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Hello! Welcome to my simple food blog. As the name implies, this blog is solely served as my repository on food. Desserts, home-made cooking, reviews both raves and rants, recipes, or whatever that I encounter :). Hope you enjoy your stay :) and if you feel like it or tried the recipe, do comment on it. Comments are loved ;).

Monday, August 20, 2012

Beef Patty with Mushroom and Leek Sauce

What do you do if you have leftover of about 250plus gr of ground beef? The easiest way out is... either hamburger steak or beef patty which are actually 99% the same thing LOL


This patties are quite versatile. You can eat them with pasta (make cream pasta), mashed potato, or rice (like the pic).

What you need:
Patty:
250-300gr minced beef
1/2 leek, chopped fine
20gr bread crumbs
1 egg
Salt, pepper - as needed 
Mushroom Sauce:
1 pack sliced white button mushroom
1/4 leek, julienned
1 onion, thinly sliced
Dried chili - as needed
Bonito stock - as needed
Seasoning: Worcestershire sauce, mirin, sake, sweet soy sauce - as needed

How to:
1. In a bowl, mix all the ingredients until well mixed and smooth
2. Scale and mold the mixture to your preference. 50gr makes small patties and will make about 8-10 patties.
3. Pan fried the patties until well-done and set aside.
4. In a same pan, stir fry dried chili, leek and onion until soft and fragrant.
5. Add on mushroom stock and seasoning.
6. Cook until mushroom is cooked.

Tips:
1. Careful not to make the patties too thick, you'll end up with dry patties because it'll take longer to cook.
2. Recipe can be changed to minced pork.
3. Mushroom sauce can be changed to demiglace sauce or beef stroganoff sauce.

Enjoy!

Sunday, August 19, 2012

My First Kurokke

It's been a long while since the last time I do deep fry and true enough my deep frying skill shrinks so much compare to before (lack of practice off course)... So, this time I made kurokke/クロッケ (Japanese Croquette). Made the basic one because I have no confident to pull those fancy creamy kurokke LOL. So, I pulled up the recipe from the net (here). Yes, as the recipe suggests, it's easy, true, it's just my deep frying skill now sucks that my kurokke look like... below, not as shinny as I want them to be.



So, what's kurokke? For Indonesian, it's basically Japanese perkedel LOL... that's the basic one. The difference Indonesian use egg for coating, Japanese use pankon (bread crumbs). I didn't really follow 100% of the recipe because I don't follow recipe, that's all LOL...

What you need:
750gr potatoes - peeled, cut, steam for 20min and mash them
100gr minced beef
1/2 leek - julienned
30 gr grated cheese
Salt & pepper - as needed
Cake flour - as needed
1 no egg - for breading
Pankon - as needed

How to:
1. Cook beef and leek until soft and cooked, seasoned it with salt & pepper, set aside.
2. Add #1 and cheese into mashed potato, mix them until well mixed
3. Mould the mixture into patties. 70gr each will make about 9-10 kurokke.
4. Coat them with cake flour then do the breading station --> egg --> pankon
5. Deep fry them until golden brwon

Point from the website:
1. Coating them with cake flour supposed to prevent the kurokke from exploding when deep fried
Point from me:
1. Don't be stingy with oil. Pankon fried faster than the softer bread crumbs so deep frying has to be fast. If your oil is not deep enough and only cover half of your kurokke, the side will get burnt fast and you'll have kurokke with black sides.
2. Don't add butter into your mashed potato, it'll become too soft and not easy to be fried. It makes the kurokke tastes nicer though. Decision, decision haha...
3. If you don't have tonkatsu at home, you can mix tomato sauce, mirin and Worcestershire sauce. It should do the job. Or try it with mayo and lemon for different flavor.

Enjoy!