Posted by Dorie Greenspan, April 24, 2008 at 2:00 PM
Illustration by Florine Asch
It's not just potato-chip makers that understand that if you offer us something salty we won't be able to eat just one—French pastry chefs know that trick too. And Arnaud Larher, whose pastry shop is in Montmartre, is a master of the add-salt-and-we'll-munch-away school. He's the chef who created the TV Snacks, irresistibly munchable, salty little butter cookies molded into lumpy, bumpy balls.
When I asked Larher how he came up with the idea to make a salty cookie, he said it came to him very naturally, since he grew up in Brittany, where butter is always salted. "I'm just continuing the tradition," he said.
I bet you could start your own tradition with these.
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Posted by Lucy Baker, March 25, 2008 at 12:30 PM
I've always wanted to try baking a clafouti, the homey French dessert that is part pancake, part pudding, and part custard. But classic clafoutis are made with fresh cherries, and I was deterred by the idea of pitting cup after cup. So when I saw a saw the clafouti recipe in the April issue of Everyday Food that replaced the cherries with dried figs, I knew I had to make it for this week's recipe review.
The clafouti recipe was part of a larger article about a basic, homemade baking mix (6 cups flour, 3 cups sugar, 2 tablespoons baking powder, and 1 tablespoon salt). The total yield is about 9 cups, which is more than enough to make one batch of every recipe in the article: the clafouti, plus oatmeal blondies, jam sandwich cookies, and silver-dollar pancake sundaes.
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Posted by Blake Royer, March 4, 2008 at 4:30 PM
My girlfriend and I had just returned from a weekend of eating pizza in New Haven, Connecticut, and, frankly, salad was the only option for our stomachs after days of cheese and grease. But we were hungry, too, and a pile of leaves wasn't going to cut it. More problematic was that cooking after a few hours of traveling was the last thing I wanted to do. The takeout menus beckoned.
But we had some mesclun greens around, as well as some cherry tomatoes. Taking inspiration from the classic Salad Niçoise, we looked in the freezer for some haricot verts, and a salmon fillet to replace the usual canned tuna.
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Posted by The Serious Eats Team, February 15, 2008 at 12:45 PM
This entire week, in honor of Valentine's Day, we put together a shelf of our favorite books on chocolate, with one Cook the Book recipe a day adapted from each volume. To end the week, and to complete our "Chocolate Lover's Library," we're adding Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Hermé
, by Serious Eats' baking contributor Dorie Greenspan. We can't think of a better duo to work on a book together. Here, you get the sophisticated chocolate desserts of Hermé written and tested for home kitchens by Dorie, so you know these recipes will work for you, and you know you'll have Dorie's expert advice guiding you through them.
The recipe we've adapted here is for simple chocolate mousse, made super-light by the addition of whipped egg whites and by using milk instead of the more common heavy cream. Hermé sees this mousse as a base recipe to which all kinds of flavors and textures can be added, from caramelized Rice Krispies to cardamom.
Win the Serious Eats Chocolate Library
We're giving away five (5) sets of the Chocolate Lover's Library—one each day this week. So you can win a copy of Dorie's Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Hermé, along with the four other other fantastic chocolate books we rolled out this week. Just answer the following question in the comments:
What is your favorite chocolate dessert?
One (1) winner will be chosen at random from among the comments of this post. Comments will be open until 3 p.m. ET February 16. You may win only once during the lifetime of the contest as a whole. The standard Serious Eats contest rules apply.
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Posted by Dorie Greenspan, February 14, 2008 at 1:00 PM
It's not easy to translate gourmandise from the French. Strictly speaking, I guess it would be a delicacy or a treat, but the word, when applied to food, can also mean greedy. It's a great word—I mean, how many of us haven't been greedy for the treats we love—and it's a great name for this dessert from Pierre Herme.
This gorgeous dessert has three parts; from the bottom up they are: rich coconut-tapioca; spears of fresh pineapple mixed with lime zest and sweet orange marmalade; and thin, thin slices of oven-dried pineapple.
When I wrote the description of this dessert for the first book that I did with Pierre (Desserts by Pierre Herme
), I said that it "... falls into that rarely explored realm between refreshing and comforting. The coconut—its consistency like that of a bisque, its floating pearls just right for popping against the roof of your mouth—is mild, milky, soupy and soothing, while the pineapple, glistening with bittersweet marmalade and spiked with lime zest, is all sparkle and zip." More than a decade later, it still seems right to me. More important, the dessert is still exciting.
Each part of the dessert can be made ahead and, really, each part could be served separately, but that wouldn't be very gourmandise-ish, would it?
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, February 6, 2008 at 5:00 PM
"This is a ridiculously easy soup to make.” Well, okay then. Nothing like Anthony Bourdain telling you what to do. I was just innocently flipping through Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, grazing over his faithful French adaptations, when I came upon a recipe that sounded like the perfect Dinner Tonight recipe. How can you go wrong a recipe even he says is the easiest recipe in the whole book?
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Posted by Dorie Greenspan, January 17, 2008 at 1:00 PM
I always think of pots de crème, or little pots of crème, as the French answer to our puddings. Really a baked custard, the crème can be created in just about any flavor combo. That uber-chef Daniel Boulud created them to be coffee-cardamom was a nod to the way coffee is often drunk in the Middle East: through a cardamom pod held between one’s teeth.
Of course, Daniel being Daniel (and thank goodness he is), he ups the ante a bit: he caramelizes the coffee beans and cardamom pods before he pours in milk and cream and steeps everything for a few minutes. Even though this dessert is made with big flavors—you can hardly call coffee or cardamom wallflower flavors—the caramelizing step makes the flavors even bigger and more intense.
When these are baked in a professional kitchen, the custard cups, set in a roasting pan filled with water, are covered with a sheet of plastic wrap. The wrap doesn’t budge or burn because the temperature is low (of course, you’ve got to have an oven that keeps this low temperature). If the idea of baking with plastic wrap doesn’t make you comfortable, cover the set-up with foil.
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Posted by Blake Royer, January 15, 2008 at 4:00 PM
I've been meaning to pick up some celeriac for awhile now, just because it may be the ugliest vegetable in the grocery store. People are always passing it by, poor thing. On the outside it's a tangled mess of dirty, fuzzy roots and knobs, but once peeled it has the faint aroma of celery, a pale color, and a smooth texture. While I always thought it was simply the root of a celery plant it's actually a related, but separate, species. Above ground it grows a few stalks and leaves, but the majority of the growth happens underground in the root. When shopping look for smaller ones, which are tender and have more flavor.
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Posted by Nick Kindelsperger, January 7, 2008 at 4:30 PM
I still can’t believe the fiancée cooked this for me. When I’m working late, it’s par for her to shun bacon, eschew oil, and cook as many vegetables as possible. So I was a little surprised when I came home to a bacon laden gratin with half a wheel of cheese melted on top. I kissed her immediately. I mean, really—what a wonderful thing to do. She found it in the North Market Cookbook. The cheesemonger said he got the recipe “from a French customer.” How intriguing.
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Posted by Dorie Greenspan, January 3, 2008 at 12:30 PM
Here in Paris we said au’revoir to the last bûches de Noël (yule logs) on New Year’s Eve and bonjour to les galettes des Rois on January 2, the day the city’s pastry shops reopened. While the galette des rois is a cake meant specifically for January 6, Epiphany, it’s impossible to resist its temptations before or after the official holiday—so impossible that some shops offer the sweet until the end of the month.
The galette is really very simple, if a little time-consuming to make—it’s an almond and pastry-cream filling sandwiched by two rounds of (all-butter) puff pastry dough—but so, so good. Nothing beats buttery puff pastry and a filling made with more good butter! But great taste is only one of its attractions—the chance to wear the king’s crown is another, and probably the one that keeps kids asking for the cake over and over.
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Posted by Robyn Lee, December 3, 2007 at 3:00 PM
If you don't think you like duck, maybe that's because you haven't eaten duck confit. The formula for duck confit can only equate to deliciousness: Cure duck legs in seasoned salt and garlic for a day, then bake the legs in duck fat for two or more hours. The resulting meat is fall-off-the-bone tender and infused with salt, garlic and fat. Try to make it yourself by following Tom Colicchio's recipe for duck confit from Think Like a Chef
. You don't have to eat them all at once; the baked duck legs may be stored in their own fat for up to a month.
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Posted by Robyn Lee, October 24, 2007 at 4:45 PM
My friend Lisa making passionfruit macarons at Jacques Torres Chocolate Haven.
I'm ashamed to admit that while I have eaten many macarons, I've never made them on my own.
Thankfully, plenty of other people much more skilled in the culinary arts than I am have bravely attempted to make macarons in their home kitchens and have shared their results on that massive virtual brain called the Internet. I'm going to list the most promising recipes I found while aggressively sifting through the web and, from those, pool together a list of tips and tricks for optimum macaron creation. All that info follows after the jump.
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Posted by Ed Levine, April 27, 2007 at 9:30 AM
Steve Cuozzo in the New York Post had a funny piece about Niçoise salad. With more and more chefs and home cooks using fresh instead of canned tuna, I thought it would be useful to publish Julia Child's classic Niçoise salad recipe. It used canned tuna, of course. I like the Italian tuna canned in olive oil or, if you feel like splurging, get the Ortiz Ventresca tuna. It's more expensive but worth it. It's buttery and meaty and delicious and will make your salade Niçoise swing so much harder.
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