Oh, silly me, I forgot to mention something. As reader Joy observes:
READ ONI learned something new today! Financiers are the little cakes I make to use up the leftover egg whites after I have made my weekly batch of mayo! I know them as Friands and bake them in a special muffin tin with oval holes. I like to add lemon zest to the cake recipe and drop two or three raspberries or blueberries on to each one before baking! They don’t last long in our house!
I was just going to get to that, reader Clarissa, thanks! The reason bakers like to brown (clarify) butter is to add more flavor notes to it. As mentioned down below, fats, while they’re great flavor mediums, tend not to add much flavor by themselves. Butter is no exception, though its unique composition does allow us to up the ante a bit by applying heat to it.
READ ONI’m personally fascinated by the subject of crispy and/or crunchy food. No question it’s an odd thing to take an interest in. However as many of you who’ve read my bio know, I work quite a bit with food growers, packagers and purveyors. And all of them — save for the beverage makers — are continually concerned with the property of crispness and/or crunchiness. It’s a highly valued property in food among human beings generally, and lots of time, effort and money has gone into studying it.
Why are human beings so terribly fond of the crispy/crunchy sensation? Every consumer group from health nuts all the way through to couch potatoes love it, creating huge markets for everything from bagged micro-greens to kettle chips. Indeed if one were to re-categorize foods in the supermarket based on their sensory characteristics alone, “crispy” would be the largest section by far, full of everything from asparagus to apples to bacon, chips, pretzels, tater tots, pickles, candy, cookies, microwave-ready edamame and frozen thin-crust pizzas.
READ ONI’m not sure. At least I haven’t found anything authoritative on the subject. The word itself means the same thing in English as in French, which is to say a money manager, or a person who owns, handles or invests large amounts of capital. As I mentioned in an earlier post, some people believe it’s the “gold bar” shape of the cake that inspired the name. Others because it was (supposedly) invented at a pastry shop located near the Paris stock exchange, the Paris Bourse.
READ ONOooh..COOL question, reader Monica! Forms greased with butter create crispy edges by facilitating the transfer of heat from the oven to the batter. That’s the first part. We coat things like vegetables and potatoes with oil before we oven-roast them for the very same reason: the oil film speeds cooking, and faster cooking means less dehydration of the food. The added benefit is that the fat helps deliver more flavor to the taste buds.
READ ONFinanciers are a terrific way to use up leftover egg whites. These days it’s popular to use silicone molds for financiers, and indeed that is probably the most convenient and least expensive way to go. Should you decide to use silicone, however, make sure to butter the form nonetheless as the extra butter will create the much-desired crispy outer crust. If you don’t want to use tart or financier molds, you can make them in muffin tins, just be sure to only put in about half an inch of batter. You’ll need:
READ ONThey’re little French cakes. Some people refer to them as cookies, even pastries, but the reality is they’re just little tiny almond cakes, frequently served with small scoops of ice cream and/or fruit. They can be round, oval-shaped or square, but the traditional shape is rectangular sort of like a gold bar. And indeed, some people theorize that it’s the gold bar shape that earned them the name financier.
READ ONI’ve been forgetting to mention that yours truly is a finalist in Saveur Magazine‘s Best Food Blog Awards for 2012. So if you have the time and inclination head on over a cast a ballot! ‘Cause I mean, is there anything YOU’d enjoy more than seeing MY name up in lights? Didn’t think so. Joe! Joe! He’s our man!
READ ONLet me apologize for the lack of posting today. I was hoping to get something going when I got up, but having been on the road six hours a day for the last three days I’m whipped. I always have odd dreams when I’m this exhausted. Last night I dreamt that I had a time machine and traveled 1000 years into the future.
There I found a society that was much like our own, save for the way they spoke about their calendars. Evidently the citizens of this society had become so spooked by millennial anxiety in the run up to the year 3,000 that their government stopped counting years numerically (2910, 2911) and gave them names instead.
READ ONWell it’s happened again, the madeleine-shaped Joe Pastry signal is shining high in the clouds over Gotham City. Someone needs baking help — fast! I’ll be back in a few days to make some financiers!
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