BBA #4: Brioche

The BBA Challenge 2011 assignment for the week was brioche. I've made brioche before, I think as a food-processor recipe, but it's been years. Reinhart offers three versions, with different levels of richness (primarily butter content). I went with middle-class brioche, the one with a cup of butter, as opposed to 2 cups (rich man's) or 1/2 cup (poor man's). No matter which level you pick, brioche is pretty indulgent stuff.

Clearly I need to work on my shaping methods for brioches à tête. Mine came out "brioches décapité", mostly (pardon my French). Part of that was maybe putting too much dough in the little tins, and maybe making the 'tête' too large. The larger part was certainly not getting the 2 pieces stuck together well enough. I used the technique I learned way back when: make the smaller piece into a teardrop shape, make a hole in the larger piece, and stick the pointy part of the teardrop in the hole. Well...that didn't work so well, and most of my heads ended up beside the bodies. Next time I'll try the one piece wrap-around and through method in the book.

I tried a few other experiments: I made 4 small cinnamon rolls with one piece of dough, using KA's cinnamon filling for convenience as I didn't have cinnamon-sugar mixed up and didn't want to add (more) butter in the filling anyway.







I stuck a chunk of dark chocolate in 2 for Brioche au Chocolat--that was lovely, though I should have skipped the 'a tete' on those for better centering of the chocolate. And when I was all out of mini brioche tins and couldn't find my big one, I made the rest of the dough into a plain loaf which will become toast and/or bostock, the variety that's staled brioche with an almond-cream topping. Meanwhile, that loaf will go in the freezer. I let the loaf over-rise, I think, as I lost track of its timing--certainly the texture isn't as nicely fine-grained as the brioche a tete.

 

Baking notes: no problems with the dough. It appeared to be too wet at one point with part of the mixture in a layer over the sides of the mixer bowl and the rest on the paddle, but when I did a scrape-down and started up the mixer again, the dough came together and was more like a usual bread dough ball. It still needed another scrape-down or two, but it crossed the line from 'batter' to 'bread' at that point. I never needed to switch to the dough hook.

I wrapped the dough in plastic wrap (instead of using a plastic bag) and tucked it in the fridge overnight for the requisite chilling, but failed to remember that it would rise some--almost tilted a fridge shelf with the rise.

I overbaked all of 'em to too high a temperature. I forgot to set a timer on one batch, but have no excuse for the rest except not checking early enough. But you know, brioche is so rich this was not a big problem. I get to try again next week, as the Casatiello is a variation on brioche.

RHC: Cradle Cake

Cake-of-the-week is a sort of gimmick cake, and harks back to the 1953 Pillsbury Bake-Off where it was a "Senior Third Prize Winner". A yellow butter cake is baked in a "cradle" of dacquoise, or meringue with chopped nuts and chocolate in it. In the original incarnation it was baked in a tube pan: Rose reduced the recipe to fit in a loaf pan, and used a buttermilk cake for the filling. (This blog has both an adaptation and the original recipe, and the recipe for Rose's version is on Serious Eats.)

The interior cake is a quick-and-easy buttermilk cake, but by adding in the dacquoise I had a mess of a kitchen at the end. There was the food processor for chopping chocolate and pecans, the KitchenAid mixer bowl with wire whip for the meringue, plus the other mixer bowl with beater blade for the cake batter. Add the other things cooking in the kitchen on Friday (the weekly whole-wheat dried-cherry challah, Latin chicken, and curried cauliflower flatbread), and the place was a mess of equipment and ingredients all afternoon. I need to spread out my cooking so Friday isn't a marathon session

For the dacquoise, I didn't pre-chop the chocolate enough and the mixture got damp and clumpy when chopped with the nuts. When I stopped for fear of ending up with chocolate-pecan butter, some small chocolate chunks were still present. I ended up hand chopping those, then re-chilled the mixture before folding it in to the meringue.






[dacquoise-lined pan, batter filling the center, cake coming out of the oven, and cake turned out of the pan]

My non-stick metal loaf pan was the right capacity (7 cups). I sprayed with Baker's Joy then lined the bottom with parchment--but I wonder if it might have done better without the parchment lining. The cake came out of pan quite easily, but when I peeled the parchment off the bottom the meringue was still damp, whereas the sides were crisp. I notice on the original recipe there's a note to be sure to not underbake, and I wonder if getting the meringue to dry out is the reason. On one side of my cake the dacquoise broke and had a gap--looking back at my photos I think I didn't get the cake batter filled in against the dacquoise.

Tasting results:

Nephew: the meringue tastes like a brownie, and the cake is moist and has good flavor.

Older niece: reminds me of a Milano cookie--needs to be eaten with milk, just like Milanos do.

Younger niece: I see where the Milano and brownie comments came from--the brownie idea is because of the crunch of the meringue with the chocolate (probably from the drizzle). This is one of my favorites of the cakes.

Sister-in-law: good, but not a favorite. The meringue might have contributed too much sweetness for me.

Me: very nice combination, with the chocolate from the dacquoise and the drizzle glaze, the little crunch from the dacquoise, and a nice moist buttermilk cake in the middle. This one is going high on my list of favorites, too. However, I'm not sure I'd ever repeat it, as it was a lot of trouble to get that nice crunchy chocolate-pecan cradle.

TVP experiments: Chipotle Black Bean Burgers and Meatless Meatballs

This was the first test of a new cookbook, Lukas Volger's Veggie Burgers Every Which Way, which I think I found via the Svelte Gourmand blog--it was some food blog or other of the list I read, anyway, and the Amazon reviews looked good, too. I'm always looking for ways to reduce the meat in my diet and not miss it (big carnivore here), and this looked like a possible option.

This first recipe was not an unqualified success. (The chipotle black bean burger is available in the Amazon "look inside" feature, so I'm not going to type it out.) First off, the oven temperature was omitted from the recipe--hitting a typo on your first shot is not a good sign. In a lot of the recipes Volger has you brown the burger on the stove first, then finish cooking it in the oven. The base of the recipe is a mix of reconstituted textured vegetable protein (TVP), cooked brown rice, and bread crumbs, with black beans, corn, and onion for character and chipotle peppers in adobo and lime juice for spice. I omitted the cilantro--I would have searched the garden to see if there was any usable parsley after our snow/sleet cover finally melted, but forgot. I did go the convenience route: canned black beans, brown rice in the pre-cooked bag (would have used Trader Joe's frozen, but I don't have any on hand), and panko.

These formed into patties without too much difficulty, and were pretty easy to brown and then move to the oven. I then had to hold them a little too long while waiting for sister-in-law's call that the rest of dinner was ready, and that probably contributed to my main problem with these: the brown rice was too hard, so the browned crust, instead of being a tasty bit, had these tough grains in it. Flavor-wise the burgers bordered on too spicy--I rounded up on the chipotltes, and should have stuck to the recommended amount. Without the cilantro (or a substitute), the peppers were the main flavoring, and it was a little one-note, I think. All in all, these were acceptable, but not great. I've got some other recipes marked to try, though!

Second TVP experiment was these Homemade Meatless Meatballs. Again some substitutions: I used smoked paprika instead of cumin, and dried basil instead of fresh. I've now got a container of browned meatballs in the fridge for quick meals--tonight's dinner was a handful of them with jarred marinara sauce on top. These are pretty good, overall. They're not going to fool anyone who's expecting ground beef or turkey, but the flavor is not bad, they hold together pretty well heated in a sauce, and are very low fat. I'll send some next door to see if anyone else finds 'em edible.

RHC: Génoise Très Café

Lots of cooking and baking this weekend, thus this flurry of posts to document the results. I'm not sure that the black-bean chipotle burgers will get written up tonight...

Cake of the week is Génoise Très Café, or a sponge cake with coffee-coffee-coffee. Coffee in the cake batter, coffee in the syrup, and coffee in the whipped ganache frosting. My bottle of coffee extract got quite a workout. I added a fourth coffee touch with chocolate-covered coffee beans as decorations. Alas, despite the strong positive feelings towards coffee in my family, this cake got mediocre reviews because of my continuing problems with génoise.

I have made reasonable génoise, though usually not ones that achieve the heights RHC states they should. I beat the eggs for at least 5 minutes (usually just that long, as I'm afraid of overbeating), I fold the remaining ingredients in lightly and quickly, and....I get a not-so-tall génoise. This one, unfortunately, was downright dense, but with lots of other cooking to do I didn't make a second one. Perhaps I should stick to ladyfingers and biscuit, which are only supposed to be a half-inch or so high.


I was again doing a half-recipe (despite our love of coffee, we do not generally love the génoise), and you can see that my baked cake is little more than half as high as the 2" cake pan sides. The syrup gave it moisture, but the texture looked more like a pound cake--not what you want in génoise. The autofocus didn't cooperate on my slice-of-cake picture, and I'll refrain from sticking in a thumbnail of it. Trust me, it was dense.

On the other hand, the light whipped ganache did much better for me than last time, perhaps because with the small quantity (a half recipe yields about a cup) I did it all by hand. I whipped very briefly--far less than the 3 minutes called for by machine--and had a lovely smooth mocha ganache just making soft peaks. Alas, it did indeed continue to thicken as I syruped my cake layer, and when I stirred the ganache to start the frosting process, I had an instantly grainy mess. At this point I wasn't putting more effort into it (hey, the ganache still tasted fine, and didn't have an objectionable mouth-feel), so I frosted away regardless.

I think I've already summarized the tasting comments: nice flavor (coffee!), but dense. I've got 3 more sponge cakes to bake from RHC, so perhaps I'll have some technique breakthrough with one of those and get a truly light génoise. No wait--one of those is the Orange-Glow Chiffon. Two more cracks at a génoise....I'll try to contain my excitement. :)

BBA #3: Bagels

The BBA Challenge 2011 is on bread #3, bagels, this week. I've never tried my hand at bagels before, but have always been intrigued by the technique of boiling, then baking. These came off very well indeed, and I'll keep working on getting just the bagel I like from the process.

The dough was (unusually for bread!) just right as written--I used the stated amounts of flour and water without adjustment. The result is an extremely stiff dough, but satiny smooth. This time I did check both temperature and the windowpane test after machine kneading, and the dough was great. I made a half-recipe again, then made the bagels in an in-between size to get 9 from the half-recipe. I let mine cold-rise for the minimum time, and my test bagel floated immediately in cold water (and also the next day when boiling them--lots of yeast action in my bagels, I guess). I was surprised at how easy and fast the boiling process was. I guess I expected the risen bagels to take careful handling, but these are sturdy and could be picked up and dropped in the water without difficulty.

I boiled mine for 2 minutes a side in search of the very chewy bagels I remember from my first bagel experiences back in the mid-'70's when I moved to Atlanta for college and had a Jewish roommate. (Best I recall there were no bagels in south Georgia at that point. No good ones, certainly.) I eventually settled on a bagel bakery at Ansley Mall that had great bagels: dense, chewy, lots of flavor. That bakery is long gone, and I haven't found a substitute for the same style. Not that there aren't some good bagel bakeries in Altanta (and I got good bagels indeed on a trip to NYC a few years ago), but the general style of bagel has gone to a less-dense and often less-chewy version.

Toppings: My favorite is sesame, sister-in-law's is poppyseed. Chris's post sparked an attempt at asiago, as there just happened to be a chunk of asiago cheese in my fridge. Younger niece requested an everything bagel. "Everything", based on my pantry contents, turned out to be sesame seed, poppyseed, kosher salt, and reconstituted dried onion. No dried garlic chips in the house, so I sprinkled a little garlic power over the blend, too.

I used Rose's suggestion in The Bread Bible of an egg white wash to glue on my toppings. I'd be interested in a side-by-side comparison of the egg white wash vs. topping the bagel when it's damp from the boiling to see if one makes the topping stick better. Next time....

Warned by Chris's post about the very short stated baking time, I checked Rose's and found it bakes at 5 minutes at 500° (like Reinhart's), but then 20 minutes at 450. I tried Rose's timing on my first batch of 6, but thought those were a little overbaked. I found a blog note with Reinhart's suggestions for asiago cheese bagels (summary: bake 8 minutes at 500, rotate, then 8 minutes at 450), and that seemed about right for full-sized bagels. I'll cut back a minute or two next time I make my mid-sized version.

Tasting comments: Good bagels! Nephew and younger niece really liked the everything bagels, sister-in-law approved the poppyseed one, and I had an asiago one with lunch yesterday and a sesame seed one for breakfast. The texture is not as dense as my memory of that long-ago bagel, but these have good chew and a nice flavor. Definitely up for a repeat, and I'll be trying cinnamon-raisin with Reinhart's adaptation, too.

Edited to add the shot of a sliced bagel, and to note that last night sister-in-law said the kids would like the bagel supply moved to their house, as they'd eaten all I took over for tasting. Too bad, I was down to two, and those are breakfasts for me this week. Guess I'll make a full recipe next time...

Chocolate Passionfruit Tart

With only a little hinting, younger niece chose a 'clipping' (printouts of web pages these days, mostly) from my recipes-to-try file for her birthday celebration: Chocolate Passionfruit Tarts. I was seduced by the beautiful photographs and by the flavor of passionfruit, discovered first by making Rose's White Gold Pasison Genoise. That was for younger niece's birthday last year, come to think of it.


Recipe description in pictures:


Make a chocolate pate sucre crust and pre-bake. Brush with egg-white glaze to seal.




Spread a thin layer of butter-enriched ganache in crusts.



Make a passionfruit mousse, let it cool, and fill tarts with it.




Notes: we all liked the flavors, but had various comments to try to improve it overall. First on the cooking side: I made a half recipe of the crust and ganache, but decided to make a full recipe of the mousse to use up more of the package of passionfruit puree. However, when I'd filled my tarts I had about an ounce of mousse left. Maybe my tart proportions made the volume difference (the recipe doesn't give a suggested tart size), but just be warned. I got 6 4-1/2" x 3/4" tartlets, one 3" or so, and 2 baby 2" tartlet from the crust scraps.

The biggest tartlets were too large for our preferred dessert serving size: on a repeat I'd go for the 3 or 3-1/2" size. The chocolate crust was difficult to work with even rolling it between 2 pieces of parchment--it's got a very high butter content and went from "too rigid to be worked" to "about to melt" in what seemed like seconds, needing frequent trips back to the fridge to chill. Younger niece wanted a higher ratio of ganache to mousse, and I think I agree with her. I suggested that we do a crustless version, even, with maybe a 1:2 ganache:mousse blend and maybe a dab of whipped cream on top. My brother would like a different crust, though, to keep the crunch but do better than the flavor in this one. Maybe a shortbread crust, or plain pate sucree. (I'm no great shakes at pate sucree or any pie crust...might improve by changing crusts, might not...)

Last note of possible improvement is that the passionfuit mousse is quite stiff. The recipe describes it as "passionfruit puree, sugar, butter, eggs, and a smidge of gelatin", but that smidge is really 3 teaspoons. I'll cut that back to 2 next time, trying for a softer and less jello-like texture.

Lots of critical comments above, but don't be turned off. These tarts are a really nice flavor combination, and are beautiful to boot.

White Chili with Cornbread

New recipe, White Chili with Cornbread from the King Arthur Flour site.

Notes: It starts with cooked chicken, and the easy route was rotisserie chicken. It took one plus the breasts of a second to get the 5-1/2 c. OK, I might have had 6 cups in there, or maybe a little more. I skipped the fresh jalapeño pepper because I didn't want to deal with chopping it, cut the cumin back from 1 tablespoon to 1/2 teaspoon (I don't like cumin very well, but even so I think I will up to a full teaspoon next time). Skipped the cilantro in the cornbread--I *really* don't like cilantro. And skipped the sugar in the cornbread because, well, sugar in cornbread is an abomination. (Hey, born-and-bread Southerner here!)

My usual pan for this type of dish is a flat Pyrex, and my 3 qt./13"x9" isn't as deep as they called for. I moved up to the 4 qt. Pyrex, and that was right for the amount of chili and cornbread. The effect was about the same thickness of cornbread and chili--seemed nicely balanced to me. This is a personal thing, as younger niece was looking for more cornbread with her servings.

I skipped putting shredded cheese on top of the chili and under the cornbread, and instead sprinkled about 3/4 c. on top of the cornbread where it browned prettily. I think it would have been lost in the middle of the casserole, at least at the amount I'd have been willing to add, even if reduced fat. A big gooey layer of it would have been tastable, of course, but the calorie load....

Tasting results: this went over well. It was not spicy, and I think several of us would like to up that next time--add the jalapeño, certainly, and maybe move up one or more of the cans of mild chopped green chilis to a higher heat level, if I can find them. (I'm not sure they come in anything but mild.) The pureed white beans give a nice 'sauce', and I found the chili mixture to be moist but not soupy, which wouldn't have worked as well under the cornbread topping. From my experiences trying to perfect Beatrice's Chicken Pie, it's difficult to hit that right balance of liquid in this type of dish.

Nephew was very dubious at first appearance, was given a sampler serving, and later went back for a serious full serving. The only person who really didn't eat it was older niece, who said she just wasn't very hungry. However, she did manage to choke down a full serving of cake-of-the-week, the Genoise Tres Cafe--she's a coffee fiend.