Daring bakers: crackers and dipping sauce

I made it! Today, on the very last day of posting, I succeeded in preparing Daring Bakers’ this months’ challenge. It was relatively easy to make and the recipe is a definite keeper for future house parties – it is cheap, tasty, and you can play around with the seasoning as much as you like.

I just moved to a new apartment and found a measuring cup laying around on the cupboard….heavenly! No more counting the tablespoons (1 cup equals 16 tbsp, so you can imagine the extra work I have done so far when using a recipe which gives you ingredients in cups…). I am no more afraid of those recipes which feature 1/2 cup or 1/3 cup or even 2/3 cup of flour or sugar or any other ingredient…I am free now to use any recipe I want! Feels good

Now the recipe -  for 1 sheet of crackers you will need the following ingredients:

 1 1/2 cups (6.75 oz) unbleached bread flour 

1/2 tsp (.13 oz) salt

1/2 tsp (.055 oz) instant yeast

1 Tb (.75 oz) agave syrup or sugar

1 Tb (.5 oz) vegetable oil

1/3 to 1/2 cup + 2 Tb (3 to 4 oz) water, at room temperature

Poppy seeds, sesame seeds, paprika, cumin seeds, caraway seeds, or kosher salt for toppings

# In a mixing bowl, stir together the flour, salt yeast, agave, oil, and just enough water to bring everything together into a ball.  You may not need the full 1/2 cup + 2 Tb of water, but be prepared to use it all if needed.

# Sprinkle some flour on the counter and transfer the dough to the counter.  Knead for about 10 minutes, or until the ingredients are evenly distributed.  Lightly oil a bowl and transfer the dough to the bowl, rolling it around to coat it with oil.  Cover the bowl with plastic wrap.

 

# Ferment at room temperature for 90 minutes, or until the dough doubles in size. (You can also retard the dough overnight in the refrigerator immediately after kneading or mixing).

# Mist the counter lightly with spray oil and transfer the dough to the counter.  Press the dough into a square with your hand and dust the top of the dough lightly with flour.  Roll it out into a paper thin sheet. When it is the desired thinness, let the dough relax for 5 minutes under a towel.  Line a sheet pan with baking parchment.  Carefully lift the sheet of dough and lay it on the parchment.  If it overlaps the edge of the pan, snip off the excess with scissors. 

 

# Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F with the oven rack on the middle shelf.  Mist the top of the dough with water and sprinkle a covering of seeds or spices on the dough (such as alternating rows of poppy seeds, sesame seeds, paprika, cumin seeds, caraway seeds, kosher or pretzel salt, etc.)  Be careful with spices and salt – a little goes a long way. Especially with cumin seeds – I used too much of those, the flavour was way tooo strong.

# If you want to precut the cracker, use a pizza cutter (rolling blade) and cut squers, diamonds or rectangles in the dough.  You do not need to separate the pieces, as they will snap apart after baking.  If you want to make shards, bake the sheet of dough without cutting it first. 

6.  Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the crackers begin to brown evenly across the top (the time will depend on how thinly and evenly you rolled the dough).

7.  When the crackers are baked, remove the pan from the oven and let them cool in the pan for about 10 minutes.  You can then snap them apart or snap off shards and serve. 

 Serve with a salsa sauce of your liking. I used the following recipe – but if you are in a hurry, pick something more simple as this salsa actually took me longer to make than the crackers. Nevertheless, it tasted good:

 

   * juice of 1 lime
    * 1/2 teaspoon minced garlic
    * 1/4 to 1/2 cup finely diced red onion
    * 1 Red Fresno and 1 Hot Yellow minced chile (seeds removed)
    * 1 to 2 teaspoons sugar,
    * 1/2 ripe sweet honeydew melon, cubed into bite-sized pieces
    * 4 small, ripe peaches, peeled and cubed into bite-sized pieces
    * salt and freshly ground black pepper
    * 1/3 cup minced fresh coriander, or coriander and mint combined

# In a medium bowl blend the lime juice, garlic, onion and chilies. Let stand 20 minutes.

# Blend in sugar and fruits with salt (a generous pinch) and pepper (to make piquant) to taste.

# Refrigerate up to 3 hours. Fold in fresh herbs just before serving.

This amount of salsa is of course too much for one sheet of crackers, but you can use it up for your dinner. Try the salsa with grilled seafoods and poultry, or over rice noodles. Is best eaten within several hours of preparation. Use organic ingredients if at all possible.

 

 

Salmon bites

Something simple and easy, a snack which I discovered in one of the cookbooks  I browsed  at the bookshop over the weekend. It was one of the only snack from about a 10 I tried to memorize  from the books and the only one I did remember entirely, when I got home. Am I getting old?

The snacks then. You should be able to eat them with your hand – at least it was said so in the cookbook, but mine came out a bit soft, so I served them from the small serving spoon.

1 big potato, peeled and grated

1 slice of smoked salmon (about 10×10 cm), sliced into 8 even pieces

sour cream

salt and pepper

lemon juice

 

# Mix grated potato with salt and pepper and shape the bowlful into 8 small cakes. Place them into the hot pan and fry until golden brown. I didn’t use any butter or oil (did not want the result to be too greasy), but it is up to you.

# Place cooled potato cakes onto a plate or serving spoons.

# Place half spoonful of sour cream on top of the small potato cakes. Top with salmon and sprinkle over with some lemon juice. Serve.

Nice snacks, something different for a while (prosciutto rolls, salmon bruschettas and bacon biteswere getting too usual and unoriginal after some time)! Don’t be afraid to overseason the potato cakes – it is better if they come out too salty rather than too bland. Mine were a bit too bland, so I needed to sprinkle them over with some extra salt…

New experience – clafoutis

Do you know what is clafoutis? Do you know that it is an oven pancake-like cake and comes from France? And that you should usually bake it with cherries and serve it warm? I learned it a few days ago, when nami-nami introduced this dish and challenged to try it.

What an easy thing to do, just prepare a pancake batter, place some berries in the bottom of an oven dish, pour them over with the batter, bake and serve. Sounds like and ideal cake. But. I don’t know whether it was me but I did not get this dessert. It was with kind of a gummy texture, like eating Haribo gummy candies. Or maybe it was just my imagination.

But do try it to get the idea of it, if you haven’t yet. Traditionally clafoutis is made with cherries, but as the price tag of cherries was twice as much as for red currants and blackberries, I decided not to go for them. After all, Im going to be a student in about a couple of weeks, so one needs to be reasonable with spending. And in any case, I don’t have any idea how to get rid of cherry stones so that the cherries would look like normal cherries (rather than thrown-to-pieces-cherries). But bear in mind that never use only red currants – I did – and the cake ended up so sour that even super-sweet whipping cream couldn’t save it.

I did the following:

150 g flour

3 eggs

300 ml milk

85 g sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

25 g butter

250 g berries

# Pour flour into a bowl, make a hole inside the flour, add the eggs and 150 ml of milk. Stir well to combine.

#Add sugar, the rest of the milk and vanilla extract.

# Place butter into an oven dish (2 litres) and place the dish into a hot (200 degrees C) oven for a couple of minutes. When the butter has melted, remove the dish from the oven.

# Pour the batter into the oven dish and place the berries on top. Bake at 200 degrees C for about 30-40 minutes. Serve when warm (believe me, it tastes better when warm).

And the verdict: well, a good cake, but not something I would serve for guests. I see it more like a weekend breakfast thing for example, but not as a dessert ending a meal. It doesn’t even feel like normal cake, if you bite it, it is more like a thick pancake with berries.

Im however glad that I tried it because now I know how a clafoutis tastes and I know what to expect should I ever order it for a dessert in some restaurant. But if I have guests to come over and I would have the same ingredients at hand, I would do something else, something more fluffy and more like a “normal” cake, to be on the safe side.