Brain Food

By Richard Cornish

Is pork butt the new pork belly? Whose room temperature are we talking about? And can you freeze cheese? (Yes, but why would you want to?)

These are some of the burning questions at the heart of every kitchen. Food science, etiquette, mythbusting, history and common sense—there is no subject too big or too small for Richard Cornish to answer in his weekly Brain Food columns, which have been must-reads for years.

Brain Food is a collection of the best cooks’ conundrums and their surprising answers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Aug 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9780522871135

Book preview

Food.

1

Baking

For generations, baking skills were passed down from elder to younger in kitchens across the nation. An unbroken chain of information transfer developed over centuries has been truncated in just a few decades. Questions about flour, butter, sugar and yeast that were once uttered around a floury kitchen bench have been silenced by packet cake mix and suburban baking franchises. Thankfully the deep urge to bake is re-emerging in the new generation. The readers generally give me a lot more detail than just their name. They often tell me a lot about themselves, where they come from and what they do for a living. I know that many of the emails I receive come from students, and from the names and spidery cursive signatures on those written in ink, I assume that many of the other queries are written by older people who were born in Europe many decades ago.

Whatever the case, the writers always provide their Christian names, something that is quickly redacted prior to publication, so I often refer to them as ‘Good Sir’ or ‘Dear Lady’. It is a pleasure to help those who feel their life is incomplete without baking skills to accomplish something fulfilling—even if it is just a fluffy scone.

When making a cake, should I sift the flour? P. Lim

There are two schools of thought on sifting—some would say it’s a kitchen schism. Sifting used to be almost compulsory as bits of bran and wheat stem would get through the milling process. Flour was also too damp and would clump. The modernists say that you don’t need to sift flour any more because contemporary milling and packaging is so good that flour is pure and doesn’t clump. The traditionalists say that sifting dry ingredients mixes them together better, aerates them and creates a lighter mix. The traditionalists also like the sound the old sifters make as their metal agitators move over the steel mesh. I had to go to a higher court on this one. My mum makes the best sponges in the world and she says ‘sift’. So that settles that.

Can you suggest how I can make muffins with the top slightly crusty but the inside still soft and moist? S. Lih

Crusty muffin top sounds like a skin disease you might contract in a shopping mall. Muffins are meant to be moist. A lot of the sensation of moistness comes from the amount of sugar in the recipe—most have an equal quantity of sugar to flour. Sugar forms bonds with water in the eggs, butter and any water-based liquids. These bonds hold a lot of the water in muffins during baking. This also stops water from allowing gluten to form. Gluten gives you a firmer texture and crunchier crust. You can get a crunchier top if you gently mix the wet ingredients with the flour first, then add the creamed butter and sugar. Phillippa Grogan from Phillippa’s bakery suggests you could also add some extra sugar and cook the muffin for less time in a hotter oven on a rack placed higher in the oven.

How much is an American ‘stick of butter’ in grams? G. Cohen-Shapira

Complexity and subtlety have their place in American life—except when it comes to Two and a Half Men and weighing ingredients when baking. Instead of using reliable and accurate (but slightly more difficult to operate) scales, Americans prefer to use cups of flour and sugar, and sticks of butter. A stick of good old American butter weighs 4 ounces or 113 grams. A small block of dinkum Aussie butter weighs 250 grams. If you enjoy baking, may I suggest you invest, if you don’t already have them, in a set of digital scales—it makes the whole process more accurate and the results so much better.

I don’t like the taste that bicarbonate of soda gives to baked goods. Can it be left out or substituted? J. Hunt

Bicarbonate of soda, baking soda and sodium bicarbonate are all the same compound. It is alkaline and reacts with acid to create gas. This gas is trapped by the batter or dough and gives baked goods their lift. The acid may come from another ingredient in the recipe such as honey, fruit juice, buttermilk or brown sugar. If too much baking soda is used in proportion to the amount of acid available, there could be residual baking soda left in the final product, which will give you that unpleasant soapy taste. Try making the recipe again using less baking soda. Sometimes baking soda is not incorporated well into the mixture, leaving little pockets that don’t react with the acid, so make sure the dry goods are well mixed by placing them together in a bowl and whisking them well. Do not leave baking soda out of a recipe or you will end up with a cake falling as flat as a joke at the Logies. Sometimes it is possible to substitute baking powder, which undergoes a chemical reaction when heated, but the success will depend on the original recipe.

What is the difference between using baking powder or using bicarbonate of soda with cream of tartar as raising agents in baking? M. Hennesy

Both methods create gas that is trapped in batter when cooking pikelets and cakes. There is a difference: timing. To put it nicely, when you use bicarb of soda and cream of tartar together then add a liquid containing water, they go off like a frog in a sock. Baking powder, however, requires heat. Try this quick kitchen experiment. Take a teaspoon of baking powder and put it in a bowl. In another bowl, add a teaspoon of bicarb of soda and two of cream of tartar. Add some water to both. The bicarb mix hisses and bubbles the second the water dissolves the powders and allows the acid and alkaline to mix and a chemical reaction to take place. Do the same with baking powder and see how long it takes. Now place the baking powder and water in a saucepan and apply heat. The chemical reaction really gets going about 80 degrees Celsius. So, when you want instant raising, such as in pikelets, use bicarb of soda and cream of tartar. When you want a longer, more sustained release of gas, such as in baking a cake, use baking powder.

I read Pigsticks and Harold and the Incredible Journey to my son at bedtime. The hamster is very keen on Battenberg cake. Can you tell me what it is? N. Russo

To help answer this vexing question I am going to refer to the seminal 1989 comedy Blackadder Goes Forth, set in World War I. In one episode the simpering and sycophantic Captain Darling exclaims, ‘I’m as British as Queen Victoria!’, to which the sardonic Captain Blackadder, played by Rowan Atkinson, replies: ‘So your father’s German, you’re half German, and you married a German!’ The Battenberg cake is made from plain and coloured sponge cake cut into four long, square fingers, arranged in a chequered pattern, held together with jam, and encased in almond paste. They are distinctly English and first appeared in the late nineteenth century after the marriage of Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Princess Victoria of Hesse-Darmstadt to Prince Louis of Battenberg. Prince Louis later took British nationality and anglicised his name to Mountbatten. The Battenberg cake is surprisingly easy to make and is delicious, especially if one makes one’s own almond paste. An excellent recipe, tested by yours truly, can be found in Phillippa’s Home Baking by Phillippa Grogan and Richard Cornish (published by Penguin Lantern).

When I cut my cakes they crumble and I end up disappointed. What can I do? R. Hansen

Lower your expectations, dear woman. If you imagine that all your baking will fail you will never be disappointed. Alternatively, you could try to allow your cake to cool on the rack in the tin when you remove it from the oven. This allows the crust and crumb (exterior and interior) of the cake to harden a little. Avoid stressing the cake by keeping it level when removing it from the tin. Most importantly, when you cut your cake use a good bread knife. A blunt knife will pull the crumb away. (I recommend the entry-level Swiss-made Victorinox bread knife.) Bread knives with scalloped blades are also good for slicing really ripe tomatoes and ham on the bone.

When I add melted butter to sponge cake mix, it loses all the trapped air and turns to slop. H. Knight

What you are referring to is a Genoise sponge or, according to Mrs Dorothy Floate, a ‘Victorian sponge’. Mrs Floate was the doyenne of the baking-as-moral-salvation movement in post-war rural Australia. She suggested that the addition of very hot molten butter to a batter is akin to a married woman spending a night out with French sailors. She advised allowing the melted butter to cool and to dribble the butter around the edge of the bowl and gently fold it through the batter after the flour has been gently folded through the beaten eggs. This will stop the hot butter bursting all the air bubbles trapped in the beaten eggs.

How do I clean up my bread dough bowl? The raw dough doesn’t come off when I wash it. J. Hoffman

Proteins coagulate at about 70 degrees Celsius and if you have very hot water coming out of your tap this will cook the dough and make it very difficult to remove. So don’t use hot water to wash raw dough from the bowl. The same goes when washing bowls with sausage mince, terrine and so on. Rinse and scrub in cold water first to remove the dough or mince and then wash with hot water and detergent.

Letters, Corrections and Apologies

Recently we tackled the question ‘What is the best way to remove bread dough from a bowl?’ A reader wrote in to suggest taking a little flour and rubbing this over one’s hands and bowl to remove sticky dough, which can then be put into the compost.

What does ‘retarding the dough’ mean? D. Monsborough

Yeast is a single-celled organism that converts sugar into carbon dioxide, water and alcohol. It also produces enzymes that convert the starch in flour (polysaccharides) into simple sugars (monosaccharides) that are in turn converted into carbon dioxide and alcohol. Modern bread mixes contain bread improvers, such as the enzyme amylase, and malt to give the yeast something to eat while the enzymes go to work. If bakers don’t want to add improvers, they can slow the fermentation to allow the yeast to create enough enzymes to convert the starch to sugar. Bakers do this by allowing the bread dough to ferment, forming it into loaves, then placing the unbaked loaves in a cooler. This is retarding the dough. Yeast is still active at low temperatures, but it works very, very slowly. While it is working, it also produces other organic compounds that give subtle aromas to the bread. You can do this at home. Make bread according to the recipe, form the loaves, place them on the tray, dust them with flour, and cover in plastic film. Refrigerate overnight. Allow the loaves to rise again in a warm place until they double in size—about 2 hours—and bake according to the instructions.

I am making Christmas puddings. A friend told me to remove the greaseproof paper and replace it with fresh greaseproof paper before storing in the fridge. G. Cullen

You could do that. And you could wish everyone ‘happy holidays’ while you’re at it. Making Christmas pudding with the family is one of those last bastions of Christmas rituals left to us. The aroma of fruit soaking in brandy, the house filled with fragrant spices, the nuggety little bowl sequestered in the linen cupboard for months to let it age. So don’t touch the paper! Leave the double layer of greaseproof paper on the pudding as it forms a seal against air. Also—before you put the batter in the bowl, make a small disc of greaseproof paper and place this on the inside bottom of the pudding bowl as this stops the pudding sticking to the bowl. I simmer the pudding with the bowl sitting on an enamel saucer to avoid the bottom of the bowl getting too hot and the pudding getting too dark.

What can I do to stop blueberries from sinking to the bottom of my muffins? P. Lyons

With their smooth skins, round shape and heavy density, blueberries are the bathyscaphes of the berry world and will descend to the depths of any batter. Drop a berry into a bowl of water and only the largest will float. Before adding the flour to the creamed butter and sugar, dust the blueberries in the flour. This will create a rougher surface that will cause drag and slow them sinking to the bottom. Don’t roll them in extra flour, unless you add proportionally more liquid.

When making pastry can I rest it in the fridge overnight? C. French

Yes. It will be even better. If you need to, you can make pastry, form it into a thick sheet half the size of A4 and freeze it. Defrost it and roll it out. Great if you want to make several batches at the one time.

I only eat home-baked bread. We are going camping. How will I survive? D. Friend

If you don’t die from snake bite, shark attack, tick poisoning or late-night funnel-web ablution punctures, then fresh bread will be the least of your worries. I don’t want to put too fine a point on it but Australian Aboriginals have been milling grain and making bread here for 30 000 years. You could make leavened damper, which means rolling the dough in ash, then baking it in the coals. Or you could form the loaf as usual and bake in a cast-iron Dutch oven. Try to order a copy of Jack and Reg Absalom’s Outback Cooking in the Camp Oven. In this 1982 classic they’ll show you how to bake a beautiful loaf over the coals as well as give you recipes for goat, kangaroo and quandong. Another really simple method is to mix, knead, prove and then shape the dough into a fat disc and then cook over a medium heat in a heavy-based frying pan. The heavier the frying pan the better. Cast iron is perfect. You’ll get a big loaf with loads of crust.

We had a pizza party on New Year’s Eve and some of the leftover dough was put in the fridge. The next day it smelled like beer. Is that okay? T. Jacobs

I often find that things in my fridge smell like beer on New Year’s Day—only to discover it is my own breath. Although yeast prefers to work at a nice warm temperature of about 27 degrees Celsius, it will continue to ferment, albeit very slowly, in the fridge. That beery smell is the trapped aromas of fermentation of the yeast in the pizza base, one of which is the alcohol. During fermentation the yeast breaks down the starch in flour into simple sugar and then digests the sugar. The carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in the sugar are reformulated by the yeast into carbon dioxide, water and alcohol. During baking the alcohol vaporises, helping make the dough light and spongy. You won’t get your guests drunk but I do like your suggestion, at the end of your long email that we were unable to publish, of creating the ‘beer-crust pizza’.

I tried to make flat biscuits that would fit perfectly into the kids’ lunchboxes but they ended up all puffy. K.

Reviews for Brain Food

[fliss88_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've given this and extra star because it was such a fun book to read. Okay it's a cook book of sorts, but it's written in the style of a novel, a fun style. I loved the tongue in cheek, conversational writing and it took nothing away from the informative detail of the topic. If you have questions about anything odd in the way of today's recipes have a look at this book. It won't answer all your questions but it'll go close.