Archive for March, 2009
A simple biscuit is such a great addition to any breakfast or dinner. Most biscuits I come across are made with white flour, either an all purpose flour or a cake flour (or other low-protein flour) in the hopes of producing the most tender biscuit. While I would never turn down a perfectly made biscuit, it is nice to know that you can still make delicious biscuits using whole grain flour without sacrificing taste or texture.
I used white whole wheat flour for these biscuits. It is much closer to all purpose flour than regular whole wheat flour, which tends to produce heavy and somewhat crumbly biscuits. I used plenty of butter and buttermilk, and came out with a biscuit that had a great buttery flavor and lots of flaky layers. It was still a little bit heartier than a plain biscuit might be, but the fact that it is made up of whole grains makes up for it.
The best way to make biscuits is to rub in the butter by hand, using your fingertips. This gives you lots of control over the size of the chunks of butter. Aim to have most of them around the size of large peas. Larger butter pieces (not huge, of course, but quite a bit larger than “wet sand”) result in a flakier biscuit. After you stir in the buttermilk, knead the dough on a floured surface a few times to allow some gluten to develop. This helps the biscuit to rise up nicely. And finally, don’t forget to add a bit of sugar into the mix. All whole wheat flour, including white whole wheat, can have a very slightly bitter taste that makes the biscuits taste a little bit too healthy, even with all that butter. Brush the biscuits with a little milk or melted butter before baking to give them a nice golden brown color.
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Anyone looking for an alternative to cakes and cupcakes for their baking this summer might want to check out the cakesicles baking pan. This baking pan has popsicle-shaped depressions that, as you can imagine, produce cakes and cookies in that same shape. The popsicles are fairly shallow, but there is no mistaking the design.
Cookies are thick and sturdy enough to hold their shape well if you slide a popsicle stick inside to complete the look, but cake can crumble when you put it on a stick. Instead, take two cakesicles, sandwich them together with frosting and dunk them into chocolate (white, milk or dark) to give them a real popsicle look. This is how the cakesicle in the photo above was made. It has a yellow cake, orange buttercream, white chocolate coating and sprinkles. I confess that this cakesicle was from a party, and not something I put together, but the pan comes with recipes that should really streamline the process. . These treats would be fantastic at a kids party or at any summer gathering – especially since you don’t need an easily accessible freezer to keep these from melting!
Pizza is not a difficult food to find. There are tons of places that will deliver a hot pie to your door in less than 30 minutes, what seems like hundreds of different brands in the freezer case of the supermarket, and too many pizzerias – good and bad – to count. Most people would say that the best pizza is one made from fresh dough and baked in a super-hot stone oven. But what about a pizza made with fresh dough that is baked in a vending machine?
Researchers at the University of Bologna in Italy, in conjunction with Unilever, have developed a pizza vending machine that, for a few Euros, will bake a fresh pizza in under three minutes. The machine includes technology to mix ingredients and roll out the dough, spread sauce and toppings, and cook the pizza itself; each one is essentially made to order. The pizza is baked using “infra-red rays” as opposed to a traditional oven (which might be something of a fire hazard in a vending machine), but there are windows on the machine so you can watch the process from start to finish, much as you would in a “real” pizzeria. A video demonstrating how it works is available online.
Unilever is planning to launch the machine in Italy in a few weeks, and hopes for a launch overseas in the near future. While the pizza probably won’t compare to a hand-tossed, artisan-made pie, I can think of a few frozen brands that it will definitely be better than. And if any of the US launches are near college towns, this pizza vending machine just might have a real future.
There are lots of good reasons to have a kitchen scale at home. The biggest reason is that they are far more accurate than just about any other means of measuring, especially when it comes to dry ingredients that are measured by cups for most US recipes. A cup full of flour can actually be two very different amounts, if one measure has been sifted and the other packed, even though they look alike. A basic scale will do – as long as it’s accurate, of course – but there are scales out there that offer many more features to the consumer, like the EatSmart Nutrition Scale.
The EatSmart Nutrition Scale is a kitchen scale that calculates nutritional information for hundreds of foods in addition to weighing them. It weighs in grams and ounces, and has a database of 999 preprogrammed food items for which it can give you the nutritional information according to the weight of the item on the scale. It gives you calories, carbs, fiber, sodium, potassium, magnesium, total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, calcium, protein and vitamin K. You can also program in up to 99 additional items, if what you’re interested in isn’t already in the scale, to have those numbers available at the touch of a button. There is also a nutrition calculator mode to adjust the stats on a nutrition label to your portion size on the scale easily.
I found the scale to be accurate and easy to use. It was fun to see the nutritional information, too. The apple pictured below was 202 grams, contained 105 calories, 27.9 grams of carbs and 4.8 grams of fiber. While I’m not usually inclined to calculate the stats for everything I make, I really liked having such an easy option. I lent it to a friend who does weight watchers and she absolutely adored it. The only downside with this particular scale is that it only goes up to 6-lbs (3000gms), so if you do a lot of bulk bread baking or think that you’ll want it to weigh out large roasts, keep that in mind before you try one out.
One of the easiest ways to infuse a citrus flavor into a baked good of some kind is to add lemon, lime or orange zest to it. Zest is not the same thing as the peel, or rind, of a lemon, although it is a part of the peel. The zest is the colorful outer layer of the citrus peel. The soft, white part of the peel just underneath the zest is the pith. The reason that the zest is so desireable is that it contains lots of essential oils that make for a strong, pleasant flavor. The pith has a bitter flavor, with very little citrus taste when eaten on its own.
The pith can actually give your baked good a bitter or slightly unpleasant taste if you incorporate it into a recipe (there are some recipes that call for using a whole fruit, but those usually compensate with extra sugar), so it is important to remove only the zest from the citrus rind when you are using it. The zest can be removed very carefully with a sharp pairing knife, but the easiest and best way to remove the zest is with a microplane. Wash your fruit very, very well before zesting it – or try to buy organic/unwaxed fruit – so that you don’t incorporate any unwanted elements into your zesting. A zested lemon can be wrapped in plastic wrap to keep it from drying out, and stored at room temperature for several days.
Zest can be added to cookies, cakes and all kinds of other recipes. Unlike lemon or orange juice, it doesn’t throw off the chemistry of the recipe (either by adding more acidity or more liquid), so you can feel confident adding a teaspoon or a tablespoon of zest to just about any recipe you want to make a little brighter. Adding zest to a recipe that already has citrus juice is a great way to enhance the flavor that is already there, as well.
