Mayodaise and Time Clarifications

Photo from Bon Appétit

James and I decided to have a festive and indulgent breakfast this morning, or actually, perhaps I should say I decided to have a festive breakfast morning (Mother's Day! Yeah... I have a mother... I should eat steak), fueled by visions of the "fool-proof" hollandaise sauce featured in my recent Bon Appétit issue. You may remember my past hang-ups about hollandaise,  the fear and terror it creates in me, juxtaposed against my insatiable urges for the sauce. 
The process outlined in Bon Appétit claims you, yes YOU, can create easy, fool-proof hollandaise sauce in 5-minutes, using a blender and ... uh... one pan. Since James was able to do it the old fashioned method and it turned out fantastic, I figured perhaps this dumbed down version could be my personal introduction into the (previously denied) culinary world of cream sauces.

However, in case you didn't notice, the world has not imploded, pigs do not fly, hell has not frozen over and I found a way to fuck hollandaise up once again. Ok, check out the recipe:

Blender Hollandaise (from Bon Appétit)

Ingredients

• 1 1/4 cups (2 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, cubed
• 2 large egg yolks
• 2 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice, plus more
• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preparation

• Fill a blender with hot water; set aside. Melt butter in a small saucepan over medium heat until foaming. Remove pan from heat. Drain blender and dry well. Put egg yolks and 2 Tbsp. lemon juice in blender; cover and blend to combine. Working quickly and with blender running, remove lid insert and slowly pour hot butter into blender in a thin stream of droplets, discarding the milk solids in bottom of the saucepan. Blend until creamy sauce forms. Season to taste with salt and pepper, and with more lemon juice. Serve immediately.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Pretty simple sounding, oui oui? Well, after the meal was consumed (errant sauce and all) I checked out the vid to see what differences in preparation must have occurred. And seriously, check it out: here it is.
  After I got over the excitement of realizing this was Eric Ripert's recipe, I watched him blend the sauce for about, oh... 10 seconds? Seriously: watch it and time it for me please. Ripert and the other dude even refer to it as "60 second" hollandaise. Ugh. You can't mess around with me and sauces! I need guidelines! Strict measurements! Hard and fast rules! The freaking printed piece called it 5-minute hollandaise! I blended that shit til I got mayo. Specifically, I blended that shit for 5 minutes. When I pressed that stop button and ventured a taste, that stuff was THICK. 
  
  
  Creamy, delicious, lemony mayo, but nonetheless, mayo. It was so good though, that I still poured that all over my plate and wondered how commercial mayo sucks so much.  
  
  
  
  Mayo: it's breakfast!

Detours

Went to Detour Cafe the other day and had the most delicious and eggy french toast, made with a housemade cardamom bread. Reminded me kind of this. It may be hard to tell from these grainy phone pics, but the place was super cute, with HUGE mimosas, little doll house booths and a rack of gourmet food magazines. Detour has huge family style dinners some nights, all at one table and some crazy cool egg sandwich specials during week days. Afterwards, we wandered around and looked at some streets covered in chalk drawings.

Hold on a minute, summer

I love fresh corn. And cherry tomatoes. I could eat those all day long come summer. Tried out a corn pancake recipe from Smitten Kitchen this morning. I'm not particularly into pancakes- they've got nothing on waffles, IMHO. But man, these fresh corn ones were doing right: very light and fluffy, savory and soft, with chunks of fresh corn folded throughout. Smitten Kitchen suggested they may pair well with fresh tomatoes, so I made a topping of cherry tomatoes, some more fresh corn (lightly sauteed in the breakfast sausage juice), tons of basil, green onion and a pinch of salt, sugar and thyme. I took one bite and kind of freaked out. James added syrup to his plate, but I did fine without.
I will def be making these again. They would be a prime candidate for upping the savory factory- perhaps some green onion or shallots would be good thrown into the batter...

Getting eggy

Last Sunday I took a break from my waffle journey and made some french toast instead. It turned out to be not too far really from my forays into waffles, as I was determined to make the eggiest french toast ever. I read up on some recipes, and decided to sort of try this recipe of Baked French Toast, off of Epicurious.com. Reviews and descriptions of the recipe described it as an extremely rich, custurdy, bread pudding sort of thing, but I wanted bread fried in eggs (who doesn't!) and I also wanted to amp up the spice, and cut down on the sugar (smother the bread in marmelade? really?) Anyway, with some sausages and fruit it turned out perfect: eggy spicy bread brightened up with citrus.


Halfway depleted pan of bread marinating in eggs. I added lots of orange zest and let the bread sit for half an hour in the mixture, turning the pieces occasionally to get them good and soppy.



I think my recipe went something sort of like this:
5 Pieces of a hearty rustic white bread (I used Grand Central's Como)
1 1/3 cup milk (approx)
3 egg yolks
1 egg with white
1/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 Tb cardamom
orange zest from 1.5 large oranges

Topping:
orange slices
maple syrup
fresh ginger

Mix all the liquid and spices. Cut bread in half and spread in deep dish and allow to soak in liquid for half an hour. I was worried I didn't have enough liquid and added some more milk (hence my "approx" above.) Turn bread slices occasionally to keep soaking. Fry up in butter.

I sliced up the oranges and grated tons of fresh ginger into them and let them sit for a while too. I added just a tiny bit of maple syrup to try to justify this as a breakfast, but it totally wasn't needed. The oranges on top of the bread added some extra nice sweet, spicy juiciness to the whole mess. Oh, and of course, you can just fry up those unused egg whites for some scrambled eggs. Lucky you; egg whites are a healthy choice! har har har

Waffle Recipe

Felicia had asked about the recipe I used for the ham and cheese waffle experiment. I slightly modify the "basic" recipe from the Joy of Cooking as follows:

1 3/4 cups flour
1 TB baking powder
spoonful sugar
pinch salt
4 beaten eggs
1/2 stick melted butter
1 1/2 cups milk

Mix all the dry ingredients together, then all the wet ingredients and then the two groups together. Add a couple handfuls on sliced green onion. If trying the ham and cheese combo, make sure the cheese is between slices of ham, so it doesn't melt into the batter and create strangeness. Also, the batter can be spread very thinly upon the iron and atop the ham- the super eggy recipe will fluff up to fill any holes or patches. Waffle iron should puff open a bit while cooking; don't worry about it and don't bother pressing it shut. It's all good.

Other mods: use 3 eggs and more butter for a crispier, more traditional waffle.
And using soy milk instead of regular milk definitely weighs down the recipe, creating slightly tougher, duller waffles. :(

Diary of Sundays: Waffle-Crazed Carnivore

Nov 1st: I continue my waffle exploration with a corn meal based waffle, topped with sausage crumbles and a sharp white chedder. The sausage goes great with the rustic hearty waffle, but I feel the cheese makes the whole dish a little too much. I think it needs a nice lite sauce or gravy to mellow everything out. Unfortunately, my gravy skillz are non-existent, and the meal ends w/me feeling no closer to my waffle magnum opus.

Definitely studly, but not quite my vision.

Nov 8th: James to tackle steak and eggs again, and decides to attempt homemade hollandaise sauce as well. I try to talk him out of it; I say things like, "gravy difficulties don't even come close to this potential disaster!" He ignores me and concocts a delicious light hollandaise. I dump copious amounts onto my still mooing steak lovingly wrapped in bacon and think fondly of animals. A good day.

A bit of the ultra violence in a soft lemon cream sauce.
Mwa ha ha- feast your eyes upon this horror!

Nov 15th: No words to describe my delight! The waffle procedure went swimmingly well, and now I have little left to live for. Went back to my basic waffle recipe but added an extra egg (4 in total.) Added thinly sliced ham, surrounding slender slices of swiss cheese, INSIDE the waffle. Careful pouring, ham/cheese placement, more careful pouring... These waffles puffed up, full and light and beautiful and meat-filled! I have created a monster! First test run went so well, I began to add sliced green onion. Savory combination went even better! Then I tried to add double the amount of ham/cheese, but discovered my waffle machine does have its limits. I believe the next step will be acquiring a rotating waffle iron to better suit my meat-stuffing tendencies.

It's alive!

Handy and delightful even when chilled.

Prep work and a straining waffle iron. Seriously, where the hell did I get this little thing?

Food That You Step On

Potatoes are a staple in Peruvian and Bolivian food, and one dish, chuño, is particularly interesting. I watched a fascinating episode of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, where, in Bolivia, he visited a farm where they prepared this potato.

The process is strange- potatoes are left in cold mountain air, to freeze at night, thaw in daylight sun, freeze again, and so on. The end result is a naturally freeze dried potato, and can be white or black in appearance. Within the freezing process, the potatoes are trampled by bare feet, I believe in order to remove the skins to further aid the freezing process. Andrew Zimmern even had the opportunity to try his hand (or foot, haha) at trampling the potatoes, but was soon told he was smashing them too harshly as he did it with too little love, and was too overweight. What a bummer, eh?

The whole process dates back to before the Inca Empire, and, not surprisingly, the potatoes can then last for years. Now, you can even get chuñu in a can, although I have no idea if you could find it here in America.

Anyway, I was watching this show with my friend Erika, who is from Bolivia, when she then told me she actually had some chuño from when her father last visited. I was totally fascinated by the whole thing, and nibbled off some of the potatoes she had. They were extremely light, hard as clay rocks, and tasted like potato flour. Travis, her husband, claimed they (chuño) made one nasty dish, which of course made me desperate to try them in a prepared dish.


Well, tonight I got home and Erika had dropped some off some prepared chuño for me! Just what I'd been craving. :)

She had mentioned she usually makes a soup, but this was a sort of stir fried preparation, dark and crumbly, with a very inviting aroma. She had included a mild sort of pico, which I just spooned on top and dug into. The consistency and texture reminded me of a ground beef, mild and meaty, with a slight potato under taste. I'll have to ask her if she cooked it in an animal fat of some sort; there also appeared to be perhaps flecks of scrambled egg thrown in as well. The whole thing was delicious. I ate it so quickly that I couldn't take a pic, and James had only one bite, but now I am dying to have the chuño soup.

I have no idea why Travis doesn't care for the dish. It wasn't tripe-with-ginger and green-onion amazing (I'll eat three plates of that in one dim sum sitting, easy), but it was tasty, comforting and intriguing. I can imagine it makes a great breakfast base, and I just may have to go throw some potatoes out my back door and hope it freezes tonight.

Noël: Waffle Window

I have been very into waffles as of late. I usually make them Sunday mornings, and enjoy trying unusual waffle recipes/combinations. The last waffle recipe I played with used yeast and required a day to rise.
However, today was James' first Saturday morning off in a million years, so I insisted we go to the waffle window. It's around the corner of the Bread and Ink Café on Hawthorne and it kicks butt. Their waffles have a great eggy texture, not too crispy nor thin. I always get the same one: the 3 Bs. It has bacon, brie and basil with a little touch of apricot jam. It pretty much rocks my world. Here's a pic of me acting like I've never seen it before.

"My word, I do believe we have never met before."

James always gets the "3 Bs" too (I insist he get his own because I don't share this thing very well) and he gets a sweet one as well. This time he got a pear and nutella wiffle waffle that looked very pretty.

Waffles inducing gang signs.

The sweet ones are a little much for me. They're really very good, just too much. I am really into the savory ones. And! When we were leaving, I saw some dude with a waffle covered in ham and a coarsely grated thick cheese, so next time I think I will venture away from the bacon and try that one.
Also, side note: did you know waffles are distant long lost relatives to the communion wafer? Supposedly, early communion wafers were baked in irons and had the same characteristic honeycomb pattern that waffles still have today. Heavy stuff.