Justin Dunham

's journal about making things

Pear-in-a-bottle

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , — Justin Dunham on May 13, 2011

Bottles of pear brandy, with prisonniers (imprisoned fruit).

A baby pear, taken by flickr user "Living in Monrovia"; click the picture for the source.

Sometimes fruit shows up in strange places.

The first picture, from flickr user kasiaeryn, is of bottles of eau de vie de poire, also known as pear brandy. Pear brandy, like other fruit brandies, is made from juice, in this case pear of course, that’s been fermented and then distilled (not to be confused with fruit liqueurs, where fruit flavoring is added to an already-made alcohol such as vodka).

But how do you get the pear in there?

The trick is to slide the bottle over the pear while it’s still young, tiny, and on the branch. The bottle is held in place with string, and over time, the pear grows to full size inside the bottle. Care must be taken to seal off the bottle neck, e.g. with gauze, so that insects can’t get in, and to tilt it so that moisture can drain out. Other leaves and young pears on the same branch can be trimmed to avoid interfering with the growth of the main, or “king”, pear.

Though the “prisonnier” (the fruit trapped inside the bottle) looks neat, according to this New York Times article it doesn’t change the flavor at all. I’d guess that the waxy skin of the pear might prevent the alcohol from penetrating the fruit; or perhaps it’s because properly distilled fruit brandy tastes so similar to the fruit itself that its presence makes little difference?

Check out the New York Times article, too, for lots of other interesting details on fruit brandies. Among other brandies that are available: wild strawberry, rose hip, and quince.

Pâté with balsamic onions, olive oil ice cream and polenta cake, carrot ginger soup with spheres, trout meuniere

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — Justin Dunham on April 16, 2011

Sauteeing some chicken livers with capers, anchovies and oil

Toast components: pâté, pâté with parsley salad, pâté with salad and balsamic onions. Yum!

Trout meuniere and salad with roasted tomatoes.

Polenta cake, olive oil ice cream, and some pears poached in marsala

Had some friends over for dinner last weekend. This meal was my return to serious cooking (I took a break for most of January and February), so I wanted to make it interesting. Also, my fiancée was back in Philadelphia for the weekend, and she loves pâté, so I thought that would be a nice surprise. Accordingly, I made the following:

This was a fun meal to make. Pâté is surprisingly easy, and this one just consisted of chicken livers, capers, anchovies, white wine, and a couple of other things, pureed. That’s it.

Another advantage (besides impressing your significant other) is that if you were to buy a pound of chicken liver pate at the store, it would cost you, what, $10 or $20? A pound of chicken livers costs about $3, and then you add maybe $1 or $2 in additional ingredients to make it yourself. And you know exactly what’s in it.

One other thing, too. By making pate yourself, you might learn to like it if you didn’t already. My original experience with pate, as it was with mayonnaise, is that I found it rather… unpleasant to contemplate. But when I saw what actually goes into it – basically just a few incredibly strong and delicious flavors – and how it’s made, I lost my dislike of it. Pate will probably never be my favorite food, but I definitely have more of an appreciation for it now. The combination of the pate, parsley salad and onions sauteed in balsamic vinegar was also… pretty awesome.

As for the carrot-ginger soup, I’ve made it before. But this time, I added an experimental ingredient. If you add some sodium alginate to a relatively neutral liquid (such as carrot juice, apple cider, or certain other things), and then put drops of the resulting combination into a bath of water and calcium chloride, the liquid immediately becomes solid spheres that burst in your mouth when you bite them. This is exactly the same experience as eating caviar. I will write a separate entry about this later, but I (actually we – I invited everyone to help) performed this procedure with some apple cider, resulting in little spheres of cider that burst in your mouth when you bite them. We then put these spheres in our soup… and also tried putting them in our water as well, which was actually sort of interesting.

I’ve written about trout meuniere before, so I won’t say too much more about that here. I served it along with a simple salad of arugula and some tomatoes that were roasted for an hour or so in oil, garlic and onions. Delicious.

Finally, there’s the dessert. I’ve been waiting to make polenta cake again for quite a while, but I didn’t know what to serve it with; the grapefruit mousse I made last time was not repeatable and not amazing. Recently, I came upon a recipe for olive oil ice cream, which seemed like the perfect complement

Let me tell you, this stuff is weird. First of all, the recipe uses raw egg yolks – no cooking as with normal ice cream. Secondly, it is made out of freaking olive oil. But man, it is really delicious. The first time you take a bite, it tastes a little unexpected. But then you want another bite… and another. I served this whole thing with some pears poached in marsala, which were a good accompaniment but which I’m not sure I’ll make again.

Asparagus soup, panade and a pear-frangipane tart

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , , , , , , , , — 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...

The panade, before baking...

...and after.

...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.

Puff Pastry Tarts, and Experimenting with Glazes

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Justin Dunham on March 24, 2010

The tarts before they go in the oven.

After.

Apple tarts, with an apricot jam glaze. Picture's a little fuzzy, sorry.

Inspired by this episode of Good Eats, I decided to experiment with puff pastry. Puff pastry’s pretty neat. The basic process for making is that you take dough and cover it with a ton of butter. You then fold the dough over so it’s like a butter sandwich.

If you keep folding it over itself, you eventually end with thousands of layers of dough and butter. When you bake it, the water in the butter boils off, causing it to… well, yes. One thing I don’t understand yet is how the layering action helps with this process.

Because it’s essentially impossible to make without industrial equipment, puff pastry is one of the few things I buy readymade these days. It’s in the freezer section. It’s not that expensive, but it allows you to produce some very good-looking and tasty stuff quite easily.

I bought one package of puff pastry and used it to produce 3 sets of tarts – one apple, one pear, and one mushroom, basil and cheese. The apple tart was straight from Good Eats, but the pear and mushroom tarts were my own experiments. Since I don’t like to waste things, I also threw the remaining scraps of dough into the oven as an experiment.

Probably the best result was the mushroom tarts. They turned out like mini-pizzas, with a croissant-like crust. Really good. I brushed the crusts with olive oil to give them a little bit of shine, which sort of worked. Anyway, one day I will actually try making a bona fide pizza this way, and I’m surprised I haven’t encountered this yet.

The apple tarts came out pretty well also. Part of what helps is that apples are really easy to work with. You can slice them really thin, which you need to do for this recipe, but they will not get waterlogged when you put them in a water / lemon juice bath (which is what I usually do to prevent browning). I melted some apricot jam and put this over the top as a glaze, which was easy.

I made some pear tarts as well. Problem number one was that the thin pear slices, after being submerged in water for a couple of hours, essentially disintegrated. This didn’t affect the taste very much, which was fine, but it did make them look… rustic. For this tart, I also experiment with an egg wash glaze, but I went a bit overboard and so the resulting tart was a little like a pear omelette. It wasn’t bad by any means, just not exactly what I wanted.

Oh yeah, as I mentioned above I also threw the pastry scraps in the oven to see what would happen. This works fine – you get little biscuit-like things which I’m sure would be delicious with dinner.

Caramel and chocolate pear cake, and a cauliflower curry

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , , , , , , — Justin Dunham on February 13, 2010

I spent a few hours yesterday on some things.

The completed cake

Caramel using the "old method". It's boiling. This is not necessary, and doesn't work for me.

Caramel using the new method. I drag the sugar around as it's melting, and lumps of caramelized sugar start to form...

...these eventually melt (shown in process) until you're left with pure liquid.

So, eventually, I was actually able to make a sauce out of this.

Making caramel was a really interesting experience. I first bought a whole bunch of plain sugar, since I expected to ruin several batches before I got it right. I then stumbled across this method for making caramel. In the past, when I’ve tried to make e.g. flan, I’ve been told that I need to have both water and sugar in the pan. I’m not sure exactly what went wrong, but this has been uniformly disastrous (to varying degrees). When I cooked a bunch of sugar, slowly, letting it melt, according to that method, it seemed to just work. It was kind of like making risotto in reverse; instead of waiting for the liquid I added to be soaked up by rice grains, I waited for the sugar grains to dissolve into liquid.

So, as it turned out, it wasn’t that difficult. Since I now had extra caramel, I decided to go ahead and try making a sauce. In typical Justin style, the first time I did this I just added a half-cup of milk to the caramel. Result: catastrophe. The milk curdled immediately, and the caramel seized up into a giant, burned ball. I guess the chemistry here is such that the caramel is a somewhat fragile system.

I then decided to look up an actual recipe for caramel. The key is first of all to add butter. And the other key is to whisk like hell when you add the butter in. The caramel bubbled up violently at first, but as I kept whisking, and hoping it would work, the sauce eventually came together and settled down. The exact same thing happened when I added milk. At the end, I came out with a pretty decent caramel sauce. It was amazing how much whisking actually transformed the dish, and I’ve noticed this happens in a lot of other contexts as well. For example, when you whisk cream enough, it turns into whipped cream. It’s pretty amazing.

Once that was done, I used it to line the bottom of a cake pan, and then put in some pear slices and chocolate cake batter. I think I may have overbaked it slightly. The diameter of the cake pan really does make a big difference, by the way – I used a 10-inch instead of a 9-inch pan, so I had to make adjustments. See the chart for how that affects the thickness of the cake. The thickness in turn affects the baking time, but I don’t know exactly how. I just tried to be really careful!

The cake came out well, though I’m realizing I’m not sure if I like caramel. Afterward, I put together a lamb and cauliflower curry. This was fine, though underseasoned in several ways – I didn’t use enough salt, I forgot to buy an onion, and I didn’t have the cilantro called for in the recipe. Lilli also pointed out to me that the recipe calls for light coconut milk, but there’s no reason to actually follow this recommendation. Finally, I don’t think I put enough curry paste in. I will try it again at some point “for real”.

I really need to use much more salt that I do. Watching “Secrets of a Restaurant Chef” with Anne Burrell this morning, I saw that she probably used a quarter-cup of salt, or more, to season a couple of Cornish game hens! I may make it my mission to oversalt something soon, to see if I am physically capable of doing it. Another way to do this would be to roast some batches of potatoes as another experiment.

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