Penney’s Palate

This month’s recipe came from Pierre Hermé, whom I had never heard of until this month. He is a very fancy French pastry chef. The recipe comes from a cookbook written by Dorie Greenspan that features a lot of his recipes involving chocolate, called Chocolate Desserts By Pierre Hermé.

I enjoyed making these, although they didn’t turn out quite how I had imagined. The Pâte à Choux was too eggy and the pastry cream was also very eggy. I chose to do a regular vanilla pastry cream instead of the chocolate pastry cream that was recommended. Next time I would like to find a pastry cream that is less eggy and tastes more like vanilla pudding. I also thought that making a chocolate sauce to go into the chocolate glaze was dumb. It tasted and acted just like chocolate glaze, but it took 3 times as long to make as regular chocolate glaze. So next time I will take the more simple approach and just make plain chocolate glaze with chocolate and heavy cream. The overall product looked ugly too… I wasn’t able to pipe them nice and smooth, so when they baked up they were a little deformed.

I keep saying next time because I really want to make these again. Despite the eggy choux and the fact that 90% of them flattened out so that I couldn’t fill them unless I sliced them in half, they were pretty good. The internet says that I should have kept them in the oven after baking (turn oven off and leave door open) so that they won’t deflate when I take them out. Tommy and I didn’t have a problem eating most of them over the weekend. They only took about 2 hours to make, start to finish including cleaning all of the dishes. Next time I make them, they won’t be eggy and they will look beautiful!

Eclairs

Ingredients
Cream Puff Dough (see below for recipe), fresh and still warm
Pastry Cream of choice
Chocolate Glaze

1) Preheat your oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Divide the oven into thirds by positioning the racks in the upper and lower half of the oven. Line two baking sheets with waxed or parchment paper.

2) Fill a large pastry bag fitted with a 2/3 (2cm) plain tip nozzle with the warm cream puff dough. Pipe the dough onto the baking sheets in long, 4 to 41/2 inches (about 11 cm) chubby fingers. Leave about 2 inches (5 cm) space in between each dough strip to allow them room to puff. The dough should give you enough to pipe 20-24 éclairs.

3) Slide both the baking sheets into the oven and bake for 12 minutes. After the éclairs have been in the oven for a total of 12 minutes, rotate the sheets top to bottom and front to back. Continue baking for a further 8 minutes or until the éclairs are puffed, golden and firm. The total baking time should be approximately 20 minutes.

4) Using a small, sharp knife, cut a small slit in each eclair to let the steam out. Let cool for a few minutes before filling and icing.

5) Slice the éclairs horizontally, using a serrated knife and a gently sawing motion. Set aside the bottoms and place the tops on a rack over a piece of parchment paper (or you can poke a hole in them and fill with pastry cream instead of slicing them into two pieces).

6) Fill the eclairs with the pastry cream, then dip the eclairs (or eclair tops if you have cut them in half) down into the chocolate glaze. The glaze should be barely warm to the touch (between 95 – 104 degrees F or 35 – 40 degrees C, as measured on an instant read thermometer).

Pierre Hermé’s Cream Puff Dough
Recipe from Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Hermé

Ingredients
• ½ cup (125g) whole milk
• ½ cup (125g) water
• 1 stick (4 ounces; 115g) unsalted butter, cut into 8 pieces
• ¼ teaspoon sugar
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• 1 cup (140g) all-purpose flour
• 5 large eggs, at room temperature

Preparation
1) In a heavy bottomed medium saucepan, bring the milk, water, butter, sugar and salt to the
boil.

2) Once the mixture is at a rolling boil, add all of the flour at once, reduce the heat to medium and start to stir the mixture vigorously with a wooden spoon. The dough comes together very quickly. Do not worry if a slight crust forms at the bottom of the pan, it’s supposed to. You need to carry on stirring for a further 2-3 minutes to dry the dough. After this time the dough will be very soft and smooth.

3) Transfer the dough into a bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or using your hand mixer or if you still have the energy, continue by hand. Add the eggs one at a time, beating after each egg has been added to incorporate it into the dough. You will notice that after you have added the first egg, the dough will separate, once again do not worry. As you keep working the dough, it will come back all together again by the time you have added the third egg. In the end the dough should be thick and shiny and when lifted it should fall back into the bowl in a ribbon.

4) The dough should be still warm. It is now ready to be used for the éclairs as directed above.

Notes:
1) Once the dough is made you need to shape it immediately.

2) You can pipe the dough and the freeze it. Simply pipe the dough onto parchment-lined baking sheets and slide the sheets into the freezer. Once the dough is completely frozen, transfer the piped shapes into freezer bags. They can be kept in the freezer for up to a month.

Pastry Cream
I used a pastry cream from a cookbook that I was borrowing from the library. I have since returned the book, and forgot to write down the recipe. Basically, any pastry cream (or vanilla pudding) will work.

Chocolate Glaze
Recipe from Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Hermé

Ingredients
• 1/3 cup (80g) heavy cream
• 3½ oz (100g) bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
• 4 tsp (20 g) unsalted butter, cut into 4 pieces, at room temperature
• 7 tbsp (110 g) Chocolate Sauce (recipe below), warm or at room temperature

Preparation
1)In a small saucepan, bring the heavy cream to a boil. Remove from the heat and slowly begin to add the chocolate, stirring with a wooden spoon or spatula.

2) Stirring gently, stir in the butter, piece by piece followed by the chocolate sauce.

Notes:
1) If the chocolate glaze is too cool (i.e. not liquid enough) you may heat it briefly? in the microwave or over a double boiler. A double boiler is basically a bowl sitting over (not touching) simmering water.

Chocolate Sauce
Recipe from Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Hermé

Ingredients
• 4½ oz (130 g) bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
• 1 cup (250 g) water
• ½ cup (125 g) crème fraîche, or heavy cream
• 1/3 cup (70 g) sugar

Preparation
1) Place all the ingredients into a heavy?bottomed saucepan and bring to a boil, making sure to stir constantly. Then reduce the heat to low and continue stirring with a wooden spoon until the sauce thickens.

2) It may take 10?15 minutes for the sauce to thicken, but you will know when it is done when it coats the back of your spoon.

One evening Tommy and I went to the new Caribbean place in town. It is a pretty neat place both inside and out. It is a renovated gas station that the owners have turned into a restaurant, with a gas-station decor (the name of the restaurant is Fuel). It looks like an old Gulf station. Out back there is some really nice seating, both covered and uncovered out on the grass. It has a bar area and a bocce ball court (more like a lane). Tommy chose to order Patacones as his side. The server described them as green plantains that were smashed and fried to a crisp. We loved them so much that we wanted to re-create the recipe at home so that we could eat them whenever we wanted. A few looks around the internet later, I had a fairly easy recipe that basically said to cut, fry, smash, fry, season, eat. At Fuel, they were served with a light orange mayonnaise-type sauce. After browsing the grocery store, I decided that the sauce was most likely Thousand Island dressing, so that is what we dipped our Patacones in.

Patacones

Ingredients
1 plantain, as green as you can find
oil for frying (I used vegetable oil this time)
Salt
Dipping sauce (I used Thousand Island dressing, but the internet says that people use ketchup, mayonnaise, and pretty much anything else you can think of to dip into)

Preparation
1. Heat oil in pan over medium to medium-high heat (oil should be 1/4 inch in depth)

2. Peel the plantain — Peeling a green plantain like a banana won’t work. Chop off a little of each end, then score the flesh down the length of the plantain 4 times, so that you have 4 sections of flesh. Then take your thumb and wedge it between the flesh and the meat and run your thumb down the length of the plantain to get the skin off.

3. Cut it into 1/2 to 1-inch pieces

4. Fry the pieces for about 2 minutes on each side, just until they start to get some color

5. Put a piece of wax paper on a cutting board. Put one piece at a time on one half of the wax paper,then fold over the other half to cover the piece of fried plantain. Use a heavy skillet to smash the plantain (it should now be no more than 1/4 inch thick. I like them on the thicker side, but some may like them super-thin).

6. Put the flattened plantains back in the frying pan and fry on each side until golden.

7. Sprinkle salt on the plantains after taking them out of the frying pan..

8. Let cool, then dip in your favorite sauce and eat!

A few nights ago I really wanted to make chocolate chip cookies. I wanted cookies and I wanted chocolate, so this seemed like a good choice. My favorite kind to make involve using 3 kinds of chocolate chips just like this recipe. The three kinds of chocolate chip cookies that I like to use are White chocolate, milk chocolate and bittersweet chocolate, all equal parts. Normally I like my chocolate stuff more chocolately and less sweet. With this combination, the bittersweet chocolate chips help to balance the sweetness of the white and milk chocolate chips. I only had maybe half of a handful left of bittersweet chocolate chips (not nearly enough to make this recipe possible). I meant to pick some up when I went grocery shopping but I forgot. After dinner when I was ready to make the chocolate chip cookies that I had been wanting all day, I realized that I didn’t have any bittersweet chocolate chips. I didn’t want to use only white chocolate and milk chocolate due to the sweetness factor, so I started to pout. Tommy suggested adding cocoa powder in place of the bittersweet chocolate chips to try and cut down on the sweetness factor. So after altering Melanie’s recipe, I ended up with 22 chocolate chocolate cookies. They turned out moist and gooey right out of the oven, and oh so chocolatey. I tried one the day after and it was still soft and chewy. I was surprised at how rich and chocolatey they were.

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients
1/2 cup butter at room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla
3/4 cup AP flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 cup white chocolate chips
1/2 cup milk chocolate chips

Preparation
Preheat oven to 350-degrees and prepare cookie sheets for baking.

1. Cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

2. Add eggs and vanilla and mix until blended.

3. Add flour, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder and salt, mixing until just blended.

4. Add chocolate chips, mixing until combined.

5. Drop by rounded tablespoon onto cookie sheets and bake for 12 minutes

6. Let sit on cookie sheets until they have flattened out and cooled down, 3-4 minutes.

I haven’t been very creative in the kitchen lately. Just chugging along, finding recipes to make for dinner. No substitutions necessary since I have nothing in the fridge and nothing on the counter to use up. Even though my creativity level has been low, we have had some pretty good dinners lately.

And not that this affects the typical dinners that Tommy and I make, I thought I would let everyone know that I have quit using high fructose corn syrup. NO MORE! I’m sure I won’t really notice an actual difference in my body by not having HFCS, but I feel better about it. I’m curious to know how long I will be able to not use it. Tommy and I watched King Corn a few weeks ago, and since then I’ve been anti-HFCS, and I’ve also been a little uneasy about beef and such, the non-grass fed kind. I’m definitely not a vegetarian or even close, but I don’t feel bad about paying a little bit more for local (ish) grass fed beef.

Some recipes that I have enjoyed recently are:

Chipotle Shrimp Tostadas, from our most recent Food & Wine magazine. I have recently discovered that I love cabbage and fish tacos, so this meal wasn’t a big stretch. The only variation I used was that I didn’t have chipotle chile powder, so I just used regular chile powder. The wine pairing recommendation was a Rose, which is exactly what we had. Delicious.

Another dinner from our most recent Food & Wine, Lemongrass Pork with Pickled Carrots, served alongside Caramelized Broccoli with Garlic was delicious too. We used boneless pork chops sliced thin, and served it over brown rice. The only thing that I would like to note about this recipe is that this is the first time that Tommy and I have cooked with Fish Sauce. When Tommy saw it on the grocery list, he said “ewww”. But I remained optimistic and forged on anyway. As I started preparing the meal, the fish sauce SMELLED REALLY BAD. I was dreading the thought of finishing the cooking and it tasting like it was smelling. But again, I kept quiet (I was hoping that Tommy wasn’t smelling what I smelled) and forged on. The finished product tasted nothing like it smelled. All of it was pretty tasty. Aside from all of the chopping (Tommy was chopping, and he goes really slow because all of his minced pieces are of uniform size), this meal was fairly quick to make. I like quick but delicious meals.

When I was little, one of my favorite things to eat was “Stew and Noodles”. My parents would buy the canned beef stew, cook up some egg noodles, and BAM, I would devour it. Whole Foods had some grass-fed stew beef that I was eyeing over the weekend. After finding a use for it, I went back and bought some. Some people might think that Tommy and I are weird for making beef stew in South Carolina in August. But we eat soup all year ’round, no matter how hot. Although it has been rather cool lately, in the 80′s. The only substitution I made for this Tuscan Beef Stew was that instead of 2.5 cups of red wine (who wants to use 2.5 cups, that’s almost the whole bottle!!), I used 1 cup of red wine (a merlot) and 1.5 cups of beef stock. We ate it with egg noodles and I slurped it up while thinking of childhood memories. For some weird reason, the memory that came up first was when I was eating the soup at our kitchen table, and I was watching our ferret steal the dog’s food, and the dog was going crazy, too afraid to stand up to the ferret stealing his food.