Saviolo
Saviolo's JournalPotatoes Duchesse Video
This week we go a little old fashioned! This sort of potato dish was popular with caterers and such Back In The Day, but actually turns out to be delicious and pretty easy to do, as well! You're going to start off with mashed potatoes, but the recipe will be a little different. No milk or cream to get started, just butter and then an egg yolk. This will help make it a little more solid before you give it the egg wash and then pop them into the oven. Make sure to chill it a bit before that egg wash!
You can change the flavour profile however you like. Ours was very bare-bones and simple with just a whisper of nutmeg. You could spice this up with a little curry powder, or some Tabasco instead of vermouth in the mash. Lots of different ways to adjust the flavour to your liking or to match what you're serving. Traditionally, these would have been piped with a big star tip piping bag, which gives you those nice even ridges to get crispy and brown, but you can also do as we did and spoon it out into mounds and just rough them up a little with a fork.
Bacon Scallop Corn Fritters Recipe
A bit of a hodgepodge this week! This is a sort of hybrid recipe that hubby thought up based on the shrimp fritters we did recently crossed with a hushpuppy. So, we've taken the fritter recipe and added some corn meal and corn flour for texture and flavour! It came out really delicious, too.
A few tricks to keep in mind for this one. If you're not going to use sparkling water, please at least use very cold water in your batter and try to keep it as cold as possible before it hits the oil. This will help keep things light and crispy. Also, do not overcook the bacon before adding it to the batter. You just want a little bit of colour, and you don't want it to be crispy, because it's going to get cooked again inside the fritter. Also also, make sure that the bacon is not super hot before you add it to your batter, otherwise it will start cooking it before it hits the oil, so drain and set your bacon aside to cool before you make the batter. Once the batter has come together, you want to get moving quickly, and get it in the hot oil right away.
You could definitely add other things to this. Some chopped green onions or chives would be great (we were out!), and you could replace the parsley with mitsuba or cilantro if you wanted. A little lemon or lime zest might be an interesting addition too, to add a bit of a citrusy zing.
Homemade Individual Serving Beef Wellington Recipe
Last year around this time we did a video about making blitz puff pastry. The thumbnail for that video was a beef wellington that we had made, but we haven't done a video on the wellingtons until today. So here it is! We made a couple of small errors on this. We rolled the dough very slightly too thin, and they could have used just a tiny bit more time in the oven to get a more uniform browning, but they were still crispy and flaky and really delicious.
The real trick here is the Duxelles: The mushroom/onion/shallot combination that is cooked down to a paste. Most people undercook this part. You really want to cook it down a lot. This is your chance to add a lot of very concentrated mushroom flavour. You don't even have to use fancy mushrooms like porcini or morels to get a really intense earthy mushroom flavour from this dish. Regular button mushrooms or cremini will work just fine. And of course we always recommend deglazing your mushrooms with a little splash of cognac or vermouth for a more nuanced flavour. The foie gras is just adding an intense richness to the overall recipe.
Texas Pecan Pie Recipe - No Corn Syrup!
We've been seeing a few recipes for pecan pie showing up online lately, and people are starting to do pecan pie recipes that do not include a ton of corn syrup, so we wanted to try it as well! Hubby went back to the family vault in Houston to look up some recipes that were syrup-free, and this is the recipe he got. We adapted it a little, because it still had a ton of sugar, and we cut the sugar basically in half for this recipe. It was still plenty sweet, but amazingly it taste like pecans and not just syrup!
Do make sure you put this over a baking sheet, because it does puff up a great deal in the oven while it's cooking. It will settle a lot as it cools, though. We don't have much of a sweet tooth, but if you like things sweeter, you could easily increase the sugar in this recipe. The original recipe called for 1 1/2c of brown sugar and 1/2c of granulated sugar. We cut that in half and just used 1c of brown sugar. If you want it sweeter, you could just ad 1/2c of granulated and it would increase the sweetness by a lot.
Chinese Steamed Buns Recipe - Two ways
Happy US Thanksgiving to everyone in the US of A. We're up in Canada, so we had our Thanksgiving last month. And this week, we did a very non-Thanksgiving type of recipe, Chinese steamed buns! Although we did fill one of them with a squash filling, does that count? We did steamed buns with two different fillings for this recipe. One was the same pork filling we used in the potstickers last week (with a couple of additions), and the other was a warm-spiced squash and garlic filling. Of course you can fill your steamed buns with whatever sort of filling you want, and something like our char siu pork would be a great choice.
The real recipe is the dough. Don't be afraid of this dough, it is very easy to make, work, and use! It's nice and springy, comes together quickly, and if your yeast is good and vigorous, it will definitely puff up and get nice and fluffy when you steam the finished buns. You can see at the end of our video how nice and fluffy ours got in the steamer, and they had that perfect smooth slightly tacky texture to the outside that you'd expect from a nice dim sum restaurant.
Homemade Pork Potsticker Dumplings Recipe
Inspired by some really excellent Chinese restaurants near us, we wanted to do something fairly authentically Chinese, and we adapted this recipe from a couple we had found. These are super easy and extremely delicious, probably more delicious if you go ahead and make your own dumpling skins, but we did not have the patience for that (especially after making our own steam bun dough, which will be next week's video!) so we just bought them.
Really important that you don't overfill these. A scant tablespoon looks like not much on the skin itself, but once you've got everything sealed up and crimped (getting as much air out as you can), they will be quite plump. If you overfill them, they won't seal properly, or they'll break up when you cook them. Also, it takes very little water for the quick steam at the end of the cooking process. Just a few tablespoons onto the hot pan, and pop the lid on quickly, and the steam will quickly finish cooking the dumpling skins, giving them that classic translucent look.
Totally Non-Traditional Croque Monsieur/Madame Recipe
A croque monsieur is a toasty ham and gruyere sandwich usually with béchamel inside and more cheese melted on top. A croque madame usually involves a fried or sunny-side-up egg on top. A Monte Cristo involves soaking the bread in an egg mixture, so it's like eating a sandwich on french toast. We've sort of mixed and matched a bit, and made some ingredient substitutions, and this is our version!
You can switch up ingredients as much as you like. We used a really excellent Bauernspeck for the ham, but you can use whatever you want. Gruyere is the most traditional cheese for this, but you can change that out for anything that melts and toasts decently. We used a fantastic farmer's cheese with fresh dill in it. A little bit of mustard and mayo (instead of the béchamel) and make sure to get your bread toasty!
Scallops with Tomatoes and Sugar Snap Peas in Garlic Butter Recipe
This one was a bit hacked together, but it sure came out delicious. Also, comes together incredibly fast once the mise en place is done. A couple of important notes: make sure your scallops are well drained and dried before you pop them into the hot pan, other wise they will release a lot of water and won't get a nice sear on them before they're overdone. Get some good colour on the sugar snap peas, and set them aside before you cook the scallops and tomatoes. The scallops take almost no time to cook, so once they hit the pan, you've got to watch them and get everything in there quick.
We put this on top of the poblano quinoa that we made last week, and it was delicious. It would also go excellently well over rice or even pasta, I suspect. You could also replace the sugar snap peas with something like snowpeas or even green beans if you want to change things up a little.
Poblano Quinoa Side Dish Recipe
Tired of rice or potatoes as your side dish? Looking for something less carby and more proteiny? This quinoa dish is really excellent on all of those fronts. It is also delicious! The trick with quinoa is you must remember to wash it before you cook it. Quinoa naturally has a chemical coating on the outside called saponin to discourage grazers, and most quinoa that you can buy from the store has not been washed enough. The way you can tell you've rinsed all of the saponin off is that the water will stop sudsing up when you rinse it. Ours took four times before the water stopped foaming up.
This is a very basic flavour profile, and you can adjust this based on what you add. You could pop a bay leaf in while it's boiling, or even some cardamom pods to adjust the flavour and aroma profile. We added the peppers after we turned off the heat, and let it sort of steam in with the hot quinoa, and it was just nicely cooked by the time we went to eat it.
Pumpkin Pie Souffle Recipe
A while back we made pumpkin pies. Unfortunately we did some measurement wrong and ended up with more filling than we had pie shells! Thankfully, pumpkin pie filling freezes just fine, so we popped it into the deep freeze until this year. Instead of making pies with the remainder of it, we made these rich and fluffy pumpkin pie soufflés!
Pumpkin pie filling is already basically a custard, we just enriched it with the egg yolks to make it a little softer, and then added the beurre manié for a little structure so that it would hold its loft after it was baked. Ours could have maybe gone for another couple of minutes for a bit more colour on top, but they were delicious as they were. Cooked all the way through and nice and fluffy.
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Gender: MaleHometown: Ottawa, Ontario
Home country: Canada
Current location: Toronto, Ontario
Member since: Wed Oct 29, 2008, 04:34 PM
Number of posts: 3,280
