What even is a backpocket recipe?
To begin with, why do we care?
Obviously, there's more to cooking than amassing recipes, and techniques are more important than recipes (though the best way to get general techniques is through specific recipes)...
Even so, these are still cool tricks. Every cook's toolbox should have these quick recipes that they can break out in dire times of need.
So, what's the deal with them?
- Short ingredient list
- Every ingredient should be a native inhabitant of your pantry
- Ideally, no more than 1 hour from "I want something sweet" to it being done
- No fancy tools or equipment. Preferably one bowl
- No yolks or whites. Whole eggs only, if any.
- Fits in an index card
- All recipes are generally easy for experienced cooks; backpocket recipes should be easy for beginners
Of course, these vague guidelines are very kitchen-, region- and cook-dependent.
Consider this recipe:
Chocolate scones/cookies
Yield: around 20- Self-rising flour 250g
- 1 tbsp icing sugar
- 30g cocoa powder
- pinch of salt
- 50g cold butter
- 100g chocolate chips
- 200ml milk
- Preheat oven to 180°C
- Mix flour, sugar, cocoa, salt in a bowl
- Rub in cubes of the butter
- Add chips, and finally add the milk
- Mix without kneading, then roll out on floured counter
- Cut into 3cm thick rounds, bake for ~15 min
At first sight, it seems to fit right in. One bowl, few ingredients, flexible (the add-in, chocolate chips, feels like it can swapped for nuts, raisins, etc.)
But is your counter clean? You need it to roll the dough. It's a bit flexible, in the sense that you can kind of roll it out in any other surface that you can flour (like a table, or a large cutting board) but, again, this is kitchen-dependent.
Are you fine with getting your hands in to rub the butter? This may sound like a triviality, but it's nice to minimize cleanup, and that includes your hands.
The region dependence can't be understated either. For example, many chinese cooks will probably have Shaoxing wine, most(?) will have arrowroot starch. These are both much rarer in western kitchens.
Here's a better example, with some of those points taken into account.
Snowball cookies
Yield: around 30(also known as: russian snowball cookies, mexican wedding cookies)
- Butter 250g
- Icing sugar 100g
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- AP flour 350g
- pinch of salt
- Extra icing sugar to dust tops
- Cream butter and sugar, add vanilla
- Sift the flour and salt into the butter+sugar. Mix until smooth. Shouldn't be liquid batter.
- Take small portions and shape into walnut-like balls.
- Bake in a tray (leave some space between them!) at 180° C for ~10 min. They musn't turn gold!!
- Dust with icing sugar after they've cooled a bit.
A bit better, right?
The key is that the backpocketness of a recipe is not in the written text but in how smooth the process is once you've gotten the hang of it. At that point, the recipe becomes more or less a guideline.
Hot research areas in the field of backpocket recipes:
- Say you have a recipe of possibly moderate complexity, but it can be kept in the freezer. This minimizes the "want something sweet" -> "eat it" time massively. Does this count?
- Enumerating all recipes to find possible backpocket recipes. Sweden's top minds are currently working on an algorithm in Prolog to do just this. This is research at the forefront of constraint solving and natural language processing.
- The maximal backpocket recipe (i.e. one with the most ingredients, or with the most amount of steps) that still feels like a backpocket recipe. This is still an open problem. The upper bound is estimated to be Ω(n ^ log log (15))