The Dinner Files

I have two secrets to my favorite chocolate chip cookies. One is an ingredient, the other is a method. I suppose I have guarded these secrets to some extent, but then no one had ever asked for them. People will compliment the cookies and I will say thanks and that tends to be the end of the conversation.

These may not be your favorite chocolate chip cookies at all. If you like crisp cookies, for example, move along, these cookies are not for you. These cookies are soft and a bit chewy and quite thin all at once, which is what I look for in a chocolate chip cookie. No cake-y nonsense here. They have oats in them because, again, that’s how I roll. They do not have nuts because I could take or leave nuts in my chocolate chip cookies but I live in a house simply filled with people who say “no” to such shenanigans.

(I just did a quick search on dictionary.com to make sure shenanigans isn’t one of those phrases with historically racist implications and found it is of “obscure origins.” The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of it in the April 25, 1855 edition of Town Talk in San Francisco. Let it be known that I am local even in my use of comically out-dated slang!)

They have a bit of nutmeg, which even if you don’t like thin-soft-chewy cookies I recommend you try adding to whatever ridiculous cake-like or crispy wafer-style chocolate chip cookie recipe you prefer. It adds a je ne sais quoi that people won’t detect other than that their hand is shoving yet another cookie into their mouth.

And the key to getting that texture I like so much? Melt the butter first. Simple as that.

Chocolate “chip” oatmeal cookies

I say “chip” because I have yet another secret: I don’t use chips. I chop the chocolate. Total pain in the ass? Yes. Completely worth the effort for the improved texture and teeny tiny shards of chocolate that work themselves throughout the dough? Absolutely. To me. You may, and likely will, decide otherwise.

3/4 cup butter

1/2 cup each granulate sugar and brown sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 – 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1 cup rolled oats (for the batch above I used up some quick-cooking oats we had in the cupboard because none of us like those for breakfast; they worked fine but I prefer the regular ones, even in my cookies)

1 – 1 1/2 cups chopped dark chocolate

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Melt the butter and stir in the two sugars so they dissolve. Let this sit until it’s warm or room temperature but definitely not hot. Since I don’t have a microwave I melt the butter on the stove, then transfer it to a large mixing bowl, which helps move the cooling down along.

Stir in the egg and the vanilla.

In another bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, salt, and nutmeg. Then mix this flour mixture into the butter sugar mixture. This really is how you should do it. Seriously. The thing is, you may decide you don’t want to dirty and extra bowl. Full confession: I never mix my dry ingredients first for cookies. I add the small amount stuff (in this case the baking soda, salt, and nutmeg) to the wet ingredients and stir them in, then add the flour. No one has ever complained about the results. Ever.

Stir in the oats and the chocolate.

Scoop in 1-tablespoon balls onto a baking sheet about an inch or so apart and bake 10-12 minutes. Let sit a minute and then transfer to a cooling rack. You’ll get almost exactly 2 dozen cookies this way. Maybe a few extra.

I had a dream. As much as I love sweet crêpes, I’ve always been a bit more of a fan of galettes – crêpes’ hearty, buckwheat flour, savory older cousins. Once when making galettes and crêpes, I made myself a dessert “crêpe” using the buckwheat galette batter. The French people present were horrified, to say the least, but I was thrilled. I didn’t know if my dessert got in my dinner or my dinner got in my dessert. The nutty buckwheat and dark chocolate were my own chocolate and peanut butter: together at last.

These cookies are way easier to make (less than 30 minutes from pulling things from the cupboard to a warm cookie in your mouth if you pay attention) and will, I hope, find a wider audience.

Chocolate buckwheat cookies

These cookies are soft, chocolate-y, and have a decidedly but undefinable nutty taste and slightly sandy texture that makes complete sense if you know there is a generous amount of buckwheat flour in them. Don’t over-bake these; the texture goes from divine to ho-hum if you do.

4 ounces bittersweet chocolate

1 cup buckwheat flour

3/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour

1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

2 teaspoons baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup butter

1 cup brown sugar

1 egg

2 teaspoons vanilla

Preheat oven to 350. Chop chocolate and melt it. (I like to put mine in a small bowl, fill a slightly larger bowl with boiling water, and set the small bowl in the boiling water and just let it sit. It melts and it can’t scorch and I can start on other things.) Let it cool a bit before using.

Combine the buckwheat and whole wheat pastry flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl. Set aside.

Cream butter and brown sugar until fairly light and fluffy. Beat in the egg and vanilla. Make sure the chocolate is cool enough to touch comfortably (go ahead, stick your finger in there!) – you don’t want it to melt the butter or start cooking the egg when you add it to the batter. Beat into the butter-sugar-egg mixture.

Add the dry ingredients and beat to stir just to combine.

Dollop generous tablespoonfuls of the batter on one cookie sheet if you want less clean-up but more cooking time (two batches) or on two cookie sheets if you’d rather rinse an extra pan than deal with a second batch. Bake 5 minutes. Turn/rotate pan(s) and bake another 5 minutes. Let cool slightly on the sheet(s) before transferring to a cooling rack.

You should get 2 dozen cookies.

I made this chocolate pudding with my best friend from high school in mind. She loves chocolate pudding. I’ve seen her eat it for breakfast and I’ve seen her eat in for dinner. Nice big bowls of it.

She does not, however, like to cook much. She bakes some mean cinnamon rolls and whips up a batch of pudding if the mood hits her. She doesn’t understand what all the fuss about pie crust is and will throw one together if she feels like eating pie. Yet I once saw her pull a can of black beans out of a cupboard and prepare to eat them cold out of the can because, as far as she could see, there was nothing in the house to make dinner out of. Cheese and eggs and tortillas and salsa were sitting, waiting, in the fridge. I made her some ad hoc huevos rancheros and she thought I was a genius.

For all her baking, fussy is not her game. I don’t think she is at all interested in tempering eggs or doing other things that, to my culinary mind, are part of making pudding. So I experimented with streamlined methods and minimal dirty-dish production. Now I just want all those hours I’ve spent whisking hot liquid into beaten eggs back. It ends up it wasn’t really necessarily in the first place.

Chocolate pudding

This is not pot de crème or extra rich or super-duper chocolate-y. This is creamy, yummy, old-fashioned chocolate pudding. The kind that is mainly milk and eggs. The kind you can tuck into a nice big bowl of. If you want a bigger chocolate hit, simply melt two to four ounces of chocolate and stir it in at the end with the vanilla.

3/4 cup sugar*

5 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder

4 tablespoons cornstarch

3 cups milk, divided

2 eggs

2 egg yolks

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

In a medium saucepan, whisk together sugar, cocoa, and cornstarch. Whisk in about 3/4 cup of the milk. Work it until it is very smooth and all the cocoa and cornstarch are dissolved and you have a brown paste. Add the eggs and egg yolks and whisk until everything is completely combined again. Now whisk in the remaining milk.

Put the pot on the stove over low heat. Cook, stirring with a wooden spoon and scarping the bottom and edges and corners of the pan to keep bits of the mixture from thickening unevenly, until the mixture thickens and coats the back of the spoon. This will take about 15 minutes. You want to cook the mixture slowly so the eggs don’t overcook and curdle into chunks. If nothing is happening, however, you may need to increase the heat – just little bits at a time – to get the mixture to thicken up properly. Take off the heat and stir in vanilla.

Transfer mixture to individual serving bowls or a single large bowl. Cover surface with plastic wrap or waxed paper and chill at least 3 hours and up to 3 days.

* I used “vanilla sugar” – sugar in which I store fresh vanilla beans. The sugar keep the vanilla beans supple and fresh; the vanilla lightly scents the sugar. Regular sugar works just fine, too.

I am supposed to be objective. Or at least not completely and totally biased. But a girl has her opinions, you know? And this girl is a huge fan of Michael Recchiuti and his awesome chocolates. There are several reasons for my devotion. First and foremost are the chocolates themselves. They are refined, they are clever without being gimmicky, they are a joy to look at and a treat to eat. The sesame nougat concoction alone is enough to make me walk across town and shell out a sort of large amount of cash for a very small chocolate. But I do so gladly. When we did a blind tasting for the best boxed chocolates at Sunset we unanimously hands-down agreed after the first round that the Recchiuti ones were the best and went on to spend hours trying to come to some semblance of a consensus on a second and a third. 

Second, there is Michael himself. I wrote a story about him and his chocolates in 2000 for a really bad “luxury lifestyle magazine for the Bay Area executive” I worked at for a short time. It was my first story with a person as the subject. I shudder to think of how I approached that interview – how little research I did ahead of time, how little I knew about chocolate – but Michael was extremely generous with his time, setting aside a whole morning to show me how they made different chocolates.

His generosity and desire to connect with people, I’m happy to report, is fully intact. I saw it in action last night when, instead of eating a wholesome meal, I participated in a preview of The Taste Project. Michael is teaming up with other foodtastic folks and has put together a series of tastings – they all involve chocolate, of course – exploring taste and pairing and food. At the preview last night various “members of the press” got to experience examples pulled from the entire series and it was one of those times when I really, truly love my job. (I go to a lot of tastings and similar events. Quite frankly, a great many of them make me hate my job, if but briefly. They can be boring, self-important, lack deliciousness, lack focus, be a waste of time, or even leave one feeling sick.)

This weekend will be the first in the series with Mark Bitterman, a self-styled selmelier who knows absolutely everything about salt. (Full disclosure: I have, on more than one occasion, eaten and drank – perhaps to excess – with Mark and/or his wife. Again, I am biased, but that doesn’t mean their salt isn’t awesome.) So we started the tasting with Recchiuti homemade graham crackers that we were invited to dredge through a slab of chocolate that was gently melting on one of the Himalayan salt slabs Mark sells at The Meadow in Portland, Oregon.

Then we tucked into stone fruit puff pastry “pizzas” that, to my eye, seemed pretty much like tarts, but that’s splitting hairs, with chocolate curls and Roasted Korean bamboo salt (yep, Roasted Korean bamboo salt – that’s the kind of crazy stuff Mark hocks). 

As we ate, Michael told us about the puff pastry, which he made and rolled himself according to a recipe and method he learned from a British chef while working in Vermont, and about the salt. At one of the real tastings, he explained, Mark the Salt Guy would give more explanation about the salt and how it worked with different foods and they would discuss how they came up with the dishes.

The Taste Project series also has a session (June 13) with Hangar One/St. George Spirits. Our preview of that was a cherry bomb – semi-sweet chocolate shells filled with St. George Spirit kirsch and topped with a chocolate-coated and cocoa-dusted Amarena cherry. And this is part of what is so cool about the whole series and about Michael – part of his motivation is to have an opportunity to make crazy labor-intensive creations that he could never put into production, but thinks of and wants to have other people experience. Michael Ruhlman wrote a book called The Soul of a Chef (great book by a great writer, by the way) and that phrase kept going through my mind as I listened to Michael Recchiuti talk about these amazing things we were tasting and how he came up with them and what excited him about the Taste Project. The desire to stretch, to explore, to create, to perfect, and, finally, to share.

Next up was the mushroom course (shout out here to the good people at Far West Fungi who are working with Recchiuti on this tasting (Sept 5) and have always been a great help to this writer, especially when she did a mushroom feature and needed lots of hard-to-find mushrooms for a fast-approaching photo shoot – visit them next time you’re at the Ferry Plaza in San Francisco). Yes, mushrooms and chocolate. More specifically, shitake-infused chocolate ice cream in a grilled brioche sandwich. Sounds insane and even nasty, I know, but I am telling you that it was amazing. If you didn’t know it was mushrooms in there you would just think, “wow, what is making this chocolate ice cream taste so amazingly awesomely delicious?”

Finally, we entered the world of bread and chocolate and… olive oil. With a Acme Bread (TBD) bread pudding and a flan and olive oil (July 11) and everything melded together into luscious bites with amazing “mouth feel” as we say in the biz. That means it feels good in your mouth. 

And while we ate, Michael talked about fermentation – something key to both bread and chocolate – and educating cocoa farmers and how the business of chocolate works and how he loves laminated doughs (that’s things like puff pastry and croissants). 

The tastings aren’t particularly cheap, but they pretty much just cover the costs – not including the creation labor – that go into the events. You get to taste things you’re not going to find anywhere else and talk about them with people who can explain just why your eyes are rolling back into your head with pleasure.

Plus, if you ask nicely, Michael will show you how they make the chocolates.

Grilled vegetables and some couscous made up our tasty but boring dinner. Boring, that is, when compared to the treat Ernie got.

Yes, it’s a chocolate bear. And guess what was inside? Yep, chocolate fish. Genius. And to think, I wasn’t sure I really wanted to stop in at Chocolate Tofino. Ernie sure is glad I did.