Raccoon and Lobster

Oh look at that!

Maca-rights! No more maca-wrongs! Rejoice! I had yet another macaron failure with the Italian sucre cuit method before I decided to try my hand at the more temperamental French macaron. Maybe 5 years of French classes offered me a  hidden advantage because I finally got properly textured macarons with feet instead of sad hollow shells that oozed into hideous almond amoebas.

Check it out baby. Two pairs of feet on each delightful cookie, a shell like crust, and a soft interior texture. I think I was botching the addition of the hot sugar syrup to the egg whites somehow and deflating my whites. With the French method I could really focus on getting my meringue to the right consistency and whisking the last bit by hand gave me even more control.

Judging by the troubleshooting pictures at Syrup and Tang, these aren’t quite perfect. The bottoms were ever so slightly sticky, which suggests that I managed to over-beat it a little. Maybe I can blame it on the high humidity today. Nonetheless, I’m declaring them a success. Once properly sandwiched into macarons, no one will be able to tell. By the way, the swirls on the shells were because I made two batches with different levels of coloring and didn’t clean out the piping bag. I think it adds a little something.

Before you get started baking macarons, you should read both of the excellent breakdowns at  Syrup and Tang and Not So Humble Pie. I referred to both when making this batch.

The recipes offered at both vary only a hair in their ratios, the primary difference is what percentage of the sugar was used to stiffen the meringue and what percentage was mixed in at the end with the almond flour. I went with Mrs. Humble’s multipliers because 2x and .3x was easier to remember than 1.6 and 0.8 respectively.

I did lose a lot of the macarons at the edges of the sheet tray to cracking, but the center ones fared just fine. I place the blame for this with my tiny wall oven so future batches will be tweaked for oven time and temperature to see if I can resolve this.

Macarons

50 grams egg whites, aged
60 grams almond meal
100 grams powdered sugar
15 grams granulated sugar

To age egg whites, leave them uncovered at room temperature for 24-72 hours. I inverted a larger bowl over it to prevent any debris from falling in but left a gap for air exchange so that the whites would dry out properly. Weigh out the egg whites after you age them.

Preheat the oven to 290°F. Prepare heavy baking trays with parchment paper and set aside.

Combine the almond meal with the powdered sugar in a food process and blend together until extremely fine. Sift into a bowl and set aside.

In a clean stainless steel or copper bowl, beat the egg whites until very foamy and soft peaks form. Gradually beat in the granulated sugar and then continue beating until you get stiff glossy peaks. Add the almond and sugar mixture to the batter in quarters and fold it in quickly without overmixing. Flavorings and food coloring can be added with the almond and sugar additions. The end result should be stiff enough that a ribbon of batter drizzled from the spatula should take about 30 seconds to disappear into the batter.

Fill a pastry bag with the batter and pipe int to 1.5″ circles onto your baking sheet. Any peaks or tails should disappear by themselves after about 30 seconds. In fact, I used a star decorating tip on my cookies because I didn’t have any plain tips that were big enough.

Let your batter rest about 30 minutes or more, until they are no longer tacky when gently poked. Bake for 16-20 minutes, rotating the pan about halfway to ensure even baking. Cookies are done when they move without breaking when nudged.

Remove your cookies a few minutes after they come out of the oven and (ideally) let them cool with the feet side up on a baking rack. I missed that last step. Oops!

When cool, apply your filling. I used some leftover chocolate ganache from the cake I made a few days ago.

Mrs. Humble advises refrigerating your macarons for 2-3 days in a loosely covered container to let them mature for best texture and flavor. I’m not sure these will survive that long but if you try it, let me know how it works out for you.

Most of the recipes that show up on a quick google search call for alum. Let’s just say that’s not gonna happen.

油条
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4 cup water
1/2 tsp salt
oil

Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, water and salt into a wet sticky dough that is very elastic. Brush generously with oil, cover and let rest for at least 30 minutes.

Heat large pot of oil to 375°

For traditional shaped you tiao, roll out dough to about 1/4″ and cut into strips, then take two strips and twist them together, stretching them lengthwise as you do so. Drop into the pot and cook until crispy golden brown. Obviously you want to adjust the size of this to fit your pot.

For a crunchier, crispier cruller, roll out pieces as thin as you can and slice 2-3 slits down the middle before frying.

Serve with warm homemade sweet or savory soy milk

Soak dried soy beans in a large pot overnight. Drain and then blend well in blender at approximately 2:1 ratio of water to beans. Cover a large pot with a clean cloth and pour in the blended mixture, straining out the solid matter. If you are doing this alone, use rubber bands to secure the cloth to the pot handles while you pour. Periodically stop to squeeze out all the liquid in the 豆渣 and then empty the strainer. Wikipedia tells me you white devils call the solid remnants okara. It can be used in cooking but I’m personally not a huge fan and just discard it.

Cook the strained soy milk well, bringing it to a boil and letting it simmer for 20 minutes. Keep an eye on it to prevent boiling over, which makes a giant frothing mess. Ask me how I know.

Season to taste with either sugar or a combination of soy sauce, chili oil, salt, pepper, rice vinegar, and other savory flavorings as desired.

I feel once again compelled to defend my culinary honor by posting successful meals from the recent past. This one dates back to the end of March and was the inaugural dish for my beautiful blue dutch oven (made possible via dealzdealzdealz from Stacy)

Milk and lemon together sounds like a terrible combination, but this came out beautifully and the split milk is actually a very nice gravy for the chicken.

Jamie Oliver’s Chicken in milk

1 whole chicken, approx 3.5 lbs
salt and pepper
1 stick of butter (4oz)
olive oil
1/2 cinnamon stick
sage leaves
zest of 2 lemons
10 cloves of garlic, with the skin on (I used probably double this)
1 pint milk

Preheat oven to 375°.

Season the chicken with salt and pepper and fry it in the butter and olive oil, turning until golden all over. Remove the chicken and pour off the fat. I saved it for the veggies that accompanied the meal. Put all remaining ingredients in pot along with the chicken and cooking in the oven for 90 minutes with the lid on. Baste occasionally.

Meat should be tender and practically falling off the bone. Serve with plenty of sauce.

Nancy Silverton says that you should treat your starter like a baby. Regular feedings and careful attention to all its needs. When I failed the last feeding and my attempts to revive the starter looked unsuccessful, I was tempted to scrap it all and restart with the pound of grapes I saved for just this occasion. But hasn’t everyone been dropped on the head a few times as a baby? No? Just me? Well my mother kept me instead of starting over and I turned out juuuuuust fine*.

So I turned to the bible and looked for guidance.  Well it turns out that the adding of water during feeding is just to maintain the consistency and so my attempts to fix my mistake by preserving the listed proportions did more harm than good. A little extra fuel in the form of flour wouldn’t have hurt as much as drowning all the baby yeasties. Which, by the way, also happened to me as a youngster left improperly attended in a boat…

Moving on again, the starter still smelled viable but the consistency was that of thin gruel, so there was no real chance for bubble formation and lord knows what was happening to the poor yeasts. So I bit the bullet and started adding flour sans measurements until it was about the same consistency as before. And you know what? The bubbles came back. The casual observer would never suspect that this starter had been nearly drowned. So if you’re intimidated by the idea of making your own sourdough starter, don’t be. Like babies, they’re much harder to kill off than you think.

*Okay so technically under the one child policy she couldn’t exactly start over anyways. So this analogy is perhaps not the best. But anyways. Moving on.

A quick and easy blog post about a quick and easy pasta. Both look like they took far more work than they actually did and can be jazzed up with some simple tricks.

Goat cheese pasta

Boil a pot of water and make some pasta. 

Heat up some tomato sauce and add in some cream.

Make a bowl of garlicky olive oil by chopping up some garlic and soaking them in oil. Duh.

When pasta is done, drizzle the garlicky oil on top, throw on some goat cheese, the tomato sauce, and some basil. 

For fancypants points, use fresh homemade pasta, homemade tomato sauce and basil from your garden. For a lazy gourmet meal, use the supermarket version of everything. Voilà!

Today being National Doughnut Day, it seems an opportune time to post a culinary non-catastrophe from the recent pre-blog past: homemade raised doughnuts!

I used the recipe listed at Erin Cooks and they came out beautifully. I’m typically not one for doughnuts, but these were tasty enough to warrant several. One friend who overindulged has started accusing me of trying to fatten him up for nefarious purposes. 

Raised Doughnuts

5 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt

2 packages active dry yeast
1 3/4 cups very warm milk (120º to 130º)
1/3 cup shortening
2 eggs
Vegetable oil
Sugar

Mix 2 cups of flour and all dry ingredients in a large bowl. Add milk, shortening and eggs. Beat on low until combined, and then gradually mix in all remaining flour, scraping the bowl. Cover and place in a warm place for an hour until dough is doubled in size.

Turn out dough onto a heavily floured and roll out to 1/2 inch thickness. Cut with pastry cutters into appropriate sized doughnuts.  Cover again and let rise until doubled in size, about 30-40 minutes. Alton Brown notes that any leftover pieces should rest 20 minutes after combining before re-cutting and they will always be tougher than the original batch. I got sick of that and made negative space fried dough pieces which were just as delicious as the round shapes and had interesting corners that were extra crispy. 

Heat about 1 to 1.5 gallons of vegetable oil in a dutch oven to 365º. Slide in doughnuts one at a time, waiting a few seconds between doughnuts so that they won’t stick together if they do bump. Flip when the dough turns golden brown, about 1 minute, and cook the other side. Transfer to a cooling rack.

Sugarphobes can eat these straight or you can roll in cinammon sugar or dip in

Glaze

1/4 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups confectioner’s sugar

Combine milk and vanilla in saucepan and heat until warm. Whisk in sugar. Remove from heat and set over a pan of warm water while you dip in doughnuts. For best results, get out the burn cream and eat while warm.