Almost given up on croissant

No, I won't attempt to learn how to make croissant, it's something that even professionals in Wellington fail to make it right. Rémi has almost given up on buying croissants here after many disappointments from supermarket shelves and French cafes.

Pictured above is a Pear and Almond Tart I attempted from my favourite Christelle Le Ru's dessert cookbook. It doesn't quite look like tart because I have kept the shape squarish. It's made using ready made frozen puff pastry bought from the supermarket, so the only work needed is to cut the pears, cook it (though my pears were so deliciously ripe that I should have skipped this step on hindsight). The other work is to make the almond cream, which I will share here, because it is so wickedly good, that we used sandwiched the remainder in croissants. The cream managed to transform the dry plain croissants, making a wonderful warm breakfast on a cold autumn morning.

Almond Cream
To go with croissants, or use in pear tart or both

60g yoghurt
70g sugar
70g ground almond
1 egg
70g melted unsalted butter
a few drops of vanilla essence
rind of half a lemon

Mix yoghurt, sugar and ground almonds in a bowl. Add egg, butter, vanilla essence and lemon zest and mix well.

One can reduce amount of butter and sugar accordingly to suit his/her dietary preference. It's quite a lot of butter here especially.

To use with croissant, sandwiched the croissant with cream, top with some almond flakes and bake for about 15 minutes over low heat (160C perhaps).

Steamed Buns and my guide to finding affordable cookbooks on Chinese cooking

Rémi the breadmaker has hijacked my bao project. He loves to eat Chinese steamed buns so much. So he couldn't resist not making them when he heard about my intention to do so.

I have two steamed bun recipes, but eventually chose the one from "Chinese Desserts 100" written by Winnie jie (I trust the Cantonese to be good dim sum makers). I bought it a bookstore in Hong Kong's airport while on transit. Rémi's Mandarin is certainly still as good as my Malay, so he will not be able to read the Chinese instructions. But fret not, like many of my Chinese cookbooks, the recipes are presented in both English and Chinese.

It's a paradox, but bilingual cookbooks that require the extra effort of translating recipes are actually cheaper than English ones. Even the Chinese version of cookbooks by celebrity chefs are much cheaper than the original English versions found in the same bookstore.

Anyway, I am not too interested in cookbooks by celebrity chefs nowadays but prefer more affordable ones by seemingly anonymous homecooks. To cater to the growing English market, more and more Chinese and Malaysian cookbooks are bilingual. It doesn't matter if you don't understand a single Chinese word. Just let yourself be guided by the accompanying deliciously shot food photos and be tolerant of the less than perfect English on the recipes. The recipes work!

So for $10-$20, you have a wider range of cookbooks on all kinds of Chinese, Malay/Indonesian and Peranakan cuisines to choose from than if you stick to purely English cookbooks.


Steamed bun (包)
Makes about 16 small or 10 medium buns

Basic bun dough:
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon yeast
2 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon lard or vegetable oil
5/8 cup fresh milk (warm)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon oil for greasing

Filling:
we're less imaginative this time, being our first bun-making experiment, so we use ready-made red bean paste bought from the Asian grocery store. But Rémi is already dreaming of making nutella buns...I prefer traditional fillings, like lotus paste, minced pork, chicken, vegetables...will hope to try egg custard fillings on the recipe someday too.


To make the dough, put flour, yeast, sugar and lard into a bowl. Add warm milk and mix well. Pour onto a countertop and knead for about 5 minutes into a soft dough. If the dough is too dry, add more warm milk or water.

Grease a deep bowl, Put in dough and cover with a damp cloth and set aside to let it prove for about one and half hours, until it has doubled in size.

Beat the dough forcefully with the palm once to squeeze out the air, put it on the countertop and roll flat into a cross shape. Sprinkle baking powder on top and knead for a while. Set aside to ferment for about 30 minutes.

Divide the dough into 16 portions. Do so by rolling it into a sausage and cutting it into equal parts. Roll each portion into a ball, flatten and wrap in the filling. Line each bun with a small square of paper.

Steam for 10 minutes. To prevent water from dripping onto the buns and affecting its look, cover the buns loosely with baking paper. Serve hot.

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.

Confiture d'abricots

Our jam making experiment continues...

Being penny-wise when it comes to jam-making, Rémi calculated that the cost of making 4 bottles of jam is cheaper than what we paid for 1 bottle.

Making your own jam can be extremely mind blowing. May even be revolting to the health conscious, when right in front of your eyes, you see the jam-maker pouring one whole pack of sugar into the pan, which were to later concentrate into four tiny bottles. So it's more than being penny-wise to spread your jam as thinly as possible.

While Rémi may disagree with me, as he still considers his strawberry jam experiment a success, I firmly believe that his apricot jam was much much better than the strawberry one. In fact, it's as good, or even better than what you can find on supermarket shelves. So if you're going to make jam for the first time, I reckon making apricot jam is a safer guarantee of success, than strawberry. We don't know about other fruits until we try them.

The recipe comes from Rémi's maman.

Apricot Jam (Confiture d'abricots)
Makes approx. four 300ml bottles

1 kg apricots
750g sugar
125ml water

Remove the pits from the apricots. Cut into quarter slices.

Dissolve sugar in water and simmer for 10 minutes over medium heat.

Add the apricot slices and continue to simmer for about 30 minutes or until the syrup has thickened and mixture has set. To check, spoon some jam onto a cold plate, if it moves very little, it is done.

Pour immediately into clean, sterilised bottles. Seal immediately and invert the jar to cool down. Check if seal is airtight by pressing the centre. If it flexes, refrigerate and use like any opened jam you buy.

Strawberry Conserves

I imagine that the commercial jam market in France is very small. Even though it has a population of 61 million, and most of these 61 million Frenchies probably have jam on toast for their breakfast everyday.

Why do I imagine so? Because French grany and maman (French for grandmother and mother) make their own jams, jars and jars of them. And they do jam exchange within the family, grany to maman, and maman with aunts for variety of flavours. And the mamans will in turn distribute these lovingly made jams to their city dwelling children. So who needs to buy jam in this country? Especially when homemade jams come with deliciously chunky pieces of real fruits!

(Well, there is still a commercial jam market in France, and one popular brand is called "Bonne Maman", translated into Good Mother. This brand of jam contains chunky fruit pieces almost like mom's. It's sold in Singapore supermarkets too, and no surprise that we've tried almost all the flavours.)

When making jam, French mamans buy big quantities of fruits. You can trust them on knowing where to buy seasonal fruits cheaply in bulk. And they are usually too ripe to be eaten on its own but perfect for jam-making, which is why they are cheaper too.

Being well into the fruity season in New Zealand, we reckon it is time to try our hands in jam making. Especially after finding 1kg of strawberries selling cheap at the Sunday market.

Our jam recipe comes from, who else, but Rémi's maman. While we reproduce the trusty recipe she has been using here, we still have to check with her on how to improve. Our jam looks more like strawberry preserves -- very liquid, with whole strawberries floating in the thickened liquid. But it's perfect with plain yoghurt. To spread on toast, just smash the extremely soft strawberries over it.

A few words on sterilising the jam jars. Put clean jars into boiling water for 10 minutes. Let them drip dry. Then pour the hot jam into the jars, cover tightly immediately and invert right away. The steam from the hot jam is supposed to kill bacteria in the remaining pocket of air. And the expanding heated air will make the jar air tight. If you suspect that air has sneaked in, then store in fridge and use immediately. Otherwise, the preserved jam can keep for a long time in your store cupboard.

Strawberry Conserve/Jam

2 kg strawberry
1.5kg sugar
250ml water

Wash strawberries and carefully remove the stalk.

Put them in a large pan with water. Cook over low heat for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the sugar and stir to mix evenly and cook 25 minutes. When it's done, store into jam jars.

Some after thoughts:
1. Traditional recipes used by mamans are always amazingly brief in details. We may have missed out the obvious step, which is to cut the strawberries into chunky pieces first (can't really blame us, we had very small strawberries, and Rémi still insists that keeping strawberries whole are better).
2. Strawberries are known to not set well. So some recipes call for adding a spoon of pectin-rich fruit (raspberry, apple, black currant, gooseberry) jam into the conserve mixture to help the gelling)

French Crepe Party Ideas

The happy problem with French crêpe party is that there is no limitations in terms of the type of fillings you can enjoy, and you end up eating more than everything.

The northwest region of France in Brittany is famous for their crêpes, but nowadays, you see French crêperies everywhere, even in Wellington. And they serve yummy crêpes!

The biggest difference between a French crêpe and an American pancake is their thickness. A French crêpe is so much thinner that you get to enjoy more, with different types of fillings, from savoury to sweet ones.

So, you can imagine that when we hold crêpe parties, there's more fillings than your stomach can hold. It's not a lot of work or pre-cooking, as we use basic ingredients like butter, sugar, nutella, bananas, strawberries, bacon, mushrooms, shredded cheese, walnuts, blue cheese, lemon juice, eggs, almonds, liquor, orange, cinnamon...

One problem with making crêpes is that, they are best enjoyed when they are hot. So if you're making crêpe on your frying pan, it makes serving everyone at the same time difficult. The French (or rather Tefal) have found a happy solution to this problem with the Multi Crêpe Party device. You basically plug it and put on your dining table, and everyone surrounds it like a steamboat and makes their own crêpe together. It makes 6 much smaller crêpes at the same time. It's fun, and useful even for parties of more than 10. Everyone just end up standing around the table, cooking and eating. However, this electronic device may be hard to find outside France, but they are widely available in stores like Carrefour or Darty in France (we actually went to the trouble of carrying one back from France).

Crêpe batter
Serves about six

250g flour
3 eggs
500ml milk
pinch of salt
about 1 teaspoon of melted butter
water

Mix flour and egg. The mixture gets very thick and dry. Add milk slowly until you get a smooth batter. Add butter and salt.

We find that the batter could be thinner, and usually add about half a cup of water and more milk, so that the crêpe spreads thinner.

Chill in fridge for about half an hour.

To cook, spread a thin layer, one at a time, on frying pan or use a multi crêpe party device.

To serve, add fillings, fold into half or quarter, or just simply roll up.



Simple Crêpe Fillings suggestions

Savoury
Bacon: This is always a winner. Fry them until they are crispy. Top with shredded cheese or mix with mushrooms.

Mushrooms: You can stir fry mixed button mushrooms (diced into small cubes) with olive oil, garlic and chopped fresh parsley (seasoned with salt and black pepper). Another alternative is to fry with bacon (and chopped onions), add some fresh cream, season with herbs, salt and black pepper).

Eggs: Beat an egg into the multi crêpe party, you get a perfect round sunny side up. Put it on top of the crêpe and add bacon and cheese if desired.

Blue cheese and Walnut: For the slightly more exotic taste buds. Popular with our crêpe party guests so far.

Sweet
Butter, sugar and cinnamon: My all time favourite! Melt them altogether on the crêpe and eat it while it's hot. Sinfully good.

Sugar with lemon juice: For some tangy punch, squeeze some lemon juice onto sugar.

Banana or strawberries with melted chocolate: Always pair well together.

Banana with milo: A great pair here too

Banana with orange: We tried cooking banana with orange juice/pulp. Something new for a change.

Banana and honey: Classic

Strawberries with sugar: Tried it yesterday and it's good.

Ice-cream: If you're fast to eat before it melts on the hot crêpe.

Liqueur: You can make a Crêpe Suzette by putting sugar and liqueur such as rum on it (with fruits like bananas), and setting it on fire. Sure to capture everyone's attention.

Jam: Or basically, just scour through your pantry for anything that you find suitable. It will ensure a successful crêpe party with a big spread of fillings to satisfy every palate.


note: Crêpes in pictures shown are made this morning with leftover batter from our crêpe party last night, using a normal frying pan.

Freshest Pitta Bread

I bought a new cookbook Making Fresh Bread two days ago and Remi got more excited than me.

So before I had even browsed through all the pages, he has studied the recipes carefully and decided we're going to have the freshest Pitta Bread, straight from the oven for breakfast today.

Now, that's nice. He tweaked the kneading process a little bit, so that he could prepare the dough the night before, leave it to expand slowly in the fridge the whole night, wake up early to knead quickly the 2nd time, go back to sleep, then wake up to put the completed dough into the oven. And it took just 5 minutes to bake, as opposed to other breads that takes longer.

Freshest Pitta Bread
makes two breads

175g white flour (use bread flour if you have)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp dried yeast
1/2 tbsp olive oil
100ml lukewarm water

Sift flour and salt together into a bowl. Stir in yeast.

Make a well in the centre and pour in the oil and lukewarm water. Stir well with wooden spoon until the dough begins to come together.

Knead with your hands until it leaves the side of the bowl. So, what does kneading mean? If you've learn pottery before, it is somewhat similar to kneading clay. Using your fingers, you try to gather the flour together and evenly distribute them into the dough. You also do this by folding the dough into half, knocking it with your fist, and repeating the steps until there's no uneven lumps of flour in the dough.

Transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface and knead well for 10 minutes until the dough is smooth and elastic.

Brush the bowl with oil (so that the dough will not stick to it). Shape dough into a ball and put it into the bowl. Cover with a damp tea towel and put into fridge to rise through the night.

The dough should have doubled in volume by morning, with uneven pockets of air inside. So knead more for about 5 minutes on a lightly floured board to remove the uneven pockets of air, divide into 2 balls and leave to rise for 30 minutes to an hour, in a bowl covered with damp tea towel.

With floured hands, slightly flatten a dough ball and roll out on a lightly floured surface to an oval (somehow, he did 2 round pitta breads).

Meanwhile, put a lightly floured baking tray/sheet in oven and preheat to 230C. Transfer pitta breads to the heated trays, spacing them well apart, and bake for 5 minutes until puffed up and golden brown.

Fresh bread for breakfast.

Lost and Found French Toast

Perhaps inspired by my brother's French Toast experiments, or simply because our bread in stock is getting old and dry, Rémi decided to relish the French Toast he used to have.

Unlike French fries, French toast do have French roots, except that they call it "pain perdu". Besides having a very sweet tooth, French love their bread, and they like only hard bread, usually handmade with love by their favourite artisan baker. But this type of bread becomes stale, dry and harder very quickly. So to save them, they dip it in milk and eggs and fry it to reclaim its goodness.

As this Frenchman has never made French Toast before, he has to google to find out what ingredients goes into a so called real French Toast. We found that other than eggs, it is common to add milk, sugar and even vanilla essence. We substituted part of the milk with yogurt because we do not have milk in stock.

And as if the fried toast is not sweet enough, we topped it with more sugar before putting it into our mouth.