Pastry Cream

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

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...

Chicken Stock

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...

Basil Puree

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.

Aioli

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.

Brine

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.

Pine Nut Crust

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.