Archive for August, 2009
Pizzelles are thin, round waffle-like Italian cookies. They’re cooked on a special little griddle that gives them a crisp texture and imprints them with a delicate floral patter. The traditional pizzelle is flavored with anise extract, which gives the cookies a subtle licorice flavor. I flavored mine with vanilla extract. They’re beautiful to look at, and very tasty to eat. They’re also very versatile little cookies that you can do a lot with once you have them.
The cookies can be eaten plain with coffee or tea, for a start, but if you want to get a little more creative you can use them to make ice cream sandwiches, s’mores or any number of other sandwich-cookie type treats. Although the cookies cool quickly into a crisp finished product, they are very malleable when they come off of the pizzelle maker and are still hot. This means that you can also roll them or fold them into different shapes. When rolled into a tube, pizzelle can be used as cannoli shells, for instance, and piped with a filling of sweetened ricotta cheese.
The only drawback – and I use that word loosely – is that you do need the pizzelle maker to cook these properly. You could experiment with using this as a drop-cookie dough, or rolling it out and using it with cookie cutters, but the machine cooks them from both sides extremely quickly in a way that other cooking methods can’t match. The baker gives them a nice golden brown color in addition to a crisp texture and detailed design.
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Bread-baking is a subject that you can never have too many books about. It’s a skill that can take a lot of time and feel to fully develop, even if the basics are simple. This is especially true if your goal is to try and replicate some of the top artisanal loaves in your home kitchen. Baking Artisan Bread: 10 Expert Formulas for Baking Better Bread at Home is a book that is intended to cover all the basics of artisan bread baking. Instead of overloading you with all kinds of detailed recipes, the book instead focuses on giving you a thorough grounding on the ingredients you need and the techniques you’ll use to make bread.
The recipe section is edited so that, while there are formulas for 10 different types of breads, there are only two or three different recipes (variations, essentially) under each category. This careful selection means that the book dedicates most of its time to detailing how the recipe should be made step-by-step. It also means that there is a good chance that you’ll actually bake all the recipes in it, unlike much larger books.
The recipes are given by volume, weight – both in standard and metric units- and in baker’s percentages. This makes it very easy to start out with the book, since you can give the recipes a trial with the volume measurements if you don’t already have a scale. The instructions are easy to follow and there are lots of photos of the various stages of the recipes to help guide your progress. Even better is the DVD that comes with the book, which demonstrates even more clearly than the book’s photos how to take a bread from a pile of ingredients to a finished loaf.
I rarely mention restaurants – unless I’m dining out of the country – but this week I had a lunch that was so foodie-oriented, I can’t resist writing about it. It was a coffee-pairing lunch hosted by Starbucks at Lucques, a restaurant in Los Angeles. The lunch was held at the end of Coffee College, a day long seminar that Starbucks hosted (and was generous enough to invite me to) that discussed everything from how coffee is grown and harvested, to how the beans are roasted and cupped (tasted, essentially) to try bring out their fullest flavor. Lunch was dedicated to seeing how different flavors in food brought out, or paired with, different flavors of coffee from different regions of the world.
The first course was a yellow tomato soup with pesto, parmesan and opal basil. The coffee pairing was with Kenya and Costa Rica La Candela coffees. The Kenya was known to have citrus notes, but turned out to be overpowered by the coffee. The Costa Rica, on the other hand, had a very bright flavor that was similar to the acidity of the tomatoes and turned out to complement the soup, drawing out peppery notes and just making it taste more flavorful. You wouldn’t necessarily expect a cup of coffee to have such an impact on a dish – especially a soup – so it was surprising, in addition to being tasty.
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It’s a bit hard to say what makes lemon poppyseed such a good combination in baked goods. Zesty lemon flavors are always good, of course, but the poppyseeds don’t contribute much in the way of flavor. They do, however, add a hint of additional texture to a cake or muffin and that crunch is a nice break from otherwise soft pastries. Perhaps it’s the subconscious idea that the teeny tiny amount of opiates in the seeds will make you feel good (and fail a drug test, if what I’ve seen on Seinfeld is true!). In reality, it’s probably a combination of some of these things: a bit of crunch from the seeds, a bright acidity from the lemon and the sweetness of the dough that surrounds them.Anyway, the combination is a good one and that’s all you really need to know before baking these lemon poppyseed cookies. The lemon flavor in the cookies comes from fresh lemon zest. It’s fairly subtle at first, but really pops once you add a lemon juice and confectioners’ sugar glaze to the top of the finished cookies. The cookies are soft and a little bit cakelike, rather than crispy. They remind me a little bit of scones or teacakes and go great with iced tea.
These are drop cookies that come together very quickly. There isn’t a whole lot of juice called for in the recipe, and one lemon is really all you need. You’ll get a better flavor with fresh zest than with lemon extract, so it’s worth picking up a fresh lemon if you don’t have one on hand. You can also try these cookies with lemon, orange or other citrus fruits for a little variety.
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While “gelato” is the Italian word for “ice cream,” the two desserts are not one and the same. There are some small, but distinctive, differences between ice cream and gelato. Ice cream is made by churning a base of cream, milk, sugar and sometimes eggs to freeze it and add air. Adding air to the mixture is what keeps ice cream soft, scoopable and helps it to have a good melt on the tongue. It also helps to prevent ice crystals from forming, keeping the texture of the ice cream uniform. Ice cream is regulated by the FDA so that manufacturers can’t just come up with any frozen mixture and call it ice cream. By law, ice creams must contain at least 10% milkfat. Ice creams with additions (like strawberries or cookies ‘n cream) must contain a minimum of 8% milk fat. Some super-premium ice creams have a much higher milk fat percentage, which makes them creamier and smoother.
Gelato is also made with a base of milk, sugar and sometimes eggs, along with a variety of ingredients added for flavoring. Gelato, however, has a lower percentage of butterfat on average, than ice cream. It contains anywhere from 2-8 percent. Also like ice cream, it is also churned to add some air and keep ice crystals from forming in the mixture. Unlike ice cream, gelato is churned more slowly and for a shorter period of time. This introduces less air and keeps the mixture more dense and even more flavorful, as there isn’t as much air hitting the tongue at the end. It is also served at a slightly higher temperature than ice cream, so that the gelato is very soft when you get it and the flavors are at their most intense.
