For June 23

These last two weeks were ones where time was extremely limited, and I was incredibly lucky to have Andrew Bodhi-Heart helping me out in the cookie-making department.  This week, it was two old favorites, both from Alice Medrich:

Buckwheat Cacao Nib Sables, from Alice Medrich, Pure Dessert
Classic Unsweetened-Chocolate Brownies, from Alice Medrich, Bittersweet

Sables are a French version of a shortbread - few ingredients other than flour and butter, but unlike the shortbread, here the ingredients are rolled into a cylinder, refrigerated, then sliced and baked.  These could not be easier to make, and it is easy to make a cylinder and freeze it so that you always have cookies available.  Anyway, this variation uses two interesting ingredients in the form of buckwheat flour in addition to the usual wheat flour, and also cacao nibs, which are a precursor to chocolate and a favorite baking ingredient of mine.  The buckwheat makes the cookies a bit gray, just like Soba noodles, which is certainly an unusual cookie color.  It also makes them quite delicate.  The cacao nibs, in contrast, are always earthy without being sweet.  I like this recipe a lot.  It is a bit of an adult cookie, overall, but it is easy to make and very flavorful and enjoyable.

In her book Bittersweet, which is all about chocolate, Alice Medrich gives a variety of brownie recipes that are all tailored to the type of chocolate you are using (i.e., there is a recipe for unsweetened chocolate, a different one for cocoa powder, etc. etc.)  The point is that different chocolates have different amounts of fat from different sources (fat from butter, fat from the cocoa butter, etc.) and that these, along with the type of sugar, result in very different flavor and texture profiles for your brownies.  It is a really interesting way to learn about different types of chocolate and their characteristics for baking, and I recommend it highly.  Last year I did around 4 or 5 of the brownie recipes in a row and it was very instructive to see how each recipe produced a different result.

Anyway, this week I made the recipe that uses unsweetened chocolate as the base.  You bake it at a high temperature for a short amount of time, and then cool it quickly in an ice bath.  It results in a brownie with a crusty top and gooey interior.  Because of that gooey interior, the baking process requires a certain leap of faith, since you can't stick a toothpick in and know they're done.  And for me, it is quite anxiety-inducing, because I multiply the recipe and use a 13x9 inch pan rather than the 8x8 called for in the recipe, and changing the pan size can alter the baking time quite significantly.  But the end result is a very good brownie (as long as you are not one of those people who likes cakey brownies, in which case you have come to the wrong blog).  These are not spectacular like some brownies, but they are, as the name indicates, a classic version of a brownie.