Recipe tips: Lady fingers

Hello fork musketeers!

Today I'll be covering some older content: lady fingers.

Homemade lady fingers are those fancy little biscuits that always gets a delighted, "Ooohhh!!" smile from your friend. Little do they know, they're pretty easy to make and you can make a pretty big batch under an hour. Crazy, I know. They don't have a very extensive list of ingredients and you will most likely have all the things at home. Crazy, I know!

What's in a lady finger?

Lady fingers, or biscuit à la cuillère, are essentially (separated) eggs; flour and sugar. Most people are probably more familiar with Italian-style lady fingers; the ones that you buy at the grocery store to make tiramisu. Fun fact: there are french-style ones!

The difference between the two is the overall texture. Italian lady fingers were designed for young toddlers in the middle of teething. The harder and drier texture relieves the pain and won't cause the toddlers to choke. French lady fingers, however, were not meant for toddlers. According to Chef, they were given to high class ladies who had an "afternoon tea" meal of champagne, strawberries and... lady fingers. Don't even try pretending you drink champagne because you have lady fingers. You're not fooling anybody.

That being said, you can totally make tiramisu with both. While Italian lady fingers are, conceptually, better since they'll absorb more spiked coffee, you can still use French lady fingers as well.

Lady finger tips

So I have some good news for you. The only electronic assistance you need is your mixer and your oven (gas assistant if you have a gas oven). Hurray! First separate your eggs. It's really important that there is NO egg yolks in your egg whites. Protein is meringue's death certificate. It'll be easier to avoid piercing the egg yolk if you tap the side of the egg on a flat surface, like your table, rather than the edge of a bowl.

Protip: It's way easier to separate eggs when the eggs are cold. You can either pass the egg yolk between the two shells or you can get messy and use your hand as a strainer. Alternatively, though maybe not the most sanitary option, you can use an empty water bottle and "suck" the egg yolk into the bottle and transfer into your bowl. 

First, beat your yolks and sugar together until it drips down your beater like this. This is called "thick ribbons". 

Set this aside in another mixing bowl and wash your mixing bowl very well. Don't worry if there's still a bit of water left in it; just make sure there's no more egg yolk/oil in it.

Protip: You may be thinking, "why can't I beat the egg whites first then the egg yolks? It'll save me some washing!" Raw meringue, however, doesn't do very well at room temperature. If you leave it out for too long it starts to separate and gets watery. It'll be ok if you can keep the meringue moving but you're looking at extending its life 20 minutes max. So, while more cumbersome, this way will prevent you from screwing up your meringue and leaving you with extra egg yolks. Which is annoying as hell, I know.

Gently beat your egg whites until it becomes foamy then you can add your sugar and continue beating. You're looking for stiff peaks; what this means is when you take your whisk out of the meringue it should hold a point or look like a bird's beak.

Chef said think of Big Bird
from Sesame street. Big bird's beak
isn't like this at all. Jussayin.

Now here comes a somewhat tricky part. What you need to do is incorporate the whipped egg yolks and the meringue together in the least amount of folds to preserve the air in your meringue.

How to fold meringue into your other ingredient(s)
Step 1: Use your spatula to take a third of your meringue and plop it into your wet ingredient. If you're incorporating flour, put some of your dry ingredients into the meringue.
Step 2: Gently scrape the side of your bowl with your spatula.

Step 3: ... and fold some batter over the top.

Step 4: Then gently smoosh your batter 2-4 times.

Finished scooping the batter over
the top...

... followed by a gentle smoosh.

Step 5: Rotate your bowl and repeat from Step 1 until the batter is well combined.

You want to make sure you don't have large pockets of meringue in your batter. This will give you some uneven rising in your finished product. When you're done, put the batter into a piping bag or screw modern convention and do the name justice by using a spoon. It depends on how rebellious you feel. I'm quite conventional so I used a piping bag.

Protip: If you have a tray that can fit your wire rack, you can put the wire rack into your tray. Top it off with parchment paper and you have a grid-guideline for your lady fingers. Just make sure to put something in the corners to prevent your paper from flying.

Lady finger guidelines

Once it's all piped out, you must, must, MUST put some icing sugar on top. Do one coat, wait 30-60s, then do a second coat. This is imperative to a crispy, texture top. Don't be shy now.

Notice how I was not shy with the sugar.
DO NOT BE SHY. Shyness won't get you
a nice crust.

Protip: If you don't have icing sugar readily available, you can use your food processor or your coffee grinder to grind regular sugar. Plus this way saves you some cash.

Now bake until it looks crispy, crusty and lovely. It's a really short bake time so don't go away. Mine took about 7 minutes on the dot.

My non-shyness paid off.

There you go. Lady fingers! They're spongey, chewy and have a really light flavour. Can you believe it's only eggs, sugar and flour?! Plus they take less than an hour to make. Now you're morally obligated to make these instead of buying them. No excuses now.

So far we've only been practicing the recipes we've done (we did pain au lait which is exactly like brioche. This isn't new content). Tomorrow we're supposed to be making apple sourdough. I'm pretty excited since I've never made sourdough before and I want to do some experiments with it. Ironically I don't really like sourdough, haha!

I hope you guys enjoyed this. Don't be shy and leave a comment down below!