Cooking Bouchon

Chocolate Bouchons

2009-01-04T19:25:00.000-07:00

This dessert wasn't supposed to be next in line. In fact, I have two other recipes to write about that were made before this. All that changed when I was walking through Williams-Sonoma the other day and saw this. Apparently Mr. Keller owns Williams-Sonoma now, because you'll see his name there more often than the stores name. After picking up these molds I was given a free little book of waffle recipes, designed by Keller himself. Seriously.

Bouchon is a French word that translates to cork in English, so it's not hard to guess why these desserts are named how they are. It's a little bit of a longer jump to connect the name of the restaurant to these desserts, but the connection is there, I promise. According to Keller:

"...the first proprietors put a pine branch or bouquet--called a bousche--above their doors, a reference to Bacchus that announced that they served wine"

So wine is the connection between the restaurant name and this seemingly unrelated chocolate dessert. Anyway, I made these for dessert after Christmas dinner. And then again for New Year's Eve. That probably gives away the ending a little early.

The ingredients here are pretty simple. You probably have all of it already, with the possible exception of 6 oz of semisweet chocolate. And all of the butter you need. The rest of the stuff is vanilla, cocoa powder, salt, sugar, flour, and eggs.

That's not a joke. That's 3 sticks of butter. That's a step in the right direction, right? The first thing I did was chop the chocolate into tiny chips. I used a 61% chocolate I found at Whole Foods (the recipe calls for 55%), and to me it was an improvement. But I'm a dark chocolate fan, so do what you like....

I put the 3 eggs and most of the sugar in the mixer and beat it on medium speed for about three minutes, until it looked roughly like this:

I added the vanilla and mixed it until just combined. To this mixture I added the dry ingredients, which had been sifted:

and 24 tablespoons of butter, alternating 1/3 of each mixture at a time. The last step was to throw in the chocolate pieces and stir it until they were evenly incorporated. Batter complete. And tasty.

A couple of hours after Christmas dinner we decided it was time for dessert. I took the batter out of the fridge and did...nothing. The batter had hardened to the point that I wasn't about to do anything with it for the next 30 minutes or so.

After it softened some, I poured the batter into a ziploc bag I had cut one corner off of and piped it into the mold I bought:

Here's another shot so you can revel in how perfectly consistent I was filling each mold:

I figured they'd melt and settle some (they did), and things would be ok. They mold, placed on a baking sheet, went into a 350 degree oven for about 22 minutes. The tops, which are really the bottoms, looked kind of like a brownie when they were finished.

I took the mold out and moved it to a cooling rack. After letting it cool for just a couple of minutes, I flipped the mold over and let the cakes finish cooling upside down (or right-side up I guess). Since this was a fancy silicone mold, they cakes popped right out, and they were ready for serving.

I dusted them with confectioners' sugar and served them with some homemade vanilla ice cream. They were fantastic. Very chocolatey, moist, and rich. For a total time investment of maybe 45 minutes, it's a dessert you probably can't beat. It's probably at the top of the list of Bouchon desserts, at least for now.

As usual, I don't post recipes here, but this one is readily available other places on the net. Check out this for more info. There are some discrepancies on the yield depending on what size molds you use, but it'll all taste the same...

Cauliflower Gratin

2008-11-24T06:00:00.000-07:00

This is part 2 of about 4 in my attempt to catch up writing about the dishes I've made. Trusty iPhoto says I downloaded the pictures in this post from the camera on October 5th. This dish was inspired by a mediocre-sized head of cauliflower we received in our CSA. You can see it below, hidden slightly behind the horseradish. Notice that it's not nearly as pretty looking as the store-bought head next to it, but hey, it also didn't travel 5,000 miles to get to my cutting board. It's probably a good thing we got it in the CSA. If we hadn't, this dish was in jeopardy of never getting made. See, cauliflower just doesn't do it for me. I'm not sure why, I just don't really like it. I think it smells weird, tastes weird, and feels funny. All that said, I promised to myself I'd keep an open mind throughout all of this.

The other ingredients in the picture are, kind of from left to right: butter, cream, parsley, nutmeg, bay leaf, vinegar, panko, curry powder, horseradish, Emmentaler cheese, and shallot.

The first step was to prepare the cauliflower. I did this by removing the leaves and cutting away the florets. The cores were set aside for use in this dish, and the florets were chopped into smallish pieces:

There is kind of an odd skin on the core, so I peeled that off and chopped the remaining core before placing it in the food processor:

I let the processor run for a solid minute to puree the core, only to find myself a little short of the required 1 cup. In went a few florets, and a few seconds later I was all set:

That's the end of the prep work associated with this dish. From this point on, it's pretty straightforward. I blanched the florets in a pot of water, salt, and vinegar (the vinegar keeps the florets white).

I added butter and shallot to a saucepan and let that cook for a minute or two to soften the shallot up:

I added to that some seasonings, the bay leaf, thyme and parsley. I added to that the cauliflower puree, and to that I added a little under a cup of water. That all turned into a milky white sauce that didn't really smell that good:

After that had cooked down a little bit, I added the cream and simmered the mixture for two minutes. I took the sauce off the heat and fished out all of the items that don't belong in a sauce.

The sauce made its way over to the blender and received a few gratings of curry powder. It looks kind of like egg nog, but trust me, it's not:

Once the mixture had cooled a little bit, I added the horseradish and blended everything until it was smooth as silk. Not really. I gave it about fifteen seconds and called it good. I tossed this sauce with the florets and seasoned the whole things with more salt, pepper, and some fresh nutmeg.

It all fit nicely into a medium-sized casserole dish, which I placed in the fridge for about an hour to let the flavors meld. This is a critical step, lest the cauliflower-flavored cauliflower puree not blend well with the cauliflower-flavored cauliflower florets.

While that was chilling in the fridge, I heated the oven to 450 degrees. I took the dish out, sprinkled it with the cheese and panko, and put that sucker in the oven for about 25 minutes. The tops were looking deliciously browned, so I broiled it for a minute or two as well. Out came this:

The lighting in these last two pictures doesn't really do the dish justice. It looked great. There was bubbling cheese, browned cauliflower florets, everything you would expect.

Unfortunately for me, the list of things I expected did not include great taste. I make absolutely no claims that this was the recipes fault. In fact, in an unofficial survey, 100% of the other taster's that enjoy cauliflower though the dish was really good. It's just not for me I guess. I'll eat broccoli, Brussels sprouts, beets, but you can keep the cauliflower.

Sweet Crepes with Peaches and Pastry Cream

2008-11-17T21:08:00.000-07:00

You may find it odd that I'm making dishes using peaches in the middle of November in Colorado, but I've just been incredibly delinquent in the writing of these posts. I actually made this dish a couple of months ago. It's a little more simple to do than it appears. I was all prepped for a crepe-tastrophy, but it wasn't meant to be.

The first task was to make the crepes. The ingredients are very simple: flour, salt, sugar, eggs, and milk. Some vanilla and butter add an extra kick.

I combined the flour, salt, and sugar in one bowl, and the eggs, milk, and vanilla in another. This looks exactly how you think it should look:

Next up was 'vigorously whisking' of half the wet mixture into the dry mixture until that was smooth. In went the rest of the wet mixture and I let the batter rest for about an hour. The guidelines here are anywhere from 30 minutes to a day.

After it's rest period I strained the batter through a fine mesh strainer to ensure there was no junk in there:

I added the melted butter to the bowl, and presto, the batter was ready. The next instruction was to 'Preheat a 12-inch crepe machine...' Uh, hmmm, I don't have one of those. '...or a large crepe pan...' Uh, hmmm, I don't have one of those either. '...or a 10-12 inch nonstick skillet.' Finally. Bring in the third string. I heated my trusty non-stick skillet over low heat, because the book says rookies should use low heat. Seriously. The more experienced crowd is allowed to work at a higher temperature. I sprayed the pan with non-stick spray because of some sort of accident-prone paranoia, so no sticking was to be had on this night.

I ladled the batter into the skillet in 1/2 cup increments and tilted the pan to spread it out. I turned the heat up to medium and cooked the crepe for a minute or so until it was lightly browned.

The next step was potential for disaster #2: flipping. This task was even tougher than it needed to be because of my third-string kitchenware, which had straight sides that were seeming 12" tall. The first one wasn't too pretty and a little under-cooked, but it's the only one I took pictures of in the cooking process:

I browned the crepe on the other side, and repeated this process for about half an hour. The yield was around a dozen crepes, which is quite a lot for two people to eat.

As for the assembly, that's a snap. I sliced the peaches into thin wedges and took the pastry cream out of the fridge. Oh wait, that's supposed to be at room temperature? Hmmm. Oh well, maybe next time. (Side note: When the next time came around, I did it correctly. I couldn't tell the difference. )

I reheated the skillet over medium heat and added a crepe. As that was reheating, I spread out a bunch of peach wedges across half of the crepe and sprinkled them with a teaspoon or so of sugar:

I added a couple of globs of pastry cream to the peach mixtures, thus completing the filling:

For the final assembly, I folded the crepe in half. And then in half again. I was positive the last fold was going to tear the crepe, but it didn't:

And that's that. I dusted each crepe with confectioner's sugar before serving on the most colorful plate I could find:

We each took a crepe and put it on a somewhat less fancy dish before quickly devouring it. I did manage to sneak this picture in:

These were really, really good. The pastry cream melted to add the perfect texture and some sweetness. The peaches were surprisingly good for the end of the season, and the crepes were a perfect little envelope. We made this again the next night, and then started messing around with the fillings after that. It's relatively easy once you have the pastry cream made and all the ingredients together, certainly something you could pull off in an hour. This goes in the keeper pile, probably just waiting for the perfect fruit filling to come along next summer.

Pastry Cream

2008-10-27T20:00:00.004-06:00

Welcome back to me. I haven't posted anything in a few weeks, even though I have made a few dishes. That's mostly due to the fact that we bought a condo, which keeps you mind-bogglingly busy. The peak of that seems to have passed, so hopefully I can get caught up in the next couple of weeks.

Pastry cream is just one of the ingredients in Sweet Crepes with Peaches and Pastry Cream, but it requires some preparation that is detailed in the recipe for a strawberry tart. . That fact earns the pastry cream its own post.

It's a pretty simple concoction, consisting of only milk, sugar, vanilla bean, cornstarch, butter, Grand Marnier, and eggs. Take out just a couple of things and you essentially have an ice cream base. It's neat to see how similar recipes yield completely different foods.

I started out by combining some of the milk, some of the sugar, and the vanilla bean into a saucepan and bringing it all to a simmer.

While the milk mixture was coming to a simmer, I combined the rest of the milk and the cornstarch in a small bowl.

Now that the cornstarch was sitting around getting happy, I whisked the eggs and remaining sugar in a bowl, resulting in this anti-climatic mixture:

Even more anti-climatic-ly, I mixed the cornstarch mixture into the egg mixture, which I'm sure you can guess looked exactly like an egg mixture mixed with a milk mixture:

The milk had come to a simmer, so I tempered the egg mixture by pouring a bit of the hot milk mixture into the egg mixture. When I was convinced the egg mixture was sufficiently warm to avoid turning it all into scrambled eggs, I dumped the egg mixture into the saucepan of simmering milk:

I cooked the mixture over medium heat. Under caution from the book, I continuously stirred it waiting for the mixture to thicken and become "lumpy". It started to thicken at about the same time that my arm was beginning to get tired:

My arm was numb around the time it started to become lumpy. It was like stirring some well-set cement:

That was it for the cooking portion. I took the cream off the heat and continue to whisk the crap out of it to remove all of the remaining lumps. After it had been off the heat for a couple of minutes, I added in the butter and Grand Marnier. Immediately after that I spread the cream out into a baking dish and covered it with plastic wrap. As far as I can tell, this is to avoid the formation of a skin on the top of cream. We all know the skin that forms on some foods when left out too long, and it's gross, so I had no intentions of dealing with it here:

Now that the cream was wrapped about four times tighter than it needed to be, it went into the refrigerator. I would use the cream in the crepe recipe the next night.

Without spilling the beans on the crepe recipe, I'll just say that the cream had pretty great flavor. The texture wasn't my favorite however. It wasn't really creamy, but more like a gel. It did something that resembled melting in the crepe, which helped, but it was still just an odd texture for me. It was the perfect complement taste-wise, balancing the lightness of the crepe and the peaches, and I don't think the crepes would of been the same without the cream.

Brioche

2008-10-05T20:09:00.006-06:00

I was supposed to make brioche for the Croque Madame I made long ago, but I was too lazy then. Instead, I linked to The French Laundry at Home and used some store bought bread. I finally got around to making the brioche about a month ago, and now I'm finally getting around to writing about it. Finally.

We'll just jump right in here with the ingredients. You'll see it's pretty tough to mess something up with ingredients like this:

It's a pretty simple list, in absolutely astounding proportions. There's eggs, cake flour, AP flour, sugar, salt, yeast and butter. That would be about five sticks of butter. For two loaves of bread. For comparisons sake, one of the loaves was about the size of a pound of butter. That means that the bread was about half butter. Seriously.

I started by blooming the yeast in some warm water. After a few minutes it looked absolutely gross:

And after ten minutes plus a good stirring it looked a little like a melted Starbucks Frappucino:

During those ten minutes, I sifted together close to equal amounts of cake and all-purpose flour, as well as the sugar and salt. That all went into the bowl of my mixer along with six eggs. I beat it with the dough hook for about a minute:

In went the yeast mixture, followed by another five minute pummeling of the dough:

Now it was time for all of the butter. As you can see in the picture above, I had cut it into slices that were a little less than a tablespoon each. I added about a quarter of the butter at a time, allowing all of the butter to be incorporated before moving on to the next batch. After all of the butter was mixed in, I allowed the mixer to have its way with the dough for ten more minutes. What came out after those ten minutes was pretty disgusting. It was kind of a slimy, greasy mess:

I lightly floured a glass bowl and dumped the dough in. After covering it with plastic wrap it took a little trip to a warm place (a corner of kitchen counter) for a three hour nap:

The dough woke from its little nap having put on a little weight:

I took care of of that problem by removing all of the excess air:

I was surprised at this point that the dough was still so runny and moist, for some reason I had expected it to dry out a little bit. I'm not sure why I thought that, but I did. The dough took another trip, this time to the refrigerator for a night's long rest.

I buttered a couple of bread pans in preparation for baking the bread. You know, just in case there wasn't enough butter in the dough to prevent sticking:

Out came the dough, which had grown yet again, although not quite as much as it had the first time.

It had, however, turned more into what I had expected consistency-wise. It was a little less slimy and a little more firm. I divided the dough into equal pieces and formed them into loaf shapes in each pan:

Then I left the house, again, so they could rise for three more hours. The recipe said to wait until the dough rose 1/2" above the top of the pan, or about three hours. After about four hours, it still hadn't even come close to the top of the pan, and it appeared as if all growth had stopped:

Now if you're keeping track at home, that's about 21 hours of resting. I got impatient, and decided that was plenty. I put both loaves into the oven, which I had pre-heated to 350 degrees. The recipe said it would bake for 35 to 40 minutes, or until the pan sounded hollow when tapped on the bottom. I gave it a little knock at about the 30 minute mark because the bread looked and smelled like it was about done. It sounded ridiculously hollow for something that was not, in fact, hollow at all. I took these out of the oven:

The next step depends on your intention for the bread. For immediate consumption, you are to let it cool for ten minutes and then slice. If you plan to eat it within a few hours, wrap the bread in foil and set it aside. For anything longer than that, wrap the hot bread in foil and freeze it immediately.

The smell at this point was pretty incredible, so there was no way both of the loaves were going to survive the day. One got set aside to be sliced in the very near future, the other wrapped up in two layers of foil and then put in a plastic bag for freezing. That process took just long enough that I could justify cutting into the bread as soon as I was done.

The bread was delicious, some of the best that I've ever had. It tasted almost like a croissant, which shouldn't be too surprising given the ingredients. The texture was great, and it stayed that way for several days. It was great plain, with some jelly, toasted, toasted with some butter, toasted with some jelly, and drizzled with chocolate for dessert. I'm sure it would have been great other ways, but I ran out after the chocolate part.

This was my first attempt at making bread from scratch, and I have to say I was pretty impressed. Aside from the absurd amount of downtime, it's pretty easy to make. There are a couple of other recipes in the book that make use of it, so I'll get to make it then at a minimum, but I hope to be able to make it a little more often than that. I guess it just depends on how much time I have available to exercise...

Glazed Vegetables

2008-09-15T15:00:00.000-06:00

The decision to make this dish was based entirely on the plethora of root vegetables that we've been receiving from our CSA. We're getting nearly ten pounds a week, and eating it all is more than challenging. We've had root vegetables in just about every possible way you can imagine. First it was beets, then potatoes, turnips and carrots.

The glazed vegetable section is a little unique to the book. There is a recipe for just 'Glazed Vegetables' which can be used for any type of vegetable you would ever want to glaze. Following that, there are individual recipes for single vegetables that cater a little more to that particular vegetable by adjusting herbs and spices and that kind of thing.

I chose the generic recipe because of my selection of vegetables. You can see below that I had orange and red carrots, turnips, and pearl onions. How disappointing is it that red carrots are orange under the skin and not red like we're all led to believe? My disappointment would not come without a consolation prize though. It turns out each vegetable has to be cooked in its own pot to avoid bleeding of colors, so I was able to put both of the carrots types into a single pot. Hooray nature! Here's the starting material:

These are not your grocery store vegetables that have been bred to look nice and uniform. These are all very different in shape and size and covered in dirt. Imagine that, dirt on your food. Anyway, this makes cooking with them a touch harder since it's a little more difficult to carve equal sized pieces.

The first step was to peel and carve all of the vegetables. It was a lot of peeling, turning my sink into a vegetable wasteland.

Keller gives a couple of options for carving the vegetables into edible sized pieces. These include small balls and "turning" them. When you turn them, or tourner for you Frenchies, you end up with a seven sided football kind of thing. I tried this a couple of times and decided it wasn't for me. What was for me was this: I started by cutting the carrots and turnips into boxes about 2"x.5"x.5". I quickly turned the four sided shape into an extruded octagon by chopping off each of the four corners of the box. It's pretty hard to write about, but very easy to actually do. By no means is it as cool as turning, but it's a lot more achievable, especially if you don't have three hours to sit around and carve shapes out of vegetables. One thing about all this carving is that is creates a lot of waste, which isn't great at all, but I'm sure you can find a use for random small pieces of turnips if you really want to.

As I mentioned earlier, each vegetable is cooked separately at the beginning to avoid the bleeding of colors. You can see here that I had the vegetables and a set of seasonings for each. These included a bay leaf, some peppercorns, and some fresh thyme.

I put each vegetable in a saucepan and just covered them with cold water. I added some butter, sugar, and the seasonings along with some salt to each pot.

I brought the water to a boil, reduced the heat and let it simmer for about half an hour. The book said ten minutes, but I'm now used to the fact that the books times are nearly always shorter than what it ends up taking for me to complete each step.

Because it took the liquid took so long to reduce I took the vegetables out of when they were tender. After the liquid had finished doing its thing and turned into a glaze, the veggies went back into their respective pots. I again seasoned them with a bit of salt.

Some vigorous shaking of the pots ensured equal coverage of all pieces. At this point everything was removed from the heat and put in a bowl to wait for dinner time a couple of hours later.

To prep everything for serving, all of the vegetables went into a single saucepan to be reheated. After I tasted a carrot for seasoning, they got transferred to individual serving plates and garnished with some fresh chives.

Now these are probably some of the coolest pictures I've taken so far, so here's another one:

Not only did the pictures turn out well, so did the vegetables. They were cooked very well, tender throughout but not mushy by any means. The glaze was sweet, but not too sweet. The herbs added a layer of complexity beyond just the veggies and glaze. It's something I'd make again given an abundance of root vegetables, or possibly as a side dish at a big meal. They were gone by the end of dinner, so they must of been well received, right?

Cats' Tongues

2008-09-07T19:54:00.007-06:00

"Cats' tongues--so called because of their long, narrow shape..."

I get a little worried anytime a recipe starts with a line like that. I guess I've never really thought about a cat tongue too much, but eating one doesn't seem like a great idea. It sounds more like some bad Chinese food joke than an actual food. But we're open-minded around here, right?

Since it's been about a month since I've made anything, I spent last weekend making a few recipes. Take a look over to the right if you want a hint at what's coming. These cookies were picked because I had everything I needed to make them on hand. The ingredients were just butter, sugar, salt, vanilla extract, eggs, and flour. That's pretty simple.

I started by adding the butter, sugar, and salt to my mixer. Fitted with the whisk attachment, I creamed the mixture. This took a little while because the quantities were pretty small and the mixer was having some issues scraping all of it together. Eventually it worked out pretty well:

I added in one egg white and the vanilla and mixed it until combined. One more egg white went in and I continued mixing it for just a few more seconds. The last ingredient, the flour, was added in one half at a time and gently folded in.

I put all of the batter into a ziploc bag and placed it into the refrigerator for about half an hour to firm everything up a little bit, but not before giving it a little taste. It essentially tasted like a sugar cookie batter. Kind of plain, but plain in the 'I could eat it all right now' kind of way.

After thirty minutes, I snipped off a corner of the ziploc bag, successfully transforming it into my own personal pastry bag. I piped all of the batter into thin lines with varying levels of success. Here's the better half, piped by my better half.

Each of the two trays went into the oven for 3 minutes at 350 degrees. After the three minutes, I switched and rotated each of the trays and they baked for about five more minutes. Out of the oven came a shorter and wider version of what went in:

They smelled great, so they didn't get too much of an opportunity to cool before they joined a couple of glasses of port and some chocolate as dessert.

These were very easy to make and provided a relatively high level of deliciousness. They probably could of used a few more minutes in the oven to crisp them up just a bit, but overall their value was good. The whole batch lasted for a few days with only a small amount of deterioration in quality. They won't stand on their own as a dessert, but they work great as an accompaniment, like say, with the pot de creme the books recommend. I'm sure we'll see these again around here.

Chicken Stock

2008-08-05T21:12:00.003-06:00

I admit it up front, this was a first for me. I've never made any kind of stock before. I'm a stock virgin. There seems to be a rising consensus that making your own stock is one of the biggest things a home cook can do for the quality of their food. Add that to the fact that there wasn't much left to make that in the entire book that doesn't require some kind of stock or broth, and it was time to get cooking.

I had been saving chicken carcasses from roast- and beer can-chickens for quite awhile. Ever make a mistake before you've even started cooking? I have. Make sure you clean the bones well before you freeze them. Frozen meat remnants are awfully hard to remove from bones when they are, um, frozen. And if that's not enough reason (it should be, it cost me an hour), you'll really have no idea how many bones you actually have when they're covered in meat. This cost me another hour and a trip to the grocery store for some supplemental bones. Once I had the proper quantity of bones, they all went into my brand spanking new stock pot:

From this point on, things are not exactly difficult, but they are somewhat tedious. If there is one standard theme across the entire book, it's that all impurities should be removed at every possible step. Stock is the perfect example of this; it requires a LOT of skimming. It's probably a good thing though, because a lot of junk that didn't exactly look appetizing rose to the top throughout the process.

Anyway, continuing on, the first step is to cover the bones in cold water. It's important to use cold water as the slow temperature changes are just as important as the actual heating to the development of flavors.

I brought the bones and water up to a simmer very slowly, skimming every few minutes the entire time. It took about 75 minutes to go from cold water and half frozen bones to simmering. Once the water was simmering I dumped in about four pounds of ice to shock the stock. Say that five times fast.

There was quite a large mass of water and bones that were very hot, so the ice melted pretty quickly. In the mean time though, it was remarkably easy to skim off a bunch of fat and some more impurities. With a good portion of the scum scraped off the top, I felt like I could carry on even given the warning that it would be hard to continue skimming once the vegetables were in the pot. What vegetables? These ones:

It's just some giant leeks, giant onions, and giant carrots. Seriously, look at the last picture. They're as big as the stock pot. I stuffed them into the pot and continued to heat the stock and simmer it for another 40 minutes.

So the vegetables weren't really that big. Sue me. Here's another shot of the simmering stock, and it gives a pretty good look at some of the junk that was continually rising to the top.

After that had simmered for 40 minutes, I removed it from the heat and let the stock settle for about ten or fifteen minutes. I then needed to shock it and cool it very quickly. You may remember from a just a few paragraphs ago that I need to go out and buy a stock pot to make this. It shouldn't be a long bridge to cross then to figure out that I didn't have another pot that big, and certainly not two that would suffice for an ice bath. Thankfully I'd planned ahead and made sure the kitchen sink wasn't stocked full of dirty dishes. Get it? Stocked?

I set my dutch oven in a sinkful of cold water filled with every bit of ice in the house. It looked only mildly ridiculous:

Some of the ice had melted at this point, but you get the idea. I, with some assistance, strained the stock into the dutch oven. This was not just a pour and strain situation though. I carefully ladled out scoop after scoop of sauce in an attempt to take as little of the settled junk as possible. It turns out it takes about fifty ladles to ladle out the full amount of stock.

It just barely fit in, which was the first signal that maybe the stock was a little light. I have a six quart dutch oven, and the recipe was only suppose to make 4 quarts. This picture gives a pretty good idea of the amount of fat that was still kind of floating on the surface. There wasn't a whole lot I could do about it. I tried for a little longer to skim off whatever I could.

And here's the remnants from the pan:

There was a lot of junk settled in the bottom that you can't see in the picture, so I'm glad I was careful when ladling the stock into the ice bath. I let it cool, stirring it occasionally until it was completely cool, and then separated it into ziploc bags for long term storage in the freezer.

It made about five and half quarts total, so that should last me many months. It tasted good, if not a little light. I guess that's to be expected though, since the opening words of the recipe are "This is a very light chicken stock." The one thing this stock certainly was not is salty like those store bought broths and stocks. That will be a welcome bonus for sure. Now we just wait for a chance to use all of this...

Chilled Salad of Haricots Verts and Tomatoes

2008-07-29T21:36:00.004-06:00

This dish was a small part of what was undoubtedly the best eating week of my life. It occurred on my honeymoon last October and included meals at The French Laundry, Bouchon, and several other Napa and Sonoma area restaurants. My wife ordered it as an appetizer and it every bit was worth it. All that said, it's not the reason I chose to make this dish. I'm wayyyyy to practical for that kind of reasoning. The last post on basil puree goes into the real reason behind making this dish (I had a lot of basil), so I'll skip that part here. Or did I just tell you? Go read the basil post anyway.

By no means have I made a large percentage of the Bouchon recipes yet, but patterns are certainly emerging. One of them is the use of vinaigrette with vegetables. Another is the pairing of hard-boiled eggs and vegetables. Another is the use of a lot of fresh herbs. Just check out the asparagus post if you don't believe me. All of these were in play for this salad.

The ingredients list for this salad is pretty long, especially for something in which he description starts off with 'This is a pretty straightforward salad..." Here's the full list: haricots verts, red onion, fennel, salt and pepper, Pernod, olive oil, tomatoes, eggs, olives, anchovy, basil puree, vinaigrette, shallots, chives, tarragon, chervil, and parsley. I cut a few corners and ended up with what you see below:

That would be fennel, hard-boiled eggs, heirloom tomatoes, red onion, and green beans for the 'meat' of the salad. Add to that the vinaigrette, basil puree, shallots, parsley, and chives for the dressing.

That means that I left out five ingredients. Try and figure it out? Get it? No? You didn't try? Fine. I left out the Pernod (hate the taste), olives (hate the taste), anchovy (totally forgot them at the store), tarragon and chervil (too cheap). Now that we have that all ironed out, let's do a little cooking and a bunch of assembling.

The first step was to blanch the green beans. I boiled a large pot of water and dumped a bunch of salt into it, because "it should taste like the sea" according to Sir Keller. In went the green beans for about four or five minutes, after which I drained them and transferred them to an ice bath. After another draining I laid them out onto paper towels to dry them further. Finally convinced that they were dry, I put them into the fridge to chill for awhile.

Next up was the chopping of the red onion into thin slices. I made sure that all of the pieces were cleanly separated and put those into the refrigerator as well. The fennel required a tad bit more careful dissection, and I wish I had taken some pictures of it because it was the first time I'd ever cooked with fennel. Gotta save the memories forever! I almost left it out for the same reasons I left out the Pernod, but it really wasn't too strong of a flavor in the final dish so I'm glad I didn't. Anyway, I cut the bulb of the fennel in half and removed what was obviously an inedible core and then sliced it into slices just like the onion. I tossed the fennel with some salt and olive oil (this is where the Pernod would of come in) and that joined the beans and the onion in the fridge.

Last up for a trip to the refrigerator were the tomatoes. I purchased two nice looking heirloom tomatoes, one red and one yellow, and sliced them fairly thinly. They got sprinkled with some salt and pepper and drizzled with olive oil. Guess what's next? That's right, into the fridge they went.

Ok, now it's time to end this lack of pictures and start assembling the salad. The bottom layer of the salad was the tomatoes. They're not the prettiest slices you've ever seen, but I promise you that they taste exactly the same as even the most perfect slices you've ever laid your eyes on. I seasoned them with a bit more salt and pepper.

Meanwhile, I tossed all of the dressing ingredients that I was using with the beans until they were well coated and then mixed that with the onion and fennel. All of that got mounded on top of the tomatoes. I'm using mounded loosely here, since it pretty much just collapsed into a single layer.

The final garnish was to add hard-boiled egg quarters. This is where the anchovy and olives would have come in as well, but I skipped that part.

And there you have it. It was very good and highlighted the concepts that Bouchon does best. That is, it lets the fresh vegetables speak for themselves but still adds additional flavor through the dressing and extra texture with the eggs. All that being said, you could take this salad down just a notch and have something that would be 95% as good and take 30% of the time. I would consider trading the basil puree for a little fresh basil next time, and also probably leave out the fennel. Those two changes alone would make the dish extraordinarily easy, quick, cheap, and still extremely good. I'm learning quickly that it's really kind of hard to mess up fresh, in season vegetables. This one is a keeper.

Basil Puree

2008-07-26T09:33:00.004-06:00

This basil puree was destined for use in a salad of tomatoes and haricots vert (beans that are green for the non-French). The ingredients are essentially the same as a basil pesto minus any pine nuts or cheese. I chose to make the aforementioned salad mostly because it included the basil puree. Why the desire to make basil puree you might ask? That would be because our basil plant is growing out of control and I needed to find something to use it for.

As I was saying, the ingredients are pretty straightforward; basil, garlic, olive oil, and salt. Take a note of the relative size of the bunch of basil leaves here compared to the garlic. There are a lot of leaves here, or so I thought. It turns out the recipe calls for about 10 times that many leaves. My plant was growing fast, but not nearly that fast. I scaled the recipe down significantly with only minor side effects. Continuing on...

The first step was to blanch the basil leaves in boiling water. This took exactly five seconds. Really. Five seconds isn't all that long, so there are no pictures of it. You'll just have to imagine the sight of a boiling pot of water with some basil leaves in it. I drained the leaves after the five seconds were up and plunged them immediately into an ice bath to stop any cooking as well as to set the color. I drained them again after all of the leaves were nice and cooled off, and dried the leaves off on paper towels for a few minutes.

After that I squeezed the remaining water out of the leaves. Can you tell they are supposed to be dry before continuing? Now that the leaves were totally dry, I chopped them up a bit to help with the blending process.

Here's your first chance to see the effects of basil shrinkage. The original leaves were about 30 times the size of the garlic, and now it's down to 5 or 6 times as big. I add the basil leaves, garlic, salt, and a little bit of oil into the blender and started trying to puree the mixture.

This is where I felt the effects of reducing the recipe by so much. There just wasn't enough oil in the blender to allow the basil leaves to puree, so I was forced to add more oil than I wanted to. The result was a slightly strong olive oil flavor in the finished puree, but hey, what are you going to do if you don't have access to a basil forest?

I eventually got everything pureed all together. I wish I had taken a picture of the garlic next to the finished puree, because we are talking about obscenely small quantities here.

That little container holds a 1/2 cup when it's full. I figured it was about 1/3 full, meaning there was about 1.3 oz at the end. It was probably about the same size as the garlic bulb in the other pictures. That is some concentrated basil goodness.

As for the flavor, it was good and very simple. When your only ingredients are basil, garlic, olive oil, and salt, that's probably what your puree is going to taste like. It worked very well in the salad (coming up soon!), so I was happy. I'll consider making it again the next time I stumble across a cubic yard of basil leaves.

Tartine of Pork with Celeriac Remoulade

2008-07-21T20:46:00.006-06:00

This sandwich was the culmination of the last several posts. Well, as culminating as leftover pork can be. I originally stumbled upon this dish while planning the next set of recipes to cook a couple of weeks ago. From there I worked backwards through everything I needed for it. This consisted of the last four posts; brine, rack of pork, aioli, and celeriac remoulade. What does this all boil down to? About two weeks of cooking for a sandwich. Was it worth it? Well, two weeks is a long time, but the sandwich was very good.

Once all of those other things were made, the assembly of the sandwich was simple. The ingredients (below) include the leftover pork, baguette, an apple, aioli, watercress, some chives, and the celeriac remoulade.

First up was preparing the baguette. This is an open face sandwich, so I just cut one slice per serving. I had to slice the bread on an impossibly severe bias to get it anywhere near the 10" long that the book recommends, but it turned out ok. I brushed each piece on both sides with some olive oil and then sprinkled on a bit of salt. Under the broiler they went for about a minute per side until they were just lightly toasted.

The rest of the sandwich was an exercise in layering. First up was a layer of the aioli. The aioli was really strong, so I kept the total amount down. It turned out to be about perfect, with just a hint of garlic flavor and the creamy goodness of homemade mayo.

Next up was a layer of watercress. The watercress didn't add a ton to the final sandwich in terms of flavor, but it served as a contrast in texture and color.

The watercress was followed by the pork. I somehow managed to take a delicious looking one of these:

And turn it into something that looked a little like I had just unwrapped it from a plastic container. It may have looked a touch weird, but it fit on the sandwich well and it tasted exactly the same as it did in its whole form. Leave me alone.

Three steps to go. First up was a layer of apples. I thought that the apples were the single best complimenting part of the sandwich. It's a combination that I could eat pretty much all day long, every day. This particular apple was of the grandmother variety, I think her name was Ms. Smith or something like that.

After that, a bit of celeriac remoulade. You may think I was a bit stingy after looking at the picture below, and that's because I was. If you read the celeriac post, you'd remember that I really didn't like it all that much. But since we abide by rules around here and the recipe called for more celeriac, I used celeriac. To be fair, it fit a little better as a piece of a bigger dish than it did on its own.

One last step was a sprinkling of chives. I put everything on a white plate with some white celeriac in an attempt to make the most boring looking plate ever. I almost succeeded if not for the piece of apple tucked in next to each sandwich. This dish certainly isn't going to win any beauty awards.

The side of celeriac remoulade still sucked, but the sandwich was great. It had pretty much every imaginable texture, and it all went together perfectly. I think I would adapt this some for everyday use It could easily be just the bread (with oil and salt), mayo, some sort of lettuce, pork, and apple. It would take all of two minutes to throw together. And that would be two minutes quite well spent.

Celeriac Remoulade

2008-07-16T15:00:00.001-06:00

Celeriac is a new ingredient for me. I kind of assumed (correctly) from the name that is was related to celery, and the book's description quickly confirmed that to be the case. Celeriac, also known as celery root, is from the same family as the celery we all know and love. Celeriac is grown exclusively for the root, which can get quite large in size. According to Wikipedia celeriac is wayyyy less starchy than the other root vegetables. And we know Wikipedia is always correct, so I believe it.

For all intents and purposes remoulade is just a flavored mayo. Because of that, and added to the fact that I don't really like celery all that much, this dish didn't have have too bright of a future in my book. But we're here to learn about new foods and techniques, so I'll try and keep an open mind.

Just a quick side note, I have a friend that hates the flavor of celery. In fact, I'm probably in trouble for indirectly referring to him and celery in the same sentence. So Rob, this is for you.
Everyone else hold on one second....Ok, cool, the door is locked.

The ingredients for the remoulade are mayo, mustard, creme fraiche, vinegar, cornichons, pepper, and herbs.

I started the remoulade by mixing the mayo and creme fraiche together. After mincing the cornichons and squeezing every last drop of water out of them, they joined the mayo and creme fraiche. I added the rest of the ingredients, seasoned it with salt and pepper, and put it in the fridge for a few hours to allow the flavors to develop.

Up next was preparing the celeriac and mixing the two parts together. You would think that chopping some celeriac would be a fairly small feat, and you would be wrong. I started by chopping off the ends.

Celeriac has to have the toughest skin of anything I've ever seen. I was pretty sure that my peeler was going to just split in half and chop my hand off while I tried to peel it. I finally managed to get it all off, but it wasn't a pretty site. Maybe that was someone's way of saying, "Hey, this really ain't for eating."

What you can't see here is the disaster I created on the floor below the board. Oh well. Consider it my exercise for the day. Now that the pain of a skin was gone, it was time to cut the celeriac into 1/8" julienne. This was not nearly as tough as peeling the celeriac, but my knife skills aren't anything that would scare a Philly mugger away. That's a fact.

Once I had that all chopped up, I added just enough of the remoulade to coat the celeriac and put it into the fridge overnight after giving it a taste. It turns out that my low hopes were not unjustified. Hopefully those flavors continued to develop. Into something totally different, kind of like the whole catepillar/butterfly thing.

The next day I took it out of the fridge, added some more remoulade, and served the celeriac remoulade along with the roast pork from a previous post. It was probably ok if you like a heavy mayo taste along with the flavor of celery. Unfortunately, I don't.

It was nothing that I'd make again, that's for sure. It wasn't terrible by any means, they're just flavors that I don't really like. I also had to use this for another recipe, and it was actually a pretty nice complement to that. Oh well, you learn something new everyday.

Aioli

2008-07-13T12:00:00.001-06:00

The giant roast rack of pork that I made provided us with more than enough leftovers. Conveniently, there is a recipe in the book that makes use of the leftovers. What is it, you might ask? Well you'll just have to wait a little while longer for that post. For now you'll just have to live with knowing that I needed some aioli for it.

Aioli is really just garlic flavored mayonnaise, and the ingredients are pretty simple. There is olive oil, salt, an egg, and garlic confit.

I started by completely obliterating the garlic by mixing in the salt and then smashing it repeatedly. And smashing it. And smashing it. It looked kind of gross at the end, but it smelled great.

I put the egg in a large bowl and then whisked in the garlic paste. There was an option to use an immersion blender for the whisking, but alas, I could not seem to find my immersion blender. Or I don't have one. Damn. About ten minutes later I would really want one though, does that count?

At this point the process involved just whisking constantly while slowly adding in the oil.

The aioli gradually grew in volume and thickened in texture.

Finally it was done. I let my arm recover for a few minutes while I contemplated what I had just made. It didn't look that good, somewhere between yellow cake batter and smashed bananas. It smelled like garlic, a lot. It tasted quite good though, mostly like garlic and a little like mayo.

I needed about two tablespoons of the stuff for my recipe, but now I have seemingly three gallons of it in my fridge. Anyone need some aioli, I'm certainly not going to use it all. At least not without suffering from a giant heart attack.

Brined Roasted Rack of Pork

2008-07-09T20:39:00.002-06:00

I decided to do this rack of pork since it's been while since I pulled off anything that could be considered a main course. Why the rack of pork and not any of the million other main courses in the book you might ask? Mostly because I'm very lacking in the stock department right now and nearly every other recipe requires some kind of stock or sauce. That's what we call, in the business, foreshadowing so keep your eyes peeled.

The first step was to brine the pork. That's not quite true. The first step was to go and buy it. This was, aside from possibly turkey at Thanksgiving, the largest piece of meat that I've ever purchased. The nice people at Whole Foods were kind enough to cut me a piece almost exactly the size that I needed, which just happened to be four and a half pounds.

There it is in all its lazy, flopped over glory. After the pork had been brined for a day, rinsed off and patted dry, I cut a shallow crosshatch pattern into the fat on the topside of the roast. This helps the rendering of the fat as well as makes it a bit easier for the meat to absorb some of its accompanying flavors.

Next up was to tie the roast to force it into a uniform shape that would allow for consistent cooking throughout the entire piece of meat. The Keller method involves using a needle threaded with kitchen twine, which I did not have. I made do, somewhat successfully, by just tying the twine around the entire roast and pulling it fairly tight. It forced the meat into more of a round shape. It wasn't perfect since I was still wrapping the twine around the ribs, but it was certainly an improvement. Check out the difference between the first and last pictures of this post and you can see the different shapes of the chops.

Once the meat was tied up I seasoned it with salt and pepper and let it sit at room temperature for about an hour. After that, it was time to cook.

The first step was to sear the roast. I used my fancy dutch oven for this, and it worked absolutely perfectly. I added just a bit of canola oil to the heated dutch oven, followed by a tablespoon of butter, and then seared the pork on all sides for a total of about 5 minutes. I threw in a little bit of thyme and some whole garlic cloves and let them cook in the oil for a few minutes.

I turned the roast meet side up and covered it with some of the thyme and garlic. Into the oven it went for 15 minutes, after which I added a bit more butter to the pan, basted the meat, and returned it to the oven. The recipe said it would be done after just fifteen more minutes, but I found that it took close to an additional 30 minutes after that (an hour total). I took out the roast and let it sit for about fifteen minutes to allow the juices to distribute themselves and for a bit of carryover cooking.

It looks pretty good, right? After the fifteen minutes were up, I quickly snapped off the twine and sliced the meat between the ribs into some pretty large chops.

That looks really good. And it was. In fact, it was better than really good. It was probably the best pork I've ever had, save maybe some BBQ, but that's a totally different animal. Not literally, figuratively. It was incredibly juicy, tasted of the herbs and garlic, and perfectly cooked. The inside was ideal and the sear on the outside was great as well. When we ate it for lunch the next day I was expecting your typical dry, reheated pork. Somehow though it was still juicier than almost any pork I'd had previously. All of this for probably only 20 minutes of active cooking time and maybe 90 minutes total. It would have easily served six or eight people, so it could be a great dinner entree.

Brine

2008-07-06T20:14:00.005-06:00

I haven't been making a whole lot of dinners in the past month or more, so I decided it was time to tackle another, in Keller's words, plat de resistance. My choice was roast rack of pork for a few reasons, which I'll let you in on when I actually write about that. For now you get a quick brining write up...

The very first step in making the pork is to brine it for 24 hours. Everyone raves about the effects of brining your meat, but I had never done it before. A learning opportunity was imminent, albeit quite a simple one. There is one recipe in the book for brining both the pork and a chicken recipe, the only difference being the addition of some lemon to the chicken brine.

The ingredients for the brine are honey, salt, peppercorns, bay leaves, thyme, parsley, rosemary, and garlic. I didn't have any rosemary, so that got left out. It seems like a lot of all of the ingredients, but since brining is essentially the magical infusion of solids into a piece of meat (also a solid last I checked), you need a lot.

I heated the brine, which now included a gallon of water, until it boiled and kept it there for just a minute. I removed it from the heat and let it sit for a long, long, time. You can only use the brine when it's around room temperature or you'll end up with some prematurely cooked meat, and that's never a good thing. For the record, a gallon of boiling water in a cast iron pan takes about three hours to cool to room temperature. Save yourself some time if you plan on using the brine the same night you make it.

After the brine was sufficiently cool, I just submerged the pork, and into the fridge it went for 24 hours. When I was ready to cook the pork I took it out of the brine, rinsed it off, and patted it dry. Ta da, all done.

Let me tell you, brining makes a huge difference. Not to let the cat out of the roast rack of pork bag, but this was easily the juiciest pork I've ever had. Ever reheat a leftover pork chop in the microwave as a quick lunch at work? They suck, right? Not anymore, not if you brine it ahead of time. Seriously, for anything like that I ever make again, brining will take place. This is probably the single biggest technique I've picked up so far.

Lemon Tart

2008-07-02T13:00:00.000-06:00

I was riding the success of the pine nut crust, so the filling for the lemon tart just had to be a success. Although it's not my favorite dessert, mostly because it lacks the sweetness to be considered among the best of the best, lemon tart is a good, light, summery kind of dessert.

The ingredients for the filling, a sabayon, are simple. There's lemon, sugar, butter, and egg. That's it.

I started by heating up a pot filled with just a bit of water to use as the base of a double boiler. After looking around for a big metal bowl to serve as the top half of the boiler, I settled on the bowl of our mixer. It's pretty large, but it's the only game in town as far as metal bowls in my kitchen are concerned. Here's the mismatched setup:

I whisked the eggs and sugar in the bowl for about a minute until it was nice and smooth. This is the base of the sabayon filling. I placed the mixture on the now boiling pot and whisked it constantly for another few minutes.

The rest of the preparation consists of adding some lemon juice and then whisking. And then some more lemon juice, then whisking. Action shot!

Then add some lemon juice. Then whisk. Then whisk. Then whisk. Then get an arm amputation. Slowly but surely, the mixture thickens, grows in volume, and lightens:

To get to this point required about 10 minutes of whisking. If you haven't done that before, it's kind of a long time. But we weren't done yet. I say "we", because this amount of whisking was a two person effort. I started to add small pieces of the butter one at a time, whisking in between until each had melted and was fully incorporated. Once that was done, I filled the tart shell. Action shot!

The filling didn't completely fill the shell, which was a tad disappointing, but by now I had figured out that both components were very tasty so I didn't care a whole lot.

While the filling was still warm, under the broiler it went. Action shot! Sorry, that's probably getting annoying by now.

About three and a half seconds later, it was browned. Ok, so maybe not three and half seconds, but really fast. No more than 30 seconds. Here's the finished tart:

We tried it while it was still warm, and it was great. We tried it again after a night in the fridge, and it was really great. Nice and tart, but still creamy with an excellent crust. The tart became a staple in our house for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for nearly the entire week.

I'll be making this again this weekend for three reasons. First, I still have enough dough for two more shells in the freezer. Second, it's very good and very easy. And most importantly, it's helping me with my upper body strength.

Pine Nut Crust

2008-06-29T07:40:00.000-06:00

Dough and pastry type recipes have been my downfall so far during this adventure. There was the macaroons, then the quiche, and the quiche again. Needless to say, I was hoping not to repeat the past here. It seemed like this was going to be significantly easier than the others were, and it made my day when I read this sentence:

There may be some cracks in the crust; they will not affect the finished tart.

Fantastic. There will be no lemon sabayon coating the inside of my oven pretending to be quiche batter.

The ingredients are pretty simple. There are pine nuts, sugar, flour, butter, egg, and vanilla. I initially wasn't too sure about the pine nuts, and therefore the whole crust. Not to give everything away so early, but the crust didn't really taste of pine nuts too much, and it certainly was not overpowering.

This crust is started in your handy food processor, and it's very quick. Add the pine nuts to the processor and blend it for a few seconds to roughly chop the nuts. Then add in the sugar and the flour and process until it's completely combined and homogeneous. Now I have a food processor that I would say is at least as big as the average home food processor.

It holds 7 cups, and I needed every little bit of that for this crust. My guess is that it wouldn't be a disaster if you didn't have a processor that was large enough. The same general result can probably be obtained by sifting the flour and then mixing it by hand with the sugar and nuts until it's all well combined before proceeding. You really do need to make sure at least the nuts are processed though, otherwise I imagine the dough would not have a very good texture.

I transferred the dough into the bowl of my mixed, and added the butter, egg, and vanilla. That all got mixed together for a few minutes. For some reason I was expecting the dough to come together in a ball, but it turns out that wasn't meant to be. Here's what it looked like when it was nice and mixed:

Now the recipe says you can mix it by hand, but I would not recommend that. You're arm would either be excruciatingly tired or the ingredients wouldn't really mix too well together. So unless your name is Rocky, stick with the mixer.

This recipe makes enough crust for three tarts. You might respond to that the same way that I did:

Hey Keller, how about just divide everything by three and make just one crust. What am I going to do with three crusts?

To which T. Keller would calmly reply:

You know, I was about to go ahead and do that, but I got tired. Running some of the best restaurants in the world is tough work. That, and it's kind of tough to divide an egg into three parts, so that's just the way it's going to have to be.

So I ended up with three crusts. All three were wrapped. Two went into the freezer for future use, and one got to spend 10 minutes in the fridge before it's date with the oven.

You probably remember that my current ~~excuse~~ reason for not succeeding with the quiche crust is that I don't have the right pan. That's happened for a number of the recipes so far, but this time I actually have a tart pan!

After the 10 minutes had passed, I took the dough and pressed it into a buttered and floured tart pan and trimmed off the excess dough. In to the 350 degree oven it went for about 20 minutes, during which I rotated it once about half way through. Out of the oven it came, and voila:

It's a fairly successful tart crust. And you can tell it's mine because you can still see my fingerprints in there somewhere. You'll have to wait for the lemon tart post for full results, but it was very good. A little on the thick side, which was my fault, but very good none the less.

Salmon Tartare

2008-06-24T18:35:00.000-06:00

I'd never had salmon tartare before, so this dished just barely registered on the 'I'm a little unsure about this one' meter. I've eaten plenty of raw salmon in sushi, so that wasn't the issue. For some reason the different preparation was just a bit foreign to me. But hey, that's what we're here for, right? It's pretty incredibly easy to make once you have the ingredients for this dish. If you don't mind chopping that is. And then chopping some more. And then some more. Needless to say, you're going to want a good knife for this.

Let's get (not exactly) cooking. You're going to need some salmon (obviously), hard-boiled eggs, chives (home grown greatness here), shallot, lemon, red onion, and creme fraiche. The recipe also calls for capers, which I really really do not like at all, so they were left out.

First up was cleaning the salmon. This step is optional if you bought pre-prepared sushi grade salmon like I did. Then it was time to chop, chop, chop. I chopped for probably five straight minutes, and easily could have gone for another five minutes if it wasn't for the fact that I was getting bored. Here's how far I got:

I transferred the salmon to a bowl and mixed in some shallot, salt, half the chives, and olive oil.

With the salmon ready to go it was time to move onto the garnishes. Garnishes is kind of the wrong word, because there is probably twice as much garnish as there is salmon. It's not the main ingredient though, so call what you whatever you want. I'm going to use garnish.

The first step was to chop up the hard boiled eggs. The direction here is to separate the yolks and whites, push each through a grater, and then chop it up. The grater apparently allows for more uniform pieces. I'm not sure the extra time is really worth it. The eggs were followed by chopping the red onion into 1/8" squares and mincing up the chives.

The instructions for plating this dish seemed to me to be a lot more complex than they needed to be. The outside ring, which will make sense in a minute, was supposed to be assembled by layering the egg yolks, then onions, then egg whites, then the chives. I went a little crazy and just mixed it all together at the start. Why do something four times when you can do it once and nobody in the world will know? Except for you guys now I guess...

So here is what I started with. Looks great, right?

And here was I made out of it. I didn't have the requisite ring mold to make the salmon nice and circular. Actually, I still don't have it. I just made something that was almost circular. For a minute I was afraid the oblong shape would cause it to not taste like salmon anymore, but lucky for me that was not the case.

I finished it off with a little scoop of creme fraiche, which really did make a difference, in a good way. It was really good, the two of us ate almost all of it. That's saying a lot, since there was probably close to 1.5 lbs of food on the plate. The salmon was pretty fatty (you can kind of see in the first picture) and that led to a slightly odd, less than appetizing color. Hopefully next time I can get some leaner fish, but it's kind of hard to find a lot of sushi grade choices around here. I'd make this again for sure, not only because it's easy, but also because it's relatively simple to make.

Most of the discussion while we were eating it centered around whether or not tartare would be an acceptable hors d'oeuvres at a party. It's certainly tasty, but would you trust your host enough to eat raw fish at their house? Let me know in the comments.

Quiche, Try #2

2008-06-22T19:44:00.000-06:00

Devoted readers of this blog probably remember the first time I attempted to make a quiche recipe. What, you're not a devoted reader? Then time-out for you while you go and read all about it. Actually, everyone should probably go read it or risk being 100% confounded by this post. Now that we're all on the same page with regard to that disaster, let's proceed with try number two. The plan this time was to make bacon and onion and quiche, mostly because I thought it sounded better than roquefort and leek quiche. Anyone want to argue that point?

The main lesson I took from trying to make the shell in the last episode was that you won't have enough dough if your pan has three inch sides and the recipe is for a pan with two inch sides. To do away with this issue I had two options: buy the right ring mold or make more dough. I chose the latter because I could do it without leaving the house. I made 1.5 times the recipe, so I had a lot of dough. More than enough to cover the pan, that's for sure. I wish I could show you with a picture here, but I forgot. Take a look at the last try though, it's more or less the same.

I put the shell into the oven and came back fifteen minutes later. Disaster! Again! The dough had fallen down the sides of the pan in several places. Apparently dough does not care that you tried very hard to make sure it's secure. And that you're not sure you can mentally handle another mess of a quiche. It just falls. We'll end this conversation about the quiche shells with my latest hypothesis on what went wrong (because there's no way it's me): I think that pan I have has sides that are just too tall. I don't think the shell can support that much of itself. I think...

So I abandoned that attempt and moved on to quiche shell recipe number two. This was much more successful for me, just look at how it turned out:

Perfect! Look at those edges! I'll bet you twenty bucks you can't find a human on this planet that can make edges like that. This is what I was forced to resort to. It wasn't that I was giving up, but it was getting late and I really wanted to make the quiche that night. Oh well. The crust sucked. What are you going to do?

So let's just forget about the whole crust saga and move onto the filling. This is also identical to the last time I made it, except for without all of the mistakes this time. The first mistake that I didn't make was to scald the milk and the cream.

Action shot, right? It's awesome. For the uninformed, Keller would like you to know that the milk is scalded when 'a skin begins to form on the surface'. Why scald, you might ask? Because scalding the dairy ensures the custard can start to cook immediately upon arrival in the hot oven. We wouldn't want it to soak through that fancy shell we just made, right? Bitter every step of the way, I completed the scalding and then let it cool for a few minutes. Ever put really hot liquids in a blender? Me either, but I've seen it done and it's not pretty. Half of the recipe went into the blender until it was nice a foamy, then the other half. Batter complete. Time for the next steps, and they had better be quick or you'll be reblending everything to keep it nice and aerated.

Aside from the shell and the batter, the ingredients for the quiche are pretty simple. It's bacon and onion quiche, so obviously there's some bacon and some onions. There's also some Emmentaler cheese and some thyme. That, plus some seasonings, is about it.

That's a nice hunk of meat, isn't it? The namesake onions were actually the delicious onion confit. Go ahead, click it. You know you want to.

The first step is to render the bacon in the oven for about half an hour. That's kind of an attempt to make it seem a bit more healthy by rendering some of the fat, but who are we kidding here? It's still bacon. Drain the little lardons on paper towels.

I combined the onions, bacon, thyme, and seasonings in a skillet for a few minutes to heat everything through.

Looks good, right? I suppose at this point you could just throw the batter in the skillet, bake it, and call it a frittata, but that's not what we're here for. Continuing on, it's now time to assemble the quiche, which is really just an exercise in layering.

First up, some cheese:

This is followed by a layer of the bacon and onions.

And then a layer of batter. Look at how that bacon and onion just sinks right to the bottom.

And then more bacon and onion.

What is going on here? First it sinks and now it floats. It's either an optical illusion or all of that blending of the batter paid off. Into the oven it went. This was a bit of a guessing game for me. The original recipe called for 90-105 minutes in the oven, but I was using less than half of the original amount of batter in some ridiculous frozen pie shell. I also live way up high, for what that's worth. It turns out that combination will shave off about 45 minutes of cooking time. It almost made up for the time I wasted on the original shell. Almost.

There's the finished product. I feel like it's not really fair to judge it. It was ok, but nothing special. There wasn't that much batter and therefore not that much egg flavor, which probably would have been solved by, um, following the recipe. The flavor was pretty good though, if you could get past the crust. The bottom line is that there will probably be an upcoming post titled 'Quiche, Try #3'. Better luck next time, self. Better luck next time.

Onion Confit

2008-06-17T18:55:00.000-06:00

I needed some onion confit for the bacon and onion quiche recipe. Lucky for me, there's an onion confit recipe in the back of the book. It's pretty easy to do, but it takes about two and half hours. That's not great, but it at least it tastes great.

There's no picture of the ingredients here because it's just onions, butter, salt, and a bouquet garni. You start by preparing the onions, which consists of cutting off both ends, cutting them lengthwise, and coring them.

They should look something like this. I then sliced each onion half into 1/4 inch slices. Everything will just kind of fall apart into nice pieces. I put the onions into a pot with just a little bit of water, a lot of bit of butter, and the bouquet garni.

This gets covered with a parchment lid. There are some instructions for making a parchment lid in the book, but it's way more complicated than it really needs to be. I just took a sheet of parchment, cut a small hole in the center, and pressed it against the surface of the onions. Perfect.

The onions have to cook on just about the lowest heat your stove top is capable of producing for two hours. I stirred them about every thirty minutes to make sure everything was happening nice and evenly. Here they are after the first hour, and then at the finish:

They're probably the best cooked onions I've ever had. They soft but not falling apart. Wilted but still colorless. Buttery but not greasy. Everything about them is great. Now I just have to come up with some other things to make that use onion confit.

Hard-Cooked Eggs in Russian Dressing

2008-06-15T14:05:00.000-06:00

This may be the simplest recipe in the book, but I wasn't overly enthusiastic about making it. How good could hard-cooked eggs smothered in Russian dressing really be? Regardless, this isn't a 'make the recipes you think will be good' blog, it's a 'cook everything in the book' blog. So here we go.

The first thing you're going to need are some hard-cooked (boiled to me) eggs. Because this book and Keller himself are so incredibly thorough, there are instructions on exactly how to do this: Cover eggs with cold water, bring them to a boil, simmer for about a minute, and then turn off the heat and let the eggs just sit there for ten minutes. Put them immediately into an ice bath. I have made eggs this way twice now. The first time was kind of a mess, which I attribute to not cooling the eggs in the ice bath for long enough. They were pretty much impossible to peel. This time was much better, and everything turned out just as expected. Because these shots are so interesting, here are a couple of pictures:

Now that the eggs are taken care of, let's make some Russian dressing. I, like Wikipedia, had always thought Russian dressing was mayo and tomato based. Bouchon apparently does not believe in Wikipedia. This Russian dressing is mayo, chili sauce, shallots, parsley, chives, and lemon juice. So it's close, but we're trading chili sauce for ketchup.

Those are home-grown herbs. Aren't they great? I don't usually quote the book verbatim, but in this case they're incredibly complex so here they are:

Combine all the ingredients in a small bowl, mixing well. Cover and refrigerate for a few hours to allow the flavors to develop.

That's pretty tough, right? Here's what it looks like:
More great shots, right? Again, a direct quote for the difficult serving instructions:

Cut the hard-cooked eggs lengthwise in half and place them cut side down on a serving platter. Spoon the sauce generously over the eggs.

I didn't really think they were anything great, that's for sure. It tasted more or less like you would expect that combination of ingredients to taste. Obviously there were eggs, there was mayo, and there was chili sauce. Nothing spectacular, but you can make it in about four and half minutes, so maybe it's a good addition to an set of appetizers.

Croque Madame - Grilled Ham and Cheese Sandwich with a Fried Egg and Mornay Sauce

2008-06-07T09:59:00.000-06:00

The recipe for croque madame is on page 101, as if to subtlety say "If you can't make this you're an idiot." Not to spoil the outcome before we even get started, but I am no idiot.

The ingredients here are about what you would expect from a grilled ham and cheese sandwich with eggs and cheese sauce:

Every single ingredient shows up in the name of the dish. That's a Cooking Bouchon first, for sure. Oh wait, we threw some butter in, because no recipe in the entire book leaves out the butter. Almost a Cooking Bouchon first. Just for the image-impaired, we have brioche*, butter, eggs, ham, Swiss cheese, and mornay sauce.

*I actually couldn't find brioche, so I had to settle for challah bread. It was still good, but I wish I had been able to try it with brioche. I had considered making some on my own using the recipe in the book and writing about it, but there is absolutely no way I could have done a better job than this.

Ok, time to get cooking. First step, preheat the oven to 375. I'm 1-1 at this point. Next up, lay four slices of bread out. 2-2. Divide the ham, and then the cheese among all four slices of bread, being careful not to let it extend over the edge of the bread.

3-3 and 4-4. This is a little different than I had ever made grilled ham and cheese before, but those were the days when I made peasant grilled ham and cheese. This was Croque Madame after all! Sorry, continuing...In those, lesser, days I would have put all of the meet and cheese on one slice of bread, then topped it with the other slice. The Bouchon way turned out at least as well, although it took a touch longer than my old way.

Before I started all of the sandwich grilling, I reheated the mornay sauce I had made the previous day. Then I melted a tablespoon of butter on a nonstick skillet, and added all four slices of bread to it.

This is the first time in this whole endeavor that I actually laughed at the recipe. Keller and the gang found it necessary to tell us that the bread should be added 'cheese side up'. Whew, good thing that's taken care of. All those years I could never understand why the bread was would never turn golden brown, but come to find out it's because I had the cheese side down. Damn.

I cooked them on the skillet until they were golden brown and then everything went into the oven for a few minutes to melt the cheese. I was worried the bread would continue to cook and eventually burn, but it didn't.

Meanwhile, I had started cooking a couple of eggs in another skillet. In another first for me, I never flipped the eggs, only allowing the bottoms of the whites to set before also putting them in the oven to allow the tops to set. In another inspirational note, the recipe reads "We cook the eggs in 4 inch individual skillets". Well, sorry guys, I don't have a bunch of teeny-weeny individual skillets laying around so these eggs are going to be ugly. Deal with it.

Anyway, everything came out of the oven exactly as planned. The cheese was melted and the top of the eggs had set. I placed two of the slices of bread together, thus creating a sandwich. Then I did it again because there were two of us eating. Each sandwich was topped with an egg, and then I spooned the mornay sauce around the whites of the egg. Done!

Let me tell you, this was good. And easy. Good and easy. It even looks really good. It was like the best grilled ham and cheese you've ever eaten topped with a very good egg and some cream and more cheese. It doesn't get much better. It's also a very rich, so a single sandwich is about all you need if you have a side dish of some sort. I whipped the whole thing up in half and hour too, so it qualifies to be the star of a Rachel Ray episode. Double bonus! I think I'm going to go make it again right now.

Roasted Beet and Mache Salad with Goat Cheese and Toasted Walnuts

2008-06-02T20:16:00.000-06:00

Beets seem to be one of the reoccurring ingredients here at Cooking Bouchon. First there was roasted beet salad, and now this. If you have read the other post, you'll soon figure out that this one was much better. There's not going to be too many pictures here, so read carefully.

The ingredients are fairly simple, although there are quite a few. We have walnuts, baby beets, olive oil, red wine vinegar, mache lettuce, shallots, chives, chervil, tarragon, parsley, some delicious walnut vinaigrette, and fresh goat cheese.

Just the herbs alone will set you back $15 if you don't have some growing on your windowsill. Lucky for me, we have herbs growing on just about every windowsill. Unlucky for me, none of them are called tarragon or chervil. 50% ain't bad.

I toasted the walnuts for about seven minutes to make them nice and tasty. To be honest, the first time I toasted them for ten minutes just like the book says to and they ended up nice and burnt. While the second batch was toasting, I cleaned and trimmed the beets and tossed them in some olive oil, some water, salt, and pepper. They went into a covered pan and into the oven for about an hour. Oh, you think I'm an idiot? I covered the pan after I put the beets in, thanks.

I employed the Thomas Keller beet peeling technique after they were done and had cooled for a few minutes. I put them in a paper towel and rubbed the skin right off. It's pretty easy even if it does leave you with what would appear to be a murder scene cover up in your trash can. Once they were peeled, I cut them into quarters and tossed them will a little more salt and pepper, some olive oil, and vinegar.

For the mache, which is one of the better lettuces I've had, I tossed it with the herbs and shallots and some of the walnut vinaigrette. The recipe called for tossing it with only a tablespoon of vinaigrette (which I thought was ludicrously little), but it was just about right.

Now it's time for assembly. I made a nice little mound of mache in the middle of the plate, and surrounded it with the walnuts, beets, and goat cheese. I also sprinkled some more vinaigrette around the outside of the plate.

It was pretty incredibly good for a simple salad. The goat cheese we bought was very good, and when mixed with the nuts and beets it was perfect. The vinaigrette was tart but not overwhelmingly so and the mache was neither overpowering nor underwhelming. All in all, a pretty great salad.

Walnut Vinaigrette

2008-05-30T16:17:00.000-06:00

This is the second vinaigrette I've made, the first being the Bouchon House Vinaigrette. This version requires nothing more than a bowl and a whisk, so needless to say it's pretty easy. There are also instructions for those of you with a hand blender (Mr. Keller's preferred method).

Oh, and a towel. I took a little tip from Alton Brown and wrapped a towel around the bottom of the bowl to keep in from sliding around. Either I'm doing it wrong or I'm a lot stronger than AB, because it didn't do a whole lot for me.

The ingredients are very similar to the house vinaigrette, with the only difference being the type of vinegar (champagne versus red wine) and oil (walnut versus canola).

Whisk together the mustard, vinegar and lemon juice in a small bowl. Starting slowly, add the oil while constantly whisking until the entire vinaigrette is nice and creamy. Season with salt and pepper. It's that easy.

I personally liked this a lot more than the house vinaigrette, mostly because it was a little less acidic. I served it as part of a mache salad with beets, goat cheese, and walnuts, and it fit in perfectly. I'll be interested to try it again on a more traditional salad.

To be honest, I couldn't even imagine tasting a difference between walnut and canola oil when mixed with all of those other ingredients. I do think the choice of vinegar matters, as does the overall ratio of ingredients (see below).

A couple of notes:

This is really just another emulsion, which is one of the reasons you need to start by adding the oil slowly. For a better description, see Michael's Ruhlman post on mayo.
The house vinaigrette has a 1:2:6 ratio of mustard:acid:oil. This vinaigrette has a 3:8:24 (1:2.7:8) ratio, and the acid is split between lemon juice and a less harsh champagne vinegar instead of red wine vinegar. This is probably what's leading to the less acidic taste here.

Steak Frites - Flatiron Steak with Herb Butter and French Fries

2008-05-26T18:11:00.000-06:00

I ordered steak frites when I went to Bouchon last October, thinking that I should order the stereotypical bistro dish. Every single bite was worth it. That's saying something, considering the giant pile of fries that come with your steak. I've made this dish before, but not this particular recipe. Those endeavors were not exactly failures, but they were nothing spectacular either. I prepared this recipe in a completely interleaved manner that would be 100% impossible to understand if I wrote this post chronologically. So you're going to get the steak, and then the fries, and then everything all together. Say thank you. You're welcome.

The choice of steak seems to be up for debate, or at least personal preference. Keller says Bouchon uses flatiron. Hanger steak (aka onglet, Anthony Bourdain's choice) or top sirloin are suitable substitutes. The grocery store I was at had a single flatiron steak, so I bought a top sirloin steak as well.

The two steaks I bought were very thin. This worried me since the recipe calls for browning on the stovetop and then finishing them in the oven. My worries were not unfounded. I preheated the oven to 450 anyway. The ingredients here are pretty simple. A couple of steaks, a few tablespoons of butter, a ton of shallots, and some thyme.

I seasoned the steaks with salt and pepper and heated a skillet over high heat. When the pan was nice and hot I added in a film of canola oil. A few seconds later the steaks and a teaspoon of butter when in. I started to let the steak brown on the first side but it became apparent almost instantly that the steaks were just too thin to allow them to brown completely. I flipped the steaks pretty early.

I basted the top side of the steaks with the butter and oil while the bottom side 'browned'. I had to deviate from the recipe at this point. The recipe said to drain the excess fat while the steak was still browning and then add the shallots, thyme, and a tablespoon or so of butter. They should cook with the steak for a few minutes before the steak is removed and shallots are finished. I took the steaks out immediately and cooked the shallots on their own. I put everything onto a baking sheet when it was done.

See how nice and browned those steaks are? The steaks were cooked all the way through by this point, so there would be no finishing them in the oven. I turned the oven off and used it just to keep the steaks warm while I finished the fries. It would not be long.

I started the fries but cutting the russet potatoes into matchsticks that were probably close to 4 inches long and 1/4 inch cross sections. I soaked the potatoes in cold water for about fifteen minutes to removes some of the excess starch. Here's the first possible chance for things to go wrong, but more about that later.

I went out and bought a gallon of peanut oil to make these since everyone seems to think that peanut oil is the best for frying. I would not argue that one bit. I put probably 80% of the gallon in my brand spankin' new dutch oven and heated it to 320 degrees Fahrenheit. It made this cool ripple in the pot, so I took a picture of it.

After draining the potatoes pretty well on paper towels, I added a bunch into the oil. The instructions said to cook them for 5 to 6 minutes or until they were a very pale gold. This is where my problems started. My potatoes were a pale gold in about 2.5 minutes.

I took them out and drained them on paper towels again while I finished the other batches. When the entire set of fries were through the first cooking, I heated the oil up to 375 degrees. The fries are supposed to get cooked for another 2 or 3 minutes at this higher temperature (it crisps the outside now that the insides are already cooked), but my fries only made it about 15 seconds. Weird. My only guess is that I didn't soak the potatoes for long enough and that they were too dry. If it's not that, I have no idea.

Whatever the cause, I sprinkled the fries with some salt and assembled everything. Assembly here means put a steak and some fries on a plate and then add a tasty slice of herb butter to the steak. It's almost time to eat.

Between the overly colored fries and underly colored steak, this was not as nice as I expected it to be. In case you wondering what all the green stuff is, it's chard. It has nothing to do with Bouchon, but it may have been the best part of this dinner. By no means were the steak and fries bad, they were perfectly acceptable. It was not, however, restaurant quality. One thing that was very noticeable was that the flatiron steak was much better than the top sirloin. It was beefier without being any tougher and it stood up better to the fries and butter.

Our consensus was that maybe this is a dish, at least the fries part anyway, that is best left to restaurants. For $3 you can have a plate full of golden brown deliciousness, and there won't be a gallon of oil on your stove a week and a half later. I'd give it a shot again, but probably only one more. It's a reasonably big mess to deal with too often. Still tastes pretty good though.

Macaroni Gratin

2008-05-20T22:00:00.000-06:00

Who doesn't like macaroni and cheese? Really, is there anyone? I didn't think so. This is a pretty amazing, and fairly simple dish to put together. Keller talks it about it being "a standard side dish in bistros, but in my bistro it's the whole dinner. It's very rich, but every bite is worth it.

Just to set the bounds a little bit, I should mention that this recipe offers the chance to make the macaroni gratin your own by adding in things like mushrooms or ham. I decided to go the boring route and just make it plain, and I'm kind of glad that I did. I tend to like my food simple; the fewer the ingredients the better. You can add ham or mushrooms to yours, it just won't be as good as mine was.

The shopping list for this is pretty simple, and nothing you wouldn't expect from a macaroni and cheese recipe. Well, a Thomas Keller macaroni and cheese recipe anyway. We've got elbow macaroni, nutmeg, thyme, Comte cheese, and panko breadcrumbs.

You're also going to need some mornay sauce. You're not going to find that at the store, so go read about it here.

Step number 1: Make the macaroni. This requires absolutely no explanation other than to note that after you cook it, rinse it in cold water and drain it on paper towels. Let it hang out there while you're busy doing other things.

I had made the mornay sauce the previous night so I had to reheat it. I took the books advice and added a little extra cream as it warmed because it was more than a bit thick. That warmed up well, and I added the macaroni then seasoned it with some salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg. This is also where the ham, mushrooms, lucky charms, or whatever else you had laying around to ruin the macaroni and cheese would go in. But you're not going to do that, right?

It all went into the nice casserole dish that you saw in the picture above. While the pasta was cooking I had mixed together the thyme, cheese, and breadcrumbs for the topping. I sprinkled that across the top of the casserole dish, and into the oven it went. I think I kept it in for about 20 minutes and then broiled it for a few more to attempt to brown the top. I only partially succeeded with the browning because my casserole dish is labeled, quite prominently, NO BROILER. So I left it in there until I has far surpassed my comfort zone, and this is what popped out. Not too shabby:

It was thick and gooey, yet crisp on the top. The one improvement that I would have made would be to increase the amount of breadcrumbs and cheese in the topping. It was a little thyme heavy for me. More importantly though, I really like that crisp topping. It also served as lunch the next day, where it served it's role admirably. The sauce may have lost a little of its original creaminess, but it was still well worth eating. Overall this was an incredibly good and pretty easy dish to make, even if i did spread it over two nights.

I've been saying most of the recent dishes have been easy. That either means my skills are advancing, or the end of this little venture is going to be very difficult. Hopefully it's the former.

Herb Butter

2008-05-15T22:09:00.000-06:00

Also known as Maitre D'Hotel Butter, herb butter is just butter, herb(s), salt, and an acid mixed together. You could say it's also known as snob butter. Whatever you call it, it's pretty good, and a very quick improvement to pretty much anything you normally put butter on.

I chose to use parsley and lemon juice as the herb and acid, respectively.

Now how simple does that picture look? Here's what you do in 3 easy steps:

Use a spatula to smooth out the butter in bowl*
Add in the rest of the ingredients*
Form into a log and refrigerate*

*The butter should be at room temperature. The herbs should be chopped. The log should be formed using the method below.

Take a piece of plastic wrap and spoon the herb butter onto the center of the sheet.

I formed the butter into something that looked like a log. The you kind of force the butter into a more dense log by sealing the butter in the plastic wrap and twisting the ends until it's forced to tighten up. Know how you take a loaf of bread and spin it around to make sure it's sealed nice and tight? It's kind of like that, but from both ends. At the end it should look something like this (I hope):

That pretty log goes into the fridge to harden up again and then it's ready to serve. We sliced off a piece to top some steak, and I even managed to get some on the pasta the next night. Both times it was great. It's one of those things that is probably worth keeping around just in case you happen to make something that could benefit from it. And what couldn't benefit from some butter, or better yet, some 'better than plain butter' butter.

Mornay Sauce

2008-05-14T22:02:00.000-06:00

I've learned a lot of things in the last few months making some of these recipes. One thing I haven't quite figured out yet was how to remember to take pictures. For that, I apologize. This wouldn't have had the most exciting pictures, but pictures are pictures.

I made this sauce as the base for macaroni gratin. It almost never made it that far, because it was really, really good. The ingredient list is kind of long, but it's mostly household items:

Butter
Onion
Flour
Milk
Heavy cream
Bay leaf
Peppercorns
Cloves (not a household item in my household, so I left it out)
Nutmeg
Salt and pepper
Comte cheese

The sauce took less than an hour to put together, and a good portion of that was inactive time, so it's even easier than it seems. I started by melting the butter over medium-low heat, then added the onions and some salt until they started to soften a little. In went the flour to form a onion-roux, and I let that cook for a few minutes, watching carefully all the while so that the flour didn't brown at all. I added the milk and cream, whisking until it all came together. That came to a simmer and I put in the bay leaf and peppercorns. I lowered the heat just a bit so that it the sauce was barely simmering and cooked it for about half and hour. It immediately smelled great, and after the 30 minutes the entire house was filled with the smell of cream, onions, and spices. That might not sound great, but it is.

I took the thickened sauce off the heat and mixed in the salt, nutmeg, and pepper. I didn't have any white pepper, which the recipe called for, so anyone that wants to enjoy my macaroni and cheese is just going to have to deal with little black flecks mixed in. Deal with it.

I strained the sauce to remove any impurities (these includes bay leaves or peppercorns that may have found their way in) and mixed in the cheese until it was all nice and melted. That's the end of the sauce making. It was at this point that I strongly considered just skipping the macaroni gratin and sitting down with the pot of sauce and a soup spoon. I decided that probably wouldn't be too great for my heart, put the sauce in an airtight container with plastic warp pushed down on the surface to prevent any film from forming, and into the refrigerator it went. Macaroni and cheese was on the menu for the next night.

Sauteed Spinach with Garlic Confit

2008-05-08T19:35:00.000-06:00

Most kids don't like spinach. It, for some reason, is the stereotypical sound of fear for everyone under the age of 12 at the dinner table. I was included in this group, except for my membership lasted until about the age of 25. I've recently changed my tune a little bit, and I now enjoy spinach on occasion. This would be one of those occasions.

I made this to go with the trout from last week, and it was perfect in multiple ways. It's a single pan dish, which accompanied the three pan trout dish on my four burner stove. It needs almost no attention, and you can pretty much do it at the last minutes. That, and the prep is really easy (If you happen to have garlic confit laying around. You probably don't, but I did and it was starting to go bad). Anyway, the only other ingredients are butter, shallots, and spinach. Easy, right? I know!

I melted the butter in a sauce pan. Because I'm shameless, here's the same picture that I used in the trout post so that you can see the extra exciting melting butter. That's it in on the back burner:

There's probably a stick of butter on those two burners. It was not necessarily a healthy night. Once the butter was melted, the shallots went in for a minute, and then the garlic confit, some salt, and pepper. As much spinach as you can fit in your pan goes into the butter mixture, and you slowly add more and more as it wilts until it's all in there. I turned the spinach occasionally to ensure an even buttery coating throughout, and everything was done in just minutes. Now there's no way to take a glamorous looking picture of wilted spinach coated with butter, but here's my attempt:

This was probably the best spinach I've ever had. It was buttery, garlickly, and I guess spinachy. The spell checker had to work extra hard on that last sentence. I would make this again pretty much any time I want to. I assume it the basic butter, garlic, greens combo would work without regard to your choice of green, but do that at your own risk. Or be safe and use spinach, because that's delicious.

Trout with Haricots Verts and Almonds

2008-05-06T23:29:00.000-06:00

I like trout. I ate a lot of it growing up in Upstate New York and spending a lot of time fishing on Lake Ontario. That was a solid 15 years ago though, and this was probably the first time that I have had it since then. It's certainly the first time I cooked it.

My squirmy-ness quotient for foods that look like animals and not like food was tested for the first time here. When I first flipped through Bouchon, there were a few things that I was (and still am) a little afraid to make, mostly because they are unfamiliar to me. Not necessarily in a taste kind of way, but in the preparation of the dishes and in experiencing the work that needs to occur to transform animal into food. These included the foie gras, frog legs, and whole fish. Whole fish was pretty far behind the other two, but looking your dinner in the eyes is an odd thing to do, so it still makes the list.

Enough with the introduction. This is another very simple dinner that can probably be made in under an hour. It's hard for me to tell since I have to arrange everything nicely to provide you with the (not so) pretty pictures. Even given all that extra work, I don't think this took more than an hour, so that should be pretty beatable.

So, who wants to take a guess what kind of ingredients we're talking about here? What would someone put in Trout with Haricot Verts and Almonds? How about trout, haricot verts, and almonds? Close, but I substituted plain old green beans for haricot verts. Now someone who actually knows these things should weigh in below, but from what I can find there are fairly small differences between green beans and haricot verts. Mainly a language translation. That, and haricot verts may or may not be longer and thinner with a slightly more complex flavor than green beans. I wouldn't know because I could only find green beans at Whole Foods. The picture is rounded out with a lot of butter, lemon, and parsley.

The first step of the recipe is pan-dressing the trout. This is especially easy when you buy your fish already pan-dressed. The only work left for me was a quick snip of the dorsal fin and to chop off the tail. All done. All the bad stuff was previously removed. I ended up with something like this. Well not something like this, this:

Time to prep the green beans. Blanch 'em for about five minutes, drain, stick 'em in some ice, drain again. Next.

Completion of this dish cost me three burners. It's a good thing the other dish, Sauteed Spinach with Garlic Confit, was a single burner dish. I guess I need to invest in a nonstick saute pan large enough to accommodate two fish at a time if I'm going to be making this a lot. Here's a shot of everything (for both dishes) in place:

My stuff, as they say, is in place. Let's cook. Wait, not quite yet. Now is when I realized that I needed toasted, and not raw, sliced almonds. Into the oven they went for about 15 minutes and then it was time to cook. I took the now salt and peppered trout and added them to some preheated and pre-oiled nonstick skillets, skin side down for four minutes. You only cook these babies on one side. This was a new idea for me, and it requires adding something pretty hot on the top of the fish to complete the cooking process, but it worked out just fine.

While that was going on, the beans, some butter and some water went into a pan. I heated it for quite a few minutes until the water had evaporated and the green beans were nice and butter-coated. Want a picture? Ok...

Look how green they are! They got the salt and pepper treatment as well and then placed on the side to wait patiently for everything else.

Just about done at this point. You have the option of cutting off the heads of the fish at this point, but that wouldn't be any fun, would it? They went on to a plate. I even remembered to warm the plate for once, I guess I am learning around here. The fish were topped with the green beans. The only thing left was some brown butter sauce. You may remember something similar from the gnochhi post, and it's pretty easy. Melt and then brown a bunch of butter, add and brown the almonds, add in some lemon juice and parsley. Serve.

I couldn't get the head to stay upright, which led to looking at the inside of the head and nothing else. That wasn't great or intended. Oh well. The fish itself was very good. The almonds provided a nice crunch and the green beans some texture. The fish was light, not too fishy but not too plain. The butter sauce was rich, but the lemon provided just the right kick. All in all, a definite keeper than can be finished with not problem in about the time of two servings of Chicken and Egg Sammies Deluxe.

Vanilla Ice Cream

2008-05-01T18:43:00.000-06:00

The early part of this little project has been slowly turning into dessert city. Already, I've conquered chocolate ice cream and pear sorbet, vanilla macaroons (not really), and vanilla macaroons (serious conquering). That's mostly because they're easy to pull off on a weeknight, which is exactly what happened with this vanilla ice cream. After this I'll probably have to go on a dessert hiatus for a little while. A little warning ahead of time, this post is a little short on pictures. Ice cream making isn't exactly exciting art, so you'll be ok, right?

Now this shouldn't come as a surprise, but vanilla ice cream is basically just chocolate ice cream, sans the chocolate. What we've got here is cream and milk (more on this in a bit), sugar, vanilla bean, and egg yolks. If you're French this is called creme anglaise. If you're me it's vanilla sauce.

Ok, it's been a bit, so here's a somewhat foreshadowing sidebar about the cream and milk. The Bouchon, recipes call for heavy cream and whole milk. This is almost definitely the reason why the chocolate ice cream felt like heaven-in-the-mouth. The problem here is that heaven-in-the-mouth is pretty terrible for you. Here's what I could find out about the relative fat contents of different varieties of milk:

Fat Free (skim) Milk - Take a guess
2% Milk - Take another guess
Whole Milk - 3.5% fat
Light Cream - >30% fat
Heavy Cream - > 36% fat

So if the recipe calls for equal parts of heavy cream and whole milk (it does), you'd end up with a mixture that was around 20% fat. That's heaven in-the-mouth. If you replace the heavy cream with light cream, you're down to about 17% fat. And if you then replace the whole milk with skim milk, you'll end up with iced water instead of iced cream. Not really, but you'll be down to around 15% fat. There are other combinations available that will get you in between 15 and 20%. The choice of cream (heavy or light) is more of a driver than the milk choice, so that should be taken into consideration. As I mentioned, I used heavy cream and whole milk for the chocolate ice cream. In an attempt to be more healthy, I jumped to the light cream and skim milk solution. I would not recommend this. The (spoiler!) ice cream turned out to be crystally, kind of like old ice cream gets. I guess next time I'll try the middle road and use light cream and whole milk or heavy cream and skim milk. If that doesn't work out then I'll just exercise more. Ok, back to the recipe.

I combined the cream, milk, and vanilla bean, and half of the sugar in a saucepan. Upon reaching a simmer, the lid went on and I let it sit for 30 minutes.

After the thirty minutes, I reheated the custard just until it was warm. Meanwhile, I setup an ice bath and whisked the egg yolks with the rest of the sugar. Once they were mixed up pretty well, I added just a bit of the warm custard to the egg mixture to temper it, then combined it all in the saucepan and cooked it over low heat for a few minutes to thicken it up. All of the custard went into the ice bath to cool it down quickly.

If you're like me, you usually manage to do exactly the opposite of what the tempering is supposed to do; that is make some scrambled eggs when you combine everything. It turned out I did pretty well this time around, but I strained the custard a couple of times anyway. Because really, who wants scrambled eggs in their ice cream? I'd learned from the previous two frozen dessert recipes that now is a good time to choose a container that will allow for easy pouring later, so out came the pitcher.

The finished custard spent the night in the refrigerator and then made the trip to the ice cream maker. 15 minutes later it was time for some soft serve vanilla. Two hours after that it was time for some fully frozen ice cream. One note here, you'll want to make sure that the dish you put the soft serve into is already very cold. I froze the first bowl I used for a couple of hours, and that ice cream turned out great. A second bowl, which I hadn't planned on needing, melted the ice cream before it hardened. That really messed things up. We enjoyed the finished ice cream both in sundae form (with some junk fudge sauce infused with rose and tea, I highly don't recommend it) and as part of root beer floats.

It was very good flavor-wise, but the texture wasn't great. I blame that on the missing fat I talked about above. I think that's part of the reason that the float was so good, you kind of lose out on the texture experience and focus mainly on the vanilla flavor. Regardless of any texture issues the entire 1.5 quarts or so disappeared in about three days, so it must of been at least ok.

Pear Sorbet

2008-04-25T14:21:00.000-06:00

This was the third of the three recipes I completed over a couple of days a week or so ago. I had already made one ice cream recipe, so I thought a sorbet might be a nice change of pace. Bouchon has recipes for five different sorbets, and only one of them has more than three ingredients. If you guessed it was this one, you're right. That being said, this was still an incredibly easy recipe. Just like I said in the chocolate ice cream post, there is absolutely no reason for you not to make your own ice cream. It's very easy, very cheap, and infinitely better than anything you'll buy at any store.

On with the cooking. The ingredients here are pears, sauvignon blanc, water, sugar, and a vanilla bean. The recipe called for Red Comice pears, but my single produce source did not have them. Oh well.

Aren't those some nicely oxidizing pears? I combined the wine, water, and sugar in a saucepan, then added in the vanilla bean. In went the pears, and I simmered everything for about 30 minutes. At that points the pears were no match for the blender. Not wanting to scald everything in the kitchen with hot sugary syrup, I left the mixture to cool for a few minutes. All of it when into a blender until it looked like applesauce.

This got refrigerated overnight, and then finished by the ice cream attachment of my Kitchen Aid mixer. A couple of hours in the freezer after that and it was time for some dessert.

This turned out really well. It was pretty sweet, but it's dessert right? Pear is not a flavor that you, or at least I, wouldn't traditionally associate with sorbet, so it was a nice surprise. It only took about half an hour of active time plus some extended stays in the fridge and freezer. This goes in the book as a quick and easy dessert that is delicious.

Roquefort and Leek Quiche

2008-04-23T22:14:00.001-06:00

Hopefully this if funny now, because it sure wasn't last week...

I started the quiche the same day I started the chickpea and carrot salad as well as the pear sorbet, so needless to say things were a little hectic. Each of the recipes were multi-day events though, so I didn't think it would be too bad. This was 110% false. So lesson number one today is to never start cooking something at 7PM if it takes over 3.5 hours to finish. It will not work out well.

Day number one was for making the dough for the shell . Keller has a small manifesto on quiche preceding this recipe, and he makes it quite clear that we are all stupid Americans for using pie crusts as quiche shells. I, however, was not about to be a stupid American. I wanted to be a regular American. The shell ingredients looked simple enough:

Flour, salt, butter, water. Pretty simply so far. This just gets mixed up, all the while ensuring that there are no signs of butter anywhere when you're done. If there are, it'll just melt away in the oven and leave you with a 350 degree version of the Titanic. I prepared the dough, formed it into a not-so-nice disk, and put it in the fridge overnight.

Day 2. It's time to bake the shell, cool the shell, make the batter, fill the shell, and bake. The baking of the shell part scared me more than probably anything I've made so far, only because dough is not my favorite thing in the world to work with. The first thing I did was to oil the ring mold. Now I didn't happen to have a 9"x2" ring mold laying around, so I decided to use the side of a 9"x3" springform pan that I have. The recipe calls for rolling the dough to a thickness of 3/16". That would seem pretty thin. It would seem much thinner, however, it you were using a pan with higher sides than you were supposed to. That would mean the dough had to be about 25% thinner than pretty thin. I did it anyway, and thought that I did a pretty reasonable job. After it was all nice and rolled out, I ~~plopped~~carefully centered the dough over the mold (which by now was sitting on a parchment-lined baking sheet) and gently formed it to the sides. This went ok, but there were a bunch of overlapping areas. I didn't think this would be too big of a deal, I was much more worried about holes than anything else.

I baked the shell according to the directions, reinspected it for any holes that may have formed (none did), and then moved on to the batter. This was quiche simple step number 3, but about step number 15 if you put everything together that I was working on that night. The ingredients are again very simple; milk, cream, eggs, salt, pepper, nutmeg.

The first sentence of the recipe says, and I quote, "Combine the milk and cream in a large saucepan and heat over medium heat until scalded." I read, well, absolutely none of this. This was probably not good, since the aforementioned manifesto had this to say, "When you're ready to fill the quiche, it's important that all the ingredients be warm. The custard needs to start cooking as soon as it's in the oven. The milk and cream should be scalded." Oops.

I did read, and follow, the rest of the recipe. It's easy, just mix all that stuff together in a blender for quite a while. Quite awhile times two if you're blender is normal sized like mine is. On to the final step...

This quiche was going to contain nothing more than the batter, some leeks, and some roquefort cheese. Roquefort is a blue cheese, which I don't generally like, so that was a bit scary. Carrying on, the leeks get chopped up and boiled for a few minutes, then laid out to dry. The oven was preheating to 325 while all of this going on.

Somewhere in the background I could hear the Jaws theme slowly starting to get louder.

I sprinkled half the cheese and half the leeks across the bottom of the shell. After reblending the batter to ensure it was plenty aerated, half of that joined the leeks and cheese. Now I didn't believe that the batter would hold the remainder of the leeks and cheese without just allowing them to fall to the bottom of the shell. It did, and that was cool. I poured the remainder of the batter over the coolness. It was go time.

Why is the Jaws theme playing so loudly?

Into the oven it went. Very carefully, I might add. There's nothing like walking around with half a gallon of batter suspended only by about 1/32" of quiche shell. Next time I'll probably heed the advice of the recipe and put in the last bit of batter while the shell is sitting on the oven rack, but today was not the day for reading recipes. I gently closed the door and planned to return in about in an hour to check on things.

Five minutes later, and I'm watching TV thinking to myself, "That's weird, it kind of smells like egg in the apartment. That was fast. And why is that freaking Jaws theme absolutely screaming right now?" I decided to go peek in the oven. Things were not good. Egg batter was starting to ooze out of the shell and drip on to the oven coils below. Burning egg is not a great smell. At this point it was just barely oozing, so I decided to wait (and hope really hard) that it would set up pretty quickly. Needless to say, it did not. It got worse, and worse, and worse. Finally, I had to pull the plug. My first major failure. At least some of the pictures are entertaining.

That looks good, right?

Scrambled eggs, anyone?

The oven still smells whenever I use it. Hopefully that goes away in the very near future. Whatever happens, I do not get credit for this quiche, so it will be making another appearance somewhere down the road. Oh well.

Carrot and Chickpea Salad

2008-04-16T20:08:00.000-06:00

I made this salad during a week in which I stormed my way through three recipes. Either that, or they stormed through me. Suffice it to say that I won't be trying three recipes in a week again. It's not that this recipe is hard; it's not at all. The problem that I'm finding with several of these recipes is that they're not always worth the time required to put them together. That is by no means an indictment of their quality, but as you'll see below three days for what essentially amounts to a side dish is probably more time than 95% of us have to give to Tuesday night dinner.

Enough with the ranting, let's do some cooking. Just kidding, first you have to soak the chickpeas for 12 hours. Night number one is now toast. Ok, done with the ranting...

The next night it was time to start applying some heat to some food. Here is the first set of ingredients:

That would be a leek, a carrot, an onion, some chickpeas, and the stuff required for a bouquet garni. For the uninitiated like me, bouqeuts garni (or is it bouquet garnies?) are all of those remaining ingredients wrapped up in something. Keller calls the herbs wrapped in leek greens a bouquet garni and a sachet if you wrap it in cheesecloth. I was hoping to find a super extra high res photo and description from Ruhlman's excellent blog, but it was not to be. You'll have to look it up if want more information. Carrying on...

Into a pot went the soaked chickpeas, a bunch of water, half the leek, the bouquet, carrot, and onion. All that stuff got brought to a boil and then simmered for quite awhile. I cooked them for about an hour, even though the recipe gives a 45 minute guideline. I kind of wish I'd cooked them a little longer, as the chickpeas still had quite a bit of bite in the finished dish. Oh well. I transferred them to a dish and let it cool and then removed all of the things that weren't chickpeas or water. Into the fridge it went, and day 2 was over.

Finishing the dish up was pretty easy. I needed a few more things:

Round the clock we have bay leaves, thyme, garlic, lemon (juice), olive oil, parsley, and carrots. Everything that wasn't bright orange went into a skillet. I haven't posted much in the way of photos of the actually cooking process, so here's my attempt at starting that:

That cooked for just a minute or so until everyone in the vicinity (me) could smell that I was in fact making something that we get to eat in the very near future. After that, in went the carrots:

I cooked them and tossed them around for another minute or so, then in went the chickpeas and some salt and pepper just until everything was warmed through. It was finally almost time to eat. I let everything cool down and took out the aromatics, and stirred in the lemon juice and parsley. Here's what made it to the table, and I have to say it's one of the prettier things so far.

The verdict? It was pretty good. The chickpeas probably could have been cooked a little longer, but I'm not really sure how tender they would have ever gotten. One thing we agreed on was that the carrots would have made an excellent dish on their own. And it certainly wouldn't have taken three days...

Mussels with Saffron and Mustard

2008-04-14T21:24:00.000-06:00

Mussels are probably one of my favorite creatures of the sea. Really, it's anything that comes in a shell, followed by tuna, a long chasm of emptiness, and then everything else. This dish, as I'm making a habit of in the early going, was pretty simple. That does not bode well for the end of this little Bouchon saga but we'll deal with that when we get to the end.

Here are the ingredients:

Starting with the mussels and going clockwise, we've got mussels, parsley, butter, shallots and garlic confit, mustard, and salt and pepper. There's also a bottle of wine involved, but that was already opened and somewhat consumed, so good photography it would not make. What's that in the middle? That enriched uranium. Not really, it's saffron, but it should of been for how expensive it was. One gram of it will set you back about 5 bucks. Five bucks isn't bad though, so what am I'm complaining about? Let's change from dollars/gram to the more American friendly dollars/pound. How does $2,270 per pound sound? It sounds absurd to me. Wikipedia has all sorts of facts about how little saffron you can get from a flower. There's also an insanely scientific way for quantifying the quality of saffron. So scientific in fact, that it sounds like everybody skips it for the more tangible 'How does it taste?' test.

Ok, back to the cooking. This is a one pot deal, so you're going to need a big pot.
Melt the butter, then add all of the dry ingredients. Cook that for a bit, then add the wine and mustard. Cook that for a bit more, and the saffron, put on the top, and stop cooking that for a bit. Wait somewhere between 5 minutes and a few hours.

Let's prepare the mussels. I was introduced to mussels by James, and I still take most of my ~~muscle~~ mussel advice from him. This seems reasonable, since he's from here. Where there's water, there are mussels, right? After a brief discussion on de-bearding them, we decided that it looked like it was already done. Hint for later: They weren't.

Meanwhile, I was bringing the broth back to a simmer. This didn't take too long because I waited much closer to five minutes than a few hours. In went the mussels, mix it up a little, cover, and cook. Three or four minutes later it was time to throw on some parsley and pepper and head for the table. Here's what we ended up with:

They were very good, if not beard-y. It was incredibly easy to make, and pretty inexpensive as well. My unrefined palette had a tough time finding the saffron, but I chalk that up to not really knowing exactly how much 4 pinches is. I probably did not use enough because each little thread is worth more that the rest of the dinner combined, so that may have been my fault. Other than that though, everything was delicious.

House Vinaigrette

2008-04-14T21:10:00.000-06:00

No pictures here, this one is too short. The house vinaigrette recipe is amazingly simple. You're going to need 1 part Dijon mustard, 2 parts red wine vinegar, and 6 parts canola oil. If you take out the mustard, you can probably figure out that the oil to vinegar ratio is 3:1. From what my brief look at other recipes tells me, 3:1 or 4:1 is pretty standard.

Anyway, combine the mustard and vinegar in a blender. Slowly add in half the oil and blend, blend, blend. Transfer everything to a bowl, and slowly add in the rest of the oil, whisking like you've never whisked before the whole time. Your arm will be tired, but it's all right, because it'll be good.

I made this for the asparagus, but it stuck around for a couple of weeks as a salad dressing. It's pretty mustard-y, so I might cut back on that the next time. I'd also add some seasonings and shallots to more of a salad dressing and less of a sauce base kind of feeling. This was easy though, so it'll definitely get used again.

Garlic Confit

2008-04-06T20:22:00.000-06:00

I really like garlic. Not in a 'eat it with corn flakes' kind of way or a '13 cloves per serving of pasta' kind of way, but I do like it. Roasted garlic and bread is one of my favorite appetizers. Needless to say I was pretty interested in making the garlic confit.

To be clear, garlic confit isn't really a recipe in the book. It's included in a appendix-type addition that gives instructions for just about every type of building block you could imagine. I'll try and write about them as I make them; they'll all have the label 'Staple'.

Making garlic confit is incredibly easy. By far the most difficult part is peeling these:

After that it's into some canola oil for about 45 minutes. The book says cook it nice and low, so that the bubbles just barely rise through the oil. I did this for the first 20 minutes and the last 20 minutes. Somehow in the middle things got a little out of hand and started boiling pretty vigorously. Boiling oil is not a great thing, so if it happens to you I'd suggest approaching it carefully. Now for the least exciting cooking picture ever taken:

Storage is as easy as letting the oil cool and then moving it to an airtight container for storage in the fridge. I made this because I needed it for some mussels, but we also tried it smeared on some bread. I didn't think it was quite as good as roasted garlic served this way, probably because it lacked the carmelization. It's pretty obvious why this would be better for additions to other recipes though. So if you like mellow, soft and creamy garlic, stop on by my house because I have a ton.

Chilled Asparagus with Vinaigrette and Eggs Mimosa

2008-04-04T21:15:00.000-06:00

All right, mimosas for everyone! Let's get drunk. No, not really. They say you learn something everyday, and on this day I learned that a Mimosa is actually a plant. Or maybe a tree. Either way, at least some of the species has yellowish-orange flowers. Hence the naming of the drink and the eggs mimosa part of this dish. This was also the first dish I was able to find a picture of the version actually prepared at Bouchon. The original blog, which contains a review of Bouchon and is very good in itself, can be found here. The dish is supposed to look something like this, so I had something to go on this time:

Let's get started. The ingredients here are pretty straightforward. That theme would follow throughout the day, as this dish was one of the easiest I've yet made. It's essentially asparagus, hard-cooked egg yolks, radishes, vinaigrette, and chives plus some seasonings.

Can't find the chives or vinaigrette in the picture? Oh, well, they blend in with the table. Just look more closely.

I started by blanching the asparagus, transferring them to an ice bath, draining them when cool, and setting them aside. Wait, you did know to break off the woody ends, trim them so that they're exactly the same length, peel them and then tie them in bundles to protect their gentle tips, right? Good.

Next up for the same treatment was a couple of cups of the asparagus trimmings. These got cooked a little longer and then pureed with just a tiny bit of the cooking water. I blended them into a coulis that would form the base of the finished plate. When I say blended, I mean really blended. For a long time. With a lot of scraping. Homogeneous doesn't begin to describe the end result.

Looks pretty great, right? Yeah, I didn't think so either. That said it was surprisingly good and pretty strongly asparagus flavored. There was going to be no shortage of bad smelling pee on this night.

After painstakingly peeling the hard cooked eggs and getting rid of the pesky whites, I pushed all of the yolks through a cheese grater. What came out looked more or less like I'd just stepped on the yolks and picked it all up and put it in a pile. Next time I'll probably just chop them up and save a little time and a dirty dish.

Now that all of the essential parts have been put in place, it was assembly time. I, as mentioned above, started with the coulis. Then down when the asparagus.

Things were getting salted and peppered and pretty much every stage now. On top of the asparagus went some vinaigrette, then the egg yolks, radishes, and chives. The finished dish looked something like this:

See how I stuck that flash in there to try and make things look a little brighter? Way to go me. I thought this was pretty outstanding, if not almost a meal in itself. The coulis and then egg yolks were fairly rich, and my god were there a lot of egg yolks. Kendra thought the eggs were a little over the top, and I didn't use more than 2/3 of what the recipe had called for. All that richness was balanced out by the vinaigrette, and the asparagus was fantastic. This currently takes the cake for vegetables so far. That really only means it beat the beets, but it was very good none the less. There were no major firsts for me in this one, but blanching is relatively new to me, so it was nice to see that turn out well.

Smoked and Steamed Salmon Rillettes

2008-03-24T18:37:00.000-06:00

Starting with this post, I'm going to add a new feature to each new adventure of Cooking Bouchon. Somewhere, somehow I'm going to document the the 'firsts' that I encounter during that particular session in the kitchen. The new stuff is the most challenging and the most interesting to me, being that I started this whole activity mostly for my own education and edification. Now on to Smoked and Steamed Salmon Rillettes.

First, Keller's introduction provides us with the usual insight into both how the cooking should be approached as well as the final dish itself. Here we get a little lesson on rillettes (First #1). For the uninitiated like me, rillettes are typically meat mixed with its own fat served as a spread. I've heard of pork and rabbit rillettes, but not of salmon ones until now. This might be in part due to the next statement of truth from Keller. Salmon, while fatty as fish may go, is certainly not pork. Because of this lack of fat, we're going to put some butter in this sucker. Last up, a little lesson on steaming raw salmon. I don't have any kind of steamer other than a vegetable steamer, so that's what got used. Another proposed option is poaching the salmon in court bouillon. Court bouillon, by my count of Keller's recipe, requires 14 ingredients. Granted, some of these everybody in the world has laying around their kitchens (water), but that's a ton of work to poach a half pound salmon filet. Vegetable steamer it is for me.

Ok, some actual food. The only modifications I made to the recipe were to cut the yield in half and to not marinate the salmon in Pernod. I've never actually cooked with Pernod, but I am not a fan of anything that even remotely tastes like anise, licorice, or any thing similar. So that was out. Everything else was by the book.

The recipe calls for salmon filet, smoked salmon, shallots, creme fraiche, lemon juice, eggs, butter, and chives. And some basic seasonings, but I don't give away entire recipes here, remember?

What, you don't see the chives there? That's because I totally forgot about them until I was about three rillettes in right before dinner. We ate them with chives, but you're not going to see any pictures with chives in them around here. Ok, if you really want to see some chives, head over to the asparagus post.

First up is to steam the salmon (First #2). This took all of about four minutes for me. This was probably because I had halved the recipe and then halved that piece of salmon to fit into my little vegetable steamer. It came out medium-rare, as directed, and not eating all of it right then was a bit of a challenge. While all of this was going on, I sauteed up some shallots in a tablespoon of butter.

Now for the fat. What? I just talked about a tablespoon of butter? That's not fat. How about throwing in another stick and and mashing it around. That's fat. Once that's nice and creamy looking, in goes some creme fraiche (First #3).

Everything gets combined in a bowl in some pre-determined order so that the fish doesn't get absolutely pulverized, and then transferred into glass crocs. In my case there were two crocs, one to be eaten in a couple of hours and one to be sealed with clarified butter (First #4) for later enjoyment. Here's a picture of the results:

And one step closer to my mouth:

Now it's not the most visually pleasing dish of them all, but it's probably one of the best I've made so far, save possibly the desserts. It was smoky, salmon-y, and creamy. You could make a meal out of it fairly easily. That might not be the healthiest option, but it would be delicious. So, here's a recap of the new things:

Rillettes. I'd never really even heard of them, except for a possibly skimming over in Bourdain's book.
Steaming salmon. I hadn't done this before either, and it turned out to be very easy. I was a bit wary of getting the doneness right, but it was pretty easy. And deliciously moist and tasty.
Using creme fraiche. I've eaten it before, but never cooked with it. Not much else to say here.
Clarified butter. I'd never made it before. I was worried that skimming the junk off of the top would be difficult, but it really wasn't. It was pretty easy in fact. You want to see the rillettes, sealed with clarified butter? Are you sure? Ok then:

How great of a picture is that? That really is it, I swear. Here it is from a bit of a better angle:

In a few days I'll crack open that top layer, and enjoy that butter-soaked salmon in the middle. If I'm feeling healthy and hungry I may even go for the plain old rillettes at the bottom. Mmm, rillettes.

Vanilla Macaroons, Part Deux

2008-03-21T10:56:00.001-06:00

Hopefully you enjoyed reading about Part Un of the Vanilla Macaroon saga. Needless to say it didn't turn out how it was supposed to. So earlier this week I didn't have anything to do at about 8:30 PM and thought I'd give it another shot. A final shot. At $20/lb for almond flour I wasn't about to repeatedly torture myself.

With Kendra's help, we repeated almost the exact same process as the previous time except for the extra 2 hours of waiting. Almost you say? Well, at 8:30 PM on a weekday night we were pretty much out of places to places to go find a vanilla bean. Or at least out of places to find a vanilla bean and finish before midnight. I would later realize that this may have been the reason the batter was a little more liquid than usual, which lead to some running together of the macaroons. Here's what the unbaked halves looked like, you can tell size control is not one of my strong points:

We kept the wait to just a bit over an hour this time, and into the oven they went. Fifteen minutes or so later out they came, looking like this:

Did mention that my piping abilities need to be improved? Most of them ran together a least a little bit. Getting these babies off of the parchment paper was no easy task. After a few casualties, I generally got the hang of separating them with a knife and then lifting them off with a spatula. Those I couldn't get off with the spatula I turned over and peeled off the paper.

Now for the assembly. This is the easiest step of any recipe I've cooked so far. Take two halves, add buttercream in between. That's it, you're done. Eat away. Just kidding, this is Thomas 'Details' Keller we're talking about. He suggests letting the buttercream come to room temperature and then whisking it smooth. My poor planning abilities meant the buttercream was still in the fridge and it was pushing 11 PM. I wasn't about to wait for it to come to room temperature, so we just put it together. I'm not sure you'd ever notice the difference. Here's what it looked like:

How were they you ask? It's a two part answer. My initial reaction was to immediately go brush my teeth. They are incredibly sweet. Being an engineer, I decided to figure out exactly what I was eating. Suffice it to say there is about 1/4 cup of sugar per macaroon. That's around 130 calories per, just for the sugar. To put it in perspective, that's close to a Coke and a half.

My second, and lingering, reaction was that they are very good. It was probably only my first or second experience with macaroons so by no means am I an expert, but they were good. I found myself coming home each of the next several days and putting one together right away. There are no more left now, which is kind of sad.

As for improvements, I have only two, and one probably doesn't count. I would use an actual vanilla bean as called for because I suspect it made the batter a little runny. I'd also trim them a little bit with a cookie cutter for appearance's sake. The picture above is probably the nicest looking pair I had. A little trimming would fix that in no time. Would I make them again? You bet, if only I didn't have to make 175+ other recipes first...

Vanilla Macaroons

2008-03-14T18:08:00.000-06:00

The vanilla macaroons recipe was probably the most complex of all I've done so far, at least in terms of the number of ingredients. I did not have high hopes at the beginning, as there are a couple of other people like me that didn't have too much success. No matter what happened, I was at least going to eat the ice cream I made with these so the night would be a partial success at a minimum.

Keller introduces the recipe with a disclaimer that you had better not screw up the size or they will not be good. Hmmm, good start I guess.

The prep work here consists of drawing a bunch of circles on parchment paper. 72 to be exact. It took me longer to find something to trace around than most of the rest of the recipe combined, but I was able to move on after some Inspector Gadget-type creativeness.

Now it's time for food. Here's the ingredients list: almond flour, confectioners' sugar, egg whites, sugar, cream of tartar, vanilla beans. You also need some buttercream, but that gets it's own write up. Wait, you don't have any almond flour? Make some. Flour is just a fancy way of saying 'thoroughly processed blanched, slivered almonds'. Either way, be prepared to spend nearly $20 to acquire the smashed up nuts. Here's what everything looks like:

Combine the almond flour and confectioners' sugar (which I've already done in the picture above. Combine them thoroughly using a food processor, which should also lighten things up a little bit. Meanwhile, add some egg whites. Gradually add in some sugar and then a bit of cream of tartar and beat until the whites hold stiff peaks.

Now it's time to put the two separate mixtures together. Start by folding in just a little bit of the flour mixture, add in the vanilla, and then finish adding in the flour mixture little by little. Eventually it will come together. Don't mix too violently though, you whipped those whites for a reason.

Next up, getting this semi-dry blob of dough onto a baking sheet in something shaped like a macaroon. Keller says use a 'pastry bag with a 1/2 inch plain tip'. Don't have one? Me either. What I did have was a gallon-sized ziploc bag which I cut the corner off of. Perfect.

The next step after piping 36 macaroon halves is to sit around and wait for somewhere around 90 minutes. Apparently this is an important step. I was cool with waiting, but not as ok with the sitting around part. I decided to run out and do a couple of quick errands. That should only take half an hour or so and I'd be back and ready to finish this baby up. So here's how the next few steps of my night went:

Put on coat
Open door
Lock door
Exit door
Close door
Realize you forgot step 2.5

Step 2.5 is the step for getting your keys so you can get back inside. This was not a good situation. Thankfully our landlord only lived a block away, so I figured she would be able to let me right back in. Incorrect. She would not return home for another three hours. Not really having any choice, I walked up to the neighborhood bar and got some dinner, each step of the way watching the clock keep advancing. Past 60 minutes. Then 90. Then 120. Then 150. I had a bad feeling about my macaroons.

I finally got back inside and just about ran over to turn on the oven and to check out the macaroons. The were pretty dry at this point, so I my hopes weren't too high. Thank God for low hopes, because here's what came out of the oven:

Needless to say, the write up is going to end here for now. ~~Hopefully I can get~~ I got another shot at this later in the week. It's really pretty easy, so you can pull it off on a weeknight without much problem. Just don't lock yourself out. If you do, there's always chocolate ice cream...

Chocolate Ice Cream

2008-03-14T17:37:00.000-06:00

Editorial Note: Ice cream is probably the most valuable food a home cook can make. In this case, valuable means that's it's absurdly easy, incredibly cheap, and many many times better than store-bought ice cream. Seriously, go buy an ice cream maker and use it. It'll pay for itself in, oh, about 10 gallons. Also buy a treadmill while you're out; you'll need this later.

The chocolate ice cream recipe probably has the fewest ingredients in the entire book, save Vanilla ice cream. What we've got here is some 61% chocolate, some milk, some heavy cream, a bunch of sugar, and a measuring cup full of yellow-orange blobs of fat.

Essentially, all you do is make some ganache and freeze it. Good write up, eh?

All right, here's some more details. I spent a little longer than I should have trying to chop up the chocolate that I bought. I made the mistake of buying about 1000 little pieces instead of a larger block, so that was lesson number one. Anyway, the chopped up chocolate goes into a bowl and waits patiently.

Meanwhile, combine the cream, milk, and sugar and bring it to a simmer. While that's happening, mix together a little more sugar and the egg yolks until it looks a little like partially thawed orange juice concentrate. Add a bit of the cream mixture to temper the eggs and then combine everything back into the pot and simmer for five to ten more minutes. Eventually the custard will thicken up a little. I believe the word, and thickness were looking for here is nape.

Divide the custard, adding about a 1/3 of it to the chocolate and the rest into a separate bowl. After a few minutes, the chocolate will be very soft and can be combined with the cream. Whisk it until it's smooth, and then combine with the other bowl. I'm not totally sure why you can't do it all at once, but if there's one thing I've learned about Sir Keller so far it's this: Seemingly unnecessary steps tend to be the difference between ordinary and extraordinary. So I followed his instructions.

I cooled the custard in an ice bath, put it into a bowl, and refrigerated it over night. This seems to be standard procedure for every ice cream I've ever made. Think of it as marinading your meat, only for dessert. The final step is to make the ice cream in your ice cream maker. It will finish with a consistency of soft serve ice cream, but a couple of hours in the freezer will take care of that.

Now that I've already declared that homemade ice cream is the best thing since homemade sliced bread, I guess I should tell you how it turned out. I made this to go with vanilla macaroons, but you can read about that disaster as soon as I write it up. Until then, let's just say there were no macaroons. The ice cream, on the other hand, was pretty fantastic. It was creamy, chocolatey, and frozen. There are probably only two improvements I would make. These are personal preferences only, and reflect nothing on the delicious recipe. First, I would use slightly darker chocolate, or maybe mix the 61% with some 72% or something along those lines. Second, and I would probably cut back on the fat for health reasons. Next time I'll use light cream instead of heavy cream just to try it out. It certainly doesn't lack creaminess with heavy cream, so I'd tone it down a bit just to see if it makes a noticeable (and unacceptable) difference.

Roasted Beet Salad

2008-03-09T20:30:00.000-06:00

The introduction to this recipe talks about beets being one of the best vegetables in the world. It read, verbatim, 'Beets are about the best vegetable in the world.' See, you get the truth around here.

The ingredients and preparation of the recipe is about as easy as it comes. The grocery list for this was nothing more than beets, red wine vinegar, OJ, red onion, and herbs and seasonings. For the visually-inclined:

The procedure goes something like this:

Roast beets
Marinate beets
Plate beets
Eat beets

Step one takes a lot longer than you would think. I left them in there for about 1:45, and they probably could of used another 15 minutes or so. There's a neat little hint on peeling beets using a paper towel after they're cooked that works really great, certainly a lot better and neater than peeling them while they're uncooked.

Step two is pretty self explanatory. Step three is as well, with the note that you add the onion somewhere in between steps two and three. That lets them mingle with the beets and marinade for a bit, and turn a really cool color.

Step four was about as expected. The marinade wasn't overwhelming by any means. In fact, it was really way way in the background. I say that was as expected because of the little love fest paragraph introducing the recipe. This is meant to taste like beets with a slight onion tang, and that's exactly what it does. We ate it with gnocchi with mushrooms and butternut squash. It wasn't exactly a magical pairing, but it worked out all right.

Oops, two more steps:

Wash your hands and everything in your kitchen.
Throw all the paper towels, foil, and everything else that's disposable away. Helpful hint: Put everything in a clean bag first. If you skip this step, you're neighbors will probably strongly consider calling the cops after they stumble upon your twenty blood red paper towels in the trash.

Gnocchi with Mushrooms and Butternut Squash

2008-03-08T22:35:00.000-07:00

Gnocchi, part 2. I wanted to write gnocchii or gnocchies or gnocchis, but I couldn't figure out which one was correct. This is the first actual finished recipe I've made from the book, so hopefully these reports get a little more interesting as time goes on. Not to say this one is going to be boring...

This dish is basically prepared in three steps. First comes the squash, then the mushrooms, then the gnocchi. After all was said and done, it was really pretty easy to put together. That doesn't mean it turned out perfect, but that wasn't the recipe's fault. Here's the 'before' picture:

Preparing the squash consisted of cooking it in a skillet with some butter, sage, salt and pepper. Very simple really. The recipe says to cook it for four to six minutes over medium heat and then to lower it and cook until done. I managed not to wait long enough and the squash was a bit underdone. I don't totally blame myself for that though. Given the 4-6+ minutes guideline, I cooked them for a solid 15 minutes. I thought they would have been done by then, and in fact some of them were. Either way, it was decided that the squash was probably the best component of the finished dish. It could easily be a side on its own. So two lessons here:

Cook stuff until it tastes like they're done, not by time.
Dice your food evenly, or else half will be done and half will still be rock solid.

Next up was the mushrooms. Same general principle here, except for use shallots and thyme instead of sage. Mistake number two came in here. The recipe called for 1.5 teaspoons of salt. As I was pouring it over the mushrooms I thought to myself, 'Man, this little adventure is going to raise my cholesterol by 50 points.' Well, they were very salty. So here's lesson number 3:

Trust yourself. If it looks like more salt than you'll like, it probably is.

So now you have some squash and mushrooms hanging out with nowhere to go. We'll remedy that by putting some of the already made gnocchi into a skillet with some olive oil and butter. Heat those mustard-y pillows of dough up until they're nice and browned on all sides. This again was longer than I thought it would take and longer than the recipe seemed to think as well. Who knew recipes could think? Anyway, once they're finished add in the squash, mushrooms, and some chives until everything is nice and warm. Almost done...

The last step is to make a brown butter sauce. I had cooked the two gnocchi in two skillets for space reasons. One was stainless steel, one was nonstick. Since the stainless steel one was larger, all the gnocchi went into there. That means the butter for the sauce went into the nonstick skillet. Cool right? Not so much. It turns out that it's really hard to see when butter has browned if the skillet is black on the bottom. So after a half minute or so and a smell that was suspiciously close to the smell of burning I added the parsley and a spray of lemon juice. And that was that.

Add the vegetables and gnocchi to the plate, spoon on some sauce, and it's dinner time. Everything turned out deliciously well. How could it not with a stick of butter involved? I decided that if I had received this in a restaurant it would have passed, but probably only with a grade of B- or so. That certainly wasn't the recipes fault though. Almost all of the points lost had to do with my ability to tell when things were finished cooking, with the exception of the salt on the mushrooms.

So we'll end it there, blaming it on the book. Yeah, the book. Here's the picture, which I was pretty proud of:

Update: I made this again with the rest of the frozen gnocchi. After showing a little more patience and a more judicious use of salt, it was absolutely fantastic. I used cremini mushrooms instead of shiitake, but I believe that was the only deivation. Right now it holds the claim to the best Bouchon recipe yet.

Gnocchi a la Parisienne

2008-03-07T16:26:00.000-07:00

First up, Gnocchi a la Parisienne. That, for the record, was the last bit of French you're going to get here. This is mostly because it's one of the few in the book that I could actually say. From now on you get the English names, in this case it's herb gnocchi. See, who knew that a la Parisienne really mean herb? Hint: it doesn't.

I chose this first mostly for reasons of convenience. I'm lacking somewhat in the pots and pans department, and my new dutch oven won't get here for a few weeks. That left me trying to find a recipe that does not use stocks or stock-based sauces. That's harder than it may seem in this book, but gnocchi will work just fine.

The ingredients here are pretty simple; some pate a choux (think profiterole dough and hence the a la Parisienne), mustard, herbs, cheese. That's it. Sound boring? It kind of is, and I probably should have already pointed out that these gnocchi are the base of another recipe. Everything looked like this before I had my way with it:

I'll be making Gnocchi with Mushrooms and Butternut Squash out of it. That brings me to the next point. I'll be making Gnocchi with Mushrooms and Butternut Squash out of half of it. And then the two of us will eat about 10% of that. It makes a lot. Like 240. Next time I'll be adjusting. In the meantime, the rest are nice and frozen.

The recipe takes a fair amount of time to make, but it's by no means hard. Putting the dough together took maybe half an hour, but the actually poaching took a long time. Not just a boring long time either. A long time during which you consistently splash 200 degree water on your arms. Fun stuff! Seriously though, between the mostly active cooking time and the waiting, it took a touch under three hours.

Anyway, you cook the little dough balls for a couple of minutes (remember that they get cooked again later), drain them, and put them in the fridge or freezer. Couldn't get any easier. How were they, you ask? Well, if you've been playing along, you've probably caught on that this recipe is just the base for another. Translation, I have no real idea yet, but they sure look like they have potential. I forgot to take a picture of the finished product, so you'll have to wait for the follow on recipe to get a look.

Rules of Engagement

2008-03-02T18:52:00.000-07:00

Rule #1: These rules will probably never stop changing.

Rule #2: Some decisions will have to be made about modifications to the recipes. This can be due to ingredients that are impossible to find or expensive, time constraints, or lack of equipment. Occasionally I may get lazy and decide it's not worth cooking a stock, turning it into a sauce, and the preparing it in order to add a tablespoon on top of a steak. It might be good, but see Rule #3. My goal is to keep these at a minimum, and I'll be clear about when they occur.

Rule #3: My goal is to make at least one meal a week. That could be just one recipe, or three. It comes with the territory of not being a professional cook and having to go to work during the day.

Rule #4: Most of the recipes will probably be reduced to make 2 servings. Why? Because I live in a house of two. Things that are easily stored for long periods of time may be an exception to this rule.

Rule #5: I won't be divulging any recipes here, so go buy the book if you want to make any of this. It's great to read, look at, learn from, and hopefully eat the results of.

Why Bouchon?

2008-02-29T18:15:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I haven't made any of the recipes yet. That's not exactly true, but I'm starting over so let's pretend. That doesn't mean getting this far has been a cakewalk. I spent at least the better part of one (1!) day trying to determine which book would be the best to achieve the goals I have (Quick goal refresher: 1. Learn 2. Satisfy infatuation 3. Eat) There were some practical limitations that ruled out some immediately. For example, there's no way I was cooking through the Joy of Cooking. That would mean one recipe a day for 12.33 years. That's a little longer term than I had in mind. Some other books I own are a little too narrowly-focused. Bouchon seemed to be a happy medium in pretty much all of the logistical departments. It covers just about every imaginable aspect of every meal, but in a concise, instructional manner.

More importantly though, Bouchon is a book of French bistro cooking. Really good French bistro cooking at that. At least it is supposed to be, we'll find out. It covers the range from simple to complex, comfort food to delicacy, and fun to serious. It has a type of at-home and relaxed feeling that is appealing to me, and that was the deal maker.

Here We Go

2008-02-29T18:02:00.000-07:00

I've decided that it would be a good idea to cook my way through the Bouchon ~~bible~~ cookbook for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I think it offers me a great opportunity to learn a lot about how to actually cook things. This is something that I only mildly have a clue about now. Second, I recently had the opportunity to eat at both The French Laundry and Bouchon while on my honeymoon. To say they were the best meals of my life would be an understatement. Ever since then I've had a slight infatuation with Mr. Keller and his food. Really I guess it's just the food, since I've never even seen the man. Last, I'll get to eat a lot things that I've probably never had before.

If you haven't seen it, it's a pretty big book. There are somewhere around 200 recipes, most complete with pictures that look far better than my dishes probably ever will. I've seen many people write about how it could be a great coffee table book, but that's not really the point of a cookbook, is it?

Here we go...