Archive for June, 2019


We’re working up a bit of a tour for our Fab Lab, and we need these pictures on the web for it. So, might as well show the world:

Tamara accepting her prize at “New Zealander of The Year 2018”
A batch of young students being instructed to “not look down the laser with their remaining eye.”

There, that should do it. Now back to your scheduled programming.


As promised on our YouTube site, the recipe for the famous wholegrain cheese straws. PDF at the bottom of the page for those who want to print it.

These are really savoury cheese straws, with a decent crunch. They have a pretence of being vaguely healthy with seeds and grains in them – we use the same mix of oats, kibbled grains, linseed, sunflower seed and so forth as our “Ollenburg loaf” but mix your own to suit or just use oats. Also, a good way of using up excess pastry, and yes we do put seed mix in our pastry for savoury tarts.

Ingredients

½ cup Grain/seed mix

1 tsp Soy sauce

70g Butter, or lard and butter

140g Flour

1 tsp Garlic powder

¼ tsp Cayenne or hot paprika

1 tsp Salt

Some Cold milk

1 cup Grated strong cheese

flour and oil to grease tray

Instructions

Well in advance, put the grains and seeds in a small bowl with ½ cup of water. Leave for 3-4 hours. You can just microwave the grains in some water and wash them under the cold tap if you’re rushed, but they must be cold before they’re added.

Put lumps of cold, hard butter, the flour, garlic powder, cayenne and salt in the food processor. Give it 10 second on/10 second off pulses until there are no lumps of butter. Put in the grains and soy sauce. Turn on low. If it doesn’t start to clump together, dribble in milk until it only just does. Stop processor, bring mix together by hand, wrap and chill for ½ hour.

Set the oven to 180C or 160C fan. Grate cheese. Grease and flour large baking sheet. Flour and roll out pastry to 5mm thick, cover 2/3 with cheese, fold the empty 1/3 over half the cheese, then fold it to cover the rest of the cheese. Fold square. Flatten, fold up again, and flatten into long shape 6mm thick and about 100mm wide. Cut into 8mm “straws” and transfer to the baking sheet.

Bake for approx 15-20 minutes until you see browned cheese and the straws are not moist. The phrase “golden brown and delicious” was invented for these straws.

Cool on a rack. In theory keeps in a biscuit tin for weeks. In practice they evaporate spontaneously.

V1.0 Vik Olliver (C)2019, GFDL Applies