About this week Episode of Dinner SOS, Test Kitchen director and host Chris Morocco is joined by Test Kitchen editor Kendra Vaculin to discuss how Kendra developed the perfect lemon bar recipe.
Developing this recipe for Foolproof Lemon Bars nearly bankrupted Kendra. There’s even video evidence to prove it. All recipes published in magazines and on the Bon Appétit and Epicurious websites are developed, tasted, critiqued and cross-tested (with a final test conducted by someone other than the developer) in our test kitchen on the 35th floor of One World Trade. I am. center. When it came to developing a new lemon bar, Kendra, as usual, didn’t make it easy for herself.
Chris explains that lemon bars typically contain large amounts of zest and juice, which are hardened into bars in one of two ways. Some use starches, such as flour, or eggs to thicken the lemon juice mixture and cause it to solidify when baked. It works, but the results are often unstable. Another method involves first making lemon curd (lemon juice concentrated with just the egg in a double boiler on the stovetop) and baking it over the prepared dough, resulting in a creamier, brighter, more delicate lemon layer. make.
Kendra’s goal was to determine if she could develop a recipe that was as simple as a mix-and-mix filling and had all the best qualities of cooked lemon curd. Kendra encountered many problems. The lemon filling flowed under the dough (the lemon bars ended up upside down!), the sweetened condensed milk overpowered the lemon flavor, and I added too much air to the lemon mixture.
After making about a dozen trays of lemon bars, Kendra finally cracked the code on how they can be stacked, don’t need to be cooked twice, and are perfect with a sunny golden lemon filling. Hear now if you were able to complete the bar.
