Oranges and potatoes
9 September 2020 04:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeMore cooking experiments; I used up some dried-out oranges very successfully by grating the zest and using the few teaspoons of juice I could squeeze out of them in Orange sweet rolls (although I cut down drastically on both the butter and the sugar in the filling, using the quantities from the cinnamon rolls recipe, rather than the four ounces of butter and sugar recommended; perhaps if I had been able to roll it out to the 17"x14" suggested in the recipe the coating of butter might not have seemed quite so thick, but I struggled to manage the 14"x10" of the cinnamon rolls, and only got eleven rolls instead of twelve out of it). Basically, you make an enrichened yeast dough, leave it to rise, roll it out into a rectangle, smear it all over with a couple of tablespoons of softened butter, and sprinkle this with orange sugar made by stirring grated orange zest and crushed cardamom seeds into white sugar. Then you roll it up along the long side, slice the roll into individual spiral buns, and set them to rise a second time into Chelsea-bun-shapes before baking.
I think the emergency yeast that I got bagged-down from a corner shop at some point in May (and decanted into my old yeast pot) is probably getting a bit elderly; it wasn't nearly as hermetically sealed as normal to start off with. Anyway, the rolls took absolutely forever to rise, to the extent that the orange sugar had absorbed enough moisture to start dissolving and oozing out at the bottom. So I put them into the oven, where they rose a good deal more and ended up sitting in a puddle of orange caramel ;-)
The cardamom flavour is delicate, but perceptible. I'm not convinced by the proportions given in the recipe; I used 8oz flour, which according to online converters should have been a little more than "1 2/3 cups", and I omitted the 3 tablespoons of warm water because it was instant yeast, but the dough was still far too soft to knead and I ended up adding vast quantities of extra flour. I should probably have simply followed the 12 oz flour given in the other recipe... However, they did look very good when finally complete, and they are very tasty. A success worth repeating, so I've copied the recipe into my scrapbook.
In the name of saving flour and yeast, I also tried "Potato Pizza" from Rose Elliott's Cheap and Easy, where the base is simply plain grated potato cooked in a big disc until crisp in a heavy frying-pan, with pizza toppings added under the grill. Like her other recipes, it really did 'just work': the potato didn't stick, it did turn into a tasty base that held together when flipped over, and sliced tomato and grated cheese (with some grated courgette, yellow beetroot and carrot), and sliced garlic on top of the cheese, made a convincing pizza topping.
My only quarrel with the recipe would be her estimate that "two medium potatoes" would make a main course for two -- I had it with a big bowl of cabbage salad, and while the salad was enough for two meals, the pizza struck me as being not over-generous as a main course for one :-p Perhaps it depends on your assessment of 'medium' in terms of potato size.
I think the emergency yeast that I got bagged-down from a corner shop at some point in May (and decanted into my old yeast pot) is probably getting a bit elderly; it wasn't nearly as hermetically sealed as normal to start off with. Anyway, the rolls took absolutely forever to rise, to the extent that the orange sugar had absorbed enough moisture to start dissolving and oozing out at the bottom. So I put them into the oven, where they rose a good deal more and ended up sitting in a puddle of orange caramel ;-)
The cardamom flavour is delicate, but perceptible. I'm not convinced by the proportions given in the recipe; I used 8oz flour, which according to online converters should have been a little more than "1 2/3 cups", and I omitted the 3 tablespoons of warm water because it was instant yeast, but the dough was still far too soft to knead and I ended up adding vast quantities of extra flour. I should probably have simply followed the 12 oz flour given in the other recipe... However, they did look very good when finally complete, and they are very tasty. A success worth repeating, so I've copied the recipe into my scrapbook.
In the name of saving flour and yeast, I also tried "Potato Pizza" from Rose Elliott's Cheap and Easy, where the base is simply plain grated potato cooked in a big disc until crisp in a heavy frying-pan, with pizza toppings added under the grill. Like her other recipes, it really did 'just work': the potato didn't stick, it did turn into a tasty base that held together when flipped over, and sliced tomato and grated cheese (with some grated courgette, yellow beetroot and carrot), and sliced garlic on top of the cheese, made a convincing pizza topping.
My only quarrel with the recipe would be her estimate that "two medium potatoes" would make a main course for two -- I had it with a big bowl of cabbage salad, and while the salad was enough for two meals, the pizza struck me as being not over-generous as a main course for one :-p Perhaps it depends on your assessment of 'medium' in terms of potato size.
