Tag: heavy cream

Categories
Puddings, Custards, Mousses, and Souffles The Book

117. Lemon Parfaits p.839

Unfortunately there’s no recipe for this available online.

This is the inaugural post for the Puddings, Custards, Mousses, and Soufflés chapter of the book. Part of my plan for this summer was to get around to working on this chapter, as well as the Frozen Desserts section. This recipe is the sum total of those efforts. It was very good, but there are still 75 recipes to go in those chapters, and I’ll have to do more than one per year if I’m ever going to finish this project.

The recipe starts by cooking lemon zest and juice together with egg yolks and sugar. Once the sugar is melted and the yolks tempered the mixture is taken off the heat and allowed to cool. The whites from the eggs are then beaten to stiff glossy peaks with cream of tartar and sugar. The meringue and cream, which has been stiffly beaten with confectioners sugar, are folded into the custard. The resulting mixture is then divided among parfait glasses. If you’re like me and don’t have parfait glasses, wine glasses make a perfectly elegant alternative. The glasses then go into the freezer for a couple of hours. Just before serving they’re topped with a bit of lemon zest.

I was very happy with this dish. I don’t eat a lot of frozen desserts, or desserts in general, but once in a while it’s a nice treat. We had a friend over for a summer barbecue, and it seemed like a nice occasion for a cooling dessert. The flavour was all clean clear lemon, it was bright and assertive with just enough sweetness to balance the acidity. I’m quite sensitive to over-sweet lemon dishes, and this one kept on the right side of the balance. The texture was the absolute highlight of this dessert though. Beating the egg whites and cream to very stiff peaks, and careful folding, allowed the dish to stay light and fluffy, but frozen. My dining companion described it as lemon scented air. It looked nice and substantial on the spoon, but melted quickly on the tongue, and practically disappeared before you swallowed. I loved that it left me with the a sense of cooling lemon freshness, without overwhelming me.

In general I like about three bites of ice cream for dessert, this dish whipped in so much air that those three bites managed to fill a whole glass. It was a lovely approach to dessert, focusing on flavour and texture over richness and substance. What a great kick off to this most vexing of chapters.

Categories
Fruit Desserts The Book

109. Strawberry Shortcake p.813

The recipe is a variation on this one from epicurious. The main difference is that the linked recipe uses buttermilk biscuits, while The Book calls for the cream biscuits I wrote about the other day.

It starts with three pints of strawberries, hulled and quartered. This is the kind of recipe instruction that I consistently underestimate. I figure this job will take in around 5 minutes, but it’s really more like 20. I’m a chronic under-estimator of time in all areas of life, so I don’t foresee this changing any time soon. Once the strawberries are quartered they’re mixed with sugar, and lightly mashed with a potato masher. The idea is to get them to release their juices without destroying them. I managed to squish out a good deal of juice without breaking more than a few of them. The strawberries are then left to macerate for an hour on the counter.

When the strawberries are swimming in their own juices it’s time to whip the creams. Heavy cream and sour cream are beaten together with some confectioner’s sugar to the soft peak stage. Then the shortcakes are assembled.

The word cake has a specific and circumscribed definition, a biscuit casually topped with whipped cream and fruit doesn’t really fit it. If the biscuits were covered in whipped cream, decoratively layered with strawberries and allowed to set up in the fridge for a while, I’d buy the argument that these are individual serving cakes. As the recipe reads this is no more a cake than a meatloaf sandwich is a hamburger.

Still, this did taste pretty darn good, and it reeked of summer. Our strawberry shortcake growing up had a very similarly textured cake, but it was a large layered affair cut into slices. I fondly remember the adventure of trying to get the slices out in one piece, and the hilarity of mom’s face as strawberries and cream plummeted toward the dining room rug. I missed that in these neat little biscuits, but as I value the carpet in my dining room maybe it’s a compromise I can live with.

As with all deserts in the book, it was too sweet. I even cut back on the recommended amount of sugar on the strawberries because they were naturally sweet and perfectly ripe. 1/3 of a cup was way too much, I should have gone with a couple of tablespoons. The extra sugar helps to pull juice out of the fruit, but it was a bit much. I really liked the sour cream tang in with the whipped cream, which acted as a nice counterpoint to all the sugar on the berries. It worked in the same way the sweet acidity of good balsamic goes with strawberries.

As I said the other day, the biscuits were a great base for this dish. The whipped creams were a winner, and you can’t go wrong with summer fresh strawberries. The Book tried to mess with the perfection of July berries, and ended up taking away from their natural goodness. Summer just wouldn’t be summer without strawberry shortcake, and this version was certainly good enough to fulfill my seasonal need.

Categories
Sauces and Salsas The Book

105. Stilton Sauce p.884


No recipe this time

A blue cheese sauce is a classic pairing for a roast tenderloin. This was my favorite of the three sauces I served on this particular evening, but I had trouble remembering anything about it. I incorrectly identified it as a béarnaise sauce in yesterday’s post. I think that says a lot about the sauce.

The recipe calls for Stilton or Roquefort, I prefer Roquefort’s more mellowed character so I went with it. The cheese is softened and mixed with an ungodly amount of butter, and then stirred into a reduced mixture of white wine and heavy cream. Once it’s melted some flat leaf parsley is stirred in, and it’s drizzled over beef or vegetables.

It’s a foregone conclusion that a sauce made of Roquefort, butter, wine, and cream is going to be insanely delicious, and this was. This classic sauce has been replicated so many times in so many ways that it’s lost all novelty though. The only real difference between the blue cheese sauce at a mega chain steakhouse, and a fine dining version is the quality of the cheese going in. But with all the butter and cream the individuality of the cheese is obscured. I don’t find much variation in the world of blue cheese sauces, they’re rich, and delightfully stinky, but they never blow me away. This was no exception, it tasted very good, but there’s nothing to really latch on to about it.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

104. Beef Tenderloin with Cornichon Tarragon Sauce p.416


The recipe

Some good friends were coming to dinner, and I wanted to make something a bit special. When I’m looking for dishes suitable for an occasion, beef tenderloin is frequently at the top of that list. I had frozen part of the tenderloin I used for the Twenty-First-Century Beef Wellington so it was an easy choice to make. I decided to serve the roast tenderloin with three sauces, the cornichon tarragon sauce from this recipe, a Stilton sauce, and whipped horseradish cream. This sort of a menu seems much more appropriate to the fall weather I’m writing this in, than the summer weather I cooked it in. However, it was a pleasantly warm day, and I made one important change to the recipe. I grilled my tenderloin outside instead of sticking it in a 350 degree oven. The sauces were a bit rich for summer, but that just encouraged restraint.

The sauce is made by reducing white wine, shallots and tarragon, then adding cream, thinly sliced cornichons, and a mixture of mustard whipped with butter. This was a seriously powerful sauce. The mustard, tarragon, and shallot flavours were fairly strong on their own, but the cornichons were overpowering. I picked up good quality, imported sour gherkins from France. They were mouth puckeringly sour, without too much other flavour. They were nicely crunchy, but not really my favourite pickle style. The recipe calls for a lot of these little guys, and their concentrated vinegar permeated the whole sauce. My first impression of the sauce wasn’t great, just too sour, and overpowering the somewhat subtle flavours of the tenderloin. As I ate more it grew on me though. Once I stopped making a sourpuss face the underlying flavours came out, and they were good. The sauce also mellowed over the next day, and ended up being in a better balance.

I’m not sure if this is how the recipe was intended to turn out, or I just got a batch of very sour pickles. I think it’s possible I did everything right, because my dining companion preferred this sauce to the other two choices. She agreed that it was sour, but she enjoyed the interplay of the rich creaminess, with the clear vinegar cutting across it. I won’t rush to repeat this one, and if I did I’d try a different brand of pickle, or cut back on them. This sauce had to struggle to get over a bad first impression, but it did redeem itself after a few bites.

Categories
Poultry The Book

98. Chicken Fricassee p.372


No recipe this time.

This was a fairly successful and simple recipe. It’s real comfort food, chicken in a creamy mushroom sauce served with noodles. Like most comfort food it’s fatty and a bit bland. The preparation was as simple as you could wish for. Break a chicken down into serving size pieces, and brown them in a skillet. Remove the chicken and make a sauce of onion, celery, garlic, thyme, mushrooms, and chicken stock. The chicken is added back in and simmered ’till it’s cooked through. Then the remaining sauce is bolstered with heavy cream and an egg yolk.

I often complain about chicken skin and wet cooking methods. The skin tends to turn into a gross mush. In my opinion there’s no point in eating the added fat of chicken skin unless it’s crispy. This is a wet cooking method, but the skin managed to retain at least a bit of texture, and loads of flavour. The chicken parts are simmered in the sauce, but only the bottom halves are covered. The skin gets steamed, but not bathed in liquid, so the caramelization you built stays in one place.

The sauce worked really well on the pasta. The sauce actually had more chicken flavour than the chicken did, and the cream and egg yolk gave it a really silken texture which coated the noodles perfectly. I ate some of the chicken, but the dish was really all about the pasta and sauce for me. The thyme and mushroom flavours were prominent, fortunately that’s a great flavour combination. I found the first few bites bland, but the addition of a good dose of fresh ground black pepper picked things up quite a bit. I sprinkled Parmesan on some leftover noodles the next day and they were even better.

This dish had very straightforward flavours, it hit all the marks of a crowd pleaser. It has the added advantage of not containing anything people really object to (except celery, but that’s just me). It tasted good, but it wasn’t really inspired, or particularly interesting. I guess you can’t have it both ways. I would have preferred something a little more novel. Combining loads of carbs, a healthy dose of fat, the unobjectionable flavour of chicken, and some pantry staple spices is a no brainer. This dish would fit in well on a family restaurant’s menu. This kind of comfort food isn’t actually the stuff I crave after a bad day, but TV tells me this is what people want when they’re upset. It tasted good, but it wasn’t really memorable.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

55. Riesling Braised Sauerkraut and Apples p.575


The Recipe

This is kind of a funny recipe. It takes the “and the kitchen sink” approach toward sauerkraut. This version starts with packaged sauerkraut, then braises is with two kinds of apples, onions, shallots, slab bacon, Riesling, chicken stock, thyme, juniper berries, and a bay leaf. It was already getting a bit busy flavour-wise at this point, but we’re not done. Once the braise is finished the sauerkraut is tossed with two cups of heavy cream, and some apple schnapps. Thankfully the cream and schnapps were optional, and I opted for only the schnapps. I get the impression that the people at The Book looked up every traditional sauerkraut ingredients from every culture that makes it, and tossed them all into one recipe.

The main problem with the dish was the word sauerkraut. If it had been called stewed cabbage with apples, bacon, and cream it would have been fine. But sauerkraut should as a minimum be sour. In this version the sauerkraut is soaked and drained twice to get rid of a lot of the salt, but also a lot of the flavour. All of the braising ingredients are there to mellow the harsh bite of the sauerkraut, but at least the stuff I bought was pretty smooth after the rinsing. All the sweet ingredients just overwhelmed the remaining flavour of the sauerkraut. There were also far too many flavours competing here, some of the comments on the epicurious version of the recipe suggest that adding the cream would have tied it together, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

This recipe simultaneously had too many ingredients, and not enough. The flavours were a jumble, but it was drastically in need of some more acid to cut all the sweetness. On a positive note the thyme, juniper, bay leaf combination worked very well, and bacon makes everything taste good.

I guess the recipe was fine, and if I’d had some more potent sauerkraut as a starting ingredient maybe all the sweet additions would have been a nice compliment. As it was the dish was going in too many directions at once, and tried to do too much. All of the additions ended up taking away from what makes sauerkraut good in the first place.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

49. Lemon Bars p.691

No recipe for this one. But they were so good I can’t help but giving you the recipe and them a five mushroom rating.

FOR CRUST
2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 sticks cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2 inch pieces

FOR FILLING
3 large eggs
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons heavy cream
1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon salt

Confectioners’ sugar for sprinkling

MAKE THE CRUST: Put a rack in middle of oven and preheat oven to 350F.
Pulse together four, sugar, and salt in a food processor just until combined. Add butter and pulse until mixture resembles coarse meal. Press dough onto bottom of an ungreased 9-inch square baking pan. Bake until golden brown, about 20 minutes.

MEANWHILE, MAKE THE FILLING: Whisk together eggs, granulated sugar, flour, heavy cream, zest, juice, and salt in a bowl until combined.

BAKE THE BARS: When crust is baked, rewhisk lemon mixture and pour onto hot crust. Bake until just set, about 16 minutes. Transfer pan to a rack to cool.

Refrigerate bars, covered, until cold, at least 4 hours. Before serving, cut into bars and sprinkle with a thick layer of confectioners’ sugar.

I’m sure we’ve all eaten a million lemon bars, some insipid, some inspired. We all know the bad ones with their mushy oily crusts, and super sweet lemon topping that’s either sloppy pudding, or a Fruit Roll-Up. Worse is the health-food version with a cardboard dry crust that crumbles if you look at it, and artificial sweeteners. My ideal lemon bar is built on really good shortbread, where good quality fresh butter is a must. The topping should be a sweet-tart just set lemon custard that’s thick enough to stay in place but avoid gumminess at all costs.

This bar lived up to that ideal quite nicely. All of the shortbread recipes in The Book seem to come out beautifully, and this one was no exception. The lemon topping balanced the tart acid of the lemons with just enough sugar, and added zip to the smooth egg and cream custard. Add a bit of powdered sugar and it was good to to.

In making this recipe I learned the value of measuring your baking dish. It calls for a 9 inch square, and I grabbed something significantly larger without thinking it though. I spread the shortbread out on one half of the pan and baked it. When it came time to pour the liquid custard on top of it I realized I had a problem. I attempted to rig up a shield wall out of aluminum foil to keep the filling on the shortbread, but my wall breached during baking. I ended up with a deep pool of filling on one side of the sheet pan, and much less filling on the shortbread than I would have liked. It was still totally delicious with half the filling, and I can only imagine that it would have been better had I not messed up.

Lemon bars, you’re the second recipe in a row to earn your five mushroom rating. Kudos.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

33. Creamed Turnips p.588


the recipe

Turnips are among the most maligned and under appreciated vegetables out there. They’re right up there with Lima beans and Brussels sprouts. Some day I’ll open a restaurant serving nothing but childhood nightmare vegetables, as far as I can tell I love them all.

Turnips have got a wonderful bite to them, and should be appreciated for what they are. My grandmother makes mashed creamed turnips she serves with roast beef. It’s the only vegetable my uncle will eat, but that’s because the turnips are swimming in so much cream and sugar the turnip is serving as more of a thickener than anything else. I love my grandmother dearly, and in their own way I love those turnips. Roast beef at her house wouldn’t be the same without the turnips and canned peas. But, I can’t say that they’re a cherished memory of my youth.

I liked that the turnips were left in good size chunks in this recipe. It allowed for some contrast between the sharp bite of the turnip, and the smooth cream sauce. I wasn’t nuts about the texture of the sauce, kinda slimy, and the white on beige coulour palate of the dish wasn’t really doing it for me either. The thyme and nutmeg worked really well here, both of which seem to have great affinities for roots and gourds of all types.

The recipe calls for white pepper, which I don’t really get. Obviously the purpose is to avoid sullying the sauce with black flecks which would be unpleasing to the eye. But it might have helped with the whiter shade of pale thing going on here. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but sprinkling this dish with parsley might not be crime against humanity.

I thought the flavours here were pretty good, but it wasn’t turnipy enough. The cream sauce masked a lot of the kick of the turnips, getting the kids to eat it shouldn’t be a problem, but it was missing something. I prepared this for a friend who’s decided that nouvelle cuisine is overrated, and who yearns for the days of butter in a butter sauce (he made me a memorable buttered rabbit). Escoffier would have loved this dish, but I grew up in the world that Alice Waters made and I’m a bit weirded out by vegetables swimming in cream.

I generally prefer my turnips roasted or grilled and relatively plain. The flavours in the sauce worked well with the turnips, but all the dairy cut the turnip flavours too far. There was nothing bad about it, but it was too mellow to satisfy my turnip craving.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

31. Pork Chops With Sautéed Apples and Cider Cream Sauce p.480

Sorry, no recipe this time

The sautéed apples and cider cream sauce were absolute stars, but the pork chops themselves were a pretty indifferent base for this recipe. It starts with the cream sauce (shallots softened in butter, cooked together with apple cider, cider vinegar, sage, chicken stock, and heavy cream), then the chops are cooked through in a heavy skillet, and the apples are cooked in the pan juices with a bit of butter once the chops are done. The apples caramelized beautifully, and took on the best of the pork’s flavours from the fond in the pan. The sauce was creamy with an enticing acid bite which contrasted the sweetness in the apples. As I’ve mentioned I love sage, and I’m always happy to see it make an appearance outside of turkey stuffings.

The chops themselves were indifferent. This is probably both my fault and that of industrial agriculture. I’m far from the first person to bemoan the lack of flavour in today’s pork. I’m too young to look wistfully back on the halcion days when every pig farm was just like in “Charlotte’s Web”, but the state of industrial pig farming today is pretty disgusting. Beyond the objections of PETA and everyone of any moral fibre, the pork that those factory farms produce doesn’t taste very good. More ethically raised meat just tastes more pork-y. Of course those sun-kissed and morally unblemished pigs are going to set you back a chunk of change. For that reason I’m going to continue eating pigs raised in deplorable conditions a good part of the time, and so are most people for the foreseeable future.

The problem with the mega-mart super pack chops in this recipe was the cooking method. They’re pan fried with salt and pepper, and that’s it. They give up their flavour to the sauce, and you’re left with dry tough and flavourless chops. The cheap-o chops just don’t do well with dry cooking methods. I raved about Pork Chops With Onion Marmalade, which was exactly the same meat, just using a wet cooking method. This kept the pork moist, and added a lot of flavour to the meat itself. Brining these chops before cooking them could have kept them moist and added flavour too. As it was they didn’t really add much to the dish.

A note on photography: Experience has taught me that photos of a big plate of meat really don’t look very nice. I’ll stop inflicting photos like the above on you ASAP.

Rating this one is a bit tricky, the apples and sauce were out of this world, and the pork wasn’t terrible, just indifferent. I suspect that if I’d used thicker chops, and ideally better quality pork this could have come out as a five mushroom recipe. I can’t really hold The Book accountable for me choosing to cut corners and buy less than stellar ingredients. On the other hand, most people making this recipe are going to use the same chops I did, and they should have tested this recipe with the ingredients their readers are likely to use.