Bread Pudding as God Intended It

When I say, "As God Intended," I mean using actual, stale, left-over bread heels.  Buying fresh bread just to tear it up and dry it out is like using striploin to make sausage. Or rolling a torchon of foie gras just to melt it into cooking fat.

Soaked in milk and cream, mixed with eggs, sugar, and rum-soaked raisins, pressed into a casserole and baked:

The classic accompanying rum sauce: two parts icing sugar, one part butter, gently cooked to remove the starchy taste of the sugar.  Finished with a bit of egg and a lot of rum.

Once the pudding has been drenched in the rum sauce, I like broiling the dish until there are a few burnt patches.  This is a trick I picked up at Jack's.  The charred bitterness sets off the sweetness nicely.

Fruitcake 2011

It's about to get all Christmasy up in here.

Here's a simple start to the Christmas posts on Button Soup.  Last year I wrote about the importance of fruitcake.  I'm fine-tuning my recipe year to year, and I thought I'd share the 2011 version.

This year I used our local evans cherries instead of the BC bings.  They were so soft after the glacé process I worried they would be too delicate to fold into the dense pound cake batter.  While they definietly don't hold their round shape like the bings, they managed to stay in one piece.  Their tartness is a welcomed addition to the cake.  There are some cursory instructions on making glacé cherries and candying peel in last year's fruitcake post.

Maybe next year I can use beaked hazelnuts from the river valley...


Fruitcake

Ingredients

• 8 oz unsalted butter, cubed
• 8 oz granulated sugar
• 8 oz eggs
• 8 oz all-purpose flour, sifted
• 2 tsp kosher salt
• 1 orange, zested and juiced
• 5 oz roasted, skinned hazelnuts
• 5 oz glacé evans cherries, strained from liquid
• 5 oz candied orange peel
• approximately 1 cup of fine, spiced rum

Procedure

1. Preheat oven to 325°F.
2. Thoroughly butter the base and sides of a ceramic terrine and line with parchment.
3. Combine butter and sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer.  Cream with the paddle attachment until light and fluffy, about five minutes.  Start on a low speed, and once the sugar and butter have combined, turn to medium-high.
4. With mixer still running, add the eggs one at a time, allowing each to be fully incorporated before adding the next.  Add the orange zest and juice.
5. Turn the mixer to  the lowest speed.  Slowly add the flour.  Stop the mixer as soon as all the flour is incorporated into the batter.  Do not over-mix.
6. Fold in the hazelnuts, cherries, and candied peel.
7. Transfer the batter to the prepared terrine.  Bake in the 325°F oven until the top of the cake is domed and brown, and a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean, roughly 60 minutes.
8. Remove the cake from terrine and cool on a wire rack.
9. Once cooled.  Transfer the cake to a container with an airtight lid.
10. Store the cake at a cool room temperature, about 15°C.  Every other day for 1 month sprinkle 1 tbsp of rum over the cake, getting the liquor on all the surfaces.  I affectionately refer to this as feeding the fruitcake.

Notes on Baking Bread

Even once I had a handle on basic techniques like dough-shaping, I found that the bread I made at home wasn't as good as the bread I made at NAIT, where they have commerical equipment like proofing boxes and deck ovens.

Here are some quick notes on using household kitchen items to replicate the equipment in professional bakeries and bake better bread.


Proofing

I've always felt that my bread doesn't proof as well at home as it does at school.  At first I thought this was a temperature issue, so I tried fermenting and proofing my bread in increasingly warmer corners of the house.  Turns out humidity was the more important factor.

In commercial kitchens bread is proofed in proofing boxes.  These are fridge-sized compartments that are temperature- and humidity-controlled.  They stay between 20°C and 30°C, the temperature range at which yeast is most active, with a relative humidity of about 70%, which prevents a dry skin from forming on the dough.

I do my proofing in a cold oven, because it is an enclosed, draft-free space.  To mimmic the humidity of a proofing box, I tried scalding a small pot of water, putting it on the bottom rack of the oven, then proofing my dough in a lightly greased casserole on the top rack.  The pot of water releases vapour, and gently warms the air in the oven.  With the added humidity, the dough develops the ideal soft, tacky feel.  Success.


Baking

Whether you're searing a steak, sautéeing mushrooms, or baking a loaf of bread, you're trying to balance the desired doneness of the interior with the desired doneness of the exterior.  For steak, we want a heavily caramelized crust on the exterior, but pink, mid-rare flesh on the interior.  We apply very high heat to develop the crust before the interior is overcooked.  If we applied the same high heat to a large roast, the exterior would burn before the interior was cooked.  For roasts we cook at a lower temperature so that the delicious brown crust is finished at the same time as the pink meat inside.

With bread we also want a deeply caramelized crust.  Besides simply cooking the interior of the dough, we also want to maximize something called oven spring.

As the dough heats up in the oven, the little gas pockets that developed during bulk fermentation and proofing expand greatly.  The yeast also has one last hurrah, binging on sugars and expelling carbon dioxide, but this does not account for nearly as much rise as the simple thermal expansion of gases.  The dramatic rise in the first few minutes of baking is called oven spring.

To maximize oven spring we heat the dough rapidly and evenly in a moist atmosphere.  The quick heating ensures that the air pockets deep inside the dough have a chance to expand before the exterior bakes.  The steam prevents the exterior from forming a crust, which would hinder spring.

To rapidly heat the dough, professional bakers use deck ovens.  The dough is placed directly onto a uniform stone or ceramic platform, called the floor or deck.

To mimmic the deck at home, I use a heavy sheet pan, inverted so that dough can easily slide on and off.  You could also use a baking stone.

Commerical bread ovens also have steam generators.  Immediately after the bread is placed on the deck, the baker injects steam into the oven.

To create a similar effect at home I was told by a few people to put a metal tray on the bottom of the hot oven, and to throw a handful of ice onto it after the dough has been loaded.  Using ice, as opposed to water, will supposedly lengthen the release of steam into the oven.

I find I get better oven spring by throwing boiling water onto the hot pan.  You get much more steam much faster.  Believers in the ice method say that the steam from boiling water dissipates before the oven spring is complete.  For my most recent batch, I put about three cups of boiling water onto the hot pan, and there was still a bit left when I pulled the bread out thirty minutes later.

Use a very heavy pan as your steam generator.  Thin aluminum pans don't hold much heat, and therefore won't create a lot of steam immediately.

My first time I used a Pyrex casserole.  It cracked.  Now I use a heavy stainless steel braising pot.

Button Soup Easter Dinner

The April installment of the Button Soup Supper Club was an Easter Dinner with Lisa's family, featuring some of the traditional, symbolic ingredients and dishes discussed earlier.  The menu:

Hot Cross Buns

Potted Rabbit, Crackers, and Cheese

Young Spinach with Bacon and Quail Egg

Smoked Ham with Scallop Potatoes

Oat Cake in Maple Syrup

Hot Cross Buns

Potted Rabbit, Crackers, and Cheese

Butchering Rabbits: a "break" from tradition

Rabbits are not usually butchered by neatly separating the joints, as you would a chicken.  They are broken into forequarters, hindquarters, and a saddle by cleaving right through the bones.  Chefs often bitch about how tedious butchering rabbits is, "especially since there's practically no meat on them."  Their words.  Not mine.

The problem with cleaving is that you're bound to splinter the bones.  I've bitten down on a fragment of rabbit bone in restaurants more than once.  Taking the time to properly butcher the rabbit by cutting through the joints and not breaking the bones minimizes the chances of choking someone.  It also shows that you care about your ingredients and take your job seriously.  Anyways...

Below, from top left: hindlegs, caul fat, kidney, heart, liver, tenderloins, forelegs, loin with belly attached.

The meat was confited and pulled...

..then potted.

I hope that the lady who invented Raincoast Crisps has made her fortune, because imitations are now everywhere I look: supermarket shelves, online recipes, restaurant cheese plates, as well as my kitchen.

Raincoast Crisps are made by baking a loaf flavoured with dried fruit, nuts, and herbs, then thinly slicing that loaf and baking it for a second time to make crackers.  Like I said, recipes abound online.  This one is my favourite.

The finsihed plate: potted rabbit, dried fruit crackers, Sylvan Star smoked gouda, and Smoky Valley Valencay.

 

Salad

Quail eggs!

 

A very fatty slab of bacon

 

Young spinach (which costs a fortune at the market at this time of year, but can be got...), hard-boiled quail eggs, bacon, onion, and vinaigrette.

 

Smoked Ham with Scalloped Potatoes

Problems with Brine Penetration

Even working from Ruhlman's recipes for ham, I always (always!) have problems with brine penetration.  With any ham larger than a hock, it seems that no matter how long I leave the meat in the brine, the brine can't reach the middle of the cut, closest to the bone. I might have to start injecting the brine deep into the meat...

Oatcake in Maple Syrup

This dish showcased this year's maple syrup.  A simple oatcake was baked, then cut into squares and cooled.  The baking dish was then filled with hot maple syrup, which the cake soaked up like a sponge.  Essentially a lazy man's pouding chômeur (a lazy man's poor man's pudding?)

Served with ice cream. 

Button Soup St. Patrick's Day Dinner

The Button Soup St. Patrick's Day Dinner was a North American-style observance of the holiday: a celebration of Irish heritage, generally, and not a commemoration of the saint. Even so, there were no cartoon leprechauns, no buckled top hats, and no green beer. Instead there were four courses based loosely on traditional Irish dishes, lots of alcohol, music, and some readings from Irish writers.

By chance, I was cooking four dishes that I have posted about in the past. Descriptions follow. All "Hipstamatic photos" are courtesy of Andy Grabia, a true son of Erin (his aversion to brawn notwithstanding). Thank you, again, Martin Kennedy, for playing host.


Brawn, Clover, Buttermilk

Brawn is the British word for headcheese, the preparation of which I wrote about here. In that post I mentioned that the brawn would look much, much better if the meat were first brined; it would be rosy pink, instead of questionable grey. This time around I did a proper brine of kosher salt, curing salt, and brown sugar.

I cut the jowl and tongue into tidy cubes that were white and red, respectively, while shredding the rest of the head meat. I enjoyed this incarnation of the headcheese much, much more than the last. Unfortunately the dish wasn't received enthusiastically. The modern eater has a serious problem with meat jelly.

The brawn was garnished with clover shoots. I thought serving clover on St. Paddy's day was a fantastic idea. Besides the obvious Irish connection, it seemed appropriate to serve sprouts at a time of year when we we're sprouting our seedlings indoors, waiting for the snow to melt (see left). Judy bought a bag of red clover from a seed vendor, who was mildly disgusted when she found out we were going to eat the sprouts ("Clover's cow food!"). The shoots are almost indistinguishable from alfalfa. They taste fine on their own, but honestly they didn't add much to the dish.

Sprouting is dead simple.  Just soak the seeds in water overnight, then drain and rinse twice a day until they grow to the desired maturity.  We kept our seeds in a glass jar with a nylon stocking stretched over the mouth.  Water can be poured through the stocking to rinse the sprouts, then the glass can be inverted to drain the water away.





Headcheese is beautiful - visually and conceptually - and it pains me as a professional cook that I will probably never be able to prepare this to an appreciative audience.

 
The sauce was mayonnaise made with egg yolks and cold-pressed canola, thinned out with buttermilk for a bit of tang, and spiced with cayenne and mustard.
 


 
Potato Broth, Dumplings

I first wrote about potato broth here. The basic idea is to steep potato skins in vegetable broth to infuse the liquid with the distinct flavour of potatoes. This particular version didn't work out too well.  The broth didn't take the flavour of the skins, possibly because I boiled the potatoes before peeling them, instead of roasting them as I did last time.

Black Pudding, Colcannon, Apples

Black Pudding is the British word for blood sausage, the preparation of which I wrote about here. In that post I mentioned that the filling didn't bind properly: the cooked sausages crumbled when sliced. This time I tried a recipe from the Au Pied de Cochon Cookbook. My only departure from Picard's recipe was using oat flour instead of chestnut flour. The major difference between this recipe and the last is the inclusion of a panada, which is bread soaked in milk. The final sausages held together beautifully, and were tender and smooth to boot. This is now my default blood sausage recipe. Thank you, Martin.

Colcannon is a mix of mashed potatoes and cabbage or kale. My colcannon is mashed potatoes heated in some of the brawn cooking liquid and butter, then mixed with shredded cabbage that has been braised in cider vinegar and bacon fat.

After the black pudding rounds were seared in a skillet, slices of Granny Smith were cooked in the same pan.








Whiskied Fruitcake, Hard Sauce

My computer is trying to tell me that "whisky" isn't a verb. How frustrating. I made fruitcake for the first time this past Christmas, and wrote about it here.

Fruitcake is a very common dish in Great Britain, even outside the Christmas season.  This particular manifestation was made with orange peel, walnuts, and raisins. I soaked the baked cake in Jameson's. Though appropriate to the St. Paddy's Day theme, Irish whisky is much less aromatic than rum, and not great for flavouring baked goods.

The cake was dressed with a classic hard sauce: two parts icing sugar cooked out in one part butter, then finished with Jameson's and egg.




Other Notes from the Dinner: Alcohol and Literature

 That's protestant whiskey!
-McNulty on Bushmills, in The Wire


As you might expect, alcohol played an important part in the dinner. I was thoroughly razzed for bringing Bushmills ("Protestant whiskey"), though it was appropriate to my Orange heritage.

There's a big difference between Scotch and Irish whiskey.  The malted barley used in Scotch is dried over peat fires, and after fermenting, is twice distilled. Traditional Irish whiskey doesn't have any of the smoky, peaty notes of Scotch, and is thrice distilled for a smoother taste. Mel Priestley recently wrote a brief but informative article for Vue Weekly on the history of Irish whiskey.  Thank you, Mel.

The real star of the show was Redbreast Irish whiskey. Very, very smooth.  Heavy on the butterscotch.  Delectable.

Obviously there was Guinness.

I can't imagine that Joyce was a willing celebrant of St. Patrick's Day, but he still made an appearance at our dinner.

Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air.  What did it mean?  Was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?

 
Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

Sugar Pie, and Tapping Maples in Edmonton(?)

The final course of the Button Soup Pork Dinner was sugar pie. If you are unfamiliar with this dish, let me introduce you by way of an aimless personal anecdote. If you are familiar with the dish, you can skip the next paragraph.

My father's family lives near Ottawa, my mother's near Sudbury. When I was little my family would sometimes drive between these two sets of relatives, following the Ottawa River valley, where there are lots of French communities, even on the Ontarian side of the border. Along the way we would always stop at a diner called Valois in the French town of Mattawa. For dessert they offered "sugar pie," a tidy translation of tarte au sucre. While some versions of sugar pie are made with corn syrup or molasses (imagine a pecan pie without the pecans), I think the word "sugar" actually implies maple syrup, just as easterners might call a grove of maple trees a sugar bush, and the building where syrup is made a cabane à sucre, or sugar shack. Basically the dish is maple syrup thickened with flour and eggs, set in a pie shell.

This particular incarnation was a light, slightly sticky maple pudding in a short crust. In fact, the custard was so loose that if a slice was left to stand, the filling slowly ran onto the plate.


Sugar Pie

For the shell, bake off your favourite rich, short dough in a 10" French tart pan. I use the recipe from the CIA's Baking and Pastry text. Be sure to dock and weight the dough while baking. Cool the shell thoroughly.

Ingredients
From The Canadian Living Cookbook

• 500 mL maple syrup
• 100 mL all-purpose flour
• 250 mL cold water
• 4 egg yolks, lightly beaten
• 50 mL butter

Whisk the flour into the water, then stir this mixture into the maple syrup. Whisk in the egg yolks. Cook over low heat until thick. Stir in the butter. Pour into expectant pie shell. Chill thoroughly. Eat with whipped cream.


Tapping Maples in Edmonton: A Fool's Errand?

Even though maple syrup is popularly described as a "Canadian" ingredient, I consider it a highly regional specialty within Canada, as it's only made on a large scale in Eastern Ontario and Quebec. In contrast to the sugar maples that grow down east, the maple trees around Edmonton produce less, and less sweet, sap. Birch and elm can also be tapped for sap, but they have even lower yields.

These facts notwithstanding, I have a perverse obsession with maple syrup (one of my favourite desserts of all time is pouding chômeur) as well as an abstract, academic nostalgia for the ingredient. Granulated sugar is one of the few highly refined products that I use regularly, and I'm interested in finding ways to replace it with, say, honey and maple syrup. Consider this:

For the colonists, maple sugar was cheaper and more available than the heavily taxed cane sugar from the West Indies. Even after the Revolution, many Americans found a moral reason for preferring maple sugar to cane; cane sugar was produced largely with slave labor. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, cane and beet sugar became so cheap that the demand for maple sugar declined steeply.^[1]

Besides all this, making maple syrup has an extremely low effort-to-benefit ratio: by drilling a hole in a tree and boiling the sap that leaks out, you can enjoy one of the great pleasures of the table.

Lisa and I are in the process of moving to a new house. Right now the backyard of that new house is a bit like a wrapped birthday present. The wrapping is the three feet snow that currently conceal the features of the yard. There are small tears in the wrapping, if you will: the tops of wooden stakes, promising some manner of garden; shrunken, frozen apples on one of the trees; and best of all, clinging to the topmost branches of a tall tree, those winged seed pods that fall to the ground spinning like propellers. Maple keys.

I resolved to tap this maple tree, though it is most likely of the low-sugar variety. I have only the most basic idea of how to do this.

• Tap the tree when the sap is running. The sap runs during the spring thaw, when the days are warm and nights are cold. I thought that these conditions started last week, as there were two very warm days of rapid thaw. Then it started snowing again...
  
• To tap the tree, drill a hole that is slightly smaller than the diameter of your spile (the metal spigot). The hole should go 2-3" into the trunk, at a 10-20 degree incline, anywhere 2-6' from the ground. Apparently south-facing holes have a higher yield in the earlier weeks of the sap run.
• Lightly tap the spile into the hole and hang a bucket to collect the sap.

If I end up with even an ounce of syrup by the end of this, I'll be sure to buy proper spiles and buckets. In the meantime I'm using some 1/2" copper pipe from the plumbing section of the hardware store, and a plastic bucket supported by a wall hook. I covered the bucket with a plastic bag so that nothing falls into the sap.

Now we wait. Hopefully my premature tapping doesn't affect the process. I need a better almanac.

I'll keep you posted.





Reference

1. McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking. ©2004 Scribner, New York. Page 668. I love this book.

Burns Supper - Dessert: Posset and Shortbread

Posset

...I have drugg'd their possets
That death and nature do contend about them
Whether they live or die.

-Lady MacBeth, in the Scottish play (fitting, no?)


Posset is an old British drink of cream curdled with sack (fortified wine) or ale.

Nowadays the term usually refers to sweetened cream curdled so that it sets like a custard.

During the years in which liquid posset was declining in popularity and solid posset was rising, the term "posset" on its own was ambiguous. Qualifiers were added for clarity, resulting in terms like "rich eating posset."

Anyways, eating-posset is one of the simplest desserts to make.

Lemon Posset
From Bon Appétit Magazine, May 2007

• 2 1/4 cups heavy cream
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 3 tbsp fresh lemon juice
• 2 tbsp fresh lime juice

Combine the sugar and cream in a saucepan and place over medium heat. Simmer for three minutes. Stir in the lemon and lime juice, then pour the mixture in the serving vessels. Leave to set in the fridge overnight.


Shortbread
Adapted from a recipe of the same name in the Culinary Institute of America's Baking and Pastry, Second Edition.

Many would not consider this cookie a shortbread, as shortbread is usually virginal white. I happen to like the molasses and bran flavours of this (pardon the pun...) "less refined" version. These cookies are very crisp, and lack the powdery mouthfeel of some shortbreads.

• 8oz cake flour
• 8oz whole wheat flour
• pinch of salt
• 11oz butter
• 5oz white sugar
  
• 8oz brown sugar

Sift together the flours and salt. Using the paddle attachment of a stand-mixer, cream the butter and sugars at medium speed for about five minutes. Gradually add the flours and salt to the butter and sugar while mixing slowly. Scrape down the sides of the mixer bowl for even incorporation. Refrigerate the dough until stiff but still workable.

Roll the dough to 1/4" thickness. Cut into desired shapes, then transfer to a heavy sheet pan covered in parchment. Refrigerate the pan for thirty minutes before baking at 350°F until the edges of the cookies are a light golden colour, roughly twenty minutes.

At the Burns Supper, these shortbread cookies were served on top of the eating-posset, with one end hanging over the bowl. The idea was to dip the cookies in the posset à la Dunkaroos.

Yule Log Cake

My mom has prepared a yule log cake every Christmas I can remember. I have no idea how this tradition came to my family, as it is extremely French ("bûche de noël"), and we are not.

The cake is a simple sponge. Whole eggs are beaten thoroughly, sugar is added, then a bit of water, and finally flour and cocoa are folded in. The batter is runny, and forms a shallow, uniform, fine-textured cake after baking.

The interior icing is a buttercream made by whipping room-temperature butter into Swiss meringue. Swiss meringue is a mixture of whipped egg whites and simple syrup cooked to soft ball stage.

The exterior frosting is icing sugar beaten into lard, which makes the colour bright white, in contrast to the beige buttercream inside the log.

I dragged a fork across the exposed sides of the cake for a bit of texture.