Ruhlman's Twenty (27 page)
Authors: Michael Ruhlman
5
/When the bowl is not warm to the touch, add the butter a few pieces at a time.
6
/Add the melted and slightly cooled chocolate.
MAKES
ONE 8-INCH/20-CENTIMETER
LOAF
In deciding what kind of batter bread I wanted to include, I simply combined my favorite batter bread with my favorite muffin. I started with the basic batter ratio of equal parts liquid and flour by weight, half as much egg, then scaled back on the liquid to account for the very moist banana.
2 cups/280 grams all-purpose/plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda/bicarbonate of soda
Kosher salt
3 large eggs
¼ cup/60 milliliters buttermilk
1/3 cup/65 grams sugar
¼ cup/60 grams butter, melted
2 bananas, mashed
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest
1 cup/140 grams blueberries, tossed with 1 tablespoon flour
Preheat the oven to 350°F/180°C/gas 4. Butter an 8-inch/20-centimeter loaf pan/tin or coat it with vegetable oil.
In a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda/bicarbonate of soda, and 1 teaspoon salt. In a large bowl, combine the eggs, buttermilk, sugar, melted butter, bananas, vanilla, and lemon zest and mix well. Add the flour mixture and whisk just to combine. Stir in the blueberries.
Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake until a paring knife or toothpick inserted into the bread comes out clean, about 1 hour. Cool in the pan on a wire rack for 15 minutes. Turn the bread out of the pan onto the rack and let cool.
Store at room temperature, well wrapped, for up to 3 days.
/MAKES ABOUT
4
POPOVERS
Popovers are showoffs. True to their name, they pop out of their pan like a girl out of a cake, as the water in the batter vaporizes. For popover batter, you want the flour to fully hydrate, so it’s best to mix the batter at least an hour before you cook it. The recipe will work if you can’t wait, but I’ve found that the popovers are better with the rest—crisper on the outside and creamier inside.
For an excellent savory preparation, try traditional Yorkshire pudding, which is popover batter poured into a pan with beef drippings (or into cups containing melted rendered beef fat).
Popovers are wonderful for Sunday morning breakfast with jam or apple butter or honey. They’re most dramatic when baked in a popover pan, but you can make them in ½-cup/120-millimeter ramekins if you wish.
1 cup/240 milliliters milk
2 large eggs
Scant 1 cup/120 grams all-purpose/plain flour
Kosher salt
4 tablespoons/55 grams butter, melted
In a bowl, combine the milk, eggs, flour, and ½ teaspoon salt. Mix with a whisk or hand blender until uniformly combined. Let the batter rest for 1 hour at room temperature (or refrigerate overnight, removing it at least 30 minutes before baking).
Place a popover pan in the oven and preheat the oven to 450°F/230°C/gas 8.
After about 10 minutes, remove the pan from the oven. Pour about 1 tablespoon of the melted butter in each cup. Fill each cup three-fourths full with the batter. Bake for 10 minutes. Reduce the oven temperature to 400°F/200°C/gas 6 and continue to bake until the popovers are golden brown and hot in the middle, about 20 minutes. Remove from the pan and serve immediately.
/MAKES
6 TO 8
PUDDINGS
Marlene Newell, who tested all the recipes in this book (and oversaw secondary testers), feels these are best done in a very hot oven. Be sure your oven is clean, to avoid smoking yourself out of the kitchen, or reduce the heat somewhat. If you don’t have a popover pan, you can use a standard muffin pan. Or it can even be done in a large baking dish with hot beef fat—it rises and bubbles and curls dramatically.
1 cup/140 grams all-purpose/plain flour
1 teaspoon mustard powder
4 or 5 large eggs
1 cup/240 milliliters whole milk
6 teaspoons vegetable oil or beef fat drippings
Sift the flour and mustard powder together into a large bowl. Add the eggs and milk and blend on high speed with a hand mixer until fully incorporated. Let the batter rest for about 2 hours, reblending it now and then.
Preheat the oven to 475°F/240°C/gas 9.
Place 1 teaspoon of vegetable oil in each cup of a popover pan. Place the pan on a baking sheet and slide it into the oven for a few minutes, until the oil is hot.
Remove the pan and pour the batter into the cups, dividing it equally and filling the cups three-fourths full. Place the pan in the oven, and turn on the light so you can watch the pudding rise. After 10 minutes, reduce the oven temperature to 450°F/230°C/gas 8. Continue to bake, without opening the oven door, until the pudding is puffed, golden brown, and hot in the center, 15 to 20 more minutes. Serve immediately.
SUGAR IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT
and complex ingredients in the kitchen. It is critical not just because of its capacity to sweeten—which is huge and pervasive in itself—but also because of its impact on the structure of cooked batters and doughs.
Furthermore, the permutations sugar undergoes at varying temperatures are more numerous than for any other single ingredient. Heat it to 240°F/115°C, and it will be clear and pliable when cooled. Heat it a little more, and it will harden completely and stay clear. Take it above 300°F/150°C, and it begins to brown, or caramelize, taking on increasingly intricate flavors. Pour a little of this clear, amber sugar in a ramekin, and it will harden to glass but then melt when a custard is cooked on top of it so that the sugar cascades down the custard’s sides when the dessert, crème caramel, is upended on a plate. Add dairy fat to liquid caramelized sugar, and you have a thick, pourable caramel sauce. Add butter, cook the sauce some more, and it will become sweet brittle toffee.
Sugar is a study in contradictions. Getting sugar very hot results in hardness in a finished preparation, whether a cookie or a candy; yet freezing it results in softness. Sugar, not fat, is the reason ice cream is pliable (consider how hard water and butter get when you freeze them). It is also why lemon bars do not become rock hard and instead take on a pleasing chewiness. Sugar has an affinity for opposites: marrying vinegar in a barbecue sauce that makes pork sing
(see Pulled Pork recipe)
, welcoming salt when used as
caramel on a sundae.
Once sugar is incorporated into food, its impact goes far beyond making something sweet. Sugar attracts and binds with water, water that might otherwise get soaked up by the flour. Its affinity for water helps make cookies crisp and keep many baked goods moist. Sugar contributes to the shortening of gluten and so can help make baked foods tender. It prevents crystallization in many frozen desserts. Try to reduce calories in a recipe by cutting the sugar, and you may have a mess on your hands. Sugar helps hold food together. It pulls moisture out of fruits to make a kind of syrup and concentrate the fruit flavors. Sprinkle strawberries liberally with sugar, and in an hour you will have a delicious topping for strawberry shortcake.
By carefully controlling the warming and heating of sugar, you can create sculptures as complex and compelling as blown glass.
That unassuming white stuff in the bowl next to the coffee and cream is a wonder.
In many ways, mastering sugar is all about balance, whether in terms of the flavor of a dish or in relation to other structural ingredients, such as flour, egg, and butter—or in terms of other flavoring ingredients, especially acidic ones.
Among the most important skills to learn as a cook is the balancing of flavor. Often, sugar added to a sauce or a braise helps round it out and balance acidity. When you evaluate any dish, sweetness should be considered. Would a little sweetness enhance this sauce, for instance? Not sure? Put some on a spoon add a little sugar and taste. As with salt, you shouldn’t taste sugar or allow it to overpower; you wouldn’t want to turn a savory sauce into a dessert sauce. Vinaigrettes are an excellent example of sugar’s capacity to balance. Make a standard 3:1 vinaigrette with sherry vinegar and oil, diced shallot, and a little Dijon mustard. Then add a little brown sugar or honey, and taste the vinaigrette. Barbecue sauces and the French techniques for
gastrique
and
aigre-doux
are all sweet-and-sour savory dishes that rely on an aggressive balance of vinegar and sugar.
When seasoning dishes, white table sugar is only one of many alternatives. Brown sugar and honey are good examples of seasoning options, as is a relative newcomer, agave nectar, a liquid derived from the agave plant and now widely available in grocery stores.
White table sugar, seemingly so plain, so ordinary, becomes an enormously powerful player once it’s put into action with water or heat. Cooked, it takes on extraordinary complexity with a range of aromas and flavors. Learning the fundamentals of sugar, especially in baking and pastry, can make you a more confident cook.
/MAKES ABOUT
13/4 CUPS/420 MILLILITERS
SAUCE
Made with just sugar and cream, caramel sauce is one of the great renditions of sugar. I grew up with a jar of store-bought caramel sauce in the door of the refrigerator, never realizing that my own, more delicious and more-fun-to-make caramel sauce could be finished in the time it took me to find the opener to get the stuck lid off the jar. It is as easy as melting a little sugar until it’s amber, then adding the same amount of cream. Cool the sauce a little by setting the pan in water for a warm caramel sundae, or let it cool completely so it doesn’t melt the ice cream.
Technically, you don’t even need cream. You can make a good caramel sauce with sugar, butter, and water, all of which we commonly have on hand, so it can be a last-minute creation.
And it can be varied. Make caramel sauce with brown sugar. Cook brown sugar with half as much butter until it’s brown and frothy, add the cream, season with a few drops of lemon juice and salt, and you’ve got an amazing butterscotch sauce.
Caramel is not just for topping ice cream, or for making
Caramel-Pecan Ice Cream
. It can be featured in a rich caramel and chocolate tart, or drizzled over cakes or brownies.
Caramel works great in savory preparations, too. There’s no reason you couldn’t improve on any barbecue sauce by replacing the sugar with caramel, or use caramel in a sauce for miso-glazed pork.
Caramel is a cooking basic. There are two ways to begin the process: melting the sugar dry by itself in the pan or melting the sugar by adding just enough water to make it look like wet sand. Both work fine. I prefer the wet approach because I feel it gives me a little more control as the water first dissolves the sugar, then cooks off. Resist the urge to stir too much. Wet or dry, stirred sugar will clump up into grainy pebbles. If this happens, be patient—the clumps will eventually melt along with the rest of the sugar. Use a silicone spatula or a flat-edged wooden spoon to stir the hot sugar.
Simple though caramel is, it comes with a major warning. Sugar can get hot, as hot as oil, and worse than oil, if you spill it on yourself, it will stick like tar. Some of the worst burns in the kitchen are sugar burns, so be careful. Use a high-sided, heavy saucepan (enameled cast iron is a good choice). When adding other ingredients such as cream, be watchful—some of the water will vaporize on contact, and the sugar will foam up in steamy violence during the first several seconds. Have a source of cold water within arm’s reach, whether a faucet or a bowl of water just in case. (Cooling the pan with water is also a good way to stop a caramel from overcooking if you sense it’s going to burn.) Lastly, never leave melting sugar unattended on the stove.