The Winter Guest

School of tapas: Spanish tortilla or tortilla española

2012-01-14T12:00:00.002+01:00

That’s right, tortilla española. This famous tapa at last after a long hiatus. Spanish tortilla is one of the few dishes that can be undoubtedly found all over Spain, if not the only one. It’s so interspersed in our identity that no region can claim to be the cradle of this ubiquitous dish or tapa. And as with every traditional dish, every family claims to prepare the ultimate version. Much debate goes on about the size to which the potato should be sliced, the kind of potato to be used, the seasoning, the degree of inner “runniness” (more cooked, more raw), with onion or onionless… it goes on and on. But the fact is that no matter how it’s made, it is a true favourite on all tables and at all Spanish homes, genuine comfort food. And by the way, my mother makes the best tortilla ever, of course…

And it’s not so difficult to make. Accurate doneness and seasoning take practice, but the result will always be edible, after all… Spanish tortilla is basically nothing more than potato, egg and salt. Some people claim that tortilla should also include some onion and that is a very common addition too, as it gives it a tasty twist that I also love, therefore I’m including this option in the directions. But let’s get to it:

Spanish tortilla
(for 6-8 tapa-sized portions)

3 medium potatoes (waxy potatoes preferred)
5 medium eggs
1/2 onion (optional)
Salt to taste
4 cups (minimum) virgin olive oil for deep frying

Peel and slice the potatoes finely (see the photos). Peel and slice the onion if using.
Heat the olive oil in a deep frying pan or in a deep-fryer, to low-medium. Add the potatoes (and onion). The potato must be poached gently, not really fried. It is essential that the potato slices don't form any hard skin (nothing near potato crisps), they must be overly soft in the end. The poaching can take anything from 5 to 10 minutes, depending on the type of potato. Turn them over once in a while with a slotted spoon if not using a deep-fryer. When done, drain them from the oil and set aside.
In a large bowl, beat the eggs thoroughly and add the salt. I have my own rule of thumb for the amount of salt: one large pinch per egg, plus another one for the potatoes... sounds silly, but it works for me.
When the potatoes have cooled down a bit, tip them into the bowl and mix well with the eggs. You can cut with a fork through the potatoes to make the slices smaller to better blend with the eggs. Let the mixture stand for 10 minutes, the potatoes will absorb some of the egg.
Prepare a heavy bottom non-stick skillet that has just the right size to hold the mixture, it must serve as a mold to shape the tortilla. You need to form a cake that is something in between 1 and 2 inches thick. Brush it with olive oil and heat on medium-low.
Cook the tortilla on low-medium heat so that it doesn't burn on the outside while it's still too soft on the inside, at least 5 minutes. Run a spatula around the edge to make sure it's not sticking. Then flip it over (that's the most interesting stage): carefully slide it on a plate large enough. Then, while you're holding the plate on one hand, turn the skillet upside down and place it on the plate. Flip the plate-skillet assembly over and cook the other side for another 5 minutes.
Slide onto a plate and serve.

Let me tell you something: frying in virgin olive oil is a must. It’s a sin not to cook Spanish tortilla in olive oil, be warned. And if you don't use olive oil, don't tell anyone, it could be life-threatening. Also remember: practice makes perfect. It’s easy to make an edible tortilla, but my friends, making an outstanding one takes superb ingredients and… your whole life. But I assure you, if there’s a dish worth mastering, this is it. Enjoy it on a sunny noon.

School of tapas: Ibérico ham and figs on potato nests

2011-10-07T13:15:00.000+02:00

I recently devised these Ibérico and fig nests for a sponsored entry on my Spanish blog. And they were a success, if I may say so, not only at home but with my readers, that's why I'm posting them here as a delicious tapa. Maybe you're still in time to catch up with the last figs of the season... Ibérico ham with figs is a match made in heaven, as simple as that.

Be sure to get yourself a premium Ibérico ham, you'll notice the difference.

To the point:

Ibérico ham and figs on potato nests
Ingredients needed per nest:

1 medium potato
3 small mozzarella slices
3 slices Ibérico ham
1 fresh fig
Salt to taste

At least in Spain, to prepare the nests with straw potatoes special molds are used that look really like two small strainers, one inside the other. Well, I don't own such a gadget. Incredible, but true (Christmas is around the corner, just a hint). However, this doesn't prevent you from making the nests, as they can be baked in some small casseroles in the oven.

Peel the potatoes and cut the straws with a blade slicer or a similar gadget. Sauté them slowly or cook them in the microwave until cooked and soft. I added fresh rosemary for additional flavor (if you want to see how to make a tart case with straw potatoes, see this wonderful post by my friend Colette, in English).
Oil the ramekins or small casseroles or line them with parchment paper to avoid sticking. Then line the pan with the cooked straw potatoes, smoothing the surface and pressing them with a spoon. Salt them.
Put the casseroles into a preheated oven at 340ºF (170ºC) and bake 40 minutes. Watch them closely and adjust temperature and time if necessary so that they brown evenly.
When the nests are baked, place the mozzarella and ham slices in them; bake slightly, for the cheese to soften, but don't overdo it, so not to thoroughly cook the ham. I prefer to add the figs raw, after taking the nests out of the oven, so that they don't soften excessively.
Lastly, enjoy the nests along a good Spanish red wine, with the fig juices oozing out the corners of your mouth.

A photographic journey

2011-09-19T15:18:00.000+02:00

You might have noticed that I have been somewhat absent ever since I came back from my summer holidays. Well, the reason is no other than the launching of a beautiful and thrilling project. Along with Spanish bloggers Sandra from La Receta de la Felicidad and Pam from Uno de dos a new web has been launched... and what is it about? It is named 1080 fotos de cocina, meaning 1080 cooking photos. If there is a classic cookbook in Spain, that is the ubiquitous 1080 Recipes by Simone Ortega, considered by many as the Bible of Spanish cookbooks. As the classic version of the book is completely devoid of images, in this very visual era many "young" and not that young people miss a little bit of graphical guidance on the recipes. Here is where we thought we could be of some help...

That's why we summoned a well seasoned team of fellow bloggers and photographers and we have set out on a joint journey for photographing each of the 1080 recipes, one a day. A real adventure, don't you think? I invite you to check our web for some succulent photography by the following fellow bloggers (as well as the three editors, including myself):

Jimena, Agoisfoto
Montse, Salseando en la cocina
Macu, Tengo un horno y sé cómo usarlo
Ingrid, My lovely food
Mayte, Rustica
Alba, Le fabuleux destin du chocolat
Cris, Crazy Tea Party
Ángeles, Cook me tender
Alicia, A mí lo que me gusta es cocinar
Linda, La letra con salsa entra
Ivana, My little things
Sonia, L’Exquisit
Zaida, Can Colette
Silvia, Food and cook
María Luisa, Zerogluten
Lydia, Just a little bite
Ana, Lovefoodblog

I started out with this photo of floating islands on custard...

Unfortunately we have not been granted permission to publish the recipes themselves, so only a personal comment is included with each recipe photo. However that is not a problem for our Spanish readers, as everyone has the book or knows someone who does...

What are you waiting for? Please visit us at 1080 fotos de cocina and make yourself at home. At least you'll leave with an urge to cook some Spanish food...

School of tapas: Grilled cuttlefish with roasted garlic alioli

2011-08-27T17:02:00.004+02:00

Grilled cuttlefish... I'm sure many people outside Spain shudder at the thought. And even people from Spain (my kids, for example). But it is a very traditional food in the Mediterranean coast and well cooked and seasoned it can be utterly delicious. In this recipe the grilled cuttlefish chunks are dipped in a tasty alioli made with roasted garlic instead of raw, for a softer taste experience.

Cuttlefish belong to the same family as octopus and squid, and share features of both. In Spain they are easily found already clean at supermarkets, but if you attempt to clean them yourself... well, you can make a real mess in your kitchen. You need to remove tentacles, eyes and beak. Then you have to gut the head and extract the ink sack. After that, you need to get rid of as much outer membrane as possible (yes, cuttlefish have like an outer skin which is better removed). The clean head has a pleasant, firm consistency and a healthy white color. It can be sliced or cubed and cooked in a variety of fashions. On the other hand, tentacles can be cooked in fish stews or used to obtain a broth... have I already discouraged you to cook cuttlefish? Overcome prejudices and you will taste something truly delicious.

On the other hand, in the old days preparing tender cuttlefish used to be trickier than today. The thing can easily acquire a tough consistency, especially if you overcook it. But nowadays the first thing you need to do to tenderize the cuttlefish is to freeze it, if it hasn't been frozen before getting to the shop. Then you need to eliminate as much skin as you can. Lastly, the grill needs to be really hot before placing the cuttlefish chunks on it and they are to be cooked no longer than 1-2 minutes on each side.

Grilled cuttlefish with alioli
Yields 2 tapa sized portions

1/2 cuttlefish head, clean
Virgin olive oil
For the alioli
1 whole head garlic
1/2 tsp salt
1 medium egg and 1 yolk
1 cup virgin olive oil

First to the alioli: wrap the head of garlic in aluminum foil and roast in the oven preheated to 170ºC (340ºF) half an hour or till tender. Let cool and peel.
Mash the roasted garlic with the salt in a mortar. Transfer the mash to a food processor or blender, add the egg and yolk and mix thoroughly.
Measure the oil. Turn on the blender or processor at medium-low speed and start pouring the oil in a tiny steady stream, until you finish all the oil. Transfer the alioli to a container and set aside.
Preheat a heavy skillet. Cut the cuttlefish head in bite-sized pieces and brush them with olive oil. When the skillet is hot, place the cuttlefish pieces to grill. They won't need longer than 1-2 minutes per side, in fact overcooking them yields a tough rubbery cuttlefish.
When done, serve them immediately with a bowl of alioli on the side.

And enjoy! This roasted garlic alioli is also wonderful with all kinds of grilled meat and fish. So if you don't dare to try the cuttlefish, try at least this scrumptious dip.

Pickled aubergines from La Mancha

2011-08-22T12:55:00.002+02:00

No, I was not missing. I was on vacation. The summer is hot here in the Spanish plateau, so we always flee from here for at least a week and head north. To wherever north. But... to the point: this post deals with Almagro aubergines or berenjenas. Almagro is a beautiful village in the plain of La Mancha, packed with historic highlights and known for its lacemakers and yearly Classical Theater festival. But also for its pickled baby aubergines. I love them. In Madrid you can spot them canned in any good food shop or supermarket, but I had never found them fresh. Till last week. I entered my favourite greengrocer's and there they were. Plump and fresh, waiting for me. So I felt the urge to buy 4 pounds, just in case. In case I get a craving for pickled baby aubergines in the middle of the winter.

Almagro aubergines are a unique product from several villages of La Mancha. They are harvested while still small and unripe, and marinated in a dressing that normally includes vinegar, salt, cumin, garlic, sweet pimentón and olive oil in varying amounts, where they must remain up to a week before being eaten. They are sometimes stuffed with sweet red pepper. Like all things pickled or marinated, they are very easy to prepare, so their secret lies in the quality of the product and the seasoning. I especially love them on a bread slice, oozing their red sour juices. They are served as a tapa in the land of Don Quixote. I first tasted these eggplants an indecent amount of time ago, while visiting Almagro on a lacespotting expedition. I used to make bobbin lace before I had any kids. Sigh...

Being that Almagro aubergines are hard to find outside La Mancha, you can always try with any baby aubergines you might find.

Pickled aubergines Almagro style

4 pounds (2kg) baby aubergines
1 head garlic cloves
1 tbsp cumin seeds
1 tbsp sweet Spanish pimentón
3 heaped tbsp salt
2 cups (500ml) cider vinegar
Virgin olive oil to taste
Water to boil the aubergines

Cut the stalk of the aubergines and half the leaves, and wash thoroughly.
Fill a large pan with water and bring to a boil. Cook the aubergines 5-7 minutes. Then drain and transfer immediately to a bowl of cold water to stop the cooking. Do not throw away your cooking water because it can be used to be added later to the pickling mixture. (The poor aubergines lose their beautiful color the moment they touch the hot water and adopt a greenish-brown hue, but nobody is perfect.)
When cool, cut them lengthwise on one side.
Prepare the dressing by mashing the garlic to a paste, then add all other ingredients. You can put everything, except the water and the oil, in a blender or food processor. A few pulses and it's ready.
Place the drained aubergines in a clay pot (that's the traditional way) then add the pickling mixture. Top with the cooking water to almost cover the aubergines and then add a good glug of virgin olive oil. I recommend to try the pickling liquid, and add vinegar and salt if it is too weak, or water if too strong. Note that the pickling liquid should be on the strong side to impart enough flavor to the aubergines.
Let stand one week in the fridge, tossing from time to time. After four days you can try an aubergine to check the flavor and adjust the seasoning if necessary.
These pickled aubergines can be preserved; my recommendations for that are the following:
- Fill the jars leaving the smallest top space possible, well covering the vegetables with the marinade.
- Use good quality vinegar of at least 6-7%.
- Use containers and lids of glass or glazed ceramic, which are unaffected by acid.
- Always use a wooden spoon to remove the vegetable pieces from the jars.
- It is not necessary to sterilize the jars as the antiseptic action of vinegar prevents the growth of bugs (in spite of that I keep my jars in the refrigerator, just to be on the safe side). They keep at least for a month.

Now I can face the end of summer sure that my family won't run short of aubergines in a while... Winter is coming.

La Buena Mesa: a cookbook review and garlic shrimp

2011-07-21T15:19:00.003+02:00

Some weeks ago I received a request from Hippocrene Books to review their recently launched book La Buena Mesa, by Elizabeth Parrish. I eagerly accepted, only too flattered that someone thought I had something to say about Spanish cooking. And flattering is the best way to get people going, don't you agree? Do you know what was my first impulse when I got the book on the mail? Checking the gazpacho recipe. Because I knew in a book on Spanish cooking there had to be one, of course. And for me, that is a rather accurate indicator of the soundness of a book on Spanish cooking. Well, when I read the recipe I could not help but smile; I found it flawless. No fancy ingredients and above all no horrible chilli additions, like I’ve seen too often outside Spain (the idea of a hot gazpacho gives me the creeps… We Spaniards are very particular about our gazpachos).

And… I started browsing through the recipes. I love cookbooks that read like a novel and this is one of them. The recipes are arranged by region and they are interspersed with brief accounts on essential ingredients or aspects of Spanish cooking; I found particularly sweet the story about cazuelas, the ubiquitous earthenware recipient for cooking all kinds of stews and other different dishes. All the recipes start with a brief introduction on some funny or intriguing related aspect. The author totally won me over when I saw her recipe for Galician sourdough rye bread! I say, that is one-daring-food-writer! If there’s one region in Spain that boasts delicious bread, that’s Galicia, so it's worth having bread recipes in such a cookbook, a subject most Spain-published cookbooks overlook.

What else can I say? Mrs. Parrish is an American expat living in Tarragona, region of Catalonia, who has lived and cooked in Spain for more than 20 years already and her book shows the author’s love for the subject. I only wished the book was not that short. So if you intend to set out on a journey into Spanish cooking, La buena mesa is undoubtedly a very good place to start.

Therefore, to illustrate how far you can get with this book, I thought I’d cook one of its recipes. I had been wanting to write a post about gambas al ajillo or garlic shrimp for ages, so I rose to the occasion. Garlic shrimp is a very simple tapa made by stir-frying shelled shrimp in olive oil and garlic. Elizabeth calls for a dash of dry sherry too, which I had never tried before, so I was intrigued by this boozy addition.

Gambas al ajillo
Yields 4 servings

1 pound (500g) shelled shrimp
4 cloves garlic
4 tbsp virgin olive oil
2 tbsp dry sherry
2 sprigs parsley

Thaw the shrimp if frozen. Peel them if they're not peeled.
Peel and finely dice the garlic cloves.
Pour the oil in a saucepan (much better in an earthenware cazuela) and add the garlic. Stir-fry just till it starts to brown at the edges, then add the drained shrimp.
Add the sherry, cover with a lid and cook a few minutes, stirring occasionally, till the shrimp are pink and cooked through.
Sprinkle with parsley and serve in small earthenware dishes.

This has been truly one of my favourite tapas ever since I was a child. The flavors meld perfectly, with the garlic not overpowering the delicate flavor of the shrimp. For those fearful of the fierceness of garlic, the flavor is largely tamed when fried. As it happens with a lot of Spanish dishes, this will be as good as your shrimp; premium quality ingredients make for a premium quality dish.

Full disclaimer: I have not been paid for this review, at least I haven’t received any payment other than the book itself. Well, I truly liked it.

School of tapas: Melon soup shots

2011-07-15T17:00:00.003+02:00

This is no traditional tapa. But due to the wild popularity tapas enjoy and the endless variations on the same theme found nowadays, sometimes small glasses or shots of cold soups or creams are also seen served as a tapa or appetizer before a copious meal. When summer is already at full speed and you long for cold and fresh drinks and dishes, a shot of chilled soup might be exactly what you need. This simple melon soup is prepared by processing melon, white wine, honey, lemon juice and salt to a pureé. It doesn't call for the use of any heat in the kitchen, which is something I am quite thankful for when temperature rises above 85 degrees.

The recipe is inspired in this Spanish website for Mediterranean cuisine.

Melon soup shots
Yields 8 servings

1 small melon *
2/5 cup (100ml) good white wine
1 tbsp honey
Juice of 1 lemon
2 pinches salt
1 thin slice good Serrano ham

Cut the melon in wedges and discard the seeds. Scoop out the flesh and transfer it to a food processor or blender.
Add the wine, the honey, the lemon juice and the salt. Process to a fine pureé. Chill thoroughly before serving.
For the jamón serrano garnish, place a slice of jamón on a plate lined with 2 sheets of kitchen paper. Cover with more paper and microwave it briefly, until dry and crispy. Crumble the jamón by hand and sprinkle the "shards" on top of the melon soup shots.

* Regarding the melon used, Spanish melons are egg shaped and quite large in size. A "small" melon can easily weigh 5 pounds.

For a more "sophisticated" experience, previously chill the serving glasses in the freezer. The contrast between the sweetness of the soup and the saltiness of the jamón is simply superb. Serve with a glass of chilled dry Sherry. And enjoy...

School of tapas: Chorizo a la sidra

2011-06-24T20:08:00.001+02:00

Traditional Spanish cooking is uncomplicated most of the times as it basically relies upon premium quality ingredients. Like good chorizo. Chorizo a la sidra or chorizo cooked in cider is one of the simplest tapas and simplest pairings you can find, fine charcuterie fried in good virgin olive oil and then stewed in cider until the liquid is reduced and the slight sweetness of the drink infuses the chorizo… heaven in a tapa. Skeptical? Don’t judge before you try it. This is a tapa that originates in the northern region of Asturias, a lusciously green, misty and humid area where apple orchards are abundant and so are sidrerías or cider houses. Asturian natural cider is a mildly alcoholic beverage made by fermenting apple juice; it is traditionally poured from the bottle from a certain height so that the liquid crashes into the glass and gets somewhat oxygenated. This fizzying effect only lasts a few seconds, that’s why the cider glassful must be gulped down in one go… Fortunately cider can be enjoyed in this tapa in a less compromising way.

Chorizo a la sidra

1 good quality chorizo (not the drier type, but tender)
1 cup natural cider
1 tbsp virgin olive oil

Slice the chorizo in 1/2 inch slices and set aside.
Pour the oil on a skillet and heat on medium. Add the chorizo slices and fry until they change in color, but don’t overdo it.
Add the cider and toss to coat the chorizo. Boil for 10-15 minutes, until the sauce has reduced by one fourth.
Serve in small bowls while still warm, though chorizo a la sidra can also be served at ambient too.

Pour yourself a good glass of red wine or cider and enjoy! And don’t forget to finish the resulting sauce by dunking large pieces of bread in it, what is called mojar in Spanish, literally to wet. I believe the act of mojar is in our genes…

School of tapas: Mushroom escabeche

2011-06-11T19:00:00.003+02:00

Escabeche is an ancient cooking and preserving method which originates during the Muslim rule of Spain in the Middle Ages. In Spain it usually consists in cooking the food in a mixture of vinegar, white wine and olive oil, seasoned with bay leaves and black pepper, among other spices, and most of the times accompanied by some vegetables like carrots and onion. This method, used for fish and meat alike, easy and versatile as it can get, allows for the food to last at least a couple of weeks in the fridge. What’s more, it is preferred to wait a couple of days before eating it, to allow for the flavors to fully develop. The finished dish is usually served at ambient temperature. Ingredients cooked in this way can be canned as well and kept for months after sterilization. I am a big fan of escabeches, as I enjoy those dishes that can be prepared in large amounts to slowly use them up along several days. The original recipe for this mushroom escabeche tapa is a signature recipe by the recently deceased 3-star Michelin Spanish chef Santi Santamaría.

This is a recipe that is easy and quick to make, very versatile as it is good not only as a tapa but also as a side dish and even in a salad on top of some greens, who could ask for more?

Mushroom escabeche, adapted from Santi Santamaría

1lb (500g) mushrooms
4 shallots
3 cloves garlic
4/5 cup (200ml) Sherry vinegar
4/5 cup (200ml) good white wine
3/5 cup (150ml) water
2 2/5 cups (600ml) virgin olive oil
1 bay leaf
1 tsp black peppercorns
1 tsp salt
1 pinch rosemary

Thoroughly clean the mushrooms, cut off their feet. Wash in a colander, rinse and slice. Set aside.
Finely chop the shallots and sauté in a heavy pot in 4 tbsp of the virgin olive oil until translucent.
Add the vinegar and reduce the liquid by half, until the shallots begin to brown and caramelize (10-15 minutes).
Add the white wine and the water, and again reduce by half (another 8-10 minutes).
Add the sliced mushrooms, the whole peeled cloves of garlic, the seasonings and remaining oil, and cook everything together 25 minutes.
Check the seasoning and add more salt if needed. Let cool the escabeche and keep it in the refrigerator for three days before eating, for the flavors to meld.

In my humble opinion, this escabeche has a master touch: the caramelized shallots. The mixture of caramel flavor with the taste of Sherry vinegar gives this escabeche a distinctly special character. Simply scrumptious. And if you wonder if you can use another type of vinegar I say yes, the result will be good too, but will not have that much character, because good quality Sherry vinegar has a very special bouquet. By the way, Sherry vinegar is one of the three vinegars protected by a designation of origin status in the European Union, the other two being Condado de Huelva vinegar, also Spanish, and the ubiquitous Italian Balsamic of Modena. I hope I have piqued your interest in this very delicious vinegar…

School of tapas: patatas con alioli

2011-06-02T16:30:00.000+02:00

I am starting a new series of articles on the most popular type of dish or at least the best known type of Spain gastronomy: tapas. I already have some tapas recipes in this blog (just click the label tapas at the bottom of this post), but never before thought about making a real series out of this type of dish. The trouble with tapas is that they’re so familiar to Spaniards that we don’t really get the hype about them. It’s not that they’re not delicious. It’s not that an array of colorful tapas is not perfect for entertaining either small or large parties. It’s just that we take tapas for granted.

Therefore I intend to change my mindset and try to think like a non-Spaniard looking for scrumptious, colorful and easy-to-make tapas. And what is a tapa? Well, you all know it is essentially a small appetizer that’s always served alongside drinks in Spanish bars and restaurants. Even though today a tapa can be made out of literally anything, with for example stews or soups served in tapa-sized portions, I prefer the very traditional choices, small bites that have been around for many years already. So let’s start with the first element I’ve chosen for this series, a real tapa classic: patatas con alioli, meaning potatoes with alioli sauce. Now that the barbecue season is starting all over the northern hemisphere, you’ll find this potato-salad-like appetizer to be a great addition to any respectable barbecue party. And this tapa can be made in advance and kept in the fridge.

Patatas con alioli is a kind of potato salad dressed with a strong garlic sauce. Alioli is made up of the Catalonian words all-i-oli, which literally translate into garlic-and-oil. Different variations of this sauce are typical throughout the Mediterranean coast of Spain (and it can also be found in France and Italy), where it is prepared by thoroughly mashing garlic cloves in a mortar to release their juices, to which a steady thin stream of olive oil is added until an emulsion is formed that looks whiter and somehow more translucent than classic mayonnaise. Because genuine alioli is not garlic mayonnaise. Although garlic mayonnaise can be used too for this potato tapa. And in fact it is used most often than not; I’m going to use it here because emulsifying the oil with the only aid of the garlic juices is a tricky matter. Believe me, I’ve tried it. It can take you more than one whole hour to add all the oil needed, drop after drop, till you get a reasonable amount of alioli. And spoiling the emulsion during the making process is the easiest thing to do.

Patatas con alioli

For the garlic mayonnaise

1 whole egg
3 garlic cloves
1 dash lemon juice
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup sunflower oil
1/2 cup mild olive oil (the oil must be mild, otherwise the sauce will taste too strong)

For the alioli potatoes

4 medium potatoes (1 per person for a tapa-sized portion)
2 tsp salt
1 bay leaf
Some sprigs of parsley

Instructions

Thoroughly wash the potatoes. Put them unpeeled in a saucepan and cover with cold water.
Add the salt and the bay leaf.
Put on high heat, bring to a rolling boil and cook uncovered for 15-20 minutes, depending on the quality of the potatoes. Add more water if needed before the potatoes are cooked. Prick with a knife to check for doneness.
When cooked, turn off the heat and leave the potatoes to temper in the water another 20 minutes. Then rinse and leave to cool completely.
Prepare the garlic mayonnaise while the potatoes cool down: peel the garlic cloves, cut them in half and pry out the germ (the sprout in the center of the cloves), as it is supposed to be the cause of the garlic’s digestive aggressivity. Dice the cloves.
Mash the garlic cloves in a mortar with a pinch of salt or process them to a puree in a food processor (if it can handle such a small amount of ingredients).
Put the egg, which should be at ambient temperature, in a blender or food processor.
Add the garlic, the salt and a dash of lemon juice. Pulse to mix.
Switch on the blender and start adding the oil in a steady thin stream through the lid, till you finish all the oil and the mixture has thickened and emulsified. When done, test for seasoning. If you find the sauce too garlicky for your taste, you can always add a ¼ cup more of oil, but not more as one egg yolk can only emulsify a certain total amount of oil. Also I recommend to keep the sauce on the salty side, as you need the sauce to outweigh the blandness of the potatoes.
Peel the potatoes and cut into chunks, put them in a salad bowl or in individual small bowls. Add the sauce to the potato chunks and toss to cover well.
To finish, finely chop a few sprigs of parsley and sprinkle on top of the potatoes.

Just a warning: as the homemade garlic mayonnaise carries raw eggs, you must get hold of the freshest eggs you can find and always keep the alioli in the fridge for no longer than 3 days.

Serve on a warm day with a very cold beer, fino or even better… with a chilled sangría. Salud!

Bica blanca, a typical white cake

2011-05-23T18:54:00.000+02:00

Bicas are a kind of popular dense cake, typical in some areas of the northwest corner of Spain, in Galicia. Among the several varieties of bicas, one of my favourites is bica blanca or white bica. And why is it called white? Well, because it uses only the egg whites and no yolks. White bica is a luscious cake made with egg whites, sugar, flour and... tons of cream. It's the perfect recipe to use up leftover egg whites from custards, flans and the like. I prepare this cake every now and then and it's always a huge success, my kids love it and you know they are quite picky. Though I am sure the bleak winters in the area where this cake originates help people to burn all the sugar and the cream it contains... unlike my boys, who certainly spend to much time in front of the video console.

Bica blanca

6 egg whites
2.5 cup/250g AP flour
1 cup/250ml whipping cream
1.3 cup/325g sugar
Butter for the dish
Ground cinnamon for sprinkling

Preheat the oven to 180º-200ºC/356º-392ºF, depending on the type of heating, either traditional or air convection.
Separate the egg whites from the yolks if you are using whole eggs instead of leftover whites. Use the yolks to make a good custard...
Measure the flour and set aside.
Measure the sugar.
Whip the egg whites in a food processor with a pinch of salt and add the sugar little by little once the whites have started to foam, till you have a stiff meringue. Set aside a couple spoonfuls of sugar for later sprinkling on top of the cake.
When the meringue is stiff, set the speed to low and add the flour by the spoonful while beating.
Whip the cream to soft peaks. Add it to the meringue-flour mixture and mix carefully and gently with a spatula.
Line a rectangular cake dish with parchment paper (typical bicas are rectangular and wrapped in paper). Butter the paper and pour the batter. Smooth the surface with a spatula, then sprinkle sugar and cinnamon on top for a perfectly genuine finish.
Bake 35 minutes. Then use a stick or toothpick to check for doneness and take out of the oven if thoroughly baked. Use the paper to pull the bica out of the dish and place on a wire rack to cool.
Devour immediately.

I use a 24x30cm/9.5x12" dish and my bicas are a bit too thin, as traditional bicas are 5-6cm/2-2.5" thick. This type of cake does not really expand a lot, as the batter is already quite "expanded" because of the egg whites and the whipped cream. It keeps perfectly well for 2-3 days wrapped in plastic foil, but it rarely lasts that long...

Medieval arroz con leche and a trip to Granada

2011-05-13T19:03:00.004+02:00

During the past Easter holiday, Semana Santa in Spanish, we spent a few days in the beautiful Ansalusian town of Granada. Amazing place, I swear. It not only houses one of the most magnificent Muslim monuments in the world, the Medieval fortress of Alhambra, but it is also a great spot for eating tapas, definitely one of the best in Spain. It is views like the ones below that prompted the 20th Century Mexican poet and diplomat, Francisco Alarcón de Icaza, to exclaim: “dale limosna mujer / que no hay en la vida nada / como la pena de ser ciego en Granada” meaning “Give him alms lady, for there is nothing in life as wretched as being blind in Granada”. (Here is a good resource about the rise and fall of Islamic Spain.) This very famous quote can be found everywhere in Granada, on tiled walls, on souvenirs for tourists… Granada is the Spanish word for pomegranate and this beautiful fruit is depicted all around, in the typical pottery, the street name signs, the sewer caps…

And can you guess what I bought in Granada? A couple of cookbooks, of course. One of them is the translation of an anonymous Andalusian manuscript of the 13th Century to be exact, written somewhere in al-Andalus, the former Islamic territory in Medieval Spain, which included not only the present region of Andalusia, but at least the southern half of the Iberian Peninsula. (Muslims ruled varying tracts of land in the Peninsula from year 711 to 1492, a time span of almost eight centuries.) A masterpiece of culinary history, but rather confusing when it relates to methods of preparation and quantities of ingredients, as if it had been written by… a grandmother (in Spain a “historical” phrase is attributed to grandmothers when it comes to pastry and bread: “add as much flour as it can take”… very precise). Nevertheless, I found it fascinating reading. I was delighted to verify how little some recipes have changed after a whopping 800 years. I love to imagine how al-Andalus citizens ate meatballs, escabeches and pepitorias virtually identical to those we eat now, sitting in the cool while listening to the rumour of one of the many fountains that graze Granada… Also interesting to see how some ingredients, now thought exotic but which were added to a wide variety of dishes at the time have disappeared completely and haven’t even been preserved in Andalusian cuisine, such as rue or citron leaves.

One of the recipes that caught my attention was a rice pudding sweetened with honey, predecessor of our current arroz con leche or rice pudding, an enormously popular dessert all over Spain, and closely related to it. In fact almost identical, but for the use of honey as the main sweetener instead of sugar. As my husband is a big fan of rice pudding, I got to it, though I dislike it myself… quite a lot. Yes, nobody is perfect.

Here follows the recipe as it appears in the book (translation extracted from this web):

Take rice and soak it in fresh water, enough to cover it, for a day or overnight. Then wash it and put it on the fire in a pot or kettle. Cook it with water or fresh milk, then add four or five ratls of clean honey from which you have skimmed the foam. Cook it carefully on a gentle fire. Moisten it, while cooking, with fresh milk until it sticks together, coagulates and becomes a paste. Pour it onto a platter and macerate it with a spoon. Make a hole in the center which you fill with fresh, melted butter and dust it with ground sugar and cinnamon and use it.

And here goes my version:

Medieval arroz con leche

Prep time: 12 hours
Cook time: 1 hour 5 mins
Total time: 13 hours 5 mins
Serves: 8
A lusciously creamy rice pudding, arroz con leche, is a hugely popular dessert all over Spain, originated during the Medieval Muslim rule of Spain. Here is a 13th century version, sweetened with honey instead of sugar.

Ingredients:

1 cup (200g) round grain rice
6 cup (150dl) whole milk
1/2 cup (175g) good quality honey*
1 stick cinnamon
Melted butter to taste
Ground cinnamon for sprinkling

Instructions:

Put the rice in a bowl, add water and let it soak overnight.
The next day let the rice drain thoroughly in a colander. Then transfer it to a pot, add the milk and the cinnamon stick.
Bring it to a very soft boil and cook for 45 minutes, stirring often and scratching the bottom of the pot to prevent the rice from sticking.
Add whatever sweetener you prefer, either honey, sugar or both (see note below) and keep cooking another 20 minutes, stirring till you have a soft and sticky mass.
Once the rice is cooked and it has achieved a creamy consistency, test for sweetness and correct if desired. Take into account that it will further thicken on cooling.
Tip the rice on a platter and let it cool covered, or better still covered with plastic foil touching the surface, so that it develops no skin (unless you like the skin of course).
To serve, sprinkle with cinnamon and drizzle with a little melted butter.

*For those who are not honey lovers, you can substitute half the honey with plain sugar, then the ratio is approximately 1/4 cup (90g) honey/1/2 cup plus 1 tbsp (110g) sugar; 1 cup plus 2 tbsp (230g) if you only use sugar. The sweetness of sugar is about 3/4 of honey.

I admit it: I didn’t taste it. I told you I don’t like it at all, though I am quite alone in this. Anyway, I’m such a sweet and loving wife that I gladly made it for my husband… ahem. And as a true “connoisseur” of rice pudding varieties, his verdict was that it was truly delicious. Although maybe he tells me so not to ruin our relationship. How am I to know? ;)

And by the way, the Spanish version of my blog was recently included in a list of recommended blogs for Spanish majors at this web of online college courses... I am so honored that anyone considers my blog is a good resource for Spanish culture! Well, namely cooking... they say "Bonus if you can make recipes published in Spanish"... fun.

Torrijas, a Spanish Easter treat

2011-04-23T20:03:00.004+02:00

All relevant religious holidays in Spain have a reflection in the food. Spain was a strictly Catholic country for centuries with the liturgical periods tightly marking the habits, and with food rules that had to be obeyed. Though nowadays the religious rules regarding food, like fasting on certain days during Easter, are largely overlooked, funnily enough the food traditions remain and making torrijas for the Easter celebration, usually a labor holiday lasting four days, is one of them. Also you can find them in pastry shops, restaurants and bars all over the country during this period. Torrijas are apparently a rather ancient recipe, as they first appear quoted by a Spanish author in the 15th Century. Now... listen to yours truly pronouncing this funny word here.

Torrijas are a very simple dish, very similar to French toast and pain perdu, most often made by soaking slices of stale bread in sugared milk, also flavoured with cinnamon or vanilla, then bathed in beaten egg, fried in oil and sprinkled with a mixture of sugar and powdered cinnamon. In fact, another one of the many ways developed by the not so well-off to use up bread leftovers. Though today bread especially baked for the purpose of making torrijas can be bought. As it usually happens with most traditional dishes, the perfect ingredients and method are controversial matters, torrijas made with sweet wine instead of milk and others bathed in syrup after frying being also popular. And of course, the best torrijas are always one's mother's, no discussion about it!

Homemade torrijas

By Miriam García
Published: April 23, 2011
Torrijas are a very simple dish, similar to French toast and pain perdu, most often made by soaking slices of stale bread in sugared milk, then bathed in beaten egg, fried in oil and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar.

4.0 stars based on
35 reviews

Prep time: 1 hour 15 minutes
Cook time: 45 minutes
Total time: 2 hours
Yield: 16

Ingredients

4 cups (1 liter) milk
3 tbsp sugar (or honey if you prefer)
1 stick cinnamon
3-4 medium eggs
Sunflower oil or other insipid oil for frying
Sugar and cinnamon for sprinkling

Cooking Directions

Cut the bread into 1 inch (2.5cm) slices. Arrange them on a shallow dish that can hold the milk.
Put all the milk in a saucepan with the sugar and the cinnamon stick, bring to a boil. Turn off the heat the moment it starts to boil and leave to infuse for 5 minutes.
Pour the milk on the bread and let soak for one hour.
Beat the eggs in a plate large enough to hold at least one torrija.
Heat the oil to medium in a large frying pan that can hold several torrijas at the same time. With a spatula (the bread might be overly soft), carefully transfer the soaked slices one by one into the egg and turn them to coat. Then transfer the slices to the hot oil.
Fry for a couple of minutes on each side, until brown.
Take out to a dish lined with a paper towel and thoroughly sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. Enjoy warm or cold.

Tips for superb torrijas: I find the result is best when you let the bread go very stale before soaking, so that the slices can soak as much milk as possible and yield a very creamy inside afterwards. So what I do sometimes is to slice the bread before letting it dry overnight, to assure that the loaf dries thoroughly (and because slicing is a lot easier while the bread is soft). And I recommend you make sure that the slices soak as much milk as feasible, so it is best to check how they are doing within say 20 minutes after pouring the warm milk on them, because you can always add a little more if the slices have soaked up all the liquid in the dish, say another cup. For me these are indeed the secrets for a lusciuosly creamy interior that looks and tastes more like pastry cream than like plain milk-soaked bread. Because that is what I really love about torrijas, that the alchemy of soaking and frying metamorphoses the simplest ingredients into something different and truly delicious.

Check this article at Honest Cooking.

Jijona turrón ice cream

2011-04-15T22:30:00.001+02:00

Do you know what turrón is? It is a nougat-like confectionery mostly made with almonds, tons of almonds… and also sugar, honey and egg whites. It is typical Christmas fare all over Spain, although originating from the southeast Mediterranean coast, in the region of Valencia (check here the Spanish pronunciation of turrón). It is usually shaped into either a rectangular tablet or a round cake where almonds can be left whole or ground to a paste to yield the following traditional varieties:

Hard (the Alicante variety): A compact block of whole almonds in a brittle mass of eggs, honey and sugar; 64% almonds (premium quality).
Soft (the Jijona variety): Similar but the almonds are reduced to a paste. The addition of oil makes the matrix more chewy and sticky; 60% almonds (premium quality).

Jijona is a small town known since the Middle Ages for its excellent honey and productive almond orchards. This local produce gave birth to turrón, referenced for the first time in a document of 1531. Turrón is such a valued confection that today its formulas and quality are standardized and endorsed by a Regulation Council.

And I guess you are wondering why I am talking about Christmas now, right at the beginning of Spring. Well, because the same as turrón itself reminds any Spaniard of Christmas, ice cream flavored with Jijona turrón is a variety that no Spanish ice cream shop fails to stock during the warm season. And as in Spain it is very common to have turrón leftovers at home after Christmas, this is a wonderful way to give this traditional confection a totally different twist. And that is exactly what I did. So as warmer weather is on its way in the northern hemisphere and just in case you happen to lay your hands on a tablet of Jijona turrón, here is the recipe for this creamy, rich and very Mediterranean ice cream:

Jijona turrón ice cream
Serves 6

For the custard:

0.75 cup (150g) sugar*
2 cups (500ml) whole milk
3 medium eggs (whites separated)

For the flavouring:

0.33oz (150g) soft Jijona turrón
3 tbsp Málaga wine (a good quality sweet Sherry can be used instead)
0.85 cup (200ml) whipping cream

To make the custard, put the sugar, milk and egg yolks in a saucepan and prepare a custard using a bain marie or double boiler, stirring slowly and continuously with a wooden spoon, until the custard is set and it coats the back of the spoon. Watch it closely to avoid any boiling, or it will curdle.
Process the crumbled turrón with the wine into a paste, then add to the custard and mix well. Set this mixture aside and let cool to ambient.
When the turrón custard is cool, whip the cream to soft peaks and add, folding gently till fully incorporated.
Whip the egg whites to stiff peaks and fold carefully into the mixture. Mix gently but thoroughly to avoid any white streaks in the final ice cream mixture.
Leave to freeze in your icebox and whip every hour till fully set or churn in your ice cream maker, if you are lucky to have one, which I am not.

*A note on sugar: the sugar content is a very region-dependent and even personal matter, and it should be adjusted to your liking, so I recommend you try the mixture before churning. Usually European confectioneries, pastries and sweet things in general are less sweet than for example in the United States. And remember frozen desserts should always be on the sweet side before freezing or churning, as the sweetness will be less noticeable afterwards.

And there you have it. To my taste this ice cream is so rich that I don’t need any topping or sauce on mine, but feel free to use some chocolate sauce or almond brittle…

Check this article at Honest Cooking.

Lentil salad with olivada

2011-04-11T14:01:00.000+02:00

I am in a process of vindicating a more frequent consumption of legumes... before myself. I have never been very fond of this ingredient, though in the last years I have come to love some pulse dishes like falafel and Asturian beans with clams. The Asturian bean, one of man's best friends... woman's too. I still remember with tears in my eyes a few days spent with friends who own a house in Colunga, Asturias. They took us for lunch to a typical merendero, and as I always do when visiting Asturias, ordered some Asturian beans with clams. You should know that in the Principality of Asturias this kind of dishes are customarily served in huge amounts in an enourmous pot, good enough for several people, so you can eat as many servings as you want... or can. It seems that day my stomach was extensible such as a boa constrictor's, because I had all the pot by myself (of at least four servings, no kidding), while my table mates stared at me with one hand on the mobile phone to call an ambulance in case I suffered a stroke. Well, it might be the sun, the fresh air, the good company, the excellent food... a planetary alignment or something, because it has not happened again after that. But back to the topic at hand, we know that vegetable salad recipes get mixed results. That is why I consider this recipe found at the French magazine Elle à Table a great success, also because I have discovered a new addiction: salt preserved lemons.

Yes, I had kept some Moroccan style homemade preserved lemons in store for almost a year, still had not found time to open the jar and this was the right time. I had never tried these lemons before, but when I opened the jar I could not believe it... The aroma was amazing! All the essence of the lemons in a highly concentrated form. Unbelievable. Exciting. I was speechless. The flavor is so concentrated that a tiny bit of lemon adds lots of sparkle to the dishes.

Besides, these lentils are coupled with some beautiful phyllo cones stuffed with olivada...

Lentil salad with olivada (adapted from Elle à Table)
Yields 4 servings

For the olivada:

250g black olives, unpitted (you better pit them at home, they will have more flavor)
2 tsp pickled capers
2 anchovy fillets (I had none and I used the same amount of nori flakes)
1 large garlic clove
50g virgin olive oil

Peel the garlic, then pit the olives, if needed, mix everything and process to the desired fineness.
With the food processor on lower speed, add the oil in a steady stream. Set aside.

For the lentils:

120g lentils (French lentils like Puy are best)
Some fresh cilantro sprigs
1 bay leaf
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp strong mustard
1 quarter preserved lemon peel*
Salt to taste

*Lemons preserved in salt are a very typical ingredient of the Moroccan cuisine which can be found in specialty stores, but that are also very easy to make at home. There are tons of recipes in the net, for example this one. You only have to take into account that the lemons need to cure or mature for a minimum period of 2 weeks.

Leave the lentils to soak in water overnight. The next day, change the water and cook them with the bay leaf, until tender.
Drain and salt to taste. Then add the mustard, the ground cumin and toss to distribute evenly.
Dice the lemon peel (and only the peel) and add too. Then cut the cilantro and sprinkle on top of the salad.
Set aside.

For the phyllo cones:

2 or 3 phyllo sheets

Cut the sheets in 10cm squares or to your liking.
Place a teaspoon of the olivada and wrap it in the phyllo dough, shaping it into a cone. Place the finished cones on an oiled oven dish.
Bake in the oven preheated to 180ºC for 10 minutes or until brown.

Serve the salad side by side with the olivada cones and take alternate bites: lentils, cone, lentils, cone... Amazing. I believe I am in love with cumin, do you think it can be serious?

Soldaditos de Pavía or codfish beignets

2011-04-02T14:53:00.002+02:00

I have wonderful news to share: I will be a contributor to the new online food magazine Honest Cooking! I am soooo excited! And I am in great company there, with colleagues like Nancy from Spicie Foodie, Simone from Junglefrog Cooking, Joan from Foodalogue, Asha from Fork Spoon Knife or Maria Laitinen from Scandi Foodie among many outstanding bloggers. You can check my published articles anytime by clicking on the cute Honest Cooking logo on my sidebar. For my debut at Honest Cooking I have chosen a very typical dish of my hometown, Madrid, the capital city of Spain. I have lived there most of my life and though in fact I live outside Madrid since 2000, in a small town 40km to the Northwest, I am still in the same province... it feels almost the same. Choosing a dish that is representative of Madrid is not an easy task. Madrid builds upon thousands of immigrants coming from all over Spain through time, so there are not many dishes that are actually exclusively from Madrid. Just take into account that Madrid had around 1 million inhabitants in 1940, after the Spanish Civil War, and it already had 3.1 millions 30 years later, in 1970. More than triple! Everything is mixed.

Soldaditos de Pavía, meaning Pavía soldiers, are strips of desalted codfish, marinated in a mixture of lemon juice and Spanish sweet pimentón, then either coated first in flour then in egg, or in a frying batter, deep-fried in olive oil and served with a strip of roasted red pepper around them. About the origin of this funny name there are two theories: the first relates to the color of the soldier uniforms at the time of the battle of Pavia, in 1525. The second relates to the color of the Spanish hussar uniforms during the 19th Century.
(Flag image by courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

But all this lore is not as important as the recipe for this simple, tasty and healthy appetizer or tapa, found in a lot of bars and tabernas in the old quarters of Madrid. So here it comes:

Soldaditos de Pavía
Yields 4 tapa-sized servings

1.1 pound (500g) good quality salted codfish
Juice of 1-2 lemons
1 1/2 tsp sweet pimentón (or more if you like)
A dash of white pepper
3 tbsp olive oil
First option - simple beignet coating:
- 1 beaten egg
- AP flour or chickpea flour
Second option - somewhat-time-consuming beignet frying batter:
- 2/3 cup (100g) flour
- 1/4 cup eau-de-vie or similar spirit
- 3/4 tsp (5g) baker's yeast
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 1 pinch of saffron
- 1 pinch salt
Virgin olive oil for deep-frying (essential for real soldaditos)
1 large roasted red pepper, in strips

Cut the codfish in strips, put them in a large bowl with cold water and leave them to desalt 24 hours. Better if you can change the water at least 3 times during this period. Believe me, you’d rather have to add some salt to the final fried fish than getting a bunch of unbearably salty and inedible soldaditos.
Prepare the marinade in a shallow dish or container, mix the lemon juice with the pimentón.
Pat dry the fish strips with a paper towel and dip them in the marinade. Toss them to coat. Then drizzle the olive oil on the fish. Marinade for 3 hours.
Rinse the fish strips. You won't normally need to salt the strips, as the fish will still retain some saltiness.
Now you can use one of two methods for making the beignets:
The most simple is to coat the strips first in plain flour (I use chickpea flour like in many places of Andalusia), then bathe them in beaten egg and put the strips straight into the hot olive oil.
The second method, a bit more elaborate, is to prepare a batter for coating the fish. Sift the flour and mix it with the tablespoon of oil, the saffron, the spirit, the salt and the yeast. Leave to rest in a warm place for the yeast to act. When the mixture has risen slightly and it's bubbly on the surface, dip the fish strips and fry them on medium-hot olive oil. Place the fried fish on a paper towel.

Serve while still warm with a strip of roasted red pepper across them. I have used piquillo peppers here instead, as they are pretty good with anything. Enjoy the juicy, lemony, flaky goodness of the fish inside the soft crust. The perfect appetizer for a warm Spring noon with a glass of beer or Fino. Better sitting on a patio.

Matcha tea mousse pies and Japan in our minds

2011-03-21T19:48:00.002+01:00

Image from Wikimedia Commons

No matter how hard we try to plan our lives, they can always be disrupted. And nature is unpredictable. I would have preferred not to have any reason to make this recipe, but Japan is in everybody's mind these days. So in remembrance of the Japanese people I have prepared this simple recipe for little mousse pies. These sweets have the subtlety of flavors so common in Japanese cuisine and are relatively easy to make, and furthermore eye-catching. The post header image is a painting by Japanese painter and engraver Hokusai, of the Edo period, executed between 1830 and 1833, and it is called... tsunami. This artist deserves to be as famous as Van Gogh, at least, but we Westerners are pretty ethnocentric... I love this painting since I was a child because this type of painting unmistakably reminds me of... Tintin books. They are obviously inspired by that art style, just take a look at the next picture. And Tintin stories have always been among my favorite readings.

Image from this blog

Before I give you the recipe, I just want to remind you that there are various charities where you can contribute to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami relief, like the Japanese Red Cross, or even one of those bakesales for Japan that are being organized here and there.

In Spain, a Japanese girl called Makiko and living in Madrid has set up a blog to ask for people to contribute by making an origami crane. The blog is called 1000 grullas por Japón, meaning 1000 cranes for Japan. It is a Japanese tradition to make 1000 origami cranes when you want to make a wish come true. This is my crane:

Once you have your crane, you have to take a picture and send it to Makiko. She will gather all the crane photos and send them to her family and friends in Japan. I found it is a beautiful initiative.

For the matcha tea mousse I have used the recipe I used for this cake, just remember to whip the cream only to soft peaks, so that the mousse is fluid enough to fill all gaps and render a smooth and marvelous little pie. I happen to have a wonderful set of silicone bombe molds, like the ones depicted here, perfect to make these little pies. Oh, and I also recommend that, as in this case the slightly bitter taste of matcha tea mousse is not offset by the same amount of other sweeter mousse, better increase the amount of sugar from 40g to 60g. For the coulis jelly layer I used strawberries, which can already be found in stores.

Matcha tea mousse pies
For the cake base:

100g uncooked marzipan
90g egg (I used 2 medium eggs, which is slightly more than that)
25g butter
30g AP flour
1g baking powder

Preheat the oven to 190ºC.
Weigh the flour and the baking powder, sieve them together and set aside.
Heat the marzipan to 50ºC in the microwave oven. Put it in a bowl and mix with the egg. Whip with a mixer till white and fluffy.
Melt the butter; add it little by little to the marzipan mixture while whipping.
Add the flour mixture and mix well.
Carefully spread the batter on an oven tray lined with parchment paper, with and offset spatula or something similar, as the batter layer needs to be quite thin. Bake for 6 minutes or till browned at the edges. Take it out of the oven and leave to cool on the paper.

Then prepare the tea mousse as per this recipe (please remember to add 60g of sugar instead of 40g) then pour the mousse in the molds, leave room on top to add the strawberry jelly later (the cake circle can be put on top, there is no need to fit it into the mold). Leave the mousse to set in the fridge.

For the strawberry jelly:

80g strawberries
1 sheet gelatin
1 tsp sugar
100ml water

Put the gelatin sheet in a bowl of cold water to hydrate as per the manufacturer's instructions.
In the meantime process the strawberries and heat the resulting puree in a saucepan; add the water little by little if it is too thick. Sieve the puree to eliminate the seeds. Then bring it to boiling point again and add the gelatin.
When the gelatin is dissolved, turn the heat off and leave to cool.

To put everything together:

When the jelly is at ambient, pour it on the set mousse portions. Take it to the fridge again for the strawberry jelly to set.
Use a pastry ring or large cutter to cut circles off the cake of the same size as the mousse in the molds (I am lucky enough to have a pastry ring of the same size as my bombe molds), then carefully lay them on top of each little pie.
When the pies are thoroughly cold, take them to the icebox, so that they can be easily unmolded without ruining them. When completely frozen, get them out of the molds and wait until thawed. You can leave them to thaw in the fridge.

Of course this mousse can also be used to fill small pastry rings or tiny tart rings, or even use it all in one cake for a layer. It is also good in small glasses, perhaps placing the cake crumbled at the bottom and the mousse on top. Mousses are very versatile, we all know. The recipe amounts are not very balanced, because the mousse was enough for my six bombe molds of about 7cm diameter and a layer for a 20cm cake, while the marzipan cake was just a little over the amount necessary for the 6 circles and for the jelly I had to increase the quantities a little (all changes already reflected in the amounts I am giving). I love mousse desserts, they are light and beautiful. In addition, this mousse in particular is not very sweet and you eat it without hardly noticing...

Potatoes sarladaises

2011-03-14T13:30:00.000+01:00

How did I happen to make this French dish? Well, after eating a delicious piece of delicious duck confit I found myself with a bowl of delicious duck fat... If you have ever tried duck confit you know what I am talking about. And with the good intention to use up this very clean and beautiful fat I stumbled upon this recipe. Mais oui. Sarladaise potatoes are named after the town of Sarlat-la-Canéda in the department of Dordogne, Aquitaine region, southwestern France. Another one of the thousands of places where I would love to go. The peculiarity of these potatoes is that they are fried in duck or goose fat, which gives them a wonderful flavor and aroma... If on top of that they are accompanied by some delicious mushrooms for example (or Perigord truffles if you are very lucky)... you have a delighful dish, simple and sturdy for these still cold days, although the trees are already timidly poking their shoots.

In Spain pork lard or duck fat are hardly ever used nowadays. Doctors have outlawed them and olive oil is widely used for frying instead. But from time to time we can look back and use those two fats, very common in the cooking of the past. And all because now we spend the whole day sitted, instead of sweating and toiling in the fields. I could philosophize about the drawbacks of modern life and our sedentary lifestyle, but I don't feel like it today. Besides, I'm not a very sportive person myself... What I find really sad is that modern life imposes on us a reduction in the variety of our food and, above all, taking much less advantage of the produce around us. Instead, we love to eat cherries in winter, just brought from the other side of the world... but I will knock it off now, I don't want to bore you... again.

I stray from the subject. And the subject is that there are leftovers recipes that are at least as good as the ones in which all ingredients are brand-new. Like this one. Strongly recommended. For this recipe I risk clogging my arteries. And this fat can be easily frozen, divided into small containers to add them to dishes like these potatoes, also mashed potatoes, artichokes, beans... you name it. Above all, don't throw it away, please.

Potatoes sarladaises (from French Cooking, de Delorme, Boue y McLachlan)

For 2 servings:

2 large potatoes
7 or 8 heaped tbsp duck fat (or as much as you deem necessary to easily stir-fry the potatoes)
1 large garlic clove
Some sprigs parsley

Peel the potatoes. Cut them in four lengthwise and then in 2mm thick slices.
Heat the duck fat in a skillet and add the potatoes. Stir-fry on high heat till they brown a little, then lower the heat and let them sizzle slowly, covered. Keep an eye on them to prevent them from sticking to the bottom, toss every now and then. The cooking time will depend largely on the quality of the potatoes.
In the meantime, prepare the persillade, a mixture of very finely minced raw garlic and parsley. When the potatoes are cooked, turn the heat off, season them to taste and sprinkle the persillade on top. Cover and let them stand 15 minutes, for them to absorb the aromas.

And there you have a great side dish or, as I said before, a great first course when accompanied by a more nourishing ingredient. The French, who are very wise, sometimes accompany them with truffles... but my budget for this month didn't allow for such feasting... In addition, I shouldn't spend more than necessary just to use up the fat... Was I not preaching frugality? Me?

Madeira cake and a very British Oscar

2011-03-08T12:13:00.001+01:00

This post is dedicated to Colin Firth. Why? Because I want to. Because I feel like it. For his freshly baked Oscar. Because he's been one of my favorite actors for hundreds of years. Because he's had to wait to have wrinkles, to lose some hair and for his cheeks to drop for critics to appreciate his performing art. Instead, we all know that Nicole Kidman, an instance among many, is a smashing actress ever since she was born. Yeah.. Maybe the film critics are mostly men? That's the reason why I recently made this utterly British classic, that the Britons used to have for high tea while sipping a glass of sweet Madeira wine with their little finger raised, hence the name of the cake... This is a touch of genius, nothing better than sweet wine to accompany this luscious cake... In fact the cake is quite a normal cake flavored with lemon, but if you picture Mr. Darcy tasting it, it suddenly and unexpectedly becomes more appealing...

Precisely because of the almost-zero recognition of movie hunks by the film critics, I worship George Clooney, because the guy must be as sharp as a tack for winning an Oscar before needing a walking stick (okay, who won for a role where he was hardly recognizable, with 20 kilos overweight). Okay, I worship him for this and for some other reasons I will not mention. It's not that I feel quite the cinephile lately, I always do because I love cinema, of course good cinema (you're wondering what good cinema is? In my blog I say what is good... and what is not). I just do not usually talk about it here, it does not usually fit with the recipes I post. This time it did not fit either, but I could not resist myself. What for?

The recipe for this cake, born in the 18th century, comes from a cute British cookbook published by Harrods, oh dear, quintessentially British (the Anglophile in me again). It also caught my attention because it carries a small proportion of rice flour, and since I had a brand new brown rice flour, I told myself this cake was the opportunity I expected. But fear not, the few healthy brown rice molecules are well neutralized by tons of butter...

To the point:

Madeira cake

150g soft unsalted butter
100g caster sugar
225g AP flour
50g rice flour
Juice and zest of one lemon
2 tsp leavening agent (or 2+2/3 tsp baking powder)*
4 medium eggs
Candied lemon peel (optional)

*To prepare a leavening agent you mix cream of tartar with baking soda. This agent is like any store-bought baking powder, that is, a mixture of an alkaline compound, sodium bicarbonate, with an acid, in this case the cream of tartar. The acid and the alkali get in contact when dissolved in the liquid of the batter and they react. The acid-alkali reaction releases carbon dioxide that makes the cake or cookie rise. In the case of store-bought baking powder, acid usually has a slow-action or is activated only by heat (that is, the reaction will not start until you put the batter in the oven). On the contrary, cream of tartar acts very quickly, immediately on dissolving in the liquid. If the dough has an acidic component, such as buttermilk, depending on the amount it might not be necessary to add the cream of tartar, but only the baking soda. Equivalence between store-bought baking powder and the mixture of baking soda and cream of tartar is as follows:

1 tsp of baking powder equals:
1/4 tsp baking soda + 1/2 tsp cream of tartar or
1/4 tsp baking soda + 120ml acid liquid, like buttermilk, sour milk or yoghourt

The ratio of cream of tartar to baking soda must always be 2 to 1, that is, double amount of cream of tartar. Well... sometimes my past as a chemist just shows. Source: On food and cooking, Harold McGee, and Joy of Baking.

Preheat the oven to 180ºC if conventional, to 160ºC if convection type.
Whip the soft butter with the sugar till white and fluffy.
In the meantime, weigh and sieve the solid ingredients, set aside. Zest the lemon and add the zest to the flour mixture.
Crack the eggs and mix with the lemon juice.
When the butter and sugar mix is ready, add the solids and the eggs alternately, in 2 or 3 batches, mixing all the time at a slower speed than before.
Line a 18cm cake pan with parchment paper. When the batter is ready, pour it in the pan (it will be quite thick) and smooth the surface with a spatula. Bake immediately as the cream of tartar will start acting at once.
Bake for one hour. Unmold and let cool on a wire rack.

I have to agree with the British: the obvious lemony taste of the cake along with its dense texture (but not heavy), coupled with a deliciously crispy crust combines beautifully with a good sweet or raisin wine... hics.

And last but not least (I've been forgeting to mention this for a month already). I was one of the judges for the photographic contest DMBLGIT, January edition, hosted by the very lovely Katherine of A girl in Madrid... Check the winners at her site. I do apologize for not posting this earlier, I kept forgeting all the time! And the experience was a tough one, so many beautiful photographs to choose from... Congratulations to all the winners, it was well deserved.

Morcilla beignets by Santi Santamaría and the giveaway winner

2011-03-01T15:45:00.000+01:00

This entry is a humble homage to a good chef, who's recently died at a too early age... Three-star Michelin chef Santi Santamaría was a Catalan chef famous for his restaurant Can Fabes, close to Barcelona. When I learned of his death some days ago, I immediately thought of making one of his recipes, being that I have a couple of his books. But as unity is strength, I decided to participate in the common homage effort started by the Catalan blog De cuina, to get a lot of blogs to cook a Santamaría recipe on the same day. And the initiative was a success. I had been craving for some dish with morcilla, the typical Spanish blood sausage or black pudding (don't sneer), for quite a while, so when I saw Santamaría had a recipe for some wonderful tapa of morcilla beignets my search was over. And the result was well worth the effort.

First to the winner of the CSN giveaway! The lucky winner of the $75 gift code is Prerna, from the very lovely blog Indian Simmer! Congratulations, Prerna, I hope you buy something to help you create even more delightful recipes for us to enjoy.

I guess morcilla is one of those things that can make you cringe when haven't grown up with it. I admit the color is not very inviting... humans don't really eat many black foods. In Spain morcilla is a soft sausage made with onion, rice, pork lard, pork blood, salt and quite some spices such as pimentón, pepper, origan, cumin and aniseed in varying amounts. I don't see why this could be more disgusting than having fish raw, or eating slimy creatures like octopus. Or sea urchins. Or even moldy blue cheeses. It's a cultural thing and an acquired taste. And a chance for the ones that have never tried it to be a little more... adventurous (maybe I should ask myself whether or not I am adventurous foodwise before advising the rest of the world to be... I still fill nauseated at the memory of Anthony Bourdain gobbling down a snake heart). I have taken the liberty to modify the filling slightly, eliminating the bread soaked in milk (something I've never really liked in meat balls) and egg. I found my Burgos morcilla unctuous enough to perfectly bind the filling mixture. And I had no desire to lighten the fierce flavor of the sausage, which I love. I added a handful of pine kernels, which to my taste combine wonderfully with morcilla. I am including the directions for the original recipe anyway, in case anyone prefers it that way. And the formula for the frying batter was superb, tasty and unbelievably crispy, undoubtedly a keeper because it stays crisp for a long time.

Morcilla beignets
Yields 25-30
For the filling:

200g good rice morcilla
120g pork meat (only 100g in the original)
1 good handful pine kernels
Salt to taste
(in the original: also 100g bread crumb soaked in milk and 1 egg)

For the frying batter:

200g AP flour
25g instant mashed potatoes flakes
15g baking powder
10g sugar
5g salt
45ml olive oil
200-250ml water (depends on the flour absorption ability)

Grind the pork meat or dice it very finely with a knife.
Peel off the casing of the morcilla, put the morcilla filling in a bowl with the pork meat and mash the soft morcilla filling with a fork. Mix thoroughly. Add the pine kernels and season to taste.
To prepare the frying batter, mix the solids with the olive oil using a mixer. Then add the water little by little in a steady stream while mixing. The final consistency should be that of a thick custard. Leave to rest 20 minutes, for the flours to hydrate and the baking powder to start acting.
Using 2 teaspoons, shape small meatballs the size of a small walnut and set aside.
Heat plenty of olive oil in a skillet for deep-frying the beignets or use a deep-fryer, to approximately 180ºC.
Place the frying batter in a shallow bowl or container and dip the meatballs. Coat them in the batter thoroughly and dip them in the hot oil with a teaspoon.
When golden, take them out to a paper towel to soak some of the oil. And eat them while warm!

You see, Mr. Santamaría, we will always have your recipes.

Sobrasada stuffed rolls and a CSN giveaway

2011-02-20T12:19:00.002+01:00

All the nutrition experts tell us that we must eat a good breakfast. That breakfast is the most important meal of the day, that it charges our batteries and it sets the tone for the entire day. I could not agree more, especially when breakfast includes some protein and not only varied sugars. I must admit breakfast makes me as happy as swinging on a swing set in the summer... I love it. For me the ideal breakfast is a fried egg with bacon and white bread... ahem. No, I do not have such a breakfast every day because then I would not fit through my door. Breakfast is a concept I try to instill in my children without really succeeding, even though I always try to sit with them for breakfast, especially on the weekends, when everything goes at a slower pace... Sometimes I make the effort to prepare luscious breakfasts with sausages, waffles, nuts, churros and other delicacies (not all at once...), but it doesn't really work. So today's breakfast is aimed for those that appreciate it the most at my house: yours truly. My kids do not even dare to try a bread with spicy charcuterie, what a sin to stain the bread with red... "looks like blood, Mom. Why don't you leave the bread alone?" Argggg. And they care even less for soft boiled eggs. They don't know what they're missing.

And... I am again hosting a giveaway thanks to CSN Stores! A gift certificate worth $75 to be spent on one of the many online CSN stores will be awarded to one lucky reader. So what do you have to do to enter?

Just follow The Winter Guest on Facebook and leave me word of it in a comment to this post (the link is on the right sidebar). Those who are followers already, just tell me so to enter.
The giveaway starts today and the final date is March 1st (00:00 AM). Each comment will be assigned a number and I will use a random generator to pick the winner. I will be posting the winner soon after.
Please note that CSN only ships items within the United States and Canada.

So back to my recipe, this type of stuffed roll is typical of the northern region of Spain, mostly Asturias, though they usually pack whole chorizos inside the breads. These breads are called panes preñaos, which literally means pregnant breads. They are delish. But this time I have used a more Mediterranean charcuterie, a kind typical from the Balearic Islands called sobrasada. Sobrasada is a kind of very soft chorizo, almost a spread, one of the most delicious foods made with pork meat in Spain.

Sobrasada stuffed rolls

600g organic wheat white strong flour
400g water
A dash of olive oil
10g fresh baker's yeast
1,5 tsp salt
Sobrasada to taste (if you can find it) or a whole chorizo sausage

Weigh the flour and yeast and crumble the latter on top of the flour.
Add the rest of the ingredients, knead well to develop the gluten, then make a ball and put it into an oiled bowl. Cover and let ferment. Mine took 2 hours, with one intermediate folding.
Preheat the oven to 250ºC (mine is convection type, I put some floor tiles in it to aid temperature stabilization).
When doubled in volume, tip the dough on the counter and press with your hands to deflate. Divide into 8-10 portions, depending on your bread-devouring ability.
Flatten each portion into a square and place two heaped tablespoons of sobrasada on its center (or the chorizo sausage). Roll the dough into a neat roll and pinch the seam to seal.
Repeat for all the rolls and leave them to ferment, covered, till almost doubled.
When risen, place them in the hot oven. Generously spray the oven with water two or three times during the first five minutes. I have found that turning the air off during these first minutes aids to prevent an early formation of the crust. The aim is to keep the moisture inside the oven for the maximum time possible, because the oven convection fan in fact extracts the moisture from the oven. As I have heat "accumulators" in my oven, that is the tiles, the temperature doesn't go down excessively if I keep the fan off for 10 minutes.
Bake the rolls 25-30 minutes, lowering the temperature to 200ºC once the breads have sprung and the crust has started to form. Check the inner temperature for doneness, it should be around 92-95ºC.

I advise you to eat them with a good fried or soft-boiled egg... well, at least that's my preference. And these breads, like any other, can be removed from the oven before they are browned and freezed after letting them cool, of course. To eat them later, take them out of the icebox and bake them straight in the oven for another 10 minutes. And there you have freshly made bread rolls... delicious. Wouldn't you like rolls like these on a quiet Saturday or Sunday morning? And yes, these penguins are egg cosies, courtesy of my sister-in-law P. Aren't they cute?

Apple cream, John Barry and Valentine's day

2011-02-10T13:42:00.001+01:00

I have a nasty cold. I am a wreck. And I do feel that way. This has not prevented me from feeling an urgent desire to make a dessert with apples though, being them one of my many addictions. I've said it before, inspiration is a very peculiar animal and comes whenever she wants to, not when it is convenient for you. Serves no programs or schedules. Just like death. That is why John Barry died on January 31st, the composer of such famous film scores as Out of Africa and well-known arranger of the original James Bond theme, when it was completely untimely for him to die... Any movie fan knows his music. He was also British and, as some say, that's a plus. Among his not so well-known compositions is the evocative soundtrack to the movie Robin and Marian, an utterly romantic movie with Sean Connery (sigh...) and Audrey Hepburn (another sigh...). Yes, the quintessential love story. I recommend you watch it, you will not regret it now that honeyed Valentine's day is on its way. Because the movie is not cloying in any way, it shows us the reunion of Marian and Robin Hood after his return from the Crusades, both middle-aged and already-done-it-all. But that does not prevent... sparks from flying between them. Delightful. Wonderful. Sublime. Totally underrated. And another excuse to enjoy the voice of Sir Sean Connery... a religious experience (although I might be thinking of something more profane). This is your homework for this cloying, sugary week. No complaining. Search for this movie and watch it, little children. And if you like it, you can watch it on every Valentine's day with your partner from now on. Though I don't wait till Valentine's day to celebrate.

You may wonder what is the relationship of the apple cream with everything that I mentioned earlier. Well, in the opening scene of the movie we see some fresh apples on a window sill that are displayed later rottening as a symbol of a world that is falling apart, Robin and Marian's. Okay, the relationship is difuse. But the ways of the subconscious are mysterious. And mine is even more mysterious, I tell you. Do not wish to know further. Also, I write my own scripts, just like Pedro Almodóvar. And that is obvious for both.

The recipe for this rather symbolic cream comes from an interesting monograph on reinette apples by a Spanish chef, famously cultivated among other regions in the north Castilian area of El Bierzo. Reinette apples are known for their tart and peculiar taste, the best for cooking desserts. Though who knows where the apples I find in my area come from. Maybe they are brought from the other side of the world, where the growers get a ridiculous revenue from them and then loads of fuel are wasted in bringing them here so that the oil companies are very happy... thanks to us. But that's another story. To the point:

Apple cream

4 large tart cooking apples
1 bottle natural cider (0,75 liters)
200g sugar
6 large egg yolks

Put the cider in a saucepan and add the sugar. Bring to a boil.
Peel and core the apples, cut them in chunks and add to the cider. Process everything to a runny puree.
Boil the mixture to a compote consistency, about 10-15 minutes. The puree must be somewhat thick, although it will thicken further with the addition of the yolks.
Once you have the required consistency, turn off the heat and add the yolks while stirring vigorously for the egg yolks to mix and set without forming threads. Leave to cool.

This simple cream is as versatile as pastry cream, because it is really quite similar. I like it well in small pots, but it can be used to fill cakes, pastries and whatever you can think of. Although to make it as pot de creme, I use a more fluid consistency than that of pastry cream, as a smooth cream for the sick... It has the pleasant color of coffee with milk, but it surprises you with the taste of apple and cider. And I've added one teaspoon of sugar on top of the cream that was conveniently caramelized with my brand new blowtorch, a gentle gift from my mother, in a créme brulée fashion.

And... celebrate your love everyday, not only when the department stores tell you to.

Soufflé potatoes with soft garlic

2011-01-22T20:30:00.000+01:00

This month a fellow Spanish blogger was challenging us to prepare a soufflé. The name of this dish comes from the French and means literally blown up. I think I've prepared a soufflé only once in my life before this, back in the mists of time, and I barely remember it. Bad thing, because if it had been memorable, I would remember. But that means too that it was not a complete disaster. You know that soufflé is a classic dish in French cuisine, which can be sweet or savory, and when it is savory it is made almost always with a bechamel sauce base with egg yolks to which various flavorings can be added, then mixed with the egg whites beaten to stiff peaks, which are the element that gives the soufflé its lightness. Soufflés are baked in the oven, where, if well prepared, they greatly increase in volume. They have the disadvantage then that on cooling they can go down... deflate... demoralize... collapse. So, do not give them time. The best solution is just to devour them as quickly as possible... without warning.

Among the various preparation options we were given in the challenge, it was to prepare the soufflé with potatoes using their skins as containers. Good idea, nothing is wasted. Instead of the classic gruyére cheese, I decided to use Manchego cheese (you know of my liking for Manchego... or perhaps I should call it addiction), and to add just a little more spark, use some stir-fried soft garlic. And so I started out on a sunny January morning.

My source for the recipe is a beautiful video, here. And here goes my adaptation:

Soufflé potatoes with Manchego cheese and tender garlic
Yields four servings:

4 medium sized starchy potatoes
4 eggs
100g Manchego cheese
15ml virgin olive oil for rubbing the potatoes
30g butter
1 bunch of soft garlic (you can use more if you are a soft garlic lover)
More virgin olive oil for frying the garlic
Salt and pepper

We start by preheating the oven to 180ºC to roast the potatoes. Wash the potatoes thoroughly and dry them very well. Rub them with the oil and coat them in salt (for the skins to get crispy) and place them on a baking dish. When the oven is hot, roast the potatoes for an hour or as required.
In the meantime grate the cheese as finely as you want. Set aside.
Clean the soft garlic, getting rid of the outer layers and slice finely; stir-fry with some olive oil on medium heat till wilted. Drain the oil and set aside too.
Crack the eggs and separate the whites from the yolks. Keep the whites in the fridge as they will be the last ingredient to be added to the soufflé mixture.
When the potatoes are thoroughly baked and soft (check by piercing them with a knife) take them out and let them temper a little, enough to avoid burns. Cut in half and hollow them with a spoon; put the potato meat in a bowl. Set the skins aside for later. Lightly mash the potato with a fork while still warm.
Raise the oven temperature to 200ºC.
Beat yolks lightly and add to mashed potatoes, mix well.
Add the butter, then the cheese and well drained garlic, then the salt and pepper. Check the seasoning, it should be on the salty side because you will still add the egg whites.
Whisk the whites with a pinch of salt until stiff, preferably with some electric appliance if you have it. Carefully mix with the mashed potato, slowly and carefully to deflate the whites as little as possible.
When thoroughly mixed, scoop portions of the mixture into the potato skins, just a little over the edge. After filling all the potatoes there will be leftover mixture enough to fill a small soufflé mold. Rub the mold with butter or oil, sprinkle with bread crumbs and pour the remaining soufflé mixture. The mold must be large enough to fit the surplus to a height of about 3/4. You can sprinkle all the soufflés with more cheese so that the tops brown nicely in the oven. Place the filled potatoes in a baking dish and bake everything around 15-20 minutes (the soufflé in the mold takes a tad more, as the amount is larger than in the potatoes).
Remove the soufflés from the oven and devour, without burning your tongue. If the potatoes were fine enough, they can be eaten whole, skin and all.

This is a succulent and fairly easy recipe and, at least in small doses it does not present a great danger of collapsing. And I like these dishes to which you can add a lot of different ingredients to make them more varied. Tell me, have you ever attempted to make soufflé? Now you have run out of excuses.

Gougéres with manchego cheese

2011-01-17T13:00:00.002+01:00

This recipe is no sophisticated reprocessing of a classic recipe, but the change of French cheese in the original recipe for such a Spanish native cheese like manchego infuses the puffs with such a rich taste that I wanted to share it. For those who do not know about gougères, they are small choux dough balls, basically very similar to sweet choux puffs like profiteroles, but tiny, savory and with cheese. They are soft and very light, because they are almost hollow. They are typical from the Burgundy region and are usually had as an appetizer to accompany the wine, including in wine tastings. The French are genius when it comes to food, oh là là. Concerning my culinary tastes, I am quite a Francophile... Everyone has a dark side. And I assure you these little puffs, like all small bites, are eaten by the dozen. You could eat tons. Well at least I could...

I have used the recipe in the Tartine book, the ever famous pastry shop in San Francisco, that I have modified only slightly. If you do not know the book, I highly recommend it. All the recipes I have tried have turned out to be a success. Making choux dough may seem a bit scary at first, when you've never even attempted it, but I assure you it really is not difficult and the result is well worth it. And with my Thermomix it is a breeze. Lately I have been preparing these puffs quite often whenever we have had guests and they are always a hit.

Gougères with manchego cheese
Yields between 90 and 100 puffs

310ml skimmed milk (or a mixture of whole milk and water at 50%)
140g unsalted butter
1/2 tsp salt
140g AP flour (in fact I usually make them with spelt)
5 medium eggs
130g soft manchego cheese, coarsely grated
Black pepper to taste
1 aditional egg for glazing
Finely grated manchego cheese for sprinkling (optional)
Some herbs for sprinkling (optional)

Preheat the oven to 170ºC if convection type, some 10ºC more if only radiation type.
To make the choux dough, put the milk, butter and salt in a saucepan and bring to a boil (heat to 90°C in the Thermomix, about 5 minutes on low speed). Once the mixture is hot, tip the flour in all at once and, without removing the pan from the heat, stir vigorously with a wooden spoon until the dough coheres into a ball and starts to detach from the walls of the pan, about a minute (Thermomix 20 seconds, speed 4).
Turn off the heat, allow the dough to temper about five minutes and then add the eggs one at a time, stirring well to absorb each time before adding the next egg (in Thermomix speed 4, no time). You will have a soft, sticky dough.
Add the cheese and mix with a spatula.
Line two baking trays with parchment paper.
With a silicone spatula, transfer the dough to a pastry bag (you will need at least two batches) with a round nozzle of about 8mm. Close the bag with a clip and, keeping the pastry bag tip at 1cm above the tray, pipe small mounds about 4cm in diameter (you do not have to be very accurate, of course), and leaving 2-3cm between them (although they rise more than expand).(*)
Beat the aditional egg and gently brush the dough mounds. Sprinkle with more cheese or herbs, if desired. The last time I made them I did not brush them with egg, but just sprinkled with a herbed salt mixture from La Camargue... delicious.
Bake for 25 minutes, be careful not to let them get burnt. When done, transfer to a wire rack to cool.
If there is still dough left, keep baking for as many batches as necessary and remember that the parchment paper can be reused.

(*) Tips: If the dough is too runny, so much so that it pours out of the pastry bag when you lift it vertically, just let it cool a bit, until the consistency is thick enough to make the mounds. Getting the "feel" of this dough just takes a little practice. On the contrary, if the dough is somewhat thick, so that is a bit hard to pipe, there is nothing really to be done, but it does not mean the gougères will not rise (well, unless the dough has the consistency of cement). They will turn out equally succulent. I advise against the use of silicon sheets on baking trays for these puffs, at least in my case I think that once they prevented my puffs from rising up right. Using parchment paper they blow up divinely like little balloons.

I serve my gougères with various types of charcuterie, I do not know if this is too French, but it is a combination you will not forget...

Roscón de Reyes or Three Kings cake

2011-01-07T21:37:00.003+01:00

Roscón de Reyes is a strong tradition in Spain (check the pronunciation of roscón here). It is eaten on the Día de Reyes or Three Kings day and also on the previous eve, when traditionally presents are given, in remembrance of the presents the Kings brought to baby Jesus. Roscón de Reyes is a brioche-y bun in the shape of a crown, traditionally studded with colorful candied fruit and scented with orange and lemon zest and orange blossom water (these flavorings are essential to a Spanish roscón, otherwise you just cannot call it such). Today roscón has become so widely popular that the cakes are baked all over Spain in huge amounts since the beginning of January or even earlier, which inevitably means that in many supermarkets and pastry shops you find stuff of very low quality. Which inevitably leads, if you are fond of baking at all like I am, to prepare it yourself. And it is not difficult, only a bit time consuming as any yeast-leavened sweet bread is. But well worth the effort.

The Christmas season has not always been so Christian as it is now. The origin of roscón has nothing to do with the arrival of the Magi to Bethlehem to worship the child, but appears to be related to the Roman Saturnalia. These were celebrations dedicated to the god Saturn in which the Roman people celebrated the longer days that started soon after the winter solstice. For these celebrations round cakes with figs, dates and honey were prepared, which were divided equally among the commoners and the slaves. Already in the 3rd century, it was usual to hide a dry bean inside the cake, and the fortunate finder was named king of kings for a short period of time agreed beforehand. This type of game was popular in the Iberian peninsula since the Roman era, he who found the bean had to pay the treat for the others... Nowadays a small figurine is hidden in the cake and the person who happens to find it is set to pay for the roscón. That is not possible if you make it at home, of course.

This recipe is uncomplicated and it works, although you need to have a basic knowledge of bread kneading and sweet doughs in general. It is adapted from my Thermomix cookbook. It yields 2 medium roscones or a large one.

Roscón de Reyes

For the flavored sugar

120g icing sugar
Zest of 1 lemon
Zest of 1 orange (feel free to use more)

For the preferment

40g whole milk
30g water (you can use also 70g skimmed milk instead of the milk and water)
10g fresh baker's yeast
130g strong flour

For the main dough

30g whole milk
30g water
70g butter, softened
2 large eggs or 3 small ones
15g fresh baker's yeast
30g orange blossom water (it may sound like a lot, but roscón is not roscón without this)
1 tbsp rhum (optional)
450g strong flour
1 pinch salt
The flavored sugar
The preferment

For garnish

Beaten egg glazing
Candied fruit
Sliced almonds
Sugar
Butter

Fine, let's make the preferment first. Sift the flour, crumble the fresh yeast on top, add the liquid and knead until just mixed.
Then fill with tepid water a bowl where the dough ball can fit and put the dough in it. When the dough is fermented enough, the ball will float. It can take from 15 minutes to half an hour, it depends on the temperature on your kitchen.
In the meantime, zest the lemon and the orange and mix the zest with the icing sugar; cover and set aside to let the aromas permeate the sugar.
Now for the main dough: sift the flour again, add the crumbled yeast, eggs, flavored sugar, orange blossom water, milk, water, preferment and salt (everything but the butter). Knead by hand or in a stand mixer with the hook attachment until you have an elastic dough. Make a ball and leave to rest for 10 minutes, covered. I prefer to let the dough stand for a while without the butter, as fat interferes in the gluten formation. Somewhere in the future I will divide the dough in two and try to add everything altogether to the first dough and delay adding the butter to the second dough, then check if the final cakes show some difference.
After the rest, flatten the dough on the counter and smear the soft butter (I prefer to do this by hand), knead thoroughly to mix well. When the dough is smooth enough, make a ball, put into an oiled bowl, brush the surface with oil too and let double in bulk, well covered. Mine takes between 3 and 5 hours, but it depends on temperature again and on how active your fresh yeast is.
Once the dough is doubled, tip it on the floured counter and flatten with your hands to degas completely. Divide the dough in two, then make a ball with each dough portion. Set one aside.
Leave the first ball to rest for a couple of minutes. Prepare two parchment papers the size of your oven sheets, flour them lightly.
Lay one of the dough balls on one of the papers, then punch a hole in the middle with your floured fingers and start opening the hole. Stretch the ring of dough little by little. If it tends to shrink, let it rest for another couple of minutes before resuming your stretching. In the end the ring should be about 6-7cm thick and have an oval shape about 30x40cm.
Brush the roscón thoroughly with beaten egg, cover with plastic (though the plastic shouldn't touch the roscón as it would stick to it) and let nearly double again, it will take at least one hour. Repeat the whole process for the second dough ball.
Half way the rising, preheat your oven to at least 180-190ºC if your oven is of the air convection type like mine, somewhat closer to 200ºC if radiation type, but not higher than that (again, you know this depends largely on every oven).
When the roscones have almost doubled, brush them with egg again, very carefully as the dough is a delicate thing at this point. Then you have two options: the traditional one is to stud the whole thing with colorful candied fruit as though the fruits were the jewels in the crown. The second one and my favourite (at home we are not exactly fond of radioactive-colored candied fruit in cakes) is to mix a handful of sugar in melted butter or in some water (just enough to get a crumbly mixture) and sprinkle on the roscón. Then sprinkle some sliced almonds too on top... delicious.
Put the roscones into the oven for 10 minutes, then lower the heat by 10ºC and leave some further 10-15 minutes (cover with aluminum foil if you find they brown too much). After the baking time, take them out and let cool on the sheets.

This time my roscones were a bit overfermented, that is why they are a bit on the flat side. A good roscón should have a rounder section. Nowadays a lot of people like their roscón stuffed with whipped cream, ganache or many other fancy fillings, you just open the roscón like a giant bagel and pipe the filling, then replace the top half. I do not like this at all, but feel free to do it. I won't interfere, but I will lose all respect for you... However, of course you must have your roscón with hot chocolate... I admit no objections about it. I would be soooo disapointed if you would not...

And by the way, this is my first submission of the year for YeastSpotting, Happy New Year, Susan!

Chocolate turrón, Spain's Christmas fare

2010-12-31T16:50:00.002+01:00

A Spanish Christmas celebration is not such without turrón, as it should graze the table of every respectable family during the holidays. Everybody here likes turrón of some type, and those who do not are regarded as hopeless individuals. Turrón is a confectionery typically made of honey, sugar and egg white, with toasted almonds or other nuts, and usually shaped into either a rectangular tablet or a round cake (check here the Spanish pronunciation of turrón). As found in Wikipedia, Spanish turrón may be roughly classified as:

Hard (the Alicante variety): A compact block of whole almonds in a brittle mass of eggs, honey and sugar; 64% almonds.
Soft (the Jijona variety): Similar but the almonds are reduced to a paste. The addition of oil makes the matrix more chewy and sticky; 60% almonds.

Eager to know more?

Chestnut tiramisu

2010-12-17T19:19:00.011+01:00

This is a variation on the classic, irresistible and delicious tiramisu, inspired by a recipe of Elle à table (this online magazine has some wonderful recipes, I strongly recommend it if you understand some French) an Italian dish sieved through the French love for chestnuts or marrons. I've modified it because the amount of added chestnut seemed simply ridiculous to me and because the eggs were added without separating whites from yolks and with little mixing, I preferred to separate the whites from the yolks, beating those until stiff as per the traditional method and make a custard with the yolks to increase slightly the conservation period of the tiramisu (I guess the true method of using the raw yolks does not give much leeway for conservation). In short, after cutting here and adding there, in the end the recipe only slightly resembles the original. But I assure you it is a terrific dessert for Christmas as it can be prepared the day before the big feast, leaving time for the yummy ladyfingers to thoroughly soak the syrup and for the custard-mousse to settle. It looks as if I had a lazy day, because I prepared the tiramisu with store-bought ladyfingers, store-bought mascarpone and store-bought chestnut puree... you can not be superwoman full time.

Chestnut tiramisu
Yields 8 large servings

4 eggs
150g unsweetened chestnut puree *
70g agave syrup
500g mascarpone cheese
350g whipping cream
12-16 soft ladyfingers
60cl strong coffee
30cl maple syrup or golden syrup
Unsweetened cocoa for sprinkling

* You can replace the total weight of the puree plus the agave syrup for sweetened chestnut puree or chestnut compote, ie, 220 g, eliminating the agave. Naturally, I recommend testing the sweetness of the cream before adding the egg whites, and add more sugar or syrup if necessary. If you prepare the recipe with sweetened chestnut puree, I recommend to use powdered sugar to adjust the sweetness, because plain sugar will not dissolve well in the custard-cream-cheese mixture.

Break the eggs and separate the yolks from the whites, keep the latter in the fridge.
Put the chestnut puree in a saucepan with the agave syrup on low heat and stir until well mixed. This is not necessary if you use the sweetened chestnut puree, of course. Add the yolks and heat yet very slowly, stirring continuously, until thickened so that the custard coats the back of your spoon. This can be done in a water bath or double boiler too, although it will take longer. Once the custard has thickened, remove from heat and let it temper a little.
While it cools, beat the mascarpone with the cream until well blended. I added a splash of milk because the mixture was too thick.
Add the chestnut custard and mix well again to blend. You should have a relatively smooth cream that can be dosed in the cups or molds after you add the beaten egg whites.
Chop the ladyfingers and lay them on the bottom of eight cups or pretty bowls, preferably glass ones, one and a half or two per glass, though this depends on your personal taste.
Mix the coffee with the golden or maple syrup and drizzle on the ladyfingers.
Then whisk the egg whites until stiff with a stand mixer, a hand beater or whatever you have on hand.
When thoroughly stiff, add the cream-cheese-chestnuts mixture and mix well with a gentle motion. Distribute the mousse among the eight cups, on the ladyfingers. If it is a bit stiff, tap the glasses carefully on a hard surface to settle the mousse and level the surface. Put the bowls in the fridge to let the tirumisu mousse set overnight. The portions are generous, if you prefer more modest rations you can divide the mixture between 10 and 12 bowls instead.
The next day, when ready to serve tiramisu, decorate each serving with two or three marrons glacé (although I used chestnuts in syrup... they are cheaper and are also delicious) and sprinkle cocoa powder on top of everything in the last minute

I assure you that the day I prepared it, the dessert was a hit with my guests. The result is a feathery airy and smooth cream with a subtle chestnut flavor, nicely complemented with the wet and sweet ladyfingers. Ideal to impress anyone and an elegant dessert for the holiday ahead of us.

Marzipan mousse with Christmas compote

2010-12-08T18:50:00.011+01:00

This is a reinterpretation of two typical Spanish Christmas sweets, marzipan and dried fruit compote, combined in one scrumptious dessert. The mousse recipe comes from a book by famous Spanish pastry chef Paco Torreblanca and for the sauce I used my method of cooking the dried fruit in sweet wine, without sugar added as marzipan already has plenty of it. Also it is a great alternative for those who find marzipan overly sweet or heavy... this is a lighter way to eat it.

Marzipan is one of those culinary treasures that we do not appreciate in full because here in Spain we all grow up with it and that makes it all too familiar for us... and we take it for granted. As Claudia Roden tells us, Spain is the largest commercial producer of marzipan in the world, with the beautiful town of Toledo as the center of this trade. In Toledo there is a marzipan museum, where this delicacy is described as the ancient symbol of harmony between Arabs, Jews and Christians in the city during the Middle Ages. In Toledo marzipan is made by grinding equal weights of blanched almonds and sugar until the almond oil that is released turns the mixture into a smooth paste. This paste is modeled with traditional molds and baked in the oven until it browns on top. I will say that the Germans (I have relatives in Germany) also have popular varieties of marzipan, with the peculiarity that their marzipan always carries a tiny ratio of bitter almonds, unlike the common Spanish marzipan. I assure you that bitter almonds give it a very interesting twist.

This mousse caught my attention because it seemed a very different way to taste something so ubiquitous and familiar to Spaniards as marzipan.

For the mousse:

400g milk
500ml whipping cream
250g marzipan
8 sheets of gelatin

For the compote:

100g dried apricots
100g seedless raisins
Sweet wine, preferably Muscat

Soak the gelatin sheets in cold water as per the package instructions.
Heat the milk to 50°C approx., cut marzipan into pieces and add to the milk. Beat well in a blender or electric mixer until completely dissolved. The mixture must be fine and without very noticeable chunks.
Add the drained gelatin sheets to the mixture and stir well to dissolve. Leave to cool to about 30°C.
When the warm milk and marzipan mixture is tempered, whip the cream to stiff peaks. Add the liquid to the whipped cream in four or five batches and mix gently each time, being careful not to deflate the cream too much.
When everything is homogenized, pour the mousse into whatever molds you want to use. Pastry rings are great for these matters, especially if we want to make small portions, but it is also possible to use a rectangular loaf dish and cut the mousse into slices. The mousse can also be poured into a round mold to use it as a layer in a cake. To easily unmold the mousse first cool it in the refrigerator and then freeze it in the freezer, better overnight. I place the pastry rings on a baking paper placed on a tray. If you use another type of mold, it’s better to line it with plastic wrap to easily unmold the mousse.
The compote-sauce is prepared by cooking the dried fruit covered with the wine. Cook until the fruits are softened and the wine has thickened to your taste and turned into a beautiful syrup. I cut the fruit in small pieces for a more homogeneous look. Let cool. You can make this several days before use, for it is better to leave it to rest so that the flavors mingle.
The day you want to serve the mousse, take it out of the freezer at least 2 hours in advance and transfer it to the fridge. Serve it on a beautiful dish and then top with the compote. This mousse, besides being a different way of eating marzipan (not exactly lighter...), can take advantage of all the marzipan leftovers after the Christmas celebrations.

There you have a very elegant dessert made with most traditional ingredients... this is going to turn into a classic at my household, I am sure. I hope you enjoy it in the upcoming Christmas.

Marble cookies and the Best of Food Blogs Cookbook

2010-11-29T05:12:00.001+01:00

The original name of these cookies was zebra cookies, but I don't like it. So I changed it to marble cookies. I don't marbleize them much though, they are more bicolor cookies... I love icebox cookies, they are easy and practical to make, you can keep them in your freezer and bake them whenever you have guests. And don't forget to keep the carton cylinder inside your plastic wrap or foil rolls, because you'll be needing it.

To change the subject, remember I told you one of my recipes had been published in the Foodista Best of Food Blogs Cookbook? Well, I recently received my book... I feel siderally connected to all the home cooks in the Universe... I must admit I loved to see my story and my recipe on print. And in a book sold in Amazon... I can imagine what it will be like to have a whole book on sale... Beside I was so lucky to have my photo featured in king-size in the book's introduction. I guess I overdid the resolution. So I'm giving away a copy of the book, check it out here. You just have to shout "hey, I'm interested in the book" in the comments section and leave your e-mail, so that I can contact you should you be the lucky winner. And after this "tooting my own horn" moment, let's get to the recipe.

This is the only recipe I've ever tried from this book. But it's never too late to do something you never did before, right?

Marble cookies (adapted from The Art of the Cookie, Jann Johnson)

1 large egg
115g butter at ambient temperature
160g sugar
210g A-P flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
30g dark chocolate

Measure the flour and sieve it with the baking powder and the salt.
Measure the butter and the sugar, and whip with a hand or stand mixer till white and fluffy.
In the meantime, melt the chocolate in a bowl, on bain-marie or in the microwave (be careful not to overheat it if using the microwave).
Beat the egg and add to the butter and sugar mixture. Then add the flour little by little, until well mixed. Divide the dough in two portions and add the melted chocolate to one of the portions. Then knead for the chocolate to distribute evenly. It may be necessary to flour the counter top, but if the dough has right consistency it is so buttery that it hardly sticks to the surface.
Now you have two doughs of different color. Then you can do whatever you want to make both colors mingle; you can lay one beside the other like I do, make a ball with both and knead slightly for the doughs to mingle or you can even roll them, put one on top of the other and roll them together to get spiral cookies. Once you've made up your mind about what to do next, you should make rolls as long as the carton cylinders in the center of you foil or plastic wrap rolls, you'll need 2 or 3.
Make dough rolls that can fit into one of these cylinders, then wrap them in plastic and put them into the carton. This helps keep the round profile of the cookies, because if you let the dough rest on a flat surface it will flatten slightly on its base.

I think I learnt this trick at Martha Stewart's website. It's wonderful as it's so easy and at hand.

Once you have your dough cylinders ready, chill them overnight or a minimum of 2 or 3 hours. When you're ready to bake, preheat the oven to 185-190ºC, slice the rolls, place the cookies on a cookie sheet with parchment paper and bake for 8-10 minutes, watching closely so that they don't brown too much. Take them out to cool on a wire rack and you're all set. For Christmas I'm thinking of adding matcha tea for green dough and red food coloring for red dough... freaking awesome.

Gnocchi with shellfish sauce, seaweed and a winner

2010-11-19T17:40:00.013+01:00

A Spanish blog was challenging us to prepare gnocchi this month. As I had already tried my hand at gnocchi in the past, in order to bring a little joy into my humdrum life, I decided to add a-not-so-common ingredient: seaweed. Because I have a confession to make: I like seaweeds. Not because I have tried them in sushi, I had tasted seaweeds before trying the ubiquitous sushi, (no, not before sushi was invented, I'm not that old). I must say sushi doesn't really thrill me, to put it mildly. However, some seaweeds can be really good when fried or boiled in a salad. So I added powdered nori to the gnocchi dough and ate them with an accompaniment of fried sea spaghetti. This is what I call an adventurous life... And my Italian readers, if any, will probably be shocked at my impudence.

Hmmm, and I'm also revealing the name of the winner of the CSN giveaway!

First to the winner of the CSN giveaway: Domestic Diva! I will soon give CSN your name and e-mail address for them to send you the code.

And... back to the recipe, for the gnocchi sauce we were free (whoops!) to make whatever we wanted, so I decided to do some refrigerator cleaning by using up some crab boiling juice that had been frozen since the Jurassic, and because this week seemed to be my improvisation week so far I devised a roux sauce of crab and saffron. The recipe for the gnocchi is the following:

1kg potatoes
300g pasta flour
1 egg
Salt

Wash the potatoes, unskinned, and cook them in salty water until tender. Leave to cool a bit to peel them without too much suffering, skin and pass through a food mill. Cover the mashed potato with plastic and allow to cool.
Add the beaten egg along with salt to the puree in the bowl of a stand mixer and mix well. Then add the flour and knead until you get a smooth dough that doesn't stick too much to your hands and can be manipulated. I do not know if it is very normal, but I had to add much more flour than the recipe called for, for dough to be manageable, so that at one point I gave up weighing the flour. I am afraid my potatoes were overcooked. I know, it's not very technical nor professional to ignore the total amount of flour I added... how I miss those times when the recipes instructed you to "add as much flour as it can take on" and everyone understood. If you think this is a cookbook, you are mistaken, it's a therapy-blog. If I did not write here I would be seeing a therapyst or something. Note that I spend most of the day alone, working on my stuff, without any nice colleagues to make caustic remarks nor a jerk boss to criticize... and I'm forced to swallow all my desire to criticize, gossip and talk-bad-about-my-neighbor... this healthy and relieving habit. And all that repression ends up accumulating in my stomach. As soon as I start to feel it, I write a post. Or something similarly blameworthy.
I added a teaspoon of dried powdered nori to the dough, but it was hardly noticeable, maybe because of the loads of flour.
Make little rolls of 1.5-2cm wide and cut them with scissors or a knife into pieces of about 2 cm. You can find an enlightening gnocchi-making video here. Each little dough pellet is crushed with a fork so that it gets the imprint of the well-bred gnocchi. Put them on a floured surface.
If you intend to cook them immediately, get plenty of salt water to boil. When boiling, but not rolling boil, toss the gnocchi in and when they rise to the surface, they are al dente. Drain them and serve with the sauce. If you're not going to eat the gnocchi right away, they freeze beautifully on trays, apart from each other so that they do not stick together. When frozen you can keep them together in freezer bags.

For the crab sauce (yields enough for 3-4 servings of gnocchi):

1 small onion
1 carrot
1 tbsp flour
1 cup of crab, shellfish or plain fish stock
1 pinch saffron
Water
4 tbsp virgin olive oil for the sofrito
Salt

Dice the veggies and fry them in the olive oil on medium heat till tender.
Add the tablespoon of flour and stir-fry a couple of minutes.
Lightly toast the saffron (I put it on a piece of aluminum foil and use a lighter to heat it from underneath), crush it in a mortar and add it to the sofrito.
Then pour the stock, add some water if needed, puree everything and leave to cook on low heat until it thickens, around 5 minutes.
Try the seasoning and adjust if needed.

I know, if the sauce had pieces of crab or fish it would be tastier, but this is good enough for an improvised sauce.

For the sea spaghetti crisps:

1 bunch of sea spaghetti (himanthalia elongata)

In Spain seaweeds are sold dried or canned. I buy them dried, they last very long and you can hydrate them for use at any time. You take the dried seaweed and place it in a bowl with water, as long as directed on the package, to be well hydrated. Separate the stems and drain well. Then fry the strips in a deep fryer or skillet until crispy, about 2 minutes. Then you can add the seaweed to the dish in small bits, like you would add some shavings of toasted Serrano ham. And both ingredients have the umami flavor. Long live the umami. Oh, and you better try seaweeds and like them, because very soon they will be the only thing left in the oceans that we can possibly eat.

Then... plate the whole thing by heaping some gnocchi, pouring a generous serving of the steaming sauce and topping it with a bunch of crispy sea spaghetti... the assembly had a deep and delicious sea flavor.

Spicy and savory butternut squash tart with a rye crust

2010-11-14T21:19:00.011+01:00

Oh my , this is a long title. For a very uncomplicated dish. I thought I would be able to let the fall go by without making a squash recipe, but I did not succeed. It has been weeks already of squash hype in the blogs and I was feeling a bit stuffed. But as I wanted to try a new recipe for pastry case using some homemade fresh cheese that was decidedly past its prime, I decided to make a small quiche with a nice organic butternut squash I happened to find at the market. I confess I'm not a big fan of squash, I find it a bit... cloying, except when accompanied by a large amount of spices, as in this case, when it can turn out to be quite addictive actually. Still, the quiche did not quite blow away Mr. Winter Guest... but he is a bit of a picky eater. But fortunately I have other relatives who live nearby and are grateful recipients of my dishes. Nothing is wasted at the Winter Guest's household.

As I said, I think squash is an ingredient that cries out for vast quantities of spices, including hot, so it was an excellent opportunity to elaborate on my addiction to... you guessed it: ras-el-hanout. Although a good curry powder is too the perfect match for the sweetness of the squash. The result was excellent considering it was completely improvised just to use up the cheese in the pastry case.

Spicy and savory butternut squash tart with a rye crust
For the pastry case (yields enough for 2 tarts), adapted from The Nordic Diet

75g AP flour
160g rye flour
150g fresh cheese
50g butter
30g cold water
1 pinch salt

Weigh the flours, put them in a food processor and add the cold butter in small pieces. Pulse several times to obtain a crumbly mixture.
Add the fresh cheese and the salt and knead by hand or with the processor until the dough coheres. If it doesn't, start to add the water little by little, until you get a ball. The final amount of water needed depends on the consistency of the cheese and on the hydration of the flours.
Divide dough in half and spread one of the portions with a roller on a floured counter top (you can freeze the other portion for later use). Butter and flour a cake pan and lay the dough on it. Fit it well and prick the bottom with a fork. Put it in the preheated oven (180 ºC) 10 to 15 minutes to seal.

For the filling

400g butternut squash
1 medium potato
2 eggs
50g fresh cheese
50ml milk
1 tsp ras el hanout or curry
Olive oil for roasting the squash
Salt

Cut the squash into large slices and remove the seeds. Lay onto an oiled baking dish, add salt and brush the slices with more oil. Bake in the oven at 180°C covered with aluminum foil to avoid drying out, until tender, about 3/4 hour, depending on the quality and size of the pieces. You can cook the potato at the same time, though it will take a little shorter (I usually cook the potato in the microwave). You can vary the proportions, decreasing the squash and adding more potato, I find potato makes a great addition to this type tart.
Once the veggies are al dente, let them cool till you can touch them and slice as you like. Arrange the veggies on the half-baked pastry case in a nice pattern.
Then mix the batter for the filling: eggs, cheese, milk and seasonings, and pour it on the veggies. Tap the dish on the counter for the batter to distribute evenly and bake half an hour at 180ºC. Enjoy!

My verdict about the pastry case was excellent, you save yourselves a portion of butter by substituting the cheese and the rye flour also gives it a different flavor twist that makes for a pleasant variation to the classical dough. I will definitely use it again.

Sparkling wine jelly and a giveaway

2010-11-07T09:38:00.001+01:00

I want to share something with you: my kitchen is one of my favourite places. It has a southern exposure, that means scorching heat in the summer but simply lovely autumn and winter afternoons... Like right now. I go through my many cookbooks sitting there on our bar stools, at our table, and sometimes I take my laptop too. I was there when I received another CSN gift code to giveaway among my readers (are you there?). It's time to start planning Christmas shopping already, don't you think? Maybe you'll also fancy the main ingredient in this recipe for your celebrations. This is a great way to use up sparkling wine or champagne leftovers, now that Christmas is approaching (yes, summer was over and the next thing you know is Christmas is around the corner). But my conscience is at ease because, after all, this is a fridge-cleaning recipe... ahem. Although in my household it is not a common occurrence that there is sparkling wine left while I am around. I know that the first step to overcoming a problem is acknowledging it, and I acknowledge it bluntly but I do not want to change. Nononono, no matter what. I looove a good cava. Slurp. But despite my dedication to the cause, life recently provided us with half a bottle that was quietly degassing, poor thing, and I decided to try this concoction I had seen in a French magazine, here. And I liked it, because in addition to having it for dessert, I find it could make an excellent addition to other dishes, also savory... Can you imagine a good liver terrine with diced cava jelly? And pink colored cava can be very decorative.

As for the giveaway, it amounts exactly to $75 to be spent on any of the varied CSN Stores (my favourite is the kitchen&dining section... go figure). And what do you have to do?

Just subscribe to my blog on Google Connect and leave word of it in a comment. All readers already subscribed just need to say so to enter. Complicated? ...
Deadline: you have till November 20th, 12pm GMT, to do so, each comment will be given a number and then I will use a random number generator to pick the winner.
As usual, unfortunately the giveaway is open only to US and Canada residents.

And now to the recipe. This dessert is so easy to make that I feel almost embarrassed to explain how. Here we go.

Sparkling wine jelly
Yields 2 plentiful glasses or 3 scant glasses

350ml cava brut or other sparkling wine (watch for the sweetness, cava brut is not very sweet, so reduce the sugar or agave nectar if using a sweeter wine)
4 sheets gelatin
2 tbsp agave syrup (say 3 tbsp sugar)
Red berries for garnish

Hydrate the gelatin sheets in a bowl with cold water according to the package instructions.
Take a cup of the wine and warm it up to about 60-70ºC, the minimum amount possible in order to dissolve the gelatin. Only a portion is used to prevent degassing the wine completely. Add the softened gelatin and stir in the warm wine until it is dissolved.
Then add the remaining wine and mix thoroughly. Choose some nice wine glasses and pour the jelly very carefully to avoid splashing on the sides, for the sake of an "elegant" presentation just like we deserve... Cool to room temperature first (do not put hot things in the fridge, that's ecological terrorism.) When cooled, transfer the glasses to the fridge to finish setting.
Serve chilled garnished with the red berries, a perfect match.

So what do you think? Do you fancy a glass of chilled cava? I do. (And how very eye-catching are glass objects...)

Trinxat, Catalan cabbage and potato dish

2010-10-31T16:46:00.011+01:00

I like cabbage in various ways, in spite of its supremely stinky smell when cooking. I like it raw in salads, sautéed with pimentón and otherwise. But this preparation is one of the best I know. Trinxat is a typical dish from Catalonia, more exactly from the region of Cerdanya, humble and simple, a sort of non-egg omelette made with boiled potatoes and cabbage, then roughly mashed, stir-fried and accompanied by garlic and charcuterie. It is also tasty and cheap for these times, and accompanied by grilled fish or fried egg makes up a wholesome and delicious dinner. It is ideal too for a windy and cool autumn day. Trinxat even has a festivity of its own, celebrated at the town of Puigcerdá... It is well deserved...

I recommend this dish to all those who claim that they do not like cooked cabbage... like my partner. The first time I prepared this dish he said: you don't notice it is cabbage... So maybe you will also change your mind. It is never too late. And this dish can not be easier. Even a six-year old could make it... so bring a six-year old.

Trinxat de la Cerdanya
Yields 4 servings

1/2 large cabbage
3 large potatos
4 somewhat thick slices of bacon
4 garlic cloves
Olive oil for frying
Salt

Cut the cabbage into pieces, removing the thicker stalks, and cook in salted water along with the potatoes, skinned and cut into large chunks.
Meanwhile, chop the bacon into small pieces (or leave it in large rashers) and sauté in a skillet over low heat with the very fat it renders, until crisp to your liking.
Peel garlic and cut into slices, and sauté in the same bacon fat, add oil if necessary. When done, remove and set aside.
When thoroughly cooked, put the drained cabbage and potatoes in the skillet where you just fried the garlic. Sauté everything slowly while mashing it roughly with the side of a spatula. Stir continuously for the flavors to meld, until you have a coarse puree. Add salt to taste.
When you consider that it is well mashed and mixed with the bacon fat and oil, use a spoon or spatula to pat it into a sort of flat cake like a Spanish tortilla and let it get brown (you may need to add a little more oil), over a somewhat stronger heat. When done on one side, turn it carefully with a lid or plate, so that the other side browns too.
Serve it warm with the bacon and garlic on top. You can also make individual or small snacks and serve them as tapas... delicious. To make small patties you can use pastry rings or egg molds, which are placed on the pan itself.

And again, if you have not ever tasted it you will be surprised, because the mixed flavor of cabbage with potatoes, garlic and bacon is fantastic. This is what I call culinary sinergy.

And by the way, stop by lovely Nancy's blog, Spicie Foodie, for a great roundup of Your Best Recipe for October including a recipe of mine, enjoy!

Dutch cookies: Arnhemse meisjes

2010-10-24T00:23:00.003+02:00

Regarding my summer vacation, I still had to devote a post to the Netherlands, where we spent some fantastic time trying to lose ourselves among the natives, that means that we barely used the car and used the bike a lot. Although in our case, losing ourselves is quite unlikely, since the Dutch are all at least two heads taller than we are (do you know that the Dutch have the highest average height of Europe?). First we spent a couple of nights in an idyllic rural cottage north of Amsterdam, to see the Sail 2010 up close, an impressive gathering of tall ships from around the world that is held every five years in the Ijhaven, the port of Amsterdam. After that we spent five days in Delft comfortably installed at our friends L. and H.'s place, enjoying their generous hospitality (scrounging?). I lived in Delft a year and a half from 1989 to 1990 and I love the town. I always love to return, but this time I particularly enjoyed it. And my family feels the same. Delft is a beautiful place with a lot of history, and for me one of its greatest charms is to be the hometown of Jan Vermeer that happens to be one of my favorite painters (I highly recommend viewing the film Girl with a pearl earring, which besides being a beautiful film, depicts a recreation of Vermeer's paintings that is unsurpassed). And be sure that the light that he portrayed is still there...

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: Woman with a water jug, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

During those five days we had the pleasure to reencounter some old friends (thanks R. and G., M. and J. for two wonderful evenings) and we received our graduation as Dutch apprentices with a dreadful shower in the wind during a night bike ride... So what? In the Netherlands even infants are used to such things. But understand that we are native to an arid continental plateau and this is unusual for us. But on the other hand, it is a pleasure to move around a city by bike, the kids had a blast and the adults too. And despite the high population density in the area, nature always seems to be just around the corner...

To choose a recipe to represent the country's cooking is no easy task, because Dutch cuisine is not... How shall I put it?... exactly wide and varied. But in all parts of the world there have always been a liking for sweet things and is not rare to find a wealth of sweetmeats comparatively higher than savory dishes, even in the Netherlands of austere Calvinist past. By the way, these cookies are among the favorites of Roald Dahl, so he tells in the cookbook that I mentioned in this post. These famous cookies have their origin in the city of Arnhem, a name that we relate to World War II, don't we? Arnhemse Meisje literally means Arnhem girl (check here the pronunciation of Meisje). These cookies consist simply of an oval flaky pastry studded with large sugar crystals, baked until they are well toasted and caramelized. They originated in the 19th century in the bakery Zalinge, former establishment of the city of Arnhem, owned by the Hagdorn, which still manufactures them. After a thorough study of the matter (ahem...), to prepare these cookies I've chosen Dahl's recipe, which he claims to have received from the very owner of this bakery. Although in my Dutch cookbook and in many websites the recipe calls for common puff pastry... I also followed the step by step procedure in the web of King Arthur flours, which in spite of not crediting the source, oddly enough follows Mr. Dahl's recipe almost exactly. These cookies are made with baker's yeast.

Arnhemse meisjes
Yields around 50 with a 5cm cutter

190g flour
100g milk
4 lemon juice drops (okay, maybe I dropped 6 or 7 drops, should I be punished?)
5g fresh baker's yeast
105g butter at ambient temperature
Sugar for glazing the cookies *

* Sparkling sugar is best for this purpose, so that the cookies really sparkle. I did not have any, so I used regular sugar.

Weight the flour, the milk and the yeast and mix on low speed with the lemon juice in a stand mixer.
Divide the butter in eight parts and add them one by one on medium-high speed. Wait each time for the dough to absorb the butter, around one minute. You will get a smooth and satiny dough. Put the dough in a bowl covered with plastic and put it into the fridge overnight. The recipe instructs to chill the dough to make it more manageable, given the huge amount of butter it carries, but I believe it is equally desirable to give it time for some fermentation to happen.
The next day preheat the oven to 140ºC.
Line a couple of cookie trays with parchment paper and roll the dough on a floured surface. I could not notice any rising in the dough. The actual shape of the cookies is oval, but I have no oval cutter, so I've made them perfectly round. Instead of flouring the countertop surface, you can also just spread the sparkling sugar and roll the dough on it. I think this is a good idea if you're going to cut the cookies into diamonds, for example, and you hardly have trimmings left, but if you are going to use a curved cutter, the dough in the trimmings will take up sugar and I do not like the idea. Flour the surface repeatedly because the dough tends to stick and you have to roll it very fine, something in between 1 and 2 mm.
Generously dust the cookies on the trays with sugar, remember the dough itself includes no sugar. Press lightly for the sugar to stick to the cookies.
Bake for 45 minutes, until golden. The girls of Arnhem puff up nicely in the oven... Take them to a cooling rack.

I found these cookies very "Dutch"... something uncomplicated and that can be delicious with good ingredients. Although as I have not ever tasted the genuine Arnhemse Meisjes, I have no reference. They are very crunchy, with a penetrating aroma of butter... I do not know if they should be more caramelized, but with that oven temperature it is impossible because it does not reach the caramelization of sugar (that's why they have such a bland color). And although it is not faithful to the original recipe, I think a touch of cinnamon would do them good.

I'm sending these cookies to Susan's Yeastspotting at Wild Yeast.

Tortas de aceite or sweet olive oil wafers for World Bread Day

2010-10-16T07:59:00.000+02:00

These tortas de aceite, meaning olive oil wafers, originate from Andalusia and they are one of those sweet things that are well known and widely eaten throughout Spain because they are just delicious. They are one of those wafers you eat unnoticedly one after another... to regret it after a few days when you cannot button up your trousers... And it was one of those recipes that has been in the pipeline since years ago, so what better occasion than the celebration of the World Bread Day to tackle them. It is also one of those miraculous cases where the taste of the homemade product is identical to the purchased one... yes, I tell you, it's unbelievable, they are just as delicious, with their anise flavour. Only their looks are not just as wonderful, but you can not compare a home oven with an industrial oven. The taste though... mmm.

The recipe is taken from the Andalusian government specification for the production of tortas de aceite, but modified and fine-tuned according to some hints found here and there, even at Wild Yeast (Susan succeeded in making wonderfully looking tortas). This is what the Government of Andalusia tells us about these tortas:

The name "TORTA DE ACEITE" expresses the specific characteristics of the product since it is a confection made from extra virgin olive oil in a proportion 27.7%. The combination of this factor with its fully manual processing, gives the product its most precious qualities: a light, thin crust, a flaky interior and its distinctive flavor and aroma of olive oil.

Well, that's it, all you need is good virgin olive oil (bushels of oil...), and to pour a lot of love in preparing them.

Tortas de aceite y anís, sweet olive oil wafers
Yields around 25 tortas

660g AP-flour (the recommended flour is W=100 strength, that means something in between all-purpose and bread flour. I used 350g spelt and 310g AP flour. You know the exact amount can vary depending on the flour absorption qualities.)
27g inverted sugar *
230g water
13g fresh yeast
280g virgin olive oil
10g aniseed
7g sesame seeds
3g salt
10g plain sugar
0,3g aniseed oil or essence

* Inverted sugar is commonly used to retard sugar crystallization in the food industry and to retain moisture in packaged foods and expand shelf life (source). It's very easy to make at home, by heating common sugar in some water with lemon juice and sodium bicarbonate. I guess the recipe includes inverted sugar only because it is a commercial formula. At home it could be omitted and you could use plain sugar, in which case, as invert sugar has a sweetening power of 130 compared to 100 of sucrose, the final amount would be at 27g·130/100 + 10g = 45g of normal sugar. Although it would be necessary to slightly adjust the amount of flour, as invert sugar is liquid and plain sugar is solid.

Weigh the flour and put in a bowl. Add the liquid ingredients and mix well (I do this in a stand mixer).
Add the solid ingredients and knead a couple of minutes. It really is not necessary to develop the gluten, I did it because I love to knead.
Cover the dough with a shower cap and let double in bulk. Allow the yeastie-beasties to enjoy the moment, after all these happy little creatures believe that life is nothing but eating and replicating... unaware that they live and work for a supreme being until they are slaughtered in an oven... How poignant. The specification indicates that the dough must be between 25º and 28ºC after kneading... Mine scored a perfect temperature, as you can see in the photo.
Preheat the oven to 190ºC if convection type, higher if radiation.
When the dough has doubled in bulk, put on the counter and pat it to deflate. Pinch dough balls the size of an apricot and roll them into circles of about 20cm in diameter and about 3mm thick. There is no need to flour the countertop because oil oozes from every pore of the dough. Put sugar on a plate and coat one side of each torta by resting it on the sugar. Place the wafers on parchment paper with sugar side up and bake around 10 minutes. Be careful when approaching the end of the baking, because my experience is that since the edges start to toast until they get completely browned it may take less than a couple of minutes. This may be due to the fact that invert sugar caramelizes at a lower temperature than sucrose.
When done, take them out to a cooling rack. The aroma throughout the house is fantastic. I recommend to bake these wafers if you have visitors whom you wish to ask some favor. They will not refuse.

This bread goes to the celebration of the World Bread Day at the blog 1 x umrühren bitte.

Sephardic veal stew

2010-10-13T11:45:00.005+02:00

This dish has been a classic in my family for some time already. It comes from one of my favorite cookbooks, in my collection for over 10 years, The Sephardic Kitchen, by Rabbi Robert Steinberg. It's one of those cookbooks that reads like a novel, and brings us closer to the kitchen of a culture that keeps many ties with Spain. The writing is very entertaining and the recipes are mingled with Sephardic folktales. It contains lots of very healthy and tasty dishes, many of those I still have to attempt... This hearty stew is one of those cases where the result is more than just the sum of its parts. A paradigmatic representation of this is a good torrija (Spanish style French toast), which makes you doubt that its creamy interior can consist only of bread soaked in milk. The succulent sauce of this stew is a perfect combination of ingredients, without any dominating over the others, and in which they all combine to create "something else" beyond the mere mixture of red wine, vegetables, honey and spices. You see, this amazing sauce inspires me and brings out the poet in me... Mmm, yum. Olé to this sauce...

And now to some historical background (an excerpt from this site), because in Spain most people know what Sephardim are, but I doubt the same holds outside Spain:

Sepharad is the Hebrew word for the Iberian peninsula that includes Spain and Portugal. (...) Jews lived in Spain long before the Visigoth (Germanic) tribes invaded in 412, however after the Moorish invasion of Spain in 700, there was a large influx of Jews immigrating to Spain. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, Spanish Judaism flourished under Muslim rule, producing poets, scholars, and courtiers - what is known as "the golden age of Jewry." By the mid-thirteenth century, however, the Christians controlled all of the Peninsula except for a small area from Granada to the Mediterranean. In March, 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella decreed the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Many Jews converted or left while others went to Portugal, where Judaism could still be practiced freely. But Portugal expelled its Jews in 1497, and the tiny kingdom of Navarre followed suit in 1498. Judaism could be practiced openly nowhere in the Peninsula. Driven from home, the Sephardim established their own congregations in such places as Morocco, Italy, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, the Land of Israel, and elsewhere.

Mr. Steinberg tells us about this sopado, original name of this dish in ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language:

It is a sweet and spicy veal stew, a typical Sephardic dish that was popular throughout the Jewish Mediterranean. The seasoning varies from one community to another. The recipe that follows is that used in Thessaloniki, Macedonia and northern Greece. Sopado reminds of Hungarian goulash, which only differs in the amount of onion and paprika employed.

Claudia Roden, in The book of Jewish food, tells us about Sephardic cooking:

What we call Sephardi cooking today is the cooking of Mediterranean and Oriental Jews. There are four broad styles. Judeo-Spanish, which is Turkish and Balkan, is the cooking of the Jews of Iberian ancestry who went on to live in the Ottoman heartlands. North African or Maghrebi Jewish cuisine includes Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian and Libyan. Then there is Judeo-Arab cooking, which is at its best in Syria and Lebanon, and the Jewish cooking of Iraq and Iran. (...) Sephardi cooking is sensual, aromatic and colourful. It makes use of anything that gives flavour - seeds, bits of bark, resins, pods, petals, pistils and flower waters. The Sephardim had a sunny, hedonistic nature (...) good eating has always been part of their traditional Jewish life. Their cooking is of a kind that lifts the spirits. The warm and sunny world they lived in had something to do with this, as had their way of life and historical experience.

Sephardic veal stew

1,5kg veal or beef for stewing, cut into large dice
8 scallions
500g onions
4 cloves garlic, peeled
2 tsp Spanish sweet pimentón
1/2 tsp Spanish hot pimentón (if the stew is aimed for children as well, you can ommit this and add the same amount to the sweet pimentón)
1/2 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1 stick cinnamon
2 bay leaves
1 cup beef stock
1 heaped tbsp honey
2 cups tomato sauce
1 large glass red wine
Olive oil for frying
Salt to taste

It's an easy dish to prepare:

Season the meat and heat the oil in a saucepan with a lid to medium-high heat. Stir-fry the meat in batches to seal (I use a cocotte or Dutch oven, which works great for this task). Set aside.
Cut the veggies and stir-fry in the rendered meat fat. When the vegetables are thoroughly soft, add both pimentones and fry the mixture for another 2-3 minutes, but not longer otherwise the pimentón can get a bitter taste. Add the allspice and ground cloves and sauté another minute.
If you are making the sauce in a pan, at this point add the broth and deglaze the bottom. If you are using the Thermomix, also add the stock and at this point you can process the sauce to smooth. I prefer it that way, like a thick, velvety sauce, but I leave it to your taste. Although I do it, the original recipe does not calls for processing.
Then add all remaining ingredients: cinnamon stick, bay leaves, honey, tomato sauce and red wine. Stir well.
Return the reserved meat to the pan, cover well and cook over low heat for about two hours, it may be longer or shorter depending on the toughness of the meat (for example, the last time I cooked this dish one and a half hour was enough). It is not usually necessary to add more liquid, as the mixture of wine, stock and tomato is usually sufficient for a suitable consistency.
When the meat is tender, add salt, further heat for a couple of minutes for the salt to mix and dissolve and check the seasoning. Adjust if necessary. The original recipe calls for a quarter cup of lemon juice at the end of the cooking, but I never add it because I don't quite like the idea and don't miss it in the finished stew.

Like most stews, this stew is more tasty the next day, when all the flavors have developed and permeated the meat. For that, and because it is delicious, it is a dish that I cook often whenever I have guests, because I can prepare it the day before. Accompanied by a good rice or baked potatoes with herbs it makes a real fiesta dish.

Like a Sephardim would say: Berajá i salú...

Bread with sparkling water

2010-10-03T18:57:00.018+02:00

Picture this: you have guests for lunch or dinner and you offer them a drink when they arrive. With the kindness and the greatness that distinguishes you, you offer to prepare some glasses of water with coloring agent, carbon dioxide and tons of sugar or aspartame. Mmm, your guests are sure to salivate at the prospect of tasting this delicious beverage. Well, that sounds exactly like one of the many sodas whose drinking we've come to find normal, though I won't mention its name. Doesn't it sound disgusting? Perhaps it is. You're probably wondering what's this all about. Well, a few days ago a respected Spanish mineral water company offered to send me a bottle of Vichy Catalán. I accepted for three reasons: first because D. and I have been drinking Vichy Catalán for 20 years, the second because I was assured that by the acceptance of this gift I committed to nothing, and the third that this company has the good sense to use glass to bottle the water. And the prospective of talking or not talking about the water in my blog made me reflect on what we drink and why.

At present I only drink water and wine (and gallons of cava when the gods are propitious..., and I don't drink beer because it tastes like pee...). Don't think that this has always been that way, in the past I used to drink that soda whose name I don't remember. Until I started having weight problems and became interested in nutritional issues. And to wonder what foods and drinks are harmful, not only for weight, but for your overall health. I know, many of you will tell me that one can't always stop and think about everything he does. Well, it depends. If I were invited to dinner by George Clooney it wouldn't take me very long to decide if it's good or bad for my body (a few milliseconds, plus it's neither good nor bad, it's sheer science fiction), but when it comes to what I put into my body, you might as well think about it. Others could object that I shouldn't drink alcohol then. Certainly I don't drink it every day, but I take my dose of red wine antioxidant... To cut a long story short, I've been drinking this sparkling water for 20 years because it's delicious, with a nice salty touch of its own. I think it was one of my sisters-in-law who introduced it in the family and her oldest daughter baptized it as spiked water when she was little... It's sad that spring water producers have to fund studies to prove that the mineral water is good for your health... my grandmother knew that. Michael Pollan is right to advise us not to eat anything your grandmother wouldn't consider edible... But it seems that humans have no common sense and we need to be reminded of the obvious.

Stop the musings. This gift seemed an ideal opportunity to test the action of carbonated water in a homemade bread, so that's what I did. I used an organic flour that I brought from my trip to Denmark because it showed some nice little pictures of bread in the package... but had rather little gluten, so I noticed when the time came to use it, at least the package read 10% (mmm, and the Roskilde supermarket was a bit out of my way to return the flour...).

Bread with sparkling water

300ml good sparkling water
480g bread flour
135g sourdough starter 100% hydration (50/50 wt.)
2 tbsp oil
5g salt

Mix all the ingredients except the salt, leave to autolyze. I used Dan Lepard's kneading system, shaped the dough into a ball and left it to ferment, covered.
After one hour proofing, I folded the dough once and put it in the fridge to retard overnight.
The next day I left it at room temperature to warm up and resume the fermentation (around 3 hours). When doubled, I shaped it into a plump batard.
Once the bread had doubled, I put it into my oven at 250°C. Since my oven is disastrous, as soon as I opened it four or five times to spray water, the temperature dropped to 230° and remained so throughout the baking. The bread took 40 minutes to score an inner temperature of 92ºC.

The result was a fairly densely crumbed bread, very tasty and with a nice crispy crust. As yesterday it wasn't my most brilliant day, my results are inconclusive because in order to check the difference sparkling water can make in a bread I should have used my regular flour, as I haven't the basis to compare, because the Danish flour was a bit weird. On one hand I mentioned it showed a very low percentage of protein in the package, on the other hand while kneading it gave me the feeling that the dough was very strong. Perhaps the density of the crumb is due to not having done a thorough kneading... I should have waited till the next day to eat the bread, but I couldn't restrain myself and half of it disappeared on the midday meal. It was gorgeous, despite its faults...

This one I'm sending to Wild Yeast's Yeastspotting.

Magras con tomate, a tapa of Spanish ham on tomato sauce

2010-09-28T01:00:00.001+02:00

I recently won a pack of Spanish extra virgin olive oil in a food photo contest, of four different varieties. So I decided to make an oil tasting with some homemade bread, a sourdough one, now that the weather is not so hot and I can use my oven without suffering a heat stroke in my own kitchen. Besides the time has come to stop publishing foreign and sweet recipes and make something Spanish to the core, as well as simple and nourishing, to put my new oil to good use: magras con tomate... before I go on a diet. Yes, my dear little children, I've repeatedly commited the sin of gluttony along the past summer and this summer in particular has placed me in the launchpad to hell. So I compulsorily need to lose some body bacon before the next great culinary orgy: Christmas. That's the story of my life... inflating and deflating.

The bread recipe isn't relevant here. Only the magras recipe is essential for mankind. Magras con tomate are typical from Navarra and Aragón, two historic regions in Northeastern Spain and they consist of some large Spanish serrano ham slices of varying thickness, lightly fried in oil and then eaten on some large bread toast with a sugary-winey sauce and tomato sauce on the side, or simply heated in the tomato sauce after frying, without the bread and the wine sauce. I prefer the first version. By the way, don't mistake serrano ham for Ibérico ham. The latter comes from a native breed of pigs and it's more expensive (and succulent) than simple serrano ham. For this dish regular serrano ham can be used. No need to buy a very expensive ham, as you're going to fry it.

For making these magras con tomate I recommend to use a nice, thick, homemade tomato sauce. The net is packed with recipes, so just choose the one you prefer. And homemade bread is a good addition too. If you're not willing to make your own bread, buy a good one, but not whole wheat bread. The whiter the better.

Magras con tomate
Yields 4 servings:

4 large slices of serrano ham or more, as needed to cover the bread slices
4 large bread slices, not too thick
2 tbsp vinegar
2 tsp sugar
1/2 glass white wine
Extra virgin olive oil
Thick tomato sauce to taste

Serrano ham gets very salty when fried, because of the water loss, that causes the salt to concentrate. This can be avoided by soaking the slices in tepid milk for 10 minutes before frying. Then drain and pat dry with kitchen paper. I don't mind the saltiness, so I don't do it. Pour a couple tablespoons oil in a frying pan and lightly fry the slices on low heat. No need to overdo it, just let them change color, then take out of the pan onto a plate. Cover to keep them warm.
Lightly fry the bread slices in the rendered fat, set aside and keep warm too.
Without turning off the heat, add the sugar and stir to caramelize. If the bread has soaked all the fat, you can add some drops of oil. When the sugar is toasted, turn off the heat and add the vinegar and wine; cover the pan as the liquids will splash a bit. Then put on low heat again and reduce the sauce while the caramel dissolves in it, for 2-3 minutes.
Place the ham on the bread slices, drizzle with the hot wine sauce and serve with the warmed tomato sauce on the side, as a dip. Enjoy!

I think the sweet-sour sauce on the salty ham makes a fantastic combination. And don't think my tomato sauce is radioactive, its orange color comes from a lot of onion and carrots I use in the making.

German rote grütze with waffles

2010-09-18T19:18:00.020+02:00

One of D's sisters lives in Kiel, north of Hamburg, in Schleswig-Holstein (I love that name...). As I told you before, this year we spent a week up there. Most of the family gathered there, 19 individuals in total, with cousins, friends, girlfriends and other animals, to explore the region of North Frisia. Friesland, the coastal area that borders the southeast corner of the North Sea, is a historical region that was divided in 1815 in Friesland in the Netherlands, and in East Friesland and North Friesland, Germany (this blog is sooo intelectual). This is a most flat region. The plain goes on into the sea and the coast is made of very large shoals, with many beaches where you can walk miles from the shore and the water won't reach up your knee. There are islands battered by the wind, beaches with sand so fine that it seems flour, full of fiery kites, colorful lighthouses, bright green meadows brimming with cows and sheep, and endless skies. A perfect place to relax.

I can't speak of all Germany, as I know little more than this small area in the north, but I can assure you here they are excellent bakers and pastry makers. The bäckerei-conditorei, that is bakeries and pastry shops, are a constant temptation with their array of varied breads and kuchen. As for the bread... I was almost in tears one day that, while sniffing among the various bread flours in a supermarket of the mini-village where we were staying (not too bad, not speaking German), I stumbled into some sourdough on sale, in liquid and solid state, ready to go... Now it seems so logical that this country is at the top of Europe. They deserve it! At least when it comes to bread, they rule...

Oh, and they also have waffles with sour cherry sauce...

Have I told you that they make some waffles with sour cherry sauce that make you levitate?

So... what better way to commemorate our trip to Germany than to cook a traditional dessert popular in the area (although it's also consumed in other parts of Germany), rote grütze... Rote grütze means something like red porridge (gruel or porridge made of coarse flour or hulled grain), because this dish was originally a pudding or porridge whose thickness could vary, but it was some kind of cereal cooked in seasonal red berries juice, plentiful in the area, that is currants, raspberries, sour cherries, etc. (although usually without strawberries). It is now more often found as a sauce, with a dense core of fruit juice thickened with corn starch and abundant whole red berries. The recipe comes from a German book I bought on a previous trip. As I said, I don't speak German, but I know most of the names of the ingredients and the rest... well, you just put a bit of imagination to work or get it into Google Translate. Nor is it so difficult, the recipes consist of a few simple instructions, the book is not a study by Goethe.

Rote grütze is traditionally accompanied by a vanilla sauce, but it's no heresy to have it with ice cream or cream cheese. And in this case also some delicate waffles on Northern German style, which I call light not because they are light in themselves, but because they're light to me compared with the leaden Belgian waffles.

Rote grütze with waffles
For rote grütze (adapted from this book):

500g assorted red berries (cranberries, sour cherries, redcurrants, raspberries, etc.)
1 liter water
4 tbsp corn starch
1 dash red wine or rhum
Sugar or sweetener to taste (I used 100g agave syrup, but this is very personal)

Wash and drain the fruit. Separate the little stems. Set aside about 150g of fruit to add at the end. Place the rest of the fruit in a saucepan with the water and bring it to a boil. Cook half an hour, stirring frequently.
About five minutes before ending the boiling, add the wine or rum, to make sure that the alcohol evaporates. After half an hour remove from the heat and pass the mixture through a food mill to remove all the hard bits of the fruit. You'll obtain a somewhat thick juice (or a liquid purée, depending how you look at it). Put it on the heat again.
Dissolve the cornstarch in the minimum amount of water and add it to the boiling juice, stirring vigorously to avoid any lump. If it's not very smooth, you can always blend it. Add the sugar or sweetener you like and test for sweetness. Please note that it should be on the sweet side, because after cooling the sweetness is always less noticeable.
Then add the reserved fruit and let it cool, so that the fruit softens slightly. Keep it in the fridge.

Please note that this concoction is quite perishable, since it doesn't have the cooking time nor the concentration of sugar in a jam, so you need to keep it in the refrigerator and eat it within a few days. But... I don't think it will last too long, do you?

For the waffles (adapted from this book), yields around 10 waffles:
I modified the recipe to use agave syrup, that being a liquid affects the other ingredient's ratios. I know, what's the use of ruling out sugar when you add scoops of butter... but that's one of my typical contradictions. So I'm giving you both recipes, with sugar and with agave syrup... because you make my day.

With sugar:

150ml boiling water
300g all-purpose flour
4 large eggs
160g sugar
200g melted butter
1 tsp baking powder

With agave syrup:

150ml boiling water
300g all-purpose flour
4 large eggs
100g agave syrup
180g melted butter
1 tsp baking powder

Of my own will I added 2 large pinches of powdered vanilla and another 2 of cinnamon.

I couldn't quite understand the purpose of the boiling water, I guess is to scald the flour, but the recipe doesnt indicate the order to add the ingredients, but just calls for you to mix everything at once... So I brought the water to a boil and threw in my flour, obtaining a funny paste.
Then I added the butter and eggs, mixed thoroughly in a good blender or stand mixer to homogenize, and then everything else. I mixed again and turned on the waffle iron.
Spread a little butter on the hot waffle iron and proceed to cook the waffles as directed on the appliance manual. When possible, try to serve the waffles warm, because they're so more delicious. Although my children eat them even the next day.
So for a nice German kaffee und kuchen, between 3 and 4 in the afternoon, serve a dish of waffles, another dish with rote grütze and some other accompaniment, then help yourself to one waffle, generously sprinkle it with powdered sugar, add a heaped serving of rote grütze and... just eat everything using the waffle as a spoon.

And by the way, if you visit this part of the globe do not fail to eat waffles with sour cherry sauce. Had I told you before?

Danish crumble and... 2 awards received!

2010-09-04T16:58:00.011+02:00

Yes, these holidays we've been to Denmark, only four days, but that's better than nothing. No, we didn't dine at restaurant Noma in Copenhagen, elected this year the best restaurant in the world (but because we didn't want to...). Yes, the weather wasn't perfect, one day it poured so heavily we had to stay at home. No, we didn't enjoy the light and interesting new Danish cuisine, we travel with children and that explains everything. Yes, I bought quite a few kitchen towels and a couple of cookbooks. No, we didn't see the famous Little Mermaid because the little rascal was spending her vacation at the Expo in Shanghai, what a shame. Yes, you all should watch the Danish film Babette's Feast, not only because it's charming, but because knowing the austere Calvinist history of gastronomy in this country we can really appreciate how much it has improved. And yeah... Vikings are damn good looking. The looks of Viggo Mortensen make all the sense now.

And now to the awards: I have won one of the categories of August's DMBLGIT . And three days ago I got the news that my recipe of migas has been chosen among the 100 out of 1500 submissions and will be published in the Food Bloggers Cookbook by Foodista (and you can already pre-order the book on Amazon)... what a great way to start the course, don't you think?

To get good advantage of a small shipment of wild blackberries, a gentle gift from my sister, beginning to ripen now, I thought of using them to make a simple crumble for breakfast with a Danish inspiration. Then I could shoehorn some photos of the trip. You may wonder what's Danish in this crumble. Well, the recipe was inspired by a book I bought in Copenhagen with delicious recipes prepared with typically Danish ingredients, in this case rolled oats. This dish is perfect to enjoy the fruits that now begin to be in season. Maybe they'll have some flavor. It's also quite light, very appropriate after the culinary excesses of summer. What? You haven't put on any more weight? Well, I have. And as everybody knows, it's so simple to make an infant could make it. So bring on an infant...

Apple and blackberry crumble (adapted from The nordic diet, Trina Hahnemann)
Yields 2 large portions or 4 more tepid ones

1 apple and 1 pear or 2 apples *
2 handfuls wild blackberries
100g rolled oats
2 heaped tbsp apple syrup **
3 tsp agave syrup
60g sliced almonds
1 tsp cinammon
25g butter
Greek yoghurt or whipped cream to garnish (optional)

* I love really tart cooking apples, but they require more sweetening. In this case I used Royal Gala and the amount of sweetener goes accordingly. You'll need further sweetening if you use more tart apples.

** I buy apple/pear syrup at the health store. It's a natural sweetener obtained by concentrating the fruit juice to molasses consistency. As I said before, it's perfect to add flavor to any dessert with apples, if you don't object to darkening the color of the dish, as the syrup has the color of motorcycle grease... You can also use any other sweetener to your taste, like honey, agave syrup, maple syrup or even sugar. Although you'll need to adjust the amount, of course.

Preheat the oven to 190ºC (convection).
Cut the fruit in cubes, unpeeled, and mix in the blackberries.
Butter a small oven dish or two individual dishes. Scatter the fruit and drizzle with the agave syrup.
Put the rolled oats, the apple syrup, the almonds and the cinammon in a bowl and toss to mix. Distribute the mixture evenly on top of the fruit and top with the diced butter.
Cover the dish with aluminum foil (apple syrup caramelizes easily), put the dish in the oven and bake 30-40 minutes. Serve warm or cold, on its own or with a dollop of thick yoghurt or cream. Or if you dare ruin its lightness, add a scoop of vanilla icecream. Divine.

When I told my kids about the awards I had won they asked me: But what will you get? 10 000 bucks?... Errrr... no. But I'm more than thrilled all the same.

L'Alsace is a kugelhopf

2010-09-01T10:23:00.009+02:00

Where do you start when you have so much to tell? These holidays have been dense in events and encounters. They started out in Strasbourg, continued in Heidelberg, lingered in the German Nordfriesland, continued briefly in Denmark and culminated in the Netherlands... what a journey. 7000km of roads and feelings, fine rain and high winds, stifly heat and watery cloudy days, endless skies, close friends, relatives and associates, jokes, Nordic blues, bright greens, misty horizons, sunsets, ships, lighthouses, shoals, islands, castles, Vikings, channels, rowing boats, pools, bicycles, waffles, berries, fish sandwiches, barbecues... So many things? 25 days go a long way or so it seems. So I returned with my eyes filled with images, my suitcase full of ingredients from distant lands and heaps of recipes to try... Yes, proper cooking is the only thing I've really missed in this trip.

So I have the intention of writing several posts illustrating the places we have visited on vacation. Although I don't make any commitment about it, because of the naturally chaotic flow of my mind and the demands of the times ahead, with the start of school involving a million things to do.

At our first stop, Strasbourg, Alsace, France, we stayed at a cute little hotel some thirty kilometers of the city, in a lovely Alsatian region called Little Switzerland. A dog and two cats dwelt in that hotel, and my kids fell in love with them all. A charming innkeeper looked after us very well. The city of Strasbourg, a name that we are used to connect to the headquarters of the European parliament, houses a beautiful old quarter, criss-crossed by numerous canals deriving from the River Rhine and full of medieval houses in half-timbered façades. I don't know why, but in these old streets I was all the time expecting to find a stinking mob cheering some poor prisoner's execution just around every corner...

Perhaps the only frustration this trip has left in me, apart from having spent too little time with friends, is not having bought a traditional kugelhopf mold in Strasbourg. Does this word sound familiar? For those who've never heard about it, kugelhopf is a sweet bread enriched with butter and eggs, related to brioche, with a characteristic grooved shape and a central hole. Its introduction in France is attributed to Marie Antoinette (originally from Austria, therefore) and its name appears to derive from its resemblance to a hat used in the Middle Ages, named gugelhut. This cake is completely naturalized now in the Alsace region, where there is no family gathering or celebration without it. It is baked in a terracotta glazed mold from Soufflenheim, nicely decorated. I didn't buy one not only because they're not exactly cheap, but especially for its bulky size.

But as I did buy a book with typical Alsatian recipes, here goes the famous bread. I do have a kugelhopf-like silicone mold, although less tall.

Kugelhopf or Köjlupf (recipe from Mon Alsace gourmande, Simone Morgenthaler)
For 2 molds of about 20cm diameter

900g bread flour
150g sugar
15g salt
300g unsalted butter
4 medium eggs
400ml milk
40g fresh baker's yeast
150g raisins (I didn't add them, my kids wouldn't have eaten the bread)
75g whole almonds
1 small glass kirsch (optional)
Icing sugar for sprinkling

Let all the ingredients get to room temperature.
Prepare a leaven with the yeast, half the milk and the right amount flour to make a batter-dough of medium consistency (I added 120g, but according to the subsequent results, I advise to add at least twice as much for the reasons explained below). Leave to ferment, well covered in a warm place.
In a different bowl mix the remaining flour with the salt, sugar, eggs and remaining milk. This second dough was tough as a brick in my case, even after having reduced the amount of flour in 100 grams from the original. I think I messed up and more flour is needed in the leaven, so that the second dough is more manageable. Or maybe larger eggs should be used... Knead for 15 minutes. In my case I was on the verge of getting hurt because of the toughness of the dough and I added a bit more milk.
When the leaven has doubled in volume, add it to this second dough. I sweated and toiled to mix something as soft as the leaven into something so hard, I almost lost my tendons in the attempt. And I appreciate my tendons a lot, they've been with me all my life... But surely the funniest task of all was adding the butter, after the leaven was incorporated... I had great fun, as well as getting sore hands and get into butter up to my eyebrows. I had to do this in three runs, because the dough was rebellious and shameless. After a while (I lost track of time...) the dough was reasonably uniform and elastic, so after ignoring the window-pane test, I locked the dough in a bowl (step back, you rogue!) and covered it in case it wanted to escape... or attack me. I left it to proof. Although I knew it would proof only if it wanted to... such a character. It took about two hours.
Once doubled, tip the dough on the countertop and flatten with your hands to deflate, and incorporate the raisins and kirsch if desired. Anything containing alcohol is a good addition. I tell you. Although I should have added the alcohol to the damn dough while kneading, to narcotize it... Butter and flour the molds. I only have one Kugelhopf-like mold, so I used a loaf pan too. Placed the almonds on the bottom of both molds. Divide the dough and place it in the molds, which should be filled to something in between 2/3 and 3/4 of the height.
Preheat the oven to 200ºC (air) while the dough undergoes the second fermentation, it should reach the edge of the pans. Bake in the oven about 20 minutes, after which the temperature can be lowered to 190ºC if the tops brown in excess. Continue baking another 20 minutes, that is 40 minutes baking in total. You can also cover the breads with foil. Remove the breads from the oven and unmold on a wire rack. Leave to cool and sprinkle with the icing sugar.

The breads were a bit too brown because of not having used the super-perfect-dreamy terracotta mold... when I say I "need" something it's because life is difficult without it. The bread is delicious, not sweet at all and with a salty punch. And if you have leftovers, it's perfect for French toasts... yum.

I'm sending this bread to Susan's Wild Yeast for the weekly YeastSpotting.

Daring Cooks' challenge July: Fusion pierogi

2010-08-17T04:42:00.004+02:00

If today's 17th August, I'm in Denmark. But I didn't want to miss this month's challenge. We've been carried to Eastern Europe, to Poland, to make pierogi. At Wikipedia we are told that pierogi are baked or boiled dumplings, in crescent shape, that most commonly are filled with sauerkraut, cheese, mashed potatoes, cabbage, onion, meat, hard boiled eggs, or a combination of any of those. They are made with fruit fillings too. They are served with generous amounts of sour cream and with a bacon or fried onion garnish. The most popular are the pierogi ruskie, filled with cheese, mashed potatoes and onion. Pierogi filled with meat are called pelmeni and originate from Siberia; they are widely popular all over Rusia, as well as in some of the ex-socialist countries. We were given permission to use a filling that reflected our local diet, therefore I chose a succulent chesnuts filling with Ibérico ham. That's why I called them fusion pierogi...

I loved the idea of making these pierogi related to the Siberian pelmeni. I have a fond memory of the first time I tasted pelmeni. It was 15 years ago that D. was participating in a project with some British colleagues. Among them was Claire, a charming linguist that was married to a Russian guy from Vladivostok. At a certain moment D. needed to go to London for some project meeting and I joined him. One evening Claire invited the whole bunch for dinner to her place. Her parents-in-law, Siberian russians, happened to be visiting and they had brought along several tons of pelmeni. Of course the pelmeni were part of the dinner and I remember Claire begging us, encouraging us to help her get rid of their pelmeni surplus... That wasn't difficult, as they were quite delicious, boiled in a clear broth, that evening of an oddly warm January in Britain...

I've found pierogi very easy to make. The dough is similar to that of Italian pasta, but because not all the liquid is egg, the consistency is different. It's not so smooth and satiny, but somewhat easier to handle.

The August 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by LizG of Bits n’ Bites and Anula of Anula’s Kitchen. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make pierogi from scratch and an optional challenge to provide one filling that best represents their locale.

Fusion pierogi
Yields around 35 dumplings, 8 cm round

Dough (traditional polish recipe):

300g pasta flour (the recipe calls for all-purpose flour)
1 large egg
1 tsp salt
125ml water (1/2 cup)

Mix the egg, water and salt in a food processor. Add the flour and mix. Roll it a couple of times on the countertop with a rolling pin. Wrap in plastic foil and leave to rest 20 minutes.
Take a portion and roll it to a maximum thickness of 3mm. Using a glass or a cookie cutter of 8cm diameter (the recipe calls for 5cm rounds) cut dough in rounds and fill them with a heaped teaspoon of the filling of your choice. This video of an Ucranian granny teaching to make the dumplings is just adorable. Set the dumplings aside on a lightly floured surface. The dough only slightly adheres to the surface, but it's sticky enough to seal the edges without moistening them.

Filling:

150g dried chestnuts
1/2 cup sweet Sherry wine
1 cup homemade beef stock
5 large slices of Ibérico ham
1 dash of cream

Put the chestnuts in water to soak overnight. The next day, bring them to a boil with the stock and the Sherry. Add some water if necessary to cover the chestnuts. Boil 3/4 hour, until cooked through.
Drain the liquid but don't discard it, then mash the chestnuts. Add a dash of cream to soften the puree and some spoonfuls of the boiling liquid if it's too dry.
Finely cut the ham and fry it in a pan, slowly heating it till it starts releasing its own fat. When crispy, add it to the chestnut puree along with the fat. Mix well and add salt if necessary.

Finishing the pierogi:

Bring salted water to a boil and add the pierogi. When the pierogi float to the surface, se count 5-8 minutes, depending on how much al dente you like them (the original recipe calls for a shorter boiling time, but my dumplings where too hard with only 3 minutes boiling, I guess it depends on the type of flour).
For not to affect the delicate flavor of the chestnuts, I decided to serve the dumplings with a simple sage butter. But I believe that a mushroom sauce would be a wonderful pairing too.
If you have pierogi or filling leftovers, just freeze them and wait till the cold arrives... I'm sure I will feel more like eating them than in this heat, don't you agree? These Eastern dishes and the chestnut filling make me long for the fall or the winter...

Balsamic tomatoes and carrots salad

2010-07-30T11:20:00.008+02:00

I like to confit tomatoes in balsamic vinegar and salt, at a low temperature in the oven. It's very convenient when you find yourself in the middle of a tomato surplus, for example, when you buy 4 kilos of cheap tomatos and forget that you already had another 3 kilos sitting in the fridge... that can happen... and maybe you don't feel like drinking 3 liters of gazpacho. Making the tomatos in confit allows you to still eat a lot of them, but in a different way. And they keep for long in the fridge. By the end of Winter, when you already start to find edible tomatoes at the market (unlike the disgusting insipid things you get in December) here in Spain, it's a very good way to eat tomatos. I find it hard to swallow cold salads in the middle of the Winter. And they're very versatile, you can serve them as a side or accompaniment to almost any dish, either cold or warm. This technique can be applied to other vegetables, like carrots in this case.

This salad couldn't be simpler, sprinkled with some virgin olive oil or basil cream... easy and delightful. And of course, some other veggies can be "confited" as well. Just take into account the different cooking times.

Salad of tomato and carrot en confit
These are the approximate amounts per person:

1-2 tomatoes, depending on size (plum tomatoes or any firm flesh tomatoes are best)
1 tender carrot
Balsamic vinegar (of not too bad quality...)
Virgin olive oil
Salt

Preheat the oven to 150ºC.
Quarter the tomatoes if they're not too big (cut them in 6 or 8 if needed) and lay them on an oiled oven dish, skin down. Drizzle each piece with balsamic vinegar (if you have spray bottle, use it) and sprinkle with a good pinch of salt. You can add some more oil too if you like. Bake them for 3/4-1 hour, depending on size and type of the tomatoes, or even on how soft you like them.
Peel and cut the carrots in thick sticks and season them in the same way, plus add 1 cm of water to another oven dish. Bake them covered around 3/4 hour. Unlike tomatoes, which are very watery and need to dry in the oven, carrots are much drier and would dry excessively if you don't cover them. Prick them to test for doneness, as it depends very much on the carrots freshness.
When the veggies are cooked, let them cool. Then lay them on a pretty dish and drizzle with a generous amount of olive oil or this basil cream .

Tomatoes en confit are delicious, they seem to unleash all their sweetness. But many people, like D., dislike overly soft tomatoes. So refrain from preparing this dish if you're one of those people.

By the way, the blog will be closed for some time... I deserve some vacation time too! We're making a trip through Germany, Denmark and The Netherlands by car. I must carry an extra suitcase with me, just to bring back all the special ingredients and kitchen gadgets I will surely buy... goodness. Take care of yourselves. Read you soon.

Suikerbrood or Dutch sugar loaf

2010-07-27T19:35:00.006+02:00

I have a soft spot for The Netherlands. I spent a year and a half living there, in Delft immediately after leaving college, 20 years ago now... unbelievable. When I look back I only regret that there were a lot of things related to my present hobbies that I didn't enjoy, like cooking and lacemaking (being so close to Belgium!). Mmm, those were the times when all my time was really mine, all the money I earnt was for me... No responsibilities, no mortgages, no children... Yes, those were the times. We'll be spending part of our next vacation in The Netherlands, visiting good old friends, riding bikes and watching the tall ships. Therefore with rather anticipated nostalgia, I felt an urge to prepare this delicious and very typically Dutch sweet bread, suikerbrood, meaning sugar loaf, for the first time. And surely it won't be the last.

I've searched the whole net for information on this bread, but the Dutch food blogging community doesn't seem to be as large as other countries', like mine for example. The information in Wikipedia is rather silly:

Suikerbrood or sûkerbôlle in Frisian, is a bread typical from the Northern region of The Netherlands, Friesland. Its shape has developed from a former round shape to a loaf type bread. The Frisian sugar bread contains 40% sugar and cinammon too. This bread is baked in some other parts of The Netherlands though, like Limburg in the south and North-Brabant, where the sugar content is lower (25%) and no cinammon is added. In Friesland this bread is presented as a gift to women who have just given birth to a girl.

It's a pity I couldn't use sourdough. I'm not baking very much lately because of the scorching heat, so my sourdough is quietly resting in my fridge. The real bread is fluffier than mine, I remember it being almost as airy as a pannetone, but the directions in the recipe I found called for a second proofing of only 15 minutes (???!!!). I proofed it 45 minutes and maybe it needed even somewhat longer. I must remark though that I used less yeast, because the recipe called for 25g fresh yeast for 1/2kg flour, and that's a lot in my opinion. The final volume after baking should be almost 4 times the unleavened dough, my bread was slightly over 3 times. But it was delicious all the same. This bread includes ginger syrup, which is hard to find here in Spain. So I had to prepare it myself to be faithful to tradition... recipe follows. The ginger syrup gives the bread a subtly special flavor.

Suikerbrood or sûkerbôlle (adapted from Living on bread and water)

500g strong flour (I used spelt. The original recipe called for all-purpose flour, but I think this is heresy when you use baker's yeast)
10g salt
1 tsp ground cinammon
3 tbsp ginger syrup
Milk to be added to the syrup up to a volume of 200ml
15g fresh yeast (if you can only use 10g and retard the first fermentation in the fridge overnight, the bread will sure have more character)
75g melted unsalted butter
2 eggs
75g sugar (the type of sugar the Dutch use for this can't be found in Spain. See how it looks here. You can use sugar cubes instead, crushed with a rolling pin. This type of sugar melts during the baking and leaves a lot of sweet and gooey pockets in the bread... Though the original recipe calls for 150g sugar, I preferred to reduce it)

Ginger syrup (from the recipe for candied ginger by David Lebovitz)

A couple of fresh ginger roots
1 cup sugar
1 cup water

Peel the ginger and slice finely.
Put everything in a pot and boil till the ginger is tender, or until the syrup scores 106ºC. I'm a primitive being and I didn't measure anything though. You just need a minimum of 3 tbsp of the damned thing. And you can keep the candied ginger for your next Christmas confections.

Fine, now that you have your ginger syrup, proceed to preparing this utterly delicious and utterly Dutch bread:

Pour the syrup into a measuring cup and add the milk till you get 200ml of liquid.
Add the eggs.
Melt the butter and add it too; mix well.
Weigh the flour and crumble the yeast in it. Add the liquid ingredients and start kneading till you have a reasonable gluten development. My dough was a bit on the dry side, maybe that's another reason why the crumb was on the dense side.
Put the dough in an oiled bowl, cover with plastic and leave to double in bulk. Mine took less than one hour yesterday because of the heat in my kitchen. Simply amazing. I can't imagine what could have happened had I added the original amount of yeast. I would have needed a machete to get into my kitchen.
Preheat the oven to 170-180ºC.
After the first proofing, tip the dough on the countertop, deflate it and shape it into a large rectangle by sliding your fingers underneath the dough and pulling. The rectangle needs to be as wide as the length of your loaf pan, so that the rolled dough fits into the mold. I don't have photos of the process as it was almost night when I started and I don't have the proper photography props. I admit donations though. And my baking inspiration doesn't arrive when it's called, I couldn't tell her to come back the next day... no no no. My dough had a wonderful gluten development I don't always get, because I could stretch it a lot without much effort. The heat also has something to do when the dough carries butter.
When the dough is well stretched, scatter the sugar pieces and sprinkle the cinammon. Roll the dough carefully to make a cylinder, lift it and put it into the oiled and floured loaf pan. Cover with plastic film and let it at least double in volume.
Bake it 40 minutes. Watch it every now and then to prevent it from browning too much on top. When done, unmold on a cooling rack. Let it cool.

If you like bread that is sugary and smells of cinammon, this is up your alley. Undescribable if you have it in a veranda with tons of butter... like the Dutch do... eet smakelijk.

And I'm sending this one to Wild Yeast, for the weekly YeastSpotting.

Indecent chocolate cake

2010-07-19T20:06:00.011+02:00

Now that I've got your attention...

That's the way some people advertised their parties while I was at college, with a notice where you could read SEX in a large font... followed by the details of the party in a much smaller font. Well, this post beginning has to do with the author of this recipe, the very well known British chef Nigella Lawson, the queen of food porn (just take a look...). Her recipes can send your blood sugar sky-rocketing and raise your cholesterol so much you'd need a chisel to clear your arteries. In fact I found the recipe already tweaked by Heidi of 101 cookbooks. She praised it so much it made me curious. So today it's a sweet and chocolatey day. I hardly try this kind of delicacy when I make it, but my children often appreciate these indecently caloric cakes, just because they don't put on weight (so far) and they can do it. Yes, they can.

I was intrigued by the sinking and deflating quality of the cake that Heidi talked about in her post. Oddly enough, my cake didn't sink although it didn't really raised a lot. It was extremely soft and moist (indecent, I tell you), I guess it has to do with the boiling water addition, which I had never seen before added to a cake. When you add the water it feels as if the chocolate in the batter melted again. My family loved this cake, I strongly recommend it, in spite of the health issues... And I dared to turn on the oven during a rather brief break from the scorching heat of this month.

Indecently rich chocolate cake

145g spelt flour (all-purpose will do too)
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
225g softened butter
215g muscovado sugar
2 large eggs
115g bittersweet chocolate
250ml boiling water (I really only added 2/3 of this amount)

Preheat the oven to 190ºC.
Sieve the flour, mix with the baking powder and the salt and set aside.
Melt the chocolate in the microwave or a double boiler and leave to temper.
Cream the butter in a stand mixer until light and fluffy then add the sugar little by little while still beating. Scrape the bowl every now and then for all the butter to homogenize. When all the sugar is added, add the eggs one by one, beat well to mix.
Bring the water to the boil.
Add the melted chocolate at a slower speed and mix thoroughly.
Lastly, add the solid ingredients and the boiling water, first 1/3 of the flour mixture, then 1/3 water, mix and repeat 2 more times. I didn't add all the water because I found the batter too thin. Mix well.
Line a loaf pan with parchment paper, oil it well using a brush (I use tigernut or sunflower oil). Don't skip the paper, otherwise you just won't be able to take the cake out of the pan. Bake for 30 minutes, then lower the temperature to 160ºC and bake for another 15 minutes. Try for doneness (although it's difficult to make out, as it's quite sticky), and leave to cool in the pan: don't unmold while still warm, as it would crumble down; it's very fragile and crumbly.

I love to use spelt in cakes and cookies. But regardless of the type of flour, what I always try is to use stone-ground flour, because it contains all the essential oils of the grain germ, something that's missing in conventional industrially milled flour. When the flour contains the germ nutrients it goes rancid more quickly... therefore if you get rid of the germ the shelf-life is extended... so that large producers and distributors can speculate. If you want to know more about this fascinating subject, read Michael Pollan's In defense of food.

Remojón or codfish and orange salad

2010-07-11T20:20:00.009+02:00

There is little doubt that this is the best time of the year for salads, that is in the Northern hemisphere of course. And if they're really nourishing, they can be a whole meal in themselves. That's very convenient when your kitchen is above 29ºC (84ºF) like mine these last days. I'm tending to avoid any meal that requires fire and oven as much as I can. But being away from the kitchen is hard for me, mainly because I'm used to the opposite. I don't seem to know what to do with the spare time I suddenly have in my hands. Today I'm posting a very simple and refreshing salad, ancient and traditional in many places of Andalusia, with such an original combination of sweet and savory flavors that would make many a modern chef envious. That's exactly what popular genius is all about. Being inimitable.

Remojón as a salad (there are also warm brothy versions), as far as I know, has countless variations in the provinces of Almería, Granada and Málaga, which are usually prepared on the basis of oranges and salted cod. In some places, the cod is added without desalting, only flaked, in others the fish is baked in the oven, even raw in some... the variations are endless. By the way, check the pronunciation of remojón here (and yes, it's my own voice).

The presence of oranges talks about a dish that was once typical of the Fall/Winter season, in fact consumed at the time of the yearly pork slaughter, which in many places of Spain occurs around Saint Martin's, on November 11th... but now we have insipid fruit grown in greenhouses at any time of year, or other brought from the far side of the globe spending a lot of resources while the Southern hemisphere farmers are hardy paid enough to live... oops, sorry, I get carried away. In short, in early summer we now have oranges available, so the alleged seasonality of this dish is no longer such.

Remojón
Yields 2 servings

250g good salted codfish
2 smallish oranges or 1 large orange
1/4 onion
1 good handful of whole black olives
2 hard boiled eggs
Virgin olive oil

Desalt the codfish by leaving it to rest in water overnight in the fridge. You can also use unsalted cod, of course, only the dish won't have that distinct saltiness. I like the cod on the salty side, the contrast with the sweet flavors is irresistible. The next day, drain the fish, put in an oven dish, drizzle with olive oil and bake in the oven preheated at 180ºC, taking care not to overbake it. Take out of the oven, let cool, flake it and set aside.
Boil the eggs for 10 minutes, let cool, peel them, cut them in fourths and set aside.
Peel the oranges and get rid of as much pith as you can. Cut them in slices or dice; set aside.
Finely dice the onion.
Pit the olives.
Place the ingredients on the plates in the following order: orange, onion, codfish, olives and eggs. That is if you want to make the salad according to my taste, but if you prefer to contradict me, do as you like. I personally prefer to skip the vinegar with this kind of fruity salads, but adding a good vinegar is the traditional thing. So you have my permission to do it. I'm that magnanimous. And lastly drizzle a fair amount of olive oil on the salad.

The combination of the sweetness of the orange with the saltiness of the fish, the freshness of the onion and the bitterness of the olives is like an adrenaline dose... I mean it. Just try it.

Ponche segoviano or Segovia layer cake

2010-07-06T19:47:00.012+02:00

I have a soft spot for Segovia. It is such a beautiful city, one of my favourites. For Madrilenians like me, Segovia has always been one of the classic day-trips at any time of year (it's only 60 km away), mainly for its succulent suckling lambs... poor things. I recall having visited it quite some times as a child. As a child it is impossible not to be impressed by its Alcázar that looks like something out of a fairy tale... One expects at any time to see on one of the tall windows, in the highest room of the tallest tower, one of those princesses with a conical cap topped by a veil or a knight coming out at full gallop across the bridge over the moat (I've told you before, all my problems come from reading too much through my childhood... and from watching Robin Hood too many times). It's been days since I wanted to complicate my life with this rich and somewhat labor-intensive dessert typical of Segovia, although relatively recent in history. For those who've never heard about it, despite its name it is a cake, not a drink, that consists of several layers of cake drenched in syrup, with an egg yolk cream between them, and with a thick layer of marzipan covering the whole thing... the perfect dessert for Segovia's cold winters.

This dessert is so famous, at least in its place of origin, that it even has its own website: www.ponchesegoviano.com. And on this website, where they state that this candy was invented in the tearoom El Alcázar, next to the cathedral, they tell us the following about its birth:

In 1926, the confectioner Frutos García Martín began marketing the candy in his establishment of the Plaza Mayor of Segovia. The King Alfonso XIII, the last Bourbon who regularly spent the summer at La Granja, encouraged him to spread the word outside of Segovia and in other areas. The king advised the confectioner to present this dessert at the Universal Exhibition of 1929 where he won the gold medal.

They also tell us the exact formula for this sweet is a well kept secret. Does that mean that the recipes found in books and websites are mere attempts? I've read that the genuine filling is not plain pastry cream, as indicated in many places (anathema!), but egg yolk custard or cream. I have used egg yolks, of course, just to avoid being chased by a mob armed with pitchforks and clubs. I don't know if Segovians will forgive me for not marking the ponche with the classic caramel lattice though... I had no adequate gadget (me?). I know that with this aspiring ponche I'm exposed to the wrath of Segovians... but anyway, I risk it because I intend to improve it... the next time I make it.

After a long and brainy research into the subject (ahem), the recipe I used is a collage of bits found here and there... The composition is roughly taken from an old and excellent book apparently no longer in print and recently inherited from a family friend, Nuestra cocina, by José Sarrau. Well, there goes my Segovian-Galapagan ponche:

Ponche segoviano
Yields about 12 servings

Cake

8 eggs
2 egg yolks
150g sugar
200g of medium strength flour
100g rice flour (potato starch in the original recipe)
25g butter
2 tablespoons warm water
Sunflower oil for brushing the mold

Weigh the flours and set aside.
Cream the eggs and yolks with the sugar until fluffy and pale, 3-4 minutes in the Thermomix at speed 5 and 37ºC. If you do not have Thermomix, you already know that creaming is accelerated by beating the mixture in a water bath with tepid water, because the temperature helps the mixture to stabilize with the air.
Preheat the oven to 180ºC.
Add the sifted flours into the eggs, with a gentle motion. Melt the butter, add and mix well. Line a large bowl with parchment paper, brush it with sunflower oil, pour the mixture and bake about 25 minutes. Remove from the oven, unmold on a rack and let cool. The oven dish size should be sufficient for the cake layer to yield three parts of reasonable size. My strips were 9 cm by 40 cm, more or less.
While the cake cools down, make the syrup and the yolk cream.

Syrup

250g sugar
200ml water
A glass of liquor (I added sweet wine)

Put the sugar and the water in a saucepan, and bring to a boil. Boil the syrup for about 7 minutes, turn off the heat, add the liquor and keep it hot for soaking the cake later.

Egg yolk cream

7 egg yolks
150g sugar
75ml of water

Make a syrup by boiling the sugar and water till it thickens slightly, around 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, crack the eggs open, separate the yolks and strain them to remove the skin that encloses them.
When the syrup is ready, add the yolks and stir vigorously. Then keep on heating the mixture on low heat, stirring continuously until it thickens. When it's thickened (thinner than a regular custard), remove from the heat and set aside.

Marzipan

500g ground almonds or almond meal
500g icing sugar
1 or 2 egg whites

For the marzipan I mixed two formulas and I added 2 full egg whites (which I had left over from the cake) and 10ml of water... blunder. My marzipan was too wet and I had to knead it on the counter for quite a while adding sugar galore. So I imagine that using only the egg whites is correct. Well, the recipe yields more marzipan than necessary for the ponche, but you can just freeze it until December. Although I don't know if will last that long, because homemade marzipan is an indescribable delight. You can buy ground almonds or grind the same amount of raw almonds. Thoroughly mix the almonds with the sugar and add the egg whites. Although at first the paste seems quite unmanageable, the liquid will slowly permeate the solid to make a more or less pliable dough.
Knead on the counter until it forms a paste that can be laminated with a rolling pin. You will need to sprinkle lots of icing sugar to prevent sticking. Wrap in plastic foil and set aside.

Putting it all together

Cut the cake layer into three equal parts. It's better to trim the edges before, which will always be somewhat uneven and lower, and form a perfect rectangle, measured with a measuring tape. You can also trim the top if it is somewhat domed, which is very common.
Place the first cake layer on a serving dish and brush it repeteadly with the hot syrup, until you see in the sides that it has permeated almost the entire cake layer. Though it might look like a lot of syrup, you should really use a third of the total amount. Oddly enough, the cake is able to suck most of that syrup. You can help the cake in soaking by poking it here and there with a toothpick. Once the first cake layer is soaked in syrup, spread one third of the egg yolk cream on top. Do the same with the second and third layers, repeating the brushing and spreading.
Roll the marzipan to a thickness of about 3 mm. Place the cake tower as close as possible to the marzipan and with the help of another person (I think it is impossible to do it by yourself), raise the marzipan layer with great care and place it on the cake. It will fit all right. Beware of any cracks on the corners, though you can hide most of all cracks and imperfections just by pressing the marzipan with your fingers. Trim the excess with a knife and adjust the marzipan around the perimeter to cover the cake perfectly.
Finally, sprinkle the entire top surface of the ponche with icing sugar (as you see the ponche can raise your blood sugar to infinity and beyond) and, for a perfect finish, you should make a classic lattice pattern on top by burning the sugar with a hot iron. I know you can do this with a red-hot metal skewer, but I always use wood skewers... Next time.

As I said, this dessert is best suited for a cold winter afternoon. But... if you get in a bathtub filled with ice cubes, the feeling is similar. You just need to find an excuse to eat this eggy and marzipaney delicacy...

Matcha noodles with basil cream and giveaway winner

2010-06-28T17:34:00.011+02:00

Well, the long-expected moment of revealing the winner of the giveaway has come. I'm sure you've been biting your nails the whole week long... Thanks to all participants! Also I'm giving in this post my first pasta recipe in the blog... I'm not a great pasta lover. It's not that I dislike it, but it's never among my favourites. I find it a bit boring (I feel your hatred coming my way...). But let's get to the point...

First to the giveaway winner: Tsue of That's what she said. Congrats, Tsue! I hope you enjoy your giveaway. To all the non-winners, thanks for participating, it's always nice to see there's someone out there. You can make the matcha pasta to help you get over the mighty blow of not winning...

And now to the recipe. As I said, I don't eat pasta myself that often. I make it for my kids, which are great pasta lovers like most children are. They're the reason for me to buy a pasta machine a year ago (or maybe the excuse for more experiments?). I must admit though that fresh homemade pasta has a far superior flavor and a texture than store-bought pasta. And I especially like stuffed pasta, it allows you to play with really crazy fillings, although making it is quite time-consuming. This time I wanted to try and add some matcha tea I still had left from this cake.

Homemade pasta with matcha tea
Yields 3-4 servings

260-270g hard wheat flour
3 heaped tsp matcha tea
3 medium eggs

The ratio is usually 100g flour to 1 egg, but I prefer to add less flour and add more later if needed. It depends on the size of the eggs and the hydration capacity of each flour.

Break the eggs and put them in the bowl of a stand mixer or food processor. Add the flour and the tea.
I use my Thermomix, 15 seconds mixing on speed 6 and 1 minute kneading. The mixture will be crumbly at the beginning but it starts to become more cohesive at a certain point during the kneading. Make a ball with the dough, wrap in plastic foil and leave to rest for half an hour. See this link for some tips on using the food processor for making pasta dough.
You know a pasta machine makes things a lot easier, although it's not really essential to make pasta. You can roll the dough with a rolling pin and cut it with a knife. I dry the pasta on a floured tray and freeze it in small portions when I'm not going to use it immediately. Boil the noodles for 4-5 minutes in salty water. Drain and add the cream.

My noodles were indeed very cute, but the tea flavour was hardly noticeable. Next time I will add more tea.

The concept for the basil cream comes from a book on Medieval cooking by a modern cook, Mincka, that I bought in Provence 2 years ago (how cool of me!). It's just a mixture of good olive oil, a lot of fresh basil and garlic.

Basil cream

250ml virgin olive oil
2 large handfuls of basil
2 cloves of garlic

Separate the basil leaves from the stems, peel the garlic cloves and throw everything with the oil in the bowl of a food processor. Pulse until it gets the desired consistency. Transfer it to a nice bottle or container. This mixture lasts for very long in good condition, there's no need to keep it in the fridge. Only the basil loses its green fresh color through time, turning brownish. Just a drizzle of this cream on any pizza or focaccia is enough to give it a delicious basil aroma. It's so delectable that I like it plain spread on a warm toast...

Horchata de chufa, tigernut cake and Saint John's Night

2010-06-24T16:39:00.003+02:00

Horchata de chufa or tigernut milk is a staple drink consumed during the scorching Spanish summer throughout the country. Tigernut milk can be made at home by processing the tigernuts in a food processor, then passing the thick slurry that's obtained through a muslin or cheese cloth and pressing the solid residue to extract as much liquid as possible. I recently made horchata for the first time... What an enriching experience, to crush the poor little tigernuts, sieve this tigernut puree and watch the tigernut milk flow through the cloth... It almost made me cry. That's what I call going back to one's primal roots. Well, not exactly to my roots, as I've never even been close to my primal roots, since I was born and raised in the city. However, I adore this kind of traditional skills, essential to survive without supermarkets and horchata street stalls (but not without my Thermomix... ahem). The thing is that the making of horchata leaves you with a reasonable amount of deliciously smelling residue. It was a pity to throw it away, therefore I looked for some interesting recipe to put it to good use, and I found a cake. Being that tigernuts eaten as a snack and horchata are as popular in the South-East coast of Spain as the celebration of Saint John's Night, I thought the cake arrived timely...

If you happen to find some plump and healthy tigernuts, here goes the recipe for horchata, as simple as it can get (this store carries all things tigernut you need for the cake, tigernut oil and flour included):

Horchata de chufa or tigernut milk (from this blog)

250g dried tigernuts
1 liter water
100g sugar (you can use other sweetener if you like, I use agave syrup)

First soak the tigernuts overnight in water. That's essential. I leave them in the refrigerator. The wrinkly little guys will get plumpy.
The next day, drain the tigernuts, which will be hydrated by now, and put them in the bowl of a food processor. Add 700 ml of water and puree thoroughly. I puree mine for as long as 2 minutes.
Lay a cheese cloth or something similar on a sieve or funnel placed on a container to collect the juice. Pour the tigernut puree, tie together the ends of the cheese cloth and press the mixture by wringing the cloth. Wring until there's no more liquid coming out.
Add the sugar and the rest of the water to the milk, stir to dissolve. You can choose to add this same amount of water in the form of icecubes instead, if you intend to drink the horchata immediately. Otherwise, put the container in the fridge and chill thoroughly.

And then you can enjoy the horchata, which is really delicious, or make the tigernut cake:

Bizcocho de chufas or tigernut cake

200g sugar
3 medium eggs
150g tigernut oil (substitute by sunflower oil)
250g horchata
20g baking powder
350g all-purpose flour
50g tigernut flour
Powdered sugar for sprinkling (optional)

You need to dry the horchata solid residue in the oven in order to use it in the cake. Half a day at 50ºC... not very energy-saving. Although interesting as an experiment.

Preheat the oven to 180ºC.
Cream the eggs with the sugar till pale. Add the horchata and the oil, mix lightly.
Sieve both flours with the baking powder, add to the liquid and mix carefully to avoid any lumps.
Line a rectangular cake pan with parchment paper. Brush the paper with oil. Pour the cake batter and bake for 30 minutes. Be careful not to overbake the edges.

The cake is moist and fluffy, only with a slight horchata undertone. It looks and tastes really very similar to the bicas. It has a crunchy feel due to the high amount of fiber in the tigernuts. I loved it, though maybe it's not suitable for everyone because of the whole-flour feel it has. I will make it again, no doubt. It's different, original and very nourishing.

Peach gazpacho and a giveaway!

2010-06-20T19:40:00.008+02:00

This year I'm in the mood for fruity gazpachos or so it seems. I happened to have some delicious peaches which were almost past its prime and I had seen an interesting peach gazpacho recipe by famous Basque chef Martín Berasategui, so I set to work. Just to compare with the cherry gazpacho I made recently... I should innovate, because at home we have gazpacho and salmorejo every other day. The only house inhabitant who doesn't eat gazpacho is my youngest boy. He says he doesn't like it. But he's never tasted it... does it sound familiar?

And... I'm announcing a giveaway!

Again, CSN stores have been so kind to consider me for a $80 gift certificate to give away to my readers! First of all, I should say finding readers out there every day is such a thrill... because it still feels unexpected to me! Although CSN pretty much have everything you can think of (bed being one of the items) I've been browsing through their cookware site and I wouldn't find it hard to choose something for my kitchen... I never have enough gadgets and I know most of you have the same illness!

So, what to do to enter the giveaway? Nothing too difficult, making it complicated would definitely be beyond my skills. Just start dreaming about what item you'd choose at CSN websites and leave a comment about it here, including your e-mail address. And one more thing: in order to count your name twice, I just kindly ask you to visit Kiva's site, check if it speaks to you in any way and leave me word of it. That's it.

The giveaway is open to any person living in the USA and Canada, and the deadline is Monday 28th, 11pm GMT. I will assign a number to each comment and use this site to generate a random number. The winner will be announced on Tuesday 29th.

Back to my point, this gazpacho has such a balanced flavor that when I first tasted it I could distinctly make out every ingredient: the peaches, the tomatos, the green pepper... And that doesn't happen often, but maybe my palate is not sensitive enough. The color was beautiful, salmon-like, iridiscent-but-like-riding-into-the-sunset... ahem.

Peach gazpacho

500g peaches, peeled and pitted
500g tasty tomatos
15g green sweet pepper
40g onion
1 small clove garlic
30g cider vinegar
50g virgin olive oil
Salt to taste

Weigh the peeled and pitted peaches and set aside. Cut the tomatos in chunks. Cut the pepper and the onion. Peel the garlic clove.
Throw everything, except the salt, together in a food processor. Process to a very smooth puree. Pass it through a food mill or a sieve if you want it really fine. Add one teaspoon salt, taste and adjust if needed. Saltiness is a very personal matter, so I only give a starting point.

I wish you luck for the giveaway!

Daring Cooks' challenge June: Pâtés and bread

2010-06-14T16:08:00.003+02:00

This month the Daring Cooks' challenge has turned out pro-French and I found it's been an excellent proposal, although in reality there were two challenges in one. It so happens that I had recently attempted a campagne-style pâté with a not-so-satisfactory result, so it was a good opportunity to undertake a tried and tested recipe and use a surplus of pork liver that I keep in the freezer since January... And the experience has been a success... I'm still licking my lips.

Being that I always tend to be unruly and disobedient I didn't exactly make baguettes, and I added raisins, which I think divinely combine with pâtés and foie. The possibilities of pâté offered were varied, including vegetarian options. I chose the most genuine, the pig's liver pâté. I also introduced some changes in the paté quantities, but the ingredients are the same.

Our hostesses this month, Evelyne of Cheap Ethnic Eatz, and Valerie of a The Chocolate Bunny, chose delicious pate with freshly baked bread as their June Daring Cook’s challenge! They’ve provided us with 4 different pate recipes to choose from and are allowing us to go wild with our homemade bread choice.

Three Spice Liver Pâté
For a 25 x 12,5 cm loaf or pan

350g pork liver (454g in the original recipe, but I was afraid that the liver taste would be overwhelming)
350g minced pork meat (227g in the original recipe)
250g Ibérico pork lard (227g in the original recipe)
2 garlic cloves
2 shallots
1 whole egg y 1 egg yolk
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cilantro seeds
1/2 tsp cumin
1 tsp salt (3/4 tsp in the original recipe)
1 tbsp peppercorns
2 tbsp sweet wine (cognac in the original recipe)
2 bay leafs
1 package bacon

Preheat the oven to 180ºC.
Cut the liver and bacon into pieces and put them in a food processor (I use my Thermomix). Process briefly.
Grind the cilantro and cumin seeds in a coffee-grinder.
Add the minced meat, the peeled garlic cloves, the diced shallots and all the spices and salt, except the peppercorns, in the processor bowl. Process till you obtain a fine puree. Add the wine, the coarsely crushed peppercorns and the eggs and mix thoroughly.
Line a loaf pan or terrine with bacon slices. Place a bay leaf on the bottom and pour the meat-liver mixture in the terrine. Smooth the surface, place another bay leaf and cover with more bacon. Cover with a lid or aluminum foil.
Place a deep dish in the oven and place the terrine on it. Fill with boiling water till it reaches 2/3 of the height. Bake for 1 1/4 hours.
When done, take out the pâté and leave to cool completely. I preferred to leave it to rest overnight in the fridge for the flavors to develop.

Being that I already have some practice in baking bread, I won't dedicate much attention here to the bread part of the challenge. I used this recipe, but shaped into small batards and I added a couple of handfuls of raisins, previously boiled in sweet wine. The bread was not perfect-looking, but it was delicious with the pâté. The pâté itself was quite addictive, even though I would reduce slightly the amount of cinnamon. I liked the sweet wine instead of the cognac. But I'm a real sweet-wine-geek, I would add it everywhere. If you think the amount of pâté is too much, consider that is freezes beautifully if you don't feel like eating the whole terrine in one go. I will make this recipe again, no doubt.

Paciencias, Castilian cookies

2010-06-11T19:41:00.005+02:00

This is the story of a failure. No, my dear little creatures, not everything in my life is success. Not everything in my life is luxury, beauty, power and gigolos, as you would imagine. Sometimes I suffer reversals of fate. I don't know if I'll ever recover from this setback in particular.I fear that it can ruin my incipient and already uncertain career as a master pastry chef... it could force my confinement in bed, reduced to a wreck without the strength to overcome it, as Charlie's grandparents, yes, Charlie of the chocolate factory. So much distress in such a small body (in vertical direction). I shall now tell everything... Everything? Yes, everything... I will spare no gory details.

I happened to have a substantial surplus of egg whites, from past cakes, custards and various pastries. So I rose one day and I told to myself, you could try to make paciencias (literally patiences), you liked them a lot when you were small. Paciencias are small round cookies typical from various parts of Castilla, the central part of Spain. So intelligent of me. There's little information about them in the net, poor creatures, but I found a recipe for a regiment (which I divided by four) in one of my cookbooks. I had to convert the old units in the recipe to less ancient units, but I was determined to overcome any obstacle to prepare my dear paciencias (which in certain places are also called pedos de monja, nun farts...). The recipe, from some pastry shop in Soria, was utterly vague about the stiffness of the egg whites, about the type of sugar to be used and about the temperature of the oven... I interpreted the recipe as best as I could, but I obviously did something wrong.

Paciencias
Yields around 200 (yes, sooo many)

280ml egg whites (10 in my case)
400g sugar
460g flour
1 pinch salt or cream of tartar
A few drops of lemon essence

Preheat the oven to 250ºC.
Weigh the sugar and the flour and set aside.
Pour the egg whites in a food processor with the salt or cream of tartar and start to whip them. When they start to foam, add the sugar little by little till you get a stiff meringue.
Then add the sifted flour and the lemon essence. Mix well with a spatula or in a stand mixer, till no flour lumps can be seen.
Prepare a pastry bag and fill it with dough. Line a couple of cookie sheets with parchment paper and pipe little mounds of approximately 3cm diameter. Keep the bag tip close to the paper, so that the cookies stay flat.
When you've filled one of the sheets with cookies, rap the sheet on the counter for the cookies to spread a little and flatten. Leave them to rest for 5 minutes.
Put them in the oven and bake for 4-5 minutes. Take them out and leave them to cool on the sheet for 5 minutes. Then slide the paper out of the tray with the cookies on it, sprinkle water on the sheet and return the paper. Wait a couple of minutes for the paper to soak the water. The cookies can now be easily released. Cross my heart.

Well... genuine paciencias have a finer texture and a more uniform color than mine. These were a tad grainy. I remember paciencias as fine and hard little things, toasted on the outside. Maybe it's not necessary to make the meringue so stiff, but somewhat more runny. Maybe the sugar has to be superfine instead of regular. I don't know. If anyone owns the secret for making perfect paciencias, I'm willing to buy it. Make yourself apparent. Now.

Anyway, my kids loved them, they found them addictive and the cookies were gone in no time... They were pretty yummy, as the flavor was indeed almost as it should be, but I should give mine another name... templanzas, esperanzas, caridades or... failures. You can't always get what you want.

Rose petal sorbet

2010-06-03T10:21:00.011+02:00

This time the British in my veins has surfaced. My anglophile (and dark, of course) side recently drove me to buy a family recipe collection by Norwegian-descent British writer Roald Dahl. For those who do not know him (?), Roald Dahl is the author of the books in which the movies Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach are based, as well as of a lot of other famous works. In short, reading the book I came across an amazing recipe for rose petal sorbet and oh, serendipity! Being that the roses in my garden are in full bloom, I set to work.

The book is beautifully edited, with great photos of Mr. Dahl and his family in the typical English cottage where he lived most of his life. I've always envied those English writers in their English cottages, leading an idyllic English life... dedicated to writing English books in a cute little house, surrounded by lush vegetation, eating tomato soup and kidney pie, and soaking in sherry... Also the photos never show the eternal English rain... In short, these are the consequences of reading too many Agatha Christie novels when I was young and too many Enid Blyton books as a child. And they say that reading is good.

Rose petal sorbet
Yields 6 servings

4 large handfuls of rose petals (at least half of them should come from pink or red roses, otherwise the sorbet won't have the right color)
570ml water
230g sugar
Juice and zest of 1 lemon
2 tsp glycerin, food grade

Collect a few roses that have not been treated with insecticide or similar crap, like mine (honestly, we don't pay any attention to them until they bloom). Carefully examine the petals to get rid of any bugs.
Put the water in a saucepan. Add the sugar and take everything to a boil. Boil for five minutes, just enough to concentrate the syrup a little bit.
Turn off the heat and add the rose petals. Mash slightly with a wooden spoon (actually, cooking the syrup and the addition of the petals could also be done in a Thermomix). The petals thoroughly lose their color. In contrast, the liquid becomes a light tea color. Cover the saucepan and let stand overnight in a cool place (the fridge if it is warm).
The next day, pass the mixture through a cheese cloth placed on a sieve (I caught an earwig... earwig flavored sorbet...). Discard the petals.
The funny thing about this recipe is that an unattractive colored liquid yields a rather gaudy pink sorbet. And the miracle is worked at this time: by adding the lemon zest and juice to the rose syrup... Voilá! The color changes. Trust me. I'm supposed to be a chemist and I have no idea why this happens... what a waste of money spent on college. I guess it's caused by the acid in the lemon. I've found on the Internet that it happens too with violet syrup... Intriguing.

Add the glycerin. I suppose that it's added to help prevent the formation of large ice crystals, but there's no explanation for it in the book. Maybe it's a family secret...
Mix well and put in a container that can go into the freezer if you have no icecream maker. Mix well every hour to prevent it from becoming a single block of ice, until very cold. I filled with the syrup some of those plastic bags to make ice cubes. Then I mashed the cubes in the Thermomix. Once the sorbet is ready, serve in the finest glasses you have, because the color is wonderful...

If roses have a a flavor, this is it, no doubt. Its aroma is instilled in the sorbet. The flavor is intriguing, you wouldn't guess the origin if you weren't told. But once you're told about the key ingredient, then you say: right, it tastes of roses! (And earwigs... but that's my secret ingredient, haha.)

Cherry gazpacho

2010-05-25T09:07:00.008+02:00

It seems that the fair weather is here to stay. This pleasant warmth announces the return of one of my favorite fruits (and I don't have many): cherries. On the other hand, at home salmorejos and gazpachos are essential items when the weather gets too hot. There is nothing better than sipping one of these refreshing soups on the terrace, watching the blackbirds and... almost touching nirvana with my fingertips. And you'll be wondering by now, what do cold soups, heat and cherries have in common? Mmm, that in order to add a colorful note to our grey and monotonous lives, and use the first cherries that I found on the market, I decided to try this daring variation of gazpacho, with cherries of course, from the famous Basque chef Martin Berasategui.

Here's the recipe:

Cherry gazpacho by Martín Berasategui

1kg ripe tomatos
220g sweet cherries (the original recipe calls for 200g, I wanted more...)
5g green pepper
5g onion
1 clove garlic
55g bread crumb
1 tbsp cider vinegar (Sherry vinegar in the original recipe, but it's a bit too strong for me)
3 tbsp virgin olive oil
Salt to taste

Pit the cherries, cut all the ingredients in chunks, place in a large bowl and leave overnight, except the vinegar and salt.
The next day, process everything together in a food processor (Thermomix in my case, of course), and put it through a fine sieve if you don't like it chunky. Refrigerate for a couple of hours at least, as it's better served well cooled.

The cherries tame and sweeten the somewhat fiery flavor of traditional gazpacho... and give it such a beautiful color... that I'd love to put it in a frame... none of those so very contemporary artists has invented liquid art? So much for this art, damn it.

I take this opportunity to share some images from my garden. Everything's bloomed all at once, hardly noticed... and this year we had almost forgotten how flowers looked like! Have a happy warm weather, everyone.

Raspberry espuma by Ferrán Adriá

2010-05-21T11:58:00.011+02:00

Maybe you've never heard about this gadget. It's the iSi Whip, which I use for making whipped cream since some years ago, because there's no other device as good for serving perfectly whipped cream, straight from the bottle. It will impress all your guests and will leave them utterly flabbergasted. I don't get paid for this, I'm that silly and I do it for free. I simply love this gadget. Mr. Ferrán Adriá, one of the most famous cooks in the world, in a quest to provide espumas, foams, mousses, or whatever you want to call them keeping the purest possible taste of the main ingredient, thought this artifact could be used to avoid air-entraining additives such as egg whites or similar things, and prepared various concoctions directly whipped in this device.

But the bad news is that this recipe can only be prepared with the mentioned device. You know that I'm the maniac for this kind of junk, even though I seem to have some childhood trauma that prevents me from buying a scale... For I am the proud owner of one of these artifacts from time immemorial, but so far I had not dared to make an Adriá style espuma. I'd been wanting to make a humble tribute to him for quite some time already and the time has come for it. Because, regardless of all the arguments about his molecular cooking, its prices and the temporary closing of his restaurant, this guy has contributed greatly to put Spain on the culinary map of the world. And I really appreciate it. As simple as that.

I have substituted agave syrup for the sugar, to make for an even lighter espuma. It's excellent as dessert or as palate-cleanser.

Raspberry espuma
Yields 4 normal servings or a handful of ridiculous spoons

250g fresh raspberries
50g sugar (you can use 40g agave syrup instead)
100g water
2 gelatine sheets

Put the raspberries in a saucepan with the sugar or sweetener and cook in a water bath for one hour. I did it in my Thermomix at 80ºC. I don't know at what temperature the puree was supposed to be in a bain-marie, but I guess pretty close to 100ºC. I didn't dare to go that high though. Allow to cool.
Pass the puree through a sieve fine enough to remove the seeds. I put it through a food mill first and then through a sieve and the result was a pretty smooth puree. I also added half the water to the puree to facilitate the process. Mr. Adriá says that with the 250g of raspberries and 50g of sugar you obtain 300g of raspberry puree... This man is an optimist. In the food mill and in the sieve you lose quite some puree even after patiently scratching the bottom of both, but that can't be helped.
Cut the gelatin sheets into strips and place in a bowl with cold water for 10 minutes. When they are soft, warm the remaining water and dissolve the gelatin in it. I wanted to experiment and substituted 10g of water for the same amount of wine, but it was barely noticeable in the final result. The next time I will add more wine (I often get to this conclusion ... food for thought).
Pour the puree into the iSi whip, close tightly and apply a gas canister. Shake vigorously and set aside in the fridge. That's what Mr. Adriá instructs you to do... But what happens then is that the mousse solidifies into a block in the bottom of the bottle and no agitation gets it off (at least, I didn't manage to). So I had to depressurize the device and stir the espuma with a spoon to loosen it. Then I used another canister to pressurize it. And it worked... I guess the best thing to do is to visit the fridge every now and then while the foam is solidifying and give the bottle a vigorous wiggle.
Then choose a nice container where the espuma can shine in all its splendor, invert the bottle, as connoisseurs already know..., press the handle with caution and... serve a beautiful pile of espuma. The espuma must be eaten almost immediately, since it deflates slowly but inexorably. I have to try adding more jelly next time.
Then you're ready to devour the espuma...

You certainly get a mousse with a pure raspberry flavor, frankly airy, which melts in the mouth, very light, volatile ... oh, ah, uh, I go into ecstasy.

There's a nice little e-book with Adriá's foam recipes in Spanish, but there doesn't seem to be an available English translation. Publishers out there, I could certainly aid in that translation... ahem.

Challah, from far away

2010-05-17T22:38:00.009+02:00

Though the English-speaking blogosphere is packed with Challah recipes, this word is quite unknown in Spain. All ethnicities and nationalities with communities of a certain importance in the United States enjoy an amplification and diffusion in the rest of the world of all their characteristics and peculiarities that for example we Spaniards do not enjoy. When we were compelled to emigrate, we had a lot of Spanish-speaking countries to go to, instead of heading for the United States, like Italians, Germans, Swedes, Irish, Russians, Poles, etc. And now our cuisine is not as widely known as theirs.

It's funny how in almost all the books where I have the recipe for challah (see here its pronunciation, I mean hear it), the name is written in the form challah. I guess that's the spelling in Yiddish and German. But in Spanish we would pronounce that starting with a sound like in the Italian word ciao, for example. I have a book in Spanish in which it is correctly transcribed, jalá, which leads me to worship the translator... I like that book, New Jewish Cooking by Elizabeth Wolf Cohen. Although the recipe I used here is not from this book, but from a baking course on festive breads. Are you yawning yet? Good. This is my method for screening my readers. Only the chosen ones will get to the bottom of the chasm of knowledge...

When I brought home my first challah from my baking course, my youngest son liked it a lot, so with the happy occasion of his birthday today, I decided to bake him a challah, because he doesn't like cakes... And also because challah is delicious. Here it is:

Challah, Shabbath's bread (recipe by Paul Merry)
Yields 2 biggish plaited breads

1/4 tsp saffron
270ml water
700g bread flour (I used 500g spelt and 200g Manitoba flour)
10g salt
12g fresh yeast
2 tbsp agave syrup (the original recipe calls for honey instead)
3 medium eggs
80g softened butter, at ambient
Poppy seeds
1 aditional egg for brushing

Lightly toast the saffron to boost its flavour. I put the threads on a little piece of aluminum foil and heat it with a lighter. Put half the water in a bowl, heat it in the microwave and leave the saffron to infuse. Let cool.
In the meantime mix the liquid ingredients. Add the cooled saffron mixture to the rest of the liquid (substract the infusion water from the total), then add all the solids except the butter and the poppy seeds.
Knead well until gluten begins to develop, around 10 minutes. Then add the softened butter in small pieces and continue kneading until the dough is smooth and supple, but not too soft. Make a ball, place it on an oiled bowl, cover and let it double in bulk, from 1 hour to 1.5 hours.
When doubled, punch it to degas. Leave it in the same container to continue the fermentation till almost double again, at least another hour. Once fermented for the second time, tip the dough on the countertop, degas again and try to shape it into a flat rectangle. Cut the rectangle into two equal parts (you can weigh the portions, but I'm a primitive person without scale), then roll each portion into a cylinder and divide into three pieces, to make the strands of the plait. Each portion is shaped into a long thread, about two fingers thick. Leave the stretched strands to rest a couple of minutes on the counter for the dough to relax.
The next step is to make the plait. What, you don't know how to make a plait? Shame on you. Here's an instructional video. The braid should be initiated at the center, progressing to one end. Then flip the bread and make the other end of the braid. The center should be thicker than the ends. Try not to overtight the crosses, better let the braid a little loose, because it needs space to rise. It's a good idea to make the braid on a well floured baking sheet so that you don't need to transfer it later.
Make a glaze with one egg yolk and a little water (the remaining egg white can be frozen). Brush both braids, trying not to let much egg flow between the strands, so that it doesn't act as glue. You can brush them a second time after a few minutes. After the final glaze, sprinkle poppy seeds on the loafs and allow them to rise a third time. They will take less than an hour, so turn on the oven to 190ºC immediately.
When properly risen, put the loafs into the oven. In my oven they took something in between 20 and 25 minutes to bake. To test for doneness, press the sides near the base, and if the bread springs back, they are ready. Handle them with great care not to break them and leave to cool on rack.

I think less yeast can be used, 10g or less may be more than sufficient. The neatness in making the strands is important for the outcome. The first loaf (which is not in the photos, uh-huh) looked worse, because all the strands rose to almost fuse with each other. The second loaf was much better looking, although the center burst to some extent. I have to improve my braiding technique. I'm willing to bake all the challah loafs that may be required. And some more. Yum.

I guess you know it keeps very well inside a plastic bag, but if you don't find it as good as freshly made, you can always slice it and toast it. It is delicious spread with butter. And as French toast...

This challah goes to Susan's Yeastspotting!

Daring Cooks' challenge May: Stacked green chile and chicken enchiladas

2010-05-13T17:48:00.012+02:00

I was really excited about this month's challenge. I haven't tried many Mexican dishes, but so far I've always loved what I've tried. I love mole and I love tacos and I love fajitas and I love quesadillas... now I would taste enchiladas for the first time. Wonderful! I was only afraid that this dish would be too hot for me...

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Our hosts this month, Barbara of Barbara Bakes and Bunnee of Anna+Food have chosen a delicious Stacked Green Chile & Grilled Chicken Enchilada recipe in celebration of Cinco de Mayo! The recipe, featuring a homemade enchilada sauce was found on www.finecooking.com and written by Robb Walsh.

Fine, so the challenge involved making an enchilada sauce consisting mainly of roasted green chiles and tomatillos, grilling some chicken breasts and making some corn tortillas (I already knew about the tortilla part...). The challenge turned out fantastic despite all the mishaps... First, after learning about the challenge, I located an online source of tomatillos in Spain, because I hadn't even seen them in my life. Perfect. Then, when the time arrived for making the enchiladas, I realized I had forgotten to order them, so I had to use green tomatoes and lemon... not the real thing. Shame on me. Second, I searched for green chiles everywhere... but they were nowhere to be found. I used regular green peppers and then add some mildly hot pickled Spanish green guindillas. Third, I wanted to make my own tortillas with my beautiful tortilla press and then I couldn't squeeze into my schedule going down to Madrid to buy the damned tortilla flour... so we had to manage with store-bought tortillas. But still your heroine (that's me) managed to make some delicious enchiladas, my way... here's how.

Stacked green chile & grilled chicken enchiladas
Serves 4

750g green peppers (not bell peppers)
2 green pickled guindillas
250g green tomatoes
Juice of 1 lemon
1 clove garlic
1/2 liter vegetable stock
1 small onion
2 tbsp cornstarch
1 tsp dried oregano
Salt to taste
2 boneless chicken breasts
Olive oil
12 small corn tortillas
200g Manchego cheese (the recipe called for cheeses not easily found in Spain and... what the heck, Manchego is perfect)

To make the sauce, first roast the peppers on an oven tray, at 180ºC, till the skin is dark. Take them out to a pot and cover them till cool. In my case, I also roasted the tomatoes.
When cool, get rid of the skin. Fry the minced onion and garlic in a frying-pan with a couple of tablespoons of oil, till wilted. Here I mixed this with the peeled peppers, the tomatos and the chopped guindillas in a food processor and pureed it.
Then add the lemon juice, the vegetable stock and the salt and boil the mixture for 10 minutes.
Add the cornstarch dissolved in a little water and continue boiling till the sauce thickens, another 10 minutes.
In the meantime, salt and oil the chicken breasts, put them into an oven dish, add a glug or two of white wine and cook them for 20 minutes at 200ºC. When done, cut or shred in little pieces.
Shred the cheese and set aside.
When the sauce and the chicken are both ready, fry the tortillas slightly in 2 or 3 tablespoons olive oil.
Take a large baking dish enough for 4 tortilla stacks or 4 individual oven plates, like I did. Ladle some sauce on the plate base, then lay the first tortilla. Ladle some more sauce on the tortilla, then some shredded chicken and some shredded cheese. Now lay a second tortilla, ladle some sauce on it, more chicken and more cheese. Top with a third tortilla, more sauce and a generous handful of cheese. Make the other three stacks in a similar fashion.
When you have 4 nice stacks, put the baking dish or plates into the oven and bake for 20 minutes at 180ºC until the cheese is melted and browned on top.
Take the enchiladas out of the oven, let them rest for 10 minutes and... enjoy!

Thanks Barbara and Bunnee for a very interesting and timely challenge!

Pastas del Consejo or Council cookies

2010-05-09T20:31:00.012+02:00

I'm working on a project that has led me to prepare pastas del Consejo. Because this project has driven me to make a tour through the most historic places in Madrid, my hometown. And there I found charming and ancient pastry shops where traditional sweets are still made with great care for the quality of the ingredients and in their ellaboration. I left Madrid 10 years ago (although I moved to a distance of only 40 km) and, like many natives of gigantic cities, I have always maintained a love-hate relationship with it. When I left, though a more correct description would be run away, I fled to a place with more space, less noise, less mess, less pollution ... ultimately more peaceful. But a couple of unhurried visits around some of its corners have sufficed for me to fall in love with her again ... I'm ready, 10 years after.

Pastas del Consejo, meaning Council cookies, are typical Madrilenian confections, one among the many specialties of one of the more traditional pastry shops in Madrid, El Riojano, located at number 10 the Calle Mayor. They are small cookies in the form of a double spiral, also shaped as small rolls, as the famous panecillos de San Antón, eaten to celebrate the feast of San Antonio on January 17th, can be prepared with this same dough. Mr. Martínez Llopis, in his book La dulcería española (Spanish pastry and sweets), tells us that these cookies were originally called Senate cookies and they only became known as Council cookies during the minority of King Alfonso XIII (1886-1941), who liked them a lot, because he used to eat them while presiding meetings of the Council of Regency with his mother the Queen. No wonder that he spent his time eating pastries... while listening to incredibly entertaining political arguments before being even 18 years old...

This we are told about El Riojano at the Madrid tourism website, turismo de Madrid:

This pastry shop was founded by Damaso Rioja de la Maza, baker of the Royal House in 1855. The establishment has not changed since then neither in the decor, with mahogany, bronze or marble, nor in the quality of its sweets. Among its specialties are the sugar candies called azucarillos, light snacks traditionally taken with brandy, and pastas del Consejo, so called because they were served in the councils of state. The shop has a small tea room where you can taste their specialties.

Pastas del Consejo (from La dulcería española, M. Martínez Llopis)
Yields around 180 cookies (I'm not good at dividing an odd egg number... you can always freeze half the dough for a rainy day)

5 eggs
3 egg yolks
250g sugar (they're not very sweet, add 50g more if you do have a sweet tooth)
125g butter
750g all-purpose flour
Lemon extract or zest
1 extra egg for brushing

Break the eggs, toss them in a bowl and add the three yolks previously separated. Add the sugar and mix well just until the sugar is dissolved, no need to cream them.
Melt the butter and add to the mixture. Then add the lemon zest or extract, to your taste.
Add the sifted flour. I add it little by little, to make a batter that gradually thickens. You can do this in a food processor.
Once all the flour is used, tip the dough on the countertop and roll it with a rolling pin a couple of times, to homogenize. The dough must be soft, but not very sticky. Add more flour if needed.
Pull little pieces and form them into a worm about 9-10cm long (I say a worm because they really have the same size as the earthworms in my garden), thicker in the middle and thinner at the ends. Then twist both ends of this churro, as shown in the photo, and put it on a baking tray lined with parchment paper or silicone mat. It's a good idea to keep the bulk of the dough into a zipper bag, to prevent it from drying. Keep only medium chunks at hand while you shape.
While you shape the cookies, preheat the oven to 190ºC (convection oven). If your oven is not convection-aided, then preheat to 200ºC.
When you've filled a whole tray with cookies, brush their tops with beaten egg and put the tray in the oven for 12-15 minutes; watch out because the exact time depends on the oven. It's better to take a look at the browning after 10 minutes. In the meantime keep shaping cookies and placing them on another tray.
When properly browned, take the cookies out to cool on a rack. And they're ready!

Sourdough blinis

2010-04-28T14:47:00.010+02:00

Blinis ... how they're yummy. These pancakes typical of the Russian cuisine, similar to American pancakes or, in flatter versions, to crepes (just similar), served as accompaniment to savory dishes, have several features that distinguish them. The main one is that they rely on bakers' yeast and beaten egg whites to raise, and another characteristic is that they often include buckwheat flour in their composition, which gives them an intriguing herbaceous smell. Well, here I use blinis to use up a fraction of the massive amounts of sourdough that sourdough geeks need to throw away when they don't make bread every day (my case).

Sourdough is just a mixture of flour and water, so if we do have leftovers at some point, they can be added to any preparation that carries flour and water in its composition and that can't be disturbed by its special flavor. "Recycling" extra sourdough instead of throwing it away is a perfect excuse to make blinis, don't you agree? To raise the intellectual level of the blog, here's a quote on blinis from Tatiana Maslenikoff's book La cocina rusa:

As in most European civilizations, Russia gathered and assimilated the beliefs and pagan traditions with its Christian equivalents, which were imported from the Byzantine Empire in the 10th century.
After the long winter, when the first signs of thawing were felt, the northern tribes coming out of their lethargy prepared a feast in honor of the Blazing Sun. Pancakes as round and golden as suns, made with mixed flours, were cooked and offered to Sun God for him not to forget to warm Mother Earth. This would in turn make the next harvest sprout. These pancakes (blini) were then eaten with butter, dried fish and meat. According to historians and archaeologists, the tribes celebrated a sort of costume party where the burning of an effigy of the Prince of Winter took place.
In the Christianized Russia, this feast was moved to the beginning of Lent (...) Blinis are served with smoked herring or caviar, but never meat.

The idea of using sourdough on blinis is not originally mine, but found in the book Breads from La Brea Bakery, by Nancy Silverton. I've adapted the recipe, because she adds baking soda and baking powder to avoid a long time rising and speed up the process. She also adds far too much sugar to my taste, that I consider unnecessary, apart from not being very faithful to traditional recipes. I usually have that problem with American recipes, they're too sweet for me. I've also halved the amounts, because the original recipe produces eight dozen small blinis ... yes, you read that right. I only made around 40 small blinis. Here's the recipe:

Sourdough blinis

250ml milk
3/4 tbsp fresh bakers' yeast
185g sourdough (100% bakers' percentage, mine was spelt's, but any white bread flour will do)
85g all-purpose flour
1 tsp agave syrup or 1 1/2 tsp sugar
70g buckwheat flour (60g if you use sugar instead of agave syrup)
1/2 tsp salt
2 medium eggs

You know that the amount of liquid depends on the absorption capacity of the flours, so maybe you'll need to adjust the final thickness. The batter must be almost as thick as pancake batter.

Lightly warm up the milk and add the fresh yeast, crumbled. Blend until dissolved. Add the sourdough and mix well. Add all the flours and the agave syrup, cover and let it ferment until double in bulk and bubbly, depending on ambient temperature and activity of yeast, something between 1 hour and 1.5 hour.
Break the eggs and separate the whites from the yolks. Add these to the batter along with the salt and let it ferment again, I think one hour is enough. Leave the egg whites in the fridge in the meantime.
When the batter is risen again, beat the egg whites to stiff peaks and gently add them to the batter, so as not to deflate them.
Heat a skillet or pancake pan and add half tablespoon of butter. The traditional method is to coat the skillet with pork fat, but I didn't have any. Ladle small portions of dough to make the blini size you choose. I made little ones, 2 or 3-bite sized, but they can be made much larger. So you decide. They cook quickly, you have to turn them over with a spatula within seconds and cook them on the other side. It is recommended to lay them on a kitchen towel as you go, covered to prevent them from cooling, and also put them just outside a hot oven to keep them warm.

They're delicious when warm, very light and airy, thanks to the egg whites. They have a rich bread-like flavor, with the sour note from the sourdough, and a very tender consistency. A surprising and addictive combination with savory accompaniments. With a good smoked salmon they are simply superb. We did make a lot of tiny sandwiches of salmon, even without the typical addition of sour cream ... We apologize to any Russian in the room for our heresy. We only missed the vodka ... ¡na zdorovje!

Salsa brava... on some potatoes

2010-04-25T18:20:00.008+02:00

Spring is here. At last. Warm weather. This year I thought winter would never end. And I was on the verge of hibernating. I mean it. Around here fair weather goes necessarily together with having some tapas in a sunny bar terrasse, sipping a beer or a wine in good company. I was so much in need of it already... Patatas con salsa brava are a really good choice then, deep-fried potatoes bathed in a tomato-based spicy sauce, a very popular tapa. This post goes to this month's challenge by Ben at México Sabroso, on homemade sauces and condiments.

And I will reveal something private here (enjoy it): patatas bravas have a kind of sentimental value for me and a special place in my (culinary) heart. When my partner and I were something more than friends, we used to go out every evening for a short visit to a nearby café (both our families lived in the same neighborhood). We always ordered some patatas bravas with our drinks. Yes, the same thing day after day. A glimpse of our future. I think that sauce was store-bought... but never mind, it's the memory that counts... And if I look back I believe I've hardly had patatas bravas ever since, I don't know why because I still love them (my subconscious trying to tell me something?). So I'm presenting here one of the endless varieties of salsa brava, adapted from this one.

Salsa brava

400g crashed or pureed tomatoes
2 cloves garlic or 2 tbsp roasted garlic puree
1 tbsp virgin olive oil
1 tbsp sweet Spanish pimentón
1/2 tbsp hot Spanish pimentón (add more if you like it really spicy)

Salsa brava is spicy for Spanish standards, but Spanish food is not spicy at all in general terms. We do like a slight tickle every now and then... but that's all. And see below for an explanation on roasted garlic puree, for the non-initiated.

I made the salsa in my Thermomix, but a regular frying pan can be used. Pour the olive oil in the pan and add the garlic, either the mashed raw garlic or the roasted puree. Fry till the garlic is toasted (softer in the case of the puree).
Then add the rest of the ingredients, mix well and cook on low heat for around 10 minutes, or as needed for the sauce to thicken. In Thermomix, 100ºC and speed 1.

Those who dislike the strong taste of raw garlic can try roasted garlic instead. It's a great invention, the taste is softened to a great extent, as well as the effect on your... breath. If you try it, you'll find yourself thinking: "I thought I didn't like garlic!". I promise. After I first heard about roasted garlic puree, some 16 years ago, I found the pretty "garlic oven" in the photo below. I bought it then and I admit I had never ever used it... ahem. Till now. For a good cause. Let me patiently explain you how to prepare this delicious roasted garlic puree, at least to those who've never tried it.

Roasted garlic puree

Preheat the oven to 150ºC. If you're not a clever person with a gnome-sized garlic oven like me (¿?), wrap 2 garlic heads in aluminum foil and put them into the oven when it's hot. Cook for one hour.
When done, you'll find the garlic cloves have turned into a soft, fragrant and caramelized mass, that can be squeezed out just by pressing the clove's peel. Just open one end of the peel and squeeze the flesh out. Empty all the garlic flesh into a bowl, then mash it with a fork to make the puree. And that's it. Good for boosting the flavor of a lot of dishes without the aggresive taste and smell of raw garlic. And delicious on toast too.

Fine, now that you have your spicy salsa brava, you need some potatoes to use it, don't you? Take 2 plump potatoes, cut them into chunks (not too big), fry them in olive oil till thoroughly cooked, but not crispy. Serve them in a beautiful cazuela and pour the sauce on top. There you have an excellent tapa for a Sunday brunch or aperitivo... Pour yourself your favourite drink and imagine you're on a terrasse under the April sun. Or just don't imagine anything, because maybe you feel so much at ease at home as I do at my own.

And if you want to see a wonderful deconstruction of this popular tapa, visit this.