It’s strawberry season; in my house that means it’s also angel food cake season.
In winter, when fresh fruit is scarce here on the east coast, my default dessert is lemon tart. Because the tart is rich with egg yolks my freezer tends to fill up with leftover egg whites.
So when strawberry season rolls around, I bake angel food cakes; nothing tastes better with strawberries than a fluff of white cake with a dollop of whipped cream.
There are a few tricks to making angel food cake. When my friend Marion Cunningham was working on The Baker’s Dozen Cookbook, she sent a recipe for Angel Food Cake to thirty-five bakers, asking them each to bake the cake, exactly as written, and bring it to a meeting. She called me afterward in great excitement; “You would not believe how different they were,” she marveled. “They all had holes in the middle, but other than that, each cake was unique.”
Appalled by this, she and the other bakers decided to perfect the recipe. This cake, created by Flo Braker, is angel food perfection. Follow these instructions and you will have a high, white cloud-like confection that truly does seem heavenly.
Five Steps to a Better Angel Food Cake
1. Cold eggs are easier to separate, so do it when the eggs are right out of the refrigerator.
2. If even the tiniest amount of fat gets into the eggs they will refuse to whip. soseparate each egg white into a separate bowl before adding it to the others, in case one of the yolks breaks.
3. Leave your egg whites in the bowl, out of the refrigerator, for about an hour. If you have an instant-read thermometer, the optimum temperature is 60 degrees. The whites are more viscous at this temperature, and the air bubbles are more stable. (Room temperature is about 70 degrees; they will whip more quickly, but at this temperature they are easy to overbeat.)
4.To insure there is no grease on the bowl or beater, wipe them with white vinegar and rinse in very hot water. Dry well.
5. Make sure your oven is 350 degrees. If the oven’s too low, the sugar will absorb the liquid from the egg whites and turn syrupy. If it’s too hot, the outside will set before the interior.
6. Allow the cake to cool completely before removing it from the pan.
Angel Food Cake (from Baker’s Dozen Cookbook)
12 large egg whites (1 1/2 cups)
1 1/2 cups sifted confectioner’s sugar
1 cup sifted cake flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla.
Allow the egg whites to sit in the bowl of a stand mixer for about an hour, to come to just below room temperature (60 degrees).
Sift the confectioner’s sugar, cake flour and salt together.
Whip egg whites at low speed until they are foamy. Add the cream of tartar and increase the speed to medium. Keep whipping, gradually adding the cup of granulated sugar, until the whites thicken and form soft, droopy peaks. Add vanilla.
Sprinkle a quarter cup of the flour mixture over the whites and fold it in, by hand, with a rubber spatula. Repeat with the next quarter, and the next, until all the flour has all been gently folded in. (This is a slower process than you might imagine.) Put into an ungreased 10-inch tube pan.
Bake at 350 degrees, 40 to 45 minutes, until the top is golden, the top springs back when you touch it, and a toothpick comes out clean. Invert the pan onto the neck of a bottle. Leave for 3 hours so that the cake is completely cool.
Run a knife around the sides of pan until you feel it release. Then push up the bottom of the pan. Loosen the cake bottom by tapping on a counter until it’s free and invert onto a plate, and then back onto a cake platter.
Slice with a serrated knife
Writing this post reminded me of something I wrote about fifteen years ago after a tour through the midwest where I was promoting a book.
When I was in Madison a couple of weeks ago, a pleasant gentleman came up to ask if I’d ever heard of a Rekul Pan-O-Cake.
I hadn’t. He handed me a Xerox of a Clementine Paddleford Food Flash from Gourmet in 1947. Here’s Ms. Paddleford.
"Angel foods, the real heavenly kind, snowy white, soft as down, tall and lithesome, are going places by mail, traveling in the Wearever aluminum pans in which they are baked. These are big cakes, the thirteen-egg kind, nine inches in diameter, four inches high. The price, $2.50 post paid.
The pan is yours, or return it for a refill. The next cakes costs but $1.25."
To make a long story short, Jackson Luker discovered that his angel food cakes got better over time if he left them in the pan. And so he started his mail order business. By 1947 he was selling half a million cakes a year. That's an awful lot of egg whites.
The company is no more, but I was curious. I found a couple of the old Re-kul pans on Ebay and immediately ordered them. They’re sturdy pans - and they really do make great cakes.
The man in Madison? He’s Jack Luker’s son - and he remembers growing up “washing the concrete-like dried crust out of the pans in order to bake more cakes."
I’m with him there; these are great pans - but it’s hard to get the cakes out (you’re supposed to bang the cake on a board, really hard, to remove it from the pan) - and even harder to wash the pans.
Thinking about dessert always makes me think of my friend Nancy Silverton, who not only brought great bread to Los Angeles but pretty much revolutionized the way restaurants in America thought about dessert. (If you haven’t already bought her new book, The Cookie That Changed My Life, what are you waiting for?)
Here’s one of her first dessert menus at Campanile. And then - the rest of the menu in that summer of 1989.
Last week, at Chicago’s Alinea, I opted for the wine pairing. My dining companion, Francis Lam, chose the non-alcoholic route. I was stunned when that did not turn out to be the usual parade of juicy libations, but rather a series of non-alcoholic wines poured from bottles. And even more stunned when some of them turned out to be really spectacular.
It’s clear we’ve entered a new era of drinking. So many people now eschew alcohol that serious minds are doing their best to create an entirely new drinking experiences. As Alinea’s wine director, John Leopold, puts it “we're constantly tinkering with these, especially as the non-alcoholic market keeps expanding and we can offer new things.
My favorite was the “Champagne” above, Lyre's Classico. I also very much enjoyed the NON1, Noughty Blanc and Muri "Passing Clouds".
Then we were on to the reds, which were, to my mind, less impressive. They were:
I’m no expert, but another non-alcoholic libation I like a lot is this Phony Negroni.
In last week’s gift guide I mentioned the custom-inscribed tomahawk steaks at Pat LaFrieda and so many of you responded that the LaFrieda folks took notice. They gave me a call.
If you’re a meat-eater who spends any time in restaurants you undoubtedly recognize the name. Pat LaFrieda is a third-generation butcher who supplies meat to chefs across the country; I first encountered his spectacular burger blend at Minetta Tavern. Now, just in time for barbecue season (and the Fourth of July), they’re offering 15% off to readers of La Briffe.
Use promo code RUTH15 at checkout - or the discount is automatically applied using this link: https://shop.lafrieda.com/discount/RUTH15 .
This offer is good through July 1st, 2024.
I got one of the Angel Food pans! Somehow, in the clearing of my mom’s cabinets, Grandma’s Angel Food “tin” was in the to go pile. Hers had a removable base/cone which made detaching a bit easier. Edith made a wicked Angel Food Cake but I’ll try the recipe you shared. Then back to Mary Ann Cake pans and shortcake. Ah strawberries and summer!
My mom made wonderful angel food cakes! I remember her whipping the egg whites by hand, even though she had a stand mixer. I don't remember why. Perhaps it was easier to get them just the right consistency.