Archive for July, 2011
Thursday, July 28th, 2011
Last week started where the previous week finished, with a bevvy of tarts. For any newcomers, don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a tale of my sordid weekends in San Francisco’s brothels, but rather the pastry variety. And what a way to start.
Using the left over Pâte à Foncer and the vanilla Sucree, as well as a chocolate version made for us by our instructor, Juliette, we made a trio of tasty treats. The first was a Pear Bourdaloue. A rectangular tart filled with frangipane, jam and topped with artfully sliced pears. Right up my ‘rue’. Next, using the chocolate sucree, a salted caramel tart. Quite a lengthy process this one, as it involved making a salted caramel with which we lined the base, a chocolate ganache which formed the bulk of the filling, all topped off with ‘black glaze’, which contrary to it’s name isn’t a new tone from Dulux, but a silky chocolate flavoured glaze which gives the finished tart a shop ready sheen.
The final tart of the trio was a creamy passion fruit tart, which had a tasty curd like filling similar to a tarte au citron, topped (slightly un-necessarily in my opinion) with blow-torched Swiss meringue, to give a nicely burnished effect. Or at least that’s the theory. For most of us, this was the first time we had used a piping bag to finish a desert, and there were some mixed results. My effort (not pictured) wasn’t too bad, but lets just say Pierre Hermé hasn’t been knocking down my door to offer me a job.
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Tags: Blow Torch, Caramel, Chantilly, Choux, Cookies, Cream, Creamy, Eclairs, Frangipane, Gateaux Saint Honoré, meringue, Muffins, Paris Brest, passion Fruit, Pastry, Peanut Butter, Pear Bourdaloue, Praline, Salted Caramel, Tart
Posted in Opinion, Reviews, Sweet Stuff, Travel | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, July 26th, 2011
For the un-initiated, Ray Mears is a legend. He’s a quietly authoritative survival and bush-craft expert, who’s brilliant TV shows have been running in the UK for years. He basically gets to live out every schoolboy’s fantasy of surviving in the great outdoors, whittling wood, foraging, and using a few of the hundred or so ways he knows how to start a fire in the wild.
Anyways, I remember seeing an episode of one of his shows a while ago (I think it was the one where he met up with another survival legend, Les Hiddins aka The Bush Tucker Man) where he cooked foil wrapped bananas with cocoa powder in the dieing embers of his camp fire.
Hardly haute cuisine I think you’ll agree, but they looked tasty, so the next time I had a barbie I thought I’d give it a go, and they’ve been a fixture ever since. So I figured if some guy from New Orleans called Foster can have a banana dish named after him, why can’t our Ray?
These ones are a posher remix of Ray’s iron rations, using dark chocolate and a bit of booze, but I’d like to think the man himself would approve.
Ingredients (per person)
1 ripe banana
2 squares of dark chocolate
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Tags: Banana, Barbecue, Bush Tucker, Bushcraft, Chocolate, Double Cream, Ray Mears, Survival, Vanilla Ice Cream, Whiskey
Posted in Dinner, Recipes, Snack, Sweet Stuff | No Comments »
Monday, July 25th, 2011
This may not make me any friends in San Francisco, but we’ve found eating out here a bit hit and miss. I think it’s great that the food scene is so vibrant and entrepreneurial, but it feels like too often that food takes the back seat over gimmicks, word of mouth and social media buzz (liquid nitrogen cooled ice-cream, anyone?).
If I’m honest, a lot of the places people rave about, we’ve just found a bit ‘meh’, and thus far, there have been very few places that have really blown us away. But Mission Chinese Food is one that we could eat at every week.
The guys who set it up used to go under the name Mission Street Food and (from what the internet tells me) were like high end food truckers, blending classical and modern culinary training with street foods from all over the world. Around a year ago, they decided to set up something a bit more permanent, and like a hermit crab set up in a shell of a former run down Chinese restaurant in The Mission, and Mission Street Food became Mission Chinese Food.
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Tags: Char Siu Pork Belly, Chinese, Danny Bowien, Fish Bumplings, Food, Lung Shan, Mission, Mission Chinese Food, Mongolian Hangar Steak, Restaurant, San Francisco, Xi'an Lamb
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Thursday, July 21st, 2011
So goodbye folding shed-load of butter into dough, and hello……folding a truck load of butter into dough.
We started our first week of pastry by making three different kinds of puff. The classic, which is sheeted and folded in a similar way to croissant dough, but gets a few extra folds to give it the lift that I’m sure you’re all familiar with. So called ‘blitz’, which is a quick puff that you make by hand, which gives you less predictable layers and is more suitable for more rustic products. And finally, the big dawg. Inverted puff.
Inverted puff is crazy. Not only do you add in 50% more butter than average puff, but your ‘beurrage’ (the butter you fold into the dough through various folds) is mixed with flour and wrapped around the OUTSIDE of the dough as opposed to locked in as with croissants and classic puff. Not sure who the first person to have done this would have been as it’s basically counter-intuitive, but he or she must have been an evil genius as the resulting pastry is pretty frikkin’ amazing. Melt-in-the-mouth-buttery-taste-sational. And before you ask, yes that is a word. Go look it up.
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Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 19th, 2011
A week or so ago on a rare, but none the less slightly grey and grim San Francisco Saturday, we headed to an area of the city called Sunset. It’s a part of town bordered by Ocean Beach (the local break for a lot of SF surfers) and the Pacific Highway that on paper has a lot going for it, but seems to have become a bit neglected, a bit like a faded British seaside town.
We’d read that the area is on the up again following a small cluster of new(ish) and interesting places opening up down there, one of which is a cafe / restaurant called Outerlands. I’d first heard about Outerlands from a Tartine Bread video that features the owner, David Muller. David had met Chad Robertson through a love of surfing, and Chad taught David how to make the bread that he now serves at the cafe.
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Tags: Black Butte Porter, Borage, Bread, Brocoli, Chad Robertson, Cheese Sandwich, David Muller, Grilled Cheese, Outerlands, Potato, San Francisco, Soup, Sunset, Surfing, Tartine
Posted in Lunch, Opinion, Reviews, Travel | No Comments »
Sunday, July 17th, 2011
‘Barbecue’ is a bit of a national obsession in the US. From what I can gather there’s a bit of rivalry between the North and South in terms of style. I forget which, but one part of the country favours the dry, and the other the more saucy, but whatever side you meat falls on, it can be some tasty shizzle.
This recipe is a culmination of a bunch of different barbecue recipes we’ve read and tasted since we’ve been out here. A lot of the more recent ones seem to favour balsamic vinegar and going heavy on the sugar as part of the sauce, which to my taste is a bit sweet, and you end up with almost Chinese style ‘candied’ ribs. I prefer a bit more of a balance between sweet and savoury, so have used apple cider vinegar. But be careful not to go too far the other way or you’ll end up with something that will strip the enamel off your teeth.
The ribs get a double dose of flavour from a dry rub (which you should allow to do it’s work for a good few hours; or ideally overnight) and a wet barbecue ‘mopping sauce’ that you douse the meat with whilst it cooks on the barbecue.
Right, lets get our grill on.
Ingredients (serves 2-3)
1.2 – 1.5 kg rack of baby back (loin) ribs
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Tags: Allspice, Baby Back Ribs, Barbecue, Bourbon, Brown Sugar, Cider Vinegar, Coleslaw, Corn, Cumin, Deliverance, Dry Rub, Garlic, Ketchup, Onion, Paprika, Pork, Sauce, Soy Sauce
Posted in Dinner, Lunch, Recipes, Travel | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, July 12th, 2011
Bit of a funny week last week. We returned to college on Tuesday after the long 4th July weekend, and everyone seemed a bit lacking in vim and vigour. Think maybe there’s a bit of course fatigue going down. It’s been a pretty full on ten weeks, so it’s not surprising, and it was also our last week of Viennoiserie before we move on to pastry.
We started the week week working on more croissants, continuing our lamination education. It was great to get a few more batches under our belts. Getting more used to the sheeters, tidying up our lamination techniques, and working on our shaping. As part of this, we also made a couple of batches of croissants using some more exotic flours.
Firstly, a teff variation using 60% teff flour pre-cooked into a rubbery porridge which we made into traditional shapes and pain au chocolat. And also a dough made using a buckwheat poolish. As noted here before, I’m not a huge fan of teff, but the croissants actually tasted pretty good, better in fact than the pain au chocolat variation, which is odd. To my palate, the buckwheat didn’t offer a great deal, although the danish-like shapes we filled with a mix of mashed potato, goats cheese and spring onions did taste pretty damn good.
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Tags: Buckwheat, Coupe Du Monde De La Patisserie, Course, Croissasnt, Danish pastry, Lamination, Pan Au Chocolat, Pan D'oro, San Franciso, SFBI, Sheeter, Sticky Buns, Teff, Viennoiserie
Posted in Opinion, Reviews, Travel | 1 Comment »
Sunday, July 10th, 2011
My latest, greatest baking discovery is the Dutch Oven I bought a few weeks ago. Recommended by the tutors at the SFBI as one of the best ways to cook bread at home, they yet again have proved they know their onions as it’s already helped me knock out a bunch of consistently great bread in the kitchen of our rented apartment.
The reasons it works so well are two fold. Firstly, the cast iron retains heat brilliantly, and as you’re baking in a sealed vessel your bread is less likely to be subject to any fluctuations in oven temp, which means a good even bake. The second reason is that it the lid traps steam, so there’s no need to fanny about with trays of boiling water or spraying your loaves pre-baking.
You could try something like a Le Creuset, as used baking Jim Lahey’s no knead loaf (where you almost pour the dough in), will work OK, but the Lodge Combo-Cooker I acquired is the business. Firstly, it was about the quarter of the price of a Le Creuset (they are quite a bit more expensive in the UK I’m afraid), and It’s other advantage is that you can invert it using the lid / skillet as the base to bake on which helps give a better crust colour while you’re venting the loaf. NB. You don’t have to have a Dutch Oven to make this formula, but it will give you better results.
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Tags: Bake, Baking, Bread, Combo-Cooker, Dan Lepard, Dutch Oven, Hand Made Loaf, Home, Le Creuset, Levain, Lodge, San Francisco, SFBI, Sourdough, Starter, Wheast Germ, Whole Wheat Flour
Posted in Equipment, Recipes, Travel | 9 Comments »
