Tomorrow, my work group is holding its first holiday potluck. Our department held a potluck before Thanksgiving, but this one is just for us. For the past few years, I've become something of an ambassador for Filipino cuisine, which is odd since I don't really eat much Filipino food.<\/p>\n
I've brought in chicken adobo, lumpia and bibinka to the office, and because no one has ever eaten these foods before, they all think it tastes really good. But I'm not much of a cook, Filipino or otherwise, and I know when things don't come out right. I'm the only one who knows.<\/p>\n
I'm bringing bibinka for this potluck, and tonight I experimented with method I've seen time and again on Good Eats<\/em> — the creaming method. I started watching Good Eats<\/em> in 2002, not because I was interested in cooking but because I thought Alton Brown was hot. I kept watching because the show uses humor as an instructional tool. In other words, I watched it because it entertained me. Your run-of-the-mill cooking show usually bores the crap out of me. But throw in cheap props and comedic acting, and I'll watch an egg boil.<\/p>\n The creaming method involves mixing room temperature butter with sugar first. Then mixing the flower with the butter-sugar mixture. Once the dry components have gained a bit of volume, the wet ingredients — for this recipe, vanilla, eggs, milk — are mixed together, then put on top of the dry ingredients. They're all combined, then baked.<\/p>\n In the past, I'd just toss everything into the bowl and hope for the best. Sometimes the bibinka came out surprisingly crisp. Other times — particularly when I didn't let the butter soften — it came out greasy and gooey. Tonight, I was wonderfully surprised by the results. The creaming method mixes air into the mixture, so essentially, I lightened up the batter. The batch I baked tonight had a light color but a crispy exterior. It was still chewy but easy to bite.<\/p>\n I think I may have found the secret to my aunt's bibinka. She took my mom's recipe and made some changes, improving it to the point where my mom started using my aunt's recipe. My mom only gave me the ingredient list and just told me to mix everything together. She never really makes note of a process. But now I have the creaming method, and I have the most surprising and pleasing results to show for it.<\/p>\n I knew all these years of oggling at Alton Brown would pay off. I just wish now he'd get a haircut.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tomorrow, my work group is holding its first holiday potluck. Our department held a potluck before Thanksgiving, but this one is just for us. For the past few years, I've become something of an ambassador for Filipino cuisine, which is odd since I don't really eat much Filipino food. I've brought in chicken adobo, lumpia […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Bkgj-1r","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/vexvox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}