Injera.... of the wheat-based, North American sort.

I have a great love for sourdough; it's a fabulous flavor addition that also keeps me from having to buy bread yeast. For years, I have been working at making various kinds of pan-baked flat breads from my sourdough, and would eventually come up with a bunch of varieties that I like. Most Americans think about the sort of thing you can get at IHOP as the only sort of pancakes, but actually, there are lots of different kinds of pancakes, as evidenced by this article in Wikipedia.

Injera is sometimes described as a pancake, sometimes as a flat bread, but whatever you call it, it is a quintessential element of Ethiopian cuisine, and I love it. As I have to regularly feed and eat my sourdough, I decided that an injera (of a sort) was an excellent project.

It took me a number of years to get a reliable rate of return on my experiments. This is not a perfect injera, as it is wheat based and does use a little more leavening than just the yeast in the sourdough, but the results of just sourdough, white flour, and water are too gummy to work well. This method will, however, produce a yummy injera that will work under any stew, or wat, or, really, whatever you might usually eat with bread to soak up sauces in any style of cuisine. Actual working time is not that long, but it is a process, so you'll have to plan for it.

Injera is a process, not a recipe!

1. Feed your sourdough starter the night before. I have a well established sourdough starter that I keep in the refrigerator. Take it out, pour off the liquid that has accumulated at the top (this is the alcohol that the fermenting sourdough has produced. You can stir it back in, but it will make a very sharp flavor that many people don't like. It will also make your starter more liquidy, and will require you to adjust the amount of liquid you add later), and scrape the rest into a plastic, ceramic, or glass bowl with plenty of room. Feed the starter one cup of flour and one cup of warm (but not too hot) water. Stir it up with a non-metal utensil*. Don't worry about lumps, just get it all moist. The bacteria and yeast in the sourdough starter will take care of the lumps. Cover the bowl, set it aside, and go to bed.

The amount of activity you get in your sourdough will relate to the temperature in your kitchen. Heat directly affects how fast the sourdough will rise and fall, with warmer kitchens producing faster rises, but 7-8 hours is usually enough in most North American kitchens to get it into the useful cycle without getting it past the useful stage (where you start producing significant amounts of alcohol).

In the morning, return 1 cup of the starter to a jar and place back into the fridge. The remainder in the bowl is what you have to work with for the injera.

If you don't have an established sourdough starter, you can get one either by following these classic instructions, or by purchasing one of the commercially available starters. Or you can get one from a friend. :-)

2. Measure out your remaining sourdough. I usually end up with between 1 to 1.5 cups. From this point, you must recognize that you are working with an ingredient that will never be as predictable as purchased yeast and be prepared for some flexibility.

3. Gather the things you need: a pan for baking, a liquid, and a baking mix. I have a dedicated, round, non-stick, flat griddle/pancake pan. A round frying pan of any sort will work, but this really works best with some kind of griddle pan, preferably something that won't require you to add a "lubricating" ingredient, like butter or oil.

As for liquid: I use almond milk, as this adds more flavor, more body, and more nutrition than water. Soy milk should work, but I haven't tried it. And for the baking mix: I use Bisquick's Heart Healthy mix, as it lacks milk and egg. There is some soy lecithin in it, but as of this time, it hasn't been a problem for me. If it ever gets to the point where it is, I'll just have to mix my own baking mix. There are plenty of instructions for a homemade baking mix online, so I won't go there now.

4. Add the milk and baking mix to the sourdough in the ratio 1 part sourdough to 1.5 parts milk, 1.5 parts baking mix. Let it rest for 15-30 minutes, to allow the sourdough to begin rising.

5. Heat your pan. Just like regular pancakes, test for heat by shaking a few drops of water on the griddle; they should roll about and jump and dance. Reduce heat slightly if needed--if you are the sort, like me, who heats on high, you'll need to cut that back when actually cooking the pancake. Medium to high-medium should do you for the baking of the injera. When the pan is heated, pour a small amount of the batter on to the hot pan and cook (as described below, beginning with #6).

This is where you must remind yourself that you are working with what is an ever-changing ingredient. What will work perfectly on day 1 will not work perfectly on day 2. The heat in your kitchen, the heat in your pan, the time you let the sourdough rise over night, the time you let the mix rise, et cetera, are a delicate balancing act.

When you finish cooking that test injera, eat it as soon as it is cool enough to eat. You are looking for it to be too thick or too gummy. "Gummy" can't really be described well, but if you ever ate a gumdrop, you know it. This method of making injera should produce, when right off the griddle, a very thin and flexible flat bread with a slightly gummy texture, but that texture should be something that you would eat even if a little gummy--you know, that "It's not perfect, but it's tasty and I can manage" sort of moment. If it's too thick--which is usually evident in the pour--add a little more liquid. If it's too gummy, add a little more baking mix and a little more liquid, and set aside another 10 minutes or so. Keep making little text injera until you are either at the point where you are satisfied with the texture, or you have invested as much of the ingredients as you are willing to invest and are accepting of the fact that this will not be a perfect batch (don't worry, though, you can still eat them, more on that later). Remember, though, the more baking mix and almond milk you add, the less intense the sourdough flavor will be.

6. Pour enough batter on the griddle to make a single, thin (about 1/8 inch) injera. Usually, your batter will land in the center and you will swirl it around to make a thin, even layer. Watch for the injera to start cooking and bubbling even as you swirl it around the pan; that's a good sign. Your pan is hot without being too hot and your batter is probably of a good consistency.



7. Let the miricle of heat, steam, and leavening do its magic. You will watch the injera carefully--small bubbles will appear and pop all over the surface. Let it all cook merrily until the top of the injera is dry. You'll recognize it. The above picture is of a dry injera. Spots that were still wet, still needing to cook, would appear brighter. It doesn't actually take very long to get to this stage.



This is a closeup of the surface, with the contrast slightly enhanced, to show you what the surface will look like. The tiny bubbles, like this, are perfect. Larger bubbles are not a problem, but the more little bubbles you have the spongier the texture will be at the end. If you have larger bubbles, try stirring down the batter to reduce the amount of air in the mixture (remember, the yeast is not the only leavening agent at work here, so it's not a tragedy if you stir it down a little). If that doesn't work, make the batter a little thinner with a little more liquid.

8. Flip the injera. Traditional injera is finished at this point, but this recipe is better with a little heat applied to both sides.



You can see the path the batter took when I swirled it in the pan along the pattern in the injera. I usually leave it flipped just long enough to let steam start penetrating this side for 5-10 seconds. Not long, just long enough to let steam start working merrily. (Note that this is the point at which you eat your test injeras, otherwise, proceed)

9. Flip the injera again and move it to a covered dish. I usually place it on a ceramic plate, fold it in half (so that the brown side is out)and cover the plate with a glass frying pan lid. Why? Because you are going to let the residual heat and steam finish cooking the injera--that's what will move the texture from slightly gummy to spongy.



Stack the cooked injera into the covered dish as you cook them. When the last one is done, set them aside and let them completely cook to room temperature. You might want to remove the lid from the dish and shake off the condensation once while it's cooling, but if you forget, it's usually no big deal. Cook up a stew and have a delish dinner.


If your Injera isn't perfect

So you let steam get you to the end and you can't stop yourself from a nibble and decide that, well, this batch came out differently than you hoped. All is not lost, so don't put that stack of food that you spent money and time to make into the garbage yet.

First, cook up the stew you were going to make and try it anyway. Very often, what doesn't work plain will be just fine once it absorbs the sauces from the stew. You can also reheat this on the griddle, and that extra bit of heat will sometimes help.

If that doesn't fix it (and it's rare for me that thiese simple steps won't rescue an imperfect batch) then you can...

• toast them in the oven and eat with sugar, butter, jam, syrup, et cetera.
  
• Slice into strips and marinate with a sauce for a very soft noodle.
  
• cut up and fry with za'atar and olive oil, or some other favorite thing, like pesto or garlic or whatever.

Only my first batches, before I stopped stirring the two-week old hootch back into the sourdough or significantly under used baking mix, were ever so awful that I couldn't finish eating what I'd made. I find this to be usable all the time, these days.

Let me know how it goes!


Note:
Sourdough should not be mixed with or rested in metal utensils--the actions of the yeast and bacteria symbosis can pick up flavors from the metal.

Roasted Eggplant

Briefly, a note about a portion of a recipe that worked well:

I ran across several recipes I would like to try on EatingWell.com, and I decided to try this one: Spiced Eggplant-Lentil Salad. Unfortunately, it depends largely on a fruit that I pretty much hate: mango. Still, it seemed easy enough to just leave the mangos off and go from there.

Unfortunately, the lentils got cooked way past the "individual lentils" stage, and so that got carried on into the usual lentil stew I make myself. Good thing I like them that way!

What I did get to try was the roasted eggplant bit:

# 4 tablespoons peanut oil or olive oil, divided
# 2 teaspoons chili powder
# 2 teaspoons curry powder
# 2 medium eggplants (3/4 pound each), trimmed and cut into 1-inch cubes

# Preheat oven to 500°F.
# Combine 1 tablespoon oil with 2 teaspoons each chili powder and curry powder in a large bowl. Add eggplant and toss well. Spread the eggplant on a large, rimmed baking sheet. Roast, stirring once halfway through, until tender, about 15 minutes.

Unfortunately, my oven takes far longer than 15 minutes to roast eggplant cubes to what I consider done, so in future, I'm going to have to remember to throw some potatoes and other vegetables in there, as well. It's a shame to waste all that fuel on a couple of eggplants.

The eggplants were very good, though, and I think I would like this even better if I subbed out the spices listed here and subbed in some of my many, many spice blends.

ETA, much time later: I tried the above with Auntie Arwen's "Sheik of the Desert Ras el Hanout" blend instead of the listed spices. OMG. So good. Must remember that.

Short note to myself: More on Fava Beans and Grit brand gravy.

So. Fava beans have to be soaked for a couple of days to really get them ready for cooking. I finally cooked some up with the skins on. 2 days soaking, long enough for them to get nice and plump and have just the hint of the little white sprout break through the brown skin. Into the pressure cooker with a little salt and a smidge of oil, and they were cooked to bursting. I was pleased that they tasted far better cooked this way than going through the misery of peeling the skins. It's still a process to prep them--but soaking them for 48 hours is a darn sight easier than soaking them for 48 hours and then needing three days to peel them.

What I was really happy about, though, was their compatibility with another gravy recipe from the Grit. I stumbled on the recipe a few days ago, and thought to try it as it was a little less fat and milk intensive. Sage and Onion gravy, to be precise. I'd love to show you the picture of the dish in the completed stage, but it was impossible to get a nice looking photo. It's such a brown dish. Really brown. Next time I make this gravy, I think I may cut back on the salt in the soy sauce--when you just don't add salt to your food, things like soy sauce can be overwhelming, and I'd hold off on the added salt in the gravy, as well--there isn't any nut milk to counteract the saltiness. I used olive oil instead of margarine. Other than that, it's a very nice and reasonably compatible dish. The nootch and soy are going to prevent it from ever being a period-like dish, but I think it could certainly be served as a compatible vegan entry at a feast that would be perfectly acceptable to an omnivore's palate. There are a few fava and onion and sage dishes out there in period literature; I may pull it together for a post on Cook-A-Long. And I'll get a picture that is far less brown. ;-)

Vegan Leek and Potatoe pie, and what appears to be the birth of the Veggie Pie Engine.

Some while ago, I made a parsnip pie in a reproduction 16th c. frying pan, which I really enjoyed.

This time, I tried a potato & leek pie in a geeze gravy and a "fake stone" 10 inch pie plate. I wish I could remember the brand name of the pie plate, but I took the label off and have not seen such a thing since. The only thing I can say about it is that I think it's some kind of cast ceramic, maybe cordierite. The point, of course, is that it's a cast stone material that is supposed to make crusts extra special crispy. I've had it for a while, and it was time to put it to use.


Leesie's Leek and Tatie Pie.


It worked nicely as a savory dinner pie, and with a salad & a glass of Shiraz, it was an easy meal. It also demonstrates the value of having a few simple recipes under your belt, because if you know how to make a basic white sauce, a basic oil-based pie crust, and perform a few simple things like prep and saute vegetables, you can easily assemble any variation on a savory vegetable pie you want to assemble.

Generative cooking, if you will, based on the concepts of the generative learning model.

This used:

• 1 recipe of basic oil pie crust: use your favorite to make a double crust pie for a plate as described below.
  
• 1 recipe of geeze gravy: use your favorite fake cheeze sauce to produce about 2-3 cups of sauce.
  
• A mess of potatoes
  
• 2-3 bunches of leeks
  
  • in short, all the leeks I had in the house plus enough potatoes to slightly overfill a 10.25 inch diameter, 1.75 inch deep pie plate
  
  
• garlic to taste--cloves if possible.
  
• salt, pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350F, or adjust according to your oven's personal foibles. The point is to have it at a temperature to bake the pie upon assembly.

Wash, clean, and slice the leeks. Set sliced leeks aside to soak in water for 30 minutes or so, to allow whatever grit may still be in them to settle out. Prepare your pie crust. Roll it out and set into a cool place to keep chilled while you are preparing the rest of the dish. Wash the potatoes, peel if desired, slice, and parboil in slightly salted water; check as needed and drain when finished. If you believe your leeks have soaked enough, saute them in some olive oil with a few cloves of garlic. Prepare your geeze gravy.

Now you are ready to assemble.

Prepare your pie pan as needed to release the pie upon completion.

Mix the sauteed leeks, the parboiled potatoes, and the geeze gravy in a large bowl. Taste for spice adjustments, adding pepper, salt, and perhaps garlic and other favorite spices and herbs, as needed. Set aside.

Place the bottom crust into the pie plate( blind bake if desired, I did not), then fill with the leek/potato/gravy mix. Cover with top crust, seal the edges, and pop into oven until done.

Serve and enjoy. This basic pie was very good with cayenne pepper sauce on it, it was good cold without additional condiments, and it was good with a pepper-heavy powder forte.

Comments on what I learned:

1. Typing it out as if it was really a recipe reinforces just how much work actually went into the dish. It's not a wonder that cooking from scratch has decreased so mightily in this day and age. They may be simple processes, but it's not really simple. It's largely why I have gotten into the habit of cooking large portions of things--that way, I have 3-5 meals for all the effort.


2. My oil crust recipe is very simple--flour, oil, liquid (usually water). I almost always use a mix of white and whole wheat flour. This time, I used straight up white flour. Ah, yeah, if it is at all possible, I will never do that again. I really like it better when it is mixed grains.


3. I really like this pie plate. The crust might have been better if the bottom crust had been blind baked slightly to decrease the inner side's moisture, but the outside of the crust was everything I expected a crispy nice crust to be, and, of course, the top crust was fine. Anyway, This is an Excellent Tool. I found it at Ace Hardware, of all places, on the clearance rack. The Ace Hardware site does not list any bakeware like it, though, so I am wondering if it is out of business. Sad.


4. It is a mild savory pie. I will be very comfortable trying a lot of spices in the sauce, to see what works, what doesn't.


5. When I made the pie, I assembled it in layers: potatoes, leeks, geeze gravy. It was good that way, or I wouldn't be recording this for my future reference. However, I would have preferred the sauce to go all through; this is the way I usually prepare savory pies. In future, mix it all up first and then place into crust.

Just as an aside, I'd like to try this with a little bit of liquid smoke--I think that it might make a nice touch. Just a very little, though.

Geeze Gravies and Grocers, part 1: Grocery stores.

Milwaukee is not a small place. I have occasionally forgotten that, because I grew up in Chicago, which, in all its immensity, easily dwarfs large numbers of the world's cities. I was reminded of the fact that Milwaukee is not all that small when I was hunting for a particular product.

There isn't much cookery going on right now, as mentioned in last post, but that has got to change. I have to eat, and when I saw my food bill this month, I realized that I can't keep this restaurant eating thing up. Sure, I have no time to cook, and yes, it's given me a reason to try a number of restaurants I've been meaning to try, but the plain fact is that I am a social servant in this culture, and so I never have the luxury of spending all the money I might feel like spending.

For a very long time, I have been trying to make a vegan, no-soy-cheese substitute sauce that will stand in for cheese in pre-1601 recipes. The standard vegan substitute in this situation is nutritional yeast, and, while the nootch certainly does impart a flavor that works and is distantly like Parmesan cheese, my blackened Laurel heart will not rest until I can come up with a sauce that will be cheese tasting and comprised of verifiable pre-1601 ingredients. You can make an argument for nootch based on the idea that yeast was certainly used for cookery in period and that it is occasionally written about in a way that you can pretend implies adding it strictly for flavor, but the plain fact, as far as I can tell, is that nootch as a specifically produced food is pretty recent on the "inventions in cookery" timeline.

This is not true of fermented tofu. Somewhere out in the world there are a bazzillion cooks who, when presented with the same challenge, might have said "Oh, yeah, I know just what to do!" and reached for their jar of doufu-ru, but I had to learn it existed. Tofu is not something I ever loved even when I was eating whatever soy jumped on to my plate, so the chances of me stumbling on this stuff became tiny, tiny, tiny the moment I realized I was going to have to cut unfermented soy out of my diet. 99.99% of the tofu on the American market is your garden variety bean curd that, as useful as it is to the general vegan/non-ovolacto piscetarian, is something that anyone with thyroid issues is not going to be able to touch.

Fermented tofu, according to this article, appears in the written record in China in 1578 CE. And so, having stumbled across the existence of the product thanks to surfing teh internetz, I stumbled around the Milwaukee area trying to find it.

And that brings me round to the point.

I suspected I could find the product in one of the many Asian markets in the area. What I wanted to know was if I could find it elsewhere--the Asian markets most likely to have a wide selection of products tend to be more on the north end of the metro area, and thus, a bit out of my way.

In Outpost? Nope. If it's not at Outpost, then there is little point in trying the more standard grocers in the area, although I did give my favorite Sentry a brief run through, just in case. Nope.

However, there is a grocer in the Milwaukee area, a place of legendary status in this metro area, a place that is considered so upscale that a number of my former acquaintances will only shop there because they imagine it adds to their "high-class" cache: Sendiks. I've only shopped there a few times, never particularly impressed either positively or negatively.

I have an impression now, though.

Sendik's sucks.

It sucks like a suck ass sucking thing of suckiness.

I swear to dog, it has got to be by the good will and generosity of the people of Milwaukee that this local chain continues to thrive--kind of like the same way people kept buying Van Heusen shirts because they were "American made" long after it had become very clear that Van Heusen had shipped its manufacturing overseas. Only a willingness to believe the bluff could explain why anyone thinks this is a chain full of unusual and finer foodstuffs for the tony crowd. That may have been true a long time ago, but it is not true now. Is there a place for Sendiks in the Milwaukee market? Sure. If they are offering a selection of things Joellen Average will never otherwise try at a price that isn't too much for her family to bear, great: I'm all for wider experiences for everyone. And if she gets her little ego boosted, well, as long as she doesn't cross my path, it's all good. But is it the establishment it's reputed to be?

Oh, hell, no. I saw nothing there that I could not find elsewhere--with one exception: the despair-inducing deli section.

Well, let's be fair--I'm not going to like anything with mango in it. I'm especially not going to like it if the "crab" turns out to be that shitty fake crab crap with the allergy-provoking egg ingredients in it. So if your special crab salad has eggs and mangoes in it, I'm going to get sick eating it.

Which I did.

If that was all, I'd shut up. But the cabbage salad sucked. The sushi--not something you'd even begin to expect would be fabulous in a grocery story--was just sad, and that was just a vegetable roll. What the hell would it have been like if there was seafood in it? I have long understood that too much wasabi ruins the balance of delicate flavors an amuse-bouche of sushi can provide, but for the first time ever, I was extraordinarily grateful for the wasabi--it changed the awful vegetable roll into a nice crispy crunchy base useful for transporting the fabulous flavor of horseradish into my mouth.

Gak. Sendik's, I am so done with you.

After that trip, I abandoned the immediate vicinity search and went to a north side Asian grocer. Milwaukee's near north side is not the nicer area, but it's not bad. A lot of rural Wisconsinites find it terrifying, and people have left my place of employment after one visit to a home on the north side, too nervous to look past their lack of familiarity with the urban experience and notice that "lack of expensive houses" does not equate with "radically terrifying and vastly dangerous area of horrific poverty."

I found the above jars at Rhino Foods. I popped it open, and, yay! It does taste remarkably like bleu cheese. Yay.


I'll soon be popping some into a non-cheese sauce, hereafter described as a geeze gravy, to determine how it will work as a flavoring agent in a non-dairy béchamel--essentially, what all vegan "cheese" sauces turn out to be. Yes, every vegan food writer talks like he or she has just invented the Best. Vegan. Cheese. Sauce. Evah. whenever they bust out their recipes (hence my thinking of them as "geeze" gravies), but all this tells me is that American cooks really lack in some basic skills. I am eternally grateful to my Junior High School Home Ec teacher for teaching me to make a white sauce. Little did I know at 12 years old that I was being given a key to a cookery kingdom.

Pennsic Eating When You Are Me

Gingered Pottage

I experimented with pressure cooking at Pennsic this year, and I can say with certainty that it is a partial success. The pressure cooker would come close to hitting standard pressure, but it never succeeded; I presume this is related to the fact that the prevailing winds cooled the pot in exactly the right ratio to the flames heating the pot to perfectly balance the heat on the edge of pressure. Foods cooked more nicely, as the lid reduces steam and heat loss even if it did not hit pressure. It would be worth dedicating a pressure cooker to the camping stuff if I can find a better cooker for home use.

We tried several things--a cooked turkey breast for Michael that was very delicious, and various "period in principle" vegetable pottages, where the idea is that you prepare a vegetable pottage comprised of period (or period like) ingredients and enjoy an easy lunch. The above pictured is the most successful, comprised of fresh garlic bulbs, a huge chunk of peeled and diced fresh ginger, carrots, potatoes, parsnips, and a rutabaga. Oh, and a bit of salt and pepper to taste. Potatoes are barely period, arriving in the occasional euro cook pot in the 16th century, but I'm not sure about the swede. The earliest reliable reference I can find is a vague description of a seventeenth century record that implies the possibility of unrecorded earlier use.

However, it was very good, and a very reasonable vegetable pottage for a Renaissance persona. If you include the gray area in your time frame, you can eat it without feeling like your place in the space-time continuum is too wretchedly disturbed. And if you can't, sub in one sweet potato and one turnip for a similar flavor and all pre-1601 edible roots.

I generally cooked meat separately for Michael, and he would add it to whatever I made. The primary problem I faced: keeping the meat. If one leaves home with rock solid frozen meat, what one brings has to be cooked within 2 or three days, depending on your cooler. Once cooked, it's only good for 2 or three days. Thus, you can only be sure of having decent meat in the cooler for 4 days, with the expectation that you might get to 6. I am seriously considering for next year precooking meats and keeping a dry-ice cooler, a fresh foods cooler, and a small defrost cooler. As bad as that might sound in terms of gear, it's only the addition of one six-pack sized cooler. I already carry 2 medium coolers to Pennsic and have done so for years.

Most years, I just shop at Giant Eagle for food when I get there, but I did pantry shopping this year--I looked at what I had on hand and just brought food from home. This worked out fine, as well--better, in some ways, as much of what was in the fridge would have had to be thrown out upon my arrival home. This fact also makes me think that the dry ice/wet ice/defrost system is going to be a better idea.

The food court at Pennsic is always something of a challenge. There is very little there for strictly vegan fare, but you can do okay if you allow eggs, dairy, or both into your vegetarianism or your piscetarianism. I did find myself in the position of "eat dairy or starve" a couple of times, so I tried the spinach wrap at Once Again/Nobleman's Inn and the Spinach Pie at Fruity Cobbler. These are the things I ate and can recommend as edible that can fit with a picetarian + dairy food style:

*French Fries from various vendors: I found I liked the ones at Nobleman/Once Again's best.

*Spinach Wrap from the same tent.

*Falafel from Fruity Cobbler. Spinach Pie was okay, but I preferred the Spinach Wrap, above.

*Shrimp and Vegetable stir fries from Delights of Cathy--be aware, however, that they do cook everything in the same woks. Their portion sizes have also gone down.

*Vegetable dishes from Cock & Bull (sauce may be butter or margarine, I didn't ask. Having already had feta cheese by that time, it hardly mattered which was used when faced by my huge-o-matic hunger).

There were other dishes I could have tried, but generally, if I was up in the food court and faced with uncontrollable hunger, I gravitated to the french fries, being the best way to control the hunger and not have to fret about how it was cooked.

A European Mock Meat. Of a Sort. Part 2 (a).

Or, a Sort-of Roman Vegetarian Patty.


Vinegar, Wine, Carrots, Lovage, Mint: some of the components cooked up into patties

This is a more experimental version of Compatible Meat Substitute/Mock Meats based on Joanna Vaught's Veggie Burger Engine.

I like "Veggie Burger Engine" much better that "DIY Veggie Burger Formula," but then, I am steeped in geektitude. :-) Major. Geeque-ti-tude. Call the list of suggested contents and proportions what you will, this is the place that I've been starting.

My goal this time was to address wheat allergies. This recipe is based on several receipts found in Apicius, so it'll be Quite. Roman. in its flavor profile when made to my satisfaction. The primary ingredients I used are listed in Apicius and the burger recipe itself is based on Apicius #31 (A sauce for oysters and shellfish), #124 ({Carrots} another way), #201 (Another gruel -- a receipt that includes chickpeas, barley, and vegetables), and #207 (Beans and chickpeas). The only non-Roman human food item in this recipe would be the oats. According to the texts I consulted (The Natural History of Pompeii and Food in the Ancient World), oats are considered fodder in Rome. The barbarians to the north ate them, but the Romans generally did not.

Roman-inspired Protein Patty/Veggie Burger/Mock Meat:

1.5 Cups cooked barley (1)
1.5 Cups cooked chickpeas
2 cups cooked carrots
3/4 cup oat flour
1/4 cup white wine
1-3 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar (2)
1/4 cup olive oil
1 T of honey (period) or 1/2 T of simple sugar syrup (vegan) (3)
sprig of fresh mint
2 sprigs of fresh lovage
3/4 t of ground cumin
1/2 t of ground pepper

When I mixed this together, it was still very wet. Next time I try this, I might try reducing the liquid involved. Since that was not an option, I added:

1/2 cup chickpea/fava flour
1 t cumin seed
1 t lovage seed
1 t ground pepper
and 1/2 t salt

Formed into patties and popped into a 450 oven.


(1) I don't recall precisely where I found this, but there was an instruction in Apicius to soak the barley overnight. I did so, and I got a much softer barley than I usually get in the rice cooker. I am accustomed to a very chewy product out of the cooker, and a soft product only after boiling in a stew for serious swathes of time. This was just right--a barley that was not so chewy that it seemed underdone, and not so soft that it was like mush.

(2) The vinegar I used was a locally made vinegar rather than a commercial product. Vinegar produced by a factory will have a much higher acetic acid content. This is why the amount is flexible. Furthermore, a white wine vinegar and possibly a malt vinegar would also work well here.

(3) There is a great debate among vegans and those who consider themselves vegans but are not according to the strict definition. Honey, an insect byproduct, is not vegan-it's considered an animal product by many a vegan. Others, who take the view that a bee is not an animal, don't have a problem with honey. I know bees to be insects, and so I do use honey. But then, I am not a vegan. Simple sugar syrup isn't something every period cook had in the kitchen (why waste loaf sugar making a sugar solution when there is honey about?) every day, but your other typical choices for a liquid sugar, agave syrup or maple syrup, are new world in origin.

I'll have to share results tomorrow. They're completed they're cooked and been nibbled at, but it's way past my exhaustion level and I'm off to bed. All I can say for sure at this time is that they did hold together and Miguel-san found them "good, like falafel."

A European Mock Meat. Of a Sort. Part 1.

No. I didn't suddenly discover that Western Europeans before 1601 regularly substituted fried turnip circles for meat or had managed to figure that bulgur is a marvy sub for finely chopped meat or made barley burgers for Lent (although those are all reasonable choices for dealing with the meat-free option when working with a free flowing minced meat recipe).

No, this is about making a solid chunk o' sumptin that can serve in place of a solid chunk o' meat. This is about veggie burgers from foods and spice choices appropriate to our period.

This is the first of several veggie burgers I'm making based on Joanna Vaught's recipe. These veggie burgers feature ingrediants known to Western Europeans, and so, while they can not be considered something anyone would have made, they can serve as something that is SCA compatible--a sure protein with the flavors of the age.



The primary veggie and protein in these burgers.
Why no picture of the actual burgers? Keep reading.

The recipe:

2 cups chopped, sauteed leeks
1.5 cups cooked black eyed peas
1.5 cups cooked brown rice
3/4 cups vital wheat gluten
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 almond milk
2 tablespoons red wine
2 teaspoons ginger
1 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon grains of paradise
1/2 teaspoon salt

*I chose the spice mix based on a couple of recipes for leeks from Du fait de cuisine (France, 1420), specifically, "White Leeks" and "Sauce Piquant." This is an obvious choice, of course, as the predominant vegetable in this recipe are the leeks.

*The long term prep work doesn't need much attention--a slow cooker for the black eyed peas, a rice cooker for the rice. I like to think of it as handing the ingrediants to a couple of servants and letting them take care of the actual cooking. ;-) Drain the black eyed peas before use.

*In reviewing a mass of leek recipes for the creation of this particular SCA compatible protein, I frequently ran across the instruction to soak the leeks first. I last used leeks with a mock cheese sauce for a recipe I did not blog--the recipe was very good, but the thing was gritty. That was a shock to me, as I had never before run into that problem. Michael suggested that I soak the leeks next time, and since there were so many recipes that include this instruction, I'm going to emphasize this as a non-skippable step in period instruction. Chop the leeks and soak them. This will filter out the grit. I promise. Let them soak for 1/2 hour or so, then drain & sautee them in as much olive oil as is needed.

When you are ready to make the burgers, pre-heat your oven to 400F. If, like me, you use cast iron for cooking, place it into the oven to preheat, as well.

Mix the dry ingredients in one bowl. Mix the veggies, rice, beans in another, then mix the dry ingredieants into that. Now add the liquids and mix it up well to get the gluten activated. If you want, grab a masher and mash the whole mess up a bit. Note that warm beans and rice will get the gluten activating right off, so be prepared to work fast if you are using warm ingrediants.

Form them into patties and place them into the pans and let them bake. Flip them at least once during the baking process. The recipe I am building on suggests 20 minutes a side, but I found I needed much longer, and ended up flipping them every 20 minutes until they were done in accordance with my tastes.

I was initially disappointed in them, because while still warm from the oven, they tasted very strongly of the VWG. Which, as I have said, is not bad, but I didn't throw in all that other good stuff just so I could eat something that tasted like bread. However, after an overnight refrigeration, the VWG flavor disappeared and what I had was yummy, yummy veggie burgers that did not fall appart and which reheated nicely in the microwave. And that would be why there are no pictures--I didn't take a picture when I thought the recipe wasn't going to work in this particular format, and next day, ate them all up before I could get a picture of the leftovers.

Seitan Bake part one

::rough draft version::

So, I've been thinking about mock meats for the SCA cook. There are plenty of Lenten recipes and so forth in period cookery, but once you cross to veganism or vegetarianism, the substitution of fish for beef is no longer a possibility.

There are no "meat analogues" in western Euro cookery before 1601, as far as I know. One could speculate on the use of certain vegetables or nuts or fungi as part of a meatless medieval diet, but I have not noticed anything that describes such a use. In eastern cuisine, meat analogues come into wide use with the spread of Buddhism. Pre-1601, both tofu and seitan are used in various Oriental cuisines specifically as meat replacements. Thus, both of these substitutes, while not in use in Europe at this time, do exist in cookery in our time period for the purpose of replacing meat. If you wish to use a meat analogue to create a vegetarian version of a beef/chicken/pork/lamb/fish dish, these would be a good choice.

I, myself, enjoy meat analogues, and find that they are very nice forserving as the source of chewiness when experimenting with sauces. However, tofu is something I rarely eat because of the effect of unfermented soy on my body. The primary fermented soy-based analogue, tempeh, does not appear in any written records before the 19th century.

Seitan, however, is a wheat based meat analogue believed to have originated in ancient China, AND it is easily made by the home cook.

So, for my first medievaloid mock meat, I decided to alter Joanna Vaught's standard seitan recipe with the typical spice profile as usually found in medieval sauces. Out with the veggie broth, nutritional yeast, and so forth, and in with a red wine sangria, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, & long pepper.

One reason I particularly like Joanna's base recipe is because she adulterates the traditional 100% vital wheat gluten (VWG) recipe with Bob's Red Mills chickpea/fava bean flour. Any Scadian cook worth her salt knows that these two legumes are proven period, and most nutritionists still recommend the practice of complementary protiens. The VWG plus the legume flour works to create such an improved product while still staying in that pre-1601 range we love so well.

But after that, it's all in your spices. I used sangria and olive oil for the wet ingrediants, VWG, chickpea flour, and the above mentioned spices for the dry mixture, blended it all together, rolled it into sausage shapes, and steamed it in the rice cooker for an hour.

And what flavor sensation did I get out of the pot?

Something that tasted remarkably like unsweetened cinnamon bread.

:sigh:

Well, I certainly did not expect it to taste like beef or pork, but I was hoping the wine would give it a little more of a stewed flavor. And, too, I know that basic seitan like thise is a first step.

So, now, I have to decide what sort of second flavoring treatment I am going to give it. I've got a texture and a flavor profile that should work with many a medieval meat recipe... Now to see how it subs in.