Mexican Chicken Soup With Asian Noodles

 

This soup was exciting. Ignore the hot sauce bottle in these pictures. The flavor was perfect! I used Penzeys’ Arizona Dreaming Seasonings to flavor the broth. I only required about 30 minutes to make this soup.

Ingredients

• 3.5 ounces thin rice noodles
• 2 chicken breasts
• 8 cups chicken stock
• 2 tablespoons Mexican seasonings (without salt)
• 2 teaspoons sea salt
• 2 tablespoons agave
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 8 ounces white mushrooms, halved
• 1 cup scallions, green and white parts, chopped
• 12 ounces rainbow baby carrots
• 2 jalapenos, stemmed and deseeded
• Juice from 1 lime
• Cilantro

Instructions

• Put everything but the noodles, lime juice, and cilantro in a large saucepan, boil, and simmer for 25 minutes
• After 20 minutes add the lime juice
• Prepare the noodles using the directions on the package
• Remove the chicken breasts from the soup and chop them to make pieces
• Put everything in a serving bowl
• Garnish with cilantro

Download The Recipe:

Mexican Chicken Soup With Asian Noodles

Using My Vegetable Ragu Recipe To Make Mole With Cornbread

Notes: 1) Penzeys has exciting Mexican seasonings, their Arizona Dreaming Seasonings are incomparable, 2) Los Chileros [1][2][3] seasonings appear to be exciting, they are available on Amazon, 3) some blenders can make chili powder using dried chilies, 4) the cornbread recipe is on the package of cornmeal from Bob’s Red Mill

This is good. I prefer to put this sauce on pasta. Mole is usually served on chicken. I would recommend putting butter and honey on the cornbread and serving the mole as soup. Since I eat ragu each week, maybe I can use this idea to make a couple of exciting recipes for mole. This is the second time that I have made mole using my ragu recipe. The can of cocoa in the pictures below instructs someone that cocoa can be used to replace baking chocolate if the cocoa is mixed with oil. I used olive oil. Some chefs serve chocolate made with olive oil. The flavor is great.

Mole is a sauce from Mexico. The idea for making mole is to simmer pureed fruits and vegetables with toasted and pounded nuts and seeds. Bananas or plantains are probably the most popular fruits to put in mole. I would use brown bananas or plantains since they are sweeter. Someone creates a mole with a specific color by choosing different ingredients. Pumpkin seeds make green mole, and someone can use yellow chilies to make yellow mole. People can thicken the mole with bread, cookies, or masa harina. To make a mole a person might collect sesame seeds, nuts, spices, sugar, and cocoa or chocolate. After toasting and pounding these things, someone would add them to a stew of tomatoes and plantains.

My vegetable ragu recipe is written similarly to a pizza menu. Someone is able to read the lists of ingredients to create a combination of vegetables for making a ragu. This ragu did not include bananas or plantains. THIS RAGU WAS INTENTIONALLY MADE WITH WATER, NOT STOCK OR BROTH BECAUSE THE FLAVOR SEEMS AUTHENTIC. I will add roasted or bananas or plantains in the future. To make mole using my ragu recipe, add the following things to the broth (in the recipe):

1. Add 16 tablespoons (3/4 cup) cocoa
2. Add 6 tablespoons (1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons) extra virgin olive oil
3. 2 tablespoons sugar, brown sugar, agave, honey
4. Add 1/2 cup of peanut butter
5. Add 1/4 or 1/2 cup of Mexican seasonings

Download The Recipe:

Vegetable Ragout

Mole Pronto

Thomas Keller’s Sourdough Bread

Note: 1) this levain is tangy not sour, Thomas Keller may explain that a firm levain, a levain made with less water, is sour

Note: 1) in Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bakery, Thomas Keller explains that the amount of flour or water to feed the levain is the weight of the levain multiplied by 1.67, 150 grams of levain x 1.67 = 250.5 grams, thus he would add 250 grams of flour and 250 grams of water to 150 grams of levain to feed the levain, if people wanted to feed 650 grams of levain, they would use 1085 grams of water and 1085 grams of flour to 650 grams of levain to feed the levain (650 grams of levain x 1.67 = 1085.5 grams)

Note: 1) I am probably going to feed levain stored in the refrigerator once or twice a week, at room temperature, the levain rises in a container, maybe once the levain rises to a similar height as a levain at room temperature, I will feed the levain

I have never had bread better than Thomas Keller’s sourdough bread. The flavor of this bread restored my faith in something. When I taste this bread, I know how much I enjoy life. No bread compares to the flavor of this bread!

This bread requires a someone to make a levain or sourdough starter. The translation of levain may be leaven. In contemporary terms, a person has to make a “leavening agent” using wild yeast. People use science to understand how water changes flour and to understand how wild yeast and bacteria work to make gas and acid. Knowing the mechanisms that make sourdough possible may invite someone to be more creative or passionate about baking. Maybe someday I will have the opportunity to know (the story for) how fermentation works.

Levain:

1. Combine 250 g water and 250 g flour
2. Wait 24 hours
3. Combine 150 g (liquid) levain, 250 g water and 250 g flour to make 650 g levain
4. Repeat step 3 every 12 hours for 2 weeks*
5. Refrigerate or freeze the levain
6. Restore the levain to room temperature
7. Repeat step 3 for 2 days before using

* Notice that 500 g of levain is discarded every 12 hours. After 4 days, someone will have 500 g of levain to make bread every 12 hours.

Bread:

Ingredients

• 424 g all-purpose flour
• 0.5 g yeast (1/8 teaspoon)
• 403 g liquid levain
• 181 g water (75°F/24°C)
• 12 g fine sea salt

Instructions

1. Make the dough (add the salt after mixing the dough, knead the dough for 20 minutes)
2. Stretch or knead the dough to make a ball
3. Let the dough rise for 2 hours in a oiled bowl
4. (Optional) Put the dough on a floured surface and pat it to make a rectangle and let it sit for 40 minutes (relaxed gluten probably “opens” the crumb)
5. Shape the dough to make a boule
6. Let the dough rise in bowl lined with a floured towel for 3 hours
7. Use the towel “to flip” the bread on a floured peel or parchment paper
8. Bake at 425°F/218°C degrees for about 30 minutes or until the internal temperature is 200°F/93°C

Download The Recipe:

Thomas Keller’s Sourdough Bread

1. Thomas Keller: ad hoc at home (New York: Artisan), 2009, 302, 303.

Croque Monsieur With Salmon And Bluecheese Mornay On Thomas Keller’s Sourdough Bread

Note: 1) melt the cheese by putting the sandwich in the oven, not the broiler

This is my first croque monsieur [1]. Someone may translate croquet monsieur to be mister crunchy. This is a French sandwich. The inside of a croque monsieur encloses meat, usually ham, between two layers of béchamel or Mornay sauce. A chef would probably prefer less pungent flavors, but I enjoyed this sandwich. It was my new version of a tuna melt.

My next blog post will reveal the incomparably flavorful recipe for Thomas Keller’s sourdough bread. I have not tasted bread with flavor this exciting since about 1985. There was a brand of freshly made sourdough bread from San Francisco where I lived that had great flavor. This bread reminded me that I enjoy eating bread. The starter for this loaf of bread was about 6 days old. The smell of the bread was great. People should desire to toast sourdough bread with butter. The smell and flavor of toasted sourdough bread is very interesting. It reminded me of something important from my childhood.

Download The Recipe:

Thomas Keller’s Croque Madame | Dish

Daniel Bouluds Bar Boulud Croque Monsieur

Basic French Bread Recipe Using Contemporary Techniques Inspired By Thomas Keller

Attempting to make French bread with a mixer can be frustrating. A mixer will only knead my current recipe sometimes (on a humid day). This can be fixed by observing the work of Thomas Keller and Jacques Pépin. Jacques reminds people that firm dough should be kneaded by hand. Thomas Keller reminds people that slack dough can be kneaded with a machine. Someone makes slack dough by increasing the amount of water in the recipe (by increasing the percentage of water). My new recipe is based on information from Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bakery. He gives people enough information to use algebra and arithmetic to create recipes intelligently (rationally).

There are four things someone should know about making bread with a mixer:

1. Firm dough must be kneaded by hand
2. A mixer can be used to mix firm dough, but it cannot knead firm dough
3. A mixer can mix and knead slack dough
4. Someone must start and stop the mixer to push a firm slack dough in the bowl while kneading the dough with a mixer

This recipe uses advanced bread baking techniques while preserving the speed and simplicity for making bread with basic baking techniques. Someone may have to stretch the dough of bread made with advanced baking techniques several times to give slack dough structure. Stretching the dough develops gluten that uses the gases made during the fermentation process to make the bread rise. People probably do not have to stretch firm dough because firm dough has enough gluten to make the bread rise during the fermentation process. The recipe in this blog post makes firm slack dough using contemporary techniques for making slack dough. The flavor and texture of bread made using these techniques are exciting. The bread is nutty and slightly sour. The texture is soft and slightly chewy.

To make this bread, I used Thomas Keller’s ideas for creating a humid oven with a constant temperature. He recommends using a pizza stone, and putting rocks and a chain in a pan in the oven. These things can create a sauna by putting water on hot rocks. I used oven mitts and a glass measuring cup to put water on the rocks. Putting something cool in the oven decreases the temperature of the oven. The hot rocks and chain add a source of heat to the oven that reduces the effect of putting something in the oven. Baking bread on stone browns the bread differently and makes a crispier crust. Jacques Pepin’s Complete Techniques has the ideas I remember from my childhood for using quarry stones. Some people believe that this may be dangerous. I read a Safety Data Sheet for the stones I used to bake this bread. The information did not suggest the tiles were toxic. I believed that I would prefer to use a pizza stone since pizza stones are made for cooking. While using the tiles, I put the bread on parchment paper.

FACTS:

1. Where the ‘Weight of Flour In Dough’ equals x, 2/3*x=’Weight of Poolish’ (Keller, p. 270)
2. A poolish has an equal amount of flour and water; divide the weight of the poolish by 2 to know the amount of flour and water

STRATEGY

Choose the weight of the flour, x. My original loaf uses 550 grams of flour. Since x equals 550 g, the weight of my poolish is 366 g. Make a poolish with 183 g of flour and 183 g of water.

RECIPE:

Poolish
flour 183 g
yeast 0.2 g (1/2 teaspoon)
water 183 g

Dough
flour 550 g (100%)
yeast 2 g (0.2%)
water 275 g (50%)
table salt 14 g (3%)

Mix the ingredients for the poolish in a bowl, cover loosely, and let stand for 12-15 hours in a place that is about 75°F/24°C.

Put half of the flour and the yeast in a mixing bowl. Pour room temperature water into the poolish. Pour the poolish in the mixing bowl. Mix the ingredients to make very thick batter. Add the flour 1/4 cup at a time. Once someone has created smooth firm slack dough, add the salt. Knead for 20 minutes. Use a spatula to push the dough off the hook every 2 minutes. Put the dough in an oiled bowl to rise for 2 hours. Put the dough on a floured surface. Pre-shape the dough. Form the dough to make a large bâtard by hand (I will have to make a blog post for making a bâtard in the future). Bake the bread at 400°F/205°C degrees until the bread has an internal temperature of 200°F/93°C, about 20 minutes.

Download The Recipe:

Basic French Bread Recipe Using Contemporary Techniques

1. Thomas Keller: ad hoc at home (New York: Artisan), 2009, 270, 254-285.

2. Jacques Pépin: Jacques Pépin’s Complete Techniques (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2001), 553-560.

Blue Cheese Buttermilk Mornay

I want to believe that someday soon I will start making sauces. I have big plans for this sauce! This sauce is a Béchamel sauce [1] mixed with cheese. Someone might put mustard and herbs in a Béchamel sauce, but I believe that people call a Béchamel with cheese a Mornay sauce [2]. There are situations for using thick or thin Béchamel sauces. I should probably dedicate some time to this subject. The recipe appears below. I doubled the recipe and I substituted the cheese in the recipe with blue cheese and the shallot with a sweet yellow onion.

Making The Sauce

Download The Recipe:

Mornay Sauce

 

Argentinian Chicken Sandwiches On Thomas Keller’s Bâtards – Argentinian Chicken Sandwiches On Bastards – Made Spontaneously

Note: 1) analyze a sauce using the idea of baker’s percentages; analyze using percentages, 2) another point in this blog post is that there is a fast method for shaping a loaf of bread with hands; there is a method for shaping a loaf that does not require a rolling pin

This was the best chicken sandwich that I have ever made. The recipe for the sandwich is from Tastemade Español, and the bread is from a recipe by Thomas Keller. Some of the recipes from Tastemade Español are by a man that travels in Patagonia, a mountainous region in South America and Argentina. He usually barbeques or cooks food in pans over fire. His style is spontaneous.

To make the sandwich, I put all the ingredients in a pile on the counter in the kitchen. The chicken was marinated in the juice of 1 lemon, adobo, and red pepper flakes. In a cast iron skillet, I sautéed onions and jalapenos with sugar. I made a sauce with equal parts of course mustard, Dijon mustard, and honey with Spanish paprika and cayenne. To make the sandwich as exciting as possible, I also put slices of tomatoes and slices of Fontina on the sandwich. A popular cultural style in Argentina is probably to be European in America. Studying French cooking techniques makes this style rational.

This is Thomas Keller’s master bread recipe. The recipe appears to use all of the advanced baking techniques for making bread that I have seen on the internet. I am excited to learn these techniques. Some people have to go to school to be introduced to these techniques. There are recipes and instructions at Fleischmann’s Bread World for making bread with advanced baking techniques.

This bread is exciting because it is soft but it appears as if it should be tough. This bread is perfect for making a European style sandwich. The flavor of the bread is very nutty. Thomas Keller might describe the flavor as being similar to hazelnuts. The flavor is primarily created by making a poolish. Using a poolish is a technique for fermenting yeast. This technique adds flavor to the bread and considerably reduces the amount of yeast that someone must use to make bread. This is exciting because yeast can be very expensive.

The recipe only uses about 4 cups of flour, despite having the appearance of being made with 6 or more cups of flour. I do not have a pizza stone and other baking tools required for making this bread using the exact instructions in the Bouchon Bakery cookbook. If I did have all of the things described in the book, I believe that the bread would have been completely browned on the outside. Browning bread adds more flavor and texture to the bread.

Poolish

Making The Bread

Baking The Bread

Preparing To Make The Sandwiches

Making The Sandwiches

Download The Recipes:

Thomas Keller’s Bâtards (Recipe) (See Artisan French Baguettes At Fleischmann’s Bread World For Similar Instructions)

Thomas Keller’s Bâtards (Baker’s Percentages)

Sandwich de Pollo Deshuesado Asado [1][2]

1. Thomas Keller: ad hoc at home (New York: Artisan, 2009), 276-285.