10.01.08
Posted in Books & Publishing, arrrrgh, cookbooks, desserts, food, how to, non-dairy, reviews, vegan at 8:11 am by Hanne Blank
I’ve got nothing against Jeff Rogers, author of Vice Cream: Over 70 Sinfully Delicious Dairy-Free Delights, although it does bear saying that his self-chosen sobriquet, “The Naughty Vegan!” is, in a word, twee.
Nor do I have anything against the idea behind his book, namely, that people who do not wish to consume animal dairy products, for whatever reason, might nevertheless enjoy a frozen dessert that wasn’t an ice or a sorbet. In fact, I heartily agree.
But I do have a number of problems with this recipe book.
First off, there’s the title. I will skip, for the moment, a discussion of why I find the invoking of terms like “vice” and “sin” in relation to food to be problematic and merely point out that if one is so devoted to clean living that one is capable of considering vegan desserts made (as instructed!) with all-organic ingredients and nary a speck of refined sugars to be “sinful,” one is perhaps living an overly-virtuous life.
Second is the fact that there are, in essence, only two recipes. All the “over 70″ variations are nothing more than ringing the changes on the two methods. Further, the two methods themselves differ only the slightest bit, in that the “raw” recipes use dates as sweetener instead of the “cooked” maple syrup called for in all the others. It is only out of courtesy that I can bring myself to say they are even two methods, rather than a more accurate one-and-a-half. Whether you find it admirable or infuriating that someone managed to parlay a recipe and a half — and not even a particularly challenging or difficult-to-derive recipe-and-a-half at that — into a book deal is entirely a matter of perspective, and heaven knows mine has oscillated to and fro all evening.
Nevertheless, the recipes are there, and therein lies the third problem: whoever edited this book should be keelhauled. I got the strong impression, reading it, that whoever was assigned to edit the book over at Celestial Arts (an imprint of Ten Speed Press) back in 2003 or so had never been inside a kitchen in his or her life, and had certainly not bothered to test any of the recipes.
Interestingly, the poor editing doesn’t show much on first browse. The copy is clean and the recipes are presented clearly. But when you begin to read with the intent of actually preparing (I’d say “cooking,” but for the fact that none of these desserts is cooked, meaning that the author has completely ignored the family of frozen desserts that use a custard base) one or two, the problems bob to the surface like clots of wheatgrass scum in an inadequately-mixed smoothie.
On the surface, the recipes seem very simple. The recipes consist of nut milks, prepared with either juice or water, some sweetener, and either fruit or flavorings in the form of extracts or spices. They rely heavily on the use of a blender and/or a juicer, not only to puree fruits and other flavorings, but also to generate the nut milk to be used as the base.
Let me say that again: to generate the nut milk to be used as a base. This book was published in 2004. Does anyone else see the problem here? Nowhere does Rogers discuss the use of prepared nut milks–which have been readily available since well before he wrote the book–in making vegan frozen desserts, nor does he even acknowledge their existence except for canned coconut milk, which he grudgingly acknowledges will do in a pinch. Also, while I appreciate the fact that Vice Cream does not rely entirely upon soy milk, the fact that it is mentioned nowhere in the book is an issue that, like a number of others, makes me think that Rogers did not approach his task as a cookbook writer — which is to say as someone aware of and capable of explaining the technical and material scope of his project and where it fits in to the larger culinary picture — but primarily as a chronicler of things he had done in his own kitchen that happened to work out well. Sadly, he did not have an editor perspicacious enough to query him on these issues, or to just encourage him to get a blog instead of attempting an actual book, which frankly would’ve been a lot more appropriate to the material.
While we’re on the subject of Things A Halfway Competent Cookbook Editor Should Have Caught, beware the paragraph Rogers includes on non-nutritive sweeteners for these desserts. Rogers recommends the use of stevia for sweetening without adding sugars in order to make diabetic-friendly and low-GI-friendly desserts. Fine as far as it goes; as it happens I am a big fan of stevia so was glad to see it featured. Rogers then fails to address the fact that stevia is produced in both liquid and powder forms, and in the liquid form, that both glycerin- and alcohol-based solutions are available, and that these variations are going to pose different challenges to creating a final product that performs well in terms of taste and texture. Most bizarrely of all, Rogers does not even hint that there could be a major texture problem with stevia-sweetened creams, which rather boggles the mind given that he is calling for recipes that ordinarily include a cup of maple syrup to be sweetened, instead, with one and a half teaspoons of a dry powder. That’s rather a lot of liquid to have just vanish from a frozen dessert and expect to have it turn out in anything like the same texture as the original recipe.
Similar lack of testing shows, and even more blatantly, in Rogers’ suggestion that brown rice syrup “may work well” when mixed with other sweeteners. Yes, it may. So might agave nectar, or malt syrup, or crystalline fructose, or for that matter the sweet sweet nectar of generosity and kindness that courses through my veins and that has so far kept me from using obscenities in writing this review. But again, I expect more from a cookbook than a hand-wave and a “well, hey, this might work.” Mr. Rogers, if you’re reading this, you may be a stalwart person, a charming conversationalist, and a dab hand with a Champion juicer, but you’re a crap cookbook writer, and you can tell your editor I said so.
While we’re on the sweetener subject, let’s talk about maple syrup. I like maple syrup. I like it a lot. I cook with it frequently. But it has a rather particular and specific flavor of its own, even when very cold. To have it feature in every single one of the non-raw recipes seems like… oh, I don’t know… no, wait, I do: culinary laziness. In some of the recipes, like the chai, or (of course!) the maple walnut, it seems like just the thing. But I can’t be the only person who saw it in a recipe for peppermint ice cream and involuntarily made a face. Maple syrup simply isn’t the best sweetener in every conceivable case. Even if one doesn’t want to attempt honey (not vegan to some) or refined cane sugar, there are numerous other sweetening options, some of which I mentioned in the previous paragraph. For that matter, why not explore other maple syrup options? For instance, how about using the more strongly-flavored Grade B syrup in places where a stronger maple flavor would be desirable? What about crystallized maple sugar, which has a very alluring texture? The All Maple Syrup All The Time regime is lazy and dull, and the All Honey Date All The Time regime in the “raw” portion of the book isn’t any better.
While I’m here, I just have to say a word or two about one particular paragraph in the front matter. On page 12 of the edition I am looking at, there’s a short paragraph about durian. Just as durian itself is a humdinger of a fruit, this is a humdinger of a paragraph:
“…[durian is] shipped to the United States frozen, so you may find it in the freezer section. Durian is a large, thorny, hard-skinned fruit containing four to five sections of fleshy fruit, each enclosing several large seeds. A seven-pound durian will yield about two and a half pounds of edible fruit. When the fruit is ripe and at room temperature, you can pull apart some of the thorns to create a tear in the skin, exposing the fruit within. Be careful as the thorns are sharp and can cut skin. You can also cut the durian open with a knife, which is a little safer. Be warned that durian is also called “stinky fruit.” It has a very distinctive odor, sometimes mistaken for natural gas.”
Where to begin? First of all, in many major cities (very much including Seattle, where Rogers lives), durian is in fact available fresh. But let us suppose that frozen durian is the only thing available. How long does it take to thaw one out? Should it be thawed at room temperature or in the refrigerator? Does the texture change markedly if it has been frozen, and if so, does this affect how one might handle it for a recipe? You certainly won’t find out from Rogers, who leapfrogs straight from dragging this deep-frozen sea mine of a tropical fruit home from the nearest freezer section to having a ripe durian at room temperature. Which he then proceeds to indicate can be pulled apart, at some risk to life and limb, before making the concession that one could conceivably use a knife.
What is that about? I mean, aside from patent idiocy? You can render a watermelon into pieces by dropping it from a height, too, and portion out servings of tuna noodle casserole by sticking your bare hand right into the bubbling hotdish, but most folks prefer to avoid unnecessary injury and mess and use the utensils that were developed specifically for the purpose of performing such tasks. You know, like knives. Which would certainly be the first thing I reached for if I had occasion to try to dismember something that weighed as much as a sack of potatoes and was sufficiently spiky that it would do nicely as a projectile weapon.
Those of you who have encountered the durian in the flesh may also concur with me that the warning about the smell comes a bit late in the game and is, in fact, almost criminally understated. This is a fruit, after all, that has been banned from public transit, airplanes and airports, and some hotels in the countries (like Malaysia) where it is grown, and these are countries where large numbers of people actively enjoy eating it. I have eaten durian, both fresh and frozen, and in various preparations, and I quite like the flavor. But even I cannot help but concur with Richard Sterling, who writes “…… its odor is best described as pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock.” There is a Malay saying that durian “smells like him, but tastes like her.” This is, you begin to comprehend, not a fruit to be approached in a casual sort of way, unless one lives not only alone, but without any neighbors within, say, a half a mile.
And after all this, how much durian pulp is actually required to make the Coconut Durian flavour of raw “vice cream”? A whopping one and a quarter cups. God alone knows what Rogers assumes the hapless vegan is going to do with the remainder of an extremely large and, at best, rather difficult fruit. For this, and his many other sins, including neglecting to mention that the same markets that sell whole durian fresh or frozen also often have the frozen pulp available in smaller quantities much more amenable to experimentation, I have but one recommendation:
Divide surplus durian pulp into two cardboard takeaway food containers. Seal them up, but not too thoroughly.
Send one to Jeff Rogers.
And send the other to his editor.
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08.20.08
Posted in blogs, cats, desserts, food, squeeeee! at 3:06 pm by Hanne Blank
Autumn (the best season, and make no mistake) is on its way.
I have proof.
Or rather, I had proof. But, because I am basically a LOLcat at heart, I eated it. Nom!
The first Mellocreme Pumpkin of the season has been et. Bring on the Autumn!
Fez is ready. She is practicing her hibernation skills with the dog’s squeaky stuffed hedgehog.
Y’all know about the Schadenfreude carnival that is the Cake Wrecks blog, right? No? Well, now you do.
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07.21.08
Posted in american, cooking, desserts, food, fruit, how to, ingredients, kitchen learning, original recipes at 8:08 am by Hanne Blank
I can’t be the first person who has wondered why the “forbidden fruit” of the Garden of Eden has always been assumed to have been an apple. I mean, apples aren’t exactly native to the Fertile Crescent. But more to the point, I think that if one takes as writ that the no-no-berry was an apple, it may mean that one has never properly reveled in the seductive virtues of cherries. Not that apples aren’t wondrous things. They are (and believe you me you’ll hear about them plenty when apple season rolls around). But really good fresh cherries, well… they’re just a whole different mouthgasm.
It may be that I inherited my love of cherries from my maternal grandmother. She is, in fact, the reason I started canning cherries every summer. She loves cherries, and especially sour or “pie” cherries, enormously, and eats them with huge enthusiasm in virtually any form: fresh, frozen, dried, canned, in syrup, as jam, as ice cream, whatever she can get her paws on. When she was younger and I was quite a bit younger still, she always seemed to have home-canned cherries on hand because she put some up every summer during the brief window when they were at their best. But by and by we both got older, and she eventually stopped canning as her house got emptier and her kids’ and grandkids’ lives got busier, and, I suspect, as she got to feeling less willing and able to haul around big pots of bubbling fruit and spend hours ministering to huge steaming cauldrons, glass jars, and a thousand and one jar lids.
Knowing how much she loved cherries, my mother and I would always try to remember to take her a big jar of Greek cherry preserves when we visited her — the Greeks use tart enough cherries, and not too much sugar, the way my grandmother prefers her cherries. But really, boughten is never quite the same as home-canned, and you can’t get the people at the factory to tailor the amount of sugar in the syrup to be precisely the way you like it. So I took it upon myself to become my grandmother’s canned pie cherry connection. Every summer but one since then, a year when the cherry harvest was very poor due to drought, I have canned cherries and given about half of what I can to her.
A few years ago, she acknowledged my cherry-canning role in her life by giving me her old, well-used cherry pitter, a 1950s-era piece of German engineering that does an admirable if not completely comprehensive job of knocking the stones out of pound upon pound of cherries. It’s a lot quicker than stoning them with a hairpin, which is what I do when I’m pitting only a pie’s worth of cherries, and having a pitter saves me untold repetitive stress injury when I’m stoning more than the five cups required for a pie. As it did this weekend, when my Belovedary and I went out to Larriland Farm, our favorite of the regional you-pick farms, and picked close to 35 pounds of pie cherries for the annual cherry jubilee.
This, I should note, is not even the whole of it. This plastic container will house an entire bundt cake with room to spare, but it’ll only hold about 25 pounds of pitted cherries and their juice. We had to put the rest in a separate container.
The first thing I did with my cherries, however, was not to can them. Instead I heeded nature’s call and made a pie.
It was very very hot and humid, near a hundred degrees, and so of course my pie crust refused categorically to behave despite having been chilled in the refrigerator for a bit. It kept going to pieces the instant I tried to move it to put it in the pan, so I decided to fall back to the eternal piemaker’s default position: slapping the broken pieces of rolled out crust into the pan as it was possible, pressing the overlapping edges together so it wouldn’t leak too much, and generally doing a yeomanly job of working with what you have to work with. I have had to learn to call the results of such pie crust shenanigans “rustic,” you see, for despite the inherent untruth in claiming that any farmwife worth her salt wouldn’t laugh her nipples off at the idea that she’d ever lower herself to serving (let alone photographing and putting on the internet!) a pie whose crust looked like it had had an interaction with the business end of an outboard motor, lots of people seem to have been decieved into thinking that “rustic” necessarily means that things are a bit unfinished, rough around the edges, or downright ragged, and furthermore that this represents an added bonus of “authenticity” and “realness.” I have in point of fact been in bakeries where a “rustic” apple galette cost twice what the presumably urban apple pie did, despite the fact that they were basically the same damn dessert and the “rustic” version took less skill and expertise to create, what with not having to trim or crimp the piecrust and all.
I have, as may be obvious, some issues with this. On the other hand it lets me smile when I serve a pie that is rather less pretty than I would ideally prefer, and have my guests ooh and ah over it, so I suck it up and claim rusticity.
If you would also like to claim rusticity — although honest, it usually doesn’t behave so badly, and won’t if your kitchen is cooler and less humid than mine was — my basic recipe for a slightly sweet double-crust pie crust (for a 9 or 10 inch pie plate), which I use for fruit pies where the fruit is slightly tart, is as follows:
Sweet Pie Crust (double crust for 9-10 inch pie)
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
4 Tablespoons sugar
10 Tablespoons butter or vegan margarine (I like Earth Balance, do not use tub margarines, though, as they have too high a liquid content), diced and very cold
10 Tablespoons solid vegetable shortening (e.g. Crisco), diced and very cold
5 Tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons ice water
Stir the dry ingredients together. Cut in the two fats with two knives (if you are seriously old-school, which I am not), or a pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal. Add the water a tablespoon at a time, incorporating it with a fork and using a folding motion. Since the water content of flour varies, it may come together before you have added all the water. When it comes together, keep working the dough with your fork to incorporate as much of the rest of the dryish mixture as you can that way without using your hands (the heat from your hands liquifies the butter, which impairs the texture). Only if you absolutely have to should you use your hands to press/knead in the remaining bits of fat/flour mixture.
Cut it in slightly uneven halves (one “half” should be a little bigger than the other), shape into discs about 5 inches diameter, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 20 minutes or so to let the dough hydrate evenly and to re-chill the butter. When you go to roll it out, the bigger half is for the bottom crust and the smaller is for the top crust. If you have left it in the fridge for more than about a half an hour you will need to let it warm up for 5-10 minutes before you roll it or it will just crumble and you will be sad.
Of course, now that you’ve got the crust made, you might as well fill the pie, right? Fortunately fresh fruit fillings go together quickly, assuming you’ve already prepped the fruit. Since we’d already done our pitting, making the filling was (if you’ll pardon my saying this) easy as pie. There are plenty of ways to make cherry pie filling, but this is mine, a slight variation on my grandmother’s version.
Filling for Cherry Pie
5 slightly heaped cups fresh pitted tart cherries, juice drained off
1 cup sugar
5 Tablespoons Minute Tapioca
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
1/4 teaspoon (or so) nutmeg, freshly ground preferred
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Toss fruit with sugar, tapioca, and flavorings/spices. Let stand about 10 minutes before filling pie crust. Stir again to thoroughly distribute sugar etc. before filling the pie crust.
Note: if you do not have Minute Tapioca, but do have regular pearl tapioca, just put 6 T of pearls in your blender jar or (clean!) coffee grinder and whiz until it is mostly powder with only a small percentage of tiny pieces. That’s all Minute Tapioca is anyway, really, is tinier pieces of regular tapioca.
I know that some people like to thicken their pies with flour or cornstarch, but I have never found them as reliable or as clear-tasting as tapioca. Do be aware that tapioca thickens, in part, as it cools, so pies will still bubble over sometimes, and will also still be runnier/juicier when they are warm than when they are cool. If you like a firmer pie filling, then by all means wait until the pie is completely cool.
Because we’d also gotten blueberries at the farm, and I was heating up the oven for cherry pie anyway, I decided also to make a blueberry pie. It was a little rustic, too.
My blueberry pie filling is slightly different to my cherry pie filling.
Filling for Blueberry Pie
6 cups fresh blueberries, washed, cleaned, and dried
1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar, depending on sweetness of the blueberries
5 Tablespoons MInute Tapioca
1 teaspoon ground dried lemon peel or the zest of 1/2 fresh lemon, minced fine
1 teapoon ground cinnamon
juice of 1/2 fresh lemon, strained
Toss berries with sugar, tapioca, and spices/zest. Add lemon juice and toss again. Pour directly into pie crust (does not need to stand).
These pies, with tall glasses of iced tea, served as a truly decadent lunch for us and for our friends who came over in the afternoon to share in some canning. They’d made a sour cherry compote that they wanted to put up, and we, of course, had a fairly large quantity of cherries to process. (And for anyone clucking their tongues at the thought of people eating pie for lunch, I’m just sorry for you that you’ve evidently never had the chance to eat fresh warm homemade fresh fruit pie as a meal, because if you had, you wouldn’t be making that face. Which you should probably stop doing before it freezes that way and you have to go through the entire rest of your life looking like someone just took a shit on your carpet. I’m just sayin’.)
And so we did. The large jars are quarts, the small jars with the white caps are twelve-ounce jars, and the small jars with the gold caps are pint jars. My grandmother gets all the small jars of cherries. The darker jars at the right end of the counter are the cherry compote jars. Plus there were almost three quarts of cherry juice left over, but I didn’t bother canning that, just poured it into refrigerator jars… and into me, and my Belovedary, and our guests, over ice.
Come February or so, when I am going a little insane because there just isn’t any fresh fruit in the market worth eating that hasn’t been shipped 10,000 miles (and I’m sorry but I just have problems eating supposedly “fresh” food that is better-traveled than I am), I will be able to head down to the cellar and come up with a couple of jars of cherries and, if I so choose, make myself a pie in the middle of the winter. Or possibly I will do exactly the same thing that my grandmother does with the jars I give to her, and just sit down, pop off the lid, and eat them with a spoon.
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07.16.08
Posted in Uncategorized, cooking, desserts, food, mediterranean, middle eastern at 9:07 am by Hanne Blank
The only thing I have ever found wanting about baklava is the fact that typically, a serving of baklava is one tiny honeyed diamond, which is frankly just not enough baklava. I adore baklava. It is an utterly magical food, capable of reversing not only my normal aversion to things that are sticky but also my low frustration threshold with foods that too easily self-destruct into their component parts. It is flaky and crispy and dense and chewy and nutty and sweet and flowery all at the same time, which makes baklava kind of like the Leatherman multitool of desserts.
Baklava is traditionally served in tiny pieces alongside coffee or tea, which makes perfect sense since it is so intensely sweet and makes such a fine complement to the astringency and bitterness of coffee or the tannins of tea. One should not, it is implied, actually need more than a tiny bit of baklava in order to be satisfied. Sometimes this is even true.
But sometimes it is not. Particularly if you are a passionate baklava eater. Which I most definitely am. But how to come by sufficient baklava, and particularly sufficient really good and worthwhile baklava, to have the chance, at least once in a while, to eat as much of it as pleased me? The options seemed limited: find an apartment near a good Mediterranean bakery, marry a Persian pastry chef, or learn how to make it myself.
I chose option #3.
Learning to make baklava was a bit of a revelation. The thing about baklava is that it’s actually really easy to make, assuming you have access to prepared phyllo dough sheets. These are now pretty readily available in supermarket freezer cases, so much so that I have been able to find them even in places like Moses Lake, Washington, and Chester, Vermont. The rest is just mechanical: making a syrup, preparing the filling, perhaps melting some butter, and layering a hell of a lot of very thin sheets of dough, each painted with butter or oil. It is, from the standpoint of the actual technique required, easier than most other desserts.
There is, of course, some art to it, not just a tolerance for the repetitive motion of layering, painting, and filling. (Which tolerance, I grant you, has to be pretty substantial, because you spend about an hour on those tasks for a single 9×13 pan of baklava.) The art, by which I mean making and spicing the syrup and filling, learning to space the layers of filling evenly through the pastry, and, most difficult of all, learning how to score and slice baklava without inducing a hull breach, takes some time and some trial and error to master.
The art is also where regionalism and ethnic tradition express themselves. Persian baklavas tend to be filled with pistachio and spiced with Silk Road flair, cardamom and cinnamon and clove, orange flower water, scented honeys. Azerbaijani baklavas, on the other hand, often feature both almond and pistachio, sometimes in distinct layers, and a saffron-laced syrup. Turkish baklavas are often made with almonds only, and lots of lemon and cinnamon. Greek baklavas are commonly made with walnuts, lemon juice, cinnamon, and rosewater.
For my recent housewarming, whose menu was on a pan-Mediterranean theme, I made two baklavas. The first I made in a classic Persian mode, with a syrup of honey and sugar spiced with cardamom and clove and finished with orange flower water, and a pistachio filling with cinnamon and cardamom. It turned out beautifully.
For the second one, though, I decided to branch out. I asked my houseguests, who had come in early for the housewarming, what kind I should make. Greek? Azeri? Turkish? Opinions were divided. Then it dawned on me that I didn’t necessarily have to stick to the known. What about pecans? I had a sufficient quantity in the pantry. But pecans are a very American nut. It didn’t seem quite right to force them into the role of walnuts in a Greek-style baklava, although I imagine I could’ve done so and it would’ve tasted fine.
I rummaged through the pantry, the freezer, the fridge. And suddenly it came to me: why not an American baklava? I had a can of frozen concentrated apple juice in the freezer, and a quart of Grade B maple syrup in the cupboard. I had lemons and cinnamon and nutmeg and cloves and Jamaican allspice and mace. I had brown sugar to add to the chopped pecans. I had butter and phyllo.
Shortly thereafter, I had a pan of fresh, deliciously fragrant American Baklava. Just out of the oven, it smelled like the apotheosis of apple pie. Served up, it was delicious, if wetter than I had hoped — I tried to compensate for the high water content of my syrup (1 part apple juice concentrate to 2 parts maple syrup) by cooking the syrup down some, but it proved not to be enough — and most importantly, my houseguests raved about it. In the mouth, it both was and wasn’t what you would immediately recognize as baklava: the textures all said baklava, but the flavors said something else… not quite apple pie, not quite pecan pie, not quite maple sugar candy. But it was definitely delicious.
I plan to tinker with the recipe some, although probably not until September when it cools down some, as running the oven during high summer in Maryland is not my favorite thing to do. Once I get the syrup problem nailed (I think the answer may be to use dry maple sugar), I will be posting the recipe here, in the hopes that a few of you will be willing to serve as recipe testers.
I don’t expect American Baklava to enter the pantheon of Great Baklavas of the World, but it is tasty and impressive as any baklava, and intriguingly different as well, and perhaps it will even appeal to some of those for whom the flavors of flower waters and honey are offputting barriers to enjoying more traditional sorts. A girl can dream.
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