January 12, 2004
Kitchen terror
I am not a baker. Melanie usually does that. If I use an oven, it usually involves a gratin or roasting some hapless animal. Once in awhile I will bake something, but it is rare. I have little patience for levelling cups of flour and poking at cakes with a sharp knife to see if there is any goo on the end. I get my kneading workout on fresh pasta dough, and I can buy great bread easily in the Bay Area. Sure, I'll make a pastry crust for a pate or a pie crust for pheasant, polenta and cheese pie, but generally I stick to the stove top.
However, Melanie enjoys baking, and she is good at it. Often she bakes some sort of yummy thing for our Monday breakfast on Sunday night. Today she and Amalia were down with some sort of cold and I was too lazy to rush out to buy breakfast food (go figure - too lazy to drive five minutes, but not too lazy to bake something. My laziness is probably more of a desire to stay in my lair). I thought that it would be fun to make panettone, but we were out of sultanas, and that brought up the driving issue.
Melanie wanted coffee cake, since I had nixed panettone. Fine. Coffee cake. Who doesn't like to start the day with a good, spicy coffee cake and a side of bacon? Sure. Then it hit me: this is one of those horrid recipes that confounds my every instinct.
The secret to a good coffee cake is to have a good "biscuit hand," which is a light touch with the mixing. To me, a proper coffee cake batter looks like lumpy dreck and conjures up images of biting into clumps of raw flour. Of course it doesn't work that way, but I have to seriously fight the temptation to just beat it into perfect smoothness.
But I resist! I pour this ugly, lumpy, oatmeal-looking goo into the buttered dish and put it in the oven and by some miracle or other, a good coffee cake comes out. It happens every time I have to make one of these things. I look at the batter and think: "nothing good will come out of this" but then it turns out fine.
There is a lesson in this, and a fairly basic one at that. Here is something that I know from experience, from authority (all good cookbooks stress undermixing biscuit-type batters), from history (watching others do it), yet it still confounds my every instinct and sets up my expectation of failure. And when the results confirm history, experience and authority, it still seems like something of a miracle.
When the object at stake is bigger and more consequential than a dollar or two of raw ingredients and 15 minutes of my time, yikes.
Posted by erik at January 12, 2004 12:17 AM | TrackBackJohn,
That is a great book. I think you will like it. Unfortunately Hughes seems to forget some parts of it in Goya (although Goya really is worth reading, especially if you are interested in art).
Posted by: Erik Keilholtz at January 14, 2004 1:00 PMErik-I have Hughes' "Culture of Complaint", but haven't read it yet. Maybe this weekend... John
Posted by: John Salmon at January 14, 2004 9:56 AMI have been using Rumford's baking powder for years - I get it from Trader joes.
Erik, thanks for the essay on food chemistry - you saved me the effort!
Peony,
Don't mix it up in quantity, as it's one drawback is that it does not last long. I get my cream of tartar in bulk from:
G.B Ratto Interntational Grocer
821 Washington Street
Oakland, CA 94507
In California: 800.228.3515
Out of State: 800.325.3483
If you are ever in the Bay Area, be sure to take a detour to Old Oakland to see Ratto's (and the nearby Housewives Marketplace). Definitely one of my favorite haunts.
The difference between Single and Double Action Baking Powders:
Single action: carbon dioxide is produced by the introduction of moisture to the powder.
Double action: carbon dioxide is produced by the introduction of moisture to the powder AND by heat, so that it starts working as soon as moisture hits it and gets a boost when it goes in the oven.
Most commercial baking powders are double action.
For a good essay on baking powder, please see Lindsey Remolif Shere's Chez Panisse Desserts, which is a great book that should be on every kitchen bookshelf anyway!
Posted by: Erik Keilholtz at January 12, 2004 8:49 PMso for homemade baking powder, what's an economical source of cream of tartar for mixing this stuff up in quantity?
maybe you could also tell us what the difference is between double-acting and single-acting baking powder! And I love this kitchen chemistry stuff, so I doubt I'll learn more than I want to know.
Posted by: Peony Moss at January 12, 2004 3:28 PMWow! So many chemistry questions!
First, I recommend making your own baking powder: 2 parts cream of tartar to 1 part each of baking soda and corn starch. I do not subscribe to the paranoia about aluminum salts, but find that the homemade stuff works really well and imparts a minimum of flavor (I have been cursed/blessed with what is called "supertasting" which means that I can pick individual components out of really complex flavors, but I also taste horrid stuff that most folks do not notice. I am rare in that I am attracted to strong flavors, spices, and aromas. Most supertasters shun that stuff. The point is, when I taste commercial baking powder, the off flavors I notice might not be an issue to 98% of the population).
2. Salt is a catalyst and works in several ways in the baking process. Flavor-wise it plays an extremely important function: it forces disparate flavors to meld. If you have to make a dish with cumin, chocolate, anchovies, ginger and garlic, you will come to love salt. Salt is the glue that makes it all come together. Glorious, wonderful Sodium Chloride!
3. Eggs curdling. What happens in curdling is that tiny bits of eggs get thoroughly cooked and bind together in little crystalline bits (scrambling). The result is grainy custard. The trick is to work the custard over low heat (double boiler) and to whisk constantly. That way, you give time for the sugar molecules to come between the yolk molecules. Make a zabaglione tonight to test: on a double boiler over low heat, whisk in four egg yolks, a quarter of a cup of sugar and a quarter of a cup of dry marsala. If the heat is low and the motion constant, you will have a good custard. Then buy a package of mixed berries at Trader Joe's (freezer section) and you've got a great dessert.
3. Yeast bubbles not popping. Basically the CO2 coming out of the yeast makes bubbles with gluten, the strong, gluey protein in flour. The bubbles form as the gluten is really firming up, essentially preserving the bubbles the way lava bubbles cool into rocks that float.
4. Oh yeah, to test your baking powder, drop a pinch of it in warm water. If it bubbles and fizzes it is fine, if not, throw it out.
5. Bringing up kitchen chemistry to someone who used to work in a food lab is dangerous. You might learn more than you want to know.
6. John, with your love of using cool-sounding phrases, you have to read Robert Hughes. I imagine that he did the same thing. Anyway, he is a good writer, and I think you will find him amusing.
7. Yes, music post. The problem is that I have not heard anything that exciting in the last week or so (besides the soundtrack for 8 1/2). I really should continue the Building Blocks of Music series. Maybe tonight.
Posted by: Erik Keilholtz at January 12, 2004 1:56 PMThat SD song, which I forgot to mention, is Don't Take Me Alive.
(This is my "subtle" effort to prompt more music posts on your site!)
Posted by: John Salmon at January 12, 2004 10:29 AMI like the phrase "roasting some hapless animal". It reminds me of the Steely Dan phrase about "luckless pedestrians" in the song about the Texas tower shooter. I used to work "luckless pedestrians" into all my papers in collge, even economics ("as unemployment rises, many of America's luckless pedestrians will be even more disillusioned.") My professors were rarely pleased!
Posted by: John Salmon at January 12, 2004 10:20 AMThank you for this fascinating info., Peony! I have noticed expiration dates on the bottom of baking powder cans--I think they're a recent innovation, since I've had other cans without them. All old ones I've tossed.
Posted by: KTC at January 12, 2004 7:13 AMMaybe the lesson is that you need to bake more coffee cake and banana bread. There aren't too many times in life when that's the moral of the story, so if I were you I'd take full advantage of the situation.
Posted by: Peony Moss at January 12, 2004 6:07 AMoh, I love that kitchen chemistry stuff! I read a book called How To Read a French Fry that was all about things like that. The Cook's Illustrated/ America's Test Kitchen crowd also is a font of that kind of information.
I know that for the baking powder/ baking soda thing, baking powder needs to react with some kind of acid in the recipe. The acid can be in buttermilk, sour cream, the molasses in brown sugar....
But if the recipe doesn't have that kind of acidic ingredient, you turn to baking powder. Baking powder is a combo of baking soda and cream of tartar (an acid byproduct of winemaking) so it provides its own acid for the baking powder to react with.
I found out the hard way that baking powder and cream of tartar can and do go flat after a while. I made a white cake with old baking powder -- the cake was perfectly tasty and tender, it just didn't rise so it was as dense as a brick.
I don't know what the salt does, though, besides perking up the taste. And I need to learn more about eggs and why they always curdle and wreck any custard-type thing I'm trying to make.
Posted by: Peony Moss at January 12, 2004 5:46 AMGod's amazing, isn't he?
Someday I'd like to look into the chemical and physical properties of baking ingredients: why is that 1/4 tsp. of salt so crucial? Why "soda" and not "powder"? How is it that yeast and egg white air bubbles do not pop with heating?
Posted by: KTC at January 12, 2004 5:00 AM