Below is the content of an email I sent to people I
know who own (or are thinking of getting) a Thermomix. And as soon as I
hit send a dozen other things occurred to me that should have been
included. So, here's the original email and I'll keep adding to it
through new blog posts.
Recipes
you just have to
try
· Magic bean chocolate cake.
This is your go-to for gluten-free pleasure or when you need a
gluten-free cake that you don't want to tell people is gluten-free because of
all the preconceptions that would trigger. The main ingredient is a tin
of red kidney beans, but you'd never guess that by how light and fluffy this
cake is. This is not like any of the potato or beetroot chocolate cakes
where you can clearly taste the vegetable; it really does just taste like
chocolate cake made with regular flour.
· Isi's easy Portuguese rolls.
Making bread in the TMX is simple, and these are a great example.
My suggestion for anything you make with yeast is to use the TMX to heat
the liquid up to 37 degrees, which is the perfect temperature to activate the
yeast and means the bowl is already warm to provide a good proving environment.
These have that gorgeous crunchy outside and fluffy perfect inside, and
you can slightly taste the honey in the crust. Just be sure to use flour
that is around 14% protein: Coles stock a brand called Lighthouse, which does a
specialty bread / pizza flour that's perfect (and you'll probably see a picture
of a TMX on the box because they're both Perth companies helping cross-promote
each other). Also you can just use one 7g sachet of dried yeast instead
of trying to hunt down the fresh stuff and the result is the same. Oh,
and knead you have the speed dial on the closed lid position first, then hit
the kneading button (the one with the wheat on it).
· Italian meatballs and spaghetti. This
will show you the power of the varoma. The spaghetti cooks in the sauce,
which is itself steaming the meatballs. And before you freak out at the
idea of steamed meatballs, once they're covered in the sauce you can't even
tell that they haven't been browned in oil. Oh, and you don't have a
frying pan to clean up after browning, so that's a winner right there.
· Golden syrup dumplings: another one to get you
using your varoma. I love the instruction to NOT wash the bowl out
between steps (there's an anti-washing-up theme developing here).
· Sixty minute eggs:
simplest recipe ever: put some eggs in their shells in the basket, cover in
water, cook at 60 degrees for 60 minutes. The egg will poach perfectly in
the shell, with the white having a lovely creamy texture, not at all rubbery,
and the yolk will be still soft and liquid but not runny. To get the eggs
out, crack the bottom as if to open a boiled egg then let it sort of plop out
onto your toast. Yes it's worth the wait, and they're perfect for dipping
toast soldiers because you can dip all of the egg, not just the yolk.
· Lemon cleaning concentrate: this smells
amazing, and is perfect for wiping out things like your oven and fridge where
you don't necessarily want to use chemicals. For the oven you'll need to
add a bit of elbow grease, but you know that you won't gas yourself using it
and you won't be baking anything toxic into your next dish if you miss wiping a
bit out. It's brilliant for cleaning out your TMX bowl with some hot
water and a whizz on speed 10. I also throw a splodge of it (few
tablespoons) in if I'm doing a load of tea towels, dishcloths and other things
that could benefit from a bit of lemon fresh vinegar light-bleaching action.
There's also some really great recipes in the book that comes with your TMX. Highlights for us have been:
· Mashed potato is just a revelation. If you
haven't tried this yet I order you to do so within the next week. Not
only is the texture incredible, but because you're not boiling all the
nutrients out into water you throw away it's healthy (even if you add as much
butter and cheese as they suggest).
· Polenta, partly because it comes out more
smooth and perfect than you could ever achieve by hand on the stove-top,
partly because there are no second degree burns from it spattering up while you
stir and partly because the jug is much easier to wash than a stove-top pot if
you haven't spent the entire 30 minutes stirring non-stop and it's stuck.
I find the speed needs to be a bit higher than the book suggests: if you
can't see the top of the polenta moving then turn the speed up a bit).
The full recipe makes absolutely heaps, so have a lamington tray lined
with baking paper ready to go and pour what you don't eat on the night into
that so you can serve it again later as polenta chips.
· Porridge: perfect in winter because it cooks
itself while you're in the shower. The official recipe in the book has
been updated but I can't find the link (lucky I wrote in my copy). Now
it's simply 160g of rolled oats, 860g of liquid (we do half milk, half water),
salt to taste then 11 minutes at 90 degrees on reverse speed 2. You don't
need to blitz the oats either, especially if you like a bit of texture.
Or, if 'texture' isn't your thing you can cook it for more like 20
minutes like Bevan does.
· Buttermilk scones are as fluffy as promised but they're
also as sticky as it warns. Worth the mess for the end result.
· Vegetable stock. Don't freak out about the
amount of salt in this. By the time you dilute it into whatever you're
making it's not much per serving. Seriously, trust
the recipe on this one. You'll find lots of recipes in the Thermomix
world use this as well so it's definitely worth making so you've got it on
hand.
· Jam. Too easy. Sterilize your jars and
fill them while they're still hot by pouring straight from the TMX bowl using
the handle. No mess at all, no second degree burns. Just be very
sure it's at setting point before you bottle it: you may need to give it a go
at varoma temperature for a few minutes to get there.
Recipes not to try
· Our gift with purchase was the
vegetarian book. The vegan leek quiche on page 71 has no butter in the
pastry and neither eggs nor cream in the filling. How they dare to call
it a quiche is beyond me. It is unspeakably grim. Bevan refused to
finish his serving and the rest went in the bin because we couldn't bear to inflict
it even on our dogs.
Websites to check out
· http://www.recipecommunity.com.au/ is the
official Thermomix Australia forum. The website seems to be a clone of
the German one, and it's horrible to navigate (anyone who uses SAP will
recognise the same Teutonic utter disdain for the user experience).
Also many of the recipes are submitted by users and have zero testing or
quality control, so you're kind of on your own a bit. However, the search
function is pretty straight froward and the recipes do at least have a rating
system to give you an idea of which are the ones with mass appeal.
· http://www.forumthermomix.com/index.php is
another user-based forum, and again the only 'guarantee' of the recipes is the
number of positive comments. They also do reviews of recipe books so you
can get an idea what people think of the recipes in it and what tweaks they've
made that you can copy. All the recipes are nicely sorted into
categories, but it's a bit hit and miss what you find from there digging
through the threads.
· http://tenina.com/ Tenina
was one of the first official Thermomix recipe developers in Australia and her
writing style is fantastic. I've got her book "For Food's Sake"
and it's full of drool-worthy recipes, but she also publishes a lot of them
here and on her blog for free.
· Assorted bloggers, each with their
own spin, including:
o Steph Berg, just for the sheer number of
recipes
o Thermovixens, because
the name is cool and they just seem to have so much fun
o Thermomixer; he's a hard-core foodie so the
recipes are a bit more 'serious'
o Quirky cooking has a focus on really
healthy, natural recipes with lots of gluten-, refined sugar- and additive-free
options. She lives in far north Queensland and home schools her four
kids, so that gives you a grossly over-generalised idea of the sightly hippy
vibe to this site.
Recipe books
· You probably don't need any other
recipe books because the forums and the blogs and adding the words
"thermomix" and "recipe" to a Google search will give you
more free resources than you'll ever need. There's also such a wide variety
of recipes in the main book that you'll be able to quickly figure out how to
convert all your favourite recipes to TMX versions (for example, I check the
shortcrust pastry recipe to know what speed and for roughly how long to rub
butter into flour even if I'm using a different pastry recipe. The answer
is 8 seconds, which sounds absurd but is true.) However, you get what you
pay for from free recipes, especially untested ones other people put up such as this one where I pointed
out that half the instructions are missing and the author
responded with no acknowledgement of the problem (but it's an excellent recipe
and another one I'd suggest you try). So, there are are a couple of books
out there that I can recommend:
· Tenina Holder's For Food's
Sake, if just for the caramelised garlic paste recipe and her
fabulous writing style (this was my bedside reading for a few nights).
It's currently sold out but get it once you can, and add some of her Crio
Bru to your order at the same time because you need it for a lot of the recipes
so you may as well save on postage.
· Dani Valent's In The Mix.
This is TMX throws a posh dinner party, and it won't be for everyone.
There are some good mid-week recipes, but a lot of them are very
involved: not necessarily difficult, just lots of steps with lots of
ingredients. My copy is from the first print run. Yay it's a first
edition, but boo it suffers from a few quirks. Mum and I went to one of
her cooking classes recently and were given a number of tweaks, such as
reducing the parsley oil from 15 minutes at speed 10 to only 8 minutes and
doubling the soy and oyster sauce quantities in the beef stir fry. A
reprint has just been released and hopefully a few of those things have been
corrected.
· The various Thermomix recipe books.
We've got the vegetarian one mentioned above for the infamous vegan leek
"quiche", which does have a few other good things in there. The
Indian book is brilliant because it translates corriander/cilantro,
zucchini/courgette, eggplant/aubergine, lots of the spices and gives really
great alternative ingredients if you can't get certain things. There's
also a gluten free one, an Asian one, a seafood one and assorted other
'healthy' ones including some non-Thermomix branded ones about cooking without
additives.
Gadgets to seriously consider
· The spatula that comes with the TMX
is clever at things like lifting out the steamer basket and scraping down the
top of the bowl while the blades are running (don't put a regular one in while
the blades are spinning: it will cut a chunk off. Here speaks the voice
of experience), but it's not all that great at scraping. Tenina sells one that
you can't use while the blades are going, but it's really good at cleaning out
the bowl. Order at least two, because they strongly resemble a pirate cutlass
and are likely to be carried off by little people with eye patches. Also
check your local homeswares store for silicone spatulas, especially one from
the Soho sub-brand of S&P where the end you use is square on one side
and rounded on the other. It's exactly the right shape for getting around
the blade.
· If you're going to do a lot of spice
cooking, consider getting a second seal for the inside of
your lid. The seal is the one thing that seems to retain
smells a bit so a second one will help you feel less worried about the
potential impact on your sweet recipes.
Other tips
· The inbuilt scales are good, but I
get a bit nervous using them because if I put in too much it's not always easy
to get out again, especially if it's not the first ingredient going into the
bowl. Luckily the scales work just as well if you sit a bowl on top of
the lid, zero out the scales, weigh the item into the bowl and then tip in.
· The steaming basket fits on top of
the lid, so if you're cooking something that has the measuring cup out but is
spitting everywhere you can sit the basket on top as a splash guard.
· If you want shredded chicken for a
salad (or to shred the ham for a pea and ham soup) you can cut breast fillets
up into about 5cm squares, steam them until cooked and then shred them in four
seconds, reverse speed 5. Absolutely perfect shredding. How long
would it take to do that by hand?
· If you're making yoghurt, when you
get to the part about letting the milk cool down make sure you wait until the
37 degree light goes out. If it's on, the temperature is somewhere
between 37 and 49, and the upper end of that range will kill your starter
culture. It doesn't matter if it drops below that temperature because
it's so easy to get it back up to there again.
· Don't be afraid of your varoma.
Make some of the recipes in the book that use it and just follow the
numbers in the recipe. It's easy, healthy and amazing how much food your
TMX can cook at once.
· If you really want to personalise
your Thermomix because you love it so much you want it to be as special as you
know it is, there's a website just for you.
Hopefully there's also a self help group.
Finding out the rest of this is half the fun, so my minor thesis ends here. Just hope you enjoy using a Thermomix as much as I do.
