Posted by Dorie Greenspan, April 24, 2008 at 2:00 PM
Illustration by Florine Asch
It's not just potato-chip makers that understand that if you offer us something salty we won't be able to eat just one—French pastry chefs know that trick too. And Arnaud Larher, whose pastry shop is in Montmartre, is a master of the add-salt-and-we'll-munch-away school. He's the chef who created the TV Snacks, irresistibly munchable, salty little butter cookies molded into lumpy, bumpy balls.
When I asked Larher how he came up with the idea to make a salty cookie, he said it came to him very naturally, since he grew up in Brittany, where butter is always salted. "I'm just continuing the tradition," he said.
I bet you could start your own tradition with these.
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Posted by Ed Levine, April 15, 2008 at 1:00 PM
All You Need Is a Recipe and a Dream
I promised myself I wasn't going to tear up when the Pillsbury Bake-Off million dollar first-prize winner was announced, but I did, and I'm not sure why. Of course it should be noted that I used to cry at the end of every Party of Five episode, too.
The winner, Carolyn Gurtz (right) of Gaithersburg, Maryland, seemed like a lovely lady, dressed in her powder-blue pantsuit, talking about how much she loves her family, husband, and baking. Gurtz's winning recipe for Double-Delight Peanut Butter Cookies [Recipe appears after the jump] was mighty tasty and certainly wasn't overly complicated or overwrought—though there were a number of those at the Bake-Off.
It isn't the peanut butter cookie that will change my life, but the million dollars she won might very well change hers. And maybe that's the point.
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Posted by Ed Levine, March 9, 2008 at 12:00 PM
This week's Cartoon Kitchen features Serious Eats' cartoonist in residence Larry Gonick's spin on amaretti, the classic ultra-light Italian cookie made with little more than almonds, egg whites, and sugar. —Ed Levine
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Posted by The Serious Eats Team, February 12, 2008 at 4:00 PM
This week, in honor of Valentine's Day, we've put together a list of our favorite books on chocolate, with one Cook the Book recipe a day coming from each volume. And the next book in our "Chocolate Lover's Library" is Pure Chocolate
by Fran Bigelow, the proprietor of Fran's Chocolates. In this, her debut book, Bigelow reveals the techniques behind her creations, with additional info on worldwide chocolate-making methods and a guide to deciphering chocolate labels.
The chocolate sablés that follow are classic refrigerator butter cookies that should bake up slightly crisp but with a soft interior. The roll freezes well, so you can tuck one away for a rainy day.
Win the Serious Eats Chocolate Library
We're giving away five (5) sets of the Chocolate Lover's Library—one each day this week. So you can win Pure Chocolate, along with four other fantastic chocolate books (to be revealed as the week progresses) by answering the following question in the comments:
What is your favorite chocolate recipe?
One (1) winner will be chosen at random from among the comments of this post. Comments will be open until 6 p.m. ET February 13. Feel free to enter every day, but you may win only once during the lifetime of the contest as a whole. The standard Serious Eats contest rules apply.
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Posted by Mario Batali, February 12, 2008 at 1:00 PM
- makes about 2 pounds of cookies -
Brutti ma buoni translates roughly to "ugly but good."
Ingredients
4 egg whites, room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
3 tablespoons flour
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon amaretto
1 tablespoon cocoa powder, bitter
1/2 cup chopped hazelnuts
1/4 cup chopped almonds
1/4 cup pine nuts
Zest of 4 oranges
Procedure
1. Preheat oven to 325°F. Butter and dust cookie sheet.
2. Place whites in the bowl of an electric mixer; whip to soft peak. Add sugar steadily, and beat 2 minutes. Stop machine; add flour, vanilla, amaretto, and cocoa powder. Mix 1 minute, and stop machine. Stir in nuts quickly; place 2-inch blobs on cookie sheet. Bake 30 minutes until crisp. Remove and let cool.
Posted by Lucy Baker, February 9, 2008 at 2:00 PM
I love chocolate. But when it comes to Valentine's Day it can be a bit of a cliché: the Whitman's Samplers with their impossible-to-decipher filling maps; the miniature heart-shape drugstore candy bars; the Hershey's Kisses, once simply silver, suddenly dressed in every shade of pink and red.
This year, why not make your honey swoon by baking her (or him) a special treat made with that other creamy, sweet, incredibly rich and decadent substance—peanut butter?
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Posted by Dorie Greenspan, February 7, 2008 at 1:00 PM
If you haven't already whipped up something wonderful for the sweetheart(s) in your life, here's a recipe for a cookie that makes any day sweeter. It's a linzer cookie—made with flour and ground nuts and spiced with cinnamon and cloves—cut out with a cute little heart-shaped cutter and dipped in melted chocolate. (I love the technique of pre-rolling the dough when it's soft and malleable and I hope you will, too.)
The cookie has the same buttery goodness and soft spices as a linzer tart and, in fact, you could use the dough to make a tart, if you wanted to. You can also make sandwich cookies (a classic linzerish thing to do), sandwiching the cookies with red jam. (Bring 1/2 cup of raspberry jam and 1 teaspoon water to the boil. Let the jam cool slightly before using it.)
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Posted by Lucy Baker, January 21, 2008 at 2:00 PM
For this week's installment of my Recipe Resolution I decided to tackle February's Bon Appetit, which is chock full of incredible sounding recipes including one by Bruce Aidells for Middle Eastern Bison Meatballs with Cilantro Yogurt Sauce that I swear I'm going to make just as soon as I splurge on an automatic spice grinder. (It's on my kitchen wish list, along with a super deluxe free-standing mixer, a crepe pan, and an immersion blender...)
Since the bison is going to have to wait until at least after my birthday (hint, hint) I decided to make the Whole Wheat S'more Cookies, primarily because I feel the same way about s'mores as I do about ice cream. That is, they shouldn’t be restricted to the summer months. Sure, they taste best when roasted over a campfire—maybe with a stray pine needle or two embedded in the marshmallow—but indoor s'mores on a cold winter’s night are nothing to sniff at. Besides, whole wheat means they're healthy, right? Right?
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Posted by Ed Levine, December 24, 2007 at 4:07 PM
- makes about 5 dozen cookies -
Adapted from Dolce Italiano by Gina DePalma
Ingredients
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/3 cup unsweetened Dutch-processed cocoa
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 cup whole hazelnuts, skinned or unskinned
1 cup (2 sticks/8 ounces) unslated butter, softened
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
5 ounces semisweet or bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
1 1/2 cups confectioners' sugar, for dusting
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Posted by Adam Kuban, December 14, 2007 at 2:30 PM
And here's a bacon-filled dessert you can make over the weekend, now that you've got some extra time. In Germany, these cookies are known as Speckkuchen, and, as James Villas, author of The Bacon Cookbook, says, rarely do you find a pastry shop in that country that doesn't have at least a small selection of them.
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Posted by Erin Zimmer, December 13, 2007 at 5:00 PM
Yesterday, D.C. Metro riders were glued to the Washington Post’s food section. 'Twas the annual Cookie edition! With 26 recipes, it got fudgy, nutty, fruity (and fatty, but whatever). One twenty-sixth of it especially struck me. The ANZAC biscuit, an all-caps acronym for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, which doesn't usually appear until April on its eponymous holiday.
According to urban legend (un-scary ones), World War I care packages were filled with these oaty rockstars to feed fighters. As a Serious Eats reader back in August put it wisely, they’re “like oatmeal cookies on steroids, and they keep forever.”
Last night I attempted the bellicose biscuits, and added a few personal touches.
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Posted by Dorie Greenspan, December 13, 2007 at 10:00 AM
Madeleines are about as iconic as pastries get in France, which might explain why I haven't had the nerve to offer these Fluff-Filled Chocolate Madeleines to my Paris neighbors. Actually, they'd probably like them—who in the world can resist chocolate and marshmallow and, just for good measure, ganache, that ethereal mix of chocolate and cream?
The first time I made these was also the first time I'd had Marshmallow Fluff. Since I didn't grow up with Fluff and it wasn't anything either my husband or son liked, filling luscious chocolate madeleines with the stuff wasn't an idea that jumped to mind naturally—I was nudged by a request from Justin Schwartz, the author of The Marshmallow Fluff Cookbook
, to come up with something fun for his collection. Since making these (I also included them in Baking: From My Home to Yours
), I keep a jar of Fluff in the cupboard, just in case the urge for these cute tea cakes strikes. I even brought a jar of Fluff to Paris. Who knows, one day I just might screw up my courage and make them for my neighbors.
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Posted by Ed Levine, November 7, 2007 at 1:00 PM
Today's Cook the Book recipe is for zaletti, a polenta cookie studded with grappa-soaked currants. When I talked with Gina DePalma, the author of Dolce Italiano: Desserts From the Babbo Kitchen, she listed it as one of her favorites. It's traditional to shape these cookies into diamonds—you don't have to, but as DePalma says, "it just feels right."
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Posted by Ed Levine, October 24, 2007 at 6:14 AM
I don't think you'd be surprised to find out that we spend a lot of time eating and talking about it at Serious Eats world headquarters. Baked goods, chocolate, and ice cream are consumed in copious quantities in the course of many days. Of course I try to convince myself that, if I just eat a little bit at a time, I can still eat what I love and still control my weight. I was doing pretty well lately until Robyn brought in these chocolate chip cookies. As she walked into the office yesterday morning she had a big smile on her face. "I brought baked goods this morning, chocolate chip cookies to be exact," she chirped.
She then went around to our desks and handed each of us one big, fat chocolate cookie that had been ever so carefully placed in a small plastic bag. It was 10 a.m., I had already had a bialy for breakfast, but there was no way I wasn't taking a small bite of that cookie. It turned out to be an amazing big fat chocolate cookie, a-chocolate-chip -cookie-hall-of-fame-level cookie—softish, chewy, with just a hint of crunch, not too sweet, and the perfect chocolate-to–cookie dough ratio. That is, you got at least the merest hint of chocolate in every bite, and about every third bite, you got a concentrated hit of bittersweet chocolate deliciousness. I thought to myself, OK, I'm just going to nibble on this cookie for the rest of the day. That wouldn't kill my diet.
I'm afraid my strategy failed. By 11 a.m. that sucker was gone.
I asked her for the recipe, which she adapted from one she found on Allrecipes. Then I remembered that our friend Meg Hourihan had embarked on a search for the perfect chocolate cookie recipe on her blog, Megnut. How did Robyn's recipe compare with Meg's ultimate "mean chocolate chip cookie" winner? (You must click through. This is one of my favorite food blog posts of all time.) See below. Make them both and decide for yourself. Or throw your own recipe into the ring. Of course I should make both and see which one I prefer. But maybe I can see if Meg and Robyn would participate in a bake-off for charity. I would insist on being the only judge.
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Posted by Dorie Greenspan, October 18, 2007 at 3:00 PM
The summer of 1995, when I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shooting the PBS Baking with Julia series, Rick Katz, a terrific pastry chef, was in charge of the prep kitchens. He had his hands full because, while one chef was upstairs in Julia Child’s kitchen taping, another was downstairs in the laundry-room-cum-prep-kitchen getting ready for his or her star turn, and it was Rick who had to whip up everything that was needed for the shoots, all those step-by-step swaps and the final beauties, too. Not only did he do it all, he’d manage to eke out time to make us treats, among them these Mocha Chocolate Chip Cookies.
The cookies use one pound—yes, a full pound—of chocolate. You can use all bittersweet (which is almost always my choice) or make a mix, say a half-pound of bitter or semi-sweet, a quarter pound of milk, and a quarter pound of white. Just use great chocolate—it makes a world of difference.
Rick would add snippets of dried apricots to the cookies, an addition I adore (I’m crazy about apricots in any form), but they’re optional.
For those of you lucky enough to live in Boston, Rick Katz can now be found at Picco Restaurant, Ice Cream, and Pizza Company, 513 Tremont Street.
(If you'd like an additional chocolate-rich cookie recipe, try this one that a friend of mine adapted from my book Baking, From My Home to Yours.)
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Posted by Adam Kuban, September 18, 2007 at 1:45 PM
Truth be told, about the only time I run into sesame seeds is on a bagel or hamburger bun. But the little suckers always delight me when they appear in desserts, as they do in this recipe for sesame cookies by Alice Medrich.
Sesame Coins appear in Medrich's Pure Dessert, in the chapter on grains, nuts, and seeds.
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