Healthy Chicken Soup with Vegetables and Noodles

The news is filled with all kinds of scary flu stories, flu shot shortages and media hysteria bordering on panic in the streets. Phffft! Baloney. Swine flu, chicken flu, Hong Kong, King Kong, or Ho Chi Min, the flu is the flu I don’t care what fancy name you put on it. The flu, common colds and all sorts of transmuting bugs and viruses,  get a toe hold in your body when your immune system isn’t up to snuff. If you are stressed out (and who isn’t in this economy?), not getting enough sleep or exercise (or both), not eating right and not washing your hands often enough, you are a target for ugly bugs. The best way to keep the flu away, in my humble opinion, is to eat Chicken Soup with plenty of onions and garlic and a load of vegetables.  Onions and garlic are great anti-viral, anti-fungal and anti-bacterial agents.  They are the front runners in my personal anti-cootie campaign.

Is Chicken Soup hard to make? Nah. It’s fast and it’s easy and it’s healthy.  Here’s the basic recipe:

1 tbs. of olive oil

2 tbs. of butter

1 onion, chopped fairly fine

2 carrots, peeled and sliced rather thin

2 stalks of celery, cleaned and sliced

1-2 cloves of garlic, mashed or minced

1 zucchini, ends chopped off, and quartered

1 bay leaf

1 1/2 qts. of Chicken Stock or Broth (homemade is best. If you don’t have any, shoot for Organic)

1 cup or more left over cooked chicken, shredded or diced (those supermarket chickens work wonders)

1 tsp. of chicken soup base (Better Than Bouillon Organic Chicken Base is a good brand)

1/4 bag of egg noodles or 1 cup of left-over rice (optional)

Salt and pepper to taste

The onions, carrots and celery are known in French as Mire Poix. It is the absolute necessary ingredient in soup and stews. If you don’t want to chop the onions, carrots and vegetables yourself, Trader Joe’s has mire poix in the cold section where all the salad stuff is located. Go buy that.

Take a 3 or 4 quart pot and turn on the heat to high.  Add the olive oil.  When it’s hot, add the butter.  When the butter is melted, add the mire poix.  Stir to coat the veggies then turn down the heat to low.  We are going to “sweat” these veggies for about 20 minutes to bring out their sweetness.  It adds depth to the soup and a load of flavor.  Keep your eye on the pot and stir now and then.  Just make sure it doesn’t burn.  Burn taste kinds sucks in soup.

Once the mire poix is done, add the Chicken Stock, the bay leaf and the garlic and turn up the heat.  When the stock begins to boil add the chicken soup base and stir to incorporate.  I like Penzeys or Better Than Bouillon Organic Chicken Base (which you can find at most grocery stores). The soup base deepens the flavor otherwise you’d be cooking that chicken soup for hours and hours.  Consider this a short-cut.

Add the chicken.  You can strip off breast and thigh meat from a roasted chicken from the grocery store.  I happen to like Zupan’s roasted chickens.  They’re a bit more expensive than Fred Meyer but a very good quality. But hey, this is chicken soup so don’t freak out if you end up at say, Safeway, for the chicken. Just throw in cooked chicken, okay?  Reduce heat and simmer for about 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes, add the zucchini.  You can add other vegetables, too. Look for packages of Organic frozen veggies and add maybe half a bag.  If there’s more vegetables than soup, add some water to cover the veggies.  The zucchini will get soft after about a half an hour.

Now, you’ve got some choices here.  If you want noodles, this is the time to add them.  Just simmer away until they are done. If you want rice, cook it first. White rice takes about 15 minutes to prep separately.  Add it after the zucchini has cooked.  Or you can opt out entirely from adding any starch.  Starch, like noodles and rice, just make the soup more filling.

After everything is done, taste it.  If it needs salt and pepper add some. We waited until all the soup was made because commercial stock, store-bought roasted chicken and the soup base all contain salt and pepper. The thing about salt is you can always add a bit more to taste but if you add too much you are screwed.

At any time during the process you need to add liquid, go ahead and add water.  The soup base will keep the flavor of the soup nice and deep and not thin.

If you are using a roasted chicken from the super market, don’t throw out that carcas. You can use it to make stock.

Okay, now make a nice green salad and slice some sourdough bread or rolls and you’ve got lunch or dinner.  And a healthy way to keep the flu at bay.  Pffft on flu shots.  Make yourself healthy.

Yum, yum. Let’s eat!

Today, I thought I’d follow up on my Pie Crust article. We need to take it out of theory and give it a whirl of practice. The following recipe is from the article Pie Dreams by Nicole Rees featured in the October/November 2009 issue (#101) of Fine Cooking Magazine (page 58). I will give you Nicole’s original recipe and make my ingredient adaptions in the parenthesis:

Basic Pie Dough (makes one 9 inch pie crust)

6 ounces (1 1/3 cups) of unbleached all-purpose flour (we’ll use Bob’s Red Mill White Pastry flour)

1 tsp. granulated sugar (we’ll use C&H Baker’s Sugar…it’s finer)

1/2 tsp. table salt (we’ll use Morton’s Kosher salt)

4 ounces (8 Tbs) of cold unsalted butter, preferably European style, cut into 3/4 inch pieces (we’ll use Plugra)

3-4 Tbs. of ice water (no substitutes here. I’d rather drink the Vodka that Cooks Illustrated recommends than put it in the pie dough).

Side Note:  The article that this recipe is adapted from is excellent. I highly recommend that you go and drop $7.00 and pick up Fine Cooking Magazine. Nicole has better pictures.  I took all my own photos for this article and my camera was covered in pie gunk when I finished.

Here's what we'll be using

Mise en Place

Mise en Place is French for “everything in its place” or a rougher translation, “get it together”.  Before you start, get your act together. It will be loads quicker and easier if you do.  So, like go get the bowls, the measuring cups and spoons and all your ingredients.  Measure everything out just like the recipe tells you.  Then put all the boxes away.  Yes, that means to go ahead and cut up the butter in those little pieces (I just cut it down the middle, then cross ways. It’s going to get flattened and there’s NO points for neatness). Put the butter in a bowl and put it back in the fridge until we are ready to use it. We do not want it to get soft. NO NO NO! It must be cold.

CHEF REMINDER: DON’T FORGET TO WASH YOUR HANDS FIRST! No cooties in the crust, please.

Mise en Place!

Next…

Next: Dump the flour, sugar and salt in a bowl and stir it up. Easy.

Then: Take the butter and dump it in the bowl. Using your hands rub the butter into the flour. Make sure the butter is covered with the flour and the flour is coated in the butter. Remember, the butter is going to help prevent too much

Flatten the butter with your hands

gluten formation. That happens when we add the ice water.  Make it lumpy, not sandy.  If the butter starts to get too soft put the bowl in the fridge for about 15 minutes and go do something else.

Now, the tricky part: Dump that flour and butter mixture on to a Silpat or pastry board.  Get your rolling pin, rub a little flour on it, and roll that butter flat.  It should look like

The butter is flat like paint chips

paint chips.  Scrape in a pile and flatten again.  Make sure the pieces are flat.

Then dump it all back into the bowl.

Add the ice water one tablespoon at a time and bring the dough together with a fork. We want to use as little water as possible. The objective here is to pull the dough together.  TRUTH: we do need the flour to make some gluten so don’t be like terrified or freaked out. Without any gluten the dough won’t hold together. We just don’t want to make too much or it’ll be too tough. Like a hockey puck.

Do not kneed. Do not stir too much. Just pull the dough together so it sticks.  Then, pat it together and make a flat disk.

Make a disk and wrap it in plastic wrap

Refrigerate for several hours…like 2-4 hours, at least. Or overnight.  After a couple of hours you can roll it out and place it in your pie plate. Then, back to the fridge it goes for another hour or so. This allows the dough to get cold and to relax the bit of gluten that has been formed.  Make sure that your pie crust really adheres to the edge of the pie pan to help keep shrinkage to a minimum.  Also, remember the formula:

HOT OVEN + COLD BUTTER = FLAKY PASTRY.

Blind Baking

If you are going to bake your crust blind (without a filling), turn on the oven when the crust is in the fridge.  Prick the bottom of the crust with a fork so the steam that’s coming off the butter won’t make a huge puff in the middle of your crust.  Line it with foil, covering the edges. Fill it with pie weights or beans or rice. That also prevents the crust from puffing up in the middle.  Bake 350 degrees about 10 minutes until it starts to get brown.

If you want to prevent the crust from getting gooey with a filling, you can sprinkle some Baker’s sugar on the bottom of the crust before baking. When the sugar melts it seals the dough.  You can also use a light coating of fine graham cracker crumbs, too.

That’s it.  You can freeze this dough for a couple of months, too. Wrap it in plastic first, then in foil. Label and date it. Just defrost in the fridge when you’re ready.

Now go experiment and let me know how it turned out.  If you have any questions or comments, just go up to the comment line next to my byline and click. You’ll need to register but, like so what?  I want to hear from you anyway.

P.S. I’m searching for a Pear Apple filling for this pie dough. If you have any recipes to contribute I’d love to take a look at them.

The truth is, pie dough is really quite simple to make. The dough consists of flour, fat, sugar, salt and a liquid (usually ice

The best ingredients for pie crust dough

water). You can certainly add a couple of other things to make it richer, such as an egg yolk or sour cream, but the basic dough is fairly straight forward.  The real quest however, comes down to two qualities: tenderness and flakiness. Therein lies the art of creating the ‘perfect’ pie crust. If you can achieve both tenderness and flakiness in your pie crust you are the Master of the Universe. Tenderness is a quality that comes from both the type of flour and fat you use. Flakiness is a quality that is achieved by the type of fat used and how it is distributed throughout the dough.

The Flour

Let’s start here. Wheat flour contains protein. When water (or liquid) hits the flour and we add agitation (kneading, stirring, mixing) those protein strands start to form a gluten structure. The higher the protein content in the flour the stronger the gluten structure will be.  Think pasta.  Pasta is made from Semolina flour which comes from Durum wheat. This type of wheat is very high in protein, about 16%.  It’s what makes pasta hard. Bread flour is about 14%, All-Purpose (AP) flour

Bob's Red Mill White Pastry Flour

is about 11%, pastry flour is around 9% and cake flour about 8%.  These are rough averages but you get the picture.

We don’t want too much gluten formation in pastry otherwise it’ll be hard as a rock. So, it would seem to be common sense then when you choose a flour for making pie crust dough you ought to be looking at pastry flour instead of AP flour. All the cooking magazines and cookbooks I’ve ever read tend to lean toward AP flour because readily available.  But I know you can find pastry flour if you look for it.  I’ve seen it in those bins at the health food stores, on the shelves at gourmet markets and you can order it over the Internet.  King Arthur Flour makes a pastry flour and so does Bob’s Red Mill. It’s not that expensive and it is worth it.

The Fat

What fat does is coat those protein strands and prevents gluten from forming or, at least, inhibits it. There are all schools of thought on what to use: all butter, all shortening, or some combination. Frankly, I prefer all butter because vegetable shortening tastes awful. Moreover, though shortening (or lard) will make the pastry tender it won’t make it flaky.  Only butter can achieve that goal.

Butter is about 80% fat and 20% water on average, thus, there’s enough fat in butter to do the job of making the pie crust tender.  The key for me is to get the best butter so I go with a European butter like Plugra.  It’s a bit higher in fat and creamier than American butters. It’s also a lot more expensive. Ah well, if you’re into the quest you might as well use

A fine European Butter

the best, no?  If you can’t find European style butter or can’t afford it just get a real high quality American butter like Land o’Lakes, Challenge or Tillamook (unsalted, please!!).  I like Strauss, as well, but their European style butter is $6.99 a pound at Zupans. Ouch! The Plugra was actually cheaper.

As to flakiness, the butter, if flattened and coated with flour, will create a “spacer” between layers. When the crust begins to set (while in the oven), the cold butter begins to melt letting off “steam” from its water content. It’s the steam that creates the air pocket which, in turn, makes the crust “flaky”. Since vegetable shortening has no water content it can not create “steam” when the shortening melts and that’s why you’ll get a tender crust but not a flaky one with shortening.

The key here is the pie dough has to be COLD when it hits the oven. That butter in the dough must be cold.  Period. Memorize this: hot oven + cold butter = steam = flakiness. Think puff pastry here or croissants.  All those little holes and layers in croissants are created by flattening cold butter while rolling it out and turning the dough over and over again. As soon as the dough starts to get a bit warm from working it, off to the fridge it goes.  After the dough is shaped, off to the fridge it goes.  Before it ever enters a hot oven the dough has been refrigerated for hours. Cold as the void of space!

In making a pie crust I will not only coat the butter with flour using my hands but I will dump the flour out on a pastry sheet (a Silpat) and flatten the butter so it looks like paint chips.  If you just put the dough in the food processor, the butter will become ’sandy’.  That sandy quality doesn’t make a flaky crust only flakes do.

Sugar and Salt

Both sugar and salt are used in pie dough to enhance flavor.  The main issue is both ingredients are crystals. Crystals are rather hard to dissolve without heat and agitation. And what makes matters a bit worrisome is that sugar helps in gluten formation. Ugh! The best way to resolve both issues is to use ultra-fine sugar like C&H’s Baker’s Sugar and a kosher salt.  The ultra-fine sugar will melt faster than regular sugar and the kosher salt is actually flakes rather than crystals so they melt faster, too. You want these two ingredients to melt so you don’t have any grittiness in the pastry.

Kosher salt is flat in shape

An Ultra-fine sugar

The Liquid

There’s a new fad started by Cook’s Illustrated that concerns using Vodka instead of ice water.  The theory is that alcohol will inhibit gluten formation so you can use a bit more liquid to pull the dough together and vodka is tasteless so you won’t get a boozy pie crust. I don’t know about this.  Too much liquid just makes the dough gooey and I don’t want to get this far into the process and have the whole thing turn into dreck because of too much liquid.  The whole idea about ice water is to keep the butter cold. You don’t want that butter melting into the dough before it hits the oven otherwise you’ll have greasy dreck. Yuck. Melted butter is just a no-no. So, call me a stickler, but I’m hanging with the ice water.

Other Tenderizers

There are other tenderizers you can use, as well.  A tablespoon or so of sour cream, plain yogurt, creme fraiche or buttermilk can also inhibit gluten formation because all those ingredients are acidic.  Just keep in mind that a little bit can go a long way so you don’t want to over do it.  Egg yolk is a fat so it will make the dough richer and…yellow.

Putting it together

So now that we know that the key to a great pie crust is the ingredients, the Grail Quest is now focused on collecting those ingredients and the task and test is going to be putting it all together. In a couple of days we’ll do just that and that’s only because I’ve got a dinner party for 12 I’ve got to do first and I’m already behind schedule. So stay tuned for the second part as we build that pie crust.

I hope this article has helped you understand how to create a better pie crust. If you have any questions please feel free to comment.  You can leave a comment by clicking on the comment counter next to my by-line. If that doesn’t work for some reason, send me an e-mail at chefdeb@lets-eatnow.com.

]]> http://www.lets-eatnow.com/2009/10/pie-crust-the-holy-grail-of-the-holidays/feed/ 2 http://www.lets-eatnow.com/2009/10/hello-world/ http://www.lets-eatnow.com/2009/10/hello-world/#comments Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:00:27 +0000 Chef Deb http://www.lets-eatnow.com/?p=1 Welcome to our website at Let’s Eat! Personal Chef Service and Catering. I’m Chef Deb and you can read all about me in About the Chef to the right. There’s information regarding our services, menus, testimonials and prices if you are looking to hire us for chef services and catering.  Our front page here is our blog and we’ll be writing about the food we cook for our clients and about our adventures in preparing those menus and meals. I’ll be giving you recipes to try at home because, basically, we are a service of home cooked meals. Since we are located in Portland, Oregon and are a big supporter of Oregon agriculture, small farmers, our own Farmer’s Markets and the local food scene, from time to time we’ll take you on field trips around the area. We enjoy profiling all the exciting and delicious food that comes from Oregon and the wonderful farmers, bread bakers, artisans and providers that contribute to our local cuisine.

The Pacific Northwest is abundant and diverse and we are joyous in being a part of it all.  We have great seafood and fresh water fish, an abundance of vegetable and herbs, game and meats of all sorts. There is so much artistic talent here it’s almost overwhelming. But we all about slow food here and real food. It’s important to us to keep it clean and green.

In a time of seemingly unending upheaval, political chaos in every country and on every front, the thing we try to do to keep us sane is sharing our abundance and keep our focus on our food, families, friends and community. It’s our anchor in a storming sea of change and confusion. When everything we hold dear descends to doubt and fear of loss we hold out and hold on to what we know is true…good, healthy, nutritious food. What else is there to say? When the bread is warm, the soup rich and flavorful, the salad crisp and green and your soul satisfied, the rest of the world can go pound sand.

It seems there’s so much greed and craziness going on, you just have to pick your battles. We focus on food. That’s our fight here. A food fight, if you will. We want our food clean, green and good. No frankenfoods, no garbage food imported from God-knows-where, no chemicals, no High Fructose Corn Syrup, MSG or Klingon additives.  In order to live you’ve got to eat. So you might as well eat the best you can. As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So stay healthy by eating right. Go outside and get some exercise and sun. Call your friends, make a meal and let’s eat!