BBQing Yakitori

Booked a BBQ pit at ECP last friday to carry out a super pungent task. I am not referring to the Yakitori. The Yakitori definitely tasted good and was the one of the two main dishes of the night, but the main objective there was to toast my belacan bought by my friends who recently went to Penang.

I attended a culinary class recently, and the chef (Chef Low) mentioned this brand to be the best in his opinion. He said it's good to toast belacan and mill it into powder form for easier storage and ease of use. But he advised us to do it outdoor as the pungent smell will stink the entire house.  Luckily, I took his advice. It was really smelly when we toasted it, but after awhile, I began to like the toasted belacan, the smell was really good. I think it going to be very convenient to make some rojak now.

So I managed to find an online cooking video on making Yakitori and preparing your own Teriyaki sauce. My wife and our friends had a awesome time feeding on the Yakitori, chicken wings and fruit-based Salsa. 

A mistake putting the Yakitori on a tray to BBQ. Took forever to cook. My toasted belacan at the background.

Expensive but fresh  mid-section from Meidi-Ya

Fruit-salsa

Yakitori with the flavourful leek!

My version of Ice Cold Beer.

The teriyaki sauce can be used to make Gyudon (Japanese Beef Bowl Rice). It's quite easy to cook, making it a fast simple home cooked meal. I must find time to post my other cooking experiments. A lot of backlogs piling up. Haha. 

Hokkaido Milk Toast

After reading the blogs of many bread enthusiasts, I decided to try my luck to look for "bread bibles" at Pageone at Vivo City  3 weeks ago. I was looking for  65C烫种面包 by Yvonne C. and 孟老师的道面包.  

I was lucky to find copies of it, as based on what was said on the web, it was difficult to find in Singapore. These two books really contained a lot of information that is really useful to novice.

I decided to make Hokkaido Milk Toast. I managed to achieve all stages exactly as what was written in the book until the final proofing stage. My bread turned out to be a bit dense and that was not how Hokkaido Milk Toast should be. It ought to be fluffy and soft. However the taste was really good albeit the poor texture. I went back to the book and re-examined the recipe again and again! Alas, I finally found out what went wrong. My comprehension of CHINESE! During the final proofing, it states: 八分满. I interpreted it as 8 minutes for final proof, which I thought it was a little short. How silly!

The recipe for this can be found here.

Dry ingredients

汤种

Kneading in progress

  

Ready for 1st proof

Adequate proofing as the finger indent remained in place.

                                                    

Relaxing the dough before shaping(15 mins)

Shaping

Roll to about 30 cm in length, before rolling into a swiss roll.

Before going into the oven

My dense bread

I tried making another loaf a few days later, this time round, the loaf came out to be a lot better. It  was soft and fluffy. However, I could not control the baking temperature well. The top burned pretty fast, and I lowered the temperature to 170 degrees. More and trial and error the next time.

Second attempt

Soft bread

Nice cottony texture