A Funny Little Cheese Course - Recipe

This was just pure play. I wanted to see if I could do a cheese course that would look like cheesecake, but not be particularly sweet. I landed on a Laura Chenel chevre with a little salty crust and strawberry granita.

A cheese course, like an amuse bouche or a tapa is an opportunity to be a little less constrained, because you don't need to make something that would be appropriate in an entree-sized portion. You can use bold flavors and surprising combinations without rapidly tiring the palate.

The strawberry component has one ingredient: strawberries. I just pureed the heck out of them and then made a simple granita by stirring/raking them with a fork every 15 minutes or so until frozen. The stirring keeps the ice crystals small and smooth. Needless to say you want to use exceptional strawberries for this; don't even bother if you only have hard tasteless berries that made a 2000 mile trip to your grocery store.

I wanted to pay homage to the classic graham cracker crust of a cheesecake, but go salty instead of sweet. I landed on coarsely pulverized rice crackers and mini-pretzels with a little butter, fennel pollen and black pepper.

Goat Cheese with Strawberry Granita and a Pretzel Crust
Vegetarian
Serves 4 as a cheese course

• 1 cup strawberries, hulled
• 25 g. rice crackers (I used the wafer-shaped ones from Trader Joe's)
• 10 g. mini-pretzels
• 25 g. unsalted butter
• big pinch of fennel pollen
• few grinds black pepper
• 3/4 c. chevre (preferably Laura Chenel brand)

1. Puree the strawberries thoroughly. Place them in a shallow plastic container in your freezer. Every fifteen minutes or so, give them a stir with a fork, raking through the ice crystals to break them up. In about two hours or less you should have a nicely frozen granita.
2. In a mini food processor, combine the rice crackers, pretzels, butter, fennel pollen and black pepper. Process until you have fairly uniform small crunchy bits, say 1/4 - 1/2 the size of a grain of puffed rice cereal. Taste and mix in a little more salt if needed.
3. To serve, spray or rub a 1" ring mold with a light coating of oil and place it on a plate. Press in a 1/2" layer of the crust mixture. Top that with 3 tablespoons of the chevre, again, presing it into the mold, then gently push the "cheesecake" out of the mold. Repeat for the remaining plates. Remove the granita from the freezer and scrape it with the fork again to restore the texture. Top each plate with a tablespoon or so of the granita and serve immediately.

Anti-griddle Pudding Pop, Bruleed Mango, Black Sesame Tuile - Recipe

 
Anti-griddle Pudding Pop, Bruleed Mango, Black Sesame Tuile

This was my dish for the MasterChef auditions that took Seattle by storm last weekend. I guess it must have been ok, it earned me a callback for a second round interview. There were no cooking facilities for the audition, so the judges made allowances if your food was intended to be served hot.

Still I figured I'd work with those restrictions instead of against them by making dessert that would allow me to do some last minute cooking with my own tools. I bruleed the mango with a torch and made the pudding pop (chocolate, filled with dulce de leche, sea salt, and a drop of toasted sesame oil) on a homebrew anti-griddle.

Anti-griddles are popular in modern-style restaurants. They circulate liquid nitrogen under a flat griddle surface, so that you can freeze a liquid in seconds. I started making a homestyle version using the dry ice from our weekly Amazon Fresh order. (If you try this yourself, use gloves and please be careful - touching dry ice can hurt you badly). I just put it between two sheet pans or cake pans. I've frozen all manner of yogurts, puddings, sauces and so forth. It helps to use a slightly thickened liquid so you can control how it spreads. It also is a good idea to lightly wipe it with oil to make it easier to release your food.

The white sauce you see on the front of the plate is coconut milk, infused with kaffir lime leaf and ginger, and thickened with Ultra-Tex 3. Ultra-Tex 3 is a modified food starch that thickens at room temperature. This makes it easy to see when you've reached the desired texture, so you don't have to be as precise as with some of the other fancy-pants hydrocolloids out there. It releases flavor well and doesn't get gummy. I know it sounds all technical, but really if you are an ambitious home cook, you should consider adding it to your pantry. I think you will find it has a lot of applications.

For the pudding, I followed this simple formula at Smitten Kitchen. Tastes great. Just be sure and use a good quality dark chocolate. These tuiles at Cooking Debauchery are dandy as well. Add about a tablespoon of Japanese black sesame paste and sprinkle them with toasted white sesame seeds before baking.

All of the components here will make way more than you will need for a small number of plates, it just isn't practical to make them in much smaller batches. I'll give the recipe in terms of a single serving.

Anti-griddle Pudding Pop, Bruleed Mango, Black Sesame Tuille
Serves 1
Vegetarian; not vegan nor gluten-free

Coconut milk sauce:

• 1 can coconut milk
• 6 kaffir lime leaves
• 1" piece of ginger, peeled and finely grated
• 2 teaspoons agave nectar
• pinch of salt
• Ultra-tex 3

1. In a small saucepan, warm the coconut milk with the kaffir lime leaves, ginger, agave nectar and salt. Turn off the heat and allow to infuse for 30 minutes. Strain through a fine sieve. Taste and adjust seasoning. It should be intensely flavored as you will be serving a very small amount.
2. Using an immersion blender, get a good vortex going. Start sprinkling in Ultra-tex 3, a teaspoon at a time until it reaches a pudding-like consistency, thick enough to stand up on the plate.
3. Strain again in case you got any lumps. Chill.

To finish and serve:

• 1 piece of mango, approx 2" x 3/4" x 3/4"
• 1 teaspon white sugar
• 1 tablespoon chocolate pudding (see link above)
• 1/8 teaspoon dulce de leche
• flaky sea salt
• a drop of toasted sesame oil
• 1 lollipop stick (cut one off of a dum-dum)
• 1/2 black sesame tuile (see link above)
• tiny bit of chiffonade shiso leaf
• coconut milk sauce

1. At one end of the mango, cut a little slot to hold tuile. At the other, poke a hole to hold the pudding pop. Sprinkle the mango with the sugar and brulee (carefully) with a torch until the sugar is deep brown.
2. Put half the chocolate pudding on the antigriddle in a small circle, about 1 1/2" in diameter. Quickly dip the lollipop stick in the dulce de leche, forming a litle ball at the end, and place it in the center of the pudding. Add a couple grains of salt and 1 drop of toasted sesame oil. Top with the rest of the pudding.
3. When the first side is frozen but the middle is still soft, flip the pop and freeze the second side. You'll get the hang of determining when it is frozen on the outside but still pleasingly soft in the interior. And eating your first few mistakes will be fun. Just please be careful not to freeze your tongue.
4. To plate, place the tuile cookie in the slot on the mango and the lollipop in the hole. Add a tiny pinch of the shiso leaf and a small stripe of the coconut milk sauce and serve.

Gateau de Crepes with Chocolate Pastry Cream and Dulce De Leche - Recipes

 
Gâteau de crêpes with chocolate pastry cream and dulce de leche

Sometimes I read a recipe and it burrows into a corner of my brain, gathers twigs and moss, builds a little nest, and refuses to move out until I make it. That was the case with this Gâteau de Crêpes from Amanda Hesser in the New York Times magazine back in 2005. The idea is simple enough: twenty layers of crepes filled with whip-cream lightened pastry cream, finished with a layer of bruleed sugar. 

Still, I knew that plenty could go wrong. Would those layers really stay together and line up neatly? What should be the density of the pastry cream so that it wouldn't collapse under the weight of the crepes and a knife, but still be suave?

I finally sucked it up and made it for my own birthday party and it turned out pretty darn tasty, if a bit sloppy looking on the outside. The inside was beautiful. Of course I had to put my own spin on it. I went with alternating layers of chocolate pastry cream and dulce de leche. As you can see, my fears of seepage were well founded, but who really cared? It was rich and delicious; a small slice would be perfectly satisfying. I had three.

 

The recipe in Hesser's article covers it fine, so there is no need to go over it here. If you want to make my variation, just add 6 ounces of high quality dark chocolate (something in the 72% range) to the hot pastry cream, and a jar of homemade or store-bought dulce de leche for the alternate layers. You'll want to warm the dulce de leche and maybe thin it with a bit of cream as well so you can spread it without destroying the crepes.

Oh, and I'm not sure why she has you heat the milk for the crepe batter. I've always used Julia Child's recipe from Mastering The Art of French Cooking, which doesn't call for that, and I've never had a problem with the results. Feel free to skip it.

If you have a pressure cooker and haven't used it to make dulce de leche, I highly recommend it. Works beautifully.