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Mastering Mandelhorns

Posted on March 24, 2010 by DebbieN

Jewish and Greek bakeries often have big, chewy almond horns somewhere in the pastry case, sometimes with the ends dipped in dark chocolate, and whenever I can find them they’re what I home in on. Babka isn’t bad, nor is baklava, don’t get me wrong. I love them both. But neither of them comes anywhere close to mandelhorns in my world. And don’t get me started on mandelbrot–not the same thing at all. AT ALL. Even my great-aunt Tessie’s, which as I understood from my dad were the pinnacle of the form.

Almond macaroons and marzipan confections in general all have three main ingredients–almonds, sugar, and eggs–plus or minus almond extract, rosewater, orange blossom water, or lemon peel, depending on your era and country of origin. They’re very basic sweets that go back at least to medieval times and were made everywhere from the eastern edges of Persia (maybe in China too) to the western edges of Spain and Morocco. You can find recipes for them in The Form of Cury, Richard II’s chef’s cookbook from the late 1300s, and they’re mentioned in early Spanish literature as “Jewish pastries” dating from before the Inquisition.

For years I’ve tried with limited success to make almond macaroons. They always come out flat or hard with shiny bottoms (not that we didn’t eat them all anyway, but really). Over the years I must have collected more than a dozen variations–they’re always listed in the newspapers for Passover, since we traditionally ban baked goods made with flour and other grains during that holiday. Which is coming up.

Right before winter break, I wanted to try and make mandelhorns right for a change, so I could bring some up to my husband’s family. I went back to my cooking file with all the variations and actually looked at them carefully.

There are a couple of ways to make almond macaroons and almond horns right, and I’d been doing none of them. The first is to make an “Italian” or “Swiss” meringue Continue reading →

Filed under: baking, cooking, Desserts | Tagged: almond horns, almond paste, bakeries, baking, Desserts, Jewish cooking, macaroons, mandelhornchen, mandelhorns, marzipan, Passover, Passover recipes, pastries, sweets | Comments Off on Mastering Mandelhorns

Knives at Dawn: Bringing Heat to the Kitchen

Posted on March 18, 2010 by DebbieN

So much of TV-chefery these days has to do with blood sport that it’s inevitable someone would start covering cooking competitions by following underdog contestants as though they were Olympic figure skating hopefuls. And although it’s been done before, both on Top Chef and in many, many of the star chef bios of the past 5 years, Knives at Dawn by Andrew Friedman gives one of the most detailed personal and critical inside views yet of the strange pursuit of haute cuisine for haute cuisine’s sake. Part sports dramalogue, part Judgment of Paris, Knives at Dawn trails a handful of American chefs attempting to compete for one of the highest honors in European cooking.

The Bocuse d’Or is one of the most prestigious cook-offs in the world and garners contestants from all over Europe and a few of the US’s top restaurants. The costs of training run the price of a small house, and the US team has had no government or corporate sponsorship, unlike many of the European competitors.

Throughout three months of preparation which Thomas Keller and Daniel Boulud oversaw in 2008-9, a team (1 chef, Timothy Hollingsworth, and 1 commis or prep chef assistant, Adina Guest) from Keller’s French Laundry are coached to represent the US in Lyon. They have to cover the training and travel bills at their own expense, and continue working their day jobs for more of the time than their European opponents.

As Hollingsworth designs and revises his competition entries, suggested garnishes get more and more elaborate–sometimes without anything that’s likely to make them taste better. Onion tuiles. Things wrapped in Swiss chard leaves or carrot ribbons. Savoy cabbage as a “fun” garnish for beef cheeks (here I confess I pictured cafeteria kale as a “fun” accompaniment to the legendary dish, chair mystère–Mystery Meat). And lots of things made with mandoline-sliced potatoes crisped to perfection between silpats. In fact, the word perfection, followed by perfectionistic and culture of perfectionism, keep repeating throughout the section on Hollingsworth and Guest’s training period. It’s a bit unglamorous, to tell you the truth.

The exactitude of discussion over details like garnish, plating, and the like for one fish dish and one meat dish is the kind of technical overdose patter that puts people to sleep at any time other than the actual routine that will count for scoring. Something like the perennial Dick Button and whichever female commentator could be roped in to join him, talking rinkside about the difference in a triple-lutz made by putting pressure on the inside versus the outside edges of the blade.

Comes the week of competition and things start to take on the frenetic tone of a typical Top Chef episode, but Friedman has a knack of lifting the description Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, Eating out, haute cuisine, Odd food, sauces and condiments | Tagged: Adina Guest, Bocuse d'Or, book reviews, Culinary Institute of America, Daniel Boulud, food writing, French Laundry, haute cuisine, Knives at Dawn, Paul Bocuse, Thomas Hollingsworth, Thomas Keller, Top Chef | Comments Off on Knives at Dawn: Bringing Heat to the Kitchen

Low-Carb Hamantaschen Without Artificial Sweeteners

Posted on February 28, 2010 by DebbieN

The first batch didn't roll out so easily, but these coin-sized minis tasted pretty good. The next batch rolled out thinner and held together better for a larger cookie with a delicate crust.

Baked goods are a big part of Jewish holidays at this time of year. Purim, being celebrated this weekend, is the last big baking bash before Passover, and hamantaschen (named for the hat, ears or purse of Haman, the villain of the story of Esther) are the cookie of choice. But with a diabetic kid in the house, the usual prospect of baking them takes on a bitter edge.

Hamantaschen–in fact, most cookies–have enough grams of carbohydrate that just two medium-sized cookies contain about half of what she’s supposed to have in any given large meal, twice what’s recommended for a snack, and they don’t have enough fiber or protein to slow down the sugars and avoid a spike in blood glucose. In short, not high-quality nutrition (not that we expect cookies to be). A grownup would have trouble dealing with the prospect of leaving them alone when everyone else gets to have them, but a kid faced with Purim celebrations at school or synagogue is bound for a certain degree of heartbreak.

It’s made me rethink our whole attitude toward things like Girl Scout cookies (this is also the season for that), chips, M&Ms, in fact any casual snack food that gets handed out innocently at school (our current woe–apparently my daughter’s teacher does this kind of thing at least weekly). The snack habit–anytime, anywhere, any or no reason–has become so ingrained in daily life we hardly think about whether it’s appropriate or not. Certainly the handouts are happening more and more frequently in class than I remember when I was a kid–did teachers even hand out treats back then? Not in my elementary school. It’s especially hard for a kid to “just say no” (and we already know how well that advice works in other contexts) when everyone else is taking a cookie or some M&Ms as a reward for answering a question (can they even keep their minds on the subject)? And even worse when it’s the teacher handing them out, because the teacher’s supposed to know whether it’s ok to eat or not.

Maybe we shouldn’t be handing these things out so casually or so often? Because while most people can handle surprise extras like these, they’re probably not all that good for anyone to eat indiscriminately at just any time of day. If they’re spiking a diabetic kid’s blood sugar, you can be sure they’re doing the same thing to your kid’s blood sugar too, only his or her body is responding with extra insulin to cover it. We get to see the results directly every couple of hours with our daughter–complete with sudden attacks of giddiness or tears if things peak and crash too quickly. But the same kind of thing happens to some degree to a lot of kids who aren’t diabetic, and they probably get reprimanded for it. Probably happens to a lot of adults, too.

Still, it’s the holiday, and total deprivation from treats is not really my aim today. So I’ve been trying to figure out a revised recipe for hamantaschen with a more manageable carb count, and preferably one without artificial sweeteners since my kid is still a kid. And neither of us wants it to taste like chalk. Very important.

I start most years with Joan Nathan’s cookie-dough hamantaschen recipe from The Jewish Holiday Kitchen because it’s the best dough I’ve ever tasted for these, even though it’s pareve (non-dairy, non-meat) and doesn’t have butter or cream cheese or the like. It’s not too sweet or too dry, and it doesn’t look or taste chalky or pasty like some of the dead-white offerings at the Purim carnivals. It tastes like a pretty good cookie, and it works really well for rolling out.

Looking at the carb count breakdown for that recipe, at about 12-15 g each, it might not be so bad to do regular hamantaschen, but my daughter would need to eat one or at most two with something protein or fiber, and she’d need insulin for it, so she couldn’t just grab one in between the planned meals. Kind of a pain, no doubt about it.

I was hoping for something closer to carb-free so she could eat hers with impunity when everyone else is eating theirs. This year I scanned the web for low-carb hamantaschen recipes and found only one Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, Desserts, history, kid food, nutrition, Revised recipes | Tagged: almond meal, baking, cookie recipes, Hamantaschen, Jewish holidays, juvenile diabetes, low-carb cookie dough, low-carb desserts, low-carb hamantaschen, pastry, Purim | Comments Off on Low-Carb Hamantaschen Without Artificial Sweeteners

Measuring when you have to be right

Posted on February 26, 2010 by DebbieN

I’ve been cooking by hand for most of my adult life, and I cook by eye as well. This mostly comes out in the form of measuring by pouring things like baking soda or ginger into the palm of my hand rather than fishing around in the silverware drawer for a quarter-teaspoon or tablespoon. Too much fuss, I always thought, and it was a point of pride to be able to do without it.

It turns out a lot of people think measuring by hand is the mark of a chef: almost every one of the rising food stars who’ve broken into print insists in their “restaurant hints for home cooks” that you should measure salt “by feel” or the like while seasoning food in several stages during cooking.

But suddenly having to calculate in grams of carbohydrate per serving for my daughter has meant buying a new set of cup and spoon measures as well as an electronic food scale and really measuring, the official kind of measuring, instead of just eyeballing.

In making the comparison, I’ve discovered a number of unpleasant truths about the by-hand method. Most of which boil down to IT’S NOT ACCURATE. AT ALL. And I’m not talking a little 20 percent error here.

Try the following:

Cup your hand and pour a pre-measured level quarter-teaspoon of table salt into it. Go on and look hard, try to memorize how high it rises on your palm, what a quarter-teaspoon of salt looks like. Now dump it, wipe off your hand, Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, kid food, nutrition, Revised recipes | Tagged: carb counting, carbohydrates, diabetes, food scale, kitchen utensils, kitchenware, low sodium, measuring cups | Comments Off on Measuring when you have to be right

Rethinking everything

Posted on February 21, 2010 by DebbieN

I’ve been away from my desk, my notebooks, this blog for two weeks now. I never expected to be–it’s become a weekly adventure to seek out new topics in food, food politics, nutrition, and alternate methods for cooking real food faster. And then last week my daughter was diagnosed with Type I diabetes.

Diabetes is one hell of a verdict when you think your kid is just growing, and then just has a simple stomach virus, and it turns out to be neither of those things. It was also one of those strange fairytale paradoxes by which a cursed or poisoned feather turns out to save the princess in rags. She’d come home from school three weeks ago with what seemed like a routine stomach bug, but it wasn’t. Instead of a bit of fever, antsy impatience at having to rest and then bouncing back, she was cool, sleeping around the clock, drinking a lot even when she couldn’t stand to eat, and losing weight fast. Taking her back to the doctor the second week, we were thinking anemia, mono–afraid to think anything worse. Thank god our doctor threw in a glucose test along with the usual suspects. By afternoon he’d called and told us to get her down to the ER.

A night in the hospital is no picnic, even if all they’re doing to your kid is putting her on an i.v. and pricking her fingers with a lancet for testing once in a while. The second night is no fun either–everything the doctors have been telling you goes in one ear and slides right out the other as you wonder what your kid will ever be able to do normally again, and how much you’ll have to worry for her the rest of her life, and how you’re going to keep from laying those worries on her. And yet–at some point in the middle of the second night, unable to sleep much between nurse interruptions–I started to realize my daughter’s legs and arms and face were already filling back out, and in fact she had spent a good part of the second day sitting up reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for all she was worth, reading me her favorite bits in a silly voice and cackling every once in a while. More energy than I’d seen in three weeks. Whatever they’d done to lower her sugars and balance her electrolytes again was really working. She was reappearing before my eyes. I had no idea how to feel anymore except shocked, grateful and slightly absurd.

Furthermore, every time the orderly came by to pick up a menu or leave a meal, my daughter tucked into the food as though it had been catered by Daniel Boulud. (Of course, most of the meals featured meat, which she loves but I don’t make very often.) It is fairly humiliating to have your kid announce that the hospital meals are better than those at home…

Then she started talking about which kinds of potatoes she likes or doesn’t, whether and how soon she can have pizza, how will she ever be able to go to a birthday party and stand not having cake or candy or ice cream without having to figure out the carbs and the insulin beforehand, what about Valentine’s Day and on and on. Somehow oatmeal raisin cookies became the benchmark of whether she was going to be able to eat like a person or not–and she hasn’t even had a taste for them in at least six months.

The shrinkage, the re-blossoming, and the total fixation on treats and sweets, all within a few days in a hospital bed–suddenly Charlie Continue reading →

Filed under: Beans and legumes, cooking, Desserts, Eating out, Grains, kid food, nutrition, Odd food, Pasta, Revised recipes | Tagged: artificial sweeteners, baking, carb counting, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, juvenile diabetes, NutraSweet, Roald Dahl, Splenda, sugar substitutes, Type I diabetes | Comments Off on Rethinking everything

Salt reduction vs. hypertension meds–which would you choose?

Posted on January 21, 2010 by DebbieN

One of the big complaints processed food companies, physicians in clinical practice, and the great gourmet media all have in common is that cutting back on salt would make food taste flat, and you as an individual wouldn’t necessarily get a big drop in your personal blood pressure from doing it. They argue that only “salt-sensitive” people have to worry about their intake, and anyway, a few points lower, they all say, isn’t really impressive enough to give up your 300-mg serving of sodium in a bowl of Kellogg’s raisin bran or 390 in a slice of La Brea sourdough. And don’t, for g-d’s sake, ask your favorite name brand celebrity chefs to stop salting early and often in each dish!

A big statistical modeling study in the New England Journal of Medicine this week knocks all this wishful thinking on the head, and does it very nicely. The study looked not at individual blood pressure drops but the health and cost benefit of dropping average salt intake by 3 grams a day over the entire U.S. population.

The researchers found that if everyone drops their salt intake back down, the benefits start to look like the ones from quitting smoking, cutting cholesterol and saturated fat, and losing weight to get to a normal BMI.

That’s because even when individual blood pressures drop by only a few points, they’re not going up (as they are today), and when a small average drop happens in a very large group, the big bell curve of disease shifts toward lower risk of consequences and later starts for developing heart disease and high blood pressure. After the first national cholesterol lowering guidelines were issued in the late 1960s, the nation’s heart disease and stroke risk dropped by about a third, and at least until obesity and blood pressure started to cause a back-reaction, the average age for a first heart attack went from 50 to 60 in men. That’s a huge kind of benefit.

The combined drop in heart disease and stroke deaths from cutting salt would be something like 200-400,000 people per year, a lot more than can be saved by simply putting everyone on blood pressure medications–the study made that comparison directly.

Altogether, a solid recommendation for dropping sodium levels in processed and restaurant foods, which make up about 80% of today’s sodium intake. And for not imitating processed food and chain restaurant thinking in your professional or home cooking, as Francis Lam seems to in his Salon.com commentary on the new NYC Department of Health initiative. And if there was any doubt that the Culinary Institute of America has been training Continue reading →

Filed under: breads, cooking, DASH Diet, Eating out, Food Blogs, Food Politics, kid food, nutrition | Tagged: cardiovascular disease, Culinary Institute of America, Food Politics, food porn, Francis Lam, heart disease, hypertension, low-salt, National Salt Reduction Initiative, processed food industry, public health, Regina Schrambling, salt, stroke | Comments Off on Salt reduction vs. hypertension meds–which would you choose?

Putting Pie Crust on a Diet

Posted on January 16, 2010 by DebbieN

From a recent LA Times special on savory pies comes a classic calorie-bomb–only, it’s not even the pie. It’s the pie dough itself:

Basic savory pie dough No. 2 (cream cheese)

Servings: 1 double-crust (9-inch) pie or 6 individual hand pies

1 (8-ounce) container cream cheese, at room temperature

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, at room temperature

1/4 cup cream

1 teaspoon salt

2 2/3 cups (11 1/2 ounces) flour

Each of 6 servings: 638 calories; 9 grams protein; 44 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams fiber; 48 grams fat; 29 grams saturated fat; 137 mg. cholesterol; 1 gram sugar; 518 mg. sodium.

Now come on. 638 calories before you ever get to the filling? Who wants to eat that much pie dough at a time, especially one so rich? OK, don’t answer that, but really. Gag.

Except for the extra cream and the teaspoon of added salt (and why do you even need those with a cream cheese dough anyway?) this is really just a classic rugelach dough–you mix the fats together and then stir in the flour a little at a time by hand. Only, rugelach dough is meant to be rolled out as thin as physically possible–1/16 inch thick or even less–before spreading with jam and nuts and chocolate and cinnamon and so on and rolling it up into a crescent shape. And a good thing too, because cream cheese doughs are notoriously rich. More dough per rugelach and you’d soon feel like you’d eaten an airline Danish–it would sit like lead in your stomach for hours.

I compared the recipe above with the one in my much-used spiral-bound 1984 edition of Joan Nathan’s The Jewish Holiday Kitchen (thank you, Hadassah rummage sale!) It was probably the one cookbook that influenced me most as a college student, and I still use it for the classics, especially baked things like rugelach and hamantaschen that I can’t just wing (note–her cookie-style hamantaschen recipe is the best I’ve ever tasted, a far cry from the usual chalky white horrors on the Purim carnival bake sale table).

Based on Nathan’s rugelach recipe, which is the same recipe everyone everywhere seems to use, the quantities in the LA Times recipe above should make something like 40 rugelach, so figure about 15-20 realistic servings, not six. The cooks at the LA Times must be rolling the dough out the standard 3/8 inch thick for their pies, but it seems like a complete waste of this dough’s particular talents. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Desserts, Food Blogs, Grains, nutrition, Revised recipes | Tagged: baking, Chocolate & Zucchini, Clotilde Dusoulier, cream cheese, Joan Nathan, olive oil, pastry, pie crust, rugelach, samosas, saturated fat, tart shells, unsaturated fat | 2 Comments »

A Year of Artichoke Hearts

Posted on January 11, 2010 by DebbieN

“Top 10 Recipes” lists are a big thing at the new year, a way to look back and figure out which dishes made a hit and which ones were just so-so. But sometimes, after an entire year, the top-10 judging criteria can get a little distorted. How do dining section editors compare five quasi-Asian stir-fried noodle-and-greens dishes, most of them mysteriously pumped up with bacon crumbles (2009’s star ingredient), and decide all five really belong in the top 10 for the year?

In one of my early posts, I was thinking about toasted cheese sandwiches (grilled cheese, hard to believe, was a Top 100 Dishes entry for Bon Appétit at that point). At the end, I threw in a quick little recipe for marinated artichoke hearts done in a microwave as an antidote to all the middle-American boredom. Yesterday I ran across an artichoke and potato salad from the LA Times‘s 2009 top-10 list and realized my artichoke hearts would probably make it better. Because they make everything better, or almost.

Marinating your own artichoke hearts takes five minutes, is less expensive than buying a jar of prepared ones, tastes fresher, and has a short list of real ingredients. A ~12-oz batch lasts more than a week in the fridge, where it’s ready to serve as a pick-me-up for sandwiches, pasta, fish, omelets, salads, and hot vegetable dishes. I use these artichoke hearts so often that whenever I get to my Trader Joe’s and they’ve run completely out of bags of plain frozen artichoke hearts in the freezer and won’t get any in for weeks, I feel horrible and deprived, like someone who’s just been told not to talk with her hands.

That puts it in MY top 10.

You don’t need more than a dash of salt in this recipe to make the artichoke hearts taste intense and bright. The fresh lemon juice and garlic do it for you, and something about the artichokes themselves makes the combination work. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Microwave tricks, nutrition, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments, top 10, Vegetabalia | Tagged: artichoke hearts, cauliflower, condiments, DASH Diet, harissa, Jewish cooking, low sodium, marinated artichoke hearts, microwave cooking, potatoes, salads, top 10 dishes, vegetables, z'khug | Comments Off on A Year of Artichoke Hearts

Not a shock: Nutrition labels understate calories

Posted on January 7, 2010 by DebbieN

Not a shock: According to diet researchers from Tufts who did calorie calculations and direct caloric measurements,

Nutrition labels for common restaurant menu items and supermarket frozen meal s consistently understate calories by up to 18 percent.

Filed under: cooking, Eating out, Food Politics, nutrition | Comments Off on Not a shock: Nutrition labels understate calories

Real Soba

Posted on January 2, 2010 by DebbieN

Happy New Year! The LA Times just published a feature on New Year celebrations in Japan. The December 30th article on making your own soba or buckwheat noodles has instructions and demo pictures from a professional soba chef–and the traditional recipe contains…no salt. At all. Contrast that with any of the store-bought brands here in the U.S. It also has a lot more buckwheat than the store-bought types, using a ni-hachi (2:8) proportion of wheat to buckwheat, so it probably has a lot more buckwheat flavor. Worth a try, and if you’re not sure you know how to knead to the right texture by hand, you might be able to knead the dough in a food processor to get it very smooth and elastic before rolling it out. Traditional Soba from the LA Times

The dipping sauce recipes that accompany the soba article are no bargain sodium-wise, and they contain a lot of sugar as well as a lot of soy sauce mixed in with the dashi stock, but at least the noodles themselves aren’t adding to the problem. You could use low-sodium soy sauce and less of it; you could also decide not to follow tradition and use a different dipping sauce with more substance and less reliance on salt and sugar for flavor. Here are two possibilities (quantities are loosely something like half a cup to a cup). Neither is Japanese but they both taste good with soba.

Dipping Sauce for Jao Tze (why not, it’s good with soba too)

1/4 c. low-sodium soy sauce
1/4 c. vinegar–red wine, apple cider, or rice vinegar
dollop (~1-2 T.) dark molasses–this takes some stirring to mix with the thinner liquids
~1/2 t. grated ginger
1 scallion fairly finely chopped
few drops toasted sesame oil
1/4 t. dab of z’khug or a bit of minced garlic, some hot pepper flakes to taste, and a bit of chopped cilantro if you have it

Peanut Curry Sauce

Serve this sauce cold or at room temperature to avoid the yogurt breaking down. If you add some lightly nuked or steamed fresh brussels sprouts (they look nice cut in halves) or other cruciferous vegetables and some hard-boiled eggs or tofu on the side, you have a pretty substantial lunch or a light supper.

1-2 T. chunky unsalted natural peanut butter (peanuts only)
1/2-1 c. plain nonfat yogurt (milk and cultures only)
1 t. curry powder (unsalted)
1 clove garlic, mashed/grated/minced
1/2 t. mashed or grated ginger
1-2 T. low-sodium soy sauce
juice of half a lime (best), lemon (ok), or 1-2 T. vinegar to taste
hot pepper flakes to taste
optional additions: scallion, finely chopped; few drops toasted sesame oil; pinch or so of sugar

Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Grains, nutrition, Pasta, Revised recipes, sauces and condiments | Tagged: Asian dipping sauces, buckwheat noodles, DASH Diet, Japanese food, low-sodium soy sauce, Pasta, soba, vegetarian cooking | Comments Off on Real Soba

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Mastering Mandelhorns

Knives at Dawn: Bringing Heat to the Kitchen

Measuring when you have to be right

Rethinking everything

Salt reduction vs. hypertension meds–which would you choose?

Putting Pie Crust on a Diet

A Year of Artichoke Hearts

Not a shock: Nutrition labels understate calories

Real Soba

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