white button mushrooms

Home Made Pizza

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Home Made Pizza

I love pizzas, but for most restaurants that make this lovely piece of slightly leavened bread, do it for much profit. Expensive for run of the mill pizzas and anything premium can really break your budget.

And if you decide to make it yourself, then it suddenly becomes very affordable. The ingredients are so much cheaper and the best part about making the pizza yourself is you can make as many pizzas as you like. There is no additional cost.

I bought bread flour, instant yeast, tomato puree and some other ingredients and I was on my way to making my own pizza.

Recipe

Ingredients

3 cups of Bread Flour
7 grams of Instant Yeast
A cup of lukewarm water
Pinch of Salt
1 teaspoon of Castor Sugar
3 tbsp of Olive Oil
Tomato Sauce (pasta sauce)
A punnet of Cherry Tomatoes
A punnet of White Button Mushrooms
1 packet of Wild Rockets
Mixed Mozzarella and Cheddar Cheese

Method

1. Using a kitchen aid machine (if you don’t have one, get it!) and a hook fixture attached, mix flour, yeast, sugar and salt together. Turn on low speed. Combine the ingredients well. Add the water and continue to mix well until it is well mixed.

2. Remove the dough from the machine and knead it a little. Then place the dough into a bowl and add the oil. Cling wrap and allow the dough to rise a little. While it is being left to rise and allowing the yeast to work its magic.

3. While that is working, and rising, you can prepare the other ingredients. Slice the mushrooms, cut up the cherry tomatoes and wash the rocket leaves.

4. After you have prepared the ingredients, you can knead the dough and cut it into smaller dollups. With a rolling pin, roll out the dough into whatever shape you like. (your pizza mah)

5. Spoon the tomato sauce (pasta sauce) onto the rolled out dough. Decorate it with sliced mushrooms, cherry tomato halves. Top the pizza with mix mozzarella and cheddar cheese.

6. Pre-heat the oven to a hot 230 degrees. Then bake the pizza for 10 minutes. After baking, the pizza bread should be slightly burnt and nicely roasted. Top the pizza with wild rockets and serve immediately.

Bon Appetit!

Wagyu Steak in Anchovy Butter

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Wagyu Steak in Anchovy Butter

Dinner time has been mostly steam fish this boiled vegetable that. So for tonight’s dinner, I am making a very simple wagyu steak in my favourite anchovy butter sauce.

I came across a rather large wagyu steak on offer at Cold Storage and knew at once that this was going to be a very nice dinner. It was on specials and honestly I couldn’t tell if it was any different from the normal priced wagyu steaks. So I got myself a whole slab. Yum.

The problem with steaks of any kind is usually the preparation of the meat. Cooking time is essential if not critical to the success of the dinner. You can fry up all the premium ingredients to complement the main, but if the doneness of the steak fails, you would have also failed miserably.

For the vegetables that accompanied the steak, I had stir fry Japanese button mushrooms, whole garlic cloves and white button mushrooms with boiled cherry tomatoes and baby potatoes. But what makes this steak really special is the anchovy butter sauce. So simple, just mix the anchovy with the butter in the pan with rosemary herbs and you have a very light butter sauce that works very well with the meat.

Recipe

Ingredients

Main
700-800 grams Wagyu Steak (if you’re not living near a specialty butcher, you could opt to order online Wagyu Kobe Steaks)
Sea Salt
Black Pepper
1 tbsp Olive Oil

Anchovy butter sauce
A small can of Anchovy in Olive Oil
20 grams of Unsalted Butter
A sprig of Rosemary (herb)

Assortment of Vegetables
A pack of Japanese Button Mushrooms
A punnet of White Button Mushrooms
A punnet of Red Cherry Tomatoes
6-7 cloves of Garlic
6 pieces Baby Potatoes
Olive Oil
Black Pepper

Method

1. Boil the baby potatoes in a small pot for about 10 minutes or until a skewer can pierce through. Once done, remove the potatoes and blanch the tomatoes for about 30 seconds. Then remove and arrange vegetabkes on serving plate.

2. In a wok, stir fry the Japanese mushrooms and mildly crushed garlic cloves in 2 tbsp Olive oil for about 2-3 minutes. Quart the white button mushrooms and add the whole lot into the same wok. Continue stir fry. Do this for another 5 minutes. Mushrooms shoukd either sear or shrink down in size. This is common as it loses water content. Once done, dish onto serving plates.

3. Sprinkle the steaks with sea salt and black pepper. In another pan, heat olive oil until smoking, then reduce heat to low. Place the steak into the pan and start pan-searing. 3 minutes on the first side and then another 2 minutes on the other side. Check doneness for medium rare. The meat centre should be a rose pink. If it is a dark red, then maybe you have to cook it a little longer.

The reason why I chose low heat as opposed to high heat is because I don’t want to over-cook the steak. So you have to time the steak strictly. Cut the middle to check for desired doneness. As the wagyu steak is very fatty, it is better to cook over low heat so that the fats will be tender. Once cooked to desired doneness, place it on serving plate.

4. In the same frying pan with the steak infused oil, add the butter and two fillets of anchovies. Break the anchovies and mash it into the butter. Throw in a sprig of Rosemary leaves. Cook until the sauce bubbles and spoon it into the steak. That’s it!

Pair it with a Cabernet Sauvignon or a spicy Shiraz.

Bon Appetit!

Stir Fry Mushrooms

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Stir Fry Mushrooms

My wife bought three types of mushrooms the other day and wanted me to fry them up as a dish. My lightning quick mind immediately thought of the style and how I would cook it. We love mushrooms, there is really nothing that we love eating more than the mysterious fungi.

The style that I would usually cook these mushrooms would be to roast them with rosemary herbs, olive oil and sea salt. Yum! But I also wanted to do a simple stir fry and see where the rabbit trail of cooking risk rewards would lead me. I wanted to see if it would taste just as fantastic if they were cooked in a Chinese uncle style. Like a charred-kway-teow uncle as he rocks his wok and flog the living daylights out of the kway teow in the pan with his magic stick.

For this dish, I am trying out the Szechuan Mala style. I have come to love the black beans used in frying this dish. So I thought I would also try it, but using the usual black beans that I always use when I make my Stir Fry Beef and Bitter Gourd. The end result was only so-so.

I think the problem could be the lack of a proper wok and big fire that is usually needed when cooking Szechuan Mala. Sigh, so sad for us home cooks with conventional equipment. Still keen to learn how I did it (and do it better)? Read on.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 packet of King Mushrooms
1 packet of Shitake Mushrooms
1 packet of White Button Mushrooms
3 tsp of preserved Black Beans
Olive Oil

Method

1. Slice and cut up the mushrooms. Add oil into frying pan, throw all the mushrooms into the pan, add the black beans. Turn up the heat and fry until the mushrooms are softened and shrunk. You generally want to sear them so that the fragrance of the black beans are infused. Make the fire as big as possible. Once fragrant, serve.

Bon Appetit!

Green Mussel Spaghetti

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Green Mussel Spaghetti

My chef friend Alvin taught me this dish a long time ago when we were still in the business, and I liked it so much that it has now become one of my favourite dishes to prepare if I have a little more time on my hands. Alvin was always quick to prepare everything, and it was a little challenging to glean off the master, but after a while, I managed to work out the recipe and managed to make it work in my home kitchen.

To make this dish, you got to have the freshest green mussels. Finding them fresh is not difficult as we have them harvested locally in our waters. The only problem was that the ones caught locally were too small for this dish. I usually get them at $3 a kilogram for my steam mussels recipe, but I was looking for the bigger ones. Cold Storage sells these in sealed packets, imported from some exotic location, and they are expensive.

Good thing they sold them in smaller packets, a little cheaper, and the portions was just about right for two persons. You just need to wash and de-beard the clams and they are ready to be used. It does seems like a lot of work at first for something that is so simple in terms of number of ingredients, but personally I enjoy the process of creating this dish, so I don’t really mind.

Then there is the herb pesto sauce which is, in and of itself, another recipe. I am not kidding. I literally wrote a recipe for that. Check it out here. Recipe: Herb Pesto Sauce.

Okay now that you already have the basics of what this dish would require, let’s try it.

Recipe

Ingredients

1 packet of Green Mussels (about 750 grams)
200 grams Spaghetti
2 tbsp of Herb Pesto Sauce
White Button Mushrooms (quartered)
3-4 cloves of Garlic (minced)
Olive Oil
Chardonnay
Salted Butter
Sea Salt

Method

1. Boil a kettle of water and then add it into a pot for cooking the spaghetti. This helps shorten the cooking process. The pasta that I usually use, cooks in 8 minutes. If you want them a little softer, you can cook them a little longer, like another 3 minutes. Be careful not too cook too long. Remember to pour a little olive oil into the pot. Once ready, scoop the pasta out onto dinner plates.
2. Saute the mushrooms in salted butter in a small pan until they are fragrant. Remove the mushrooms and then add the minced garlic to fry. Do this until you can smell the garlic. Then add the herb pesto sauce and give it a good stir. Then add the mussels and a splash of chardonnay. Seafood usually cooks very quickly, so you want to monitor your seafood carefully.
3. Add a little sea salt for taste, then add the mushrooms back into the pot and continue cooking. Once the ingredients are are sufficiently cooked, pour them over the cooked pasta and serve immediately.

Bon Appetit!

 

Spaghetti Carbonara

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Spaghetti Carbonara

One of my all time favourite pasta to eat as well as to prepare, the spaghetti cabonara, a cream based pasta that will tantalise your tastebuds and bring you all the way to Italy. Truly, there is no pasta that is so distinctively yummy as this one.

I made my pasta a little more creamy just so you guys can see the texture of the pasta. I am using spaghetti here instead of linguine because I still have spaghetti at home. But that said, linguine makes a better pasta as it can soak up the cream based sauce really well.

I know some recipes call for eggs and parmesan cheese, but my version doesn’t require all these, it is simple, and easy to do. Anyone can do it. So are you ready?

Recipe for 1

Ingredients

125 grams of Barilla Spaghetti
50 grams of Streaky Bacon
4-5 pcs of White Button Mushrooms
4 cloves of Garlic
100 ml of Cooking Cream
15 grams of Salted Butter
100 ml of full cream Milk
1 tsp Black Pepper
1 tsp Mixed Italian Herbs
Pinch of Sea Salt

Method

1. Firstly we cook the pasta in the pot. I use Barilla Spaghetti which cooks in 5 minutes to an al dente. Remember to add a little sea salt and olive oil. If you prefer it a little softer, add a 1 or 2 to the cooking time.

2. In another pot, stir fry the quartered button mushrooms in salted butter. I find salted butter much better to work with as opposed to unsalted butter when it comes to cooking, but if you’re baking, then perhaps unsalted butter might work better for you. Once the fragrance of the mushrooms can be inhaled (lack of a better word!) you should remove the mushrooms and set them aside. Then in the juice of the mushrooms, cook the minced garlic, cooked until fragrant. Then add the chopped streaky bacon. Fry this until the fragrance of the bacon can be breathed (still trying to find a better word!). I am not using olive oil in this recipe because butter goes better with cream in this carbonara recipe. Furthermore the oil in the streaky bacon is more delicious.

3. The pasta should be about al dente by now. You can remove the pasta or continue to cook it longer until it is softer. In the meantime, you add the cooking cream into the ingredients and cook, add the milk to dilute the carbonara sauce a little. If you like the sauce to be a little thicker, you can just use the cooking cream and leave out the milk altogether. Add herbs flakes and black pepper. A little salt to taste. Cook till the sauce is hot. After that drizzle it over the pasta and give it a good mix. Serve with grated parmesan cheese if you like, but it is already quite rich if you ask me.

Bon Appetit!

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