The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [95]
Alice Medrich is in a much more difficult fix. Saturated fat is extremely prominent in chocolate desserts, and so is Medrich. Founder and the owner of the late Cocolat, the dessert and chocolate shop in Berkeley, California, and author of the prize-winning cookbook Cocolat (Warner Books), Medrich has taken the job of creating low-fat chocolate desserts extremely seriously, and in Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts she has succeeded at least half the time by my count, an incredibly good score. Her goal, after all, is to create “truly indulgent,” “sensational” desserts, not just desserts that are judged “not bad for low fat.” Most of her creations are new, not low-fat versions of her earlier recipes. Medrich cannot help making the kind of apocalyptic and self-congratulatory comments that other low-fat authors do. “These are the new desserts of the future,” she writes proudly, and refers to the research for her book as a “journey of discovery.” But unlike the author of Butter Busters, Medrich uses only high-quality, natural ingredients and no food substitutes. She wants her desserts to taste rich, not light, and she uses fat strategically rather than replacing it.
Grease is good. Grease works. As all low-fat cooks discover, fat serves a remarkable number of purposes: it blends and softens flavors, carries them about the mouth and allows them to linger; in cooking, it conducts heat more effectively than water and allows temperatures high enough for the delicious browning reaction to occur; and it contributes to texture in obvious and less obvious ways. At first Medrich discovered that her mousses did not stiffen, frostings did not hold their peaks, pastry became soggy, and fillings would not retain moisture without “bleeding” or draining. And some flavors became oddly aggressive. Sugar grew sweeter, but eliminating sugar made for drier textures because sugar retains water. Fat holds and stabilizes flavors; low-fat desserts can become tasteless after brief storage, and any inferior ingredients in them will be exposed.
Medrich relies only sometimes on two easy and common but unpalatable solutions: replacing all chocolate (which contains 55 to 75 percent fat calories) with lower-fat cocoa and substituting egg whites for yolks. She also eliminates a good part of the fat in pastry creams and mousses, lightens her sponge cake so that she can use richer toppings, toasts nuts for more flavor and chops them finer so they will go further, and makes an exception to her general principles by including “light” cream cheese in frostings. By the time she is finished, her recipes, through a host of careful and canny compromises, range from acceptable to delicious.
This book is not simply a collection of recipes; it is a manual for the creation of low-fat chocolate desserts and devotes several chapters to theory and general principles. The mixture of smooth and crunchy is fundamentally satisfying, Medrich believes. Some flavors, such as caramel, taste inherently rich, though they contain no fat. Medrich uses meringue as a substitute for some of the whipped cream in mousses and to add lightness, volume, and creaminess. But as she considers uncooked egg whites to be dangerous, she has developed a useful but tiresome procedure for pasteurizing them by raising their temperature to 160 degrees over hot water after mixing them with water, cream of tartar, and sugar. (Without these additions, they would scramble.) Occasionally, I wished that Medrich had aimed for a more varied range of sensory qualities than richness alone. Chocolate wears a hundred faces.
The proof is in the pudding, and I cooked eight or nine of them. On the rebound from my repulsive encounter with the Butter Busters brownies, I began with Medrich’s. They were shiny to gaze upon and moist to consume, with a rich, chocolaty flavor—far superior to any of the commercially available low-fat brownies that I receive almost weekly by UPS. Only by tireless eating was I able to detect in them the flaws that mar Medrich’s less perfect recipes (and that destroy