by Jeff Potter
For example, Vietnamese fish sauce is a wonderful ingredient, but if you use a little bit too much it ruins the dish. What do you do at that point? If you eat it you might be turned off from fish sauce for the rest of your life. There is a lot of food waste that goes through my kitchen. There wouldn’t be as much if I weren’t running Cooking for Engineers, but it’s really important to experiment. It’s one thing to read a cookbook, but once in a while it’s important to deviate and try something completely new.
Time and activity bar chart for the Original Tiramisu.
Sometimes, these mistakes can be expensive; you might ruin your pot. Sometimes they will reveal something awesome. In some recipes, you’re told to be sure to not burn the garlic, but then if you experiment and do overcook the garlic, it becomes these little crispy bitter pieces that work really well with certain types of vegetables. People want to get it right the first time. Part of that is due to not wanting to waste the food or the money, but the other part is they haven’t gotten to the point where they’re enjoying doing it over until they get it right.
Have there been any particular recipes whose success has caught you off-guard?
Tiramisu is the recipe that launched Cooking for Engineers. I posted the tiramisu recipe, and three days later I was getting maybe 100 page views a day on that article. Enough people saw it that I got attention from Slashdot, which wrote an article about this new cooking website geared toward geeky people. Boom, I got a lot of readership. So much so that I had a little trouble keeping up with the number of people who were looking at the web pages on the little server that I was running on.
The tiramisu recipe that we have on Cooking for Engineers is a bit more simplified than many of the other tiramisu recipes. I spent a lot of time developing it. I wanted to come up with something that inexperienced cooks could do without extra steps, so I came up with a method where the cream is mixed in with the Mascarpone cheese to produce the lighter, fluffier texture. I modified the amount of ingredients so that it was well balanced. The tiramisu recipe is probably one of the best we’ve ever tasted, and very simple to make. It’s called "simple tiramisu." After the success of the simple one I included one that was closer to what the original tiramisu was as well, to let people compare them.
For photographs and step-by-step directions, see Michael’s site. The two recipes are located at http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/26/Simple-Tiramisu and http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/60/The-Classic-Tiramisu-original-recipe.
TIRAMISU RECIPES USED BY PERMISSION OF MICHAEL CHU
Time and activity chart for Simple Tiramisu.
Note
Cream whippers—canisters that can be filled with a liquid and then pressurized with gas (usually nitrous oxide)—are also a form of mechanical leavening. The gas dissolves into the liquid and then, upon spraying, bubbles back out of saturation, foaming up the liquid. From a structural point of view, foams created this way are entirely different from foams created by whisking: instead of a 3D mesh of surfactants holding on to the air bubbles, the air bubbles are essentially just in suspension. This is why hand-whipped cream is more stable than whipped cream from a can. For more on cream whippers, see Cream Whippers (a.k.a. "iSi Whippers") in Chapter 7.
Chocolate Mousse
Compare the following two methods for making chocolate mousse. The egg-white version creates a creamy, dense mousse, while the whipped cream version creates a stiffer version.
Chocolate Mousse (Whipped Egg White version)
Chocolate Mousse (Whipped Cream version)
In a saucepan, heat ½ cup (120g) of whipping or heavy cream to just below a boil and turn off heat. Add 4 oz (115g) of bittersweet chocolate that’s been chopped into small chunks.
Melt 4 oz (115g) of bittersweet chocolate in a microwave-safe bowl. Add 2 tablespoons (28g) of butter and 2 tablespoons (28g) of cream and whisk to combine. Place in fridge to cool.
Separate 4 eggs, putting 2 of the yolks into the saucepan and all the whites into a clean bowl for whisking. Save the other 2 yolks for a different recipe.
Whisk the egg whites with 4 tablespoons (50g) of sugar to soft peaks. Whisk the cream, chocolate, and yolks together to combine. Fold the whites into the sauce.
Transfer mousse to individual serving glasses and refrigerate for several hours—overnight, preferably.
In a chilled bowl, whisk 1 cup (240g) of whipping or heavy cream with 4 tablespoons (50g) of sugar to soft peaks.
Make sure the chocolate mixture has cooled down to at least room temperature (~15 minutes in the fridge). Fold the whipped cream into the chocolate mix. Transfer mousse to individual serving glasses and refrigerate for several hours; overnight, preferably.
Note
Note
The egg whites in this are uncooked, so there is a chance of salmonella. While it’s rare in chicken eggs in the United States, if you are concerned, use pasteurized egg whites.
Try replacing the 2 tablespoons of cream with 2 tablespoons of espresso, Grand Marnier, cognac, or another flavoring liquid.
What About Steam?
While steam doesn’t involve mechanically trapping air as the other methods in this section do, it’s still a physical process by which air is introduced into food. Most of the recipes given so far also rely on steam generation as part of their leavening; few baked goods truly rely on only one method for providing lift. Try this popover recipe, which is a classic example of a baked good leavened by steam.
Popovers
Traditionally, these are made in specialized popover cups, which are narrow cups with a slight slope to them and that have some heft to them, giving them good heat retention. You can use muffin tins or ramekins instead.
Whisk together in a mixing bowl or blend in a blender:
1 ½ cups (380g) whole milk
3 large (180g) eggs
1 ½ cups (180g) flour (try half AP, half bread)
1 tablespoon (15g) melted butter
½ teaspoon (2g) salt
Preheat both the oven and the popover cups or muffin tin at 425°F / 220°C.
Heavily grease the popover cups or muffin tins with butter: melt a few tablespoons of butter and put a teaspoon in the bottom of each cup. Fill each cup about ⅓ to ½ full with batter and bake. After 15 minutes, drop the temperature to 350°F / 175°C and continue baking until the outside is set and golden-dark brown, about another 20 minutes.
Serve at once with jam and butter.
Notes
How does gluten affect the inside and crust of the popover? As an experiment, make two batches of the batter, one with either cake or AP flour and the second with a higher-gluten flour. Fill half the cups with one batter and the other half with the second batter and bake them at the same time to eliminate the potential for differences between runs.
Try adding grated cheddar cheese or Parmesan cheese for a savory version, or sugar and cinnamon for a sweet version. You can also pour the popover batter into a large cast iron pan (preheated), top with sliced fruit such as pears or peaches, and bake to make a large, tort-like breakfast pastry.
Don’t peek while these are baking! Opening the oven door will drop the air temperature, causing the popovers to drop in temperature and lose some of the steam that’s critical to their rise.
David Lebovitz on American Cooking
PHOTO OF DAVID LEBOVITZ USED BY PERMISSION OF PIA STERN
David Lebovitz was a pastry chef at the renowned Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California for over a decade. Since then, he’s written several well-received books on desserts. His blog is at http://www.davidlebovitz.com.
What was working at Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse like for you?
Chez Panisse is a great place to work. Money is no object when it comes to sourcing ingredients, and it’s a great training ground for cooks. The restaurant really supports the owners and the other cooks, who are very, very interested in producing good food. Once you’re in that environment, it’s hard to leave. You go somewhere else and you’re
working with a bunch of line cooks that just care about who won the game last night and how fast they can cook the steaks on the grill so they can get out and go drink beer.
The whole idea of Chez Panisse is to find good ingredients and do as little to them as possible. When we had beautiful fruit, we would often just serve a bowl of fruit or a fruit tart with ice cream; or if we had really good chocolate, we would make a chocolate cake, but it wasn’t a cake that was highly decorated, it didn’t have a lot of technical swoops and things. Chez Panisse is all about flavor. A lot of the fancy stuff doesn’t taste good, so we were more concerned with flavor.
I had dinner last night at a fancy restaurant. They brought this chocolate mousse and there was tapenade on the side. Someone was, like, "Olives: it would be really cool on the plate!" But if someone tasted it? Disgusting. I just wanted to go into the kitchen and say, "Have you guys tasted this food? Because it’s stupid."
You had worked at Chez Panisse for years before taking culinary training. What surprises did you run across in that culinary training?
I wasn’t expecting things not to taste good. I took a course in making cakes in France, and I thought, "We’re going to make cakes that are delicious." It actually was making mousses with gelatin and with fruit purees from the freezer, and everything was like sponge cake, gelatinized fruit puree, and decorations. It was interesting, and I learned something, but those skills don’t even translate to what I do. Even if you use fresh fruit, it’s just not the best way to use it. I’m an ingredients-based cook.
I did go to chocolate school and that was great; I learned a lot about chocolate, how to work with it, how to manipulate it. Once again, I’m more interested in finding wonderful hazelnuts and in rolling them in chocolate, rather than opening up a can of hazelnut paste and making chocolates out of it.
What would you recommend to somebody who wants to learn how to bake?
The best thing they can do is just bake. The thing about baking is it’s very recipe-oriented. If you want to learn to make a pound cake, you just make a recipe, and the longer you go, the more you see how things work, how you can change things. You can add an egg yolk to make things richer or substitute sour cream for the milk in the recipe.
A lot of bakers are very precise, and we do have a reputation, especially in the professional world. A chef once said to me, "Why are you guys all so weird?" There are a lot of strange people in the pastry world, because we are very precise, we do like to go in our own little world, and we’re very analytical people in general. We think a lot about things, whereas a line cook, it’s a lot of brawn; it’s big, bold flavors; it’s roasting meat; it’s frying vegetables; it’s grilling. Those are ways of coaxing flavor out, but pastry is a much more delicate thing, it demands a lot more care, a lot more softer skills.
This is probably sexist, but a lot of women work in pastry for that reason, because a lot of women are very sensitive. I’ve always worked in women-owned restaurants, except for one, which was interesting. I never was aware of the whole "macho" thing—the way the guys would talk and treat people—until I went to other restaurants. I read these kitchen memoir books about sexual harassment and stuff, but to me, it’s about the food.
When you’re working on a pastry, how do you go about getting unstuck when it’s just not coming out the way you want it to?
If you knew how to get out of that, you wouldn’t be in there in the first place. I develop recipes and write books, so I’ll be making things, I’ll make them over and over again, and if I’m really stumped, I have a decent network of people who can help me. I might write to a friend who is a bakery cooking professor and say, "I’m trying to make persimmon pie; have you ever made it?" and he’ll be like, "Oh, persimmons have a chemical in there that prevents this from happening, and try doing this..." Bakers are sharers, so we do have a loose-knit community. Also, a lot of baking is science. If I make a cake and I want it to be moister and higher, I just have to sit down with my calculator and work it out.
How do you know what the formula is for working it out?
There are printed formulas, which some bakers use. But I’m not so good with math. Michael Ruhlman wrote a wonderful book on ratios, but my brain isn’t wired to think that way. So I just make things a million times, until I get it right.
So yours is a much more try-it-and-see approach, as opposed to sitting down and trying to figure out the optimal formula?
Yeah.
A lot of people are very analytical about cooking, and they want to know how things work. It’s a different method. It’s like a lot of Europeans wonder why Americans won’t give up their measuring cups and spoons, which is a terrible way to cook. It’s inaccurate and leads to people doing all sorts of weird things.
Americans like to hold measuring cups and spoons; it makes us feel good, so we’re not going to give them up. Cooking is a visceral thing, a lot of people like to overanalyze recipes. They’re like, "Can I make this cake without the quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract?" and I’m like, "Okay, well, think about it, what do you think?" A lot of people don’t know, because they’re overanalyzing the recipe. They’re not stupid, it’s just that they’re not, I don’t know what... It’s like, "If I let 5% of air out of my tire, can I still drive?" "Yes. Better if it’s full."
Why do you think Americans overanalyze recipes?
That’s the big question nowadays. Everyone’s trying to figure out why are Americans scared to cook? I think that Americans are in this weird space now where they want to be told what to do; they want to have a recipe; they want an authority to tell them that this is the recipe, don’t change it. We spent eight years under Bush and nobody questioned what he did for four and a half years. Everyone just wanted to be told what to do rather than say, "Wait a minute, look at the facts!" A recipe might say bake a chicken for an hour, and someone will write and say they baked it for an hour, and it was too dry. Well, your chicken was probably four pounds instead of six. There’s only so much stuff you can put in a recipe.
Where do you think this fear of failure comes from?
That’s something I haven’t been able to figure out, because everybody makes mistakes. A lot of people look at food magazines and the pictures are beautiful, and they’re like, "Oh, mine doesn’t look like that!" Well, you don’t have a team of food stylists and a camera and a photographer lighting it right. The best piece of pie is not supposed to hold together with 2″ sides that are perfectly smooth. The best chocolate chip cookies are not the ones that look perfect; they’re the ones that are full of oozy chocolate chips that are gushing all over the place.
Why did you start your blog?
The site was started in 1999, when my first book came out, because I thought—famous last words—I thought it would be a good way for people to get in touch with me in case they had problems with the recipes. You don’t want people saying the recipes don’t work; you’d rather have them write to you and say, "I made this cake and it didn’t work; what did I do wrong?" Now it’s like, "I made Bill Smith’s chocolate cake and it didn’t work; what did I do wrong?"
I have a recipe—actually, it’s in the oven right now—for a cake that has one egg in the whole cake; that’s the only fat in it. Some woman wrote me—she’s trying to eat less fat—what could she replace the egg with? I’m like, one egg yolk? That’s 5 grams of fat for 12 servings. Somebody actually asked that, and then I wonder how these people go to the bank every day, get their driver’s license, pay bills, write a check, and work. What’s going through their minds?
I’m not quite sure I follow you there.
Those kinds of things seem common sense to me. Somebody who is concerned about eating an eighth or a twelfth of an egg yolk because they’re on a low-fat diet? I don’t understand that thinking. If the recipe had six egg yolks or four egg yolks, maybe I could see it, but it’s a cake, and it’s like saying, "I don’t like chocolate; how can I make these chocolate chip cookies without chocolate?" It’s like sorry, that’s what it is.
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I just read that book, French Women Don’t Get Fat, because somebody had it at their house and I borrowed it. I was reading it, and I was like, "Oh. My. God." They pass on this myth that French women eat a certain way, that they drink half a glass of champagne only once a week. The book sold millions of copies in America based on something I don’t consider necessarily to be true. There’s a lot of fat women here. [David lives in Paris.] Everyone’s asking me what I think about that book, and I’m like, ask the one who wrote it. Do you really think French women don’t eat junk food and don’t smoke their brains out? Wake up. It’s like French people saying, "Don’t all Americans carry guns?" I’m like, "Yes, when we’re born, they put a gun in our hand. When you’re two, everyone gets a gun in America."
I think there’s a certain cultural gullibility that we have in both directions, both Americans dealing with people with international backgrounds and being in other countries and talking about Americans. I was at a Thanksgiving that was 18 international students from Harvard’s Kennedy School and I started talking about the ghost of Thanksgiving past, present, and future, where the ghost of the turkey that you had previously eaten would show up. These international students just ate it up. They totally believed that this was part of the American "story." I was like, "Really, no, this isn’t true guys; I’m completely pulling your leg." It’s amazing how much cultural misunderstanding there seems to be about these things. I wonder what cultural differences there are in learning how to cook?
