Ad Hoc At Home: Cream of Cauliflower Soup with Red Beet Chips (Course 1)

Cream of Cauliflower Soup with Red Beet Chips

• 2 heads cauliflower (4 to 5 pounds total)
• 4 tablespoons (2 ounces) unsalted butter
• ¾ cup coarsely chopped onion
• ¾ cup coarsely chopped leeks (white and light green parts only)
• ¼ teaspoon Yellow Curry Powder or Madras curry powder
• Kosher salt
• 2 cups milk
• 2 cups heavy cream
• 2 cups water
• Peanut or canola oil for deep-frying
• 1 medium beet
• 1 teaspoon distilled white vinegar
• Torn Croutons (see belwow)
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Fresh ground pepper

The unctuous, velvety, creamy texture of this soup is so elegant and satisfying. Curry offsets the richness and cauliflower florets, croutons, and beet chips give the soup some body and crunch.

Remove the leaves from the cauliflower, and cut out the core. Trim off the stems and reserve them. For the garnish, trim 2 cups florets about the size of a quarter and set aside.

Coarsely chop the remaining cauliflower and the stems into 1-inch pieces so that they will cook in the same amount of time. You need 8 cups of cauliflower (reserve any extra for another use).

Melt 3 tablespoons of the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion, leeks, curry, and coarsely chopped cauliflower, season with 2 teaspoons salt, cover with a parchment lid,

Pour in the milk, cream, and water, increase the heat to medium high, and bring to a simmer. Simmer for 30 minutes, skimming off the foam from time to time.

Working in batches, transfer the cauliflower mixture to a Vita Mix (leave an opening in the lid for the steam to escape). Begin pureeing the cauliflower on the lowest speed and blend, slowly increasing the speed, until smooth and velvety. Check the seasoning and add more salt if needed. Transfer to a large saucepan and keep warm. (The soup can be refrigerated for up to 2 days.)

Fill a small deep pot with 1 inch of peanut oil and heat over medium heat to 300 degrees F. Set a cooling rack over a baking sheet. Line the rack with paper towels.

While the oil heats, peel the beet and slice off about ½ inch from the top. Using a Japanese mandolin or other vegetable slicer, slice the beet into rounds that are slightly thicker than paper-thin. Reserve only the full rounds.

Carefully add a few beet rounds to the oil and fry, turning them with a wire skimmer or slotted spoon as the edges begin to curl and pressing gently on the chips to keep them submerged. You will see a great deal of bubbling around the beets as the moisture in them evaporates; when the bubbling stops, after 1 to 1 ½ minutes, the beets will be crisp. Transfer the beets to the paper-towel-lined rack and season with salt. Fry the remaining chips in batches. The chips can be kept warm in a low oven.

Bring a medium saucepan of salted water to a boil. Add the vinegar and the reserved cauliflower florets and blanch until tender, 4 to 6 minutes. The vinegar will help keep the cauliflower white. Drain.

Melt the remaining 1 tablespoon butter in a medium frying pan over medium-high heat, swirling the pan occasionally, until the butter turns a rich golden brown. Add the florets and sauté until a rich golden brown. Set aside.

Pour the soup into a serving bowl or soup tureen. Top each serving with a few cauliflower florets, several torn croutons, and a stack of beet ships. (If the beet chips sit in the soup, they will be come soggy and discolor it.) Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with pepper. Serve the remaining florets, croutons, and chips in separate bowls on the side.

SERVES 6 (MAKES ABOUT 2 QUARTS)

(Page 127)

Torn Croutons

• 1 loaf country bread
• Garlic Oil (see below)
• 2 tablespoons (1 ounce) unsalted butter

Cooking the torn pieces of bread very, very slowly is the key to these garlicky croutons. When toasted over high heat, croutons become a little dry; these absorb the oil and butter through the slow cooking, and the result is croutons that are very crunchy but bursting with the flavor of the oil when you bite into them. We serve these in many salads.

Cut the crusts off the loaf of bread. Tear the bread into irregular pieces no larger than 2 inches. You need about 3 cups of croutons; reserve any remaining bread for another use.

Pour 1/8 inch of the garlic oil into a large sauté pan and heat over medium heat until hot. Spread the bread in a single layer in the pan (if your pan is not large enough, these can be cooked in two smaller pans). Add the butter. The oil and butter should be bubbling, but if you hear sizzling, the heat is too high. Adjust the heat as necessary, and stir the croutons often as they cook. Cook until the croutons are crisp and a beautiful rich golden brown on all sides, 15 to 20 minutes. Move the croutons to one side of the pan and keep warm until ready to serve. (Do not drain on paper towels; you want the flavors of the oil intermingled with the other ingredients as you eat the croutons in a salad.) Torn croutons should be used the day they are made; you can reheat them in a low oven before serving if necessary.

MAKES 3 CUPS

Note: If you don’t have any garlic oil on hand, pour 1/8 inch of canola oil into a sauté pan, add 5 crushed, peeled garlic cloves, and heat over low heat until the garlic cloves are golden brown, flipping the cloves from time to time. Remove the garlic cloves and use the oil for the croutons.

(Page 274)

Garlic Confit and Oil

• 1 cup peeled garlic cloves
• About 2 cups canola oil

Cut off and discard the root ends of the garlic cloves. Put the cloves in a small saucepan and add enough oil to cover them by about 1 inch – none of the garlic cloves should be poking through the oil.

Set the saucepan on a diffuser over medium-low heat. The garlic should cook gently: very small bubbles will come up through the oil, but the bubbles should not break the surface; adjust the heat as necessary and/or move the pan to one side of the diffuser if it is cooking too quickly. Cook the garlic for about 40 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes or so, until the cloves are completely tender when pierced with the tip of a knife. Remove the saucepan from the heat and allow the garlic to cool in the oil.

Refrigerate the garlic in a covered container, submerged in the oil, for up to 1 week.

MAKES 1 CUP

(Page 266)

Source: Thomas Keller Ad Hoc At Home – Family Style Recipes (Artisan)

Har Gow Supplemental

Ha Gow - Test Run

We followed the recipe pretty closely for the filling, choosing bamboo shoots as the compliment to the shrimp, as well as using mirin and black bean sauce as suggested. Peeled and de-veined shrimp from Marina Market helped with process. The filling turned out straightforward and pretty tasty. The only caveat is that we found cutting the shrimp pieces smaller (instead of the 1/2" in the recipe) made filling the dumplings easier.


The dough came next. We got wheat starch from Marina Market and tapioca flour from Whole Foods.


Rolling out the dough went smoothly. The only curious part of the recipe was the hot chicken stock, more on this later. The dough was formed into rolls and cut into pieces.



We made wrappers from individual pieces by pressing them with a heavy pot between wax paper, and some slight enlarging with a rolling pin after.


Making pleats were a little difficult, especially given the hand made wrappers. We found our Ha Gow somewhat like regular dumplings in appearance, but overall not too bad looking.



The moment of truth. We steamed a few dumplings and the rejects to test the taste. It actually tasted pretty good, to our surprise. The filling was flavorful and the shrimp and bamboo shoots went together well. However, the wrapper left something to be desired. The wrappers had the translucent quality you normally see in Ha Gow, but were colored a bit yellow and were a bit overly chewy. The yellow color we believe came from the chicken stock (other recipes used water).

Ha Gow 2.0. Since we had some filling left, we decided to make another try at the dough and wrapper, this time choosing a water based recipe, to hopefully get rid of the yellow and chewy-ness. We found this recipe instead:

1 1/2 cups wheat starch
2 Tbsp tapioca starch
1 cup boiling water
1 Tbsp lard (we used veg. oil)

Supposedly this came from the book "Classic Deem Sum: Recipes from Yang Sing Restaurant, SF." by Henry Chan (http://www.amazon.com/Classic-Deem-Sum-Henry-Chan/dp/0030715466). We felt this was auspicious since we like Yank Sing.


We also watched some youtube videos on making wrappers, and found that some chefs used their cleavers to flatten the dough. So we decided to try this route, putting vegetable oil on both the table and the cleaver. We found this actually worked very well, and was faster than the rolling pin and produced thinner wrappers.


After making up dumplings with the rest of the filling, we decided to steam a few rejects again to taste the new recipe. The result was a success! The wrappers were translucent as before, and did not have the yellow coloring. They also weren't as chewy and tasted fairly close in texture to restaurant ha gow. For future dumplings we will definitely use the new dough recipe and the cleaver flattening method.

Lotus Leaf Wraps (Lo Mai Gai)

This dish is not hard to make, but does take a long time to prep. We started at 6pm and ended at midnight. so watch out for a long prep time.

The recipe says it makes 8 and we doubled it but actually still only got 8 servings, so the portion sizes are a bit off.

Also, the steaming of the rice is what took forever to get the right texture -- instead of 40 min (if you double the recipe it is 40 instead of 20 min) it actually took us about double the time (80 min). One thing we did wrong was to cram all the rice into one bamboo steamer, but after taking forever, we realize we should have separated the portion to two steamers going at the same time. This went faster but the overall process still took some time.

What was time consuming was also the presoaking of the leaves, rice, and mushrooms, and all the chopping. Then you had to wait until the rice and chicken mixture were both cooled enough to then wrap individually. Like I said, this is definitely not a 30 minute meal!!

Once everything was prepped however, the cooking and assembly was pretty simple. Going to steam these just in time for our meet-up tomorrow. Since this made 8 exactly, we didn't get a chance to taste them yet. The chicken mixture was tasty though, so hopefully they will come out good tomorrow.

Portuguese Egg Tarts: Test Run.

Portuguese Egg Tarts are some of my favorite dessert/snacks. I'd get them in the Chinese bakeries out here almost whenever I see them. However, the best ones I've had where in Macau. There, the custard was rich and creamy, but the crust was the standout. It was puff pastry, and it flaked as you bit into it.

I picked this dessert because I wanted to learn how to make it at home, and to see if I could get it to be more like the ones I've had in Macau.

Looking on the web, most of the recipes were similar. They consisted of the same ingredients for the most part, with a few being different ratios, and others adding in other flavor components like lemon skin and cinnamon sticks. I choose one to use as a baseline.

We followed the recipe exactly to get an idea of a baseline recipe, so that later during our club meal, we could try to adjust to get it even better.

First off, after making the custard it seemed like it wasn't enough. It said the recipe would produce 20 tarts. However, after reading the recipe again, it was for mini tarts. So we rolled the puff pastry like the recipe directed, then cut the roll into pieces, which we put into the mini-muffin pan. The method we used here then, was to press in the center, then push up the pastry up the sides of the walls of each muffin. The difficulty in this was that the pastry tended to break on the top, and it didn't look great. On our next try, we'll try another method that I researched as well as this one. We'll flatten out the puff pastry, roll it out thin, then cut it into circles, then lay it into the pan. Also, we decided that using the mini-muffin pan created a higher pastry to custard ratio. So we will use normal-sized muffin pans instead to get them to the same size as the ones you get in a restaurant.

One thing to note while stirring and cooking the custard, is that you have to know your kitchen. When a recipe says "medium," what is medium heat on your range? So as I cooked and stirred I watched the custard carefully so we wouldn't have any curdling of the egg.

After getting everything ready and into the oven, we let it bake for 12 minutes. Then we broiled the tarts for 2-3 minutes. As I opened up the oven door, I notice a minor burning smell. I immediately pulled out the pan, and it was a little burnt on top. This is another area where you have to watch over the tarts carefully. Next time, I would put the pan more towards the middle of the oven. We put it 4" from the top like the recipe said, but we found that it was too close and wasn't really cooking the tarts evenly.

One option that we might try on our next run, is to use a torch instead of the broiler. That way, we can control the "charring" on the top without overcooking the rest of the tart.

Another challenge with this dish is its presentation. So that is an area we'd want to work on, especially in the pastry. Using the press down method, we tended to get uneven thicknesses and broken areas. Also, when we tasted the tarts, the pastry wasn't as flaky as I would have liked.


Into the pan.


Ready for the oven.


A little charred.

The custard wasn't quite as rich as I remembered them usually tasting. And the lemon flavor came out too strong, which may have taken away from the creaminess. I did more research by looking at other recipes, and one possible change would be to use more egg yolks (one recipe called for double the eggs than this recipe). Also, we could get more complex flavors by infusing other herbs/spices. One idea which we may try is cardamom and lime, instead of lemon and cinnamon.

Xiao Long Bao

First a short story on my experience with this food, and then a reasoning on why we decided to choose it for cooking club.

I'm actually not sure the first time I had xiao long bao, but something makes me think it was at 168 in 2000, possibly ordered by Ying during a lunchtime meal. At any rate, despite 168 being "the best Chinese food in the east bay" -anonymous (A. Yen) source, the "soup dumplings" didn't blow me away, and somewhat set the benchmark for what I came to expect from xlb as a dish: somewhat thick, grayish/brown skin, wrapped around a meat filling which may or may not have included the actual "soup" ingredient.

Fast forward to late 2011, when Ei-Lun took me to the fabled Original Din Tai Fung in Taiwan on Xinyi road. There was so much hype about this place, and not just this resturant, but the particular location, the original, that I didn't bother trying to discount the hype. Instead, I embraced the hype, and held the highest standard possible and fully expected my lofty expectations to be exceeded. As with many of the other food adventures from our Asia-food-adventure trip, once again I realized I had never in my life had "real" xiaolongbao. Whatever I had eaten in the past that shared the same name, had nothing to do with these dumplings; they were simply amazing.

Since that fateful meal, I've tried two other locations of Din Tai Fung, one in Taiwan, and one in Los Angeles, and can now tote the same line as the other fanatics (and family members) which is: "You cannot beat the original Din Tai Fung!"

Knowing the amount of lore around this dish, the incredible technical skill required to form the dumplings, the importance of the filling, the quality of the wrapper, and ultimately the challenge of trying to replicate, or surpass the epic Din Tai Fung dumplings was what enticed us to pick this dish.

So here we are, a few days from cooking club and are only on attempt #1. It's possible we will hit a home-run on the first try, and we've been watching videos and looking at pictures, but I have a feeling this recipe and the many others on the web will get plenty of use by us on our way to Din Tai Fung xiao long bao perfection!

A couple of notes on the ingredients, 99 Ranch didn't have the pork skin, but said to come back tomorrow, they would have it. Whole foods didn't have pig skin, in fact they looked at us funny when we asked. We used a prosciutto for the ham, and we used wheat flour (gluten) for the "high gluten" flour (thanks Agnes!). Also, we bought a can of chili oil from Din Tai Fung in Taiwan for the dipping sauce. (ginger, vinegar, soy sauce, chili oil) We picked up some bamboo steamers in the south bay at a restaurant supply store near Ranch, and got the paper with holes in it, instead of using cabbage. The Din Tai Fung in Taiwan uses actual cloth for that purpose.

Test run notes 3/12: Forget the wrapper recipe here, instead we used one from here which only uses water and all-purpose flour. We were also able to use our soba-class skills from Japan to knead the dough to the right consistency. The first try with the recipe below yielded some pretty funky looking dough, and way way too stretchy/rubbery. (also it required sitting for 4hrs, vs. 30mins for the all-purpose flour one) When rolling out the wrapper, get them as thin as possible, nearly see-through. Also, using the recipe below for the soup, you end up with 2 cups of liquid, it says to use only 1 cup for the filling, but save the other cup. When putting together the filling put 2 parts of the filling and 1 part of the coagulated soup. The final test run was with the ultra-thin wrapper, and +extra-soup, and was quite tasty. Holding it up with chopsticks resulted in a see-through, sagging dumpling, filled with pork filling and some steaming hot soup! One step closer to Din Tai Fung, a few thousand left to go...


Base Recipe

Ingredients
Wrapper

• 3/4 cup high gluten flour
• 1/3 cup less 1 tablespoon water
• 1/3 cup plain flour
• 1/4 cup boiling water
• flour for dusting
• 2 teaspoons oil

Soup

• 180 grams skin of pork
• 225 grams chicken breast
• 140 grams pork
• 60 grams Chinese ham
• 1 scallion
• 2 slices ginger
• Chinese rice wine
• salt

Filling

• 285 grams ground pork
• 2 tablespoons light soy sauce
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon ginger and scallion water
• pepper
• sugar
• 2 teaspoons sesame oil
• 2 teaspoons Chinese rice wine

Making the soup (makes 2 cups. use only one)
Wash and clean pork skin. Parboil in boiling water with the chicken breast and ham. Place all the meat in a saucepan with 6 cups of water. Add scallion and ginger and bring to the boil. Reduce heat and simmer till pork skin is soft. Continue simmering till only 2 cups of liquid remains. Strain and reserve the liquid keeping the pork skin. Diced the saved pork skin. Food process the pork skin and liquid in a blender till milky. Season with salt and leave to cool. Use before it gelatinizes.

Preparing the Filling
Place the ground pork into a mixing bowl. Add salt and light soy sauce. Stir with chopstick or wooden spoon continuously and in one direction only. Add the rest of the ingredients. Continue to stir in the same direction until the mixture forms a thick paste.

Pour in one cup of the prepared soup, a little at a time, stirring to mix thoroughly with the pork.

Wrap in plastic wrap and put in the refrigerator to cool.

Preparing the wrapper (makes 40 wrappers) [See above recipe line from the 3/12 test run, instead of this one.]
In a large mixing bowl, mix the 3/4 cups of high gluten flour and 1/3 cup less one tablespoon less water until it resembles bread crumbs. Knead into a dough.

Place the plain flour in a mixing bowl. In a small saucepan bring 1/4 cup of water to the boil. Add the 1/3 cup plain flour and move the saucepan away from the flame, stirring the flour vigorously with a wooden spoon. Leave it to cool a little before kneading together with the high gluten flour dough prepared earlier. Cover with clean damp cloth and leave to rest for 4 hours.

Forming the dumplings
Place 2 teaspoons of oil on the worktop, put the dough on top and knead for a little while. Cut the dough into 4 quarters. Form one quarter into a 2cm roll. Divide the cylinder into 10 pieces. Roll each piece into a ball. Flatten each piece with the palm of your hand into a disk. Use a rolling pin to roll the disk out forming a 6cm disk with the edges thinner than the center. Make a well with you thumb and first finger and drape the disk over. Let it sag in the middle to form a recess for the filling. Use a teaspoon to place 2 teaspoons of filling. Carefully gather the edge of wrapper making folds and holding on to them till fully gathered. Traditionally, 18 folds are made to close the dumpling.

Steaming
Cut out 10 cabbage leaf disks or use thin slices of carrot and stick one piece to the bottom of each dumpling. Place the dumplings in a 200mm bamboo steamer. In a large saucepan or wok, bring water to a rolling boil. Sit the Steamer on a rack over the boiling water, close the lid and steam for seven minutes. The dumpling is done when the filling feels firm to the touch. Serve with a small dish of thinly shredded ginger in vinegar. (and chili oil and soy sauce)

Misc
Video on chowhound.
Another recipe on the web that goes in to greater detail on the ginger-scallion water here.