Tag Archives: Butter

Recipe: Omelette

20 Wednesday Aug 2014

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Ingredients3 eggsThat’s it, nothing else. Just three eggsOh yes, salt. A pinch of salt.But that’s all.Salt and eggs.Oh, a knob of butter too.But that’s definitely it. Really nothing else.At allMethodThe simplest recipes are the hardest to master. Take the earlier (after chapter 22) example of mashed potato, which has only three or four ingredients – potato, butter, salt and perhaps milk. It takes longer to write down the recipe than it does to cook it. Good grief.Same with omelettes. An omelette can, of course, have many more ingredients and many optional flavourings, but the corridor to hell is papered with false omelette recipes.So, first, put your omelette pan on to heat, and get it good and warm but not smoking hot. Your omelette pan will look like many other omelette pans but this is your omelette pan. Your omelette pan is your best friend. It is your life. You must master it as you must master your life. Your omelette pan, without you, is useless. Without your omelette pan, you are useless.Above all, NEVER let your spouse near your omelette pan. They will claim it is dirty and wash it, scour it and put it in the dishwasher. And then you will have a freshly-dug grave in the garden to explain to the nice police officer.Cast iron, conditioned according to the best advice you can find on the internet. Or non-stick. I’m afraid I’m actually agnostic on this point, what counts is the quality of the eggs and your technique.So, roughly beat together the eggs with a pinch of salt, using a fork. When the pan is nicely hot, add your knob of butter. When the foam has settled and just before the butter colours – you don’t want beurre noisette for goodness’ sake – pour in the eggs. Swirl them gently round the pan to make sure all the bottom is coated, then start drawing the already cooked mixture from the edges into the centre using the back of your mixing fork. Check and re-check the heat, you don’t want to colour the eggs at all, just set them.Keep drawing the mixture into the centre with the fork until it’s almost set all across, then tilt the pan at 45 degrees with the handle up towards your chest and encourage the top edge to fold over with your fork. The omelette should be ‘baveuse’, slobbery like a labrador, or ‘eek that’s not cooked’ if you’re my mother or any other English person, come to think of it.Ignore the shreiks and, with the pan still at 45 degrees, gently encourage it to fold over again and out of the pan onto your warmed, waiting plate. The omelette should be nicely yellow not browned at all, almost in a roll and gently leaking a little bit of runny egg from each end.Eat it immediately with the same fork you used to mix and then move round the mixture, especially if it’s you doing the washing up.If you are a heathen you may wish to add some chopped herbs just before the folding part of the event – chives, dill and parsely individually or together are popular I hear, down in the cheap seats where they like to call such things ‘fines herbes’. If you run a restaurant you’ll probably be obliged to add in cheese, ham and goodness knows what else. Do what they want, they’re paying to feed your plain omelette habit after all. They probably won’t even care if the outside is browned.Animals.

Recipe: Beurre blanc

20 Wednesday Aug 2014

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Ingredients250g butter (the best you can get. Unsalted of course)150g – 200g shallots20cl white wine10cl white wine vinegar10-20cl cream (very optional)MethodCut the butter into 1cm cubes and put it back into the fridge.Now chop your shallots VERY finely. Very. 1mm dice. It’s easier, as I may have mentioned, when you’re on your 200th kilo of them.Put the shallots, wine and wine vinegar into a saucepan (sauteuse, if you want to be smart) and bring gently to a boil then allow to simmer. Reduce the liquid down to almost nothing – 5-10 minutes. Don’t do it too quickly, you want the shallots to absorb the flavour of the liquid and vice-versa. You can use the time to argue with any passing French person about the exact proportions of wine and vinegar you should be using, or even if you should be using wine or vinegar at all. This may get quite heated but you probably won’t need a knife, although you should keep one within reach.When the liquid has all almost but not quite gone, reduce the heat by half and start adding in the butter piece by piece, stirring it in with a whisk energetically. Don’t, whatever you do, show your chef the page in the official recipe book which suggests that the butter you use should be softened. Well, not unless you want to drive him into an apopleptic rage, that is.If you’re reet posh you may wish to strain the sauce, but most people prefer this sauce with the bits of onion in it so don’t bother. Unless, as I say, you’re posh.You should serve it straight away, or if you have to keep it at 45C-50C for a sort time. It can’t be made in advance and reheated, it will separate out and you’ll need to start over.Nap it over fish, as is traditional, or if you’re a daring radical think of adding some chopped herbs or vegetable purée (peppers, for example, or dill) and serve it with vegetables.This is my favourite sauce, I should note. Usually I have to make double portions because, as my wife puts it, ‘Je le mange à la louche’, I eat it by the ladleful.

Recipe: Purée de pomme de terre – mashed potato

20 Wednesday Aug 2014

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Ingredients1 kilo floury potatoes250g-500g butter (yes, half a kilo)250ml-500ml milk (basically you want your milk and butter together to weigh half what the potatoes weigh)10g saltMethodFirst, put down that potato peeler. That’s it, put it down. On the floor. Now kick it towards me. That’s right, nice and easy now.Please. Stop peeling your potatoes. It’s no good for them and definitely no good for you. OK?Right. Next, verify that your potatoes are the same size. You need to do this so that they all cook at the same speed, OK? Titchy potatoes will be cooked before the giant ones. It sounds obvious now you read it, but it isn’t unless you know it. Also, while it’s sometimes acceptable to cut up potatoes so the bits are the same size it’s not recommended from a flavour point of view – the cut surface allows water to penetrate the potato and spoil the flavour (OK, only a bit but we’re going for the best ever mashed potato here so nuances count).Now the best kind of potato for this are Pommes Rattes. Usually you find these in fairly small sizes, about the length of your thumb, but bigger ones are best and, most importantly, peel.Yes, peel. You will, eventually, peel these potatoes but not now, calm down big boy.Put the potatoes in a saucepan, cover with water, add the salt. I’m always being asked how much salt – well, 10-12 grammes per litre of water is the official amount. A good three-fingered pinch of cooking salt – not table salt – is the generic, about-how-much quantity. Do use cooking salt, by the way, the iodine in table salt doesn’t do cooking flavours any favours. Remember, we’re talking nuances here – but three nuances make a wodge and four wodges make a heap of difference.It’s going to take about 20-25 minutes to cook the potatoes, so spend the time lightly melting the butter and warming the milk in whatever proportions you like. I go for 50/50, an assertion which is enough to start a fight in the bar of most French cookery schools. Bring up ‘bouillabaisse’ if you fancy a knife fight.When they’re cooked – test with the point of a fine-bladed knife, not the prongs of a fork – strain them and peel them. Straight away. So prepare to burn your hands – or hold them in a tea towel, your choice. You’ll find that after a little practice you can peel off just the very outer layer of the skin, the coloured part, between your thumb and a knife blade. You’ll also need to cut out any major blemishes and marks.Now instead of mashing with a potato masher, either use a moulin a legumes, a vegetable mill, or a potato ricer. The moulin looks like a conical metal bowl with a mesh base and a stirring paddle in the middle – feed veg into the top and purée comes out of the bottom. Every French house has one, knock on any door and ask to see theirs – they’ll be happy to show theirs off and explain its use in great detail. Honest.The potato ricer looks like a giant garlic press – pop a potato in the top, squish down the press bit and purée comes out of the bottom.Whichever you use, let the purée fall into a dry saucepan. When you’ve puréed all the potatoes, set it on a medium heat and stir with a wooden spoon or spatula to dry the mix as much as possible. This is one of the great secrets of great mash – dry the spuds after cooking them.When they’re dry enough (this, happily, normally coincides with the moment when you get bored and/or tired of the drying process), start adding the butter a little at a time, now beating the mix with a decent-sized baloon whisk. Heretics choose to use electric mixers at this point but they will burn in hell later for their sins.Once the butter’s all been added, start adding the milk a little at a time. Be more careful now, this is where you’re going for your chosen consistency – which should be a little runnier than you think it needs to be. Keep whisking furiously all the time, and continue to beat your mixture when all the milk’s been added, always over your medium heat. It’s this portion of the event more than anything which will give unctuosity to the final result.You also need to whisk like mad to emulsify the mixture – potatoes and this much milk and cream are not an entirely stable mix. They won’t go bang – that’ll be your stomach after eating your fourth portion – but they will start to separate eventually.This method is largely based on that of the great French chef Joel Robuchon, who made purée de pomme de terre one of his signature dishes. Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTTvZ2PW96k for all the gory details.

Recipe: Hollandaise sauce

18 Monday Aug 2014

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Ingredients4 egg yolks25ml cold water250g butterJuice of half a lemonSaltCayenne pepperMethodHollandaise, as I learned at school, is a sauce émulsionnée instable chaude – an unstable hot emulsified sauce. Which means, basically, whisk it lots and eat it quick.So, cut your butter into small chunks and clarify it in a bain marie if you’re a wuss, directly on the heat if you’re a manly man’s chef. ‘Clarify’, let’s clarify, means separate out the good oily buttery bit from the nasty milk solids. So you heat it gently without stirring, then skim off any scum from the surface and decant the good, clear, yellow stuff off the top and leave the white nasty bits behind.Separate your egg yolks – don’t faff around with half egg shells or squeeze bottles, just crack it and strain it through your fingers, all right?Put the yolks into a shallow saucepan and add the cold water and either on a fairly gentle heat (manly man) or bain marie (wussy wimp) whisk energetically in a figure of 8 with a supple sauce whisk (the kind that’s about 30 cms long top to bottom). Keep doing this until your mixture is, in the words of my textbook, ‘unctuous and mousse-like’.In practice this means for much, much longer than you’d think necessary. The mixture should be at around 60C – enough to make you go ‘Ouch!’ when you test it with a finger – and each stroke of the whisk should leave a VERY clear trail across the bottom of the pan. Add a little warm water – drop by drop – if you think it’s too thick. Take my word for it, you’ll get the hand of this after your first two or three hundred litres of the stuff. How hot? My restaurant chef’s tip was: Hold your hand on the side of the pan whilst whisking; when you smell burning flesh, it’s too hot.Add in the lemon juice and then the WARM butter drop by drop, whisking furiously all the time. You can add the lemon at the end if you prefer, along with a pinch of cayenne pepper.Again, a few drops of warm water will help if you think it’s too thick.And there you go; ready for your Eggs Benedict (beurck) or to be transformed into mustard sauce, mousse line, Maltaise (blood orange) or Mikado (mandarin orange) sauce.Seriously, this isn’t the difficult sauce to make that many fear – put all your ingredients in place and do this last just before serving the appropriate dish (you can keep it if you can maintain a bain marie at 60C but hey…) and you’ll be fine.Then again that’s easy for me to say, 250 practise litres ahead of you….

Recipe: Sauce Bonne Femme

18 Monday Aug 2014

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Ingredients250ml fish stockSplash of Noilly Prat200ml thick cream100g unsalted butterMethodThis is a good example of where your preparation and mise en place come into their own. Having previously made your fumet de poisson, fish stock – see Chapter 6’s recipe – you simply reduce some of it down and then thicken it with cream and/or butter.This is, in fact, a prime tenet of nouvelle cuisine as originally championed back in the 1950s by Fernand Point. He, rebelling against the Age d’Or cookery of Escoffier which had dominated the first half of the century, refused to thicken sauces with flour. “Beurre, toujours du beurre…Butter, always butter” he said, shortly before dying of a heart attack a plump, middle-aged man.So. Take a suitable quantity of your fish stock – for four people think a quarter of a litre.After cooking your fish – say, pan-frying some filets of rouget, red mullet – deglaze the pan with a little vermouth – Noilly Prat is the French cook’s weapon of choice here. Deglazing means splashing in a little liquid, barely enough to cover the bottom of the pan over a high heat and then scraping furiously at bottom of said pan with a wooden scraper to dislodge all the nice bits stuck to it. Nice bits caused by the famous Maillard Reactions, which have nothing to do with a duck.Once you’ve deglazed you add your stock and reduce it as quickly as possible to a syrupy consistency. Don’t faff around here, boil it like mad. Then, add 200 ml of thick cream, reduce the whole by half or more until it’s nice and thick. Then whisk in your butter in small cubes straight from fridge, away from the heat. Serve immediately spooned over your fish fillets.