Balls to the Wall

Principal Ramdev returned to KLB last Friday. That very day, he brought up a subject again which I had hoped he had forgotten, because it had been a couple of weeks since we last discussed it:

“Pat, you need to try again to come up with some spicy snack to sell.” Damnit!

Number one, I’m no good at spicy. I’m good at sweet. Number two, he wants something as a snack, not a meal, and all the salty/spicy snacks that the girls like are already being sold elsewhere in mass quantities. Number three, American cuisine just isn’t very good at spicy. We’re good at sweet, and some southern cuisine is spicy, but those things are usually meats or meals, like tacos or fajitas or carne adovado. I’ve told him this many times, but he keeps insisting that I borrow from another culture or country. “Perhaps Canadian cuisine has something spicy?” Wait, does Canada even have a cuisine, or just watery beer and hockey?

The fourth and biggest obstacle that I’ve mentioned before is limitations, both in ingredients and equipment. No oven, no large burners, sometimes not even measuring cups or spatulas, and there’s not a lot I can do with food that hasn’t already been done. You have to understand that this culture has been using the same recipes, same basic cooking methods, and sometimes even the same equipment for the past 5,000 years. Palampur is rural enough that Western influence hasn’t yet kicked down the door with hot dogs and marshmallow cream, so they haven’t had the need to change much. As a result, when it comes to their ingredients and their methods, they’ve thought of it all. Everything. Anything that can be done has already been done for at least a few millennia. They’ve got their own version of falafel, which I found out after I made it. And all the desserts I’ve made require either unusual equipment (an oven) or uncommon, expensive ingredients (peanut butter, cocoa). Plus I still can’t use eggs without alienating a large portion of the market. This is one of the biggest challenges I face here: being original with what I’ve got.

So you can imagine how excited I was this weekend when I invented a completely new dessert. Not only has it never been done in India, but I’m pretty sure that while it has counterparts in American sweet pastries, it is in a category of its own. I have a friend that writes a cooking blog and takes pictures of the delicious delicacies that she creates, and earlier this week, cinnamon buns were featured on her site. My mouth waters every time I open her page, but this time, I had to practically turn off the faucet in my salivary glands. I love yeasted desserts like cinnamon buns, as well as pretty much anything else that is leavened by yeast and baked. The smell that fills your kitchen when you cook off a fresh loaf of good bread or a pan of monkey bread is unbeatable, and cinnamon is another one of those smells that cannot be matched.

(Sidebar: I purchased 300g of great-quality whole cinnamon from a shop here for 36 rupees. That’s about 80 cents. Go to Penzeys Spices website and check out the price of cinnamon there, by weight. Then feel free to email me your spice orders.)

“Man, I have to make those here. I’ll need to buy milk, a couple of eggs, cinnamon… and an oven. Crap.”

No. Not this time. I’m going to figure it out how to have my eggless, oven-free cake and eat it too. I just have to think outside the box a little. I’ve got a really good recipe for sweet yeasted dough from back in the states. This same dough can be used for not only cinnamon buns, but also any sort of sweet baked bread that requires rising times. And I can’t bake them, but there are other cooking methods available. Pan frying won’t work, because it doesn’t generate enough even heat to get the yeast to expand the dough. Boiling is completely out of the question, unless you like to eat your cinnamon buns out of a soup bowl. Open flame is a good idea, but that would burn the outside before the inside has a chance to even feel the heat. That leaves deep frying.

Deep frying gets a bad rep in the states, and it shouldn’t. Sure, if that’s the only kind of food you eat, and you go to McDonalds for three meals a day, you’ll gain a few (hundred) pounds. But if you fry something correctly, on your own, you add almost no fat to the target food. It’s a very popular method of cooking in Asian countries because it’s very efficient; the food is done in no time with a minimal amount of fuel and wasted. The way to fry something correctly is to keep the oil hot as possible without burning it and not fry too many pieces of food at the same time. Generally, oil stays right around 190°C, and you already know that water boils at 100°C. So, when a piece of food that has water in it (which they all do before they are cooked) is surrounded by oil that is already almost twice the temperature of the boiling point, the water is going to instantly boil and turn into steam, which will force its way out of the food. As long as there is water left in the food turning to steam and pushing out of the food, it will keep the oil from getting into the food. The trick is to remove the food from the oil just before it is finished cooking and just before all the water in the food is gone. The other trick is to not add too much food at a time, because that will crowd the pot and decrease the total temperature of the oil, slowing the cooking time and inviting oil into the food. If you do it right and keep an eye on the temperature, no oil is added to the food besides whatever sticks to the surface as it is removed, and that is usually wicked off by newspaper or the like. Plus, you’ll be treated with crispy, delicious and fast food without all the greasiness. Don’t believe me? Next time you deep fry, weigh the pot full of oil before and after the cooking. If you fry well, it’s not going to weigh much less after cooking, meaning very little oil left the pot.

Thus, the cinnamon rolls, I decided, were destined to be deep fried. The only problem is that if I make the traditional cinnamon roll shape, the butter/sugar/cinnamon filling rolled up in the middle of the pastry would immediately melt and leak out into the oil. That would not only ruin the oil, but I would lose that oh-so-delicious cinnamon taste that drives me crazy. Solution? Roll a flat circle out of a small piece of the dough, place the cinnamon filling in the middle, and crimp up the sides to form a neat little walnut-sized ball with the cinnamon filling hidden on the inside, safe from the oil.

Verdict: Freaking Awesome! It’s kind of like a doughnut in that it’s a small fried ball with a sweet filling, and it’s true that the outside tastes kind of like one, but on the inside, the dough is all bun-like. It’s flaky and light, minimally sweet, with none of the grainy, fall-apart-in-your-mouth texture of a doughnut. Plus the cinnamon filling is contained on the inside and doesn’t spread throughout the whole thing, which, in my mind, separates it from a true cinnamon bun. Why do I think that is new to not only India, but America? Because there is no reason for it to be made this way in the states. If you want a cinnamon bun, you bake it, and if you want a fried pastry, you use doughnut dough. Necessity is the mother of invention, and in the land of opportunity there was no necessity to think of a way besides oven baking to cook sweet yeasted dough, which is distinctly different from doughnuts in texture, taste, sweetness and structure.

One more question you may have is, why do I feel this is an important enough experience to write about? Because it’s a sign that I’m starting to be original in my surroundings. I used ingredients, cooking methods and equipment very common in Himachal Pradesh to create something completely new and different, as well as delicious. There’s hope for me, and my work, yet.

As I sit here and write this, polishing off yet another of my tasty creations for more inspiration, I realize that these new concoctions need a name. Hmm… well, this is a sweet yeasted dough that, while commonly used in cinnamon rolls, can be used for many things, including a favorite from my camping days called monkey bread. Monkeys are common in India. These things are small and round. They’re new and need a catchy name. Nothing’s more memorable than humor.

Sooooo…

Monkey Balls.

Coming soon to a bakery near you!