Shortbread is a taken-for-granted kind of cookie. It's usually ho-hum, buttery, sweet, nothing too special. It's versatile. You can add spices, citrus zest, vanilla bean, cocoa nibs. Some people really enjoy buttery, flaky cookies and my mother is one of them, so this is what she got for Mother's day. For the record, it shipped well and did not break. Always useful information.
This particular shortbread is flaky, tall, and soft. (There are other chewy shortbreads that are delicious too and this is not one of them). It's adapted from the Tartine cookbook. I've tried it out a couple of times and it's critical to do it by hand, with the butter at a supersoft consistency. As if you've left it out on a humid July day while you went to the corner store for some eggs, ran into your neighbor, chatted for fifteen minutes, and came back home to find squeezable, malleable butter.
If you'd rather make this shortbread, orange, vanilla, (orange-vanilla), fennel, baharat, or anything else, you go right ahead. How do you do this? Add some flavoring (seeds from 1 van. bean, 1 t spices, etc), and then taste the dough. Start small...for obvious reasons.
Lemony shortbread:
(makes one 9-inch round, to be cut into 8-10 wedges)
soft butter: 9 oz.
salt: 1/2 tsp. + pinch (reserved)
lemon zest: 1-2 large lemons*
rice flour: 1/2 c. + 2T**
granulated sugar: 1/3 c. + more for topping
Paddle softened butter with a spatula by hand until creamy. Work in sugar and lemon zest. Add rice flour and mix until dough comes together. Pat dough into baking tin and smooth to level grade. Top dough with granulated sugar and reserved pinch of salt. Bake in 325 degree oven 30-40 minutes. Should be just slightly golden but cooked through in center. Let cool before cutting.
*I used Eureka lemons.
**Cornstach can be substituted for rice flour.
Showing posts with label tartine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tartine. Show all posts
Monday, May 11, 2009
Thursday, August 09, 2007
local eating/thursday rant, or Pardon My Low Blood Sugar
7 pm now and I just finished dinner, after not eating anything all day except for an unfrosted carrot cupcake and a frosted mini cupcake. Dinner was brown rice, lentils, onions, carrots, kale and those ever-lasting 79 cent mushrooms spiced up with some ras el hannout and toasted cumin seeds. I've got some shortbread in the oven (trying out Tartine's recipe, but with lavender and walnuts mixed in.) If it comes out well (skeptical as it's now been in the oven about double the suggested time, but that might just be what I get for using an 8x8 pyrex and not a 6x10) I'm taking it to the potluck.
I was going to put a big post last night about the scraps n leftovers local meal I had...local egg omelette with avocado and Star Route spinach. And leftovers of the best rice I've ever made...Massa's organic brown rice with sauteed spinach, mushrooms, shallot and zaatar mixed in. But then my old college friend called, so I went out to a bar in the Castro where I got mistaken for a man in the bathroom line, got some perspective on the 9 to 5 (or whenever) lifestyle, and discussed our pathetic singledom in a bar full of cute, look-alike fag couples.
I'm on the verge of getting sick and this not eating thing really isn't helping. I brought food today but the cupcakery was zany and even though I promised myself ten minutes for lunch after finishing the vanilla batters that turned into 'll just eat it while I heat the juice for curd and make american buttercream which then turned into well it's one thirty and I'm here till three I'll just take a bite of carrot.
I should just get a tattoo on my forehead that reads I require clear and effective communication and while that might save me a lot of headaches I probably wouldn't get any dates. As I tell my FH coworkers on market day, just make me a list. Cause I'm very good at getting done what needs to be done.
Chef gossip at the cupcakery but I'm not spilling.
I hung out with my favorite cupcake slingers the other night. Took them blackberry picking on Bernal Heights where they, two native SFers, had never been. They gave me their berries in exchange for a promised pie, and I gave them tips on east coast living since their respective college are in Boston and NYC. We went for burritos in the Mission and I understood for the first time how you could prefer burritos to a slice. Time for a good slice, perhaps, as opposed to a whole yuppified pizza?
I've got tickets to Boston in October! Give me apples, autumn leaves, a chance to go to Beehive, the new ICA...if I weren't so food deprived I'd be jumping up and down.
I was going to put a big post last night about the scraps n leftovers local meal I had...local egg omelette with avocado and Star Route spinach. And leftovers of the best rice I've ever made...Massa's organic brown rice with sauteed spinach, mushrooms, shallot and zaatar mixed in. But then my old college friend called, so I went out to a bar in the Castro where I got mistaken for a man in the bathroom line, got some perspective on the 9 to 5 (or whenever) lifestyle, and discussed our pathetic singledom in a bar full of cute, look-alike fag couples.
I'm on the verge of getting sick and this not eating thing really isn't helping. I brought food today but the cupcakery was zany and even though I promised myself ten minutes for lunch after finishing the vanilla batters that turned into 'll just eat it while I heat the juice for curd and make american buttercream which then turned into well it's one thirty and I'm here till three I'll just take a bite of carrot.
I should just get a tattoo on my forehead that reads I require clear and effective communication and while that might save me a lot of headaches I probably wouldn't get any dates. As I tell my FH coworkers on market day, just make me a list. Cause I'm very good at getting done what needs to be done.
Chef gossip at the cupcakery but I'm not spilling.
I hung out with my favorite cupcake slingers the other night. Took them blackberry picking on Bernal Heights where they, two native SFers, had never been. They gave me their berries in exchange for a promised pie, and I gave them tips on east coast living since their respective college are in Boston and NYC. We went for burritos in the Mission and I understood for the first time how you could prefer burritos to a slice. Time for a good slice, perhaps, as opposed to a whole yuppified pizza?
I've got tickets to Boston in October! Give me apples, autumn leaves, a chance to go to Beehive, the new ICA...if I weren't so food deprived I'd be jumping up and down.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
don't fuck with my mise!
I should be going to sleep soon, but it's really nice to have energy. Especially since I almost fell asleep this evening when I got home from work, and almost burned my teriyaki chicken (rescued just in time to still be tender, mostly, and have REALLY crispy skin). I've been working like a dog since Friday.
I used to not really understand very well the teamwork aspect of professional kitchens, because where I've been the pastry person is always alone and usually taking up someone else's counter or oven space
(insert memories of Sonsie brunches and fighting over the oven for bacon versus focaccia).
During the Saturday market the girls would get low on pastries and forget to ask me to bake more, then come to me as I was cutting fruit for fruit tarts, whipping vanilla cream for shortcakes, etc. and demand seventy pastries be egg washed and baked. I'd do it immediately, push my project to the side, get my table dirty, clean, go back to my mise, be interrupted again, and not be able to bake off the new pastries because there was no oven space. It could all be avoided by proper planning. But please, don't fuck with my mise. It makes for a very long day.
However, it's very nice to be able to pop some shortcake in your mouth in the middle of a long day. I was feeling very frustrated on Saturday that it's my job to make yummy things for other people but not part of my job description to eat them. I was feeling like I needed food=love to get some energy to wash away the frustration, and get back to busting out pastries. It worked very well. It's hard to take a moment to eat or take a real break when you have enough work to keep you occupied. It saddens me that food workers don't get to feed themselves properly, but I go all day without eating too.
Saturday night was a catered wedding at Tilden, with a Masse's wedding cake. Two layers of chocolate raspberry and one of passionfruit. I demanded and got some of each. The passionfruit one was good, better than I was expecting. Better than the Tartine passionfruit coconut cake I got to try today since one of the girls at the cupcakery bought one for us all to try (must be nice to be rich, eh?)Tartine's was all about the overly large shredded coconut on the outside, and not skinning the underside of the cake, which is something that bothers me if you're going to be presenting cakes. Masse's was nicely trimmed. From the texture of the cake I was afraid it was going to be dry, but it wasn't. There was passionfruit bavarian and curd, or curd lightened mousse, or something. The caterer wasn't quite sure. There was also wine and Hennessey's cognac to take home, and quite drunken bridesmaids.
Then up this morning to get to the cupcakery by 8 (tomorrow as well). It was a big production day and I didn't leave the back room at all. Just busted through batches of chocolate and vanilla frosting, chocolate batter, cream cheese frosting. The funny thing about being the new girl is you do things like made a 4x batch of frosting and put it all in the large Hobart and then when your butter's good and creamed and you're adding the sugar (my first experience with American buttercream) the other bakers get around to telling you no one's ever done a batch that large in that mixer before. It's not cockiness when I pull it off and it's fine, and I get to cross it off the production list, and everyone's stoked that we saved some time, but rather a quiet happiness for something done efficiently.
The Sonsie days really are behind me. They've been on my mind lately, possibly because I know that for right now I'm not going to be working in any restaurant kitchens. Lifting large Hobart bowls that I'm not strong enough to maneuver (but trying to do it anyway) recalls the daily battle with the pizza dough, or the vanilla pound cake. It's interesting now that I'm also in a creative position. I'm on a big herbal kick right now. Scented creams, infusions, berries and spice. I get tired of making things week after week and have considered doing away with the strawberry lavender tart (just after it's developed a following, ah!). it's my duty now to think about flavors and components. When making the polenta cake, I found myself thinking of texture/crunch/creamy/sweet, which was a nice step from "I miss that semolina cake, maybe I'll make one with blackberries since we have them on hand." But there's still so much more I need to understand.
I used to not really understand very well the teamwork aspect of professional kitchens, because where I've been the pastry person is always alone and usually taking up someone else's counter or oven space
(insert memories of Sonsie brunches and fighting over the oven for bacon versus focaccia).
During the Saturday market the girls would get low on pastries and forget to ask me to bake more, then come to me as I was cutting fruit for fruit tarts, whipping vanilla cream for shortcakes, etc. and demand seventy pastries be egg washed and baked. I'd do it immediately, push my project to the side, get my table dirty, clean, go back to my mise, be interrupted again, and not be able to bake off the new pastries because there was no oven space. It could all be avoided by proper planning. But please, don't fuck with my mise. It makes for a very long day.
However, it's very nice to be able to pop some shortcake in your mouth in the middle of a long day. I was feeling very frustrated on Saturday that it's my job to make yummy things for other people but not part of my job description to eat them. I was feeling like I needed food=love to get some energy to wash away the frustration, and get back to busting out pastries. It worked very well. It's hard to take a moment to eat or take a real break when you have enough work to keep you occupied. It saddens me that food workers don't get to feed themselves properly, but I go all day without eating too.
Saturday night was a catered wedding at Tilden, with a Masse's wedding cake. Two layers of chocolate raspberry and one of passionfruit. I demanded and got some of each. The passionfruit one was good, better than I was expecting. Better than the Tartine passionfruit coconut cake I got to try today since one of the girls at the cupcakery bought one for us all to try (must be nice to be rich, eh?)Tartine's was all about the overly large shredded coconut on the outside, and not skinning the underside of the cake, which is something that bothers me if you're going to be presenting cakes. Masse's was nicely trimmed. From the texture of the cake I was afraid it was going to be dry, but it wasn't. There was passionfruit bavarian and curd, or curd lightened mousse, or something. The caterer wasn't quite sure. There was also wine and Hennessey's cognac to take home, and quite drunken bridesmaids.
Then up this morning to get to the cupcakery by 8 (tomorrow as well). It was a big production day and I didn't leave the back room at all. Just busted through batches of chocolate and vanilla frosting, chocolate batter, cream cheese frosting. The funny thing about being the new girl is you do things like made a 4x batch of frosting and put it all in the large Hobart and then when your butter's good and creamed and you're adding the sugar (my first experience with American buttercream) the other bakers get around to telling you no one's ever done a batch that large in that mixer before. It's not cockiness when I pull it off and it's fine, and I get to cross it off the production list, and everyone's stoked that we saved some time, but rather a quiet happiness for something done efficiently.
The Sonsie days really are behind me. They've been on my mind lately, possibly because I know that for right now I'm not going to be working in any restaurant kitchens. Lifting large Hobart bowls that I'm not strong enough to maneuver (but trying to do it anyway) recalls the daily battle with the pizza dough, or the vanilla pound cake. It's interesting now that I'm also in a creative position. I'm on a big herbal kick right now. Scented creams, infusions, berries and spice. I get tired of making things week after week and have considered doing away with the strawberry lavender tart (just after it's developed a following, ah!). it's my duty now to think about flavors and components. When making the polenta cake, I found myself thinking of texture/crunch/creamy/sweet, which was a nice step from "I miss that semolina cake, maybe I'll make one with blackberries since we have them on hand." But there's still so much more I need to understand.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
so nice to have a job I like finally
I was just drooling over the Tartine cookbook today in Sur La Table while I waited for my knives to get sharpened. Absolutely and without shame drooling.
The girls who work the farm market are really taken with my strawberry lavender tarts. I brought some out today and they got all "oh, yay! you made those! i was hoping you did!" and then later, sidled up to me all flirty asking were there more of them? not just cause they wanted to eat them, but cause they recommended them to customers. I've been dolloping them with a really fatty quenelle of lavender whipped cream and a sprinkle of dried lavender on top. I really have to bring my camera and start taking pics for my portfolio. But it's really rewarding to see things sell. Like the rhubarb orange upside down cakes, which are so PRETTY with the dark red of the blood oranges and the pale rhubarb pink, and sold down to 2.
I'd like my things to sell more although it's difficult to get a lot of things made, what with all the standard baking off and mising for saturday items. I guess I'll just have to get through my prep faster, but it has been difficult to get a lot done when each time I want to do something I'm getting the frozen butter and heating it up until it's soft enough to cream. Oh well.
There's an apricot jam and hazelnut tart I'd like to try, and I still do want to make a bavarian and do some chocolate cherry tarts when the cherries come in. Maybe this week I'll look for something I'd be really excited to try out. I should look through Chef's recipes, too. I've got all this great French training and I'm just running around after Elizabeth Faulkner, Lindsey Shere and Claudia Fleming like and wondering what Maura would do. Maybe it's just the aesthetic of traditional French pastries that don't appeal to me or maybe they're too involved. But there's got to be something I can adapt...a lot of Cheffy's stuff was really, really good.
I am glad to finally have a job I enjoy and look forward to. Especially when I get to be so creative. Hopefully I'll learn a lot from it, but I still would like to go somewhere else and get the organic bakery experience thing, though the being-my-own-boss thing will be useful down the line too.
The girls who work the farm market are really taken with my strawberry lavender tarts. I brought some out today and they got all "oh, yay! you made those! i was hoping you did!" and then later, sidled up to me all flirty asking were there more of them? not just cause they wanted to eat them, but cause they recommended them to customers. I've been dolloping them with a really fatty quenelle of lavender whipped cream and a sprinkle of dried lavender on top. I really have to bring my camera and start taking pics for my portfolio. But it's really rewarding to see things sell. Like the rhubarb orange upside down cakes, which are so PRETTY with the dark red of the blood oranges and the pale rhubarb pink, and sold down to 2.
I'd like my things to sell more although it's difficult to get a lot of things made, what with all the standard baking off and mising for saturday items. I guess I'll just have to get through my prep faster, but it has been difficult to get a lot done when each time I want to do something I'm getting the frozen butter and heating it up until it's soft enough to cream. Oh well.
There's an apricot jam and hazelnut tart I'd like to try, and I still do want to make a bavarian and do some chocolate cherry tarts when the cherries come in. Maybe this week I'll look for something I'd be really excited to try out. I should look through Chef's recipes, too. I've got all this great French training and I'm just running around after Elizabeth Faulkner, Lindsey Shere and Claudia Fleming like and wondering what Maura would do. Maybe it's just the aesthetic of traditional French pastries that don't appeal to me or maybe they're too involved. But there's got to be something I can adapt...a lot of Cheffy's stuff was really, really good.
I am glad to finally have a job I enjoy and look forward to. Especially when I get to be so creative. Hopefully I'll learn a lot from it, but I still would like to go somewhere else and get the organic bakery experience thing, though the being-my-own-boss thing will be useful down the line too.
Sunday, April 01, 2007
pineapple-rum compote
I just made a ginger-rum-pineapple compote today, straight from the April issue of Gourmet. It sounded so good, and I wanted something to put on my vanilla ice cream, and I knew it's only cost about 2 dollars for the pineapple and ginger. So then I started thinking, what to do with the rest? Came up with:
pineapple flan
trifle with vanilla poundcake, coconut pastry cream and compote
upside down cakes
warm gingerbread with rum whipped cream and compote
pineapple macarooms with compote and pineapple frozen yogurt
Probably I'll make some flan. Although the trifle could be nice, too, but I don't really want to make pound cakes, at least until the kitchen aid comes.
I went to tartine today with a new friend. So sensuous! Their pastries just look so sexy. I got the Scharffen Berger chocolate pudding...so rich. Truly amazing pudding experience. Reese got the banana cream pie, and it was the PERFECT flaky dough with a layer of chocolate on the bottom, then bananas in cream, a caramel drizzle and whipped cream on top. Umph. Sort of impossible to eat with the plastic forks, but that dough was amazing.
When the kitchen aid comes, I will make some truly amazing flaky dough...and I;ll do the strawberry lavender tart from oleana, and the rhubard nougatine tart from david lebovitz, and I'll go on from there. In the meantime, what to do with all my pineapple?
pineapple flan
trifle with vanilla poundcake, coconut pastry cream and compote
upside down cakes
warm gingerbread with rum whipped cream and compote
pineapple macarooms with compote and pineapple frozen yogurt
Probably I'll make some flan. Although the trifle could be nice, too, but I don't really want to make pound cakes, at least until the kitchen aid comes.
I went to tartine today with a new friend. So sensuous! Their pastries just look so sexy. I got the Scharffen Berger chocolate pudding...so rich. Truly amazing pudding experience. Reese got the banana cream pie, and it was the PERFECT flaky dough with a layer of chocolate on the bottom, then bananas in cream, a caramel drizzle and whipped cream on top. Umph. Sort of impossible to eat with the plastic forks, but that dough was amazing.
When the kitchen aid comes, I will make some truly amazing flaky dough...and I;ll do the strawberry lavender tart from oleana, and the rhubard nougatine tart from david lebovitz, and I'll go on from there. In the meantime, what to do with all my pineapple?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
.jpg)
Posts
