Cooking Poor:Making yoghurt at home

If your reaction to the subject of this article is Ew, I don’t like yoghurt, then go away. I’ll be preaching to the choir.

Yoghurt is miracle. Milk plus some bacteria equals one of the oldest treats known to mankind. While I’m sure it’s terribly good for you, as so many claim, what matters most is that it’s delicious and keeps for weeks. I may use coffee to kickstart my brain, but it’s that morning bowl of yoghurt that makes my days worth facing.

If you embrace the principles of “living poor,” making yoghurt at home fits right in.

First off, you’re manufacturing something yourself rather than paying someone to do it for you—in this case, the dairy industry. The people who profit when you buy processed milk products at the supermarket aren’t dairy farmers, but stockholders invested in supermarket chains and the food conglomerates supplying them. While we can’t avoid the dairy industry when it comes to basics like milk, butter, and cheese, we can give it the finger by making yoghurt at home.

Secondly, the environmental damage caused by unnecessary processing of foods is reduced every time you make a product marketers would have you thinking it’s easier, or better, or faster, or simpler to buy—yoghurt, especially flavoured yoghurts, being a classic example.

Making yoghurt is no trouble at all, and litre for litre costs the same as milk. Where I live, a container of supermarket yoghurt comparable in flavour to what I make at home costs four times what I pay for the equivalent amount of milk.

Yoghurt enthusiasts on the Web have their hearts in the right place, but may be doing a disservice because of their excessive emphasis on getting temperatures perfect. There are thousands of articles out there telling you to heat the milk to such-and-such a precise temperature, then let it cool to such-and-such another precise temperature, then let it incubate at yet another precise temperature.

Bollocks! In thirty years of making yoghurt, I have never touched a thermometer. Here’s the skinny on how to make real, no-fuss, no-worry yoghurt.

Pour any quanitity of milk you like into a thick-bottomed pot. Heat, stirring contantly, until it begins to foam. Reduce the heat and simmer for two minutes, still stirring constantly. Milk has an awful tendency to boil over.

Remove the pot from the element and let the milk cool until it passes the baby-bottle wrist test, typically half an hour.

Pour the milk into a clean bowl and stir in a tablespoon or so of your last batch of yoghurt. If you’re making yoghurt for the very first time, buy a small container of good, unflavoured commercial yoghurt and use a tablespoon of that instead.

Cover the bowl with a lid or plate, and set it in the oven with the oven light turned on. Leave for 12 hours.

Voilà! A bowl of yoghurt, ready to be cooled. I usually pass a whisk through it a couple of times to incorporate any whey (the clear liquid that rises to the top) before transfering it to a smaller pot for storage in the fridge.

The consistency of homemade yoghurt is a little runnier than commercial offerings, which often use lecithin, egg-white powder, and other thickeners. Why, I do not know. Extending the product, maybe, so manufacturers can squeeze another dollar out of a litre of milk? At any rate, the 2-minute simmering evaporates excess water from the milk and ensures a thick, unctuous, honest yoghurt.

The flavour is generally better than bought yoghurt, and you can increase the tanginess by letting the yoghurt incubate longer. I like a good, “bright” yoghurt, and have found 12 hours to be just about right.

The essence of living poor, cooking poor, is summed up by making yoghurt at home. It costs less than buying, it robs food conglomerates of inauthentically-generated profit, it contributes to the well-being of the Earth by reducing wasteful and destructive over-processing, it diminishes the carbon footprint of shipping, and it tastes fantastic. How perfect is that?

Cooking Poor:Whole wheat quick breads

Bread. I adore the stuff no matter what form it comes in. I’ve often said a bread and water diet would present no hardship for me, provided the bread were good.

When you’re living poor, bread really is the staff of life, a superb source of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, complex carbohydrates and dietary fibre. All of which is secondary to the fact that bread is filling, something that’s important when you’re trying to spend the least amount of money possible on food.

In the broadest terms, bread is nothing more than flour or meal mixed with liquid to make a dough, then heated. Every culture in the world makes bread in some form or another, whether it’s French baguettes, Jewish challah, Mexican tortillas, Lebanese pita, or Indian nan.

For most North Americans, bread means a yeast-risen loaf—basically, the stuff you buy in plastic bags at the supermarket. The problem there, of course, is that you’re paying an industry to make something that you could be making yourself, and the cheap offerings, like Wonderbread, simply don't deliver the flavour and nutrition of an honest loaf.

Baking beautiful, whole wheat loaves is an activity I do regularly, but I won’t lie: It’s a lengthy process that ties you to the kitchen for a couple of hours, and it’s a skill that takes practice. Well worth it, but even we dedicated bakers need alternatives to yeast-risen breads for those times when we want a simple, no-fuss loaf.

So-called “quick breads” are breads leavened with baking soda or baking powder instead of yeast. Other than Irish soda bread, which is sui generis, they require sugar in some form or another in order to produce a good texture, or “crumb”, as bakers call it. Consequently, most quick bread recipes you come across are quite sweet and fall into the dessert category, like zucchini bread or date-and-nut loaf. While delicious, they’re not as useful dietarily as regular yeast breads. For example, you wouldn’t want to make a tuna sandwich on banana bread.

I made it a project of mine some years ago to come up with a quick loaf that could stand in for yeast bread and be as suitable dripping with marmalade as bracketing a tomato sandwich. The following two recipes are the fruits of my labours. Despite their seeming similarity, each produces a distinctly different loaf. The one with corn syrup has the sturdier crumb of the two and a faint sweetness that brings out the flavour of the whole wheat. The molasses loaf has a slightly denser crumb with a paradoxically more delicate texture. The molasses does not predominate, but adds complexity and richness. Both toast beautifully—an essential quality in any useful bread—and both make great sandwiches.

A couple of baking tips:
    Always sift your dry ingredients, no matter that many cookbooks swear it isn’t necessary. Aside from ensuring even distribution of the flour and leavening agent, sifting loosens and aerates the flour, which benefits every kind of baking.
    When a recipe calls for buttermilk, which is expensive, put a tablespoon or so of vinegar in the measuring cup, then fill it to the desired measure with milk. Let sit for five minutes to sour.
    When a recipe calls a sticky liquid, such as molasses, along with oil, use the same measuring cup for both, and measure the oil first. Afterwards, the sticky stuff will pour out cleanly, leaving only a small drop at the lip.
    Do not overbake. Ever. Dry baked goods are nearly always the result of overbaking, not an inferior recipe.

Whole Wheat Quick Bread #1

1-1/2 cups whole-wheat flour
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1-1/2 cups buttermilk
1/4 cup corn syrup
1/4 cup vegetable oil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease a 9-1/2 x 5 inch loaf pan or equivalent.

Sift together the flours, baking soda, salt, sugar, and baking powder. Make a well in the middle.

In another bowl, mix together the buttermilk, oil, and corn syrup. Pour into the well. Stir just enough to combine. Transfer the batter to the loaf pan.

Bake 45-50 minutes. Turn the loaf out onto a wire rack and cover with a damp cloth while it cools.

Whole Wheat Quick Bread #2

2 cups whole-wheat flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1-1/2 cups buttermilk
1/4 cup molasses
1/4 cup vegetable oil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease a 9-1/2 x 5 inch loaf pan or equivalent.

Sift together the flours, baking soda, salt, sugar, and baking powder. Make a well in the middle.

In another bowl, mix together the buttermilk, oil, and molasses. Pour into the well. Stir just enough to combine. Transfer the batter to the loaf pan.

Bake 40-50 minutes. Turn the loaf out onto a wire rack and cover with a damp cloth while it cools.

Cooking Poor:White sauce, creamed vegetables

The French refer to White Sauce, which I wrote about here, as a “mother sauce” because it provides the foundation for a host of variations. If you’re living poor, it’s a miracle for stretching food that costs only pennies. Your grandmother knew it. If you’re lucky, your mom knew it, too.

These days, white sauce isn’t something home cooks whip up regularly for weekday meals. More’s the pity. So-called creamed dishes—meats, leftovers, and particularly vegetables added to a basic white sauce—make great comfort food. They can be served as a side, or as a main dish spooned over rice or slices of toast. Excellent “living poor” food that makes your leftovers and vegetables go twice as far.

Unadulterated white sauce has a particular affinity for cooked vegetables, which reveal unexpected flavours when the two come together. Root vegetables like carrots or turnips become less aggressive and develop a pleasant sweetness. Scalloped potatoes (sliced potatoes and onions baked in white sauce) are their own brand of delicious. Equally good, if less fancy, are cubed, cooked potatoes added directly to the sauce—useful to know when you’re down to just a few shrivelling spuds. Green and yellow vegetables like peas, beans, celery, corn, and squashes undergo subtle transformations that reveal new sides to their character. Spinach and chard loose any residual bitterness and turn comfortingly rich. Anything in the cabbage family can be creamed, including broccoli, as can boiled white or yellow onions.

All that’s required for creamed vegetables is a quantity of white sauce and a quantity of cooked vegetables. The basic recipe for white sauce gives one cup, but it can be doubled endlessly. The vegetables should be cubed or sliced, not too thinly, and cooked simply by steaming or boiling. Combine the two in the pot you use to make the sauce and keep warm over low heat so the mixture doesn’t boil.

It often happens that when you add the vegetables, the sauce becomes a little too thick. Thin it with small amounts of milk, which can be cold, to bring it to the desired consistency.

A favourite creamed dish of mine is cabbage. Cabbages are a vegetable of choice when you’re living poor, at least here in Canada, because they’re inexpensive, filling, and nutritious. What’s more, they grow everywhere, ship easily, require minimal refrigeration, and keep for ages—qualities we should look for in our supermarket produce in order to slow the destruction of planet Earth. Reducing the harm done when money exchanges hands is one of the guiding principles of living poor.

Here’s my gussied-up version of creamed cabbage, the one I use when serving guests.

Creamed Cabbage

4 tbsp butter
4 tbsp flour
1-3/4 cups hot milk
1/2 tsp salt
freshly cracked pepper
nutmeg
1 small or 1/2 large head cabbage
buttered breadcrumbs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Shred cabbage, place in a large, heavy-bottomed pot, add a little water, and steam, covered, for 20 minutes. Drain and transfer to a casserole.

Make a white sauce of the butter, flour, milk, salt, and pepper. Season well with freshly grated nutmeg. Pour over the cabbage, cover with buttered breadcrumbs, and bake until bubbly and golden brown.

Next: White Sauce variations

Cooking Poor:Basic White Sauce

It has been said that one of the most subversive things you can do these days is grow your own food. Supermarket chains, and the food processing and shipping conglomerates that support them, don’t want you raising your own crops. They can’t make money from it. Heaven forfend consumers should also be producers. With a small plot of land—say, the size of a suburban backyard—your beets, potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, tomatoes, beans, squashes, and herbs cost virtually nothing but the time devoted to their cultivation. A kitchen garden deprives global food corporations of the only crop they harvest: money.

Living poor, especially in the city, you probably don’t own a patch of arable land despite being a person far more likely to cultivate it than the urban landowners who do. The kitchen garden “movement” is a great conscience-easer for the middle-class and wealthier, but is meaningless and insulting to the poor.

A more attainable way to give the finger to greed is to learn to cook your own food from scratch. Not the “seared Kobe beef with pancetta lardons and tarragon-balsamic vinegar reduction” cooking worshipped by pretentious urban foodies, but real home cooking, whose foundation is economy.

As with most of what used to be called the domestic arts, basic cooking skills are viewed as optional by many foodie dabblers. They either mistake expensive ingredients and exotic products for solid technique, or protest that learning somehow interferes with creativity, or are simply undisciplined frauds wearing the borrowed colours of a professional chef.

I’m alarmed at times by the number of people I know who don’t know how to mash potatoes, cook rice, steam vegetables, roast fowl, make stock, and a host of other fundamental kitchen skills. Without those skills, you wind up paying to have someone else prepare your food, either by purchasing processed approximations of the real thing or by supporting the hugely wasteful restaurant industry.

I’ve been preparing my own food and feeding households on a limited budget for years. I’ve already written a few food-themed articles in this blog, and am now beginning to realize I should incorporate more. Living poor and eating well is something I’ve spend decades practising. The time has come to share the fruits of my experience.

Good, practical cooking is largely a question of creating variety out of a small number of staples combined with fresh, unprocessed ingredients. One of the essentials to achieving this is knowing how to make White Sauce.

Foodies balk whenever I say White Sauce, preferring the la-dee-dah term, béchamel, unless, of course, they’re so far misguided by snobbery that their noses crinkle at the very thought of pre-nouvelle cuisine. They’re wrong in any case. Béchamel is a white sauce variation, not the thing itself.

White Sauce is a combination of milk, butter, and flour that produces a medium-thick, pleasantly mild sauce that serves as a sort of culinary blank slate for all sorts of foods and flavours. For budget-limited cooks, it is the “extender” par excellence, and for that reason alone deserves its place as one of the foundations of home cooking.

White Sauce Recipe

1 cup of milk
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons flour
1/4 teaspoon salt*
pepper
(nutmeg)
*If your butter is salted, reduce this quantity by half

Begin by heating the milk, either in a double-boiler until steam starts to rise off the surface, or for 1 minute in the microwave.

While the milk is heating, melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Do not let the butter brown.

When the butter’s melted, reduce the heat to low and stir in the flour and salt. Let the roux, as the flour and butter mixture is called, cook for 1 minute, then remove it from the heat until the milk is ready. Do not let the roux brown.

Return the heat to medium and set the saucepan back on the burner. Using a whisk, incorporate the hot milk into the roux a little at a time, whisking constantly so the two blend together smoothly.

Continue cooking and stirring until the sauce achieves a medium-thick consistency. Do not let it boil, as this imparts an unwanted sweetness. I use a wooden spoon for the last bit of stirring because it’s easier to keep the sauce from sticking to the bottom and sides of the pan.

Season with a few twists from the peppermill and, for a wonderfully pleasant flavour that marries beautifully with all sorts of foods, a small grating of nutmeg.

That’s it. Perfect white sauce, ready for whatever use you can think of.

In my next food-related article, I’ll discuss some of the things you can do with our marvellous culinary blank slate.