Vogue

Restaurant food, like everything else, has its share of fads and trends. Beef Wellington, vichyssoise and chocolate soufflés are certainly delicious, but they don’t see much action these days, being relegated to that dusty shelf in the back, labeled “old school.”

I don’t know who was the first person to discover the secret to making faux caviar using alginate, but Ferran Adria of El Bulli is credited with being the first to serve it in a restaurant. He and others abandoned the cherished trends of the day and struck out using foams and powders and science to propel their food. Of course, this was more than a decade ago. What started with just a few restaurants has now propagated its way through the food world, changing how we look at what we eat.

My boss bought a caviar making “kit” a few months ago, on a whim. He played with it once or twice, without moderate results, and so soon we both forgot about it, going back to things we were more confident with. It wasn’t until recently that I got the motivation to play around with it again. During a lull in the dinner service, a co-worker and I decided to try making some spheres. I suggested espresso, seeing as I had a coffee-flavored dessert on the brain. In no time, we were brewing espresso, reading and re-reading the vague recipes and instructions, and assembling a caviar-making station.

Sodium alginate is a hydrocolloid; it’s similar to gelatin or agar agar in that it creates a molecular web that suspends water molecules. Unlike gelatin or agar agar, though, it does not need heat in order to be dissolved and dispersed. Instead, it will begin to set in the presence of calcium. To make the caviar, then, it is simply a matter of dripping small drops of a liquid containing the alginate (in my case, the coffee), into a water bath spiked with a little soluble calcium. On contact, the calcium begins to “cook” the coffee mixture, forming a skin around a liquid espresso center. The longer the caviar balls are left in the calcium bath, the thicker the skin will be. Once removed from the calcium bath, the balls get a quick dip in a regular water bath to wash off any calcium that may be hanging around before they are ready to serve.

The texture certainly added something to the final dessert; a Vietnamese Coffee Tart, with Condensed Milk Chantilly, Miso Caramel, and Espresso Caviar. They were like little tapioca pearls that added an extra kick of espresso flavor. It’s not a technique that I plan to use often, but certainly one to keep in the repertoire.

Success

My girlfriend’s birthday has come and gone. It’s one of the great ironies of our relationship that in the five years that we have been together, I’ve only made dessert for her a handful of times. So this year, I decided that I would actually make her a cake for once.

Inspired by Fransisco Migoya’s The Modern Café, I wanted to try my hand at another entremet. For those who don’t know, an entremet is a cake… sort of. It can really be made of anything, but it serves the same purpose. Commonly, an entremet will consist of layers of some sort of cake, and typically a mousse of some sort. The idea is to have flavors and textures that complement and contrast each other in one bite. It is like an entire dessert in cake form.

The first thing I did was to decide some flavors I wanted to pair together: Crème fraiche, chocolate, nuts. Chocolate is a great ingredient to use for entremet, because cocoa butter will help stabilize the chocolate components of the cake without having to add a ton of gelatin, which can ruin the texture. I chose to add the crème fraiche because, along with being incredibly delicious on its own, I think it is chocolate’s best friend, and the tanginess helps to cut the richness of the chocolate. The nuts I chose because they are just plain tasty.

What I came up with was a Milk Chocolate Chantilly Cake, Chocolate Jaconde—a thin almond sponge cake, Krispy Chocolate, and Crème Fraiche Crème Brulée.

Building it was relatively easy. I made all the individual components ahead of time, and had them stored in the freezer, ready to go. Assembly was nothing more than piping the mousse into the bottom (which became the top) and sides of the mold, and then stacking the pre-made rings of crème brulée, jaconde, and Krispy chocolate, making sure to add more mousse where needed. After all that was finished, it took another trip to the freezer to get rock hard.

After that came glazing. In retrospect, I think I need a new glaze recipe, because it is too viscous, even at the correct temperature. I ended up with lumps and streaks where it should have been completely smooth. That was ok though, because the chocolate décor covered most of it up.

The most stressful part of the whole process is thawing the cake. After glazing, the cake is pulled out of the freezer and left to thaw overnight. If there wasn’t enough gelatin in the mousse, or if it was over-whipped, or if the crème brulée layer was too soft, the whole thing could collapse in on itself and be just a big pile of stuff in the morning. Luckily the gods were with me, and it stayed stable.

I would call that a success!

Not just for breakfast anymore...

Waffles. Of all the breakfast foods—other than Dutch Babies, which hold a special and artery-clogging place in my heart—waffles would be my favorite. Sure, I eat more French toast, but that’s because I always have stale bread lying around, and its quick to make, but waffles; waffles are king.

In America, we treat them as a breakfast-only item, but other places in the world sees it differently. In Belgium, one can find waffles in little street carts, with pearl sugar added to the batter so that it caramelizes as the waffle cooks. A similar sweet street food can be found in Hong Kong, topped with sweetened condensed milk. What makes waffles so good? I have no idea. What makes a good waffle? That is a different question entirely.

The first secret to making a good waffle is in the waffle iron. The whole idea behind a waffle iron is that the checkerboard pattern greatly increases the surface-area that is in contact with the hot metal. The result is something that cooks much more quickly, and a finished product that is crispy. If you are using an American waffle iron (the kind with the really small squares), you can make a half-decent waffle, but the deep Belgian style waffle iron is really the only way to go if you want a great waffle.

The next point, as important as the first, is that waffles are not pancakes, they are waffles. It sounds simple, but more than once, I have run into people who think that a waffle is nothing more than a square pancake. Its not. Pancakes are, well, cakes: soft, moist, and spongy. Waffles should be crispy on the outside, and soft on the inside—almost more like toast. Waffle batter is much stiffer than pancake. It can be leavened with baking soda, like a pancake, but most good recipes use other means to make the batter rise.

My method is one that uses yeast. The yeast gives a very distinct flavor, and also a… well… yeastiness.. I’ve had good luck with this recipe. They are good as sweet waffles, but you could just as easily top them with some fried chicken. I found that they even freeze better than other recipes that I’ve tried.

Yeasted Waffles

Yield: ~15 Belgian style waffles

12oz Milk 4oz Butter 2.5oz Sugar 3/4t. Salt 2ea eggs, separated 2c flour 1½t. instant dry yeast

1) Combine milk and butter and microwave until hot (Not boiling. Like 150°ish) 2) Combine dry ingredients except for sugar and sift 3) Add milk/butter mixture to dry, followed by egg yolks. 4) In a separate bowl, wisk egg whites, slowly incorporating the sugar, until they reach soft peaks 5) Fold egg whites into batter. 6) Pour into a large bowl or other container (batter will expand substantially). 7) Allow to rise for an hour at room temperature. At this point they can be cooked, or placed in the fridge for up to another 24 hrs. 8) Add roughly a 1/3 cup scoop to hot waffle iron and cook until golden

I made the waffles chocolate simply by substituting about ¼ cup of flour for an equal amount of cocoa powder. In truth, even with all the cocoa powder, the waffles didn’t taste that chocolaty, but it was enough.

The inspiration behind the dessert was bananas, chocolate, and peanut. I decided to top the waffle with some bruléed bananas (by far my favorite way to treat a banana), and peanut butter ice cream and a little chocolate lace (not pictured), to add crunch and that extra chocolatiness. People liked it so much I ended up running it two weekends in a row!

V-Day

For the restaurant industry, there is always a lull in business between New Years and the beginning of spring. It’s the time where you see most restaurants tightening their belts, cutting labor costs, and spending less wherever possible. It’s also the time when many restaurants go under. Between the normal expenditures and taxes that are due, even diligent owners can find themselves with the painful realization that their product isn’t selling.

Valentines Day, our favorite Hallmark holiday, is highly anticipated in the restaurant community, because it is a night where one can be certain that the numbers will be good. While it doesn’t do a whole lot in the long run for a restaurants financials, it does provide much-needed morale to employees who are generally bored. Finally, we get to make something different. Finally we get to serve something exciting. At least, that’s the theory…

If there’s something that I’ve discovered in researching for this particular dessert, it’s that people tend to play it safe on v-day. Whether they know it or not, I think people tend to stick to things that they are certain are going to taste good. No matter how good the apples look right now, no matter how extravagant the preparation, it won’t sell. Customers look to the night’s dessert with only one real question: is it chocolate?

Chocolate’s power as an aphrodisiac is debatable at best, but I can’t deny that it satisfies something deep in the soul. Like wine, where you get your chocolate from will greatly affect its flavor. The climate, or terrior as wine aficionados would call it, and how the beans are roasted give an unimaginable range of flavors: from smokey and bitter, or tart and fruity, to sweet with hints of caramel.

I could go on at length about chocolate production, but I think I’ll save that for another post. Books and books have been written on the subject, and there’s still more out there yet to be uncovered. For the moment, I think I will just give you a couple of my thoughts on choosing and eating chocolate:

· Know what you’re buying. Chocolate is expensive. Good chocolate should be [relatively] expensive. Spending money on Hershey’s is like buying non-alcoholic Keystone Light. It’s just not worth it. I’m not saying that you should be unloading your next paycheck for one bar, but go out on a limb and reach for the upper shelf occasionally.

· Don’t count out milk and white chocolate. Many adults claim that milk and white chocolate are for kids who’s taste buds haven’t’ developed yet. Shut up. Anyone who’s had a great milk chocolate can tell you that it is a life-changing experience. A good milk chocolate should let you taste the cocoa bean as much as a dark should.

· Take the percentages that chocolate maker’s proudly display with a grain of salt. They can be very misleading, and are not the mark of what makes chocolate great. All that little number means is how much of that bar is cacao, and how much is not. Two chocolates that are labeled as 64% can taste vastly different. The only time a use those is as a way to differentiate between chocolates that one company makes, since they are rarely given other names.

· Some brands I tend to like: Voges, Sharffen berger, El Rey, Valrhona (though it’s given more credit than it is due), and Callebaut

· Some brands I tend to stay away from: Hershey’s, Lindt, Ghiradelli

These are, of course, my own opinion. I’m not going to come to your house and throw out all of the bad chocolate. In fact, I’m sure I have stashed away somewhere a couple Hershey’s bars from my last camping trip. Does that make me a hypocrite? Probably. Depends on whom you talk to.

As for the much-anticipated Valentines dessert, I decided to stick with something that most people could identify with. I took my inspiration from a hazelnut laté, and deconstructed it.

For the coffee part, I made an espresso semifreddo. Semifreddo literally means “half frozen,” but it really refers to a frozen mousse, of sorts, that has had so much air incorporated into it prior to freezing that it never gets completely solid. I simply whipped my espresso infused cream, whipped my egg yolks, and whipped my egg whites and gently folded them all together depositing into a flexipan and freezing.

For the first chocolate component of the plate, I made a pudding cake. Pudding cake, like French toast, is a great way to use up a product that would otherwise be thrown away. I had some leftover chocolate almond cake from a previous dessert. They were odd shaped pieces, some of which had dried out, but still tasted wonderful. To make the pudding cake, I made a custard of egg yolks, cream, sugar and chocolate, and then added the leftover cake, mixing until the pieces had broken up into a homogenous mass. They were then baked and allowed to cool in the freezer before cutting into little rectangles. They would be warmed to order, which would contrast nicely with the cold semifreddo.

The hazelnut component was the chocolate-hazelnut gelato that I froze into little cylinders. I topped the semifreddo with a toasted marshmallow at the behest of my girlfriend—who was kind enough to not be mad at me when I had to spend v-day with the restaurant instead of her, and finished the plate with some cocoa nib lace that provided the much-needed crunch.

I don’t have any recipes this week, but I do have some promising ideas.

Rough

I debated with myself a lot on whether or not to share this dessert. Its not that I have some personal interest in keeping the recipe secret, I just think the final plate ended up a less-then-perfect specimen of a plated dessert. Normally in this case, I would just forget about it and wait until I had something worth posting, but after some reflection, I have decided that there were strong elements about the dessert that I liked and which were worth sharing.

As I have mentioned before, I don’t really like cheesecake. Blasphemy to many, I know. Get over it. Of course, I understand that other people like it, so from time to time I will throw one out there. Given this most recent cheesecake episode, I’m almost inclined to think that as long as you call it cheesecake, it doesn’t matter how ill-fashioned the dessert is: people fall on it like a pack of hungry wolves. It could taste like sawdust, and most people wouldn’t say a thing about it. After all, its cheesecake. How could it be bad? Not an inspiring thought.

I received, as either a Christmas or birthday gift, The Sweet Spot by Pichet Ong. It’s a book that I highly recommend, especially for anyone trying to make desserts in a sushi restaurant. While not limited only to Japanese sweets, it is a book of sweets, from cookies to custards, which have Asian influenced flavors and techniques. It was here that I was first introduced to the Tofu Cheesecake.

As Pichet explains, Cheesecake is becoming almost as popular to the Japanese as it is to Americans. Presumably, someone Japanese cook discovered that by replacing the heavy cream cheese with tofu, the cheesecake could be made lighter. “Over time,” Ong explains “it has become something of a nouveau national dessert in Japan. The dairy-free, no-bake cheesecakes and perfect for a mostly lactose-intolerant population who, for the most part, don’t have ovens.”

Tofu Cheesecake adapted from Pichet Ong

Yield: ~1 9-inch cheesecake, or 10 individual ones

19oz silken tofu 2t Yuzu juice* 4oz Heavy cream 1t salt 5 sheets or 2¼t gelatin 2oz water 12oz cream cheese, room temperature 5½ oz sugar *Lemon juice can be substituted for yuzu

1) Place tofu and yuzu in blander and blend until smooth 2) Hydrate gelatin in the water 3) Combine cream and salt, and scald 4) Add gelatin to cream and stir to dissolve. Combine with tofu mixture 5) Add cream and sugar to an electric mixer with paddle attachment and cream until light and fluffy 6) Slowly incorporate the tofu/cream mixture until homogenous 7) Pour over prepared crust or into individually prepared ring molds

As you can see, the recipe still calls for cream cheese because it really isn’t cheesecake without that dense, tangy richness. As it is, it tastes like tofu… but in a good way.

I took the plain tofu cheesecake base, and poured it into ring molds and deposited a round of ganache in the bottom. Instead of the standard graham cracker crust (which I hate), I decided to do something a little different by sitting the cheesecake atop a cocoa nib crumble. To add a citrus pop, I topped the cheesecake with some basil seeds hydrated in sweetened yuzu juice. Lastly, the quintessential strawberries, this time in the form of strawberry pearls.

As I said, most of the components were delicious, but the plate was amateur. It looked a little jumbled together. If I were to do it again, I would probably change a few things:

1) The cheesecakes should have been molded and tamped better, to remove the air bubbles. It might not seem like a big deal, but it is.

2) Get rid of the basil seeds. I love basil seeds, but this was the wrong application.

3) Crumble the “crust” into smaller pieces, so that the cheesecake would stay level.

4) Change the plating… it looks messy

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.

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.