Beer and Baking

When I was in high school, my father told me that if I drank enough beer I would learn to like it.  I spent the next five years or so doing my best to drink "enough" beer.  It never worked - beer is disgusting, bitter and nasty.  For the next ten years after that, I just thought that I was deficient in the drinking department.  There are very, very few alcoholic drinks that I like, and those are only the ones where you can't taste the alcohol.

I put this down to having an undeveloped/immature tongue.  Our parents used to tell us that we would like different foods when we got older, like eggplant and arugula.  But I never started liking any of those types of foods, and I just assumed that my tongue was the Peter Pan of my anatomy, doomed to be child-like forever.

I was complaining about this to a food guy, who looked at me like I was nuts (and to be fair, he may be right) and said, "You're a supertaster.  There's nothing wrong with you."

Supertasters are more sensitive to bitter tastes than normal tasters.  The wikipedia list of foods that supertasters hate is pretty true to my experiences, except that I like the more mellow types of green tea.  It also explains why I had such a hard time taking quinine and threw up afterwards.

So now I take a different approach to cooking, baking, and which ingredients I choose to use: if it's for other people, I use ingredients that are on the list because normal tasters like them; if it's for me, I only use ingredients that aren't on the list or which I know will have their taste covered up by something else.  The good news is that the taste of beer can be covered up easily in a lot of baking recipes so that it only comes out as a faint aftertaste.

That's good news because beer is one of the best liquids to use in baking.  It has both carbonation and gluten, and lifts dough and batter up to be light, moist, and fluffy.  Some people call beer a secret ingredient, but there's nothing secret about it.  Humans have been baking and cooking with beer for literally thousands of years.

Friend B's husband R is a beer guy, so if I have a beer-containing recipe that I want to try I just wait until there's an occasion in honor of R.  My thought process goes like this: "This recipe may turn out horribly, but R likes beer so he'll like it anyways!"  R is too polite to say, "Jesus Christ, this shit is terrible!  Not even beer can rescue it!" about a cake that somebody has made for him.

R's birthday was last week, so he got my second try at making a beer cake.  The first try was for something last year (Honey Spice Beer Cake) and this try was supposed to go along with the Italian-themed dinner party (Chocolate Stout Cake).  Both cakes turned out great, and the recipes only needed a little massaging.

Holiday Parties Galore: Mojito Doughnuts

Now that it's January and I'm looking back at the holiday season, I'm still convinced that work holiday parties are horrible.  It's not that I don't have friends at work, it's that either I've got work that needs to get done and I don't have time to waste or I usually hang out with my friends at work while we're at work and I don't need to do that with hundreds of other people as well.  I'm a total Scrooge and there will not be a Tiny Tim coming by to change that anytime soon.

By the time I got to the last holiday party in the Week Of Seven Holiday Parties, I was clearly in need of something alcoholic.  So why not make something sweet and boozy?  I've forgotten exactly what combination of words I put into google to find this recipe, but I'm sure that it included "yummy", "alcoholic", "sweet", and "doughnut".  Mojito doughnuts!  What a perfect and brilliant idea.

Of course, there were several setbacks, including my lack of a doughnut pan and the fact that one of my old roommates had a serious drug and alcohol problem and had secretly stolen all of my cooking booze (except the arak - even alcoholics won't drink the arak).  So I bought rum and with its help constructed a doughnut pan out of tin foil and a muffin tin.

Between the rum and the rest of the week, I was at the point where I didn't care if the recipe worked or not.  That's why it turned out to be one of the best recipes I'd made in 2012: recipes only work perfectly when you don't care anymore.  Martha Stewart should do a show about this phenomenon.

What's a slightly drunk girl with no doughnut pan going to do when she tries to bake doughnuts?  Construct one!  I just expected that it wasn't going to work and I would have oddly shaped, solid doughnuts, but it actually worked like a charm.  Who knew?  Definitely not me.

Holiday Parties Galore: Fantastic Holiday Party Cake Recipe

Having two jobs means that I've basically got double of all of those job-related things that crop up in life - specifically, I had three job-related holiday parties to go to.  If they had been spread out through the month of December, it would have been fine.  But not only were they in the same week, they were also in the same week as four other holiday parties that I had already said I'd go to.  To be blunt, the second week of December kicked my ass.

I wasn't planning on going to both holiday parties for Job 1, but I miscalculated: when you bake cakes that people like, they want you to come back for other potluck parties.  I got ambushed by the secretary to the Deputy Director a couple of days before one of the parties, and while I was making excuses about why I wasn't going, the Deputy Director popped up and said that he'd loved my cake last year and would I please bring it again this year.

This would normally be complimentary, but I'm pretty sure that the Deputy Director of a federal agency the size of ours doesn't know me from Adam and certainly didn't remember what cake I'd brought to a potluck party with hundreds of people that happened a year earlier.  But his secretary remembered and he's a good boss who tries his best to keep her happy, so I got commanded to show up with the cake.

They got a bit of a surprise when I mentioned that it was a lime-zucchini cake.  Zucchinis are a secret baking weapon: full of water to make cakes moist but they have a weak taste that can be overridden by any citrus fruit.  Lime-zucchini cakes just taste like lime, and nobody can tell that there's zucchinis in it.

Zucchini cakes are just like carrot cakes, where a mild tasting vegetable that holds a lot of water is used to produce a very moist cake.  If the idea of a zucchini cake freaks you out, just remember that lots of people love carrot cakes and don't think that there's anything wrong with using carrots in a cake.

What To Make For The Holidays? Cranberry-apple Crisp!

It's that time of the year: holiday parties for two months, where you want to bring something nice but after the first couple of parties you just can't be bothered.  You're running around, trying to go to your friends' parties to see them and have a good time with them while arranging your own holiday life, getting in fights with your parents, failing to find presents that your sisters will actually like, forgetting some of your friends when setting up your own party invitations, trying to get all of your work done while half of your coworkers are gone.  It's no wonder that there's a popular urban legend that the suicide rate goes up because of winter holidays.

The best recipe for this time of year should be delicious, easy to make, quick to make, and require only ingredients that you've already got in your kitchen.  Not surprisingly, such a recipe does not exist.  The closest you can get are delicious recipes that are easy to make and which use common ingredients, ones that you can easily get at the grocery store.  The good news is that this recipe meets all of those requirements, and gets better the longer it sits in the fridge.

This recipe works because it releases a lot of the sugar (sucrose) held in the apples and cranberries.  The longer the apples sit with the cranberries, the more the tastes mingle, so the two-day old leftovers from this recipes will often taste better than the freshly made version.

You can also change things up quite easily in this recipe.  I didn't have dried cranberries about half of the times that I made this crisp, so I just used more fresh cranberries instead.  It came out fine.  You can also add in other flavors easily - orange zest, lemon zest, nutmeg, etc.  The one part of the recipe you don't want to change is the topping (the part that becomes crisp when you bake it).

I got this recipe from America's Test Kitchen: All-time Best Holiday Recipes, which was an impulse buy when I was stuck in a ludicrously long line in a Whole Foods.  I don't know why the website says price: $9.95, on sale: $9.95.  Maybe they are great at baking and terrible at arithmetic.  All I can tell you is that this magazine is worth the money.

This crisp is a great party dish because it is easy to make and transport (just one baking dish), it has ingredients that are considered to be winter holiday fruits (apples + cranberries), and it's different from what most people bring (chocolate, gingerbread, or pumpkin pie).  It's easy to serve and people are always impressed if you make fresh whipped cream to go along with it.

Potluck Experiments: Plum Galette

Chez Panisse is a very famous restaurant in my hometown of Berkeley, notable for the fact that it basically started the California cuisine movement: use fresh, local foods to make fusion cuisine - very Californian.  I've never been there since a) I can't afford it and b) my mother and the owner got in a fight back in 90's and my mother holds a grudge.  Berkeley isn't a cosmopolis - it's really just a small town that happens to have a large university in the middle of it - and the personal interactions are what you'd expect to see in a small town in the middle of nowhere.  Imagine a Thornton Wilder play with more grumbling about the lack of state educational funding.  (I'm not kidding about this: Thornton Wilder went to Berkeley High.)

In any case, I have that Berkeleyan smug disdain for Chez Panisse that everybody there develops eventually.  "Oh, yes, Chez Panisse.  Did you know that the original Peet's is just around the corner?  And it's so much easier to just grab a slice of pizza at the Cheeseboard.  Chez Panisse is just okay now.  Oooh, you know what I heard?  Now they're using beets in everything.  Can you imagine?  Beets!  Chez Panisse is so overpriced."  We're allowed to complain about it but nobody else is.

The internet does not have the same attitude towards Chez Panisse.  For example, this website is run by a guy who loves Chez Panisse.  In fact, he posted this recipe because of a picture he saw in the flicr photostream for the Chez Panisse 40th Anniversary Party.

This photo, to be precise.  Original.

Now I completely get what he's talking about, because when I saw one of his photos on his website I decided that I had to try making a plum galette as well.

His photo.  Who wouldn't want to try making that?

I had to fiddle with his recipe a bit to make it work but it turned out all right in the end.  While I can't tell you is if this is the type of thing that they serve at Chez Panisse, I can say that the people at the potluck liked it.  I was expecting the crust to be softer but it's actually flaky.

Potluck Experiments: 抹茶マーブルシフォン (Matcha Marbled Chiffon Cake)

As part of my post-hurricane potluck baking experiments, I decided that I wanted to try baking a nice cake made with green tea.  I had bought some good quality matcha (a type of Japanese green tea) powder from Amazon and so far I'd only made desserts using green tea cream.  Why not bake a nice cake with matcha instead?

American baked desserts are notably sweeter than baked desserts in Japan.  I like the flavor of matcha in a dessert but it really does taste weird when the dessert is at American levels of sweetness.  My parents have mentioned that one of the things they had a hard time adjusting to when we lived in Japan was that the cakes were not sweet in the way that they were expecting.  I ended up with the opposite reaction: Japanese-style cakes that are made to American sweetness levels don't taste right.

All of the recipes I found that looked promising for matcha cakes were in Japanese.  I couldn't find English translations (or I couldn't figure out the right phrases to google).  Eventually I ended up using google translate and my horrible Japanese to translate several recipes that looked promising.

The Japanese was not the most difficult part of translating the recipes - the different measurement systems were.  Most Americans don't know that we're the odd man out when it comes to cooking measurements, and it's not Imperial versus metric.  Almost every other country (except Australia) uses weight or mass when measuring dry ingredients, but we use volume.

Unfortunately, it's a bit more complicated than that.  Liquid ingredients are generally measured by volume in most countries but with a different measuring system than in the US.  Most dry or bulky ingredients are measured by weight or mass instead of volume.

The worst problem is converting from US to Imperial (UK) or vice versa, where we use the same words but mean different amounts.  This is why we can have ounces of milk and ounces of butter in the US and mean two completely separate measurements.  Fluid ounces are not the same thing as solid ounces.  This is also why you can't buy a cookbook in England and use it back in the US.  I've got a UK version of one of Nigella Lawson's cookbooks and I ended up buying another US copy of it because it was easier than converting every single recipe.

There are different conversions for each ingredient.  One cup of milk and one cup of flour do not have the same weight.  If you do end up having to translate a recipe, make sure that you look up the conversions for each ingredient.  Don't use the conversion for flour when you are calculating the amount of sugar!

If you scroll down this page to the baking conversions, you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.

Potluck Experiments: Blackberry Cobbler

Once a month, I meet up with a group of friends to play games and have a potluck.  It's perfect because I get to try out new games that I would never have heard of otherwise and I get to inflict any new baking experiments on a pre-arranged group of people and demand constructive criticism.  It's the best kind of two-in-one: fun for me, arranged by somebody else.

I always end up making more than one recipe because I can't choose just one thing to bake.  There usually isn't any link between the various recipes except that I thought that they sounded interesting.  We had another gaming potluck last Saturday, and since the weather has gotten cold and we had just been through a hurricane, I thought that blueberry cobbler would be a good dessert choice.

The definition of a cobbler is very broad: some kind of filling in a baking dish covered with a topping that is not crumbled (pie crust, biscuits, or batter).  Cobblers never have a bottom crust like pies do.  Although most people think that cobblers are an old European or British dessert, cobblers originated in the US as an alternative to pies and puddings.  There are lots and lots of regional differences and names for cobblers, most of which I'd never heard of before googling "cobblers" (grunt, slump, buckle, sonker, and pan dowdy's).  A Brown Betty is technically a cobbler because it doesn't have a bottom crust.  A crumble is like a cobbler but it uses oatmeal in the crust instead.

My mother would occasionally make a cobbler in the winter and tell us how great is was to have a nice hot cobbler when it's cold.  But we grew up in San Francisco, where it gets chilly instead of cold, so I never really understood what she meant.  The first time I had a hot cobbler for dessert in the middle of a Chicago winter made it all clear.

Although apple cobblers and peach cobblers are popular, I associate cobbler with blueberries.  As far as I know, there is no one type of fruit that is more popular for a cobbler than any other and this link with blueberries is probably just left over from my childhood.

So when I realized that I was going to a potluck less than a week after Hurricane Sandy (which is also when the temperature dropped from the 70's to the 40's - thanks, Mother Nature!), I immediately thought of a blueberry cobbler.  This was also a good idea because we found out that the furnace was broken during the hurricane and we didn't (and still don't) have any heat for the house.  I was not adverse to the idea of spending hours in the kitchen with the oven on.

Time For Something New

When you're tired after a long day, it's so easy to stay in a food rut and eat the same thing you always do when you're exhausted.  In my case, that's either a bowl of chocolate chip cookie dough or take out from a Thai restaurant.  I've been trying to eat better since the beginning of October and I've actually been doing a pretty good job.  It was easy to stop ordering take out when I was tired, but a little more difficult to break the habit of eating something sweet.  Things are slowly progressing, for which my digestive system seems to be grateful.

But I really miss Thai food.  It is so good - spicy and savory and the tastes combine perfectly with the textures of the ingredients.  Although I can't eat the really spicy dishes anymore, like papaya salad, I can still have the savory ones.  Several weeks ago I decided it was time to try making my favorite at home: pad see ew.

Of course it turned out that pad see ew is one of those dishes that you really can't recreate exactly at home.  You need a well-seasoned wok with an industrial strength stove to get restaurant-style pad see ew.  Most of the Thai cooking blogs I looked at said that you can do a pretty good approximation at home if you're patient.  I was pretty nervous about trying to make pad see ew after reading all of this, and I figured that I'd give it a try and it would be terrible and that would be that.

Unexpectedly, pad see ew is really easy to make at home.  The blogs are right - the taste isn't exactly the same without the high heat but it's definitely edible and tastes similar to a restaurant's version. 

Restaurant-style pad see ew: my version got pretty close.

Gnocchi: Not As Italian As You'd Think (+ Pesto)

There's a very simple rule for eating pasta: thin pasta, thick sauce; thick pasta, thin sauce.  You eat gnocchi with a thin sauce, even though it's not pasta.  Gnocchi are little dumplings, not noodles.  They're usually listed with the pasta on the menu at Italian restaurants and sold with pasta in grocery store, which creates some confusion.

There really isn't a stereotypical "Italian" dinner any more than there is an "American" dinner.  Sure, some Americans really do eat green bean casserole made with Campbell's cream of mushroom soup and hamburgers for dinner in the same way that some Italians really do eat tomatoes and mozzarella and chicken cacciatore with tiramisu for dessert.  But there is considerable regional differences in both American and Italian cooking which makes it difficult to say what Americans or Italians "eat for dinner".  Most cookbooks and travel magazines do the best they can, writing very broad descriptions that aren't wrong but aren't really right, either.

In these descriptions, an Italian dinner has a lighter first course which is usually some kind of pasta/gnocchi/soup and a heavier main course which is a meat dish.  Gnocchi may not be pasta but it is cooked similarly and used interchangeably with pasta in the first course.

Most people know the potato version of gnocchi, but they can be made with lots of ingredients, including ricotta, flour, and pumpkin.  Tuscany has a version of gnocchi called malfatti, which are ricotta and spinach dumplings.  The idea of small dumplings made from flour was spread across Europe by the Roman empire and most European countries have some version of them. If you've ever had spätzle, then you know what I'm talking about.

Although potato gnocchi are the most commonly made version of gnocchi, potatoes are not indigenous to Italy and weren't introduced until the 16th century.  Many of the food items that we consider to be historically Italian are actually made with foods from the New World, like tomatoes and potatoes.  When new food items became available, Italians worked them into their older recipes which is how we get pizza with tomato sauce or potato gnocchi.

What's In A Name? Flour Does Not Smell As Sweet

At some point, we've all discovered that the same food can have different names.  The name for soda (or pop or tonic or soft drinks or...) is a big one in the US, and everybody thinks that everybody else's regional dialect has a silly name.  I personally believe that calling all sodas "Coke" is just plain ridiculous.  This snippet of a real conversation I heard in a diner illustrates my point:

"I'd like a Coke."
"Sure, what kind?"
"A 7-Up."

What?!

It's not just soda, of course.  A milkshake in New England is (or used to be) a blend of milk and flavored syrup and not a blend of milk and ice cream.  That is a frappe - except in Rhode Island, where it's a cabinet.  I learned about frappes ten years ago, which is also when I figured out what the name "frappuccino" was supposed to mean: frappe + cappuccino.  Nobody has explained why a coffee chain that's from Seattle is naming things using a strictly New England regional name.

There's also regional brand name differences, such as Edy's/Dreyer's, Best Foods/Hellmann's, and Arnold/Oroweat.  Then there's differences in names between countries that supposedly speak the same language.  In the UK, cilantro is called coriander and zucchinis are courgettes.  We have also borrowed a lot of words in English and have ended up changing the meanings: in Italy, peperoni are bell peppers and salame piccante means pepperoni (the American version).

But some food name differences are important and really don't mean the same thing.  Take the word "flour": in the US, flour generally means wheat flour and any other type of flour is called "plant flour" to indicate what plant it was made from.  However, there are many different types of wheat flour and you shouldn't use a different type unless you know how to adapt a recipe for substitution.

The key difference between wheat flours is the amount of gluten.  Gluten is a protein that is found in wheat and other relatives, such as rye and barley.  It helps dough to rise and keep its shape and makes the dough elastic, which is why bread is chewy.  In general, savory dough recipes use flours with more gluten and sweet dough recipes use flours with less gluten.

There are six classes of wheat in the US (durum, hard red spring, hard red winter, soft red winter, hard white, soft white), and the types of flour they produce are different.  Not surprisingly, the hard wheat types are best for yeast breads and the soft types are best for pastries.  Durum is the hardest type of all, and is used to make pasta.

This is what your bread started out as.