Rich, buttery croissants

In previous articles, we’ve shown you how to make mini croissants, and how to make full size croissants. In this article, we show you how to up your game, using European style butters.

There is nothing as delicious as a warm buttery croissant and in this article we’ll show you how to make croissants using European butters like Kerrygold. These butters are lower in water content and higher in butterfat, making them rich and smooth. However, they also have a lower melting point than conventional U.S. butters and you need to keep both the butter and the dough cold to make the croissants a success.

Kerrygold butter is created in Ireland, and usually packaged in 250 gram blocks. In the U.S., the Illinois packager forms the butter into similar half pound blocks (227 grams). If you cut a block in half lengthwise, each is a quarter pound and for this half-recipe, we’ll need 2-1/2 quarter pound blocks, or 5 halves of quarter pound sticks.

Ingredients

½ cup milk
2 tsp active dry yeast
2 ½ cups all-purpose flour (plus more for rolling the dough and butter)
¼ cup sugar
1 ½ Tb coarse salt
½ cup water (about)
12 oz cold, unsalted grass-fed butter, such as Kerrygold.
1 large egg, lightly beaten for the egg wash
A ruler or tape measure and a drawing triangle, and wheel cutter if you have one

First day

In a microwave, heat the milk in a pitcher or small bowl until it is about 110˚ F. This will only take 15-20 seconds. Add the yeast to the pitcher and let it proof for 5 minutes.
Mix the flour, sugar and salt, the yeast/milk mixture and the water to the bowl of an electric mixer and the paddle attachment. Beat it until the dough just comes together, about 2 minutes. The dough can be a little sticky, as long as when you knead it on a floured board, it becomes smooth.
Knead the dough on a lightly floured surface and form it into a smooth ball. To help you roll this inro a rectangle later, cut a cross halfway down the dough ball
Wrap the dough in plastic wrap or a gallon freezer bag, or a covered bowl, and chill for 6 hours or overnight.

Second Day

Cut the butter into 5 half-sticks and arrange them on a sheet of baking parchment. Kerrygold comes in half pound blocks, and you will need 1-1/4 of them.
Wrap the butter in the parchment, and pound it with a rolling pin, on a pastry marble if you have one.
When the butter is workable, but not too soft, wrap it in a new sheet of parchment and make it into a a package about 4” x 8” and force the butter into a flat 4×8 sheet. Refrigerate the butter in the parchment while you prepare the flour.
Flour the work surface and roll out the dough to an 8 ½ by 10” rectangle, about ½ inch thick. Trim it to have straight edges and square corners, using a wheel cutter or sharp knife. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and freeze for 20 minutes.

Lay the butter on center of the dough and fold the two sides over top of it, Pinch to close the dough package. If the butter is too wide, cut a little off before sealing.
Roll the dough to an 8” x 10” rectangle. Square the corners and then fold the left half of the dough towards the center, and then fold the right half to meet in the center. This is called one “turn.” Wrap in plastic or a gallon freezer bag and freeze the dough for 20 minutes and then refrigerate for one hour.
Repeat the rolling, folding, freezing and refrigerate in a bag for another hour. This is the second turn.
Repeat the rolling and folding, freeze for 15 minutes and then refrigerate in a bag for 6 hours or overnight. This is the third turn.

Third day

First, create a proofing chamber. Fill a large frying pan with water and bring it to a boil, Put the pan on the bottom rack of your oven, and close the door. Don’t turn on the oven. The steam it generates is an ideal proofing environment for the croissants to rise in. You don’t have to use a lot of water. You want the steam, but the oven should soon be cool enough that the butter won’t melt.
Roll the dough out on a floured board to about 14 ½ by 8 ½ inches. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and freeze it for 20 minutes. You may have to fold the dough in half to fit it on the sheet.
Roll the dough to around 14” x 8”. Square the corners using a drawing triangle if you have one. Cut the edges to be straight and as square as you make them.
Cut the dough in half lengthwise, so you have two 14” x 4” rectangles. Save scraps in a bowl to make Monkey Bread, or an additional croissant, later.
Cut each rectangle diagonally, lengthwise to make two triangles. Cut a little wedge off the bottom of each triangle to make the sides even in length (isosceles triangles).

Forming the croissants

Roll each triangle from the base up to the point. Place each rolled croissant on baking sheet covered with parchment, with the tip on the bottom. You may have enough scraps to make one or two more. (See if you guess which two are the “extras.”)

Put the baking sheet into your proofing oven and let them rise until they have increased in size by about 50%. This will take 2 to 3 hours. Be sure that the proofing oven is no longer warm, just steamy. It should be about 75˚F in there. If warmer, the butter will melt out. If it is still warm, cover the croissants with loose plastic wrap for half an hour or so, until the temperature falls.
When they have risen enough, remove the baking pan and frying pan from the oven and set it to 375˚ F, and set a rack in the center of the oven.
Make an egg wash by beating the large egg, perhaps with a tsp of water, and then brush the wash onto each croissant.
Bake the croissants for 20 minutes, rotate the pan, and then bake further until they are golden brown. This will take about an additional 10 minutes.
Remove the croissants to a wire rack to cool. Serve warm.

Warming up croissants later

The rich buttery goodness of these croissants only comes out when they are warm. Before serving, heat them on a cookie sheet in a 350˚ F oven for 5 minutes. They will be terrific!

Making full sized croissants

In our previous article, we showed how to make a dozen 5” croissants, which make great accompaniments to any meal. But supposing you want the larger, more traditional sized croissants. How to make those?

Well, it is exactly the same as making the little ones right up to the time you cut up the dough into triangles.

Follow our original recipe, up to the third day step 2. Roll the dough out to 14″ x 8″.
Cut the dough inhalf along the 14″ axis to make two 14″ x 4″ rectangles.
Cut a diagonal line in each rectangle from the top left to the bottom right corner.

Now you have 4 triangles, except that they are right triangles instead of ones with equal long sides (isosceles triangles). Cut a little wedge off the bottom of each triangle to make the side about equal.
Then roll them up in the same was as before, to make 4 large croissants.
Brush them with beaten egg.
Bake at 375˚ F for 20 minutes, then rotate the pan and bake for around 20 more minutes until golden brown.

Wasn’t that easy?

We found that we could sometimes make an extra croissant by rolling out the dough scraps instead of saving them for monkey bread. This last one may not be quite as pretty, but should taste pretty good.
Of course, you may want more than 4, and you can get at least 8 by doubling the recipe. We’ll cover that in a future article.

Traditional Croissants

This recipe is adapted from John Baricelli’s recipe in the Sono Baking Company Cookbook. His recipe is for 24 croissants, and that is more than I could ever consume in time, so this recipe is half that big. Making croissants is generally a 3-day affair, but most of it is waiting for the dough to chill again. The third day, when you cut and assemble the croissants is the only one that is time consuming.

It takes some experience to make really good croissants, but after you have made them a couple of times, you will be really pleased with the results. In our first recipe here, we are going to make twelve 5” croissants.

Ingredients

½ cup milk
2 tsp active dry yeast
2 ½ cups all-purpose flour (plus more for rolling the dough and butter)
¼ cup sugar
1 ½ Tb coarse salt
½ cup water (about)
12 oz (2 ½ sticks) cold, unsalted butter
1 large egg, lightly beaten for the egg wash
A ruler or tape measure and a drawing triangle, and wheel cutter if you have one

First day

In a microwave, heat the milk in a pitcher or small bowl until it is about 110˚ F. This will only take 15-20 seconds. Add the yeast to the pitcher and let it proof for 5 minutes.
Mix the flour, sugar and salt, the yeast/milk mixture and the water to the bowl of an electric mixer and the paddle attachment. Beat it until the dough just comes together, about 2 minutes. The dough can be a little sticky, as long as when you knead it on a floured board, it becomes smooth.
Knead the dough on a lightly floured surface and form it into a smooth ball. To help you roll this inro a rectangle later, cut a cross halfway down the dough ball
Wrap the dough in plastic wrap or a gallon freezer bag and chill for 6 hours or overnight.

Second Day

Cut the butter into 5 half-sticks and arrange them on a sheet of baking parchment. Avoid using grass-fed butter like Kerrygold just yet, as it melts more easily.*
Wrap the butter in the parchment, and pound it with a rolling pin, on a pastry marble if you have one.
When the butter is workable, but not too soft, wrap it in a new sheet of parchment and make it into a a package about 4” x 8” and force the butter into a flat 4×8 sheet. Refrigerate the butter while you prepare the flour.
Flour the work surface and roll out the dough to an 8 ½ by 10” rectangle, about ½ inch thick. Trim it to have straight edges and square corners, using a wheel cutter or sharp knife.
Lay the butter on center of the dough and fold the two sides over top of it, Pinch to close the dough package. If the butter is too wide, cut a little off before sealing.
Roll the dough to an 8” x 10” rectangle. Square the corners and then fold the left half of the dough towards the center, and then fold the right half to meet in the center. This is called one “turn.” Wrap in plastic or a gallon freezer bag and refrigerate for one hour.
Repeat the rolling and folding and refrigerate in a bag for another hour. This is the second turn.
Repeat the rolling and folding and refrigerate in a bag for 6 hours or overnight. This is the third turn.

Third day

Borrowing an idea from Claire Saffitz’s recipe, we first created a proofing chamber. Fill a large frying pan with water and bring it to a boil, Put the pan on the bottom rack of your oven, and close the door. Don’t turn on the oven. The steam it generates is an ideal proofing environment for the croissants to rise in. You don’t have to use a lot of water. You want the steam, but the oven should soon be cool enough that the butter won’t melt.
Roll the dough out on a floured board to about 14 ½ “ by 17”. Chill as needed if the dough seems too warm. Chill on a baking sheet for 30 minutes. You will probably have to fold the dough in half to fit it on the sheet.
Roll the dough to around 14” x 16”. Square the corners using a drawing triangle if you have one. Cut the edges to be straight and as square as you make them.
Cut the dough in half lengthwise, so you have two 14” x 8” rectangles. Brush off any excess flour and lay one rectangle on top of the other. The rectangle may not exactly match, since the dough is quite flexible. Trim and roll them a bit until they match. Save scraps in a bowl to make Monkey Bread, or an additional croissant, later.

Forming the triangles

Now we are going to mark the dough so we can cut the triangles. Start at the top left edge, and using a ruler or tape measure, measure over 2” and make a little nick in the dough. Then measure from that 2” mark, every 4 inches over to the right side, making a nick at each point. On the bottom edge, measure over 4” and repeat nicking every 4” to the right side.
Using a ruler or straight edge, make a cut through both layers from the top 2” mark to the bottom corner.
Then make a cut from that 2” mark over to the first 4” mark on the bottom. That makes first (two) triangles. Put the little leftover scraps in the scrap bowl.
To make the rest of the triangles, cut a line from the bottom right of the first triangle up to the second 4” mark at the top. You now have made 4 more triangles. Repeat across the rest of the dough.
Lay out all of the single triangles (from both layers) and cut a 1” slit in the bottom center of each triangle. Pull it apart and fold one piece from the center to the left and the other from center to the right.
Roll each triangle from the base up to the point, and pull the ends towards each other to form a crescent. Place each rolled croissant on baking sheet covered with parchment, with the tip on the bottom.
Put the baking sheet into your proofing oven and let them rise until they have increased in size by about 50%. This will take 2 to 2 ½ hours. Be sure that the proofing oven is no longer warm, just steamy. It should be about 75˚F in there. If warmer, the butter will melt out. If it is still warm, cover the croissants with loose plastic wrap for half an hour or so, until the temperature falls.
When they have risen enough, remove the baking pan and frying pan from the oven and set it to 375˚ F, and set a rack in the center of the oven.
When the croissants have risen, make an egg wash by beating the large egg, perhaps with a tsp of water, and then brush the wash onto each croissant. In Saffitz’s recipe, she adds a 1 Tb of heavy cream to the beaten egg yolk. This would make the croissants a bit darker when they bake.
Place the baking sheet in the oven.
Bake the croissants for 20 minutes, rotate the pan, and then bake further until they are golden brown.
Remove the croissants when baked and move them to a wire rack to cool. Serve warm.

You can actually do this in 2 days by mixing the dough in the morning and chilling it for 6 hours. Then in the afternoon or evening, you add the butter and fold the dough and chill it 3 times. It is also possible to have croissants in the morning, if you get up 4 hours before you need them.

Since you will probably end up with croissants in the afternoon or evening, you can warm them again in the morning in a 350˚ F oven for about 5 minutes. Don’t use a microwave, as it will melt the butter inside your croissants.

* When you get some experience, you can indeed use grass-fed butter, but you will need to freeze the dough for 20 minutes before letting it rest between turns.

The Best Croissants

I got interested in really good croissants after having really exceptional ones on a recent cruise on Explora Journeys. They make croissants fresh daily, and given that there were about 750 passengers, they must make many hundreds of them every day. A really good croissant should be light and flakey with many layers of dough, as you can see on this cut photo.

So, I wondered where you can get croissants as good as those without paying for another cruise!

Costco

There is general scuttlebutt on social network sites that you can buy very good croissants at Costco. We found that you can buy a lot of them cheaply there, with a dozen of them for only $5.99, making them about 50 cents apiece.

Unfortunately, they are not flakey at all, and there are no discernable layers. They are just tubular bread. You can, of course, slice them open and make decent sandwiches with them, but they are really just bread, not real croissants.

Stop and Shop

Stop and Shop also sells packages of “croissants” with a half dozen costing $5.79, but despite their being more expensive than Costco is, they are just fairly tasteless tubular bread!

Trader Joe’s

Some Foodies praise the frozen croissants from Trader Joe’s. They offer 8 frozen 5” mini-croissants for $5.79. You bake them at 350˚F for 28 minutes. As you can see, they inflate a great deal during baking.

However, once they are baked and you try to cut one or bite into one, it deflates right away: it is full of air and is quite unlike an actual croissant. If you look at croissant recipes, you will find that during rising, the dough may increase by 50% in size, but does not generally rise much more during baking. The reason these croissants blow up like this is easily discerned from the ingredients. While ordinary croissants contain only, flour, milk, yeast, salt and sugar, these contain a host of additives: Dough conditioner (wheat gluten, wheat four, rapeseed lecithin, malted wheat flour, deactivated yeast, ascorbic acid, enzymes) whole milk powder, carob bean gum, expeller pressed soybean oil, egg yolks, xanthan gum, cultured butter (milk, natural flavor, bacterial culture). And the flour is enriched with vitamins: niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin and folic acid. So, they really aren’t croissants at all.

Trader Joe’s also offers full-sized chocolate croissants that you have to thaw and let rise before you can bake them. This probably takes a couple of hours. Since I was looking for croissants as a companion to my eggs, these wouldn’t do.

Kermit’s Bake Shop

So much for grocers. Now we look to real bakeries. Kermit’s in Redding (Georgetown), CT is a terrific bakery, offering breads, rolls and croissants, including croissant sandwiches. These were top notch! And even after keeping them in a bag overnight, they were really delicious!

The Sono Baking Company

And we can’t conclude with praising the Sono Baking Company, that makes wonderful croissants in their shops in Norwalk and Darien. Since Kermit’s was so good, we didn’t go down there: Kermit’s is closer for us, but you can’t go wrong there either.

So, skip the grocers and look for a local baker.

Or, you can make them yourself. More on this in the next article!

Wonder what Wonder Restaurants are?

You may have seen the “Sad Trombonist” ads for Wonder, which promises you can order from up to 20 restaurants at once to get what everyone wants. Wonder now has restaurant branches in New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Massachusetts, soon in New Hampshire and most recently in Connecticut.

But what the heck is it? Wonder offers the ability to order food from around 15 or so restaurants providing a variety of kinds of food and you get all of that food in a single order, pickup or delivery.

You will find a complete list of the “restaurants” they provide food from here. At any given location, they may offer some but not all of these choices, but usually around 15 of them. So you find the closest locations and place an order. In the more established locations, they offer free delivery, but in newer locations such as Connecticut, delivery hasn’t been established yet. But you can go pick up your food at any nearby location.

Connecticut Restaurants

In Connecticut, the restaurants are:

Alanza – Simple Italian, including meatballs, chicken Milanese, chicken Parmigiana, and some pasta dishes.

Alanza Pizza – A few kinds of pizza

The Mainstay (Marc Murphy) – Steaks and chicken

SriPraPhi – Thai cuisine.

Detroit Brick Pizza – a few other kinds of pizza

Bobby Flay Steak – Steaks, salmon, chicken, pork chop, branzino and salads.

Fred’s Meat and Bread – Burgers and Cheesesteak

Tejas – Texas barbecue: Brisket, pork, ribs, and smoked turkey BLT.

Walnut Lane by Jonathan Waxman – Salmon, linguini, short ribs, sea bass, shrimp, pastas.

Yasas by Michael Symon —Sandwiches, bowls, souvlaki, hummus, and so forth

Kin House – standard Chinese restaurant fare, but not as broad a selection as real Chinese restaurants.

Hanu Poke — Salmon, tune and shrimp poke bowls

Lime Salt – Mexican style bowls, quesadilla, burrito bowls.

Wing Trip – 6, 12, 24, 36 and 48 piece wings, classic or boneless, Buffalo sauce on the side.

Room for Dessert – Cheese cake, cookies, brownies, cupcakes and pudding.

Di Fara Pizza – Pepperoni and Sausage pizzas.

Bellies – This looks to be “kid food” like chicken tenders, kid burgers, mac and cheese.

Maydan– Middle Eastern Kebabs: chicken, shrimp, hummus.

Burger Baby – Burgers and hot dogs.

Royal Greens – Build your own bowls.

Streetbird – Chef Marcus Samuelson’s chicken sandwiches and tenders. Not much what you’d find at his actual Harlem restaurant.

Mr. D’s Fried Chicken – Mississipi style fried chicken. Buckets of 4 or 8 pieces as well as sandwiches. Plain or spicy. This menu has disappeared from Connecticut, however.

Ordering

So, we decided to try it out. Since they offered a significant discount in our first order, we decided to order a steak from Bobby Flay ($39). How could that go wrong? We installed the app on our phone and entered the order. We could choose the degree of doneness and whether or not we wanted steak sauce (no extra charge) and one side item. We chose the truffled mashed potatoes. The Flay restaurant had some pricey salads, but that seemed excessive. Other restaurants had some cheaper salads but we skipped them this time. They said it would be ready to pick up in 18 minutes.

It took quite a bit more than 18 minutes to get to 1300 Post Rd East in Westport. That’s nearly into Fairfield: a block or two beyond the Post Plaza that used to hold a big Barnes and Noble.

When we got to that address, we found a windowless concrete-walled building with a driveway to the entrance in the back. The façade was pretty nondescript and when we walked inside, we found a rack with a couple of order bags on it, one of which was ours. But no people and no view of the kitchen. How do they prepare all that food and why can’t we watch? There are certainly no actual restaurants here, just a terminal where you could place an order and a few leaflets describing the restaurants.

We found an article in Tasting Table that explains what’s actually going on here. Almost all of the food is actually prepared in a central commissary in New Jersey and shipped to the branches for final heating “using compact, bare-minimum, ventless kitchens.” In other words, probably steamers and microwaves.

And while these “restaurants” have names, and some attached to chefs, they don’t really exist at all. They are a marketing fantasy. Let’s call them fauxRests. All the food comes from the same kitchen! And when you boil it down, you have 3 pizza fauxRests, two steak fauxRests, 3 burger fauxRests, 3 chicken fauxRests, and four fauxRests that have succumbed to bowlification of their cuisine. And it’s not a Food Hall, like Eataly is.

How was the food?

Actually, the steak was not bad. The steak and the potatoes came in two metal containers, and the steak sauce in a small dish. The steak was prepared with some sauteed onions and was fairly tender, although certainly no longer warm or medium rare. Steaks keep on cooking if they are hot, so they need to allow for that. Bobby Flay is a proponent of the “reverse sear” method cooking steaks, where you sear the outside and then cook the steak, sometimes just in a warm oven. They clearly didn’t do that here.

I don’t think medium rare would in general survive a delivery trip, whether by them or by me. The truffled mashed potatoes had little bits of mushrooms along with the “truffle oil,” which was surely 2,4-dithiapentane (CH3-S-CH2-S-CH3), one of many compounds found in actual truffles along with a number of others. I did find one section of that steak that was still medium rare and it was quite good.

But if you look at the menu overall, it is really pretty simplistic with only a few interesting dishes here and there. And if you just want a burger, there are lots of places that probably are just as good and probably no more expensive. I think a lot of these dishes from burgers to nicer Italian dishes would be best prepared fresh on the spot. A warmed over burger won’t cut it.

Stamford

But, to find out for sure, we placed an order for several of those dishes in the Stamford branch of Wonder. This location is just a couple of blocks south of the Merritt Parkway on Long Ridge Rd, and located in a big block of stores with a lot of cars parked there. But, Wonder has a 5 minute pickup parking spot to go grab your food, so you may not have to hunt.

In scanning through the dishes, we found that none of the Chinese dishes were at all spicy. This means that the Hot Sour soup and General Tso’s chicken would not contain any of the usual peppers. However, in the SriPraPhai Thai section, we found that while most of the dishes were “mildly spicy,” the green curries were in fact spicy, so we ordered the Green Curry with Chicken. For comparison, we also ordered the Kin House version of General Tso’s Chicken, and for burger fans, we ordered the Bacon Stack double cheeseburger and Fred’s Fries from Fred’s Meat and Bread. For a salad, we ordered Kale, citrus and blue cheese salad from Bobby Flay.

The Stamford location is larger and considerably more welcoming than the Westport one. There are several tables where you can eat, and there is actually a counter with a staff member to help you. There is a window to the almost open kitchen so you can see what’s going on. When I was there: not a lot was going on.

Fred’s Bacon Stack Double Cheeseburger ($10.95 + $4.95)

Fred’s burger and fries came in two cardboard boxes, the burger further wrapped in aluminum foil. When we got it open, the temperature was 115˚ F, which is barely lukewarm. The fries were barely warm and lacked any crispness: they were soggy and floppy. All burgers at Wonder are cooked to Well Done, which means they aren’t particularly juicy: in fact, they are rather dry.

The burger itself was a bit more compressed than the menu picture, and the top patty was covered with several sweet pickles (rather than dill). You can order it with tomato and onion as well. It was spread with a somewhat sweet mayonnaise. Neither the burger nor the fries were particularly appetizing. If you want burgers and good fries, there is a Five Guys about two blocks north of Wonder. Go there instead.

SriPraPhai Green Curry Chicken ($17.95)

This was a great success. The chicken was fairly tender and the sauce was relatively spicy, in the American sense, nice but not overpowering. You have a choice of jasmine rice or no rice. It was white rice, still at 95˚F, but we didn’t detect much jasmine flavor. The chicken was mostly tender except for the largest piece. Overall, we enjoyed this one and ate nearly all of it.

Bobby Flay’s Citrus and Blue Cheese Salad($12.95)

You will find this salad both and Flay and under the Royal Greens salad fauxRest. It is said to consist of Kale, Romaine, orange, candied pecans, and blue cheese crumbles. Ours came with a sliced hardboiled egg as well. The promised dressing was couple of containers of Lime-chipotle dressing. For some reason, this salad comes with a small circle of pita bread, shown in the first picture.

While it was delivered with each component in a little piles in corners of the salad, we mixed them all together, and found it delicious. This salad is quite large and will easily feed to or three people.

Kin House General Tso’s Chicken ($16.95)

General Tso’s Chicken started out in Taiwan and got modified by Chinese chefs in New York. It is supposed to be crispy pieces of fried chicken with a sweet and spicy sauce. If you want a really good recipe for it, here is a video where Kenji Lopez-Alt makes it for you. The chefs at Wonder aren’t following it, because they leave out the Arbol peppers. The result is a sickly sweet sauce with little acidity and no spice.

They also provide tiny packets of soy sauce and some anemic sriracha, neither of which make much different. To quote Lopez-Alt this is General Tso-Tso’s chicken. It isn’t very good, as all the subtlety of the actual ingredients is lost. The chicken, as it came out of the sealed container was about 115˚F, so it had cooled way too much on the drive home or delivery. After a couple of tastes, I tossed it out.

Desserts

To complete our experiment, we felt we should order a dessert. It turns out that all the desserts in Room for Dessert are imported from other vendors, notably Junior’s Cheesecake and a number of dishes from Magnolia Bakery. There are a number of cookies as well, and we finally settled on Chocolatier Killer Brownie ($3.95).

This is a brownie with a hard crust and really soft center. Wonder describes it as “soft and moist with a crackle top.” I would say that the middle is soft and gooey and really rich. In fact, it was so rich it sat like lead in my stomach all evening! I think I’d get a cookie or a cupcake next time, or just skip ordering dessert, and have some ice cream from my freezer. Basically all of these items are going to come in plastic packages.

Conclusions

There are a few good dishes at Wonder if you choose carefully, but a lot of them deteriorate during take-out or delivery. Wonder also offers “free” delivery from a number of local restaurants, including breakfast items, but there is no way of knowing how well they would travel.

The dishes come sealed in containers with heavy tape that is difficult to cut, and hard to peel off without spilling the ingredients.

Overall, they are not a food hall and not a series of restaurants and a number of the recipes seemed to have been simplified or dumbed down like the Tso-Tso chicken. If I want Chinese food, I can get it from a very nice Chinese restaurant here in Wilton, CT. And if I want to spend $40 on a steak, I’ll go to a steak house and get it hot and the right doneness.

The Anthology restaurant aboard Explora ships

I had the privilege of a week long journey on the Explora I ship. Explora ships are a luxury branch of the MSC Cruise Line (Swiss/Italian). The ships are much smaller than the behemoth MSC ships, about 900 passengers, with spacious cabins, a 1.25:1 passenger/staff ratio, and all-inclusive pricing, meals, drinks and most activities. Of the six on-board restaurants, the Anthology restaurant is an exception, in that it’s 5 (or more) course meals have an up-charge of about $165 per person. This is still way less than major city dining, and since your travel agent may well have given you an on-board credit, the actual cost is much less, in my case $15. The style is fine Italian cuisine, curated by Head of Culinary, Franck Garanger.

My experience at Anthology was utterly top-notch, and I thought I’d share it with you.

When I arrived, a punch cocktail was already poured, sort of a lemon punch with gin. Bread soon arrived, along with some of the finest peppery Sicilian olive oil I’ve ever tasted, from a producer that has been in business since 1911.

The menu is divided into 5 sections with around 3 choices in each section. And note that some of the palate cleansing intermissions are included as well

After placing my order, they brought out the first amuse-bouche, a creamy, cheesy topping over a bit of diced tomatoes and other vegetables. And, a small bowl of lobster bisque with bits of several vegetables (but no lobster).

Soon, the first course arrived, shown at the top of the article, Osetra Royal caviar atop lobster and green apply, served with a sweet an sour vinaigrette. In some ways this beautiful presentation is one of things I’ll always remember from that evening.

This was soon followed by Canneloni di Capasanta, a scallop cannelloni with black truffles, herb salad and a Parmigiana Reggiano foam. I savored ever delicious bite.

The next course, Raviolo Allo Scampi was equally outstanding: Langoustine ravioli, San Marzano tomato consommé and sage butter.

Then it was time for a palate cleanser, a Granita alla Grappa. This is a premium grappa, transformed into an crystalline, icy sort of dessert. Not to be missed!

The main course was Wagyu beef with Amarone sauce, and, amazingly chard stuffed with porcini mushrooms and s truffle potato pallet. The beef was, as you would expect, very tender and juicy and the chard quite a delicious surprise. The potato was excellent as well.

Then, as another palette cleanser, a lemon-vanille grapefruit compote with a blood orange sorbet.

And, almost finally, the dessert course: Euforia di Ciocolatto, with dark chocolate leaves made with chocolate and tofu, covering a chocolate-tofu custard, with amaretto toasted almonds.

But, wait, there are the petit fours! From the dessert cart we picked out couple to finish with. What a spectacular evening!

The Anthology restaurants are on all of the growing line of Explora ships. I hope to run into you on one sometime soon!

Comparing Fried Chicken

Making Fried Chicken

To make good fried chicken, you need to start with small birds, weighing less than 3.5 lbs. The smaller pieces on these birds fry much better than those of the 4.5 lb behemoths, which seem to taste old and the breast meat more likely to dry out. Chicken is best when briefly marinated in salted buttermilk, for half an hour or so.

Most fried chicken emporiums cut the thighs to include the backbone ribs and then bread and fry it that way to make it look bigger. However, since there is no meat on those ribs, you just get more breading.

We visited all but two of these businesses (Popeye’s and Stop and Shop) twice to make sure we had a fair appraisal of their products.

KFC

The KFC Chicken Combo with 3 pieces of chicken, mashed potatoes, a biscuit and a soda is $12.39. The KFC original recipe chicken was warm, moist and flavorful. The flavor was enhanced by the “herbs and spices” in their breading, which while tasty, fell off the chicken onto the plate. The accompanying mashed potatoes and gravy were smooth and had an excellent flavor.

On a second visit, we just ordered a few chicken pieces and specified “extra crispy.” This was a much better choice, and the crust adhered to the chicken much better than the original recipe. The mashed potatoes were very good and the biscuit nondescript. Chicken grade: A. Oh, and one of their drinks is “lemonade.” It’s bright red and has a weird taste. Stick to the sodas.

Popeye’s

We ordered the Popeye’s 4-piece Chicken Combo (all dark meat) with mashed potatoes and Cajun gravy (very mildly spicy). The chicken crust was crisp the the chicken meat moist and juicy. It also comes with a nondescript biscuit, for $13.69. Absolutely perfect. Grade: A.

New Canaan Chicken

The website says that their business name is New Canaan Chicken and BBQ, and much of their menu features barbecue items. But they still have fried chicken.

You get 3 pieces for $12 or 4 pieces for $14. But if you want to have it delivered, the minimum order is $15, so we ordered the tomato-mozzarella salad (1 lb is enough for 2 or 3). We ordered all dark meat, which was OK, but didn’t have much chickeny taste. Some spices in the breading would have helped. They do not offer mashed potatoes, and the French fries were tough, dry and cold. The tomato-mozzarella salad was really quite good considering they had to use winter tomatoes, but it took me scissors, pliers, and a bottle opener to open the plastic salad container. They also offered “potato cones,” but not for delivery, so we didn’t get to try them the first time.

The second time, we ordered the 3-piece dinner, but added the potato cones, which turned out to be mashed potatoes mixed with a bit of flour, breaded and fried. They are better than the French fries, but not all that tasty. The coleslaw was quite liquid and had a somewhat unusual taste. This second time, we found the chicken crust had a nice snap, but the chicken itself was rather dry. Grade: B.

Greer’s Southern Table

Greer’s Southern Table is a full service restaurant at 7 River St in Norwalk. But don’t be confused by the address. The actual entrance is around the corner in an alley across from a parking garage. There is also ample street parking in front of this side entrance. You can also try to enter from River St, but no one will notice you, since the hospitality entrance is around the corner. Greer’s does have an extensive take-out menu, and you can eat in or take out as you wish.

They offer steaks, shrimp and grits, salmon, ribs, jambalaya, roast chicken and of course, their Buttermilk Fried Chicken. You get 4 pieces of chicken along with cornbread, and coleslaw, and one other side. Since they don’t offer mashed potatoes, we ordered the succotash, which frankly was better than chicken. The waitress said they had baked potatoes, but she was mistaken. The on-line menu does offer Marry Me Duck Fat Potato fingerlings, which might have been fun to try.

The waitress told me you get two pieces of dark meat and two breast pieces. In fact, I got one decent drumstick, one small, juicy boneless piece of breast meat and two enormous chicken breast pieces that may have come from a young pterodactyl. They were tough and dry and I didn’t eat them. This was a Sunday night, and the B team may have been in the kitchen. Our second experience was much better.

On this second visit, we ordered the $29 Buttermilk Fried chicken dinner with cornbread and coleslaw along with the Marry Me Duck Fat Potatoes as takeout. The potatoes had a garlic flavor and were a nice addition to the meal. The crust was crispy and the 3 thighs were juicy and flavorful. The one chicken breast was fairly moist as well. BUT, they left out the cornbread and coleslaw from my take-out bag. I tried to reach someone for a comment on this, but was not successful. The chicken was absolutely outstanding: Chicken grade: A+.

Village Market

The Village Market Is a beloved specialty grocer in Wilton, CT. They are noted for their fresh meats and vegetables, their baked goods, ready to eat meals and sushi. Their deli provides meats and cheeses as well as rotisserie chickens. There is also a hot food display case where they offer freshly made fried chicken. We bought a drumstick and a thigh for $6.78. They are sold by weight, so the heavy breading is not surprising. The drumstick and the thigh weighed about the same at around 4.3 oz.

And, if you’re lucky, they also have a tray of fresh mashed potatoes you can take home warm. If the warm potatoes are gone, there are usually some mashed potatoes in the cold takeout display case that you can heat up in a microwave in a minute or two. We found that adding a dab of butter and a little salt made them quite tasty.

We found the chicken crust very substantial but snappy, and the drumsticks were good, but the thighs tended to be dry in spots. Chicken grade: A-

They usually sell out of dark meat before 4pm, so plan your shopping accordingly.

Wegman’s

Wegman’s supermarkets just recently came to Connecticut, with a relatively new store in Norwalk. It has an enormous 2-level parking garage as well as some front parking, and is open daily from 7am to midnight. The staff is plentiful and helpful in helping you find things in what is quite a sizable store. And, there are plenty of staffed checkouts as well as a self-checkout section. We are particularly partial to Wegman’s fresh bottled orange juice: far better than Tropicana, and it is the only local store that carries cultured butter.

Wegman’s has a substantial prepared food section offering all sorts of sandwiches, seafood and chicken. You can pick up hot chicken wings to eat right away, but their fried chicken pieces are in the chilled food display. They suggest you heat up the chicken for about 30 minutes in a 350˚ F oven. We tried this with a 4-piece package, but the chicken had a dry, tough crust and dry meat. The large breast piece was around 12 oz, and quite dry.

While they offered a package of mashed potatoes that looked much like the one at Village Market, it was not the same thing at all. We tried heating one of the scoops of potatoes in the microwave, but the ball deflated into a gooey pile, because it also contained cream, butter, water, roasted garlic, citric acid, carrageenan (seaweed thickener), cornstarch, cultured sugar (whatever that is: it retards spoilage) and sodium pyrophosphate. The pile of goo didn’t taste much like potatoes, and the four scoops cost $8.

Chicken: D, Potatoes: F.

Stop and Shop

We hadn’t realized until today that Stop and Shop also offers fried chicken, right next to their rotisserie chickens. There were only a few packages at 11am, but they may add more later in the day.

We bought a package of 8 pieces of fried chicken for $7.98, about half the price of the other suppliers. Surprisingly, this chicken was very good. It was warm and juicy and had a nice, crispy crust. It was actually one of the best of the fried chickens we tried. Chicken grade: A.

Conclusions

It is no big surprise that the chicken emporiums: KFC and Popeye’s make some of the best fried chicken. That is all they do and they do it very well. Typically, chicken by the piece is around $2 at these places, while Greer’s is much more expensive. Stop and Shop was a big surprise, with their excellent chicken about a dollar a piece.

Toss out your Teflon pans!

In a recent NY Times article, Chef Andrew Zimmern points out the chefs never use Teflon pans, because they don’t need them. These non-stick pans are safe and work fine UNTIL the coating starts to disintegrate or is overheated. In both of those cases, you are then exposed to the poly-fluoro alkyls (PFAS) that have been found to be quite toxic “forever chemicals,” meaning that they don’t break down in the environment, but remain there more or less forever. And of course, the manufacture of Teflon spreads this problem quite broadly.

When my last Teflon pan started to crumble a few years ago, I tossed it and bought a ridged sort of Henkels pan from Costco that claimed to be nonstick. It wasn’t.

But here’s the thing. As Zimmern points out, your cast iron skillet really is pretty much non-stick and utterly durable. I have two such cast iron pans, about 10” and 12” diameters. They were my mother’s and she took good care of them. In fact, those pans are nearly centenarians!

Last weekend, I made my usual bacon and eggs using my 10-inch pan (probably an inside diameter of 9 ½ inches. The results were outstanding! These pictures show the 10-inch pan. We could cook 4 eggs in te 12-incher.

I cooked the bacon as usual, using medium to medium/high heat, and let to pan cool down a bit to medium/low. I like my eggs basted rather than over-easy, so I spooned the bacon fat to cook the tops.

And now, the important test. Did the eggs stick? Not at all. They slipped easily onto my spatula and onto my plate. Another time, I make an egg sandwich with a single egg using just a dab of butter, and it too cooked without sticking.

So forget your 1950s Teflon pan and just use your mom’s cast iron pan, or buy one yourself.

Cleanup? Swirl the pan in hot water, perhaps with a dish brush, and dry it with a paper towel.

Do you have to be careful of using soap? Not at all. These pans wear “like iron.” In fact, we once absent-mindedly ran one through the dishwasher, and with just a swish of oil to re-season it, it was good as new (or old).

Rich blueberry scones

This delicious scone variation produces a softer textured scone, almost like a little cake. They are more delicate, and you can eat them with a fork while hot, or by hand when cool. I got this recipe from my daughter-in-law, and I assure you these are a great hit with company!

2 ½ cups flour
¼ cup granulated sugar
¼ cup light brown sugar
1 Tb baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
¼ tsp salt
6 Tb butter, cut up
1 cup cold, heavy cream plus 2 Tablespoons
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
Turbinado or brown sugar for sprinkling
½ cup blueberries or other fruit

Preheat the oven to 400˚ F. Line a baking sheet with parchment.
Mix together the flour, sugars, baking powder and baking soda.

Cut in the cold butter with a pastry blender.
Mix the heavy cream, egg and vanilla and add to the flour. Mix until uniform.
Add the blueberries, cut up if very large. You can also press blueberries into each scone after you cut them up, and even vary which kind of berry you use. Or even chocolate chips!

Either pat the dough into a circle and cut into wedges as we described earlier, or scoop out dough using a large cookie scoop or ice cream scoop.

Brush each scone with cream and sprinkle with brown sugar.
Bake for 16-18 minutes until browned and a toothpick comes out clean.

Let cool a bit before serving. Serve with lots of butter.

Makes about 15 or 16. They keep well in an air-tight bag or container. Heat them in the microwave for 30 sec before serving the next day.

Golden Diner Pancakes revisited

A week or two ago, the New York Times published a recipe for Sam Yoo’s Golden Diner Pancakes, fabulous, tall pancakes served with a fruit compote and honey-butter syrup and topping. The recipe was quite a hit, based on how often it appeared on social media. You can stand in line for hours at the Golden Diner near the Manhattan Bridge to sample these pancakes, or you can make them yourself.

There are several unique things about Mr Yoo’s recipe (as scaled down for the Times by Genvieve Ko): the most important one is that you “pre-ferment” the flour, yeast and buttermilk for an hour or so, before mixing up the batter. The other thing is that in the Golden Diner kitchen, they cook each pancake in a 7-8 inch non-stick pan, so the pancakes are wider and taller than conventional pancakes.

When we first made them, we used a couple of skillets about the size Ko recommends, and since we were making for a couple of us, we had to make two, and keep them warm while we made two more. This worked pretty well, and they were delicious, but we had a lot of difficulty controlling the heat to keep the pancakes from browning too much.

But we noted that that pre-fermented batter also had developed a lot of gluten stretchiness and the batter was very cohesive. So, we wondered if you could make them on a griddle and cut out a couple of steps (the pans and the warming). This was a great success, and we report on the slightly revised recipe here.

Pancake batter

Pre-ferment ingredients

2 ¼ tsp active dry yeast
1 cup of all purpose flour
1 ¼ cups buttermilk
¼ cup water

Batter ingredients

1 cup all purpose flour
2 Tb sugar
¾ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
2 large eggs
¼ cup canola oil or other neutral oil

Maple-Honey Butter

¼ cup (1/2 stick) Kerrygold butter, softened
3 Tb honey
2 Tb pure maple syrup
¾ tsp fine salt

Maple-Honey Syrup

½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1/3 cup honey
1 ½ Tb maple syrup
1 tsp soy sauce
½ tsp fine salt

Berry Compote

16 oz mixed berries, such as blueberries and strawberries cut up
½ cup sugar
2 tsp cornstarch
1 lemon

First thing in the morning, combine 1 cup of flour and the yeast in a modest sized bowl. Put the buttermilk and water in a pitcher and warm it in the microwave until luke-warm. (This takes 4-50 seconds. We suggest trying 15 second steps until the milk mixture seems lukewarm. Don’t let it get over 100˚F (37˚ C) or you could kill the yeast. Mix the warm milk mixture with the flour and yeast until smooth and cover with plastic wrap and let it ferment for at least an hour. You can make the honey-butter, the syrup and the fruit compote while you are waiting.

Make the maple-honey butter, by mixing the honey, maple syrup and salt into the softened Kerrygold butter with a wooden spoon. We chose KerryGold over the original unsalted butter because it has a lot more flavor. Let butter mixture sit out until you need it, unless you are doing this long in advance. Then, chill it and warm it back up when serving.

To make the maple-honey syrup, combine the butter, honey, syrup, soy sauce and salt in a small saucepan, and heat with whisking until the butter melts completely. Add 1 ½ tsp water and keep whisking until emulsified. Leave the pan on the stove so you can rewarm it before serving.

To make the berry compote, mix all the ingredients in a large cast-iron skilled, and stir and mix while heating. Heat until some of the blueberries pop. Keep the berries in the pan and rewarm before serving.
Heat a griddle to 375˚F. Mix the remaining 1 cup of flour with the sugar, baking soda and salt in a small bowl. In a large bowl, mix the canola oil and the two eggs. Add the pre-ferment batter and mix. Mix in the flour/sugar mixture until no flour is unmixed. The batter may be lumpy and this is OK.
Heat the butter-honey syrup and the fruit compote.

Scoop the batter onto the hot griddle using a rounded half-cup measure. You can make them bigger if you want, but these will be about 6-7 inches each. You can make 4 at once, or 6 at once if you have a bigger griddle. Cook on each side for around 2 minutes.
To assemble, put one pancake on each of two (or three) plates, and pour the maple-honey syrup over them. Spread fruit compote on top of that, and then place the second pancake on top. Again, add the maple-honey syrup and the fruit compote, and top with a rounded spoon of the hone-butter. Serve at once.

These pancakes are a fabulous special breakfast. They may seem to take some time, but you can make the syrup, butter and fruit compote while the batter is fermenting.

So, while this is Yoo’s (and Ko’s) recipe, we make the following simplifications.

We warmed the buttermilk and water in a microwave instead of on the stove.
We used Kerrygold butter in the honey-butter and decreased the butter by half: you don’t need that much for 2 or 3 diners.
We increased the fruit compote to 16 oz. 14 didn’t seem like quite enough.
We cooked the pancakes on a griddle instead of pans.
Ko suggested using two spoons to make little oblong pats of butter to go on top, but this didn’t work as well with the Kerrygold, so we skipped it.

If you have batter left for another day, Kat Lieu says it will keep, refrigerated for a week. She also tried making the large pancakes in a big rice cooker with some success, but only one at a time.

And, if you have any of that honey-butter left, it is great on English muffins!