Tag: baking

Unintentional Mochi

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.

I’ll be honest, it took me a bit to think through this prompt. I, personally, alone, have not had any baking or cooking fails that I would count as “epic”.

I do, however, have one with my siblings for a family holiday meal.

Some brief background: while my brother has not been diagnosed (to my knowledge) with any sort of gluten sensitivity, he has noted that he feels better when he doesn’t have any gluten products and made the choice to go gluten free.

So, every family meal we have typically has some gluten free component, which in general is easier than you think. This has been going on for several years at this point and is part of my family’s new normal.

One Thanksgiving my sister and I were trying to follow an instant pot mac n cheese recipe using gluten free rice-based macaroni. She said she had made it before, and I had no reason to doubt her, so I followed her lead.

We measured everything out, and placed the pasta and liquids (I think it was a combination of water and milk, but I could be misremembering the milk part) into the instant pot. She hit some buttons, started the timer, and went to work on some other dishes while we waited.

It can’t have been more than 10 minutes, MAYBE 15 at the most, and the noodles should have been done and ready for us to add the sauce ingredients. Unfortunately, we  made a mistake somewhere, and when my sister went to vent the instant pot it started spitting a milky liquid (maybe that’s why I thought milk was involved) which caused us to panic a little and carefully throw a towel over it to prevent the hot liquid from getting everywhere.

As soon as the spitting stopped, we opened the lid. The pasta was still swimming in water. My sister said it should be fine and that we just needed to drain them, so she got a large spoon to try and get some out to check that the noodles were cooked appropriately before moving to the sink. To our horrible surprise we found that the noodles basically collapsed and rapidly turned into a mush. My sister quickly dug in to see if she could find any noodles that survived, but she only made it worse. She mixed the rice pasta macaroni too much, which in its current state didn’t take much at all, and the whole thing turned into a hot, sticky, homogeneous mass.

We looked at each other in mild shock and disbelief before we started laughing at the absolute disaster. We immediately wrote it off as a failure and played with it for a couple seconds. I tried poking it with my finger and it was almost like Oobleck the way it stuck to me.

As it cooled down and solidified more, I noticed the change in firmness and bounciness was almost like what I had seen in those videos of people making mochi. Then it dawned on me why. Mochi is made with rice flour, and as I had mentioned earlier the box of gluten free pasta was rice based.

We more or less made instant pot mochi.

A favorite recipe of mine

Taylor Burian1 Comment

What’s your favorite recipe?

I feel like I’ve answered this prompt before, or something similar, but I don’t know that I’ve ever considered any particular recipe to be my absolute favorite, as if only one were allowed to be described that way. I’m sure if I truly cared to “put one on a pedestal” then it would come to mind easily and I wouldn’t be writing this part.

So, while I wouldn’t classify the one I’m about to share as my one favorite, it is still  ONE OF my favorites. Although, technically it’s less a recipe and more a simple modification to one.

This is a simple modification for cookie recipes. Take a box of instant pudding mix and an egg, and add them to whatever cookie recipe you’re planning to make.

The trick I’ve found for this is to add the dry pudding mix into the butter and sugar after you’ve creamed those together. Then, when it comes to adding eggs, if your recipe already calls for one, just add a second. You can proceed from there and follow your baking instructions as normal. Usually. You may need to adjust the bake time.

That’s all there is to it!

Favorite fruits

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

List your top 5 favorite fruits.

Well, this should be quick and easy. My top 5 favorite fruits, in no particular order:

  • Strawberry
  • Banana
  • Lime
  • Pineapple
  • Mango

Orange and kiwi are honorable mentions.

Now, for a little nitpicking, lime bubly is the best flavor (followed by pineapple) but if I’m enjoying something other than bubly then pineapple is typically preferred. If I’m making something with kiwi, lime, and/or orange they are typically flavors that I build on top of because they are supporting rather than starring in the dish or drink.

There was an attempt: Pizza

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

For the last, I don’t know, several months I’ve been watching FoodTube. I love watching Kenji, Babish, and Joshua Weissman. Who doesn’t?

Well, after a couple weeks of watching videos from the latter of the three, I decided to try one of his pizza recipes.

I didn’t think to take any pictures last night when I was making the dough, so you’ll have to use your imagination. I followed the recipe for the Roman Dough on Joshua’s website. I measured everything out accordingly since I have a food scale (which all of them say you need for baking) and started following the directions. It did not go as I had hoped.

When I started to mix the wet and dry ingredients I didn’t fully know what to expect having only ever watched the videos (typically on my phone) so I didn’t recognize right away that something was wrong. The dough was too sticky. I pushed on anyway, thinking “maybe this is what he meant in the recipe?” I kept following the recipe as best I could. Mix, rest, slap and fold, rest, slap and fold again. Each time the dough was still too sticky, so I decided to let it rest a third time and rewatch Josh’s video on the Neapolitan vs roman pizza. Surely it was something minute that I overlooked. Nope, nothing.

So at the end of the night, after I had put my little dough baby in the fridge, I checked the recipe again. Being the usually vigilant and detail oriented person I am I did eventually notice something was off and wondered how I had missed this all important detail. Like, so important that everyone on FoodTube making dough calls it out EVERY TIME.

The measurements were wrong. I did some cross checking with other unrelated sites to confirm my suspicion as I did the math.

What Josh had in his recipe was 600g of bread flour and 432g of water (for 64% hydration). This was huge. So I took this information and submitted a message on his website to let him know. 432g would actually be 72% hydration… No wonder it was too sticky all the way through the process! If I had truly wanted to hit the 64% mark I would have ACTUALLY needed 384g of water.

So like I said, I submitted a message on the site. We’ll see if I get a response. In the meantime, if you come across this post and you’re having the same issue, know that you’re not alone.