Sunday, March 05, 2006

Back to Cooking

Tonight's food experiment: Spicy Chicken Coconut Curry with Cool Cucumber Raita and Gingered Rice brought to you by Food 911 on the food network.

This was particularly fun because we tried making 'hung' yogurt for the first time in our kitchen. Never heard of hung yogurt? Well you take plain yogurt and pour it into a cheese cloth and let the liquid seep through leaving behind a thicker yogurt. If you are looking for more info check this out from Good Eats, also on the food network. We were all excited about trying this out, especially after Michael found something similar to cheesecloth at the grocery store. Or at least we thought it was similar...

The paper thin items he found seem to be designed to hold baozi (meat buns) while cooking. They sort of resemble very thin Bounce dryer sheets except they are circular. We thought these would work as a lovely substitute for cheesecloth, which we don't have. As it turned out, we were not quite right.
After we had lined a colander with the baozi sheets and poured about half the yogurt in, it then occurred to us that we really ought to check just how porous these sheets are. So Michael separated a new sacrificial sheet and, making a sort of balloon out of by holding the edge, he filled the sheet with water... and we watched as all that water stayed safely within the sheet. This was not going to be so useful as a sieve. Uh.. oops.

But not all was lost because a regular old (clean) dish towel was substituted for those silly sheets and the yogurt was hung. Ta-dah!

While the chicken was not very special on its own, when the raita was added this turned into quite a nice dinner. And we have enough leftovers to probably last us the week.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have also used coffee filters in a large funnel to make yogurt 'cheese'. No dish towel lint!