Liz Denys

Replacing white bread with wheat bread has been becoming more and more popular recently, and people seem to be wondering how to generally add more whole grains to their diets. This doesn't come as much of a surprise: whole grains haven't had their bran and germ removed through milling, and as such, they are better sources of fiber and other nutrients than their refined counterparts. Even though many refined grains are enriched by the addition of vitamins and minerals, they won't provide as many nutrients as the whole grains, especially as much fiber. My favorite benefit of high-fiber foods is that they tend to make you feel full longer.

The problem is that the whole grain taste is very different from that of refined grains; mentally compare the flavors of white rice and brown rice - odds are you love one and hate the other. If you're like me, you grew up eating twelve grain whole wheat bread, brown rice, and foods that were generally low on excessive amounts of butters, oils, and creams, so whole grain baked goods not only seem like a healthy alternative to mix into your routine periodically, but what you want to eat. But that's certainly not true for everyone.

Enter the white whole wheat flour. It's milled from white wheat instead of red wheat like traditional whole wheat flours, which gives it a look closer to traditional white flour:

The flour on the left is all-purpose flour, white whole wheat flour is in the center, and traditional whole wheat flour is shown on the right. The visual differences in the flours themselves are more pronounced than those the final baked goods; those made with only white whole wheat flour look a bit richer in color - almost a more buttery color instead of that darker brown we usually associate with whole grain wheat.

In addition to visually being able to pull a fast one on your friends and family who may be more opposed to whole grains than you, white wheat is a milder tasting wheat than red wheat, which means it'll pass the taste test, too. White whole wheat baked goods taste a whole lot more like the recipes you've made with white all-purpose flour for years and years than regular whole wheat baked goods. Also, you can generally substitute white whole wheat flour for all of the all-purpose flour in a recipe.

One of my favorite white whole wheat flour recipes is muffins. I love the slightly heavier texture that this flour lends to it in a way that white all-purpose flour just can't. It makes the batter light enough to fold in delicate fruits like fresh blueberries and cranberries but strong enough to support cups of chocolate chips. Last night, I made a double batch of white whole wheat blueberry muffins for myself, my brother, and my office:

The recipe follows. I like to think of it as a good white whole wheat flour muffin base recipe; while it calls for blueberries, you can really substitute any other kind of fruit or even chocolate chips - just remember to adjust the surrounding flavors like cinnamon accordingly.

White whole wheat blueberry muffins

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/2 cup milk
• 2 large eggs
• 2 cups white whole wheat flour
• 1 1/2 cups fresh blueberries
• Demerara sugar for topping

Preparation:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease or line with muffin cups a standard-size muffin pan.
2. Cream the butter and sugar together.
3. Add in baking powder, salt, vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg and mix until fluffy.
4. Mix in the milk and eggs.
5. Mix in the flour.
6. Once fully mixed, fold in the fresh blueberries.
7. Spoon the batter into the muffin cups; each of the muffin cups should be filled.
8. Top each muffin with a light sprinkle of demerara sugar.
9. Bake the muffins for about 25 minutes (until a toothpick comes out clean).
10. Remove from the oven and place muffins on a cooling rack.

Yields about 14 regularly sized muffins.

My friends (and lots of other people, too) know that I bake a lot. In my opinion, one of the biggest challenges of baking is acquiring the all of the necessary ingredients, and the heaviest burden is the sugar and flour (pun only partially intended). Especially when you live the city life without a car.

King Arthur Flour decided they wanted to make this part of the baking experience a handful more pleasant. Not only are their flours among the best available based both on quality and consistent quality, but one can order large quantities of their flours online without unreasonable shipping charges, which removes lugging ten pounds of flour from the grocery store on top of milk, eggs, meat, and produce from my weekly routine. It's an excellent marketing trick for them, too: in addition to brand loyalty, I never think twice about buying cake flour in addition to all-purpose flour because clicking that extra "add to cart" is much more convenient than spending some quality time with a sifter and ending up with only a reasonable approximation of what I actually wanted.

Unfortunately, even standard ground shipping isn't free. While there isn't a flat rate per order - entirely unsurprising as flours do weigh nontrivial amounts - you tend to get a better deal if you buy more flour per order. Let me say what I mean to say: I try to consolidate my flour orders into larger orders - orders that I expect to last about four months. As such, my last two flour orders have been upwards of fifty pounds. My last order (which should be arriving soon!) had fifty pounds of unbleached all-purpose flour alone.

"Holy flour, Batman! Fifty pounds of flour over the course of four months?" Well, I bake a lot. But it's been very hard for me to quantify what "I bake a lot" actually means in terms of pounds of flour because we generally think of baking in terms of tablespoons and cups. The internet combined with some basic math leads me to believe that fifty pounds of flour works out to about 200 cups, but 200 is still a sufficiently large number of cups that it is hard to fathom in terms of delicious, ready to eat baked goods.

To help quantify what fifty pounds of flour really is, I've created a Twitter account, @cupsofflour, to track both how much flour I buy and how much flour I use in each baked good I create. I know that it won't answer the question "how much flour is fifty pounds of flour?" as accurately as I might wish because I won't just be tracking my consumption of all-purpose flour (though I will be certain to distinguish what types of flour I'm use each time I bake) and because I rarely actually let my cabinet run out of flour completely (though I was completely out of all-purpose flour for about four days last week). I'll try to post a picture accompanying the type and measurement of flour in attempts to paint the most complete picture. Also, so that I can overwhelm you with my baking habits.

Isn't everything?

Star Wars partnered with Williams-Sonoma to make pancake molds and some rather insanely high quality cookie cutters:

The set of four includes a Yoda face and helmets from each of Darth Vader, Boba Fett, and a stormtrooper. I knew that if I ever got my hands on these, I'd have to make Yoda green tea cookies to optimize for both cuteness and deliciousness.

Once upon a time, there was a (really just mediocre) tea store on Newbury Street called Whittard of Chelsea. While the tea was not very impressive, they did stock these amazing tea sweet cookies by a now closed store called Amai Tea and Bake House. I can't vouch for the quality of their tea either, as I've never had it, but their green tea cookies were simply amazing.

When I found out I could no longer buy these cookies (as I mentioned, Amai closed), I decided to try and recreate these cookies by modifying a shortbread recipe. Of course, I had to add the green tea flavor, so matcha green tea powder was the obvious choice. I recommend using a latte grade matcha powder because the flavor and bitterness of tea ceremony quality matcha powder will be drowned out by the sugar in the dough. Amai's cookies were much smoother than a standard shortbread, so I used cake flour and confectioner's sugar instead of oatmeal or all-purpose flour and granulated sugar. Finally, they were clearly coated in granulated sugar before baking. You can play along with the recipe below; it makes roughly 36 Yoda cookies. These also make for some adorable Christmas tree cookies when the holidays roll around.

Green tea cookies

Ingredients:

• 3 tablespoons and 1 teaspoon matcha powder
• 1 and 2/3 cups confectioner's sugar
• 2 and 1/2 sticks unsalted butter cut into small (tablespoon sized) slices
• 3 and 1/4 cups cake flour (you can substitute all-purpose flour)
• 6 large egg yolks
• About 1/2 cup of granulated sugar

Preparation:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees if you don't plan on chilling the dough.
2. Whisk the matcha tea powder and confectioner's sugar together. Using a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, cream this mixture with the butter.
3. Add the flour and mix until combined. The texture should now be crumbly.
4. Add the egg yolks and mix until fully incorporated. The dough should now be very smooth.
5. Chill the dough in the refrigerator until firm and cool throughout. I usually let the dough chill overnight for convenience, but a couple of hours is definitely sufficient.
6. Roll the dough out until it about half an inch thick. Cut out cookies, toss each in a bowl of granulated sugar to coat, and place onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet. Bake for roughly 11 minutes at 350 degrees. The cookies are done when they have just turned golden at the edges.

Yields roughly 36 two inch cookies.

Just a cleaned up version of a silly little comic that I came up with during a 6.033 (Computer Systems Engineering) recitation last semester:

My subconscious seems to be running in 6/8 time with the beat on the dotted quarter and 60 beats per minute; at least, whenever I sit down at a piano without sheet music in front of me, I always converge on that setting. Sometimes, I write some of these musings down:

I've mentioned before that I struggle to title compositions, so I titled the short piece above, which reminds me of a Renaissance dance, with another short stanza:

Had I had a fear of heights, maybe,
maybe the view would stick
and reflect in the corner of my eyes.

You can grab a pdf of the score.