15 minute emergency brownies

I don´t want to start with a tiresome cliché about how brownies are the little black dress of chocolate puddings, so I won´t.  I will say, though, that they´re an endlessly useful recipe, because everyone seems to love brownies, and they go with everything, and they can be served just as is for a picnic or dolled up with hot fudge and ice cream for your best dinner party.

Or so I think, anyway.

They can also be frozen, so that when you make a big batch and have leftovers you can remove temptation, a little. Once they´re frozen they don´t even have to be thawed; just slice them thinly  and you won´t miss any Swiss bonbon.

If they have one shortcoming it´s the  impromptu chocolate binge. From start to finish, including baking time and cooling time, it´s at least an hour before you can be biting into your brownie. Not bad, but sometimes not quick enough.

For these moments we have the wonder brownie, also known as the brownie-cookie (no, I won´t say brookie).

This is simply a scaled down recipe, made with just one egg, and baked in dollops, cookiewise, for just five or six minutes.

The result are about fifteen wodgy disks, chewy at the rim, fudgy in the middle, perfect for scoffing right out of the oven, or to serve any way you would a brownie, in case of a brownie emergency.

I made them on Sunday and it took me eighteen minutes from start to finish, but that included doing the sums, never my forte. Since you have it done already, count on fifteen minutes, tops.

Preheat oven to 180ºC.

Melt 65 grams of chopped chocolate and 65 of butter in a bowl in the mircowave, on medium, for a minute. Once out, stir thoroughly with a wooden spoon so it mixes really well. Add one egg, beat, add 65 grams of sugar, and 40 of flour. Pinch of salt, stir well and spoon onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

Bake for six or seven minutes. 

In this time you can lick the bowl and spoon, wash them for real, make coffee and prepare a pretty tray.

A palette knife might be good to take the things out, as they´ll be still sticky in the middle.

Serve and astound friends and family. You´re gonna love me for these, I bet.

Oh, and if you want to make a proper tray, the recipe I use is Nigella Lawson´s from How to be a domestic goddess, minus 100 gr. of sugar. It´s here.

Bread, II.

I´m on a bread kick. It happens to me every year, but I would lie if I said it led to my making all the bread I eat. Usually after a few weeks my interest peters out.
But maybe this time it won´t. My last two loaves were so stellar, they may just have hooked me.
I made two, by the old hit and run method I wrote about, except that in one I used more water and it whooshed into an airy, domed creation. I also forgot to add the yeast to it, and bunged it in later, and mixed it without much hope. But it still turned out fine, so I´m beginning to think that it´s really no big deal.

One of the loaves, the normal one, smelled very yeasty on coming out of the oven, but didn´t taste so strongly of it. Not that I mind bread tasting of yeast. If it tasted of fish, or old socks, then I would worry, but yeast? Hardly.
However, I just bought the latest River Cottage book, and since I had the baby off my hands for the whole morning yesterday, I decided to try out the sponge method.

It bubbled away merrily all day yesterday, and the kneaded dough has risen admirably overnight, and now I´m waiting for it to prove. It seems to be a slow process but there´s no hurry. I´m curious to know if the flavour is really all so much better, because, frankly, that basic elemental bread turned out beautiful, delicious, and lasted all week.

So, while I find out about the supposedly fabulous bubbling sponge , here´s the variations on the basic recipe from the other post.

I used 350 gr. white flour, 150 gr. wholemeal, about a half cup of wheat germ, 40 gr. of gluten, a tablespoonful of dried yeast and one envelope of cultured buttermilk. This last is a very exotic ingredient that I´m almost running out of, but it´s just a question of using 1 cup of milk instead of all water.
The difference in this loaf was that I used almost 400 ml of water, which made the dough impossible to handle after it came out of the machine. But so much water means so much steam, and airy bubbles inside.
A sprinkling of cornmeal on the bottom of the loaf pan makes for a very good addition to a crackly crust.

Master mojito recipe from "Taste of Cuba"

Ah, Cuba... still as shabby and as gorgeous as ever. It was great to be back, even though the tropical summre heat knocked me flat.
Being deeply in love with Mad Men I was in a swoon over all the beautiful modernist architecture. We also went to Trinidad, a beautiful town that has managed to retain its XVIII century character without looking fake and over polished (unlike some bits of old Havana).
And the food? Well, Cuba has the sort of hearty Creole cuisine that I love, and staying at the house of a wonderful cook I was lucky enough to taste the best of it, which isn´t always easy for a tourist (or a Cuban citizen).
I could give you a recipe for beans and rice, or those fritters, or the amazing Key Lime Pie we had . Instead, I think I´ll do you a favour and pass on this great mojito, because that´s the best way to win friends and influence people, and if you´d been at the book launch, that´s what you´d have had, so here goes.

The beauty of it is that it´s a mojito base that you can make and keep in the fridge for any impromptu mojito madness. It will also make serving a lot of them the work of a moment, which, you won´t need me to point out, is great for a party.

Mix well, really well, like, shake the hell out of: 1 cup sugar, 1 cup fresh lime juice, a bunch of mint (stalks and all) and 1 75 cl bottle of 3 year old rum.
It keeps in the fridge for at least a month, as the rum in the mix keeps everything fresh..

When you want to make the mojito, just quarter fill a tall glass with the mixture, add ice cubes, sparkling water and a sprig of mint. Maraca noises optional.

Off to Cuba

There´s an exhibition of drawings from the book "A taste of Cuba" at the Biblioteca Nacional in Havana. If you care to browse a bit of the book, here´s a link. I´ll be back in a week, and report faithfully.

The bread post

So, here´s what I think is the problem with bread:

If you want to buy bread, you are lost between either industrial, cheap, pre-frozen or plastic stuff on the one hand, and artisanal, wonderful, insanely expensive things on the other.

If you want to make bread you find things that look easy but are only edible to earth-mother types who live mainly on sprouts and peanut butter. Or else you have to wade through weighty tomes written by people who all seem to have biochemistry degrees from the MIT.

I tried making Laurie Colwin´s bread, and Nigella Lawson´s simple white loaf. And they were fine, and they of course produce that magic buzz you always get when you take bread out of the oven. Sometimes they were better than others, and I didn´t know why. Now I think I do, and here´s what I´ve learnt: 

They will tell you about yeast being a living organism, and fragile, and precious, a being to be treated with all the respect due to your firstborn. Well, I take my darling one-year-old to the park in mismatched socks, and give her ice cream in public, and sometimes salt her food, and sure I get dirty looks, but she´s survived so far. So, accomodate the dough to your schedule. Leave it to rise overnight, or up the yeast a little to make it quicker. Don´t suffer. But if you don´t have time to let it rise, don´t go the yeast way, make biscuit dough instead.

Strong bread flour really makes a difference. I can´t always find an obliging baker to sell me some, but Guru stepped in to the rescue and told me to buy gluten from a health store. A spoonful of powder and voila, you have strong flour (I calculate around 10% of the four weight, a bit less, maybe, nothing to get hung up on).

The oven really really has to be hot. I mean HOT. So wait for it. But don´t bother with quarry tiles or trays of boiling water or anything that might put your life in peril. Do want a Bocuse d´Or or a loaf of bread?

That "will sound hollow when it´s done" is true, but it will also sound hollow when it´s slightly underdone, so watch out. And whatever you do, wait for the bread to be cold to slice it. I know it smells good, I know you want a piece. Believe me, I know. But wait.

Dough can stay around for a week in your fridge. This means you can pull out a ball and cook just what you need each day. And it´s where the flatbread thing really comes in handy. For feeding lots of people the oven is still best, but for one or two quick naans or pizzas, go the stovetop way.

My bread recipe

One day, maybe, I will try all those sponge methods that involve stirring a dough a hundred times in the same direction, and I will knead by hand, and I will locate caraway seeds. But for now, this is how I do it, in my trusty old Thermomix.

Put 500 grams of all-purpose flour, a teaspoonful of salt, a heaping tablespoonful of gluten and a teaspoonful of dry yeast in the bowl. Give it a whirr so they mix well. 

Now add 300 grams/ml of water. Mix on 6 until it clumps into a ball. See if you think it needs more water or more flour. Irritating sort of instruction, I know, but you just have to eyeball things sometimes.

Now put it on kneading position for two and a half minutes.

Turn it out into a bowl and either dust it with flour all around or give it a coating of oil. Leave it to rise, covered with a tea towel or plastic wrap. I usually make this around midday, when I remember, and leave it to rise over a few hours.

When it´s doubled in size, punch it down (that´s fun) and knead a little. Shape it and leave it to proof if you can. That just means you leave it to puff up a bit again, and then bake it as you will.

For pizza or focaccia I add a good glug of olive oil to the dough. For naans I substitute some of the water for yogurt (125 ml, since that´s the size of yogurt pots in Spain). Sometimes I make half wholewehat half white, and others I add wheat germ, and of course you can go the way of the seeds and nuts. It´s all fairly loose.

That amount makes four pizzas the size of a dinner plate, or eight naans. It can be kept in the fridge and pulled out as need be, so it´s as well to make the full amount, but the recipe can be halved easily.

The illustration if for Abe´s Penny.

Spanish mangoes

They´re in season! Whole boxes of them, fresh from Almuñécar, cheap and beautiful. I gloat.

Free from flatbread fear

One of the few cookbooks that has survived my cull is Flatbreads and Flavors. I´ve had it for a year, and I´ve picked it up and put it down many times, but I´ve never cooked from it. For one thing, it is almost off-puttingly cool. I´m not always in the mood for the off the cuff "we got this recipefrom a Tajik woman milking a goat outside her yurt when we were cycling in the Chinese Pamirs". If it catches you on one of those "Am I measuring my life out in coffee spoons?" days, it might tip you over to the suicidal.
On more settled, serene days, however, you can acknowledge with grace the fact that if you´ve never cycled in Guadarrama you´re unlikely to do it in the Chinese, or any other, Pamirs, and that that´s ok. But when you think of making the flatbread you quail. It looks complicated, there are quarry tiles invovled, and a process where you have to open and shut the oven door seventeen times, not to mention tackling something called a sponge. With a weary sigh you think that there´s as much chance of making injera as of climbing some Hymalayan gorge, and open a bag of flour tortillas instead.

The book is chock full of other things besides bread, though, so you can have a field day with curries and condiments. So all is not lost.

Unless, that is, you suddenly perfect a great method for making flatbreads. One that will win no smiles from Neapolitan grandmothers, and would make a Pakistani mother in law faint. But do you care? You can have a beautiful, golden hot slab of holy glory on the table in a few minutes, and who cares if it´s called pita or naan or fougasse or what? It´s there and it´s delicious, that´s all that matters.

It´s from The Kitchn, and it´s brilliant. Once you have your dough (and you can buy it, you know, so don´t complain) all you do is heat a covered skillet and cook a pizza or a naan or whatever inside. It works just as they say, except that you should definitely turn down the gas once you turn the thing. Brown spots are lovely, charred, blackened crust, no.

Also, I find that best results come from a heavy non-stick skillet, topped with a cast iron lid. This heats up in no time, and you don´t have to waste a lot of time and energy, and make your kitchen a living hell in summer. I think of this as the easy-bake tandoor, and it´s brilliant.

As for doughs, I have found out a heap of things in my experiments this week, and will Tell All in the next post.

Quinoa in a rice cooker

In the two years since I discovered the gizmo, I´ve become a recognized rice cooker bore. I love my rice cooker so much, you see, I just can´t shut up about it. And since it´s so cheap, I´ve embarked on a near-reaching campaign to spread the gospel, and have given away several to deserving friends and relatives.
Not everyone is with me on this, and on receiving a largish box, they say, oh, but it´s so big, and where will I put it? It only makes rice...

Now, this is plain silly. I´ve never heard anyone complain that their favourite brain surgeon can´t play the violin or score winning goals. And I´ve met plenty of coffe makers that take up lots of counter space and only make indifferent coffee.

But anyway, that don´t matter, because when I read this piece in Gourmet, I found out something I´d long suspected but never tried: you can make quinoa in a rice cooker. Isn´t that great? Those little seeds can be a right bore to get just right, just like rice. And as the mother of an enterprising toddler who is apt to climb tables to get to the (thank God) butter knife, I appreciate hands off cooking.

So anyway, quinoa, andean gold, the perfect side dish, and so distressingly healthful, too, is there for you at the push of a button. Now go and get a rice cooker, will you?

Brick-fried chicken

Roast chicken is great in almost every way, but it has two drawbacks. One, that the oven must be turned on, which in Madrid in the second hottest summer ever is a no-go. The other is that if you´re on your own, it makes for a lot of leftovers: J is away, and baby P can pack away a less than impressive amount.

However, there is a way to crisp skin and tender meat. This recipe, Sally Schneider´s brick-fried chicken, but made with chicken parts rather than a whole chicken. Drumsticks, or thighs, or whatever. You need only buy as much chicken as you can bear to live with , fit it snugly in your skillet, and then enjoy the fun DIY aspect of playing around with weights, since I doubt you keep bricks in the kitchen.

Just one note: turn off the smoke detector at first, and watch the time. Single bits will take less than the whole chicken in the original recipe.

One must assume that the man was talking about literature and not food, because for all the love you may choose to throw at cake, it won´t come out unless you stick to your recipe. Still, I like the sentiment.