Recipes and costs

I'll talk about how I am costing things out for daily prices as my techniques morph into more and more practical ways of accomplishing it...

   Mercedes tortillas:
3 cups corn masa flour
2 cups wheat flour
1/2 cup oil(or any shortening or lard) cut in to make crumbles
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
water, added little by little until flour is soaked up and soft and pliable
Dry roast the tortillas onon both sides atop a griddle or cast iron skillet, then paint with butter, if you like.
 
Easy Biscuits
total cost (this week's prices): $.66
for our dumplings, we doubled the batch, since it was the main bulk of the meal=$1.32

2 cups flour

1/2 tsp salt

2 tsp baking powder

1/3 cup oil

1 tablespoon sugar, optional

1 cup milk

(or substitute buttermilk for the milk.  Because buttermilk is sour, you add in a little baking soda, and reduce your baking powder a by the same amount)

     Stir dry ingredients together, add oil and mix until crumbly, then add milk and press together.  If you knead much, your biscuits will not be as tender, so the bigger hurry you are in, the better they will turn out.  (Same is true when you make your pie crusts!)  Next, roll or press the dough to cut into biscuits, or form balls for dropping dumplings into simmering broth. 

      By the way, I have used this biscuit recipe for fruit cobbler top-crusts many times with rave reviews.   

        French bread is easy and inexpensive because it's only ingredients are flour, water, salt, and yeast.  The only cheaper kind of bread would be sourdough, because sourdough utilizes wild yeast, so no pennies would be spent on that.

one loaf of French Bread:

1 cup water

3/4 tsp salt

1/2 to 1 tsp yeast

(depending on how much of a hurry you are in)

2 to 21/2 cups of flour

"Fry Bread"

     Fry bread can really be made with any recipe you choose.  Traditional Indian Fry bread has very simple ingredients such as you see in the recipe for french bread above.  This is the recipe I used for the pictures in the Friday post.

    French bread makes chewy and plain tasting bread, so will be good when accompanying liquid meals, for dipping the bread in soups or stews.  In East Indian cuisine, fried bread goes by a different name, but is very common. 

     The beauty of fried bread is that it does not require use of an oven.  Therefore, good for hot days, camping trips, or tight schedules.  If your family is in a hurry, or the bread hasn't risen fast enough, or you forgot to preheat the oven and now it is almost supper time, just fry it up.  You are adding calories, but if everybody usually butters their bread anyway, then the oil from the frying takes place of the butter calories that we usually don't think about.

     I usually use a richer recipe for making fry bread, more like a dinner roll recipe.  This creates a silky-soft, tender and delightful bread which we often dip in cinnamon sugar for a dessert. 

     I do not roll the dough out ahead of time, because I'm against making more mess in my dinky kitchen than necessary, and I don't want to lose the bubbles in the bread dough.  After letting the dough rise until doubled, I just whack off 5 or 6 little hunks of dough with a wet bread knife and wet fingers, stretch the hunks longer, then hang them over the edge of the bowl and carefully set them into my kettle of hot oil, all at the same time. 

     While those 5 pieces are frying, I cut 5 more, hang them over the bowl in preparation, then turn the first batch, so both sides brown nicely.  When I take them out, the next five are ready to go.  With this technique I don't have to clean up floured counters or have burnt flour in my oil off the outside of the dough. 

     Maybe I can document that process in pictures sometime soon.  My family would love to have me make some more fry bread!