Dulce De Leche Brownies

Dulce de leche is a rather recent discovery for me.  A couple years ago, I helped organize a few international movie nights at work and had the idea to bring in some food from each movie’s country of origin.  For example, I made samosas for the Bollywood movie night.

When it came time to watch the Argentinian film Nine Queens, one of my favorite movies, I turned to the advice of my friend from Buenos Aires because I had no clue what the cuisine of Argentina was like.  She suggested I make alfajores de dulce de leche: a sandwich cookie with dulce de leche in the middle.  I was hooked on dulce de leche from that point on and frequently found myself eating it straight up by the spoonful.  Simply describing it as “caramel” doesn’t really do it justice.

The first time I made dulce de leche, I used the stovetop method of simmering a can of sweetened condensed milk for a few hours.  This method works fine, but now that I have a sous vide setup, I thought I’d try it that way and hold it in a 185 F water bath for about 14 hours.  As a side note, I would not recommend the microwave method of making dulce de leche unless time is an issue.  It’s too much trouble compared to the simmer-in-a-can method.

Recently, I’ve been making chocolates and chocolate pastries featuring dulce de leche.  The rich and creamy caramel-like flavor of dulce de leche (as I said before, not doing it justice) goes nicely with the bitterness of chocolate.  The brownie recipe I’ve been tinkering with is from Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home and I found the recipe’s method of preparing the butter interesting.  Not only does it call for a artery-clogging 3 sticks of butter, but it calls for melting half the butter and using that to melt the other half.  This results in a very creamy emulsion that I’ve never seen before with butter.

As for the dulce de leche, I portioned out 100 grams of the confection and popped it in the freezer to harden so I could chop it up into small, even chunks and add it to the batter.  This probably wasn’t the best idea as the distribution of the dulce de leche didn’t turn out very well and I ended up just scooping dulce de leche onto the finished brownies.

Instead of using a traditional baking vessel, I decided to use a silicone mold that I originally bought for making chocolates.  Incidentally, the mold is actually marketed as a brownie mold.  The mold worked well enough and helped each square develop a nice texture on the top edge much like the rim on a muffin top.  Brownies with a muffin top rim?  I’ll take it.

Another success was serving the brownies with a side of crispy homemade pancetta.  Alternating between sweet and salty extended the addictiveness of an already crack-like dessert, and I’m a big fan of a little saltiness with my sweets to balance things out.

Dulce De Leche

Mise En Place

• One 14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk, label removed

Method

1. Submerse the can completely in a pot and simmer (do not boil) for 3-4 hours.  A longer simmering time results in a thicker dulce de leche.  Alternatively, submerse the can in a 185 F water bath for about 14 hours.
2. Cool for about 15 minutes.  At this point, the dulce de leche will be like a thick sauce and be used as such if desired.
3. Refrigerate.  It will harden as it cools.

Brownies

Via Ad Hoc at Home

My Own Candy Bar: beng-beng

I recently purchased a Playstation 3 in order to play Modern Warfare 2 with some of my coworkers.  One of my coworkers suggested my online name should be KissKissBengBeng, which I thought was golden.  To my chagrin, KissKissBengBeng was already taken as was BengBeng, beng-beng, and beng--beng.  I ended up settling for beng---beng (that’s with 3 hyphens).

Then, a couple weeks ago I randomly googled “beng-beng” and came across what may be the most awesomely named candy ever.  From the description on the website that I ordered from, “Beng Beng is Indonesian famous chocolate covered wafer snack with delicious caramel and cream filling.  Crispy and delightful snack bar with Double Chocolate & Double Caramel.”  How could I not buy some considering the name and broken English (borderline Engrish) in the description? 

Tootsie Rolls

The Tootsie Rolls always intrigued me as a kid.  I always pondered whether it was a chocolate that was somehow made into a taffy-like chew or whether it was a taffy-like chew that had chocolate flavoring.  Also, I could never quite put my finger on what it was that gave it that classic Tootsie Roll zing in the flavor.

Now I enjoy chocolate as much as the next person, but sometimes I really hate having that chocolatey bitterness linger on my palate for a long time.  If I were to be captured by terrorists, one of the worst forms of torture they could put me through would be to feed me a bunch of dark chocolate and not allow me to drink a glass of milk after.  It’s not quite as bad as feeding me raw celery, though.

But this is where Tootsie Rolls appeal to me so well.  The chocolate flavor isn’t very intense at all and the zinginess helps balance things out, which explains why at times I thought it was a taffy-like chew that had chocolate flavoring.

Well recently I got the answer to both what a Tootsie Roll is and what gives it its zing.  Turns out a Tootsie Roll is indeed chocolate but mixed with corn syrup.  That zing?  Orange extract.  The process of making them was relatively easy: melt chocolate, mix in corn syrup and orange extract, spread out to harden (by the way, parchment paper is my new secret crush), cut, and roll.  One peculiar note about the recipe I found was that it called for the chocolate to be cooled overnight at room temperature.  I’m not sure if speeding up the cooling process by putting the chocolate in the fridge would have altered the final product.

Rolling the chocolate was a tad annoying.  The chocolate had stiffened up pretty good overnight, and squishing the blocks I cut length-wise to get the roll started proved to be harder than I thought.  Sometimes it felt like trying to fold a piece of paper in half more than seven times.  Not to mention that the heat of my hands would make the chocolate slippery while folding the block or shaping the roll and the roll would fly out of my hands from time to time.

I did have some lemons laying around, and I thought it might be nice to incorporate some fresh zest into a batch of the rolls to compliment the orange extract and make it extra zingy.  Unfortunately time was not on my side as I rolled the rolls in the morning on a weekday and I didn’t want to miss my train to work.  The next time I make Tootsie Rolls, I definitely want to incorporate some fresh ingredients.