Day 3: Fat

I'd like to apologize for my missed posts. Justin and I adopted two kittens, so we were preparing the apartment and getting them acclimated.

This is one of the culprits, Balthasar.
(We haven't been able to get a good photo of Minerva yet.)

That being said, I am trying to catch up. We tasted all of our muffins with different flours. The crumb and the tunneling changed. Also, the amount that the muffins rose and the amount of browning varied. Unfortunately, they were all eaten by the culinary students before I had a chance to take photos of them.

The rest of Thursday was all about fats. We talked about the difference between the muffin method and creaming method for mixing ingredients. Basically, the muffin method is putting all of the dry ingredients into one bowl and the wet ingredients into another, then mixing them at the very end. The creaming method is when you cream together the butter and the sugar. This allows leavening to occur by trapping air in the butter which will expands as it heats up. We made two batches of the same recipe for muffin with each method.

Muffin Method Muffins

Creaming Method Muffins

We then browned and clarified butter. When you brown butter the water evaporates and the milk solids caramelize; when you clarify butter you remove the milk solids. Most butter has about 80-83% fat, but removing the milk solids brings the fat content up to 100% while reducing the number calories.

Browned Butter

Clarified Butter

We made multiple batches of muffins with different fats, just as we did with the different flours.The fats we used were "regular" butter (about 80% fat), clarified butter, browned butter, olive oil, lard, -20% butter, +20% butter, and European butter (fat content of about 83%). I didn't take pictures of them because they pretty much all looked the same. The only exception was the amount of browning. The olive oil muffins were browned the most and the ones with lard were barely browned at all.

Over the course of the day we finished making our butter kits into actual butter. After sitting out all night the butter kit had turned into me crème fraîche. We put it in a food processor and whipped the crap out of it. This process turned it into curds and whey. After that we drained the whey out through cheese cloth and rinsed it with ice water. It was put into the fridge to harden.

The butter kit after sitting out all night, at this point it's crème fraîche

Curds and Whey

The isolated curds=butter

My butter on toasted bread I made in our bread maker