Raccoon and Lobster

Oh hello, food blog. Good to see you’re still standing. I’ve been at Melisse pulling 60 hour weeks since…basically my last post, with a few days off here and there. Right around the time I do a giant batch of laundry and see some friends and return to civilization, it’s about time to go back to work. I’m learning so much, but I’m also so, so tired. I come home after a 13 hour day completely exhausted and yet unable to sleep because I’m so wound up over the day I just had. It’s been a crazy, exhilarating, wild, unbelievable ride. I have so much post fodder that needs to find its way to the page, if I could just get a quiet moment to write it all down. But I’m still alive. And I’m still at Melisse. And if I stop to analyze it I might wake up.

Saturday was my first day behind the scenes at Mélisse, and it was crazypants.

I got my first blister about 30 minutes in while chopping a hojillion bulbs of fennel. For future reference, if you’re going to do a lot of knife work, take a little sandpaper to the spine of the knife where the base of your index finger hits, down near the handle and round off the square edge. It’ll make your life a lot easier.

After you spend extended time in the walk in fridge cutting puff pastry, your fingers go a little numb and shelling peas becomes a lot more challenging.

There is such a thing as bacon overload, even when it’s bacon confit. After medium dicing two giant slabs of it, it lost a lot of the appeal of omg I’m holding so much quality bacon right now.

I got to the point where I could portion out pasta to within a gram of the right weight without using the scale.

I learned how to use the vacuum sealer and the industrial blender. Both took less time to figure out than the finicky motion activated paper towel dispenser.

Eating the staff meal with the maitre d’ and the sommelier, both in casual clothes, was slightly surreal given how intimidated I was walking into Mélisse the first time. I told the sommelier that I had seen him when I dined there last week and he said “Oh, was I nice to you?”

Throughout the day, you can sense the energy level rising as it gets closer and closer to service. The mood in the kitchen changes and people start moving even faster. The peak of service was a frenzy of activity for everyone else but there was actually very little for me to do because all the prep had already happened. I was occasionally asked to prep something that we were low on but the rest of the time the chefs didn’t need anything and I was told to just watch the service.

I felt kind of useless just observing and trying to stay out of the way so when I realized that one of the plates leaving the pastry station needed ingredients from the walk in right before it went out, I started doing the legwork. After a few runs, the chef started wordlessly assigning me other tasks. He would set out the plates for the order and demonstrate what he wanted on one plate and then hand over the supplies for me to do the rest. By the end of the night I was helping to plate a lot of the desserts and was allowed to try my hand at  decorating and was even allowed to wield the torch*. Having to carry a rejected plating job to the wash was always a sad moment.

I finished the night absolutely exhausted. I knew it was going to be a long day of hard work but I didn’t fully appreciate how tired I was going to be until I staggered out after 12 hours.

As far as first time experiences go, I feel extremely lucky to be invited into a kitchen with a friendly staff that was happy to show me the ropes and put up with my inexperience. After reading all those kitchen memoirs, I expected a high drama kitchen filled with outrageous antics, excessive profanity, and brutal hazing. I’m afraid no one will be offering me a book deal to write about my completely scandal free experience. The good news is that I have been invited back and will be going in again next Saturday and barring any catastrophes, more days in the following week. It’s still totally surreal that they’ll allow any riffraff off the street into the kitchen, but until Chef figures out his mistake I’ll keep on showing up.

*Before I started in the kitchen I read as much as I could on how to stage in a kitchen and even sent a message to Chef Rick Bayless via twitter asking for advice. He responded “jump in and work quickly, carefully, efficiently.” At the time, I didn’t quite realize what he meant and thought it was pretty generic advice, but once in the kitchen I realized how important it actually was. By seeing an opportunity to help and doing it without being asked, I was able to prove my usefulness, and was gradually trusted with more tasks and more chances to prove myself. If I hadn’t taken Chef Bayless’s advice and jumped in, I would probably have finished the night still standing in a corner trying to stay out of the way instead of getting to try my hand at so many things in the pastry station. Thank you Chef.

Oh look at that!

Maca-rights! No more maca-wrongs! Rejoice! I had yet another macaron failure with the Italian sucre cuit method before I decided to try my hand at the more temperamental French macaron. Maybe 5 years of French classes offered me a  hidden advantage because I finally got properly textured macarons with feet instead of sad hollow shells that oozed into hideous almond amoebas.

Check it out baby. Two pairs of feet on each delightful cookie, a shell like crust, and a soft interior texture. I think I was botching the addition of the hot sugar syrup to the egg whites somehow and deflating my whites. With the French method I could really focus on getting my meringue to the right consistency and whisking the last bit by hand gave me even more control.

Judging by the troubleshooting pictures at Syrup and Tang, these aren’t quite perfect. The bottoms were ever so slightly sticky, which suggests that I managed to over-beat it a little. Maybe I can blame it on the high humidity today. Nonetheless, I’m declaring them a success. Once properly sandwiched into macarons, no one will be able to tell. By the way, the swirls on the shells were because I made two batches with different levels of coloring and didn’t clean out the piping bag. I think it adds a little something.

Before you get started baking macarons, you should read both of the excellent breakdowns at  Syrup and Tang and Not So Humble Pie. I referred to both when making this batch.

The recipes offered at both vary only a hair in their ratios, the primary difference is what percentage of the sugar was used to stiffen the meringue and what percentage was mixed in at the end with the almond flour. I went with Mrs. Humble’s multipliers because 2x and .3x was easier to remember than 1.6 and 0.8 respectively.

I did lose a lot of the macarons at the edges of the sheet tray to cracking, but the center ones fared just fine. I place the blame for this with my tiny wall oven so future batches will be tweaked for oven time and temperature to see if I can resolve this.

Macarons

50 grams egg whites, aged
60 grams almond meal
100 grams powdered sugar
15 grams granulated sugar

To age egg whites, leave them uncovered at room temperature for 24-72 hours. I inverted a larger bowl over it to prevent any debris from falling in but left a gap for air exchange so that the whites would dry out properly. Weigh out the egg whites after you age them.

Preheat the oven to 290°F. Prepare heavy baking trays with parchment paper and set aside.

Combine the almond meal with the powdered sugar in a food process and blend together until extremely fine. Sift into a bowl and set aside.

In a clean stainless steel or copper bowl, beat the egg whites until very foamy and soft peaks form. Gradually beat in the granulated sugar and then continue beating until you get stiff glossy peaks. Add the almond and sugar mixture to the batter in quarters and fold it in quickly without overmixing. Flavorings and food coloring can be added with the almond and sugar additions. The end result should be stiff enough that a ribbon of batter drizzled from the spatula should take about 30 seconds to disappear into the batter.

Fill a pastry bag with the batter and pipe int to 1.5″ circles onto your baking sheet. Any peaks or tails should disappear by themselves after about 30 seconds. In fact, I used a star decorating tip on my cookies because I didn’t have any plain tips that were big enough.

Let your batter rest about 30 minutes or more, until they are no longer tacky when gently poked. Bake for 16-20 minutes, rotating the pan about halfway to ensure even baking. Cookies are done when they move without breaking when nudged.

Remove your cookies a few minutes after they come out of the oven and (ideally) let them cool with the feet side up on a baking rack. I missed that last step. Oops!

When cool, apply your filling. I used some leftover chocolate ganache from the cake I made a few days ago.

Mrs. Humble advises refrigerating your macarons for 2-3 days in a loosely covered container to let them mature for best texture and flavor. I’m not sure these will survive that long but if you try it, let me know how it works out for you.

Squash blossoms have arrived at the farmer’s market!

They are very delicate and should be eaten within a day of purchase and ideally within a few hours, so I had to get to cooking and get these lovely flowers in my stomach ASAP. One of the most common ways to prepare them is by stuffing them with a soft cheese mixture, dipping them in batter, and deep frying. My specific recipe is based on my pantry contents at the time, all quantities are approximate. The end result was delicious and and had a faint zucchini flavor.

Fried Squash Blossoms

~12 squash blossoms
1/2 cup goat cheese
1/2 cup mascarpone
1/4 cup chives , minced
1 clove garlic, minced
salt & pepper
2 eggs
1/4 cup milk
1 cup cornmeal (can also use flour or masa harina)
vegetable oil

To prepare the blossoms, rinse gently with water and drain. Gently open the flower and clean out the inside of any insects or debris and trim off the reproductive organs. For male blossoms, trim the stem to about 1″ long. For female blossoms, you can leave the squash on if desired.

Mix together the goat cheese, mascarpone, chives, and garlic. Salt and pepper to taste.  Roll about a teaspoon of cheese into a ball and stuff into the blossom and gently close the petals and twist the ends to hold the filling. Repeat with all blossoms.

Beat together the eggs and milk and dip the blossoms into the mixture, and then roll it in the cornmeal.

Fill a skillet with about 1″ of oil and heat to 350°F. Fry the blossoms in small batches until golden brown. Drain over a baking rack and serve immediately.

Ahh..hubris.

The San Francisco MOMA sells a beautiful Mondrian cake for $8 a slice. It’s a museum attraction unto itself:

With my masterful understanding of economic theory, I decided to make my own Mondrian cake, which I could then sell for $7 a slice. Devious! Unfortunately, it is a lot easier to boast about making a Mondrian cake than actually making an intriciate, perfectly square art cake that is worth charging $7 a slice for.

My recipe was a basic white velvet cake and dark chocolate ganache, both adapted from (say it with me now) Rose’s Heavenly Cakes. In retrospect, a denser pound cake would have worked a lot better structurally. My blue and yellow food coloring was hastily purchased from the grocery store and the color concentration was so miserable that after using the entire tube on a quarter-batch of batter, I had only the palest of icy blues. I was able to achieve pureed a decent blue color by pureeing frozen blueberries and mixing it in with the batter and scrapped the yellow cake completely.

The ganache on the bottom of the cake stuck to the wax paper, forcing me to serve the cake on the same messy sheet that I had decorated it on, losing me presentation points right off the bat. Cutting so many small squares left crumbs all over the table, and it was very difficult to get a crumb-free frosting. Any unevenness in pressure in applying the frosting led to deformation of the cake, and the square shape gradually deteriorated into an irregular trapezoid.

The only good thing about a project like this is the sheer quantity of leftover cake you get to eat. There is excess red and blue cake, excess white cake, and two endcaps that need to be sliced off to even out all the strips of cake. Delicious, if a bit sad to look at.

Total creation time was about 3 hours, which included baking three cakes in two batches.

White Velvet Cake from Rose’s Heavenly Cakes
3 large egg whites (90 g)
2/3 cup milk (160 g)
1.5 teaspoon vanilllla extract
2 cups cake or AP flour (200 g)
1 cup baker’s sugar (200 g)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 stick unsalted butter, softened (113 g)

The recipe above makes one 9×2 round cake, I scaled it up to a 9×2 square cake which entails multiplying everything by 1.27.

Whisk the egg whites, vanilla, and a few tablespoons of milk together until combined.

In a large bowl, beat together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt until well combined and any clumps are broken up. Add the butter and remaining milk and slowly increase the speed to medium and beat for 1½ minutes, scraping the sides of the bowl as necessary. The batter should be light and fluffy.

Add half of the egg mixture and beat for 30 seconds, then the other half and beat for another 30 seconds. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake until a cake tester comes out clean and the cake springs back when pressed lightly in the center, about 30-40 minutes.

One batch of batter can be divided into two standard 9″ loaf pans to make the blue and red cakes. Mix in either food coloring or a fruit puree until desired color is reached and bake.

Cool completely before frosting.

Dark Chocolate Ganache
12 oz dark chocolate (62%)
5 oz heavy cream, warm
2.5 oz unsalted butter, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler, remove from heat and add in the heavy cream, stirring until even in color and texture. Allow the chocolate to cool until warm to the touch and and gently stir in the butter and vanilla. Ganache will thicken when allowed to cool. To apply in thin layers, I ended up drizzling warm ganache to get an even application and then smoothing it out and scraping off the excess with a spatula after it thickens upon cooling. This helps to avoid stirring up any crumbs from the soft cake.

It’s 5am and I can’t sleep. The Boyfriend just kicked me out because I was thinking so hard that it was keeping him awake. I am radiating nervous energy from every pore, even while lying perfectly still.

Last night was a Significant Birthday, and one that has lead to a fair amount of what-does-it-all-mean angst. To drown out my dread, I went out for a meal with a group of lovely friends the night before and celebrated my Last Day. Kat was friendly with the chef and he visited our table several times to conspire about specials and later gave us a tour of the kitchen and allowed us to see where the magic all happened.

The actual Dreaded Day was a low key affair with The Boyfriend, mostly dedicated to playing shuffleboard, lawn bowling, and bingo, like all Citizens of Advanced Age. After hobbling our geriatric bodies down by the ocean for a spell, we ducked into a tapas bar for a quick bite and met the chef there. Chefs! They’re just like regular people! A streak was building, but I wasn’t in a position to see it just yet.

The Boyfriend, in his infinite generosity, took me out to dinner at Mélisse where I had the most incredible meal of my life. The 10 year anniversary menu featured ten classic dishes, the greatest hits compilation menu, if you will. Four hours of culinary bliss that left my brain a gibbering mess.

I had intended to ask if I could be allowed to see the kitchen and observe/obstruct the goings on at yet another restaurant, but by the time we finished the last course I so addled with truffle-drunkenness that someone was helping me into my jacket before any coherent words left my mouth.

The Boyfriend waited patiently outside while I barged my way into yet another kitchen and met the Chef de cuisine himself. About 30  seconds later,  while blundering my way through some sentence fragments indicating a general awe of the food and a fondness for cooking, I somehow pieced together a few words about peeling potatoes and being good at staying out of the way.  Suddenly I was wandering out of the kitchen with the business card of the chef and instructions to email him about a stage. In his kitchen. At Mélisse. Where I was in the presence of a White Asparagus Velouté so divine that even thinking about it now I have to stop, close my eyes, and remember the taste.

I was so incredulous of the idea of me being worthy to peel potatoes at Mélisse that I just stood there, flustered, for several moments while my brain struggled to find an appropriate response. Surely they wanted someone else? Someone with more professional potato peeling experience? Good decision on his part or not, I would be a fool not to leap at the opportunity to learn in that kitchen, and yet I was so dumbstruck by the whole interaction that I almost was that fool. I talked a few more minutes with the chef before staggering in a daze out of the kitchen and reviewing the moment now, I barely managed to sound competent to hold a vegetable peeler, much less a paring knife.

It seems almost inevitable that this will end with a combination of tears, skin grafts, and missing fingers, but even at that cost, I cannot pass up the opportunity. Happy Birthday indeed.

It’s been almost 3 weeks since I’ve baked a cake, a funk I attribute to a combination of general laziness, pesky real-life problems, and a lingering malaise brought about by watching the much-lauded but highly depressing TV crime drama The Wire.

I needed something to snap me out of the funk so I strapped on my apron and attempted to bake until the corruption, despair, and hopelessness of inner-city decay was purged my mind. It worked pretty well until The Boyfriend and I settled in to watch the next episode, which is more about the gritty realism of The Wire than about the healing powers of this cake.

This recipe comes courtesy of Shuna Fish Lydon and features a caramel syrup that appears in both the batter and frosting and is also drizzled on top for extra caramel goodness. The frosting is best with a little more sea salt, which adds some complexity to what is usually a sugar explosion.

Caramel Syrup

2 cups sugar
1/2 cup water
1 cup water for stopping the caramelization

You probably want to have long sleeves on for this part as the caramel can jump and sputter when the water is poured in and burns can happen. Sugar syrup holds an amazing amount of heat. I still have burn marks on my fingers from making Candied Apples when I was a kid, but that didn’t stop me from burning my tongue when I tasted it .

In a small saucepan with tall sides, mix the sugar and 1/2 cup water until mixture feels like wet sand. Use a wet pastry brush to brush down any stray sugar crystals. Turn on heat to highest flame and cook until the syrup is dark amber and smoking slightly.

Pour in the remaining cup of water, pouring evenly and smoothly with control will minimize splatter. Whisk the syrup over medium heat until it has reduced slightly and feels thicker and heavier on the whisk. If you remove a drop and allow it to cool, it should feel sticky to the touch. The end viscosity should be like that of maple syrup.

Caramel Cake

2 cups AP flour, I used 10oz per the guidelines on her blog
½ teaspoon baking powder
5oz unsalted butter, softened
1¼ cups sugar
½ teaspoon kosher salt (or ¼ teaspoon table salt)
1⁄3 cup caramel syrup, cooled to room temperature
2 large eggs, room temperature (I used 100g / 3.5oz of egg)
splash vanilla extract
1 cup milk, room temperature

Preheat oven to 350°F and butter and flour a tall 9″ cake pan. I used a 2″ deep pan, but 2.5″ would probably have been better.

Sift together the flour and baking powder and set aside.

Cream the butter in a mixer until soft and light and add the sugar and salt. Cream until the mixture is airy and fluffy. Slowly add the caramel syrup, letting it get combined in before adding more. Add the eggs and vanilla in the same manner, beating well after each addition to maintain a light and airy batter.

Alternate adding the flour mixture with the cup of milk, mixing in 1/3 of the total in each addition. Mix the batter after each addition until it is incorporated into the batter, scraping down the bowl as needed.

When the batter is smooth and uniform, pour into the prepared cake pan and bake for 45-50 minutes, rotating once after 30 minutes. Cake is done when a tester comes out clean and the top of the cake springs back to the touch.

Caramelized Butter Frosting

6oz unsalted butter
1 pound confectioner’s sugar, sifted
4-6 tablespoons heavy cream
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2-4 tablespoons caramel syrup
salt to taste

Cook butter until brown and strain through a fine sieve to remove the butter solids. Let cool.

Beat the sugar into the cooled brown butter, adding a little at a time. When the mixture is too dry to take more sugar, add some of the cream or caramel syrup and resume beating in the sugar. Continue until the mixture is smooth and all the sugar is incorporated. Add salt to taste.

I had a little bit of difficulty with the end texture of the frosting, and it turns out that Stacy was experiencing problems both times that she made this recipe too. I used 4 tablespoons of heavy cream and 4 tablespoons of caramel syrup, and the end result came out a bit too dry. I think a little more fat in the form of cream would make it a little easier to work with, but just know that you’re not alone if you have issues with the frosting.

It is a fact universally acknowledged to be true that dogs are extremely sensitive creatures. Their keen senses and canine intuition gives them powers that border on the supernatural. In times of natural disaster, one need look no further than Man’s Best Friend for guidance. Thus, when the 7.2 earthquake rocked, shimmied, and swayed across Southern California , I had plenty of warning.

The following is a dramatic pre-creation:

So fear not, fellow residents of Southern California. I’ve got you covered. If the Big One hits, right before California falls into the ocean, our resident seismologist Prof. Rock E. Raccoon will bat his luscious blond lashes exactly once. I feel safer already.

It’s not often that the boys get split up, but every so often The Boyfriend gets swamped at work and requires some help down at the office. Because of his heartless draconian employers, he is limited to only one office assistant, and so it was that poor Arthur was left at home to nap on the couch and collect canine unemployment while Rocky was hard at work helping to shred sensitive papers.

Being an office dog is hard work though, and sometimes a project comes up that requires more puppy power. Thanks to the wonders of modern videoconferencing technology, Rocky can brainstorm with a friend in the business and Arthur can enjoy a brief but highly lucrative stint as an independent canine contractor.

A few weeks ago, on St. Patrick’s Day, my kitchen was invaded by a giant hunchback.

At first, like the denizens of 15th century Paris, I was afraid and confused. But soon, understanding set in, and with it came compassion. The Hunchback did not deserve my contempt, he was merely a victim of unfortunate circumstance who deserved the same amount of love and respect as anyone else.

In fact, in my tale, the villain of the story was actually a Monster Egg. Well, a pair of Monster Eggs.

I’ll start from the beginning.

I was going out to dinner with a group of friends and decided to bring a cake to share, because that’s the kind of generous person I am. The cake I chose was Thomas Keller’s almond cake, which I had made several times already and was so fast and simple and delicious that I made a point to always stock almond paste in the house in case of a cake emergency.

As I mixed up the batter, I noticed that the consistency was wrong. Very, very, wrong. Having just recently experienced a failure to rise on a red velvet cake , I was being very careful about my ingredients and I knew I had followed the recipe precisely this time. Once again, I had a baking mystery on my hands that needed solving. I poured my watery batter into the baking pan and watched as it barely covered the bottom of the pan. Instead of over an inch of batter, I was looking at less than half of that. I stuck the sad creation in the oven while I pondered what had gone wrong this time. With all the ingredients accounted for, the outcome would at least be edible.

Twenty minutes later, I returned to rotate the pan and check on my pint sized cake. Just as I had predicted, it had barely risen at all. Good thing I had already washed everything I needed to make a second cake. Five minutes later, I opened the oven to take out the pan and was faced with an enormous cake that was rising aggressively. My petite batch of batter had risen well out of the walls of the pan and had developed a hump that was roughly 4 inches high and rising! Quite alarming for a 2 inch cake. Somehow my thin gruel of a batter had found the power to transform into a lumbering beast.

When the cake finished baking, it was very springy to the touch and the unsightly hump had developed an even more unsightly crack across the top. I was still hopeful that I might be able to salvage this cake by sawing off the hump, and I set it on the cooling rack and went to grab my camera to document the monstrosity for you, my dear readers.

By the time I returned, the cake had already begun to collapse, and mere moments later my giant hunchback had fallen all the way back down to just under an inch high. My almond cake was acting more like almond soufflé. Hmmm….

Like most chefs writing for an American audience, Thomas Keller’s cake recipe was all volume measurements, even though chefs always rely on weight measurements for baking. I used the standard conversions for everything but slacked on one step: the eggs. I buy my eggs from a nice lady at the farmer’s market, and they run a little bigger than normal. The last time I had measured them for a recipe, I had used 6 eggs instead of the 7 called for by the recipe. Since Chef Keller’s recipe didn’t specify a size of egg, and didn’t specify a weight, I figured that the excess egg would not be a problem. Indeed, it hadn’t been a problem for me any other time I had made this recipe. But a cake shouldn’t behave like a soufflé with just 32% more egg, so I pulled out my copy of Rose’s Heavenly Cakes and looked up her definition of a standard egg and weighed my own eggs.

I guess the hens were eating well this week because my eggs were running over 50% heavier than normal. By putting 2 of those eggs in a recipe, I was actually using the equivalent of over 3 standard eggs. Hence the too liquid batter, hence the soufflé-like behavior, hence the giant unsightly hump. All because of two Monster Eggs.

I made a second almond cake and portioned out the appropriate amount of eggs using my trusty digital scale and brought a lovely hunch-less almond cake to dinner.

And thus ends the Parable of The Hunchback or, The Importance Of Always Using Your Cooking Scale When Baking Lest You Are Also Derailed From Baking Greatness By A Pair Of Monster Eggs.