Friday, February 26, 2010

Cracker-Bread Puffy Things (Part Three: All is Revealed)

So, imagine this...

Each guest sits down to dinner, and there's a strange bready thing in a bowl for each person.

The guests look a bit apprehensive. What is it?
Alien egg?
Bread and water for dinner?
An upcoming practical joke?
You invite them to tap it with a fork to crack it open.

Tap, tap...crack crack.


A bit of green peeks out.
This is certainly strange.
But not so frightening.

Guest poke, prod and crack.
There appear to be lettuce inside the bread.

Crack crack crunch...
It looks like someone stuffed a salad inside this bread.

The bread is so cracker-thin and fragile that it shatters,
and the lettuce comes spilling out.

Salad dressing, anyone?

As everyone eats, they wonder how you did it.
Because, obviously, you can't bake lettuce inside bread.
Or can you?
But it's all one piece, and impossibly fragile.

So how did you do it, kitchen magician?

Simple.

Turn the bread over. The flat side is the bottom.
Moisten a small circle on the bottom of the bread, about the side of a quarter.
Let it sit for a few seconds, the take a small, sharp, pointy knife and poke a hole.
The moistening lets you crack that hole without the whole thing shattering.
But it's good to make extras. Accidents happen.

Now it's time to fill the balloon.
It's best to do the filling right before serving.
No matter how dry your lettuce is, it will start making the bread less crisp the longer it sits.
Gently stuff lettuce into the hole.
Small pieces are good, and soft lettuce is better than something like iceberg.
Fill the ball until the lettuce it's full.
It's kind of cool if the lettuce springs up a bit when the ball is cracked open, but you can compact a lot of lettuce into one of these, so keep the serving size in mind as well.

Since the ball is so fragile, it will crack apart as people eat, so they probably will never notice the hole in the bottom, particularly if you save the bits you break out and put them at the bottom of the bowl. If all the pieces seem to be there, no one will know when the break occurred.

And when they ask how you did it, just tell them that it's all magic.

And if you missed it, the recipe is here, and troubleshooting tips are here.

Yum

1 comment:

Kerosena said...

This is so freakin' cool!

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