Molten hollandaise/cauliflower cakes

I've had this: http://blogs.cotemaison.fr/torchons-serviettes/2010/05/08/coulant-au-chou-fleur/
 on my Pinterest board for some months.  It looked intriguing, but it clearly wasn't a summer dish, so it sat waiting for cooler weather.  It looked rich, gooey, warm.  And it's full of vegetables and hollandaise sauce.  What's not to love?  In fact, there's really only one problem with this dish...I have no idea what to call it in English.  It's not a souffle, and it seems misleading to call it a muffin.  It's sort of cake-like in its ingredients, but the US doesn't usually do savory cakes, so "cauliflower cake" sounds weird.  In French it's called a "coulant", which sounds much sexier in French, but really just means "fluid", not the most appetizing name for a food.  It matters not what you call it.  What matters is that it's really, really delicious, and very easy.

You begin by having hollandaise.  Normally this is a fiddly operation, involving butter and eggs and wrists of steel, but lucky for you, Trader Joe's has it in the refrigerated section.  This was mildly earth-shattering when I discovered it for the first time, because while I do have some awesome wrist muscles, some days you just want some Eggs Benedict without all the fuss.

Next, take your hollandaise, put it into a silicon mini-muffin mold (or even an ice cube tray if you must), and put it in the freezer.  Now you have little pucks of frozen hollandaise, which is EVEN BETTER because you can have hollandaise on a whim for months.  On anything.  On a ham sandwich.  You're welcome.  (Now you know why it is I can lose a whole bag of aspic in my freezer.  It is full of a panoply of frozen ingredients for spontaneous future decongelation.)

A tiny puck of hollandaise, waiting for its moment

At some future date, when you're ready, bust out your frozen hollandaise sauce.  Swing by your trusty Trader Joe's, and grab a bag of roasted cauliflower from the freezer section.  These take about thirty minutes all told, making them quite suitable for a weeknight dinner.  They'd probably pair nicely with baked ham, or a hearty salad.

Hollandaise dimples

Ingredients:
1 8 oz package of hollandaise from Trader Joe's (you will have leftovers).
200 g of cooked cauliflower
2 whole eggs, plus 1 yolk
70 g of grated cheese (Comté, Emmentaler, mild cheddar in a pinch...)
60 g of all purpose flour
20 cl of milk (about 6.7 oz)
2 Tbsp olive oil
salt, pepper, nutmeg

Freeze the hollandaise into pucks overnight.

Pre-heat the oven to 400 F.

Find a nice big bowl, and mix everything except the hollandaise in it with a stick blender until it's thick, like muffin batter.

Pour the puree into muffin tins.   I found this filled both a big muffin tin and a mini-muffin tin, your mileage may vary.  If using mini-muffin tins, cut the hollandaise down into smaller pieces.

 Slip a puck of hollandaise in the center of each mold and make sure it's covered by the mix

Bake at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes.

Xiao Long Bao take too long.

Shanghai-style Xiaolongbao (小籠包), also known as soup dumplings, are a delicacy I can't get enough of.  When they're well made, they're a juicy pork and shrimp morsel, swimming in soup, inside a thin wrapper that bursts the moment you bite in.  I've made them in the past, and it had been a while, so I set forth to make them again.  However, every time I make them, I always forget why it is I never make them.  It's because they're a colossal pain in the neck, and very labor intensive.

Firstly, to make soup dumplings, you need to make aspic, otherwise known as "MEAT JELLO!?!".  This forms the basis of the "soup" in the soup dumplings.  It's a solid at room temperature, so you can mix it with the filling, and then when it's steamed, it melts into soupy delicious broth.  You just combine some smoked ham, chicken wings and backs, and some sauces and seasonings, then cook it for 3 hours.  No big, right?  If you're like me, you have uninterrupted 3 hour blocks of time just lying around all over the place.  *cough*.  The good news is, it's almost all hands off time, so you can go do other things while your aspic is rendering.  Once it's done, you pour it into a large pan and refrigerate it, and then chop it into tiny cubes the next morning, which I did, and then promptly threw them into the freezer and forgot about them.  For 8 months.  And a house move.

Whilst rooting around in my freezer looking for dinner 8 months later, I stumbled across a small package of aspic, and slapped my forehead.  I had been going to make soup dumplings!  Fortunately it's starting to cool off again, and it's good weather for soup, so I decided to make them on a Sunday for lunch.  I bought all my ingredients, half-froze the pork, half-thawed the shrimp, chopped everything, mixed everything, lined my steamer with cabbage leaves...  Ready to roll!

Now comes the bad part.  The recipe makes approximately 4 cups of filling.  The filling must be parceled, tablespoon by tablespoon, onto wonton wrappers, each of which must be lovingly sealed completely, otherwise all the soup leaks out.  I wetted.  I pinched, I pleated.  I steamed, and steamed, and steamed.  It took me two hours to make lunch, and I still had a small mountain of un-steamed soup dumplings left, because the recipe makes about 48.

So the good news is, I have leftover soup dumplings in the freezer for a rainy day.  Which is good, because I swear that I am never making the blasted things again, at least until the next time I forget how long they take to make.

Recipe from Bon Appetit, with significant modifications.

Xiao Long Bao (Shanghai Soup Dumplings)

For the aspic:
10 cups water
3 pounds chicken wings (or other cartilaginous parts.  Back, neck, leg joints...)
2 1/2 ounces unsweetened smoked ham, or 1 oz prosciutto
3/4 cup coarsely chopped green onions (white parts only)
2 (1-inch-diameter 1/2-inch-thick) slices peeled fresh ginger
2 whole dried shiitake mushrooms
1 large garlic clove, flattened
1 tablespoon soy sauce
2 teaspoons sake
1 Tbsp gelatin

Take everything except the gelatin, put it in a pot over low heat, and walk away for about 2-2.5 hours.  Check it every so often, but you shouldn't run out of water.

At 2.5 hours, strain it, and return the liquid to the pot (save the meat, you can turn it into another round of dumpling filling, or throw it in chicken broth and have a passable soup.)

Boil the liquid until you've reduced it to about two cups, about 20-30 minutes, and then remove from heat.

Mix the gelatin with a bit of cold water in a bowl, and then mix it thoroughly into the hot liquid.

Pour the liquid into a large pan (ideally metal), and let it cool in the fridge until it's solid (a few hours.)

Remove from pan and chop into cubes.  Refrigerate or freeze until you're ready for the next step.

For the dumplings:
Aspic from previous step
1 pound pork, ground or hand minced
1/4 pound raw shrimp, finely chopped (easier if they're half frozen)
1/3 cup finely chopped green onions
3 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons soy sauce (or use a mix of soy sauce and fish sauce)
1 large garlic clove, minced
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon fresh ginger, minced
1/2 teaspoon mirin
1/4 teaspoon sesame oil
1 package of wonton wrappers (about 48)
1 head of cabbage OR one package parchment paper

Mix all of the ingredients in a large bowl except for the wrappers and cabbage.

Set cabbage leaves or parchment paper in a steamer (bamboo steamers are cool-looking, but even a vegetable steamer will work, as long as you line it.)

Fill a small bowl with water, and set it next to your prep space.  Dip your fingers in it, and run them around the perimeter of a wonton wrapper.

Place about a tablespoon of filling in the center of the wrapper.

Bring the opposite two corners of the wrapper together, to form a triangle, and press them together gently.  Repeat with the other two corners.  Now very delicately line up each pair of edges, and press them together until they seal, making sure there are no holes where your precious soup can leak out.

Place the soup dumpling in the steamer, and repeat the sealing process with the next dumpling.  Make sure that none of the dumplings touch, they're very sticky, and will tear when you try to remove them.

Once you're out of room in the steamer basket, place the dumplings over high heat, and steam them for about 5 minutes (note that cooking time begins when the column of steam comes out of the pot, not when you put them on the burner.)

Remove the steamer from the heat, and very, very carefully, lift each dumpling out so as not to tear them.  If you're using parchment paper, you can cheat, and lift out the whole paper, otherwise you have to carefully remove the dumplings one by one.  I find that it's actually easiest to lift them by the top with my fingers, but you may find other techniques that work better.

Repeat the steaming process with another round of dumplings, until a: you run out of dumpling ingredients, or b: you're really sick of making dumplings, or c: you're completely full of soup dumplings and about to burst.

If you have any remaining dumpling ingredients and are not totally sick of folding them, assemble them and freeze them on parchment paper.

A Cucumber-Rose Lemon Drop

You might wonder if I'm mad. If you've never had Hendrick's gin, I would understand. The first time I heard of a cucumber rose gin, I thought it sounded crazy, too.

But it works. And it works so, so well. It's hard to explain, so I'll just leave you for now with:  try it.

---

For New Year's Eve, it was suggested that we make "French 75" cocktails since we're in Paris. Lemon, gin, sugar, champagne. Definitely the sort of thing that has "hangover" written all over it. And easy-to-drink, too.

So we made them, using Hendrick's, because it's our favorite gin. And they were fantastic. But while I was making them, I tasted the syrup that you pour into the champagne, and realized that it would make a great drink all by itself.

And so here it is:

The Cucumber-Rose Lemon Drop

You need:

• Two fresh lemons, of a good, tasty variety. I used some in-season Spanish ones. You'll be tasting the flavors of the lemon in the end product, so use something that's tasty, not just sour and bitter.
• Extra-fine sugar (poudre is extra-fine, don't use powdered, it has corn starch in it to stop it from clumping)
• Hendrick's Gin

To make:

1)  Halve your lemons, and prepare your favorite juicing device. I got about 75ml of juice out of these guys.

2) Sweeten to take the edge off the lemons. This is going to be entirely subjective. Add slowly, mixing well, and taste until it goes from "too tart", to "slightly sweet and still tart". For me, with this batch, that was 4 of these spoonfuls.

Note these are not typical kitchen spoons, they're tiny little spoons about the size of my thumb. I may have used a table-spoon all told.

3) Pour into a small glass, and add gin to taste. Again with that subjective bit. As you add the gin, the cucumber and rose will get stronger vs. the lemon. Stop when you have a nice balance.  50/50 is a good starting point, and then adjust to taste from there. At some point I'll actually measure these, but honestly, it's not how I make them, and the lemons are likely to be different from batch to batch.

Bacon from "Frenchie to Go"

Because sometimes you really miss things from home, but this isn't exactly something from home.

First, some background.

On the street below our apartment is a fantastic series of restaurants by Chef Gregory Marchand.  He's a french chef that picked up the nickname Frenchie when he worked for Jamie Oliver in London.  

He runs a fantastic trio of places here on rue du Nil:

• Frenchie - the main restaurant, small, cozy, fantastic, impossible to get reservations for (2+ month wait)
• Frenchie's Wine Bar - first come/first serve seating because the restaurant has a 2-3 month waiting list for reservations
• Frenchie-to-Go - a bistro/café that does breakfast and lunch

I confess that the coupling of the fantastic food and the fact that's the closest place to get lunch causes me to eat there regularly (sometimes twice a week).   But the staff is great.  Warm and friendly greetings.  And the food is, well...  it's fantastic.

One of my lunch favorites is his pulled pork sandwich. It's idiosyncratically french, with the use of a coleslaw that contains beets as well as cabbage.  But it works.  Oh does it work.  It's easily the best pulled pork I've ever had.

The other favorite is a bacon fumé english muffin avec un oeuf et de cheddar.  It's a "breakfast" sandwich.  But it's divine.  The bacon is out of this world, house-cured with maple syrup and then smoked.  The cheese is a fantastic Cheddar from Neal's Yard Dairy.

When we first ate at the café, I noticed that the menu said that they sold bacon by the kilo.  They didn't for a long time (they needed to cure a large enough stock of it, because it's house-cured).  But it was finally available. 

And it's perfect.  It is exactly what I imagine bacon to be.  Just enough fat, well marbled, smokey, with just a hint of sweetness hiding among the flavors.

I don't have any photos from after cooking it, I'm sorry.  It doesn't last that long.  In fact, when I cooked up a bunch for brunch on Christmas, I had to stake out my own claim, or it all would have vanished.

Simple Prime Rib Tips

Aaron and I did prime rib (a.k.a., côté de bœuf, should you be looking for it on a French menu) twice this holiday season, first a trial run with cheap prime rib, and then a second round for Christmas dinner, using aged grass-fed beef from the fantastic locally sourced high end boucherie across the street from me. Sadly, I also had a house full of guests, and no time to photo, so there are no prep photos available.

Like many things in cooking, it's actually really easy to make awesome prime rib once you know the technique. Was the grass-fed dry aged beef sublime? Oh yes. Was the cheap beef also delicious and meltingly tender? Yep.  In fact, it was good enough, easy enough, and cheap enough I might just add prime rib to my list of weekend dinner options.  Salt on Friday night, cook on Saturday or Sunday, some lazy rainy day when I don't plan to leave the house.  It's cheaper than a decent burgers and fries for two.

As usual, Kenji Alt-Lopez (from Serious Eats) is my go-to guy for food science, but I wound up using a mix of techniques from him and the Amazing Ribs guy to get it just right.

First:

Salt. Salt, salt, salt. As I mentioned in this post on the old blog, salt is magic. We salted 24 hours in advance both times, wrapped it tightly with waxed paper, and let it rest in the fridge to let all the salt permeate the meat. 

Second:

Cut the bone off, and tie your roast so that it's as round as possible. That helps it cook evenly, so that it's the right temperature and level of doneness. The bone doesn't actually add flavor (that is a myth), and you can use the bone for making gravy later.

Third:

Once you've tied it and the salt has had time to penetrate, slather it with a tablespoon or two of an herbed oil. Amazing Ribs has some tasty sounding recommendations, but I just used peppercorns and rosemary in olive oil. Let that sit for another hour or so to extract all the oil based flavor compounds from the herbs. 

Fourth:

Cook it low and slow. I cooked it at about 225 ºF, and for six people's worth of prime rib, it took about two hours to get it to 120 ºF in the center, which is medium rare. 

Fifth:

Once it's near the appropriate internal temp, sear it in a very lightly oiled hot pan. Direct heat, hot as you can get, to develop a nice brown crust on that oiled herb surface without cooking the interior any further.

Once I had seared the meat, I set it aside to rest, not because it needs it, but because it bought me time to sear the bones that I had held aside, and then to build up a nice red wine pan sauce using the searing juices from both. I seared the bones in the same pan as the meat, poured a cup of wine over them and reduced it along with some rosemary, and then finished it with whatever drippings I had, and a bit of beef broth.  Then I pulled the bones and added a sprinkle of fresh parsley.  If the drippings were very lean (mine were), a tiny pat of butter swirled in helps the sauce become a nice rich emulsion that won't run off your meat.

Sources:

http://www.amazingribs.com/recipes/beef/prime_rib_roast.html

http://www.seriouseats.com/2012/12/how-to-make-perfect-prime-rib-for-christmas-dinner.html

The world's simplest chocolate mousse

Hervé This is a culinary genius.  But perhaps you already knew that.  You may have heard his name whispered in hushed tones between your foodie coworkers, or stumbled across a YouTube video of him doing mad food science.

But if you needed further proof, I present the two ingredient chocolate mousse.  (Ok, really just one ingredient.  Water doesn't count.  It's chocolate mousse, made with chocolate.  Just chocolate.)  It's delicious, rich, stupidly simple, vegan, kosher, halal, dolphin safe, etc., etc.  If you can eat chocolate, you can eat this.  You can jazz it up with liqueurs or fruit, dollop whipped cream on top, or just savor it, bite by chocolatey bite.

Here is the cool science part: to make this, you're basically doing the same thing with chocolate that you do with whipped cream.  When you whip cream, you're incorporating tiny bits of air into a water-fat emulsion, and when there's just the right amount of fat in the emulsion, the air gets trapped, making a stable foam.  The reason why you add water to the chocolate is to create the right ratio of water to fat.  Once you have that nailed, you whisk like mad as it cools, and voila, mousse.

As a bonus, if you over-whisk it, or screw up the ratio, all you have to do is remelt it, correct the proportions if needed, and rewhisk.  Try doing THAT with whipped cream.  (Wait, can you do that with whipped cream?  Gonna need to look into that.  I'll report back at some later date.  Right after I figure out how to do this with olive oil and water, because infused olive oil whipped foam.)

Without further ado, or any more gushing about chemistry, here is the recipe.  Yes, you can halve or double it.

• 6 oz water (3/4 cup)
• 8 oz good quality chocolate at your favorite strength.  (We used a mix of Scharffen Berger, some Rich Milk and some 62%, but you can use anything from white chocolate to baking chocolate.)

If you like, you can substitute some of your favorite liqueur or fruit juice for the water.  We swapped in a tablespoon of a ruby port.  We also threw in blueberries and garnished with whipped cream.  We're big on lily-gilding around here.

Prepare a large bowl full of ice cubes and water, with a smaller bowl inside it, large enough to hold at least 4 cups.  (You may recognize this setup if you've ever made whipped cream by hand.) While you're at it, set out 4-6 mid-sized ramekins. We tossed the blueberries on the bottom.

Chop the chocolate finely.

Put the water (and liqueur if you're using it) into a sauce pan over low heat, and add the chocolate slowly to the water.

Whisk continuously, until it all melts.

As soon as it's all fully melted, pour the mixture into the small bowl on ice, and whisk vigorously!  I prefer to do it by hand, and it sets up slightly faster than whipped cream does, but you could use egg beaters if you prefer.  Keep an eye on it, and don't over whisk.

When it starts to form very soft peaks and follow the whisk when you pull it out, pour it immediately into the ramekins.

Let it set up for a bit at room temperature, but don't chill it (it will get really hard in the fridge, unlike whipped cream.)  Once it's firmed, garnish it however you prefer.


Troubleshooting tips:
If it doesn't thicken, reheat and add more chocolate.
If it's too thick and too hard, reheat and add more water.
If it's grainy, you over-whisked it.  Reheat and rewhisk.

Food Blogging: Hot Chocolate

Hot Chocolate?

It seems like it's the sort of thing we all know how to make, right?  You dump some Hersey's syrup into a mug with milk, microwave, and there you have it.  Well, you have mediocre hot cocoa, but what you don't have is Hot Chocolate.

So what's the difference?  This:

So why the bar of chocolate in the background?  It's the primary ingredient.  Yup, this stuff is pretty decadent.

This is my favorite new way to make hot chocolate.  I got this idea from the coffee roaster and chocolate importer across the street from us.  They had a small metal pitcher of it sitting on top of one of the espresso machines, keeping warm.  That batch was made with chocolate that was 75% cocoa, and it was delicious.

A bit of reverse engineering and improvement landed me this recipe.

Here's the ingredient list:

• 1/2 bar of bittersweet dark chocolate
• about a tablespoon of water
• about a tablespoon of heavy cream

As the chocolate is the primary ingredient, use a kind that you really like.  I would stick to the dark side, at least 50% cocoa.  In the US, I'd use Scharffen-Berger bittersweet 70% cocoa bars.  But that's me.  Aleatha might use the 82%...  :)

Anyway, the process is easy.  In fact, this is so easy, I don't think I'm ever going to be doing this any other way again.  The whole thing takes about 5 minutes, including getting out the ingredients.

Start by breaking up the bar into chunks.

Turn on your smallest burner to the lowest heat setting.  It's very easy to overdo the heat, and then you cook the chocolate, and it gets gritty.

Stir with a spatula to make sure it's all melted.

Then add in the water, and stir.

The water is to thin the chocolate to make it drinkable, so the amount you add adjusts the thickness of the result.  I slowly add water, stirring, until I get a consistency that I like (thick and goopy).

But this can be a bit harsh, especially with the high-cocoa bars, so adding a bit of heavy cream smoothens it out:

Stir in the cream, and then pour into cups or mugs, and enjoy!

Adjustments:

Depending on the amount of water and/or cream you use, you can make it as thick as chocolate pudding, or as thin as that "hot cocoa" you get from vending machines (but why would you want to do that?)