Tag: butter

Categories
Poultry The Book

125. Chicken with Cornmeal Dumplings p.373


The recipe

I had The Book for a while before I started The Project, and this was one of the recipes I used regularly before The Book and I got serious. Making it again emphasized how much The Project has changed my cooking style. The biggest difference is that I actually read the recipe this time around, and it came out much better.

You start by breaking a chicken down into serving sized pieces, browning them, and then simmering them with white wine and shallots ’till the pieces are cooked through. Meanwhile you put together a dumpling dough with flour, cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda, salt, pepper, butter, chives, parsley, and buttermilk. The chicken is moved to the oven, and the juices left in the skillet are fortified with stock, cream, salt, and pepper. Once this gravy is simmering the dumplings are gently dropped in and allowed to cook for about 15 minutes, then it’s time to eat.

This time around the cooking went well, there wasn’t anything too tricky about it. In previous attempts I’ve managed to really mess things up. The biggest lesson I learned is that the cooking vessel the recipe calls for really is important. In the recipe all of this happens in a deep 12 inch heavy skillet, I don’t have one of those (but if Santa got my letter…), so I used to make it in a 5 quart pot. It seemed like a pretty decent substitution at the time, but I was wrong. Getting the dumplings right depends on the depth of liquid they’re simmered in, too deep and they disintegrate, or raft together into one super-dumpling. This time I used a 10 quart oval dutch oven, which has a similar surface area to a 12 inch skillet, and things worked out. The other lesson I’ve learned is the difference between a simmer and boil. Previously I had my gravy boiling away, and the bubbles tore my dumplings to shreds, a gentle simmer with just the occasional bubble reaching the surface is the way to go. I’m kind of amazed that I made this recipe about five times trying to get it right, and I didn’t pick up on what I was doing wrong.

My previous attempts also fell prey to my undiagnosed culinary dyslexia.I constantly mix up shallots and scallions, I have the hardest time keeping them straight. They’re very different, but it’s a coin toss as to which vegetable I’ll imaging when I hear one of those words. I’m embarrassed to say that I have the same problem with elevators and escalators, weird eh? Long simmered scallions turn kind of yellow and gross, I wouldn’t recommend the substitution. Some practice with The Book has made me sensitive to my neurological condition, so now I double check that my shopping list corresponds to the ingredient list.

My standards for what constitutes a successful recipe have also changed over the course of The Project. In the pre-Project days this came out reasonably well a couple of times, and I was quite impressed by it. I still love the dumplings, and I’d be happy to make them again and again, but the chicken is lacking, and the whole dish is bland. I’ve ranted about chicken skin and wet cooking methods several times, and it was just as unappealing here as in every other dish. The chicken is poached in white wine and shallots, which is fine, but the addition of another herb would be nice, maybe thyme, rosemary, or tarragon. The chicken gives up flavour and interest for the sake of the dumplings, and it’s almost a fair trade. The dumplings have an excellent texture and flavour, they pull in loads of chicken flavour, and have a wonderful buttermilk tang. They’re absolutely the highlight of the dish. I’d rather skip the whole chicken making part of this dish, and just make the dumplings in a stock based gravy. The chicken would be better served by being simply grilled, then served along with the dumplings. Doing something about the beige on beige colour pallet would be nice too.

Maybe I’m being a bit unfair. This dish is a Southern classic, but I have no clue what it’s supposed to taste like. I don’t have any reference point, so I’m probably trying to turn this dish into something it was never meant to be. Using a chicken like this allows a little bit of meat to be stretched into a hearty meal, so there are perfectly good reasons for recipes like this to have developed. And, Its blandly fatty simplicity is what comfort food is all about, but it’s not really my thing these days.

Pre-Project me liked this dish because the dumplings are awesome, but also because it’s essentially a one pot dish, it’s quite inexpensive, not too hard, and it makes good leftovers. Present day me doesn’t mind working a little harder, spending a little more, or using a few more dishes (much to my dining companion’s chagrin) for a better dish. I agree with my former self about the dumplings though.

Categories
Pies, Tarts, and Pastries The Book

123. Sweet Pastry Dough p.791


The recipe

I should state at the outset that I’m a pastry neophyte. Before I started The Project, I think I’d made two pies in my life. Sure, I baked stuff in pie shells, but I always picked up the Tenderflake pre-made ones, and figured it was good enough. I don’t really have a knack for pastry, but I’m working on it. This is the inaugural entry for the Pies, Tarts, and Pastries chapter of The Book, so hopefully my pastry skills will improve as I work my way through it.

This pie dough is a sweetened and butter based. It gets used in all sorts of other recipes in The Book. I definitely prefer a sweetened dough for dessert pies and tarts. My mother is a rolling pin virtuoso whose pies always turn out perfectly, but she uses the same lard based dough for all her recipes. We have tourtière (a spiced meat pie) every Christmas, which I adore. I particularly like the way the crust is infused with the meaty filling’s flavour. However, when summer comes around and she starts baking up fruit pies using the same dough, I can’t help but imagining the taste of the meat filling along with the crust. Tourtière innards and strawberries aren’t destined to be the next great taste sensation. She recently started adding sugar to her dough for sweet pies, and it made a world of difference. Somehow a little sugar gets rid of the yuletide association, and the pies become pure summer.

The ingredients and method for this dough are pretty standard, combine flour, sugar, and salt, then blend butter in until you’ve got pea sized lumps in a sandy mixture. Then egg yolk and a bit of water are incorporated, until the dough barely holds together. The dough is then divided up, smeared once with your palm, and refrigerated for an hour.

I had some trouble with rolling this dough out. I’ve made it twice, the photo above is the most recent attempt. You can see the scraps to the left, which were probably 40% of the pie dough. I had a really tough time getting it to roll out evenly, and small cracks at the edges developed into big fissures as I was rolling. It was actually fairly easy to work with, and I think my problems were a matter of technique rather than the recipe. The first time I made it was much more of a fiasco though. I made it in late August, on a day with 95% humidity, and it didn’t go so well. Here’s a photo of the crust after baking. 123_sweet_pastry_dough_p791_bad_attempt.jpgYou can see that I had to do a lot of patching before I even got the dough into the oven, and small cracks I’d missed developed into chasms once baked.

The flavour of the dough is excellent, but the texture isn’t ideal. Butter doughs are usually tender, but not flaky. Using a mixture of lard or shortening with butter should give a flavourful dough with great texture. The Book’s Basic Pastry Dough takes this approach (without sugar), and I’m looking forward to trying it. This dough was perfectly fine, it tasted good, and the texture was totally acceptable, but I don’t think it’s the definitive sweet pastry dough. Perhaps as I make and remake it for all the recipes that call for it I’ll get the technique down. For now it’s very serviceable, and I’m content to keep using it.

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
The Book Vegetables

81. Spaghetti Squash with Moroccan Spices p.581

The recipe

This recipe was extremely simple, and as far I’ve seen is the only recipe in The Book that calls for the use of a microwave. Basically a spaghetti squash is microwaved, the strands are pulled out and tossed with a compound butter made with garlic, cumin, coriander, cayenne, and salt. Top with a bit of fresh cilantro and you have a simple side. This dish tasted good because spaghetti squash taste good, but I’m not sure the compound butter was the best possible pairing for it. The title of the recipe is a bit of a misnomer, there’s nothing all that Moroccan about the spices, in fact they read like basic Tex-Mex cookery. I suppose it’s the coriander that’s supposed to recall North Africa?

The dish probably would have been better if it had gone more Tex-Mex. A splash of lime juice would have added some welcome acidity, and replacing the cayenne with chopped fresh jalapenos would have added more dimension than the straightforward heat of cayenne. The ground coriander was the least appealing part of the butter, it was only 1/2 teaspoon, but a little coriander goes a long way. I found it a bit distracting, and out of balance with the other flavours. The recipe could also have cut back on the butter without anyone missing it.

All of those issues are easily fixed, and the basic method of preparing the squash is great. All I did was poke the squash with a fork, then microwave on high for ~7 minutes per side. The instructions in The Book are for an 800 watt microwave, and I think mine is 1100, so it cooked a bit faster. The quicker cooking didn’t seem to have damaged anything, and you’ll know when it’s done when the squash gets soft, so the exact time doesn’t really matter. A little bit of juice flows from the holes you pricked, and the sugars quickly caramelize making the outside quite sticky. I didn’t put the squash on a plate, and the microwave try was a bother to clean.

The strands of squash come out nicely separated, and whole. They have a great texture, and they’re inherently fun to eat. My squash was sweet, deeply flavoured, and vibrantly yellow. I don’t think I’d toss it with this particular butter again, but from now on my spaghetti squash are going in the microwave.

Categories
Cakes The Book

78. Ginger Pound Cake p.704

no recipe for this one.

I served substantial pieces of this pound cake following our Beef Wellington supper. If that sounds like a ridiculously rich follow-up to one of the heavier items of the British cookbook, you’re absolutely right. I served both the cake and the Wellington to one of The Boys and his lady friend. The last time they had us over they tried to plumb the depths of the English butter first cooking philosophy. Their opening volley was rabbit braised in a butter sauce, and asparagus gently floating in a butter pond. When we had them over, what could we do but wrap meat in pastry, and try to get as much butter into a cake as is humanly possible? The next round of this escalating war on our arteries has been planned, and intercepted intelligence indicates he’s got a duck wrapped in bacon, possibly stuffed with a rabbit ready to deploy.

This is quite a large cake, it fills a 10 inch tube pan and ends up about 6 inches tall. You really need a crowd to get through it, because as much as you might want to you’ll only be able to eat a little. The traditional proportions for a pound cake are a pound of flour, a pound of butter, and a pound of sugar, hence the name. This recipe does indeed include a pound of butter, a bit more than a pound of cake flour (at 4.6 oz / sifted cup), and a pound and a half of sugar (at 8 oz / cup) add six eggs into the mix, and you’ve got an appropriate retort to the buttered rabbit. Those proportions should tell you what you need to know about this cake. It was decidedly buttery, and a bit too sweet. In this case the more than traditional sugar level had a very good reason. When they call this a ginger pound cake they’re not fooling around. The recipe starts with 6 oz of grated fresh ginger, and they give explicit instructions about preserving every precious drop of ginger juice. Just to punch it up a bit they call for one and a half teaspoons of dried powdered ginger as well. The main flavour of the cake is not at all subtle.

Actually making the cake was very easy. I used my stand mixer, while the recipe calls for a hand mixer. There was a lot of creaming of butter and sugar to do, so I’d say go with the stand mixer if you have one. The method was straightforward, sift the dry stuff together, then cream the butter and sugar, stir in the ginger, and add the flour mixture and milk in alternating batches. This cake is already pretty dense, so building gluten would be a very bad thing. The recipe calls for cake flour, which is less prone to gluten formation, but it’s quite important to mix the flour in slowly and as little as possible. The standard recipe phrase “mix until just combined” really means until it doesn’t quite look combined and there are still some little chunks of flour, but it no longer looks like a swirled lollipop. The batter goes into a buttered and floured tube ban, and baked at 300 for up to an hour and a half.

The final cake was rich and dense, but managed to have a really excellent crumb. I was quite surprised by how good the texture was. Many pound cakes end up having a uniform, tiny, dense packed crumb. In this version there was a lot more texture, it gave the appearance of a much lighter cake, but had the mouth filling feel of the rich beast it truly is. The ginger in it’s various forms came through loud an clear. The sweetness of the cake mellowed its spiciness, and recalled the heavenly balance of candied ginger (if anyone wants to get me a Christmas present, a box wouldn’t go amiss). I served it with raspberries and whipped cream. The berries were a nice contrast, but honestly enough is enough with the dairy. I prefer a fruit coulis with a pound cake, but I guess with everything going on in this cake it would have been overkill.

I was really happy with the way this cake turned out. The texture was excellent, and the flavour was just what I’d hoped for. This cake would be best served at a function, or a pot-luck. You’ll never get enough people around one table to eat it all.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

56. Rosemary Walnuts p.5

No recipe this time, sorry.

This is the second recipe in the book, with only Candied Walnuts coming before it. It’s a very strong start. It combines my favorite things, simple, delicious, and affordable. It’s a shame that the recipe isn’t available online, but the proportions aren’t that important anyway. All you need to do is melt butter with crushed dried rosemary, salt, and cayenne. Then toss the nuts in the butter and bake the whole thing at 350 for ten minutes.

Those of you who’ve been paying attention will have noticed that the above photo has been contaminated with non-walnut nuts. My excuse? The grocery store was out of walnuts an hour before my guests arrived, so I went with what they had. In combination with the walnuts I had in the freezer I figured it would count. As a matter of fact the walnuts weren’t event the best part. I found that the cashews and pecans really sparkled with this treatment.

The star of the show in this dish is the cayenne, it’s unexpected, and it plays a beautiful counterpoint to the richness of the nuts. But wait! clearly the rosemary is the star. It gives the dish body, and takes the flavours to a more sophisticated place. Without the rosemary the dish would risk being brushed off as “spicy nuts”. Maybe neither star is enough to carry the show, but together they light up the stage like Sonny and Cher.

My only tiny change would be to reduce the butter by about half. Ideally there would be just enough to coat the spices onto the nuts without pooling and carrying flavours away.

These were are really excellent appetizer, and no one could help themselves from having just one more. If you find yourself in the kitchen singing “I’ve got you babe” to a dish of these, I won’t blame you.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

50. Winter Vegetables With Horseradish Dill Butter p.526

This version of the recipe makes three times as much as The Book’s, and recommends steaming the veggies for two thirds of the time.

Parsnips, turnips, and Brussels sprouts, horseradish, and dill all in one recipe? My goodness gracious, it’s almost too good to be true. The parsnips, turnips and Brussels sprouts are steamed together, while potatoes and carrots are steamed in another pot. Then everything is tossed with a horseradish dill butter augmented with a hit of cider vinegar.

I admit I cheated a bit and cooked the veggies wrapped in tin foil on the grill, but steaming is steaming right? The biggest trick with the recipe is to get all the veggies to be done at the same moment. For example, by the time my potatoes were finished, the carrots were overdone, and while the Brussels sprouts were still crisp, the turnip was a bit mushy. This is probably my fault, I don’t think I followed the recipe very precisely when it came to cutting the veggies. For example, the carrots are to be cut diagonally into 1 inch long pieces, but the parsnips were supposed to be 2 by 1 inch sticks. They’re pretty much the same shape, so I cut them into pretty much the same size chunks. The nice people at Gourmet spent quite some time experimenting with different vegetable geometries to get this right, I’d recommend taking their advice and not going it alone.

This recipe stars often overlooked and under appreciated winter vegetables, presents them beautifully, and plays up their fundamental bitter nature. I love that the recipe resists the temptation to sweeten, or add cream. The carrots and potatoes keep this from being too bitter, all the while celebrating the joys of roots. The horseradish boldly adds a tangy punch of heat, in fact I could have happily added more. The use of dill makes me think of the dish as Eastern European, and brings romantic notions of hearty Ukrainian farm families fending off the winter’s chill to my mind.

I really enjoyed the flavours and concepts here, but the execution was a bit trickier than the recipe led me to believe.

Categories
Cakes The Book

32. Flourless Chocolate Cake p.739


the recipe

This cake will make you believe flour and leavening were just getting in the way of every cake you’ve ever made before. It’s the chocolate cake equivalent of shortbread, the essence of the dish with all the frills stripped away. Cheap butter spoils shortbread; cheap chocolate would spoil this cake. There’s nothing in here but chocolate, butter, sugar, eggs, and enough cocoa powder to hold it together (the linked recipe makes an 8 inch cake’s worth, The Book’s a 10 inch).

The cake is moist, dense, rich, and intensely chocolaty. It’s elegant enough for any dinner party, and decadent enough to drown your sorrows in. It also comes together as easily as a batch of brownies. In fact there are a lot of similarities between this cake and really really good brownies. An article in the NY Times Dining and Wine section this week (link, username and password = metafilter) suggests that brownies may be fine dining after all.

I really appreciated the versatility of this cake. It would be a great finish to a romantic dinner, it travels well, it gets around a lot of dietary restrictions (no flour, no nuts), and it will appeal to the kids as much as the grown ups. This cake is forthright, unapologetically bad for you, requires nothing you don’t have on hand, takes 20 minutes, and most importantly it’s tasty.

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

3. Garlic Bread p.606

the recipe

Ahh Garlic bread, the ubiquitous starchy accompaniment to a big plate of my mom’s pasta. Weren’t the fat phobic carb happy 80’s a good time? So this is fairly idiot proof: apply garlic butter to bread, bake in tinfoil till warmed through, open tinfoil package to crisp up bread. Who could screw this up? apparently I can.

Things were going well through the cutting of the ciabatta loaf, and smearing butter stages. All clear for operation put in tinfoil and bake at 350 for 15 minutes. Things were going so swimmingly I decided to focus on the rest of dinner. 15 minutes became 20, and the first hint of burning came to my nose. I never opened the package to crisp, and while the bottom of the loaf got nicely done, the rest of the loaf was the soggy mess of a thousand backyard BBQs.

Soggy garlic bread does have some fairly good memories associated with it, and
I enjoyed it thoroughly. However, I was really looking forward to the crispy crunch. Thankfully this is as simple a recipe as there is, so a redo won’t call for any untoward effort.

One thing I really appreciated about this was the suggestion to replace the parsley with basil (a suggestion not made in the linked recipe). To me parsley is a bit of waste of an herb, the Italian stuff has some nice flavor, the frizzy has none. All in all I’ll give parsley a pass whenever possible. Unfortunately The Book (and the whole world) seems to have a bit of thing for it. I won’t balk at spending eight bucks on a tiny piece of goat cheese, but that 79 cent parsley tax so many recipes charge really irks me.

This is a childhood classic not re-imagined in any way, as it should be.