Low sugar chocolate chip cookie

Since both my mom, and Chris’ mom are diabetic, we’ve been trying some low and sugar free recipes. We’ve made a few recipes with varying levels of success, but I’ve found we have better results using the splenda for baking blends at half amounts. With this in mind, we pulled out one of our favorite chocolate chip cookie recipes, Alton Brown’s Chewy cookie recipe as a base.

Ingredients
2 sticks salted butter
2 1/4 cups bread flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 tbsp splenda sugar blend for baking
1/2 cup plus 2 tbsp splenda brown sugar blend for baking
1 egg
1 egg yolk
2 tablespoons milk
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract (more or less-we always use more)
2 cups bittersweet chocolate chips (the higher cocoa, the better)

Method:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Melt butter, and once it’s cooled some, add the sugar blends and mix until smooth (it may take a while). Add the beaten egg and yolk to the mixture and stir in, along with the vanilla. In a separate bowl, mix the dry ingredients, then add to the wet. Mix until mostly incorporated. Add the chocolate chips, and mix in. Portion onto parchment lined cookie sheets, and bake for 12-14 minutes, until golden on the edges.

One thing to mention is that cookies baked with splenda don’t spread as well as full sugar cookies, so you’ll want to smush the cookie down a little so you get a cookie shaped cookie, rather than a bombe shaped cookie.

They turned out well, a little more crumby than a typical cookie, but in the future, I may try AP or cake flour instead, just for giggles.

St. Louis style Pizza

If you’ve ever had a St. Louis style pizza, you know they’re different. Generally, people either love it, or hate it, without much middle ground. I’ve only had St. Louis style pizza at Imo’s, a St. Louis chain that has a location in the KC area.

What is St. Louis style pizza? Basically, its a thin crust pizza, very crunchy, that utilizes a pasteurized-process cheese known as Provel. Yes. Process cheese. I know. Ick. Well, actually, Provel is pretty good for processed cheese, a darn sight better than the typical American cheese slices.

Provel is essentially a mixture of Swiss, Provolone, and white Cheddar, with a slight smoke flavoring.

St. Louis style pizza sauce is generally pretty sweet, but in this case I used sauce I had in the freezer. It was made with a 28 oz can of tomato puree, a couple tbsp of double strength tomato paste, 1 onion minced, and Penzey’s pizza seasoning – and possibly a couple pinches of sugar. If you don’t have a pizza sauce seasoning blend, basically you’ll want to start with a pinch of salt, 1/2tbsp dried crushed oregano, a pinch of time, and and pinch of basil.

The interesting thing about St. Louis pizza is that the pizza crust is unleavened, which means there’s no yeast, no rising time, no waiting.

Dough:
2 cups + 2tbsp AP flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp oil (olive, canola)
2 tsp corn syrup (I used dark)
1/2 cup + 2tbsp water.

Mix ingredients until a stiff dough is formed. I found I needed more water, but not much.

Roll it out on a floured board, as thin as you can without breaking it.

Put it on a pizza stone or pan. I think ours is 18″ or so.

Preheat oven to 450.

Top the dough with around 1/4 cup sauce, and about 2 cups of Provel (I think I used around 1 cup of Provel, and 1 cup of mozzarella, since Katie isn’t a big fan of the Provel). Other toppings included fresh basil, oregano and thyme, as well as about 15 or 20 slices of turkey pepperoni.

Bake at 450 for about 10-13 minutes, so that the crust browns on the bottom.

Oh, and unless you want to be a St. Louis pizza pretender, cut it into squares, not those wedge shapes everyone else uses.

Our St. Louis style pizza

Buttermilk Bread

This morning I decided to use some of the excess buttermilk we had in the fridge (I forgot to read the label last time we were at the store getting milk…oops). I poked around online, and found this recipe. I left out the ginger, but otherwise followed it as written. The loaves turned out very well-nice and soft with that characteristic buttermilk tang to them. Considering I still have a half gallon of unopened buttermilk in the fridge, I don’t think it will be too long before I’m making another batch of this.

Pizza dough, take 2

For lunch today we made some pizza-mozzarella, mushroom and fresh basil. We’ve been tinkering with the dough for a while, and I think this finally hit it.

Ingredients
8 oz bread flour
8 oz AP flour
1.25 cups warm water
1 tablespoon yeast
1.5 tsp sugar
1 tablespoon salt
2 tablespoons butter

Proof the yeast with the water and sugar. For this batch, I decided to try the dough blade of the food processor, and it worked fabulously. The dough was silky and smooth. Let it rise twice, then shape into a round. This amount was more than sufficient for the large pizza pan we bought, so in the future, I’ll cut a little off for breadsticks. Once shaped and topped, bake for about 10-15 minutes, or until the crust is browned and the cheese is bubbly and brown at 450-500 degrees. We found that we need to bake the pizza on the lowest rack to get the bottom of the crust cooked at the same time as the top.

This pizza was great, and is even good cold (always a good test for pizza quality).

Grilled Swordfish with Pesto, Lemon capellini, and Sauteed Asparagus with Shallots

Tonight we wanted something different and fun, and since the weather was good, we decided to grill.

We found frozen swordfish that looked better than anything in the fresh fish section of the local megamart.
They got thawed and grilled over medium heat, after being seasoned with salt and pepper. Put on grill, close lid. After two minutes rotate 90 degrees, after two more minutes, flip. Two minutes later, rotate 90 degrees. Cook a final 2 minutes. Put on plate, top with about 1 tsp of pesto each, spread it out, tent with foil, let rest. Swordfish – done.
Obviously, you’ll hold off on cooking the swordfish until the capellini and asparagus is nearly finished, so it stays hot.

Asparagus with Shallots.
Trim 1 bunch asparagus as needed
Mince one shallot.
Melt 1 tbsp butter in a sautee pan and sautee the shallots a bit, then add the asparagus.
Salt and pepper it lightly. We used a bit of Penzey’s shallot salt as well.
Add a little water so that it’ll steam the asparagus a little and not burn the shallots once they have developed some color. We didn’t put a lid on to trap steam, just avoid burning the finely minced shallots. All told, this sauté takes probably 15 minutes – 3 to 5 for the shallots and 10-12 for the asparagus.

Serve with lemon capellini. Obvously, the cook time for capellini is shorter than spaghetti. We use somewhat more lemon juice and cheese, and about half the oil that Giada’s recipe calls for.

Pot Roast…er…braise.

This really isn’t a roast, since it isn’t dry roasted, but rather braised very much like osso buco. The Professional Chef calls this “Yankee Pot Roast” in spite of the fact that it’s a braise. Anyway, it does yield a very nice roast, and a wonderful gravy. We served it with mashed potatoes, peas, and the rolls in the prior post.

We bought a 2lb bottom round roast, and a package of raw, plain bratwurst.

You’ll also need:
1 white onion finely chopped
3 oz or so of tomato paste
8 oz red wine (we had a Rosemount Shiraz on hand)
2 carrots finely chopped
1 parsnip finely chopped (or not, we happened to have one on hand)
3 to 4 cans of low sodium beef broth (or your own homemade stock, but we’re currently out of that)
Pepper – no salt – there is salt enough in the low sodium broth to get things started.
Veg. Oil (2 tbsp or so).
Fresh herbs such as parsley, thyme and rosemary. A couple of sprigs of each.
1 dry bay leaf.

Pepper the roast lightly.
Over medium high heat, sear the meat on all sides in the hot oil, in a roasting pan (or other pan, but you may have to play the transfer game to get things where you want them in the end) until it is a dark brown all over, then set it aside, and add the onion, carrot, and parsnip. Sautee it until nicely browned, about 10 minutes. Add the tomato paste and let it cook a minute or so, stirring it, until it gives off a sweet smell. Add the wine, and reduce it by at least half. Then put the roast back in the pan and add 2 to 3 cans of the broth (or enough to come halfway up the roast). Add the raw brats (or german rope sausage, or whatever you like – a small pork roast, also seared, would be fine as well – I find that having a beef and pork mixture of some sort makes for more interesting gravy in the end.)
Put the lid on it, and put it in a 350 to 375 degree oven for about 2.5 hours. Turn it now and then to keep it moist, and make sure you’ve got a decent level of liquid in the pan. Add the herbs, and perhaps a bit of garlic powder or a clove of garlic.

We also made a carrot cake and the hot rolls, so there were times it came out of the oven and went onto two burners over medium heat on the stove for a while. It’s a covered roasting pan, it really doesn’t matter – it isn’t as though with a braise we’re trying to take advantage of dry heat on all sides, instead we’ve got moist heat in a more or less sealed environment. With a heavy enough roasting pan, you could easily do this on the stove top the whole time and probably never notice a difference.

When the roast is done, the brats will have taken on a nice color as well, and will be well cooked. The cooking liquid will be nice and thick – in fact, I added a cup of water during cooking to keep the liquid level up where it needs to be.

Take the roast and sausages out and tent with foil on a cutting board. The juices need to be strained to get the herb stems and so on out. I have a chinois, so I poured everything through the chinois, and then worked it through, which served to puree the vegetables in the cooking liquid and force them through. Scrape the outside of the chinois down and stir the pureed veggies into the liquid. If you don’t have too much salt, and don’t mind it a little thin, you probably have gravy at this point. Gordon Ramsay did basically this with the gravy at the Fenwick Arms in a Kitchen Nightmares episode. I decided I wanted a little more volume, and wanted to dilute the salt just a bit as well. Had I had homemade beef stock on hand, I would not have had any salt problem at all, but let’s face it, even the low sodium beef broth by Swanson has more salt than is needed for most recipes. I added about 1 cup of water to the strained liquid to dilute the braising liquid, and then made a flour and butter roux about 3 tbsp flour to 3 tbsp butter, cooked that for a couple of minutes (stirring constantly), and then added the braising liquid to the roux and cooked it for several minutes at a low boil, stirring constantly.

The red wine, broth, carrot and tomato paste all gave their best to create a really nice, beefy, and very dark colored gravy, with the veggies in it providing a slight sweetness, nice body and texture that is often missing from gravy. Adjust seasoning – you’ll probably want more pepper, but with as salty as even low salt beef broth is, I can’t imagine wanting more salt.

If you’re following along in the Big Book of Braising, you’ll note that this method really isn’t any different than what you’d do to braise lamb shanks, soup bones, oxtail, short ribs, or beef/veal shanks.

Where we varied from the Professional Chef’s method is that in the last 30 minutes of simmering, they would have you add peeled turnips, potatoes, and pearl onions, which would be lovely, but we wanted mashed potatoes instead, so we omitted that step. If you added the root veggies, their starch would serve to thicken the braising liquid, and might make a roux unnecessary. It would still benefit from being run through a chinois or strainer to really even out the texture prior to serving, unless you don’t mind chunky veggies and wanted to de-stem your fresh herbs prior to adding them to the pot.

Great Grandma’s Potato Hot Rolls

A year or two ago, Katie and I were digging through a little metal card file of family recipes. Amongst them was a 4 card set entitled “Grandma Daily’s Hot Rolls”. This is actually my great grandmother referenced in the title. We’ve looked at this card a couple of times, and thought they’d be great, but then decided it was too much trouble, or we didn’t have time.

Today, along with a pot roast, we made these rolls. They are wonderful, but not particularly good for you.

Ingredients:
2.5 tsp active dry yeast (or equivalent)
1 cup potato water (warm – from boiling potatoes for mashed potatoes)
1/2 cup sugar (approx. maybe 1 to 2 tbsp more)
1 cup crisco shortening
2 eggs, beaten
1 tbsp salt
3 cups milk
1 cup mashed potatoes
8 to 10 cups flour (we get really fresh, dry flour, and tend to use rather more in any recipe. We probably ended up using at least 11 cups).

Add the yeast and sugar to the water, and let proof.
Heat milk until hot, add butter and shortening to melt, cool to 80-90ish degrees – you don’t want to kill the yeast. Mix the milk mixture with the eggs and salt, and add the potato water, yeast and sugar mixture to that. mix the flour and mashed potatoes into this, forming a nice soft dough. It should be very moist but not gooey. Knead as typical for breads, cover and let rise until doubled, punch down, let it rise again. Punch it down and divide it into about 3 oz portions, and pan them in lasagna trays or similar, greased. Let rise, covered, again for about 20 minutes or so and bake in a 375 degree oven for about 20 minutes. When done, we rubbed a stick of soft butter on the top.

These are a truly wonderful potato hot roll that really isn’t a lot more work than any other bread. They’re soft, light, and so on, because of the fat and sugar. We both wish we had made these years ago. Mom hadn’t had them in at least 30 years, and thought they were absolutely wonderful.

Edit from Katie: Just as a side note, a full recipe of these made about 3 dozen 3 oz rolls, so unless you’re feeding an army, a half batch would probably be a good idea.

Homebrew Update: Yum

The brown ale has been bottle conditioned for about a month or so now, and its really quite nice. It has good carbonation, small bubbles, and lots of them, but its not over carbonated like a lot of mass produced beer. It’s nice and malty, with some hops, but not overpowering. Its really quite good, and a huge improvement over the Imperial Stout that I made a couple of years ago. I think the 8oz pack of dried whole malted barley that was steeped initially really helped the flavor. It also ended up pretty well clarified from sitting in secondary fermentation for a couple of weeks.

I’m definitely going to do this again.

Mexican Hot Chocolate Frosting, redone

Recently for work, I threw together another vanilla cinnamon cake, but this time I altered the frosting recipe some. I used the standard Italian buttercream from the CIA’s baking book, at a half recipe and I still had a couple of cups of leftover frosting.

Mexican Hot Chocolate Buttercream
4 oz egg whites
8 oz sugar
2 oz water
1 lb butter (unsalted, and softened)
1.5 teaspoons vanilla extract
4.5 oz chocolate (mixed dark and white, to taste)
1 teaspoon ancho powder
1/4 teaspoon cayenne
1.5 teaspoon cinnamon (as usual for this recipe, cassia is the way to go)

Melt 6 oz of the sugar with the water in a heavy bottomed saucepan over medium-high heat, until it reaches soft-ball stage (240 degrees). Meanwhile, beat egg whites until frothy, then add remaining sugar and continue beating to medium peaks. When syrup reaches the target temperature, slowly pour into the egg whites, with mixer on medium speed. When all the syrup has been added, beat meringue on high until it returns to room temperature. Add butter in small batches, letting each addition blend in before adding more. When buttercream is smooth, blend in the chocolate, spices and vanilla. Use now, or refridgerate for later use.

Also: The dry nature of the cake has always been a bit of a problem, so I think next time instead of 4 whole eggs, I’ll use 2 whole eggs, and 4 egg yolks. Hopefully leaving the whites out will keep the cake more moist, and the increased fat from the yolks will help with the same thing.

Osso Buco take two

It’s been some time since Chris and I tried osso buco , and that was with lamb shank. This time we were able to get some nice meaty beef shank to use. The recipe was the same, but this time we were able to liberate some marrow to use in the risotto, which was a lovely addition. The meat was reasonably tender after a prolonged braising period, and we were easily able to split one shank and feel very full. Although the sauce for the osso buco is amazingly rich, it’s also amazingly flavorful, and this is definitely something to make again.