Cook's Country

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- I think I'm home I think I'm home How nice to look at you again Along the road Along the road Anytime you want me You can find me living right between your eyes, yeah Oh, I think I'm home Oh, I think I'm home -Today on "Cook's Country", Julia and Bridget revive a traditional recipe for Wellesley fudge cake, Adam reveals his top pick for immersion blenders, and Bryan makes Bridget a Southern specialty, chicken and pastry. That's all right here on "Cook's Country". -About 100 years ago at Wellesley, the women's college of Massachusetts, chocolate fudge was considered serious contraband on campus. -The college's founder, Henry Fowle Durant, held strict dietary beliefs, and the students were expected to stick to plain food and avoid sweets. -In fact, he claimed that, "Pies, lies, and doughnuts should never have a place in Wellesley College." -And the students, well, they reacted as students do, and they rebelled by holding secret fudge-making parties in their dorm rooms. -It wasn't long before local tea rooms began aiding the rebellion by making cakes for the students with a fudge-based frosting. -It's called a Wellesley fudge cake, and today, we're going to show you how to make it. So, I live in the town right next to Wellesley, and even today, you can still find the Wellesley fudge cake on menus around town. -And I love recipes like this where you do a little bit of digging out there. You do a little bit of research, and you find older recipes that really need to be brought back and spotlighted. -Plus it feels a little rebellious, and that's fun. -We're such rebels. -Rebel cake. -Rebel cake, yes, that's what we should call it. Now, one of the things when you look for recipes is you find ingredients that maybe aren't as prevalent today, and the first one that we found was thick soured milk. -Gesundheit. I've never heard of it. -Well, they had to do something with milk that went off really quickly, and it was called soured milk. Well, today, we have buttermilk. -Mm-hmm. -This is a very soft cake, and the acid in the buttermilk is going to help with that texture. All right. -Makes sense. -Now, another ingredient that we looked at and we changed was pastry flour. -Mm-hmm. -Now, that's still around today, but it's a very low-gluten flour, doesn't give a lot of structure. One of the problems that we had with this cake was frosting it. -Right. -It's a fudge frosting. -Mm-hmm. -So it'd tear the cakes. So this is is 2 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour. We're going to mix together our dry ingredients. We're using two leaveners here. This is 1 teaspoon of baking powder and then 2 teaspoons of baking soda, and this is going to react with the acidic buttermilk to help provide lift. This is 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Mix this together, standard operating procedure so far. Let's get to the chocolate. This is 1/2 cup of Dutch processed cocoa. Now, we want to draw out its flavor, so we're going to bloom it with 3/4 cup of hot water. -And that's a good idea to do whenever you're working with cocoa. Bloom it in hot water, and you'll get more flavor out of it. -We're also going to mix in a little bit of vanilla here. This is 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract. And I'll stir this with my whisk until the cocoa is dissolved. -Let's get mixing here. -Okay. We're going to start with creaming the butter and sugar. This is two sticks, or 16 tablespoons, of unsalted butter. We softened it just a little bit. We're going to mix in 2 cups of granulated sugar. This is an old-fashioned recipe. It's supposed to be on the sweeter side. Start it on low, and then move it on up to medium-high until it gets fluffy and creamy. That's going to take about three minutes. Fluffy butter and sugar, can't get much better than that. -And this is a really important step when making a cake. You don't want to skimp on the time, or else you'll ruin the texture of the cake. -Now we're going to work in two eggs. I'm going to add them one at a time on off. There we go. Start it on low, and then work it back up to medium-high just to incorporate. All right. That one is mostly worked in. Let's get the other one in there. All right. That looks good. So now we're going to start adding the flour in three additions and the buttermilk in two -- don't want to dump it all in there. You end up with big pockets of unmixed flour. -Mm-hmm, and lumps. -And lumps. It's Armageddon. So, I'm going to start with the mixer off with about one-third of this flour mixture. Let's start this on low just until it's incorporated in. All right. That looks good. It's just mixed in. I'm going to add half of the buttermilk, and that would be 1/2 cup. Mix this on low just until incorporated. All right. Half of the remaining flour. -And you're being very careful not to overwork that batter. -Yes. You don't want to deflate it too much, and you don't want to activate the gluten in the flour too much. So now the remaining buttermilk......and this final addition of flour, and now I just want to get it until it's all brought together, and that's about it. I do want to scrape down the sides of that bowl, and then we're going to add the cocoa gradually, and then we'll mix it until it's combined. That's only going to take about a minute. That is coming together nicely. -Mmm. -All right. And I like to give it a final stir really just to make sure that any of those hidden pockets that sometimes live on the bottom... -The divot on the bottom always catches a little batter. -All right. So now let's go ahead and pour some of this into our pans... -Mmm. -...which are not circular. -They are not round. -And as you know, Wellesley fudge cake is made in square pans. -Mm-hmm. -This is traditional. These are 8-inch square pans that we've gone ahead and greased with a little bit of the vegetable-oil cooking spray that has flour in it, but if you don't have that, you can grease it and then flour the pans. That will work out fine. Little final rap. -That's just to get any air bubbles out from underneath the bottom of the batter. -Exactly. So these are going to bake at 350, and I'm going to keep them in there for about half an hour, but what I'm going to look for is a toothpick inserted in the center of the cakes comes out clean. All right. -Mmm. -Smells amazing. -It sure does. -All right. One cake, two. All right. Let's check these for doneness. Take my toothpick, stick it right in the center, and a few crumbs should stick to that toothpick, and that looks great. These have to cool in their pans completely, and that's going to take at least an hour. If you want to be sure, leave more time, but you can actually make these a couple days in advance if you want to. They're pretty moist, and they will stay nice and fresh. -Ooh. -Okay? So let's move on down to the frosting. -Mm-hmm. Fudge frosting. -Fudge frosting, and we're making real fudge frosting. Fudge-making with evaporated milk became popular in 1950s for a good reason -- because it doesn't split. It's already been processed and heated. A lot of the liquid is already gone, so we don't have to cook it as long. So this is 1/2 cup of evaporated milk, 1 1/2 cups of light brown sugar, and it's already a little bit moist, so it's not going to crystallize the way granulated sugar can, and also, it's going to give a deeper flavor to our frosting. -Almost butterscotch-y. -Almost butterscotch-y. This is 4 tablespoons of unsalted butter and a little bit of salt, 1/2 teaspoon. Now, we're going to cook this over medium. There we go. I'm going to keep an eye on it and stir it. The magic temperature for this is going to be between 235 to 238. Now, it's been about four, five minutes, and you can see that beautiful color, but I do want to check the temp because, again, we're looking for around 235. Up to 238 will be great. Anything within there is going to give us exactly what we need in terms of temp. 236. -Mm-hmm. -So now we want to stop that cooking as soon as possible, so I'll transfer it to a stand mixer. -So this cold bowl will help cool down the mixture. -That's right, but you don't want to chill a glass bowl and then pour it into there, so just room-temperature bowl is perfect. We're going to chill it down even more with 4 tablespoons more of our unsalted butter and another 1/2 cup of evaporated milk. So let's move this over to our stand mixer. We're going to let this go on low for about 30 seconds until the butter and the milk is fully incorporated. Let's turn that off now. We're going to let it cool down for about 10, maybe 15 minutes, looking for a temperature around 130. All right. It's been about 15 minutes. I'm going to check the temp because we cannot move on until it's 130. That's good. All right. Good because, again, if it was too hot, the chocolate would start to separate. Speaking of, let me tilt this up. We're going to add our chocolate, and this is 8 ounces of bittersweet chocolate that we've chopped. -Mmm. -It's real. I've tasted it. That goes in, a little vanilla. So a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Now, we're going to mix this on low just until the chocolate is fully melted. It's going to take about a minute. So that is looking beautiful, all mixed in. All right. So now we want to turn this into a frosting, and this is 3 cups of confectioners' sugar, good old 10X, as we call it, goes right in there. -All at once? -All at once. You see why I didn't add it while it was attached to the machine. I still managed, I think, to get some... -Minimal amount on the counter. -Oh, good. Good. All right. So we're going to mix this on low for about three minutes. We want all of that sugar to be incorporated, and so I'll probably have to scrape down the bowl a couple of times, but once all the sugar is mixed in there, we're going to let this cool down even more, so we're going to wait until it's 80 degrees. That's going to take a good hour. All right, Julia. Now, after an hour, take a look at what the frosting looks like. -Wow. It really got a crust on top. -It did. You can touch it. It's okay. -It's hard. -It's real fudge. -Yeah. -You could actually have poured this into a pan, cut it into squares, and given it to me for Christmas, but we're going to turn this into a frosting, so let me affix the beater back on, now over medium-high for just a minute until it's aerated and it comes back together. Julia, that looks whippy enough. It went from fudge to frosting. So you remember those cakes, right? Going to frost it right on this pedestal. I want to protect it. -Mm-hmm. -Have these little parchment strips. -Yeah. This is a really great tip to help keep your cake platter clean. -All right. So now I do want to scoop out a cup of this frosting... -Mmm. -...to put right on that first layer. Let's scoop it right in the middle, and I'll start working this to the sides of the cake. -Ooh. That frosting looks nice to work with. -It's beautiful. You want to give it a swirl? -No. I'm enjoying watching you do it. -All right. Yeah. This is my Zen. You know, some people have yoga. -Mm-hmm. -I frost cakes. Now, we don't need this to be too neat, but we want it to be even. Second layer goes on top, and I'm going to take this top part and flip it down so that this nice, flat top is right on top of our cake, and that's what we're going to see. All right. So I like to start -- plop a whole bunch on there. -So you start on the top of the cake. -I do, and that doesn't mean I'm not going to finish on the top, too. I will, but I always like to make sure -- This is what everybody sees, so I like to make sure that I have allotted enough for the top. Now that I have the top mostly covered, I'm going to start slapping some on the sides there. I'm going to start taking that frosting out just a little bit more. See how I let it go over the edge just a little bit, so now as it falls, I'm just catching it right on the corners just like that, and with each pass of a corner, it gets a little bit more covered. Now, here's that big blurb of chocolate frosting. There we go. Now it's fully loaded with frosting. We're going to do a nice design right on the top, just a little swirly back and forth. So I'm going to continue to work on this a little bit more, and then we do want to refrigerate it for at least an hour to make sure that fudge frosting is good and set. -Hard work pays off. -Mm-hmm. I like we have the square cake. You have the square cake platter, and I have square plates at the ready. -Because we're a couple of squares. Well, this is what an hour in the fridge does. You can actually touch it. -Oh, that's some good fudge right there. -It's fudge but a frosting. -I love it. -So I'm going to take a long slicing knife and go right halfway through, and now we start slicing this way because you get all these little ridges right across. There we go. -Mmm. -Look at that. -Look at that. I love it. It tastes like an old-fashioned chocolate cake, and you can taste some of that brown sugar, a little bit of caramel notes in there. -Mm-hmm. That cocoa-y chocolate. There's some smart ladies there at Wellesley College. -So if you want to make a chocolate contraband cake, start by blooming cocoa in hot water. For the cake, use a standard mixing method where you cream butter and sugar, then add the eggs, and finally the dry and wet ingredients in alternating batches. Bake the cake in square pans, and while they cool, make a foolproof fudge frosting, and whip it just before serving. From "Cook's Country", it's no longer a secret -- Wellesley fudge cake. -I'd go back to school for eight years if they served this. -Here at "Cook's Country", we love immersion blenders because it's the easiest way to puree a soup or a sauce right in the pot without making a mess, and Adam is here to tell us which stick blender is worth the money. -You know, another reason that we love immersion blenders is that they're great for small jobs like making a little pesto, making a little bit of whipped cream, making mayonnaise, something like that. Let me just show you what's going on with immersion blenders in general. They're two parts -- the wand with the business end at the bottom, which is where the blade is, and there's a little cover over the blade that allows the food to move around and go back into the blade, and then the top is where the motor is and the handle is. Usually, the controls are there, too. We had an initial lineup of 12 different immersion blenders. -That's a lot. -The price range was $15 up to $130, and the very first test was to make potato soup. -Mm. -This turned into an elimination round. The potato-soup test was like a comedy of errors. -Oh, no. -Yeah. Some of these, the wands fell right off into the pot. Other ones, the wands wouldn't come off at all, so they were horrible to clean. The controls were really uncomfortable, so four of them got eliminated in that round, with the remaining eight testers went on to make pesto, make mayonnaise, make smoothies, and to puree tomatoes. They were looking for good mixing performance. They were looking for them to be comfortable and easy to hold. That was really important because, when you're using an immersion blender, you're usually holding it up, and some of those, like the one you just picked up, what do you think of that sort of handle? -It's awkward. I can't really grasp it hard enough because it's so big. -Testers with smaller hands had a really hard time with that one. Also, it's pretty heavy. -Yeah. It is heavy. -Yeah. Why don't you try this one? -This one? Ooh, that's nice. I get a good grip on it partly because the surface is nice and grip-y, and it's not too heavy. -Exactly. The handle is slimmer. You have that nice nonslip material on the outside, and that one is about a pound and a half, so it was 25% lighter than that heavy one that you just picked up. -Interesting. -Another feature that testers disliked was something like that. Why don't you show that one? See the speed dial? It's right at the top... -Oh, that's awkward. -...on the handle. -It would be much better if it was right here where my pointer finger is. -Yeah. If it's at the top, you need two hands to operate it. If it's right on the handle, you just switch from speed to speed with one finger. -Mm. -It's a lot more streamlined. Now, a lot of these have features like a turbo button, or they have 15 different speeds. Testers actually looked at the speeds with a tachometer, which measures RPMs, or revolutions per minute, and they found, actually, that the RPM differences between a lot of speeds were just minimal. All of that stuff is superfluous. You really don't need it. In the end, this is the one that testers liked the best. This is the Braun Multiquick 5 Hand Blender. It's $59.99. It's one of those that has a really comfortable handle. The buttons are right where you want them to be. It's got two well-calibrated speeds, and it is our new top choice for immersion blenders. -And there you have it. For the ultimate immersion blender, choose the Braun Multiquick 5 Hand Blender at $59.99 with a good handle and just two speeds. -I grew up south of the Mason-Dixon Line, so few cookbooks shaped the way I think about food more than Edna Lewis' "The Taste of Country Cooking". Now, some of Edna Lewis' dishes, well, they were popular all over the South, such as chicken and pastry, and Bryan is here to tell us more about that dish. -That's right. I actually traveled down to Alabama to a little town about 30 miles outside of Montgomery called Grady, Alabama, and I visited a restaurant called Red's Little Schoolhouse. It was actually a little one-room schoolhouse from 1910 to 1960. It's got all the same kind of character as it did in 1910, wide pine floors, checkered tablecloths, all the way down to the chalkboard menu, and this is where I first had chicken and pastry. You're familiar with chicken and dumplings... -Mm-hmm. -...and chicken and slicks. Well, this is kind of in between. These are puffy, delicate noodles, I guess you would say... -Mm-hmm. -...fat noodles. -Fat noodles. -We're going to start off by making the pastry. I have 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour here. To that, we're going to add 2 teaspoons of baking powder. -You did say they're going to be puffy. -It's going to be the culprit right there. 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and this dish has a little bit of a kick of black pepper, so we're going to add 1/2 teaspoon to our pastry. Then we're going to combine 2 tablespoons of melted butter with 1/2 cup of milk, want to just mix that up, and we're just going to add that to our flour mixture, and just stir it until it comes together. It's a very rustic, homey dish. It's one of those dishes in the test kitchen where, after we've been eating all day long, this is the one thing that the cooks still crave, you know? -Yeah. I know. I have stood in line trying to get leftover chicken and pastry. -Okay, so you see the dough is just starting to come together, and we could turn it out onto a lightly floured counter, and just give it a couple of turns until it comes together into a cohesive ball. We want it to have enough structure to roll out to a nice, thin 1/8-inch sheet, but thanks to that baking powder, it's going to cook up nice and fluffy. So we try to roll it out right now, there's so much gluten developed that it would spring back on us, so we want to give this dough a little chance to rest. -Okay. -So we'll set it aside and cover it. You could do this up to a day in advance if you like. Now we could talk about chicken. We've got bone-in chicken thighs, so we want to start off by patting the chicken dry, and then we're just going to season it with pepper. The thing I like about dark-meat chicken is that they hold up really well to a long simmer. There's a lot of nice fat and connective tissue that'll give the stew some body and extra flavor. -Yeah. -Okay. We have a tablespoon of butter we're melting over medium-high heat. We're just going to go ahead and add the chicken skin side down, and we're going to let that go until it's nicely brown to both sides, and that's about five minutes per side. Okay, Bridget. It's been 10 minutes. You can see that we've got the chicken nicely browned on both sides. See all that fond that's developed, all that browning on that skin? That's going to equal a lot of flavor in the stew. -I love it. -So now we're going to add 4 cups of chicken broth, 1 cup of water, and 1/2 rib of celery, and one halved onion, so we're just going to bring this up to a boil, put a lid on it, reduce the heat to low, and let it go for about 25 minutes until the chicken is nice and tender and that broth is really fortified with chicken-y flavor. -Sounds great. -It's been 25 minutes, and that chicken is just cooked through. You can smell how chicken-y that broth is. -Yes. It's pure chicken. -So now we can cut the heat on it, and first, we can discard the onion and the celery because they've done their part. They've given us all they've got, and we can transfer the chicken to a plate. -Oh, the flavor gives off. It's all about the broth, really. -Absolutely. -Yeah. -We'll let that chicken cool down for a few minutes, and now we can turn our attention to the pastry. -All right. -We're going to roll this pastry out into a perfect 12-inch square. So I like to put pressure from the middle of the dough out and rotate the dough. Start in the middle. Start pressing down and push it up. Then come back and put pressure on the middle. Push down. Every now and then, I'll just come back with a bench scraper and square it up a little bit. -All right. -We're going to cut the pastry into little diamonds, and this is something we learned from the Edna Lewis book. Diamonds tend to taste better. -

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-Okay, so I'm just going to mark this dough at 1-inch intervals, going to use my roller as a guide, and I like to use a pizza cutter for this because it's nice and easy and goes pretty quickly, and it's less likely to scratch up your counter or your cutting board. So we're going to turn the ruler about 45 degrees, and we'll space them about 1 inch apart. So, of course, the edge pieces aren't going to be perfect diamonds. -Those are beautiful. -Thanks, Bridget. -I'm impressed. -All right. So I'm just going to put a little flour down and scrape them up. Okay. We brought that broth back to a boil, and we can go ahead and add the pastry now. Give it a little stir to distribute the pastry nice and evenly. You can see they've already begun to start puffing up a little bit. -Sure have. -It's only going to get better from there. We're going to put a lid on this and reduce the heat to low and let that go for 15 minutes to cook that pastry all the way through. -All right. -While that's going on, we can come over here and shred our chicken. Take the skin off and discard it, and then we're just going to peel the chicken off the bone... -All right. -...and shred it into bite-size pieces. All right, Bridget. It's been 15 minutes, and you can see that that pastry is nice and puffed. We're just going to stir our shredded chicken in there to heat through, and during that time, the stew will thicken up just a touch. Okay, Bridget. The chicken has heated through for just a minute or so. I'm going to taste it for seasoning. Going to add a touch of black pepper and a little pinch of salt. Stir that in, and we're ready to eat. -That is it? -That's it. -No garnish? -The garnish is the diamond. I don't know how many times we have to go over the diamond shape. -It's so true! It's so true! Well, I love dishes like this. It's just -- it is what it is. It's chicken and pastry. That's what you said. That's what you called it, and that's what's in the bowls. -Mm, super chicken-y, huh? -And you get a little bit of that onion and the celery. Like, it tastes like a broth that you spent all day making, but it really came together quickly. I just have to say, the pastry is everything. -Yeah. -This thing will feed your belly and feed your soul, and it starts with browning chicken on the stovetop. Then simmer the chicken with onion, celery, and some broth. Set that aside to shred a little bit later on. Then make a quick dough by stirring milk and butter into a mix of flour and baking powder. Then roll out and cut into fancy diamonds. Now, simmer the pastry until tender. Add the shredded chicken back to the pot, and you have a huge, satisfying dinner. So from "Cook's Country", a soul-warming and belly-filling chicken and pastry, and you can get this recipe and all of the recipes from this season, along with tastings, testings, and select episodes on our website. It's cookscountry.com/diamond. -Let us help with dinner tonight. Visit our website any time for access to this season's recipes, taste tests, and equipment ratings, or to watch current-season episodes. Log on to cookscountry.com.

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