JOURNAL: Gingered Duck (Cookies) II

In preparation for the Gingered Duck Cookies, I made a few dozen traditional Swedish ginger and bacon fat cookies to help me consider my adaptation scheme. I think I can just swap out the fats, but I am going to do a little melt test and some Internet research before I make the first batch.

Based on flavor, I was thinking that they would make a killer ice cream sandwich with vanilla or lemon gelato between, but they are sort of hard, so I don’t think the structure of the cookie would be conducive to a sandwich. To bring them from delicious to amazing, I am considering the addition of lemon zest and/or almonds to enhance the flavor. I would really love to find a way to get them to fluff up more too, rather than spreading and crisping so much, so I will experiment with not pressing them, adding more baking soda, etc. but the science of baking is something I do not understand. To prove it, the following paragraph illustrates how I tried to use physics to solve a chemistry problem.

While trying to counteract the cookie’s tendency to flatten, I discovered a fun trick that circumvents the ice cream sandwich issue. I figured that if the cookies would have no room to spread out, then they might take the path of least resistance and rise, so I dropped a dozen dough balls into a cupcake pan. I should have figured that you can’t use force to coax dough into rising, since really it’s a chemical reaction issue. Rather than rise, they spread up the sides of the cups, resulting in flat-bottomed, bowl-shaped cookies, which would perfectly cradle a scoop of ice cream. Next time I am going to use a bigger ball of dough in the cup and see if can make a larger cookie cup. I love the happy accidents, and the cupcake pan cookies actually are a little fluffier and softer than the cookie sheet variety. Brute force and ignorance triumph again!

JOURNAL: Gingered Duck (Cookies)

The classic Swedish holiday cookie involves two of my all-time favorite ingredients, neither of which I usually associate with cookies, or each other. The appearances, flavors, aromas and textures of ginger and bacon fat seem so diametrically opposed that I was both horrified and intrigued by the thought of combining them into one sticky biscuit.

It works. It works as well as I imagined it possibly could, and the flavor and texture of these cookies is hard to rival, but I thought I might be able to come up with a little trick to make it work even better, a twist to put it over the top, and that got me thinking about other favorite fats and ginger dishes, and it all fell right into place.

Rendered duck fat is probably the most amazing thing on Earth, up there with Bose-Einstein Condensate as a substance that both perplexes and amazes me, so impossible to wrap my head around how it can do what it does. I have found that in the kitchen, anything that benefits from a richly flavored fat like bacon grease can become ten times more tantalizing when substituted with rendered duck fat. Ginger duck dishes also work very well in Asian cuisine, so I think I might just have devised a winner.

Experiments will follow soon and I will update with a recipe and results in an impending posting.