Tag: cloves

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

173. Spice Sugar Cookies p.669

The recipe

My cookie baking bonanza got a little bit confused. I made ginger cookies that didn’t taste much like ginger, and these spice cookies, which are gingerbread in disguise. I kept mixing them up when I told people which cookies where which, it seemed pretty obvious that the crispy cookies which tasted like ginger should have been the ginger crisps, but no. Whatever they’re called, these were among the best gingerbread cookies I’ve ever had.

I’m reading “A History of Food” by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat right now, so my head is filled with culinary fast facts. Apparently ginger is a recent addition to what we now call gingerbread. In French gingerbread is still called pain d’épice, spice bread, and for most of it’s history was made with whatever spices happened to be available, rarely ginger.

The cookies are a little odd in that they’re made with vegetable shortening instead of butter. I expected that to be a big turn-off, but it really worked. The cookies are made by sifting together the dry ingredients, flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and salt, then beating together the shortening and brown sugar, adding an egg and molasses, then gently mixing in the mixture of dry ingredients. The dough then goes into the fridge to chill for an hour, and is rolled into tablespoon balls. The balls are dipped in sugar, and baked sugar side up.

I was really happy with the way these cookies came out, they had a lovely colour, and sparkling sugar topping was very attractive. I liked the way the sugar caused the tops to crack and craze. The shortening really contributed to the texture of the cookies, they were crisp outside, soft inside, and appealingly rich. An acquaintance tried these at a party and said “they’re greasy, I like that”, I can’t think of a better way to put it. Usually greasiness isn’t something I look for in a cookie, but here it really worked. The spice mixture was right on, not overpowering by any means, but delicate and balanced.

These cookies are an absolute keeper. Just looking at the recipe I probably wouldn’t have made these if I wasn’t doing this project, but I’m certainly glad I did.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

164. Beef Bourguignon p.440

The recipe

I grew up on boeuf bourguignon, we could be guaranteed to have it at least once a month during the winter. Since a braised dish like this is better a day or two after it’s cooked, my mom would usually make it on a Sunday, and it would sit on the chilly garage floor in her big orange Le Creuset Dutch oven until dinnertime on Tuesday. I remember being very small, and being tasked with bringing the stew upstairs, I swear that cast iron pot weighed more than I did, and it was so cold it burned. Since a bottle of wine goes into a boeuf bourguignon, and even after a long braise not all of the alcohol cooks off, I’m wondering if this dish didn’t contribute to some of excellent sleeping we got done as kids.

The recipe starts with some home butchery, getting beef shoulder off the bone, and cubed. The cubes are then seasoned, coated in flour, and thoroughly browned. The meat then braises for an afternoon with sweated onions, garlic, and carrots, tomatoes, red wine, and a bouquet garni. While that’s going on you get to blanch and peel boiling onions. I hate peeling boiling onions, but I did it anyway. The onions then get browned with some butter, and simmered until tender. You then sauté some mushrooms in butter, and add the mushrooms and onions to the braise, and let it simmer for a few minutes. Once everything’s done cooking you can eat it right away, or better yet stick in in the back of the fridge and forget about it for a couple of days. The Book recommends serving this dish with buttered potatoes, but I’ve always been a fan of egg noodles with boeuf bourguignon, so that’s what we had.

There’s an error in this recipe. The first ingredient listed is a quarter pound of bacon, and the fist cooking direction is to simmer the bacon in water for a few minutes. That bacon is never mentioned again. The linked Epicurious recipe has the error fixed, you’re supposed to crisp up the bacon in the pot before starting the braise, but it’s mystery bacon if you follow The Books version. I guessed that it was meant to go into the braise, and that worked out well, but I hope they’ve caught this mistake in the updated version of The Book.

I was entirely satisfied with this dish, it tastes just like what mom used to make, it’s hearty, rich, stick to your ribs, winter cooking. The flavours were right on, this is not a difficult dish to get close to right, but making it really well is a challenge. This is a really solid boeuf bourguignon recipe, my only complaint is that it was a bit too salty. I’ll certainly be making this one again next winter.

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

150. Pumpkin Apple Bread p.599


The recipe courtesy of The Amateur Gourmet

A loaf is a dangerous thing. It hardly ever occurs to me to bake up some banana bread, or a lemon loaf. If you asked me to name my favourite desserts, no loaf would make the list. I don’t think about them, or go out of my way to get them, but the second a sweet cakey loaf comes out of the oven, I’m lost.

The insatiable craving that takes hold isn’t a conscious one. I have a slice with an espresso, dining companion and I chat about how nice it is, then I get on with my day. About half an hour later, I find myself back in the kitchen with the knife in my hand, and another reasonably sized slice on my plate. After all, it really is better when it’s fresh. I trick myself into the next slice with a lie about pumpkin and apples making it a healthy snack. It gets worse from there, I probably won’t have any appetite for dinner, and my dining companion may not get a second slice. These types of loaves are a triumph of marketing. They’re not cake, they’re bread! and look! they’re full of healthy fruits and nuts! At least a black-forest cake is honest, if you eat it for breakfast you know exactly what a bad person you are.

This particular temptress is made by sifting together flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice in one bowl, canned pumpkin, oil, sugar, and eggs in another, and then adding the dry stuff to the wet stuff, and folding in chopped apples. The batter is divided between two loaf pans, sprinkled with the inevitable streusel topping (flour, sugar, cinnamon and butter), and baked.

This bread is about as autumnal as it gets. Think pumpkin pie, now with carbs! If you’re a fan of the pie, this is the bread for you. Being in the house while it baked was a pleasure. Someone should distill it into a perfume. The bread was exceptionally moist, with a loose spongy crumb, and the barest hint of toothsomeness. The chunks of Granny Smith added a necessary textural counterpoint, and a little bit of bite to keep things in perspective. This topping worked better than some of The Book’s other efforts. In this case it was a flavourful glaze on the loaf, and not the overwhelming mess that sometimes results. I might toss in some crushed walnuts or pecans next time, but as it is it’s a winner

If you’re the sort of person who has a modicum of self control when it comes to baked goods in the house, I happily recommend this bread. For those of you who don’t, bake it and give it away, at least you’ll be able to enjoy the way your kitchen smells. Unfortunately I tried the second strategy, and for possibly the first time in human history a lab full of grad students was too busy to polish off free baking on the first go-round. I ended up with a third of a loaf on my desk for the afternoon, I’m not at liberty to say what happened next.

Categories
Grains and Beans The Book

101. Cassoulet de Canard p.273


The recipe

This is The Book’s definitive and official cassoulet recipe. I wrote about the Easy Cassoulet recipe a couple of months ago, which skipped steps and cut corners, but still resulted in a very delicious dinner. This adaptation of Julia’s from Mastering the Art of French Cooking takes two days, and goes out of it’s way to find traditional steps for you to follow.

On the first day you soak the beans. But you don’ just soak them. You bring them to a boil and let them sit for 50 minutes. Then you bring them back to a boil, with a bouquet garni, onions, salt, and pork rind you spent the preceding 50 minutes ritualistically rinsing, boiling, and slicing. Then it’s simmer and skim for the next 1 1/4 hours. The beans are then left to cool overnight.

Day one’s activities continue with the skinning, defatting, and shredding of the duck legs, the browning of mutton (I used veal) bones in a whole cup of goose fat, and the caramelizing of onions in that goose fat. The duck, the bones, the onions, and let us not forget the fat are brought to a simmer with bay leaves, stock, tomatoes, garlic, and white wine. After an hour and half on the stove it’s left to cool overnight.

Day two is fairly straightforward. You brown and slice some sausage, and remove the inedible bits from the now cold beans, and the duck mixture. Then the cassoulet is assembled in alternating layers of beans and meat, then topped with bread crumbs and parsley. The recipe calls for a 10 quart enameled cast iron pot, but the biggest one I could get my hands on was 7 3/4 quarts. I managed to get almost everything into the smaller pot, but the full sized pot would have been better. The cassoulet is brought to a simmer on the stovetop, the baked for about an hour until the juices are bubbling up through the crust.

There were a lot of steps, a lot of tricky to source ingredients, and some strange cooking instructions here. It resulted in a rather delicious cassoulet though. I cheated in more than a few places, and messed up in a few others, so I’m not sure the dish came out exactly as it did in The Book’s test kitchens. For the record I had a mix up with the bouquet garni and ended up putting in 15 cloves instead of 5, which really changed the flavour of the beans. I didn’t peel the tomatoes, because I hate peeling tomatoes and I don’t find it’s really worth the effort. I didn’t make beef stock, and I did used the specifically forbidden canned variety. I used a cured garlic kielbasa instead of the fresh garlic sausage called for. I also couldn’t stand the idea of serving the dish with all that goose fat in there, so I removed most of the fat that floated to the top of the meat pot. It was still decidedly rich and fatty, but not nearly as oily as the recipe intended.

That is a long list of cheats, normally I do my best to stick to the recipe as closely as possible, but this time I just wasn’t in the cards. I made the recipe for The Boys on one of our weekend getaways, and I was cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen, with only the equipment I’d thought to bring with me (they don’t cook much, so the facilities are minimal). I couldn’t find some ingredients, some of the steps I just didn’t have time for, and there were a couple of honest mistakes thrown in for good measure. I think the final dish was pretty close to what the original intended though.

In the end the cassoulet tasted great. It was similar to the easy cassoulet, with the duck and sausage flavours predominating. However, the beans in this version were really worth all the effort. They were tender with a bit of bite left to them, and packed with flavour. Unfortunately a lot of that flavour was cloves, but the smoky bacon, and pork belly were there, with the thyme and onions adding a nice backdrop.

The breadcrumb crust was a bit of a letdown. The easy cassoulet had an amazing crust, made by turning the duck skin into cracklings, and toasting the bread crumbs in some of the duck fat and garlic. That topping was just out of this world, whereas the topping on this dish is just there to absorb some liquid. The recipe has you throw away the confit duck skin and its fat, but then add in a whole whack of goose fat. I really didn’t understand the rationale, it seems like an obvious missed opportunity.

This dish was labour intensive, and I don’t think it would have been nearly as much fun without the help of my co-chef Al. Whenever it’s time to make an excessively fatty fat fat dish, I can count on him. I should also thank the other boys for washing the seeminly endless sink-fulls of goose fat coated dishes this produced. Cassoulet is an absolute indulgence, and indulging is much more fun with friends, especially if you’ve had to work for your reward.

I feel that this recipe is one I’ll make again and again, until I get it just right. My first attempt tasted about as good as the Easy Cassoulet, but I’m sure that with practice this recipe has the potential to blow the easy version out of the water. It’s the kind of dish that people perfect and refine over lifetimes, to get just the right texture in the beans, the perfect amount of bacon flavour, the ideal thickened but still runny texture in the juices. Next time I’ll be much better prepared for some of the more obtuse steps, and counterintuitive instructions. I can see some improvements I’d like to make, but overall it was a delicious, and faithful rendition of a very classic dish.

Categories
Poultry The Book

90. Chicken in Pumpkin Seed Sauce p.360

No recipe for this one.

I had a very mixed reaction to this dish. I made it for friends along with some of the other recipes listed under Mexican in the index. It makes a good deal of food, and we weren’t able to eat it all. On the night of the party I had the chicken and decided it was delicious, I had some leftovers the next day and decided they were gross and that I’d never liked it in the first place. Some time passed and my memories softened, I recalled the chicken fondly again but with a queezy uncertainty. I’d frozen some of it, so I pulled it out when I saw it was time to write the dish up. The verdict? slightly freezer burned. In the end I think there were some really strong elements to the dish, and some fairly weak ones.

A chicken is divided into serving size pieces, and simmered with garlic, onion, cilantro, salt, pepper, and allspice. The chicken is then topped with a sauce of toasted pumpkin seeds, cumin, allspice, cloves, pepper, tomatillos, serranos, onion, garlic, cilantro, salt, and a poblano. The whole thing is then baked and served.

The sauce has some excellent flavours, I really liked everything that went into it, and the combined beautifully. The flavours were really complex, but cohesive. There are a huge number of flavourful ingredients in this sauce, and marshaling their forces this deftly isn’t easy. The sauce’s flavour was the strong point of the dish, It’s texture and appearance were pretty much awful. A light beigey-green sauce over some beige chicken didn’t do much for visual impact. The pumpkin seeds and spices are ground to a powder before being added to the sauce, and the sauce is pureed thoroughly, but it still ended up mealy and unpleasant. I think I just don’t like the texture of ground nuts or seeds in sauces. Maybe passing this sauce through a Chinoise would have improved it, but I don’t have one, and the recipe didn’t call for it.

The chicken itself was a bit of letdown. It’s topped with a flavour packed sauce, but the meat is absolutely bland. It simmers in a broth for ~50 minutes, picking up flavour from the arromatics you added. Unfortunately the chicken flavour is escaping to the liquid at the same time. 3 1/2 cups of the liquid get added into the pumpkin seed sauce, but the other ~3 quarts went into the freezer. The Mexican inspired chicken stock was a nice little bonus from making this dish, but you wouldn’t’ serve your guests chicken you’d used to make stock with first, so why do it here? In the end you have an exhausted chicken covered with gooey boiled skin, yum.

I should emphasize that the sauce for this chicken was really delicious, everything else about the dish is wrong wrong wrong, but it’s almost good enough to make up for it. If I were to make it again I’d grill the chicken instead of boiling it, grind the pumpkin seed mixture into a nano-scale powder, puree the sauce obsessively, then pass it through a hepa filter.