Authors: Michael Ruhlman
Ruhlman's Twenty (19 page)
10
/Using the hand blender with the whisk attachment, you can add as much oil as you wish—just make sure you have lemon juice or water in proportion to maintain the emulsion.
11
/This is a broken mayonnaise—pourable and unappetizing.
/MAKES
1 CUP/240 MILLILITERS
AIOLI
Aioli, mayonnaise made with garlic and olive oil, is a fabulous sauce for, well, just about anything, from hot or cold vegetables to a steak sandwich, and fried foods such as fish tempura. Traditionally, it was prepared in a mortar using a pestle. I did this once, and it was well worth the effort, as the aioli was exquisitely textured. But I did it only once. I don’t want to have arms like Popeye. Be sure your olive oil tastes good—it’s often rancid or bitter (I find it’s best to buy good olive oil in cans, as light damages olive oil). If it doesn’t taste good plain, it’s going to taste especially poor when it’s emulsified. I find that most aiolis made with 100-percent olive oil are too strongly flavored, so I combine the olive oil with canola or other neutral-tasting oil.
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1 garlic clove, germ removed, mashed to a paste or crushed
1 large egg yolk
½ teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon water
1 cup/240 milliliters olive oil (or a combination of ½ cup/120 milliliters olive oil and ½ cup/120 milliliters other vegetable oil)
Following any of the
methods for making mayonnaise
, combine the lemon juice, garlic, egg yolk, salt, and water. Measure the oil in a cup with a spout, and mix as directed.
SERVES
8 AS AN APPETIZER
OR
4 AS A MAIN DISH
The soufflé is a preparation famed for being temperamental, though I don’t know why. Cooking soufflés is simple. Making them is what takes a little doing. The soufflé is a great example of putting the air-trapping capacity of the egg white to use, while also taking advantage of the richness of the egg yolk.
There are three parts to a great soufflé: the vehicle for the soufflé’s flavoring (often referred to as the base), the flavoring, and the egg whites, whipped to glossy peaks. The base is made first, typically a flour-thickened sauce such as béchamel for savory soufflés or pastry cream for sweet ones. Yolks are added to a béchamel and often are part of the pastry cream. The flavor, often something rich such as cheese or chocolate, is then folded into the sauce, followed by the whipped whites. The mixture is put into ramekins and baked.
The timing is important—soufflés should be served immediately, before the trapped air begins to cool and contract. Fortunately, soufflés can be made ahead and frozen and then baked straight from the freezer in not much more time than it takes to bake them when they’re at room temperature.
This traditional cheese soufflé makes a perfect appetizer or light main dish, served with a salad and a glass of white wine. Because the recipe calls for Cheddar cheese (quality matters here, so buy a good one), I think of it as an American version of the French cheese soufflé, which uses Gruyère. Feel free to use that instead. Or you can experiment—make the béchamel sweet, fold in the same weight of chocolate and let it melt to incorporate it, and then fold in the egg whites for a chocolate soufflé.
Butter for greasing ramekins, plus 2 tablespoons
Finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano for dusting ramekins
1 shallot, minced (about 2 tablespoons)
Kosher salt
2 tablespoons all-purpose/plain flour
1 cup/240 milliliters milk
Cayenne pepper
6 large eggs, separated
1 teaspoon lemon juice
4 ounces/115 grams farmhouse Cheddar cheese, grated (about 1½ cups/170 grams)
Preheat the oven to 350°F/180°C/gas 4.
Butter eight ½-cup/120-milliliter ramekins (or spray them with vegetable oil). Dust the insides with the Parmigiano-Reggiano. Put the ramekins on a baking sheet/tray.
In a small saucepan over medium-high heat, melt the 2 tablespoons butter. Add the shallot and sweat it, stirring, for 1 minute. Add a pinch of salt. Add the flour and stir until the butter and flour are combined and the flour cooks a little. Whisk in the milk and bring to a simmer, continuing to whisk until it becomes thick. Add another pinch of salt and a pinch of cayenne. Remove the béchamel from the heat and let stand for a few minutes.
Meanwhile, in a large bowl, beat the egg whites until frothy. Add the lemon juice and a three-finger pinch of salt. Continue beating until the whites form stiff, glossy peaks.
Beat the egg yolks into the cooled béchamel. Stir in one-fourth of the cheese, followed by about one-fourth of the beaten whites. Fold the béchamel into the remaining beaten whites, sprinkling the remaining cheese over the mixture as you do. When all the ingredients are uniformly combined, spoon the mixture into the ramekins, filling the ramekins about two-thirds full.
Place the baking sheet/tray in the oven and bake until the soufflés are light and airy but set, and the tops are nicely browned, about 25 minutes. Serve immediately.
To freeze soufflés: Fill the ramekins three-fourths full (the freezing has a small impact on the end volume), cover with plastic wrap/cling film and freeze for up to 2 weeks. When ready to cook them, move them straight from the freezer to the hot oven on a baking sheet/tray and bake for 35 to 45 minutes.
/SERVES
8
This is comfort food at its best. What I also like about the bread pudding is that it’s a further example of the power of the egg to transform ordinary ingredients into a special dish. Bread puddings, sweet or savory, are simply custard that has soaked into bread and been cooked, giving richness, flavor, and body to the bread. This recipe works perfectly fine with day-old bread; if using a fresh loaf, toast the bread until dry.
I’ve flavored this bread pudding with the same ingredients that flavor the water for onion soup, the only difference being that the custard replaces the water. The flavor profile of the pudding is similar to that of the soup—which combines the richness and sharpness of the cheese with the sweetness of the onions and the tang of the sherry. This is one way you can teach yourself to improvise. You can look at the bread pudding as blank canvas, as you would a quiche—think bacon and onions (Lorraine), spinach (Florentine), or, in a more dramatic direction, chorizo and roasted red and green peppers.
I like serving the bread pudding with
roast chicken
. Leftovers can be refrigerated for several days, then sliced and sautéed in butter to reheat.
1½ cups/360 milliliters heavy/double cream
1½ cups/360 milliliters milk
6 large eggs
¼ cup/60 milliliters sherry
½ teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 large onions, cut into slices and
caramelized as for onion soup
1 loaf Pullman or good-quality sandwich bread, cut into ¾- to 1-inch/2- to 2.5-centimeter cubes and lightly toasted (about 10 cups/570 grams)
3 cups/340 grams grated Gruyère cheese
½ cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
Preheat the oven to 325°F/165°C/gas 3.
In a blender, combine the cream, milk, eggs, sherry, nutmeg, two three-finger pinches of salt, a few grindings of pepper, and one-third to one-half of the onions. Process until combined.
In a large bowl, toss the remaining onions with the bread until the onions are evenly dispersed. Spread a layer of bread and onions in the bottom of a 9-by-13-inch/23-by-33-centimeter baking dish. Sprinkle about one-third of the Gruyère over the bread. Spread another layer of bread over the cheese, followed by another layer of cheese. Spread the remaining bread over the cheese and then the rest of the Gruyère over the bread. Top with the Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Pour the cream mixture over the bread. Press the bread down to help it begin absorbing some of the liquid. Let sit for 15 minutes or so, then bake until the custard is set, about 1 hour. Serve immediately.
/SERVES
2
The Velvet Tango Room, a bar on the near West Side of Cleveland, Ohio, takes its cocktails seriously. Here is where I had my first Ramos gin fizz, which contains an egg white. As I went on to explore more of the bar’s offerings, I paid close attention to the impact of the egg white on the cocktails. Proprietor Paulius Nasvytis has on his menu a variety of cocktails that include egg white. An egg white gives a cocktail excellent body and a cohesive texture on the palate. It also can be argued that egg white turns the cocktail into food, obviating the argument that it’s 5 P.M. somewhere. The egg certainly makes this cocktail more nourishing than a martini.
Here, all the ingredients except the whiskey are added to a shaker and given a preliminary sturdy shake to ensure that the egg white gets mixed enough. Then bourbon is added and shaken hard to further loosen the egg white, followed by the ice. If you don’t have a cocktail shaker, you can whip the ingredients with a whisk until frothy, pour the mixture over ice and stir, and then strain into glasses when the cocktail is cold.
This version, served straight up, is adapted from Paulius’s recipe to make two cocktails and to provide an easy simple syrup. The exact recipe for the VTR whiskey sour, measured out on a scale at the bar, is 1 egg white, 20 grams simple syrup (2 parts sugar dissolved in 1 part water), 15 grams lemon juice, 5 grams lime juice, and 30 grams Maker’s Mark. The quantities here can be halved or doubled as needed.
1 large egg white
1 tablespoon sugar dissolved in 1 tablespoon water
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 teaspoons lime juice
3 ounces/90 milliliters Maker’s Mark or bourbon of your choice
Ice cubes
Orange slices and cherries for garnish (traditional but very optional as far as I’m concerned)
Chill two martini glasses.
Put the egg white in a cocktail shaker and shake thoroughly 20 to 30 times. Add the sugar water, lemon and lime juices, and bourbon and shake again until well combined. Fill the shaker with ice and shake gently to chill the cocktail completely. Strain into the chilled glasses. Garnish if desired.
THE SUBTITLE TO THIS CHAPTER,
immortal I pray, was written by Fernand Point, chef proprietor of La Pyramide, one of the great restaurants of the twentieth century. A man of extraordinary generosity, he trained a generation of the chefs who would transform French cuisine. He was not only a gifted cook and chef, but an observant and thoughtful man, as his cookbook-cum-memoir,
Ma Gastronomie,
clearly shows.
“The duty of a good cuisinier is to transmit to the generations who will replace him, everything he has learned and experienced.”
“Success is the sum of a lot of little things done correctly.”
“Before judging a thin man, one must get some information. Perhaps he was once fat.”
Point was a large man in every way, and there’s no better reflection of his spirit and his culinary wisdom than his exclamation on butter. Every chef knows why he would say such a thing. This magical, mystical gift from the cow makes almost everything taste better.
As chefs also know, and preach,
fat is flavor,
and few fats are as flavorful or as useful as this dairy fat. Slowly and surely, America is learning that fat is not bad, that it might even be good, that fat doesn’t make us fat. (What does? Eating too much! Surprise!)
Butter is the most useful and most common fat for cooking and eating, and understanding how to use it makes you a better cook. Butter sits in a covered dish on the kitchen counter, is offered wrapped in foil in a dish of ice at a hotel buffet, and is stacked in boxes in the refrigerator case at the grocery store. This easy availability is yet another facet of its usefulness. Unlike other flavorful fats, such as duck fat or mascarpone, butter is always on hand. But because it is ubiquitous, we scarcely stop to think about how truly valuable it is.
Thinking about butter allows us to see it, and use it, as a tool. It shortens the dough that will hold your pie filling or form the cookie you serve with tea. It enriches a sponge cake and also becomes part of the frosting on that cake. It cooks and flavors the meat in your roasting pan/tray. Basting the meat with butter simultaneously helps the meat cook and flavors it, then enriches the pan sauce you later make for the meat. The solids in butter take on extraordinary flavors when gently browned. Butter is a ready-made sauce—serve it soft with a roast chicken, along with a little Dijon mustard. Add aromatics, such as a little shallot and lemon, and it becomes a more complex sauce. Knead some flour into butter, and the mixture becomes the perfect thickener for sauce.
Butter is critical in the sweet kitchen; indeed, it’s hard to imagine a pastry kitchen without it. When asked about butter’s single most important attribute in the pastry kitchen, chef and writer David Lebovitz said, “For me, the most important quality of butter is its flavor. Since baked goods usually have few ingredients, the flavor of the butter is paramount. A second important effect butter brings to doughs and batters is aeration—fluffing up the butter with the sugar creates air pockets that cause cakes, and other batters, to rise so nicely.”
Butter is every bit as critical in the savory kitchen. As Tony Bourdain, chef, writer, and television personality, puts it, “In a professional kitchen, it’s almost always the first and last thing in a pan.” Butter is a great cooking medium, flavoring and giving color to sautés. Added at the end, it completes a dish, making it more luscious, and it smoothes out the texture and flavor of the finished sauce
(see technique #11, Sauce).
Here is a truism that makes the uncertainties and stresses of life a little more manageable: few things cannot be made better with the
addition of a little (more) butter. All cooks should rejoice in this happy circumstance.
To harness the magic of butter, you need to know its parts and how those parts work. Butter is primarily milk fat, 80 percent usually. The fat is what contributes great flavor and texture to so many foods. This fat is hard and opaque at room temperature but melts into translucency. When the fat is separated from the other components of butter, it can be heated to 400°F/200°C before it starts to smoke, which makes it a superlative medium for cooking. Butter fat will do things that other fats do—shorten or make more tender a dough or pastry crust, add richness and flavor to a sauce, or be the main component of a sauce. Water makes up about 15 percent of butter. This is why butter is soft and spreadable at room temperature; pure butter fat is not. Water is what makes it froth when you heat butter in a pan, and it is what keeps the pan cool. The remaining weight of butter is composed of solids (proteins, salts, lactose). Once the water has been cooked out of butter, these solids become brown and flavorful, but they can turn black and bitter if you cook them too long.
Think about the three components that make the butter, and you will have more control over your cooking and a better understanding of why your food is behaving as it does.
As a cooking medium, butter has a few different tiers of use. The first is simply gentle heating. Melt a little butter over medium-low heat and cook food in it until the food is heated through—this can be an egg, a thin piece of fish, or green beans that you’ve boiled and shocked
(see technique #20, Chill).
Generally speaking, no. It’s a matter of choice. Originally salted to help preserve it, butter is now salted because salt improves flavor. If you don’t want extra salt in whatever you’re cooking, use unsalted butter. I almost always use salted butter because that’s what I’ve always used and I like it. For a preparation in which I want to have great control over the salt level (in a sweet pastry) or where salt might not be desirable (in a buttercream icing, say), I may choose unsalted butter.
Chefs, especially pastry chefs, tend to prefer unsalted butter because it gives them more control over the salt levels in their food.
More important to me than salt or no salt is the quality of the butter. At home, use the type of butter you like best.
Raising the heat a little alters the situation. The higher heat cooks off the water in the butter more rapidly. Once that happens, the butter solids brown, and some adhere to the food, coloring it and flavoring it. The only thing to do once this happens is to make sure the solids don’t burn. One of the advantages of cooking food this way is that the butter can be used as a baste. Basting, spooning butter over what you’re cooking, does two things: it flavors the food with the butter fat and the browning butter solids, and it cooks the food from the top down while the hot pan cooks it from the bottom up.
You can use butter to cook at very high temperatures—it is a very effective cooking
fat—but you must first remove the solids that would otherwise turn black and ruin the butter. The process is called
clarifying
butter. As butter is melted over low heat, the solids rise to the top and are spooned away as the water cooks off until all you are left with is pure butter fat. Clarified butter is wonderful for sautéing fish and beef, and it may be the best fat for cooking potatoes.
The fourth level of butter as a cooking method is using it as a poaching liquid. Butter is whisked into a bit of water and melted to retain the solids, water, and butter fat in a homogenous but liquid state. This dense, flavorful medium cooks food very gently and is thus well suited to cooking ingredients that need gentle heat such as
lobster or shrimp
. (See also Using Whole Liquid Butter, following.)
When we combine butter and flour, the butter shortens the strands of gluten that make some flour-based preparations chewy, such as bread, resulting in a tender crumb, which you want in a pastry crust or in shortbread. The reason to choose butter as opposed to another fat, such as lard or vegetable shortening or even olive oil (a fat that’s fluid at room temperature), is flavor. The flavor of butter is a natural partner for flour. Try the shortbread for a vivid expression of this.
Remember that butter is composed of 15 percent water, which encourages the formation of gluten, especially with a lot of kneading. Gluten is desirable in a bread or a noodle, but not in a pie crust. Butter will thus have less shortening power than the same weight of a pure fat, such as lard.
One of the wonderful components of butter is the milk solids, which turn brown as they cook and develop rich nutty, salty, sweet flavors. These flavors enhance the taste of many foods, especially starchy foods. Pasta, bread, potatoes, polenta, and risotto all make a great canvas for the complexity of brown butter. Brown butter is a traditional sauce for lean white fish, seasoned with lemon juice and parsley, a preparation called à la meunière (mew-nee-AIR). The
roasted cauliflower
owes most of its deliciousness to the butter that melts down through the florets, browns in the pan, and then flavors the cauliflower as a baste. Brown butter pairs perfectly with sweet pastries, creams, and cakes. You can even try browned butter on popcorn. It’s fabulous.
The only thing you need to be careful about is overcooking the butter, in which case it goes from brown to black, and black rarely tastes good. When you know that the butter in your refrigerator can be transformed into a versatile, delectable sauce, you have a last-minute way to finish almost any dish.
If you take care not to let the water and solids separate from the fat when you melt butter, you will have a product completely different from butter in any other form. In restaurant kitchens, it’s often referred to as
beurre monté
(burr mohn-TAY), “mounted butter,” from the French phrase
monter au beurre,
to mount, or whisk, butter into a sauce. The butter is ready to enrich sauces at the last minute when the kitchen is busy and time is tight. It also makes a great baste and an incomparable cooking medium.
Beurre monté
is made by whisking chunks of butter into a tablespoon or two of hot water over medium heat. Butter is already an emulsification of fat and water. By melting the butter this way, you maintain the emulsion so that the butter is liquid but opaque, creamy, and homogenous. If you were simply to melt the butter without the continual whisking, the clear fat would separate from the water and solids.
As a cooking medium,
beurre monté
is especially suited to foods that require gentle
heat, especially lobster and shrimp. Lean, firm white fish such as halibut are likewise excellent poached in butter. It can be spooned over pan-roasted meats as a baste, and it can be added to sauces in the same way that whole solid butter is swirled into sauces.
Most hot, stock-based sauces are improved when you finish them by swirling in a little butter just before serving. In professional kitchen parlance, this is called mounting a sauce with butter, or
monté au beurre.
The butter smoothes out the texture of the sauce, making it more voluptuous and satisfying.
If you work an equal volume of flour into solid butter, you will have something called kneaded butter,
beurre manié
(burr man-YAY), which is whisked into a sauce. A loose, broth-like sauce will become opaque and thicken as the flour grains, separated from one another by a coating of butter, expand in the hot liquid. It’s a terrific way to enrich a sauce while improving its texture.
One of the best ways to put the qualities of butter to work is as a garnish. Butter and mustard make a great finish for a roasted chicken. Radishes with butter are a traditional French hors d’oeuvre. Butter on bread is even a kind of garnish.
A preparation called compound butter is a terrific do-ahead garnish for most grilled/barbecued or roasted meats and fish. Simple to make, it can be varied according to your whim. Let the butter soften, then mix in aromatics, fresh herbs, minced shallot, or lemon. One traditional variation is
“hotel butter”—
beurre maître d’hôtel
—
which includes parsley, shallot, and lemo. Compound butter is usually rolled into a log using plastic wrap/cling film, then is sliced and placed atop hot meat or fish, over which it slowly melts. For a grilled steak, I like to make a
compound butter with chipotle chiles, cilantro/fresh coriander, shallot, and lime juice
.
In the same way that duck fat and lard are used to make confits—poaching duck or pork in fat, then allowing it to cool submerged in the fat, preserving the meat—butter can act as a preserver. My friend and teacher Michael Pardus suggests a couple of approaches to using butter for this purpose.
You can make salmon confit by poaching a salmon fillet in
beurre monté
that’s about 145° to 150°F/63° to 65°C. A thin piece will take about 5 minutes, a thick piece about 7 minutes. Let the salmon cool in the pan. Or transfer it to a dish and pour the butter in the pan over the salmon so that it is completely submerged. Refrigerate the salmon until you’re ready to use it. It can be warmed and eaten as is, or you can make salmon rillettes: bring it to room temperature and stir it so that it shreds, season with salt and lemon, add some of the poaching butter, and then put the salmon in a ramekin and pour a layer of butter on top.
The preservative effects of butter also work with summer berries. Beat room-temperature butter with a rubber spatula until soft and creamy. Stir in berries as if making a berry compound butter. Roll the butter into a log with plastic wrap/ cling film and freeze to use later in the year for baking, making a sauce, garnishing, or finishing a dessert. “Berry compound butter on waffles is awesome!” Pardus exclaims.
When you learn to cook, you learn to group foods and techniques in ways that may not be obvious. One of the most useful groupings is fat. When professional cooks taste a dish, in addition to evaluating it for seasoning (salt) and acidity/sweetness, they ask themselves, Does this dish have the right amount of fat? Fat gives food depth of flavor, succulence, and fine texture. Think of sorbet on your tongue, and then think of ice cream on your tongue. Fat is the primary difference in the experience. When you taste something you’re working on, ask yourself, Does this sauce have the depth of texture and satisfying nature that I’m after? If not, fat may be the solution.
The next question is, What kind of fat? Butter is the most common and useful finishing fat. But for a tomato sauce, emulsifying some olive oil may be what you’re after (though I like butter in fresh tomato sauces as well). Cream, in effect butter with a lot more water, is another fat that can enhance a dish. Animal fats—bacon fat or duck fat, for instance—can add great flavor to a sauce such as a vinaigrette.
Fat as a cooking medium allows you to get food very, very hot, so hot that it can become crispy. Your choice of fat makes a difference in the finished dish. Potatoes fried in duck fat have a different flavor than potatoes fried in canola oil, a neutral oil; they also seem to get especially crispy. Clarified butter gets hotter than most other flavorful fats and so makes a great fat for sautéing. Duck poached in duck fat will give you a delicious preparation called duck confit, preserved duck that’s unparalleled in its rich flavor and succulence. A simple batter of eggs, flour, and milk cooked in hot beef fat makes luxurious, savory Yorkshire pudding.
The type of fat you use in a pastry dough affects the dough. You can make a pie crust using butter (rich and flavorful, with some water), vegetable shortening (neutral flavor), or lard (a rich savory flavor with greater shortening capacity because of its lack of water).
Some fats should only be used as finishing fats. Extra-virgin olive oil would be ruined in a hot sauté pan. Use it cold or warm for its elegant flavor.
Choose fat according to the results you want. A factor in your decision may be the desire to make your wallet happy—the most flavorful fats are often more expensive than the neutral ones. It’s fine to use less expensive oils for big jobs such as deep-frying and daily sautéing. Canola oil and other neutral oils tend to have less saturated fat and are considered better for your body.
