Daring Cooks' December 2011 - Cha Sui Bao

Our Daring Cooks’ December 2011 hostess is Sara from Belly Rumbles! Sara chose awesome Char Sui Bao as our challenge, where we made the buns, Char Sui, and filling from scratch – delicious!

Okay, so this is possibly going to be my dodgiest post ever. I completed this challenge back in late November but stupidly I didn't do my post before our baby was born (!) on 8 December. Since then I have been um, kinda busy. But I have to post to prove I did it and besides, this was my favourite DC challenge yet.  I love to eat BBQ pork buns but had never made them at home before, and both versions I made were excellent. 
I first made the recipe as suggested by the host, cooking the BBQ pork on the BBQ (duh!) and steaming the buns. Then, as I was a lady of leisure on maternity leave, I also made a version of David Chang's famous pork buns, which are like a cross between Char Sui Bao and Peking Duck pancakes. 
Thank you for the challenge Sara, I loved it. 

The inside of the Char Sui Bao with Tom enjoying one in the background 

The BBQ pork on the trusty Weber BabyQ 

Char Sui Bao pre-steaming 

My Momofuku-style pork buns. We visited David Chang's new Sydney restaurant Seiobo for Tom's birthday in October and these buns were served as part of the 14 course degustation

Daring Bakers November 2011 - Sans Rival

Catherine of Munchie Musings was our November Daring Bakers’ host and she challenged us to make a traditional Filipino dessert – the delicious Sans Rival cake! And for those of us who wanted to try an additional Filipino dessert, Catherine also gave us a bonus recipe for Bibingka which comes from her friend Jun of Jun-blog.

I got in early this month so I could make this in time for my very last day at work before starting maternity leave. A Sans Rival cake involves layers of baked dacquoise (similar to meringue) with lots and lots of buttercream icing. I have a serious sweet tooth and am not afraid of fat, but even I had to baulk at the idea of eating this cake between two. Fortunately it was a big hit at work . I am hoping that I find a mothers' group that likes baked goods so I have a regular place to share the DB challenges and other sweet things I make.

I made the recipe exactly as prescribed, except I adopted a suggestion from someone in the forum to bake the dacquoise layers spread on baking paper instead of in a tin. That worked really well because I don't have multiple cake tins in the same size, but I could still bake 2 at a time. Although this is not the kind of thing I would usually make by choice, it was lots of fun to prepare the layers and decorate the cake.

Thank-you Catherine for hosting this month and for introducing me to something new. I would love to explore more Filipino foods in the future.

The Daring Cooks November 2011 - Cooking with Tea

Sarah from Simply Cooked was our November Daring Cooks’ hostess and she challenged us to create something truly unique in both taste and technique! We learned how to cook using tea with recipes from Tea Cookbook by Tonia George and The New Tea Book by Sara Perry.

For this month's challenge I took up smoking. I'd had the idea of using tea leaves to smoke food floating around in my head for awhile, I can't remember where I picked it up. So when this challenge was revealed and the only requirement was to make something savoury with tea, I knew what I wanted to do.

I googled tea-smoked chicken and it came back with hundreds of recipes and suggestions, but many of them were based on a mixture of equal parts tea leaves, raw rice and brown sugar. The traditional approach is to use a foil-lined wok but I wanted to try it in our barbecue.

I have described my method and ingredients below, but it really extremely flexible and could be used in any sort of salad, or sandwich or ramen or pasta or whatever. The result was some perfectly cooked and very tasty chicken pieces, but the smoke flavour was very subtle and the tea flavour was non-existent. I think it would need a longer smoking time (at a lower temperature than I could achieve in our barbecue) to develop more flavour.

Tea-smoked chicken summer salad

For the chicken

4 skinless chicken thigh pieces

Salt

Pepper

1/4 cup tea leaves

1/4 cup uncooked rice

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 cinnamon stick crumbled into pieces

Lightly season the chicken with salt and pepper and set aside.

Preheat your barbecue on high for around 10 minutes.

Choose a robust baking tray and wire rack that will fit inside your barbecue.

Wrap the tray on both sides with a double layer of foil.

Combine the tea, rice, sugar and cinnamon and spread evenly inside the tray.

Place the tray inside the barbecue and wait until it starts to smoke

Place the chicken on the rack and then put the wire rack over the tea mixture in the barbecue.

Turn the heat down to low, close the lid of the barbecue and leave for 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes I checked the temperature using a digital thermometer with a probe and it was good to go.

For the salad (to serve 2)

2 smoked chicken thighs, shredded

1/2 cos lettuce, shredded

1 bunch asparagus, blanched and sliced

1/2 ripe avocado, sliced

1 cup cherry tomatoes, quartered

Combine all the ingredients in a salad bowl and dress as desired. I used just a little olive oil and balsamic.

Daring Bakers' October 2011 - Povitica

The Daring Baker’s October 2011 challenge was Povitica, hosted by Jenni of The Gingered Whisk. Povitica is a traditional Eastern European Dessert Bread that is as lovely to look at as it is to eat!

What a beautiful challenge. While I am usually more interested in the taste of food than the look, it is fun to make something that also looks lovely. And I had never heard of or seen this kind of bread before.

The basic idea is to make a sweet bread dough, roll it out very thin, top it with a sweet nutty filling, roll it up jelly roll style, then loop the roll around in the bread pan to create a pretty pattern in the baked loaf.

The challenge recipe called for a 1.5 hour rise time, but with a really busy week and an inability to stay up late, I made the dough in the evening, left it to rise all night, then rolled and baked early the next morning. Surprisingly this didn't seem have any adverse effect on the finished product.

You can find the recipe I used, which was created by the host, here in the Daring Kitchen archive. I made the half batch to produce 2 loaves. For one loaf I used the suggested walnut filling and for the other I used poppy seeds, simply replacing the amount of ground walnuts in the recipe with poppy seeds.

You can see from the pictures that the poppy seed version was more successful. I think that was partly because I allowed the loaf longer to rise/rest after it was placed in the plan, and party because the poppy seed mixture was thinner and easier to spread than the walnut version.

It seems that this bread also goes by the name Potica, and you can find many different recipes by searching for that.

Thanks to Jenni for the excellent challenge - it was fun to make and yummy to eat and I will definitely be making it again. This last picture features one of my favorite op-shopped linen tea towels - I thought it was appropriate as it was made in Czech republic.

The Daring Cooks October 2011 - Moo Shu

The October Daring Cooks' Challenge was hosted by Shelley of C Mom Cook and her sister Ruth of The Crafts of Mommyhood. They challenged us to bring a taste of the East into our home kitchens by making our own Moo Shu, including thin pancakes, stir fry and sauce.

I was intrigued by this month's challenge. We eat lots of Chinese and go to lots of Chinese restaurants and I have never heard of Moo Shu. I don’t think it is a thing in Australia. But I love pancakes of any description, so I was keen to give it a go. In fact on the day I made this I also made pancakes for breakfast - a truly excellent day.

So this challenge had three components – pancakes, filling and sauce. The pancake dough was easy to work with and I found I could roll it very thin, but I was not completely happy with the results. In short, the pancakes were hard. I found they were only pliable enough to wrap after a short zap in the microwave. A minute or so in a steam basket would probably have the same effect. Also the favour was quite bland. Next time I would follow the suggestion of some of the other Daring Cooks and add salt to the dough.

The stir-fry was very simple to prepare, but I had never used wood ear fungus before, so that was fun. It is amazing how much it puffs up when re-hydrated and I loved the unique rubbery texture. I still have most of a bag of dried fungus in the cupboard so I am on the lookout for ideas to use it up.

When it came to the hoisin sauce recipe I was very sceptical. Why would you make your own hoisin sauce, especially with inauthentic Chinese ingredients like peanut butter and honey? But I am a (mostly) obedient Daring Cook, so I gave it a whirl.

The overall effect was a perfectly tasty dinner, but for me it didn't quite have the wow factor of other challenges. I would love to try Moo Shu in a good Chinese restaurant and see how it compares.

Thanks to Shelley and Ruth for introducing me to something new. I especially enjoyed reading about the history and etymology of Moo Shu.

Croissants - Daring Bakers' Challenge September 2011

The Daring Bakers go retro this month! Thanks to one of our very talented non-blogging members, Sarah, the Daring Bakers were challenged to make Croissants using a recipe from the Queen of French Cooking, none other than Julia Child!

Ah, whoops. I was so excited about this challenge that I didn't realise we were required to make croissants to a specific recipe. 500 grams of butter later, there was no way I was going to make a second batch, so I hope I will be forgiven.

I recently acquired the Bourke St Bakery cookbook, which I have wanted for ages. I got it at the newly opened Sydney Costco for only $30 and was excited to try the croissant recipe. The book includes a basic croissant dough which can be used to make traditional croissants, pan au chocolat, raisin scrolls and danishes.

The basic recipe calls for 900 grams of flour, 500 grams of butter and fresh yeast, and at one point the instructions say to roll the dough out to 90 cm, which is wider than our kitchen bench. So the recipe is not wonderfully suited to the home baker. But I forged ahead. The results were not perfect. The taste was too buttery - I know croissants are meant to be buttery, but these were extreme. In terms of texture, the outside was crisp and somewhat flakey, but the inside was a little too doughy.

The interior honeycomb - not perfect but not a disaster either.

The money shot! Despite my misgivings, I must say that when I was eating this for breakfast the next day, with butter, strawberry jam and a coffee, I was feeling extremely smug.

I divided the huge amount of dough into three and also made some almond croissants and cinnamon nut scrolls.

Almond croissants are my personal all-time favorite pastry and there are lots of different versions. I made mine by spreading some frangipane over the cut croissant dough before rolling and then sprinkling flaked almonds on the top before baking.

I made the scrolls using the cinnamon bun roll and cut technique with chopped walnuts added. All three versions were tasty but I liked the basic croissant best. I froze some of each version and I am hoping I can lure some friends around for brunch soon and impress them with my handmade pastry.

Thank you to our host Sarah and I am awfully sorry I didn't make the Julia Child recipe. I promise I will try it out next time I make croissants.

Appam and Curry - The Daring Cooks Challenge August 2011

Mary, who writes the delicious blog, Mary Mary Culinary was our August Daring Cooks’ host. Mary chose to show us how delicious South Indian cuisine is! She challenged us to make Appam and another South Indian/Sri Lankan dish to go with the warm flat bread.

I am always excited when a new challenge is revealed, but I was especially excited when I saw this one. I have a connection with Sri Lanka because my father was born there and my grandparents lived there as tea-estate managers for many years. Also my sister lived in Colombo for a time in 2006 and I visited her there. I have many good memories of the food, but my absolute favorite thing was the egg hopper - also known as appam!

I made the appams, the beef curry and the carrot dish as suggested by the host. You can find all the recipes here. I also made a pol sambol from a recipe by Charmaine Solomon and a chilli sambol. This was one of the best meals I have had in a long time. The variety of flavours and textures was wonderful and everything tasted very authentic.

I saved some of the batter for next morning and made an egg hopper. I wouldn't usually go for chilli sambol at breakfast, but this was brilliant and also very satisfying.

And look - this is a picture from my trip to Sri Lanka in 2006. You can see an egg hopper with pol sambol and chilli sambol in the background, and I think probably a fish curry in the foreground. How good is it that I am able to recreate such amazing food at home? Thank you so much host Mary, this was my favourite challenge yet.