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    This mostly-raw blueberry pie is a snap to make and very versatile--the filling microwaves in a few minutes, and you don't even have to bake the zippy gingered graham cracker crust--perfect for a hot Fourth of July and all summer long.

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Pastry again: vinegar adds the tender touch

Posted on December 31, 2013 by DebbieN

Most people, if faced with a quick baking dilemma, probably go to the supermarket and buy cookies or brownie bites or something.  And it makes sense, kind of, although with a food processor, you can make pretty good cookies and brownies in less time than it would take you to fight over holiday parking, much less elbow your way through the store.

The corresponding shortcut for most people who do bake would probably have to be pie crust–to say nothing of puff pastry dough. For years I’ve been looking for ways to make a pastry dough that is close to puff pastry–flaky and light and puffy–without being as heavy on saturated fats and calories. Not the easiest combination.

Fillo (purchased, I’m not enough of a DIYer to make my own yet and my kitchen’s too tiny for rolling and tossing a huge thin sail of dough the right way)–fillo is good for a lot of things, but it’s so obviously itself and not pie dough, tart dough or puff pastry. It’s also pretty salted–I always have to comparison-shop to remember which commercial version has the least sodium per ounce (they vary within brands, because some are intended for savories and the others for sweet pastries. I think the savory ones are much too salty and use the less-salted ones for spanakopita and so on as well as for baklava).

After having made a variety of pie doughs–standard flour-butter-salt-water, olive oil tart dough, rugelach butter-cream-cheese dough, and even a puff pastry recipe with about half the fat called for in the classics–plus croissants that I finally got right–I can say my latest experiment is something of an eye-opener for me.

All of these worked okay as doughs, but except for the olive oil tart dough, which I use routinely for quiche, none are really all that light-tasting or actually light in terms of fat content and overall calories. And rolling them thinner than the standard 3/8 inch (thinner equals less dough and fewer calories per serving…) sometimes leads to a tough pastry. The fact that I tend to use bread flour instead of all-purpose or cake flour is probably at fault as well, I’m sure, but I’m mostly a bread baker and not exactly a perfectionist, so how many different sacks of flour do I really want hanging around my cramped galley kitchen at any given time?

A week or two ago I checked out an older cookbook (late ’80s) on Armenian food and tried to puzzle out the Armenian, Lebanese, Turkish and Russian influences–it’s a real mix. I was looking for a recipe for bureka dough, and this book had one.

The recipe for spinach burekas had an accompanying (and aging, over-tinted ’80s-style) photo of a browned and flaky dough wrapped around a log of improbably-green spinach filling on a platter lined with too-green lettuce and too-orange tomato slices underneath. But other than the color enhancements, the spinach log, kind of like a spinach Wellington, looked pretty nice.

To my great surprise, the dough was quite similar to some of the ones Joan Nathan had in The Jewish Holiday Kitchen.  The key ingredient differences from my standard pie doughs are:

1. slightly more butter for the amount of flour than for standard pastry dough (to be expected–you want it flakier, you probably need more fat in the dough) though a lot less than for rugelach or puff pastry

2. a little vegetable oil as well

3. an egg. Nathan’s “muerbeteig” egg dough for a plum pie calls for a hard boiled egg yolk, of all things, but the one here is raw. I’m not sure what it’s for, exactly. Perhaps for leavening or some other structural purpose–maybe it helps the dough puff into layers and hold them better with less hard fat than puff pastry requires?

4. a quarter-cup of dry white wine–which I didn’t have, only red, which would have turned the dough gray…so I substituted half apple cider vinegar and half water–the vinegar because Nathan had used it in a dough with egg. Why wine or vinegar? I think–don’t quote me–it’s the acidity, which breaks down gluten a little and tenderizes the dough. Certainly it did in this case compared to my usual experience.

So anyway–this dough came out surprisingly well. It doesn’t puff anywhere near as much as puff pastry–at least not while rolled out as thin as possible, and I haven’t tried it thicker–but it’s light, crisp and tender at the same time and not heavy or greasy. It’s unsweetened and mostly unsalted and would be equally good for savory pastries, Wellingtons and other encased main-dish things (like pot pies, coulibiac of salmon, and spinach-type fillings) where it’s the top layer or a wraparound, and for sweet ones like the impromptu almond paste and apple tartlet at the bottom of this post. Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, books, cooking, Desserts, fruits, haute cuisine, holiday cooking, nutrition, nuts, Revised recipes, wine | Tagged: , , , | Comments Off on Pastry again: vinegar adds the tender touch

Celebration Update: “Mashup” Does Not Mean “More Potatoes”

Posted on December 20, 2013 by DebbieN

Two or three Thanksgivings ago I railed (as I often do) at the lack of imaginative and good-looking (both aesthetically and nutritionally)  vegetarian offerings for Thanksgiving main dishes. I wasn’t having a whole lot of luck being impressed by what I saw in the newsstand food glam magazines, vegetarian and vegan cookbooks, food blogs, my local newspaper food section, or even the freezer section of my local Whole Foods. So I came up with a list of suggestions for vegetarian centerpiece dishes.

This year, we had the double-double challenge: Thanksgiving fell on the first day (though only the second evening) of Chanukah for the first time in over 100 years (1860s was the last time?) and won’t again for another 77,000 or so (well, some sources say there’ll be another Thanksgivukkah moment in about another 100 years and then the big schlep out to 77K. Either way, for most of us, this is “that moment”).

For me, mashing up Thanksgiving and Chanukah just this once gives us some ideas for rethinking the kneejerk popular way of celebrating the big important holidays in general. Maybe even exploring what’s so vital about holidays and family and clearing away some of the thoughtless excesses.

Chanukah came so early this year that we had nearly no chance at buying or making tons of presents before having to schlep ourselves up the I5 to my in-laws’, so none of us was expecting anything but silly socks, a paperback or so, and maybe a stop in Solvang for Danish marzipan-based sweets on the way back home. That’s all to the good–Chanukah was never really meant to be a “more presents all the time” kind of holiday, it’s about freedom of religion, freedom from outside oppression, and gratitude for the miracle of having enough resources to go around. Thanksgiving is about those things too.

Unlike most years, I didn’t find a two-page checklist that Martin Luther would be jealous of, listing all the acceptable giftees our daughter wanted, posted on the fridge. Partly that’s because we wouldn’t be home to see it, and partly because she already had her bat mitzvah in June and she’s old enough now to feel like it’s more than plenty in the way of gifts. Plus by now she knows me–I have a strong tendency to roll my eyes and cross most of the stuff off the list with the familiar yearly litany of:

“Library…library…library…library…not wearable at school or synagogue, so what’s left, the mirror?…we have an unusually skilled cat and I don’t really want to think about hamsters in that context, do you?…library…library…not until you practice piano…I know I promised you could get your ears pierced eventually…maybe next month…”

It’s just a matter of practice. And a willingness to channel Sylvia (one of my favorite cartoon characters,  by the great Nicole Hollander).

Anyway, I have no idea if any of my ideas the last time I riffed on vegetarian centerpiece dishes gave someone else ideas–I hope so–but recently I ran across a vegan cookbook with dishes that look like they’d be just right for a celebration. It’s too late to recommend for Thanksgiving or Chanukah, but maybe for Christmas and onward? Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, DASH Diet, Food Blogs, holiday cooking, nuts, Revised recipes, shopping, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Halvah update–I think I’ve got it

Posted on January 4, 2013 by DebbieN

Just before we left for Boston (22 degree weather, anyone? anyone?–too much Ferris Bueller on the first week of school break), I revisited the Halvah Conundrum: how to make halvah that has the right texture when no one’s ever described it properly in a recipe. Last time’s attempt, which made use of a food processor, wasn’t too bad but the texture was still crumbly and tough–overworked, most likely.

Then I read a comment on another food site that recommended working the tehina/sugar syrup mixture like fudge by kneading the mixture in one direction as it cooled to get it to the right semicrystalline texture. I’d seen footage of a career fudge maker paddling the mass of chocolate and sugar syrup on a marble slab until it stiffened up, and thought the Syrian halvah manufacturing process (mechanized boxing glove in a vat of tehina and hot syrup) looked like a similar idea. So I thought kneading the mixture might strike the right balance between halvah that came out too limp and oily and the meringue-like stuff I’d produced last time–too aerated, and when pressed together, too tough and crumbly.

So  this time I skipped the food processor for blending the sugar syrup with the tehina and flavorings. I stirred the vanilla and lemon juice and powdered clove into the tehina while the syrup was cooking in the microwave. I’d forgotten to scale down the amount of lemon juice for a smaller amount of tehina–maybe this helped a bit, actually, because adding a small amount of water-based liquid to tehina stiffens it and makes it a bit doughy. Maybe that little bit of extra lemon juice helped give the mixture a start on developing the volume it needs without overworking or drying it out too much?

I stirred the hot, thickened sugar syrup into the tehina mix in thirds using a hand whisk, thinking that maybe not all of the syrup would become overworked if I did it in stages. After all the syrup was in the mixing bowl, I folded the limp oily brown mass (my heart was sinking when I saw this, but I bravely continued) back onto itself several times with a fork, essentially kneading it in the bowl, 10-20 turns, maybe half a minute worth of time, just until it turned a little lighter and stiffer, but not as stiff as meringues. I started with only a third of a pound of tehina, so for a full recipe, it would probably take a bit longer.

Then I pressed it flat into a container with a lid and stuck it in the fridge overnight. The next day I cut into it–I could cut thin slices! and it was almost like deli halvah! It’s still not quite as light and crystalline, it’s still a bit chewier, but it’s definitely closer. Next time: try the egg whites beaten in with the tehina, and then the hot syrup mixed in…

[April 20, 2014: A new question on halvah, with a few updates from me]

David S:

Debbie, I have been down a similar path in trying at times over several years to create halvah like Achva’s (my fave). But it has been textural failure after textural failure. Each time, the result is worth eating and tasty, but that elusive texture…can’t get it. So, I am thinking that the saponaria may be an important detail. The problem is, I have been unable to find it in reasonably small amounts (an ounce or two would prob. last a long time, but I see it for sale only by the 1lb container and it’s not cheap). And, if I did find some, it’s not clear how much should be used–1/4 to 1/2 tsp for a pound of halvah? If you know where I might buy small quantities, please let me know. I live in the San Fran. Bay Area, and usually about anything can be found around here, but saponaria (powder, I presume) is a tough one.

Oh–and the lemon juice: I don’t see that ingredient listed in commercial halvahs. Is it just for flavor, or is it a functional ingredient?

Achva’s ingredients for vanilla halvah: Sesame Seeds, Glucose Syrup, Sugar, Vegetable Fat (Palm), Natural Spice – Saponariae Root, Natural Identical Vanilla.

Btw, I have tried using glucose instead of regular sugar, and no luck. The Achva above is a mix of glucose and sugar. Odd that more fat is added!! It’s not as if sesame paste is a low-fat product to start with. I wonder if this is palm kernel oil, added for its solidity? I don’t recall seeing this ~10 years ago on their label.

Thanks for your detailed blog–it’s reassuring to know others are struggling with this too.

Hi David! Thanks–I’m never sure whether I fall into the “interesting experiment” category of foodieism or the “just plain weird”, but I appreciate it.

I’ve finally managed to find a YouTube video on a Turkish (I think) halvah maker who shows the saponaria root extract mixed in  with the hot syrup first–it makes a very white, thick ribbony foam like Swiss (or Italian) meringue (that’s probably why some halvah recipes I’ve seen use whipped egg whites, come to think of it) or marshmallow. Then they pour a large dollop of that mixture (in the half-gallon or 2-liter range) over a big working vat of tehina that must be 3 or 4 gallons (12-16 liters) and start folding it in with his hand–looks like a real workout for the guy doing it. He has a silicone hot glove on his mixing hand and keeps turning the work bowl as he mixes. It takes about 5-10 minutes for him to incorporate all of it gently and it starts cooling down to thick ribbons of stuff that dissolve back into the mass before the whole thing suddenly starts to look like bread dough.

That said, I’ve also seen a few recipes lately with no saponaria or egg white and that use a blender or food processor and the pictures of the resulting halvah look fine with a lot less work–as did the stuff in “Aromas of Aleppo”, so I think they either found the sweet spot on how long to boil the syrup or they were lucky and someone showed them or they don’t mind if it’s not deli-perfect in texture. Or maybe they’re lying and bought their perfect 3-inch-high slabs from a local deli. (jealous, moi?)

What else–oh. The lemon juice is for flavor, so taste and see if you like it, I suppose. I think it tastes pretty good with the ground clove and the vanilla and keeps it from being too blandly sweet. It’s not detectable as “lemony” unless you double or triple the amount, which I have done just to see if adding a little more juice to the tehina and stirring would stiffen it and give it a little more structure ahead of adding the syrup. Even then, it wasn’t bad. The palm oil is a very inexpensive fat/filler ingredient that’s gaining ground in processed food everywhere, mostly in baked goods but sometimes in spreads as well. I disapprove on principle because it dilutes the tehina flavor, plus it’s high in saturated fat, even though it’s vegetarian. One reason (other than simple interest in playing with my food…) why I wanted to try making it from scratch.

— DebbieN

[December 9, 2013: This question came in too late to post as a comment to this page, but I thought it was worth adding here–DebbieN]

On 2013/11/27
Elena

Hi, Debbie!
I want to try a home-made halva too. and I have all ingredients ( include soapwort), but I would prefer to create some sugar-reduce variation. What do you think – is it possible to reduce quantity of sugar syrup in your recipe?

On 2013/12/9

Hi Elena,
I don’t know–I don’t have instructions for a version with soapwort (I’m impressed that you can get it where you are). I’m still struggling to get the texture of my halvah right even this much later, and I still haven’t tried a version with whipped egg whites folded into the tehina before adding the syrup. Without egg whites or soapwort, just sugar syrup and tehina and flavorings, I wouldn’t try substituting for all the sugar–something tells me you need some sugar there to create the microcrystalline structure. But on the other hand, the Israeli brand Achva does make an artificially sweetened version that sells in our local Armenian grocery alongside their regular halvah, the standard cans of Joyva, and the (to my palate) slightly-too-sweet Cortas and Ziyadi (I think?). So theoretically it’s possible to go lower-sugar.

One way would be just cutting down on the sugar proportion and perhaps cooking the syrup to a slightly higher stage (ie a little beyond soft ball)–though it might seize up when you stir it into the tehina, unless you heated the tehina somewhat before mixing. Some recipes do call for heating the tehina to 120 F, which might keep the hot syrup from “shocking” and seizing up hard. Or else you might cut down a little on sugar syrup for the amount of tehina and add artificial sweetener to the tehina mixture before stirring in the syrup.

With soapwort, you might get more structure with less sugar syrup, so you could probably add artificial sweetener more effectively, but I don’t have a recipe for it and don’t know how to work with it. If it’s not too expensive and you’re willing to risk it or you’ve made halvah successfully before, try reducing the sugar syrup by 1/3 and adding sweetener to the tehina, keeping everything else the same. I would do this for a sample recipe amount, maybe just half a cup of tehina and proportional sugar syrup. Don’t risk a whole pound of tehina and 2 cups of sugar!

One thing I have discovered (yesterday, in fact) is that if the halvah comes out too soft and sticky, like limp caramels, you can put it in a microwaveable bowl, microwave it a minute or two until it just foams up and turns a lighter creamier color, and then beat air into it a few times with a fork until it just begins to stiffen like mashed potatoes. Unfortunately mine seized up and turned to sandy crumbs just after that point, but it still came out closer to right once I packed it together and let it cool.

Best of luck–DebbieN

Filed under: cooking, Desserts, nuts, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , | Comments Off on Halvah update–I think I’ve got it

Rugelach and the Chanukah Fairy

Posted on December 23, 2012 by DebbieN

Doesn’t that sound like the perfect title for an equal-opportunity holiday-themed kiddie book? Too bad my daughter’s too old for it now, and so are my nephews. Plus no one under 30 knows how to pronounce rugelach anymore. The “ch” always makes for Adam Sandler jokes because it’s so obviously Hard to Pronounce and even more obviously Not English–you use your throat to talk? Gross joke alert! The young and self-conscious have even taken to respelling Chanukah Hanukkah, just to avoid getting laughed at by their friends. Or their parents.

You may be asking what on earth rugelach have to do with Chanukah–and I’m a little late discoursing about Chanukah this week, since it just ended. However, let me warn you, they’re entirely relevant to the holiday treats vs. self-control dilemma.

Rugelach rolls slashed, baked and ready to be cut apart

Forming long rolls, slashing them partway before baking and then slicing them after is a quicker and easier way to form rugelach, especially with a very soft, delicate and hard-to-handle dough. It also lets the dough bake into crisp layers without letting the jam leak out. These two rolls are half the batch.

Fresh cheese (cream cheese, farmer’s or pot cheese) and sour cream are symbolic of Chanukah just as much as frying latkes or sufganiyot (doughnuts) in olive oil. During the war with the Assyrian Greeks in ca. 165 BCE that led to the rededication of the Temple (the event that sparked Chanukah), a Jewish woman named Judith invited the Assyrian Greek general Holofernes into her tent for what he thought was dinner and a movie–and she served him rich cheesecake (sometimes the story says “cheese pancakes”–maybe blintzes? who knows) to make him thirsty and then offered him a lot of undiluted wine. After that, the tryptophan got to him as she’d hoped (they didn’t have turkey back then) and he fell asleep. She chopped off his head (possibly to save the Jews, probably to stop the snoring) and Famous Western Painters from Rubens to Klimt have been painting her portrait ever since.

Puts another spin on the supposed tameness of homestyle baking, don’t it? Also serves as a warning on the more-is-more approach to pigging out. But old-style rugelach are designed to prevent both tameness and pigging out.

Now rugelach–the real thing–are what Pop Tarts never aspired to be (see Jerry Seinfeld’s Pop Tart joke in development at the New York Times online). That is, rugelach are self-limiting (an anti-commercial value) not because there are only two in the package but because they are serious pastry and taste like it.

The real thing is rich and flavorful enough that a few bites, one or two rugelach, are plenty even though they’re small. And before you ask why, it’s the use of cream cheese in the dough; the  tang makes the flavor seem a lot richer with a little less fat than an all-butter pastry dough. And it makes the dietary badness self-limiting: you really know when you’ve had enough.

One or two–delightful, blissful, they don’t do it like this anymore, it’s really Old School, my grandmother used to make these, how do you get them so flaky? Three–these are delicious, these are so evil, you’ve got to try the chocolate apricot one, I’ve already had so many! Four–klunk, groan (head hits knees in queasy stupor). It never fails.

Despite the Americanization and factory production of rugelach (even Starbucks sells a tame untangy version of them occasionally, or they used to), rugelach are a Jewish bakery specialty with a very simple dough that gives unbelievably rich, flaky, almost strudel-like results if you do it right. And luckily for me, it’s easy to do right. But it’s still too dangerous to do often.

And yet I’ve found myself making several batches this “holiday season”–one for my daughter’s piano recital, using the classic (and palming off the leftovers on the hosts so I wouldn’t have them at home), one for an experimental “lite” version that almost, but not quite, worked. It had flake, it lacked character. Sort of like the bland Americanized versions. What can I tell you? The lack of tang can’t be made up with salt and sugar–the tang is really what does it, which is why I went back to the classic and won’t revisit it again until next year.

…Although a woman in my congregation says she has a recipe that uses cottage cheese instead of cream cheese and is really good, I am choosing not to believe her.

Note on the dietary badness factor: If you go with either of these doughs and the fillings as directed in the recipe (i.e., you don’t double the sugar or use very sugary jam), a single rugelach comes out with about 6 grams total fat and 6 grams carbohydrate, about 65 calories, and about 20 mg. sodium. The degree of saturated fat depends on which recipe you use.

Classic Rugelach Dough (makes 44-48)

The classic recipe for the dough is:

  • 2 sticks (8 oz., 1/2 lb.) unsalted butter
  • an 8 oz package cream cheese
  • 2 c. flour

So basically equal and large amounts of butter and cream cheese. Soften them both and beat them together (a food processor is fine). Put the blended fats in a big mixing bowl and fold in the flour very gently with a wooden spoon, a couple of forks or the like, and don’t mix too thoroughly,  just barely enough for everything to come together as a very soft crumbly dough you can press into a ball. Put the dough in a plastic bag and pat it into a disk, divide it into four parts with a knife, and chill in the fridge or freezer about an hour until it’s firm enough to roll out. Easy, right?

Some people decorate the basic recipe with extra salt or sugar or, G-d help us, vanilla (Gale Gand puts in all three, why I don’t know). But really, the basic is the best. It gives you a nonsweet, very savory base for a sweet filling, and it’s anything but boring. It does NOT need jazzing up any more than French or Danish puff pastry does. And it builds character to make a pastry that doesn’t bow to middle-American excess. We have plenty of our own excess, thank you very much.

But cream cheese AND butter. A pound of fats for only two cups of flour, and almost all of it’s saturated. Yikes.

So I got to thinking (it had to happen sometime last week). Could I make the dough a little less rich and still great? Subbing in a reduced-fat labaneh from Karoun Dairies for the cream cheese? Maybe–but there’d be some water in it. Might not flake right. Hmm. Try it anyway, report back. Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, Dairy, Desserts, history, holiday cooking, nutrition, nuts, Revised recipes | Tagged: , , , | Comments Off on Rugelach and the Chanukah Fairy

Homemade Halvah

Posted on September 18, 2012 by DebbieN
Sesame halvah with pistachios

A little trickier than it looks–this one is nearly right and tastes good, but it was stiffer and more crumbly than professional halvah once it cooled. Next time!

I first tasted halvah at the age of six while visiting my cousins, who lived in my town but had been to Israel the year before. One afternoon my aunt shaved off a very thin sliver from this mysterious loaf of sandy light-brown stuff and handed to me with the caution, “Only a little piece at a time. It’s very rich.” Which it was, but the feathery impossible texture melted on my tongue and I wanted more.  When I got home from the visit, my father laughed when I asked him what my aunt had meant by “rich”–and explained that it meant “heavy”. That made no sense either–the tiny sliver was light and delicate. Then he said that once when he was twelve he’d eaten an entire pound of halvah in a single sitting and been extremely sorry afterward, because it sat in his stomach like a lead brick for hours…

I mention these things not just because they’re true of eating halvah, but they’re a good indication of the balance you need to achieve if you ever try making it.

Last year at Rosh Hashanah I made stuffed eggplants and onions with tamarind sauce from Poopa Dweck’s Aromas of Aleppo. I’ve enjoyed them enough to make the onions repeatedly over the past year, and I’ve also enjoyed the idea of making a new food for the New Year. Dweck’s book happens to have a halvah recipe, and the pictures look right, and the recipe looks really simple.

Well…the ingredients are incredibly simple–tehina, sugar, water, lemon juice, flavorings like a little vanilla, clove and cinnamon, maybe some pistachios or sliced almonds to mix in. The steps–boil sugar with a bit of water until it reaches 240°F on a candy thermometer. I don’t have one but she adds, helpfully, that it’s until the syrup coats the back of a spoon and is at the soft ball stage–shades of childhood reading through the Joy of Cooking‘s mysterious and dangerous section on candy recipes. Ahem! Boil the syrup and pour it hot over the tehina in the food processor, add the flavorings and blend. Take out the mass of halvah and press it into a pan to cool, then cut into cubes or slices and store at room temperature for a week or the refrigerator for up to 6 months…not that it will last that long.

Simple, right? So simple. I can probably microwave the syrup in about 2 minutes instead of simmering it for 20 on the stove, at least if I stir every 20-30 seconds and keep checking it…with the food processor handy, it’s like a 10-minute recipe if that! Simple.

The trouble with making halvah at home, as I discovered last week, three times, is that it’s not so simple. The first time I tried a proportionate miniature test version, with half a cup of tehina and about 3/8 cup of sugar, all measured and calculated down to the gram. The syrup cooked in a minute in the microwave and things were going really well…except the mixture seized up hard and crumbly the instant I mixed the syrup and tehina with a fork. And it was a bit too sweet and bland. Did something go wrong with the proportions? Did it need more of the oily tehina to make it flexible?

The second time I made it, the syrup was a little looser and the mixture turned a flat oily dark putty color and never really solidified past a thick paste. Nearly the same exact proportions, better taste (less bland, less cloying, more sesame). But I had made a soft sesame version of peanut butter fudge. You could slice it in squares, but it would sag like soft caramel.

So clearly it’s not that simple. I went to the web, thinking, of course someone will know what I’m doing wrong. And maybe someone does, but he or she is clearly not on the web expounding on the finer points of making halvah.

Oh, there are dissertations on halvah, but most of them are talking about the wide variety of desserts around the world that go by the same name–kinds that are based on wheat flour, carrots, sunflower seeds, and other main ingredients to mix with the syrup and pat into a pan.

Most of the (relatively few) tehina-based recipes are identical to Dweck’s, a pound of tehina, two cups of sugar, 1/3 cup of water, a teaspoon of lemon juice, a pinch of clove and cinnamon, maybe a spoonful of vanilla.

But the pictures show (and sometimes the rueful comments do too) that it’s not the ingredients at fault when the texture’s off. It’s the technique, which is usually missing from the recipe.

The videos I found on YouTube specifically for making tehina-based halvah didn’t really help. Iraqi halvah workers boiling syrup in an old–well, it kind of looks like a very worn-out steel bowl set over a trash can fire in an abandoned stairwell, and they’re stirring away with a wooden paddle before pouring in the tehina, which turns into curds that they then paddle and knead until they’re happy with it, but you can’t really see what it is that makes the difference.

Then there’s the Syrian halvah factory demonstration posted by Middle Eastern chef and cookbook author Anissa Helou–much cleaner, with an official halvah-kneading machine that Willy Wonka might have been proud of, pummeling the tehina/syrup mixture with what looks like a mechanical boxing glove on a stick, until it looks like hummus that’s Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, Desserts, haute cuisine, history, holiday cooking, nuts | Tagged: , , , , , | Comments Off on Homemade Halvah

Pistachio madness two ways

Posted on August 4, 2012 by DebbieN

(plus a handful of other frozen yogurt ideas)

Homemade pistachio frozen yogurt, very low carb

It’s over 90 degrees most of the day in Pasadena, and I’ve gotten tired of looking at the limited selection of Dreyer’s (Edy’s east of the Rockies), Breyers, Haagen Daz, and Private Selection flavors with my daughter. It’s starting to get tedious, and they’ve dropped many of the classics for the cheapest possible quality candy-plus-ersatz-vanilla (note: their real vanillas are better). The forgotten classics were better-tasting, less dependent on goo and sweetened brown wax parading as chocolate or (if salted) peanut butter.

No supermarket ice cream brand in the non-superpremium range today offers rum raisin or pistachio worth considering anymore. It’s easy enough to doctor your own version with storebought vanilla ice cream and the aforementioned rum and raisins, but pistachio?

Pistachio used to be a standard ice cream flavor, didn’t it? Maybe I’m just getting old? Naah. Even in the ’70s when I was a kid, most of the “pistachio” ice cream around was already fake. I want the real thing, not the artificially green, mostly-vanilla-with-a-tinge-of-synthetic-almond kind.

And I want it low-fat for me and my husband and low-carb for my daughter (and us too, why not?) And I want it to taste delicious despite all that. Tall order? Actually, it’s easier than you’d think.

David Lebovitz has a Sicilian pistachio paste-based gelato in The Perfect Scoop, and he blogged about it a couple of years ago as well. He made it sound delicious, but also expensive and hard to find the ingredients for. Not that I’m against a trip to Sicily, except in July when it’s about as searing as LA (been there, done that, got the sunburn and the Fellini moments combined with heat exhaustion).

About the same time, a local gelateria owner in my area took much the same position on the utter superiority of Sicilian pistachios versus California ones for an interview in the LA Times. Which is lovely if you have a good source of Sicilian pistachios or pistachio paste at a decent price, but what if you don’t?

Most of the home-brew pistachio ice cream recipes I’ve seen in magazines, blogs and cookbooks call for adding significant amounts of heavy cream. Or else they involve large amounts of sugar. Or both. Yes, those recipes will give ice cream-like results, but they’re completely offtrack for what I need.

In my universe, good taste on a hot day shouldn’t mean losing your svelte, your cool or your wallet.

The nuts themselves are okay–pistachios, like most nuts and seeds, are very low carb and though high in calories from total fat, most of that is unsaturated. If I can keep the rest of the ingredients low fat and low carb and the stuff still tastes good, I’ll have it. Right?

So okay. I’ve been playing around with California pistachios and–not gelato, that requires making an egg-based custard and blending it with flavorings. Done it once or twice, and it worked, but it’s more work than I want to do most days. Or it used to be. Nowadays I’ve got the microwave moxie to make custard without so much work, but it’s still not what I want today. I want easy.

Frozen yogurt made with real yogurt is too tart to work with anything much but fruit unless you mix in some milk–and then it’s icier and freezes harder.

However, this summer I’ve been playing around with fat-free Greek yogurt as the base for a couple of different ices in small quantities. Greek yogurt varies a bit in nutritional stats from brand to brand, and it’s expensive, which is why I took so long to try it out. But the cheapest all-real (no gelatin) stuff–Trader Joe’s O% fat plain version–while still twice as expensive as the regular plain nonfat yogurt ($5 vs. $2.50 a quart), has considerably less carb, maybe only 7 grams of carb per cup as opposed to 17 for regular. And it has about twice the protein–22 grams per cup. It’s a lot thicker and less acidic, so I’m assuming they drained out a lot of the carb in the whey. And it makes really easy frozen yogurts that taste like something and aren’t overwhelmingly tart.

Just mix in your flavoring of choice (preferably not too watery) with some sugar, and you can still-freeze it within an hour or two. If you think the tang needs to be tamed further, a little milk mixed in works okay and it stays thick enough to freeze fairly gracefully.

The texture is never going to be like ice cream, not entirely. It still mixes up pretty hard and a little icy if you still-freeze it, but once you’ve got it thawed out to the point where you can dig out a serving, it tastes good and changes to a creamy texture as you eat it, something like khulfi. Higher-fat yogurt would break the iciness up a bit but would defeat my purpose of lowering the saturated fat to something I can handle.

And the heavy fats and sugars mask any delicate flavorings. Think Italian gelato (the real kind you get on the street in Florence, not the overpriced stuff you get in pints in the supermarket here) and you know that a lighter base allows you things like rose or ricotta or apricot or kiwi, or hazelnut, or four different highly refined grades of chocolate. If you want to taste anything delicate in your ice cream, you have to get the fats and sugars down enough not to overwhelm it.

Not that I’m entirely subtle. My favorite icier-textured frogurt for when it’s broiling out is mint–Greek yogurt, a couple of drops of mint extract, if that’s strong enough without tasting like postage stamps, and a tablespoon or so of sugar. Divvy it up into 2-4 paper cups or popsicle makers (small is okay for this), freeze. On a searingly hot day it’s pretty good, intensely flavored and refreshing, and its popsicle-style texture is fine with me.

For something like coffee frogurt, I really do want a creamier texture if I can get it. I finally figured I should just brew a little bit of triple-strength coffee so I can mix just a few spoonfuls into a cup of Greek yogurt, maybe with a few spoonfuls of milk, and still get strong enough flavor.

A spoonful or two of alcohol-based flavorings like rum, amaretto, even just vanilla extract can soften the hard-freeze effect, since the alcohol freezing point is lower than that for water.

Or you can add something protein or starch to the mix–egg custards and cornstarch are the usual route for gelati and standard commercial ice cream, but silken tofu and nonfat powdered dry milk also work to break up the ice crystals. Greek yogurt is providing most of the protein here and little water, and the carb is a lot less than for the powdered dry milk.

The last thing on my list, and it sounds either weird or completely obvious, is to add a fat–but I want something unsaturated. Oil? Yuck (though I have seen some olive oil ice creams flavored with basil or the like). But what about nut butters? Those, don’t laugh too hard, work pretty well and give the frozen yogurt a richness that feels like ice cream, only without big saturated fats or modifiers or xanthan gum or corn syrup solids or whatever. Plus they’re interesting flavors.

Halvah: I started with my trusty jar of tehina–sesame paste. It’s got almost all its fat in polyunsaturated form. A tablespoon in a cup of Greek yogurt, plus a tablespoon of sugar, stir, freeze, dig out a chunk–not so hard! And the flavor–kind of like frozen halvah. Very rich, though. Maybe I could get away with less tehina or more yogurt?

Chocolate halvah: I tried a chocolate version–also not bad–by adding two tablespoons of cocoa powder and an additional spoonful of sugar to the tehina/yogurt mix. Pretty good, but the tehina taste was definitely still there alongside the chocolate. Like chocolate marble halvah. You have to be a fan.

Peanut butter? Probably more Americans would like it than the tehina version. Go easy on the peanut butter; a good-tasting mix I once made with half a cup got way, way way too rich very quickly once it was frozen. Stick with a tablespoon or so per cup of yogurt. I’d use natural peanuts-only peanut butter, preferably the crunchy one, for the purest taste, limit the sugar and add a pinch of salt.

But really. I started out wanting pistachio, and that’s where I’m still going with this. Because I ended up with two, count ’em TWO, really good, really different variations on pistachio, and both of them were really easy, really low in saturated fat, and REALLY low-carb. And actively delicious, which is definitely the point.

California pistachios may not be the Sicilian ideal, but they taste pretty good for what they are.  TJ’s sells 8 oz of roasted unsalted ones for about 5 bucks. Not exactly cheap. Still, the shelling’s been done, and for a pint of finished frogurt, you only need an ounce of pistachios. Will that be enough to taste like something? Oh, yes. Continue reading →

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Fruitcake and the Jews

Posted on December 27, 2011 by DebbieN

A week or so ago, just before the Chanukah madness, my husband brought home what he assumed were The Goods from the local Vons (Safeway chain affiliate on the west coast)–a classic fruitcake, green and red candied citron glowing evilly amid chunks of walnut and raisins and other less identifiable bits and topped with syrupy pecans and glacéed cherries. Tacky as hell, we know. We love fruitcake anyway.

Why do Jews like fruitcake more than Christians do? You know, the kind of indestructible fruitcake everyone jokes about passing off to some unsuspecting cousin after having received it 20 years earlier and having kept the tin in the closet all that time underneath some shoes. The kind the British refer to as “doorstop”. The kind all modern cake blogs decry when they present their own lighter, cakier, less fruity and less chewy version as “fruitcake you’ll actually like.” THAT fruitcake.

Well. Private Selection or not, the cake from Vons was…I don’t know if there are new legal restrictions on using rum or bourbon or other booze as a baking ingredient these days (or ice cream flavor; hard to find Rum Raisin anymore). Maybe it’s a California-does-rehab thing, or just a huge downgrading of quality, but it. Was. Awful.

No rum. No bourbon or other appropriate flavoring. Instead, the loaf was permeated with an aggressively soapy flavor/odor (we couldn’t even tell which), horridly artificial and perfumy like fruit-scented liquid hand soap. Or that overpowering Dove soap I always hated as a kid. You couldn’t even taste the raisins or walnuts, which by all accounts, including visual inspection, were present.

We were, perhaps for the first time ever, not tempted to eat any more, not even to try a tiny second taste the next day to see if it was really as bad as we thought the first time. Just passing the open packet on the table was enough to convince us the bar of Dove that must have fallen into the batter was still giving that loaf its younger-looking complexion. After several days of forlorn looks in its direction, we actually threw it out.

In any case, I’ve been looking for a trustworthy recipe for fruitcake ever since and not succeeding much. In a place where there is no fruitcake, strive thou to make taka a fruitcake. (Not exactly sure what the “taka” part means in Yiddish; the way my mother says it, it means something like “especially” or “such a”, but less polite and more ironic, as you might use it when pointing out how incredibly garish and over-the-top the neighbor’s Christmas lights are with the Continue reading →

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Pecans, Profits, Poverty: reason to remember the gleaners

Posted on December 20, 2011 by DebbieN

From the New York Times today:
In Georgia, Pecan Thieves Find Windfall, at $1.50 a Pound

Now I know stealing is stealing, and scrumping is scrumping, but there’s a decent argument in here somewhere for leaving some of the fallen nuts for the poor to gather–even if it’s to sell to local nut brokers at a dollar-fifty a pound. The farmers claim their losses are growing this year–small wonder!–but one of the biggest growers estimates he’s selling 7 million pounds and the thefts total to about 10,000 pounds. Less than one percent. The article quotes $3 per pound as standard wholesale–all I can say is, out here in California our best local price is $9 per pound for shelled pecans (I don’t bother with the ones still in the shells; I’m not that good).

Some of the thieves are stealing amounts large enough to be serious theft–1400 pounds in one case–and cutting fences to break in. You get no argument from me for calling the sheriff on them. But most are genuinely poor–laid off and out of work, trying to make 15 or 20 bucks with the bit they can gather in a bucket or sack from the edges of the local pecan groves. Yes, that starts to add up if you have 50 people doing it, and yes, it’s more than one person would expect to be able to eat because they were hungry, but perhaps the talk of theft should be reconsidered and turned around to a discussion on gleaning, and not trimming the corners of your fields but rather leaving the last bits of the harvest for the poor to gather. The amount of money these small-scale gatherers can expect to make by selling to the local nut brokers is paltry and nowhere near in competition with the price the growers can get per pound.

Ironically, if the growers let locals pay a significant discount price per pound–50 cents a pound? 75 cents? to gather fallen nuts themselves after the main harvest, as many apple orchards do, they might reduce the incentive for break-ins, reduce their financial losses from theft and security costs, and save themselves some labor and wear-and-tear on their expensive ground harvesters. And they might still be seen as generous.

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