No outside cooking today- Boo!

Well, I was greeted with this, when I made my first trip down to the fire pit...
I am not going to be able to cook in the pit today. Time to pivot!
I had LOTS of leftover barley. Time for plan B - to make barley cakes!

First I got out the slab I was going to use, got off the label and sticky feet! 🤣.  It was a charcuterie board I got at Ollie's, a discount store.
Got it on the grill and was looking at it.
It has a crack! Since I want to use it in a few weeks as an actual  charcuterie board, I am not going to risk heating it and having it crack in two.
On to plan C. I got out the griddle that goes with the grill. Not very period other than testing ingredients.
I mashed up the barley with ham and onions and butter. 
Made balls about the size of a walnut and flattened the to small cakes.
I still have lots left. So the next batch I'll add an egg.
Got them on the grill.
They aren't sticking together well.
Nope. This is going to be a problem. 
I got one!
Take two, with and egg. They are holding together better.
Well, sort of.
With egg on the left and no egg on the right. I was able to retrieve more cakes, but they are still really delicate. I am calling this a FAIL!

I think the first major issue is the barley mix. It's barley grains, not porridge. A most consistent batter might have helped. I did try to mash the barley but it obviously wasn't sticky enough, so a more cooked barley might have stuck together better.

I am going to cook the rest of the leftovers more, on the kitchen stove...
I tossed back the batch I fried on the grill into a pot. It should be around 50g starter barley. Added about 50ml water.
After about 15 minutes it's boiling and looks like starch is coming out? Another 50 ml water added.
Added 50ml more water at 45 minutes in.

As an aside. I sprinkled the egg batch of "cakes" with a bit of ground pepper and some "italian" seasoning and that seemed to eliminate the overly buttery texture/flavor that I disliked, as evidenced by me devouring most of it. (Thank you to Nicola, my classmate, writing about her spices this morning! She's investigating redacting some of the oldest written recipes.) It wasn't even a lot of spice I added.

After about an hour of cooking I started washing the porridge.
It's sticking together! It's a bit "wet" now, so I'll add a bit of barley flour left over from my quern playtime at the International Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo MI. Hopefully I can get it to stay together. 
Well, life happens and I've not been able to continue today. We'll see what it looks like in the morning. I've got prior obligations tomorrow and over the weekend. I amy not be able to cook again until Monday. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More to do!

Image
We've been busy for a while. First it was the experiments, then Pennsic, then we got on a boat and traveled from Boston to Montreal and back. We are finally home for a while, but Cynthia wants to enter an SCA Arts and Science Competition, so has a deadline to get that together. In addition, since we got married, while at Pennsic, there's all sorts of name changing stuff to do! So Cynthia needs to decides the format of the submission. We've decided to bring the pots, the two querns we have, a "faux" barley bundle from our kit. The pots as well as the imitation barley are obvious, but why two querns?  Amazon purchased quern The Amazon purchased quern, showing how many times grain needs to be ground to become flour. At top left, is the whole grain hulled barley. Then, left to right has been passed through the quern, once to five time to become finer. Just below the fifth, is the sixth, which is a reasonable flour. Also pictured is a bone spoon. I also have a reproduc...
Read more

Viking Age Food Experimental Archaeology Progress Report 1

So the first step in Experimental Archaeology is research. In the past couple of trimesters, in our Experimental Archaeology and Material Culture Graduate Certificate through University College Dublin, I've been working towards doing an Experiment in Viking Age Food. I've read loads of papers about soapstone vessels, a common cooking vessel in Viking Age Norway. I've also read about Torksey ceramic pots found in York England. I wrote papers on these topics. (I got excellent grades too!) Along with these two major types, Viking Age cooks also used iron pots. So far, I've acquired some pots (soapstone, ceramic and copper), a quern, used to grind grain, and some wooden utensils. None of these cooking tools are reproductions, but what is easily, but expensively available on Amazon. For recipe suggestions, I've got An Early Meal, by Daniel Serra and Hanna Tunberg. I also have Eat Like a Viking, volumes one and two, by Craig Brooks. I also have Tastes of Anglo-Saxon Engla...
Read more

Post Class musings

Image
The question arose in class about how cooking recipes can be an actual experiment. Scientific methods include recording data. For recipes, the ingredients are important, but also the order of addition, aka Instructions. Weights are more accurate than volumes. So I can weigh ingredients, since I do have a scale. Another thought occurs that in bacon, for example, the portions are of fat to lean, are different in parts adjacent to each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bacon_in_a_pan.jpg I wonder how to control for that... In looking at these pieces of bacon, between three similar pieces, they're relatively the same. I guess I'll have to compare slices/portions of the ingredients in an attempt to keep similarity of ingredients. Other things I need to record are heat in conjunction with the coal volumes. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Embers_01.JPG How am I going to keep up with three separate cooking vessels and record data at the same time? Coals are variable too...
Read more