Comfort foods

 

Today the weather is chilly and wet.  Rain and near freezing temperatures are making everyone think of the possibility of icy roads.  I, however, am thinking of wonderful, warm and tasty comfort foods.

There are many recipes that I choose to keep as part of my repertoire simply because they are foods from my youth.  These foods have an emotional aspect to them as well as a culinary one.  For example, I remember so often when I was young placing a dozen eggs into a pan, boiling them, chilling them, peeling them, and turning them into egg salad sandwiches.  To this day, every time I have an egg salad sandwich, I think of all the times as a kid that I made them and they were so incredibly delicious.  So they have become a comfort food me.

I remember picking wild black raspberries and mixing them with fresh whipped cream with just the right amount of vanilla added, and then spooning them onto crepes which were then rolled and dusted with powdered sugar.

I remember large containers full of brownies and cookies at Christmas.  Among those are some of my favorites today including spritz cookies.  I remember simple tuna salad sandwiches on hoagie rolls with potato chips inserted for a little added crunch.  I remember lemon slushes, and fresh made raw egg nog, yes, made with raw eggs and put into the blender.  

So many great recipes and foods are part of my adult life that originated in my younger years.  On a day like today when it is so cold and so wet, and the sky is dark with clouds, and everything seems grey, nothing seems finer than to sit inside in a cheerily lit room with music or a movie playing and making great delicious comfort foods.

 

Sustained learning

 

One of the most rewarding things about baking and cooking is that learning is a constant process.  Yeah, I know ... one could say the same about anything.  But with certain things, this idea of learning as a constant process seems to be more significant.  With food, that significance is because we are going to immediately eat what we have made.

Sometimes I think of a test change to make in a mixing process, or an ingredient ratio change to test.  When I make those changes, I learn whether or not they work.  Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't.  Either way, though, a finished product, a cookie, a brownie, a cake, etc., is the result.  If they work, then consuming that finished product is great.  When they don't, I hate having to toss it out.  I'm one of those people who hates to see food go to waste.  So if I make something that turns out to be less delicious than what I hoped, I feel a sense of guilt if I don't eat it, if I let it go to waste.  Thankfully I have lots of squirrels and birds who visit the yard and are more than happy to consume what I won't.

I remember when I was learning to temper chocolate.  In principle the idea is simple.  In practice, it takes .... well, it takes practice.  The good thing about learning to temper chocolate is that even when I failed, the end result was still always very delicious.   

On the other hand, I remember once spending time creating new recipes for bisques, cream-based soups.  I developed one for a carrot bisque that is on the full menu.  Learning the subtleties of that recipe took a bit of time and experimentation.  And I was very happy with my final result.  However, I also tried to create a celery bisque that same week.  It seemed like a good idea to try.  But I learned something very important that day, and that is that I do not like the aroma that comes from celery boiling in water.  The idea was to cook and soften the celery in the same way as with the carrots.  But the aroma that flowed through the air from the kitchen was not at all to my liking.  As a matter of fact, it was downright awful!  I will try the celery bisque again sometime, but the memory of that aroma has completely derailed any idea of trying another one so far.    

Failures notwithstanding, I love the continual learning that comes from baking and cooking on a regular basis.  Some of what is learned comes simply from accumulated experience.  Some of what is learned comes from trial and error, successes and failures.  It's all good, though, even if some of the final results are put out for the native wildlife.

Have a great winter morning, everyone!

Chilly mornings and baking

 

January always feels colder to me than December, and that holds true even if the daily temperatures are virtually the same.  There's something about getting deeper into the winter that makes it feel colder to me even if it actually isn't.  I always wonder why that is.  Whatever the reason, it means that baking on a cold January morning is a welcome activity.  

A simple action like opening the oven door, preheated to 450 F for making a crisp-skinned bread, is an enormously rewarding thing as the hot air from the oven chamber spills out and up into the kitchen.

Standing at the stove and slowly stirring a hot mixture that is destined to become pastry cream means you are feeling the warm moist air rising around you.

Pulling out a tray of cookies and leaning forward to breathe in the aroma means you are met with warm air heavy with flavor that completely envelopes your face.

Lifting hot cinnamon rolls heavy with their spiced aroma from the pan and taking that first bite that fills the mouth with heat from both temperature and cinnamon is absolutely amazing on a cold winter morning.

Baking is such an aesthetically rewarding activity anyway, but on a January morning it is even more so because of the living warmth it bathes you in as you move about the kitchen.  So next time it's a cold day, turn on that oven, turn on that stove, mix up whatever you want to eat, and immerse yourself in the warmth.  

Precision

Precision.  It's what makes baking work at it's best most of the time.

I love things like the roulade in the photo above.  This roulade looks so neat and precise.  When I cut it into pieces that are nearly the same size, the pieces will look amazing lined up in a row.

When I make something like this roulade, the precision in the measuring of ingredients is exceedingly important.  If a recipes call for one cup of flour .... well, how much is one cup of flour?  I've done a previous blog post on this exact topic which shows the variation in weight of a quantity of flour as measured by volume depending on how you scoop out the flour.  The weight variation can be significant.

If 140 grams of flour is needed, then does it matter if it's 142 or 138?  I've never noticed that a small variation of a gram or two is significant, but certainly ten grams is significant depending on what is being made.  Ten grams variation in a batch of cookie dough may not change the final product much.  But ten grams variation in a roulade is more significant.  

Precision in portioning of doughs and batters is also important.  It's a lot more likely that every cookie on the baking sheet will bake to the same "doneness" if they are all the same size.  So weighing the amount of cookie dough in every ball of dough to ensure that each cookie has the same weight makes the baking process a lot easier and your baking times a lot more reliable.  

What I ultimately like about the precision required in baking is that when one is precise in measuring, in shaping, in baking time, etc., there is an amount of certainty that comes from this.  (Breads can be another story due to daily variations in ambient temperature and humidity and other things, but that's a post for another day.)  Being able to rely on precision to have the same result virtually every time you use a recipe is something I find very important and very satisfying in a world that is constantly beset with uncertainty.