Baking

I cook quite a bit, though my lack of posts recently does not suggest this. [And, I've moved home with my parents, and I've been eating my mom's food.] Cooking is fun, and easy, and as long as you sort of follow a recipe, use most of the right ingredients, and keep your eye on the kitchen timer, pretty much anything that you cook is going to turn out all right.

Baking on the other hand, can be stressful and hard. This is difficult to admit to, because the act of baking is very similar to what I do every day at work in the lab. Baking is all about chemistry. But, as my dad said, you shouldn't ever try anything at home that you do at work - you're bound to mess it up.

If I were to make the mistakes that I made today, trying to finish the Apple and Goat's Cheese Clafoutis that I made this evening after work, while at work, I would get fired. People would begin to question the validity of my diploma. I'd be sent back to eighth grade physical science.

The first mistake that I made was to dump too many of the ingredients into the mixing bowl at once. The recipe says to "mix the sugar, butter, eggs, and cheese . . ." and I just kept going down the list and added the flour too. If I were cooking, this wouldn't be such a problem. I'd probably go in and scoop out the prematurely added ingredient, or simply keep going, and hope that it didn't get too mushy. Problem here is, you can't exactly fish flour out of egg yolk.

Flour is a tricky thing; it's used in both baked desserts like cake and cookies, but also in breads and rolls, and it serves a different function in each. In bread, flour serves a structural purpose. When the flour is kneaded with wet ingredients, a fibrous protein called gluten contained in flour polymerizes, forming long, sinewy chains that you can see forming the outline of those big air pockets in good bread. Gluten is what makes bread and pizza dough stretchy, and what allows them to maintain their shape on a baking stone, instead of running all over the place like a cake batter would. This sinewy quality is highly prized in bread dough - as long as it doesn't get too tough.

In cakes, cookies, and even clafouti, flour is present mostly for substance, a little extra something to hold the important ingredients together. You'll notice that this recipe calls for almost twice as much sugar as flour, and that it directs the flour to be folded, not mixed, into the batter. Clafoutis is sort of like a structured pudding or custard; developed gluten would turn it into sweet, gooey hard tack.

But there I was with unmixed eggs, sugar, butter and chevre and a lot of flour. So I set the mixing bowl by the stove where my mom was reheating some soup, and let the butter and cheese get really soft. Then I took a whisk and slowly tamped up and down on in the bowl, combining all of the ingredients but trying my best not to stretch the flour too much. After a half an hour, I finally got it to the right consistency. I poured the batter into the cake pan and set the apple slices on top in concentric circles. Fifteen minutes after I put it in the oven, when the cake was half-done, I realized that I'd forgotten to add salt. Doh. [The addition of salt may have aided in the leavening action of the eggs, and the end result would have been less dense.]

The apples I sliced super thin (1/8 inch) with my food processor. I hadn't used the slicing blade on the food processor since I'd gotten it, and it was amazing - three apples took ten seconds to slice. I also coated the top of the apples before baking with raw cane sugar.

In the end I was lucky - none of my screw-ups really mattered (sort of like cooking.) I've never had clafoutis before and neither had my parents or my sister, and so none of us knew what it was supposed to taste like. But it tasted good. The edges of the clafoutis had gotten crusty, and the sugar (of which there is a massive amount) had carmelized. The inside, however, was soft - like a thick custard. The apples added just the tiniest bit of tartness, the goat's cheese just a little bite, and with a cup of hot coffee, this made a great dessert. I am going to try making it again, soon - but following the directions. Here's the recipe, from Chef2Chef.net:

Apple and Goat Cheese Clafoutis

Makes 6 servings

Ingredients:

3 Gala apples, peeled, cored and sliced thinly
10 Tablespoons (5/8 cup) sugar plus additional for sprinkling (I used white sugar for the batter and sprinkled the cake with turbinado, or raw cane, sugar)
2 eggs
6 Tablespoons (3/8 cup) softened butter, unsalted
1/2 cup (1 4-oz package) softened goat cheese
6 Tablespoons (3/8 cup) flour
salt

Preparation:

Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Mix sugar with eggs, butter and cheese. Sift flour and salt together, fold in with the rest of ingredients except apples.

Pour batter into 9-in. buttered and sugared springform pan, or a 9-in cake pan lined with parchment paper. (I lined a cake pan with parchment paper, and the folds in the paper gave a really pretty texture to the edge of the cake.) Place the apple slices in concentric circles, overlapping one another, on the top of the batter. Sprinkle the top with raw cane sugar, if you have it, or regular sugar. Bake thirty to forty minutes in the oven until it is brown on top. Pierce the top with a toothpick and if it comes out clean, then the cake is done. Let cool a few minutes and serve with coffee and vanilla ice cream.