Italian Almond Biscotti - experiences that balance

2015, October 24

 The days when I do something quite awe-inspiring, and then back-it-up by those silly, little but awful mistakes generally emanating from possible exhaustion. The story of experimenting with home-made Italian Almond Biscotti, and then, backing it up with experimental failure story of burnt pizza-ingredients.



Italian Almond Biscotti 



The kind of day - After the horrific in-the-face kind of customer service at one of the cellphone service providers in Chandigarh called BSNL, I decided to make it up by trying something new and experimenting with my techniques. The interesting thing is, generally the value chain of big companies is such big that even if the product is reliable, because of the direct bitter experience with front-desk sometimes, the take-away is a bad impression of the company itself. Anyways, Biscotti has been a favourite in my repertoire ever since shopping for them at Kroger's or be it as birthday presents from Chef Lynn at the Co-ops (The North Campus Co-operatives) in Ann Arbor.





Italian biscotti recipe

Makes about 25 pieces

 Ingredients -
 200g non-blanched almonds
 215g plain flour
 100g sugar
 1/8 teaspoon salt
 1/8 teaspoon saffron powder
 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda (sodium bicarbonate)
 2 eggs
 1 egg while, slightly whipped for glaze

 For the complete instruction, please refer to Martha Day - Complete baking.

 The overall setup is as follows - I roasted the almonds, and then about 1/4th I pulverised. The remaining chopped into 2-3 parts for each almond. This fine part was mixed with all the dry ingredients, mixed well. Then, I added the two eggs, and mixed. The mixture was still dry and so I improvised with 50g melted salted butter. Once the mixture was thoroughly mixed, I transferred to a sheet for kneading whereupon I rolled the rest of chopped almonds into the mixture... divided the entire dough into three parts, rolled into long cylinders, applied the whipped egg white and put in the oven for 21 mins at 180C. After 21m, took out made slanted cuts, and put 'em back for 25 mins at 140C. Voila!

 In hindsight, I feel I could have chopped the almonds a bit finer as well, lets say 5-6 parts each. The roasted almonds leave an amazing aftertaste.

Experiment of the recipe - Baking is generally an exact method. Follow the recipe exactly, and generally things go as described in recipe, which means the steps when followed exactly yield a similar looking product. However, sometimes events just can not as planned, and the ability to improvise comes with a certain feeling of the gut, an intuitiveness of what ingredients might go together just fine. What I have experimented with was this. The 2 eggs weren't able to bind the ingredients into a dough. So, I decided to add 50g salted butter melted through pre-heat. In hindsight, the butter should have been unsalted, but it was still alright. The salted butter tends to leave a different aftertaste which is more towards sweet-salty. However, after cooling in refrigerator, the taste is suppressed a bit, and the flavour of almonds has been elevated.




Technique(s) learnt -

The glaze applied by the egg white and allowing to bake was ground breaking in my cooking skills. It gave the biscotti a thin brittle shining crust. I had always wondered about it in the past.





Mushroom, zucchini, tomato, onion, red-pepper pizza

I baked the vegetable except tomato before spreading on the pizza base. The base was readymade, but I intend to make the dough and try my own pizza base very soon. However, the vegetables got burnt, well at least some. But, they did give off some genuine flavour to the pizza as the water got dried up, and only taste from the ingredients was left behind. As usual, I applied two base sauces on the two-halves - pesto and pizza base sauce, which has been quite overpowering spicy in the past.