Fahim tells me that, when we lived in our first house, we would buy these packages of masala papadam and I would heat them up in the microwave, which, by the way, is not the proper way to prepare papadam, but apparently we liked them that much.

I gotta be honest with you – I don’t recall that even a single little bit.

But my memory is bad.

So one day, we bought a pack. These are masala papadam – there are different types, made from different flours, with seasonings or not. These ones are made with oorid flour, pepper, cumin seed, salt, and sodium bicarbonate. When I did a search on oorid flour to find out what, exactly, it was, it appeared that its from a type of split pea or dal, and is sometimes called urid dal, urad dal, or split undu, and is made from dried black urid lentils.

I wasn’t entirely sure of the best way to properly cook them up, so I waited until Fahim’s mom was in town and asked her. She kindly provided a demonstration.

Perhaps an explanation of papadam is in order. Papadam are very thin dry discs of dough. To cook up, they’re usually cut or broken into quarters, then fried. Upon frying, they puff up a bit, with some types puffing up more than others. Papadam are frequently sold with rice and curry packets here. The place where we get our rice and curry packets uses a different type of papadam that puffs up a lot more, frequently leaving a huge air pocket in the middle. They’re crunchy crispy and provide a contrast to the rice and curries.

To prepare the papadam, cut or fold the papadam so it breaks off into four quarters. One at a time, insert a quarter into a shallow amount of hot oil – Fahim’s mom put about an inch of oil into the pan. It’ll make all sorts of happy noises while it puffs and curls and frolics in the oil. Make sure all of it is immersed, then quickly remove when it’s a very light golden brown. Cook it too long and it can taste bitter. Drain on paper towels or the like.

That’s it!

Given that papadam are so easily available here, and I’m lousy at rolling anything out thin and keeping it intact, it’s quite likely that I won’t try making these from scratch, although I might just change my mind at some point. We’ll see.

No doubt the majority of us have believed, at least at one time, that kneading bread dough for 5 or 10 minutes, or longer, was necessary if the bread was going to develop properly and rise.

Fortunately, especially for those of us with problem and painful joints, it simply isn’t true.

Personally, instead of kneading for minutes at a time, I’ll do one of two things:

1. After letting the dough rest for 20-30 minutes (autolyze), I’ll knead for 10 strokes, let the dough rest for 15 minutes, and then repeat twice for a total of 3 sets of kneading and resting. Then, after another 15 or so minutes, I’ll do a few stretch and folds. Then I let the dough rise until doubled in volume, then do the same old shaping and second rise that kneaders do.
2. After letting the dough rest for 20-30 minutes (autolyze), I’ll do a few stretch and folds, then let the dough rest 45 minutes, then repeat for a total of 3 stretch and fold then rest sessions. After the last rest after the final stretch and fold, I’ll shape it and let it do the regular second rise.

Even with my severely borked joints, I can do these, and it’s much easier and much less effort than using my rather, ah, sad food processor to try to mix and knead the dough for me.

Better yet, my bread turns out just as fluffy as bread made by those who knead.

Stretching and folding is something I learned from Sourdough Home when I was looking for easier kneading methods for me. There’s a much longer explanation of the stretch and fold method there, along with videos that demonstrate it. Well worth checking out.

Oh, yeah, and while you’re at it, check out this Panda Bread. Very cute!

I recently got a new cast iron griddle. I happen to be very fond of it and use it fairly often, including for making flat bread. Takes a while to heat up, as all cast iron does, but has very even heat when it does. Beautiful, beautiful!

I’ve used it a few times as the base of my baking-on-the-stove setup, and it works just fine. It works about the same as my two aluminum lids stacked on each other, so no benefit there.

However, if used frequently in this manner with a high flame, over time, the seasoning on the cast iron does burn off. If you use your cast iron pan frequently otherwise, it’s probably not an issue, and for me, it’s not an issue yet, but it is something to be aware of if you’re going to use a seasoned cast iron pot or griddle or such on a regular basis for baking on the stove.

In my case, since the cast iron griddle offers no benefits over my aluminum lids, I’m switching back to the aluminum lids since they don’t get damaged by frequent use and, honestly, I wouldn’t care even if they did. My cast iron griddle, on the other hand, I don’t want to re-season.

My mother-in-law kindly showed her coconut de-husking and wacking-open skills for me while I recorder her doing it. She’s very accommodating.

Here’s the result.

It’s only 1:25 long and well worth watching.

When I was a kid, I was told that the easiest way to crack open a coconut was to put it in the oven and bake it for 20 minutes, then poke through one of the eyes on the end of the coconut, drain the coconut milk out, then pry it open.

Well, no. So no no no.

That liquid in the middle of the coconut is not milk. It’s coconut water. Coconut milk is done by extracting the liquid out of the nut meat, and that’ll be a lesson for another day.

And that method from above? I could seriously injure myself doing that. No, really. Okay, so it doesn’t help that I’m incredibly clumsy, but that isn’t a great way of doing things.

I now crack open coconuts the way my husband and mother in law taught me. I even use my mother in law’s Weapon Of War for whacking purposes.

1. Put the coconut in your non-dominant hand (that would be my left) with the eyes either facing your fingertips or your wrist.
2. Take a heavy knife and, with the blunt end, wack the coconut around its equator (if you think about the coconut as the earth and the eyes of the coconut as one of its poles). My mother in law can open a coconut with about three wacks of a knife. I now take six. In the beginning, I’d take *cough* a couple of dozen.
3. When it starts to sound hollow, you’ve broken through to the inside. The water will come out. Either discard or save for drinking or other uses as you please. Pry the coconut open as necessary.
4. You should now have two more-or-less halves of a coconut. Yay!

It takes much longer to type this up than the actual execution, by the way.

Then you can do whatever your little heart desires with the coconut meat. Me, I shred.

Tags: coconuts, Sri Lanka

I’m trying to remember what drove me to give sauerkraut a try. I didn’t grow up on the stuff despite being of good ol’ Mennonite ancestry. In fact, I’d never had sauerkraut at all until a couple or three months ago.

At any rate, I explored how to make sauerkraut and learned it could be made using

• 11.34 kg / 25 pounds cabbage
• 180 grams / 3/4 cup salt

Or

• 1 kg cabbage, shredded
• 16 grams / 3 1/4 teaspoon salt

Or, more loosely, shred or slice finely whatever amount of cabbage you want to use. Pound until the cabbage glistens, doing it layer by layer as necessary. Add enough salt to make it taste right. Put into a non-reactive container, put a weight on top to keep the cabbage submerged in the liquied, and leave, at room temperature, until the cabbage is ready. Ready depends on your preferences for how you like your sauerkraut and what kind of cabbage you used (ie head or Napa). When it’s ready, store in the fridge.

If you’ve already made a batch of sauerkraut, it’s also said that you can add a tablespoon or two of the liquid from the old sauerkraut to the new to help it ferment faster.

Personally, I went with the looser definition of making sauerkraut, and it turned out that Fahim and I loved it, as did Fahim’s brother and his wife. Fahim’s parents, however, did not. Ah well, can’t win ‘em all.

From my first batch of sauerkraut:

From my second batch of sauerkraut:

I pounded the cabbage with the end of the rolling pin for the first two batches. Okay, okay, Fahim’s whine if he reads this. Fahim took pity on me and pounded the second batch, which was at least twice as big as the first batch. He was great about it – pounding layer by layer as I cut up the cabbage. Worked out great for me. He also added the salt and red chilli pepper powder in perfect proportions. Go figure.

For my third batch, I used my stone pestle, which is dang heavy, and let its weight do all the work for me – much easier! Once I’m done pounding, I put a sheet of plastic over the cabbage, then put a plate on top of that and weighed it down so the liquid rose above the level of the cabbage.

If the cabbage is above the level of the liquid, it can rot and go slimy. We don’t want that.

For the second and third batches, I also added red chilli pepper powder – Fahim thought it would be great – and we love it that way even more. Technically, this brings us closer to the realm of kimchi, but I don’t think we’re there quite yet…

Tags: sauerkraut, pickled cabbage, kimchi, cabbage

I have a lot to learn about bread baking and, more specifically, sourdough bread baking. One thing I learned about a while ago is autolyse.

Autolyse is a fancy word for the stage in the bread-making process where you combine the flour with the liquids (water, milk, etc.) and then let it rest for twenty minutes or a half hour. This lets the flour fully absorb the liquid, so dough is less sticky when kneaded (if you knead, that is. ) It allows the gluten to more fully develop with a lot less kneading.

In some recipes, salt, oil, and sourdough starter are added after the autolyse stage. Oil, from what I’ve read, will coat the flour, preventing the flour from absorbing the liquid, and will in turn inhibit gluten from doing its thing. We want gluten to do its thing.

The next time you make bread, why not allow the dough to autolyse – that is, set the dough aside for 20-30 minutes – and see how much kneading (if you knead) your dough requires compared to how much the dough requires when you don’t autolyse. Let me know your results.