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.

Homemade veggie dumplings with whole wheat wrappers

On Sunday, I made a batch of veggie dumpling filling using onion, shallot, garlic, ginger, shitake and cremini mushrooms, and cabbage. Today, I made up a batch of whole wheat dumpling wrappers, using China Sichuan Food's Dumpling Wrappers recipe as my reference, but replacing ⅓ of the flour with whole wheat flour. I was able to use up ½ of the dough — creating twenty 16g wrappers — on the filling, freezing half of the batch for later.

The dumplings hit the spot and I think I'll use up the remaining dough on a batch of beef and onion filling I can make up with stuff in my pantry and freezer.

Chinese green onion pancakes!

In light of the fact that this weekend's likely to be fairly cooking-intensive (it's going to be our first Christmas gathering at the new house!), we're doing soup and sandwiches for dinners this week. Consequently, this means there are odds and ends in the fridge. Given that I've got about ¼ lb. of cooked roast pork to use up, plus a few avocadoes, plus a bit of leaf lettuce, and had a bunch of green onions, I decided to make up a batch of Chinese green onion pancakes (having had the forethought to pick up garlic hoisin sauce and sunflower oil — which I use as a sesame oil substitute), and make wraps.

I used the quantities provided by Chef John's Chinese Scallion Pancakes recipe, with the modifications suggested by "Huadong Feng" (currently the pinned comment in that video's comment thread), using chopped, whole green onion, and cooking the onion in oil. I departed from those by then adding flour to the cooked onion and oil mixture until my roux was pale blonde.

Pictured is the first cooked pancake of the day. Not pictured are the wraps I made, stuffed with chopped pork, hoisin, avocado, and leaf lettuce (which is about as close to Heaven as you can get in food-form, methinks).

First batch of (this home) homemade bread!

This recipe is from the much-admired (around these parts) The Complete Guide to Cooking Techniques by Norma Macmillan (which is also the cookbook that taught me how to make risotto and pie crust). This is also the first time I used the dough hook on my 15 year-old KitchenAid stand mixer. It kneaded the dough considerably faster than I could have, for a double-batch of bread dough. I think I'll use it again.

Let there be light

After an entire year of inactivity due to Kara's decision that she didn't like the taste of "burnt" (read: charred) food, the grill was fired up for Saturday's housewarming at our place.

Before the guests arrived, I grilled up a couple of breakfast hamburgers for her and me, and am exceedingly pleased to announce that Kara deemed her burger "the best". She then proceeded to heap praises upon my cooking technique, to which I responded that the grill really was responsible for that amazing flavour. Looks like we'll get to use it a few more times before Winter sets in!

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.