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jmacnaughtan

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Everything posted by jmacnaughtan

  1. Nice work, Alleguede! Those hearts are great- did you make little 2-person ones, or are they large-scale entremets? And I don't suppose you want to share your recipe for the red glaze?
  2. Sounds grim. I really don't like the current trend of making starters and main courses sweet. Put the fruit away, it's better in dessert! Leave the vanilla alone! I'm probably just old-fashioned, but I crave savory flavors in savory courses. This Valentine's dinner was a fairly simple magret de canard à la bordelaise with mashed potatoes and peas cooked in the juices from the duck. Dessert was tonka bean and cinnamon roasted Victoria pineapple with vanilla ice cream. I love Victoria pineapple, but it's so expensive for its size... Perfect for two people though. Especially if you know how to spiral cut it to remove the eyes and make it look pretty
  3. Most British-published cookbooks have recipes in weights, and all professional-level pastry books do too (if they don't, I'd be worried and put them back on the shelf as quickly as possible). I imagine that any books translated from French would keep the metric weight measurements (or just buy them in French). For pastry, although I'm not convinced by a lot of his desserts and recipes, Francisco Migoya only uses weights and gives recipes in metric, imperial and %.
  4. jmacnaughtan

    White Pepper

    Generally, black pepper should be used just to finish dishes, it can become too bitter with prolonged cooking. I generally keep a pot with 10:1 fine sea salt: white pepper for seasoning as I go. It works well for me.
  5. You can, but I don't think that the result is the same. I've got a recipe for floating islands cooked in the microwave, as it's supposed to give a "poached" texture. However, when I tried it my meringues swelled up enormously then collapsed into sad little heaps. In any case, you won't dehydrate them very effectively in there.
  6. You may be right, but that's not generally the point- having a cheese course means you can finish the glass or bottle you drink with the main course before moving onto something better suited to dessert. I can't imagine having beer with a cheese course. It seems wrong. Plus, it means switching from wine back to beer, which is never a good idea.
  7. Good point. The people I'm making it for are generally not Russians, so I don't think tradition is much of an issue. And anyway, my benchmark is the Café Pouchkine version, created by a French pastry chef in Moscow. I've never tried an "authentic" home-made Medovik, but I figure that if I can get it to a point where I'm happy with it, other people will be happy with it too. Even if it's not what babushka makes.
  8. Looks good, Franci. I like how you've got the layers very fine, it works well. Try2cook, I was thinking the same thing. You could probably make a honey dulce de leche using unsweetened evaporated milk and honey, combined in a jar and cooked as normal. I'm not sure I'm willing to go that far though, I have nightmare visions of trying to scrape scalding honey-scented goop of the walls, ceiling and my skin. I'll give it another try this weekend, using a syrup.
  9. I find this works even better if you incorporate the gelatin and leave it to set overnight before whipping. You get an excellent texture and it holds its shape really well, and is perfect if you're infusing the cream with vanilla. Sorry, didn't read that you use vanilla extract. Still, I'd recommend real vanilla
  10. Gelatin works well. It's easier if you bring the small amount of cream you're using to temper it up at least to room temperature to avoid pre-setting. If you ever do this recipe again, I'd recommend warming the dulce de leche and dissolving the gelatin in that. You can then leave it to cool and whip it up with the other ingredients.
  11. So, attempt n°2. I used gfron1's recipe for the biscuit (halved, for a 14cm biscuit), made a chantilly (250g double cream, 100g crème fraîche, 35g honey, 1 vanilla bean and 3g gelatin) and used confiture de lait (dulce de leche) straight from the jar. The layers cooked well, with a baking sheet on top they stayed flat, but there was even less honey flavor than before, even using stronger miel de sapin. I got 7 layers of biscuit in the 4.5cm high cake, I think any more would be pushing it. Maybe I could get 8. The layers were biscuit - ddl - biscuit - chantilly - biscuit etc. You can hardly see the chantilly layers, the biscuit absorbed it all The texture was fairly dense and fudgy, not really what I was after. It needed the cream within the layers to keep it moist, I think, and when absorbed it was a little too dry. I subbed out a lot of the crème fraîche for double cream to try and eliminate the mushroom aftertaste, but it lost almost all the acidity. I'll work on that... And the ddl could have done with a pinch of fleur de sel to balance the sweetness. Overall, the cake was too sweet. The biscuit near the edge is much softer, moister and more pleasant than in the center in this one as well. What I'll try with the next one is making a soaking syrup from honey and milk. Has anyone made a soaking syrup with dairy before? I figure this might help with the texture and help retain the integrity of the layers. I'm happy with the presentation though. For the final one, I'll probably make a honey tuile, but for now I love the brown velvet effect.
  12. Slow-cooked oxtail in dark beer is a good one.
  13. Yes, indeed, they look similar to oreilletes. In the South of France, where we lived until September, they are called bugnes. The bugnes I'm used are make with yeast. For chiacchiere I don't use any yeast or baking powder. The dough gets a nice flavour from a mix of grappa and marsala, plus lemon zest. Where were you living? I've always known bugnes to be the little yeast-risen knots and oreillettes to be the flat, crispy ones. That may just be a Lyon thing though. I'll never make oreillettes again- I still have greasy memories of long, long mornings in front of the industrial size frier...
  14. If you want to show off your pastry skills, it's easier to do it here. Keep up the good work
  15. Nice, they look like oreillettes. Do you flavour the dough? That reminds me to make some bugnes for mardi gras...
  16. How do you find the temperature control holds up? The last time I used one was in a professional kitchen- it was a couple of years old and the temp settings were out by about 10-15°C.
  17. Thanks a lot for that, Kerry. I hate cup conversions, and tend to avoid most US-based recipes because of that. Electronic gram scales all the way for me
  18. I'm thinking kimchee, andouillette and Epoisses. If you really want the kitchen to yourself, just stick a tarte au Maroilles in the oven. Even industrial ventilation is no match for that. Also, some olives give off a really bad smell. Just try walking past an olive vendor in August. You might want to try cachaille, a re-fermented Provençal cheese mix flavored with garlic and eau de vie (although I can't stomach that one. The taste won't leave your mouth even after repeated brushing). There's another breton cheese that's matured in beer, which tastes good but smells dreadful, but I can't remember the name. Anyone that reads French might want to have a look at Wikipédia France's "fromage fort" section.
  19. Thanks Kerry, that looks like a good recipe. I wonder why the baking soda is cooked out first? Looking forward to hearing about your effort with the DDL filling, Franci. Keep us up to date with the results My next attempt will come this weekend, I think I'll try the Russian one Kerry posted. Just have to find a decent cup-metric converter... By the way, can anyone tell me whether margarine has the same water content as butter? I hate baking with the stuff, so I'd like to be able to swap it out without adding or removing too much water. Thanks, James
  20. OK, here's what it looks like rested and cut: I was pleasantly surprised. It wasn't hard and dry, and the flavour was fine. I think it may have needed longer to rest though, as the centre was drier than the outer edges, but not a complete failure. I have a problem with the texture though. It has the kind of texture you get from dunking a biscuit into tea, and it's not great. I'll try one of the other biscuit recipes to see if it makes a difference. If not, I'll switch to something more cakey. Any ideas on how to bump up the honey flavor, though? I've just been using standard liquid honey, so maybe its time to pony up for some buckwheat or pine. Also, the cream had a really weird aftertaste. The initial sourness of the crème fraïche is great, but then it gives way to something almost mushroomy. Maybe I just need to switch brand. By the way, Franci, I didn't properly turn it (if by turn you mean masking and then finishing the tops and side with cream). I used a cake ring, assembled it inside and let it firm up in the freezer before unmoulding and adding a final layer to the semi-hard cake. I know it's cheating, but my spatula skills are not good.
  21. You're probably right, I didn't try that. The cook in the first video Franci posted does that too and the layers are fairly thin. I may do that next time, but using another biscuit recipe.
  22. OK, sorry for the delay in posting. Medovik 1.0 has been built, and is now "resting" in the fridge, and will be tested later. I used this recipe, halved and aimed for a 14-15cm diameter by 4.5-5cm cake. Dough Really strange, almost like a cross between choux pastry and cookie dough. There was no way I was going to be able to roll it out fresh, so I let it sit in the fridge for a few hours, which turned it into ultra-soft sweet pastry. I rolled it as thin as possible, around 1mm, and after cooking each layer ballooned up by about 4 or 5 times, surprising and dismaying me. Here's the before and after, the coin is a 10 centime piece. I do not have high hopes for this "biscuit". It's dry, thick and surprisingly heavy for something that rose so much. Cream I couldn't find any sour cream, so I whipped up half a litre of crème fraïche and incorporated 50g of icing sugar. It's OK. Here's a picture of the finished article. I coated it in blitzed medovik crumbs for a traditional finish. Due to the thickness of the layers, there are only four or five in there, and I was hoping for six or seven at least. I'll see how it turns out after the rest in the fridge- if it's as bad as I fear, I may ditch the biscuit style layers and use something softer. Maybe a pain d'épices, minus the spices and with a hit of strong honey. As for the filling, I still want to incorporate the dulce de leche. I was thinking of using a whipped crème fraïche/vanilla chantilly for the exterior and maybe a dulce de leche crémeux for the layers. What do you guys think? All suggestions welcome.
  23. With things like that cake batter and cookies, you're never going to get a lot of flavor from the milk- you just don't use enough, and during baking, almost all flavors get knocked down a notch or two. Try it in a crème anglaise, maybe, then experiment with mousses, pastry creams crème brûlées. That's the place to go if you want to keep the flavour.
  24. I've worked for a large-scale traiteur in France that does good food, but also uses a range of frozen preparations. Most are very good- there's nothing wrong with using frozen chopped herbs or frozen fruit preparations. I don't think there's any pâtisserie in France that doesn't use at the very least frozen fruit purées. It's also an embarrassing truth that many frozen croissants are better than fresh. They're hard to make properly, and a lot of otherwise good boulangeries can't make ones that rival good quality frozen pastries. Finally, in every pâtisserie, boulangerie and I imagine most traiteurs, preparations are made in the afternoon and stored in the fridge or freezer. In that way, they can be quickly finished the following mornings and dispatched either to the front of shop or elsewhere. The impact on quality? Zero difference. In fact, it's probably better as the workers have time to do it properly.
  25. Looks great- what's the veil you've put over it? Is it white chocolate?
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