This weekend was suppose to produce at least one successful recipe out of my trials, either from the Honey and Sichuan Pepper cake or the Limu Omani Brown Butter Cookies, but nope it wasn’t to be.
Over the period I’ve been posting recipes I forget how many kilos eggs, butter, sugar, flour, fruit, chocolate I’ve wasted developing recipes but that’s what happens. Sometimes the failures are edible and other times like these two they go straight into the bin.
The cake was the most successful out of the two, the flavour was good, it had that lovely lemony tangy fragrance of the Sichuan pepper as if you had put your nose in the pepper jar. The major problem is the texture, it’s too dry which is very easy to correct but the other less solvable problem is the grit texture the pepper gives. I blended the Sichuan peppers as much as possible and sieved it into a powder form but you still could taste a slight grittiness when chewing the crumb. No one wants sand-like grains in a cake.
The cookies were just wrong, the flavour wasn’t there, the infusion of the dried limes didn’t translate through into the brown butter and worst of it was the cement-like texture the brown butter produced.
The Honey and Sichuan Pepper Cake
I tried grinding the peppers two ways, one was to slightly warm them first in a dry pan.
That produced a pretty good powder that needed sieving. The heat made the berries lose their edge, that freshness, not surprising really since that’s what heat does. You can read about the loss of volatile oils in my post Don’t Dry Roast Spices.
I tried grinding raw but couldn’t get a satisfactory powder, eventually I added a tablespoon of sugar which did the trick.
After sieving with an ultra fine mini sieve I had what felt like a white fragrant powder.
Adding this powder to the cake produced the taste effect I was after…
…but not the crumb texture.
I need to sit on this one for a while and come back to it as it think it’s salvageable if I can find a way of transferring enough of the fragrance into the cake without adding any actual pepper powder.
The Limu Omani Brown Butter Cookies
I broke one lime into bits.
Melted the butter with the lime crumbs until beurre noisette stage.
And the butter had enough or at least appeared to have enough of the lime fragrance.
But by the time the cookie dough rested and baked the fragrance had been lost and worst still was the texture.
Another one bites the dust.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
How frustrating!
I wonder if you could get enough sichuan flavour by infusing them in liquid then used in the cake batter?
I made some sichuan pepper ice cream this way recently which was lovely. But of course, I could cook the peppers in with the cream to really get the flavour, before filtering them out completely.
Yes Kavey agree with that, it’s the only way forward. Either incorporate into the flavour of the honey by heating it together, or add vegetable oil to the cake (which needs it anyway) and flavour that OR completely leave the cake alone but make a syrup flavoured with the pepper and drizzle over it when it’s warm to soak through…
I have read that to get finely ground sichuan peppercorns, they need to be ground with salt, which is why, when you ground them with sugar, you got the result!
Most of the flavour apparently, is in the orange-red outer fruit and not the seed because of its gritty texture.
I’m wondering what this is like, although freshly ground is always the best way to go!
http://www.theasiancookshop.co.uk/ground-sichuan-peppercorn-szechwan-pepper-powder-5181-p.asp
Would it be feasible to put the peppercorns in the dry flour for some days/weeks prior to use, in a similar principle to vanilla pods in sugar? (And then obvs sieve them out before using the flour.) I have no idea at all if it would work but since my first thought of infusing a liquid had already been suggested this is the only alternative I could think of
hi Steve – not a bad idea, I can see the logic in it but wonder if would be strong enough to come through baked cake..but nothing like trying to find out.
hi Renée – yes that’s what I read too about the grittiness coming from the inner seed not the husk. I could try it ready ground one and see what flavour comes out.
I’ve just done an experiment with my new very basic spice grinder from Lakeland, using coriander seeds and the result was quite fine as you can see here:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v218/reneemeryl/Spicegrindercoriander001Small.jpg
This electric spice grinder might be the way to go because it does grind to a fine powder:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wahl-Martin-ZX789-Grinder-Booklet/dp/B005CZYN2Y/ref=sr_1_2?s=kitchen&ie=UTF8&qid=1347618972&sr=1-2
hi Renée – I used my coffee grinder which after adding the sugar grounded into a very fine powder but unfortunately that grittiness from the inner seeds still persists.