I've come across a couple of good in-depth profiles of well-known chefs that are worth reading if you're interested in the personalities behind the big-time restaurant scene.
First, New York Magazine had this article about Alain Ducasse. Ducasse is one of the most famous chefs in the world, but he has never managed to open a successful restaurant in New York. Somehow his restaurants have so far always failed to match the current moods and trends in fine dining. He has just opened Adour in Manhattan in the St. Regis hotel near the upscale shopping epicenter at the intersection of 5th Avenue and 57th Street. The anecdote in the article about the prim and proper Ducasse's encounter with carpe diem personified in the larger-than-life-in-every-way form of Mario Batali is priceless. (Batali saunters right up to the quiet and reserved Ducasse, who is formally dressed in a nice suit, smothers him in a bear hug, and says enthusiastically to anyone within ear shot, "This guy is fucking awesome!")
Second, The New Yorker, in its issue dated March 24, has a profile of David Chang, who has become all the rage in the last few years after opening, of all things to launch a career as a star top chef, a noodle bar, Momofuku (which literally translated means "lucky peach", but also happens to be the name of the inventor, or at least the popularizer or commercializer, of Ramen noodles). He has since expanded to a couple more restaurants, each a bit different in its concept and food, and this profile is written as the third of his restaurants is set to open. Momofuku Ko is an ambitious restaurant in a style I first heard about in Chicago when Schwa became famous: it is a very small restaurant that makes the style of food with the kind of ingredients that you find at the best fine dining establishments around, with only a handful of seats and no waitstaff because everything is served by the chefs and cooks who prepare it. The New Yorker article is not available online, but Ed Levine wrote a worthwhile summary and commentary on it here.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Heat, Chemistry, Pastry
We are in the middle of two weeks of pastry classes at school right now. Like most cooking schools, the FCI has a full program just for pastry training, but everyone in the culinary program goes through some of the basics of pastries. Many pastry preparations can be used to make savory (non-dessert) dishes, and in addition any chef who aspires to run a kitchen or other food service operation needs to have some understanding of pastries to better work with his pastry chef and to fill in when the pastry chef is not at work.
Most elementary pastry preparations that underlie any finished product are involve more chemistry and science than the usual off-the-cuff throwing together of interesting ingredients that you see on something like Top Chef. Where we taste and adjust dishes as we go in cooking, when preparing pastries we measure precisely and follow directions carefully. In addition to measuring ingredients to the right proportions to get the desired chemical and structural transformations take place, I'm learning that the precise application of heat is often even more important to many recipes.
The process of tempering chocolate is one of the more interesting examples of how varying heat within a small temperature range changes the properties of one of the most common ingredients used in sweets. Chocolate has a structure that consists of a couple of different kinds of crystals. One of the crystals, the "unstable" one, melts near room temperature, at anywhere from 59F to 82F; the "stable" crystals melt at 89F-93F. In addition to the desirable "melts in your hands, but not in your room" property of the more stable crystals, they also have a glossier appearance and a less gummy texture than the unstable crystals. If you melt chocolate, to use as a frosting for example, if it cools rapidly (as it will if spread in a thin layer, like a frosting) there will not be enough stable crystals formed before it cools below 82F and unstable crystals take over and determine the crystalline structure of the solid chocolate. To "temper" chocolate, which makes it look and feel nicer on things, the cook melts solid chocolate and then cools it to the point where crystals form but it can still be stirred, and then gently heats it to a temperature above the melting point of unstable crystals but below the melting point of stable crystals (about 88F) to eliminate any unstable crystals that formed. It is held at that temperature to allow enough stable crystals to develop that when it is further cooled there will be enough of them to establish the structure of all of the solid chocolate. This is something I've only read about and never done, and in the basic pastry training that the culinary students get at the FCI we will not be doing it. I've heard (but never seen with my own eyes) that one of my friends who is a trained pastry chef can go through this process just by feel, without using a thermometer. She can also always recognize that most chocolate-covered desserts, even in many upscale bakeries and fine restaurants, have had some wax added to the chocolate to make it more shiny and stable and look like properly tempered chocolate.
We've been through a couple of simpler careful heating processes in the past week during our pastry classes at school. The first was to make Génoise cakes, a very light sponge cake that rises and becomes airy through creating and cooking egg foam, without any chemical or other leavening agents (such as baking powder or yeasts). The first step in making Génoise is to whisk together eggs and sugar into something like a sabayon (which normally includes only egg yolks, not the whole eggs used in Génoise). As the eggs are whipped, they will increase in volume as air is incorporated into them, but the foam is not stable enough to survive the amount of heat and time it takes to bake the cake. To make them more stable, you heat the eggs and sugar as they are whisked. The heat causes the tightly-wound proteins in the eggs to lengthen into strands that can bond with each other and form a more stable network in which air can be trapped for a longer period of time. In many pastry sauces and creams, eggs can be heated as the binder in a liquid all the way to boiling and will not curdle (scramble) if they are handled properly and stirred constantly. But for Génoise, we want to heat the eggs just to the point that they can hold a foam structure long enough to last through the baking process. If they are heated beyond that, the cake will become tough and chewy as the network of proteins gets more solid. To achieve the result we want, the eggs must come to a temperature of at least 110F, and we usually heat them to a minimum of 115F for the best results, but if at any point they go over 120F, we'll throw the mixture away and start over. When the cake is baked (after adding a little bit of flour to make a batter out of the whipped eggs and sugar), the foam is just stable enough to last through the baking process, and in fact if you remove the cake from the oven and it is not baked all the way through, the uncooked batter will quickly deflate and you'll have what Chef Marc derisively calls "a flat tire." There is no recovery if this happens -- you just have to start over.
The second preparation we made that involved achieving a narrow temperature range was classic buttercream frosting. As our assistant instructor Chef Matthew (who worked for awhile as a pastry chef) told us, a colleague once told him that the only real purpose of Génoise is to serve as a platform for the delivery of buttercream. The frosting is made from only 3 basic ingredients: egg yolks, sugar, and butter. The frosting is not cooked and there is no liquid in which to dissolve the sugar, but we want the sugar to be soft and not grainy when the finished preparation is at or below room temperature. The solution is to heat the sugar to a stage where its crystal structure will be permanently changed and it would cool into a soft and pliable solid if left on its own and not mixed into our frosting. We'll get this result by heating the sugar to what is called the "soft ball" stage, between 234F and 240F. When it is in that temperature range, a bit of the sugar cooled in ice water can be rolled between your fingers into a soft but cohesive ball. If heated to just below that range, the sugar upon cooling will tend to spin fine threads rather than forming a solid lump or ball; if heated above that range, it will form crunchier and eventually rock-hard solids when it is cooled (this is how hard candies are made). To make buttercream, you beat egg yolks and then mix hot sugar brought to the soft ball stage into the eggs, then cool the mix enough that it will not melt butter, and whip a whole lot of butter into it to form a frosting.
Most elementary pastry preparations that underlie any finished product are involve more chemistry and science than the usual off-the-cuff throwing together of interesting ingredients that you see on something like Top Chef. Where we taste and adjust dishes as we go in cooking, when preparing pastries we measure precisely and follow directions carefully. In addition to measuring ingredients to the right proportions to get the desired chemical and structural transformations take place, I'm learning that the precise application of heat is often even more important to many recipes.
The process of tempering chocolate is one of the more interesting examples of how varying heat within a small temperature range changes the properties of one of the most common ingredients used in sweets. Chocolate has a structure that consists of a couple of different kinds of crystals. One of the crystals, the "unstable" one, melts near room temperature, at anywhere from 59F to 82F; the "stable" crystals melt at 89F-93F. In addition to the desirable "melts in your hands, but not in your room" property of the more stable crystals, they also have a glossier appearance and a less gummy texture than the unstable crystals. If you melt chocolate, to use as a frosting for example, if it cools rapidly (as it will if spread in a thin layer, like a frosting) there will not be enough stable crystals formed before it cools below 82F and unstable crystals take over and determine the crystalline structure of the solid chocolate. To "temper" chocolate, which makes it look and feel nicer on things, the cook melts solid chocolate and then cools it to the point where crystals form but it can still be stirred, and then gently heats it to a temperature above the melting point of unstable crystals but below the melting point of stable crystals (about 88F) to eliminate any unstable crystals that formed. It is held at that temperature to allow enough stable crystals to develop that when it is further cooled there will be enough of them to establish the structure of all of the solid chocolate. This is something I've only read about and never done, and in the basic pastry training that the culinary students get at the FCI we will not be doing it. I've heard (but never seen with my own eyes) that one of my friends who is a trained pastry chef can go through this process just by feel, without using a thermometer. She can also always recognize that most chocolate-covered desserts, even in many upscale bakeries and fine restaurants, have had some wax added to the chocolate to make it more shiny and stable and look like properly tempered chocolate.
We've been through a couple of simpler careful heating processes in the past week during our pastry classes at school. The first was to make Génoise cakes, a very light sponge cake that rises and becomes airy through creating and cooking egg foam, without any chemical or other leavening agents (such as baking powder or yeasts). The first step in making Génoise is to whisk together eggs and sugar into something like a sabayon (which normally includes only egg yolks, not the whole eggs used in Génoise). As the eggs are whipped, they will increase in volume as air is incorporated into them, but the foam is not stable enough to survive the amount of heat and time it takes to bake the cake. To make them more stable, you heat the eggs and sugar as they are whisked. The heat causes the tightly-wound proteins in the eggs to lengthen into strands that can bond with each other and form a more stable network in which air can be trapped for a longer period of time. In many pastry sauces and creams, eggs can be heated as the binder in a liquid all the way to boiling and will not curdle (scramble) if they are handled properly and stirred constantly. But for Génoise, we want to heat the eggs just to the point that they can hold a foam structure long enough to last through the baking process. If they are heated beyond that, the cake will become tough and chewy as the network of proteins gets more solid. To achieve the result we want, the eggs must come to a temperature of at least 110F, and we usually heat them to a minimum of 115F for the best results, but if at any point they go over 120F, we'll throw the mixture away and start over. When the cake is baked (after adding a little bit of flour to make a batter out of the whipped eggs and sugar), the foam is just stable enough to last through the baking process, and in fact if you remove the cake from the oven and it is not baked all the way through, the uncooked batter will quickly deflate and you'll have what Chef Marc derisively calls "a flat tire." There is no recovery if this happens -- you just have to start over.
The second preparation we made that involved achieving a narrow temperature range was classic buttercream frosting. As our assistant instructor Chef Matthew (who worked for awhile as a pastry chef) told us, a colleague once told him that the only real purpose of Génoise is to serve as a platform for the delivery of buttercream. The frosting is made from only 3 basic ingredients: egg yolks, sugar, and butter. The frosting is not cooked and there is no liquid in which to dissolve the sugar, but we want the sugar to be soft and not grainy when the finished preparation is at or below room temperature. The solution is to heat the sugar to a stage where its crystal structure will be permanently changed and it would cool into a soft and pliable solid if left on its own and not mixed into our frosting. We'll get this result by heating the sugar to what is called the "soft ball" stage, between 234F and 240F. When it is in that temperature range, a bit of the sugar cooled in ice water can be rolled between your fingers into a soft but cohesive ball. If heated to just below that range, the sugar upon cooling will tend to spin fine threads rather than forming a solid lump or ball; if heated above that range, it will form crunchier and eventually rock-hard solids when it is cooled (this is how hard candies are made). To make buttercream, you beat egg yolks and then mix hot sugar brought to the soft ball stage into the eggs, then cool the mix enough that it will not melt butter, and whip a whole lot of butter into it to form a frosting.
Recipe: Génoise (Whole Egg Sponge Cake)
A good Génoise cake is going to rise a lot in baking, enough that you can make two or three layers by slicing a single cake. It will be 3 or 4 inches tall. This means that you need a pretty deep cake pan to make it, like the deep aluminum pans you'll find in kitchen supply stores that have the sorts of heavy but inexpensive equipment used in restaurant kitchens. You also need a thermometer that you are confident is both accurate to within 2 or 3 degrees and that you can read that precisely.
Prepare one cake pan (choose a deep pan, at least 2" tall) by buttering and flouring it, line the bottom with parchment paper, and put it in the refrigerator to cool. Preheat the oven to 350F.
It is better to weigh your ingredients if possible, especially the flour, but since many home cooks do not have a scale, I've approximated the equivalent volume measurements.
Get a double-boiler ready by fitting a large bowl (large enough to be able to vigorously whisk the eggs until they triple in volume) over a hot water bath. Do not let the water touch the bottom of the bowl. Once you've checked that the bowl fits over your pan and that the water does not come to the bottom of the bowl, set the bowl aside (it must not be hot when you add the raw eggs to it) and heat the water to a simmer.
Put the eggs and sugar into your bowl and begin whisking them with a large balloon whisk. After they come together (about a minute), continue whisking over the hot water bath. Whisk until the eggs are tripled in volume, which will take about 10 minutes (or more like 30 minutes if you are stirring and not whisking, something that as simple as it sounds I did not really understand until Chef Marc yelled at me about 10 times over the course of 20 minutes on the night we first made Hollandaise sauce -- to whisk, you have to rapidly lift the whisk completely out of the egg mixture with each stroke so that you pick up a lot of air). While you whisk, periodically check the temperature of the mix. If you reach 115F, take it off the heat. You must get to at least 110F, 115F is ideal, and if at any point the eggs go over 120F you should throw them away and start over. When you take the temperature, tip the bowl up on its side and lay the thermometer in it along the side of the bowl so that you have a couple inches of the thermometer in the eggs. If you reach the proper temperature before the eggs have been whisked until light and foamy and 3 or 4 times their original volume, take the bowl off the heat to finish whisking.
Fold in the sifted flour with a spatula, trying not to stir too much and deflate the batter. Pour the batter into the buttered and floured cake pan. Spin the pan around quickly one time and bang it firmly on the countertop one time to even out the batter. Place it in the oven and bake until the cake does not keep an indentation you make in its top with your finger. Wait at least 20 minutes before you open the oven door to check it for the first time. The cake will get quite brown before it is finished. My cakes have all taken 35-40 minutes to bake. If the cake is not completely baked, it will collapse when removed from the oven.
When it is finished, remove it from the pan immediately and let it cool on a cooling rack, covered with a damp towel to keep it from drying out. Once it dries, the cake is usually sliced in half (into layers) and middle of the cake is brushed with a simple syrup (a mix of equal parts sugar and water, heated to dissolve the sugar, which you can also flavor with things like whole cloves or cinnamon sticks that you remove before you use the syrup). The cake can absorb a lot of syrup without getting soggy -- I used about 1/2 cup of syrup on one 6-inch cake. You can frost between the layers or not, as you like.
| 6-Inch Cake | 8-Inch Cake | |
| Eggs | 3 | 5 |
| Sugar | 1/3 cup (75 grams) | 1/2 cup (125 g) |
| Cake flour, sifted | 1/2 cup (75 grams) | 7/8 cup (125 grams) |
Prepare one cake pan (choose a deep pan, at least 2" tall) by buttering and flouring it, line the bottom with parchment paper, and put it in the refrigerator to cool. Preheat the oven to 350F.
It is better to weigh your ingredients if possible, especially the flour, but since many home cooks do not have a scale, I've approximated the equivalent volume measurements.
Get a double-boiler ready by fitting a large bowl (large enough to be able to vigorously whisk the eggs until they triple in volume) over a hot water bath. Do not let the water touch the bottom of the bowl. Once you've checked that the bowl fits over your pan and that the water does not come to the bottom of the bowl, set the bowl aside (it must not be hot when you add the raw eggs to it) and heat the water to a simmer.
Put the eggs and sugar into your bowl and begin whisking them with a large balloon whisk. After they come together (about a minute), continue whisking over the hot water bath. Whisk until the eggs are tripled in volume, which will take about 10 minutes (or more like 30 minutes if you are stirring and not whisking, something that as simple as it sounds I did not really understand until Chef Marc yelled at me about 10 times over the course of 20 minutes on the night we first made Hollandaise sauce -- to whisk, you have to rapidly lift the whisk completely out of the egg mixture with each stroke so that you pick up a lot of air). While you whisk, periodically check the temperature of the mix. If you reach 115F, take it off the heat. You must get to at least 110F, 115F is ideal, and if at any point the eggs go over 120F you should throw them away and start over. When you take the temperature, tip the bowl up on its side and lay the thermometer in it along the side of the bowl so that you have a couple inches of the thermometer in the eggs. If you reach the proper temperature before the eggs have been whisked until light and foamy and 3 or 4 times their original volume, take the bowl off the heat to finish whisking.
Fold in the sifted flour with a spatula, trying not to stir too much and deflate the batter. Pour the batter into the buttered and floured cake pan. Spin the pan around quickly one time and bang it firmly on the countertop one time to even out the batter. Place it in the oven and bake until the cake does not keep an indentation you make in its top with your finger. Wait at least 20 minutes before you open the oven door to check it for the first time. The cake will get quite brown before it is finished. My cakes have all taken 35-40 minutes to bake. If the cake is not completely baked, it will collapse when removed from the oven.
When it is finished, remove it from the pan immediately and let it cool on a cooling rack, covered with a damp towel to keep it from drying out. Once it dries, the cake is usually sliced in half (into layers) and middle of the cake is brushed with a simple syrup (a mix of equal parts sugar and water, heated to dissolve the sugar, which you can also flavor with things like whole cloves or cinnamon sticks that you remove before you use the syrup). The cake can absorb a lot of syrup without getting soggy -- I used about 1/2 cup of syrup on one 6-inch cake. You can frost between the layers or not, as you like.
Recipe: Buttercream
1 1/3 cups (300 grams) sugar
1/3 cup water
6 egg yolks
5 sticks (1 1/4 lbs) butter, warmed to room temperature, but not melted
Separate the eggs and put the yolks in a mixing bowl. Discard or reserve the whites for another use.
Have a pastry brush and a bowl of ice water next to the stove before you begin to heat the sugar. Sugar is very hot and can be dangerous, a lot like a pot of hot oil for deep frying, so be careful not to splash yourself; this is an operation for which you might not want any children in the room. Place the sugar and water in a heavy-bottomed pan on the stove over high heat. Do not stir the sugar or shake the pan as it heats, or the sugar may crystalize and you will have to start over. As the sugar and water come to a boil, quickly and repeatedly brush ice water all around the sides of the pan just above the sugar (don't get your brush in the hot sugar) to wash any sugar crystals that form on the sides of the pan down into the rest of the sugar -- you use very cold water so that it will not completely boil away before it can run down the side of the pan into the sugar. When the sugar reaches the soft ball stage (234F-240F), take it off the heat immediately. (Here is a page with good descriptions of the stages of sugar as it is heated.)
As soon as the sugar is off heat, start whipping the egg yolks using a wire whip on a mixer. When they have become a bit pale, start adding the warm sugar while beating the eggs with the wire whip by pouring the sugar down the side of the mixing bowl. Your goal is for the sugar to get down to the eggs without it touching the wire whip, or the whip will fling it against the sides of the bowl and it won't get incorporated into the eggs.
Once all the sugar has been added to the eggs, continue mixing it to cool it until it is no longer hot enough to melt butter. Then, while still mixing with the whip, add the butter until it is completely incorporated. The buttercream is then ready to use. You can flavor or color it however you like, with food coloring dyes, liqueurs, or extracts like vanilla, almond or coffee.
Buttercream will keep in the refrigerator for about a week, or you can freeze it for several months. Bring it to near room temperature to work with it.
1/3 cup water
6 egg yolks
5 sticks (1 1/4 lbs) butter, warmed to room temperature, but not melted
Separate the eggs and put the yolks in a mixing bowl. Discard or reserve the whites for another use.
Have a pastry brush and a bowl of ice water next to the stove before you begin to heat the sugar. Sugar is very hot and can be dangerous, a lot like a pot of hot oil for deep frying, so be careful not to splash yourself; this is an operation for which you might not want any children in the room. Place the sugar and water in a heavy-bottomed pan on the stove over high heat. Do not stir the sugar or shake the pan as it heats, or the sugar may crystalize and you will have to start over. As the sugar and water come to a boil, quickly and repeatedly brush ice water all around the sides of the pan just above the sugar (don't get your brush in the hot sugar) to wash any sugar crystals that form on the sides of the pan down into the rest of the sugar -- you use very cold water so that it will not completely boil away before it can run down the side of the pan into the sugar. When the sugar reaches the soft ball stage (234F-240F), take it off the heat immediately. (Here is a page with good descriptions of the stages of sugar as it is heated.)
As soon as the sugar is off heat, start whipping the egg yolks using a wire whip on a mixer. When they have become a bit pale, start adding the warm sugar while beating the eggs with the wire whip by pouring the sugar down the side of the mixing bowl. Your goal is for the sugar to get down to the eggs without it touching the wire whip, or the whip will fling it against the sides of the bowl and it won't get incorporated into the eggs.
Once all the sugar has been added to the eggs, continue mixing it to cool it until it is no longer hot enough to melt butter. Then, while still mixing with the whip, add the butter until it is completely incorporated. The buttercream is then ready to use. You can flavor or color it however you like, with food coloring dyes, liqueurs, or extracts like vanilla, almond or coffee.
Buttercream will keep in the refrigerator for about a week, or you can freeze it for several months. Bring it to near room temperature to work with it.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Controlling Heat and Goal-Oriented Cooking
One of the fundamental skills for a cook to develop is the control and use of heat. Heat is such a basic part of cooking that those of us who control it well take it for granted that everyone knows or should know how to use heat in the kitchen; those of us who don't control it at all probably don't even recognize the application of heat to food as a significant skill in and of itself. Chefs bristle and sometimes even grow angry when asked, "How long should I cook it?" It's an exasperating question to ask a cook, because there is no correct short answer to the question. Often you'll hear the flippant answer, "Until it's done." The chef who gives that answer knows that it isn't helpful to the person who asked, and yet he intends it in a helpful way: he wants to prod the questioner to think about the problem in a different way.
In an analogy that I thought was brilliant, an essay that I read a few months ago said that to tell someone to cook something for five minutes made as much sense as telling them that to get to your house they should drive for five minutes and then turn right. Anyone who drives knows that while the approximate time it will take to get somewhere can be known in advance, you don't use a timer to tell you when to take the next action (like turning right) as you drive. Instead, you look for landmarks or roadsigns. In the same way, a chef assumes that anyone who cooks will know that while the approximate cooking time of something can be known in advance, you can't use time to tell you when to take the next action (like adding the next ingredient, or deglazing your pan, or serving the finished dish) as you cook something. Instead you need to learn what signs to look for that the food being cooked has reached the state where it is time for the next step.
Most cookbooks encourage the idea that elapsed time is how to tell when something is cooked. Every step of a recipe that tells you to cook something also tells you how long to cook it. I've read that there are often battles between chefs and cookbook editors about whether to include timings in recipes or not. The editors and publishers always win the argument, and they are probably right to think that they will have a difficult time selling a cookbook that doesn't say anything about how long you should cook your onions before you add your tomatoes. Yet the fact remains that for many recipes, if you "cook over medium heat for five minutes" as instructed, whether the food you make comes out well or not is mostly a matter of luck (or your skill at knowing from the context and dish whether the author meant for you to saute or sweat the food), and not related to the quality of the dish or the recipe.
The more I cook, and the more I write about cooking and try to describe recipes to friends either in writing or while I'm talking to them, the more I believe that most of what you do in cooking, especially when you apply heat to something, is "goal-oriented." What I mean is that in every step of a recipe, the author has in mind some state that the food will be in at the end of that step. Usually the goal (the state in which the food should be) is not explicitly stated. Instead of telling you what the goal is, recipes generally give you an action to carry out, such as our earlier example, "cook over medium heat for five minutes." It's not only the "five minutes" part of that instruction that might or might not work out as intended; the "medium heat" bit leaves even more room for error. The cook would be better off if he were told, "Cook over medium heat until softened but still with some bite, and pale white or yellow in color, which might take about five minutes." Depending on your skill, how many other things you have going on in the kitchen at the same time, what kind of pan you use, how much heat you apply and how much you stir or shake the pan, that step might take anywhere from 3 minutes to 20 minutes. But if you focus on the goal -- soft texture and pale color -- you'll get the step right no matter how much time is involved.
It's difficult to write a goal-oriented cookbook that can be used by a general audience. One common approach is to include an introductory chapter or two in the book, before the chapters of recipes, with general information and instructions. But reality is that most people aren't ever going to read that stuff (though for me it is the most-read parts of the cookbooks I own). Another approach I've seen is to describe the goals of each step right in the recipe. One of the cookbooks that is among the handful of important books in my own development as a cook is Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen, and in it Bayless often takes a fairly long paragraph to describe each step. Since so many of the techniques are common to a lot of the recipes, he repeats the same description of a step several times throughout the book, so that when you go to make anything, you have everything you need to know right there in the recipe in front of you. As a result, many of his recipes take 3 pages or more of text, which can deter people from reading or attempting them. But it was a transformative book for me, because it started me along the road to thinking of every step in cooking a dish as having a desired outcome, and not just as a direction to be followed in the hope that everything would turn out well at the end of all of the steps.
Whenever you apply heat to food, you should know what your goal is. For example, when you cook anything in oil in a pan, you should at least know whether you want it to get browned or not, and in addition you might want to know whether you're trying to drive out none, some or most of its moisture. Recipes often don't specify these things, although they do sometimes throw you a hint about the color ("golden brown") you want to achieve, which can be helpful. In writing and describing recipes, I'm starting to think that describing at the beginning of the recipe the important intermediate goals to keep in mind as you cook is the way I like to tackle the issue. The "Cooking Objectives" section of the Potato Leek Soup recipe I posted here awhile ago is an example.
Once you know what your goals are, you can depart from the directions of your recipes and use your own methods to achieve them. Recently I read an article by Eric Ripert, the chef at Le Bernardin, regarded as the best restaurant in New York by many people (and where I ate the best piece of cooked salmon I've ever had), in which he outlined the most important aspects of the way he cooks a fish fillet. A couple of them were to heat the oil until it's smoking before you put in the fillet, and then put the fillet in skin-side down and press down on it firmly with a spatula to prevent the skin from curling. Not long after I read that, I saw an interview with Tom Colicchio, the founding executive chef (he has since moved on) of Gramercy Tavern, the restaurant where I had the best cooked striped bass (my "go-to" fish) dish I ever ate. He said in a nutshell, "You don't have to get your oil that hot, and pressing it down with a spatula like many chefs do is unnecessary." Who is right? Well, both are -- they can both produce perfectly-cooked fish, with crispy skin, using different techniques. Their goals are the same, their methods are different. But the lesson here is not that the technique doesn't matter, because you can't mix-and-match your favorite parts of each way of doing it: if you use very hot oil, you need to press with the spatula, or the fish will curl away from the pan and it won't cook correctly at all. I've used both methods successfully, and I don't really have a favorite, although based on how good the results have been a few times, if I needed to make a perfect fish fillet for a special plate, I'd go with the smoking oil and spatula. But again, to use that method, you need to know your goals and keep them in mind. You don't want to burn the fish, and when you use high heat often it's the fat (oil) that burns before the food does, and since the oil will move around in the pan and coat the food, burned oil will make the fish taste acrid and bitter even if you don't overheat its surface. The solution is to use a pan of the right size, that will just accommodate the fish you want to cook (with a half inch or a bit more between the pieces), but not any larger, because what burns your oil is having a large surface area of your pan over the burner without any food in contact with it to absorb the heat.
In an analogy that I thought was brilliant, an essay that I read a few months ago said that to tell someone to cook something for five minutes made as much sense as telling them that to get to your house they should drive for five minutes and then turn right. Anyone who drives knows that while the approximate time it will take to get somewhere can be known in advance, you don't use a timer to tell you when to take the next action (like turning right) as you drive. Instead, you look for landmarks or roadsigns. In the same way, a chef assumes that anyone who cooks will know that while the approximate cooking time of something can be known in advance, you can't use time to tell you when to take the next action (like adding the next ingredient, or deglazing your pan, or serving the finished dish) as you cook something. Instead you need to learn what signs to look for that the food being cooked has reached the state where it is time for the next step.
Most cookbooks encourage the idea that elapsed time is how to tell when something is cooked. Every step of a recipe that tells you to cook something also tells you how long to cook it. I've read that there are often battles between chefs and cookbook editors about whether to include timings in recipes or not. The editors and publishers always win the argument, and they are probably right to think that they will have a difficult time selling a cookbook that doesn't say anything about how long you should cook your onions before you add your tomatoes. Yet the fact remains that for many recipes, if you "cook over medium heat for five minutes" as instructed, whether the food you make comes out well or not is mostly a matter of luck (or your skill at knowing from the context and dish whether the author meant for you to saute or sweat the food), and not related to the quality of the dish or the recipe.
The more I cook, and the more I write about cooking and try to describe recipes to friends either in writing or while I'm talking to them, the more I believe that most of what you do in cooking, especially when you apply heat to something, is "goal-oriented." What I mean is that in every step of a recipe, the author has in mind some state that the food will be in at the end of that step. Usually the goal (the state in which the food should be) is not explicitly stated. Instead of telling you what the goal is, recipes generally give you an action to carry out, such as our earlier example, "cook over medium heat for five minutes." It's not only the "five minutes" part of that instruction that might or might not work out as intended; the "medium heat" bit leaves even more room for error. The cook would be better off if he were told, "Cook over medium heat until softened but still with some bite, and pale white or yellow in color, which might take about five minutes." Depending on your skill, how many other things you have going on in the kitchen at the same time, what kind of pan you use, how much heat you apply and how much you stir or shake the pan, that step might take anywhere from 3 minutes to 20 minutes. But if you focus on the goal -- soft texture and pale color -- you'll get the step right no matter how much time is involved.
It's difficult to write a goal-oriented cookbook that can be used by a general audience. One common approach is to include an introductory chapter or two in the book, before the chapters of recipes, with general information and instructions. But reality is that most people aren't ever going to read that stuff (though for me it is the most-read parts of the cookbooks I own). Another approach I've seen is to describe the goals of each step right in the recipe. One of the cookbooks that is among the handful of important books in my own development as a cook is Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen, and in it Bayless often takes a fairly long paragraph to describe each step. Since so many of the techniques are common to a lot of the recipes, he repeats the same description of a step several times throughout the book, so that when you go to make anything, you have everything you need to know right there in the recipe in front of you. As a result, many of his recipes take 3 pages or more of text, which can deter people from reading or attempting them. But it was a transformative book for me, because it started me along the road to thinking of every step in cooking a dish as having a desired outcome, and not just as a direction to be followed in the hope that everything would turn out well at the end of all of the steps.
Whenever you apply heat to food, you should know what your goal is. For example, when you cook anything in oil in a pan, you should at least know whether you want it to get browned or not, and in addition you might want to know whether you're trying to drive out none, some or most of its moisture. Recipes often don't specify these things, although they do sometimes throw you a hint about the color ("golden brown") you want to achieve, which can be helpful. In writing and describing recipes, I'm starting to think that describing at the beginning of the recipe the important intermediate goals to keep in mind as you cook is the way I like to tackle the issue. The "Cooking Objectives" section of the Potato Leek Soup recipe I posted here awhile ago is an example.
Once you know what your goals are, you can depart from the directions of your recipes and use your own methods to achieve them. Recently I read an article by Eric Ripert, the chef at Le Bernardin, regarded as the best restaurant in New York by many people (and where I ate the best piece of cooked salmon I've ever had), in which he outlined the most important aspects of the way he cooks a fish fillet. A couple of them were to heat the oil until it's smoking before you put in the fillet, and then put the fillet in skin-side down and press down on it firmly with a spatula to prevent the skin from curling. Not long after I read that, I saw an interview with Tom Colicchio, the founding executive chef (he has since moved on) of Gramercy Tavern, the restaurant where I had the best cooked striped bass (my "go-to" fish) dish I ever ate. He said in a nutshell, "You don't have to get your oil that hot, and pressing it down with a spatula like many chefs do is unnecessary." Who is right? Well, both are -- they can both produce perfectly-cooked fish, with crispy skin, using different techniques. Their goals are the same, their methods are different. But the lesson here is not that the technique doesn't matter, because you can't mix-and-match your favorite parts of each way of doing it: if you use very hot oil, you need to press with the spatula, or the fish will curl away from the pan and it won't cook correctly at all. I've used both methods successfully, and I don't really have a favorite, although based on how good the results have been a few times, if I needed to make a perfect fish fillet for a special plate, I'd go with the smoking oil and spatula. But again, to use that method, you need to know your goals and keep them in mind. You don't want to burn the fish, and when you use high heat often it's the fat (oil) that burns before the food does, and since the oil will move around in the pan and coat the food, burned oil will make the fish taste acrid and bitter even if you don't overheat its surface. The solution is to use a pan of the right size, that will just accommodate the fish you want to cook (with a half inch or a bit more between the pieces), but not any larger, because what burns your oil is having a large surface area of your pan over the burner without any food in contact with it to absorb the heat.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Jean-Luc's Favorite Wines
Last week, I went to a great wine tasting event at Le Du's wine shop, a store hidden (but well-known) in an out-of-the-way corner of the Meat Packing District. The event was called "Jean-Luc's Favorite Wines," and it was basically a good excuse for the owner of the store to get a bunch of us to pay for him to get to open and drink some of his best wines. But I think most people there would gladly pay for him to do that any chance they get -- he is an entertaining speaker and chooses terrific wines.
Jean-Luc Le Du was the wine director for Daniel Boulud for 10 years before he left to open his own wine shop. I think of that job as the wine analog of being manager of the New York Yankees: if you wanted to be in the wine profession in the United States in some capacity other than a winemaker and you could pick from any job, that would have to be in your top handful of choices. He was born in France and hails from Brittany (where, as he says, they don't make any wine, but they produce a lot of very nice pigs), but didn't discover wine until he came to the United States in the mid-eighties. A friend opened his eyes to outstanding wines with a bottle of 1964 Château Cheval Blanc, a well-known Bordeaux from Saint-Emilion. As Jean-Luc tells it, "I didn't know anything about wine. I thought you could just go to a liquor store with five dollars and ask for a sixty-four Château Cheval Blanc." (Current bottlings are around $300 now.) But he fell in love with wine and became determined to learn about it, and began buying $100 worth of wine every week, which must have gone quite a long way in the United States in the eighties, before this country really discovered wine and our demand pushed prices up.
We had eight wines (about a half glass of each) over the course of two hours at the tasting, with Jean-Luc speaking extemporaneously about each one for fifteen minutes or more. At times, people remarked that they didn't like something as much, or didn't taste in the wine what Jean-Luc did, and a couple of times in response he made people laugh by pointing at the top of the sheet that listed the wines and had as its title, "My Favorite Wines," and saying, "If you look to the top of your sheet, you'll see it is called MY favorite wines; your favorite wines might be something else," but he said it in a light-hearted way, not at all defensively or dismissively. The lineup featured one champagne, one white wine, four red wines, and two dessert wines:
Most champagnes are made to taste sort of nondescript, because the producer's goal with nonvintage champagnes and sparkling wines (probably most readers of this have only ever had nonvintage sparkling wine) is for them to taste pretty much the same from year to year so that the consumer will know what he's getting in the bottle. Like most food products where your goal is to be able to duplicate the same flavor over and over without variation, nonvintage champagnes are made by blending together raw ingredients from a wide variety of sources: wine from a lot of different grapes (the same variety, but harvested from different sites) grown in a lot of different years is combined to drive out the distinguishing characteristics of any one of them, leaving the producer with a wine that is more a reflection of how it was made than what it was made from. This is not a bad thing, because often you want something simple and good that will be exactly what you expect, a wine clearly in the style of some well-known producer, but if you only ever try nonvintage sparkling wines, you're guaranteed to miss the best and most interesting champagnes. After tasting this wine, I will look for vintage sparkling wines more in restaurants.
Both red Bordeaux and Barolo wines are very tannic, and can generally benefit from aging. Tannin, found in the skins of dark grapes, gives a red wine roughness and bitterness, but it is also what usually allows a wine to be aged. To give you some idea of the kind of edge it gives to a wine, tannic acid has a similar quality to and is the main taste in (unsweetened, obviously, and un-lemoned) iced tea. Tannins give a wine what is often called "structure," the layers of taste that you pick up in different parts of your mouth in different sequences as you taste a wine by holding it in your mouth for several seconds (or, for some wines, several minutes). The '82 Bordeaux had lost nearly all of its tannic taste, and therefore all of its "structure," and Jean-Luc remarked that it was on the verge of "falling apart." In addition it had lost nearly all of the taste of the original fruit. In fact, until I tasted this wine, I'm not sure that I really understood what it meant for a red wine to taste "fruity" other than in a very obvious way. When all of the fruit has aged away, it really hits you how fruity every other red wine is, even those that are so tannic and bitter that they aren't ready to drink. In some sense it was a very pure expression of Bordeaux, and aside from the obvious novelty aspect of getting to try an old wine, that is why I am glad to have tasted it. Take away the tannic bitterness and the regular old grape fruitiness, and what you're left with is the concentrated essence of the land that the wine came from, the minerals and nutrients and organisms in the soil, the taste and smell of the air that gave life to the vines. I thought of it like a consomme of Bordeaux. Someone remarked that it had the quality of a perfume, which I think is a good way to describe it: a light but very distinctive and powerful aroma and flavor.
All in all, I'm glad I got to try all of those wines. One of my friends who was at the tasting asked Jean-Luc near the end, since he had been repeatedly and humorously making the point that these were his favorite wines, when he was going to have a tasting of his second-favorite wines. I hope he does so before too long -- I'll be there.
Jean-Luc Le Du was the wine director for Daniel Boulud for 10 years before he left to open his own wine shop. I think of that job as the wine analog of being manager of the New York Yankees: if you wanted to be in the wine profession in the United States in some capacity other than a winemaker and you could pick from any job, that would have to be in your top handful of choices. He was born in France and hails from Brittany (where, as he says, they don't make any wine, but they produce a lot of very nice pigs), but didn't discover wine until he came to the United States in the mid-eighties. A friend opened his eyes to outstanding wines with a bottle of 1964 Château Cheval Blanc, a well-known Bordeaux from Saint-Emilion. As Jean-Luc tells it, "I didn't know anything about wine. I thought you could just go to a liquor store with five dollars and ask for a sixty-four Château Cheval Blanc." (Current bottlings are around $300 now.) But he fell in love with wine and became determined to learn about it, and began buying $100 worth of wine every week, which must have gone quite a long way in the United States in the eighties, before this country really discovered wine and our demand pushed prices up.
We had eight wines (about a half glass of each) over the course of two hours at the tasting, with Jean-Luc speaking extemporaneously about each one for fifteen minutes or more. At times, people remarked that they didn't like something as much, or didn't taste in the wine what Jean-Luc did, and a couple of times in response he made people laugh by pointing at the top of the sheet that listed the wines and had as its title, "My Favorite Wines," and saying, "If you look to the top of your sheet, you'll see it is called MY favorite wines; your favorite wines might be something else," but he said it in a light-hearted way, not at all defensively or dismissively. The lineup featured one champagne, one white wine, four red wines, and two dessert wines:
- Vintage Champagne: Egly Ouriet 2000
- Old White Burgundy: Puligny Montrachet "Les Combettes" 1er Cru, Nicolas Potel 1990
- Northern Rhone Syrah: Cornas, Auguste Clape 2005
- Priorat Blend: Clos Mogador 2005
- Old Bordeaux: Château Grand Puy Lacoste 1982
- Old Barolo: Barolo, Giacomo Conterno 1971
- Dessert Wine, Late Harvest Loire Valley Chenin Blanc: Vouvray Moelleux, Domaine Foreau 2005
- Dessert Wine: Banyuls, Dr. Parce 1961
Egly Ouriet 2000
The champagne was the first that I've ever had that I would say had a distinct character and the body of a "real" wine. I drink a fair amount of sparkling wine nowadays, often with cheeses instead of desserts in restaurants, and most of it tastes to me like good nondescript dry white wine with a bit of apple flavor to it that I like. This champagne was made of chardonnay grapes, and had the butteriness and heft of a chardonnay, and the toastiness of a bit of age. It had been oaked a bit, but not so much that it was obtrusive. During Jean-Luc's remarks, I picked up some very basic sparkling wine knowledge that is pretty obvious when you stop and think about it for a moment, but was new to me nevertheless: "blanc de blanc" means the wine was made with chardonnay grapes, and "blanc de noir" means the wine was made with pinot noir grapes. (Dark grapes are often used to make white wines: the color in red wines comes from leaving the skins on during the processing of the grapes; if you remove the skins early, the flesh of the grape is light and you get a white wine.)Most champagnes are made to taste sort of nondescript, because the producer's goal with nonvintage champagnes and sparkling wines (probably most readers of this have only ever had nonvintage sparkling wine) is for them to taste pretty much the same from year to year so that the consumer will know what he's getting in the bottle. Like most food products where your goal is to be able to duplicate the same flavor over and over without variation, nonvintage champagnes are made by blending together raw ingredients from a wide variety of sources: wine from a lot of different grapes (the same variety, but harvested from different sites) grown in a lot of different years is combined to drive out the distinguishing characteristics of any one of them, leaving the producer with a wine that is more a reflection of how it was made than what it was made from. This is not a bad thing, because often you want something simple and good that will be exactly what you expect, a wine clearly in the style of some well-known producer, but if you only ever try nonvintage sparkling wines, you're guaranteed to miss the best and most interesting champagnes. After tasting this wine, I will look for vintage sparkling wines more in restaurants.
Puligny Montrachet "Les Combettes" 1er Cru, Nicolas Potel 1990
The white Burgundy that we tasted from 1990 was probably the standout wine of the tasting for me (although its hard to say that, because nearly every wine there was the standout the moment I first tried it). It is the first time I've ever had a white wine where I understood why someone might pay a lot of money for a white wine. This wine showed a lot of depth and many layers of flavor. A lot of the acidity had gone away with age, allowing everything else about the wine to come forward. Both this and the vintage champagne we had were a very deep golden color, pretty to look at, although later in the tasting in response to a comment someone made, Jean-Luc said that in his experience shades or depth of color tell you nothing at all about the quality of a wine or how it will taste.Cornas, Auguste Clape 2005
The first red we had was a syrah from Cornas, in the northern Rhone. Jean-Luc said, "To me, this is syrah," and by saying that he was drawing a contrast with the style of shiraz from Australia, often big red wines with a lot of alcohol. This wine tasted a bit chalky to me, maybe what you might more politely call a mineral flavor. I thought it also had the distinct and strong smell of the Elmer's glue paste we used when we were five years old, but a friend that I shared that observation with thought it was more like rubber cement. Despite these descriptions, it was a very good wine, maybe the wine I would be most likely to buy among the reds we tried. We had the 2005 bottling, and it was a little rough and will be better with age. Jean-Luc said that he had just gotten in the 2001 of the same wine, and thought that morning about serving it instead of the 2005, but he had already sent out the list of wines to everyone attending, and didn't want to get in an argument with any of his paying customers about a change in the list of promised wines.Priorat Blend: Clos Mogador 2005
The next red was from Priorat, in northeastern Spain just down the coast from France and Barcelona. This might have been my favorite red of the night, though not as interesting to me as the Cornas. It was a blend of Grenache and other grapes, much like what you find in southern Rhone wines (the most well-known being Chateauneuf du Pape). Jean-Luc talked about a conversation he'd had with a maker of southern Rhone blends who said that it is no mystery why wines from that region have been made from blends of a lot of grapes for hundreds of years: none of the grapes alone makes a great wine. Spanish wines are to me the easiest to identify from their taste. Most of the Spanish wine I've had seems to taste and smell a little bit like a tapas restaurant (perhaps it's really the other way around). This wine tasted like a southern Rhone wine that had been decanted and left to absorb tastes out of the air in a tapas restaurant. That remark doesn't begin to do it justice, though -- it was a lot more interesting than that. I liked this wine a lot.Château Grand Puy Lacoste 1982
The next two red wines were really the deciding factor in my decision to spend the money to go to this tasting: a 1982 Bordeaux and a 1971 Barolo. The chance to taste one of those kinds of wines, let alone two of them, without spending hundreds of dollars doesn't come along all that often, at least not so far in my short wine life. They were both offered for sale at the tasting, for between $300 and $400 a bottle. Surprisingly (to me, at least), they were my least favorite wines of the night. But I am still very glad to have gotten to try both of them.Both red Bordeaux and Barolo wines are very tannic, and can generally benefit from aging. Tannin, found in the skins of dark grapes, gives a red wine roughness and bitterness, but it is also what usually allows a wine to be aged. To give you some idea of the kind of edge it gives to a wine, tannic acid has a similar quality to and is the main taste in (unsweetened, obviously, and un-lemoned) iced tea. Tannins give a wine what is often called "structure," the layers of taste that you pick up in different parts of your mouth in different sequences as you taste a wine by holding it in your mouth for several seconds (or, for some wines, several minutes). The '82 Bordeaux had lost nearly all of its tannic taste, and therefore all of its "structure," and Jean-Luc remarked that it was on the verge of "falling apart." In addition it had lost nearly all of the taste of the original fruit. In fact, until I tasted this wine, I'm not sure that I really understood what it meant for a red wine to taste "fruity" other than in a very obvious way. When all of the fruit has aged away, it really hits you how fruity every other red wine is, even those that are so tannic and bitter that they aren't ready to drink. In some sense it was a very pure expression of Bordeaux, and aside from the obvious novelty aspect of getting to try an old wine, that is why I am glad to have tasted it. Take away the tannic bitterness and the regular old grape fruitiness, and what you're left with is the concentrated essence of the land that the wine came from, the minerals and nutrients and organisms in the soil, the taste and smell of the air that gave life to the vines. I thought of it like a consomme of Bordeaux. Someone remarked that it had the quality of a perfume, which I think is a good way to describe it: a light but very distinctive and powerful aroma and flavor.
Barolo, Giacomo Conterno 1971
This was my least favorite of the wines we had, though again I am glad to have tried it. Good Barolos are among my favorite wines, and one of the things I enjoy about eating in restaurants in New York is that you can often find them available by the glass because there's enough of a market here that a restaurant can go through several bottles a night of a good wine even if they have to charge $30 a glass, and they won't end up wasting most of a bottle because only one glass is sold. Barolo and Barbaresco wines from northern Italy are made from a grape called nebbiolo, which might be the most tannic grape of any used to make wines. The wines can be very rough and assertive when young, and they benefit more than other wines from being decanted well in advance of drinking -- leaving them in the glass for at least a couple of hours before you drink them is a good idea. This wine, like the Bordeaux, had lost most of the fruit in its taste. But unlike the Bordeaux, it still had a tannic edge to it. Jean-Luc said that no matter how long you age a wine made from nebbiolo grapes, it will still show tannins: he's never had one that completely lost its tannic bite. For my taste, at least at this point in my novice wine appreciation career, some of the fruit is necessary if the wine is still going to have its tannic edge. As Jean-Luc kept reminding us by pointing to the "My" in the "My Favorite Wines" title on the sheet he had passed out at the beginning of the night, each of us likes different things in food and wine (and anything else), and some friends that were also at the tasting liked this wine so much that they bought the only bottle available for sale in the store.Vouvray Moelleux, Domaine Foreau 2005
The first of our dessert wines was a chenin blanc from the Loire valley. I haven't had many dessert wines, but I used to have a friend that liked Tokaji (pronounced "toh-kie," rhyming with "eye") dessert wines from Hungary quite a bit, and I've tasted a few of those. They taste to me like a minerally honey. This reminded me of those Tokajis, but with much more of an emphasis on the honey and not so much mineral edge. It was very sweet, but still with interesting complexity to its flavor, and not just like drinking a syrup. If price were no object, of the wines we had, this one would be second on my list to buy so I could try it again and share it with others (the first, if price were no object, would be the 1990 white Burgundy).Banyuls, Dr. Parce 1961
Jean-Luc said this was the wine he had been most looking forward to for the evening. I believe Banyuls is a wine made in southern France just north of Spain on the Mediterranean Sea. Everyone says it is something like Port wine, although I haven't liked the Ports I've had that were said to be very good ones, and I've liked Banyuls every time I've had it. It is amber in color, not the deep, dark red or purple of port. I didn't find anything remarkable about it, though that is mostly because I haven't had enough examples of it to identify anything that distinguishes one from another. Jean-Luc said it is a real "wine geek" wine, in that it is a wine that is nearly impossible to find. He said that almost any famous wine you want you can get if you simply have enough money -- if you want a bottle of '47 Petrus or '61 Lafite, there is one available at nearly every big wine auction, and just by bringing enough money to the table you can get hold of them. But a nearly 50-year-old Banyuls is a real rarity, and you could see the enjoyment on Jean-Luc's face as he tasted the wine.All in all, I'm glad I got to try all of those wines. One of my friends who was at the tasting asked Jean-Luc near the end, since he had been repeatedly and humorously making the point that these were his favorite wines, when he was going to have a tasting of his second-favorite wines. I hope he does so before too long -- I'll be there.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Recipe: Chimay Style Stuffed Eggs
Tonight was egg night at school. This is one of the dishes we made: eggs stuffed with mushrooms and egg yolks. I was very pleasantly surprised by how good this was.
Ingredients (for six small servings):
3 eggs, hard boiled
For duxelles:
1 shallot, finely chopped
4 white button mushrooms, finely chopped
Juice of 1/2 lemon
1-2 Tbsp butter
For Sauce Mornay:
1 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp flour
1 cup milk
Salt and pepper
4 Tbsp Gruyere cheese, grated
1 egg yolk
Cayenne pepper
Nutmeg
First, hard boil the eggs. There are a few ways to do this so that the yolks don't turn green on their surface. At school the official procedure is to place eggs in a pot with enough cold water to cover them and then about an inch more because some will evaporate when you start to heat it. Bring the water (with the eggs in it) to a boil, and once it is boiling, lower your heat to a simmer and cook the eggs for 11 minutes. Take them out of the hot water and put them into ice water to cool them off. After a few minutes, tap the shell so that it cracks, and put them into cold water with their shell cracked. The water will seep in between the shell and the egg white and make it easier to peel the hard boiled eggs.
Next, prepare a mushroom duxelles. Chop your white mushrooms and shallot finely, so they are in pieces about 1/8" or 3/16" -- 1/4" is too large. When the mushrooms are chopped, put them in a bowl and squeeze the lemon juice into them and toss them. Melt the butter in a small pan, add the shallots, and cook over low to medium-low heat -- what you want is for the shallots to begin to soften, but not brown at all. (This is called "sweating" the shallots.) When the shallots have begun to turn a bit translucent, after about 3-4 minutes, add the mushrooms to the pan, and salt them. Cook over low heat until the mushrooms release their water into the pan and then the water evaporates and the mushrooms are soft. Remove the pan from the heat and set it aside.
At this point, preheat your oven. It doesn't really matter much what temperature -- 350 or so is fine.
Now, prepare your eggs. Peel them (remove the shells) if you haven't already, and cut them in half lengthwise. Remove the yolks, and set the egg white halves aside -- those are what you will be stuffing soon. Crush the yolks with a fork so that they end up in smaller pieces than your shallot and mushrooms, and add stir them into the shallot-mushroom mixture.
Then it's time to do your sauce. Start by getting one egg yolk ready in a small bowl. Next, melt the butter in a small saucepan, then stir the flour into it, and once it is smooth cook that mixture over low heat for about 3 minutes. Don't let it get too warm, or it'll start to brown. It should just barely have some foaming bubbles to it, and you'll need to stir it every minute or so to keep it from browning. This is a "white roux," perhaps the most standard of classical sauce thickeners. Now, with a whisk ready to go in one hand, and the milk already measured and sitting next to your stove, raise the heat on your roux to high, and while whisking (start whisking the roux by itself before you start to pour), pour in about a quarter of the milk, and whisk it to try to break up lumps that form. Then, still whisking (but not as urgently), add the rest of the milk. Bring it all the way to a boil, and then reduce the heat so that it doesn't foam up and overflow your pan (but it should still gently boil), and whisk it for about 30 seconds to a minute. It should thicken up into a saucelike consistency. At this point, you have one of the five classic "mother sauces" (these are a few basic sauces that serve as the starting point for almost any sauce in a western dish) called "Béchamel." (If you followed the same process but used a light stock, like chicken, vegetable, or fish stock, instead of the milk, you'd have another of the mother sauces, Velouté.)
Take a couple of spoons of the sauce and stir them into your mushroom and egg yolk mixture. You can do this to taste -- this mixture is going to be the stuffing for your eggs, so you want it solid enough that you can mound it up on top of the egg white halves and it won't run at all. Otherwise, how much sauce to stir into it is only a matter of what kind of texture you think you'll like.
Now start to transform your Béchamel sauce into Sauce Mornay. Stir about half of the cheese into the sauce. (At this point, if you were serious about your sauce, you would strain it, but for home cooking if you don't feel like it, you can skip straining. The price of skipping it is that your sauce will be a little bit pasty in texture, and may have small floury lumps in it.) In a separate small bowl, stir up the egg yolk, and then add one small spoon of your white sauce to the egg yolk and stir them together. This is called "tempering" the egg, and its purpose is to prevent the egg from curdling (scrambling) when you add it to the sauce, which you're about to do. Remove the white sauce from the heat.
While the white sauce cools a bit before you stir the egg into it, use a fork or spoon to stuff the mushroom and egg yolk mix into your egg white halves. Mound it up on the eggs so there is plenty of stuffing on top of each egg. Place the eggs onto something that can go in the oven -- a regular old dinner plate is fine.
Finally, stir the tempered egg yolk into the white sauce. Season it with a pinch of cayenne pepper and nutmeg, and then taste it and add salt until it tastes like a nice sauce. Spoon the sauce over the stuffed eggs. Top each egg with a bit of the remaining Gruyere cheese. Place them in the oven to thoroughly warm the eggs, stuffing, and sauce, and melt the cheese, for about 4 minutes or so. If you want to brown up the tops a bit, you can put them under a broiler for a short time.
Now that I've written this out, I realize that as usual, I've probably overestimated its simplicity in the view of the average home cook. I think of this as being a simple recipe, something you might throw together for friends on a whim. I guess that's why cooking school is not a bad place for me to be.
When I describe a recipe for a general audience, it takes a lot of words. (Soon, I plan to write a piece about why this is, including an idea I've been considering for a bit of a new kind of cookbook someday.) If I were to write this recipe for myself or another cook, it would be much shorter, something like this:
- Hard boil and peel 3 eggs.
- Prepare a mushroom duxelles using the mushrooms, shallot, and lemon.
- Halve the eggs lengthwise, set the whites aside, grate or mash the yolks, and add them to the duxelles.
- Make a Béchamel. Add a bit of Béchamel to the duxelles and yolks. Stir half the cheese into the Béchamel, and strain.
- Temper the egg yolk, and stir it into the sauce. Season the sauce with cayenne pepper, nutmeg and salt.
- Stuff the eggs with the duxelles and yolks, top with the sauce and remaining cheese, bake to heat through and melt the cheese.
Ingredients (for six small servings):
3 eggs, hard boiled
For duxelles:
1 shallot, finely chopped
4 white button mushrooms, finely chopped
Juice of 1/2 lemon
1-2 Tbsp butter
For Sauce Mornay:
1 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp flour
1 cup milk
Salt and pepper
4 Tbsp Gruyere cheese, grated
1 egg yolk
Cayenne pepper
Nutmeg
First, hard boil the eggs. There are a few ways to do this so that the yolks don't turn green on their surface. At school the official procedure is to place eggs in a pot with enough cold water to cover them and then about an inch more because some will evaporate when you start to heat it. Bring the water (with the eggs in it) to a boil, and once it is boiling, lower your heat to a simmer and cook the eggs for 11 minutes. Take them out of the hot water and put them into ice water to cool them off. After a few minutes, tap the shell so that it cracks, and put them into cold water with their shell cracked. The water will seep in between the shell and the egg white and make it easier to peel the hard boiled eggs.
Next, prepare a mushroom duxelles. Chop your white mushrooms and shallot finely, so they are in pieces about 1/8" or 3/16" -- 1/4" is too large. When the mushrooms are chopped, put them in a bowl and squeeze the lemon juice into them and toss them. Melt the butter in a small pan, add the shallots, and cook over low to medium-low heat -- what you want is for the shallots to begin to soften, but not brown at all. (This is called "sweating" the shallots.) When the shallots have begun to turn a bit translucent, after about 3-4 minutes, add the mushrooms to the pan, and salt them. Cook over low heat until the mushrooms release their water into the pan and then the water evaporates and the mushrooms are soft. Remove the pan from the heat and set it aside.
At this point, preheat your oven. It doesn't really matter much what temperature -- 350 or so is fine.
Now, prepare your eggs. Peel them (remove the shells) if you haven't already, and cut them in half lengthwise. Remove the yolks, and set the egg white halves aside -- those are what you will be stuffing soon. Crush the yolks with a fork so that they end up in smaller pieces than your shallot and mushrooms, and add stir them into the shallot-mushroom mixture.
Then it's time to do your sauce. Start by getting one egg yolk ready in a small bowl. Next, melt the butter in a small saucepan, then stir the flour into it, and once it is smooth cook that mixture over low heat for about 3 minutes. Don't let it get too warm, or it'll start to brown. It should just barely have some foaming bubbles to it, and you'll need to stir it every minute or so to keep it from browning. This is a "white roux," perhaps the most standard of classical sauce thickeners. Now, with a whisk ready to go in one hand, and the milk already measured and sitting next to your stove, raise the heat on your roux to high, and while whisking (start whisking the roux by itself before you start to pour), pour in about a quarter of the milk, and whisk it to try to break up lumps that form. Then, still whisking (but not as urgently), add the rest of the milk. Bring it all the way to a boil, and then reduce the heat so that it doesn't foam up and overflow your pan (but it should still gently boil), and whisk it for about 30 seconds to a minute. It should thicken up into a saucelike consistency. At this point, you have one of the five classic "mother sauces" (these are a few basic sauces that serve as the starting point for almost any sauce in a western dish) called "Béchamel." (If you followed the same process but used a light stock, like chicken, vegetable, or fish stock, instead of the milk, you'd have another of the mother sauces, Velouté.)
Take a couple of spoons of the sauce and stir them into your mushroom and egg yolk mixture. You can do this to taste -- this mixture is going to be the stuffing for your eggs, so you want it solid enough that you can mound it up on top of the egg white halves and it won't run at all. Otherwise, how much sauce to stir into it is only a matter of what kind of texture you think you'll like.
Now start to transform your Béchamel sauce into Sauce Mornay. Stir about half of the cheese into the sauce. (At this point, if you were serious about your sauce, you would strain it, but for home cooking if you don't feel like it, you can skip straining. The price of skipping it is that your sauce will be a little bit pasty in texture, and may have small floury lumps in it.) In a separate small bowl, stir up the egg yolk, and then add one small spoon of your white sauce to the egg yolk and stir them together. This is called "tempering" the egg, and its purpose is to prevent the egg from curdling (scrambling) when you add it to the sauce, which you're about to do. Remove the white sauce from the heat.
While the white sauce cools a bit before you stir the egg into it, use a fork or spoon to stuff the mushroom and egg yolk mix into your egg white halves. Mound it up on the eggs so there is plenty of stuffing on top of each egg. Place the eggs onto something that can go in the oven -- a regular old dinner plate is fine.
Finally, stir the tempered egg yolk into the white sauce. Season it with a pinch of cayenne pepper and nutmeg, and then taste it and add salt until it tastes like a nice sauce. Spoon the sauce over the stuffed eggs. Top each egg with a bit of the remaining Gruyere cheese. Place them in the oven to thoroughly warm the eggs, stuffing, and sauce, and melt the cheese, for about 4 minutes or so. If you want to brown up the tops a bit, you can put them under a broiler for a short time.
Now that I've written this out, I realize that as usual, I've probably overestimated its simplicity in the view of the average home cook. I think of this as being a simple recipe, something you might throw together for friends on a whim. I guess that's why cooking school is not a bad place for me to be.
When I describe a recipe for a general audience, it takes a lot of words. (Soon, I plan to write a piece about why this is, including an idea I've been considering for a bit of a new kind of cookbook someday.) If I were to write this recipe for myself or another cook, it would be much shorter, something like this:
- Hard boil and peel 3 eggs.
- Prepare a mushroom duxelles using the mushrooms, shallot, and lemon.
- Halve the eggs lengthwise, set the whites aside, grate or mash the yolks, and add them to the duxelles.
- Make a Béchamel. Add a bit of Béchamel to the duxelles and yolks. Stir half the cheese into the Béchamel, and strain.
- Temper the egg yolk, and stir it into the sauce. Season the sauce with cayenne pepper, nutmeg and salt.
- Stuff the eggs with the duxelles and yolks, top with the sauce and remaining cheese, bake to heat through and melt the cheese.
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