mix, mix… stir, stir

First things first - Happy Voting day! Here is a little cookie tribute to our flag in celebration of the big day.

photo by David Peterman

It was another cookie week for the Tuesdays with Dorie bakers as we all made rugelach. I have never made this type of cookie before and can only recall ever eating them once. David and I bought a big tub of them from Costco, and though it was years ago, I recall they were darn tasty.

photo by David Peterman

Rugelach is hard to spell, strange to say, and despite liking the ones I tried from Costco, has never been a type of cookie I have been drawn to. I suspect if it weren’t for this baking group I would have skipped right over this recipe in my book and unknowingly been missing out on a great easy to make baked delight.

Rugelach is made from a simple cream cheese dough that comes together with a few pulses of a food processor. Aside from needing a few hours for the dough to chill before rolling, these are quick and easy cookies to make and yet they look so complicated and impressive. I was expecting a very tedious task of cutting lots of triangles to make these, and yes triangles need to be cut, but not in a tedious way. Think pizza; a bunch of triangles cut in seconds! I was thinking of triangles as a quilter, and cutting fabric triangles is rather tedious work.

Typically rugelach is filled with a variety of fillings including fruit, nuts, jam, poppy seed paste, or chocolate. Dorie’s recipe gives a few suggestions and I made two varieties, one chocolate and for the other I used a fig cardamom and rose water jam (I would share the recipe, but I still have a bit more refining to do before it is finalized).

photo by David Peterman

The fig jam version also included currents, walnuts, and chopped chocolate. In the future, I would leave the chocolate out of fruit fillings. The chocolate took away from the bright tangy fruit flavor and worked much better as the solo star in the all-chocolate filling which also included a little hint of cinnamon and ancho chile. The chocolate filling also made for very tidy little cookies because the filling was smooth and uniform. I liked both versions very much, and I am thrilled to now know how to make this impressive looking little cookie. Thank you to Grace of Piggy’s Cooking Journal for giving me a new baking experience with her recipe selection.

You can find Dorie’s recipe for rugelach in her book Baking: From My Home to Yours. Here is the recipe I came up with for my chocolate filling. This was just a bit more than I needed to fill one 12 inch diameter round of dough.

3 oz. dark chocolate, chopped
2 oz. unsweetened chocolate, chopped
2 Tbsp. granulated sugar
1 1/4 cups powdered sugar
1 egg
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/8 tsp. ancho chile powder

Place the chopped chocolates in a medium sized bowl and set aside. Mix the sugars and egg together in a small bowl. Set the bowl over a pot of simmering water and stir until the mixture is about 120 degrees F. Pour the sugar mixture over the chocolate and let it stand for a minute. Begin whisking the mixture to melt the chocolate and combine the ingredients. If the chocolate does not completely melt, set the bowl over the pot of warm water and stir to fully melt the chocolate. Stir in the spices. The chocolate mixture will be thick, but still spreadable. Set filling aside and roll out dough. Place pieces of chocolate paste filling on the dough and press the filling out using fingers to create a uniform layer.

Rolling round dough

Rolling a uniform circle of dough can be a challenge because dough seems to prefer to take on free-form amoeba like formations rather than perfect circles. I find it helps to start with dough that is chilled as a nice flat and uniformly round disk. When rolling the dough roll from the center out in one direction, then turn the dough a quarter turn and roll again from the center out to the edge. Continue spinning the dough after each roll and it should grow in a uniform circular manner. The edges can often times get ragged and split apart, but just pinch and push them back into shape if they start to grow in odd directions. Turning the dough after each roll also prevents it from getting too stuck to the counter. Have a bench scraper or long spatula handy to free the dough between rolls if necessary and then toss a bit more flour down before continuing on if it is sticking. Running your hand over the dough you should be able to feel any bumps or thick spots that need to be evened out as you are rolling. Working uniformly in all directions should result in a perfectly round result.

Parchment paper and cheese cloth are two things I like to always have on hand in the kitchen. Not that I use cheese cloth everyday, but often it’s a handy solution for an impromptu straining or infusing task, and I really hate trips to the grocery store mid-recipe.

photo by David Peterman

With all of my stock making lately I have been going through more cheese cloth than normal, so when I was at a fabric store recently it occurred to me to ask, “Do you sell cheese cloth?” Yes they do, and for a fraction of the cost of the packages sold in the cookware isle of grocery stores! Even better, I had a choice between a lose weave, or a tight weave. I just bought two yards of 36″ wide tight weave cheese cloth for five dollars! What a deal.

I have always frozen spare egg whites for future use, but been perplexed over what to do with spare egg yolks. Over the years I have made attempts to freeze yolks and they just never thaw correctly. I was always left with gummy, pasty, yellow balls of goo that were clearly ready to cause catastrophe to any recipe I dared use them in.

While flipping through Harold McGee’s book, On Food and Cooking, I came across a great bit of information. Firstly, he confirms what I discovered, that yolks frozen directly and thawed results in a pasty consistency that does not readily combine with other ingredients. Being the smart food science guy that he is, he provides a solution!

Mixing yolks with either salt, sugar, or acid solves the problem. He recommends mixing 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 tablespoon of sugar, or 4 tablespoons of lemon juice per pint of whole eggs or egg yolks. One large U.S. egg is equivalent to 3 Tablespoons and an egg yolk is equivalent to 1 tablespoon. I was working on a much smaller scale and just for simplicity sake I did some rounding and for six egg yolks mixed in 1 teaspoon of sugar and it worked great.

I no longer feel the need to make ice cream every time I make an angle food cake, meringue, or marshmallows. It’s a whole new world!