Tag: Hors D’Oeuvres & First Courses

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

95. Rye Crispbread Crackers with Pepper-Dill Crème Fraîche and Smoked Salmon p.38

The recipe

This is a funny recipe, it’s a play on the old standby of lox and cream cheese on pumpernickel. In this version you bake your own crackers, use dill infused crème fraîche, and dress them up with fresh dill and orange zest. I’ve never made crackers before, and my first experience suggests it’s exactly as pointless an activity as it seems. The recipe waxes on about how great the crackers are, and how they really make the dish. If that’s the case why is this recipe in the hors d’oeuvres section? They have a perfectly good Breads and Crackers section.

The crackers are made with a yeast dough using both white and rye flour, kosher salt, and toasted caraway seeds. The dough is allowed to rise, rolled into thin sheets, and allowed a brief second rise before baking. The final texture was unusual. It wasn’t cracker crisp, it wasn’t bready soft, it was crunchy on the outside, and tough and chewy on the inside. I wasn’t impressed with the final texture at all, and I actually had to gnaw through a couple of them. My sister, who was appalled at the amount of time, effort, energy, and cash recipes from The Book seem to require, quite liked the crackers. She felt that if you were going to go to the bother of making your own, at the very least they should be softer than boxed crackers. I felt that if they’re called rye crispbread crackers the least they could do was to be crisp. The flavour was very nice, the caraway seeds added a lot, but frankly these things just weren’t worth it.

The crème fraîche layer had a structural issue. The crème was mixed with chopped dill, salt, and pepper, then added to the crackers. Unfortunately, crème fraîche is barely gelled when it’s scooped out of the container. Stirring in the other ingredients moved it back to the liquid side of things. It was prone to running off the crackers, and onto people’s laps. Not exactly ideal in a finger food. Once again the flavour was good, but the texture was off. Maybe a combination of crème fraîche and sour cream, or cream cheese would have provided the richness and flavour, while staying where I put it.

The flavours in the dish were right on. The crackers were delicious, rye and carraway are old friends. The dill and crème fraîche played well with the smoked salmon, and the orange zest set the whole thing off, making it lighter and brighter, and cutting some of the oiliness of the fish and richness of the crème. I also thought these appetizers looked great, despite the odd dribble of crème fraîche. Unfortunately the texture of the crackers left a lot to be desired, every grocery store has much better substitutes for hardly any money and no effort. The rest of the dish was pretty standard fare, the crackers were the make or break aspect of the dish. In this case they didn’t break easily enough.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

57. Onion Parmesan Toasts p.34


The recipe

These were remarkably simple little appetizers with some old school flair. It falls into the ancient and proud “stuff on toast” camp of appetizers. The secret to this style of appetizers is to give something either healthy or expensive prime billing in the name, but to make absolutely sure that most of your on-toast topping is creamy, cheesy, fatty, or preferably all three.

Here the role of healthy is played by a sweet onion, cheesy is played by Parmeigiano-Reggiano, and fatty is portrayed by mayonnaise. By volume there are 3/4 of a cup of onion, and a combined 3/4 of a cup of the cheese and mayo. By weight however the creamy fatty team makes up most of the toppings. A bonus rule for old school on-toast appetizers is to avoid unusual spices that might scandalize the croquet ladies. Garlic would be a bit outre, and curry powder is firmly in the province of those bohemian ne’er-do-wells that are tearing this country apart. My dining companion and I brought some guacamole to a family affair a while back, and when my grandmother tried it she said “who made this green stuff? It hurts my mouth”. Here the spices are kept safe and stayed, fresh ground black pepper. Of course pre-ground would be more familiar to the bridge club, but we can modernize a little bit.

I didn’t think I was going to like these all that much, broiled mayonnaise seemed a bit weird, but it really worked. The toasts, cocktail rye of course, crisped up nicely and the topping browned beautifully. I feared that the mayo would break under the heat, but that didn’t’ happen. The onions cooked enough to soften a bit and give off a great deal of flavour, and the cheese turned golden-brown and delicious. These were a fun easy throwback, that was yanked forward into modern times for some very good reasons.

The Book is a celebration of Gourmet Magazine’s 50th anniversary. A lot of the recipes are weighted towards the ’80’s and ’90’s though. It’s nice to see one that very clearly showed up in the earliest issues.

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.