Tag: cheddar

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

168. Cheddar Scallion Drop Biscuits p.597

The recipe

The Boys were over for breakfast, and I decided to make them biscuits. One of them has been living down in the Carolinas for the last few years, and has become something of a biscuit connoisseur, so I didn’t dare try a traditional buttermilk biscuit. These are far simpler, and less error prone. It’s a basic biscuit dough (flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, butter, buttermilk) with a bit of sugar, cheddar cheese and scallions mixed in. These aren’t kneaded or shaped which when done wrong can toughen the biscuits, they’re not cut out so there’s no risk of collapsing the flaky layers, and there aren’t twenty generations of ancestors looking over your shoulder to make sure you do it exactly right. You just blend butter into the dry ingredients, stir in the cheese and scallions, and barely mix in the buttermilk (gluten is still your enemy). The biscuits get unceremoniously dropped onto a baking sheet, and stuck in the oven.

As Epicurious posters have noted, the cooking time is off, at 450 these will be burned after the recommended 18-20 minutes, I started smelling a hint of char from the bottoms after 14-15 mintues. so don’t get too far from the oven, and use your nose.

They tasted a lot like the biscuits at Red Lobster. I don’t think I’ve been to a Red Lobster since 1998, but the taste of their biscuits is stuck in my food memory. They’re less over the top greasy (which unfortunately means not quite as good), in fact they’re a little dry. A bunch of the Epicurious posters recommended adding more buttermilk, and I think I’d go with that suggestion next time. The cheese flavour is prominent in these biscuits, I used some middle of the road aged cheddar, but I’d definitely choose the oldest sharpest stuff I could get my hands on next time, the cheese is the make or break ingredient, so choose it wisely. I really liked the addition of scallions, the onion flavour wasn’t overwhelming, or un-breakfasty, just delicious. The exteriors of these biscuits were glossy and crispy, and while the insides were a bit dry once they’d cooled, they were lovely and tender when warm. The solution is obviously never to let these cool down.

These biscuits were a success, they’re fairly idiot proof, so I can handle making them before the espresso machine has heated up. The ingredients are mostly things you’ll have on hand (or maybe normal people don’t absolutely always have scallions in the fridge, but that’s just semantics), they taste good, and look pretty. While the recipe has a few problems, with a couple modification I think they could be a breakfast standby.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

138. Macaroni and Cheese p.223


The recipe

I haven’t eaten all that much macaroni and cheese since I graduated to shoes with laces, but most of the kids I knew, and the stoners they grew up to be, loved the stuff from the box. As a child, macaroni and cheese was just the brand neutral way of saying your mom was making Kraft Dinner. I decided that KD was not for me around age 5, and looked for creative ways to avoid it, or mask its flavour. For reference, cut up hot dogs made it better, ketchup made it worse. Unfortunately kids in Montreal ate a lot of KD in the ’80s. My mom accepted my quirks and stopped serving it to me, but I still ate a lot of it at friends houses.

I was well pleased to leave mac and cheese behind me by the time I reached high school, and it stayed that way ’till a a nice Southern girl introduced me to the home made version in my early 20’s. Her macaroni and cheese was an entirely different animal, using real cheese, building flavour and texture with a roux, adding a touch of heat, and baking the whole thing with some extra cheese on top. I came around, and macaroni and cheese became something worth looking forward to.

I started experimenting with my own versions of mac and cheese, without much success. The problem I was trying to solve was that M&C is inherently rich, bland, and straightforward. Some people interpret that as a food surrogate for mother’s love, but I find it a bit dull. I tried adding herbs to the M&C, which fubared it, adding more chili flakes didn’t help either. One version with chipotles was actually pretty good, and worth revisiting sometime. Drawing on my childhood hot dog experience, I tried adding some slices of merguez, which worked quite well. These experiments brought me closer to what I was looking for, but they were still lacking. I was happy to discover that Gourmet has hit upon secret elixir that cuts the richness, and ties everything together, Dijon mustard. The Book’s version isn’t perfect, but I’m immensely grateful to it for bringing me closer to the ultimate macaroni and cheese recipe.

In this version, you make a three minute roux with butter, flour, and red pepper flakes, then whisk in milk and bring the sauce to a boil. After letting it boil for a few minutes, cream, extra-sharp Cheddar, and Dijon are added. The sauce is then added to cooked macaroni, and some of the water from the pot in a baking dish, then topped with mixture of butter, panko bread crumbs, and more cheese. The casserole goes into the oven for around half an hour, and then served.

The mustard and red pepper flakes make all the difference, and prevent this from being just too rich to be enjoyable. Getting the cheese right is important too. The recipe calls for extra-sharp Cheddar, which seems simple, but even an average grocery store will have about ten different versions, ranging from the plastic packaged stuff sold along with the milk, to fancy-pants imported stuff at the cheese counter. You can spend a fortune on truly wonderful Cheddar, but it’s probably a waste of money to go melting that into mac and cheese. The low end rubbery stuff will be OK, but not as good as it could be. The cheese really carries this dish so spending a bit more on a nice piece of aged local Cheddar is a worthwhile investment.

The recipe calls for panko, or other dried bread crumbs. I couldn’t get my hands on any panko, so I went with bread crumbs from the bakery down the street. Panko are known for their lightness and texture, while my bread crumbs were quite finely ground and dense. The 2 cups of panko the recipe called for might have been a nice topping, but 2 cups of my bread crumbs probably weighed twice as much as panko did. The macaroni was just too heavy on the topping, and the very dry bread crumbs sucked up a huge amount of moisture, so that within about 20 minutes of taking the dish out of the oven, the macaroni had set up, and lost the saucy-runny aspect you’re looking for in macaroni and cheese. You can see from the photo that it was next to impossible to find any of the macaroni under all the topping.

I think this recipe did a very nice job with the macaroni and sauce aspects, but fell short with the topping. I can’t comment on how it would have been with panko, but while they gave regular bread crumbs as an acceptable alternative, it obviously wasn’t. Beyond the topping, it was probably the best macaroni and cheese I’ve ever had. I’m sure that just a little tweaking could result in a truly great macaroni and cheese dinner, for the adults as well as the kids.

Categories
Grains and Beans The Book

80. Broiled Polenta with Tomato Sauce p.266

The recipe

This recipe uses The Book’s Basic Polenta recipe as it’s main ingredient. The basic polenta is a great no-fail staple recipe. Here it’s dressed up by stirring in some cheese, putting it under the broiler, and topping with a very simple tomato sauce.

I served this as part of a vegetarian dinner. It was nicely substantial, and made a good centerpiece for my menu. Very often polenta is served straight from the pot, so that it’s thick but still runny, which highlights the risotto like creamless creaminess. Here the polenta is poured into a baking dish and allowed to cool and set up before it goes under the broiler. This gives it a completely different texture, it ends up gelled and reminiscent of a rice or bread pudding. In this application it seems much more substantial, which is a better base for a sauce. Putting a sauce on a custardy plate of fresh polenta might be a little unidimensional on the texture front.

The recipe calls for fontina to be stirred into the hot polenta. I don’t think I’ve ever used or tasted fontina, and I didn’t use it here. I substituted a mixture of mozzarella and cheddar, and called it good enough. It browned up nicely, and melted seamlessly into the polenta, so it seems like a fair substitution to me.

The tomato sauce was extremely simple, perhaps too simple. The sauce is nothing but softened onions, a bit of garlic, a can of tomatoes, salt, pepper, and a pointless dash of parsley. I’m writing this in August when the local tomato crop is at it’s peak, and it seems like the less you do to them the better everything ends up. I made this sauce in April, using canned tomatoes, when charms of a minimalist sauce aren’t quite as beguiling. I’ve got nothing against canned tomatoes, they’re much more flavorful than the mealy, flavourless, perfectly red, imported California tomatoes we get in April. But, they can’t compare to the hight of summer’s flavour. If you’re going to do a slow cooked sauce based on canned tomatoes I think a bit of flavouring is important. I would definitely have added a bay leaf to the sauce, and thyme or oregano wouldn’t have hurt anything at all, a splash of vodka would bring out those flavourful alcohol soluble compounds in the tomatoes, and a hint of fire from a chile or red pepper flakes wouldn’t have been unwelcome. Once the sauce was finished I tasted it and stirred in some fresh rosemary, which really improved things.

This dish was fine, but a better concept than execution. It started with a really excellent polenta base, but didn’t do enough to it. The addition of cheese and time under the broiler added great flavour and texture, but the lackluster sauce was at best a missed opportunity, and at worst dragged the dish down. There’s a huge amount of room to play and experiment with a dish like this. It’s rare that I accuse The Book of being too simple, or lacking in obscure ingredients, but this is one of those times.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

71. Baked Cheddar Olives p.28

The recipe

I should have planned an old-timey supper from The Book instead of doing them all separately. There are some great retro recipes in here, and as some of you may have guessed I’m a sucker for dishes that recall church suppers of a bygone era. Here pimento stuffed olives are wrapped in a buttery extra old cheddar dough, and baked. I love imagining the genesis of this cocktail party nibbler. Did someone think that olives weren’t rich and salty enough on their own? Maybe someone ran out of cocktail weenies and made olives in a blanket instead? Maybe a guest spilled the dregs of her martini into the cheese biscuit dough? or perhaps it was part of a wrapping perfectly good foods in dough craze that swept the nation? The world may never know.

The dough was absolutely delicious, it came together easily, and didn’t require any special shopping. All it requires is good sharp cheddar, flour, butter, and the secret ingredient: cayenne. The cayenne sets the richness of the cheese off, and makes the whole crust sparkle. The dough bakes up perfectly, it gets wonderfully crisp on the outside, and the inside is rich and chewy.

My only issue with the dish was the pimentos. I can’t say I love them. I’m a big fan of olives, but I tend to stick to black ones (Kalamata, nicoise, or the Moroccan salt-cured wrinkly ones). Pitted and stuffed cocktail olives have never held much appeal for me. Neither do the sliced olives you find in low end of the spectrum pizza joints and hot-dog stands. I don’t know if it’s the nature of pimentos I don’t like, or a quality issue. Canned and jarred pitted olives tend to be of pretty pathetic quality and flavour compared to whole olives from the olive bar. I don’t know of anyone who produces high end pimento stuffed olives, but with the cocktail renaissance we’re living though someone must have tried to reinvent the martini olive. In any case, I used pretty run-of-the-mill olives, and they tasted pretty run-of-the-mill when I bit into them.

If you’re the sort of person who will happily pick away at a bowl of pimento stuffed olives, then they will be vastly improved by baking them in this cheesy dough. I can think of half a dozen other things I would have preferred to swaddle in this heavenly cheese dough though.