Caramel Cook

Stock, Yogurt, Quick Delicious Meals

2008-06-22T17:05:00.000-07:00

Another of my increasingly-infrequent check-ins. What has Brian been cooking and eating? OK, last weekend I made chicken stock out of the eight or so carcasses I'd accumulated in the freezer. Hacked them to bits with my cleaver so they'd all fit in the pot and I'd get as concentrated a stock as possible, added a bouquet garni and chopped up veggies:

Came out really, really well. I've got stock for months, now, frozen as ice cubes in a big ziploc bag.

I've also been eating a lot of yogurt. What I've been doing is buying the White Mountain gallon jugs of nonfat yogurt and then straining it down. In the future, I hope to make my own yogurt once I find a good source for raw milk (it's a little under-the-table here in Texas where you can't sell it in stores.) At any rate, here's my straining apparatus. Very high-tech:

That's a doubled-up cheesecloth bag full of yogurt hanging over my sink via trussing twine from a broom running between my cabinets. I do this every weekend with a gallon of yogurt, and then wash the cheesecloth out (cheesecloth starts to get expensive if you use it this often and don't reuse it!)

Then I'll eat the yogurt something like this:

A bowl of yogurt with diced mango, raisins, goji berries, flax seeds, and toasted pecans. So good, and needs no additional sweetener. Plus, insanely healthy. It's a win on all fronts.

Part of my motivation for eating more yogurt is that, as I have been weightlifting a bunch recently, the way the nutrition works out is that your body can absorb, they say, roughly 30 grams of protein, roughly every few hours. So you don't want to eat a giant steak for dinner; a quarter pound of meat is roughly 30g of protein, and it's not very much (one split chicken breast or large leg has about 30g, and I divide other meats like seafood into quarter-pound chunks and wrap them in saran wrap and freeze them so I can just pop them under the broiler when it's time to eat.)

Yogurt, as food goes, is pretty interesting. The basic way it works is this: bacteria (at least thermophilus and bulgaricus, and potentially others like acidophilus, bifidus, L. casei) ferment the milk by digesting its lactose (the milk sugar) and producing lactic acid. The lactic acid creates, obviously, an acidic environment; a result of this acid is curdling, which is when the milk proteins gel into a matrix, i.e. solidify.

You can make yogurt yourself very easily; just take milk, put it in a very, very clean container, mix in some starter bacteria (either powdered packets you can buy or just mix in a scoop of existing yogurt you like) and cover it with a very, very clean cover, and let it sit somewhere warm for a few days. Yogurt bacteria are most active around 100-110F, but will die above about 113F, so you can't just boil it and hope for the best. You want it at least 85F or so so the bacteria start to proliferate before the milk starts to spoil or sour.

I find food preservation techniques especially interesting because, growing up, the only one I really knew about was refrigeration. The idea of leaving milk out in a hot room for days seemed really wrong to me, but I think, just like canning, pickling, brewing, salting, smoking, etc., it's important to understand dairy preservation to develop a full appreciation for food. The complex and myriad styles of food preservation, after all, are a huge part of food history. Refrigeration hasn't been around that long. And surrendering some of my compulsive reliance on refrigeration and fear of spoilage let me start enjoying some of the culinary world's funkier pleasures. Like really aggressive blue cheeses, or knock-your-socks-off kimchi. Or, in this case, a variety of yogurts.

Yogurt is preserved dairy because the acid environment produced by the bacteria is inhospitable to spoilage processes. I've kept the same gallon of yogurt for over a month; it doesn't really go bad.

Of course, preservation relies heavily on cleanliness, and even the slightest contaminant in a bowl you're leaving full of milk on top of your water heater for 3 days will start to develop into something relatively unpleasant.

But I digress. A well-made yogurt is smooth in consistency, the protein matrix forming gently and slowly, able to incorporate a lot of the whey. If you make your yogurt too quickly, it'll be grainier, like real curds, and leaky, unable to contain all the whey. You can mitigate some of that by heating the milk to around 180F first to denature the proteins so they gel more smoothly, but if I manage to hunt down raw milk the last thing I'm going to do is cook it, so I'm fine with taking things slow.

Strained, non-fat yogurt, then, is something like a perfect food for athletes, because if thoroughly fermented, yogurt is very low in lactose (most of it having been digested by the bacteria) so it's palatable to the somewhat lactose-intolerant, and the stuff you have left after straining is the protein gel, without the other parts of the whey.

I strain the yogurt for maybe 4 hours, or so, and of what's left, a bowl full as you see above is a portion containing 30g of protein. Success!

Obviously I don't only eat yogurt, so I also just made and ate this, which I'll post a picture of because it was delicious:

Those are agnolotti filled with chicken & sage that I've had in the freezer for a while. I boiled them up, but unsure that there was really a quarter pound of chicken in the portion I was eating, I poached two eggs in the pasta water (with a splash of distilled vinegar in the hopes it'd help the eggs hold their shapes; still, they weren't pretty.) Lay the eggs atop the pasta, good salt and pepper. Then I sweated minced garlic, shallot, and sage leaves (my sage plants are going nuts lately) in olive oil, added some of that chicken stock you see up top, a splash of white wine, cooked it down, whisked in a little ap flour for consistency, and poured it on top.

Man, it was delicious. I love poached eggs; the yolks running in with the rest of the sauce was like liquid velvet. Delicious and rich.

Chicken & Polenta

2008-05-05T21:17:00.000-07:00

This post is, as much as anything, to let you all know I'm not dead. I've just fallen out of the habit of blogging, and furthermore the site needs work if I'm going to continue -- that table of contents is too long now, and while I'd like to make it a nice dynamic little widget that you can expand and collapse with plus signs and all that goodness, I haven't the foggiest idea how to go about doing that so for now, I'm just not adding to it.

Alright, here's another sub-30-minute meal (like the homemade pasta and tomato sauce) that tastes super gourmet.

But first, a rant. Most restaurants woefully under-salt everything they cook. In fact, I'd go so far as to say most of the difference between your average OK restaurant and most high-end/"gourmet" restaurants is just that the gourmet places aren't afraid to use enough salt at the right times, and then bring your food out promptly while it's still the right temperature and texture.

Salt has to be applied at the right times, though; you can't just cook a chicken breast with no salt and then salt the living hell out of it right before you serve it. You need the salt to help pull the liquids out during cooking, and you need the salt to dissolve a bit so it's not such a punch to the face when you bite into it. For example.

This whole meal needs salt. The chicken needs salting during cooking, the polenta needs salting during cooking, and the cheese itself is salty. Getting those all in the right portions is, while not trivial, also not exactly rocket science, and it makes all the difference in the world. Poorly-salted polenta is like eating Elmer's glue, and poorly-salted chicken is just bland.

Salt doesn't just make food taste salty; up to a point, it actually amplifies the flavor of the food itself. At the cellular level, salt disrupts the water potential around cells and causes them to burst, which has a lot to do with the way it enhances flavor and draws out juices. (This is also related to its preservative properties, since it makes an environment inhospitable to spoilage bacteria.) You want to get as much of this effect as you can, and so generally speaking, you want to put as much salt in food as you can without actually making the end product taste salty. The right amount of salt will just make the food more flavorful without becoming a prominent flavor in its own right.

This threshold is higher than most people think. Last year when I was at the French Laundry, amidst all the amazing food I was eating, the thing that struck me the most was actually very mundane: They use much more salt in their food than most places would dare, because they've got balls up there in Yountville, and also the chops to pull it off. Every dish had the perfect amount of salt, and it raised it above comparable preparations I'd had anywhere else.

Now, with chicken, I actually go a bit heavy on the salt, because I actually do want the skin to taste a little salty, but that's personal preference. With polenta, though, like most grains, you don't want it to taste salty; that'll ruin it. So I salt as I go and to taste. With the sauce, take it easy; it already has the salt from the cooking chicken, and too much salt in this sauce will just make the whole meal nauseating.

But for the love of all that is holy, salt is your friend, and you probably need to use more of it.

Start with:

half-breast of chicken
butter, olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic, onion, thyme (or whatever herbs, rosemary or sage would be good too)
beef stock (I freeze mine in ice cube trays and store it in bags in the freezer)
polenta
parmigiano reggiano or other comparable cheese

Combine 1/2c polenta with 2c water or so and bring to a boil in a small saucepan. Turn the heat down immediately to medium-low or just so it's very slowly simmering. Add a 1/2t of salt or so. Stir occasionally with a sauce whisk or something that'll break up clumps and continue to cook as the water is absorbed.

In the meantime, heat up some butter and olive oil (a tbsp of each or so) in a skillet over medium-high heat. Toss the chicken breast in and pan-fry for about 5 minutes on each side so it's nice and golden and crispy. Turn the heat down to medium-low, generously salt and pepper the chicken breast (both sides), throw in half a chopped onion, 2 cloves minced garlic, and some thyme leaves, and continue to cook until its internal temperature is 155F, or it's not translucent when you cut into it, or however you like to tell your chicken is done.

The polenta should finish roughly when the chicken is done. You want the polenta still relatively liquid because it congeals when it cools off a bit. I mean, do whatever you want, it's your polenta. I like mine very soft, so it's creamy, not gooey.

Remove the chicken breast to a plate and immediately throw a few ice cubes of stock in the pan, turn the heat back up to medium-high, and stir while they melt, and then splash some marsala or other wine into the pan. As the stock starts to bubble at the edges, whisk in maybe 1/2t of flour or just enough to get it to thicken up a little (it doesn't take much.)

Portion the polenta (it makes about two servings but you can't really cook 1/4c of polenta by itself unless you have a saucepan from a dollhouse.) Put half of it in the fridge for later. To the remainder, add 1T butter and a generous grating of parmesan, and stir as they melt.

Plate and sauce and eat.

Since the chicken and polenta take roughly the same amount of time to cook, and neither requires much attention, this one is easy and quick, and pretty easy cleanup, too (both pans wash out easily.)

I've been buying whole chickens but then quartering them before cooking rather than roasting them whole, lately, because I realize how much more I like chicken when it's freshly cooked. Mostly I broil the legs, but pan-frying the breasts yields really delicious, juicy meat.

Two Caramel Ice Creams

2008-02-12T17:22:00.000-08:00

I got this saucepan for Christmas from my parents. It's the most beautiful piece of cookware I own. Solid copper, even the copper handle riveted to the body with copper rivets. Pour spout. 2qt Mauviel sugar saucepan.

I wanted its first few uses to be special, so naturally I had to make caramel in it. First, I made the Pear-Caramel Ice Cream from The Perfect Scoop. It's an interesting process; I'm so used to two-pot dairy caramel at this point that just caramelizing plain sugar with no water or interfering agent and then dumping chopped pear directly into it seemed a little bizarre. And indeed, the caramel sizzled and seized and spat a bit when I did it, but lo, it worked out just fine:

After cooking it a bit longer it melted back down, liquid seeped from the pear and I had a nice caramel-pear base simmering.

Mix that with some cream and salt and some other random stuff and hit it with a hand blender for a while (right in the saucepan! Easiest cleanup ever!) and I had a perfect ice cream base, ready to freeze. If I'd really wanted the creamiest results possible, I could have strained the tiny pear grit out with cheesecloth, I guess, but I didn't bother and it was still extremely creamy & smooth.

I don't seem to have photographed the finished product. It was great.

OK, before the next one, let me extol the virtues of this saucepan. It's really a pretty amazing thing to cook with. I'd always read that copper conducts heat "very evenly," but I guess I always assumed that just mean I wouldn't get quite the same brutal hotspots on the bottom of the pan that I do with my cheap saucepans that invariably lead to uneven cooking and burning, scorching, and force me to keep the stove no higher than medium for fear it'll all get out of my control.

This saucepan heats so evenly that not only were there no perceptible hotspots, even the sides get really hot, too. I didn't even think about it until my spatula was caked with dried caramel and I went to scrape it off on the sides of the pan... and it cleanly scraped off, melted, and slid back into the pan! Unheard-of! Yes, this does mean the handle gets scorching hot, too. I just use a dishtowel to hold it. It's well worth it: I can just dump straight sugar into this pan, turn the stove on highest heat, and comfortably stir it as the sugar evenly melts and caramelizes, with no fear I'll burn it. It's really amazing.

OK, on to the next ice cream. I was at Teo the other day, and Matt, the proprietor with whom I lately have a decent rapport, offered me tastes of various gelatos until we came to the "Salty Caramel" gelato: a golden-colored gelato covered in glasslike shards of thin, dark amber caramelized sugar. I knew my choice was made for me. Then I started to eat it and noticed a little something unexpected, a funkiness in its finish, and I leaned over and quietly asked Matt,

"Have you ever made this with goat's milk?"

He looked back with a conspiratorial smile and nodded. "I can't put it on the sign because it freaks people out, but yeah, that's cajeta."

It was delicious. I knew I had to try it myself. I took David's Salted Butter Caramel Ice Cream recipe and modified it with goat's butter and goat's milk instead of the bovine equivalents. At David's suggestion I just used goat's milk for both the milk and cream, and added 2 more egg yolks to compensate for the lost fat.

First, I made the crunchy caramelized sugar brittle:

... and poured it out on a silpat with some fleur de sel to make as thin a sheet of the brittle caramel as possible:

Then I followed his recipe to the letter. Caramelize the sugar, take it off the heat, add the goat's butter and a cup of the milk. At this point the caramel has fully seized and I coaxed it slowly back into liquid form over medium-low heat for a while. When it finished, I added the second cup of milk, tempered the egg yolks with a bit of it, and poured them back in. At that point David's recipe says to cook the custard until it thickens, and predicts a temperature of about 160-170F. Mine didn't thicken up until 195F. I'm not sure if it's something about goat's milk versus cow's milk, or simply that I used all milk and no cream, but it was a bit confusing because mine had 7 egg yolks instead of his 5, so I'd expected it to thicken up especially fast.

That said, oddly, it didn't curdle at all by 195F. Last time I made a custard with cow's milk was the creme anglaise for the other pear ice cream I made a while back, and I got a little carried away, and it curdled by about 185F. Again, maybe it's something about goat's milk. I dunno. But it worked.

I strained it into the bowl sitting in an ice bath with the third and final cup of goat's milk.

I refrigerated it overnight and then churned it. I think I'm finally getting the hang of this ice cream maker, thanks to tips from Lulu. It's really all about cranking my fridge and freezer both as cold as they can possibly go, to get the mix and the freezer bowl as cold as they can be. Now my results are nice and smooth; previously I just couldn't get the mix to freeze well enough in the bowl, and it'd get icy in its subsequent stay in the freezer. No longer; this stuff was fantastic.

The goat's milk caramel is fantastic. Funky and complex, but still deeply sweet and rich, I think it beats any cow's milk caramel I've ever had, hands-down. I could eat this stuff all day.

And, as David's recipe predicts, the bits of crushed caramelized sugar start to bleed into the ice cream, turn sticky, and it all works together beautifully.

Pear Ice Cream & Stilton

2008-01-12T18:47:00.000-08:00

I received for Christmas the KitchenAid ice cream maker attachment, and so I've been thinking of what I'd make with it. By chance, Shuna discussed pear ice cream recently as she's using it at Sens, I assume. Her recipe sounded pretty great: poach the pears, puree the pears, reduce the syrup, combine with creme anglaise, and freeze.

The creme anglaise was straightforward from the Joy of Cooking. I didn't have any cream around so I used whole milk. I just made 2 cups of it, since I didn't really know how the proportions would work out. I realized it probably wouldn't thicken as much as I wanted with the ratio of eggs to milk I used, so I accidentally overcooked it and it curdled. I poured it off and ran my hand blender through it and all was well. Phew.

I poached 4 pears ala Chez Panisse: Fruit. Simmer a 2:1:1 mix of white wine, water, and sugar, add some vanilla bean and lemon juice, submerge the pears, put a plate on them to hold them under, and simmer until a paring knife slices through the pear flesh with no resistance.

I pureed the pears with, again, my hand blender (seriously, how did I ever cook without one?) as the poaching syrup reduced.

The poaching syrup reduced slowly but steadily and darkened to a deep amber color even though it never exceeded 235F. I'm not quite sure why this is; maybe a lot of fructose got pulled out of the pears? Or maybe fructose was left in the white wine if it wasn't terribly dry? I'm kind of grasping at straws, here. Sucrose, the sugar I added to the poaching liquid, shouldn't brown until 320F and it obviously was nowhere near that. But it was deep amber color and had the distinct taste of sugar browning, not Maillard browning or something wacky like that. Fructose browns at something like 220F or 230F, so that would explain it, but I'm just not clear on where the fructose would have come from.

Anyway, the poaching syrup, reduced, was delicious.

I ended up with more than I needed, and saved the leftovers. I often eat yogurt with a drizzle of honey; I find that yogurt with a drizzle of this thick pear-poaching syrup (not quite as thick as honey, but close) is especially delicious.

I mixed about 2c creme anglaise and enough pureed pear to bring it to almost 2 quarts (this was all 4 pears, pureed.) I added about 2/3c of the reduced poaching liquid. Then I froze it.

It really didn't freeze up so well. I guess there was a lot of sugar in it. And probably still a fair amount of white wine, although that flavor doesn't really come through in the finished dessert. But after half an hour in the ice cream maker, it still took several hours in the freezer to solidify. On the upside, it softens nicely if left out for just 5 minutes or so.

The flavor is fantastic. Quoth Shuna, "very pear-y, I must say." That's for sure. I'm glad I went easy on the vanilla and lemon in the poaching. The resulting ice cream really tastes very clearly of pear, not of some artificial sugared-up poached pear. It's light and refreshing, but also indulgent. Really, it tastes seriously delicious.

Next time I'd double the volume of creme anglaise and use fewer pears, and probably less of the poaching syrup. The pear flavor is really unmistakably strong and in no danger of being diluted with a lighter fruit mix. And the resulting ice cream is halfway to a sorbet since about 75% of the volume of it is just pear puree. It's a bit icy when fully frozen, but nicely smooth and creamy when thawed a bit. But it's certainly not creamy in the way that normal ice cream is. Maybe next time I'll use heavy cream in the creme anglaise, too.

I ate the ice cream with little bits of Stilton cheese on the side, in the classic pairing. The rich creaminess of the Stilton actually goes pretty well with the less-thick, less-creamy nature of this pear ice cream.

Mac 'n' Cheese

2008-01-03T22:12:00.000-08:00

OK, Mac 'n' Cheese is a misnomer, but I wanted the title to fit in the table of contents. The full name of this dish would be, I guess, "Chicken & sun-dried tomato meatballs, whole wheat orecchiette, wilted chard, gruyere mornay."

I was in my yoga class yesterday and suddenly had a strong craving for macaroni & cheese.
My parents also just gave me the Kitchenaid Food Grinder attachment for Christmas, and I wanted to use it.

I decided, for some reason, to make this hugely elaborate meal. The mac 'n' cheese part would be orecchiette -- because that shape, it obviously holds the sauce well -- and a straight-up mornay sauce (which, as that Wiki link will tell you, is just a bechamel with grated cheese.)

Then, meatballs. At first I thought chicken, but then, maybe it would be too lean. Then I thought, duck. But Lulu convinced me that duck and cheese was probably not the best mix, both being so heavy. She suggested chicken with sun-dried tomato.

By the time I did my shopping it was 10pm. Yes, I started to make this entire thing from scratch at 10pm. Yeah. Good scheduling, huh?

I started by taking the chicken thighs I'd bought and skinning and boning them. This is harder than I thought. Connective tissue -- what a pain! I finally thought to use my kitchen shears and it sped things up a lot, but it still took the better part of an hour.

Into the grinder it went, about 3lbs chicken meat with 3oz sun-dried tomatoes. This food grinder is no joke. It works very well. It made short work of the chicken and even the whole dried tomatoes. I ran the mixture through three times to get it very smooth, and it came out well.

I added two eggs, salt, pepper, some oregano, and a shake of panko to absorb a little moisture, mixed it up, and shaped it into about 1.5" meatballs. Voila. Just like cookies from a bowl of cookie batter, I got far more meatballs than I had guessed from the volume of meat in the bowl.

Oh yeah, one more thing. Cooking with chicken in my kitchen has become a kind of dangerous undertaking, because early on I fed my cats the hearts of whole chickens and scraps and whatnot as I worked, and so they can smell this stuff, even raw, even from the next room. And they want it, bad.

That was basically what I saw when I looked down at the floor the entire time I was cooking.

At this point it's probably about midnight. On to the pasta. I've never made orecchiette before, and it took a while to find a way to shape it that was reasonably fast. I ended up rolling the dough into 1/2" diameter logs, slicing those logs into about 1/8" thick slices. Then I'd take a slice, hold it between the thumb and index finger of both hands and turn it, pinching, to make it into a kind of hollow dome. Then I'd press the convex side of the dome against the tip of one pinky finger and, with the other hand, pinch it down to form the depression.

That might be hard to follow in words. Sadly, I didn't record a video of it. Then again, it took forever and they only look OK, so it's not a technique I necessarily want anyone else to use.

In particular, I don't know how commercial orecchiette are made to have the kind of shaggy texture on the outside. I wish mine had that.

Orecchiette take a long time to make by hand, longer than any other pasta I make. (Ravioli probably take longer, but armed with the French Laundry technique for agnolotti, I will never make ravioli again, so that's moot.)

By now it's maybe 2am. Time for the sauce. Not much to this; it's the Joy of Cooking Bechamel (melt butter, whisk in flour, add milk, toss in onion, cloves, bay leaf, cook until thickened, strain) with a bunch of grated cheese thrown in. I got a good sharp Gruyere.

Finally, ready to assemble it all. I fried the meatballs lightly in my lovely cast-iron skillet, and at the very end, threw in some strips of chard to let them wilt with the leftover heat in the pan. It was approaching 3am, so I cut the meatballs in half to speed their cooking. Gimme a break, I was starving and tired.

Ready for assembly. In went the pasta, tossed with the chard, topped with the meatballs, and a good spoonful of sauce.

Oh my God, this was good. I know, I'd been cooking for 5 hours and was probably delirious and so hungry a running shoe would have tasted good, but still, this was fantastic. I took a bite and couldn't help myself, I started laughing with glee just a little at how good it was.

The sun-dried tomato in the meatball is genius. Credit to Lulu for that. The chicken thigh meat has enough fat that they're not dry, but is certainly not as fatty as beef or pork or duck. The oregano is a nice complement. The whole wheat in the orecchiette helps them stand up to the other strong flavors well. The chard is just the right amount of punctuation. The mornay, I mean, it's a gruyere mornay, thick and creamy and delicious, at once coating the mouth and stinging the tongue. Everything in this dish is excellent on its own, and it all combines especially well.

Giggling quietly like a crazy person, I ate it all, and then sat in my bar stool, eyes closed, rocking gently forwards and backwards like some kind of trauma victim. Then I hunted down my only friend still online that late just to tell her about the food I made and how good it was. I know, what a tease. In my defense, I wasn't thinking so clearly by then.

Christmas Chocolates

2007-12-26T20:21:00.000-08:00

My friend Charles emailed me asking various questions about caramels -- how much salt to use, how to infuse herb scents, how to enrobe them -- and then my friend Lulu mentioned that she was going to make truffles as gifts for family when she visited over the holidays. My answers to Charles touched on ideas I hadn't yet tried myself (using silicone molds and infusing various herbs by steeping) and so inspired by Lulu's ambition, I decided to do the same myself.

I got a pound each of three kinds of chocolate, all El Rey brand. White, a 41% milk, and a 70% dark. I bought two silicone candy molds. I brought my Le Creuset silicone pastry brushes back to Massachusetts with me. My idea was to paint melted chocolate into the molds to make the top shell, then fill each with a filling, then paint the feet on.

First I started with the white chocolate, melting it in a double boiler:

I wanted to fill the white chocolate with a mint concoction, so I tried making a simple mint syrup, but overcooked it to 250F so when it cooled, it was much too solid to use as a filling. I relented and whisked in some butter and a splash of heavy cream to make a pretty standard buttercream. I wanted peppermint, but unable to procure the fresh leaves, used spearmint that my father graciously picked up and a splash of peppermint extract for intensity:

I've been avoiding using artificial coloring, so it was nice to have the leaves themselves to add bits of color to what would otherwise be plain white-on-white (an unforgivably gauche fashion sin, especially at this time of year.)

The painting proved tougher than I thought, until my brother Kevin made an astute suggestion: don't freeze the molds after painting the chocolate, freeze them before. Since silicone has a very high specific heat (i.e. it's an excellent insulator), this worked well, because cold silicone can chill melted chocolate down very effectively. If I'd used those thin clear plastic molds, those would have just warmed up too fast. So, here I am, painting some chocolate (I think this is the milk chocolate, so this is not chronological) into some molds with the pastry brush:

The successful technique we arrived at was: freeze the mold, then paint in a thin layer of melted chocolate. Freeze it again, paint on a second layer. Freeze it a third time and it's ready to be filled. Fill it and freeze it just until the it's solid enough to paint on a final chocolate layer, the foot; one more (longer) stay in the freezer and they're ready to turn out of the molds.
Kevin's suggestion worked so well that I drafted him into servitude. He was actually very good at all the technique, and was painting molds, filling the chocolates, running molds to and from the freezer, and turning them out and trimming them down like a pro immediately. Here he is, turning out a finished mold of white chocolates:

And here are those chocolates. We were pretty consistently overzealous about the amount of filling we packed into each, so the finished products didn't have flat bottoms and needed trimming down and cleaning up.

The next batch we made were the dark chocolates. I filled those with a rosemary fleur de sel caramel:

Testing a suggestion I'd made to Charles, I used double the suggested amount of fleur de sel from this recipe, and I steeped several sprigs of rosemary in the cream / butter / salt mixture before adding it to the sugar syrup (removing the rosemary before that part, of course.) It worked out very well. Here's a gratuitous shot of the caramel, looking delicious:

The rosemary was very potent; it could have been more subtle, but with the dark chocolate it worked very well. And we added a few grains of fleur de sel to each shell before pouring the caramel in to give it an extra salt kick and crunch.

Here's a mold of these guys, with the feet just painted on. So these will be done as soon as they are chilled enough to turn out without deforming and then trimmed up.

Note that I did not use the hearts. Their sides are too steep and the shape is too detailed, which makes them hard to paint with chocolate and hard to turn out when they're done. Plus, it's Christmas, not Valentine's Day. Come on.

Here are a finished batch of the dark chocolates, turned out and ready for trimming:

Note that I did not attempt to temper this chocolate at all. I knew I'd be keeping them in cold storage (out on the porch; it's Massachusetts, it's cold up here!) and I also have never successfully tempered chocolate and if I ever learn I think it'll have to be by example from someone who's good at it. It sounds difficult and finicky. They looked and tasted quite good even if they could have been shinier.

Finally, I made the milk chocolates. I wanted a more straightforward crowd-pleaser than the first two, so while I'd brought a bottle of rose water back with me from Austin, I decided at the last minute not to make rose caramel, but just a straight vanilla caramel. I used the same recipe, omitted the salt, added a scraped vanilla bean into the caramel as it cooked, and whisked some lemon juice in as it cooled. It was delicious. You can barely make out the vanilla specks in this photo:

My suspicion about the crowd-pleasing was confirmed: There were more milk chocolates than either of the other two, since it was our third batch and we had practice, so our yield was highest. And yet, as I write this, there are some dark and white chocolates left, a few, and all the milk chocolates are gone. I think it's because you can't really eat the white or dark chocolates in volume -- they're pretty intense -- but you can stuff your face with milk chocolate & vanilla caramel for hours before it gets old. At least, I can.

We cranked through a lot of chocolates in one day. All told, minus the ones we ate during preparation for "testing", we had 138 of them on the sheets at the end.

I boxed a bunch of them up as gifts. Six to a box: Two of each kind. And I gave them out to family that showed up, and have a handful of boxes left for my parents' neighbors.

The rest of them (and there were still quite a few) I handed out as mignardises after Christmas day dinner and put out on a platter later for dessert.

Overall, they were a huge success. None were botched, and it pretty much all worked out just like I'd hoped it would. The chocolate shells were nicely thin even though I used normal chocolate and not couverture; it was easy to paint the shells into the molds, fill them, and turn them out, and they looked good and the flavors worked together fantastically. I'd like to use exclusively peppermint next time, but you have to work with what you've got. And I'd probably use less rosemary next time in the caramel to make it a bit more subtle, but that's more a preference than anything else. It certainly wasn't overbearing.

The one difficulty I encountered that I'm not quite sure how to solve is that it took a while to get through all the batches of a given chocolate, during which the caramel would cool and need reheating to make it liquid enough to pour. Every time I reheated it, it crystallized a bit. The vanilla caramels had a good enough yield I had to reheat the caramel twice, and after the second time it was visibly grainy. Still tasted good, but the ones from that last batch were more like a sugar candy than a nice gooey caramel.

Anyone know how to solve that? I'm thinking maybe I should keep the caramel over a warm double boiler so it never solidifies, that maybe it was the fluctuation in temperature -- cooling then warming then cooling them warming -- that really spurred the crystal formation. I'm not quite sure.

That notwithstanding, these were a great success, surprisingly quick to make, and delicious. And thanks to Kevin for all his help!

Sweet Potato Gnocchi with Rosemary Butter & Arugula

2007-12-19T22:44:00.000-08:00

This is a meal for cooking night, tomorrow. I had to make the gnocchi tonight because every time I make pasta the day of cooking night, I end up rushing and regretting it.

I referred to the Omnivorous Fish's guidelines for gnocchi, as usual. Boiled some sweet potatoes and riced 'em as soon as I could stand to peel them:

I got a ricer at Marshall's for $5.00, so this time the texture was actually right. Marshall's, by the way, is an amazing store for cookware of all kinds. They even have nice Le Creuset for 50% off! It's hit-or-miss, but man, it's worth checking out. T.J. Maxx is, too; it's basically the exact same store as Marshall's; they're interchangeable.

I made a dough with the potato and an egg and a bunch of flour, cut it up, and started rolling and cutting it to make gnocchi:

An hour or so later, after much rolling of my thumb over fork tines, I had a bunch of gnocchi. Hooray!

The entire time, my actions were carefully monitored by a quality control agent, you'll be glad to know:

Stoically she sat and watched me make the gnocchi. She watches me cook a lot. Her sister never does. I'm pretty sure she's studying to become a chef, and practices when I am not around.

I pan-fried the gnocchi in plugra butter with rosemary and served it over fresh arugula, which wilted ever so slightly just from the warm butter.

I might throw on some chipped Parmigiano or add some pine nuts or something, but it really stands pretty solidly on its own. It was tasty.

More Autumn Food

2007-12-04T18:36:00.000-08:00

I know, it's been forever since I posted. It's not just that I'm lazy, I swear. What I noticed is that, when I started this blog, I had been working very diligently to improve my cooking technique. I've always been good at following recipes, but not as much at improvising. So for a while there, I was making lots of recipes, learning new techniques, classical preparations, fleshing out my repertoire.

I've been reading McGee cover to cover. I'm about halfway through. I started with the last couple chapters on cooking methods and common food molecules and then went back to the beginning. I've read eggs, dairy, meat, fish, shellfish, vegetables, and fruit, and am now at herbs & vegetable flavorings. Still to come: seeds, nuts, coffee, tea, wine, beer, maybe a couple other things. I'm getting there.

I've been reading several of my cookbooks, not just looking up recipes but really reading them, cover to cover, reading the sections on technique and the opinions of the authors and the nuances of various ingredients and cooking techniques.

And I've made a lot of progress. In particular, I can walk into the grocery store or farm or farmer's market now and just look around and see what's good and buy it and in my head ideas are floating around where they weren't before. Before it was more of a vague anxiety, like, I hope I can find something to do with all this stuff.

My cooking has been a bit less flashy and certainly less recipe-driven as a result, but it's been good. When I realized it had been far too long since I'd posted here, I thought, well, I can just post a random survey of what I've been eating lately.

For Thanksgiving I used the rest of the giant bag of sweet potatoes I got from Marysol, peeled, sliced, and roasted them in the oven with a bit of butter so they browned nicely, then mashed them with a little leftover cream, layered them in a pie plate, and topped with an improv crumble topping that I sweetened with blackstrap molasses and scented with orange juice and orange zest. It was great.

Here are my cats:

For the Thanksgiving meal at my office, I made vegetable pot pies. I took the ingredients on the left and, using only my knife, no mandoline (I'm working on my knife skills), turned them into the mise on the right.

Then I cooked the veggies variously (roasted the carrots, fennel, and potato in a big baking dish until tender, sauteed the mushrooms in cream) and lightly browned some chopped onion. I made two pie crusts ala Tartine (read: 2 sticks of butter per pie) and filled them.

I closed the tops, trimmed it all down, and then baked them in the morning before heading into the office, naturally forgetting to photograph them then. But come on, obviously they were delicious. Tartine pie crust filled with savory veggies and cream and spices? Duh.

For cooking night, I promised something hearty and filling, so I went to Whole Foods. On finding that they finally had Meyer lemons in stock (they're on trees all over the place here, why'd it take so long?) I picked up a bunch of those, some good Granny Smith apples, some carrots, and a few shallots and just cooked it all down separately:

I cooked the lemons into a marmalade with as little sugar as I could tolerate, cooked the apples down into a straightforward applesauce, cooked the carrots until they were soft enough to mash, then turned the heat up to brown the bottoms a bit, caramelized the shallots, and layered it all in a pie plate. I mashed the carrots with the shallots and spread them on the bottom of the plate; I topped that with the applesauce, and finally spread the marmalade on top.

Man, it was an interesting dish. Sweet but herbal carrots, sweet but very brown and bulby shallots, sweet fruity applesauce, and super-tart, thyme-y, gelled Meyer lemon marmalade on top. It was kind of intense, especially the way the caramelized shallot flavor and Meyer lemon flavors went together. But it was really good! It kind of reminded me of the flavor of beets (a vegetable I am still learning to love) -- not that it actually tasted like beets, but it had that sweetness combined with the odd off-flavors and sharpness. I'd make it again.

Speaking of beets, last night I roasted some, topped them with a good Roquefort, simply pan-fried a chunk of good thick tuna steak, and ate it all with the leftover carrot/apple/lemon stuff:

Now you see why I didn't photograph the carrots/apples/lemons separately: They don't actually look very photogenic. It's just three orangey-yellow pastes on top of each other. The appearance belies the complex, delicious taste.

Yesterday while the beets were roasting, I also started another marmalade, this time cranberry-orange. Again, I used as little sugar as I could bear (still a reasonable amount, since cranberries and orange peel are both completely inedible, the one tart and the other bitter.)

I just simmered that for a long time. Cranberries and oranges have a ton of pectin in them, and I threw in the orange peel while it simmered, so it was basically a Jell-O mold in a saucepan by the time I took it off the heat.

I also prepped a chicken yesterday, drying it off and salting and peppering it, trussing it, and then wrapping it back up and refrigerating it overnight. I took it out tonight, drained the fluid that the salt pulled out, and dried it again with paper towels so the skin was as dry as could be, and then roasted it in the usual manner. About a half hour before it was done, I took it out and glazed it with a nice thick coat of the marmalade.

Here's my weirdo cat trying to eat my Rock Band box:

And again:

I always take my chicken's temperature from a different place. Usually I go with the Bouchon instruction: stop when the flesh between the thigh and body hits 155; it'll keep going to 160 on its own while resting. This time, it's the Joy of Cooking: stop when the thick part of the thigh hits 170 to 175. It should be about the same time, but it's an easier thing to consistently measure.

It sure looks good, anyway. Now I have to let it sit for 15 minutes. You'll have to wait until next time to find out. (And at my rate, that might be 2008.)

Fall Vegetable Menu

2007-11-19T09:08:00.001-08:00

I've discovered that I'm not alone in finding the autumn and early winter rather challenging months. It seems like the change in weather patterns, drop in temperature, falling of the leaves, and general end of that summer exuberance subdues my mood a bit, and invites nostalgia, wistfulness, and melancholy.

The seasons of one year are often compared to the stages of a full human life: Spring is the birth and youth, summer is the heyday, followed by the golden years of autumn and finally winter, death. All followed by the whole thing all over again.

My mother always used to say, when God closes a door, He opens a window, and I think that spirit is alive in the various seasonal harvest. As melancholy as I find autumn, I think it's a nice benevolent treat that the autumn harvest tends so heavily towards warming, starchy, filling vegetables. The Earth throws me off with the change in season, but with a conciliatory offering: comfort food.

I've been trying to form new, positive sense-memories of these seasons by taking advantage of that food, so last night I had a bunch of good friends over for dinner, and made a vegetarian menu of seasonal food, most of it local.

First, a word of thanks to my friend Marysol. Marysol runs Hands of the Earth Farm, previously known (and still referred to at that website) as Oasis Gardens Farm. It's less than 9 miles from my house in central Austin, and is a beautiful, 10 acre organic farm. I'm a member of their CSA program right now, and when I invited Marysol to dinner she offered to get me any vegetables that she could. I gave her the list of what I was planning to use, and when I showed up on Saturday to get my regular basket, she gave me the amazing gift of a huge bounty of fresh, local, organic veggies. Even a dozen fresh, local eggs! Almost everything here was from her (with only a few notable exceptions like the apples, oranges, pears, and celery.)

And much of that went into the dinner.

My camera battery was dead and I was busy trying to cook for 8 people and hang out and drink wine all at the same time, so I don't have any more photos, but I'll describe the menu.

First, I'd intended to serve the eggs Marysol gave me, poached, with roasted cherry tomatoes, boiler onions, and golden beets. But I ran out of time. Planning for a big dinner party is still a lot of intuition for me. Even when I write out all the various steps, it's hard for me to visualize exactly how all the pots, pans, stove burners, oven, steamer, blender, and stand mixer will be utilized. I actually considered trying to plan dinner parties out in Microsoft Project. Maybe I still will, someday, even though it seems really dorky. If it works, why not?

Plus, I wouldn't be the only one going a bit overboard on large meal logistical planning. So at least I'd be in good company.

Drink
Cortland Cider

I sat Dave down with my juicer when he arrived and had him juice a big bucket of Cortland apples (from New York -- I'd be a bad Locavore, I know.) The result had a lot of solid to it, so it was halfway between cider and applesauce, but it was delicious, fragrant and complex. A week or two ago I bought one each of 7 different kinds of apples from Central Market and juiced them all, and Cortlands made the best cider.

Bread
Parker House Rolls, Kerrygold Butter

I got this recipe from Epicurious, wanting a nice yeasted white roll. The one step I take issue with is where you add cold milk to melted butter and "heat until lukewarm." In my case it was more than lukewarm after mixing, even with the milk straight from the refrigerator, and so it ended up hot enough even in the few moments it took me to realize its temperature that when I poured it into the dough I'm pretty sure it killed a lot of the yeast. The dough didn't seem to rise as much as I expected.

But they came out alright, still had decent loft to them, weren't tough like hockey pucks or anything, just not quite as airy and pillowy as they might have been.

Serving them with good cultured Irish butter doesn't hurt, either.

Soup
Tamopan Persimmon, Crimini Mushroom, Pine Nut

This was modeled somewhat after a soup Lulu and Robin had at the French Laundry when we just went at the end of October. Theirs was, I think, Parsnip, Fuyu Persimmon, Black Truffle, and Pine Nut. It's easy to prepare and delicious; I used Tamopan persimmons because that's what Marysol grows. They are like Hachiyas in that they are astringent until totally squishy-soft ripe, whereas Fuyu you can eat when their flesh is still firm.

I just cut the persimmons in half, scoop the flesh out with a spoon, and put it at the bottom of a bowl. Then, saute the mushrooms in butter for a bit until they soften, then add some milk and continue to simmer for a while. In the meantime, toast the pine nuts in the toaster until they are a golden brown and aromatic. Puree the mushrooms, milk, and pine nuts in a blender for several minutes to get it as smooth as possible, adding milk to get it to the consistency of thick soup. Pour that mixture over the persimmon and serve.

It's amazing how well these flavors combine. This is really the only thing I know to do with persimmon beyond the cookies, pudding, and serving it in a salad.

Pasta
Sweet Potato & Shallot Agnolotti with Celery-Mustard Green Puree

One downside to using local, organic sweet potatoes is that they're funny shapes and harder to peel. One upside is that they are delicious, creamy, soft, and richly flavorful. In the end, it's a good trade if you can make it.

I peeled and sliced maybe 3 pounds of the potatoes since they were all different sizes and I wanted them to cook evenly. I layered them in a baking dish, scattered a few minced shallots over the top, and then drizzled with olive oil and a teaspoon or two of salt. Covered the pan with tinfoil, popped it in a 350F oven, and just let it sit there for an hour or two while I prepared other stuff. Took off the tinfoil eventually and gave it another 30 minutes to brown some of the potatoes for a little extra roasty flavor.

Then I pureed it gently in the blender, leaving some small bits of potato and shallot intact for texture and salting again to taste, put it in a gallon ziploc bag and refrigerated it overnight.

I make the agnolotti as described in the French Laundry Cookbook. I make my standard semolina egg dough and roll it out in my Imperia machine to setting 5 (one short of the thinnest, 6). As Keller says, you should be able to see your hand through it, but it should not be so thin to be translucent. Then, cut a 1/4" hole off the tip of the ziploc bag of filling and pipe a tube out onto the pasta, close to the bottom edge. Roll it up, seal it by pressing with my fingers, then pinch it so it forms 1" wide pockets of filling separated by 3/4" pinched spots, and roll a ravioli cutter along the pinched spots to divide them into individual pieces.

For the sauce, I just blanched a few mustard leaves (with any particularly fibrous stem removed) and about 4 large ribs of celery, chopped. I blanch them separately, as they take totally different lengths of time. I threw them together in a blender with a splash of water and a pinch of salt and pureed them to as smooth a consistency as possible. I bet I could strain them to get a really extra-smooth puree, but I didn't bother. The key is to blanch them only long enough that they are still vivid, bright green, so the puree is a beautiful emerald color.

I urged everyone to sauce the agnolotti lightly. Celery and mustard is a sharp, bright combination, and could overwhelm the low, warm, sweet and bulby nature of the filling. In the right balance, it's a really nice dish.

Salad
Pickled Okra, Cauliflower, Cabbage, Bell Pepper, Jalapeno, Onion

I stuck a salad in the middle to add a little zip in between courses that were otherwise very warm, deep, and heavy. This was actually at a friend's recommendation: He glanced at my planned menu and said, "I know you're going for comfort food, but that might be a little more like coma food."

I took the advice but didn't plan ahead enough to make good fermented pickle, so instead I made quick vinegar pickle as per Cooks Illustrated. Distilled vinegar, spices, water, boiled and poured over a big nonreactive bowl full of the various veggies. I kept them submerged with a sheet of parchment and a heavy plate, wrapped it all up in cellophane and left it in my refrigerator for a week.

It was definitely sharp. The red okra bled all its color out into the brine, and the cauliflower turned a neat shade of pink. Okra's really surprisingly good when pickled; the acid seems to totally eliminate the sliminess.

Between the sweet potato pasta and the next course, this quick pickle was a nice palate cleanser and also functioned like smelling salts, keeping all my guests from falling asleep at the table!

Main Course
Baked Beans, Brussels Sprouts, Parsnip, Brown Bread

The brown bread and baked beans were from America: The Vegetarian Table by Deborah Madison. I made the brown bread first thing in the morning, dumping out a can of Chock Full 'o' Nuts I'd bought expressly for the purpose, mixing up the batter (rye flour, whole wheat flour, cornmeal, molasses, baking soda, salt, buttermilk) and pouring it into the well-buttered can, sealing the top with tinfoil and tying it with string. If you do this, use heavy tinfoil and good string, and tie it tight. And I recommend mixing it a little longer than you might otherwise; mine must have had a pocket of undermixed batter with more soda than the rest, because it made a big bubble in the center of the bread and some of the batter squirted out the side while it was cooking.

The bread cooks in a bain marie -- "double boiler" doesn't seem quite right here, it's really just a hot water bath -- with the can sitting in a large covered pot with boiling water halfway up the side of the can. For 3 hours! So I did it early so I could have my soup pot back later for all the boiling and blanching.

I boiled the brussels sprouts just until tender. I think I prefer them steamed; boiling in salted water left them a little bit funkier than I'm used to. I tossed them in coarse kosher salt (a bit too much kosher salt, it turns out) and then finished them in a scorching-hot cast iron skillet to brown them. It took a while to brown them, as they still had a lot of water in them. I'm not sure how I might prepare them differently next time to dry them out more before frying. At any rate, they came out well and were a nice component of the course.

The parsnip I just peeled, chopped, salted, and steamed in my handy rice cooker & steamer until it was nice and soft, then pureed in the blender with just enough cream to get it to blend. (This is one reason I might eventually break down and get a food processor: you can't puree without liquid in a blender.)

The baked beans are a real preparation; Madison uses yellow soybeans which soak for 12 hours beforehand and then simmer for 3 more just to be tender, followed by roasting for another hour and a half! It's worth it, though; the beans with the onion, molasses, brown sugar, soy sauce, and chipotle come out sweet and dark and especially hearty, with a bit of smoke to them. In the past I've added a pinch of lapsang souchong tea instead of the chipotle for the smokiness, but I forgot it at my office this time. The beans really do have some heat to them with the chipotle. I think I prefer the tea.

All together, this makes a very good course. The parsnip is sweet and herbal and ultra-smooth and thick with the cream. The beans are intensely spicy and sweet and creamy and rich. The sprouts are green and funky and salty and crispy-brown, and the brown bread is the perfect complement to the beans, sticky and moist, dense and warm.

Dessert
Poached Concorde Pears, Brown Butter Creme Anglaise

I made the creme anglaise as per the Joy of Cooking (although mine's the previous version), substituting brown butter for a portion of the milk/cream mixture. It was just about the perfect amount. The eggy custardiness combined really well with the brown butter nuttiness and complexity. I could have cooked it a bit thicker, though.

I poached the pears with the recipe in Chez Panisse Fruit. White wine, water, sugar, cinnamon, vanilla bean, lemon juice. Simmer until the flesh offers no resistance to a paring knife.

I sliced the pears and served a half pear, sliced and fanned out, topped with the sauce.

Originally I'd intended to pair them with buckwheat cakes, as described on Shuna's awesome dessert menu at Sens (I've wanted to try my hand at making something like it since I didn't get it when I was there), but again, I left it to the end and ran out of time. Or, I probably could have made it, but would have been standing at my Kitchenaid making noise in the middle of the meal instead of sitting at the table socializing. Tough balance! I was also going to roast some chestnuts, but again, ran out of time.

Mignardises
Chocolate-Hazelnut Macarons with Chestnut Buttercream

I roasted some of the chestnuts ahead of time as a test, and ended up with enough I went ahead and whipped out some macarons early in the day, hoping they'd have time to settle, absorb moisture, do their magic thing they do that turn them from cakey, chewy cookies into delicate, crispy, melting meringues.

Turns out it takes more than the 5 or 6 hours I gave them, but they were still good, if a bit more unwieldy to eat. I made the buttercream directly from the Joy of Cooking, pureed the roast chestnuts in the blender and mixed the puree into the buttercream, and then let it sit in the fridge as I made the shells. The shells are old hat by now; I made them the usual way, with the proportions described in David Lebovitz's seminal post on the subject. They came out quite well. I like these cookies because, once you get the hang of them, you can crank out a whole batch from scratch in well under an hour.

The Littlest Cantaloupe

2007-11-05T17:20:00.000-08:00

I went out into my backyard this morning for some reason or another, and spotted this out of the corner of my eye in my garden.

I had thought all the vines were long dead, but here it was, bright orange, perfectly ripe, perfectly spherical. The littlest cantaloupe.

What could I do? I cut it open. Its seeds, sure enough, were full-size.

Its flesh smoothly faded from the orange rind to a spring green and back to orange at the center. I scooped out the seeds and filled it with a little ball of red grape-white wine sorbet, and a sprig of Mexican mint.

Then I ate it. All three bites of it. It was delicious. All the flesh, green and orange, was perfectly ripe, juicy, and sweet.

And then it was gone.

Three Dessert Custards with Vanilla Tuile and Espresso Cream

2007-10-26T23:35:00.000-07:00

This little set of desserts was an experiment. It all started when I went to Teo, home of both the best espresso and the best gelato I've yet had in Austin. (In fact, David Lebovitz sent Matthew, owner of Teo an email, which is printed out and taped to the register, saying that in a recent tour of the United States, theirs was the best gelato he had -- the best in the nation!)

I was sitting outside enjoying my usual short double cappuccino and small gelato, and Matt came out and handed me a cup. "Here," he said, "You have to try this. It's great." It was a few shots of their Italian espresso with a scoop of their "Texican Vanilla" gelato. I swirled it together with my spoon and half-slurped, half-spooned it into my mouth. It was a fantastic combination.

It was also my third, fourth, and fifth shot of espresso, so my heart damn near exploded. It was worth it.

It got me thinking about flavor combinations and how we choose the flavors we assemble into dishes. I tend to think of both vanilla and coffee as relatively European, in terms of dessert. When I think of vanilla I think of pastry cream, creme brulee, caramel. When I think of coffee, I think of tiramisu.

But thinking about them that way is kind of a dead end. It doesn't really help me think of new ways to use them.

That day at Teo I realized that they're connected in a totally different way: by their region of origin. Mexican vanilla and coffee beans come from the same region of the world. And I think flavors from a given region often have a natural affinity for one another. Not always, of course, but it kind of feels right to me, seems intuitive that they should work together.

I decided to play around, and figured I'd take this vanilla & espresso and add other flavors from Central and South America or even the Southwestern United States. I picked three: squash, corn, and bananas.

I started this whole experiment thinking primarily about flavor, but texture is no less important. I juggled a bunch of ideas. Soft warm cakes of banana, squash, or corn, sitting in a small pool of cold espresso and topped with a warm vanilla custard? Thin rolled tortillas of the three filled with a vanilla gelato and coffee syrup?

Anything could have worked, I suppose. But I decided to go with little custard cups. Each of those three ingredients became a custard, sandwiched between a crispy vanilla cookie base and an espresso whipped cream garnish.

Vanilla Tuile & Espresso Whipped Cream

First, then, the cookies. I've never made tuile cookies, but I love the light, wafer-thin crispiness, and they're often made with vanilla, so I took the first Google result for "tuile cookie recipe" and mixed up some batter, adding some extra scraped vanilla bean.

The technique for making these cookies took some practice, and is relatively unlike what the recipe claimed. First, the only way I could get them thin enough was to take a glob of batter on my index finger and swirl it on a silpat into a disk, like these:

The key is to move in concentric circles so you end up with a disk of perfectly even thickness. It needs to be exceedingly thin, too. To top it all off, you need to move quickly because if the batter heats up too much from your fingertip, it stops sticking to the silpat and you're just dragging it around.

I baked the cookies for just a few minutes, until the batter had bubbled a bit on top. The goal here was to get them just solid enough to lift off the silpat, but no firmer. Then, pull them from the oven, lift them off the sheet, and press each cookie into something oven-proof and cup-shaped. I used silicone muffin molds:

Ramekins or custard cups would likely also work. Then, I baked them for another minute or two until the edges were brown and the whole cookie was at least golden.

They still aren't the most precise-looking cookies, but they do the job and just have a certain, uh, hand-made-ness to them. Ahem.

For the espresso whipped cream, I just cold-brewed some coffee so it was nice and strong, and then poured a little bit in with some whipping cream as I whipped it, adding a bunch of ground espresso beans right at the end. Voila.

Now, for each custard. Err, soup. Err, whatever. I'm calling them custards because it's convenient, and because they are custard-like, but they're all actually different. The squash component is technically a pudding, thickened with a bit of starch (oatmeal). The corn component is just a simple puree. Only the banana component is an honest-to-goodness custard, cooked with egg yolks in a double-boiler.

All of this was pretty ad-hoc, so I'm not doing a formal recipe here, but they're really pretty hard to screw up, so if you follow my imprecise lead, you'll no doubt have something quite good.

Squash

I'll start with the squash because it's the one I made first, although it's the one I liked the least, in the end. I sliced up a butternut squash and boiled it with just enough water to cover and a small handful of old-fashioned rolled oats and cooked until the squash was tender.

On the side, I chopped up and toasted some Scharffen Berger cacao nibs, and mixed them into the puree. Then I sweetened that with agave nectar to taste.

The oatmeal gives it a nice silkiness and a sheen; as starches go it's a good one for thickening soups. The problem was that the squash wasn't really very ripe, and boiling it won't really accentuate the flavor much, so the soup tasted extremely bland, but sweet, so it was pretty unremarkable. The prominent flavor, in fact, was the oatmeal. Hmm. Not what I'd intended.

Next time, I'd probably slice the squash the same way, maybe 1/4" thick, and oven-roast it with salt until it was a bit browned and tender, and then puree it with only enough water to make a nice consistency, and omit the oatmeal altogether. The squash has enough sugar to it that the browning flavors would be really nice, and a slight smokiness to the soup would be complemented well by the bitterness in the espresso and matched nicely by the warmth of the vanilla.

Corn-Guajillo Puree

The corn-guajilla chowder was a superstar. It's a beautiful, vibrant orange, intensely flavorful, and was super-simple and easy to make.

First, I took a few dried guajillo chiles, sliced them into strips, removed the seeds and ribs, and soaked them in warm water to let them plump up and soften. Then I sliced the kernels off a few ears of corn, and sauteed them in butter for a bit. I added the chiles after about 10 minutes of soaking, added some heavy cream and good kosher salt, and simmered for maybe ten minutes to let the flavors mingle.

Then I pureed it, and it was perfect.

If I'd been serving it on its own I would have added some more complexity -- a mirepoix or other base of sweated veggies, maybe another kind of pepper, maybe roasted the corn first, whatever. Since I knew it was already going with the vanilla cookies and espresso cream, I left it alone. Enough flavors, already!

It was fantastic. I served it at room temperature and then, later, chilled, and both ways it was great. Thick, creamy, and simultaneously sweet with the corn and a bit picante, acidic, and smoky from the guajillo, it was very full, comfort food, which went well with the vanilla and was offset well by the espresso cream.

The experience of eating one of these things, by the way, if you pop it whole into your mouth, starts with the cold, smooth slick of the espresso cream on your tongue, followed by the textural crunch as you bite through the cookie, after which the soup washes over your mouth, followed finally by the vanilla coming in and then the espresso mingling with the rest of the flavors for a nice combined finish. I think it's serendipity that I happened to sandwich the soup in between the vanilla and espresso, because I think it makes for a nice little experience, start to finish. In the case of the corn, if you tasted the corn and chiles first, it would overwhelm the rest of it too quickly.

Banana Custard

This banana custard was easy to make and delicious. What's more, it's not really that unhealthy. I used no added sugar, and only a little dairy; it's really just bananas and eggs. It came out so well that I've made it a few times since, especially when I've had leftover egg yolks or old bananas that are on the verge of going bad.

First, I took 3 bananas and pureed them in the blender with just a splash of cream to facilitate the blending. I mixed them with 5 egg yolks in a metal bowl and set it over a saucepan with an inch or so of boiling water over medium heat, yielding this improv double-boiler:

I cooked that mixture, whisking it fiercely until it registered 180F on a thermometer. If you try this, you'll know it's getting there because it starts tangibly thickening around 150F and is really gelling by 180F, cohesive and pulling away from the sides of the bowl and all that.

Here it is at, I think, about 170F.

For measuring the temperature I use my IR thermometer, which I love and wholeheartedly endorse, but I know it gives a reading significantly below the internal temperature (because the surface is so much cooler) so I compensate accordingly. You could also use a normal thermometer (here is the one I have, and it functions quite well) and it'll give a clear reading, but it's kind of in the way. Or, once you're comfortable, you could just do it by feel.

Once it hit 180F, I removed the bowl from the pan immediately and set it off the heat. I let it cool a bit, whisked it a bit, and when it was getting near room temperature, so I had some idea of its cooled consistency, I whisked in some more cream to thin it just a bit.

Subsequently I've used whole milk instead of heavy cream, and it comes out a bit less creamy, of course, but still tasty. And while I've always used entirely yolks (it gives it a nicer yellow color, I think, and lately I've had a lot of leftover yolks from meringues), you could substitute a roughly equivalent volume of whole eggs.

The custard is nice because it's hard to screw up. Fundamentally, as long as you don't wildly screw up the proportions (say, combine 8 bananas with one egg yolk) and cook it gently, the eggs will form that protein matrix. It's like making scrambled eggs with some banana puree mixed in. And an eight-year-old can scramble eggs! It's that easy. And impressively tasty.

Results?

I talked about the individual results in each section, but how were these things overall? They were really very good. I brought them to a party and one woman popped one of the corn-guajillo cups into her mouth and excitedly proclaimed it "The most amazing thing I've ever put in my mouth!"

Her boyfriend was standing nearby, but he seemed not to hear.

I wouldn't necessarily go that far, but they were good. The flavor, texture, and temperature combinations all go together surprisingly well, and I'm labeling this one a success. The only liability with it is its lack of portability: the tuile quickly sog with the liquids in them, so you need to assemble them moments before eating or the effect is seriously diminished (or, worse, the sogged bottom falls out and the effect becomes "Orange soup down your shirt.")

Assuming the portability's not an issue, though, they're definitely worth a shot. Plus, I like this kind of format: three major flavors in separate components with distinct texture and temperature, simply combined and eaten. I might have to play around with it some more. Maybe I'll try savory, next time.

How do the rest of you think up new ways to mix flavors? Any particular success stories recently?

30-Minute Homemade Pasta & Tomato Sauce

2007-10-13T21:16:00.000-07:00

I used to cook a lot of dried, store-bought pasta. Then I discovered that I could buy fresh pasta from such places as the fantastic Pasta & Co. here in Austin, staffed by wonderful, friendly people. And it wasn't much more expensive than dried! My life was changed.

My life changed again when I noticed that, gee, every time I make pasta, it doesn't really seem to take that long. In fact, now that I have my big butcher-block island to work on, it's really extremely quick. I decided to see just how quickly I could throw together a pasta dish from scratch, and the result? Thirty minutes.

This post is meant to be both informative and also offer an imperative: make your own pasta! It's really not that hard! I think a lot of people see pasta as some kind of atomic ingredient, and the phrase "making pasta by hand" sounds something like "making rice by hand." But it's not. Pasta is just a dough that you shape, like any other dough, and it doesn't need to do anything tricky like rise.

Without further ado, I present the thirty-minute home-made pasta & tomato sauce. I used a simple pasta dough of just flour and eggs, because I like eggs but also because they act as a binder and will make the dough elastic better than water would. Since I prefer my pasta without all-purpose flour, and opt usually for all-semolina or sometimes a blend with whole-wheat flour, that's relatively important, because semolina flour doesn't develop gluten when you knead it quite like all-purpose flour does, so you won't get anywhere near as much elasticity from the flour. When you're trying to make the pasta quickly, elasticity is a handy quality because it means you can roll it out quickly, without letting the dough rest first, and it won't break or crumble.

As for the sauce, it's kind of secondary to this post, but I offer it for the sake of completion. I used a can of diced tomatoes, garlic, some leftover asparagus, and then a bunch of vegetables and herbs I had in my CSA basket: lemon basil, bell peppers, and a few jalapeños. I threw in some chopped roast chicken when it was almost done, just to reheat the chicken for the dish.

The trick to making this whole dish, start to finish, in 30 minutes is multitasking. Start the sauce simmering first thing, and then start the pasta dough. About 10 minutes in, put the water on to boil. As you finish cutting the pasta, throw the chicken in the sauce. Everything just fits together like clockwork.

There's the sauce, simmering away. Since I was hurried I just threw the asparagus in at the beginning, which meant it was a bit yellowed by the end, instead of staying vibrant green. Still tasted good. If I were presenting this to friends, I would have kept it separate and blanched it ala Keller in a giant pot of very salty water right before plating. But that alone would have taken 30 minutes.

Minutes to this step: 2. Or however many it takes you to open a can of tomatoes, cut up a few veggies, press a few cloves of garlic through a garlic press, and put it all in a pot over low heat.

As the sauce simmered, I mounded the flour on my countertop, dumped the eggs in the center, and began to mix it together with a fork. You can use your free hand to help rebuild the outer wall of flour like a sand-castle in the tide as you draw the flour into the egg mixture in the center. Soon, though, it's firm enough that you don't really need to worry about it leaking out.

Minutes to this step: 9. Mixing the dough goes quickly if you've got the counter space. I suppose you could do it in a bowl if you don't, too.

Knead the dough for a few minutes, folding and pressing down and out with your hands. You do want to develop whatever gluten there is in whatever flour you use, so stretch the dough out with your hands as you knead, don't just press it down to mix it. Stop when it feels fully integrated and has a nice, silky, stretchy texture.

Minutes to this step: 14. At this point, put the pasta water on to boil.

I chose to roll the pasta dough out with a rolling pin instead of using my Imperia hand-crank pasta machine because, frankly, it's faster to roll it. It does yield less consistent thickness, of course, and requires that I cut it by hand, but for something simple like this fettuccine cut, that's not only fine, I think it's desirable. The imperfect hand cutting and hand-rolled thickness variation makes it seem more rustic. If you have guests over, I suppose it's also nice because it makes it clear the pasta is hand-made without you having to announce it and look like you're digging for praise. Which, of course, you are.

Let the pasta dig for praise on your behalf.

As for the technique, well, just keep at it, rolling from the center out in all directions. You want the dough to be about 1/16" thick. If at any point it starts sticking to the pin or counter, either dust the top with flour or lift it up gently and dust the counter underneath it with flour, and keep going.

Minutes to this step: 20. Rolling does take a while.

Cut it with a sharp knife, dragging just the tip of the knife down through it so the dough doesn't bunch up as you go. Hold it steady with the other hand as you cut. This starts a bit slow but gets faster as you both develop confidence and lose patience.

Minutes to this step: 25. At this point, tear up that chicken and throw it in the sauce.

I made more pasta than I was going to eat in one sitting. The right way to store it is to pick up a handful of pasta and gently lower it, coiling, onto the counter so it forms a kind of bird's nest. The key, though, is that you don't want any two strands of pasta to be have any significant surface area in contact, or they'll stick together and won't cook thoroughly, and you'll be unpleasantly surprised during your meal by a bite of what seems more like tire rubber than delightful hand-made pasta.

Minutes to this step: 26. Hey, it's quick.

After that, all that's left is to throw some pasta in the now-boiling water, and let it cook just until it floats back to the surface of the water. Drain it, plate it, and pour some sauce on it.

Minutes to this step: 30. Voila.

30-Minute Handmade Pasta & Tomato Sauce

For the pasta
300g (scant 2c) flour -- semolina, all-purpose, whole-wheat, or some combination thereof.
3 large eggs

For the sauce
1 can of diced tomatoes
2 large cloves of garlic, minced or pressed
5 stalks of asparagus, cut into 1" lengths
1 bell pepper, chopped into 1/4" pieces
2 small jalapeño peppers, seeded and de-veined, medium dice (BHS: Wear latex gloves!!)
2T lemon basil, finely chopped
pinch salt
pinch sugar
thigh meat from one roast chicken, chopped into bite-sized pieces.

Begin with the sauce. Combine the tomatoes, garlic, asparagus, bell pepper, and jalapeño in a saucepan and place over medium-low heat.

Then, the pasta: On a counter surface dusted with flour, or in a bowl, put the flour, and make a well in the center large enough for the eggs. Crack the eggs and pour them into the well. With a fork, break the yolks and beat the eggs briefly, and then continue mixing, gradually drawing the flour into the egg mixture in the center, using your free hand to keep the well intact and prevent leakage. Continue until all the flour is mixed in.

If using a bowl, turn the dough out onto a floured countertop. If using a countertop, add flour to the surface as needed. Begin kneading the dough, folding, turning, and pressing out for several minutes until it has a silken, elastic texture.

Put a pot of water with several generous pinches of salt on to boil over high heat.

Roll the dough out on the counter with a rolling pin to a thickness of 1/16". Using the tip of a sharp knife, cut the dough into 1/4" wide strips.

At this point, add the basil, salt, sugar, and chicken to the tomato sauce.

If not using all the pasta immediately, take the pasta to be saved in handfuls. Holding them up above the counter by one end, lower the handful onto the counter, coiling it in a spiral, so it forms a little bird's nest and each strand of pasta is not sticking to any other.

When the pasta water is boiling, add the pasta and cook briefly, for just a couple minutes, until the pasta has sunk to the bottom of the pan and then floated back up to the surface.

Drain the pasta and serve, topped with a generous ladle of the sauce.

Kitchen Herb Garden Nook

2007-10-10T18:23:00.000-07:00

This post isn't about cooking, but it is about food. I'd like to keep this blog away from a totally rigid one-entry, one-recipe format, so here's my first entry that doesn't concern actual cooking technique.

This entry has a corresponding Instructable to go along with it, since it concerns building something. And a corresponding Flickr set, too, in case the images on the Instructable are too small to read details like measurements easily.

Instead, it's about growing my own herbs. I've long tried to grow herbs because, well, I use them a lot, but never in huge volume, and I tire of buying them from the grocery store in a bundle at least twice as big as I need for $1.50, and then throwing the rest out when it wilts. One of my goals with cooking is to use everything, to avoid waste, and that's always been a source of inevitable waste.

I built some box gardens for my backyard, and those were doing well while it was still raining, but eventually the blistering heat of the Austin summer managed to finish off my herbs. I've never really been much of a gardener, so I don't really know the right way to prune plants to maximize their growth, the right times to water, and generally how to keep them alive. Plus, I don't spend a lot of time in my backyard. Some days I don't go out there at all. And like they say, out of sight? Out of mind. That hasn't helped the situation any.

In one particularly egregious example, I've tried and failed to grow rosemary (from an existing plant) four times, now. Rosemary grows wild in Austin. There are stores on 6th Street whose sidewalks are lined with giant rosemary hedges. It's a little embarrassing that I can't keep rosemary alive. When I told a guy at a nursery about that recently, he couldn't stop laughing.

Well, I don't give up easily. Why not grow the herbs indoors, I thought? Then I happened to wander into a Sur La Table recently and spot this new gizmo, the AeroGarden, a sleek little black device that grows herbs (or tomatoes or other random plants) aeroponically -- they are suspended in midair, the roots hanging freely down, and the device mists the roots with nutrient-rich water and gives them the appropriate amount of light to grow them at maximum speed. It really does work; the Sur La Table I went into had one set up, and over a couple weeks, those seedlings turned into big, lush plants.

I have three problems with the AeroGarden. First, it's not very big. Even in that image on Amazon with the herbs so fully grown it looks like a jungle, I could easily use all of one of those herbs on a single meal. That's not enough parsley for 1/4c chopped. You couldn't make enough pesto for a single plate of pasta with that basil.

Second, even on Amazon, it's $170 for the device and the herb starters. And third, since it's this wacky aeroponic system, you can't just get seeds. You have to buy their starter kits, and they're about $20 each for the various kinds. Herbs, tomatoes, lettuces, whatever.

Organic, local small herb plants are generally about $2 each from any of the local nurseries, and assuming I manage not to kill them, I can grow those to any size I want. I have a giant pile of garden soil in my backyard still, enough to pot hundreds of herbs, and I have a decent wood shop.

I decided to see what kind of indoor herb garden I could build, and at what cost.

I ended up making a custom corner shelving unit out of the following materials. Every single one, save the tinfoil, was from Home Depot.

24" x 48" sheet of birch plywood: $10
some scrap plywood I had sitting around: maybe $5
tinfoil: let's say $2
big roll of cheap plastic sheeting: $10
some shelf brackets: $5
a piece of plastic tube: $1
two cheap shop lights: $10
one old-fashioned outlet timer: $7
two compact fluorescent grow light bulbs: $40
Total: $90

Ninety bucks! Just over half the price of a single AeroGarden. And the light bulbs alone were almost half of that, at twenty bucks a pop. And, since they're rated for 10,000 hours, I shouldn't have to replace them terribly often.

Plus, I built and installed the whole thing, from scratch, in 4 hours in a single night, and it has a ton of shelf space. I have 15 different herbs on those shelves right now, each in a 5" round terra cotta pot, and there's still some space left.

It came out pretty well, if I may say so myself.

With the lights off

With the lights on

It actually matches the kitchen pretty well, looks surprisingly attractive. It's also low-maintenance: the plastic sheeting and plastic tubing mean both shelves drain down into a yogurt container on the floor, so while I do have to water the plants by hand, I can just pour water on them and let them drain automatically on their own. The lights are programmed (via the outlet timer) so they bathe the herbs in fake sunlight, currently, from 9am to 5pm. Plus, if it turns out some herbs really prefer less sun, I can put the lights on separate timers and put the light-loving herbs together on one shelf and the others on the other.

It remains to be seen if I can keep them alive now, but I think my chances are as good as they're going to get: everything but the watering is completely automated, the herbs are right smack in front of me in my kitchen where I will see them all the time, and their climate is completely controlled.

If you're interested, I photographed the whole building process and posted it as a fully-annotated, ordered Flickr set. Update! I also wrote up an Instructable for it! There should be enough detail in there for you to completely replicate my design, if you want. It doesn't take terribly sophisticated tools, either: you could cut the wood with a handsaw, even. There aren't many cuts to make. Otherwise, you just need a hot glue gun, staple gun, hammer, screwdriver, and a bunch of tape.

If you're inexperienced with woodworking, you might not finish it in a single evening, but seriously, there is nothing advanced about this construction. I'm pretty confident that anyone could put this together in a weekend.

Happy gardening!

Tartine Lemon Meringue Cake

2007-10-06T22:20:00.000-07:00

In case you needed another reason to buy the Tartine cookbook, here's some pictures of their Lemon Meringue Cake that I made this week. It's layers of lemon chiffon cake filled with simple lemon syrup, vanilla caramel, and lemon custard, frosted with thick meringue and torched to a golden brown.

It came out very well; the cake is delicious. It's so time-intensive, though, that I'm not about to make it again soon. I made the caramel, lemon syrup, and lemon custard on the first night, made and filled the cake on the second, and then made the meringue, frosted the cake, and torched it and served it on the on the third.

No recipe with this one: The scones were a relatively short, self-contained endeavor, but this one relies on several of Tartine's basic preparations and is very detailed; reprinting it all here would be like giving half the book away.

Preparing the caramel

Cooking the lemon custard over a double-boiler

Making the cake batter: gently folding in the egg white foam

The finished cake

Filling the cake layers

Delicious thick meringue

Frosted cake

The torched, finished cake

This cake is fun to make because it's an opportunity to practice a bunch of different techniques using well-written, detailed recipes --the caramel doesn't even use a thermometer. The lemon custard is wonderfully simple and essential. The cake recipe is good enough that, surprisingly, it came out perfectly on my first attempt. As an added treat, you get to make two separate egg white foams in this one -- the one folded into the cake batter is plain, simple, room temperature egg whites whipped up. The frosting is egg whites, first whisked with sugar and heated over a double-boiler and then whipped up into a foam. It's a good opportunity to see the difference: in the frosting, adding the sugar right at the start prevents the foam from rising as high, and heating it up before whipping makes the texture velvety and extremely smooth.

Furthermore, while it's time-consuming overall, each component of the cake is relatively simple, and everything but the meringue frosting can be prepared days in advance.

It came out well. It's surprisingly heavy, given that it's an egg-heavy but dairy-light cake, and so much of it is whipped. I was expecting it to be a bit lighter. I guess when you soak that fluffy cake in chilled sugar syrup, caramel, and lemon custard, it gets a little bit more... solid.

So cut those slices thin.

Buttermilk Scones with Peaches

2007-10-01T20:19:00.001-07:00

Scones are one of my favorite breakfast foods to make, especially for others. In fact, only for others, because these scones, more than any other baked good I've ever made, are significantly better fresh from the oven than reheated later in a toaster. They're still good later, don't get me wrong, but the difference is really shocking.

I think of scones just like I think of espresso: Most scones you can get, at stores, coffeeshops, wherever, are really not very good. Similarly, most espresso at the average coffee shop is painfully bitter and acidic. I'm a little sensitive to being called a food snob, and I think it's happened once or twice with the coffee, but my contention is that it doesn't take a particularly sophisticated palate to appreciate the difference. It's just that a surprising number of people have never had the fortune to drink a great espresso, or eat a really excellent scone. Once they do, I contend, they'll never go back.

On Saturday, I brought a chicken pot pie to friends who just gave birth to a beautiful baby boy, and while hanging out them and talking, I mentioned scones and she said, "I don't think I like scones." I asked a few questions, suspecting she'd just never had a really good one, and indeed, she described the average scone as leathery and tough.

Never one to turn down a challenge, I went straight to Central Market to pick up the couple things I didn't already have on hand for this recipe -- some buttermilk and the currants. Only, the peaches looked so good I ditched the currants and bought a few peaches instead.

I doubled the recipe, on a whim, thinking if I was going to deliver scones to one friend on Sunday morning, I might as well deliver them to more. I brought scones to 7 different homes in south Austin, all my friends who responded to my text messages, and it made for a great Sunday morning. Actually, it ran long, so it made for a nice Sunday afternoon, too. Luckily the scones obligingly stayed warm for several hours.

This recipe is straight from the Tartine Cookbook. It is amazing. The scones are buttery, warm, crumbly and soft, just the tiniest bit tangy from the buttermilk, and with a faint crust of sugar on top to give a little crunch.

I wasn't sure how I felt about reprinting a recipe verbatim, but this is one of the book's simpler ones, I don't think it's illegal, and hopefully this post will convince at least a few of you to go buy the book. You should; it's fantastic. Tartine is one of the best bakeries in San Francisco, and their cookbook lives up to the pedigree. It's full of useful tips and observations, subtle technical details of pastry and baking, and it is worth its weight in gold if you ever want to make pies, cakes, custards, croissants, any of that. Everything I have made from the cookbook has been wonderful.

With that introduction: first, take some peaches. Pit them and then dice them into 1/4" dice or so. Be as even as you can; if they're all haphazard, some will cook more than others and your scones will be inconsistent.

Note: Like I said above, I doubled this recipe, so all my photos are of twice the amount. Don't freak out that I show four sticks of butter and later say you should use only two.

After that, the dough follows a familiar pattern. Sift together the dry, cut in the butter, then add the wet. In this case, there's not actually that much sugar, but there is quite a bit of butter.

The secret to this, just like the secret to a good butter pie crust, is not to be gentle with it, not to get all OCD about mixing everything together into one homogeneous mass. Cut the butter into small pieces so you don't need to beat the holy Hell out of it to get it to combine:

And stop mixing the butter with the flour when there are still pea-sized lumps of butter in there. Fold the buttermilk into it gently, mixing only as much as you must.

It's hard to tell from that photo, but there are still chunks of butter in there, not at all combined, still about the size of peas.

I added the peaches at the very end because I didn't want to freeze them first, and if I'd mixed them in with the buttermilk they would have gotten smashed and bled color into the dough. So I just gently cut them in with my hands at the end, when I turned the dough out onto the counter:

When you shape the dough into long rectangles to cut the scones, again, be gentle! Don't knead it. Just gently pat it into shape. Cut it into triangles:

Then transfer them, using the side of the knife like a spatula, onto a buttered cookie sheet. Brush with the melted butter and dust with sugar:

Finally, bake. Even as they go into the oven, you should still see small discrete chunks of butter in the dough.

Serve them immediately, before they cool off. Eat them plain, or with honey, or clotted cream.

BHS, 11/2/07: I emailed Tartine about posting the recipe; nobody ever responded. I went there when I was just in San Francisco, and asked the girl helping me if there was someone I could talk to about getting permission. She shrugged and said, "I'd just go ahead and do it. I'm sure it's fine." At this point, that's good enough for me. Sorry for the delay.

Buttermilk Scones
Makes 1 dozen

1 ripe peach, pitted and cut into 1/4" dice
4 3/4c all-purpose flour
1T baking powder
3/4t baking soda
1/2c granulated sugar
1 1/4t salt
1c + 1T unsalted butter, very cold
1 1/2c buttermilk
1t grated lemon zest
melted butter and crystal sugar, for topping

Preheat the oven to 400F and butter a baking sheet.

Put the peaches in the freezer briefly so that they are easier to mix with the dough.

Sift the flour, baking powder, and baking soda into a large mixing bowl. Add the sugar and salt and stir to mix with a wooden spoon. Cut the butter into 1/2" cubes and scatter over the dry ingredients. Cut together, either with a pastry blender, 2 table knives, or a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, but don't overmix. You want to end up with a coarse mixture with pea-sized lumps of butter visible.

Add the buttermilk all at once along with the lemon zest and mix gently with the wooden spoon. Continue to mix just until you have a dough that holds together. You still want to see some of the butter pieces at this point, which will add to the flakiness of the scones once they are baked.

Dust your work surface with flour, and turn the dough out onto it. Using your hands, pat the dough into a rectangle about 18" long, 5" wide, and 1 1/2" thick. Brush the top with the melted butter and then sprinkle with the sugar. using a chef's knife, cut the dough into 12 triangles and transfer to the prepared baking sheet.

Bake the scones until the tops are lightly browned, 25 to 35 minutes. Remove from the oven and serve immediately

Southwestern Corn & Bean Salad

2007-09-23T14:04:00.001-07:00

I was walking through Central Market the other day and for some reason glanced at the poblano peppers and it occurred to me that I hadn't had fresh corn in a long time. Of course I've got my Rancho Gordo beans around, too, that I'm always looking for an excuse to cook up, so I whipped up this quick Southwestern / Mexican influenced salad.

When I work on tricky things like macarons these posts might be interesting reads and hopefully inspire people to try their hand at more technically challenging stuff, but obviously most of my day-to-day cooking is not like that. Most of what I cook, since I am single and don't have a ton of free time, is designed to keep well in the fridge, or freeze, and be easily repurposed for other dishes, transforming its way through the week. This salad is a good example of that. When you have leftovers?

Mix a cup of whole milk or light cream and 2 tablespoons of butter together in a saucepan over medium-high heat. When the butter is melted, add 2c of the salad and turn the heat down to medium; simmer it all together until everything softens and flavors and colors mix a bit into a hearty chowder.
Flatten a chicken breast by pounding it between layers of plastic wrap, and layer some of the salad on top. Roll it up and tie it with kitchen twine. Coat with panko or some other coating, and roast at 350F until the chicken is cooked through and juices run clear when cut, roughly 20-30 minutes.
Puree a can of tomatoes and mix with the salad to make a thick salsa; serve with chips.
Mix some salad with chopped cooked chicken, some reduced chicken stock, and a bit of flour and spread in a prepared pie crust for an impromptu chicken pot pie.

The only remotely "technical" things about this salad are the removal of the corn kernels from the cobs and then the cooking of the beans. Getting the corn kernels off is easy; just use a knife and run it down the side. It's easy to tell if you're cutting into the cob (because it's about ten times tougher than the kernels!) so get as far in as you can to try to get the kernels intact without cutting into the cob.

Then, flip the knife over and run the back of the blade down the ear to get out the corn scrapings, the bits of kernel still left in the sockets and a lot of juice from the ear itself.

You can do that in advance of making the salad. Then leave the corn in a bowl in the refrigerator until you're ready to use it.

I cooked the beans very simply in this; I just sweated the shallots and poblano and garlic in some oil to soften them up a bit, added the corn kernels for a few minutes, then dumped them out of the pot and cooked the beans in their soaking liquid in the same pot without washing it (so some of the garlic and pepper made its way into the beans as they cooked.) If you're not comfortable cooking a pot of beans, I recommend starting with the Rancho Gordo cooking page; about halfway down where it says "Master Recipe List", they have their basic instructions, and now a video, too!

The only modification there is that there's no explicit mirepoix here because the beans are going into the salad. The flavored oil left in the pot should be enough.

Many people will tell you various things about cooking beans with or without salt, acids, calcium, or sugar, saying that all of those things can keep the beans from becoming fully tender. In my experience, beans come out much more tender when soaked and cooked in filtered water (I use the soaking water as the cooking water, another controversial topic -- it has never caused me any problems.) And I don't often make sweetened bean dishes (like baked beans with molasses, although they are delicious) so I can't say for certain what sugar does to the beans.

As for acids and salt, though, I have not found any substantial difference in cooking beans with or without salt, and when I cook beans with acid like tomatoes, they still become tender but the skins tend to stay more intact. For this recipe, if you're concerned about appearances, you might add some acid to the beans halfway through cooking to help keep the skins from splitting and keep the beans cohesive in the salad. I liked the idea of them getting a little mushy and adding some creaminess to the salad, so I just cooked them in plain, unadulterated water.

I used the Rancho Gordo Vaquero beans, handsome black-and-white beans, the skins reminiscent of the RG Calypso beans I fondly remember cooking several times in San Francisco. The Vaqueros are warm, meaty and assertive, with mostly deeper flavors, not a lot of green taste, a nice hearty addition to this salad, offsetting the light sweetness of the corn and slight bitterness of the barely-cooked peppers.

Here's the full spread of ingredients for the salad. Except I forgot to put in the ham. If you're so inclined, chop up a slice and throw it in with the beans as they cook. My current favorite ham is the Vande Rose Farms artisan ham; as you can see in the image, it's nicely marbled, a good slightly-cured pink color, and the texture wonderful; just fibrous enough to pull apart but elastic enough to be nicely chewy. And it's from happy, well-cared-for pigs.

Note that this photo is for a double batch of the recipe; it made an enormous amount, so in the recipe I've halved everything to make it a more reasonable yield.

I'm in love with queso fresco these days, too; Central Market has a panela barra white cheese that fries without melting; it slumps a bit but never liquefies, and it browns nicely and has a good, dense, chewy texture. (McGee observes that fresh cheeses were historically known as peasant meat, having a similar dense chewiness and with good protein and fat, but much less expensive, since the cheese is quick and easy to make.) I fried a bit, either in little slices as garnish or as cubes to mix in with the salad. It's not as salty as the more crumbly fresh cheeses, and primarily adds some welcome texture and creaminess.

Southwestern Corn & Bean Salad

Serves 8, as a salad
1/2lb dried hearty beans (black, pinto, or similar), cooked (or about 2 cans)
2T olive oil
1 small shallot, medium dice
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 poblano pepper, chopped
Kernels and scrapings from 3 medium-sized ears of corn
pinch of cumin seed
large pinch of epazote (optional; said to reduce gas from the beans)
1 small heirloom tomato, large dice
soft Mexican fresh cheese such as panela barra

Soak the beans for at least 2 hours, and up to 6 if they are older. Pour the olive oil in the bottom of a large stock pot over medium heat, and add the shallot, garlic, and chopped poblano pepper and sweat them for a minute or two, until the shallot is translucent. Add the corn kernels and cumin seed and cook over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally, for a few minutes, until the corn kernels soften a bit.

Pour the veggie mixture into a bowl, but leave the oil in the pan. Add the beans with their soaking liquid and enough extra water to cover them by 2", stir in the epazote (if using) and turn the heat to high, and bring the pot to a strong boil for 5 minutes. Turn the heat down to medium-low, low enough that the pan is still simmering, but barely. Cook until the beans are tender. This will depend strongly on the variety and age of the beans and length of soaking time. Taste a bean after 45 minutes and then every 15 minutes thereafter until its flesh is pleasantly tender but the skin has not disintegrated. Remove the pot from the heat and drain off most but not all of the remaining cooking liquid (don't strain the beans, you want some liquid left to mix into the salad.) Salt the beans to taste.

Mix the diced tomato with the veggie mixture, and then toss in the beans gently, trying not to smash anything in the process.

Fry slices or 1/2" dice of the cheese in a dry, non-stick skillet over high heat, flipping to get all the sides nicely browned.

Serve the salad in bowls, garnished with the fried cheese.

Fresno Chile & Chevre Macarons

2007-09-21T00:17:00.000-07:00

I've been interested in making macarons that are a bit more savory. All the ones I've ever had are dessert cookies, fragile rosewater, pistachio, raspberry, chocolate, that kind of thing.

At first I wanted to make a savory hazelnut dacquoise and fill it with whipped gorgonzola cheese, but I've made enough of these little guys now to know that you can't really have dacquoise without the sugar. They are rather inseparable. And so I set off to try something else.

I had some chevre left from my chicken sandwiches over the past week, and thought, chevre goes well with chile peppers; chile peppers and sugar might team up well; why not try that?

My first attempt was a learning experience (I heard, recently, "Experience is what you get when you don't get what you wanted." That's kind of what I mean, here.) I minced a Fresno pepper (bright red, fruity with only a mild heat) and a little bit of jalapeño for heat, and tossed them in a dry skillet over medium heat, hopefully to dehydrate them enough to mix with the nut flour and sugar. I used cashews - why not? - and did everything as described in my prior post about macarons, modifying weights and whatnot to make sure everything still added up.

It didn't work at all. The resulting "flour" was actually a paste with the exact consistency of marzipan.

I knew I was in trouble but figured, why not finish the exercise? Maybe I'll learn something. I folded the paste into the meringues:

It didn't fold well. The best I got was a sagging, orange meringue with big chunks of paste in it. I gave in and whisked it until it combined, at which point the meringue had totally collapsed and it was just a bowl of thick liquid.

Again, I soldiered on, at least out of curiosity to see what Frankenstein's monster would emerge from my oven. I whipped another egg white into a stiff foam and folded it in. I piped the mutant batter onto the cookie sheet and baked them, and got just about what I expected:

They bear a vague resemblance to macaron dacquoise, but only in a fleeting, ephemeral way. In reality, eating one was like chewing on a paper towel.

I tried again tonight. I debated between totally punting and sticking with dried chiles or simply keeping the fresh chiles but folding them in separately at the very end. I opted for the latter, since I wanted the fruitiness of the fresh peppers, and also because the cookies are dirt cheap and don't take long to make, so I didn't lose much by trying. Here are the dry ingredients and the minced, pan-fried chiles, happily separated. Oh, and I added about 5g of cocoa powder to this batch, just because it occurred to me that it would taste good.

Then I piped them onto the sheet. I'm getting better at the piping! I still can't quite get rid of that little peak, though, the one that forms when I lift the pastry bag away. Still, these are much improved.

Fifteen minutes later, I pulled them out of the oven to find, to my delight, perfect little shells.

I kept the filling simple, just mixed chevre with 2% milk maybe 3 parts chevre to 1 part milk, just enough to soften it but keep it firm enough to stay in place when spread. Depending on your chevre this might differ. The Cowgirl fresh chevre would be the perfect texture as-is; it's softer, creamier, and lighter than anything I've found in Austin.

I like the reddish-brown hue of the shells, and the sugar in the meringue goes very well with the chiles. They actually taste fairly savory, in spite of the large quantity of powdered & baker's sugar in the shells.

I think I'm happy with my macarons for now. Time to move on to something else. I'm happy I made these, though; they're tasty and were a fun experiment.

Fig & Anise French Macaroons

2007-09-17T11:47:00.000-07:00

These cookies are my submission for Sugar High Fridays #35: The Beautiful Fig.

I remember the first time I had a French macaron, which I suppose should be "macaroon," but most people hear "macaroon" and think of a dense, moist mound of coconut, perhaps half-dipped in chocolate. Those are good, too, but the French macaroon? Divine.

I was at the French Laundry with my sister and aunt. It was late. We'd already eaten probably 9 courses, but they just wouldn't stop bringing food. I felt like I was going to burst. And then they brought a plate of these perfect, glossy little sandwich cookies, pale yellow with golden filling. I bit through it, and my teeth first broke the crispy outer shell, then sunk into the chewy-but-fluffy, caramelized center of the meringues, and then through the milk caramel buttercream filling. I was in heaven. I closed my eyes and savored the cookie as it melted slowly in my mouth. The next day we went to Bouchon and bought a whole bunch more. My sister intended to bring them home to share, but confessed later that she ate almost all of them herself.

No other cookie I've had provides the same textural depth and perfect balance of richness, fluffiness, and crispness. They're elusive, too; in San Francisco you really just had to go to Miette in the Ferry building to get good ones, and then they were several dollars apiece. And so I thought, all this time, that they must be impossibly difficult to make and full of prohibitively expensive ingredients.

Well, they are a fair amount of work, and they do require more technical skill than any other cookie I've ever made, but like anything, it just takes practice. When I spotted SHF #35 I'd already been practicing my macaroon-making, and so I decided to take the opportunity to try another batch.

As for the flavor combination, I once made the fig, roasted pepper, and fennel salad from the French Laundry Cookbook, and it was fairly easy and delicious, the figs and peppers marinated in balsamic vinaigrette and served with a variety of fennel: shaved, powdered, and infused in oil. The flavors worked well there, in a savory dish, so I thought, I bet anise and fig would go well together.

I've based all my macaroon-making so far off of David Lebovitz's extraordinarily useful post on the subject. So go read that first, if you haven't already, and then come back. Back? Good.

Oh, and before you try to make meringue, it's worth reading Heidi's excerpt from Madam E. Saint-Ange's detailed notes on whisking egg whites.

And, last but not at all least, Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking contains an exceptionally detailed chapter on eggs, including a big section on egg white foams. Reading that will take your understanding of eggs to a whole new level. If I could only have one book on cooking, that would be it. No question.

OK, enough with the preamble. On to the recipe! I started with the recipe from David's post, modifying it a bit to make the dacquoise shells taste of anise instead of chocolate. (Dacquoise is a nut meringue; macaroon shells are always meringue with nut flour of some kind.) Cocoa powder is somewhat starch and somewhat fat, so I compensated for it by adding ground star anise and boosting the volume of nuts. Because the recipe calls for dutch cocoa powder, which is treated with alkali to neutralize its acid, I didn't need to compensate for that (I almost missed that and added some cream of tartar, which I suppose wouldn't have been the end of the world.)

For the filling, I wanted a very thick fig jam. I bought some black mission figs, and at Lulu's suggestion, diced them very small:

This took a bit of time. Here's a hint: no matter how sharp you think you keep your knife, go ahead and sharpen it right before doing this. It really speeds things up.

I mixed the diced figs together with sugar in a saucepan over medium-low heat. My figs weren't as ripe as I would have liked, so I mixed 8oz figs with a little over 1/4c of sugar. With very ripe figs I would have used a bit less.

I let them cook for a while, and when they started to release their juices, I added a splash of red wine vinegar, several generous coarse grinds of black pepper, and the flesh from a quarter of a navel orange, minced fine to break up the starchy membrane.

I turned the heat down to low, covered the pan, and let it cook while I made the shells.

To make the shells, I took about 10 grams of star anise and ground it up in a mortar & pestle (10g comes to about a heaping tablespoon when ground)

It's not necessary to get it completely powdered in the mortar & pestle, because the blender will finish some of that. The key is to get it broken down enough for the blender; it'll be in the blender with the nuts, and if you put the star anise in the blender whole, it'll mostly just get flung around. In the time it would take the blender to grind it to powder, the nuts would have gone past "nut flour" to "nut butter."

I asked a pastry chef over at the new (and awesome) Oakville Grocery Austin if he had any tips for making these shells, and he said, "Throw a pinch of flour in with the nuts to help absorb the oil when you grind them." It really helps a lot. I put the ground star anise in a canning jar with 65g of nuts (which is maybe 1/2c or so of whole almonds) and a generous pinch of all-purpose flour. The threads on canning jars fit on most blender bases, which is handy for things like this where quantities aren't large enough to use the full blender jar.

I ground that down in the blender until it was a relatively coarse meal. You don't want to overdo it or the oils in the nuts will take over and it'll get really goopy.

Then, as per David's recipe, I mixed the powdered sugar in with that, being grateful that it all (barely) fit in the jar I picked:

Then I blended it all together. This time I ground it further, so it was the texture of a flour. The powdered sugar and especially the cornstarch in it (an anti-caking agent) absorb some of the oil, making it possible to grind the nuts down further while keeping things dry.

I sifted the resulting dry mix through a coarse wire-mesh sieve into a bowl. A lot of home cooks I know treat sifting of dry ingredients as some kind of joke, like an absurd detail to be skipped. But there's nothing funny about it.

The oils in the nuts, even with the sugar and cornstarch and flour and all that, will still cause clumping in this dry mix, and when you mix this stuff into the meringue, every spatula-stroke counts. By sifting this, you break up those clumps, filter out any debris that didn't get ground fine enough, and aerate it all so it's nice and fluffy and easy to mix into the meringue.

Nerdy-but-important detail: When left with little clumped pebbles, instead of pressing them down against the mesh to break them up, I grab a pinch of them at a time, lift them off the mesh, and roll them around in my fingers to break them up. Pushing them against the mesh risks pushing through other stuff you don't want, like coarse splinters of star anise. Don't be afraid to throw stuff like that away (there shouldn't be very much of it, if you ground it all properly.)

After that, all that remained was the meringue. I took the 2 egg whites at room temperature (that's critical: cold egg whites won't whip as well) and whipped them in my Kitchenaid mixer at top speed for maybe 1 minute, until the mass was solid white, glossy, but still soft. Without stopping the mixer I poured in the 65g sugar -- I used baker's sugar, so it's granular but extra-fine -- and continued whipping until the meringue was as stiff as possible without losing its gloss.

Meringue is kind of like whipped cream when it comes to folding things into it. The more you whip it, the fluffier it is, but also the harder it is to mix with other things. This makes sense, intuitively: the more you whip either foam, the more air bubbles and the thinner the liquid membrane encasing all the bubbles, and hence the harder it is to get it all in contact with whatever you're adding.

Nonetheless, you want the meringue for the dacquoise as fluffy as possible. It just means that when you fold the dry ingredients in, you have to be extremely patient and very careful not to crush the meringue. I took my meringue, sifted half the dry ingredients over it, and folded them in very gently. The technique is this: slide the spatula down through the center of the meringue, sideways, so the blade edge goes in and you're not mashing the meringue. Then, draw it back towards you, scoop up as much of the meringue off the bottom as you can, and flip it so you deposit it on top of the rest of the mix in the bowl. Then, rotate the bowl a quarter-turn or so, and repeat.

It will seem at first like nothing is happening, and the meringue and dry ingredients are just getting piled on top of each other. It will be very tempting to press the broad side of the spatula down through the meringue to smash it and mix the dry ingredients in. Resist the temptation. Doing that will crush the air out of the meringue and your cookies will lose some of their lightness with every bubble that bursts. Keep on folding, trusting that eventually it will start to genuinely combine.

After about half of that mix was integrated with the meringue, I sifted the rest in and finished folding it together. I still get a minor reduction in meringue volume from doing this, but every time I make it, it's better and better.

I scooped that batter into a pastry bag -- David's recipe calls for a broad tip, I just leave it tipless, with about a 1/2" hole at the top -- and piped them onto baking sheets lined with parchment. They ought to be about 1" around. They won't settle, rise, or change shape much at all while cooking, so whatever size you pipe them is the size you'll get in the finished cookie.

I've made these shells on a number of different surfaces now. On a Silpat, thanks to silicone's non-stick property, they're certainly easy to remove, but thanks to its heat-insulating property, they end up a bit too chewy because the bottoms don't get enough heat for my liking. On parchment on an insulated baking sheet (one of the ones with the double layer of metal with air in between) I find they're just about perfect. On parchment on a single-layer baking sheet, the bottoms get a touch too brown.

My piping, as Lulu gently observed, could use some work. The reward for a perfectly-folded batter with a very lofty meringue is that it doesn't settle at all, but the downside is that it will reveal all the imperfections of your piping work. If you screw up and flatten the meringue a bit as you mix, it'll settle more during cooking and the shells will, aesthetically speaking, be more forgiving of your poor piping, but then of course the texture of the cookies suffers. This time I kept the batter loftier than ever before, but unfortunately it does show up my mediocre piping skills. It's something to work on for next time!

David mentions rapping the sheet firmly on the counter before baking them to help flatten them out, but I found that my batter was too stiff, and that had no effect at all.

I popped those in a 375F oven for 15 minutes. I find that any less than 15 minutes and they are a bit too chewy; more than 15 and they brown too much. 15 is the magic number, for me. I also have had poor results trying to bake multiple sheets at once on different-level oven racks. I strongly suggest baking them one sheet at a time with the oven rack in the center.

When the shells were done, I took them out of the oven and lamented my poor piping skills, but celebrated the perfect development of the little, crispy "foot" a good macaroon cookie has at the bottom:

Something I've found in my macaroons that surprised me -- I hadn't read it anywhere else -- is that the shells will not have the proper texture after cooking (or, at least, mine never do.) When you let them cool, the bottoms and interiors will seem too crisp, the insides too full. A finished macaroon should have the crispy outer shell, but then a big air pocket and a softer, moister meringue towards the filling. I worried at first that my cookies were overcooked, the bottoms were so crispy, the insides so solid.

Not to fear. After filling the macaroons and letting them sit in an airtight container on the counter overnight, their texture dramatically changes. The meringues absorb some of the moisture from the filling and the insides of the meringue fall towards the filling. It's surprising how significant that change is, even with a relatively viscous filling like this one.

Speaking of the filling, where did we leave that? Yes, I'd set it on the stove to cook. I checked on it periodically, stirring it, and it was very low in moisture so I generally left it covered while cooking, and just as I put the meringues in the oven I checked and it seemed about perfectly done. The skins didn't quite break down as much as I'd hoped, though, so I pureed it just a little with a hand blender to smooth it out without destroying the crunchy fig seeds. Then I mixed in some chopped orange zest to taste, and the result was a very thick, sweet, sticky, perfect fig jam:

I smeared some jam on a cookie, pressed another cookie on top of it, and repeated until I had a nice little pile of macaroons.

Like I said, it takes several hours of sitting for them to develop the right texture. Resist the urge to bite into one as soon as you've filled them. The cookies will be too solid and crisp and it'll just squeeze them together and squirt filling out the sides. Instead, take a deep breath, put them in a tupperware container, leave them on the counter overnight, and then bite into one in the morning, and claim your reward:

Result? These are delicious. The flavors combine exceptionally well. As for what I'd do differently, well, I'd certainly work on piping them into perfect little domes next time. I'd also probably cut the anise by a little bit, maybe to only 6 or 7 grams, adding almonds to compensate, and also put more fig jam in each one (I was worried I'd run out, but in fact I had some left over.) The fig is a noticeable flavor in these, but the anise is a bit bossier than I expected.

This recipe is, like I said, a modification of David Lebovitz's, here.

Fig & Anise Macarons

For the batter
1 cup (100g) powdered sugar
1/2c (65g) whole almonds
1T heaping (10g) pulverized star anise
generous pinch all-purpose flour
2 large egg whites, at room temperature
5 tablespoons (65g) granulated sugar

For the filling
8oz black mission figs
1/4c sugar (more or less depending on fig ripeness)
generous splash red wine vinegar
flesh of 1/4 of a navel orange, minced
2t fresh, coarsely-ground black pepper
orange zest, to taste

Preheat the oven to 375F (180C).

Cut the figs into small dice. Combine the figs and sugar in a saucepan and heat on medium-low until the figs begin to release juices and the sugar is dissolved. Add the red wine vinegar, orange flesh, and pepper, reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer until the figs break down. Depending on the ripeness of the figs, this will take roughly 30-45 minutes.

In the meantime, put the almonds, star anise, and flour in a blender and chop it, pulsing the blender, to a coarse meal. Add the powdered sugar and continue pulsing until fully combined and ground finer, nearly the consistency of flour. Sift the mixture into a bowl.

In a mixer, whip the egg whites until they are glossy and form soft peaks. Add the
granulated sugar and continue whipping until the whites are very stiff and firm, but still glossy, 2 minutes or so.

Sift half the dry mixture over the whites in the mixer bowl and fold carefully with a spatula until mostly combined. Sift in the remaining dry mixture and continue folding until barely combined, when no streaks of pure white are visible and all the dry ingredients are integrated.

Scrape the batter into a pastry bag with a 1/2" circular tip and pipe onto a parchment-lined baking sheet. Each cookie should be about 1" in diameter, roughly 1T of batter, and cookies should be 1" apart.

Bake for 15 minutes on the center rack, 1 baking sheet at a time.

When the jam is fully reduced and thick, puree it with a hand-blender until the skins are broken up but the seeds are still intact. Mix in the orange zest to taste.

When the cookies have cooled for a few minutes, remove them from the parchment and fill them, spreading a bit of the jam on one with a butter knife and sandwiching another on top.

Seal the cookies in an air-tight container and leave at room temperature for several hours, preferably overnight.

Caramel: By Way of Introduction

2007-09-14T22:04:00.000-07:00

Hello, and welcome to my new cooking blog.

For a long time I've run my other blog and merely sat back as a passive reader of other food blogs, posting the occasional comment. At some point I realized my catch-all blog was more and more just about food, but it wasn't really a cooking blog, so I hesitated to really go more in-depth than, "I made this, and it was good."

No longer.

I picked the name Caramel Cook because, as a child, the thing my taste buds remember most fondly were the Christmas caramels my Dad always made, with the peculiar recipe handed down in his family, using strange substances like Milnot. Every year at Christmas-time I ate as much of that stuff as I could get away with. It was smooth, rich, sweet, but not cloying. The caramel flavors were intense and complex. Some years it tasted almost like fruit, with notes of cantaloupe. Some years it was more like molasses. Every year, it was heavenly. And so my love of caramel was born. Some people identify as "chocoholics." I appreciate good chocolate, but I think it's at its best when it's a vehicle for caramel.

That said, I'm certainly not going to talk exclusively about caramels, or even confections. Of course, caramel's more complicated than that: It's not just a candy. It's also a basic ingredient and a technique, all rolled up into one. Caramel plays a role in everything from creme brulee to dal toppings. And as versatile as caramel is, so is this blog. It's just Caramel Cook because, well, that happens to be one of my favorite things to eat.

I figured my very first post ought to be pretty exclusively about caramel, though. Conveniently enough, I wanted to make the site header image out of actual caramel, and so needed to make a pan. Two birds, one stone: Here's how that went.

I started with a basic caramel. With caramel, the basic process is the same, no matter how interesting your caramel. You cook the dairy a bit, you mix in the sugar, you cook to a particular temperature, and then you're done.

In the case of this recipe, because it uses granular sugar, you cook it down with water separately. Here are the two saucepans: the one on the right with the dairy and salt, already brought to a boil and now staying warm, and the one on the left with the sugar mix not yet fully dissolved.

As the sugar fully dissolves, crystallization starts to become a concern. We stop stirring the solution to stop smearing it up the sides of the pan, where it'll dry and crystallize, and instead gently swish it around. Furthermore, it's helpful to have a pastry brush and small dish of water; brushing water up the sides of the pans will dissolve the crystals and keep the caramel smooth. Furthermore, it does no damage to the caramel: if we poured in a lot of ice water, it would shock and disturb the fragile solution, but tiny amounts of room-temperature water are absorbed into the caramel with no ill effects.

The day I spent the $6 on a silicone pastry brush, my caramel-making became much more pleasant. No more goopy sugary bristle brushes to clean up afterwards!

In this recipe it's really up to us how long we cook the sugar solution before adding the dairy. The key is this: caramel's flavor comes substantially from browning reactions, but which browning reactions? There's sugar and there's dairy. A quick glance at Nina's neat temperature chart over at SweetNapa shows us that sweetened condensed milk begins browning at 212F, whereas sucrose doesn't caramelize until 320F. If that's true, now's our only chance to get sugar-browning, because once we add the dairy, we can't cook it higher than around 250F if we want it to stay chewy when it cools.

Indeed, we can confirm this first-hand: our sugar solution doesn't begin to change color until it gets very hot, as you can see here with the aid of my handy IR thermometer (no doubt the subject of a future post, I love it so much):

I like to let the sugar cook up that hot because I think it adds some extra complexity to the caramel to get some browning from the sugar and not solely the dairy. That said, it makes things a bit more, uh, exciting when we add the dairy, because the sugar solution is so hot that it very quickly boils the dairy mixture and froths and foams and expands dramatically. There's another important lesson: always use a large saucepan for caramel. Scorching-hot caramel boiling over and gushing all over your stovetop would be at best a giant nuisance, and at worst extremely dangerous.

If you've made it this far, all that's left is to cook the caramel to the right temperature and then stop it there. Still, easier said than done, sometimes. If you're not totally comfortable with your thermometer, and especially if you're relying solely on the cold-water test (though, really, you'd have to be very brave, very talented, or very foolish to make candy without a thermometer), keep the heat on medium-low, enough that the temperature will continue rising, but not quickly. Being caught by surprise by a rapid rise in temperature is nearly a guarantee of ruined caramel.

Oh, yeah. A note on cookware: I recommend using thin-bottomed pans to cook caramel. Why?

I have pretty lousy pans. I'd love it if I had a beautiful copper saucepan for making caramel, but I don't. My saucepans are either thick-bottomed aluminum core steel pans from Target or thin, flimsy stainless steel things from God-knows-where. At first, I used the thick-bottomed pans when making caramel to distribute the heat better, but after taking the caramel off the heat, the thick bottom of the pan had so much heat stored up that it'd cook the caramel up another 5 degrees or more -- disaster! I worked around that by pouring the caramel out of the pan immediately when it was done, which is fine if it's just going into a parchment-lined baking pan to be cut into candies, but can be a hassle if it isn't. Actually, no, it's a hassle either way. When you're making caramel you don't need any extra reasons to feel hurried.

Lo and behold, I tried using my flimsy stainless steel pans instead, and found that the heat distribution wasn't really a problem and that they worked very well.

Caramel has a relatively high specific heat, and doesn't scorch on the pan bottom as easily as something like plain milk. As long as you keep stirring it, the heat distribution isn't as critical as it is for most other things. Fundamentally, you're not cooking it for terribly long, anyway. And it's a big help with caramel to use pans that respond quickly to changes in temperature.

Here's the caramel, approaching completion:

As you can see, the dairy browns quite a bit at those low temperatures, so now we've got some sugar-browning flavors and some dairy-browning flavors in there. Delicious.

If you want the caramels to be solid, chewy candies, you probably want to cook them into the firm-ball stage, which is 245F-250F (again, see the cold water test chart.) If you live in a warmer climate, like them especially chewy, or need them to hold their shape impeccably, aim for the top of that range, or maybe even a degree or two above -- 252F or so.

In my case, I wanted a thick syrup that I could put in a squeeze bottle to draw letters, so I cooked it to 235F, right between thread-stage and soft-ball stage, so it would be about the consistency of very soft fudge, or very thick syrup.

And it worked out perfectly! I lettered the header with the caramel, and ornamented it with sugar, dyed blue, and sifted over a stencil:

... and then I ate it.