Meatballs in Mediterranean Tomato Sauce

I learned to make hamburger with beef and pork awhile back ago. Yet I seldom make them because they are still too meaty to me. When I bought frozen meatballs from Ikea recently, I saw bread crumbs in the ingredients. A bulb lighted up above my head… So that’s how they soften the texture. I decided to make it at home.

I used one part of beef, one part of pork, and one part of Japanese “pan” crumbs (by volume, not weight). After spending the time to make the meatballs, I got lazy and used a Japanese tomato sauce bouillon I have at home. Looks good, tastes good. I’m happy with this one dish meal.

Green Tea Tofu No Bake Cheesecake

Made this for my friend Angel’s birthday. I was going to make Japanese Cheesecake but when I mentioned Japanese, Vincent asked, “Is it green tea?” Oh, ok, I’ll give it a try. I followed a couple of recipes but I was not happy with the texture. It’s too late to buy a cake, so my poor group of friends became my guinea pigs again. They were all very nice and polite when they said, “It’s a good cake”. They didn’t complain… (in front of me). Adrian was honest, as usual. He said, “It’s the worst cake I’ve ever had!” To be fair, the taste is not that bad. Since he loves cheese, he can’t relate green tea with cheesecake. I do agree there is lots of room for improvement though. Sorry Angel!

Tofu Pudding With Dark Syrup 黑糖漿豆腐布丁

Inatei has been our family favourite Japanese restaurant lately.  Their fish are always fresh and you can tell they really care about what they serve.  Ho told me that the restaurant owner’s wife also works there as the dessert chef.  I tried several kinds of their desserts; they are all delicate looking, unique, tasty, but not overly sweet.  Out of all varieties, Ho loves their Tofu Pudding the most.  It’s very smooth and filled with rich soy flavour.  The syrup that comes with it gives a distinct taste that is almost like caramel but lighter.  To me, it’s somewhat close to a smoky flavour.  I was wondering how they made it.  Then I found this recipe from a Chinese blog Oak & Bakes.

It turns out that the special flavour come from a Japanese brown sugar.  The recipe is a very simple one.  However, this Okinara brown sugar (沖繩黑糖) costs Cdn$13 a bag.  I don’t plan to spend this much on an ingredient when I haven’t even tested the recipe before.  Luckily Cherry told me about this Taiwanese brown sugar available at Chinese grocery store.  It’s only $1.99 a bag.  Then I won’t feel as bad even if I fail the recipe.

The original recipe is in Chinese.  Here’s my translation with little changes from me:

Ingredients:

Pudding

650 ml  Unsweetened homemade soya milk *

10g      Gelatin powder

30g      Granulated sugar

Syrup

70g      Okinara Brown Sugar (or Taiwanese)

30g      Maltose

50ml     Water

Method:

1. Sprinkle gelatin on 50 ml of soya milk.  Let it dissolve.

2. Heat remaining 600ml of soya milk in saucepan until warm enough to just before boiling.

3. Add sugar to heated soya milk.

4. Put (1) in microwave for 15-20 seconds to until gelatin is melted.

5. Stir in (4) to (3).

6. Spoon to moulds and let them cool off before putting them in refrigerator for 3 hours.

7. Mix all syrup ingredients in saucepan and bring it to boil.  Simmer to consistency similar to maple syrup.  About 1 minute.  Don’t overdo it, otherwise you’ll get caramel.

* Store bought soya milk is fine too but you have to pick one that is rich in soy flavour.  Some just taste like water with cream colour.

Inatei also serve their pudding with red bean.  I did it too.  It is good in either way!

Hokkaido Milky Loaf

My husband has been bugging me on making Japanese white bread.  I googled it and realized a lot of people were looking for the recipe too.  Someone posted this site, and wow, what a great collection!

http://schneiderchen.de/237Hokkaido-Milky-Loaf.html

The original recipe was enough to make 2 loaves.  Here's my modified version for one 9" loaf:

Ingredients:

• 270 g Bread flour
• 30 g Cake flour
• 5 g Dry active yeast
• 15 g Milk powder
• 40 g Sugar
• 5 g Salt
• 1 pc egg
• 125 ml Fresh milk
• 75 ml Whipping cream

Method:

1. Sift all dry ingredients except salt together.
2. Warm milk and whipping cream to 40C.
3. Add #2 milk mixture to yeast in large mixing bowl.
4. Sprinkle 1/2 cup of dry ingredients on #3 milk mixture and leave it aside without moving it.
5. Once the flour starts to crack, about 20 mins, add remaining dry ingredients plus salt and start kneading with electric mixer.
6. Add the egg.
7. After 5 mins of kneading, scrape bowl and knead for 1-2 mins.
8. Shape dough into ball and cover with damp cloth.  Proof until double in size.
9. Punch down dough and knead a few times.
10. Shape it into a log and put in a greased 9" loaf pan. Let it proof to at least same height of the pan or a little taller.  Mine took almost 3 hours!

 11. Brush with egg wash or milk. (I forgot about this part)

 12. Bake in preheated 340F oven for 35 mins.

Tip: Check after 10 mins, if it starts getting too brown, cover it with foil.

I added a little too much flour when I finished the dough.  The bread was a little dense and not as moist as I wanted it to be but the taste is good and close enough to those from J-Town.  I'll try it again with exactly the same as what I wrote above and see.

Muji Japanese Chiffon Cake

I don’t usually use cake mix since I believe everything tastes better when it’s homemade.  Jennifer, my sister-in-law, bought me this Chiffon Cake mix from Japan.  Of course I want to try it.  Japanese bakeries make amazing cakes.  I used my limited Japanese learned from years ago to read the ingredients and instructions.  Luckily I could understand core part of it and managed to make the cake successfully.  It was really easy to do.  The package even includes a paper mold.  The cake was very soft and had a strong egg taste.  I wonder how we can achieve the same result by making it from scratch…

Tonkatsu

Had a very nice Tonkatsu meal when I was in Hong Kong. I thought, "Can I make pork chops like this?"  Just so happened that CitySuper had free recipes for customers to promote their products, and they had pork chop cutlets recipe available too.  I wouldn't recommend people to pick up all free recipes from there because some don't show all basic ingredients.  For example, they have "cream puff mix", or "pound cake mix", not much help for me.  However, since they are only promoting the dipping sauce in their cutlet recipe, I can follow the instructions to handle the pork chops.

One special trick it listed was to use low gluten flour (cake flour) to cover the meat before dipping it in egg and then panko (Japanese bread crumbs).  It didn't explain why but I did it and the batter was very fluffy and crunchy.  I didn't completely follow the marinade ingredients.  I kind of combined what I learned from different people to mix the seasoning together.  It's a success!

Ingredients:

4 - 6 fast fry pork loin centre cut (Fast fry is thinner slices so it will be cooked before the the batter is burnt)

1 tbsp mirin

1/2 tsp vinegar (this will tenderize the pork)

1/2 tsp sugar (just to cover up the sour taste from vinegar)

salt and pepper

one egg, beaten

low gluten flour (I sifted it first to get rid of the lumps)

panko (Japanese bread crumbs)

vegetable oil

sesame oil

lettuce, tomatoes, lemon for sides

Katsu sauce from Kikkoman

Method:

1 Cut small incisions into the surface o the pork particularly in the muscle and fat areas.  Doing this will prevent the pork cutlets from shrinking in size when it's heated. You can cut them into 3" size if each slice is too big.

2 Hit the pork with back of knife to tenderize the meat.  Marinade the pork for at least 1 hour.

3 Prepar flour, beaten egg, and panko.  Coat the pork with flour and shake off the excess.

4 Dip the pork into the beaten egg.

5 Put bread crumbs all over the pork.  Secure bread crumbs by patting.

6 Here's one trick from TV:  Heat vegetable oil and a few drops of sesame oil in it.

7 Slide pork cutlets into hot oil. (Original recipe says 170C, but I don't have a cooking thermometer.  I just saw the oil "moved" around in the pot quickly and I put in the meat and turned down the heat to medium to medium high.)

8 Since it's fast fry pork loin, as soon as you see the batter turned light goldenbrown colour, you can remove the pork to a stand to drain off the excess grease. Otherwise the meat will be too dry.

9 Cut them up in long slices.  Garnish with shredded lettuce, lemon wedges, and tomatoes slices.

I think it doesn't need much Katsu sauce.  The flavour is good by itself.  Adrian experimented different dipping ways and told me that one light dip on each end of the slice would be perfect.

Yum!