Baking

Baking Steel and Pizza Stone Side by Side

Baking is so much fun. There’s always something new to try, plus you get to eat the results (well, unless they’re too burnt–we’ve all been there). On top of that, there are lots of different cool tools. I’ve talked about some of these before, but there are two additional ones that happily are in our kitchen: a pizza stone and a baking steel.

A Lifetime of Pizza

Why are those two tools in our kitchen? It’s all in a name: Pizza.

Like most other kids, I loved pizza growing up. Back then, it was simple: Your Mom buys the Chef Boyardee pizza box from the store and you follow the instructions. The big tools you need are really just a bowl to mix up the ingredients, some oil, and a round baking pan to put the pizza on. Some minutes later, the pizza comes out.

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A slice of Boston Cream Pie

About every other week, I’m posting about a project I recently completed. Usually this involves baking, as that’s my favorite project, but it could involve books, home projects, etc. Dads have lots of roles, after all. This week’s project, Boston Cream Pie, is from the The Cook’s Illustrated baking book.

Boston cream pie is, when done well, truly incredible. The interesting thing is that, at least in the restaurants we go to, it’s not served much anymore. Similar to the previous project, Baltimore Berger Cookies, I last had one while traveling; in this case, on the east coast. Go figure–Boston cream pie is more common around Boston.

If you’ve never had a Boston cream pie, you can see the pictures in this post, but the general idea is this: Cake layer on the bottom. A cream layer in the middle. Another cake layer on top of that. All of this is capped off with a chocolate layer that surrounds the top cake layer and drips down the sides. So, yes, with all those layers you don’t need a large piece to get a lot of dessert.

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Baltimore Berger Cookies Closeup

About every other week, I’m posting about a project I recently completed. Usually this involves baking, as that’s my favorite project, but it could involve books, home projects, etc. Dads have lots of roles, after all. This week’s project, Baltimore Berger Cookies, is from King Arthur Flour. You can find the recipe here.

I’ve had to travel sometimes as part of my job. When I was a contractor for a systems integrator, this meant traveling to different places in the U.S. Moving into the non-contractor world, the rare travel situations have been to other countries.

No matter how good or bad a trip to another country is, the food experiences are always interesting. Lots of people rave about incredible dinners, but on a trip to Finland a couple of years ago I enjoyed breakfast far more. The overall amount, variety, and quality of food was excellent, but one little item became a favorite morning treat. It was a crisp cookie which had a fairly basic dough flavor, but was half dipped in chocolate. The crunch of it, the smooth chocolate taste, were a nice little sugar rush to wake my jetlagged behind up.

I felt weird doing it, but I took a picture of one of those cookies. I was unable to find anything about it online once I got back, and I couldn’t find any recipe that really looked like it. That is, until King Arthur Flour published in their magazine Sift about favorite foods in different states. And lo and behold–Baltimore had something called a Berger cookie that looked darned close to what I ate in Finland. Of course, that meant I had to make it to see if it actually was similar.

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Three styles of New York Cheese Pizza

I’ve mentioned Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast before, which is for making breads. A companion book to it is Forkish’s The Elements of Pizza: Unlocking the Secrets to World-Class Pies at Home. It has lots of great recipes for dough, sauce, and the overall pizza. Making the New York Cheese Pizza was my personal project for this week.

Preparation

We prepare our normal pizzas within the span of about 15 minutes: dough, sauce, toppings, the whole shebang. With the New York Cheese Pizza recipe, you prepare the dough two to three days ahead of time. The dough yields three dough balls, so you can make three different pizzas (or get three chances to do one right 🙂 ).

Here’s what the dough balls look like fresh from their second fermentation in the refrigerator:

New York Cheese Pizza Doughballs
Doughballs, Fresh from the Fridge!

The sauce can also be made ahead of time. You can get most of it done in the blender with prepared ingredients, and then there’s a bit of cooking with some sugar. Here’s what it looks like in the blender:

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Molten Cake OK

RECENT PROJECT

This week’s project was again from the Cook’s Illustrated Baking Book (p. 334, to be exact).  Amongst the many baking projects that I haven’t yet honed my skills on, molten chocolate cakes (or Fallen Chocolate Cakes, as the book calls them) are at the top of my list.  Last time I made them they were basically a cake texture, with a little dollop of something that was still kind of a cake texture in the middle.  Not exactly appetizing.  So this was a redemption bake for me.

The first part of the process went well, meaning I didn’t break the glass bowl that I stacked on top of a pot of water to rig up a double boiler.  I’ve never tried that approach before, and

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