Baking gone commercial!?

April 10th, 2012

If you think I just open up a bakery store to supply all my yummy desserts, well, I hate to disappoint you. Unless it pays more than $30 an hour, I don’t have to work more than 45 hours a week, dealing with labor issue, and extremely difficult health department, there is no way I would quit my day job and make a career change!

So what are we talking about here? Hmm……. let’s look at how I have been making attempt to bake small treat in the past, a counter top toaster/pizza oven:

The counter top oven is a good size for pie, 9″ sponge/chiffon cake, which is what I bake very often. However, the oven has a few flaw that I can no longer tolerate, nor want to take the chance with. The counter top oven has many features, from broiling, convection bake to rotisserie, yes, you can do rotisserie chicken in this thing. However, if you look at the side, you would notice a big problem.

The oven door is not completely sealed! I’m not talking about a small gap of a toothpick, but a few millimeter that run almost from top to bottom. Since heat get lost from this gap, it takes forever for the oven to preheat. Once it’s preheated and start cooking, the whole kitchen heat up like a sauna room, reminded me of my sister’s kitchen back in Malaysia when she bake. Also, if you cook roast duck or pork, the smell of the grease could be overwhelming since the whole kitchen would smell like pork fat and duck grease!

The counter top oven has its design flaw, it’s good for toasting and broiling, just not good for dessert baking, well, not my style of baking anyway. Looking into the interior of the counter top oven, you would see heating element tube on top and bottom of the oven:

The bottom heating element is very close to the bottom rack, having the baking rack in the middle position, it’s still only a few short inches away from the bottom heating tube. So, imagine you want to bake a pie, you put in the middle rack of the oven so the bottom do not get burn, but guess what? The upper heating tube is also a few inches away from the top crust of the pie! If you want to bake cookies, you can only bake one tray at a time using the middle rack.

Don’t get me wrong, the counter top oven is good for making savory dish like roast pork, air fry chicken, hot pocket or anything that you like to air fry or would splatter. It’s one of the reason I consider it to begin with as I don’t want to spend time to clean the big oven that built into the cook top. With a counter top oven, if it get dirty to the point of beyond cleaning, I would just toss it away and get a new one, and it only cost me about $90!

When come to baking dessert, which is what I enjoy the most and do it quite frequently, it’s time to get serious. So, a few days of research online, product demo in YouTube, and price comparison, the next thing you knew is, I had my order in, and within two weeks, the UPS guy drop a big box in my front step. I carried that big box into my kitchen, but it seems to be too big to put on the kitchen island. It’s not heavy, just bulky so if I put it on the kitchen island, I wouldn’t be able to retrieve what’s inside of the box:

When the big box is cut open, I’m really impressed by the packaging, it’s so well cushion, the smaller box inside has no sign of crush or dent.

Well, the box inside is the real deal:

I was already excited to see the box is in good shape, when I saw the label, I’m even more excited, it’s made in Italy!!!!! Not those crappy quality Made in China stuff!

My OCD kicks in, and I refuse to tear the box apart, so I took my time to get the new gadget out of the box, ta-da! A commercial oven!!!!

The oven is very easy to operate, just two dial, the one on the left for timer, the one on the right for temperature setting. There is also a light indicate if the heating element is on or off.

Once I peel off the sticker protective layer, the true beauty reveal, a shinny tough mean looking oven that can take on any commercial all day baking and abuse kind of job:

When you open the oven door, guess what, a gasket around the baking chamber! This will ensure heat insulation and efficient.

If you peek inside the baking chamber, there is no heating element!!!! Everything inside is high grade stainless steel for ease of cleaning. So where is the heat come from? Well, the heating element is actually hide in front of the convection fan. When the oven heat up, the fan blow heated air into the chamber to create an even cooking throughout the whole chamber, so it doesn’t matter if the cookie is on the top or the bottom rack, they will cook evenly.

The back of the oven is very simple, just standard household plug, and a chimney looking vent at the corner for moisture to escape, that mean I can push it against the wall quite close if I want to.

One of the impressive part is the oven door, it’s not only heavy and study, but it’s double glass such that the second panel will always cool to the touch, I think they call it double insulated door.

The oven is design for quarter size sheet pan and tray kind of baking. With the cooking chamber measuring at about 9″x14″x12″ (H x W x D), it’s really perfect for a pie, a 9″ sponge cake and perhaps two 9″ layer cake. I don’t bake cookie much, but I’m sure it will do an excellent job since it’s convection oven. I wish I have room and money for a bigger commercial oven since most of my baking sheets are half-size standard. But the bigger oven cost almost 2 times more, so I decided to go with this and use my full size oven if I need to use half-size baking tray for big scale cooking.

The full size oven built into my cooking range is 4.4 cubic ft, if you want to bake a pie in it, yes, it’s more than adequate, but it’s also a waste since it take longer time to preheat, and no reason to heat up a big space just for a small item. This little tough box? It’s only 0.8 cubic ft. Now, since it’s a commercial oven, the fan could get very loud, but you get use to it, and when the bake goods come out from it, you’d forget about all the short coming of the commercial oven.

I’m telling you, once you’ve gone commercial equipment, it makes you wonder why household item cost so much, perform badly and can’t take the abuse! If I can do it all over around my house, I want to have a commercial fridge/freezer, commercial ice cream machine, commercial stove……and the list go on.

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Cooking with Magic – Bak Kut Teh

March 4th, 2012

Bak Kut Teh, which translate to “Meat bone tea” is a very well known comfort food around South East Asia. Sadly, it’s impossible to make your own because every food vendor have their own secret, and you need to be very educated in Chinese herb and medicine in order to know the right kind of herbs to use, and the right amount to include because a little bit too much pepper corn could turn it into a pepper soup, while a little too much star anise could turn it into a funky Chinese Master Stock.

Back in late 2010 when I went home for my father’s 70th birthday, I brought back a pack of the Bak Kut Teh mix to give it a try. I liked it so much, I decided to buy more when I visit home again last September for my brother’s wedding.

The reason I like this mix is because it’s using real herbs, and doesn’t have any chemical powder like those commercial prepackaged mix.

I generally cook ribs BBQ style because it render the fat out nicely, and it’s one of the few meat that I’m willing to put extra effort to deal with the smoker. However, given that it’s winter outside, and I’m craving for some pork dish, it’s time for me to whip out this comfort herbal soup. The ingredient couldn’t be simple enough, just as much meaty pork spare ribs that you want and cut into chunks:

A few pieces of hydrated Chinese dried mushroom to give it that extra umami flavor:

Two big bulb of garlic, and don’t bother to peel them:


I have made dish and soup that calls for chunky herb for quite a few times. Knowing that the clean up could be messy, I took out some of the stock supply I bought from Asia back in 2010 as well:

The herb pouch I got are quick small, so I had to use 5 pouch to pack up all the herbs and garlic, which I think it work out well because the smaller package size will allow them to nest around the pot.

Cooking with the magic cooker couldn’t be easy enough, and most important of all, the result is very satisfying. The magic cooker is commonly refer as Thermal cooker, and I bought it from Singapore for a very great price, and shipped to me by my sister through the early 2011 care package.

There is no special mechanism inside a magic cooker, just very well made insulation like your coffee thermal mug. However, I can’t stress enough that if you decided to get one, make sure it is made in Japan! The Japanese invented this thing, and any made in China knock off stuff could just make it frustrating. The Japanese made thermal cooker could keep the food warm up to 12 hours, while I can’t say the China made one could do it.

Cooking with magic cooker is just as simple as boiling water, yes, just boil water! In my case, it’s just water and soy sauce because the water will be infused by the meaty pork spare ribs.

Before letting the water boil, I have the habit of just put the meat and other non delicate ingredient into the water so they can be brought up to temperature at the same time. If you dumb meat into already boiling water, the water temperature will cool down rapidly, while the inside of the meat is still very cold so it’s not a very good thing for tender meat.

Once the soup has boiled, I added the mushroom, and let them boil for a few minutes, cover the pot with lid then just insert into the Magic cooker.

The rest is just cover the Magic cooker lid, walk away for a few hours. Since I’m cooking pork instead of chicken, I just let it cook for 5 hours. Well, technically it cook itself for 5 hours because the way it work is actually just let the residue heat in the soup, slowly cook the meat. There is very minimal heat and moisture lost since the thermal wall of the cooker is so well made, it’s basically almost like cooking in Sous vide.

Five hours later went by very quickly, for example, I just boil the soup after lunch, stick it into the Magic cooker, go and watch TV for the whole afternoon, by dinner time, it’s ready to be taken out of the Magic cooker.

Normally when you open up the stock pot lid, you would see very clear soup. Since we have quite a lot of soy sauce in the Bak Kut Teh, you can’t see the clarity of slow cooked broth. Regardless, a lot of the fat from the pork spare ribs also get rendered out and float to the surface.

Dishing up the Bak Kut Teh couldn’t be easy enough thanks to the soup pouch. I just pick them up and let them sit on a sieve to drain the precious broth, then skim out the fat from the stock pot. By the time I’m done with skimming out the fat, the broth would have drained from the herb pouch and I just dumb them into the trash. If you don’t use the herb pouch, you would have to spend some time to fish out bit and pieces of loose herbs and draining the whole pot of soup into another big container, talk about easy clean up!

Dinner on Sunday is served! A pretty big bowl of tender moist melt in your mouth pork spare ribs in comfort herbal broth just warm up your belly in the cool winter night. The herb flavor is so well infused into the soup, you can taste every bit of sweetness from the cinnamon sticks, the heat from the pepper corns, and the mild bitterness of the sliced liquorice root.

Back up, Bak Kut Teh could get fancy like having pig intestine, liver, tail and all kind of stuff from puff tofu to ice burg lettuce. For me, I’m keeping it simple and as healthy as it could be.

The Magic cooker really does what it does, no stove top could duplicate that kind of result, not even a slow cooker! The amazing part of it, it cook by itself!!!!

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