food basics

the Rules of Cassoulet

Nibbles
Quick Cassoulet

Quick Cassoulet

As I mentioned over on the cocktail blog, I’m re-reading Toussaint-Samat’s A History of Food. I remember reading parts of it while in Culinary School and using it for a research paper (yes, folks, Culinary School requires homework, papers and all that other stuff in addition to cooking) but I really didn’t retain much. This time around I’m just finding the material so much more interesting–maybe I should have been blogging back then, too!

Cassoulet is sorta like gumbo–each person you ask is going to tell you their way is the right way. According to Toussaint-Samat, though, all cassoulet have these things in common:

  • Beans that are cooked twice (“two lots of water”).
  • It starts on the stove and finishes in the oven.
  • And have a crust of breadcrumbs that’s broken in 6 places.

The predecessor to America pork ‘n beans? Maybe, it certainly has some similarities.

I made a quickie cassoulet as a test for the cookbook, following (rather loosely, I must confess) the version presented in Joy of Cooking. Since I was going for simplicity for the new cook and speed as it was a weeknight I used canned great northern beans, 3 types of meat (chicken sausage, ham and diced chicken–no confit around that night, sad to say) and skipped the baking step.

According to the aforementioned rules I probably can’t call this a cassoulet (I suppose I’ll have to rename it to avoid some busy-body correcting me) without reworking it a bit (a possibility).

I can see multiple reasons to adjust the recipe to your needs but there’s always a work-around.

  • No time to soak and boil and cook the beans again? Canned will work, just buy quality canned goods, drain them and rinse them well before adding to your stew.
  • All out of confit? There are store-bought versions available at a specialty grocer or you can just omit it. And next time you see a duck in the store pick one up and confit-it so you can have it available for your next cassoulet.
  • Lack a Le Creuset to go stylishly from stove to oven? Transfer the stove-top beginnings to any available casserole dish with a lid and go with the flow.

But keep your eyes peeled at your favorite overstock or discount store–I’ve seen some amazing deals on very nice cookware that would be perfect for this sort of thing.

Shortcake… or is it?

Nibbles

It was Mom’s birthday this weekend and she put in a double request for dessert: something with strawberry and chocolate and a chocolate pecan pie. So I suggested a chocolate angel food cake layered with cream and strawberries.

Like a shortcake, right?

Not really. This has been bugging me for a few weeks, now, after having seen an “expert” reply to this:

Q. Are strawberry shortcake and angel food cake the same

A. The cake is the same but the way you eat them are completely different.

Shortcakes versus Foam Cakes

Classic Strawberry Shortcake

Classic Strawberry Shortcake

A short cake is actually more like a biscuit or scone and takes it’s name from the “shortening” of the gluten from the solid fat (butter or vegetable shortening–no that name is not a coincidence) being cut in to the dry ingredients. Short cakes also use baking soda or powder for leavening.

Angle food cakes, on the other hand, are foam cakes, use absolutely no fat whatsoever and very little flour, for that matter. What gives them their lift and structure is the protein from the beaten egg whites that make up the majority of their volume.

Those little golden twinkie-textured things near the fruit in the produce section? Those are usually sponge cakes. Unlike foam cakes they often use outside leavening agents while still depending on the air beaten into the eggs (whether whole or separately and then combined).

So what is that shortcake-like dessert made with a split angel food cake, berries and cream?

A really yummy dessert. You could, I suppose, call it a torte after the process of splitting and filling the layers (commonly known as torting) though a traditional (German) torte is dense from the use of ground nuts instead of flour (though there are exceptions to every rule). But calling it a cake (even a strawberry cake) is really the safest bet out there.

Chocolate Angel Food Cake with Strawberries

Back to Mom’s birthday cake.

When in need of a fool-proof cake recipe, there’s one place I can turn: Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Cake Bible. Of course she has a chocolate angel food cake recipe and, of course, the instructions are incredibly detailed. It’s really tough to mess up one of her recipes unless you take a short cut somewhere.

Incredible Egg Whites

Incredible Expanding Egg Whites

The one thing I didn’t have was cream of tartar but I opted to just go without–it adds stability and helps you to form stiff peaks of the egg white but with my stand mixer I wasn’t too worried about that. The 2 cups of egg whites (from 16 large eggs) quickly grew to fill the 4.5 quart bowl. It’s a good thing to have a separate, larger bowl to do the folding of the scant dry ingredients in with the very stiff egg whites.

We also ran into a slight problem with the cooling step–it seems my angel food pan was made differently than most and the opening of the center tube was not large enough to fit over the neck of the wine bottle, as suggested, or anything else that we could find. Until, that is, Todd spied the lighthouse decoration in our bathroom–between the dowel-rod point on top and the upper cabinets to keep it from wobbling we managed to keep the finished cake from deflating too very much while it cooled the required 1 1/2 hours. Pans with the little arms on top can also serve this same purpose, sans lighthouse.

I had planned to use whipped cream in the layers, along with macerated (sliced and sugared) strawberries and fudge sauce but the 16 egg yolks were just screaming to be made into a batch of Deluxe Pastry Cream (all yolks instead of half yolks, half whole eggs). Granted, it yielded over 2 quarts of pastry cream and it took a little more time than the whipped cream would have, but the finished dessert was that much creamier for the extra effort.

Speaking of which….

The Interior Layers

The Interior Layers

I split the angel food cake into three layers and topped the bottom and middle layers with pastry cream, strawberries and drizzles of chocolate. The top layer, once in place, got pastry cream and chocolate drizzle and the 6 whole strawberries I’d saved out of the quart before slicing the rest. The finished cake tipped a little in towards the center but benefited from a 2 hour rest during which the pastry cream seeped into the cake and turned the airy layers into creamy ones.

And Mom loved it, which would have made it right even if it’d been technically wrong.

Chocolate Angel Food with Strawberries

the Finished Chocolate Angel Food Cake with Strawberries

Way Cool!

Nibbles

Have you ever thought about what happens to food when you freeze it? Have you ever wondered why some foods don’t look or feel the same once they’ve been defrosted? Have you ever asked if there was a way to make this work for you instead of against you?

This is one of my favorite food-science factoids.

Did you ever have to look at things like cork or onion under a microscope? Meat, vegetables, breads and cakes–everything is made up of thousands of little cells and each cell contains at least a little bit of water.

If you’ve ever put a bottle or can of soda in the freezer to chill and forgotten about it, you know first-hand how frozen liquids take up more space than in their non-solid state. Not only does it take up extra space, ice has sharp edges that poke through delicate cell walls that get in their way.

Which is why, when you defrost some frozen vegetables before cooking them, the formerly perky produce seems a bit deflated and mushy: the ice melted and the cells couldn’t hold in the moisture with their now-perforated walls.

Ways to work around this:

  • Cook frozen foods without defrosting them–the shock of heat will turn the ice to steam as the cell walls solidify during the cooking process
  • Pre-cook food before freezing to shore-up the cell walls (and eliminate some of the moisture, depending on the food) before the ice has a chance to do it’s thing

Way that this can be beneficial:

  • Freezing fruits for smoothies and sauces means part of your work is already done for you, the fruit will break down quicker and you’re recipe can be completed sooner
  • Dense baked goods (like pound cake) actually undergo an amazing transformation in the freezer as the ice action helps break down the heavier textures into a more delicate finished object
  • Release the oils in citrus zest for future use

A couple weeks ago I was making fruit salad and rather than throwing the orange peels away, I trimmed off the pith (the white spongy stuff with a bitter taste) from the zest (the colored rind packed with oils). Rather than chop or grate it then, I left it in large pieces, about 2 inches long by 1 inch wide, and stored it in a freezer bag in the freezer.

Last week I decided to make some oatmeal chocolate chip cookies and added some of the reserved orange zest to the mix. Not only was it nice to have the zest on hand, the frozen zest was a breeze to chop and smelled absolutely divine. In the finished cookies you definitely tasted the orange flavor, even though only a tablespoon of zest when into 3 dozen cookies and that’s when it hit me:

When the water in the orange peel froze and then melted, the oils in the cells were given free reign to mix and mingle with the rest of the batter, spreading that flavor all around.

Even though freezing has always been a great way to store foods for long periods of time without spoiling, I’m liking the more immediate ways the freezer can be of help in the kitchen!

the Chicken Connection

Nibbles

An easy thing to do, if you’re goal is to eat a bit healthier, is to eat more chicken and fish compared to beef and pork. Most people know this. But a strange thing has happened over the years when it comes to the median size of a fresh chicken breast.

If I buy a pound of chicken breasts at the local grocery store I invariably end up with 3 breasts in the package and almost always it’s 2 very large ones and 1 not quite as large. None, however, are anything close to 3-4 ounces, which is a serving size of chicken.

Since 1 lb of chicken should yield at least 4 servings (5 is closer to goal, but I’m not going to quibble about an additional ounce of lean chicken, especially if it’s being prepared healthily, as I would be about an additional ounce of potato chips or fried something or other) so a mis-matched package of 3 leaves you with a few options to serve 4: buy 2 packages and store the leftover 2 in the freezer for another application or, using a bit of basic math*, divide it into 12 pieces so that we’re somewhere close to even servings.

Almost.

You see, another problem with these chicken breasts is that they’re not uniform in size so if you cook them as is you run the very real chance of not cooking the center of the thick portion all the way before the thinner end is dried out into jerky. And chicken is NOT something you want to serve medium-rare. Shudder.

The way we fix this in our house is, first, to buy the 5 lb+ packs of chicken. Not only do these chickens tend to be slightly less gargantuan that their single-pound counterparts, you’re price per pound is generally lower, making money sense as well as serving sense. Depending on the size of the breasts, there’s usually 9-11 in there. That’s where the second fix comes in: we split each breast in half, laterally (like you’re going to butterfly it, only not stopping part-way through). Not only does this give us 2 correct portions per breast and stretches the grocery budget but it also makes for a more uniform piece of meat that cooks evenly and looks better on the plate than a bunch of pieces!

Incidentally, there is a bit of a learning curve when it comes to splitting the chicken breasts. If you do botch one or two, set them aside and put these oops along with any other smaller portions in a freezer bag marked pieces and use that the next time you make a stir-fry or chicken salad. We usually keep 4 portions per bag because we cook enough to bring for lunch the next day (both for saving money on unnecessary lunch purchases and the health-benefits of a home-cooked lunch) but, obviously, use what works best for your household.

*Remember fractions? Back when you had to add 1/3 and 1/4, in order to do so you had to find the LCD (lowest common denominator–not liquid crystal display!) so you could add apples to apples. The LCD of 3 breasts and 4 servings is 12 pieces, but only if the breasts are of similar size.