumps con carne?
Caldo de leekie: cock-a-leekie soup but with mexican rice dumped in after cooking, caldo-de-pollo-style?
Something like a chimichanga but battered before it’s fried? (my god, that sounds like an instant heart attack)