Apparently my Soylent Brûlée abomination has earned me the right to set the rules for the 8th Grubski Challenge.
I am not much of a cook. Therefore, I decided to keep things simple. Grubski Challenge #8 is all about the number THREE.
Here are the three rules:
1) You must use three distinct ingredients. No more, no less. Water, oil (or butter), and dry seasonings do not contribute to the ingredient count. EVERYTHING ELSE DOES.
2) Take pictures! Document the process and the result.
3) Entries will be accepted until Tuesday, December 16th at Midnight (also the beginning of Hanukkah).
Inspiration:
Follow #grubski.
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What follows is lengthy. Excuse me in advance. For this challenge I chose to make pomme dauphine, which is French for potatoes duaphine. Since we aren't considering butter, salt and oil as "ingredients", we have three: eggs, potatoes, and flour. The flour is gluten free, which is scary, because this dish requires making a pate a choux as the base, and I've never attempted that before with wheat flour, let alone its retarded cousin. Anyway, I tried. To begin, water and butter are brought to a boil. After boiling very briefly, the mixture is removed from the heat and all the flour is added and incorporated by mixing vigorously. The mixture is returned to low heat and mixed constantly until the starches in the flour are cooked through, roughly 5 minutes until a shiny dough is formed. Eggs are mixed in one at a time until a smooth, almost batter-like consistency is obtained. Finally, after four eggs, our pate a choux is complete Meanwhile, the potatoes were boiling, but peeling them was a huge pain, since I used baby golds, as my grocery store didn't carry full sized yukons. The potatoes are passed through a food mill and then mixed into the pate a choux. The dough is then scooped out into tablespoon sized balls and dropped into hot oil. A lot of guesswork was involved, because I couldn't find a candy thermometer anywhere near me, and didn't have time to go to the mall. Therefore, I had to rely on my line cook experience and just drip some water into the oil and listen to determine the temp. Water makes a very distinctive sound when dropped into oil that is hot enough. The finished product couldn't have been better. You'll notice lighter colored ones and darker ones. The lighter color was from the first batch, when the oil wasn't quite to temp. The dough puffed up perfectly; when finished with salt, they were amazing. I regret not taking a photo of one broken open. They're almost hollow, as the water in the dough quickly evaporates upon cooking which expands them into spheroids. When finished, they are a crispy ball with a mashed potato center. I will definitely be making these again in the near future. BONUS ROUND With some extra pate a choux, I made cream puffs onto which I added melted dark chocolate bar mixed with confectioners sugar. Technically that's four ingredients, but still...
Thanks! I would recommend trying. It really wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be. It's one if those things where what you need most is patience. As for the flour, it was Bob's Red Mill, which is a mixture of many types of flour. I'm no expert on the stuff. My wife has celiac, which means I usually just avoid flour altogether. This stuff worked great for pastry, but pastry is the kind of thing where you're not working the dough a lot to really develop the glutens, so I don't know how it would fair in more traditional baking. There's a brand called Cup-for-Cup that I've been meaning to try. Heard wonderful things, but I haven't used it yet.
So I missed the "dry seasoning" caveat which I guess makes this a "two ingredient" dish. This would be Spaghetti Squash with Walnuts from this month's Mother Earth News. Doesn't it look lovely? So as soon as I was halfway into this recipe I decided they were stupid. For starters, they suggest that you cook your (1) spaghetti squash, then cut it open. This has the (supposed) advantage of keeping the squash "moist." It has the unmentioned disadvantage of cutting open a block of hot lava and then waiting around until it isn't so hot as to nuke your fingers.
Which, by the way, is a PITA because the stuff that comes out easily, when raw, takes a lot of the cooked with it. And since you're waiting long enough to be able to handle the squash with your fingers, you're also waiting around long enough that it's too cold to eat. Next thing we do is melt some (DOESN'T COUNT) butter. The recipe calls for adding (WOULD COUNT) fresh sage but since I forgot that I bought sage the same time as the stupid squash, I left it in the fridge and used (DOESN'T COUNT) dry sage. Not pictured are the (2) walnuts which we throw in a skillet to toast, or the step where we scrape out the spaghetti squash, or the step where we cook the sage in the butter, or the part where we put the spaghetti squash in a casserole and top with sage butter and walnuts. What can I say? I made candied orange peel, fudge and toffee that day and was mostly just trying to get dinner on the table. How was it? Fucking bland. Were I to do it again I'd fuckin' well cut the squash first. I'd also add a shit ton of parmesan. I'll be honest - this uninspiring approach to cooking squash has left me with the notion that (A) I oughtta eat more spaghetti squash (B) not use recipes from Mother Earth News. Know how you tell if spaghetti squash is cooked? You poke the flesh and see if it goes clear through. Know how not done the squash is when you try that from the outside? Let's just say it was unacceptably crunchy and leave it at that. We served it with some uninspiring, fully-cooked chicken sausages from Trader Joe's, which my wife decided to poach in some undrinkable Raven's Crest merlot someone brought over for Thanksgiving. 2/5 would not do again
Get read for some tasty flapjacks. Ingredients:
1) This is really simple. First, chuck everything in a food processor. If, like me, you don't have such luxuries, you're going to have to use some elbow grease. If you do it using the processor, make sure not to decimate the oats, you want to leave some texture. Pulse it. 2) Mix it up. That's right, I used a saucepan. I had nothing better. 3) Spread evenly in a cake tin or whatever you fancy using. 4) Cook for around 20 minutes at 180°C until golden brown. It will be soft when it comes out the oven, so you might want to use this opportunity to score some lines for where you aim to cut it once it's cooled. Alternatively, do this before putting it in the oven. 5) Once cooled, serve and gobble. Gobble like you've never gobbled before. It actually makes a few more pieces that this, but I gobbled them whilst it was still warm and gooey.
I read that Golden Syrup isn't that widespread of a product in the states? That sucks because it's delicious. You'll also see from the pictures that I added some raisins to my recipe. That's because I had some that needed using up. They are not essential to the recipe and I don't usually use them. If this disqualifies me, then so be it. 250g of Oats
125g of Butter
125g of Brown Sugar
3 tablespoons of Golden Syrup
Huevos Diablos For the three ingredient challenge, I decided to try to make a Mexican influenced devilled egg. b_b get credit for the name. The three ingredients: Fine chopped the Poblano. Boiled 6 eggs and cut them in half lengthwise. Scooped out the yolks. Added pepper, black pepper, and about 1/4 cup sour cream to the yolks and mashed it together. Stuffed the egg whites and topped with paprika and a dash of salt. Lessons learned Huevos Diablos were quite good, but they weren't great. They didn't have enough kick to them. However, I think I know how to make them much better. Typically, devilled eggs calls for mayonaise and vinegar to be mixed with the yolk. I think that sour cream is a fine substitute for mayo, but I predict that Cholula would be a killer substitute for vinegar in this recipe. As Cholula is basically vinegar and hot pepper, it's not really even a substitution. I might also go with jalapeno instead of poblano pepper. I'll probably be bringing Huevos Diablos to a holiday gathering.
1. Eggs
2. Poblano Pepper
3. Sour Cream
The process: pepper, paprika, and salt
Not too much, really. Nothing that should throw off the attempt, anyway. http://www.cholula.com/images/products/original_nutrition.gif It'll probably give them some nice color as well. I eat that stuff on eggs all the time as it is.
http://fapc.biz/files/factsheets/fapc140.pdf Read a little deeper on that: it appears that you get to choose whether you do it by weight or by volume. Now ask yourself: "Self, if they're listing dried peppers ahead of vinegar and they're listing by weight or volume, that's kind of a fuckload of peppers, eh what?" Not to mention the fact that if you're using less than 2% you get to say "less than 2% of a bunch of shit" and they've not only got "spices" listed ahead of the thickener, they've got "salt" listed ahead of the vinegar. Put another way: there's more water than peppers, more peppers than salt and more salt than vinegar in Cholula. Tabasco? (I just can't allow you to malign Cholula in this way; I buy it over Tapatio for precisely the reason that it doesn't taste like vinegar)Ingredients must be listed by their common name in
descending order by predominance of weight or volume. This
includes items such as preservatives, colors and flavors.
I like it. I have the perfect thing that I've been meaning to try: pomme dauphine, a French concoction composed of potatoes, eggs and flour (since we're excluding butter and salt from the list). My knowledge of French cooking is lacking, so it will be a lot of fun to try execute a complex dish from such simple ingredients.
I'm loving this logic - I mean, you're right, of course - who would have thought you could make so many versatile things with 3 ingredients so long as butter and spices don't count? Bet you could make a nice plain white bread. Yeast, flour, (oil/butter,) sugar, (salt), (water). Or does water count?