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Mushroom soup

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: carrots, cream, leeks, mushrooms, onions, parsley, stock, thyme, white wine — Justin Dunham on July 22, 2011

Soup!

This is a great, and fairly easy to make, mushroom soup. It’s creamy and earthy, and the leeks actually help to bring out the more subtle mushroom flavor.

One sort of unique thing about this soup is that you make the stock for it from scratch. I’ve never actually made stock before (please don’t get too upset), but I’ve heard homemade stock is much better than the stuff you buy at the store. One of these days, I’ll have to commit to saving up some chicken bones so I can compare.

I can tell you that the mushroom stock for this recipe is delicious, and you get it pretty cheap, for the price of a carrot, an onion and some thyme, along with the stems of the mushrooms you bought, which you weren’t going to serve anyway, right? After boiling those ingredients in water for a while, you strain those ingredients out and put the mushroom caps, and sauteed leeks, into the liquid. That, together with some cream and white wine, is the soup. Stock, mushroom caps, leeks, white wine and cream.

You may ask why you wouldn’t simply make a soup with all of the ingredients, i.e. the carrots, onions, leeks, mushroom caps, mushroom stems, etc. Perhaps even puree them together? I was thinking about this myself, but by making a separate stock you really increase the flavor intensity of the resulting dish. The ingredients used for the stock, if you try tasting them, are a bland, vaguely flavored mush. Still strangely appealing, but not something you’d want as part of a meal.

The other reason is that there is something fitting about having this be a chunky, thin soup rather than a more velvety, thick, smooth soup. I’m not sure why, but the rustic texture of a soup with chopped vegetables in it seems to go better with the woodsy mushroom flavor. Maybe I’m imagining that you can make this in some homestead where you might have access to the woods, but not to a blender or food processor.

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Catering 2

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: avocadoes, bananas, barbecue, blackberries, buttermilk, catering, chicken, chocolate, cilantro, condensed milk, cornbread, cornmeal, cream, cumin, dill, eggs, evaporated milk, flour, garlic, honey, ketchup, lemon, marshmallows, mayonnaise, milk, oil, onions, orange, oregano, parsley, pepper, potatoes, salt, strawberries, tomatoes, vinegar, worcester sauce — Justin Dunham on July 14, 2011

One of these days I need to learn how to work a grill.

Cornbread and (in the background) a couple of different types of salads. I made too much cornbread, but people were happy to take it home with them...

Tres leches and strawberry country cakes.

Note: This is a followup to this post.

A month or so ago, I wrote about some of the constraints I faced with catering a barbecue for 40 out of my tiny Philadelphia kitchen. (Seriously, I think the kitchen is about 30 square feet, including all counter space, oven, and fridge). In this entry, I’ll talk about my experience in cooking and how everything turned out.

One thing that is surprisingly difficult to do in cooking is scaling a recipe. I mean, it’s not too hard for things like salad where you just multiply out the ingredients, or for soup. But when you’re baking things – and that can be cakes, pastries, or lots of savory dishes as well – things often don’t turn out the way you expect. For example, these miniature carrot souffles still take the 11 minutes to bake that a full-sized souffle does. I recently made some beet donuts (more on that later), and same deal, the miniaturization does nothing.

Those are easy examples, because the timing changes but everything else is fine. More heart-rendingly, take note of my experience with cauliflower gratin, which I attempted to make at approximately triple the size (i.e. three portions in a 3x baking dish).

Disaster. The dish is basically cauliflower in a rich cheese sauce. It seemed to bake fine, though it took an abnormally long time. I waited an hour or so for it to cool, and as it cooled… the sauce separated. Instead of a thick, pudding-like sauce, I ended up with a layer of fat on the bottom, and pools of grease on the top, of the dish. The grease then soaked through all of the ingredients, creating an inedible, soggy messy. I had to throw it away! Six cauliflowers’ worth of gratin, gone. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I guess the lesson is, don’t scale if you don’t have to. It would have been much better to just cook a bunch of normally-sized portions.

The other lesson is to make lots of different things; because I had done this, losing one dish didn’t matter. And actually, my experience with the cornbread I made was the opposite – the vastly scaled-up sheets (the recipe isn’t even for bread, it’s for muffins) were some of the best cornbread I have ever made, with a soft, moist interior and a slightly crunchy top.

Overall, the meal seems to have gone pretty well. The avocado and tomato salad, cornbread, and deviled eggs were devoured. Part of the art, of course, is to pick things that are difficult to screw up, which worked in my favor. People seemed to have an aversion to the potato salad; I couldn’t figure out why. The cakes I made didn’t get finished either (actually only about half of each cake was consumed), but I did hear several people struggle with their inability to put down their fork, despite being stuffed. Overriding your eaters’ free will is every chef’s main goal.

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Catering

Shopping list...

The ingredients for ten pounds of potato salad

This is about half of the shopping I did

Note: Part 2 of this post is here.

On this blog, I write a lot about dinners for two, and more recently dinners for five, seven, etc. I suppose it was inevitable that I would eventually end up catering a 40-person barbecue. Yes, inevitable!

So, when the opportunity arose to feed about half of my Wharton cohort, I took it. This doesn’t mean, reader, that I organized logistics for getting food to this event. I actually took a few days out and made all the food. This is possibly the best job I have ever had.

This first entry will be about the setup for the event, and then I’ll write another one about what I learned in trying to scale my recipes to feed more people and how everything turned out (pretty well).

Fortunately, barbecues are pretty much the easiest possible events to cater as a newbie. The atmosphere is casual, people are relaxed, everything can be served at the same time, and everything is either served at room temperature or cooked a la minute. You may even be lucky enough – as I was – to have several very skilled grillmasters who will actually do the cooking for you.

Still, I had to think carefully about what to make. Here were my constraints:

Tiny kitchen. Seriously, it’s about 30′ square and that is including the floor space taken up by cabinets, the fridge, oven, etc. Storage would, therefore, be an issue – I couldn’t make massive quantities of food in advance that had to be refrigerated, and everything would have to be made sequentially since I didn’t have prep room for more than one dish at a time.
Limited time and resources. It was just me doing the cooking! So I’d have to be able to prepare a lot of things in advance, and I couldn’t do anything too complicated.
Transportation. Everything had to be packaged for, and survive, a 30-minute car trip to the barbecue site.

I thought about, and then rejected, several dishes such as biscuits (only really good right out of the oven, definitely wouldn’t keep overnight) and camp bananas (didn’t have time to make the truly prodigious quantities of marshmallows required). Fortunately I didn’t have to get too creative and ended up with a pretty good list of barbecue favorites:

Avocado and tomato salad
Potato salad
Honey cornbread
BBQ chicken with homemade marinade and BBQ sauce
Last minute addition: Deviled eggs
Tres leches cake and strawberry country cake

The next problem was buying ingredients. Since I used to be an investment banker, when confronted with most problems I immediately think: “Excel”. (This is true even though I quit quite a few years ago). Anyway, I made the giant spreadsheet you see pictured on the left to keep track of everything. In retrospect, I ended up overbuying a few things – a mistake in a recipe also almost caused me to buy 17 cups of paprika (at least $200 worth).

I had to be careful to buy things in a deliberate sequence, since (a) I couldn’t carry everything home at once, and (b) some things like avocadoes had to be bought early so they could ripen, whereas fresh berries had to be bought just before using them.

Finally, I had to schedule everything properly. Some things, like the avocado salad, I had to make the day of. Other things, like the cornbread and the cakes, I could make several days before. And then a few other things could be partially made in advance, and finished closer to the time – I made the potato salad and barbecue sauce, and marinated the chicken, the night before; I glazed the cakes the morning of the event, etc.

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Breakfast

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: asparagus, bananas, basil, blueberries, coffee, cream, eggs, flour, frittatas, honey, kiwi berries, kiwis, lemon, orange juice, oranges, plums, potoatoes, scones, strawberries, tea, yogurt — Justin Dunham on May 23, 2011

Fruit salad with plums and berries, including kiwi berry (actinidia arguta)

The full spread. Frittata, scones, fruit salad, orange juice, asparagus...

Frittata closeup. Check out the beautiful crust that develops.

For the first meeting of my Wharton learning team, I decided to make dinner. So I thought that, for the last meeting, it might be fitting to make breakfast. Plus breakfast would give me the chance to make a frittata; an excuse to make a new dish is often an important motivator for me. And I thought it would be a nice thing to do!

I got up early – real early; sunrise in our apartment is beautiful since we have a northern exposure. I made a fruit salad with a lemon/yogurt/honey sauce, I experimented with substituting strawberries for onions in this scone recipe (result fine), roasted some asparagus, and squeezed some orange juice. Oh, and I made this basil-potato frittata, which you can see in closeup on the left.

Fruit salad is kind of cheating, isn’t it? (So is fresh-squeezed orange juice, but it’s a crowd-pleaser). Regardless, people seemed to enjoy it. Since the Trader Joe’s that I live above doesn’t have great produce, I had to make some last-minute decisions about what went in, but the banana/plum/ berry combination seemed to work well.

I also had a chance to include actinidia arguta, also known as the hardy kiwi or kiwi berry. This was a fairly expensive addition, but I always like to try interesting products when I see them. The kiwi berry is basically a miniature kiwi, with a grape-like skin that you don’t need to peel off. Not really worth the extra money, but an interesting eating experience. I should mention, however, that I usually eat kiwis with the skin on, so perhaps I find regular kiwis (actinidia deliciosa) easier to handle than others do.

The frittata came out really well, also, and made great leftovers. I had never eaten one before this – for those who don’t know, a frittata is sort of like a quiche or giant omelette. However, unlike a quiche, there is no pastry shell, and unlike an omelette, the ingredients are cooked within the egg mixture instead of on top. This recipe includes a little baking powder as well, so you get some extra fluffiness, and since it’s baked for about an hour, a delicious and beautiful brown crust develops around the edges.

Not all was successful. I invested a huge amount of time in making this hash browns recipe – peeling 1.5 lbs of potatoes takes forever – and it was a total failure. I have never made hash browns before, so perhaps I did something wrong in making the recipe. Did excluding the lardons make that much of a difference? Did I just not wring the shredded potatoes out enough? Whatever the error, I was left with a disc of shredded potatoes, burned on the outside and soggy and uncooked on the inside, that stuck fast to the pan.

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The difference between caramel, butterscotch, and toffee

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: brown sugar, butterscotch, caramel, corn syrup, cream, dulce de leche, marshmallows, milk, nougat, peanut brittle, sugar, taffy, toffee — Justin Dunham on May 11, 2011

From left to right: butterscotch chips, toffee, caramel

Here are three sugary solids that look similar – butterscotch, toffee, and caramel. It’s not too hard to tell them apart by taste and texture, but what are the actual differences in their manufacture?

All types of sugar candy are made from the same fundamental ingredient, a sugar/water syrup. The syrup is cooked, and as the temperature rises, the water boils off and the moisture content of the syrup decreases. The less water you have in the solution, the harder the resulting candy will generally be. For example, if you want to make hard candy or lollipops, you heat the solution to at least 300 degrees Fahrenheit before letting it cool. If, on the other hand, you want to make fudge, you heat it to only 230 degrees.

Check out the chart below, which is cribbed from Wikipedia (source), for all the details. Some of the stages have names, which describe what happens to the solution if you put a spoonful of it in cold water (the test that was used before candy thermometers were available).

Stage	Temperature (°F)	Temperature (°C)	Sugar concentration
Thread	230–233 °F	110–111 °C	80%
Soft Ball	234–240 °F	112–115 °C	85%
Firm Ball	244–248 °F	118–120 °C	87%
Hard Ball	250–266 °F	121–130 °C	92%
Soft Crack	270–290 °F	132–143 °C	95%
Hard Crack	295–310 °F	146–154 °C	99%
Clear Liquid	320 °F	160 °C	100%
Brown Liquid	338 °F	170 °C	100%
Burnt Sugar	350 °F	177 °C	100%

You’ll notice that by 320 degrees Fahrenheit, all the water has boiled away, and what’s left is a pure solution of melted sugar. This is the beginning of caramel (apparently thought to be ultimately from Greek kanna, “sugar”, and melos, “honey”). As the sugar is cooked further, the caramel gets darker and darker until it burns. Why doesn’t caramel just taste like a bunch of sugar? As the sugar gets heated, a bunch of delicious chemical reactions happen that create all sorts of interesting new molecules, which I’ll leave you to read about here. This also happens as you cook certain other foods as well, which is part of the reason why, for example, sauteeing vegetables can enhance their flavor dramatically.

So that’s caramel. By the way, caramel candy is made by taking the caramel, letting it cool, then mixing it with cream, sugar and vanilla. Or you can cook everything together and let the sugars in the milk caramelize instead of the added sugar, in which case you have a milk caramel.

What about toffee and butterscotch? Toffee is sugar heated to the hard crack stage, with lots of butter mixed in as well. Butterscotch is sugar heated to the soft crack stage, and you use brown sugar (sugar with molasses) instead of white sugar.

Here’s a chart explaining how a few other types of candy are made, as well, to give you a sense of what variations are possible on this process. You’ll notice corn syrup is in a lot of recipes in addition to normal sugar; because of its molecular structure it helps improve shine, smoothness and body.

Dulce de leche: Milk and sugar are simmered and stirred; water evaporates, and the sugars caramelize (though I can’t tell whether it’s the milk sugars that caramelize, the grantulated sugar, or both). A different browning reaction called the Maillard reaction takes place simultaneously; this is the same reaction that makes toast delicious.
Nougat: Water and sugar are heated to the soft ball stage, and whipped egg whites are added. To this is added a second solution of sugar, corn syrup, and often nuts, heated to the hard crack stage. Finally, add butter and vanilla. The mixture is left to cool in a pan.
Marshmallows: Water, sugar and corn syrup are heated to the soft ball stage. The hot syrup is added to a mixture of gelatin, water and vanilla extract, which is then whipped to incorporate air. The mixture is left to cool in a pan.
Peanut brittle: Water, sugar, corn syrup and peanuts are heated to the hard crack stage. The mixture is removed from the heat, butter and baking soda (for airyness) are added, and the mixture is poured into a pan to cool.
Taffy: Water, sugar, corn syrup and salt are heated to the hard ball stage. The mixture is removed from the heat, and butter, flavoring and color are added. As the mixture cools, it’s pulled to make it fluffy. The word “taffy” is a variant of “toffee”, which has an unknown etymology.

(Butterscotch chips photo from user mikefroese at sxc.hu, caramel photo posted by user Rainier Zenz at Wikimedia Commons)

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