It’s vacation season, and what may very well be extra pleasant than savoring Grandma’s chocolate-covered brownies?
Useful spirit that I’m (and since Dec. 8 truly occurs to be – no lie – Nationwide Brownie Day), I’m gifting grandmas in every single place this 12 months with a fail-safe recipe for these treats from an unimpeachable supply: the US Division of Protection.
Nice baker that she is, Grandma could also be unaware of some nuances the navy requires within the creation of mess corridor “Brownies, chocolate coated.”
Grandma’s personal recipe could also be scrawled on the again of an envelope, but when she desires the navy model, MIL-C-44072C, she’ll discover a listing of directions spanning 26 pages.
She could swear by her personal methodology, utilizing “slightly little bit of this and slightly little bit of that,” however the DOD insists on extra precision, viz:
“The shortening shall have the steadiness of not lower than 100 hours as decided by the Lively Oxygen Methodology (AOM) in Methodology Cd 12-57 of the Industrial Fat and Oils chapter within the Official and Tentative Strategies of the American Oil Chemists Society.
“The shortening could comprise alpha monoglycerides and an antioxidant or mixture of antioxidants, as permitted by the Federal Grain Inspection Service (FGIS), and the Federal Meals, Drug, and Beauty Act and rules promulgated thereunder.”
The navy advises that if nuts are used, “a minimal of 95 %, by weight, of the items shall go by way of a 4/16-diameter spherical gap display.” If pecans are the selection, they “shall be coated with an accredited meals grade antioxidant and shall be of the newest season’s crop.”
In terms of cracking eggs, Grandma higher concentrate: “Entire eggs could also be liquid or frozen and shall have been processed and labeled in accordance with the Laws Governing the Inspection of Eggs and Egg Merchandise (7 CFR Half 59). The entire eggs shall be egg whites and egg yolks of their pure proportions as damaged immediately from the shell eggs as evidenced by a USDA Egg Merchandise Inspection Certificates.”
Vegetable fats for the chocolate coating “shall be pure or hydrogenated coconut, palm kernel, babascu, tucum, or different excessive auric acid oils or mixtures thereof … The free fatty acid content material ought to be no better than 0.08 %…”
Making the chocolate coating is a breeze, as soon as Grandma melts “Sorbitan monostearate and polyoxyethylene” in with different substances and makes a combination refined to “20 microns or much less, 7/10,000 inch in order that it has a easy mouthfeel with out grittiness.”
Now, take pleasure in – it’s completed, so long as “the size of the coated brownie shall not exceed 3 1/2 inches by 2 1/2 inches by 5/8 inch.”
In need of going AWOL and begging the closest bakery for a covert field of Christmas brownies, I don’t understand how most grandmas would deal with all this. However I can simply think about mine in her kitchen years in the past at Chanukah – studying the recipe, slapping a hand to her wrinkled forehead, and muttering a plaintively Yiddish and really non-military, “Oy, vey!”
Gerry Goldstein (gerryg76@verizon.net), a common contributor, is a retired Windfall Journal editor and columnist.