So as my true faithful readers know, I will self promote the shit out of myself, least ways as much as any lazy man would.  But this week, I don’t have to!! In yet another demonstration of this city’s undying and ever pounding lust for all things McCarthy, the Willamette Week Restaurant guide had some very kind words to say about yours truly in their review of Ten-01. Now lets take a look, shall we:

Ten 01’s secret weapon is pastry chef Jeff McCarthy, whose highbrow stoner desserts are addictive. His Valrhona chocolate trio—a light malted milkshake, crazy-rich bittersweet torte and dense sorbet decorated with rice puffs—is freakin’ ridiculous.

Upstairs it’s all about the soup, pork loin and anything McCarthy makes.

Kelly Clarke Willamette Week

Ah yes, the Willamette Week has been kind to me once again, and once again I will regurgitate their words onto this blog in order to make you all aware that someone out there, somebody gets what I’m doing, even if i don’t a good portion of the time.  Let’s see what was said about desserts at Tabla, where I also make the sweets in collaboration with Chef Anthony Cafiero.

…the dessert menu, which has options both rich (chocolate truffle cake) and perfect for summer (a lemon poundcake with blueberries and lemon mascarpone).

Michael Mannheimer Willamette Week

In all seriousness, it sure is nice to have a little validation, a little pat on the back, a little “Nice work, Champ!” every once in awhile.  Do I care that the description of the dessert was a little off? Not really.  The milkshake is not malted at all, the misuse of the word “torte” is flagrant, and the sorbet is garnished with toasted baguette, not “rice puffs,” but hey, do I care?  Not a single iota.  Fact is, the desserts are being enjoyed.  People are thinking and writing about them, so color me happy as shit folks.  Thanks to all who ate and enjoyed, and even to those who ate and criticized, for without you I would not get any better at what I do.   Also, ironically, the cover of this years WW Restaurant Guide is graced by none other than the lovely Miss Ingrid Chen, with whom I am in close relation.

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

2 1/2 lb all purpose flour

3 tsp baking powder

2 1/2 tsp baking soda

3 tsp salt

1 lb 4 oz butter at room temperature

10 oz muscovado

10 oz brown sugar

1 lb granulated sugar

4 eggs

4 tsp vanilla

1 1/4 lb chocolate pistoles (64%)

1 1/4 lb milk chocolate pistoles (38%)

fluer de sel for sprinkling

Instructions:

• Sift the flour, baking soda, baking powder and set aside.

• Cream the butter and sugars in the bowl of a stand mixer until light and fluffy, at least ten minutes.

• Add the eggs on at a time, scraping after the second and final egg. Add vanilla.

• Sift in the dry ingredients and mix until well combined.

• Add in the chocolate and mix until it is evenly dispersed in the batter.

• Transfer the dough to a sheet pan and wrap tightly. Refrigerate for 36 hours.

• Preheat the oven to 350. Scoop the cookies to desired size and place evenly on a parchment lined sheet pan. Sprinkle each cookie with a touch of fleur de sel.

• Bake until golden brown but still soft, 15 to 18 minutes. Cool slightly before serving.

Hello! I recently found your site online and have become somewhat obsessed. I’ve looked through all your plated desserts and they are beautiful! I am currently enrolled in culinary school as a prospective pastry chef and found your recipe for the chocolate whiskey cake! I am actually making this at school right now for our plated desserts in the restaurant on campus (inspired by your post.)  I just wanted to let you know that its genius. I switched out makers mark for Evan Williams (sour mash) and it tastes amazing!  So I guess I’m writing to thank you for having an awesome blog and such in depth directions and whatnot. not only do I get a giggle out of your words, but I’ve learned a lot! Keep it coming!

This is a variation of one of my older recipes, literally the first dessert I made at ten-01. I learned this one from Tony, of course, and I’ve been tweaking it ever since.  If you review the earlier version, you’ll notice a few changes in the recipe below.  Firstly, the weights have changed.  Somewhere along the line, while converting it for various applications, I skewed the amounts.  The newer proportions reflect just how many times I’ve made this recipe, how many times I’ve observed it’s subtleties.  Chef actually improved upon its technique by mistake while I was in Europe.  Anyway, here’s whats changed and why.

This recipe contains all my favorite ingredients; butter, chocolate, eggs, sugar, and booze.  I was taught to melt the butter and chocolate over a double boiler Then whisk together the sugar and the eggs.  Then, when the chocolate was melted, everything was whisked together with the booze and baked in a water bath in ten inch cake pans.  When baked and thoroughly cooled we glazed them with a one to one ganache and sliced them in 16 portions.  Onto a marble and out to the buffet.   Simple and decadently effective.  The main trick then (and now) was knowing when to pull them from the oven.  They never really look baked, all loose and jiggly.  It’s still a kind of leap of faith for me when I pull them.  I find myself touching them every five minutes until they cool and solidify.

At Carlyle this recipe started to evolve.  The original recipe, just cut in half, was giving me some great results. I realized at this point how similar this cake was to cheesecake, and I treat cheesecake like a custard. I started baking it at a  lower temperature, and turning off the oven for the last half hour of baking.  A thick, fudgey texture was my reward.  I started trying different molds, and building up creamy layers.  The best version at those times was with passionfruit, I wanted to call it Sexual Chocolate.

For my tasting at ten-01, I baked the cake in a small ring mold and served it with brown butter ice cream.  It was over the top rich and showed I wasn’t afraid to knock people unconscious with chocolate.  At least that’s what I kept telling myself as they ate it (”They don’t hate you, they don’t hate you, they don’t even KNOW you, man!”)  I got the job, needless to say, and the cake ended up on the first menu.  I started to bake it in frames around this time, and that marks the first change in the recipe’s proportions.  Every time I pulled the 1/2 sheet cakes from the oven, the tops were just pooled with butter.  I think this happened because the cakes where to big to cook through before basically breaking.  I tried varying oven temperatures, mixing techniques, and finally ended up just reducing the amount of butter.  The cake had a slightly more crumbly texture but was still dense and fudgy.  Chef suggested I started serving the cake at room temperature. Chef knows a lot about food.  Much like cheese, the cake was way better at room temp. He actually improved upon the recipe by mistake, confusing the bread pudding technique with this one and whipped it on high speed for over 15 minutes. The cake melted in the mouth, inducing groaning.  This version of the cake sold really well. It seemed like it was around forever.  I started to get bored with it.  I replaced it with another Tony Classic and tried to forget about it.

Fast forward three or four menus.  The servers are clamoring for a rich, knock-out chocolate dessert.  The stupid Guinness brownie thing just wasn’t working.  Marble Cheesecake? Yeah, kind of, but not quite.  Scouring the internet for ideas,  I came across this.  The tenth item on McCormick’s 2008 Flavor Forecast was rubbed sage and rye whiskey.  Things started to click into place in my mind; the hamster running in its wheel turned the lock’s tumblers to open my mind on a new idea.  I knew whiskey and chocolate worked.  Would I use whiskey in the cake or in the sauce?  I knew how to make a kick-ass mint ice cream, would it work with sage? And would it go with the rich fudginess of the cake?   As it turns out, it does.  Famously.  I remember standing in the walk-in waiting for the ice cream base to cool down enough to spin.  I had some whiskey caramel left over form the Guinness brownie.  I spooned the caramel into my mouth followed by the sage base.  Closing my eyes, nodding, I reached to the top shelf for a beer…it was time to celebrate.

“Oh wait…” I thought, “…it’s only 6:30.”  I started straight away making a batch of flourless chocolate cake. Scanning over the ingredients, I encountered a problem.  I’ve only made this recipe with alcohol.  It’s always been whiskey, or Grand Mariner or Bailey’s or something.  I knew this recipe really well and just knew that I had to come up something to use in the place of whiskey, 3/4 of a cup of what, dammit, air?  Suddenly it hit me.  Water.

This batch of cakes,  baked in my handy new flexipans, was one of the best I’ve created.  Fudgy, of course, but the main flavor was chocolate. Not booze, but chocolate.  Water made this possible.  Having worked in pastry for a few years, this really struck me.  Water, the arch-nemesis of chocolate, was helping me showcase chocolate in this recipe.  Sometimes when things seem weird at first, proper handling can produce fantastic results.  Water is now my new favorite ingredient.  Even chocolate isn’t scared anymore. I  even used the two together it in the mirror glaze.  Anyway, enough of my jawing, here’s the recipes for my faithful readers, and also for the readers of the Willamette Week, who will find this cake in the October 15th Restaurant Guide.

Chocolate Flourless Cake

1 pound 14 ounces chocolate (64%)

1 pound 8 ounces butter

15 ounces eggs

15 ounces sugar

3/4 cup water

1.  Pre-heat your convection oven to 200 F.

2.  Weigh the chocolate into a bowl and set aside.

3.  Weigh the butter into a sauce pot, and bring it to a boil.

4.  Weigh the eggs and butter into the bowl of a stand mixer and whip light and fluffy.

5.  Pour the boiling butter over the chocolate, give the bowl a shake and a spin and let stand two minutes.

6.  Whisk the chocolate until smooth.

7.   Fold the whipped eggs into the  melted chocolate, then fold in the water.

8.   Pour the batter into the flexipans and bake in a water bath until set, about 30 minutes.

9.  Cool properly and chill thoroughly before demolding and glazing.

Mirror Glaze

1/2 cup corn syrup

1/2 cup heavy cream

9 ounces chocolate

enough hot water to reach desired consistency

1.  Weigh the chocolate into a bowl.

2.  Measure the corn syrup and heavy cream into a sauce pot and bring to a boil.

3. Pour the boiling cream over the chocolate, give the bowl a shake and a spin and let stand two minutes.

4. Whisk the chocolate until smooth.

5.  Whisk in enough hot water to make the glaze loose and pour easily.

Assembly- Set the de-molded  cakes on a glazing rack and ladle the hot glaze over the cakes.  Chill the cakes and apply a second coat.  Serve at room temperature with Sage Ice Cream and Whiskey Caramel.

I wanted to write rap song and wear gold chains and shit but instead I’ll just post these images. A little self-promotion never hurts. My faithful readers know, I’m humble as shit. Above is Baking and Pastry North America. I’m in the same magazine as Pierre Herme and Claire Clark, the pastry chef at the French Laundry. I guess I’m in good company. Remember this dessert? Funny how things work themselves out. Really I have my sister-in-law Keri to thank for this. Her picture of those funnel cakes is gorgeous. The other article is from Bon Appetit. Yeah it’s only two sentences. Fucking Bon Appetit!! Thanks everyone. A lot has happened for me at Ten-01. The life of a cookie baker is a wild ride.