Olive Oil Baking
by Lisa A. Sheldon
Cumberland House Publishing, 2007
$19.95, cloth
160 pages
For cooks and eaters who want to be healthy and enjoy food, the Mediterranean diet has become a watchword. And it's a diet easy to follow and enjoy, when drizzling olive oil on fresh tomatoes and sopping up the juices with a crusty heel of whole grain bread. But when it comes to cakes, cookies, breakfast muffins, and pancakes, we start to crave the flavor and texture of butter.
Dedicated bakers will have found a few recipes that really work well with olive oil, but the default ingredient is butter for baking. Lisa Sheldon is a nutritionist inspired by the Mediterranean diet and is not content to limit olive oil to savory dishes. She worked up this book of sweet recipes (and a few savories)that will have you rethinking your baking and maybe even feeling good (or at least not quite so guilty) about brownies, lemon bars, gingerbread pancakes, fudge cake.
There is no punishment in these recipes, and no diet-type substitutions of eggs or sugar. Sheldon uses a portion of whole wheat pastry flour along with the white flour in most of her recipes, but has no qualms about a four egg pound cake, an Almond Coconut Bundt Cake studded with chocolate chips, or sugar dusted Chocolate Crinkle cookies.
She's come up with a wide and creative list of appealing recipes. There are familiar favorites like gingerbread, pound cakes, coffeecakes, muffins, and cookies along with a few European inspired recipes for biscotti. She makes it easy to work olive oil into the kind of baking you're called on to do for potlucks, bake sales, or weekend breakfasts.
Pear Coffeecake with Ginger and Pecans is moist, as you would expect from an oil based cake, but by no means gummy, even though the batter is studded with chopped fresh pears. A streusel topping is a bit of the dry mix for the batter, set aside, then sprinkled on top with pecans and chopped, crystallized ginger. Some whole wheat flour in the mix adds an appealing texture that stands up to the spice and fruit.
It's hard to get excited about bran muffins. They seem sort of medicinal and hardly as appealing of some of Sheldon's other muffins, like Pineapple Coconut, Lemon Ginger, or Chocolate Banana. But her Super Bran Muffins are just that. Not heavy or stodgy, they are lightly spicy, and just sweet enough. They are moist and tender when warm from the oven and freeze well. She again uses a portion of whole wheat flour and creates a gentle flavor with brown sugar, vanilla, and lemon zest.
Well this all sounds very healthy and good for you, but what about a real treat. Sheldon has worked that out too. Her chapter on cakes includes Coconut Layer Cake and Carrot Cake. Her Rich Chocolate Fudge Cake takes its deep flavor from cocoa powder and brewed coffee and a slight tang of olive oil, which helps it stay moist, if you can make it last more than a day or two.
While Sheldon's headnotes rarely give clues to what results a recipe might give, most of recipes are familiar enough to imagine, and are clearly presented and simple to make. And there are no calorie or nutrition counts. Health is a pleasure in this book, not meant to measured, but enjoyed.
© 2007 Claudia Kousoulas
