Birthday meal

It's actually been a month since my birthday, and I have just been too busy to post the meal that I cooked for the occasion. I decided that I was going to make a meal with all the stuff that I have wanted to try for a while, but have been too busy to do so. The menu consisted of:

- brandade on toasted garlic baguette
- roasted chicken, roasted potatoes, and carrots
- chocolate mousse

I have always wanted to try brandade but for some reason never had (except for the fried version which has been featured in this blog before). For the roast chicken dish, I am basically following the recipes in Heston Blumenthal's In Search of Perfection series. Finally, the chocolate mousse recipe was from Herv´e; This.

First the brandade: I followed the recipe from Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles cookbook. This was served on toasted garlic baguette. I had to recipe more than what the recipe called for to achieve the right consistency. Other than that, it was great.



The main course was the main show: slow roasted chicken. I have actually brined it first (different from the recipe) before roasting. The chickens were roasted in an 160F oven (the lowest my oven would go). After 4.5 hours they were at 140F and "done" according to the recipe.
But I was chicken (pun intended) and decided to crank it up a little until they reached 165F. The birds look pale on the outside. They were then quickly seared in a pan to crisp the skin. Unfortunately I was not able to do this successfully (see a bit of torn skin in the picture) and the skin was brown but not crisp. The chicken was extremely moist and flavorful. Despite the fact that there is virtually no drippings for a sauce because of the low oven temperature, there is absolutely no need for a sauce. It was a little bit strange, though, to eat pink chicken and have pink juice running out when the chicken is carved. Overall it was very good, though perhaps it would be even better to finish them in a turkey fryer (as he tried on the show).



I also made some carrots in butter, and also roasted potatoes according to his recipes. Unfortunately, I grossly underestimated how good the potatoes were and had barely enough. The method of boiling the potatoes (with a bag of skin) until they almost break up and then roasting them gives a very crunchy outside and creamy inside. The texture contrast was great.



The dessert course was chocolate mousse. I used the non-classical recipe of Herv´e; This,
which involved melting chocolate with water and then whipping the mixture at high speed over an ice bath. The result was a very pure tasting chocolate mousse. I used semi-sweet chocolate, and I did not add any sugar. So for me it was a bit too much chocolate. As a result, I paired it with a raspberry coulis (just a few drops in my case) and it worked very well. Still, I discovered that the proportion for this chocolate mousse has to be scaled back because there is much less air and a small bit is already a lot!



Overall, I think it was a great meal. I am definitely happy with how it went.

octopus stew, bacon ice cream, and other adventures

Some recent adventures:


I made Chinese BBQ pork again, this time using pork butt instead of tenderloin. This is now absolutely perfect: the little bit of fat in between the meat was giving the perfect texture.



Octopus stew: I followed a Greek recipe (thanks to a book from "K"). The octopus was stewed in onions, tomatoes, vinegar, and red wine. At the end it was a bit too sour for my taste, but adding a little bit of sugar made it much better. I cooked everything in a slow cooker for 8 hours, and the octopus is definitely tender.


The star of the show: bacon maple syrup ice cream. This was somewhat inspired by Blumenthal's idea of bacon ice cream, though it is definitely not the way he would prepare it (e.g. I made the custard the normal way without intentionally overcooking it). The bacon was roasted in an oven with maple syrup, and the resulting bacon bits was mixed into a maple syrup ice cream. It was certainly very successful. When it hits your mouth, you first get the maple syrup taste (which is very good by itself). Then the smokiness and slight saltiness of the candied bacon bits come through. The combination was more successful than I would have imagined. Certainly one of the flavors that I would make again. Maybe I should serve it with french toast.


For the meal, I also purchased a frozen durian. I have not had durian for a long time (maybe for 20 years...), and even though it is frozen it is definitely strong. It actually tasted a lot
better than I thought. Having said that, the smell is really something and there was no way we were going to eat the whole thing.

Chinese BBQ pork, water chestnut cake

I made a couple of Chinese dishes:



First I made the Chinese BBQ pork (char siu). The taste worked out just like the restaurant stuff, but I have chosen to use pork tenderloin instead. Since it is actually warm outside these are made on a real BBQ: that means good caramelization on the outside too. The pork is tender but very lean. The traditional BBQ pork has some fat in it. The next time I try this I will have to use the right kind of meat. As usual, plenty of red food coloring is added.





For dessert is a steamed and then pan-fried water chestnut cake. It is actually relatively simple to make because I just used water chestnut flour. After steaming and cooled, the cake is sliced and then pan-fried. Crispy on the outside and soft on the inside.

I also attempted to make shrimp dumplings, but the dumpling skin was really hard for me to deal with and it was a bit of a disaster. My skin was either way too thick or it was too thin and the dumplings broke. I am too ashamed to show any pictures. I guess making shrimp dumpling is not that easy after all. Maybe I will try again some other time.

French onion soup

It's been a while since the last post...the only big project I have done since the last post is French onion soup. I followed Thomas Keller's recipe from his Bouchon book almost exactly, except for substituting balsamic vinegar for sherry vinegar (I can't find it in Lethbridge).

First, I made beef stock from scratch. Nothing new here, done that many times. In parallel, the onions were slowly caramelized for 5 hours. I am ashamed to say that I was slightly impatient for 15 minutes or so and turned the heat just a little too high, and I ended up with a few burned bits at the end. There is probably less than 0.05% of it, but since it is black it shows up in the soup.



We didn't have the proper soup bowls, so we toasted some baguette slices separately with Emmantaler cheese and put them on top of the soup. At the end it was excellent, definitely worth the trouble.

Chinese Roast Pork

If you live in a place with a significant Chinese population, it is usually not worth the trouble to make Chinese roast pork on your own---it will be cheaper and easier to get it at a Chinese BBQ shop. But here in Lethbridge there is not a single shop that sells roast pork, so there is really only one solution if I want to eat it.

I looked at many recipes on the web, and eventually followed this one (with small changes) and the result was absolutely great. Perhaps even better than many of the Chinese BBQ shops that I know in Edmonton.

First, I found some pork belly with the skin on from Mountain Sausage. I followed the recipe for skin preparation and also the rub, though the rub was perhaps a little too salty. Next time I will reduce that by 1/2.

Here is the setup I had for roasting: meat on a cake rack, and then a drip pan on the bottom.
I roasted the meat 5 minutes more than indicated by the recipe because the meat thermometer
still says 110F after 20 minutes. Then I switched to broil. You can see that the skin is just starting to blister.


I followed the advice from the recipe and broil the meat until the skin is actually almost completely charred. Because the oven perhaps is a little bit uneven, I rotated the meat a few times. At the end, there were still a couple of spots that were not charred. This is easily fixed with a creme brulee torch. This is what it looks like at the end:

Then the burnt parts are scrapped off with a knife, leaving a reddish crispy skin.

Perhaps I didn't leave enough space between the drip pan and the rack, so the seasoning paste at the bottom was still quite wet. I put everything on a nonstick pan to heat up and dry out a little bit:


After resting it for 15 minutes, I sliced the pork into strips:

and then chopped into pieces:



At the end it was a great success. The skin was crispy even after a day, and the flavor was almost right except that it was slightly too salty. The meat was tender too. Definitely will try to do that again.

Sannakji

I just came back from my trip to Seoul, Korea. Lots of interesting culinary adventures, but this one is the best: sannakji. That's live octopus, chopped up and served quickly. As is usual for Korean meals, it is served with a number of side dishes such as pickled radish, vegetables, soup, etc. It is served with two dipping sauce: a fermented chili soybean paste, and a sesame oil mixed with salt.





Of course, the pictures are not that helpful in the experience...here is a video that will help:


The octopus still moves around on the plate, and in fact the suction cups are still somewhat active. It is rather interesting when they stick to the plate, the spoon, the dipping sauce dish, and, even my tongue and the inside of the mouth. I did chew carefully to make sure that it doesn't get stuck on my throat.

Luckily I never had any "fear factor" to worry about. It actually does taste very good, especially with the sesame oil dipping sauce. The experience is very enjoyable, and too bad it is difficult to get it at home.

Coq au vin

I got a nice big chicken and thought that it would be good to make the French classic dish Coq au vin:



I pretty much followed the recipe in Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles cookbook. This is the second time I have tried this recipe, and both times have been wonderful. I even made some fresh pasta to go with it.

A trio of ice creams

For a BBQ event, I made three ice creams:

Olive oil ice cream



Basil lemon ice cream



Avocado ice cream



All three are quite refreshing for the summer time. The avocado ice cream has a sour cream base so it has a much denser texture but and feels heavier, but they all taste great.

Turducken

Another week, another bird. Actually three birds. We attempted the "Turducken"---chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey.

The deboning of the birds went without much problems. The birds were brined to give some flavor (and perhaps to keep them from being too dry). Cornbread stuffing was put between the turkey and the duck, sausage stuffing between the duck and the chicken, and mushroom wild rice stuffing inside the chicken. This is what it looks like just before we tie everything up:


The bird(s) roasted pretty nicely in about 5.5 hours:


Here are some pictures of the cross-sections:

Overall it tasted very good, even if it is quite a heavy dish. I do not know if it is worth the effort, however. I would much rather have a nicely roasted meaty duck instead.

One minor complaint: the chicken and duck skin inside would have been much better if they could have been crisped up somehow. I wonder if this can be done by first roasting the chicken with stuffing until skin is crisp, then wrap it inside the duck and repeat, and finally put everything together roast the whole thing. I wonder if this can be done without overcooking everything. But it would be too much work even for me, as there will be a need to stitch up the birds at each step and unstitch for the next step.

Peking Duck, Blumenthal's style

After I saw the Peking duck episode of Heston Blumenthal's "In Search of Perfection", it is apparent that one has to be crazy to come up with that recipe, and one has to be even more crazy to try it. That fits me well...

First course was, of course, the duck skin pancakes. Instead of the traditional method of inflating the duck to separate the skin followed by roasting, this recipe calls for separating the skin and stitching it onto a cooling rack.

The skin was then cooked in a low temperature oven for 3 hours to render out the fat. A mixture of maltose and vinegar was brushed on top, and the skin was then cooked at a higher temperature (with a smoke package) for 15 minutes. Just before serving, hot oil was ladled over the skin until the skin is crisp and take on a nice colour. This last step actually took a lot longer than I imagined (about 30 minutes). This is what the skin looked like after the oil bath and then cut up.

One very strange thing about this recipe is that Blumenthal's recipes usually start from scratch on everything, including baking your own buns and perhaps even constructing your own oven for the job. In this case, he just asks you to buy the pancakes. Ironically the only place I know that sells these pancakes in Lethbridge actually ran out, so I had to make them myself. At the end they were perhaps a few mm thicker than they should be, but the texture was right.

Here is what the pancakes look like just before I wrapped it up.

The second course was some duck breast that had been brined and then poached slowly in a duck stock (more on this later). It came out as I expected: tender and very flavorful.

The third course was a duck consomme with tofu. I did not follow the "consomme with dumpling" recipe in the book: somehow I thought tofu was more what I mentally expect from such a soup. To make the consomme, I first made a double stock with duck bones, chicken wings, and pork bones.
This was done in a pressure cooker so it was extremely cloudy. The next part of the recipe calls for ice filtration: freezing the stock and slowly melting it in the fridge so that the gelatin would trap all impurities.

This was supposed to take 24 hours, but after 12 hours not a single drop has come out. I took it out of the fridge for another 3 hours. Nothing. It was clear that perhaps I put in too much gelatin. I then put it next to a space heater and finally it started to drip. As expected, absolutely clear and flavorful liquid started to come out. Unfortunately there was definitely too much gelatin and I only managed to get a few tbsp after 1.5 hours from 1.5L of stock! Then disaster struck: the gelatin was melting too fast and dripped down, and everything was cloudy again.

At that point I gave up and decided to clarify the stock with the classical technique: simmering with egg white, aromatics, lean ground meat. That did the trick. The stock was then seasoned and tofu was added for a very flavorful consomme.

Last course was stir fry with leg meat. Again I deviated from the recipe. I poached the legs instead of making a confit---confit is not really a Chinese technique, and I was poaching the breast anyway. The duck meat was then chopped into small bits. I added bamboo shoot, water chestnuts, shiitake mushrooms, and straw mushrooms. A touch of oyster sauce and sesame oil were added as well. Everything was then wrapped in large lettuce leaves.

Overall, it was a lot of work and perhaps it's easier to just go and order from restaurant. But it was definitely fun to do it yourself and the result was actually better: especially the soup. I will have to try ice filtration some other day.

Honey and Roquefort ice cream

The combination of honey and Roquefort is a pretty strange idea for an ice cream, but I just had to try it. It actually worked out quite well. It is more like a cheese course at the end instead of an actual dessert, and as long as you use Roquefort in moderation it would not be too overpowering. The other interesting thing is that this mixture does not freeze into a solid like other mixture, so the result is actually a very smooth ice cream even after a long time in the freezer. Perhaps it has to do with the honey inside.

Braised abalone

I was in Calgary and bought a can of abalone to try:




This is a pretty typical "banquet" Chinese food. Kind of expensive, but I wanted to try it once. The can contained 1.5 abalone. This is what the whole one looks like:



To cook, I blanched some broccoli florets as garnish, and braised some Chinese dried shiitake mushrooms (rehydrated, of course) in a sauce made from the abalone cooking liquid, oyster sauce, and a bit of the mushroom water. The abalone was sliced thinly and heated briefly in the sauce:




The appearance was not as good as the banquet food (I did not arrange the abalone slices too well), but the taste was right. So at the end I am happy with the dish, though there are other $60 dish that I would rather have...

Weird foods

I hosted a couple of parties last year with the theme "weird foods". Here are some selected items:

Simmered smoked beef tongue



Preserved duck eggs and jellyfish




Frog leg tempura



Puff pastry tart with escargot and garlic parsley butter



Overall, everything was good although nothing was made to be presented nicely :).

Ravioli

Has been a long time since the last update...just posting various food pictures from the past...

Now that we have a pasta machine and ravioli maker, we have made ravioli a couple of times. First time, we made a filling with shrimp, ricotta, and tarragon. The sauce is made with the shrimp shells and cream:




The filling the second time (no pictures...) was roasted butternut squash with a brown butter sauce.

It is a bit of work to make the pasta, but it is certainly worth it. They were great.