Food & Thoughts

Lavede efter Chad Robertsons opskrift, bare en halv portion - og det skal man passe på med, for fik puttet for meget salt i, og kæmpede så med at pille de (heldigvis!) store saltkrystaller ud igen, mens jeg vendte dejen. Brugte: Primært Gærda + 20 g. Rugpaul, cirka - 100 g. i alt. Begge flød fint. Halv/halv valset (Bornholms Valsemølle) og stenkværnet Skærtoft Skærtoft grov hvede Og så, ja... 17 g. salt. Fra sammenrør til formet ca. 5 timer. Kunne nok godt have hævet lidt mere inden shaping, men jeg skulle nå på vagt. Fik tre timer på køkkenbordet, inden den så røg på køl. Så ganske fin ud morgenen efter, kl 845, hvor den blev bagt af. Ovn opvarmet til 275, skruede ned til 250 + kraftig damp - men efter 2-3 minutter blev jeg en kylling, og skruede ned til 220. Derfor 20 min. i alt med kraftig damp, og så op på 250 i 5-6 minutter til farve. DOMMEN: Lidt tættere i krummen end de sidste par stykker, og skorpen lidt tynd. Jeg skal nok prøve at følge instruktionen - egentlig...

It's June, it's summer, it's HOT! Can't have the oven on for too long, so brownies, layered with ice cream from the lovely,  Foodbeam ? Hear hear! Only I never got so far as to do the cookie sandwiches - I just ate my cookies alongside banana ice cream from ParadIS . It was lovely! METHOD: This is a cookie, but unlike most cookies I make, there's no creaming of butter and sugar. Instead, you go the standard brownie route: melt chocolate and butter together, beat eggs and sugar, mix the two and add flour mixture. The batter ends up somewhat stiffer than a regular brownie batter, but only by a whisker. INGREDIENTS: These cookies use brown sugar - that's new, only my standard recipe has a mix of brown sugar and regular sugar. There's a - in comparison - tiny bit of sugar (30 grams), but that is more than made up for by the amount of chocolate - 200 grams. I used Valrhona Guanaja 70%. chocolate:egg:sugar ratio: Standard (January): 110:2:300 Meyer...

  For the month of May, I'd decided to try a cakey brownie. I should probably let you know - and I guess I already have - that I much prefer my brownies fudgy, rather than cakey. But you know - science. Perhaps I was missing out, not ever trying out the cakey ones? If anyone should know about chocolate (and hence, brownies) it oughta be The Scharffen Berger people. So I grabbed the cookbook I have from them, and found the aptly named: cakey brownie. They have other kinds, too, but this what was I needed. Here we go: METHOD:  The method in this cake involved doing a meringue to start - whipping egg whites with sugar, luckily nothing with thermometers and sugar syrup! I let the trusty KA do the job, and it was no problemo. The recipe did call for the meringue to be whipped until the sugar dissolved, and while it was whicking away, I started thinking whether my sugar ever dissolves?? Not just using this method, but Im pretty sure there's always a little grit to it... I al...

Unsweetened chocolate. Oh, the woe is me. Unsweetened chocolate was the key ingredient in this months brownie , coming to you from Deb, over at Smitten Kitchen . Not easy to come by around these parts, let me tell you. Back when I started this project, I asked one of my friends going to New York if he would get me some, but even in the City of Dreams, he didn't find it. Well, he didn't find the Sharffen-Berger kind I wanted. Luckily, I had some at home, from a trip I did many, many moons ago - but it was long-past-it's-best-before-date. Not one to be deterred, I used it anyways - which may be an explanation for my less than impressive results. (yes, that was a spoiler right there...) METHOD You melt chocolate and butter, then whisk in sugar, then eggs. Similar to my standard recipe, but the batter became almost fudge-caramel like - long and dense, somehow. And you could tell there was a LOT of sugar in there, with it almost crystallizing. INGREDIENTS: chocolat...

The first month of spring, and time for something new. For me, and The Year of Brownies, that meant really getting out of the comfort zone, in the form of adding something not chocolate to my brownies. Enter the walnut. I've had bad experiences with nuts. There's nothing that can ruin a cake, bread or salad like a stale nut, and for a long time, I was the type of person that bought stockpiles of nuts, only to have them go rancid at the back of the drawer. And a bad nut will most certainly mess up the taste experience, so perhaps what I've not liked about nuts in my brownies was not so much the texture, but the (off) taste. Given time, I've learned to keep my nuts in rotation, and now buy them when I need them, so they're fresh and sweet. There seems to be a trend towards me posting at the very end of the month, but I promise, these were baked on March 31st (hence the back-dating of the post). Nothing like a deadline, eh? METHOD: Slightly different from m...