Hazelnut Brownies

Brownies are disproportionately easy, relative to the joy they bring. They feel much more special than an ordinary ‘traybake’ cake, but are as easy as a cake mix to put together. The basic principle is this: melt chocolate and/or cocoa with butter; beat in sugar and cold eggs; beat in flour, turn into pan; bake. That’s it – if you’ve got a microwave, you can do the whole lot in a single bowl.

I’ve been refining my brownie recipe over several years – it’s easy to do, because it’s such a forgiving recipe. Alice Medrich’s recipes in Bittersweet give almost every variation, dedicating a whole chapter to a nearly-forensic analysis of brownie baking. The version below is an amalgamation of her cocoa and chocolate brownie recipes, with some changes. I’ve also uprated the recipe from the usual 8 x 8 inch tin to a larger 12 x 9 tin: you can never have too many brownies.

Alice Medrich supplied many of the tricks here: it is her testing that indicates you should use cold eggs, and that the mixture should be beaten firmly after adding the flour; I am choosing not to re-invent the wheel. She also has a very useful trick of refrigerating brownie batter in the tin for up to 24 hours before baking. Not only does this make it possible to produce just-baked brownies within half an hour, but it makes the brownies even fudgier.

Frangelico is a pretty obscure liqueur, but I have to say, it makes all the difference to this recipe, giving a toasted, fragrant nut flavour to the whole thing. That said, the recipe makes perfectly good brownies if you don’t want to go to the bother of searching it out. You can also substitute the carefully toasted nuts with a packet of roasted (unsalted) mixed nuts from the supermarket.

Ingredients:
170g butter
55g cocoa
130g chocolate (combination of dark (70%) chocolate and milk chocolate)
40g chocolate & hazelnut spread (Nutella, Green& Blacks)

300g caster sugar
2 tbsp Frangelico (hazelnut liqueur) – or 1.5 tsp vanilla extract

3 cold eggs

105g flour
1/2 tsp salt
150g hazelnuts, toasted

Method:
Line a 12×8 inch tin with baking parchment or foil.

Melt the butter, cocoa, chocolates and chocolate spread together – use a microwave in short bursts or a bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Stir together until smooth.

Stir in the sugar and Frangelico (if using) until thoroughly mixed.

Beat in the eggs, one at a time.

Fold in the flour with the salt, then beat firmly until the mixture is glossy and pulls away from the side of the bowl a little (about 30 stiff beats). Mix in the nuts.

Scrape into the lined tin. Bake at 200C for 20-25 minutes or until the mixture just begins to pull away from the side of the pan. Wait until completely cold before slicing (if you have the patience…)

10 elements of basic kitchen knowledge – part 1

I came across this great interview today in which Hervé This describes his 10 elements of basic kitchen knowledge. I thought these were great, but I can see how someone reading this (or indeed This – pronounced Tees) for the first time might wonder what on earth this list had to do with everyday cooking. So I’ve set myself the task of trying to explain what *I* think is important about each of Hervé’s elements, perhaps adding some of my own along the way.

His list in full:

Hervé This’s 10 elements of basic kitchen knowledge

  1. Salt dissolves in water.
  2. Salt does not dissolve in oil.
  3. Oil does not dissolve in water.
  4. Water boils at 100 C (212 F).
  5. Generally foods contain mostly water (or another fluid).
  6. Foods without water or fluid are tough.
  7. Some proteins (in eggs, meat, fish) coagulate.
  8. Collagen dissolves in water at temperatures higher than 55 C (131 F).
  9. Dishes are dispersed systems (combinations of gas, liquid or solid ingredients transformed by cooking).
  10. Some chemical processes – such as the Maillard Reaction (browning or caramelizing) – generate new flavours.

And without further ado:

1. Salt dissolves in water

Salt is the essential cooking ingredient – if you doubt this, you need only to taste unsalted bread and then taste it again spread with salted butter. Or, if you need further convincing, try this wonderful book. Salt is essential for life – all our cells are bathed in something a lot like salt water – a relic from when our single-celled ancestors floated around in the seas. Salt is a fairly basic substance – NaCl: equal parts Sodium and Chlorine, both of which are pretty nasty on their own, but when together, make a stable, crystalline whole. The fact that salt dissolves in water is why you shouldn’t generally use expensive salts in
your pasta water – it’s all the same once it’s dissolved (except for those free-flowing salts that include extra things to stop them caking). If you’re going to add a nice textured salt for crunch, add it just before serving to ensure it doesn’t dissolve (or, as Hervé says, mix it with oil first).
When seasoning a salad dressing, add the salt to the vinegar (where it will dissolve) not the oil (where it won’t).

Ugly Baguettes


Ugly Baguettes

Originally uploaded by louise_marston

Aren’t these the ugliest baguettes you’ve ever seen? I think not careful enough punching down, and incomplete shaping are to blame. However, I’m hoping the big ugly bubbles on the surface are a promise of nice big irregular holes in the crumb. I’ll find out when we eat them next weekend (going into the freezer today).

Other things that came out of the Marston kitchen over the long Easter Weekend:
– Brasato (beef pot roast) from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook
– Fairy cakes with orange icing (How to be a Domestic Goddess)
– Banana splits with ice-cream and chocolate sauce (like on the Sainsburys ad)
– Camembert baked in the box
– Roast chicken, potatoes roasted in duck fat, spring cabbage
– Chocolate gingerbread from Nigella’s ‘Feast’
– Italian Spinach and Ham Tart from Jamie at Home (but without the ham… or the spinach..)
– Chocolate Granola from Orangette

Fast food: pizza

I am not a fan of Domino’s pizza (unlike my husband) and will go to some lengths to avoid it. So when I feel the urge for pizza at the end of a hot day, and have some energy in reserve, I go ahead and make  it at home. The only tiresome part about this is the production line nature of it – I tend to make small ones, which means a tantalising wait between mouthfuls as we wait for the next one to bake.

Tomato sauce:

  • 1 can tinned tomatoes
  • 1/2 jar passata
  • 1 garlic clove, sliced
  • 1 tsp olive oil
  • 15g butter
  • 1 tsp fresh thyme

This is loosely based on Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce recipe. Simply put everything in a saucepan together and simmer slowly for about 30 minutes. Make the dough first, and then pull this together while it rises.
Pizza dough

I have been using this recipe from a Guardian cutting for years. You can make it, put it into an oiled plastic bag in the fridge and just take portions out and bake pizzas all week long. Or you can take the leftover dough and shape it into rolls or foccacia and bake it as bread.

  • 500g strong white bread flour
  • 200 g/ml warm water
  • 1 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 packet (7g) instant yeast

Put all the ingredients into a bowl and mix until there is a single shaggy mass. If this doesn’t happen, add more water until it does – if it’s too sticky, add a little more flour. Knead for a few minutes until the surface of the dough becomes very smooth. (I use my KitchenAid mixer with the dough hook for this – by hand is fine, or you can also use a food processor). Cover with a tea towel and leave to rise for about an hour (perhaps longer if it’s cold).

Divide the dough into anything between 4 and 8 pieces (depending on how large you like your pizza), and roll each piece into a little round ball. Set aside again, covered with a tea towel, for 15 or 20 minutes while you prepare the toppings (grate cheese, slice veg, etc.). Preheat the oven as high as you can get it, with a thick baking sheet in the bottom of the oven.

When you’re ready to go, remove one ball at a time, flour a worktop and roll out firmly with a rolling pin, picking the dough up and rotating it between rolls, to make sure it doesn’t stick. Try and get it as thin as you can. Spread with a spoonful of tomato sauce, your toppings and finish with salt, pepper and a drizzle of olive oil.

Use a flat baking sheet (or anything else heatproof without a rim), sprinkled with a little polenta, to slide the pizza into the hot oven and onto the pre-heated baking sheet. Bake for about 8 minutes, or until it looks ready.

Repeat with each subsequent ball of dough until you’re so full you can’t move. 🙂

Greengage Jam

A few weeks ago I transported a box full of greengage plums, plus my mother’s old preserving pan back from my parent’s house in the back of a mini. There was around 1kg of fruit that we had picked from the large tree in their garden. At home, you could always tell when the fruit was getting ripe by the soft ‘splat’ from the plums as they fell from the tree and onto the patio below, to be nibbled on by wasps and other insects. That was when the ladder would have to come out, to reach all those fruits that would inevitably be just beyond your fingertips, forcing you to tiptoe on the top of the ladder in a particularly precarious way.

I never sought these plums out when I was little (being somewhat fruit-averse as a child) but now, older and wiser, while I still don’t fancy eating them raw from the tree, I can appreciate their worth as cooking material. First thoughts would be as roast fruit, a crumble or a jam. Having roasted plums very successfully when they arrived in my organic box a month or so ago (using Gordon Ramsay’s recipe from ‘Just Desserts‘) I went for jam this time.

As so often when stuck for a recipe, I went to my Google customised search, which covers blogs as well as recipe sites like the BBC and Waitrose.com. There, I found a beautifully simple recipe on Orangette. This follows the simple principle of macerating the fruit with the sugar in advance (something that I believe is supposed to keep the fruit whole), and then boiled until a set is reached. This only made 2 jars of jam, but considering the small amount of fruit I had and the tastiness of the jam, that’s just fine with me.

Recipe

  • around 875g plums or greengages, to give 800g stoned fruit
  • 400g granulated sugar
  • juice of 1/2 small lemon

Mix everything together in a non-metallic bowl and macerate for at least 2 hours, and up to 6.

Sterilise jam jars (I only needed 2) by washing them in hot water, or in the dishwasher, then placing on a tray in a 140C oven for 30 minutes.

Transfer the fruit & sugar mixture to a preserving pan or wide saucepan. Bring to to a boil and boil for 30 minutes. Skim the foam from the surface about 10 or 15 minutes in. Test the set briefly on a cold plate, then pot and seal.

As plums are high in pectin, you shouldn’t have any problem with the set – in fact, mine was quite firm, so I could probably have got away with a shorter boiling time.

Easy ribs

I have a dilemma: I like slow-cooked food, I like to cook whenever I can, but I seldom have more than half an hour after getting home before I’m so hungry I can’t wait any longer. My favourite way to get around this problem is to prepare the slow-cooked stuff in several separate stages. Pork ribs (spare ribs) adjust well to this approach, benefiting from a three stage process:

  1. Marinade – flavour the meat
  2. Braise – cook with liquid to dissolve the collagen into gelatin, and make the meat tender
  3. Glaze – caramelise the meat and create a sticky glaze

There are two ways you can go with ribs (although many would disagree and say there are many more than that): Chinese-influenced or American-influenced. My most recent attempt saw me take the Chinese route, following a recipe from Nigella Lawson’s “Forever Summer”. To adapt this to a different flavour, simply play with the spices and liquid in the marinade. You can also make the marinade a ‘dry rub’, by tossing the ribs in spices and salt, and then adding liquid just before braising.

Spare ribs

  • 16 pork spare ribs (around 1.5kg)

Marinade:

  • 4 tbsp rice wine vinegar
  • 3 tbsp soy sauce
  • 2 tsp dried red chilli flakes
  • 5cm piece fresh ginger, peeled and sliced
  • 2 tbsp runny honey
  • 2 star anise
  • 1 stick cinnamon, broken in 2
  • 1 tsp sesame oil
  • 2 tbsp sunflower oil
  • 4 spring onions, roughly chopped

Divide the ribs between 2 large freezer bags. Mix together all the marinade ingredients, and divide between the bags. Seal up the freezer bags and squish everything around. Put into a container and leave in the fridge for at least 24 hours.

The next evening, empty the bags into one or two roasting tins – give them enough room to sit in one layer. Cover and seal with foil – you want to keep the steam in. Heat the oven to 180C, and cook for 1 and a half hours. Allow to cool before putting in the fridge.

Glaze:

  • 2 tbsp honey
  • 2 tsp five-spice powder (see note)

On the third evening, put the ribs, uncovered, back into a cold oven and heat to 200C. After 10 minutes, remove the ribs and gently toss in the honey and five-spice. Glaze for 30 minutes, turning once. Sprinkle with finely chopped spring onions and chillies to serve.

Note: I didn’t have any five spice powder when I made this, so left it out. I have since looked it up and found that I could have made it myself with my spices-only coffee grinder. To make it, toast and then grind together: 2 tbsp peppercorns (Szechuan, or substitute black), 2 tbsp whole cloves, 2 tbsp fennel seed, 2 cinnamon sticks and 6 whole star anise.

Monday Muffins

At my request, every birthday brings me a new crop of cookbooks to wallow in. This year was particularly fine, bringing me the two books from bloggers: David Lebovitz’s “The Perfect Scoop” and Heidi Swanson’s “Super Natural Cooking“.

Banana pecan muffinsSuper Natural Cooking is the one intriguing me most at the moment (and only partly because I don’t have a freezer yet, so can’t make David’s ice creams!) It is one of the most unusual books I’ve come across in a long time: a book of healthy, natural, vegetarian recipes containing a wealth of unfamiliar ingredients … that all look incredibly delicious and tempting. All this has been said before, but this is a really beautiful and interesting book, and I look forward to getting to grips with quinoa, farro and sprouted chickpea burgers in the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, something from my more usual baking repetoire – banana muffins. A bunch of organic bananas had been sitting on the windowsill glowering at me for more than a week, and getting browner and browner. This was the solution – and they seemed to go down very well at work to cheer up a grey and rainy monday.

Espresso Banana Muffins

  • 290g light brown self-raising flour
  • 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • (or 145g whole wheat flour, 145g plain flour and 2 tsp baking powder)
  • 1/2 tsp sea salt
  • 150g walnuts (I used pecans)
  • 1 tbsp espresso powder
  • 85g butter, room temperature
  • 120g soft brown sugar
  • 60 golden caster sugar
  • 2 large eggs
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 250g plain yoghurt
  • 310g peeled bananas, mashed (about 3 large bananas, the riper the better)

Heat the oven to 180C/350F. Spread the pecans or walnuts onto a baking sheet and toast for about 8 minutes. Remove from the oven, cool a little and chop. Set aside. Turn the oven up to 190C/375F. Prepare a 12 cup muffin tin with paper cases.

Mix the flour, baking powder, salt, espresso powder and around two-thirds of the chopped walnuts together.

Mash the bananas and mix in the yoghurt and vanilla. Set aside.

Beat the butter and sugars together until creamy. Mix in the eggs one at a time, then stir in the yoghurt mixture.

Add the flour, and stir together briefly, just until the streaks of flour have pretty much disappeared. Don’t overmix; it’s better to leave it too lumpy than too smooth.

Spoon the mixture into the muffin cups and top with the remaining chopped nuts.

Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out without batter clinging to it. Cool in the tin for 5 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Goldilocks’ Chicken

When choosing a recipe to make, I often find myself objecting to some element of each one I read – an unpossessed ingredient, a step that I deem too fiddly – and move right along to the next one. Given the size of my cookbook library (not to mention the awesome power of the interwebs), this can lead to excessive time being lost before even getting to the kitchen. So the right course is often to pick and choose elements from each of them to arrive at a happy compromise – the option in the middle that is just right.

Yesterday’s problem was roast chicken, and my inspiration came from reading Laurie Colwin’s second compilation of cooking writing, More Home Cooking.  Her idea is to roast the chicken relatively slowly but thoroughly, to the point where the joints separate easily, and the leg meat falls from the bone, and to roast some vegetables at the same time. Laurie Colwin prescribes over 3 hours of roasting at a low temperature – I didn’t have time for that, but I liked the idea of the end result.So I turned to a reliable standby:  Marcella Hazan’s Roast Chicken with Two Lemons.

Marcella Hazan prescribes a pattern of temperatures that leads to a good, well-cooked bird, but also that your chicken is stuffed with 2 pierced lemons and the cavity sealed with a toothpick – and I didn’t want to fiddle that much. So I ended up with a compromise – and that was just right.

Roast chicken and vegetables

  • 1 large organic chicken
  • 5 or 6 medium potatoes
  • 1 onion
  • 4 medium carrots
  • 1/2 lemon
  • 6 cloves garlic
  • small handful fresh thyme
  • 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
  • olive oil, salt and pepper

Remove the chicken from the fridge at least an hour before you want to start cooking, to allow it to come towards room temperature. Pre-heat the oven to 180C (160C fan). Spread a little olive oil in a roasting tin. Remove any fat from the cavity, season inside the cavity with salt, and place the garlic cloves (unpeeled), thyme and half lemon in there. There now follows a series of roasting phases:

  1. Place the chicken breast side down and roast for 30 minutes.
  2. Turn the chicken breast-side up, baste it and add the peeled potatoes and onions to the pan. Roast for a further 30 minutes.
  3. Remove the chicken and add the carrots, peeled and halved, and baste again. Roast for a further 30 minutes.
  4. Turn up the oven to 210C (190C fan) for a final 20 minutes.
  5. Remove the chicken to a cutting board to rest. Toss the vegetables in the pan juices and return to the hot oven to brown for another 10 minutes.

Carve the chicken and serve with the roasted vegetables, plus a green vegetable such as green beans or broccoli. I served this with green beans from the garden, which are going great guns in all this rain.

Marbled Cupcakes

Marbled chocolate cupcakeHaving promised to make dessert for friends who were giving us lunch on Sunday, I found myself able to indulge in one my chief cooking pleasures: picking something to bake from my capacious cookbook collection. My first thoughts were for a strawberry tart, something that characterises early summer. But as the week wore on, and it got windier and wetter, I felt that something comforting and chocolately would fit the bill. I ended up with Alice Medrich’s ‘Bittersweet‘, which has chocolate recipes for every occasion you could think of. I was lucky enough to attend one of Alice’s classes in California; she combines a great depth of knowledge about chocolate with an infectious curiosity. This comes across in the recipes, which are suitable for the most elevated occasions, but also detailed and reliable: which is one reason why I felt comfortable breaking the rule that you should never try out a new recipe for the first time on guests.

Molten Raspberry-Chocolate Cupcakes with Marbled Glaze

adapted from ‘Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a life in chocolate’ by Alice Medrich

Note: I used the cup measures that Alice specifies in the book when I made them. I have given conversions to metric, but haven’t checked these, so be warned. I’ll test these out next time I make this recipe.

  • 1 cup plain flour (140g)
  • 1/2 cup cocoa powder (50g)
  • 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 cup seedless raspberry puree (125ml) (1 punnet raspberries, pureed and sieved)
  • 3 tablespoons brandy or rum (I was stuck here, so used 1tbsp Grand Marnier, 1tbsp vodka and 1 tbsp water)
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 10 tablespoons butter (145g)
  • 1 and 1/3 cups caster sugar (300g)
  • 3 large eggs

For the chocolate glaze:

  • 6oz dark chocolate, 65-70% (170g)
  • 8 tbsp butter (115g)
  • 1 tbsp corn syrup (there’s not really a good substitute for this as far as I know – but some supermarkets stock it)

For the marbling:

  • 1 oz white chocolate (25g)

Preheat the oven to 350F/180C. Prepare a muffin tin with paper cases or grease the moulds. This makes about 18 muffins; I made 12 muffins and 2 little cakes in some 4″ pie dishes.

Thoroughly mix the flour, cocoa, baking powder, bicarb and salt in a bowl. Sift onto a sheet of greaseproof paper to help mix and get all the lumps out of the cocoa. This also gives extra lightness to the sponge.

Combine the raspberry puree, brandy and vanilla in a small bowl or jug. This will be quite liquid.

In a medium to large bowl, or the bowl of a stand mixer, cream the butter (*much* easier with electric assistance). Add the sugar gradually while you continue to beat the butter. Once all the sugar is in, continue to beat for 4 or 5 minutes – it should be really pale and fluffy. Don’t shortcut this part – it gets all the air in.

Break the eggs into a bowl or jug and whisk just to combine the yolks and whites. Add to the butter and sugar in a trickle, while continuing to beat. Adding it slowly prevents the mixture from curdling, but if it goes ahead and curdles anyway, don’t worry – it will mean slightly less air in the mixture, but it’ll still turn out OK.

Stop the mixer, and add one third of the flour mixture from the paper. Mix just to combine, then add half the raspberry mix and mix again. Alternate the flour and raspberry until everything’s combined. Be gentle, to keep all the air in that will help the mixture rise.

Scrape the batter into the pan or spoon into the muffin tins. Bake for 20 minutes, until the mixture pulls away from the side of the tin, and a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Cool on a cake rack. (You can store the cakes in an air-tight container overnight at this point, or freeze).

While the cake cools, make the glaze: melt the chocolate, butter and corn syrup together over simmering water, or in the microwave, stirring until smooth. Melt the white chocolate at the same time in a separate bowl. Cool the glaze until it is thickened but still pourable, then dip the top of each muffin into the glaze. While the glaze is still wet, dip a teaspoon or skewer into the white chocolate and drizzle randomly onto the glaze. Use a skewer or toothpick to drag lines through the chocolate and create the marbled effect. I found it easiest to dip 3 muffins before decorating with the white chocolate. Leave the glaze to set.

Salade Tiede – Warm Salad

Two things have provoked me into breaking my blogging silence:

  1. my attendance of a booksigning for Clotilde’s new book ‘Chocolate and Zucchini’
  2. the appearance of my first French beans from my very first vegetable garden

Clotilde gave a wonderful performance at the booksigning – a few words over the signing of the book and a lovely speech about the genesis of the book and her food-writing career (she has what Americans might describe as ‘the cutest little accent – French-Californian). There was also food, cooked from recipes in the book by her British publisher, Catheryn.

Having nibbled on Tomato, Pistachio and Chorizo loaf and Very Chocolate Cookies at the book event, I didn’t feel in need of a vast meal when I got home, but I definitely had french food on the brain. This, combined with my green beans waiting in the garden led me to a warm salad.

My schooling at Tante Marie’s taught me some useful rules of thumb regarding salads:

  • choose 2 or 3 ingredients (apart from the leaves) – more than that and it gets too complicated
  • for a warm salad, dress everything over the heat, and toss in the leaves at the last minute
  • pick ingredients that have a balance of flavours – sweet, sour, salty, bitter, savoury

I feel pretty good about this combination – the pancetta (supplied in neat little pre-cut cubes) gives salt and savoury, and also provides the warm dressing with some of the fat, plus some vinegar. The tomatoes give the sweetness and the beans a nice crunch and that clean, vegetal flavour. I suspect I will return to this format with beans again, looking at the number of them on the plants, and they will definitely lend themselves to a nut oil and toasted nut combination as well (walnuts? sesame seeds?). Batavia is useful for this (apart from being what I had in the fridge) – it is crisp but also bitter and robust enough to stand up to a warm salad. Curly endive is a good alternative. Quantities are for one, ‘cos it was just me, but can easily be scaled up.

Warm Salad of Green Beans, Oven-dried tomatoes and Pancetta

Warm salad

  • small handful green beans (haricots verts)
  • 1/2 packet cubetti di pancetta (from Waitrose or Sainsburys)
  • 5-6 cherry tomatoes
  • 1/2 head Batavia lettuce
  • 1 tsp olive oil
  • 1/2 tsp white wine vinegar
  • salt and pepper

Optional: oven dry the tomatoes. I did this because I had two tubs that needed using up, but it’s fine to use them fresh. Half the tomatoes, and spread on a baking tray, cut side up. Drizzle with oilive oil, sprinkle with thinly sliced garlic, salt and pepper, and bake for 2-3 hours at 160C (140C fan). This can also be done fors a shorter time at a higher temperature, or a longer time (even overnight) at a low one. It changes the texture, but the concentration of sugars and flavour is pretty similar.

Fry the pancetta gently in the olive oil, untill slightly browned. Meanwhile, trim the beans and steam for 4-5 minutes. Once the bacon is done, remove it to a metal bowl with a slotted spoon, along with some of the bacon fat. Toss in the beans and tomatoes until coated, then add the vinegar and season and taste a bean. Adjust the fat, vinegar and seasoning until it tastes good, then toss in the lettuce leaves, and taste again. Places the leaves on the plate first, and top with the other ingredients (which is the way it works anyway – the leaves will work to the top and the rest to the bottom while you’re doing the dressing).