Maple Butter (or Maple Cream, If You’re Fancy)
I’ve had maple butter bouncing around in my head for a while, a new fun something to make after being told that I must try it. I had no idea what maple butter was, but research explained that by heating maple syrup to 233 °F, cooling to 40 °F, then warming it back up to 60 °F, the syrup morphed into maple butter (or maple cream, if you’re fancy). The promise of a spreadable maple syrup stuck with me since I discovered its existence, but I wanted a yard full of snow before I tried to make something that required rapid cooling. Cold, wet, and messy on their own are fine, but they make up the Trifecta of Horrible when combined. As such, I do everything I can to avoid making an ice bath.
A heavy snow on Friday night and Saturday morning took care of the ice bath problem and I got out the trusty candy thermometer to make maple butter. I confess that my research on maple butter was minimal and that I stirred when I ought not to (during the cooling phase), but everything still turned out, and how.
I kept eating the maple butter off of the spoon and finally had to pack it up so I would leave it alone. The next morning I had my doubts about why I was swooning over this stuff (OH THIS IS NEW SO IT MUST BE AWESOME AND BETTER THAN ANYTHING ELSE), so I compared a drizzle of maple syrup to a bit of the maple butter in oatmeal to see if I was simply infatuated by something bright and shiny.
No, it was true love. Straight maple syrup tasted tinny and one-dimensional but the maple butter was full, toasty, and strikingly buttery. I figured the name ‘maple butter’ referred to its consistency (it is spreadable like peanut butter), but it tasted so buttery that, had I not made it, I would have guessed butter had been added. I went ahead and added butter to the bowl in this photo, just to push it over the top.
What also surprised me was the texture of the maple butter. The maple butter appears to be a dilatant. Like a cornstarch and water mixture, it is solid if you touch it but if you begin to push it around or stir it, it has fluid-like qualities. Dilatants have “a dense mixture of granules and liquids” which makes perfect sense as to why the maple butter acts as it does.
With hopes of finding out more about sugars in maple syrup, I opened McGee’s On Food and Cooking and read how the process of making maple butter is very similar to making maple sugar (his temperatures are a little different from Wikipedia, if you’re fact checking). The difference between making maple sugar and maple butter is the step of cooling and stirring in maple butter. Maple sugar is made by heating maple syrup to above boiling, then allowing it to cool and form sugar crystals. Maple butter is heated, rapidly cooled, then rewarmed and stirred vigorously– instead of ending up with big crystals of maple sugar in syrup, the sugar crystals are very fine and densely distributed in the reduced maple syrup. Maple butter, the great dilatant confection.
Maple Butter (Maple Cream)
Full-flavored, buttery, and spreadable, I have to keep this out of my sight or I eat it straight off of the spoon. I put a pat on a waffle and added it to oatmeal, but maple butter would be great in a milk-based drink, added to BBQ sauce, in a sweet-savory sandwich, between two cookies….
You must use 100% pure maple syrup for this recipe.
Ingredients
- 1 cup pure maple syrup
Instructions
- Prepare an ice-bath (or wait until you have snow drifts deep enough to put a small pot, your call) for a small pot.
- Fit a small, deep pot with a candy thermometer.
- Over medium-high heat, bring the syrup up to 233 °F (112 °C), stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, about 3-4 minutes.
- Immediately remove the pot from the stove and set in the ice bath. Stir occasionally until the syrup cools to 40 °F (4 °C), about 5-8 minutes.
- Back on the stove over medium-low heat, warm the syrup to 60 °F (15 °C), stirring frequently.
- Once the maple syrup reaches 60 °F, remove from heat again and stir vigorously for 2-3 minutes.
- Set the pot aside and let stand for 10 minutes. The syrup will begin to cloud and turn a light tan color.
- Stir until the maple butter is smooth and easily spreadable.
- Use at once or store covered in the refrigerator.
Quick notes
This is exactly how I made the maple butter, goof-ups and all. Keep an eye on the syrup since as it reaches 233 °F it boils up considerably. If you’d like to experiment, try leaving the maple syrup undisturbed as it cools, then beat it with a wooden spoon while bringing it back up to 60 °F until it is tan in color and smooth.
Cooking time: 20-25 minutes
Yield: Scant 3/4 cup
A Kitchen Gift Guide – Part Three: Media and Classes
This is the final part of a kitchen gift-guide designed to help with giving something meaningful to the cooks and bakers on your list. Most of these can be purchased at the last minute which is handy as we are down to the wire now.
Like the guides before, this is not a comprehensive list of books or subscriptions that I recommend for people. These are things that I like and think would make fun gifts. I’ve not been paid, compensated, or asked to feature any of the following items.
Subscriptions
The best gifts are ones that give a little bit of happy every time the receiver thinks about them. Subscriptions are my favorite things to gift to people because the giftee gets the present anew all year long.
Canal House Cooking – $49.95 for a one-year subscription, published three times a year.
Strongly reminiscent of the River Cottage cookbooks, Canal House Cooking is my favorite subscription-based food publication. I’m hesitant to call it a magazine as the issues are small, hard-bound books with no ads. It is more akin to getting three cookbooks a year in the mail. Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton self-publish Canal House with a focus on what is local and in season. One of the issues last year was titled “Farm Markets and Gardens” and we used every fantastic tomato recipe in the book. Hirsheimer and Hamilton always manage to keep from sounding as if they’re looking down their noses as they write, though; they devoted a following volume to “The Grocery Store.” It is balanced writing with understated photography in a pretty package.
Buttermilk and Date Ice Cream with Orange Blossom Water and a Goode Company Giveaway
The contest is now closed. Scroll down for the winner!
This ice cream has always been about pecans.
I came up with the recipe as an accompaniment for pecans
specifically for a pecan pie.
Usually, pecans make me feel mushy and happy because I associate them with home:
my parents have pecan trees growing on their property in Texas
my grandmothers both say PEE-can, tickling me no to end
and while I don’t care for plain pecans, when holiday baking begins I end up eating a treeload’s worth in pecan pralines.
The gooey and sentimental feelings on pecans persisted until a few days ago
right up until the fifth attempt at making a pecan pie simply to photograph under the ice cream.
Five times on top of a burned Thanksgiving pie is past my threshold of Pie Failures in Ten Days.
Just the ice cream photographs, then.
A Kitchen Gift Guide – Part Two: Edibles
This is part two of a kitchen gift-guide I’m writing as the holidays and their shopping are at full tilt. The first post covered equipment and the following guide has edible items.
Like the equipment guide, this is not a comprehensive list of things that should be in someone’s pantry. These are things that I like and have found that not everyone has them in their kitchen. I’ve not been paid, compensated, or asked to feature any of the following items.
Aleppo pepper – $6.25 for 1.9oz
From Turkey and used frequently in Eastern Mediterranean food, crushed Aleppo pepper also seems to have quite the fan club among BBQ-lovers. I am not a raving BBQ fan but I am sweet on this pepper. When eaten straight it tastes a smidge like an Ancho pepper. It is somewhat chocolatey, but the peppery flavor is certainly there along with moderate heat. I use this in a bunch of recipes from Wolfert’s The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean and The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen. When I’m feeling fancy I use Aleppo pepper instead of standard crushed red pepper. In less refined matters, I am not ashamed to say that I also put it on pizza in large amounts. In short, it’s good for all occasions.
A Kitchen Gift Guide – Part One: Equipment
A handful of people have asked me about what gifts to get for people who love to cook at home, so I thought a shopping guide might be helpful for those wandering the aisles of specialty kitchen stores, sifting through the offering of unitaskers upon unitaskers.
This is part one in a series of posts I’ll be writing in the upcoming week(s) as holiday shopping gets into high gear. Kitchen equipment is first, with Ingredients and Media to follow.
First and foremost, know that this is not an exhaustive list of equipment that someone should have in their home kitchen. You will notice that there are no knives, pots, or baking pans in my list. I’ve not been paid, compensated, or asked to feature any of the following items. I simply love them and, at one point or another (or now), would’ve loved to open a box containing them. I think most other cooking-inclined people would, too.
The prices displayed are from Amazon.com. Prices fluctuate on Amazon a lot, so the prices may have changed since the publishing of this post.
High-Temperature Digital Thermometer 
I am big on enabling people (in positive things, of course). A high-temperature thermometer, a/k/a a candy thermometer, opens up an entirely new realm of cooking. You can make candy, perfect chicken fried steak, fudge, fried chicken, frostings upon FROSTINGS, and many more things that are not very good for you.
The thing about making and eating things that aren’t very good for you is that when you do eat them, they better be the BEST horrible thing for you that you ever ate. A thermometer will help you get your oil hot enough for stupendous fried chicken. Get your sugar to the correct temperature and you’ll have a syrup or candy or caramel. This is the Number One kitchen gift I recommend (that’s why I put it first. ahHA!). With ONE gift you’ve given the lucky thermometer receiver a million new recipes.
Note: Amazon shows some negative reviews for this particular brand but I’ve never had a problem with mine.
Kale, Sausage, and Potato Soup
Most people think that my mother taught me how to cook.
We have a lot in common.
She cooks a lot, I cook a lot
I have lots of cookbooks, she has lots of cookbooks.
She did not teach me how to cook, however.
I’m sure I could’ve asked her to teach me.
She did try to teach me how to make bread one time
and I didn’t try to make bread for years afterwards.
It was not her fault.
I was one of those kids who liked to cook everything over high heat
then wonder why the crust was burnt and the inside raw.
I’m much better about that
(most of the time)
but my mother and I are still very, VERY different cooks.
My mom never met a recipe she loved for how it was
and cakes are her sworn enemy
…probably due to her recipe aversion.
I taught myself how to cook when Trevor was studying for the MCATs.
The standardized tests for entrance into medical school warranted serious attention
and 8 hours of studying on top of 3 hours of daily college classes
didn’t leave him a lot of room for cooking
or for eating.
I decided to cook for him.
That way, I figured,
he wouldn’t one day find himself unable to get out of his swivel chair because of malnutrition.
Scared to waste food and money by mangling perfectly fine ingredients,
I started cooking out of the few cookbooks I had
mostly chicken dishes.
Trevor didn’t waste away
and I got really good at cooking chicken.
I never stopped cooking after that.
People always tease Trevor
saying that he must be a really shitty cook
but he’s actually a very good cook.
(We won’t mention the one time he made cornbread that I privately dubbed ‘cornbrick.’)
He doesn’t cook because he loves my cooking
and PROBABLY because it’s significantly less work for him.
Eh heh.
Different though we are
Trevor also loves my mom’s cooking.
Every now and then I will unwedge a binder from the crammed bookcases
a binder full of notes and printouts
scribbled half-recipes and ingredient lists cut from packages
and pull out one of my mom’s recipes.
Of course, I use the term ‘recipe’ loosely;
like everyone elses beloved family member
her recipes are ‘a little of this, some of that, a few of those.’
A recently added recipe to the binder is another one of my mother’s.
It’s recipe for soup with a lot of kale
some sausage and potatoes
something fitting for the cold day that appeared out of nowhere.
We’ve had a weird fall here, with snow last month
one side of our yard home to blooming yellow flowers
the other, trees with fiery leaves.
It’s quite the technicolor show.
When I went to go collect the greens from the garden for the soup
I also brought in a few branches from a very red bush outside.
Keep Your BBQ Sauce Off of my Pizza
Unlike the times before it
last week’s pasta making was successful.
Given my previous attempts at making noodles
I probably should’ve started the project the day before
but lady luck stood by a few hours before the supper club
and I had beautiful strands of beet pasta swaying on clean chairbacks.
My kitchen looked festive
and I think hats and horns wouldn’t have been out of place.
I kind of wanted to put on a flapper outfit.
From a Better Homes and Garden Cookbook, circa 1950
Honestly,
this morning I’ve gone around
not saying much more than “spank that cookie.”
A Very Angry Wrist Pens a Menu Plan
I’ve done something to my wrist
something that made it very, very, angry.
Thankfully, it is my left hand
so my dominant right can do mostly what it needs to do
unless the left is needed to help.
You know,
I only need my left hand for things like picking up a baby
holding something while chopping
getting dressed
changing a diaper
or a million other things I need to do all day long.
Nothing of import has been completed today.
However, there is still time
so maybe I’ll lug around my useless hand and check off a few to-do boxes
counting myself lucky that my wrist is still attached to my arm.
I HAVE managed to make out my menu plan for this week.
One box checked.
On Saturday I watched snowflakes the size of dessert plates land in my backyard,
thankful I managed to save the bell peppers from the garden the night before.
some of the bell peppers