Archives Under "pastries" (RSS)
The Bomb.
11 February 2010 | Europe, chocolate, delicious, dessert, faithful readers, pastries, plated dessert, recipe | 5 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?
Cake Donuts.
26 January 2010 | Ten 01, delicious, dessert, pastries, plated dessert | 4 Responses
2010: The Future is Now.
7 January 2010 | Ten 01, cake, delicious, dessert, faithful readers, pastries, plated dessert, recipe | 5 Responses
Two thousand and motherfucking TEN?!? The future is now my faithful readers. I command the powers of the internet in my pants. I make ice cream base in an immersion circulator. As a race we fringe on symbiosis with technology; and I can’t wait to realize this next phase of evolution. Anyway, I been busy as shit. The holidays kicked my ass; and with in-laws in town and hell of prep, plating and me plowing through it all it went by in a pop! Shit 2009 was a pop, a bang, a blast, dice cast and rolled and truth be told past year was fucking fast. I turned thirty, I got married, I’ve become a half way decent pastry chef and an annoying blogger. I’ve made some bad-assed desserts and also learned some killer savory food. Pretty standard actually. Looking to the new year, I’m hoping to step up my game. Turn it up to eleven so to speak. I just need to work harder, cleaner. The desserts will be smaller, more precise. Flavors? Louder. Here’s a recipe bitches. I adapted it from one of the best recipes I’ve learned in a long time.
Graham Cracker Sponge Cake
250 g soft butter
375 g sugar
5 g salt
6 eggs
375 g fine ground graham cracker crumbs.
7.5 g baking powder
100 g A.P. flour
1. Preheat your convection oven to 300 F. Spray and line with parchment one half sheet pan.
2. Cream the butter, sugar and salt light and fluffy in the bowl of a stand mixer.
3. Weigh the crumbs, baking powder, and flour into a bowl and whisk them together well.
4. Add the eggs 2 at a time, allowing the batter to fully absorb each addition of eggs. Scrape the bowl twice during this step.
5. Scape the bowl again and add the dry ingredients all at once. Mix the batter on low speed until homogeneous.
6. Transfer the batter to the prepared pan and bake 12 minutes, rotate the pans, and bake an additional 6 to 8 minutes, or until golden brown and springy. Use as a base for a no bake cheesecake or serve it warm with a cream cheese ice cream.
Design Process.
12 July 2009 | Ten 01, dessert, faithful readers, pastries, plated dessert | 5 Responses
I’m a bit of a hack, I must admit. I mean sure, I got skills. I’ve got brains. I have a strong undestanding of proper technique, yeah I’ve baked some shit. I know custards, cookies, cakes, and muffins, I’m sure I could puzzle out a turkey stuffins. The chessecake hand is strong, the bread pudding, people don’t shut up about it. What I’m trying to say here kids is I’ve cooked a bit, I’ve spent some time baking. Having said all that, I’m kind of a hack. I hack my way through plated desserts. I’m like a blunt instrument swung lamely; a dull machete rampage in a chandelier shop. When it comes to innovation, creativity, style, I’ve got a lot to learn. I don’t have an original bone in my body. Most of the things I do are bit off someone else, twisted and forced through the filter of someone in the one to five years of experience demographic. I’m getting better, I think I might be starting to figure it out. I Google ideas. I read cookbooks, magazines. I try and eat dessert when I go out. I write shit down a lot. Well these days, I just tap it in. I’ll be on the bus or my bike or whatever and suddenly I’ll think: Grilled Zucchini Bread with Root Beer Ice Cream!! Into myPhone it goes. I’ve always drawn plates, shapes and squiggles sometimes reverse engineering shapes into flavors. I like to bounce my ideas off Kate because she has a keen eye for design. She taught me “plan view;” brilliant!. I try to come up with something that looks cool and eats well. I shoot for ninety percent Damn That’s Good and ten percent How’d He Do That? Most times, it works. I’ve been hammering out a new summer menu, and I think these are some bad-assed desserts. I’ve been working with a consultant who asked to remain anonymous, suffice to say this person is a also bad-assed. One of the best pastry chef’s I have worked with, this person has forced me to create outside my comfort zone, deviate from my normal menu formula. Oregon produce is so good right now, fruit is everywhere on this one. Changing desserts this week; stay tuned for more my faithful readers.
Devil’s Food Cake with Dulce de Leche Mousse.
27 April 2009 | Ten 01, chocolate, creative presentation of the week, delicious, faithful readers, pastries, plated dessert, recipe | 8 Responses
in possibly my best effort in plated dessert design to date, I give my faithful readers this fucking thing. Hopefully, the plate exudes a clean elegance, peppered with a touch of how’ did he do that? Well, I’ll tell you. The sponge cake base is a classic Devil’s Food cake recipe that I found in one of my new favorite cookbooks, Dessert Fourplay by Johnny Iuzzini. The recipe calls for mayonnaise, which tickles me, and keeps the cake super-moist. The science of that is kind of obvious: cake batters have eggs and oil, mayo is eggs and oil emulsified. On top of the sponge cake I pipe a chocolate icing that I found the recipe for on the best food site ever, IDEAS IN FOOD. The icing calls for sweetened condensed milk (like the dulche,) and balsamic vinegar to blend with dark chocolate. The sticky icing has a nice subtle acid note, a quiet personality. On top of the icing is a thin piece of tempered chocolate, a nice thin snappy-crunch. I’ve seen garnish this used a lot; especially in Parisian pastry shops. With the help of my ChocoBot, some marble slabs, and some precise cuts, this process proved to be quite easy. Just like Salted Caramel Sauce, easy peasy-smack-a-jeezy. Really, the only semi-difficult element to this dish is the dulce de leche mousse. The recipe it self is no brain-tease; just a spin on a white chocolate mousse. In fact, I was originally going to use caramelized white chocolate, but decided the laborious process wasn’t worth the taste. It tastes like dulce, so why not just use dulce? Making dulce de leche is not hard, just kinda weird. Take a few cans of sweetened condensed milk, place them in a large pot (yes in the can.) Fill the pot with water, be sure to cover the cans by a few inches. Bring the water to a boil, and keep boiling for 3 to 4 hours. Keep a bucket of water nearby to refill the water as it evaporates. After 4 hours, kill the heat and dump out the water. Cover the cans with ice to cool them off. When cooled, open the cans and enjoy the dulceness. I know this sounds strange, but it’s way easier than the traditional method. So here’s the hard part, molding the cylinders. Not really hard I guess, just time consuming. I’ve seen Michael Laiskonis of Le Bernardin make cool cylnders on his blog, and always wanted to try it. After a month of experimenting, I have a process. There’s got to be a better way, but here’s how I do it. Take your cannoli forms and line one side of each mold with tin foil. Stand them upright in a six pan or secured with a rubber band on a sheet tray. Line each mold with acetate, the thin clear plastic stuff. When the mousse is ready, pipe it into the molds. Freeze them shits rock hard, at least 3 hours, better to do it overnight. \Demold the mousse and plate while frozen, and thaw in the fridge on the plates. Serve with desired components. Or wrap them shits.
Dulce De Leche Mousse
4 1/2 sheets of gelatin.
1 1/4 cups heavy cream
1 lb 5 oz Dulce de Leche
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
1. Bloom the gelatin in cold water.
2. Weigh the dulce de leche into a bowl. Bring the first measurement of cream to a boil, and then pour it over the ducle. Drain and add the gelatin. Whisk to combine. Or use an immersion blender.
3. Allow the mixture to cool to room temperature. Meanwhile, whip the second measurement of cream to soft peaks.
4. Fold in the cream gently. Pipe into desired molds, or just into a martini glass. Chill until set and enjoy.
Back in the Day.
10 February 2009 | chef, pastries, pictures | 2 Responses
Pictured above are two younger men, at a time that seems like a forever ago. Myself and my old friend and mentor Chris Boos, whom I’ve recently gotten reaquainted with He posted some pics on Facebook that I had to get up here. These were taken at the 131st Salon of Culinary Arts in New York in 1999. Chris was the captain the culinary team at Mohonk Mountain House, where we worked. Everyone on the team won first prize for thier work, myself included. Pictured below is my gold-medal winning sugar showpiece, which I called The Winemaker. I remember as we were sliding the glass dome over it, the arm broke off and sugar shattered everywhere. Chris, fortunately, had brought his entire sugar shop with him. We had the piece fixed and back on the table in no time. I learned a powerful lesson that day about preparedness, and also about never giving up. Just one of the numerous lessons I learned working with this talented Chef. He was my first mentor in the pastry biz, and I owe a large part of my success to him. 
More Eating.
11 June 2008 | Europe, delicious, eating, food, pastries | No Responses
In Beaune, France, I visited a real pastry shop. Near our hotel there was a spot with delicious smelling individual pastries, all smart and clean and made similar modular molds and built in frames. I bought a triple chocolate mousse cake. The delicate chocolate garnish on top caught my eye, and the barely gelatine-ized mousses melted easily in my mouth. I felt myself getting closer to Paris as I ate my little cake in the park. My mecca of food and cooking was on the next horizon. I felt it all deep-like. We visited the local cheese shop, the smell of moldy funk filling the air, the streets. Viva fucking France, Man!! For lunch, we wandered an open air market We bought cheese, bread, tapanade, and fruit. We ate by the merry-go-round and people watched. Our dinners were good in Beaune, everything from snail shaped foie to burger and fries and carpaccio. We played cards at night and talked while drinking local wine. We woke early one morning and boarded a train to Paris. I knew soon I would be eating at Pierre Herme’s shop, the epicenter of my pastry dreams. A few days later, in a jewelery shop style setting, precise desserts were handed to me by white gloved employees who openly mocked my poor French. OK, maybe they didn’t have white gloves, but I couldn’t get my mind around this perfect pastry shop. I could barely take it in. I was all jittery, starstruck. Perfect soldier-like rows of macrons and chocolate masks. 60 euro boxes of truffles and what looked like loaves of quick-bread. I ended up buying a chocolate dome called Plentitude and two macarons. The two cookies we ate while walking through the Tuileries Gardens outside the Louvre. One cookie was olive oil, the other salted caramel. Kate found a huge wrought iron spider. Later, inside the Musee Dorsay, I ate the chocolate mousse dome. We saw several great paintings and cool sculptures. I saw paintings by Van Gogh and Degas. Pierre Herme’s mousse cake left a more lasting impression than either. Fractal shapes of uber-thin chocolate fit into a seemingly random pattern, covering the dome. Underneath, a glossy ganache coated a luscious dark chocolate mousse and a crisp cookie base. I went back a second time, and bought more delicious stuff. More macarons of course, and in Luxembourg Gardens, I ate another dome. This one had a creamy salty caramel center and milk chocolate mousse. A chocolate macaron made a base for the tempered chocolate hemisphere. I have got to get me one of them molds. I also visited Laduree in Paris, and had a fine meal. Seared Foie with crisp brioche and foie fat. Veal Sweetbreads with parsnip puree. Kate had Scallops with Black Rice. My first taste ever of sweebreads left me drooling and the foie was cooked perfectly. Kate cleaned her plate and we ordered dessert. An opera cake sort of, and a chocolate passion fruit tart. Both were cleanly executed and delicious…but I still had Pierre Herme’s in tongue-memory. The macarons we bought on the way out weren’t nearly as good. I could feel myself getting fatter and I didn’t care.
Eating in Italy Part I.
2 May 2008 | Europe, food, pastries | 7 Responses
In Malcesine (Mal-CHEE-see-nay,) Italy, we had the most amazing pastries. I think technically they were cookies, made from some kind of short dough, but there they called them Balls of Snow. Sure I had pizza and pasta, but it wasn’t until I ate these things that I knew I was in for some really interesting food. Balls of Snow are apparently only available in Malcesine, and can be a little tricky to eat. From what I could taste, this was a butter cookie of some sort, that while still warm from the oven was slathered with a filling and rolled into a ball. Then once cooled, a topping or glaze was added. After I started stuffing my face, it didn’t matter, they were brilliant, and fun to eat. I had other pastries in Italy, none that really stick out in my mind. Eating there was all about showcasing fresh ingredients, and this really came through on the savory side of things. In Limone, I had pizza that was so simple, yet so perfect, it left me speechless. Well, more like slurping, but you get the idea. One of our best meals was in Bellagio, at a little place called Barchetta. We walked up this little stairway/sidewalk, sat in the sun and had the lunch of a life time. We had bruscetta, then I had the Gorgonzola Gnocci, and Kate Spaghetti Carbonara. We washed it down with a 4 euro carafe of wine and were absolutely sated. I went inside to pay the bill and tipped the cook directly for an amazing meal. It was so good, that night we went back for dinner. At 7 pm, the dining room above the street opens up, and they serve even more good food. We shared a plate of Pan Fried Lake trout over Parmesan Rissotto, and of course more cheap wine. Our dessert was creme brulee (below,) but not in the traditional presentation. The custard was quenelled onto the plate and bruleed in a free-form way…on the black plate it looked sharp. Kate looked at me with that special look she’s got, and we knew we’d had another great meal. It was just enough to push us into a full fledged food coma. We slept like babies that night. Fat babies.
