Cold rains and chocolate

On this cold late-winter March morning, we have chilly rains falling off and on today here in Kansas City.  This is great weather for baking things which fill the house with warm aromas that take us deep into good memories of our past.  

This weekend I have made several things.  First up was warm roasted tomatoes with olive oil and herbs.  Then was egg salad for easy-to-fix sandwiches.  Then I made some tuna salad just because it seemed good to have fixings for two different kinds of sandwiches.  After that I made deviled eggs dusted with lots of paprika.  Then snickerdoodles, and finally chocolate chunk grand cookies.

These are one of my favorite cookies to make.  Yeah, yeah, I say that about a lot of things, but today this is my favorite cookie to make.  Tomorrow it might be something else.

These are big.  Each dough ball is 100 grams of dough.  You can see in the photo above how big the dough balls are compared to a typical dinner spoon.

They are filled with eggs, brown sugar, vanilla, and a few other minor ingredients, and then a combination of cake flour and bread flour -- that's right, no all-purpose flour.  This flour combination gives such a wonderful texture to the cookie.  

Then 20 ounces of chocolate are broken up into shards.  I don't chop them. I simply break the chocolate fêves into shards.  This gives each cookie pockets of liquid chocolate which are are different in size after they are baked up.

In then end, we have 18 cookies that are large and dense and heavy.  The outside of each is just a bit crusty, and then inside there is a wonderful soft chewy texture with those irregularly sized pockets of chocolate.  Each cookies has more than an ounce of chocolate in it.  That may not sound like much, but trust me, it is it a lot. 

I sent some of these foods home with family and friends this weekend.  And I ate quite a lot as well.  A cold spring morning with chilly rains is perfect for baking and eating.

Have a great week everyone!

Slow

Good morning everyone.  It's a pleasant weekend here in Kansas City.  Mild temperatures are in play here on this beautiful Sunday morning.

Already this morning I've cooked some brownies.  Later I will make a batch of snickerdoodles.  And then some slow-roasted tomatoes. SLOW-roasted tomatoes.  SLOW.

Slow ---- what a great word.  The world moves so quickly, so very very quickly.  It seems we are asked to do more in less time every day, day after day.  Everyone is focused on productivity.  Productivity is nice, certainly, but there's a lot to be said for "slow".

Cooking makes us go slow.  We have to take time for a meat to sit in a marinade.  We have to take time for bread to rise.  We have to take time for biscuits to bake.  There's no speeding these process in most cases.  They take the time they take.  And that's one of the great things about making food.

Would we like to make food faster?  Sure.  But certain processes can't be rushed.  And that's a blessing in some ways.  We are forced to slow down.  We are forced to consider what we are doing, to think while breads are rising and baking, etc.

I love that cooking makes me slow down.  I was thinking as I was wolfing down a huge deli sandwich last night that we often eat so very quickly as well.  And shouldn't we do the opposite?  Shouldn't we eat more slowly?  Taking the time to eat allows us to savor and appreciate, just as taking the time to cook allows us to appreciate the food and the effort that goes into making it.

I love food.  I love cooking.  I love being forced to take my time and slow down just a bit in this fast-paced world.

Foggy weather and scones

scone dough ready to be rolled and cut

What a difference a week makes....

Last week here in Kansas City, we dealt with sub-zero highs on a few days .... brutal, brutal cold for this area.  And today, as the morning begins, it's above freezing, and very very foggy with visibility only a couple hundred yards in my neighborhood.  This is the perfect weather for scones, and biscuits, and muffins.  

So today I'm making some scones.  It's a recipe I've tweaked just a bit from the original, but it comes from the book Baking With Julia.  This is a great book that showcases recipes that guests demonstrated on the PBS show Baking With Julia.  Julia Child and her guest chefs and bakers always had fun displaying some of their favorite foods, and some of these recipes are very easy to do.

I've taken the recipe for buttermilk scones from this book, and, as I said, I've tweaked it just a bit.  But essentially it's the same.  It's a very easy recipe that can be made in minutes.  It's very forgiving.  And the end result is very delicious and homestyle.  

But what I wanted to share today is something very easy to do with any scone.  The final flourish on this recipe is to brush the prepared dough with melted butter and then lightly sprinkle granulated sugar over the top, but I always add a little bit of large-crystal sugar as well.  This gives a wonderful mild sweetness to the top of the scone as well as a little bit of sweet crunch.

Simple enhancements like this add so much to any food.

Enjoy the foggy morning, and think sweet thoughts of the coming warm spring.

Brownies in winter

 

Hello, everyone!  What a cold week we have had in Kansas City.  It is the perfect weather for warm brownies today and tomorrow and the day after and ..... 

I am always interested in tweaking brownie recipes because it seems to me that brownies, much more than cookie and cakes, can be radically different from just the tiniest tweaks.  And so I like to experiment with tiny adjustments sometimes just to see what happens.  Over time I've developed strong opinions about recipes and techniques for making brownies.

For example, I never use brownie recipes that ask for chocolate but no cocoa powder.  For me, cocoa powder is an essential part of every brownie.  A brownie made with both cocoa powder and chopped/ground chocolate has a nicer level of sweetness for me, and I also like the texture much more.  If I want to use a specific brownie recipe that doesn't call for cocoa powder, I will always add some anyway, usually (but not always) reducing the flour weight by the same amount as the added cocoa powder.  Not a lot is needed.  Even a small amount does wonders.  And of course the type of cocoa powder is very important.  Quality is paramount.

I often like to use a combination of chocolates, balancing the chocolate flavor by combining chocolate with different percentages of cacao when I make just about anything that has chocolate, and this is especially true when I make brownies.

Even technique is important.  For instance, one recipe I know and use (although I've modified it a bit for my own use), instructs the baker to rapidly and vigorously mix the brownie batter until it starts to pull away from the edge of the saucepan and achieves a certain texture and viscosity.  If you make this batch twice, once by mixing that way and once not, you can definitely tell a difference.  It is proof that technique does matter when making many things in the kitchen.

Eggs should be room temperature before being added and mixed into the batter, and they should be mixed thoroughly or you could have strands of egg whites that don't completely combine.

Some brownies are best when baked in a foil-lined pan.  Some not.  For some I use different types of molds.  Some need to be completely cooled before removing them from the pan and cutting.  For some brownies, it's good to freeze them after baking so that you can get clean cuts for a nice appearance.

Those are a few of the things that I think about when it comes to making brownies.  Of course, the most important thing is to think about great they will taste

Well, this weekend I'm going to be making probably two or three different types.  It's going to be a nice chocolatey weekend.  I better pick up some extra milk today.  

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Cold weather and blueberry cake

 

This week here in Kansas City has been very cold.  Actually, it's been very very cold!  But it's going to get even worse over the next few days.  That means staying inside and reading, watching movies, and cooking.  While the high temperatures will be in the single digits over the next few days and the low temperatures will be below zero, I will be safely ensconced in my kitchen making good food.

Today I've already made blueberry cinnamon snack cake.  Every time I make this, my mind is taken back to the practice runs I did with this cake when I was first developing it.  The first few times I made it, I loved the flavor, but there were two problems.

First, the cake was challenging to bake because to bake it entirely through sometimes meant cooking it too long and what was supposed to be a very moist cake turned out to be too firm on the crust and too dry in the outer layers.  If it wasn't cooked long enough then there was the risk of a thin horizontal layer through the middle of the cake that was still not cooked enough, a thin layer of batter that hadn't quite turned into cake.  This would have been mitigated if I had chosen to make small cakes, but I wanted a full 9-inch cake and I was determined to make that happen.  The solution in the end was simple.  The blueberries had to be completely warmed up.  They had to sit out at room temperature first and then be microwaved a short time to warm them up even more.  Once I had that figured out, then the issue was resolved.

Second, I didn't want the cake to be blue.  The problem here is that once you microwave the blueberries they often start to release their juices.  So I experimented with various things and finally came up with the solution.  After microwaving, I rinse the blueberries in warm water, not cold, and then let them dry on a paper towel to soak up the water as well as any juices still releasing from the berries.  Now they could be mixed into the batter without turning everything blue.

These are rather simple solutions, but the details in them proved challenging to define:  how warm to make the blueberries, how to dry them without squishing them, whether to use large blueberries or small wild blueberries, etc.  I experimented with this recipe for a couple weeks tweaking and tweaking the process until I got it just right and I could duplicate it every time to my satisfaction.  And I took lots of notes on all the attempts and what worked and what didn't, trying to detail the protocol precisely.  I ate a lot of blueberry cinnamon snack cake and so did the wildlife that visits my yard.  

I am glad I went to all that effort.  It is one of my favorite things to make and pass out to people.  And today I will be eating many slices throughout the day.  It is sweet but also relatively healthy as cakes go.  Have a great weekend everyone.  Stay inside and stay warm!

Triple chocolate sablés

Today I am making triple chocolate sablés.  These don't require many ingredients and they aren't very complicated.  They also don't require much time.  And they taste amazing!

First we need flour with a small quantity of very high quality cocoa powder mixed in and a small amount of baking soda.  Then we will measure out both white sugar and light brown sugar, a little fleur de sel, and a teaspoon of vanilla.  Butter should be measured out but kept chilled in the fridge.  We will not soften the butter before creating our dough.  The final ingredient to prepare is the chocolate.  For this recipe I use 5 ounces of chocolate:  2 ounces bittersweet with 60% - 66 % cacao, and 3 ounces semisweet with 52% - 55% cacao.  The cacao percentages can be modified, but these are the percentages I prefer for this cookie.  All 5 ounces are chopped -- some pieces will be tiny, some just very small, and there will be a fair amount of almost powdered chocolate when finished.  The non-uniformity of the chopped chocolate is one of the good things about this cookie.

The cold butter is creamed in the mixer.  Then the sugars, fleur de sel and vanilla are added and mixed in thoroughly.  Now the flour mixture is poured into the mixing bowl but mixed only until incorporated.  We don't want to overmix this.  Finally the chopped chocolate is added.  The chocolate pieces will help any butter mixture that remains stuck on the sides mix in as it swirls in the bowl.

Now the entire mixture is poured out onto a tray.  It is quite crumbly, but this is OK.  We want it that way.  At this point, I will use my hands to start forming it into a log.  As the log takes shape, I start flattening the sides so that in the end it is a four side square log about 9 inches long.  I will manipulate it both by hand pressure and by percussive force on the tray (tamping it down on the tray) until I have a basically even shape from end to end.  Then I will turn the square log on it's end and tamp it down just a bit to flatten it, and then repeat with the other end.

Now this has to go into the fridge for at last a few hours.  It should be cold and very firm.  Once chilled, slice off 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick slices and pop them into a 325 F oven for 11 1/2 minutes, 12 at most.  One of the nice things about this dough is that is can be taken straight from the freezer (where it can be stored for a month or so), cut and baked right away without the need to warm up.  Simply bake the cookies an extra minute or so.

When they come out of the oven, let them sit on the pan for a few minutes.  They need to firm up a bit before removal to a cooling rack.

These are an amazing cookie.  The first batch will be out of the oven soon.  I can hardly wait.

Enjoy the mild weather today.  Soon we will see bitterly cold temperatures if the weather forecasts are correct.  I will keep some of this dough in the freezer for those cold days coming up.

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.