Spiced Rum Choco Bombs

I’ve been terrible for updating the blog. Part laziness, part unwillingness to fight with WordPress formatting. However, there’s now a perfect storm of motivation:

- I had a gas line installed to the kitchen, and got my Dream Stove (TM) installed.
Now we’re cooking with gas, baby!

- Thanksgiving is coming! It’s like the Food Superbowl.

- I’m celebrating my 40th birthday in Philly this weekend, so I’m anticipating hardcore Food Pr0n to share.

- Spousal Unit got me an iPad for my Birthday! I’m drafting this post on it right now.

For starters, here is the first recipe I made on my new stove. Because I had leftover heavy cream to use up, I decided to use the basic ganache recipe from Ruhlman’s Ratio as a starting point for improvisation. It’s about as simple as a recipe gets: Add hot cream to an equal weight of chopped chocolate, and whisk together.

The immediate product is a thick chocolate sauce, which can also be chilled to a firmer texture.

I raided my pantry for ingredients, and considered what would make a good holiday treat. My mom once made rum balls for Christmas, and one of the Ruhlman examples used rum and cardamom. I saw that I had Star anise, and wondered what spices are used to make spiced rum. After some Googling, I had an answer. Here’s what I came up with:

8 oz semisweet or bittersweet, good-quality chocolate (for this trial, leftover Ghiradelli semisweet chocolate chips were used)
8 oz heavy cream, by weight
half a thin stick of cinnamon
1 clove
1 allspice berry
1/3 of a star anise (about 3 “points” if memory serves)
freshly ground nutmeg (about 1/4 tsp)
1 cardamom pod, split in two
1 oz dark rum
cocoa powder to roll the balls in

The spices and cream were brought to a bare simmer (using my fancy new simmer burner), then removed from the heat and covered. Half an hour later, the cream was brought back to a simmer, then the rum was added and the mixture was strained through a metal mesh onto the chocolate. The mixture was whisked to combine, then chilled in the refrigerator.

Various preps, including Ruhlman’s, have you hand-roll the ganache, but I found that too messy– the chocolate melts easily in my hands. Perhaps my fridge could be colder, or I could try briefly freezing the mixture (but I don’t know how well the ganache would maintain it’s consistency if it were frozen too much). Instead, I used a Mellon baller and a teaspoon to roughly shape the balls, then rolled them in cocoa powder and tapped off the excess.

Verdict: a success! Great for the holiday season. The next step would be learning how to coat them in chocolate and turn them into a truffle. I imagine you could cut corners and use spiced rum instead, but this recipe is so simple there’s not much incentive to do so.

As I write this, none of the choco-bombs have survived long enough to have it’s picture taken. I’ll add a photo of the final product when I get home tomorrow.

Pasta with Creamy Parmesan-Mushroom Sauce

Last weekend we visited the annual Mushroom Festival held in Kennett Square, PA. However, despite the name, the festival definitely needed More Mushrooms. A minority of the booths involved food, and a minority of those featured mushrooms prominently. That, plus the crowds, made it difficult to actually enjoy some ‘shrooms.

In my opinion, the Talula’s Table booth stole the show. In particular, their mushroom soup was exactly what I hoped to find: a dish that was full of in-your-face mushroom flavor. I also enjoyed the bison hotdog with boar-mushroom chili from the Half Moon Restaurant & Saloon booth. Their website boasts their use of wild and exotic meats such as elk, antelope and emu. We’ll have to give their restaurant a try sometime.

Malfadine pasta from Pappardelle's

Ax

Ax

Ax

Ax

Overall, however, there wasn’t much for a mycophile to choose from. I decided to take matters into my own hands. The festival had fresh mushrooms you could buy, so I selected some trumpet, maitake and oyster mushrooms (4 oz each). I then picked up some whole-wheat malfadine pasta from the Pappardelle’s booth. We stopped by the grocery store on the way home for some shallots, and I was in business.

Ax

Getting my mise together: shallots, onion, garlic, and 'shrooms

The recipe is taken from Cooking Light, except using the malfadine instead of farfalle (bowtie) pasta. It’s an extremely easy recipe, yet is worthy of a good restaurant. In his book Kitchen Confidential (“How To Cook Like The Pros”), Tony Bourdain mentions that shallots and butter are Two reasons restaurant food tastes better than average home cooking. I’ll add a third: wine. If a recipe involves butter, shallots and wine, it’s going to be good.

Mushrooms, shallot, onion, and garlic are cooked in butter and seasoned with salt and pepper. White wine goes into the pan and is cooked off. Dump onto the hot cooked pasta. Add heavy cream, fresh grated parmesan, and a bit of chopped parsley to give the illusion of healthy eating. Stir, serve, and drink the rest of the wine with it.

Critique: whole-wheat pasta with this sauce wasn’t the best choice for a blog entry, because of the lack of color contrast.  It could be Hamburger Helper, as far as you can tell from the photo.  The Willm Pinot Gris had just a bit too much sweetness to pair properly; I think a non-oakey chardonnay or our standard Alsace ONE would have been a better choice.

If you ever find yourself in the possession of good mushrooms, and are looking for a quick and easy recipe to put them to good use, I highly recommend this recipe.

Original Cocktail: The Tanned Ukrainian

I was struck by the chocolate-Kahlua flavours in my cold-brewed coffee, and wondered if I could use it in a cocktail. I had some heavy cream left over from the panna cotta recipe, so I decided to conduct some experiments:

(Note: I normally make my own simple syrup, and don’t buy it! We just had a bottle kicking around to use up.)

I started with the IBA ratios for a White Russian, but substituted the cold-brewed coffee concentrate for Kahlua. I then tweaked the ratio of coffee to vodka, and then the amount of cream. Finally, I worked on adding sweetness.

The first iteration, which I dubbed the “White Ukrainian”, used simple syrup as the sweetener. It wasn’t quite there. Too thin in mouthfeel, too alcoholic. The solution occured to me a few hours later: I could use dulce de leche, also left over from the panna cotta, as the sweetener!

The caramel-like roundness of the dulce de leche tied the other elements of the drink together. It was difficult to get it to dissolve into the cold drink however. I think in the future it should be added to the coffee/cream mixture first, and then the vodka added at the end.

Because of the colour of the dulce de leche, the Spousal Unit suggested the cocktail be dubbed the Tanned Ukrainian. Here’s the final ratio:

50 mL vodka
40 mL cold-brewed coffee concentrate (recipe here)
40 mL heavy cream
20 mL dulce de leche

Enjoy.

Today’s Oxymoron: “Sustainably Farmed” Bluefin Tuna

I was disappointed by a recent philly.com article by Aliza Green on the availability of farmed bluefin tuna in Philadelphia’s restaurants. restauranteurs seem to have been taken in:

“These Japanese scientists want to do the right thing for this majestic animal,” said Anthony D’Angelo, head of product development at Samuels. “The fish eat their natural diet, they are not crammed into small pens. . . . Their true value is the future of our fisheries.”

Chef Hiroyuki “Zama” Tanaka, of Zama Restaurant, realized he needed to take a stand on the bluefin tuna: “I am so happy that I deal with Kindai tuna because it is sustainable, consistent, and clean. Every time I order the fish it’s the same.”

Initially, he listed the Kindai as bluefin tuna on his menu and it sold slowly. When he changed the wording to “100 percent sustainable,” sales took off.

However, I believe these enthusiasts are being sold on a “sustainability” label that doesn’t pass scrutiny. Although the author refers to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Program:

“All populations of bluefin tuna are being caught faster than they can reproduce,” according to Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch.

I suspect this was based on a search of their website, and not contact with anyone with the program. On twitter, Seafood Watch indicated that the practice indeed does not warrant the “sustainable” label.

The fact that this is not a truly sustainable way of producing bluefin tuna should have been discovered by the author, who noted:

Kindai tuna are farmed, rather than ranched: raised to maturity from wild bluefin eggs, which ensures genetic diversity.

There have been other programs that capture juvenile tuna from the wild and then raise them. These programs are more obviously not sustainable…the tuna are captured from the wild and then farm raised. In the case of the “Kindai” tuna, fish are still taken from the wild, but their eggs are hatched and raised. This is a step forward, because one wild-caught fish becomes multiple pen-raised tuna. However, it still means that wild populations are being depleted. In the meantime, the practice supports a market for bluefin tuna, and some consumers that would normally avoid bluefin may be mislead by the misleading “sustainable” label.

Besides the fact that the practice isn’t truly “sustainable”, the other problems inherent with fish farming still exist. The fish must be fed other fish, which may be caught in unsustainable fashion, or may be species that humans could eat directly (e.g. mackerel). There are environmental considerations. Finally, I would be surprised if the farmed product matched the qualities of wild-caught bluefin.

A more balanced article at the Washington Post on the “Kindai” bluefin tuna was found by a simple google search. In contrast, the philly.com article leaves the unfortunate impression that diners can enjoy “sustainable” bluefin guilt-free. To me, this is like cigarette manufacturers of the early 20th century adding filters to their cigarettes and trying to advertise that their smokes cure cancer.

The philly.com article ends with a revealing quote:

Marc Vetri, chef/owner of Vetri, Osteria, and Amis, said he had been using Kindai more and more as part of his tasting menus at Vetri. “I love it! It’s ridiculous how good it is,” he said. “And it’s a step in the right direction [emphasis mine] for bluefin tuna.”

which at least hints at balance: the “Kindai” farmed tuna isn’t the answer. It may be a step in the right direction, but until the reliance on wild bluefin stock is broken, the practice isn’t truly sustainable.

Cold-Brewed Coffee

Cold-brewed coffee with cream and sugar (more photogenic than black)

This preparation would have been more timely at the start of the summer than the end, but there’s still time to enjoy cold coffee as the summer wanes.

If you like coffee, but haven’t been a fan of iced coffee, you should consider giving cold-brewed coffee a try. The procedure I use produces a concentrated coffee extract that can then be diluted with water or melting ice. Because the water is at room temperature instead of hot, a lot of the tannins are left in the grounds; it’s the tannins that lend an astringent, acidic quality to brewed coffee. Cold coffee made by this method is much smoother, and also has a different flavour profile. I think the resulting brew has a sort of chocolate-Kahlua note.

It’s also the tannins that stain plastic pitchers and tumblers. You’ll notice that the cold-brewed coffee won’t stain its container nearly to the extent that regular coffee would.

You’ll find several different methods for preparing CBC on the internet, and can buy devices explicitly for making coffee this way. I prefer this fairly simple method:

Ingredients:
1 lb coffee, coarse-ground
9 cups water, preferably filtered (I currently use a Pur carafe)

Add water at room temperature to the coffee grounds in a large pot. Cover and forget about it for 12 h or so. Strain through a fine-meshed sieve, and then filter the liquid through standard coffee filters. Store in the refrigerator. Best if used within 4-5 days, but I usually keep in much longer.

However, the final filtration can take quite a while, and I frequently changed the filters as they clogged. Next time I’ll include an extra filtration through cheese cloth so that the clogging of the paper filters should be less of an issue.

A note about the grind: a coarse grind should result in the smoothest product, and makes it easier to filter, but probably results in a lower caffeine content. At least, this is what I gather from reading the Intertubes. I am lucky to have a burr grinder that I can adjust to whatever size grind I want. If you don’t have one, you could either fill a small hand-held electric coffee mill a gajillion times and try to approximate a coarse grind, or you could use a supermarket grinder, but I suspect a store-bought medium grind will work just fine.

For this last batch I used the Starbucks Gazebo blend, which they tout as being particularly good for iced coffee. It’s good but I would not be able to distinguish the cold product from the other Starbucks beans I’ve used. If I could find the Eight O’Clock Columbian coffee in bean form, I think that would work well, and be cheaper to boot. I used to be able to find the beans in the grocery store, but now it’s always pre-ground.

My preferred preparation is to dilute 1 part of coffee concentrate with 2 parts of cold water. I’m not normally a black coffee drinker, but I will usually drink this as-is. You can add cream and sugar, or you can use milk instead of water to dilute. If you want a cup of hot coffee fast, you can even dilute some and nuke it. I think it’s inferior to regular-brewed hot coffee, but it’s acceptable.

Because of the Kahlua-esque flavour, I decided to see if I could make a cocktail using it. I’ll report my findings soon.

More Cornography: Corn Panna Cotta with Dulce de Leche

While contemplating dessert options for the Spousal Unit’s birthday, I came across this recipe on Epicurious for a corn panna cotta. We’ve been getting more corn from our CSA than we’ve been eating, so this looked like a good opportunity to learn a new cooking technique and try an unusual concept (a corn dessert?) while using up a couple ears of corn.

Panna cotta is essentially a dairy Jell-O: a mixture of milk, cream, and sugar that’s thickened with gelatin and/or corn starch. Although it seems a common enough menu item, there’s no mention of it in my two most encyclopedic cooking references (The Cook’s Book and On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen). The prep is easy enough, and the result so good, that it should be more ubiquitous.

I used a chef’s knife to cut the corn kernels off the cob, and cut each of the cobs into four pieces. The whole milk and sugar were brought to a simmer, then the corn kernels were added. After 5 minutes, the mixture was strained into another saucepan, and the corn kernels were refrigerated.

To the strained milk was added heavy cream (this recipe is NOT low fat), salt, and the corn cobs. After reaching a simmer, the pot was removed from the heat and the cobs allowed to steep for half an hour. I think this is in part to extract the remaining corn bits and juice from the cobs, and in part to leech out some corn starch to help thicken the dessert.

During the steep, a small amount of gelatin was bloomed in some water. After the steep, the corn cobs were removed and the dairy brought back to a simmer. The gelatin was added, and the mixture was stirred off the heat until the gelatin dissolved. I poured it into some ramekins (well, 4 kinda ramekins and 2 small bowls) and refrigerated for 6 h.

Once the panna cottas had set, I mixed store-bought dulce de leche with heavy cream to make a caramel sauce. When I’m feeling more adventurous, I’ll try making the dulce de leche from scratch. Alton Brown has prepared dulce de leche on Good Eats, and it doesn’t look that difficult (it just takes a while).

It was a bit hard to dislodge the panna cottas from their ramekins. I ran a knife around the edge, inverted the ramekin onto a plate, and shook it until they grudgingly fell out. I smothered each panna cotta in a couple tablespoons of the caramel sauce, and added some of the reserved corn kernels on the top.

Verdict: really good, and not as sweet as it looks. Now that I’ve made panna cotta once, I can imagine a lot of possible variations (coconut, vanilla, fresh fruit, …).

Burger Pr0n and Corn Smut: A Day In Philly

Village Whiskey, Philadelphia

As part of the Spousal Unit’s birthday week celebrations, we visited the Late Renoir exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We also ate our faces off.

Lunch was our second ever visit to Iron Chef Jose Garces’ Village Whiskey, which has arguably the best burgers in Philadelphia and an impressive bar. On our first visit, our bartender (I believe it was this guy) mixed expert whiskey cocktails for us. This time around, we were in the mood for beer and went with a Czech pilsner.

I decided on bacon and egg for my burger toppings, plus the duck fat fries and cheddar sauce. I usually get steaks medium rare, but burgers medium well. This is partially for food safety, but more personal preference. The burger was cooked to what I consider a perfect medium-well, but was wonderfully juicy. The sunny-side up egg had a perfect runny yolk. The bacon was very lean and crisp.  The duck-fat fries with cheddar sauce were golden-to-brown with Maillard Reaction goodness.

We added insult to dietary injury by getting the bourbon, peanut butter, and banana milkshake; I liked that the milkshake wasn’t too sweet, something you don’t expect from a PB & banana dessert.

Supper was our second visit to El Vez (warning: annoying animated website), where apparently Jose Garces used to work (I was unaware of that connection before writing this post). On our way there, I noticed just down the block was another Mexican restaurant, Lolita, whose sidewalk sign invited patrons to “B.Y.O.T” (Bring Your Own Tequila). I later learned that the restaurant was featured on Food Network’s “The Best Thing I Ever Ate” recently. I may check it out the next time I’m in the area.

One of the attractions (or, from what I gather, detractions, to guac purists) of El Vez is fresh-made guacamole served in a molcajete.  I noticed a “truffle guacamole” version, and the ingredient huitlacoche grabbed my attention. What is it? you may be wondering.

Corn Smut. I remembered reading about this ingredient, and also that Richard Blais had recently posted a picture of him and some smutty ears of corn on Twitter. Although American farmers consider it a blight, Aztec farmers consumed it, and would deliberately innoculate corn with the fungus to encourage its growth. I asked for a taste to be sent out.

It had a mushroomy taste, and you could taste the corn as well, but it was more complicated than that. There was a savory umami flavor that reminded me in some ways of fermented black beans. I’m not sure how it was prepared–it was a dark-chocolate coloured goop–but I imagine that it’s  a seasonal ingredient that has been converted to some sort of preserve. If anyone knows where and when the fresh stuff can be found in our area, I might be brave enough to experiment with it.

Ax

Ax

Here’s the guacamole with huitlacoche:

I think the last time we were at El Vez I had the pibil pork tacos and enjoyed them, but I’ve been making a Rick Bayless version at home lately, and it’s eradicated whatever memory of the El Vez dish may have lingered. This time, I felt like having fish tacos, but the menu said they were “sea bass”. I asked the server to find out specifically which fish it was, and it was Chilean Seabass. Ordering it would be about as morally defendable as ordering Panda Enchiladas.

Instead, I got the Classic Red Chile and Chicken enchiladas in red sauce, and my wife got an assortment of chicken, shrimp, and bean enchiladas. I’m still a novice at Mexican cuisine, but my enchiladas seemed like a good, straightforward and honest representation. I’m not enough of a chile connoisseur to place the type of chile used (guajillo?) but it was fairly mild. My wife liked her bean enchilada the best, but wasn’t fond of the shrimp enchilada, which she thought tasted almost like an Italian dish instead of a Mexican one. I tried it and agreed…the pepper flavour was so mild, that after a few margaritas it could be mistaken for an Italian red sauce.

Before leaving, I put in a plug for sustainable seafood and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program:

All in all, we enjoyed our meal, but I’m ready to explore other Mexican options.

(Footnote: I found a Houson blogger’s El Vez experience here. They also mention Lolita.)