It was barely 11 o’clock in the morning, but I was already dipping into raspberry chocolate jam.
“I’m tasting something funny, something metallic,” I said.
“Really?” said the voice on the other end of the line.
“It’s very fudgy,” I said. “Like hot fudge. I wonder if you lose the raspberry flavor in the chocolate. Maybe there’s too much chocolate.”
“Could you spread it on toast?”
“It would be like really intense Nutella,” I answered.
“But you’re not convinced. Let’s stick with the other recipe. I might mess around with the different version with cocoa powder, but for now let’s do the other one.”
And so it begins. The first extensive week of recipe testing for a new cookbook project I’m working on with a chef is underway. The weekend consisted of making cherry jam (the result pictured here–and yes, it looks like it came out of an episode of True Blood). This week it’s about researching the book’s story and, more pressing, converting restaurant recipes to ones for the home kitchen.
If you’ve ever wanted to spend the day contemplating the virtues of grams compared with ounces (grams always win), the disagreeable nature of translating volume measurements into weight measurements, and old-fashioned fractional division, recipe development surely is up your alley.
For instance, here are the questions that have been nagging at me all day long:
What else will have to change in this recipe if we cut the tomatoes down from 100 pounds to 5?
Can I assume that a teaspoon of paprika weighs the same as a teaspoon of curry powder?
Does vinegar weigh the same as water, more or less?
What is 1/4 of 5/6?
The phone rings. It’s the recipe tester. “Some of the volume measurements don’t match up to the weight measurements,” he said.
I check my notes. “Go with the weight measurements first, and keep track of the new volume measurements,” I said. Thumbs up for detail-oriented people.
Back to the kitchen. I heat up the chocolate raspberry jam thinking that it might taste like raspberry hot fudge. Yes. It’s good. Really good. And that metallic taste? Gone. (Must have been the toothpaste.)
So, what is the cookbook project I’ve been alluding to? Oh, it’s a fun one. I’ll spill the beans as soon as everything is neatly signed. In the meantime, I’m getting my teaspoons, tablespoons, cups, and liquid measuring devices in order. And the scale. Thank goodness for a digital scale.
