“Tofuworld”

Tofu isn’t in my everyday diet.  It’s not even in my every week diet.  Basically, it only shows up in my diet if I head to the Chinese restaurant down the road (you know, the one with the lucky cat statue and the buffet), and get some hot-and-sour soup.  Like most non-Asian-Americans, that’s more or less the extent of my knowledge of using tofu.  In fact, I used to be weirded out by the stuff.  I mean, it has little to no taste, and is made from pressed soybeans.  It’s not natural!

As time went on, I learned more about the stuff.  Sure, it has no flavor of its own, but that means it’s perfect for adding protein to dishes without adding meat.  It’s perfect in soups, since it will drink up the flavor of the soup.  But that’s only the beginning of what tofu can do.  Softer tofu can stand in for pudding or smoothies, and firm tofu can even be pan-fried.  Oh, and did I mention it’s cheap?  I found an Asian market relatively nearby selling tofu by the pound for about a buck and a half.  Try finding meat on sale that cheap!

So, now that I’ve got the tofu, what do I do with it?  Well, the two recipes in this chapter showcase the two general styles of tofu – firm and soft.  I started with the firm tofu, as it was fairly straightforward to make.  As I said before, tofu is a culinary sponge, and will soak up whatever flavors you give it.  But firm tofu still has quite a bit of water, so we need to wring that sponge out before we let it take liquid back into itself.  I cut it into four equal pieces, wrapped it in paper towels, and pressed it for two hours between two sheet pans weighted with a 28-oz. can of tomatoes, changing the towels once.  After the tofu is pressed, it gets placed into a zip-top bag with some vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, and some hot pepper sauce to marinate for two hours.  At that point, the tofu gets dredged in breading and pan-fried in canola oil for a few minutes a side, just long enough to brown the panko breadcrumbs.  After cooling briefly, they’re served.  Having tasted them, I think they either needed more time in the marinade or more marinade, as most of the flavor was lost.  Still, I think I see what Alton was going for in this recipe.  The acidity of the vinegar, the fishiness of the Worcestershire sauce, and the crunchiness of the fry is supposed to make you think of a fish fry.  The heat wasn’t noticable, but I suspect that was his Southern expressing itself.  I need to make this one again in the future, just to see if I can get the flavors stronger.

The second one is called Moo-Less Chocolate Pie, and is nothing short of devious.  A package of semisweet chocolate chips are melted in a metal bowl along with some coffee liqueur and vanilla extract.  This is added to a food processor, along with a pound of soft tofu and some honey, and pulsed until smooth and pudding-like.  That’s all added to a chocolate wafer crust and refrigerated.  It’s incredibly simple to make, and unlike my poaching trials, I didn’t have any issues making this one.  The recipe, though, says that Alton has served this pie to unsuspecting diners, and nobody has ever suspected the secret ingredient.  I had to replicate this experiment, so I made a pie and took it to work the next day.  I informed them that there was a secret ingredient, but made them guess what it was.  True enough, nobody got it.  One person came close, guessing that I used avocado to make the pudding (she’d recently been working with making mousse with avocado), but nobody actually suspected tofu.  Experiment successful!  I’ll definitely be making this one again.

Next: I work with the only vegetable that can be spelled using musical notes.

Recipes:

Filet o’Fu

Moo-Less Chocolate Pie

“Three Chips for Sister Marsha”

You know how I said before “I am not a baker”?  Well, when it comes to something simple like cookies, I might be.  Whether this is because I’m a better baker than I think I am, or whether it’s because cookies are pretty easy to make, I can’t say.  Normally, this is where I start talking about what the food in question means to me, where I’ve had the best version of it, or the like, but in this case…it’s cookies.  Everyone likes cookies, even if we shouldn’t have them as often as we’d like to.  Even Cookie Monster has been forced to go on record and say that “cookies are a sometimes food.”  I rarely bake them, though, so this was an experiment – try out this recipe.  I knew I was going to be bringing these into work, since I didn’t want two dozen chocolate chip cookies staring me down, daring me to eat them, so I started talking with some people at the office.  I convinced one or two to also bring in some cookies, and we’d all compete to see who had the best cookie recipe.  This quickly escalated in my small office environment, and where the field was originally two or three bakers, no fewer than ten bakers would be competing.  I had little expectation of winning, especially since one or two of the other entrants were grandmothers, and everyone knows you can’t outbake a grandmother.

Still, I was willing to compete regardless the number of entrants, and I faced down my challenge.  The episode itself was all about how changes to a recipe can affect the final baked good.  It’s sort of like jazz – the Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe was the base melody, and the three recipes presented were the riffs.  Only one of the three was represented in the book, so that’s the one I made.  It was also the most radically different recipe, creating a chewy cookie.  What liberties were taken?  Well, to start with, the butter was melted, which meant that there really wasn’t a creaming stage – you can’t cut sugar into liquid butter, obviously.  On top of this, the AP flour was replaced with bread flour, which would create more gluten when worked, and more gluten means more chewiness.  The original recipe calls for equal parts white and brown sugar – in this recipe, the sugar was almost brown sugar exclusively in order to again promote chewiness.  Where the original called for two eggs, the new one only used one egg plus one egg yolk along with some whole milk – egg whites dry, so removing one of them and replacing it with dairy would make a wetter, chewier cookie.  Once the dough was made up, I added my secret weapon – Ghirardelli semisweet and dark chocolate morsels, which I hoped would distinguish myself from regular Nestle milk chocolates.  The dough was chilled for about an hour, then scooped onto sheet pans lined with parchment paper.  Within an hour, nearly three dozen cookies were created, which was astonishing, because I’d doubled a recipe that should have made two dozen.

As I expected, I didn’t win the competition.  The winner was an almond shortbread cookie, and I was alright with this – I loved my cookies.  Cookies are like pizza – even bad cookies are still pretty good!  One last thing to mention: in the episode, Alton is forced to make cookies for his sister Marsha when hers are stolen.  In a case of life imitating art, I’d sent a picture of the cooling cookies to a friend, much as I’d done for many of these other recipes before.  As it turned out, she was with several of her friends in her dance troupe, and they immediately said that they wanted me to make them some cookies in a few weeks.  Good thing these things are easy to make!

Next Time: The quick and the bread.

Recipe:

The Chewy

“The Art of Darkness I”

When I say the word “chocolate,” what words come to mind?  Well, if you’re one of my friends on Facebook, those words would be something like “necessary,” “essential,” or “melty.”  There were other words as well, such as “melty,” “incongruous,” and “Hitler.”  (The last was a friend deliberately Godwinning the thread.  I have strange friends.)  The point of the experiment, though, is that chocolate holds a special place in our palates.  There aren’t many other foods that have words like “sinful” or “decadent” attached to them.  Chocolate has its own luxuriousness that no other confection can match.  Want more proof?  Ever hear of someone calling themself a “steakaholic?”  Nope, only chocolate is made of equal parts satisfaction and seduction.
Alton provides two recipes in this first chapter on chocolate – the first is wholly American, while the other is classical French.  Starting with the second recipe, we set out to make that lightest of chocolate desserts – mousse.  It’s a rather simple procedure – melt some chocolate, whip some cream, and then integrate the two of them together.  In practice, it’s only a bit harder.  Chocolate gets melted over simmering water, and some espresso, rum, butter and a pinch of salt get added to round out the flavors.  Most of the cream gets whipped until we just have medium peaks – any less, and the mousse won’t have any stability; any more, and it loses its airiness.  The remainder of the cream gets bloomed over heat with a packet of gelatin.  This unusual step is designed to help give the mousse extra stability.  Part of the whipped cream and the gelatin gets stirred into the chocolate, and then the rest of the whipped cream is folded in, so as to protect as many of the tiny bubbles as possible.

How did it go?  Well ,rather swimmingly, actually.  The only catches I had was I added all the flavorings to the chocolate at once – and any experienced confectioner can probably see what the problem with that is.  Three ounces of coffee and 1 tablespoon of rum has a rather dangerous ingredient for chocolate – DHMO.  Dihydrogen monoxide.  Water.  Water and chocolate do not mix.  The chocolate seizes up, turning into a clumpy mass rather than a gooey syrup.  Fortunately, the addition of extra fat – in this case, butter – breaks up the chocolate and allows it to melt as intended.  The problem?  The butter I added was cold, and took awhile to melt.  While everything turned out alright in the end, the thick mass was unsettling until the butter finally melted.  Also, the gelatin was slightly unusual.  I’ve never worked with the stuff, and I wasn’t sure if I was doing everything right.  When I added the gelatin to the cold cream, it immediately turned into a paste.  It took a bit of coaxing over heat for the gelatin to turn into something even remotely palatable.

The finished dish, however, was simply divine.  Light, airy, and due to the semisweet chips I used, intensely chocolaty.  Given the ease of making it, I definitely intend on making plenty more.

The second dish (well, technically, the first) was chocolate lava muffins.  Again, it’s a fairly simple procedure.  Melt some chocolate and butter in the bowl of a stand mixer, then add some vanilla.  Crank the mixer up to medium and add some eggs.  Sift some flour, sugar, cocoa powder and salt into the bowl, then turn up the speed until you’ve got a light and creamy batter.  Chill the mix.  Butter a muffin tin, dust it with cocoa powder, and then fill up the cups with the chocolate batter.  Bake until the outside is set and the inside isn’t.  Serve with a melted vanilla ice-cream espresso powder sauce.

This went well again, and I really didn’t have any problems with the creation.  I think the only thing I would have done differently is cook them for a bit less time than the recipe calls for – for something called “chocolate lava muffins,” there wasn’t all that much lava coming out.  They were tasty, though, and the cool sauce mixed with the hot muffins was a great contrast.

Next time, we get seasonal with Good Eats most famous episode…

 

Recipes:

Chocolate Mousse

Chocolate Lava Muffins