Techniques of F*ing Refinement

Intro

La Croix sparkling water in a can as I catch my breath after yoga and post. The sound of the oven, which has been producing delectables all the live-long day, is my music. The post today is named for Dave, as he is usually the one in the house who combines magic, science, and cookery into something really amazing. True to form, he is currently braising the most exquisite-smelling Korean short ribs. But this post isn't about the short ribs--or any of Dave's cookery. Nope. Today was my day to kick butt and take names in the kitchen as I upped my biscotti game. 

Today I made four kinds--two keto two regular--with four different kinds of dark chocolate--one keto (sugar-free) and three regular ranging from 55% to 72% cocoa --in five batches. I planned to make four batches, but I accidentally doubled one of the ingredients in one of the batches and had to double the batch. But that's okay because it was the regular Stella Parks straight recipe that got doubled, and I already know it's perfect so it served as the control group. The biscotti shown above are (from left to right):

• Regular (almond/anise) with Lily's dark chocolate
• Regular with almond flour and monkfruit sweetener
• Regular with Guittard Extra Dark
• Regular with almond flour and allolose
• Regular with Ghirardelli 72% cocoa 

The basics of biscotti

I mentioned previously that Stella Parks is my baking guru. I wrote about her pie crust recipe, and today I delve into her take on biscotti. First, let me say, I do not like licorice. Anise is similar to licorice. I am not usually attracted to recipes that call for anise. The Stella Park's biscotti recipe is loaded with anise, but the flavor profile is so well-balanced that it works. 

What makes good biscotti? First and foremost, it must be hard. Biscotti is meant to be dipped, and there are few things more disappointing than the tip of the biscotti plopping off into your coffee and sluggishly swimming around dissolving in it. It also has to be sturdy--hold together and not crumble in the tin. Finally, it needs a complex, delicate flavor. An additional requirement for me today--as I made five batches and I only eat a piece a day--is it should have a long shelf-life. Stella Parks recipe has all of those things:

• It is satisfyingly rock-like
• It stays in one, perfect piece when cut
• The blend of vanilla, toasted whole almonds, and chopped anise seeds is sublime
• It has no fat in it so it lasts *forever*

I have made this recipe a few times in past couple of months, and though it requires precision and paying attention, it is not difficult. You toast the almonds, roughly chop them and the anise, mix the chopped bits with the rest of the dry ingredients using the stand mixer, add three cold eggs, and blend until smooth. Then you make a loaf from the dough, roll it out till it is as long as the half-sheet pan you bake it on, and pat it flat until it measures 17" x 4" x 1/2". It is baked in three stages. The first, and half the total baking time is unttil it is puffy and just beginning to brown. At that point you take it out of the oven and let it cool five minutes on the pan and then five minutes more on the cutting board. When is just warm and no longer hot, you cut it into 1/2" slices with a thin serrated knife, and put the slices on their sides and they go back into the oven for 12 minutes on one side and then 12 minutes on the other side, and Bob's your uncle! (That means they're done).

Today's bunch of batches is in preparation for meeting up with some friends in Florida at the end of the week. As some of them are big keto-ers, I decided to play with the recipe a bit and make:

• almond/anise (the regular recipe, two batches)
• pistachio (no anise, otherwise the regular recipe)
• keto almond/anise with almond flour and monk fruit
• keto almond/anise with almond flour and allulose

Adding another variable to the experiment

Chocolates used

Even though the biscotti is perfectly flavored on its own, I also wanted to try tempering chocolate and drizzling it over some f the slices. For those who are not familiar with the term "tempering" (like me before the other day), tempered chocolate is chocolate that has melted and hardened in such a way that it forms just the right crystalline structure. Chocolate, you see, is a six-phase polymorphic crystal because of the cocoa butter in it, and the optimal polymorphic form is Form V, also known as beta-V. "Beta crystals are composed of triglyceride molecules interlocked in a way that makes them most resistant to melting (they have a melting point of about 95 or 96 degrees F and most resistant to physical distortion (this is the reason the chocolate snaps rather than bends and doesn't set when cooled)."  Really. 

Getting it to form into the beta V structure is all about managing the heat, and this is the only time that Stella Parks has let me down. She is old-school, and uses a technique called seeding. Seeding it too loosey-goosey (prone to failure) for me so I used the sous-vide technique detailed in this article by  J. Kenji López-Alt. He wrote The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science (which Dave, of course, has). He is an excellent, knowledgable, engaging writer, and makes the science-y stuff accessible to, well, everyone. In addition to being able to exactly control the temperature changes with the sous vide, another benefit of this method is that there is absolutely no mess and no waste. To do it you vacuum-seal the chocolate, pop it into a sous vide bath at 115 degrees F, after a few minutes (five or so) when it is all melted, drop the temperature to 81 degrees. To drop the temp, you add ice to the sous vide. When it gets down to 80 degrees, set the sous-vide for 90 degrees. As the temperature rises, take the bag(s) of chocolate out every minute oor so and really mash them around to keep the chocolate mixing, and the crystals forming appropriately and evenly. You can then hold the chocolate at 90 degrees until you are ready to use it.

To use it, snip a corner of the vacuum bag like a pastry bag, and drizzle the melted chocolate. When you are done, you just reseal the bag with the vacuum sealer, and the left-over chocolate keeps indefinitely for future melting, re-tempering, and drizzling!

The chocolates I used are:

• Guittard 63% Extra Dark Chocolate Baking Chips
• Guittard Akoma Extra Semisweet Organic 55% Dark Chocolate Baking Chips
• Ghirardelli 72% Cacao Dark Chocolate Premium Baking Chips
• Lily's Dark Chocolate Baking Chips 55% cocoa (sweetened with Stevia)

Labeling

Vacuum-sealed bags of chocolate, labeled

When baking a bunch of different things which end up looking pretty much the same it is wise to label every stage of every batch. To this end, I used a black Sharpie to write the type of biscotti in each batch on the parchment paper. I also numbered the bags of chocolate chips 1-4 and put the corresponding numbers on the vacuum bags after I sealed them. Finally, I have pretty little cellophane bags that I Sharpied on the bottom with the code for the biscotti and the chocolate. Well, that was my INTENT anyway! the reality was pretty much like that, and even where I missed labeling I can tell which is which for the biscotti and most of the chocolate.

Results - biscotti

Pistachio is a wonderful flavor, but just pistachio with no spice counterpoint is not as orally exciting as almond and anise. It made an adequate biscotti, not a brilliant one. Next time I need to find a spice for it...

Almond flour doers not make biscotti. What it makes is closer to a coarse shortbread. It is also MUCH harder to handle as almond flour does not have the structural integrity of wheat flour (i.e., gliuten) so the pieces were prone to crumbling and breaking as they were cut and flipped for baking. The almond flour is richer and sweeter than wheat flour, and chock full of oil--something missing from regular wheat-flour biscotti. The oil also makes it a bit softer and not as dry. I would guess it is also less shelf-stable thanks to the oil. If I want biscotti, I prefer the wheat version. However, if I were gluten-sensitive or on keto, the almond-flour version (made with Stella Park's recipe substituting almond flour for all-purpose flour 1:1 and dusting the rolling surface with almond flour too) is not bad.  

As for sweeteners, I had high hopes for monk fruit as it does not raise your glycemic level, has anti-inflammatory properties, is all natural, and has no calories. It is also 200 times sweeter than sugar. In spite of the disparity in sweetness, different brands of monkfruit sweetener recommend different ratios for substitution for sugar. I used HEB's brand which recommends 1:1, and it was both too sweet and had a weird sweetener flavor that I don't really like. Again, if I couldn't have sugar, the monkfruit version was good enough. It just wasn't great.

On the other hand, the biscotti made with the allulose sugar substitute (Swerve) had a less noticeable taste and adequate sweetness. It is also used 1:1 for sugar. Allulose is another naturally occurring sugar that is 70% as sweet as sugar, does not raise blood sugar, does not cause tooth decay, and is almost calorie free. The biggest downsides to allulose are the price (it is WAY expensive) and that excessive consumption can cause gassiness and bloating. 

I might experiment a little more, but my inclination now is to use allullose whenever I can't use sugar.

Results - chocolate

Wow is this turning into a long post! 

Okay, all chocolate does not melt the same. There seems to be a correlation between flow of the chocolate and the percentage of cocoa. (Interesting note: For something to be called chocolate in the US, it must contain 100% cocoa butter and not any less expensive fat like coconut or palm oil). The Ghirardelli was runny like chocolate syrup and slightly melted into the sides of the biscotti. The Lily's dark and the Guittard dark (both at 55%) were very stiff and kept their shape, just resting on surface of the biscotti slices. The Guittard Akoma (63% and the first one I used) was almost as stiff as the 55% ones. Next time I use them, I think I will up the temperature a bit for the lower % cocoa chocolates to see if they will flow better.

For taste and appearance, all were delicious and glossy with a good snap to them.

Conclusion

I have experimented enough with keto biscotti. I am going to stick with all-purpose flour and sugar, and make keto batches upon request for friends. My next forays will be into spice-nut combinations: 

• pecan/brown sugar, molasses, cinnamon
• walnut/nutmeg, clove
• pistachio/chai spice
• cashews/pumpkin pie spice (cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice, cloves)

As for the chocolate, as easy as it is, I'll do it--but only for half the batch: There is nothing like the pure flavor of the biscotti dipped in coffee to make my morning perfect!