Category: Recipes

Chicken breasts with mushroom puree

The idea behind this recipe in Bon Appetit is a good one. Making mushroom puree to go with chicken breasts (which are less flavorful than thighs) is a good one. But this is another case where the recipe just doesn’t work out at all like the photo: a problem we have with most recipes in Bon Appetit.

The complete recipe is linked here, but amounts to browning bone-in chicken breasts and then cooking them in the oven at 350˚ F for about 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, you make the mushroom puree from

4 Tbsp. unsalted butter
8 oz. button mushrooms, halved
2 shallots, finely chopped
3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 sprig thyme
1 bay leaf
2 cups low-sodium chicken broth
1 cup heavy cream
2 Tbsp. crème fraiche
2 tsp. truffle oil (don’t do this!)
Kosher salt, freshly ground pepper

Just as you’d think, you sauté the mushrooms in the butter until they give up their water and
add the shallots and garlic, and saute them.
Then you add the chicken broth, thyme and bay and cook it down at least by half.
Next you add the cream and cook that down by half or more
Skip the truffle oil: it always has a chemical taste since it isn’t truffles at all but 2,4-dthiapentane, and tests pretty fake.
Remove the bay and thyme leaves and blend the whole thing until smooth..

Ideally the breasts are done now, and you put the puree on each plate and top with the sliced chicken breasts and a little sauteed Swiss chard.

I can tell you that the puree is really delicious and would work with any sort of chicken as a sauce.

But there are problems

The BonAppetit recipe doesn’t stop there. It has you sauté more shallots and garlic in butter and then boil down 2 more cups of chicken stock and strain it to make a sort of gravy. This is utterly superfluous, because it has the same flavors as the mushroom puree and runs off into the puree anyway.
Serving the chicken breast sliced but with the bone still included makes it very hard to eat the chicken. You should debone it before slicing and serving.
Cooking store-bought chicken breasts is not that simple since most of them are huge and hard to cook through without drying out.
The puree in the BA picture is very thick and creamy. Despite our boiling it down a lot more than they say, we never got it to be that thick. Perhaps they used some arrowroot as well?
Our puree had black flecks in it because most supermarket mushrooms have black gills. They call for “button mushrooms,” which may be whiter, but weren’t in our stores.

Our conclusion is that a simpler version of this recipe has real promise, but we’d not go through all those steps again.

Pancake ‘toad-in-the-hole’

Toad in the hole is a classic British dish, made up of sausages embedded in a Yorkshire pudding batter and baked. The name comes from the ends of the sausages peeking out of the baked batter. In the U.S., the name has been used to describe eggs cooked inside bread or toast as well as sausages. That version is sometimes called “egg with a hat” to describe the little circle of bread you cut out for the egg. In fact, the beavers at Myrecipes.com found that there are 66 different names for this dish.

So, with that in mind, we decided to make one more. Suppose you are making pancakes, as we often do on Sundays. Why not add an egg into those pancakes and make a Pancake Toad in the Hole?

So to try this, we made buttermilk pancakes using this heirloom family recipe (which is much like everyone else’s.)

Then we cooked one side of a pancake with a little melted butter on the griddle for flavor, and then turned out over.

About 1 minute later, we used a biscuit cutter to cut a hole on the pancake. The pancake will still be doughy in the middle, but you can cook that little “hat” while you make the main event.

Break an egg into a cup and pour it into the hole you just cut.

Let the pancake/egg cook until the egg is cloudy, and then flip it. This may take two spatulas (spatulae?) to keep the uncooked egg from weeping out. Cook the egg for 30 seconds or more and flip the pancake back over. Serve the “Pancake toad” right away with the little hat alongside.

This sweet/savory combination could have syrup added, or your could just eat it the way it is, using the pancake to sop up the egg.

Pancake benedict?

One variation we tried was to cook a small slice of ham in a little butter, and then put it in the hole of a pancake, and then add the egg. Again, cook until the egg is cloudy, flip it, cook 30 seconds, flip it back and serve.

In this case, syrup might be overkill. We suppose you might add hollandaise instead, but that might be ever more overkill.

You could also add a slice of sausage, but make sure it is a thin slice, or there may not be room for the egg.

A delicious breakfast addition to impress your family and friends!

Easy gazpacho, two ways

There isn’t much to making gazpacho: it’s a cold soup made from tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and anything else in your garden you might want to try. Now that there are really flavorful tomatoes at peak ripeness, you can chop up some gazpacho in your blender just a few minutes. If you don’t have a garden bursting with tomatoes, try getting some from a farm stand or farmer’s market to get the best flavor. Supermarket tomatoes are bred for traveling ability, not flavor, so you probably want to avoid those.

The first tomatoes that come in most gardens are the cherry-sized ones, and those are usually the sweetest as well. Use those along with a few bigger tomatoes for the best result.

We call for about 2 lb of tomatoes, but depending on the number of guests, you can increase or decrease this. Just make sure you fill your blender with all the veggies. You can always make more, and combine them in a bowl to make sure the flavors are uniform.

2 lb tomatoes, quartered. (Leave the cherry-sized whole)
1-2 cucumbers, depending on size, peeled
½ bell pepper (red, orange or green) cut up
1 clove garlic, smushed to remove the skin
2 Tb red wine vinegar or sherry wine vinegar
½ cup water
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil, extra for garnish
Kosher salt
Pepper

Put all the above ingredients into a blender and blitz until uniform. This should give you a nice, chunky soup, which will still have bits of peel and seeds among the chunks.
To make a smoother gazpacho, run the soup through a food mill to filter out the seeds and skins. The flavor will be the same, but the mouth feel will be less chunky.

Serving

Chill the soup for an hour or so in the blender or in a couple of quart mason jars.

½ loaf French or other country bread, cut into croutons
Basil, cut into strips (uses scissors or a knife)
More extra virgin olive oil

Put a little regular olive oil into a cast iron pan and brown the croutons briefly.
Pour the soup into serving bowls, and add a few toasted croutons to each bowl, and garnish with a few strips of basil and a splash of extra-virgin olive oil.

Serve at once.

Strawberry almond torte

This is a refreshing summer dessert that can serve 10 or so people, and while it looks rather elaborate, it really is just strawberries in whipped cream layered between meringues and iced with a buttercream frosting mixed with almond crunch. The only time-consuming part is making the meringues, and most of the time is waiting for them to bake. This recipe is adapted from one we found in the Sunday NY Times many years ago.

Torte layers

5 egg whites at room temperature- twice
1/8 tsp cream of tartar – twice
1 cup blanched almonds, finely ground – twice
1 cup confectioners’ sugar – twice
Baking parchment

Blanched almonds

“Blanched almonds” means almonds with the skins removed. You can buy them that way or you can remove them yourself, a bit more cheaply. For this entire recipe, we used 2 6-oz bags of whole almonds, which amount to about 2 ½ cups.

To blanch the almonds, bring a saucepan of water to a boil and drop in all the almonds. Let them boil for just one minute (no longer!) and then drain them in a strainer and cool them with running water. You will find that you can pop the skins off the almonds by pinching the thick end of the almond. The almond should pop right out of the skin. You can even do two or three at a time.

When the almonds are cool, chop them up in a food processor as fine as you can. Reserve ½ cup for the almond crunch below, and use the remaining chopped almonds to make the torte layers.

Making the torte layers

In this recipe, we will make 4 layers at a time and then repeat to end up with 8 layers.

Preheat the oven to 350˚ F.
Put the 5 egg whites in a mixer bowl with the 1/8 tsp of cream of tartar and beat until the egg whites are stiff and dry. Reserve 4 egg yolks (once) to use in the frosting below.
Fold in 1 cup of confectioners’ sugar and 1 cup of the chopped almonds.
Cut 4 squares of baking parchment to 8” x 8”. The roll of Reynolds parchment is only 15” wide, so our “squares” were actually 8” x 7.5”. Place the parchment squares on two cookie sheets and divide the meringue mixture equally among them.
Spread the meringue to near the edges of the squares.
Bake for 16 minutes or more. You want the meringues to be well browned. We found that varied a bit with the thickness of the meringue but was closer to 18 minutes.
Immediately after removing the meringues from the oven, use a spatula to flip them over onto a wooden counter, and use a small spreading spatula to peel the parchment off the meringues. You need to do this right away while the meringues are warm. Don’t worry if there are some small holes.
Stack the meringues on a plate, separated by wax paper.
Repeat to make 4 more meringue layers.

Almond crunch

½ cup blanched almonds
½ cup sugar
Place the almonds (chopped or not) in a small iron skilled along with the sugar.
Heat until the sugar melts and turns golden brown. Don’t let it burn.
Pour the hot sugar mixture into a buttered pan and allow it to cool.
When cool, put the solid sugar-almond mass in a food processor and grind it to a powder.
Set aside to use in the frosting.

Filling

1 quart strawberries
Sugar
1 tsp unflavored gelatin
1 ½ Tb cold water
1 ½ cups heavy cream
½ cup sliced or slivered almonds.

Reserve 4 large strawberries for decoration.
Slice the berries, sprinkle with sugar and set aside.
Mix the water and gelatin in a small pan, and heat until the gelatin dissolves.
Beat the cream in a mixer until it is fairly firm.
Then dribble in the gelatin solution and mix through.
Fold in the sliced berries

Frosting

½ cup sugar
½ cup water
4 egg yolks, beaten in a mixer bowl
½ lb softened sweet butter

Put the sugar and water in a saucepan and heat until it is dissolved.
Continue heating at a slow boil until the solution reaches 238˚ F, the “soft ball” stage.
Put the egg yolks in a mixer, and beat them and then slowly add the syrup to the yolks while continuing to beat.
Beat until cool
Gradually beat in the butter.
Stir in the powdered almond crunch and transfer the mixture to a small bowl and refrigerate until of a spreading consistency.

Assembly

Place one of the better meringue layers on a cake cardboard or plate.
Spread with around one-seventh of the strawberry-cream mixture.
Continue adding layers and spreading cream and top with the last meringue layer.
Chill the layers for an hour.
Take the layers out of the fridge, place on a cake turntable and, using a sharp knife, cut off any uneven pieces of meringue or berries.
Spread the frosting along the top and then along the sides. If the berry mixture begins to ooze out, return the layers to the refrigerator, and centime later.
Decorate the sides with the slivered or slice almonds and top the torte with large pieces of strawberries.
Chill for a few hours and serve cool to your adoring fans.

We recommend slicing with a sharp knife so that the layers are distinct.

Chicken with forty cloves of garlic

Richard Olney was an American Painter who moved to France in 1951, and became enamored of French food while in Paris. He moved to a farmhouse in Provence, which he essential built and rebuilt by hand and wrote some of the seminal cookbooks on French country cooking. His French Menu Cookbook was his first big success, and he bought an expensive French stove with some of the proceeds. His books stress using local ingredients and discuss pairing each recipe with wines.

In one of the most fascinating intersection of chefs as cookbook authors, Luke Barr’s book Provence, 1970 describes a year when Julia Child, Simone (Simca) Beck, MFK Fisher, James Beard, cookbook editor Judith Jones and Richard Olney all visited together in Provence, cooking, sharing ideas and changing the course of food in America.

This recipe for Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic is Olney’s and is a jumping off place for all sorts of variations. Writing in the New York Times, Dorie Greenspan describes this dish as a “no-matter-what recipe” that young cooks can count on to always work. She also proposes some interesting variations, noting that you can add wine, more kinds of vegetables among other things.

The essence of Olney’s recipe is chicken, herbs, and four heads of garlic cloves, all cooked together in a casserole until only a gentle hint of garlic flavor remains. We have described the details of how garlic flavor develops and noted that you get very little of that flavor if you don’t cut into each clove. While Olney and other chefs may not have known the botany of garlic, chefs in general knew the properties of garlic and how to obtain them, by mincing the clove or, as this recipe does, simply using them cloves whole.

The recipe calls for a whole chicken or four drumsticks and thighs. Comments on Greenspan’s article suggest you remove the chicken skin, since it doesn’t become crisp in this recipe and would just hang around looking floppy.

In the accompanying photos, we made only half a recipe, with two chicken legs and used only 2 heads of garlic.

1 whole chicken, cut up, or 4 chicken legs cut into thighs and drumsticks, skin removed.
2/3 cup olive oil
4 heads of garlic, cloves separated but unpeeled. Discard any loose hulls.
Salt, pepper
1 tsp mixed dry herbs (thyme, oregano, savory)
1 large bouquet garni, large branch celery, parsley, bay leaf, leek grrens and lovage if available, tied with string.
Flour and water for dough

Cut up the chicken, remove the skin and place the pieces in a casserole.
Add the olive oil, salt and pepper, and the herbs, chopped if fresh, and mix it all together with your hands.
Place the bouquet garni in the center of the chicken pieces, and push the garlic cloves all around between the chicken pieces.
Put about 2-3 cups of flour in a bowl and add water and a few drops of olive oil to make a dough.
Roll out the dough large enough to cover and seal the casserole.

Moisten the rim of the casserole and press the dough all around the rim.
Cover the casserole and bake it at 350˚ F for 1-3/4 hours.
Remove the lid.
Some suggest serving the sealed casserole and breaking through the dough seal at the table. Actually, you almost lift it off whole. It isn’t really to be eaten.

Serve with crusty French bread, grilled or toasted if you prefer. Take a couple of garlic cloves with each serving and squeeze them with a fork to get the soft, cooked garlic out to spread on the bread. You will find it delicious, slightly sweet and not garlicky at all!

Garlic Fries: great even outside the ballpark

We haven’t made garlic fries in some years, so we looked at published recipes to see what people are doing. As far as we could tell, they all got it wrong! All the recipes we found suggested mincing the garlic and the sauteing it to “reduce the garlic flavor.” Duh! Why no just use less garlic? Those recipes also suggest pouring the cooking oil over the fries along with the dis-flavored garlic, making a greasy mess.

The problem is that cooking the garlic can easily make it nearly tasteless. You could throw on some rice instead! And further, since garlic has a lot of sugar in it, it is very easy to burn it!

As we noted in our previous article, garlic develops its flavor when you cut it up, and loses its flavor when heated.

So, we went back to our own recipe from years ago:

5-6 cloves of garlic
4-6 sprigs of Italian parsley
2-3 Tb Diamond Kosher salt
French fries (frozen ones are OK)

Mince the garlic to small pieces and then chop it with the parsley.
Chop both into the pile of salt until well mixed.
Toss over freshly made French fries and mix well. Let any excess fall off when you move them to a serving dish.

Serve at once.

Not much trouble here, and they go as well with hamburgers as they do with baseball. Note that we chose Diamond Kosher salt of Morton’s, because the salt crystals are smaller. And while we have a wooden counter top, we chose to chop this up on a cutting board, making cleanup easier.

To get the garlic smell off your hands, rub them with salt before washing them.

All about garlic

The garlic bulb is a really unusual plant. Each clove in the garlic head is actually a single swollen leaf, according to Harold McGee. Garlic’s strong taste and smell is actually a protection the plant evolved: when an animal bites into it, the strong taste is released, repelling the animal.

A whole garlic clove has only a mild taste and aroma, but when you cut into it, the enzyme alliinase is released from one part of the bulb and reacts with the compound alliin (a derivative a the amino acid cysteine) in another part of the bulb to form allicin, which has the characteristic garlic aroma and taste. Note that the plant evolved this defense to keep away animals, and garlic is actually quite toxic to dogs and cats: you should avoid letting any get into their food.

The alliinase enzyme is quite sensitive to temperature. Students of Professor John Milner at Penn State carried out a simple experiment where they placed garlic cloves in a microwave oven for one minute. While the garlic cloves appeared unchanged, analysis showed that the enzyme had completely disappeared after heating. They noted that other types of heating are sure to give the same results.

So this means that you need to chop the garlic before heating or cooking it, and that you should let the chopped garlic stand for a few minutes before adding it to the food you are preparing, to allow time for the enzyme to work to develop the flavor.

Garlic has much more sugar in it (fructose) than onions do, and is thus more prone to burning. Cook it at low temperatures when sautéing it, or add it directly to a liquid.

These two facts explain why dishes like Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic are so mild. The garlic cloves are never cut up: and the alliinase is destroyed by heating soon after the cloves are added to the pot.

Always buy fresh heads of garlic. Avoid the ones in little boxes, as they may be very old. You should also avoid bottled peeled garlic cloves in oil, as they are prone to develop botulism, according to McGee. And do not refrigerate garlic, which also will reduce the flavor.

When peeling garlic, you can use the simple rubber garlic peeler tube shown above, or you can use Jacques Pepin’s technique, and just cut a small slice from the root end of the clove. This will free the skin and it will just about come apart in your hand. You can also just crush the garlic and pick out the peel from the rubble.

And how do you get that garlicky smell off your hands? Rub them with salt and then wash as usual.

See also

Beer batter shrimp

You can make these nice, puffy beer-battered shrimp with very little effort. You just need to let the batter sit for 30-45 minutes before you start dipping and frying the shrimp. We found that the best frying temperature for the shrimp was about 350˚ F. They still take only minutes to brown.

If you are using a stand mixer, you might find that it can’t beat a single egg white. We usually put in two so the beaters will catch the whites, and then only use about half of the beaten whites.

1 lb shrimp, peeled and deveined.
½ cup flour
Dash of salt
1 beaten egg
1 Tb melted butter
½ cup beer
1 egg white, beaten
About 3-4 cups canola oil
Lemon wedges
Seafood sauce of your choice

Folding egg whites into batter

Mix the flour and salt and stir in the butter and egg.
Add the beer gradually, stirring only until smooth.
Let the batter stand in a warm place for 30-45 minutes
Preheat the oil to 350˚ F.
Beat the egg white to stiff peaks.
Fold the egg white into the batter.
Dip the shrimp into the batter and drop directly into the hot oil. Cook only 5-6 at a time to keep the oil from cooling.
Serve with French fries, lemon wedges and cocktail sauce.

French fries

Since you have the hot oil, why not make some French fries, too? Cut about 1 or potatoes per person into strips and soak in cold water for an hour, and then drain them.

Turn the oil temperature up to 375˚ F. Dry the fries, and cook them in a couple of batches. Serve at once.

Shrimp and fries, with corn

Buttermilk brined roast chicken

If you like juicy roast chicken, you will love this recipe. It produces the juiciest, tenderest chicken we’ve ever tried. All you have to do is brine the chicken in salted buttermilk overnight or for at least 12 hours. You will love the results! This recipe is based on one in the New York Times, originally by Samin Nosrat, and it is well worth the little extra effort.

You can apply this recipe to smaller chickens (3.4-4.5 lbs), roasting chicken (7 lbs or more) or smaller turkeys (say 16 lbs). The only limiting factor is a plastic bag nig enough to hold the buttermilk without leaking in your fridge.

For the two of us, we often roast a chicken for dinner, eating the legs and saving the chicken breasts for sandwiches. And what moist sandwiches this recipe makes!

One moderate chicken (around 4lbs)
Around 2-3 cups buttermilk
Kosher salt

To prepare the chicken,

Cut off the wing tips with shears and remove any giblet packages. Run the chicken with kosher salt and let it sit for 30 minutes or so.
Put the chicken in a zip lock plastic bag and add the buttermilk: enough to pretty much cover the chicken.
Stir in 2 Tb kosher salt and mix the liquid a bit.
Then seal the bag and put it in an outer plastic bag to avoid leaks, and refrigerate overnight.
Take the chicken out of the fridge about an hour before roasting.
Preheat the oven to 425 ˚ F. Scrape excess buttermilk off the chicken and place it on a rack in a cast iron pan. Tie the legs together with twine.
Roast for 20 minutes with the legs pointed toward a rear corner (which is a hot spot), or using the Convection Bake setting at 400˚ F.
After that 20 minutes, reduce the heat to 400 (or 375 if convection). Rotate the pan to point towards the other back corner. The skin should be starting to brown.

If the skin darkens too much, put a foil tent over the bird.
Continue to roast until a meat thermometer registers about 160˚ F, which will probably take no more than 30 more minutes, but be careful not to overcook it. Remove the chicken and let it rest for 10 minutes, during which the temperature will rise a bit more.
Serve at once. It will be really moist and juicy because of the brining. Enjoy it!

The breast meat from this juicy chicken makes absolutely terrific chicken sandwiches. You will note that they aren’t dry and don’t shred, but cut easily into slices. These sandwiches are the second payoff for this delicious recipe!

Can you slide eggs around in a non-stick pan?

There have been a lot of commercials for various cheesy and quality pans that show off how you can slide the eggs around on the non-stick surface. But they never answer the question: why the heck would you do this? We have a good quality Misen nonstick pan, so we decided to try this silly experiment. We got out Misen pan over a year ago and really like it. We use it quite frequently: at least once a week and it has performed well for us. But we never tried to cook an egg without any butter or bacon drippings before!

So, we set our pan over medium-low heat on our gas stove, and broke an egg into a cup and slipped it into the pan. After it started to solidify, we tried to slide it around with wrist motion. That wasn’t enough, but after we briefly slipped a spatula under the egg, we could slide it around promiscuously!

Of course, we had to wait until the white was mostly cooked, but we could then easily pour the egg out of the pan and onto a plate. Of course, this really isn’t the best way to cook an egg: you would normally baste it was bacon drippings or butter, or flip the egg over, but we got it cooked.

Then we melted a little unsalted butter in the pan and cooked another egg. We had to cook it at a slightly lower temperature to avoid burning the butter, so it took a little longer. We had to dislodge it slightly with a spatula, but then it slid around in the bit of butter just as gleefully. And we could slip that egg onto a plate just as easily.

Results

So what are the results? The egg cooked in the dry pan didn’t have much flavor, since fat carries the flavor. The one cooked in butter tasted a lot better, but both were pretty tough, because they were only cooked on the one side. We actually took two butter fried eggs, put them back in the pan, flipped them and cooked them for maybe 15 seconds. Then we put them between bread and made nice sandwiches. We added a little mayo for moisture, and some onion salt for flavor.

They weren’t bad, but would have been better flipped sooner, or basted in a bit of butter. But the dry-cooked one just wasn’t very good.

Overall, whole thing is silly.