On Sunday, I woke up at 3:30 in the morning and thought,
“Perfect! I can make beignets.” The Old N’Awlins powdered-sugar
doughnut squares (or triangles) are a family brunch favorite. Gotta
eat ‘em hot, too, right from the pan.
Breads require advance notice in order to rise twice, thus do
bakers rise early. I had to shop. The recipe for beignets calls
for:
Flour, 2 and a half cups
Milk, 1 cup, heated but not hot
Oil, one quarter cup
Sugar, one quarter cup
Yeast, 2 T.
Cream of Tartar, 1 T.
Egg, 1
Nutmeg, 1 t.
Salt, pinch
FOR PUFFIER BEIGNETS, the usual recipe includes baking soda
and/or powder; I can’t eat them on a dialysis diet, so I leave them
out. Use a tablespoon of soda and/or a teaspoon of powder if you
like. I recently used up the last of my fresh nutmegs, which have
to be ground or grated. Grate till it smells right; grated fresh
nutmeg is much stronger than packaged powder, so you’ll need less
than a teaspoon. It really adds a zing and is absolutely worth the
trouble.
I knew we were out of eggs, for one; that the boys needed milk,
for two; and that we appeared to have a backup bag of flour. So out
I dashed for two stops at all-night merchants: Dunkin’ Donuts (for
a fresh cinnamon doughnut) and Shop n Shop (hey, their
orthography). I bought, besides some extra groceries, the needed
milk and eggs, returned home, and started to put together the
beignet dough…
And discovered at the very last that the backup bag of flour was
whole wheat. If there had been no white flour at all, I would have
had to go out again right away. An all-whole wheat dough would have
been impossibly dense, downright unpalatable without jacking up the
yeast, the soda, and the baking powder, which I could not do. In
the mixer, all-wheat dough would just stick and stick and stick and
stick. Fried in hot oil, the beignets would have burned before they
cooked through.
As it was, I used all the available white (about two thirds of a
cup) and just enough wheat to make the batter pull away from the
mixer bowl.
THAT BEIGNET RECIPE FOLLOWS the standard ratio for dry vs. wet
ingredients (i.e., flour vs. milk plus egg plus oil) in yeasted
baked goods. “Regular” bread would be 2.8 to 1; the beignets, a
bread but slightly wetter for frying, come in at 5 to 3. In a
continuum, the ratios run from a low 1 to 1 for pancakes and
waffles, to 2 to 1 for muffins and batter breads, up to 3 to 1 for
Italian or French baguettes.
It also follows a mnemonic I invented for making sure all the
ingredients go in, a necessity for a fast ad-lib cook like me. The
mnemonic, SOY sweetwater, reminds me to put in Salt, Oil (or other
shortening or butter), and Yeast (or other rising agent).
“Sweetwater” means any sweetened liquid.
I came to these discoveries 30 years ago when I was on dialysis
for the first time. I had moved in with my mother and her
boyfriend, a jovial American Indian named Skip. We lived in a
double-wide mobile home overlooking the Pacific, cheap housing in
an expensive Southern California town. Social Security’s SSI
program paid me $250 a month. The program did not allow any
on-the-books work.
So I got up at about 4, listened to Ken & Bob on WABC, and
baked, in four shifts of the oven, 14 loaves of bread: Six of
Swedish rye and eight of whole wheat (on a base of coffee, honey,
and minced lemon peel). I tried hard to avoid noise, kept the
banging to a minimum and the radio low, and mixed the batter by
hand in a giant steel bowl with two carved wooden cooking sticks in
a two-handed motion that made the bowl spin on the formica counter.
Then I kneaded it by hand, which gave me an intimate knowledge of
flours and dough and the characteristics of bread.
Mom and Skip always said they occasionally woke up and went back
to sleep, but it was worth it to rise in a home filled with the
smell of fresh bread. At about nine, I’d pack up all the loaves but
one, if we needed one at home, and drove around West L.A. in my old
Volkswagen until I had sold them all for two dollars apiece. Four
times a week, make that about a hundred extra bucks, old Volkswagen
with gas at 89 cents, a pack of Pall Malls, free rent, and I was
happy.
I LIVED WITH LOVING GOOD SPORTS THEN, and I live with loving good
sports today. As I told my wife yesterday, “You are married to an
odd old duck.” She agreed, and she loves me still. Thirty years on,
please hold the moral pronouncements, Mom and Skip are still an
unmarried item. They still recall that great bread.
To duplicate the Swedish rye today, for example, from a recipe I
devised and adapted and never wrote down, I would have to buy some
rye flour (it took all three kinds, white, rye, and whole wheat),
and have buttermilk, beer, and dill always on hand. Then I would
have to experiment with proportions, reducing my original recipe to
a single loaf. The only thing I can remember is that I started with
equal amounts of buttermilk and beer, and that that amount was
dictated by the convenience of using a whole 12 ounce can of beer.
So take 2.8 to 1 and multiply out starting from 24 ounces.
THOSE BEIGNETS? I took an experienced baker’s precautions. When I
mixed the initial batter, I started with half my 2/3 cup of white
flour, then added whole wheat very sparingly. As I saw the dough in
the mixer begin to pull and form the characteristic strings and
tears that signal completion, I stopped adding the whole wheat.
(You could, at this point, just put in more whole wheat endlessly;
it’s like that.)
Last step, add the remaining white flour till the dough truly
pulls away from the bowl, and drip in a little oil to coat. The
remaining finished dough was wetter than usual, and I did have to
go out again to buy white flour to use for the second rise
squash-down and rollout.
Then I heated oil in a pan to the verge of smoking, turned the
flame way down, and cooked two beignets to experiment. At the point
where they were on the verge of scorching, I took them out, drained
them, and sprinkled them with powdered sugar. Before cooking any
more, I tasted them to make sure they were cooked through. They
were, so I cooked the rest at a lower temperature, to a glazed
brown.
Verdict: Superb. Crunchy, rich, even tastier than usual. I’ll
probably use whole wheat flour in beignets again. Just not as
much.
