puff pastry « Justin Dunham - 's journal about making things

Coconut cake with hibiscus sauce, salad with pomegranate seeds, salmon and mashed potatoes, duxelles puff pastry

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: arugula, coconut cake, cream, dill, hibiscus, honey, lemons, lettuce, mushrooms, onions, pearl onions, peas, pistachios, pomegranates, potatoes, puff pastry, salmon, thyme, walnuts, white wine — Justin Dunham on January 20, 2011

Blanched and peeled pistachios. They look like little avocadoes...

Cake + sauce.

Dried hibiscus flowers. Image by Wikimedia user Thelmadatter.

Salad with pomegranate seeds and red onions.

Salmon with a cream sauce, over mashed potatoes and peas

Wow, this entry is late. Anyway, just before the holidays I had the chance to cook for some people from my class at school, which was really fun.

Let me start at the end and work backwards. Dessert was a coconut cake, with a hibiscus sauce and some toasted pistachios.

Coconut cake’s been on my list for a while now, and I’m glad I finally got a chance to make it. I am also frustrated that I burned the bottom of the cake slightly. There are several ways to test the doneness of a cake, including inserting a toothpick and seeing if it comes out clean (the toothpick test), seeing whether the cake springs back when you depress the top, and also waiting for it to start pulling away from the sides of the pan. I generally use the toothpick test, and I’m worried that I’m being too stringent since things I bake often come out a little overdone. In writing this, I realize the other possible problem is that I am using very long toothpicks that we happen to have. I wonder whether the point of the toothpick test is that it is only supposed to check the middle of the cake?

But what was really fun was making the hibiscus sauce. First of all, hibiscus isn’t that easy to track down, especially in Philadelphia. What saved me were some totally awesome Mexican grocery stores in the Italian Market neighborhood, specifically the one right next to Taqueria Verecruzana at 930 Washington St. They stock an incredible array of stuff in a tiny space! I didn’t really know what hibiscus flowers even looked like but fortunately was able to recognize their Spanish name, jamaica. Oh yeah, and the sauce was really delicious, and a beautiful, deep purple color.

For the main course I baked some salmon and served with a really tasty mashed potato, pearl onion, pea and dill mixture. At the last minute, I figured it could use a sauce, so I whipped something up with lemon, white wine, dill and cream.

Before that, I served an appetizer of mushroom duxelles in puff pastry, with a little thyme and a smoked tomato sauce. Duxelles is basically a mushroom paste with cream and white wine, named after the duke of Uxelles, who employed the chef who created it. (I think it would be a little bit of a stretch to call what I made duxelles, but I’m working on it!) I got the general outline of that recipe here.

And finally, for the salad, I served this pomegranate and spinach salad. I think I have written about this before. Note that it only works with fresh pomegranate seeds, and also almonds really do work better in this recipe than walnuts, which is what I used.

Comments Off

Puff Pastry Tarts, and Experimenting with Glazes

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: apples, apricots, basil, cheese, eggs, mushrooms, olive oil, pears, puff pastry — 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.

Comments Off