Did You Know? Banana Edition

In the not too distant past, I somehow came across a bunch of online forums where moms were debating the best way to manage bananas for their babies. The complaint was regarding how to best store bananas after peeling them because their babies were only eating a small part of the banana at a time. There were all kinds of methods mentioned, but not one single person discussed the simplest method of all.

Simply cut whatever amount of banana off that you want to use and... leave the rest there. That's it. That's all there is to it.

The end of the banana dries out and seals itself and when you are ready to consume the rest of the banana, all you do is cut or peel off the dried end and proceed as usual. How long will it last like that, you might ask? As long as the banana will last before turning to goo on your counter. Yay for simple answers!

Better Butter

This is one of those things that I always feel weird posting because it seems too simple. I originally started doing this when my boy first started eating solids, about three years ago. I wanted to reduce the amount of sodium in the butter I used, so I could use a wider range of other ingredients without feeling like I was blowing his daily limit too badly. Interestingly, a couple times over the last few years, I've briefly had to go back to regular butter and it's just not as good! I find myself getting anxious to get back to the "good stuff."

When I recently had multiple people in a short time period asking what butter I used because they thought it tasted so good, I decided maybe it was time to share my secret with the world. It's so simple, it's hard to imagine it making such a big difference! All I do is mix one stick of salted butter with one stick of unsalted butter. Then I put the mixture in a crock and leave it on the counter. So, so easy.

Why does it make such a big difference? I think the reason is two fold. First, I think salted butter is salty enough that it tends to overwhelm the delicate flavor of the butter. Second, look at the photo below. The top box is salted. See the ingredients? Cream and salt. That's it. Now look at the bottom box. See those ingredients? Cream and natural flavoring. Initially, I was, like, whoa!, what are they sticking in my butter!?! But after a little snooping around, it appears that to keep it from tasting too flat without any salt, manufacturers add a little lactic acid to the butter to give it a little tang. It's a cheaper way to give a little bit of cultured flavor to butter (like what the Europeans do) without actually having to culture the cream. I think between those two things, the butter just tastes extra fresh and delicious. Additionally, now that I am used to the lower sodium, regular salted butter seems overwhelming to me.

The other good news is, that in my experience, it doesn't matter what butter you use. Name brand or store bought, it all comes out tasting about the same. Yay! 

In other news, see the utensil in that bowl? That's called a "sandwich spreader" in food service lingo. May just be the most awesome tool ever made. I use them for everything. In this case, though, they make mixing butter like this a breeze and they make spreading soft butter on toast amazingly easy. I own around half a dozen of them and almost start crying when I realize they're all in the dishwasher. :-)

The Crust that Shatters

Every now and then, I discover something earth shattering totally by accident. And, I must say, what a wonderful bit of serendipity this discovery was! Over the years, I have made a lot of bread of many different types. I have posted about french baguettes and boules, and most recently about high-hydration artisan loaves. In all that time, I was rarely able to obtain the really shattering crust for which I was looking. Oh, sure, occasionally it happened (with my almost no knead recipe in particular- now I know why!), but it was never consistent. The crust mostly just came out... hard. It might be crisp, but it wasn't shattering.

If you don't know what I mean by shattering, then you are missing out on the best the bread world has to offer. It's a delicate crispness that only lasts while the loaf is fresh, but is one of the best reasons to ignore prudence and jump into that loaf before it's fully cooled. Shatter is truly the world for it because the second you start to bite down on it, the crust breaks into a million flavorful pieces in your mouth. It is divine. It was elusive.

I have been working on a rye boule recipe for some time now. It's just about ready to share with you, but it took a while because there were some issues that had to be dealt with. The biggest issue was that the finished loaf was often gummy. After quite a bit of research, I came to find out that is a particular issue with rye. Apparently, it has more of a certain enzyme that converts starch to sugar, leading to a gummy crumb. The cure? Acidity. And here's where the serendipity came in. The very first time I added citric acid to my loaf, the crust dramatically changed. Not only did that tiny amount of acid fix my gummy crumb, it improved my crust a hundred fold. It was absolutely magical. I have since tried adding a little acid to a variety of artisan type loaves with great success. For a 600 gram flour boule, I use a mere half teaspoon of powdered citric acid. This certainly explains why the almost no knead bread often had that crust - it has vinegar in it, providing some acidity. I suppose you could just add some vinegar to your water when making bread, but I think the consistency the powdered citric acid gives is very nice. In either case, the acid imparts no meaningful flavor to the final product, but, oh, what a difference it makes in the crust!

Baker's Math

I know there are a lot of folks out there with math phobia. I see them when my earth science students mutter that they thought they signed up for a science class, not a math class. What they, and a lot of other people, don't realize, is that math makes the world go round. We are fortunate that the universe appears to be structured in a very deliberate and organized way. I would argue that it is quite possible that until we are able to mathematically describe physical phenomena we see in our universe, we do not truly understand it.

Now, what does all of this have to do with baking bread? Well, to be honest, not a whole lot. I'm not worried about mathematically modeling the chemistry of bread baking, but I do believe that a few math skills in baking can be darn useful.

I won't lie to you. It took me a while to really grasp its usefulness, and many of you may find yourselves in that category forever. There's nothing wrong with that. You don't need baker's math to make great bread. But it comes in really handy when you want to start fiddling. Or scaling recipes. It really comes in handy there.

The whole idea of baker's math is that the recipe is presented as a list of percentages. Here's a sample recipe for french bread:

Flour 100

Salt 1.9

Yeast 0.55

Water 65

Two things you may notice right away: 1) the flour is 100%, 2) the total of all ingredients does not total 100%. All baker's math formulas are based on the flour totaling 100%. The other ingredients are listed as a percent of the flour's weight. How much weight is totally up to you. In this case, if you start with 4 cups of flour (weighing approximately 5 oz per cup), the required water would be 13 ounces. I obtained that number by using this first formula here. I plugged in 65 for the ingredient % (from the recipe above) and 20 ounces for the flour weight (4x5 oz). Multiply those two numbers together and divide by the 100 gives you how much water you need to add.

So, now if you want to use a baker's math recipe, you have a formula that can allow you to easily figure out how much of each ingredient you need. All you need to do is decide how much flour you want to start with and do one calculation per ingredient.

I used to pooh-pooh the use of the scale in the kitchen because it seemed laborious and unnecessary, but when it comes to making bread, the scale really is a rock star. Simply place your bowl on the scale, tare it, and start adding ingredients until you hit the requisite amount. Tare between each ingredient and there's no thinking involved!

But really, most cookbooks give the baker's weight and conventional measurements, so the above formula is only sometimes useful. So why the hubbub about baker's math?

Because I like to fiddle.

Lately, I've been fiddling with french bread. None of the recipes I tried quite gave me the results I was looking for, but many of the recipes had features I liked. But it is very hard to compare different recipes when they are written in conventional measurements. However, in baker's math, you can easily compare the recipes. Here are four french bread recipes from three different cookbooks that I converted to baker's percentages. The first thing to note is that they are quite similar. In fact, I could now probably write a set of parameters for what constitutes a french bread dough. And while there are a lot of factors that can influence the final product besides proportions of ingredients, it's an important place to start.


After making 5-6 different batches of baguettes, I took the above information and came up with a formula of my own I wanted to try. I decided on my percentages, and then I used the above formula to determine the weight of each ingredient. (I'll share that recipe in the not too distant future.)

What if you want to scale a recipe that is in conventional measurements? Then you need a different arrangement of the above formula.

With this formula, you need the weight of each ingredient, so you'll have to use a scale to get started. Once you have the weight of each, you can simply plug in the ingredient weight and flour weight to get the percent of each. Remember, in every case, the flour weight is 100%.

Again, baker's math is not required for bread baking, but it can be very useful when you want to compare recipes or scale them for a different yield. It may not be that hard to scale the measurements to increase a yield from 2 to 3 loaves, but what if you have a recipe that always makes loaves just a little smaller than you are happy with? With baker's math, you can simply and easily scale them up just a bit while still keeping all of the proportions equal! Handy dandy!

Phyllo Dough Shortcut

Good news! Your life is about to get easier.

For a long time now, I've wondered, do I have to brush phyllo dough with butter to get the best results? I love baking with phyllo dough... those flaky layers get me every time, but I hate brushing each layer with butter. And, in this case, I really mean hate.

So, the other evening I conducted a test. I built two stacks of plain phyllo dough and baked them for comparison. On one I brushed butter like I usually do, on the other, I sprayed plain old cooking spray on each layer. First, I want to let you know that building the stack using the cooking spray was a breeze! It was wonderfully easy and I could control the amount of fat I used somewhat too. When you're trying to brush tissue paper thin sheets of dough with butter, there's no such thing as going easy on the stuff.

I purposefully made the stacks with no flavorings whatsoever. I wanted to be see if I could discern a difference in flavor between the two, because - as we all know - butter has a special flavor profile and if there was a difference, the hassle of brushing might be worth it.

And the good news is: knock yourself out with the cooking spray. Not only was the result just as flaky and puffed as the butter (in fact, maybe even more so), there was no significant flavor difference between the two. Make your life easy! Make phyllo with cooking spray!

NOTE: The cooking spray tower is on the right in the above picture, the butter on the left. When I bit into them, there was really no significant difference in flakiness. I think the difference you see in the picture is due to the edges of the layers sticking more with the butter when I trimmed around each stack before baking. Another kudos to the cooking spray, I suppose!

Chilling Bat

I'm not sure I can convey the amount of joy I feel for the recent change in weather down here in Florida. While the majority of folks here are lamenting how "cold" it is (you know, temperatures below 60 degrees), I am singing hallelujah. Did you know that yesterday I took my dog for a walk and did not even break a sweat? Granted, I am a bit freakish in that department... what can I say? Apparently, I was genetically made to live in the desert. But, still! It was so enjoyable! I keep trying to tell myself that I simply have to trick my brain into thinking summer here is like winter up north in that you don't spend a lot of time outside. As far as I'm concerned, we're just now getting into the good season.

But, despite the cooling temperatures, I'm pretty sure we'll never really get truly cold here. One of my favorite things about living up north is that in the winter, I don't have to worry about food safety when it came to chilling things quickly. You never worry about putting hot soup into the refrigerator; you just stick it outside! It's like the largest walk-in cooler ever! I'm pretty darn sure I'll never be able to do that here.

That means I have to stick with using a chilling bat when I have hot liquid I want to cool down quickly. Putting a big pot of hot stuff into your refrigerator not only means that the liquid will take a long time to chill down but it will also warm up the other items in your chill box. That leaves a fair amount of time for little microscopic critters to get a foothold in your food. Down with food creepy crawlies! Away!

In restaurants, they use a chilling bat... or paddle... or wand. The gizmos go by many names, but they all have the same purpose: to help cool down your hot liquids quickly so that they spend less time in the temperature "danger zone." Here is a picture of a chilling paddle from the Webstaurant store. Do you know food service suppliers want over twenty bucks for such a device? Crazy!
But, don't you fret, because for less than $1.50, you can have your own chilling bat. Just carefully wash and remove the label from a 2-liter soda bottle. Fill it with water until it's about an inch shy of being full, put the cap on, and store in your freezer. The next time you make a pot of something that needs to be chilled down quickly, you've got it made! I reuse mine over and over. Just wash the outside between each use and replace in the freezer.

Not a bad deal until I can make my way back to the land of real winters...

Handy Dandy Pancetta

You know the old adage about how everything tastes better with bacon? It's true, you know. And there are so many bacon choices out there! There's regular old bacon, thick cut bacon, and apple wood smoked bacon. Oooo, let's not forget about Italian bacon. Pancetta is so wonderfully different from American bacon. Because Pancetta isn't smoked but cured with spices such as nutmeg or fennel, it has a very different flavor profile. Besides the obvious differences in taste, I like that it cooks up so much more quickly (and with less mess) than traditional bacon.

I also like that it is easy to package into quick-use slices. I ask the deli to slice them fairly thickly (they use setting 5 at my deli, about 3/8 to 1/4 of an inch). When I get home, I use patty paper (small squares of wax paper) in between each slice and then freeze in a zip top bag. Once frozen, I can easily remove one or more slices and cook immediately and quickly into any dish that needs a little bacon punch. I particularly like using Pancetta for bacon bits on salads.

Once you remove the slice(s) from the freezer, you can dice up and add the pieces to the pan still frozen. They cook up very quickly over medium heat. Yuuuummmm... bacon.

Prepping Artichokes

Artichokes have always been a little odd to me. They seem so prehistoric. And when I really think about it, it does seem wacky to be eating what basically is the unopened blossom of a thistle. And intimidating? Well, goodness, just look at them. It's no wonder so many people pick them up at the market and wonder, "What the heck am I supposed to do with that?" Fortunately, they're not as difficult as they might seem. Once they're prepped, there are plenty of things you can do with them. The simplest is steaming them and dipping into melted butter. Stuffing them is probably the second most popular preparation. There are lots of recipes out there for what to do with them. In this post, I'm going to show you step by step how to get those funny flower buds ready to use.

The first step is to cut off the top. Cut off enough to reach the pinkish/purple portion in side.

The next step is to trim the prickly ends of the leaves off. The best tool for this task is a kitchen shears or scissors. Oh, and this is important. See that bowl in the upper right hand corner of the following picture? That bowl has some acidified water in it. Artichokes, like so many other types of produce, oxidize and turn brown when exposed to air. Be sure to have this bowl ready to dip the artichoke in periodically to prevent browning. You can acidify the water with lemon juice, vinegar, or citric acid.

While some recipes require the artichokes to remain whole, I prefer to cut them in half. I think it makes them steam more evenly. It's also much easier to remove the choke if they are in half. If your recipe needs them to remain whole, skip this step.

Now pare the tough outer layer of the stem off with a paring knife. This step may involve removing some of the lower leaves to reach the tender inner stem. Notice that I am keeping the spare half in the acidified water.

Artichokes brown very quickly. It doesn't look very attractive all browned, does it? So be sure to have the water ready and dip frequently.

Here's the choke or the "thistly" part that needs to be removed. As you can see, it wouldn't be good to eat.

Use a large spoon to scoop the choke out, scraping to clean it out thoroughly. If you are keeping your artichoke whole, this can be tricky. Peel back the leaves enough to access the center and scoop out. You may need to cut the tops back more when preparing them whole than when you are halving them.

And that's it! Now they are ready to use in your favorite recipe.

Ode to My Cast Iron

While I am not quite as devoted to my cast iron as I used to be, I still believe there are many things that are best cooked in it. I used to own nothing but cast iron skillets, but, to be honest, my arms started getting tired. Actually, I think the real reason had to do with finally being able to afford good quality non-stick cookware. Either way, I still love my cast iron. Here's why:

• Nothing manages heat better. If you want to pan fry something, nothing beats cast iron. Looking to roast something in the oven? Nothing keeps moisture in the meat better.
• It's the original stove to oven cookware.
• If your cast iron is well seasoned, it allows you to enjoy non-stick cooking at high temperatures without having to worry about toxic materials leaching into your food like is believed to be possible with Teflon pans. In fact, cast iron contributes iron to your food!
• You don't have to break the bank to buy a good cast iron pan.
• You don't have to worry about using special utensils when cooking.

As you can see, cast iron has a lot of benefits. Sure, there are a few draw backs, namely - it's HEAVY! But, heck, you can get a workout while you cook! The only other potential drawback I can think of is that it really requires you to clean the pan immediately. You shouldn't use soap on cast iron (it tends to remove the pan's seasoning); salt and hot water is all you need to keep your cast iron in tip-top shape.

To enjoy the full benefits of cast iron requires the pan to be well seasoned. This involves wiping down the inside surfaces with vegetable shortening. Bake in the oven at 350 degrees F for about an hour. While Lodge is the most common new cast iron available, if you can find a Wagner pan at an antique store that is in good condition, you should grab it. Wagner pans have a smoother interior surface that I find forms a better non-stick surface when seasoned properly.

A Better Rolling Pin Cover

I always hated traditional rolling pin covers but not using one was even worse. I hated that they were expensive and often hard to find. I hated that they left wacky lines all over the dough. I hated that they always ended up stretched out and then would get sloppy on the rolling pin, sliding all about. And it never took long before they looked nasty and dirty, even after washing.

Fortunately, I found a perfect alternative. I had a drawer full of those white knee high nylons that come in the little plastic balls. On a whim a couple of years ago I figured I would try using one on my rolling pin. It was perfect! I cut off the toe and the ribbed top and it ended up just the right length to cover my rolling pin. It is super stretchy, so it easily fits over the pin, but it is elastic enough to stay in place. I love that it does not leave a bizarre pattern on my dough, but it doesn't stick to it at all either. I like that it is super easy to clean and dries quickly. Washing and drying it also reinvigorates its elasticity. I have to change the nylon out maybe three or four times a year. And the best part? A pair of 'em only costs 49 cents.