Week 30: Around the world in multiple meat dishes

Another week criss crossing the globe - Thailand, Russia, India, France - I'm exhausted.

We start the week at the business end of cookery - that is with a hunk of beast (no, not the tutor) and a demo of boning out the fillet and the sirloin. 

We cut 160gm sirloins, vacpac and set side til Thursday, and slice up another 180 grams to make something I haven't made since the late 1970s - Beef Stroganoff.  Stroganoff - now that drives me off to my friend Wiki immediately.  It has its origins in 19th century Russia and is popular in various forms around the world, from Portugal to Brazil to Japan to Sweden. Wiki reports many recipes and variations exist, and goes on to add somewhat frighteningly: "with or without wine, with canned sweet corn, with ketchup ..."  Hmmmm.

Chicken Kiev. The height of sophistication in the 1970s. Where did this dish originate? Wiki is uncharacteristically brief and tells me the name comes from the capital of Ukraine, Kiev (duh!)  However, the Russian food historian  William Pokhlebkin claims that Chicken Kiev was not invented in Kiev but in the Moscow Merchants' Club in the early 20th century and was renamed Chicken Kiev in one of the Soviet restaurants in later years.  So now you know as much as I about the etymology of the dish.  What I find more interesting is that when Marks and Spencer first introduced ready made meals in 1975, guess what was first off the block?  Pay attention, you may need to know this for a pub trivia quiz one day... Yes! Chicken Kiev.

Pound a chicken breast and stuff with cold garlic butter with herbs, then pane (i.e. flour, egg, breadcrumbs and egg and breadcrumb a second time to ensure the fillet is well sealed) and fry or bake.  I stop short of either and freeze the stuffed breasts for future baking.

We break down (chef talk for cut up) another chicken into sauté cuts: 8 pieces, comprising 2 drums, 2 thighs, and 4 breasts. Don't be alarmed, I know the hormones they feed poultry are bizarre but the birds we break have only two breasts,  each one is cut into two, yielding four breast pieces in total.
 

We make a Thai Green Chicken Curry using half the chicken we sauté cut on Monday, having already prepared Thai green curry paste. The other half of the chicken becomes Chicken Chasseur.  Chatty girl, the one who never stops talking, gives a dissertation on how she always thought  "chasseur" meant shoe - she works in a shoe shop part time.  An easy mistake: la chaussure is shoe and le chasseur is the hunter.  Yes, aside from the spelling and difference in pronunciation, note a gender difference: shoe is feminine and hunter is masculine. You can see from the photos they are two entirely different things!

 



Chicken chasseur

 


Christian Louboutin chaussure





  We continue the curry theme across Thailand and the subcontinent: we make spice mixes for Thai red curry with beef, and for an Indian Lamb Korma.  

I have my suspicions about the origin of korma, and entertain a notion is is an English curry bastardisation of an Indian dish.  However, my notion is unfounded.  Although the origin of the word korma is Turkish, the dish is traditional Mughlai cuisine and can be traced back to the 16th century. 

What else this week?  A delicious crusted lamb rack.  First we French trim the rack, taking off every skerrick of sinew and connective tissue to leave a clean bone, then smear Dijon mustard and herbs over it, crumb and cook.  We also grill the sirloin steak and make Duchess Potatoes - a puree of potato, egg and butter with a pinch of nutmeg, piped into a conical meringue shape, egg washed and baked to give a crust on the outside.  I am sure you've eaten these at some time or other. 

We also make one of the many Duchess derivatives,  Marquise Potatoes.  This involves piping the potato into a nest, filling it with sweated shallots, concassé tomato and parsley, then egg washing  before baking. I SO wish I had my camera to show you these little beauties.  Actually they taste better than I expect. 

Way, way back in Week 3: Hot stock and several smokin' sauces, I talked about how a base stock or sauce becomes so many others. the derivatives are the same with potatoes - a base puree then countless derivatives. A basic roast potato and countless derivatives. A basic sauteed potato and - well, you get the picture.  I could write a whole blog on potato derivatives but I will restrain myself.

Next week? More meat - including an exciting installment on offal. I will cook sweetbreads for the first time. Stand by.

Week 29: A proliferation of pastries

Here's a new word for you, one I feel confident few of you will have encountered: pithivier. We assume the origin is from the French Pithiviers, a small town about two hours south of Paris. Pithivier sometimes makes an appearance on menus and is quite likely the chef's pretentious way of saying "pie" - you can charge much more for a pithivier than for a pie. Do not be fooled! A pithivier has specific characteristics which include:

• crust - made of puff pastry
• shape - formed by taking two discs of puff pastry, the top slightly larger than the bottom. The filling is lumped on and the top layer tucked over it and sealed at the edges
• filling: traditionally frangipane - make by creaming butter and sugar, adding eggs and then almond meal
• finishing and appearance - traditionally decorated with spiral lines drawn from the top outwards, and with scalloped edges. Glazed by caramelising icing sugar at the end of baking.

 

We use the puff pastry to make the Pithivier, obviously, and also a divine Apple Tart. In a blast from the past we also make Cream Horns. Now this takes me back to my early childhood when I remember my Mum making these lavish morning and afternoon tea "spreads" for the men when they were haymaking. Often there'd be cream horns along with bacon and egg pie and sandwiches, cakes and slices.  Thinking back, that was certainly the days before ready made so she either made her own puff pastry or used a sweet short crust.

We also make a very, very thin dough for Apple Strudel. This is a weird paste - it is similar to the stretchiness you get in a pizza dough but more delicate as with a filo. You can see how stretchy and thin it is from the photos of chef pulling it out. (And yes, as chef describes pulling it, it is again like being in primary school as this is, of course, a double entendre that must be acknowledged with guffaws and nudges).  The pastry needs stretching on baking paper or a tea towel so you can use that to assist in rolling up the apple filling. When cooked the pastry itself is very brittle and when cut it flakes and breaks.

For preference I would use filo for strudel rather than make this style again.

Wanting to share these vast quantities of pastry, I invite my Tuesday yoga class comprising ex-colleagues and the lady-in-waiting, the dentist and the radiographer, to dinner and force them to eat up all the various products for dessert.  First I reprise the Seafood Tajine (or Tagine as some prefer) from last week, making extra couscous for the dentist.

On Wednesday we turn our attention to choux pastry and I am reminded why I am on the course - learning why the right way to do things and understanding why  when something may have gone wrong.  In the past I have had varying degrees of success with choux pastry: beautiful crisp, dry hollow shells through to miserable flat pancakes.  I now know why the failures have occurred.  A few simple things include ensuring the water doesn't boil before the butter melts, thereby evaporating and reducing the quantity of wet ingredients.  After adding the flour, wait until the temperature of the dough drops to about 60 C before adding the eggs. The protein in the eggs sets at 62 C and you don't want the eggs to cook until they are in the dough in the oven.  Recipes usually give numbers of eggs, but the consistency of the mixture drives how much egg you need. Chef's fail safe tip is that the mixture should just be "dropping consistency" i.e. stretch and drop off the wooden spoon when you hold it up.  So we make profiteroles, éclairs and Paris Brest - a large choux ring. Everything is glazed with chocolate ganache and filled with Chantilly cream.  Don't worry, I keep some empty to bring home for the hunter gatherer. in fact I have just filled and glazed them and, somewhat decadently, we're taking them to fellow grape grower friends for afternoon tea - not quite like haymaking, but near enough!

Next week: meat eaters get excited - BUTCHERY!

Now for words you have most certainly heard before - puff pastry.  Born of a beautiful marriage between flour and fat. A lot of fat. Butter. Fonterra need never fear a slump in the demand for dairy products as long as the world enjoys a pastry. This week we make French Puff Pastry, as opposed to the English method we used in Week 23: How much butter is in that . The only difference seems to be in the initial shaping. The photo in week 23's blog shows a flat roll with the slab of butter.  This time we make a ball and cut a cross in it, fold out the leaves and roll them to a 1/4 the thickness of the centre, place the slab of cold butter in the middle, fold the leaves back over, then start the folding and rolling process. So much butter! Even the pastry looks embarrassed to have to consume so much butter -  it's covering its eyes!

Roll out, fold, put in the fridge - repeat 4 times or more as time allows. The more folds, the more layers as the butter gets trapped each time - why does this make me think of all those fat people programmes on TV?  In  week 23 I describe the ratio of fat to flour in croissants and Danish pastries, and the magic that occurs as a result of layering butter and producing steam - go on, look back if you can't remember, I'll still be here when you get back. Well, for puff pastry we are talking a ratio of 1:1.  And such a lot of effort and delicacy to make it.  The croissants and danishes had yeast so I am not sure if that is why it is easier. This is a nightmare - the layers are thin and the butter must be trapped fully, or when it bakes the butter oozes out instead of steaming up the layers of dough. For crying our loud, go to the supermarket and buy ready made it is my advice.