Food
Recipe Redux: Chocolate Caramels, 1881
By AMANDA HESSER
A few weeks ago, I gave Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski, a husband-and-wife team of San Francisco chefs, a 19th-century recipe for simple chocolate caramels made with molasses and vanilla and asked them to use it as inspiration for an entirely new dish.
The beauty of this free-form recipe assignment, which I give to a chef each month, is that I never know what he or she will come up with. My rule is that the chefs can improvise with flavors and techniques as much as they want, as long as they can later explain how they got from A to B.
Brioza and Krasinski were the chef and pastry chef, respectively, at Rubicon until it closed in 2008. While they work on their next restaurant venture, they have more time than usual on their hands — or, at least, more access to daylight and creative thinking. Two days after sending them the candy recipe, I received one back for Black-Sugar-Glazed Medjool Dates With Pecorino and Walnuts, a remarkably good dish that can be served either as a tapa, a cheese course or a sweet-savory dessert.
There is a connection between the candy and the dates, though it’s not obvious. “We threw a ton of ideas out there,” Brioza said. They began with one flavor — molasses — and then built the dish, piece by piece, like a homemade boat until it could set sail.
“We started thinking about molasses, because that was the strongest flavor in the caramel recipe,” Brioza explained. Anise and fennel flavors came to mind next, as did Scandinavian licorice: “You know, they’re molassesy and black, chewy and gummy,” he continued. “We thought of vinegar as a way to balance that out. We thought, Well, dates could take on the texture we’re really looking for in that kind of candy. The pecorino came in to play a role because the dates were too sweet. And then the walnuts — kind of a no-brainer,” to balance the dish and give it texture.
A structure had taken shape: plump medjool dates would be topped with pecorino shavings, walnuts and walnut oil, and after a little time in the oven to barely melt the cheese — a date melt! — they’d be drizzled with a sauce consisting of molasses, dark muscovado sugar, fennel seed, sherry vinegar, salt and cocoa powder. You’ll never taste the cocoa, but its bitterness is what makes the contentious sugar and vinegar play nice.
Medjool dates are intensely sweet, and they need a contrary sauce and flickers of salt. If you’re a cheese-stuffed-dates person, you will find in this recipe a new, more complex love. (And a sauce that you’ll want to splash on everything from figs to ice cream.)
And while the dish appears to be a celebration of molasses, it actually corrects what Krasinski and Brioza see as the sweetener’s shortcoming: a blunt flavor that lacks complexity.
The 19th-century cooks who came up with the chocolate-caramel recipe used molasses not for its subtlety but for its price. Tim Richardson writes in “Sweets: A History of Candy” that after the Sugar Act of 1760 imposed taxes on imported sugar, Americans were forced to supplement sugar with molasses until about a hundred years ago, when sugar production became cheaper. Molasses is the foundation of rum and birch beer, and during this heyday it came to define such dishes as gingersnaps, shoofly pie, baked beans, Indian pudding and Cracker Jack.
For Brioza and Krasinski, though, regular sugar doesn’t quite work, either. In the glaze they created for the dates, the sweetness really comes from dark muscovado sugar, which they call “black sugar” (made from sugar-cane juice and unrelated to brown sugar, which is refined sugar with molasses added).
“It’s the secret ingredient,” Krasinski said. “I think it makes everything better. It’s got lots of minerals and other things left in it. It adds things that people might not recognize when they taste a dish.” No offense to molasses, but next time I make the caramels, I might have to substitute muscovado.
1881: Chocolate Caramels
This recipe appeared in The Times in an 1881 article titled “Receipts.” The recipe was signed “Fanny.”
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus more for greasing the baking dish
41/2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped (about 1 cup)
1 cup whole milk
1 cup molasses
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Softened butter, for cutting the caramels.
1. Butter an 8-by-8-inch baking dish. Clip a candy thermometer to the side of a medium, heavy saucepan. Combine the butter, chocolate, milk, molasses and sugar in the pan and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture reaches 248 degrees on the thermometer. Do this slowly, scraping the bottom of the pan with a silicon spatula (or a wooden spoon) so the mixture doesn’t stick and burn.
2. Wearing an oven mitt, remove the pan from the heat and add the vanilla to the hot mixture. Give it a quick stir, then pour the mixture into the buttered baking dish.
3. As soon as the caramel is cool enough to handle, transfer it to a cutting board and use a buttered chef’s knife (or scissors) to cut the caramel into ¾-inch-wide strips, and then crosswise into ¾-inch pieces.
4. When the caramels are completely cool, wrap them individually in wax paper, or layer in parchment paper in an airtight container. Store in a cool, dry place for up to 1 month. Makes about 100 pieces.
BACK STORY: In 1881, when this recipe ran in The Times, chocolate was a more unusual ingredient than the molasses that sweetens it.
GEAR: A thermometer helps, like the CDN TCG400 Professional Candy and Deep Fry Thermometer, available for $12.99 at Amazon.com.
TWEAKS: Toss in some chopped walnuts at the end of cooking. And while the candy is firming up, sprinkle the top with fleur de sel.
PRECAUTIONS: Making candy may seem a hot and dangerous business, but if you take your time and pay attention, it’s no more precarious than making jam. To be extra safe, wear an oven mitt on your stirring hand.
PEP TALK: Working with candy is all about temperature, and you are in full control. If, when slicing the caramel, it hardens too much, just slip it back into the baking dish and into a 200-degree oven to soften.
STORAGE: The best way to store caramels is in single layers between sheets of parchment or wax paper in a tin with a tight-fitting lid.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14food-t-000.html
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