Starting the Christmas baking season

We have an excellent little bakery in the village, named "David's Bakery for Maltese and Fancy Bread". So there is no wish unfulfilled. But today, I wanted to test the Panasonic NN-DF383B as an oven by baking a bread. Think of it as the MiG-35 or F/A-18E Super Hornet of the kitchen: multi-role, high tech, compact. Exactly what a German-Chinese household needs! Once the needed capabilities were found in the manual, it was just about getting ingredients and a recipe. 

Obviously Italian wheat flour, Type Double Zero.

For an easy bread baking recipe, I asked my sister and it goes as follows:

1. Dissolve 1 table spoon of dry yeast, a bit of salt and sugar in 1/4 litre of water. Add 500 grams of flour and make a dough. I added a hand full of walnuts, as I had spare ones from my muesli production.

2. Let the dough grow one hour in a warm place.

3. Bake it 45 minutes at 180 degree Celsius. Pardon me for quoting metric units, but perhaps like this it is safer that it does not turn into anything like "English bread".

Finished. Is good. Added 15 minutes to the baking time. If you knock on the bread and it sounds "knock knock knock" then it needs more baking, until it sounds "bumm bumm bumm". Hope that is clear. No? Try.

Simple bread baked in a Panasonic NN-DF383B.

Why does the world have Rice Cookers?

After having cooked or steamed rice for decades without any problems in a pot, I recently was surprised that many Chinese I talk to don't know how to do that. They need a rice cooker. These are electric appliances, which do absolutely nothing else, than what you do in a normal cooking pot. Some of them have some digital functions and beep around and flash some LEDs. Mainly they just control temperature and time. Some of them also allow steaming. But still on first sight rice cookers seemed to me as completely obsolete.

But I was wrong. Rice cookers in China reach back to a time in which many people were still cooking on a coal fire - actually, many still do this today. As this was the only fire place which can heat a Wok to cook other things than rice, it was convenient to have a self sustained rice cooker, which could do the job in any corner where there is an electric plug. Also, many more modern electric and gas stoves actually only have 2 fires, and not 4. So, again a rice cooker helps a lot to keep these for cooking other dishes than rice.  

Rice cookers go back to 1937 where they were used for mobile kitchens in the Japanese Army. In 1945 Mitsubishi brought the first civil electric rice cooker to the market and in the 1950s Toshiba followed with the first fully automated rice cookers. 

Interesting. But having a gas stove with 4 fires, I stay with my pot for now.