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.