The War On Cookbooks

The Late late Christmas food diary.

 
 

Venison loin with venison stuffing ballotine, triple cooked goose fat chips, soubise of leek, caramelized onion hearts, parsnip crisps with a creme de cassis sauce and an orange sabayon.
 

Sorry sorry sorry, but due to feeling slightly under the weather and working over christmas and new year this is all coming a little late. 

I'm still not feeling great (COUGH!! SPLUTTER!!) so this is still going to be a short update. I have a week or so of work so I'll make sure I do a more meaningful update before its back to the kitchen.

So pictures and brief unsatisfying explanations it is then...ok ?

 

Roast pigeon on brioche, with pancetta and watercress in a maple syrup vinaigrette.

 

Boozy Mincemeat Pithivier with Beurre noisette ice cream, nutmeg anglaise, lemon pith marmalade and a brandy sabayon.

Unfortunately I forgot to consider colour when putting together the dessert. So it all looked very beige but tasted rather nice... I promise. The ice cream maybe being the star of the show if not the year. 

The lemon pith marmalade was made COUGH!!by blanching an refreshing lemon pith 10 times (to get rid of the bitterness) and then boiling it down in sugar syrup until the pectins thicken the sauce almost to a jelly.

The leek soubise was also pretty exciting in my little world. Slow cooked leek in butter and white wine for about 12 hours at 75oC, it falls apart COUGH!!almost to a sauce consistency and went well as a counterbalance to the sweet reduction sauce.

As always I'm happy to share recipes if anyone is interested, just ask kids.

happy new year and all that COUGH!!

x

 

Beurre Noisette Ice cream recipe for Mat

100g butter

200g double cream

150g milk

125g sugar

5 egg yolks

This Ice cream is easy and delicious. Burn the hell out of 100g of butter until black in a pan, leave to infuse for a few minutes then sieve out black bits with a fine cloth or muslin. Cool to room temp.

Add this to 350 grams off creme anglaise (My preference is 5 egg yolks, 200 ml cream and 150 ml milk but any ice cream quantity should do) brought to thickening consistency and then cooled to the same temperature as the butter. 

Combine whilst mixing well and instantly churn.

 

The Front Line Food Diary (7 course tasting menu for Helen's birthday)

Helen's Birthday tasting menu.

If you're doing a tasting menu for only 2 people you may as well (except for maybe the washing up) do it for 10. It's a phenomenal amount of work for one person to do and I don't recommend it unless you feel like punishing yourself. Also taking into consideration the fact that the guest lives with you and they are not supposed to know what your cooking there are countless other problems that can arise.

So mission one is getting girlfriend out of the house and 2 is to cook as fast as possible. 

Still all this said I did get to enjoy what I cooked and drank lot's of wine while cooking (maybe a little reflection of the small mistakes in my last two courses...only little ones mind)

Starter 

Insalata Caprese

A basil sorbet, spherification of mozzarella, 

roasted cherry tomato and balsamic and olive oil crystals.

This was essentially an experiment in temperature and texture using traditional flavour combinations. The Mozzarella sphere bursts into a sauce for the rest of the dish and is seasoned with the crystals. I need to work a bit on the seasoning balance but it works very well. 

The great thing about the temperature variances is that it delays the flavours in your mouth so you taste everything one after the next all in one mouthful.

Fish Course

Fish and Chips (A French Laundry rip off)

Pan fried red mullet, a garlic palette, parsley coulis and a salad of milk blanched garlic chips and shallots.

The palettes are made from blending lots of blanched garlic with hard boiled egg yolks and butter. You then freeze them, cut out circles and pan coat them in panko breadcrumbs using cream and flour. The garlic chips are blanched in milk to make them less bitter and the coulis is self explanatory. 

You can get the full recipe from The French Laundry Cookbook.

This is the only recipe that wasn't mine. I did it mostly out of curiosity and also because Helen likes fish and chips and she'd already eaten all of my variations. 

It turned out beautifully and not bad looking either. The only thing that didn't look like it was supposed to was the palette. It looked great on its own but without 40 staff at my side to help me plate up and by the time I had done everything it had melted a bit with the heat and weight of the fish (The fillets

were also way too big portion wise but what was I going to do with the rest ?). 

Amuse Bouche

Scallop sashimi with balsamic and strawberry hearts.

Simply some very nice scallops from atari ya sliced and plated with some finely sliced strawberry hearts( I say hearts because I only uses the middle cut of the strawberry, otherwise is didn't look as cool with all the veins and stuff) and a balsamic reduction. Also drizzled with small drop of very expensive (Seriously I must have been drunk when I bought it) balsamic vinegar. Dressed with some watercress and fresh basil.

I served this with some sparkling sake at the table. It was all very nice as expected. There really is no way to go wrong with this so I wont bore you with any tasting notes.

First Meat Course

A Chicken, Bacon and Avocado Sandwich.

The surprise star of the show for me. I had based this dish on 

Helen's favorite sandwich which as it turned out she luckily 

didn't have for lunch that day. As far as experiments go this 

was pretty last minute. I honestly had never practiced this 

nor did I have any idea if it would even work.

The dish is composed of a sandwich of poussin (cooked at 

56oC) and loin of pork (also cooked at 56oC) with the loin 

sandwiched in between two breast cuts. I have to admit I 

did want pork belly for this but I didn't leave myself enough 

time in the end to cook it well.

The meat sandwich is then wrapped in the whole poussin

skin and is pan fried in deep hot oil and 

butter until it's crispy.

It's served with an light avocado sauce made minutes 

before plating.

The lightness of the sauce with the fatty skin and the 

texture of the meat inside was surprisingly good.

I do want to try it again with belly though. I think 

that would be top notch.

Main Course

72 hour cooked Veal with a thyme butter sauce.

I do have a picture of this but it is so out off focus and 

burry its not worth looking at. This could 

have been a result of the fading light outside or the volume 

of wine we had both drunk by this stage. It is more likely 

some sort of combination of the two.

The shoulder of veal was cooked at 56oC for 72 hours 

in a water bath. The reason for the long cooking 

time is because of the way the collagen breaks down 

at lower temperatures than normal and the effect it has 

the meat during this. Apparently it actually tenderizes 

the meat. I don't know if any of this is true or not but 

what I do know is that Alain Ducasse cooks it this way 

and the veal I had in his restaurant in paris was the best 

thing I've eaten in my whole life...'nuff said I think ?

Whatever happened it was like butter. I simply pan fried 

it with some enoki mushrooms and plated both. I then 

browned some butter in the pan, to which I thew in

a few sprigs of thyme at the last minute and poured over 

the veal. I then garnished with some deep fried shallots.

It needed nothing else. If you get the veal cooked right 

the butter is enough of a compliment. Simple and 

perfect. 

Dessert

Chocolate honey sphere with a toblerone sauce.

Once again no picture, but this time I am slightly 

annoyed. It looked really good.

I made four chocolate half circle moulds using some 

egg poachers. I also made some honeycomb and a 

honey ice cream.

I placed a ball of ice cream and some honeycomb 

inside one of the half circles and places another

half circle on top. So what we had was a chocolate 

football filled with the ice cream and honeycomb.

I then heated a sauce of melted toblerone and 

cream and served it so as when you pour the hot

sauce over the ball it melts it and reveals what is 

inside.

It looked good...honest.

Petit Fours

Cherries and Almond

Chocolate coated cherry fudge, a profiterole filled with 

kirsch cream patisserie and covered in boiled

fondant, some caramel coated cherries and a shot of 

Disaronno.

We ate these much later on that night and we were 

feeling a bit full and sick straight after the meal. 

I also ate some the next morning with my hangover, 

which I don't recommend.

+ The Wine

The Front Line Food Diary (Duck Breast with Cherry pie, almond butter mash and a port sauce)

Duck breast cooked in a water bath with a cherry pie (yes really), some almond butter mash, a port sauce and some deep fried herbs.

Inspired by a Apple lattice pie I cooked the other day at Tante Marie I looked up a few cherry pie recipes and thought I came across one for duck and cherry pie...weird right ? Actually I misread it but then figured 'what the hell !' 

Duck and cherry = good

Pie and duck = good

Pie and cherry = also good. 

I made a port sauce with some stock, port, the pan juices and some black cherry conserve. 

I also served it with some almond butter mash. Almond butter is made by blitzing some blanched and roasted almonds until they break down completely and then passing them though a fine sieve. It's basically an almond peanut butter.

Almonds and cherries both contain benzaldehyde which apparently is what makes cherries taste of cherries. This according to Harold McGee and Heston Bumenthal makes them a perfect pairing. And those clever buggers were right.

This was fab although I have to confess I messed up the short crust a bit. It turned out a bit more like flakey pastry. I assume that was down to being a bit heavy handed with the butter or the lard after my food processor failed to mix them together with the flour and I had to switch to hand mixing. I should have just made a new batch but I had hungry guests by this stage.

As always if you want recipe detail just ask.

MY FOOD HELL (Vegan Jaffa Cakes (with a twist))

For those of you that don’t know what a jaffa cake is, let me explain.  Jaffa Cakes are chocolate and orange jelly biscuity cake things, that just happen to be immensely popular in the UK.

I don’t know where my dislike for jaffa cakes comes from? Maybe I was confused by the whole ‘looks like a biscuit but calls itself a cake’ thing, maybe my bully of a brother stuffed a whole packet in my mouth when I was a baby or maybe I was eating one during some horrendous childhood tragedy that I thankfully can’t recall?

What I do know is that I am very much alone in this. I have never to this day met anyone who even mildly dislikes them and this love for chocolate orange cakey things doesn’t stop at your typical Joe Normal. It extends as far as many as some of the best restaurants and palates in the world.

I can’t remember the dishes, because to be fair it was quite a while ago, but at both Gordon Ramsay’s Royal Hospital Road and Alain Ducasse’s Jules Verne in Paris I ended up being tricked (in my opinion) into eating a desert that tasted similar to jaffa cakes. Considerably better quality I concede, but a jaffa cake all the same. Even at the Fat Duck, during the best eating experience of my life,  my last taste of the night was a chocolate a Mandarin Aerated Chocolate Peti Four…jaffa cake. Now as far as Ramsey and Alain are concerned I would find it highly unlikely that jaffa cakes were an immediate source of inspiration, but Heston on the other hand? Well, considering his theories on childhood nostalgia I wouldn’t put it past him.

So I figured I’d set myself the hardest task I could before I head of to this place  tomorrow. I thought I should attempt to make not only my most despised flavour combination into something I enjoyed eating, but I’d make it even more difficult by making it vegan friendly.

This means no butter, no milk, no eggs, and no cream. In other words, none of the good stuff.

I won’t go too into the reasons why I dislike vegan cooking because it’s not really dislike of vegans themselves or their food. I respect veganism immensely but I intensely dislike it when they hand me a cake and call it a vegan cake, Vegan as far as I’m aware is not a flavour (unless it actually contains vegans), so I don’t want or need to know. Just let me try it and I’ll tell you if I like it or not. Telling me first that it’s lacking the necessary ingredients for proper baking and enhancement of flavour isn't unlikely to get me salivating. It might even lead to me carefully slipping it into my pocket the minute your back is turned.

On another note I intended not to use any crappy substitute ingredients.  I’m going to use science and lots of it, and it’s going to look badass.

An Egg Poached in Asparagus Velouté, with parmesan and truffle oil.

Asparagus season in upon us, and it's traditional around these parts to go out and buy big bunches of the stuff and throw them into every dish imaginable, regardless of whether or not they go together. 

One pairing that does definitely go together is asparagus and egg. A nice poached egg with a few spears of the green stuff can be one of those simple pleasures that remind you of an easier life. One without the need for expensive ingredients, scientific analysis, complicated high tech cooking techniques and fancy pants plating.

But isn't it all a bit boring ?

...I think maybe it is.

Looking back on my egg poaching blog and the ones yet to come ( I have written some of them but I keep getting distracted by shiny things and posting those instead) there was a definite need to try poaching eggs in a thicker liquid than water. So being the sort to do so I put the two projects together and here we are.

The Velouté

The basic idea of making any veloute is simply to break down the vegetable in a simmering liquid, blitz it in a mixer and then pass it though a sieve. That's it...simple.

So first of all I threw some finely chopped onion and the roughly chopped asparagus into a pan with a little butter and left until both started to soften. As soon as the asparagus was softening I threw in some chicken stock (vegetarians, veg stock will do nicely), some water and some milk. Enough stock to cover the asparagus and a little of the other two to top the mixture up. The more creamy you want your end product the more milk you add. You could even add cream as well.

Leave this on a heavy simmer until you can see the asparagus is soft enough to fall apart without much help. At this stage take it off the heat.

Spoon your asparagus into a blender and top up with the liquid (Don't over fill your blender. Do this in stages. The mixture is hot and very dangerous, so be careful). Blitz until smooth then pass though sieve into a clean pan.

Heat this mixture and season well to taste.

The Egg

Once you are happy with the veloute have your eggs ready to poach.

Bring your veloute to the boil then turn off the heat and drop your egg/eggs into the centre (if doing more than one make sure you spread them out). The mixture should be thick enough to stop it from spreading and hot enough to quickly start coagulation.

Wait for 2-3 mins or until the egg (remove with a slotted spoon to check) looks almost cooked. The egg will cook for longer in the bowl so we don't want to over do it.

Remove the egg and lay it in the bowl. Then pour over the veloute though another sieve (incase you have any thin pieces of egg).

The Rest

I added some thin strips of Parmesan, some crispy croutons and a few drops of white truffle oil (the last addition I highly recommend.)

and voila

 

Simply delicious. Do try.

The Front Line Food Diary (Sous-Vide Mackerel with Sake Noodles and a Miso Emulsion)

Sous-vide Mackerel with sake noodles, deep fried tofu, enoki mushrooms, a miso emulsion and a chili teriyaki dressing.

I bought some Mackerel from Atari-Ya in Kingston today. I love this shop, they sell fantastic sushi grade fish and the people that work there are a delight. So to honor them I thought I would do a little Japanese inspired dish. 

The fish turned out beautifully even though I messed up one of the fillets I prepped by trying in vain to remove the skin (I did want crisp the skin separately...wasn't going to happen). The skin as it turns out is very delicate so instead I opted to flash fry it after the water bath.

The sake noodles were made out of jellified sake which I gently heated in a miso soup mix. 

As always, if you want to know anymore please ask and I will go into more detail...with pleasure.

 

A Playboy Bunny Pie (A Wild Rabbit, Champagne and Tarragon Pie)

At the tender age of fifteen I was whisked away to a sleepy Boston suburb to stay with a sleepy Boston suburban family in their sleepy Boston suburban house.  On reflection this sounds like a recipe for one of the dullest summers a fifteen-year-old boy could have, but for some reason it turned out to be one of the most memorable.

This could be something to do with the lovely family I stayed with although for the life of me I can’t remember any of their names. I remember the big white wooden Simpson’s-like house with its stars and stripes flag flying high outside and I remember how every other house in the village looked much the same. I remember how many cars they had, how nice their dog was, how religious they were and how generous they were during my stay. I remember how big the supermarket was, how nice the ice cream tasted, how bad they were at holding their booze and how surprised I was to find a gun in their son’s car. I remember quite a bit about my stay but one moment I remember more than most is that I remember vividly the moment when I found a stack of Playboy Magazines under the bed I was sleeping on.

I come from Scotland, so my impression of girly magazines up until this point was crumpled pages under my brother’s bed, reader’s wives, next directory underwear section and that national geographic article. So I was surprised and somewhat excited to finally come across the Real McCoy I was even more surprised when I found out it was actually a bloody good read. In fact I’m surprised every time I’ve pick up Playboy to this day at how good a magazine it actually is.

Now I’m not trying to shirk my reasons for picking the magazine up in the first place (…I am a bit). I’m a man after all and our eternal shame for our sexual personification of women has been imprinted on our DNA ever since Adam worked out what Eve’s jiggly bits were good for. 

Still, I firmly believe playboy has always been a more honest version of what so called ‘lads mags’ are today, and the lineage of contributors puts almost every other magazine in the world to shame regardless of category. So when I was asked the other week to do some food writing for their UK website, not only did I jump at the chance, I also baked them a pie.

…A Playboy Bunny Pie.

My planned ingredients list was as follows

 

-       1 wild Rabbit (very difficult to find at your local butcher. But you can order on line from a number of supliers .Buy these whole, with bones and everything.)

-       1 bottle of good champagne.

-       4 large carrots

-       3 leaks

-       1 stick of celery

-       2 onions

-       2 cloves of garlic

-       1 pre rolled sheet of puff pastry

-       1 bunch of tarragon

-       1 bunch rosemary

-       2 bay leaves

-       Black peppercorns

-       1 litre of chicken stock (not A stock cube, buy the nice stuff)

-       Double cream

-       Flour

-       Butter

-       Plus some wild mushrooms that I would apparently forget to use. (Explained later)

    

A White Chocolate and Frangelico Soufflé

"The only thing that will make a soufflé fall is if it knows you are afraid of it."

James Beard

If there was one dish that summed up the home cooks unnecessary fear though misunderstanding it would be the humble soufflé. Going though the huge list of recipes in cookbooks and on the Internet you would be forgiven for thinking that the ideal recipe was shrouded in mysticism and was lost somewhere in history. Maybe rather than reading though the thousands of differing opinions out there, one would be better off looking for the clues in a Leonardo Da Vinci painting.

Cook at 220, 180, 160, 100, 220 then turn the oven off, use egg yolks, don’t use egg yolks, add cournflour, cook on a hotplate, cook on the bottom of the oven, cook in a vacuum, on so on and on. The list of differing opinions in enough to scare you off ever making one. Which would be a shame, cause not only is making a soufflé as easy as making anything else, it’s also a highly versatile and tasty weapon in any cooks arsenal.

So let us first concentrate at what we are trying to do here.

The Science bit

A soufflé works (rises) because the egg whites, which make up at least 50% of the dish are predominantly (about 90%) made out of water. When we cook the egg whites the water evaporates and creates steam, which as we all know rises.

Of course simply heating egg whites as they are would do nothing. The moisture would simply escape as the egg white is too dense and all we would have is cooked egg white. We need to turn the egg whites into a structure that will hold its shape and has the capacity to contain some of the steam. This is the fundamental reason why whipping the egg whites to a strong foam (small bubbles, tightly packed) is so important. Like the froth on your cappuccino, the size and density of the bubbles are paramount to the stability of the foam.

We could make a soufflé simply by beating some egg whites and sticking them in the oven. However not only would it only taste of egg whites (nothing) but because the foam is weak it would also almost immediately collapse under its own weight. So when we add any other ingredients to our whites, we need to make sure that they will aid in strengthening this foam and well as taste good. To do this, whatever we add should be as thick as possible whilst still having a level of viscosity, which allows it to be incorporated into the egg whites.

So to simplify:

Stiff egg whites + some other tasty thick liquid = any soufflé.

Actually that’s pretty much it but there are a few things we also need to consider.

1. The bubbles in the egg whites do not respond at all well to fat. If you want a demonstration pour some oil into your bubble bath and see what happens. So when thinking about a base we need to minimize the amount of fat also.
2. And when I said tasty it needs to be really tasty, cause whatever your liquid is, it will need to have enough flavour to withstand being diluted by the egg whites which have no flavour. So making a sauce that had a very delicate flavour will probably be lost in the mix. You would be wise in this case to season or sweeten it as much as you can get away with or maybe go with something else.

So that’s about it, let’s soufflé.