sous vide: fennel (and banana!)

After proteins we switched to cooking vegetables and fruits. My group did fennel, artichoke, strawberries and bananas.

For fennel, I cut the bulb into sections and vacuum packed them with some herbs/seasonings: tarragon, thyme, bay leaf, star anise, caraway seeds.



The herbs were wrapped in plastic before being vacuum-packed, otherwise they would flavor the fennel too strongly. The package was cooked at 185F for 40 minutes.



After the fennel was cooked, I seared it with some butter, salt and pepper. It still tasted bland so I squeezed some lemon juice on it and sprinkled some cayenne pepper and then it tasted amazing. I could barely get a picture before all of the fennel disappeared.



After that we did bananas, and I cooked the caramel because I want to keep getting better at pastry things such as caramel. This was sugar and glucose syrup, with the addition of lemon and orange zest after the heat was turned off.



The zests were picked out before the caramel was added to the bananas. It was funny, the zests became like candied lemon and orange, tasty but a little bitter. Also funny was that the caramel cooled and hardened after they were poured on the bananas, and I was actually able to slide the banana logs out from the caramel, resulting in the caramel being one hard mass full of banana log-shaped curves. I guess this is the beginning to making caramel sculpture pieces...?



The caramel-covered bananas were cooked at 149F for 20 minutes. When they came out they were really soft, and the caramel had liquified. I think the next step would be to soak them in alcohol and set them on fire, or to cover them in sugar and brulee them. We just ate them.

food & fitness: quickbreads

Besides Sous Vide Cooking (and later on in the semester, Modern Sauces), the other cooking-related class I'm taking is called Food & Fitness. I was hoping to learn more about culinary nutrition than I did in the required nutrition class (that turned out much more science-y than I'd hoped). And so far, I have learned a lot about healthful cooking and what not to eat.

Sadly, I'm not big on avoidance. I'd rather eat less and exercise more than keep a list of what I shouldn't be eating and filter all of my available food options through that no-no list. Because that method requires more work/thinking, and because I believe that it also wears down your available willpower, which could be used to do other things.

Anyway! We alternate between lecture classes and lab classes. Our first lab class involved baked goods, mostly muffins/quickbreads. And the fat in those baked goods were substituted with applesauce and prune puree, which works to some degree because those ingredients provide moisture, which is a big part of what fat does for baked goods.



Our group of seven (almost all non-culinary students) tackled prune buttermilk bread and raisin bran muffins. The prune buttermilk bread used some margarine but also chopped prunes. The raisin bran muffins used a tiny amount of oil but also applesauce.



Another group did banana pecan muffins, which had also a tiny amount of oil but prune puree and nonfat yogurt.



Another group did lowfat fudgy brownies, which only had prune puree.



Everything tasted okay in terms of moistness and sweetness, but the missing fat took away from the savoriness. The substitutions are interesting to me, not because I want to be more healthy, but because it's always interesting to know what different ingredients do for a particular product. I tend to substitute greek yogurt for sour cream, because I think the tastes are similar enough (for a baked good or for a dip), but also because I'm more likely to buy greek yogurt because I can eat it with fruit and honey. I think applesauce and prune puree are ingredients I would add in addition to fat instead of to replace fat. It reminds me of the carrot cake I once made with canned pineapples - the carrot cake came out so moist because of that addition.

I think the star of the session was the apricot blackberry cornmeal kuchen, which had an interesting textural grittiness because of the cornmeal. It was almost like gritty cornbread but very airy, and the apricot & blackberries were delicious. I've never thought of those two fruits as a combination, but I'm definitely going to use it from now on.

sous vide: egg

After steak and salmon, the next protein we tackled was eggs. This is where I think the sous vide machine really shines because eggs are even easier to overcook than meat and seafood. I mean, if you're trying to do a batch of soft-boiled eggs, forget about it, the sous vide machine is the way to go.



For soft-boiled eggs, 150F for 30 minutes.

While the eggs were cooking, we each got to work cooking the rest of the brunch dish that the egg was going to top. Namely, bacon (or lardo)-wrapped asparagus, frisee salad and shallot vinaigrette.

I chose bacon because of the higher meat ratio and because it was better for wrapping. The asparagus was blanched, wrapped in half-cooked bacon, then fried some more with garlic and thyme.



The frisee I tossed in shallot vinaigrette (shallot, olive oil, champagne vinegar, salt and pepper) and plated in a shallow bowl (to reflect the roundness of the soft-boiled egg).



Besides placing the bacon-wrapped asparagus on top I also added some bits of compressed cantaloupe (vacuum-sealed so less watery and more flavor-intensive). The bacon made me think of proscuitto, which goes with melon.



On top we had the option of shaved bottarga, which is cured fish roe but when shaved adds a savory/salty dimension, like what Parmesean cheese does. Of course then I added some shaved Parmesean as well. Once the soft-boiled egg went on top I sprinkled some smoked paprika on too.



Soft-boiled eggs are hard to plate. Mine slid halfway off the mound of frisee, so in retrospect I should have made a bigger hole for it to sit in. This is a very rich dish, not what I would normally eat, but delicious with an extra helping of shallot vinaigrette to cut through all the richness. Very good for brunch.

sous vide: steak and salmon

The advanced technique classes on offer this semester were Sous Vide Cooking, Modern Sauces, and Charcuterie. I tried to get into the first two, wanting more experience in those, but since I've taken advanced classes before I had to be part of a lottery, which I lost. But then somebody dropped the class and I was able to add.

So I missed one class, but the class I started on was sous vide steak and salmon! The class was divided into team of 5-6, and each team had to come up a steak dish and a salmon dish. The proteins were all cooked sous vide (in a temperature-controlled water bath) for the same amount of time. For example, all the steaks were cooked for 45 minutes in 135F water (making the meat medium rare throughout) and then seared with butter, garlic and thyme. But the seasonings, side dishes and sauces were up to us.

My team did steak, mashed potatoes and green beans. I volunteered myself for green beans, which I blanched and then sauteed (olive oil, sesame oil, garlic, shallot, soy sauce, rice wine vinegar). Then I helped up with the sauce (brown, otherwise known as beef stock with mirepoix, roux, tomato paste, and a sachet of herbs). And I did the plating. Very traditional looking, as Chef Morse commented.



This team did a take on beef pho - fried noodles, basil, chili, broth.



Another did a modern plating with baby carrots, thin-sliced potato and micro herbs.



And another did an appetizer-like plating with steak cubes, potato puree rosette, pesto sauce, horseradish foam.



For our salmon dish we did wild rice pilaf and tomato salad. The sous vide salmon was melty and soft, sashimi-like in texture.



Overall I prefer sous vide steak but not sous vide salmon. But of course any day with steak and salmon is a good day.

lessons from pumpkin flan

Since moving from New York, I haven't seen most of my East Coast friends at all. But by chance my friend Vanessa was flying home to NYC after a summer in Hong Kong, and she had a layover at San Francisco airport! So I went to meet her, but before I went I asked her what her dessert preferences were so I could make something to bring her. She said: "chocolate, pumpkin, macarons". Of course I really should have made her chocolate pumpkin macarons, but instead I opted for pumpkin flan.

My favorite kind of flan is soft, silky, the melt-in-your-mouth kind that Irving Cafe sells. It's harder to get pumpkin flan this way because pumpkin is kind of fibrous and chunky. My only experience with pumpkin flan was in the fall season of 2009, after pumpkin picking, and I had overcooked it then. So I tried again with this recipe. It turned out custardy, which is better than overcooked, but still not what I'm looking for. But I learned a couple of lessons.

1) You can get caramel just by cooking sugar by itself. Without water. But keep a close eye on it, because I burned it twice. Take it off the heat as soon as a portion has turned brown. The liquid can be poured into the bottoms of the ramekins. Then soak the pot immediately in hot water, so the residual caramel can be washed off.



2) When combining ingredients for flan (or anything that requires egg yolk and sugar), make sure to add the sugar last (or only when you're whisking) so the egg yolks and sugar don't sit together for any length of time. I kind of absorbed this rule subconsciously in Advanced Baking, but this article cleared up why. Basically the sugar will suck up all the moisture and cause the egg proteins to clump up.



3) When you're baking anything that's supposed to turn out smooth, rich, or custardy, make sure to bake it in a hot water bath that covers half of the item's height. Cold water is no good because it will mess with the cooking time.



4) You can get chocolate shavings by taking a vegetable peeler to a piece of chocolate!



5) The caramel poured in the bottom of the ramekins don't have to evenly cover the bottom, because once baked, it will spread over the bottom. (I was afraid the caramel would be spotty, but I was pleasantly surprised after I took them out.)



6) If you bake something in an otherwise-lidded jar, you can put the lid on later and it will be portable! That's how I was able to transport the flan.



7) Of course, I also unmolded one for myself to try. I waited for it to cool before I tried it, but I microwaved it later and it tasted better warm! So I guess the soft/silky flans taste better cold but the custardy ones taste better warm.



8) Hot or cold, food always taste better when shared. With friends. With iPhone sticky picture apps. Lesson learned :)