Brioche: My Obsession

Brioche. I get a food boner just thinking the word. I'm slightly obsessed with it. When food blogger Tony Tahhan came to visit the CIA we had a great conversation about blogging, bread and especially brioche. He wrote a whole blog post about our conversation.
I love brioche because it is a wonderful wonderful half bread, half butter pastry.  It is so classic, yet so versatile. It can be full fat, half fat, whole wheat, sweet or savory; either way it makes great hamburger buns, french toast, waffles, donuts, pastries and if you feel particularly naughty you can laminate it!(the process of folding butter in between layers of dough)
During my time in back of house Apple Pie Bakery Cafe (APBC), the student run cafe at the Culinary Institute of America, I worked the brioche station. Every morning I was responsible for making a slew of pastries made out of brioche. During my class evaluation with the chef of the cafe, Francisco Migoya, he made a comment to me that brioche is so versatile that you could have an entire bakery of brioche products. I don't know if he saw that light bulb switch on over my head but he planted a seed that day. I had long been an ardent rejecter of any notion that I would one day own my own place. "too much work" I always replied, but secretly, I day-dream about a successful bakery cafe that only sells brioche products. Of course it would have to be somewhere where the customers do not care about butter consumption... maybe if Paula Dean sponsored it...
There are any number of ways that I could make a brioche item for my graduation open house. Since I'm having a hard time picking one, I'll make three. The first is my take on one of the pastries I made at APBC: a brioche fruit tart. The second is a miniature version of the national bread of Belgium: Craquelin. The third is another classic Belgian preparation: a waffle.

Brioche can be difficult to make at home, you need a strong, powerful mixer. My professional series Kitchen Aid is a very strong mixer, however, every time I make brioche I put it within seconds of overheating and breaking. To give my mixer a break, I usually start the dough in the mixer until it comes together. Then I remove the dough and hand knead the dough to full gluten development.
This can take quite a few minutes and gives my arm muscles an intense work out!
After the dough has reached intense gluten development, I return it to the mixer and start adding butter, small pliable pieces at a time until it is all incorporated.

This is called the window. It shows gluten development. If the dough pulls apart when stretched, the gluten development is light. If you can pull the dough very thinly and see light through the other side without tearing holes in the dough, it has reached full gluten development.

These are the baked Craquelin: brioche wrapped around sugar cubes.

 waffled brioche dipped in fondant

citrus vanilla custard brioche tarts with orange marmelade

Chocolate Maker's Mark Bottles

The next item on my meaningful food series is another chocolate. This combines a favorite technique I learned in chocolate class and my alcoholic drink of choice: Maker's Mark Bourbon.
One Thanksgiving a few years past, my best friend, Christian and I decided to drive to her house outside of Louisville because it was about six hours closer to our New York campus than Kansas City. We had a blast on our weekend 14 hour road trip each way. When we arrived, Christian really wanted to drink our way through the Kentucky Bourbon Trial and who was I to say no?! We started at Maker's Mark distillery, which really is a shame. My advice to anyone who is interested in doing the bourbon trial, save Maker's Mark for last because it truly is the best and will put all the others to shame! All of the other distilleries have some kind of self guided gift shop/ hallway that explains the bourbon making process. At maker's Mark, you drive out to the middle of who knows where and pull in a long winding drive. The distillery is dwarfed by all the others, the buildings are black and every window is adorned by bright red shutters with the shape of a bottle cut out. There is an old wooden covered bridge and being that it was the holidays everything was adorned by a bright red bow. If my description sounds so sweet and adorable it is giving you cavities, then stop reading because it only gets more charming.

These are the open mash tanks. The whole room smelled very very yeasty. Yum.

We were heartily greeted by every person we passed on our way inside the visitor center. We were given a tour by a descendant of the founder and she knew the name of every employee we passed. That might be more impressive if there were more than about 50 employees total. We saw every step in the process and were even allowed to taste the sour mash if we desired.
At the end of the tour, we entered a large gift shop where you can buy anything dipped in red wax. If somehow they forgot to dip something, you can dip it at the bottle dipping station in the gift shop. Of course I HAD to dip my own commemorative bottle.

The chocolates I am making for the graduation open house where I am featuring these special foods are mini chocolate Maker's Mark Bourbon Bottles. It is a very difficult technique that I did in school and have tried three times at home and have never been successful. I am determinded to make these work!

The first step is to mold a tiny bourbon bottle out of polymer clay and fill up a shallow sided cookie sheet with regular corn starch. Bake the corn starch and the clay bottle in a low oven. The bottle should take about 10-15 minutes and the corn starch should be baked for several hours and even over night. This dries out the corn starch, it is a very important step! If the cornstarch is not dried out, it will just obsorb the liquor syrup and you will just have a big mess. Tip: make sure you have more than enough dried corn starch to fill the baking pan AND plenty to dust over the top later. I once made the mistake of not drying enough and dusted fresh corn starch over the top and it just obsorbed into the syrup.

The second step, once the corn starch is dry, is to level it and press the clay bottle into the starch. This is a tidious and frustrating step. Every ridge, tiny ball of starch and imperfection will be evident in the finished sugar mold and could show in the finished chocolate. Tip: make plenty of molds because you will inevitably break several along the way.

The third step is to cook your sugar syrup and add the liquor. This step is much easier when you have the proper equipment: a fondant gun. Unfortunatly I don't have the funds for a proper fondant gun or any other suitable substitute. So I ghetto rig an aluiminum foil cone and wrap it in tea towels or anything else I can put between my fingers and 200 degree sugar. However I still use my bare finger and thumb to pinch the tip as I move from mold to mold. My fingers are burnt by the time I finish, but the end result is worth the sacrifice.

The fourth step is to dust the extra dried corn starch over these molds. Make sure they are well covered. The starch draws moisture away from the syrup and causes the sugar to crystalize and form a shell all the way around.

The fifth step is the most fun and also the most infuriating becasue this is when the most bottles break. After the bottles have been crystalizing in the starch for a day or two depending on the size of your bottles, very carefully escavate the bottles out of the starch. Using a clean pastry brush, gently brush away as much excess starch as you can. Tip: if the bottles break, over the starch, just cover the syrup with starch and allow it to recrystalize. It makes the cleaning process much easier.

The sixth step is to dip however many surviving bottles you have in well tempered chocolate. If you have bottles that have a tiny hole that slowly seeps syrup, you can still dip it. However, if the syrup is rapidly leaking out, just cut your loss and pop it into your mouth. Decorate the bottles to mimic the bottle of which ever liquor you use; I colored white chocolate bright red to drip over the top of the bottles.

These chocolates can be infuriating to make, but they are fun and always impress! Don't worry about getting drunk, you will get sick from the sugar long before you feel the effects of alcohol.

Inside the bottle: you can see the crystalized sugar and the liquor syrup pouring out.

Lord, Forgive Me for Lusting After These Beautiful Tomatoes

This next meaningful food is a real culinary tale. It is the tale of me and the tomato. I never liked tomatoes as a child. They had an awful smell and the jelly middle parts disgusted me. My distaste refusal to eat fresh tomato was sealed for me around the age of four. My Greek babysitter had placed a wedge of tomato on every one's lunch plate and I ate everything but that. Before I could go out side and play with everyone, she said that I had to eat the tomato. I didn't want to. So my dear babysitter, with the best of intentions, forced the tomato in my mouth and held my mouth shut until I swallowed. Needless to say, I didn't eat another fresh tomato for almost 16 years.

I was 19 and living in Orlando working at Primo by Melissa Kelly. The restaurant has a garden where they grow a large portion of the restaurant's produce. One night I was working the pastry line and Penny, who was working the salad station announced that she had an extra tomato salad and offered it to me. This salad had always disgusted me, it was a plate of nothing but fresh tomato wedges drizzled with balsamic vinegar and fresh basil. Instinctly, I refused the salad feeling queasy at the thought of eating it, however, in a spilt second I realized that it was not queasy I felt, but ravenous.

 It was ten O'clock at night and I had not eaten anything substantial all day. I turned around and snatched the salad before someone else took it and only out of the desperation of starvation, I forced a tomato in my mouth and swallowed as quickly as possible. I did it again and again trying not to taste the tomato, but it was too late. The tomatoes had coated the inside of my mouth with their sweet, hearty flavor combined with balsamic and basil... I had a religious experience while eating that salad; I was in heaven.

Later I realized that those were not the perfect, red, disgusting tomatoes of my youth. Those were wonderful heirloom tomatoes of many shapes and colors.

Heirloom vegetables are open pollinated, meaning that they will cross pollinate with any flower in their plant family and produce viable seeds. The vegetables that you buy in the grocery store are genetically modified (GMO) and hybrids. The seeds have either been genetically modified to not grow or will not produce consistent vegetables because they are hybrids. They have been bred for consistent size and color to survive shipment rather than flavor.

Heirloom's beauty are in their imperfection and wide variety of colors. I consider them to be the ultimate food porn, they are described with terms like lobed, luscious, juicy, succulent and I would add sexy. Part of their sexiness also comes from their limited availability; unlike their GMO cousins, these tomatoes are only available in the heat of summer usually from the garden. Or so I thought... I was dumbfounded when I walked through the produce section of our local Hy-Vee grocery store and saw local, hot house heirloom tomatoes!

I said a Hail Mary and asked for forgiveness for buying tomatoes in the middle of winter. In my defense, they are real heirloom tomatoes grown locally in a green house, not shipped from Chile. They taste like hot house tomatoes, but they are absolutely beautiful!

Heirloom tomato skewers with fresh torn basil and drizzled with balsamic vinegar.

Thyme and Sea Salt Chocolates

The second food in my series of meaningful food is a chocolate. My very first real culinary job was at Christopher Elbow Chocolates. I was involved in all aspects of making the chocolates back when the shop was in the back of a high end furniture store in the Crossroads Arts District of Kansas City. Now Chris has his own shop in the Crossroads District and a store front in San Francisco.
It is obvious why Christopher Elbow Chocolates has been successful, the chocolates are bright and playful, the flavors are fun and fresh because there are no preservatives or artificial flavors.

The chocolate counter in Kansas City.

This was after we boxed a few hundred boxes one evening before Christmas.

For my graduation open house, I thought for a very long time and quizzed all of my friends about which flavor I should make to represent me.  I knew it had to be fun and unexpected. One night while making dinner I added fresh thyme and thought for a moment about how much I like thyme; instantly I knew the flavor I should make: thyme and sea salt. The chocolate is to honor the time I spent with Chris, so it needed to be colorful. I chose green and blue to represent thyme and the blue of the sea. That also happens to be my favorite color combination.
Here are the steps to make these colorful chocolates:
First, paint the mold with colored cocoa butter.

Since I am molding these in dark chocolate the colors have to be backed in white in order to be seen.

(Unfortunatly, I did not take pictures of the following steps.)
Second, create the chocolate shell by pouring melted, tempered chocolate in the molds and pouring it back out.

Third, make the ganache filling and pipe it into the molded shells almost to the top. Let the ganache sit over night to firm.

Fourth, pour melted, tempered chocolate over the filled mold. Using a wide flat scraper, scrap the chocolate over the mold; the chocolate that fills in the molds creates the bottoms of the pieces.

Fifth and lastly, the pieces can be unmolded by quickly flipping the mold over. If your chocolate has been tempered correctly, the pieces will easily fall out.

Oma's Influence: Fried Rosettes

Now that all of the holiday dust has settled, my mother has decreed that there should be an open house in honor of my graduation. This is exciting, or it would be if I had more friends in Kansas City. Sadly I have kept in sporadic touch with a select few in my native city. It's nothing personal, unfortunately I am prone to out of sight out of mind very often. So a lot of old friends, school teachers, and many of my mother's acquaintances who happen to be my biggest fans are randomly invited to my open house.
There will be food, of course; so I hope more than ten people not on a New Year's crash diet show up. Being a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, I cannot open a can of baked beans and roll some piggies in blankets and call it a day. I have to impress my fans.
I decided that I will make a few finger foods that represent my culinary influences, experiences and travels. This leads me to today's post, the first in a mini series of foods that are meaningful to me. So where does this series of meaningful food begin?
At the beginning. Many Chefs will tell you they started cooking at a young age helping their mother or grandmother in the kitchen. I am no different. I tried to help everyone in the kitchen, but the woman who inspired me in many ways was my Oma, or grandma. She lived an extraordinary life in extraordinary times. She was born at the end of the first world war on the Austrian- Italian border. She was raised in a tiny Alpine village and moved to Rome with her brother who was studying to become a priest. She stayed in Rome during the second war and didn't return home until after the war ended. While working at a ski resort for American soldiers, she met my grandfather. They married and she followed him around Europe, giving birth to three sons until my grandfather was finally stationed state side. She was fluent in six languages, including Latin. She was a college German professor until she retired at the age of 89. Every year she went on a trip with a group from her college and brought back amazing souvenirs. Now, at the ripe old age of 91, she proudly boasts that she has visited 13% of the world's countries on every continent.

This is Oma on our trip through Italy and her homeland two years ago. She is standing behind her house overlooking the 11th century castle ruins and a 17th century castle in Sudtirol.

In the kitchen, she inspired me on many levels. Every year Oma made our birthday cakes, she always had fresh baked cookies, and she made many traditional European tortes which I never appreciated until I was in classical cakes class. Probably the most amazed I have ever been by a culinary achievement was the first time I watched Oma cut up a real potato and make french fries! I had no idea that was possible. It became a special treat at Oma's house and after we fried the fries, we always had rosettes for dessert.
I'm using Oma's set of irons to make rosettes for the party, they look just like they did when I was six.

Warm your soul with a Maker's Mark Tom &Jerry

I have been contemplating my first post of 2011 for a week now. So far I have laid around in my pajamas, grown out my beard, and made dinner for anyone who comes home; that does not inspire a great blog post. However, today the weather changed my routine and I was inspired to share. We are currently being covered in a blanket of snow that is expected to reach eight inches thick. It is wreaking havoc upon Kansas City and I can imagine my friends in New York who have just dug themselves out of two feet of snow rolling their eyes.

Surrounded by cold, I needed something to warm me to the core. A heavy fleece blanket and double socks were not cutting it so I went to an old favorite when snow is falling: a Tom& Jerry.
Tom & Jerry is a classic American Holiday drink. It is a wonderful marshmellowy take on traditional egg nog. It is usually made with Jamaican rum and some people add brandy. Maker's Mark, being my drink of choice, (more on that later) replaces the brandy in my version. It is so easy to make and really warms your soul quickly.

To make  enough drinks to warm your soul and a best friend or two, you need:
1 Tbs Jamaican rum, Maker's Mark (to taste), 2 cups of milk, 2 eggs, separated, 2 1/2 Tbs sugar, small pinch of ground cloves, small pinch of ground allspice, large pinch of ground cinnamon, 1 tsp vanilla extract, fresh nutmeg.

First, lightly beat the yolks, add the vanilla, rum, sugar and spices.

Second, in a separate bowl, whip the egg whites to stiff peaks.

Third, fold the whipped whites into the yolk mixture with a spatula.

It should be smooth and evenly mixed. This is called the base.

While you mix the base, pour the milk into a small sauce pan and bring it just to a boil.

If you are very traditional, their are special Tom & Jerry cups that you can buy; however, this is not a traditional Tom & Jerry, so I am going to use the snowman mug I made in 8th grade ceramics class. You can use whatever mug you prefer.
To make the drinks, fill a quarter of your mug with base. Add as much Maker's Mark into your mug as you would like, everyone can make it as strong as they like. Stir the base and bourbon together.

Next, fill your mug with the scalding hot milk.

Lastly, grate fresh nutmeg over the top.

Enjoy! (and stay warm)

Pastry Chefs have feelings too

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year's with family and friends. The holidays were pretty low key at our house this year. Not only did I take over dinner making responsibilities but I was also prodded into baking cookies to give to neighbors and family friends. I say that I was prodded because to be honest, I really did not feel like baking. however, once I accepted the fact that my mom was determined that I was going to bake, I started planning with enthusiasm. Soon, my list of cookies was extensive and needed dwindling down. I narrowed the list to one or two from each category: cakey, crisp, soft, chocolate, traditional, and unexpected.

My mother wanted to bake with me, bless her, but I haven't learned to share the kitchen with someone who doesn't know what they are doing. So I would ask her to measure a cup of milk or melt a stick of butter, then she was relegated to dish duty.  With my mom's... ahemm... help, I baked off all the cookies.  After all of the cookies were baked and cooled, I mixed icing and began decorating. This is where my pastry skills were tested.

Being a perfectionist, I wanted to do most of the cookies over. One snowflake cookie had squiggly piping, one gingerbread man's eyes were too far apart, etc... I wasn't excited about everyone receiving my cookies and them knowing that I was a professional. I didn't want to ruin my reputation over some Christmas cookies; suddenly I regretted judging a fellow patry chef's cake pictures posted on facebook.



Here are the plates of cookies that were given out: (clockwise from the top left) piselle, mocha madeleines, stained glass tree& gingerbreadman, pecan linzer sandwich cookies, chocolate macaron, peppermint macaron, honey macaron, pumpkin pie macaron, chocolate blackpepper crisp, chocolate cayanne snickerdoodle.



A plate of cookies was not enough, so I also made mini gingerbread houses filled with candied ginger chocolate truffles. The roof was not attached, so you could lift the roof and pick a hidden truffle.

The day before Christmas Eve, as plates of baked goods began to be exchanged, I realized that if I was worried about people judging my cookies, it was nothing compared to angst they felt about handing over their treats. Some seemed apologetic as my mother accepted their plates, almost all stated their apprehension about giving a pastry chef their baked goods.

Here are lists of Do's and Don'ts when exchanging baked goods with a pastry chef.
When giving a chef your baked goods:

1. Do take advice from Julia Child and never apologize.  Be confident in your baking.
2. Do ask for feedback, once, appropriately. If you get a fluff answer, the chef was probably being polite. Appriciate that.
3. Do not assume that a chef makes something better than you. There are a lot of fruit cake recipes and yours might be better!
4. Do try different recipes to change things up.
5. Don't over-extend your self trying to impress the chef. The simplest food in  the world can be the best food when made correctly.
6. Do ask for baking advice or recipes the chef might know about.
7. Don't ask for a good recipe for dirt and worms. (true story)

When receiving baked goods from a chef:

1. Do not exclaim that whatever it is, is too pretty to eat. It was made to be eaten.
2. Do not rave about your expectation that everything will be delicious, a modest mmmmm will suffice.
3. Don't expect baked goods every time you see them, chefs have busy schedules.
4. Don't say that's too fancy for your tastes. keep an open mind!
5. Don't say that was too simple or you expected more from a pastry chef unless you'd like a throw down!
6. Do: say thank you and EAT IT