FAIL. 6 April 2008 11:28 pm
Posted by Tracy in : America's Test Kitchen, cooking, dessert, food snobbery, kitchen mishaps , trackbackSo I made my first attempt at testing a recipe for America’s Test Kitchen a few hours ago, and ended up feeling like a big loser. Behold the disastrousness:
The recipe was for butterscotch pudding, and I was really excited going in, and it all went sadly south not long after Peter and I had the following mini-conversation:
T: If there’s anything that smells better than butter and brown sugar —
P: It’d probably involve garlic and onions?
T: And I’d still want to rub it all over my body.
So. I’m not allowed to share the recipe (nor would I want to, lest any of you readers suffer my results) but I feel okay venting about the resulting debacle. Here goes!
Problem #1 was the instruction to cook butter and brown sugar until the mixture looked “like molten lava.” I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean — molten lava is red-hot and glowing and scary, and none of those seem to me like particularly good outcomes for dessert. Also maybe I was too slavish in cooking on medium heat as directed, and my stove’s interpretation of medium heat is on the wimpy side, but all my cooking times were way longer than the ones in the recipe. But that’s getting ahead of myself.
The picture shown above is what happened when I stirred cold cream into the butter-sugar caramel. It was a nightmare getting all those clumps of toffee to melt off the whisk, I tell you what. The finished pudding had a strange graininess to its texture, which I think was a result of that seizing up. DOOM!
Back to complaining about the cooking times — I think I must have burned the caramel in the process of waiting for it to look like lava, because the finished pudding had a weird bitterness to it. Also it was way too sweet for my taste (even Peter, who’s an incredibly good sport about eating almost everything I make, had to admit it was gross). I’ve got a messload of pudding left over, but I’m pretty sure I have to throw it out, which is a bummer.
The worst part of all this is I’m really not even sure what went wrong (besides the big clumps of toffee in cream — that was pretty obviously a screwup). I may have been using dark brown sugar instead of the light brown the recipe called for (we buy sugar in bulk, and I’m not sure what kind the dark brown sugar is), but I don’t think that can account for all the weird bitterness. While I haven’t made butterscotch pudding before, I have made sweet sauces with similar ingredients to the butterscotch base of this pudding, and for those I cooked the butter, brown sugar, and cream all at once — I wonder if that approach might have prevented the seizing here? I’m not sure how I’d deal with the ridiculously overpowering sweetness beyond using less sugar, which in turn might mean adjusting the liquids and fats, but that’s okay by me; I almost always favor richness over sweetness.
In conclusion, dang, what a disappointment. I doubt I’ll try that recipe again, but I almost want to make some other kind of non-disgusting pudding now, just to prove I can, but it’s late and I’m mostly just glad I didn’t try anything ambitious for dinner. Instead, we had an old, forgiving standby — brown gack burritos. Yay for not being entirely incompetent!
Comments»
I am generally crap at desserts and baking, but would it have helped to “temper” the cream — stir in a little of the caramel, stir it, add a little more, stir, etc — basically, get the creme and the caramel closer in temperature to avoid seizing the latter? “Until it looks like lava” is a pretty sucky direction, if you ask me….
My instinct is that warming up the cream would have maybe prevented the seizing up of doom, but it was an incomplete recipe or I’m sure there would have been the usual ATK extensive explanation of their methods. When I checked their version of butterscotch pudding in The New Best Recipe, they claimed that warm cream made the caramel seize up, but cold cream didn’t. Weird. Maybe I just added the cream too fast? I do not know. Clearly, I’ve still got something to learn here, but maybe it’s to rely on sticky toffee pudding when I’m in the mood for carameliciousness.