do you ever find that when you're having a dinner party, and you're finally sitting down to eat, you...don't actually feel like eating? it's one part adrenaline from getting everything done, and one part nervousness about people liking what you've made - especially when you're cooking for people you haven't ever cooked for. it's not like cooking for friends back home, where you've already been tried and vetted. granted, i don't think anyone's going to be judgmental about just a dinner party, but when i do give one, there is always that competitive spirit that aims to impress, vying with the more social desire to feed people.
i think i've mentioned this before, but really, the best part of the dinner party for me is the cooking part; of course, when you cook something, somebody needs to eat it, so naturally it makes sense to invite some people over. and the social phenomenon of a dinner party really appeals to me: a group of people gathered around a table, talking and idling the evening away. take note of the table: it actually makes a huge difference, having now entertained for four years without one. it really surprises me just how much having the table matters - just having this physical thing that everybody is sitting around, and that you can rest your elbows on.
back to the matter at hand: a recap of last night's dinner. i know you're all waiting with bated breath. i was going to be cooking for more people than usual - typically i cook for four to six, on a given weekday in cambridge, but it was going to be a party of ten. i wanted to improve on the previous dinner party with respect to logistics, where it wouldn't be late and where i could set everything up ahead of time. i thought that dessert (vanilla panna cotta) slowed me down last time, and i also didn't give it enough time to set. i had been wanting to make a cheesecake for a few weeks - i just bought a good set of stainless steel springforms from sur la table, for cheap - so there's dessert. i also didn't want to make as many separate things as i did last time - salad, meat dish, veg side - but i did want to maintain the robustness of having lots of vegetables, since it's summer (aka produce season) and i do believe in both butter and vegetables. so, in the interest of time, space, and economy, i decided to make a big all-inclusive pasta with some sort of veg side/salad.
i don't know why this is, but i always seem to be better at making desserts, even though i spend more time thinking about the dinner part. cooking (as opposed to baking) is the more essential skill, because you've got to eat dinner, but you don't have to eat dessert; because cooking is the survival skill, i've tried to cultivate it. perhaps it's just the logistics of cooking for more people than i'm used to - apparently i can really only do 4-6 people or 25 people, well - but i think that in both dinner parties, dinner has been a bit of a letdown, but dessert has always been good. last night, for the salad, i did a green bean salad - i had been thinking green beans, and was sold when the green beans at whole foods looked uncommonly good. they were really green, a little waxy in sheen, crisp, and just very attractive. the salad is a cherrypicked combination of two different salads i've made before (for those who know them, the wheatberry salad and the dilled warm green bean salad). so: green beans, smoked mozzarella, tomatoes, oranges and their zest, and a little bit of balsamic vinaigrette which i couldn't get to emulsify correctly (oops). i was going to add some cilantro too, but i thought there was enough in the salad already, so there you go.
for the record, i've been superbusy this week - longish hours at the office followed by 6-7 hours for my other job - so i didn't even decide on what to make until friday night. i was a little worried about making enough food for ten people, so i thought a pasta with meat and veg in it would be doable. specifically: sweet italian pork sausage, a little bit of bacon, onions, garlic, thyme, and peas. verdict: so-so. the stuff:pasta ratio was a little too low for my liking, and i think one more veg would have been good - mushrooms, or maybe sundried tomatoes to add a bit of acidity. oh, i also added a couple pinches of the smoked salt (smoked alderwood salt from whole foods, from the bulk foods aisle), and i thought it was pretty good. i think it would be better in stews, or long braises, but it went with the bacon pretty well - it would be out of place in a vegetarian dish. i also think that the sizes of things were a little off - the sausage was a little too big (i took the casings off and tore the sausages into bits before browning them), and i thought the pasta was as well, so it was a bit hard to get a bite with everything in it. if i did this again, i would probably use a different pasta - maybe an orecchiette or acini de pepe, or at least pipette - i used chocciole or something like that, from whole foods, because they didn't have pipette (a barilla brand pasta shape that i really like - it's a little smaller than the chocciole).
i also thought that the pasta lacked something saucy to bind it all together. i had originally been thinking that i'd make a pesto to fulfill that purpose, but then i remembered that i have neither blender nor food processor in this apartment, so that was out of the question. i briefly considered buying premade pesto, but i wasn't really ever serious about that. i was hoping that the surfeit of onions and combined, concentrated meat juices would be enough to sauce the pasta, in combination with parmesan cheese, but it just wasn't quite there. i also considered tomatoes, because the pasta is essentially an all'amatriciana with a couple of extras tacked on, but tomatoes are super-expensive these days, and i didn't want to use canned. in retrospect, a pesto would have been perfect - a little bit of vegetal freshness to contrast the meat flavors - and i should have at least gone with some tomatoes. consider this my mea culpa.
i thought dessert was pretty good, though - i ended up making a gingered plum compote to go with the cheesecake, for a few reasons: (1), for color; (2), to bump up the net volume of a serving of dessert because there would be so many people; and (3) because fruit is always good with cheesecake. i realized far too late (ie, now) that this is the second time that i've made something with yogurt and forgotten to tell c, who is allergic to yogurt (oh, crap) and i'm hoping that he's not really sick today. perhaps the bacteria cultures in yogurt die when they're cooked? i sure hope so, although i'm not sure that that's the case at all. well, anyway, the fact that i had to use anna's lemon things (not the ginger-flavored thins that i generally use) did not detract from the cheesecake, although i do think that ginger flavored thins are a little better. the plums - which i typically make for plum shortcake - were pretty good. i grated the ginger this time, which eliminated the problem of the gross texture combination of sauteed plum and minced ginger. we also had some farmer's market ufo/donut peaches that y+g brought, which were really good - peaches are one of those things i would actually buy at a farmer's market, because you know they haven't been artificially treated with ethylene to make sure they ripen at the end of their thousands-of-miles-long journey to your supermarket.
despite the hiccups and poor choices, i thought that dinner went well - i'm slowly getting the hang of dinner parties at a table, for more than four (and, budgeting for this many people). oh, and iced tea, take 2 went well - i used the harney + sons peach iced tea, slightly sweetened. i might go buy some more before the summer is over - that's how much i like this tea. anyway, this dinner had the right amount of things - everything fit well on the table, including a couple of ramekins with lemon slices in them - yes, i did buy meyer lemons at whole foods just because they were beautiful. plus, you don't find them all that often on this coast, although they're common in california. they were this gorgeous, brilliant egg-yolk-y yellow. one of the things that i do miss about cambridge, though, is that it's so much easier to have spontaneous dinner party (these tend to be more dinner, less party) in cambridge because i can just send out an email in the afternoon and stop by the supermarket on the walk home. there's no having to contend with completely variegated schedules because almost everyone i know is in school; no having to spend an hour and half going to the grocery store; no having to wait for people to travel from more than 20 minutes away. if i'm wandering around the city, i don't mind when it takes forever to get anywhere or do anything, but if i've planned something, the time that it takes to do anything in this city really get to me.
notes
in the boston globe's (not that great) interview with tim cushman, the chef/owner of o ya, he reports that the restaurant is booked solid for 1 1/2 months. right now i'm feeling pretty good about having made a reservation the day the review came out. when i made i wondered if i was being silly, but now i'm glad i didn't have to have dinner surrounded by obnoxious yuppie foodies. p.s. i am completely aware that most people would consider me to be a yuppie foodie. and to those people: i defy you! i'm not a foodie; i just happen to like food. and food science.
also, about the chocolate bundt cake - looked fabulous, tasted not bad. i really should have bought toothpicks to test the cake, which i thought was slightly overdone. whoops. these are the problems attendant to using a 10-cup bundt pan instead of of a 12-cup bundt pan. so the cake really needed an extra day for its flavor to develop, because i thought the brown sugar was a little too prominent over the chocolate, but it was pretty good anyway. a chocolate glaze - i'd been thinking of making one, but judged it to be too easy to mess up the glaze when transporting the cake - would probably have been a welcome addition. i made one last summer when i made this cake for my office then.
i stopped by whole foods in union square with my mother on saturday; they don't sell cocoa nibs, but they do sell bittersweet callebaut chocolate. it mystifies me why they don't sell the bittersweet at whole foods tribeca. and i've really soured on new york grocery stores in general, given this whole cocoa nib fiasco. granted, they're somewhat hard to find in cambridge too - i walked all the way to christina's once, only to find that they were out, and the next time they had them, they didn't have the same ones - but you're supposed to be able to find anything in new york city, right? i would have liked to have done a taste test between the cocoa nibs i have - locally processed tazo brand nibs, organically grown in the dominican republic - with another type of cocoa nibs. i really liked the ones that i got at christina's before the tazo ones - they were smaller and have a purer chocolate smell. perhaps one of these days i'll happen upon them, and let me tell you, those will be happy days.
17 août 2008
07 août 2008
summer baking experiment #2
as my funds run out (i just parted with my tuition money - my first semester paid with money i earned all on my own!), i am still managing to fritter away money on my baking experiments. i guess i'll just have to work more hours on my freelance stuff.
i have to admit that, in the absence of my (cambridge) roommates, it's really nice that people at the office are willing to eat things that people bring in. in cambridge, we basically have a revolving door and somebody is over almost every day or night, thus creating the perfect environment to give away food after every experiment. in new york, i just don't know as many people, nor do the people i know live close enough to just stop by in the evenings. so the office is my stand-in recipient of my baking experiments.
this week's experiment is actually a pretty poor in terms of rating an experiment, and more a crowd pleaser for work - it's a chocolate pound cake i've made several times. i like pound cake in general because it has very little artificial leavening - ie, baking soda or baking powder. instead, it derives its structure and texture from the actual making of the cake - if you don't mix the batter enough, your pound cake won't have the right texture. when i bought my first baking cookbook, the author expounded on the virtue of creaming the butter for a full five minutes every time. i admit that i was a young and naive 18 year old at the time, and i scoffed. i still make cookies with a wooden spoon (ie no creaming the butter), but i am a convert to creaming the butter properly for cakes. creaming the butter incorporates air into the butter, giving your cake structure and texture. pound cake is essentially a study in how to incorporate air into your batter - the standard method is to cream the butter, beat the butter and sugar for a good long 10 minutes, add the eggs one at a time, then alternate dry ingredients and some moisture-rich ingredient (sour cream, in this case), beating each in every time. so you see that by beating everything in very slowly, you develop the structure of the cake purely by mixing the ingredients together. the efficiency of the method is a beautiful thing.
so i was curious to know how hot weather affects this sort of butter-rich batter - i would expect that it would be harder to mix everything because the butter would get melty too fast. true to form, the coating i use on the pan to keep the cake from sticking - just melted butter and cocoa - refused to cool until i stuck it in the fridge. in defense of the butter, i also didn't brush the pan with the cocoa butter until i was done making the batter, so i was probably overly impatient. surprisingly, though, the batter looks pretty much as it always does: tan, thick, airy. it was slightly shinier than it usually is, but it was nowhere nearly as bad as i thought it would be. it's also not the hottest evening, but just ignore that part. it's definitely warmer in the apt than it usually is at cutcat. the most noticeable point at which the butter was meltier than usual was when i creamed the butter by itself - it took very little time and was super-shiny. i was still worried when i added the sugar and it was still looking shiny, but that's why you beat the butter and sugar together for a full ten minutes: the incorporation of air starts to minimize the butter meltage. you know what else? billington's dark brown sugar - my favorite to use when the flavor really matters - has been really lumpy the past couple of times i've used it. i don't remember it being that lumpy in the past; perhaps both times it was an old batch of sugar? i mean, i know brown sugar has a tendency to clump, but it's been a little ridiculous.
i can smell the cake now, which is a good sign - it's been in for about 35 minutes or so. will report back later on how it tasted.
i have to admit that, in the absence of my (cambridge) roommates, it's really nice that people at the office are willing to eat things that people bring in. in cambridge, we basically have a revolving door and somebody is over almost every day or night, thus creating the perfect environment to give away food after every experiment. in new york, i just don't know as many people, nor do the people i know live close enough to just stop by in the evenings. so the office is my stand-in recipient of my baking experiments.
this week's experiment is actually a pretty poor in terms of rating an experiment, and more a crowd pleaser for work - it's a chocolate pound cake i've made several times. i like pound cake in general because it has very little artificial leavening - ie, baking soda or baking powder. instead, it derives its structure and texture from the actual making of the cake - if you don't mix the batter enough, your pound cake won't have the right texture. when i bought my first baking cookbook, the author expounded on the virtue of creaming the butter for a full five minutes every time. i admit that i was a young and naive 18 year old at the time, and i scoffed. i still make cookies with a wooden spoon (ie no creaming the butter), but i am a convert to creaming the butter properly for cakes. creaming the butter incorporates air into the butter, giving your cake structure and texture. pound cake is essentially a study in how to incorporate air into your batter - the standard method is to cream the butter, beat the butter and sugar for a good long 10 minutes, add the eggs one at a time, then alternate dry ingredients and some moisture-rich ingredient (sour cream, in this case), beating each in every time. so you see that by beating everything in very slowly, you develop the structure of the cake purely by mixing the ingredients together. the efficiency of the method is a beautiful thing.
so i was curious to know how hot weather affects this sort of butter-rich batter - i would expect that it would be harder to mix everything because the butter would get melty too fast. true to form, the coating i use on the pan to keep the cake from sticking - just melted butter and cocoa - refused to cool until i stuck it in the fridge. in defense of the butter, i also didn't brush the pan with the cocoa butter until i was done making the batter, so i was probably overly impatient. surprisingly, though, the batter looks pretty much as it always does: tan, thick, airy. it was slightly shinier than it usually is, but it was nowhere nearly as bad as i thought it would be. it's also not the hottest evening, but just ignore that part. it's definitely warmer in the apt than it usually is at cutcat. the most noticeable point at which the butter was meltier than usual was when i creamed the butter by itself - it took very little time and was super-shiny. i was still worried when i added the sugar and it was still looking shiny, but that's why you beat the butter and sugar together for a full ten minutes: the incorporation of air starts to minimize the butter meltage. you know what else? billington's dark brown sugar - my favorite to use when the flavor really matters - has been really lumpy the past couple of times i've used it. i don't remember it being that lumpy in the past; perhaps both times it was an old batch of sugar? i mean, i know brown sugar has a tendency to clump, but it's been a little ridiculous.
i can smell the cake now, which is a good sign - it's been in for about 35 minutes or so. will report back later on how it tasted.
04 août 2008
home and homesickness
i've been kind of grumpy lately, because i've been trying to figure out whether or not to take a semester off, but more, i suspect, because i'm starting to get homesick. don't get me wrong, new york: i like you fine. even more than fine, really. i really like you. but living out of a suitcase for a few months, regardless of how much of your stuff you've surrounded yourself with, just can't compare to being home: there's this permanent sense of your life being temporary.
i think i've felt as much at home as i can this summer, and in truth it really has felt like a vacation. you know, a vacation where i've got multiple jobs, but a break from school is a break from school. so now that i've finally had enough vacation, i'm starting to get antsy about feeling like i'm at home. part of this is cooking, and it's just been so long since i've gotten to do any therapeutic cooking. this sounds pretty stupid, but it's actually a great way to relax: basically i just do something that's really complicated or unnecessary, just for the sake of doing it. my standby is roasting a chicken to use the meat for chicken pot pie; usually people just buy a rotisserie chicken from the supermarket (ugh) or poach some chicken breast (uninspiring). after you roast the chicken and pull all the meat off the bones, you get to make chicken stock. and somehow the chicken and the food it's turned into all disappears within a day or two, courtesy of your friends.
i like the involved nature of doing something like this, and also the physical exhaustion that comes with it after you've been on your feet for hours. your kitchen smells good, and you've washed all the dishes so there's no mess, and you can go to sleep feeling that you've done something for the day. all of this is very satisfying.
so i'm making dinner for the roommates tomorrow, as you know, so today i made dessert (chocolate pudding) and the chicken stock for the risotto. really i should have made veal stock, but i'm sure the flavor of the sausage will overtake the risotto anyway, so it doesn't matter. anyway, i roasted a chicken while making the pudding, and then put the stock on the stove to simmer after finishing the pudding. i also made some peach iced tea, which i picked up at balducci's - it's harney + sons, and it's really quite good (it's a blend of fruit infusion and black tea).
i'm actually pretty excited about the risotto (which will be have to be timed carefully to be done in time for dinner). i was too lazy to make the oven-roasted tomatoes, so i'm going to do a tomato relish with lemon zest that's cold, to go with the warm risotto. the risotto will have sausage and morels in it, with fennel and sage. so the meatiness gets balanced by the fennel and sage, and the morels and the creaminess of the risotto get balanced by the acidity of the tomatoes and lemon zest. i think it'll be pretty good.
i did my shopping at fairway this time, and frustratingly came away with fennel (an impulse buy) but without cocoa nibs. i've now been to whole foods, citarella, and fairway, without success in sourcing cocoa nibs, and their unavailability is really starting to bother me. what gets me is that i know exactly where to get them in cambridge (christina's) and although i know i can get them at the scharffenberger store, i don't actually like scharffenberger chocolate, so that's kind of a no go. ah well...i guess there won't be any buckwheat cookies this week unless i suddenly acquire cocoa nibs. it's actually possible that fairway had them (they're the only grocery store to carry my callebaut bittersweet - whole foods and citarella only carry unsweetened and semisweet), but it was such a madhouse that i didn't really try that hard to look. in general, i like fairway, but apparently when you go after work, you catch the after work crowd. i never really mind waiting at the cash register, but i do mind having to navigate around people constantly because i like to do a nice, leisurely circuit of the whole place so i can remember what's on the shelves and what they don't have, for future reference. fairway seems to be organized so that people are always banging into each other - it's some combination of what's on the shelves and where, and the narrowness of the aisles. i wonder if it would be better if i went early in the morning? i'll have to see.
i think i've felt as much at home as i can this summer, and in truth it really has felt like a vacation. you know, a vacation where i've got multiple jobs, but a break from school is a break from school. so now that i've finally had enough vacation, i'm starting to get antsy about feeling like i'm at home. part of this is cooking, and it's just been so long since i've gotten to do any therapeutic cooking. this sounds pretty stupid, but it's actually a great way to relax: basically i just do something that's really complicated or unnecessary, just for the sake of doing it. my standby is roasting a chicken to use the meat for chicken pot pie; usually people just buy a rotisserie chicken from the supermarket (ugh) or poach some chicken breast (uninspiring). after you roast the chicken and pull all the meat off the bones, you get to make chicken stock. and somehow the chicken and the food it's turned into all disappears within a day or two, courtesy of your friends.
i like the involved nature of doing something like this, and also the physical exhaustion that comes with it after you've been on your feet for hours. your kitchen smells good, and you've washed all the dishes so there's no mess, and you can go to sleep feeling that you've done something for the day. all of this is very satisfying.
so i'm making dinner for the roommates tomorrow, as you know, so today i made dessert (chocolate pudding) and the chicken stock for the risotto. really i should have made veal stock, but i'm sure the flavor of the sausage will overtake the risotto anyway, so it doesn't matter. anyway, i roasted a chicken while making the pudding, and then put the stock on the stove to simmer after finishing the pudding. i also made some peach iced tea, which i picked up at balducci's - it's harney + sons, and it's really quite good (it's a blend of fruit infusion and black tea).
i'm actually pretty excited about the risotto (which will be have to be timed carefully to be done in time for dinner). i was too lazy to make the oven-roasted tomatoes, so i'm going to do a tomato relish with lemon zest that's cold, to go with the warm risotto. the risotto will have sausage and morels in it, with fennel and sage. so the meatiness gets balanced by the fennel and sage, and the morels and the creaminess of the risotto get balanced by the acidity of the tomatoes and lemon zest. i think it'll be pretty good.
i did my shopping at fairway this time, and frustratingly came away with fennel (an impulse buy) but without cocoa nibs. i've now been to whole foods, citarella, and fairway, without success in sourcing cocoa nibs, and their unavailability is really starting to bother me. what gets me is that i know exactly where to get them in cambridge (christina's) and although i know i can get them at the scharffenberger store, i don't actually like scharffenberger chocolate, so that's kind of a no go. ah well...i guess there won't be any buckwheat cookies this week unless i suddenly acquire cocoa nibs. it's actually possible that fairway had them (they're the only grocery store to carry my callebaut bittersweet - whole foods and citarella only carry unsweetened and semisweet), but it was such a madhouse that i didn't really try that hard to look. in general, i like fairway, but apparently when you go after work, you catch the after work crowd. i never really mind waiting at the cash register, but i do mind having to navigate around people constantly because i like to do a nice, leisurely circuit of the whole place so i can remember what's on the shelves and what they don't have, for future reference. fairway seems to be organized so that people are always banging into each other - it's some combination of what's on the shelves and where, and the narrowness of the aisles. i wonder if it would be better if i went early in the morning? i'll have to see.
03 août 2008
food, logic, and my ocd
do you ever think about food as a puzzle? because sometimes i do. i don't know if it's because it's some subconscious need to elevate cooking to some other level as a justification for doing it so frequently, or if it's just because that's the way my mind works; probably some combination. i mean, let's face it: normal people don't plan things out as thoroughly as i often do. i'm not a total nutcase, but i definitely have above average oc disorder.
problematizing (to use a fake archispeak word, sorry) food and cooking is basically the selfish part of why i like having dinner parties: getting to set a menu. i like this part of planning a dinner party so much that i probably derive a little too much pleasure from it. first you think about when you will be eating: is it going to be nice weather? what would you want to eat in that weather? how will people be eating, at a table or standing around, or just sitting on couches? because certainly you wouldn't want your guests to have to cut anything while standing up unless they were all four-handed people, right? i've definitely never made that mistake before...er, moving on.
and then you get into what's in season right now and available at the supermarket, which helps constrain your choices more. you have to balance the meal, so you start with something and it's actually good for you, rather than being likely to set off heart attacks. if you do have something rich in one course, then you'd balance it with something lighter in another course.
i'm making up a menu right now, for dinner on tuesday with my roommates. in fact i kind of need to prep some things tonight. i think i'm going to make a risotto, because it won't take too long (um, hopefully). i was thinking of doing a sausage risotto with morels in it, but that seems a bit rich, so i'm going to add in some oven-dried tomatoes for acidity. it occurred to me that i could make the tomatoes, so i need to do that tonight. oops, i just looked at the recipe (search this blog for "oven-roasted tomatoes") and it says 200F for 6-8 hours. i guess i remembered that time wrong. gotta get on that then. maybe i'll try 4 hours at 300F, that's still pretty low...
so anyway, i went to whole foods today and bought some of the ingredients. i was intrigued by the prospect of using fresh morels (i've already got dried morels from balducci's), so i bought a few for comparison. i also got a chicken because it costs the same amount to make your own chicken stock as it does to buy 3 packages of it. and then you also get the chicken meat, so i guess i may actually bring my lunch a couple days this week. i suppose i could also make chicken pot pie. at any rate, i'm going to roast the chicken, pull all the meat off, and make stock out of the bones. it'll be good. while i was at whole foods, i also bought a few pork chops; i actually haven't decided if it will be a sausage risotto plus some roasted veg, or just risotto with pork chops and roasted veg. i suppose it would be easier to do just a risotto, and less cleanup too. perhaps i'll freeze the pork chops in that case; as i think about this more, it seems to be the appropriate thing to do. regarding herbs, i'm thinking sage, to go with the pork; i saw some cheap and good-quality sage at citarella this afternoon.
i was also going to make a cheesecake because i just bought some nice and cheap springform pans at sur la table, but i think that may have to wait - the thought of using the oven so much tomorrow is kind of daunting. i might do just berries and whipped cream, which i can do with a whisk and a good bowl. i could also do a pudding, since i've been wanting to make pudding forever and now have the chocolate pudding recipe in hand. hmm. i should think more about dessert. i don't think i'm doing a first course, since this is just a simple weekday dinner; if it were friday, maybe. i had been thinking about making these parmesan basil zucchini muffins i made a while back, but that might be a bit too much work for just a weekday dinner, right?
i've also been thinking about what to make next for the office. i really like having an office where i can bring stuff in and people will eat it (i mean, nothing gross or ugly or anything, just the successful things...). i remember being really frustrated the summer i was in seattle, because i didn't know enough people at work to bring stuff in (and there was nowhere to put it, anyway) and my roommates were allergic to gluten. i've been meaning to make the buckwheat cocoa nib cookies again, but i have yet to find a source for cocoa nibs. actually, this is really pissing me off, because citarella doesn't have them, i didn't see them at the tribeca whole foods, and fairway is really far away (also, i don't know if they have them, though egullet reports that they do). and that's the only exotic ingredient in these cookies (the other ingredients being flour, buckwheat flour, butter and sugar)! hmph. i've also been toying with the idea of making the chocolate cupcakes again. they're so good, and would be great cold from the fridge, but really, where does one put 50 cupcakes anyway? are there really that many people in the office? 50 cupcakes is also a lot to transport, and i'd have to make up a special box to put them in, even. i've thought about making tiny cupcakes, but that would require a special pan, which i don't have here. i guess rocco is coming this weekend and i could ask him to bring my mini muffin tins...but anyway, it would be hard to find a place for these cupcakes in the office kitchen. it would be fun, though. i could bring in a half gallon of milk, too, as a whimsical, fun accompaniment for those who wanted it. i wanted to bring in milk for the chocolate chip cookies, but i didn't know if people would think it was stupid or just not want it. anyway, the most likely thing for work this week will be the buckwheat butter cookies, as soon as i can get my hands on cocoa nibs.
problematizing (to use a fake archispeak word, sorry) food and cooking is basically the selfish part of why i like having dinner parties: getting to set a menu. i like this part of planning a dinner party so much that i probably derive a little too much pleasure from it. first you think about when you will be eating: is it going to be nice weather? what would you want to eat in that weather? how will people be eating, at a table or standing around, or just sitting on couches? because certainly you wouldn't want your guests to have to cut anything while standing up unless they were all four-handed people, right? i've definitely never made that mistake before...er, moving on.
and then you get into what's in season right now and available at the supermarket, which helps constrain your choices more. you have to balance the meal, so you start with something and it's actually good for you, rather than being likely to set off heart attacks. if you do have something rich in one course, then you'd balance it with something lighter in another course.
i'm making up a menu right now, for dinner on tuesday with my roommates. in fact i kind of need to prep some things tonight. i think i'm going to make a risotto, because it won't take too long (um, hopefully). i was thinking of doing a sausage risotto with morels in it, but that seems a bit rich, so i'm going to add in some oven-dried tomatoes for acidity. it occurred to me that i could make the tomatoes, so i need to do that tonight. oops, i just looked at the recipe (search this blog for "oven-roasted tomatoes") and it says 200F for 6-8 hours. i guess i remembered that time wrong. gotta get on that then. maybe i'll try 4 hours at 300F, that's still pretty low...
so anyway, i went to whole foods today and bought some of the ingredients. i was intrigued by the prospect of using fresh morels (i've already got dried morels from balducci's), so i bought a few for comparison. i also got a chicken because it costs the same amount to make your own chicken stock as it does to buy 3 packages of it. and then you also get the chicken meat, so i guess i may actually bring my lunch a couple days this week. i suppose i could also make chicken pot pie. at any rate, i'm going to roast the chicken, pull all the meat off, and make stock out of the bones. it'll be good. while i was at whole foods, i also bought a few pork chops; i actually haven't decided if it will be a sausage risotto plus some roasted veg, or just risotto with pork chops and roasted veg. i suppose it would be easier to do just a risotto, and less cleanup too. perhaps i'll freeze the pork chops in that case; as i think about this more, it seems to be the appropriate thing to do. regarding herbs, i'm thinking sage, to go with the pork; i saw some cheap and good-quality sage at citarella this afternoon.
i was also going to make a cheesecake because i just bought some nice and cheap springform pans at sur la table, but i think that may have to wait - the thought of using the oven so much tomorrow is kind of daunting. i might do just berries and whipped cream, which i can do with a whisk and a good bowl. i could also do a pudding, since i've been wanting to make pudding forever and now have the chocolate pudding recipe in hand. hmm. i should think more about dessert. i don't think i'm doing a first course, since this is just a simple weekday dinner; if it were friday, maybe. i had been thinking about making these parmesan basil zucchini muffins i made a while back, but that might be a bit too much work for just a weekday dinner, right?
i've also been thinking about what to make next for the office. i really like having an office where i can bring stuff in and people will eat it (i mean, nothing gross or ugly or anything, just the successful things...). i remember being really frustrated the summer i was in seattle, because i didn't know enough people at work to bring stuff in (and there was nowhere to put it, anyway) and my roommates were allergic to gluten. i've been meaning to make the buckwheat cocoa nib cookies again, but i have yet to find a source for cocoa nibs. actually, this is really pissing me off, because citarella doesn't have them, i didn't see them at the tribeca whole foods, and fairway is really far away (also, i don't know if they have them, though egullet reports that they do). and that's the only exotic ingredient in these cookies (the other ingredients being flour, buckwheat flour, butter and sugar)! hmph. i've also been toying with the idea of making the chocolate cupcakes again. they're so good, and would be great cold from the fridge, but really, where does one put 50 cupcakes anyway? are there really that many people in the office? 50 cupcakes is also a lot to transport, and i'd have to make up a special box to put them in, even. i've thought about making tiny cupcakes, but that would require a special pan, which i don't have here. i guess rocco is coming this weekend and i could ask him to bring my mini muffin tins...but anyway, it would be hard to find a place for these cupcakes in the office kitchen. it would be fun, though. i could bring in a half gallon of milk, too, as a whimsical, fun accompaniment for those who wanted it. i wanted to bring in milk for the chocolate chip cookies, but i didn't know if people would think it was stupid or just not want it. anyway, the most likely thing for work this week will be the buckwheat butter cookies, as soon as i can get my hands on cocoa nibs.
lab report: ny times v. toll house
i haven't done a lab report since high school chemistry (10 years ago!), so here you go.
purpose/problem: i used to use the chocolate chip cookie recipe from nick malgieri's cookies unlimited; however, as i stopped making chocolate chip cookies as frequently, i forgot the recipe (i basically had it memorized) and then reverted to the trusty toll house cookie recipe. i have been using the toll house recipe for some time, though it's not the best chocolate chip cookie in the world, to be honest. it's just the easiest and simplest to remember. then i saw the new york times article and had to know: does the new york times chocolate chip cookie recipe really beat out toll house chocolate chip cookies? a corollary question: if the new york times beats toll house, is the extra effort required to make the cookies outweighed by the better flavor of the cookies (ie, do you actually gain utility from the new york times cookies)? specifically, the new york times recipe differs in the proportions of ingredients (most notably, the flour-butter ratio) and also in the inclusion of a chilling period. which of these differences has the most effect on the cookies?
hypothesis: this is a taste test, so positing a hypothesis would probably unduly influence the outcome of this experiment.
materials: here is the new york times recipe and also the toll house recipe. i don't really believe in using an electric mixer to make cookies so i used a bowl, wooden spoon, and measuring cups. i couldn't find the measuring spoons, so i just estimated with a non-standard metal spoon from the silverware drawer.
procedure: i made a batch of the new york times recipe and a batch of toll house at the same time (well, not exactly at the same time because i only have two hands), and chilled it for 24-ish hours. i also made a batch of toll house before i started baking the other cookies; it sat in the fridge chilling for about 2 1/2 hours before i baked it. it was still a little softer than i would prefer when i baked it, but it was late and i was tired, so there you go.
i made a few substitutions in the batter: all batches omitted vanilla extract, because vanilla extract is gross. no, really, i find it quite disgusting these days. in addition to not liking the flavor of vanilla extract, i'm treading the locavore/clear flavors/higher yuppie moral ground when i posit to you that omitting the vanilla allows the butter-sugar flavor to come through better. why muck up something that's already fantastic? i mean, we eat butter cookies for a reason: because butter and sugar is a wonderful flavor. i'm sure there's some reason why we use vanilla that has to do with trade and nations manipulating what we eat. because really, what if some enterprising nation wanted us to eat a lot of almond extract and started providing subsidies to almond extract producers? yeah, our cookies would have almond extract in them. so i view vanilla extract as an unnecessary, capricious inclusion in these recipes. i will also say that i love real vanilla, as in vanilla beans scraped from the pod; i like both the flavor and the very slight crunch you get when you eat the tiny vanilla flecks.
um, ok, more substitutions, now that i'm done ranting about vanilla. i used light brown sugar for the first two batches and then dark brown sugar for the last batch, because when i went to whole foods to buy sugar they were actually out of light brown sugar. i generally use dark brown sugar for chocolate chip cookies anyway, but in terms of keeping the sugar variable constant, i've kind of failed miserably. for your records, i also used ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate chips for all of the cookies - i like the shape and size of these chips. they just make your cookies more attractive - they have a nicer sheen than other chocolate chips, too. lastly - for the new york times recipe, it stipulates a combination of cake and bread flour. i'm guessing that this is a measure to prevent too much gluten from forming when you stir the dough, since it has a high flour:butter ration. i didn't really care to buy cake and bread flour, though, since then i'd be stuck with cake and bread flour. accordingly, i just used regular unbleached flour instead.
analysis/conclusion: yeah, this is getting combined because this experiment does not totally conform to the lab report format. sorry for you purists out there.
effect of chilling the dough
i do typically chill the dough before baking it, but not for flavor reasons. it's simply a measure to prevent the cookies from spreading too much as they bake: the colder the dough is, the more slowly the butter will melt and you'll have prettier cookies. it's also easier to handle if it's not sticking more to your hands than the baking sheet - all the more easily to make perfectly shaped cookies without bothering with a cookie dough scooper.
so i'm bothered by the new york times article, actually, in which david leite talks about the recipe. it seemed to me that the article was mostly about extolling the virtues of chilling the dough, and the miraculous effect that has on the dough. well, i didn't read the recipes before making them, and after looking at them a little more closely, i see that the new york times' recipe actually has a much higher flour:butter ratio - ie, more flour per tablespoon butter. and i think that chilling the dough does have an effect, but this effect is mitigated in the new york times recipe by the fact that it has so much flour in it - the dough needs more time in the first place to chill, because there are more dry ingredients than there are in the toll house recipe. so the article is actually being a little facetious in the way that it plays up chilling the dough, since the recipe it gives automatically needs a long chilling time, and thus the effect of chilling the dough is partially negated.
at the end of the day, it's true that chilling the dough seems to have some effect on the flavor. or so people tell me: having brought the vast majority of the cookies to work, it seemed that the chilled-dough toll house cookies were the favorite. alack, my palate did not detect enough of a difference between the 24-hour-chilled toll house cookies and the chilled-until-firm toll house cookies. it's up to you to decide what you want to do when you make the cookies, then.
effect of the flour:butter ratio
let's return to the ingredient proportions and the flour:butter ratio. toll house does 2 1/4c flour for 2 sticks butter, while the new york times does about 3 2/3c flour for 2 1/2 sticks butter. that's 0.14 cups flour/tbsp butter for toll house v. 0.18 cups flour/tbsp butter for ny times, or 2.24T flour/T butter for toll house and 2.93T/T butter for ny times. a significant difference: that's 30% more flour in the new york times recipe. of course, i did a straight substitution without weighing things out, as my electronic scale is in cambridge, so there was probably some adjusting to do that i didn't do. but still: that is a noteworthy difference.
ok, so it's true that somehow this higher flour content made the new york times cookies a lot more attractive. a lot more attractive. but it also made the cookies a little chewier with too much crumb - i have to say that i prefer a cookie with more butter and sugar, so that it's a little candy-like in the caramelization of sugar and butter, rather than being a more bready cookie. all things considered, more attractive cookies is not an acceptable tradeoff for less flavorful cookies unless you're not planning to actually eat the cookies. or if you're giving them to someone you don't like, or who you know won't be eating the cookies.
effect of weather
i'd like to put in a word about the weather here. i generally haven't baked all that much in hot weather, and i recall vaguely that at cutcat, we would have the air conditioning on while i was baking so it was never really hot when i baked stuff there. (i know it's not a good strategy with respect to energy and sustainability, but nobody's perfect.) in this case, i was baking at night when it was cooler, but it was still pretty hot, and i'm fairly certain that this had an effect on the cookies - they spread faster than they normally would. i say this because in every other case when i've made chocolate chip cookies, they have not looked quite so...flat as these did. in short, they looked like an amateur made them, and that was certainly a little annoying. i mean, if they were going to have the gall to look so ugly, then why bother to chill the dough at all? hmph. that's what i think of you, new york weather.
effect of attractiveness of cookies on eating utility
it's nice to know that people (including myself) like chocolate chip cookies so much that even if they're kind of crappy looking, people will eat them. chocolate chip cookies positively ooze nostalgia for childhood - or, at the very least, other people have memories of making chocolate chip cookies as a child. i don't, really; perhaps this is why i really like them now. however, this brings up an interesting issue: how much are we affected by how good the food looks? i mean, i was really disappointed with these toll house batches because the last batch i made a few weeks back were the most gorgeous cookies i had ever seen. they were golden brown from the dark brown sugar (billington's brand), perfectly puffed but still soft and chewy in the middle, and the chocolate chips looked so pretty in the mass of the cookie that they positively glowed. they certainly had a very pretty luster to them. and because these cookies were so beautiful, they were actually more pleasing to eat. i can picture those cookies now, and it frustrates me that the next batch didn't look like them either. i know it wasn't the leavening, because it was new; i know it wasn't the dark brown sugar, either. the only thing that was different was the butter: i used plugra in that batch last month because it was cheaper to buy a half pound of plugra than it was to buy a pound of regular american butter. but wouldn't you expect that using butter with higher fat content would cause the cookies to spread more? i sure would, yet the converse of that happened. search me; i have no answers for you except to say that i would probably have to do another experiment between regular and european butter to figure out where the culprit lies. i think it's most likely the weather, but i do wonder if the plugra had an effect on the dough. to come back to cookie attractiveness: i suppose i'm lucky that people are so forgiving with chocolate chip cookies; only my ego is bruised.
and the winner is...
i almost forgot to render my verdict regarding the recipes! whoops. well, everyone, the new york times is a little like per se: pretending to be all posh, but not really delivering in the end (let us just say that per se delivers more than the new york times, though). i really don't think it's worth all the trouble to make the new york times cookies. i do think that toll house can be improved - the cookies are really a little too sweet for me - but i have yet to find the recipe that does that. i guess now we know?
purpose/problem: i used to use the chocolate chip cookie recipe from nick malgieri's cookies unlimited; however, as i stopped making chocolate chip cookies as frequently, i forgot the recipe (i basically had it memorized) and then reverted to the trusty toll house cookie recipe. i have been using the toll house recipe for some time, though it's not the best chocolate chip cookie in the world, to be honest. it's just the easiest and simplest to remember. then i saw the new york times article and had to know: does the new york times chocolate chip cookie recipe really beat out toll house chocolate chip cookies? a corollary question: if the new york times beats toll house, is the extra effort required to make the cookies outweighed by the better flavor of the cookies (ie, do you actually gain utility from the new york times cookies)? specifically, the new york times recipe differs in the proportions of ingredients (most notably, the flour-butter ratio) and also in the inclusion of a chilling period. which of these differences has the most effect on the cookies?
hypothesis: this is a taste test, so positing a hypothesis would probably unduly influence the outcome of this experiment.
materials: here is the new york times recipe and also the toll house recipe. i don't really believe in using an electric mixer to make cookies so i used a bowl, wooden spoon, and measuring cups. i couldn't find the measuring spoons, so i just estimated with a non-standard metal spoon from the silverware drawer.
procedure: i made a batch of the new york times recipe and a batch of toll house at the same time (well, not exactly at the same time because i only have two hands), and chilled it for 24-ish hours. i also made a batch of toll house before i started baking the other cookies; it sat in the fridge chilling for about 2 1/2 hours before i baked it. it was still a little softer than i would prefer when i baked it, but it was late and i was tired, so there you go.
i made a few substitutions in the batter: all batches omitted vanilla extract, because vanilla extract is gross. no, really, i find it quite disgusting these days. in addition to not liking the flavor of vanilla extract, i'm treading the locavore/clear flavors/higher yuppie moral ground when i posit to you that omitting the vanilla allows the butter-sugar flavor to come through better. why muck up something that's already fantastic? i mean, we eat butter cookies for a reason: because butter and sugar is a wonderful flavor. i'm sure there's some reason why we use vanilla that has to do with trade and nations manipulating what we eat. because really, what if some enterprising nation wanted us to eat a lot of almond extract and started providing subsidies to almond extract producers? yeah, our cookies would have almond extract in them. so i view vanilla extract as an unnecessary, capricious inclusion in these recipes. i will also say that i love real vanilla, as in vanilla beans scraped from the pod; i like both the flavor and the very slight crunch you get when you eat the tiny vanilla flecks.
um, ok, more substitutions, now that i'm done ranting about vanilla. i used light brown sugar for the first two batches and then dark brown sugar for the last batch, because when i went to whole foods to buy sugar they were actually out of light brown sugar. i generally use dark brown sugar for chocolate chip cookies anyway, but in terms of keeping the sugar variable constant, i've kind of failed miserably. for your records, i also used ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate chips for all of the cookies - i like the shape and size of these chips. they just make your cookies more attractive - they have a nicer sheen than other chocolate chips, too. lastly - for the new york times recipe, it stipulates a combination of cake and bread flour. i'm guessing that this is a measure to prevent too much gluten from forming when you stir the dough, since it has a high flour:butter ration. i didn't really care to buy cake and bread flour, though, since then i'd be stuck with cake and bread flour. accordingly, i just used regular unbleached flour instead.
analysis/conclusion: yeah, this is getting combined because this experiment does not totally conform to the lab report format. sorry for you purists out there.
effect of chilling the dough
i do typically chill the dough before baking it, but not for flavor reasons. it's simply a measure to prevent the cookies from spreading too much as they bake: the colder the dough is, the more slowly the butter will melt and you'll have prettier cookies. it's also easier to handle if it's not sticking more to your hands than the baking sheet - all the more easily to make perfectly shaped cookies without bothering with a cookie dough scooper.
so i'm bothered by the new york times article, actually, in which david leite talks about the recipe. it seemed to me that the article was mostly about extolling the virtues of chilling the dough, and the miraculous effect that has on the dough. well, i didn't read the recipes before making them, and after looking at them a little more closely, i see that the new york times' recipe actually has a much higher flour:butter ratio - ie, more flour per tablespoon butter. and i think that chilling the dough does have an effect, but this effect is mitigated in the new york times recipe by the fact that it has so much flour in it - the dough needs more time in the first place to chill, because there are more dry ingredients than there are in the toll house recipe. so the article is actually being a little facetious in the way that it plays up chilling the dough, since the recipe it gives automatically needs a long chilling time, and thus the effect of chilling the dough is partially negated.
at the end of the day, it's true that chilling the dough seems to have some effect on the flavor. or so people tell me: having brought the vast majority of the cookies to work, it seemed that the chilled-dough toll house cookies were the favorite. alack, my palate did not detect enough of a difference between the 24-hour-chilled toll house cookies and the chilled-until-firm toll house cookies. it's up to you to decide what you want to do when you make the cookies, then.
effect of the flour:butter ratio
let's return to the ingredient proportions and the flour:butter ratio. toll house does 2 1/4c flour for 2 sticks butter, while the new york times does about 3 2/3c flour for 2 1/2 sticks butter. that's 0.14 cups flour/tbsp butter for toll house v. 0.18 cups flour/tbsp butter for ny times, or 2.24T flour/T butter for toll house and 2.93T/T butter for ny times. a significant difference: that's 30% more flour in the new york times recipe. of course, i did a straight substitution without weighing things out, as my electronic scale is in cambridge, so there was probably some adjusting to do that i didn't do. but still: that is a noteworthy difference.
ok, so it's true that somehow this higher flour content made the new york times cookies a lot more attractive. a lot more attractive. but it also made the cookies a little chewier with too much crumb - i have to say that i prefer a cookie with more butter and sugar, so that it's a little candy-like in the caramelization of sugar and butter, rather than being a more bready cookie. all things considered, more attractive cookies is not an acceptable tradeoff for less flavorful cookies unless you're not planning to actually eat the cookies. or if you're giving them to someone you don't like, or who you know won't be eating the cookies.
effect of weather
i'd like to put in a word about the weather here. i generally haven't baked all that much in hot weather, and i recall vaguely that at cutcat, we would have the air conditioning on while i was baking so it was never really hot when i baked stuff there. (i know it's not a good strategy with respect to energy and sustainability, but nobody's perfect.) in this case, i was baking at night when it was cooler, but it was still pretty hot, and i'm fairly certain that this had an effect on the cookies - they spread faster than they normally would. i say this because in every other case when i've made chocolate chip cookies, they have not looked quite so...flat as these did. in short, they looked like an amateur made them, and that was certainly a little annoying. i mean, if they were going to have the gall to look so ugly, then why bother to chill the dough at all? hmph. that's what i think of you, new york weather.
effect of attractiveness of cookies on eating utility
it's nice to know that people (including myself) like chocolate chip cookies so much that even if they're kind of crappy looking, people will eat them. chocolate chip cookies positively ooze nostalgia for childhood - or, at the very least, other people have memories of making chocolate chip cookies as a child. i don't, really; perhaps this is why i really like them now. however, this brings up an interesting issue: how much are we affected by how good the food looks? i mean, i was really disappointed with these toll house batches because the last batch i made a few weeks back were the most gorgeous cookies i had ever seen. they were golden brown from the dark brown sugar (billington's brand), perfectly puffed but still soft and chewy in the middle, and the chocolate chips looked so pretty in the mass of the cookie that they positively glowed. they certainly had a very pretty luster to them. and because these cookies were so beautiful, they were actually more pleasing to eat. i can picture those cookies now, and it frustrates me that the next batch didn't look like them either. i know it wasn't the leavening, because it was new; i know it wasn't the dark brown sugar, either. the only thing that was different was the butter: i used plugra in that batch last month because it was cheaper to buy a half pound of plugra than it was to buy a pound of regular american butter. but wouldn't you expect that using butter with higher fat content would cause the cookies to spread more? i sure would, yet the converse of that happened. search me; i have no answers for you except to say that i would probably have to do another experiment between regular and european butter to figure out where the culprit lies. i think it's most likely the weather, but i do wonder if the plugra had an effect on the dough. to come back to cookie attractiveness: i suppose i'm lucky that people are so forgiving with chocolate chip cookies; only my ego is bruised.
and the winner is...
i almost forgot to render my verdict regarding the recipes! whoops. well, everyone, the new york times is a little like per se: pretending to be all posh, but not really delivering in the end (let us just say that per se delivers more than the new york times, though). i really don't think it's worth all the trouble to make the new york times cookies. i do think that toll house can be improved - the cookies are really a little too sweet for me - but i have yet to find the recipe that does that. i guess now we know?
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