Month 2 day 14: Sourdough Pancakes and なんちゃって Kufteh

Today I made:
Green Apple-Sourdough Pancakes, Food Network Magazine March 2010
Kufteh, Saveur March 2012

It's an exciting time towards the end of the month, when my magazines only have a couple of sticky-flags left. The only problem is that our freezer is filling up; we need to start paying closer attention to serving sizes and start halving recipes or inviting people over when we make a dish that serves 8.

Today was a day of butchering recipes.

Last night, I mixed up a sourdough starter:  milk, yeast, apple cider vinegar, sugar, butter, and flour. This got left at room temperature overnight. I figured if this was unsafe it wouldn't be published in a magazine.  Now that I look at the recipe, I think it was supposed to just be apple cider of the non-vinegar variety.

Pancakes in the early morning sun, at 6:45 before
G left to snowboard (and I went back to sleep until 11)

This was weird. It tasted like sourdough, in that it was sour, but it really seemed more like this was due to the vinegar than any sort of natural fermentation. Maybe the taste would have been better with real apple cider instead of vinegar, but without the vinegar I wonder if it would have been sour at all-- although maybe the acidity of the vinegar prevented the yeast from doing their job. But the combination of vinegar and baking soda did make it nice and airy, like an elementary science project. So I don't know. Also, are you supposed to put store-bought yeast into a sourdough starter? I thought the point was for this to come from the air. I guess that would take longer than overnight.
Anyway, I don't think we're going to keep this recipe. It's just a little too weird. If anyone tries it with normal apple cider, let me know how it tastes. I'm surprised that this is a March recipe instead of a fall one if they want you to use normal apple cider.

The next thing I made was Kufteh, from Saveur's feature on Persian food, or at least my artist's interpretation of the recipe. I made several changes based on what was and wasn't available/too expensive for my sensibilities. There was no fresh tarragon (needed 1/2 cup! I just put in a generous sprinkling of dried), saffron I think is too  expensive for its subtle flavor, we didn't realize that we were out of batsmati rice but we did have leftover Mexican rice (...), and Persian sour plums? Saveur mentions a website to buy these at, but I wasn't going to do that. I figured they are probably something like umeboshi or li hing mui. There was no li hing mui to be found in Boston, but the Korean store nearby had umeboshi, so I went with that. After buying it, I wondered if this was a good idea, because G has eaten umeboshi before and did not like it I recall. So I decided not to put it inside of the meatballs, but just in the broth, and I erred on the side of less than half-a-cup. For whatever reason, this made about twice as many meatballs as it should've, even though I felt like I was making them bigger than they should be-- they were supposed to be just 1/3 c meat mixture each and end up being 2" diameter. I went for the 2" diameter, using I think more than 1/3 c per meatball, and ended up making 12. A lot of them disintegrated into the soup while cooking though, so it ended up bearing little resemblance to the picture in the magazine:

Surprisingly, the kufteh tasted seemingly-authentic-- very exotic and good, like something you might get at a restaurant. G said it tasted very fancy, but also supposed that might have been influenced by his knowing that the recipe came from Saveur. The umeboshi taste was faintly there, but definitely not overpowering. Same with dill, which I find overwhelming usually. We will keep this recipe.

I forgot that, at least at the time of making the grocery list, I had planned to make a pilaf dish on the side. But we don't have any rice except arborio and brown, so oh well. Now that we have fresh dill, chives, and parsley, I wonder if it isn't worth cooking a couple more of the recipes instead of moving ahead with the things I had planned for next week. It is spring break, so a lot of our normal evening activities (that force us to do 30-minute recipes) are on hiatus.