Food is the New Lego

I spent most of my childhood in my bedroom building stuff with Lego. Sometimes by myself; sometimes with friends. Sometimes following the directions that came with the sets; sometimes making stuff up. Often building my own version of something I had seen in the real world (an interesting house, car, etc) and wanted to process a bit.

It occurred to me the other day that, though I no longer play with Lego very much, food now plays a very similar role in my life. I've hopefully demonstrated by now that I really like to play with food, and that it affords a similar sort of creativity: using existing recipes, improvising, and trying to replicate stuff I've seen in the world.

One aspect of this that I find particularly fun is the dinner party. Some of my favorite experiences over the past several years have involved elaborate, fascinating meals with friends at exceptional restaurants. I will save specific details for other posts, but the key point here is that these meals are something I very much enjoy trying to replicate.

That said, I will never be able to replicate any of these meals. I don't have the skills, staff of sous chefs, fancy equipment, or access to extreme ingredients. In the same way, though, I could never really replicate stuff in the real world with Lego. But I could come up with my own approximation that had some similar properties. That was fun in and of itself.

That's exactly what I try to do with dinner parties. I like my dinner parties to be elaborate enough to replicate what I consider to be key elements of my favorite meals: lots of courses (which gives a meal a certain sense of decadence and means you'll spend a long time together), interesting ingredients (stuff you don't eat every day makes a meal special, even if the ingredient is not expensive or rare), and creative technique (ditto the previous explanation).

I hosted one of these parties the other night (actually hosted it at a friend's place, who has a much cooler and larger apartment than I do). It was rather ambitious for a mostly solo effort, but it was lots of fun. Here is a rundown of the menu, with thanks to my friend Mike for taking photos all evening.

Amuse Bouche: Sweet potato smoothie with cinnamon and cumin. A few years ago I began starting all dinners with a savory smoothie. It's a fun way to start. This one was rich, creamy and featured warm flavors.









Soup: Butternut squash with roasted tomatillos and chipotles. This is out of Moosewood's New Classics (a _great_ book). Hearty, warming and spicy soup. Garnished with cilantro.






Salad: Spicy cabbage with coconut. This one is based on a recipe from Alford & Duguid's Mangoes and Curry Leaves (also a great book). The cabbage cooks in the water from rinsing. Curry leaves, onions and lots of chilies give it flavor. Coconut gives it a bit of richness and absorbs some of the water. Tasty.




Palate Cleanser: Lemongrass sorbet. Simple and refreshing. Just lemongrass steeped in a simple syrup. Should probably have added some stabilizer to prevent iciness.






Entree: Chicken breasts marinated in a ginger & galangal yogurt sauce, plus carrots cooked in coconut milk with chilies and curry leaves. Chicken based on a chicken kiev recipe, filled with yogurt sauce and roasted. Carrots based on a South Asian recipe for beets.





"Cheese": Not really cheese, but it was dairy and at that point in the meal. Olive oil ice cream, lemon zest, capers, walnuts, sea salt. I've been wanting to do a savory ice cream sundae for a while. Olive oil ice cream (from the Perfect Scoop) seemed a good place to start, and these ingredients mostly worked. Some felt the capers were too strong. it was interesting, in any event.



Pre-Dessert: Caramel apple, one bite (see previous blog post). These suffered from the classic problem of very fragile spheres. Might not make it again; too much stress.






Dessert: Dehydrated key lime pie, mango powder, blackberry coulis, chocolate soda (powder).
Pie is a crumbled pie crust (graham cracker, butter, sugar, cinnamon) plus a dehydrated key lime curd (based on a recipe from Achatz's Alinea cookbook; butter, eggs, sugar, key lime juice, agar gelled in the fridge and then dehydrated on acetate sheets for 15 hours).

Chocolate soda powder was cocoa powder, sugar, citric acid, baking soda, and maltodextrin. The acid and baking soda make it fizz. The maltodextrin tames it a bit. The acid also makes it sour, unfortunately. I don't think people liked this a lot.

The coulis was fairly straightforward. The mango powder was purchased.

Mango Icing with Coconut Cupcakes

Ok…raise your hand if you don't adore buttercream icing. Sweet, rich, creamy deliciousness. Reason to angle for a corner piece of birthday cake. Good enough to scrape off the plate with a fork. I'm betting not many hands are up right now.

And yet…sometimes buttercream can overwhelm. Maybe it's too much richness for an already rich cupcake that needs some sort of topping. Or the sugary sweetness overwhelms the intended flavor of the icing. Sometimes flavor matters more than sweetness and richness. What's a baker to do?

I have no doubt that purists will throw up their hands when I say this, but one answer is a really interesting set of modified food starches with cryptic names like "Ultra Tex 3" and "Ultra Sperse." The interesting thing about these starches is that they have been modified to swell in basically any liquid. Unlike corn starch, which needs to be cooked to thicken a custard, these powders will thicken anything you can put in a blender without any heating. And the texture is smooth, consistent and creamy.

I'm finding that "custards" made with these starches make a really nice, light icing for baked goods. Say you want apple icing. Put some apples through a juicer (or just buy some cider). Put the juice in a blender. Turn on the blender. Add a couple teaspoons of Ultra-Tex while it spins. Done. And it tastes like apple. Maybe add a little powdered sugar to boost the flavor.

So that's what I did this week. Many of you know that I love mangoes. I wanted to make an icing that screamed mango, and would complement some sort of tropically flavored cupcake.

Decent mangoes really aren't available at this time of year. Happily, however, one can always get delicious canned Kesar mango puree from India. "Canned mango?" you may be asking, "really?" Yes, really. Mangoes from India are so good that the canned ones are still way better than the best supermarket mango in December. So my first stop was one of the little Indian groceries on Parliament in Toronto.

Then I poured a cup or so of mango puree into the blender, along with 2 tsp of powdered sugar (to make the flavor pop a bit) and a splash of milk (to thin the pulp just a tiny bit). I turned the blender on, and dropped in about 5 tsp of Ultra-Sperse 3 while the motor was running, letting it blend quite a bit between spoonfuls.

The result was a creamy, pudding-like concoction that did indeed scream mango. I put it atop these cupcakes from Epicurious, which I made last night (and to which I added a pinch of cayenne):

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Vanilla-Bean-Coconut-Cupcakes-with-Coconut-Frosting-352095

Remembering Aunt Belle: Apple Cheesecake

This is an odd Thanksgiving. It'll be the first without Aunt Belle (technically my mom's aunt), who passed away last week at the age of 94. If you know me, you're probably already aware that she was a legend and had a larger-than-life presence in so many ways. Most relevant to this online venue, however, is her love for baking.

For as long as I can remember (and right up until just a few months ago), Aunt Belle was in charge of desserts for family gatherings: Thanksgiving, Passover seders, other holidays -- you name it. Sometimes she made the classics: macaroons, rugelach, cheesecake, sponge cake, etc.. Sometimes she ventured into new territory. She never made fewer than 3 or 4 options, however.

My job (ok, along with just about everybody else in the family; but she made me _feel_ like it was my job alone) was to taste each and every one, and let her know what I thought. This was slightly tricky. On the one hand, she very clearly wanted to be told that they were all delicious. She also told us this herself. On the other hand, though, I think she was genuinely interested in feedback on recipes she hadn't tried before.

A long discussion ensued at the "kids table" during Thanksgiving a few years ago about how to best let her know that we didn't really care for the "millionaire's pie" (yeah, i don't know either) she had made as an experiment. As I recall, we agreed (after much deliberation) to tell her that it was delicious, but maybe not as delicious as some other things she'd made that we'd rather have again.

In honor of Aunt Belle, I'm currently in the midst of making her apple cheesecake. It has all the makings of a typical Aunt Belle recipe. It's very simple to make (it can mostly be done in the food processor; she rarely made anything requiring a rolling pin, and once told me she had never used yeast). It uses great ingredients (little can go wrong when mixing fresh fruit, cream cheese and sugar). And it's really, really, really good.

For your holiday baking pleasure, I present the recipe for this cake. Be warned that it's not at all a traditional cheesecake -- it has a shortbread-like crust, and the cream cheese layer is very thin. It's also pretty easy to modify slightly -- I've made it with ginger instead of cinnamon; the crust would be great with a ground vanilla bean; etc.


Apple Cheesecake

Apple Topping:
4 cups sliced apples
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp. ground cinnamon

Crust:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 stick butter, sliced
1/4 tsp vanilla extract

Filling:
1 8 oz pkg cream cheese
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract


1. Pre-heat oven to 450.

2. Combine apples, sugar and cinnamon. Let sit in bowl.

3. Combine crust ingredients in food processor (or use pastry blender). Pulse to combine. Press into bottom of 10" springform pan.

4. Combine filling ingredients in food processor with metal blade. Let run for a few minutes to blend completely and beat the egg thoroughly.

5. Pour filling over crust, top with apples; bake for 10 min @ 450, then 25 min @ 400.

A Few of My Favorite...

So far this blog has been mostly about stuff I've made, with an emphasis on ingredients and flavor combinations. I've shown you tweaks I've made to other people's recipes, and different ways of combining component elements (taffy and Methocel puffs, e.g.).

That's all well and good, but I confess that sometimes it's fun just to make a recipe exactly as it's presented by somebody else. No tweaks. No novelty. Just a replication of something somebody else decided was good enough to publish. I did a fair bit of that sort of baking this weekend.

And this experience provides me with the first of (what will hopefully be) several opportunities to tell you about my favorite cookbooks.

This weekend, I made a couple recipes from Alice Medrich's Pure Dessert. In contrast to the fairly bold and sometimes exotic flavors I've been telling you about over the past few weeks, this book is all about subtle. Medrich divides her book into categories that reflect different classes of ingredients (milk, grains, sugar/sweeteners, fruit, etc.). In each category, she provides recipes that draw on the unique properties of those ingredients to provide flavor. Where simple staples like flour or sugar are just the base for other flavors in most desserts, Medrich gives them center stage.

What happens, for example, when you substitute buckwheat flour and cornmeal into scones? Crunchiness and a rich, nutty flavor, it turns out. What about using different sugars (turbinado, muscovado, piloncillo, etc.)? Rich sweetness in all sorts of ways. This book is great not just for its recipes, but (like any good cookbook, I think) because thumbing through it on the couch on a rainy afternoon is an educational experience. Medrich explains the ingredients and the effect they have on recipes, and details why she has chosen a particular grain or sweetener. She also talks about her experiments with them.

This morning I made her ginger snap recipe, which is one of my favorites from this book. They derive their spicy and intense ginger flavor from ground ginger, grated fresh ginger, and diced candied ginger. The intensity is rounded out with a bit of cinnamon and allspice; and counterbalanced with rich sweetness from molasses, white sugar, brown sugar, and a turbinado sugar coating. Delicious. And super quick to make.

When I had some friends over for tea yesterday, I made her buckwheat and cornmeal scones with walnuts. I improvised a little bit by adding some chopped white chocolate (1 c) and lemon zest (1 lemon). Delightful, and also very easy.

Back to more experiments next weekend, probably. Have a good week!

Cardamom Puffs with Pear Taffy Filling

Given the name of the blog, it seemed odd to have not posted anything involving pears. Problem solved.

This experiment was born from a confluence of two factors. First, I wanted to play more with stuff on my shelf full o' food chemistry fun. Second, I really like the tastes of pear and cardamom together. This was an attempt to do that, but as I'll note below it wasn't completely successful. More on that later. First a description of technique.

You may be wondering what a 'puff' is. The basic idea here is borrowed directly from Grant Achatz at Alinea. Take an intensely flavored liquid (in this case a cardamom syrup), blend it with Methocel-F50 (a gelling agent derived from plant cellulose and available from Dow Chemical) to form a foam, and then dehydrate the foam to form a meringue-like 'puff.'

To make these cardamom puffs, I first made a cardamom syrup with 10-15 green cardamom pods, 2 cups of water, and a cup of sugar. I let it steep for about two hours after bringing to a boil and dissolving the sugar. Then I took 210g of syrup and blended it with 5g of Methocel-F50 in the blender. I then transferred it to the stand mixer, and whipped it at high speed with the whisk for about 10 minutes. Once it resembled whipped cream or meringue, I put it in a Ziploc, and piped it onto acetate sheets sprayed with cooking spray. I then put these in the dehydrator for about 5 hours at 150 degrees F.

The idea was for the cardamom puffs to be filled with pear taffy, which meant I also needed some pear taffy. For this I turned to Achatz again, following his recipe for red pepper taffy. This involved mixing pear juice (from fresh pears via juice extractor), sugar, liquid glucose, isomalt, corn starch, and salt. These were cooked together to 235 degrees, then mixed with a bit of butter, and cooled on a Silpat.


Next I hollowed out the puffs and filled them with the taffy (see photo above).

The taffy came out nicely. It's very smooth and tastes clearly of pear. The puffs are not as good. They're sweet and sort of a cool way to present the taffy, but the cardamom flavor just isn't as strong as I'd like it to be. Not sure if I could help this with some more cardamom, more steeping, or if maybe it's just too subtle a flavor.

Tomatillo Cupcakes/Muffins*

Another week, another post, another theme. This week: using typically savory ingredients in sweet dishes.

I think it's interesting that certain foods get to be associated with savory (read: main dishes, appetizers, etc.) or sweet (read: dessert) dishes, often for essentially arbitrary and often reasons largely stemming from local traditions. Avocados, for instance, are used by North Americans in guacamole and salads/sandwiches, but in Vietnam they make sweet (and delicious!) smoothies from them. There are lots of other examples.

It can be fun, though, to play with these expectations and use ingredients in different ways. This is especially fun in desserts. That's the idea behind these cupcakes, which highlight the versatility of the tomatillo.

Tomatillos are most commonly used in tangy salsa verde, but a couple of things convinced me they'd make an interesting cupcake. First, I once made a molten chocolate cake (from a recipe I really thought I had found on Epicurious, but I couldn't find it to link) served with a tomatillo-vanilla sauce. Second, I heard recently that green tomatoes (which I figure are sort of like tomatillos) could be substituted for apples in baking recipes.

So…this week's experiment was adapted the Apple-Cardamom cupcake recipe at Vanilla Garlic (a great source for cupcake recipes). Here's the recipe I used:

Tomatillo Cupcakes
Makes 18 cupcakes / 350F oven

3 cups chopped tomatillos
1.5 cups of sugar
1/2 cups vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 egg whites
2.25 cups of all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon of cinnamon

What to do:

1) Chop tomatillos and combine them with the sugar and let them macerate for one hour. Next add the oil, vanilla and stir.

2) Preheat over to 350 degrees F (165 C).

3) Slightly beat egg whites just until a light foam appears. Combine them with the oil and apple mixture.

4) Sift the flour, salt, baking soda, and spices together. Stir into the apple mixture, and then place into cupcake papers about 3/4ths full.

5) Bake for 15 minutes undisturbed, then rotate the pan and cook for another 3-7 minutes, testing with a toothpick for doneness. Careful, as if the toothpick goes into an apple it will not come out clean, but cupcake may be done.



* For the purposes of this blog from now on, cupcakes and muffins are distinguished only by the presence of icing. Cupcakes have icing. Muffins do not.

Ingredient: Thai Long Peppers

One of the reasons I decided to start this blog was because people were asking about my experiments with flavors and molecular gastronomy stuff. Another was that I've noticed myself spending more and more time chasing down ingredients not found in normal grocery stores.

Sometimes (often, even) this involves a trip to Chinatown or Little India in Toronto. More on these another time. In this case, there was a bit more adventure.

I had never heard of Thai Long Peppers until dinner at Alinea, where we had a thai long pepper cream along with hibiscus gel and bubble gum tapioca pearls served in a sort of giant glass straw. I was intrigued and did some searching to learn more about them.

I had at first assumed they were a chili sort of pepper, but it turns out they're a spice -- more like a peppercorn but, well, long. They were apparently quite popular in the Roman Empire, before black peppercorns became more common. Now they're used mostly in Southeast Asia.

Since one can get just about anything in Toronto, I assumed they'd be in one of the Asian or South Asian markets. Not so much, at least as far as I could tell. Many of the staff in these places don't speak English, and labels are often nonexistent or non-English. But I searched quite a bit and couldn't turn up anything.

I kept them in the back of my mind, though, until a trip to Singapore for a conference and to see my sister (who lives there) last summer. She suggested we look for long peppers at the Thai supermarket (which I'd like to link to, but they don't seem to have a web site) in Singapore. We looked around, again not totally sure what to look for. And sure enough, there was this bag staring back at me from a shelf full of spices. I immediately bought them.

The flavor is interesting. They're quite spicy like pepper, but also have an anise-y almost smoky quality to them. The first thing I did with them was to make ice cream, grinding them up and substituting them into a black pepper ice cream recipe from David Lebovitz's book. It was clear they paired well with sugar and fat, which highlighted the flavors and cut the heat a bit. I also tried them in a cupcake with chocolate icing, and infused into vodka (which was seriously spicy, but better when combined with a vanilla/sugar syrup).

And that brings us to this week's dessert: Lime and Thai Long Pepper shortbread. Simple shortbread plus 1 TB or so lime zest and 1.5 tsp or so ground long pepper. Plus they're coated with a long pepper/sugar mixture. The lime plays fairly nicely with the long pepper, which gives it a bit of bite and peppery-ness. We'll see how they go over with colleagues tomorrow.

Apologies for this rather forlorn looking photo. I was in a bit of a rush.

Caramel Apple: One Bite

At long last, I'm getting around to putting this blog together. It's been a long time coming and I'm delighted that you've decided to stop by. I intend to regularly update you on my food-related experiments and ideas in this space. So...without further ado.

People who've eaten stuff I make know that I'm a big fan of combining flavors. Sometimes it's to try something new (i.e., bubble gum tarts with chocolate crust, or Indian kebab-style beef patties with grilled fruit and coconut-curry sorbet). Sometimes it's to put a new spin on an old classic. This week's experiment falls firmly in the latter category.

Few things beat fresh, crisp apples in the fall. And few things complement the sweet-yet-still-a-bit-tart taste of a great apple like a rich dose of caramel. In addition to being delicious, this pairing reminds me of after-school trips to the Franklin Cider Mill when I was a kid. That was my motivation here.

In essence, I wanted to put a contemporary spin on this pairing, and to capture it in a single, intense bite. In this regard I'm inspired a bit by Toronto's Claudio Aprile (Colborne Lane), who is a master of the single-bite explosion of related flavors.

The result is quite simple: an apple sphere set atop a bed of dry caramel, served in an Asian soup spoon.

The apple spheres were based on an online recipe from Ferran Adria (El Bulli). I juiced a few Cortland apples (in a juice extractor), mixed the juice (1 C or so) with some sodium alginate (1/2 tsp) in the blender, and then heated this to boiling. Then I poured this into silicone half-sphere molds (1") and froze. After letting these freeze, I dropped them (gently) into a heated mixture of water (2 C) and calcium chloride (1/2 tsp), rinsed, and set aside (you can see them in the not-so-great picture).


The dry caramel is directly from Grant Achatz's Alinea cookbook. Corn syrup, sugar, cream and butter cooked to 230 degrees, left to harden on a Silpat, and then blended with tapioca maltodextrin in the food processor.

I'm pretty pleased with how these turned out. If I made them again, I'd consider intensifying the apple a little bit (possibly by boiling down the juice and/or including some ginger or sugar). I also don't love that the caramel flavor doesn't hit the tastebuds until after the apple is mostly gone. I think that's because of the maltodextrin; not sure how I'd get around that. They were also a bit tricky in that the spheres are really delicate. More than one was burst by the caramel powder.

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