Zee Restaurant recipes

[geonuc]

I'll be posting recipes that we used at the restaurant as part of an exchange of recipes series I started with a long time friend from India.

So here's the first, the bread:
Bread:
950g plain flour
1 T salt
1 T sugar
1 T yeast
800g of warm water ( about 100F)
15g of olive oil/sesame (50/50) oil mix
sesame seeds
caraway seeds.
Egg wash:
1 egg, about 1-2Tsp of milk mixed completely. Makes about 4 loaves.
Add dry ingredients then water. Add oil into water or it can clump. Mix quickly for about 30 seconds to a minute. Cover with cellophane or damp tea towel. For best results put in fridge and allow it to rise there overnight. Otherwise a good compromise can be had by leaving it in a warm area. In warm climates, on the bench works. Be careful as it can overflow.
Place on non stick flat pan and spread so it's about 2cm thick. Brush on egg wash and then liberally sprinkle the sesame and caraway seeds.
Bake in preheated oven of 450F for about 22 minutes.
Cover with damp tea towel when it's cooked and let rest for 15 minutes before cutting.
This recipe makes really good bread with almost no effort. I could make 3 batches daily and it hardly took any work time. Most of it is rising, cooking and resting.
Next post will be the capsicum dip. Followed by the kebabs.

So, I made the bread and it turned out great. I did forget the seeds, though.

Couple of suggestions:
1. I don't have a kitchen scale (I'll get one eventually) so listing the amount of flour, water and oil in grams required some conversion. With the oil in particular. Who measures oil in grams? Unlike water, which has a gram-ml conversion of 1-1, the weight of oil is not readily apparent. My bottle lists the contents in Fl. oz and ml. Even if it did have grams, with such a small amount used it would have been a challenge. I found the necessary conversions to translate it into teaspoons. In general, I think you should provide ingredient amounts in units that will be used in the kitchen. Flour in cups, water in ml or fl oz and all other stuff in tea or tablespoons. I'm sure it's different outside the US but most of the people on the forum are in the US.

2. I really didn't know what to think about '1 T' of yeast being added to all the ingredients at the start. Not sure what yeast you use but the only one I have readily available is the dry Flieshmanns stuff. And with that, I typically see instructions to activate it in warm water before using. However, I followed instructions and added the dry yeast to everything else and mixed it up. It worked fine and maybe that's exactly what you meant, but maybe some clarification would be good.

I'm not a baker and hardly can call myself a cook, but those are suggestions coming from someone trying to interpret the instructions.

[vendic]

Thanks for the feedback. Glad it turned out well for you.

There is a specific reason that some things are in grams and others in teaspoons.
This was a restaurant recipe!
The key is to get a reset-able digital scale. Reset before adding each ingredient. It's easy, fast, accurate and requires few utensils.
I reset the thing with the bowl on it. Then added the correct weight in flour. Then the yeast, salt, sugar and reset.
Add the water. As the display will be close to 800g you mentally add the weight of the oil and add that amount. Or you can reset it again. Very fast, no measuring tools except the table spoon.

If you are baking and you want consistency you can go for volume after doing things to make sure you get uniform density.
This means sifting it and people have different sifters and don't always do it right plus it makes a mess and takes extra time.
Weighing means you get the right amount of flour every time. Even when changing flours, such as multigrains, you will get about the right figure. Volume recipe's would fail because of the different densities of the flour.
For us it ensured day to day consistency with the product. Every day the bread came out exactly the same and it took literally a minute to make the dough and mix it. I repeatedly did it under a minute at the restaurant. Clean up was almost nothing. One tablespoon, one spoon, one bowl one cookie sheet and a silicone brush. Rarely did we even spill flour so even the table needed no cleanup. Totally different to most baking.

The oil we poured directly into the mix from the bottle. This meant less cleanup.

Yeast wise we used Saf yeast. Get yourself some from Amazon. It's cheap, lasts over a year, needs no activation and is very consistent. It's one of the most widely used yeasts in the baking professional world. We have yeast from the restaurant and it's still good. That's over two years. I have tested it with different yeasts and the recipe works pretty well even with some that say they require activation.

So in a nutshell, I can change the recipe but then it would make the results less predictable, changing flours or the flour density is different batch to batch it would require recalculating, and makes more mess using more utensils.
For the $15 cost of a digital scale it's well worth it to use and have in the kitchen.

The main reason I use weight is that for most things this gives the most reliable result. I've changed many of my older recipe's to the new weight system and it's heaven compared to before.

Hope that answers your questions.

[geonuc]

Oh, I wasn't suggesting you change the recipe, only how the measurements are presented so people don't have to resort to Google to convert them if they don't have a kitchen scale. Such as this:

950g (7 cups) plain flour
1 T salt
1 T sugar
1 T yeast
800g (800 ml) of warm water (about 100F)
15g (a little less than 3 1/2 tsp) of olive oil/sesame (50/50) oil mix

I actually halved all the ingredients to make less dough. And I used this for the oil conversion:
http://convert-to.com/558/olive-oil-amo ... facts.html

[vendic]

I should probably do both.
I will say though, once you get a digital scale and convert to grams, you'll never go back!

For the record we now halve the recipe as well. Its too much bread for three people.

We also do variations of the same thing. Like turning it into afghan style bread.
Use twice the oil and no egg wash, no sugar and no carroway seeds. Sesame seeds are optional but they won't stick well unless you spray the top first with water.

Do everything the same but you have to let it rise in a warm area instead of the fridge. Roll it out onto a table that is liberally coated with four. Roll and roll till it is completely covered. Spread it out making sure there is always loose flour on the dough on both sides.
Transfer to a cookie sheet. Don't butter the cookie sheet. It should not stick due to the dusted flour.
Let it sit on the sheet for a while to rise again then use your fingers to depress little dots in it to near the full depth but not enough to punch to the sheet. Make many of these.
Let rise a few more minutes and throw in the oven at as hot a temp as you can get. I do it at 500F and have done it at 525F.
As soon as it's slightly medium/dark brown remove and cover with damp towel.
It's more tough and chewy than the original. Certainly not cake like. Great for dips and kebabs.


To make great tasting traditional white bread you do the same recipe (as the afghan for the dough) but instead of putting it on a cookie sheet, you let the dough rise in the mixing bowl and when it's risen, mix again and pour into a bread pan. Let rise in the bread pan till it's almost overflowing. All done in warm area. It needs cellophane to stop it drying the surface.
Put in the oven at about 375 for about 45 min (depends on pan).
Remove from pan when golden brown and cover with tea towel if you want a soft crust or leave uncovered if you want a crisp crust.
This is one of my favorite versions. Makes great sandwiches or antipasto bread.

[geonuc]

That Afghan bread might be the same as what we used to call 'rock bread' when we lived in Iran. Actual name is sangak. It was baked in an oven over small rocks. When you got the bread fresh out of the oven, you had to check it and flick out any embedded rocks.

[Swift]

That Afghan bread might be the same as what we used to call 'rock bread' when we lived in Iran.

I wonder if there is such a bread in the neighboring country of Ir-rock?

[geonuc]

That Afghan bread might be the same as what we used to call 'rock bread' when we lived in Iran.

I wonder if there is such a bread in the neighboring country of Ir-rock?

Points for pronouncing it correctly. Not that I expected you wouldn't.

Otherwise ...

[vendic]

I made some today. It was great.

[vendic]

A friend from the Marina we were at in Colonial Beach asked me to give him the Zee Chicken recipe. I can't remember if I posted it or not but we did serve it on special occasions at the restaurant so here it is. He's the guy I stayed with when I went to pick the car up recently and then drove me to the Marina and back.

Ok, so here's the step by step instructions with pictures.

2 medium Chicken breasts trimmed of fat and gristle
Few slices of bacon (optional) not shown in pics.
1 spring onion, sliced thinly long ways
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp pepper
1 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp salt
2 Tbs olive oil
half a round package of Brie cheese sliced into 1/4 thick slices. Aged is best. Do not discard the white coating.
1/4 red bell pepper (Capsicum) sliced very thinly
2 cloves of garlic per breast, sliced finely

We usually make fried asparagus as the side but roast potato's, fried potato's or anything works well. Even a salad.

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Preheat the oven to about 450, it can go higher but not lower.
put dry ingredients into the baking pan, add the oil and mix.

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Butterfly the chicken breasts making them as evenly cut as possible. open them up and coat every surfave in the oil and spice mix.

Make sure everything is cut/sliced as directed.

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Place cheese, garlic, bell pepper and spring onion on butterflied chicken half.

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Fold over the chicken so that it fully covers the ingredients. Do the same for all the breasts you are making. If you have left over ingredients, put them on top of the chicken and around it. If you want to put bacon on top of the chicken do so. We used Australian bacon but American bacon works good too.

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Put in the oven and bake till chicken is fully cooked. Depending on the oven, size of the breasts pan etc time will vary but it should show a little charring on the chicken edges.

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That's it. Not hard to do, tastes really good. The hotter you get the oven the better it comes out. Too low a temperature cooks the cheese and melts it about the same time as the chicken so it becomes a runny mess. The right temp cooks the chicken fully and melts the cheese without splitting it. This is also why the ingredients on the inside are very thinly sliced. otherwise they come out crunchy and don't really impart their flavor to the meal.