Baker. Crafter. Carnivore. High Kicker.
I’m ridiculous, I know. This was from the day at the Astoria Beer Gardens, which was filled with brats ‘n beer. Thought this would be a good Friday post, just looking forward to the weekend and am thankful that I’m not this guy. I didn’t realize that they publicly executed the Chinese dude in charge of food safety. I’m sure the same fate is in store for the guy in charge of the lethal baby formulas. Yikes.
Sorry it has been a little while since I updated. I’ve been busy moving & packing — I actually leave for the farm on Sunday!! Today I had a chance to bake and experiment a little. I did a test on the snickerdoodles to test different butter brands. I used Land-O-Lakes, Plugra & Breakstone’s since they are available at all grocery stores in PA & NYC. So far I like Plugra best, but not by much. My step mom is taking some into work to ask her friends which they prefer.
I also tested AP vs. Cake Flour in a cake recipe that calls for AP flour. I used King Arthur’s AP & Pillsbury’s Softasilk (cake), since both are widely available and the King is my favorite AP Flour. I tested using my favorite vanilla cake recipe. Without question the cake flour cupcake tasted much better, had a softer texture and a whiter crumb. I’d like to try again with a different cake recipe to see if the results are the same — next time with chocolate cake.
I was out with some pastry chefs last night and I was talking about my nerdy experimenting with the snickerdoodles. One of them brought up the fact that shortening helps retain moisture in the cookie, so after a few days it will fare better than butter. I didn’t even take it into consideration!! Damn. Although I think cookies should be enjoyed within one or two days, they do sometimes hang around for a week. So, I’m going to do a 3-day-old cookie experiment (a repeat of the butter vs. shortening grudge match).
Yesterday I did yet another experiment with snickerdoodles, this time testing the effects of different brands of flour. To the left are the brands used in the experiment. I tried to get White Lily flour (soft winter wheat) to include in the experiment, I know it is carried at Balducci’s, but I couldn’t get there and tried 5 other stores, none of which carried White Lily brand. At this point, I decided it’s not worth it.
I had 6 people separately evaluate each cookie and tell me what they liked/disliked and if they had a favorite overall. The general consensus was that #2 & #4 were the best, which was Heckers/Ceresota and King Arthur Brand. The King Arthur cookie looked a bit prettier than the Hecker’s cookie, but both had about the same rise. #3, Gold Medal, faired the worst’everyone (myself included) said it was bland tasting. The Pillsbury flour was the fluffiest & cakey-est of them all with a nice flavor, but not everyone is into a cakey cookie. The whole wheat one was too dense for most with a very strong flavor, though one person said that one was his favorite. The reason the whole wheat is so dense is because when gluten strands develop (gluten is a protein that helps build structure and affects texture) the jagged bran cuts them, which makes it hard for whole wheat baked goods to rise.
Some notes about the products:
Both Heckers/Ceresota and King Arthur are unbleached flours (Heckers claims an emphatic ’Unbleached Forever!’ on their packaging). Both Gold Medal and Pillsbury were the bleached variety. Now, I suppose I should redo the experiment with all unbleached flour, but neither Gold Medal nor Pillsbury’s unbleached were available at the five grocery stores I went to. I did this experiment with flours that home bakers would not have to go out of their way to get, because I’m sure they don’t feel that one flour brand is very different from the next, though they would be wrong in thinking so. Now I’m rambling, but the point is, I wanted to experiment with flours that any Joe would be able to actually find at their local market.
Heckers flour is milled from hard wheat, King Arthur mills hard red winter wheat that is grown in Kansas, Gold Medal uses a mix of hard and soft wheat, while Pillsbury doesn’t state this information (at least not on their website).
I’m going to bake off more King Arthur & Heckers and pass them along to another set of people to see if there is a clear winner between the two, since they came out on top in the last judging.
Of course, now that I’ve done this experiment with cookies, I want to try it with cake and see if the same flours come out ahead. I’ll throw some cake flour in there as well — stay tuned for that.
For more nerdly information on flour check out King Arthur’s handy Guide to Understanding Flour Analysis.
I played with my snickerdoodles yet again, this time testing the necessity of cream of tartar and baking soda. I thought maybe I could replace those two ingredients with baking powder, since it is baking soda with an acid, typically cream of tartar. I made 3 batches: one only using baking soda, one with baking soda and cream of tartar, and the other with only baking powder. The original recipe calls for 1 tsp cream of tartar and 1/2 tsp of baking soda. Where there was no cream of tartar, I used 1 tsp leavener. All cookies were rolled into 30 gram balls (about 1 oz) and all had the same amount of rest time (none) before getting shoved into the oven.
Click on images to see a larger picture.
As you can see, batch #1 with only baking soda was very flat and yellow because the baking soda didn’t have any acid to react to. Batch #2 with baking soda and cream of tartar was less flat, higher and whiter (due to more aeration from chemical reaction). Batch #3 with the baking powder had a huge rise in the oven and look more like scones than cookies.
Moral of the story is that the cream of tartar is key here and that you can’t just substitute a mixture of baking soda and cream of tartar with baking powder with the same results. If you want big, puffy scone-like cookies, then by all means use baking powder in soda’s stead.
So am I done with the ‘doodles? Not quite yet my dearies — I want to play around with the role of different brands of flour. I figure snickerdoodles are a good cookie to do it with, since they are so simple.
I finally did my butter vs. shortening grudge match in a snickerdoodle recipe. I made 3 recipes: #1 used all shortening, #2 used half shortening/half butter, #3 used all butter, while all other variables remained exactly the same. As I suspected, I liked the all butter recipe best. The shortening cookies were dry and the cracks were huge. The butter cookies, while flattest of all three had the best flavor and I like the texture. The half and half had a good flavor and the cookie was “fluffy-er” than the butter. My conclusion: all butter is the best. If the flatness is a big concern, feel free to substitute a portion of the butter for shortening. When it comes to taste, you can’t beat butter!!
Notice the creepy huge cracks in the all-shortening. Some cracks are part of this cookie’s charm, but this is ridiculous.
Here we have half & half — it looks gorgeous and it tastes pretty good, but not as good as all butter.
And all butter. Delicious!! Slightly flatter than the rest, but the taste more than makes up for it.
There you have it folks! I am still having others “blind” taste it, and I will weigh their results in later.
