Tag: cream

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

198. Currant Tea Scones p.598

The recipe

Scones are serious business. Done right, they’re transcendent, rich, with just a hint of sweetness and a striated flaky texture. A scone should be substantial, but not dense. Unfortunately they’re often done very very poorly. Starbucks gets my vote for worst mass market scone. Their oversized scones are dense enough to sink, and so dry you can’t get through a bite without a sip of coffee. The few times I’ve eaten them I’ve ended up with an Elmer’s school glue paste in my mouth, and a boulder in my stomach. This scone philosophy may work for Starbucks’ bottom line, but it has no place in my kitchen.

This recipe has a much happier take on the classic British treat. Here you make a quick dough by working butter into a mixture of flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt, then gently mixing in half-and-half until a sticky dough forms. You stir in currents which have been plumped in just a couple of tablespoons of hot brewed tea, form the dough into a disk, score it, brush it with half-and-half, then sprinkle it with sugar and bake.

The Good: The scones came out with pretty much the texture I was hoping for, tender-chewy cake stacked in airy layers. The cream and sugar brushing gave a nice gloss to the upper sides, and the bottoms were just barely golden. All in all a pretty darn good scone.

The Bad: I’m quite picky about scones, so while the results were generally good, there was room for improvement. First, they were a little too dry, substituting full fat cream for half-and-half might have taken care of that. Second, I like currants as much or more than the next guy, but half as many would have been plenty. Third, I wasn’t a huge fan of the bake, and then cut, plan with these. I prefer to bake scones separately, because the sweet and shiny outer layer is the best part. This cut-a-disk-up-like-a-cake strategy messes up the surface to volume ratio. Fourth, I thought going in that soaking the currants in tea might add a tea flavour to the scones, but it really did nothing at all. There’s nothing wrong with not-tea-flavoured scones, but the plumping in tea step was a bit of a waste of time. If there’s no way to get the tea above the threshold of human perception I’d just use hot water instead. Finally, this recipe is for an unusually small batch. It makes just 4 scones. That’s about breakfast for two. If I’m going to go to the trouble of making scones I’d like to count on some leftovers, so I’d plan on doubling or tripling the recipe.

The Verdict: Overall this is a solid scone recipe. It’s not my ideal, but I think scones are largely a matter of personal taste. It comes fairly close to what I’m looking for in a scone, and it’s a good basis for further experimentation.

Categories
Cakes The Book

69. Almond Cake with Kirsch Cream and Lingonberry Preserves p.710

The recipe

In the comments for yesterday’s cassoulet someone mentioned that many of the recipes I’ve posted are heart attacks waiting to happen. This cake is no exception. With 8 eggs, 2 sticks of butter, and a bunch of almond paste it is no where near anyones definition of a light finish to a meal. The cake is dense and very moist, topped with Kirsh flavoured whipped cream and lingonberry preserves.

The cake recipe is a very standard method, but with funny proportions. It’s only got one cup of flour to 7 ounces of almond paste, 1/2 lb of butter, 8 eggs and 1 1/2 cups of sugar. The almond paste is replacing some of the flour, but why does it need 8 eggs?

With all the super rich stuff that went into it, the result is a super rich cake. With so little flour to provide structure it didn’t rise very much. The texture was like a very moist brownie that had been allowed to rise a bit more than normal. The almond paste did a good job of permeating the cake with almond flavour, but it could have been boosted with almond extract, or an almond liqueur.

The Kirsh whipped cream topping was a good concept. Almond and cherries are one of the magical flavour combinations of our world, and I’m glad to see it celebrated. The Kirsh gave the cream an alcohol bite that helped cut some of the richness. The cream was a bit potent to eat comfortably though. There were bites where I misjudged the proportion of cream to cake and just found it to be sour and unpleasant.

The lingonberry preserves were a very nice touch. Apparently this is a Scandinavian cake, and nothing says northern Europe like lingonberries. The average megalomart doesn’t carry these preserves so you’ll have to go to a specialty shop, or Ikea. Those masters of flat-packed over designed furniture sell a broad array of Swedish delights, including three different types of lingonberry preserves (one with chipotle).

This cake keeps forever, I divided it and froze half for a few months. The remains in my fridge were good for at least a week. This is a good thing, because the cake is so rich an average sized family would need that week to get through it. The lingonberry preserves were the best part of the dish, the cream topping was a nice counterpoint, but it was a bit too boozy. The cake’s flavour was fine, and the super moist texture had it’s own appeal, but overall I can’t recommend it because of it’s unconscionable ingredient list. A simple yellow cake with almond flavouring would have served the same purpose, and helped everyone to avoid an insulin coma.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

65. Chocolate Truffles p.696

The recipe.

This recipe has three ingredients, chocolate, cream, and cocoa powder. Almost by definition the success of failure of the recipe is in the quality of those ingredients, and the method of combining them. I used the wrong ingredients, and ignored parts of the method. They still came out tasty, if a bit ugly. The recipe calls for 56% cacao Valrhona chocolate, I ignored this and used another good quality dark chocolate with about the same cocoa percentage. I couldn’t find the Valrhona and decided the recipe was just being snooty. I’m not sure if it would have made a difference, but you should definitely use a chocolate you like the taste of before it’s used in the ganache.

The recipe is dead simple, the cream is boiled, and then poured over the cut up chocolate, it’s then gently stirred (in concentric circles starting from the centre, while standing on one leg, under a full moon). The resultant ganache is then cooled and piped into truffle shapes. After the truffles are frozen they’re smeared with bit of melted chocolate and tossed in cacao powder before serving.

I ran into a bit of trouble in the piping section of the recipe. I didn’t have the right size tip and found I couldn’t pipe and elegant looking truffle with the desired soft point on top. Even cooling the ganache for the recommended time I needed to put in in the fridge for a while to get it to firm up enough for easy piping. As you can see in the picture above I didn’t get anything near the elegant teardrop shaped confections I was going for. Real truffles are ugly and misshapen, and so are mine. I’m not going to let myself feel too bad about it.

The coating with chocolate and tossing in cacao powder step was much messier than I would have predicted. I think it takes a lot more planning, and forethought than I gave it. You need to reserve one gloved hand for smearing the chocolate and dropping the truffles into the cocoa powder, and one hand for extracting them to a sheet pan on the other end. Mixing this method up results in the dreaded club hand. I’ll know better for next time.

Although this was a really simple recipe I have hardly any experience working with confections. I found it to be more complicated than it seemed at first. But, I’m sure a second attempt would go much more smoothly. Flavourwise, they were good. It’s chocolate and cream, it tastes like chocolate and cream. Fancy chocolatiers seem to be able to take those same ingredients and make absolute magic happen. For me, this recipe produced tasty little after dinner treats, but there was nothing transcendent about it.

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.