Archives Under "delicious" (RSS)
Ten Top.
22 April 2011 | chef, delicious, faithful readers, jack yoss, jeff, tentop | 4 Responses
As faithful readers know, I’ve cooked my whole working life. In my seventeen years of kitchen work, I’ve only had one job that wasn’t food related; driving a horse carriage in Vail. I still hesitate to call myself a Chef, as it is a moniker for which I hold much respect. Even though I’ve had the word in my title as pastry chef for a few years now, Chef with a capital “c” is something else altogether. Jack Yoss is a Chef. Compared to him I will always be a cook. Semantics aside, the gods have somehow seen fit to land me in a Chef role of sorts, and I couldn’t be happier. As Chef jobs go, this one is breezy. It’s an invite only pop up restaurant for ten people, hence the name. The counter at Kitchen Cru was just begging for this model, and why shouldn’t it be me who answers the call. I was able to convince Michael, the owner of KitchenCru and my employer to try. Him being far from a slouch in the kitchen, a very experienced home cook, in fact, he came on board as co-chef. TenTop was born. We had very keen ideas from the beginning about what this would be; very small; very exclusive, the two of us having fun with food and friends. The idea to implement a Twitter/Facebook update blackout came to us very early, my friend and mentor Adam Berger having suggested it. Make this a true experience, one that didn’t need validation from the internet. Any blogging, tweeting or Facebooking that took place would happen on our end, before and after the event.
Our first dinner was Satan’s Feast, a heavy metal themed dinner. I wanted to make it fun and have an element of another driving force in my life: music. The menu descriptions were cryptic, as I tried to make them sound as metal as possible. I played some Instrametal like Pelican and Animals as Leaders during the dinner which at a lower volume seemed quite nice to eat to. Our first course was a freshly shucked oyster, because what is more metal than eating something that was alive only moments before? Second was my favorite dish of the evening, poached leeks with and Arrabbiata vinaigrette and duchess potato garnished with fried pepperoni. A last minute course we put together before the entree turned out to be the most metal of all, chicken heart dipped in agro dulce served on a duplex nail with a shot of grappa. Our entree was a fra diavolo surf & turf sandwich with some chioggia beet chips. Served on a house made pullman loaf, this sando was something to behold. It didn’t eat as well as I hoped, it ended up being a little cumbersome. The flavors were spot on though, hell of decadent. For dessert, I looked to make pastry metal by using the most brutal ingredient of all, blood. A pig’s blood custard with lemon sherbet, smoked pickled cherries, and blood caramel. This was a successful dish, the flavor of pig’s blood goes quite well with cocoa, the panna cotta’s other main flavoring ingredient. A subtle coppery earthiness and a slightly viscous texture created a nice complexity.
All in all, our first dinner was a huge success. In the near future I’m going to be bringing in some buddies of mine, fellow cooks and sous Chef’s who want to unleash their own food on the public, but don’t have a venue because they work in another chef’s kitchen. Also, you’ll see plenty of these dinners blogged about here with pictures and recipes, a la mrjeffmccarthy.com. For now you can download the recipes here. Check out all the photos for this event on my Flickr page. Follow TenTop on twitter @tentopcru, or check out the facebook page.
Your Moms Baked Goods.
12 February 2011 | Your Moms', cookies, delicious, faithful readers | 10 Responses
Hey did you every wonder about that magic? That little light that helps you find your way home, to your heart of hearts? That spark that keeps you going, in spite of it all? That little magic that conjures itself, with nary a swish or flick, and serves to inspire you through your day, to keep you going? I’m not magic, I don’t even profess to do magic. What I do is barely science. But I can tell you what gets me through my day. Indulgence. At the very least the promise there of. That promise of that first cold beer, heads lifting and turning like meerkats at the tell-tale “shh-pck.” Or maybe it’s that perfectly cooked burger, piled high with fixins’ and oozing mayo like you know you want it to, all sexy like. Hell, maybe for you it’s peeing off the bridge on your walk home, but you know what I mean. Something you do just for you, like a midnight cookie dipped into a cold glass of milk in the refrigerator light.
Speaking of indulgence, and cookies for that matter, why not satisfy your need for both with a few late night flicks of the wrist? No, that’s not what I mean, you know; click the mouse. Oh just buy my shit.
As faithful readers know, I’m a recent inductee into that elite club of high earning loafers, the select few paid to merely “look” for work. This sudden extreme increase of free time has got me thinking. The not so distant past of my pastry chef profile, the state of fine dining in this economy and so forth, I mean Executive Pastry Chef? In Portland? There’s like two. What if I could strip away all the smoke and mirrors of fine dining and using the hairy diodes of the internet and put my pastry right in your very hands? Where to start? Would you buy it? Would you electronically transmit your hard earned money to get at that sweet indulgence that only I can provide, you faceless billions behind glowing screens everywhere? I mean you could be eating my cookies right now, if they were available online. This is how the idea for Your Mom’s Baked Goods came to me.
Why Your Moms? The obvious mom joke is already hanging there, like ripe, low-hanging fruit. Your Mom’s Cookies. Heh heh. Your Mom. This kind of facile low-brow humor comes so easily to my faithful readers that uttering it would only cheapen it. I thought, then why not make it also make it a tribute to Moms everywhere? I love my Mom, and you love yours, right? What group, other than babies, are so universally loved worldwide than mothers? And how many of them have inspired us to bake? My mother used to make us the most awesome birthday cakes. She used a box mix most of the time, but would spend hours decorating mounds of cake into Spider Man or something. I seem to remember an igloo cake at some point. Yeah, moms rule. So do my cookies. So would you buy ‘em? Let’s find out! This weekend at Tabla, where I was lucky enough to crash-land part time after losing my job; diners receive a free sample of my salted chocolate chip cookie. while supplies last. Hopefully, a good amount of people reading this scored one of those samples, and will show their support and feedback in the comments. Everyone else, let me know what you think of this whole venture. Follow the progress on twitter @yourmomsbaked
Copyright Infringement Pie.
15 December 2010 | Uncategorized, delicious, dessert, faithful readers, plated dessert, recipe | 6 Responses
This is the 200th post on mrjeffmccarthy.com!!
If you haven’t heard of Crack Pie, crawl out from under the rock you’ve been hiding under and Google the shit. I mean, this fucking thing is trademarked! Also, FYI: they brought back the McRib. Anyway here’s my version of the sucker, served with a sweet potato puree and toasted oatmeal ice cream. A simple garnish of ground honey roasted hazelnuts adds a crunch. The pastry is really similar to chess pie; or the more archaic Barbara Fritchie Pie, which to me tastes like pecan pie without the pecans. Faithful readers and newbies alike will appreciate the simplicity of this dessert, a nod to seasonality and old world pastry, it’s just fucking good. I recently traveled to New York to visit my family, and on our way back Shorty and I visited NYC and Momofuku Milk bar. We of course had the original crack pie, and it was damned good, and illuminating. You see, I had been over-baking mine, looking for it to be totally set. Miss Tosi pulls hers as it’s just starting to firm up, and serves it cold. I prefer a room temp treat, but if I baked it her way it would be an oozy mess. Anyway, I still take mine a bit further in the oven and still serve it room temp. Another tweak I…tweak is this: I substitute half of the brown sugar with muscavado sugar, and the butter with brown butter, both in the crust and in the filling. The molasses-y flavor of this almost ebony sweetener adds a nice bitter tone to an otherwise sticky sweet concoction. I also use a half sheet pan in lieu of the standard pie pan, because i like rectangles better then wedges. At the restaurant be call this this little bitch a Brown Sugar Bar, because I don’t want David Chang suing my ass. But look, if they were worried about me using the recipe, they wouldn’t have published the fucker in Bon Appetit The Ice cream we serve here was created by my pastry cook Liz Clements, who has since moved on to a full time pastry gig in a fancy restaurant. I’m sad to see her go, but proud to have her moving on up in the world. I also bit this recipe off her before she bounced so it’s all good. The sweet potato puree is piss easy, a simple process I learned from my Chef Michael: peel and slice the yams, cover ‘em with water, a little salt and a vanilla bean, and boil the shit out of them. When the water is almost completely evaporated, the potatoes should be completely cooked and ready to puree in your Vita-Prep. pass the mess through a tamis and cool to room temp before serving.
makes 2 half sheet pans
Crust
12 oz brown butter at room temp.
4 oz sugar
4 oz brown sugar
4 oz muscavado sugar
4 eggs
12 oz rolled oats
2 C A.P. Flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1. Preheat the oven to 325. Cream the butter and the sugars; add the eggs and scrape, you know the deal.
2. Add in the dry ingredients, and mix on low until dough just forms.
3. Spread the batter onto a full sheet pan in an even layer.
4. Bake until GBD
5. Cool completely and then crumble by hand. Then add:
8 oz brown butter
1 1/2 oz brown sugar
1 1/2 oz muscavado sugar
6. Mix by hand to form a crust like dough, similar to graham cracker crust.
7. Weigh the dough and divide it between two parchment lined pans. Press and roll the dough into an even layer. Set aside so you can make the
Filling
4 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 1/2 cups muscavado sugar
6 tblsp milk powder
12 oz brown butter, melted and cooled.
1 1/2 tsp salt
10 oz heavy cream
24 egg yolks
3 tblsp vanilla
1. Whisk together the first four ingredients well, break up any large clumps of sugar with your hands.
2. Add the melted cooled brown butter and whisk smooth. Add the remaining ingredients and whisk smooth.
3. Weigh the batter and divide it between the two pans. Bake until GBD and just set, the top will have a nice crust.
4. Cool completely before portioning and putting into your face.
Valrhona Flourless, Fernet Menta Caramel.
8 November 2010 | cake, chocolate, delicious, dessert, faithful readers, plated dessert | 5 Responses
So here we are again, another blog post and another version of the ever evolving flourless chocolate cake. Why do I continually return to this cake, faithful readers might ask? And why do I do so many mother loving chocolate desserts already? Well, my answer is this: I fucking love chocolate, and a flourless cake is a clean way to showcase it’s decadence. Served at room temperature this cake is smooth, rich as fuck, and chocolatey as a motherfucker. In the past I’ve typically made this cake with Cocoa Barry 64% and it was good. This past year I made the switch over to all things Valrhona and have never looked back. The recipe below uses a combination of Jivara 40% and Couer de Guanaja 80% chocolates. The result is a sweet and creamy smoothness with a nice strong bitter backbone. I bake the shit in thin layers and hit the bottom with a crunchy layer of milk chocolate and feuilletine, then glaze the top with a ganache of sorts and then the milk chocolate decorative lines. The cake itself is pretty standard, nothing I haven’t kind of done before. The blood orange ice cream, yeah…you’ve seen it before. The ice cream is perched on a simple chocolate tuile, which is stuck to the cake with an equally simple chocolate cremeaux. The real joy in this plate for me is in the sauce. Fernet Menta Caramel suckers!! Again, not a huge deviance from the formula here, kids. I been putting booze in caramel from the beginning. But this is Fernet, and I’ve been wanting to work it into a dessert forever. So here it is. Also garnishing the plate is a mint foam, and what I think is a nice, subtle use of the ubiquitous mint leaf.
Valrhona Chocolate Flourless Cake
!5 oz Valrhona Jivara 35%
7 oz Valrhona Couer de Guanaja 80%
12 oz butter
11.25 oz egg
9 0z sugar
4.5 oz water
1. Preheat your convection oven to 275 F and prepare the desired mold.
2. Melt chocolate and butter over a double boiler.
3. Whisk together the eggs, sugar and water.
4. When the chocolate and butter are melted, whisk in the eggs until thoroughly incorporated.
5. Pour into the prepared mold and bake in a covered water bath until just set, like a cheesecake.
To review the methodology for this recipe click here.
Fernet Menta Caramel
12 oz sugar
5 oz corn syrup
6 oz butter
1.25 cups heavy cream
1/2 cup Fernet Menta
1. Weigh the sugar and corn syrup into a heavy bottomed sauce pot. Caramelize according to your tastes.
2. Whisk in the butter, continue whisking until incorporated.
3. Whisk in the heavy cream until incorporated, return to a boil.
4. Pour the caramel through a strainer into a storage vessel.
5. When the caramel has cooled to room temperature, whisk in the fernet menta. Serve warm.
For the Blood Orange ice cream click here.
To see a video of me plating this bitch up, click here.
To see a video of a kitten riding a turtle, click here.
Creme Brulee Can Suck it.
26 September 2010 | custard, delicious, dessert, plated dessert | 22 Responses
Seriously, ordering a Creme Brulee is like purchasing a golden retriever. Have some fucking imagination. I mean, its like saying you favorite Simon &Garfunkel song is “The Boxer,” I have had it on my menu for so long for a couple reasons, first and foremost: It sells. People identify with it. Much like the golden retriever, it’s an easy out, you don’t have to think about it. Also, I have the molds, and I have the process down cold. I don’t even use a water bath to bake ‘em. I could caramelize a creme brulee in my sleep. In fact, I’ve often done so in my nightmares. You see there’s this snake in a vest rolling a big doughnut, and he’s standing over this table that goes on forever, with and endless supply of custard waiting to be torched. I always wake up screaming.
So enough ranting about custard that can suck it, let’s talk about something that is almost exactly the same but somehow different. It’s like the difference between spaghetti and penne. It’s made from the same ingredients; but is texturally different, it somehow “tastes” different. Pot de Creme and creme brulee are almost identical recipes. Sweetened dairy product thickened with eggs. One has a caramelized sugar crust and one does not. One is typically baked in a low flat dish and one in a cup or “pot.” One in my mind is totally played out and annoying, and one is pretty cool. Anyway, here’s a recipe. My method may seem overwrought and finicky, but it works every time.
Caramel Pot de Creme
yields 14 - 4 oz molds
Re: Tart.
18 September 2010 | blueberries, delicious, dessert, faithful readers, recipe | 8 Responses
A fruit tart is a ubiquitous pastry, as old school as it comes and typically sells really well on any menu. I’ve done them in the past and will no doubt do them in the future. The large varietal, the ten to twelve inch pastry shell loaded down with pastry cream and too much fruit, can basically blow me. Sure they look nice whole, but how do you get a clean slice out of an artful display of fruit that’s brushed with simple syrup or apricot glaze? I can’t. Best I can hope for is a mashed up mess of cookie, cream, and fruit. The precision baker loathes a large fruit tart, least ways one intended to eat. I can understand the exactitude required to make a showpiece, but you don’t eat a showpiece.
Now the individual variety, as pictured here, is something I can get behind. It arrives on your plate as a simple showcase of quality ingredients. In this case, the plate is smeared with a buttery lemon curd, the thin pate sucree shell next, a vanilla white chocolate mousse is piped in, Viridian Farms blueberries arranged, and then the cocaine. This is assembled a la minute and that is the key. When a tart of this nature is filled to far before it is meant to be eaten; the crust gets soggy, and faithful readers now that soggy crust is straight bullshit. So fill your fruit tarts to order or to hell with you. The recipe below I’ve used for years, is used without permission from one of my most beloved cookbooks: Desserts by Charlie Trotter.
Pate Sucree
Such as a Simple Cookie.
14 August 2010 | chocolate, cookies, delicious, faithful readers, recipe, shameless self promotion | 11 Responses
I hear the phrase “the best thing I’ve ever eaten” thrown around, and ultimately, I call bullshit. I mean the notion of “the best” is a fake idea. With subject like food which is completely psychological, The best? Well how many tacos have you eaten, faithful readers? How many burgers have you consumed? Have you eaten enough chocolate chip cookies to definitively say that that is the best? The tradition of chocolate chip cookies is well documented, and who the fuck are you to say “this is the best.” Who the fuck am I for that matter?
As I re-read that last paragraph I realize that I to, am full of shit. Because you know what? Sometimes things are simply “the best.” Like my chocolate chip cookies. I know, I know. But they are. It’s like the old adage says: “if one person calls you a horse, tell them he’s crazy. If twenty people call you a horse, go buy a fucking saddle.” And so I have started to believe the hype about these little god dammits. We give them away for free at the restaurant, as part of out mignardises program, if you have dinner. I go through about three or four hundred a week. People come back in to purchase the cookies for a dollar a piece, not bad for a nineteen cent cookie.
The recipe is based upon a now classic by the famous Jacques Torres. I first tasted these years ago, brought to work for sampling by a very close friend of mine. The most important step in this recipe is the aging the dough. Jacques suggests between 24 and 36 hours, and up to 72. I imagine that this process would improve upon almost any cookie recipe, the flavor and texture improved by hydrating the flour. I have been told recently that even cake batters can stand to sit and hydrate for a while, a few hours in the fridge improving the quality remarkably. But that guy also boiled gelatin with a snarky look and kept his sugar and eggs mixed together in the fridge. These are things that i cannot bring myself to do, even if the pastry chef from Valrhona says I should.
I improve upon Jacques recipe in two simple ways. I substitute muscovado sugar for half of the amount of brown, and I use both semi-sweet and milk chocolate pistoles. Almost as important as the aging the dough is the selection of chocolate. Pistoles, disks, or feves are a must, as they create s sort of layering of chocolate unique to the texture of this recipe. Think you might want to skip the sprinkling of sea salt on top? Don’t. These are the best for a reason, and salt is part of that reason. I believe Jacques likes fluer de sel and I prefer Maldon’s but any quality, coarse sea salt would work. Also, batters of this nature always come together nicer when all your ingredients are at room temperature, even the eggs. A note on baking: I typically am baking these from frozen in a 300 degree convection oven. I like to pull them when they just puff up, and just barely start to brown on the edges. These are little guys too, maybe a tablespoon of dough. At that size they take about 12 minutes, with one rotation halfway through baking. If you make them bigger, they’re going to take longer. Our Chef at the restaurant enjoys the dough frozen, and I always smile when he grabs a handful. This recipe makes A LOT!! it’s a rim-rider in my 600 pro-series Kitchen Aid. You might want to cut it in half.
The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies
Popcorn Ice Cream.
3 August 2010 | custard, delicious, dessert, faithful readers, recipe | 12 Responses
Does this look like barf to you? Does it remind you of that morning after close up you got of the contents of the toilet after that long night of too many PBRs and poor choices? Me too! But that’s not what it is. In fact, it’s popped popcorn infusing dairy product with its buttery goodness. Last year I had pretty good success with sweet corn ice cream in a blackberry float. The idea of a float on a summer dessert menu is always a welcome one to me, both refreshing and decadent if done right. So after several large bong hits and two bags of sour cream and onion potato chips I thought: “Dude…POPCORN…ICE CREAM!!”
To be honest, the process is quite easy and the results are quite rewarding. Sure, it takes three days. Sure it uses three bags of popcorn that you could have just eaten. But was Rome built in a day? Fuck no. Neither was a Raspberry Float. The frozen custard is smooth and creamy but toasty and buttery. It tastes just like it sounds. I decided to pair it with raspberries in the float, it just seemed natural, like raspberry cornbread. I wish the fucking thing sold better, I guess it just sounds too weird for people. Faithful readers know, though: I wouldn’t steer anyone wrong! I deal in delicious through and through people!! Now eat the shit!
Popcorn Ice Cream (makes a shit ton)
3 bags popcorn (no “light” bullshit. Use something that sounds bad for you.)
6 cups half & half
2 cups heavy cream
16 oz sugar
1 cup glucose powder (optional)
16 egg youlks
More half & half as needed
1. Pop two of the bags of popcorn and place in a large sauce pot. Add the half & half and heavy cream. Bring to a boil and cover, then kill the heat. Steep for thirty minutes.
2. Transfer to an airtight container and refrigerate overnight. Next day, pour the whole barfy mess into a chinoise and use the back of a ladle to push as much of the liquid through as possible.
3. Re-measure the cream and make up any difference with half & half. Pop the final bag of popcorn and place it in your large sauce pot. Add the popcorn milk and BTAB. Cover and kill the heat, Steep for thirty minutes.
4. Strain the dairy (use the ladle to push) again and re-measure. Make up any difference with half & half. Return to a pot and create a custard with the sugar and egg yolks. Review how to do this here, be sure to read the footnote.
5. Pour the custard into an airtight container and refrigerate over night to ripen the flavors.
6. Next day strain the custard again and spin it in an ice cream machine according to the manufacturer’s instructions.
You could serve this in a float, or simply in a bowl with berries and caramel corn. Have your friends over and surprise the living shit out of them with your culinary prowess. I promise, there will be no barfing.
The Best Apple Cake in 47 Years of Cooking.
17 March 2010 | cake, delicious, dessert, nuts, plated dessert | 7 Responses
So one day I was thinking I’d make an apple cake. Since I had never really made an apple cake, I turned to my good buddy Google and soon found this recipe on Group Recipes. Kate and I had gotten a Bakers Edge pan for Christmas and on a chilly winter evening soon after I first tried the Best Apple cake In 47 Years of cooking recipe. At the restaurant I churched up this simple, outstanding, breakfasty cake into something a bit more. Maybe another 47 years? Who can say without the benefit of time travel. The genius of the cake is it’s basic nature. A true quick bread leavened with both eggs and baking soda you really just kind of mix it all up; not much to it. When it comes out of the oven, let it sit for a few minutes ad then glaze it with the brown sugar glaze. The smell stirs one to salivation, heads turn and sniff, they sniff-sniff. I actually have a bit of a thing for the raw batter. So anyway, give it a try. I change up the recipe a little from the original: where it says 3 cups of apples I just slice three apples, Also and I brown the butter in the glaze before adding the sugar and cream. At the restaurant I leave out the walnuts so people with “nut allergies” can order it too. I get back at them by serving it with toasted walnut ice cream, sage caramel, brown butter struesel and candied walnuts. I fucking love walnuts. The sage powder is I cool trick I learned working with Chef Eric Suniga, a man of true kitchen prowess. Pick a bunch of sage, pile up the leaves, and roll into into a blunt with plastic wrap. Freeze rock solid and micro plane at service.
The Best Apple Cake in 47 Years of Cooking.
The Bomb.
11 February 2010 | Europe, chocolate, delicious, dessert, faithful readers, pastries, plated dessert, recipe | 6 Responses
A fucking bomb went off! Chocolate flourless cake, salty caramel core, milk chocolate shell and blood orange ice cream. The dessert is inspired by a pastry I had in Paris, from the shop of the revered pastry Chef Pierre Herme. It was a bombe, tempered shell and caramel core, I enjoyed it on a park bench in Luxembourg gardens. Mr. Herme ingeniously used a macaron base, his desserts were all marked by inventive skill and imagination. I employ a compressed devil’s food cake sealed with icing to seal in the oozing salty caramel, just a candle held towards Chef Pierre’s brilliance. The milk chocolate shell is just that, tempered 38% milk chocolate. Here’s a recipe for my faithful readers.
Blood Orange Ice Cream
2 cups milk
2 cups blood orange puree
1 1/2 cups sugar
4 oz butter
pinch o’ salt
2 cups heavy cream
3/4 cup egg yolks
P.S. See this in the Willamette Week?
