Caramel Sauce

We would make a sauce like this all the time at the bakery I used to work at, but we generally referred to it as cajeta. As far as I'm concerned, why would you ever want to buy store-bought caramel sauce when it's this easy to make at home?

I started with half a cup of sugar and a splash of water, just enough to make the sugar look like wet sand when mixed together with it. I put this over medium-high heat and let it start to melt. After a while, it will start to boil. Keep boiling it until it starts to turn amber. Don't stir it until it gets at least a little color! If you do, it'll all crystalize and you'll have to start over. The amber color will signal to you that the sugar bonds are now too damaged to crystalize. You can start stirring it now, with a wooden spoon, if you like. If one part of the pan starts to color before another, I would even recommend stirring so that that one part doesn't burn.

Now, things are going to happen pretty quick here, especially with only half a cup of sugar. When you start to see little wisps of smoke, remove the pan from the heat and slowly stir in half a cup of cold cream. Be careful! It will steam up right away, so keep your stirring hand (and your pouring hand for that matter) as safe a distance as you can, without stopping them from what they're doing. Now, the cold cream may make the sugar harden. Go ahead and put it back over medium-low heat and stir until the sugar is all melted again, and completely integrated with the cream. Go ahead and let that cool.

Now, I keep a supply of squeeze bottles around from my local restaurant supply store (pictured below). If you don't have a local restaurant supply store, a clean ketchup or mustard bottle is fine. If nothing else, a reclosable plastic container is fine. But what do you do with it? Pour it over ice cream, apple pie, just about anything, really. Resist the temptation to eat it straight. It really is good stuff.

Thrift Book Score!

So, I've been checking out food photography sites lately. I've noticed that more than one of them talk about plating. One of the things they talk about is where to find good plates for photographs. Thrift stores are great, because the plates are going to be cheap, and it doesn't matter if you don't get a whole set because you're only using them for photos anyway. Bearing this in mind, today I headed down to our local thrift store, Deseret Industries. Yes, that's Deseret, not Desert or Dessert.

Unfortunately, the DI stores in Utah Valley are pretty picked-over, much more so than they used to be, so there weren't really any decent dishes to be had. But I'm not one to leave the store without checking out the place, so I mosied around a bit. I discovered a beautiful score! This place not only had books, they even bothered to sort them. Even better, there was a pretty decent-sized cookbook section. I don't know if I saw more than three books less than fifteen years old.

There's just something about old cookbooks. Something... alluring, and yet something almost repulsive. Maybe repulsive isn't the right word. It's just fascinating for me to see what food trends were like, thirty, fifty, heck even just five years ago. And yet, I don't want to look. It scares me. But I did find some real jems.

The Yogurt Cookbook by Olga Smetinoff was the first book I spotted that I knew I had to have. Printed in 1966, I wasn't even able to find an ISBN number on it. With a cover price of $1.98, I managed to pick this baby up for half price, at only $1.00. Not only does it have recipes for "Yogurt w/ eggplant", "Yogurt w/ zucchini" and the ever-so-popular "Yogurt broiled tomatoes", it also has a section on how to make homemade yogurt. Actually, the recipes seem surprisingly simple, and try as I might, I have yet to see the words "chanterelle" or "truffle". This was written in a different time, with a different outlook on food. We don't need no creme fraiche. We got yogurt.

The Gluten Book by Le Arta Moulton is another sans-ISBN book, published in 1974. My copy was actually the fourth printing, from 1977. That's right, this was a popular book. BYU grad and mother of four, Le Arta covers methods that I'd never even thought of before, such as "washing the dough to extract gluten". For those of you not in the know, gluten is a protein formed with two other wheat proteins (gliadin and glutenin) get together with water. Gluten extraction seems to be important for this book, which treats the bread protein as a meat. That's right, a meat. Page 19 includes three, yes, three cooking methods for gluten steaks. You can cook jerky, mock liver and something called "Carob Crackle". I will definitely be spending some time with this book.

Food Science by Helen Charley is my third book with no ISBN. Mine is the first edition, published in 1970. This is kind of like a forerunner to On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee, currently regarded by many chefs as a sort of bible of food science. This book is fascinating. I don't even know what to say about it. I picked it up because I was really interested to see how the face of food science has changed in the past 36 years. I'll have to update you on this later, this is going to be an interesting read.

So next time you see a stack of old cook books, take a look. There may be some scary things in there, but if you're lucky, you'll find some real gems, just like I did.

What to do with crab apples? Apple butter

One of the problems with making homemade applesauce is that you end up with a lot of it. In my case, I already had a lot of it, so when I made more, well, I think you get the idea. I had to do something else with my new applesauce. What would one do? Apple butter, of course. For those of you who have never had the pleasure, apple butter is a really smooth, thick, spreadable applesauce that ends up getting caramelized by the long and slow cooking process used to make it smooth and thick. It doesn't actually have butter as an ingredient, but you can use it in a lot of the same ways.

So, as it turns out, making apple butter is pretty easy. I looked up several recipes online and found pretty much the same thing in all of them. You take a lot of applesauce, a good bit of apple juice, a bit of acid (such as lemon juice or cider vinegar) and a good bit of sugar, you mix it all together in a wide pot or pan, and you let it cook on low heat for a few hours.

I probably had about 4 1/2 cups of crab applesauce left over from the previous day's cooking. I added about 1 1/2 cups of apple juice, about 1/4 cup sugar (since there was already plenty of sugar in there), and a splash of cider vinegar. Now, you could technically use water for this. I'm guessing that the reason you add all the liquid is to give the apple and sugar mixture more time to caramelize without burning. But water adds nothing in terms of flavor. When apple juice evaporates, it leaves just that much more apple flavor to intensify the taste. This is also why I used cider vinegar instead of a lemon.

Now, I set this over medium low heat and let it sit for a good few hours. Every 15 minutes or so, I would give it a good stir with a rubber spatula, making sure to scrap the sides and the bottom, to make sure nothing burned. About halfway through, I got smart and pulled out my stick blender and ran that through the mixture a bit to smooth it out. After all, apple butter is supposed to be smooth, right? After about 3 hours, the apple mixture had reduced down to less than half its volume. By this point, I had been scraping every few minutes. The color had gone from that bright red to kind of a brownish red, and it was starting to really hold its shape when stirred. In the baking world, we call this a ribbon.

When it was clear it wasn't going to evaporate much more, I pulled it from the heat and let it cool. Now, when I say it holds its shape, I'm not kidding. I was able to pipe it out with a star tip the same way I could with a softened butter. And the taste? Yes, it's very intense. Not as smooth as I'm used to, I suppose I should have spent more time with the stick blender, but good nonetheless.

What to do with crab apples? Apple sauce

What are crab apples? Little, tart apples that seem to grow everywhere in Utah. Jayce has a crab apple tree growing in his backyard, and it provides him with an excess of crab apples. They fall everywhere, and if one doesn't collect them and get rid of them, they just sit there and rot and ferment. But what does one do with their over-abundance of crab apples? In Jayce's case, one finds his local chef and asks if he wants them. Why not, I thought? I'll see what kinds of dishes I can make from them before I get sick of them too. So yesterday, Jayce plopped down a big old bag of crab apples on my desk. He was even nice enough to sort through them and throw out any that looked like they had worms.

Now, the ones he gave me were small, perhaps a little bigger than a large cherry. And yes, they were tart, like sour apple candy. I spent the day thinking about what kinds of culinary creations I would concoct from these gems. I decided to start with the basics: apple sauce.

Of course, one problem with crab apples is that not only are they small, they have seeds too. Just a couple per apple, but since apple seeds are poisonous, they've got to go. There's also stems and the like. But did I want to go through a whole bag of cherry-sized apples and core them individually? I think not. So I turned to my trusty steamer basket. Having rinsed off the apples, I put two or three inches of water in the bottom of a large pot and added the apples. I set the heat to high and covered the pot. After about 15 minutes, the apples were starting to get soft. By 25 minutes, the skins had started to pop and peel away. Perfect.

I moved the apples to a bowl and started mashing them with my potato masher. I held onto the steaming liquid, which had taken on a candy red color. When the apples were sufficiently mashed, I moved them to a strainer with holes just smaller than the apple seeds, put that over a bowl and started working them with a rubber spatula. After a few minutes, I switched to a wooden spoon, which was much more effective. After a while, the only things left in the strainer were the seeds, stems and some of the apple cores. I tossed all of those, and focused on the pulp remaining in the bowl. I added that back to the pot, along with the steaming liquid. Why not? It still had all that apple flavor in it, and it would be a shame to lose that.

I put the pot back over the heat, this time to medium, and gave the apple sauce a taste. It wasn't as tart as before, but it needed help. I poured in some maple syrup and tried it again. Better, but still not there. It did taste a little brighter though. A few shakes of cinnamon added to that brightness. I decided to try adding a little molasses to see if I could deepen the flavor a little too. After all, molasses is a key ingredient in brown sugar, and brown sugar goes great with apples. Unfortunately, it did not deepen the flavor, it deadened it. No more of that, I guess. A little more maple syrup and cinnamon brightened it some more, and helped counter that tartness a little more. By the time I was done, there was still a good bit of tart there, but the applesauce tasted dang good.

As you'll see in the , it was not the regular light-brown color that we generally associate with applesauce. In fact, even before I added that candy red steaming water, the apple pulp was a really nice red color. I'm guessing this is mostly because I didn't bother removing the skins, which apparently have a lot of pigment. Don't worry, you can't tell that the skins are there. They just kind of blended in with the rest of the pulp. This ended up being a really nice applesauce.

New Wallpaper: Crab Apples

That's right, Jayce dropped off a big old bag of crab apples at my desk yesterday. First order of business: making wallpaper. Hope you like it.

Yard Sale!

I'm selling some stuff. At the moment, I'm only selling old books and magazines, but I will likely put some computer parts up at some point. Read all about it here.

Southwest Succotash

Okay, before I start, let me preface this by saying that I know it's not really succotash if it doesn't have lima beans. If you really want lima beans in it, go ahead and add them, it won't hurt my feelings. I used black beans because I like black beans, and I have tons of them in my pantry.

I'm still on my soft foods diet. Yay, whee, yippy-skippy. Fortunately, hot foods are allowed now. Looking through my fridge and my pantry, I saw a few ingredients that I thought might work, so long as I made them soft. I diced up half a red bell pepper and a whole jalapeno, and started sauteeing them with a little salt and veggie oil in a pan on medium heat. When they were soft, I added half a can of corn and half a can of black beans, both drained. When I made this again the next day, I also ended up adding 1/3 cucumber (should have used zucchini), peeled and diced. I also added a hit or two of Worcestershire sauce and a teaspoon of chile powder. After a couple of minutes, I added 3 roma tomatoes, seeded and diced, and a tomatillo, also diced. The second time I made it, I ran out of tomatoes, and ended up using two tomatillos. Then I poured in about 1/3 cup of chicken stock and slapped on the lid for 5 minutes.

After 5 minutes, I uncovered, gave it a stir, and let it cook until the liquid was mostly gone. It only took another minute or so. At this point, it was all soft and ready to eat. The second day, I added some of it to an omelet, and then sprinkled cheese on top of it and the omelet. That worked out pretty well. The name didn't come until after I had cooked it the first time. Succotash is generally composed of lima beans and corn, although there are variations that don't involve corn. I don't suppose a whole lot else is generally added, but hey, I'm a growing dude. And it did end up pretty tasty.