Tag: salt

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

185. Tomato Barbecue Sauce p.479

There’s no recipe for this one on Epicurious.

This barbecue sauce is meant to accompany Lillie’s North Carolina Chopped Barbecue, which we’ll get to next time. It’s apparently the style of barbecue sauce popular in Lillie’s part of North Carolina, and is best served slathered over chopped pork barbecue. It probably works well on most grilled meats though. This sauce is unlike most of the barbecue sauces I’ve known. It’s very vinegary, and fairly sweet, without a whole lot of heat, and not a lot of depth.

The recipe has a fair list of ingredients, but since you just stir them together and simmer for five minutes it’s not too much trouble. You just combine tomato purée, cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, apple juice, pineapple juice, brown sugar, dry mustard, salt, chili powder, Tabasco, cayenne, celery seed, and cinnamon in a saucepan, simmer, and apply to the protein of your choice.

The recipe is really heavy on the vinegar, 3/4 of a cup compared to 1 cup of tomato purée. The rest of the ingredients are in tablespoons and teaspoons, so this ratio really sets the tone of the recipe. Cider vinegar is a little sweeter, and less acidic than many other vinegars, but that’s still makes for a very sharply flavoured sauce. The recipe describes this as a particularly sweet sauce, but compared to the BBQ sauces available on grocery store shelves it’s certainly not pushing the boundaries of sugar content. It’s a sauce to be applied near the end of cooking, or over offset heat, it will burn quickly if exposed to direct flame, but it’s by no means a candied glaze.

My main issue with this sauce was a lack of depth. The ingredients mostly contributed to sweetness, acidity, or heat, precious few give the sauce body, richness, or complexity. Specifically many of my favourite BBQ sauces have a slow simmered tomato base, or include smoked peppers, and more spices. The recipe is counting on Worcestershire sauce to cover most of those bases, and while it’s a wonderful product, it just wasnt quite able to do the job on it’s own.

This sauce was by no means bad, the identically named Tomato Barbecue Sauce, and Coffee Bourbon Barbecue Sacues on page 898 seem much more promising. I made a hybrid of those two recipes a couple of weeks ago to great results. If lots of vinegar, moderate sugar, and modest heat is your ideal BBQ sauce, then this is a perfectly decent way to go. It’s just not my personal preference.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

174. Chocolate Sambuca Crinkle Cookies p.671


The recipe

This is a polarizing recipe. If the thought of anise and chocolate together piques your interest, you’ll probably like these cookies. If however that sounds like the worst idea you’ve heard all day, you probably won’t. That may sound trite or obvious, but anise is like that. I don’t know anyone who is neutral on the subject of black licorice. People love it, hate it, or have a complex ambivalence towards it. If a recipe is anise scented, you know right off the bat that that’s going to be a dominant element of the recipe’s flavour.

I’m all for anise, I especially like it in savory cooking, I have a little trouble with those super salty licorice candies the Dutch love, but otherwise anise and I are good. When I first flipped through the cookies section of The Book these ones caught my eye, and I’ve been looking forward to making them ever since. I haven’t done them until now because they needed to be served in the right context. My dining companion and I aren’t huge on desserts, so I usually try to serve them when we have friends over, or to bring them places. It’s hard to bring chocolate-anise cookies to a party or dinner, because you know going in that lots of people are going to hate them. I had to wait until I was making batches and batches of cookies, so that they could be one among many elements of a cookie tray.

The cookie recipe is fairly standard. You sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt, melt bittersweet chocolate and butter in a double boiler, and whisk together eggs, walnuts, Sambuca, and sugar. You then add the chocolate and flour mixtures to the egg mixture and combine. You pop the batter in the fridge for two hours, then roll heaping tablespoons of dough into balls, and toss them in confectioner’s sugar before baking.

The sugar causes the tops to crack, and I was hoping it was going to give the uncracked parts a nice glaze. As you can see a lot of the sugar stayed in white clumps, which I didn’t find too attractive. The insides of the cookies were soft and cakey, studded with walnuts. As predicted chocolate, and anise were the dominant flavours. I used Pernod instead of Sambuca for this recipe (a Book approved substitution), but I should have remembered that Sambuca is much sweeter than Pernod and compensated.

For people who are into anise cookies, these were quite good. They weren’t the most beautiful cookies I’ve ever produced, but the texture was very nice, and the rich chocolate and anise combination was a winner for me. I try to take other people’s opinions into account when rating these recipes, I usually estimate other’s average ratings, and split the difference between their liking and mine. But we have a bimodal distribution here, and the mean is no longer a meaningful statistic, the mode or the median aren’t much help either. Since this is the food blog part of my life, and not the behavioral neurobiology part, I get to violate good statistical practice, and just ignore all those anise haters.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

171. Mexican Tea Cakes p.673


The recipe

While there’s nothing particularly Mexican about these tea cakes, they’re an international favorite for good reason. I’ve always heard these cookies called Russian Tea Cakes, and they mostly seem to be made by older eastern European women at bake sales and Christmas fairs. As children, these were the cookies that we ignored on the big cookie platter, preferring the triple chocolate and jam puddle options. Conveniently the adults in the room weren’t too interested in those ultra sweet and sticky confections, and seemed to prefer the tea cakes. I didn’t get it, the nuts made them taste suspiciously healthy, and they were far too dry. Now nut based cookies are some of my favorites, and I realize what a joy dry cookies are with tea or coffee.

The cookies take a little bit of forethought, but they’re well worth it. You start by making the dough (cream together butter and confectioners sugar, add vanilla, flour, finely chopped pecans, and salt, mix until just combined), and refrigerating it for 6 hours. You then roll the dough into balls, and bake. The hot cookies go directly from the baking sheet to a bowl  of confectioners sugar. The heat of the cookies melts the sugar and ices them for you. Once the cookies have had a chance to cool they go back to the sugar bowl to get a final layer of powdered sugar.

By far the best thing about these cookies is that they keep forever. The recipe says they keep at room temperature for up to three weeks, but I kept mine for more than a month and the last one was almost as good as the first. The pecans are both the prominent flavour and texture of these cookies, and that’s a very good thing. They’re quite dry and a bit crumbly, but their sugar coating keeps them from completely drying out or becoming brittle.

Before making this recipe I’d never realized how cookies like this got so evenly glazed, the hot cookies in sugar method was a real revelation for me. I’m adding these cookies to my repertoire. They’re delicious but not at all showy, can be made well in advance, they work year round, and they  fill out a cookie tray nicely. Having cookies like these in your arsenal is a very smart move.

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

166. Skillet Corn Bread p.600

The recipe in The Book is identical to this one on Epicurious, but The Book adds a tablespoon of sugar to the corn bread.

The desire to make corn bread comes in waves for me. Six months will go by, and I won’t even think of it, then I’ll get the urge, and make it three times in a week. I like to play with my recipes, and improvise. The first batch of the week is usually pretty straightforward, in a baking pan, hardly sweet, good with gravy. Then I get stupid and try putting things that shouldn’t go into corn bread into my recipe. I’ve never once liked the cheese or sausage corn bread I’ve made, and I don’t particularly like corn bread muffins, I should just learn my lesson. I make the third batch to redeem myself. By this point I’ve remembered how much I like leftover corn bread for breakfast, and that I really like it warmed for a few seconds in the microwave, with a bit of butter, and a drizzle of maple syrup. I substitute maple syrup for the sugar in the recipe, and add a bit of extra butter directly to the batter for the week’s final batch, and I am usually well pleased. By the time we’ve finished that pan, I’m so ODed on corn bread that I can’t look at it for another few months.

This recipe takes the unusual step of omitting the flour that’s in most corn bread recipes, it’s all cornmeal. That makes the bread more coarse and granular, and less cake-like. The nice thing about corn bread is that it’s fairly idiot-proof. You just whisk together the dry ingredients, gently stir in the wet ingredients until it’s barely combined, and bake. This bread is baked in a preheated cast iron pan, and the butter that goes into the bread is melted in the pan first, this leaves you with a browned butter coating in the pan, which tastes nice, and helps keep the bread from sticking. The recipe uses the muffin method, of barely combining the wet and dry ingredients, which is usually done to prevent gluten from forming, and making a baked good tough. In this case there’s no flour, so I can’t see why you shouldn’t beat the tar out of it.

This was perfectly fine corn bread, I liked the cast iron skillet method which created a very nice deeply browned crust. This was a dryer style of corn bread than I prefer, and even with the tablespoon of sugar, I would have liked a bit more sweetness. I found it a bit crumbly, and missed the soft texture of a flour based corn bread. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it, and it’s probably somebody’s favourite style. As a recipe I think it worked quite well, I just wasn’t totally on board with what it was trying to do.

Categories
Pies, Tarts, and Pastries The Book

160. Cranberry Walnut Tart p.786


The recipe

Cooking is a learning process, and a lot of lessons just need to be learned the hard way. There are a host of excellent kitchen habits that food educators are desperate for us to get into, such as, reading the recipe all the way through, verifying that you have all the ingredients, doing things that can be done ahead ahead, getting your mise en place, and cleaning as you go. These are wonderful, labour saving, better for you in the long run, habits. Unfortunately it takes a fiasco for me to really internalize any of those teachings.

Today’s lesson was “Don’t assume, you’ll make an ass out of u and me”. I’d already learned the read the recipe all the way through lesson, so it was time to screw up the checking that you have all the ingredients you think you have step. I made a special trip to the grocery store to get the stuff for this tart, and picking up corn syrup wouldn’t have been a problem, but I took it on faith that somewhere in the depths of the pantry a sticky bottle of light corn syrup was waiting for me. I was wrong, in a two cook household you can never trust that the pantry fairies haven’t come along and wiped you out of cream of tartar. For the record, acceptable substitutions for 1 cup of light corn syrup are 1 cup of dark corn syrup, 1 cup of treacle, 1 cup of liquid glucose, 1 cup of honey, or 1 cup of granulated white sugar (increase the liquid in the recipe by 1/4 cup). You’ll notice that 1 cup of maple syrup is not on that list. I knew that I should really make a simple syrup as a stand in, and two seconds of googling would have turned me on to honey, but I went with maple syrup because I’d failed to heed the “do what can be done ahead ahead” lesson, and the guests were coming much sooner than I was ready for.

For this tart I baked off a batch of Sweet Pastry Dough, then whisked together eggs, brown sugar, maple syrup instead of corn syrup, butter, salt, and vanilla, then stirred in chopped walnuts and cranberries which i forgot to chop (I was frazzled). I baked it for half of the recommended 45 minutes because it was starting to burn.

Part of the filling boiled over the sides of the pan and onto the bottom of the oven, and some got between the crust and the tart pan. That left a lot less filling in the actual pie shell, so it began to dry out. Maybe if I’d chopped the cranberries as as I was supposed to they would have released more juice, and kept the caramel saucy. The pie was really sticky and thick, hard to cut, hard to eat, and didn’t taste all that great. The cranberry-walnut-caramel combination should have been a winner, and it might well have been if I’d followed the recipe properly. The people on Epicurious seem to like it well enough.

As a pie this really wasn’t great, but it worked out well as a life lesson. Today I learned that just because I’ve had an ingredient at some point doesn’t mean I still have it. I’ve also started to think about organizing the pantry so that it makes some kind of sense. In future, if the cook’s note at the bottom says that the recipe can me made a day in advance, I’ll consider availing myself of that. Sometimes it takes several painful repetitions for a lesson to sink in, but I’m begining to appreciate the fact that the Gods of pastry aren’t shy about smiting those who play fast and loose with the recipe. I always feel bad when I give a recipe a poor rating when it was at least partially my fault, but too bad, The Book doesn’t actually have feelings that I can hurt. I give my performance as a cook here 1/5 mushrooms, but the tart fares a bit better.

Categories
Cakes The Book

153. Golden Cake with Chocolate-Sour Cream Frosting p.725


The recipe

This cake and its frosting are separate recipes, so I’ll only be tackling the cake in this post. That’s fine by me. I’m sure I’ve mentioned that I’m not really a frosting person. For me, the icing is just getting in the way of the cake. There are icings I like more (buttercream) and icings I like less (glacé, royal icing, penuche), but they’re never the part of the cake I look forward to, and they can often detract from an otherwise lovely dessert. Thankfully there are enough people who feel exactly the opposite way that a my-icing-for-your-cake trade can sometimes be arranged.

I have very little pastry experience, and my dessert terminology is a little vague. Are the terms frosting and icing interchangable? or do they refer to distinct classes of cake topping? Wikipedia redirects a search for frosting to their icing page, and their dictionary definitions don’t appear to be too different. If any of you know if there’s a difference, please enlighten me.

Even if the frosting doesn’t do much for me tastewise, I do appreciate it’s structural role. A giant layer cake would be nothing without it, and I do love a layer cake. They’re the quintessential birthday cake, big enough to serve a crowd, and they look great with candles stuck in the top. A stacked cake like this can make an occasion. Beyond just admiring it when it comes out, watching the host try to serve it is a spectator sport. Will the first piece come out neatly? Will the layers stay together? Can your host flop a slice onto a serving plate with anything approaching grace? Your aunt is watching her weight, just how thin a slice is it possible to cut? We didn’t put any candles on this particular cake, but it didn’t taste quite right without the little bits of wax melted into the top.

The main difference between this cake and a standard yellow cake is the addition of sour cream. You start by sifting together the dry ingredients, flour, baking power, baking soda, and salt, in a bowl. You then cream the butter and sugar in another, followed by eggs beaten in one at a time, and the vanilla. It’s nice of The Book to provide hand mixer instructions, but the Kitchenaid is sitting there on the counter, and there was no way I wasn’t going to use it. The flour mixture then goes in with alternating additions of sour cream. The batter is divided into two round cake pans, baked, and cooled. When it’s time to assemble the cake, you cut off the rounded top of at least one of the cakes, and then divide each of the cakes into halves. They’re then stacked with icing between the layers, and covered with the rest of the icing.

I was quite pleased with the cake part of this cake, I’ll get to the icing next time, but the cake itself was lovely. Sour cream does good things for baked goods, it keeps them exceptionally moist, and adds just a bit of a tang to counter all the sweetness. It was a fairly dense cake with a soft springy texture. It’s a good choice for a big stacked cake like this, it was easy to cut and serve, and stood up to some rough treatment during icing.

If I was looking for a birthday cake for a casual gathering, I’d happily make this again. It’s a bit of a workhorse of a cake, solid, and reliable. Because I’m not all that competent in the pastry department, those are attributes that really appeal to me. I’m working my way up to precious little confections, but even after I’ve mastered them, I’ll keep coming back to crowd pleasing cakes like this.

Categories
Breakfast and Brunch The Book

132. Blueberry Muffins p.641


The recipe

My dining companion has been doing a lot of driving for work over the past few months, and I’ve been looking for little treats that travel well to send along with her. These muffins looked like they’d fit the bill, and I was pleased to discover that they’re not just portable, they’re tasty. They’ve got another of Ruth’s seemingly unnecessary streusel toppings, but that’s not such a bad thing.

The recipe follows the standard muffin method, mix the wet stuff together, mix the dry stuff together, add the wet stuff to the dry stuff, and mix until it’s barely combined. In this case the wet stuff is played by melted butter, whole milk, egg, egg yolk, and vanilla, while the roles of the dry stuff are capably portrayed by flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Once the muffin mixture is together, the blueberries are delicately folded in, and the batter is divided into muffin cups. It then gets topped with a shortbread like mixture of flour, butter, and sugar. The muffins bake at 375 for 18 – 20 minutes.

The muffins were very simply flavoured, rich and moist, with a carefully balanced sweetness that enhanced the blueberries. I like to give credit where credit is due, and this is one baked good where The Book got the sugar right. The topping was less successful, the recipe says to bake the muffins ’till they’re golden and crisp, but they were cooked through, and smelling done before the topping changed colour. If I’d waited any longer the undersides would have burned. I think there was just too much topping, so it was left a bit raw looking. It tasted quite good, but wasn’t as visually appealing as I would have liked.

This recipe gets nearly everything right, good texture, clean flavours, satisfying richness, and a wallop of blueberry essence. Unfortunately the undercooked topping takes away from the effect. I’d certainly make these again, but I’d use half the topping, or omit it entirely. It did lend a nice contrasting texture, but the “studies in white, number 6” vibe didn’t do it for me. Overall quite a nice muffin though.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

127. Barbecued Chile-Marinated Spareribs p.490

There’s no recipe for this one.

These ribs are dead simple, but they take some forethought. The ribs are simmered in water for an hour, then marinated in sauce of New Mexico chiles, ketchup, garlic, cider vinegar, brown sugar, salt, tequila, vegetable oil, ground cumin, and ground allspice for the next eight hours. Half of the sauce is used for the marinade, a quarter to baste during cooking, and the remaining quarter as a dipping sauce at the table. A little more than an hour before dinner the ribs come out of the fridge and warm to room temperature, then they’re transfered to a grill over low flame for 35 minutes. They’re basted with more of the sauce for the last 15 minutes of grilling time, then they’re rested for a few minutes, and served with the remaining sauce.

The barbecue sauce was simple and delicious. It filled its three roles admirably, it was salty enough to penetrate deeply as a marinate, sweet enough to turn to glowing caramel on the grill, and the uncooked dipping sauce’s raw edge complimented and contrasted the cooked sauce on the ribs. I was very happy to find a barbecue sauce that has a good deal of complexity, and shows some restraint with the sugar. I often find that restaurant ribs are sticky pork candy without much going on beyond slightly spiced ketchup. The bit of the tequila in the dipping sauce was a nice touch, of course bourbon wouldn’t be out of place either.

I’d make the sauce again without hesitation, and slather it on pretty much anything destined for the grill. Unfortunately I don’t think the hour-long simmer did the ribs any favours. They were wonderfully falling apart tender, but I think they gave up a lot of their flavour to the water that went down the drain. I wonder if steaming the ribs, then reducing the steaming liquid and adding it to the sauce would have brought more of the porky goodness to the plate? I preferred the texture and flavour of the meat from the Chinese-Hawaiian “Barbecued” Ribs where they were slowly roasted in the oven. I can’t really see why that technique wouldn’t work with this sauce, and it’s probably worth a test.

Both of those recipes use the word barbecue without actually grilling anything low and slow. I don’t really understand why The Book avoids a long grill over offset heat? Even with my gas grill with few soaked hardwood chips for smoke, I’d bet that basting the ribs with this sauce for a few hours would result in some pretty good barbecue.

I was actually happy with the way these came out, but they could have been even better. The cooking technique literally threw the baby out with the bathwater. They still tasted very nice, but it was primarily the delicious sauce that came through. The pork was there, but not nearly as prominent as it deserved to be.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

99. Chinese-Hawaiian “Barbecued” Ribs p.491

The recipe

I wasn’t sure I was going to like these ribs, but I was pleasantly surprised. These are racks of ribs marinated in soy, sugar, ketchup, sherry, salt, garlic and ginger. They’re then baked at 325 for 1 3/4 hours, basting with the marinade every 20 minutes. Everything about the title is confusing, I get the Chinese part of the name, soy + ginger + garlic = Chinese, fine. But Hawaiian? Is it the ketchup that makes it Hawaiian? The blurb says the recipe came from a Hawaiian restaurant, but if they’d come from a Sweedish restaurant would they be Chinese-Sweedish ribs? Chinese-Hawaiian doesn’t really tell me a lot about what they’re going to taste like. “Barbecued” is another misnomer, quotation marks don’t turn barbecue into baking. Yes they’re low and slow, but where there’s no smoke there’s no barbecue.

I’m usually pretty relaxed about health and safety standards when I’m cooking. I’m happy to eat raw eggs, tartars and carpaccios, and if some leftovers have sat out longer than they should have I’m probably still going to eat them for lunch the next day. One aspect of this recipe gave me pause though. The ribs are marinated, then the marinade is used to baste the ribs while they’re in the oven. Using a marinade as a basting liquid or a glaze is often a delicious way of making the most of your marinade. Usually the marinade is brought to a boil before it does double duty as a glaze though. Not here, the only safety precaution the recipe mentions is to apply the last coating of glaze 10 minutes before you take it out of the oven. Maybe 10 minutes at 325 is enough to kill any nasties that have been growing in the raw meat juice marinade sitting out for nearly two hours… maybe. I followed the directions, and nothing bad happened. But it seems like bringing the marinade to a boil for a few minutes would make the whole operation a lot safer and not take a lot more effort.

The ribs themselves were surprisingly good. I was only able to marinade them for about 1 1/2 hours, instead of 3, but that didn’t seem to hurt anything. All the sugar in the marinade made for a thick caramelized coating, and the long cooking time almost gave them the falling off the bone tender texture of real barbecue. The glaze was thick enough to seal all the juices inside the ribs, so they stayed nice and moist. The glaze was a bit intense for my taste, it was really really salty and sweet. It could have used something to cut that. Normally some acid would be added to give the glaze some tang, or some chilies would spice things up. I find those flavours can balance the salty-sweet, whereas the ginger and garlic here weren’t really able to get the job done. I thought they were tasty, but too intense and unbalanced. My first few bites were delicious but after a couple of ribs it was getting to be too much.

I liked the baked and glazed ribs concept a lot. In future I would play around with the glaze, and try to keep the flavours in equilibrium. Low sodium soy might be an improvement, and cutting the sugar wouldn’t be a bad idea. The baking “barbecue” worked out well, it’s a pretty good substitute for those of use who don’t have a pit in the back yard. I’m still unclear how they were Hawaiian, but they were good.