Category — Books

Thanks to Luisa Weiss of The Wednesday Chef, I learned of the writing of Laurie Colwin.  I got these wonderful books used, and I’m so glad I got them.

Two great books by Laurie Colwin

Laurie Colwin was a great food writer, with a lovely voice,  and an encouraging, anything but snobby personality, who unfortunately is no longer with us.  These books are collections of her essays that she wrote for Gourmet magazine, and are great bedside reading.  It’s amazing how forward  looking she was, mentioning the importance of knowing where your food comes from, how much better organic chickens taste, and skepticism of agribusiness in 1987.

Ready to bake

This weekend, while breezing through Home Cooking, I re-read the Gingerbread essay.  I was hooked.  I’m quite partial to those molasses/ginger/allspice flavors from my New England childhood, which included gingerbread, Indian Pudding, and baked beans.  Laurie discusses English recipes for gingerbread, and cites Steen Cane Syrup from Louisiana as the King of Molasses in the United States.  Crosby’s Molasses was the brand of my childhood in Maine.  We didn’t bother getting it in the little jars.  We always had a gallon of it in the cupboard.  Crosby’s is a Canadian brand, so I’ve provided a link for people in the USA.  I can get neither without the aid of UPS here in Minnesota, but at least I can find jars in the stores.  This was not so easy when I lived in Colorado.

Gingery Glory Completed

Laurie Colwin’s Gingerbread recipe makes a single nine inch cake.  I doubled the recipe, and used a Kugelhopf pan (made by NordicWare, of Minneapolis, MN) that I got at my local Ace hardware store.  I didn’t bother icing mine (Laurie provides a couple icing recipes).  I’d rather have mine with whipped cream.  This recipe is the original, for a nine inch cake pan.  I’ll let you do the doubling yourself.  Laurie would probably not use an electric mixer to make this cake, but do it with a bowl and spoon, which is perfectly good exercise for your forearms.

Equipment

• nine inch round cake pan
• mixing bowl
• spoon (or electric mixer)
• rubber spatula
• measuring cups (liquid and dry)
• measuring spoons
• cooling rack
• oven mitts or potholders

Ingredients

• 1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted (sweet) butter, softened
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup molasses
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 2 tsp. vanilla extract or lemon brandy (lemon extract WON’T DO)
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• 1 Tbsp. ground ginger (Laurie calls for a very generous Tbsp.  I agree.)
• 1 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp. ground cloves
• 1/4 tsp. ground allspice

Procedure

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Butter your cake pan (I would line the bottom with parchment paper to ease removal, but go with what works for you.)
3. Cream the butter and brown sugar together.  Beat until it’s fluffy.
4. Beat in the molasses, then the eggs, beating well after each addition.
5. Add the dry ingredients and the vanilla, and mix to incorporate.
6. Add the buttermilk, and mix in.
7. Turn the batter out into the cake pan, spreading where necessary to even out the batter.
8. Bake for 20-30 minutes.  Test for doneness after 20 minutes by inserting a toothpick in the cake.  If it comes out clean, the cake is done.
9. Cool on a rack. Remove from pan and frost (optional) or serve.

Some basic tools, a basic result

Here are the keys to Mr. Ruhlman’s Ratio-  you need a scale, the formulas, and you can learn how the ratios work, WITH PRACTICE.  Here is my result from my Friday night after work bread effort.  The loaf is not beautifully formed, but I did get a little oven spring that I wasn’t expecting, so all the better.

This is the basic bread dough described in the first chapter, with part whole wheat, part all-purpose flour.

The ratio is 5:3 flour:liquid, plus some salt and some yeast (2 tsp. and 1 tsp., respectively, for the 20 oz of flour (16 white, 4 whole wheat, a 4:1 ratio, of course) and 12 oz of water.

My scale is an OXO, from Target, which has a 5lb. limit, and cost about $30.  Others are recommended by Mr. Ruhlman, and by America’s Test Kitchen (the OXO 11lb. scale for $50), but this one was easily available, and works fine.

Mr. Ruhlman’s Basic Ratio Bread

Equipment:

• scale
• mixer with dough hook
• oven
• loaf pan
• bowl for mixer
• measuring cups (liquid and dry)
• measuring spoons

Ingredients:

• flour (all-purpose or bread flour)
• water
• salt
• yeast

Process:

1. Put bowl on scale.  Zero the scale (tare) to subtract the bowl’s weight.
2. Add flour until you reach the right weight.  Zero the scale again.
3. Add water until you reach the right weight. (Water is actually volume/weight equivalent in ounce measurement, so this was 1.5 cups -  “A pint’s a pound the world around”)
4. Add 2 tsp. salt (for flavor), and 1 tsp. yeast (I used SAF instant).
5. Mix with mixer, knead with dough hook for 10 mins plus or minus.
6. Let rise in warm place, covered, until doubled.
7. Deflate, shape, put in loaf pan, let rise again.
8. Bake until internal temp is 200 degrees F. (I baked this at 375 degrees F for about 45 min.)

Here are the process photos I remembered to take (though I missed the excitement of measuring, which is quite fun with the big digital readout):

Kneading the bread with the New KitchenAid

Yes, I have read the owner’s manual on this one, and I dutifully kept the mixer on 2 for the kneading process.  I think it went for about 12 minutes.

Ready for a rise

I covered it with plastic wrap, and set it inside the oven, which I’d let heat for 5 min. at about 185 degrees, then turned the oven off.

(Snacks and chatting with DH in between here)

After the first rise

I didn’t watch the clock for how long this was, but I’d guess about an hour and a half.  I formed the loaf and put it in a standard loaf pan, and let it rise again, for another amount of time.

(DH and I agonize through Friday NY Times crossword puzzle.  Really, it’s fun.)

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F,  pop in the loaf, and about 45 minutes later, here’s the result:

I think this is its best angle

I expect I will need to be a little more concentrated when I work on other batters/doughs  (I’m hoping the basic cookie recipe will help change my bad cookie karma), but I can see myself making this bread weekly, or at least some variation of it.  Thanks to Mr. Ruhlman, and Mr. Del Grosso for their fine work.

A rainy spring weekend is a great excuse to stay inside, read, and putter in the kitchen. I picked up my awaited copy of Michael Ruhlman‘s latest book (Ratio, The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking) at our local bookstore.  Over about my third cup of coffee, I curled up in a comfy spot and proceeded to read half of the book straight.

***Start of fawning aside about Michael Ruhlman as an author***

I’ve read several of Michael Ruhlman’s previous books about professional chefs and the Culinary Institute of America, and his cookbook collaborations.  Charcuterie is one of my home cookbook Canon.  I like his writing style. He has been through the trenches in cooking school and cooking professionally, and it gives me more confidence in his opinions.  The fact he’s passed Skills and can communicate the details clearly mean more to me than that he’s collaborated with Thomas Keller, though that’s probably why he collaborates with such lofty people in the first place.

Reading his books about chefs and my experience at JPH many moons ago make going to a restaurant like Fore Street even more fun, since I observe and more deeply understand the level of detail in the way the chef and staff work. This made my experience there much more enjoyable as an eater, cooking nerd, and former restaurant employee. Especially since I know that the level of detail is something most of their diners won’t even notice.

*** End of fawning aside, back to Ratio ***

Ratio is a book based in his experiences at CIA, and from his experience as a home cook.  The premise is that if you know the basic ratios of ingredients (by weight) that make up the foundational recipes (for batters, doughs, sauces, stocks), and understand how the ingredients work together, it frees you as a cook/chef.  You have a reliable foundation for the dish, and can improvise at combining flavors or sizing up or down the number of servings, as long as you maintain the ratio of base ingredients.

This is the kind of cooking that appeals to the engineer in me- the hows, the whys the ingredients do what they do, and how your technique of combining the ingredients can change the way the ingredients work together.  And the Harold McGee references are always a plus.

I pulled out a scale and mixed up the basic bread dough (5:3 flour:liquid), giving the new mixer’s dough hook a whirl.  I used part whole wheat flour and part all-purpose, with a little salt and a teaspoon of yeast.  I successfully made a lovely large loaf of bread.  Yes, the ratios work (and despite recent failures, I am still a cook!).  I’m looking forward to exploring them more.  I may need to frame the book jacket, and hang it in the kitchen.  It even goes nicely with the paint on the walls.  Form AND Function.  Love it!

As is the case with many food bloggers, I read a lot about food. (Thank you Captain Obvious!) Over time, I have started to move away from cookbooks to more referential works, such as On Food And Cooking, by Harold McGee, which explains the science and history of ingredients, Michael Ruhlman’s books about chefs and chef training, and works by Barbara Kingsolver, Catherine Friend, and Michael Pollan. And, of course, I also read blogs (shocker!) such as Honest Meat and Bitten, among others. Not all of my reading has been non-fiction or editorial. My Year of Meats, by Ruth Ozeki, is a quirky novel that some might find as a modern day or cross-cultural version of The Jungle, exploring the relationships of people, food production, and choices.

Some Recent Reading

As I have become more aware of industrial food production, and that the industrial production of meat produces significantly more greenhouse gases than transportation (an amazing fact to most people), I find that it is difficult to ignore the politics associated with food production. Disclaimer: The fact that I married a Political Scientist makes it easier for me to find politics in more parts of life. I live in a relatively rural area of the Midwest, where I pass farms that grow corn and soybeans on my way to work as a software engineer. I regularly see the tanker cars of ADM’s High Fructose Corn Syrup going by while I wait at railroad crossings. The health conflicts and the economic conflicts of industrial food production that Pollan and others discuss hits home harder when you can see the ironies and how they affect you and your neighbors, instead of viewing them as issues “for those people in the big states in the middle”.  I think this is why I’ve become interested in groups such as Food Democracy Now!, as well as Slow Food in the US.

All this reading has changed some of my behavior, and the foodways of our household. I am much more aware of what I’m buying, and I do make an effort to buy locally produced food products. (Which frankly I haven’t found difficult to do. I am lucky in where I am situated in this regard.) With a large freezer, and access to local farmers, we can now buy meats from producers we’ve gotten to know, who feed their ruminants grass rather than grain, etc.

I understand that the “locavore” model that I can adopt is not an option for everyone, and that going local won’t replace the need for the large food distribution networks that have been developed to feed our nation. I realize that I can willingly spend more on food than some others can, and that I choose to spend time doing the research or “discovery” necessary to support these habits. I also don’t have children, which means more of my time is my own.

While I have not bought any of his cookbooks, I do own a copy of Mark Bittman’s Food Matters, A Guide to Conscious Eating. A cynic might call this book a rehash of Pollan and a rehash of How to Cook Everything recipes, to capitalize on the latest food craze. I find this book to be a concise guide to the major issues we face producing food in the world today, and a guide to eating more consciously and healthfully in the same way. Given the other reading I’ve done, there are no real surprises for me in Food Matters, but like the Artisan Bread in Five book, Bittman provides a framework for eating more healthfully within the constraints of our modern age. Bittman lives in the city, so his shopping tips and cooking tips can fit the urban and suburban lifestyles of most Americans. The only real constraint is that you need to be willing to spend some time cooking, rather than buying prepackaged, ready to eat foods.

Since I am a cook, none of this looks hard to me. I could easily adapt to cooking a lot of grains and beans at once, or in a slow cooker, and putting them in my freezer, so I can have them to combine with other ingredients at mealtimes. This might be harder to do if you have a life that is very unplanned and unpredictable, or if you are not someone who likes to plan at all. Like the Five Minute a Day bread, the work ahead makes things convenient for later. Freezer management is an excellent skill to develop.

I’d recommend this book to friends who are new to cooking, or want to make more conscious food choices for health reasons. The sample meal plans and recipes can help. Remember, your choices DO matter, not only to you, but to the world and markets around you. Just as low demand this holiday season made electronic prices drop, changes in how you eat will affect the food industry, as well as your health. For worse and for better.