Week 10: bake off
Abby: building a pumpkin bread bridge to the distant past
Do you remember the flour shortage last March? Like everyone else, I panicked. Though I had only baked in my apartment in San Francisco once (a three ingredient cookie recipe where two of the ingredients were pilfered from the Medium office), I was seized with an immediate desire to bake. I could not wait for the supply chain to recover.
In San Francisco, I’d been having weekly Sunday night dinners with my uncle and ultra gluten-free aunt who had imparted a lot of wheat-free wisdom. So, in the face of the shortage, I could rattle off numerous viable substitutes: gluten-free all-purpose flour, oat-flour, coconut-flour, cassava flour, tapioca flour, and many more. I went online and ordered 5lbs of my favorite alt-flour: almond flour which was indeed kind of a lot. To justify the purchase, I told myself and anyone else who would listen that the nutty flavor of almond flour would definitely make desserts even more delicious than regular flour ever could.
Days passed, however, and the almond flour never came. Amazon kept pushing back the expected delivery date until one day I got an email that my order was cancelled and my card refunded. Sad, I went back online and put in another 5lb order. A couple days later, two 5lb bags of almond flour arrived. A miracle! 10 lbs for the price of 5! But also a gauntlet. I had a lot of baking to do.
When you google “dairy-free almond-flour” recipes (context: I am allergic to dairy), you launch yourself into a weird corner of the internet: the Paleo baking community. As I understand it, “Paleo” is a diet where you try to mimic the eating habits of the early cave people. I think the underlying idea is that we are naturally equipped to metabolize certain foods better than others? Anyway, it involves eliminating processed foods, dairy, gluten and probably more. In my first wary foray into Paleo baking last spring, I tried a banana bread recipe. It used two cups of almond flour, was sweetened with honey (I guess the cave people could have harvested it from their bee-hives?) and was totally delicious. My family ate it all in one night.
I spent the rest of the spring connecting with my aboriginal ancestors by baking paleo. I made almond-flour blondies, brownies and tahini chocolate chip cookies. I even bought coconut sugar, a granulated sugar that somehow gets the cave-person seal of approval.
One year later, we still have ~4-6 lbs of almond flour left in Truro. So when I was back there last weekend, I knew what I had to do. Beloved reader Caroline Kravitz had recently sent me a tantalizing picture of her home-baked pumpkin muffins so I decided to take my almond-flour talents to pumpkin bread. My mom and I found a chill recipe without any chemical substitutes (sometimes those wacky paleo bakers get a little too creative in their quest to not use sugar, flour, butter etc) and assembled all the ingredients. My mom is a reliably delicious baker and lucky for you, I am going to share her secret: Sarah does not skimp on the chocolate chips. The process looks like this: we dumped almost a whole bag in the bowl and began folding it in. Then we paused and gave the bowl a suspicious once-over. “Not enough chips,” Sarah pronounced and we poured in some more.
That night after dinner, we dug in and, not to brag, but it rocked. But 20 minutes later I felt so full that I was clutching my stomach in pain, swearing I would never eat again. The next day, I answered the pumpkin bread’s siren call once more and sadly experienced the same result. I puzzled over this extreme dessert response. The pumpkin bread was so good--there had to be a way to eat both grain-free and pain-free. And then it hit me--the pumpkin bread packed a proteinous punch. In addition to the almond flour (which is merely crushed up almonds) we were working with 4 eggs and a cup of pecans. And I guess I’m not living a hearty enough life of hunting, gathering and defending my territory to eat such an item after a full dinner.
I don’t have a clear-cut lesson for you here because I regret nothing. I still think that almond flour imparts a delicious nutty flavor. If I had more of that pumpkin bread, I would gobble that delicious vixen down in a second. I also recognize that I have found myself in a somewhat specific set of circumstances that probably do not apply to you. So all I can say is this: if by some chance you are venturing into the world of paleo baking, I recommend some conscious prioritization of stomach space. Maybe even eat dessert first and then if you are still hungry, have some dinner after. IDK.
Liv
For Carmen’s birthday Noa and I wanted to bake her a cake. I’d remembered her saying once tres leches was her favorite kind of cake. The search for a good recipe turned out to be a winding one. The comments that accompanied the nytimes version revealed a scorching rancor: “Total disaster. The egg/sugar/flour mixture turned into a solid paste, almost resembling scrambled eggs, and could not be penetrated by the egg white mixture... Literally the worst tres leches I’ve ever made. I’m so disappointed!!”
The only other recipes I could find were from really, how do you say, um White sources. Literally the recipe I ended up using was from the website called The Pioneer Woman!! (The other contenders were not much better: “preppykitchen.com”) Still I appreciated the step by step photos that came with the former recipe. Really, I shouldn't give that Pioneer Lady too much crap because the cake turned out really well! We got to enjoy the cake with two of Carmen’s pals on our roof. It was a really fun, unseasonably warm day. It made me feel like spring and fun and all the good things (HEALTH) are coming. Also, the next night we destroyed what remained of the cake between the three of us. This may be the best way to eat cake, I think: hovering over the countertop and armed with only a spoon.
I know this is a digression from our bake-off theme but I have another tale I need to report. This week I thought I’d try my hand at Abby and Nate’s classic dish: Salmon Thursday; I put my own little spin on it by making it ‘Salmon Saturday’
The recipe Abby and Nate use has a very hands-off parenting tone: “This is what we call around here a no-recipe recipe… Heat your oven to 400. Make a mixture of Dijon mustard and brown sugar to the degree of spicy-sweetness that pleases you. ” Usually, I like a thorough set of directions, pictures, even a video! Nevertheless, I was feeling confident. Yeah, I’d never made fish before but how hard could it be!
Turns out, actually kind of hard. Reader, what follows is a lesson in humility rather than affirmation of my innate culinary skills. Like Icarus, I flew too close to the sun and, as the myth goes, because of my hubris I wasted a beautiful salmon filet.
Things started off fine enough. I made a marinade of country dijon and brown sugar. I kept on tasting it in order to achieve the perfect the ratio but no matter how much I tinkered it was really just sugary mustard. Onto the filet it went! Turned out, there was more of it than I expected. Oh well! More flavor. This was going too be amazing
The next step was my undoing. I heeded the advice of the most upvoted comment which said to broil instead of roast. Unfortunately, I think my filet was larger than this intrepid commenter’s salmon. After 6 minutes the thinner side was cooked through but the rest was, ultimately, what you would call ‘raw.’ I kept putting it back under the broiler and periodically mashing my fork into it to check if it was done. I repeated this in four minute increments, a bold choice which, quite frankly, resulted in an insane final look. There really is nothing more chaotic than desperately scraping a piece of fish with a fork under an open flame. At one point, at my wits end, I poured some of the soy sauce marinade I'd made for my bok choy over the partially cooked salmon. “High risk, high reward!” I said aloud to no one.
I was not rewarded for that artistic flourish. The sauce left a kind of oily residue. In the end, even the particularly meaty part of the fillet was done and I ate it. In some parts the piece was perfectly cooked, but others, not so much. Try it! I begged Carmen and Noa. they pretended to like it but could taste (and see) the failure as well as the bok choy soy sauce.
For the sake of transparency I am sharing the photos. You can honestly feel the anxiety radiating off every macerated crevice of the filet.
Abby, Nate, and others -- what should I do next time? Should I have cut the filet into pieces? Pounded the living daylights out of ti? I will not accept defeat and must try it again! Please write in your suggestions. What do y’all know that I don’t???
P.S. because I need to preserve what remains of my dignity I am also enclosing the photos of my eggplant parm. I know. She’s a heartbreaker.
