Sheets Culinary Feats

The traditional Yule log was a large log that was burned all night long during the celebration. However sometime during the 18th or 19th century the French created a pastry out of the conecpt and began serving it during Christmas celebrations. It is basically a jelly roll filled with hazelnut mousse and coated in chocolate. Now a days the pastries are done up beautifully to more greatly resemble the log they are name after.

The jelly roll in this recipe is very light and delicate and requires a gentle touch when you are rolling it up. It’s much easier if you use a long piece of parchament paper underneath the log to help you roll it up nice and tight. There’s a lot of steps to this recipe, but it’ll turn out looking gorgeous at the end. I’ve left out the meringue mushrooms, but if you’re interested in putting them on the log, leave a note and I’ll post the recipe.

Yule Log

Ingredients:

For the Cake:

6 eggs, seperated

1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon of sugar

1/2 cup all purpose flour, sifted

For the hazelnut mousse:

1 1/2 cups heavy cream

5 ounces hazel nuts, toasted

5 ounces milk chocolate cut into small pieces

1 tablespoon hazelnut oil

For the chocolate frosting:

12 ounces bittersweet chocolate, cut in small pieces

8 ounces unsalted butter, cut in small pieces

1/2 cup powdered sugar

3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa

1/2 strong coffee

1/4 cup sour cream

Method of Preparation:

For the cake:

1. Butter a jelly roll pan, line with parchment paper, butter the paper and sprinkle with flour, tapping to remove excess flour. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. In a medium bowl, whisk the egg yolks with 2 tablespoons of the sugar.
3. Meanwhile, place the egg whites in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat until soft peaks form. Turn the machine up to high, and beat in the remaining 3 tablespoons of sugar, continue to beat until shiny but not stiff.
4. Add the flour to the yolk/sugar mixture and whisk to combine. Add l/4 of the egg whites to the yolk mixture, whisking to lighten the mixture. Then return the yolk mixture to the egg whites, and fold gently.
5. Scrape into the prepared pan and even the top by running a long offset spatula across the surface. Bake until cake is golden brown and springs back when lightly touched, l2 to l5 minutes. Cool on a rack. Set aside.

For Hazelnut mousse:

1. Place cooled hazelnuts on a kitchen towel and rub together to remove skins. Place the skinned hazelnuts in a food processor fitted with a steel blade. Process for l minute. Add the hazelnut oil through the feeder tube and process until a paste forms.
2. Melt chocolate in a medium bowl placed over simmering water, or melt in a microwave oven. Add the melted chocolate to the hazelnut paste and set aside.
3. Whip the heavy cream until stiff peaks form. Fold in the hazelnut/chocolate mixture. Keep covered in the refrigerator until needed.

For the Chocolate Frosting:

1. Melt the chocolate. In a small pot, heat the coffee and cocoa. Add the sour cream.
2. In the bowl of a mixer, beat the butter and sugar until light and creamy. Add the chocolate mixture and combine completely. Transfer to a medium bowl and set aside until of spreading consistency.

To Assemble:

1. Trim the edges of the sponge cake. Place the Hazelnut mousse on the cake layer. Spread the mixture evenly over the cake, leaving a l inch space along the long side.
2. Using the parchment paper to aid you, carefully roll up the cake into a thick log, enclosing the mousse. Leave the wrapped, rolled-up cake on the sheet pan and refrigerate until filling is firm, at least 2 hours.
3. Remove pan with cake from refrigerator and place wrapped cake on a firm surface. Carefully unwrap cake. Using a serrated knife, from one end cut a 2-inch piece of cake on the diagonal. Set the cut piece aside.
4. Cut out a piece of cardboard the length and width of the cake. Cover the cardboard with foil and place the cake on it. Spread a little frosting on the bottom of the small cut piece and set on top of the cake roll. Using a small spatula, spread the frosting over the entire cake as well as the small piece atop the cake. With a wooden skewer or the point of a small knife, make furrows to simulate bark along the sides and top of the cake.
5. Arrange Christmas greens and plastic holly around the Yule Log. Sift powdered sugar over the whole thing to simulate snow. Fresh cranberries can be scattered around for added color.

So taking a few requests I’m going to put up some of my favorite Japanese recipes this week.

Few things make me happier than cooking Japanese food. It’s so simple, and elegant, and easy to do, yet still flexible enough to incorporate a limitless combination of flavors and plate designs.

Stay tuned, in the next few weeks I want to start a foray into the art of the bento box and see what I can come up with.

I’m going to keep this a fairly short week, what with the holidays and such time is a valuable commodity.  So with no further ado, here’s this weeks recipes:

Yakisoba

Gyoza

Bison is a wonderful meat, while it can be easy to overcook it and dry it out because it has a much lower fat content than beef. However, it has a lot more natural flavor than beef does, however some folks may not care for the gamier flavor. Because of the lower fat content Bison shouldn’t be prepared more than medium, but of course everyone has their own preferences, but care should be taken when cooking it to medium-well or well done.

If desired you can always substitute beef tenderloin steaks for this recipe.

Bison Steaks, yield 2 servings

Prep time: 5 minutes to mix ingredients, 8 hours to marinate

Cooking time: 6-8 minutes depending on doneness

Ingredients:

2 bison tenderloin steaks, about 6 oz each.

To taste Kosher salt and cracked black pepper.

2 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil.

3 cloves of garlic finely minced.

Method of Preparation:

1. Coat each steak with kosher salt and cracked black pepper. Place into a resealable plastic bag.
2. Add the olive oil and garlic and coat each steak well. Place in the refrigerator and allow to marinate for at least 8 hours.
3. Preheat your grill to 400 degrees.
4. To get beautiful grill marks you will want to place the steaks on your preheated grill with one tip pointing to the 10 o’clock position, let it sear for at least a minute and a half. In order to decrease the cook time turn the steaks over to the uncooked side leaving them pointed at 10 o’clock. Again let it sear for at least a minute and a half and then turn the steaks to the 2 o’clock position. After another minute and a half turn the steaks back over to the other side left at the 2 o’clock position and you will see the beautiful diamond grill mark paterns on your steak. After these 6 minutes your steak should be about medium rare, if you desire it to be more well done you can leave them longer on each side so that no one side becomes over done.

This recipe for butternut squash is amazingly simple and one of my favorites ever.

Simple Butternut Squash, Yield 2 servings

Prep time: 5 minutes

Cook time: 30-45 minutes

Ingredients:

1 medium sized butternut squash

2 Tablespoons butter (not margarine), divided

2 Tablespoons brown sugar, divided

Method of preparation:

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Wash any dirt or grit off of the outside of the butternut squash.
2. Using a heavy and sharp chef’s knife cut the stem end off of the squash. Depending on how much you want to serve you can cut the top off down to the bulb, or leave it intact. There is a fair amount of meat in the top part of the stem, but it may be easier for some to only eat the rounded bulb. Next with the squash standing straight up and down, cut it in half. Be extremely careful as the squash tends to be very tough and it can be easy to lose control of the knife. Then remove any seeds with a large spoon from the inside of the bulb, leaving a rounded indentation.
3. Place one tablespoon of both butter and brown sugar into the indentation of the squash and place on a backing sheet line with foil, cut side up. Bake in the oven until a paring knife goes into the flesh easily.

As I mentioned yesterday this is the season for canning and chutneys to be canned and stored for the winter time. I found this recipe on about.com, it’s a great use of the seasonal apples and onions.

Orchard Apple Chutney, yield 2 cups

Prep time: 10 minutes

Cook time: 20 minutes

Ingredients:

2 cups rice vinegar

3/4 cup packed brown sugar

1/2 large red bell pepper, diced

2 large Jalapeno peppers, seeded and diced

2 tablespoons diced yellow onion

3 tart firm apples; peeled, cored, and diced

Juice of 1 lemon

Method of preperation:

1. Sterilize 2 half-pint canning jars and keep them hot.
2. Bring the vinegar and sugar to a boil in a large saucepan. Stir to dissolve the sugar completely. Add the Bell pepper, jalapenos, and onion and continue to boil for 8 minutes. Add the apples, reduce the heat and simmer until the apples are tender, about 10 minutes more. Remove from the heat and stir in the lemon juice.
3. Spoon or ladle the chutney into the jars. Cap according to the manufacturer’s directions. Process for 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath. Let cool and then test for the seal. Stored in a cool, dry, dark place the chutney will last indefinitely.

Variation: If you do not want to process and can the chutney, spoon or ladle it into sterilized lidded jars. Let them cool slightly and refrigerate. This will keep for 2 weeks in the refrigerator.

I know that I promised to discuss some of the other goals that I have for this site, and while it’s been a tad I fully intend to have this discussion now.

Colorado cuisine:

One of the biggest problems I’ve always seen with Colorado is that it has no real sense of itself when it comes to food. When you think of places like New England you think clam chowder, or Maine Lobster comes to mind. Alaska dreams of spawning salmon cross, or even New Mexico where the spicy twist on tex mex are imprinted on our minds.

Colorado finds itself not having much of an identity, but instead borrowing from so many other regions. There are very few restaurants that claim to be truly Colorado cuisine.

I think that this problem stems from the climate of Colorado itself. With some of the extremes that are seen because we are semi-arid, but yet hot and cold seeing all those extremes during all of our seasons it takes a hardy crop to actually be able to survive here.

So what does grow well here? Corn and wheat are two of our major exports to the rest of the country. As well as squash, potatoes, onions, and apples. But I think our major industry, following suit with Wyoming is in ranching. With the wide open spaces, Colorado has always been a great place for cattle, sheep, and buffalo.

With that being said I plan to start focusing on meals and recipes that reflect a much more Colorado feel. This may be a bit hard starting in the fall, but we have a large number of wonderful fall produce that is available to us. Now is the season for canning, so I’ll bring up some chutneys, recipes for canning and make use of the delicious squashes that are available.

 Cooking demos:

I’ve been working a little with my videographer and we’re going to start meeting to discuss the taping of a weekly cooking demo that we would then post up on youtube. We’ve already got several ideas for some episodes to tape. However we’d love to have some ideas, feel free to respond here and tell me what demonstrations you’d like to see.

So last week I was strolling through the cheese section at the Deli of King Soopers when I came across a cheese that really caught my eye. There sat this light cream colored cheese with some beautiful marbling of spices running throughout it.

I stopped and picked it up, and the name stuck with me then as well, No Woman. The lable told me how the beautiful marbling was actually Jamaican jerk seasonings, adding a delicious nutty flavor to the cheese. It made it directly into my basket and I whisked it away home.

It is with the deepest of regrets that I must report that this cheese was in fact quite awful. While the texture was ok, not over flaky, it wasn’t overly creamy either. Tasted more like a medium quality white American or low quality white cheddar cheese. I know that I can’t expect much out of an american cheese that must be pasteurized, but I was hoping for at least some mouth feel, but alas there was none.

Next we’ll come to the flavor…the cheese itself brought nothing to the table. Not even a hint of that velveeta or kraft oily knockoff cheese flavor. It seems that Beecher’s sought to support the entire cheese on the Jamaican jerk spices alone…and of that they did a poor job.

The jerk seasonings that I have had before have all exploded on to my tounge instantly with a tremendous spicy yet totally delicious flavor. One that did not simply burn out your taste buds but danced across it, bringing tears to your eyes because of the heat but making you laugh out in joy at the life it brings to your buds.

No Woman failed at that one too. The only thing that I tasted was a bitter burned flavor, with nary a distinct or happy spice to be found. Perhaps if they had even made the attempt to be like spicy pepper jack and just burn my mouth it would have been acceptable.

All I was left with in the end was a poor destitute triangular shaped white hunk of nasty. I didn’t even move on to trying to cook with it, didn’t seem like it was anything other than a waste of my hard earned $7 for a 1/4 pound.

One final comment, this cheese has made my list…it is the first cheese that I have never liked. I can even appreciate lousy American cheese slices that are individually wrapped, velveeta, feta, Chevre…all of it I love..but not No Woman.

So I know that there are a lot of blogs out there from people who love to review food, restaurants, and everything in between. I’ve looked at this niche, and I think I see room for one more. I want you all to know that I want more from this blog and my site than just a small following of readers.

I would love for this to become something truly informative and helpful for everyone out there. I don’t want to be the cynic that dogs on everything he eats because it doesn’t live up to his ideals. Sure there is a lot out there that I don’t care for but there is so much that I do love.

That’s one of the things that I always try to stick by in every dish that I create. Love, it’s that one secret ingredient to food that can’t be identified in any recipe, but without it all food becomes lifeless and boring. There are cooks who can sling hash on a plate in less than 30 seconds, and it’s good in that, “well at least it’s warm and brown” kind of way, but there’s no passion in it’s design.

Food can be the ultimate expression of friendship or love. It can cross all cultural boundaries and bring people together over a table. For thousands of years there have been strict customs and guidelines for how people should break bread with each other.

Sometimes I think that we’ve forgotten all of these things in our new highspeed world of the McDonalds drive through. When families don’t make the time to sit together and talk about how they are doing, or how their days have been. Maybe it is a little cliche, but if people look at it, I bet it’s one thing that they miss from when they were children.

As I mentioned above I would love for this blog to be more than just a review site, or a totalitarian diatribe of my own beliefs. So I’ll work my hardest to make it more than that. However, to make things better it’s going to have to change and evolve. I’ll gladly listen to any ideas, complaints, or compliments you have on this and I’ll work to make it better.

So, a little about me.

I didn’t grow up in a small village in France, learning to appreciate the finer things in life such as the amazing foodstuffs that can only be found on the side streets of Paris.

I grew up in a suburb of Denver Colorado. Arvada was never very exciting, kind of a small town on the western end of a relatively small metropolitan area. My grandfather was alergic to so many things that my grandmother was forced to cook with a very limited repetoir of ingredients, and I think that really colored my mothers cooking. So growing up I never really got to experience a lot of wonderful foods, as we didn’t have a lot of money it was mostly comfort and convienence food. Dishes all prepared in one pot to save on the cleanup, barely any salt or pepper, and there were almost never any other spices to compliment it.

So from an early age I always wanted to experiment more with other flavor combinations and spices. Like most families we had those 20 year old spices in the cupboard that were never used. I tried them though, mixing and matching when no one was home. Sure I made a lot of mistakes, being 8…and having no experience, but I began to learn what I liked and what went well together.

As I grew older I began watching the cooking shows on Public Television. I longed to be like them, some day I would have my own show I swore. When I would sit in my nightly bath I would pretend like I had my own show, mimicking my heroes: Graham Kerr, Justin Wilson, Julia Child, and Martin Yan.

Then, I suppose, as all children experience my dreams faded as I grew older. We are taught that to follow our passions is unrealistic and our goals are unreachable. Teachers educate us on how to be round pegs and go through the round holes of life, and to not be different.

I found myself adrift after highschool. I moved from job to job, working in the fast food industry, security, casinos, banking, IT…and all of it seemed to leave me unsatisfied. However I coninued to experiment with my food at home, occasionally trying out new dishes on my family at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Eventually I married, and she was much like my mother. She didn’t appreciate fine food, or the blending of different spices all working to compliment each other. But still I cooked, it was the only thing that ever made me truly happy, it was still the only thing that could get my energies and juices flowing no matter how lousy my day had been.

Then one day I got laid of from my IT job. Not knowing where anything was going to lead I decided to take an even larger plunge and finally go to college. So I attended Johnson & Wales University here in Denver. Finally I had found where I truly belonged, in a huge kitchen, producing on the hotline for scores of hungry people. I excelled in my classes, maintaining a 3.76 GPA while working one full time job, and sometimes a second job just to keep the bills paid.

Unfortunately as I moved closer to my following my dreams my wife worked hard to quash them. Constantly leaving passive aggressive signs that she didn’t approve of what I was doing. Newspaper clippings about failed restaurants, magazine articles about the lower numbers of people eating out, the constant off hand comments about how I couldn’t do it. So once I finished my internship at the Stanley Hotel and graduated, I left my wife and moved on.

Since then life has had it’s ups and downs, I’ve worked catering jobs, restaurant jobs, and times have gotten hard and I’ve moved back to IT to get health insurance. But still I cook for those I care about, and I explore my culinary career in other ways.

For the past two years I have done a Japanese Cooking presentation at the Anime convention that I volunteer for. It has proven to be an overwhelming success and only looks like it can get better.

Currently I am working on expanding into other areas, with ideas that are low cost but can bring me and others a great deal of satisfaction. Stay tuned here and I’ll update again with more information.

I suppose technically that’s Molé…

Any ways, this last weekend I decided to try out my hand at making some authentic Mexican sauces, and I whipped out a molé sauce. I found the recipe on one of my favorite sites www.foodnetwork.comof course. I took Tyler Florence’s recipe and played around with it just a little bit.  I wasn’t able to find any anaheim or serrrano chillies so I added more anchos, a few extra chipotles and the adobo sauce from the can.

As well, I don’t have a coffee grinder for spices, I plan on getting one soon, but I just used my food processor and it came out a bit thick, but I like that rustic look. (Note: in professional culinary terms when something doesn’t look perfect it’s rustic.)

The chocolate flavor should not be overpowering in the sauce, you should just be able to detect the hint of it at the back of your mouth. As well with the mixture of peppers it should not be so spicy that it destroys your taste buds on contact, but rather just enough spice to say, “HI, I’M HERE!!!!” but with a wonderfully complex flavor, which the acid in the lime juice brings to the forefront of your palette so wonderfully.

First I tried it out on some wonderful Beef Ribs and it turned out pretty well. I didn’t think it had quite as much flavor as I wanted so we headed back to the store where we picked up some round steak. I portioned out all the steaks and marinated them in the mole for about 3 hours.

From there Maggie (that’s my girlfriend) and I headed off to her company picnic where I was determined to enjoy the sauce a little more. By then the recipe had married into itself a little more like all good Mexican sauces do and it tasted twice as good. So with a few SNAFUs with the grilling (read: don’t ever buy the light in the bag charcoal, it don’t work.) Anywho, the steaks turned out to be a pretty big hit, I cooked 24 of them and there were only 3 left when we decided to head off for the night.

Here’s my altered recipe:

Mole sauce:

6 dried ancho chilies, stemmed and seeded

4 canned chipotle chilies, plus 3 T adobo sauce

1/4 cup golden raisins

1/4 cup whole almonds

1/4 cup sesame seeds

1 tablespoon whole black peppercorns

1 cinnamon stick, preferably Mexican, broken in pieces

1 tablespoon dried oregano, preferably Mexican

4 sprigs fresh thyme, leaves only

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

2 onions, sliced

3 cloves garlic, chopped

2 serrano peppers, stemmed and seeded

6 plum tomatoes, chopped

2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, preferably Mexican, chopped

The juice of 1 lime

Directions

For the mole: Tear the ancho, anaheim, and chipotle chiles into large pieces and toast them in a dry skillet over medium heat until they change color a bit, about 2 minutes. Put them into a bowl with the raisins and cover them with hot water. Soak unti softened, about 30 minutes. In the same skillet over medium heat, add the almonds, sesame seeds, peppercorns, cinnamon stick, oregano, and thyme. Toast for 2 minutes, grind in a spice grinder, and add the powder to a blender. In the same skillet over medium-high heat add the olive oil, onions, garlic, and serrano. Cook until lightly browned, then add the tomatoes. Cook until vegetables are softened, about 10 to 15 minutes, then add to the blender. Add the chocolate and the soaked chiles and raisins to the blender along with some of the chile soaking liquid. Puree, adding more soaking liquid as needed, to make a smooth sauce. (This makes about 4 cups sauce, the recipe uses 2 cups, the extra can be frozen).