The Unreal Meal

According to my friend Stacy, and also apparently according to the the NY Examiner, August 30th is National Toasted Marshmallow Day.  Apparently the toasted marshmallow folks are somewhat lacking in their PR department, as I can’t really find anything (besides the Examiner link) outside of the blogosphere to support that claim.  It is, however, a good lead in for this post about marshmallows!

Marshmallows, though not toasted ones.

A couple weeks ago, Food2 posted a blog entry on Extreme S’more Creations, and one of the creations was a bacon s’more.  My instant reaction when I saw it was “bacon s’more, yes please!”  Then I started thinking about what it really is: graham crackers smeared with some Nutella topped with a toasted marshmallow around which a flimsy piece of bacon had been wrapped.  I thought that I might be able to do better, even though part of me was saying, “Really? Bacon? Another thing with bacon? I mean, isn’t this just playing into the current bacon fad in the food world?  Does everything have to have bacon?”

I decided that I didn’t really care if it was a fad or not, that it was probably going to be a fun and delicious experiment.  My brain went to ways in which I could conceivably do this, and started thinking about things that go well with bacon that might include chocolate, and suddenly I was picturing myself eating chocolate chip pancakes with dark maple syrup and a crispy side of bacon, dipping the bacon in the maple syrup and melted chocolate bits.  That’s when it hit me: bacon graham crackers, dark chocolate, maple marshmallows.

I haven’t gotten to the graham crackers yet, but I promise there will a follow-up post about that forthcoming.  Yesterday, though, somewhat coincidentally to it being National Toasted Marshmallow Day, I made some maple marshmallows.

I started with Alton Brown’s marshmallow recipe and actually altered it very little.  Instead of using all corn syrup, I used a mixture of corn and maple syrup.  The recipe site says that this recipe makes nine dozen marshmallows or 1 1/2 pounds of mini ‘shmallows, but I think that’s probably reversed, because in no world could I have come up with nine dozen normal-sized marshmallows!  I think I probably got about four dozen from one 13 x 9″ pan (I didn’t actually count).

Maple Marshmallows
(Adapted from Alton Brown’s Food Network recipe.)

3 envelopes of unflavored gelatin (I used Knox)
1 cup ice cold water, divided
12 ounces granulated sugar  (this requires a kitchen scale, which every home cook should have!)
1/2 cup light corn syrup
1/2 cup grade B dark amber maple syrup
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons extra maple sugar
1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar (powdered sugar)
1/2 cup cornstarch
Nonstick cooking spray

First, let me preface the actual recipe instructions with this note: You might think your best friend’s name is Bob or Sue or Tony, but I promise you that when it comes to making marshmallows, your best friend in the world is PAM.  Words cannot adequately describe how sticky marshmallow batter (for lack of a better word) is, and how it can stick to any and everything, including the bowl, the spatula, the kitchen table, the floor, the ceiling, and the cat, to name a few.  More than that, it will stick to you. I promise that you will think to yourself “I just won’t use my hands,” but you will, and you’ll get fluff on everything.  So let me tell you this upfront: nonstick cooking spray will stop the stick.  Use it on everything that might possibly come into contact with the marshmallow goo, including your hands, and you’ll thank me for it, I swear.

Moving on!  In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, dissolve the three packets of gelatin into 1/2 cup of the ice cold water.

While that’s getting all cold and hard and gelatinous in the bottom of your mixer (don’t be alarmed when you look at it and it looks a bit like the surface of an alien planet), combine the sugar, the other 1/2 cup of water, the syrups (minus the extra 2 tsp of maple), and the salt in a medium-sized sauce pan.  (Alton tells us a small sauce pan, but I nearly had molten hot sugar goo boil over the sides of my small sauce pan, so I’m advising an upgrade.)  Place it over medium-high heat, and stir as it starts to melt together.  After a few minutes, strap a candy thermometer to the inside of the pot, and continue to let it heat.

Now, another warning comes in here.  This comes to a boil very quickly (or at least it did on my stove with my small saucepan), and almost as soon as it starts bubbling away, it starts to try and escape the pan.  I pulled it off the heat momentarily to allow it to simmer down a bit, but be really careful.  After all, it’s effectively nothing but really hot sugar, and not only can that burn like hell (it’s like candy napalm), but I can’t imagine that it would be fun to clean if it boiled over onto/into your stove.

Anyway, once you’ve got the napalm under control, let it heat up on the stove until it comes to 240° F.  Don’t be alarmed that this seems to take for-freakin’-ever, or that it seems to hover in the 210-215° range for an inordinate amount of time.  Alton says 7 to 8 minutes for this stage, and he might be right (I didn’t time it), but it seemed longer to me.  Eventually, though, you’ll get it to go up above 215°, and then watch carefully because 240° isn’t too far away.

Now, the tricky part.  Once you’ve hit the magical temperature, turn on your mixer on low.  I have a 6-quart KitchenAid Professional Stand Mixer, and I put it on #2 (just above ‘stir’).  While the mixer is mixing, pour the sugar napalm in a single thin stream down the side of the bowl.  Don’t pour it directly on the whisk attachment, or you’ll spray hot molten sugar lava all over yourself and your kitchen, which is really not recommended.  Once it’s all in the bowl, gradually increase the speed to high.  By ‘gradually’ I mean a few seconds in between increases on the switch.  Once it’s on high, let it go for about ten minutes (Alton says 12 – 15) until it’s thick, fluffy, and lukewarm.  When that’s almost finished, add in the remaining 2 teaspoons of maple syrup (or you could probably use just a teaspoon of maple extract).  It’ll look something like this:

Thick and Fluffy!

Now, in the ten or so minutes that you have while this is mixing, you want to prepare your mallow pan and get your utensils (including your best friend, PAM) ready to go.  To do that, first combine the powdered sugar and the corn starch in a small bowl.  You’re going to want some way of being able to dust with it, so either use a fine mesh strainer or a sifter (I used a sifter, since my fine mesh strainer is about 2″ across and takes a long time to dust things of any substantial size with it.

Once your dust is ready, then prep your pan.  You’ll want a 13 x 9″ pan.  Alton Brown says to use a metal one, and of course I don’t have a metal pan of that size.  I have a glass baking dish of that size.  As such, I opted to line it with parchment paper, then sprayed that lightly with my dear friend PAM, and then dusted that with the cornstarch/sugar mix.  I was determined to make sure that it didn’t stick!  It didn’t, but I did look like I was working for Pablo Escobar, circa 1985 or so…

Now, the moment of truth!  Once your napalm has transformed to fluff, it’s time to “pour” it into the pan (and I use that term loosely, it’s more like you’re manipulating it into the pan).  You can see how thick and gooey it is by the column that formed when I pulled the whisk out of the bowl:

It's a column of marshmallow fluff!

It’s light and airy, but thick and a bit cement-like at the same time, if that makes sense.  Here’s what I found to be the best way to get the fluff off the whisk: spray the crap out of my fingers with PAM, and use them to clean it.  Drop all that goo into the bowl, then it’s time to maneuver the fluff into the pan.  To do that, spray a rubber or silicon spatula (I used one that was all silicon with no exposed wood), and then carefully start to scrape the fluff into the pan.  You’ll find that every couple of scrapes, it will start to stick to the spatula.  Stop at that point and respray, and don’t worry about a little residual fluff on the utensil — just spray over it and keep going.  Once it’s almost all in the pan, I ended up spraying my hands again (oh PAM, I do love you so), and scraped what else I could out of the mixing bowl.  There was still a coating of fluff when I was done, but the majority of it went in the pan, and thanks to my future wife, PAM, very little of it got anywhere else.

After you’ve successfully negotiated the fluff into the pan, dust the top with more of the powdered sugar mixture, and let it sit, uncovered, for at least four hours.  After it’s settled, turn it out of the pan onto a cutting board, and cut using a pizza roller that has also been dusted with sugar.  You’ll find that it cuts pretty easily, but it also likes to try and stick back together, so make sure that you dust each piece as you cut it.  I cut my pieces into somewhere in the 1″ cube range, though they’re not entirely uniform, and that’s really fine by me.  I haven’t tried toasting them yet (as the fact that I made them on National Toasted Marshmallow Day was somewhat coincidental), but that’s next, along with the bacon graham crackers!

It's a marshmallow, up close and personal!

September is somehow already close upon us, and with September comes not just the turn of fall leaves and harvesting summer vegetables, but also football season! Football season may mean nothing to a lot of people (and this isn’t a sports blog, so I’ll try not to dwell too much on that), but to many, football games are synonymous with food. In my world, there’s a lot of fantasy football, and with that comes gatherings of good friends for fantasy drafts.

Tonight marks the first draft of my (many) fantasy leagues this year, and since it’s at my humble abode, I chose to bake my favorite cookies to celebrate the occasion.  Once in the past, for one of the boyfriend’s drafts, I baked these cookies in the shape of footballs, and it was highly entertaining to have a friend of ours keep repeating the Ace Ventura quote, ”they’re shaped like little footballs!”  However, they don’t bake nearly as evenly as the standard round cookie shape, and it’s a bit of a pain in the rump to pipe the icing on so that it looks like perfect pigskin laces.  Freeform drizzles are much easier, thus I opted this year for the classic style.

Not shaped like little footballs, in fact.

My very most favorite thing about these cookies is not actually eating them myself, but it’s watching other people eat them.  They’re a bit of a surprise for novice nibblers, as they’re not just plain chocolate cookies with white chocolate drizzles.  They have a chewy caramel center, which I’ve been told is like finding a pot of gooey gold in the center of a chocolate rainbow.  Yeah yeah, it’s a terrible metaphor, but I blame the fact that the cookies are good enough that people are temporarily stupefied after eating them.

Gooey Caramel Center

I’ve been making these for years — I honestly have no idea where I even found the recipe at this point — and since I’ve had so many requests for it, I’m finally sharing this with the world.  The best thing about these cookies is that they’re so incredibly simple, but could so easily be changed to incorporate other stuff and thus a whole new cookie is born.

Chocolate Salted Caramel Cookies

2 1/4 cups All Purpose Flour, unsifted
3/4 cups good quality cocoa powder (I prefer natural, but Dutch processed is fine, too)
2 cups granulated sugar*
2 Tablespoons molasses*
1 cup butter, softened
2 1/2 tsp baking powder (you could use 1 tsp of baking soda instead, but the cookies would be less fluffy)
2 large eggs
1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon chocolate extract (optional — not everyone has this, and they’re just fine without it)
48 Rolos candies or other small pieces of caramel
Fine grain sea salt, like Maldon or Fleur de Sel
1 cup white chocolate chips

*Alternately, you could substitute 1 cup white sugar and 1 cup brown sugar, and skip the molasses, but I always tend to be out of brown sugar, and I generally have a jar of molasses for which I have little use.

Preheat the oven to 375° F.

In a mixing bowl, cream together the softened butter, the sugars, and the molasses (I use salted butter and omit putting any salt in the batter).  When the mixture is light and fluffy, add the vanilla extract, chocolate extract (if applicable) and eggs, and mix until lighter and fluffier.

In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and cocoa powder.  Whisk it together until it’s fairly uniform.

Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet, about 1/2 cup at a time, making sure to incorporate all of dry stuff before adding more.  Once it’s all mixed in, let the cookie dough rest in the fridge for about twenty minutes, or it will be hard to form.

Once chilled, wrap about a tablespoon of dough around a Rolo and very lightly sprinkle a couple flakes of sea salt on the bottom of the candy before completely enclosing all the gooey center.  Line up on an ungreased cookie sheet, approximately 2″ apart, and bake for 7 – 9 minutes  until they’re set and just starting to crack a little.

Remove from the oven and let cool on a wire rack.  Once the cookies are completely cooled, put the white chocolate chips in a microwave safe bowl, and microwave on 50% power for 2 minutes.  Remove from the microwave, stir until smooth.  If they’re not completely melted, put them back in the microwave for another 30 seconds at 50% power until completely melted.

Pour the melted white chocolate into a zip-top bag, and snip a very small hole in one of the pointy ends so that you can pipe the chocolate, willy nilly, onto the cookies.  Let the chocolate set, then enjoy!

These are fantastic, and really versatile.  I’ve made them with mini Reeses inside, with Andes mints, with various colors of chocolate on top.  Let me know if you try them and you do a variation on a theme; I’d love to know what other people come up with!

The finished product!

For so many of us, food and wine are a natural complement.  Hell, it’s so natural that there’s a magazine with that name.  So it shouldn’t really have been much of a surprise to me when I got an e-mail this morning from Tasting Table sharing knowledge of a new wine club with a new twist (more on that in a minute).

Wine clubs are a dime a dozen these days (or, more likely, about $45 a two-pack of bottles).  Various vineyards have their own clubs, lots of resellers have them, it’s a fairly common way to introduce myriad selections to people who might be regular wine drinkers who like a little variety.  I, myself, have been a wine.com subscriber for a couple years.  Sometimes they send good things, sometimes it’s average.  My problem with wine.com is that they tend to overcharge for things, and their customer service is not always the best.  Plus, they sell out of popular things way too fast.

Keeping that in mind, I haven’t actively been looking for a new wine club, but Mama always taught me to keep my options open and be receptive to things that might cross my path.  Enter in this morning’s Tasting Table e-mail that talked of a new joint venture between Cookstr and Pasanella & Sons Vintners.

Cookstr is a fantastically well designed recipe database that features recipes from a lot of famous chefs and cookbook authors in one handy website.  Pasanella & Sons (I really need to stop resisting the urge to type panzanella – also delicious, but totally different) is a local wine shop here in NYC in, I believe, what used to be the old South Street fish market.  Combine the two, and you obviously have food and wine, but you get something more with their new service: a wine club plus a book club — a cookbook club, to be precise.  You get a bottle of red, a bottle of white, and (apologies to Billy Joel), a book with which to cook tonight.

I was so enamored of this idea (I’m a bit of a sucker for cookbooks, which is ironic since I don’t use them that often) that I immediately went to the site in the hopes of signing up for a new ongoing membership that could replace my wine.com shipment.  When I got there, they had a few options: a one-time month-only choice for $49.99, a 3-month option for $149.99, 6 months for $299.99, and 12 months for $599.99.  What was missing was a month-by-month option where I could subscribe on an ongoing basis, but without having to shell out six hundred smackeroos.

Doing what any enterprising woman might, I clicked the link associated with questions and comments, and e-mailed asking if this was an option or if it might become an option in the future.  I sent my e-mail at 12:50 this afternoon.  Ten minutes later, Will Schwalbe, the CEO and founder of Cookstr, responded to say that they didn’t have the ability quite yet, but would likely figure it out soon, and that he’d follow up with another e-mail once they did.

I was tickled and, quite frankly, a little stunned to have such a fast and amiable response!  Then I got sucked into various work duties (after all, I can’t spend every minute of my workday on fun stuff!), and before I knew it, I had another e-mail from Marco Pasanella thanking me for such a great idea and letting me know that he’d added that option to their website.

Let me tell you guys, I’ve worked in some sort of service industry (either food or customer) for my entire adult life, and I know two definitive things about it:  First, it’s incredibly easy to provide great service to customers if you’re simply responsive.  Second, in spite of that fact, it’s something that very very very many people neglect.  I don’t know if it’s because they’re just lazy or careless or what the story is, but more and more, I find that people are clueless about what constitutes good service.

Happily, Will and Marco do not fall into that second category!  I was so thrilled by their nearly immediate responses and actions, that I instantly signed up for the shiny new month-by-month program.  I cannot wait for the first shipment, and my first cookbook!

The practical upshot is this: food and wine are delicious, but there’s no substitute for great service.  And since they so willingly accommodated my wishes, I felt that I should do my part to get their name out there to more people that might be interested in the Vino & Cookbook of the Month Club.  You don’t have to be a New Yorker to join!

Once I have my first shipment, I’ll have to find something delectable from the cookbook that will go nicely with the wine they send.  Perhaps a nice bread salad would do.