Part of many families' Christmas traditions is cookies. Cookies range in flavor, which means some ingredients change from cookie to cookie, but most of the recipes will stay the same for every cookie you encounter. This week in Little Lab Coats, we'll be focusing on a different kind of experiment: baking.
One of my favorite cookies my family makes is Lebkuchen. This is a traditional German recipe that my grandmother learned when she and my grandfather lived on a military base in Germany. We make a lot of these cookies every Christmas and put them into the freezer to eat for the next few months.
Flour
There are a lot of different kinds of flour. The difference between all the different types of flour is the gluten content. Flour provides almost all of the structure of the cookie. The structures in flour function to absorb the liquid and proteins created by gluten and other ingredients. Starch and gluten are like a web. As the cookie bakes, this web stretches and traps air. The air would have just bubbled out if there wasn't enough flour, and this would have led to pretty mushy and flare cookies.
The stability of the web changes depending on the flour and will determine the chewiness of the cookie. All-purpose flour is used most often in cookies. It has about 11% protein, and the rest is starch. Cake flour has a protein count of about 6%, which will give you a soft cookie. Bread flour has a higher protein content of 14% and will give you extra chewie cookies. Flour is one of the things that has the most impact on your cookies, so changing it will give you drastically different results.
Eggs
Eggs give most of the moisture to cookies. It also gives a lot of structure when it bonds with the flour. Eggs help make the cookie chewy. The ratio of egg yolk to egg whites isn’t something you can control, but you can control how big the egg is. The more egg white in the egg means the cookie will rise more in the oven. The extra water that is in an egg with more egg white helps with gluten formation. This will bake a taller cookie. The more egg yolk in the egg, or the more egg yolks you add to a recipe, will add moisture to the cookie. It will also add more protein, which will keep the cookies fudgey.
Eggless recipes are very common in vegan recipes and can be easily replaced. Eggs are often substituted with milk, yogurt, or applesauce. Oil and water are used to replace the moisture and fat protein that react with the flour. Eggless recipes are an experiment within themselves because of the different combinations of ingredients that can replace them.
Lebkuchen
Ingredients
¾ cup brown sugar
½ cup honey
1 egg
½ molasses
3 cup all-purpose flour
1 ¼ teaspoons ground nutmeg
1 ¼ teaspoons cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground cloves
½ teaspoon ground allspice
½ teaspoon baking soda
Glaze
Powdered sugar
Lemon juice
Instructions
Beat brown sugar, honey, and egg in a large bowl with an electric mixer until smooth; stir in molasses.
Combine flour, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, and baking soda in a separate bowl; stir into the molasses mixture to form a sticky dough. Cover dough and chill overnight in the fridge.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Cover the baking sheet with parchment paper. Roll out dough on a lightly floured surface to a thickness of 1/4 inch.
Use cookie cutters to cut out shapes. Place cookies 1 1/2 inches apart on prepared cookie sheets.
Bake in the preheated oven until lightly browned, about 10 to 12 minutes.
While the cookies are baking, make the glaze: lemon juice mixed in confectioners' sugar until smooth.
Brush glaze over cookies while they are still warm.
Enjoy!
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/25827/german-lebkuchen/
Comentários