I've been eating too many fresh fruits and vegetables. I feel like I've been on a diet of soft foods. Sure, they're delicious and fresh and I know I'm doing good things for my body by eating them, but my teeth need more work! I need strong flavour! So I knew I wanted to make biscotti. That way I could finish a meal with a satisfying crackle and crunch. I don't drink coffee but I knew that dipped in plain, bitter yogurt the sweetness of the biscotti would marry well with the tang, especially when made with bittersweet chocolate. I didn't want a lot of sugar, but I wanted a mildly sweet treat.Okay, fine, so that's decided, I thought.
Nope, I also saw a recipe for oatmeal cookies and I'd been dreaming of soft chewy cookies for awhile. I wanted the chew of oatmeal and the density, not the air of plain chocolate chip cookies. I didn't want any fruit messing with the flavour. All I needed was a plain oatmeal cookie.
So I made both. It's been so long since I've baked, and it's so good for the soul. There's nothing like a fresh cookie to make looking for a roommate better. You probably don't believe me. I counted today; I've lived with 28 people in the last 6 years. 3 men, 25 women. I've had enough roommates. My next roommate will be #29, and if I make it to 30 I'll feel much older in terms of living experiences than the number. Perhaps I'll have an early midlife roommate crisis. Perhaps I'm already having one.
This is why I needed to spend a few hours baking in my kitchen. Emotional therapy.
These are amazing biscotti. They're from my favourite chocolate book, Alice Medrich's "Chocolate and Art of Low-Fat Desserts". My mother bought an extra used copy online (it's discontinued) just so that I don't have to lug it home in my suitcase whenever I go home. That's how much I love this book. It includes everything from ridiculous buches de Noel, 5 different mousses, cakes, creams to petite sweets - quarter-sized cookies, meringues and haystacks. There is, of course, an exceptional biscotti recipe. There are, in fact, three, and I sort of combined the first two to create my perfect snack.
Chocolate Spiked Biscotti:
2 cups flour (I used my gluten-free flour blend, which worked perfectly in these and less perfectly in the oatmeal cookies I made later)
1 tsp baking soda
1 square of bittersweet baking chocolate, grated
1/4 tsp salt (I feel like I added too much, because my cookies taste way too deliciously salty. It could just be that I used fleur de sel so the little salt rocks explode in the bites where my teeth find them)
2 eggs
3/4 cup cane sugar
1 tbsp molasses (the recipe calles for about 1/2 a cup of white sugar and 1/2 of dark, but white sugar just has more of the nutrients from molasses - the brown in brown sugar - taken out of it, so it's an easy fix)
1 tsp vanilla
1/3 cup ground toasted, blanched almonds (Oh, for more info on toasting nuts, check my bittersweet chocolate truffle hazelnut mousse torte recipe)
I think because I used fleur de sel and cane sugar the biscotti turned out grainier than expected, but it was actually so perfect since they helped the crunch. I love it. Dipping these in coffee to soften them would be a sin. Well,in a few days when they're a bit more rock hard it may be a necessity, but freshly hardened, they're perfect.
I whisked the flour, salt, baking soda and grated chocolate. Grating the chocolate was annoying, since I grated it very finely. What was good about it, though, was that it was so difficult I decided to only do one square of it instead of two, keeping the fat down. It was just chocolate-y enough, especially when eaten right after an oatmeal cookie. Actually, then it seemed VERY chocolate-y. You could also coarsely chop the chocolate but then it doesn't go as far. You don't get chocolate in every bite. So there's a balance.
In a large mixing bowl I then beat the eggs with the sugar and vanilla. None of this "3 minutes until pale" business. Medrich gets right down to it and just says "util combined". Apparently biscotti aren't so fussy. You're not going for perfect cake texture. They're intentionally supposed to be tough. These are hardy cookies. No frills, just exceptional flavour. Then I stirred in the flour until combined (you can also beat, if you don't mind flour flying everywhere), and then added the nuts. Stir, stir, stir. Actually, I more so folded with a whisk, but as long as it gets combined it'll be just fine.
I preheated the oven to 300 Fahrenheit and lined my cookie tray with aluminum foil. Then I shaped the cookie dough into three long logs on the tray. They're supposed to go lengthwise and stay about 2 1/2 inches apart, but my cookie sheet isn't big enough for that. I figured it didn't really matter because these didn't have to be gorgeous cookies, and if they flowed into each other, well, I could live with that. I can live with a lot of things. A bad roommate is not one of them.
So these long logs are kind of like freshly planted gardens. Spiked with chocolate and almonds and in 35 minutes they'll come out of the oven as fully-grown cookies. That's where the fun starts. Biscotti means "twice-baked" in Italian. It also just means "cookie", since this is generally what they eat as a cookie. Not so much into the oatmeal raisin thing. This is only the first baking stage. Some vegetables and planted things can be eaten raw, but many need to be cooked, or re-baked, like these biscotti. I did eat one after 35 minutes to see what they were like, and they were very much like a cookie, but not quite yet like the crunch I was craving.
So the logs came off the aluminum foil, got cooled for 10 minutes, got carefully sliced back apart (they had baked into each other a little, but not irreparably so), and got sliced into 1/2 inch slices.
This is where Medrich assumes you read all her biscotti recipes before making one. I've made biscotti before, and generally you slice them on the diagonal to make the pieces longer. The biscotti you see in coffee shops are ridiculously long and are the equivalent of 3 biscotti, but even so, these biscotti become prettier when cut diagonally. One of her biscotti recipes says to cut on the diagonal and the other doesn't. I was surprised not to see it in the first, and didn't check the second. It really doesn't make a big difference, besides an aesthetic one. Now it also says to place the cookies on the oven rack. I did a double take. Put the cookies directly on the oven racks? Well it didn't say "directly", but the next line said "or arrange slices on two baking sheets" and bake them for half the time, rotate, flip front to back, top to bottom, fuss, fuss, fuss. So I figured I'd go with the less fuss step of baking directly on the oven rack. By the way, the rack should be on the bottom of the oven. I put it on the second bottom rung because the very bottom seemed bizarre. Actually one of the recipes didn't even specify where the rack should be. In the other recipe it did say explicitly to put the cookies "directly" on the oven rack. I don't know why publishers don't employ the copy and paste function of their computers when it would help a poor baker out.
Anyway, on the racks the slices went, carefully placed one by one. The oven was still "on" and hot, so I did this all very carefully. It's not great for the back. I miraculously didn't burn myself. 20 minutes later the cookies were carefully removed from the oven one by one. Medrich gives a trick (in one recipe only, of course) to take one cookie out when the timer goes and leave the rest in for another minute or 2. Once the removed cookie is cooled you can test it. If it's crunchy enough then you can take all the cookies out. If not, leave them all in there for another few minutes. Repeat test procedure. This can get dangerous, for both the tongue and waistline. Don't rush the testing or you'll burn your mouth, and call it quits when the sugar rush kicks in. It shouldn't go longer than 5 minutes, this whole "extra baking time" business.
Now the important thing is to cool the cookies completely before storing. If they get stored while they're still hot they'll soften up. NOTE! THERE IS NO BUTTER IN THESE COOKIES!!! and because they're so dry, they last for WEEKS at room temperature in a sealed container. I also just noticed that Alice and I agree on alternatives serving methods for the cookies. She thinks a scoop of yogurt is a lovely idea (though she specifies a "really pretty coffee cup" for presentation. Apparently yogurt is nothing special on its own. She is not French or Greek, it seems. She also think coffee should get poured around the yogurt. I agree with her that it's a great topping for frozen yogurt or non-fruity gelato, but one idea I didn't foresee was crushing them and pressing them against the sides of a cheesecake or iced cake (the iced cake is my addition, what we the fact that I don't eat a whole lot of cheesecake). Alice, we're a good team, you and I. You probably already have a roommate, right?
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