This week, Laura and I join thousands of other students taking the HarvardX course Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science via EdX.
https://www.edx.org/course/harvard-university/spu27x/science-cooking-haute-cuisine/639
Look out for occasional reports!
Meanwhile, watch Ferran Adriá perform feats of wizardry science, while José Andrés narrates.
Are you taking the course too? Give us a shout!
A good blondie recipe is an important asset for any dessert repertoire. Sometimes called butterscotch brownies, these morsels of butter and sugar are easy to master, delicious, and infinitely adaptable. You can make them plain or dress them up with nuts, chocolate chips or dried fruits.
Since butter is the main ingredient here, the key to the perfect blondie is coaxing as much flavor out of it as possible. The nuttiness of the browned butter, emphasized by the nutmeg, adds depth and character to this particular batter.
Adapted from How to Cook Everything and the Joy of Cooking.
The presence of free-roaming water molecules is what separates delicious ice cream from crappy, icy milk. Think of water molecules as wild Pokémon, waiting to jump out of the tall grass to attack you and ruin your ice cream. Your job as ice cream maker is similar to that of a Pokémon trainer: you must use the Pokémon/ingredients in your roster – in this case, sugar, starch and protein – to capture the wild roaming water molecules and put them to work for you.
When Rhys and I got married last summer, my lovely coworkers got us a 2 Quart Cuisinart ice cream maker, along with a copy of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home to help get me started. While Jeni’s recipes are delicious and inspiring, the true asset of the cookbook is its ice cream base recipe, which provides a solid foundation for experimenting with other flavor combinations as well.
In the place of egg yolks, Jeni uses cream cheese as the primary source of protein to “capture” the water molecules in the ice cream mixture, giving it that smooth, velvety texture once frozen. When heated, the casein in the cream cheese binds with the water molecules in the milk and cream, preventing them from sticking together and forming ice chunks once frozen. Since you only need about 3 tablespoons of the stuff, the cream cheese barely contributes any taste to the final product. Plus, there is no risk of leaving scrambled eggs in your ice cream (yuck).
Here, the base serves as a great conduit for the ginger and cardamom flavors.
The Domestic Pig 