Our News department is on a brief hiatus, while we take a deep breath and try to calm the rage that stems from the increasing decline into plutocracy that is US politics today. Here’s a feature from our Culinary Arts, instead.
English is a famously odd language – you might have wound bandages around the wound, for example, or had your Polish butler polish the silverware. Often, the same word means different things in different contexts: The farmer hacked at the weeds while his spouse employed another clever hack to clean the bathroom sink. On the computer in his bedroom, the farmer boy hacked into NORAD. His brother, a notorious hack, wrote another blog column, and the house cat hacked up a hairball. Ergo – here’s some cooking hacks, or hairballs, if you prefer.
One of my favorite shortcuts – meaning I made this one up entirely by myself – has to do with the command frequently found in baking recipes that the butter needs to be “room temperature.” What temperature? Which room? When? At 3:00 am my bathroom is about 29ºF — there’s ice on the tile floor.
What they really mean is “soft.” I’ve tried using a microwave to soften refrigerated butter, but there’s no satisfactory setting that doesn’t lead to a puddle of butter. Solution? If you have a relatively modern electric oven, you may notice that it has a “Proof” setting, which is a temperature between oh, say, 85-100ºF. Stick the butter in there for 20 minutes or so on “proof,” and voila! Soft, not melted.
Alternative solution: Store your butter in a warm place. The problem with this alternative is that many times the butter needs to be refrigerated, and it’s easier to measure when it’s cold.
While we’re on the topic of baking with softened butter, usually the softening facilitates beating the butter together with sugar preparatory to making cakes or cookies. This is called “creaming” (there’s another one of those words) with the usual instructions to do it until the mixture is “light and fluffy.” Now, if you’re like me, you wouldn’t know “light and fluffy” if someone rubbed it on your cheeks, and certainly not by appearance. What to do? Put the sugar in a stand mixer with the butter, lock it down, turn in on, and slowly but surely shift the dial to “8.” Set your timer for 5 minutes and go find something else to do.
Do you NEED to sift the flour together with the other dry ingredients? No. Use a whisk.
Recipes often call for biscuit or scone dough to be rolled out. Do not do this. You may notice that biscuits and scones are practically the same thing, with minor adjustments in ingredients. The thing they have in common is that the dough is somewhat on the dry side, and the goal is to create a baked good that is “flaky and airy” (not to be confused with light and fluffy). The rolling pin is specifically designed to defeat that aim. Keep it in the drawer. After you’ve mixed the dough, scoop it out on a floured surface, press it into a ball, and maybe fold/knead it once or twice. Then pat it out to your desired thickness. Two centimeters is good. Pat pat pat. Once you have it ncely flattened, cut it into your preferred shapes. Biscuits should be round.
P.S. If you’re using a food processor to mix your dough, stop it. Do it by hand. You’ll feel better about yourself.
P.P.S. Note to our UK friends: The American biscuit is a sort of savory scone, with risen layers of buttery goodness, and not the cookie-thingie you think it is, which we call crackers.
Some of you are probably hoping I’ll give you a good trick for artisanal bread that simplifies the incredibly detailed, moment by moment instructions offered by bread makers, all of whom fancy themselves to be the next Paul Hollywood – all that attention to gluten and hydration and the care and feeding of active yeast, the hours spent proofing and refrigerating and rising and deflating to achieve the perfect goddamned CRUMB, whatever that is, and baking in a pre-heated oven that is simultaneously 1000ºC (fan) and damp as a swamp, cooked on a special stone that you had to import from France. Probably. Well, here’s the hack – get off your ass and go to the bakery. You’ll never match a local bakery’s level of commitment or the quality of their product, and you should support small businesses.
Two more things, from other sources:
1. The perfect mashed potato. Noted French chef and restauranteur Paul Bocuse (“The Pope of Gastronomy”) offers a strikingly simple rule – one pound of potato, one pound of butter. Trust me on this. Bocuse lived to be 91.
2. You have, perhaps, traveled to New Orleans and sampled some form of Cajun gumbo, which is the soup of the Gods to my way of thinking. Maybe, as I did, you rushed home fully intent on whipping some up on your own stove, only to discover that the first step (“first you make a roux”) is a back-breaking labor of 20-30 minutes over a hot stove, continuously – CONTINUOUSLY, it cannot be emphasized enough – stirring a mixture of equal parts (more or less) flour and oil/butter/lard (I stick with peanut oil, high smoke point and neutral taste, has the added benefit of removing from your table people who whine about their peanut allergy) over exactly the right amount of heat – not too much – all in an effort to make a chocolate-brown roux that isn’t burned. Solution: double the mixture (e.g., 2 cups flour and 1 ¾ cups oil), put it in a 8-quart Dutch, shove it into a 350ºF oven uncovered, and cook it for 1 ½ to 2 hours. Stir it occasionally if you like, until it’s as dark as you like. Refrigerate what you don’t use for next time, it keeps practically forever. Thank you Alton Brown.
Next time: Household hairballs
Cool hints but quit cooking several yrs ago. Retired after 70+ yrs of doing everything you’ve written about. It’s just me now so I cook and eat what I damn well please. Don’t even own an oven any more. Too hot to bake.