milk – Toidublogi

January 7 2024

Béchamel sauce

andrestover National dishes, Sauces France, milk, nutmeg, wheat flour 0

One of the mainstays of sauces in French cuisine. Many people find this sauce a little boring, but if you make it according to the historical instructions, the result is delicious and the texture is thoroughly enjoyable. This sauce was first prepared by Loius de Béchamel. The recipe for this sauce first appeared in a cookbook in 1651. Béchamel sauce is used with boiled eggs, boiled or steamed fish, and boiled or steamed vegetables.
Sauces are a very important part of food. Most of the time, no special attention is paid to the preparation of the sauce and it is often made somewhat haphazardly.
In 2024, I will try to prepare well-known sauces and help the readers of these recipes navigate the rich world of sauces.

Preparation time: 40 minutes
Level: Easy
Quantity: For two to four

Ingredients:
500 ml of milk
One layer of white spring onion
1 clove of nutmeg
1 bay leaf
40 g of butter
Ground black pepper and sea salt
A few pinches of ground nutmeg

Preparation:

Pour milk into a thick-bottomed saucepan, add one layer of the onion, bay leaf, and one chip of nutmeg, and heat on medium heat until boiling.
Set the milk aside and let the flavors infuse for 30 minutes.
Melt 40 g of butter in a saucepan over low heat and add 40 g of flour, mix with a whisk until smooth. When the milk has settled, strain out the seasonings and start adding the milk little by little, stirring constantly. Keep the temperature low.
When all the milk has been added and the sauce is uniform and liquid, increase the temperature to medium and stir constantly with a whisk until the sauce thickens and comes to a slight boil.
Add freshly ground black pepper sea salt and a few pinches of finely grated nutmeg to the sauce.
Ready!!

January 23 2022

Yorkshire pudding

andrestover National dishes, Side dishes egg, English, milk, salt, wheat flour 0

Yorkshire pudding is from the County of York in the north of England and is made with flour, milk, eggs, salt, and oil. I have eaten it once, not in Yorkshire, but in London, where it was served with meat and sauce. I prepared it next to the gravlax and it went pretty well with this food.
Historically, the first recipes for making this pudding date back to the mid-18th century. It was usually eaten with thick sauce and mushrooms or vegetables and was primarily a cheaper type of food. According to Wikipedia, Yorkshire pudding is one of the top 10 things people love about the UK.
I thoroughly researched how to make it before I started doing it myself. In reality, it seemed to me that there was one important aspect that was worth following and that I was following. It is worth making the dough a day earlier so that it will hydrate. This is how the pudding rises well and looks good.

Preparation time: Dough preparation 15 min, hydration at +4 degrees overnight, baking 20 min.
Level: Average
Quantity: for two or four

Ingredients:
4 large eggs
150 g of wheat flour
200 ml of 2.5% milk
1 teaspoon sea salt
about 150 ml of cooking oil for baking pudding

Preparation:
1. Mix eggs, milk, salt, and flour. Mix until smooth and leave to stand at +4 degrees overnight.
2. Before baking, pour the dough into a jug or bottle so that it is easy to pour into the molds and so that it does not drip onto the edges of the mold.
3. Pour the outer row of a metal 6×4 muffin tin three-quarters full of cooking oil and tilt the tin so that the oil flows evenly into all the holes.
4. Preheat the oven to 230 degrees place the oil-filled muffin mold in the oven and heat until the oil smokes slightly.
5. Take the mold out of the oven and pour the dough into each mold hole until the holes are filled. The oil rises to the surface and the dough is at the bottom, but it should be so. Fill out the entire muffin mold this way.
6. Place in an oven at 230 degrees and bake for 20 minutes. Do not open the oven during baking!! During this time, Yorkshire puddings will rise high and turn golden brown.
7. After baking, place the Yorkshire puddings on a serving plate and serve immediately. If there is oil left in the pudding cavity, pour it off before placing it on the plate. Serve with the topping you like.
In Britain, it is eaten with meat, gravy, and vegetables. I offered it with gravlax and gravy.
Ready !!

November 1 2020

Napoleon cake

andrestover Bakes, Cakes, National dishes, Nostalgic foods milk, Russia, vanilla, vinegar 0

The origin of this classic cake is a bit confusing. This cake is similar to the French cake mille-feuille but at the same time, it is different enough to name it differently. The name of the cake may refer to the origin of this region of Naples, Italy, but it is also believed that it was made in Russia in honor of the victory over Emperor Napoleon’s army in 1812. A similar cake was made already in 18th-century French pastry shops, but in modern era, it was well-known and made in homes and cafes during the Soviet period.
I found a very old Russian-language source, over a hundred years old, that gave me ideas on how this cake was made at the time. I think the recipes I used to put together my recipe for Krista’s birthday cake have been in the very right way to make a good and authentic Napoleon cake.
Making this cake was difficult for me. Not technically, but I was constantly afraid of two things that the cake would be too dry or the cake would be too wet. After all, it came as average. While writing this recipe, I slightly adjusted the amount of cream I used to assemble the cake so that it would look better on those using the recipe.
Making this cake is such a semi-meditative activity and it takes a relatively long time. I made this cake for a total of four hours before it moved to the fridge to finish.

Preparation time: 4 hours, before eating the cake should be kept at +4 C overnight
Level: average
Quantity: 16-20 slices

Ingredients:

Dough
2 eggs
200 ml of cold water
1 tablespoon 30% vinegar
0.5 teaspoons of salt
690 g of flour
400g butter

Cream
6 egg yolks
175g sugar
45 g of potato starch
750 ml of milk
230 g butter
3 heaping teaspoons vanilla sugar

Preparation:
1. Mix eggs, water and vinegar evenly
2. Chop cold or mix with flour until even
3. Add a mixture of water, eggs, and vinegar to the flour or mixture
4. Mix until smooth. Divide the dough into 11-12 equal parts, form dough into balls, and store at +4 C until you make the cake
5. Prepare the cream. To do this, mix the egg yolks with the sugar and vanilla sugar into a foam. Whisk in the starch
6. Heat the milk (do not bring to a boil) and pour the milk over the whipped cream, stirring constantly
7. Pour the mixture into a pot with a thick bottom and heat, stirring constantly from the bottom, until the cream has become the consistency of sour cream
8. Remove the cream from the heat and mix in 230 g of diced butter. Stir until smooth and silky. Cover the cream with a film to prevent milk skin and allow to cool completely
9. Bake the finished cake layers until the cream in cooling down Roll the dough thinly on baking paper and cut out a circle with the edge of a 24 cm cake tin. The “edges” outside the circle cook together with the base of the cake and are used to make the crumbs needed to decorate the cake.
10. Using baking paper place the cake layer on the oven pan, punch holes in the bottom of the cake with a fork and bake at 190 C for 15 minutes until the cake pan turns light brown
11. Bake all 11-12 cake layers. Place the finished baked cake tops on top of each other, save the edges to make the crumbs
12. When the cream has cooled and the cake layers are ready, put the cake together. Place one layer of cake base on the serving tray and cover with 4 tablespoons (3 is a little too few) of cream and place the next layer of cake base on top.
13. Continue this process until all the layers have been stacked. Cover the cake with cream on the top and sides.
14. Crush the edge pieces so that they form a coarser crumb. Cover the cake with crumbs on both sides and top.
15. Clean the edges of the serving trays and place the covered cake at +4 C to soak overnight
16. Decorate the cake with berries, mint, or lemon balm leaves. Serve with good coffee or tea.
Done !!!

October 6 2018

Yogurt

andrestover Dips and spreads, Side dishes milk 0

Yogurt (yoğurt) is a Turkish word for tart semisolid, fermented milk mass The same milk fermentation product was used for centuries in India, Eastern Europe countries in Northern Africa and the Middle East where it was named by various names and used for food preparation, marinades, sauces, and drinks. First preparation of yogurt believed to be dated in 5000 BC in Mesopotamia.
In Europe, yogurt remains exotic until the early 20th century when Immunologist Ilya Metchnikov connected with the number of scientists in different countries to discuss theorized that fermented milk acidifies the digestive tract preventing the growth of the pathogenic bacteria (Harold McGee “On Food And Cooking: The Science And Lore Of The Kitchen” 2004). Factory-scale production of the yogurt starts in the 1920s and was broadly distributed in 1960s when Swiss companies were started to add berries and flavors into the yogurt.
Standard yogurt is fermented by the symbiosis of two bacteria Lactobacillus delbrueckii spp. bulgaricus and Streptococcus salivarius spp. thermophilus. Different species stimulating each other’s growth and fermentation of the milk is more rapid.
Heating of the milk for making yogurt is essential. It is recommended to heat the milk 30 min at 85 degrees or 10 min 90 degrees. The heating denatures the whey proteins which otherwise will aggregate to form particles with casein in a surface of the yogurt. Denaturating whey proteins allow forming the better matrix of the yogurt mass.
If milk is heated, it is needed to cool down the milt to the 40-45 degrees before adding the bacterial culture (typically portion of the previous yogurt batch). There are two ways to make yogurt, fermentation in 30 or 40-45 degrees. The fast way is to use 40-45 degrees but yogurt will be more coarse protein network which releases easily whey. Fermentation of yogurt takes 3-4 hours at 40-45 degrees and more than 18 hours at 30 degrees. I am preferring 40-45 degrees fermentation and 4 hours fermentation period.

It takes time to grow-out the yogurt culture from yogurt available in supermarkets. Please choose yogurt from a local market or purchase pure bacterial culture from bio markets. If you are using supermarket yogurt, please select Turkish or Greek yogurt to start. Follow instructions below and if the result isn’t satisfactory first three fermentations, it’s not a problem, please prepare first time small batches to keep the material and time. It took 4 fermentations for me to get good yogurt for eating and used as the starter of the new batch.

Preparation time: 30-45 min boiling of the milk, 1-hour cooling the milk, 4-hour fermentation
Level: not too tricky
Quantity: 2L

Ingredients:

2L of milk
2 tablespoons of previous yogurt batch

Preparation:

1. Heat the milk to 85 degrees for a 30 min or 90 degrees for a 10 min
2. Cool the milk to the 45 degrees
3. Mix 2 tablespoons of the previous batch of the yogurt into the small amount of the milt and add to the 2L of milk.
4. Divide inoculated milk into glass cans or plastic boxes and put in an oven. Light two tea-candles and put aside of the fermenting yogurt. Candles are keeping temperature ~40 degrees. If possible measure from time to time temperature. If it needs to be changed add or remove candles. Let yogurt to fermentate for four hours. If you prefer more acidic yogurt, increase the time to 6 hours.
5. Keep yogurt at +4 degrees, it remains good for a 10 days period. It is recommended to prepare each week new batch after one-week bacteria viability is good to start rapidly fermentation process.
Eat yogurt with cereals, jam, honey or enjoy the simple sour taste of the yogurt.
Ready !!