Classic

I’ve often wondered how I would look at food and pastry had I ended up going to culinary school. I certainly don’t regret my decision not to go; I often tell myself that everything one learns in culinary school, one can also learn on the job, yet I’m not entirely convinced I believe that. At the very least, culinary schools force you to be exposed to things that you might not otherwise encounter.

Mignardises (Meen-YAR- deez), as a whole, are something that one doesn’t often find in most restaurants. Taken from the Old French word “mignard,” meaning something small or delicate, mignardises are bite-sized desserts that are served at the very end of a meal. Think of them as dessert number two (or three… or four. I suppose it depends where you go). Some typical mignardises would be chocolates, cookies, or candies: pretty much any little confection one could enjoy with coffee. As I said, they don’t often get much play in a lot of restaurants today (especially in the Boulder area), which is a shame, because it gives the diner an opportunity to experience a wider variety of flavors and textures than any single dessert can provide.

I decided to do a mignardise plate at Jianken, to change things up a little, and also to sneak in some shameless self-promotion. Besides, ever since I stumbled across this video on the interwebs, I have been looking for an excuse to make macarons.

Macarons are one of those quintessential French confections that are not given the credit they deserve in the American foodscape. While there’s some debate as to their origins, most people believe that the macaron came about sometime during the 16^th century, most likely brought from Italy. In its simplest form, a macaron (note: one “o” not two. Macaroons are entirely different) is just almond flour, egg whites, and sugar, baked together. The ratio of sugar to almonds and sugar to egg whites will effect the end product; more sugar produces a chewier macaron, less makes a crispier one. I had never made a macaron prior to this, and ended up having to do a lot of research before I felt confident to try a batch of my own.

Black Sesame Macaron

Yield ~ 50

190g egg whites, at room temperature 250g sugar 100g water 40g black sesame powder 235g almond flower 230 confectioners sugar

1) Add egg whites to stand mixer with wisk attachment. Start on med-low speed. 2) In a saucepan, combine sugar and water, and cook to 240°f (soft ball stage) 3) Increase mixer speed to medium and slowly stream in the cooked sugar, trying to pour between the bowl and the wisk so as not to fling the sugar around the bowl 4) Whip until the meringue has cooled and forms still peaks 5) Sift together dry ingredients 6) In three stages, fold the meringue into the dry ingredients until homogenous 7) pipe 3cm circles onto parchment, allowing room for expansion 8) allow to dry for a minimum of 30 minutes at room temperature 9) bake at 400°f for 11 min, or until done. 10) cool, remove from parchment, and sandwich two together with about a teaspoon of yuzu curd

It took a couple attempts to get a batch that I was happy with. For having so few ingredients, macarons are tricky things to get right. I just need to do it a few thousand more time and I will be as good as the guy in the video.

As for the rest of the plate, I went with some old stand bys, just in case the macarons never turned out. Glazed caramel cake, earl grey and lavender bon bons, and peanut brittle. Classic.

Who knows. One of these days, I may even try my hand at entremets…

Copycat

A lot of chefs seem to like to refer to the craft as an art. It’s a nice thought: something so simple and necessary as food turned into an expression of ones self and ones feelings. Nice, and yet for the most part, I disagree. While there certainly chefs who one could call artists, and for whom food is an expression of the soul, I like to think of us more as the marketing department. You know you need to eat, but our job is to convince you to eat (and generally pay) for the food we make for you. The refined plating and complexity are just a way to make our product stand out… like packaging.

Thinking of food as art does have its advantages, though, because it allows us to do something that a marketing VP generally cannot: Shamelessly steal ideas.

The first seeds of this dessert were planted when they had a chocolate savarin on the menu at D Bar. I remember trying to take the recipe back home to fiddle with it, but didn’t ever manage to get the texture right. It wasn’t until I found a similar recipe on the Callebaut website that I decided to give it another go.

The basic principle behind the Savarin Moelleux is a mousse that is slightly baked, both to give it [some] structural stability and to prevent any possibility of salmonella. What you get is a mousse that is firm enough to hold its shape, but is airy and light on the palate.

Savarin Moelleux adapted from Alexandre Bourdeaux

Yield: ~750g

100g butter 250g Dark Chocolate 100g egg yolks 225g egg whites 50g sugar pinch salt

1) Combine butter and chocolate and melt 2) Whip egg whites on medium speed. 3) Slowly add sugar and salt into egg whites and whip to medium peaks 4) Add yolks to chocolate mixture and emulsify 5) Fold egg whites into chocolate mixture thoroughly. 6) Dispense into flexipans and freeze solid (about 4 hours). 7) Bake at 425° for 6-10 min, rotating once 8) Return to freezer and freeze solid (about 5 hours) 9) Unmold, and allow to thaw.

A couple caveats: Freezing the mix ensures that they won’t soufflé up during baking. If they begin to rise, they are most likely over baked. If you get impatient, and try to unmold them before they are completely frozen, you risk breaking the pieces.

With this as the center of the dish, the rest of the dessert just seemed to fall into place. I filled the well in the top of the savarin with a white chocolate and crème fraiche ganache. A quenelle of orange chocolate creameux, and a lacey chocolate tuile on top to add crunch.

Thinking of winter desserts, it is hard to ignore citrus fruits, which are coming into their peak right now. While at the store, I picked up a bag of clementines thinking that I would give them a try and see how they were. To my excitement, they were exactly how I like them. They were tart, but sweet, with little pith and a nice thin membrane. The acid would do wonders to cut the thick fats of the chocolate and cream.

After eating one or two (or five), I realized that if I didn’t do something with them soon, there wouldn’t be any left for the dessert. I took a gamble, and let the segmented clementines soak in strong brewed earl grey tea. Earl grey is fermented with bergamot, a variety of bitter orange, and so is the natural choice for citrus applications. After about four hours in the earl grey, I drained the segments and popped one into my mouth. The initial taste was very earl grey, but as I bit down discovered that the membrane of the celemetines had absorbed the earl grey, but it hadn’t penetrated into the rest of the fruit. The meat was still bright and clean. I’m so happy with this technique, I might always use it from now on. The other benefit of the soak is that it will prevent the segments from drying out over time.

Finally, I took the left over earl grey “marinade” and added it to about half its amount of orange juice and reduced it down to a sauce consistency.

Pear

Happy New Year! Again, it has been longer than I would like since my last past, and as a result, one of my resolutions is to pick back up the pace of my posts to at least once a week.

Note: For some reason, the pictures I took of this dessert seem to be missing. Instead of putting off posting, I decided to go ahead, and I will add the pictures in later.

I decided to celebrate the end of fall with a pear dessert since pears are really only worth eating in the fall. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with pears. When they’re good, they’re great. It’s really easy, however, to get pears that are either too soft, or too mealy. My approach to the dessert was three different pears five different ways.

The focal point of the of the dessert is the sake poached bosc pear. Bosc pears are good for poaching because they don’t let go of their water as much as many other varieties, so they don’t shrink during the cooking process. I took a bit of a gamble by poaching them in sake as opposed to wine, because despite the fact that sake is called “rice wine,” the flavor it brings is far different. The result, happily, was a pear that kept its delicate flavor, while picking up some of the dryness of the sake.

For the second iteration of pear, I took the poaching liquid from the pears, reduced it down, and made a caramel out of it by adding some extra sugar, bringing it up to around 320°, and adding scalded cream and sake to make a complex caramel sauce that has a strong taste of sake and also a slight fruitiness that is distinctly pear.

The third variety of pear is a pear galette, which is simply puff pastry, topped with sliced pear, brushed with butter and sprinkled with sugar. When they bake, the pears –bartlet this time—wilt down a little bit, but keep all of their flavor. I chose bartlet pears for the galette because I think they have the fullest flavor, and are [fairly] consistent.

The fourth preparation for the pears is another taken from the pages of Keegan Gerhard: a sweet-and-sour roasted pear (though I don’t know if he would necessarily describe it that way). For this I used the little Forelle pears, which taste similar to a bartlet, but are only about a third the size, and made sure that they were a little on the hard side. I roasted them in palm sugar and butter in a 300ish oven, cored and skin on, but with a few slits poked in the sides, moving them around the pan every 20 minutes or so. After about an hour and a half, I added a sprinkle of yuzu juice, to add that distinct tartness.

The final style of pear is a simple pear chip (you will notice that it is missing in the picture). To make the chips, I took the left over Bartlett pears, sliced them very thinly, and lay them out on a silpat. They dry out in a low oven (150°) for 2-3 hours, and then are ready to go.

Of course, in keeping with my obsession over brown butter, the dessert wouldn’t be complete without the addition of a scoop of brown butter ice cream.

Roasted

So I realize that it’s been a while. I would like to blame the chocolates, but in truth, it has been a combination of laziness and lack of material that kept me from posting. The special I made two weeks ago was nice, but needed a lot of work, and I decided to hold off on posting until I came up with something better.

The original idea for this weekend was a Li Hing Mui roasted pineapple. Its something that I have done before, and really liked, but didn’t get quite right the first time. The nice thing about pineapple is that it is pretty much a year-round fruit, which is ideal for a menu that doesn’t change seasonally. The Li Hing (which is made from dried sour plums, sugar and salt) is huge in Hawaii, and adds a fun complexity to the pineapple.

Li Hing Roast Pineapple	Yield: ~12 pieces
2ea Pineapple 6oz sugar 1t Li Hing Mui 8oz Plum Wine	1) Skin pineapple and cut into roughly 6 large batons per pineapple, removing the core 2) Combine sugar and Li Hing Mui 3) Toss sugar with pineapple batons and place in a roasting dish 4) Add the plum wine to the pineapples, and roast at 350° for about 45 min, or until soft

When I think pineapple, I think coconut. I decided to take a page from Ferran Adria, and try my hand at the “micro-sponge.” One combines all the ingredients in a foam siphon, and dispenses into paper cups. The mixture is then microwaved. The result is an incredibly light, moist sponge that tastes faintly of coconut and sort of like sweetened condensed milk. The key to the sponge is getting it to unmold without deflating. It is so light that if it is handled too much, or if it isn’t cooked enough, the air pockets in the sponge collapse.

Another flavor that I think is a must with pineapple is vanilla. Truth be told, vanilla is a good flavor to go with most things. Few people give vanilla the credit it deserves. I decided to incorporate vanilla onto the plate in the form of another new concept to me: fluid gel.

As the name suggests, fluid gel is a gel (usually set with agar agar or gellan gum) that has been vigorously agitated while it set, so that the end result is a consistency similar to a reduction or gravy. Fluid gels are really useful in situations where the flavor is damaged with heat (things like mellon which, trust me, should be left as close to uncooked as possible), in either sweet or savory applications. I recently ordered a few fun ingredients to play around with, one of which is powdered agar agar. I have tried working with the flakes, but they require a long time to soften, and then must be boiled for a long time in order to ensure that they dissolve, which it never seems to do fully. The powder, however, can just be added straight into your liquid and dissolves readily.

For me, I took the roasting liquid from the pineapple and added agar agar at 1.5% of the total weight (in other words 1.5g for every 100g of liquid), boiled for 2-3 min, and then poured into a container to set. Once set, I popped it into a blender, and blended for a few minutes, or until completely smooth.

I finished the plate with a scoop of caramel ice cream on top of a coconut crumble, to anchor it to the plate, and a pineapple chip on top.

Beurre Noisette

Its official. My new site is up: Mcswiggenconfections.com

Interestingly enough, I tried importing this blog onto the site, in the interest of consolidation, but it doesn't sync up, and I'm not willing to keep up with two blogs, to I decided to just keep this one up.

All the chocolates I'm offering are surprisingly good. Even I'm satisfied with them, which is unusual indeed. I think there's something to the whole "practice makes perfect" thing.

I think that the chocolate that I'm proudest of, personally, is the Brown Butter truffle. What is brown butter? It’s a result of the Maillard reaction. Simply put, it’s the caramelization of the milk proteins due to heat. It’s the same idea as toasting bread, just a different protein that caramelizes. There's something about brown butter that makes everything better, whether sweet or savory. In the past few months I have played with incorporating brown butter into a couple different things. I started with a recipe that I saw in a magazine for brown butter sorbet. It was delicious, but even better as brown butter ice cream. I've also used it in my molten chocolate cakes, to great success.

About the same time that I was making my little brown butter discoveries, I was reading about caramelizing white chocolate. It’s a concept that has seemingly sprung up in the past few years simultaneously in a couple places. At D Bar, they had just introduced a pear dessert with a caramelized white chocolate mousse; Michael Laiskonis, on his blog, talked about the possibility of using it in a dessert as well. It’s pretty much the same idea as brown butter. If the chocolate gets too hot, the milk solids start to caramelize and color. This can happen accidentally just by having your water bath too hot, or intentionally by roasting the chocolate in a low oven. In my few experiments, I’ve decided that the slower you caramelize the milk solids, the smoother the end chocolate will be (the chocolate will begin to seize if roasted too hot or too long). I recommend keeping the oven at about 200° for about 2 hours, but it may take longer if you want the chocolate darker. In the end, you will have some beautiful golden white chocolate that tastes, unsurprisingly, a little like a deeper brown butter.

After that, it was just a matter of making a ganache and rolling them in milk chocolate. It’s amazing how much the Maillard reaction cuts the sweet taste and leaves a rounder, bolder flavor. Delicious.

Thanksgiving

When your job is to serve someone else, you will inevitably be asked to do something that you would rather not do. The old adage that the customer is always right rings truer than we sometimes think. A few weeks ago, a regular started asking when I would be doing a pumpkin dessert. About the same time, cries for a cheesecake special also started popping up. Something about fall makes people crave the fatty, the rich, and the homey.

Now, as I have said before, I have no real problem with homey. Fatty and rich? Well, there’s nothing that feels more Fall than that. It is ironic to me that I look forward so much to Thanksgiving, and yet I dislike so much of the “classic” Thanksgiving food. Cranberries: get those out of here. Stuffing: too savory. Mashed potatoes: boring. Pumpkin pie: no way. So when customers challenged me to make a fall dessert, I put it off as long as possible, but one can only delay for so long. With the coming holiday, I knew I had to do something.

I’m convinced that most people don’t actually like pumpkin. Most pumpkin pies are so heavily laden with spices that it mush be an attempt to mask the pumpkin flavor. I decided that if I were going to do something with pumpkin, it would be something that let the true pumpkin flavor shine through. A pumpkin and white chocolate semifreddo (which literally means “half frozen” in Italian) keeps the flavors light and smooth. To incorporate the spicy element, I made a pumpkin cake as the base of the semifreddo that has ginger and nutmeg and cinnamon; all the traditional pumpkin pie flavors. To keep the fall motif going, I added a sage-apple cider reduction that brightens up the dish with some acidity. As a last touch, I added in a little cranberry gelée. The cranberry, barely sweetened, also added a touch of bitterness to cut through the sweet white chocolate.

For most people that would have been enough, but I felt that the plate was a little lacking In my search for a pumpkin dessert that I would actually be willing to make, I stumbled across a lot of pumpkin cheesecakes. In fact, my original idea was to make a frozen pumpkin

cheesecake and satisfy both parties. The pumpkin element obviously changed, but the idea of frozen cheesecake stuck in my brain. After all, cheesecake is essentially a custard that’s baked. Why can’t it be frozen? Or better yet, churned and frozen. That’s right, its cheesecake ice cream. While the recipe needs to be tweaked, because it froze up a little too firm, the flavor is there. A scoop of that, anchored to the plate with a graham cracker crumble, and you have a nice looking dessert.

That’s two birds, for those keeping score.

Under Ripe

There’s a part of me that believes that it’s impossible to improve on nature. Well, not impossible, but there are few things that beat a good apple eaten out-of-hand. Or cherries. Or a nice, sweet, delicious mango. When the product is good, there is no reason to mess with it. It almost seems a sin to make a peach cobbler if your peaches are sweet and juicy. If, however, you find yourself with fruit that are a little under ripe…

I have to admit that I spent very little time thinking about what the special was going to be this week. My mind was on chocolate, and the holidays, and our Guatemalan line cook getting deported… ya know, the usual. So, when my alarm went off this morning, I found myself doing what I always do when I don’t have I good idea: I copy someone elses.

Tarte Tatin is on a lot of menus right now because apples are amazing this time of year. Woefully, apples don’t really fit with the sushi theme. Believe me, I’ve tried to make apple desserts at Jianken, and while they’re all taste, they are decidedly “not sushi.” I instead found myself looking at mangoes. I searched three of my local supermarkets to find good mangoes, but even the nicest ones were firm at best. A smart person would scrap that idea and go back to the drawing board, but being stubborn as I am, I decided that I would make this Mango Tarte Tatin anyways. I bought them, peeled and ate a bite of one and was pleasantly surprised to find that while hard, they were still fairly sweet. I diced them up and into the oven with some palm sugar, which has a slightly molassesey taste, and butter.

Classically, Tarte Tatin is apples that are baked with sugar and butter with the crust baked on top. The whole thing is then flipped over and cut into wedges. It should be very caramelized and dark. Mangoes, when roasted, tent to drop a significant amount of their liquid, which means they would turn to mush before they started to caramelize. To get around this, I roasted the mangoes until they were just soft, and drained off all the moisture, reserving it. I then made a basic clear caramel sauce, but used the roasting liquid in place of the water.

To order, the caramel is heated in a small saucepan with the mangoes, then stacked in a ring mold. A pre-baked circle of Sablé Breton is added on top, followed by cucumber granita, that way, when the ring is removed, you’re left with three distinct layers. I finished off the plate with a little avocado cream, a quenelle of chantilly, and a phyllo crisp to add a different kind of crunch.

Cucumber Granita	Yield: ~1 quart
20oz English cucumber, seeded and chopped 4oz Sugar 4oz water 1T Lemon or lime juice	1) blend all ingredients in a blender for 5 minutes, or until completely smooth 2) strain with cheese cloth or a coffee filter over a bowl. Allow to drain until all liquid has separated out 3) freeze solid and flake with a fork

Why cucumber and avocado? Well, I love using avocado for dessert. It’s delicious and creamy and possibly better sweet than savory. In fact, if everything goes according to plan, I will be adding some sort of avocado chocolate to this year’s collection. Cucumber granita is something that I have wanted to try making, partly because I think cucumbers taste more like a melon than a vegetable, but mostly because I have always had, in the back of my mind, an idea to make “dessert sushi” that actually uses sushi flavors, not just the style. Plus, its pretty rare that you can get something that green in a dessert naturally. That’s right… there’s no food coloring in it.

“But David,” you say, “That plating looks a lot like the apple Tarte Tatin at D Bar.” Why, yes. It does. I like to think of it as an homage to them, not as copying. Either way, I think that the final result was damn good.