My Food Geek

The eater always tells me I make the best sandwiches. My formula for a good sandwich starts with good bread. Leave the Wonder bread for toast and find something good - something with a good crust, something with an unusal flavor, or something with a nice airy texture. I then try to match the ingredients in the sandwich with the bread. You can never say too much about good, fresh vegetables or top-quality deli-meats, don’t skimp here! Finally, to hold everything together, you need a good spread. Dry sandwiches just aren’t any good so find something to bind it all together and marry the flavors. To top everything off, garnish the sandwich with something fun, like olives, and pile on the potato chips…mmmmm, potato chips.

Here’s one I almost deleted and didn’t show everyone.

• Whole Foods focaccia bread
• Fresh mozzarella
• Homegrown sprouts
• Red leaf lettuce
• Ripe, hydroponic tomato (hey, it’s still winter in New England)
• Olive tapenade /mayo mix

It was a damn good sandwich, I can’t lie.

Here’s a quick photo recipe of banana curry. I used green plantains here which worked out real well. Since I’m not doing so well writing these days, I’ll leave you with a photo recipe. Any questions?

In an attempt to get some more cooking inspiration, I signed up for Taste and Create VII. The idea of Taste and Create is you are randomly paired up with another food blog, find a recipe listed on their site, make the recipe, and blog about it. I thought it would be a great way to try something new and get a little more involved in the community. For my first T&C I was paired up with Food and Laughter.

Food and Laughter is a blog mostly about Indian food. I find this fascinating because Indian food is something that I don’t usually cook but often eat out at restaurants. My lack of experience with this cooking style made this event even more exciting. The Eater and I checked out the site and decided to make a dish called Toovar Dal.

My first reading of this recipe I was a little bit overwhelmed with all the ingredients that weren’t familiar to me. I was worried that I was going to have to special order these ingredients and wouldn’t be able to finish the dish in time. After a little bit of research I found out that many of these ingredients just have different names in different parts of the world. Here’s some examples and what I did with the ones I couldn’t find:

toovar dal - Pigeon Peas
chana dal - Chick Peas
jaggery - a type of Palm sugar. I substituted regular light brown sugar here.
jeera - cumin

I didn’t have any real sources for these two:

kokum - this is similar to tamarind so I substituted chopped raisins
asafoetida ( heeng) - I had no ideas for this one, so I omitted it.

Cooking this dish was pretty exciting. The sights and sounds of the popping mustard seeds was something I was not expecting; they really pop and go everywhere. The dish came together quickly and quite nicely, there were no surprises after the mustard seeds. I opted for both dals but skipped the yams because I felt like it. I also decreased the spice level a bit because I was afraid it may be too spicy for the eater.

While I’ve never had this dish before, I don’t feel like my substitutions adversely affected the dish. In my mind, a large part of cooking is being able to adapt recipes to ingredients that you have on hand without sacrificing results. I’m sure I broke some sort of rules, but both the eater and I thought the dish was a keeper, as-is.

The pigeon peas really are the star in this dish lending a nice, subtle sweetness. The peanuts added a bit of a surprise crunch that I was not expecting even after cooking this dish myself. This really is a good dish, sweet, tangy, spicy, and a little sour, pretty much everything I wanted in a dish. I served up the dal with some long grain rice. I opted for a little extra spice on mine in the form of red pepper which worked out nicely.

Late again?I hope this doesn’t become habit forming…

This month the Daring Bakers chose a recipe by Boston’s own Julia Child: Baguettes. This recipe was probably 3 pages long and very detailed. I’m not listing it here, but I’m sure you can find it on another Daring Baker’s site.

While mine did not come out as perfect as I wanted, the taste and texture were pretty good for skipping a two steps in the recipe.

The first step I omitted with proofing the bread on a cloth. I searched high and low but could not find anything appropriate in my house to this sort of application. I ended up proofing them on a silpat, on the counter, with a small tea towel draped over them.

The second step omitted, which is pretty important, was I didn’t cook with steam. I tried spritzing the loaves with a sprayer but omitted any of the other (very important) steps the recipe suggested for producing steam in a home oven.

The results were decently shaped baguettes with a crust that wasn’t as crunchy as I hoped. This didn’t stop me from eating an entire baguette with jam though, they were more than tasty. Would I try this recipe again? Maybe. If I use the recipe again, there are a few things I would change:

• I’d skip the whole cloth proofing and just use a sheet pan with a towel over the top
• I wouldn’t try to flip the proofed loaves over and THEN cook them, too much risk
• Create steam in the oven, it is important for the crust formation
• Less flour, more water. I even thought the recipe had a high hydration factor, but I was wrong.
• Take more pictures and show them off!

These baguettes featured in a salad I made later in the week, as well. They were thinly sliced and toasted and served with a grilled goat cheese; I then paired that with a golden beet salad. I jokingly called it, “The Yellow Beet Road.”

While I really love these French-style baguettes, I’ve started to acquire a taste for the Vietnamese-style baguettes. The Asian-inspired breads had a bit lighter texture and had a better crust formation even without steam. The recipe was a little bit less involved, too!

Shortly before I moved away from San Diego I discovered this Vietnamese bakery that sold some of the best sandwiches. Crunchy baguettes filled with just the right amount of lettuce, barbecued pork, pickled vegetables, and cilantro; these little sandwiches were not only tasty they were very cheap - about THREE BUCKS! We had these sandwiches several times before we made the trek back east.

It wasn’t until recently that I found out the name of these sandwiches: Bánh mì . A trip over to wikipedia sums up what they are:

Bánh mì is a Vietnamese baguette made with wheat and rice flour or a type of sandwich traditionally made with this type of baguette. The sandwich is made up of thinly sliced pickled carrots, daikon, onions, cilantro, and meat or tofu. Popular bánh mì fillings include pork, paté, chicken, and head cheese. The contrasting flavors and textures of the sandwich — as well as its relatively low cost — make it a popular dish.

I made a cursory search of my immediate surroundings and haven’t been able to find a Vietnamese shop that offers these sandwiches in the way I remember them. So I did what any self-respecting ex-chef would do, I recreated them how I remembered.

For these sandwiches to be successful, they needed to include the following:

• Crunchy, salty, tangy pickled vegetables
• Fresh greens, cilantro, cucumbers, and jalapeño peppers
• A savory pork, chicken, or egg filling
• A light, crispy, yet not too crusty baguette

I searched around the web for a pickled vegetable recipe and finally settled on the recipe over at Battle of the Banh Mi. I wasn’t able to find daikon at the normal mega-mart and didn’t make a trip to the Asian stores so I just used carrots. I think the flavors would have turned out a little bit better with the mix of carrots and daikon but the thought of not having any pickles on my Banh MI was out of the question. I should warn you that their recipe makes quite a large amount of pickles, which isn’t always a bad thing, is it?

The vegetables are a pretty standard sandwich mix. I decided on red leaf lettuce since it looked good. A plain old cucumber, bunch of cilantro, and jalapeño pepper rounded out the mix. I’m sure once the summer comes around the selections of vegetables in the north east will drastically improve. For now, I settled on the best looking ones I could find at whole foods.

For my first run of sandwiches I decided on using a nicely marbled pork shoulder. The pork shoulder was thinly sliced, marinated in a soy and ginger sauce, then quickly pan-fried. I then thinly sliced the pork into fat, match stick sized pieces. I had the pork both warm and cold and both were winners. If I knew it was going to come out so well I would have made much more!

The last obstacle to overcome was getting a baguette that was somewhere between crunchy like a French baguette but also soft enough that it made for a decent sandwich. Right away I decided against buying a baguette since I’m almost never happy with that is available at the supermarkets. Rarely do I find a baguette that is worth the $3 price point it commands. I scoured the internet and pieced together a recipe. It took a few tries, but this is the final recipe that I’ve been using.

Vietnamese Baguettes

1 cup warm water (between 85-110F)
2 teaspoons yeast
2 tablespoons sugar

1 1/2 cups AP Flour
1/2 cup Rice Flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons butter

Place the yeast, 1 cup lukewarm water, and sugar in the bowl of a mixer with a dough hook. Mix together the all-purpose flour, rice flour and salt in a separate bowl.

Starting the mixer at the lowest speed gradually add the dry ingredients and beat until well combined, about 3 minutes. Add the butter to the dough.

Increase the speed to medium and continue beating the dough until it is smooth and comes away from the sides of the mixing bowl easily. Put the dough on a lightly floured surface, cover with plastic wrap, and allow to rise (double in volume), 45 minutes to 1 hour.

Punch down the dough and separate into 4 portions. Shape each into an 8-inch-long baguette. (The dough may be sticky and hard to handle at this point. Do not overwork it, just gently shape it.) Cover loosely with plastic wrap and allow to rise a second time, about 45 minutes.

Place baking stone on a rack set in the middle of the oven and preheat the oven to 415 degrees Fahrenheit.

With a sharp knife blade or a clean razor blade, make three diagonal slits along the top of each baguette.

Bake either directly on the stone or on a sheet pan for about 20 minutes or until golden brown.

There’s nothing special about how the sandwich is put together. If you’ve ever made a sandwich before this should be pretty simple. A thin layer of Japanese mayo ties the sandwich together while the thinly sliced jalapeños and sriracha hot sauce added the much needed spicy that this sandwich deserved.

These came out so well (and I made so many pickles) that I was able to experiment a little bit. What isn’t pictured is a version of this sandwich with a thinly rolled omelet. I’m trying to get the courage up to try a spam version of this sandwich. I’m sure it isn’t an original idea, but the thought has invaded my mind recently.