Gnocchi

Hay smoked potato gnocchi.

As far as I know, I am German and French Canadian, not Italian, which means that I can't say that I make authentic Italian food.  On the other hand, it gives me license to not abide by any rules of Italian cooking.  But, that is the fun of cooking.  I have always been a bit perturbed when people get up in your grill about how something should be cooked.  Like how spaghetti carbonara should be made with guanciale and not pancetta like many people use. I say, if you can get guanciale, use it, but if you can't, or would rather use pancetta, or bacon for that matter, do it.  There's no such thing as pasta police.  At least, I hope there isn't.

So, what is gnocchi, besides awesome?  In a nutshell, it is a dumpling.  It is commonly made with potatoes, but can be made with semolina, flour, etc.  It seems like every culture has a dumpling.  I grew up eating spaetzle, which is a small, German drop dumpling.

As I have mentioned before, my goal is not to have a recipe blog.  They are dime a dozen.  Rather, I want to share ideas and techniques to help you become a better home cook and is aimed at an intermediate audience.  One way to do that is to think outside the box, so to speak.  For the dish above, it came to be due to having about two pounds of hay smoked potatoes that I had prepared for a dinner engagement with a dear friend.  The engagement ended up getting rescheduled, so my first thought was of me eating hay smoked mashed potatoes for the next few days.  Normally, not a bad deal, but I had just gotten done eating hay smoked mashed potatoes the previous few days before.  So, I kind of had enough of them for a week or so.  So, what to do with the smoked potatoes.  Chips, maybe.  Fries, even better idea.  Fried, maybe not today.  Then it hit me, gnocchi.  As I am no stranger to making gnocchi, it seemed like a good idea and was punctuated with the fact the potatoes were hay smoked.  Bonus.

Again, there are tons of recipes already posted about gnocchi, but just to summarize at high level:

• Boil your potatoes
• When done, drain and let cool
• Put them through a ricer.  It makes for an easier time mixing the ingredients.
• Add flour, and egg yolk or two, an salt to taste.  I used 1 kg or potatoes, 150 g flour, two yolks, and salt to taste.
• Mix the dough until it forms a ball
• Kneed the dough on a floured cutting board
• Cut the dough in about 8 pieces
• Roll the dough into a "rope" about the diameter of your thumb
• Cut the "rope" into 1/2" pieces
• Use your finger to dent each one
• Put in simmering water until they float

At this point, they can be served with some sauce of your choice, or you can brown them in some olive oil, then finish with some butter, herbs, or a sauce.  If you don't plan to consume them right away, they can be placed on a non-stick cookie sheet and refrigerated for a couple hours until dinner, or frozen, then placed in a plastic bag and kept in the freezer for a couple weeks.

As far as the ones picture above, I just fried them and hit them with a bit of basil and arugula pesto.  They were very delicious, and I thought the smoke flavor was very subtle.  It is also worth mentioning that I ate them several times this week, since I had two pounds of them.  In total, I had them with:

• Pork ragu
• Butter and sage
• Pesto
• Sausage and arugula

Each arrangement was fantastic.  Gnocchi are only limited by your imagination. It also seems prudent to mention that although it seems like quite a bit of work at first glance, once you get the dough made, you can be rolling, cutting, and denting while the previous batch of gnocchi simmers, and before you know it, you are done.  These are a definite "must try" recipe.

Hay Smoked Mashed Potatoes

Hay smoked mashed potatoes.

Let's face it, I'm by no means avant garde with most of my cooking.  Rene Redzepi is.  He has arguably the best restaurant in the world with a large staff and they spend their days inventing new flavors and techniques.  But I was bored.  So very bored.  Winter stared in November and has not let up for months.  Just snow, ice, and cold.  This is something out of research not my brain.  But like most of my posts, I am trying to sum stuff up from my research.  For starters, smoking or cooking in hay is not a new thing.  People have been doing it for years in the old world.  It is not a technique that you stumble across in day to day "let see what Pinterest thinks I should have for dinner" surfing.

So, where did I find this idea and why did I try it?  I heard about it at some point and kind of put it away in the back of my mind.  Finally, I decided to try it just for kicks, but mostly out of boredom.  One of the things I noticed in my research was how the definition of hay was not defined.  It was just referred to as hay, like you could go to your local market and pick up a bag of it.  It would be hanging there with the word "Hay" on the bag.  I spent enough time in the Midwest bailing the stuff to understand is a general term.  Basically, hay is dried forage.  Meaning food for animals.  Hay can be any edible grass or plant that animals can eat that can be cut, dried, and stored.  If you mow the ditch around a highway, rake it into a wind row, let it dry, and bail it, you have hay.  It may contain many different plants, but mostly grass.  Now, if you bail dried stalks of wheat or oats, you have straw.  That is used for bedding for animals and is not the same as hay.  So, hay goes in the feeder and straw goes on the floor.  Hay is green, straw is yellow or gold in color.

That being said, hay can be made up of many different things.  Where I grew up, alfalfa is the main type of hay.  For this recipe, we will be using alfalfa and Timothy hay made from Timothy grass.  So, you may be thinking that you really enjoy sitting next to a wood fire roasting marshmallows and hot dogs.  The smell bring many people back to a camping trip of fireplace during a cold winter.  A grass fire does not bring about those memories.  We associate grass fires with smoke and stink.  Not something we would put in a fire pit and cook hot dogs over.  So why would this be any good.  To be honest, I really don't know, but it is.  In fact, it works so well with potatoes that it is now my favorite type of mashed potato.  You just need to try it for yourself.

Hay Smoked Potatoes

What you will need:

• A good vent hood, or do this outside on a grill side burner.
• A pot that you don't mind making smell like smoke for the rest of its life.  It should have a heavy bottom to disperse the heat.
• Aluminum foil
• Timothy hay
• Alfalfa hay
• Some Russet potatoes.  I hear you can use just about any kind, but I have used Russets because that is what I had on hand at the time and they worked out swimmingly.
• Your normal mashed potato ingredients like butter, milk, half and half, salt, pepper, etc.  I would keep it simple and not go crazy with anything else until you try them this way first.

The process:

• Place a piece of foil on the bottom of the pot.
• Put about 1 C of Timothy hay and 2 C of alfalfa hay uniformly on the foil.  Hay can be purchased at most pet stores and is relatively inexpensive.
• Place another piece of foil over the hay.
• Arrange the potatoes (unpeeled, raw) on the foil.
• Cover and place on the stove.
• Turn the stove to high and wait until you see smoke.  Let it smoke for 5 minutes.
• Reduce heat to low and cook for 50 minutes.
• Remove the potatoes to a plate and let cool
• Once they are cool enough to handle, peel and make mashed potatoes like normal.  

Reserve some boiling water if you want to add more smoky
flavor to your mashed potatoes.

What struck me was how pungent the potatoes were after smoking them.  And to be honest, it was not the most appetizing smell.  However, once the skins are peeled off and they are boiled and turned into mashed potatoes, they are mildly smoky.  The smoke flavor is sweet and melds well with the potatoes.  So far, they have been a huge hit an I am glad to have tried them.  I guess that maybe being housebound, in the dead of what I can only describe as one of the seemingly longest winters ever, can yield some rewards. 

Home Coffee Roasting

Frankenroaster.

Wow, it has been a long time since I posted.  Sometimes life gets in the way.  It shouldn't, but it does.  I guess that is the price we pay for being human.  It kind of puts it in perspective when you think about the human sitting on a bench with his dog.  The human is thinking about work, money, relationships, politics, world events, taxes, etc.  And the dog is just thinking about his human.  It takes a lot of work to shut that other crap off.  One way I try to do that, with varying degrees of success, is to be mindful.  Basically, getting lost in the moment and thinking about only that one thing, whatever it is.

Which leads me to this topic.  The kitchen is one place where, if I make an effort, I can get lost in the moment.  Become mindful.  Get into the flow.  Whatever you want to call it.  I tend to make things in the kitchen that most people just buy.  Some things are because of how sick I am of the ingredients in store bought products, like pickles.  It is getting hard to find any without preservatives or artificial colors.  So, I tend to make my own.  But other things I do, because it tastes better and/or I want to understand the process.  Enter the crazy contraption above.  I called it Frankenroaster for lack of a  better term, but I think it is a apt name.  This all started because I love coffee and finding really good coffee is difficult in my small town.  So, I started doing some research into roasting my own coffee and found that it isn't really that difficult.  You can roast coffee just like they used to do many years ago and use a frying pan.  So, I scoured the internet and found that people did one of the following:

• Paid a crap ton of money and bought a small commercial roaster.  We are talking at least 4 digits for one of these.  Too rich for my blood.  I would rather have a new motorcycle for that money.
• Bought a home use roaster.  These go for around $200 for a cheap one, to a few hundred.  Still a pretty big investment for a first time roaster not knowing if it is worth the effort or not.
• Used a popcorn popper.  Either an air popper or the one with the hotplate, dome, and arms that agitate the beans.  This is actually a pretty good way to go.  We will talk more about this in a bit.
• Used a frying pan, although, you hear a lot of comments that you "can" use a pan, but not much about people actually using one.
• Since most of the posts were by guys, there were also a lot of massively over-engineered DIY roasters.  Ingenious and worthy of bragging rights, but I want something I can store in a cupboard and can set up in about 2 seconds.

So, popcorn popper it is.  Now, there are a few considerations for roasting your own coffee:

• You need something hot enough to roast the beans.  We have already established that a popcorn popper will work.  A hot air popper will get up to around 450 F.
• It makes a lot of smoke.  And to answer your follow up question, no, it does not smell awesome like fresh roasted coffee.  It smells like burnt coffee and will quickly set off your smoke detectors unless you have a good vent hood, or do it outside.
• Depending on the type of coffee/supplier, there can be a lot of chaff that comes off the bean that needs to be separated.  A hot air popper will do that automatically for you, but unless you have a way to catch it, it ends up all over your kitchen.  A regular hotplate style popper won't do that for you, so you need to take care of that during the cooling process.
• And, finally, you need to cool the beans to stop the roasting process.  So, in the case of either popcorn popper, you need to dump the beans into a sieve, or on a screen and hit it with a fan.  In the case of the hotplate style popper, now is when the chaff will blow off, and cause the same issue we talked about in the bullet above.

So, given all this information, I decided on the hot air approach.  It is worth noting that there is a roaster or two on the market that are based on the hot air approach.  Both ratings and price turned me off.  One that had decent ratings (except for the person who had one start on fire) was still close to $200.  I really didn't want to risk that money for something I didn't fully understand yet.  So, I found a Poplite air popper on Amazon for $16.  Not much to spend if things don't work out.  So, this was the method:

• Place 1/2 cup of green coffee in the popper
• Put the cover on
• Set up my small clip on fan nearby for cooling
• Place it on my cook top with the vent hood at full bore
• Plug it in
• Place mesh strainer over the output to catch the chaff
• Roast the coffee through first crack and into second and catch about 30% of the chaff while the rest goes all over the place and also losing quite a few coffee beans because they blow out way more than popcorn.  I assume it has something to do with the larger surface area of the coffee bean.
• Once roasted, unplug the popper, blow out the strainer in the sink, again, making a mess, and pour the beans into the strainer
• Hold over the fan and stir with a spoon until cool enough to handle

The result was a decent batch of coffee.  A messy cook top.  My clothes and hair smelled like burnt coffee.  And it was kind of a pain in the ass.  But, the final product was good enough to merit another round.

Fast forward to Frankenroaster.  This design was based on the hot air roaster I talked about above, because it made sense to me, although I still didn't want to shell out $200.  I ended up making mine for under $40 and the only part that can go bad is the popper, and I can replace that for about $20.  What I used to build it:

• 1 - Poplite popcorn popper
• 2 - single-pole toggle switches (120V of course)
• 1 - 15 oz food can with both ends removed.  It fits nice and snug into the throat of the popper.  I could have used a piece of 3" aluminum duct, but I thought the reducer (next bullet) would fit right into the popper.  It did, but has a lot of gap which beans got caught in, so not wanting to go back out in the dead of winter to get a piece of duct, I was resourceful and found that a 15 oz can works.
• 1 - 4" to 3" aluminum duct reducer
• 1 - 4" piece of aluminum duct about 8"-10" long.  Mine was an adjustable bend as I was experimenting with the design.  In the end, straight up works the best in my opinion.
• 1 - 4" dryer vent clamp
• 1 - piece of single layer cheese cloth for the chaff catcher
• A drill, drill bits, screw driver, utility knife, pop rivets, and a couple wire nuts.

Warning:  If you are not handy and understand electricity and wiring, don't attempt this.

The method:

• Open the popcorn popper by removing the screws on the bottom of the case.  You will end up with the bottom of the case, three screws, a fan/heat source, a metal throat, and the main case.
• Remove every other vent rib on the bottom of the case to increase air flow.
• Figure out which wire is the main power and which one leads to the main heat coil.
• Drill two holes the same size as the toggle switches.
• Wire up one switch for the main power and one for the heat source.
• Mount the switches and reassemble the popper.
• Test it to make sure your switches are correct.  I found that the main heat switch, when off, still produce a small amount of heat, but only slightly higher than room temperature.  Still enough to cool the beans and I didn't want to get to in-depth on rewiring it.  Simple is always better.
• Since the reducer duct didn't fit into the can very well, I chose to push the can through from the 4" side.  Since the can was steel and the duct was aluminum, I forced it through fairly easily.  Wear leather gloves, this is just an emergency room visit waiting to happen if you don't.
• Add the 4" duct and secure all pieces with a few pop rivets.  This is what I will refer to as the chimney assembly, for lack of a better term.
• Clamp the piece of cheese cloth on the top.
• Remove the Poplite label and make your own label, plus one for the main power switch and one for the heat switch.
• You have a coffee roaster!

Now that the hard work is done, what is my new and improved method for roasting coffee?

• Take roaster out of cupboard and place on cook top.
• Turn on vent hood.
• Remove the chimney assembly.
• Dump in 1/2 cup of green coffee beans.
• Replace chimney assembly.
• Plug it in.
• Turn on the master power to make sure the beans are moving around freely.
• Turn on the heat.
• Sip a cup of coffee an listen.
• First crack will sound like popcorn popping.  Pretty loud.  You need to go through this stage in order for the beans to be roasted.
• Once it is done with the first crack, it will quiet down, but soon will start the second crack.  Second crack sounds like Rice Krispies.  Once it starts second crack, you have a light roast and the further through you go, you get a darker roast.  You will need to experiment to find what you like, but since this device can only do about 1/2 cup at a time, it is easy to do.
• When it is roasted just about to where you think you want it, turn off the heat and let the fan cool the beans.  This is the beauty of the air popper.  I find that 2-3 minutes is about enough.  You can always use an infrared thermometer to monitor things.  I got mine on Amazon for about $16.  I love Amazon.
• Turn off the roaster while removing the chimney assembly at about the same time.  It will keep the chaff at the top on the cheese cloth.  Use a towel or pot holder because the metal will still be too hot to handle with bare hands.
• Pour the coffee in a container.  Depending the type of beans you use, it will be ready to grind in 1-4 days.  Don't grind it right away.  It is not ready and you will be disappointed in the result.

Stuff I have learned along the way:

• Coffee doesn't smell wonderful when you are roasting it.  It stinks.  So will your house if you don't have a good vent.
• Coffee needs to out-gas before you should use it. 
• Some coffee has very little chaff and others have copious amounts.
• Some coffee is very noisy during first crack and some is not.
• Some coffee is very noisy during second crack and some is not.
• Some coffee, such as my personal favorite Papua New Guinea, goes through a huge flavor profile change over 4-5 days.  It starts out, as all do, burnt smelling, then after a couple hours have huge caramel tones.  This starts to fade over 3-4 days, but the flavor becomes more complex.  Experiment with it.  It's fun.
• I may not be a world class coffee roaster, but it tastes better than most anything I can find from a coffee shop.  You simply can't beat small batch roasting.  This is the coffee equivalent of home brewing.
• Amazon is a great place to buy green beans.  Even better if you are a Prime member.

Well, there you have it.  Anyone can roast coffee at home.  I roast about 2-3 time per week and is quick to do.  For 1/2 cup, you are talking around 10-15 minutes, of which you spend most time just listening, and hopefully, relaxing and dreaming about drinking it.  I hope you find this article interesting and useful.  I didn't really find anything like this when I was researching, so I wanted to help people who, like me, want to take the time to roast their own coffee and don't mind spending about 30 minutes total to build a cool roaster that I don't feel is over-engineered.  I am an engineer by profession, and we like simple, elegant solutions.  Well, one out of two isn't bad.