Recipe 72: Roasted Peppers

So many of the recipes I am using at present have roast peppers as one of the main ingredients, so I thought I would add how to roast them in a separate entry.
Plus, roasted peppers go very well with cheese and crackers as a separate dish as well!

Roast Peppers

Capsicums

METHOD

1. Preheat the oven to 180c. Put the whole pepper in a baking dish and bake for 20-30 minutes until the skin is wrinkled and the pepper is soft. 
2. Leave to cool for 10 minutes or until cool enough to handle, then remove the skin, stalk and seeds and chop coarsely.

Technique: Creating your own self raising flour

Ah... Learning so much from this years resolution- not only in cooking itself, but also techniques that I never even knew existed. It's just about May and granted I am 14 recipes behind, but I am content in reaching recipe 50! Truthfully I thought I would have given up by now.

So this morning when I was making Recipe 50: the Banana scones, I failed to check the pantry to see whether I had all the ingredients. Go figure, all out of self-raising flour.

Self Raising Flour- Home made

For 1 cup self-raising flour:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking soda

Please note that this is in addition to any baking powder already in the recipe.

The Result- worked like a charm!

A shot at pastries

Mad or completely bonkers, well, that's what I thought when deciding to make my Lemon Meringue Pie from scratch. But when you have guests in a few hours and packing up your child to then unpack him to go to the grocers, the idea of 1) getting an extra recipe for my blog and 2) not moving a sleeping baby, won out.

Firstly- a technique called "cutting in" is something you need to know about when making pastry. To "Cut in" use a knife or food processor to combine butter with flour to get a crumb-like consistency.

Sweet Shortcrust Pastry

1 cup standard plain flour
75g butter
1/4 cup sugar
1 egg yolk
1 tbsp water


METHOD

1. Sift flour, cut in butter until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. 
2. Stir in sugar. 
3. Add egg yolk and water. Mix to a stiff dough. 
4. Roll out into sheets and chill for 30 minutes before using.

You can also add 2 tsps of mixed spice to the flour for a Spice Pastry or 1/2 cup of chopped walnut or nuts of your choice before mixing to a stiff dough to make a Nut Pastry.

Technique: Blind Baking - useful for pies.

I had never heard of this until the other day when I had to make a lemon meringue pie (next post). Stupidly the first thing that went through my head was 'where do I get a blind man from to bake' and 'surely that means baking by feel not by calculations and time etc.'... Suppose this is the reason why I am doing this challenge, as I was wrong on both accounts.

Blind Baking or "Bake Blind": 

 Blind baking is the technique cooks and chefs use to pre cook a pastry, when the filling it will be used for:

• needs little cooking itself so pre-cooking the pastry shell is important so as not to serve a raw pastry
• is wet or a liquid, so pre-cooking or blind baking is required to stop the pastry absorbing the moisture and being a wet mess
• is dense, so we pre cook the pastry to ensure it is cooked

METHOD

Loosely cover an unbaked pastry case with a sheet of baking paper larger than the size of the tin. Fill with dried beans, pasta or rice and bake. This ensures the pastry base is cooked sufficiently for holding moist fillings. Baking blind beans or rice can be stored and re-used.

It took a couple of goes to get this right- the first time I did it, there was not enough rice weighing the baking paper down and the pastry rose- which is not very good if you need to actually put something in your so called "pie"! The second time was better, I also pricked the pastry with a fork before putting more rice on the baking paper. 

Technique: Blanching vs. Boiling… one in the same? ahhh, No!

All this time I had been making recipe number 10 – the Cream of Broccoli Soup by what I deemed was blanching, only to find out just yesterday that in fact I had been boiling the crap out of the broccoli instead of doing what the recipe said. 

The only reason why I picked up on this was due to yesterday’s relish recipe (will feature sometime this week) which required for the tomatoes to be skinned.
'How does one skin a tomato?' I asked myself. Luckily, the trusty web is full of information on cooking techniques and  I find that I should blanch them so the skin comes off easily and quickly. Well, this was something I can do!  So I thought anyway, when what I deemed as blanching successfully gave me slop. Yep, the skins were “easy” to get off, you just picked them out of the bottom of the saucepan after going through the mush.

So back to the drawing board to learn what the difference is.

The term "blanching" refers to the technique of plunging a food, usually a vegetable or fruit, into boiling water until either its color has set or the food has softened slightly. This takes anywhere from a few seconds (30 seconds for a tomato- so I found) to several minutes, depending on what is being blanched.
The food is then removed from the boiling water to an ice bath to "shock," or stop the cooking process and to set color.

Why do you use this technique?

Peeling:  It makes it easier to peel the skin of fruits like tomatoes and peaches.
Colour:  It also enhances the color of vegetables like green beans or broccoli. That is why the blanched green beans shown here look so vivid.
Storage:  It's also a good idea to blanch vegetables you intend to freeze, because blanching inactivates the enzymes that promote spoilage.

Other "boiling water techniques"

Parboiling:  Parboiling is a technique that is similar to blanching, but takes a bit longer. Parboiled food is actually partially cooked. This technique is especially useful when you are stir-frying foods that take different amounts of time to cook. If you parboil a dense food, such as broccoli, you can add it to your wok at the last minute to cook along with a quicker-cooking food, such as shrimp.
Boiling: Well, I think everyone knows this one… food is cooked in boiling water and then served.

I have learnt my lesson- from now on, even if I think I know what the recipe terminology is, I am going to look it up.