the butcher, the baker

A Bun Out of the Oven!

2012-02-19T23:10:00.002-05:00

Nils Gunnar

I'm back at work now, but it sure was an eventful week off. Pictured above is my new son, taken at eight days old. This little monster came out at nigh on 9.5lbs, and he has been keeping us very busy ever since because he never stops eating. It may sound like hyperbole, but come around the house and see. It's absurd.

So there you have it. I'm just a proud new dad and wanted to share this with the internet at large. And, really, how could I pass up the opportunity to make such a punny title?

Soft Cinnamon-Raisin Bagels

2012-02-09T18:05:00.000-05:00

So, my lady has had some problems with her temporomandibular joint. This means that eating a normal, boiled, chewy bagel can be a hardship. Doing my best to make her happy in her extreme pregnancy, I worked out this pleasantly soft cinnamon-raisin bagel. It's still a bagel, and has a bit of chew, but it's much closer to those bagels in the packaged bread area of the supermarket than the glossy boiled (sometimes steamed) ones that are found in bagel shops.

Oh, the things we do for love.

Recipe after the break.

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So the plan here was to make the dough a little more slack and add some fat in order to soften things up, followed by not-boiling. It also a bonus that the fat will help the bagels' staying power, but it won't be by much. You'll get two good days out of these if they are well wrapped after cooling off.

Soft Cinnamon-Raisin Bagels
Yields: ½ dozen bagels
Time to complete: 5 hours

Click here to get your own copy of this recipe in a spreadsheet in Google Docs(File->Make A Copy to get your own). Also take a look at the guide to using the spreadsheet, which will allow you to print a recipe for any weight of dough or flour in any unit of weight/mass that you enter.

Ingredients

Preferment:

46g, at least, of Sourdough Starter

Soaker:

None

Final Dough:

      394g Bread Flour
      46g Starter
      6g Salt
      12g Malt Powder
      215g Water
      2g Instant Yeast
      25g Lard
      2g Cinnamon (half at a time)
      70g Raisins

Procedure:

Six hours or the day before, feed your 1:1 flour/water sourdough starter so that you can pull out 46g for our dough. If your sourdough is in a healthy state as it is, just go straight into the dough. No need to disrupt your current feeding schedule. If you don't have a sourdough going on, substituting 4g yeast, 21g bread flour, 21g water.
That matter settled, throw all of the ingredients for the final dough (except for the second half of the cinnamon) into a bowl together and mix with a paddle until it just comes together into a shaggy mass.
Either by hand or by dough hook, mix this dough for 4 minutes until it just passes the windowpane test. Stop before the last 30 seconds of mixing to sprinkle the rest of the cinnamon over the dough, and then complete mixing. This should leave a couple of streaks of cinnamon in the final dough, and make it more attractive. Ball the dough, cover, and let rest for 1½ hours. The dough should be around 78°F at this stage, which is something you can manipulate by tooling with the water temperature.
The dough should have roughly doubled in size after 2 hours, at which point you should cut the dough into pieces. 110g will get you a slightly undersized bagel, which is what I used at home, or 140g would resemble something more commonly seen in a bagel shop. Pre-shape each of the pieces into a round, poke your thumb through their centers to create the bagels' holes, and let rest for five minutes.
After their rest, the bagels will be more willing to stretch, and that's exactly what you need to do. Gently stretch the rings of dough out as much as you can without tearing them, which could be a little more than an inch on the 110g bagels. Cover these and let rest for 45-60 minutes. Preheat your oven to 350°F.
Bake the bagels! Keep an eye on them, but around 20-30 minutes ought to do it. Tap the bottom, sounds hollow, etc. etc.

What to Do With This Bread

It's a bagel, you know what to do here, right? I normally love lox and cream cheese on my bagel, but with this being cinnamon-raisin I'd say plain cream cheese or butter, sans the cured fish, is the way to go.

The Butcher, The Baker On TV

2012-02-08T14:32:00.000-05:00

Dish It Out, a local cooking show had me on at the end of 2011, and they put the episode up on YouTube! I don't think I actually did very badly, so I'm not too embarrassed to share it on here. This is my post on the restaurant's blog with more explanation, plus another video of the chef's appearance.

In the video I demonstrate how we make our burger at the restaurant, which you may even remember reading about before on this blog.

January 2012 Links

2012-02-05T00:57:00.000-05:00

I had some links I wanted to share for January, but I plum forgot until tonight.

we hosted a Bar Mitzvah, and I made lots of challah

Norwegian Food Illustrated {By an Italian} is the blog I've most recently fallen in love with. I think I came across it by way of this illustration of Pinnekjøtt, which is just adorable(I love the bit about the lambada), but each post has been really entertaining and informative as I continue to try to absorb Norwegian culinary and cultural information every day. Go through the entire history of posts there if you like either art or food, and you'll thank me for referring you.

Bakers Row not only linked to my 12 Stages of Bread Production article, but they deserve some more traffic just for their content. The most recent post is even using a formula from Jeffrey Hamelman, which is something I am completely on board with. That guy is wonderful. I even used his challah formula for the loaves in the photo above.

A fun food tattoo (vegetables!) posted on FYeahTattoos. I still can't figure out if or how cooking will be incorporated into my skin art, but I sure do have an urge to get a lot of it.

And a note: I have enabled comments on all posts on the site. Nobody was knocking down my door trying to post any comments on the blog, but hey, now it is there if anyone has any questions or anything.

Chicken, Pheasant, and Crimini Sausage

2012-02-05T00:16:00.001-05:00

We had a surplus of chicken and pheasant thighs at the restaurant, so I worked this out for an appetizer. It took two attempts but I think I nailed it here.

raw links

It's got a really nice, warm flavor with the mushrooms and shallots. The sweetness of the Worcestershire sauce is a good balance, and it's all very satisfying in the final package. Read on for the recipe.

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Chicken, Pheasant, and Crimini Sausage

Yields: ~15 lbs sausage

Time to complete: 1 hour

Ingredients

      5216g Chicken/Pheasant/Pork Fat
      111g Salt
      6g Thyme Leaves
      18g Parsley, finely chopped
      930g Crimini, sliced fine
      193g Shallots, chopped fine
      28g Garlic, Chopped fine
      4ea Bay Leaves, fresh, beat up with the back of a knife
      72g Worcestershire Sauce
      155g Madeira Wine
      500g Heavy Cream
Butter
Cleaned and soaked hog casings

Procedure:

Mix the meat and fat (eyeball at least 30% fat for the whole mixture) with the salt and Worcestershire sauce. Set in the fridge while you do the rest of your work.
Get the mushrooms, dry, into a very hot pan and leave by themselves until the water has left the mushrooms and evaporated. Add the shallots, bay, and garlic with enough butter to keep from burning and keep things moving until everything is cooked.
Deglaze this pan with the madeira, but don't worry too much about cooking it off since there isn't enough here to come through as raw alcohol in the final preparation. Mix in the thyme and parsley now and spread everything out in a pan in the fridge and wait until cool.
Grind the meat into a mixer bowl, add the mushroom mixture and the cream, and mix on medium-high speed until the cream is subsumed and the mixture becomes tacky
Stuff into hog casings.
Cook them all to 150°F and immediately cool and store, or keep them raw for a few days in the fridge and cook them as needed a la minute, to the same temperature.

ingredients going to the mixer

What to Do With This Bread

It being winter(though the weather in Princeton lately might have you thinking otherwise), I would serve with a light helping of risotto and something else to provide crunch, maybe some vegetable or Parmiggiano-Reggiano chips. There's always toasty bread, too.

Rye Crackers

2012-01-31T16:00:00.000-05:00

I had a bunch of pickled herring in the fridge for our most recent weekly gathering of family and friends, so of course I needed rye crackers and sharp cheese to serve with the fish. As it turns out, not a single person would participate in my herring party and I had to eat it all myself. I thought my youngest brother would actually vomit after yielding to my pressure and putting some into his mouth, however briefly.

It may have taken me a while to go through the herring without help, but it was okay because the batch of crackers kept just fine on their stick, unwrapped, on the counter for at least three days

crackers on a stick

This is a very thin and crunchy cracker which I made with little time on my hands while preparing an actual meal, so it's not knekkebrød (the standard, more leavened accoutrement for pickled herring), though I may adapt the this to produce that crispbread another time. Read on for the recipe.

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I used some sourdough starter in this dough just because I had it lying around, and it would be a quick path to some flavor requiring me only to let the dough sit a little longer(not very difficult) while I prepared an actual meal. I provide alternate measurements for using commercial yeast below.

rolling out

Rye Crackers

Yields: 15 Crackers

Time to complete: 3.5 hours

Click here to get your own copy of this recipe in a spreadsheet in Google Docs(File--Make A Copy to get your own). Also take a look at the guide to using the spreadsheet, which will allow you to print a recipe for any weight of dough or flour in any unit of weight/mass that you enter.

Ingredients

      141g Whole Rye Flour
      66g Whole Wheat Flour
      60g Barm/Sourdough (That's the 50/50 mix of flour and water that you allowed to be colonized by yeast and bacteria weeks ago and subsequently have kept fed and healthy. You have that, right? If not, substitute with 28g of rye flour, 28g of water, and 4g of instant yeast.)
      124g Water
      4g Salt
      7g Honey
      5g Caraway

Procedure:

This won't be too complicated - just throw everything into a mixer bowl and start it spinning with a dough hook. Mix for 2-3 minutes on a medium speed until the dough just barely passes the windowpane test.
Leave dough in a warmish spot for 2.5 hours or so. It won't double in size like a less rough dough would, but it will grow perhaps half again in size.
Cut the dough into pieces that will fit into your pasta roller, squish manually to flatten, and then start rolling, dusting with flour as necessary. Take two or three steps to roll through increasingly finer sizes until the dough starts to tear from the caraway, then back off by one notch on the rest of the dough. On my machine, I got to 4, but I don't know if there is any standard to these things and your mileage may vary.
Punch holes in the middle of your crackers so that they can be stored on a string or stick for display purposes (optional) and bake for 15 minutes at 350F. Your mileage may vary here as well, but just bake until golden brown, delicious, and unburned. And crackery.

baked, cooling

What to Do With This Bread

They keep well just sitting on the counter for 3 days or so, by my recent experience during winter here. I served them with sharp cheese and pickled herring, but everyone else used them as a snack chip and stuck them into some creamy ranch dip. If you do the latter, I might consider giving the crackers a little sprinkling of salt before baking.

Quick Summer Sausage

2012-01-22T22:55:00.000-05:00

It's been a bit cold, what with winter, so I got to thinking of summer sausage. Normally summer sausage is cured and dried at warmish temperatures, which results in a sour flavor as bacteria produce acid during fermentation. This is a sort of fast, cooked version of that which is good for a quick fix!

See how I substituted for the sour flavor without actually fermenting anything after the break.

Quick Summer Sausage
Yields: 10 lbs sausage

Time to complete: 1 hour

Ingredients

      2390g Pork and Pork Fat
      42g Salt
      10g TCM
      11g Black Pepper
      3g Fennel Seed
      5g Coriander
      3g Ginger Powder
      4g Onion Powder
      4g Garlic Powder
      8g Mustard Powder
      30g Nonfat Yogurt Powder/Buttermilk Powder
      60g Worcestershire Sauce
      150g Milk

Procedure:

A few hours ahead of time, mix all of the ingredients together except for the milk. This includes the yogurt or buttermilk powder, which will give the tang of fermentation to the sausage without having to actually hang it up.
Grind the meat into a mixing bowl, add the milk, and mix on medium-high speed for a couple of minutes until the milk incorporates and the whole thing takes on a tacky appearance.
Test a sample in a pan and adjust the seasoning where necessary. When satisfied with that, stuff into sheep casings or form into patties.

What to Do With This

Fry the links or patties up in a pan and serve for breakfast with some sharp cheese and substantial toast.

December Links

2012-01-01T20:53:00.000-05:00

I've subscribed to some blogs and online news outlets that discuss Norwegian culture since I've been studying the language, and came across some things that I'd really like to make and/or eat. This being December, some of them are holiday related. Also, thai food.

a portion my holiday jelly ring(rectangle) production

Sylte is pretty much a norwegian pressed headcheese. I find it interesting that there is a dedicated pressing tool, and it reminds me of the french duck press, except without the blood and... well, honestly they're not at all releated except I know of no other meat-pressing devices.

lussekatter*

Lussekatter are a saffron flavored yeasted bread/cake that is pretty wonderful with tea or hot chocolate. I made some last week for the first time and I fully intend to do it again a couple more times before the winter is through. They're so full of sugar and fat that they keep for a pretty long time, if you can avoid eating them all in a couple of days. I don't remember where the recipe I started with was from, but I changed it around a little bit and recorded the ingredient amounts in metric masses as I put it together. I may get around to making this a blog post, but in the meantime here is my formula, with the kinks not worked out as of this writing.

Thai Street Food is a beautiful book I received for Christmas, full of recipes for things Jenny and I ate in Thailand and I can't wait to start cooking a whole bunch of different things out of it. There's even recipe for black chicken! I've been looking at those darkly-colored birds at the asian market nearby and wondering what the hell to do with them for years. Now I know!

*photo from kj.vogelius via CC license

Chicken Truffle Sausages

2011-12-28T16:53:00.003-05:00

No funny business with these, just a straight truffle-flavored chicken sausage for a Christmas Eve dish at the restaurant. It is definitely a good winter sausage, warm and earthy. It was a pleasure to mix too, what with the truffles. It's possible that is smells almost as good raw as it does cooked.

Concerning the truffles, I'd love to have skipped the oil and just used nothing but truffles themselves, but white truffles(which could have been fragrant enough for the task) are way to expensive for my lowly sausage and the black needed a little help to show through in the end. Their scent just got lost after cooking with the meat, so I added some white truffle oil.

The chicken came from Stonybrook Meadows, where my friend and co-worker Laura is growing and raising all kinds of good food. If you're doing any cooking around Princeton, give them a ring.

cooked in a cook & hold oven

Recipe follows...

Chicken Truffle Sausage
Yields: 5lbs-ish

Time to complete: 1 hour

Ingredients

      1352g Chicken Thighs
      580g Pork Fat
      36g Salt
      6g TCM
      14g Honey
      26g Brandy
      121g Heavy Cream
      18.4g Black Truffles Peelings, chopped fine
      12g White Truffle Oil
      3g Thyme, chopped fine
      5g Parsley, chopped fine
      4g Black Pepper, ground
      .5g Bay Leaf, dry and ground
      50g AP Flour
      32g Milk Powder
      3g Garlic, chopped
      17g Shallots, chopped

Procedure:

Debone the thighs, and chop into grind-able pieces with the fatback. Toss in the shallots and garlic, apply the salt and TCM, and let sit in the fridge for a few hours. In the meantime...
Mix together cream honey, brandy and flour and leave to chill in the fridge. This is the panade, most often made with bread in my experience, but today made with flour.
Grind the meat into a mixing bowl, and include any fluid that came out of the salting meat.
Add all of the rest of the ingredients to the bowl and mix on medium-high speed with a paddle for some 2-3 minutes until the mixture looks tacky.
Wrap a pinky finger of the farce in some plastic and cook in simmering water to test the seasoning. Adjust if necessary.
Stuff into sausage casings(I used hog middles in the photographs), poke each link once or twice with something very fine to avoid any blowouts, and cook in some sort of wet environment(e.g.: a cook & hold oven, simmering pot of water) until the internal temperature is just under 160°F. Once there, toss them into ice water to stop cooking and you're all set.

stuffed, raw

What to Do With This

Sear and heat the sausage through before serving with something rich and creamy. Eating this with some cabbage and a potato gratin would make me really happy inside.

Pheasant Liver Terrine With Quince and Candied Ginger

2011-12-11T17:06:00.001-05:00

Here's some more autumn meat cookery.

the parts of the terrine

Recipe after the break.

Pheasant Liver Terrine With Quince and Candied Ginger

Yields: ~4lbs of terrine

Time to complete: 1hr

Ingredients
      931g Pheasant
      399g Pork Fat
      28g Salt
      7g TCM
      180g Pheasant Liver
      160g Quince Purée
      110g Candied Ginger, rinsed of its chunky sugar coating and diced

A note on the quince puree: The quince purée I used was some that we produced (with ginger, chiles and sweet spices) at the restaurant from a ton of fresh quince. It was pretty wet and if you were to try to get some standard quince paste to resemble what I used in this recipe you would need to add the ginger/chiles/spices and replace some of its mass with water until it reached a pourable consistency. Or just fudge it. It'll all work out, I'm sure, as long as you check seasoning carefully before cooking it.

Procedure:

Sprinkle the salt and TCM over the meat, fat and liver. Mix the salt into everything, but be sure that the liver is kept separate from the rest of the meat. We will not be grinding the liver with everything else.
Taking things right out of the fridge to keep it cold, grind the meat/fat mixture into a mixer bowl. Chop the liver by hand so it will keep its integrity in the final farce. The cure with the TCM will allow it to keep some of its pinkness too. Add this and all the rest of the ingredients to the bowl.
Mix on a medium speed for 2-4 minutes until the mixture takes on a tacky appearance. Test a quick ball of the farce wrapped in plastic wrap in some simmering water and adjust salt/sugar etc. if necessary.
Slap the farce off of a spatula into a vacuum bag, if you want to cook it as I do, or into a terrine mold for a more traditional method. I do the cooking in a steam oven at 200°F, but you may cook it in a terrine mold in a water bath at 350°F. Either way, you're looking for an internal temperature of 150°F.
Once out of the oven, press the terrine with whatever weights you can find that will squish it evenly and set it in the fridge until cool.

What to Do With This

Served warm or at room temperature this would be a tasty terrine to have with a simple salad and some fried shoestring potatoes.

Pheasant Sausage With Portabellas and Hazelnuts

2011-11-23T18:49:00.001-05:00

I'm feeling really productive during this autumn season, and here is another meat concoction full of fall flavors. As I made this sausage it was cold, clammy, and raining outside. I suggest using this recipe as an excuse to stay inside and cook on such a day.

the finished product would look the same as every other naked sausage, so here it is being mixed

Recipe after the break.

Pheasant Sausage With Portabellas and Hazelnuts

Yields: 4¼lbs of forcemeat

Time to complete: 1½ hours

Ingredients

    1105g Pheasant
    473g Pork Fat
    23g Salt
    2g TCM
    2g Thyme
    23g Shallots, diced
    95g Portabellas, diced
    103g Hazelnuts, broken roughly with the underside of a pan
    1x Bay Leaves, fresh, beat up
    6g Parsley, chopped fine
    30g Apple Brandy
    112g Milk

Procedure:

Ahead of time, so that the mixture is able to cool before being mixed into the sausage, cook the shallots in a pan with butter. Keeping things hot, add in the mushrooms and bay leaves, and then the hazelnuts and thyme once the mushrooms are cooked. Finally throw in the brandy and reduce until the alcohol is no longer running on the bottom of the pan. Spread this mixture out on a pan and chill.
Grind the pheasant and fat into a mixing bowl. Add the salt, TCM, parsley, milk, and mushroom/hazelnut mixture. Mix on medium speed for around 3 minutes, or until the mixture comes to look tacky.
Stuff this mixture into casings or molds and cook gently in water or steam until the internal temperature reaches 150°F, after which it should be immediately plunged into ice water to halt the cooking.

What to Do With This

This sausage would do really well as the main bit of an appetizer. Eat with some root vegetables and maybe some more mushrooms. A sturdy leafy green would serve well also.

Buttermilk Biscuits

2011-11-22T08:48:00.001-05:00

I am sure that I am adding zero to the conversation here, since there are hundreds of thousands of other buttermilk biscuit recipes out there(according to Google) as I write this, but here is the current version of the buttermilk biscuit that I make for brunch at the restaurant. It's a little richer than some, what with the heavy cream, but I count this as a boon.


unimpressive photography of a tasty biscuit

Recipe after the break.

Buttermilk Biscuit

Yields: 4lbs of biscuits

Time to complete: 45 minutes

Ingredients

Preferment:

None

Soaker:

None

Final Dough:

      970g Cake Flour
    32g Salt
      44g Baking Powder
      200g Butter
      356g Buttermilk
      194g Heavy Cream

Procedure:

Mix together all of the dry ingredients, and then cut in the butter. This will involve using a couple of bench scrapers to chop the butter into the flour. I make sure to go particularly fine with this step, since for brunch I use this dough to make tiny little one-bite biscuits, and any larger chunks of butter would take up nearly the whole biscuit, but you may not have to be so vigilant.
Briefly go through the flour with your hands now and flatten out between your forefinger and thumb whatever larger bits butter you come across. If you feel the butter melting on your fingers, you've squished too hard. You just want to flatten them, and the flour covering the pieces will keep it from melting if you don't go too crazy on it.
Mix in the wet ingredients. I do this by hand because my batches are huge(nigh on 20 lbs) and I have no tools that would do the job better, but if you have a large and sturdy wooden spoon just do whatever works. The main thing to consider is to avoid overworking this dough as though it were a proper bread. Once the dry stuff is absorbed, and you add a little more moisture if necessary, it is done mixing.
Slap the dough out on to the countertop and squish it to half an inch high. Now cut out the biscuits. The traditional way to cut the biscuits would be a ring mold, repurposed aluminum can, or a specialized biscuit cutter, but unless you have a use for the inevitable scraps from between the round biscuits I suggest just using your bench scraper to cut out squares. There are probably some southern grandmothers who would be upset by this sacrilege, but I am from New York and I do not care.
If your biscuits are 2" square, they'll probably take about 17 minutes in a 375F oven based upon the test I just did.
Eating these while warm would not ruin your day at all.

What to Do With This Bread

Serve as one of the title characters in biscuits and gravy, or next to some collard greens and chicken-fried meat with more gravy, or with butter and jam in the morning. You don't need my help here, you've had biscuits enough times before. Just enjoy your food and the making of it.

Orange-Allspice Venison Terrine

2011-11-15T07:11:00.001-05:00

Hunting season is here! Time for a fairly rich terrine of deer with sweet spices.

Orange-Allspice Venison Terrine

Yields: 4.5 lbs

Time to complete: 1 hour

Ingredients

    1065g Venison
    456g Fat
    30g Salt
    4g TCM
    4g Black Pepper
    6g Allspice
    19g Orange Zest (some orange oil/extract would be cool instead if available)
    55g Shallots, roughly chopped
    10g Garlic, roughly chopped
    195g Cream
    70g Yolks
    48g Egg Whites
    16g Parsley, Chopped finely
    Bacon to wrap

This process will be just about the same as any other non-emulsified sausage on this site, but here it is:

Procedure:

If time allows, it would not hurt to mix the venison, fat, salt, pepper, allspice, orange, shallots, and garlic together ahead of time and let sit overnight to get to know each other.
Whether they laid together overnight or not, go ahead and grind together the preceding list of ingredients.
Add the rest of the ingredients except for the bacon to the forcemeat in the bowl of a mixer and let it spin at a medium speed until it starts to look tacky. This will take a minute or two depending on the temperatures of the ingredients, the bowl, the room, etc.
Now to create the roll with the bacon, start by sprinkling some water onto your counter top and laying out a large sheet of plastic wrap. The water will give the sheet something to cling to instead of itself.
Lay out the strips of bacon alongside eachother, very slightly overlapping, until you've created a foot-long rectangle. Slap down a horizontal pile of the forcemeat in the lower third of the bacon and then wrap the bacon over the meat using the plastic to create a roll, as pictured at the top of the post. Repeat as necessary until your terrine is all done up.
I cooked this in a steam oven at 200F for about 35 minutes, but it could also be cooked in simmering water if very well-wrapped in plastic. Either way, gently get the internal temperature to just about 150F and pop it into an ice bath to stop the cooking.

What to Do With This

I suppose this could be the start of a tasty sandwich, but we are serving it just on the charcuterie plate with mustards and baguette. As flavorful as it is, it doesn't need much more on it.

Five-Spice Apricot Pork Sausage

2011-10-24T20:21:00.001-04:00

Five-Spice Apricot Pork Sausage

Yields: 4 lbs of sausage

Time to complete: 1 hour

Ingredients

      1625g Pork
      5g TCM
      191g Dried Apricots, chopped
      9g Five-Spice Powder
      7.5g Ginger, grated
      12.5g Fish Sauce
      5g Honey
      82.5g Water

Procedure:

Grind all ingredients, except for the water, together. Keep everything cold! You can see in my photo above that I used a coarse die, leaving some attractive white chunks of fat in the sausage.
Add the water and mix on medium speed with a paddle until it develops a tacky appearance.
Stuff into hog casings, twist into links if desired, and prick all over with a pin to prevent unplanned bursting.
Simmer the links in water at around 190°F until their internal temperature reaches very nearly 150°F. Remove and plunge them immediately into ice water to halt the cooking.
Fin!

What to Do With This

Chopping this up into a ricey stir-fry would work okay, but at the restaurant it just went onto the charcuterie plate as plain slices with asian mustard and crackers.

Creme Fraiche Coffee Cake

2011-09-21T13:25:00.000-04:00

I make this cake for brunch on Sundays and could probably eat the entire bowl of batter without even cooking any. Sweet and sour. Yum.


still warm

Creme Fraiche Coffee Cake

Yields: 1 hotel pan of cake

Time to complete: 40 minutes

Ingredients

Preferment:

None

Soaker:

None

Final Dough:

       567g AP Flour
       312g Butter
       572g Sugar
       351g Egg
       8g Vanilla extract
       420g Creme fraiche
       4g Salt
       12g Baking powder
       4g Baking soda

Procedure:

Beat the butter with a paddle in a mixer bowl until it gets fluffy. It will be a minute or two, particularly if you didn't think ahead and get it to room temperature.
Add the sugar to the butter and then let it spin for another round until very fluffy.
Add the creme fraiche, vanilla, and egg to the butter and set it spinning again, being careful not to start off on high speed and cover the kitchen in half-made cake batter. Mix in by parts if necessary.
Scrape the butter down off of the sides halfway if it's not really mixing in.
Mix the remaining (dry) ingredients together in another bowl, homogenize, and add to the wet. Mix this just until it resembles a rather thick pancake batter. for bonus points, mix by gently folding with a spatula.
Prepare your hotel pan/cake pan/whatever by spraying with non-stick spray, laying down parchment that goes up the sides as well as the bottom, and then spraying once more.
Pour the batter into the pan, give the entire thing a few stern knocks on the counter to knock out any large air bubbles, and get that thing in the oven. It took me about 23 minutes in a 325°F convection oven. In an oven without a fan, you could probably look at a similar timeframe but with an extra 50°F.

What to Do With This Bread

We just cut it up and serve it as-is with the scones, croissants et al. It's also substantial enough that it could totally hod up to an icing. I even tried some of the batter out as a really sweet pancake and it worked just fine. I imagine it could serve well in some petit fours if you made tiny little pancake medallions out of it.

Apple-Cinnamon Muffins

2011-09-14T01:32:00.000-04:00

Hey, been a while since I've posted on here. Let's fix that.

It's not quite the season for these yet, but at least it will be up here so you can be ready in a few months.

Apple-Cinnamon Muffins

Yields: Some muffins

Time to complete: 20-25 minutes

Ingredients

Preferment:

None

Soaker:

None

Final Dough:

      400g AP Flour
      333g Apples, Granny Smith, Diced
      171g Butter, melted
      92g Eggs
      29g Yolks
      3g Vanilla Extract
      152 Sugar
      12 Baking Powder
      3 Salt
      5 Cinnamon
      Turbinado sugar for dusting

Procedure:

Cook the apples gently until easily it turns easily into apple sauce, covered in a pot on the stove or in the oven. Reserve the fluid that cooks out.
Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and cinnamon and mix until evenly distributed.
Combine the apples, butter, eggs, yolks and vanilla extract and then add them all to the dry mixture. Mix until it resembles a rather thick and lumpy pancake batter.
Spoon or pipe the batter into a muffin tin and cook... until done. The tiny ones I made in the photo up top took about 12 minutes at 325°F in a convection oven.

What to Do With This Bread

Place in mouth, chew. At the restaurant we also make this with different toppings, like the stuff you would find on a crumble, so go ahead and experiment with that. Generally something with a crunch is a good idea.

Valentine's Day Heart-Shaped Baguette

2011-02-15T18:01:00.000-05:00

I had a little fun with some straight baguette dough on Valentines Day, and here was the result.

First I put the baguette to proof into this shapely metal thing that I found:

Then tied a string over the pan to create the indentation in the top:

Then baked as normal. The dough expanded into the string, which maintained the indentation, and the pointed bottom of the pan which gave us the heart. And when it was done...

Chickpea Pita

2011-02-09T11:27:00.000-05:00

I came up with this pita for something or other on the lunch menu a while ago involving curry. The chickpea flower makes it a pretty yellow color while also making the bread more delicate with its lack of gluten. Recipe after the break.

Chickpea Pita
Yields: 1 Dozen Pitas

Time to complete: Around 3 hours

Ingredients

Preferment:

None

Soaker:

None

Final Dough:

      652g Bread Flour
      280g Chickpea/Gram Flour
    484g Water
    14g Instant Yeast
    18g Salt
    2g Madrass Curry Powder (optional)
    52g Ghee/Butter (melted)

Procedure:

Mix the flours, salt, yeast and curry powder(if using).
Add the water and butter and mix on medium speed until it just about passes the windowpane test; maybe four minutes.
Let the dough rise 1.5 hours until about doubles in size.
Portion the dough into 120g pieces and then shape each of these into a tight ball. Let these balls rise one more hour.
Get the oven nice and hot at 425F and roll the balls out into rounds. You should do your best not to roll any thinner than 1/8in, or the pocket is less likely to form in the oven.
Place the sheet of flattened pitas directly onto the bottom of the oven (or put the pitas themselves directly onto a baking stone if you've got one!) and bake for 6-7 minutes. It should be about a minute after the pocket blows up that they are done; if they brown on top, they've gone too long.

What to Do With This Bread

Well, I used it to hold some acidic chickpea salad. It wouldn't make a bad gyro, either.

January Links

2011-02-04T21:41:00.001-05:00

So, that was January! A food-related photo and some links lie ahead.

a dessert spread from my anniversary dinner

BoroughBees is a blog about bee-keeping, run by a fellow SA goon, and I love it. He's really had a lot to write about since the Mystery of the Red Honey in parts I, II and III and anyone, especially around NYC, will probably be interested in the drama of the story. It's nuts. Almost overnight a whole bunch of beehives suddenly turned a sickly bright red and it's up to our heroes to get to the bottom of things. It's like the beginning of some strange bee-centric horror movie.

Nordic Breads sells their ruis bread at the New Amsterdam Market in NYC every weekend, as well as by internet order, and they're quite good if you like rye sourdough. They were recently featured in a small article in the NYT Dining Section.

Consumption of Buffalo Meat at an All-Time High is the title of another NYT article which discusses the growing success of American bison meat in the markets alongside much cheaper beef. The interesting part is the disagreement between ranchers over whether to finish their bison on grain or not. In my experience with beef, I prefer the flavor of grain-finished meat but a well-reared cow is still delicious either way, and I'm interested to taste the difference between bison both ways.

An Afternoon With Dario Cecchini, the Dante of Meat

2011-01-28T18:48:00.002-05:00

Here in the states, if anyone is familiar with Dario Cecchini it is probably from the his role in the book "Heat." In Heat, Bill Buford wrote about his culinary journey from Mario Batali's kitchen at Babbo to Dario's butcher shop in Panzano. And here is Dario.

Dario, all smiles

Dario was made to be quite a character in the book, and as it turns out, he is just as interesting in real life. I got to attend a demo with Dario at the French Culinary Institute recently and it was such a good time I couldn't wait to come back and share some photographs, notes, and recipes with the internet. All that after the break.

packed house

He spoke only a bit of English and after letting the overflowing crowd know it was "very very pleasure," his translator, on the left in the photo above, took over. As he set up he spoke a little of his philosophy, wanting to share "not just technique but a passion for meat." And passionate he is. Dario comes from a long line of butchers, his shop being passed down to him from his father, and to him from his, and so on. Having been at it for more than 30 years now, Dario clearly enjoys being an ambassador for good meat and good Italian food.

getting started

The demo was on butchering a leg from an American cow, procured through Eataly and his friend Mario Batali. The cattle Dario usually butchers at home in the Chianti region of Italy are grass-fed on the hills right around the wineries, and he gave the impression that this is the right way to do things by him, but he conceded that it can be hard to produce the best cow on grass alone and did not seem to have a problem with grain finishing. The meat on the table was nice and fat, from a grain-fed female and leg was the biggest I've ever actually seen. Though this one was fresh, in his shop the meat is usually 30-40 days old before butchery.

panzanese steak

big shank, recipe below

The different areas of Italy have different methods of butchery, as for much of its meat history it was not a unified state, and Dario demonstrated for us the way his region, and his family, would break down a leg of beef. As you might expect from a butchering tradition that may not even have blinked at the invention of the band saw, the cuts begin with the major seams between the muscles. From there further cuts are taken from the major muscles in the leg based on how they will cook, i.e. The more tender cuts may end up as the huge Panzanese steaks that Buford so mouth-wateringly described in his book, while the tougher meat from around the knee or shank will be braised until they turn almost magically into the most flavorful pieces of all.

the leg breaking into its four main pieces

And on that note, a couple of simple recipes from my scribblings.

Christmas Beef Shank

Debone shank and season with salt, pepper, and rosemary.
Saw across the thigh bone and extract the marrow.
Stuff the shank with the marrow just as it would have been positioned within the bone, and tie closed in a roll.
Cover partially with water or broth and add a kilo of whole shallots and a half glass of EVOO.
Cook in the oven for 3 hours, covered, at 350F.
Halfway through cooking, add some vin santo(an Italian dessert wine).
After done and allowed to settle, slice across and serve.

Polpettone de Medici

Grind 800g beef, 200g pork, and 100g red onion twice through successively more fine dies.
Mix very thoroughly with 1 egg, salt, pepper, thyme, and garlic until tacky and holding together well.
Form into large(this is as specific as he got) balls, roll in breadcrumbs, and bake at 350F for 1.5hrs.

Dario showed everybody how he cuts meat, of course, but the real take-away was his philosophy. He seems to appreciate, more than anything, the meat and in particular the work of artisans as they bring their traditions into the future. In the end, talking about a school for butchery which he would like to open, he said the motto would be "You only have what you're capable of being." So, uh, there it is.

Dario preparing and people eating his "chianti sushi"

Corned Beef Tongue

2011-01-21T21:29:00.000-05:00

Corned beef tongue is simple enough... it's rather like the corned beef we all know, but it's a tongue instead of a brisket. There's an extra step of removing the very tough skin, but otherwise it's easy as pie. Recipe after the break.

As simple as this is, it's really going to be more of a method than a recipe. To sum up,we'll just brine the tongues, smoke them, and cook them gently with moisture. Here we go:

Fix up a brine. Find how many liters of water it will take to cover them in whatever you'll be using as a brine bucket and, a liter being a kg of water, calculate 7% of that for the salt and 3.5% for the sugar. For instance, if you need 10L to cover a bunch of tongues(good luck fitting that in your fridge at home), you will require 700g of salt and 350g of sugar. If you have TCM/Instacure #1 you can replace a small portion of the salt with that to keep the meat red through cooking and add a tiny bit to the flavor. Also feel free to play around with other sweeteners to impart any flavors you like, like molasses or honey.
Stir these into the water until absorbed and add the tongues. Leave in the brine, in the fridge, for a week
Remove the tongues from the brine.
Cut the large piece of muscle off of the underside of the tongue to smoke separately - you can find a seam in the fat and connective tissue to follow if you look for it. I do this for two reasons: it exposes more of the tongue's surface area for the smoke to flavor and the meat on the bottom is different enough, I argue, to handle separately.

bottom and top
Pat dry and place the tongues on a rack in the fridge to dry further. It can take a few hours to overnight to develop the pellicle, or tacky surface of the meat to which smoke will more readily adhere.
Once dry, smoke until the tongues take on a dark color.
Cook until done by steaming, braising or, as I usually do, roasting in a steam oven. I'd generally say "done" is when a knife easily pierces the meat, but try not to be fooled by the skin which will be tough much longer than everything else. Poke from the underside.
Peel the skin off of the tongue once cool enough to handle. With lamb tongues, for instance, this could be done by hand but in the case of beef you will pretty much need to do all of the trimming with a knife. You'll know you missed some of the skin if your first bite is as a chewy as a rubber tire.

cooked

What To Do With This
My tongues usually get sliced thin and put on a plate of mixed meats with condiments. It could also serve as the meat component of a breakfast hash or be chopped up and used in taco filling.

Also use the smoky scraps from trimming the skin in a stock of some sort as you would use a ham bone for your split-pea soup. Reduce waste and eat better!

Buckwheat Sourdough Bread

2011-01-14T20:21:00.000-05:00

Do you like buckwheat? This is a grain that most Americans don't seem to be very familiar with, but it packs a lot of flavor and is worth a look. Here is a bread made with only part buckwheat, yielding what I think is a good balance of taste(the buckwheat can be very strong) and texture(the buckwheat doesn't provide strong of a gluten network to tighten the dough like white flour). The recipe follows.

Buckwheat Sourdough Bread
Yields: 2 1-lb loaves

Time to complete: Day 1: 6 hours, Day 2: 4 hours

Ingredients

Preferment:

      88g Buckwheat Flour
      88g Sourdough Barm/Mother(1:1)
      44g Water

Soaker:

None

Final Dough:

      380g Bread Flour
      219g Buckwheat Preferment
      4g Instant Yeast
      245g Water
      10g Salt
      3g Caraway, toasted
      14g Molasses
      44g Buckwheat Groats, cooked

Procedure:

Mix all of the preferment ingredients and let sit at room temperature until it grows to about half-again its original size. Either continue from here or place in the fridge overnight.
After some hours or overnight, combine all the rest of the ingredients with the starter and mix in a stand mixer for 4-5 minutes. It will barely pass the windowpane test with all that buckwheat in there, but that will be fine. Form into a ball, cover, and let sit for an hour.
After the first hour, fold the dough over on itself and leave covered again for another hour.
Divide the dough into two pieces and roll into either a batard(torpedo) or boule(ball). Let rise covered for an hour.
Bake the loaves at 450F until the center reaches 200F or a tap on the bottom sounds hollow. Let cool on a rack.

PS: If you instead make the formula with 1600 DTW it makes a very nice larger boule.

What to Do With This Bread

Butter and salt: delicious. Toasting it to bring out the nutty buckwheat and making a crusty ham sandwich wouldn't disappoint either.

Sesame Miso Buns

2011-01-08T16:21:00.130-05:00

I had a light day, as far as bread goes, earlier this week and found great success on a first attempt at a bread with miso paste. I used a white miso, so it was fairly gentle and resulted in a delicately flavored sesame-covered bun. Experience suggests that the soft and chewy bread would also have done very well as a steamed bun with some azuki bean paste rolled into the middle.

sesame miso buns

In order to get as much miso taste into the dough as possible I just replaced all of the salt with the salt in the miso. This specific miso had 800mg of sodium per serving(16g), so I was able to calculate from that how much miso would make for the necessary amount of salt. If you use a miso with more, or less, salt you will have to change the numbers accordingly.

Sesame Miso Buns
Yields: A baker's dozen

Time to complete: 3 hours

Ingredients

Preferment:

None

Soaker:

None

Final Dough:

      478g Bread Flour
      7g Instant Yeast
      16g Honey
      76g Shiro Miso
      38g Malt Powder
      34g Vegetable Oil
      252g Water

Procedure:

Whisk the miso paste into the water.
Mix all of the dry ingredients together and finally add the miso/water.
Mix for 5 minutes in a stand mixer on low. It will be a little longer by hand, as well also more difficult, because it is a very slack dough which will want to gum up on your fingers.
Form the dough into a ball and cover for an hour and a half.
Divide the dough into 66g portions for a medium sized dinner roll.
Roll these into a ball and roll the top half in sesame seeds. Let rise, covered, for 45 minutes to an hour.
Bake at 325F for 20 minutes, remove and let cool.

Again, I think this would also be good if you rolled some azuki bean paste into the middle and cooked them in a steamer rather than the oven. I'll leave that experiment up to you.

What to Do With This Bread

Serving as a dinner roll with a meaty meal of Asian flavors would make sense. Serving them steamed as mentioned above could even make them an appetizer all their own. Maybe even a mini banh mi sandwich for snacks.

Morcilla: Spanish Blood Sausage

2011-01-06T20:03:00.001-05:00

Aha, blood sausage! This one is a really fun and messy project. Hopefully, with this recipe, some might also say it's a tasty one. A lot of blood comes out of a pig at slaughter and it would be a shame to waste it all. Make sure you use fresh blood, like within a day or two of slaughter, or the sausage won't set firm. Not that it would hurt anybody after an extra couple of days, but it will look more like soup than sausage. Of course you could make blood soup instead, but that's for someone else's blog.
Not a lot of folks that I know from the US seem to like blood sausage very much, or have even tried it, but any readers in the UK should be pretty familiar with black pudding, a mixture of blood with oats and some simple spices, for breakfast. Here is my version of the Spanish approach.

mess!

Morcilla

Ingredients

    1000g Pig Blood
    810g Rice, 90% cooked
    800g Red Onion, raw, chopped
    780g Bacon, raw, smoked hard and ground
    100g Eggs
    200g Heavy Cream
    45g Salt
    10g Black Pepper
    2g Cinnamon
    3g Cloves
    40g Paprika
    12g Chipotles, dry,de-seeded and ground

Procedure:

The day before, cook the rice about about 90% of the way to finished and mix immediately with the raw red onions. Let cool in the fridge overnight. The rice will soak up a lot of moisture from the onions.
Whisk the salt and spices into the cream and eggs.
Whisk the blood into the cream mixture.
Add the bacon, rice and onions evenly to the blood mixture.
Funnel this slop into hog casings(which you have checked for holes by filling with water, right?) or even vacuum bags, as I did. Whatever the vessel, it will be messy.
Poach gently in simmering water to 150F. Don't go poking with a thermometer too early, or all of the fluid contents will pour out into the water. Wait until things are more firm.

What to Do With This

Fry slices and serve with some beans and rice. This would also work well in a paella if you dig blood.

Slaughtering Local Geese

2011-01-03T13:45:00.000-05:00

My co-worker slaughtered a couple of her own geese recently and I took a couple of pictures. After the break is a bit of gore and discussion.

She had been trying to figure out how to personally slaughter the geese for a week or two before getting the advice she needed from a farmer. He said to cut a hole in the corner of a burlap sack, and then throw the goose inside, feeding its head through the hole. Caught in the sack as it will be, it will be unable to flap around and its throat can be cut without a huge fight. That is what she did and it worked well enough.

neck

It could have been a cleaner job but it's not bad for the first time. After slaughter she began to remove the feathers which was hard to do manually. A very large pot of boiling water to blanch the bird would probably have made things easier. Even better than that would be the machine we saw on our field trip around the corner to Griggstown Farm:

a bowl full of big black dildos

.... in which the birds are whacked uniformly with small rubber sticks which catch the small and difficult-to-remove feathers and pull them from the skin. Here was her slow-and-steady manual method.

maybe even save the down and make a pillow

After this is all done, it's pretty much the same process as I've documented previously with some ducks to remove the guts and get to butchering.

Now cooking the bird is another matter entirely...