Shoddy Souffle

I hate souffles.

The souffle (no, no accent; I can't be bothered to figure out how to type one) is a creation that inspires well-documented fear in amateur cooks, ostensibly because experienced ones have shared their horror stories regarding the fluffy disastor-in-waiting. A "good" souffle is many things: poofy, yet rich; airy, yet filling; springy, yet cohesive; and, perhaps most importantly, challenging, yet delicious.

Inspired by my friend Shari's gentle prodding (or insistent demand, depending on who you ask) that I attempt a recipe she discovered, I took it upon myself to make my first attempt at this mysterious juxtaposition of conflicting descriptions. Naturally, I had to try a "non-traditional" souffle recipe as my first creation, and just as naturally, it was a miserable mess, and met none of the criteria I so painstakingly listed in the paragraph above. Never one to turn my back on a delightful "disaster post", I now proudly display my failed dish of banana pudding and bubbles in order that these mistakes never be made again. I must warn you, however, that some of the images (including the one at the top of this post) contain graphic depictions of unappetizing culinary creations, and as such, should not be viewed while a) eating, b) in the dark, alone, c) pregnant, or d) a master chef.

Banana Souffle

(Stolen from Tasty Eats At Home )

Ingredients

2 ripe bananas, mashed

3tbsp water

1/3c plus 1tbsp sugar

1/2tsp cornstarch

pinch of cinnamon

4 egg whites

pinch of salt

Preheat oven to 400F

Procedure

I like to get all the required ingredients together so I can look at them prior to starting. That way, when I forget something, I can see that it was because I forgot it in the first place and not because kitchen gnomes came in and stole the salt.

Prior to attempting the preparation, butter and sugar 4 ramekins (or, in my case, a single souffle dish) and set aside. Mix the water and the 1/3c sugar in a small saucepan and set over medium-high heat until it reaches a boil. In the meanttime, mash the hell out of those bananas (or cheat, and use a food processor, blender. Cheater.) and mix the cinnamon and corn starch into the mashed goo. Verify that the sugar has dissolved in the water and remove the saucepan from the heat. Stir the banana sludge into the syrup until thoroughly incorporated and set aside to cool.

The recipe's creator notes here, and I re-emphasize: make sure the mixture cools to room temperature before proceeding. It shouldn't take long, but if it's overly warm, it'll break apart the whipped egg whites and screw up your bubbles later on.

While the mixture is cooling, add the egg whites to a mixing bowl (ideally the bowl that goes with your stand mixer. ... What? I can cheat too. Shut up!) and mix until slightly frothy. Add the salt and continue mixing until the "soft peaks" stage is reached. Be sure not to overmix! When finished, bring the banana slime back to the equation and set it alongside the egg whites, just so they know who's boss.

Despite my intimidation technique, the ingredients didn't seem to take me very seriously, judging by my result.

Now that the ingredients have been put in their proper places, it is time to fold. Gently fold the egg whites into the brown goo, and don't over-fold: some white streaks are fine, as you want to retain that bubbly action for the rising portion later.

Hungry yet?

Pour the entire mixture into your ramekins (or souffle) and place them (it) into the oven. After it's in, reduce the heat to 375F and bake for 10-12 minutes, or until it has puffed upwards and the top has browned.

Not so ugly now, is it?

Lessons Learned

Lessons? An interesting question, seeing as how I'm not confident that any one thing went wrong. I suspect I under-mixed my eggs and had overly-soft peaks, as they did not mix well with the sludge portion of the dish. What is probably a greater problem is my use of a souffle instead of smaller ramekins; I suspect I should have modified the baking time to compensate, but even after trying that, it simply didn't want to set. I had a soup in the center and a beautifully browned exterior.

That said, I really don't have any problem eating dishes that look unappetizing, but I simply didn't care much for the flavor of this. The banana-cinnamon combination didn't work for me, and while I'm not a big fan of banana to start with (at least not as a stand-alone flavor), the combination created something that smelled particularly strong and tasted cloyingly sweet. The flavor problems I can probably simply blame on my palate, but the overall process simply didn't work for me. Next time I'll probably try a standard souffle recipe (utilizing egg yolks) and see if that causes similar problems. Given that I'm still adjusting to a new oven, uneven cooking temperature may be part of the issue as well. Long story short, I hate souffles.

Sweetening the Nut

Pictured: Not my peanuts.

Lest one of my rapidly-dwindling readers decide to make a wise remark, I'll just preface this by stating that I am fully aware that peanuts are not nuts; however, "Sweetening the Legume" certainly doesn't have the same ring to it. That said, brace yourselves for yet another of my infamous culinary disasters, which unfortunately seem to happen with frightening frequency. My initial goal of creating my own delicious honey-roasted peanuts (thereby sticking it to Mr. Peanut, the greedy bastard that charges so heavily for these things) remains a distant sight that will hopefully be reached with some minor tweaks to the current recipe.

My more avid readers will find it entirely unsurprising that I stole this recipe from The Kitchn add to the lack of surprise, despite their claims to the contrary, I can safely assure you, the readers that I hold so dear, that the Kitchnfolks who oringially posted the recipe almost certainly didn't even bother attempting it before giving it shining accolades. If they had, I'd like to think that they would have been willing to level with the Internet at large by pointing out that the recipe is very poorly balanced and doesn't work at all (I'll elaborate in greater detail towards the end of this post). However, I do think that the recipe shows promise for tinkering, so it may as well be documented for posterity.

Honey-Roasted Peanuts

(Stolen from The Kitchn)

Ingredients

16oz. Roasted unsalted peanuts*

1/3c Honey

1/2c Sugar

*I don't know that I've ever been able to find roasted unsalted peanuts anywhere. Even if they did exist, they'd be too expensive for this recipe to be cost-effective for anyone other than the aforementioned Mr. Peanut himself. Thus, I settled on using salted peanuts and eliminating the kosher salt from the original recipe. I know that would result in a small sacrifice in texture, but I made up for it with sugar instead.

Preheat oven to 350F

Melt the honey in the microwave until it is liquified and runs smoothly (probably about 1 minute). Make sure not to let it go too long, lest it burn and become unpleasant. Also, don't touch it. Hot honey burns are painful. Pour the peanuts into a large mixing bowl and prepare to make a mess.

Sure, they look innocent now...

Drizzle the melted honey over the peanuts and mix thoroughly. This will require some effort, as honey tends to be somewhat sticky, and honey-coated peanuts like to stick to anything that makes contact with them.

At this point, one hopes that coating the peanuts in salt will help with the stickage. Yeah, let's see how that works out.

Sprinkle the sugar over the peanuts and stir to coat (as best you can). Spread them out onto a well-greased baking sheet and bake for around 20 minutes, stirring frequently to ensure that the peanuts don't burn. You want them to brown, but that's about it. Let them cool before attempting to handle (naturally).

You can't really tell, but the spatula is stuck there. I couldn't remove it. I ended up shooting the entire thing, bowl and all, into the center of the sun. Now I need a new spatula.

Lessons Learned

You will note that I unfortunately did not retain a photo of my actual finished product (I know, you're shocked that the picture up top is not a real result, right?). Suffice it to say that this recipe produced what I would charitably describe as "a gooey mess". See, honey is sticky and messy at room temperature, which is the temperature at which most peanuts tend to be stored. Therefore, coating the peanuts in said goo and then setting them out simply results in peanuts that pack up into clumps and leave a honey-sugar residue on the fingers. This result, while tasty, does not meet my definition of honey-roasted peanuts.

To fix this result, I think it might help to add some of the sugar to the honey during the microwave process in order to create a solution that has been hypersaturated with sugar. One might note that sugar itself is solid at room temperature; therefore, more sugar makes more solid. Baking the peanuts at a lower temperature for longer might also help, as the baking process eliminates water from the coating, which would (hopefully) result in a more solid glaze. Of course, this is just speculation until my next attempt, which should be coming soon!

Mutiny on the HMS Hostess

Who would've thought such a simple device could cause such trouble?

As my few readers have no doubt noticed, thus far I have posted recipes that have been considered more or less successful. Even in the instances where the finished product was not something I was looking for, the experience was informative and it ultimately brings me a greater understanding of the product I *do* want. Well, lest you all think that my kitchen is a wonderland of magical materials that render ever attempt perfect, I present what is quite possibly the greatest culinary disaster my kitchen has ever seen: pocket pies.

As a child, I grew up gorging myself on Hostess products, just as my father had before me and so on through generations. The passing down of the Hostess craving was something of a time-honored tradition in our family, and I often found I could make a meal out of nothing more than 2-3 of their handheld fruit pies. (Yes, one would be enough, but one wants a little variety in a meal!) Naturally, as my metabolism has slowed and my fat reserves grown, I have thankfully steered myself out of the fast lane towards diabetes and back towards more conservative eating habits (my lingering bulk notwithstanding). However, when I discovered an episode of Good Eats dedicated solely to reproducing these little delicacies from my youth, there was little doubt in my mind that I would have to at least attempt the recipe and simply hope that I could bring the things into work and thereby spread the guilt joy amongst my coworkers instead.

Be not ye fooled; the photo at the top of this post, if you haven't guessed already, is most certainly not the end result of this experiment. Indeed, this recipe has convinced me that as gods were those who created the Hostess fruit pie, for it is certainly beyond my mortal abilities to recreate my beloved confection. Perhaps this is for the best, as my experience with this recipe has not only convinced me to halt any pie pastry-related endeavors in my near future, but it may have also soured me to the Hostess products I had once adored. Read on, my faithful viewers, and behold the horrific tale that unfolds.

Chocolate-filled Pocket Pies
Recipes adapted from various sources, as listed in each section below.

Pastry Dough:
Recipe appropriated from Laylita's Recipes
3c flour
1/2c sugar
Pinch of salt
2 eggs
8 tbsp butter
8 tbsp shortening
2-4 tbsp cold water

1) Mix the flour, sugar, and salt in a large bowl with a fork or whisk until well mixed.

2) Add the butter, eggs, and water and mix until a dough forms.

Funny note: From the looks of things (and upon reflection), I don't think I added the damned eggs!

3) Form the dough into a large mound and flatten out somewhat. Refrigerate the lump for around 30 minutes.

This is what it looked like *before* entering the fridge... However, I let it sit overnight out of laziness.

... yes, there's more to Laylita's recipe, and no, I didn't get there. Due to a combination of complications (including the lack of eggs I mentioned above... damn it), the dough came out of the fridge a powdery mess that refused to coalesce back into the lump shown above. Now, after much reflection, I came up with several reasons for this:

a) Too much sugar in the dough: adding too much sugar can cause the sugar to lay claim to water intended for the flour, thus leaving the flour to be a powdery mess.
b) Too much time in the fridge: combined with the excessive sugar, the extra time simply allowed the sugar to mug the flour particles for their water for an extended period.
c) Lack of eggs: Obviously, the eggs would help as both a binder and a liquifier. With this revelation in hand, the dough recipe might actually be worth trying again sometime. Sometime later.

Regardless of the reasons behind it, I threw out the dough, as I was tired of fighting with it. I decided to roll back to the original recipe's dough instead. But in the meantime, I decided to create the chocolate goo that I was going to fill my pastries with. After all, it's chocolate filling--I couldn't possibly screw it up!

Chocolate Filling:
Recipe appropriated from Good Eats
2.5c sugar
1/4c + 1tbsp cocoa powder
1/4tsp salt
10oz butter

1) Dump the sugar, powder, and salt into a zip-top bag and shake vigorously.

At this point, my shaking was most vigorous, as I was already in a mood.

2) Add the butter to the bag and squish the crap out of it.

Squishing is also a good activity when frustrated.

While this recipe looks fairly innocent, it actually ends up being a huge pain simply because it takes a hell of a lot of squishing to get a uniform distribution between that much butter and that much not-butter! Nonetheless, this was obviously the more pleasant portion of my experiment. Since I did my squishing immediately after placing my pastry dough in the fridge, I refrigerated it until I was ready to pipe it out. Note that if refrigerated, this stuff needs to sit out to return to room temperature before it's easy to pipe out of the bag. So, now that that's taken care of, we can move onto the final portion of this god-forsaken recipe--my second batch (grr...) of dough.

Pastry Dough (Second Incarnation):
Recipe appropriated from Good Eats
2c flour
2tsp baking powder
3/4tsp salt
6tbsp shortening
3/4c milk
1 egg mixed with 1tsp of water (for sealing)

Preheat oven to 350F

I should note that while preparing this dough, I was already irritated with my previous experience, and as such, was not necessarily planning on publishing the recipe. Thus, I didn't take any pictures until the end. I'll have to try to fill in the blanks with my masterful wordsmithing instead.

1) Mix the flour, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl with a fork or whisk. The recipe calls for a food processor, but I really don't see the need at this point, and I don't own one anyway.

2) Knead the shortening into the mixture with your hands until it is crumbly, much like when making a pie dough.

I think the thought "pie dough" is what screwed me up with the first recipe; I never add eggs to pie dough, so I didn't think about it when I blindly omittted them.

3) Add the milk and mix it in with a spatula until the dough comes together. Note that since this isn't actually going to be a pie crust, you don't need to worry about overmixing the dough as excess gluten will not hurt the end texture here.

4) Lightly flour the countertop and your hands and slam the dough onto it. Flour the top of the dough as well.

5) Roll out the dough until it is about 1/3 of an inch thick. I strongly suspect I rolled mine out too thin--yet another bad omen.

6) Cut out rounds of the dough with a biscuit cutter (or other ring approximately 2 inches in diameter). Re-roll the dough as many times as necessary after cutting rounds out of it.

7) Roll each round out slightly to make it ovular in shape and pipe out a small blob of the chocolate filling into each one. Note that this step can (and probably should) be performed one round at a time, rather than all of them at once.

8) Brush the egg mixture across one side of the oval using the tip of a finger or pastry brush.

9) Fold the dough over and try to press out any excess air.

10) Use the tines of a fork to crimp the edges of the pastry and to pierce some ventilation holes in the top of the pie.

11) Repeat steps 7-10 for all the pastry rounds. Place the finished pastries on a baking sheet and bake for 25-30 minutes.

Seems relatively straightforward, if a little long in the steps, right? Well, here we are:

Stupid pies.

As you can see, I took the liberty of placing the damned things on a wire rack, as I figured that would provide better ventilation around all sides of the pie. Even though it would *probably* leave wire rack indentations on the pies themselves, I could live with that. Right? Ha! I bet these things exploded after the first minute, and spent the rest of the baking time laughing at me for my audacity.

Lessons learned:
That I probably won't be trying this again for the time being? I can't say never, as I'll give them another shot at some point, but certainly not for now. Perhaps the best lesson to take out of this is that $1 for a Hostess pie suddenly seems a lot more reasonable.