Leaf gelatin

Most people have used gelatin in their kitchen, usually in the form of a powder.  If you ever get a chance to use it in leaf form, I urge you to give it a try.  The picture above shows several sheets of leaf gelatin.  They are rather hard to see clearly so here's another photo of a single sheet.

Leaf gelatin comes in four strengths:  bronze, silver, gold, and platinum, in ascending order of thickening capacity as measured by what is known as "bloom strength".  I keep silver leaf gelatin sheets on hand for a few different things that I make on a regular basis.  The sheets are about 2 1/2 inches wide and about 8 inches long.  They are soaked in cold water prior to using.  When they are soft and squishable (Is that even a word?  I'll use it regardless.), the water must be wrung out of them.  Then you toss it in whatever hot liquid mixture you are using and it melts and dissolves away, becoming part of the mixture.  I prefer using this type of gelatin rather than powder.  It's easy and it's very effective, plus there is no chance of undissolved granules of powder.  It dissolves more slowly than powder, but it gives a clearer gel.

Gelatin is a thermoreversible cold-setting polymer.  That sounds impressive enough to warrant attention.  But more importantly it makes great desserts.  Cake glazes, puddings, mousses and a host of other dishes that require thickening and setting might all use leaf gelatin.  It's not something one typically finds in the supermarket but there are plenty of specialty places you can locate online that provide this product as well as many other hard-to-find items for the avid cook and baker.

Pesto, pasta, pesto, pasta .... try saying that 5 times fast.

farfalle pasta with chicken, pine nuts, olives, tomatoes, parmesan and pesto

Today's post is about a delicious pasta dish.  Mark and Celine are the grandparents of my son's girlfriend.  He eats at their place with some frequency, and one of the dishes he always enjoys having there is Celine's penne pasta with chicken.  She passed along the recipe to me and I've tweaked it just a small bit to fit my preferences, but otherwise this dish comes from her.

Cook a pound of farfalle (bowtie) pasta.  I always like to cook it past the al dente stage since I prefer my pasta very soft.  While that's happening, cook (or reheat if it's already cooked) about a pound and a half of chicken.  You can use breast meat or dark meat.  It's up to you.  Dark meat has more flavor.  And if you cook chicken on the bone and then pick the meat from the bone you have added flavor as well.  But no matter which way you do it, the chicken meat will be delicious.  I like to have the chicken cooked ahead of time but kept warm so it's ready when the pasta is drained but still hot.  You can cook it in a skillet, roast it, braise it, whatever, just as long as the chicken is hot and ready for the pasta.  The pound and half measurement is for meat only, not bone.  You can use less meat, but more is better (in my opinion).

Combine the hot pasta with the hot chicken and add 6 or more ounces of pesto.  Add more or less according to your preference.   I always like lots of extra sauce no matter what kind of pasta dish I am having.  Add 1/4 cup to a 1/2 cup of grated parmesan cheese at the same time that you add the pesto.  Again, the amount doesn't have to be exact.  And I always use more rather than less when it comes to parmesan in any cooking endeavor.  (Same with cinnamon and baking -- lots of cinnamon and you can never go wrong, in my opinion - but that's another recipe for later.)

Stir in about 1/2 cup, maybe 3/4 cup, of roasted pine nuts.  Roasting them is easy:  350 oven for about 5 minutes on a cookie sheet.  You can put in raw pine nuts, but roasting them makes a difference.  Roast them ahead of time, of course, so that your hot pasta and chicken are not cooling off while waiting for the pine nuts.

Toss in a 15-ounce can of pitted black olives, drained and sliced.  Toss in about a pint of cherry tomatoes, sliced in half.  Mix the whole thing together.  I would do all of this in a very large bowl so you have plenty of room to combine it without sending things flying out of the bowl.

After dishing out servings, dust each portion liberally with more parmesan, maybe a little chopped parsley, and you are set to eat.  This dish can be reheated as well, although much of the pesto will have have been absorbed by the pasta, so I always heat extra pesto to add be stirred in.

An added note:  traditional pesto is the norm, but I especially like sun-dried tomato and basil pesto in this dish.

So there you have it:  a delicious pasta dish all thanks to Celine.  Mark and Celine have enthusiastically eaten many things that came from my kitchen over the past few years.  So thanks for that as well.  I always love sharing with people who appreciate good food.

Relaxed cooking days and egg wash

egg wash

Today is drizzly and damp and chilly here in Kansas City.  We've had a bit of winter weather with ice and snow yesterday, but today it's above freezing for a least most of the day.  Later it will dip below and everything will start to slick up again.  Snow perhaps tonight and tomorrow.  I love days like this, days which just seem made for filling a home with the aromas of good food.  I started my day with an hour and a half of practice on the piano, and my morning is now clear and much of the afternoon as well as I don't have my normal complement of piano lessons to teach today.  So I'm spending the rest of the morning listening to Chopin, Ginastera, and Haydn while I cook and bake.  

apple slab pie ready for the oven

I'm making apple slab pies today.  These are basically pies without a pie dish.  They are particularly good for those who wish a greater crust to pie filling ratio than one usually finds in a pie.  They are a bit rustic or casual in nature, in essence a great big hand pie, but you don't eat it by hand because it's too large to do so.  

apples resting in sugar and spices

Lots of apples, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla go into the filling with just a bit of flour to help in thickening.  Pie dough is rolled out into a rectangle and filling is placed on one half.  The other half of the dough is pulled over the filling and crimped to seal it.  Then the whole thing is brushed with egg wash and dusted with cinnamon, nutmeg, and sanding sugar. 45 minutes or so in the oven and you have a great dessert.  Egg wash is a marvelous thing but people often tell me they don't always like to use it because it's hard to get the eggs completely mixed by hand since those egg whites like to hang together.  The answer to this, I learned long ago, is to add a pinch of salt to your egg wash.  The salt denatures, or breaks down, the proteins which means the egg wash is now much easier to brush onto any sort of dough.  When you add that pinch of salt, you have to a wait a minute or two for it to act on the egg.  But after that, it is much easier to whisk with a fork and then brush on your pies.

hot milk cake

  I always make extra when it comes to pie fillings.  I like to err on the side of abundance when it comes to having enough to fill a pie or a tart.  So the extra that's left over gets repurposed.  Today that extra is simmering on the stove in a saucepan, breaking down the apples, cooking everything until the mixture is a rich and very soft compote.  This will then be put on slices of hot milk cake which I made yesterday.  If I had ice cream, it would be great on that as well.  Never toss out your extra pie fillings for they can always be used to enhance something else.

As I said, this is a nice day.  I will be starting to prep some things for weekend orders: deviled eggs and pecan shortbread and oatmeal chocolate chunk cookie flats are all going out to different people Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The oatmeal chocolate chunk cookie flats are something I've never given out to anyone before.  I love them.  They are very crunchy and have a wonderful flavor.  I'm hoping everyone loves them as much as I do.  To anyone who is reading this, enjoy this chilly January day and stay warm with some good food.

Gold rush

Edible gold leaf is a nice little touch to add to some desserts.  Since gold is biologically inert, meaning it can be consumed and processed through the digestive tract without being absorbed by the human body, edible gold leaf is completely safe.  To be edible it must be 22-24 carats; anything less means there are some mineral impurities in the gold.  It comes in flakes and very thin sheets and is relatively inexpensive.  The photo above shows 1.5 inch sheets that an be purchased in a small package of 24 sheets for about $15.00.

palet d'or with edible gold leaf decoration

Sheets are very delicate and require a gentle touch to be placed on a dessert.  They are very thin and tend to cling to just about everything.  The first time I ever used it was quite frustrating at first since I didn't realize how delicate and careful one must be in handling this.  But it didn't take long to get accustomed to the care in takes in handling and placing.  These sheets are so thin that even a small puff of air will blow one away until is placed on your dessert where it then clings to the surface.

Edible gold has no taste and no texture that can be noticed when eating a dessert decorated with the sheets.  While it is usually used for desserts, sometimes you will find it used on savory items.  In all cases, though, it is a purely decorative element.  I love to place it on my palet d'or cake desserts where it shows up in striking relief against the dark chocolate mirror glaze. 

Apples

Today we have another wintry day here in Kansas City.  Ice on the roads means all the schools are closed and people are staying off the roads if they can.  Of course, it's a business day and that means many people are relegated to getting out and doing their best to drive safely.  Best wishes to anyone who has to brave the challenging weather.

I, however, get to stay inside.  I have been working on tweaking a recipe for apple slab pie recently.  Part of that tweak is trying different types of apples.  And so I have been doing a bit of research on apples in general.  Here are some interesting facts that I have found using different resources, in particular state and government departments related to agriculture as well as university extension services.

There are over 7,500 varieties of apples grown globally, but only about 2,500 are grown in the US, and of those only about 100 varieties are grown commercially.  When you think about the differences in taste and texture that are quite discernible between the handful of varieties one typically finds in a grocery store produce section, it's a shame that we all don't get to try so many more of those thousands of other varieties.  An amazing statistic that I found was that since the early 1900s, we have lost more than 80% of the apple varieties that used to exist.  They simply are no longer found.

Typical annual per capita consumption of fresh apples in Europe is more than twice that in the US. 

An apple tree typically takes four to five years of growing before producing it's first fruit.  This can vary, of course.  But it's worth mentioning as to why it's so important to take care of our trees, not just apple trees, but every kind.

Some apple varieties are as small as a large cherry.  And at least one is grapefruit-sized.

A typical medium-sized apple has about five grams of fiber - one good reason to follow the maxim "an apple a day...".  Two-thirds of that fiber is found in the peel, and the peel also includes lots of antioxidants which help prevent cell damage. 

Apples have five individual pockets of seeds inside. 

A bushel of apples ways just about 42 pounds.

The longest continuous apple peel was done by 16-year old Kathy Madison of Rochester, NY.  Her effort resulted in one long thin continuous apple peel that reached 172 feet 4 inches.  Now that must have taken some incredible patience.

Almost 1/4 of all apples produced in the US is exported elsewhere.

Well, enough of these interesting facts.  I'm going to spend at least part of my day, while it's freezing rain and sleeting outside, making a few different foods: lavash crackers and flatbreads, a batch of French vanilla ice cream, some cookies and cornbread for orders this weekend, and last but not least, some apple slab pie. 

A special chili

final stages of mole pork chorizo chili

Today was a very fun day.  It started off with a trip to the grocery store.  I wanted to go a couple days ago, but it iced and snowed on Saturday and Sunday, and yesterday we had dense fog and freezing temperatures for the first half of the day, so I really didn't want to go out on the roads.  I try never to go out when there's even a hint of ice on the roads.  So today the weather was nicer although very foggy again and the trip to the grocery store was a little bit like flying through space, or so I would imagine.  I was out at 5:30 AM, and between the foggy dark and the associated lack of visibility, as well as the lack of traffic on the roads, it was an absolutely peaceful drive.

It was nice to get stocked up on eggs and milk and some other things I had run out of.  And I also picked up all the fixings for mole pork chorizo chili.

This is one of my favorite meal dishes to make.  A little bit of oil is heated in a deep pot, 4 logs of chopped chorizo without casings are added and cooked for a bit.  Then diced yellow onion, a couple bell peppers (different colors), and several different spices and seasonings are added.  Then black beans, garbanzo beans, and lots of chopped tomatoes and their juices are added and brought to a boil.  The temperature is reduced to a gentle heat and everything sits for 30 minutes to an hour.  Finally corn is added, just enough to add some additional color and texture, followed by chopped semisweet chocolate.  There's not a lot of chocolate in this, although sometimes I like to add more on a whim when I'm making it for only myself.  Otherwise only a small amount is added, a few ounces, not enough that a lot of people would detect it especially with all the spices in play.  But if you tasted a bowl without the chocolate and one with, a difference would be discernible. 

a finished bowl of mole pork chorizo chili

I like to let all this sit and simmer for additional time after the chocolate is finally added, reducing the mixture just a bit so that I can choose between eating in a bowl or filling a flour tortilla.  My son likes to fill a flour tortilla and grill it in a skillet giving it a nice toasty brown crust on each side with just a bit of crunch, and he adds cheese and corn chips inside the tortilla with the chili as well.  It's a great way to eat it.  It's only too bad you can't make a bunch of these chili burrito concoctions ahead of time.  We've tried.  The tortilla absorbs way too much moisture from the chili if it's grilled and then put away in the fridge for a a few hours, and so heating it up again is palatable but nothing special -- certainly it's best when fresh.

Personally I love just about anything in a tortilla, and this is no exception.  But tortilla or bowl, it's all good to me.  A fun dish to make that will provide meals for multiple days as the end-result is a rather large pot filled with this delicious spicy chili. 

A day in the kitchen in winter

Rain late yesterday as temperatures fell close to and then below freezing, and snow now falling on top of the ice...... all that makes for an enjoyable day inside as the roads are in no condition to be traveled safely.  I've got some great television drama playing, a show on Netflix called Virgin River, and the kitchen is already filled with aromas of hazelnuts and yeasty dough with more to come.  I've put out lots of fresh feed for the birds: seeds, mealworms, and peanuts in the shell for the blue jays in particular.  I've done all my morning routine, a handful of chores, checking emails and news of the day, a tall glass of cold milk with a slice of fresh bread from yesterday with butter and fresh honey.  A great peaceful morning ahead of a nice day of cooking and TV and chess online and whatever else I naturally gravitate towards on this day of no plans.

I love how winter days of ice and snow tend to make the world stop.  We all move so quickly all the time, and the world seems to pace itself on a constant high level 24 hours a days, never stopping.  So when weather makes the world stop, I feel inside like it's a great reprieve from the pressures of constant action that world seems to insist on.

Today I'm making hazelnut florentines, French vanilla ice cream, soft white bread, and maybe one or two other things depending on how things go.  I've got no real agenda for today other than prepping one order of a few items for a neighbor.  All other orders this weekend were picked up ahead of the storm yesterday. 

I will probably spend part of the day looking for things to make that I've never tried before.  It's always fun to explore something new.  Here's to the pleasures of snow and ice and a beautiful winter day.

Crackers

lavash cracker dough with spices

I've been playing around with flatbreads and crackers a bit of late.  These are very simple things, typically.  (Flour, salt, and water will give you a bread at it's most basic.)  I like to make something called lavash crackers which in addition to those three ingredients have a bit of honey and a bit of vegetable oil and just a small amount of yeast.  They are rolled out very thin after a 90 minute rise, and then left to sit for just a few minutes.  After spritzing with a fine mist of water over the surface, you are free to toss on spices and seeds (poppy and sesame) and salt, whatever seasonings you might be in the mood to try.  I find this fun to do because these crackers take very little effort and very little time, and since they are made in small batches very few ingredients go to waste if you wind up with something that is relatively unpalatable in terms of spice combinations.  And if you try something that you've never tired before, some combination that seems like it wouldn't work but it does, that's a very satisfying experiment to complete.

One of my favorite combinations is kosher salt, course ground black pepper, poppy seeds, sesame seeds, paprika, cayenne pepper, garlic powder and curry powder.  I decided to try curry powder one day and really didn't think I would like it on these crackers.  But it turned out to be really good.  I try to be careful not to put too much on because spices in general go a long way and it's easy to go overboard, especially with something so potent as curry powder (at least I consider it potent -- maybe others don't -- but I love it).  I sprinkle these on the cracker dough and then toss the pan into the oven for 15 minutes at 350 F.  If the dough is rolled out thin enough, the whole thing come out in a mottled brown and breaks apart in nice crispy shards.  And it tastes amazing.

I discovered by accident some time ago that if this same dough is rolled out thin and then folded over on itself and rolled out again, but not nearly so thin, what comes out of the oven is a very tasty flatbread with this same combination of spices that has nice taught skin on the outside and is tender on the inside.  Ever since then when I make this I take some of the dough and experiment with different handling and rolling techniques just to see what happens.  Sometimes nothing noteworthy comes of it, and other times I get something really nice like big puffy pockets of dough that are similar to pita but different enough that I wouldn't call them pita. 

Baking is such a precise process where things are measured in grams and the handling of an item must be carefully duplicated in order to have consistency every time it's made.  So to have a bit of fun with something like these lavash crackers where you can give way to whimsy and creativity is a nice change.  I love the precision of baking, but I also enjoy just trying something to see what happens.  Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, but it's always fun.

Whipped cream

Today, January 5th, is National Whipped Cream Day.  Now, I have to admit that many times we designate days for silly things in this world.  Then again, perhaps I'm not being sensitive enough to those persons to whom those "silly things" are important.  Someone might say designating a day as National Whipped Cream Day is silly..... but I love whipped cream!  However, I have to admit I also think it's a bit silly to have a day for it.  But this world can use all sorts of silly and frivolous things to help us deal with all the heavier and tragic things that occur every day.  So onward with National Whipped Cream Day!

This day happens to be the birthday of Aaron Lapin whose nickname was "Bunny".  Lapin invented Reddi-Whip in 1948.  Prior to that he had already invented a whipped cream substitute using vegetable oil.  But then he worked in tandem with Aaron Block to come up with Reddi-Whip, pressured real cream in a can with nitrous oxide.  And of course we still see it in our stores today.

I have cream in my refrigerator constantly, so I really never have a reason to buy a can of whipped cream or one of the non-dairy substitutes that are available.  When I whip cream, sometimes I will do it with a mixer and whisk attachment, and sometimes I will just do it by hand.  No matter what, though, I always chill the bowl and the whisk, an important tip for those who whip their own cream.  

I love flavoring whipped creams as well, especially with something like a sweetened raspberry juice reduction or a bit of almond extract.  And to be honest, I find you can put whipped cream on just about any desert or fruit and it works.  Nothing is quite so luscious and delectable.  One thing I've never been able to do is put whipped cream on granita.  I love making granita, especially with melon.  And it seems every time I see a granita recipe, the suggestion is also there that whipped cream will be great with it.  But I've tried and it just doesn't work for me.  So there's a sweet dessert to which I will not add whipped cream.  But for everything else, add a dollop of smooth creamy cold whipped cream, and I am a happy person.  Happy National Whipped Cream Day everyone!

Another new year

Well, it is now 2020.  As I wrote recently, I love the mental reset that comes with the end of the year.  It's always nice to think of what will be coming in the new year.

I spent a lot of time cooking and baking over the last few weeks, and now I'm getting ready to start up a new session of piano lessons for my students in just a few days.  Over the holidays I watched a lot of Christmas movies and then started watching all the MCU movies in the proper chronological-event order (not release date order).  As of today, I am on Ant-Man and the Wasp, and have only Avengers: Endgame and then Spider-Man: Far From Home to watch to complete the run.  I love epic stories and the worlds which are created in them, whether books or movies: The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, the Mission Impossible movies, the MCU movies, the Matrix movies, etc.  One of the things I like about making food is that in a sense I feel I am creating a world, a world that has all my favorite things in it.

I've been thinking a lot about some of my favorites, new items that will go out on the full menu for Bruce Bakery and Bistro this coming year as well.  Here are some things you can expect to see soon:

lavash crackers
French vanilla ice cream
crab and chive tarts
palet d'or (a wonderful chocolate cream cake dessert)
blueberry mascarpone roulade
multiple banana breads
multiple brownies
lemon tarts
brioche
vegetable pot-au-feu
apple slab pie
lasagna
mole chili
key lime tarts
multiple cinnamon rolls
and more.

I have a lot of fun prepping new foods for offering to my friends and family.  I get excited to introduce others to these great foods.  I never expect everyone to like every item; after all, individual tastes are not to be argued or persuaded.  But it is fun nevertheless to send these things out into the world.

Have a great start to the new year everyone!~