Mushroom pot pie, a quick, easy, vegetarian friendly Thanksgiving dish / Masterchef audition

Mushroom and leek pot pie with roasted red pepper sauce, goat cheese, and fried thyme

Hey everyone, so each year for Thanksgiving I like to cook for a small group of friends & find a new dish to challenge myself.  This year, we were going to have some vegetarian guests, so I got real excited thinking about ways to make the greatest vegetarian Thanksgiving dishes.

For one of these dishes, I chose one that could incorporate some of what I believe to be the best and richest vegetarian dish components: puff pastry, mushrooms (all sorts, truffles included), goat cheese, and eggs.  Out of the many many iterations of puff pastry-based dishes (strudels, wellingtons, tarts...), I decided to go with pot pies, which seemed to fit the rusticity that goes with the spirit of Thanksgiving.

The great thing about pot pies, besides the flavors of the filling, rich gravy, and buttery pastry, is that they can be prepared well in advance of the intended meal.  In these pictures, I had actually pre-cooked my mushrooms, leeks (green onions), and gravy about 2 days before I actually made the pot pie.  For my non-vegetarian friendly version, I mixed in some leftover rabbit that I had braised in beer, soy sauce, and sugar (leftover meats of really any kind go great into pot pies) to make an equally great rabbit, mushroom and leek pot pie.  After preparing all your components in advance, all that's left to do is make a simple puff pastry (modified slightly from Alton Brown) and whatever accompaniments you'd like (see my recipe pages to the right for more detail).

Left: Preparing puff pastry. Middle left: Making a vegetarian gravy with roux and vegetable broth, testing the consistency to see if it's "nape".  Middle right: Making a roast pepper sauce.  Right: Fried mushroom and green onions

As you hopefully noticed, the presentation of the dish is a bit better than usual.  This is due in part to my recent experience at this year's Masterchef auditions.  I went to the open casting call in NY, and brought materials to assemble the steamed bun trio and the beer pastry cream cronut AKA "bronut".  After hours of waiting in line, doing some filming in Times Square for a TV promo, and some more waiting in lines, I finally reached a room with some 20-30 other hopefuls presenting dishes to one or two judges.  My presentation was markedly worse than all the competitors in the room, but I was lucky enough to be selected to move on past the first round.  However, past that point the judges were only interested in personality, and I got beat out by some girl who had 20 pet chickens.  Ah well, I have a whole year to learn how to be bizarro enough for TV.  Below is a T-shirt I made specifically for the audition, but some of my friends liked the design and wanted ones too, so I set up a cafepress storefront.  Check it out if you want your own (alternatively, wait for a sale & just search "haters etc etc" on the cafepress main site)!

T shirt I made for my Masterchef audition.  Check out my cafepress store if you want one too! OR wait for a sale & search "haters etc etc" on the cafepress main site

The formula for a longer-lasting soufflé / taro, Thai tea, and green tea soufflés

Lemon soufflé with candied lemon peel

Hey all, I know it's been a while since my last post.  This recent project took a few unexpected turns.  Anyways, I decided this time to focus on soufflés, which are known to be one of the more intimidating baked goods to make.  This reputation was earned in part due to the idea that soufflés will readily collapse, surely ruining whatever dinner party you had planned.  I'm writing this article to hopefully encourage you to give soufflés a chance, as they are a highly versatile and delicious dessert with surprisingly simple execution.

Left: pastry cream, center-left: pastry cream combined with melted chocolate and cocoa powder, with 1/3 of the meringue to be mixed in. Center-right: folding in remaining meringue into pastry cream mixture, right: baked chocolate soufflé

Soufflés have essentially three components, 1) pastry cream, combined with 2) a flavoring element, with 3) a meringue folded in.  This makes the finished product basically a baked pudding, but with the added meringue component allows the soufflé to expand with heat.   My key goals with this dessert were to 1) find a generalizable formula for soufflés that could be customized for whatever flavor desired, and 2) find a way to keep soufflés standing.

A summary of findings and procedure:

1. create a batch of pastry cream 
2. choose flavorings low in water content, like powdered drink mixes or alcohol based flavorings, and mix into pastry cream
3. follow the per-ramekin formula provided below for proportions of pastry cream, flavorings, and meringue
4. stir 1/3 of meringue into pastry cream mixture, then fold in of the rest
5. fill ramekins coated with butter and sugar with soufflé batter to the top, scrape a knife over the top to flatten the batter, tap the ramekin against the counter to release any large air bubbles, and run a fingernail along the ramekin edge to create a lip between the edge of the batter and ramekin
6. bake at ~390 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes

• in the absence of a working oven, soufflés can be cooked in a rice cooker by loading ramekins in, filling water up halfway, and cooking for ~25 minutes, with slightly inferior texture
• to a point, higher temperatures and longer cooking times improve soufflé stability
• lemon juice is known to stabilize meringues, and likewise seems to have an effect stabilizing soufflés, a small amount can be used per ramekin, 0.5-1 tbsp, but will alter the soufflé flavor.  cream of tartar may achieve a similar effect

A generalizable soufflé formula

Creating  raspberry and blueberry fruit flavorings by simmering with sugar and straining to create purees.  Left: boiling lemon peels in first water 2-3 times before boiling in a simple syrup.

I noticed that if I took Gordon Ramsay's chocolate souffle recipe and switched out the flavoring components by volume for fruit puree, the result was delicious, but messy and undercooked.  The obvious cause of this is water content: the flavoring components of a chocolate souffle (chocolate and cocoa powder) each have fairly low water content, while fruit purees have a larger amount of water by volume.  Water as a high specific heat, and must be heated up and vaporized for the protein matrix of the soufflé to set, however, in the meantime all that water is basically boiling the soufflé batter and spilling it all over the place (see above figure).  The key to a generalizable soufflé recipe is then choosing flavoring components with minimal water content.  

Left: combined pastry cream and fruit purees.  Center: soufflé batters added to ramekins coated with butter and sugar.  Right: messy, finished soufflés.  The water content and amount of the fruit flavorings were too high, this can be remedied most easily by using fruit-flavored alcohols or powders for flavor, or  using very small quantities of fruit purees.

I chose to demonstrate this using some of my favorite bubble tea flavors: taro, green tea, and Thai tea, which are each available in flavored powder forms (for green tea, don't make the mistake I did and use real 100% green tea powder, which will end up too bitter and hygroscopic - use the green tea powder mix).  This same strategy can be seen in various other soufflé recipes that call for the use of alcohol for flavoring, since alcohol evaporates much more readily than water.

Left: combining pastry cream with taro puree and taro powder, thai tea powder, and green tea powder mix. Center: ramekins filled with batter prior to baking. Right: Finished taro, thai tea, and green tea souffles.  Note: incorporating 1 tbsp of taro puree per ramekin adds considerable richness and texture to the soufflé.  I highly recommend this flavor.  For green tea, do not use 100% green tea as I did, use green tea powder mix

Formula for a single-ramekin soufflé: 
1/2 cup pastry cream + 2 tbsp low-water content flavoring + 1-1 1/3 large egg whites (with 1 tbsp sugar) worth of meringue.

A longer-standing soufflé

Experimenting with different possible ways of stabilizing soufflés. Left: combining pastry cream with taro puree and taro powder.  Center: combining pastry cream and meringue elements.  Right: finished soufflé batters in ramekins.  The top ramekin contains a small amount of lemon juice, the center contains a higher meringue-to-pastry cream ratio, and the bottom one contains more pastry cream and less meringue

Many recipes online will claim to have a 'foolproof' soufflé, but few bother to explain why this or that formulation actually helps keep a soufflé stable. My initial thoughts were that the key to maintaining a soufflé's height after removal from the oven was to add more structural support, in the form of gelatin or methylcellulose.  These attempts were all met with failure.  Instead, I noticed that if I incorporated large amounts of meringue into my soufflé formulations, I saw more shrinkage of the soufflé as it cooled.  The behavior of the soufflé then is not unlike a cloud of gas, which can be defined by the ideal gas law,

Pressure * Volume = moles of gas * ideal gas constant * Temperature

(or PV = nRT)

Holding pressure, moles of gas, and the constant R constant, the volume of gases/air pockets within the soufflé are dependent on their temperature.  A drop in a soufflé internal temperature from 160 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit would result in a 10% shrinkage of air pockets (a somewhat larger drop in volume is observed since the soufflé air pockets are not gas impermeable - the moles of gas, n, within each pocket is not actually constant and may also drop with time).  While the cooling of the soufflé and shrinking of air pockets is unavoidable, the effects can be minimized by decreasing the meringue composition of the soufflé.  This was factored into the generalizable soufflé formula provided above.

Left: Soufflés immediately after 20 minutes at ~390 degrees Fahrenheit.  Center: Soufflés 5 mintues removed from oven.  Right: Soufflés 10 minutes removed from oven.  The leftmost ramekin contains lemon juice, the center contains more meringue-to-pastry cream, while the right most contains more pastry cream-to-meringue by volume.  The key comparison is between the rightmost ramekins, where the soufflé with more pastry cream had a smaller deflation

I hope this guide helped clear up some questions about how to go about making soufflés, and will encourage you to go out and try to make soufflés of new and interesting flavors! In the future I may post more articles on some more out-there flavors I made, as well as more advanced things you can do with soufflés.  

Lays, FTFY: Making Improved Sriracha Chips and Chicken & Waffle Chips

Hey everyone, so some of my friends know that I was pretty devastated by the loss of Sriracha and Chicken & Waffles in the recent "Lay's Do Us a Flavor" contest, where predictably, some cheese-based flavor ended up winning.  The only one I got to try was sriracha, which my friends and I decided tasted more like American hot sauces, and didn't have the distinct sriracha flavor that comes with fermentation of the chili peppers.  In general, I've heard that the chicken & waffle flavor was lacking in chicken flavor and was maybe too sweet.

First, in order to design better sriracha and chicken & waffle (c&w) chips, it's important to understand where the originals went wrong.  The sriracha chips ingredients list indicates that their chips were flavored by creating a "creamy sriracha seasoning", which included "natural flavors" (probably some chili powder blend) and sour cream/cream/cheddar cheese, which were likely responsible for diluting the sriracha flavor.  Also, these high-fat components were used so that they could make a powder using maltodextrin, a starch that stabilizes fat, allowing them to be turned into powders.  The chicken and waffle chips ingredients notably contain no chicken based ingredients and no maple syrup components (using instead brown sugar).

For the sriracha chips, I decided it would be easiest to just find a way to make a powder out of store-bought sriracha sauce.  After dehydrating in an oven for several hours, the solid sriracha formed a nice powder when ground up in a coffee grinder . 

Left: 1/3 cup sriracha sauce spread out onto parchment paper.  Middle: sriracha sauce spread thin.  Right: After ~4 hours at 250 degrees F, sriracha sheets were peeled off parchment paper

In order to slightly prolong the shelf-life of the powder (only from about 1 day to more like a week or two before the powder really gunks up), and also to make it easier to pour/sprinkle, I weighed out 2% by weight silicon dioxide .  Silicon Dioxide (SiO2) is basically sand, and you'll find it as an additive in many spices in stores, listed as an "anti-caking agent".  SiO2 is a dessicant, meaning it will seriously absorb water, and is what makes up the insides of those silica packets you find inside of various food items, like beef jerky.  WARNING: silicon dioxide inhaled into your lungs can't really be gotten rid of (prolonged exposure can lead to silicosis, which is serious business), so if you do decide to work with this stuff, please use reasonable precautions (I would recommend some form of mask, working in a well ventilated area, taking care not to aerosolize the SiO2)

Left: Dried sriracha put into a coffee grinder.  Center: Dried sriracha ground with 2% by weight silicon dioxide, forming a fine dry powder.  Right: Put it in a saltshaker for easy distribution

Making C&W powder was a bit more difficult, just because there are many more components that need balancing.  For chicken flavor, I decided the best source was chicken broth powder, which is available in most stores.  I chose Lee Kum Kee brand chicken bouillon powder , since in the ingredients list it had the fewest extra flavorings included (lots of other brands like to include tumeric or cumin or other spices that would distract from the c&w flavor).  Maple powder and butter powder are available from American Spice Co, although if you're really interested, you could probably make maple powder using the same procedure as with sriracha.  However, there was one major component missing. In C&W, the most dominant flavor is always the flavor of 'fried'.  Both the exterior of the waffle and the chicken are essentially fried flour, and the chicken, maple, and butter flavors are basically secondary flavors.  It was critical to find a way to make a powder that captured this 'fried' flavor.

Left: melting 1 tbsp butter. Center: Still melting.  Right: Pouring brown butter into a few tablespoons of maltodextrin.

One option would be to actually make a waffle and grind it up into a powder, but that seemed wasteful and time consuming.  Instead, I had the thought of trying to make a powder out of either roux or brown butter, both have very nutty flavors/aromas that remind me of fried goods.  To do this, I just heated a small amount of butter until bubbling ceased and nutty flavor was strong.  I mixed this with maltodextrin to get it into a solid form.

Left: Brown butter mixed with maltodextrin, forming large chunks.  Center: Brown butter powder mixed with maple powder, butter powder, and chicken broth powder.  Right: after grinding in a coffee grinder, filled another saltshaker with chicken & waffle powder

The final step was to coat some potato chips and eat.  I actually tried making some chips from scratch, and determined it was a total waste of time.  For the time and money (mainly in using up so much oil to deep-fry), you could just buy several bags of plain potato chips.  The finished powders were sprinkled on a regular bag of chips, although it helped to some degree to pre-heat the chips for about 2 minutes at 400, to release some oil onto the chip surface.  Here it was very important to coat very liberally, without a substantial amount of powder, the salty potato flavor can easily dominate.  

Left: regular uncoated potato chips.  Center: Sriracha potato chips.  Right: Chicken & waffle potato chips

So that's it, you all can rest easy knowing that good sriracha and chicken & waffle chips aren't gone for good, give it a shot and let me know if it beats the Lay's versions or not!

Detailed recipe coming soon!

Building a better cronut - the BRONUT / beer pastry cream filled cronut with chocolate shavings

10/7/14 EDIT: Dominique Ansel has just released his cronut recipe, which is more or less in line with mine (some proportions slightly different), will do a comparison later.  A key difference between our approaches is that he includes 2 overnight rests, making the entire process last 3 days long, which is unnecessary.  The first rest allows for some gluten relaxation and for some very minor gas production by yeast (most is produced during the room temperature proofing step), which overall improve the cronut texture somewhat.  The second rest just makes the cooled, laminated dough easier to handle, and allows for even more gluten relaxation. The technique for making cronut dough is roughly the same as puff pastry or croissant dough, which also can potentially take as long as 3 days, but have been done successfully in less.  With reduced rests, the whole process would only take ~2 hours, with 1.5 hours proofing time, or about 3.5 hours total, a 95% reduction in preparation time!  By keeping only the second overnight rest for better texture, the time savings are still substantial.

For those of y’all less inclined to read, I will write up an explicit recipe for how to make bronuts/cronuts/broissants, if there is sufficient interest.  Instead...

Summary/quick tips:

• Use a regular croissant dough recipe from a reputable source, but adjust the ingredients for lower water content, higher carb content, higher protein content
• After cutting out your donuts, it is CRITICAL to let them "proof" or rise at room temperature for 1.5-2 hours.  Helpful tool: donut cutter
• Deep fry at 360 deg F for 90 seconds for a soft exterior, 120 seconds for a crispier exterior.  Helpful tool: deep fry thermometer 
• Use a grating tool to grate a dark chocolate bar over the cronut for chocolate shaving topping.  Helpful tool:microplane 
• Use a piping bag with thin tip or a squeeze bottle to pipe beer pastry cream (or other heavy flavor to balance the light cronut) into four points of the cronut.  Useful tools: piping bag or squeeze bottle 

As some of you may know, the big new food craze to hit NY is Dominique Ansel’s “cronut” – a donut shaped pastry with a flaky, layered croissant interior.  A good half the hype is how rare these seem to be, as only 200 or so are made each day, and are typically sold out within an hour or two (meaning people typically need to line up between 5 and 7 AM).  One Sunday some of my friends and I had nothing better to do so we decided to see what all the fuss was about.

Left: The line at 7AM on a Sunday for cronuts.  Right two: We did it! Only 8 people from the cutoff

It was alright, but many of us agreed it was not what we were expecting.  I agreed with some people’s criticisms I had read online – the lemon pastry cream filling was a bit sweet and didn’t mesh well with the donut, but my main beef with the donut was with its texture.  I was expecting something with good contrast – crispier on the outside, soft and buttery on the inside.  This may be more my own personal preference, since I think most donuts do have this same soft outside, soft inside, uniform texture.  In any case, I sympathized with some of the people who  barely missed the cutoff, or don’t want to pay $5 for a pastry, or think that the whole cronut business is snooty and exclusive.  For many of these reasons, I decided to go about building a better cronut.

To create this improved cronut, some background understanding on three key pastries is necessary: croissants, donuts, and beignets (bits of fried dough with a pillowy soft inside and a crisp/crunchy outside).  My ideal cronut would have a beignet’s texture contrast, but be made out of croissant dough and be shaped like a donut. 

Heat transfer simulation in ABAQUS of a donut-shaped and similar-dimension circular disk of dough fried in 360^o F oil, using dough thermal parameters from the Food Properties Handbook, 2^nd ed by Rahman.  The disk has regions on the interior ~309 K or 96.5 F, vs 321 K or 118 F on the interior of the donut).\

The donut shape: The toroidal shape of donuts is actually an important element here.  The frying of dough happens very quickly, on the order of a minute or two.  Other people trying to copycat the cronut recipe have noted that just deep frying a croissant results in a raw interior.  As I’ve discussed earlier, the key here is the surface area-to-volume ratio.  In the figure above, you can see that after 2 minutes frying at the same temperature, if the donut hole is not removed, then the interior of the dough is significantly less cooked (~20 degree difference, dark blue seen in disk, no dark blue in donut).

Fat, water, protein, and carb composition of croissant (n=6), beignet, and yum-yum recipes.  The fried recipes appear to have higher fat content and lower water content than the croissant, as well as possibly higher protein content.  This chart should put your mind at ease as to how much room for error there is for croissant doughs

The croissant dough:  Some people may be surprised to learn that fried croissant dough is actually not that innovative – this pastry, called a “Yum-Yum” has been around in the UK for decades (maybe centuries? sorry, I’m not really a food historian).  But before I learned about this, I knew that in order to fry croissant dough, some modifications would be necessary.  Alton Brown mentioned in his waffle episode (The Waffle Truth) that fried doughs typically need higher fat and sugar content to stand up to frying.  To confirm this, I did what I call a meta-analysis of multiple recipes.  This appeared to be the case, as an example beignet recipe (from cottonseedoiltour.com, based on ones from Café du Monde) and yum-yum recipe (from James morton) both had higher carb content, lower water content, and possibly higher protein and fat content by mass than average croissant doughs (taken from 6 reputable sources).  I chose the one recipe with highest carb, highest protein, and lowest water content and adjusted these up a bit more for my first trial.

Left: Croissant dough initial proof/rising.  Center: Making a flat sheet of butter, I like to use an old shopping bag and a wine bottle as a rolling pin.  Right: After folding and sealing the dough around the sheet of butter, the dough-butter package was folded into thirds.  This three-fold process is done three times total, with 30-minute refrigeration breaks in between before chilling overnight.

Note: while many baking recipes insist on weighing out ingredients, which is more precise than using volumes (cups, tablespoons, etc), from the graph you should get an idea for the margins of error acceptable within a croissant dough recipe, so really the precision of a scale is not necessary.

Left: After an overnight chill, I rolled the dough thin, to ~1/4 inch thickness, and cut out about 3-inch diameter circles (I used a ramekin as a template and just used a knife, if you want to be precise you can buy a donut/biscuit cutter ).  I also cut out a 1-inch diameter circle from the center.  Center: Two cronuts deep frying.  Right: Two finished cronuts, with flaky cross-section.

Frying technique: Nothing too special about the frying technique, I made the laminated dough, proofed it for an hour and a half, and then tried frying it within a range of temperatures from 375-350 F (typical temperatures used in donut and beignet recipes), and stuck to frying single donuts at 365 F for 90 seconds for a softer outside, 120 seconds for a crispier texture, which was what I was looking for.  After removing from the oil, I dusted on some regular sugar while the exterior is still hot.

Left: I don’t have a piping bag with a thin enough opening, so I used one of those ketchup-looking squeeze bottles to fill the cronuts with beer pastry cream.  Left-Center: A finished bronut filled with beer pastry cream, topped with chocolate shavings and more beer pastry cream.  Right-Center: Bronut cross-section.  Right: Don’t forget about those cronut holes!

Fillings: Since the original cronut had a lemon pastry cream that seemed maybe a bit too light, I decided to make two types of fillings: a lemon pastry cream like the original, except less sweet, and a beer pastry cream.  The cronut is already very light and airy, so I thought that a heavier pastry cream would actually be a better complement.  This, and the fact that my friend Yanran over at skinny bacon had coined the name “bronuts” made using beer the obvious choice.  To make the beer pastry cream, I just used a standard pastry cream recipe I found online but substituted half the milk with a pale ale and 2 tbsp butter.  For lemon pastry cream, just grate a lemon’s worth of zest into the simmering milk. 

After injecting the beer pastry cream into the cronut, I topped it with some chocolate shavings, followed by another ring of pastry cream aaaand boom – bronut complete.

Oh, and remember to save the cronut holes. They're good eats too!

Arrested Development returns! / Chocolate and peanut butter frozen bananas and hydrophobicity

In celebration of the new arrested development season, I thought it'd be most appropriate to post some quick tips on making your own Bluth frozen banana.

Bluth frozen banana stand, Columbus Circle NYC. Pretty tasty,  apparently made by the company 'Totally Bananas'

The whole process is greatly accelerated if you have access to any liquid nitrogen, but otherwise using an ordinary freezer is fine.  Start by halving peeled bananas and running Popsicle sticks or chopsticks through the center.  Keep these in the freezer for 2 hours, although overnight makes the following steps easier.

Once your bananas are frozen, you could coat these with melted chocolate immediately, but here is where a bit of science helps.  Dark chocolate contains ~30% fat components, which makes it relatively hydrophobic. If you've ever seen oil and water forming separate layers and not mixing, it is because fat is hydrophobic (fats generally contain long non polar carbon chains, while water is small, polar, and can form hydrogen bonding networks).The longer a frozen banana is removed from the freezer, the more ice on the surface will melt. When these small droplets of water hot melted chocolate, they cause it to "seize up", or become hard and lumpy. This is because fats within the chocolate are trying to minimize contact with water molecules and minimize disruption of hydrogen bonding networks, which is thermodynamically unfavorable.

Left: An example of a fat-water interface.  The orange and yellow molecules are fat molecules, with multiple  chains of yellow carbon atoms.  The red (oxygen) and blue (hydrogen) molecules are water, which can form hydrogen bond networks (dotted line).  The two types of molecules separate out creating an interface, shown with a solid line.  Right: A very small amount of water is introduced into a mostly-fat environment, the water molecules arrange to maximize hydrogen bonds, fat molecules arrange themselves to minimally interfere.

Some solutions to the chocolate seizing problem: if you used liquid nitrogen to freeze dry your bananas, the frozen water on the banana surface would sublimate (turn into gaseous water vapor) rather than for liquid water droplets, avoiding the problem. The approach I used was to have a buffer layer between the banana and the chocolate, by spreading a thin layer of peanut butter on the banana prior to chocolate coating.  For technique, I would recommend using a cake-frosting strategy of placing a large lump of peanut butter on the banana and then spreading it thin, rather than trying to do several single thin strokes, and
doing this with bananas frozen overnight (peanut butter will have some difficulty sticking as water droplets form, but likely will not seize as most peanut butter brands contain some kinds of emulsifiers).  Chill the peanut butter coated bananas in the freezer for about 15 minutes.

Peanut butter spread on frozen banana on chopstick

When it comes time to coat with chocolate, I'd recommend melting about 1/4 cup of dark chocolate per banana half.  Melt this in the microwave at 20 second intervals, stirring each time, until you just reach the point when all the chocolate has melted (any further and it will likely burn).  Some other recipes I've seen have advocated mixing in butter or coconut oil or other components, but I find these to not add much to the flavor of the shell and at times, interfere with proper hardening or spreading of the shell.  Either dip your peanut butter bananas into the melted chocolate, or if working with a small batch, just spread the melted chocolate on with a knife (as I did, a bit less presentable).  You can also dip frozen bananas without the peanut butter coating, but would have to work fast - dip each one immediately after removal from the freezer. This is also a good time to add a sprinkling of nuts, shaved coconuts, candies, whatever. Allow these to chill in the freezer for another 15 minutes, then serve.

A messily chocolate and peanut butter coated frozen banana. For a smoother chocolate coat, melt more chocolate and dip rather than spread

Steamed bun trio / why let pork belly have all the fun

Left: Peking duck steamed bun with hoisin sauce and scallions. Center: Vietnamese-style pork belly steamed bun with cilantro and sriracha. Right: Crispy salmon steamed bun with creamy dill sauce

Hey all, it's been a while since my last post, but I've finally gotten everything together from my last project.  A relatively new trend that's been cropping up is places serving pork belly steamed buns.  From appetizers on Momofuku menus to food trucks and entire eateries devoted to serving these treats, this somewhat traditional Taiwanese snack is now being repopularized across the US.  However, I've been a bit disappointed to note the lack of variety in most steamed-bun related offerings: the majority of menu items are all pork belly, usually with cucumbers, pickled whatnots, or other tasty toppings.   Not that there's anything wrong with a deliciously roasted pork belly, but truth be told, the steamed bun has much more potential than this.

The first time I ever had this sort of steamed bun was actually back in Houston, served with slices of peking duck and hoisin sauce, and scallions.  I see this as a more traditional form of the steamed bun, and am surprised to not see this offered in more steamed bun venues.  I see the steamed bun as a flexible tool, that can be served with any fatty meat (crispy texture a plus), complementary sauce, and fresh green herbs, and so created a delicious new type of steamed bun: crispy salmon with a creamy dill sauce.

The general process for making steamed buns involves a simple yeast-based dough that's allowed to rise, rolled into a cylinder, cut, and then rolled again into 1" diameter balls that are once again allowed to rise.  I tinkered around with dough formulations from online, and found that several recipes rather overcomplicated things.  I've posted a recipe reduced to the more essential ingredients, and determined that cake dough is necessary for the characteristic puffiness of the steamed bun (using bread flour resulted in flat although deliciously chewy buns - similar effect as in my cookie article)

Left: Yeast based steamed bun dough before rising. Center: Dough after rising. Right: Dough cut and rolled into 1" balls 

These dough balls are flattened out into ovals, allowed to rest, and then steamed for 10-15 minutes.  This is a good time IMO to introduce some extra flavors.  I slid in a slice of ginger to add a faint ginger scent to the buns.  Once finished, these buns can be frozen for weeks and reheated as needed.

Left: Flattened dough balls with slices of ginger. Center: Steamed buns set up on a rice cooker steamer.  Right: Steamed buns steamed and finished

For the meat, simply sear off a skin-on salmon filet.  Alternatively, you can try your hand at roasting a peking duck or use my braised pork belly recipe.  For this project, I modified the recipe to include fish sauce and lemongrass in the marinade, for a more Vietnamese flavor.  All three of these meats are wondrously fatty and have crispy textures to balance the soft chewiness of the bun.

Left: Braised Vietnamese-style pork belly with lemongrass, Center: peking roast duck, Right: seared salmon filet with dill

All that's left is choosing herbs and sauces to complement the meat.  For this Vietnamese-style pork belly, I used sriracha and cilantro.  For the peking duck, the classic pairing of hoisin sauce and scallions.  For the crispy salmon filet, a creamy dill, mustard, and sour cream sauce.

Left: finished steamed buns. Center: chopped scallions, cilantro, and dill, clockwise from top left. Right: creamy dill, mustard, and sour cream sauce for crispy salmon steamed bun

Assemble and enjoy!  Check out my pages to the right for more detailed recipes - to be added soon.

Left: crispy salmon steamed bun with creamy dill sauce. Center: Vietnamese-style pork belly steamed bun with cilantro and sriracha. Right: Peking duck steamed bun with hoisin sauce and scallions

Happy Pi day! / Some quick pie tips

It all comes together pretty well for pi day, it's possibly the only one of the cool irrational numbers that can be broken up nicely into a date (unlike my favorite, phi ~1.61) AND sounds like a tasty, round dessert.  So duhh it's a great time to share some sweet pie tips.

If you like a crisp bottom crust, consider pre-baking the bottom crust, using a dull metal pan.  Black in color I believe would be best, since black materials absorb heat most effectively (allowing more heat to be transferred to the pie via conduction), while a shiny metal pan would reflect heat away.  A glass pan does not have the free electrodes that a metal pan would have, and so heats up slower.  

Diagram of two metal pans in a 400 F oven.  The wavy red lines indcate radiating heat within the oven.  The black metal pan absorbs most of the heat, which can be transferred to the pie via conduction.  The pan on the right reflects most of the heat away, leaving little to transfer to the pie.

Another key factor to consider is the moisture of the pie contents.  If you leave all the fruit liquids in, the pan material almost won't even matter.  You can choose to either cook your pie contents on the stove at low heat to get rid of some excess moisture, or wait 10 minutes or so for moisture to be leached out of the fruit.  The fruit will lose a fair amount of moisture over time just due to the fact that cells are damaged during the cutting process, and due to the presence of relatively high sugar/salt concentrations outside the fruit cells, causing some cells to rupture.  I like to not waste these fruit juices, and will pour them into a pan and heat on the stove until thickened, giving you a nice caramel-like sauce.

Or if you like softer bottom crusts (like me, since I like the variety of texture and that it soaks up that tasty pie juice), you can opt for the glass or shiny metal pans and retain all the extra moisture by NOT pre-cooking your pie contents or discarding liquids given off by the fruit.

Check out my plum pie recipe to the right!  
Can also be adapted for other fruits, like for a crispy crust apple pie.

Some sick crust weaving skills

Valentine's Dinner / new dish: Scallop & pate bruschetta with wine-caramel sauce

Hey guys, so I thought I'd start transitioning to posting more of the cooler things I decide to make, rather than having strictly all science-related projects.  About a week ago, I let my girlfriend choose from a menu of things for our valentine's dinner.  She chose some tricky stuff, but it was fun to make together.  

1st course: Scallop & pate bruschetta with red-wine caramel sauce
2nd course: Pork milanese (picture here with roasted leeks and 6 minute eggs)
Dessert: Apple pie

I'll go into the first course a bit, since it was a bit of an original idea of mine, and I think it came out pretty well.  Pork milanese you can find plenty of great recipes online (I totally just followed the one in that link, with a few changes), and that apple pie is something of a family recipe.

Pate is best made a day or more in advance, to give the flavors time to mellow and to let the mixture set.  You start off by sauteeing some aromatics (shallot, thyme) in butter, followed by searing off cleaned pieces of chicken liver (duck liver if you're fancy and have access to some).  Once browned, aromatics and liver pieces are added to a food processor.  

The pan should be deglazed with some booze (rum, wine, cognac, plenty of options), and the alcohol reduced.  Once you add the reduced alcohol and any additional flavorings (ginger powder, five spice powder, again you have some options here) to the food processor, you're good to go on the first round of blending.  Once smooth, add some extra fat (heavy cream, butter, or both) and blend again till smooth.  Pass the food processor contents through a sieve into a container, seal, and refrigerate until use.

For the rest, just sear some bay scallops on high heat, about 4 minutes on one side until brown and crispy.  Toast some bread (400 in the oven for say 10-15 minutes or in a toaster).  Make red wine sauce as described here, and assemble.

Left: seared bay scallops. Middle: chicken liver pate, Right: red wine caramel sauce

Check out my pages to the right for more detailed recipes!

The Cookie Equations! / calculating cookie ingredients based on desired chewiness and tallness

Hey guys, have been away for a while, but finally back with a new project: creating a fully customizable chocolate chip cookie recipe.

See recipe tab to the right for the cookie ingredient calculator java applet!

Left: a plot showing my conceptualization of the range of cookie textures; they range in tallness and chewiness. Right: cross sections of the cookies I made.  Top row are the chewy variety, bottom row are the crispy variety.

Everyone in the world has their own favorite kind of cookie, some like them thick and chewy, some (who I'll never understand) prefer the thin and crispies.  To the people who don't even like cookies, why are you here?  The function of each cookie ingredient is fairly well understood, so visionary Alton Brown used this information to develop a "chewy", "thin" and "puffy" spin-off of the classic "Toll-House" chocolate chip cookie recipe by manipulating the fat, sugar, protein and moisture content in specific ways.

But why stop at three? Based on the information provided in the "Three chips for Sister Marsha" episode and other references, I've developed a system of equations where users can input how chewy and tall they would like their cookies, on a scale from 0 to 1, and calculate the required cookie ingredients.  With these equations, programmed into the applet, there are theoretically infinite recipes at your disposal! Enjoy!

Some shortcuts:

• If an ingredient is listed at <0.05, you can probably leave it out.
• 0.125 = 1/8, which can help when you're approximating a volume
• AP flour has protein content midway between bread flour and cake flour, so if you need 1.125 cups bread flour and 1.125 cups cake flour, you can instead just use 2.25 cups AP flour.  Another example, if you need 0.75 cups bread flour and 1.5 cups cake flour, you can instead use 1.5 cups AP flour and 0.75 cups cake flour, since 0.75 cups bread flour and cake flour average out to be the same as AP flour in protein content.
• Nothing wrong with approximating, I know it's difficult to measure 0.87 egg whites.

All-purpose recipe:
1) Combine Fats (any butter or shortening) and sugars (brown or white sugars) until smooth.
2) Add Liquids (water, milk, vanilla extract) and egg components (all whites and yolks) to creamed fats.  Combine until smooth.
3) Add flours, leavening agents (baking soda and/or baking powder), and salt.  Combine until smooth.
4) Stir in chocolate chips.
5) (Optional) If you want thicker cookies (thickness parameter > 0.5), I would recommend chilling the batter for at least 45 minutes
6) Scoop out batter with an ice cream scooper onto parchment paper laid on a baking sheet, 6 per sheet.
7) (Optional) If you want thinner cookies (thickness parameter < 0.5), I would recommend flattening out the scoops manually to about 1/4" thick.
8) Bake at 375 for 15-18 minutes.  (15 minutes for chewiness > 0.5, 18 minutes for chewiness < 0.5).

In photos, the general procedure:

Combining fats, sugars, and liquids

Adding flour and chocolate chips

Distribution onto pan and baking