The beautiful Charlotte

With a name as beautiful as its taste, it is still debatable how this classic French moulded dessert or its name come about.

Besides sponge biscuits, bread, sponge bread or biscuits are also used to line the mould, which is then filled with a fruits and whipped cream or custard.

The below Charlotte recipe was done with canned peach, making it very straightforward to make. Just make sure you give yourself plenty of time to set in the fridge.

Recipe source: unknown. It was a recipe Rémi found on some French website long ago and untraceable.


Charlotte with canned peach
serves 4-6

2 packets of sponge fingers biscuits
1 big can of peaches in syrup
250ml fresh cream
pinch of sugar (icing or castor)
pinch of salt
a few drops of vanilla essence

Before starting to whip fresh cream, leave the mixing bowl in freezer for 15 minutes. The fresh cream has to be cold (if you're using packet long-life cream, put into fridge an hour earlier).

Whip the cream until thick. Add the sugar, salt and vanilla essence.

To achieve the above look, you need to have a loose-based round baking tin. Although I didn't think of that when I made it yesterday, place the ring of the tin onto a serving dish.

Next is to start lining the tin with sponge fingers. Each time you do that, dip the biscuit BRIEFLY in the peach syrup.

Cut one end of the sponge fingers, and place them cut-end down to line round side of the tin. Use the leftover pieces and more biscuits if needed to line the bottom until the bottom is tightly packed.

Spread a generous layer of whipped cream over the sponge fingers base. Follow by a layer of sliced peaches. And then follow by another layer of sponge fingers (remember to dip in syrup first).

Top with another layer of whipped cream. And then cover with diced peaches.

Refrigerate for 4-6 hours before serving.

My charlotte didn't collapse when I remove the ring around it. If yours do, tie up with a thick ribbon, that should do the trick in keeping the biscuits in place.

Tips:
1. A big jelly mould can be used instead of ring tin. In this case, end the last layer with the sponge finger biscuits, cover with a plate, and unmould be inverting it.
2. Fruits like strawberries can be used in place of canned peach. In this case, make your own sweet syrup. Like making a syrup out of strawberry jam.
3. Custard can be used in place of whipped cream, though we've never tried that.

Chestnut Jam

Chestnuts feature very much in Corsican cooking (Corsica is an island off the South of France), so much so that they name an entire region after it (la Castagniccia).

I remember on my trip there a couple of years ago, we were delighted to find ourselves camping under a chestnut tree. While it wasn't the season for chestnuts, we picked some leaves, and Rémi's mom made a Corsican cheesecake on the leaves. C'est magnifique.

In French cooking, chestnuts are used in both savoury and sweet dishes. While not a Corsican dish, there is a famous French dessert named after its highest mountain. The Mont Blanc is made of mashed chestnuts shaped like its namesake and topped with chantilly cream at its peak. I guess you have to like chestnuts very much to enjoy this dessert.

One of our favourite toppings with natural plain yoghurt is chestnut jam. Talking about yoghurt, despite the variety of flavours on supermarket shelves, I reckon the healthiest and most versatile option is to buy plain ones, and create your own flavours using jams, honey, fruits etc. Unfortunately, unsweetened plain yoghurt is not always the most popular, and hence there are less brands to choose from.

The below chestnut jam recipe has been translated from the following website. The proportion of peeled chestnuts to sugar is supposed to be 1:1, but we find that overly sweet and halved the proportion. Not sure if it will affect the shelf life of the jam, but it will hopefully extend our lives with a reduced sugar diet.


Chestnut Jam (Confiture de Châtaignes)
makes 2 jars

500g chestnuts (weight after it has been shelled and peeled)
250g sugar (recipe calls for 500g, but we find it too sweet)
180ml water

Make slits on the chestnut shells. Boil for about 10 minutes so that the shells are softened and easier to peel. After removing all the shells, boil the whole chestnuts for another 45 minutes. Peel off the second layer of skin and remove rotten parts.

Weigh the final quantity of chestnuts. Adjust the amount of water and sugar to be used accordingly. Smash the chestnuts, but leave some chunkier pieces if you like a chunkier texture.

Dissolve sugar in water. Add the chestnuts and simmer for 20 minutes. Stir occasionally. Voilah, you now have chestnut jam.

It goes very well with plain natural yoghurt.

Make Bread with Rice Cooker

I love my rice cooker. It's amazing how many things you can cook with it, beside simple plain rice. Steam, stew, boil (for steamboat), and now bread!

Trust the Japanese to come up with this. Rémi tried and it worked!



Although our bread didn't rise to a perfect round, but it tasted soft and freshly good nonetheless.

To do this, you need to have, say an afternoon free. The actual kneading takes probably just half an hour, but you need time for the dough to rise, and to cook very slowly in the rice cooker. We reckon it's faster to pop the dough into the oven, but good for those who doesn't have an oven (aka my sister).

A note on the proportion of liquid used. We were initially confused by the unit of measurement used here -- cc. Found that it actually refers to cubic centimetres which is equivalent to millilitres (ml). Which is different from centilitres which the French are so used to.

And last weekend, we finally found a store selling slotted cutting boards for bread. Now we have a dedicated board for cutting our bread, and more importantly, collecting all those crumbs before they run all over the kitchen.

Steamed Chocolate Cake with Fruits

This recipe is for my sister, who horror of all horrors, doesn't have an oven in her current rented apartment! She does have a dishwasher which I'm hankering after, but I'll choose an oven over a dishwasher if I can only have one. And she has a part time helper to do the washing, so that makes her dishwasher quite redundant too. (Afternote: she doesn't have dishwasher. Worse than that, it's a steriliser!)

I have always thought steamed cake to be very Chinese, like the ones we always see on the altar table for the ancestors, or have auspicious names like 发糕, meaning rise cake (implying that your fortunes will rise like the cake).

So when I was browsing my cookbooks looking for caramelised apple recipe (Rémi bought 2 kgs of apples last Sunday, wanting to make apple tart but now looking more like making rotten apples). And voilah! Saw this steamed chocolate cake with apple recipe. And just nice, as I was steaming glutinous rice, can put my double layer steamer to better use, one heat, 2 dishes!

Actually, the recipe, from this cookbook titled "Appetizers, Finger Food, Buffets & Parties" (aka, a bible on entertaining) calls it a pudding. But the fluffy texture of the chocolate sponge makes it tastes like a cake.

It's very simple to do, just mix all the ingredients together. And fret not if you don't have a cake tin. Ceramic Chinese rice bowls will do the trick (though I used an Ikea bowl and ramekins, which didn't give as nice a round shape as a rice bowl would).

While the chocolate syrup gives the cake a luscious taste, the cake could also be eaten on its own, or topped with icing sugar, or rainbow rice. It's all up to the imagination and improvisation.

Steamed Chocolate Cake with Fruits
Serves 4
(I halved the quantity, and it was enough for 1 medium Ikea bowl and 2 small ramekins)

115g dark muscovado sugar (I used brown sugar)
1 apple (I think mixed berries or pear will go well. Recipe also calls for cranberries which I conveniently omited)
115g soft butter (to soften the cold hard butter in a minute, I 'warmed' my mixing bowl, with the cut butter in it over the steaming hot soup I was cooking)
2 eggs
75g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder

Chocolate syrup
Alright, we absolutely did not follow the recipe here. Just melt pieces of dark chocolate bar with about 1 tablespoon butter. To make the chocolate more runny, add either cream or milk.

Prepare the steamer. Grease 4 heatproof bowls and sprinkle sugar with a little of sugar to coat all over. Tip out the excess sugar.

If using apple or pear, peel and core and cut into small pieces. Put them in equal portions into the prepared bowls.

To make the cake mixture, put sugar, butter, eggs, flour, baking powder and cocoa powder all together and beat well until combined and smooth. My mixture was quite sticky and didn't flow into the bowl as smoothly as I had wanted, but the cake still turned out well and shapely.

Spoon the mixture into the bowls and cover the top of each with a layer of greaseproof paper, followed by foil, tied securely with string. No rubber bands please.

Steam for about 45 minutes until the cake are well risen and firm. Well, I didn't check before turning off the heat, since the bowls are well covered.

Make the chocolate syrup.

Turn out the cake onto plates and top with the syrup.

Fragrant Glutinous Rice

Time for me to start understanding how to use glutinous rice, in case I decide to make rice dumplings to celebrate Duanwu Festival (端午节), known otherwise as Dragon Boat Festival (even though dragon boat is just one of the traditional activities to celebrate this festival marking the summer solstice).

My cousin's grandma is very good at making steam glutinous rice. While I do not have her recipe, I found one in Reviving Local Dialect Cuisines. Yes, this is a traditional Hokkien dish that my family always have during festivities like commemorating the death anniversaries of ancestors.

I've tweaked the recipe a bit to suit the ingredients I had at hand. And as usual, I'm lacking in spring onion, coriander and chillies to make the dish more attractive looking.

Fragrant Glutinous Rice (油香糯米饭)
Serves two

1 cup glutinous rice
2 pieces of deboned chicken thigh (can also use pork)
2 tablespoons dried shrimps
2-3 large dried Shitake mushrooms
3 garlic, minced
6-8 chestnuts

Seasonings
light soy sauce
oyster sauce
dark soy sauce
sugar
salt
pepper

Rinse glutinous rice and soak in water for at least 6 hours. I did it overnight. Drain.

On preparing chestnuts, slit a cross on the shell. Boil violently for about 10 minutes. Remove the shells and the second layer of skin, as well as any rotten parts.

Cut the meat into shreds. Soak dried shrimps and mushrooms separately until soft. Slice the mushrooms.

Heat about 1 big tablespoon of oil and fry the minced garlic until fragrant. Add the dried shrimps. After about 1 minute, add the meat, chestnuts and mushrooms. Stir for about 2 minutes and add in the glutinous rice.

Season according to taste. As a rough gauge, about 1 tablespoon or less each of the sauces and sugar and just a little bit of salt and pepper. Mix well.

Dish onto a steaming plate or bowl and steam for about 40 minutes.

Garnish with fried shallots, coriander, spring onion and chillies before serving.

More on pork and saucisson

In my humble opinion (not that it counts for anything), saucisson ranks very highly in French food culture, besides wine and cheese.

Saucisson is large dried sausage, normally pork cured with salt, and eaten sliced as a cold cut. Sounds straightforward? Until you go to a saucisson gourmet shop and you'll be spoilt for choice with the varieties available. Like cured with Provencal herbs, garlic, nuts, peppercorn...or from pork to wild boar to donkey meat!

Yeap, we tried the donkey meat saucisson in Meribel, right in the Savoie region famous for its saucisson, it's powerful! I think Corsica is another region famous for its delicious varieties of saucisson, particularly the wild boar ones and we enjoyed it just as much.

Besides eating it sliced as appetisers, saucisson is handy in picnics and makes excellent sandwiches in between long hikes. We also tried fusion, by adding it to Chinese pork porridge with pork floss and ham. Just for fun.

Our affinity for 'pungent' food probably explains our obliviousness to the testosterone raging smell of nz pork.



I also remember fondly of the butcher shops we visited in Barcelona two years ago. The Spanish may be more obsessed with their ham than the French of their saucisson. Seeing so many hanging legs (complete with the trotters) straight in your face can be a bit off-putting, but the thinly sliced ham never disappointed us during our trip. Prices vary widely too, according to the breeds of the pig, their feeds, the region of origins, age etc. Just ask the butcher and he'll rant off all the subtle differences that possibly could only be picked up by a local or gourmet.

It's a pity we can't bring saucisson or ham from our trips back to New Zealand.

Dissecting Pork

All my Singaporean friends swear that the pork in New Zealand has a strong smell, unlike those in Singapore. Me and Rémi are quite oblivious to this 'smell' so far. But even my brother in faraway Sweden complains about the 'smelly' pork there. Hmmm...is this due to different breeds of pig or feeds used in Western countries? But wait, Singapore imports frozen pork from Australia.

My father, a retired pig farmer, solves the mystery for us.
Male pigs are inherently smelly due to the testosterone raging in their balls.

I further quote from Wikipedia:
"In domestic pigs the taint is caused by androstenone and skatole concentrations stored in the fat tissues of the animal after sexual maturity. It is released when the fat is heated and has a distinct odor and flavor that is widely considered unpalatable to consumers."

So male pigs, before they reach puberty, are castrated by Asian farmers (at least in Malaysia or Indonesia, where Singapore gets its pork supply), making them barrows! Well, when I see pigs in farms or zoos, I do not particularly check how their male anatomy looks like, but according to my father, pigs that can't be castrated due to, say inward growth of their balls are usually sold at steep discounts to the butchery, and used for making smoked sausages or ham.

What about Australian pork? As the Chinese are so picky about the odour, butcher in Singapore only imports female pigs from Australia, since they may not be able to influence the farmers there to remove the male pigs' manhood.

Maybe that's why it leaves only male pigs for sale in the Western market, if all the female ones have been exported.

Since I can't tell the butcher in kiwi supermarkets I only want female or castrated pork, my father has this advice: buy cuts that steer clear of the hind of the pig.

Which comes to the next problem: which cuts should I buy? Especially since pork sold here are cut more for cooking chops. And that I'm more used to Chinese names for different cuts for Chinese cooking.

Here's my suggestion for Chinese cooking, some of which are still subjected to further trials and experiments:
Fillet or Tenderloin (腰柳，腰嫩肉，小里脊): The long thin muscle, that is the most tender and more expensive cut in Singapore. Called premium cut fillet on supermarket shelves here, it is excellent for slicing into thin strips for stir-fry or in soup. It is much better than the already sliced pork which is from possibly a lesser cut of the pork and usually less tender.

Loin chop (里脊肉): Being located on the back, they are by default far from the testosterone raging part of the male pig. And lean too.

Shoulder/Blade(肩胛肉，梅花肉): Same as above. Supposed to be good for mincing or dicing for stews. That's also where the spare ribs come from.

Pork belly (五花肉): Fatty, but we love it stew the Hokkien way, richly seasoned with five spice powder, dark soy sauce....never mind smell or no smell.