Cake and Commerce

Making Pupusas in El Salvador with Marielena

Marielena, who works for Bess and Ethan, showed us how to make pupusas our second morning in El Salvador. Pupusas are one of my favorite uses of masa - basically they're extremely thick tortillas filled with a combination of cheese, meat and/or vegetables. The standard 'classic' filling is chicharron paste, made from pork and spices. They sell it pre-made, in chubs, at the supermarket:

Another key ingredient is cheese. The standard Salvadoran pupusa cheese is a fresh cheese called quesillo that has a texture somewhat similar to ricotta. It is sold in blocks or as pieces at the lacteos shops:

The last ingredient is beans. A black bean and cheese combination is available almost everywhere pupusas are sold. Marielena prepared the beans ahead of time (see above) and had them ready to be added. The black beans are pureed and thinned with water to the desired consistency. For the pupusas they are thick. For breakfast we had black beans that were almost as thin as gravy.

Marielena prepared the masa (to a much softer consistency than tortillas) ahead of time and kept a bowl of cold water out to make handing the pupusas easier.

She grabbed a small handful of the masa. Working quickly, she formed a thick 3-4" diameter cake with her hands and then filled it first with cheese, then beans:

She then folds over the pancake to form a semi-circle and pinches the ends together, using water as 'glue'. She fills in gaps with extra masa:

She then begins the process of carefully, slowly, forming the filled masa cake into a flat pancake. The seam is at the top as she presses down:

Once the pupusa is the right size, she places it on an oiled griddle to cook:

The cheese bubbles out, the tops get brown and crisp. Jenny and I both take turns making pupusas:

We fill the entire griddle up with bean and cheese pupusas:

The perfect pupusa:

I take an 'arty' food shot, just to show the thickness (yeah, right). Usually pupusas are served with a mild Salvadoran sauerkraut, which we didn't have at home. I made do with Marie Sharp's habanero sauce from Belize:

So good.

Recipe: Gluten-free Chocolate Chip Cookies

Yes, this photo shows gluten free cookies. They do really come out like this. Undoctored by photoshop.

It was a total disaster, or, at least it was at first. I followed my absolute favorite recipe for chocolate chip cookies (from the Village Baker's Wife by Gayle Ortiz et al) and made the assumption that my gluten-free substitute (a random combination of tapioca flour, brown rice flour, and garbanzo and fava bean flour) would actually mimic the wheat flour called for in the recipe.

Here is the first test batch. Ugly photo is intentional:

The starch matrix, unfortunately, did not even come close to a 3rd rate imitation of flour. So I added more tapioca flour. And baked. And added more tapioca. And baked. And added more tapioca. Finally, after added about 1.25 more cups of tapioca flour, the cookies looked like this:

Ah! Solution! They were crispy yet chewy.  And even the slightly-too-savory note that comes from the garbanzo/fava flour mixture was mostly eliminated by using significantly less in the gluten-free flours combination. Here's the recipe that worked (I think):

Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies

Preheat oven to 350F

8 oz butter
3/4 C granular sugar
1-1/4C firmly packed brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (or just a little less)
3/4 C Garbanzo/Fava Flour
1-1/2 C Brown Rice Flour
2-1/4 C Tapioca Flour
2 teaspoons Baking Soda
1-1/4 teaspoons Baking Powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2-1/2 C Chocolate Chips

Method:
1. Combine Butter and sugars in bowl of mixer and cream until thoroughly combined (not fluffy! This ain't no muffin batter....)
2. Add two eggs. Mix until combined
3. Add vanilla extract and salt (I always combine my salt here because I like it integrated into the dough, not crystalline, which sometimes happens when it is added later).
4. Sift together flours, baking soda, and baking powder. Add to butter/sugar/egg combo in bowl. Mix together very slowly.
5. Fold in chocolate chips. If it still feels wet, add in about 1/4 cup of tapioca flour. Keep adding until it feels less tacky and slightly more smooth, like you could roll it out into a cylinder and it wouldn't turn to mush)
6. Portion out into small sphere. Press the sphere down before baking.
7. Bake in center rack of oven for 9 minutes. After 9 minutes check to see if it has started cracking. If it has not, give it one more minute. Do not overbake as the cookies will become crispy rather than chewy.

Good Luck!

Making Sudachi Liqueur

They were selling sudachi, or Japanese limes, at Mitsuwa today. So I decided to make some sudachi liqueur from Soju and sudachi, and organic sugar.

They are tiny, these sudachi. You can't really tell from the picture, but they are about 1/2 as large as limes, have a much softer flesh, and are full of juice.

So I zested them, juiced them, and then stuck them in a jar with about 1 cup of sugar and soju. I'll probably have to add more sugar in about a month.

Here's the jar, just before I tucked it into a cabinet for its slumber.

Moment of Duck

 

Duck Soup. Made from duck stock, duck cracklings, soba noodles, hijiki, and baby bok choy.

My favorite Purveyor of Cute takes food pix too!

Christina Gordon is obscenely talented. Her prints are gorgeous - her images of lost, doe-eyed girls captivate me in a way no other contemporary artist has as I usually despise the contemporary girl habit of drawing innocents with doe eyes. Christina's work really stands out for so many reasons. I just find her prints very striking and evocative.

But not only is she a printmaker, she's an incredibly creative Blythe artist (I'm really not sure what a Blythe artist calls herself, do forgive me) - that's right, she makes some of the most amazing clothing and dioramas for Blythe dolls that I have ever seen (caveat: I haven't seen many, but hers are wickedly impressive). Her blog is wonderful - combining photos of her Blythe work, her prints, and whatever else is on her mind.

While I was looking at her photos on flickr from her recent Japan trip, I came across her photo of some delicious looking eclairs from Sadaharu Aoki...so good looking, in fact, that I've renewed my resolve to get back to Japan to eat and perhaps take some lessons from Elizabeth Andoh. Ah a girl can dream.

Holiday Cookie Party!

My friends Megan and Trina have been hosting the annual cookie party for 13 years now, almost as long as they have known each other. Unlike traditional cookie parties, where participants bring finished cookies along with copies of the recipe to share, Megan and Trina's party involves arriving empty handed and leaving laden with cookies, anywhere from two to ten hours after arriving.

All the recipes and all the ingredients you could possibly want are available. They have every issue of just about every magazine that publishes a seasonal cookie collection. They have a score of cookie books. And if you can't find what you are looking for in Martha Stewart, there's always the internet.

Here's a view of the of the supply table:

They set up two cookie stations, four kitchenaid mixers, a cuisinart, at least a dozen silpats and cookie pans and a large number of festive cookie cutters, and all the flour, sugar, butter, chocolate and nuts you could ever wish for. Along with a large selection of merry Christmas libations. I give you exhibit A, above.

I decided that this year I would make homestyle Mallowmars. Yep, my absolute favorite childhood cookie...tender graham-ish crust, stable marshmallow, all covered in chocolate. Here's what they looked like ('scuse the flash...it was night by the time I got around to taking pictures, due to the nap I took just after finishing them at 2 pm):

So the kids gobbled up these first and left a few that I made with coconut rather than chocolate for the grownups.

Megan got very creative with something called "Ethopian Truffles" -- basically a chocolate/nut ball inside a shortbread cookie. They were incredible. Here she is rolling them: 

Here's the finished cookie buffet. At the end of the night everyone is handed a bucket or a tin and asked to take home as much as they can carry:

I made a couple other types of cookies -- chocolate chip, chocolate souffle, and a chocolate-nougatine truffle.

that's the nougatine truffle -- with toasted coconut.

That's Lemore's impressionistic gingerbread man. Lemore is 6 or so.

I had so much after the party that I brought my bucket to work two days later and there's still uneaten cookies and candy.

I'm grateful this only happens once a year.

My Super Unsanitary Cheesemaking Experiment

  I can't even imagine what this must look like to someone unfamilar with my somewhat cluttered kitchen. Unsanitary is the first word that comes to mind (though I am using some very sterile stainless steel...ok, maybe not 'very'). I decided to make some goat cheese with some ancient (three years old!!!) culture from my freezer. That's right. I have been transporting it around, from Maine to Massachusetts to Chicago since the summer of 2003. And it still worked.

I get my culture (or should I say 'got my culture') from New England Cheesemaking Supply, which has a fine selection of cultures, bacteria, molds, instructional videos and books and the like available. They even teach classes there, which I took back in 1996 with a couple nuns who owned a cow. There's a joke there somewhere.

Making cheese is really easy. The key is getting good milk, which for most urban dwellers is a challenge. Access to a good farmer's market, a sympathetic farmer or your own goats, sheep, and/or cows is helpful, if not imperative. Unless your milk is delicious (and not something you brought home from your local supermarket) the cheese won't be all that good. A good output results from good inputs, and homogenized, ultrapasteurized milk just doesn't do it.

The cheese I made tasted fine, but the milk just wasn't fresh. I won't make it again until I can find a local goat.