Kouign Amann

Ever since my honeymoon in Brittany, this has been a dessert I've wanted ot master.  I've cooked in 3-4 times since then with different techniques and different recipes, but I finally have one I really like.

For those of you not in the know, this is like a croissant, but with a ton of sugar folded in that turns the whole thing into a buttery caramel mess.  

The big goal here, like with all laminated doughs is to keep thigns cold enough the butter doesn't melt.

Ingredients:

Dough:

• 220g whole wheat bread flour + 180g water

              OR

• 250g white bread flour + 150g water
• 5g /1tspn yeast
• 3g / 0.5tspn salt

Folding:

• 200g sugar
• 200g salted butter (Ideally from Brittany.  Trader Joe's sells it)

Directions:

Mix the flour, water, salt and yeast into a dough and knead until smoothe.  I tend to use whole wheat for everything and like the taste, but white flour is the more traditional and easier to work with ingredient.

Let the dough rise an hour until doubled in size.

Meanwhile, beat the butter into a flat square in between two sheets of parchment paper and chill in the refrigerator.

Initial Turning:

1. Roll the dough out into a rectangle 2x the size of your butter square.
2. Place the butter on one half and cover in 1/5 / 40g of the sugar, then fold over the dough and seal the edges, making a dough packet to hold the butter and sugar.

4 turnings:

1. Fold the quare of dough in 1/3rds, sprinkling 40g of sugar between the folds (1/2 in 1st fold and 1/2 in second)
2. Chill for 30min in refrigerator.
3. Roll back into a recantgle.

Repeat the fold 3 more times, ending with rolling out into a square the size of your cake pan.

In the photo below, my cake pan is too large. Next time I will use one 2/3 the size, and shape the quare into a round with corners either tucked under (traditional breton way) or pointing up (more common in America).

It is important here to use a light colored/ aluminum pan.  A lot fo caramel is generated, and in my experiences, black cake pans burn it. 

Notice also how the layers are so think you can see butter through the top one, but the butter is still a solid mass.

Baking:

If you want, you can leave the kouign amann overnight covered in the fridge or bake right away.

Place the cake pan on a parchment lined baking tray for drips and bake in a 425F oven for 25min.

Sooo gooey.

Savory Gruyere Quiche

This is a classic cheese quiche that I made for a work brunch.  It is . . . decadent and kind of subtle, so maube not everyone's cup of tea.

Makes 1 9-inch quiche

The Crust:

I used a pretty basic butter crust recipe as follows.

0.5lb / 2 sticks salted butter

300g / 2.5 cups whole wheat pstry flour

˜125ml / 0.5cup water

(crumb together butter and flour then add ice cold water until just firm, rest in fridge for 1hr and roll out)

I then put the crust in the freezer for 20minutes whiel I preheated an oven to 425.  Then poked hoels in the crust with a fork, covered in foil and pie weights (I used beans) and baked for 20min.

Bake for 3-5 more min without the foil or weights.  The crust will shrink some in baking, so make it a little taller.

Store in the freezer overnight.

The Filling:

Finely grate 0.5lb gruyere cheese (using the very fine, hair like pores on a basic cheese grater)  It should be light and fluffy.

Preheat oven to 300F.

Mix 500ml / 2 cups half and hlaf with 250ml / 1 cup heavy cream and bring to a simmer

(Next time I may just do half and half, as this was VERY rich)

Mix 6 eggs, then slowly pour the hot milk into the eggs while whisking

(Next time I wil add 1 tspn salt to the egg mix while whisking. You can add pepper to taste as well.)

Spread the gruyere evenly over the bottom of the crust and then pour in the egg mix.

Bake for ˜30min until edges are firm but center very jiggly

After first 15 minutes rotate pan

You can see here how it is a soft creamy custard that just holds shape.  

Pecan Praline Macarons

I had never made a macaron before and had a lot of egg whites left over from my previous baking.  Most macarons are made with almonds and filled with butter cream, but I got it in my head to make one from pecans and fill with salted caramel.

I had two goals:

Get the cool ruffled "foot"that is the sign of a perfectly made macaron

Get a delicious, crunchy then chewy texture

Spoiler Alert:  I only succeed in one of these.

I started with the recipe from here:

https://www.howtocookthat.net/public_html/easy-macaron-macaroon-recipe/

First I blended together in my kitchenaid:

4 egg whites and 70g "caster"sugar, where "caster" means I pulsed some normal sugar in my food proccessor lazily.

Made a perfect meringue fluffy meringue, so far so good.

Then I made my add in mix:

120g pecans

230g "powedered sugar"

No salt (the pecans were already salty)

What I did here was just throw normal sugar and pecans into the food proccessor, and ran into two issues:

First, while the coffee grinder makes escellent powdered sugar right off, the food proccessor doesn't work as well.  Second, pecans are SUPER oily.

I was supposed to have a light dust I could sift into my egg whites, instead I had a thick, wet, dough that I had to crumble over.

Then I mixed them:

At this point things had already run off the rails, but I did manage to get a nice incorporated marshamallowy consistency and pipe everythign out into little dallops.

Popped them into a 300F degree oven, one tray at a time.

Filling!

I stole my caramel recipe from here:

http://sallysbakingaddiction.com/homemade-salted-caramel-recipe/

It's exactly the same, except I didn't have cream so I added whole milk-- you know because they're basically identical. . . .

So then my caramel seperated.

Fun Fact:  If your caramel ever seperates, you can re-emulsify it by taking it off the heat and running a stick blender through it for 3min while it cools.  

Here's the assembled product:

And my cool Instagram montage:

Lessons Learned:  Macarons are basically 90% sugar.  I actually was turned off baking of a bit by the sheer unhealthiness of them.  Soooooo much sugar.

That said, these were pretty amazing.  Crunchy, then chewy, salty and sweet with a strong pecan flavor.  They disappeared from both T and my work pretty quick.

Caramel Glazed Cherry Profiteroles, and an attempt at croquembouche

If I may paraphrase This American Life, the crucial ingredient in a Fiasco is an ambition reaching just beyond capability.

The first three steps of this recipe all worked out well, but at the last it became a fiasco that ended in me losing an inlay in caramel, and ruching to the dentist.  (Everythin is alright now)

The goal here is to make a cherry pastry cream filled profiterole, with a caramel glaze on top, and then assemble them into a tall, hollow, cone.

Step one, Pastry Cream (night before):

Add 1/3 cup sugar to 600ml (~2 and 1/2 cup) whole milk and bring to a boil.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the following until an even pale yellow:

6 egg yolks

4tbspns corn starch

1/4 tspn salt

1/3 cup sugar

Add to this egg mix 50ml (~3tbspn) creme d'cassis or another fruit flavored liqueur (I used Trader Joe's raspberry wine), and 100ml (~1/3 cup) strong cherry juice.  I made this by cooking and sieving frozen cherries.

While rapidly whisking pour 1/3 of the hot milk mix into the egg mix, then add the egg mix back into the milk and return to the stove over medium heat.

Stirring constantly, heat the mix until it begins to thicken and bubble and then for 2-4minutes more.

Transfer to a new container, let stop steaming (5min) cover with clingfilm or parchment paper to prevent a skin forming and put in the fridge.

***I originally added the cherry juice to the milk directly, but it caused curdling, and I lost a lot of the milk proteins***

Step Two, Choux Pastries (night before):

6 large eggs

375ml water

190g whole wheat four or 210g white flour

150g butter

Bring the water and butter to a boil.

Add all the flour, remove from the heat and stir together, then knead with a spatula until it is smooth and glossy (~2min)

Add eggs one at a time, fully incorporating each egg before adding the next.

Using a piping bag of a Ziploc bag with the corner cut off, make 1.5inch circles spaced out on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

Bake at 415F for 15min then lower the temperature to 350F and bake for another 10-15minutes until firm and beginning to brown.

Cool on a wire rack completely, then store in an airtight container overnight.

***These were very fluffy, but nt spherical, which was either caused by using pastry flour or whole wheat flour.  Next time I might add some bread flour.  One the other hand, they were very soft and delicious.***

Step 3:  Assembly (2 hours before eating):

Place the choux pastries in a 350F oven for 5minutes to dry them back out, and then let them cool for 10 minutes.

Using a pastry bag with a metal tip, fill 40 choux pastries with the pastry cream.  Do not re-mix the pastry cream, as this will break it apart.

Make caramel on the stove:

2 cups sugar

1/2 cup water

1/4 cup creme d'casis or other fruit liqueur

Boil until 300 degrees, swirling occasionally (do not stir) or until caramel colored with distinctive caramel smell.

Remove from the stove and swirl until it start to cool (1-2min)

Wipe excess filling off outside of each profiterole and dip the top half in the caramel then set aside. 

You need to work quickly here.  While the caramel is warm you will get a nice thin layer, but as it cools you'll get too much on each profiterole. 

At this point I had a very nice, pretty, delicious dessert.  I recommend stopping here.

Step 4, optional: 

This is where it all went wrong. . . .

If you want to make a croquembouche you make a cone by stacking concentric rings of pastries, cementing them together with caramel.

When I tried this I had three problems: 

1) It collapsed.

2) It was hard to retrieve an individual profiterole.

3) there was too much caramel on the profiteroles.

It think a better alternative is to just make an attractive stack of the profiteroles, and probably won't try for the croquembouche in the future.

Behold the sad caramel mountain:

Fun changes to try next time:

Any fruit flavoring could be used for the pastry cream

You can mix the pastry cream with an equal volume of whipped cream before filling to get a different texture of filling

You can glaze with melted chocolate, colored icing, or a softer butter caramel.

Custard Test

For a while I have been wanting to get good at making baked egg custards without starch, a tricky process.

Here are the salient facts from On Food and Cooking:

Ingredients

• 250ml (1 cup) whole milk
• 30 grams (2 tbspns sugar
• 1-2eggs or 3-6 yolks-- egg whites = firm and glossy, egg yolks= rich and creamy

Cooking

Eggs set at 175F(80C) and curdle at 185F (85C).  Most people aim to take them out at 180F/83C.

You get them most of the way to this temperature by pouring the boiling hot milk slowly into the sugar and egg mixture while stirring, which usually ends up at 130F-150F.

Now it's all about slowly and reliably getting it all that extra 50F at the same time:

I have one cook book that suggests cooking in a convection oven at 200F (90C)

On Food and Cooking, and most other sources suggest placing the custard pans in warm water and then in a 300F-350F oven.  The water bath, if left uncovered, cannot rise above 180F because of evaporative cooling.

The Test:

Starting at the bottom right and moving clockwise, I have 2 yolks, 1 egg, 1 egg + 1 yolk, 2 eggs.  Can you spot which of these is a pastured egg and which are from Trader Joe's?

For flavoring I boiled my milk for 10minutes with a rooibos ginger chai mix, then strained it and measured 250ml into each bowl.

I then divided each mix between three muffin slots and placed the silicone muffin tins in a home made bain marie.  By this point the mixture has cooled a lot, so it actually took forever to cook!

The leftovers were all mixed together and placed in a bowl in my toaster oven at 90C.

The Results and Lessons Learned:

Starting at the top right and moving clockwise: 2 yolks, 1 egg, 1 egg + 1 yolk, 2 eggs.

First thing I learned is that I need to do a better job of marking which tins are which.  I may have confused the 2 yolk and 1 egg samples by messing up pan orientation, BUT since On Food and Cooking clearly states that a 2 yolk custard will be too soft to hold for outside it's tin while a 1 egg custard can, I am pretty sure which is which.

Things I learned.  I did NOT like the 2 egg custard, which was far too rubbery and stiff.  The 2 yolk was more like a delicate cream and would need to be cooked and served in a  ramekin.  I actually thought the 1 egg (which I expected to be deficient somehow was my favorite, being just set and still tasting creamy from the whole milk.  Most confusing was the 1egg + 1 yolk, which I expected to be richer than the 1 egg custard, but was also much firmer.

Conclusion:  I think 1 egg custards are a nice economical taste option if you don't want to do the classic 3 yolk.  Also, any recipe that suggests 2 eggs / cup of milk is going to give something very stiff.

Valuable lessons:

• This is the section where I document the many things that went wrong.
• Firstly, my custards took forever to cook, and lost some volume (which probably effected results) and got really obvious unpleasant skins on them. 
• Also, 3 of the 2 yolk custards were ruined by water from the bath getting in them (these were in flexible silicone muffin molds).
• All of the above can be solved by COVERING YOUR CUSTARD.  Not to future Danielle.  Do this!

Also, ratcheting down the oven temperature to 250F feels "safe" but actually just means a 40min process takes 2 hours.  Ditto with 200F sans water bath.  Here's how I'd cook these next time:

Set my oven to 350F and place a barbecue thermometer in the water bath.  If the water bath gets too/over 180F, lower the heat to 300F, but don't go lower than that.  Start checking the custards every 10min starting at 30min.

This was mostly an experiment, but some point soon I'll use this knowledge to actually bake a custard.

Arlettes (GBBO fan recreation)

I saw these on Great British Bake Off a few weeks ago and because I <3 lamination, had to try them.

Here's the recipe:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/arlettes_17164

Here are my changes:

I used whole wheat flour so for the dough, I used 10% less flour (55g of each).

There's a direction in the recipe to encase the dough in the butter, which is the opposite of every other recipe, and the only difference it makes is going "butter, dough, butter, dough, butter" instead of the other way round.  We're talking about n-1 vs n+1 butter layers, and with 3 bookend turns, this is out of 60 total layers.  I think it's not worth the hassle, and simply wrapped the butter in the dough.

At the end of all the folding and rolling and cutting you end up with 8 discs like this:

Each of these is the size of my palm.  When they say thin they mean *thin*.  So far so good.

Baking:

The instructions said to do 350F with convection or 400F without.  I don't have a convection oven, so I did 400F, and that was a big mistake.  With how thin these are, and coated in powdered sugar, they went from not done to slightly burnt in <1 min.

Next time I will do at 350F, and probably only do one set of 4 at a time, so I can be more confident that everything will cook evenly and not burn.  I'll also ehr on the side of not brown enough, trusting crispiness to come as they cool.

You know what else would help?  Actual baking sheets.  I am embarrassed to say, given how much I bake, that I don't have more than one, and use a variety of wire racks and such to bake on.

As you can see, there's some burning on the finished product.  Still tasty though.  I'm going to go dunk one in a cup of tea.

18th Century Roast Hare

It's been over a year since my last post (to be fair, "inconstant" is in the title of this blog), but a bunch of life stuff has cleared out of the way, and I am back int he kitchen!

On Sunday I grabbed a rabbit from the farmer's market, and decided to cook it based on a  recipe in Hanah Glasse.

The recipe for rabbit said "as per a hare, but lard it." I looked up larding and found this:

Sadly, I don't have a larding needle--make that I *didn't* have a larding needle, as it turns out Amazon sells everything.  Still, until it arrives, larding is out, so I just rubbed the rabbit with melted fat and moved onto the hare recipe:


The pudding:

• 4oz suet
• 4oz finely grated bread crumbs
• 4oz chicken livers
• large handful of parsley
• 2 tbspn herbs de provence
• zest of one lemon
• teaspoon of nutmeg
• salt and pepper to taste

There are some changes from the above recipe.  My rabbit was missing a liver, so I added the same weight in chicken livers (one rabbit liver is 4-6 ounces for a 4lb rabbit).  Also, for the "sweet herbs" I used a herbs de provence mix that contained marjoram, thyme, savory, and rosemary.

The nutmeg can be easy to over do, so start with 1/2 the amount above and fry a small amount up to taste the seasoning, then readjust.

Here's what it all looked like before I added the 2 eggs:

Fun note, according the Collonial Williamsburg, 18th century recipes use Medium eggs, as opposed to the XL or Jumbo from the market.  Looking at an egg size chart I saw that the difference between Medium and the Large eggs I had from the farmer's market were only marginally different, so I just stayed with two.

When I started this I pictured a stuffing, but it became rapidly clear that I was stuffing my rabbit with sausage.  

Cooking:

After all this, the cooking itself was easy.  I dry-brined the rabbit for 3 hours (1/2 teaspoon kosher salt per pound) because I know rabbit is dry, then I decided to smoke it at 325F until the stuffing reached 165F.  Smoking seemed the closest equivalent available to me to either an earthen fire over or spit roasting.

Here is the final product:

How'd It Taste?

The pudding was a big hit, very tasty and not as oddly seasoned as we all expected.  The rabbit was dry, but good with gravy.  I blame the dryness on food safety, and it's why I never stuff anything anymore.  Rabbit is best at 160F, but by the time my stuffing reaches 165F the meat was at 175F.

Hannah Glasse had probably never heard of food safety and just cooked until the meat was delish.