Sizzling Blood and the Unholy Stench...

...Of Murder.

As some of you know, I currently work at a kitchen supply store.  We have all sorts of gadgets, from the mundane to the insane.  The other day, some of the kids in my baking class asked what might be the strangest gadget in our repertoire.  Our manager brought them to the duck press.

The duck press is something that I've noticed in the store since I began working there over two years ago.  However, I never knew what it was, nor did I even think of it as some sort of kitchen tool.  It sits up on a shelf, the only of its kind, as if it is merely a decorative knick knack.  When I learned that it is for sale, and that it retails for just under $2,000, I was filled with curiosity.

What does it do??  What is it for??  A DUCK press?  Do you press the whole duck in there?  What do you press?  Why does it have duck feet??

Well, the initial explanation I received involved pressing organs to make pate juices and au jus.  Duck juice extraction for sauces, essentially.

That was weird, but then I delved further and discovered a classic French dish that goes by a few different names.  If you're lucky, you'll get a canard a la presse, or pressed duck.  If you're some sort of pagan meat fiend, however, you'll order by another name: either canard a la rouennaise, or canard au sang.  Duck in blood sauce, or duck in blood, respectively.

WiseGeek has a pretty good description.

In short, a live duck is strangled (so as to minimise blood loss), partially roasted, and then broken down.  Meaty hunks are removed for further roasting, and then the carcass is pressed to extract all sorts of blood and marrow.  This extraction is used as the basis for the sauce that is then poured over the roasted meat.  Oh yes, all this pressed business is done by the waiter AT YOUR TABLE.  So you get to watch (and presumably hear and smell) the duck get crushed, you sick, sick little man.

If you want to view pictures of the process from La Tour d'Argent, a Parisian restaurant that serves the dish for 130 €, head over to fxcuisine.com.  But I'm warning you, those pictures are nasty gross.

As a side note, La Tour d'Argent has every reason to be proud of their dish.  Canetons à la Rouennaise was on the menu of the "Dinner of the Three Emperors," an eight hour meal that "is reputed to have been the most magnificent ever to have occurred in any restaurant in the world." (yes, I just quoted Wikipedia.)  La Tour d'Argent is the restaurant descendant, so to speak, of Café Anglais, where the dinner took place.

Fancy pants aside, I'll never view that duck press the same way again.  This, friends, is why I stay away from the savory side of the kitchen.

Further Thoughts on Lye Pretzels

Here's a bit more to ponder:

Since lye is corrosive, it hates certain metals.  Take aluminum, for instance.  Lye wants to kick aluminum in the face.  And aluminum has no defenses; it's one of the most reactive metals on earth.  You can get aluminum to react with air if you just look at it the wrong way.

Keep in mind that most sheet pans are made out of aluminum, so spilling any amount of lye on them will cause the metal to have a molecular anxiety attack.  Atoms of aluminum freak out and combine with the sodium hydroxide to form weird aluminum salts, with the byproduct being pure hydrogen gas.

It's inevitable that some lye will jack up your pans.  But as a precaution, always bake pretzels on something like parchment paper or a Silpat to control this reaction and subsequent buildup of hydrogen gas in your oven.  (!!!)

What to do with leftover lye?  Easy.  Dump it down the drain followed by a hot water flush.  Is this safe?  Yup: in addition to making world class pretzels, sodium hydroxide is one of the chemicals most commonly used as a drain cleaner.  (According to the MSDS for Pro Strength Liquid Plumr, the concentration level is only HALF what I use for pretzels.  eek!)  Anyway, sodium hydroxide eats away at gunk and also uses the saponification trick to turn trapped grease into soap, essentially causing the drain gunk to clean itself.

If you really want to make pretzels but the lye thing freaks you out, you can simply use a weaker alkali found in the kitchen: baking soda.  Mix it up with water for the dip, but you will have to bring the mix to around 190 degrees (F) or so.  Essentially, the pretzels will be poached, just like making bagels!  Everyone is happy!

I should also say, bibliography style, that Joe Pastry has taught me a lot about lye pretzels.  While I hope to have added some to the discussion without directly plagiarising his work, I make no guarantees.  Check out his posts here.

That is all!

I Stole and I Lyed

just because you asked me to.

So I've been making pretzels on a fairly regular basis lately, for a few reasons.  They are fun to make, they impress people (which is always a priority for me, of course), and they involve dangerous chemicals.  What fun!

Wait, dangerous chemicals?  What's all this about?  Well, all pretzels have secrets, and in this case it is a magical white powder called sodium hydroxide, or lye.  My go to illustration for what lye is, and why it is bad, is that scene from Fight Club.  Tyler explains that lye is used to make soap and then uses a chemical burn to go on some sort of existential rant.  (The bit about soap is true; a metallic alkaline solution combined with fat causes saponification, the process of making soap!  This process can lead to soapy cookies if you have too much baking soda in the mix without enough acid to neutralise it.  Keep that in mind!)

What does this have to do with pretzels?  Well, just before pretzels are baked, they get dipped in lye.  The lye solution has a pH of 13 (so I gather; I have no litmus papers hanging around the kitchen).  The alkaline environment coating the pretzels aids in various browning reactions that create that deep crust color.  It also adds unique flavor and texture to the surface of the pretzel.

Is it safe to eat?  Well, throw back a shot of lye and you'll be feeling very sick and ill, indeed.  But in the oven, chemical reactions happen that make it safe to eat.  This specifically involves the Carbon Dioxide present in the dough, CO₂ being the waste product of yeast that is harnessed to make bread rise.  Lye, being NaOH, combines with the CO₂ and evaporating H₂O to create both Na₂CO₃ and Na₂HCO₃, being sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate, respectively.  Both of which are much safer to eat than NaOH!

All this aside, there are other applications for this crazy food science.  The Norwegian abomination delicacy known as Lutefisk involves soaking fish in lye to denature and "jelly" the proteins.  Soak dried corn in lye and you get hominy, the plump morsels of corn found in menudo and pozole.  Use lye to make pasta, and your noodles will turn out ramen-yellow.

---

Chemicals aside, let's make pretzels.  The back story: I made pretzels at a bakery for a while, but was always dissatisfied with them.  I've developed my own formula and technique that comes much closer to an authentic pretzel than the bakery's interpretation.  Theirs are dense and rich.  Good, but a bit..."much."  (My current boss, born and raised in Vienna, has given me awesome feedback along the way).

So here we are:

• 100% Bread Flour
• 52.5% Water
• 10% Butter (or a solid veg fat if you're veganomically inclined)
• 2ish% Salt
• 1.75ish% Dry Yeast

 (side note: I'll always give plain English measurements if you want them, but let's be honest: I don't expect anyone following this blog to make the stuff I write about.  But let me know.)

Mix the dough, knead till smooth and springy, shape into a ball and let rest for no more than 20 minutes.  This allows the gluten to relax without any real yeast activity happening.  We want most of the rising to happen after shaping; this controls the internal crumb of the pretzels somehow or another.  Roll out the dough into a squareish shape.  Do you like that little baby rolling pin?  Handmade out of teak by my friend and his dad.  Smooth as glass!

Scale out the dough to 45g pieces, keep under plastic wrap to prevent drying.  I scaled this batch to make 20 pretzels at 45g each, which is less than half the size that I usually make.  I'm experimenting with mini guys because my friend wants me to make mini pretzels for her engagement party.

For pretzel shaping, we first want to get these blobs of dough into a tight little cylinder.  We let the cylinder relax for a few minutes (really, just long enough to go through the whole batch and then come back around to the beginning again.)

This is called a preshape.  This is necessary because gluten has a very good memory.  If you've ever taken a wad of bread dough and tried to roll it in your hands to form a ball, Play-Doh style, you know it doesn't work that way.  You have to give it an initial round shape to "program" the dough to accept the final shape.  In this case, our final shape is essentially a rope, so we make an initial version of the rope to tell the dough where it's headed.

But here, how about a video?  You know I hate making them, but I know you love watching them, so here you are.  Being without a Gorillapod, I have no convenient place for a camera, so my clunky hands get in the way of these small dough pieces.  Sorry about that, but I promise it might be interesting.  The first video covers preshape and final shape for the traditional pretzel.  The second video covers some other final shapes that I think are fun.

After shaping, we let them rise till just about doubled in size, and then pop them in the freezer.  This firms them up, which eases the lye dip.  Speaking of, here's the set up for the lye dip.  I use that bucket on the far left to mix the solution, using 75g of lye to 1.5kg water (5% solution).  Creating this solution gives off a lot of heat, so add lye to cold water only.  It also gives off some sort of gas for a short bit which makes me choke and feel this throat pain that I've never felt before, so that's fun.  Keep a loose lid on top for ten minutes or so to control this; after that it's fine.

Dip, sprinkle with salt (I use Maldon, because it's flaky and British), bake at 375 for 18ish minutes, cool, dip in mustard, nutella, jam, whatever you like.  There you have it!

The Mighty Bouche

 The May 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Cat of Little Miss Cupcake. Cat challenged everyone to make a pièce montée, or croquembouche, based on recipes from Peter Kump’s Baking School in Manhattan and Nick Malgieri.  

Remember when I signed up for that daring baker thing?  Well the first challenge handed to me was to make a croquembouche.  But here's the thing: I do not like croquembouche.

Now what, you ask, is a croquembouche?  It's a type of classic French wedding dessert, though nothing at all like a cake.  In essence, it is a conical tower of profiteroles (cream puffs) held together with caramelised sugar.  Then it gets decorated with all sorts of things, usually including spun sugar.

The construction is a bit tedious, but is able to split into different components: pate a choux, pronounced "patty chokes*", which is the "batter" used to make the cream puffs; pastry cream, the filling; and the final caramel, which must be made immediately before assembly (although...  I suppose you could make it ahead, let it solidify, and carefully melt it back down.  But I digress).

I've made one before, with my school partner Shane.  Here is a picture of us in mid-build:
 
That croaky-ma-boosh took us four hours, start to finish, using some thousands** of profiteroles and gallons** of caramel and cream filling.

So wait, now I'm supposed to make one BY MYSELF, ON MY OWN FREE TIME??  Ridiculous.  The mere mention of this sent a wave of wanton rebellion through my mind.  Ever the maverick, I quickly ran through a number of ideas that, while still following the challenge rules, would give me a good outlet for creative steam.  A model of Stonehenge?  Possibly a Croquembouche version of the NCC-1701-D?

Wait a second, hold up.  Remember this: I am not a croquembouche fan.  Do I really want to put forth a good deal of effort on this thing?  No.  Not really.  My final croaked bush ended up using eclairs instead of profiteroles (the challenge didn't specify shape!!!  it only said use pate a choux filled with pastry cream!!  i think i'm safe!!).  The idea was to build a Jenga tower out of eclairs.

The problem with eclairs is that they are soft and roundy, rather than firm and squared off like Jenga blocks.  And so, even with the hardening caramel holding the pieces together, it didn't get very tall before threatening to topple.  I tried to get some good strands of spun caramel around it, but the tower just wasn't cooperating.  Whipped out the camera, took a picture, knocked it down, stuck it all in the fridge.  There's still some in there.  Whatevs.  On to the next challenge!

Oh, you can check out other entries here.






*not really.  come now.
**quantities approximated

Baker Meet Blogger

You don't know a thing about their lives
They live where you wouldn't dare to bake...

Or at least, some of us wouldn't dare.  But I did.  Today's obscure song reference pays tribute to The Daring Kitchen, a secret culinary society into which I was recently accepted and given the role of Daring Baker.

What is this Daring business all about?  Well, it's really just a group of food bloggers, both bakers and cooks, who make a secret recipe each month.  Someone gets selected to throw out a recipe challenge on the first of each month, and then everyone has until the 27th of that month to make the recipe and write up a blog about the whole thing.

The deal is, the challenge is a SECRET!!!  We're not allowed to release the blog post until the 27th!  If we do so before, our membership is revoked!  Membership may also be revoked if we DON'T PARTICIPATE in the challenge!  This is legit!

My membership wasn't approved until after the April challenge, which was to make a traditional English steamed pudding.  Flip.  I basically live for a good steamed pud, but whatever.  The May challenge was released today, and let me tell you this: it's a doozy.  It's something I've done before, which is a plus, but I've never done it on my own.

Perhaps I've said too much!  They police the member's blogs for this stuff (maybe).

Anyway, it all sounds so fancy, and it sort of is, but consider this: anybody can join, and there are hundreds of members.  I really don't understand the secrecy of it all, because the only people who care about the challenges are in the club anyway, and so they know the deal.  But I don't mind the formalities; I think they're what make it fun :]

Peter Take a Bow

Back at culinary school, one of our classes was all about bread.  At one point, the dean of the baking program came in and spoke for a while about his passion for bread, which really got me hooked on the whole idea.  He brought in a book titled The Bread Baker's Apprentice, written by a Johnson and Wales instructor named Peter Reinhart.  Chef mentioned that Reinhart is basically the man when it comes to bread, so I checked out a few of his books at the library.  Turns out that, in addition to being a baker and instructor, Chef Reinhart is also a member of an Eastern Orthodox service order, and likes to weave a taste of lay theology into his baking craft.

This intrigued me, so I eventually bought his book Bread Upon the Waters.  This is a memoir, of sorts, in which the author's process of self discovery and spiritual awakening is paralleled with the process of baking bread.  In fact, the whole reason Chef Reinhart got into baking in the first place is that he started preparing all the meals within his faith community.  He and his wife went on to open Brother Juniper's Cafe in 1987 as an outreach effort for the community.  His servant-like vision for the cafe was very close to what I have always wanted to do with food.  Combine this with the fact that Brother Juniper's was in my hometown of Santa Rosa, CA, and I was sold on this guy.

So when I heard that he would be in Portland, where I now live, doing a demo class at Sur La Table, where I work, I was pretty excited.  I teach baking classes there part time, and my boss asked if I would be willing to prep out Chef Reinhart's doughs the day ahead of the class.  I jumped on that opportunity, and then sat in on the class the next day.

Listening to Peter Reinhart is inspiring.  He speaks about baking with the authoritative wisdom of a prophet, the overflowing knowledge of a professor, and the excited wonder of a child.  I didn't care much to hear about bread instruction that evening; I have already read about his techniques.  What I wanted to hear, first hand, was his passion.  In three short hours, Chef Reinhart's passion spilled out in an array of pithy bread wisdom.  I will attempt to paraphrase my favorite bit, something he said in regards to the symbolism of bread (or if you prefer, check out the embedded video at the bottom to hear this along with some other good stuff, beginning at around 7 minutes in).

Bread shows us the cycle of life and death, of rebirth, renewal, regeneration.  Bread starts as wheat, which grows like grass.  It is green, vibrant, alive.  In an effort to reproduce, this grass forms seeds.  These seeds carry within them all the potential to form new life and carry on the cycle.

But we pluck the seeds and crush them, forever destroying the life within.  This dust is mixed with water and a little salt, which only serves to form a lifeless lump of clay.  However, yeast is then added to the mix.  Yeast is the bread's leavening, which is derived from the word enliven.  Life is added to the formless clay-like mass.  The yeast gives off its gasses and breathes into the dough, strengthening and rejuvenating this thing that looks nothing like the grass in the fields.  

The baker forms the dough, instructs it to grow into a specific shape, and then bakes it.  The baking must occur, because raw dough is indigestible.  In the oven, many transformations happen, one of which is that the yeast is killed.  The only thing giving life to the dough has now been sacrificed so that we may have bread as an end result.  This bread is again dead, but it is nutritious, it gives life, thus completing the cycle when we eat it.

Isn't that neat?  I think so.  Chef went on to say that this would all just be meaningless poetry if the bread didn't actually taste good.  I would say that there's a lesson there, too.

After the class, everybody lined up to get their copy of BBA or Artisan Breads Everyday signed.  I had my copy of Bread Upon the Waters in hand, because those thoughts are more valuable to me than a few recipes.  During class clean up, I was able to pose a question to Chef Reinhart that has been heavy on my heart lately.  Is it truly possible to combine my love for baking with my desire to serve those around me (I was recently told that I would never find this)?  He told me of course it is possible, our passions will always find a way to intertwine in harmony.  We spoke for a few minutes, and he told me to email him sometime, to "share the journey."  I will certainly take him up on that offer.

And the short definition of baking?
Baking is a balancing act between time, temperature, and ingredients.  In using these, it is the baker's responsibility to evoke from the wheat the fullness of its potential. -Peter Reinhart

Crashed Down on the CrossBuns

Yesterday my friend Jessica and I made Hot Cross Buns (it being Easter and all). The recipe was a further step in the evolution of my trusty rich bread, which was the formula base for both the Christmas bread and the Saffron buns. However, for the HCB, I decreased the butter a bit, increased the sugar a bit (and switched it to brown sugar, or B-Sug as we say in the biz), changed the spices around... I think that's it.

We didn't have time to candy up some citrus peels, so we just used zest instead. Some would say this defies traditional HCB methodology, but there were still currants. Those are just small raisins, by the way.

And look, we used the KitchenAid, with the new and improved spiral dough hook!

For the crosses on top, we used the weird paste that you just make out of flour and water, because I hear that's more traditional.  The crosses came out dark in the bake though, so I don't know what's up with that.