Carmen is still collecting farcellet filling in the most remote corners of her kitchen: “Those rolls can’t stand it even if you grape them. Not to mention that it is not detailed that as long as you do not remove the pan where you are making them, you have all the ballots that they will stick to you. Well, a show of Sevillian farcellets has stayed with me. My mother, always so kind, asked me if she had cooked them with a hand grenade.”
Making packages with cabbage leaves is not an easy thing. Miriam García already warns in the section ‘Recipe Difficulty’. Reviewing what was written, I see that an important detail has been included: cutting the central nerve of the sheet, which would prevent being able to handle and bend the sheets. The doneness is also key: it must allow them to bend without breaking, something that is also mentioned in the recipe. Another definitive point is to choose the largest leaves of the cabbage, since when cutting them in half to eliminate the nerve, it would be difficult to make a bundle with the smaller ones. We add this endpoint to the instructions.
Beyond those details, the elaboration of the packages is left to the skill of each cook. Without going any further, this defender has a friend to which they never end up coming out very tight. The old trick of the toothpick can work to prevent them from opening during cooking: you just have to prepare a farce compact, make the packages with enough cabbage so that they have large flaps and secure them strategically by sticking a toothpick so that they do not open during cooking.
Stirring the pan is not recommended. Cooking is done over low heat with the lid on, without evaporation or strong cooking. With these wickers, the farcellets should not stick together. To avoid problems, respect the time and the degree of cooking, check from time to time and add a little water to the bottom if you see that at any time the sauce begins to dry.
A leather chapati bread
Elsa wanted to prepare a chapati bread to sink her teeth into a curry and ended up making a bag and two belts: “I tried to make the chapati bread. I followed the recipe by heart and every time I got a kind of semi-hard brown leather sheet, nothing to do with the video, I never understood it”.
Loaded with a sack of whole wheat flour, I began to knead with grace. The first thing I noticed is that the dough did not look like the one Agnès kneads in the video. Mine had a darker tone and was stamped with the typical flecks that bran gives. Agnès’ dough had a lighter and more homogeneous color, with no apparent trace of bran. I put on my goggles defending wrongdoing and arrived at the flour used in the original recipe, which is wholemeal and wheat, but completely different from the wholemeal flour that we can find on the market in Spain. The atta flourwhich is the one used to make the chapatis, is a white durum wheat wholemeal flour, it has a high content of gluten and its milling is different.
The kneading, with the proportions of the recipe and whole wheat flour, was a failure. The dough stuck to the hands, to the table, to the rolling pin. I added more flour to knead it and got the same weird brown sheet as the reader. I repeated the operation with common flour and things were no better. I did a third test with strong flour –very rich in gluten– and this time I was able to knead the chapatis without having to rectify the proportions or add extra flour to the casserole.
Agnès Dapère recommends adjusting the water during kneading because each flour is different: “They can be made with strong flour or with commonly used white flour. The important thing is the amount of water. The more gluten, the more water. With a weak flour, you have to put less water.” From Agnès’s words I draw the conclusion that the measure of water and flour in the recipe is indicative, since it is impossible to give a measure that matches all types of flour. Full of bread wisdom, the queen of flat breads gives us some recommendations to get some tender chapatis. Tips that we add to the recipe and summarize below:
- Mixing the flour with a little oil helps make the dough elastic.
- Water gives better results warm, up to 50 or 60 degrees.
- Add the water little by little and knead. If you add the water all at once, the dough becomes sticky. By adding a lot of flour, we will have the leather effect.
- It is better to look at the texture than the exact amounts of water and flour.
- Stop adding water when the dough looks like play dough and has a uniform consistency.
- Letting rest for 15 to 30 minutes with a damp cloth on top allows the gluten to develop.
- When stretching the dough, do not flour too much. Stretch the chapati very thin so that it can swell well.
- The pan has to be quite hot.
A doubtful brine
Rosana, foodie and piedeletrist, cannot get the raw prawns in brine to be nickel-plated: “I am very interested in the recipe for raw prawns in brine, but I have followed it to the letter, with the precise quantities, and it has not stepped out. Has it happened to someone else or is it just me that is clumsy? Dear reader: I have not received any complaints about this recipe and when I have made it, to check if there is any error in the ingredients, quantities or times, I have not found where to put a but.
In your consultation you do not specify what the problem has been or why you deduce that the recipe has not turned out well for you. I think you have to go to this recipe with realistic expectations after having carefully read the introduction and the title. It is a recipe for raw shrimp. Raw raw, marinated in a brine to lightly season them all over and without a stroke of heat to put on the mustache. They don’t even change color, as you can see in the cover image of the recipe and in the one I took out of them after brining them, as if they were influencers Of the seas.
What can Rosana do in the face of this challenge? Make them again with clear ideas and the certainty that the recipe is correct, or renege on raw food and cook the prawns with vanilla and coconut, with garlic, in a sauce or sautéed with chickpeas and prawns.
A conflict of difficulties
Pablo lost his youth trying to peel chestnuts to cook pork stew with mushrooms and chestnuts: “The result was spectacular. My complaint is related to the conflict between the difficulty of the dish and the odyssey to follow the instruction to peel the chestnuts. It was my first time cooking chestnuts, so I tried to peel them with a sharp knife. The outer shell came off without a hitch, but the inner skin had no way. My family still talks about the chestnut incident. I researched and found a video on YouTube in which they explained how to peel chestnuts easily and that prevented me from going out to take over the Capitol or some other crazy thing.”
Maximum defender solidarity with Pablo and his rebellious chestnuts. The first time I tried to peel some chestnuts bareback, I ended up entering a Trappist convent to regain my composure. The trick that never fails to peel them without hating them forever is to cook them in boiling water for a few minutes. After this step through the spa, they can be easily peeled without leaving the stumps. We add this video with the chestnut trick to the recipe along with a recommendation to peel them without losing fingerprints.
#Reader #complaints #busted #farcellets