cheese « Justin Dunham - 's journal about making things

Grape Bread 2

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: bread, cheese, concord grapes, grapes, rosemary, yeast — Justin Dunham on August 13, 2012

Been meaning to write this up for a long time now, but a few months ago I decided to make this grape bread again. This time, I used a different recipe, one that caused it come up much more like a flatbread, rather than something puffy. I also used actual concord grapes (seeded of course).

Really excellent served with a sharp goat cheese and some additional grapes on the side. Because this recipe is much crispier – or at least came out that way for me – and because it has a much more savory flavor, brought about the heavy rosemary usage, it was a great appetizer course.

With an herb-wrapped goat cheese and more grapes.

Crisping in the oven.

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White Russian ice cream and blueberry coffee cake, trout meuniere, carrot-ginger/potato-leek harlequin soup, and other things

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: bacon, blueberries, broccoli, carrot, cauliflower, cheese, coffee cake, collard greens, cream, feta, flour, ginger, ice cream, kahlua, kale, leek, mustard, onions, potato, sole meuniere, thyme, tomatoes, trout — Justin Dunham on April 1, 2011

Harlequin soup - right is carrot ginger, left is potato leek.

Collard green salad.

Trout meuniere with a mustard cream sauce, broccoli, and cauliflower gratin.

Blueberry coffee cake and White Russian ice cream.

A while ago, I made a four-course dinner with the following courses: a kale salad with bacon, a harlequin soup (half carrot-ginger and half potato-leek), trout meuniere with cauliflower gratin and broccoli, and finally blueberry coffee cake with White Russian ice cream. Whew!

The harlequin soup came out well as usual – the flavors of the carrot-ginger soup and potato-leek soup actually went together pretty well. The salad was interesting – I was supposed to use kale, and only had access to collard greens. Raw collard greens, that’s right. I would probably reconsider making this salad, although one of the things you do to make the greens softer is pour very hot bacon grease over them. It actually went together pretty well, and the bacon is sort of a “reward” for getting through the greens.

The trout and sauce were simple to make and delicious, as was the cauliflower gratin (probably incredibly unhealthy but great). The trout is basically breaded sole meunière (with trout instead of sole), so named because the fish is coated in flour before it is cooked – the meunière is the miller’s wife.

Finally, the White Russian ice cream. I don’t usually use recipes from Rachael Ray, but I was thinking of doing something along these lines and wanted to use something that would definitely work. The White Russian flavor is extremely apparent and delicious, and it goes particularly well in an ice cream format because of the cream that normally goes into a White Russian. It can – and should – be used anywhere vanilla ice cream is!

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Asparagus soup, panade and a pear-frangipane tart

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: almonds, asparagus, bread, cheese, chicken stock, cream, kale, pears, squash — Justin Dunham on December 21, 2010

The frangipane tart (I don't talk about this until the end of this post, be patient!) before baking...

...and after.

Asparagus soup, with some asparagus tips and feta cheese.

Asparagus soup, with asparagus tips and some feta cheese.

The panade, before baking...

...and after.

I read this recipe quite a long time ago, and while the recipe itself sounded interesting, what made me really want to make it was the possibilities.

The link is to a recipe for panade, which is somewhat similar in concept to a trifle, except made with stale bread, vegetables, and cream. There’s a little bit of prep that goes on, but essentially you layer a bunch of vegetables and bread in a dutch oven, bathe it in cream and chicken stock, and bake it for a while. This one has cauliflower, kale (I used collard greens), and cauliflower.

Oh yeah, then you top it with cheese, and bake some more.

By my standards, this recipe is relatively healthy – yes, it includes cheese and cream, but other than that it’s just vegetables. I kind of consider good cheese a health food, though. I acknowledge that this would probably be a controversial view in the evidence-based nutrition community.

Also, as I mentioned above, think of the possibilities! You could maybe do this with beets and spinach, and rye… or some kind of black bread.

I needed a vegetable-oriented first course to along with the panade. This asparagus soup has been on my list for about a year. The asparagus soup is actually healthy, since it’s basically puréed and strained asparagus, together with some chicken stock. I didn’t like this as much as many of my other soups – the flavor of the asparagus doesn’t seem to quite stand up to the flavor of the stock. Also, part of the appeal of asparagus is its crispness and woodiness, which you lose by making it into a soup.

Lastly, and this was the best part, I had a bunch of extra almonds, so I decided to make this wonderful pear-frangipane tart. Wow, this was good. Frangipane in this case is basically an almond paste made with butter and sugar. Very similar, if not the same as, marzipan. It’s incredibly sweet, which I’m normally sensitive to, but something about the almond flavor cuts through this nicely.

We made it from scratch, which involved boiling the almonds for thirty seconds and immediately cooling them down (“blanching”), then peeling the skins off. Blanching‘s a useful technique. It makes it easy (possible?) to peel almonds, and lots of other things too, like tomatoes. It also helps “fix” the color of certain vegetables.

Anyway, after being blanched, the almonds are ground up with butter and sugar. You pour the resulting paste into a pie crust, layer some pear slices on top, and bake. The frangipane becomes a beautiful golden-brown color and firms up nicely.

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Antipasti, pizza and snow pudding

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: anchovies, artichokes, basil, bread, capers, cheese, custard, gelatin, mozzarella, onions, parsley, peppers, pizza, strawberry, tomatoes — Justin Dunham on November 27, 2010

Pizza!

Anchovies!

Quartered artichokes. You can see the purple and fuzzy "choke" part in the picture.

The antipasti dish. The anchovy mixture is on the right, buried under onions.

Strawberry pudding and basil custard.

I have been wanting to make pizza at home, from scratch, for a very long time. So when I happened to watch the Cooking Channel the other day and catch a pizza being made from scratch in a home oven, I figured this was my opportunity.

I decided to also make some antipasti so I’d have an excuse to cook with artichokes, and I’ve wanted to try a different spin on the lemon snow pudding I made earlier in the year, which seemed to fit here.

So, I made a pizza, a strawberry snow pudding, and three antipasti (recipe links below).

Antipasti: “Stuffed” artichokes, roasted peppers, and marinated anchovies.

The anchovies are marinated in vinegar, olive oil, capers and red onion, at least overnight. This turned out to be probably the highlight of the entire meal. Lots of wonderful, very strong flavors that taste delicious together.
- Soaking the anchovies in vinegar softens their bones, so don’t bother trying to debone them. (This took me most of an hour and ended being a complete waste of time).
- This recipe is also really quick, too; if you don’t debone the most time-consuming step is cutting up an onion!
The peppers roasting in the oven smell great, but I wish I had made half the result – to me, these don’t keep very well because they get unpleasantly slimy. However, they would likely be awesome on a pizza, or as part of a larger salad, rather than by themselves.
- One thing that all roasted pepper recipes seem to call for is covering the peppers after you take them out of the oven. I wonder why this is? Is it so the water in the peppers doesn’t steam off?
“Stuffed” artichokes. This is really quartered artichokes with a tomato and bread sauce put over them. I will admit that I have never really eaten (or prepared) artichokes before, so this was an interesting experiment.
- You cut off the sharp or papery bits of the artichokes, then you quarter them and remove the fuzzy “choke” from the middle.
- Once they’ve been boiled for an hour, the insides get nice and tender, and you can remove the coating on the insides of the leaves.
- Artichokes themselves taste pretty good, though I’m not sure I really liked this recipe, and I’m not sure if I think they’re worth the work. I can see why a lemon mayonnaise would go very well, though.

Pizza.

This came out pretty well, I thought. I made a pizza dough, covered it with some pureed tomatoes, plenty of cheese, and basil. Then it’s into the oven on a sheet pan.
Mechanically, this worked out great and I think I will make more pizzas like this in the future. As far as taste goes, it definitely lacked a certain pizza-ness. This is probably because, for some strange reason, I only put in basil, rather than the full complement of Italian herbs and spices.
However, it was pretty good and, strangely, improved dramatically when we heated the leftovers up the next day.

Snow pudding.

Normally this is made with an airy egg-white lemon pudding and a basil custard. I substituted a strawberry puree for the lemon juice in the pudding, and I’m sorry to say it didn’t work that well.
My guess is that because the mixture expands massively in volume (about 4x) as you make the recipe, the strawberry’s sapid molecules get “spread out”. So you can’t really taste the strawberry flavor, although the basil custard helps bring the flavor out a bit more.
This doesn’t happen with lemon juice since that is such a concentrated flavor, which makes me wonder if I would have more luck with either lime juice or a strawberry syrup.
I had a very similar problem with the blueberry marshmallows I made, although in the case of marshmallows, the strawberry worked quite well. Hm.

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Building a cheese plate

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: beets, blue cheese, cheddar, cheese, ginger, grapes, munster, walnuts — Justin Dunham on July 23, 2010

The plate: munster, grapes, cheddar, beet jam, blue cheese

Making the beet jam

(Note: This is a followup to this post.)

In trying to educate myself about eating and cooking, one area I haven’t spent a lot of time on yet is cheese. By itself, cheese comprises a whole culinary world with thousands of combinations of flavor and texture, like wine or beer. And that is leaving aside the use of these cheeses in various dishes, or pairing cheeses with accompaniments that enhance their flavor.

Practically, a cheese plate is an easy way to serve an elegant snack to guests, that rewards care but doesn’t require a lot of it, and doesn’t have to be that expensive either – the cheese plate I put together below, which was probably 3x what I needed to serve, cost about $15 in total (though it may not be possible to go far below that, since it’s hard to buy a very small amount of good cheese).

In putting together a cheese plate, you have wide latitude and there are lots of resources on the web that make interesting suggestions for what to use.

But I thought as a basic guideline it would be good to pick 3 different types of cheese, and for that I had to learn a basic taxonomy. No definitive taxonomy exists, so I tried to cobble one together based on Wikipedia and on this informative, but charmingly quaint (“Hispanic-style” is a category) cheese pairing guide from the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board:

fresh (e.g. mozzarella, queso fresco, feta, neufchatel, cottage cheese, ricotta, paneer)
soft-textured (e.g. munster, havarti, gruyere, jarlsberg)
firm-textured (e.g. cheddar, edam, gouda – though there is no definitive line between “firm-textured” and “soft-textured” cheeses)
hard-textured (e.g. parmesan, romano, asiago)
soft-ripened (e.g. brie, camembert)
blue-vein (e.g. stilton, gorgonzola, any blue cheese)

Part of the problem is that there’s a fair amount of overlap between these categories. A blue-vein cheese obviously has a texture dimension as well, as do soft-ripened cheeses. Textures can’t be uniformly delinated, etc. It seems as if the important dimensions are:

age (fresh cheeses are young, all others aren’t)
texture / hardness
milk source, though I wonder what influence this has on cheese characteristics
mold type, if any
special features?

So, I suppose you could characterize cheeses using these dimensions also.

Anyway, I ended up picking (a) an English cheddar – firm-textured, (b) a raw milk blue cheese – blue-vein, (c) an Alsatian Munster cheese – soft-textured. They worked well together and were sufficiently different that the experience of comparing them was interesting.

I served these together with some grapes, as well a jam that I made from beets, ginger and some walnuts. I didn’t worry too much about how those flavors would interact with the cheeses themselves, because I figured no matter what it would likely be an interesting contrast, and we could all decide what went well and what didn’t, ourselves.

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