Almond Biscotti

The cooking project was stalled for a while when my Mom visited for 2.5 weeks in July, and fell into a state of malaise throughout most of August.  I've cooked, but not in a concentrated, purposeful way.  This week was the nadir of my food consumption.  I've been scrounging for crumbs and falling back on smoothies of questionable flavor.  If I don't go to the grocery store today or tomorrow, I will be reduced to eating cabbage and naked pasta. 

This is my mom standing in front of a moose at the Anchorage Zoo, by the way.


I made a couple of things during the long, silent stretch, though.  First was Almond Biscotti (Cookies Chapter, page 604), intended to impress my mother.  I wouldn't call her reaction impressed, exactly, but she did think they were good, and they did get eaten.  I even took a few over to Ryan's new commanding officer, who lives a few doors down on our street.

But the Biscotti.  First note: purposeful cooking means purposeful grocery.  The Commissary is, without a doubt, the most cost-effective grocery option.  Unfortunately, it's also a good 20 minutes out of my way and often crowded with harried parents, screaming children, and indecisive retirees.  It's one of few places (along with the base hospital) that makes me conscious of my own rising blood pressure.  So in order to cook purposefully, rather than just throwing together odds and ends, I have to make my list and gird my loins for grocery battle.  This is what a triumphant cart looks like.


Probably my favorite thing about this recipe is that it come together in the food processor.  Mine is a 12-Cup Cuisinart Elite model that I bought for myself right before Christmas Ryan bought for me for Christmas last year.  I actually got it because I like the Cooks' Illustrated recipes, which work under the assumption that you own a food processor.  I don't use it every day, but for big jobs, it does most of the things I hate to do by hand: grating, chopping, slicing, and blending.  With the mean machine, the biscotti dough came together in about 5 minutes.

Unfortunately, after it had come together, I realized that I had pushed aside chopped almonds that were meant to be worked into the dough.  Evidently, I need to pay a little more attention to the pictures. By that point, what was a girl to do?  Things would just have to be a little less almondy.

The recipe calls the output a "batter," but I think that "dough" is more accurate.  I had to take these buttery clumps and squeeze them into a ball.  Then, I split the balls in half and patted them into loaves on a waxed paper-lined cookie sheet.

 I thought it was interesting how Cooks' Illustrated corrected one of the problems with biscotti.  Because of uneven "loaf" size, the cookies would cook unevenly, resulting in varying levels of crunchiness.  To correct this, the recipe had me use a ruler to draw 8" by 3" on the waxed paper, then pat loaves flat to fit inside of the rectangle.  That     way, they're evenly sized and will come out more uniform.  Ingenious!

 

You spray the loaves with PAM, brush with egg wash, then bake until they're golden.  Then you set the loaves aside and let them cool completely.

Here comes the part that sets biscotti apart from other cookies and makes them dunkable.  You use a long, serrated knife to slice the loaves at a slight bias, then you bake the slices again, flipping them midway through baking.

Confession: I screwed up twice during this recipe--first by leaving out some of the almonds, and second during the baking of the slices.  Cook's Illustrated is careful to say that the slices should be baked atop a wire rack to create even air circulation and help with browning.  My only wire rack is so large that I can't fit it in the oven (see above).  Rather than halting the process for sake of perfectionism, I did without the rack.  The cookies might not have been perfect, but they were good enough for me.

Almond Biscotti, Page 606: Accomplished.