timer
Unless you keep an inner time that’s on par with the atomic clock, you are going to need a timer for anything that gets baked (unless, of course, you have a dependable oven timer).
whisk
You need a whisk. It’s a great way to homogenize a mixture. Get a typical French wire whisk, and you’ll be set.
Listen, we’re only really fussy about the techniques that will make or break your desserts, the difference between bready lumps-of-coal-like cookies and our buttery, lacy domes of heaven. So read on for the Milk Bar accelerated pastry program and the techniques that truly make a difference.
God bless … freedom measurements
I run a kitchen where a new recipe will be tested five times with 2-gram increments of a certain ingredient until we hit the perfect proportions. When writing this book, however, I knew I would have to give measurements that the average home cook or baker would recognize—meaning in cups and spoons. But everyone knows that one person’s “packed” brown sugar is not another’s. It hurt my heart a little to have to give what can be such incredibly variable measurements.
Europeans use the metric system, lovely precise measurements. What are our cups and spoons even called? Late one night, after staring at recipes and a computer screen for far too long, we decided to call them “freedom measurements.” The recipes in this book were developed in grams and tested in both their metric and freedom incarnations. We have done our best to give the most accurate freedom-measurement equivalent to each gram quantity. If you want your recipe to be exact, buy a small scale and get to baking in grams; if you want to get remarkably close, free yourself with freedom measurements.
cookie sizes and shapes
There’s only one size at Milk Bar: not too big, not too small. But I suppose I could understand if you wanted to make cookies a different size at home.
You can shape any of these cookies using a larger scoop or a smaller scoop, or use a pan to make bar cookies, etc. You can also roll any of the cookie doughs into a cylinder or log in plastic wrap or parchment paper, then refrigerate or freeze and slice and bake to order. Depending on the size and shape you decide on, alter your baking times accordingly: less time for smaller, flatter cookies; more time for larger, taller cookies. Keep in mind that the time and oven temperature listed in each cookie recipe is for our no. 16, 2¾-ounce NSF blue scoop, Milk Bar’s cookie size.
tasting for yourself, thinking for yourself
Baking is the ultimate act of nurturing. Yes, precision is key, but so is remembering you are making delicious food for yourself or someone else. Follow each recipe, tasting every step of the way. You have to know what you’re making tastes like before and after—know what too little vanilla extract tastes like, what too much flour and baking powder taste like in a cookie dough. That is how I taught myself to bake.
Taste to learn what tastes good to you. Learn how to use sugars, salt, and citrus juices or citric acid to balance flavors in any recipe. Tweak any recipe if you want it sweeter, saltier, or more acidic. I like sharper balances of flavors. Punch-you-in-the-face-type final products. Sugar, salt, and acid are always noticeable in my desserts, but maybe you like a more subtle balance. Know how to adjust our Cereal Milk or Pear Sorbet to your taste buds.
tempering eggs is a waste of time
I went to culinary school. I understand and respect the method and intention behind tempering, the classic technique used to gently incorporate raw eggs into a warm liquid or sauce. A small amount of warm mixture is whisked into eggs to temper them, or raise their temperature without running the risk of curdling or scrambling them. The warm eggy mixture is then poured into the remaining warm liquid and heated further.
The thing is, I just don’t buy it. At least not in my kitchen. If you incorporate enough of the other ingredients in a recipe into the eggs, blend it all immediately into a homogenous mixture, and then heat that mixture all together, you are still changing the eggs’ temperature gently. But you’re not dirtying additional kitchen equipment while trying to pour hot liquid from a burner into a bowl on your counter and then back again.
Try it my way before you attempt to wrestle the Banana Cream or Sweet Corn Cereal Milk “Ice Cream” Pie Filling in some old-fashioned sensibility of tempering.
also, sifting is a waste of time
I don’t sift flour. I see it as a messy waste of time. Cookies are meant to be rich and dense, so there’s no need to worry about deflating the dough when adding the flour. And although mixing cake flour into a batter without sifting does deflate the mixture ever so slightly, we bake buttery, moist American cakes, not touchy angel food cakes or delicate soufflés. So don’t waste your time.
the ten-minute creaming process, or why milk bar cookies are so damn good
In order to achieve the improbable crispy-on-the-outside, fudgy-and-slightly-underbaked-in-the-center defining texture of a Milk Bar cookie—defying science and gravity—a serious creaming process is required. I will go so far as to say it is the most important step in making a Milk Bar cookie. Mixing the cookie dough is the first thing any of our cooks learn how to do. Everyone thinks they know how to mix a cookie, but I disagree.
The basics are as follows:
• Use a stand mixer with the paddle attachment. Make sure both the bowl and paddle are at room temperature (not hot out of the dishwasher or dishwater).
• Use room-temperature butter (65° to 70°F). Butter that’s too warm will make butter soup; butter that’s too cold will take twice as long to cream properly.
• Beat the butter and sugar(s) together on medium-high for 2 to 3 minutes. (If the recipe calls for glucose, add it with the butter and sugar.) This dissolves the sugar while incorporating small pockets of air into the mixture. The air pockets develop as the sugar granules cut into the butter. This creaming process seals the hardbody bond between your butter and sugar.
• Use either cold or room-temperature eggs; room-temperature ones will incorporate more quickly.
• Add the eggs one by one, waiting for each one to be incorporated before adding the next. Then paddle on high for 7 to 8 minutes. The eggs help to strengthen and emulsify the bond.
• If the recipe calls for vanilla extract, add it with the eggs.
• If the butter ever begins to separate or turn into soup on you, throw everything into the fridge for 5 minutes, let the butter firm up, and try again.
You can think of this process in terms of how a croissant bakes. Butter is made up of fat, milk solids, and water. As a croissant bakes, the water content in the butter steams the delicate layers of the croissant apart, creating air pockets and a flaky dough. Without the bond between the butter and the flour, there would be no structure to hold the dough around the air pockets.
So works the bond between butter and sugar in the creaming process. The eggs are the insurance for the butter-sugar bond. In the oven, the butter-sugar bond rises and crisps up, rendering the outside of your cookie delicately crunchy in texture. But if creaming is not executed properly, unbound sugars bake into a dense, sandy cookie, where excess butter without a bond and without a home seeps out onto your pan instead of baking into your cookie.
Signs things are going right:
• The butter mixture is a very pale yellow (with a hint of brown if brown sugar is in the mix).
• The mixture has doubled in size and looks like a cloud: puffy and voluminous, with soft peaks.
• The mixture is slightly shiny and homogenous, with just a little grit from the sugar crystals.
Take this process seriously. Magic doesn’t just bake itself in an oven. You can certainly make delicious cookies even without a mixer, melting the butter and mixing the dough with a wooden spoon. But not these cookies.
the (in)sane milk bar approach to layering a cake
When we first opened Milk Bar, our bare-bones staff of four would stay into the very wee hours of the morning working—knowing good and well we weren’t going home at all, except for maybe a s
hower and a clean change of clothes. We worked as zombies assembling cakes and scaling each layer of each cake to the gram (including the cake soak).
That’s how crazy we were, how much we cared, and yet how little we knew about opening and running a bakery. Ol’ Marian Mar is a stickler for detail and she’d be damned if a cake filling was off by a gram. So we have all of our cake fillings measured down to the layer, down to the gram.
If you’re an incredibly precise individual, power to you, channel some Marian Mar and get your gem scale out. If you’re looking for the path of a little more laid-back cake assembly, divide each filling needed by eye (that’s how I do it). Each layer cake purposefully has different filling ratios to balance out the different flavors and textures. So keep that in mind as you go.
making brown butter in the microwave
Know it. Love it. Brown butter is one of the most delicious things to use in any recipe to deepen an already nutty, cinnamony, or brown-sugary flavor. The easiest way to make brown butter at home is in the microwave. Browning the butter in a saucepan on the stove makes you far more likely to burn yourself, or curse like a sailor while trying to scrub the bottom of a saucepan rich in burnt butter solids.
Put the butter in a microwave-safe (Pyrex) bowl, cover the bowl with a microwave-safe saucer or plate, and microwave on high for 3 to 5 minutes, depending on the amount of butter and heat/intensity of your microwave and its settings. The butter will melt, then start to pop and begin to brown during this period. Don’t be shy about browning the butter. You want it deep brown in color and super-nutty in aroma. The lighter in color, the lighter in flavor it will be in the pie, and vice versa—so get it as dark as possible. Cool it completely, stirring it as it cools to distribute the caramelized milk solids evenly.
save your scraps!
Bits and pieces of crumbs, crunches, and fillings make a delicious snack or informal dessert. Helen Jo, one of the chefs who runs Milk Bar, is an artiste when it comes to turning scraps into snacks. She will make you a pint container filled with leftover bits and pieces of recipes piled high into a trifle or just tossed around like a snack mix. She will label the container with your name and draw a hilarious caricature of you (or a dog or a koala bear) before delivery. And not only is the concoction always delicious, it makes you feel like the most important person in the world, or at least the most beloved.
Cake scraps are great as cake truffles, but they aren’t the only binder for a round snack cluster. Leftover Ritz Crunch is amazing when mixed with some Pumpkin Ganache and charred marshmallows. Chocolate crumbs make an amazing salty-sweet Rice Krispie–like treat when you mix it with some leftover mini marshmallows, melted down with butter and Fudge Sauce.
We also use our leftovers in ice cream recipes or as ice cream toppings.
amazon.com, be forever mine
When I’m baking at home and don’t have the amazing wealth of purveyors carting in daily deliveries of Valrhona chocolate or glucose syrup or freeze-dried corn, I go to the best place for one-stop shopping: amazon.com. They have everything we use in our kitchen, specialty and pedestrian alike, and they’ll get it to your doorstep in no time at all. Though I love to go to the grocery store to shop, I abhor bounding from store to store in search of what I need. Which is why, when I need to reup our supply of 6-inch cake rings and acetate, buy some citric acid, or get some candy corn for Halloween flair or a dolphin piñata for Courtney’s upcoming birthday—all in 5 minutes—I proudly purr, “Amazon.com, be forever mine.”
the tender art of quenelling
I’m not talking about salty creamed whitefish. I’m talking about the shape of that famous French salty, creamy whitefish, or the fancy technique of scooping ice cream into perfect little egg-like forms.
They kind of teach you how to quenelle at culinary school, but almost every savory and pastry cook learns how to quenelle at that first real restaurant job—knee-deep in the middle of dinner service with a sous-chef breathing down your back, taking lopsided excuses for a quenelle and throwing them into the trash, and screaming at you to get your ass in gear. Basically you teach yourself. But I’ll try to teach you here.
I do have to say first that by no means does pear sorbet in a quenelle shape taste better than a good old-fashioned sphere of sorbet out of an ice cream scoop. But it is a pretty cool hardbody technique to master:
• You need a well-shaped spoon (choose one that looks most like half an egg), a cup of just barely warm water, and an ice cream (or sorbet) that is neither too hard (temper it in your refrigerator) nor too soft (leave it in your freezer for another hour).
• Dip your spoon into the warm water, insert it into the middle of the ice cream, and pull the spoon toward you until the spoon fills with ice cream.
• If you’re right-handed, turn your wrist a quarter to the right, then three-quarters to the left, and finally upward toward the lip of the container of ice cream.
• Use the lip of the container to shave off any excess ice cream.
• Warm the bottom of the spoon in your palm. The heat from your hand and the friction against the bottom of the spoon should create just enough heat to release the quenelle.
• Transfer the quenelle to your crumb or crunch or schmear, the nest for your fancy egg-shaped ice cream.
It’s an awkward motion that can only be perfected with practice. I don’t care how skilled you are: if you’ve never done it before, you’re not going to get it the first time. But keep at it, and you’ll get it, I promise.
blooming gelatin: get it right, or do it twice
In order to incorporate it seamlessly into a mixture, gelatin must be softened, or “bloomed,” first. To bloom any amount of sheet gelatin, soak it in a small bowl of cold water. The gelatin is bloomed when it has become soft, after about 2 minutes. If the gelatin still has hard bits to it, it needs to bloom longer. If it is so soft it is falling apart, it is overbloomed; discard the gelatin and start over. Gently squeeze the bloomed gelatin to remove any excess water before using.
To bloom powdered gelatin (any amount between ½ teaspoon and 2 teaspoons), sprinkle it evenly onto the surface of 2 tablespoons of cold water in a small cup. If you pour the powdered gelatin into a pile on top of the water, the granules in the center will remain hard and will not bloom. If you use too much water to bloom the gelatin, it will dilute the flavor of the recipe and its consistency will be looser than intended. Allow the granules to soften entirely in the cold water for 3 to 5 minutes.
Once it is bloomed, in order to incorporate either kind of gelatin into a mixture, you need to dissolve the gelatin in hot, but not boiling, liquid—usually a bit of whatever it will be mixed into. If the gelatin gets too hot, it will lose its strength and you will have to start over again.
why the hell is there gelatin in your ice cream base?
We do not use eggs in our ice cream bases unless we are making a brownie ice cream and it needs eggs for flavor. Cereal milk ice cream shouldn’t taste eggy, so we don’t put eggs in it. We outsmart the traditional approach to making ice cream (which includes tempering eggs and making an egg-milk mixture, called an anglaise, that thickens as it heats) by using gelatin as an ice cream stabilizer. It thickens the ice cream, gives it great body and mouth feel—free of crystallization—and keeps it from melting too quickly when you are scooping a sundae or from freezing too hard once stored in the freezer overnight.
wait to spin your ice cream until you are ready to serve it
There is nothing quite like freshly spun (frozen) ice cream. It’s the perfect temperature and consistency right out of the ice cream maker. It’s easy to scoop or quenelle and it melts in your mouth just right. In the restaurant industry, when you work in joints that give a damn, you spin the ice creams fresh daily and melt down any leftover ice cream in the fridge each night to “spin” the next day. Apply the same philosophy in your kitchen. Freshly spun ice cream will make you and your friends and family ice cream snobs in all the right ways.
the highbrow �
�schmear”
This is the fancy sauce presentation you see more and more in dessert (and savory) dishes. It is a step up from the squeeze-bottle dollop or lattice of sauces and dressings.
More or less: you plop a sauce onto one side of a serving plate or bowl. Using the back of a spoon or an offset spatula, in one motion only, apply moderate force and drag the sauce to the fade-out spot at the other end of the plate; ease up on the amount of pressure you are putting on the spoon or spatula as you pull and run out of sauce to drag.
Cereal milk is my homage to steeped milk.
When I worked at wd~50, we played around infusing milk with all kinds of ingredients—grains, spices, just about anything. Some combinations worked better than others. Some were good, like sesame ice cream, oat panna cotta, and rice sorbet. Some were epic, like toast ice cream: imagine a perfect piece of diner toast—golden brown, crisp (but not so crisp it scrapes the roof of your mouth), saturated in lightly salted butter—and now imagine that as an ice cream flavor.
Cereal milk, by comparison, seems almost dumb. Anyone who’s ever spent a lazy Saturday morning, drowning in holey sweatpants, watching hour after hour of USA reruns, knows the flavor: it’s that dense, tasty, slightly sweet, kind of starchy, corny milk from the bottom of the cereal bowl.
The seed for it was planted when I was a pastry cook for Wylie and Sam. We were preparing for our spring-to-summer menu changeover, and Sam had cornbread ice cream on the mind. I probably made ten different versions of homemade cornbread, but we couldn’t get the corny flavor and guilty pleasure of piping-hot-out-of-the-oven-Jiffy-cornbread just right with my homemade versions. What we got instead were a lot of infused milk tests that all tasted like lame versions of cereal: one tasted like Kix, one like Corn Pops, one like Rice Krispies, one like Special K. They weren’t what we were looking for. But, for whatever reason, I felt like I’d learned a secret: milk infusions could hit as close to home as the bottom of my cereal bowl and I happily gulped each failed cornbread milk turned cereal-flavored milk. I filed the idea away deep in the vault and got back to work.
Momofuku Milk Bar Page 5