mix, mix…stir, stir

It’s brownie time again for the Tuesdays with Doriegang! This time it’s Rick Katz’s Brownies for Julia. When Dorie Greenspan was working on the PBS series, Baking with Julia,Rick Katz did all the behind the scene recipe prep and often made treats for the crew, like these brownies.

What caught Dorie’s attention about this recipe is not just that they taste good, but the procedure of beating part of the eggs and sugar until thick is quite unique as far as brownie recipes go. The texture is somewhere between gooey and cakey. I have made these twice. The first time they disappeared before we managed to get a picture so I had to whip up another batch, darn. They fell on the sweet side for me, so the second batch I made with all unsweetened chocolate rather than the suggested mix of unsweetened and bittersweet and I liked the change.

A twist to brownies I’ve been enjoying lately is sprinkling walnuts and cocoa nibs on top of the batter. I love the tiny bitter flavor hits from the nibs and the crunch is really nice too. By sprinkling the garnish on top, it’s easy to preserve half of the batch for purists that don’t care for said funny business in brownies.

Though these brownies are very tasty, the extra dirty dishes involved in making them is enough for me to remain loyal to my standard brownie recipe. I am, however, working on a new version of my brownie recipe after testing the Best Chewy Brownies in the March/April 2010 issue of Cook’s Illustrated. They actually seem to have cracked the code for making brownies as chewy as a box mix. It’s funny that boxed brownie mix is really the pinnacle of brownie greatness. Oh to capture that boxed mix chewiness. It turns out the key to a nice chewy texture lies in the fat; you need to have 29% saturated fat (butter) to 71% unsaturated fat (oil).

I applied this ratio to my brownie recipe and learned that messing with the fats messes up the whole recipe, so I’m still testing to see how I can get my recipe to be chewy-like-a-box-mix. I will post the results when I get it worked out.  Sorry I’m not posting the Cook’s Illustrated recipe, but I don’t have copyright permission to do so. It’s on the newsstand now so you can pick up a copy of the magazine or get it from your local library. Though the texture of their recipe was great, it was also too sweet for my taste.

Thank you to Tanya of Chocolatechic for selecting this week’s recipe. She has the recipe posted on her blog if you are in the mood for making brownies.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 112 recipes completed 109 to go! Look we are over the hump!

Gargantuan buttermilk rolls! I made these after seeing Michael Ruhlman’s post featuring utterly delicious looking rolls. I’m not sure why mine rose up as though they were off to conquer the world.

The first rise was wonderfully successful and the sweet yeasty aroma of the dough filled me with anticipation.

Soft dinner rolls have always evaded me. I haven’t attempted Parker House rolls for years, but I recall never being able to get them to rise very well; clearly not an issue with these. Once portioned and given time to rise again, I garnished them with fennel seeds and nigella seeds.

I weighed the ingredients and scaled out each roll to 4 ounces, same as he did.  Even though they are busting out of the pan the interior seems to have a nice crumb. I will give these another try, but bake them in something larger than a 9″ springform pan and portion them to 2 ounces rather than 4. I am interested to see the results he will be posting from other readers who tried the recipe. If you feel like baking up some delightfully tender rolls you will find the recipe on his blog.

Personal sized desserts always look like they were more work to make, but really there is no difference and they are a lot easier to serve. This week for Tuesdays with Dorie it was Milk Chocolate Mini Bundt Cakes, and the recipe really got me thinking about ingredient substitutions.

Most notably I didn’t use milk chocolate. I much prefer dark, really dark, chocolate so I rarely have milk chocolate on hand and just did a straight substitution of dark for milk. The flavor was great. I often bend a recipe to suit my taste, or to work with ingredients I have on hand. If you don’t care for an ingredient in a recipe don’t be afraid to find an equivalent to substitute. The trick is to understanding the role of the objectionable ingredient so you substitute an alternate that serves the same purpose. David likes to mock me, “well I didn’t have any ground beef so I substituted peanut butter” or some other outlandish swap, but I rarely have a substitution related disaster. Notice I didn’t use the word “never”, hence the mocking.

This recipe gave an alternative that I wouldn’t have thought of off the top of my head, but will remember for future applications. The cake called for ½ cup whole milk and in the sidebar notes Dorie mentioned buttermilk can be substituted with the addition of 1/8 teaspoon of baking soda to the dry ingredients (the baking soda is important to neutralize the acidity of the buttermilk). I was happy for the option because I had buttermilk, but no whole milk, thus no special trip to the store needed!

These little cakes hold a surprise swirl of crunchy treats. Had I followed the recipe, it would be walnuts with cocoa powder and sugar, but I thought walnuts and cocoa nibs would be more interesting. The cocoa nibs were fantastic. They were actually the hit of the cake requiring vigilant attention to ward off intruding forks attempting to sneak over and steal them off of one another’s plates. There was an increased risk of nib pilfering because I over baked the cakes which made them crumbly and if a crumb contained a cocoa nib, be on guard it might get snitched. I think it’s because I baked them on the convection setting, but forgot to decrease the baking time. I’ll be interested to visit other Tuesday with Dorie baker’s posts to see if anyone else had dry cakes.

If you haven’t used cocoa nibs, I hope you will pick some up and give them a try. They make a great addition to most baked goods. They add texture that is crunchy but not gritty. Nibs crunch and then sort of  melt when chewed. They also lend a deep chocolate flavor the way unsweetened chocolate or cocoa powder would. Cocoa nibs are created very early in the chocolate making process. Once cocoa beans are roasted they are run through a machine called a winnoer to remove the outer husk. The pieces of bean that are kept for chocolate are cocoa nibs. The nibs are then ground and conched, which is essentially a grinding process to create a beautiful smooth texture before the chocolate is molded into bars or candies. My favorite cocoa nibs come from Theo Chocolate. They are a local Seattle company that is one of very few manufacturers in the US making chocolate from raw beans to finished bars. One of the reasons they have such a nice product is they process in very small batches so the quality of the roast on the nibs is carefully monitored.

Kristin of I’m Right About Everything picked the recipe for this week and will have it posted on her blog if you’d like to give it a try.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 111 recipes completed 110 to go! Look we are over the hump!

If you want to eat chocolate for breakfast, here’s your ticket. This bread drives the deliciously bitter and complex flavors of cocoa front and center leaving the bananas to the finish as a hint that this is legitimate breakfast food.

A full cup of cocoa powder gives the bread a dark enticing appearance and bold flavor; it reminded me more of coffee than chocolate. What could be more perfect for breakfast? I would even consider leaving out the pieces of chopped chocolate next time. I added a generous ¼ teaspoon of freshly ground cardamom which created a beautiful lingering warm floral flavor that complimented both the cocoa and banana equally well.

It turned out I could have pulled my bread out of the oven a few minutes earlier because it was just on the boarder of being over baked. I may have been thrown off by the bits of chocolate in the batter making it look like the toothpick I inserted to check for doneness was coming out with wet batter attached, when I actually just stabbed a reservoir of chocolate. It’s probably a good idea to try pricking a few different spots before making a final assessment as to the doneness of the bread.

A parchment paper sling is my surefire way to be able to remove baked goods from pans. In the recipe, Dorie suggests placing the loaf pan on a sheet pan, but instead I used two nested loaf pans to create a little air space in the bottom for insulation. It worked great. The batter filled a 9×5 loaf pan perfectly. If you have a smaller 4×8 loaf pan, bake some of the batter in a separate ramekin or muffin tin.

I am so thrilled with this bread and can’t wait to make it again. I was really taken with the beautiful bitterness of the cocoa that came through. My favorite cocoa powder is Felchlin Cacaopulver. I buy it through The Chocolate Man who offers a fantastic selection of quality chocolates from around the world.

Steph of Obsessed with Baking made the recipe selection for this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie kitchen activity. She has the recipe posted on her wonderful blog. I encourage you to check out the recipe for Cocoa-Nana Bread and click around to see what other culinary adventures she has been on.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 110 recipes completed 111 to go!

I’ve been on a nice run of baking successes lately, but had a doozie of a failure last night. I made rye bread that is better suited as a doorstop rather than as a consumable.

I expected creating the rye starter to be the tricky part, but that worked like a charm, sort of. I tried two different starter methods. The one from the recipe I was interested in trying seemed so unconventional that I decided it would be wise to create a back-up starter, which turned out to be a good plan. The recipe called for a starter made from rye flour, buttermilk and salt, which was then to be left for four days to do it’s starter thing. The use of buttermilk in starter is unusual though not unheard of, but I have never heard of salt being added so early in the game as it’s a yeast inhibitor, and I was very suspicious that the starter didn’t need to be fed daily. 

For my back up starter I turned to a new book I have been exploring. I received a review copy of Bread Matters by Andrew Whitley from the publisher, Andrews McMeel. The book gives a great overview of rye starter and bread and instructions for a simple starter of rye flour and water that was bubbly and active after the first day. After four days of feeding it was ready to go, unlike the buttermilk starter which I tossed out on day two when I discovered a thick coating of fuzzy mold growing across the top.

As Whitley describes in Bread Matters, rye bread dough is supposed to be very wet and loose like the consistency of mashed potatoes. The recipe I made created dough more like cake batter. I think it was just too wet to be able to rise. Now that I at least have a healthy rye starter I look forward to trying the rye bread recipes from Bread Matters and I expect they will be winners. The only thing I have made so far from the book besides the rye starter is the English muffin recipe, which I make almost weekly. This recipe alone is enough to put this book on my “buy” list, but once I do a bit more baking from the book I will share a full review.  I have to say I find myself reaching for this book over the other bread books I own when I want information, like how to make a rye starter, for example.