Food (Mini) Lab 13: Choux Pastry

Pate a Choux has a reputation for being...difficult. Like a beautiful but high maintenance woman, before approaching it, you tend to ask yourself, "Is this really worth it?"

To that, I say: "Hot from the oven gougeres? Not worth it? Are you CRAZY?"

Also, here's a secret: choux pastry isn't that hard.

Really.

Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees.

Take 4 eggs out of the fridge (they need to come to room temperature).

Boil 1 c. of liquid (all milk, milk and water, or milk and stock for savory applications) with 1/4 lb. of butter (cut up) and about 1/2 tsp. of salt over medium heat.

While still over the heat, stir in 1 c. of flour. It's going to look, as Chef Spouse pointed out, like a bechamel sauce gone wrong. Don't worry - keep stirring! Eventually, it will get kind of satiny looking. When that happens, turn off the heat.

Let the choux cool slightly.

Pop it into a bowl and start mixing in the eggs one at a time. Initially, the egg/dough mixture is going to look weird, and you'll be thinking that the dough is messed up and not going to come together. Don't worry - keep stirring! Once the first egg is incorporated, keep doing the same with the other three eggs. At the end, you'll once again have a lovely satiny dough.

Then you load up your pastry bag, pipe your choux onto a baking sheet, and pop it in the oven. 10 minutes at 400, then 20 minutes at 350, then flaky pastry goodness.

What should you pipe it like? Depends on what you're going to do with it - you can pipe it into 1-2 tsp mounds for savory or sweet fillings, rectangles for eclair applications, a ring for a pastry cake (see Julia Child's The Way to Cook for an example) - whatever you like.

What should you fill it with? The Mad Kitchen Scientist had pre-prepared mushroom duxelles and a Moroccan lamb thing for the New Year's Eve party. Of course, ice cream (for profiteroles) or cream (for cream puffs) are traditional sweet fillings. You can mix cheese into the dough before cooking for gougeres. We were speculating that you could make LARGE puffs as a basis for poached eggs. Really, the only limit is your palate/imagination.

So don't be scared - ask that pretty lady to have a drink. Appearances can be deceiving.

News & Notes

First, if you haven't seen the "The 10 Types of Foodies" slideshow on the HuffPo, get over there immediately. It's hilarious. Your intrepid Food Labbers definitely fall in the "Made It Myself!" and "DIY" categories. Where do you fall?

Second, when's the next lab? We'll be doing a mini-lab this weekend of pate a choux at Mad Kitchen Scientist and The Executive Committee's New Year's Eve party. Gougeres for everyone!

We did have a full Lab planned for December 18, but due to some schedule conflicts, it had to be postponed until after the New Year. Topic? Well, here's a hint: it's a "part 2" of an earlier lab, and it's apropos we'll be doing it during football season (well, OK, post-season).

I've done a few more rounds of homemade croissants since our butter dough lab of last fall, always sticking with Julia's recipe from MtAoFC. This last time, I tried my first shot at chocolate-filled. Rather than trying to get the chocolate to stay in the traditional crescent shaped rolls, I went with rectangles, so I could seal them securely. They were good, particularly when they were still warm, but they needed *more* chocolate inside. Next time. That's them in the photo.

Chef Spouse's dad sent him the first Cook's Illustrated cookbook for Christmas (I'd already gotten him The New Best Recipe cookbook), and it has a different take on croissants that I'm looking forward to trying soon. Definitely need to do it while we still have some of the Julia recipe croissants in the freezer for taste testing.

Speaking of Chef Spouse, one of the gifts he gave me this year was 12 coupons for "Honey, I'd like you to try this recipe...". He's been feeling a little bored with his cooking, so be on the lookout for some hijinks.

Also speaking of Chef Spouse, I have a rule about New Year's resolutions that they have to be something fun. He's enjoyed tagging along on some of them (trapeze lessons, getting our motorcycle licenses, sky diving, etc.), but he's never done it himself. This year, he's joining the party. His resolution? To take a serious cooking class, potentially one of the CIA boot camps or something at L'Academie de Cuisine (which has the advantage of being local). Assuming he goes through with it, I'm going to MAKE him write about it for this blog, because that would be too awesome not to document.

Food Lab 12: Rice

Chef Spouse has a love/hate relationship with rice. Well, since he got serious about cooking, it's actually mostly been a hate/hate relationship. It always seems to come out sticky. Like clumpy sticky.

Ouch.

So we decided, once and for all, to figure out how to get it right.

Before you even start with me, yes, I know: "rice cooker." But Chef Spouse is of the "no single taskers!" school of though, so no rice cooker. Also, even though when we renovated the kitchen, we got a LOT more cabinet space, it's not infinite. And we don't really make rice often enough to make it worthwhile to devote the space to that as opposed to, say, a food mill.

Despite what you might think from the lovely picture above, we stuck with basmati rice the entire time for quality control.

The basic variables are:

Rinsed versus unrinsed
Soaked versus unsoaked
Boiled versus steamed versus baked

The first test we did was rinsed then soaked versus unrinsed then soaked. By "rinse," I mean you rinse and swirl and drain until the water runs clean. Both were then drained and cooked in the traditional manner: bring rice and water (in a 1:1.5 ratio) to boil, then lower heat and simmer under water's pretty much gone (~8 minutes for pre-soaked white rice), then remove from heat, covered, and steam for ~10 minutes. Unsurprisingly, there wasn't much difference between rinsed versus unrinsed when you were then going to soak and drain.

For the second test, we rinsed them both, then tested the boiled in lots of water (like pasta would be) versus the traditional cooking method described above. The pasta style was softer and fluffier, while the traditional cooking method was more al dente. Strong preferences started to emerge.

For the third test, we did everything wrong - no rinsing, stirring constantly, no rest. That rice was not good, and didn't cook the whole way through. We used it later to make Persian rice (which is basically rice that's partially cooked, drained, and then finished by being poached in butter. Yeah, it was pretty damn good.)

For the fourth test, we did the Commander's Palace method - it's a parboil, at a 1:4 ratio, for ~12 minutes, then you drain it, bung in butter and bake it at 325 for ~5 minutes. It's good, for sure (BUTTER!), but would probably be best for a situation in which the oven's already on.

For the fifth test, we tried a risotto style method, where you saute your rice in fat first (BUTTER!), then do the traditional 1:1.5 boil/simmer/steam method. This one also came out a true al dente, with a nice chewy center.

Of course, we also ran a test with the Mad Kitchen Scientist's rice cooker.  It came out quite light and fluffy - similar to the pasta-style rice.

So what did we learn?

Rinsing is critical. No matter what method you use, you MUST rinse your rice first.

Resting/steaming at the end to finish the cooking is also critical. Well, at least when you do the boil/simmer/steam method of cooking.

Soaking is good, if you remember/have time for it. If you rinse your rice and put it on to soak as you start your dinner prep, you should be golden, particularly since pre-soaked rice will cook more quickly.

Pasta-style is great if you need to make a LOT of rice, because it's more forgiving on technique and time, and you don't have to worry about the bottom grains burning to the pot before the top grains are cooked through.

And yes, a rice cooker is also great, if you have space for one and aren't ethically opposed to single-taskers.

So of course, with all that leftover rice, we made rice pudding.

Actually, the funny part is, only one of the recipes we chose used already-cooked rice. So we cooked yet more rice for two of the three rice puddings we made. Food Lab, thy name is excess.

So we did a custard style that started with cooking rice in milk on the stovetop and then ended with the custard topping dumped on top going into the oven. That resulted in a rice pudding bottom with a flan-like top. Good. Not amazing. Would be better as rice pudding and flan, two separate desserts.

We also used leftover rice to make an entirely stovetop version. That was quite good, very easy, and what is going to happen to all my leftover takeout Chinese rice from now on.

And then there was the version that started with uncooked arborio rice and went straight into the oven. A few caveats: take the advice of the commenters and stir it every 15 minutes to prevent a skin from forming in the first place. It will take about an extra 15 minutes to cook in the ramekins (probably longer if you do it all in one container). Add vanilla when you add the heavy cream at the end.

All that said: IT WAS F-ING AMAZING.

O.M.G.

Best rice pudding ever.

EVER.

Not kidding.

Food Lab 11: Corn Tortillas

Chef Spouse and I are both passionate about food and drink, but we're also passionate about the NFL. So every year, we have a big Super Bowl party. And Chef Spouse has a dream. His dream is for everything we cook for the Super Bowl party to be made from scratch. We usually do Tex-Mex, not least of which because it's easy to make for a large but indeterminately sized crowd, and while I don't think he's going to try to make tequila in the basement (as far as I know), he did want to learn how to make tortillas.

We were originally planning to make both corn and flour tortillas, but we got side-tracked (beer-tracked? thanks for the awesome homebrew, Mad Kitchen Scientist!) and only got to corn.

Turns out, corn tortillas are REALLY easy to make.

Because corn flour, aka masa, develops no gluten, you can screw around with the dough as much as you need to with no ill effect. And it doesn't need to rise or rest or anything - it takes longer to heat the pan that it does to make the tortillas.

To wit: the first batch of dough I made was, we discovered after pressing a few tortillas, too dry. So I dumped it back into the bowl, added a bit more water, mixed some more, rolled some more dough balls, and Chef Spouse pressed them. And they cooked and tasted just fine.

So what we discovered is that we wanted about equal amounts of masa and water, rather than the 4/3 ratio we had found online.

Traditional corn tortillas are literally just masa and water. We also discovered that a little sprinkle of salt after pressing was nice.

You do definitely want a tortilla press - rolling them with a pin was a pain in the ass, and resulted in very thick tortillas. And then you just cook them in a hot, dry cast iron skillet. Once cooked, we popped them on a cookie sheet covered by a tea towel to retain some heat and moisture, and that was it.

What did we eat on them? Mad Kitchen Scientist had prepared mole pork and refried beans, and Chef Spouse and I made a bunch of salsas - fresh mango and kiwi with fresh chiles, roasted tomatillo and roasted chiles, roasted pineapple and fresh and roasted chiles, and roasted tomato with roasted chiles. I can't really say with 100% certainty what was in any of them, since we just had bowls of ingredients and added everything to taste. But I can say that the bowls contained roasted tomatillos; roasted japalenos, habaneros, and serranos; fresh jalapenos, garlic, shallots, cilantro, and salt & pepper.

Now, I don't know if Chef Spouse is really going to make a zillion fresh corn tortillas and deep fry them all up for the chips for the Super Bowl party, but it's nice to know we could if we wanted to.

Food Lab 10: Sausage

Told you we weren't out of business.

In what has become a continuing theme for us, we went for excess: 9 1/2 pounds of pork shoulder, 2 1/2 pounds of uncured pork belly. For those who are bad at math, that's TWELVE pounds of meat to grind, season, and stuff into casings.

One thing we realized immediately: sausage making brings out your inner 12 year old. Yes, it's all kind of gross and lends itself to lots of adolescent jokes about sex. I even pulled out "that's what she said" at one point, and I NEVER make "that's what she said" jokes. NEVER.

Another thing we realized nearly immediately: as Mad Kitchen Scientist observed, "This is a process that lends itself to industrialization." The grinding, mixing and spicing was FAST. The stuffing was S-L-O-W. No wonder sausages are made in factories.

 We chose 3 basic sausage recipes:

1. The herbed breakfast sausage from Lets Make Sausage.
2. Chef Donald Link's spicy sausage recipe from Real Cajun.
3. The andouille recipe from The Spicy Sausage.

A few notes on making sausage: one, the recipes all make HUGE batches. We cut everything at least in half. Two, we thought none of them seemed seasoned enough, so after cutting the meat in half or more, we kept all the other spicing as the original full recipe called for, other than the salt - we reduced the salt accordingly.

For grinding, we did a rough chop on everything (like 2 inches x 2 inches), then fed it through the KitchenAid meat grinder.

The mixing of ingredients happened fast. All the sausage recipes recommend mixing with your hands, and they're right - you need to feel the distribution of your herbs and spices throughout the meat. We followed the first two recipes pretty closely, although, as often happens with Food Lab, things started to spin out of control by the third sausage, so we got a little creative with the andouille recipe. Fresh hot peppers and cloves both made an unexpected appearance. The spinning out of control may have been related to the excellent home brew Mad Kitchen Scientist supplied - a porter, a steam ale, and an accidental summer lager that was FANTASTIC.

Julia and McGee both recommend a 2 to 1 ratio of meat to fat. Most of the recipes we found online called for no additional fat. That just seemed wrong to us, so we sought a middle way, spreading the 2 1/2 pounds of pork belly across the 9 1/2 pounds of shoulder.

Anywho, the thing that really takes the time is the stuffing. The guy who runs Let's Make Sausage seems to have some sort of press that apparently makes the stuffing process go quickly. The KitchenAid stuffing attachment works fine, but it takes FOREVER. It takes to long that Chef Spouse uttered the unthinkable: if we start making a lot of homemade sausage, we're getting that uni-tasker sausage press. What would Alton Brown say?!?!?

Even though we had snacks, we wanted to try the sausage, so we did do a little cooking and tasting of patty sausage. We quickly learned that the patty sausage is not nearly as good as the sausage in casings. My theory is that sausage in casings basically cooks by poaching in its own fat, while the fat in patty sausage cooks out. I could be wrong. But I don't think so.

Another thing we learned? The casings smell BAD. It was the pig's GI tract. It smells like it was the pig's GI tract.

I thought the best sausage was Donald Link's spicy sausage. Chef Spouse and The Executive Committee preferred the herbed sausage. Mad Kitchen Scientist was reserving judgement until he had the chance to smoke some of the andouille.

So how much did it make? FIFTY 6-8 inch sausages. The IAs couldn't make it - the Spawn was having a bad day - and I've already promised them some of the haul. Yes, it made THAT MUCH sausage.

[Insert naughty sausage joke here.]

Four Questions

When's the next Food Lab?

We were going to do it over the holiday weekend, but illness and schedules intervened, so we're now re-scheduled for Sunday, July 31.  The re-schedule means that we might have a special guest chef join us. Who? You'll just have to wait to find out.

What will you be labbing?

Well, I don't like to give these away in advance, but I can say that it required Chef Spouse to purchase another attachment for the Kitchen Aid mixer AND we have the following accompaniments planned: home brew from Mad Kitchen Scientist, various slaws from Mama IA, and I'll be making the hot pretzels from Food Lab: Boiled Doughs again. That should give you a good clue as to what's on tap.

Are you doing a CSA again this summer?

I am, although it wasn't nearly as much of a challenge as I anticipated last year, so I've opted against blogging about it again. But rest assured I'm still getting weekly deliveries of delicious (mostly) organic produce from our friends at Shallowbrook Farm. So far, I've enjoyed summer squash and Boston bibb lettuce pretty much every week, plus red cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, sugar peas, green beans, Swiss chard, scallions, onions, red potatoes, turnips, rutabagas, beets, green peppers, corn on the cob, strawberries, and blackberries some weeks, plus this week, I got my very first peaches of the season. PEACHES!

Any other exciting food news going on?

Chef Spouse and I have been trying to get out once a week to enjoy all the new restaurants that are popping up in our newly hip neighborhood. Favorites so far include the Atlas Room and Smith Commons, joining old favorites Ethiopic, Granville Moore's, the recently renovated Argonaut, and H Street Country Club. Eat local!

Chef Spouse has perfected his chicken and andouille gumbo recipe - now we're on to experimenting with duck gumbo. Can mastering Prejean's pheasant-duck-andouille gumbo be far behind?

We've been playing around with flavored simple syrups for cocktails - so far, the ginger is the biggest hit.

The grape vines we planted a few years ago (gift from my pops) are LOADED with grapes. We'll see if any survive the annual summer bird onslaught.

Chef Spouse is also working on learning how to properly cook fish this summer. He never liked fish growing up (a real shame for a boy from Cape Cod), but he's realizing it was because it was mostly poor quality and poorly prepared. We can afford good fish, and we're both good cooks, so he's decided it's time to conquer his fear/distaste. Score! (since I love fish)

We've been continuing to enjoy the deep fryer my parents got us for Christmas last year, although we never have gotten around to trying fried Snickers bars again. But I'm kicking some beignet ass, and we continue to enjoy properly made French fries at home from time to time.

We planted a second large pot of Kentucky Colonel mint for juleps this summer, and, predictably, we're now completely overwhelmed with mint. Hmmm - speaking of flavored simple syrups.


So what's new with you?

Food Lab 9a: More -aise-iness

The return of the leftover egg whites . . .

Yes, even with egg-white cocktails, Aise-lab left a surplus of egg whites, but oddly no butter leftovers . . . hmmm.

So as is often the way with food lab, the goodness keeps on coming. In this case, an orange angel cake for the Executive Committee's birthday! Following Joy to a T -- and happily noting that Joy's recipes calls for one-and-a-half cups of egg whites (easily measured) rather than X egg whites (impossible, given the chaotic accretion of egg whites during Aise-lab) -- a light, fluffy temptation is ready to go into the oven: