Recipe : Baked Brie with Caramelised Almonds (Vegetarian)

Brie is a soft French Cheese made from cow's milk. It has a harder rind on the outside which protects a soft cheese on the inside. The flavour is normally mild and not too ripe. A ripened Brie is called a Brie Noir.

Brie can be eaten as it is or baked to make it a little more gooey and runny. The rind is completely edible and best left as is (with a little hole cut out to breathe), if you plan to bake it. the rind will help keep your Brie in shape.

Brie is sold in circular shapes or triangular wedges. The circles work best for this recipe. If all you have access to is the triangular variety, then make sure that it has rind on the sides before baking it, else you'll just end up with an extremely limp quesadilla.

While I have used almonds in my recipe. All nuts work well and so do some fruits like cranberries when baking Brie.

This dish looks very fancy, but its very easy and fast to prepare, if you have all the ingredients in your pantry.

Ingredients:
1 small round of Brie (4.5" is the commonly available size in India).
1 tsp butter (salted is fine)
2-3 tbsp brown sugar (it gives better flavour, but if you are out of brown sugar, you can try regular sugar too, just try and brown it when caramelising)
1.5 handfuls of nuts (I used almonds, you can use walnuts or pecans)
pinch of salt (or to taste)
1/2 tsp chilli powder

Special equipment :
Aluminium Foil
Oven proof small round baking dish

Method :
Bring the Brie to room temperature.

In a normal frying pan (preferably non-stick), melt the butter on a low flame.
Add half the sugar, salt, chilli powder and nuts and continue to swirl them around the pan occasionally on a low flame.
When all the ingredients (except the nuts) combine to form a sticky paste, take it off the flame and transfer the nuts onto  the aluminium foil.

Preheat your over to 180C.

Thinly slice off the top rind of the Brie, but leave the sides and bottom intact.
Place it in the oven proof bowl sliced side top.
Sprinkle the remaining brown sugar on the sliced side and then top with the caramelised nuts.
(I sprinkled the remaining nuts around the Brie too)

Bake at 180C for about 20 minutes - until you see the soft cheese bubbling and changing consistency.

Let it rest for a few minutes and then serve hot with sliced Baguettes or crackers.

This can be served as a fancy appetiser, on a cheeseboard or as a snack for 2.

Kim's Notes:
Its important to move the hot caramelised nuts out of the pan and onto the foil to prevent sticking to your pan.

Also, don't move the nuts directly onto the Brie, it will start melting on top and your cooking won't be even.

If like me, you have been taught not to waste any food in the kitchen, then slip the sliced bits under the brie when baking or keep them and use them in any pasta sauce.

Standard Brie Size is 9-15 inches, so double the recipe for a Standard serving of Brie.

Recipe : Roast Chicken with Duxelles

If you cook this right, the meat will be incredibly soft, tender and juicy. Don't pull out the chicken skin before roasting. It helps keep the meat moist, the stuffing in and adds a lovely texture and flavour to the dish.

Since I roast chicken in the microwave on convection setting, I've found that roasting it covered for 2/3 of the time helps keep most of the moisture in.

Ingredients:
1 roasting chicken with skin - around 1kg
1 quantity duxelles (from 400gm mushrooms) at room temperature
1 tsp salt
juice of 1 lime
a little butter or olive oil for basting.

Method:
Clean the chicken well, especially the inside and dry
Rub the chicken with a mixture of lemon juice and salt, both inside and outside and keep for 10-15 minutes.
Stuff the chicken with the duxelles and if you can get the skin loose, pack some duxelles between the skin and the flesh.
(My butcher here in Ahmedabad, ends up tearing the skin when he de-feathers the chicken and unless I clean my chicken myself, I have to make do with what I'm given)

Baste the chicken with a little melted butter or olive oil.
Roast in a preheated oven at 200C for about an hour and a half.
Keep an eye on the chicken as it roasts and increase or decrease the time as needed.

You can serve your chicken completely coked but moist, or slightly crispy.

I've made this a home style roast chicken, but you can obviously make this a much neater dish, by trussing the chicken once stuffed.

If you are roasting it uncovered in a regular oven, you can cover the wings and the final leg joint with foil until half cooked, to get an even colouring all over.

Recipe : Duxelles - Vegetarian / Vegan - Stuffing / Pate

I first heard about Duxelles on the first season of Junior Masterchef Australia, and the concept of  minced mushrooms cooked in butter seemed so tasty that I had to look it up and try it for myself.

There are a multitude of recipes for Duxelles online, but I took a look at ingredients that were easily available to me and what would suit our tastebuds and this is the final recipe that I came up with.

Ingredients:
1 medium onion
6 - 8 cloves garlic
400gms fresh button mushrooms (the kind most easily available in India)
2 pinches of herbs of your choice - thyme, parsley, tarragon
3 tbsp butter (vegans can use olive oil)
1/2 tsp olive oil
salt to taste

Method:
Finely mince the onions, garlic and mushrooms (separately)
In a pan, heat the butter with the oil (the oil will prevent the butter from burning)
Fry garlic till slightly soft, then add onions and fry till completely soft.
Fry on a low heat, so everything cooks without turning brown.
Add mushrooms, when mushrooms are half cooked, add the herbs.

Keep cooking on a low flame until the mixture turns into a spreadable paste.
Now adjust salt.

Use it as a spread on toast or for stuffing chicken, beef wellington, puff pastry or savoury tarts.

Kim's tips:
The trick to cooking duxelles is to keep the fire low and stir constantly, so that everything cooks into a paste, rather than crisping up.

Its critical to wait until the end to adjust the salt, because the mixture really shrinks in quantity and the flavours get very intense. If you salt it at the beginning, you will very likely end up with an over-salty duxelles.

If you plan to use the duxelles as a stuffing, don't scrimp on the butter, it will be needed to keep the meat moist.

Duxelles keeps well in the fridge for at least a week. Reheat  and stir well before using.

Jamón ibérico - The King of Hams!

I received this in the mail, a couple of days ago:

From swine raised like royalty, cured ham called jamon iberico is finally here.

This party has been two years in the making. At the home of Frank Cutitta, friends are beginning to gather. Cutitta, a media executive, is in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on pasta alla carbonara and veal saltimbocca. Outside on a stone patio overlooking a pond, people mill around the guest of honor.

It weighs 13 pounds, glistens with fat, and is capped by a dramatic black hoof.

It's a ham, but not just any ham. This is jamon iberico de bellota, the be-all-and-end-all, Rolls Royce, of ultra hams: one that positively demands a party. It comes from Spain, and it is among the first whole bellota hams to legally reach this country. Until now, to get a taste of this porcine holy grail, American foodies had to hop a plane.

The ham has arrived in the United States because the Spanish company Embutidos Fermin, located in the medieval village of La Alberca, spent much of the last decade working to meet USDA specifications. The company built a new slaughterhouse and formed a partnership with chef Jose Andres, host of the PBS series "Made in Spain," and Portland, Maine, importers the Rogers Collection. In 2008, they got the green light. The following year jamon iberico began to trickle into the country, first in the form of sausages, then paletas, or shoulders. But the actual hams, which take several years to cure, didn't start shipping to customers till recently.

The ham has arrived in Wayland because Cutitta's friend Victor Grillo, the man behind such ads as the famous Ginsu knife infomercial, heard about it long ago and decided to get his hands on one.

He found out he couldn't. "It was forbidden fruit," he says. "You want what you can't have." When he discovered a waiting list for jamon iberico (pronounced: ham-ON ee-BEAR-ee-ko) started by La Tienda, a website specializing in Spanish products, he put down his name and a
$199 deposit.

He was among about 400 people to do so, according to La Tienda owner Don Harris. That was two years ago. Some people have been on the waiting list for as long as six years. Very few of them are in the restaurant business. These are individuals, caught up in pure porky obsession.

"They are ham fanatics," Harris says. "One guy was postponing his wedding till he got one. He has a motorcycle club called the Patas Negras," or "black hooves," another name for the Iberian pigs from which the ham is made. "We had a customer who went and visited his ham in the mountain village where it was being cured."

Jamon iberico's cult following stems in part from its mystique: nearly nattainable, dearly expensive. It retails for $96 a pound and up.

Its provenance adds to that; the ham comes from pigs that are as coddled as the cattle that become Kobe beef. The pigs roam free, feasting on acorns ("bellotas" in Spanish). "They live in pig paradise," says Harris. "They grow up as a gang together for two years, then when it's time for them to meet their maker, they play them Mozart. After Mozart, they go to bed for the night. I don't know if they're tucked in. The next morning they get hot showers, then some mysterious carbon dioxide enters their atmosphere and they go off to piggy heaven." This is referred to not as slaughtering the pigs, but as sacrificing them. The hams then cure for up to four years in clean mountain air.

The piggy spa treatment takes place for a practical reason. "They want them very mellow," Harris says. "If they're scared, they produce epinephrine. If they're not stressed, the meat is fine. I'm not saying the ham people are pig lovers. They're meat lovers."

The main reason bellota ham is so coveted, of course, is its flavor.
"It's very meaty, rich, marbled with fat," writes Andres in an e-mail from Spain. "Jamon iberico is the finest ham in the world. It is a ham that will ruin you for other hams." He recommends serving it alone, or topped with caviar and rolled up like a cigar.

The meat is dark red, almost the shade of corned beef. It tastes like prosciutto in Technicolor, nuanced and blossoming in the mouth, with a lingering touch of iron. The fat has faintly fruity undertones; it dissolves on your tongue. Harris says the curing process converts much of the fat of acorn-fed hams into healthy monounsaturated fat, like olive oil that happens to taste like pork. According to the nutrition label on Fermin's website, a 1 ounce serving has 84.5 calories, 51.3 from fat; about a third of that is saturated. So it's not exactly health food, but it does taste extraordinary.

"The operative word for the bellota is 'meaty,' " says Harry Saltzman, the La Tienda customer who went to visit his ham in La Alberca. "Even the fat, which of course my wife assiduously cuts off and I love and I eat when she's not looking. I've been told the acorns give the ham and the fat this rich flavor. It's spectacular. Nobody believes it's as good as I say."

Back at the Cutitta home, the spread is on the table. Cutitta, who is famous among friends for his cooking, has created a feast based around Grillo's ham. There are slices of jamon iberico de bellota, unadorned; figs topped with the ham, manchego, and Italian honey; skewers of shrimp with ham; mushrooms with ham; the carbonara and the veal ("make sure you say it's from Waverly Market," Cutitta says).

"Isn't it great when food brings people together?" Grillo says. Then he takes his first bite of carbonara, topped with more slivers of jamon and Spanish cheese. "I'm gonna fall over," he says, practically swooning.
"Oh my God, this is awesome. This is better than sex."

And with that, it's time for a toast. "Here's to the pig!" Grillo says, raising a glass of Rioja. And together the friends salute the guest of honor.

"Here's to the pig!"

SOURCE: Devra First Globe Newspaper Company.

Wikipedia also has an entry on this ham that seems to support this article.

Interesting, isn't it?

Quest for Sicilian Granita

Found this floating around. Sorry, I do not know the original source. If you do, please tell me & I will credit it after verification.

Quest for Sicilian Granita

By Phil Torre

If you have never been to Sicily, you have never had granita. Granita is Italian ice, but it is nothing like the Italian ice you find here in America. They are completely different, from the taste to the consistency. Some of my fondest memories of my visits to Sicily are of sitting in the café in the morning and having a Granita di Limone and brioche for breakfast. That’s right I said for breakfast. In the summer in Sicily, granita and gelato are breakfast foods. That's what I call paradise!
This summer I decided to take on the daunting task of trying to approximate Sicilian granita starting with my favorite flavor, lemon. When I say approximate I do mean just that, I wasn't going to kid myself into thinking that I could get it exactly the way it is in Sicily. The only way you can get true Sicilian granita is by going to the island itself. There are just too many variables involved, starting with the lemons. You can pick a lemon off a tree in Sicily and eat it like an apple. They are much sweeter than any lemons you can get here.
My first thoughts went to trying to achieve the right consistency. You could never serve true granita in the paper cups for people to eat like an ice cream cone that Italian pastry shops in the states serve ices in. Granita is way too wet; it must be served in glass and eaten with a spoon.
I decided that I was going to try two methods. My Mother told me that my Aunt in Sicily makes her own granita, by freezing it and then using a hand blender to crush it up. I was going to try this method, in addition to my own idea, which is using my ice cream machine.

I thought that trying to get the flavor down was going to be harder. I had several formulas I was going to try. First, I went with the most basic method: water, sugar, and lemon juice. Later I would try adding grated lemon zest to the mixture to see if it helped. Finally, I was going to try spooning out all of the pulp from the lemons and puréeing that for the mixture. All along I would be adjusting the sugar until I got as close to the real thing as possible.

I placed 4 cups of water and 1-1/2 cups of sugar in a pot over low heat and stirred until the sugar dissolved. Then I added ¾ cup of fresh squeezed lemon juice and stirred well. Normally, if I am making ice cream I make the custard and chill it in the refrigerator for a few hours before trying to freeze it in the ice cream machine. But, since I didn’t want the granita to freeze too much I figured it was ok to just let it get to room temperature. That was my first mistake.

I was ready to freeze, so I got the machine going and start pouring in the mixture. I poured it all in and my first thought was I filled it too high. That was my second mistake. “No way is this going to freeze,” I thought. Well, I was right. So I had to go into salvage mode. I transferred the mixture to a container, covered it and placed it in the freezer. I figured in the morning I could try my Aunt’s method with the hand blender. Then I could have granita for breakfast, just like in Sicily.
Undaunted, I wasn’t ready to give up on the ice cream machine method just yet. I still had lemons, so I halved the recipe. Actually I halved the sugar and water, but I only cut down the lemon juice by ¼ cup. Then I put it in the refrigerator to chill overnight and I would continue the next day.
In the morning I took the granita out of the freezer and broke out the hand blender. This was a little harder than I thought it would be, but once I got some of it broken up it got easier. I mixed it up until it was nice and slushy and scooped it out. It wasn’t bad for my first try. The consistency was close to what I am trying to achieve(although it was closer to the Italian Ices you get here in the New York area than true Sicilian granita), but it was a little too sweet.
When I tried the ice cream machine method that night I got much better results. I could tell right away that it was going to work. I was pretty happy with the morning’s results with the hand blender, but this was close to perfect. Little chunks of soft ice sitting with just a little bit of liquid in the bottom of the cup. This one was a little more lemony than the first, which I like better also.

I didn’t finish all of the granita, so I transferred it to a container, covered and placed it in the freezer. The next morning when I took it out to have my Sicilian style breakfast, I discovered the flaw in the ice cream machine method. The granita was a block of solid ice and impossible to scoop or scrape out. The one made with the hand blender, on the other hand, retains its consistency better when sitting in the freezer and is always relatively easy to serve.

So, which method do I recommend? I say there is room for both. If you are making the granita for dessert after a dinner party and will most likely be serving all of it immediately, use the ice ceam machine. If you are making a big batch to keep handy in the freezer for refreshing snack on hot days or a breakfast alla Sicilia, use the hand blender.

I continued to experiment with the formula, adding the lemon zest, the pulp, adjusting the sugar, etc. To my surprise I found that the best combination was the second one I tried. So there you have my valiant attempt to duplicate something that is essentially impossible to duplicate. That doesn’t mean that it is not worth making, because it is still a delicious and refreshing snack.

Are you a gourmet snob?

Brilliant Article in The Guardian by Self-confessed gastronome Tim Hayward on 10 tell-tale signs that you love food a little too much.

Friday June 23, 2006
The Guardian

The chef's table
Located inside the kitchen, this concept has been introduced in several restaurants (though Gordon Ramsay's is still considered the ultimate) and throws foodies right in among the fire and knives. Most foodies have never worked in a professional kitchen, so they are oblivious to the deep, psychotic hatred that cooks hold for anyone or anything that distracts them during service. Still, dining sumptuously with a table of yapping sybarites while surrounded by overheated manual workers does display a certain, pre-revolutionary elan. The fact that they hate you and are armed with knives and boiling fat merely adds a seasoning of danger.

Ironic food
Throughout history chefs have amused diners with little culinary jokes: roast suckling pigs with peacock wings, pies full of blackbirds; not, admittedly laugh-out-loud hysterical but enough to enliven a dull banquet. The modern equivalent - "ironic" food - has a far more vital purpose than mere entertainment. Foodies chortle wryly at a foie gras hamburger in a brioche bun for the same reason that people laugh loudly at all the references in Shakespeare in Love - to make sure you're aware exactly how clever they are.

Ordering 'off-menu'
Having managed, by luck or influence, to get a booking at a top restaurant, most people would be happy to choose from the menu. A really high-grade foodie regards the menu as a list of raw materials and, in a jaw-dropping display of arrogance, will discuss with the waiter a completely new combination of the available ingredients. Ordering "off-menu" is the foodie equivalent of skiing off-piste - risky, performed by those with more confidence than ability, but extraordinarily impressive if you can carry it off.

Kitchen slang
Foodies love the arcane patois of the professional kitchen and, whenever possible, use it in general conversation. "Frying off", sounds gratifyingly professional, which, of course, it is, in the right circumstances. "I'll just pour two pints of industrial-grade grease into this metre-square brat pan, fry off 800 battery chicken breasts, slap them under the heat lamps and hope no one dies on my shift." That's professional. "I'll fry off this Marks & Spencer salmon fishcake," on the other hand, is just absurd.

Foodie/chef relationship
Foodies believe that no one appreciates great food like they do, except maybe the person who cooked it. They believe they have a bond with the chef and that making a little fuss in the restaurant, showing the staff that they know what they're about, will result in better service, better food and ultimately a visit by the man in white to meet the erudite fellow gastronaut on table eight. No one has been brave enough to ask chefs how they feel about this "bond" but it's a fair bet that anyone who calls you out in the middle of service to have their ego massaged with a discussion on the provenance of your mushrooms is not going to stay your best mate for long.

Fats
A collection of oils arouses little comment these days, (at least three single-estate olive oils and a bottle of Moroccan Argan are currently de rigueur) but extreme foodies also collect solid fats. Pork, duck, beef dripping, rendered pancetta trimmings, are all saved in little jars at the back of the fridge. Sometimes at the end of the meal the host may take a favoured friend over to view this little collection, proudly pointing out the goose fat left over from Christmas. Few civilians, with the exception of mass murderers, are entirely comfortable with this disturbingly forensic display.

Molecular gastronomy
A term coined in 1969 by a French physicist called Hervé This, who was attempting to popularise science through cooking. Foodies have embraced this as the nearest thing to a movement currently available. "Molecular gastronomy" is to blame for foams, food eaten blindfold, liquid nitrogen in the kitchen and desserts served in syringes. Only a real foodie can say "Molecular gastronomy" with an entirely straight face and without making little quotation marks with his fingers.

Outrageous equipment
Now that merely "professional" equipment is available to any oaf with a credit card, "specialist" or "bespoke" kit is a foodie essential. Take knives as an example. Somewhere in a back street in Tokyo there's a brilliant, wizened sashimi chef who was first allowed to slice fish after 20 years of washing dishes for one of the great masters. This sensei has been cutting sashimi for longer than you've been alive. He doesn't need a £900 hand-forged sashimi knife, individually weighted to fit his hand - though, apparently, a foodie who throws the occasional dinner party for friends in Muswell Hill does.

Travel
The problem with the UK's culinary renaissance is that it's now too easy to get great food. What was cutting-edge ethnic cuisine five years ago is now available to anyone who can pierce the film and nuke it. For a foodie to maintain distance from the merely discerning, travel and research have become essential. We're not talking about touring France for the 3-star restaurants here - that's for retired solicitors - we're talking Vietnam for the frogs.

Collecting 'restos'
American foodies are in a different league and have taken to gastronomy with a frightening enthusiasm. They began the trend for "collecting" Michelin-starred restaurants, a sort of culinary Munro-bagging which reduces the sublime to the level of "extreme" sport. They're also responsible for the most egregious foodie pretension, just beginning to creep into British usage, using the term "resto" as shorthand for restaurant. Pray God we can pull together as a nation and stop this in its tracks.

· Tim Hayward is UK editor of the website eGullet.org