Bacon Buns

If you're like me, you have a problem: you always have a container full of bacon drippings in your refrigerator. (To clarify, the only problem with this plethora of bacon drippings is making sure they get used up before they go bad.) A discussion of this issue a week ago Tuesday led to this Tuesday's experiment: bacon buns.

I took my old reliable hamburger/hot dog roll recipe and substituted bacon drippings for the butter. Since the recipe calls for heating the milk and butter to 100F before combining ingredients, and since bacon drippings melt nicely at 100F, it seemed success would be likely. To account for the extra sodium in the drippings, and to give a boost to the bacony bouquet, I also reduced the 2.5t of salt in the recipe to 2t, using 1t of table salt and 1t of Bacon Salt (which does a nice job of lending "meaty smoky" flavor to things, but doesn't actually taste like bacon in our opinion).



For a final touch, I brushed some room-temperature bacon drippings on top of the rolls and crosscut the tops.



The verdict: while they were not strongly bacon-flavored, they did have a nice "meaty" flavor. They also had a nice crunch to the crust and were soft and dense on the inside, similar in texture to a potato roll. They stood up well against the very flavorful burgers from Thundering Hooves and the watercress, bitter greens, and strong mustard accompaniments. Josh will have to supply his photographs of the finished dinner product - stay tuned!

cooking

This should really be a post about last nights dinner of delicious burgers with home-made rolls, but i didn't get pictures, so i'll let someone else get to it. In the mean time, this handy list of egg substitutes might come in useful some day:
http://tipnut.com/egg-substitutes/

Catching up...

Relatively little to report in my neck of the woods; that whole getting-hit-by-a-car thing has cut down a lot on my kitchen time.

But allow me to reminisce for a moment: On Cory's birthday, Megan made delicious chili.





After chili, there was chocolate lava cake courtesy of Josh.



Everything was accompanied by a fabulous bottle (courtesy of Mark Ryan winery, via Josh).



Around here, we call this "Tuesday."

Random food facts

Since we haven't had a new picture-iffic post lately, i thought i would fill in the gaps by linking to this article on sustainable sushi:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/pacificnw/2009076641_pacificfootfood19.html?cmpid=2628

For all that we all generally like decadent and delicious foods, we also all tend towards the from first principals, responsible food. Of course, it seems to me, the more you think about food and how it fits into your life, the more it becomes apparent that responsible choices are also good choices.

coffee tasting

A while ago I noticed an article that said that Howard Schultz was serving the new Via (Starbucks instant) coffee at his house, and he claimed his guests couldn't tell the difference. I assumed that his guests just didn't want to claim that the emporer was naked!

However, I also thought we needed a taste test. So, we set up our taste test. In addition to coffee, Josh cooked up a superb breakfast of waffles and bacond, served with fruit salad from Heidi, and coffee cake from Miranda. We sure do eat well around here.

The coffee tasting was set up with
1. Starbucks, Via, Italian Roast coffee
compared to
Starbucks Italian Roast, freshly ground beans, prepared with
2. Stove top espresso maker
3. Mr. Coffee drip maker
4. French Press
5. Bodum vaccuum coffee maker
and finally, for a nice control
6. Nescafe instant crystals.

Running the test was a bit haphazard on our part, and next time i'd do it better. (Actually, i'd love to do a real cupping at some point, but that just didn't make sense since we weren't comparing beans to beans.) However, what we did was two waves, with each of six types of coffee served in 4 oz. dixie cups. (Dixie cups, as it turns out, are sub-optimal. They start to leak quickly, and cool off quickly, and perhaps didn't help the taste.) We had sugar and cream available, but suggested that people try things black first.

The biggest problem we ran into was in consistently preparing the coffee well. I had not used the drip maker in years, and I set it up poorly the first time around - two little ground coffee. I also used less ground coffee than i should have in the vaccuum pot (because i made a different amount of coffee than i normally do). Meanwhile, the Nescafe was made far too strongly the first time around. I think we did better with the second round of servings, but, i do think this affected our results.

People who tasted the first round all hated the Nescafe, which was really chemically and bitter. Mostly they thought the drip and vaccuum pots were just watery. The results from the second round, though, seems telling. The Nescafe still didn't go over well. The drip maker and the stove top espresso were judged to be harsh with little depth of flavor or aroma. The most favorite were the french press and vaccuum pot, which scored about evenly. The big important result, though, was that the Via scored almost as well as the winners. No one did guess that it was an instant coffee.

So, perhaps Schultz was telling the truth afterall.
And my take-away, is that I'll use the french press or vaccuum pot whenever possible (really ought to be pretty much all the time, right?), but it is worthwhile keeping the Via around for emergencies, or packing light, and storing for a while in my office.

(Pictures somewhere, i think. And, as usual, thanks to all my great friends for making it a fun morning, and for their brave palates.)

Chocolate Lava Muffins

When we have birthdays in this group, we've tried to make an effort to make a nice dinner for the birthday critter. Down below we have details on Dan's birthday dinner this past year, and for Cory, we ended up making chili. Megan put together a lovely pot of chili, which I don't have a lot of details on. She doesn't really cook by a recipe, instead just throwing stuff in a pot and letting it simmer. Which, I suppose, is the way chili should be made. However, there is one great thing about the chili: Eli had a truly epic brainwave. Check this out:



Apologies for the cel phone photo - my phone does far better than most, but I wish I could have used a real camera for the majesty that is that photo. That is chili topped with Cheetos. I highly recommend you give that a try. It is so choice. And if you don't like Cheetos, I weep for your lack of enjoyment of life.

Anyway, the other thing I whipped together were some Chocolate Lava Muffins. I usually use Alton Brown's recipe, but there are a couple of things about the recipe that are off. For starters, there is no way in hell that that recipe yields a dozen 4-oz scoops of batter. I use a #12 disher (which is 2 2/3 ounces) and usually get nine muffins out of it. I use a normal muffin tin, and make sure you spray it liberally with spray, because they will overflow the cups a little bit. The other thing about that recipe is that the cooking time is off. I believe it usually ends up taking more like 14 minutes, but I start peeking at them at 10 minutes (without opening the door). The cooking time does tend to vary. At any rate, the batter is really easy to throw together, and they're always delicious. Here's what they look like, in a seriously craptastic photo:

Food for thought

Homemade Chicken, Vegetable, Rice & Pasta Soup (8 oz) vs. Campbell's Chunky Chicken, Vegetable & Pasta Soup (8 oz)*
	Homemade	Campbell's
Protein (g)	10.9	6
Carbohydrate (g)	24.2	14
Fat (g)	3.9	2.5
Calories	178	120
Unpronounceable ingredients	0	6
Time until hungry again (hr)	3	0.5

*Not a scientific study.