Tag: cheese

Categories
Fruit Desserts The Book

197. Balsamic-Roasted Pears with Pepper and Honey p.809


The recipe

This is how dessert should be, simple, elegant, and not too heavy. I’m rarely in the mood for a slice of cake right after dinner, and the yen for creamy or frozen treats is even more infrequent. However, a cheese plate is always a welcome addition to a meal. I associate this kind of dessert with Italy, almost every menu has some combination of pear and cheese, and honey is a common touch. One handwritten menu I saw there advertised the Cheese and Fear plate, I was hoping for a high concept dessert, but it was just a typo. 

The dish is simple to prepare. You roast pears in a buttered dish for 20 minutes, then pour balsamic over-top and roast for 5 minutes more. Plate the pears, drizzle them with the juices in the pan, and serve with slices of Manchego. Drizzle the plate with honey, and a few grinds of pepper, then serve. 

The Good: With hardly any effort you can create a satisfying end to a big meal. It can pretty well all be done ahead, just pop the pears in the oven while you’re clearing the dishes, and they’ll be ready once everyone’s finished up their glass of wine. The presentation is really simple, but it looks great. Pears have a great affinity for cheeses, and the balsamic glaze makes the whole interaction more appealing. The few grinds of pepper emphasize the sweet-savoury interplay of the dish. 

The Bad: For my money, this dish could have moved a little more to the savoury side. I found the total effect of the roasted pears + balsamic + honey to be pushing the balance too far to the sweet. A more assertively flavoured cheese, or a more acidic balsamic might have brought things into balance. Also, some nuts would have been a very nice addition to the plate. Roasting pears is a delicate affair. I like them roasted so that they loose their gritty-grainy texture, but I don’t want them to turn to mush. Mine ended up a little too firm, half an hour in the oven might have served them better.

The Verdict: Overall I was quite happy with this dish, and I’ll certainly make variations on it again. I think disliking sweet desserts is largely my own personal issue, so it may not turn others off this dish at all. Even with a little more sugar than I would have liked it was an excellent way to finish our dinner.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

138. Macaroni and Cheese p.223


The recipe

I haven’t eaten all that much macaroni and cheese since I graduated to shoes with laces, but most of the kids I knew, and the stoners they grew up to be, loved the stuff from the box. As a child, macaroni and cheese was just the brand neutral way of saying your mom was making Kraft Dinner. I decided that KD was not for me around age 5, and looked for creative ways to avoid it, or mask its flavour. For reference, cut up hot dogs made it better, ketchup made it worse. Unfortunately kids in Montreal ate a lot of KD in the ’80s. My mom accepted my quirks and stopped serving it to me, but I still ate a lot of it at friends houses.

I was well pleased to leave mac and cheese behind me by the time I reached high school, and it stayed that way ’till a a nice Southern girl introduced me to the home made version in my early 20’s. Her macaroni and cheese was an entirely different animal, using real cheese, building flavour and texture with a roux, adding a touch of heat, and baking the whole thing with some extra cheese on top. I came around, and macaroni and cheese became something worth looking forward to.

I started experimenting with my own versions of mac and cheese, without much success. The problem I was trying to solve was that M&C is inherently rich, bland, and straightforward. Some people interpret that as a food surrogate for mother’s love, but I find it a bit dull. I tried adding herbs to the M&C, which fubared it, adding more chili flakes didn’t help either. One version with chipotles was actually pretty good, and worth revisiting sometime. Drawing on my childhood hot dog experience, I tried adding some slices of merguez, which worked quite well. These experiments brought me closer to what I was looking for, but they were still lacking. I was happy to discover that Gourmet has hit upon secret elixir that cuts the richness, and ties everything together, Dijon mustard. The Book’s version isn’t perfect, but I’m immensely grateful to it for bringing me closer to the ultimate macaroni and cheese recipe.

In this version, you make a three minute roux with butter, flour, and red pepper flakes, then whisk in milk and bring the sauce to a boil. After letting it boil for a few minutes, cream, extra-sharp Cheddar, and Dijon are added. The sauce is then added to cooked macaroni, and some of the water from the pot in a baking dish, then topped with mixture of butter, panko bread crumbs, and more cheese. The casserole goes into the oven for around half an hour, and then served.

The mustard and red pepper flakes make all the difference, and prevent this from being just too rich to be enjoyable. Getting the cheese right is important too. The recipe calls for extra-sharp Cheddar, which seems simple, but even an average grocery store will have about ten different versions, ranging from the plastic packaged stuff sold along with the milk, to fancy-pants imported stuff at the cheese counter. You can spend a fortune on truly wonderful Cheddar, but it’s probably a waste of money to go melting that into mac and cheese. The low end rubbery stuff will be OK, but not as good as it could be. The cheese really carries this dish so spending a bit more on a nice piece of aged local Cheddar is a worthwhile investment.

The recipe calls for panko, or other dried bread crumbs. I couldn’t get my hands on any panko, so I went with bread crumbs from the bakery down the street. Panko are known for their lightness and texture, while my bread crumbs were quite finely ground and dense. The 2 cups of panko the recipe called for might have been a nice topping, but 2 cups of my bread crumbs probably weighed twice as much as panko did. The macaroni was just too heavy on the topping, and the very dry bread crumbs sucked up a huge amount of moisture, so that within about 20 minutes of taking the dish out of the oven, the macaroni had set up, and lost the saucy-runny aspect you’re looking for in macaroni and cheese. You can see from the photo that it was next to impossible to find any of the macaroni under all the topping.

I think this recipe did a very nice job with the macaroni and sauce aspects, but fell short with the topping. I can’t comment on how it would have been with panko, but while they gave regular bread crumbs as an acceptable alternative, it obviously wasn’t. Beyond the topping, it was probably the best macaroni and cheese I’ve ever had. I’m sure that just a little tweaking could result in a truly great macaroni and cheese dinner, for the adults as well as the kids.

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

107. Cream Biscuits p.596

No, recipe appears on line, and that’s a shame.

I really enjoyed these biscuits. They’re light but not too fluffy, nicely moist, and just crumbly enough. The recipe is simplicity itself, it’s just flour, baking powder, and salt, mixed with whipping cream. After kneading it for a few seconds it’s patted into a 1/2 inch thick round, and cut into ~3 inch rounds. Then they’re transferred to a baking sheet, brushed with a bit more cream, and popped into a 425 oven for 12-15 minutes.

Early on in the history of Good Eats, Alton Brown had a biscuit episode where his grandmother (mee-maw) came on to show him the proper technique. The recipes there were buttermilk based, but the principles still hold. He emphasized that the most important thing was to use a very sharp cookie cutter, with a decisive push through the dough to avoid compressing the biscuits, and to ensure a good rise. I took that advice to heart, and then completely ignored it when the moment came. I used the dull edge of a drinking glass to cut them out (the recipe calls for a cookie cutter), and my biscuits didn’t rise nearly as much as I’d hoped they would.

The recipe calls for White Lily flour, which that same Good Eats episode tells me is commonly available in the American South, but as far as I know it’s not to be had here. Standard AP flour was given as an alternative, and it worked just fine, these were still absolutely delicious biscuits.

These are probably best suited to sweet applications, because of the straightforward richness of the cream. If I was going to cover biscuits in gravy I’d want the tang of buttermilk to help balance things. The Book uses these as the basis for its strawberry shortcake recipe, and I think they were perfectly suited to the task. I ate some leftovers with some of my homemade strawberry jam and a bit of sharp cheddar, which may have been even better.

Categories
Grains and Beans The Book

80. Broiled Polenta with Tomato Sauce p.266

The recipe

This recipe uses The Book’s Basic Polenta recipe as it’s main ingredient. The basic polenta is a great no-fail staple recipe. Here it’s dressed up by stirring in some cheese, putting it under the broiler, and topping with a very simple tomato sauce.

I served this as part of a vegetarian dinner. It was nicely substantial, and made a good centerpiece for my menu. Very often polenta is served straight from the pot, so that it’s thick but still runny, which highlights the risotto like creamless creaminess. Here the polenta is poured into a baking dish and allowed to cool and set up before it goes under the broiler. This gives it a completely different texture, it ends up gelled and reminiscent of a rice or bread pudding. In this application it seems much more substantial, which is a better base for a sauce. Putting a sauce on a custardy plate of fresh polenta might be a little unidimensional on the texture front.

The recipe calls for fontina to be stirred into the hot polenta. I don’t think I’ve ever used or tasted fontina, and I didn’t use it here. I substituted a mixture of mozzarella and cheddar, and called it good enough. It browned up nicely, and melted seamlessly into the polenta, so it seems like a fair substitution to me.

The tomato sauce was extremely simple, perhaps too simple. The sauce is nothing but softened onions, a bit of garlic, a can of tomatoes, salt, pepper, and a pointless dash of parsley. I’m writing this in August when the local tomato crop is at it’s peak, and it seems like the less you do to them the better everything ends up. I made this sauce in April, using canned tomatoes, when charms of a minimalist sauce aren’t quite as beguiling. I’ve got nothing against canned tomatoes, they’re much more flavorful than the mealy, flavourless, perfectly red, imported California tomatoes we get in April. But, they can’t compare to the hight of summer’s flavour. If you’re going to do a slow cooked sauce based on canned tomatoes I think a bit of flavouring is important. I would definitely have added a bay leaf to the sauce, and thyme or oregano wouldn’t have hurt anything at all, a splash of vodka would bring out those flavourful alcohol soluble compounds in the tomatoes, and a hint of fire from a chile or red pepper flakes wouldn’t have been unwelcome. Once the sauce was finished I tasted it and stirred in some fresh rosemary, which really improved things.

This dish was fine, but a better concept than execution. It started with a really excellent polenta base, but didn’t do enough to it. The addition of cheese and time under the broiler added great flavour and texture, but the lackluster sauce was at best a missed opportunity, and at worst dragged the dish down. There’s a huge amount of room to play and experiment with a dish like this. It’s rare that I accuse The Book of being too simple, or lacking in obscure ingredients, but this is one of those times.

Categories
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.

Categories
Soups The Book

28. Rustic Garlic Soup p.94

Sorry, no recipe this time.

This is an Italian soup called aquacotta or “cooked water”, because it comes together from nothing special. It starts with a garlic broth (water, garlic, thyme, bay leaf, and salt) which is forced through a sieve, and slowly added to a mixture of egg yolks, parmigiano-reggiano, and olive oil. Add pepper, and spoon it over some chunks of country style bread. I wanted to make it more of a meal so I browned some cheddar on the bread under the broiler and added it to the soup.

This recipe really appealed to me because I’d invited a friend over for supper, but when I got home from work I just couldn’t face going to the grocery store. I loved that it didn’t require anything I didn’t have on hand, and that it hardly took any effort. The garlic broth worked out really well, giving the soup a pungent flavour, without the same old same old of chicken stock.

The egg yolks gave the soup a bunch of body. The recipe says only to stir the hot broth into the egg mixture slowly, but it would probably be a good idea to take the time to temper the mixture before you start adding in a stream. Coagulating your yolks wouldn’t be good news for anyone.

Most of the saltiness came from the cheese, which was nice. Not too many soups call for cheese in such a nice proportion. I appreciated that the cheese was a nice flavouring agent, without being the star. My cheddar topped toasts didn’t work too well as a replacement for the bread chunks. They floated to the top, and ended up looking a bit sickly. Also one of the best things about cheese on toast is the contrast between the gooey cheese, and the crisp toast. That’s obviously a non-starter when your toast is floating in soup. I wish I’d just stuck to the recipe as it was, or served them on the side.

Overall I liked this one, it was simple, flavourful, economical, and not much fuss.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

19. Gougères p. 33


very much like this recipe, except The Book omits the dill seeds, and adds two tablespoons of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, and one teaspoon of nutmeg.

This one went quite well. They were fluffy and airy without being greasy. The cheese flavours were definitely there, but not overwhelming. The nutmeg was a nice touch.

Making them was quick and easy. When I added the flour to the liquids it seized into a near solid mass almost instantly, and it took a lot of stirring to get it to the right consistancy. Other than that it wasn’t much trouble. The recipe suggests piping the gougères onto a sheet pan from a pastry bag, or just using a teaspoon. I didn’t have a bag, so I went with the spoon. The batter is very sticky, so piping them would have been a bit easier, but it wasn’t a big deal. Mine were also finished baking in ~15 minutes, while the recipe suggests they should take ~30. I recently got an oven thermometer, and it turns out my oven ends up ~25 degrees hotter than the dial suggests. This might explain the reduced baking time.

These were really tasty, and a great two-bite size. Be warned, you could very easily eat twelve of these without really noticing.

Categories
Salads The Book

1. Baby Greens With Warm Goat Cheese p.131

the recipe
Ahh, you always remember your first. This was a great little salad, mesclun in a simple vinaigrette topped with goat cheese croquettes. It hardly took any time to put together, and the warm gooey goat cheese is pretty hard to beat. Make sure the cheese is well coated with the bread crumb mixture, or the cheese will end up in the pan instead of in your mouth.