Eggs Benedict Part 1 - Poaching

Eggs Benedict is one of the most respected and imposing phrases in the brunch lexicon. Culled from the simplest ingredients - eggs, bread, and butter - this dish is nonetheless rendered intimidating for the legendary hollandaise sauce that, along with properly poached yolks, lends its distinctive creaminess. Awe-inspiring when prepared correctly, it is nothing more than eggs and toast when these crucial aspects are mis-executed.

With an eye to hosting, this dish demands a presentation to match its culinary prowess. Just as too-firm yolks will ruin the joy of consumption, a messy plate will fail to inspire the diner’s appetite. Such inspiration is particularly important for a dish as infamously challenging this: while Eggs Benedict are a high delicacy when dining out, guests might be nervous about trying them in the home. What if the host fails to emulsify the hollandaise? What if the eggs are raw and contain salmonella? What if the bread is soggy? The best way to put one’s guests at ease is with a clean, tasteful tableau.

 

The plate pictured above is a great example: the palette combines a range of colors without clashing, and - this is particular to Eggs Benedict - the heavy, lugubrious hollandaise does not dominate the dish or make it appear sloppy, but instead keeps to the center.

It is a good idea to plan out one’s presentation in advance whenever preparing for guests, because it allows you to produce multiple dishes that all look alike (that way no one feels short-changed!). For eggs Benedict in particular, such foresight is crucial. Once those eggs start cooking you will need both hands (ideally a second set of “helper” hands as well), and will need to move quickly so that the yolks don’t seize up.

The two pillars that hold up this dish are the texture of the eggs, and the hollandaise sauce. Poaching the eggs sounds intimidating, but, like nearly every other “intimidating” kitchen process, becomes achingly simple if one observes a few basic rules.

In a saucepan, heat enough water to cover an egg. When the water is just below a boil, add a couple teaspoons of vinegar. This will hold the egg together and help it to congeal so that you don’t end up with egg-drop soup. It is important that the water-vinegar solution does not fully boil, but remains slightly below that temperature threshold (otherwise, the yolks will become tough).

Working with one egg at a time, crack each into a small dish or cup. Use a spoon to swirl the water in the saucepan. Then, holding the dish on level with the simmering water, gently slide the egg - white and yolk together - into the pan. Using your spoon, “encourage” the white to wrap itself around the yolk like a turban.

After about 3 minutes, the whites will set and appear opaque. Lift the egg out of the water with a slotted spoon and set it - very gently! - on a paper towel.

The goal here is for the white of the egg to be solid enough to hold it all together, but for the yolk to remain soft and runny (think of the delicious texture when it spills out over the bread and swirls into the hollandaise...yum). So, timing is essential: under-cooking will cause the white to split prematurely, ruining the presentation; overcooking will mean no swirling :(

Three beautifully poached eggs and...one explosion

As you can tell, this is a rather complex process that may require several minutes for each egg. At the same time, you don’t want your poached eggs to cool too long before being eaten. In terms of serving, therefore, this dish may be best for smaller parties. Working with only one set of hands, it’s probably not realistic to prep more than three at a time while keeping temperatures correct.

Poached eggs can, of course, be used in a variety of other dishes. Enjoy them over quinoa, spinach salads, smoked ham, grilled tomatoes, on a slice of fresh baguette with a slab of brie... Or, if you're feeling sufficiently adventurous, stay tuned for our next post: Eggs Benedict Part 2 - Hollandaise Sauce

Quinoa: do-it-yourself for the aspiring yuppie

The newly-discovered miracle grain, quinoa, has made quite a splash among health food gurus and Whole Foods shoppers alike. Whether to supplement their diets with protein or simply to make them feel like they're eating healthy, countless Americans have turned to this south-American cereal. In fact, it's hardly an exaggeration to say this is the staple nutrient in the yuppie diet. Just stroll through the quinoa shelves at Whole Foods - you'll see what I mean. 

In all seriousness, though, it is an amazing new addition to the culinary toolkit. Versatile as it is nutritious, quinoa can be prepared as one would rice, oats, grits, or tabouleh; it can be sauteed, tossed, pureed, or baked into patties; it can complement savory, sweet, or spicy dishes. If you are the type of chef that arrives home tired and tosses together an assemblage of whatever you find in the fridge, keep some quinoa around for such occasions. It can literally be made to go with anything!

I was recently faced with just such a last-resort situation: a couple friends and I decided to get together and cook dinner after work, with the added complication that we wanted to be "classy." We live in Washington D.C., and anyone unfortunate enough to have searched for housing around here knows that the cost of living leaves little spare cash for buying expensive groceries. We therefore decided to be creative and throw something together with what we already had: two tomatoes, an avocado, feta cheese and an onion. What could pull these disparate ingredients together? Nothing so well as quinoa.

One of my fellow chefs was having some performance anxiety, being more accustomed to prepping caseroles than to home-cooked haute cuisine (she's from Indiana). Fortunately, the recipe devised here is very user-friendly. We cooled off from the August humidity with some pinot grigio, and after a couple glasses she was ready to tackle task #1: chopping a white onion and several cloves of garlic.

Meanwhile, I started to boil the quinoa. Begin with two parts water to each one part quinoa; as the water boils off, test the grain for flavor and texture, and if necessary simply add more water. It will be finished when the kernels have "opened" and taken on a nutty taste.

We sauteed the onions and garlic to soften their flavor, while chef #3 diced the tomatoes. Black beans (the only item purchased specifically for this meal) went into the sautee for a couple of minutes.

When the quinoa was cooked to perfection we tossed all these ingredients in a bowl together. This part of the meal was inspired by Tabouleh salad, and serves as an extremely healthy foundation, in place of starchier carbs like potatoes or even rice. It is complemented by salt, pepper, Spanish oregano to taste and - most importantly! - half a lime squeezed on top, which lends an acidic bite to the otherwise mellow flavor milieu.

What brings this hearty but inelegant mixture to the level of haute cuisine? Two show-stopping ingredients: avocado and feta cheese. Each is distinctive in flavor and texture, and each is capable of refined appearance. The soft, creaminess of the avocado contrasts with the bite of salty feta cubes. Though they are generally associated with vastly different regional cuisines, this dish transcends geography. Assemble the two side-by-side on a round plate, garnish with half a lime and voila! 

By sheer luck, we had on hand the perfect dishware and glass table-top to aesthetically complement this meal. By the time we were ready to serve the Pinot Grigio was long gone, and we transitioned over to a red blend (which we drank out of mason jars - again, our host was from Indiana).

In a small group, we were able to serve ourselves one-by-one with a scoopful of quinoa, several slices of avocado, and a handful of feta. If I were to make this again for a more formal occasion or larger group I would prep each plate in advance (as pictured below). Because these ingredients are not usually thought of together, it is necessary to persuade your diners that they really do belong on the same plate - the best way to do so is through artful presentation.

This meal was simple, delicious, and packed with deceptively healthy ingredients. You can have complete confidence preparing it for epicurians, aesthetes, and yuppies alike; most importantly, even the most bashful cooks can be persuaded to take part in preparation. Bon chance!

Farfalle, Avocado, Pesto, and the endless combinations

Our friend Sarah was probably the most faithful attendee to our college dinner parties. A proud devotee of the bay-area lifestyle, Sarah exudes a love of long outdoor jogs and fresh California vegetables. Her reverence for avocados borders on worship. To satisfy our best customer's yen for avocado (and also to utilize the ingredients that she so generously supplied) we developed this variation on pasta salad. Like Sarah, it is healthy, satisfying, infinitely variable, and can be adapted to formal and informal contexts alike.

The fundamental elements of this dish are pasta, avocado, and pesto. Use a small pasta - farfalle is best, but penne or rigatoni will work - to match the other ingredients in size.When it has been cooked and drained, toss it liberally with pesto. Pesto provides plenty of oil and salt here, so taste before adding more of either. Finally, chop the avocado in chunks about half the size of a farfalla and stir them vigorously in to the pasta while it is still warm. The heat from the pasta will soften the avocado so that as you mix the dish becomes creamy (without ever adding actual cream!). This is healthy-food substitution magic!

In addition to these three elements, there are countless exciting additions that add pizzazz to the dish and tailor it to the particular occasion (kind of like Sarah adding accessories to her outfits). Asparagus spears can be chopped into 3-inch sections, then blanched for no more than 2 minutes in a saucepan of boiling water and thrown into the mix. The crispiness of appropriately cooked asparagus contrasts perfectly with the softness of avocado and adds a fresh flair. It is perfect for Springtime picnics or lunches on the patio.

I believe strongly in balancing the color of a dish. If you look at it an feel a hue is missing, a flavor is probably missing as well. With that in mind, I like to add warm-colored vegetables to this dish. Sun-dried tomatoes, roasted red peppers, and chili flakes all go well with the otherwise soft-toned palate.

Speaking of warm hues, this should definitely be served with red wine. We were pleased with the Neprica that we served with it, and also had success with a red zinfandel.

Depending on the amount and potency of the cheese in your pesto, additional cheese can be added as a topping. Like the avocado, this will melt into the warm pasta when stirred, adding to the overall creaminess of each bite.

This pasta shines best at a casual lunch, and is a go-to for potlucks or garden parties. It is great to prepare on steamy summer days because it requires very little cooking, so your kitchen will not turn in to a sauna - your guests will appreciate this! Because of its unrefined appearance this should not be the centerpiece of anything formal, but can certainly serve as the main course for a dinner among friends. This is a vegetable dish that does not feel like it is lacking meat, so vegetarians and carnivores can enjoy it together. If your diet-conscious friends are resistant to eating pasta, remind them that there is very little fat besides the natural omegas from the avocado, while all those vegetables are packed with nutrients!

Serve in a bowl. If you find the dish lacking in kick, sautee chopped garlic in olive oil and pour some over each bowl. Refill many times. Refresh your palate with a sip of wine after every bite.

Turn Up the Beets!

Perhaps I was inspired to do this post from the clever name of the salad place near where I work-- "Lettuce Turnip the Beet", or maybe it was just because my roommate bought some beets and we needed something to do with them. Anyway, this post is about beet gnocchi. Handmade gnocchi is one of my favorite dishes to make, mostly because there are so many ways to make it-- with regular potatoes, sweet potatoes or beets! And also because the final product is quite delicious. This was a great meal to make in college because, like pasta, it did not require many ingredients. The gnocchi itself is just beets, flour and an egg.

The time is takes to prepare this meal depends upon how many people you are cooking for. The total prep and cooking time for 4 diners was about 2 and a half hours. If you are cooking for more than 4, plan on taking more prep and cooking time, since you will be making more gnocchi and it will take longer to cook them all. This may not be the best meal to cook if you have a lot of guests. We learned that the hard way one time in New Orleans, when we decided to be liberal with our dinner invitations and ended up hand rolling sweet potato gnocchi for about a dozen guests.

For this particular meal, I modified a beet gnocchi recipe I know to make it dairy-free, because I was cooking with a friend who does not eat dairy. The meal can also be modified even further to be completely vegan by simply not using the egg. I usually use eggs in all of my gnocchi recipes, but it is not necessary. I paired the gnocchi with a sage walnut garlic paste, a dairy-free version of a sage butter sauce. The paste ended up being similar in texture to a pesto sauce and is much healthier than the butter sauce.

To serve 4 people, here's what you need for the gnocchi:

3 medium sized beets, 3-4 cups of flour, 1 egg (optional), nutmeg, salt and pepper (to taste)

And for the sage walnut garlic paste:

1/4 cup of olive oil, 15-10 chopped sage leaves, 1/4 cup of chopped walnuts, 4 cloves of garlic, salt and pepper to taste

The first step of making the gnocchi is to cook the beets. There are multiple ways to do this, you can bake them in the oven, or you can boil them. What I did was a sort of combination of the two. First, preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Then, cut off the leafy bits of the beets, and put the beets upside down in a baking dish. Brush the beets with some olive oil, salt and pepper and put about 1/4 of an inch of water at the bottom of the dish. Cover the baking dish tightly with foil. Here is where some improvisation was necessary for me, because I had run out of foil. This is a tragedy of the commons type of scenario I ran across a lot as a college student-- everyone wants to use the tinfoil, but no one wants to replace it. But it makes for more creativity in cooking. Instead of tinfoil, I just used another baking dish to cover the botton dish. It worked perfectly for me. Cook the beets for about an hour, or until tender. To test for tenderness, I stuck a fork in on the beets as far as it would go, and made sure it came out easily.

While the beets are in the oven, you have an hour of downtime, which you can use to prepare the paste. Just chop up the sage, walnuts and garlic, combine them with the olive oil, and put it aside. I chopped everything very small, so that the paste would be like a pesto, but you can chop them to any size you want to alter the texture. You can also food process everything together instead. I don't currently own a food processor, so I am forced to chop everything old school style, but I actually like the slightly chunkier bits for this paste and other pesto sauces that comes from chopping by hand.

Preparing the paste does not take the entire hour that the beets are cooking, so this is the point in the recipe when I usually open a bottle of wine. I was drinking a California Chardonnay while cooking and eating this meal, which I think went well with the beet gnocchi. It would probably go especially well with the sage butter sauce, since the buttery Chardonnay and the sauce would match each other in richness.

Once the beets are done cooking, wait for them to cool a bit, and then peel off the skin. At this point the skin should be soft enough to peel off using a butter knife and your fingers. Just a warning, since the beets have a very rich, red color, I would definitely recommend wearing an apron or clothes that you do not particularly care about while peeling and mashing the beets. There is definitely some potential for staining in the next couple of steps. Once the beets are peeled, cut them into 1 or 2 inch pieces and put them in a large mixing bowl to mash. If you have a potato masher, you can use that, or what I did was just use a fork. If you want to get fancy, you can use a food processor to puree the beets as well. But honestly, just a plain old fork worked perfectly for me.

After you have pureed the beets (in whichever way you chose to), add the egg, nutmeg, salt and pepper. Make sure that before you add the egg, the beets are completely cooled, otherwise the egg may cook in the beets. By the time I had peeled and mashed the beets, they were cool enough to add the egg, so it really does not take too long for the beets to cool. It took much less time for the beets to cool than for potatoes to cool when I have made potato gnocchi. I just added a pinch of nutmeg, salt and pepper after the egg. Altogether, I had about 1 and a half to 2 cups of beet puree before adding the flour.

Now for the flour! In total, I probably added about 3-4 cups of flour to the beet puree. Begin by adding a handful of flour at a time, and mix the flour into the puree with a wooden spoon. Continue to add flour until the dough is no longer sticky. This direction is vague, but what I mean is add flour until you can pick up the dough in pieces and roll it out. As you are adding flour, and feeling the dough, you will get a sense of when it is ready. You do not want to add too much flour, or your gnocchi will taste floury, and if you don't have enough flour, you won't be able to work with the dough.

Once you have finished the dough, it may be a good time to begin heating up a pot of water for cooking the gnocchi. Use a medium or large pot, and fill about half way with water.

When your dough is ready to roll out and form the gnocchi, flour a work surface, grab a handful of the dough, and roll it out into a log shape, about an inch thick. Next, take a sharp knife and cut the log into 1/2 inch pieces. Once you have cut the pieces, take each piece, and press it against the bottom of the prongs of a fork. Then, take your fingers and gently roll the piece of gnocchi forward, to create a sort of pool on one side of the gnocchi. This is meant to hold the sauce. On one side of each piece of gnocchi, there should be light fork marks, and on the other side there should be a little indent. This is probably the most difficult part of the recipe, and may take some practice. Even if the gnocchi does not look perfect, it will still taste great. Repeat these instructions for all of the dough, and set each piece of gnocchi aside on a plate. Do not pile the gnocchi on top of each other, because they are delicate and may stick together.

After you have formed all of the gnocchi, it is time to begin cooking the gnocchi. The temperature of the water is very important for cooking gnocchi. Once the water is boiling, add only a few pieces of gnocchi at a time, maybe about 6-8 pieces. Adding too much gnocchi will lower the temperature of the boiling water. When the gnocchi is done cooking, they will rise to the top of the water. This takes about 3 minutes. As the pieces finish and rise to the top, scoop each piece out with a slotted spoon and set aside in a large bowl or a colander. Continue, with only about 6-8 pieces of gnocchi in the water at a time until you have cooked all of the gnocchi.

Next, plate the gnocchi and drizzle the sage walnut garlic paste on top of each plate. Since I am not dairy-free, I added some freshly grated parmesan cheese to my dish. Pour yourself a glass of wine and enjoy!

Shrimp Remoulade: Turning Ketchup & Mustard into a Gourmet Sauce

College students are perpetually on a budget. College students also love indulgent, satisfying...how do I put this? Drunk food - food that satisfies the rumblings of a belly already bloated with beer and a body exhausted from raging. Cooking for our friends at Tulane, at the pulse of inebriated New Orleans, we wondered: could we prepare affordable, high quality food to satisfy drunken, just-back-from-the-boot cravings?

The affirmative answer is rooted in two of the most basic elements of American fast food: ketchup and mustard. These sauces lay the flavorful foundation of remoulade, a potent marinade best offset by seafood. Remoulade is classic fare in New Orleans restaurants, from the high-scale Galatoire's to food trucks and street stands.

Like much cajun food, the appeal of shrimp remoulade is its powerful flavor. Horseradish, scallions, and parsley join the ketchup, mustard, and paprika, plunging together into a tempest of taste. The miracle of remoulade is that none of these assertive flavors dominates: while all vie for attention, none succeeds in taking center stage.

Shrimp remoulade requires very little cooking, but lots of time to marinate. The longer it marinates, the stronger and more well-integrated the flavors (think of a group of charismatic divas that need a little time to accept one another's prominence). Begin by grilling the shrimp; when they are fully cooked set them aside to cool while you make the sauce.

Because it can and should be prepared far in advance, this makes a great appetizer for an elaborate meal - simply put it out an hour before serving dinner, and you can focus all your energy on preparing the main entree. Similarly it is perfect for a midnight snack - coming home from a late night it is waiting for you in the fridge, succulently satisfying and even better delicious than it did when you made it.

Roughly chop several cups of vegetables: celery, scallions, parsley, and onion. This doesn't need to be precise by any means; the goal is simply to make them fit in the blender. For each of these, alter proportions to your own taste (for example, I think celery adds an important undertone to stabilize all the other violent flavors, so I would add more celery than onion) - the remoulade should be unique to the maker.

Puree the vegetables with between 1/4 and 1/2 cup each of: ketchup, tomato paste, coarse mustard, and red wine vinegar (again, the relative proportions are up to you, the chef, depending on which flavor you want to highlight most). Add two tablespoons each of horseradish, and paprika and one tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce. As you puree, it may be necessary to add a little vegetable oil to emulsify the ingredients.

Two ingredients that should not be added are salt and pepper - there are enough of these already in the other sauces!

Once the remoulade is smooth enough to treat as a sauce, throw it together with the shrimp in a bowl and refrigerate for at least several hours - though overnight is preferable.

Presentation deserves some thought here. Delicious though it may be, remoulade is not exactly beautiful in color. A leaf of lettuce contrasts well with the warm colors of the sauce and the shrimp, and purple cabbage or raddicchio adds the perfect flair to balance out this palette. The sauce is thick and messy, so be sure to provide diners with toothpicks (if it will be served from a buffet) or small forks (if it will be served seated). To serve it as an elegant appetizer, three can be arranged on each small plate.

...or, as I suggested in the introduction, if it is to be devoured by ravenous college students at 3am before passing out, several forks and plenty of napkins are all you'll need.