周老師的美食教室英文版

各位讀友：

這個部落格是「周老師的美食教室」英文版，各篇食譜都是由周老師的網友們義務翻譯，歡迎大家多加利用，但請尊重版權，也請不吝支持您喜歡的食譜和譯者，只要按個「讚」或「推」，就是一份鼓勵。

目前已有人翻譯的食譜如下，我會找時間一一貼上，如果還有朋友願意翻譯其它食譜，我將會非常歡迎與感激！麻煩您將譯文寄到cloudwr@yahoo.com.tw即可。

英文暱稱

中文暱稱

Steamed rice roll with shrimps is one of the simpler dim sum items. The rice roll is soft and silky which makes you want to eat more than just one plate. Dim sum resturants typically make the rice roll with indica rice flour (typically sold as rice flour in the US) with wheat starch or water chestnut flour. I added Tai Bi powder (potato startch) to make the rice roll texture a little more chewy than the usual Hong Kongness style.

It is important to buy good quality (i.e. no strange oder) indica rice flour and Tai Bi powder. Besides using shrimps as the rice roll filling, other indgredients will work equally well. Try the Chinese fried dough stick with the soft silky wrapper. The texture is very unique because it is crunchy and soft at the same time!

The trick of making this dish is to make very thin rice wrapper. I use a 23 cm (9 in) pizza pan as the steaming plate. You should use the rice wrapper batter to make 8 wrappers so each wrapper will be thin enough for this recipe. If you can find a bigger plate to steam the wrappers, you won’t have to steam so many times. For example, if the pizza pan is 46 cm (18 in) in diameter, divide the filling into 4 portions, then you only have to steam 4 times to make 4 rolls. Cut each roll in half to get 8 total.

Ingredients

Yield: 8

I had this strange craving for MacDonald’s breakfast sausage McMuffin® and creamy corn soup lately! I didn’t want to make a special trip to MacDonald’s so I decided to make them myself since I have all the ingredients at home. I replaced the English muffin with a waffle or pancakes (see recipe 12 for the recipe or http://homeeconomics.pixnet.net/blog/post/66280761).

Sausage Patty

Yield: 24

Ingredients

Ground pork – 1200 g (2.65 lb.)

A while ago I read in the magazines about the colorful cake rolls (I don' t know what the Japanese name is). They look very cute, and may be suitable as Christmas gifts too. Even though I haven't finished the recipes for the cake pops, I started making the cake rolls today, having lots of fun.

I used the recipe listed in my book “Light Cake” for the cake made with separated eggs without additives, and I multiplied the quantity by 1.5. The amount is just enough for one baking sheet (46.3cm x 37.3 cm). Readers who do not have this book can reference the recipe in #130 “Chiffon Cake Roll” in this blog. The recipe for butter cream and the instructions on how to roll up the cake can also be found in the same book and in the posting #130.

The texture of chiffon cake is very good. It is not too sweet or too oily, and it has great flexibility. It continues to be loved by Taiwanese people. Unfortunately it tends to have some large holes, unlike cakes made with SP emulsifier. The cake rolls listed in the Japanese magazines are all cakes made with SP and make beautiful photographs. However, I believe most readers can accept the natural beauty of cakes with some holes. After all, our wish to promote both health and taste for our families and friends is the main reason that we bake at home.

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There is no much difference between making this kind of colorful cake rolls and making traditional cake rolls. But please note the following points:

I will only purchase a particular mold when it has multiple uses. I am going to use the same cake pop baking pan to make other shapes to make the cake pops. Acorn shape is pretty cut and easier to make than the round cake pops. Half round cake balls can be stacked to make Christmas trees which are pretty for the holiday season.

Acorn Cake Pops

Yield: 24

Ingredients

Pound cake batter – 1 recipe portion

The easiest cake pops are tennis balls, colorful balls, and Christmas balls. For bakers who are familiar with handling chocolates, it will be an easy task. Chocolate covered cake pops can keep for a longer period of time and good for shipping.

Tennis Ball Cake Pops

Yield: 24

Steps

1. Cover the entire cake pop with melted white chocolate. Shake off the excess and let it harden.

Cake balls are usually made with leftover hardened cake. European (American) style cakes are usually made with flour batter. A good example is the pound cake. Pound cake is a mixture of a pound of butter, a pound of eggs, and a pound of flour then baked in four loaf pans. Each loaf is also a pound in weight. Thus the cake is named the pound cake.

Pound cake is fairly dense. It is easily crumbled into pieces. Buttercream or chocolate is added to the crumbled cake, shaped into a ball or other shapes, and covered with frosting to transform the pound cake into cute and delicious little desserts.

Cake ball with a lollipop stick is a cake pop! There are many cake pop recipes in the US which stress the decorating techniques and ingredients to make many different beautiful cake pops. Some of the techniques may be too difficult for the home cooks so many semi-finished decorating products are available to make the process easier.

Although these semi-finished decorating products are convenient to use but they usually contain many additives to order to extend the shelf life. Grounded cake shavings, pre-made frostings, colorful candy pieces (to be melted to make the hard shell on the cake pop), chocolate sprinkles, and edible paint all contain hundreds of species, artificial coloring, preservatives, and other unknown additives.

Out of the fear of ingesting these unhealthy chemicals, I want to make cake pops with natural ingredients with a tiny amount of food coloring but no other artificial ingredients.

I discovered this fun little dish while I was watching TV. I just knew that my boys will enjoy this tremendously because it is a combination of meat and rice.

It is important to get the right type of meat for this dish. There are two types of pre-sliced meat (i.e. pork): thin ones for hot pots; thick ones for grilling/BBQ. The thinly sliced meat is ideal for wrapping the rice roll because the portion size is ideal to be served as a main dish.

It is more difficult to use thinly sliced hot pot meat to wrap larger quantity of cooked rice because it tears easily. Therefore, sliced meat from the tenderloin holds its shape the best, followed by pork shoulder, then pork belly. In the US, pre-sliced hot pot pork slices are sold in the frozen section in the Asian supermarket, customers may not have a choice of selecting the region of the meat you prefer.

If you want to make large rice rolls, use thicker slices of meat in order to hold the rice in. Smaller rice rolls require thinner meat slices. The rice rolls in this recipe is of medium size. One bowl of rice and 100 g of meat will make 3 rice rolls. You can reduce the size in half (or even smaller). The picture below shows 16 small rice rolls on the left and 12 medium sized ones on the right. Regardless of size, they are all very delicious!

The meat wrapped rice rolls I saw on TV are probably the large ones, about the size of an ice cream bar, with a popsicle stick. You may even be able to grill them.

This recipe is all about using good quality ingredients to make the meat dumping soup: pieces of pork dipped in homemade fish paste swimming in a warm hearty soup. Please refer to recipe 92 for homemade fish paste. Please note that water is eliminated from recipe 92 to make the fish paste for this recipe (sweet potato powder and other condiments are still necessary). Fish paste with water is more suitable for frying like Taiwanese tenpura; waterless fish paste holds its texture better while cooked in soup.

Ingredients

Meat dumpling:

Pork shoulder – 600 g

Salt – 1 teaspoon

Yield: 3 portions

Like the name suggested, pulled noodles means pulling the dough into thin strands of noodles. To ensure the dough can be pulled easily, the salted dough must contain high amount of water, develop high amount of gluten,  and kneaded thoroughly then followed by adequate rise.

This hand-made pulled noodle tastes distinctively different from machine-made (pasta machine) ones because the dough has high amounts gluten and water. Of course each type of noodle is still delicious in its own right. If you are interested in other noodle recipes, my blog has several noodles made with the hand operated pasta machine.

Cooked hand-made pulled noodles look like the following: slightly translucent, shiny, and slightly curly.

It is not easy for the home cooks to pull the whole dough into noodles (as seen on TV). This recipe is the simplified version which produces equally great pulled noodles. You can make enough dough for one week (80 g of flour = calories of 1 cup of rice) all at once, stack each portion up then refrigerate in a sealed container or freezer bag. Take out needed portion(s) before the meal, cook the freshly made pulled noodle as you make them, and enjoy them in about 5 – 10 minutes! It is not much harder than making ramen noodles.

Gelatin desserts or jello can be made with the simplest ingredients or be elevated by using fresh ripened fruits. These desserts not only are flavorful but also doesn’t contain any type of fat and the sugar can be substituted with any artificial sweetener (artificial sweetener usually tints the flavor in other types of desserts).

These fruit-filled gelatin desserts must use fruits that are soft in texture with uncomplicated flavors and also at their ripest. Bing and Rainer cherries, mango, white peach, loquat, green and purple grapes, litchi, mandarin orange, pear, strawberry, raspberry, melon, or kiwi are all tasty additions.

Besides the yummy fruit, this dessert also requires the use of gelatin powder. Agar agar, pectin, and gelatine are great choices. It is even more convenient to use packaged gelatin powder such as Jell-O. I used konjac jelly powder in this recipe to get the glistening translucent gelatin dessert with firm yet jiggly texture.

Lemon juice is also quite important when making this dessert. It gives the gelatin a slight tartness and also keeps the fruit from oxidizing. But too much lemon juice will affect gelatin’s ability to solidify then more gelatin powder should be added to retain the balance.

If you are not making the gelatin dessert for kids, add some wine or liqueur. Fruit matches well with wine or spirits.

In Recipe #294, the steamed rolls are made with the colorful purple Chinese yam and pumpkin. Each with its own distinct, light, and unique flavor.

The purple Chinese yam and pumpkin are used as pastes in the steamed rolls because they have about 82% water content which is much higher than the dough of the steamed rolls. So it is not feasible to use them as sticks or cubes. Once the nicely shaped rolls are steamed, water comes out of the yam and pumpkin pastes, the result is flattened steamed rolls without any of the soft and fluffy texture.

The water content of the taro root and sweet potato is about 69% which is similar to the steamed roll dough. Of course one can choose to use the taro and sweet potato as pastes in this recipe but the unique texture and taste of these vegetables is best represented when they are coarse like the sticks and cubes.

Many of the taro steamed rolls sold in the Asian supermarkets and in some restaurants are purple with taro taste without actual bits of taro at all. These steamed rolls are basically plain dough with purple food coloring and artificial taro flavoring! So why subject ourselves to these chemicals? These homemade rolls are healthy with beneficial nutrients.

Taro steamed rolls with taro bits taste great, 100% natural, and healthy. They have a rustic look because they are homemade!