Tea and Cookies (6 page)
Authors: Rick Rodgers
1 cup “Not” Sun Tea (page 35)
One 12-ounce bottle chilled ginger ale or ginger beer
1.
Using a vegetable peeler, peel the peach. (Use a moderate amount of pressure, and go around the circumference of the peach with a slight sawing up-and-down motion. This is quicker than the usual method of blanching the peach in boiling water.) Cut the peach in half and remove the pit. Coarsely chop the peach flesh. Transfer to a blender, add the lemon juice and sugar, and puree. Transfer to a covered container and refrigerate until ready to use. (The puree can be made up to 2 hours ahead.)
2.
Pour the peach puree into two tall glasses. Fill with the frozen tea cubes. Pour equal amounts of the iced tea into each glass. Top each with about ¼ cup of the ginger ale (save the remaining ginger ale for another use) and serve chilled.
MAKES
8
SERVINGS
I first learned to love
agua fresca de flor de jamaica,
the Mexican answer to iced tea, during my sojourn at the university of Guadalajara. It is quite tart on its own and is always sweetened, but you could make it unsweetened and serve simple syrup on the side so each guest can add the syrup to taste.
½ cup dried hibiscus flowers (
flor de jamaica
)
½ cup sugar
Ice cubes for serving
Lime wedges for serving
Simple Syrup (page 36) for serving
1.
Bring 2 quarts water to a boil in a large saucepan over high heat. Remove from the heat, add the hibiscus flowers and sugar, and stir to dissolve the sugar. Let stand 10 minutes.
2.
Strain into a heatproof pitcher and cool to room temperature. Serve over ice, garnished with lime wedges, with the syrup on the side.
CARIBBEAN SORREL PUNCH
in Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean, the hibiscus “tea” is flavored with ginger. Add 8 quarter-size slices of fresh ginger, crushed under a knife, to the water before boiling.
MAKES
4
SERVINGS
Whoever thought up the combination of lemonade and iced tea is to be commended (its invention is attributed to Arnold Palmer). There are few more thirst-quenching drinks under the sun, and this one is especially useful at summer parties as an alternative to alcoholic beverages. Rather than make separate batches of lemonade and tea, here’s how I prepare it in one fell swoop. To simplify the chore of juicing the lemons, buy an inexpensive electric citrus juicer.
1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar
4 rounded teaspoons black tea leaves, such as English Breakfast
½ cup fresh lemon juice (about 3 lemons)
Frozen tea cubes (see page 39) for serving
Fresh mint sprigs for garnish
1.
In a medium saucepan over high heat, bring 4 cups water and the sugar to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar.
2.
Add the tea and let steep for 4 to 5 minutes. (This goes against the usual advice to always add water to tea and not the other way around, but it doesn’t make enough of a flavor difference here to bother with methods that would require extra utensils.) Stir in the lemon juice.
3.
Strain into a heatproof pitcher. Let cool. Serve over frozen tea cubes, garnishing each glass with a mint sprig.
MAKES
2
SERVINGS
Bubble tea, also called boba or pearl tea (among many other names), is a lot of fun to make. You will need to make a trip to an Asian grocery store to find the tapioca pearls (regular pearl tapioca doesn’t work) and wide straws used to slurp up the “bubbles,” or shop online at www.bobateadirect.com. As adding ice cubes will cause some dilution, make this tea on the strong side. Change the drink by varying the fruit-flavored tea and matching syrup.
3 tablespoons pearl tapioca for bubble tea
Simple Syrup (page 36), as needed
3 rounded teaspoons fruit-flavored black tea, such as mango or passion fruit
2 tablespoons fruit-flavored beverage syrup, such as mango or passion fruit
½ cup whole milk
Ice cubes
1.
To prepare the tapioca “bubbles,” bring 1½ cups water to a boil over high heat in a small saucepan. Add the tapioca and reduce the heat to medium-low. Simmer until the tapioca is barely tender, about 30 minutes. Remove from the heat, cover, and let stand for 30 minutes. Drain in a wire sieve and rinse under cold water. Transfer to a small bowl and add enough simple syrup to cover. Let cool, but use within 6 hours.
2.
Bring 2 cups water to a boil over high heat. Add the tea to a teapot and add the hot water. Let stand 5 minutes. Pour the tea through a tea strainer into a heatproof pitcher. Let cool.
3.
Fill a cocktail shaker with ice cubes. Add the cooled tea, beverage syrup, and milk. Place the lid on the shaker and cover. Shake well until the mixture is foamy. Add more simple or beverage syrup to taste. Divide the tapioca bubbles between two tall glasses. Pour the tea and ice cubes into the glasses. Serve chilled, with wide straws for slurping up the tapioca bubbles.
W
hen I was a beginning baker, my cookies were generally acceptable, but I was often confused by their behavior. Sometimes they were perfect. Other times, they spread out like pancakes on the baking sheet, or they were too toasty on the bottoms. Because they were still edible, I didn’t analyze the situation. For nostalgia’s sake, I clung to the way my family taught me to bake cookies. I refused to chuck my grandmother’s thin cookie sheets for sturdy half-sheet pans, and to ditch the chore of greasing and flouring the sheets for the ease of lining them with parchment paper. I still creamed butter and sugar with a wooden spoon, because that was the way Grandma did it.
When I received a call to help a cookbook-author friend test cookie recipes for her cookbook, she convinced me that my cookie skills needed an attitude adjustment. Armed with new half-sheet baking pans and a stack of parchment paper, I discovered how the right equipment can make the difference between good cookies and great ones. And, faced with the challenge of baking scores of cookie recipes, one after the other, I was forced to observe the fine points of the genre. What follows is a primer of what I have learned about these sweet little morsels over the years.
INGREDIENTS
Cookies could be thought of as small cakes. Of course, the main difference is, cakes are molded in pans, but most cookies are not. Nonetheless, cookies and cakes share many of the same ingredients. Here is a glossary of common baking ingredients, and suggestions for their use when making cookies.
FLOUR
Flour is the backbone of all cookie recipes. Milled from wheat, flour is mostly starch, but also contains proteins. These proteins give structure to baked goods—without them, the cake would collapse. When two of these proteins, gliadin and glutenin, are moistened with water and mixed, they form gluten, an invisible system in the dough. Manipulating the dough strengthens the gluten structure.
Bread dough is kneaded to create a strong gluten structure for chewy, crusty bread. When it comes to cookies, the batter should be mixed just long enough to incorporate the flour, keeping gluten formation at a minimum to avoid tough cookies. (In some cases, such as madeleines, the flour is only folded in, and not mixed at all.)
Professionals designate flour as “hard” or “soft,” depending on the amount of potential gluten in the flour. Bread bakers prefer hard flour because their dough must have a strong gluten structure that can withstand kneading, and bake into bread with a crisp crust and chewy texture. Bread flour and unbleached flour are considered hard flours. Cake and pastry flours, with a low gluten content, are considered soft flours.
A
LL-PURPOSE FLOUR
is a combination of hard and soft flours.
U
NBLEACHED ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR
has had the hull and bran removed before milling, and it has a relatively high protein content.
B
LEACHED ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR
has been chemically treated to lengthen its shelf life, a process that also reduces the protein. Bleached flour makes for slightly more tender baked goods, but you can use unbleached if you prefer.
The flour in this book was measured by the dip-and-sweep method (see page 56).
BUTTER
There is no substitute for the creamy flavor of butter, and it is also an important building block in cookie dough. Mixing aerates the butter to create air bubbles that are part of the leavening process.
Butter is available unsalted or salted. Unsalted butter is best because the baker is in control over how much salt will be added to the recipe. Salt was originally added to butter to cover up any off flavors and to improve its shelf life, neither of which is an especially positive improvement.
When the butter will be creamed, the recipe’s ingredient list instructs to have the butter “at room temperature.” This is a useful phrase, but not entirely accurate, unless your kitchen is exactly 68°F, which is the optimum temperature for beating air into the butter during the creaming process. The butter should stand at room temperature until it has a malleable, almost plastic consistency, with a dull, not shiny, appearance. In general, this takes about 30 minutes for a stick of butter. One of the most common baking mistakes occurs when the butter is too soft, reducing the number of bubbles that can be created and resulting in an under-risen cake.
If you don’t have the time to let the cold butter stand at room temperature and soften on its own, there are options. Cut the butter into ½-inch cubes and put them in a warm spot near the oven for about 15 minutes (meanwhile you can preheat the oven, assemble the ingredients, and prepare the pan). Or grate the chilled butter on the large holes of a box grater into the mixing bowl. Do not use a microwave, as it is too easy to melt and not soften the butter.
EGGS
Eggs moisten the batter and give it an elasticity that traps air and contributes to rising. The eggs should be at room temperature, which makes them more easily absorbed into the batter. The discrepancy in temperature between the creamed mixture and chilled eggs can cause curdling. And room-temperature eggs have the best elasticity and ability to expand when beaten.
To quickly bring cold eggs to room temperature, place the uncracked eggs in a bowl, cover with hot tap water, and let stand for about 5 minutes. Eggs are easier to separate when they are chilled. For separated eggs, place the yolks and whites in separate bowls, place each bowl in a larger bowl of warm water, and let stand until the contents lose their chill, about 5 minutes.