Welcome to new readers who arrived from Grist.org’s excellent post by Jane Mountain on 5 Foods You’ll Never Have to Buy Again. 

Have you ever tried cooking with whole-wheat flour, only to find the results didn’t turn out as well as you hoped? Cooking with whole wheat requires some adjustments in planning and expectations.

The first thing to keep in mind is that whole-wheat grains contain oil, which can get rancid. So check the date on the package, and always store all whole grains in the refrigerator or freezer. By the way, this is why whole grains are sometimes more expensive. You might think that whole grains should be cheaper, because they don’t need as much processing. But in fact, refined (white) flours became popular because they could be shipped long distances and stored at length without refrigeration. This lowered their cost as well.

Some complaints about whole grain flours, for instance bitterness, may result from improper storage. If you store whole-wheat flour in the freezer it should last a good few months.

I’ve compiled a few more tips for switching to baking with whole wheat:

1. Change your expectations. The texture will be different and there’s no way around that. I now find baked goods from bleached white flour to be pasty. Keep in mind that whole-wheat baked goods crumble more easily, too.
2. Start gradually. Many products fall in between the extremes of bleached, refined white flour and 100% stone-ground whole wheat. Examples include white whole wheat and 70% or 90% whole wheat, which is unrefined but has a percentage of the toughest fibers removed. Flours also vary in texture–whole-wheat flours ground finely yield results closer to white flour. You can also mix white and whole wheat–start with 30 or 40 % whole wheat and gradually increase as you get used to the change.
3. Start with the right recipes. Whole wheat bread, fruit muffins, or banana bread will go over better than whole-wheat angel-food cake. You can also use whole-wheat flour for thickening patties or casseroles without a noticeable difference in texture.
4. Pastries. I use 90% whole-wheat flour for pastries and yeast doughs. They can be rolled out, but not as thinly as with white flour.
5. Sifting. One reader said that sifting makes her whole-wheat challah lighter. My mother always insisted on sifting flour, and we sifted ingredients for her home-made baking mix no less than three times! I”m not sure that sifting helps keep the dough lighter, and many cooks skip it. Other reasons for sifting flour include removing insects and ensuring uniform measurement. But weighing the flour is a more accurate method for delicate recipes. Since I rarely make delicate cakes this isn’t such an issue for me—for bread I guess based on the texture. Humidity also affects recipes, making recipes less important.
6. Add extra water to the recipe. This is tied into the weight of the flour—flours vary in their weight per cup, and heavier flours require more liquid—but the whole grains seem to absorb more liquid and suffer more from dryness. Whole-grain bread doughs should remain sticky.
7. Add extra sweetener. I’m no fan of sugar, but if you or your family expects a certain amount of sweetness in their baked goods you will need to increase the amount in the recipe.
8. Start with a sponge. For breads, I calculate about 700 cc. (24 oz.) of water for a kilogram of flour (454 grams). For the sponge, I add about 700 g. of the flour to all of the liquid, along with the yeast or sourdough starter. For more information, see my recipe for Challah Bread Using Sponge Method.

Have you ever baked with whole wheat flour? Please share your successes and challenges in the comments!

Thanks to Cooking Manager Facebook Page members  for their contributions.

You may also enjoy:

Going Brown: The Challenge of Eating More Whole Grains

How I Cut My Baking Time in Half

Extreme Frugality: Twenty Memories of My Mother

image: little blue hen

 There’s nothing I love more, dear readers, than finding out a kitchen task can be skipped.

And my favorite chore to skip is peeling vegetables. At least for now.

The only vegetables my peeler has seen in recent months are carrots and the odd potato.

(I know I could skip peeling carrots, but I don’t like the taste of carrot peels. Fortunately, my kids do the peeling. )

Peeling raw vegetables means throwing out a large percentage of your food, since the vegetable comes off with the peel. Try weighing a pound of potatoes before and after peeling. Un-peeling saves time and money. What could be wrong with that?

Winter squash and pumpkin. I got excited to learn that those tough peels on winter squash, the ones you need to wrestle with your chopping knife, are edible. This includes peel from butternut, acorn, and pumpkin squashes. All you need to do is cook the squash long enough to get soft. And you get an added bonus–the peel helps pieces stay in one piece.

My other favorite un-peeling secret works for the people who don’t like peel. First, roast or cook the vegetable. When it is finished, remove the peel in a thin layer. This method works for beets, turnips, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. I may even try it for carrots. And the part of the vegetable right under the peel is richest in vitamins, most of which hang out right under the peel.

When should you peel? Sometimes the peel is cracked, wrinkled or dirty. If I can’t get off the dirt with scrubbing, or the peel is thick and unappetizing, I peel. Our beets are full of dirt, and cracked around the stems. Sometimes there is more dirt than vegetables. I soak them and scrub them as well as possible. I would look the other way, but I like to use the cooking water from beets in my recipes. You can always strain the cooking water with a cheesecloth to get rid of dirt that doesn’t get scrubbed off. I don’t worry about bacteria on the vegetables, since the heat will kill the germs.

Fortunately many vegetables, like turnips and squash, have smooth skin that is easily scrubbed clean. Some vegetables have wax or other coatings. If you can’t get it off, you may want to peel.

I haven’t peeled cucumbers in a long time as the ones I get here have smooth, thin skin.

Onions and garlic. Mark Bittman says the peel falls away when you start to cut them, as with garlic. Garlic and onion peel are annoying to find in your food. But when roasting there is no need to peel onion and garlic.

Broccoli and cauliflower. Bittman also peels broccoli stalks. I haven’t cooked broccoli in a while, but I do enjoy cauliflower. I cut the stalk into quarters lengthwise, including the peel. I love eating it that way. You can also add the stalks in soup stock.

Peel is pretty. It adds texture and color. And the best thing about un-peeling is that you give your family or guests the option of eating the peel or discarding it.

So what do you peel, and what do you un-peel?

You may also enjoy:

Healthy Last-Minute Dinners

Creamy Parsnip Soup

9 Tips to Help Food Last Longer

Produce Shopping and Storage: 4-Part Series

With apologies to my vegetarian readers. I’ll make it up to you tomorrow with a recipe for winter squash quiche.

Recently I compared the advantages of cooking fresh over bulk cooking and freezing. Today I consider cooking whole chickens versus chicken parts.

Advantages of Cooking Whole Chickens

• Usually costs more, if bought in parts
• Cutting raw chicken is time-consuming and messy; easier to cut when cooked.
• Whole roast chicken comes out much juicier, with tender white meat
• Carcass can more easily be saved for soup.
• More economical as you can cut off as much as needed, not limited to standard 8 parts (although raw chicken can also be cut creatively).
• May be served stuffed, but may be risky as the stuffing may not reach a safe temperature.
• Impressive appearance

Advantages of Cooking  Chicken Parts

• No need to cut just before serving, under time pressure or in front of guests.
• Parts take up less room in the oven, refrigerator, or freezer.
• Choose which pieces can be used for each meal, or cook s parts some parts in different recipes.
• If you buy only the parts your family likes, you won’t be left with the unpopular pieces.
• Collect parts and freeze, like wings for barbecuing, necks for soup, or breasts for stir-fries and chicken salad.
• Less cooking time

If you like chicken, do you buy it whole or in parts?

You may also enjoy:

Handle Raw Chicken Safely to Prevent Illness

11 Great Ways to Cook Beets

Barriers to Home Cooking

Photo: jameelwinter

Which is better—cooking each meal fresh, or cooking in bulk and freezing for future meals? Cooking in bulk is generally viewed as more efficient. However, there are important advantages to cooking fresh.

Keep in mind that the options are not mutually exclusive. You can prepares some things in bulk, like rice, sauce or chicken stock, to use as part of a fresh meal.

In the table below, I analyze the considerations for each method.

You may also enjoy:

My Cooking Spreadsheet

Do You Admit to Guests that the Food Isn’t Great?

Ripening Sourdough: Images at Various Stages

Photo: achichi

This Sunday or Monday, Jews around the world celebrate the holiday of Purim. The traditional food is a filled, triangle-shaped cookie know n as hamantashen. You can use any cookie dough that is easy to roll and cut.

I’d never made yeast hamantashen before, and I decided to experiment with sourdough. They came out okay, but I prefer a crisp dough that I always make. I’m a traditional kind of girl. . .

The filling pictured is also the traditional poppyseed. The recipe is 3/4 cup of ground poppy seed, juice of half a lemon, an egg yolk, lemon zest, and 1-2 tablespoons honey. You may need a little more egg to get the filling to stick together. You can grind poppy seeds in a coffee grinder.

Over at Orthonomics, Sephardi Lady gave her recipe for 15-minute challah. Readers were appreciative, but complained that they dreaded making challah because cleaning out the bowl was her least favorite job. One reader mentioned not  having room for a bowl of soapy water on her counter.

I was mystified. Cleaning the bread dough bowl takes two or three minutes, perhaps only one. Is the problem that too much dough is left in the bowl after the challah has been shaped? If your bowl is full of dough, it’s messy to clean. The dough gets into the sink and has to be fished out of the drain, too. That would make anyone want to avoid baking.

When I knead dough,  the dough naturally separates from the bowl. It’s been a while since I used a mixer or food processor for kneading—I do it by hand because I bake in large quantities. But either way, it’s worth the minimal effort to collect the leftover dough and add it to your loaf. It doesn’t matter if the dough has dried out a little bit.

If you’ve already shaped the dough, stick what you’ve gathered on the bottom of your loaf, or in some other unobtrusive place. An inexpensive plastic spatula helps a lot. With experience, you will naturally start add dough from the sides as you are emptying the bowl.

Washing the bowl

Once you’ve scraped out most of the dough, washing is a breeze. The remaining bits will already be starting to dry out, and that’s good. Don’t fill the bowl with water. The bits of dough will crumble, and you can use your hand to scrape them into the garbage. What’s left comes off easily with a slightly soapy sponge.

Am I missing something obvious.  Is there another reason that bread dough bowls are challenging to clean?

Related:

Why You Should Eat Everything on Your Plate

Easy Kitchen Cleanup: Start from the Beginning

Is This Food Safe to Eat?

Please welcome Leah Gabrielle Goodman for today’s guest post.

When you talk about vegetarianism to many people, they imagine eating salad and tofu. Perhaps they’ve seen a tofurkey or two in their day, but they don’t realize how many non-meat options can can be substituted in recipes.

Meat Substitutes

Zucchini as Liver?

Much of the flavor of a good chopped liver comes from the onions. Grill a zucchini, add fried onions, mash well, and it’s not quite chopped liver, but it’ll go great on crackers. Add chunks of walnuts for some protein and a little more texture.

Eggs

Not for the vegans among us, but eggs are great protein. Adding fried egg to a stir fry gives it the protein and some of the texture that you’d expect in a meat stir-fry. Eggs are also usually a good bit cheaper than meat or chicken. I usually add one egg per person.

Soy

The frozen stuff, such as Morningstar Farms or Green Giant often tastes pretty good, but costs a lot. Textured vegetable protein (TVP) is much cheaper. It starts out looking fairly unpalatable, but if you use it in the right recipes, it’s great. Use the finely ground TVP in a spaghetti sauce for a texture like bolognese. Use the bigger chunks in chili. You can even use it in stir fry, though you’ll need to soak it in hot water and then squeeze the water out before you put it into the pan.

How to Use Tofu

Tofu has a weird texture and its flavor isn’t all that pleasant either, but there are some good ways to make tofu taste better. Try a marinade of soy sauce or teri yaki. After marinading it in soy sauce, it needs no further cooking. Stir-fry also makes tofu more palatable. It will take on the flavorings you add in, and it’ll add a nice texture.

Dairy Substitutes

Coconut Milk/Cream – In sweet recipes, it adds a richness of flavor that you don’t get when you substitute soy milk. I’ve tried it in pumpkin pie and chocolate cake, and both times, the flavor is incredible.

Olive Oil – If the recipe calls for butter a butter-flavored margarine can work. But if you’re dealing with a savory recipe, then unless you need the texture, olive oil is a good option. It will obviously change the flavor of the food, but it won’t clog your arteries and will give the food a better flavor rather than detracting from the flavor the way that margarine can. This is particularly good if you’re trying to “kosherize” a meat recipe that calls for butter.

Other Vegetable Oil

If you’re dealing with a sweet recipe, try oil. You might need to look up a different recipe for the same food. For pie crusts, for example, oil-based crusts are easier to work with than butter/margarine crusts. For cookies, the butter might be needed to hold the cookies together, so you might not be able to substitute with oil. If the recipe doesn’t call for eggs, be wary about using oil in place of butter.

Leah Goodman is a Work at Home Mom with two kids, who just opened her own business, SimchaVideos.com. She blogs at http://trilcat.blogspot.com.

You may also enjoy:

Hosting Is Not for the Faint of Heart: Accommodating Special Diets

Vegan Response to Dangers of a Vegan Diet

Rice Pudding in the Microwave (Gluten-Free)

Photo credit: House of Sims

In this short video, I share how to braid a challah using two strands. I got the idea from Ted at “There’s a Fire in My Kitchen,” a blog that is now inactive. Unfortunately he didn’t show exactly how to do the braiding, so I improvised a little.

You can find the recipe for the dough here: Challah Bread Using Sponge Method.  Yosefa, of Cooking Outside the Box, who also videotaped this clip, wrote:

I made this Challah a couple months ago with mostly whole wheat. It tasted pretty yeasty to me, maybe because I left the dough in the fridge overnight. It was still the best Challah I’ve ever made. I froze a loaf and some rolls and warmed them in the oven a couple months later. Amazing! My dad also used this recipe and he and my mom said it was the best Challah any of us has ever made.

There’s a reason bread is traditionally made in loaves. Loaf pans keep the bread from spreading, and slices are even and easy to use in sandwiches. They also save baking time.

A few months ago, I bought two new loaf pans to add to the two I already had. Loaf pans fit easily into the oven. I have two racks for most baking, three for pizza or cookies. I usually make large batches of challah, but in all different sizes: loaf pans, round cake pans, or cookie sheets. But now that I have four loaf pans, I braided the challahs to fit the loaf pans. Two leftover rolls went into a cake pan.

Now I could bake all of my challah (about two kilograms worth of flour–this recipe) in one batch. Baking time was cut to about 25-30 minutes, after the oven was heated up. If I bake two challahs on a flat cooking pan, they’ll stick together. And if even one challah won’t fit in to the oven, the baking time is doubled.

I could be even more efficient if I bought two more loaf pans for a total of six. They would probably pay for themselves in energy savings if I regularly made recipes for the six loaf pans that fit perfectly into my oven.

Paying attention to how your equipment fits into your cooking space saves time and money.

You may also like:

A Look at an Efficient Cooking Session

Eleven Tips for Easy Kitchen Cleanup

Avoid the Emergency Run to the Store

I’ve been thinking about blintzes, a traditional food served on the Jewish holiday of Shavuot (Pentecost). To make these yummy, creamy, cheese-filled crepes, you fry the crepes, fill them with sweetened cheese, fold them into an envelope shape, and refry. They’re not the healthiest choice for a few reasons:

• They’re fried, twice!
• They contain no vegetables or whole grains
• They’re high in fat from the oil and cheese.
• The filling is sweetened with sugar
• The crepes are mainly eggs, and the filling also contains eggs. This is a concern especially if you are watching your cholesterol.

But blintzes are traditionally for Shavuot. For many people the holiday is just not the same without them.

There are a few different approaches to this common dilemma.

You can say that the holiday is once a year. You’re going to enjoy it and not feel guilty.

You can go to the other extreme and skip the blintzes, which are time-consuming to make, and serve fish or a vegetarian dish with lots of salads and whole grains.

Or you can do something in between—serve the blintzes alongside other less traditional, but healthier, foods. That way everyone can have a taste of their favorites. Another compromise is to make the blintzes healthier, and hope that they still satisfy the traditionalists.

How to make healthier blintzes (cheese-filled crepes)

• Use a non-stick pan to make the crepes, spraying oil on the pan in between each crepe.
• Use part or all whole-wheat flour. The crepes won’t be as thin and crisp.
• Use low-fat, or no-fat cheese.
• Cut the sugar in the filling.
• Fill some or all of the blintzes with sauteed onions or mushrooms, or other vegetables, instead of cheese.
• Bake the blintzes in a greased pan instead of frying them in the last step (thanks to Norene Gilletz’s Pleasures of Your Food Processor for that tip).
• Serve with a marinara sauce instead of white sauce, sugar (!), or sour cream.

What approach do you take when it comes to traditional, yet unhealthy foods?

More Shavuot recipe ideas:

Lentils with Onions and Garlic

Greek Salad with Feta Cheese

Mushroom and Barley Soup

I’ll post a recipe for blintzes tomorrow.

Photo credit: antiparticle