Tuesday, September 30, 2008

More Layers to Layer Cakes

In my Oct. 1 story about layer cakes, I talk about how to use the creaming method for cakes, but I didn’t have room to go into a lot of detail about why it is so important.

Creaming is really the foundation for a good layer cake.

A butter cake’s lightness comes mostly from creaming. Sure, the baking powder will help the cake rise, but a good creamed mixture and baking powder together achieve maximum volume and lightness.

Butter tenderizes cakes by coating flour particles, preventing the formation of gluten, a protein in wheat flour. Gluten forms any time that flour gets wet. When a lot of gluten forms, it makes the cake tough; so much of the process of making a cake batter involves keeping the formation of gluten to a minimum.

Sugar dilutes gluten, so it also tenderizes cakes. During creaming, butter is whipped to trap air bubbles inside it. The sharp edges of granulated sugar crystals help create those pockets of air. Those air pockets produce a light texture, or what is called a fine crumb.

So well-done creaming not only produces a light cake with good volume, but also ensures that the butter and sugar will be well dispersed in the batter to produce a perfectly tender cake.

Speaking of gluten, you do need some of it. Flour and its gluten provide the structure to cakes. Of course, the trick is to make it a very light and delicate structure with minimal gluten formation.

Many cooks choose cake flour, because it is lower in protein — and thus lower in potential gluten formation — than all-purpose flour. But not all cooks do. Baking expert and cookbook author Nick Malgieri said he stopped using cake flour a few years because he didn’t think it made much difference. “I think the whole thing about using cake flour was from when mills didn’t really control the amount of protein in all-purpose flour,” he said, noting that now all-purpose flours have a fairly narrow range of protein contents.
How you mix the cake too affects the gluten development. That’s why recipes call for alternating small additions of flour and milk. You start with the flour so it gets coated with fat particles, for minimal gluten formation and thus a more tender cake. Alternating the dry and liquid ingredients helps the batter blend better, and helps keep the batter light and creamy.

Here’s one more recipe for a classic layer cake with a boiled icing.
Devil’s Food Cake
Recipe adapted from The Perfect Cake (Broadway Books, 2002) by Susan Purdy.
2¼ sifted all-purpose flour
1¼ teaspoons baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup sifted regular (natural) unsweetened cocoa (not Dutch-process)
½ cup (1stick) unsalted butter, softened
1½ cups granulated sugar
2 large eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1½ cups buttermilk

1. Grease and flour two 8-inch round cake pans. (This can be made in 9-inch pans, but the cake will cook faster and be done in less time.) Heat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Sift together the flour, baking soda, salt and cocoa. Set aside.
3. In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes on medium speed. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in vanilla. Alternately add flour mixture and buttermilk, beginning and ending with flour, beating slowly to blend after each addition.
4. Divide batter evenly among the prepared pans. Level the tops, then spread the batter from the centers toward the edges.
5. Bake about 35 minutes, or just until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean and the cake feels lightly spongy to the touch.
6. Cool on a wire rack for 10 minutes. Run tip of a knife around the edges to loosen as needed, then invert cakes and remove from pans. Cool completely on wire rack. Once cool, frost with chocolate buttercream frosting, on Fluffy White Frosting.
Fluffy White Frosting
This boiled icing is adapted from Nick Malgieri’s new book, The Modern Baker (DK Publishing).
4 large egg whites
Large pinch of salt
1 cup granulated sugar
½ cup light corn syrup

1. Half-fill as saucepan with water and bring to a boil over medium heat.
2. Combine egg whites, salt, sugar and corn syrup in bowl of an electric mixer and whisk by hand, just to mix together.
3. Place bowl of egg-white mixture over the pan of water and reduce heat to a simmer or gentle boil. Whisk the egg-white mixture constantly until it is hot (about 130 degrees) and all of the sugar is dissolved.
4. Place the bowl on the electric mixer with the whisk attachment and whip the icing until it has cooled and become white and fluffy.

Monday, September 29, 2008

Paul’s Food Revolution

I’ve always like Paul Newman for his acting.

I liked him even more after he started Newman’s Own.

His idea of a food company was supposedly just a joke when he started it with writer A.E. Hotchner in 1982, but it came to be taken quite seriously.

Sure, his success relied a lot on his name, but his company is a model for people who want to do the right thing.

Doing the right thing for Newman was giving all the company’s profits to charities. He never harped much on the food itself, except during the obligatory promotional stints.

But just as a movie with Newman in it was almost a sure sign of quality, so was a salad dressing, chocolate bar or other food with Newman’s Own on the label.

In fact, quality ingredients, fair labor practices and philanthropy were part of Newman’s business plan from the beginning. And though his daughter Nell had to talk her dad into starting a line of organic foods in 1993, he was smart enough to go along. It’s not too much to say that Paul Newman and Newman’s Own helped make organic food mainstream.

(Newman’s Own Organics became a separate company in 2001, but still operates the same way, giving away profits to charity)

And Newman made provisions for the company to continue after his death by setting up the Newman’s Own Foundation.

And, next to all the benefits that charities received, you know what the best part of Newman’s Own is?

The food tastes good.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Hidden Food Costs

It’s pretty obvious to anyone who buys food that costs have gone up a lot this year, even if they haven’t been following the economic news.

A lot of grocery staples have gone up, and a lot of restaurants have increased the prices on their menus.
But many of the increases are less obvious.

Restaurants, for instance, have reduced portion sizes while keeping the prices the same. Others, including Noble’s Grille in Winston-Salem, switched to a la carte menu that leaves side dishes off of entree plates and instead sells them separately, a de facto entree increase of $3 or more in most cases.

In the supermarket, some companies have shrunk the size of their packages. Edy’s and other ice-cream makers, for example, reduced their cartons from 1.75 quarts to 1.5 quarts . Consumers pay the same but get only about 86 percent as much ice cream.

I realize that restaurateurs and food manufacturers have to do something to cope with higher costs. The problem I have with some of the strategies is they amount to lies and deceit by omission. When a company shrinks its package size, you don’t hear about it from them. So I have to think they hope we won’t notice, like the kid who break Mom’s favorite piece of china and squirrels away the shards to avoid getting in trouble.

“Childish” might be too mild a term for some of these sneaky strategies in the food business.

The Today show had an interesting segment about Hershey’s chocolate on Sept. 19. MSNBC.com had a report on it, too.

Hershey has yet another strategy for dealing with increased costs. This one really takes the cake for me. Today reported how Hershey’s has removed part or all of the cocoa butter from some of its chocolates and replaced it with vegetable oil.
Hershey’s is smart enough not to have done this with its iconic Hershey’s bar, Kisses or Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. The ingredient change does affect Kissables, Milk Duds, Krackel, Whatchamacallit and Mr. Goodbar.

According to the report, Hershey’s already has put the cocoa butter back in Almond Joy bars because people complained.

This change is significant for two reasons. First, cocoa butter supplies much of the chocolate flavor to these candies. Second, a company cannot legally call a product plain “milk chocolate” if it doesn’t have cocoa butter.

Other companies make plenty of chocolately foods that are not in fact chocolate. What is newsworthy here is that what was one day chocolate was diluted with vegetable oil, and all on the quiet.

Hershey’s did have to change its labels to comply with the law. But the changes are so small that consumers are very unlikely to notice, and I have to believe that was Hershey’s sneaky ambition all along.

Where the Kissables label used to say “milk chocolate,” it now says “chocolate candy.” Now the FDA is partly to blame for allowing such loose language, but do most people really know that “chocolate candy” is not actually chocolate?

Check out both these Kissables labels above and below and see how subtle the change is.

Other words allowed for candy that is not legally chocolate include “made with chocolate” and “chocolatey.”

Cybele May, who writes the Candy Blog, calls these vegetable-oil Hershey products “mockolate,“ a term she says she first heard on an episode of the former Friends sitcom.

I wonder what Hereshey’s would think of labeling its Kissables and Mr. Goodbars “mockolate”?

Eating Out: Los Nopales

Tucked into a bend of Old Lexington Road in the Waughtown neighborhood, Los Nopales is in prime Mexican food territory.

So I had high hopes when my friend Dan and I headed to Los Nopales earlier this week. We ordered cheese and chicharron (pork rind) pupusas, a barbacoa gordita and a chicken torta, all washed down with some horchata.

The verdict? You won’t be reading about Los Nopales from me anytime soon (other than here). For one, it’s not a new restaurant that opened with a lot of fanfare in a prominent location. But it’s not exactly worth hunting out, either. I was hoping to bring you a review of the next great little taqueria, and that’s not going to happen, either. There are plenty of better choices across Winston-Salem for truly excellent Mexican food. Los Nopales is not one of them. It’s not a good sign to be sitting at a restaurant, daydreaming about another just up the street. In my case, I picked at my chicken torta with its dry, broken bun, flavorless meat and serious dearth of avocado, thinking all the while of La Perlita and its rotisserie chicken, doused with addictive salsa verde literally about a block away.

In hindsight, I had some doubts about Los Nopales from the moment we walked in. It was lunchtime on a Wednesday, and we were two of four people in the place. The other taquerias nearby are usually packed with local Latinos on their lunch breaks. I didn’t take Los Nopales’ quiet as a good sign (though I did like that the restaurant was staffed by one woman - she did all the order-taking and cooking, but maybe there’s a reason they don’t need more people working).

I’d come here again for the pupusas. But that’s it. Life’s too short to waste on mediocre Mexican.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

From the Mailbag/Inbox

A few epicurean events going on in the near future…

Jesse Williams, the former chef at the Kitchen at Elkin Creek who is now at Winston’s Eatery, will hold a beer dinner on Sept. 27 at 6:30 p.m. It’s $45 a person or $85 for couples. The five courses begin with oysters with pickled watermelon and cider vinegar migonette and ends with buttered popcorn gelato in a tuile sesame cone, and it’s all paired with Belgian brews.

Erin Aycock, the owner of sip (a wine consulting business) will hold another tasting of 30-plus wines at the Zeverly House this Thursday at 7 p.m. $25, and it includes apps.

Sweet Potatoes is now serving Sunday brunch. The menu includes some dishes from the now-closed Cotton Mill. such as curried shrimp and grits.

Further down the road and calendar, the very excellant Bistro Sofia in Greensboro will be holding a prix fixe Oktoberfest dinner on Oct. 15. Three courses for $25, with complimentary bier und wein, ja, wohl!

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Family Meals

Sept. 21 through 27 is National Eat Together Week, according to a release from the National Pork Board.

The idea here is to encourage families to sit down at the table together.

As far as I can tell, this is an idea of the pork board, a marketing tool designed to get people to eat more pork.

But who can argue with the idea of families sitting down to eat together, right?

No one, unless maybe you know a severely dysfunctional family in which everyone would kill each other if trapped in the same room for more than five minutes.

Anyway…. I will argue about the idea of National Eat Together Week.  I have mixed feelings about it.

Have things really gotten so bad that we need a special week to get us around the dinner table at the same time?

Buried in the http://www.eattogetherformealtime.com Web site, I found this interesting “Dinner Pledge,“ a kind of contract for any families that have seriously strayed from routine dinners together:

NATIONAL EAT DINNER TOGETHER WEEK
DINNERTIME PLEDGE
THIS AGREEMENT is made and entered into this _______ day of __________, 20____,
by the members of the _____________ household
1. We, the _____________ household, agree that during this 10th annual
National Eat Dinner Together Week (NEDTW), we will sit down together to
share a meal as a family, at least four nights during the week.
2. We, the _____________ household, agree to make meals memorable for
more than what is on the menu. We pledge to establish a quiet place for
meals and make a habit of temporarily eliminating interruptions such as
telephone, television and toys.
3. We, the _____________ household, agree to contribute to the creation of the
grocery list and menu plan. We will remember to practice good nutrition with
fruits and vegetables.
4. We, the _____________ household, agree to throw away the old rules of
calendar holidays and make family dinner a time to mark milestones. We
agree to pull out the stops and use candles, table decorations and easy
themed meals to acknowledge big days – from birthdays to test days – with
meaningful family time together.
5. We, the _____________ household, agree to work as a team for meal
preparation and cleanup. We agree to share duties by searching for recipes
in cookbooks and online, setting the table, washing the vegetables and
washing the dishes.
We have read and understood this entire document, and we agree to be bound by its
terms.
Household Members:
______________________
______________________
______________________
______________________
©

Friday, September 19, 2008

Genetically Modified Chicken, Available Soon in Your Grocer’s Freezer?

Would you tuck into a hamburger from a genetically modified cow resistant to mad cow disease?

An Associated Press story in today’s Journal indicates that the FDA may soon allow that to happen. According to the story, such food won’t be labeled as genetically modified unless it changes the final product, such as low cholesterol filet mignon (flown in by jet pack! Welcome to the future!).

But I do think this won’t fly with many consumers down the road. More people than ever are interested in where their food comes from, what kind of diet it had growing up, if it was treated humanely, and perhaps if it was trained in ballet, or taught Latin or given hot stone massages. So they’re certainly going to want to know if it’s genetically modified, even if it doesn’t have known health effects.

Companies will probably argue that genetically modified food won’t need labels just for that reason. And I wonder if this is similar to the debate over milk that comes from cows that have been given recombinant bovine growth hormone. Companies who don’t use milk from cows given growth hormone are quick to make a point of it on their labels, even if the FDA thinks the hormone is safe. And major buyers, like Wal-Mart, have moved away from buying milk from rbST-treated cows.

I like labels that err on the side of more rather than less. The FDA required milk producers to add a caveat to their hormone-free labels. It underscores that they’ve found no difference between milk with or without hormones. At least we have the option of knowing what kind of milk we’re buying.

If better living through science is really safe, what’s wrong with a label that gives us a little more information about what we eat?

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Glorious Quiche

In Wednesday’s column in the Journal, I talk about the amazing roasted tomatoes that Kathleen Flinn uses in her onion and tomato quiche. But the whole quiche is really delicious, too. She coaxes sweet, concentrated flavors from both vegetables using different methods: caramelizing the onions in a saute pan, and slowly roasted pieces of tomato in the oven.
The quiche recipe is one of about 30 in Flinn’s book, The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry (Viking Penguin Group).

Here’s Flinn’s quiche recipe. She also has a few more recipes posted on her Web site, http://www.kathleenflinn.com.

Quiche aux Oignons D’or et aux Tomates Rôties
(Golden Onion and Roasted Tomato Quiche)
Quiche is like pizza — it can be made with almost anything. This version uses onions and tomatoes, but try asparagus, ham, artichokes, whatever. The onions will seem like an insurmountable pile, but they reduce drastically. If good tomatoes aren’t available or time is short, use soft sun-dried tomatoes. Prepared pie crust dough may be used.Quiche may be served hot, warm or chilled, and reheats well in a low oven.

Prepared pie dough or pâte brisée for one 9-inch single crust
Roasted tomato petals:
6 to 8 tomatoes
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 clove garlic, roughly chopped
4 sprigs thyme
1 teaspoon coarse salt
Caramelized onions:
3 large onions (about two pounds), sliced
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon flour

Quiche filling:
3 large eggs
¾ cup (175 ml) heavy cream
Coarse salt, ground pepper
½ teaspoon fresh thyme
3 ounces (90 grams) Gruyère cheese, grated

1. Preheat oven to 250 degrees. Slice an ‘x’ on the bottom of each tomato. Drop into boiling water for a few seconds, then plunge into a bowl of ice water. Tear the flaps on the “x” to remove skin. Cut out the core and then quarter and remove the seeds. Line slivers on parchment atop a baking sheet. Drizzle on the oil and add garlic, thyme and salt. Gently bake for about 1 1/2 hours, or until they are tender.
2. Meanwhile, in a large sauté pan melt the butter with the olive oil. Add the onions and bay leaf. Cook and stir patiently until they’re brown and soft, about a half hour. Once browned, sprinkle with flour and a dash of salt and cook another 2 minutes. Set aside to cool. Remove the tomato petals from the sheet, let cool.
3. Increase oven temperature to 425 degrees. Roll out the dough, press it into a quiche or pie pan. Pierce the bottom with a fork. To keep its shape, set parchment or aluminum foil in the center and fill with pie weights or dry beans. Bake for 5 minutes. Remove weights, brush the pastry with beaten egg and return to oven for 7 minutes. Cool slightly.
4. Whisk the eggs and cream in a bowl. Stir in about one-third of the cheese, salt, pepper and thyme. Stir in the cooled onions and then pour into the pastry shell. Arrange tomatoes in decorative pattern on top. Sprinkle on remaining Gruyère. Bake for 25 to 35 minutes until firm, slightly browned and a bit puffy.
Makes one quiche, or six to eight slices.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Sharpening Skills

I recently read The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry by Kathleen Flinn in preparation for this Saturday’s Bookmarks festival at Historic Bethabara Park..

The book is basically a memoir of Flinn’s stint at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris.

It’s also a bit romance, travelogue, and if it were a film it might be dubbed a “chick flick,” in that Flinn’s female perspective pervades her writing.

Of course, it does have lots of food.

What I particularly got out of the book is a reminder of the true professional cook’s sense of exactitude, the attention to technique often the little details, that makes a difference.

One simple example is the chopping of an onion. Anybody can chop an onion. Not everyone can neatly chop an onion so that that all the pieces are of a uniform size that will cook evenly and spread evenly throughout a dish.

It’s just one of those little details that makes a difference in cooking.

Here’s Flinn’s description of her chef instructor demonstrating how to chop an onion during one of her first Cordon Bleu classes — what she calls turning “a simple task into a moment of beauty”:

“With a chef’s knife, he cuts a peeled onion in half at the root. He places one half cut-side down on the board and cuts thin vertical slices toward the root but not through it, keeping the onion intact, as if on a hinge. Twisting the blade flat, he cuts thin slices across, parallel to his cutting board, again stopping each slice before the root end. Then, he slices across the top of the onion down, and perfect tiny cubes tumble onto the cutting board.”

Flinn will demonstrate a couple of recipes as well as knife skills at 11:30 a.m. in the Food for Thought tent at Bookmarks.

I’ll be around at the festival, too. If you see me, stop and say hello.

Cajeta, Mexico’s Caramel

Meet my new love as we head into cooler weather. Readers, cajeta. Cajeta, take a bow.

A sweet, sticky Mexican sauce traditionally made with goat’s milk and a close cousin to dulce de leche, cajeta is easy to make and delicious on almost everything. I made it for a party recently, and drizzled it on small, hand-sized peach pies, then added a small pool of lime crema (Mexican sour cream) for some zing.

You can make it with cow’s milk or goat’s milk, or a combination, but I really love the earthy, tangy flavor that is unmistakably goat underneath the golden notes of caramelized sugar and cinnamon. The goat’s subtle, but it’s there, and this sauce is all the more interesting for it.

Chef and cookbook author Rick Bayless gets a jonesing for cajeta at Mexican street fairs, where he finds stands offering fried plantains. He likes them drizzled with cajeta and thick cream. In one of his cookbooks, Mexico, One Plate at a Time, Bayless suggests swirling some into vanilla ice cream, spooning it on crepes and baking them in the oven, or making rustic little apple tarts, then drizzling with a gentle rain of cajeta.

Locally, you can find cajeta at Super Compare Foods on Silas Creek Parkway (interestingly, I haven’t noticed it at restaurants - perhaps it’s more of a street food?). It’s in the “international” aisle (as if that whole store isn’t a mind-blowing jog through many countries), and it comes in a plastic squeezy bottle like ketchup. I can’t vouch for it, though, because I’m still going through a jar of my own. A little goes a long way, and it’ll last for weeks in the fridge (just warm it up in the microwave before you use it, unless you like it really thick). It may seem like a lot of work, but it’s not. You don’t have to babysit cooking cajeta until the very end.

Update: you can find goat’s milk at Compare Foods, too.

Cajeta, or goat’s milk caramel sauce
Adapted from Mexico, One Plate at a Time by Rick Bayless

Makes about 3 cups

Note: This recipe can easily be halved.

2 quarts goat’s milk or a combination of goat’s milk and cow’s milk, or all cow’s milk (use whole milk in all cases; goat’s milk is available locally at Whole Foods)
2 cups sugar
a 2-inch piece of cinnamon stick, preferably Mexican canela
1/2 teaspoon baking soda, dissolved in 1 tablespoon water

In a medium-large pot (preferably a Dutch oven), combine the milk, sugar and cinnamon stick and set over medium heat. Stir regularly until the milk comes to a simmer and the sugar is dissolved. Remove the pot from the heat and stir in the dissolved baking soda. It will foam up a bit. When the bubbles subside, return the pot to the heat.

Adjust the heat to maintain the mixture at a brisk simmer. Cook, stirring regularly (you don’t have to hover over the pot - give it a stir about once every two or three minutes), until the mixture turns pale golden, about an hour. Now, begin to stir frequently as the mixture turns caramel-brown and thickens to the consistency of maple syrup. The caramel will start to bubble, and the bubbles will become bigger and glassier. Sitr regularly so nothing sticks to the bottom. Test a couple of drops on a cold plate. When cool, the cajeta should be the consistency of a medium-thick caramel sauce. If the cooled cajeta is thicker, stir in a tablespoon of water and remove from the heat. If it’s too runny, keep cooking.

Pour the cajeta into a wide-mouth glass jar or bowl through a mesh strainer. Cool, cover and refrigerate.