Bubbling Along

A little challenge was what I wanted. Penne pasta al forno with wild mushrooms and cheese sounds all sophisticated but it's really just a fancy version of macaroni cheese, I thought to myself. The recipe had a much longer list of ingredients than the one-pot recipes that eased me into cooking. No big deal. The method, albeit with pictures for each step, was a lot more complicated. Scalding milk, what's the big deal! Grating cheese, grinding bread, …, slicing mushrooms and onions – not my favorite thing in the world as mentioned in my first post, stir-frying, cooking flour in butter, ... Certainly not the one-pot recipes I was used to. Toto, we're not in Kansas any more!

Before long, I started getting cold feet. It seemed daunting. Don't we all prefer staying in our comfort zone when it comes to challenges that aren't exactly our passion? Perhaps, that's what people misinterpret as laziness in others – fear! Some of us have fear of complexity, fear of arduousness, fear of embarrassment that follows failure, or in my case, the fear of lumps in my white sauce! Not to mention the cheese turning into strings of curds. For my love of creamy sauces, I actually attempted making white sauce a long time ago. Unfortunately, the recipe back then had abysmal instructions like “add flour to the butter and cook for a while, then slowly add milk”, giving no clue to what is “a while” or the temperature setting for the hob. Yes, always blame the recipe, not yourself (hahaha!) As you can imagine, it all turned into custard, and it's not the type you would want to eat. But! Perseverance is a virtue.

Certain amount of faith is required to achieve success, for anybody, in anything. This is a new recipe after all. I measured out the cheese and grated it. I pulsed the slices of bread in the food processor to make the breadcrumbs and mixed in the specified amount of grated cheese with a snip of chives. I scalded the milk with a bay leaf and a slice of onion. I put on a pot of boiling water and cooked the pasta, sliced the mushrooms and onions, stir-fried them, and proceeded to make the béchamel sauce with the liter of scalded milk and 2 tablespoons of flour. Wait, what? 2 tablespoons of flour to 1 liter of milk? Faith, remember? Faith!

One more look at the recipe had me discover that only two-third of the milk is initially used, before adding the cheese. The rest of the milk was to be added after the cheese sauce was formed. Still, 2 tablespoons of flour to over 2 cups of milk didn't seem quite enough. The instructions said to first heat the sauce until it boils and thickens and then add the cheese. Being inexperienced takes so much longer to do things than it would for a master chef on TV. The milk was cold by the time I reached this stage in the recipe. Cold milk takes a while to boil, and a lot of cold milk takes a lot longer. Tick-tock, tick-tock, ...

Two sore feet and nearly an hour later, I had a cold pasta in lukewarm, not so much a sauce as, a cheese liquid, finally ready to be put in the oven. But nearly there; it is the home stretch. I was so excited and anxious that I kept looking through the oven window to see if the topping was browning and the pasta starting to bubble. Well, I wasn't watching a pot boil. :p Thirty minutes later, as promised by the recipe, it was golden and bubbling around the edges. It tasted great too! The cheese liquid had magically transformed into a beautifully gooey cheese sauce. Yay!

Three weeks passed, I tried the recipe again. <&*#@!> Please excuse the special characters. Everything turned into custard again. I followed the recipe the same way, and the only difference was that I managed to work faster with a little more experience and higher confidence, and I didn't watch the baking. The assembled dish was still warm before turning into the oven. This time the fancy mac 'n' cheese turned into baked mushy pasta with dry cheese strings. What is the conclusion? The recipe must have anticipated a cold assembled dish, for the cheese to not be overheated and the pasta not overcooked. Why didn't it just say so?! I couldn't give up now, having tasted success before. And, perseverance paid off. Now, I've learned to gauge the state of my cheese sauce against the recipe's cooking time. When the dish just starts to bubble around the edges, it has already reached the temperature for the cheese sauce to thicken, regardless of how little baking time has elapsed. If the dish is not browned enough by then, switching from bake to grill still can overheat the dish. A pale look is better than a horrid inside, in my opinion. Perhaps, I should try a chef's blow torch one day.

A Strolling Start

With the motivation mentioned in my previous post, I embarked on my culinary endeavour. The first thing I wanted to do better was, of course, pasta, since it was the ground-zero dish that ignited the whole thing. And, what better to begin with than something I already had some rudimentary skills in!

I already knew to cook pasta to al dente. Taste, not just for pasta but everything, naturally was the target. All the salt and pepper and olive oil didn't make tasty pasta, just a salty bland pasta. My poor hubby tolerated it for so long.

Fortunately, my younger sister gave me a big stack of cookbooks amongst her wedding gifts to me. Now I was finally using them. My first attempts were simply following the one-pot recipes. It was easy to do and great to eat. Cook the pasta, drain, stir in cheese and chopped meat, plus microwaved frozen vegetables, and may be chopped nuts, adjust seasoning and serve. Viola! For cheese, I used not just cheddar but sometimes feta, camembert or even creamy blue. Meat was mostly ham or other cold cuts and sometimes cut up sausages that was baked in the oven, or shredded meat of a ready-to-serve roast chicken from the supermarket. Convenient, though not really elegant.

So, it was a nice, easy success. No pasta sauce to make (or ruin). Adding double cream was the saucey (and saucy!) shortcut. But, it soon became boring.

Making pasta sauce from scratch is not a difficult thing, if you already know how to do it right. It actually is a vast subject, as you may already know. A rich tomatoey meat sauce is but one out of hundreds of sauces. There are books written entirely on sauces alone by culinary greats (and not exactly greats, but definitely many). So, what should I take as my next challenge? Hmm....

Of course, macaroni cheese! A pasta al forno, just to make it sound all fancy. Then, I discovered how opposite to simple it was. There a quite a few things to trip you up, starting with the béchamel sauce, or basic white sauce, to getting the dish to a golden brown without turning the cheese into curds inside. It was an obstacle course. But more about this battle and triumph next time.

The Spark

Most passionate cooks and chefs found their passion from the beginning. I really enjoy cooking and baking now, but my kitchen life began rather differently from everyone else – I hated cooking. I have always loved food, but it didn't entice me to cook. Cooking seemed like a tedious chore.

In my college days, flatting with my younger sister the awesome cook, she used to laugh at me when I helped out with chopping vegetables. I did the task so gingerly that she thought I looked like I was laboring on my arts class homework with engineering precisions. I didn't like art classes, either. She and our mother were talented, fantastic cooks. I used to say that I would rather wash dishes than to cook. However, I loved chemistry lab classes in high school. Not chemistry theories, for all the memmorization I had to do, but the experiments were fun. Little did I know, that would be a seed to my cooking life.

My husband didn't mind that I did not know how to cook when we first got married. It doesn't mean that I did not have to cook from day 1 – he was raised the old-fashioned way. Well, I guess I slipped into the role naturally too, because although my parents did not teach me to conduct myself as an old-fashioned housewife, my parents' old-fashioned relationship was a model for mine in my subconscious. My hubby has always been very kind about my cooking, except this one time... He was not well, and I made him pasta with ham and peas. My culinary repertoire then was rather restricted. I asked him if the dish was OK. The illness-induced irritability took over my sweet husband and snapped, "Yeah, if you add salt to it!" Ouch! That was the motivation I needed. I decided to learn to cook properly.

My family was oceans away by the time I wanted to learn to cook. So, I followed recipe books, but frankly, most of them don't teach basic skills very well, if at all. Incredibly, some recipes still in circulation have been passed down through generations and may be century(s) old. These old recipes contain instructions written in archaic vernaculars and out-dated context that don't apply well in modern day situations. For example, "beat eggs until light" and "dissolve in cold milk". Two common, simple steps that silently test your knowledge of history in cookery, imparting no wisdom on "beating" in the old days being with a wooden spoon, not an eggbeater, electric mixer or whisk, thus "light" refers to color, not texture, and "cold milk" being non-hot milk, not refrigerated milk. And to complicate things, not every 'cryptic' recipe is an ancient recipe. It can be quite frustrating for beginners. Thank goodness, my love in chemistry experiments helped. In a way, the experimentation had me hooked.

One tip I can offer with no reservation is that straight from the refrigerator is a lousy temperature for dissolving flour in milk. Temperature in the range between room temperature and lukewarm are good, with tepid being the best. Sieved flour would help if cold milk is required. Did you know you can make a white sauce without oil or butter this way – without making a roux first? Beware that as it cools, it exhibits a slightly non-Newtonian consistency, similar to cornstarch-thickened sauces.

With the advent of the Internet and World Wide Web, you can now look up how to do virtually anything - pun not intended ;)  There are hundreds and thousands or more recipes you can cross-reference, or pick and choose from. The only problem is having to try out a recipe in order to find out if it delivers a result that meets your expectation of the dish or baked goods.