Brave Potato

Sausage, take two

Mon, 10 May 2010 21:15:38 -0500

Soon after my first sausage-making experiment, I went ahead and bought the sausage stuffer attachment for the KitchenAid food grinder. Now, this piece of equipment has a pretty mixed review history online, so I was a little worried that I might be cheaping out by not committing to a full-sized sausage-maker. As a serious gadgetphile, this kind of anxiety is always lingering around! Well, I can now honestly say, those negative reviews are absurd. This $10 set of tubes produced perfect sausage with no problems whatsoever. Leaving aside the fact that many reviewers were clearly using the attachment incorrectly (with the grinder blades still attached, perhaps?) I can't imagine how people found fault with this thing! I had no trouble creating a seal with the filling that prevented air bubbles from developing and I found I could easily regulate the shape and size of the sausage just by gently holding the emerging sausage. I imagine there are things on the market that make sausage creation easier, but let me tell you, if you think producing sausage with one of these things is hard, I direct you to the spoons and funnels method.

So what did I make for my test batch of sausage? A simple, recipe-less pork sausage of tenderloin and fatback with lots of garlic and a little nutmeg. The whole project took about 40 minutes, and the result was richly garlicky with that perfect snappy bite and a slightly nubbled texture. I don't think we'll be seeing storebought sausages around here anytime soon!

Daring Bakers: Tiramisu

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:57:53 -0500

The February 2010 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen and Deeba of Passionate About Baking. They chose Tiramisu as the challenge for the month. Their challenge recipe is based on recipes from The Washington Post, Cordon Bleu at Home and Baking Obsession. You can find the complete recipes on either of their blogs.

I've never been that crazy about tiramisu. I don't dislike it, but it's just not on the top of my dessert list. That said, I thought it would be a lot of fun to make. And it was. But for me, the odd thing about making tiramisu was that almost every component was more delicious on its own than in the final product.

The creamy part of the tiramisu is a mixture of zabaglione, pastry cream, marscapone, and whipped cream. This is spread between layers of espresso-dipped ladyfingers. How could that combo go wrong, right?

Well, just listen to the wonderful contrasts between the components. My zabaglione was thick and custardy, with notes of rich rum and tart lemon. My pastry cream was supersweet, smooth, and just short of cloying with vanilla. The homemade marscapone was fresh, mild, heavenly. Whipped cream was... well, whipped cream. But mixed together, they were merely sweet, and very rich. Oh, the lemon was there, the rum and vanilla, but smooshed all together they became one round flavor, without the contrast of textures and flavors that I enjoyed tasting while I was cooking. Ladyfingers, fresh from the oven, were like fluffy sandcastles, but in the assembled tiramisu, they lost their delicate crunch and became merely a coffee-flavored interruption to the otherwise overwhelming sweet creaminess.

I still enjoyed the outcome, but if I do this again, I think it will definitely be tirimisu:deconstructed.

Sausage!

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:48:26 -0500

Did you know that there is an add-on you can buy for the KitchenAid meat grinder that stuffs sausage? And did you know that that attachment costs a mere $10? Well, April and I sure didn't when we started this project.

It turns out that pushing 6 or 7 pounds of meat through a funnel and into a temperamental tube of animal tissue by hand is quite tedious. But after several hours of fussing and many glasses of wine, we did manage to produce two batches of very respectable-looking sausages.

The meat starts out looking like this, diced and seasoned. Then you just grind it, and you're halfway done, right?

No, actually, not at all. You may be halfway though the instructions, but you are nowhere near the middle of your project — that's because the second half of the instructions involve casing. Somehow none of the recipes we read managed to mention that casings are somewhere between those holiday light strands that your *unnamed family member* was responsible for putting away last year and that over-oiled spaghetti that won't stay politely curled on your fork: incredibly easy to tangle, impossibly long and slippery, and just generally unmanageable.

The recipes call for flushing the casings with water, but just how do you fill what is essentially a slimy 10-foot-long balloon animal with water? We initially put the casings in a bowl and tried to run a little bit of water through them at a time, but as we lifted each section of casing, pushing the water along, the remaining sections twirled and twisted, creating impossible knots farther ahead. We eventually got things sorted out, but I think next time I am going to rig some kind of spools to keep the tangling to a minimum.

Once we got the casings bunched up on the base of the funnel, sort of like putting the world's longest nylons on the world's shortest leg, the procedure was much more straightforward, if a tad slow. We simply pushed the ground meat in, massaging out air bubbles and trying to neither over- or under-fill. The last step is twisting off the links — I broke the casing in a few locations, but it's easy enough to twist off a section and make a new link out of any escaped filling. Of course, after all that work, we couldn't resist frying and consuming our results right away. We were in such a fever to eat that I completely neglected to photograph the meal, so you'll have to settle for that cooking shot up top, but trust me, they were beautiful.

April made a rabbit sausage recipe from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, while I made bratwurst from Charcuterie. The flavor of the rabbit sausage was bolder than we expected, and the texture was velvety-smooth with the addition of eggs, cream, and breadcrumbs. It was made in lamb casings, which were slimmer and more tender than the pork ones we used for the bratwurst. The bratwurst was mild but richly porky, with a satisfying bite to the skin. Both were excellent sausages, certainly better than any off-the-shelf varieties I've tried. For the price and effort, even with the hand-coaxing of the meat into the casing, this project was satisfying and worthwhile. All the same, next time I'm investing in the sausage-stuffer.

Lamb Tagine

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:38:25 -0500

I've been having some bad luck in the kitchen: two batches of pickles came out tasting off, twice pans of caramels have burnt, my kefir grains are struggling to return from dormancy, and my freezer is just two darned small. Lately it seems like all I can do to make a decent dinner — like this lamb tagine with raisins and almonds, carrot salad, and tomato and pepper salad with preserved lemon. It's not much, but I did manage not to burn it.

Confit Part 1

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:55:47 -0500

Since the nice long holiday break gave me a couple days to run errands and fart around the kitchen, I decided to take on a project more time-consuming than any I've done since we moved — confit.

It may be time-consuming, but it's not exactly difficult. If you can set your oven for 200 degrees and leave it there for a few hours, you can make confit. I started by buying two ducks and removing their legs, saving the breasts and carcass for another meal. I also scavenged all the skin and fat from the ducks. The legs I cured with salt, pepper, cloves, garlic, and bay leaf for two days in the fridge, as per Ruhlman and Polcyn.

The morning I made the confit, I took the fat I had salvaged from the ducks and chopped it and rendered in the oven on low heat. As the guy at the butcher shop had suggested, the ducks I got were rather too lean to supply enough fat to cover the legs — luckily he also gave me a supplementary tub of duck fat. I added that to the fat I had rendered and poured it all over the rinsed and dried legs, making sure they were completely covered (I had to poke a few air bubbles out from underneath the skin to convince them to stay at the bottom of the pan). I turned the oven to 200, popped em in, and forgot about them until bedtime, approximately eight hours later.

But to really make confit, you can't just cook the duck in fat, you have to age it there too. The legs get transferred to a crock, and the fat is poured on top (carefully, so the settled cooking liquids don't make it into the crock), where it hardens and solidifies when refrigerated. Some weeks later, you remove the legs, heat them and crisp the skin, and enjoy - but that's for another entry.

Holiday Haul

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:17:38 -0500

Here's what I brought to the christmas table — clockwise from the top: malted milk honeycomb, chocolate covered turkish delight, molasses honeycomb, mexican chocolate caramels with chili and salt, Lillet marshmallows, turkish delight, and chocolate covered honeycomb. Sprinkled throughout are orange and peppermint ribbon candies.

And here's a selection of some of the treats that others contributed to the dessert table. I can't identify half of these cookies, but in there somewhere are pfeffernusse, crisp cherry chews, three kinds of sugar cookies, gingersnaps, and there are a half-dozen more I didn't get photos of!

It was a long, lazy, and sugar-filled holiday vacation, and I hope yours was as restful and joyous! Now it is back to the grindstone!

Daring Bakers: Gingerbread House

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:10:39 -0500

The December 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers' everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

I, however, did not use any of those recipes. I did not use any recipes at all, in fact, as someone else did all the baking, while I simply sat on my tuckus drinking wine and waiting to swoop in for the fun part: the decorating.

See, I was planning on blowing off this challenge, as I had already spent most of the month making candy, and was frankly a little bit baked-out. But when two of my holiday hosts, April and Will, decided to take on the hard work, I was more than willing to do my part with the application of Necco roofing tiles and frosting stucco.

April's family gingerbread recipe makes a very thin and very sturdy gingerbread, perfect for construction, and melted-sugar glue creates a practically indestructible bond between the pieces. The freshly assembled house looked gorgeous on its own, but we were soon all drawn into brainstorming decorating ideas and rearranging bits of candy here and there, even running out to the pharmacy in the middle of Christmas Day to buy more Necco wafers so that the roof's colored stripes wouldn't be interrupted. We went with a classic half-timbered look, with plenty of gumdrop trim and tinted Rice Krispie treat greenery, and even a little garden out back. Unfortunately, I failed to take a photo of the house filled with candlelight, the stained-glass window illuminated from within, and the welcoming light spilling out the tiny door.

Bonus gingerbread house: here's the gingerbread pyramid that I helped my nephews and sister-in-law with over Thanksgiving. They won Most Creative at the local Ronald McDonald House charity gingerbread competition!

Ribbon Candy

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:22:52 -0500

Now that DIY projects like homebrewing and canning are becoming so popular, it seems to me that it is only a matter of time before candymaking gets its moment in the sun. Most of the materials are inexpensive, the processes are simple enough to learn that you can get started in an evening, but they are difficult enough to master that it's never dull, and it's open to infinite variations. Best of all, the results can be damn near professional looking.

I've made nougats, fudges, chocolates, brittles, and caramels, but this is my first attempt at a plain hard candy. Ribbon candy is a particularly neglected variety of sweet; in fact, the only recipe I found is at about.com. That's the recipe I followed, and I was really delighted with the results.

Ribbon candy turns out to be fairly straightforward project, but surprisingly beautiful at times. After a few pulls and twists, the clear molten sugar becomes a shimmering, opalescent cord, reflecting light from every internal layer until it appears to glow. I used a less-refined variety of sugar, which resulted in the uncolored portions of the candy being a charming old-fashioned shiny tan sort of color that was particularly surprising: as it was pulled, it transformed from a brownish liquid to a firm golden-cream colored rope that glinted warmly.

As for shaping the pulled candy into ribbons, canes, or lozenges, it's a bit of an acquired skill — and one that I clearly haven't acquired. You have to move quick, and know how much candy you can shape at a time before it begins to be brittle and crack. Ok, so my results this time didn't exactly look professional, but they tasted fantastic, crunchy and bright with mint, and I think maybe next time I'll be able to manage a few more ribbon-shaped ribbons and a few less lump-shaped ones.

Cocktail Onions

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 21:06:07 -0500

One of the first things I had to do to make the new kitchen feel like my own was start a batch of pickles or three. Last month I saw a bag of tiny purple pearl onions and picked them up on a whim, and by the time I was at the checkout counter I had decided to make some cocktail onions.

Cocktail onions have a reputation as, well, an old man's accoutrement. But when it comes to cocktails, I may be a little bit of an old man. Scotch on the rocks, gimlets, and martinis (both gin, how could you even ask?) are my favorites. I might venture into old fashioneds, pimm's cups, fizzes, and negronis if I am feeling adventurous. If I'm feeling specifically like an old Italian man, I might drink slightly warm lambrusco out of a juice glass. So yeah, bitter, herbal, spicy, I'm all about it.

Traditional cocktail onions apparently are made with tumeric and paprika, but when I googled for recipes, I came up with this intriguing page. I wanted to make brine, rather than vinegar, pickles, but I started from this list of spices. After trimming and peeling what felt like a million onions, I ended up with two cups of onions (and about four cups of skin). I added three bay leaves, a sprig of rosemary, a piece of star anise, three small dried chilies, and a sprinkling of juniper berries, mustard seed, cardamom, ground nutmeg, and peppercorns. I was fresh out of vermouth, and I just plain forgot about the sugar, so I just covered the onions and spices with brine — the standard 3 Tbs sea salt per quart of water, per Katz. I weighted the onions down with a dish to keep them well under the brine, covered them with a lid to keep in the rather potent smell of the fermenting onions, and left them to their devices for the next three weeks.

And this weekend, finally, I canned them. I drained off the brine and strained it through some cheesecloth, then added some sugar to the brine to make up for my earlier forgetfulness. Then I processed like standard pickles: hot sterilized jars, boiling brine and a ten-minute boiling water bath. Next week: the cocktail!

Daring Bakers: Cannoli

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 09:21:13 -0500

The November 2009 Daring Bakers Challenge was chosen and hosted by Lisa Michele of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drives. She chose the Italian Pastry, Cannolo (Cannoli is plural), using the cookbooks Lidia's Italian-American Kitchen by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and The Sopranos Family Cookbook by Allen Rucker; recipes by Michelle Scicolone, as ingredient/direction guides. She added her own modifications/changes, so the recipe is not 100% verbatim from either book.

The first step is to make the ricotta for the filling. I've made traditional ricotta before, from the whey produced by hard cheese making, but, unfortunately, I didn't have time to make hard cheese this week — so instead, I made it the quick and dirty way. With just whole milk, cream, salt, and lemon juice, it is incredibly easy, and it makes a tender, rich cheese.

After simmering the salted milk and cream with lemon juice until it curdles, it is drained through cheesecloth for a couple hours, and then refrigerated overnight.

On Thanksgiving morning I made the cannolo dough, a rubbery mass made aromatic by the addition of dessert wine and cinnamon. It also needs to chill for a few hours, so it can relax enough to be rolled paper-thin.

The cannoli assembly was the Thanksgiving post-dinner entertainment, and it became a family project. My nephew and my husband helped me roll out the dough as thin as possible, and cut 3" circles using a coffee mug. I rolled the circles even thinner, and then wrapped them around these metal cannoli forms while my mom sealed them with egg whites. Finally I slid the dough-wrapped forms into the hot oil and turned them until they were bubbly and brown. The thinner the dough was rolled, the bubblier and crisper the resulting cannoli shells were. Thicker dough tended to warp and pull away from the form, and produce a soft, chewy shell.

You can see that some shells turned out a little prettier than others. This recipe made about twice as many cannoli as I expected &mdash these piles were still growing.

Meanwhile, my sister-in-law was beating the ricotta with powdered sugar, vanilla, and lemon and grapefruit zest. She folded in some whipped cream to lighten the filling, and then we piped it into the cannoli with a plastic bag.

I'm kind of a purist when it comes to cannoli: I don't like them dipped in chocolate, I don't like them studded with nuts or chocolate chips, and I don't like them flavored. This seemed to be especially relevant for these homemade cannoli, which had so much more character than bakery versions. These shells were so crispy and flavorful, with notes of spiced grapes and olive oil, and the fresh ricotta and citrus zest was so rich and tangy, it would be a shame to distract from them.

Brandy Alexander Pie

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:54:59 -0500

Over the weekend I made one of my favorite pies, Dick Taeuber's Cordial Pie, in Brandy Alexander. I've made it a few times now, and (while I always over-chill the filling, resulting in a slightly lumpy interior) it has never failed to be a hit. It's particularly popular with the kind of friends who throw an annual thanksgiving party that requires a half-dozen boxes of wine, an entire refrigerator reserved for Jello shots, and a minimum of four turkeys.

That's because this pie is packing a pretty decent punch: half a cup of alcohol that never sees the heat of a stove. It's essentially a boozy Jello, with meringue and whipped cream folded in to make it almost unbearably rich, creamy, and fluffy. In the '70s, Dick Taeuber compiled formulas for something like 50 different flavors of cocktail pie, and while I've never ventured past the Brandy Alexander (cognac and creme de cacao), 20 delicious-sounding versions are still to be found on the New York Times site. It's even more perfect for a party because it takes about as much time and effort to make as a batch of Jello.

And by the way, that party? Here's what my plate looked like before I made it to the dessert table. I politely decline to post any photos of what anything looked liked after I made it to the bar.

I'm Back!

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:33:06 -0500

New city, new digs, new jobs, new schedules... and a new kitchen. We've made a lot of changes, but things are settling down into something resembling a routine, and I am ready to start cooking (and blogging) again!

Last weekend I did a few things in the kitchen, just warm up exercises, really. I oiled my cutting boards and wooden spoons. I planted some paperwhites and roasted a couple chickens. I made my favorite beer-deglazed chicken stock. (is it possible I haven't posted about my favorite chicken stock yet?! Soon.)

I am still getting used to my new kitchen, figuring out the best layout, storage arrangements, and workflows. It's quite small, although it may actually have more usable storage space than our last kitchen due to its compact layout. The fridge is tiny, the counter space is nonexistent, and the cold water pressure is strangely low while the range's gas flow is unreasonably high. It desperately needs a spice rack. But it is MINE, damn it.

And I can't wait to start testing its limits!

Daring Cooks: Vegan Indian Dosas

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 10:05:14 -0500

This month's Daring Cooks challenge is a vegan version of Indian dosas, presented by Debyi from Healthy Vegan Kitchen.

Ladies and gentlemen, this challenge was HARD. Now, I eat a fair amount of vegetarian food, and Indian veggie dishes are some of my favorites, but the line to vegan is one I rarely cross. I am a huuuge fan of dairy and animal fats, and since this is also a low-fat recipe, the urge to slip a little ghee or at least vegetable oil in somewhere was pretty strong. That's not actually what hindered me most in this challenge, however. The real problem was that I was without a non-stick skillet. Without a non-stick pan, I really couldn't get the dosas to cook correctly, though I tried all different heats and even ended up trying puddles of vegetable oil. What finally worked to produce a decent pancake was a medium-thin layer of oil and very low heat, with no flipping. But not before I produced a giant pile of crispy torn dosa corners.

My favorite part of this recipe was the tasty coconut curry sauce, which added some excellent spice and depth of flavor to the milder chickpea filling. And, while I am still no vegan (that's mozzarella I am slicing in the background here) I did learn that I really like almond milk, and I've been enjoying the leftover from this dish with my cereal in the mornings.

Summer Plums

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:18:35 -0500

Daring Bakers: Dobos Torte

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 21:17:56 -0500

The August 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Angela of A Spoonful of Sugar and Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella. They chose the spectacular Dobos Torte based on a recipe from Rick Rodgers' cookbook Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Caffés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague. The Dobos Torte is composed of six layers of thin, delicate sponge cake, five of them encased in rich chocolate buttercream and the last drenched in lemony caramel and set jauntily atop the torte.

Once again, heat and humidity made this project a little trying, but it turned out much better than I expected given that all my sticks of butter turned molten mere seconds out of the fridge. You can probably tell that the buttercream was a little on the soft side, but the flavor was sublime. Meanwhile, the sponge cake layers puffed up like a dream, and the caramel was thin enough to spread but thick enough to crisp perfectly on cooling.

What most surprised me about this recipe was the amount of lemon juice in the caramel. It added quite a tang to the cake's flavor profile, and really kept it from being too cloying. I loved the combination of crunchy caramel and tender cake, at once insubstantial and sticky between the teeth, with flavors both mild and bold. Delicious!

More good news (although what could be better news than chocolate buttercream and caramel-coated spongecake, I don't know): it looks like things are going to be settling down around here in the next couple weeks. I'm even planning to start some serious kitchen projects this weekend, and I can't wait to blog about them. So hopefully The Brave Potato's long silent summer will be at an end very soon.