Tag: baking

The Cookie Bible

Leave a comment

If you have any interest in baking, you know Rose Levy Beranbaum, acclaimed for her must-have tome The Cake Bible. She offers both creative excellence and technical mastery. Her advice is compelling and masterful, and she provides a treasury of technical information as well as peerless judgment. This work is every bit as valuable as The Cake Bible and every bit as wide-ranging geographically. Have you ever made kourambiethes? Chocolate puff pastry? Pepparkakors – a stunning recipe with lots of black pepper from Norway?

If you have children, start with her recipe for Lion’s Paws, adorable-looking cookies complete with claws. This is one she invented as part of a magazine article. Look for the hidden chocolate chips. Brilliant!

Altogether, this is a master’s program in cookie making. You will find both techniques to improve your cooking and many wildly delicious recipes. Here is one:

Rose’s Crescents

Ingredients:

  • 113 grams of unsalted butter
  • 33 grams of sugar (ideally superfine)
  • 28 grams of blanched, sliced almonds
  • 118 grams of bleached, all-purpose flour
  • A pinch of sea salt

An hour before you begin, cut the butter into tablespoon-sized pieces and set them aside to soften.

Process the almonds with the sugar until the nuts are finely ground. Add the butter one piece at a time, and scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add the flour and the salt and pulse until they are incorporated. Scrape the sticky dough onto a sheet of plastic wrap. Press into a thick disc. Wrap and refrigerate for 1 to 2 hours, until the dough is firm.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees for 20 minutes at least, with a rack in the middle of the oven.

Topping

Make a topping with 50 grams of superfine sugar and a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon.

Shaping the Dough

Divide the dough into four equal pieces. Refrigerate three and allow the fourth piece to sit for 10 minutes, then knead it until it is malleable. Pinch off half-tablespoons of dough, roll into cylinders, bend them into crescent shapes, and place them an inch apart on a cookie sheet. Cover with plastic wrap and continue until the sheet is full.

Bake for eight minutes, rotate the sheet, and bake for six to eight minutes more (don’t let the cookies brown). Use a skinny offset metal spatula to put each cookie into a bowl with the topping. Store them at room temperature in an airtight container.

Adding Indian Flavors

Leave a comment

Chetna Makan, a participant on the Great British Baking Show, created a cookbook worth adding to anyone’s culinary library. The Cardamom Trail: Chetna Bakes with the Flavors of the East, brings Indian spices to familiar treats and introduces recipes that are familiar in Britain and may be new to American taste buds. Here is one I have found to be a universal favorite.

Pistachio, cardamom, and white chocolate cake

Ingredients

  • 8 ounces of unsalted butter
  • 8 ounces sugar
  • 4 large eggs
  • 9 ounces of self-raising flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon cardamom seeds, crushed to a fine powder
  • 3 ½ fluid ounces of whole milk
  • 1 ¾ ounce pistachio nuts roughly chopped
  • 1 ¾ ounce white chocolate

For the icing

  • 5 ½ ounces white chocolate, chopped
  • 5 ½ ounces butter at room temperature
  • ¼ teaspoon vanilla extract
  • Generous handful of finely chopped pistachios

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter two 8-inch cake pans and then line them with parchment.

Cream the butter and sugar together with a hand-held mixer or a stand mixer, using the whisk attachment, until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time making sure the batter is smooth before adding the next egg. In a small bowl, mix the flour, cardamom, baking powder, and milk, then add that mix to the butter and egg mixture.

Beat for one minute, then fold in the chopped pistachios and the white chocolate with a spatula. Divide the batter between the cake pans. I weigh the pans to make sure they are equal in quantity.

Bake for 30 minutes until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let the cakes cool in the pan. It is important to allow them to completely cool.

To make the icing, break the white chocolate into pieces in a heat-proof bowl and set t over a pan of steaming water until it melts completely. Keep the bowl from actually touching the water. Let it cool somewhat. In a separate bowl, cream the butter. Add the vanilla and the melted chocolate. Mix until light and creamy.

Spread half the icing on one cake layer. Place the second layer on top, ice with the remaining icing, and sprinkle with the finely chopped pistachios.

Note: Cake layers naturally rise in the center. To make a more attractive final product, use a sharp bread knife and slice off the bulge, making the top of each layer flat. That makes the cake easier to ice and the result is far more attractive.

Mushroom Bourguignon

Leave a comment

This recipe comes from the book Genius Recipes under the ultimate direction of Amanda Hesser. The cookbook is essential – if you have it you will use it constantly. And you will give it as a present to all your food friends who don’t already have it. It has an associated food channel on YouTube that features Editor Kristen Miglore, who is an excellent source of great ideas.

Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 2 tablespoons softened butter
  • 2 pounds of Portobello mushrooms sliced into ¼ inch slices
  • 1 cup pearl onions
  • ½ carrot, finely sliced
  • 1 small yellow onion, finely diced
  • I teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
  • 2 cloves of garlic, minced
  • 1 cup of a full-bodied red wine
  • 2 tablespoons tomato paste
  • 2 cups chicken or vegetable broth
  • 1 ½ tablespoon flour egg noodles, for serving
  • Sour cream for garnish

Directions

In a heavy saucepan or Dutch oven, heat one tablespoon of the butter and one tablespoon of the oil over high heat. Add the mushrooms and the pearl onions and sear until they begin to take on some color, 3 to 4 minutes. Remove them from the pan and hold them in a bowl.

Lower the heat to medium. Add the second tablespoon of oil to the pan and add the carrot, diced onion, thyme, a few pinches of salt and grind some black pepper into the cooking vegetable. Cook for 10 minutes stirring occasionally until the onions are lightly browned. Add the minced garlic and cook for 1 more minute.

Add the wine to the pot, turn the heat up to high, and scrape the pan until all bits sticking to the bottom are released. Cook until the liquid is reduced by half. Stir in the tomato paste and the broth and add the mushrooms and onions along with any juice collected in that bowl. Reduce the heat and simmer for 20 minutes.

In a separate dish (or in your hands) combine the remaining tablespoon of softened butter and the tablespoon of flour into a ball. Add that to the stew. Simmer for 10 more minutes stirring to create a smooth texture. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

This can be served over polenta, egg noodles, rice, or potatoes. Dollop with the sour cream. You can replace the broth with beef or vegetable broth (the latter if you want a vegetarian version). On a personal note, I would avoid beef broth or bouillon. Not a good flavor. Find a market that produces its own veal broth, or make your own. Or, substitute chicken broth.

Anne Applebaum: Hunter’s Stew

Leave a comment

Found in From a Polish Country House Kitchen

If you know, award-winning author Anne Applebaum as a journalist and a historian, this book is a surprise and a delight. Using the derelict manor house she and husband Radoslaw Sikorski bought in Poland as a start point, she explores Polish cuisine in this highly readable book executed with Danielle Crittenden. It offers some familiar classics, such as barszch, and some new and delicious dishes, such as her Beet, Cherry, and Garlic Salad.

One celebratory explosion of flavor worth mastering is Hunter’s Stew, or Bigos, a sensational feast in a bowl—though maybe not when your vegan friends come for dinner.

Ingredients

One and three-quarters pounds of sauerkraut

Four strips of good bacon

One small head of green cabbage, sliced thinly

A small handful of dried wild mushrooms

Half pound boneless stewing venison cut into one-inch pieces

Half a pound stewing beef cut into one-inch pieces

Half a pound of pork cut into one-inch pieces

Quarter-cup all-purpose flour

Three tablespoons of lard

One medium onion peeled and chopped coarse

One cup dry red wine

Half a pound smoked kielbasa thickly sliced

One cup pitted prunes

Salt and pepper

Directions

Drain the sauerkraut, place in a medium saucepan with the bacon cut into pieces and two cups of water. Cover and boil at medium until the bacon is fully cooked, at least 20 minutes. While it cooks, place the green cabbage and the dried mushrooms in a large saucepan, cover with water and bring to a boil. Simmer until the cabbage is ten der, 20 to 30 minutes. Drain and set aside.

Rinse the meat and dry it, place it all in a large mixing bowl with the flour, and toss with your hands until it is fully coated.

In a very large stew pot or cast iron casserole, heat one tablespoon of the lard and cook the onion until it is soft (but not brown). Using a slotted spoon, place the cooked onion in a small bowl. Add the remaining lard and melt, then brown the meat in batches over medium heat, cooking about three minutes per side. Heap it on a plate as it is finished. When all the meat is browned, raise the temperature to high and pour in the wine, using the boiling liquid to scrape up all the fond in the pot.

Return all the meat to the pot along with its resting juices. Add the sauerkraut, the onion, kielbasa, prunes and bacon as well as the water the bacon cooked in. Salt generously and add as much pepper as you like. Bring the mixture to a boil. Turn the heat down to three hours. The meat will be breaking apart and the broth will be very rich and brown.

Ideally, make this one day to serve the next. Let it cool and stick it into the refrigerator overnight, then slowly heat it up before serving it. The best accompaniment is heavy dark rye bread.

The Way We Eat Now: Off-Taste

Leave a comment

Off-taste Bee Wilson’s book The Way We Eat Now (Basic Books) offers a deep dive into food trends and their impact. A seasoned veteran as a food writer and historian, Wilson brings impressive depth and a broad perspective to the subject. The book offers a very useful bibliography.

Alas, the tone is distinctly off-putting: peevish and scolding, she finds we are all eating the wrong things, or the wrong combinations of things, or things at the wrong time (except maybe the Danes). This is a cumulative weight for her narrative and ultimately sucks the pleasure out of a deeply informative and timely work.

The Joy of Cooking

Leave a comment

In a library of wonderful cookbooks, one is truly foundational: Joy of Cooking.

A new version is now available, by John Becker and Megan Scott (Becker is a great-grandson of Irma S. Rombauer who created it in 1931). Whatever innovative recipe books you have in the kitchen, this is a requirement. The new version is a genuinely refreshed classic—not just scrubbed and tweaked but reimagined in very useful and appealing ways.

Quick add-ons address ways to butcher and prepare fish and fowl for cooking that are both intensely practical and easy to understand. This book is a cooking school between covers.

It has two defining qualities:

1: it is trustworthy. Recipes that require some flair or familiarity, such as risotto, are presented in a way that can be confidently executed.

2: it is comprehensive. Spatchcock a chicken, make socca like you used to love it in Nice, or roll your own sushi with Joy.