Slow Feuilletage

A few days ago, I was planning to have a dinner party and while on the Quai St. Antoine, I saw the man who comes down some days from the Jura mountains. Amid various mountain cheeses, he had a slab of raw butter. After asking his price, which when calculated in my mind cost slightly more than your average supermarket butter, but less than the haut gamme butters in mass distribution, I asked for a taste. Light, unsalted, complex as it flowered on my tongue, it sold itself to me easily. I bought a kilo. While he wedged off two large chunks that miraculously enough came out to weigh about 500 grams each, he told me that the butter he was selling me had been made at the farm just the day before. Walking back home, I wondered at the deliciousness that this raw butter made just the previous day would produce in my home made pastry.

Having my recipe for fast feuilletage already in your notebook, I thought I'd share a few ideas and a reminder that puff pastry rolled out at home tastes far superior to anything you can find in the store and quite possibly better than you can get from the neighborhood bakery. It's all about the butter. When I talk about good butter, I don't mean some technical quality that one or another butter might have, but the flavor of the butter. A butter that tastes good makes excellent puff pastry.

Puff pastry has got such a bad rap. I just don't know what to say when people say they can't bring themselves to do it. After all, I used to be one of those people. Oh the things I never dared to do! But after some risk taking and realization that it isn't nearly as easy to mess up as people say it is, I felt like I was in on a kind of secret. One of the most wonderful things about puff pastry is that it freezes very well. Instead of hours of hard labor, hands-on time is more like 15 minutes, in little pleasurable bursts interspersed over an evening. If you have a kitchen timer and a little counter space or a table, you can easily fit feuilletage between cooking dinner, bathing children, story time, reading a book, catching up on your e-mails, or talking on the phone. It fits into normal family contemporary lifestyles, and can make a huge difference in your inclination to invite people over at a moment's notice, because you'll be able to serve really great tasting and beautiful feuilletage-based creations if you already have the good kind ready in your freezer.

What can you do with feuilletage? For starters, I suggest taking a good look at the many recipes that require pre-fab puff pastry. Next, know that you don't need recipes to have fun with puff pastry. You can roll things up in it and slice them, make matchsticks and spread them with things before baking, use leftovers, cut shapes with cookie cutters, make sweet desserts, tartes, classic millefeuilles, and hundreds of other things just by using your imagination.

Last night I had dinner out, and enjoyed a first course of this season's asparagus, roquefort and thin sliced cured ham layered between two little rectangular wedges of feuilletage. The asparagus had been cooked in advance, and this first course was constructed and placed in the oven just long enough for the cheese to melt and the pastry to puff, crispen and brown on top. It was a delicious combination and will be even better with my own pastry. I plan to do a variation on that very soon as a first course for friends.

In the meantime, I have a freezer full of tapenade rolls ready to bake, and several blank slates ready for just about anything. There are so many things, sweet or savory, that you can do with this pastry dough. Use the kitchen scale for this and weigh the water too.

Recipe: Slow Feuilletage

500 grams flour
12 grams finely ground sea salt
300 grams water
400 grams butter, chilled

Place the flour and salt in a bowl and make a well in the center. Pour the water in and work it into a smooth homogenous dough. Work the dough with your hands to get it nice and smooth, place it in a ziplock or wrap it in plastic wrap and place this dough into the refrigerator to rest for 30 minutes.

Notice the rounded ends are tucked under at first.

You don't have to do this but it makes things roll out more squarely.

Remove the dough from the wrap and lightly flour your counter surface. Roll the dough about 1 inch thick and then with the rolling pin roll out four edges to form flaps that you will fold over the butter. Once you have done that, remove the butter from the refrigerator, and place it on a big sheet of freezer paper or baking parchment, fold the paper over it to protect the rolling pin from getting greasy, and pound the butter with the rolling pin into a flat piece that will fit easily into the center of the dough. Fold the edges you have created over the butter in the center. Now, you are ready to roll it out.

Roll this mound of dough folded over your butter out flat into an oblong rectangle. Now fold this rectangle into thirds, turn it a quarter turn, and roll it out again. Fold and roll once again, then place this into the refrigerator to chill for 40 minutes.

Repeat this folding into thirds process 2 more times, for a total number of folding and rolling of 6 times. From there, you can place it back in the refrigerator to be ready when you plan to use it in the next day or two, or put that into the freezer, where it will keep up to three months.

Thanks go to Chef Sylvain Malland of Cuisine et Dependences Acte II, 68 rue de la Charité, in Lyon's 2nd arrondissement for allowing me to take photos of him rolling and folding puff pastry during a coaching cuisine demonstration at Emile Henry.

This Season's Asparagus

If you want the ultimate asparagus experience, the time is now. People are talking at the market about this year's unusual weather. Spring officially started 3 weeks ago and the weather's been like we're about to enter the month of June! Aside from an amazingly flush selection of culinary herbs, promising fabulous workshops and inspiring great ideas for how to best put them in the spotlight, we see that the Asparagus is out. This is quite extraordinary, actually. If you cook with the seasons where you live, you might have already observed some things where you live being ahead of schedule. The producer's stands are piled high with crisp fresh spears here in Lyon. This won't last long. As the season evolves, the prices will drop as well as the quality, since the smaller stems are better eating than the larger ones. The producer of the asparagus pictured above confided that the early season is going to leave him in the lurch until his next wave of produce reaches maturity. I think also it was an excuse for charging such high prices for his product. I didn't hesitate to buy from him anyway, since he's got great produce at reasonable prices the rest of the year. We are eating his excellent asparagus either plain or lightly dressed with a lemon boosted green olive oil dressing, and with hollandaise. As the season wears on, soup is on the menu chez Vanel. Here's my sampling of French market menu uses for asparagus, one I refer to often when thinking of great ways to use it. Green asparagus is kind of exotic in France, because traditionally the French only had white. This struck me as strange when I first arrived, having only had the green ones growing up.

Giving it Up

Many good years in this apartment. We hadn't planned on selling just yet, but when we met that sunny afternoon in the notary's office on the Quai Saint Antoine and each signed our names on every page of a big stack of documents, it was like a hammer slid into the cog of the inner workings of a big ancient clock. The papers were signed and everything got set in motion, to open the next doorway along the passageway to ownership. We must come forth with the full amount for the new site, design work and renovations, and in order for us to get the loan, our lovely apartment must at least be on the market. I am scrambling to get all of my creative clutter under control, mainly planning to sort and pack it up, living in more of a blank slate while we show our home. While I take these little objects and place them into boxes, I am reminded of my stubborn belief in charms. The baby delights in the big open spaces, placing himself in various staging areas to dance and play. I didn't know it was possible to harbor such opposing emotions. We tried to find a way to keep this apartment, guarding it for retirement, maybe renting it out, while at the same time moving into a place that better suits our needs. But sometimes you just have to make that decision to move forward, when the dream comes forth with enough momentum and you remind yourself that you needn't let go of the memories.

Pickled Radis Noir

A couple of months ago, Hank Shaw was seeking ideas for the use of radis noir, which is ubiquitous on market tables here in Lyon at the end of winter. I immediately suggested pickles, since I had some experience with simple pickled spring radishes and knew that this type of root generally takes kindly to a vinegar pickling method. The next time I was out with my basket, I decided to give pickling them a try with a couple of big ones wedged into chunks. Coriander seeds harvested last autumn from my garden, whole fennel seeds and bay leaves went into the jar, along with a handful of shallots which I simply peeled and left whole. I wasn't very enthusiastic about the results at first, since the roots seeped some of their color and gave a drab tint to the vinegar. I placed the jar alongside many other half done experiments in a cool place and forgot about it for a while.

It's funny what a little time can do. About a week ago, I realized that these pickles had taken on a nice mellow flavor. At the opening of salad season, I was fishing around for additions to my lunch bowls and suddenly I was looking at these now mature pickles in a new light. I have found that slicing them thin and sprinkling them over salads is one delicious way to enjoy them, as well as using them to garnish toasts and canapes with potted meat and slices of dried sausage. They are excellent slivered and folded into Caviar de la Croix Rousse. They add crisp punctuation and look pretty too. This jar is almost halfway gone and I don't suspect they'll last very much longer. They came out tasting so nice, I think I'll do two jars next year.

When you pickle radis noir, be sure to give them a very good scrub with a potato brush and blanch them whole before slicing them into chunks and salting them. Otherwise, the recipe and method are the same as this one here.

Greens for Spring

At about this time of the year in Lyon, we always see an assortment of various foraged or otherwise uncommon greens making their appearance at the markets, a kind of bridge to the bounty, taking us on a little joyride past the precocious radish. When the weather warms up, people go out searching for a burgeoning explosion of cute little vegetables, and the reality is that yes, while the weather is indeed warming, we can't expect miracles. Things need time to grow.

We saw stinging nettles, bins full of dandilions, aka pissenlit, given this name for their long held reputation as causing children to wet their beds, and some scraggly turnip greens lopped from last year's plants. While they looked a bit ragged around the edges and gone to seed, I had a hankering for some. When did you last have a nice plate of fresh turnip greens? People were asking how to cook them. The lady was telling them they should put them into soup. I could already taste them tossed with the bacon I had, the good bacon that I buy from the girl who smokes it herself.

That night after a good washing, they went into the pressure cooker to steam, which is what I do with old greens like this that might need a head start cooking before I toss them in the hot pan. I steamed them with slices of this wonderful bacon and a few tendrils of fresh young thyme. After steaming them under pressure for 5 minutes, they still had a their body but it was easy to pick through them quickly to pull out any hard stems that might not be good to eat. The leaves and soft stems came off cleanly. They were ready to be chopped and transferred into a pan of sizzling onions I'd gotten started on the side. I tossed them over high heat for a bit to get a little sizzle along the edges of the steamed bacon, then since we had a little time, I added a teacup full of that veal stock that I had recuperated from the pot on Saturday morning (always a habit to set a little aside for opportunities such as this) and put that on low to simmer and mingle while the baby got his bath. When things settled down, chopped spring chervil went in at the last minute and we ate simply with pasta, enjoying the haze of the heavy spring evening outside the window, thinking of the season, waiting for the rain to begin.