Chef Elliot Prag was our teacher for the day - he's a Natural Gourmet staple. Big personality, witty and goofy, passionate about pastries, Chef Elliot provided comedic relief (as well as lots of knowledge and baking tips) the entire day. He started class by creating his version of Top Chef's "drawing knives" ceremony - he drew names to pair us for the day, as well as drew recipes for each pair. I was assigned to work with Gisella on the Ghiradelli "Outrageous Brownies" recipe. Our challenge was to take the original recipe and by modifying it step by step, turn the recipe into a delicious vegan alternative.
Oatmeal raisin cookies made by Tracy and Chris:
So the first step was to make the recipe as is - white sugar, processed cocoa powder and all. The brownies turned out delicious - so I thought. Chewy, gooey, SWEET.
Step 2: Change the flour - so we changed AP flour to whole wheat pastry flour. This change didn't really make a big difference, but we added a little bit of whole grain to our decadent dessert... that can't be a bad thing.
Step 3: Change the additives. The additive in our recipe was the cocoa powder. Processed, refined cocoa powder is an interesting product - if you look on the back of the package at the ingredients list, you will notice that sugar is either the first or second ingredient. (We used Ghiradelli cocoa powder - as called for in the recipe) We changed from Ghiradelli cocoa powder to 100% cocoa powder. The difference in taste was incredible, something I had never noticed before taking a bite of recipe 1 right before tasting recipe 3. The brownie was no longer a bite of chewy, sweetness; it had been transformed into a bite of rich, chewy, CHOCOLATE. Until now, my brain had simply told me I was tasting chocolate because it was sweet and brown. Now, my mouth told me I was tasting chocolate because I really was.
Step 4: change the sugar. We changed from white sugar to coconut sugar. Coconut sugar is sugar drawn from a coconut. It is minimally processed, flavorless (as in, it does not taste ultra-coconuty), and is lower on the glycemic index scale. The sweetness seemed to be pretty much the same; however, we began to notice that the brownie had a density that it had not had before. We decided that this was most likely from the cocoa powder, considering that it was 100% chocolate and had no extra sugar.
Step 5: change the fat. This is the step that gets tricky - remove 1 stick of butter, substituting for some other "health-supportive" fat. We decided on coconut oil. It seems to work well in baking, is relatively flavorless, and is slightly thick at room temperature (which resembles butter). When substituting oil for butter, the normal exchange rate is about 3.5:4... so we added 7 TBSP coconut oil instead of 8 TBSP butter. The brownies came out a little bit dry, too cakey we thought. So we made the recipe again, however this time adding 7 TBSP of coconut oil and 2 TBSP of hazelnut oil (which we thought would add a rich, deep, extra layer of flavor). They came out PERFECTLY.
Step 6: (batch #7) change the eggs. The is the second of the hard steps. There are lots of things in the "vegan" world that can substitute for eggs. Alot of people use an "egg-substitute" mixture - which I find extremely questionable. In my mind, if you are going to use such a processed, "fake" product (it's not food), it would be much healthier and morally "correct" to simply use butter, and don't over indulge. However, there are other egg options out there. We chose to use a kuzu slurry (a mixture of kuzu and water). The kuzu acts as a thickener and a binder, which were the 2 major purposes of the egg in the recipe. The batch turned out well, relatively no problems at all.
We made batch #8 just for few, adding an extra bit of coarse sea salt to offset the rich, bittersweet flavor of the chocolate - just for fun.
Here's a picture of most of half of the brownies we made during the day
To help us survive the day, Chef Elliot made an amazing pot of miso soup - an extremely salty, contractive soup to help counteract the expansive, sugar high that we all had reached half-way through the day.
At the end of the afternoon, each group (8 in total) had made between 8 and 10 batches of each of our recipes. We had chocolate chip cookies, brownies, peanut butter cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies, black and white cookies, carrot cake, banana muffins, and ginger muffins coming out of our ears into the halls of the entire school! I have NEVER seen so many sweets in my whole life.
Peanut Butter Cookies (These were my favorite)
After discussing each of our experiences and packing up lots of goodies to take home (I brought Lindsay 2 bags full of sweets! - I couldn't even look at another cookie for myself), we still had trays and trays full of food.
I think that this was a great exercise to help us learn the effects of certain components of baking recipes. It's also the most effective way to change recipes - by changing one small thing at a time, you see the role that each part plays. I think that even after 6 hours and 8 batches of brownies, I could have worked for 6 more hours and made 8 more batches, and still would not have had the perfect vegan brownie... but we are getting closer!
No comments:
Post a Comment