Shopping for a Savory Flan

Régal is a relatively new food magazine in France but the time is right. They speak to a new generation of enthusiasts. I love Régal, because they hire young talented photographers that push the meaning of food photography with their passion for their subjects and creativity. I love Régal because they make little shopping lists just the right size for me to punch holes in and add to my MUJI pocket notebook to take to the market.

While looking for ingredients to make a kind of onion flan cooked in the bain marie served with a pea cream on top, I discovered the name of the cébette onion (thanks to it being on my little Régal shopping list). It is one of the primeurs, meaning young fresh spring vegetable, but instead of just one kind of spring onion, there are several kinds. The cébette is the elongated thin one.These peas looked very fresh today, and I got some for the recipe. The local ones still haven't come out although we've had some from Morocco for couple of weeks now. The lady from Bresse had turkey eggs and promises a whole range of different species on Sunday.

For Laura, a Chinese Dumpling Tutorial.

For Jiaozi or Guotie:--->recipe and tutorial follows...
Dumpling skins:
5 cups flour type 55
1 - 1 1/4 cups water (ratio 5:1), you can halve this.
Filling:
500 grams (a pound) of greens, cabbage, chard, chinese cabbage, etc.
500 grams ground pork, at least 1/3 of which should be nice and fatty
100 grams pork lard or duck fat
a bunch of spring onions or chives, use garlic chives judiciously
a piece of fresh smooth skinned ginger the size of your thumb
3 teaspoons salt
3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon sugar
2 teaspoons sesame oil
2 tablespoons Chinese black vinegar
optional: Chinese tree ear mushroom, shrimp, shredded carrots, other things you have aroundThe first thing you want to do is to make your dough, which should be done with type 55 flour and water. I use the moulinex to make my dough but have done it by hand. This will take you about 20 minutes of hard kneading so I suggest you gather up Kim, Julia, Alison, Tom, Simon, and anyone else you can get all into your little 12 square meters and begin lining them up to knead for a few minutes each. The dough will be difficult to knead at first and then at a certain moment, the strings of proteins in the flour will break. You will feel that the texture suddenly goes soft and easy to knead. When it does that, you know it is done. (Don't try this with Simon's hand mouli thingie, it is not the right type of blender and will burn out the machine if you try.) Once you have the dough, put it in the fridge and let it rest while you make the stuffing.
Chop up your greens. These can be chard, chinese cabbage, regular cabbage, spinach, collards, broccoli rabe, anything fresh. If you use spinach you don't have to parboil much. Heat up a large pot of water.
If you are using tree ear mushrooms, set them in hot water to hydrate. These mushrooms are also called black cloud mushrooms and are found at the chinese shops. They add texture and color to your jiaozi but are not absolutely necessary.
If you decide to make them fancy with shrimp, chop up your shrimp and mince your ginger. This can go straight into the bowl with the ground pork.
Shrimp is not something we always put into our jiaozi. In fact the only main things you need for good jiaozi is some nice fatty pork and greens. Once the water boils, parboil your greens. This is done by putting the chopped greens into rapidly boiling water all at once, and when it comes to a boil again, quickly turn it into a collander or chinois which has been lined with a clean rinsed dishcloth, and run cold water over it to cool it down completely. Once that is done, you'll want to twist the towel around and around and squeeze as hard as you can to remove as much liquid as you can from them. Add it to the bowl with the pork and the shrimp.Bu this time, your mushrooms should be hydrated.
Chop them up and add them to the bowl, along with your seasonings: spring onions or garlic chives if in season, ginger, salt, soy, sugar, sesame oil, and chinese black vinegar. Mix that up with your hands really well. That's your stuffing. Now for the dumpling making: Cut your ball of dough into 4 pieces with the knife. Keep them under a damp towel in their bowl to stop them from drying out while you work. Roll the quarter piece into a snake about 1cm thick, and cut the snake in half lengthwise, then half of that and half of that all along, ending up with 16 small pieces the size of good sized gnocci. Roll each one out into a flat circle by spinning it along as you give it two or three good rolls. This way your dumpling will be rolled thinner round the edges. It is good to have a nice thick jiaozi skin in the middle, especially if you are going to make guotie with them, which are these very same dumplings which are cooked by frying instead of boiling. Folding dumplings is just something you have to learn by doing. Many people just fold them in half. The more you make these dumplings, the more you'll fall into your own personal style. The person who taught me to fold dumplings was my Chinese housekeeper, the one who saved my life when I was living in Beijing. Over the years, Ive made dumplings with lots of Chinese people and each person has had his or her own style, learned from their family. In Shanghai, they like to make them small, to delicately pop into your mouth. In Beijing, the style is a bigger dumpling that comes to the table freshly boiled in big steaming heaps in the middle of winter. in Hong Kong, where they fry them and often steam them instead of boiling, there again you have a different style. The most important thing is to make sure that the stuffing is well sealed in the middle of the dumpling, so that water doesn't leak into them and dilute the flavor. When you make your own dumpling skins, you don't have to wet the edge of the skin to seal it, because it already contains enough moisture and broken glutens to bind together, The skins you work with when they are homemade are more flexible and easier to make into the "purse" shape, sitting upright. At this point you can freeze them if you want. Note that the fried dumplings do much better when you have some frozen already, since they don't overcook in the middle all the time when the bottom is browning. To cook by boiling, which is my favorite way because that's what we used to eat in Beijing, you add the dumplings to simmering water, and let them simmer until they float to the top. If the dumplings are frozen and you want to boil them, bring the water to a boil, and then cook it down with a small bowl of cold water twice, bringing the dumplings to boil twice. If you cook these dumplings too long, they will not taste as good - don't overboil them. Serve them with nice cold Chinese beer, Tsingdao or the likes. For the dipping sauce, in each dipping bowl put 2 Tablespoons Chinese black vinegar, 1 Tablespoon soy sauce, 2 drops of sesame oil, and a 1/4 teaspoon finely minced raw garlic.
I hope you like them!

Broccio's Double Life

Kind of like the metamorphosis of the caterpillar to butterfly in ewe's cheese form. Around Springtime, the fresh Broccio begins to appear at the fromageries. Les Halles is probably as close as we're going to get to the source of this cheese if we're not going to quit town for Corsica. It was at Les Halles in Lyon that I first learned about Broccio, which is made by adding milk to the leftover whey from cheesemaking. In fact this cheese is the first AOC protected cheese to be made from recycled whey by adding milk and heating it until the milk's curds rise. The curds are skimmed into baskets where they slowly lose their liquid. Some gets consumed right away, and some gets put up to dry. Broccio, named Brocciu at the source in Corsica's local lingo.

Dried and for sale at Les Halles Lyon

Gaperon d'Auvergne

A visiting friend tasted a particular cheese local to Lyon and noted that it tasted much better at the source. If you are ever traveling in France, don't pass over a local cheese because you can get it from your favorite cheese purveyor at home! You'll really miss out on something special. If you love cheese, you know that every fromagerie has certain cheeses they handle well. There's an alternative choice to hitting 5 different cheese shops for the perfect cheese plate, of course. Lets say you have a few hours with which to travel in any direction. You can go a place where cheese is made and experience it first hand, learn something new, and gather up a few to make a plate. Most likely you will come to a new understanding of that region's cheese.

This weekend we went to the Auvergne and brought home some local artisanal Gaperon. We can get this type of cheese in Lyon and it is indeed shipped all over the world, but believe me, the on-site version gave us a whole lot to think about. The original Gaperon was considered to be a low fat cheese, because it was traditionally made with the whey leftover from butter making (buttermilk) which is naturally low in fat. In the local Auvergnat dialect, the word for buttermilk is "Gap". However, most contemporary versions use only whole milk. The fat content of the artisanal Gaperon that we found this weekend was 50 percent. The effect of this on the stages of affinage is really pronounced, developing a beautiful complex flavor starting under the skin and moving in toward the center. It is a raw milk cheese that is flavored with garlic and black and white peppercorns and cured in a ball shaped form for about 60 days before being sent to market.

The photo above is of one of the many black Maries found throughout the Auvergne, this particular one looking out to the volcanic mountains from atop the Notre Dame Cathedral in the town of Clermont Ferrand.

Stealing Recipes

Debate at the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters got me thinking about the legendary stolen recipes of France. Legend has it that at the turn of the 20th century, the famous signature dessert served at a certain small town hotel along a businessman's travel route in the Loire Valley was so innovative and delectable that the chef of Maxim’s in Paris, after having passed through and tasted it, decided, when he failed to obtain the recipe himself, to send a spy there to observe in the kitchen and bring back the goods for him. Who knows why he didn't get the recipe himself. Perhaps he didn't think of asking for it at the time, perhaps it was considered bad form in those days to ask, perhaps he asked and was refused. No one knows.
The spy, presenting himself as a gardener, was successful in observing all of the details of the legendary tarte’s preparation. He was also sucessful in transferring that information to the kitchen at Maxim's. Once the technique and ingredients had been tested and approved as the correct recipe, the chef put it directly on the menu, and the tradition of serving it at Maxim’s has been maintained ever since. What did he call it? Tarte des demoiselles Tatin, in honor of its creators, the Tatin Sisters, proprieters of the hotel Tatin.

Recipe: Tatin d'endives aux saucisses de Montbéliard

In the past few decades, the technique of caramelizing the contents of a tarte in the manner of the Tatin sisters has been applied to a myriad of ingredients, sweet and savory alike, and it has become common practice to call this type of tarte a Tatin. While thinking of the innovative chefs at the restaurants in Chicago and New York that had their recipes slavishly reproduced down to the very last molecule without being given the courtesy of attribution, I used up the last of this season’s endives to prepare a Tatin d'endives aux saucisses de Montbéliard. I attribute the idea of this dish to Klary Koopmans, an eGullet member residing in the Netherlands, who cooked up endives from her aunt and uncle's basement the other night for dinner, to the French food journalist Thierry Rousillon, who recited a recipe for a tatin d'endives on the radio three weeks ago, and to Julia Child, who taught me the preliminaries and details of braising endives, the first steps of which I executed before sprinkling them with sugar, flipped them sugar side down, and caramelized them for the base of the tarte. The idea for using the sausages came from two sources, a mention of them in the magazine Regal from two months ago, where they warned us not to confuse la Morteau and la Montbéliard, and my butcher, who had the little beauts on prominent display near his register. Here's how to make it.

1 batch of Pâte Brisée
3 beligian endives
1 montbéliard sausage or any small smoked uncooked sausage you have handy. Bacon will do in a pinch.
1 Tablespoon butter
1 Tableshpoon duck fat (or butter)
salt and pepper
juice of one half lemon
1/4 cup water
about 1 Tablespoon of granulated sugar

- Prepare your pastry and place it in the refrigerator to chill.
- Wash, remove any damaged leaves from the endives, cut off the foot base and slice the endives in half. With a sharp knife, cut out the conical inner wedge near the base of the endive, which can be very bitter.
- Heat the butter and duck fat in a large sautee pan, spread the endive halves cut side up in the hot fat, and sprinkle with lemon juice and salt.
- Pour the water into the side so that it sizzles on the bottom. Quickly reduce the heat to about medium and cover, simmering slowly for about 10 minutes.
- Remove the cover, sprinkle the cut side of the endives with sugar, and turn the endives sugar side down. Raise the heat a notch and let the remaining fluid evaporate and the sugars to start to caramelize.
- preheat the oven to about 400F/200C.
- When the cut side is sufficiently brown, remove the pan from heat.
- Butter a tarte pan and lay the caramelized endives brown side down in the pan.
- Slice the sausage into 1/8 inch slices and lay it all over the endives.
- Roll out your batch of pate brisee to about 1 inch larger than the top of the tarte pan.
- Lay the rolled pastry on top of the endives and sausage.
- Pierce the pastry with a fork all over and bake for 25-30 minutes.
- When you bring it out of the oven, place your serving dish top side down over the tarte dish, and invert it to turn the tarte out onto it's dish. Serve it hot out of the oven.

Cheesecake: Mother of Invention

Cheesecake is one of those things we order when in New York, eat after dinner with Sadie and Ethel, and now, that we live in France, make at home. I knew someone who used to go to great lengths and expense to do everything from scratch but would buy her cheesecake, I thought - boy it must be really hard to make. When you come to live in a country where cheese abounds and is appreciated in its uncooked form the way it is, you realize that cheesecake is not something that the French would come up with for dessert. When you've been here for a few years, going back to the land of cheesecake becomes a pilgrammage of sorts. But going home should not be all about cheesecake! It should be about so many other things. Some inventiveness was in order, to create my own source of real, rich, dense, delectable New York style cheesecake. Guess what? It's easy.

My cheesecake is not made with any cheese that can be bought in a store. After much experimentation, I found the perfect cheese. It is made with that fresh cows milk farm cheese that does not age or keep well. The cheese is available at most outdoor markets from the people who sell their own butter and yougert but will keep only for a week before it begins a downward spiral. There is no reason to reject this cheese because it is fragile. It is not heavily salted or whipped or any such nonsense like what you might consider similar ones adapted for mass transport and adopted for length of shelf time. It looks like chevre, is soft, a bit tangy but not much, and is perfect for the cheesecake. When you spead it and eat it plain it tastes exactly like whatever the Philly people were trying to imitate when they developed their product. Except it's fresh. ---> recipe follows.

A friend of mine who often finds herself in similar predicaments showed off some cookies that a friend had toted all the way from Belgium with a suggestion that she use them in place of graham crackers or oreos (neither of which are easily found here) for a crust. They are called speculos. They're cinnamon cookies and do well. I found them recently at a local store.

Cheesecake the French Way

250 grams speculos cookies
50 grams granulated sugar (1/4 cup)
125 g. cup butter

or, for a thinner less fatty crust only along the bottom:

100 grams cookies
2T. butter
2 T. granulated sugar

For the cheese part:

700 grams fresh white farm cheese, room temp
180 grams granulated sugar (1 1/3 cup)
1/4 cup heavy cream
(flavorings of your choice)
3 eggs

Process the cookies, sugar and butter until it makes a thick crumb. Press the crumbs into the sides and along the bottom or just along the bottom of a springform pan, depending on how you like your crust.

Preheat the oven to 145C/300F degrees. Work the cheese and sugar together, add the cream and eggs, stir until fully incorporated. Add flavorings (if desired). Pour batter into the cookie crumb shell. Bake for 50 minutes. The top may become dark brown, depending on your oven. The cake will rise to almost double its volume but then sink back down after you've taken it out of the oven. When you take it out of the oven it will still jiggle a bit. If you have chosen a minimal crust on the bottom, run a knife around the edges of the cake to make sure it settles down evenly. Once it's cool, put it in the refrigerator. This tastes better and better as you eat it over the days. We have not ever had a cheesecake last longer than three days. The last slices are the best. (theory: letting a cheesecake sit for a day or even two uncut might actually improve the cake but this theory has never been tested)

Note on flavorings: People add all kinds of crazy things to their cheesecake. I like mine plain. Vanilla is really not necessary.

Note, this recipe was edited in July 2007 to include an option for less crust, and to lower the cooking temperature from 350F to 300F, which I tried recently with excellent results.

Soupe de Soissons

The day after the dinner I prepared, in 23 minutes, the soup that my vain shot at soup one-upsmanship scorned the night before. Why oh why did I not prepare this soup? My gourmandise for expensive ingredients got in the way of what could have been the perfect meal.

The soup:



The beans for this soup were soaked and simmered over the weekend, and were actually leftovers from a white bean and lamb dinner. The bean, Le Haricot de Soissons, is the largest French white bean available while it also packs the most flavour. They cost quite a lot by weight but when they are soaked they multiply in size and then enlarge even more with cooking. I got them for a dinner with friends over the weekend, but not knowing that they would end up expanding to an enormous size, I ended up soaking and cooking way more than we could eat that evening. Le Haricot Soissons is protected under AOC rules. You can learn more about this lovely bean at the website of the co-op that grows them. If you don't have these beans in your home town, you can replace them with any kind of white bean you like, navy, coco, etc. Just use the most flavorful one you know.

200 grams broth cooked Haricots de Soissons (big white beans)
1 branch sage
1 clove garlic
1 European bay leaf or 1/3 to 1/2 of a California bay
water to cover
1 courgette
1 small onion
1 slice of leftover leg of lamb
2 tablespoons duck fat
salt and pepper
2 tablespoons veal demi-glace
the juice of ½ lemon
a drizzle of good olive oil

Make a bouquet with the sage and bay. Put the beans, the bouquet, and the clove of garlic of which you have peeled and removed the germ in a small pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil, and then turn the heat down to very low. Simmer for 15 minutes. Cube the courgette and mince the onion. Cut the slice of lamb into strips and heat the duck fat to very hot. Toss and turn the strips of lamb in the duck fat until they are browned and crisp. Remove the lamb from the pan, and add the courgettes and the onion. Put two soup bowls in the oven to warm. Turn the heat down on the courgettes and cook them slowly, stirring occasionally until soft, about 5 minutes. Remove the bouquet from the beans, leaving a leaf or two of the sage. Mix the beans and their liquor with the blender into a smooth puree. Add the demi-glace, stir, season with salt and pepper, and brighten with lemon juice. Taste and adjust seasoning. Bring the hot bowls from the oven and mound a spoonful of courgettes into the center of the bowl. Cover with soup, and then pile the crisped lamb strips in the center. Drizzle with fruity olive oil and serve immediately with dense crusty bread.

Blazing Through Bresse

Loic and I decided to ski in the Ain this past weekend, near Geneva. It was exceptionally cold and windy but there was a lot of sun and tons of snow so we were happy for that. The countryside is really beautiful. We saw lots of wild birds of all kinds near the marshes as we drove through the area close to Bourg-en-Bresse, and I felt sad about the news that's been focused on the region lately. One of the major questions is that analysts have been plotting normal bird migration patterns and say that the H5N1 virus outbreak patterns don't seem to match up with the path the birds are actually taking. It has raised questions about method of propogation of the virus. In any case, we feel fine eating chicken at this moment, since we have been following the facts closely and if there is any real danger to the consumer we'll know about it.

Rouelle Cendrée, je t'aime.

To get me through these last few cloudy days of the season, because it was raining and I lost twice to Loic at Geister, because the music we played had pushed me into a mood, I was destined to find the Rouelle. I looked for a long time at it, happily the fromagère was occupied. Staring for long periods of time at cheese is something that is easy to do but even easier when it is meant to be! Where have you been all my life? Finalement, j'ai trouvé mon bonheur.