French Apple Tart

This came from Cooks Illustrated 131 and looked fussy but impressive. The pastry crust is super easy; the puree plus apple rosette topping is a bit of work but worth it. Active time is about three hours, most of it on prepping and cooking the apples -- the crust and filling are pretty quick. It is fancy as a dessert, and indulgent as breakfast. We made it a couple times and it's a hit. We've updated the quantities and some procedure for what worked for us. You can double the recipe but will need to have plenty of big skillets.

Baked in a 9-inch tart pan

For simplicity, use the same variety of apples for the puree as for the topping because different varieties cook at different rates; if you want some contrast make sure you cook the puree apples separately from the topping apples. Varieties like Muntaner and Braeburn work well, they stay firm; surprisingly, Granny Smiths turn mushy very quickly when cooking.

Ingredients below are for one 9-inch tart pan with removable bottom, but you can also use a 9-inch disposable aluminum pie tin or Pyrex pie pan. I recently made this in a 10x3-inch spring-form pan (so it would be easier to transport to a friend's house), and scaled up the ingredients by 25% to accommodate the larger volume.

Crust

The big innovation Cooks contributes here, IMHO, is the super-easy pastry crust using melted butter: it comes together quickly and doesn't bubble or shrink. If you're not using a tart pan, you might want to increase the quantity so you have enough to run up the sides.

10-inch 9-inch  9-inch pan

228 g   185 g   6 1/2 ounce (1 1/3 cup)  Flour, all purpose
 80 g    65 g   2 1/4 ounce (5 Tbs)      Sugar
  6 g     5 g     1/2 tsp                Salt
185 g   150 g  10     Tbs                Butter, unsalted, melted

Preheat oven to 180C/350F or 165C/325F convection.
Whisk together the dry ingredients, then pour in the melted butter and combine until you get a smooth play-dough-like consistency.

Press into the tart pan, bottom and sides; I cover with cellophane and smooth with the bottom of a measuring cup.
Bake 30-35 minutes until deep golden brown; set aside until ready to fill.

Filling

You might want to add one more apple to your mix but we needed less than Cooks 5 pounds (2250 g). In Barcelona with a 10-inch spring form pan, I used 880 g sweet apples for the base and 1040 g tart apples for the top (total of 1920 g, 8 large apples), and had some topping apples left over.

1400 g     3 pounds Apples, flavorful, firm, peeled and cored
  45 g     3 Tbs    Butter, unsalted
  15 ml    1 Tbs    Water (use some from holding the apples)
                    Lemon Juice
 120 ml  1/2 Cup    Apricot Preserves
   2 g   1/4 tsp    Salt

Peel and core the apples; hold them in a bowl of water with a squeeze of lemon to prevent then from turning brown. If you don't have an apple corer (we don't, it's a "uni-tasker"), you can cut the apples in half after peeling then use a melon baller to remove the tough center.

Cut the halves into 6-8 wedges each, you want to preserve the wedge shape of the apple for presentation. Hold the cored wedges in the acidulated water until you're finished with prepping the apples.

If you're doing a single recipe, you probably can do topping and puree apples in two separate large skillets, or use one large skillet and do the topping and puree sequentially. If you're doubling the batch, you probably won't have enough giant skillets.

Cook a bit less than half the apples (by weight is easiest to measure), the best looking wedges, in half the butter and some of the water from the holding bowl until they're pliant but not soft and mushy. Stir gently to make sure all the wedges get fairly evenly cooked. If some break, it's OK, you can use them for the puree, but try to be careful.  It took about 10 minutes for our apples, but every variety will be different. Reserve to a large plate; I used cookie sheet lined with a nonstick mat.

While the apples are cooking, add a bit of water to the Apricot Preserves and heat in microwave to thin, strain to collect thin syrup in a bowl for finishing, and retain solids for the puree.

Cook the other half of the apples for the puree the same way, but cook longer until they're a bit softer. If you need to make up some presentation wedges for the topping, pull them out early and put them with the previous cooked wedges.  Put these puree wedges into a food processor with the Apricot Preserves solids and process until very smooth.  Put the puree back into the skillet and cook to concentrate flavor and texture -- I was looking for an almost custard-like texture rather than loose applesauce. Remove from heat.

Fill the baked crust to the top with the puree but don't go over the edge; if you're a bit short, that's fine.

Start laying out the attractive wedges around the outside, starting with the largest wedges, overlapping each one. Continue to the center, pressing each slightly into the puree, being mindful that you want to end up in the dead center and not wander off.  When you are almost done, select the smallest and most thin pliable wedges to curl and nestle snugly into the center void.

Bake at 180C/350F or 165C/325F convection for 30 minutes on a wire rack above a sheet pan to catch any drips but let the bottom of the tart pan to get some heat.
Remove tart from oven and turn on the broiler, with a rack about 3-4 inches below the top element.
If the retained Apricot Preserve syrup is thick, reheat in the microwave briefly to thin.
Brush the syrup over the tops of the apple wedges to gloss, drizzling it between the wedges to cover all surfaces; avoid getting it on the tart pan else it will make releasing difficult.
Return to broiler and broil 30 seconds to a few minutes, just until you develop attractive highlights in the glaze; you may need to rotate the tart pan to get even browning.
Remove and let cool.

Works fine in a disposable 9-inch aluminum pan

Scaled up for a 10-inch spring form pan

Cassoulet

We've been making Cassoulet since 1996 with various complicated French recipes, and even took a class at L'Academie de Cuisine. It's a great, rich, hearty, cold-weather bean and meat stew from southern France. We've even made a pilgrimage to Castelnaudry which claims to have invented the dish; indeed, the fields all around the town are planted with the white beans that comprise the base. Now we're not so fussy, especially after seeing L'Academie's chef-owner wasn't even following his own recipe. We always used to start with a 2-pound bag of white beans, but it makes a ton of rich stew; here, we're cutting back to 1 pound dried beans to start: it still makes 6-8 portions.

The basic idea is to cook the rehydrated beans in a rich, flavorful stock, then combine with garlic-y sausage and duck confit; some recipes have you layer them, others have you combine at service; it's OK to just combine when you're finishing in the oven.  Most recipes suggest adding breadcrumbs and fat while finishing in the oven and this gives a wonderfully crunchy crust.

We make duck confit with a simple sous vide technique; it's so easy there's no reason not to have this simple luxury.

Ingredients

• 1 pound Beans, dry, white, northern or flageolets (2 Cups)
• 4 Cup Stock
• 1/2 pound Bacon, slab
• 1 Carrot, cut into thirds
• 1 Onion, halved, stuck with the Clove
• 1 Clove
• 1 Bouquet Garni
• 1 Tbs Salt
• 2 piece Duck Confit (legs), prepared earlier
• 1 Sausage, garlic or lamb, cut into coins
• 2 Onions, finely chopped
• 3 clove Garlic, chopped
• 1 Tomatoes, peeled, seeded, chopped bean-size (or 2 Cups canned)
• 1/2 Cup Breadcrumbs
• 1/4 Cup Duck Fat from the Confit

Beans

Soak Beans in 3x amount of cold water for 12 hours. If after 6 hours water is cloudy, change it. Drain. Rinse the Beans and place in large heavy-bottomed pan. Cover with cold water and bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes. Drain. Return Beans to the pot and add 4 Cups Stock. Add Salt, Bacon, Carrot, Clove-studded Onion, and Bouquet Garni. Bring to boil and simmer for about 1 hour, until beans are almost tender. Do not stir while cooking.

Meat and Veg

Meanwhile...

In saute pan, brown the Sausage; you can also brown the Duck, skin side down, or pull the skin and crisp it separately, adding the cooked Duck Confit in later. Season with salt and pepper and set aside. In the same pan, sweat the finely chopped Onions in butter until soft and translucent. Add the chopped garlic, tomatoes, and 1/2 C of the cooking liquid from beans. Cook covered for 5 minutes; if drying out, add some stock.

Assembly

When the beans are almost tender, remove Carrot, Onion, Bacon, Bouquet Garni; Beans should be still quite wet, lots of liquid remains; this is necessary. 

Add the Onion/Tomato mixture, Sausage, Duck meat pulled from the bones. 

Check the seasoning of the Beans; some cooking liquid should remain.

In a large oven-proof casserole, layer or simply combine the meats and beans with their liquid. Sprinkle with Breadcrumbs and pour 1/2 Cup Duck Fat over the crumbs. Bake covered at 325F for 2 hours. Uncover 20 minutes before done to brown the Breadcrumbs.

2012-02-26 Dry Beans

We didn't have hydrated or soaked beans so use a pressure cooker to expedite the cooking -- we wanted cassoulet tonight, dammit! We used 2 pounds dry Great Northern Beans (about 5 Cups), 15 Cups water, 6 Tbs Oil (to prevent foaming), and included Bacon Rind, Carrot, Onion. Pressure cooked at 15 PSI for 20 minutes, and the beans came out done -- done enough to eat, but a little too done for further cooking. Since our beans were wet and finished, we cut back from 8 Cup Stock to 5 Cups. We baked uncovered so we didn't cook any more than necessary. Here too we used duck confit made directly by sous vide method. Next time, for 2 pounds (5 cups), cut back to 12 cups water and 15 minutes pressure cooking.

Sous Vide Duck Leg Confit

We love duck leg confit but don't want to scavenge for a bucket of duck fat. We can instead cook it sous vide in a minimal amount of fat, and add salt and seasonings directly to the cooking bag. This makes it a no-brainer, without losing quality and taste.

Traditionally, duck legs are dry brined with a lot of salt and some spice in order to draw out the blood and firm up the flesh; it's then rinsed, dried, then submerged in duck fat and cooked low and slow, and finally left to cool completely covered in an anaerobic layer fat. This is a technique borne out of the necessity to preserve the meat before refrigeration.

Since fridge-free preservation is not our concern, we don't need to draw off the blood that would spoil in the bucket o' fat. We'll just add a reduced amount of salt and spices to our vacuum bag with the legs directly. We can leave it that way in the fridge to let the seasoning penetrate a bit before cooking sous vide, but that my not be necessary -- the long cooking time should be enough. When cooked, we'll pour off the juices and fat, and separate, then save the jelled juice separate from the fat: both have plenty of uses.

We'll cook in the skin which should render some fat. If we're serving this directly, we'd then sear in a screaming hot pan, skin side down to crisp up. For cassoulet, we'd pull off the flesh and then crisp the skin separately to use as a crouton-like topping.

Various recipes suggest anywhere from 75-82C temperatures, for 8-24 hours. We'll go with 80C for 12 hours, since we're targeting meat for cassoulet; we'd probably do 8 hours for a leg we'd sear and serve by itself.

2 whole Duck Legs, skin on
1 Tbs Kosher Salt
2 tsp Pepper Corns
1 Bay Leaf
2 clove Garlic, minced
3 springs Thyme
2 Tbs Duck Fat (from previous adventures; pork, bacon, butter, or oil are OK in a pinch)

Sprinkle the legs with the salt.
Grind/chop the dry spices and dust the legs, sprinkle on the garlic.

Add the duck, spices, garlic and a couple tablespoons of duck fat to the vacuum bags and seal.
Let sit overnight in the fridge for flavors to penetrate.

Cook sous vide at 80C/176F for 8-12 hours.
If you're serving this soon, pour off the fat and liquid and separate, and save; then finish the duck as you like (e.g., sear the skin on ripping hot cast iron).
If you're saving this for later, drop the bags in an ice bath to chill, then store in the freezer until desired.

Pork Belly using the Fredy Girardet method

I first saw this mentioned as a innovative way to cook fish in the Modernist Cuisine books: fish is placed in a pan with wine coming up most of the sides of the fish, with the skin exposed, and broiled -- the liquid keeps the flesh from overcooking while letting the skin brown. Could the same be done for pork belly? We came pretty close.

Some others have blogged about doing the original Fredy Giaradet method on fish, with mixed success. Cook's Illustrated came up with a fine technique involving slow-roasting to cook, then crisping the skin in a thin layer of hot fat in the November 2015 issue (pay wall). I figured I'd try marrying the techniques.

I cut the pork belly into 3 cm widths, then scored through the skin in about 1cm increments; these would be where I cut for service and plating. Scoring would expose the fat under the skin to the heat.

Per the Cook's Illustrated technique coated the meat with a sugar/salt mixture on the bottom and sides, leaving the skin alone. This was placed, unwrapped, in the fridge overnight to flavor the meat and dry the skin.

The next day, I carefully placed them in as small a skillet as would contain them, and filled it with an affordable, quaffable white wine until it just came below the fat/skin height. If I had copious cider, I would have used that instead, but we saved Irene's homemade cider to serve with dinner.

This was placed in the oven, with the skin a couple inches below the broiler to cook. It took a fair while: the wine heated, cooking the flesh. The intense heat of the broiler first dried the skin, then it started to brown, and finally it began to bubble as the fat boiled, crisping the skin. I had to add a bit more wine part way through since evaporation dropped the level to a point where it was exposing the flesh.

I took it out when it looked about crispy-bubbly enough; I should have probably left it in longer. The wine protected the meat from overcooking, but there was still a hard, chitinous edge to the skin that wasn't ideal -- longer cooking should have caused the fat to puff more of the skin, until it became one big crackling.

I sliced each pork belly slice through the cuts that we made at the outset, then fanned them out on the plate for service. We paired them with Brussels sprouts and turnips that we roasted in the oven below the pan with the pork belly -- good cool-weather dinner.

Irene said the wine was too acidic; again, if we made a big batch of cider (or found some reasonably priced stuff that wasn't sickly sweet) I'd use that instead.

Jalapeño Cheese Bread and a Giant Boule

Out of the blue, my dad mentioned he liked jalapeño cheese bread. Why not make some? But I was in my parents' kitchen without my scales,  rising buckets and other paraphernalia.  But I made up a recipe and also one for a plain boule so I could use maximize the use of the oven's heat. They turned out quite well.

For both, I used a really high hydration (wet) dough so I could use the no-knead method I favor for flavor as well as laziness. Mix the ingredients together, put in a covered bucket (my mom's biggest pots), cover and refrigerate overnight (or three). I folded grated cheese and diced fresh jalapeños into one batch and left the other unadorned.  I gave them each a turn before going to bed, and another early in the morning.

Around noon, I  split the cheesy dough into thirds and shaped, and rose each in a mixing bowl nestled on a sheet of parchment paper; I shaped the unflavored dough into a giant boule in a big Le Cruset pot, also on parchment.  Both were left to rise two or three hours until the dough weakly sprung back from a poke in the side: the were risen enough but not too much.

I preheated the oven as high as it would go with three large pyrex mixing bowls and a giant ceramic crockpot insert inside it to get screaming hot, and when at temperature, carefully lowered the boules into their right-sized pots, using the parchment as a sling.  I covered them lightly with foil to retain moisture to encourage a lofty oven-spring.

They rose beautifully. After a half hour, I removed the foil to let them brown.   It's a ton of good bread and is going fast at the house.

This giant boule used 6 cups flour and is bigger than my head, or our giant Crypto. It's the most massive loaf I've made to date. 

Christmas 2015 Capon Stuffed with Duck, Sausage, Cherries

After watching Jacques Pepin's video of deboning a chicken ("it should take no more than one minute", hah!) we knew we wanted to do a ballotine -- a bird stuffed in a bigger bird. So for Xmas 2015, we asked M&P to pick up a capon (a castrated chicken, a very large bird) and a duck. We deboned the capon per Pepin's technique, and did likewise for the duck even though we didn't need to.

The deboning took at least 2 hours as the muscles and tendons of capons and ducks were much more developed than chickens, but we were practicing our technique. We separated the meat from the duck skin, and cooked up a log of pork sausage for the center. We laid out the sausage and duck meat on the opened deboned capon, then sprinkled with dried cherries.

We then rolled it up tight, ensuring the skin covered as much as we could, trussed it up tight and let it rest uncovered in the fridge overnight to ensure the skin was thoroughly dry to improve crispness.

The next day, we put it on an open rack over a shallow pan; it started breast side down since the white meat would tolerate less heat. We cooked it as low as the oven would go -- 170F; we were hoping to achieve an effect like we'd get with sous vide cooking: evenly cooked all the way through, avoiding drying out the exterior before the dense dark-meat ducky interior was thoroughly cooked. We had a temperature probe embedded in the center and watched it rise about 10F every half hour, and -- sure enough -- it rose from fridge temperature (maybe 35F) at noon to our target of about 165F at the designated dinner time of 6:00PM.

A blast under the broiler gave it a beautiful burnished look.

Then we cut off the strings and carved it for serving. Since it was cooked long and low (like sous vide) there was no need to rest it like conventional cooking. The meat held together well (even without transglutaminase, aka "meat glue") and maintained its shape.

Ed, Marge, Scott, Irene, Pat and I enjoyed it with roasted potatoes and green beans, and a gravy Irene elaborated from a stock she made from the bones. 

One disappointment we didn't expect was that capon skin is much thicker than chicken, so although it browned attractively, it was much too tough to chew through. This is definitely something we'd do again but I think we need a more domesticated bird to get the crisp skin.

Lime Frozen Yogurt Deconstructed Pie from Lucky Peach

We made this Lime Frozen Yogurt deconstructed pie from Lucky Peach magazine and really liked the zingy taste and rich body. The graham cracker crumbles were OK, but weren't so special. The lime yogurt froyo is fine as it is, or it makes a great key lime style pie. I'm taking it verbatim from their new web site, because I can never find it in my print magazine.


Makes 8 servings

LIME FROZEN YOGURT

2 C simple syrup
1/2 C + 2 T lime juice, strained
6 oz plain yogurt
3 1/2 oz sour cream
+ ice cream maker

MAKE THE LIME FROZEN YOGURT

Combine the yogurt ingredients—syrup, lime juice, yogurt, sour cream—in a large mixing bowl, and process with an immersion blender for one minute, until everything is completely homogeneous.

Churn the mixture in an ice cream machine for 20 minutes, or according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Freeze for at least a few hours, preferably overnight, before serving. Serve with graham cracker crumble and toasted meringue.