arepa special

When I was backpacking in Europe over winter break, I crashed with friends and friends of friends to save money. By chance I stayed with a Columbian guy named Fernando in Amsterdam, and the night I arrived he taught me how to make arepas from scratch.

There was no real measuring involved, just four ingredients: corn/masa flour, butter, salt, and hot water. And a lot of kneading. I enjoyed the experience a lot, so for Latin Quarter specials I naturally thought I would try again, this time on my own.

Without any native Columbian experience I consulted some recipes online for measurements, and settled on: roughly 2 cups masa/corn flour, 2 tablespoons melted butter, 2 big pinches of salt, and 2 cups hot water. Mixed everything together and kneaded the dough hard, then pinched off dollops and patted them flat between the palms, then rounded the edges. The dough rounds were then placed on a flat top griddle, flipped every few minutes until both sides were browned. I was really afraid that I made the dough wrong, since the rounds felt very fragile, like they would break apart. Thank goodness it worked out.

For the filling I used leftover chorizo, shredded chicken breast, mozzarella and black beans. Heated/melted everything together.

For a sauce I wanted to make chimichurri, because the last time I had chimichurri sauce it was so delicious I knew I had to make it as soon as I got a chance.

I made a modified version of this recipe: I used equal parts parsley and cilantro (about a fistful of each), and also added some dried oregano and sugar. I also made the sauce an emulsified one (dripped in vinegar with all of the rest of the ingredients in the food processor spinning). The sauce came out tasting stronger (in the mustard sense of strong) than I remembered - maybe it had to do with the emulsion, or maybe just because it wasn't accompanied by a well-marbled steak. I had Chef Morse taste it though, and he gave the OK, which was a huge relief.



To serve, I cut each arepa open, coated the insides with chimichurri sauce, then stuffed it with filling and garnished with diced tomatoes. The combination worked really well together. My only complaint was that the arepas were a lot thinner then they should have been - ideally the outside would be crispy and insides soft. Mine were so thin they didn't have an inside, they were just like crispy flats.



In the end I sold out of all the arepas I made. There was one guy who ordered two at once, and I remember seeing him sitting down to eat them. It was a strange and kind of exciting feeling, to watch someone buy and enjoy something you made. Definitely different than feeding someone you know, but a satisfying feeling nonetheless.

chinese chicken porridge

Growing up my mom would always make what she called "cantonese porridge" (otherwise known as congee, jook, or 廣東稀飯) when I was sick. It became my equivalent of chicken noodle soup, so whenever I'm sick I try to drag myself out of bed to make a big pot of it.

Before culinary school this involved buying a rotisserie chicken, cutting it up and simmering it in a pot of water with rice thrown in. My culinary school experience has upgraded that process a bit, and recently I made some of the best porridge I've ever tasted, so I wanted to share.

Ingredients:
whole roasted chicken (half the meat cut off for other dishes)
scallions (white and green parts separated)
shittake mushroom stems
ginger, sliced
garlic cloves
cooked rice (~4 cups)
half a napa cabbage, diced
salt & pepper

First I heated about a tablespoon of oil in a stockpot, and used it to sautee the aromatics (scallion stems, mushroom stems, ginger slices, and garlic cloves). I just used what I happened to have lying around - nothing is really essential but I do to prefer to have ginger since the Chinese claim it drives away colds.

After about a minute of sauteeing, I fill the stockpot about 2/3 of the way, enough to submerge the chicken carcass. I put the lid on and brought the mixture to a boil, then lowered the heat down to a simmer.

Then after about 30-45 minutes (the vegetables can't simmer beyond that because they'll disintegrate), I scoop the chicken carcass and the aromatics out (except the ginger), then dump the rice and cabbage in. I also pick the meat off of the carcass and return the meat bits to the pot. Then I let the mixture simmer more.

After another 30 minutes the rice should be sufficiently mushy to be considered porridge. Depending on what consistency you like your porridge, you may have to add more water and/or let it simmer more.

At this point I turn off the heat and mix in chopped scallion (the green parts). Serve yourself a bowl and eat it while it's hot!

kale salad (that's surprisingly delicious)

My garde manger team consists of 7 people. First up for us, compound salads. In one 3-hour class period we had to turn out two compound salads. So we split up into two teams. My team did a kale salad, recipe here (courtesy of Chrissy).

The salad consisted of kale, strips of purple cabbage and granny smith apples, pancetta bits, candied pecans, shaved parmesean (we didn't have pecorino) and chive. I was responsible for the pecans, which involved a different candying method than what I did for PCR salad station last semester. Back then I had to candy walnuts, and that involved tossing walnuts in a butter/brown sugar/honey mixture. This time I wet the pecans, then tossed it in a confectioner's sugar mixture. The coating on this was a lot lighter - guess it really depends on what you like.



I also grated the parmesean with a microplane grater - which made it very light and fluffy. Reminded someone of dandruff when sprinkled... but um, it tasted like heaven.



The originally involved pancetta grease, but the grease became little globules of fat and broke up the dressing (might have had to do with the caper brine), so Jason made an orange vinaigrette.

To fancy it up I decorated the bowl with kale and cabbage leaves:



Only too late did I realize that the salad we made wasn't actually a compound salad because it had greens. It's okay though, the other half of the team made a grain and bean salad from the CIA Garde Manger book, which legitimized us.



However, despite being a faux pas, the kale salad tasted great. I was worried about the kale being bitter and too hard in texture (considered blanching it), but the vinaigrette really softened it up and took out the bitterness. Consider making it the next time you want a crunchy (think cole slaw) type salad that's diverse in flavor and extra good for you. People just don't eat kale enough and this salad could change things.

garde manger preview

Garde Manger, French for "keep to eat", commonly refers to the cold kitchen (salads, cold appetizers). In larger operations it involves buffet and elaborate presentation pieces. In my interpretation, garde manger also involves recycling leftovers, keeping scraps and recombining them into something different (terrines seem to be a perfect example).

Chef Oakley has us divided into stations: pâté/terrines, sausages, open-face sandwiches and compound salads. But before setting us to work he demo-ed most of what we would be doing. First up, meat terrine:



It literally contains everything: cold cuts, ground meat, pork loin, dried fruits, madeira wine (brandy would be even better). It's encased in a layer of dough so it's almost like a pie. After being baked and cooled, gelatin is injected, which fills all of the gaps. Here's the finished product, cut into slices.

Chef also made vegetable terrine with marinated/grilled vegetables. Everything was layered and compacted, just like meat terrine. The gelatin, however, was sprinkled as a powder between the layers - since the vegetables Chef used produce water when baked, he said that would activate/bloom the gelatin.


Chef also made hot dog from scratch, which didn't taste like the industrial hot dogs because it lacked that characteristic springy/chewiness. It was more like the original frankfurters, fattier/richer tasting, more like actual meat. Sadly, I kind of missed the industrial hot dog taste.



Lastly Chef demo-ed a compound salad, which is a salad without greens. He made the best cous cous I have ever tasted - flavored with orange zest and cinnamon, fluffy (having been lightly raked with a fork after cooking), and combined with diced cucumbers and toasted almonds.



Demos, although helpful, mostly had us standing around while Chef worked. Can't wait to get hands on!

puff pastry

Chef Mark's Advanced Baking & Pastry class is very structured, not unlike the beginning pastry experience I had with him first semester. Every one or two weeks we explore a different topic: first pâte à choux (which went undocumented for lack of camera), then puff pastry.

It doesn't surprise me that puff pastry is one of the hardest things to get right - puff pastry was always one of my favorites because the puff just seemed so magical. And previous I had been limited only to the commercially-made kind in the freezer section, which, as I learned, is made with shortening and contains none of the real butter taste of real puff pastry.

Making the dough is similar to making the croissant/danish dough from first semester. There's vocabulary that's particular to puff pastry, however. There's the dough part (mostly flour, some butter) called détrempe, and there's the butter part (mostly butter, some flour) called beurrage, and the combination for the finished dough package is called a paton. Here's me making détrempe and looking very happy because I love kneading things:



Here's chef sandwiching the beurrage between the détrempe.



After that the edges are sealed to lock in the butter (there's a number of ways to do this but the sandwich method is the simplest).



This is sheeted long and folded in four for a total of four times (with a half hour rest between each sheeting and folding). Which means that by the time it's done, the puff pastry dough has 512 layers (2 original layers in the sandwich x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4). Butter between each of those layers means that when the dough is baked, butter melts and generate steam (due to high heat, which is why puff has to be baked at over 400 degrees), which leavens the dough naturally and allows it to puff so much.



Chef taught us to many different shapes to make with our dough. He also made a pithivier cake, which is just like the French gallette des rois (king cake) I had in Paris.



Some of the shapes Marianne and I ended up making were in honor of Valentine's Day. Others were just because I liked them (palmiers, which involve puff pastry dough coated with sugar on both sides, the folded up and cut into thin sections). I added cinnamon to the sugar though, as a variation.



The finished product was a little flat. Our beurrage had been too soft, as it oozed out of different spots each time we sheeted the dough. Chef was right, puff is one of the hardest things to make.