Tag: buttermilk

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

168. Cheddar Scallion Drop Biscuits p.597

The recipe

The Boys were over for breakfast, and I decided to make them biscuits. One of them has been living down in the Carolinas for the last few years, and has become something of a biscuit connoisseur, so I didn’t dare try a traditional buttermilk biscuit. These are far simpler, and less error prone. It’s a basic biscuit dough (flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, butter, buttermilk) with a bit of sugar, cheddar cheese and scallions mixed in. These aren’t kneaded or shaped which when done wrong can toughen the biscuits, they’re not cut out so there’s no risk of collapsing the flaky layers, and there aren’t twenty generations of ancestors looking over your shoulder to make sure you do it exactly right. You just blend butter into the dry ingredients, stir in the cheese and scallions, and barely mix in the buttermilk (gluten is still your enemy). The biscuits get unceremoniously dropped onto a baking sheet, and stuck in the oven.

As Epicurious posters have noted, the cooking time is off, at 450 these will be burned after the recommended 18-20 minutes, I started smelling a hint of char from the bottoms after 14-15 mintues. so don’t get too far from the oven, and use your nose.

They tasted a lot like the biscuits at Red Lobster. I don’t think I’ve been to a Red Lobster since 1998, but the taste of their biscuits is stuck in my food memory. They’re less over the top greasy (which unfortunately means not quite as good), in fact they’re a little dry. A bunch of the Epicurious posters recommended adding more buttermilk, and I think I’d go with that suggestion next time. The cheese flavour is prominent in these biscuits, I used some middle of the road aged cheddar, but I’d definitely choose the oldest sharpest stuff I could get my hands on next time, the cheese is the make or break ingredient, so choose it wisely. I really liked the addition of scallions, the onion flavour wasn’t overwhelming, or un-breakfasty, just delicious. The exteriors of these biscuits were glossy and crispy, and while the insides were a bit dry once they’d cooled, they were lovely and tender when warm. The solution is obviously never to let these cool down.

These biscuits were a success, they’re fairly idiot proof, so I can handle making them before the espresso machine has heated up. The ingredients are mostly things you’ll have on hand (or maybe normal people don’t absolutely always have scallions in the fridge, but that’s just semantics), they taste good, and look pretty. While the recipe has a few problems, with a couple modification I think they could be a breakfast standby.

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

166. Skillet Corn Bread p.600

The recipe in The Book is identical to this one on Epicurious, but The Book adds a tablespoon of sugar to the corn bread.

The desire to make corn bread comes in waves for me. Six months will go by, and I won’t even think of it, then I’ll get the urge, and make it three times in a week. I like to play with my recipes, and improvise. The first batch of the week is usually pretty straightforward, in a baking pan, hardly sweet, good with gravy. Then I get stupid and try putting things that shouldn’t go into corn bread into my recipe. I’ve never once liked the cheese or sausage corn bread I’ve made, and I don’t particularly like corn bread muffins, I should just learn my lesson. I make the third batch to redeem myself. By this point I’ve remembered how much I like leftover corn bread for breakfast, and that I really like it warmed for a few seconds in the microwave, with a bit of butter, and a drizzle of maple syrup. I substitute maple syrup for the sugar in the recipe, and add a bit of extra butter directly to the batter for the week’s final batch, and I am usually well pleased. By the time we’ve finished that pan, I’m so ODed on corn bread that I can’t look at it for another few months.

This recipe takes the unusual step of omitting the flour that’s in most corn bread recipes, it’s all cornmeal. That makes the bread more coarse and granular, and less cake-like. The nice thing about corn bread is that it’s fairly idiot-proof. You just whisk together the dry ingredients, gently stir in the wet ingredients until it’s barely combined, and bake. This bread is baked in a preheated cast iron pan, and the butter that goes into the bread is melted in the pan first, this leaves you with a browned butter coating in the pan, which tastes nice, and helps keep the bread from sticking. The recipe uses the muffin method, of barely combining the wet and dry ingredients, which is usually done to prevent gluten from forming, and making a baked good tough. In this case there’s no flour, so I can’t see why you shouldn’t beat the tar out of it.

This was perfectly fine corn bread, I liked the cast iron skillet method which created a very nice deeply browned crust. This was a dryer style of corn bread than I prefer, and even with the tablespoon of sugar, I would have liked a bit more sweetness. I found it a bit crumbly, and missed the soft texture of a flour based corn bread. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it, and it’s probably somebody’s favourite style. As a recipe I think it worked quite well, I just wasn’t totally on board with what it was trying to do.

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
The Book Vegetables

30. Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes with Caramelized Shallots p.559


the recipe

These were nice potatoes, not spectacular, but good. These were part of the same meal as the pork chops, so I I was scaling this recipe up too. I’m not always a fan of stuff in mashed potatoes, I do like a little roasted garlic, but people can go too far with cheese, bacon, chives and who knows what else. I’m sure if you looked hard enough you could find a recipe that will tell you to put hot dogs in your mashers. In this case the additions were very restrained, just some caramelized shallots. They added a nicely sweet edge, and brought the goodness of the Maillard reaction to this dish.

The sweet shallots were a nice compliment to the sour bite of the buttermilk. I think buttermilk was the real star of this dish actually. It helped to take them from straight ahead starchy goodness to a more nuanced place. Sour cream has an undeniable affinity for baked potatoes, and the same magic is happening here. The recipe calls for very little butter (1/2 tablespoon for 3/4 lb potatoes), this is both the recipe’s virtue and it’s vice. They were very flavourful, and the thickness of the buttermilk helped them take on a bit of a creamy texture without too much added fat, but I can’t deny that I missed the butter. I was serving this to a room full of ravenous 20 something boys, so they wouldn’t have cared if I’d added butter by the pound.

My take on the lack of butter might have been quite different if it was making this for just my dining companion and I. She eats most of these meals with me, and often asks if I can look for something a bit less rich to make from The Book. I’m already running out of heart-healthy options. This is one of the few recipes that fits the bill, and I wasted it on The Boys.

There were a lot of good ideas going on in this recipe: Limited additions, not much butter, building texture and flavour with buttermilk. But, somehow it just didn’t gel into the ne plus ultra of mashed potato recipes.