Some Cakes are Figgier than Others, Part Two

Figs!  Yes, they are creepy; yes, they are delicious.

Since a fig is not exactly a fruit, it tastes not exactly like a fruit.  Fruit flavors certainly cover a wide spectrum, but they usually contain sweet flavors and some type of acidic flavor (some stronger than others).  Figs are one of those flavors that is hard to pin down.  They're sweet, but not too sweet.  They've got no hint of acidic tartness.  The flavor is very... floral.  Fitting, no?

Now of course there are different varieties of figs to be eaten.  The ones we are probably most familiar with are the black mission figs.  Mission figs are probably the sweetest figs out there, in an almost too much kind of way.  Their texture is not my favorite; sort of syrupy and mushy and gyuh gyuh gyuh as you try to swallow.   Then there are the other dark figs, brown turkish figs.  These guys are sweet like the black missions, but not so cloying, and the texture is a little bit more substantial.

Then there are a few green figs.  Even though their skin is green, their insides are still rosy red, which makes a great color contrast.  My favorite light skinned figs are kadotas. These are a delight; they taste like honey itself, and when straight off the tree are filled with a refreshing nectar.  Yumm!

Let's talk recipes. I really wanted to find a great baking recipe that utilized fresh figs, but those are hard to come by.  Most fig breads or cakes call for chopped dried figs, used like raisins.  This is great and all, but I want a fresh fig recipe!  Three cliche fresh fig recipes sprang to mind: grilled figs, grilled figs wrapped in prosciutto, and figs simmered in port (and then possibly grilled and wrapped in prosciutto).  Lame.  These are overdone, people.  Come up with something new.

That's exactly what I did!  I made up a recipe.  This particular recipe may not be super original, but i didn't get it from anywhere, so it's original for me.

I give you: honey lemon fig cake!

It utilizes fresh fig puree as a main ingredient (similar to how banana bread uses banana puree).  It's also got honey, which complements the flavor of figs, and lemon juice / zest, which offset the sweetness.  I'm also throwing in some yogurt, for flavor and softness in the cake.  Also, the combo of honey, lemon, figs, and yogurt sounded exotic to me.  A bit mediterranean maybe?  I don't know, but I like to think of this cake as paying tribute to the figs of yesteryear.

Speaking of paying tribute to things, this recipe pays tribute to the Summer with those flavors, and adds a hit of nutmeg to ring in the fall.  Perfect, because today is the first day of Fall!

Wait, are figs still in season?  Some of them, yes.  Kadota figs are a late season fig, beginning in mid August or so and lasting until mid October, if you're lucky.  I was still able to find some mission (left) and turkey figs (right), too, so they're still around.  Just as figs overlap the seasons, this cake recipe does the same thing!

I used these figs for the puree.  The kadota figs featured in the previous post were all eaten fresh :D

The Recipe:

Liquids:
Honey -- 4oz
Yogurt -- 8 oz (I used full fat, but not the Greek kind.  You want more liquid than that will offer.)
Veg Oil -- 4 oz
Eggs -- 2 ea
Vanilla Extract -- a little bit
Zest of two lemons
Juice of one lemon
Pureed Figs -- 12 oz  (Just take the stems off, dump the whole figs in a food processor, and let 'er go)

Fig Puree!  Everyone needs a Cuisinart.

Lemon zest!  Everyone needs a Microplane.


Dries:
AP Flour -- 12 oz (really, pastry or even cake flour might be better.  I only had AP.  Cakes came out more like muffins.)
Baking Powder -- 1.25 tsp
Baking Soda -- .25 tsp
Salt -- 1 tsp
Nutmeg -- .5 tsp


Procedure:  Super simple.  Ready?  Whisk all your liquids together, ending with the fig puree.  Sift or whisk all your dries together.  Fold dry into liquid.  Portion out, I used a Wilton mini-bundt pan with enough left over for a thin 6" layer.  Bake at 350f for 18ish minutes.



Done!  I also made a glaze with lemon juice and powdered sugar, but I forgot to take picture until the day after they were fresh, so the glaze just got absorbed into the cake  :[

Conculsions:  They're pretty good, but I may have discovered why dried figs are usually used in baking: the delicate flavor of fresh figs is easily lost during the baking process.  The flavor is still there, but more as a backdrop.  If anything, the rosy fig color is more apparent than the flavor.

This recipe could use some tweaking, I'm aware of that.  But figs are expensive, and I won't be able to make it again until next fig season rolls around.  But you can bet I will :]

Some Cakes are Figgier than Others, Part One

Part One being the nerdy info post.  Part two will contain culinary info and a recipe!  Also, I'm just going to throw this out there: there's a lot of smut in this post; there was really no way around it.

I've been wanting to write about figs for a while now.  In fact, this post was set to go up about a week ago, when my friend put an article on my wall that basically said everything I was hoping to say.  Bah!  It seems I'm not the only person in the world.  After coming up with a recipe to add to this post to make everything a bit more original, here we are.

But first thing's first.  Why was I planning to write about figs?  Simply because I am pretty fascinated by them.  Figs have a lot of interesting secrets, ones that I try to tell people (but they never believe me!).

Let's start off with an easy one:  Figs are not (technically) a fruit.  Think about this: every fruit tree goes into blossom before it bears fruit, right?  Well, go check out a fig tree next time summer rolls around and wait for the blossoms.

There are none!
That's because the blossoms are the figs!

It's true.  If you open up a fig, you'll see all these soft threads and things.  These are the bits that make up the blossom, essentially.  They're like the fig equivalent of a flower's pistel and stamen, depending on whether or not you've got a male fig or a female fig.  You'll see seeds in there, too, which are part of the technical fruits of the fig, but the big plump thing you eat is more like an inside out flower.  Neat, huh?

So let's talk about flowers and plant sex for a bit.  Plants reproduce when a mommy flower and a daddy flower fall in love and pollen goes from one of them to the other (I'm not sure which one, I forget how that whole thing works).  In nature, flowers are often pollinated by insects, such as bees.  Happy Bee Child walks around on the flower, because this is a nice thing for a Happy Bee to do, and unknowingly gets covered in pollen.  You know the rest.  Bee visits flower #2 and carries on the plant's dirty hedonistic business.

So if a fig is an inside out flower, and the flowery reproductive bits are on the inside, how does this pollination happen?  This is the fun part.  Don't let it gross you out, it's just nature, folks.

There's an insect called a fig wasp.  It doesn't really look like a scary bitey type wasp.  It's much smaller and probably doesn't bite.  Let's say there's a female fig wasp flying around looking for a safe place to lay its cache of eggs.  (I'm not sure where the pregnant wasp came from; it's a chicken / egg situation.)  Luckily for Ms. Wasp ("Ms.", because she's on her own but doesn't need the world to know), there is a ficus tree that needs her.  This tree has a plump little pocket of nectar with a hole on the bottom.  The hole is big enough for Ms. Wasp to crawl into, where she'll find a moist, sheltered environment for her eggs.  But alas!  Crawling through the tiny hole has ripped off her wings!  She will die inside the nectar pocket and get digested by its juices, but not before she gets a chance to lay her eggs.

So the eggs hatch, poppin' out male and female wasps.  The baby wasps are quick to get busy with their own reproductive business ("Life is short, can't waste time with all this dating nonsense."  Heathens!).  All that rolling around inside their home means some pollen is going to shake loose.  After they're done doing their thing, the females escape, with buns in the oven and pollen on their wet, naked insect bodies, only to seek out another nectar pocket.  Then they all go dancing till it all starts over again.  Right?  Something like that.

Here's the point: those nectar pockets are figs.  The things human kind have been eating for millenia.  Tree sex organs and combination wasp love nest and sarcophagus, all rolled into one.  The essence of the fig is one madcap romp through Mother Nature's blatantly excessive fecundity.

Now, I don't think there's any guarantee that this happens with every single fig you ever come across, but it certainly happens with enough frequency that any fig lover has most likely eaten one of these red light figs. 

I enjoy telling people this because I get a real kick out of it.  Symbiosis is fascinating, but most people would rather disbelieve or get sick, or both.  Until recently, I only had a Wikipedia article to back me up, and it's so easy for people to disregard Wikipedia when they disagree with it.

But!  Sweet vindication, I was at Powell's the other day reading through the summer issue of Gastronomica.  This is a quarterly journal of food and culture, published by the UC Press in Berkely, CA.  This is legit stuff, not some lame magazine with the top 63 summer grilling recipes.  Anyway, the summer issue had an article written by Gary Paul Nabhan titled "A Fig by Any Other Name."  It was very interesting, mainly comparing and contrasting figs and prickly pears, both of which have been historically and culturally important throughout humanity's life.  (Side note, the prickly pear was sometimes called an "Indian Fig").  He doesn't mention this part, but many cultures hold figs as a symbol of female fertility.  I'm not sure where they get that from.

Nabhan does mention, however, that one of the differences between the two is the whole false fruit thing, and the whole waspy sex thing!  Which is what I was trying to tell people!  And furthermore, here are some great links about the same issues to back me up!  They pretty much say the same thing, albeit much more concisely than my midnite banter will allow.  (Bonus, the first link has PBS videos!!)

Oscillator: Edible Symbiosis
The Kitchn: Strange Symbiosis

Humorous anecdote: I shared some figs and fig knowledge with a friend recently, saving the wasp bit till last, as is my custom (because would you eat a fig if someone told you about that first?).  She looked at me with a shock.  "You mean there were eggs inside here?"  "Well, there may have been.  Or maybe shells."  Still more shock.  that's when it occurred to me: my friend is vegan.  I felt horrible.  She shrugged it off and ate the rest of the fig anyway.  Oops!

Invader Puff

In the midst of my latest attempt at conquering earth, I was interrupted by screams from the courtyard:

--"We're having a potluck!  Everyone's making food!  You're going to make eclairs!"

"Filthy human worm babies!!  You dare insult my genius with such an impudent request as eclairs?!  The very concept that a superior baking race would participate in a... "pot luck" is sheer fantasy!  I will rule you all with an iron fist!"

--"Make a really huge eclair!  Like the size of the sheet pan!"

"YOU!  Obey the fist!"

"I want tacos!"

"Silence!"

"Tacos Tacos Tacos!!"

"Enough of this foolishness!  We will cater to their whims, and provide them with delicious treats the likes of which they have never knoooown!  They will live to regret this daaay!!"

"You gonna make biscuits? You gonna make biscuits? Youuu gonna make biiiscuits??"

"No.  I never want you to mention biscuits ever again.  We will make...  PROFITEROLES!"

"Isn't that really just a bite sized eclair?  Won't you still just be making eclairs like they asked?"

"Insolent cur!  You will not question my plans for Earth's Destruction!  Quickly now, gather these ingredients:"

Pâte à Choux:

• 4 oz Dihydrogen Monoxide
• 4 oz Bovine Mammary Extract
• 4 oz Solid emulsified BME fat
• 1 oz Crystalline Sucrose
  
• Pinch of Sodium Chloride
• Several drops of Soluble Green Tincture
• 6 oz Pulverised Triticum aestivum seed, sifted to remove bran
• 4 whole Gallus gallus domesticus ovae, unfertilised!!

1. Bring first six ingredients to full rolling boil!
2. Add full amount of T. aestivum.  Stir over high heat as if your miserable life depended on it!  It does!!
3. Remove from heat once the Sticky Skin Substance begins to form on the bottom of the pot.  Let it cool for a few minutes.
4. Beat in the G. gallus ovae, ONE AT A TIME!!
5. Pipe into bite sized circles.  Bake at 491 K for 15 minutes.  Then lower temperature to 463 K and continue to bake until dry, at least another 15 minutes.
6. Fill with Delicious Delicious Cream Filling!
7. Dip in prepared sauce derived from Theobroma cacao seeds!

 Delicious Delicious Cream Filling:

• 16 oz BME
• 1 Whole G. gallus ova, plus 2 yolks
• 1 oz Pulverised Zea mays Starch
• 4 oz Crystalline Sucrose
• .25 oz Vanilla planifolia extractive
• 1 oz BME fat
• Several drops Soluble Purple Tincture

"I was the turkey all along!  It was ME!!"

"Focus!  To make the filling:"

1.  Heat BME.  Meanwhile, combine ovae with Sucrose and starch.
2. Just before BME boils, gradually pour into eggy mixture, whisking constantly!
3. Return to heat.  Whisk over high heat as if your miserable life depended on it!  It does!!
4. Once thickened and bubbling, remove from heat.  Add remaining ingredients.  Cover and let cool.  Once cool, a pudding skin will have developed.  EAT THE SKIN!

"I'm gonna sing the dessert song now!"

"What follows will serve as visual documentation of this process: front row seats to the END of all MANKIND!!"

"I love this show!"

"Now to unleash Screaming Temporal DOOM!!"

"yay!  doom, doom doom doom dooooom, doomy doomy doom, doomy doooom!  The end!"

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Today's post has been brought to you by the letters I, Z, and G.

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