I ate about half a jar of this in a day... is that bad?

Forget ganache. Forget praline. Forget flower, herb, and tea infusions. I’ve discovered the next big thing in chocolate fillings: speculoos cream. Speculoos are a French and Belgian specialty cookie sort of like gingerbread. They’re spice-based and very crunchy, best dipped in coffee during those long cold winters. A few years ago a French company famous for their spéculoos cookies came out with a “spéculoos cream” meant to be spread on bread much like Nutella, though I eat mine by the fingerful (why let spoons get in the way between deliciousness and my mouth?).

I have to admit, I spend an embarrassing amount of money on gourmet chocolate truffles, but sometimes I need to gorge myself on large amounts of high-sugar and high-fat lower-quality chocolates. I adore the delicate tea-scented fillings, and there’s nothing I like more than a smooth gianduja made with properly roasted hazelnuts and a dark, bold chocolate. The chili trend à la ancienne is, um, interesting, and other spices aren’t very popular, but they do exist. Speculoos fillings would probably fall under the “spice” category, but really they’re a little more complicated. The jar lists whole cookies as the primary ingredient,  meaning that the paste actually contains cooked butter, eggs, oil, flour, baking soda, sugar, and other cookie things along with plain old spices. The cookies have been ground into a smooth paste, and extra added oils make the spread rich and creamy – enough that no one would notice the mouth feel when spread onto a piece of baguette. In a chocolate, however, the roughness would become apparent to the trained tongue.

This is when the “cheap and plentiful” aspect comes in. I would gladly eat a box of these chocolates filled with speculoos paste directly from the jar, and anyone who knows me also knows that’s a pretty good endorsement. It’s the same idea as peanut-butter cups, but higher-quality. The professional chocolatier can easily make his own filling just as he might his own peanut butter (though sadly few artisan chocolatiers actually make peanut-butter chocolates). More finely-ground flour and spices, less and smaller sugar grains, a swirl of chocolate, and his custom speculoos spice mix can take care of the texture problem and improve flavor. If all else fails, adding crunchy speculoos crumbs will make sure that people chew the truffles which will help to mask the roughness a little and add a pleasant surprise.

Are you reading this, chocolatiers? If you make some, I’ll gladly test your samples!

Sometimes 5th grade-level math is hard.

Starting this week, I will take orders for custom candy! I will make whatever you’d like. If interested, please leave a comment, email me at wingedscones@gmail.com, or call me at (650)-787-4862 so we can design your order. Candies will be made from scratch, fresh, with the highest quality ingredients available to me. This means no artificial flavorings ever! Organic upon request. Most candies are vegan…unless you request candied bacon (which I can make!).

As a rough guideline, the price is $10.00 for one pound or $6.00 for a half-pound for most candies, but this price is negotiable depending on the type of candy you had in mind, since some are much easier to make than others, and possible shipping costs. It’s actually a pretty good deal, considering that the most recent high-fructose-corn-syrup-based candy bar I bought was $7.00 a pound (it had more HFCS than it did chocolate!). And, honestly, a pound is a lot of candy.

Help me help you make your life a little bit sweeter! I have some suggestions below:

1. These are my personal favorites! See post here.

2. I can make a variety of flavored hard candies and lollipops. I suggest sour plum, jujube, tea, sesame, and almost any type of spice or herb. Rosemary is pretty good, but then again I like rosemary on pretty much anything.

3. Barley candy is my specialty, and you won’t be able to find it anywhere else. Try something new and unique! See my posts here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

4. For an artistic experience as well, try something crazy! Wouldn’t something like this look cool in your living room?

Despite being the biggest corn producer in the world, somehow America never seemed to have gotten the concept of corn as everyday flavoring. Instead, even our most basic everyday flavorings rely on relatively exotic ingredients like cacao and vanilla bean, both of which we need to source thousands of miles from tropical countries in order to meet our demands. Corn is not only dirt cheap, locally-grown (for many of us), and high in fiber, but actually has great flavor, which many people don’t seem to recognize. The Chinese, as the second-largest corn producers, seemed to be tuned in to this magical little plant. Corn is everywhere: it’s sold by the cob as snacks, marketed in fancy “Western-styled” dishes, juiced to quench summer cravings, and made into every kind of dessert imaginable. Part of this might be due to increased varieties of corn sold in common grocery stores. The Chinese seem to prefer heartier varieties over America’s super-sweet varieties. Although not as sweet and delicate, common Chinese corn has better flavor, but is tougher. I’m especially fond of glutinous corn.

Corn ice cream! It’s a large tube of corn-flavored ice cream on a stick covered by a crepe-like layer imprinted and shaped to look like corn. And yes, it’s supposed to look like corn and not certain other guilty pleasures (after all, it was made for children!).

Corn candy! From left to right: buttered corn hard candy, clear corn gummy, opaque corn gummy. Although these three are artificially flavored (like the majority of other hard candies), they replicate the corn taste rather well. The butter corn is the best with its more intense sweetness, delicious buttery flavor with a hint of salt, and a lack of complexity that instantly brings to mind “pure”. The clear gummy runs a close second, but perhaps falls behind due to my personal preferences. I prefer my gummies slightly chewy, but this one cleaved into pieces like firm jello. It lacks the creamy butteriness of the first candy while adding an obvious gelatin flavor. However, because it’s a soft candy, it fills the entire mouth with not only flavor, but also substance. The opaque gummy falls into third place for its rough sugar coating, strange salty sensation, and inferior flavoring that tastes too strongly of chemicals. This one was a little disturbing compared to the others.

Corn juice! It’s better freshly-squeezed (cut off kernels, run through juicing machine), but at least the boxes are portable. It tastes like concentrated corn – sort of refreshing, sort of filling, sort of sweet, and sort of nutritious. Oh, and putting pretty women on packaging is very popular among advertising firms in China, especially when the women take up a fourth or more of the total surface area of the package. They do all seem to be rather un-scandalously dressed, though.

Also of note: I will be taking custom orders for homemade candy for the first week of April upon request! There will be more details in the next post, but if you think you’re interested, please email wingedscones@gmail.com . I still need to work out the details. You’ll get to decide what I make!

No, trees don’t really have ears, silly! Wood ears, or 木耳 (mù ěr) are an edible type of fungi (like mushrooms) that grow on tree trunks. Large, mildly translucent, and brown, the slices curl and fold as they grow so that they resemble the pinnae of human ears (this picture is a great example). Although certain places sell them fresh, they’re usually bought dried and rehydrated by soaking in water. This is especially true for the more expensive white/colorless kind called 银耳 (aka yín ěr, or silver ear). The more delicate white ears are generally used in desserts while the brown ears, which stand up better to stirring and high heat, are sautéed for savory dishes.

Perhaps they’re also named “ears” because in the mouth they feel similar to pigs’ ears, which is another common Chinese dish. Vegan pig ears, if you will, enjoyed as a staple food of mountain monks and nuns sworn to vegetarianism.  Sort of like tofurky but better. Unlike most other fungi, vegetables, fruits, and roots, they retain their slight crunchiness even when cooked, but they’re not quite as crunchy as the thin layer of cartilage in pig ears and certainly not as crunchy as raw carrot. They’re just resilient enough to increase chewability time, but not so resilient that you’ll feel the shards scratching your esophagus the entire way down. Needless to say, like most foods, the tender young ones are better. Silver ears, and less so for wood ears, also possess a firm jelly-like quality that makes them softer and a little slippery.

The brown wood ears have a mild but distinctive flavor that takes either a bit of focus or a lot of experience to taste. They taste clouded – not in the “mist and fog” sense, but in the “ominous cumulonimbus” sense. Strong flavor pairings easily cover the wood ears’ flavor, but this isn’t to say that it isn’t done, since chefs often add them for the texture alone. I tend toward the minimalist side, so the dish above contains only napa cabbage, thin pork slices, salt, and oil in addition to the wood ears. If you’d like to make this yourself*:

1. Heat neutral-flavored oil in pan on high heat. This means no butter! Lard would be more authentic, but I doubt you’re going to use it. I didn’t either.
2. Add pork slices and sauté until almost cooked. Vegans/vegetarians may omit pork, but I don’t recommend substituting tofu because it will fall apart if added at this step. I suggest trying a moderately flavorful vegetable instead, like jalapenos. (Deseed them if you must…although I discourage deseeding anything in general, I wouldn’t want you to make a trip to the hospital!)
3. Add pre-washed and pre-cut napa cabbage.
4. Add pre-washed wood ear. Try to choose tender pieces and wash well! Sandy food is never pleasant. Unless they’re sablés, of course!
5. You should have at minimum enough oil in the pan to coat everything with a shiny layer. More is better, but less healthy. As a compromise, you can add more oil while cooking, but pour out the excess oil then quickly drain the food in a handheld strainer before plating.
6. Sautée just until everything is cooked. Add salt. Mix well.
7. Turn off heat and serve as soon as possible.

*Note: Keep in mind that stir-fried Chinese food is meant to be cooked quickly at very high temperature. The recommended excess oil in step 5 greatly facilitates this, but isn’t necessary. Also, I didn’t include measurements because I have strong faith in your ability to judge your personal tastes, but in case you doubt your own ability, you can find a more satisfying explanation of my decision in the second paragraph of this post.

The process of becoming a connoisseur is an initiation process into an exclusive club founded on a shared knowledge and love of certain objects or activities. Connoisseurship is really an international sorority or fraternity, but for adults (usually, anyway). For example, members of yacht clubs may also be rechristianed “sailing connoisseurs”, and country club members may be “lifestyle connoisseurs”, which, in principle, is no different from “art connoisseurs” or “food connoisseurs”.

This isn’t to say that all self-defined foodies, gastronomes, and gourmets are snobs who need to be pushed off of their high-horse at the top of the food pyramid. That little “sugars and fats” triangle at the top is there for a reason and serves its function when kept to a minimum. Without people to define for us “good food” and “bad food”, how will we know what to eat and what to avoid among the myriad of epicurial choices?

My recommendation: Eat. Make use of others’ knowledge. Spread your knowledge. Aid, suggest, recommend, but do not preach. Do not look down upon others’ choices. Respect. Add friends.

You might have wondered at one point where I get my knowledge of food and confectionary. I’ll let you in on a secret: I was born with it because I’m magical. No, everyone has to work for their knowledge, though some might be fortunate enough to have been born into a culture where food knowledge is just as widespread as knowledge about, say, how to drive. Fortunately, I fall into the latter category. Although my mother’s favorite dish is boiled noodles with soy sauce (Literally. She boils dried noodles and adds soy sauce. Sometime she adds vinegar.), she encourages me to look though recipe books and tells me about Chinese ingredients. My grandmother is a wealth of information for Chinese foods made the traditional way – you know, the recipes passed down orally which have about a hundred and thirty separate steps and include such accurate descriptions like adding “a dash” of this and “a pinch” of that, to be stirred together exactly thirty times counterclockwise under a full moon.

Instructions... with pictures! This is amazing.

Basic confectionary, however, was not part of my childhood. This winter my candy bible was Chocolates and Confections by Peter P. Greweling of the Culinary Institute of America (aka the CIA – so that’s what those guys in suits and sunglasses are up to, huh?). Most books on how to make candy are really just collections of recipes with minimal guidance, which often leaves home chefs wondering why their candy always ends up burnt or why the recipe doesn’t work when they substitute a flavor. Chocolates and Confections is more of a textbook for the aspiring professional, which means that it gives useful information like the purpose of each ingredient in a recipe and why there is exactly that much of it. I like it for its scientific explanations on the molecular level. Plus, I always fall for minimalist layout. It is unbelievably useful. It’s what I turn to when something doesn’t work out correctly, and is my main source of information for learning new techniques. Well-written books are a service to all mankind, and I whole-heartedly thank Mr. Greweling for his contribution!

P.S. I’ve decided to post once a week on Sunday at midnight at the latest. This means that the best time to check my blog is on Monday, though occasionally I might get my posts up earlier. And in case I haven’t said this enough already: thank you for reading!

The most delicious things on earth is probably cold, pure, fresh air. It isn’t very filling, but is every bit as comforting as mac & cheese. Oh how good the first breath off the airplane felt! Now that I’m back in Oberlin and classes start on Monday, there are going to be a few changes to Wingèd Scones. This week I’ll try to translate a few more posts into French, which means that beginning tomorrow, Wingèd Scones will no longer be updated daily. Posts will be once weekly or biweekly (depending on how many people continue to read this blog over the coming weeks), most likely updated on Friday nights or Sunday nights. My posts will feature less Chinese food and more confectionary, but will continue to be a good balance of a bit of everything on my mind. If you’re in or around Oberlin, Ohio, keep an eye out for a powerpoint presentation and tasting session (yes, tasting) in the next few weeks! To tide you over until the next post, you can read the archives, comment on posts (why not ask a question?), try to decipher my horrifyingly grammatically incorrect posts in French, or chat with me via email me at wingedscones@gmail.com

In short, check back next Friday or Sunday night!

At the end of my citrus phase, I had some leftover orange and grapefruit peels, so I made some citrus confit. If you eat a lot of citrus, next time you might want to save the peels you were going to throw away/compost and make some too (it’s incredibly easy!). The semi-candied peels make great toppings for ice cream or yogurt, especially with honey, and the sauce can be mixed into lemonade instead of sugar. They’re also great on their own, though I find them a little strong for my taste. Oh, and I wouldn’t use grapefruit again.

The following is what I would call a recipe, though you might not call it that due to its lack of numbers. I try to not measure ingredients as much as possible, preferring to judge by sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound, in that order. This way, I have a better understanding of the basic principles of cooking, and I can more easily fix each dish the moment I notice something is amiss, whereas if I blindly follow the numbers on a recipe I might not notice anything is wrong until the dish is already on the table and it’s too late to fix anything. Anyway, the recipe:

1. Cut peels into preferred shape and size. Whole peels work, but are harder to manage, while minced peels will yield purée. I prefer finger-sized slices.
2. Blanch peels two or three times, using fresh water each time. Each time involves bringing peels and enough water to cover peels to a boil, simmering for three to five minutes, then pouring out the water. Avoid over-stirring peels to prevent them from breaking into tiny pieces. Similarly, blanch only until the peels lose their bitterness and no more so that the peels don’t become too soft and disintegrate.
3. After blanching, add enough water to cover peels, plus a little more to be boiled off. Measure out  as much sugar as water in volume, but do not add to water yet (e.g. if you added 1 cup of water, then measure out 1 cup sugar and set aside).
4. Fish peels out of water and set aside.
5. Add sugar to water in saucepan. For every two cups of water, add one or two tablespoons of corn syrup. Those who wish to avoid consuming corn syrup may add less if desired, but to be conservative and ensure the prevention of crystallization, you may add more without harm.
6. Bring sugar mixture to boil, then add peels.
7. Simmer uncovered for about an hour, or until peels are translucent.
8. Storage: Let mixture cool, then store peels and syrup together in an air-tight non-reactive container (like a glass or plastic jar) in the refrigerator. If not often opened, this will keep for a week or two, and maybe longer. When in doubt, boil mixture again.

Update: When I said I wouldn’t try this again using grapefruit, I actually meant pomelo. Grapefruit would probably be great.

Site of the First National Congress of the Communist Party (took place in 1921), located in the swank French Concession area. It’s been restored and well-maintained throughout the years.

The sign next to the door notes the significance of this building. When I walked by, a group of French elementary school kids were taking pictures under the sign. They apparently knew a little Mandarin. When the parent/teacher asked someone to read the sign, one little boy read “Zhong gúo blah blah blah dì yi blah blah gúo blah blah dà blah blah blah!” Very cute.  At least the not-blah characters were accurate.