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Chocolate Tart and Texas Hold ‘Em

October 30, 2011 //
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Yesterday was all about the snow storm. It seemed to come from out of nowhere: beginning at 11 am Brooklyn began its transformation from mid-fall stupor to winter wonderland. The snow came down fast and hard and blanketed New York City with three inches by the evening.

Last night, despite the inclement weather, eight of us made it to poker in Fort Greene. I decided I’d bring a dessert—it was a perfect day after all for staying inside with the oven on—and landed on a chocolate tart recipe by the trusty David Lebovitz. But first I needed to pick up the few ingredients I didn’t already have on hand (the chocolate, for one), and a tart mold.

I’ve been needing a tart pan for ages so ran into Whisk on Bedford Ave. Whisk is a great kitchen supply store that opened in Williamsburg maybe two years ago and carries top of the line everything. Yuji double-parked out front and I ran in prepared to wince at the price tag and fork over my Visa. But it would be worth it, I thought, for a delicious chocolate tart! Well wasn’t I pleasantly surprised when the mold turned out to be a reasonable $8.99. And the icing on the cake? Christina Tosi, the Wonka-esque pastry chef, was in the back room signing copies of her new book, Momofuku Milk Bar, released this fall by Clarkson Potter.

Given the freezing rain and general freakishness of the weather I was not surprised to find her hanging out with just a couple of Whisk employees, sitting around shootin the you-know-what, without many groupies in sight. I went up and introduced myself and then helped myself to two of her famous cake truffles, birthday cake and dulce de leche. Only three letters to describe those things: O-M-G. I flipped through the book, thanked her for her pastry wizadry and dashed back out into the freezing rain, into the warmth of the Volvo. It was an auspicious beginning to the tart-making.

Back at the ranch, I began by making the pastry, for which I also used the recipe from David’s blog. It really was quite an easy job, requiring neither a stand mixer or electric appliance of any kind. He has a funny post here describing how he came to this particular recipe. You put butter, vegetable oil, water, sugar, and salt into an oven-proof bowl and place that in a hot oven for about fifteen minutes. You take it out, add the flour, and voila, there is your pastry, ready to roll out into the tart shell.

Using the heel of your hand you press the dough into the tart mold. You bake this in the oven to a golden brown before inserting your filling.

The filling is all about bitter chocolate. But first actually you make caramel on the stovetop, melting the sugar until it is a liquid, sweet gold, and then fold in your chocolate. Buy good quality bittersweet and unsweetened chocolate. The recipe also calls for adding 6 tbsp of coffee and just a tsp of vanilla extract. You pour the mixture into your cooled tart dough and then pop it back into the oven.

The resulting tart tasted hardly sweet; with the deep dark notes of the caramel, coffee, and chocolate, it was a nice ending to our pre-poker dinner of braised short ribs, polenta, and broccoli rabe. I was lucky the tart turned out well, but not quite as lucky at poker. In the end I only lost $6 though.

French Pastry Dough
Adapted from Paule Caillat of Promenades Gourmandes and David Lebovitz

3 oz (90 g) unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1 tbsp vegetable oil
3 tbsp water
1 tbsp sugar
1/8 tsp salt
1 rounded cup (150 g) flour

Preheat the oven to 410º F (210º C).

1. In a medium-sized ovenproof bowl, combine the butter, oil, water, sugar, and salt.

2. Place the bowl in the oven for approximately 15 minutes, until the mixture begins to bubble and just starts to brown.

3. Remove from the oven, being very careful not to burn yourself on the hot bowl. Stir the flour in quickly, until it comes together and forms a ball.

4. Transfer the dough to a 9-in. (23 cm) tart mold with a removable bottom and, with the heel of your hand, press it evenly into the bottom and sides. If the dough is still hot you can wait until it cools to handle. Reserve a small bit of dough for later in case you need it for patching up any cracks.

5. Prick the dough all over with the tines of a fork (about ten times) to prevent the dough from puffing up, and bake the tart shell in the oven for 12-15 minutes. Keep an eye on it so it doesn’t burn. You want the dough to be golden brown.

6. Remove from the oven and patch any cracks with the reserved dough if necessary. Let the shell cool before filling.

Chocolate Tart
Serves 8-10

1 1/4 c (250 g) sugar
6 tbsp (90 ml) warm coffee
4 oz (115 g) unsalted butter, cubed, at room temperature
pinch of salt
4 oz (115 g) bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped
2 oz (55 g) unsweetened chocolate, chopped
2 large eggs
1/4 c (35 g) flour
1 tsp vanilla extract (or 1 tbsp dark rum)

1. Lower the oven temperature to 350ºF (180ºC).

2. Spread the sugar in an even layer in the bottom of a large, heavy-duty saucepan or Dutch oven. Cook the sugar over moderate heat, stirring occasionally with a heatproof utensil, until it begins to liquify. Take care, as caramel can splatter and burn.

3. Once the sugar is melted it will caramelize quickly. When it begins to smoke turn off the heat and stir in the coffee. (You may want to avert your face and be sure to wear oven mitts!) Then add the butter and salt, stir until melted, then stir in both chocolates until smooth.

4. Once the mixture has cooled just a bit, mix in the eggs, then add the flour. Stir in the vanilla extract or rum.

5. Pour the mixture into your pre-baked tart shell then bake for about 15 minutes, just until the filling starts to rise and crack at the edges but the center is still jiggly. Do not overbake.

Remove from the oven and let cool completely before slicing.

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Categories Chocolate, Coffee, Desserts, Entertaining, Fall, Pastry

Trading Summer for Fall

October 1, 2011 //
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Fall officially began last Friday, and October begins today. So along with trading my floppy moccasins for leather boots, I’m trading my summer ice cream fetish for hot chocolate. During the warm months I have a thing for ice cream—it’s hard for me to walk by a yellow Van Leeuwen truck or any gelataria without sampling the goods. And then as soon as the weather turns cool all of a sudden I have no problem passing up a cone of mint chocolate chip or a cup of black sesame, say. But I just trade one habit for another.

Now I have to avoid the stretch of 18th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues to avoid City Bakery lest I indulge in a daily splurge of their famous liquid chocolate (yes it’s made from melted chocolate bars). Luckily I no longer work near either of Jacques Torres‘s locations in Dumbo or West SoHo so that settles that.

Well a hot chocolate habit can get pretty expensive—at nearly $5 a pop at Pain Quotidien (a stone’s throw from my office) and $3 at Pret (also within stone-throwing distance) it was time I got creative and got in the kitchen. I don’t generally buy milk anymore. I just didn’t have that many uses for it. Lately I rotate among three alternatives: rice, soy, and almond. I like them all for different reasons. Rice is great with cereal or on its own; soy is best as a substitution in recipes and sauces in place of milk; and almond is when you want something lighter.

So last week, on the first day of fall in fact, I found myself at home wanting hot chocolate but unwilling to venture out into the pouring rain to get some. I had almond milk in the fridge so started by warming up a cup in a small saucepan on the stove. Now all I needed was the chocolate and the sweetener, both of which could take multiple forms. I have Fox’s U-Bet syrup in the fridge for making classic egg creams but that seemed too cloying for the occasion. I had a bar of dark chocolate but was saving that to eat on its own. So instead I opted for the cocoa powder in my cupboard. As for adding sweetness, I passed up the agave, white sugar, brown sugar, cane sugar, and honey in favor of…you guessed it folks…Vermont Grade B maple syrup. You might recall my post back in the spring for Vermont iced coffee sweetened with the stuff.

I added less than a tablespoon but more than teaspoon of the cocoa powder to the almond milk heating in the saucepan, and a small spoonful of maple syrup. I heated it up for about 5 minutes until hot but not boiling then served in a big ‘ol mug. So there you have it folks: vegan hot chocolate. That was not my intention per se but it was delicious, chocolatey, and not too sweet at all, just the way I like it. It went down as smooth as ice cream.

Hot Chocolate
serves 1

1 c (8 oz) almond milk – could also use soy, rice, or cow
1/2 tbsp cocoa powder – can use more or less to taste
1/2-1 tbsp maple syrup – again, can adjust to taste
tiniest pinch of salt

Put the milk in a small saucepan and turn the heat on low. Add the cocoa powder and maple syrup, stir, and heat up for a few minutes until hot but not boiling. Serve on its own, with whipped cream, or a tiny pinch of cayenne to spice it up.

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Now the photo up top is not in fact from a hot chocolate quest, but is from this morning’s field trip with a few new friends in my neighborhood. This is Bedford Hill Coffee Bar, on Franklin Ave. in Bed-Stuy, home of delicious americanos and pastries. And below, well that would have to be Dough now wouldn’t it? Just up the street from Bedford Hill, Dough makes delectable yeast donuts with wacky flavors like passionfruit with cacao nibs, dulce de leche with toasted almonds, and a bright pink hibiscus donut. Today I opted for passionfruit.

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Categories Chocolate, Coffee, Desserts, Dining Out, Fall

American Woman’s Cook Book

September 29, 2011 //
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I recently came upon a treasure. For the past couple of months my grandmother has been telling me of an old blue cookbook she’s had for ages that she wanted to give me. She said it contained recipes for things like Campbell’s tomato soup cake and various gelatinous desserts that might be fun to create. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the book and start cooking, retro style.

To my chagrin we couldn’t find the book anywhere in her house; I turned closets upside down, called my mother asking if she had thrown it away, to no avail. Then recently, on my last visit, she told me to go to the upstairs kitchen and look above the sink. I dashed up the stairs, like it was Christmas morning, and there it was: a little musty, mildewy, and indeed, blue.

The American Woman’s Cook Book, edited by Ruth Berolzheimer, the director of the Culinary Arts Institute, was published in Chicago in 1945. Back then, my grandmother was a secretary in Manhattan at an insurance company. She traveled into the city from the Flatbush section of Brooklyn where she lived with her mother and sister. The way she remembers it, one day, someone came into the office and all the “girls” had to each buy a copy of the newly published cookbook. I should say the book was first published in 1938 and later revised by Berolzheimer in 1945.

Well there isn’t in fact a recipe for tomato soup cake, or even too many wiggly desserts. It’s a treasure of classics with recipes including: creamed salmon, bacon corn bread, popovers, welsh rarebit, réchauffé of lamb, roast beef, and coconut cream pie. Oh the good old days! When folks drank buttermilk with dinner and dissolved baking soda in water when sick. When milk was dropped off in glass jars on your doorstep and people made their own preserves and jellies.

The Table of Contents reveals a chapter for “The Lunch Box” and another for “Food for Invalids.” The Lunch Box section reads:

“As much care is needed in selecting and preparing the food for the lunch box as for the other meals served to the family. If the lunch is inadequate or lacking in food essentials throughout the year, the individual’s whole nutrition will be seriously affected, and his work will suffer. The lunch box is one of three meals, not just a ‘snack,’ and should possess the following characteristics:

1. It should be abundant in amount for a hungry, healthy individual. A little too much is better than too little.
2. It should be chosen with regard to nutritive needs of the individual, and in relation to the whole day’s food.
3. It should be clean, appetizing, wholesome and attractive.”

That’s a tall order. It’s also quite different from today when most people get a $7 burrito from Qdoba or a $5 footlong from Subway and call it a lunch. I like the idea though of a well-prepared, carefully presented lunch, in a metal box, with a thermos and cloth napkin and silverware (to say nothing of course that the woman didn’t have much of a choice whether this was the job she wanted or not, preparing cute and wholesome lunches for her husband and kids). Some of the menu suggestions are cream of spinach soup with crackers, an egg salad sandwich with lettuce, raw vegetable strips, an apple, and cup cake (that’s one lunch); or peanut butter, bacon and lettuce sandwiches, carrot sticks, cauliflowerlets, a hard-cooked egg, gingerbread, grapes, and milk (again, that’s all one lunch).

“Food for Invalids” reads, “The following general suggestions are intended to help the housewife who, in addition to her other work, has the duty of ministering to the needs of the sick and convalescent.” It recommends presenting the food as nicely as possible, and serving hot foods very hot and cold foods very cold, with meals arriving at regular intervals, perhaps with a sprig of green or a flower on the tray. Dishes in this section include banana gruel, egg drinks, kumiss (milk, yeast-cake, and sugar), rice jelly, and flaxseed lemonade. A recipe for something called “panada” says to place 2 soda or graham crackers in a bowl and add boiling water to soak the crackers, for 20-30 minutes. Lift them from the water carefully and serve on a hot saucer, serve with sugar and cream.

Needless to say I can’t wait to start cooking from this book. I’d like to try the chess pie, which includes only pastry, butter, sugar, eggs, raisins, nuts, and vanilla; fricassee of chicken; chicken and dumplings; the devil’s food cake; and many more. This weekend I hope to carve out some time for at least one or two recipes, and if I do you’ll hear about it here of course.

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Categories Cookbooks, Desserts, Eggs, Reading, Savory
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