Tag: muffins

Whole Wheat Popovers

If you follow the recipe for “Perfect Popovers”, you’ll be known as the never-fail popover baker in your family or even in the neighborhood. But since popovers are just hollow muffins, it is almost inevitable that someone is going to say, “I wonder what would happen if you tried adding some whole wheat flour to these things.”

I asked myself that question a couple of years ago, and whole wheat popovers appeared on the table one morning. They didn’t pop quite as high, but they were delicious, and I enjoyed thinking that I was eating a healthier breakfast as I spooned some scrambled eggs into half a popover.

They are just as easy to make as ordinary popovers. Just make sure you follow these two basic rules. First, the eggs and milk must be at WARM room temperature; seventy degrees is too cool. Second, don’t beat the batter too long.

INGREDIENTS:

1/2 cup plus 1 T whole wheat flour
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup plus 4 tsp. milk
2 tsp. vegetable oil
3 large eggs

PROCEDURE:

Make sure that the baking rack in your oven is in or slightly below the center position. Preheat the oven to 450º. Grease the popover pan lightly and place it in the oven to heat.

While the oven is heating, put the unbroken eggs in a small bowl and cover them with very warm water from the tap. Let them sit for at least five minutes. Warm the milk on the range or in the microwave until it feels slightly warm to the touch.

Mix the flours and salt together in a one quart measuring cup or bowl. Add the warm milk, oil and eggs and beat the batter with an electric mixer for eleven seconds (NO MORE) on high. Take the mixer out of the bowl and stir the batter slowly with a fork to mix in any remaining large dry clumps. Small lumps are OK.

Take the hot pan from the oven and fill the cups evenly; they should be one-half to two-thirds full. Put the pan into the hot oven, turn the heat down to 425º and bake twenty minutes. Reduce the heat to 350º and continue baking the popovers for another twenty minutes. DO NOT OPEN THE OVEN DURING BAKING. PERIOD.

Remove the pan from the oven, let it cool for fifteen or twenty seconds, remove the popovers from the pan and serve them while they are still hot. Give each popover a gentle twist to loosen it. A table knife works to loosen stubborn popovers. If you want, cut a small slit in the side of each popover to release the steam.

NOTES: The eggs and milk must be warm. The oven door must remain closed during the entire baking period. Have faith. They will pop. You can make popovers in an ordinary muffin pan, but they don’t pop as high.

James Beard’s Crumpets

If, like ours, your house does not feature central air conditioning, you probably noticed that we had a few hot days recently. We have one small window air conditioner which keeps our bedroom comfortable, and the house, which was built more than sixty years before home air conditioners were available, does a pretty good job of handling heat waves.

Air conditioning has a long history. The ancient Egyptians, Romans and Chinese all developed various ways to cool the air. The Egyptians made evaporative coolers by trickling water down reeds hung in windows and the Romans piped cold water through building walls. Nearly 2,000 years ago a Chinese inventor, Ding Huan, invented a large rotary fan powered by servants to cool the air for the emperors of the Han dynasty.

But lacking servants and having only one small window air conditioner and a couple of fans, Jerri has devised a fairly effective energy management routine. As the temperature drops at night we open windows and use a fan to pull nice cool air into the house. When the temperature rises next morning we close the windows and use the fan to circulate the air. During beastly hot spells like we just endured we keep the bedroom air conditioner running in hopes that some cooler air will fall down the stairs to the main floor.

When I start gasping and complaining, Jerri suggests that I man up, that her mother used to remind her that “Grandma Goering lived 90 some summers without a fan.” Kansas farm women were tough back then. Tougher than most of us, I suspect.

One thing you don’t do on hot days if your home lacks central air conditioning is heat the oven unnecessarily. We bake breads, cakes and pies in the evenings or on cooler days. Even if you have central air you may want to hold down the electric bill or simply not waste energy. Generating the electricity we use to cool our homes contributes to climate change that is partially responsible for those long hot spells. Using less electricity can help reduce the need for air conditioning a little bit, which as we all know is better than doing nothing.

Another thing you can do is bake breads that don’t require heating the oven. Crumpets are an excellent example. You just bake them like pancakes on a hot griddle. Once mainly a bread eaten with butter and jam at teatime in Great Britain, crumpets are now enjoyed by people from New Zealand to Wisconsin. You don’t even need to like tea. Try a crumpet instead of toast with eggs and bacon for breakfast or a nice toasted crumpet dripping with butter and honey for dessert.

Wonderful things, crumpets, and they are easy to make. Stir up the batter, let it sit, then spoon it into rings sitting on a hot frying pan. Empty tuna cans used to make perfect crumpet rings, but the extruded kind now used for tuna don’t work. You can make do with water chestnut or bamboo shoot cans, or you can buy crumpet rings in many kitchen supply stores or online at reasonable prices.

I have used James Beard’s recipe for crumpets for over thirty years with never a failure, which is something I can’t say for a lot of recipes I have tried.

INGREDIENTS:

1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup boiling water
2-1/4 tsp. active dry yeast
1 tsp. sugar
1-1/2 tsp. salt
1-3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp. baking soda, dissolved in 1 T hot water
8 to 10 crumpet rings or tuna cans with the tops and bottoms removed

PROCEDURE:

Put a half cup of milk into a large bowl and stir in a half cup of boiling water.

When the milk mixture is lukewarm, stir in the yeast and sugar. Let it sit for 5 minutes to proof. When the liquid gets bubbly, mix the salt with the flour, and add it to the yeast mixture. Beat the batter with a spoon for several minutes, then let the batter rise until it has doubled in bulk and is slightly bubbly.

Dissolve the soda into a tablespoon of hot water and beat it into the batter. Let it rise again until it has again doubled in bulk.

Heat a griddle or large frying pan over medium-hot heat. Grease the rings and pan. Place the rings in the pan and spoon batter into the rings to a depth of about a half inch. Cook until dry and bubbly on top.

Use a table knife to loosen the crumpets and remove them from the rings. Turn the crumpets and brown them lightly on the other side.

Transfer them to a rack to cool. Serve them warm from the rack, or toast and serve them later with plenty of butter, jelly, jam or honey.

NOTES: If you can make pancakes, you can make crumpets. Crumpet batter is like a thick pancake batter that you spoon into the rings rather than just pour onto a griddle.

The problem with the water chestnut cans is that they are about an inch and a half high, which makes it a bit awkward to loosen the crumpets. A pair of tongs or pliers make it easy to remove the rings.

I like to use an electric griddle to bake crumpets because I can set the thermostat for about 325 degrees, which results in a nice brown crust when the top is nearly dry. A cast iron skillet over medium high heat works okay too. You can check how the crumpets are browning by lifting them with a turner. A properly done crumpet will be moist but not sticky.