Justin Dunham

's journal about making things

Miniature carrot soufflés

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

Sitting in a bain-marie, waiting to be put in the oven. The batter is a mixture of carrots, milk, orange juice, eggs and other flavoring ingredients

Served with a simple arugula salad with roasted tomatoes on the side.

I had a bunch of carrots left over from another recipe, and I also have been waiting to make another soufflé for quite a long time. So I decided to make this tasty-looking carrot soufflé recipe. Only problem – not nearly enough carrots, as it turned out! So I decided to make miniature soufflés.

 

They turned out pretty well. To a carrot purée is added milk, eggs, cinnamon and orange juice – all very typical carrot-complementary flavors, many of which are in the recipe I use for carrot-ginger soup as well.

Despite letting them cook for quite a long time, the soufflés actually did not rise or really set up properly. That was unfortunate, but they did develop a crunchy crust on top, and were smooth and rich on the inside, so were actually still tasty. It was kind of like eating a carrot pudding, and that texture, combined with the sweet flavor of the carrot and cinnamon  reminded me of a fall dessert.

I think the mistake may have been setting the soufflés up in a water bath (see first picture). The idea was to cause the soufflés to rise more evenly; I was especially worried about this given their small size. But the recipe doesn’t actually call for a water bath, and so I wonder if I may have upset the action of the baking powder or caused some other problem by putting them in one.

I needed something to serve them with, so I added some arugula, parmesan cheese, and cherry tomatoes roasted slightly too much – so that they became almost jammy – in olive oil.

Banana and kiwi pudding

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , , — Justin Dunham on July 6, 2010

Just before the final layer of pudding is added.

The completed dish.

A few months ago, I made this banana pudding recipe, which claims to be that of the Magnolia Bakery, and does indeed taste very similar.

More recently I thought, why not try using this method with some other types of fruit? Provided the fruit is somewhat ripe, pretty much anything should work.

So, I tried substituting kiwis for half the bananas. I also added some lime zest in the pudding itself. The result came out very well, and was a different sort of experience.

One mistake I made was not planning in advance – as a result, I used ripe, but not very ripe, bananas or kiwis. Ripeness helps because the fruit disintegrates somewhat and its flavor spreads more thoroughly throughout the rest of the pudding.

I’ll try this again at some point keeping that in mind. I’ll also try this with some other fruit, such as strawberries.

Lemon Pudding with Basil Custard Sauce

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , , — Justin Dunham on May 1, 2010

Dessert.

Cookies made with the leftover custard.

Together with this dinner, I also made this lemon pudding with basil custard sauce. To make the pudding, a mixture of gelatin, water and lemon zest is added to a meringue (egg white foam).

The result is hardly what I’d think of as a pudding – it’s very light and airy, almost like a lemon Italian ice without the ice crystals, if you can imagine that.

To this is added a basil custard sauce. To make the sauce, the recipe says to bring milk carefully to a boil, without letting it boil over, and then add plenty of basil leaves to steep in it as it cools. Once the milk has cooled, you can remove the basil leaves and heat the milk again.

Finally, you add several egg yolks, which help to thicken the final sauce.

Egg yolks are interesting to work with in conjunction with hot liquids. Typically the proteins in eggs coagulate at high temperatures, and this coagulation gives you scrambled eggs (for example). Even in a simple fried egg, the solidification and opacification of the yolk results from the coagulation of the egg (white) proteins. This is my understanding, anyway.

But when you’re making a custard, you don’t want coagulation. That would give you a custard base plus scrambled eggs. You avoid this by tempering the yolks, which means that you mix them together with a small part of the hot liquid to raise their temperature, then mix that mixture back into the larger batch of liquid. Doing so causes the eggs to heat up more slowly, which for some reason prevents them from coagulating. (I haven’t been able to find a satisfactory explanation of why, yet).

Once the custard is made, you simply pour the basil custard sauce (also known as a creme anglaise) over the pudding. It’s a really interesting and extremely refreshing combination. It’s best served with a basil leaf for garnish – see above photo – and some berries, e.g. raspberries or blueberries. I originally made the pudding in a giant dish but next time I’ll pour it directly into wine glasses to set.

We got through the pudding pretty quickly, but there was a lot of custard left over. To try to use it up, I just added a huge amount of flour and made cookies out of it. They tasted OK, but the texture was really off.

I don’t know if that was primarily because my oven freaked out – it often goes to 500 degrees for no apparent reason, which forced me to pull the cookies out immediately – or whether it was because there is something wrong with the recipe I improvised.

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Lemon-Snow-Pudding-with-Basil-Custard-Sauce-352321

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