Recipe Notes: Chocolate Chunk Oatmeal Cookies with Pecans and Dried Cherries

17 September 2018

Recipe from The Perfect Cookie, America's Test Kitchen, 2017, p. 33

What additions can you make to an oatmeal cookie? Chocolate chips, for sure. Raisins are common. How about nuts? We've probably all had oatmeal cookies with one or even two of these addends, but never all three. That's what this recipe is all about, loading up a basic oatmeal cookie with lots of flavorful ingredients. Will it be too little, too much, or just right?

The recipe specified pecans, dried sour cherries, and chopped bittersweet chocolate for the additions. I used walnuts, because I had them on hand and they were mentioned in the recipe as an alternate to pecans. I used dried cherries because that's what I found at the supermarket. The bag didn't say sour, it just said cherries and they weren't very sour; the recipe suggests dried cranberries and these would be worth trying. I used chopped bittersweet chocolate, as specified. The procedure for making the dough was standard: the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt) were whisked together in a bowl. The nuts, dried fruit, and chocolate were roughly chopped and mixed with rolled oats. Softened butter and brown sugar were beaten together in a stand mixer. An egg and vanilla extract were beaten into the sugar mixture. The dry ingredients were stirred in followed by the oat mixture. Using a #24 disher (smaller than what the recipe suggested, #16 or #20 would probably have been better) resulted in 19 cookies which were baked for 18 minutes for the first batch and 16 minutes for the second. Total time to make these cookies was 100 minutes.

I enjoyed these cookies. The mixture of the earthy nuts and oats with the bittersweet chocolate and sour-ish cherries was great. I didn't think there were too many extras added to the cookies, the ratio of cookie to additions was fine. However, the cookies were more crispy than chewy. This was my fault for over-baking them and making them a little too small, faults easily corrected, They taste good and are enjoyable, and with a little more attention to the details of baking should be just right.

Recipe Notes: Tacos Dorados

25 June 2018

Recipe from Cook's Illustrated, July 2018

Tacos dorados is a regular dinner item at our house. It means crispy tacos, i.e. tacos served using a crispy corn taco shell. It is usually a pretty simple affair. The taco shells are store bought. These are brought to the table with an array of taco fillings: ground beef (sometimes seasoned, sometimes not), shredded lettuce and cheese, avocado, tomatoes, roasted corn, sliced olives, sour cream, taco sauce, salsa, etc. Each person then builds a taco to suit their taste. In this Cook's Illustrated recipe the meat is seasoned and the taco shells are fried at home. I wanted to try some of what was in the recipe but not make it too complicated, after all we are cooking for just the two of us. Thus, I prepared tacos in our normal fashion but I prepared the ground beef filling using the recipe from the magazine.

Ground beef (90% lean, 13 oz) was mixed with water and baking soda; this raised its pH and prevented it from getting tough and rubbery when cooked. In a skillet with hot oil, one finely chopped onion was cooked to soften the onion. The seasonings were added to bloom their flavors: chili powder, paprika, cumin, and garlic powder. After a minute or so the ground beef was added and cooked until no pink remained. Soy sauce was added (in place of the tomato paste in the recipe) and the mixture transferred to a bowl where shredded cheese was stirred in. Including these steps it took about 50 minutes to prepare dinner. The meat mixture was sufficient for three meals.

The resulting tacos were okay. By itself the meat mixture was too spicy for our tastes, but served with the other fixin's it was acceptable. But is it worth the extra effort to prepare this spicy meat mixture? Especially when the taco is seasoned with prepared salsa or bottled taco sauce? My answer is no and we will stick with our simpler, quicker method of preparing tacos. Nonetheless it was worth doing once and who knows, perhaps some of what we learned will be adopted to become part of our standard preparation.

Recipe Notes: Chocolate Chewies

25 June 2018

Recipe from The Perfect Cookie, America's Test Kitchen, 2017, p. 63

When I saw this recipe in The Perfect Cookie it reminded me of Chocolate Chubbies, an excellent cookie that's something between a cookie and a brownie. While I have been rather methodical in working my way through the cookbook, I skipped ahead to try this recipe, inspired by the goodness of Chocolate Chubbies and hopes for an even better version.

There were several striking elements in the list of ingredients. There was a lot of sugar (2¼ cups confectioners' sugar), a lot of pecans (2 cups), very little flour (2 tablespoons), and very little fat (no butter and no egg yolks).  Creating the batter was straightforward. Dry ingredients (confectioners' sugar, cocoa, flour, salt) were mixed in a stand mixer. The wet ingredients were added one at a time: egg whites and vanilla. Finally, the pecans, which had been toasted and chopped, were added along with 1 ounce of grated bittersweet chocolate. These were baked, 15-18 minutes. I used a #60 disher which generated 33 cookies. Total time was 80 minutes.

My feelings about these cookies changed over time as I worked my way through the batch. (As with almost all cookies that I make, I freeze most of them, taking about a week's worth from the freezer once a week.) My first impression is they should have been called pecan cookies. Their flavor and texture were dominated by the nuts. Indeed, the batter was very thin and it was the pecans that held it together. The cookies were chewy, too, as advertised, but the chocolate flavor took a back seat to the pecans. The more I ate them, though, the more I grew to like them, to enjoy them for what they were rather than what I was expecting. Then towards the end of the batch my impression of them soured somewhat as I concluded they were too nutty for my taste. These were not much like chocolate chubbies where chocolate is the star, that is probably why I like them so much.