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.

I Scream

I realize that, for the most part, this blog is aimed at people that who know a thing or two about pastry, or at least can afford to invest in cool pastry toys. To be sure, everyone can read and enjoy my literary genius (cough), but even the most avid cooks rarely have silicone baking mats, flexipans, and copious amounts of freezer space dedicated solely to the pursuit of large quantities of high-calorie sweets. I would like to think, though, that even to the uninitiated, there could be some benefit gained from my ramblings.

Given that I work in a restaurant, I think most people (including myself, not long ago) would assume that when, I make ice cream, I use a big, expensive batch freezer, which can churn gallons of the cold stuff at a time. You would be wrong. In fact, for the first year and a half that I spent at Jianken, we didn’t make our own ice creams or sorbets. We bought them.

It wasn’t until I hi-jacked my mom’s machine from their home that I made my first dessert special featuring an ice cream. I did eventually give it back, after having convinced my boss that it was a worthwhile investment. So what did we buy as its replacement?

A Cuisinart IEC-30BC, on sale for $50. That’s pretty cheap, even for a home ice cream maker. The sad and amazing thing is how well it works. Granted, the new ice cream maker can only produce 2 quarts of ice cream at a time, and it takes time to re-freeze the bowl before I can churn another batch. But it works. And, hey, how much ice cream can one sushi bar sell anyway?

The deal with home ice cream makers is that every one is different; whichever you decide to buy, you should follow the manufacturer’s recommendations for the best results. I recommend one like the one that I use. It disassembles easily, which makes it easy to clean, and it is smaller and less expensive than the ones that contain their own freezing unit. I would stay away from the ones that use ice cubes and rock salt as the freezing agent; they just don’t get cold enough.

Point is, even a home cook can afford to make great frozen desserts.

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!

Work in Progress

So this is my first attempt at “Entremets.” I’m not necessarily posting this as something to strive towards, but as a starting point.

One could think of an entremet as a cake, and they would be sort of right. I think of it more as a dessert that you eat by the slice. The shape can be similar (in this case, a standard, 10” round), but what it is made of can be very different. A good entremet should be many layers of contrasting textures and/or flavors that complement each other; sort of like getting a little bit of everything in a single spoonful.

For this attempt, my flavors were a little on the tropical side: banana, coconut, caramel. Layers of banana bread and caramel sauce, suspended in coconut bavaroise (mousse). It was then covered in a white chocolate glaze and colored white chocolate décor.

If I were to give it a rating, I would give it a 6/10. Not bad for a first attempt, but could use some improvement. Among other things, it needed some crunch and was a little too sweet. I also wish that the layers were a little more visibly distinct. But it was good, and the other people that ate it had great thing to say about it.

As I said, it’s a work in progress.

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.

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.

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.