Archive for August, 2009
Yogurt Dumplings
August 26th, 2009
Here is our recipe for yogurt dumplings. This is a recipe we have not thought of until recently. It came back up in some inspiring conversations during today's workshop and we felt it might we useful and happily extrapolated as menus begin to shift from summer to fall.
Yogurt Dumplings
485 grams drained whole milk yogurt
45 grams honey
3 grams salt
5.33 grams activa y-g (1%)
blade in place and process the mixture once with the blue air valve pressed
in. This is done to prevent excess
air from being incorporated into the mixture. When the cycle is done, remove the canister and scrape the
inside walls to bring the entire mixture together. Put the canister and blade back on the Paco Jet and process
one more time with the blue air valve pressed in. When the second cycle has finished, remove the canister from
the machine and place the mixture into a squeeze bottle.
Spray the inside of the magnetic sphere mold with pan spray
and then with a dry paper towel wipe clean. The fine film remaining will ease the un-molding
process. Close the sphere molds
and then fill each cavity through the top opening by extruding the yogurt
mixture into the opening. Fill all
the spheres and then tap the plastic mold on the counter to force out any air
bubbles. If the cavities empty
during this process, top them off with any remaining apparet. Loosely cover the top of the sphere
mold with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 18 hours.
Remove the mold from the refrigerator and carefully remove
the top section of the magnetic mold.
The spheres will have set and there will be a small extension on each
sphere from the fill hole. Use a
pairing knife to cut this yogurt extension off of each sphere. Once the spheres are trimmed, gently
remove each sphere from the mold and place in a shallow container. Cover the container and reserve in the refrigerator.
To serve, gently warm the spheres in simmering water to heat
through. Once the spheres are hot,
remove them from the water and place them in the pan with the appropriate sauce
and glaze.
Posted in
Synchronicity
August 25th, 2009
Sometimes ingredients just come together. We found amazing organic green grapes at the market. The next day we picked up heirloom tomatoes at Shady Brook Farm. Finally we stopped at Di Bruno Bros. and Hunter hooked us up with an amazing Robiola cheese. The Blis Elixer and Manni olive oil were already in our pantry. All we had to do was put them together…
Enjoy Your Food
August 24th, 2009
We’re at the point where every meal is an adventure. Amaya may not eat everything we give her. She examines each bite, squishes things with her fingers, smells every bite, and then more often than not, manages to get it in her mouth. Sometimes she smiles, sometimes she shivers, and sometimes she screws up her entire face and recoils. No matter what the reaction, nine times out of ten she will taste whatever it is again. Amaya may not go in for the third bite but unless something is truly terrible she will give it a second chance. If something is good on the first try her entire face will light up and she will promptly throw anything left in her hands into the air in celebration. Needless to say meals are messy affairs. No matter what we set in front of her, she eats wholeheartedly with intense concentration and focus. Amaya loves to share the experience, checking often to make sure we’re paying attention. It’s a beautiful thing. Which doesn’t mean that the mess doesn’t make me a little bit crazy. It goes against my nature to let her toss food onto the floor. She can whip off her bib one-handed with a dramatic flourish and send it flying. She usually chooses to do so mid-meal. Amaya loves to share and happily feeds us bites of her food from her sticky fists.
For two people who love food and cook for a living her active participation in every meal is a revelation. Too often we rush through our own meals consumed by a thousand other things. We enjoy the first few bites and then slowly get distracted and accelerate through our daily meals. There’s always a laundry list of other things to do. Watching Amaya is a reminder that even a simple meal should be celebrated. We should be able to take that extra ten minutes to feed our spirits along with our bellies. We should remember to enjoy our food.
Roasted and Smoked
August 23rd, 2009
More flavor. How can we get more flavor into our pasta? Roasting pasta in the oven is one way to deepen its flavor and broaden its taste spectrum. The flours become nuttier, there are caramel like notes. We have read about toasting pasta when cooking it like risotto and it’s been years since we thought to pre-roast it for cooking. Until we started hydrating our pasta for expedited cooking. After more research into pasta cooking and reading Harold McGee’s piece on little water cooking several times, it dawned on us. Some of the detractors in the piece noted a lack of flavor in the pasta. Those doubts followed by McGee’s comments on the risotto style pasta cookery had us reaching for the pasta and turning on the oven. If we roasted the noodles and then hydrated we should have a more intense pasta flavor. Our tests proved correct. We roasted the noodles for twenty minutes in a 350 degree F oven and then hydrated them in cold water for an hour and a half. We brought a small pot of water to a boil, cooked for a minute and tossed with butter, salt and black pepper. The roasted noodles were amazing. Linguine with clam sauce and simple fresh tomato sauce will now have a deeper flavor and aroma, which we did not know was possible.
Since I cannot leave well enough alone I took some of the roasted and hydrated noodles and smoked them with a smoking gun. The quick and direct smoking of the noodles allowed us to be eating smoked and roasted pasta almost instantly. To accent the dish we added a few garlic chives and some Ossau Iraty cheese. The delicate smoke on top of the roasted flavor was mind blowing. The simplicity of the ingredients and ease of execution were even more exciting. The deep flavors present a wonderful canvas to work with. Aki is pushing for crabmeat and jalapenos and I am looking to sweet corn and country ham.
Big Sky … Thick Jungle … Zero Tolerance (and Diane Saves The Day)
August 23rd, 2009
The camera people are walking on cocaine. Six tons of it. Thousands of kilos of un-cut pure rock. The air is thick with clouds of the stuff as men with machetes are hacking the kilo packages open, scattering it, spraying and spilling the stuff everywhere in white clouds. It looks like Tony Montana’s desktop, multiplied by many thousands. My shoes alone are caked with enough to keep an aging supermodel happy for weeks and the Director General of Panamanian security forces advises me to wash them carefully before flying home as the sniffer doggies at the airport are going to find me intriguing to say the least. I would also roundly fail a urine test he says. Just by standing here. In a few moments I will set all of it on fire. About this, I have mixed emotions, as an earlier version of myself would have found this …painful to watch.
Malt Crisps
August 22nd, 2009
Another new ingredient in our pantry is these malt crisps. The crunchy malt flavor and light texture is really tasty. Having malt in this form presents a number of new possibilities: from a crunchy topping for sweetbreads paired with smoked fennel puree to the texture on top of a delicate chocolate sheet. Right now, they are a great snack while writing and thinking about food. In fact, as I’m mulling this, they could work well with the foie gras flake bar we are working on.
September 12, 2009
August 21st, 2009
Dinner will be served at 7:00 pm. The meal will be held in our workshop space in Levittown, PA. Guests are welcome to arrive a bit early to check out the space and the preparations. There are twelve seats available. The cost of the dinner is $150 per person, BYOB. Any dietary issues must be noted at the time of your reservation. Email us via the blog or the website if you would like to reserve space.
Because Everyone Loves a Good BLT
August 21st, 2009
The thing about using traditionally savory ingredients in ice cream is that you have to decide how to serve it. Sometimes the flavors work for dessert and sometimes you have to slide the ice cream over to the first part of the menu. This works as long as the diner can suspend their pre-conceived notions long enough to appreciate the flavors before making a judgment call. Here we have a bacon ice cream, the ice cream is sweet, the application savory. The best of all worlds if you please. We’ve paired it with heirloom tomato, purslane, and croutons cooked in bacon fat and dusted with raw sugar. It’s a small savory dish balanced by sweet elements. A little bit out there and so good that we could probably even win Jay over with this one. We never can resist a challenge…
Ideas in Food-Studiokitchen III
August 20th, 2009
It is with great pleasure that we can announce the third dinner in our series of collaborations with Shola. It, being the third, brings even more substance because it will be held in our workshop space. What this means is that Aki will not just be consulting or sending along components from our kitchen, she will bring a hands on approach to the menu, the food and the execution of the dishes. It is only appropriate that the third dinner has all three of us.
The details:
Friday October 2nd
Saturday October 3rd
The location will be our workshop in Levittown, PA.
30 minutes from Downtown Philadelphia.
Cost is $150 per person. BYOB
Dinner begins promptly at 7:30. Guests are welcome to arrive earlier.
Email your requested interest in reserving a seat(s) to idskvolume3@gmail.com
Lobster and Corn
August 20th, 2009
Cooking lobster is something I enjoy. Cooking lobster for other people,
particularly Aki and now Amaya, is even more gratifying with higher
expectations. Eating lobster either on the shore or in your backyard evokes memories. Memories of the last time you had the lobster, where you were, what you were doing. Usually corn is not too far off when lobster is cooked. The butter, a frivolous luxury for both the corn and the lobster for Aki, is a necessity in my world. Eating lobster is often messy business. I remember eating lobsters and corn, juices dripping, mingling, and having to wipe my face, my legs, and occasionally losing my napkins in the fray. In my haste to grab my errant napkins occasionally a weed or two would be caught with them. I am not going to presume the weeds under the picnic table were the same as those we are cultivating, though they could have been. In any case, we have rethought our past. We used the peeled lobster claws with a buttered popcorn puree and balanced them with weeds, I mean herbs, from our garden. The lobster preparation resembles a risotto in appearance and texture, it is not a real risotto as to be served in Italy, although the analogy serves us well in describing the dish. (We recently received a thoughtful and passionate email about our menu terminology from someone we respect and are slowly digesting the contents.) We punctuate the dish not with lemon, the traditional go to for lobster garnish, instead we use our weeds: oxalis leaves and pods and a few tips of purslane. The flavors are easily imagined, the texture is familiar, the finished dish is…something slightly different and simply delicious.
