Homemade baklava!

I had leftover phyllo after having made the me-friendly Can't Get Knafeh of It chocolate bar, so after slicing an additional 70g off for the purposes of making a second bar if I so choose, I was left with 340g or about 75% of a full recipe's worth of phyllo for Fifteen Spatulas' homemade Baklava recipe. I'd made it in the past — substituting in a mix of pumpkin and sunflower seeds for the nuts — and was very pleased with the results. Kara, however, is not a fan of sweetened citrus, so she asked that that component be omitted in the future. Here are the ingredient amounts and substitutions I used for this reduced-sized batch (which was baked in two loaf pans, rather than one large pan):

Filling (of which 150g went unused, so everything here can be reduced to 70%)

• 500g raw, hulled, unsalted sunflower seeds
• 1 ½ tsp ground cinnamon
• ¼ tsp fresh-ground cardamom (husks removed)
• ¼ tsp fresh-ground cloves
• ¼ tsp salt

Pastry component

• 340g phyllo dough
• 95g vegan butter, melted

Syrup

• ¾ cup water
• ¾ cup sugar
• ½ cup honey
• 1 cinnamon stick

I think I'd like to try halving the amount of sugar in the sugar/honey syrup next time, since the dessert's a bit sweeter than I typically prefer, but I admit that the overall flavour profile has mellowed since we had our first slices last night after dinner. It seems less sweet today.

Just can't get (vegan, allergen-free) knafeh

It's been a long time since I first heard of the "Viral Dubai" (ugh)/FIX Dessert Can't Get Knafeh of It chocolate bar. Obviously, a bar that uses tree nuts, sesame and dairy wasn't going to work well for me regardless, so I was happy to see that there were creators like Emmymade who were sharing their homemade recipes for the dessert. Emmy's video in particular confirmed that the textural experience alone was worth attempting to adapt this treat to my sensitivities at least once.

So I had Caty order the Fidqiog Chocolate Bar Mold for me when she recently had Amazon Prime. I also made sure I had phyllo dough on-hand, a jar of pumpkin seed butter, cocoa butter, dairy-free chocolate and a good quality plant-based butter.

Caty got the mold to me at Em and Austin's housewarming party this past Saturday and I had the time to be able to assemble a bar today. Here are the ingredients I used:

Pumpkin Seed Cream (Pistachio Cream substitute)

• 55g 42g cocoa butter
• 125g 95g pumpkin seed butter
• 25g 20g icing sugar
• additional sugar to taste (I added 4g 3g granulated sugar to the complete filling mix)

Crispy, feuilletine-inspired kaitifi

• 30g 23g vegan butter
• 25g 20g granulated sugar
• 70g 53g knife-shredded phyllo pastry

Also

• 250g dairy-free chocolate

Method:

1. In a double boiler, melt cocoa butter over medium heat. Add pumpkin seed butter and stir until well incorporated. Sift in icing sugar. Stir well. Set aside.
2. In a shallow pan, melt vegan butter over medium-low heat. Add sugar and watch until sugar becomes golden. Take off heat and immediately add kaitifi/shredded phyllo pastry. Toss pastry to coat. Set aside to cool.
3. Taste a small amount of the golden kaitifi. If it's not crispy, spread the pastry shreds out on a parchment-lined baking sheet and bake at 350°F until golden brown. Set aside to cool.
4. When kaitifi is cooled down, stir into the pumpkin seed cream. Taste. Add additional sugar as necessary to sweeten the filling as desired.
5. In a double boiler, melt chocolate over medium-low heat, stirring as necessary to ensure smoothness. If required, temper chocolate.
6. Pour chocolate into mold, then turn mold to coat the insides. Allow to set for approximately 5 minutes. Pour excess chocolate back out into a separate bowl.
7. Cool mold in the fridge for approximately 5 minutes to set the top and sides of the chocolate bar.
8. Spoon filling into bottom of the mold. Chill for an additional 5-15 minutes to set the filling.
9. Pour the remaining chocolate over the bottom of the bar (the top of the mold), scrape off excess. Chill for approximately 5 minutes until set.

This makes a big bar of chocolate. Matt, Kara and I each had ⅓ of a row (each row is ⅕ of the total bar) for each of the two servings we shared today.

I really enjoy the way the flavours and textures come together here, and I think adding a hard-crack caramel to the kaitifi component is the way to go; it adds extra crunch to the experience, which I think saves it from resembling the "Shredded Wheat" element that others have noted. Also, I think it was the better choice that I went with a "stiffer" filling than some of the versions I've seen. This is sweet without being cloying, crispy, crunchy, gooey without being messy and blends flavours well. I could see me making this again, despite the amount of work it takes.

Next day edit: I forgot to note that I had 85g of filling left over when I made up the original batch, which I'm calculating to be about 25% of the total, so I've adjusted the filling amounts to be 75% of what I used.

Mini loaves of bread!

Here's the recipe I used as a reference. I ended up subbing in 1/3 of the flour with whole wheat flour, as well as 15 g of vital wheat gluten. I also used melted margarine in place of the olive oil.

Butter Chicken Pizza!

I've been using up leftover butter chicken (when such a thing exists — this one's made with KFI's Vegan Butter Chicken Sauce) by using The Kitchn's No Knead Bread recipe as a jumping-off point for making a batch of pizza dough (replacing ⅓ of the a.p. flour with whole wheat flour), putting that on a sheet pan, and topping it with the yummy-ness.

It's been such a hit that it gets made fairly often around here these days.

Beef Birria Tacos!

Made up a pot of beef birria last Friday, using Joshua Weissman's Beef Quesa Tacos as my jumping-off point. My adaptations included having all 3 lbs. of beef be beef rib "finger meat", using 6 guajillo chiles in place of all of the chiles, freshly-ground black pepper in place of the peppercorns, and replacing the fresh oregano with half the amount of dried oregano. The flavour is amazingly complex and satisfying.

The picture above is of the beef birria served on half-corn and half-flour tortillas, with quick-pickled shallots (salt, sugar, and lime juice were added) and fresh cilantro. This is one of my favourite things to have ever eaten.

Pumpkin doughnuts with coconut glaze

I've had Pro Home Cooks/Brothers Green Eats/Mike G's "Healthy" Doughnut recipe on my to-do list ever since it was published a couple of years ago. The promise of a good, but not overly sweet, doughnut glaze was tempting. I took the occasion of Caty's birthday a couple of days ago to make my own version (as, obviously, mine cannot include butter, milk or eggs).

Kabocha Pumpkin Doughnut

• one 398 mL can pureed pumpkin (the stuff in my cupboard happened to be organic)
• 4 T (60 g) vegan margarine, melted
• 1 cup (250 mL) hemp milk
• 1 T (15 mL) honey
• 1 T yeast
• the equivalent of 2 eggs in egg replacer powder
• 5 cups of flour
• ½ t salt

I melted the margarine and added the room-temperature hemp milk, pulling the mixture off the heat. It was lukewarm at this point and I added the honey and stirred in the yeast. Into the large bowl of my stand mixer, I added the flour, egg replacer powder and salt and used the dough hook to stir it together. Once the yeast mixture had formed a sponge, I added it and the pumpkin to the flour mixture and began the mixer on low. The original amount of flour called for in the recipe has nowhere near adequate, so I kept adding flour until I ended up with a wet dough, banking on it needing to rest to stop being sticky. I allowed that to proof, covered, for about an hour, then punched it down and began cutting out the doughnuts, laying them on parchment squares on a baking sheet for easy removal. Those were allowed to proof further, for an hour, under a floured cloth. For this batch, I fried the two "extra" doughnuts day-of, and allowed the remaining 12 to do a slow-rise overnight in the fridge. I can't say that the pumpkin really brings anything to this dough, unfortunately. It makes the dough denser than my ideal doughnut would be, but could be a good fritter base if I wanted to experiment with spicing it in the future.

As for the glaze, I adapted the original recipe as well.

Coconut Glaze (makes two batches worth)

• ~1 cup (half a 498 mL jar) coconut manna
• 1 tsp gelatin
• 1 T hemp milk, plus enough to get to desired consistency
• ¾ cup icing sugar
• pinch of salt
• ~1 tsp vanilla

I'd tried to use the recommended amount of sugar, but found that it was barely sweet, and would definitely not be sweet enough to make the doughnut worth eating, so I had to bump up the amount considerably. I am, however, a huge fan of using the coconut manna as a "filler"; it makes the glaze coconut-flavoured without being overpowering. I also found that the gelatin didn't cause the glaze to set up as nicely as it did for the original recipe — it was still a bit gel-like even when "dry". That said, I'd absolutely work with this again, seeing about omitting the gelatin entirely next time, and maybe using a coconut milk (or citrus juice!) instead of the hemp milk.

This was a decent "start" towards something really good, but I can't claim that I thought it was a great substitute for a traditional yeasted doughnut.

Refined-sugar free matcha cake!

A recent trip to the local "hippie" store saw me bringing home my first ever tin of matcha powder, which called to mind the green tea castella cakes which were ubiquitous in our old neighbourhood. I thought I'd try adapting the refined-sugar free cake recipe I developed several years ago. This version, then, uses:

• ⅔ c. coconut milk
• ½ t. apple cider vinegar
• 1 c. pitted dates (the Medjool ones were unavailable), soaked and drained
• ⅓ c. avocado oil
• 2 t. vanilla extract
• 1 c. packed all-purpose flour
• 1 T. matcha powder
• ¾ t. baking powder
• ½ t. baking soda
• ¼ t. salt

This cake was baked in a greased loaf pan for about 20 minutes at 325° F. The cake is very lightly sweet, tender and fluffy. It's a hit!

Snow day, so cookies!

Kara helped me bake up a batch of Mrs. Fields Chocolate Cream-Filled Hearts from the (very) out-of-print Mrs. Fields Cookie Book: 100 Recipes from the Kitchen of Mrs. Fields, or, at least, I think that's the book this recipe came from. Caty got it as part of a Scholastic order back when we were in elementary school, and I've long-since photocopied out the recipes I liked most. Strangely, I think this is the first time anyone in our family has made this recipe, but it's a keeper!

My only complaint has more to do with the butter substitute I use than the recipe itself. I've been using Earth Balance Soy Free in my baking so that I don't risk causing digestive troubles for myself, but it doesn't handle as well as butter does: it's much softer, which means that any attempts I've taken at making a sugar cookie (as in this case), results in very crumbly dough. I find I have to let it warm considerably before there's any structural cohesion while raw. When it's baked, it makes a good cookie, but getting it there is a task!

I also used a mini can of coconut milk for the heavy cream, and added a pinch of salt to the dough and the ganache.

These are good!

Much Better

This cross-section is from the second batch, following the two aforementioned letter-fold double turns and a full rise. These are the best homemade croissants I've made.

Kinda-Fail: Homemade, From-Scratch Croissants

It looks like my technique for attempting to make dairy-free croissants hadn't changed in over a decade. I'd make up a batch of puff pastry, roll it, and end up with under-baked dough in the resultant pastries. I've recently been following YouTuber Alex French Guy's croissant series, and realized early on that I wasn't going to bother with the more technically-intensive steps (like building a lamination device), but that I could reasonably aim for his recipe technique, which involves starting with a yeast bread and laminating that. I've had great success with the bread recipe from The Complete Guide to Cooking Techniques, and wanted to try using that dough as my jumping-off point. And so it was, with Kara home with a cold and all of us house-bound with blizzard conditions yesterday, I worked on a croissant dough.

Sadly, I suspect I didn't give the dough enough time to rest between rollings, and found that the croissants weren't "flaky", so much as pleasantly bread-like with odd cracker-like leaves. I gave the remaining half-batch of dough another two letter-fold turns this morning in the hopes that I'll have created a flakier pastry. We shall see. If this doesn't work as intended, I think I'll modify my technique so that I'm brushing or rubbing the fat between the layers, rather than trying to encase it. I'm thinking that the soy-free margarine I'm using, because it's softer than butter when refrigerated, just doesn't have the structure I need to keep it manageable, and that's affecting the texture.

Our first-ever batch of scratch-made homemade dumplings!

Yesterday's cool weather and the general sense of mild exhaustion that came following a two-night-visit from Caty at our new house led us to finally getting around to making homemade dumplings.

We followed China Sichuan Food's Dumpling Wrappers recipe for the skins, portioning the dough into 4 batches before further breaking those down into 15-12 portions per quarter. In total, about 50 dumplings were made — and about half were consumed! The remainder are freezing on a waxed paper-lined sheet tray in the freezer. As I got more practice, the dumplings became much more even in shape, too.

For the filling, I had to hand-chop a little over a pound of pork belly (my food processor simply didn't want to further break up the chunks I'd cut — a feat which my now slightly-sore right shoulder is a bit peeved about), a little less than a pound of cooked ground chicken (that Kara decided she didn't want to eat earlier in the week), a bunch of chopped green onions, a head of chopped garlic, a knob of chopped ginger, a few mushrooms I had leftover from an earlier pizza-making venture, Chinese cooking wine, tamari, President's Choice 5-Spice Blend, salt, white pepper, and freshly-ground black pepper. About 1/3 of the filling is unused and went into a freezer bag for later.

While these are far from the most photogenic of Chinese dumplings ever made, the flavour was phenomenal! I went heavy-handed with the ginger and don't regret it in the least.

Homemade kare-pan (curry bread)!

This weekend saw me blitzing through content provided by TabiEats' YouTube channel, starting with their vending machine restaurant review, and eventually leading to their — and others' — curry bun recipes.

I love the curry buns one can find in the Toronto-area Chinese bakeries, but end up generally disappointed at the lack of vegetable matter (it's usually just minced onion) and skimpiness of the filling in the ones I've tried. They're delicious, but more bun than curry. So, seeing that recipes varied widely, I decided to make up a "small" batch (it's still an awful lot) of my Japanese-style curry, replacing the chunks of stewing beef with ground beef.

So my new quantities for the curry are:

• ½ package of S&B Foods Golden Curry Sauce Mix Mild in the 240g size
• 2 small shallots, minced
• 1 small yellow onion, minced
• 1 lb. lean ground beef
• 1 finely chopped, small potato
• 2 small carrots, diced small
• 227g mushrooms, sliced
• frozen peas
• ¼ seeded, finely chopped shepherd pepper

The dough recipe I based mine on is Closet Cooking's Kare Pan recipe, halving the amount of sugar called for (I don't care for the overly-sweet buns some Asian bakeries offer, and wanted to err on the side of caution), using vegan margarine in place of the butter, and adding both a tablespoon of vital wheat gluten to the dough to boost the protein content in a dairy- and egg-free fashion and two tablespoons of turmeric for its anti-inflammatory properties (I'm still trying to kick a cold I came down with over a week ago) and to give it the yellow colour I've come to associate with Asian bakeries' buns. I also am out of panko, so the breading step has been omitted entirely so far.

Yesterday saw me baking two buns. I liked them, but found them much dryer than I prefer. Today, I heated up my skillet, poured in some oil and fried another couple. The first of those is pictured above and — if anything — they're even more delicious than they look! The dough fries with a finely-bubbled texture and the filling is exactly the way I like my Japanese curry!

So, basically, I'm going to be making delicious Japanese-style Hot Pockets for the rest of my lunches this week.

Treating myself to brunch today

Yeah, this is absolutely not the most colourful breakfast I've ever eaten, but it was damn delicious. A quick trip to the local Chinese supermarket today to pick up some more duck eggs also yielded a rib eye steak. Thus, today's brunch was steak and eggs with toast and home fries. It was so immensely satisfying.

Homemade English muffins

I used Chef John's recipe, doubled, using a whole duck egg in place of two egg whites. These are intriguingly fluffy and hit the spot with an over-easy duck egg for brunch today.

Homemade common-allergen-free bibimbap!

Not gonna lie: having this many food allergies and sensitivities sucks. Since Kara was born, my body has lost the ability to process chicken eggs, soy, and bananas. Add that to all of the other things my body hates and the only common food allergen that I can still eat without consequence is wheat (which is good, 'cause my only meat-like substitute these days is seitan — and I'm trying to eat that sparingly, lest I develop a sensitivity.

But yeah, I missed the simple, quick and easy meals I had next-to-no-time to throw together when Kara was a baby, like egg sandwiches or — in my predominately Korean neighbourhood, with grocery stores to match — bibimbap.

So it was a revelation to discover, just before Christmas of last year (i.e., about 3 months ago) that people with chicken egg allergies can sometimes eat duck eggs without difficulty. That was around the time that I picked up a 6-pack from the local Chinese grocery and tried it in my baking, thinking that having trace amounts of a single egg across a batch of shared baked goods would be a good litmus test for sensitivity on my part. I'm happy to report that not only did it work out, but that I've since been able to branch out into making duck egg-intensive foods like tamago-yaki without ill effect.

When you factor in the fact that I've recently been mainlining episodes from Maangchi's YouTube cooking channel, it's not hard to see how I might've arrived at the conclusion that I ought to try my hand at making bibimbap. And so it was that I had a common-allergen-free bibimbap as my early lunch today. This one features short-grain brown rice, blanched spinach with chives, and "sweated" and stir-fried carrots, zucchini, cucumber, and red bell pepper. It was topped with an over-easy duck egg. Everything was seasoned with salt, sunflower seed oil, and garlic.

I began the vegetable prep work last night to minimize the amount of time that'd take today. It was fairly time-intensive, but I think the results were well worth it. I had an unbelievably delicious, nutritious, and quick-to-assemble meal option today and still have plenty of the vegetables left over for later in the week.

Mmmmm...homemade white chocolate

A trip to Michael's on Friday yielded a silicone chocolate mold, a purchase I resigned myself to when I had multiple failed attempts (and one, sad, lonely success) at molding chocolates in a polycarbonate mold. I'd previously consulted Ann Reardon's YouTube tutorial on How to Temper Chocolate and seemed to have gotten the knack for it, but couldn't verify that fact due to my failures at getting them to de-mold.

On Sunday, I whipped up a batch of vegan white chocolate on Saturday, tempered using a marble board, offset spatula and bench scraper, poured the mixture into my new mold, and — after setting in the fridge — de-molded successfully! Thus, I had beautiful, glossy, homemade, dairy-free white chocolate this weekend!

I believe the expression goes, "YAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSS"

A few months ago, I discovered that the Colonel's "secret recipe" was supposedly leaked. At the time, I tried it on a few chicken pieces and found that the flavour was much too peppery and heavy on the oregano. Delicious, but overpowering on some fronts.

After a nasty gastrointestinal blowout early last weekend, I spent most of Saturday and Sunday loafing around on the couch, binge-watching vegan cooking channels on YouTube. And so I was reminded of my attempt at making vegan Chick-fil-A. It was then that I resolved to hybridize the two recipes and — hopefully — end up with something greater than the sum of its parts.

This time, I made the seitan patties as previously (replacing the tahini with sesame oil), but I got eight patties out of the batch, instead of the previous four. I still soaked the patties for a little less than an hour in pickle juice, but I used the KFC spice blend recipe, with halved amounts of white pepper and oregano, plus ⅓ cup of icing sugar and 1 tsp of baking powder, as my dredge. My binder was unsweetened hemp milk. Yesterday's fry-up, pictured above, had me cutting the patties into quarters, length-wise, before starting the pickle juice soak.

Oddly, when one cuts back on the pepper in the dredge, its lack of salt becomes noteable. I will have to add a bit more, going forward. Otherwise, these adaptations are definitely on the right track!

Homemade mini-baguettes

Yesterday, using ChowTown's recipe for Vietnamese-style baguettes as a jumping-off point, I made my very first ever batch of (mini-)baguettes! My recipe follows:

• ½ cup warm water
• 1 T. sugar
• 1 T. Fleischmann's Traditional Yeast
• approx. 390g white bread flour (I needed a little less than ¼ cup more)
• 1 T. vital wheat gluten
• 1 ½ t. salt

Dissolve the sugar into the warm water, then add the yeast. Allow to foam. Meanwhile, thoroughly mix the bread flour, vital wheat gluten and salt. Add the yeast mixture to the flour mixture and knead — adding flour as needed to reduce stickiness — until you have a smooth, moist (not wet, sticky or shaggy) dough ball. Leave to rise in an ungreased bowl in a warm, draft-free place for ~40 minutes.

"Punch down" the dough and turn out onto a lightly-floured countertop/work surface. Cut the dough into four, approximately equal-sized, parts. Pull each dough ball into a rough rectangle, then roll tightly into log shapes. Leave to rise, well-floured, for ~20 minutes under loosely-laid plastic wrap.

Preheat oven (preferably convection) with pizza stone to 400°C. When oven has come to temperature, gently lift each loaf and place on pizza stone. Slash vents in tops of loaves, then mist liberally with water before closing oven door. Bake until your house smells like fresh-baked bread, or when loaves are a mouth-watering golden brown.

If you've got the willpower for it, allow to cool, raised on a cooling rack.

I used mine to assemble pseudo Philly cheesesteak sandwiches, made with leftover French-style braised beef, chopped red bell pepper, chopped shallots, Daiya provolone slices and Follow Your Heart Chipotle Vegenaise (which is not only soy-free, but much akin to crack cocaine, I imagine).

Happy Birthday, Matt!

Matt isn't shy with his opinions about pie. I admit that I made a very authentic (and painstaking and time-consuming) coconut cream pie early in our relationship, only to discover that authentic wasn't what he had in mind. And yeah, he makes no secret of the fact that cherry pie is his absolute favourite, but that he's had enough failed attempts at it that he's wary of attempting it anywhere unfamiliar. So, naturally, I thought I'd try my hand at it.

Lo, my cherry pie! Honestly, it's actually my go-to pie crust recipe with canned cherry filling in it (the local grocery store wasn't stocking frozen cherries). And I'll be surprised if it isn't exactly what he's looking for.

Las ketchup.

The wee one has returned to school today (in Grade 1!), so I actually have the opportunity to update my blog!

I've been experimenting with the new waffle iron, including an attempt at using my go-to vegan doughnut recipe as the "batter". I must admit that I vastly prefer the results from using the Bunner's-based batter, but this was good. Shown topping this batch of waffles is KFC-like boneless, skinless chicken breasts (for which I used hemp milk for the wash) and a sugar-free lucuma powder "butter" I've been making, based on my go-to white chocolate recipe. Really, none of those ingredients work ideally together, but they were still hungrily and gratefully devoured.

Next up was the batch of vegan doughnuts I made using the remainder of the dough from my waffle experiment. They all got dusted with powdered sugar. Useful technique picked up during this attempt: for circular doughnuts, keep the dough chilled while cutting.

Finally, Kara and I took another run at they No-Whey assortment, this time finding that the Choco NoNo's were vastly superior to anything else we've tried in the product range. We genuinely look forward to eating these again.

It's been a prolific Summer Break!