Food Lab: Throwback

Or, as Mad Kitchen Scientist termed it: Food Lab - Squashgiving! 

"Why 'throwback'?" you might ask. 

"Wasn't your very first lab about eggs?" 

(yes) 

"What does that have to do with squash?"

Not a damn thing. 

BUT! 

The *idea* for Food Lab came to Chef Spouse while he was working on cream of tomato soup.

Inspired by the season, we decided to take on winter squash soup, in part because all of us have found ourselves defaulting to curry spicing, which, while delicious, is also limited.

So Chef Spouse cleaned our favorite purveyor at the farmers' market out of butternut (most flesh bang for your squash buck) and we were off! 

We started with the same base for all:

Mirepoix (2 parts onion, 1 part celery, 1 part carrots, garlic)

2 parts Chef Spouse's homemade chicken stock

1 part peeled, cubed, and roasted butternut squash 

Salt & pepper 

Once done simmering, all were pressed through a chinois before moving to the all-important seasoning step, giving us four soup bases of just over one quart each.

Option 1: Spicy

2 Tbsp arborio rice
1 tsp harissa (plus more to garnish for those who wish)

Option 2: US Southwest 

Poblano (roasted) 4-5 little ones
1/2 tsp chipotle powder
1 tsp cumin
Sour cream & pepitas to garnish

Option 3: East Asian

1/2 c coconut milk
Ginger coins
4 kaffir lime leaves
1/2 tsp coriander
1 Tbsp red miso

Option 4: Pumpkin spice

1/2 c heavy cream
1 clove
1 star anise
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
Juice of 1 orange
Diced apple to garnish

They came out thusly

clockwise from top

East Asian - Spicy - US SW - Pumpkin spice

Now, I have never been a fan of sweet takes on squash soup, nor am I a PSL fan, so I was shocked to discover that my favorite take on the soups was in fact pumpkin (really, baking) spice, particularly with the addition of the crisp diced apple. It was delicious.

The US Southwest was my second favorite, and the thing that most surprised us all there was that the roasted poblanos REALLY thickened it up - you may not be able to tell from the photos, but it was the thickest soup, even without any type of cream added. 

The East Asian was lovely, but needed more umami and/or acid. I still have my leftover portion, and I plan to add fish sauce when I reheat it for lunch this weekend.

The spicy harrisa was a bit of a fail. We had the idea of adding the rice for body, but the problem was we didn't pre-cook it in any way, leaving the grains a little too al dente. In retrospect, we should've toasted then ground the rice, then added it to the soup base. 

For dessert? The Executive Committee had recently picked up New Native American Cuisine: Five-Star Recipes From The Chefs Of Arizona's Kai Restaurant, which included a recipe for butternut squash creme brûlée, which seemed like the obvious choice.

Mad Kitchen Scientist decided to guild the lily, 

so to speak, 

by torching some maple sugar on top

Now, we are talking an "n" of 1 here, but this is not a cookbook for inexperienced cooks, as the recipe instructions were lacking. In short, if you don't already know the technique to make creme brûlée, you will not be able to figure it out from these instructions. The flavors were excellent, but the squash base probably would've benefitting from being passed through a chinois or tamis - it was a little grainy. 

Chef Spouse also proposed trying techniques to roast winter squash to the point of crispness rather than softness. We all thought that would be a fail, seeing as squash contains so much water, and we were right (honestly not sure what he was thinking there). And we experimented with trying to make spaghetti squash palatable, and, sadly, confirming all my previous experience with spaghetti squash, that was also a fail. It's just so freakin' bland. Spaghetti squash? Just say "nah," no matter how much pesto and parm you have on hand.

Food Lab: Chocolate Redux

Precisely two years ago, your intrepid Food Labbers bit off more than we could chew and attempted to make chocolate from beans at the same time as testing the differences between Dutch process and natural cocoa powder, methods of melting chocolate, tempering chocolate, and fixing seized chocolate.

We did not get to all of that.

But we all still had raw and roasted cacao beans, so we decided to make another run at bean to bar, still inspired by what Chef Spouse and I had seen in Cozumel in the winter of 2022.

In theory, the process is simple:

Roast beans

Hull beans

Grind beans

Combine with sugar (and, potentially, some combination of honey, vanilla, allspice, cinnamon, and/or achiote) 

Sounds easy, right?

Challenge one, which we'd discovered two years ago: hulling the beans takes some serious time.

No problem! Chef Spouse roasted and hulled in advance!

Challenge two: grinding the beans finely enough to be palatable.

When we watched the demo in Cozumel, the guy making the chocolate used a large rectangular molcajete, with a grinder that was more rolling pin than pestle, and it came out great.

We have a mortar and pestle style molcajete, plus a blender, a food processor, and an electric coffee grinder that's reserved for spices. So grinding the beans should be no problem, right?

Wrong.

The taste? Well, it was great - we were adding all those optional flavors to taste, so: YUM. But no matter what we tried - and the electric coffee grinder can easily take coffee beans to an espresso grind - we could not get the grind fine enough for the finished product to be anything other than unpleasantly grainy. 

We even tried heating some of the ground beans with a little cream - on the left up there - and all that happened was the fat separated.

BOO!

Turns out, if you REALLY want to make bean to bar chocolate, you need a melanger, a device that's designed to run for 24-48 hours STRAIGHT without burning out the motor, to get the grind fine enough.

Well, damn.

What to do with all those roasted and ground cacao beans? 

Chef Spouse observed: They look kinda like coffee. What if we treated them as such?

All by themselves, the brew is too thin. But, as we've discovered in the mornings since, adding 1-2 TBSP to your usual coffee beans makes for a DELICIOUS morning cuppa.

Fortunately, we'd planned a meal of tacos al pastor, frijoles negros, and corn and black bean salad in advance, because the bean to bar experiment was a FIAL.

Mad Kitchen Scientist also brought the ingredients to make homemade Irish cream, and here's where we landed there:

1 tsp cocoa powder

1/2 tsp espresso powder

1/2 c heavy cream 

14 oz can sweetened condensed milk

1/2 tsp vanilla

1 c Irish whiskey (he chose Jameson)

Blend all & refrigerate 

For dessert? Chocolate flan, natch.