Millet Heaps

Dear all,

At the moment, my body hovers at a crucial point: I still have to lose a bit of the holiday weight and I need to do it now, before the Christmas and new years celebrations hit again. Do you also know these cycles? Luckily, it is only a matter of a few pounds…

I am always interested in news about weight loss. The number of diets never ceases to amaze me – and the number of people following and swearing on them. In this newsletter I want to have a closer look at two popular diets that have cropped up recently: alkaline and paleo diet.

For the purpose of weight loss I usually turn to high fibre food. In combination with avoiding sugar and alcohol I usually succeed in maintaining my figure.

This month, a friend of mine inspired me because she cured her stomach ulcer with alkaline food. This reminded me of millet, the only grain with alkalizing properties. Recently, I have found organic millet in many supermarkets. What better way than to use it in a healthy snack?

I call this recipe millet heaps because of their look. The added vegetables deliver vitamins and phytonutrients and keep the heaps moist inside. The crunchy exterior is reached by baking them on a cookie tray laced with plenty of olive oil. You can serve millet heaps as a healthy snack, a light meal with a salad at the side or a guilt-free addition to a Thanksgiving dinner.

This recipe ticks all the boxes of the alkaline diet but does little for the paleo lovers. Hard core paleo fans consider millet as poison.

Like always, I listen to my body. I like millet. It tastes great and keeps my insides running smoothly. These millet heaps are so easy to make, you can call them fool proof.

Wishing you happy cooking, always!

Kornelia Santoro with family

Millet Heaps

Ingredients (for 20 pieces):

• 1 cup millet
• 4 tablespoons whole-wheat flour
• 1 medium zucchini
• 1 medium carrot
• 3 eggs
• 6 tablespoons olive oil
• 3 big cloves garlic
• 1 tablespoon ground cumin
• 1 tablespoon ground cardamon
• 1 tablespoon ground turmeric
• salt
• pepper

Method:

Place the millet with double the amount of water and one teaspoon salt into a pot.

Bring it to a boil and let it simmer until the millet has absorbed all the water. This takes 10 to 15 minutes.

Clean and skin the carrot. Wash the zucchini. Grate them into a big mixing bowl.

Add the spices, the crushed garlic, the eggs, the whole-wheat flour and the millet. Mix everything well and season with salt and pepper.

Spread olive oil over a cookie tray and place heaps of the millet mix onto the tray. I use an ice cream scoop for this job.

Place into the oven and bake for 45 minutes at 200 degrees Celsius.

If you use a gas oven, turn them after half an hour to get them crunchy all around. If you use an electric oven, this might not be necessary. Enjoy.

Hummus, A Healthy Classic

Dear all,

The other day I received an email with a link to 32 different chickpea recipes ‘to dug me out of my hummus hole’. So far, I had been unaware of the existence of such a hole.

I love hummus and serve it regularly at dinner parties. Often I eat it as a healthy lunch with a little salad and some whole wheat crackers – very refreshing, especially during the current heat wave in India.

Although hummus has lost its exotic factor in the country where we live, many people still ask me for the recipe. Although it is as simple as can be, some manage to get it wrong. I think, the biggest mistake commonly made is to add too much tahini, the sesame paste from Middle East. Although tahini is wonderfully healthy, it has a strange texture. When you eat it by itself, it feels very sticky and tastes slightly bitter. Too much tahini can ruin your hummus.

Of course, you can also add to much lemon and too much garlic, although this is largely a matter of personal taste. One time, I dropped too much pepper powder in my blender. There was no way I could get rid of it, so this one time we had a very peppery hummus – my guests liked it though.

In general, I think we should eat as many legumes as possible. They provide cheap protein in combination with fibre, complex carbohydrates (the good ones) and many minerals, vitamins and phytonutrients.

Legumes are great to keep slim and fit and hummus is the perfect recipe. You can keep it up to one week in the fridge and you can even freeze it. When you open the door of my freezer, you will always find a container with hummus, next to some pasta sauces and homemade pâtés.

Wishing you happy cooking, always!

Kornelia Santoro with family

Hummus - a classic dip

Ingredients:
(for 8 servings)

• 1 cup dried chickpeas
•  2 tablespoons tahini
•  4 tablespoons lemon juice
•  3 tablespoons olive oil
•  2 cloves garlic
•  salt
•  pepper
• ½ cup cooking liquid

Method:

Spread out the beans and check them for small stones, debris and damaged beans. Wash the chickpeas and soak them in plenty of water overnight. The next day, drain the soaked chickpeas, put them into a pot, cover with two litres salt water and boil them until soft.

If you use a pressure cooker, add only one litre of water with the chickpeas and cook for 30 minutes after the first whistle. The chickpeas need to become really soft. Drain the chickpeas, but save half a cup of the liquid.

You can prepare humus either with a blender stick or in a blender. With a blender stick, mash the chickpeas first, and then add the tahini, the lemon juice, the olive oil and the crushed garlic. Combine with some cooking liquid to obtain a smooth paste.

If you use a blender, throw in all the ingredients and blend away. It is better to crush the garlic before adding it.

Whole-wheat Pretzels

Dear all,

We love pretzels. As a Bavarian I call them ‘Brezen’. There is something about these dark brown breads that makes them very addictive. I prefer pretzels the Bavarian way: a soft centre covered by a deliciously salty skin that offers a bit of crunchy resistance to the bite. The fat pretzels sold everywhere in Manhattan do nothing for me (excuse me bakers of New York). They lack flavour and texture.

Unfortunately, here in India pretzels are hard to come by. For a long time I wanted to bake them at home and I finally succeeded for the sake of my newsletter.

When I was a teenager and living in Bavaria, I tried one time to make pretzels but that experiment resulted in utter failure. Something went wrong with the alkali solution that you dip the pretzels in before baking them – the secret behind the brown skin of pretzels. My pretzels did not change colour at all and I gave up on baking them.

A few days ago, I set out again to bake homemade pretzels. I wanted to make them with whole-wheat flour because I avoid white flour whenever possible. Thanks to the Internet I found plenty of recipes. Nevertheless, my latest pretzel experiment turned out as a kind of hit and miss.

You need to dip the pretzels before baking into a boiling solution of water with salt and baking soda. My first pretzels did not like this at all. They disintegrated almost immediately when they hit the solution.

I thought I have to find another recipe for this month’s newsletter. Fortunately I remembered a German website recommending to freeze them before dipping them to ‘keep the shape better’. Honestly, my pretzels needed one hour in the freezer to keep their shape at all.

The flavour of my pretzels came pretty close to the original. They tasted good enough to disappear almost immediately. I like to slice open my pretzels and smother them with fresh butter, accompanied by a cold beer.

At this point I would like to announce that I am taking a two-month holiday from writing because we will be travelling in Europe. I have worked very hard to finish the manuscript of my new book with the working title ‘Cooking for Happiness’. I am proud to announce that HarperCollins India will publish it towards the end of this year or beginning of next year.

Wishing you happy cooking, always!

Kornelia Santoro with family

Whole-wheat Pretzels

Ingredients:
(for 8 large pretzels)

• 500 g whole-wheat flour
• 2 packets dry yeast
• 50 g butter
• 200 ml milk
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 100 g baking soda
• Salt
• Water

Method:

Pretzels are made with yeast dough. When you replace white flour with whole-wheat flour, you have to remember that you need more rising power because whole-wheat dough tends to be denser. Normally one packet of yeast would be sufficient for 500 g flour. But pretzels need to be light that’s why we need two packets to do the job.

Making yeast dough is not difficult but you need to remember some basic facts: yeast is a fungus that likes moisture and warm temperature. You cannot make yeast dough in a hurry because it needs time to rise. If you heat yeast to more than 60 degrees, it dies.

First of all, you need to wake up the dry yeast. Place the sugar into a bowl, mix it with a cup of water and add the yeast. Stir well and wait until bubbles develop.

Place the flour into a bowl and dig out a well. Fill the bubbling yeast into the well and cover it with flour.

When the yeast bubbles out of the flour, start adding the milk and ½ tablespoon salt.

Melt the butter and add it to the bowl. It is not really necessary to melt the butter but it makes mixing a lot easier.

Yeast dough needs severe kneading, when you use whole-wheat flour even more so. Kneading activates the gluten that holds the dough together and makes it rise. I start off to incorporate enough liquid to obtain smooth dough with the help of the kneading hooks of my hand mixer. It is rather impossible to predict how much liquid you need exactly. Remember that the extra fibre of whole-wheat flour soaks up quite a bit of liquid. Work the dough for at least 15 minutes.

I gave it 10 minutes with my hand mixer and then I kneaded some more by hand. You can also lift up the dough and through it hard onto your kitchen counter.

You can stop when you have dough that does not stick to your fingers and that gives the impression that it is growing by the minute. If you have added too much liquid and the dough remains sticky, incorporate more flour until you feel the consistency is right.

Cover the dough with a moist cloth and let it rise until it has doubled in volume.
Knead it through one more time and divide it into equal pieces. One German website suggests to weigh it but that seems a bit exaggerated to me.

Roll each piece of dough into a long string that is thicker in the middle. You might need a little bit of flour to prevent it sticking to your work surface.

Cross the ends.

Turn them around one time and fasten them to the opposite side to get the typical pretzel shape.

Place the pretzels onto baking paper so you can remove them easily. Let them rise for half an hour or so. They should visibly grow. Don’t cover them; they need to develop a kind of skin. When they have risen enough place them into the freezer for at least half an hour. They need to be hard to the touch.
In the meantime, prepare the dipping solution. Place 1.5 litres water into a pot and add one-tablespoon salt. Bring it to a boil. Switch off the fire and add the baking soda gradually. Be careful, it tends to bubble up quite a bit. Bring it to the boil again. Your solution is ready now.

When your pretzels are ready to be dipped, bring the solution to a boil and preheat the oven to 200 degrees. Drop each pretzel into the solution and let it swim for at least 30 seconds. Keep pressing it carefully down with a slotted spoon to make sure that the whole skin is immersed in the solution.


After 30 seconds take them out with a spatula or the slotted spoon and place them onto a cookie sheet. Sprinkle them with salt. Some people like rough salt on their pretzels.
I use a silicone sheet to avoid sticking. If you don’t have one, butter the cookie sheet generously. If any pretzels disintegrate - like my first ones did - form them into balls or just keep the fragments. Keep them longer in the freezer before dipping them.

Probably you will need to bake your pretzels in two batches.

They need around 20 minutes in the oven at 200 degrees. In my gas oven I finish them with five minutes under the grill to make sure they are crispy. Let them cool down and eat them as soon as possible. Pretzels tend to turn soggy quickly. However, you can always crisp them up again. 10 minutes in the oven by 200 degrees should do the trick.

Spannakopitta - Spinach Pie

Nothing infuriates me more than people wasting my time. Time moves only in one direction: it never comes back.

I write this because I am still angry with the organisers of an art performance. The other day, I was invited to participate in a performance. I thought it might be interesting and fun and promised to be there. The beginning of the performance was announced for 6 pm – we were asked to be there half an hour earlier for a briefing. The evening before, an assistant even called me up to make sure I would be there at 5.30 pm sharp.

I have been educated that punctuality is a sign of respect and polite behaviour. It is ingrained in my soul. I don’t want to make people wait for me and I have difficulties if this courtesy is not reciprocated.

Goa is not known for punctuality but I thought I have to be there because they asked me to be sharp on time. Being familiar with local customs, I arrived 15 minutes late. Unfortunately, I was way too early. I had to stand around for three quarters of an hour before anything happened. The artist did not consider it necessary to apologize for the delay. He did not even mention it. He also took the fun out of the experience by forbidding all participants to laugh or to show any emotional reaction. At this point I was furious but I kept my feelings in check as best as I could.

The set up for the performance was so stupid and superficial that I deeply regretted my participation. I left with the promise to myself that I will never let anybody waste my time again and that I am done with performances that I don’t choreograph myself. Before committing my time again, I will think long and hard.

I should have stayed at home and cooked something healthy for my family – for example this month’s recipe, spannakopitta, Greek spinach pie. A real spannakopitta in Greece is made with puff pastry. I must admit that I never tried to make real puff pastry. It is one of the things I intend to learn before I die – if I don’t get caught up in too many art performances.

I make a short crust pastry with oil and whole wheat instead of puff pastry. My journey with short crust is a rather rocky one with many failures. I decided to give my spannakopitta a makeover after people complained that my pastry is too heavy. Honestly, I like a crust that I can sink my teeth into but many people don’t share this attitude.

As a consequence I learned a lot about different kinds of short crusts and I came up with the technique described in this newsletter. The main thing to remember is to move the flour as little as possible because you don’t want to activate the gluten. 

 

Ingredients:

(for 8 servings or a 29-cm, 12.5-in pie dish)

• 3 cups whole wheat flour
• 10 tablespoons olive oil
• 6 bundles spinach (about 500 grams)
• 2 leeks
• 2 bundles spring onions
• 1 ½ packets feta cheese (300 grams)
• 1 egg yolk
• cold water
• salt
• pepper

Method:

Clean the spinach carefully, throwing away all brownish leaves. Wash and cut into pieces roughly. Clean the leeks and the spring onions and cut them into pieces too. 

Mix the spinach, leeks and spring onions with three teaspoons salt in a big bowl thoroughly using your hands and crushing the leaves. Let it sit so the salt pulls out the water from the spinach.

Put the flour into a mixing bowl. Add eight tablespoons olive oil – also a little more would not hurt – and one teaspoon salt. Add some water and mix it carefully with a spoon. Add water until you feel that all the flour might bind.

Carefully press the mixture together until you have a big clump of dough. Never mind if it is not mixed completely and still a little crumbly.

Wrap the dough in cling film and let it rest for half an hour in the fridge.  

Drain all the accumulated juice from the spinach mixture in a sieve and put it into a mixing bowl. Cut the feta cheese into cubes. Mix the drained vegetables with the cheese, two tablespoons olive oil and pepper. Taste it, probably you won’t have to add salt.

Spread olive oil over a pie form with.

When the dough has rested enough, spread cling film over your working surface. Take a bit more than half the dough. Never mind if it looks spotty. This ensures a flaky crust. Place it on the cling film, flatten it a bit and cover it with cling film.

Roll it out as thin as possible. You need to lift the upper cling film as the dough spreads out to give it room.

Make sure that the dough is big enough to cover the bottom of the pie form and more than height of the sides.

Pull off the cling film from the top and place the sheet upside down into the pie form with the help of the rolling pin. You need the dough to overlap the sides of the form.

Spread the spinach in the pie form and tuck the overlapping dough over it.

Roll out the rest of the dough between cling film and cover the spinach. Cut off any overlapping dough from the cover. You can use leftovers to cut out some decorations if you feel inclined to do so. I always make a few leaves.

Mix the egg yolk with a pinch of salt and brush the surface of the spannakopitta. Poke some holes with a fork so the steam can escape during baking.

Bake the spinach pie in the oven at 190 degrees Celsius for about one hour and 20 minutes until it is golden brown. It tastes good warm or cold.