Ruhlman's Twenty (22 page)

This recipe is a great example of the power butter has when you cook its solids until they turn a caramel, nutty golden brown. Brown butter added to any plain starch is transformative. Serve the potatoes with
roasted chicken,
fried chicken
, or
prime rib
.

1 pound/455 grams russet/baking or Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and cut into large pieces

1 cup/240 milliliters milk, plus more if needed

Kosher salt

½ cup/115 grams butter

Put the potatoes in a medium saucepan and add water to cover. Bring to a simmer over high heat, then reduce the heat to medium-low and cook until the potatoes are tender throughout, about 20 minutes. Don’t boil the potatoes; this can disintegrate the exterior. Drain the potatoes and set aside to let the moisture steam off.

In the same saucepan, combine the milk and 2 teaspoons salt and set over medium heat. When the milk is hot, return the potatoes to the pan. You can mash them in the pan with a masher (I like them chunky so I prefer this method), or mash them directly into the pan with a ricer or food mill. Stir the potatoes just to combine with the milk; don’t overmix. Taste and season with salt if needed.

In a small saucepan over medium-high heat, melt the butter. When the foaming subsides, stir the butter and note the color of the solids. When the solids are golden brown, add half of the butter to the mashed potatoes. Taste for seasoning. If you prefer the potatoes thinner, add a little more milk.

Serve the potatoes topped with a spoonful of the remaining brown butter.

This recipe is adapted from the one passed down to my friend Stephanie by her Scottish grandmother. What I love about this shortbread is its simplicity: flour, butter and sugar. The flavor of the shortbread is almost entirely dependent on the butter. Try to use a cultured butter, made from cream that has been cultured like yogurt, or, better yet, make your own
cultured butter
and use that. It will have a more complex flavor and is worth the added expense. I prefer a lightly salted butter here; if you use unsalted butter, you may want to add ¼ teaspoon salt to the dough.

A key feature of shortbread is its tender, almost crumbly crumb. This is achieved by reducing the gluten, the protein in flour that can make flour-based preparations chewy (such as bread). Stephanie’s grandmother used a combination of rice flour and regular flour. This version is made with a low-gluten flour. The recipe works if you just combine everything in a bowl and stir, but I think creaming the butter—that is, paddling or beating the butter and sugar together until the sugar has begun to dissolve and the butter becomes light and fluffy—makes for a better distribution of the sugar and a better finished texture. I like the way Shuna Fish Lydon, a.k.a. Eggbeater, a pastry chef, fine writer, and creaming advocate, describes shortbread: “The best shortbread in the world calls absolutely no attention to itself. It’s as humble as the rough terrain it hails from.”

2 scant cups/225 grams cake/soft-wheat flour

¾ cup/170 grams cultured butter or other high-quality butter, at room temperature

½ cup/100 grams sugar

Preheat the oven to 350°F/180°C/gas 4.

Combine the flour, butter, and sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle. Beat on the lowest speed until the dough comes together. This can take a few minutes.

Press the dough into an 8-inch/20-centimeter cake pan/tin or other baking pan. The dough should be about ½-inch/12-millimeter thick.

Bake until cooked through and lightly browned, about 30 minutes. Cut into servings while still hot.

DOUGH IS FLOUR THAT’S BEEN GIVEN
shape by water. Without some form of liquid, it remains powder, a collection of individual, distinct granules of starch and protein. Add water, and the proteins in the flour—tightly curled strands collectively called
gluten
—can stretch out and connect with one another, forming long strands of proteins and a single mass of dough.

Sometimes the water in a dough is contained in a fat (butter) that is combined with the flour. Fat shortens the long strands of gluten created by the water, resulting in a tender, flaky pie dough, rather than a loaf of bread or a noodle with some bite. Fat coats the particles of flour, so if only fat is added to the flour, the granules can be shaped using a mold such as a tart pan/tin or ring mold and then baked. The flour will cook and set up, but the pastry will be very crumbly. Eggs are more than half water; flour and eggs will thus create an elastic dough much like bread, but we tend to boil this dough rather than bake it.

Understanding the behavior of these proteins is what gives you control over dough. The proteins allow us to shape dough, and they are what account for its elasticity. Protein is what allows dough to stretch without breaking, giving us delicious pastas and trapping gas to give us leavened bread.

When you work dough, mixing it or kneading it, you encourage these strands of protein to elongate and connect, both end to end and side to side, with each other. The more they connect and line up, the more smooth, elastic, and strong the dough becomes.

Another facet to understand is that this protein network relaxes, meaning that at first, if you stretch the protein strands, they want to snap back, but if you leave them alone for a while, you can stretch them and they won’t stretch back quite so strongly. This is why bread and pasta doughs should rest before you shape or roll them out.

Fat interacts with the proteins by keeping them separate, thereby preventing them from linking up and forming long, elastic chains. This is why pie doughs are tender, not chewy, and why cookies crumble rather than tear.

The final piece of the flour puzzle, and it’s an important one, is the fact that depending on a number of unpredictable conditions, the weight of specific volumes of flour differs. That is, on one day, 1 cup of flour may weigh 4 ounces/ 115 grams, and on another day, it may weigh 6 ounces/170 grams. If there is a single reason why people fear baking, why bread seems daunting, and why a simple sponge cake can seem an arch enemy, it is because measurements of flour are almost always given as a volume, which is guesswork.

Given that a cup of flour can differ by 50 percent, it’s no wonder that some recipes “don’t work.” If your recipe asks you to put 4 cups flour into a bowl, you might have 1 pound of flour in there, or you might have 1½ pounds. Who knows?

This is why recipes that give the weight of flour are more likely to work than those that give the volume of flour. Also, recipes using the weight of flour are more successfully doubled or tripled. I urge you to buy a scale and use it
(see SOURCES).
Scales also provide a much cleaner and easier way to measure, in addition to being accurate. Most digital scales offer ounce and gram measurements. If you have a scale, I recommend following the metric recipes in this chapter.

The recipes here focus on three fundamental dough preparations: bread, pie, and cookie.

Once you can make a great loaf of bread, whole worlds seem to open up. For the most part, bread is bread, meaning there’s not a lot of variation in
basic breads—baguettes, sandwich bread, pizza dough, ciabatta, flatbread. They are variations on the same thing—roughly a five-to-three ratio of flour to water by weight, plus yeast and salt. Fabulous bread is no more difficult than that. I’ve found that most recipes have too many instructions, overcomplicating what is a simple business: flour, water, salt, and yeast, mixed until the dough is good and elastic.

Any wheat flour will work: cake/soft-wheat flour, bread/strong flour, all-purpose/plain flour. There are some differences using a low-gluten flour (cake) rather than a high-gluten flour, or using a whole-wheat/wholemeal flour, which will give you a denser bread, but not so much that you should worry about making bread if you don’t have bread/strong flour in the pantry.

The only time you should not attempt bread is when you need to eat in an hour. Bread can’t be rushed. Bread takes time. The longer you give it, the better it is.

FLOUR AND WATER:
You need about five parts flour and three parts water by weight; that will give you a good consistency and result in a versatile dough, not so wet that it sticks to everything and not so dry that it’s difficult to mix. That would amount to 5 ounces of flour and 3 ounces of water, for a very tiny loaf. I use 20 ounces of flour for a standard loaf, with 12 ounces of water, for 2 pounds of raw dough (in metric, it’s even easier: 500 grams flour, 300 grams water).

For those who don’t have a scale, I have translated 5 ounces of flour to equal 1 cup of flour.

SALT:
Salt is what gives the dough flavor. That’s why it’s there. Bread with no salt is insipid. The general rule of thumb is to multiply the weight of the flour by 0.02 and that is the amount of salt to use; in other words, salt should equal 2 percent of the weight of the flour. For 20 ounces of flour I use 0.4 ounces (again metrics shine: for 500 grams flour, 10 grams of salt). You can also use a scant ½ teaspoon of coarse kosher salt per 1 cup of flour if you aren’t weighing your ingredients.

For those who don’t have a scale, I recommend using Morton’s coarse kosher salt, which has a near equal volume to weight ratio, that is, 1 tablespoon equals ½ ounce.

YEAST:
Yeast is what makes it bread rather than hard tack. The amount of yeast can vary considerably; the more yeast you put in, the faster the dough will rise. I use active dry yeast, but instant dry yeast is fine, too (it’s a little more active than active!). I use 0.5 percent of the weight of the flour. You can also use ¼ teaspoon of yeast per 1 cup of flour.

Many bread recipes are fussy about adhering to various temperatures, such as blooming yeast in 110°F/43°C water or adding 75°F/24°C water to flour. Bakers will concur that variables in bread baking are many and that a yeast dough is alive and responds to the environment. But for basic bread at home, you don’t need to drive yourself crazy with temperatures. Just know that if you use warm water, or the day is very hot and humid, the yeast is going to act faster than if the dough is chilly.

Three phases require your attention for good basic bread: the mixing, the first rise, and the second rise.

Mixing is what develops the gluten network that will give the dough its structure and the elasticity that will allow it to rise. Aligning all those proteins is the work of mixing. A properly mixed dough should be smooth and so elastic that you can stretch it to translucency.

The first rise , also called fermenting, allows the yeast to propagate, eating the sugars that compose the starch granules and releasing gas as a result. This not only begins the leavening process but also develops flavor. You should let
the dough rise until it doubles in size; the longer it takes to do this, the more flavorful the bread will be. The first rise is finished when you press a finger into the dough and the dough does not spring back. If you let the dough rise too long, it can become slack, and you won’t get a proper final rise.