Economic baking

[wiseheart]

Ever heard about it? It's a method I developed to avoid waste when baking ungodly amounts and variations of Christmas cookies. I hate waste. I spent my childhood in quite unromantic poverty, so I was taught early on to be careful with foodstuffs. Grandma was fairly particular in this aspect - of course, without her financial acrobatics we wouldn't have had much to eat back then.

Anyway, it works like this. Let's say, I want to bake marzipan pretzels, like those below:



They are lovely, delicious, and a small amount of dough yields a great many cookies. Unfortunately, the ingredients, especially marzipan and eggs, aren't exactly cheap on these shores, and the double batch I baked (half of it for a colleague) requires 5 egg yolks but no egg whites.

So, what should I do with the egg whites? Simply throwing them out is out of the question - Grandma would come back from the afterlife and knock me out cold; besides, I hate waste, too. I could make meringues, of course, except that no-one needs so many meringues in a year; plus we don't like them because they're abysmally sweet and besides, I can never do them right.

The solution is to find a recipe that requires egg whites only, like the one below:



Which was the other thing I baked today while the dough for the marzipan pretzels was happily chilling in the fridge. Of course, the second recipe only required three egg whites, so I still had two left. I froze them in a small tinfoil dish and will thaw them out and use later, eventually. Perhaps our neighbour lady can teach me how to make a small batch of meringues, after all. Which I'll then take to school and feed to the kids during a visit.

In any case, I spent the whole morning in the kitchen and was too dead on my feet to do anything else. But I'll go out of the house tomorrow, yessss, precioussss, we will!

PS: Those of you who haven't heard yet Dan Vasc singing "I See Fire, should do so. I've listened to the original version and prefer his by far.

Comments

[spikesgirl58.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a great way to use everything up and make due with what you have. I think we could all do with a bit more of that these days.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Plus, when you manage to do the economic way, it gives you immense satisfaction. ;)
No, really, it does!

[artemis10002000]

Thank you for the recipes!

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

You are welcome! I'm planning to scan in a lot more of them and put them up on my Pinterest board for your baking pleasure. I'm sure you won't mind that they're in German. ;))

[artemis10002000]

Not at all! I'll keep an eye open for when they pop up

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Soon, I promise.

[motodraconis.livejournal.com]

I can't bear food waste either, but I'm a poor baker and in awe of your cooking skills. I'd probably have just fried the whites with vegetables or whisked them into noodle soup or something.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Oh, I do that, too - whisking them into noodle soup, I mean. But with five of them, there would be more egg white than soup, in the end. ;)

[meathiel]

We actually made scrambled eggs with the extra egg whites and some eggs last week ... 😉

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

That works with one or two extra egg whites, but with five, when we're only two people...

[elwenlj.livejournal.com]

I was brought up the same way, but grew more wasteful when the money was coming in regularly. I don't bake, but now I'm back to using up every scrap of food, and it's amazing how much money I can save. Lesson learned.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Indeed. As we say in Hungarian: Don't stretch any further than your blanket would reach.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Our usual Christmas combo always used to be rum truffles (egg yolks) and peppermint creams (egg whites). I didn't do any of them last year - maybe this year.