Hey, Look, a Cookie!

Buckwheat shortbread.  This unassuming little cookie has become my favorite over the years.  Nothing tricksy about it, just flours, sugar, butter, a little baking powder and salt.  Extremely forgiving.  The first time I made these I misunderstood Mary's cryptic jottings on the recipe (she's our home's main sweets baker), and combined the ingredients in totally the wrong order.  They still came out great.  Sablé means sandy in French, an apt description of the slightly gritty quality the buckwheat flour lends.  These are rustic and somehow elegant at the same time, distinctive, but comfortingly familiar.

Buckwheat Sablés
makes about 6 dozen


8 ounces butter (2 sticks)
2/3 cup sugar
1 cup buckwheat flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 large egg yolks


Preheat oven to 325. In a large mixing bowl, thoroughly mix the butter and sugar. In a separate bowl, combine the flours, baking powder, and salt. Add the flour mixture to the butter and sugar, mixing with your hands to incorporate. Form a well in the center and add the egg yolks, then mix them in with a fork until the texture is uniform, a bit like wet sand. Test the dough to see if it will come together by squeezing a little ball in your hand. If it's crumbly, mix in cold water a tablespoon at a time until it coheres.

Two ways to proceed from here: Roll out the dough 1/4 inch thick and cut out small fluted cookies (or another shape you like).  Or divide the dough into four pieces and roll each into a log about one inch in diameter. Wrap these in plastic and refrigerate for at least 45 minutes. When the dough is cold, slice off 1/3-inch pieces.

In either case: Place the dough on non-stick or parchment-lined cookie sheets, and bake for 18 to 20 minutes, until lightly brown--the color or the buckwheat make it a little tough to tell, but they shouldn't need more than 20 minutes.

Remove from the oven and let the cookies cool on the cookie sheets for two or three minutes, then remove them to a wire rack to finish cooling. These keep quite well in a close container.
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p.s.~ I switched to the new blog editor, which seems to have solved the line break problem I was having--but I wonder why I can't seem to be able to add more than one photo at a time to the blog...?


Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Sweetly

Got all the recipes for the book rounded up, a hundred-forty-plus: two desserts, and one of them was toast. I'm not joking.



Me, when I hear "dessert," I translate that to "cheese." It is not that I don't like sweets; indeed, at certain points in my life, like my entire childhood, I liked them too much, just ask my dentist. Little will power issue there, so over time I backed away until today I hardly ever eat dessert. But I felt that a whole wide-ranging cookbook with two desserts, one of them toast, would be sort of lame. So I cooked a few up, and I'm glad I did. In the last couple of days I made two takes on maple, apple, cream and eggs: maple flan with maple-calvados sauce, and maple-apple custard pots (pots de creme, en autres mots). Maple and apple go really well together, and hey, it's what I've got.



Then today, an apple-blackberry galette, darling and delicious, with our own apples and blackberry jam, a triumph. So lately I am taking that good advice about eating dessert first, and then eating it again, just for good measure. Pictures here of two of those three, recipe for one. I gotta go walk the dogs for a couple of hours.



Maple Flan with Maple-Calvados Sauce
Serves four

The custard is rich and light at the same time, just barely sweet. The caramel and syrup are intensely mapley, quite sweet; the Calvados and vinegar cut the sweetness and complement the maple flavor beautifully.

The Syrup:
¾ cup maple syrup
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
1 ½ tablespoons Calvados or applejack (or, in a pinch, brandy or rum)
Good pinch salt
2 teaspoons unsalted butter

The Custard:
3 yolks from large eggs
1 whole large egg
6 tablespoons maple syrup
1 ½ tablespoons Calvados or applejack
Pinch salt
1 cup whole milk
½ cup heavy cream

Heat your oven to 300.

For the syrup, reduce the maple syrup by half in a small saucepan over medium heat, taking care that it does not boil over. When it is reduced, very thick and dark, spoon one tablespoon into each half-cup ramekin, and turn and tip the ramekins to distribute the syrup partway up the sides. To the remaining reduced syrup add the vinegar, Calvados, and a pinch of salt, and stir to mix. Set aside.

For the custard: In a mixing bowl whisk together the egg yolks and whole egg. Heat the milk and cream to boiling in a small saucepan. Turn off the heat and let sit for two minutes. Very slowly whisk the milk-cream mixture into the eggs yolks, a couple of tablespoons at a time at first. When half the milk and cream have been added, pour in the rest in a steady stream, continuing to whisk. Add the six tablespoons maple syrup, Calvados, and salt. Strain the custard into a large measuring cup, then pour it into the ramekins. Place the ramekins in a cake pan and add hot water to halfway up the ramekins. Loosely cover the pan with aluminum foil. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes. The custards are done when the sides have firmed up, and there’s just a wee wiggle in the center. Let cool to room temperature, then refrigerate until ready to serve.

Just before serving, reheat the sauce over medium heat. Stir in the butter and bring the sauce to a boil. It should have a syrupy consistency; if you want it thicker, reduce it a bit more.

Run a paring knife around the edge of the ramekins, and invert each onto a plate. Spoon a bit of sauce over the custards, and bring the rest to the table.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

The Last Pizza Post

I never would have thought that in the first six months of Trout Caviar I'd do three pizza posts, but there you go. In the previous post I mentioned an idea for a grilled dessert pizza topped with rhubarb compote, and that idea came to fruition so successfully, I have to share the results.

So: You make the pizza dough from this entry (you need to scroll down a bit). Three-quarters of it you use for the main-course pizza, the rest becomes dessert. (You can make the dough, any of the three options, the morning or even the night before you plan to use it; refrigerate, punch down a couple times till it stops overflowing the bowl, take it out a couple hours before dinner to let it warm up.)

As topping I made this simple, delicious rhubarb compote:

Rhubarb-Honey-Thyme Compote

1/2 pound rhubarb (about six stalks)--cut into 1/2" pieces
1/4 cup honey
1/2 cup water

Combine in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Turn down and simmer 10 minutes. Remove from heat and add:

A few sprigs fresh thyme
Pinch salt
A couple grinds black pepper (this was a nice touch of spice)

A few drops lemon juice, if you like

Cover and let the thyme steep for at least an hour.

This can then be used on the pizza, on a buttermilk shortcake, over ice cream.

Continuing with the pizza: Shape the remaining dough into a 10-inch round. Brush the top with a neutral oil like canola or grapeseed.

Prepare a glaze: Mix two teaspoons honey with one teaspoon of rum (or brandy, or water in a pinch).

Have your coals ready, as in the previous post. You can, and should, grill the dessert crust right after you're done the main-course pizza, while your coals are still good. Then it can just sit until you're ready to top it.

Brush the grill grate with oil, and slide the dough on. Grill for three minutes, watching to be sure it doesn't burn. Flip the dough over, and bake for two minutes. Then flip again, brush the top (you once again have the original top facing up) with the honey-rum glaze, flip it once more, and cook for another minute-and-a-half or so--BE VERY CAREFUL not to let it burn. With the honey it will burn very quickly.

But a little focused attention will produce something like what you see above, which would be good enough to eat as is, or with a dusting of powdered sugar, like a county fair funnel cake. Topped with the rhubarb compote and some whipped cream, it becomes an elegantly rustic dessert.

You could also top it with strawberries--a strawberry shortcake-type variation--fresh peaches in season, grilled apples tossed with a little more of the honey-rum glaze and a few leaves of fresh thyme or mint. Knock yourselves out.

This really is worth doing. The glaze baked to a lacquered, glossy finish, keeping the dough nice and crisp and light. The compote had the right tart-sweet balance, the thyme and pepper adding complexity, and the Cedar Summit whipped cream--I could eat a bowl of that straight up.

And thus concludes the pizza posts.

Text & photos copyright 2008 by Brett Laidlaw