Tag: tarragon

Categories
Sauces and Salsas The Book

135. Green Mayonnaise p.887


The recipe

This mayo is meant to accompany the Poached Salmon in Aspic. I wasn’t quite sure why an aspic covered fish, served with aspic on the side, needed a mayonnaise as well. My guests didn’t eat much of this mayo with the salmon, possibly because I didn’t make it obvious enough that they were meant to be served together, but I suspect it was because no one really felt it was lacking in mayo. If it had just been a poached salmon, a nice sauce would be appreciated, but it seemed out of place with the aspic.

The recipe is dead simple. I started with a cup of yesterday’s recipe for plain mayonnaise. I ran parsley, chives, tarragon, and dill through the food processor with lemon juice and half the mayo. I omitted the optional chervil. Once it was smooth, I added the rest of the mayo, and stuck it in the fridge to come together for a couple of hours.

It tasted very much like mayonnaise with a bunch of herbs puréed into it. Fresh herbs are almost always nice, and they added all sorts of flavour to the mayo. Tarragon and dill aren’t subtle, so it was fairly bold. The additional lemon juice and water from the herbs thinned it out a lot, so it was more of a drizzling than a spreading mayo. As I said, it didn’t do much for the salmon, so I was left with a lot of this. I couldn’t really think of many other uses though. I tried sandwiches, I tried serving it with grilled chicken, and I put some on asparagus. In all cases it was just fine, but I would have preferred plain old mayo, or perhaps an aïoli. Simply grilled or poached fish would be a natural use for this, which I wouldn’t mind trying it at some point, and if it were thicker it could be quite interesting with French fries.

I’m sure there’s a dish out there just begging for a drizzle of green mayonnaise, but I haven’t found it yet.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

104. Beef Tenderloin with Cornichon Tarragon Sauce p.416


The recipe

Some good friends were coming to dinner, and I wanted to make something a bit special. When I’m looking for dishes suitable for an occasion, beef tenderloin is frequently at the top of that list. I had frozen part of the tenderloin I used for the Twenty-First-Century Beef Wellington so it was an easy choice to make. I decided to serve the roast tenderloin with three sauces, the cornichon tarragon sauce from this recipe, a Stilton sauce, and whipped horseradish cream. This sort of a menu seems much more appropriate to the fall weather I’m writing this in, than the summer weather I cooked it in. However, it was a pleasantly warm day, and I made one important change to the recipe. I grilled my tenderloin outside instead of sticking it in a 350 degree oven. The sauces were a bit rich for summer, but that just encouraged restraint.

The sauce is made by reducing white wine, shallots and tarragon, then adding cream, thinly sliced cornichons, and a mixture of mustard whipped with butter. This was a seriously powerful sauce. The mustard, tarragon, and shallot flavours were fairly strong on their own, but the cornichons were overpowering. I picked up good quality, imported sour gherkins from France. They were mouth puckeringly sour, without too much other flavour. They were nicely crunchy, but not really my favourite pickle style. The recipe calls for a lot of these little guys, and their concentrated vinegar permeated the whole sauce. My first impression of the sauce wasn’t great, just too sour, and overpowering the somewhat subtle flavours of the tenderloin. As I ate more it grew on me though. Once I stopped making a sourpuss face the underlying flavours came out, and they were good. The sauce also mellowed over the next day, and ended up being in a better balance.

I’m not sure if this is how the recipe was intended to turn out, or I just got a batch of very sour pickles. I think it’s possible I did everything right, because my dining companion preferred this sauce to the other two choices. She agreed that it was sour, but she enjoyed the interplay of the rich creaminess, with the clear vinegar cutting across it. I won’t rush to repeat this one, and if I did I’d try a different brand of pickle, or cut back on them. This sauce had to struggle to get over a bad first impression, but it did redeem itself after a few bites.

Categories
Breakfast and Brunch The Book

92. Baked Eggs and Mushrooms in Ham Cups p.634

The recipe

The eggs are really pretty, taste great, and come in manageable individual sized portions. It’s not really practical to do fried eggs for a crowd, you end up spending all your time at the stove, and the toast gets cold. The solution is often scrambled, or poached eggs. Scrambled are nice, but a bit boring, and I really like having a yolk to dip into. Poached are great, and as my poaching skills improve I appreciate it more and more. I’m always worried about getting the eggs out of the pan, nicely drained, and onto the plate without breaking at least one of them though.

This type of dish is a nice option for a big brunch. Slices of ham are fitted into muffin cups, and filled with a mixture of sautéed mushrooms and shallots, fresh tarragon, and crème fraîche. Each cup is topped with an egg, and then popped in the oven at 400 degrees until the whites are set. They’re excellent little self-contained dishes that are easy to serve, and most of the work can be done ahead. They’re easy to make, the presentation is impressive, and quite charming.

I was a big fan of the flavours at work here. The ham crisped up and showed off its bacony side, which paired well with the classic mushroom tarragon combination. The crème fraîche added a bit of richness and luxury, and the egg was a none to subtle reminder that this was a breakfast dish.

Despite my enthusiasm, the recipe had some technical problems. When buying the ham for this recipe it’s important to get slices without any holes, otherwise the filling will leak out. I decided that thicker slices should stay together better, but I failed to consider that they’re less malleable. I had trouble getting them into the egg cups, and ended up cracking some of them. In the end, a lot of the filling did run out of them. This isn’t really the recipe’s fault, after all it did warn me. But your ham should be neither too thick nor too thin, and the more uniform it is the better.

The real problem with the recipe came in the baking of the eggs. I put them in the oven for the recommended 15 minutes, but the whites weren’t even close to being set. It took an extra 10 minutes for them to set up. Unfortunately the yolks were fully set by that point, which was a real letdown. It’s possible that the broiler element came on at some point during the eggs’ cooking and applied too much direct heat from the top. Since you don’t really care if the eggs steam a bit, you could probably cover the muffin tin in the oven.

I’m not sure where I went wrong with the eggs, Teena at the other gourmet project made these recently. She didn’t seem to like them nearly as much as I did, but the eggs in her photo look like they have set whites and runny yolks. I may have messed up somewhere along the line.

These eggs looked and tasted great, and were really easy to make. Mine didn’t work out as well as they could have, but they were still delicious. Tarragon is a prominent flavour here, and not one you often find in breakfast dishes. For me that was a welcome surprise, I’m always happy to eat more tarragon. It doesn’t really jump to mind when you think of flavours to pair with coffee and orange juice though. I think these eggs work best as part of a less breakfasty brunch. I served them with baguette and a green salad, which worked really well. I’m excited to try these again, if I can find a way to maintain my ham’s structural containment and sort the eggs out, I think this dish could be a real winner.

Categories
Poultry The Book

43. Rabbit With Mustard Sauce p.408

The recipe is very similar to this Epicurious version. Except that both Dijon and Whole grain mustard are used, and 2/3 cups shallots are browned in the pan before deglazing the fond.

Rabbit with… wait for it…. wait for it…. mustard sauce! yawn. It’s good, don’t get me wrong. But it seems like people hardly eat rabbit at all, and most of them will never have tasted it without a mustard sauce. This recipe follows three or four variations each for squab, poussin, and quail. Beyond the question of why the lone rabbit recipe in the book is tacked on to the end of the poultry section, why did it only get one rendition? I know a lot of people are uncomfortable eating cute little bunny rabbits, but they’re delicious. Similarly the book is devoid of recipes for venison, wild boar, or horse, all of which are on the menus around Montreal. Horse is probably just a Quebec thing, and Canada is developing it’s culinary identity around a lot of game meats, but those ingredients are much more familiar to me than any of those little birds.

Anyway, the recipe itself was pretty good. It’s simple, and it’s a classic for a reason. I found a beautiful rabbit for this one, probably closer to 4 pounds than the recommended 3. I liked the textural addition of whole grain mustard as well. It’s a very simple and unpretentious dish. The rabbit is browned, the shallot – white wine – mustard sauce is brought together, and the rabbit goes back in to cook through. Afterwards the rabbit is removed, the sauce thickened, and some parsley is stirred in at the end.

I’ve complained many times about parsley, and all of my objections stand. Also, stirring parsley into hot dishes doesn’t do anything for it. It’s only use in my mind is for a bright green punch of colour, heating it so it turns limp and grey sort of defeats the purpose.

It’s not the recipes fault, but it felt like something was missing. That something is tarragon. My father often made rabbit with mustard sauce growing up, particularly while he was living in Belgium. His version always added tarragon to the mix, and it was absolutely delicious. Taragon and mustard are natural buddies, and mustard with rabbit is a classic. It’s such a natural fit, but a quick search for tarragon mustard sauce recipes didn’t turn much up. The anise flavour adds it’s own dimension, and compliments what’s already going on in this dish. I’d highly recommend trying it.

This dish tasted good, was easy to prepare, and at least rabbit made the book in some fashion. It wasn’t inspired, but it was a solid basic. If you’re unfamiliar with rabbit this is a great introduction.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

10. Asparagus With Tarragon Sherry Vinaigrette p.520

the recipe

This turned out quite well. I served it with steak Diane and brown-buttered corn with basil. Here the asparagus is steamed and then shocked in ice water before tossing with the vinaigrette. I usually boil my asparagus, but steaming worked very well. The recipe calls for a hard boiled egg to be passed through a sieve and sprinkled on top. I skipped this step, as my dinner was heavy enough with the steak. If I were serving this with salmon the egg might have worked very well.

The Tarragon was a great addition to this dish. The vinaigrette was simple and added a pleasant tang, while the tarragon has a great affinity for both the asparagus and the mustard in the vinaigrette. I chose to do this recipe early on in the project because I love tarragon, but don’t encounter it all that often. I actually hear about it more as a classic ingredient in French cuisine than I come across it on the plate. I live in Montreal, where every second restaurant is a French bistro, and you might expect it to turn up. That’s not to say that it’s not around, just that it’s under appreciated.