I have decided I will do NaNoWriMo after all this year, so this prep month of writing is necessary. I shall simply take my notebook writing practice, ala Natalie Goldberg's system from Wild Mind, and begin it fresh here. You've been warned!
10/21:
Dough and Do Nots.
The babka dough is rising. It's a chocolate babka, unlike the dried fruit version I grew up eating on special Sunday or holiday mornings. This is from the pages of Food&Wine magazine, more or less. I've tweaked the filling by adding orange peel & ginger, and using clabbered plant milk for whole cow's milk; and I've decided to shape the loaves differently.
Tweaking recipes is my usual thing, but I didn't start out cooking that way on purpose. It's just that when I first moved out of mother's home into an apt., I didn't have the greatest set of cookware or a budget for exotic ingredients (and back then, fresh ginger was exotic, fresh cilantro was unheard of). So I learned to substitute flavorings or skip steps, as when I first made a flourless chocolate cake by Alice Medrich of Cocolat fame, and decided not to waste cash on blanched almonds that were just going to be ground into almond flour anyway. The cake was delicious, perfect, gorgeous and dramatic, with it's subtle topping of sifted dark cocoa, ringed with caramelized dried apricots.
Years later, she now makes the same cake with whole raw almonds, as I did way back when. Validation!!! Of course, I've also read that during that time, she had so many mags and such asking her for recipes (while she was running a full-time food biz), that she didn't actually test all of the spinoff versions (like the one I made) of certain of her most famous recipes; like me now, she could come up with changes that she KNEW would work, and send them off. I do that all of the time in the kitchen-- if you have a good grounding in the type of recipe you're making, you don't have to measure or test to tweak successfully. You just have to understand how flavors work together, how the physics & chemistry of baking works.
Hell, I never even follow a recipe or use measurements for some things, like shortbread crusts. I know the components, I know what it should look, feel and taste like, and I know when I want it sweeter or more buttery or more floury. Only if I was making a grand production type of dessert from some specific Patisserie recipe, say a special torte from Kaffeehaus, would I follow the measurements for that kind of crust or bottom layer, because then it's a matter of having the right balance for the whole.
And then sometimes, you make a bread or pastry exactly as the recipe says, and the balance doesn't suit your own taste. In these cases, I'll tweak like a mother**er the next time I make it, if it is worth making again otherwise.
Once I tweaked a crumb topping beforehand, just from misreading the amount of butter, and when I realized my mistake later, I had to wonder what the hell the woman that gave out the recipe originally was thinking-- because my topping was perfect (and that topping, I DO use again and again, for various baked goods). Hers would have been way too gooey to be properly called "crumb."
The whole recipe was for a crumb-topped apple pie, one made with chunked rather than sliced apples-- it's become my go-to apple pie recipe, and several other people have said it's their favorite ever. What's great about it is that dicing six cups of peeled apples is much quicker and easier than slicing them, and you don't have to worry so much about the arrangement either, just pile them up and pat them in. I think I might have to make one next week, to celebrate October.
And right now, I have to go check that babka dough; it's probably ready for shaping now.
--Aging Ophelia
10/21:
Dough and Do Nots.
The babka dough is rising. It's a chocolate babka, unlike the dried fruit version I grew up eating on special Sunday or holiday mornings. This is from the pages of Food&Wine magazine, more or less. I've tweaked the filling by adding orange peel & ginger, and using clabbered plant milk for whole cow's milk; and I've decided to shape the loaves differently.
Tweaking recipes is my usual thing, but I didn't start out cooking that way on purpose. It's just that when I first moved out of mother's home into an apt., I didn't have the greatest set of cookware or a budget for exotic ingredients (and back then, fresh ginger was exotic, fresh cilantro was unheard of). So I learned to substitute flavorings or skip steps, as when I first made a flourless chocolate cake by Alice Medrich of Cocolat fame, and decided not to waste cash on blanched almonds that were just going to be ground into almond flour anyway. The cake was delicious, perfect, gorgeous and dramatic, with it's subtle topping of sifted dark cocoa, ringed with caramelized dried apricots.
Years later, she now makes the same cake with whole raw almonds, as I did way back when. Validation!!! Of course, I've also read that during that time, she had so many mags and such asking her for recipes (while she was running a full-time food biz), that she didn't actually test all of the spinoff versions (like the one I made) of certain of her most famous recipes; like me now, she could come up with changes that she KNEW would work, and send them off. I do that all of the time in the kitchen-- if you have a good grounding in the type of recipe you're making, you don't have to measure or test to tweak successfully. You just have to understand how flavors work together, how the physics & chemistry of baking works.
Hell, I never even follow a recipe or use measurements for some things, like shortbread crusts. I know the components, I know what it should look, feel and taste like, and I know when I want it sweeter or more buttery or more floury. Only if I was making a grand production type of dessert from some specific Patisserie recipe, say a special torte from Kaffeehaus, would I follow the measurements for that kind of crust or bottom layer, because then it's a matter of having the right balance for the whole.
And then sometimes, you make a bread or pastry exactly as the recipe says, and the balance doesn't suit your own taste. In these cases, I'll tweak like a mother**er the next time I make it, if it is worth making again otherwise.
Once I tweaked a crumb topping beforehand, just from misreading the amount of butter, and when I realized my mistake later, I had to wonder what the hell the woman that gave out the recipe originally was thinking-- because my topping was perfect (and that topping, I DO use again and again, for various baked goods). Hers would have been way too gooey to be properly called "crumb."
The whole recipe was for a crumb-topped apple pie, one made with chunked rather than sliced apples-- it's become my go-to apple pie recipe, and several other people have said it's their favorite ever. What's great about it is that dicing six cups of peeled apples is much quicker and easier than slicing them, and you don't have to worry so much about the arrangement either, just pile them up and pat them in. I think I might have to make one next week, to celebrate October.
And right now, I have to go check that babka dough; it's probably ready for shaping now.
--Aging Ophelia
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