This is two tablespoons of cocoa powder combined with two tablespoons of water and a teaspoon of baking soda. If you look closely you can see that an interesting chemical reaction is taking place. See there? Right along the edge where the mixture meets the dish? A little reddish tint. Look close now…see it there?
READ ONA lot of very creative balderdash surrounds the red velvet cake, from its origin myths to its chemistry to its odd little preparation rituals (making a paste of red food coloring and cocoa powder, etc.). There’ll be more on all that this week. For now all you need to know is that red velvet cake is little more than a buttermilk layer cake with a hint of chocolate and a whole lot of red food coloring. It goes like this:
6 large egg yolks
11 ounces (1 1/4 cups plus two tablespoons buttermilk)
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 ounces red food coloring
13 1/2 ounces (3 cups) cake flour, sifted
10 1/2 ounces (1 1/2 cups) sugar
1/4 cup cocoa powder
3/4 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
12 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
I’ve put off red velvet cake for a long, long time because, well, I hate ruining shirts with food coloring stains. But I can resist it no more…there are simply too many requests. So…off we go!
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Po-TEET-sa, po-TEET-sa is how it’s pronounced, just in case there’s still a question on that. I’m told that back in Slovenia if you can make potica you’re entitled to call yourself a cook. Assuming that’s true, then I’ve earned the right to sling hash in any all-night greasy spoon in Ljubljana. Adam and Eve on a raft — wreck ’em!
This isn’t bad for a first try. I’ve got a few surface defects but the interior looks good, and that’s the part that really matters with potica. Notice that I’ve got quite a few layers going here. I was able to stretch the dough quite thin, though a yeast dough is never going to get as thin as a very elastic strudel dough. So if many, many thin layers are what you’re after, head over to the strudel recipe and employ the dough you find there. Otherwise assemble the ingredients for potica and proceed as follows. Place the flour, yeast, salt and sugar in the bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle (beater). Stir that on low.
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On the surface of it, an egg white isn’t a very interesting thing. It’s colorless with very little flavor and is made up of about 90% water. However there’s quite a lot of magic in that last 10%. How so? Because that’s where the proteins are. The white contains about half the total proteins of the egg, most of which are different from those of the yolk, and which do some pretty interesting biological jobs. Some of them bind up vitamins, others digest cell walls, still others bind to digestive enzymes rendering them useless. All combined they serve to make the white of an egg a very unfriendly place for invading microbes. They’re a big part of the reason an egg can be stored for so long.
READ ONReader Barbie writes:
Loved the egg enyzme post, Joe. But it made me wonder: are there any other chemical traps that might be out there, waiting to spring on an unsuspecting pastry maker?
That’s a good question, Barbie. Other than carnivorous pineapples, I can’t really think of any.
READ ONI’d never heard of this trick before, but Christy over at Pretty Easy Living has a great tip on how to make box cakes for people with egg allergies. Who knew cans of soda pop were this useful?
READ ONI confess I’ve been saving this question since the weekend, as it dovetails beautifully with today’s discussion on the subject of egg yolks. Reader Peet writes (wrote):
Hi Joe! I’m having a problem with my pastry creams, i.e. they’re too thin. I cook them but have never been comfortable with bringing them to a boil since I’m afraid of curdling, and anyway egg proteins thicken at a much lower temperature. Which means there’s no reason the creams shouldn’t be thick, but they start out thick and eventually turn to soup in the refrigerator. Is boiling really the key to a thick pastry cream? And if so, why?
I think I see the problem, Peet. The heart of it is that pastry cream isn’t a protein-thickened custard (at least not primarily), but rather a starch-thickened custard. But this poses an excellent question: why must starch-thickened custards be boiled? The answer has to do with an enzyme called amylase that’s present in egg yolks. If you remember how flour thickens watery mixtures, it does so when it warms enough that the individual starch molecules — long, string-like amylose molecules and branch-like amylopectin molecules — start to separate from the flour granules. They float off and get tangled up with one another, restricting the flow of the water around them.
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That’s a very pretty, upstanding yolk, no? It’s the mark of a fresh egg. If you’re ever in a position where you need to evaluate the relative age of an egg, a yolk is a good place to start. If it’s fairly roundish and bright yellow, and is sitting high atop a slightly milky-looking mound of almost gel-like egg white, your egg is extremely fresh. Make cake, cookies or muffins out of it. Or better still cook it up, because fresh eggs make mighty good eatin’.
Old eggs are very different in their appearance just out of the shell. The white becomes very clear and watery due to a progressive change in the pH of the egg, which begins as soon as the egg is laid. That change in pH causes the proteins in the white to drift away from each other, dispersing the large aggregations that formerly made the egg white jelly-thick and whitish. As that happens the membrane around the yolk starts to weaken. More water from the white enters the yolk, diluting its pigments and giving it a pale appearance. As that happens the yolk membrane stretches out, causing the yolk to lie almost flat. If you’ve ever tried to separate an old egg, you know just how weak that membrane is after many weeks of sitting. If the egg is sitting at room temperature, the pH change happens many times faster.
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A post on eggs could go on almost indefinitely. However since I want to focus on the egg as ingredient, I’ll do my best to keep this short and useful. The logical place to start is: how are eggs used in the pastry kitchen? I can think of three main categories of use: as a structural component in cakes, as a thickener in custards and creams and as a foam in batters, meringues, frostings and the like. It’s a pretty crude taxonomy when you consider how much eggs offer the pastry cook in terms of flavor, enrichment and color, but it seems functional to me.
Eggs come in different colors, sizes and grades. For our purposes I’ll focus on the basic white, large (as opposed to “peewee”, “small”, “medium”, “extra large” or “jumbo” as defined by the US Department of Agriculture) chicken egg, since that’s what most pastry recipes printed in the States call for. They’re also the most commonly available egg for home bakers and commercial bakers alike. Those that use shell eggs, anyway. Large eggs weigh about two ounces. The white weighs about an ounce, the yolk about half an ounce and the shell accounts for the rest.
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