My Celia

Thick? It's January, Isn't It?

2012-01-25T20:39:00.000-05:00

I'm thinkin', Pancakes!

Somehow - I'm not sure the reason - I've ended up with two half-full molasses jars. This is noteworthy only because I'm not a huge molasses fan, so why I'd replace my supply before needed is a mystery. Nonetheless there they sit, two bottles half full of viscous, sugary, thick-as-printers-ink syrup.

Don't get me wrong, there's a time and a place for this sugar byproduct. You can't make great Boston baked beans without it, and it's essential to BBQ sauce as well. I enjoy a dollop on buckwheat pancakes, and a tablespoon gives exotic depth to full-grain breads. Mostly though, molasses reminds me of my younger, disorganized years. Whenever I failed to plan carefully enough (this happened often) I'd run out of sugar and have to go rooting through the cabinet for any sweetener. Molasses it often was.

Recently molasses came up in the form of a challenge. We were at a New Years Eve party when an acquaintance broached the topic of gluten-free baking. An excellent cook (we knew this from the outstanding appetizers she'd contributed) she bemoaned the fact that she'd failed to make acceptable molasses cookies. We talked ingredients a bit, then the conversation drifted to other quarters, but I was left wondering if I could succeed.

The goal ... achieved.

It took a week for me to find the time, another to meditate on the problem, a third to try, and reject, an adaptation from America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book (too spicy). By then I was mentally enmeshed in the classic GF baked goods problem: how to avoid powdery aftertastes and dry, crumbly results. The answer came while re-organizing my storage shelves. Deep in the back of a forlorn cabinet were 10 pounds of a flour I'd almost forgotten: King Lion Cassava. As soon as I saw it I knew it would save the day.

Cassava is a tropical plant that’s mostly starch. We use its extract, tapioca starch, as a common ingredient in GF baking. As the late Bette Hagman said, "It gives our products 'chew'." King Lion Cassava flour, however, is not an extracted product but the whole cassava root dried and ground. It's more nutritious than plain tapioca starch, and far more versatile. You can use it straight-up to make terrific brownies; it's quite helpful for Chinese dumplings; I depend on it for GF Kerelian (Finnish) bread. At the American Key Food Products booth in Carmel, Indiana, (AKFP imports and sells King Lion) I tasted some cassava cookies that were fantastic.

My one problem with using straight cassava flour is its lightness. It not only makes products fluffy (sometimes unappetizingly so), it is also pale in color, so it would not make molasses cookies visually dark, which I felt was an important requirement. To solve this I mixed in some dark teff flour. Which, I quickly discovered, did not in itself make dark cookies, though it did add a complex, subtly spicy flavor.

As good as they look

In various ratios the dark teff flour never accomplished what I was after, color-wise. That's when I came up with yet another solution: Central American cake sugar. Actually I was on my way to buy dark brown sugar (I only had light in the house) when it struck me that the Latin aisle contained these rustic, cylindrical blocks. Less sweet but more intensely flavored than standard Domino dark, the cake sugar presented just one obstacle: it must be shredded to be used.

Using Goya cake sugar I finally got what I was after: dark, intensely flavored cookies that were crisp at the edge and tender in the center, without powdery aftertastes or over-reliance on spices. They're clean on the palette, a celebration of simple ingredients.

But there was one more idea I needed to try. Recalling that my favorite use of molasses was on buckwheat pancakes, I substituted buckwheat flour for the dark teff. When I assembled ingredients I discovered a shortfall of butter. No problem, I thought to myself, I'll use 1/3 coconut oil. The results were even tastier, though the cookies were less attractive due to more-rapid spread in the oven. I think pre-chilling will help - by which I mean sticking the shaped dough in the freezer for 10 minutes before baking - but I've eaten too many cookies over the past two weeks to want to bake more.

Incidentally, this recipe was intended to be another small yield formulation but didn't quite turn out that way. Its size is driven by eggs - specifically, egg yolks - and I've made it as small as practical by using medium eggs. If you are inclined to divide a yolk or shop for quail eggs, you could make it smaller. As with my upside-down cake, I've provided opportunities for substitution.

Gluten-Free Classic Molasses Cookies

Ingredients:

5 TBLSP unsalted butter (or 3 TBLSP unsalted butter and 2 TBLSP coconut oil)

30 grams Latin American cake sugar (or dark brown sugar)

14 grams granulated sugar

82 grams cassava flour (available from AKFP - click for their website)

17 grams dark teff flour (or buckwheat flour)

18 grams potato starch

1/3 tsp baking soda

A pinch, or 0.6 gm, salt

1/2 tsp vanilla extract (OK to substitute anise extract)

3 TBLSPs dark molasses

1/2 tsp xanthan gum

1 medium egg yolk

granulated sugar (for coating)

Procedure:

1. Preheat oven to 350 F and assemble ingredients, as well as a baking sheet and parchment paper. Set out butter and coconut oil, if using, and allow to reach @ 55 F. Place flours, soda, salt and xanthan gum in a medium bowl. Whisk until blended. Place egg yolk and vanilla in a small bowl. Place molasses in a second small bowl. Place the brown sugar and 14 grams of granulated sugar in a third small bowl. Place the larger quantity of granulated sugar in a medium bowl.

2. Using a power mixer set to medium-high, cream the butter, @2 minutes. Add the sugar blend and cream until smooth and light, another 2 minutes or so. Add the egg yolk plus vanilla and mix on low speed until blended. Add the molasses and mix on low speed until blended. Add flour blend and mix on medium until blended.

3. Dampen your hands or use a wetted, 1 tablespoon scoop. Form small balls of dough. Roll each one in the granulated sugar and place on the parchment paper, separating each ball by 2 inches. Bake 7 minutes, then turn the baking sheet 180 degrees and bake another 6 minutes. Remove to a cooling rack.

Anybody?

2012-01-16T20:18:00.000-05:00

Food porn.

Welcome to the world's least-controversial blog.

That, at least, is the way it feels when post after post drifts out into the sphere and no one sneers, argues, whines or even comments.

It's not that I like anger or argument, but writing to a silent audience does begin to feel pointless. I mean, here I am, generating calorific treats that require discipline for proper disposal, or that end up benefiting only a couple of skinny ice skaters, and the careful, accurate recipes get tried out by absolutely nobody. Or so it seems.

My own critical voice asks, "Are you surprised? I mean, how many of your pathetically tiny handful of readers has the time, to say nothing of the inclination, to track down something like mahlep or Expandex?" Indeed, who besides me would trek to Jersey City on a 10 degree morning in search of Fenugreek seeds, roast and grind their own spices, sprout sorghum, or patiently squeeze frozen butter pads into chilled flour?

What I'm hearing myself say, is, make an easy recipe and they will read. And dine.

OK, I have. Sort of. Now, if you make this, will you let me know?

Apple-cranberry upside-down spice cake.

My inspiration for this recipe, which is yet again a mini, suitable for two adults who love dessert but not a lot of dessert, was the half-empty bag of cranberries that's been knocking around in my crisper drawer since Thanksgiving. Now I find it amusing that a food lasts so long without spoiling, but, hey, I need the space in that drawer. And yes, I bought too many Gold Rush apples the last time I was in Ohio, and they're in the drawer too. And I'm tired of pie. But not tired of butter, flour egg and spices. So here we go.

I began work on this cake by following one of Michael Ruhlman's recipes from his wonderful book Ratios, adapted with a gluten-free pastry flour. My first iteration didn't have a pleasing enough crumb, though, so I riffed on technique. This second version - which I barely got photographed before Leslie and I wolfed it down - is the benchmark.

On the way to our plates. And palettes.

Take note of that riffing. That's what this recipe offers, lots of opportunity to improvise, change and adapt. Ruhlman's version is not a spice cake. I removed two of his ingredients and replaced them with a teaspoon of spice blend, which I made by toasting raw spices and adding a dose of mahlep. Not inclined to be so fussy? Use a mix of allspice, ground mace, ginger, rose buds, or whatever tweaks your nose. You can reduce the amount of butter, use a mix of butter and coconut oil, even substitute a nut oil. You could use brown sugar, or make the "bottom" from berries, peaches, or (God forbid) canned pineapples. Scroll to the recipe and you'll see my suggested substitutions.

There is one ingredient you should track down for this cake: Ivory Teff flour. It is not an absolute necessity - the pastry blend spelled out below lists acceptable substitutions - but it is one excellent flour to have on hand. Teff is an Ethiopian grain, now grown in Idaho (USA) and probably other places. It is very high in iron, has a bright, spicy flavor, and comes in two colors: dark and ivory. Dark is fairly easy to find; it's even in New Jersey grocery stores. I've never seen ivory here, however - I order it in bulk (50 lbs) from a mill that will also sell smaller quantities. Click any of the hotlinks in this paragraph to get to their website. I use both colors of teff, but prefer ivory for some recipes. Its flavor is markedly different from dark teff, and its lighter color allows the spices in this cake to tint the crumb an appetizing hue. I'll be posting more ivory teff recipes as the year goes on, so I do urge you to get some. It can be safely stored in your refrigerator.

One more caveat: this recipe takes a lot of bowls. Having grown up in a household without a dishwasher, and hearing "tsssk!" every time I got a dish dirty, I get nervous making such a mess. Hopefully your neurosis is different. But you will need space in the dishwasher or sink to clean up after making this.

Cranberry-apple upside-down spiced mini cake

Makes 2, 4" round cakes, or four small servings

Ingredients for the cake:

54 grams Ivory Teff Pastry blend (see formula below)

54 grams granulated sugar

54 grams unsalted butter, melted (or other fat, such as coconut oil)

54 grams of egg, separated (1 extra-large)

(note this 1:1:1:1 ratio. If you expand the recipe, just keep this. The amounts listed fill the round 4" springform pans about 3/4 full. You can build this recipe up to about 75/75/75/75 but no more if you stick to 4"pans. With two medium eggs you'd have too much batter, since each weighs 45 grams and you'd therefore need 90 grams of flour, sugar, and fat. In such a case you can use one egg and a second yolk, or one egg and a second white.)

1.9 grams (1/4 tsp) salt

1/2 tsp baking powder (optional)

2.0 grams Xanthan gum

1 tsp spice blend (I toasted 5 shreds of mace, 7 green cardamom pods, 1/3 a star anise and 1/4 a cinnamon stick, plus a tablespoon of raw mahlep.)

For the topping:

1 Gold Rush or similarly tart apple, cored, peeled and sliced thin (weight about 125 grams)

30 grams chopped raw cranberries (if you don't chop them they'll float)

2 tsp granulated sugar

1 TBLSP corn starch

1 TBLSP boiled cider (available from King Arthur Flour) (substitutes: maple syrup, corn syrup, honey. If you use any of these, cut sugar by 1/2.)

1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

1/8 tsp ground nutmeg

1/8 tsp ground ginger

Note on I-teff pastry blend: the formula is: 167 grams ivory teff flour (or white rice or brown rice flour); 145 grams cornstarch; 115 grams tapioca starch or Expandex modified tapioca starch; 13 grams potato flour (not potato starch). I pour these into a ziplock, shake to blend, scoop out what I need and "store" the leftovers by tossing onto my cool granite work surface.

Procedure:

1. If you are roasting your own spices, place the cinnamon, cardomom, mace and star anise in a heavy frying pan. Heat on moderate high, stirring constantly, until spices smell toasted and good - about 3 minutes. Dump immediately onto cool countertop. Pick out the cinnamon chunks and set aside. Place the remainder in a spice grinder and

pulverize. Add mahlep and blend, then place into a small bowl. Place cinnamon, nutmeg and grated ginger in the grinder and pulverize. Set into a separate bowl.

2. Preheat oven to 350 F. Prepare two, 4" springform pans by lining bottom and sides with parchment paper. Do not grease.

3. Peel, core and slice the apple(s). Chop the cranberries. In a medium to large bowl, mix apples, cranberries, the 2 tsps of sugar, the cornstarch, and the cinnamon/nutmeg/ginger spice blend. Mix well, then layer the bottoms of the two pans with equal quantities of this blend.

4. Separate the egg. In a medium bowl, whip the whites until they are stiff but not dry. In another medium bowl, mix 1 tsp of the mahlep spice blend, the salt, the baking powder and the flour. whisk to blend well. In a third bowl, whip the egg yolk and sugar until the sugar is dissolved. Add the yolk/sugar to the flour and stir well. Add the melted butter and stir well. Fold in the egg whites. Divide the batter between the two springform pans and insert into the oven. Bake 30 - 40 minutes, turning half way through, until an inserted toothpick comes out clean. Cool on a rack.

5. Invert cakes over small plates, peel away paper edge, then separate bottom and paper. Serve as dessert or a breakfast coffee cake.

Bile or Pie?

2012-01-06T22:27:00.000-05:00

Happy 2012!

Mini-pie with Northern Spy apples cut into big chunks

My original intention for this first blog of the New Year was a curmudgeonly attack on unscientific beliefs about food. However, I find it hard to display bad temper when 2012 promises to be a wonderful year. So instead of sarcasm and bile, I'm writing about apple pie.

Wait! Don’t go! This isn't a gooey, Ozzie-and-Harriet piece. I hate most apple pies.

This proverbial all-American food is savaged by commercial production. Store-bought or restaurant apple pies are sticky spice-bouquets bundled with a tiny hint of apple. Too sweet, too thin, too laden with cornstarch, they're the kind of food that makes you want to wash out your mouth with truck stop coffee.

It doesn't have to be that way. Take the time to make an apple pie yourself, using the right kind of apples, and you'll have an exquisite treat. All it takes - really! - is obedience to that italicized phrase.

Gold Rush apples from White House Farms, Canfield OH

I grew up in a family of apple-lovers. Mom would wax ecstatic over whatever species was ripe, and I learned the names Yellow Transparent, Northern Spy, Winesap and Jonathan before I toddled off to pre-school. Dad had a small orchard in the backyard - raw eating varieties - and was obsessed about visual as well as taste perfection. It was a rare week in any season that didn't find him doing something out there: pruning, spraying, propping laden branches, harvesting. Our apples were definitely not organic - Dad believed in potent insecticides - but they were fresh, and therefore outrageously good.

Ironically , apple pies were not a family favorite. Perhaps that's because Dad didn't grow the number-one best pie variety and Mom didn't see the point of making pies with number two. Once in a while a relative would show up with a peck of Northern Spy, however, and that's when the rolling pin, flour, shortening, sugar and spices would get dragged from the cupboard. You see, Northern Spy are the sort of apple that makes pies worthwhile. Indeed they are one of the few.

I've experimented with a lot of apples over the years and can say with a bit of confidence there are only three that are worth the effort to turn into pies: Northern Spy (the hands-down best), Lodi, and Gold Rush. (These are northern/midwestern apples. There may be other good ones in your geographic area. I’d appreciate hearing recommendations if you have them.)

Here's the thing about apples: they're like cherries. Those that taste wonderful raw are lousy cooked. Most grocery stores carry "double-duty" apple varieties, bred to be washed and eaten raw and maybe, just once-in-a-while, cooked. Some of these are terrific tasting fresh from the bin: Honey Crisp, MacIntosh, Macoun, Fuji. They'll make an acceptable applesauce, and cookbooks say they're OK for pies. But don't believe that. They're in the bins because the grocer can unload them at a quick enough pace to generate profit, and like most things generic and fast, they're disappointing when the chips come down.

The chips in this case are heat. The sweetness, crispy cell structure and cheery redness that make generic apples mouthwateringly good in the raw state get broken down and lost in the oven. What you need is an apple bred to hold up to temperature. Or even be enhanced by it. Raw taste and appearance be damned.

Pie apples are not pretty. Lodi, which mature in July and August, are huge green lumps that split in refrigerated storage. Northern Spy, ripe in the late fall, are dull green and streaked with red. Cut them and they turn immediately brown, and they bruise as easily as a hemophiliac. Gold Rush, a very late apple (December) is the exception. It's beautiful; speckled gold with yellow, non-browning flesh. The skin is tough however, and you'll find yourself sharpening your paring knife or your peeler-corer sooner than you'd like.

Mini-pies of Gold Rush apples

The big problem is finding and storing pie apples. It's the rare farmer who wants to grow them - not enough demand, and Northern Spy only produce every other year - and an even rarer grocer willing to sell them. Luckily there's enough demand in the crowded, urban Northeast (USA) so that greenmarkets in NYC and environs stock them. (Gold Rush are “in” through January, at farm markets that stock them.) With a bit of persistence you can find sellers - check this website. But if you are a pie lover and happen, like me, to have a small appetite and a small family, you'll be stuck with a conundrum: buying more than you can reasonably expect to eat.

Fortunately all the apples that make great pies are easy to freeze. I do this in two ways: A) Make a full pie and freeze it without baking; and, B) prep up the apples and freeze in a bag. When we're having guests for dinner I'll pull out a frozen pie and stick it straight in the oven. If Leslie and I start craving pies, I'll roll a bit of crust and make minis or micros from the bagged apples.

I've also had success dehydrating Lodi (a tactic which makes the apartment smell wonderful) though I seem to never find enough Northern Spy or Gold Rush for this.

By the way, a “full pie” for me is a 6” (most recipes call for 9”). To make mini-pies, I press the dough into cupcake tins. For micro-pies I use mini-cupcake tins; these are true one-bite desserts. Most pie doughs freeze quite nicely, so you can easily break down a full recipe into small units, bag and freeze these, and pull out what you need whenever you want some pie.

A trick to remember with cooking apples is restraint. To my taste, an error on the tart side is better than one on the sweet side. I like to use just enough sugar to maximize flavors and dash on the spices. (after all, these are great apples and you're not trying to do what commercial kitchens do with mediocre ones, hide the taste under sugar and spice). That said, I do add sugar to my dough - I find the bit of caramelized crunch it adds is worth the tiny bit of extra measuring.

Finally, I want to suggest you add one more tool to your kitchen: a hand-cranked peeler-corer. I know it sounds excessive, especially for a small household or one that rarely consumes apple pies, but peeler-corers do two extremely useful things: speed up the prep work by a major factor, and slice the apple into 1/8” flats. This latter allows you to stack layers in the pie shell with unprecedented tightness, which not only prevents the pie “lid” from collapsing but packs in extra flavor, too. (BTW I avoided buying one for years, but when I realized they were only $20 I grabbed one up and don’t regret a single penny.)

Here’s my recipe for a 6” apple pie:

500 grams Northern Spy, Lodi or Gold Rush apples

2 - 4 TBLSP granulated sugar (2 for the Northern Spy, 4 for the Lodi and Gold Rush)

2 TBLSP cornstarch

2 TBLSP unsalted butter

1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

Pinch salt

1) Preheat the oven to 425 F.

2) Make your pie shell and drape into the pan. If you are using a standard, 9” pan, you’ll have to re-proportion ingredients. My previous post on numbers will help.

3) Peel and core the apples. If you’ve not yet sprung for a peeler-corer, cut the apples into very thin slices. A peeler-corer will do this for you. If you do have a peeler-corer, stand the sliced apples on end (the slices tend to adhere) and cut the circular apple into sixths, making each thin slice into a miniature wedge.

4) Place the apple wedges in a large bowl. Add the sugar, cornstarch, nutmeg, cinnamon and salt. Stir vigorously until all the wedges are evenly coated and no solids remain in the bottom of the bowl.

5) Taking your time, lay the wedges flat in the shell, arranging for maximum tightness and minimum air and “doming” the apples. Divide the butter into lima-bean-sized pats and scatter over the apples. Place a dough “lid” on the pie, cut vent holes, seal edges, and place on a sheet of aluminum foil. Insert into oven.

6) Bake 10 min at 425 then reduce heat to 350 without opening oven. Set timer to 45 minutes. Check at that time. Vent holes should reveal bubbling apple syrup and the crust should be oak-brown. If not, continue baking until those conditions are met. Remove to a cooling rack and allow to cool before eating.

Interregnum

2011-12-26T20:58:00.000-05:00

Note: For the next two posts I'll be taking a break from mini-desserts and other edibles, and writing about other things. Hope you enjoy!

With Christmas just past I'm thinking many of you had the holiday experience of watching It's a Wonderful Life. I've sat through this movie so many times I believe I could recite every line in it, but there's one scene that never fails to provoke a twang: it's when George Bailey, his kid brother, and their buddies go sled-riding on a shovel.

Me as a teenager - January 1967

There's a dramatic purpose to this scene, one I won't reveal and spoil the film for first-timers, but it's not this that captures me. It's that what the boys are doing is exactly the sort of thing I did as a boy.

I don't remember any weather too rugged to prevent me from going out and playing, or the lack of a "correct" toy stopping the fun. In fact, the colder, snowier and more-blustery it was, the more I liked it, and the less perfect the toy, the more I'd have to use my imagination and resources. I've ridden plenty of coal shovels.

Our house sat atop a small hill and the road in front curved down a longer one. Let there be just an inch of snow and I was out in it, rubber snap-top boots and floppy eared cap, raggedy coat, wool pants and hand-me-down flexible flyer with carefully sanded and waxed runners.

There might be traffic on the road or it might be night and 5 below zero, but winter was mine and I loved it. With the neighborhood kids I performed all sorts of devilment and don't recall ever being in trouble, except once. That was the year some of the "Big kids" down the street stole a cement mixing trough and turned it into a 10-kid toboggan. It wasn't the icy hill and 20 mph ride that provoked my parents, but the theft of the trough. We could have probably ridden, flipped and spun that sucker for a dozen winters had it been morally obtained. As it was, we had but a single day. Glorious if ill-obtained.

Other acts passed without prohibition or punishment: ice skating deep in the woods on a swampy pond, thickness checked by no one but 12-year-old me. Patting down the snow of a steep valley into a u-shaped chute, breaking the ice in the creek at the bottom to provide buckets-full to slosh the run, then coming back the next day to have a go in our flying saucer sleds. (My neighbor Chipper fell through the ice and we dragged him home on a sled, his sodden legs wrapped in our coats). Seeing how many of us could stack up on a sled, then running it over a jump. Making a sled out of 2 X 6's and fire-bent reinforcing rods, not bothering to wonder how it might be steered. And, when I was 16 and could drive, going to Mill Creek Park at night to skate the big frozen lakes under the stars.

Television didn't enter our household until I was 11, and right from the start I had no use for it. If I wasn't at school or doing homework I was out-of-doors. Spring and summer there were edible plants to harvest and woods to explore; in the fall I hunted rabbits and pheasants (I owned a shotgun from age 13). Winter remained my favorite season. It had everything and besides it was a challenge - one that even pre-adolescent me could overcome.

Psychologist Alice Miller has pointed out that love of nature often springs from a miserable family life, and that was assuredly so for me. But love of nature also teaches wonderful things - things I watch my urban(e) friends struggle to grasp. The out-of-doors rarely scares me (exception: thunderstorms. Perhaps that's b/c I was struck with lightening when a teen-ager). I'll throw myself onto snow or ice without hesitation. I know most Eastern (USA) trees by their bark and shape, no leaves necessary, which gives my view of the forest personality as well as allows me to scope mushroom-foraging niches in the off season. And, while I find the notion of bug bites, bee stings, snakebites, bears, and panthers discomfiting, I'd never let any of them stop me from a walk or bike ride in the woods.

I feel sorry for children born to helicopter parents or dropped before TV screens and digital devices before they're old enough to think. Ditto those who have every toy, complete with instructions for the one-and-only way to enjoy it. There's no way that anything on a glowing box is as deep, rewarding, or fun as a day outdoors in a snowstorm. And, if you're always being protected and instructed you'll never learn to play, which means you'll grow up creatively stunted, angry, neurotic and sad.

Which is not to say my childhood was perfect, or even good - far, far from it. When Christmas rolls around, though, and I remember those first ice skates or that good, full-sized sled, or, yes, that bb gun - the picture which comes to mind is a snowy, cold, Ohio field with me in the middle, trudging joyfully towards hill or pond. In other words, the boy version of the man I remain today.

Post-script: I wrote these words December 23 at Mohonk Mountain House, a wonderful, historic hotel set amidst thousands of acres of cliffy woodlands in New York State. The next afternoon my wife Leslie and I went for a 2-mile hike on the Mohonk Preserve. It was mid-20’s, dry, sunny and just a bit windy - a perfect winter day (though not quite as wild as I usually prefer - there was no snow.) During that long afternoon we passed only two hikers, both adults. Not one child was out there. What a pity.

Cake and Liver

2011-12-20T19:49:00.000-05:00

This story begins at a party. I’m sitting on the floor, trying to negotiate a shipment of venison liver from my friend Karen. Her neighbor is an avid bowhunter, and a great dessert-lover. Karen has devoured a chunk of my Root Beer Float cheesecake and thinks a swap might be do-able. I’ve never had venison liver but I would love to try.

Which is when our mutual friend Rachel enters the conversation. “You’re talking cheesecake ... again,” Rachel avers, as we nod, smiling.

“Do you have to use a springform pan?” she asks.

Without thinking, I quickly say, “Yes.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” she answers. “I only ever see them big.”

Selection of pie pans: 9" (left) 6" (silver) and 4" (gunmetal gray)

It’s true - in most houseware stores, the only springform pan you’re likely to see is 9” across. Fill this puppy all the way to its top with cheesecake and you’ve got at least 12 huge servings. Of course you can make a half-recipe, with its resulting not-very-high cheesecake, but still you end up with massive plates of sweet.

“Yeah, that’s a problem,” I agree. “But, look what I found at a farm market last year.” I swoop into a storage drawer and come up with a 4” springform pan.

“Cute!” Rachel says. But then, before I can riff on the virtues of 4” cheesecakes, someone interrupts and the conversation fragments.

What I might have said, had Rachel or Karen questioned me, was that a 4” cheesecake was just about perfect for a couple or small family, but that an intuitive baker would make a grand mistake scaling his recipes for it. That would be because, while the 4” pan seems to be about 1/2 the size of a 9” pan, it is actually much, much smaller.

And, yes, this post is about math.

Baked goods are three-dimensional; therefore, they have volume. To scale a recipe up or down, we must sometimes perform calculations.

Spring form pans - 9" and 4"

Consider a simple rectangular cake. A recipe might say, “Grease a 9” square cake pan,” but what it really means is, “Grease a 9” X 9” X 2” pan.” The extra dimension is crucial for anyone who wants to convert the recipe to circular pans or larger, or smaller rectangles. Conversion requires knowing volume, and volume must be calculated by the following: (Area) X (Height.) In this case, the pan area is (9)²but the volume is (9)² X 2, or 162 cubic inches.

Were you to reach into the cupboard and pull out an 8” pan by mistake, the overflow would not be small, for an 8 X 8 X 2 pan has a volume of 128 cubic inches. 34 cubic inches of overflow on your counter is nothing to sneeze at, and it represents a lot of sponge-mopping, a lot of waste.

Most of us can perform such simple math, but the situation gets slippery when circles, triangles, and weird shapes are involved. The volume of a column - which is what we have with circular baking pans - is calculated as πr² X h, with π = 3.1417, r = the radius of the circular base and h = the height of the column. A 9” baking pan has a diameter of 9”, thus a radius of 4.5”. If its height is 2”, its volume is 127.2 cubic inches - or even less than the 8 X 8 X 2 rectangular pan.

Now I have some ‘splaining to do. I’ve been harping on the advantages of weighing ingredients for so long it may seem like I’m backtracking to suggest that volumes are useful. However, understanding how to determine and proportion volume does not negate the superiority of measuring by weight. No matter how you measure baking ingredients, you’d need an engineers worth of math to anticipate the actual liquid volume of ingredients when combined. So when I set out to make a micro-dessert, and my point of departure is a standard, feed-a-farm-family recipe, I check the pan size in the recipe first, then scale ingredients - using percentages - based on the pan I’ll be using.

The "Cute" pan - 4" springform

This is where weight measurements come in handy. Reducing a weight measurement by a percentage is child’s play, but try it with volumes.

For example: a 9” round cheesecake recipe calls for 4 tablespoons of toasted almond flour, which weighs 12 grams per tablespoon (48 grams.) I want to make a 4” round cheesecake. How much almond flour do I use?

(Shortcut answer: Who the hell cares? A tablespoon and a half is close enough! A little bit of almond flour one way or the other hardly matters!) {But would anybody’s grandmother accept that? Not in a family of educators and scientists .... Like mine}

Anyway - the volume of my 3” deep, 4” diameter cheesecake pan is 38 cubic inches, about 30% of the volume of the 9” pan. 4 TBLSP X .30 = 1.2, or a tablespoon-and-a-quarter, more or less. Using weight, 48 grams X .3 = 14.4 grams.

Who’s even seen a quarter-tablespoon measuring device? But 14 grams on a cheap cook scale is totally easy - and if you have a Cole Palmer home science scale that measures tenth of grams (I do, natch) you can be totally accurate. Which means your cheesecakes will be consistent - a good thing.

But now you’re sick of numbers and want a recipe. So here it is, my famous Root Beer Float cheesecake (Mostly borrowed from America’s Test Kitchen Family Baking Book). Oh, but wait - this is as much a quiz as it is a recipe. What follows is a recipe for a 9” diameter, 2.75” deep springform pan. If you want to adapt it to a smaller (or, God forbid, larger) size, you’ll need to do the math yourself!

NOTE: Although I use pieces of wild sassafras root bark in this recipe, several sources caution that genuine sassafras may have carcinogenic properties. I am unable to verify or disprove this, so if the prospect frightens you, use an alternative to sassafras root, such as sassafras oil (Click HERE), substituting 1/2 tsp sassafras oil for the ingredients I list below. If on the other hand, you are like my father, who waved a hand in nonchalance over his daily cup of sassafras tea when I told him the carcinogenic news, and then went on to live to 95, perhaps you should come sassafras foraging with me this March. That’s probably the only way you’ll get real sassafras root.

Root Beer Float Cheesecake

Serves 12 - 20

For the crust:

100 grams (+/-) dried, crumbled GF cookies or dry, leftover GF cake

40 grams almond flour or almonds processed in a food processor to fine consistency

3/4 stick unsalted butter softened to room temperature, plus @ 1 TBLS for greasing the pan

3 TBLSP granulated sugar

For the filling:

2.5 lbs cream cheese (do NOT use “lite” or “reduced fat” cream cheese) softened at room temperature.

1.5 oz sugar

1/8 tsp salt

1/3 cup sour cream (I prefer Daisy brand as it is the only one made from cream and nothing but. How can you call something sour cream when it includes skim milk???)

6 large eggs

2 large egg yolks

2 TBLSP heavy cream

1 TBLSP vodka, brandy, or water

@ 2 grams sassafras root-bark, peeled and dried

For the topping:

4 oz heavy whipping cream

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Instructions:

Place 2 TBLSP of heavy cream in a small bowl and drop 1/2 the sassafras in it. Stir until sassafras is covered, then cover bowl with plastic wrap and set aside at room temperature for at least 6 hours, or overnight.

In a mortar and pestle, pound the remaining sassafras root bark to a fine powder. Add the vodka, brandy or water to this and allow to steep at least one hour.

Thoroughly grease the bottom of a 9” springform pan. Cut a circle of baker’s parchment and place it in the pan bottom. Preheat oven to 325 F.

Place the cookies, almond flour and sugar in a food processor. Pulse to a coarse meal. Add butter and pulse until dough comes together. Spread this on the bottom of the pan, taking care to make an even, flat layer. Bake @ 15 minutes, or until the crust just begins to brown. Remove from the oven and allow to cool.

Increase oven temperature to 500 F. Cut the cream cheese into small chunks and add them one at a time to a stand mixer, equipped with a paddle blade, running at medium low speed. Beat 1 - 3 minutes or until very smooth. Beat in sugar and salt, half at a time, until incorporated. Beat in the sour cream until incorporated.

Remove sassafras bark from the heavy cream and add the cream to the mix, beating until incorporated. Add the vodka/brandy/water extract and beat. Beat in the egg yolks and eggs two at a time and beat 1 - 3 minutes, until very smooth.

Brush the walls of the springform pan with melted butter. Wrap a ring of aluminum foil around the outside of the pan. Place pan on baking sheet, pour filling into pan, and place into the oven. Bake for 10 minutes, then reduce heat to 200 F without opening oven door. After 45 minutes rotate pan 180 degrees and check inner temperature. In another 30 minutes check temperature again. You want the cheesecake to be 150 F.

Before removing cake from the oven, run a knife around the inner edge of the pan. Turn heat off and allow pan to remain in oven 5 minutes. Remove to a cooling rack. After 10 minutes run the knife around the inside again, and do so periodically as the cake slowly cools to room temperature.

When cake reaches room temperature, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate.

When cake is cold, remove from refrigerator, release springform edge and carefully remove the cake from the pan. Slide cake from springform bottom onto plastic or wooden serving tray (so that you will not dull your knife as you slice pieces), retaining the parchment. (If you are able to carefully peel off the parchment, do so. However it may be easier to remove parchment individually from slices.)

Whip the heavy cream and vanilla to make a frosting. Spread atop cake. Cut with a clean, wet knife, washing the knife between each slice. Enjoy!

Turkish Gifts

2011-12-11T11:28:00.000-05:00

A great spice for those in the know

Every July when my wife Leslie returns from her annual trip to her AFS "Family" in Izmir, Turkey, I thrill to the homecoming. Ten or so days without her is tough, and it's wonderful when she's back. Besides, she always brings gifts.

The Inci family insists on sending presents, "For letting them have her." These are inevitably food products, which I unpack, admire, and puzzle over for months.

This past summer Leslie brought home what I'd requested: two kilos of mastic, a spicy sap indigenous to the Izmir area as well as Chios, Greece. However, her Turkish "Niece" Elif insisted on buying additional spices. There were more than a dozen cellophane packets in Elif's gift basket. Most were hot peppers, which she had rated with a star system from "1=Hot" to "4=Poison!", but one packet was labeled "Mahlep for cookies."

I’ve been using the hot peppers since August, working my way up through the stars. Meanwhile the mahlep has been untouched, waiting for the right moment.

That right moment came this week. I'd become bored with cookies, and was about to shift focus to other micro-desserts (pie, anyone? Cheesecake?) when that box of Turkish spices beckoned. Deciding not to Google "Mahlep" until after a taste-test, I snipped open the cellophane and took a whiff. Eastern aromas tingled my nose - vague hints of cinnamon, tree bark, fruits and nuts. I dipped a finger in and sampled. The bark taste was pungent, and fruitiness swam through the background. Then came a potent bitterness. "What IS this stuff?" I wondered. Rather than seek an actual answer I decided to experiment.

I jotted down "partner flavors" - tastes I sensed would go well with the mahlep: walnuts, sassafras, heavy cream. Next I worked on the ratio of fats to sugar to flour. I wanted a soft, chewy cookie, something on the decadent side. I decided on 1 part butter, 1.5 parts sugar and 2 parts flour. The flour would be ivory teff, which has a spicy flavor and would provide a final, enhancing note.

Creaming butter and sugar, I meditated on the aromas. An egg yolk would add richness, I decided, and the flour couldn't be teff alone - too gritty, and a bit overwhelming (teff by itself can have a fishy taste). As is the case with most gluten-free sweets I’d have to ratio in some starches - potato and modified tapioca starch would do. Also, some type of extract could help. But not vanilla - every cookie uses vanilla. I blindly reached into the spice drawer --- and came up with anise.

The dough came together nicely and the raw flavors (I grew up licking beaters and have never stopped!) were rewarding. I rolled balls and flattened them, my thoughts on oven time. And then - foolishness: I'd neglected to cap the anise bottle and a false move sent it splashing across the countertop. Instantly the whole apartment reeked of Ouzo, and I was mentally in Crete in the 1970's, battling a hangover on the beach.

A quick mop-up eliminated the spill but not the scent. I sent the cookies into the oven and pulled them 12 minutes later, but by now my senses were so ouzo-saturated the cloying liquor was all I could think about. Fortunately Leslie and I had theatre tickets; I grabbed a barely-cooled cookie and stuffed it into my mouth on the way out the door.

Half-eaten and Christmas-ready

Wow! It was 'way too spicy and not nearly nutty enough, but pretty damned good. Once I got past the feeling it'd been scraped from the floor of a taverna, that is.

I didn't get around to Googling "Mahlep" until the next day. Turns out it is the ground-up heart of St. Lucie cherry pits, and is a spice more widely used in Greece than elsewhere. So the anise/ouzo taste was not so far off. I checked to be sure that you, my readers, could find it in the USA (you can - click here), then went back to the drawing board to make an even better cookie.

My original plan had produced the right balance of chew and crisp (heavy on the former, lean on the latter), but the results, though overpowering, lacked something. Deciding to back down on spiciness while ramping up richness, I came up with a walnut-laden, brown sugar version.

Taste-testing around this house yielded the consensus that these wren’t sweet enough. I nonetheless decided to include the recipe because the cookies have a gingerbread-y appeal. Also, they sat on the kitchen counter uncovered for 48 hours at relative humidity 10% and did not dry out.

Next I stepped far out of bounds and went all out for tree products: sassafras root, pignoli nuts and hickory-smoked salt all feature in my final recipe. These are adult cookies - not cloying enough to keep the kids happy, and salty in that pungent way you’ll recognize from caviar.

(please read the link on sassafras before digging up roots and using them. Harvesting sassafras roots was a spring ritual in my family even after research surfaced that linked them to liver damage and cancer. Perhaps the way we all escaped was by using only the thinnest layer of outer root cambium, but I have no proof that this is safe. You, my readers, should be aware of the hazards.)

It’ll take some doing to track down all these ingredients, but I think it will be worth your time. Mahleb is useful in many sweets, and ivory teff is a great flour to have on hand. And sassafras ... well, you’ll meet sassafras again when I do get to cheesecakes. The next entry.

Dark Mahlep Cookies - micro-recipe

Makes 6, 2.5” X 3/8” cookies

Ingredients

45 grams dark brown sugar

32 grams dark teff flour

20 grams unsalted butter at @ 65 F

20 grams walnuts, toasted and chopped fine

18 grams potato starch

10 grams coconut oil at room temperature

10 grams shredded coconut

5 grams Expandex modified tapioca starch

3 grams mahlep

1.5 grams xanthan gum

1 yolk, medium egg

1 TBLSP heavy cream

@ 1/8 tsp sassafras root (optional)

1 drop anise extract

Tiny pinch salt

Procedure

Preheat oven to 350. Cut a half-sheet of parchment in half and place on a cookie rack.

Place the scrap of sassafras root in a mortar and pestle and pound into powder. Add cream and stir well, then set aside.

Heat a heavy skillet over high flame. Toss the walnuts in it until they begin to darken and emit a pleasing, smoky aroma. Remove from heat and immediately drop into ceramic bowl (to prevent their continued toasting). When cool, chop fine.

In a medium bowl, blend teff flour, potato starch, Expandex, mahlep, xanthan gum and salt. Stir to blend well.

Separate the egg, leaving the yolk in a small bowl.

Combine the walnuts and coconut in a small bowl.

In a small bowl, with an electric mixer, cream butter and coconut oil using medium speed until white-ish and fluffy - about 1 minute. Add sugar and cream again until fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add anise and whip to combine. Add cream and sassafras and whip to combine. Add egg yolk and whip to combine.

Turn mixer off, add flour blend, then beat on low speed until well combined. Add nuts and combine.

Bake for 14 minutes, rotating the cookie sheet half-way through. Remove to a cooling rack, sliding parchment from sheet onto rack. Allow to cool thoroughly before eating.

Light Mahlep cookies, micro-recipe

Makes 6, 2.5” X 3/8” cookies

Ingredients:

6o grams granulated sugar

40 grams unsalted butter at 65 F

32 grams ivory teff flour

20 grams pignoli nuts

18 grams potato starch

10 grams Expandex modified tapioca starch

5 grams mahlep

1.5 grams xanthan gum

1 medium egg yolk

1 TBLSP heavy cream

1/8 tsp (+/-) sassafras root (optional)

3 drops anise extract

Tiny pinch salt

Several pinches coarse, hickory-smoked salt

Procedure:

Preheat oven to 350 F. Cut a 1/2 sheet of parchment into two, and place one of the sheets on a cookie sheet.

Place the scrap of sassafras root in a mortar and pestle and pound into powder. Add cream and stir well. Place into a small prep bowl and set aside.

Place the pignoli nuts into the mortar and pestle and pound to a fine pulp. Set aside.

In a medium bowl, blend teff flour, potato starch, Expandex, mahlep, xanthan gum and salt. Stir to blend well.

Separate the egg, leaving the yolk in a small bowl.

In a small bowl, with an electric mixer, cream butter using medium speed - about 1 minute. Add sugar, and cream again until fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add anise and whip to combine. Add cream and sassafras and whip to combine. Add egg yolk and whip to combine.

Turn mixer off, add flour blend, then beat on low speed until well combined. Add pignoli paste and combine.

Form dough into a ball. Pinch off six equal sections, roll into balls and place on the parchment, leaving at least 2” between each ball. Flatten each ball to @ 1/2 inch, pressing in tine marks if you wish. Sprinkle a pinch of hickory smoked salt onto the top of each cookie and press gently into the surface.

Bake for 14 minutes, rotating the cookie sheet half-way through. Remove to a cooling rack, sliding parchment from sheet onto rack. Allow to cool thoroughly before eating.

Eggs

2011-11-23T21:05:00.000-05:00

Something unique and wonderful is happening in desserts today: a trend to smallness. Every time I pick up a catalog or menu I notice something micro or mini. It does my heart good - and not only because I find a nation of porcine humans revolting. I’m equally revolted by giant slabs of anything on my plate. No matter how wonderful the dessert, if there’s too much of it my gut goes into over-bloat and my tastebuds shut down.

From the perspective of the home baker, however, the micro/mini “movement” presents challenges. Older cookbooks published dessert recipes in the farmhouse tradition - ie - for hungry families of 12; and contemporary recipes, which were often based on the traditional ones, are frequently oversized. OK, so anyone with a calculator and basic math skills should be able to reduce recipes. But downsizing falls short when measurements are in dry volume. (When, for example, was the last time you saw a 3/32 measuring spoon?)

And then there’s eggs.

I’ve campaigned against dry volume measurements elsewhere, even posted a conversion table on my website. But the problem of eggs is more significant.

Eggs are an essential part of many pastries. Their role in structure and flavor is indisputable, and I feel sorry for folks who are allergic to them. When it comes to dividing a recipe into small quantities, however, eggs get in the way.

If a cake requires 4 eggs and will be 6” high, and we know that a 1 and 1/2” high cake which is cut and presented nicely will be perfectly satisfying, most of us can do the math. But what if that 1 and 1/2” cake is still too big? What if we want it to be 33% less, or just 1” tall? How do you cut an egg into thirds?

OK - you could make the batter and then throw away 1/3 of it. Call me Presbyterian (I am), but that seems incredibly wasteful. There’s also no need, if you just get a bit flexible with eggs.

Your kitchen scale continues to be your friend. You can put a bowl on your scale, zero out the scale, break the egg into the bowl, mix the egg gently, and then take out what you do not need. A turkey baster helps in this, but arm yourself with a sharp knife, ‘cause you’ll have to slice through an eggy drool at the nozzle end to get exact weight. If the egg must be separated you’ll need to use two bowls. When using the baster to draw up discard, start with the egg white, since yolk contaminating white will make it impossible to whip peaks.

Mise en place for cookies, with a single medium egg

Another alternative is to use smaller eggs. Almost every recipe that uses eggs calls for “large.” Our national obsession with excess has provoked grocers into stocking “extra-large” and “jumbo”, but some stores - notably in poorer neighborhoods - carry “medium”. (I have yet to see “small”, though my local upscale market carries quail and pheasant eggs, which are quite tiny.)

I recently worked my way through a carton of medium and another carton of large eggs, weighing each. Shell on, larges weighed an average of 65 grams and mediums, 50 grams. Put another way, if you substitute a medium for a large you can reduce the rest of the ingredients down 77%.

Medium eggs were very helpful when I baked a first-try of Bennecake cookies. The published recipe, built around one large egg, promised a yield of 22, 3 1/2” cookies. - great for a party but not so great for two middle-aged people not interested in gaining weight. Cutting back to a medium egg brought the recipe down to 14 cookies, which were dispersed as follows: 2 for Leslie and I to taste-test, 4 to set aside for dessert the following evening, 4 to give my skinny, young, ice skating coach, and 4 to bring to my mother when I drive to Ohio. (She weighs only 114, is 91 years old, and could stand to put on some weight. Or not care if she does.)

Bennecake cookies, ready to bribe my coach

I happen to think that such dispersal is cheating, since the objective of home micro-recipes should be just enough for one small dessert, but when you try to bake really small, other problems creep in - such as finding a bowl-and-beater combination that will let you cream the butter efficiently, and measuring tiny amounts of baking powder, salt, etc. with precision.

I’ll suggest precision methods and do some of the math in another post, but since you’re all by now more interested in that word “Bennecake”, I’ll follow that thread.

I learned about Bennecake from an article in The New Yorker, which prompted me to look up Anson Mills, maker of Bennecake flour and other goodies. Almost everything you’ll need to know about making these cookies (which really are divine, by the way - the folks at Anson are right when they say peanut butter cookies are sturdy clogs and Bennecake cookies are a pair of elegant slides) can be found on the website, with one crucial exception: of course the published recipe uses wheat flour.

My 1:1 substitute for pastry wheat flour, at least in a recipe where you want the Bennecake, sugar, and butter to dominate, is the late Bette Hageman’s Featherlite blend. My version, slightly different from hers, is 167 grams of fine white rice flour, 145 grams Expandex modified tapioca starch, 115 grams cornstarch and 13 grams potato flour (NOT potato starch). I also added 1/4 tsp of Xanthan gum, which perhaps could be cut in half for anyone desiring a more-crumbly result.

My ingredient list:

109 grams butter, softened to 60 F

88 grams light brown sugar

109 grams Featherlite flour blend

1/4 tsp Xanthan gum

55 grams Bennecake flour

3/16 tsp baking powder

3/8 tsp fine sea salt

1 medium egg

3/4 tsp vanilla extract

3/4 TBLSP milk

Rather than print the extensive instructions, I’ll refer you to the Anson Mills website.

My next cookie project includes concepts based on Turkish spices and the flours of Africa (Teff; Sorghum). If they take me too long to perfect, I’ll post a math column first. Happy Thanksgiving, all!

Excuses, Excuses

2011-11-15T14:53:00.001-05:00

Ingredients for an oft-postponed test

The elders in my family prove that old saw, “It takes guts to get old.” Dad lived to 95 but spend the final 10 years in an Alzheimer haze, and Mom is now 90 but so crippled with arthritis she can barely move. It doesn’t take much to cause her a fall, and when she does, I’m the sibling to get a call from her assisted living facility. Which, incidentally, is 400 miles away.

The past two weeks have been spent cleaning up from just such an incident. First came the call, then a midnight ER trip (Thank God for our friend Betsy Ford, who stayed with Mom in the ER until my sister Ruth could arrive), then a 3AM return home. And then, three days later, a leg infection which developed into cellulitis.

I took Mom to the ER again a week ago Saturday for the leg infection, and let me tell you, Emergency Departments are hell for 90-year-olds. Luckily she was admitted to the hospital after only 6 hours, and even luckier, the infection was not MRSA. Still she had three days of in-patient IV antibiotics and was sent home exhausted and confused. I stayed 48 more hours to help her get straightened around.

So I’m going to excuse myself for not blogging about 2-bite-dessert cookie experiments. They did go on, however, and I’m here to report success.

Mise en place for the taste test

Before Mom’s fall I performed a basic cookie test, following directions in Michael Ruhlman’s book Ratio. (see previous blog) The sugar-fat-flour ratio for cookies is 1:2:3. Ruhlman suggests this flavor test: make a cookie using that ratio and only butter, sugar and flour. The point is to see for yourself what cookies’ fundamental flavors and structure are. Great idea! Except that, unlike Ruhlman and other wheat-eaters, I have 11 flours in the house.

Pre-baking.

I selected nine of these for my cookie test: millet, sorghum, brown rice, montina, buckwheat, GF oats, ivory teff, dark teff and black cocoa. I began by creaming enough butter with sugar to make 18 cookies total - 2 of each flavor. Then, using almost every bowl I had, I divided the creamed butter/sugar into 9 parts, added flour to each, and stirred until blended, then formed balls. To keep things straight I marked a piece of baker’s parchment with numbers on which I pressed the balls to 3/8” discs. I then set my project in a 350F oven for about 20 minutes, turning the baking sheet once.

Post-baking began with discarding the mistakes - cocoa and montina. The cocoa got short shrift of butter/sugar (due to measuring errors) and was crumbly and inedibly bitter (though one could sense potential). The montina looked like moose droppings and tasted like tree bark.

Almost every remaining cookie was powdery on the tongue, and the flavors of butter and sugar were so prominent it was hard to get past them to the flavor of grains. But subtle differences expanded upon chewing, and I soon had an interesting page of notes.

The one cookie that succeeded as plain, just-the-way-it-is, was buckwheat. That may be because I grind my own flour and keep the mill set to extra-coarse. Thus the buckwheat didn’t absorb the oven-melting butter/sugar blend and the cookies spread. However the flavor was great, with slightly caramelized edges to the cookies. They left me thinking a dab of syrup and a touch of salt, plus enough time in the oven to really caramelize things, might make for a nice treat.

I already have several good buckwheat recipes, so I wanted to move in another direction. The second-best flavor was millet, though my taste buds wanted citrus in the blend.

Some ingredients for lemon-millet cookies

Unfortunately my first millet experiments turned out powdery. Thinking back to buckwheat, I decided to experiment with coarse grinds. There was little initial improvement, but the textural experience was interesting. That’s when I hit on an idea: simmer whole millet grains in milk to soften the seeds and incorporate these.

The results were mediocre but tasty enough to keep going. Thinking a coarse texture wasn’t wholly cookie-like, I made the next batch adding starch flours. To avoid abandoning the concept of a light, airy cookie, I made a second flour batch with commercial millet flour plus starches.

For the citrus taste I used a blend of lemon oil (available from King Arthur Flours), lemon extract and lemon zest. A small amount of xanthan gum helped cut the powdery taste, and a pinch of salt enhanced flavors.

Two-bite lemon-millet cookies

Thinking strategically, I reduced the amount of butter for the simmered grain batch by the weight of the absorbed milk. That was overcompensation, but the cookies are nonetheless keepers.

When I make them again I’ll frost them with half-sour-orange, half-lime. They’ll be more photogenic that way, and taste better too. I also think a ginger frosting would do, which gives me enough indecision that instead of posting the recipes with frosting, I’ll do without.

Lemon-Millet Cookies

Each formulation makes 6 two-bite or 8 one-bite cookies

Coarse

26 gr. millet seeds

23 gr. Cornstarch

18 gr. Expandex modified tapioca starch

2 gr. Potato flour (NOT starch)

1 gr. Xanthan gum (@ 1/4 tsp)

@ 1/2 cup milk

10 gr. Butter

23 gr. sugar

1/8 tsp lemon extract

2 tsp fresh-grated lemon zest

Pinch salt

Fine

26 gr. millet flour
23 gr. Cornstarch
18 gr. Expandex modified tapioca starch
2 gr. Potato flour (NOT starch
1 gr. Xanthan gum (@ 1/4 tsp)
46 gr. Butter
23 gr. Sugar
1/8 tsp lemon extract
2 tsp fresh-grated lemon zest
Pinch salt

If making the coarse cookies, begin by simmering the millet seeds in milk for 10’. Remove from heat and drain milk from seeds using a screen or cheesecloth. Set aside.

Preheat oven to 425 F. Set out a cookie sheet and a 1/2 sheet of bakers parchment.

If making the fine cookies, in a medium bowl blend flour, starches, salt and xanthan gum.

If making the coarse cookies, in a medium bowl blend starches, salt and xanthan gum.

Cream butter and sugar. Best results come from butter at @ 60 F creamed with the sugar for @ 1 1/2 minutes on high-medium speed. Add lemon extract and blend. Add zest and blend.

Add flour blend to creamed butter (fine cookies) or add drained seeds (coarse cookies) and then starches blend. Blend until dough comes together in a cohesive ball.

Divide the dough into 6 to 8 small balls and distribute on cookie sheet, leaving @ 2” on all sides of each ball. Flatten with the back of a spoon or a fork.

Bake a total of 16 minutes, rotating the cookie sheet half way through the cycle. Remove to a rack and allow to cool.

Mise En Place

2011-10-29T18:28:00.001-04:00

A freak October blizzard howls outside, tearing down trees and bringing to an over-dramatic close the spectacular mushroom season of 2011. Hardcore foragers will scoff, but when my favorite fleshy basidiomyces freeze solid, I head for the stack of postponed non-fungal projects. Unlike true myco-fanatics (some of whom foraged in NYC's infamous Boxing Day Blizzard of 2010), I'd rather bake than study slime mold scraped from an icy log.

Mushroomer Jason Cortland

So it's back to the two-bite dessert project, but this time with a vengeance. Uninterrupted by reports of momentous blewit outcroppings, I can concentrate on the next phase: cookies.

Before I do, though, I'd like to set some things right. That is, provide a bit of mise en place about tools and texts.

Texts first. You can't love baking without loving cookbooks. Set me down in a big-box bookstore, or better yet, Powells in Portland Oregon, and I'll gravitate to the cookbook section like an iron chip floating to magnetic north. I don't buy much, but the pictures entice me, the ingredients and techniques astonish me, and the authors' credentials impress me. It's like visiting an X-rated video store, but without the fantasy and humility. (I could acquire author credentials!)

Several weeks ago I found myself in a cookbook section of a Barnes and Noble in Carmel Indiana. There I found, tucked among the food porn, a slim and almost-unillustrated volume that has changed my baking life. The book is Michael Ruhlman's Ratio, and it is pure magic.

What Ruhlman has done is assemble universal cooking ratios in a single, clearly written and easy-to-understand volume. Ratios are the hidden engine behind recipes; anyone who's done anything in the kitchen has used them. (Example: to make coffee, use 1 heaping tablespoon of ground coffee for every 6 oz of water.) However, Ruhlman has reduced them to mathematical simplicity, removing gibberish (how does a "heaping tablespoon” of solid relate to 6 oz. of liquid?) and pointed out their universality. This elevates ratios to the status of architecture - ie, the underpinnings of everything we cook - while at the same time de-mystifying them.

A bit of caution before you rush out and buy your copy: Ruhlman's ratios are based on wheat flour, and they don't always hold with gluten-free blends. Nonetheless they are close enough to provide useful starting points, plus they are conceptually revelatory. Understanding that all cookies, for example, are based on the same ratio of sugar-to-fat-to-flour liberates the mind from slavishly following others' recipes and frees it to work on one's own. The foundation established, secondary flavors become variables that any creative cook can adjust with confidence.

There's a caveat, however, and it's this: ratios are based on weight, not dry measure. Ruhlman might tell us that biscuits are all 3:1:2 (flour to fat to milk), but you can't put together a reasonable facsimile of anything biscuit-y if you use cups or tablespoons to proportion these ingredients. However, if - for example - you make the biscuits with 300 grams Bette Hageman's Featherlite Gluten-Free flour blend, 100 grams pinched, unsalted butter, and 200 grams buttermilk, you're golden.

Which leads me to the most important tool in my kitchen these days, a digital scale. Like most other home bakers I balked at the prospect of weighing, rather than scooping and eyeballing, ingredients, and then I remembered my Photography Chemistry courses with the late Paul Krot, and how crucial it was to get the quantities right with home-brews. There's little chance a cook will expose himself to such photography hazards as chlorine gas from improperly proportioned bleach, but the more I thought about the unknown territory I was traversing (onward to perfect gluten-free bread!) the more I realized I needed - wanted - reliable instruments.

My digital scale cost all of $30, and was a sacrifice at the time (2008). Shortly after I bought it I realized how unerring my formulas had become, and acknowledged it was the best investment of the summer. Not only that, it was easy to use. Set a bowl on the scale, turn the scale on, pour an ingredient into the bowl until you reach the desired amount, and, bingo. If the ingredient was damp or sticky and adhered to its bowl, the next ingredient could be measured in a new bowl after pushing the button called "tare", which means, "cancel the weight on the scale now so you're measuring only what you add."

Three years later I still use these scales daily, though they're rimmed with flour, nicked and marred. I haven't even changed the batteries!

I've been happy to see a slow public drift toward weighing, rather than dry-measuring. Concurrent with this is the increased use of weight in determining the dietary impact of foods. Hence you can now buy very good scales in places like CVS pharmacies and Bed, Bath and Beyond. I've seen them for less than $10.

Scale and Ruhlman at the ready, I'm about to develop cookie recipes. From the gluten-free perspective this will be a far more interesting and complex project than it would be for wheat-eaters. My pantry doesn't just have one or two flours, but 11 - not counting variations of grains, like blue, red, white and yellow cornmeal. When I apply a sugar-fats-flour ratio to each of these I'll have a wide-ranging pallet of flavors, each of which could be further amplified, riffed upon, or counterpointed with such ingredients as nuts, vanilla, butterscotch, fruits, seeds and so on.

However, before I begin I need to go shopping, and that brings me to two essential ingredients for my mise en place: sugar and butter.

Just listing these makes me chuckle, since I can sense the wince they induce in some readers. Both have been "food villains" in decades past - sugar in the 70's and dairy in the 80's - much as gluten is today. In fact, every health problem the "alternative health" folks now lay at gluten's doorstep (except celiac disease, which is a scientifically documented disorder) has been previously assigned to sugar or dairy. Which is not to say these ingredients can create problems for a minority of individuals. Diabetics need to monitor sugar intake, and sugar can induce tooth decay. (No, it will not speed up your kids - that's a myth). Some people are allergic to dairy, and lactose intolerance is a problem for a few people (contrary to myths circulating the internet, the majority of humans DO have the gene that allows digestion of cows' milk). Finally, some folks don't eat dairy on principal.

If your belief system eschews dairy, by all means don't use it. And if you've got diabetes, sugar, whether in cookies or cakes or most other desserts, is problematic. Finally, butter is a fat, and fats pack a calorie punch. There's also some "bad fats" in the complex structure of butter, so folks with heart problems also need to use discretion. But if you're lactose intolerant (diagnosed by an MD or a DO, not a Facebook post), I say grab the Lactaid and make your desserts with butter, for there's nothing finer.

Taste is not the whole part of it. Unique among fats, butter contains water. When hit with oven heat, butter produces steam. This steam lifts the dough, and if you've figured out a formula that traps the effect, your products will have light, open crumb, or, alternatively, flaky light crumb. Thus they'll be more toothsome than would be the case with any other fat.

Butter also offers some unique structural properties, creaming easily with sugar when it is @ 60F, flattening wonderfully when it's around 40F and melting at about 80F. Before it melts it can flake or raise doughs but afterward it's not so good at this trick. And once melted it can't be returned to its original structural quality no matter the temperature.

Fun with butter, sugar and flour will commence once the pantry is re-stocked. For now I'm watching the snow fly and baking some spaghetti squash. What's on my mind as the afternoon winds down is the evening's main course: a vegetarian pasta. But that's a different blog, as the saying goes.

Out With the Old

2011-10-25T19:29:00.001-04:00

Leftovers, well-used.

I cannot be the only one who's astonished to find November breathing down his neck. Wasn't it just August last week? Probably this means I'm lucky. I must be having a good time.

Changing seasons are an exciting time in my kitchen. I look forward to the treats Winter will inspire (COOKIES!!!) while at the same time savoring those last luscious bites from the rapidly-passing growing season. October in New Jersey is the time of Macoun apples, cauliflower, winter squash, and a final splash of mushrooms:

Grayling mushrooms

blewits and graylings, chicken mushrooms and meadow mushrooms, brick tops and angel wings and oyster mushrooms ... and more. My oven never rests - nor, for that matter does the stovetop.

It's also the season for freezer-diving. Time to dig out whatever items I put in last October and either give them a heave-ho or figure out some way to use them.

Yesterday, rooting past a two-year-old buttercup squash and a dried-out bag of apple chunks, I came to a sack of cranberries. With 2011 cranberries just appearing in stores, it was time to remove 2010's. Luckily, I was ready.

An ongoing obsession with puff pastry had not yet departed. I still think the concept of a buttery, flaky dough has countless applications. Using the basic concept of one part butter, one part flour and 1/2 part water, one should be able to make shimmering little squares of goodness for just about any sweet and many savories. Bananas. Heirloom tomatoes. Blewits with scallops and cream. And, yes, cranberries

Blewits

I thought I'd tussled with puff just about as much as I cared to, but when I saw my fellow bloggers succeeding, I decided against abandoning the challenge. In a recent brainstorm I wondered what might happen if I rolled butter into thin sheets, layered it with gluten-free flour, spritzed the flour with ice water, then stuck the results into the fridge to absorb water, instead of doing it a more traditional way.

Letting the flour do its soak-up thing proved a lengthier process than I anticipated. The flour was hydrophobic, and once spritzed, required a 24-hour rest before it could be worked. Unable to abandon tradition after all, I folded and rolled the rectangle of dough, trying to increase the number and thin-ness of butter layers. I cannot say I recommend this, since a few nice layers are better than overworked dough. Plus the routine is tedious: spray dough, wait a day, flip and fold a few times, spray again, wait again, etc. I guess you could say I've decided, the **bleep** with puff. What I'd most like are tender, flakey, corn-flour biscuits.

We'll get to the biscuits in a future post. In the meantime, a confession: In addition to the cranberries, the freezer contained a bag of frozen plums, circa 2009. Finally, the supermarket had raspberries on sale and I could not pass them by. The tart I made with butter and flour and some other cool stuff ended up being topped with cranberries, raspberries and plums. And here's the recipe:

Two-bite fruit tart

Makes four small servings or two generous ones

For the crust:

1/3 stick butter, very cold

56 grams Bette Hagman's Featherlite Flour blend

35 grams (approximately) ice water

1/4 tsp Xanthan gum

1/4 tsp sugar

pinch salt

For the filling:

@ 1/3 cup cranberries, chopped

@ 1/4 cup fresh raspberries

@ 1/6 cup plums, chopped

2 TBLS sugar

Procedure:

1) In a small bowl, blend flour, Xanthan gum, sugar and salt. Stir to blend well and place in refrigerator until well-chilled. Fill a clean water sprayer with a bit more than the required amount of ice water. Set the sprayer in the refrigerator to chill too.

2) On a well-chilled work surface, cut the butter into 1/4" thick slices. Spread these around and cover with the flour. Lay a sheet of plastic wrap atop this and roll with a rolling pin until each piece of butter is a thin, flat sheet. You may have to occasionally stop and peel the butter from the plastic. Take care not to melt the butter with your fingertips when you do.

3) Remove the plastic wrap and invert it. Scrape up flour from the work surface and scatter on the plastic wrap in an area @ 4" X 6". Spritz lightly with water. Using a metal bench scraper or knife, lay one to several sheets of butter on the damp flour. Sprinkle flour on the butter and spritz the flour. Repeat until all butter and flour is used. Spritz the stack with whatever water remains, then wrap in the plastic and refrigerate for 24 hours.

4) Preheat oven to 400 F. In a medium bowl, combine fruits and sugars. Allow to stand and macerate while working on the pastry.

5) Remove pastry from refrigerator but do not remove plastic. Using a rolling pin, flatten pastry within the plastic, forming a rectangle about 1/4" thick. Roll up edges slightly or create a depression in the center using the back of a spoon. Spoon fruit mixture into depression.

6) Transfer to cookie sheet or floured parchment. Bake for @25 minutes, or until fruits bubble and melt. Cool on a rack.

Rough Puff Rustic, the Director's Cut

2011-10-14T22:29:00.000-04:00

Another Drooling Tart

I'll admit it: I make rustic-looking desserts because I don't have the skills to turn out slick ones. My long love of cooking is untutored. While real chefs were in culinary school, practicing technique day in and day out and learning to make things right, I was in art school, learning that "Things right" meant Ronald Reagan, and therefore beneath my interest.

I'm thrilled whenever the wheel of history twists food design back toward rough-and-ready, as it now appears to be doing. A stampede of chefs (so I read in the NY Times) is interested in foraged foods, foods of Scandinavia, and "real" (ie - homegrown) food. Maybe my desserts will fit right in.

One that should make any neo-rustic menu is Rough Puff pastry, hereinafter called Rustic Puff. (Sounds like a line from a Monty Python movie, does it not? "He's a lumberjack/a rustic puff.....")

Rustic Puff is my gluten-free take on a slacker take on the classic mille foile, and despite being many technique steps removed from Elegant and French, is one delicious pile of dough sheets.

Beginning a month or so ago I became obsessed with puff pastry. It started with crumbly, bitter pie crust. I understand what happened: the chestnut flour I used was stale, and on top of that I under hydrated the dough, so had to add water, re-shape the dough ball, and re-roll the half-rolled crust. But despite the fact that my friends ate the pie without complaint, I couldn't help wondering how to make a real - ie – super-flaky and super-tender, crust.

I recalled a cookbook photo of a chef hammering dough onto several sticks of butter, then folding the results and hammering again. The image entered my dreams, and in them I slaved over an icy countertop with a sledge hammer and kilos of butter, flour flying like sparks from an anvil. I woke up knowing I had to find that picture, see what it really represented, and make the pastry.

Thus passed one of the last days of summer; in a beach chair at our lake club with a generous stack of cookbooks. Results: A) the pastry was called puff pastry; B) the technique did not involve hammering; C) it was nonetheless very difficult; D) traditionally the chef did not develop gluten in the dough; ergo; E) I had a decent chance of making this stuff gluten-free.

You'd have thought my unconscious would have let go at this point but, no. That night I dreamed again of making puff pastry, only this time, because the cookbooks all said things like “The master pasty chef's penultimate challenge” I sweated over a too-hot counter, trying to fold buttered batter that kept melting.

I woke up vowing to make the damned pastry and put nightmares to rest.

Fortunately, I went on-line first. "No!" many home bakers averred, "don't do it the traditional way. Do what the pros do. A shortcut. Rough Puff."

I'll spare a paragraph of misspelled quotes and cut to the chase. With Rough Puff, anyone who can chop butter and push a rolling pin can make passable puff pastry. It helps to have a kitchen scale, I saw one today in CVS for $10) though you can get by with my weight/volume table (click here), and you'll need to be scrupulous about temperature control, but the truth is, Rough Puff is easy.

And Rustic Rough Puff, AKA “I Don’t Give A *bleep* About Pretty,” is easier still.

Mise en place: water, flour, butter, work table, cutter, plastic and roller

You start with equal weights unsalted butter and GF pastry flour, like Bette Hagman’s Featherlite Blend, ice water in an amount @ 2/3 the weight of the butter, plus some white rice flour for surface dusting, and some plastic wrap. Chill the flour in your refrigerator and, if you have the space, chill your work board and your bench knife (or table knife) too.

Cut the butter to this size

When everything is <40F, put the butter on the board, chop it into 1/4” thick slices, sprinkle the flour over this, randomly chop the butter through the flour, making no piece smaller than 1/2” X 1/2”, then press down on the individual chunks of butter with a thumb tip to flatten them. Whey you get all the butter chunks flat, scrape everything into a mound, create a cup depression in the mound top, and pour the water there. Wait a moment, then, using the bench scraper, work the flour and water together until the dough just adheres. Toss this around on the work bench and you’re ready for the next (and last!) step, making layers.

dust with flour

Chop butter into largish chunks

Press chunks flat

Pile of "dough" ready for first roll

Roughly shape the very shaggy dough into a rectangle. Dust this with rice flour, lay a sheet of plastic atop it, then, tapping with the roller, bench scraper of side of your fist, make the rectangle @ 3/4” thick. Stop tapping and peel back the plastic to be sure no butter is sticking to it (if any is, peel away from the plastic, dust with rice flour and toss back on the rectangle). Re-dust the rectangle (or plastic), re-cover with plastic, then roll the rectangle until it is @ 1/2” thick.

Starting the first fold.

The plastic comes off again, and now the “dough” (it won’t look like dough, but more like turkey stuffing) gets folded in thirds, letter style. This forms a smaller rectangle that gets treated just like the last one. You’ll notice that the dough is now smoother and easier to work. You also might discover that your work surface is warming slightly – if so you’ll want to shift the rectangle to a still-cold part and do a pound-roll-fold again (a third time).

After three rolls

The fourth pound/roll should go much smoother, since the flour has fully absorbed all the water. This time you’ll want to make the rectangle as neat as you can, because you want to extend the long dimension and restrict the short one to set-up geometry that can make a four-layer fold, not a three-layer one. When you’ve made the fold, wrap that plastic around your now-finished puff pastry and stick it in the ‘fridge until you’re ready to make something delectable.

Finished and ready for refrigeration

There’s a problem with this basic recipe, however – it’s rather bland. While perfect for supporting cream-painted fruits, it doesn't fulfill the qualities I seek in a dessert any more, namely, such terrific tastiness that two bites are all one needs. So I've begun straying from basics (Surprise! Remember that stuff about art school? What do you think they taught us? Stay on the straight and narrow?) My goal is to rescue Rough Puff. Take it out of a supporting role and make it a star in its own right.

My first experiment used buckwheat flour. (That's why the dough in all the photos is so gray - that's buckwheat for ya.) The “dessert” I concocted was 2” X 2”, 1/4” thick, brushed with maple syrup, and topped with a few crumbled walnuts. Alas, I underhydrated the dough, which meant 6 or 7 folds, not 4. The results were tasty but far from puffy (Oh, well, that gives me material for another blog, and still another excuse to not do a recipe containing eggs). It’s rather like buckwheat shortbread, just not quite as good.

The buckwheat flaky thing

We can all see where this is going, right? 1/4 stick of butter, a trial blend of flours, ice water and pounding and “OMG how many more of these are we going to have to eat?”

Obviously you’ll see more in my next post.

Little Bites

2011-09-28T16:29:00.000-04:00

"Exotic" one-bite millet bars. Recipe below.

In case you haven’t noticed, we in the United States are surrounded by abundance … and obesity. I love to eat, but I’ve always felt I wouldn’t achieve the body mass that others have. Genetics are in my favor (my parents and most of my grandparents were slender), and I love muscle-powered sports – in fact I can barely tolerate sitting still. So it was with dismay that I saw the scale my last physical check-up. At 5 foot 9 I did not want to be 165.

How did I get this way? How do most? Eating more than the body needs is the simple answer, but in order to undo the unwanted, it’s smart to know which, of the many foods in my diet, was the biggest culprit.

I didn’t have to contemplate too hard. In fact I knew what was happening as it happened. (Don’t we always?) Dessert was the problem. Rather: desserts.

In the 9 years since I’ve been bitten by the gluten-free perfectionist bug I’ve worked daily to make great bread, but as I stir and shape and weigh and bake, I mentally wander into sweeter terrain. All those ingredients I don’t use – fats, sugars, dairy, eggs, chocolate – are not only luscious, but the stuff of most baking. And so I sometimes take the plunge turning out chocolate quinoa cupcakes, buckwheat shortbread cookies, buttermilk coconut pie, sticky buns and layer cakes.

weighing millet puffs

Don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing wrong with desserts per se. A world without them would be a grim place. The vast majority of humans can eat butter and chocolate and eggs and sugar without consequence, as long as we don’t overindulge. Desserts add immensely to the joy of dining. The problem is simply one of abundance: too much dessert.

The abundance problem in my life is amplified by the fact that I inhabit a household of two. Dessert recipes for such a “family profile” are virtually non-existent.

It’s true that I can make big quantities of dessert, then share the bounty. When I was employed at the C.C., my students loved when I performed this feat of calorie dumping, and the skinny figure skaters at the rink where I practice still do. Alternatively I can store leftovers. Cookies keep, pies can be frozen, etc and etc. However, neither of these strategies remove the temptation of abundance. If I make a lot of dessert, I eat more than I should.

This presents an intriguing problem (well, intriguing to me): can dessert recipes be invented that will produce very small quantities that are nonetheless richly satisfying? It’s an art-and-science problem involving careful measurement, calculation (all ingredients must be in proper ratios), creativity and an eye for the unexpected (eg: what impact does the volume of heated oven air have ?) Baking is more like architecture than meets the casual mind. To make the thought parallel: if a suburban home is designed as a shrunken version of Chicago’s Sears Tower, will it stand up? Will the elevators run? Toilets flush? Circuit breakers function?

28 grams of chopped walnuts

I’ve decided that my next home baking project is to find out. This will undoubtedly occupy many months of culinary fun, all of which I’ll share on these pages. With a little luck I’ll end up with enough material to create a cookbook. With even more luck I’ll not end up with excess adipose tissue. After all, what would the point be if my efforts turned out unhealthy?

Since one of the biggest scaling and ratio problems will be eggs, the first dessert I’m making does not use them. It’s my take on an old classic, and I present it in two versions – Plain and Exotic. Plain may seem familiar. It’s basically a Rice Crispies treat that I had to stop eating because the cereal contained malt. I’ve now grown so accustomed to the less-sugary millet that I prefer it. The resulting flavors just seem more grown-up. Exotic relies on a product you’ll have to smuggle into the US – Turkish mastic. Plain uses domestic flavors. I hope you try both.

Melting mastic and sugar in corn syrup.

Oh, and about eggs … Eggs are an ingredient in so many baked goods it’s difficult to count. They provide crucial structure, and I have no intention of creating food without them. However, when it comes to ratio and quantity, we can be stymied by the fact that dividing a recipe down to two units might leave us using 1/2 or 1/3 or even 1/5 an egg. I’ll be suggesting ways around this in future blogs. Today we’re just skipping the issue.

Plain and Exotic Cereal Bars

Makes 8, two-bite bars or 16 one-bite bars

Ingredients:

Exotic Plain

10 grams millet puffs 10 grams millet puffs

28 grams chopped walnuts 28 grams chopped walnuts

70 grams almond butter 70 grams chunky peanut butter

pinch fresh-ground nutmeg 2 TBLS granulated sugar

2 TBLS granulated sugar 2 TBLS honey

3 TBLS Turkish mastic 1 TBLS light corn syrup

1 TBLS light corn syrup 60 grams bittersweet chocolate

60 grams bittersweet chocolate 60 grams caramel

60 grams caramel (Caramel is available at King Arthur Flour)

1/2 tsp espresso powder

Procedure:

Line the bottom of two 4” springform pans with baker’s parchment. Spray the insides with spray oil.

Springform pans with parchment added

Using a medium bowl, put puffs and walnuts together and stir to mix.

Place sugar, cornstarch and mastic (honey) in a medium saucepan. Place over medium heat and, stirring continually, heat until the sugar melts. Add almond butter (peanut butter). Stir to an even consistency. Add cereal mix and stir to blend. NOTE: mix will be heavy and hard to stir.

Turn hot mix out into springform pans, dividing equally. Press down with the spoon back to achieve a smooth surface. Set aside.

Mixture pressed into place

Add caramel to a small, heavy-bottom saucepan and place over very low heat. Stir and heat until caramel is melted. Add chocolate, small bits at a time, stirring continually. When all chocolate is melted and mixture is well blended, pour onto puffs in pan. Smooth with spoon back and place pans in refrigerator.

After about 45 minutes, desserts can be removed and cut. Return to refrigerator and allow to cool completely before serving.

Store in a cool place, or refrigerate.

Coated and ready to chill

At Least We Have Mushrooms

2011-09-14T17:40:00.000-04:00

If you’re sick of reading about wild mushroom adventures, you can rejoice: the season is rapidly nearing an end. But be forewarned, it’s not over yet. In fact from the point of view of most foragers, it’s just now reaching a peak.

Fall is the time of greatest variety of species, and in many cases the greatest bounty within species. In the worst of years there’s usually something out there. Damp years there’s ALWAYS something out there, and hurricane years … well, they’re rare.

There’s a trail I park at where I can tell what the mushroom take will be with a glance out the windshield. An oak at the turnout sprouts a Maitake every good year. This time there were two.

I parked, pulled my collection knife from my pocket, and walked over. The mushrooms – also called hen-of-the-woods or most properly, Grifola frondosa – were the most tender of their species I’d ever touched. Thinking – knowing – there’d be more beneath other oaks up the mountain, I stuck the Maitake twins in my car, grabbed a collection basket and two shopping bags, glanced at but did not pick up my backpack, and took off.

The forest was as damp as a dishtowel. Sunlight filtering through the trees was muted by a scrim of fog. The day was windless and utterly silent, save for the distant drumming of a grouse and the occasional scratch and thump of a falling acorn. I was thinking about a post my friend Paul Sadowski put up several days back, in which he’d said foraging in the East this fall was a “Mushroom a minute,” the best he’d ever seen. Taking in the forest floor, I calculated one per second. Stripping away the inedibles would maybe equal one per minute, I acknowledged. And then I spotted hedgehog mushrooms.

Sweet tooth, some call this genus. There’s two species, both good edibles – the whitish Hydnum repadnum (also called pied de mouton, or sheep-foot) and the smaller, orange Hydnum umbilicum. My find was the latter and I eagerly pounced. Each was about the size of a thumb, big for H. umbilicum. There were at least ten, and in a place I rarely found any. I dropped them into a quart berry container, stuck this in my collection basket and trekked on, feeling very optimistic.

I don’t recall the moment I first noticed mosquitoes. I could have been in a dull few seconds between ever-proliferating patches of H. umbilicum and a remnant batch of black trumpets, which I was in fact surprised to see. Or it could have been when I ducked into a very damp spot to gather 40 hedgehogs, which were not small in this area but the size of silver dollars.

Mosquitoes don’t usually bother me. I’m one of those lucky ones whose bites don’t itch or swell. But the noise and feel of little wings on the skin is annoying, and when there’s enough of them the gnawing does hurt. Brushing them away as I harvested I wondered about DEET-ing myself. But the stuff I carry is 100% and stinks like hell. I wasn’t sure I wanted the car to reek of it. So I postponed the application.

1/4 mile later I was bitten head to toe, though not minding too much because I had more H. Umbilicum than I’d ever seen and another Maitake tree was in sight. And then I got to that tree. And forgot about everything. The Maitake was a giant hemisphere nearly 3 feet in diameter. Never had I found one so huge. And it was not stale.

5 minutes of cutting and cleaning were followed by several more minutes maneuvering the monster into a shopping bag. I chose the largest, sturdiest one, but even as I turned to go back down the trail I had an inkling it would be insufficient. The handles strained and the paper sagged. I knew the mushroom was damp. I determined to get back to the car as quickly as I could.

This turned out to not be an easy task. Every ten steps there was another batch of Hydnum. Some were as big as dessert plates – I simply could not pass them by. Plus an occasional chanterelle, honey mushroom or lacterius showed itself. I simply had to collect.

For each new find I had to set the bag down. It was too heavy to hold while I bent and cut. At about the fifth stop the inevitable happened – a tear. No problem – I’d carry it under an arm.

By this time the basket was too heavy for me to swing it around easily, which meant that mosquitoes landing on the sack-carrying arm couldn’t be brushed away. Hurrying now and cursing, I almost missed the biggest treat of all: a patch of maybe 20 chanterelles, each one bright orange and big as a softball.

I put the bag down one more time. My back-up bag was just enough to hold the chanterelles. I picked up the Maitake… and its bag shredded into fragments.

That last quarter mile between chanterelles and car will go down as the bookend to an extraordinary and extraordinarily uncomfortable mushroom year. What began in the chilly May rain as friends and I fought hypothermia foraging morels ended in a sweat-and-mosquito bath on a rocky steep trail. I carried that Maitake baby-to-chest, while both arms got chewed to shreds, my glasses skidded down my nose, and my shirt acquired more unpleasant scent than any dozen bottles of DEET. By the time I finally unloaded, all I could think about was my condo’s pool and the relaxing laps I’d do as soon as I got home.

Later – much later –a pool-water-smelling me sat at the dinner table smirking over an excellent haul and an even better story. Leslie was staring at her laptop looking peeved. I knew there was a message from our condo management, and she’s on the board. “Unbelievable!” she exclaimed, raising her eyes to me. “You didn’t go swimming today, did you?”

“Uh, yes…”

“When did you have time?”

I gestured at the kitchen counter. “All this took only an hour.” My story swelled in my throat.

“Oh. Well. Too bad.”

“Huh?”

“A-202 let their dogs swim in the pool yesterday.”

My story stopped dead. “What?” I exclaimed. “What kind of morons live here?”

She rolled her eyes sympathetically, in just the right way to show solidarity while calming my outrage. Right, I thought. Indulgent, half-witted dog-owners. Probably though they would have fled a forest at the first buzz of mosquito. “Fine them,” I suggested. “If I get sick I’ll sue them. But in the meantime, we have mushrooms.”

Tongue

2011-08-30T08:33:00.001-04:00

Note: This blog does not give you enough information to identify any wild mushroom.

Never eat a wild mushroom unless it is absolutely identified by an expert!

Night was falling as I lurched through the woods, my feet finding the trail by instinct. An expanding patch of chanterelles had drawn me deep into the forest and I'd only stopped picking as the last rays of sun disappeared through the oaks. Fortunately this was a familiar place, and I was confident I could get back to the car. But it would be no fun in the pitch-black.

F. hepatica's sticky upper surface

Suddenly I stopped. Hanging onto the side of a dead stump was what looked like a cow tongue. Although I could barely see it, and really didn't have the time to inspect and judge, I went over for a squeeze. Squishy. Damp. An acidic scent. Could it be? I reached for my knife and collecting bag.

20 minutes later my car's dome light revealed my good fortune. That fat tongue was Fistulina hepatica, AKA beefsteak mushroom, an unusual but delectable species. Cautiously I took a confirming nibble. F. hepatica is one of the very few mushrooms that is safe to eat raw, and it has such a distinctive flavor it's hard to mistake. A better ID - checking the undersurface with a hand lens, which, if the specimen was Fistulina, would reveal a network of independent tubules - would have to wait; my lens was at home. But my mouth didn't lie: sharp ascorbic acid gave way to rich mellow fungus. F. hepatica indeed.

The distinctive underside in close-up

Several years had passed since I'd found one of these, and I was thrilled. The question now was what to do with it. I've made a decadent and simple appetizer with the last "catch", slicing it thin and layering it with stale, stinky mozzarella. Alas my "mozz" source has gone out of business. Plus we were going to dinner with friends the next evening and I wasn't sure their taste for the unique extended so far. The appetizer was, frankly, weird. F. hepatica is slimy-chewy, and the lemon-plus-raw fungus flavor borders on disgusting, with a strong undercurrent of danger.

And then it hit me: the combination of sharp and rich was not unlike beef cooked with sour cream. Stroganoff, in other words. Before I left the parking lot I'd mentally formed a recipe: F. hepatica and onions sautéd in butter, cream added, maybe garlic, served over noodles.

There was one significant obstacle: Hurricane Irene was due to hit in 48 hours and the last thing I could imagine was me in the grocery store searching for GF noodles. Luckily my pantry revealed a box of unopened spaghetti. Well, I rationalized, this wouldn't be a traditional Stroganoff anyway. Sticking the spaghetti back and putting the F. hepatica into the refrigerator, I set the project aside for a night when I didn't have dinner already prepared.

Peeled, it looks like sandstone cliffs

24 hours later I pulled the mushroom out for a photo session, only to discover its gooey upper surface had stuck to the paper storage bag. (Note to the uninitiated: wild mushrooms, which are often super-hydrated, should never be stored in plastic). This turned out well, for that layer was unappetizingly decorated with bug bites, pine needles and random dirt, and when I tried to loosen it from the paper, discovered it peeled from the rest of the 'shroom very nicely. Moreover, when peeled, F. hepatica turns out to be a most attractive specimen.

Sliced, in fact, this unique mushroom looks a dead ringer for well-marbled brisket.

Yes it is a mushroom!

I wanted to barely sauté this specimen. Long cooking would soften it a bit much, I thought, and there was something about that disgust/danger/umami combination I found appealing. However, the acidic taste was very strong, and I also wanted to incorporate lots of cream flavor. I ended up barely softening the mushroom in hot butter, then simmering in cream for a few minutes. A bit of Mexican lime (“Cal”, or calcium hydroxide) neutralized some of the tartness (baking soda would have done as well, perhaps), and shavings of garlic scape produced a nice finish. It became a bit bland, but retained its tongue-like chewiness, which made for a very sexy meal. Grated Parmesan gave a final burst of flavor. My one regret was insufficient onion. However, that’s better than overabundant onion.

Granted that few readers will ever dine on anything so exotic, I do think a similar dish could be accomplished with Portobellos (which are not wild, btw, or even any different from white button mushrooms. They’re just overgrown buttons) or Porcini. Let’s call this a vegetarian Stroganoff, and if you ever do have a chance to prepare it with F. hepatica, I hope you will.

Water

2011-08-27T14:29:00.000-04:00

What's not to love about a summer so damp that every excursion into the forest produces bags of wild mushrooms? Fruit, that's what. All that excess moisture works its way into those luscious edibles, turning them bland. If you ate blueberries recently and found them lacking, or if - like me - you've yet to buy a New Jersey melon that's worth what you paid, thank the rain.

I was sorely disappointed recently when, after cleaning several pounds of black trumpet and Boletus edulis mushrooms, I went to reward myself with a slice of cantaloupe and found tasteless mush in my mouth. I was tempted to throw the whole thing away, but then I realized what I'd just done with about half the mushrooms, and a light bulb went on. The trumpets were arranged on a drying rack. I had a spare insert. What would happen if I dried slices of melon?

Semi-dry melon chunk, used to "mop up" leftover cur

After 8 hours at 135 F, the truth was revealed: though only semi-dry, the melon was far tastier than fresh. Moreover, the mushiness had turned to chew. Now I had a new problem: What to do with half a pound of sweet chewy melon slices. I wanted to make some kind of dessert to take to friends for dinner, but just 3 days ago I'd promised myself to stop making big and overabundant ones. Half a pound of melon (which, granted, could be eaten by itself or served with a nice sharp cheese, either of which would be a perfectly acceptable dessert) would make a helluva lot of dessert.

It took an hour of wandering vacantly around the apartment before I came up with an idea: Lime plus melon = good. With a little mental effort I expanded this to lime curd atop melon atop a disc of puff pastry. In a 6 oz. ramekin it would qualify as Small Dessert.

The problem was, I'd never made puff pastry. Discarding that idea (I was feeling lazy; go figure), and considering our probable hosts, one of whom must reduce her cholesterol, I decided to simply work chunks of coconut butter into GF pastry flour, chill and flatten this dough then cut discs for the ramekins and blind-bake.

This turned out to be not straightforward, since the coconut butter I'd found became liquid on my 80 F counter top. Some tricky work with ice saved the day, but then I had to flatten and roll the dough, and that was a handful. I ended up with a layer 1/4" thick. I wished for thinner but decided thickness would be no problem since it might absorb moisture from the melon, becoming more tender in the process.

Dough disc in the bottom of ramekin

A bit of research turned up a curd recipe that wasn't all egg yolks (again, cholesterol was on my mind). The rest was a cinch. If you're so inspired, the recipe follows:

Lime curd and semi-dehydrated melon dessert

Makes 4, 6 oz. ramekins

Ingredients:

For the melon: 1/4 large cantaloupe, honeydew, or similar melon, cut into inch- thick slices with rind removed.

For the curd: 4 limes

3 large egg yolks

2 large eggs

4 TBLS unsalted butter, softened and cut into small pieces

1/2 cup sugar

pinch salt

For the crust: 150 grams Bette Hagman's Featherlite flour blend (*)

50 grams granulated sugar

15 grams almond flour

1 gram Bakewell cream

0.5 gram baking soda

(alternate to Bakewell Cream and Baking Soda = 1/2 tsp baking powder)

0.8 grams Xanthan gum

0.3 grams salt

6 TBLS coconut butter

1 large egg yolk

1/2 TBLS white vinegar

1 1/2 TBLS ice water

(*flour blend: 167 grams white rice flour, 115 grams tapioca starch, 145 grams cornstarch, 13 grams potato flour {NOT potato starch})

Procedure:

Prepare the melon: Place the melon slices on the rack of a food dryer and run the dryer at 135 - 145 F for 8 hours or longer. The objective is to dry the slices to chewiness but not leatheriness.

Make the pastry dough: in a large bowl, blend dry ingredients. Chill. Bring the cocoa butter to 50 - 70 F and tear off pieces the size of lima beans. Stir these into the flour blend, then, using your fingers, pinch them flat. Toss and tear and pinch until the fat is well incorporated. Add egg yolk, vinegar and ice water, toss and stir with your fingers and press into a firm ball. Spritz once or twice with more water and refrigerate at least 4 hours.

Make the curd: Grate zest from one of the limes and set aside. Extract juice from the limes. In a large bowl, whisk sugar, yolks and eggs until blended. Add lime juice and blend.

Place blend in a medium saucepan and set over low heat. Stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, add the butter, one chunk at a time. Continue stirring for 10 - 15 minutes until mixture thickens so much that the spoon leaves clear trails revealing the bottom of the pan. (note: If mix starts to curdle remove immediately from heat and whisk vigorously).

Remove curd from stove and transfer to a medium bowl. Whisk in the zest. Cover and refrigerate 4 hours or more.

Finish and assembly: Remove dough from refrigerator. Warm to 50 - 70 F. Place between two large plastic sheets. Using a tortilla press, or pressing with your hands, flatten to a disk about 3/4 inch thick. Use a rolling pin to flatten to @ 1/4" thick. Cut circles of dough and place in the bottom of 4 small ramekins. Save remainder in refrigerator or freezer.

Ready for the table.

Blind-bake at 425 F for 14 minutes. Remove and cool.

Carefully cross-slice melon sections into pieces @ 1/8" thick. Arrange on crust discs.

Spoon curd in equal amounts onto melon slices. Re-refrigerate, and serve garnished with a chunk of watermelon.

Cravings

2011-08-22T10:23:00.000-04:00

Supercell advancing

One more day of vacation. We'll hike some in the Black Hills, then it is off to Rapid City and our flight home.

We came to this state to satisfy questions that had turned into cravings: What are the Black Hills like, and why do so few Easterners go there? What's the Res like? How does it feel to breathe the air at Wounded Knee? How are the sounds and smells of the Great Plains different from the places we grew up?

Now we have answers, some expected (Wounded Knee exudes spiritual tragedy to this day), some astonishing (the Black Hills are filled with granite spires and Ponderosa pine), and some ethereal (the song of a meadow lark - if you've never experienced it, it is difficult to explain).

Ciabatta friend, it is time for you to "go public".

And there are new cravings: my own cooking, a launch to my bread business, lounging beside "our" lake, foraging in NJ's very wet woods.

When I get home it's focus on flatbreads as I prepare for a workshop October 7-8. It's weird that I've been dreaming about them (flatbreads), but perhaps that's better than my usual August dreams: classrooms filled with unresponsive students. So, hey out there, if you want to learn to make easy thin crust pizza, delicious cheese-and-mushroom-stuffed gorditas, or a Finnish treat - Karelian bread - all gluten free of course, just let me know!

Prairie Morning

2011-08-20T11:11:00.000-04:00

There is nothing quite like stepping out in a prairie morning after a night of thunderstorms. The songs of meadow larks ring bright; everything smells clean; and diffuse, cool light makes the grasslands glow.

Cultivated sunflowers near Pine Ridge SD

Yesterday we drove south and east out of Custer State Park in the Black Hills, destination Badlands National Park. It was a day of car touring across one of the most contested landscapes in post-civil-war history – the Lakota Sioux lands of Pine Ridge. We stopped for lunch in the town of Pine Ridge and spent major time at Wounded Knee. And while a long discourse on the genocide that unfolded there is not my topic today, I urge folks to Google “Wounded Knee” and read for themselves.

It was a cool and windy day – so cool it was difficult to sit outside more than 20 minutes. Sooty clouds accompanied the entire drive, which in a way was unfortunate, since I’m trying to dry a stack of bolete slices in the car. But the light was gorgeous. East of the Black Hills the land shifts to rolling prairie alternatively cultivated and wild, and the soft blue light turned the panoply of greens, yellows and tans delicious.

Badlands scene

We got to Badlands in the late afternoon, had one of those meals that makes you think, “Must be tough to have Celiac out here,” then made a short hike while watching a vast storm circle, pause and pass to the east.

Methinks this park is not on most visitors’ overnight radar. Accommodations are limited, the campground seems less than 1/2 full and the access roads were quiet all night. If you’re driving to or from the charismatic places – like Yellowstone – you could “do” Badlands as a just-off-I-90 loop, which is, I suspect, the profile of a visitor. Yet the park is a perfect respite for Eastern Urbanites: spacious, quiet and utterly exposed to the sky.

Sunset, Badlands National Park

It is this last element that defines the prairie for me, the constant, huge and overarching sky. Here we are at the utter mercy of weather. What is up there comes down at us without impediment or consciousness. We must be subjugated by nature, there is no hope of subduing her.

But enough – the day is cool and bright again and the larks invite me. Enjoy your day, and tune in again (does anybody still know what that idiom means?) soon!

The sky, always the sky.

Briefs

2011-08-19T10:37:00.000-04:00

Leslie in Awe

Time is short this morning as we pack to move on. Instead of filling this page with lots of prose I'll mostly add captioned photos, including some that (friends will understand) demonstrate that this trip is now complete.

We hiked a goat trail to this magnificent pass.

Descending. Find the hat, find Leslie.

Under pines at the pass. Lactarius deliciosis.

Well deserved.

Next stop: Badlands and prairies.

Strange Days

2011-08-17T22:57:00.000-04:00

Among the tourists at Mount Rushmore

My wife Leslie and I take the strangest vacations. Three weeks ago we were in Vermont foraging mushrooms, then I went to Pennsylvania for more of the same. In late August we’ll be swimming and BBQ-ing at a NJ lake club and right now we’re in South Dakota.

Sylvan Lake by Leslie Bryan

I’ve been loathe to mention SD to my sophisticated friends, but I now realize it’s time to put away fear. Where we are – Custer State Park in the Black Hills – holds its own. As Leslie said when we drove in past towering spires of white granite and cool, lush groves of ponderosa pine, “Wow. Who knew?”

Of course The Black Hills are home to Mount Rushmore, tourism center for the middle west (where you cannot get close without forking over 11 bucks for parking, $50 for motorhomes) but the state park is the real gem. It’s sited to capture the greatest number of rugged granite spires in the Black Hills, which makes for awesome hiking, excellent climbing (probably – that sport is off our radar for now), and challenging car-touring (think tunnels at the apex of switchbacks). Most surprising it also has a line-up of first-class lodging.

We’re staying at Sylvan Lake Lodge, a small but classy hotel overlooking the eponymous body of water and Harney Peak, South Dakota’s high point (7124 feet.) The lodge itself is at 6,400 feet, which means the air is clean and cool and the night sky, spectacular. There’s an excellent dining room too: last night we had Dakota Walleye pan fried to perfection, and our waiter “got it right” in the celiac department, skipping bread and croutons and answering our questions about preparation.

On the wildlife loop. Yes, mules here are wild. No, they are not smart.

We’re here for the out-of-doors, however, so today we visited the granite presidential portraits, drove a road called the wildlife loop and hiked the prairie at Wind Cave National Park.

Photo by Leslie Bryan. No telephoto lens involved.

The park seems especially proud of its bison herd, members of which are dully impervious to automobiles. It’s no wonder they were easy targets for the white settlers. Archaeology tells us they were pretty easy for indigenous peoples too. Today it’s speculated that the herd was rather small by 1400 – going the way wooly mammoth and hairy aurochs had gone – but grew very rapidly after the Europeans landed on Atlantic shores. You see, our infectious diseases raced westward before we did, decimating those humans who had no immunity. With fewer hunters decimating them, the bison grew to 60 million strong by the 1880’s. We then set out after them – by 1920 there were only about 600 alive.

Today there are enough bison for guys like me to eat a “buffalo burger” (hold the bun, please) every now and then, a treat I appreciate. (The meat is rather tasty). I’ve not had one this trip though – at least not yet. Our big score on food was of the vegetarian variety: at the rather skimpy Rapid City Farmer’s Market there was one guy selling heirloom tomatoes. Sliced and served with Basque cheese they made a wondrous lunch.

Camouflage

2011-08-13T21:20:00.000-04:00

(Under the guise of a blog much good news is revealed.)

This past week proved an ideal time to stoke my test kitchen ovens. It was rather cool for the NE, and, since I needed to tweak my bread-in-a-bag formula, improve my Bold Buckwheat recipe, and come up with an unique flatbread, I baked my @@@ off.

As Luce's Gluten-Free Artisan Bread negotiates with a wholesale bakery that's interested in producing our line, one of the activities I've "kept for myself" is the right to teach workshops, as long as the content doesn't reveal any unique inventions. So, on the weekend of October 7 - 9 I'll be offering a flatbread workshop at the Gluten-Free Living Now Expo in Carmel Indiana.

GF Karkalan Piirakka, ready for the table

I'll be demonstrating my way of making thin-crust pizza as well as cheese-and-mushroom-filled gorditas. Also, thanks to a former student and her mother, the class and I will be crafting Karjalan Piirakka.

OK, don't bother trying to pronounce that. "Karelian Bread" is the way I say it. It's a Finnish delicacy, or so say Kiran and her mother. (Mom should know - she's a chef for the Finnish ambassador in NYC.) Unique among the world flatbreads it's made with rye flour, which of course I can’t digest. It’s taken several iterations but I finally have a reasonable GF recipe.

As it happens I've got 5 lbs of gluten-free rye flavoring, courtesy of a wholesale buy from Authentic Foods. It only takes about 10 grams to give a big flavor punch to two pounds of bread, so I have enough to make hundreds of discs of Karelian.

In Kiran's Karjalan Piirakka recipe, the dough is rolled thin enough "to see seven churches through it," a technique that’s virtually impossible without something stretchy involved, like gluten or fat. However Kirelian bread is supposed to be lean: flour, water and salt - no shortenings, no leavens and no conditioners. Thus it was a perfect opportunity to put cassava flour to the test.

Count the churches

For several months I've been experimenting with American Key Foods Products' King Lion brand cassava flour. This interesting ingredient works wonders with GF sweets and has vast potential for savories. I've made black chocolate brownies and Chinese dumplings with it and have incorporated it into "beta" breads. It imparts chew and stretch as well as vaguely exotic flavors. At my last meeting with Mel Festejo and Connie Ponce de Leon of AKFP I learned the company was making King Lion available to home bakers. Small quantities can now be bought through the company's website (click the hotlink above.) It's definitely worth a try.

Discs of dough and dusting flour

My adaptation of Kiran's Karjalan Piirakka recipe was very much a shot in the dark, since I've never tasted "the real thing." Not only did I need to figure out a GF version, but, since Kiran's recipe would make 12 - 14 "pasties" (sorry but that word always makes me think of burlesque), I had to tame the quantity. I ended up with too little rice, which left me unable to resolve the dough edges nicely. Also my bread tastes not quite rye enough. I'm on the right track, however, and in subsequent versions I'll come close enough to hand something over to mother and daughter for a taste test. In the meantime I'll go ahead and share what I've come up with, knowing that one of you will create tasty modifications and improvements.

Ready for the oven

Always use the right serving utensil

(Or perhaps you'll sign up for my October workshop, by which time I'll have it nailed).

Enjoy! Karjalan Piirakka is particularly great for breakfast.

Gluten-Free Karjalan Piirakka.

makes 2, 6" circular pasties

ingredients:(for dough) 21 grams cassava flour

15 grams sorghum flour

15 grams teff flour

10 grams potato starch

1 gram potato flour

2 grams xanthan gum

1 gram salt

4 grams Authentic Foods rye flavor

75 grams water

melted butter for brushing onto bread

(for filling) 1/3 cup arborio rice

1 cup whole milk

salt to taste

Procedure:

1) Place all dry ingredients in a medium bowl and stir to blend. Add water and stir vigorously to form a thick dough. Set aside.

2) Put the milk in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil and sprinkle in the rice. Reduce heat to simmer, and cook, stirring occasionally, for 15 - 20 minutes, or until the rice becomes "al dente". Remove from heat and salt to taste.

3) Position an oven rack to the highest slot. Place a pizza stone on the rack. Pre heat oven to 500 F.

4) Place a sheet of plastic wrap on your kitchen counter. Dust liberally with sorghum flour. Turn dough out onto this. Dust your hands with sorghum flour and shape dough into two equal spheres. Pat the spheres into discs, then, using a well-floured rolling pin, roll the discs very thin (see text, above).

5) Slide discs onto a well-floured pizza peel, or (alternatively) a sheet of parchment paper. Spread rice porridge onto discs. Fold edge over the rice to keep it from oozing onto the stone and decoratively pinch the dough edge. Slide the pasties directly onto the hot stone (or, if using parchment, slide parchment onto the stone). Bake until the rice has small brown spots, 5 - 10 minutes. Remove from oven and place on a rack to cool.

6) Before pasties have cooled to room temperature, brush liberally with melted butter. They can be stacked in a paper bag at this point, which will soften them. However they're perfectly good when crispy, too.

Serve as is, or with hard-boiled egg chopped fine and stirred with butter.

In The Woods

2011-08-06T18:56:00.002-04:00

For the past three days I've been rooting in the damp woods of central Pennsylvania as a participant in the North American Mycological Association (NAMA) annual foray. This is a first NAMA foray for me, so I was as puzzled as many of you by what exactly would happen. Here's the story:

Bolete display table at NAMA

If that sounds totally weird, well, that would be a description fitting many of us. Who besides a fungi-lover not only enjoys rain but can spend weeks trekking off-trail in dripping forests, then emerge to social events where half the conversations in Latin. To most of the world, "fungi" = plague. Mycology is weird by definition. It is also fascinating.

Normal people are surprised to discover how many fungi there are on planet earth. If you count the zillions of unicellular organisms, like yeasts and molds, there are tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands. Even if you just count the macro-fungi - those big enough to be seen with a naked eye - there are thousands. How many thousands it's hard to say, because fungi as a kingdom are woefully understudied. Barely a year passes that new species aren't discovered, described and named. In fact, mycology is one of the few fields in which a science-minded individual can hope to make a truly original contribution.

(News Flash: On Sunday, the last day of our foray, identifying mycologists announced that one of our forages had discovered a new species of Amanita.)

Some of the energy that drives an event like the NAMA foray derives from this. Yes, NAMA is an energetic event.

Every day, buses queue up and take hundreds of us into the forests and fields where we scour earth, water, flora and sometimes fauna for mushrooms. Some foragers, like yours truly, are looking for tasty edibles, but most search for beauty, strangeness, rarity or utility.

Meanwhile, back at the campus where our conference is taking place, non-foragers learn from experts. Lecture and workshop topics range from quirky (making dyes from mushrooms) to the esoteric (a tour of ascomycetes[one of the phyla]). Finally, skilled mycologists and university graduate students work day and night with microscopes, chemical stains and exceptional skills in Latin to identify and name what the foragers bring in.

Collections on tables, ID crew on stage

My NAMA experience began with a 5 hour drive from Weehawken NJ, my home, to Clarion PA, site of Clarion University, with three friends from the New York Mycological Society, the local club in which I am active. That part was uneventful. Once we arrived in town things changed. Two of us realized we didn't have a towel as required (?!) so we hustled off to a big box to buy some. Lucky for me I pass through Clarion every time I drive to Ohio, which is frequently, so I could get us to the store fast.

On campus we confronted one of life's predictable mysteries: in an environment rich with graphic designers, artists, cartographers and writers, colleges in general seem unable to create useful maps. Clarion University was abuzz with wandering mycology buffs asking one another where this or that place was, grousing about the huge numbers of stairs that had to be negotiated, and going off in wrong directions. Eventually w e all got registered, received our room and meal keys, picked up the paper-thin scraps of cotton passing for sheets and checked into our (dorm) rooms.

This was only the second time I've been in a dorm since college, and while I suspect the room I'm in is a cut above many, it is just a depressing as I remember. We've got beds and absolutely nothing else. No bathmats, no wastebaskets, no soap, no clothes hangers - nothing.

I've not been in the room very much, however. Every day begins at 6:30. The first buses leave for foray sites at 8:30 and return at 11:30. I spend maybe half an hour sorting out my finds, filling out voucher slips (which include my pathetically inadequate attempts to identify things) handing them over to the mycologists and discovering I'm wrong, then setting them out to be catalogued and photographed by those energetic grad students. "Lunch", provided by Chartwells AKA "gluten free? Oh, you can have the spaghetti"' ends at 12:45 and the second round of forays runs 1 - 4:00. Following "dinner" there's evening lectures and fun stuff, such as prizes awarded by Audobon Field Guide Author Gary Lincoff.

Somewhat surprisingly the forests here haven't been very productive. Instead of shopping bags full of chanterelles, like we pulled out of Vermont last week, there's been maybe 4 quarts. Foragers in the deep white pine woods of Cook Forest State Park found very little of any species, and some genii, like the usually-abundant Amanita, have been rare.

Colorful chicken mushrooms

Nonetheless there are hundreds of things to admire, including the beautiful (chanterelles), the bizarre (insect-eating Cordyceps), the deadly (Amanita virescens) and the illegal (Psylocibia sp.) It's been a great time. I've learned a lot and discovered future hunting grounds. Even made some new friends. Still I'm glad to be heading home tomorrow. I've got three bread formulas to tweak, a business contract to negotiate and several secret chanterelle sites to clean out before taking a vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Which, like it or not, you'll hear plenty about.

Default

2011-08-03T19:06:00.000-04:00

Sometimes the world of fungi does not cooperate. That was the case recently when I took my friend Claudine Michaud in search of black trumpets (Chantherelles fallax) at a favorite site in Vermont. We came back from a 3 hour hike with barely a pint of the tasty, dark fungi.

NOT a Vermont haul. These trumpets (w/ chanterelles for color reference)
came from New Jersey in early July.

I did score a culinary bounty, however: Lobster mushrooms. 8 small ones.

When nature fails, I take a cheap shot: risotto.

Now I realize that if your kitchen is un-air-conditioned, the idea of standing over a stove and stirring simmering rice for 20 minutes hardly constitutes a cheap shot. To explain: risottos are such basic foods it hardly seems worthwhile to blog about them. The line, however, between good and great risottos is so fine it does seem fair to point out a few tricks.

Mushroom risottos are my specialty. I hate to say it, but outside my own kitchen I've had many substandard versions, including a few that cost more than $25. Generally the failures are in the realm of imagination: not enough thought as to which flavors compliment which mushrooms - but all too often they're the result of ordinary cheapness - insufficient amounts of mushrooms and super-abundant quantities of onions.

Thus my attitude: make risottos when you've got enough to load a side dish or small entree with great flavor, and move on to something bigger when nature cooperates.

I cook for two middle-aged adults with small appetites. The risottos I make are tiny, based on 3/4 cup of rice. It does not take many mushrooms to create generous flavor with that portion.

When assembling ingredients I pay special attention to the fats as well as the bright flavors. In the spring, I make risottos with morels, to which I add small amounts of San André cheese, unsalted butter and olive oil. Chanterelles, an archetypal summer mushroom, respond better to Parmesan, butter and hazelnut oil. It's important to not overdo the cheese, though butter and oil are hard to have too much of. Chanterelles can take a bit of citrus, so shavings of orange peel or @ 1/4 tsp lemon juice work nicely.

Lobster mushrooms (orange) and chanterelles

As noted above, my recent prize was lobster mushrooms, which presents a bit of a dilemma. More than one variety of mushroom can confuse a dish. This is especially true when the mushrooms have very different textures as well as flavors. Lobster mushrooms are crunchy with a shellfish underflavor. Chanterelles are melting-chewy with a fruity taste. To solve the potential clash, I incorporate the chanterelles into the risotto and add the lobster mushrooms at the end. This keeps the stove busy and angers the dishwasher but the results are superlative.

Here is my recipe:

Chanterelle risotto with lobster mushroom topping

Ingredients:

1 - 2 cups chanterelle mushrooms, brushed clean and cut or torn into small pieces

1 - 2 cups lobster mushrooms, brushed clean and cut into @ 1/2" cubes (*)

3/4 cup arborio rice

2 1/2 cups chicken broth

1/3 medium onion, diced fine

1/4 cup dry white wine

3 TBLS lite olive oil

1 TBLS hazelnut oil

2 TBLS unsalted butter

@ 2 oz fresh grated, high-quality parmesan, such as Reggiano

1/4 - 1/2 tsp grated orange peel

1/2 tsp salt, or to taste

(*) good supermarkets carry these mushrooms fresh in the produce section from about July through December. I do not use dried chanterelles - I find them to be leathery.

Procedure:

In a medium size saucepan, melt 1 TBLS of the butter over low heat. Add the chanterelles, stir, and adjust heat until they are barely simmering. Braise for 10 minutes, stir, and braise another 10. Add the chicken broth and raise heat slightly, until this stock is barely boiling. Reduce heat to lowest setting.

Place a small skillet over a back burner on low heat. Melt the remaining butter. Add the lobster mushrooms and allow to simmer slowly while you continue making the risotto. You will need to stir the lobster mushrooms occasionally.

Place a second, medium size saucepan over medium-to-high heat. Add the olive oil, and when oil has reached a temperature just below the smoke point, add onions. Stir and cook until they have passed translucency and threaten to caramelize. At this point add the arborio rice. Allow rice to sit, unstirred, a minute or two, then stir to coat all grains with oil. Rest a minute, stir again, then add the wine. Stir constantly until wine is absorbed and rice/onion/wine/oil blend has reached a doughy thickness, then add @ 1/2 cup of the broth-with-chanterelles. Stir and allow to simmer.

Stir the risotto frequently (or constantly) adding mushroom stock every so often to replace what has been absorbed by the rice. After about 12 minutes you should begin taste-testing the rice. When rice has reached the point of just-beyond crunchy, reduce heat to low and stir in parmesan. Add salt. Add stock if necessary, being sure that all chanterelles are in the risotto. Stir well, add hazelnut oil and remove from heat. Stir in orange peel.

Assure that lobster mushrooms are adequately cooked. Scoop risotto into serving bowl. Pour lobster mushrooms over top, being certain to scrape all the bright red cooking oil onto risotto. Serve immediately

Puff

2011-07-28T21:55:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow morning we head off to Vermont for the New York Mycological Society’s annual chanterelle foray, and I’m very excited. Now I realize that to many of you the idea of excitement about mushrooms is about as reasonable as dinner with an ax-murderer, so I have to say – I have no idea what caused the attraction, but I find mushrooms as weird, varied and charming as the human population.

Morel mushrooms

But mushrooms are but a part of this weekend. I get to hang with like-minded folks, many of them long-term, dear friends. And I get to eat. And cook.

Lemmee cook!!

The weekend would not be complete without me making buckwheat pancakes for Saturday breakfast. The recipe was handed down from my mother’s mother (who I never met, she died in 1935). I’ve adapted it to be gluten free.

This is an old-fashioned recipe, and requires a yeasted sponge, which sits overnight bubbling and becoming sour. In the morning one adds baking soda to the blend, then greases the skillet and griddles away. Sometimes the nighttime ferment goes slightly out-of-hand and the batter plays Vesuvius, usually about 2 AM. Well-tuned ears have heard a glop of it slap to the floor. My friend Claudine refers to the process as “Those pancakes that walk out of the bowl.”

Such a power in leavens! And yet, so much mis-information and ignorance. Recently I’ve read so much online chatter about them I thought it might be good to set the record straight.

Leavens are substances that cause breads, cakes and pancakes to rise. Basically they produce gas, which is captured in the structure of a baked good. Oven heat renders this inflation permanent by solidifying the structure.

We like eating leavened foods because they feel good in the mouth. There’s also a taste to leavening agents (often a so-called “acquired taste”) that many find appealing.

There’s two general categories of leavens, chemical and biological. Baking soda/baking powder is the first, yeasts are the second.

Baking soda is a potent alkali. Adding it to an acidic liquid creates a vigorous reaction, including the creation of CO2 gas. Baking powder is mostly acidic. Together the two react once they get wet. In a wet, sugary, protein-rich environment, like cake dough with eggs and milk, they produce lots of CO2 – especially when heated in an oven. (Chemical reactions proceed more rapidly as heat increases).

Baking soda by itself is a leaven when the dough is acidic, as is the case in buckwheat pancake batter that’s been over-fermented by yeast, time (overnight) and temperature (summer warmth). The batter, when hit with a small dose of baking soda, produces CO2, and a rise.

One thing to remember about baking soda + acid: Chemical reactions proceed rapidly and end suddenly. This is particularly true of acid+alkali reactions. If you’ve ever waited half an hour after mixing cake batter before putting it in the oven you know what happens – a doorstop. That’s because the chemical reaction has played out and the gasification is over. It’s also why most baking recipes call for the oven to be preheated and the cake to be inserted immediately.

Also, since the addition of baking soda to an acidic dough creates pH neutrality as well as gas, it’s easy to over-soda sourdough and end up with blandness.

Soda-based leavens are primarily found in sweet baked goods. When it comes to savory, the dominant leaven is biological.

For this you've got to use yeast

Yeast is our biological leaven friend, though “biologic” is a misnomer – “mycologic” fits better. (Mycology is the study of fungi.)

Yeasts are monocellular fungi. There’s hundreds of species and dozens of genus. When it comes to leavening, however, we use but a few.

Yeast leavens do the same thing as chemical leavens – produce CO2 gas. However they produce it through digestion, by ingesting sugars found in grains and “burping out” CO2. A yeast based gas production cycle is much longer and more complex than a soda gas production cycle, because as the yeast cells are digesting they’re also reproducing and producing alcohol as well as CO2. A small quantity of yeast might be all that is added to bread dough, but the food-rich dough provokes the yeast to reproduce. A yeast population produces its greatest amount of gas just before over-reproduction sets in. The trick for bakers is to seize that moment. Wait too long and the taste of dead yeast cells gives the bread an off flavor; bake too soon and the rise is insufficient.

Actually the situation is more interesting than I’ve just let on. CO2 production is a side effect of digestion, not the main activity. Yeasts break down complex carbohydrates as well as simple sugars, producing compounds we humans recognize as flavors. (Side note: This is the third kingdom’s environmental job. Ever see a tree covered with shelf mushrooms? Return in a few years and see what’s happened. Wood tissue won’t become soil by itself; fungi are necessary). The tastes we associate with bread are greatly aided by yeast digestion.

Which brings us to an interesting dilemma: As digestion continues, flavor production increases. Thus it behooves bakers to extend digestion as long as possible. However, for-profit production insists that “time is money”. It behooves investors to extend digestion as little as possible (to produce more product in the shortest amount of time). Thus baking divides between those who are after the most flavor versus those who are after the most profit.

Those in the former group will adjust the yeast in a recipe downward to the lowest possible amount in hopes of prolonging digestion. Those in the latter add as much yeast as they can – and then add sugars to boost speed. It’s CO2 they’re after, not flavor.

Commercial yeasts are all the same species of fungi Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The difference between dry, instant, and cake yeasts has to do with the number of yeast cells per unit measure. You can use these different forms interchangeably by adjusting rise times.

If speed over taste is a formulation you reject, there’s an alternative: wild yeast. To work with wild yeasts means capturing, cultivating and incorporating them as cultures. It’s a tricky process but not impossible, and it has the side benefit of producing a leaven with unique flavor.

But first an aside: There’s a lot of concern today about yeasts’ impacts on humans. In fact there are many fungi that can have a deleterious effect on us, causing problems from “jock itch” to such horrors as Blastomycosis. http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/jan2001.html Fortunately, the yeasts used in baking are NOT the ones associated with human infestations. Nor does the presence of one yeast assure the presence of another. Mushrooms do grow on mushrooms (this is called a hypomyces, and is found in gourmet food with the lobster mushroom) but Candida albicans does not flourish better in an environment rich with Saccharomyces cerevisia.

Capturing wild yeasts is so popular an activity today there’s workshops as well as books and countless web articles on the subject. Basically it involves adding water to grain (usually wheat or rye), keeping the temperature right, and waiting. Eventually a complex community of microorganisms flourishes. This is a sourdough, so-called because the community includes bacteria as well as fungi, and the bacteria create sour-tasting acid.

A sourdough also works by digesting grains, but now the process is even more interesting. The yeast digestion byproducts feed the bacteria, and the acid environment the bacteria create retards yeast reproduction just enough to lengthen digestion to optimal times. Flavors created by sourdough leavening are greater in number as well as intensity than those made with commercial yeast. Seizing the right moment now involves taking pH measurements (to determine acidification) as well as watching time and temperature.

Exactly what species constitute wild yeasts, and exactly where these come from, is the topic of debate. While mycologists know that any cubic meter of sea-level air contains spores from every known fungi, they are also quick to point out that spores alone do not equal life. It may be that exposing grains + water to air captures floating yeast cells, or it may be that the cells were colonized on the grain and “liberated” by water. Also, since identifying yeast species is a job for specialists, bakers can’t say what their wild yeasts actually are. Instead we call them Saccharomyces exiguus: “existing” or “wild”.

The presence of variety in the yeast culture, as well as the absence of aggressive commercial yeasts, may be the reason people with reported yeast allergies find they can eat sourdough bread. However there may be another reason: Correctly done, sourdough fermentation is a long process – 8 to 12 hours. Many of the flour’s complex carbohydrates are digested over such an extended time. Thus the bread is pre-digested and therefore easier for the human gut to process.

It intrigues me that in this world of technology and change, leaven science isn’t exactly evolving. Sourdoughs were probably discovered about 5,000 years ago. Commercial yeasts came to dominance in the late 19^th century, as did baking soda/powder. Basically there’s been no leavening agents invented since.

So when I sling batter onto the griddle Saturday AM, I’ll thank chemistry and mycology as well as family. And after filling myself and 15 good friends up with healthful, nutritious food, I’ll raise a knife and a paper bag to the mycology gods and say, “Bring on the goods.” Not single-celled yeastie beasties, but full-form basidiomyces:

Chanterelles (top), Lobster mushrooms (center) and Sweet tooth (bottom)

Jewelry on the Vine

2011-07-17T13:53:00.000-04:00

I brake for berries. Whether atop a mountain bike, hiking in the woods or driving country roads, the sight of succulent, soft vine or cane fruits brings me to a screeching halt.

It’s because of my childhood. Blackberries grew wild in the Ohio fields, and my father cultivated red raspberries and Boysenberries. Mom never had to ask me to forage the former – a bucket full meant pie for dessert, and what can beat blackberry pie? – while the latter represented pocket change. One of my summer chores was harvesting and pedaling raspberries through the neighborhood.

But more than that – berries taste sublime – period. So I brake for them.

Ripe now in New Jersey are a species of wild raspberries called Wineberries. These gorgeous, beryl-colored fruits look like jewelry. They’re not my favorite; the fruits are waxy and often very tart, but more to the point, they remind me of an unfortunate summer 4 years ago when I fell ill with sepsis. The day I realized I had a fever I was in the midst of a wineberry patch. Still, paired with stone fruit, wineberries make superb pies and tarts.

Three days ago when I drove past what I now call “Sepsis Hill” my eyes tracked right and there they were. A few seconds of braking later and I was in the patch. “Just enough,” I promised myself, “for one pie.”

I had to exercise restraint. Bags of chanterelles and black trumpets filled the back seat, and I had to get them home before they became overheated. Also, I’d planned meals for the week to come and there wasn’t space in the calorie column for pie. In fact there wasn’t supposed to be dessert at all. But we were soon to barbeque with my in-laws – perhaps there’d be opportunity …..

My next stop was a farm market run by a former student, Devin Race. To my immense pleasure she had a bin filled with fresh-picked apricots.

Ingredients in hand I had only to figure out how to use them. BBQ’d tart was a tempting thought. I’ve been trying to expand my public grill repertoire with desserts. I’d recently purchased a cast iron tray – I forget what its purpose is supposed to be – but covered with a sheet of thick aluminum foil it makes a reasonably good ersatz smoker-oven. So far I’d used it on ribs. But why not bake in it?

At this point laziness kicked in and I decided to eschew a classic tart crust, as well as precise technique. “Make it easy” is a perfect summer mantra. I threw about 3/4 cup of almonds into the food processor, added about 1/4 cup roasted Brazil nuts, a short teaspoon of cinnamon and about 2 teaspoons of brown sugar. Processed to coarse flour the nut blend tasted great. 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter (more or less) pulsed with the nut flour a half dozen times and I had “dough”.

At the picnic grounds I pressed the dough into 4 small tart pans, lined the edges with quartered apricots and filled the center with a blend of apricots and wineberries, mixed with @ 1/4 cup sugar. The tart pans had to be layered in my “smoker” – they did not all fit side-by-side. I sat the smoker atop a small charcoal fire, and while Leslie and her parents toured the lake club, I tended the flame (don’t feel bad for me – I’d swum before they got there). Occasionally I got close enough for a good sniff and once or twice I peeled back the aluminum foil to see how things were progressing. It took about an hour – enough time for the day to cool and the swimmers to return to my table.

The tarts weren’t bad, in the long run, though the bottom layer were burnt. I’m giving myself a “C”, with a self-reminder that baked goods can’t rest directly on the smoker oven floor. Next time I’ll make a wineberry buckle and put a heat source inside the contraption, like I’ve done with ribs. A few lumps of untreated charcoal should do the trick.

Oh, you want to know what else we ate? Salad, a “bum pack” of sweet potatoes, sweet onions, bacon and brown suga,r and salmon crusted with black trumpet mushrooms. And, yes, we do eat like that all the time.