Cardamom rice pudding

We recently purchased a jar of ground cardamom after seeing a suspiciously low price at Whole Foods, of all places (maybe it's not real cardamom??).  For the first time using it, I wanted to make something that would showcase the spice as opposed to making something like a curry where it would be combined with several other spices.  I finally settled on a rice pudding recipe from Joy of Cooking and used a 1/2 teaspoon of cardamom where the same quantity of vanilla had been called for.

There are two basic rice pudding recipes in the cookbook; there's the baked rice pudding, and then there's the stovetop version.  Here's how we decided to go stovetop:

"Should we do stovetop or baked rice pudding?"
"Hmm....."
"The stovetop has fewer ingredients, but--"
"Stovetop."

Fewer ingredients made it easier to get everything together, but at the same time it meant a less-flavorful finished product.  The only flavorings in the pudding were milk and white sugar, so it was similar to a fior di latte gelato.  The recipe said to add the vanilla (cardamom, in our case) after removing the pudding from the heat, but I wonder if adding the cardamom with the milk would have done more for the overall flavor, almost like steeping chai in milk instead of water.  Substituting brown sugar for white could also have added a little depth of flavor, as well as adding just a pinch of cinnamon.  I realize that I'd specifically wanted a dish where the cardamom would be the main flavoring, but a little more flavor would not have hurt.

Too much milk.

The other issue was the amount of liquid in the recipe.  I had to cook 3/4 c. of rice in 1 1/2 cups of water, which is much more than I would usually use for rice.  Once the rice was cooked, I had to then add 4 cups of milk.  The photo above was taken more than a half hour after adding the milk, whereas the recipe claimed that the pudding should only need about 30 minutes of cooking.  It probably took about 45 minutes for the pudding to cook down into, well, a pudding.  Good thing I didn't have to cook that night.*

Yum.

For a little extra flavour, we added sliced honeycrisp apples and a dusting of cardamom to the serving bowls, but a drizzle of honey or a sprinkling of cinnamon would also be tasty.




*We actually went out for dinner that evening to Masala Pakistani and Indian Cuisine in North Providence, RI.  Going out for dinner is a big, big deal for us since we strongly prefer cooking our own stuff.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 820
Writeup background noise: The Herd with Colin Cowherd on ESPN Radio.  All ESPN is talking about these days is some football game being played on Sunday, but as far as I'm concerned, football season ended two weeks ago.

Croissants

I didn't particularly like croissants as a kid, but once I started, there was no stopping it: I was on a mission to find the best croissants in Ann Arbor.  Along the way, I discovered what gives croissants their unique structure; I also realized that perhaps there should be some kind of limit to how frequently I buy these.  Like any food that I take a shine to, I checked our handy Joy of Cooking to see if I could possibly make these myself; even knowing that croissants can be finicky, I was still a little put off by the fact that the recipe spanned 2.5 columns (their recipes are rarely more than one column).  I also didn't feel up to trying to combine butter with flour while also trying to keep the butter's temperature low.

I requested the Bouchon Bakery cookbook from the library to check out their macaron recipe, but it turns out that their croissant recipe doesn't require the step of combining butter with flour, so I thought that this was as good a time as any to try making croissants.

The entire process took about 19 hours; I started during the 4th quarter of a Monday Night Football game, and the croissants were ready for dinner on Tuesday.  Good thing I wasn't working when I made these.

16 December, about 11 PM: Poolish is now fermenting.  If ever there was a good time to use the lesser-quality Target brand plastic wrap instead of the superior Saran Wrap, this was it, since the recipe called for the poolish to be covered loosely at this point.

17 December, about 10.45 AM: The poolish looks like the picture in the book!

Dough, post-mixing: the dough-making process would have been a little easier with instant yeast (which is what the recipe called for) instead of active dry; I wouldn't have had so much issue with regulating the amount of liquid in the dough had I just gone out and bought the instant yeast.

About 11.45 AM: After some minutes of rolling and shaping, the dough is ready to rest for an hour.

This is a pretty good sign, so far.  It's ready to be rolled out!

This is why I feel the need to hit the gym every day.

This, I believe, was probably "Turn 1"; the recipe called for three such turns (roll/flatten the packet of dough, then fold like a business letter).  This entire process of turns (apparently called "laminating") took about an hour and 40 minutes total, since you pop the dough packet into the freezer in between turns to keep its temperature down.

About 2.50 PM: They look like crescent rolls, but better.  Now to proof for two hours!

5 PM: Ready for the oven!  They have a lot of potential here.  I was able to make two baking sheets' worth of croissants, with 11 or 12 on each one.

6 PM: A batch fresh out of the oven.  Unfortunately, they didn't puff as much as they should have.

Sad crumb, but the end result was something like a flaky brioche; the outer layers were flaky, but the rest of the crumb had a more uniform but very rich texture.

Of course, I didn't expect croissants worthy of a boulangerie on my first attempt, but it was still a bit of a bummer as I'd put so much time into these.  I have two hypotheses as to why these didn't turn out.  At first, I suspected that something had gone wrong in the laminating stages, like I'd let the butter get too warm, and thus it had become incorporated into the dough instead of remaining separate to give the finished croissant its flaky layers.

But then in chatting with my mom, we thought that perhaps the oven had not been hot enough.  The outer layers of the croissants were all flaky and certainly made a bit of a mess when biting into them, so I had done something correctly; then I remembered that I had seen distinct layers of dough and butter when I had cut the triangles for each croissant, so maybe it wasn't entirely my fault.  The recipe noted different temperatures for convection ovens versus conventional ovens, and I had made sure to use the temperature for the 'regular' oven.  In thinking about it though, when making macarons, I have had to experiment with higher and higher temperatures to see what works for my oven; my macaron book lists a temperature for convection ovens, and only notes that people with regular ovens may have to set the temperature maybe 10 degrees higher (which I have had to exceed).  So maybe oven temperature was the culprit?  Perhaps at a higher temperature, the butter on the insides of the croissants won't have as much of a chance to melt directly into the dough?

It's worth trying again, but it was a lot of time and effort, and I still have a bunch of frozen brioche-croissants in my freezer, since I didn't even think these were nice enough to give to friends.  But I suppose if I'm to make my favored type of almond croissant--dough rolled with almond filling, not day-old croissant split in half and filled with pastry cream--I should just do it myself as those tend to be more difficult to find than the pastry cream version.

And I still haven't found any croissants as tasty as those from Zingerman's, though the boulangerie at the corner of Rue Grimaldi and Rue Princesse Caroline in Monaco was a close second if only for its location.


Thomas Keller and Sebastien Rouxel, Bouchon Bakery (2012), p.236-243 (!)
Writeup background noise: New Orleans Saints vs. Philadelphia Eagles.  Saints win?!

Pumpkin pie

If you know me at all, you know that I greatly enjoy baking: cookies, cakes, rolls, you name it.  Pie is a relative exception, as I am not usually impressed with store-bought pie crusts (what's in those?) and I don't particularly care for super-flaky pie crust anyway.  Also, I've noticed that almost every pie crust recipe is awash with dire warnings like "MAKE SURE EVERYTHING IS COLD!!!1!" or "DO NOT OVERHANDLE DOUGH AT RISK OF TURNING IT INTO SOMETHING TERRIBLE", or "Don't use a food processor, the pastry blender is the ONLY way to do it", etc. etc.  So for a while, I would make fruit cobblers, crisps, and other treats that only required a top crust.  But then I received a small food processor for my birthday along with a later suggestion that it could be used to make pie crusts.

Our handy copy of Joy of cooking has a number of pie crust recipes, but they all feature shortening, which we never buy.  So I found a few recipes and techniques for all-butter pie crusts and set about making some dough.

I needed some way to keep the water cold.  Festive, no?

The new food processor is ready for some pie crust action.

Either my food processor was too small for the amount of stuff, or a flour grenade went off in my kitchen.  Nonetheless, this was the dough before it got dumped onto the counter, shaped, and tossed into the fridge.

Recipes say that the dough should be able to form a disk at this point.  I got something more like a crumbly mound o' dough.  Perhaps I hadn't added enough water?

Crumbliness notwithstanding, this stuff rolled out great after a couple days in the fridge and a much-longer-than-recommended time between taking the dough out of the fridge and rolling it out.  Look at that edge!

A pumpkin pie in all its glory.  This is made with a pie pumpkin that I had already baked; I never liked pumpkin pie (no joke) until I started making it with a fresh pumpkin.  This crust turned out tender and not very flaky: perfect for Dom and me, but your conclusion may vary.

Was this as much trouble as I thought it was going to be?  Not really.  Sure, making crust takes a lot longer than going to the store and getting some out of the freezer case, and I'm sure it can be very finicky, but I think the results are worth it.  Based on some of the comments I got for this one, it seems that others thought so too!

TASTY.

Hawaiian shrimp curry

Shortly before we left Ann Arbor, we discovered Indian food (it just took us a little while), thanks to the wonderful Cardamom Restaurant that opened in April near our old apartment.  Emboldened by this 'new' discovery, Dom immediately declared that we had to try making a curry.  It took us a couple of months and a change of residence to make that happen, but we finally tried a shrimp curry recipe.  It's from a cookbook written by a mother and daughter originally from Hawaii, but who had started a Hawaiian cafe in Ann Arbor a number of years ago.  As far as I can tell the cafe is no longer in business, since I would have found it by now if it were.

This was a great first effort, though of course there is room for improvement.  Our notes:

• We did not take the time to make shrimp shell broth as the recipe called for.  Not only did we not have any shrimp shells, having opted for the convenience of the peeled and deveined shrimp, but we used the suggested substitute of chicken broth.  No doubt the dish would have been even better with the shrimp broth, or even chicken stock we'd made ourselves.
• Our curry did not thicken much.  At first I thought it may have been a mistake with the amount of fat originally in the pan; we had started with probably a tablespoon of olive oil, when the recipe called for 2 tablespoons of butter.  (I hastily added about a tablespoon of butter upon realizing that I was making a sauce.)  Thanks to a chat with my mom I now realize that there may not have been enough flour in the recipe for the amount of liquid.  2 tablespoons of flour for 2 cups of chicken broth + half a can of coconut milk....or, maybe I'm just not good at making a white sauce.
• Slightly put off by negative press regarding the health of coconut-derived foods that aren't coconut water, I had opted for the 'lite' coconut milk, but I probably more than made up for that with the addition of some half and half into the curry.
• The addition of a bit of salt at the end (not called for in the recipe) did measures for the flavour.
• The Simply Organic curry powder was fine for beginners like us: pretty mild and very slightly spicy.  Next time we buy a jar of curry powder, we should try to get something a little more adventurous.
• Sort of a cookbook pet peeve of mine: when ingredients are not listed in the order they are used in the recipe.  This wreaks havoc with my organisation of ingredients prior to cooking.

The final result was extremely tasty, and we will definitely see what other kinds of curries we can make.

Shirley Tong Parola and Lisa Parola Gaynier, Remembering Diamond Head, Remembering Hawaii (1999), p. 209
Writeup background music: Jack Johnson, From Here to Now to You (2013)

Unrelated to food, but related to the writeup background music.  We saw Jack Johnson (not that Jack Johnson) at the Life Is Good Festival on the 22nd.  He played "Sweet Caroline" probably because the festival was held outside Boston, but it was like an early birthday present for me!

Mini madeleines

I'm on a bit of a French kick right now.  A coworker's delicious-looking snack of a madeleine one afternoon got me to thinking about making these, and thanks to my mom, a mini madeleine pan was procured almost immediately!

I used a recipe from Joy of Baking, mostly because they gave a baking time specifically for mini madeleines.  I think it turned out great, except that all told, it was a little over two hours from gathering ingredients to taking the last madeleines out of the pan.  Not generally a problem, unless you start after 9 PM on a Monday evening and you have to go to work the next day.

My notes:

• Because of time constraints, I took the eggs out of the fridge about 15 minutes before using them; the end product came out fine, but next time I'll try to plan to have everything at room temperature.  The results could be even better!
• Once again, I used less sugar than called for in the recipe; I scooped out 2/3 c. sugar, but I filled each 1/3 spoon about 7/8 full.  I don't feel like calculating what fraction of a cup of sugar actually got used.
• Our sole remaining, and much-maligned hand mixer (great for whipped cream, not so much for cookie dough) has found another use: beating the eggs for this recipe.  The whisk attachments worked great.

Light 'n frothy eggs.

The batter after coming out of the fridge.

• The madeleine molds should only be filled to maybe 50%, maybe a 1/2-3/4 teaspoon's worth of dough for each one.  My first batch came out way too huge!  I think by the end I got the size right.
• The silicone baking sheet was great; I sprayed nonstick spray twice, once before the first batch and once after the second, and it probably didn't need the second spray.  And none of the madeleines stuck!

Madeleines made easy.  Also, from the looks of these molds, gigantic.

• The recipe says to bake 7-9 minutes at 375°F; I found 8 minutes to be ideal for our oven.
• The recipe made 75 mini madeleines, but the first tray used significantly more dough than subsequent trays, so I could probably have gotten 85 or so out of this batch.  May it be said, though, that not all 75 made it into the storage containers...

Verdict: this will not be the last time I make madeleines!  Now that I know roughly how long to bake the mini ones, I'd like to adapt different recipes.  Nothing wrong with this one, but I want to try the one in our French cookbook!

The madeleines on the left probably came out of that batch you see in the molds above; the ones on the right came after I'd figured out that each mold didn't need so much dough.