The Fugue

About a week or two ago I got it in my head to try and make Danish butter cookies (a la Royal Dansk). None of the online recipes I could find seemed like they would give the desired results, except maybe this one. So I tried it and wasn't pleased with the results. Dense, blah.

So I set about reverse engineering it from the label of a tin of Royal Dansk. It couldn't be that hard, right? There are relatively few ingredients and if I could set up a system of equations based on the nutritional information...

So this is what I got:

Danish Butter Cookies

Preheat oven to 325°F.
Makes about 40 cookies.

4 oz fresh high-quality unsalted butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

8 oz flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch salt

Creaming method.
Press into a thin round, poke with a fork, bake until light brown.

That jives with the ingredient list and nutritional information. Quite well, actually. But there's some things to note. The ingredient list includes desiccated coconut, eggs, and ammonium bicarbonate. I think the coconut is in one variety in the box only, so consider it an optional addition. While there may be some egg there's neither the cholesterol nor protein to support more than maybe an egg wash (hint: it's listed after the coconut).

Ammonium bicarbonate, aka hartshorn, is a leavening agent not entirely unlike baking powder. Except it's supposed to be more awesome for making cookies. If you can find some, by all means use it.

Ok, so that jives, but when I tried it I was a bit disappointed. The dough was very dry. Very crumbly. It didn't look at all like the dough in the video. It certainly couldn't be squirted out a pastry bag to make those little circle cookies. Or could it? Maybe if the butter was allowed to melt? Or did they add water (not on the ingredient list)? These are mysteries to me.

Also, it baked up even denser. But the taste was spot on!

I figured probably the easiest thing was to back the flour off to be closer to what shortbread recipes call for, which would be 6 oz instead of 8 oz. I also suspected my creaming method technique was lacking.

So today I made another test batch, and I finally got a great result. The recipe I used today is slightly different (and half as big):

2 oz salted butter
1 oz sugar
1/4 tsp vanilla extract

3 oz flour
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/8 tsp cream of tartar

This time I made sure to cream the sugar and butter real good, until it was light and fluffy. Really, it does get both light (in color) and fluffy (it about doubles in volume). Funny, that.

Then I mixed the flour in by hand and put it in the fridge in a bag. Did I have to put it in the fridge? I don't know. I don't think so. But it was convenient.

Then I rolled it thin. It was more workable but still a bit crumbly for working with individual cookies. Maybe rolling it will make it more dense, in the future I will probably just press it without refrigerating.

I baked it for 20 minutes in a 325°F oven. It was a light brown. I let it cool and then came the break test. It broke, nay snapped! It was crispy. It was very thin, but what "crumb" it did have looked like the inside of a Royal Dansk.

Notice that I used baking soda and cream of tartar. It may be my imagination but I thought I was getting a metallic taste. I wanted to be sure it wasn't my baking powder (which is aluminum-free anyway). The astute will notice I have it backwards—you're supposed to have 1/2 tsp cream of tartar and 1/4 tsp baking soda for each tsp of baking powder. I misremembered. But it didn't adversely affect the end result. In fact, the free baking soda may have contributed to the crisp by interacting with the butter fatty acids (is that possible?)

No doubt I'll continue to refine my recipe and method, but not with the frequency I had been (much to my wife's chagrin). It may take me a few months/years to get it fully ironed out from a scientific standpoint, but it works as it stands.

Oh, and note I have a bit less sugar—more in line with a shortbread than with the nutritional information on the tin. Indeed, they taste a bit less sweet than the Royal Dansk, but less sweet is ok by me. If you want the original taste, stick with the sugar ratio in the first recipe.

In summary, I think, really cream it good, thinner is better, and flour:butter:sugar ratio of 3:2:1 or maybe 4:2:1 (by weight of course!) if you can manage the crumbly dough (or find the secret to making it magically un-crumbly). Sorry for the imprecision, but my wife will kill me if I make any more butter cookies this week.

My wife is out of town and I'm fending for myself in the kitchen. This is of course the best part of playing bachelor, since I get to try all the weird things and seafood that my wife balks at. Still, I decided to be rather boring tonight and have salad. I like a salad with nice dark leafy greens (no iceberg thanks), cheese (feta and cheddar in this case), boiled egg, and ranch dressing. There is no substitute for ranch dressing. I don't smother my salad in ranch, but I do need ranch or maybe bleu cheese in a pinch. Caesar can be ok, and I've been known to eat other dressings to be polite (or none at all—a spinach, mozarella, and mandarin orange salad can stand on its own, for example), but for the purposes of this blog post, there is nothing but ranch. And I was out.

Now actually, though ranch is by far my favorite dressing, I am not well pleased by the ranch dressings on the shelf. My mom used to make it by hand (and I used to help). I don't remember much about it (I was pretty small), but I do remember buttermilk, some kind of mix, and lots of shaking. It was good stuff. Until a short time ago, I never found a ranch dressing that I liked in the store. Hidden Valley was as close as I could get, but it wasn't quite right. Some of the others were simply hideous. And most have MSG which I halfheartedly try to avoid.

A short while back, I came across a Kraft ranch I had never seen. Actually a whole line of them. Maybe I had just missed them before they changed the bottle, maybe they weren't stocked, maybe they sprung into existence overnight. I didn't know, but I checked and it didn't have MSG so I bought it. It was better than Hidden Valley, and it doesn't have MSG. So, my new commercial favorite. It was this bottle that had just run out.

So I jumped on ye olde internet in a quest to find out what makes ranch ranch. Near the top was a chowhound.com link, and I find that the chowhounds generally get things right, or are at least a good jumping-off place, so I beelined.

Some people on the thread believe that MSG is the flavor of ranch. Well, sorry, but my bottle of Kraft preemptively debunked that theory. My wife recently tried making ranch (I'm not sure what her motivations were exactly, but probably something to do with health and preservatives and MSG), and I don't know what recipe she used but it flopped. It lacked something we couldn't put our fingers on but we called "body", and for a moment as I read I feared that something was MSG. But I kept reading and let my senses return, and several people on the chowhound thread said it was nonsense and they had been making perfectly good ranch without MSG for years. I decided to try this one. I didn't have quite a full cup of mayo, and I was lazy about measuring the herbiage and it ended up a bit too biting (too much parsley probably), and I forgot the vinegar. But it turned out great. In fact, I tasted it when it was just mayo and buttermilk and it was instantly recognizable as containing the essence of ranch.

So, my recipe based off of MollyGee's is:

Ranch Dressing

1 cup mayonaise
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 t salt
freshly and coarsley ground pepper
1 t vinegar

garlic
dill
chives
green onions

Naturally, this is tailorable to your tastes. One thing I might try next time is replacing 1/2 cup mayo with 1/2 cup sour cream. Thickness isn't a big issue with me, but keeping it at least thin enough to shake well seems like a good idea, based on her observation that it gets "weepy". I seriously doubt it goes bad after 3 days. Mayo and buttermilk aren't prone to spoiling quickly. But I can see it needing remixing (hence the good shake).

Now go forth and eat salad.

I grew up eating french toast once every week or two. Delicious stuff, and easy too. Some eggs, a little milk, dip the bread and cook like a pancake.

Then I got married, and my wife did the same thing but ruined it by adding cinnamon. Well, to each her own. We started dividing the egg stuff before she added the cinnamon to her mix.

One day I watched the Good Eats episode Toast Modern where AB goes through this complicated process to get some kind of "perfect" french toast. It sure didn't look worth the effort to me, so I promptly forgot all about it.

Then I visited New Orleans for a conference. The hotel I stayed at had complimentary breakfast (and not that lame cover-up people call "continental breakfast"). One day I ordered the french toast, unwittingly changing my life forever.

What they served was, as AB says, crispy on the outside and soft and creamy on the inside. It tasted less eggy than what I was used to. It was lightly dusted with powdered sugar before I put some syrup on, but I knew it went deeper than condiments. This was fundamentally different french toast to what I had been accustomed to. And I loved it. Truly incredible. More than anything else about that trip to New Orleans, I will remember the french toast.

Fast forward again, and I came across the same Good Eats episode. This time I paid closer attention and due respect to AB. Then I tried the recipe faithfully, but with mediocre results. First, the homemade artisan bread I was using had curled up while staling, making it very difficult to get a good browning in the pan. It also was quite holey. Second, I just didn't get much of a crisp. So again I chalked the recipe up to too complicated and not really worth it.

Yesterday I again had the hankering for some french toast like what I had in New Orleans. So I decided to follow AB's recipe again, but also to take some insurance out. I did some surfing and found that New Orleans french toast is apparently famous. Most recipes that seemed credible had the same basic structure: custard, pan-fry in butter, maybe put in the oven for the final crisping (I get the feeling some just use more butter or butter/oil mixture and fry it to crisp instead). So I grabbed french bread from the store (for reproduceability) and the rest of AB's ingredients. I mixed the custard and set out sliced bread the night before. In the morning, I followed his instructions to the T, except that I used the toaster oven and I included baking in the toaster oven in the pipeline (since I couldn't fit all 8 slices in at once anyway). It worked well, and wasn't too complicated.

The toaster oven really cuts down on the wait for preheat and the wasted heat. I actually set it to 400°F instead of the 375°F he recommended, and it worked well (5 minutes in). I may even toy with using the toast setting instead of the bake setting.

The rack and cookie sheet are, I believe, an unnecessary complication. If properly staled, the toast loses very little custard while resting, so i wouldn't worry about pooling. Instead I plan to use foil, or maybe just a cookie sheet, to cut down on the cleanup.

The french bread didn't curl, and tasted alright. As good as Albertson's french bread could be expected to taste. Next time I'll use my own artisan bread again (one with a bit more even crumb), and make sure to not lay it out in a way that bends the bread. I expect the results will be fantastic.

I feel like I'm working with the same principles that the hotel chef was working with. It is close to what I had, and I think perfection is within my grasp. What's more, it's no harder than the old way though it does take just a hair more planning and a less-common ingredient (half and half).

A short while back, we were enjoying some ice cream. Erin and I have different ideas on the proper dressing for ice cream. She likes hot fudge and maybe some chopped almonds. I like caramel, roasted peanuts (not chopped), and maybe some chocolate (if she's already gone through the trouble of heating up her hot fudge). So we traded spoonfuls as we sometimes do, and the hot fudge struck me as more disgusting than usual. It really is sickening stuff. Not that I don't like chocolate. In fact, a truly good hot fudge on ice cream is a treat indeed. It's just that stuff they sell in the supermarkets that passes for hot fudge that's disgusting.

This experience coincided with me running out of caramel sauce, so fate had thrown down the gauntlet: make really delicious hot fudge and caramel sauce from scratch.

To make a long story short, she actually wants a good hot chocolate sauce, not a hot fudge sauce, and I really want a good cajeta sauce, not caramel sauce.

The hot chocolate sauce is easier. I consulted my mentor redbeard and he suggested a ganache. It turned out to be the perfect suggestion. Bring 1/2 cup cream just to a boil (in a large pot because it will bubble up), and pour over 3 oz quality semisweet chocolate. Stir to melt and drizzle on ice cream. Store in a jar in the fridge. It will set up, so the microwave is your friend in the future. May I recommend a small glass condiment bowl for microwaving small quantities? It will melt faster and you won't be remelting the stuff at the bottom over and over. Now, this sauce isn't very sweet. More of a dark chocolate flavor. But the ice cream is already sweet - all we need is creamy chocolate and heat - and I think this sauce is a perfect ice cream topping.

For the cajeta, there were two challenges. First, cajeta is quite thick, more suited to a cookie sandwich than an ice cream topping. Second, how do you make the stuff? There's loads of unnecessary mystery, complication, and noise on the internet on this subject.

Let's tackle the second one first. I had already convinced myself I was too simple for redbeard's simple caramel sauce. Either his recipe isn't foolproof or I'm less than a fool. (I think, after further reading, that my troubles could be mitigated by not adding that splash of water, but starting with just dry sugar). I was worried that making cajeta (which is a different beast than caramelizing sugar) would also fail, but I didn't have to worry. There's a good article on Chowhound to clear up the mystery surrounding this confection, and a simple recipe by Suzanne Martinson that fills in the gaps. There, that was easy.

Now, we need to make a sauce out of it. If you're smarter than me, it might already be obvious to you how to make a sauce out of dulce de leche: add liquid to thin it out. This didn't come to me until I was reading about the cold water candy test and it dawned on me that this mumbo jumbo about cooking sugar syrup to a certain temperature isn't about the temperature so much as it is about the concentration of the syrup. The thermometer, or cold water test, is just an indicator of the sugar concentration. That's a bit oversimplified of course, but that's how it came to me. Now, if you just stopped cooking cajeta at 230°F (thread stage), you might not get the full maillard reaction. No, better to cook the cajeta completely, then add liquid to bring it back to a sauce consistency. You can find my recipe here. I burnt my first batch (by not stirring it) and it was still too good to throw away. Absolute heaven.

The Chile Relleno (plural Chiles Rellenos, for you grammar nazi wannabes), is one of the best dishes for showing off those delicious chiles in your garden (or supermarket). Poblano chiles and Oaxaca cheese seem to be the traditional dish in Mexico, but I'm talking about New Mexican cuisine here and the only way to go is pure New Mexico chile.

Sadly, even here in Las Cruces, less than an hour away from Hatch, the chile capital of the world, most restaurants don't even make edible chiles rellenos, let alone delectable. I've had half a dozen different renditions here in Las Cruces, from some of the most acclaimed local restaurants, and only one was slightly better than sawdust. They were bland, limp, cold, and tasteless.

The perfect chile relleno is a delight to the chileholic. A medium green chile with just enough heat to make your scalp begin to perspire and packed with a lot of New Mexican taste, delicious gooey melted Monterey Jack cheese, all encased in a crispy batter fried to golden brown and delicious perfection.

This isn't rocket science, and you can make the perfect chile relleno in your very own kitchen (if you can find perfect chiles where you live, that is). The most difficult part is managing the chile while roasting, peeling, gutting and stuffing. I won't tell you how to do this, because Google has this one covered pretty well.

Chiles Rellenos

Fresh green chile
Monterey Jack cheese for stuffing
Batter:
  ½ cup flour
  ½ tsp salt
  ½ tsp garlic powder
  1 egg
  ½ cup ice water

Prepare the chiles by roasting and peeling, then through a small T-shaped
incision near the stem remove the bulk of the seeds. Don't worry about
getting every last seed out. Stuff the chile through this same incision,
with Monterey Jack cheese. Dredge in flour.

Mix batter at the last minute. Combine dry ingredients. Whisk the egg and
water together. Add dry ingredients to liquid and stir. Stir gently and
briefly, like tempura.

Dip dredged chile in batter and fry in an inch or two of 350°F oil.

Serve warm and soon. Put the chiles on a tray in a warm oven as needed
before serving.

I would say fry until golden brown and delicious, but mine didn't really brown. They still tasted great. I don't know, but it might be because I used mostly new oil. AB says the secret to getting a good brown on battered goods is old oil. But it also might have to do with my batter recipe. If you know, please enlighten us in the comments.

Once upon a time, I blogged about the Shangri La "diet". I suppose I owe it to all 4 of my readers to summarize my experience. So here's the summary: it worked and I have no idea if it was placebo effect.

Look at this graph:

The period between about 6/5 and 8/2 is when I was following the procedure, with about 80% fidelity. I lost 10 pounds in short order. I was less hungry. My wife got mad because I ate less than her almost all the time.

Then I got lazy and stopped taking my swigs. You do get used to swigging olive oil, but it's never actually fun. The second time around I saw the same results as before, but I was even less faithful. If I ever got organized enough to do it 100% I might lose even more weight.

I noticed that even after stopping I naturally ate less for quite some time. I still eat less than I used to, though not as much less as last August and September.

Now, was it the placebo effect? No clue. But if it is, is there anything so wrong with harmlessly tricking your body and mind into eating more healthily? Is it a failure? No, I think it was a success for me. I just didn't give it enough priority to continue in the face of vacations and so on. Would I go back to it? Sure, I'd rather drink a little olive oil between meals than do almost any other diet.

But really it was mostly an experiment. I know as well as you that just losing weight is almost absurd. Being fit is more important than how much I weigh, and I'm terrible at being fit. So that's where I need to focus my efforts.

Being honest with myself, here are the obstacles to being fit, in decreasing order: time, effort, and a love of swimming.

Time is one of the things I most treasure. Giving up 200-300 perfectly good hours a year to some mindless excercise is frankly apalling. I need to convince myself that it would be worth it, or make it something I want to do.

It takes effort to get up and excercise, and I won't deny that it's easier to sit there programming or researching. My mind is already in shape and it's much easier to work my mind than my body.

Now love of swimming might seem like a silly factor, but it's at least partially true. I love to swim, and I hate to run/walk/etc. If I'm going to excercise you better believe I'm going to be swimming, not running/walking/etc. But getting to the pool is more than just effort, it's logistics. Money, car, parking, being all wet, chlorine... It's not an insurmountable obstacle, it will just take some planning.

I mention all that because soon you will see a post about how my new swimming habit is going. I got a book that promises to make lap swimming enjoyable, and from what I've read I believe them. The pool is closed this week but I've got all the plane laid out on how to adjust my routine, and next wednesday I'll start my new life. I'll reset my graph in the sidebar and we'll see how swimming compares to swigging olive oil.

I recently watched the Pop Culture (transcript) episode of Good Eats. I'm generally an AB fanboy, but sometimes I disagree, and I had to disagree with AB's equipment choice.

I know AB doesn't like unitaskers, and I don't either. But my Stir Crazy is an exception. I don't feel the least bit of shame for having and recommending a unitasker, and I know AB himself has done so on occasion too.

AB said,

[looks at a popper with a rotating bar on a flat pan] Oh, now that’s just silly. Even if all the kernels popped, steam condenses on the dome and runs back on the corn. Even if it worked perfectly, who’d want such a gigantic unitasker hanging around the kitchen? Well, not me.

I'll agree it looks silly, but it does work. Not all the kernels pop, but almost all of them do. (Have you ever seen all the kernels pop? Even an air popper has some duds.) I don't know where he's coming up with this steam theory, but it doesn't compute. There are steam holes in the top, which allow the steam to escape, and we've never had the least bit of problem with wet popcorn in all these years. What's more, I'm willing to bet that steam is more likely to condense on his tin foil hat and drip on the corn than on the plastic dome.

Back before my family got a Stir Crazy, we used to pop popcorn in a pan over the stove, just like he does on the show (except he uses tongs where we used a hotpad. I'd use my welding gloves today, and I'm surprised he doesn't suggest that because he's the one that told us to get welding gloves in the first place). We didn't use a bowl and take advantage of the concentration of oil in the narrow bottom, but otherwise it was the same. Regardless of whether you use a pan or a bowl, it's a royal pain. It's long, boring, tiring, hot, and no fun at all, and you get a lot of unpopped kernels. The Stir Crazy involves putting corn and oil in during a commercial break (and putting some butter in the microwave to melt), and unplugging it when the popping stops. No babysitting. No tedious shaking. No problem. Yes, it's bulky but it's worth every inch if you like popcorn.

Incidentally I tried adding salt to the unpopped kernels and oil, and it doesn't work with the Stir Crazy. It picked up ever so little of the salt, but not enough and it left a lot on the bottom of the popper. Maybe it works in his steel bowl contraption, I don't know.

I liked the rest of the show, especially his disendorsement of air poppers. I'm going to have to try out some of those gourmet varieties. I think I'll leave the insipid caramel corn to CrackerJack though, and I'll stick with the good gooey caramel corn that my family has made for years.

Put down that diet soda and read this article. Yes, you.

Drinking soda regularly (1+ cans a day) is not exactly the smartest thing you can do for your body, whether or not it's diet. </soapbox>

Redbeard's post about Beans and Rice used leftover cooked rice, but it got me thinking that I could blog about how the Latin Americans cook their rice. My information comes from little old abuelitas that were kind enough to show me how they cooked things, and a Brazilian missionary roommate.

Latinos cook rice differently than most Americans. I'm not talking about that "spanish rice" stuff that the Mexicans make. I'm talking plain white rice which prevails in every other Latin American country. The islanders also have this yellow stuff which is pretty good, but that's another show.

There are many variations, as is always the case with rice, but it seems to me that the basics are simple enough. First, sweat some garlic, onions, and salt. To be really cool, smash the garlic in a mortar and pestle using the salt as an abrasive agent. Or you can be lazy and use a garlic press. You'll have to come to terms with how much garlic and onion to use, but for a standard saucepan worth try a clove and half a small yellow onion. As for salt, your instincts probably tell you to use too little. Don't skimp - garlic and onion without salt is not good eats.

Second, put the rice in and stir occasionally (or constantly if you're the nervous type). Do this for awhile, until you see most of the rice change. I don't remember if it gets translucent or more opaque or what, but you'll notice the change.

Third, add water. Americans would add two parts water, but the Latinos added one part or one and a half parts. I think most that added one part would add some in the middle, so you might as well go with 1.5. If you're a coward, go ahead and put two parts in, but you'll miss out on the pegado.

Bring to a boil and if necessary let it boil down to where there's just half an inch or so of water above the rice. This of course depends on the size and shape of your vessel, but it's a good rule of thumb. Now, cover loosely and reduce heat. But don't reduce it to almost nothing like we Americans do. We're not simply steaming the rice here, we're also cooking it.

Let the rice cook, checking when you think it might be done. Depending on how hot and how much water you had you may have to add a little, that's ok. When it's done, it's ready to eat with black beans or whatever.

The end result is some of the most delicious rice you've ever tasted, and if you're lucky there will be rice stuck to the bottom and/or sides of the pan. This is the pegado, and it's delicious (if you didn't burn it). If you've never had this, befriend a latino that isn't from Mexico and stop in for dinner. You probably won't get it right the first time, but if you know what it's supposed to taste like you can probably use the scientific method to bridge the gap. A few rules of thumb: don't skimp on the oil or the salt, and be sure to fry the rice long enough.

¡Buena Suerte!

Over at r.f.s people have been experimenting with making bread with minimal kneading. This is right up my alley, I thought, so I gave it a few tries. It works astonishingly well.

The basic idea is that gluten development is a hydration process. When you knead a dough, you are working in the water and possibly creating little air bubbles. If you leave a ball of dough long enough, the water will work itself in. I know you don't believe me, but it's the truth. In my experience the loaves I make are plenty fluffy - more fluffy than when I knead - so I don't think the air bubbles part is an issue. You be the judge.

So the goal is to let water do the hard work over time. With normal bread, this poses a challenge in that you can't leave the yeasted dough a few more hours without ruining things. With normal bread, people do things with part of the flour and water beforehand and then mix in the rest and the yeast later, etc. etc. I'm no expert on what they do, and frankly it's too complicated. We don't have that problem because sourdough is naturally slower and gives us sufficient time.

Here's what I do. Let's say I want to bake on Saturday morning, and I plan on getting 6-8 hours of sleep. 6-8 hours is a nice rise time for chilled sourdough so I prep the starter so it's nice and active when I get home from work, then I mix up the dough and put it in the fridge. I take it out of the fridge after a few hours, just before bed, and form it into a loaf. I place it under a plastic container (I call it the greenhouse, because that's basically what it does: keep in moisture and heat) and go to bed. In the morning, unless something has gone drastically wrong, it's ready to pop in the oven and bake.

So let's review:

• mix
• rest
• bake

And now some more ramblings about the boring details. You do need to mix it to get the water distributed, and maybe there's some air bubble action going on there too. But you don't have to use your hard-to-clean mixer or get your hands dirty. Mix all the ingredients, including salt.

If you want to deflate or knead or stretch and fold during the rest phase, by all means have at it. Remember that even with sourdough you can only rest so long before the yeast eats all its food. Chilling retards this.

For those of you who like recipes:

No-knead Sourdough Bread (small loaf)

  - 200 g    active 100% hydration starter
  - 125 ml   water
  - 174 g    flour
  -   1 tsp  salt
  -   1 Tbsp oil
  -   1 Tbsp honey

Mix well. Let rest for 1.5 hours at room temperature, or up to 24 hours in
the fridge. Deflate/work it mildly and halfheartedly, then form into a loaf
and rise in a humid (and preferably warm) environment until ready to bake
(use the finger test). Bake in a cold-start oven at 400 degrees for 20
minutes, then at 350 degrees until internal temperature reaches the boiling
point. (You do have a probe thermometer, don't you?) Turn off the heat and
let it bake another 5 minutes and then take it out of the oven and let it
cool thoroughly for best flavor. If you can't hold off the ravening butter
slatherers, don't blame me.