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 while it works for melting butter and chocolate together smoothly, it’s VERY slow when you’re used to just zapping them in the microwave.

Once I mixed in all the other frothed-up ingredients with the chocolate mix, and folded those in with the flour, the result looked like this:

I poured it into the ramekins and everything looked all ready to go.

Then all I had to do was wait, and hope that these things turned out this time.  The first one I pulled out had been the ramekin that was the most filled up.  It was a complete failure.

Let’s call that a “Completely Fallen, Undercooked Chocolate Cake”.

I had one that actually came out fairly well, though it was oozing out the side right away.

We’ll call that one “Not so pretty, but meets the intent.”

I did find one that looked alright that I gave the wife to try.  It had a really moist center, just over the point of being molten, and she said the taste was good (though this picture of it–not so good).

It was still closer to a regular cake or brownie than a fallen chocolate cake, and considering only two or three of the five I baked came out OK, I’ll have another go at these later.  *Sigh* Still my unicorn.

TOPIC FOR TODAY

One of the lessons that I’ve been so grateful for in my life has been that, in reality, I know about a pinky fingernail’s worth of what there is to know in the world, and that’s stretching it.  As I’ve learned more about baking, and the fact that I really enjoy it, I’ve started running into lots of fun devices for baking that I had no idea existed.  Some things are just weird, others have a very specific niche, and others are so common that I just never knew they actually had a name.

To provide some education to others out there who are curious, are starting off on their own baking journey, or perhaps just want to go, “I can’t believe you didn’t know that”, this post is about three of the new-to-me baking devices that I’ve come across so far.  There are a lot more, but this is meant to be a fun post (rather than overwhelming), so three’s the limit.

BROTFORM (OR BANNETON)

When I started reading Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast,  I realized that all of the loaves in the book (at least, as far as I’ve gotten in it) are round loaves.  Obviously a round loaf doesn’t come from a rectangular bread pan, so the question was–how does the roundness happen?  Is it just lumping your dough on a sheet and then baking it (which can work, but not great)?  Or is there something out there that I’ve never used before?

As it turns out, there is a baking tool that helps your round loaves be, well, round.  These are called brotforms or bannetons, though the less fun term is “proofing baskets”.  Coming in different diameters, in addition to being available in a rectangular form, they’re made of wicker coiled into a basket.  Because you put sticky dough in them, you need to flour the brotform itself generously which, because of the coiled sides, imparts nice concentric circles of flour on your loaf.  Containing the dough in the basket while proofing helps to ensure a nice roundness to the loaves before baking.

I’ve got two different brotforms of slightly differing diameters, which you can see below, and each is from a different company.  These were both reasonably priced (I think $15 – $30) and, while the pricing for brotforms can vary widely, I’ve been completely happy with these.

PIZZA PEEL

It seems like once you venture into the world of bread baking, because you end up looking at different kinds of dough, there’s always some lead-in to making pizza dough as well.  This then leads to talking about making pizza and one of the tools used for that:  the pizza peel.  If you’re like me, you say, “What the heck is a pizza peel?  Is it something for pulling extra dough off the bottom of the pizza?  Or for pulling up the top layer to make a stuffed pizza?”

It’s actually neither of those.  The answer is that it’s something that you’ve probably seen so much before, either in movies or at an actual pizza place, that you haven’t given it a thought.  A pizza peel is the long-handled wood or metal paddle that you use to put pizza into and take pizza out of the oven.  I’ve seen this at the places that use a brick oven, and I’ve seen smaller-handled peels that are available for home use.  Peels not only help you to handle moving the pizza quickly, they also keep you from getting burned in the process.

If you’ve never seen a pizza peel before, check out a few pictures and a discussion of the different types here.

PASTRY BLENDER

OK, OK, so I’m cheating a bit here.  The pastry blender isn’t really a new-to-me tool; my Mom used it when baking pot pie shells in the kitchen when I was little.  It is a tool, though, that I had only used off and on over the years, and I thought it worth adding in here.

As you can see above, the pastry blender is just a round tube for the handle, and then two sides that come down to support several bars going across.  You use a pastry blender to get your dough all mixed up the way you want it to be, such as when adding butter or shortening to the mix.  Typically, the bars aren’t sharp enough to cut you, but I can attest that if you hit them just right or apply enough pressure you can definitely hurt yourself on one.

I was curious, just before writing this post, about what the correct way is to use a pastry blender.  Do you just mash straight downward with it?  Use a bit of a rocking motion while pressing down?  Or maybe even just sweep across the dough with a little downward pressure?  In spite of searching, I couldn’t find a solid answer.  The most common means seems to be the one I use, which is:  push down into your mix with one side, rock towards the other side, lift, repeat.  The curved shape of the bars make this the most sensible approach, so it’s the one I’m sticking with.

TO QUOTE BUGS BUNNY . . .

I hope you’ve enjoyed a look at a few of these tools that are less known in the common kitchen.  As I said at the beginning, this was a post primarily written for fun.  However, because there are SO many different tools that you can use in baking, I might write a Round 2 of this.  For now, though:  That’s all, folks!