jam session

Alright, so we didn't get together and guitar-strum our way to any sweet tunes, but the Five Star Club (culinary student club on campus) did organize an afternoon jam workshop with the legendary professor and veteran jam-maker, Ms. Barbara Haimes.

First we were led through a cooked-fruit jam demo involving apricots (although any ripe fleshy fruit of your choice would work). The fruit was cut up into small pieces (the smaller the pieces, the more texturally consistent to mush the jam will be) and cooked over medium heat. No flavoring was added since the fruit was ripe enough, but this is of course up to individual taste.



In technical terms, the fruit was cooked till softball sugar stage (~240° F), which made intuitive sense to me after pastry class because that's the temperature where cooked sugar syrup will coalesce into a soft ball if you drop it into cold water (which is the same consistency you want your jam to be). Ms. Haimes being the expert she is, could tell the doneness of cooking just by observing the foaming and bubbling and then testing by spoon (letting some of the liquid drip off a spoon and watching the viscosity).

After cooking, the jam was scooped/funneled into sterilized jam jars (ideally along with the noyaux, or inside of the pit, which imparts flavor although it cannot be eaten because it contains trace amounts of cyanide) and sealed.

Then we moved onto making freezer jam because it was logistically easier for everyone to participate.



To make freezer jam, first find the ripest (and/or most organic) fruit you can. This is why summer is a good time to jam, as it allows you to taste the ripe sweetness of summer fruits later on, even in the dead of winter. We used fresh-picked strawberries.



Clean and cut the fruit into pieces, then mash them to a pulp. A potato masher works well for this.



Sugar and sour the berries to your taste. The goal is to simply enhance/complement the ripe fruit's flavor, not to cover or overpower. Here somebody used organic cane sugar and lemon juice, although others did more exotic combinations such as honey and balsamic vinegar.



Then add pectin, which is the gelling agent that solidifies the mash into a more solid jam-like consistency. Pectin packets can be purchased in any supermarket, though pectin can also be made at home with green apples, as it is naturally found in certain fruit skins. We used Sure-Gell (grocery store-bought) and Pomona's Universal Pectin (which is a little more difficult to use but is free from preservatives and other pesky ingredients). The Sure-Gell was mixed over the stove but Pomona's required a food processor to blend and the addition of calcium water for activation.



The mash and pectin mixture was stirred until some gelling started to take place, then everything was scooped/funneled into containers. Jam funnels are different from regular funnels in that the opening is a lot wider.

Everyone got to take a few containers home. The jam had to sit out for 24 hours in order to fully gel, but after that one could either keep it in the refrigerator for 2 weeks or in the freezer (hence the name of freezer jam) for up to a year.



I kept mine in the fridge and promptly served it over French toast the day after it gelled up. Mmm-mmm-mmm!

alemany farm dinner

Once school got out I had more time on my hands, which meant I went volunteering! Alemany Farm was one of the places I had read about on the AmeriCorps Alums blog when I was first moving to San Francisco, and finally I was able to go.

Alemany Farm is located on a plot of land right by the highway and next to some housing projects. The farm was brought into existence (and is maintained) exclusively by volunteers. The produce that is harvested goes to the volunteers and to the people in the neighborhood - the produce can't actually be sold because the land belongs to the city.

After a long and cold/windy afternoon of pulling weeds and pushing wheelbarrows uphill, it came to be harvest time. Veteran volunteers led us in pointing out what and how much could be harvested. Aside from getting free and fresh (literally organic) produce, the whole process really opened my eyes to the variety of vegetables that groceries stores don't sell.



For example, I was able to get multiple kinds of chard and multiple kinds of kale. Many grocery stores don't even have one kind of either. It just goes to show how mass-produced our food is (and also how us Americans only eat certain particular vegetables, if any).



I didn't go prepared with a bag or anything, so I ended up taking a planter full of vegetables home. The bounty was rather staggering, and it inspired me to cook a group dinner. In order to figure out what dishes to make with the foreignness of it all, I searched through online recipes for inspiration.



Because I had squash blossoms (pictured above) and butter lettuce, I decided to make something similar to this salad. (Note: the acorn-like things next to the squash blossoms are ground cherries, which you open up like a present and eat - they taste like citrus-y grape tomatoes).



The salad turned out to be easily my favorite dish - creamy avocado, tangy dressing, fresh lettuce, velvety squash blossoms.



Then there was bok choy inspired by this recipe. I really just did the fried shallot part (with the addition of some thinly sliced carrot, parsnip and garlic) and sprinkled it on blanched bok choy leaves. What I liked about this dish was just the look (which reminded me of a peacock) - sadly it was missing a sauce that I didn't know how to make and didn't have on hand, the kind they drizzle over Chinese broccoli at dim sum places.



Next up was purslane, which I had no idea how to use so I substituted it as the basil in pesto. I consulted this recipe just to know what pesto ingredients were, blended everything in a blender and adjusted by taste. I also threw in a couple of spinach leaves from the farm because I didn't find a place to fit them anywhere else.

I was afraid no one would like the pesto because the purslane made it spicy in this wasabi kind of way. But everyone ate it anyway!



Then there was the chards and kales, which were somewhat inspired by this and this recipe. I wasn't sure how people would take to such serious greens, so I wanted to cook them with bacon, but I did a portion without - just to taste the difference - I was curious how tasty the greens would be without the inherent tastiness of bacon grease.

The vegetarian version had fava beans instead of bacon - which I blanched with the chards and kales. I find that I have a stir-fry methodology: I blanch the hardier vegetables (so they get soft and take to the stir-fry better), then after that's done I start up the fry pan with oil and aromatics (in this case garlic, shallots, fennel seed, italian herbs, cayenne, salt and pepper), then I throw in the vegetables by degree of softness. (I figured that the softer the vegetable the less heat it can take before it wilts and/or fades in color.)



For the non-vegetarian version I omitted the oil - instead I fried up bacon and used the grease. Also I used less aromatics because they weren't needed as much. I think both dishes ended up the same in tastiness, although I could be biased because I do like vegetables a lot.

All in all a successful dinner - seven people were fed and all the produce I brought home got used up. Would love to do it again sometime, if only without the back-bending farm labor...!

end of semester

To conclude the semester's work, I leave you with a picture of me practicing for the last practical of the year: chocolate writing.



I put in the most effort for this last practical, and I think it paid off.

Congratulations to all of my fellow first-semesters for having made it through!

And congratulations to me for finally making through this semester's worth of blog posts. Now onto non-school but nevertheless food-related stuff!

brotchen rolls

On the last day of kitchen I decided to make something by special request of my dearest Jonas, because he remembered the rolls that he used to get at the bakery back in Germany.

A quick Google search led me to this recipe, which I presented to Chef for approval. I was told to make a double batch and to approximate the ingredients, since we measure ingredients by weight and not by volume.



(Here I am with my assigned task of rolls, in the last Bread Station game plan of the semester!)



This dough was different than all of the other doughs I made because it included meringue (not sure what difference meringue makes in bread though). In terms of ingredients, I used half the amount of yeast the recipe called for, and also it was instant dry yeast instead of active dry yeast (so the yeast-soaking step was omitted).

The dough turned out rather wet, so I had to add a bunch of flour in order to knead it. Then I fermented it and folded it (what the recipe termed "deflating" the dough, or what other recipes will term "punching down").



Then I placed the dough on this metal plate, which goes into the roll machine so it can be shaped into rolls (same process for challah rolls).



I thought it was an amazing coincidence that the roll machine had been made in West Germany, the same place where these rolls originated from.



Because the dough mass was moist and unwieldy, the rolls didn't come out shaped as nicely as the challah rolls had. Nevermind though, I hand-shaped some and put others through the machine once more.



The recipe called for an egg white/milk wash, but the one I prepared was accidentally thrown out so the rolls went into the oven without. Chef steamed them in the oven extra though, to make up for it.



This is how they came out. I had no basis for comparison as to whether or not these looked or tasted right. I thought they tasted like plain dinner rolls, but Jonas liked how they tasted and said they were pretty much like the rolls he had been used to. Und das ist gut!

challah (holla!)

Challah bread was a semi-regular of bread station, most commonly made into rolls but sometimes braided into loaves as well.

Challah is another example of enriched dough because it contains egg yolks (fat) and oil (also fat). First, 5 lb 4 oz of bread flour and 1 oz of instant dry yeast are mixed together. Then, separately mixed is 32 oz of water, 1 lb of egg yolks, 8 oz of vegetable oil, 8 oz of sugar, and 1.5 oz of salt. The flour mixture is added to the wet mixture in the mixer, and together it's mixed for 4 minutes on low speed and 4 minutes on medium speed. Then it is fermented for just one hour before it gets portioned.



This batch of challah was portioned for a loaf and two batches of rolls. We did a five-braid loaf, with each braid being 5.5 oz (pre-shaped and shaped much like a baguette would be). The two batches for rolls were 3 lbs each, to be inserted into the roll machine to be shaped into two dozen rolls (four dozen altogether).



Braiding challah was really fun. Basically the five strands are lined up together, pinched at the top, and then the braids were invisibly numbered from 1 to 5, left to right. As the braids switched places they were renumbered 1 to 5, so there was no need to keep track of what number went where. The pattern basically went: 1 over 3, 2 over 3, 5 over 2 (repeat). If a low-number was going over a high-number, it would go to the right of that braid, and if a high-number was going over a low-number, it would go to the left. This continued until the ends of the strands, where all five were pinched together to end.



Here is everybody braiding, all serious-like.



The idea was to make a braid that would come out looking like this.



Before the challah rolls and loaves were baked, they were egg-washed so they would come out with a nice sheen.



Here are the rolls after baking.



This was my first loaf, deceptively nice-looking but still raw on the inside because at this point I had not known that you could tell a bread's doneness by checking its temperature. I fretted over the rawness because that day's challah had been by special request of Chef Morse, and I really wanted him to have nice bread (oh well, too bad).

The next time I made challah it turned out really nice, and my housemate Molly made delicious French toast out of it :)