Ask Special Sauce, Holiday Edition: Stella and Daniel on Combustible Artichokes and Making a Better Cookie

I had such a good time answering your Thanksgiving questions with Kenji and Stella on our recent installment of Call Special Sauce, we thought we'd do the same thing in a two-episode series leading up to the end-of-year holidays. This week and next, Daniel Gritzer joins Stella to answer your holiday cooking and baking questions, and I can tell you that I learned a lot. You'll want to listen to the episode or read the transcript to hear Stella's and Daniel's complete answers, but here's a preview:

If you're among the few Serious Eaters who haven't heard of roasted sugar, one of Stella's genius inventions, Stella offers a quick definition: "So toasted sugar is just plain, white, granulated sugar that has been tossed into an oven for some period of time, and that period of time, it's kind of like toasting bread crumbs or toasting almonds or something, where you can give it a little bit [of time] or a lot to pull out different flavor profiles, like a light toast or a dark toast.... The sugar starts to thermally decompose, which is to say, it starts to caramelize without ever melting, and so you end up getting this kind of dry, granular, lightly caramelized product."

What's in it for the baker, you might wonder? One advantage is that using roasted sugar in your holiday cookies makes them less sweet: "It's still mostly sucrose, so it behaves like sugar in any recipe that calls for white sugar. It's a total one-to-one swap, but because some caramelization has taken place, it doesn't taste as sweet, and it does bring a little bit more complexity, some toastiness, some nuttiness, and that sort of thing coming into a dough."

To improve on classic holiday sugar cookies- you know, the kind you roll out and cut into shapes and frost with colorful icing and pack into tins as gifts- Stella advocates a slight substitution: "Most cookies are all-butter cookies, but instead of using pure butter in this recipe, I substitute a little bit of it with refined coconut oil. And refined coconut oil is a style that has no aroma or flavor of coconut. So even if you're like, 'I hate coconut,' this is not something that's going to come into play in this recipe. It's just there for the added richness, because if you've ever made a rolled sugar cookie cutout, you may have noticed that they can be a little bit dry, especially over time, if you're trying to make a cookie that keeps well. So using a little bit of coconut oil in the dough helps it to stay more moist and rich, and it helps it seem more rich, because coconut oil is higher in fat per ounce when compared to butter."

Besides advising a reader on how to successfully cook a big (and pricey) standing rib roast, Daniel describes his method for making crispy Roman-Jewish fried artichokes, a traditional Hanukkah dish: "It's a two-stage cooking process, where first you cook the artichokes in olive oil at a lower temperature.... That's to make them tender. They come out. You kind of smash them flat a little bit and open them up so that they kind of look like flowers, and then you raise the heat on the oil to deep-frying temperatures, up to 350 or so, and then go back in, and you fry them until they're golden and crisp."

If you've heard that frying in olive oil can be dangerous, fear not: "There is no scientific evidence that I have been able to find to suggest that it is a bad thing to do. The Roman Jews have been doing it for millennia, literally, and it seems to be perfectly fine." The real risk might lie in that dry, out-of-season artichoke: "I have actually had an artichoke combust, spontaneously combust, while I was slicing it.... Sparks and char and tufts of smoke wafting up off the artichoke from nothing more than cutting it."

So don't sweat your holiday cooking and baking this year- we've got you covered, on both Special Sauce and the site. Next week, we'll answer even more of your questions in the second part of this holiday edition of Ask Special Sauce.

Happy holidays, Serious Eaters. I hope it's not too early to say that.

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The full transcript for this episode can be found over here at Serious Eats: https://www.seriouseats.com/2018/12/special-sauce-holiday-cooking-part-1.html