yule73

[yule73]

Lemon and Yuzu velvet with pistachio macaron

After I made the “Paris-Brest with hazelnut praline & koshian mousse” (blog post here), I tried the “Espresso, Fig and Raspberry Entremet with pink peppercorns” on page 96 of the book Japanese Patisserie, but I completely, miserably and embarrassingly failed. I had not experienced such a disaster in a long time. I will try again and blog about it when figs are back on the market.

This post is about the “Lemon and Yuzu velvet with pistachio macaron” on page 86. It is a lemon mousse cake with yuzu curd in the middle and pistachio macaron as a base. In the book, it was made as a round cake using the Vague silicone mold from Silikomart.  But the recipe requires two different sizes of round molds, which I didn’t have.  Also I really wanted to use a fancy silicon mold kit my husband gave me for my birthday. So my cake would look totally different from the one in the book.  

What held me back from trying this recipe for a long time was yuzu juice or puree. But recently my husband ordered a bottle of yuzu puree from Monin for me (yes, thankfully, he is very cooperative in my projects). It has a really good tangy taste, which got me excited about making the cake with the puree (and cocktails as well!). The recipe suggested having everything ready before starting to make the lemon mousse.  So, I started with the yuzu curd insert. I froze it overnight, but it became just gooey, not hard enough to push it out from a mold. I waited another night, but it didn’t change. Actually this was the first time I had used gellan gum. I had no idea if I had bought the right category for this recipe (there are low acyl and high acyl. I used high acyl), I did something wrong, there was something in the puree that prevented it from freezing (high sugar content or pectin or additives) or I should have prepared the silicon mold by lining it with plastic wrap or coating it with butter. Anyway it was clear it wouldn’t solidify as the recipe required even if I waited longer. So, let’s move on and make the base and the mousse (these share Italian meringue).

When I lived in Paris, I learnt how to make macarons and also invented my own recipes of different flavored macarons with sesame or chestnut flour. So, making the pistachio macaron was done using a familiar process with no sweat. The only difference between the recipe and how I usually do is that the recipe does not require waiting until the surface of each macaron is completely dried after piping. I think this was the reason why some macarons puffed or cracked. The macarons in the book looked light green to me (or it could be just my imagination), but mine were not.  This was not surprising because my pistachio flour was brown like regular nut meals. I don’t know if there is a greener pistachio flour.

The instructions to make the lemon mousse followed a standard procedure using meringue (split one preparation with the macarons) and whipped cream with gelatin. To assemble the cake, I put the mousse in the mold, scraped sticky yuzu curd out of the mold with a spoon, tried to shape it as nice as possible, placed it in the mousse, covered it with the macaron base and froze it overnight. 

The big challenge I faced the last time I used the mold kit was removing the cake from it.  As you can see in the book’s cover photo, there is a thin wall of mousse between the insert and the mold.  If it is not completely frozen, it can break easily. The mousse sticks to the mold, and the filling might be exposed. This was one of the reasons I failed “Espresso, Fig and Raspberry Entremet with pink peppercorns” miserably.  But this time, I waited long enough and could push it out nicely.  The recipe says to spray aerosol chocolate on the surface, but I skipped this process.  The mold has a nice groove on the top, so I prepared yuzu jelly with the puree and powdered gelatin, and decorated it with the macarons.

I was really satisfied with the result.  I wish the shape of the yuzu curd insert was nicer when the cake was cut, but I will definitely try to make this cake again.  I really loved the tart taste, not too sweet, not too sour and refreshing.  

[yule73]

Paris-Brest with hazelnut praline & koshian mousse

The next recipe I decided to try from the book Japanese Patisserie was a Paris-Brest with hazelnut praline and koshian mousse.  The book has instructions on how to make koshian, a sweet red bean paste often used in Asian cuisine, but I went to a Japanese grocery store in a Boston suburb, where I was sure it was available. In my childhood, I often visited my grandparents on both sides, who lived in the same city, and had a lot of chances to see or help my grandmothers prepare many different things in their kitchen that we can buy ready-made these days. These experiences were very precious and probably the foundation of my curiosity and enthusiasm about cooking and baking.  However, koshian wasn’t something to make at home even 40 years ago, and we always purchased it in a can. Haha.  

So, back to the Paris-Brest.  I have often prepared choux pastry to make choux à la crème, eclairs and gougères but I have never made any with a crunch topping. The concept of putting cookie dough on the choux pastry before baking scares me.  I am so afraid they won’t inflate nice and puffy, but I had to try today for the first time! The recipe started with preparing the crunch topping.  It was simple: mix all the ingredients, roll them out thin and freeze.  I was probably so scared that the weight of the dough would prevent the choux pastry from rising, and rolled it out too thin, even though the recipe suggested 2 mm thickness. It broke when I took it out of the freezer or stamped it out as rings. Uh-oh, it may be a problem, but I didn’t thaw and combine all the pieces to roll it again.  I decided to do a puzzle. 

Making choux rings wasn’t different from how I had done before.  I laid pieces of broken crunch toppings on top of each choux ring and baked them.  As I feared, they didn’t rise as well as I had expected, but they looked pretty.  Phew, the most difficult part of the recipe was done! 

Making the praline decoration was just a matter of speed. You need to spread out the mixture of sliced almonds and caramel quickly before it hardens. 

The last part was making two kinds of mousse: hazelnut praline and koshian. All the ingredients except for the hazelnut praline paste and koshian were prepared together and separated into two parts. They are easy to make. I realized the patissier likes to use mascarpone in mousses. In the book, there are several other mousse recipes using it. I really like it both taste- and technique-wise. I feel the mousse is not as fatty as regular mousse with whipped cream and meringue. And also, as I might have mentioned in other posts before, I am really not good at making meringue, especially Italian style. So, skipping the meringue is really uplifting for me.  

Look at what I made!  They look pretty good although I wish the choux would have risen a bit more. The koshian mousse is pink in color, and very pretty. I didn’t have excess crunchy topping, but plenty of choux pastry and both mousses so I also made bite-size choux. They're very cute, aren’t they? 

As always, I was impressed that the recipe was not too complicated, but the outcome was so heavenly. Both mousses taste really really good and light. I am thrilled to think of new recipes using them.

[yule73]

White sesame & adzuki cheesecake

It has been 6 months since I started my new job.  It’s not surprising that I’m busier than in my previous position, but I’ve found that I have much less time and energy than I expected on my days off.  I was waiting for the fig season to come so I could make the Espresso, Fig & Raspberry Entremet with pink peppercorns (page 97) from the book Japanese Patisserie, but the best time for figs is now long gone and I’ve already seen frozen puddles in the streets.  I have tried at least a couple of recipes from the book since I last posted. I just was not able to write about them.  Finally today, I would like to talk about white sesame & adzuki bean cheesecake with tahini & chocolate sesame soil.  

The base of the cheesecake was authentic, consisting of crumbled graham crackers pressed down to the bottom of a mold with melted butter.  I prefer to use honey instead of butter for a lemony, refreshing yogurt cheesecake, but it was not difficult to imagine that this version would be creamy and rich, so I followed the recipe and used butter.  

Many times, I have made non-baked cheesecake using cream cheese, whipped cream and gelatin.  In these recipes, the whipped cream creates a light fluffy texture, but this time was the first recipe to use meringue for this purpose.  Feeling a bit of pressure, I started making French meringue.  It has to be hard and stable, otherwise a thick mixture of cream cheese, tahini and koshian paste would smash the form, and the cheesecake would be heavy, not fluffy.  Other than this, the recipe was very easy, especially since I had previously made the chocolate sesame soil for a bitter chocolate, sesame and caramelized miso tart (here).  

I made this for a dinner with friends.  They also love food and cooking like my husband and me, and we often exchange cookbooks and ideas and invite each other over to test new recipes.  Their cooking is always very inspiring and they are open to trying anything new, so I did not hesitate at all to bring this unique dessert.  We all thoroughly enjoyed the combination of creaminess from the cream cheese and the cream fraiche, bitterness from the tahini, and the subtle koshian flavor.  I honestly expected the cake to have a somewhat stronger flavor of adzuki, and I am sure it would not be exotic even with a bit more koshian flavor.  Maybe next time, I will test a little less tahini and more koshian.  Overall, this is a gorgeous, rich, and risk-free dessert recipe for a dinner and/or a party.  I am sure everyone will enjoy this unique cheesecake.  

[yule73]

Matcha, pink peppercorn & wild strawberry madeleines

I’ve already mentioned my soft spot for green tea flavored sweets (here).   One of the other recipes using matcha green tea in the book ‘Japanese Patisserie’ is matcha, pink peppercorn & wild strawberry madeleines.  I had wanted a madeleine pan for a long time, ever since I took a baking class at Cordon Bleu Paris in 2012, but I still didn’t have one until a couple of months ago.  I thought it was time to buy one and started looking on the Internet.  There are many types: mini or standard size, bell shape or round shape, silicon or metal, non-stick or regular metal, 12 or 16 cavities…  I spent a lot of time choosing, and finally ordered a Gobel non-stick bell shape 12-cavity pan, because of its good reputation for the non-stick coating.  

A new ingredient used in this recipe for me was pink peppercorn.  I have found it several times on my dishes, for example fish crudo, but I could never remember the flavor.  I was so curious to see how this spice would go with matcha green tea.  One mistake I made was that I tried to grind it with a pepper mill.  Trust me, never try it.  Unlike black peppercorns, pink peppercorns are soft and moist, so they clog the mill very easily. It took forever to obtain 1/2 tablespoon of ground pink peppercorns by cleaning the mill with a toothpick every minute.  But I quickly fell in love with the fragrance, which is refreshing and citrusy like sansho pepper. But the very mild peppery taste does not numb my tongue or feel fiery, even when I eat an entire peppercorn.

The recipe is simple: whip egg whites and sugar, fold dry ingredients in, add brown butter and rest the mixture in the fridge for at least an hour. Another madeleine recipe I use, which is by Pierre Hermé, suggests resting the mixture overnight in the fridge, so I figure it doesn’t matter even though I only have one madeleine pan with 12 cavities and cannot bake all the mixture at the same time.  

What do you do with the excess egg whites when you make, for example, crème pâtissière or lemon curd?  I usually freeze them.  When I lived in Paris, I learnt how to make macarons according to the Pierre Hermé recipe, and knew that making good meringue is easier if the egg whites are old. Actually, his recipe says they should be separated from the egg yolks and kept in the fridge for 5 days.  Freezing accelerates this ‘aging’ process, while letting us reserve the unused egg whites for some other occasion.  Madeleines do not require meringue, but I used egg whites from the freezer.  

While waiting for the egg whites to defrost, I prepared browned butter (beurre noisette), carefully enough so that it didn’t burn and turn into beurre noir (something I often do!).  All the ingredients were mixed in, adding the ground pink peppercorn last.  The color contrast of matcha green and pink peppercorn was so beautiful.  I added a bit more of the peppercorns so that each madeleine would have more pink flecks.

After an hour of resting the mixture in the fridge, it was time to bake! I was overconfident about my brand-new non-stick madeleine pan, and did not add any grease  even though I was using it for the first time.  This was mistake number 1.  I could not find wild strawberries, so used blueberries and raspberries instead.  I pressed the berries down all the way to the bottom of the molds.  This was probably mistake number 2.  Although the madeleines were baked a beautiful golden green on top, the bottom was still undercooked because of a lot of water from the fresh berries. As a result, they stuck to the molds and broke apart when I tried to remove them. If the berries had been on top of the cakes, probably I could have baked them longer until the bottoms were baked evenly and enough to detach.  

In the second round, I skipped adding fresh berries and greased the molds.  As the recipe suggested, I baked for 12 minutes, took them out from the oven and let them stand for a minute.  Nervously I turned the mold upside down, and TAP! Tada-!!!  All 12 madeleines fell from the molds in the perfect scalloped shape! Without being overbaked, the vivid moss green color of matcha was beautifully conserved.  It was a huge satisfaction.  

After I tested several recipes from the book, I was 100% confident about the taste and as I expected, the matcha and pink peppercorn madeleines were very elegant, with the balanced flavor of green tea and a refreshing citrusy hint of pink peppercorns.  I have already made this twice, and will repeat more soon.

[yule73]

Mont Blanc

One day in January when we had a snowstorm and everything outside was covered in white, a perfect dessert for such a day came to mind: Mont Blanc, a cake with rich and creamy chestnut chantilly. This cake typically looks like a dome of chestnut puree piped out in a swirl like a bird’s nest, with whipped cream inside and topped with marrons glacés. Probably because of availability of chestnuts, we Japanese use them for many kinds of sweets and savory dishes in autumn (here), and there are many big fans of this dessert.

In the book Japanese Pâtisseries, a buttery sablé Breton cookie is used as the cake’s base, and mascarpone mousse for the filing. The recipe looks very simple, except for one concern: where can I find chestnut cream and purée? It would be easy if I were in France, and of course, we can buy anything from Amazon, but I wanted to make and eat it “on the day”. I had a small tin of chestnut cream a friend of mine brought back from France a while ago, although it was not enough to prepare the full portion of the recipe. I searched the Internet and called stores in Boston that sell gourmet or imported foods. I was lucky that one of them, Formaggio Kitchen, had cans of chestnut purée and marrons glacés. It was just a 10 min walk away, but it was not a normal 10 min walk on that day, in the middle of a snowstorm! Anyway, I was determined because I was craving the cake after seeing its photo in the book.

The recipe says to mix the chestnut cream and purée 1:1, but the can of chestnut cream I had was too small, so I mixed it 1:3 and added some sweetener. The mixture was not smooth and had some chestnut crumbles, so I passed it through a sieve. This step was time consuming and tiring, but I could easily imagine the unsieved mixture clogging the Mont Blanc tip (aka grass nozzle). After the chestnut mixture, preparing the sablé Breton and mascarpone mousse was straightforward. Then it was time for assembling. The main event of the day was piping the chestnut mixture out from the Mont Blanc tip!!

Difficult!! Not only was my piping technique poor, but the chestnut mixture also had to be smoother and softer. The recipe says to start from the base, but I found it impossible to wind up to the top. After repeatedly piping and removing the chestnut mixture from the mascarpone mousse (which fortunately I could do because the mascarpone mousse was frozen), I finally made an ok-looking Mont Blanc to post a photo here.

Looking outside at the snow with a warm café au lait in hand, I took my first bite. As with the other recipes from the book, the cake was very tasty, not heavy, not over-sweetened and flavorful. I decided to share a piece with the friend who gave me the chestnut cream. I was sure she would love the cake, and she did! If I were to change anything from the recipe next time, I would probably use a smaller mold for mascarpone mousse so that I could put more chestnut cream on top. Also maybe I would get a Mont Blanc tip with bigger holes!!

[yule73]

Matcha Alfajores

Both my grandmothers practiced the tea ceremony, and they had tea time twice a day every day. Each time I visited them, I enjoyed having matcha (and wagashi) with them. When I was a college student, I also practiced the tea ceremony. Every year I bring back matcha green tea powder from the tea store in my hometown where my family always shops. Not only the thin matcha called usucha, but also any green tea color confections spark joy in me.

On the back cover of the book ‘Japanese Pâtisseries, there are green tea color cookies called Matcha Alfajores. I decided to try making them. According to Wikipedia, alfajore is a traditional confection in South America, the Caribbean and Spain. There are many variations, but the one in the book looks like the South American style, consisting of two round, sweet biscuits made of wheat flour and cornstarch joined together with sweet miso caramel, instead of dulce de leche.

First, bake the alfajore cookies. I was surprised that cornstarch accounted for more than half of the dry ingredients. I use cornstarch in baking/confectionery to prevent marshmallows from sticking to each other, but not much else. I had no idea what the consistency of the cookies would be! I needed to add a bit of water to press the dough together into a ball, as the recipe suggested. I loved the dough’s bright color of green tea powder.

After being chilled in the fridge for 30 min, the dough was rolled out and cut into about 2 inch diameter circles, then baked at 350 F. The recipe says, “bake in the preheated oven for around 7-10 min until set.” Ummm, until “set”?? The dough was pretty dry, so it was difficult to know if the cookies were baked enough. I probably kept them in the oven too long. The nice bright green color turned to bit brown-ish. Urg.

Making the miso caramel was not first time for me (here). The only difference from the one I made for the bitter chocolate, sesame & caramelized miso tart was no butter. And I want to repeat loudly, I LOVE this caramel! To assemble the cookies, I first paired the ones of similar size and shape, then spooned on the caramel and made a sandwich. Look, how cute they are!

    Unexpectedly, the alfajores were quite moist, although I thought I had overbaked them. And they had the nice fresh matcha flavor, not overpowered by sweetness. They are a really easy-to-make delicacy, and one of the most creative variations of alfajores. I would bake them again soon.

[yule73]

Bitter chocolate, sesame and caramelized miso tart

My husband and I both love cooking. Every Christmas, we spend a whole day in the kitchen (like here).  Usually, I’m the one who prepares the desserts.  For this Christmas dinner, I chose a bitter chocolate, sesame and caramelized miso tart from the Japanese Patisserie book.  My husband likes chocolaty desserts and I had all ingredients to make it.  The tart requires preparing four things: chocolate shortcrust pastry, miso caramel, chocolate tart filling and sesame seed soil, plus tempered chocolate decorations as an option. The trickiest part of the recipe for me seems to be making the caramel.  I have failed to make caramel several times, either by burning it or by making it too runny or too hard.  Also, I am bad at tempering chocolate.  Yes, I know. Making caramel or tempering chocolate should not be difficult if you have patience and a candy thermometer.  So, on Christmas Eve, I ran to a local Sur La Table store to buy a candy thermometer at least.  

On Christmas day, I was so nervous and carefully read the recipe over and over.  First, I prepared the chocolate shortcrust pastry.  It went well without any problems.  My only question was the amount, which seemed like way more than what I needed for a 20 cm/8 inch tart pan.  But that's not an issue; in fact, it’s rather good. I prefer preparing an extra portion as a backup.

While the shortcrust dough was resting in the fridge, I prepared the sesame seed soil.  After pouring the hot sugar syrup onto a mixture of sesame seeds and chocolate, I should have started mixing right away, but didn’t.  The sugar syrup cooled down quickly.  The mixture should have looked like soil, but some of mine was clear candy glass!  Oops. But, not a problem.  All I needed was just to pick up and toss the candy glass.

Now it was time to bake the tart shell.  The dough was rolled out smoothly and beautifully lined a pan.  Because the color of the dough is dark, it was difficult to judge whether it was baked or not.  Maybe I over-baked, and the tart shell shrank a bit.  But, no problem as long as it holds some filling.  Keep calm and carry on!

Miso caramel was next.  I used a miso from my hometown called hatcho miso, which is a type of aka-miso (very dark reddish brown miso) made of 100% soybeans.  Probably not the one meant to be used for this recipe, but it tastes very good when it is sweetened, so I was sure it would make very good salted caramel. The recipe didn’t say how much caramel should be put in the shell (definitely not all or it overflows), so I poured enough to cover a few mms on the bottom of the tart shell, and placed it in the freezer, as the recipe said, for 1 hour or until it had set.  Oh boy… My miso caramel never set.  It became thicker after hours in the freezer, but it was still runny.  Why!? Anyway, I had no backup plan for dessert for the Christmas dinner, so I pretended it had set and filled up the tart with chocolate filling.  The last step was to bake it in the oven for about 40 minutes, which I was able to do just a few minutes before we started dinner.  Phew!

I ran out of time, so I didn’t try making fancy chocolate decorations.  I just microwaved a few chocolate chips (Oh, yeah, I didn’t use the candy thermometer) and made several brushstrokes.  But, ta-da-!!  The tart turned out to be a show-stopper!!

Not only was the way it looked quite satisfying, but the taste was also excellent.  It was very rich, but not a heartburn trigger, because the bitterness of the chocolate filling was dominant and not sugary at all. I don’t like overly sweet desserts, but I went for a second slice of this guy.  I was so impressed by the crisp flakiness and perfect taste of the chocolate tart shell as well. I will use the recipe from now on each time I need chocolate shortcrust pastry.  And the miso caramel!!  It was so delicious.  I could have licked it non-stop.  I want to learn the basics to adjust caramel hardness and understand why my miso caramel did not set, so that I can make candies with it.  The crunchy sesame seed soil would be delicious to use as granola.  So many reasons why this chocolate tart recipe is definitely a KEEPER!  

And lastly, do you want to know the best part?  I got praise from Chef James Campbell on my Instagram post!!  YAY!

[yule73]

2019 is the year for baking (and blogging)

After a long, long break, I would like to get back on track and start blogging again about my experiences and thoughts on food. This doesn’t mean that there haven’t been any exciting cooking/baking/dining out episodes since the last post. On the contrary, I have had many noteworthy experiences and I hope I will have a chance to blog about them some time.

But since it’s a new year, I would like to start something new. Have you seen the movie, ‘Julie and Julia’? It’s about a woman named Julie who makes all of the recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and blogs about it. Ever since I watched the movie, I’ve been interested in doing something similar, but in baking, and have been looking for the perfect book. I have the two-inch thick French Patisserie: Master Recipes and Techniques from the Ferrandi School of Culinary Arts and I’m sure that I’d acquire so many skills if I tried all the recipes, but I’d probably become diabetic (and my husband too!). So, not that one. The perfect book would contain about 40-50 recipes, not hundreds, using various skills and techniques, challenging but not impossible, and of course all delicious.

One day as I was browsing the Amazon website, one of the recommendations caught my eye: Japanese Pâtisseries. But the beautiful cake on the cover doesn’t look like a Japanese sweet (和菓子– wagashi) at all, and the author is not familiar either. Which aspect does the book consider Japanese, I wonder and decide to check it out. The subtitle is ‘Exploring the Beautiful and Delicious Fusion of East meets West’. I see! The recipes call for unique ingredients, not only matcha and yuzu, but also miso, sansho, koshian, sake, etc. I love this kind of creativity; for example I can’t wait to taste sansho-flavored pâtisseries! And the techniques used in the book range from the basics to molecular gastronomy, including spherification and emulsification, which I always enjoy, but have never used for any real dishes or sweets. Another thing I really appreciate is that all of the recipes are illustrated with a photo, and all of the cakes are so beautiful, especially some of the ones that I have no idea how to prepare.

This book is THE ONE.

The book includes 53 recipes. If I test one per weekend, it will take at least a year. Whoa! I don’t think I can test a recipe a week, so this is going to be a long-term project. Can I maintain my motivation for so long? Of course, I am also nervous about a lot of other things, too. Am I, an amateur pâtissière, capable of preparing such beautiful cakes? Can I easily find all of the necessary ingredients/equipment? Are the recipes really meant to be prepared in an ordinary, non-professional home kitchen?

This project is definitely challenging, but I love challenges. And now, after so many years of searching, I have found the perfect book to challenge me. So, I would like to try. For me, 2019 is going to be the year of making pâtisseries. And I will blog about my experience in testing each recipe.

So exciting!! Please stay tuned #JapanesePâtisseries.

[yule73]

Barbados food scene

Swimming with sea turtles was one of my dreams since childhood.  Without knowing I have planned but failed to go/camp at Dry Tortugas 8 years ago for the dream, my husband took me for our honeymoon (and my birthday) to Barbados, where we could snorkel with sea turtles.  Our only concern was, as usual, if food is good there and we would find good restaurants and bars (since it was a former British colony and we did not know anything else than rum!!).  Needless to worry, Bajan cuisine was interesting and very delicious with a lot of fresh seafood, and we really enjoyed their local food and many restaurants. 

The must-try Bajan food is fried flying fish.  Flying fish is Barbados's national fish as it is depicted on a $1 coin.  Fillet of flying fish was soaked in salt water with lime juice, marinated with Bajan seasoning and deep fried.  According to recipes I found on internet, seasoning for marinade is paste, which we can buy in a jar, and dried seasoning (a mixture of herbs and spices like onion, thyme, garlic, coriander, black pepper, parsley, marjoram, paprika, scotch bonnet paper, etc) is used to season breadcrumbs.  Unfortunately I have never found flying fish in Boston, but I was so sure I would miss the dish and brought the seasonings back from Barbados.  Less than two weeks after we came back from Barbados, I craved it and decided to cook by my own.  I used sole fillets.  It was a great compromise.

Blue Room Sports Bar and Grill was our favorite place for fried flying fish.  Their Flying Fish Goujons was the best among places we tried, but it was not only dish we enjoyed there.  Their rum punch was the best among ones we had at many places.  Our very first hour in Barbados, we found the place and decided to celebrate a start of our honeymoon there.  It was during a happy hour, which happens twice a day (6-7 and 9-10pm).  We ordered 2 rum punches, one each, but a bartender started making 4 glasses.  The glasses were kind of small, so I just thought 'Oh, they don't have glasses for rum punch right now, and dividing one portion into 2 glasses.'.  But later, when I decided to try Bajan beer, Banks, I got '2 bottles'.  Yes, during a happy hour in Barbados, drinks are the same price, but provided double amount!!  We loved it!  <3<3 

In addition to fried flying fish, you should try fish balls at Rockely beach, jerk chicken at the seagrape beach bar, nice restaurants like Tapas or Champers, or at Shaker's among locals.  Oh, fish sandwich at Cuz on the pebble beach is also must-try.  My husband and I really enjoyed the food scene in Barbados, and cannot wait going back there.

[yule73]

Champagne, Cava, Prosecco

'Would you like something to drink?  Wine?', ‘Anything bubbly.  What do you have?’  This is a first conversation I am at restaurants or bars.  I love all kinds of sparkling wines, Champagne (of course! Who doesn't!?), Prosecco, Cava, plus cocktails using sparkling wine, like French 75, although I am not a fan to have sweet stuff before meals.  I can drink bubbly  not only with appetizers like raw bar, foie gras torchon, charcuteries, or carpaccio/sashimi, but also with steak tartare or duck breast.

Any authentic Japanese dish goes along with Champagne, especially, Blanc de Blancs.  When I went to a brilliant kaiseki restaurant in Kyoto last autumn, Kitcho Arashiyama, we had Champagne for the entire course.  The photo below is not from Kitcho, but one of my mom's cooking when I visited them in Japan some years ago.  Matching with a dish of grilled Matsutake mushroom and ginkgo nuts (both are traditional autumn ingredients, which I was also served at Kitcho), my parents decided to open a bottle of Don Perignon from their cellar.  It was a nice welcoming back message from them, who are too shy to actually say that.  And me? Hahaha.  I am also too shy to put my appreciation  to them into words.  It must be in the family, I guess.  Anyway, the bottle that represented my parents’ love could not have been more special.

By the way, a supermarket near my apartment has an incredible selection of champagnes.  I wonder why?  The store is not a place for gourmets, rather an ordinary supermarket chain that gives us a plastic members discount card for our key chain.  However, the selection they offer is Dom Perignon, Perrier-Jouet Belle Epoque, Veuve Clicquot Grand Dame, etc.  And this is not for a year-end partying season, all year around!  What a dangerous (too seductive) place it is!  Although, as you see behind of Perrier-Jouet in the photo below, it has a lot of stuff like canned sparkling or wines in a milk carton.  ;)

The other day, I tasted an interesting sparkling wine.  The wine, Alma Negra, which means 'dark soul', has a scary face like Batman on the label, but it is pretty pink Rosé.  Even though it was made by a traditional method, this wine was a fresh experience for me.  What is unique about this wine is that it is made of Malbec (85%) and originates from Argentina.  It is not too sweet (dark soul cannot be sweet, right?), very light and refreshing with a flavor of sour fruits like lemon or berries.  When I found this wine, I was sheltering from a Thunderstorm, and it was really hot and humid as the glass got condensation so quickly, but discovering such wine always makes my day.  

Now, the end of summer, when there are no more Thunderstorms but the sun is still high even after work, it is a perfect time to enjoy a bottle on our little balcony with my loved ones (boyfriend and two cats).  I hope such beautiful happy days last forever.  

[yule73]

French Laundry cookbook

A year ago for my big birthday, my boss invited me to dinner and gave me a gift. I opened it and saw a back cover of a book. I immediately recognized what book it was and said, ‘French laundry!!’. I had checked it out many times in book stores. Not all the recipes in the book have photos, but all dishes with a photo are beautifully presented and very inspiring. Unfortunately, I did not find a chance to cook anything from this book for a year, but because each recipe has some episodes about how it was developed or why the chef, Thomas Keller, thought it was best to prepare the dish in such a way, etc., even if you do not try any recipes from the book, you still enjoy owning it (at least this is true for me).

In the last couple of years, I have been spending Christmas eve as a day devoted for cooking; I prepare dinner with challenging dishes or ingredients. This year, I decided to cook a full course dinner from this book. An amuse bouche was mousse au foie gras with Sauternes jelly, which was my original recipe, and toasted brioche. Matching sweet wine, especially Sauternes, with foie gras, is a tradition, and I could have prepared the mousse with fig or blueberry balsamic reduction and drunken Sauternes, but for a celebration like Christmas, I always want to start with sparkling wine. By chance, I found a bottle that I wanted to taste, Domaine Huet Vouvray petillant, as a starter.

The first dish was crab meat salad with cucumber jelly. I thought the cucumber jelly was just for presentation, and did not expect it would contribute to the taste of the entire dish. But the flavor of cucumber was unexpectedly strong and really refreshing between bites of the crab meat marinated with mustard flavored whipped cream. To prepare cucumber juice, because I do not have a juice press, I sliced cucumbers and squeezed them by hand. I was not sure if this would work (probably it does not work always depending on the ripeness of the cucumbers), but I was so glad I did not replace it with some other green juice like kale or spirulina.

The second dish was truffle infused egg custard with ragout. At the end of my stay in Paris, I started to see egg dishes more often on menus in restaurants. Eggs are definitely not fancy ingredients, but simple dishes with high quality eggs as a main ingredient gave me chances to enjoy the real taste of eggs. Also I was attracted to this recipe because it used egg shells as a cup. It was fun to saw eggs with a bread knife. :) The dish was delicious with or without ragout.

The main dish was sous-vide cooked duck breast. This was the second time I tried sous-vide cooking. The first time was in a molecular gastronomy cooking class in Paris, where we cooked pork fillet. Undercooked pork can be dangerous, but duck breast can be cooked over a wide range, from rare to well done.  A guest did not eat red meat, so I really needed to cook the meat well-done, and I cooked much longer than the recipe suggested, but sous-vide without a thermos water bath is not easy.  Also, the meat was wrapped with Swiss Chard, which prevent me from checking how it was cooked.  The meat came out as rose. Urg... 

A dessert was a chocolate tarte with a cage of caramel.  It was so much fun to prepare a cage of caramel.  I remembered when I was a kid, summer festivals at a shrine in my neighborhood had many food stands on a street leading toward to the shrine.  Often one or two were sugar sculpture stands (amezaiku, great youtube video here).  After many failures, I was again amazed by the technique of those who made candy sculptures for me.  At the end of the dinner, I was a bit drunk and I could not even drop raspberry and greentea sauce on right spots and made ugly stains on the plate!!  

[yule73]

Sashimi bar Uni

I often go to restaurants alone. My job makes it hard to plan of time when I can finish work each day. Sometimes I do not have energy to cook after work and I go to a restaurant even though I have everything to prepare dinner in my fridge. Sashimi bar Uni is one of my favorite places to have a quick but nice dinner and it is relatively easy to get a seat at a counter if I am alone. Another good thing about going to eat alone is that I have more chance to talk to people, including chefs.

I have had a nice chat with the chef of Uni. I found an article about him in the Edible Boston winter issue of 2013 (Edible Boston is a free food magazine published four times a year). I really enjoyed reading the article.  He uses many different kind of sauces for sashimi. As shown in the photos of the article, I also saw many little bottles of sauces behind of the counter. They are prepared not only with japanese ingredients but also ingredients unique in any kinds of cuisine, like tabasco, jalapeños, western herbs, truffles, and olive oils. He said in the article that to create the menu, he chooses sauces before fish. Maybe this makes more sense nowadays. We Japanese feel autumn is coming when we start to see mackerel pike in fish markets (In Japanese, it is written with Chinese characters as autumn knife fish). We feel winter if we see monk fish in markets. But because of advanced transportation system, we can find some kind of seafood all year round. Fresh seafood from the southern hemisphere is in restaurants in Boston the next day after it is caught.  Seasonality in dishes, which is very important for Japanese cuisine, is likely to be created also by ingredients of a sauce, in addition to by the fish itself, if a variety of sauces are used, not only soy sauce and wasabi. And the most important point is that his sauces do not mask or destroy natural flavors of fish.

One thing that really surprised me in this article was “The Japanese do things differently, and for a reason. They typically point their index finger when holding a knife because it allows for more control of the knife”. WHAT?? The way to hold knives I learned in cooking classes at junior high school is the Japanese way!?  I have never doubted it was not universal!!  Interesting…

After enjoying their sashimi dishes (the second photo is a chef's choice sashimi platter), I recommend trying their pork buns (the third photo). It is superb. Their wine list is also very interesting. I am so excited to check it out every time I go there. One day, I found very good aged Loire wine with a reasonable price.

You can read the article here:

http://edibleboston.com/not-your-average-sashimi-chef/

In the article, he said, “People eat with their eyes first so I try to make everything as appealing as possible in every sense”. In the next post, I would like to write about an article in NY Times and surprising comments from the readers in this point of view.

[yule73]

Chocolat chaud

This is my second winter in Boston. After I experienced the first one, I honestly thought it was not at all as bad as everyone warned me about. At the beginning of this winter, everybody told me the last one was very mild, scaring me again. It is true. Now it is still December, but we have already had an entire week when the temperature never went up above 0 °C (32F), two snow storms and a frozen Charles river.

I am not a big chocolate fan. I still like simple dark chocolate without ganache or nouggat inside, and if I have a choice of a dessert, between one with chocolate and one with fruits, I will definitely choose the one with fruits. However, this weather… Such cold weather made me try something unusual. ‘Let’s go to have a hot chocolate!��.

Last winter, a friend of mine introduced me a good chocolatier in Boston, L.A. Burdick. How lovely it was, he gave me a birthday gift from this shop! It was their signature product, mouse shaped chocolate. I do not have any problem to eat something cute, so I picked up the mouse with the tail, and threw it into my mouth without hesitation. Delicious! I decided to go there for a hot chocolate. There were several choices, hot chocolate with dark, milk or white chocolate. The white hot chocolate was interesting, but I was afraid it could be too sweet for me. I ordered a dark one. YUMMM! It was not too sweet and had a strong flavor of cacao. It warmed me up so much. I also ordered a small cake, which was also rich and good. However, the large cup of hot chocolate was too large for me. As soon as I got out from the cafe, I started looking for a place to buy a bottle of water. You can tell how dense the hot chocolate was, can't you?

The famous place for hot chocolate in Paris is Angelina. This cafe has several places in Paris. The one on Rue de Rivoli always has a long queue extending outside, but it is worth it to wait because the interior of the place is beautiful and gorgeous (unfortunately all my photos include only their food, not the interior). I had Brunch Angelina, a set of tea, coffee or hot chocolate with fresh fruits juice, mini pastries and organic bread. The hot chocolate tasted very elegant, and made me feel the moment I was sitting in the cafe unreal. For a while, I forgot about my work or any hectic business in my life.

On another day, I had a cake with fruits at Angelina. Not only chocolate but also any kind of dessert from this place seems good. A friend had a mont blanc, which is another speciality of this cafe.

L. A. Burdick

220 Clarendon Street, Boston, MA

Angelina

226 Rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris, France

[yule73]

Puritan & Company

One day in the beginning of December, I had an opportunity to go to a christmas party of an IT company as a plus one.  The restaurant, Puritan & Company, which has many good reviews, was reserved for the party.  I was thrilled and enjoyed choosing a dress, shoes and accessories for a few days.  I know, I know, it does not matter what I wear to eat good food, and it does not change tastes of food, but such an opportunity is a good excuse to wear my lovely little black dresses waiting in the wings long time.  ;)

First we enjoyed apéros and hors-d'œuvres cocktail party style.  I had a glass of Spanish sparkling Cava.  The restaurant stuff served us hors-d'œuvres like scallops crudo, swordfish pastrami, etc. and we also could munch marble bread rusk with duck liver pâte (this was excellent), roasted mini carrots (the presentation was interesting), shrimp cocktail, fresh oysters or clams from a raw bar.  All the seafood was really fresh and my friend who had raw scallops first time enjoyed it, too!

After a while, we took a seat at a table and chose a starter, main and dessert from a menu.   The restaurant prepared 3 choices of starters, 4 choices of main, and 3 choices of dessert for the reserved party of 50-60 people.  I chose beet salad, pan-roasted monkfish and lemon curd.

The beet salad was interesting.  Not only were various colored beets used in the dish, but they were also prepared in different ways.  Some pieces of beets were pickled, some were roasted (so naturally sweet) and I could not tell how each piece would taste until I put them in my mouth.  And the yogurt dressing was really refreshing.

And the main.  I love monkfish.  I could not resist having it when I saw it on the menu.  I switched my drink to Sancerre, because I thought the buttery meat would be good with it.  The perfectly cooked monkfish was firm and without any fishiness, which was a proof how fresh the meat was.  

The dessert was lemon curd with Crème fraîche sorbet, white chocolate cream, pistachio crumbles and a bit of olive oil.  The harmony of each flavor was very pleasant and refreshing.  The whole experience of the night was really great: meeting new people, having fun conversation, good food and wine.  Thank you, thank you, thank you for taking me to the party.

By the way, their list of bottle wine is very fat and interesting.  I found (at least) two bottles I have wanted to taste long time!  I have to go back to this place soon.  :)

Puritan & Company

1166 Cambridge St,

Cambridge, MA

[yule73]

Autumn in the supermarket

We Japanese say 'autumn is a season for a big appetite'. I have experienced gaining several pounds in autumn. Probably I tend to lose appetite during summer because of the heat, and to gain it back once it becomes cooler. Also, I guess we have to prepare for winter, which is a time of a year we need to burn more fat to maintain our body temperature.  Anyway, many things are delicious in this season! This is what I love among autumn foods.

Chestnuts (châtaigne:French, Kuri:Japanese): In Japanese cuisine, we use them for salty dishes as well as sweets.  My favorites are Kuri-Okowa (栗おこわ), which is sweet rice cooked with chestnuts, and Kuri-kinton, which is a sweet prepared from mashed chestnuts.  It is a lot of work to peal the hard shell of chestnuts, but I cannot resist buying them if I see them in a supermarket.  Recipes for them are quite straightforward, and save the original flavors very well.  

While I was living in Manhattan, NYC, a big Whole Foods was opened at Columbus Circle.  I went to check it out with a French friend.  He was so excited when he found farine de châtaigne (chestnut flour).  We had never used it, so we decided to do an experiment together.  He prepared pasta with it, and I prepared a sauce for the pasta.  I thought about which sauce would go along with the pasta, and decided to prepare a sauce with cream and dried Porcini mushrooms.  The combination of subtle sweetness from the pasta and rich fragrance of porcini was unforgettable.  Since then, chestnuts flour is a 'must have' ingredient in my kitchen.  Not only did I used chestnuts flour for pasta, but I also tried to use it for some other recipes, for example, biscotti or French macaron.  It does not always  work (I feel chestnut flour absorbs more water than wheat flour), but generally to simply replace 1/4 to 1/3 of an amount of flour with chestnuts flour works fine (the texture of the dough is not changed and we can feel the flavor of chestnuts).

Pumpkin (Poitron:French, Kabocha:Japanese): As soon as we feel summer is over, we start to see tons of pumpkins in stores.  But most of them are for halloween decorations such as Jack O' Lanterns, not to eat.  I carve pumpkins almost every year, but never eat the carved inside part.  It directly goes to a garbage disposal in the kitchen sink, even though I definitely feel so bad wasting food.  A last couple of years ago, I started to see many Japanese origin (or Asian origin) vegetables in regular supermarkets, not only stores for  Asian speciality.  Kabocha is one of them.  Kabocha is much sweeter than acorn squash (I used acorn squash a lot as the closest substitution for kabocha), with dark green skin and orange inside.  Unfortunately, the recipe was lost, but when I was a child, my mom prepared excellent pumpkin bread.  As a lunch for my school day excursions, she baked the bread and let me bring it on the trip.  She also prepares a delicious pumpkin soup.  Both recipes use the whole pumpkin, including the green skin!  The green blended particles of the skin in the soup or bread does not look beautiful, but they make me feel I am tasting the entire thing and I think actually the taste might be more complex.  I really hope my mom finds the bread recipe, especially now that I can buy kabocha really easily here in the US.

Brussels sprouts: In Japan, I had never seen brussels sprouts on a stem.  In Japanese, it is called 芽キャベツ (me-kyabetsu: direct translation is cabbage sprout).  So, I imagined a brussels sprout stuck out from soil like a baby cabbage!  When I saw for the first time that  they were on a stem, I took a photo and sent it to my Mom, I remember.  I love a simple recipe with it: boil or microwave it and sauté it with walnuts in a frying pan and at the end, sprinkle sugar to make a caramel coat on them.  The bitterness of brussels sprouts and sweetness from the caramel is what I love.

Mushrooms: I love love love mushrooms, all kinds of mushrooms!!  It creates great vegetarian broth as does sea weed, and the flavor is really rich.  It can beat any other meat origin broth.  In autumn in Paris, I saw many kind of mushrooms in marche.  There were Girroles, black trumpet, fresh Cepe, Morel, pied de mouton, etc...  I also love Japanese mushrooms, like shimeji, maitake, matsutake, enoki, which can be seen in the Whole Foods these days (except for Matsutake, an equivalent of Cepe or Porcini) as shown in a photo below as well as Girroles and black trumpet.  I have tested a recipe of mushroom bisque from the Jamie Oliver website.  The result was really satisfactory, but the prep was not easy, because if I bought mushrooms in a marche in Paris, the mushrooms were usually mixed with a lot of dirt, fallen dead leaves or pine spines from trees, etc, and took so long to clean or separate mushrooms and some other things we do not want to eat.  Probably I should try again to prepare my own mushroom bisque here in the US, where I can easily buy organically grown mushrooms, with almost no contamination from any other inedible things.  

Once or twice a year, I see a news article on a Japanese news site that some people die due to poison from mushrooms they picked in a forest.  This was the reason why I did not go mushroom picking with my friends to Fontainebleau, a suburb of Paris. It is really difficult to know for the non-specialist which mushrooms are poisonous or safe.  But some brave friends went mushroom picking and cooked and ate them.  Next day, one of the friends told me she saw a GREEN GNOME.  I knew this could happen!!  It must have been a hallucinating mushroom!!!   I was so happy I did not go with them.  

[yule73]

Bread + Butter

One sunny Friday afternoon in October I had to visit a government office near Haymarket.  Because it did not take so long to finish the errand in the office, I was given a bit of extra time, which was enough to have lunch before going back to work.  

Probably I have used this subway station only once, to go to Bostonian Little Italy.  As the name tells us, there is a farmer's market in front of the station.  I saw a lot of fresh vegetables, fruits and seafood.  And I found a cafe that had a nice open terrace full of sunshine.  It was an Indian summer day, and I was thirsty.  I popped in the cafe to get a cold drink.

There were many pastries that looked good in a showcase in the cafe, and their salad and sandwich menu looked good as well.  I decided to eat there.  Taking a glance at the pastries with great desire, I ordered a salad and iced latte (I am on a diet).  Kale + Faro salad included baby kale, farro (I love it!), roasted cauliflower, carrots and grape tomatoes.  The roasted cauliflower in the salad was really tasty.  I had thought cauliflower was boring, but I refreshed my impression.  It creates sweetnesswhen roasted.  And I love kale andI do not think I had had it raw before.  I always cooked it (put it in a microwave for a minute) because I thought it had a strong bitter taste and the texture of the uncooked leaves would be too hard, almost like papers.  But the raw baby kale was soft and had a mlld flavor, which I really enjoyed in the salad.  I decided to use those ingredients more often at home.  Anyway, all ingredients in the salad were fresh and the matching dressing was really good with the salad.  Just one thing I would request was that even though I stayed in the cafe to have the salad and drink, both were served in plastic containers.  I would enjoy a time and experience there without feeling guilty if they used real dishes and utensils.

After the happy moment with the good food and sunshine, I left the place and walked toward a subway station to go back to work.  When I had to stop for a red traffic signal to cross the street, finally I lost restraint, turned back to the cafe and bought an almond croissant.  I just had a conversation with my boss (French) in the morning about where we could find good pastries in Boston.  My plan was to bring it to work, invite her for a tea break and share the almond croissant with her.  But of course, it was Friday.  She left her office a bit early, and I had to keep it all to myself.  ;)

Now, I am looking forward to a chance to tell her 'hey, you missed a chance to taste the best almond croissant in Boston!'

Bread + Butter

64 Cross Street, Boston, MA 02113

[yule73]

Hangover - Dr. Smurf

Sigh… How many times I have sworn ‘I will never drink alcohol, never ever again!’… I still have not learned to stop drinking after a half bottle of wine (a full bottle is my max capacity); rather, I have a hangover more frequently these days. This is a good sign because I drink only when I am happy. :)

There is interesting research about the drinking habits of Western Europeans. Southern Europeans drink alcohol for meals, i.e. wine is a normal part of the daily diet. On the other hand, Northern Europeans drink alcohol (beer) to get drunk!! This phenomenon was described already in the 16th century (according to ‘The peasants of Languedoc’ By Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie), and it is also true in secondary cultures spawned by European colonialism like North and South America.

Of course nothing about Japanese drinking habits is mentioned in this article, but we Japanese drink to get to know each other or get rid of superficiality. There is a special word in Japanese language. 無礼講 (bureiko) means abandonment of normal social formalities by drunkenness. And of course, without social formalities, we follow our own instinct and have fun. Sometimes we have TOO MUCH fun and do not want to remember it the next day. Oooops!

And after such situations, we are often damaged not only mentally by the foolish memories, but also physically by a hangover. In Japan, we believe a cup of miso soup cures it. It supplies us sufficient salt and amino acids, which are useful to re-balance the electrolytes in our body. For the same reason, in the US people suggested to me to drink chicken or beef bouillon soup and French onion soup in France. Another quick way to replenish electrolytes in our body is drinking a sports drink like Gatorade or Powerade. When I was in Paris, I had a really good friend (and colleague) to ‘have fun’ with. We kept a jar of Powerade powder in our office with a small mascot Smurf, who we called Dr. Smurf. After a fun night, we both came to work, prepared this toxically blue drink and drank a lot of it until we became the same color as Dr. Smurf begging him ‘please help me~’. Hahaha, it is a really good memory.

By the way, next Thursday, which the third Thursday of November, is a day for the release of beaujolais nouveau. In bars in Paris, people drink the wine, dance and sing together. I love the ambiance, but never the wine. It is the drink that most effectively causes us to have a hangover. And do not believe it if French people suggest to you to have eau de vie or pastis without water to cure a hangover. ’Hair of the dog’ never works well, according to Dr. Smurf. Instead, try croissant and café au lait. Fat from the butter and protein from the milk helps you. 

Oh, the top photo is a statue in the Tuileries garden in Paris. Occasionally he has a hangover due to mischievous Parisians.  ;)