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IACP Highlight: Dorie Greenspan on the evolution of cookbooks
Let no one say that Dorie Greenspan hasn’t embraced the future of cookbook publishing.
The author of 10 books about baking and cooking has teamed up with Geoffrey Drummond, a longtime TV producer and founder of CulinApp, to create “Baking with Dorie” an iPad app that has revolutionized the way Greenspan thinks about creating and sharing recipes.
Both are in Austin this week to talk about the evolution of cookbooks and technology at the International Association of Culinary Professionals’ annual conference.
(Dorie is also bringing Cookie Bar, a New York pop-up cookie shop that is a joint effort with her son, to Brush Square Park at 10 a.m. on Friday, June 3. She and her team will be giving away sablés, her signature French vanilla shortbread cookies whose recipe is below, out of an Airstream trailer until they run out.)
“I adore being online,” she says. “Cyberspace is where we’re meeting these days.” When she found out about Tuesdays with Dorie, a baking blog where a group of more than 300 bloggers bake one recipe a week from Greenspan’s 2008 book “Baking From My Home to Yours,” she decided to start her own blog in response. “It’s incredible for an author to see her book go out there and being used.” (Now there’s “French Fridays with Dorie,” a spin-off based on her new book “Around My French Table,” which is nominated for an IACP award.)
The new app takes “From My Home to Yours” to a new level. All of the video segments were shot in Greenspan’s Connecticut kitchen, which means she had to cook the entire book herself all over again, this time with a camera crew capturing every step. “I could have never imagined seeing these recipe I know so well presented in a way that is so new.”
By recording video of every single step of every single recipe, Greenspan can add a whole new level of instruction. “I was excited to do this because it makes the recipes so alive,” she says. “It’s me baking with you, while you’re doing it.” The best part is that instead of it being a 30 minute TV episode, Greenspan and her crew weren’t under time constraints to edit out certain parts to make it fit in a time slot.
Throughout her many years of recipe writing and teaching, Greenspan says she always tries to frame the dish — be it a cookie or a lamb and apricot tagine — in an accessible way so that it’s easy for people to understand and try to replicate at home.
“Every time I write a recipe, I think of it as being a teacher,” she says. “To be able to do this visually, to give people the chance to see every step and stop and go back if they need to have another look, I see it as a new way of teaching.”
A teacher Greenspan always looked up to was Julia Child, with whom she worked on cookbooks and television shows, and says that even though she was a stickler for doing things the right way, she was always open to new things.
Greenspan recalled a time when Julia had called her up to ask if she had a bread machine. Greenspan responded that no, she didn’t have one and she wasn’t really interested in having one. “She said to me, ‘Well, if you haven’t had one and you haven’t tried one, then you can’t say that’….She even had a personal computer before anyone on the block did.”
As a TV pioneer who brought cooking classes to the masses, Julia would have been thrilled at this new medium through which to teach. “She would love it for the same reason I love it. It’s another way to reach and to teach people.”
Sablés
For the cookies:
2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup confectioners’ sugar, sifted
1/2 tsp. salt, preferably fine sea salt
2 large egg yolks, at room temperature
2 cups all-purpose flour
For decorating:
1 large egg yolk
Decorating, crystal or dazzle sugar (or even colored sprinkles)
Working in a stand mixer with a paddle attachment, or with a hand mixer in a large bowl, beat butter at medium speed until smooth and creamy. Add sugars and salt and beat until well blended, about 1 minute. The mixture should be smooth and velvety, not fluffy and airy. Reduce the mixer speed to low and beat in the egg yolks, again beating until the mixture is homogeneous.
Turn off mixer. Pour in the flour, drape a kitchen towel over the stand mixer to protect yourself and the counter from flying flour and pulse the mixer at low speed about 5 times, a second or two each time. Take a peek - if there is still a lot of flour on the surface of the dough, pulse a couple more times; if not, remove the towel. Continuing at low speed, mix for about 30 seconds more, just until the flour disappears into the dough and the dough looks uniformly moist. (If most of the flour is incorporated but you’ve still got some on the bottom of the bowl, use a rubber spatula to work the rest of the flour into the dough.) The dough will not clean the sides of the bowl nor will it come together in a ball - and it shouldn’t.
You want to work the dough as little as possible. What you’re aiming for is a soft, moist, clumpy (rather than smooth) dough. Pinch it and it will feel a little like Play-Doh.
Scrape the dough out onto a smooth work surface, gather it into a ball and divide it in half. Shape each piece into a smooth log about 9 inches long; it’s easiest to work on a piece of plastic wrap and use the plastic to help form the log. Wrap the logs well and chill them for at least 3 hours, preferably longer. The dough can be kept in the refrigerator for up to 3 days or frozen for up to 2 months.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment or silicone mats. Remove a log of dough from the refrigerator and place it on a piece of parchment or wax paper. Whisk the egg yolk until it is smooth, and brush some of the yolk all over with the sides of the dough, and then sprinkle the entire surface of the log with sugar.
Trim the ends of the roll if they’re ragged, and slice the log into 1/3-inch thick cookies. (You can make these as thick as 1/2 inch or as thin as 1/4 inch.) Place the rounds on the baking sheets, leaving an inch of space between them. Bake one sheet at a time for 17 to 20 minutes, rotating the baking sheet at the midway point. When properly baked, the cookies will be light brown on the bottom, lightly golden around the edges and pale on top; they may feel tender when you touch the top gently and that’s fine. Remove from the oven and let the cookies rest a minute or two before carefully lifting them onto a rack with a wide metal spatula and allowing them to cool to room temperature. Repeat with the remaining log of dough, making sure the baking sheet is cool before you bake the second batch. Makes about 50 cookies.
(The cookies will keep in a tin at room temperature for about 5 days.If you do not sprinkle the sablés with sugar, they can be wrapped airtight and frozen for up to 2 months. Because the sugar will melt in the freezer, decorated cookies are not suitable for freezing.)
— From ‘Baking From My Home to Yours,’ by Dorie Greenspan (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
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