Kitchen experiment: vanilla

At the same time that we purchased our jar of Ceylon cinnamon, we also picked up a bottle of Mexican vanilla extract.  I'd tried a Mexican vanilla ice cream at a shop in San Antonio which delivered a slightly different taste from most vanilla ice creams, so I figured, why not try the Mexican vanilla extract if offered the opportunity?

I used the same method as when we tried the two different types of cinnamon: two batches of 1/3 of a recipe of rice pudding, though this time I was able to do my as-close-as-two-people-can-get-to-a-double-blind-experiment design.  I made the puddings, assigned a number to each extract (1 for Madagascar vanilla, and 2 for Mexican vanilla), then labeled the bowls by number.  After dinner, Dom set the de facto order in which we each tried the puddings.

If I'd read the recipe more carefully, I would have seen that I could have made a single pot of rice pudding, then split the cooked pudding in half before adding the extracts.  Well, what's one more pot to wash, I suppose?

Turns out I tasted Pudding 1 first, and Dom tasted Pudding 2.  After testing each one, we determined that though we liked the pudding we had each tried first, there was not much of a difference in the taste; the taste difference was markedly less than the difference for the two cinnamon varieties that we own.  The following day, we switched it up: Dom tasted Pudding 1 first, and I tasted Pudding 2, though this time we probably introduced bias in that we knew which ones we were tasting first.  Interestingly, we again liked whichever pudding we had tried first.  Our results were more or less inconclusive since the difference between the two vanillas was too subtle for us, but we both agreed that we liked actual the rice pudding better without having cooked the cinnamon in it!  Just a sprinkling of cinnamon on top is all that we might need.

We wondered if by the time a flavoring reaches the extract stage and is then used to flavor something else, most of the nuances of the original flavor are lost, such that Mexican vanilla extract in cooked or baked goods tastes more or less the same as Madagascar or Tahitian vanilla extract in the same situation.  I would think it would be a different matter if, for example, one used the actual vanilla bean to flavor an ice cream or rice pudding.  Perhaps that should be a future experiment!




Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 820: once again, we used the "stovetop rice pudding", not the "baked rice pudding".

Anniversary apple pie

We wanted to have a special dessert for our anniversary.  I didn't want to get a cake from a bakery, and I have never had much success making a cake at home, so we decided to make a fruit pie.  After spending some minutes scouring all of our cookbooks and Google Drive recipes, we finally decided on a recipe from a cookbook we don't even own: the Betty Crocker French apple pie recipe, the one my dad always used and for which I have carried a scanned copy through numerous apartments in three states.

As you can imagine, apples aren't really in season right now, and we are at least 2000 miles from the nearest commercial orchard.  We had a mix of Fuji, Gala, and Braeburn varieties, and we had to really go through the bins at the grocery store to find the good ones.

I had found a new (for us, at least) pie crust recipe that substitutes sour cream for the ice water and some of the butter: for a 9" pie, it's 1 cup flour, 1 stick of butter, ¼ cup sour cream, ½ tsp. salt, and 1 tsp. sugar.  It looked pretty foolproof, and while I wasn't the one who made the crust this time, I can attest that the dough ended up in the refrigerator in near-record time, and the end result was tasty...so, I'd say it was a success.

While the crust didn't take long to put together, I had a very short time window to roll out the dough and get it into the pan; it got soft fast, and it isn't even very hot in our kitchen anymore.*  So this may have to be a wintertime pie crust recipe unless I can get quicker about rolling it out.  However, I stuck the crust into the freezer while I got the filling ready, and it was just fine by the time I was ready to fill and bake.

Betty Crocker's recipe is pretty simple.  For a 9" pie:

6 cups of apples
¾ cup sugar (white sugar, but I used brown)
½ tsp. cinnamon (I used our Trader Joe's stuff; maybe I should try the Ceylon cinnamon next time!)
½ tsp. nutmeg
¾ cup flour
Dash of salt (I used 1/8 tsp. of kosher salt)

To this, I added the juice of one lemon, partly to keep the apples from browning while I peeled and sliced all of them, and partly to punch up the flavour.  This could have been reduced to a half lemon as the pie had a pretty strong lemon taste (obvs).

I made half of the crumb topping recipe, as I've noticed in the past that a full recipe makes WAY too much.

½ cup flour
¼ cup butter
¼ cup brown sugar

This seemed to work just fine for the pie.  I also added some cardamom (because why not?); while good, for me it was not entirely necessary.  Take it or leave it.

I used the pi dish, of course.

Obviously, for me, this will always be a recipe to keep.  We made just a couple of small modifications to tailor it to us specifically, but the crust, the filling, and the topping all turned out great.

Similar to my experiences with peach pie, I cut the apples into chunks rather than thin slices.

*This is a relative statement, as the chocolate on our chocolate-covered shortbread cookies (a Christmas gift) became soft enough to stick to the plastic wrapper and peel away from the actual cookie as we'd unwrap them.  We now store the box in the fridge.

Betty Crocker's Cookbook (year unknown, c. 1960s-1970s), p. 321
Writeup background noise: an interesting assortment of music, including Kylie (1988-2007 selections), Tom Petty, Rihanna, Santana, the Jackson 5, KT Tunstall, Yael Naim, and Gavin DeGraw.  Not to mention the Australian Open on mute in the super-background (Serena's match is about to start).  Wow.

Kitchen experiment: cinnamon

On a recent trip to California, we took the opportunity to visit a Penzeys Spices store.  One of the items on my list was Ceylon cinnamon, supposedly 'true cinnamon' as opposed to the cassia that is usually packaged as cinnamon; they're both part of the genus Cinnamomum, so it's more a matter of labeling and semantics, I suppose.  We were curious, so we picked up a jar along with several other herbs and spices, some of which were on the original list...and multiple that had not been.

I wanted to test the Ceylon cinnamon against "regular" cinnamon, so I decided on rice pudding: a nice neutral background for a flavoring.*  I used the Joy of Cooking recipe, and made two batches of 1/3-recipe so that we wouldn't be inundated with rice pudding.  To each batch, I added 1 egg yolk (I had used some egg whites earlier in the afternoon and didn't have any other immediate use for the yolks) and 3/4 tsp. cinnamon, both mixed in with the milk and sugar.  When I opened up the Ceylon cinnamon, I decided to first compare the fragrance of the two: the ol' swipe-a-finger-across-the-inside-of-the-lid-to-pick-up-just-a-bit trick.  Of course, at that point, I couldn't stop making Dune references.

Puddings in process.  Yes, the regular cinnamon is from Trader Joe's, and we haven't lived in a state with a Trader Joe's in over 6 months.  Might the age of the cinnamon have affected our conclusions?  Our past experience with 'older' spices indicates that this is negligible for us, but perhaps not so negligible for a professional.

At the first tasting, we both decided that the pudding with Ceylon cinnamon was our preference: it seemed to have a stronger and punchier flavour, though both puddings were tasty.  Even after a day in the fridge, we still both liked the pudding made with the Ceylon cinnamon.  Neither cinnamon was 'better', as it were, and since neither of us is any kind of a connoisseur (wine, beer, coffee, cheese, etc.), we can't even really quantify the taste differences between the two.  Most likely we won't go too far out of our way to get the 'real' stuff (though we'd never turn it down if given the opportunity), but this was an interesting experiment that gave us a good excuse to try something new.  And a good reason to buy a bunch of stuff at Penzeys.

Our finished puddings: that's 1/3 of a recipe of rice pudding in each 25-oz. bowl.  Two servings each!

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 820: the "stovetop rice pudding", not the "baked rice pudding".

*With one actual scientist and one aspiring scientist in the household, I needed to create as close to a double-blind study as is possible when only two people are involved, so I devised this method: I would make the puddings and assign a random number to each bowl of pudding while Dom was at work.  Then, when it would be time for tasting, he would select the number of pudding that we'd test first, without telling me which number it was.  Unfortunately, time ran out on my day off and we ended up making the puddings together, but I'd say we have a solid design for our next experiment: Madagascar vanilla vs. Mexican vanilla.

Quiche Lorraine

I wanted to make something new for dinner, and since we actually had eggs, butter, and (2%!) milk in our fridge, I decided on a quiche.  We also had some bacon and a LOT of onion, for some reason.  In short, we had almost everything we needed to make a quiche, and I'll take any opportunity to use my mini Cuisinart food processor.

I used my now-standard pie crust recipe, scaled for a 9" pie plate:

• 1¼ c. flour
• ½ c. butter [cubed and tossed in the freezer for as long as possible]
• ½ tsp. salt
• 3-4 Tbsp. ice water [I tend to use a couple more Tbsp. than recipes call for, but maybe that's just me being a pie crust beginner.]
• ½ tsp. sugar [omitted for the quiche]

The crust came together fairly quickly, and I chilled it for maybe 10 minutes before rolling it out into the pie plate.  This worked better than letting the dough chill for a couple hours, then taking it back out and letting it come up to room temperature for several minutes before rolling.  Most likely a product of the local climate on average being much warmer than most places where American cookbooks are written.

The crust needed to be baked before filling.  I have a handy tool to weight pie crust while baking, which worked very well, but the crust recipe said to bake 20 minutes with weights, then to remove the weights, poke holes in the bottom of the crust, and bake for about 10 minutes longer.  For whatever reason, the crust still puffed up quite a bit during the last 10 minutes of baking, even though I took especial care to actually poke the crust all the way through to the plate.  Next time I have to pre-bake a crust like this I might try baking the entire 30 minutes with the pie weight on.  This might also help bake the crust more thoroughly than the process of baking, then cooling slightly, then baking some more.

Joy of Cooking's quiche recipe calls for 2 cups of milk and 3 eggs.  Perhaps we should have used whole milk instead of 2% that we had, but the custard turned out to be quite soft and I had to bake the quiche for 50 minutes altogether, rather than the "35 to 40 minutes" that the cookbook said.  Even at 40 minutes, the quiche was nowhere near a solid.  Looking at my other recent posts, maybe I should get an oven thermometer to see how accurate our oven is, because there seems to be a theme of "had to bake for way longer than called for" in some of the other writeups.  Perhaps a correct oven temperature would have helped set the custard; or perhaps we should have used an additional egg or two.

Not bad, not great, and sadly not worth several hours' prep time.

The verdict on this one, though, was that I would NOT make a quiche again, or if I did, I would not do my own pie crust.  I spent an entire afternoon in our windowless kitchen making and baking a pie crust, then slicing and cooking onions and bacon, and finally preparing the filling (admittedly the easiest part of it all).  The finished product was not astounding, and the worst part was, it was not even a satisfying dinner: I could have used another slice or two but held off since I knew exactly how much butter and bacon had gone into that quiche.  So, unfortunately, this is probably not going to be a repeat recipe.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 108-109

Maple granola

My standard breakfast is Greek yogurt (FAGE Total 2%) with either honey or jam on top, and a carb on the side.  The yogurt is non-negotiable, but the carb can be almost anything that isn't too super sweet: biscuits, muffins, a slice of bread, leftover French toast, leftover tortilla, leftover slice of pizza (no joke).  I tend not to combine the carb with the yogurt, but I recently saw an intriguing granola recipe in The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook for which we already had most of the ingredients and which called for mixing everything with a beaten egg white before baking to get nice big granola clusters.  Plus, in the interest of being frugal, I thought I might be able to get several breakfasts' worth of carb out of a recipe that makes 7 cups of granola.

Recipe notes

• I used sweetened shredded coconut as we did not have any unsweetened.  Illegal substitution, 5 yard penalty?  No, it seemed to come out just fine; the final product wasn't ridiculously sweet or anything, though there wasn't a very pronounced coconut taste.  Maybe next time I should get those big shavings of unsweetened flaked coconut.
• Instead of 1 cup of walnuts, I used 1/2 cup walnuts + 1/2 cup of sliced almonds, partly because that combination was less expensive at Foodland than buying walnuts only.  I got "walnut halves" instead of "shelled walnuts" in the hope that the manufacturer had packaged by volume and that I'd get more actual walnuts.  They probably packaged by weight to cover for that.
• For me, sliced almonds are too insubstantial for a recipe called "big cluster maple granola"; they get sort of lost in the shuffle.  Next time, I'd go with whole almonds: raw, if possible, since they get 45-55 minutes of baking for the granola.
• The walnuts became sort of brittle and lost their crunch after being baked for 50 minutes.  I'm not sure what I would do next time: maybe bake the granola with the almonds, then add the walnuts after baking?  Bake for less time overall?
• I omitted the toasted wheat germ because I didn't feel up to walking all around Foodland and/or Whole Foods trying to find that.
• I added the dry ingredients to the bowl first, including the salt and cinnamon (1/2 tsp. each), then added the olive oil and maple syrup and mixed everything together.  By adding the salt and cinnamon (especially the salt) before the liquids though, the grains tended to get filtered down to the bottom of the bowl, which then ended up remaining in the bowl rather than getting dumped out onto the baking sheet.  I don't know if this made a huge difference in the end, but next time, I'll add the liquids, mix together, then add the salt and cinnamon.
• The single beaten egg white did not seem to be enough for the entire mixture; there was still a lot of very crumbly granola after baking.  Maybe next time I should use 2 egg whites?  More maple syrup?  Honey?
• In a happy coincidence, I had purchased a nicely large bag of dried Montmorency cherries at Costco earlier this week before finding this recipe.  While I love me some dried cherries, I would experiment with using other dried fruit next time as the star of this recipe seems to be the maple flavor of the oats.  For me, if I'm using dried cherries in a recipe, I want that to be the predominant flavor; here they seemed to be simply part of the mixture.

Because of the maple syrup and the cinnamon, this definitely had that autumnal aroma going on when it was baking.  But since it's still over 80°F here every day, there's some cognitive dissonance going on there.

The granola went pretty well with the yogurt.  Not what I might call "ridiculously awesome", perhaps, but I'll work on that, and as it was, it was good enough for a breakfast change.

This was a very easy recipe to make, but the fantastic thing is, next time I can modify the recipe to taste.  Walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, or almonds?  Sunflower seeds?  Pignoli?  Dried cherries, dried apricots, raisins, or dried mango?  Cinnamon, plus cardamom?  The possibilities are endless!




The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook (2012): pages unknown as I was using an unpaginated ebook version.
Writeup background noise: coverage of the ND-Clemson game (21-3 Clemson right now!).