Coconut Bread!

One year later. 
I am now very confident when baking with yeast. It's simple! Fun! I haven't bought bread in a year. This is weird because I used to go through a loaf of sliced bread a week.
Today I made coconut buns without following a specific recpie. It just looked right. I wish Algorithms were this easy. I've read that baking bread has to be very exact, but I think I use more intuition than measurement when I make successful bread. Perhaps I'm just not very particular about my bread?



The recipe goes something like this:

Ingredients
750 g flour (I used 650 g white flour, 100 g whole wheat flour)
20 g active dry yeast
100-150 ml whipping cream (can possibly substitute with cow or coconut milk)
100-150 ml water (not really sure)
Unsweetened shreds of 1 actual coconut (see note below)
100 g white sugar (make it 200 g if you like sweet buns)

Note: My mum bought a coconut and my sister and I drank the coconut juice. After throwing the coconut (in a plastic bag) onto a brick repeatedly until it cracked, we cut up the flesh into bite-sized chunks, and blended it with 2 cups of warm water (60 degrees C?). After straining the slurry, we ended up with some delicious fatty coconut milk and a lot of shredded coconut. The coconut milk separated in the fridge, and it seems sensible to make coconut buns with the coconut milk, but I had to use up the whipping cream that had been in the freezer for a while. The coconut milk will probably be used for curry tomorrow.

Method

1. Microwave water for 15-30 seconds, or until it feels a bit warmer than finger temperature.
2. Mix everything except coconut shreds together in an enormous bowl.
3. Knead for some 10 minutes. At first, your situation will seem hopeless as there does not seem to be enough liquid, and flour will start sticking to the side of your bowl. After a few minutes of vigorous kneading, however, you will realize that the dough ball has actually become sticky! Now, it will suck up all that flour!
4. Throw in coconut shreds. They add a bit of moisture so you might want to throw in some more flour too.
5. Leave to rest (in a plastic bag if you want) for 2 hours. If it's a bit chilly indoors, you can leave it in your car. If you do not have a car, leaving it out for 2-3 hours is fine.
6. Scoop out lumps of dough, roll (without squeezing too hard), and put onto a foil-lined baking sheet. The bread I make apparently never sticks to foil after it's done baking, which is pretty neat. You can keep the balls of dough about 1 cm apart from each other if you want the buns to touch. If you don't want them to touch, keep them 5 cm apart.
7. Let rise for 1 hour.
8. Paint on some coconut milk and sprinkle more coconut/sugar/sesame/whatever on top.
9. Stick a small container of water (50 ml) on the bottom rack of oven. This makes steam.
10. Bake at 350 F for 25 minutes in an unpreheated oven, middle rack.

Results

SO FLUFFY!! Look at the wonderful crumb!



My mum said it rivals the buns sold at the Asian supermarket nearby. Or, you know, in those Chinese bakeries in Chinatown.



Here is a bun. It is beautiful.



Had a cookie butter (from Trader Joe's) sandwich. You can taste a hint of coconut texture in every bite. The bun is not very sweet, which is fine.

Crispy Stuff!

As a backup to my (no, it's not failed! It's just...premature) croissants, I decided to make some crispy cracker-crisp things because I accidentally bought too much flour.

 I used this recipe but instead of using poppy seeds, I used wheat germ to make these extra wheaty. I suppose they're pretty healthy, as there is mainly whole wheat flour, wheat germ and sesame seeds. Unfortunately, because of the black sesame seeds, they are really not photogenic. Basically, you bake a huge, thin, rolled out piece of dough. Then you break it into crackers. Next time I will probably just poke lines with a fork so that when I break them, they will be more evenly-shaped (or, I could just give someone a huge sheet of cracker with cut lines and then these crackers can be a thing cool kids bring to school for snack. Haha.). My sister shoveled this stuff in her mouth along with the risotto leftovers from yesterday (she eats risotto now! Surprise surprise!).

 Incidentally, my mum bought some "Chinese Spaghetti Sauce" (its Chinese name is "sauce to mix with noodles or rice"). With a name so funny, who can resist using it? There's a lot of oil in the product, along with cubes of something that tasted like sardines. It turns out that it's tofu and gluten, and it tastes absolutely delicious! The name cracks me up every time. It would be even more hilarious if it had been spelled as "Chinese Spaghetty Sauce".

Ma Hua ("Sesame Flowers")

I really don't know what these are called in English, but the translation of 麻花 (ma2hua1) is "Sesame Flowers". I suppose "Braided Twists with Sesame Seeds" is a better description of the food product though. In the past, I've only eaten the mini version of these ma2hua1, since that was the only kind sold at Kamman, and I don't recall ever eating these in China/HK. I don't think it ever occurred to my mum to buy these for us, actually.

Thus, I feel quite indifferent to these crunchy, crispy, ultra unctuous (Don't ask me how, but oil was leaking out of the neatly-sealed plastic, into the tin, and even out of the tin) sweet fried pieces of dough studded with white sesame seeds.

They've a hint of ginger and are quite sweet, which is not what I'd expected from ma2hua1. The ones I've had in the past (and generally all fried crispy Chinese street food) is savoury, so this is a surprise.

This is another of those traditional Wuhan foods, but again, I'm not sure whether this huge sweet version is authentic. My mum told me about when she was younger, she used to buy ma2hua1, the size of her finger, for for a few cents at street stalls. That size seems more appropriate considering the ma2hua1 I've eaten in the past. Instead of having 2 x 6 strands of dough being twisted together, it was only two strands of dough (Well, technically one strand, since it would be folded in half, and the two ends would be looped around each other).

I think I prefer the finger-sized seaweed flavoured (or even just the original flavoured) ma2hua1 that I've had before. Just my preference.

Hot Dry Noodles (Wuhan Specialty)

In exchange for providing my cousin with ongoing hours of ACT and TOEFL prep, my uncle bought me food which my dad brought back food from his trip to China. There is nothing I'd rather have, especially as the food they got is just unobtainable here in the U.S., or it's really expensive, or the shipping fee costs more than the actual food product. Wuhan is a city in Hubei province, and my uncle and his family live there, as does a local culture of pretty delicious food. My mum always reminds me that Wuhan cuisine is quite spicy and numbing - 麻辣 (ma2 la4).

Today at lunch, my mum made some of the Hot Dry Noodles, 热干面 (re4 gan1 mian4 - it's literally called "Hot Dry Noodles" in Chinese), from a package of them that we got from my uncle. Of course, normal Hot Dry Noodles are eaten in dingy little restaurants or at street food stands in Wuhan. I remember this one time we went to my mum's friend's restaurant when I was really young, and the Hot Dry Noodles were too spicy for me, so I didn't really appreciate them.

Despite the fact that we didn't eat the straight-from-the-pot-in-a-cheap-Wuhan-eatery Hot Dry Noodles, the packaged version still reminded me of those sultry summers when I was in China, forced to eat Chinese food all the time, and being fussed over because we were "foreign". It's actually pretty funny because once, at one of those banquet dinners, my relatives ordered some fries for me and my brother because we refused to eat the Chinese dishes. The fries ended up being extremely spicy, due to the fact that the oil that the restaurant used was spicy. It's pretty funny, now that I think of it.

The Hot Dry Noodles came with packets of sauce that usually is homemade at those roadside eateries. One is a sort of chili oil with carrots and ginger, another is sesame sauce (sesame paste and sesame oil), and the other is soy sauce. The Hot Dry Noodles today were so spicy that I only used half the package of chili oil, and I had to eat a lot of bread on the side. They weren't as numbing as I remember them to be, which is a good thing. I don't really like the numbing sensation, even though it's always present in Ma Po DouFu - ma2 po2 dou4 fu3 (麻婆豆腐). I think that my brother was more zealous about these noodles than I was; he sighed that these reminded him of Wuhan. I don't feel too much nostalgia from eating these, which is a little bizarre. Even though it doesn't look sanitary (food inspections?! Psh, yeah right), if you ever go to Wuhan, you should try these! They're probably not going to be plated neatly, and the cook may tell you to hurry up and pay the few yuan already, but Hot Dry Noodles are one of the most famous dishes in Wuhan (this statement is backed up by my cousin's response to a TOEFL Speaking question).

Random Blahs.

I'm actually going to go out to dinner later, but I'm not going to be back in time to update... so tomorrow I shall update about that. Instead, I'm just going to post a few random pictures.

Whole wheat spaghetti soup with onions and garlic and green peppers. And tomato, of course. And clumps of Boca burger. I have officially finished cooking Boca burgers and I will never consume another Boca burger in my life. I am completely sick of them. I like plain tofu better. Or even plain chickpeas.

:)

I found some Airheads candy in the food drawer. From 2007. Or maybe it was 2006. I don't really know. So I unwrapped them all, rolled them into a tyre shape [hey, it fits the theme of Cars] and threw it into the garden. Now I have a nice piece of space in the drawer for other food!

Yup - the sesame chocolate cookies I made a few days ago... This time I microwaved them for 40 seconds, flipped each over, and microwaved them for another 17 seconds. My sister actually liked them! She said that they looked and sort of tasted like fudge. Which is great, since fudge is very much appreciated in the world. Which is why everyone says, "Oh. Fudge!" when something goes wrong, because, by calling fudge into the world, all problems shall disappear.

Sesame Chocolate Cookies!

In the book Chocolate by Nick Malgieri, I found a recipe for almond chocolate cookies on page 179. Actually, they're called "Sicilian Easter Hearts", although after my tweaking, they are official not such an object. I also didn't bake the cookies. I just microwaved them.

Ingredients:

1.5 cups of flour and cocoa powder. Use whatever ratio you want.

1 cup of ground sesame - We happen to have ground sesame [a.k.a. sesame flour?] at home. You may have ground almonds.

Ginger powder

0.5 cups of honey

0.5 tbsp baking soda

Some sugar and/or instant coffee powder. Just 'cuz.

Water

So, you just mix everything except the water. Then, add water at about a tablespoon at a time until you get something that resembles dough. This dough must be really dry, but it also has to be malleable. In other words, you can roll balls of it in your hands without it crumbling. If it gets too sticky, too bad, you're out of luck :P.

I stuck mine in the fridge for easy slicing. Then, I sliced three of them [small pieces] and microwaved it for 30 seconds. Seeing that it was still a tad gooey, I microwaved it again for 20 seconds. This time, two of the cookies turned out fantastic, but the third one was a bit too hard in the middle. Either way, this is way more efficient than actually baking the cookies. I'm not sure how many these yield, since I have the rest of the log in the fridge, but the book says that it "makes about 15 large cookies".

Although eating this raw had the same texture as... say, almond paste, I think I prefer it cooked. I prefer it cookied. Haha. It's a bit too dry. So, after microwaving, I prodded them, and they were really poofy and looked like mini pastries, even though they were technically "low fat" [technically, there is a ton of fat in sesame and cocoa powder. However, the fat in those substances pales in comparison to the % of fat in oil or butter or cream cheese, which is basically 100%]. They even tasted like some sorta cakey-cookie thing! The cookie above was really moist in the middle, as you can see. I couldn't really taste much cocoa powder, due to the fact that there was three times as much ground sesame as there was cocoa powder... so I think this leans towards the more "exotic" and "non-traditional" flavourings of cookies, which is cool. I couldn't taste much ginger spice though :(, which is a bit of a letdown. Guess I'll add more next time. I think I'm going to experiment with the microwave a lot more now... since I have proven that it does NOT produce inferior cookies. I mean, the past few years, the microwave has yielded disasters concerning cookies... but this was a nice change.

Dinner

Somehow, my mum made even better mantou today.

"They look like the ones we buy! You can sell these to the Chinese store [Kamman] for them to sell!", exclaimed my sister in Chinese.

And yes they do. They taste better though, as I have stated before. This time, my mum made layers with sesame seeds, which added a nice crunch.

Look at the bubbles pockets!

The smooooooth ones.

I also had some split pea soup. Turns out that I don't really like tumeric that much... the soup wasn't bad though.

Chinese Version of Mochi!

When my grandpa came to visit us, he brought over a few kilos of food [he's still here; he's going back in September], and among them was this sesame mochi. Mochi is this Japanese candy, made out of rice flour. Inside the rice flour is a flavoured filling, such as sesame paste, red bean paste, green tea flavoured cream, or chocolate [in the U.S.]. The one my grandpa brought isn't exactly Japanese mochi; the rice flour exterior was kinda lumpy and dry and of course, it was manufactured in China. The sesame had a very peculiar taste. There was a modicum of sourness. This was rather disturbing, because sour sesame filling can only mean one thing. There was a random ingredient!!! Oh no! Though, if China had a non-corrupt FDA, I wouldn't be blogging about this mochi right now. Then again, I'd rather be healthy than have sour-sesame-inflicted-cancer. However, I'm not a hypochondriac...so I digress. Anyway. One funny thing is that the wrapper said "injoy". It's pretty funny, as I have two friends named "Joy", and I suppose the mochi would be in them, if they consume it...
I love looking at Chinese translations into English, because they are truly. Fail. I'm probably going to blog about that, one day, too. All I needa do is go to the Asian food store at some point in the near future...
I didn't know my camera was capable of going into such detail. I suppose natural light is way better than flash. Anyway, you guys can see the calluses on my hand from doing push ups on the track. :) I've just realised how much I love sports... even though I've never really looked at myself as "athletic". I mean, I love XC, track, badminton, archery, table tennis, parkouring, climbing trees, pole vaulting [which I tried yesterday and today, probably for the first and last times ever]...
I just realised that none of that stuff is "big" in the U.S. The U.S. likes American football and baseball. Oh, and swimming, because of Phelps.

Bagel CD...

Bagels.

Badge-alls.

Seriously, the first time I encountered this word was in HK when I was... 11? and I was at the Central Public Library, and I saw this logic puzzles book, and it posed this puzzle:

"Using three straight cuts, cut a bagel into 7 pieces." [At least, I think this is what it is. I've kinda forgotten.]

Before that, I had never heard of a bagel in my life. When I told SVC, she looked at me blankly, going "Badge-all???"

After I spelled it to her, she burst out laughing, in typical SVC fashion. "OHHHH BAYYY-GUL!!" In all honesty, the word "bagel" sounded so foreign to me.

The first time I tasted a bagel was ... my second day in the U.S., breakfast time at the Summerfield Suites in Parsippany [I think?]. It was so weird, because breakfast was so. Different.

So. Bagels now.

The cliche response is cream cheese.

Then it may be butter. Or bread. Or yeast. Flour. Cinnamon/raisin/"everything"/sesame etc. - all those cliche flavours.

Then PARMESAN! A didn't believe that they existed until I showed her this picture:

And I remember eating them [they're from Costco] a few years ago, but I don't eat them anymore due to the insipid fact that there is HFCS in them... makes me sad.

But I'm okay...because I somehow acquired a bagel CD. No kidding. I don't even know where I got it from, since when I play the CD, it is ... eh, not my type of music, and it's in a language that I do not understand. At all. There's this puppet show on it too [there's a video portion, too, on it].
So I think I'll use it as decoration now, since it has more visual appeal than audio.


Cute, hm?