What are You Cooking the Week of January 7, 2018?

[Italiancook]

I feel your salt-reduction pain, Mike. I hope there don't turn out to be many foods you have to give up completely.

For lunch, I roasted a chicken and served it with rice and gravy. I put the chicken in the pan breast side down. Nancy Fuller of Farmhouse Rules (Food Network) claims that keeps the breast moist. I can't verify that, because I ate a leg and thigh. I'm planning on making chicken salad with the breasts, so I'll never know for certain. If it's cooked with the breast down, the top of the chicken isn't fit to take to the table whole. The skin stuck to the pan, so the breast meat was exposed when on the plate. The bottom of the roast was beautifully brown, though.

[Mike Nolan]

Today I'm making a batch of chili using ground beef, onions, red peppers, no-salt-added beans and no-salt-added tomatoes, plus some tomato sauce from the freezer. I tastes OK but I think it's going to need some doctoring with herbs and spices, so far it's got some pepper, some celery seed and some parsley. I'm thinking about adding a few dashes of tabasco or dried chipotle pepper, but I'll wait until my wife is home, because I don't want to go overboard. That may be added at the table. (Many chili powders have garlic in them, so we don't even have that on the shelf.)

• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[BakerAunt]

Tonight, I made the Simple Pot Roast, from the special issue of Cook's Illustrated Harvest Recipes. I used a round roast, and although I cut the oven time down, I overcooked it a bit, although my husband thinks it is fine. For seasoning, I sprinkled the roast with Penzey's Tsardust seasoning, and added some rosemary. I also used a tablespoon of tomato paste and a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, as well as some red wine vinegar. I added yellow potatoes, small carrots, and halved mushrooms in the last hour.

[Mike Nolan]

To me a pot roast isn't done if the meat isn't falling-apart tender. But a (top or bottom) round roast is not one that I would generally use for a pot roast, I prefer cuts like chuck (preferably a 7 bone roast), rump roast or arm roast.

[Joan Simpson]

Tonight I got some ham out of the freezer,made a pot of pinto beans with onions,a little garlic,chili powder,paprika a spoonful of brown sugar and a little and a dash of cayenne cooked with a ham bone,some Italian green beans and macaroni and tomatoes.

[aaronatthedoublef]

I made turkey meatballs from an Otto Lenghi's Jerusalem cookbook. It had a sauce my wife made but she would not touch the ground turkey. Can't blame her. Ground turkey is unpleasant and I eat it. It had garlic and scallions and zucchini mixed in. My two boys loved it and one of them though it was lamb. I guess he just assumed it was because of the Otto Lenghi book. If you've never seen his they are works of art independent of what they offer in recipes and cooking techniques.

Mike - how much salt do you put in your dough? I'm down to two tsps. for four pounds of dough. If we make the sauce the sodium is low but if we use jarred it's 340 mg per serving. I may start making my own sauce now to see if I can get that reduced. The cheese is 190 per serving but since it has 16 servings per 16 oz. and the sauce is eight servings per 32 oz jar the cheese is higher.

I like your idea of tomato paste but I'm not sure how that would go over with my family. We actually use jarred marinara sauce unless company is coming and then we make our own. I've tried jarred pizza sauce and the ones I've tried are sweeter and don't taste as good.

My wife likes lots of sauce so I tend to be heavy handed there. Also if I suspect a pizza will go into the refrigerator and eaten the next day I use extra sauce because it dries out some.

Next time I make pizza dough I'll pay attention to quantities. I start with three cups of water then add two tsp. of instant yeast (I use SAF red) and add white whole wheat and cake flour in equal portions. The WWW is KAF and the cake is Bob's Red Mill and I add flour until it feels right. I also add 2/3 cup of both red flax meal and chickpea flour (both from Bob's Red Mill). I add a tsp of salt and I am adding in the flour.

[cwcdesign]

I tried a new sheet pan recipe the other day that had a balsamic and herb sauce. We liked the flavor, but not her choice of vegetables - some worked with the marinade, some did not. It called for two sheet pans, but next time I’ll do what I do with my sheet pan fajitas - cook the chicken separately from the Vegas cuz the chicken got over cooked.

[BakerAunt]

Mike--my husband will not let me use a chuck roast because he sees the fat when we are at the grocery and vetoes buying that cut. I cannot seem to explain to him that the fat is necessary for the cooking process and it will "melt" away during cooking.

[Mike Nolan]

Have you tried an arm roast? Sometimes I will cut any heavy fat ridges out of a chuck roast.

The 'low fat' recommendations are being scaled back, turns out some fat is necessary! `

[Mike Nolan]

As I recall, different brands of kosher salt have a different weight per teaspoon, because the size of the salt crystals isn't standard. But if you measure by teaspoon, you're definitely adding less salt by weight when you use kosher salt.

The salt manufacturers do not recommend using kosher salt for baking bread, because it may not dissolve as well as finer grained table salt does. It's OK for other kinds of cooking.

[Mike Nolan]

Most bread recipes are usually between 1.25% and 2% salt (baker's weight, ie, compared to the weight of the flour). A few years back I did some experimenting and found that you can cut the salt down to about 1% before you start to notice much change in either texture or taste.

The no-salt challah I made yesterday was rather bland, Peter Reinhart's challah uses about 1.4% salt.

The cinnamon rolls I made yesterday called for 1/4 teaspoon of salt in a recipe that used 150 grams of flour, so it was already only at about 1% salt. I cut that to 1/8 teaspoon and couldn't tell the difference in taste at all. They might have been a bit more puffy, but I don't consider that a bad thing in a cinnamon roll!

Paddy's Clonmel Kitchens Double Crusty Bread recipe, which I use to make Vienna bread, has 2 teaspoons of salt in about 32 ounces of flour, or about 1.25% salt (though it does have an egg, so that adds some sodium from the egg white.) I may try making it with just one teaspoon of salt.

And of course there is a little sodium in wheat flour, too.

[aaronatthedoublef]

I use Morton kosher salt. I'll weigh out a couple of tsps. when I can get back into the kitchen.

[Mike Nolan]

I remember Peter Reinhart had some comments in the recipes I was helping test for his Artisan book about the different weight of various brands of kosher salt. As I recall, Diamond kosher salt was slightly lighter than Morton kosher salt, because the crystals were larger, so there was more space between crystals. I don't recall if those comments made it into the published book.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Just checked the side of my box of Morton's and 1/4 tsp weighs 1.2 grams and has 480 mg of sodium.

So my two tsps. would have 8*480=3648 mg. This is divided across nine or 10 pizzas or about 426 mg of sodium per pizza.

I was stunned at how much sodium is in "plain" canned tomatoes. Pomi crushed tomatoes was much lower coming in at 10 mg but otherwise everything else is at least 180 mg or more.

All these companies are trying to move away from "preservatives" and the two natural preservatives are salt and sugar. I have a book a friend gave me that I have yet to read that is The Case Against Sugar. And carbs are still on the bad list! But, at least, fat is back as Mike points out!

[skeptic7]

I am following all the conversations about salt, and while I try hard to be good, I pick up a lot of sodium from cheese and crackers and tortilla chips.
My normal English Muffin recipe has 1 teaspoon of salt to 4 cups sifted whole wheat flour. I think this is just over 1% by weight. Can someone give tell me a more exact %, and whether I should reduce the salt.

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