Kitchen Adventures

In the midst of our water heater debacle we realized we were going to be spending longer than expected in Anderson.  We decided to finally try our hand at making some of our favorite snack foods.

Our first experiment was potato chips.  We did our research, brushed up on our chemistry regarding heat and its effects on starch, and got to it.  We hand cut our first batch and fired them up on the grill outside in canola oil.  They were delicious but...

- They were a little too thick

- The oil would not stay hot enough on the grill once the potatoes were in... it didn't help that it was below freezing outside

George decided he wanted to try frying them in lard next...EWWWWWWWW says the vegetarian.  We procured the lard and this time used the food processor to slice the potatoes.  The slices were paper thin.  George them trekked out to the grill once again with his pot of lard in hand and tried again.  I thought they were gross, but...

- According to George and Jesse they taste like Gibbles

- They were not too thick and not to thin

- They were very crunchy

Ultimately we found that if we can get our hands on a mandoline slicer, keep the oil temperature where it needs to be, we may be in business making both lard fried (gross) and oil fried potato chips that taste delicious.

Next we tried our hand at soft pretzels.  We tried three different recipes; two regular and on sourdough.  The first batch was good but bready.  The second batch was good but breadier.  The third batch was better than the first two but not quite right.  

We burned the first set of the third batch and they tasted like Synders sourdough hard pretzels.  We reduced the time for the second set of the third batch and they were good but not quite sourdoughy enough.  Jesse and Nancy both thought all our batches were good, and we think this last one is getting close. 

We love Berger cookies, so we tackled making those next.  We made chocolate ones to start with, then George said we should try peanut butter.  So we made some peanut butter ones.  Then he said we need to try 50/50 peanut butter and chocolate like black and white cookies.  I looked for a peanut butter icing recipe and found one that sounded delicious.  

Our cookies taste great, but they may be a little too thick.  According to George, our chocolate icing is too chocolatey and our peanut butter icing is too fluffy.  Our cookies look and taste spectacular though (if not for being too rich.)  We need to work on getting our cookies the right consistency, making a denser peanut butter icing, and a less chocolatey chocolate icing.

I made a sourdough starter for our sourdough pretzel experiment, but I knew I would not be able to maintain it.  Sourdough starter is similar to friendship bread.  You keep feeding it, but you also have to keep using it.  On the road we don't have access to an oven and we are very limited on space.  So I decided to use up the rest of starter to make some no knead sourdough bread.  The bread turned out nicely.  It has a gentle sourdough flavor and the crumb is a little denser than I would like, but overall it was quite successful.