1. When I got an ice cream maker, I was excited to try out some of the recipes in "The Sweet Life" dessert cookbook. For a holiday meal I made two: Apple Cider and Caramel Ice Cream, and Quince Sorbet. The first came off well and offered my first opportunity to make caramel, and as the book said it would, the flavor was quite reminiscent of Tarte Tatin. But I have to admit I was a bit disappointed that the flavor of the two ingredients was so fused, rather than remaining independently recognizable.
The Quince Sorbet turned out very nicely, and was pretty fun to make. The book advised that leaving the seeds in during the preparation, then straining them out at the end, would allow the pectin in them to act as a natural gelatin and make the sorbet creamier. The texture was unique, quite different from that of other sorbet, perhaps halfway between sorbet and Jell-o. The results are below.
2. When I finally got a large Le Creuset Dutch/French oven, I tried out the No-Knead Bread recipe from the New York Times. The recipe's concept is that letting the dough sit at room temperature for an extended period does the same work that kneading would normally do. Supposedly this technique allows home cooks to produce bread of the same calibre as the best bakeries.
The recipe instructs us to "Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature." I let it rest for the full 18, but I found that at that point the dough had actually fallen some from the volume it had at 12 hours. This may have contributed to the compressed appearance the bread had after cooking. It was pretty tasty, but a small reward for the effort because it got stale very very quickly.
3. I spoke recently of my devotion to Pierre Hermé's macarons, or French macaroons. I took the chance to try making my own when the office held a cookie bake-off. I thought I might try to recreate the flavors in the Ispahan, but although I did find Rose water, I couldn't find any lychees in the time I had. So instead I went with chocolate and raspberry, and combined recipes from the web and The Sweet Life. The preparations were a lot of fun and a big mess. Maya offered some much-appreciated assistance in assembling the final product.
To my great surprise, I ended up winning the bake-off. The best part of this was that while everyone was tasting cookies, the bakers were anonymous, so I got to hear everyone's totally honest reactions. Some said that my macaroons tasted like Milanos, others compared them to peanut butter and jelly, and others just made interesting faces. After my trip to Pierre Hermé and the fun I had making them, I think I'll stick to my theme if there's ever another bake-off, and experiment with flavors some more.
4. I've also been pretty excited about Molecular Gastronomy, whatever its limitations, and wanting to see if I can do any of it at home without any anti-griddles or vacuum cookers. I perused the recipe collection at Khymos.org, and one struck me as requiring almost no effort or special ingredients at all. It wasn't really a recipe so much as the idea, from Hervé This, that if you made an emulsion of egg white and olive oil, and heated it in a microwave, it would set as a gel. This might not taste very good on its own, but it was suggested that one could add other flavors easily. There were no measures specified.
When I microwaved the mixture, bubbles expanded outward and upward in an impressive display. I let the microwave go for about ten seconds. When I turned it off, the mixture lost its volume abruptly. I took it out, and it had basically turned into a small puck of cooked egg white. In appearance and smell it was just about the nastiest thing I've ever made; I didn't bother tasting it.
The recipe collection has now been updated and much improved, and this idea has become a real recipe, with fruit syrup in the place of olive oil. It states that one egg white will yield two liters of foam, and that only a couple of seconds in the microwave are necessary.
