Irene Field

Pizza. Those five letters are the embodiment of one of the wonders of the food world. I am not talking fast food chain pizza here. In my mind, that is the embodiment of the wonders of the garbage bin. I am talking homemade pizza. From the bottom up, to the delectable, mouth watering topping.

Yeast was a cooking ingredient that scared me. Don’t ask me why. Entrenched in my mind was the fact that yeast was ‘difficult’. All the rising and associated kneading. Then I attended Italian cooking classes. The fact that I was able to not only make a base but associated toppings in the short time span of an evening class, sold me. From that time onwards my only pizza bases are home based yeast ones.

I am not sure what your preference is, but for my crust I prefer thin. With the simple ingredients of flour, yeast, water and olive oil, there is almost a hedonistic pleasure in kneading the dough. I was taught that you must knead for at least 5 minutes. You knead, stretch, push and turn. Kneading dough – for myself anyway – resembles an exercise class. I never knew how much I grunted as I stretched, pushed and turned the dough, until an attentive audience brought the fact to my attention.

Back to our pizza. The rising of the dough.You can speed this up by placing in a 50 degree Celsius oven. I prefer to leave mine in a greased bowl covered with glad wrap. Watching that dough rise is like watching a child grow.

The topping. If you want to be really basic, I finely chop an onion with lots of garlic added (you never know when those nasty vampires may be around). Saute in oil until softened and then add canned tomatoes. Gently simmer the sauce, until it has thickened, but you do not want a dry sauce. It must still be wet. If it dries out too much you can add water – my preference is a dash of red wine.

Roll your pizza dough out. I keep promising myself I will buy a rolling pin. I still don’t have one in my possession! I have a wooden ‘stick’ that resembles an extremely anorexic rolling pin. I purchased It in my Romanian travels, as it is used to stir Polenta. The Polenta is still sitting in the pantry, and the wooden ‘stick’ gets used as an anorexic rolling pin instead.

My secret to a good Pizza? I cook the base first, without the topping. In a hot oven for 10 minutes. Make sure you prick holes over the entire base, otherwise your base will resemble a teenager’s acne-ridden face. Not a good analogy for food sorry, but that is the only resemblance that comes to mind.

Take the base out of the oven, you can top it immediately, let it cool or freeze for later use. I use the above tomato sauce as my base, and to keep it plain you can add mozzarella, and a few leaves of basil if you wish. Or be adventurous. A pizza sauce does not have to be tomato based. I have also used eggplant (refer to my earlier blog regarding exploding eggplants).

Gather the famiglia. Sit down with a good bottle (or two) of Chianti. Have Dean Martin singing on your music system. All together now… When the Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie, That’s Amore.

Samantha

There are some food combinations that have been put on earth to rival some of the greatest pleasures in life.

One that most people seem to agree on is strawberries and chocolate. Or raspberries and chocolate.

Cake and berries always gets me watering at the mouth, particularly my crowd favourite chocolate cake with a raspberry mash filling or my raspberry friands! DELICIOUS.

But there are some odd combinations that will have people screwing up their nose at, or wondering what on earth possessed you to put those two items of food together in the first place.

I love nutella melted into the split of a banana, yoghurt and honey, cheese and carrot sticks, cheese and grapes, and one that you can never go past pineapple and cheese. This particular combination is best eaten together on a toothpick, preferably sticking out of an orange like a hedgehog. (My mum used to make these for my childhood birthday parties, always a favourite.)

It should look something like this…

Proper Chocolate Hail and Eierkoeken – Edible Planet

We have been meaning to try the Dutch Hagel Slag for ages and we were talking to our Dutch neighbour about it. He just raved. He grew up with this Dutch version of chocolate hail on toast for breakfast as we grew up with marmite and vegemite.

Since I could not see any down side to a food experiment involving a chocolate product, I ended up buying the dark chocolate version to sample. The pieces are much bigger than the chocolate hail we are used to. But to compare it to the usual New Zealand chocolate hail is to compare the Auckland July earthquake with Christchurch’s June shake up – not even close!

The Dutch one is proper, little bits of chocolate. We tried it first liberally sprinkled on a piece of hot buttered toast. We all agreed, it was fantastic! It is similar to having Nutella on toast. It seems quite a treat to us, the idea of chocolate in the morning, but it definitely is tasty.

Our Dutch neighbour reckoned that the best way to have the Hagel Slag was on hot eierkoeken or egg cakes. So we decided to go for the ultimate experience and see if we could make them. There are many, many recipes on the internet. The basic ingredients usually were the same with slight alterations in proportions. In the end we chose one off a forum that was given in reply to a question about eierkoeken not rising sufficiently. It had 125g sugar, 3 eggs, 1 teaspoon of horn salt, 250g flour and 125ml milk. Unfortunately we didn’t have any horn salt handy. Horn salt is ammonium bicarbonate and is a leavening agent like the more familiar sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) and baking powder. It is a traditional ingredient in Scandinavian baking and has its advantages. You get more rise for a smaller amount of leavening agent and it doesn’t leave any flavour in the product like baking soda does. Many of the other recipes we looked at used baking powder so we substituted 1 and 1/2 teaspoons for the horn salt. The recipe said to whisk the eggs and sugar until thick and then add the dry ingredients and milk. You cook the wet dough in circles on baking paper in a hot oven. We also added some vanilla essence, since other recipes had this included and we love vanilla.

The results were not quite as I expected and they didn’t rise enough but they cooked. They were quite crispy on the outside and soft in the inside. They didn’t have much flavour – like a soft sponge cake. We took some next door for a taste test and the flavour was perfect – they were deemed just a bit too flat.

The soft, egg cake was nice with melted butter and the Hagel Slag but so far we have preferred it on toast, though another batch of eierkoeken might change our minds. Next time we will try whisking the egg whites and yolks separately to get more air into them.

It was a tasty and fun experiment especially since while searching for recipes and finding out about the egg cake, we found out the province of Zeeland in the Netherlands consumed the most eierkoeken. Here we were in New Zealand trying to make our own.

www.edibleplanet.co.nz/
Fiona Summerfield

Samantha

Sometimes I like to pretend I know everything.

I’ve been gluten intolerant for seven years, lactose sensitive for five years, and have avoided alcohol and caffeine for the last six years due to the symptoms I’m presented with when I try and consume either of the two.

On top of this I follow the FODMAPS diet which helped me identify my intolerance to fructans and in particular apples, onions and pears. I will look into FODMAPS another time because that in itself opens a whole area of discussion.

Because of all the challenges I’m faced with when it comes to food, sometimes I like to think I’m an expert. I will willingly pipe up with information on intolerances, recommend food people should avoid and other little tidbits of information that probably drive those around me mental.

However, when an acquaintance of mine read my last blog post, she bought to my attention the existence of GERD. I had never even heard of GERD let alone the dietary requirements that go along with it.

Naturally I had to do a little research.

GERD stands for Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease which is condition where the stomach contents (be it food or liquid) leak backwards from the stomach into the esophagus.

Perhaps a diagram would help…

When this leaking occurs, the esophagus naturally gets irritated and the individual can experience heartburn, nausea and the feeling that food may be trapped behind the breastbone.

Other less common symptoms can include coughing or wheezing, hiccups, hoarseness of the vocal chords, trouble with swallowing, food regurgitation and sore throats.

All very unpleasant symptoms to have to experience! I can imagine dealing with GERD will almost make your frightened to eat!

Luckily extensive research has been done to develop a diet to ensure those with GERD can keep most of these symptoms at bay.

Some of the most common food triggers of GERD include alcohol, caffeine, carbonated drinks such as Coca Cola and Sprite, chocolate, citrus fruits and juice such as oranges and lemons, tomatoes and tomato sauces, avocados and nuts with their high fat content, peppermint and spearmint, garlic, onion, spicy or fatty foods and full fat dairy products (the silver or blue top milk and tasty cheese – I’m looking at you!).

I don’t know about you but to me that looks like a super random mix of foods to try and avoid. While many on the GERD diet claim it’s “not too bad” once you’ve got the hang of it, maintaining control over this kind of diet can be particularly tricky, especially when traveling and eating out.

I have enough trouble eating out at restaurants when I say “gluten free please, and no onions” so I can’t imagine the looks I would get if I rattled off the list above – “no citrus juices, hold the tomato sauce and tomatoes and is it possible to have it without the spicy seasoning”

One aspect my acquaintance said she found particularly difficult to manage while on a GERD diet is the fact that many products replace the fat with spices.

Products that look like they could be okay for people on a GERD diet, the ones labelled low fat, are actually no better than full fat products as the food has been filled with a variety of spices to maintain flavour and texture.

When starting out on the GERD diet this means you will have to carry with you a list of the foods to avoid and spend time poring over the ingredient list of each item to determine whether or not the food is ‘safe’.

I guess one positive aspect of the GERD diet is that it will keep you healthy. You’ll be forced to bulk up your portions of other fruits and vegetables such as bananas, apples, carrot, broccoli, cabbage and peas while limiting the amount of sugar and full fat you consume.

The GERD diet has not just been recommended for sufferers of Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease but also for those dealing with Irritable Bowel Syndrome!

There are numerous articles and discussions online which talk of the benefits people suffering from IBS have found while trailing the GERD diet.

While of course with any disease which requires a controlled diet, a great deal of what you can and can’t eat comes down to trial and error, a good place to start is by eliminating all the food outlined by the particular diet.

Therefore some people with GERD or IBS who are on the GERD diet may in fact be able to eat chocolate or drink orange juice, yet having any trace of onion may trigger the symptoms. Once you have eliminated
all the food, you can then slowly begin reintroducing each item to see what you do and don’t react to.

Embarking on the GERD diet may seem like you’re about to climb Mt Everest, and with the lack of ‘GERD friendly’ recipe books at times it can be.

However, if you suffer any of the symptoms suffered by those with GERD, or even IBS, perhaps giving this diet a try would be worth it in the long run.

With a little understanding of what food to avoid, a little reshuffling of your pantry and planning of your supermarket trips, you’ll get in the swing in no time.

You never know – the GERD diet may change your way of living!

Irene Field

Which would you rather? Coffee or Chocolate? The reason I ask, is that we are inundated with messages that life isn’t worth living without chocolate. But is this really true? Or is this some astute marketing campaign by a secret hidden ‘Chocolate Marketing Board’. I love a good conspiracy theory don’t you?

What bought this to mind is the routine of my day. I have to start to my day with a coffee. I mean, I ‘HAVE’ to start my day with coffee. Insert quotation marks, exclamation marks or what you will. If my day does not start with a coffee – watch out!

I am not denigrating chocolate by any means. I can go days or even weeks without chocolate. But ask me to go days or weeks without my morning and subsequent daily coffees, and we are in a whole new ball game.

The Instant granules that some shake their head at, is actually my preference. When you open a new pack or jar, and spy those granules and the aroma hits your nose, now that is heaven. Powdered instant – we won’t go there. It has to be the granules.

A coffee machine? Not in this house. I hardly have room for a kitchen, let alone a coffee machine taking up bench space.

In a strange quirk of taste buds however, I do not like coffee in my baking. It can sit in a cup in liquid form, alongside baking treats, but coffee cream or a coffee cake are a no go.

Whilst I enjoy a nice chocolate, as I said it is something I can do without. Is there some food or drink that you can’t go without in your daily life?

Oh and as for my evening drink. We won’t go there – yet!

Many years ago, Donovan sang that he was wild about saffron.

That was a long time ago and I didn’t even know then what saffron was. But time has moved on and I’ve learnt a few things about this expensive spice, mostly due to being able to surf the web to find things out.

When saffron is used in cooking, the saffron threads are infused with a liquid, usually water, and then added to the cooking. The spice aroma is rich, pungent and musky and its taste is variously described as being warm, bitter and musky.

Saffron is made from the styles and stigmas of the saffron crocus (crocus sativus). The stigma is the middle part of the flower that receives pollen and the style attaches the stigma to the flower.

Saffron originated around the Mediterranean and western Asia regions and today the most important saffron producing countries are Spain, Iran, India, Greece and Morocco.

Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world but why is this?

Well, it’s all in the labour. The stigmas and styles of the saffron crocus are hand-picked. A single saffron crocus has three stigmas that together weigh about 0.5 gram (less than 0.02 oz). It usually takes between 110,000 and 165,000 saffron crocus flowers to produce a kilogram (2.2 lb) of dried saffron (that’s roughly the size of two football fields full of flowers). It takes about 40 hours of labour to hand-pick this amount of saffron so it’s easy to understand why saffron is so expensive spice. A kilogram of dried saffron can cost over US$10,000.

After picking, the saffron stigmas and styles are quickly dried and stored in airtight containers in order to stop the saffron from losing its pungency and flavour (most spices lose their potency if left out in the open and saffron is no exception).

The dried saffron stigmas are called threads and you can buy small containers of saffron at most good supermarkets. I checked at my local Countdown last weekend and a small plastic container cost $8.69, with a net weight of 0.5oz, and you get about 150 threads in the container. Remember that the most expensive place to buy spices is usually a supermarket and you can usually get saffron threads from your local Indian supply shop. I found that the plastic container of spices from a supermarket just wasn’t airtight so I transferred the threads to a small airtight glass jar (apparently you can keep saffron threads fresh in an airtight container for a couple of years).

You need to treat ground saffron with suspicion because the saffron is often adulterated with other powders (such as turmeric) with the mixture being passed off as pure saffron. This kind of substitution is hard to do if you buy saffron threads.

Saffron is expensive but, luckily, you don’t need to use much in cooking because the spice is pretty pungent. It only takes about 10 saffron threads to be infused and then added to rice to give it the typical saffron yellow/orange colour and taste (to infuse the saffron, the saffron threads are lightly crushed between your fingers and then soaked in a small amount of hot water for about 10-15 minutes before being added to the cooking rice).

Sometimes you come across recipes that say to use a pinch of saffron. But what is a pinch? Big fingers grab a lot more threads than small fingers. Most websites that I’ve visited say that a pinch of saffron equates to 0.1 gram (0.004 oz), which is a measure that is way too tiny to register on most kitchen scales. One day I bought a container of saffron threads, noted the net weight, counted the threads and then worked out that there are about 10 saffron threads in a pinch. But you might like to use more, or less, depending on your own tastes.

Saffron is not just used as a spice. Saffron has cancer suppressing and anti-oxidant properties and is used in some medicines. And it also finds its way into some perfumes. And, of course, saffron is widely used to dye clothes (Indian Buddhist robes are dyed with saffron).

Now that song’s in my head again. I used to have Donovan’s song but it disappeared a long time ago. Time to spend another evening on YouTube.

Curry Focus

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Samantha

The other day I overheard two women discussing the increasing number of people with special dietary requirements.

One woman was certain it was all down to fad dieting while the other pushed her view that many modern-day people need to be on special diets for health reasons.

The first woman argued that couldn’t be true because in her grandmother’s day hardly anyone had food intolerances – everyone could and would have to eat everything that was put on the plate in front of them.

That got me thinking: why is it that there are so many different special dietary requirements nowadays?

Has there been a dramatic increase in the number of people who have food intolerances? Or is it simply that problems with food used to go undiagnosed?

When I was at primary school in the 90’s, I don’t remember any other children having dietary restrictions. Now, however, step foot into almost any primary school and you’d find a good percentage of children who have dietary requirements for health reasons.

The Year 5 class might have two children with coeliacs disease while a child in Year 1 avoids lactose products like the plague. It isn’t uncommon to hear about the entire Year 3 class who makes sure no one brings any nut products into the classroom because of one child’s severe allergy.

The Australasian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy found the number of people with food allergies was rising dramatically.

In fact, from 1994 to 2005 there was a 550% increase in the rate of hospital admissions in Australia alone for food-related anaphylactic for children under five. That’s a huge increase in just eleven years and I can’t help but wonder why the number of people dealing with food intolerances continues to rise.

My childhood years were free of dietary requirements, yet by the time I hit university, people’s eyes would bulge at the list of food I had to avoid. So why is it that one hundred years ago, problems with food weren’t so widespread?

I believe one of the main reasons is that the world was a very different place back then. Our grandparent’s and great-grandparents didn’t live in a ‘now’ society.

The idea of ‘fast’ and ‘convenient’ food was almost non-existent. Food wasn’t processed. It wasn’t bought in packets and wasn’t something you ‘zapped in the microwave for two minutes.’ If you didn’t grow it yourself, food was regularly bought fresh from local markets, meals were cooked from scratch, and while they may not have been as fancy as we’d find today, they didn’t seem to upset the stomachs of our ancestors!

There is no denying there are a huge amount of processed foods available to buy now and I wonder if these processed foods are the culprit behind the widespread increase in food intolerances and allergies.

Then again, the world of medicine has advanced in the last century. We now have vaccinations and cures for illnesses that hadn’t even been identified at the turn of the 20th century.

Could it be that people have always been struggling with food intolerances, yet their symptoms have been passed off as something else?

In saying that, 100 years ago, being gluten or lactose intolerant wouldn’t have been such a big deal. There wasn’t a great amount of gluten or lactose in regular diets.

Now, however, most products you’ll find at the supermarket have all sorts of preservatives, flavours and thickeners added to it to increase its convenience and longevity.

Perhaps the answer is to go back to basics. Maybe we all need to take a leaf out of grandma’s book and join the slow food resurgence.

It seems both the two women I overheard had valid points. While it is true the number of people with special dietary requirements for health reasons has increased, perhaps the other woman was also stating a true fact when she stated there was some fad dieting at play.

However, this fad diet is perhaps not ‘fad dieting’ in the traditional sense of the word, but in the fact that more people are realising the health benefits that come with avoiding overly processed, packaged foods and instead choosing to eat food that must be prepared from scratch.

What do you think? Is there something to be said to joining the slow food movement? After all, it can’t hurt to try… you may even find a new lease on life!