Tomatillo Cupcakes/Muffins*

Another week, another post, another theme. This week: using typically savory ingredients in sweet dishes.

I think it's interesting that certain foods get to be associated with savory (read: main dishes, appetizers, etc.) or sweet (read: dessert) dishes, often for essentially arbitrary and often reasons largely stemming from local traditions. Avocados, for instance, are used by North Americans in guacamole and salads/sandwiches, but in Vietnam they make sweet (and delicious!) smoothies from them. There are lots of other examples.

It can be fun, though, to play with these expectations and use ingredients in different ways. This is especially fun in desserts. That's the idea behind these cupcakes, which highlight the versatility of the tomatillo.

Tomatillos are most commonly used in tangy salsa verde, but a couple of things convinced me they'd make an interesting cupcake. First, I once made a molten chocolate cake (from a recipe I really thought I had found on Epicurious, but I couldn't find it to link) served with a tomatillo-vanilla sauce. Second, I heard recently that green tomatoes (which I figure are sort of like tomatillos) could be substituted for apples in baking recipes.

So…this week's experiment was adapted the Apple-Cardamom cupcake recipe at Vanilla Garlic (a great source for cupcake recipes). Here's the recipe I used:

Tomatillo Cupcakes
Makes 18 cupcakes / 350F oven

3 cups chopped tomatillos
1.5 cups of sugar
1/2 cups vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 egg whites
2.25 cups of all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon of cinnamon

What to do:

1) Chop tomatillos and combine them with the sugar and let them macerate for one hour. Next add the oil, vanilla and stir.

2) Preheat over to 350 degrees F (165 C).

3) Slightly beat egg whites just until a light foam appears. Combine them with the oil and apple mixture.

4) Sift the flour, salt, baking soda, and spices together. Stir into the apple mixture, and then place into cupcake papers about 3/4ths full.

5) Bake for 15 minutes undisturbed, then rotate the pan and cook for another 3-7 minutes, testing with a toothpick for doneness. Careful, as if the toothpick goes into an apple it will not come out clean, but cupcake may be done.



* For the purposes of this blog from now on, cupcakes and muffins are distinguished only by the presence of icing. Cupcakes have icing. Muffins do not.

Ingredient: Thai Long Peppers

One of the reasons I decided to start this blog was because people were asking about my experiments with flavors and molecular gastronomy stuff. Another was that I've noticed myself spending more and more time chasing down ingredients not found in normal grocery stores.

Sometimes (often, even) this involves a trip to Chinatown or Little India in Toronto. More on these another time. In this case, there was a bit more adventure.

I had never heard of Thai Long Peppers until dinner at Alinea, where we had a thai long pepper cream along with hibiscus gel and bubble gum tapioca pearls served in a sort of giant glass straw. I was intrigued and did some searching to learn more about them.

I had at first assumed they were a chili sort of pepper, but it turns out they're a spice -- more like a peppercorn but, well, long. They were apparently quite popular in the Roman Empire, before black peppercorns became more common. Now they're used mostly in Southeast Asia.

Since one can get just about anything in Toronto, I assumed they'd be in one of the Asian or South Asian markets. Not so much, at least as far as I could tell. Many of the staff in these places don't speak English, and labels are often nonexistent or non-English. But I searched quite a bit and couldn't turn up anything.

I kept them in the back of my mind, though, until a trip to Singapore for a conference and to see my sister (who lives there) last summer. She suggested we look for long peppers at the Thai supermarket (which I'd like to link to, but they don't seem to have a web site) in Singapore. We looked around, again not totally sure what to look for. And sure enough, there was this bag staring back at me from a shelf full of spices. I immediately bought them.

The flavor is interesting. They're quite spicy like pepper, but also have an anise-y almost smoky quality to them. The first thing I did with them was to make ice cream, grinding them up and substituting them into a black pepper ice cream recipe from David Lebovitz's book. It was clear they paired well with sugar and fat, which highlighted the flavors and cut the heat a bit. I also tried them in a cupcake with chocolate icing, and infused into vodka (which was seriously spicy, but better when combined with a vanilla/sugar syrup).

And that brings us to this week's dessert: Lime and Thai Long Pepper shortbread. Simple shortbread plus 1 TB or so lime zest and 1.5 tsp or so ground long pepper. Plus they're coated with a long pepper/sugar mixture. The lime plays fairly nicely with the long pepper, which gives it a bit of bite and peppery-ness. We'll see how they go over with colleagues tomorrow.

Apologies for this rather forlorn looking photo. I was in a bit of a rush.

Caramel Apple: One Bite

At long last, I'm getting around to putting this blog together. It's been a long time coming and I'm delighted that you've decided to stop by. I intend to regularly update you on my food-related experiments and ideas in this space. So...without further ado.

People who've eaten stuff I make know that I'm a big fan of combining flavors. Sometimes it's to try something new (i.e., bubble gum tarts with chocolate crust, or Indian kebab-style beef patties with grilled fruit and coconut-curry sorbet). Sometimes it's to put a new spin on an old classic. This week's experiment falls firmly in the latter category.

Few things beat fresh, crisp apples in the fall. And few things complement the sweet-yet-still-a-bit-tart taste of a great apple like a rich dose of caramel. In addition to being delicious, this pairing reminds me of after-school trips to the Franklin Cider Mill when I was a kid. That was my motivation here.

In essence, I wanted to put a contemporary spin on this pairing, and to capture it in a single, intense bite. In this regard I'm inspired a bit by Toronto's Claudio Aprile (Colborne Lane), who is a master of the single-bite explosion of related flavors.

The result is quite simple: an apple sphere set atop a bed of dry caramel, served in an Asian soup spoon.

The apple spheres were based on an online recipe from Ferran Adria (El Bulli). I juiced a few Cortland apples (in a juice extractor), mixed the juice (1 C or so) with some sodium alginate (1/2 tsp) in the blender, and then heated this to boiling. Then I poured this into silicone half-sphere molds (1") and froze. After letting these freeze, I dropped them (gently) into a heated mixture of water (2 C) and calcium chloride (1/2 tsp), rinsed, and set aside (you can see them in the not-so-great picture).


The dry caramel is directly from Grant Achatz's Alinea cookbook. Corn syrup, sugar, cream and butter cooked to 230 degrees, left to harden on a Silpat, and then blended with tapioca maltodextrin in the food processor.

I'm pretty pleased with how these turned out. If I made them again, I'd consider intensifying the apple a little bit (possibly by boiling down the juice and/or including some ginger or sugar). I also don't love that the caramel flavor doesn't hit the tastebuds until after the apple is mostly gone. I think that's because of the maltodextrin; not sure how I'd get around that. They were also a bit tricky in that the spheres are really delicate. More than one was burst by the caramel powder.