Fancying it up–Gateau de Crepes

French food week on 52 weeks of belated cooking posts. I mean 52 weeks of cooking. The week of the best cuisine in the world, at least if you subscribe to the theory that French food is the best food. I haven’t eaten enough or done enough comparison to make that judgment myself, but there is definitely a reputation there.

Then again, maybe there isn’t such a reputation anymore, depending on who you ask. That’s all I’ll say on that matter for now.

On a more personal level however, as a Vietnamese American, it is hard to deny the influence of the French upon our cuisine. The introduction of baguettes led to the now well known banh mi. Custards, potatoes, and onions are also a few of the many other introductions they made to Vietnamese cuisine, and I certainly have no complaints with these items at all.

And while it would be fairly easy to show off a French influenced Vietnamese dish, I shall try to be a bit more French leanings with the Gateau de Crepes, literally translated into a Crepe Cake. It may also be called a  mille crepe, or thousand crepes, but given that it is either 20 or 30 layers typically, wouldn’t it be better to call it the vingt or trente cake?

“A Deconstructed Grilled Cheese,” Or In a Less Artsy Fartsy Way–Fried Cheese Filled Bread Balls

Few of the foods I have loved from my childhood evoke more ire and disdain from friends and celebrated food icons than the much maligned processed cheese food, also known as American Cheese, the boldly orange stuff found in convenient individual plastic wraps. Often considered a lowbrow food, it must be admitted that it is a much used ingredient by harried mothers everywhere seeking to make something quick and satisfying for their children after a long day of school and a great way to shut them up for a few minutes which they scarf down their white bread and American cheese while watching the afternoon cartoons.

Before then, I actually did not know what a true grilled cheese sandwich in this form was for a long time. My family had always simply placed the cheese on bread slices, and toasted them in the toaster oven, and I had liked it just fine, and still did after learning the proper way. Truth be told, I still enjoy this as a quick snack when I can get away with it. But when I witnessed my friend’s mother butter the sides of two pieces of bread, slide not one but two pieces of American cheese between them, and them grill them between the plates of a George Foreman grill did my perception of how grand a grilled cheese could be was truly elevated. Perhaps that experience was one of the contributing elements to my love of cooking and its abilities to transform food.

So it is this memory that I pay homage to for this post, and with love that I transform it into this. I really hope I’m not using the word deconstruction incorrectly when I call this a deconstructed grilled cheese. It seems more like a reconstruction, but obviously I haven’t watched enough Top Chef to figure it out.

So behold my creation of love and quick thinking, a “deconstructed grilled cheese,” which is now in the form of homemade bread dough, studded with chopped garlic, stuffed with American cheese, and fried to doneness.

I Hope You’re a Big Flan of Asparagus Custard.

Actually, I’d understand perfectly well if you were not, I won’t be offended really. That said, if you’re into asparagus, custards, and are adventurous enough to see what the bizarre love child of mingling the two would be, I would suggest you consider this admittedly somewhat out there recipe.

Ah, yes, by the way, this week’s theme is asparagus, not custard, but no one is keeping score I don’t think.

I originally had intended on doing something a bit more commonplace, such as roasted asparagus, a regular favorite in the household, but it being a challenge I decided to challenge myself. A tickle in the back of my head reminded me that there was something one could do with asparagus and eggs that was mentioned in Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio so I took a look and there it was, Asparagus Custard.

A bit taken aback, I had to beg my family to allow me to foist this upon them.

Molding issues aside, it had a really nice green color at the end of it. Oh and don’t worry, this isn’t a dessert at all, but it is certainly cooling. Read on if you haven’t been scared off!

Prepare to Gougere!

A few weeks back, I gave my first try at using choux pastry to make profiteroles, most definitely a sweet treat. This time I am using it as a vessel to serve of some cheesy goodness, seeing as how cheese is this week’s theme for the 52 week cooking challenge.

Oh, a quick aside, here is a shout out to a young person in PA who has just started checking out the blog and going through some challenges right now.  There are people thinking of you and rooting for things to work out! All the best luck to ya kid.

Ok back to business.

The preparation is called the gougere and is prepared almost exactly like the choux pastry for the profiteroles, with possibly the slight change of slightly more salt. And of course the addition of cheese. I’d like to take the time to add a caveat that one not go too crazy with the salt depending on the cheese you intend to use.

If you had, say a particularly salty Parmigiano-Reggiano, rather than adding a full teaspoon extra of salt, you might just want to go for a pretty big pinch.

And if you don’t care about looks and feel very lazy, they can end up rather flat looking. But still wonderfully creamy and cheesy on the inside.

It’s a Choux In! Week 9, Coffee: Profiteroles Filled with Coffee “Infused” Pastry Cream.

It’s another almost last minute post to meet this week’s theme on 52 Weeks of Cooking. At least it isn’t Sunday. Well, maybe it is, but I started working on this post on Saturday, so give me at least partial credit. Ok racing the clock!

As stated in the title, the theme is Coffee. I wrestled quite a bit over what to make. After a bit of deliberation, along with some flat out rejection of my thoughts of some savory coffee dishes by my family, I opted to go with something a bit more conventional, and took the dessert route. I had my heart set on making curry, but I suppose paying tribute to a Vietnamese Borrowed from French cooking tradition, the Bánh Choux, or as it is more commonly called in the States, a Cream Puff. Other equally acceptable names are Bánh Xu, Bánh Su, Bánh Sữa, and as mentioned in the title, profiteroles. I’m sure I’ve missed a few iterations not to mention several languages, but we have some cooking to get to.

Anyway, first the glamour shot. This is the end result folks! So now that you know what we’re in for, you can continue reading or… well, I hope you do.

Ciabatta Believe It! Roasted Garlic and Herb Ciabatta

Are there terrible puns I am unwilling to make? No. Especially if they are based on food. I will apologize for them though, so, I’m sorry. Kind of.

Now that apologies are out of the way, I will put the most awesome foreword I could ever put on this blog (for now.) This bread is Michael Ruhlman approved! He retweeted the picture I put on twitter, saying “nice crumb!” Super awesome feeling to have someone I respect that much compliment something I did learning from his book!

So with that in mind, I promised I would post about the ciabatta bread in my last post, and so here we go.

I opted to take some of his suggestions for making a roasted garlic and rosemary bread to heart, and substituted dried oregano for fresh rosemary.

As always, the use of Michael’s guidelines in Ratio greatly demystified the process of baking.

Agnolotti Again! Stuffed with Chicken Mousseline, topped with Spicy Red Sauce.

We’ve done this dance once before, but I saw enough potential in the agnolotti method that I simply had to give it another go with different ingredients. Specifically, something with more protein. I also thought that this attempt would be a good time to  knock out another ratio from Ratio. With this post I have currently used 7 out of 31 ratios. For anyone trying to keep count here’s what I’ve done so far: fritters, pasta, pie dough, sponge cake, brine, mayo, mousseline.

Chicken mousseline is typically made with the dark meat, but I decided to chance it with chicken breast meat this time. For the record, it worked out just fine.

Experiment with Butternut Agnolotti: Recipe Creation in Progress.

It’s not bad, but I want to work on it a bit more.

I’m going to try something new for this post, something a bit incomplete, but working well. So don’t expect a recipe at the end like usual, what you see is what you’ve got, a collection of pictures documenting a process that I’d like to spend more time on. I think I’ve made enough progress that it’s worth sharing however! If you disagree, feel free to let me know.

This was also my first foray into making stuffed pasta, an agnolotti in this case. It is sort of like a ravioli, except the stuffing methodology is a bit different, with a bit more folding involved, at least for some practitioners. It hails from the Piedmont region of Italy, and is typically stuffed with a mixture of meat and vegetables.

I decided to make a butternut agnolotti because A: I had butternut on hand and we rarely eat it, and B: it was one of the suggestions for what to do with pasta dough in Ratio.

For the butternut, you have to roast it, and there are any number of recipes for it online. I don’t know exactly which one I used, but the process is pretty much the same.

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees, cut your butternut in half, season it with salt (and maybe pepper), coat with a fat such as butter or oil, and maybe sprinkel on some brown sugar, and optionally some of the “sweeter” spices, that is to say cinnamon and nutmeg.

Scoop out the seeds of course, reserving them if that tickles your fancy.

Yes, very attractive and uniform buttering. Or not. I had balance issues and should have cut  some more of the squash off the sides to keep them level. Anyway, roast these in a hot oven, probably about 40 minutes, or more. I saw a recipe that said 25 minutes and that is just wrong.

When the butternut is easily pierced by a knife, it’s ready for use. Could be served up as is almost right now, perhaps cut into cubes and sauteed quickly in a hot pan with even more butter. For my purposes, I would have reduced the brown sugar dramatically for the use of stuffed pasta.

For my purposes however, I scooped out the flesh and used my food mill to turn it into a nice puree.

Season with more salt to taste. Don’t be shy. I was, and I think it needed more salt.

Touch of cream to these things rarely hurts either.

I actually made the pasta while roasting the butternut for what it’s worth, but in the interest of simplicity here’s the pasta section.

Making pasta dough is incredibly simple if you have a food processor. Two eggs, conveniently 2 ounces each, and 6 ounces of flour. Since a cup of flour is roughly five ounces, maybe a cup of flour and a very scant quarter cup, seeing as how 1/5 cup measurements aren’t typically available. Basically I recommend you get a scale. They’re fun.

So, throw the eggs and flour into a food processor, pulse a few times to combine, and when it starts coming together dump the shaggy mass onto a floured surface and work it together with your fingers.

There’s always the traditional swirling the egg in the bowl of flour methodology, and you are a badass if you do it that way. Me? I don’t have time to be a badass right now, I’m hungry.

Ok, once again, with pictures.

Two eggs, just shy of four ounces.

I’ll go with a bit less than six ounces of flour in that case.

Pulse process until it becomes a shaggy mass.

Dump it out, mush it together.

And there you have it, an attractive ball of pasta dough.

Wrap it and let rest for at least ten minutes. If you are going to let it rest more than an hour, refrigerate it.

Here is my relaxed dough, ready for rolling.

This here is the Imperia pasta machine. It’s pretty good at rolling out pasta but the handle has a super annoying habit of falling out at certain angles when you let go of it. I can’t complain because it was given to me for free by a great friend, but I can see why he switched to the Kitchenaid attachment for his own purposes.

But yes, much more convenient than using a rolling pin.

Sorry for a lack of pictures by the way, wiping off flour covered hands between shots and getting dirty again just gets repetitive. This is one of the stages of rolling.

And here is a sheet of it at its thinnest shape. Oh protip, parchment paper is fantastic for handling this stage, otherwise you will probably want to do this on a very well floured surface.

Fill up a piping bag with some butternut puree, or perhaps a huge ziploc bag with the corner cut out and a piping tip stuck in the end.

Squeeze out a line.

Brush with beaten egg and fold, then use your fingers to make the line of squash into rectangles. 

Just check out this guy for a clearer idea of what to do.

What a pro!

Ok now that you’ve seen how a master does it, here’s my way.

And fold once more.

Cut with a knife like me if you don’t have that cool frazzled edging thingy. Anyway, these are my agnolotti, and I am proud of their shape.

Boil for about three or four minutes and drain.

I tried them plain for quality purposes. Not too bad, but definitely needed more aggressive seasoning. Or a nice sauce!

I think a good red sauce would have been best, but being a bit short supplied in the kitchen, went with sauteed mushrooms.

Hot butter.

Mushrooms, garlic, salt, pepper. A roux might have been better, along with some of that cream. Ah, hindsight.

Still, I can’t really complain that much can I?

Not bad at all. Still, I’m not too sure about sharing this recipe until I’ve got it down pat. It needs a bit of something, perhaps more vegetables or fresh herbs in the puree.

I also pan fried the boiled agnolotti with some chopped onion, as seen in the first image, which actually was quite pleasant like a potsticker almost.

I hope this was interesting to read, and that it keeps you wanting more!

Take Time to Fritter Away the Day.

Week 4 of 52 weeks of cooking, and the theme is pan frying. In case you’re wondering what happened in week three, it’s best not to dwell on it. Actually, maybe you can if you like. I’m going to take two birds our with one stone here by also using one of the formula’s from Michael Ruhlman's Ratio, fritter batter. Another down, maybe 27 more to go.

Fritter batter’s ratio is a pretty simple one, and very versatile to use. Two parts flour, two parts liquid, one part egg. A little bit of baking powder to help with leavening, a bit of salt to bring out the flavor. This is the foundation through which a huge array of garnishes can be pulled together with different flavor combinations for an easy snack.

Japanese Christmas Cake! Week Zero of 52 Weeks of Cooking!

First of all, hi to reddit and those taking part in the 52 weeks of cooking challenge. This is indeed my first entry for week zero, with this “week’s” theme being holiday food. After perusing the very helpful wiki link on Christmas dishes around the world posted by rach11, I settled on Japan, because Japan is awesome, and the Japanese Christmas Cake seemed very appealing. On that note, I send my holiday wishes to r/japanesefood and r/asianeats!

As an admittedly big time anime fan, I find great humor in the trope of the Christmas cake as a metaphor for women in their mid twenties fearing becoming one. No matter how delicious a Christmas cake is, no one wants it after the 25th. If you still don’t get it, the saying means that women won’t be able to marry if they haven’t married by the time they are 25. It is an utterly ludicrous and highly old fashioned sentiment, but still pretty funny in anime format. Ok, on to the Japanese Christmas Cake!

An Autumn Harvest Dessert–Persimmon Tarts with a Baking Stone.

After the adventures of pumpkin pie comparison, I still had one pie dough chilling in the refrigerator, waiting for some exciting use. Not wanting to let it wait overlong, I turned to inspiration in the fruit basket on my counter, and selected the Fuyu persimmons picked from my friend’s backyard.

Some quick research was required before I jumped into this project, and seeing that the top result for a persimmon tart on Google was from the very talented Hong and Kim from the blog The Ravenous Couple, I needed to look no further!

The main difference in the recipe is that while they used convenient puff pastry, I was using homemade pie dough (see previous post here) made very conveniently with the KitchenAid Mixer and the insights of Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio.  I also used a handy baking stone because it was readily available. I’m pretty sure its use really helped the dish.

Can’t Be Crusted: First Attempt at Homemade Pie Dough.

You may remember the post on pumpkin pies. One of those posts required a prepared pie crust, so I made my own with the readily available ingredients of flour, butter, sugar, and water. I wanted to take on the question of whether things really were “easy as pie.”  If you have a KitchenAid Mixer, it definitely makes things easier!

I once again turned to Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio for the methodology to pie dough. It’s pretty simple really, as easy as 3-2-1. Three parts flour, two parts fat, and one part ice water.

Before we get started, this will result in two nine inch crusts, so adjust as necessary. The math’s pretty simple.

Two sticks of butter is 8 ounces, making the rest of the calculation easy; you will need to use 12 oz. of flour and about 4 ounces of ice water to complete things (Note: since butter has some water in it already, you want to be very careful with the addition of it at that step). A pinch of salt and some sugar evens out this pie dough for use with desserts.

But you don’t just need a ratio, you need some technique as well. The butter is better if it is cold. I cut up the butter into three lengths, then those into three, and then finally into little cubes before placing them together loosely and into the freezer while I prepared everything else.

To twelve oz. of flour, two tablespoons of sugar are sifted in.

Now the hard part. Mixing everything in together gently yet thoroughly, starting with the flour and chilled butter. A very gentle stirring through with the Kitchenaid paddle attachment is how I went about it.

Once it started to come together, I gently added two ounces of the water, before adding a little bit more as necessary. This is about as far as you want to mix things in, and the appearance seemed about right to my eyes. I may have overworked it already. At any rate, proceed carefully.

Gently work it together into two balls. I did this by making one ball and cutting it in half.

Flatten into disks, wrap well and place in refrigerator until ready to use.

When you’re ready, roll it out into a 9 inch crust, if that’s what you’re using it for!

Let me know what you think, did I totally botch it, or does it look ok?

The next post will showcase another use of pie dough. Botched or not, a careful treatment of the dough and the use of a baking stone will result in a fantastic treat in the form of a fruit tart!