There was only one problem: I couldn’t find veal bones.

This happens every now and then with ingredients, especially ingredients mentioned in American cookbooks. The author will claim that such-and-such ingredient is “widely available” at a given type of store, yet visits to those stores turn up fruitless. It happened when I tried to find mother of vinegar, it happened when I tried to find beer brewing supplies (the stores around here seem to carry only boxed kits, not bulk dry malt extract), and it’s starting to frustrate even my husband in his search for praline paste for chocolates. Is the Canadian market really so different from the U.S. one?

Fortunately, in this case, I found a relatively new butcher in a neighbouring town, the Bauer Butcher, who were more than happy to supply me with the veal bones and veal breast I needed. They’re going to be my new go-to for special meat orders. Sadly, they weren’t able to get me calves’ feet, but I’ll take what I can get for now.

Stock recipes are all relatively interchangeable, but because the end goal here is a dish in the Eleven Madison Park book, I decided to follow their particular recipe as closely as possible, rather than, say, using the pressure-cooker method. (Unfortunately, there’s a typo in the recipe: the ingredient list includes white wine, but the recipe never says where to add it. A quick query to the e-mail address given in the book cleared that up; it goes in with the ice.) The only unusual thing about this recipe, to my mind, is the total exclusion of carrot, and the inclusion of celery root. The celery root is something I’ll probably adopt in future stocks of my own, partly because I love it under any circumstances, and partly because it’s got all the aromatics of celery but in a package that’s sweet rather than bitter. It’s fundamentally just a great idea.

So I loaded my 8 pounds of veal bones and 4 pounds of veal breast into my stockpot – actually, I split it between two pots, because my stockpot wasn’t big enough – covered it with very cold water, and simmered it for 6 hours, skimming as I went. After straining and reducing, I was left with 4.5 litres of gelatinous, lightly golden stock that’s safely stashed in my freezer for the time being, awaiting its destiny in a future recipe.

This isn’t to say I wasn’t curious how they work. Bread is kneaded to develop gluten, the stretchy protein that poses a health risk to a number of unfortunate people (and is vilified by still more) and that gives bread its structure by trapping carbon dioxide bubbles produced by yeast. Several factors go into gluten development: the variety of wheat (“hard” flours have more protein that “soft” ones), mechanical action (kneading), hydration (water) and time.

In general, the more water added to a dough, the more easily it will form gluten from the precursor proteins, glutenin and gliadin. The hydration trade-off, though, is that as you increase the water content, the dough becomes more difficult to work with and shape. A no-knead dough takes this to the extreme, increasing the water content so far that you don’t even need to work the dough: given enough time, the gluten will essentially produce itself.

As I was flipping through Ideas in Food for the chocolate pudding I knew I wanted to make, I spotted the no-knead brioche recipe. I’m planning to make a dish soon that requires some brioche bread crumbs, so it seemed like a good excuse to give the recipe a try.

Sticky bun topping

The technique was as easy as advertised: mix dry ingredients, mix wet ingredients, combine, let rest for several hours. Fold the edges of the dough into the centre (no, this doesn’t count as kneading!) and let rest overnight, then bake. I was surprised to see that the dough didn’t need to be shaped at all before baking. It just went into the loaf pan as a lump, but produced a pretty nice oven spring.

With 8 eggs and a pound of butter, it’s an expensive recipe, but the payoff is in the flavour. This is a rich brioche that speaks of luxury. Unfortunately, I overbaked it a little, slightly burning the bottom of the loaf, but that’s easy to fix next time, both by baking on a higher rack and reducing the cooking time. (My only beef with the recipe is that it uses the old “tap and listen for a hollow sound” test for doneness, rather than specifying an internal temperature.) I used the other half of the dough to make the “brioche sticky buns,” which were delicious the first day, but staled quickly. I’d happily make them again, but only if I had several guests to share them with!

Merry Christmas!

I’ve always loved mincemeat. When I was growing up, my mother always made mincemeat tarts at Christmas. She used store-bought mincemeat, but made her own pastry: the only time I can recall her doing so. She formed them in muffin tins, and I remember asking her one year whether they were hard to unmold. Naturally, that was the first year she ever had trouble with it!

But mincemeat – like fruitcake – is a divider, not a uniter. My husband’s family tradition of mincemeat comes in the form of mincemeat squares. Every year, we include them on the trays of Christmas cookies at our gatherings; every year, we get queried as to whether they are date squares; and every year, we find pieces of half-eaten mincemeat squares wrapped in paper napkins and tucked discreetly into corners. Conversely, the mincemeat fans will happily help themselves to several of them.

It would seem that mincemeat has had a bit of a hard reputation for a long time, even when it was enormously popular. Of course, back then it was still actually made with meat, an ingredient reflected only in the vestigial suet in modern recipes. (Some “mincemeat” blends omit even the suet!)

When I came across a recipe for mincemeat in Fergus Henderson’s Beyond Nose to Tail, I decided this would be the year I finally made it myself, not least because it included quinces, one of my favourite Christmastime fruits! The quinces first have to be poached, then the other ingredients mixed in and the whole allowed to rest for two days, before being slowly baked for 4-5 hours, so it’s not a quick proposition. (At least it doesn’t have to be closely monitored.) But if you have the time to do it, you will be rewarded with a wonderful, rich aroma that will take you straight back to Christmastimes of old.

When it comes to mincemeat, are you pro or anti?

The first recipe in this chapter that really caught my eye was the Citrus-Cured Salmon. (Though that may only be because I’ve been curing my own bacon ever since I first laid my hands on Charcuterie!) I’ve always loved smoked salmon, but don’t have the equipment to properly cold-smoke fish (you have to keep the temperature of the smoke below 100°F/38°C, or else the fish will cook). So cured fish with flavours other than smoke is the next-best thing.

At first, I hesitated to make the dish, because I could only get access to farmed salmon, unless I wanted frozen wild. But after discussing with a friend, I decided to go ahead with the farmed fish. (As a bonus, farmed salmon is largely free of anisakids, which allayed my other concern about eating essentially raw fish at home.)

After salting and pressing the salmon for 24 hours, I wasn’t convinced. But then I let it rest in the fridge for another day (as the recipe stipulates), and the texture improved, though I still found the top to be a bit too firm and salty. I diced some of it for an hors d’oeuvre at my Christmas party, using it to fill hollowed-out sections of small cucumbers, and then topping the whole thing with red onion crème fraîche and chives. The rest I’ve just been enjoying sliced, on crackers or crostini, with more crème fraîche and chives.

Gougères are just pâte à choux (similar to the pastry used for cream puffs and éclairs), with the addition of some grated cheese. I’ve made pâte à choux several times before; in fact, I would rate it as less tricky than pie crust.

To be fair, the Eleven Madison Park recipe for gougères is slightly (though not dramatically) idiosyncratic: other recipes I’ve seen, such as in the French Laundry cookbook, call for the eggs to be added to the flour-butter-water mixture first, followed by the cheese, while EMP reverses the order and adds cream along with the eggs. Not a big deal… as long as you follow the recipe, rather than relying on hazy memories of past experience.

The bigger factor, though, was the lack of a weight measurement for the flour. I know that when using the “scoop and level” method, I personally tend to weigh flour “heavy” – as much as 6 oz. per cup. So I estimated it at about 5 oz. per cup the first time I made them. That estimate may have been my downfall, as we needed to add a lot more eggs to get the dough to the right consistency for piping.

Because I was so frustrated the first time, I knew I had to try them again. I scaled the flour back to 4 oz. per cup, and followed the recipe nearly to the letter. Instead of Gruyère, I used Manchego, and I also mixed in some finely diced dry-cured Spanish chorizo at the end, just before piping them out. They took a little longer to bake than the recipe says, but I think they turned out beautifully!

It may sound strange, but beet pâte de fruit is not that uncommon: it has a long history at the Fat Duck, and can be found in the Noma cookbook as well. Beet is such a sweet vegetable to begin with that adding a bit more sugar and making it into candy isn’t much of a stretch. (For me, anyway. My husband’s stated position is, “We are not poor. We do not need to eat vegetables for dessert.” Needless to say, I don’t get pumpkin pie that often, either.)

The recipe I chose to use, though, was from the recently published cookbook for the “Paris 1906” menu at Chicago’s Next Restauarant. The book, published exclusively in electronic form, is beautiful – even on my minuscule iPhone screen, which admittedly made it somewhat difficult to cook from.

It’s a straight-up pâte de fruit recipe, using beet juice, sugar, a little citric acid and pectin. I had read in the Fat Duck Cookbook that beet, combined with enough acid, will begin to taste like blackcurrant, and there’s enough citric acid in this recipe that it flirts with that effect; I noticed it especially while it was cooking. But the flavour is decidedly beet, and decidedly delicious.

There are a few different ingredients that can be used to stabilize foams made in a whipped cream siphon. Gelatin is one of the easiest and most common, but has the drawback that it must be served cold. If you want a warm siphon foam, you have to base it on something else, such as egg whites, which essentially use the siphon to make instant, flavoured meringue. The microwave sponge cake is simply an extension of this, taking that meringue (with a little flour added) and cooking it.

The result is, like aerated chocolate, a “set foam”: when you heat an egg-white foam, the bubbles in it expand, and eventually the egg proteins coagulate, forming a solid matrix and trapping those bubbles forever. That’s more or less how a soufflé works. Only instead of whipping the eggs with a mixer, this cake uses a siphon, and instead of baking it in an oven, you cook it in a microwave.

Although I’d never used this technique before, I decided to try developing my own recipe with it. I made up a spreadsheet of the ingredients in a handful of other recipes I had, and decided the basic ratio of ingredients is about 20 grams of flour, 100g of egg whites, 80g of sugar, anywhere from 0g to 80g of egg yolk, and 120g of your chosen flavour, preferably something that has about 50% fat. I’ve seen recipes using pistachio, chocolate, yogurt and black sesame. There are, of course, outliers to this, but that seemed like a good starting point.

For flavour, I wanted red velvet cake. I’ve had this popular cake only once or twice, but I’m well versed in its distinguishing characteristics: bright red colour, buttermilk, and a hint of chocolate. I devised a recipe that I thought reflected this and would work with this technique. After mixing all the ingredients, straining them, and charging the siphon, I dispensed some into a paper cup with holes punched in the bottom, and microwaved it on high for 40 seconds. Success!

To round out the dessert, I made a beet fluid gel (since beets are sometimes used in the original cake instead of artificial food colouring, and beet pairs nicely with chocolate), cream cheese icing, and candied pecans. I really wanted a green element on the plate, but I couldn’t find any traditional garnish for red velvet cake that was green. And I’m not a fan of the token mint leaf found on so many different desserts.

The one drawback I found to my recipe is that the cakes, left for more than a few minutes, will harden somewhat. I don’t have enough experience with pastry to know what causes this, though it would be nice to be able to refine the recipe so it doesn’t happen. Now that I’m past my “running before you walk” phase, it may be time to take a step back and make one of the professional recipes as a basis of comparison. In the meantime, here’s what I did.

How to make red velvet microwave cake

This recipe should easily serve 6-8 people

100g egg whites
70g egg yolk
80g sugar
20g all-purpose flour
5g cocoa powder
Pinch salt
60g butter, melted
60g buttermilk
Red food colouring, in paste form, as desired

Combine the egg whites, egg yolks and sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer. Whisk for 1 minute on medium speed to combine. Sift the flour and cocoa powder over top, and add the salt. Whisk again until just combined. While whisking, drizzle in the butter and buttermilk, and add the red food colouring until you get the colour you want.

Strain the mixture, and transfer it into a half-litre whipped cream siphon. Charge the siphon with two nitrous oxide cartridges, shaking well after each one. Keep refrigerated.

How to make beet fluid gel

140g beet juice
55g 1:1 simple syrup
1.95g agar

Combine the beet juice and syrup. You can adjust the syrup to taste; just make sure you adjust the agar to be 1% of the total combined weight of the two. Bring to a low simmer, and sprinkle the agar over top, whisking to combine. Bring to a full boil and boil for 1 minute to hydrate the agar. Strain into a heatproof container and allow to set at room temperature.

Once set, cut the gel into cubes, and puree with a blender until the mixture forms a smooth gel. Transfer to a squeeze bottle and reserve in the fridge.

How to make cream cheese icing

150g cream cheese
75g icing sugar
60 ml whipping cream

Beat the cream cheese in an electric mixer until very soft. Sift the icing sugar over top, and beat again until combined, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary. Add the whipping cream and beat again until combine. Transfer to a pastry bag fitted with a large plain tip, and reserve in the fridge.

How to make candied pecans
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 Tbsp. white corn syrup
1 Tbsp. water
25 pecan halves

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Spread the pecan halves on a baking sheet, and place in the oven. While they cook, combine the sugar, corn syrup and water in a saucepan. Heat over medium heat until the sugar caramelizes. Immediately remove the warmed pecans from the oven, add to the caramel, and stir to cook. Spread on a parchment-lined baking sheet, keeping each pecan half separate, and allow to cool. Break off any extra caramel, transfer to an airtight container, and reserve.

To plate the dessert

Pipe random dots of cream cheese icing and beet gel onto a plate. Take a 9-oz paper cup, poke four holes in the bottom, then dispense the microwave red velvet cake batter into the cup, filling halfway. Microwave on high for about 40 seconds (you may have to adjust the time, depending on the power of your microwave). Allow to cool briefly, then run a thin-bladed knife around the inside of the cup to loosen the cake. Tear in half and place on the plate. (I cooked 6 microwave cakes for 4 servings, allowing one and a half per person.) Lean candied pecans against the cream cheese icing.

Last weekend, I found myself with a little spare time, so I got out my heat gun and the other half-pound of green coffee I’d picked up, to take a second shot at it. Trying to make the process go a little faster than last time, I held the gun closer to the beans, and stirred them less vigorously in the early stage of the process, and was rewarded by watching them move quickly through the yellow and light-brown stages.

Once they hit brown, however, it became apparent that the colouring wasn’t as even as last time. I still couldn’t hear the first crack, which I’m choosing to blame on the combined sounds of the heat gun’s fan and the beans being stirred. I kept going for a little while, trying for a slightly darker roast, but it seemed to stall. Eventually, after seeing no real change in the beans for a few minutes, I decided to wrap up.

The first roast was all about watching the stages of the process. This time, I wanted to exercise more control over it, but felt like I didn’t really achieve that goal. It’s hard to draw any real conclusions, though, because I changed one major variable at the outset: the beans. These beans were from Colombia (another country our local roaster doesn’t source from), while the fist batch was from Kenya. I’m not sure how differently different batches of beans respond to the process, and I’m not experienced enough to adjust my approach as I go.

So the next step is to buy a larger quantity of beans from one origin, then roast several successive batches to see if I can get a better feel for it before I start branching out.

What’s your favourite origin for coffee beans?