♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Today on "America's Test Kitchen," Dan makes Julia the Austrian classic linzertorte, Adam reveals his top pick for tube pans, and Erin makes Bridget Belgian spice cookies.

It's all coming up right here on "America's Test Kitchen."

♪♪ -Linzertorte is one of the oldest known cakes, and it was first documented in a cookbook that dates back to the 1600s.

Now, that book was found in the library of the Admont Abbey, located in the Austrian Alps, which makes sense since the linzertorte is named for Linz, Austria.

Now, by today's standards, this is a very simple confection made of buttery pastry, a few nuts, and a little jam, but it has stood the test of time.

And today Dan's going to show us a modern way to make it.

-So there's really a lot to love about linzertorte, but some of the old recipes can be pretty fussy.

-Mm-hmm.

-So we're gonna streamline some things as we go, but we're going to start in the classic way with lots of nuts.

This recipe is about 50% nuts and 50% flour.

So it's a 1:1 ratio of nuts to flour.

-Which is delicious but hard to work with.

-Exactly.

So before we get to the nuts, we're gonna mix our liquid ingredients together, and there's not a lot of liquid in this recipe.

We've got one egg, and we've got 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract.

So I'm just going to combine these with a fork.

Okay, great.

So now onto the rest of our dough.

So we're working with hazelnuts which add a ton of rich, nutty flavor.

This is 1 cup of hazelnuts, and we've toasted and then skinned them.

You don't get rid of every little bit of skin.

A little bit won't be noticeable.

But you want to get rid of most of it.

-Okay.

-I also have sugar.

So this is 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons of sugar.

Our next nut is blanched almonds, and we're using 1/2 cup of these.

And, finally, 1/2 teaspoon of salt.

We're gonna go for about 45 to 60 seconds until it's nice and fine.

-Alright.

[ Mixer whirs, turns off ] -Great.

So we can even just take a look at that.

Really nice and fine.

It's like store-bought nut flour at that point.

So our next ingredient is 1 teaspoon of lemon zest, and I'm just going to pulse this five pulses until it's incorporated.

Alright, so next up we have our flour.

This is all-purpose flour.

It's 1 1/2 cups.

So we have 1 1/2 cups of nuts, 1 1/2 cups of flour.

Nut-heavy dough, which is awesome -- tons of flavor and fat.

So now for our spices.

We're gonna use cinnamon and allspice.

We found some used clove, which really ends up competing with that fruity flavor.

So I have 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon and 1/8 teaspoon of allspice.

So, again, five pulses just until combined.

So nuts aren't the only thing contributing fat in this recipe.

We also have lots of butter.

-Alright.

-So this is 12 tablespoons of unsalted butter that we cut into 1/2-inch pieces, nice and chilled.

So we're gonna cut it into here, which can take about 15 pulses.

What we're looking for is something that looks like kind of coarse cornmeal.

You can see it looks like kind of coarse cornmeal there.

-Mm-hmm.

-Beautiful.

And we have our liquid ingredients.

So we're just gonna have this running, import it into the feed tube, and go for about 12 seconds.

We'll see it come together and smoothed out.

Awesome.

Time to get it out of our food processor.

Alright, so now I'm just gonna really gently form it into a mound and then divide it into two pieces.

I'm just gonna round this a little bit.

We're gonna make a 5-inch disk out of it.

Okay, great.

So that we have down to about a 5-inch disk right there.

-Mm, yep, that's 5 inches.

-Yep?

It's 5 inches?

-Mm-hmm.

-Alright, so I'm just going to move this out of the way, and it is time for the tart pan.

-Okay.

-And it has the removable bottom, which is gonna make it a lot easier when it comes to serving this.

We're gonna basically treat this like Play-Doh.

We're gonna do a pat-in-the-pan crust.

-A press-in crust.

-I'm just pulling off walnut-sized pieces, basically, and dropping them evenly spaced across the tart here.

-Boy, that just took a lot of the hard work out of this dough.

-Right?

And I just start patting it out.

So I'm working it kind of from the center out because what I want at the edge is a little bit of a surplus so I can go up the sides a bit.

And I'm gonna press it up about 3/4 inch up the side.

Okay, so that's about as far as I can go with my hands.

I'm gonna get some plastic in here now, and we're gonna use the bottom of a measuring cup, which is just gonna help us get a little more flat on the bottom.

Okay, that looks good.

So before we do anything else with this, it needs to get cold.

If it's really warm, it's not going to bake really nicely, so I'm going to transfer this to the freezer, and I'm gonna keep it in there for about 30 minutes until it really firms up.

Alright, so while that is in the freezer, we're gonna work on our lattice top.

-Ooh, the fun part.

-The fun part.

The pretty part.

So I'm gonna work with this dough here, and I've got two sheets of parchment here.

I'm going to give just a light flour dusting on this guy here.

Okay, so I got a little bit of bench flour on the parchment and then my dough and then a little bit more on top there.

What I'm looking for is a 12-inch square that I want to get this out to.

And the neat thing about this parchment paper is that it's 12 inches in the short direction here.

So if we work with it on top and bottom like that, it'll be a nice visual guide.

-Ahh!

-If at any point it starts to crease and you can tell it's really sticking, just dust a little bit more flour.

Awesome.

Okay.

So we don't need to be at a perfect 12-inch square right now.

We're gonna do that after we take it out of the fridge.

So we're gonna give this a nice chill like we're doing our other dough.

So I'm gonna transfer this to an upside-down rimmed baking sheet here.

That means we have enough room for the whole 12 inches.

And I'm gonna pop this in the fridge for 15 minutes to set up before we cut our lattice.

So our bottom crust is nice and frozen.

-Ooh, yeah.

-So that's going to help us retain a really nice shape while we bake it.

But the other part that's gonna help us is we're gonna blind bake it with pie weights in it, which is the best way.

So we're gonna take this plastic off.

We have two layers of aluminum foil here, and I'm gonna spray it with some nonstick spray.

So I'm going to fill it with our pie weights.

You really need it to be thick enough to go up the sides.

And then finally, I am going to crimp this down over the sides.

We want this to bake and set up and not get too much color.

It'll just be golden brown around the edge, and folding it over helps with that.

Alright, great, so I'm gonna go into a 350-degree oven on the middle rack.

It's gonna take about 30 minutes, and we're gonna see a nice, golden rim.

Okay, so now we have a really nice, chilled dough here, and that's what we want when we want to cut our lattice.

We'll slide it off, and I'm gonna peel off the top layer nice and carefully here.

And then I'm going to trim it up just so we have a really nice, perfect 12-inch square here.

Awesome.

So now I'm looking for 3/4-inch lattice.

So I'm going to lay my ruler over here and just give myself a few little markings.

-There's a little bit of math in there.

-It is a little bit of math in there.

So I've got my lines there.

And so here's the thing is I want to use this parchment to help me transfer these over afterwards.

I'm gonna cut down right through the parchment paper.

-Very clever.

-And I'm just going to start a little bit above it there and then drag right through.

Okay, so now the final step here is, I want to free these up.

I didn't go all the way to the edge.

Just place my ruler right here.

-You give them each their own strip of parchment so they're easy to move around.

-Exactly.

-Clever.

-Okay, so this has softened up a lot as we've been working with it.

Before we move it and transfer it and actually make our tart, we want it to get really cold.

So we're gonna pop it in the freezer for at least 20 minutes.

First, I'm gonna pop on a piece of parchment just to keep it protected.

-Very well.

-Foil cools off really quickly, so you can kind of grab with your fingers there and just peek.

So we're looking for beautiful golden brown like that.

We don't want to go any darker at this stage, 'cause it's gonna bake longer in the second bake.

-That makes sense.

-So this looks perfect.

So I'm just going to pick up the foil all around and transfer it away.

So we want to cool this all the way down to room temperature.

It's gonna take about an hour before we fill and then top with our lattice.

This is nice and cool, and it is time for our filling.

We're gonna start with 1 1/4 cups of raspberry preserves.

-Mm-hmm.

-And then 1 tablespoon of lemon juice.

-Mmm, just to brighten it up a bit.

-Exactly.

Okay, so now dump it right in the middle.

I do like to put it all in the center, and then you can kind of work your way out with it.

Filling is in.

Time for the lattice.

I'm gonna go grab it from the freezer.

It's important.

You want to keep it nice and cold right until you use it.

Okay.

So now it is time to do our lattice.

And you'll see that these strips -- really nice and easy to work with right now.

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna start close to the edge here and put one strip down.

Let that soften a little bit, and you'll see that it's actually gonna sag a little bit into it, which is perfect.

That's what you want.

So I'm going to put my next one on.

That's gonna go right across the center.

And then the third one goes just like that one but over here.

We'll go back, and we'll just peel that parchment right off.

So we're gonna let this sit.

I'm gonna give it a 90-degree turn here, and we're gonna repeat the process.

And our third one right up here.

So, again, go through and pull off our parchment.

Okay, another 90-degree turn, and we're gonna start filling in the spaces in between.

So we go right here and right here.

One final 90-degree turn.

So what I'm gonna do is just kind of press that down a little bit and then use the edge of the tart pan here to knock off that excess.

So now I'm just gonna go around with these extra little bits of dough and fill in the gaps in between.

Okay, so the final flourish before this goes into the oven -- I'm painting on about 1 tablespoon of heavy cream, and then we're gonna use 1 1/2 teaspoons of Demerara sugar just over the lattice there to give it some nice crunch and sweetness.

And now it is time to bake.

We're gonna go back into our 350-degree oven on the middle rack, bake for about 40 to 45 minutes, and we're looking for nice, bubbling filling and golden-brown edges.

-Ooh.

-It's gorgeous.

It looks perfect.

You get some nice bubbling, really good browning.

We got to let this cool for a while, though.

-Yeah, I bet.

-Goes for about two hours.

We'll let it cool, and then we can cut into it.

Alright, so it's been two hours.

It is nice and cool.

It's finally time to unmold and check this guy out.

-Beautiful.

-So just gonna slide under here, and we just want to separate the crust from the bottom.

Oh, that is gorgeous.

-It's even prettier out of the pan.

-So I'm using a chef's knife here, and you just want to press down and be really firm.

Go right through that crust.

-My goodness.

Look at that piece.

-Isn't that beautiful?

-That is perfection, Dan.

-Sometimes it's better to use a serrated knife, but this is the perfect thing, is a chef's knife.

-Mmm.

-Ah, that's really good.

Mmm.

-Goodness.

The dough is nutty and short but not too delicate, just enough jam to have a little sweetness and fruit.

The lattice on top is beautiful.

-I love how much texture, you know, contrast you have in here, too.

The Demerara sugar on top is awesome, there's some seeds in the preserves, and then all that nutty richness from the crust is so good.

-Well done, Dan.

-Thank you.

-So if you want to make this impressive tart, start by making the crust in the food processor, then divide it into two pieces.

Pat one piece into the bottom of a tart pan, and roll the other piece into a 12-inch square between parchment.

Cut the square into 10 strips and use the parchment to help transfer those strips to the jam-filled tart to make a beautiful lattice top.

Brush the lattice with cream and sugar, bake, and serve.

From "America's Test Kitchen" to your kitchen, a foolproof recipe for linzertorte.

I'm totally making this.

♪♪ -A tube pan is essential if you want to bake an angel food cake or any other cake with a hole in the center.

Now to talk to us all about which ones won our testing is Adam Ried.

-Without a hole in the center.

-[ Chuckles ] -Okay, Bridget, there are three reasons that you have to have a tube pan if you're gonna bake an angel food cake or, really, any egg-leavened cake.

-Okay.

-The first is that the cake has to climb up the sides, and the sides are tall... -Right.

-...so that, as it bakes, the batter clings, and you get a higher rise.

-Statuesque.

-The second reason is the center stack here delivers air to the center of the cake so it will bake and set at the same pace as the outside of the cake.

Again, this is all because it's a pretty delicate batter.

The third reason has to do with cooling the cake, which has to happen upside down.

Otherwise, gravity will deflate the cake.

So this hole allows you to put it like so on a bottle.

So we have this lineup of five different tube pans.

The price range was a low of about $15 to a high of about $30.

They were all about a 16-cup capacity.

You can see they're slightly different finishes.

One of them stands out from the others.

This one is uncoated.

The other ones were all nonstick-coated, so a slightly darker finish.

And various features.

This one, for instance, has these feet so that you can turn it upside down and they will elevate it off the counter without this whole wine-bottle rigmarole.

-Okay, great.

-Three of them have removable bottoms, like this, so that you can pull the whole cake out.

And I'll tell you, testers did angel food cakes and cold-oven pound cakes in all of the pans.

Testers tested the durability by running a knife around the perimeter five times just to see how badly it would get scratched or not.

They evaluated the cakes based on appearance, height, flavor, and texture.

And all of these pans produced perfectly acceptable cakes.

The cake that came out of the uncoated aluminum pan was slightly lighter in terms of its hue.

-Okay.

-Testers preferred the darker pans producing a slightly darker crust just for that caramelized flavor.

-Sure.

-The features that were really important -- they definitely preferred having feet so that they could turn it upside down without the wine bottle.

-Right.

-Even more important, though, was the removable bottom because that lets you lift the whole cake out of the pan a little more easily.

What you have in front of you is an angel food cake that's cooled in a pan with a removable bottom.

You want to show us how easy it is to get it out?

-Sure thing.

Alright.

Just gonna take my knife right around the edge.

-Right.

You always have to loosen it a little bit.

-Yep, and I'm going as close to that edge as I possibly can.

You can also use a plastic knife.

-And that's if you're worried about the nonstick finish.

-Exactly.

Now I'm going to flip this, and this should come right away.

-Perfect.

And then all you have to do is take the cake off the base.

-That's right.

That's right.

-Now, why don't you try this one, which does not have the removable bottom?

-Alright.

-Testers had to do a lot more sort of cutting around the edges and prying and shaking and shimmying and convincing for the cake to come out of this one.

-Yes.

It's got beautiful height, but, yeah, this is going to be a nightmare to get through.

-Yeah.

-We'll see if you were a good boy.

-[ Laughs ] Cake or me?

-Yeah, exactly.

Alright.

-Cake is the question.

-Let's see.

Got to shimmy it out.

Are you gonna shimmy?

No, it's stuck in there.

-Yeah, so can see it really makes a difference to have that removable bottom.

-Right, right.

-And so, in the end, this is the top tube pan.

It's the $18 Chicago Metallic two-piece angel food cake pan with feet.

It's got the removable bottom.

It's got the feet.

It's got a nonstick coating.

-And not that expensive, right?

-And not that expensive.

$18.

-That sounds like a lot of angel food cakes in my future.

The winner is the Chicago Metallic two-piece angel food cake pan with feet, and it retails for $18.

♪♪ In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Europeans start baking their signature spice cookies, and, in Germany, they make lebkuchen, while in Sweden they make muskotsnittar.

But in Belgium they make speculoos, and it's a gorgeous little cookie that's often embossed with beautiful shapes and patterns.

And Erin's here, she's gonna show us how to make a wonderfully spiced cookie that's a lot easier to make at home.

-It's very easy, Bridget.

This is such a wonderful spice cookie.

It has really nice, subtle caramel notes and it has a very pronounced spice flavor and the texture is very thin, crisp, and has a beautiful honeycomb texture, and it just -- like the marriage of all those combined, it makes a perfect cookie.

-Alright.

-Let's start with 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour.

I'm going to add 5 teaspoons of cinnamon.

Cinnamon is our primary spice with this spice cookie.

I'm also gonna add 1 teaspoon of ground cardamom.

This is one of my favorite spices.

-Me too.

-1/4 teaspoon of ground clove.

1/4 teaspoon of baking powder.

Just gonna create an open crumb and nice texture.

And we're also gonna add 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda and 1/4 teaspoon of salt.

-Alright.

-Okay, so we're just gonna whisk this together.

Okay, so we're gonna leave that here.

Now we're gonna move over to the sugar.

Traditionally, they're made with Belgian brown sugar Belgian brown sugar is made by adding caramelized sugar to refined white sugar, but it's not widely available.

So we turned to turbinado sugar.

So, as you can see here, turbinado sugar is a larger crystal.

-Mm-hmm.

-The cookies were too granular.

It was not right.

So I turned to the food processor I'm gonna add 3/4 of a cup of turbinado sugar.

So I'm going to process this for about 30 seconds.

We just want those sugar crystals to break down a little bit.

We're gonna have a combination of larger crystals and also smaller crystals.

-Okay.

-Okay, so that's been about 30 seconds.

Smells and tastes good.

Can you taste it in the air?

-It's like a caramel smoke.

-As you can see, the crystals have broken down, and there's some dust.

And then there's also some larger pieces.

And this is the key to getting the perfect texture in our cookie.

This is going to make our cookies have that honeycomb texture.

-Gotcha.

-Alright, so now I'm gonna add 8 tablespoons of unsalted butter that I cut into 1/2-inch pieces, and this is cold butter.

We're gonna process this for another 30 seconds until a uniform mass is created.

-Okay.

-There's our uniform mass, right?

Okay, now I'm just gonna add one egg, and the egg is gonna give our cookie structure.

-And it's a whole egg?

-It's one whole egg.

I'm gonna process this for 10 seconds until a paste is formed.

-Perfect.

Now it's time to add our dry ingredients.

-Alright.

-And now I'm just gonna process this for another 30 seconds, and what we're looking for is cookie dough to form, basically, but we still want it to be crumbly, but we don't want to see any dry ingredients left in the bowl.

This is gonna take about 30 seconds.

Alright, so I'm gonna stop right there.

Okay, so now I'm just gonna knead it together one last time with my spatula.

See, there's, like, some bits of flour in there.

Just want to make sure that it's all kneaded together.

Okay, our dough is ready, and it's time to roll.

-Alright, but I don't think we're using this.

This is an authentic speculoos rolling pin.

Now, this is actually a Dutch pin from the Netherlands, and they're they call it speculaas.

Same thing, though.

But you can see this beautiful pattern.

I mentioned before the patterns that are embossed on top of the dough.

This is what's used to create that.

Or they take the dough and they put it in these tiny, little molds, and out pops a beautiful design.

But we're not making it with this today.

-We're not.

A speculoos cookie is rectangular in shape.

They're very thin, and so in order to make sure that we're going to yield all of our cookies that are all the same thickness and also the same size, I've created this template.

So this is a 10"x12" rectangle.

And I've also marked along this short side 1 1/4 inches so that I know that they're gonna be 1 1/14 inches wide.

And at the bottom, I've marked every three inches so that they're going to be 3 inches long.

-Got it.

-So I then took another piece of parchment paper, and I just traced on here.

So it was much easier.

So I didn't have to do it twice.

-Gotcha.

-Alright.

So I want to put that pencil side down so that the dough does not touch the pencil.

I'm just gonna press this into roughly a 6"x9" rectangle.

I'm just gonna get it going before we use our rolling pin.

So now I'm just gonna line this up, and now I'm just gonna roll this out so that it meets the line so it's a 10"x12" rectangle.

-Gotcha.

-And I'm gonna roll and I'm also gonna use smearing motions.

So these ultimately are gonna be 3/8 of an inch thick.

-Very thin.

-Very thin.

Alright, so now that I'm getting close to the edges...

I've gone over over there, but I need some more dough here so I'm going to kind of, like, cut and paste my dough from the overhang and just do a little patchwork.

I'm feeling pretty good about this.

-Alright.

-I've gone to the corners.

-Nice.

-We are good to go.

So now this dough just needs to refrigerate for about an hour and a half.

Okay, Bridget, our dough has chilled for an hour and a half, and we're ready to cut.

-Very, very firm.

-Yep, very firm.

That's exactly what we want.

Okay, so this is where the lines really come into play here.

I'm gonna trim the edges so that it's a 10"x12" rectangle, and these crisscrosses are really going to help me.

I'm using a fluted pastry wheel here.

This is gonna give our cookies a nice decorative edge.

-Mm, pretty.

And if you don't have this, you can just use a chef knife.

Now I'm just going to cut my cookies into 1 1/4-inch strips.

So this dough, it does warm up pretty quickly.

So you want to be efficient.

And that's another reason why it's really good to mark up your parchment ahead of time.

You don't want the dough to get too warm too quickly, 'cause then your cookies will bend and not have that nice, perfect shape that you want.

And now I'm cutting them into 3-inch lengths.

-Ah, they are beautiful.

-This makes a great gift.

Make a ton of them.

Fill up some cookie tins.

Give them to your favorite people.

-Yeah, like I'm giving these away.

-Now I have two rimless baking sheets, and this is really important that they're rimless so that you have full air circulation in the oven.

If you have rimmed baking sheets, flip them over.

And, again, you should work fairly quickly here.

We're gonna create four rows of four.

Okay, Bridget, it is time to bake them.

-Yay.

I have an oven preheating at 300 degrees.

The racks are set at the upper middle and the lower middle.

-Okay.

-They're gonna bake for about 30 to 32 minutes.

It's a low temperature.

We want these cookies not so much to brown, but we want them to dry out and get very crisp.

And then halfway through, I'm going to rotate them from top to bottom and then we're going to rotate from front to back.

-Sounds good.

-Okay.

Whew.

-Can you smell that?

-[ Breathes deeply ] Beautiful.

-Heaven.

Thank you.

-I'll get the other one.

-Okay.

-Lovely.

-We have to let them cool.

-How long?

-20 minutes.

-Okay.

And we're just gonna let them cool on this rack.

As you can see, they got a little shade darker.

I can see that they're crisp.

-[ Breathes deeply ] Ah, it smells heavenly in here.

They're cooled, right?

-They are cooled.

And don't they look beautiful?

-Gorgeous.

-Can't you picture them on your holiday buffet?

-They're spectacular.

-Would you like one?

-I'd like two, please.

-You would?

-Yes.

I have to get through the first one before I start to taste.

[ Chuckles ] Nice and crisp.

-Thin.

Uniformly thin.

-Alright.

-Mm.

-That texture is unlike any other cookie.

It really is kind of that honeycomb feeling where it almost starts to collapse into each other.

-Yes.

-It's not sandy.

-Mm-hmm.

The subtle caramel notes are right there, there's no bitterness, and they're not too sweet.

This is why I love them.

They're sweet enough.

-Definitely a good addition to the cookie jar.

Thanks, Erin.

-You're welcome.

-The original Spice Girls.

-Mm-hmm.

-[ Laughs ] Well, to make speculoos at home, whisk flour with spices and leaveners and then cream butter and sugar together in a food processor before adding an egg.

Combine the wet and dry ingredients and then roll the dough out into a rectangle between sheets of parchment.

Refrigerate the dough until it's firm, and then cut into beautiful cookies.

Bake, cool, and eat.

So, from "America's Test Kitchen" to your kitchen, holiday-worthy Belgian spice cookies, and you can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season along with tastings, testings, and select episodes at americastestkitchen.com.

Speculoos.

-Let us help you with dinner tonight.

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