[Sca-cooks] Experimentation results for Amidono d' amido

[Raphaella DiContini]

Greetings, 
   Thank you all so much for your feedback and help. I went to my local grocery store that carries Bob's Red Mill products, but sadly they didn't have any wheat starch as it was a very limited selection. I then went to a local Asian supermarket (which was an adventure this close to Chinese new year) and while they didn't have any wheat starch, they did have rice starch so this first set of experiments was using that. There are still some questions, but I think I'm off to a good start. 

Here's the translation I've been working from to start things off: 
I. (1) Amidono of starch {Almond milk pudding}
If you want to make starch dish for 12 people, take two pounds of almonds and one pound of amido/starch. And half of sugar and take ½ of peeled pine nuts and half a quarter (1/8th) of cloves, and take the almonds well peeled and well crushed, and temper them with clear water well boiled and separate the milk and set it to boil, of that that remains raw put to soften the starch.  When the milk has boiled enough, temper the starch and put it into and mix thick for serving, and put in enough sugar, and dust with scrapes of sugar and cloves and whole pine nuts.  And if you want to make it for more persons or for less, make it like this to this same recipe and it is a perfect food. 

Using the weights kindly supplied by Antonia and others I recalculated the amounts given for a 1/4 recipe using the Troy pound. 

6 oz Almond
3 oz Amido/ starch
1.5 oz sugar (I used superfine baker's sugar)
1.5 oz peeled pine nuts
.5 oz cloves

I started with a water based almond milk and left roughly half out, which I mixed with the rice starch. Once the almond milk had boiled I poured that into the starch/almond milk mixture and then back into the pan to slowly bring it back up to temperature. At this point I was struggling with lumps quite a bit, but after managing to work most of them out added the sugar to taste leaving some for garnish and added some of the cloves and the pine nuts. 

I wasn't very happy with this first try. The texture wasn't great and having measured out all the ingredients, but adding the sugar and cloves slowly the clove was still much, much too overwhelming. I could definitely see it's potential as it was quite tasty if visually unappealing before the clove was added. 

The second run through was done by having measured out the calculated amounts again, but this time adding things slowly until the right balance seemed to be reached. I also realized that as this starch was already light and fluffy, having the consistency of powdered sugar that it likely didn't need the step of "softening" which greatly increased the lumpiness. 

This time I brought all of the almond milk (6oz) to a boil and sifted the starch into it and then whisked it smooth. The resulting texture was nearly perfect. However when I reached 1 oz of the starch, it set perfectly and I chose not to try to over saturate it to add the other 2/3 of the called for amount. I then whisked in most of the sugar to taste, plated it and sprinkled it with a bit more sugar, pine nuts, and a pinch of clove. 

The result was very well recivied. My stunt non-foodie even asked for more and there was nothing left at the end! 

I've got some theories as to why the interpretation that seemed to work best had differnent measurements than the original. The first is the almonds/ almond milk. Not having been given the amount of boiled water used for the almond milk I used to measurement given for the almonds as a placeholder and I'm fairly certain this was the biggest miscalculation. When I make almond milk I typically will use 1 cup of skinless almonds to 3 cups of water, which yeilds 3 cups of almond milk + solids to be strained. If I were to increase the amount of almond milk by three that would put the texture just about perfect, and would increase the bulk enough that the amount of sugar wouldn't overpower the delicate flavor (but that may have been what they were aming for as sugar=prestige). 

My theory on the completely overwhelming cloves is that they would have been more garnish, and as the description was "scrapes of sugar and cloves" that they weren't ground which difuses the flavor much more powerfully and might to some degree have been eaten around. 

I'm still planning on doing at least one more run with this recipe using my almond milk theory, and I've had quite a bit of fun! Thank you all again for all of your input. 

In joyous service, 
Raffaella