jmacnaughtan
-
Posts
838 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Store
Help Articles
Posts posted by jmacnaughtan
-
-
1 hour ago, rarerollingobject said:
Nah. Chocolate and ancho chile.
Seems logical
-
4 hours ago, rarerollingobject said:
It's a long story as to why. Don't ask. But I made a Day of the Dead cake. And yes, I made the buttercream flowers.
What would you flavour a Day of the Dead cake with?
Please don't say Mezcal.
-
1 hour ago, rarerollingobject said:
Made a cake last night..a four layer devil’s food chocolate cake, filled with thick salted butter caramel, coated in salted caramel buttercream, hazelnut praline with smoked salt, feuilletine, brown sugar crumb and edible pansies. And yes, it’s supposed to be roughly and thinly frosted like that, I figured there was more than enough sugar for my vulture colleagues to feed on as it is.
I personally think it’s an abomination, but after I made that healthy pineapple and brown rice syrup ‘cakelet’ thing for the fitness and paleo blogger chick in my office last week, the chica whose birthday it is THIS week requested that I “put all the sugar that I took out of that cake into this one”. So I did.
Is that brown sugar crumb just pure brown sugar? I know I enjoy eating the lumps in brown sugar myself, but I'm not sure I'd have the courage to put them straight on a cake...
-
11 hours ago, curls said:
New recipe from a friend of mine. She calls it a blueberry flan -- it is a cross between a pie and a tart. I wonder if at some point this recipe used fewer blueberries and called for being baked in a flan pan. It most definitely is not what I think of as a flan but it is very tasty.
That's a French-style flan, like you see in every bakery here. They're built to be sturdy enough to take a slice out of and eat out of hand.
Normally, it's just pastry cream baked in puff pastry, but you frequently see it with apricot or coconut. It's the first time I've seen it with blueberries.
Looks good, though
-
1
-
-
Pure white silicon kitty litter with some distilled water works as a good humidifier. I've never used it with brown sugar, but it's a great way of keeping humidity up - I use it in my electric wine cellar, and it works like a charm.
I got the tip from a cigar forum - if you need to know anything about humidity, technical cigar threads are a good place to start. And stop, quickly, before they drown you in tedious, tedious detail.
-
The only proper way to cut a doughnut is with your teeth.
-
9
-
-
9 minutes ago, patris said:
I would never serve other people way too much of anything I wouldn't eat way too much of myself!
That sounds like a tattoo if ever I heard one.
Or an epitaph.
-
6
-
-
28 minutes ago, rarerollingobject said:
It might be because I (medically) have no sense of smell; I'm always looking for more intensity of flavour, perhaps to compensate. Lemon things never taste
lemony enough to me; if a recipe says 1 tablespoon of ginger, I want 9 tablespoons, etc.
Your instinct is probably the hallmark of a more nuanced cook; I just want more. MORE.
Ah, I understand. I used to be the same, looking for extremely big flavours.
I think it's partly food TV that's put me off - TV chefs and critics always wanting to be punched in the face with flavours.
I think I just don't enjoy being punched in the face any more...
-
1
-
-
5 hours ago, rarerollingobject said:
I'm very into improving my baking to make ingredients/flavours (the ginger, the pear) taste the most OF themselves that I possibly can without being overwhelming, and layering them in texture and intensity so you hopefully go, "Wow, I have never tasted anything more pear-y. Even the last pear I ate was not as pear-y as this."
(See also: that time I spent 2 days pureeing and reducing a whole watermelon, injecting fresh slices of another watermelon with the resulting watermelon reduction, and vacuum packing the lot overnight to produce a watermelon slice that SLAMMED YOU IN YOUR MOTHERFLIPPING FACE with watermelon.)
Interesting. I used to do that a lot, until I realised that what I really wanted wasn't actually a dessert that tasted (for example) like a really intense pear, lemon or piece of chocolate (because I can get that by eating a properly ripened pear or a piece of good chocolate, and lemon on its own is not great), but rather one that tasted like a really good pear, lemon or chocolate dessert.
I get more pleasure out of harmonising these flavour elements with sugar, fat, starch, etc. now than going to great lengths to amplify them.
-
1
-
-
19 hours ago, shain said:
Kaisermann. Fluffy, soft and hot with plenty of vanilla. Plum sauce.
Just curious- how many portions are on this plate? If it's just one, I'm impressed.
-
@rarerollingobject, that squid looks good.
I celebrated my 30th on Saturday, so I decided to have a bit of a party and get 20 or so people around the table. Most of the cooking was outsourced - the star of the show was a 7kg suckling pig, with a leg of lamb and two racks of ribs, all spit-roasted by my obliging butcher
To pre-empt any questions:
- There were some leftovers, but not as much as I expected from more than 10kg of meat.
- Suckling pigs are harder to carve as they seem, even when relatively sober.
- I regret to say there are no photos of the cheese platters or dessert. The hands taking the photos had become somewhat unstable and greasy.
- And yes, those are all magnums of wine. Mostly Burgundy and Champagne, and a jeroboam each of Bordeaux and Rosé for the apero (not in the photos). I refuse to have anything smaller than that on my table
-
18
-
-
I've recently been hooked on the vintage French cooking videos from the INA archives on Youtube, so I thought it would be a good time to bump this thread.
Has anyone seen this technique before? Here, Paul Bocuse removes all the tendons in a turkey's legs using a broom handle (start watching at the 10' mark). Excellent video. Obviously, it is in French, but hey. It's Bocuse!
-
1
-
-
2 hours ago, liuzhou said:
What can I do to make asparagus soup LOOK good? (rhetorical question)
Yeah, I know it's rhetorical. I'll still answer
Cook the asparagus and the broth separately. Blanched or charred tips/stems in a clear broth would look pretty...
-
41 minutes ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:
So far more savory, i.e. accompaniment to pork where I might otherwise serve applesauce.
Ah, OK. So do you do anything to counter the sweetness of the caramel and the pears? In my experience, they don't have much in the way of acidity.
But with pork they should be excellent
-
On 2017-6-1 at 8:53 AM, JoNorvelleWalker said:
I misspoke through ignorance. Yesterday I found many comice in the store, just not in the organic section.
Curiously having now finished the volume, the inside rear cover of Classic Techniques of Italian Cooking has a color plate of Pere alla Corrado. Bugialli arranged his pear slices the same as mine, ha! But stark white pears in an almost cochineal scarlet syrup. I may have seriously misinterpreted the recipe...though more likely in 1982 Bugialli had neither Photoshop nor a calibrated monitor.
It looks interesting.
And this may be a silly question, but are these pears destined for sweet or savoury purposes?
-
2 hours ago, Kim Shook said:
Croissant Panini w/ Biscoff Spread and bananas:
Wow. That's something I've never seen before. How do you stop it sticking?
-
2
-
-
If you have digital scales, then it's just as easy to weigh the ingredients as to wing it.
You do need to use instinct when dealing with fruit and other fresh products - they vary enormously, even within the same variety. But for structural ingredients like flour, eggs, etc. it's not worth the hassle. Find a decent recipe and stick to it. Use your intuition to work out when to take it out of the oven
-
2
-
-
I like those. I'm not sure how you'd going about preserving the shape, unless you wanted to slice a "steak" out of it and prepare it whole. Recently, I've been tempted to do that myself - brown it off in butter, then braise it in stock. With any luck, you could preserve some of the texture.
What I frequently enjoy doing is slicing it (whole) quite thinly, frying off the slices and layering them with equally finely sliced tomatoes. Bake slowly for a couple of hours, then top with breadcrumbs fried with... whatever you want, really. Bacon is good.
-
2
-
-
14 hours ago, paulraphael said:
Huh. I make a dessert with pears, cherry, cognac, goat cheese, and cardamom. I think the flavors are great together.
They may be. But you've got some big flavours jousting on that dessert... I'd be interested to see how you put them together.
In any case, my problem with cardamom is that it tends to be way too powerful. In the original recipe for this topic, the poster uses "a couple" of cardamom pods for a chocolate mousse, which seems an enormous quantity. If I was doing it, I would take it down to just one or two of the seeds within the pods. You'd still get the aroma, but without that mouth-wash astringency.
-
9 hours ago, paulraphael said:
I'm not sure I've ever met a flavor that didn't go with cardamom. It's one of my not-very-secret weapons. Putting cardamom on it around here is like putting a bird on it in Portland.
Cheese.
-
A little smaller than the white chocolate leviathan above, but there were only four of us...
Apricot Fraisier
Genoise soaked in muscat syrup
Whipped muscat curd
Dried apricots reconstituted in reduced muscat
Gariguette strawberries
Marzipan
Hedgehog (optional)
-
20
-
-
3 hours ago, sartoric said:
I made this chocolate and pear cake yesterday. It's yummy and disappearing quickly, but I have some questions...
This is the pan I used, 9 inch square, silicon fused to a metal edge. There's a ridge just below the top of the silicon sides, which made it kind of tricky to turn out. Could I have your thoughts on that ? It was picked up (still in the original packaging) at an op shop for $5, so I'm more than happy to recycle it back to them. Also, after cutting two pieces for testing, it broke in half as I manoeuvred it to the storage tub. I was using my largest spatula, about 3 inches wide. Is there a workaround I could have used to prevent the break ? Thanks...
If you're having trouble getting it out in one piece, you could try chilling it before unmoulding. Cakes are always much more fragile when warm, so if it's down to fridge temperature it will be more robust.
-
2
-
-
5 hours ago, btbyrd said:
In related news, tonight I'm having some very much well-done but still quite delicious grassfed skirt steak. SV for four hours at 130F with a salt-free (except for MSG) spice rub, then cooked to crispy death on a super-hot grill, covered and cheese, and broiled to a bubbly finish.
Skirt is so thin you pretty much can't get it anything less than medium-well, and it's eminently splittable. A possible cut for bliss in the OP's household? Not really a "steak," but...
I disagree. A lot of the skirt you get here is closing in on an inch thick in places, and it's excellent rare. It's one of the few cuts I enjoy blue, mostly because there's so little fat
-
1
-
-
3 hours ago, Fernwood said:
I think some cuts and some qualities of beef tolerate more thorough cooking better. Ribeye cap and skirt steak are two cuts that still taste good to me well-done. And the more marbled the meat, the better it will survive. Don't try this with lean sirloin, folks!
Agreed. Just make sure it has plenty of fat in it to keep it moist.
I used to have my côte de boeuf (rib steak? Beef rib joint? The part that the ribeye comes from...) rare, and have come around to having it medium, even slightly well done. It's a big piece of meat - normally around 1.2kg - with a lot of different muscles, so you'll get very well done on some, then progressively rarer as you get towards the bone. This might be an option - when you carve, serve your wife the more done parts (which are still delicious), and keep the pinker meat for yourself.
And then, preferably when she's left the table, attack the bone
-
1
-
Your Daily Sweets: What Are You Making and Baking? (2017 – )
in Pastry & Baking
Posted
Looks good!
Your sponge looks a lot different from the dacquoises I'm used to making - would you mind sharing the recipe?