Newbie Gourmet

Strudel! Could you imagine the labor involved in making the paper-thin dough? The stretching, rolling, why, it could take hours, right? I would never make strudel--too much work.

And then came the The Daring Baker's May Challenge: Linda of Make Life Sweeter and Courtney of Coco Cooks choose STRUDEL. Ay, dios mios.

I put it off until the very last day, yesterday. I just really did not want to make strudel. I thought, well, I can miss a few challenges, right? And then as the day dragged on, I remembered, oh yes, the point was to challenge me. So, at 6:45pm last night, I decided I would make my first strudel.

And boy, am I glad I did. It was easy, quick, painless, and most rewarding of all, delicious.

Now, the original recipe was an apple strudel, whose recipe follows, but as I waited until literally hours before it was due, I did not have the ingredients for apple strudel. I stuffed my strudel, which I divided into four small balls I could roll on my counter because a certain cat refused to get off the dining table, with chocolate, Andes mints, coconut, blueberries and cream cheese. Not all in one strudel, of course.


This recipe made four hand-size strudels, but the Daring Bakers say, and I now agree, it's easy enough to make and the ingredients are cheap enough that it is worth it to double the recipe. The dough also freezes well.

Apple strudel
from “Kaffeehaus – Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest and Prague” by Rick Rodgers

2 tablespoons (30 ml) golden rum
3 tablespoons (45 ml) raisins
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon (80 g) sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick / 115 g) unsalted butter, melted, divided
1 1/2 cups (350 ml) fresh bread crumbs
strudel dough (recipe below)
1/2 cup (120 ml, about 60 g) coarsely chopped walnuts
2 pounds (900 g) tart cooking apples, peeled, cored and cut into ¼ inch-thick slices (use apples that hold their shape during baking)

1. Mix the rum and raisins in a bowl. Mix the cinnamon and sugar in another bowl.

2. Heat 3 tablespoons of the butter in a large skillet over medium-high. Add the breadcrumbs and cook whilst stirring until golden and toasted. This will take about 3 minutes. Let it cool completely.

3. Put the rack in the upper third of the oven and preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C). Line a large baking sheet with baking paper (parchment paper). Make the strudel dough as described below. Spread about 3 tablespoons of the remaining melted butter over the dough using your hands (a bristle brush could tear the dough, you could use a special feather pastry brush instead of your hands). Sprinkle the buttered dough with the bread crumbs. Spread the walnuts about 3 inches (8 cm) from the short edge of the dough in a 6-inch-(15cm)-wide strip. Mix the apples with the raisins (including the rum), and the cinnamon sugar. Spread the mixture over the walnuts.

4. Fold the short end of the dough onto the filling. Lift the tablecloth at the short end of the dough so that the strudel rolls onto itself. Transfer the strudel to the prepared baking sheet by lifting it. Curve it into a horseshoe to fit. Tuck the ends under the strudel. Brush the top with the remaining melted butter.

5. Bake the strudel for about 30 minutes or until it is deep golden brown. Cool for at least 30 minutes before slicing. Use a serrated knife and serve either warm or at room temperature. It is best on the day it is baked.

Strudel dough
from “Kaffeehaus – Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest and Prague” by Rick Rodgers

1 1/3 cups (200 g) unbleached flour
1/8 teaspoon salt
7 tablespoons (105 ml) water, plus more if needed
2 tablespoons (30 ml) vegetable oil, plus additional for coating the dough
1/2 teaspoon cider vinegar

1. Combine the flour and salt in a stand-mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Mix the water, oil and vinegar in a measuring cup. Add the water/oil mixture to the flour with the mixer on low speed. You will get a soft dough. Make sure it is not too dry, add a little more water if necessary.
Take the dough out of the mixer. Change to the dough hook. Put the dough ball back in the mixer. Let the dough knead on medium until you get a soft dough ball with a somewhat rough surface.

2. Take the dough out of the mixer and continue kneading by hand on an unfloured work surface. Knead for about 2 minutes. Pick up the dough and throw it down hard onto your working surface occasionally.
Shape the dough into a ball and transfer it to a plate. Oil the top of the dough ball lightly. Cover the ball tightly with plastic wrap. Allow to stand for 30-90 minutes (longer is better).

3. It would be best if you have a work area that you can walk around on all sides like a 36 inch (90 cm) round table or a work surface of 23 x 38 inches (60 x 100 cm). Cover your working area with table cloth, dust it with flour and rub it into the fabric. Put your dough ball in the middle and roll it out as much as you can.
Pick the dough up by holding it by an edge. This way the weight of the dough and gravity can help stretching it as it hangs. Using the back of your hands to gently stretch and pull the dough. You can use your forearms to support it.

4. The dough will become too large to hold. Put it on your work surface. Leave the thicker edge of the dough to hang over the edge of the table. Place your hands underneath the dough and stretch and pull the dough thinner using the backs of your hands. Stretch and pull the dough until it's about 2 feet (60 cm) wide and 3 feet (90 cm) long, it will be tissue-thin by this time. Cut away the thick dough around the edges with scissors. The dough is now ready to be filled.


So, that's it. This recipe was so easy, I'm going to make it again this weekend for the neighbors. With my strudels, I sprinkled some raw sugar on them to make them look prettier and when I rolled them, I made them look more like crude palmiers than rolls (pictures below). I baked mine at 375 instead of 400, because of my fillings, which were mostly just chocolate. In other words, I just needed the strudel, not the stuffing, to bake. But if you make the apple stuffing, then follow the above temperature recommendations.



When rolling out the dough, don't skimp on the flour. The dough is very easy to work with, but it sticks to the surface like any other dough does.

And don't leave your strudel out on the coffee table, because even thought they're pretty to look at, the puppy can now reach the table and you are probably going to find her eating blueberry strudel on your white carpet! I would have killed her, but she's so adorable.

So, a while back I was on this low-calorie diet. You'd think that it would be horrible and bland, right? Well, I found this very nice recipe in the Picture Perfect Recipe Book some years ago, and have continued to use it, diet or no. I'm not sure if I've made changes to it, because I've lent the book out. It is not only delicious, but simple to make. It also makes for an elegant side dish.

Stuffed Portabellos

Ingredients:

• 4-6 Gigantic Portabellos
  
• 1/4 c. Italian Dressing
  
• 1/4 c. Balsamic Vinegar
  
• 6 Large Sun-Dried Tomatoes Halves in Oil, Minced
  
• 2 TBS Minced Garlic
  
• 1/8 c. Minced Shallot
  
• 1/2 c. Italian Bread Crumbs
  
• 3 Minced Fresh Basil Leaves
  
• 2 TBS Fresh Thyme
  
• Salt & Pepper to Taste
  
• Cooking Spray
  

Preparation:

1.) Remove the stems from your portabellos, mince the stems, and put them aside. I save the stems for omelettes and salads. You can also buy portabellos without stems, in which case, skip to the next step.*

2.) In a big zip-lock freezer bag, combine the dressing and vinegar, then add the mushroom caps. Let them marinate for an hour--any more than that and the vinegar taste will be too strong. Flip the mushroom bag over halfway through the marinating so that both sides of the mushroom caps will get the marinade on them.

3.) Take the mushrooms out of the bag, but don't throw away the marinade. Spray a large cookie sheet with cooking spray, and put the mushrooms on the sheet, stem-side up. Broil for five minutes (they should start turning brown just before you take them out).

4.) In a bowl, mix the tomatoes, garlic, onion, bread crumbs, basil, thyme, and salt and pepper. Now, the tricky part. Remember the marinade in the bag? Add a couple of spoonfuls to the bowl, and mix it up. The consistency you're going for with the mix is moist, but not wet. You'll have to slowly add marinade until you get this consistency. For me, it's usually three or four tablespoons, but it can be more or less depending on the bread crumbs, tomatoes, and garlic you use.

5.) Stuff the mushrooms with the mix. Broil them for another five to ten minutes, until the filling is hot. Keep a close eye on them because they burn easily.

6.) Serve piping hot as a main dish (great alternative to meat) or a delicious (and filling) side dish. You can decorate the dish by placing fresh thyme sprigs on top.


*Note: The gills of the mushrooms will absorb a lot of the marinade, so if you don't like the vinegar taste, you can certainly remove the gills of the mushrooms with a spoon before going to step two.

My boss encouraged me to join The Daring Baker's Forum as a way to experiment with new recipes. Each month, a challenge is issued and members are asked to make a recipe they might not be comfortable with or to change up a recipe they might make regularly. This month's challenge was cheesecakes, based on Abbey's Infamous Cheesecake recipe, chosen by Jenny Bakes.

I'm great with cheesecakes. I love making them, eating them, watching others eat them. Well, I couldn't just do a cheesecake, because that would be cheating, so I decided to experiment with a new flavor combination for April. I wanted something floral and light, and roses seemed to fit the bill. But everyone knows how to do a rose cheesecake; they're all over the internet. Thankfully, I found another flavor to mix it up a bit: orange blossom water. Using these two flavors in a marbled cheesecake made for the perfect cheesecake for the month of April.

Elizabeth's Spring-Blossom Cheesecake

Ingredients:

For the Crust:

3/4 c. graham cracker crumbs
3/4 c. Savoiardi (ladyfinger) crumbs
1/2 c. granulated sugar
1 tsp orange extract
6 TBS butter, melted

For the Cake:

2 1/2 lb cream cheese, softened
1 3/4 c. granulated sugar
3 TBS all-purpose flour
2 egg yolks
5 large eggs
1/4 c. heavy cream
1 TBS rose syrup*
1 TBS orange blossom water*
Red and yellow food coloring

*Note: I use Al-Rabih brands.

Preparation:

PREHEAT OVEN TO 300F DEGREES

1. Wrap an entremet with parchment paper so that the bottom and sides are tightly covered. You'll see in my pictures that I use tight triangular folds all around the outside to do this. Mix the crumbs, extract, and the sugar together in a small bowl, then add the melted butter to the crumb mixture. Use your hands to press the mixture into the bottom and sides of the entremet so that there is a nice, even distribution of crumbs across the bottom and sides.

2. In a large mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, whip the cream cheese until it is light and fluffy. You cannot over-mix the cream cheese at this point, so make sure there is not a single lump in it when you are done. Use your hands to scrape the cream cheese from the paddle and sides of the bowl between mixings until no lumps are left at all! It's so important for the final texture of the cake.

3. When the cream cheese is fluffy and lump-free, add the sugar and flour. Mix well, but do not overmix.

4. Add the yolks and mix until just incorporated. Add the eggs and mix until just incorporated.

5. At this point, mix it with your hands to make sure everything is mixed and that nothing has lumped together or settled on the bottom. When you are sure everything is mixed together correctly, add the heavy cream and mix only very briefly. If you over-mix the cream (it should take just seconds to mix), then your cheese cake will rise and crack during cooking.

6. Divide the batter equally between two bowls. In one bowl, gently fold the rose flavoring into the batter. In the second bowl, gently fold the orange blossom flavoring, two drops of red food coloring and three drops of yellow food coloring into the batter.

7. Pour half of the rose batter in the cake pan so it completely lines the bottom. Tilt the pan so that the rose batter also lightly covers the sides. Gently add the orange batter to the pan so that it covers the rose batter; leave 1/4 c. for the marbelization. Put the remaining rose batter on top of the orange batter layer, then use a spoon or a piping bag to create a spiral of orange blossom batter on the top of the cake. Use toothpicks to draw the batter from the middle of the cake to the sides of the cake so that you will achieve a marbelization effect, as shown below.



8. Bake the cake for one hour at 300 degrees. The cake is done when the center of the cake is firm to the touch, though it may jiggle a lot. The sides will have risen up only slightly and may even have cracked a bit. Let the cake cool on a cooling rack for an hour or so until it is at room temperature before removing it from the mold. Removing it too soon could cause it to collapse. When it has reached room temperature, you may remove it from the mold and freeze or refrigerate it. Just make sure it is well chilled before serving.

So, today I came into work all ready to go. You know, when you go into work in a mood to accomplish everything? Well, it was one of those days and I was on a roll (no pun intended). Cheesecake ingredients out, baguette dough rolled onto the table, pastry dough defrosting and butter softening all before nine in the morning.

Well, my boss came by and said she wanted to show me how to do the baguette rolls. I thought that was odd since I had done four batches of baguettes (maybe more) since I started working there and thought I had it down. I'll be the first to admit my last batch looked a little lumpy. Okay, a little deformed. Well, maybe a lot. It was because I was focused on making sure that each baguette was exactly one pound rather than baguette-looking. I knew they looked bad. What I didn't know was that everyone thought that they were, I mean, really ugly.

My boss said my last batch of baguettes looked like a bunch of "cancerous penises," and that they were "scaring the wait staff."

I laughed, because I was imagining how that conversation with the wait staff went. I asked the waitress about it later (she and I are friends), and she admitted that she had told Mary that I might have been sexually frustrated when I made the last batch. Maybe. I don't know.

In any event, this is how you make artisan baguettes look like baguettes and not like cancerous penises:



Put a good dusting of flour on your pastry board (or table, in my case). Use your hands to stretch the dough into a roughly rectangular shape with a width as long as your baking sheet (in my case a little under 18". Don't worry if you can't pull the whole thing out. In this picture, you can see I didn't have enough room on the table to stretch the whole thing out. I just focused on the end on which I was working. You can see it's about 18" wide. I use a scraper to cut my bread, but you can certainly use a knife.

Go straight across the dough and make sure it is nice and even, about an inch thick. The cut should look like this:


I always put the cut-side facing up, as in this picture. The dough rises better that way. After letting it rise for ten minutes, I cut four diagonal slits along the top, about 1/4" deep for artistic effect and also so that the bread doesn't split while baking. I let it rise another twenty minutes to a half-hour and spray it down with a lot of water before throwing it in a 400 degree oven. The water is what makes the crust crispity crunchety on the outside while maintaining a doughy soft interior.

This makes for delicious bread that is phallic, to be sure, but would never be called cancerous penis-like.

The baguette recipe I use at home is from The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart.

Photo by Gene Deason for The Brownwood Bulletin

They posted this image in the local paper. It's my boss and her husband accepting the award for Small Business of the Year. She was so nervous about having to do a speech...and it turns out she didn't need to make one after all. Oh, that was a fun night.

This week was very busy, and very exciting, too. On Tuesday, my boss was set to go to the Taste of Abilene event with one of my coworkers. My coworker was "sick" (read: having a panic attack because her boyfriend of three years surprised her with an engagement ring!) so I got to go instead. My boss spent all morning making wonderful sorbetto flavors for the event: pineapple, cantaloupe, lemon, and blood orange. We were one of the last restaurants to show up, but were early enough to set up everything before the event began. Last year, apparently, there was a lot left over, so this year my boss didn't bring as much stuff. We had bags with information about the restaurant, the city, and the Way Out Winery Tour, but most of the people who came weren't interested in any of that, and we had several who were honest and up-front about it, choosing to cut-off our About-the-Restaurant spiel with, "Just tell me what food you got."

We sold out the sorbetto pretty quickly.

I, meanwhile, began working on my super-secret Daring Baker's April Challenge, which would be really fun to tell you about but I can't because...it's a secret. So, that will be discussed in late April, when the challenge ends and I can post pictures and the new recipe I made just for the challenge. Of course, you can certainly come to visit the restaurant, where my challenge recipe outcome was good enough to serve to the masses and currently resides in the gelataria display case.

More exciting, my boss, Mary Stanley, and her husband, David, were honored by the city yesterday evening. They received an award from the Chamber for Business of the Year and were quite pleasantly surprised and flattered. So, we all went out to celebrate and had many drinks between us in their honor. For my part, I may have had too many drinks, as I was giggling a lot during the awards ceremony and for the life of me, cannot remember what on earth was so funny. Thankfully, I wasn't the only one.

Work has been getting a lot easier since now I've gotten the technique down for most of the recipes and my bread, especially, has drastically improved. Here's a picture of my gorgeous focaccia bread:



The recipe I use for home baking is in The Bread Baker's Apprentice, which I have read several times over now as part of homework for my job. Mary was telling me how great my bread was lately, and she let me know not to change a thing despite one customer complaining that the bread was "too crunchy for Brownwoodian teeth." There's always going to be that one customer, I suppose. You can't please every one.

Baking is just so much about technique. It's a point Mary keeps drilling into my head. It's not just a bunch of ingredients you smack together and throw in an oven. The more I focus on perfecting technique, the better things taste. Case in point: palmiers.

I hate that I forgot to take a picture of the last batch of palmiers I made. They came out excellently delicious, with a perfectly carmelized exterior and a perfectly flaky interior. I used the same recipe as I did last time (which I will post in my next blog post), but used a different technique. Last time, they did not crisp up, did not carmelize, and as many burned as were undercooked. This time: perfection. I love learning new tricks.

Monday is date-night for me and my hubby, which is basically just one day a week when we agree to be extra nice to each other and either he or I make dinner (or go out) and watch a movie or work on something together. It's just a very relaxing evening for the both of us.

Tonight, I made the dinner and we had, amongst other things, some feta cheese-stuffed mushrooms with balsamic vinegar...but of course there was dessert afterwards. I mean, this is me, people.

Dessert was a very basic (and therefore date-night appropriate) but nonetheless delicious chocolate truffle recipe, which I've made from various recipes I've tried over the years. These truffles remind me of Lindt truffles, the way a hard chocolate shell gives way to the melt-in-your-mouth chocolate inside. They are very rich, so you only need to eat two or three before you've had your fill. They keep in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks, though, so I don't see a need to reduce the recipe.

Ten-Minute Chocolate Truffles

Ingredients:

10 oz. semi-sweet or dark chocolate chips or bar
2 1/2 c. unsalted butter

1 c. milk chocolate chips or bar

Toppings*

*Toppings can be anything you imagine. For the picture, I used Andes mint baking chips, but you can use crushed nuts, cocoa powder, powdered sugar, or anything else.

Preparation:

Put the butter in a medium bowl and microwave for one minute, or until melted. Stir in the semi-sweet chocolate with a spoon until completely melted, about two minutes. The mixture should look like chocolate syrup. Refrigerate for thirty minutes, or until completely solid.

When the mixture is solid, use a melon baller or better yet, a tiny scoop, to form the hard chocolate mix into balls and place on a Silpat (or plastic wrap--something nonstick). I usually have to resort to rolling the balls in my hands to make them round. Smaller balls are better because these are rich.

Melt the milk chocolate in the microwave for a minute, or until melted, stirring every thirty seconds. Use a fork to lift the semi-sweet chocolate balls and dip them completely in the milk chocolate. Then transfer them back to the Silpat. Let sit for two minutes, then dip again in the chocolate. Repeat. You want three coats of milk chocolate shell. On the third dipping, sprinkle on your topping of choice before the coating sets.

Refrigerate or eat and enjoy. They are delicious and decadent.