Time To Make The Doughnuts

Growing up, My Wonderful Mom would make doughnuts.  I don't mean doughnuts.  I mean doughnuts.  These deep fried delicacies were the stuff of legend amongst friends and family.  Quoting from a recent exchange on the Social Media site that everybody loves to hate:

• I said auntie used to make the best doughnuts and mom agreed.
• I loved those donuts!
• I brag about how good they were!

Efforts by said family to get her to come out of retirement were not successful:

• Would it work if I told you what I told my darling daughter.  Go to Tim's, that is what I do!  Can't believe those donuts are coming back to haunt me, there were pretty darn good.

But I am one not easily dissuaded.  She was coming to visit for a weekend, and I would not be denied.  Through a clever combination of begging and pleading, I was successful in getting her to agree that Doughnuts. Would. Be. Made.  It was like a dream come true.

What follows is part recipe, part adventure.  You see, My Wonderful Mom isn't too hung up on that whole recipe thing.  Her original recipe called for "flour", but with no indication as to how much.

This Is A Recipe?

Maybe if you've made them a couple hundred times before, "flour" is sufficient.  But if you are a doughnut newbie like me, you're screwed.  So she basically went by a few scribbles for a recipe and followed her nose while I frantically made notes, weighed bags of flour before and after, etc.  My Lovely Wife served as Official Photographer.

In the thousands of words that follow, you are going to see strange things like "199 grams of Apple Sauce", but I'm just recording what it was.  I haven't made any effort here to round things up or down to make even numbers anywhere, but you should feel free to do so.  You're also going to see a lot of steps, but I've broken this down into excruciating detail so you aren't left guessing.  And the work of the Official Photographer makes things that much easier.

This recipe makes a hell of a lot of stuff.  And by a hell of a lot of stuff, I mean:

• Twenty-five Doughnuts
• Twenty-two Doughnut Holes
• A dozen Bismarks
• Eighteen Cinnamon Buns
• Two pizza-sized Kolache

We used almost a full five pound bag of flour that afternoon.  You might want to consider cutting the recipe in half or something like that if you want to make some of one thing but not another.  Or don't and make the whole damn batch.  Live large, and have fun.

Now if we're going to make some doughnuts, we're going to knead a dough (Get it?  "knead" ... "dough".  Ahem, that's OK.  I'll see myself out).  Making this dough is a three part process: getting the yeast going, mixing some eggs and sugar together, and then getting all of that into the main dough mixture.  Ready?  Set!  Go!!!

Make the Yeast Mixture

Ingredients

• 16 grams Active Dry Yeast (16 grams = 2 pouches)
• 237 grams Lukewarm Water (110ºF) (237 grams water = 1 cup)
• 8 grams Sugar (8 grams = 2 tsp)

Method

• Warm water in a small bowl. Dissolve sugar into water. Sprinkle yeast on top of the water (no need to stir it in). Leave sit for 10 minutes so yeast can activate. While waiting, proceed with the steps below.

Make the Egg / Sugar Mixture

Ingredients

• 4 Extra Large Eggs
• 142 grams Sugar (142 grams = 3/4 cup minus 2 tsp in the yeast mixture)

Method

• In a medium sized bowl, lightly beat the eggs. Add in sugar and stir to combine. You are probably still waiting for the yeast at this point so get started on the dough in the steps below.

Make The Dough

Ingredients

• 948 grams Barely Warm Water (80ºF) (948 grams = 4 cups)
• 11 grams Salt (11 grams = scant 3/4 tablespoon)
• 2101 grams All Purpose Flour (Divided into batches) (1 cup flour = 120 - 140 grams).  I used Roger's All Purpose Unbleached Flour and used the batch sizes below (actually, my mom just dumped in flour and I weighed it as she went).  You don't need to be exact here per batch but the final flour total is going to be pretty close.
• Batch 1: 900 grams
• Batch 2: 750 grams
• Batch 3: 200 grams
• Batch 4: 160 grams
• Batch 5: 50 grams
• Batch 6: 41 grams
• 226 grams Unsalted, Softened Butter (226 grams butter = 2 sticks)
• All Yeast Mixture From Above
• All Egg/Sugar Mixture From Above

Method

• Pour the 80ºF water into a very large bowl (we use a big ceramic dough bowl). A full batch of this dough will take almost five pounds of flour, so plan accordingly! Add the salt and Batch 1 of the flour and mix the flour into the water just a bit.
• Cut the softened butter (not melted, softened) into small chunks. Add the butter, the egg / sugar mixture, and the (by now) frothy yeast mixture into the large bowl with the flour and water. Stir everything together to make a loose batter.
• Add Batch 2 of the flour and keep stirring together. Batter will thicken.
• Add Batch 3 of the flour. At around this point, a sticky dough begins to form. Start using your hand at this point to mix the dough by slipping your hand to the bottom of the bowl, grabbing a handful of dough, and pulling it up and over the top of the mixture. Give the bowl a quarter turn and repeat again and again.
• After each batch of flour is incorporated and worked in a bit, add in the next one. The consistency is correct when the dough is pulling away from the bowl and not sticking to your fingers. Use this as the guide for the final amount of flour to add. Note also that it is this slow incorporation of the flour that kneads the dough along the way. The dough is worked entirely within the bowl and never placed on the counter for further kneading.

My Wonderful Mom Mixing The Dough - LIKE A BOSS

• Once the dough has been mixed, shape into a ball. Sprinkle flour all around its surface and place into a VERY LARGE mixing bowl (we used our monster steel mixing bowl that we keep downstairs). A full batch of dough took 12g of flour for the dusting. This flour is to help prevent the dough from sticking to the bowl. DON'T USE OIL for this, as most recipes will advise. I don't know why for sure, but Mom just says DON'T and I listen. Good enough for me.

• Cover the dough bowl with Saran Wrap to prevent the dough from drying out. Then place a dish towel over the dough bowl to help keep it warm. Place the bowl into a warm spot to rise until doubled. We had it in the spring day sun with the house around 22ºC and it took 2h 15m to double, and we rotated the bowl every now and then to help warm it evenly. The dough pressed right up against the Saran Wrap stretched across the top of our monster metal bowl.

Before

After (!)

• While the rise is underway, prepare your work area. You need two spaces: one being a good sized chunk of counter space that can be dusted with flour and the dough rolled out on. The second space is for laying down a large, cotton tea towel on which the doughnuts will sit for their second rise. This will take up a lot of space if you are making a bunch of doughnuts, so plan accordingly once again.
• While the rise is underway, make sure you have your other ingredients ready. For the doughnuts, get together any sugar, sprinkles, icing, or what have you (I do not sully my doughnuts with such things). For the Bismarks, figure out what jams or jellies you are going to want as filling and have it ready. For the cinnamon buns, you'll need softened butter, cinnamon, brown sugar, and anything else you might like in the filling (Bits of chopped apple are great. Raisins are OK in a pinch). For the Kolache, you'll need a filling of some kind: I love homemade applesauce topped with a crumble of butter, flour, and sugar. My Grandma would also use cottage cheese with raisins sprinkled on top. Some cooked up poppy seeds are another classic.
• While the rise is underway, get your tools together. You are going to need a rolling pin, and a couple of very large, non-fuzzy cotton tea towels to place the doughnuts on for their second rise.  More importantly, you are going to need something to cut the doughnuts and something to make the doughnut holes. Our doughnut maker was a jar lid used with canning jars that is 3.25" in diameter and 3/4" high. Our doughnut holer was an old cap from a container of baby oil with its little lid cut off. It was 1 1/8" in diameter. What made this holer work so well was that the little hole from which the baby oil would come out from also worked well to let air out as the doughnut holes were being cut.

Donut Cutter

Donut Holer

• While the rise is underway, strategize! Are you going to make all doughnuts? What are you going to do with the bits cut away during the doughnut making process? We found that 1500 grams of dough makes around 20 doughnuts with about 350 grams of cut away dough bits left over. A full batch of dough is around 3840 grams, so that is a lot of doughnuts! What we did with our full batch was to make two batches of doughnuts using about 72% of the dough and two pans of cinnamon buns with the remainder. The scrap bits from making the doughnuts went to making two Kolaches. This was a good use for Kolaches because they don't need to rise up as puffy as doughnuts or cinnamon buns.
• And while the rise is underway, get the stuff together that you'll need for cooking. For cooking the doughnuts, we used a KitchenAid Dutch Oven, around 1 liter of oil for cooking (we used a Becel canola / sunflower mix, but any neutral tasting vegetable oil would do), a thermometer to ensure the oil is at the right temperature, chopsticks / tongs / forks to flip and remove the doughnuts from the oil, paper towels and a plate to get excess oil off the doughnuts, and lots of cooling racks to place the doughnuts on after cooking. For the Kolache, we used one pizza pan and one cookie sheet that were greased with butter. For the cinnamon buns, we use two 9"x13" Pyrex baking pans greased with butter.

Make The Doughnuts

• When rise is complete, take somewhere between a 1200g - 1500g chunk of the dough and place it on the counter dusted with flour. Punch the dough down and roll it out into a circle until it is a little more than 1/4" thick. Throw a little skiff of flour underneath the dough as it is being rolled out so the dough doesn't stick to the counter. First time we made this, Batch 1 was 1491 grams of dough.

• Use the jar ring to cut the doughnut shapes, shifting the rolled out dough a bit this way and that to minimize the amount of "scrap" dough.

• Next, use the doughnut holer to cut the hole in the center of each doughnut. The hole will usually get stuck in the cutter, so use either your finger or a toothpick to work them out.

• Place the holes onto a non-fuzzy cotton tea towel in a little group of their own. Alternatively, skip cutting a hole into some of the doughnuts and make Bismarks instead. After the Bismark is cooked and cooled, you can cut a hole in the Bismark to make a home for your favorite jam or jelly.
• The doughnuts and Bismarks are pulled off of the floured counter and placed onto the tea towel to rise as they are cut. Floured side goes down. Give them a bit of space to rise.  Do not put any extra flour on to the tea towel: the dough shouldn't be so sticky that you'll need to do this.

• Once a batch of doughnuts has been cut, gather all of the dough scraps together and form them into a ball. Place them back in the bowl under Saran Wrap in a warm spot for a second rise to make something else like Kolache.
• As doughnuts are placed onto the tea towel, cover them with a second towel to keep them warm and prevent them from drying out. Let them rise a second time for about 45 minutes to an hour, or until puffy looking. NOTE: About 15 minutes before the doughnuts finish their rise, heat about 1 liter of a neutral flavored oil to 375ºF in a deep fryer or Dutch Oven. Again, we used our KitchenAid Dutch oven and a thermometer to verify the temperature. Too cold and the doughnuts will be greasy. Too hot and the doughnuts won't cook properly on the inside.
• By the way, here is how things broke down between the doughnuts, the cinnamon buns, and the Kolache.
• Doughnut Batch 1: Started with 1491g of dough. Made 20 doughnuts, 18 holes, and had 349 grams dough left over for Kolache.
• Doughnut Batch 2: Started with 1277g of dough. Made 5 doughnuts, 5 holes, 12 Bismarks, 2 odd shapes, and had 296 grams dough left over for Kolache.
• Kolache: Made two with 645 grams of "scrap" dough from the doughnuts one on a pizza pan and another on a cookie sheet.
• Cinnamon Buns: Made two 9x13 pans with the leftover 1071 grams of "virgin" dough.

The end result of the two doughnut batches we cut up looked a little something like this.

Actually, It Looked Exactly Like This

While the doughnuts rose, we got the cinnamon buns and the Kolache ready.

Make The Cinnamon Buns

Everybody knows what cinnamon buns are, and everybody has their cinnamon bun ideal.  To many, this ideal is a cinnamon bun dripping in brown sugar and topped with a heavy layer of cream cheese icing.  These people are wrong.  More is not always better.  More is sometimes just more.

This is a cinnamon bun that harkens back to a simpler time.  It is not horrifically sweet, and you won't need an insulin shot immediately after consumption.  It is a simple recipe where each element gets a chance to shine.  Try it.  You'll like it.

Ingredients

• 1071 grams Virgin Dough not used in doughnut making
• 17 grams Melted Butter + more for brushing on top of shaped buns
• 119 grams Brown Sugar
• Cinnamon To Taste
• Raisins / Diced Apple / Etc To Taste

Method

• Roll out the dough for the cinnamon buns similar to how the dough for the doughnuts was rolled out. Place the dough on the counter dusted with flour. Punch the dough down and roll it out into a roughly square shape until it is a little more than 1/4" thick. Throw a little skiff of flour underneath the dough as it is being rolled out to minimize the dough sticking to the counter.

• Brush the melted butter evenly across the top surface of the dough using a pastry brush. Here we used softened butter and a knife to spread it.  Same difference.

• Sprinkle a healthy dose of cinnamon across the surface of the dough.

• Then sprinkle the brown sugar evenly across the top.

• Roll up the dough loosely but evenly along the long edge.

• Use a knife to cut the roll into even slices to the desired thickness (we got 18 buns for the full batch above using a thickness of around 3/4", but thicker probably would have been better). As each slice is cut, lay it into a greased 9x13" pan. Don't crowd the buns so that they have room to grow outward a bit. Brush top of each cinnamon bun with melted butter.

• Let the cinnamon buns rise for about 45 minutes to an hour, or until puffy looking (this in a relatively warm kitchen). About 20 minutes before the first batch is due for the oven, preheat the oven to 350ºF with the oven rack in the middle position.
• Bake the cinnamon buns one pan at a time at 350ºF, rotating the pan 180º halfway through the bake. When we made these the first time, they were done after 26 minutes and a turn halfway through at 13 minutes. When done, the buns were a light brown on the top and a fairly deep brown on the bottom. Be careful not to bake them off to hard or the brown sugar will burn on the bottom of the pan.
• Take the buns out of the oven when done and get the next batch baking. After each pan is cooked, leave the buns to cool in the pan for just a minute or two. Then flip the buns out onto a cooling rack. Otherwise they'll get soggy sitting in the pan. The syrupy bottom will also harden up and you'll never get them out if you wait too long.

Make The Kolache

Everybody has heard of Doughnuts.  Everybody has heard of Cinnamon Buns.  Almost nobody has ever heard of Kolache unless you had an awesome Czech Grandmother like I did.  My Grandma always had Kolache at her house.  Always.  And they were fantastic.  And you never ate just one, no matter how much lunch you'd had.  Never.  Because if all you ate was one, her face would grow sad and she'd say...

What?  You don't like Grandma's Cooking?

And I guaran-damned-tee that you'd find room for another.

My Lovely Wife's First Attempt - A Bit Puffy, But Absolutely Delicious

As I noted above and as shown in the picture, these are going to be made with applesauce and a crumb mixture made from butter, flour, and sugar.  Cottage cheese and raisins were another of Grandma's go-to's, as were some cooked up poppy seeds.  Me?  I always had this version.  Always.

Kolache can be made two ways: as a single serving size or kinda pizza size.  We're going pizza size here, because we've got a lot of other irons in the fire.  I'll have to go into Kolache more at some point, but that'll have to be another blog post.  In the meantime, do a little research if you're interested.

Ingredients

• 645 grams Scrap Dough left over from making doughnuts
• 199 grams Apple Sauce (Homemade, if at all possible)
• 24 grams Softened Butter
• 63 grams All Purpose Flour
• 55 grams Sugar

Method

• While you were frantically making doughnuts and cinnamon buns, the scrap dough from the doughnuts should have been balled up and left to rise in a nice warm spot. Get going on these once the cinnamon buns are done.
• Place dough onto a pizza pan or cookie sheet greased with a bit of butter. The 645g of dough we had here was enough to make two Kolache, and the dough was split more or less evenly between the two. Flatten the dough out into the shape of the pan. Again, the dough should be about 1/4" thick or so, about the thickness it was for the doughnuts and the cinnamon buns.
• Combine the flour and sugar into a small bowl. Cut the butter into chunks and work it into this mixture with a fork, spoon, or pastry cutter. You're looking to make small and medium sized chunks of goodness here. Set the mixture aside.
• Spread the apple sauce over the Kolache as if you were spreading sauce on a pizza. Leave a bit of bare crust at the very edge. Homemade apple sauce is amazingly superior to the store bought stuff, BTW, and it makes a huge difference to the final result.
• Sprinkle the crumble mixture over the Kolache as if you were sprinkling cheese on top of a pizza.

Note Crumb Mixture on Kolache At Left

• Set the Kolache aside to rise for about 45 minutes to an hour, or until puffy looking.  The Kolache were made from scrap dough during the doughnut making, so they might need a little more rise time than the doughnuts and the cinnamon buns.  Like the cinnamon buns, they are cooked at 350ºF with the oven rack in the middle position. If you aren't making the buns, remember to preheat the oven about 20 minutes before the Kolache finish their rise.
• Once the Kolache are finished their rise, place the pans in the oven to bake at 350ºF for 20 minutes. We were able to fit both pans into the oven at the same time. Rotate the pans 180º after about 10 minutes to help them bake evenly. The Kolache are done when they are a medium brown on the bottom. Don't let them get too brown and crispy.
• Remove Kolache from oven when done and slide them out onto a cooling rack to cool.

Cooking The Doughnuts

• At this point, the doughnuts should have risen for about an hour and at least one liter of some neutral flavored oil like vegetable oil should be pre-heated in a Dutch Oven or deep fryer to 375ºF. Obviously, if your cooking vessel is larger, you'll need more oil to get sufficient depth. I'll stress that if the oil is too cold, the doughnuts will take too long to cook and be greasy. Too hot and the inside won't be cooked by the time the outside is done. Monitor the temperature of the oil closely while the doughnuts are cooking as the temperature tends to drop as you put in the colder dough.
• Start by cooking one or two of the holes as a test run. Take a few off the tea towel and drop them in the hot oil. They only take a minute or so to brown on one side, and they will grow in size as they are cooked. Try to flip them around in the oil using tongs, chopsticks, or a fork (my Wonderful Mom's weapon of choice) so they brown evenly on all sides. The holes are tricky because they have a mind of their own. Don't stress it if the holes don't brown evenly on all sides. They are small and will still cook through OK.

• Remove the holes from the oil once they are a rich brown and put them on a plate lined with a few paper towels. Immediately cover with another paper towel and lightly press / roll them around to sop up any excess oil. Transfer the holes to a cooking rack after a few seconds.

Or To A Plate For Immediate Consumption

• Cook the rest of the holes, in batches if necessary so the holes aren't too crowded in the oil while cooking. They will poof up and take more space as they cook.
• Now start cooking the doughnuts, starting with the first ones that were cut. Pull the doughnuts gently from the tea towel by hand and gently drop into the hot oil top side down. Again, don't crowd the doughnuts because they will puff up. We were able to cook four at a time in the KitchenAid Dutch Oven.

• Once the underside has a rich brown side (after a minute or so), use a couple forks or whatever to gently flip the doughnuts over to the other side.

• Remove from the oil once they are browned on both sides to the paper-towel lined plate, dab the excess oil off of them as you did with the holes, and transfer to a cooling rack after a few seconds. Use fresh paper towels as required if the old ones start getting greasy. It helps a lot to have two people doing this: one person cooking and the other dabbing the oil off.

• Repeat until all the doughnuts are cooked, and keep an eye on the oil temperature all the way along. Don't let it stray too far one way or the other from 375ºF.

On the subject of topping the doughnuts...  Me, I like 'em just plain, so you are on your own if you want to add toppings to these deep-fried treasures. I'd think that sugar or sprinkles should go on while the doughnuts are still very hot. Bismarks should be filled with jelly or jam after they have cooled so the jam doesn't melt in and make the center of the Bismark all soggy. Topping with some kind of icing is probably best done once they have cooled as well.

Right after this baking extravaganza, it was time for supper.  We whipped up a delicious supper for My Wonderful Mom featuring Ricotta Gnocchi and Chicken Breast With Tomatoes and Capers.  Dessert was, of course, doughnuts.  I grabbed one off the counter and took a bite walking back to the table.  BOOM.  I was instantly transported back to my teenage years.  The doughnuts tasted exactly as I remembered them.  And in that second, all of that effort was worth it.

But you, dear reader, let's not forget about you.  All you have seen to this point are isolated pictures of this and that.  But I'm a big picture guy, so let's look at the big picture.  What came out of that afternoon?

Like Looking Into The Face Of God

One hell of a lot of awesomeness, that is what came out of that afternoon.  But there is more that is not shown here.  I had a great day with Mom.  And I mean, a great day.  She hadn't made these doughnuts for decades!  We had a lot of laughs and relived a lot of memories while recreating a classic memory from my youth.  If something terrible were to happen tomorrow, I'd look back fondly to this day and think that I made the most of it.  Even if I hadn't gotten to taste a single bite of any of what we'd made, it would have been worth every second spending that time with her.

I don't want to be that person that says "I only wish I had learned to make X from my Granda / Mom / Aunt.  It was so good, but I never got the recipe."  To Hell with that.  Don't be that person either.  Go see your Grandma / Mom / Aunt and tell them how much you enjoyed that whatever when you were a kid.  Then spend the day making it together, and have a blast while doing it.

Days after My Wonderful Mom left, I opened the cutlery drawer.

The Donut Holer

She'd deliberately left her Donut Holer behind, her way of passing the baton.  And here I sit with a freezer full of baked goods, and a lump in my throat.

Go cook something, go do it now, and go do it with someone you love.  And tell 'em the guy from Mad Scientist Labs sent you.

The Making of the Perfect Puffed Wheat Square

Ask me.  Go ahead.  Ask me.

"DeKay, you say you know how to make the Perfect Puffed Wheat Square, but just what is a Puffed Wheat Square anyway?"

Glad you asked.  Webster's Dictionary defines "Puffed Wheat Square" as... well, actually it doesn't define it at all.  The Wikipedia entry for "Puffed Wheat Square" describes it as...  

The page "Puffed Wheat Square" does not exist.

Why is life so hard?  Why do I have to do everything myself?

Here is how I would define a Puffed Wheat Square:

Puffed Wheat Square is proof that there is a God and that he loves us.

Apt, but it leaves a lot to interpretation.  Let's try again.

Puffed Wheat Square is a dessert made from puffed wheat (duh) coated in some kind of syrup and cut into squares (really???)

Or maybe I should just show you a picture.

The Embodiment of Deliciousness

Like Nanaimo Bars and Insulin Medication (both of which have Wikipedia entries), Puffed Wheat Square is a Canadian invention.  Puffed Wheat Square is lesser known than both, I'll grant you that.  But like Nanaimo Bars, they seem better known in the Western portion of This Great Land.  I am sure there are many people like myself that grew up on them.

My Wonderful Mother made a mean Puffed Wheat Square, and those are not words to be taken lightly.  Puffed Wheat Squares are hard to get right, and the problem is the syrup: one day you'll get a syrup that is too soft that makes for a crumbly square that doesn't hold together.  The next day you'll get a syrup that is too crisp and makes the square hard and dried out.  In fact, Puffed Wheat Square is hard enough to get right that My Lovely Wife, a force to be reckoned with in the kitchen for sure, had given up on them entirely.  But I wanted Puffed Wheat Square, and I wanted the Puffed Wheat Square of my youth.  That could mean only one thing: I would yet again have to do this myself.  Because life is hard.

I am an Engineer, and before I go to make something, I need to define a set of requirements.  That rigor has served me well in my career, so let's apply that process to a Puffed Wheat Square.  What make a good Puffed Wheat Square?

• The syrup has to be the proper consistency.  This is the big one.  Once it has cooled, you should be able to eat the Puffed Wheat Square by pulling away one puffed wheat at a time (this is, in fact, how I eat savor mine and it proves that I am a unique human being).  The syrup has to have enough give that each little puffed wheat does not split apart or crumble as you pull it away from the square itself.  But, the syrup has to be hard enough that the individual puffed wheats hold together with the rest of the square.  A crumbly Puffed Wheat Square is a sad thing.
• The syrup can't taste grainy.  'Nuf said.
• The puffed wheat can't taste soggy.
• The square must not be overly sweet.  Some squares go overboard on the syrup.  If you and your dentist are into that, then make more syrup if you must and leave me out of it.
• The square has to have chocolate in it.
• The recipe has to be reproducible.

Now that we have our requirements nailed down, it is time to find a recipe.  And here is where the troubles began: there is no definitive recipe for Puffed Wheat Squares.  A basic Puffed Wheat Square breaks down to:

• Puffed Wheat
• "Golden Syrup" (more on this later)
• Butter
• Brown Sugar
• Cocoa Powder

Some recipes add a bit of vanilla extract or a dash of salt.  The puffed wheat is put into a mixing bowl and the rest of the ingredients are heated in a pot on the stove until a syrup is formed.  Somewhere around when the syrup starts to boil, the pot is removed from the heat, the vanilla is stirred in, and the mixture is dumped over top of the puffed wheat.  Quickly mix while the syrup is still hot, and then press the mixture into a greased baking dish to cool.

In search of a recipe, I found that:

• all the ratios of all the ingredients in all of the recipes are different
• all of the ingredients are always specified by volume instead of by weight.  Not such a big deal for puffed wheat or butter, but brown sugar is a notoriously variable beast since it packs like crazy.  I also didn't want to be arsed to dirty a measuring cup with the ridiculously sticky syrup and then dirty a spatula scraping the syrup into the pot.
• every recipe online is inevitably followed by comments that the syrup didn't come out right, even though the author of the recipe swears that it is foolproof

I decided to go back to first principles.  First, "Golden Syrup" seems to be the syrup of choice.  What is Golden Syrup?  Well, this time, Wikipedia has my back.  Golden Syrup is made in the process of refining sugar cane or beet juice into sugar.  It is thick like molasses but tastes nothing like it.  And it is golden in color.  You are surprised, I can tell.

There are two kinds of Golden Syrup popular in my neck of the woods: Lyle's Golden Syrup and Roger's Golden Syrup.  It turns out that you can also make your own Golden Syrup, but I decided to go with a known product because there were enough damn variables in this project already.  That and it wasn't like buying some syrup was going to change my retirement date.

My Lovely Wife made the bold move of buying both of them so we could see which one tasted better.  In Lyle's favor, they have a tradition going back to the 1800's. In Roger's favor, they make the stuff in Western Canada which is the birthplace of Puffed Wheat Squares (I think).  So taste them, we did, and despite Lyle's being three or four times more expensive than Roger's, we could not taste a difference between the two of them.  So disregard comments like #107 in Smitten Kitchen's Pecan Pie Recipe where posters claim that Lyle's is so much better "since Aussies know about Golden Syrup" (the stuff is in fact made in the UK).

BTW, that Smitten Kitchen recipe has a fascinating treatise on Golden vs. Corn Syrup in pecan pie that is well worth reading.  So go read that now.  I'll wait. 

Just to be on the safe side, I checked out each of the syrups with my handheld refractometer (doesn't everyone have a handheld refractometer?), and the Brix (sugar content) are almost identical between the two syrups.  If there is a difference, it is minute and you sure as hell aren't going to tell the difference in a blind Puffed Wheat Square taste test.

Everybody Needs A Refractometer

This is my refractometer. You need one too.  A little over twenty bucks with free shipping gets you something that will accurately measure the sugar concentration in various liquids from 0 - 90 Brix (where 1 degree Brix = 1 gram of sucrose in 100 grams of water).  That lets you measure pretty much anything sweet, including and beyond honey.  Not only can you use it to dispute the purported differences between two essentially identical syrups, but you can also use it to nail the sweetness of jams and jellies, get the right sugar content in your homemade ice cream so it doesn't ice up, and even use it for tracking the fermentation progress of homemade beer and wine.

Now, neither Golden Syrup manufacturer has a recipe for Puffed Wheat Squares on their website.  Let me stress: on their website.  But, I just so happen to have a copy of Round The Year With Rogers. It was printed even before it was deemed necessary to put a date on things like this.

My Mom Loves Me!  The Sticky Note Says So!

This was a recipe booklet that Rogers used to attach to the monstrous metal tins that they used to sell syrup in.  Now why I have this booklet in the first place is a long story in and of itself.  How can you get a copy for your own?

• You could write to the Vancouver archives and have them photocopy their booklet for you for some ridiculous price.
• You can hit up EBay and buy a vintage empty tin of syrup that might also include the booklet if you are lucky for some ridiculous price.
• You could click on this link and get your very own copy of my high quality PDF scan instantly and for nothing.  Seems like a no-brainer to me.  Lots of other interesting stuff in there too, so grab a copy either way.

I checked out my little recipe book and what did I find?  The jackpot.

This was my starting point.  A manufacturer of Golden Syrup publishing an old-time recipe from the birthplace of Puffed Wheat Square aka "Chocolate Puffs".  And the recipe claimed they were good for me.  Sweet deal!  (Get it?  Sweet?  Syrup?  Never mind, I'll see myself out).

But before I made this, I wanted to understand the problem of why the syrup consistency seemed so hit and miss.  All the recipes I read focused on how long to boil the syrup for.  Some said as soon as it came to a boil.  Some said to boil it for at least a minute.  Why did the recommendations vary?  Why was it inconsistent?  Time to do a little research.

What I came upon in short order was the expertise of the candy makers out there.  The time you let the syrup boil for is a red herring.  What is important is the temperature that the syrup gets to, and how long it takes to get to that temperature will depend on the size of your pot, the heat your stove is putting out, and a bunch of other things.  No wonder this inconsistency exists.

This link explains everything you need to know about the relationship between temperature and how hard the syrup will get.  A temperature of 230 - 235°F is the "Thread Stage" and sounded too thin to be a proper Puffed Wheat Square syrup.  This would explain all of those squares that would fall apart.  A temperature of 245 - 250°F is the "Firm Ball Stage" and is a caramel-like consistency.  That explains all those hard, dried out Puffed Wheat Squares.  A temperature of 235 - 240°F is the "Soft Ball Stage" and is a consistency like that of fudge.  That sounded to me like the Goldilock's bed of Puffed Wheat Square syrup consistency: not too hard, not too soft, but just right.

Now you might ask "DeKay, how do I know when my syrup is 235 - 240°F?"  And I might respond "Just use your Thermopen."  And you might say "DeKay, but I don't have a Thermopen."  And I be like

Srsly?

Buy a Thermopen.  Yes they are expensive.   Ask for one for Christmas or for your birthday.  Sell your car.  Wait for a sale.  Just get yourself a damn Thermopen and stop overcooking every meat you barbecue.  And while you are at it, verify that your fridge temperature is too warm so you can stop your milk from going sour all the time.  Or cheap out, buy a lesser thermometer, and lead a sad life.

Now I've got a recipe and I know how to get the right consistency of syrup.  But remember that I had a requirement that the recipe be reproducible, and that means none of this "cups" stuff when it comes to stuff like brown sugar measurements.  I scoured the Internet to come up with reasonable conversions so that you don't have to, and here is what I came up with.

Chocolate Puffed Wheat Square  

Ingredients

• 68 grams (4.5 cups) puffed wheat
• 72 grams (a half a cup) brown sugar
• 72 grams (a quarter cup) golden syrup
• 28 grams (2 tablespoons) butter
• 1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder
• ¼ teaspoon vanilla

Method:

• Butter a baking dish about 8" square and set aside.
• Put the puffed wheat into a large mixing bowl and set aside.
• Put the brown sugar, golden syrup, butter, and cocoa powder into a small pot over medium heat.
• Stir constantly until the temperature hits 235°F, the "soft ball stage".
• Immediately remove from heat and then quickly mix in the vanilla.
• Pour the mixture over the puffed wheat and stir to combine until puffs are well coated.  Work quickly as the syrup will get thicker as it cools.
• Spoon the mixture into the buttered dish.  Smooth out with a spatula or wooden spoon.  Better yet, use a piece of wax paper cut roughly to the shape of your pan and press it down flat and evenly using your hands.  Credit for this brilliant technique goes out to Nana's Best Recipes.
• Let cool and cut into squares with a sharp knife.

So what do you get?

Something pretty damn good, that is what you get.

My very first attempt at this hit all of my requirements.  Chocolatey, not too sweet, and most importantly, a pretty much perfect consistency to the syrup that kept the puffed wheat together without it being too hard and sticky.  My world was perfect, but only for a short time.

My Hippie Cousin posted a recipe for a Peanut Butter Puffed Wheat Square and All Hell Broke Loose.

I'd argue that this square Is not, in fact, a cake.  But she's family so I let it go.

Intrigued, I whipped up a batch.  What did I get?

Pseudo-Puffed Wheat Square

I got something resembling, but not quite like, the Puffed Wheat Square that I knew and loved.  What did I notice?

• The stick-togetheredness of the puffed wheat turned out a bit loose for me.
• The puffed wheat didn't quite have the crispness that my version did.
• It was too sweet for my tastes.

But it was My Lovely Wife who pointed out the biggest flaw:

"A Puffed Wheat Square has to have chocolate in it."

 She was right, of course.  This rule is right up there with Star Trek's Prime Directive.

So that is when I conceived of my cunning plan: I would make a Chocolate Peanut Butter Puffed Wheat Square.  Genius!  I mean, who doesn't like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups?  But an idea is nothing unless you have a plan to make it happen.  My plan was to start with the recipe I had come up with since it was closer to my ideal.  I would simply swap out the butter in my recipe with an amount of peanut butter that gave me the equivalent fat content.  Easy!  A little bit of Internet told me:

• Butter is 81.1% fat by weight
• Peanut butter is 50.4% by weight

So it would take more peanut butter than butter to get the same amount of fat.  I thought I'd ease into it, so instead of my original recipe of 28 grams butter, I went with 10 grams of butter and 30 grams of peanut butter.  That gave me 23.23 grams of fat in this version vs. 22.7 grams in the original.  Close enough!  And yes, in fact, I did create a spreadsheet to calculate all of this.  You would have too if you were me.

So the big day came.  I whipped up a batch of Puffed Wheat Square with these tweaks and cooked my syrup to 235°F (the "soft ball stage") as I had done before.  I fully expected Puffed Wheat Square Nirvana, but I was sadly mistaken.  First problem was that the syrup was too hard, so the square was too dry and crispy.  But it was My Lovely Wife that once again pointed out the biggest flaw:

"Needs MOAR peanut butter."

She was right again.

I was undeterred.  I figured I had mistakenly overcooked the syrup somehow.  The syrup isn't very deep in the pan I was using so maybe I wasn't getting a good temperature reading.  It was time to double down.  Version 2 would be all peanut butter, all the time, and I would cook the syrup to only 230°F in case there was something in the peanut butter that was screwing up my "soft ball" stage.  My spreadsheet told me that for the same amount of fat I would get from 28 grams of butter, I would need about 45 grams of peanut butter.  No problem.  I got this.  I whipped up another batch.

And Version 2 was a terrible failure.  Despite cooking the syrup to only 230°F, this version was at least as dried out if not more than Version 1.  And leave it again to My Lovely Wife to point out the biggest flaw:

"You can't taste the peanut butter."

Dammit.  This woman is never wrong.  Inexplicably, despite being 100% peanut butter and 0% actual butter, you couldn't taste the peanut butter.

Why?

I despaired.  Perhaps a Chocolate Peanut Butter Puffed Wheat Square was just not meant to be?  I double checked my calculations.  I blamed the new bag of puffed wheat that we had bought as being too dry and brittle compared to the old bag we had run out of.  Clearly, I was in denial.

I lied awake at night puzzling over the problem (not joking).  I was ready to give up.  There was no point in trying to perfect a Chocolate Peanut Butter Puffed Wheat Square that didn't taste like peanut butter.

Time passed.

Then one evening I was working out while nibbling on a piece of dry, crusty, Puffed Wheat Square between sets.  I had abandoned my usual savoring of the square by eating it one puffed wheat at a time because the stuff was so brittle as to make that nigh impossible.  But it was then I started to notice that the Puffed Wheat Square had softened in the area from where I had previously taken a bite.  Must just be getting soggy?  Later in the workout, my subconscious got busy and percolated something up from the Rogers Cookbook that I had read:

Rogers Golden Syrup has another quality besides sweetness that makes it a valuable cooking syrup.  It attracts moisture from the air."

It hit me like a ton of bricks.  Golden syrup is hygroscopic: it sucks up moisture.  Butter has at least a little water in it.  If there isn't much water in peanut butter, then the syrup isn't getting the water it needs as it cooks and it cools to be much harder than you would expect.  And you don't taste the peanut butter because the flavor is locked up in the hard candy syrup.  Suddenly, everything made sense.  Everything added up.  It was like when the Theory of Relativity was discovered.

Get it?  Squared away?  Puffed Wheat Square?  Sigh.  Tough crowd.

I finished my workout and hit the Canadian Food and Nutrition Database and discovered this:

• Butter is 17.94% moisture by weight
• Peanut butter is 1.55% moisture by weight

Based on this, the full butter version of my recipe had 5 grams of water in it vs. 0.7 grams in the recipe that was all peanut butter.  Could this be it?  I mean, this was saying the delta was a little over 4 grams of water.  Consider that there are only five grams of water in a teaspoon.  Was I making crappy Puffed Wheat Squares because I was missing a lousy teaspoon of water?  I decided to find out.

I made a half batch of the all- peanut butter version but added a full teaspoon of water.  That was about twice as much as I should have needed, but I wanted to make sure I was going in the right direction.  I also decided to cook the syrup up to the "soft ball" stage of 235°F.  I cooked up the syrup in a glass ramekin on our gas stove instead of using a pot, since the small amount of syrup would have been too shallow in the pot to get an accurate reading with the Thermopen.  I noticed immediately as the syrup's temperature climbed that it was a lot less thick than previous failed attempts.  Was I on the right track?

I hit 235°F and immediately removed the syrup from the heat, poured in the vanilla, and then poured that over the puffed wheat.  Everything mixed together easily.  I dumped the mix into a greased loaf pan (again, I was making a half batch here) and I was easily able to flatten it out.  I let it cool and then My Lovely Wife and I cut ourselves a slice.  The square sliced easily without the puffed wheat shattering apart.  My Lovely Wife then said:

"You can taste the peanut butter."

You can!!!  You can taste the peanut butter!!!  And then she had another piece to prove the point.

Version 3, only a short time later.

The taste of the peanut butter was no longer locked away in the syrup.  The individual puffed wheats pulled away easily from the square, perhaps a bit too easily.  The puffed wheat was generally good but some of them tasted almost a bit soggy.

And I was ecstatic.

I had purposefully put in too much water just too see if this was the culprit and the results were as you'd expect if I was right.  Now the road ahead was clear: add enough water to match that from the butter in the original recipe as well as enough peanut butter to match the fat content.  Crunch the numbers and here is what you get.  The...

Perfect Chocolate Peanut Butter Puffed Wheat Square

Ingredients

• 68 grams (4.5 cups) puffed wheat
• 72 grams (a half a cup) brown sugar
• 72 grams (a quarter cup) golden syrup
• 45 grams (3 tablespoons) natural peanut butter
• 8 grams (1.5 teaspoons) water
• 1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder
• ¼ teaspoon vanilla

Method:

• Butter a baking dish about 8" square and set aside.
• Put the puffed wheat into a large mixing bowl and set aside.
• Put the brown sugar, golden syrup, peanut butter, water, and cocoa powder into a small pot over medium heat.
• Stir constantly until the temperature hits 235°F, the "soft ball stage".
• Immediately remove from heat and then quickly mix in the vanilla.
• Pour the mixture over the puffed wheat and stir to combine until puffs are well coated.  Work quickly as the syrup will get thicker as it cools.
• Spoon the mixture into the buttered dish.  Smooth out with a spatula or wooden spoon.  Better yet, use a piece of wax paper cut roughly to the shape of your pan and press it down flat and evenly using your hands.  Credit for this brilliant technique goes out to Nana's Best Recipes.
• Let cool and cut into squares.

I actually added a little bit extra water to get a syrup that wouldn't get to crunchy if the square wasn't all eaten up after a day or so.  But fat chance of that happening.  Feel free to adjust the amount of water yourself either way.  Just know that anything less than a teaspoon in the recipe above will run you the risk of baking a puffed wheat brick.

The first thing you might want to change with this recipe is doubling it.  I may or may not have grown up on Puffed Wheat Square that was double this thickness.  I got a little hesitant at making big batches myself here for fear of a failed experiment that I've have to eat all of.  That fear has now been erased.

The second thing you might want to change with this recipe is adding more cocoa for an extra chocolate hit.  I haven't tried this myself, but I wouldn't expect more cocoa to throw off the fat / water ratio enough to affect the end result.  I'd start with maybe an extra half tablespoon and go from there.

It has also occurred to me that you might be able to use something like those terra cotta disks used to keep brown sugar from turning hard as another way to prevent leftover square from drying out.  Same principle, right?  Have a few pieces of square to make room in the pan and then drop one of these bad boys in there.  Haven't tried this myself either, but if you do, let me know how it worked out in the comments.

The Cure For Dried Out Puffed Wheat Square?

My Wonderful Mom is here visiting this weekend so I whipped up a test half-batch for her.  Remember I said above how she made a mean Puffed Wheat Square?  Here is her verdict on mine:

Victory, Hard Won

Achievement Unlocked: The Perfect Puffed Wheat Square.  Go make some.  Now.

How To Make A Sandwich

The Lowly Sandwich. For too long, the Sandwich did not get the respect nor the attention it deserved. Then two things happened. First, "Sandwich" (and the closely related "Sammich") became a meme.  I really like this one, just because I think Steve Balmer is a doofus...

A Filthy Rich Doofus, But Still a Doofus

... but you gotta like this one too.  Because Nigella.

Everything In This Picture Is Good

The second thing that happened was my writing of this blog post.  Srsly.

If your first thought of a Sammich is a slice of bologna with store-bought white sandwich bread, you’re doing it wrong. Very wrong.  I'm here to fix that.   It is time to dress The Lowly Sandwich up a bit and give it a chance to strut its stuff.

Nothing In This Picture Is Good

Now I’ll admit, I’ve long had pretty low Sammich expectations. I basically grew up on something much like the unadorned beast pictured above, taking a lunch to school for the majority of my school years in Grades 1 through 12. And in those days, lunch meant Sammiches.  Let’s just say I ate a lot of Sammiches over that time, and going back down that road didn’t initially hold a ton of appeal.

But appreciating and, even better, making your own good food means you’ve sometimes got to open your eyes and see a challenge in a whole new light. Sometimes, you’ve got to do that in territory that you might think has been well trodden. Can we turn the pedestrian Sammich into something that you dream about? Can a Sammich blow your mind?

The best way to answer this question is, of course, by example. I’m going to show you my take on a popular Sammich available in these parts: the Chicken, Brie, and Fig Sandwich from Earl’s Restaurant. Earl’s is a restaurant chain here in the Great White North that pairs a pretty decent menu with a pretty decent beer selection brewed on premises. What is not to like? Very little as it turns out.

The menu states that the Chicken, Brie, and Fig Sammich includes  "roasted apples, spinach, garlic aioli, fresh ciabatta".  Hmmmm... Bread. Brie. Chicken Breast. These are not exotic ingredients. You might have these ingredients or reasonable facsimiles thereof sitting in your fridge right now. That was the case in my refrigerator when this idea came to me anyway. What I ended up doing was making the best with what I had on hand at the time to put together an Earl’s-like Sammich.  I subsequently devouring said result. How did I go about it? Let me show you.  Let me show you exactly - to the gram.  Because that's how I roll.

First off, you need some decent bread. Bread is the foundation of a good Sammich, and a crappy bread is a crappy foundation. I recommend something like my No Knead Blue Cheese and Toasted Sesame Seed Bread (Jim Lahey's No Knead Bread with 40g each of crumbled blue cheese and toasted sesame seeds) described by a friend as “The best bread I’ve ever had”. And his mom was a baker. If you think you don’t like blue cheese, you are wrong. Blue cheese is amazing. The amount of blue cheese in this recipe is just enough to haunt the bread with its flavour, not beat you over the head with it.

Cut yourself a couple slices but don’t go too thick here. The bread is the foundation of the Sammich, but there is little worse than a Sammich that just tastes like all bread. That isn’t a Sammich. That’s just bread with some stuff on it. The slices in the picture below could probably be a little thinner.

This Bread Tastes Like More

Next up, you’ll want to lay a little mayo down. This serves a couple purposes. First and foremost, it adds a nice tang to the sandwich. Second of all, it serves as a kind of waterproofing layer so that the next ingredient up won’t make the bread soggy. I’m using a low fat mayo hear and can hear the boos from the audience even in advance of posting this. Haters gotta hate. I went this route because a) it is what I had in the fridge and b) low fat for a non-critical element like this lets me eat more of other stuff. Life is full of decisions. Make yours. Put on what you like.

Don't Hate Me

How about an option even at this early stage? Once in making this sandwich I made the “mistake” of putting on this ridiculously awesome concoction.

Best.  Mistake.  Ever.

If you see this stuff in your grocery store, buy it on the spot. It. Is. Spectacular. And by Spectacular (capital S), I mean it will clear your sinuses in one hell of a hurry. This stuff lays the heat down far better than any “hot” horseradish I’ve ever bought in a grocery store. Store-bought horseradish is an abomination that should stay in the store. I am convinced that if you want good horseradish, you need to make it yourself. But that is a post for another time. Go easy on this stuff if you got it.  You have been warned.

Next up we add a bit of sweetness with a little applesauce. Again, I’ve had bad luck with store-bought. I have been disappointed time and again with anything out of a can. Want good applesauce? Buy a pressure-cooker and make your own. We make ours from crabapples given to us by our friends in the fall, after they have picked multiple five-gallon pails for themselves and can’t bear to look at a single apple more. The tang you get from these apples makes a delicious applesauce, so don’t go ruining it by adding sugar. Oh, and make pie. Not too heavy here. The applesauce, I mean. If you’re making pie, make it as heavy as you like.

Mmmmmm.... Pie

The Earl’s menu says they use fig jam. Fig jam? I didn’t have no fig jam. What I did have was dates, to which My Lovely Wife has a habit nastier than anything cocaine or heroin could pull someone in to. I sliced a few dates as thin as I could and laid them down on top of the applesauce. This is easier said than done because dates are kinda mushy and very sticky, but I persevered Because Of Sammich.

Jam Would Have Spread Better

Next up: chicken breast. Cut up chicken breast and put it on the Sammich. This part isn’t complicated. Just use small pieces or thin slices and everything will be fine, just fine. It wouldn’t hurt here to pop it into the microwave for a bit just to take the chill off.

[Insert Breast Joke Here]

Next up would be the Brie in the Chicken and Brie sandwich. But again, your options are open here. I think you want to stick to a softer cheese that will make the effort to get your attention, rather than a rather flavourless cheese that everybody goes with because they know it (mozzarella, I’m looking at you). I went with a garlic-flavoured Boursin cheese based on a tip from a buddy of mine. He was not wrong. But don’t get me wrong, Brie would have been good here too. I guess what I’m trying to say here is: get a damn tasty soft cheese and lay it down on the other piece of bread.  You probably want to use more than I did here.

That done, bring the two slices of bread together. You are so close now, you should be able to taste it. Patience. There is one more step to go.

What I’ve been doing up to now is tossing the entire sandwich into the microwave for a very short period of time. How short? I can’t remember to be honest, but I seem to remember it was in the twenty second ballpark. That is just long enough to take the cold out of the chicken breast and apple sauce, but not so long that the applesauce is steaming hot. The microwave also does a pretty great job of making bread that might not be at its freshest taste a lot better. I also like how the warming of the bread brings out the flavour of the Blue Cheese in my Blue Cheese and Toasted Sesame Seed Bread even more.

I present for your inspection below the end result, cut in half and ready to be devoured in no time flat. It is good. Damn good. Is it a dead-ringer for the Earl’s version? Not exactly, but I did take several liberties along the way.

How Good?  Damn Good, I Said.

As good as that sandwich was, one always needs to think ahead to Next Time.  Next time, I want to try something a little different. Something like this.

And What Is This I See Before Me???

This is my waffle maker. There are many like it. This one is mine. Inspired by The Waffleizer’s book “Will It Waffle” (the answer is yes), I made up this Sammich over Christmas with my now famous Diablo Bread, some leftover turkey breast cooked sous vide (with these seasonings but this cooking method), mozzarella cheese, and thin slices of dill pickle. Were you to have actually tasted this yourself, you would have wept uncontrollably with joy. I can say without fear of exaggeration that this is the best Sammich that has ever been made or ever will be made.

It didn’t hurt that I brought a nice new technique to the party.  I was finding the lid of the waffle iron didn’t put enough weight on the Sammich to transfer the heat to it like I wanted. So I put my water bottle (about half full) onto the handle of the waffle iron, and I jammed a chopstick in there to prevent the bottle from rolling off. The beauty of this technique is that you can adjust the amount of “press” this ghetto Panini press puts on your Sammich by tweaking the amount of water in the bottle.

Patent Pending

And why, you might ask, am I using a waffle iron instead of a Panini press to make this Sammich??? Jeez Louise. Really??? Can you make King Arthur Sourdough Waffles in a Panini press???  No. Can I make paninis in a waffle iron???  Yes. Are we done here???  Yes.

Based on the spectacularity of this Diablo Bread / Turkey Breast / Mozzarella Cheese / Dill Pickle Sammich, I can only imagine how mind blowing a waffled Blue Cheese and Toasted Sesame Seed No Knead Bread / Horseradish Mayo / Applesauce / Date / Chicken Breast Sammich would taste. But I have a pretty damn good guess. It would be definitive proof that there is a God and He loves me. I don’t know about the rest of you, but me for sure at least.

Good food is good food.  Go make some.