ChoJin’s Quarter

Good cooking starts with good quality ingredients. But there are so many brands… What should you use?

For example, when I first came to the USA, I had hard time to find a good quality milk, like the one I was used in France. They all tasted “funny”, and very diluted, as if the producers were diluting the milk with a lot of water. I first thought it was due to the milk being fat reduced, but it was not. It just seemed I couldn’t find milk with the same rich and complex flavor I was used to. The same story repeated itself with pretty much any ingredients I was buying (such as the chocolate powder, which tasted more like sugar than chocolate… Bad milk and bad chocolate powder… no wonder why all the hot chocolates taste awful around here. But we’ll come back on the hot chocolate later).

So anyway, I don’t pretend having tested them all, but I’m going to list the brands I use for the basic ingredients and why I settled on them. This should also give a good base to reproduce the recipes I will blog, as I often found that the quality of an ingredient can make or break a recipe. And hopefully, it would help others from having to play the same cat and mouse game I went through.

Milk

So, let’s start with the milk since I complained so much about it.

Initially I was buying the normal milk from Safeway (these big 1-gallon transparent plastic bottles). First, apart from its taste (quite awful), I couldn’t understand why it would only conserve for one week or two (I was used to 1 liter paperboard carton bottles we could keep for months). Anyway, I finally settled on Stremick Heritage Foods’s milk. Frankly, I can’t care less that this milk is organic. But it tastes good, and that is all that matter. You can also keep it for two months, which saves some trips to to grocery.

I started by using the Organic Milk Vitamin D 3% fat milk (the red one), but I’m now using the reduced 2% fat milk (the blue one) because it taste the same… so why eating these extra fat?

Flour

The flour is also a long story… I used the Gold Medal’s flour for about a year to bake breads. But I was never getting the taste I was looking for. I first thought it was because I didn’t have fresh yeast, then I thought it was my bread machine which wasn’t good enough. I also suspected the recipes… I basically suspected everything but the flour… After reading quite a lot about bread making, I realized that most people were using King Arthur Flour. So I bought some from Amazon. And man… what a difference! I couldn’t believe myself that the flour would make such a difference.

I’m currently using two of their flour: the all-purpose flour because it is available in local groceries (check their website for a store locator), and the french-style flour to make French baguettes, French croissants and the likes (by the way, I tried their Yeast Bread Mix French Herb and it was quite good too).

Chocolate

For the chocolate I usually use the Baker’s German’s sweet chocolate Bar. I use this chocolate in various recipes such as French Chocolate Croissants and Chocolate Moelleux. You could also use the semi-sweet and unsweet version from the Baker’s if you want to. One note when using unsweet chocolate though: make sure your sugar is correctly incorporated in the chocolate, otherwise it will really taste bad.

Butter

No long story here. I’m just using the Challenge European Style Butter. It tastes good and has a nice texture. I’m using this same butter when doing puff pastry dough after adding a little bit of flour to absorb the excess of humidity.

Sources and Links:

Stremick Heritage Food’s milk

King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour, 5 lb (by Amazon)

European-Style Artisan Bread Flour (By Amazon)

Yeast Bread Mix French Herb (By Amazon)

Baker’s Baking Chocolate, German Sweet Chocolate, 4 oz

Challenge European Style Butter