Christmas Insecurity Complex

When Pasplore invited me to contribute a recipe to their holiday recipe mosaic I was quite flattered. A little holiday recognition for Joe! I thought. Then I saw the thing. Very cool, but talk about making a guy feel small — Lord! The size of the food blogosphere boggles the mind. That so many of you have found your way here is something of a miracle. That so many of you keep coming back, given all the nonsense you regularly find here, is an even greater miracle (and one I an extremely grateful for).

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Hold your horses…

There are a few too many Sicilian flowers in this recipe for my liking. Just too much perfume. I’m going to change the formula (no offense, Peter!) and perhaps eliminate the fiori completely. I think some extra vanilla plus some orange zest is all the perfume I need. Otherwise, I’d put a teaspoon of Fiori […]

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Duty Calls

And when it does you’d darn well better pick up the phone. Seems I gotta run to Chicago tomorrow morning for an overnighter. I’ll back back on Monday to tell you all about the panettone I made today. Later bakers!

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What is Fiori di Sicilia?

I’m glad you asked, reader Katie, because I forgot to make a note about it. Fiori di Sicilia is an extract that combines vanilla, citrus and flower essences. “Flowers of Sicily” is what it literally means. I’ve looked around and can’t determine for certain if Italians use this exact product in their panettone baking, however it seems clear that extracts containing flower essences are fairly common there. The most dominant flavors in Fiori di Sicilia are vanilla and orange, so, if you can’t find — or don’t want to order — the actually item, a blend of 50 percent orange extract and vanilla works just fine.

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What is “sulphured” fruit?

This question comes in some form every year, and it’s always worth answering because the answer is, well, fun. Any time you set out to buy dried or candied fruit you can count on seeing labels that say things like “Naturally Unsulphured!” which has to be good, right? But then what is “sulphuring” anyway, and is it really a bad thing?

The process of sulphuring has to do with plant enzymes. Enzymes are and always have been a major headache for fruit eaters, since they cause picked fruit to brown and soften. And that’s a bummer if you’re the type of person that likes to make picked fruit last. Humans have expended lots of time and energy over the millennia trying to figure out ways to shut enzymes down (even if they didn’t realize what enzymes were). But then what are these browning enzymes doing in fruit in the first place? The answer is because they’re a key part of a plant’s natural pest control system.

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And that should about do it.

Blitz, biscuit, creaming, egg foam, muffin, one-bowl, roll-in, straight dough and whipping. Those are all the mixing methods I can think of, and now they’re all codified under the “Mixing Methods” section of the Baking Basics menu to the left. I think I’ll leave it there unless someone knows of a method I’ve forgotten. Pastry […]

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The Whipping Method

I think of the whipping method as “European” and I don’t think that’s an inaccurate assessment, since you only tend to come across it when making spongecakes like génoise, joconde, ladyfingers or specialty cakes like rehrücken. I can’t think of any common uses for the whipping method here in the States, except perhaps for flourless chocolate cake. Essentially, the whipping method is how European bakers create very light cake layers in the absence of chemical leaveners.

You need a lot of eggs — plus plenty of sugar, which helps create a thick syrup that keeps the egg foam from collapsing. The neat thing about the whipping method is that it gives lie to the myth that egg foams can only be created with whites. Twaddle. Indeed in most instances where the whipping method is employed you’re whipping either whole eggs or egg yolks plus sugar. Egg whites plus sugar are a rarity in the whipping method universe because, well, then you’d have a meringue, would you not?

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The Roll-In Method

The “roll-in” method is the description for what you do when you laminate dough for croissants, Danishes and puff pastry. Effectively you’re “rolling” butter into a flour-and-water dough. Personally I think of it as “folding” it in, but there you go. Who am I to argue with decades of established pastry lingo?

There’s no question that laminating seems more like a technique than a “mixing” method, though when you consider that one of the chief aims of mixing is to incorporate fat it all starts to make a little more sense.

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The “Blitz” or “One Step” Method

This technically isn’t even a method. Rather it’s the opposite of a method. But I made reference to it in the gâteau battu series I did (which seemed to go on for months). The “blitz” method is simply shorthand for putting everything in the mixer bowl at once and turning on the machine. See what I mean about it being a “non-method”? There’s no methodology to it at all.

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