Category: The Book

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Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

72. Tuna Empanaditas p.37

The recipe

These bite sized party favours are built with the duct tape of the home entertaining wold: puff pastry. A filling of oil-packed tuna, pimientos, capers, and onion is added to rounds of puff pastry, which are folded into semicircles and crimped. They can be frozen at this point, and baked whenever your heart desires.

The filling was very salty, and didn’t really taste like tuna. As I mentioned yesterday I don’t have much love in my heart for pimiento-stuffed olives, and they failed to impress me again here. The capers were really the saving grace, they contributed to the salt problem, but they brought a lot of flavour along with them. With more tuna, and better olives I think this could have worked out really well though. The ideas are sound, but I get the feeling they tried to make the dish too easy. Asking us to pit a quarter cup of olives isn’t an unreasonable demand, and they certainly don’t shy away from it in other sections of The Book.

The puff pastry section of the recipe was trickier than I would have guessed. The recipe calls for a round cookie cutter in the special equipment section. I didn’t have one and tried to make do with the edge of a wine glass. This isn’t a good idea, both because my glass couldn’t cut through and it took forever to go around the edges with a pairing knife, and because using a blunt instrument on puff pastry interferes with the puff. Puff pastry is made by layering butter and pastry, and when it hits the heat the water in the butter creates steam, thus puffing the pastry. Smooshing the pastry too much can compress the pastry layers, and displace butter messing with the puffing. In any case, this recipe makes 50 hors d’oeuvres, and the cutting, folding, crimping process takes quite a while. The recipe suggests it should take one hour active time, but I’m sure it took me two. I was quite late to the dinner party I was bringing them to, which is pretty bad form when you’re bringing the appetizers.

Before you’re ready to serve the empanaditas are baked on a cookie sheet at 400 degrees. The recipe says this should take 20 to 25 minutes. Mine were overcooked and dry within 15. As I was cooking these at a party, I had no way of checking that the temperature I set the oven to was really the temperature inside the box, but that’s a pretty big discrepancy.

In the end these didn’t come out too well. A few changes to the lineup in the filling, and more attentive baking on my part might have improved them dramatically. As is, mine were dried out and heavily salted. I like the concept of an empanadita, people might feel sheepish admitting it, but everyone likes mini versions of regular sized food. In this case the execution left something to be desired though.

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Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

71. Baked Cheddar Olives p.28

The recipe

I should have planned an old-timey supper from The Book instead of doing them all separately. There are some great retro recipes in here, and as some of you may have guessed I’m a sucker for dishes that recall church suppers of a bygone era. Here pimento stuffed olives are wrapped in a buttery extra old cheddar dough, and baked. I love imagining the genesis of this cocktail party nibbler. Did someone think that olives weren’t rich and salty enough on their own? Maybe someone ran out of cocktail weenies and made olives in a blanket instead? Maybe a guest spilled the dregs of her martini into the cheese biscuit dough? or perhaps it was part of a wrapping perfectly good foods in dough craze that swept the nation? The world may never know.

The dough was absolutely delicious, it came together easily, and didn’t require any special shopping. All it requires is good sharp cheddar, flour, butter, and the secret ingredient: cayenne. The cayenne sets the richness of the cheese off, and makes the whole crust sparkle. The dough bakes up perfectly, it gets wonderfully crisp on the outside, and the inside is rich and chewy.

My only issue with the dish was the pimentos. I can’t say I love them. I’m a big fan of olives, but I tend to stick to black ones (Kalamata, nicoise, or the Moroccan salt-cured wrinkly ones). Pitted and stuffed cocktail olives have never held much appeal for me. Neither do the sliced olives you find in low end of the spectrum pizza joints and hot-dog stands. I don’t know if it’s the nature of pimentos I don’t like, or a quality issue. Canned and jarred pitted olives tend to be of pretty pathetic quality and flavour compared to whole olives from the olive bar. I don’t know of anyone who produces high end pimento stuffed olives, but with the cocktail renaissance we’re living though someone must have tried to reinvent the martini olive. In any case, I used pretty run-of-the-mill olives, and they tasted pretty run-of-the-mill when I bit into them.

If you’re the sort of person who will happily pick away at a bowl of pimento stuffed olives, then they will be vastly improved by baking them in this cheesy dough. I can think of half a dozen other things I would have preferred to swaddle in this heavenly cheese dough though.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

70. Chow Fun with Chinese Barbecued Pork and Snow Peas p.249


The recipe.

This is the stir fry I mentioned a while back. It called for leftover Char Siu as an ingredient. The stir fry alone is competent, but not exceptional. The char siu is what makes the dish. The stir fry is very restrained in it’s selection of vegetables, just snow peats, scallions, and bean sprouts. This is cooked up with rice noodles, and the char siu. The flavourings are a fairly standard combination of chicken stock, oyster sauce, soy, sake, sugar, garlic, ginger, and sesame oil. All good stuff, nothing hard to find, and quite well balanced. This stir fry is the closest to Chinese take-out I’ve ever made at home. I’ve made stir fries I’ve liked better, but this was the most authentic if you’ll permit me to stretch that word to it’s breaking point.

The cooking directions seem a bit backwards to me. The recipe fries the noodles in the wok first, then adds the vegetables and aromatics and sauces. One of my favourite things about stir fry is the way the vegetables get seared on the outside, but remain crisp inside. In this method the noodles prevent the veg from ever really making contact with the bottom of the wok, so they end up steamed. That’s not so bad, but I missed the caramelization.

Once the frying is done the stock, oyster sauce, soy, sake, sugar mixture is added, boiled and thickened with corn starch. This did a great job of producing that take-out style slick glossy texture, and made them more fun to eat.

I was a bit surprised to see that the recipe called for a wok. Home wokery seems to have fallen out of favour in the last decade or so (Cook’s illustrated would have us throw them out). The objection is that wok cooking is an extremely high heat cooking method, and that our ranges (even top of the line gas burners) can’t pump out the BTUs necessary to do the technique justice. I’ve seen Alton Brown get around this by setting a round bottomed wok on the industrial sized burner of a turkey deep-fryer, or over a charcoal chimney starter. I have a large round-bottomed stain-prone steel wok that I enjoy cooking with on my electric burner, even if it doesn’t have the benediction of Chris Kimball. I like the size and shape more than its heat distribution properties. I enjoy having room to move the food around without slopping things over the sides. I’m a fan of my wok, but I’ve felt like it was my dirty little secret. It’s nice to see The Book validate my cooking lifestyle choice.

If you have Char Siu in the freezer this recipe takes 20 minutes, and tastes great. I’d like to have a control condition stir fry though. I feel like the Char Siu recipe was so good it could make any stir fry delicious. However, if you’re feeling like DIY take-out food this dish is the way to go.

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Cakes The Book

69. Almond Cake with Kirsch Cream and Lingonberry Preserves p.710

The recipe

In the comments for yesterday’s cassoulet someone mentioned that many of the recipes I’ve posted are heart attacks waiting to happen. This cake is no exception. With 8 eggs, 2 sticks of butter, and a bunch of almond paste it is no where near anyones definition of a light finish to a meal. The cake is dense and very moist, topped with Kirsh flavoured whipped cream and lingonberry preserves.

The cake recipe is a very standard method, but with funny proportions. It’s only got one cup of flour to 7 ounces of almond paste, 1/2 lb of butter, 8 eggs and 1 1/2 cups of sugar. The almond paste is replacing some of the flour, but why does it need 8 eggs?

With all the super rich stuff that went into it, the result is a super rich cake. With so little flour to provide structure it didn’t rise very much. The texture was like a very moist brownie that had been allowed to rise a bit more than normal. The almond paste did a good job of permeating the cake with almond flavour, but it could have been boosted with almond extract, or an almond liqueur.

The Kirsh whipped cream topping was a good concept. Almond and cherries are one of the magical flavour combinations of our world, and I’m glad to see it celebrated. The Kirsh gave the cream an alcohol bite that helped cut some of the richness. The cream was a bit potent to eat comfortably though. There were bites where I misjudged the proportion of cream to cake and just found it to be sour and unpleasant.

The lingonberry preserves were a very nice touch. Apparently this is a Scandinavian cake, and nothing says northern Europe like lingonberries. The average megalomart doesn’t carry these preserves so you’ll have to go to a specialty shop, or Ikea. Those masters of flat-packed over designed furniture sell a broad array of Swedish delights, including three different types of lingonberry preserves (one with chipotle).

This cake keeps forever, I divided it and froze half for a few months. The remains in my fridge were good for at least a week. This is a good thing, because the cake is so rich an average sized family would need that week to get through it. The lingonberry preserves were the best part of the dish, the cream topping was a nice counterpoint, but it was a bit too boozy. The cake’s flavour was fine, and the super moist texture had it’s own appeal, but overall I can’t recommend it because of it’s unconscionable ingredient list. A simple yellow cake with almond flavouring would have served the same purpose, and helped everyone to avoid an insulin coma.

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Grains and Beans The Book

68. Easy Cassoulet p.272

No recipe for this one.

Easy indeed. I’ve made both of the cassoulet recipes in the book now. This is the easy version which can be prepared in 4 hours, plus soaking time for beans. The more authentic version takes 2 days. Both were delicious, and the differences between them were pretty subtle. It’s nice to know that you can get pretty much the full effect of the dish in 1/12th the time.

In more traditional versions lots of effort goes into getting flavour into the beans. They’re soaked then simmered with aromatics, meats, and browned bones then allowed to sit overnight. All of this works to pack as much taste into the beans as possible. It’s a bit of pain, but it does get the flavours in there. In contrast, this recipe soaks the beans without any added flavouring, then quickly simmers them a bouquet garni, tomato paste, and garlic. The beans are not quite as tasty, but still delicious. In this version browned sausage and shredded duck confit are added to the beans. The dish is then covered with a garlic laden topping which uses the duck fat to make make cracklings, and toast bread crumbs. Then the whole things goes into a 350 degree oven until it’s bubbling merrily.

In this versions the beans are not even close to being the star of the show. They’re functional, they soak up a lot of the other flavours, but they’re more or less just there. In the more elaborate version from The Book the beans were a much more central player. The quality of the duck confit and sausage is what will make or break the dish for you. Spare no expense, and travel great distances to find a really good cooked garlic pork sausage. As far as I know the best garlic Keilbasa in Montreal is to be found at Euro Deli (St. Viateur and St. Urbain next to the church). I picked up the duck legs at a little butcher shop on Van Horne (Boucherie France – Canada, 1142 rue Van Horne). She does a brisk business in duck confit, and cassoulet. You can also go enjoy the selection of Nicole Kidman photos she has taped to her fridge. As long as the duck and sausage are up to snuff this will be a no fail recipe.

The bread-crumb topping is hugely flavourful, and was everyone’s favorite part. The cracklings are made by tearing the duck skin into strips and then cooking it with any duck fat that was scraped off the legs. My cracklings never really crisped up, but they were still completely delicious. The bread crumbs toasted in duck fat are absolutely out of this world. Your cardiologist will hate me for recommending this to you, but the topping absolutely made the dish. Because the bread crumbs are so central to the dish, it would be nice to use a top quality baguette if at all possible.

The duck is torn into chunks in this recipe. Frequently the duck legs are left whole and then served on top of the beans, which makes for a dramatic presentation. The tearing strategy worked out well though, more surface area = more delectable duck flavour permeating the casserole.

I served this cassoulet to my brother and his girlfriend. Everyone really enjoyed themselves and the dish. It was rich, hearty, and satisfying. I liked that this version managed to simplify a classic without asking for unreasonable compromises in taste. I think a lot of people avoid making cassoulet at home because it requires so many obscure ingredients, and a fair bit of planning. This version makes it much more accessible, and still results in a delicious dish.

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Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

67. Roasted Pumpkin Seeds p.5

The recipe is just like this one from Epicurious, except that The Book gives proportions for the ingredients. I think the Epicurious version is more honest. This is barely even a recipe. Toast pumpkin seeds in a dry skillet ’till they’re browned and smell good, toss with olive oil and sea salt. That’s it.

Despite it’s tenuous recipe status, I’m glad it was in there. I probably wouldn’t have remembered how delicious toasted pumpkin seeds are, and never would have thought to put them out for guests. I ate some of them warm , and some at room temperature the next day. They’re totally delicious either way. I find the flavour of pumpkin seeds hard to pin down, they’re nutty, and they do have squashy pumpkin flavours, plus a whole other level of aromas that make them their own. You could serve sunflower seeds like this, but it just wouldn’t be the same.

Finding fresh green pumpkin seeds wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. My grocery store carries them sporadically, and the ones at the health food store sometimes look a little ratty. The Book warns that pumpkin seeds spoil quickly, so a place with high turnover is key. They’re frequently used in Mexican cuisine, so a latino food shop might be the way to go to find a good fresh supply.

Since pumpkin sees freeze well I’ve taken to keeping a bag on hand. The Book seems to call for them fairly frequently, and I’ll never be without a tried-and-true last minute appetizer if friends drop by unexpectedly.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

66. Mocha Toffee Cashew Bars p.694

The recipe.

Opinion varied wildly about these bars. We brought these to dinner with another couple. The guy loved them, my dining companion hated them, and the other girl and I were of mixed opinions. They’re built on a fairly dense espresso flavoured cookie base, then topped with chocolate and salted roasted cashews.

I thought things were going well until the cashews. The cookie base was rich, full of espresso flavour, firm and a bit chewy. All on it’s own it would have made a very good cookie. Adding chocolate on top was a perfectly good idea, espresso and chocolate do wonders together. Adding cashews didn’t seem like a bad idea either, but this is where the problems came in.

The recipe called for a quite a lot of nuts, 3/4 of a cup, which may have been a bit excessive, 1/2 cup would have been fine. The nuts were supposed to be chopped. I thought I’d chop them with a few pulses in the food processor, which resulted in more of a cashew dust than anything else. The real issue with the cashew topping was the salt though. It’s possible that I just picked up particularly heavily salted cashews, but I don’t really think that was the case. Adding this much salt to a sweet bar made things very confusing for the palate. There was definately something wrong with the flavour, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it. Eventually my dining companion pointed out that they tasted like trail mix. Once she said it my imagination filled in the little bits of dried fruit, and my ability to imagine this as a refined after dinner square to be sipped with a macchiato disappeared. The final effect of these squares is like a coffee flavoured energy bar.

I had some of the leftover bars as afternoon snacks, and they worked much better in that context. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the flavours going on here, other than the excessive saltiness, they were just poorly marketed.

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Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

65. Chocolate Truffles p.696

The recipe.

This recipe has three ingredients, chocolate, cream, and cocoa powder. Almost by definition the success of failure of the recipe is in the quality of those ingredients, and the method of combining them. I used the wrong ingredients, and ignored parts of the method. They still came out tasty, if a bit ugly. The recipe calls for 56% cacao Valrhona chocolate, I ignored this and used another good quality dark chocolate with about the same cocoa percentage. I couldn’t find the Valrhona and decided the recipe was just being snooty. I’m not sure if it would have made a difference, but you should definitely use a chocolate you like the taste of before it’s used in the ganache.

The recipe is dead simple, the cream is boiled, and then poured over the cut up chocolate, it’s then gently stirred (in concentric circles starting from the centre, while standing on one leg, under a full moon). The resultant ganache is then cooled and piped into truffle shapes. After the truffles are frozen they’re smeared with bit of melted chocolate and tossed in cacao powder before serving.

I ran into a bit of trouble in the piping section of the recipe. I didn’t have the right size tip and found I couldn’t pipe and elegant looking truffle with the desired soft point on top. Even cooling the ganache for the recommended time I needed to put in in the fridge for a while to get it to firm up enough for easy piping. As you can see in the picture above I didn’t get anything near the elegant teardrop shaped confections I was going for. Real truffles are ugly and misshapen, and so are mine. I’m not going to let myself feel too bad about it.

The coating with chocolate and tossing in cacao powder step was much messier than I would have predicted. I think it takes a lot more planning, and forethought than I gave it. You need to reserve one gloved hand for smearing the chocolate and dropping the truffles into the cocoa powder, and one hand for extracting them to a sheet pan on the other end. Mixing this method up results in the dreaded club hand. I’ll know better for next time.

Although this was a really simple recipe I have hardly any experience working with confections. I found it to be more complicated than it seemed at first. But, I’m sure a second attempt would go much more smoothly. Flavourwise, they were good. It’s chocolate and cream, it tastes like chocolate and cream. Fancy chocolatiers seem to be able to take those same ingredients and make absolute magic happen. For me, this recipe produced tasty little after dinner treats, but there was nothing transcendent about it.

Categories
Poultry The Book

64. Coq au Vin p.368

No recipe for this one.

Coq au Vin is such a classic it’s practically drowning in preconception and expectation. This recipe doesn’t throw any wild experiments or out of the play book ingredients in, but it tries to simplify the process a bit too much. The biggest twist in this recipe is that it calls for white instead of red wine. It also doesn’t call for much of it. Most recipes seem to call for about a bottle of wine, this one asks for only 1 1/2 cups. The traditional method usually involves soaking the chicken in wine with a bouquet garni overnight, or for a couple of days. Sometimes the giblets are used to flavour the sauce as well. This version skips all that and just browns the chicken in bacon fat, then braises it in a wine and stock mixture with a bouquet garni, bacon, and onions. Sautéed mushrooms with cognac are stirred in near the end, and then the sauce is thickened with a beurre manié.

The result is pretty good, but the extra little touches in the more traditional versions do make a difference. I prefer the taste of red to white wine, and I definitely missed it here. The Book suggests using white because the final dish will look nicer, but even there I disagree. Yes, the purple tinge red wine gives the chicken is a bit weird, but this white wine version was an unrelieved beige. I can’t necessarily say that it looked any better. As a concession to ease of finding ingredients the recipe calls for a standard supermarket chicken. The traditional version is made with a stewing hen, which is an egg laying hen that’s grown too old to keep around the farm. These birds are tough, but loaded with flavour, i.e. the perfect subject for a long slow tenderizing braise. I bought a good quality chicken, but there’s no way it can compare in flavour. Admittedly tracking down a real stewing hen would be a major pain, and if the recipe had called for one I probably would have complained about that instead.

Coq au Vin in an international success because the flavours in the dish work so well together, chicken, wine, bacon, mushroom, onions, and the oh so French bouquet garni (celery, thyme, parsley, bay leaf). This version didn’t do everything that could be done with those flavours, but it only took 2 hours to prepare. If you’ve got the time or the inclination seek out a battle hardened old chicken, and the forethought to give the bird a wine bath the day before you’ll be rewarded with a better dish than this one. However, this version is easy enough to do as a Tuesday night supper, and tasty enough to serve at your next dinner party.

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Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

63. Cheese Fondue p.72


the recipe

My God I love fondue. Everything about it is good. Incredibly rich gooey cheese swaddling a crunchy bite of bakery fresh baguette, what could be better than that? It’s an easy to prepare and casual meal, that’s inherently social and fun. It’s horrible for you, which makes it even better to share with close friends you don’t mind relaxing around. Its got traditions, like the communal kirsch shot that’s taken half way through (one for each participant, and one goes into the pot to keep things from thickening), and inventive punishments for the poor soul whose bread falls off their fork. Better yet, there’s a special surprise at the bottom of the pot where the sterno bakes a perfect little cheese crisp. Just in case it wasn’t enough fun, it involves alcohol and an open flame.

Fondue enjoyed wild popularity in the ’60’s and ’70’s and has since slipped from vogue. I feel privileged to have my mother’s fondue pot as a relic of that renaissance. I’m not sure what caused this fall from grace for this near perfect food. Maybe people just got tired of it, maybe it got watered down with poor packaged versions and less than stellar bread. I can’t say, but I think it’s ready for a comeback. I wonder sometimes if sushi will go down the same road. Now that almost every grocery store has a sushi counter, how long can it remain a hip thing to eat? And, when sushi goes, what will come next?

This particular cheese fondue recipe worked out wonderfully. It has a couple of nice touches, like a mixture of emental and Gruyère, the occasionally overlooked rubbing of the pot with a clove of garlic, and directions for a zig zag stirring method that keeps the cheese from clumping or breaking on you. It lived up to the standards set for me by a Swiss friend, and great fondue aficionado.

I was lucky to be able to find good quality cheeses at reasonable prices, and as Montreal is overrun with good quality french bakeries a beautiful baguette was no trouble to obtain. On a recent visit out west I was introduced to the French stick. My understanding of this term is that it’s a baguette, only bad. I’ve started calling the grocery store fluffy interior mushy exterior baguettes French sticks, and reserving the term baguette for a loaf with a crisp crust, and a chewy interior, made with baguette flour. I’m not sure if the term French stick came about because people don’t like food with weird French names, and the only baguettes in those places happen to be bad. Or, if the French stick is an entirely different animal, and the standards for judging what makes a good one are just different. I find the division useful, if a bit snobby. But I’m certainly not above a bit of francophilic food snobbery.

I don’t have enough good things to say about fondue in general, and this fondue in particular. Make it, love it, share it.