KitchenSavvy

Back to My Childhood

When I was a kid, we used to make these wonderful bush pies.  For those who don't know what a bush pie is, it is a sandwich made by compressing to pieces of bread, with filling in the middle, in a device which compresses the edges and which you then heat over a fire to toast the outside while heating the interior at the same time.  My all time favorite filling was peanut butter.

The bush pie maker we had was shaped so that the pies came out looking like little toasted flying saucers.  If you got it right, the edges where the two slices of bread had sealed together was crunchy.  Inside the peanut butter would have undergone a magical transformation.  Where it was closer to the bread, it would have become firm and almost fudge-like while the middle was molten hot.  Of course, you could always wait a few minutes to let it cool down a bit, but it was a bit of a dare for me to see how soon I could get to the molten center without it being to hot to eat.

When my parents downsized their home, I got those bush pie makers and enjoyed making them with my own kids until one day the things disappeared.  I searched for them everywhere and, when I couldn't find them, I searched the internet for replacements.  There were lots of imitators, but none that would make those perfect, round, flying saucer bush pies of my childhood.

Enter Toas-Tite.  These folks have produced an authentic replica of the 1949 sandwich toaster of my dreams, packaged in a retro box complete with reprints of original instruction and recipe booklets.

You can fill them with pretty much anything.  The recipes include meat pies, chicken pies, bologna, grilled cheese, apple pie and even pirogi!  Or you can make up recipes of your own.  Add a piece of chocolate to peanut butter to make Reese's Pies.  Make a Bush Pie 'Monsieur' by filling it with ham, Gruyère cheese and some Dijon mustard.  Tuna melt? Tuna, mayo, salt pepper and Swiss cheese.  An 'Elvis'? Peanut butter, mashed banana and crumbled bacon.  The combinations are endless.

Next stop, family week up at the lake (typical Saskatchewanian, saying "the lake", like there is only one!) and introducing my six-year old grandson to the joys of Toas-Tite Bush Pies. I can hardly wait!

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Due to the volume of questions received, not all can be answered, nor can we guarantee we will answer questions immediately
© Lost Hobbit Enterprises 2004 onward

Better Beans

One of those "wish I could do it better" items that has sat on my cooking  To-Do list for years is beans.  I prefer for taste, nutrition and cost to work with dried beans, but I'm forever plagued by inconsistent results.  Well, two books that I recently got seem to have removed most if not all of my worries.  The books are Harold McGee's Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes and The Science of Good Cooking from Cook's Illustrated.

McGee is the author of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, which is the go-to reference for culinary professionals, worldwide. Cook's Illustrated is a publishing arm of America's Test Kitchen, a 2,500 square foot test kitchen located just outside of Boston with more than three dozen full-time cooks and product testers.

Both Keys to Good Cooking and The Science of Good Cooking agree that the first step for any dried beans that require prolonged soaking is to brine them in a solution of 2 teaspoons (10ml) of salt per quart or liter of water.  According to Cook's Illustrated, what happens is that the seed coat of beans is made up of pectin molecules which are cross connected by calcium and magnesium.  The sodium in salt replaces some of the calcium atoms in the pectin matrix which makes up the seed coat, weakening the coat and allowing water to penetrate into the interior.  Beans should be brined for a minimum of 8 hours and preferably over night.

The next step is to cook the beans long and slow to allow the interior to soften without breaking the coat.  This is easiest done by bringing the beans to a very gentle simmer on the stovetop, and then putting them in an oven set to around 250°F (121°C).  Keys and Science differ slightly in whether to add salt to the cooking water.  Cook's Illustrated says to salt the water, whereas McGee says that salt won't hurt, but added to cooking water without pre-soaking, it can slow down water absorption.  Both agree that acidic liquids, sugar and calcium can all keep the beans firm.  For this reason, other ingredients, particularly tomatoes, molasses, sugar, etc., are added later in the cooking.

To do the pre-cook, drain the beans, place them in a dutch oven with an equal amount of water, by volume, and bring to a gentle simmer over medium heat.  Cover and place in the oven for approximately 2 hours or until the beans are nearly cooked but still slightly al dente.  If you want, you can add a bit of baking soda (1/4 tsp per cup of dried beans) and the salt called for in the recipe.

After the two hour cooking, all of the other ingredients can be added and the dish finished according to instructions.  Uncover if necessary for the last half hour or so if there is too much liquid.

I tried the above -- brine overnight, pre-cook for two hours in the oven in equal parts water with 1/4 tsp of baking soda and then finish the recipe -- making chili con carne and got spectacular results.  Most of the beans remained whole, with unbroken shells, but their insides were creamy smooth, almost buttery.  Next stop, Boston Baked Beans.

Try brining them overnight.  It may just change your outlook on using dried beans.

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If you have food or cooking questions, send them to Questions@KitchenSavvy.com

 

 

Due to the volume of questions received, not all can be answered, nor can we guarantee we will answer questions immediately
© Lost Hobbit Enterprises 2004 onward

No Mix-ology

Hi.  My wife keeps telling me that I shouldn't mix the last leftovers, say from a container of hummus, with the new one.  I say there is no reason not to.  What do you think?
- Jake

There is good reason behind your wife's concern, and that is that you are mixing food that has already had a chance for bacterial growth into new food, thus accelerating the time at which it will go bad.

Take as a hypothetical example a fresh 16 fluid ounce container of store-bought hummus.  Let's say, for the sake of discussion, that there is one bacterium per tablespoon of hummus (no food is ever completely bug free), that the bacteria multiply once every 6 hours under refrigeration, and lets just say that once there are more than a billion bacteria per tablespoon you are likely to get sick from eating it.  Remember, these are just made up numbers for the example.  Real numbers would depend on what bacteria, what food, what temperature, and a host of other factors.

So, after 6 hours in our theoretical hummus there will be 2 bacteria per tablespoon, after another 6 there will be 4, and so on.  After a week, there will be 2²⁷ = 134,217,728 bacteria per tablespoon, give or take a few million. You may be OK if you eat it.

Now, let's suppose that you take one tablespoon of leftover hummus from the 7-day old container, and stir it into another new one.  Now you have "diluted" the old hummus, and raised the per tablespoon bacteria count in the fresh stuff from one to a mere 4,194,304.  After a week of sitting around in the fridge, there will be 1,125,899,906,842,620 bacteria per tablespoon, a million times our hypothetical limit. Not good!

Do the same thing again, and you will have 35,184,372,088,832 bacteria per tablespoon at the start of the week, and around 9½ sextillion bacteria per tablespoon at the end of the week.

OK, so you get my drift, whatever the real numbers may be.  Mixing old food into new makes the new food go bad quicker, and doing it repeatedly just accelerates the rate at which your food goes bad.

Your best bet is to either throw away the last little bit of any old container, whether it's hummus or something else, or eat it separately (assuming it hasn't gone bad), before digging into the new stuff.

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If you have food or cooking questions, send them to Questions@KitchenSavvy.com

 

 

Due to the volume of questions received, not all can be answered, nor can we guarantee we will answer questions immediately
© Lost Hobbit Enterprises 2004 onward

Say Again!

If a diet calls for 9 ounces of protein daily, how many grams would that be?
- Kitty

Nine ounces equals 255 grams, but if a diet calls for nine ounces of protein, the first thing I would recommend is checking out just exactly what the author meant by the word 'protein'.  Technically, proteins are organic molecules made up of amino acids, which are the basic building blocks for life.  Your body uses amino acids to build or repair tissue.  They are also necessary for almost every chemical reaction in the human body.

According to the USDA, by this definition of protein, you need about 0.75 grams per kilogram (2.24 pounds) of weight.  An average person weighing 155 pounds would need 155 / 2.24 X 0.8 = 52 grams of protein per day,  or 1.8 ounces. Pregnant or lactating women need more protein, as do people engaged in strenuous physical activity.  Protein requirements also change with age.  By the technical meaning of protein, 255 grams would be almost 5 times the amount needed by an average healthy person.

The other way in which the word 'protein' is used it to mean foods, such as meats, that are the primary source of protein in western omnivore diets.  This is what is meant, for instance, when someone refers to a meal as having a protein, a vegetable and a starch.  The protein content of foods varies widely.  For example, cod has around 22%  protein by weight, while turkey breast meat has about 32% protein by weight.

In order to simplify dietary guidelines, recommendations are frequently made in terms of the amount of protein rich foods to eat, since most people don't track specific nutrients, if they watch anything at all.  Unfortunately, in the process the word 'protein' has now become ambiguous. Are they talking about protein rich foods, or the actual protein amount itself?

If a diet says to consume 9 ounces of protein rich foods such a meat and fish, at say 20% protein by weight on average, that means you would get about 1.8 ounces of real protein, or very close to the recommended amount.

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If you have food or cooking questions, send them to Questions@KitchenSavvy.com

 

 

Due to the volume of questions received, not all can be answered, nor can we guarantee we will answer questions immediately
© Lost Hobbit Enterprises 2004 onward