Hungry In Hogtown

IMBB #25: DC Duby's Pan-fried bread pudding with orange-braised endive and chicory ice cream

Ever prepare a dish that was good but left you wondering if it was good enough?  The issue I'm raising speaks to the relationship between the quality of a dish versus the amount of effort needed to create it.  Consider, for example, the classic Italian spaghetti aglio e oglio:  noodles dressed with good olive oil, some finely chopped garlic, dried chilli flakes to taste, and then topped with a generous grating of parmigiano or pecorino.  This is by no means my favourite pasta, but it is easy and delicious, and can be prepared in minutes.  For the minimal effort involved, the payback is huge.

Now take our contribution to the stale bread edition of Is My Blog Burning? hosted by An Obsession with Food, DC Duby's pan-fried bread pudding with orange-braised chicon (endive) and chicory ice cream.  Quite a mouthful to say, isn't it?  It should be, because making this dish requires no fewer than six distinct preparations, including fruit stock, bread pudding, braised endive, chicory ice cream, and two different caramels.  That's a lot of work for a home cook -- work measured in days and hours rather than minutes.

The unusual suspects: a trip through the molecular pantry

The suspense was killing me.  After finally getting my hands on the cookbook of my dreams, El Bulli: 1998-2002, I was twiddling my thumbs waiting for UPS to deliver the ingredients I needed to finally try a recipe.

First the package was stopped at the border.  "What type of chemical is fondant, sir?" asked the woman at the UPS call centre.  "And what's dextrose?  Canada Customs won't let your package cross the border until they know."

"Fondant," I explained, trying to stifle my laugh, "is not a chemical, it's more like cake icing, and dextrose is a type of sugar.  I'm going to cook with them."  Problem solved, or so I thought.

Two days later, I found myself yet again speaking with a UPS representative, this time to find out why the package they had promised to deliver that day had not arrived.  As it turned out, one of the containers had cracked during shipment -- no doubt due to the fine job Canada Customs did resealing the package -- and my box was leaking white powder.  As you can imagine, this makes people uneasy.  But I begged, I pleaded: "If there's a problem, I'll make arrangements with the shipper.  Please, just send it to me tomorrow anyway."  Thankfully, they did.

I include this tale to illustrate two important points about the ingredients found in what I call the "molecular pantry:" first, they're not easy to find; secondly, they often sound more like components of a science experiment, not recipe ingredients.

In our post on liquid pea ravioli, I promised to provide a link to a supplier of the chemicals necessary to make that dish.  The supplier is L'Epicerie, a web-based vendor of a great many hard-to-find ingredients.  In case you're wondering, I'm not affiliated with L'Epicerie in any way.  I'm just a happy customer.

While I'm at it, I thought I'd also give a brief rundown of some of the other uncommon ingredients that make it possible to cook like Ferran Adria (or at least try to).  Each ingredient contains a link to the corresponding product page on L'Epicerie.

Ooh la la! Rillettes à la Bourdain with Poilâne bread

We love Paris, with its wide boulevards, stunning art, and remarkable cuisine, and our hearts beat a little faster every time we reminisce about La Rambla, Gaudi, and the glories of Barcelona.  Yet more than any other place, our hearts belong to Italy.  From our first glimpse of the Colosseum, to our first bite of our first meal in Rome, we've been in love with Italy and its food.  Rob went so far as to learn the language -- taking great delight in shocking his Italian teacher by asking her the meaning of particularly titillating words with feigned, wide-eyed innocence -- and we flirted with the idea of moving there.  We gaze at the belpaese every day, or at least the map on our wall.  We even honeymooned there. 

So why the heck do we have so much French food on our blog lately?

Drool Britannia! Sticky toffee pudding... ice cream

Rob:  Hey, Becks & Posh and Jam Faced are holding a St. George's Day What's For Pud event.  What's a traditional English dessert we can make?

Rachel:  What about sticky toffee pudding?  It sounds really homey and delicious and we've never tried it.  Look, it even has dates.  I love dates!

Rob (to himself):  I bet I can make ice cream out of it.

Rachel:  What did you say?

Rob:  Nothing, love.  (Under his breath) Oh, yes, there will be ice cream.  Lots of ice cream.  Mwahahahahahaha!

Rachel:  Why  am I suddenly nervous?

It's a bit of a story, really, but it all starts with a molecular gastronomy preparation: Moto's doughnut soup.   While preparing the doughnut soup, it occurred to me that I'd also essentially made an egg-free, or Philadelphia-style (aka New York- or American-style too, for that matter) ice cream base.  Unbeknownst to Rachel, I had already decided to turn our next baked dessert into an ice cream.

SHF #18: Bailey's Irish Cream Crème Brûlée

I need a drink.  Badly.

There are few dishes in this world that cause me more anxiety -- of the finger-chewing, hall-pacing variety -- than making crème brûlée.  I do it, nonetheless, because the reward when I succeed is a dish so delicious I become prone to crème brûlée-induced erratic behaviour.  Take the Bailey's Irish Cream crème brûlée I've made for the liquor-themed edition of Sugar High Friday, hosted by Lick The Spoon: dark, smooth, creamy, flecked with vanilla seeds, and capped with a crackling burnt sugar crust, the already decadent custard is enriched with the unmistakable whiskey and aromatic notes of Bailey's.

But when I fail, I fail spectacularly.  For this I blame the egg, the petulant diva of gastronomy.  Treat her well, and the egg rewards you with flavour, texture, and body.  Make the slightest misstep, however, and our spoiled little prodigy is not afraid to throw her steaming hot, non-fat, organic soy milk latte on you, give you the "Do you know who I am?" treatment, and ruin your dish in a hissyfit of coagulation and curdling.  Never is this flightiness more apparent than in the creation of custards.

Two great tastes: milk chocolate-peanut butter sandwich cookies

A girl can't live on liquid ravioli and coconut foam alone.  Sometimes I find myself craving a big green salad, or a nice hot bowl of steelcut oatmeal with brown sugar.  You know, something more substantial and homey than nori croquant.  Something a little more Betty Crocker than Ferran Adria.

That's why, the same day we made the liquid pea ravioli, I kept getting distracted by the recent issue of Bon Appétit.  It kept falling open to the same page, like a favourite centrefold.  This glossy photo, though, was of luscious peanut-butter and milk-chocolate sandwich cookies.  And what's more wholesome than chocolate chip cookies and PB chased down with some ice-cold milk?

In less time than you can say, "Recharge my foaming canister!", we whipped up a batch of these decadent treats.  Imagine chunks of Valrhona milk chocolate studding a crumbly dough flavoured with smooth Kraft peanut butter (the recipe specifically warns against using natural or fresh PB).  Now layer those cookies with a milk chocolate ganache into which you've slowly melted even more peanut butter. 

It's all my childhood cookie fantasies melded into one grown-up treat.  And let's not stop at peanut butter and milk chocolate!  Imagine almond butter, cashew butter, hazelnuts, dark chocolate, Nutella...

Mind you, it's no bowl of oatmeal.

For the recipe from the February 2006 issue of Bon Appétit, click here.  Assorted Valrhona bars, and bulk chips and pieces are available from Lively Life International Fine Foods in the St. Lawrence Market.

Weekend Cookbook Challenge #4: All it's croqued up to be

There may be no show on Food Network Canada Rachel and I enjoy more than Barefoot Contessa.  That's not to say we think Ina Garten is the best chef on the dial, or that she prepares the most inventive dishes, not by a long shot.  There's just something about her show we find endlessly entertaining.

I still remember the first time we watched an episode, after Rachel's mother had urged us to check it out.  What a strange universe it depicts.  There's Miguel, the stylist; that damn florist who looks like Stuart Smalley; the omnipresent but only sometimes seen husband, Jeffrey; and, of course, the larger-than-life presence of Ina herself.  As if that weren't enough, add the picture-perfect backdrops of the Hamptons and Ina's ridiculously well-equipped kitchen which, pardon my envy (and I'm not alone), happens to face a garden the size of a small park.

But wait, there's the food.

Foaming at the mouth: El Bulli's Americano and Piña Colada cocktails

It may seem hard to believe, but El Bulli -- hell, maybe even molecular gastronomy as a whole -- is a phenomenon built on foam.  This is something of an oversimplification, sure, but the advent of espumas, as they are widely known, propelled Ferran Adria and his restaurant from the ranks of the well-known into the culinary stratosphere.  As impressive as that may be, the legacy of these foams is greater still, for they represent the first of El Bulli's techniques to make the leap to the non-molecular kitchen.

Given its impact, I was surprised to learn that foams were discovered somewhat by accident.  Adria and his team had been dabbling with the concept for a couple of years without success, and then, one day, they just happened to be in the right place at the right time:

In the winter of 1993-1994, while we were helping our friend Eduard Roigé to draw up the menu of the restaurant Bel-Air in Barcelona, a customer asked for a dessert with whipped cream. To our surprise, the cream was served in the kitchen with a gadget they took out of the fridge, from which whipped cream emerged by pressing a lever at the top. Suddenly we saw the light, and we reckoned that this siphon might solve the foams problem. So we borrowed the siphon, and in a matter of just a few days, our dream became a reality. 

(To read this and other fascinating excerpts from El Bulli: 1994-1997, click here for Part I or here for Part II.)

The siphon in question is an iSi cream whipper, which I'm sure many of you who frequent coffee shops will recognize.  It is, I must say, yet another kitchen toy that makes this boy very happy.  In Toronto, you can find both the siphons and nitrous oxide cartridges at Home Outfitters and Canadian Tire.

"You must crawl, before you can walk," they say, which is why I began my experiments with foams by preparing cocktails from El Bulli: 1998-2002.  "Crawl" is the operative word here, because most of the cocktails pack a real punch.

Gnocching on heaven's door: Boulud's braised short ribs with homemade potato gnocchi

We fell upon Italy and its food like a two-person swarm of locusts.  After five days in Malta -- the British started leaving in the 1960s, but apparently forgot to take 1960s British food with them -- we were ready to eat.  Malta is a beautiful country with a remarkable history and, for Rob, a deeply personal history too, given that his father was born there.  Nonetheless, after living on pastizzi, the delicious flaky pastry turnovers filled with ricotta or mushy peas, for the better part of a week, we approached Italy with eager appetites.

We arrived in Florence after several days of gluttony in Rome (to read a little about that, click here).  Not knowing a pesce from a pesca made eating well a challenge, but we wandered throughout the city and opened our minds and our stomachs to every tantalizing experience we could find.  I guess it's no surprise then, that we stumbled into an almost-empty restaurant at seven one evening, an unthinkable hour for any self-respecting Italian.  Thanks to the patience and kindness of our remarkable waiter, we eventually ordered a meal using a clumsy mix of broken English and heavily-accented pidgin-Italian.

But, oh, what a meal!  The highlight was a steaming plate of tiny potato dumplings sauced in a rich truffle cream that were like clouds on the tongue.  Our eyes met as I realized I was in gastronomic heaven.  Then I turned away from the waiter, and smiled at Rob.  We started laughing out loud -- it was that good.

Once back in Toronto, we put a lot of effort into recreating those lighter-than-air gnocchi.

Clean and soba: fresh soba noodles at Hiro Sushi

Consider for a moment the artistry of a bowl of handmade soba noodles crowned with a large chunk of freshly made oboro tofu and thinly sliced scallion.  The flavours are pure but very subtle: a hint of primeval earthiness, a slight woodsy tone, some salty notes, but nothing to jar the palate.  Harmony.

The textures are bolder, but progress on a scale: the custard-like oboro tofu dissolves in the mouth, the chilled soba noodles offer resistance to the tooth, and the slight crunch of scallion counterbalances it all.  Dipped in soba tsuyu -- the traditional soy and bonito-based sauce accompaniment -- the combination is lively and refreshing.

It all seems so simple, yet hundreds -- even thousands -- of years of skill and history, taste and tradition are summoned in the hours before the meal, to turn the humblest of raw ingredients, some buckwheat and soy beans, into an artisanal gastronomic statement.