May « 2011 « Justin Dunham - 's journal about making things

Breakfast

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: asparagus, bananas, basil, blueberries, coffee, cream, eggs, flour, frittatas, honey, kiwi berries, kiwis, lemon, orange juice, oranges, plums, potoatoes, scones, strawberries, tea, yogurt — Justin Dunham on May 23, 2011

Fruit salad with plums and berries, including kiwi berry (actinidia arguta)

The full spread. Frittata, scones, fruit salad, orange juice, asparagus...

Frittata closeup. Check out the beautiful crust that develops.

For the first meeting of my Wharton learning team, I decided to make dinner. So I thought that, for the last meeting, it might be fitting to make breakfast. Plus breakfast would give me the chance to make a frittata; an excuse to make a new dish is often an important motivator for me. And I thought it would be a nice thing to do!

I got up early – real early; sunrise in our apartment is beautiful since we have a northern exposure. I made a fruit salad with a lemon/yogurt/honey sauce, I experimented with substituting strawberries for onions in this scone recipe (result fine), roasted some asparagus, and squeezed some orange juice. Oh, and I made this basil-potato frittata, which you can see in closeup on the left.

Fruit salad is kind of cheating, isn’t it? (So is fresh-squeezed orange juice, but it’s a crowd-pleaser). Regardless, people seemed to enjoy it. Since the Trader Joe’s that I live above doesn’t have great produce, I had to make some last-minute decisions about what went in, but the banana/plum/ berry combination seemed to work well.

I also had a chance to include actinidia arguta, also known as the hardy kiwi or kiwi berry. This was a fairly expensive addition, but I always like to try interesting products when I see them. The kiwi berry is basically a miniature kiwi, with a grape-like skin that you don’t need to peel off. Not really worth the extra money, but an interesting eating experience. I should mention, however, that I usually eat kiwis with the skin on, so perhaps I find regular kiwis (actinidia deliciosa) easier to handle than others do.

The frittata came out really well, also, and made great leftovers. I had never eaten one before this – for those who don’t know, a frittata is sort of like a quiche or giant omelette. However, unlike a quiche, there is no pastry shell, and unlike an omelette, the ingredients are cooked within the egg mixture instead of on top. This recipe includes a little baking powder as well, so you get some extra fluffiness, and since it’s baked for about an hour, a delicious and beautiful brown crust develops around the edges.

Not all was successful. I invested a huge amount of time in making this hash browns recipe – peeling 1.5 lbs of potatoes takes forever – and it was a total failure. I have never made hash browns before, so perhaps I did something wrong in making the recipe. Did excluding the lardons make that much of a difference? Did I just not wring the shredded potatoes out enough? Whatever the error, I was left with a disc of shredded potatoes, burned on the outside and soggy and uncooked on the inside, that stuck fast to the pan.

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Pear-in-a-bottle

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: brandy, pears — Justin Dunham on May 13, 2011

Bottles of pear brandy, with prisonniers (imprisoned fruit).

A baby pear, taken by flickr user "Living in Monrovia"; click the picture for the source.

Sometimes fruit shows up in strange places.

The first picture, from flickr user kasiaeryn, is of bottles of eau de vie de poire, also known as pear brandy. Pear brandy, like other fruit brandies, is made from juice, in this case pear of course, that’s been fermented and then distilled (not to be confused with fruit liqueurs, where fruit flavoring is added to an already-made alcohol such as vodka).

But how do you get the pear in there?

The trick is to slide the bottle over the pear while it’s still young, tiny, and on the branch. The bottle is held in place with string, and over time, the pear grows to full size inside the bottle. Care must be taken to seal off the bottle neck, e.g. with gauze, so that insects can’t get in, and to tilt it so that moisture can drain out. Other leaves and young pears on the same branch can be trimmed to avoid interfering with the growth of the main, or “king”, pear.

Though the “prisonnier” (the fruit trapped inside the bottle) looks neat, according to this New York Times article it doesn’t change the flavor at all. I’d guess that the waxy skin of the pear might prevent the alcohol from penetrating the fruit; or perhaps it’s because properly distilled fruit brandy tastes so similar to the fruit itself that its presence makes little difference?

Check out the New York Times article, too, for lots of other interesting details on fruit brandies. Among other brandies that are available: wild strawberry, rose hip, and quince.

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The difference between caramel, butterscotch, and toffee

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: brown sugar, butterscotch, caramel, corn syrup, cream, dulce de leche, marshmallows, milk, nougat, peanut brittle, sugar, taffy, toffee — Justin Dunham on May 11, 2011

From left to right: butterscotch chips, toffee, caramel

Here are three sugary solids that look similar – butterscotch, toffee, and caramel. It’s not too hard to tell them apart by taste and texture, but what are the actual differences in their manufacture?

All types of sugar candy are made from the same fundamental ingredient, a sugar/water syrup. The syrup is cooked, and as the temperature rises, the water boils off and the moisture content of the syrup decreases. The less water you have in the solution, the harder the resulting candy will generally be. For example, if you want to make hard candy or lollipops, you heat the solution to at least 300 degrees Fahrenheit before letting it cool. If, on the other hand, you want to make fudge, you heat it to only 230 degrees.

Check out the chart below, which is cribbed from Wikipedia (source), for all the details. Some of the stages have names, which describe what happens to the solution if you put a spoonful of it in cold water (the test that was used before candy thermometers were available).

Stage	Temperature (°F)	Temperature (°C)	Sugar concentration
Thread	230–233 °F	110–111 °C	80%
Soft Ball	234–240 °F	112–115 °C	85%
Firm Ball	244–248 °F	118–120 °C	87%
Hard Ball	250–266 °F	121–130 °C	92%
Soft Crack	270–290 °F	132–143 °C	95%
Hard Crack	295–310 °F	146–154 °C	99%
Clear Liquid	320 °F	160 °C	100%
Brown Liquid	338 °F	170 °C	100%
Burnt Sugar	350 °F	177 °C	100%

You’ll notice that by 320 degrees Fahrenheit, all the water has boiled away, and what’s left is a pure solution of melted sugar. This is the beginning of caramel (apparently thought to be ultimately from Greek kanna, “sugar”, and melos, “honey”). As the sugar is cooked further, the caramel gets darker and darker until it burns. Why doesn’t caramel just taste like a bunch of sugar? As the sugar gets heated, a bunch of delicious chemical reactions happen that create all sorts of interesting new molecules, which I’ll leave you to read about here. This also happens as you cook certain other foods as well, which is part of the reason why, for example, sauteeing vegetables can enhance their flavor dramatically.

So that’s caramel. By the way, caramel candy is made by taking the caramel, letting it cool, then mixing it with cream, sugar and vanilla. Or you can cook everything together and let the sugars in the milk caramelize instead of the added sugar, in which case you have a milk caramel.

What about toffee and butterscotch? Toffee is sugar heated to the hard crack stage, with lots of butter mixed in as well. Butterscotch is sugar heated to the soft crack stage, and you use brown sugar (sugar with molasses) instead of white sugar.

Here’s a chart explaining how a few other types of candy are made, as well, to give you a sense of what variations are possible on this process. You’ll notice corn syrup is in a lot of recipes in addition to normal sugar; because of its molecular structure it helps improve shine, smoothness and body.

Dulce de leche: Milk and sugar are simmered and stirred; water evaporates, and the sugars caramelize (though I can’t tell whether it’s the milk sugars that caramelize, the grantulated sugar, or both). A different browning reaction called the Maillard reaction takes place simultaneously; this is the same reaction that makes toast delicious.
Nougat: Water and sugar are heated to the soft ball stage, and whipped egg whites are added. To this is added a second solution of sugar, corn syrup, and often nuts, heated to the hard crack stage. Finally, add butter and vanilla. The mixture is left to cool in a pan.
Marshmallows: Water, sugar and corn syrup are heated to the soft ball stage. The hot syrup is added to a mixture of gelatin, water and vanilla extract, which is then whipped to incorporate air. The mixture is left to cool in a pan.
Peanut brittle: Water, sugar, corn syrup and peanuts are heated to the hard crack stage. The mixture is removed from the heat, butter and baking soda (for airyness) are added, and the mixture is poured into a pan to cool.
Taffy: Water, sugar, corn syrup and salt are heated to the hard ball stage. The mixture is removed from the heat, and butter, flavoring and color are added. As the mixture cools, it’s pulled to make it fluffy. The word “taffy” is a variant of “toffee”, which has an unknown etymology.

(Butterscotch chips photo from user mikefroese at sxc.hu, caramel photo posted by user Rainier Zenz at Wikimedia Commons)

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