Valentine's Day at Home

Amuse bouche: watermelon, pealed cherry tomato, basil, basil oil ala el Bulli

Valentine's Day is notoriously one of the busiest days of the year for restaurants. Reservations are booked and special V-day fixed menus are designed temporarily nudging the regular menu to the side for the night. Because of this I thought what better way to celebrate than to cook a nice dinner at home. I wanted to make a four course meal and settled upon a soup of some sort, something that could use a beurre blanc, a market salad, and butternut squash gnocchi.

Soup: I heard about an amazing carrot soup that was served at the French Laundry at one point and was describe as a carrot explosion in your mouth. Sounded great and I even found the recipe online from Saveur. This was served with a "fine herb" mousse, which was whipped creme fraiche with some chopped herbs folded in. Think of a creme fraiche whipped cream in terms of texture and a hint of herbs. It was a really nice complement to the silky soup.

Carrot soup with fine herb mousse

Scallops with a clementine beurre blanc: I really wanted to try out making a beurre blanc since I think mastering, or at least learning, classic saucing techniques can really improve a dish. Translating to "white butter" a beurre blanc is an emulsified sauce consisting of wine, vinegar, or both along with shallots and butter. It is often finished with some type of citrus such as clementines (one clementine down from the 50 or so in the bag!). It is a notoriously difficult sauce to make since the emulsion often breaks when the butter is whisked into the reduced wine/vinegar mixture over low heat. I wanted to do a twist on this and foam the sauce so I jumped at the chance to use Jess' iSi whipper. After I made the sauce (it didn't break!) I added some into the iSi canister, charged it with some nitrous, and shook vigorously. Sometime during that process I realized that the releasing the pressurized nitrous into the canister is a very cold process (think the carbon dioxide canisters for cleaning your keyboard) and that this was mixing with my butter sauce. Uh-oh. Sure enough when I tried to dispense it the sauce was now solid! Oh well. Luckily I save extra in case anything went wrong. Jessica promptly informed me that I could keep the charge canister in a warm water bath until I was ready to dispense it next time...sometimes it pays to consult the professional. Anyway, I served the clementine beurre blanc with seared diver scallops.

Scallops with clementine beurre blanc

Market salad: Simple. All I wanted was something from the market that went with prosciutto and a sherry vinegrette. I decided upon blanched shaved aspargus and shaved colored carrots with leeks.

Market salad: prosciutto, carrots, asparagus, greens

Butternut squash gnocchi: For long time I've wanted to make gnocchi. I've read over and over again about how hard it is to make perfect gnocchi as alight as a pillow and not dried out. I chose to butternut squash since, for some reason, this seems easier and less technical than the traditional potato gnocchi. The problem with the recipe was that it called for a 1-1.5 lb butternut squash. In terms of making a dough with flour this seems like quite the range...but it was all I had to go on. While they turned out really good (served in a sage butter sauce) they were a bit "mushy" - definitely could have used more flour.

Butternut squash gnocchi with butter sage sauce

Overall, I was quite happy with the meal and learning a new sauce (and having it technically work out well).

Steamed Filled Buns (Zheng Bao)

For awhile now I've been lusting after Asian Dumplings: Mastering Gyoza, Spring Rolls, Samosas, and More by Andrea Nguyen. I first found out about this book through her blog Vietworldkitchen.com, which I had been following for awhile. Once I found out about this book I knew I couldn't pass up it up. I mean it's entirely dedicated to dumplings! After realizing how easy it was to make the filling for dumplings awhile back (while, admittedly, using store bought fresh wrappers) and at the same time how great it was to have a stock of frozen dumplings for a quick dinner in the freezer I finally bought the book.





















I started off by making a simple, Asian chicken stock consisting of chicken, onion, and ginger that I could use for some of the fillings of the dumplings. Not being one of those good people who slowly accumulate chicken bones in the freezer I just bought a whole chicken and used that. This, of course, left me with an entire chicken's worth of poached meat. Well, let's look in the book for something that I could use this for! Hm....Curried Chicken Bun Filling for steamed filled buns? OK! The filled buns were something I wanted to try eventually anyway so I thought this would be a good use. The recipe has you make a curry paste and cook the chicken with it along with coconut milk. Filling, check. The buns are a risen yeast dough, which slightly intimidated me since I'm, well, not so great baking (odd since I work in a bio lab...). Luckily, I had a professionally trained pastry chef in the apartment to assist! The dough was easy enough to make, but the hard part was shaping them and figuring out how thick to role them since they have a second rise after filling them. For a first try I don't think they turned out too shabby. We thought we had done something wrong at first after we pulled them from the steamer since they looked raw, however we soon realized that restaurants use a special rice flour that makes their buns a brilliant white.

These were good, but both of us thought that the dough could have been lighter and fluffier. Not sure if that was because of how it was mixed or shaped, or if that is just a function of the recipe. I'll either use this recipe again, try adding in some baking powder for a second levener, or try out David Chang's bun recipe from the Momofuku cookbook.

These were a great start! Next filling to try: Char Siu Pork (I think this is the red pork I normally associate with steamed buns)

Hot Sauce Redux

Right before we left for Peru we ran out of hot sauce. Tragic, I know. In our house this is unacceptable since hot sauce, we believe, pretty much goes on everything. Now that I have the time I thought I would restock the old version and experiment with some new additions.

First, I pretty much followed the hot sauce recipe I had up here before with the simple substitutions of 1/2 apple cider vinegar and 1/2 white vinegar instead of all white vinegar and habaneros for serranos. I've finally decided that I don't like apple cider vinegar all that much. I think it overpowers whatever it is put in (including pickles; I discovered this with some B&Bs that I canned) not allowing the other ingredients to shine. I also discovered that, at least with this hot sauce, there is a too hot. If I was making something like Tabasco I'd be less concerned, but here I want to taste the peppers and garlic as well. So, with that in mind I think I'll go back to jalapenos and serranos, more garlic (instead of the 2-3 I wrote before I'd probably up it to 6 cloves), error on the side of less vinegar as I mentioned before (near 2 cups for ~2lbs peppers) and to under season with salt and sugar at first then add more if need be (2-3 tablespoons of sugar to start and 1 tablespoon of salt). 

Here it is again with some modifications:

1.5-2 lbs roasted peppers (jalapenos and serranos work well)

2 cups white vinegar to start (add more to taste)

6 garlic cloves

2-3 tablespoons sugar to start 

1 tablespoon salt to start

I've discovered that recipes like this are really all about playing around...even if they do end up poorly like they did tonight. Oh well, now I think I've got it down! Speaking of playing around...

I also decided to try and make the same hot sauce, but with these amazing dried chile moras from Spice Market in Silver Lake that I found. I learned that they are basically chipotles, but the jalapenos (which are smoked and dried to create chipotles) are just picked younger resulting in a sweeter, more raison like flavor. Of course, since they are smoke, they have a...well...smokey flavor. They smelled delicious in the jar so I couldn't pass them up. I followed my original recipe and since I made the above hot sauce first I decided not to include the apple cider vinegar and go easy on seasoning at first. 

Since the chiles are dried I toasted them in a pan for about a minute and then rehydrated them in boiling water for ~1 hour. After this I followed my basic hot sauce recipe and I think the resulting sauce is great. It's smokey, sweet, and spicy. I threw in some habaneros since I was led to believe moras aren't very spicy....they are. I think I'd leave the habaneros out next time so you can taste the flavor of the chiles better without searing off your taste buds. 

Making both of these was great since I got to practice making hot sauces and learning what about the seasonings are important. These are very easy to play around with in terms of execution and cost!