Pretty Damn Good Chocolate Chip Cookies

About a month ago, my pops sent me a link to a recipe he found online promising the "perfect"

chocolate chip cookies.

And I made them, and they were good, don't get me wrong.

But this is Food Lab, goddamnit. "They were good" doesn't cut it. Drop and give me 20, soldier!

I thought the other cookies were too sweet. I liked going heavier on the brown sugar than the white for a nice moist cookie with a deeper flavor, but 1 1/2 c.  sugar total is too much, particularly with 12 oz. of semisweet chips AND 8 oz. bittersweet.

I also thought they were too large. In the "traditional" Toll House recipe, you're putting down about 1/4-1/2 oz. per cookie. "Perfect" tells you to make each cookie 2 oz. That's 1/4 c. batter. That's not a cookie - it's a dinner plate with chocolate chips in it.

I also followed the mixing directions to the letter, which was a mistake. I ended up with a bunch of unincorporated dry stuff at the bottom of the bowl. And kosher salt was a mistake, too - the grains are too big - and the recipe called for too little (also contributing to the "too sweet" problem).

So I decided to tweak the recipe.

1 c. unsalted butter at cool room temperature
2/3 c. brown sugar
1/2 c. white sugar
1 tsp. sea salt 
2 tsp. vanilla
2 large eggs
1 tsp. baking soda
2 c. flour
16 oz. (ish) of bittersweet chocolate chips (I didn't measure precisely - I had a full bag and a partial bag that was, I think, about 1/2 full, which would technically be 18 oz. of chips)
1 c. pecans, finely chopped (which you can replace with walnuts or skip entirely if you don't like nuts)

Preheat your oven to 375 F. 

Cream the butter, sugars, salt, and vanilla (you can do it by hand but it's a hell of a lot easier to do it in your stand mixer). The creamed mixture will not be as fluffy or light in color as normal because of the higher amount of brown sugar, but that's OK - don't worry!

Add the eggs and beat until they're fully incorporated, then add the baking soda.

With the mixer on low speed (so flour doesn't fly all over the place), add the flour 1/2 c. at a time, stopping to scrape up the bottom, scrape down the sides, and scrape out the paddle periodically. Mix until it's all fully incorporated.

Toss in your chips and nuts, and mix on low speed until fully incorporated. Make sure the arm of your mixer is locked, or all those chips and nuts will make it buck. Alternatively, you can take the batter off the mixer first and stir in the chips and nuts by hand.

Drop your cookie batter by rounded tablespoons onto your favorite cookie sheet. You're looking for about 1 oz. batter per cookie. It's up to you whether you grease or not, parchment paper or not, Silpat or not, or just go au naturel. I've tried it with the Silpat and bare and not noticed a significant difference.

Bake for about 9 minutes. The original recipe is correct - you need to pull them out when they're getting a little brown and crispy at the edges but are still underdone in the middle. Let them rest on the hot cookie sheet for about a minute to firm up, then remove them to racks to cool.

Tell me those aren't gorgeous!

Next time, I think I'm going to try forming them into balls and refrigerating them before baking, like I do with most of my other butter-based cookies. I think it will help them maintain their shape better in the oven.

Food Lab 26: Mole

Every year for our Super Bowl party, Chef Spouse creates a Tex-Mex extravaganza (with the assistance of Made Kitchen Scientist, The Executive Committee, and me). Every year for the past few years, the Tex-Mex extravaganza has been getting more complex. We now make all our own tortillas (corn and flour of course) to wrap around Chef Spouse's delicious fajita fillings and homemade guacamole. We are likely to add homemade salsa this year, too, and we have talked about doing all the tortilla chips from scratch, since we have a deep fryer.

While we were prepping this year's New Year's Eve feast, we were chatting with MKS and TEC about what might add to the Super Bowl deliciousness, and we arrived on mole. Mad Kitchen Scientist has made mole before, but Chef Spouse and I have not. Hence, a Food Lab.

MKS posited that, if we were going to do this right, we would have to start the Lab with a field trip to the legendary Penzey's Spices, since we were going to need a wide variety of dried chiles and interesting spices. To date, Chef Spouse and I have been, well, resistant is not really the word. Slow to get on the Penzey's train, mostly out of fear for our bank account. Turns out, that fear was well founded. We got chiles, for sure, but Chef Spouse and I also dropped over $100 on

In case you can't see it all, that basket contains:

• Star anise
• Crystalized ginger bits (pre-chopped to perfect baking size)
• Red chile flakes
• Brown mustard seeds (Chef Spouse has been doing a lot of Indian cooking lately and could only find yellow at the local megamart)
• Juniper berries
• Vietnamese cinnamon (SOOOO spicy!)
• Chinese cinnamon (sweet, rich, and warm)
• Galangal (for Thai cooking, and also hard to find at the local megamart)
• Cumin seed (NOT ground, also useful in Indian food and hard to find)
• Green cardamon seeds (GORGEOUS and impossible to pass up)
• Ceylon whole cloves (bright and fresh)
• Madagascar whole cloves(darker and richer)
• Smoked paprika
• Sumac
• a GIANT bottle of high quality Mexican vanilla extract (hey, it's not like it goes bad)

It was a bit of a frenzy, and required reorganization of our spice storage when we got home.

Then, when we got back to Chez Executive Committee, Chef Spouse played with Mad Kitchen Scientist's new toy from Santa. We already have four different knife sharpening tools/systems, and we live less than one mile from a butcher who can professionally sharpen your knives in 24 hours or less for, like, $3 a knife. But apparently, we need another knife sharpening tool in the house. Of course, Chef Spouse is going to have to get the fancier, more expensive kind because he has both German and Japanese knives, which sharpen at different angles. Sigh.

We also parboiled five pounds of chicken thighs so we'd have something to eat all this mole on (and which provided a few quarts of a very light chicken broth that turned out to be quite helpful).

Anyway, we eventually started work on the mole, guided by MKS's house recipe, Rick Bayless, and Diana Kennedy (who, if you weren't already aware, apparently hate each other, which led to much trash talking about "team Bayless" and "team Kennedy").

I quote Rick on mole (thus revealing my team preference):

...when you say mole poblano, non-natives immediately think "chocolate chicken," while natives' mouths water to visions of a dark, complex sauce made of dried chiles, nuts, seeds, flavorings, vegetables, spices, and, yes, a bit of chocolate. 

Whereas Diana Kennedy insists that mole does NOT include chocolate.

From what we could determine, basic mole consists of chiles, nuts, allium, some sort of fat (traditionally lard), spices, and a binder (generally stale tortillas). It may, but does not have to, include fruit, tomatoes, and/or chocolate.

So after some debate and comparing of recipes, we decided to lab four varieties:

• Dried chiles, no chocolate
• Dried chiles with 2 TBP cocoa powder
• Dried chiles with 2 oz. chopped 60% cacao bar chocolate
• Fresh chiles only, which also got 2 oz. of the bar chocolate

For each of the three dried chile varieties, we used:

• A little more than 1 chipotle (which are jalapenos that have been allowed to ripen to red before being dried, and were the hottest of the four)
• 5 cascabels (sweet and vegetal)
• 8 guajillos (smoky and mild)
• 3-4 anchos (meaty, and, incidentally, MKS's favorites)

If you're doing the math at home, that's four chipotles, 15 cascabels, 24 guajillos, and 11 anchos, so 54 chiles total, all of which had to be stemmed, seeded, de-veined, and torn or cut into small pieces before being cooked briefly in lard and then reconstituted in chicken broth. Who processed all those chiles? Yours truly, which took about an hour and a half.

(According to both Bayless and Kennedy, mulato chiles are traditional, and are supposed to be "widely available." Maybe in Texas and California, but we had NO luck locating any in the DMV.)

Those three versions also got 1/2 c. of pulverized, dry-toasted almonds each as their nut component.

The fresh chile version used four jalapenos and six anaheims, all of which we roasted in the oven then peeled, seeded, and de-veined before using. The fresh version also got 3/4 c. pepitas (roasted pumpkin seeds) for its nut component.

All the varieties also got the following:

• 1 cinnamon stick
• ½ tsp anise seeds, toasted
• ½ tsp coriander seeds, toasted
• 3 TBSP sesame seeds, toasted
• ½ tsp mixed seeds from the dried chiles
• 3 oz. tomato paste
• 4 cloves, ground
• 1 whole onion and 1 clove garlic, chopped and browned in lard
• 2 cloves raw garlic, chopped
• ¼ c. mixed brown and golden raisins
• 2 corn tortillas (which, of course, we made fresh and then staled-out in the oven)

We had all that prepped and standing by in four bowls before we started cooking. For each of the three dried chile batches, first, we stick-blended the dried, reconstituted chiles in their chicken broth, then poured that into a Dutch oven to brown in lard before adding that list of ingredients above plus about 1/2 c. homemade smoked chicken stock (that MKS just happened to have on hand), whirring with the stick blender again, then simmering for about 30 minutes, adding the parboiled chicken thighs, and simmering an additional 30 minutes. The only difference with the fresh chile version is that we just put the above ingredients and the roasted chiles in the Dutch oven together with the last of the chicken broth and more like 1 c.  of the homemade smoked chicken stock, then went through the same whirring, simmering, chicken, more simmering process as above.

When the chicken was done, we pulled it out, shredded it, and served each with a bowl of its sauce on the side, thusly:

All together, the process took more than five hours, which is actually pretty fast considering that Rick Bayless opines that it takes multiple days to make a really good mole.

Both Chef Spouse and The Executive Committee found the fresh variety too hot, although, chile-head that I am, it was my favorite. I liked the brightness of no chocolate variety as well, finding both the chocolate varieties a little too rich. Surprisingly, the cocoa variety had a smoother mouth-feel than the bar chocolate variety. But I wouldn't, as the saying goes, kick any of them out of bed for eating crackers.

"But was there a drinks lab?" you ask. Of course! Aside from wine with the mole, we also enjoyed two tasty cocktails.

Mad Kitchen Scientist made us delish fresh mango ginger margaritas to start the day. He muddled 1 mango, 2 limes, and a thumb joint-sized piece of fresh ginger, chopped fine, then used that as the base for drinks, each of which were 1 part Tequila, 1/2 part Cointreau, and 1/4 part agave nectar.

Chef Spouse responded with a yet-to-be-named pomegranate drink, consisting of 1 part simple syrup, 1 part lemon juice, 2 parts Aperol, 3 parts gin, and 3 parts 100% pomegranate juice. I, of course, didn't find it bitter enough and added orange bitters to mine.

So was it worth the time and effort? Absolutely, because each recipe makes a lot of mole, which, according to Mad Kitchen Scientist, freezes really well. We had quite a bit of the chicken left, too, which is going to show up at the Super Bowl party as filling for a fresh corn tortilla taquito appetizer.

Food Lab: Update

Happy New Year, Foodies!

Checking in on your valiant Food Labbers, although we haven't done a formal lab since September, we have all been busy with food and non-food activities.

As usual, of course, it gets tougher to schedule Labs in the fall due to one of my other leisure activities, and things were further complicated this fall by Labbers traveling domestically and internationally and changing jobs and looking for jobs and several house renovation projects and ANOTHER one of my leisure activities, among other things.

Chef Spouse and I did join Mad Kitchen Scientist, The Executive Committee, and some of their friends at the family homestead in Catawba, OH Thanksgiving week. We did a LOT of cooking, and sort of half of a lab looking at making aspics, but Chef Spouse and I had to leave before that finished up, and we mostly forgot to take any pictures, which makes things a little tough to write about.

What I learned:

• REALLY good meat is REALLY cheap in Ohio. We got a huge, beautiful beef tenderloin (yes, the WHOLE tenderloin) for $30. Not joking.
• Pressure cookers are awesome for making stock - they speed up the process and extract a LOT more gelatinous goodness.
• If you feed and use your sourdough starter to bake bread daily, you stop needing any sort of recipe pretty much immediately. Now I just make bread.
• Those old-fashioned pizzelle irons that require you to cook the pizzelles over a gas burner are a BITCH to use, but remind everyone how delicious homemade pizzelles. Fortunately, Santa was reminded, too, and brought me one of these.
• Chef Spouse is the cocktail MASTER (I already knew that, but he worked his magic for us nightly to good effect, including using hibiscus blossoms we found at the local market).
• Aperol is YUMMY.
• Brining a turkey is not that hard as long as you have a spare cooler you can use.
• 8 people need at least 10 pies (we did have two each of pumpkin and pecan).
• DO NOT attempt to chop the leeks before you've had your coffee. You may lose a bit of the end of your thumb. Which hurts like HELL but does get you out of helping with the cleanup.
• A snug house, two happy dogs, hot buttered rum, and conversation with good friends around the fire is an EXCELLENT way to spend an evening.

We've had some great foodie moments since then, too, including the annual Old Ebbitt Grill oyster riot, an afternoon teaching a group of friends that will be traveling to Jamaica with us in the spring how to make pasta from scratch, meals at some great new restaurants in the DMV, attending the annual Feast of the Seven Fishes Italian (of course) friends of ours put together, and our traditional New Year's Eve helping Mad Kitchen Scientist and The Executive Committee prep and then joining a bunch of their other friends for their fantastic house party featuring our delicious food and Mad Kitchen Scientist's top-quality homebrews.

Food Lab will return soon now that the 2013 NFL season is winding down. In the meantime, happy New Year to you and all your loved ones. I wish you a 2014 full of amazing food, fun, laughter, love, learning, and good friends - in other words, that you'll have a Food Lab kind of year!

Food Lab 25: Smoked Mollusks

We knew it had to happen sooner or later. And it's not like we haven't had previews: the bourbon eggs, attempts to make cheese, homemade rice paper, lobster thermidor, gluten-free pizza crust...I could go on. But this is the first time that the main lab idea was a total #FAIL.

The day started so well. Mad Kitchen Scientist, Chef Spouse and I gathered at the Maine Avenue Fish Market to stock up. We bought big and little clams, mussels, oysters, head-on shrimp, crawfish, some octopus and a piece of salmon for The Empress and Chef Spouse, who's not huge on bivalves.

Upon arriving back, the first thing we did was put the mussels in a brine, consisting of:

4 qt water
1/2 c kosher salt
1/4 c brown sugar
Bay leaves
Dried hot peppers
1 dozen allspice berries
Fennel seed
Mix of peppercorns

Looks promising (and pretty), doesn't it?  Just you wait....

Chef Spouse then valiantly started opening the oysters, even though he'd never done it before and we had no oyster knife. It did not go well, to the point that, after destroying the shell on one, semi-successfully opening two more, and determining that there was no way to open the rest without the right tools, he left to purchase an oyster knife. While he was gone, the IAs arrived. Turns out, Papa IA is a man of hidden talents, including the fact that he worked as an oyster shucker at one point. Once Chef Spouse had the right tool and a good coach, he dispatched the rest of the oysters in quick order, and we proceeded to slurp them all down poste haste.

In the meantime, the octopus went into a marinade of:

Shallots
Garlic
Olive oil
Lemon juice
Hot peppers
Chopped fresh rosemary
Chopped fresh sage

And Mad Kitchen Scientist fired up the Big Green Egg.

Next we par-boiled the crawfish in a simple Old Bay and salt mix, since we were planning to smoke them. Why did we par-boil them first? Visions of still-live crawfish scattering the second they hit the grate in the smoker.

Then it was out of the brine for the mussels, out of the pot for some of the crawfish, and onto a slow smoke heat (around 225) until the mussels opened up, signaling that they were - or should have been - ready to eat.

Here's the thing. I've had smoked mussels before. I know it's possible. But it wasn't this weekend. Instead of forming into tasty, juicy little pockets of chewy deliciousness, the mussels were rigid and nearly impossible to pry fully open and, when we did, there were two flat bits of flesh against the inside of each shell that were kind of the consistency of pate. They didn't taste bad, exactly, and you could taste the smoke, but they were profoundly disappointing. The crawfish fared a little better, although you couldn't really taste any smokiness.

After that, we cranked up the heat in the Egg (I still think it needs a name), and put together a sort of clam bake in Mad Kitchen Scientist's new 9 qt cast iron dutch oven. It included:

3/4 L white wine
2 fennel bulbs, quartered
1 onion, chopped in eighths
Head on shrimp
2 red and 2 yellow tomatoes, also in eighths
6 ears corn halved
all 3 dozen clams

Once again, looks pretty good, right? Oh my, were we wrong.

So we kept the Egg closer to 400, smoked until the clams started to open, then popped the lid on to steam briefly.

The clams were not terrible. They were a little tough, but not inedible, and again, you could taste the smoke. The shrimp overcooked to the point that they fell apart. I couldn't eat the corn - banged one of my teeth slightly loose in an accident earlier this summer, and it's still not 100% - but the tomatoes, onions, and fennel were not great, either.

Thank goodness we had those oysters, that octopus, which we grilled, and salmon, which we also grilled, or we would've had nothing to eat but the cheese and olives The Executive Committee had put out for us.

So our first disaster. Doing a little additional research now, I realize we left out the key step with the mussels: that they needed to be briefly boiled and de-shelled THEN smoked. Same thing with the clams. The shrimp should have also been removed from their shells and dry-smoked, preferably after being treated to a rub or marinade of some sort. To paraphrase The Wedding Singer, this is information I would have found useful YESTERDAY. Fortunately, we had plenty of champagne, sparkling wine, and white wine to console ourselves with.

Food Lab 24: Smoking

No labs since March, then two in two weeks. Schedules: what can you do?

Like the crepe lab, this wasn't a *pure* lab. As I mentioned, The Executive Committee and Mad Kitchen Scientist have been providing a home to a Big Green Egg since late last fall, which means they've had plenty of time to get quite good at smoking meat, aka "Real Barbeque."

Our task for this lab was to figure out if you could get a reasonable facsimile of smoking inside a gas grill.

The answer, we discovered, was yes, with some caveats.

You start with soaked wood chips and some sort of container for them, thusly:

(Did you know you can pre-soak your chips, store them in bags in the freezer, and use them without thawing? Efficient!)

Step two is to cover (or, as we later learned, PARTIALLY cover) the chips to keep them from burning too fast and to regulate the smoke:

(Nice alternate use of grill fork there, Chef Spouse.)

Then you start a LOW flame under JUST the chips (so your chip container needs to correspond with how your grill burners light, left/right or front/back). The chips go over the flame. The meat DOES NOT go over flame. Remember, smoking is all about INDIRECT heat.

So what's the caveat?

Flare ups.

They are not your friend.

In order to maximize grill space and also because we were smoking both boneless (pork chops) and bone-in (pork ribs) meats, we were using the upper rack, a portion of which was directly over the covered chip basket. Without constant vigilance, and with dripping grease, you get this:

 (That's a little TOO much char, Son.)

With constant vigilance, on the other hand, you get this:

(Now THAT'S what I'm talking about! Also, notice the partially covered chips.)

The other thing with a grill is that it's much harder to regulate the temperature, which means the chips burn unevenly. So you cycle from too hot/too much smoke, through "the chips are burning too fast!" to too cool/not enough smoke pretty regularly. The Big Green Egg is very Low Maintenance. It's Lauren Bacall. The grill is definitely HM. It's Sally Albright.

We used pecan chips.

The Egg (I feel like it needs a name, no?) got the pork shoulder, some chorizo, and some sweet Italian sausage. Also hickory chips.

There didn't appear to be any significant taste differences between hickory and pecan, at least not that our palates could discern.

What goes with Real Barbeque?

Collards and beer, natch.

We labbed two collard recipes, one with ham hocks, one without. We had no seasoned salt, so we altered the spicing in the ham hock recipe to:

1 Tsp salt
1 Tsp black pepper
1/2 Tsp turmeric
1/2 Tsp sugar
1/2 Tsp smoked paprika
1/2 Tsp onion powder
2 crushed cloves of garlic
2 Tbsp sriracha

The only alteration we made to the no ham hocks recipe was that we omitted the bacon, too. Vegetarian collards, y'all.

Now, you would expect the ham hock recipe to be better. But you'd be wrong. Even when we amped up the salt and sriracha, it was surprisingly boring. The veg version, on the other hand, was delish.

On the beer front, Mad Kitchen Scientist is quite the accomplished home brewer, so we had plenty of good stuff to choose from, but we decided to get fancy with Beertails (aka, cocktails made with beer).

We tried a shandy, traditionally 1/2 beer and 1/2 lemonade, with fresh homemade lemonade and four different beers:

• BBQ ale homebrew
• ESB homebrew
• Rye Pale Ale homebrew
• Hop Crisis IPA

The rye pale ale was best, but all the beers were better without mucking them up with lemonade.

We then tried a Hoedown. I'm not even linking to a recipe. Suffice it to say, it uses fresh watermelon juice, and it was AWFUL. You should NEVER mix fresh watermelon juice with beer, particularly when there are such better options, like this, for instance, which we also tried with basil in place of the tarragon (an improvement), and lavender simple syrup in place of regular (which was not - too floral, like when you overdo the Creme de Violette in an Aviation).

But the real winner, of course, was watermelon margaritas. Take your normal favorite margarita recipe (I personally like 2 tequila, 2 lime, 1 Cointreau, 1 agave nectar) and add watermelon juice. It's extra awesome if you happen to have jalapeno-infused tequila around.

How do you make jalapeno-infused tequila?

Take the seeds and membranes from three jalapenos and steep them in one cup of silver tequila for at least an hour (longer if you like it hotter). Strain and bottle. Go, go, garde manger!

Mama IA also did some experiments in gluten-free cooking, making corn bread and cupcakes with The Empress, but she'll have to detail that for you (if we can persuade her).

So yes, you can smoke meat quite successfully in your gas grill, as long as you remember:

Food Lab 23: Crepes

OK, it hasn't actually be four full months since the Food Lab crew assembled. We had a lab planned

back in the middle of April: candy making. We were going to do caramels, lollipops, and chocolate truffles. Unfortunately, at the last minute, the IAs were unable to join us, and seeing as Mama IA was the instigator of Candy Lab, we didn't feel right about proceeding without her.

So, blessed with extraordinarily good weather that day, Chef Spouse and I hung out with Mad Kitchen Scientist and The Executive Committee in their backyard playing with the Green Egg smoker to which they're providing a temporary home, grilling flat bread and veg of all sorts, and trying out the molecular gastronomy kit The Executive Committee got for Christmas. We made lemon foam (for our grilled asparagus) and balsamic vinegar pearls (for our grilled romaine). And chocolate truffles, which wasn't really a lab because Chef Spouse makes them all the time, but he did NOT use the Super-Secret Recipe provided to him be a friend of ours for purposes of, I quote, "sexual blackmail."

But I digress.

May and June were busy travel months for various members of your Food Lab team, which left us next able to gather on Sunday, July 14, also known as Bastille Day.

Bastille Day food lab?

Crepes, bien sur!

First, to get you in the mood, go ahead and start the video below of Edith Piaf singing La Vie En Rose.



So we used both Julia Child recipes, sweet and savory, an extremely simple sourdough (using the sourdough starter I've grown over the past several months, who goes by Fred), and a buckwheat batter. All were made the previous day.

The thing about crepes isn't the batter, though. The batter is simple: flour, eggs, butter, salt, milk, and water.

It's the flipping technique.

I should back up. Several years *before* he started getting serious about cooking, Chef Spouse decided he wanted to learn how to make crepes. So we got him official French steel crepe pans (sorta like these), and he perfected his flipping technique. He can actually flip with both hands at the same time. It's pretty impressive. Like a dope, I didn't take video.

Anyway, according to his notes, here's how it works:

1. Combine the wet ingredients, then beat in the flour and salt until the batter is the consistency of a milk shake
2. Heat your crepe pan, add a little butter, then pour in just enough batter to cover the pan
3. Flip when golden brown by making sure the crepe is loose, then slide the crepe away from you until 1/4 is hanging off the pan, then flip with a flick of the wrist

In more detail:

Butter: use a full stick of frozen butter and rub it on the pan between crepes to avoid using too much. The butter should sizzle but not brown.

Pouring in the batter: a traditional crepe pan will take about 1/3 of a cup of batter. When pouring it in, tilt the crepe pan so the batter runs down it and fills the pan. Pour the batter across the top from left to right (10 o'clock to 2 o'clock) across the top, with the bulk of the batter pouring out at the top of the pan (12 o'clock). The batter will slowly pool to the bottom and join up.

When to flip: never let crepes cook until they smoke or the edges get brown, or they will crack when you roll them. The crepe should shake loose in the pan before flipping. A very quick shift (forward/back) of the wrist will let you know if the crepe has separated from the pan yet.  You can't flip a crepe that is still stuck to the pan.

How to flip: as Julia Child states, you must have courage. Hesitation will kill your flip, a la -->

We did discover one key thing. If you’re short, you need to stand back from the stove for the flip because your arm needs to be lower  than stove height. If your arm is too high, you can’t do the motion correctly, and you end up with a mess. The problem, of course, is that if stand back from the stove to flip your crepe and miss, the crepe hits the floor.

Now, you don't have to have a crepe pan. You can use a more traditional fry pan/skillet. The problem is that it ups the degree of difficulty on the flip significantly. SIGNIFICANTLY.

So what did we fill all these crepes with? Spinach sauteed with onions and pancetta, mushroom duxelles, lightly steamed asparagus, home-smoked salmon (see above, re: Green Egg), homemade duck confit (which we also tried adding to the crepe batter itself, tasty but hard to flip), goat cheese, and Gruyere.

Of course, at the end, we had sweet crepes. We had all sorts of plans for them, but it came down to two things: a gooseberry/blueberry compote Mad Kitchen Scientist had made with mascarpone cheese and, of course, Crepes Suzette (because setting things on fire in the kitchen on purpose is fun).

What did we drink? Well, wine, of course, and French 75s, one of my very favorite cocktails ever. Booze, simple syrup, lemon juice, and champagne. Ah, but what booze? The traditional is gin v. cognac, and we tried both. They were both lovely, with gin clearly the winner for warm weather, and cognac clearly the winter version. We then moved on to trying rye and silver tequila. After all, a French75 is basically a Tom Collins topped with champagne rather than club soda, so why NOT try it with a whiskey sour as the base? And we needed a comparison booze. Well, the silver tequila blew us all away, so we then moved on to the inevitable silver v. resposado comparison. Resposado was better.

Finally for Mad Kitchen Scientist, who was sad we didn't have a recording to play:

Food Lab 22: Irish Cooking (Sort Of)

Chef Spouse has a good friend who lives in Pittsburgh who is a pretty serious cook himself (Mr. Pittsburgh even considered throwing over computer work for culinary school), so since he and his good friend who is a girl but not a girlfriend were visiting us for the weekend, we decided to lab it up.

The IAs were able to join us as well, so we had a full kitchen and MANY, MANY ideas. After quite a bit of back and forth (and speculation about where we might be able to procure liquid nitrogen), we arrived on "Ethnic cooking: Irish" in honor of St. Pat's weekend. And since we all still have lots of tasty, tasty lamb, we decided to go in a shepherd's pie direction, plus The Executive Committee was interested in learning the mashed potato technique Chef Spouse learned in his cooking course at L'Academie de Cuisine.

This quickly expanded, as it tends to do, to include making fresh farmer's cheese (two versions, one with cow milk, one with goat milk), making three different types of mashed potatoes, making a traditional colcannon mash, making cabbage cooked in bacon, making a Meyer lemon cocktail (as Mad Kitchen Scientist and The Executive Committee had found some lovely Meyer lemons at the grocery), and testing various brown liquors against each other in a manhattan.

As usual, we had "an absurdity" of ideas, and we also had "an absurdity" of cooks. (We've decided that "an absurdity" is the official Food Lab term for excess, so in other words, every single Food Lab we ever do).

Lesson one: eight cooks really is too many, even for our relatively spacious kitchen. So all y'all who've been hinting that you'd like to join us (you know who you are): you really, really do need to franchise this idea. We don't have room.

Drinks first:

We looked at a bunch of recipes that specifically called for Meyer lemons, and ended up choosing this one, for a Meyer lemon blossom, in part because it called for celery bitters. Of course we have celery bitters, along with at least 10 other types of bitters ranging from the typical (Angostura, Peychaud's) to the obscure (rhubarb, gin barrel orange, the aforementioned celery). Hey, we're serious about our cocktails in this house. It was decent, but it really amped up when Papa IA had the idea to muddle some fresh sage in.

We also decided to try 3 brown liquors - Irish whiskey, rye, and bourbon - in a manhattan and taste test.

While all three were delicious, Mad Kitchen Scientist and I clearly preferred the rye version (spicy and not as sweet as bourbon, but still with a solid kick), while Papa IA like the "gentleness" of the Irish whiskey version.

Why is Irish whiskey more "gentle"? The proof is lower.

On to the mashed potatoes. We labbed Yukon golds versus russets, and boiling versus baking. Why would you bake potatoes you're going to mash? The secret to creamy, decadent mashed potatoes is: one, don't over-mash as it breaks down the starch too much and renders them gluey; and two, and perhaps even more important, potatoes can only absorb so much non-potato material. The less water they absorb, the more space there is for butter and cream.

You know another way to make them even more decadent? Reduce the cream before you start adding it. Yowza.

Mad Kitchen Scientist preferred the Yukon golds, but I liked the baked russets best. They had a really nice roasted (no other way to describe it) flavor.

Then again, all versions had so much butter and reduced heavy cream in them that, even though they had been a little over-processed and weren't texturally perfect, Chef Spouse had to take them away from us in the "tasting" (aka "gobbling down") process so as to retain enough to top our shepherd's pie.

Speaking of, we started with Alton Brown's recipe, and then reorganized it, because it seemed like the order of operations was a little backwards, at least given our ingredients. Alton calls for you to saute the veg first and use ground lamb, but we had cubed lamb leg, so after consulting with Chef Spouse, we decided to process the ingredients more like you would for bouef bourgignon, which he makes every year for Christmas. We browned the meat in batches first, then sauteed the vegetables in the meaty fond goodness, then moved the veg to a large pot so we could saute the meat again with flour (which you need to form the gravy), then combined the meat in the large pot with the veg and added lamb stock, tomato paste, and herbs. We reduced the sauce, popped the lamb mixture into a pan, topped with the reserved mashed potatoes, and baked. It was REALLY delicious, and heated up quite well the next week, which I appreciated, since Chef Spouse was out of town and I have late classes some nights.

On to the cheese: The Executive Committee and Mad Kitchen Scientist had also procured rennet and citric acid. We just followed the process on the rennet package, other than skipping the final heating, so the cheeses that resulted were more like dryish ricotta in texture rather than fresh mozzarella-like. Actually, it was exactly like real Pennsylvania Dutch schmercase, which is a fresh cheese farmers make when they have too much milk, as opposed to the weirdo spread that includes cottage cheese and Worcestershire sauce you'll find if you Google it. Both were very tasty, particularly on homemade bread with a little honey (which is also the traditional Pennsylvania Dutch way to eat schmercase). We had enough remaining to cure a ball of each in brine for at least a week, as recommended, which means we get to try it this weekend, so I'll report back.