Posts Tagged “chocolate”

I’ve been informed that today, June 12, is National Peanut Butter Cookie Day.  What better day to test my crackpot theory that you can improve things by adding peanut butter.  For example, here is Quaker Oats’ “Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookie” recipe, and my modifications in [brackets].

• Preheat overn to 350F
• Combine and cream
  • 1/2 pound (2 sticks) margarine or butter [avoid margarine at all costs; substitute peanut butter for half the butter]
  • 1 cup firmly packed brown sugar [if your brown sugar has turned into a rock, gently microwave it into molasses]
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• Add and beat in
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• Add
  • 1+1/2 cups flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon [I've never bothered with this, although I have been known to add some ground coffee]
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt (optional) [salt is never optional]
• Stir in
  • 3 cupts oats
  • 1 cup raisins [feh, I use chocolate chips or more likely a hacked up chocolate bar or Reese's pieces for special occasions]
• Drop by rounded tablespoons onto cookie sheets [use a larger spoon or just scoop chunks with your hands if you get bored]
• Bake 10-12 mins

Viola!  Chocolate chunk peanut butter oatmeal cookies.

When you live outside the tropics, it’s sort of hard to buy “local chocolate.”  You can buy from a local chocolatier, which is somebody who buys chocolate from someplace else and melts, molds, rolls, carves and otherwise remakes it into delicious confections.  You can also buy chocolate from a local chocolate maker, somebody who imports cocoa beans and turns them into what we know as chocolate.  Somerville’s Taza Chocolate is in the latter category, and this weekend, they opened their doors for an open house and tour.

Health codes prevented the hundreds of tour-goers from entering most of the factory, but we did get a good look at the roaster and winnower with co-founder Larry.  The aroma was intoxicating.

Looking vaguely Steve Jobslike, Larry held forth passionately about Taza’s commitment to their cocoa cooperative in the Dominican Republic, local partnerships in Somerville (they buy letterpress labels from nearby Albertine Press!), and creating an organic product using ancient Mexican stone mills.  The company is just three years old, but the major equipment was purchased used and is over 30 years old.

Is that a cork substituting for a button on the winnowing machine?  No matter. One business-minded guest asked where the bottleneck was in the process, and it turns out that the answer to that is wrapping and packaging, and Taza plans to expand into adjacent space in the building to increase capacity.

Indulging my usual passion for salty chocolate, I picked up a $4 round of Taza’s Stone Ground Organic Chocolate Mexicano in the salted almond variety.  The factory might not open to the public again for a while, but run don’t walk to Taza’s website or your local supplier.

Earlier this week I was in Santa Monica engaging in the dark art of qualitative marketing research. (For more insight into marketing research, try Lynne’s shiny new blog, Marketing Analytics) While dining with my colleagues, I discovered that they had been having on ongoing discussion on foodie topics, and were eager to draw me into the symposium.

The questions came rapid-fire, each one positing gut-wrenching choices: “if you could have just one cheese for the rest of your life…” “what’s your favourite fruit?” “what’s the best seduction meal?” “what would be your last meal?” and so forth. I shot from the hip answering alternately thoughtfully and blithely, and then they unleashed the stumper – the question that was disturbing in its very implication.

Cheese or chocolate?

If starting right now – no last fling allowed – you had to give up one of those foods forever, which would it be? Each one has hundreds or even thousands of varieties and forms and applications. There’s chocolate in some of my favorite coffee drinks, and cheese in so many savory foods. For some, a dessert is incomplete without one or both. Chocolate cheesecake is off the table immediately. I waffled, I wavered, I changed the subject.

I told two friends about it recently, and they chose quickly but came down on opposite sides. One claimed a bit of lactose intolerance and the other pledged allegiance to the savory side of life. Others I’ve told, especially vegetarians, have been as worried by the question as I am.

I remember a few months back, twitter buddy @thespottedduck asked which four cheeses you would restrict yourself to for the rest of your life and had a hard time getting any takers to cut back to just four types, even with broad categories like “swiss” or “goat.” And similarly terrible to contemplate, a man in England raised over 1,000 pounds for charity by pledging to give up cheese for just one month. See the terrified reaction here by one bloke who has a list of top five European cheeses. He’s not cutting back to four anytime soon.

As a marketer, I’m all about forced ranking as a way to uncover preferences. As a businessman, I’m all about making tough choices to stay focused and productive. But as an eater, I’m just not sure I like thinking about this sort of thing.

Is there anything finer than a good chocolate babka?  Probably not, but after bringing back no fewer than three such treats from New York City this weekend, I got to wondering, just what is babka, anyway?

Like so many of my favorite baked things, babka comes from Ashkenaz.  Wikipedia cites “Eastern European” origins, Russian etymology (Babka = бабка = grandmother), and savory variants from Belarus and Lithuania.  But none of those technicalities really get to the soul of the babka.

We all know that Jerry and Elaine spend a good portion of The Dinner Party seeking, discussing, dissecting and obsessing about babka. (I edited the spelling from “bobka” in the amateur transcription linked here) That’s a start.

JERRY: That’s the last Babka. They got the last Babka.

ELAINE: I know. They’re going in first with the last Babka.

JERRY: That was our Babka.

ELAINE: You can’t beat a Babka.

JERRY: We should have had that Babka.

My particular prize was a Green’s chocolate babka, private labeled for Zabars.  It’s a little flaky but mostly gooey, disturbingly heavy, and oddly parve.  A seemingly similar article can be found at Delancey Desserts.

A little poking around led to a recipe from of all people, Martha Stewart, which including milk, butter and cream, so definitely not that close to Green’s, but which does reveal the basic chemistry of the babka:

• 1 1/2 cups warm milk, 110 degrees
• 2 (1/4 ounce each) packages active dry yeast
• 1 3/4 cups plus a pinch of sugar
• 3 whole large eggs, room temperature
• 2 large egg yolks, room temperature
• 6 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for work surface
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 3/4 cups (3 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch pieces, room temperature, plus more for bowl and loaf pans
• 2 1/4 pounds semisweet chocolate, very finely chopped
• 2 1/2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon heavy cream

This makes three loaves, but we’re still talking 3/4 of a pound of chocolate per loaf, similar to a full bag of chocolate chips.  That’s got to have something to do with it.  Another variant from Su Good Sweets is Nutella Babka, which seems to mix in about 1/3 nutella with the chocolate.

Green’s babka is kosher, and depends on oil (palm, I hear) for fatty goodness, but that renders it parve, and allows it to be served more flexibly in kosher households.  A definite benefit for some that might impede the flavor for others.  I’ve never felt compelled to complain when my babka answers to a higher authority.

Should you find yourself in posession of a babka, be sure to warm it slightly before serving to bring the chocolate to the necessary state of gooeyness.

I should probably quit while I’m ahead, but I found a couple more babka notes that I must impart.  We’ve dwelled on chocolate babka so far, and while I won’t even mention the usual secondary or “lesser” babka variant, it appears that there are savory dishes also called babka.

Again, via wikipedia, there is the savory dish from Belarus and Lithuania: “It is made from grated potatoes, egg, onions, and smoked bacon. It is baked in a crock, and often served with a sauce of sour cream and pork flitch. Depending on recipe and cooking method it may be either a flaky potato pie, or a heavy potato pudding.”  Sounds delicious in its own right, but seems pretty far off from the sweet stuff, and awfully distant from anything kosher, too.

From Aloyada, we also have a Ukrainian fish babka, described as “…souffle-like. Which meant that when baked, it rose almost as much as a conventional souffle– but stayed puffed up and impressive. The egg yolks, milk, fried onion, bits of bread and stiff egg white give it a lovely light and very tasty texture; an aerated clear yellow omlette-style base in which the embedded pieces of fish and herbs (nutmeg and dill or tarragon) are delicious, subtle and moist.”  Also interesting, and maybe a little more likely to be related to the chocolate babka of ashkenaz.

Enticing as the savory options are, there will always be just one true babka for me, and unless I freeze some of it now, it’s not going to last till my next trip to New York.

OK, it’s not exactly a cheese sandwich with the image of the BVM on in, but as household miracles go, I’m thinking this one is much more useful if less lucrative.  After dinner, I was looking around for a snack, and I found a nice bar of dark chocolate, but it had gone all bloomy.

As per the all-knowing wikipedia, with my emphasis:

Chocolate is very sensitive to temperature and humidity. Ideal storage temperatures are between 15 and 17 °C (59 to 63 °F), with a relative humidity of less than 50%. Chocolate should be stored away from other foods as it can absorb different aromas. Ideally, chocolates are packed or wrapped, and placed in proper storage with the correct humidity and temperature. Additionally chocolate should be stored in a dark place or protected from light by wrapping paper. Various types of “blooming” effects can occur if chocolate is stored or served improperly. If refrigerated or frozen without containment, chocolate can absorb enough moisture to cause a whitish discoloration, the result of fat or sugar crystals rising to the surface. Moving chocolate from one temperature extreme to another, such as from a refrigerator on a hot day can result in an oily texture. Although visually unappealing, these conditions are perfectly safe for consumption.

So I figured I’d suck it up, and I put a couple of pieces on a dish and sat down to do some work.  When I reached over to take a piece, I saw that the chocolates – which had been sitting on my Apple Time Capsule – had miraculously returned to their dark and luscious state!

O. M. G.

Just to make sure I wasn’t losing it, I went and got another piece of the bloomed chocolate and put it on the dish for comparison.  Check it out:

Observe the ugly, waxy, bloomed and blemished chocolate on the left, and a piece of the same bar on the right after mere minutes sitting on the Time Capsule.

Is it the heat from the drive?  The radiation from the WiFi?  Cosmic emanations from Steve J-bs?  I’m not really sure I want to know, I’m just glad my chocolate is back in shape.