It’s hard to beat a granita for an easy and cold summertime treat. No need to drag out the ice-cream machine for this one, but the rewards are abundant: fresh fruit attired in an icy texture that is just a few notches above slushy. Too granulated to be sorbet but more substantial than a frozen drink, if you’re unfamiliar with this Italian dessert, you could think of granitas as royal members of a family that is distantly related to the humble snow cone.

Strawberry and black pepper is a nice combination that is interesting enough without much danger of being off-putting to traditionalists. That is, you could probably serve it to your grandmother without complaint - I did, and I don’t think she identified the pepper at all, only that “there’s something a little different”. I did keep the pepper quantity on the low side, but feel free to add more to taste if you like a very assertive bite.

This granita recipe is a very basic one that works with just about any kind of puréed fruit - and it’s happily open to various small adjustments in the sugar and spice quantities. I tend to like them on the less-sweet side, so the fruit flavor shines through and the tartness can be tempered with a dot of whipped cream at times. For a sweeter granita, add up to 4 or 5 more tablespoons of sugar (this also can vary depending on the sweetness/ripeness of the fruit you use)

Strawberry Black Pepper Granita

1 cup warm water
1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 pound strawberries (about 3 1/2 cups sliced )
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, or more to taste.

Stir sugar, lemon juice, and water in a bowl until sugar dissolves. Place sugar mixture and strawberries in a food processor and purée until smooth.

Stir first 3 ingredients in small bowl until sugar dissolves. Blend 3 cups strawberries in processor until smooth. Add sugar syrup and blend until combined. Pour into a glass or metal 13×9x2 inch pan, and place in freezer. Scrape/stir with a fork every 30 minutes or so, combining the more-frozen edges with the less-frozen center, until the whole thing is crystallized. Use a spoon to scrape into cups or small bowls.

Notes:
This recipe halves easily.
You can make this a day or so ahead, and to achieve the proper texture, take it out of the freezer to thaw a bit before serving, scraping into crystals with a fork as it softens. Alternatively, you could put hard-frozen chunks in the food processor and pulse briefly a couple of times until granulated but not slushy.

Frozen | 2 Comments »

Cherokee Purple heirloom tomato (with olives for eyes and flanked by some red hybrid cousins, whose names I didn’t catch), this week at Farmers @ Firehouse in the Strip District.

I need to remember to plant these when I have an actual yard.

Is this not one of the best snacks ever? Sliced fresh tomato, salt & pepper, bread, and olive oil. The Cherokee’s flesh is darker on the skin than inside, but it’s juicy, sweet, and rich, not unlike Brandywine tomatoes.

Eating in Pittsburgh | No Comments »

Well, I ended up having to freeze the sour cherries until they can meet a proper fate. With this class I’m taking and the Mad Scientist’s impending move, things have been incredibly hectic. I will have to save them for a couple weeks until I have more time, as right now there’s barely enough time or energy to make anything more complicated than frittatas for dinner. Well, except one thing…

Buying lots of fruit is a great excuse to make sweet things, isn’t it? “But the fruit was about to go bad, so I had to bake something!”

There is this really really simple cake - really more like a tart of sorts, as it’s basically a butter crust with fruit on top - that acts as a wonderful little helper for using up the summer bounty. You can mix and match the fruit to your preferences or for whatever is in season. It cooks for a long time so the fruit doesn’t burst, but rather coalesces into something soft, juicy, and delectable. I’ve been eating it for breakfast all week.

Nectarine Blueberry Cake
adapted from Epicurious

Pastry crust:
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 stick (1/2 cup) cold unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla

Fruit topping:
4 tablespoons sugar (use a bit more or less as needed, depending on the tartness of your fruit)
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon tapioca flour
4 nectarines, sliced lengthwise
1 cup blueberries
1 tablespoon lemon juice

Preheat oven to 350°F

For pastry:
Mix flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a food processor. Add butter and pulse just until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add egg and vanilla and pulse just until dough clumps and begins to form a ball (don’t overdo it or the heat from the processor will melt all the butter and it will become a sticky mess).

Press dough on to the bottom and up the side of a 9″ springform pan (it won’t go all the way up to the top, this is no problem).

Topping:
Mix together flours and sugar in a large bowl. Add peaches, blueberries, and lemon juice, and toss to coat. Spoon topping into pastry and bake, loosely covered with a sheet of foil, until filling is bubbling in center and crust is golden, about 1 1/2 hours.

This cake is great at any temperature: warm, room temp, and even cold.

Baking | No Comments »

I present to you, the coveted box of sour cherries:

I love LOVE LOVE sour cherries, but they are very hard to find here and disappear in a wink. I bought these a few days ago, thrilled to see them at one of the farm markets at which they had just arrived. Less than a week later, every last one is gone. I’d been hoping to stop back tonight to get more for freezing, but my goodness! Seems I’m not the only one who’s been waiting all year. So I had better do this small batch justice and make them into something reeeeally good. Chocolate? You bet. The cogs are turning…

General | 2 Comments »

The Question: Is it possible to make muffins with no butter that actually taste good?

I was feeling the urge to bake, had strawberries to use up, and no butter in the house. I also wanted to make something to bring in to work. And, I was feeling corny (nothing new there). I have fantastic recipes for strawberry cornmeal cake and corn muffins, but those and just about every corn pone recipe I came upon called for butter. For good reason, too: butter makes baked goods taste so much better and lighter than oil. But hey, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Although I use allrecipes.com with some frequency, one has to admit that many of the baked-good recipes in that repository are tailored for busy people who don’t mind cutting a few corners - be it with cake mixes, gelatine, Miracle Whip…you get the idea. I suspected that someone would have figured out how to make a decent, not-too-leaden muffin with oil…and I was right! However, I am quite sure that the muffins made as-is would have been a bit bland. The use of oil, which dutifully adds fat and moisture, does not have much of a yum factor. This was an easy fix,though, with a jaunty trio of vanilla, lemon peel, and of course the chopped strawberries.

I topped them with a little sanding sugar before baking. In retrospect, it might have been just a touch too sweet.

Strawberry Cornmeal Mini-Muffins

Ingredients
1 cup cornmeal
1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup white sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
1/4 cup oil (I used olive, but feel free to use safflower, canola, etc)
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
finely grated zest from 1 large lemon
1 1/2 cups chopped strawberries

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Grease mini-muffin tin or line with paper cups.
In a large bowl, mix dry ingredients: corn meal, flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and lemon zest.
In a smaller bowl, mix wet ingredients: egg, oil, milk, and vanilla. Gently stir wetr
Spoon batter into prepared mini-muffin cups (an ice cream scoop makes quick work of this).
Bake at 400 degrees for 13-15 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into a muffin comes out clean.

Makes about 24 mini-muffins. For regular muffins, bake at 400F for 18-20 minutes

So, if the question is, it is possible to make tasty, non-greasy muffins with oil?
The answer is yes, but to make up for the loss of buttery bliss, add strong flavors like citrus rind, extracts and the like.

Baking | No Comments »

A near-universal problem for all who like to cook: what to do when the weather is sticky but the urge for decent food is still strong? My apartment, while for the most part quite serviceable, is on the 3rd floor and thus becomes an oppressive cage towards the end of July and pretty much all through August. My little window A/C unit is just enough to cool the bedroom and sunroom, leaving the rest of the place to its own devices. Luckily, the sun doesn’t shine too hard on the kitchen side, but I am in no hurry to do any extended baking. This presents a little problem, of course, when there is abundant fresh fruit and it’s eager to be used up in some kind of baked good or other.

Some folks might just avoid turning the oven on, but my approach is instead to make the A/C extra-cold, so the chilled rooms are full of icy relief when I can’t take the proverbial heat. It is in this way that I tried out the low-fat raspberry tart from Nick Malgieri’s mouthful of a new book Perfect Light Desserts: Fabulous Cakes, Cookies, Pies, and More Made with Real Butter, Sugar, Flour, and Eggs, All Under 300 Calories Per Generous Serving. I usually do not truck much with low-fat desserts, but recently The Mad Scientist (boyfriend of Cookworm) has issued an ultimatum of sorts: I need to start cooking low-fat or smaller quantities of sweets to preserve his waistline (oh, and that nonsense about health, blah blah). Well, reducing quantities can be tricky, so onward we shall march to the low(fat) lands! Still, I was a bit skeptical of trying a low-fat pastry crust, mainly because of fears that it would become too hard or be flavorless. Luckily those concerns were quickly laid to rest, as Nick Malgieri truly knows his stuff. I was careful not to overcook the crust, and the result was tender and easy to work with. Although it did not have a knock-your-socks-off glory of a fully buttered up crust, the texture was sort of like a crisp ladyfinger and definitely pleasant. Actually, it was so light I was encouraged to eat more.

The tart crust I filled with Nick’s low fat pastry cream and topped with fresh raspberries. The pastry cream had a good texture and did not taste particularly “light”, although I may prefer Alice Medrich’s low-fat pastry cream a bit more, even though they are fairly similar ingredients-wise. I might actually just use regular pastry cream in the future with a low-fat crust, because we prefer the thicker egginess of a non-enlightened patisserie cream. On the other hand, stronger flavorings might also help - I kept it pretty low-key because this was essentially a trial run. It’s a very standard summer fruit tart, something difficult to mess up if done the usual way, but I’ve tried enough low-fat desserts in my time to know that the simple can turn downright terrible when the fat compensation is not managed well.

The conclusion? This tart was ultimately successful, and would be fine to serve to others at a casual summer dinner. While it tastes a little “different” than the standard full-butter crust with rich, eggy filling, it tastes substantial and not oversweetened as if to hide a nasty secret (too often I’ve noticed that low-fat desserts seem to do this, especially muffins). I’ve also tried a few other recipes in the cookbook (the chocolate sherbet is outstanding), and I recommend it highly. Not only does he explain how to do things, but also whyit’s important to use certain techniques in low-fat cooking or just all-purpose tips (the reasons for using liquid sugar in ice cream may seem obvious to some, but to me it was a revelation). I can only imagine what sort of mouthwatering desserts and care his non-low-fat books contain. In fact, I may just sneak out and buy one on the sly…

Baking | No Comments »