Tartine of Pork with Celeriac Remoulade

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.

Quiche, Try #2

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.

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

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.

Macaroni Gratin

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.

Roquefort and Leek Quiche

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 ploppedcarefully 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.