It's like buttah!

A few weeks ago Court sent me a link to a New York Times article from the food section (you won't be able to see the page unless you have the NY Times online subscription-thingy). Essentially the article explains how, using a standard stand mixer, one can make butter at home. Obviously the foodie in Court and I had it's interest piqued. In the article grandiose claims were made about the quality of this homemade butter.

So a few weekends ago I bought some Whole Foods brand heavy cream and brought it home. After a grand total of about fifteen minutes of work we had on our hands about a pound (probably slightly more... in the neighborhood of 2 pounds) of fantastic homemade butter. The claims in the NY Times article were not wrong. The butter had the flavor and consistency of the butter you get at very fine restaurants. Furthermore you could make the argument that it is a little teensy bit healthier than store bought butter as we added no salt whatsoever during the process (even unsalted commercial butter typically has salt added during processing). I know claims of healthy butter are a bit of a stretch, but whatever.

For the cost of 6 cups of heavy cream (~$5.37 + taxes) we got approximately 2 pounds of butter and 4 cups of buttermilk. The buttermilk is also a great cooking reagent. Unlike the processed slightly sour buttermilk one finds in the store, this buttermilk is very light with a hint of sweetness to it. The Times article lists several recipes that make use of this homemade buttermilk as well as the fantastic butter you get from this process. Here is how it goes:

Ingredients:
6 cups heavy cream
salt (optional)

Place the heavy cream in the bowl of your stand mixer. Use the balloon whisk attachment. Carefully wrap the top of the bowl with cling film to protect your walls, ceiling and self from spraying cream. When you have the bowl nice and sealed off, turn the stand mixer to medium high speed. Let it go for a while. You will notice the cream picking up air and eventually it will look like the stuff that comes out of a can. Congratulations, you have just made whipped cream. Whipped cream is not what we want, however, so continue to let the mixer run. In 6-8 minutes you will notice a subtle change in the character of the cream. It will first get hard and have very stiff peaks. Then it will become almost pebbly in texture. Finally it will begin to change color ever so slightly and become yellowish. At about this point the fat solids that you've been smashing around with the mixer will separate from the buttermilk. When buttermilk starts splashing up against the plastic wrap you will know you are done. Stop the machine and strain the butter/buttermilk mixture through a fine sieve. What you will have in the sieve is a very soggy butter so you need to get the rest of the buttermilk out of there. To do this just take your hopefully clean hands (if they aren't, wash them... shame on you) and begin to knead the butter in the strainer. This kneading serves two purposes: it gets rid of the buttermilk and begins to give the butter its creamy texture. When you've got all the milk out and the butter has a nice consistency divide it up into appropriate sized chunks. Put some in the fridge and freeze the rest for later use. If you want you can mix salt into the butter after you've kneaded it for a bit. Salt will contribute to the taste as well as serve as a preservative.

Things we've done with the butter:
Bread and butter (with a pinch of salt for flavor)
Used it in various cooking applications (fried eggs, scrambled eggs, baking, etc.)

Things I'd like to try with the butter:
Making clarified butter
Make compound butter with herbs

Remember to keep the buttermilk, too! It can be used in place of that sour stuff you get at the store, but keep in mind the flavor is quite different.

-Nick

4th of July Kebabs?!

Yesterday, the 4th of July (birthdate of this great country) Court and I decided to try a recipe that we'd recently seen on Tyler's Ultimate, the show of one of the Food Network's celebrity chefs, Tyler Florence. Generally we are a little leery of Mr. Florence's work due again to our petty dislikes of certain aspects of his on-show personality and his dubious affiliation with Applebees. However, when a recipe looks good, a recipe looks good.

The basis of the recipe is a chicken kebab. Now I know in these "Times of Terror" a less enlightened patriot might question the making of food from the middle east for a 4th of July celebration, but have no fear. This recipe was actually of italian descent via Mexico at heart. Mexico?? Not much better than middle-eastern, say you? Let the author state that we had no political reasoning for our choice of July 4th meals. It just looked like a good summery meal that involved that wonderful culinary invention, the grill.

The recipe essentially involves a rehashing of that old classic, the Caesar salad. Chicken, Italian sausage and large hunks of bread are put on a kebab and doused with olive oil before being put on the grill. Tyler Florence also put bay leaves between each meat/bread combo on the skewers, but we only had dried bay that would've crumbled if we tried to stick it on so we omitted this. The kebabs are cooked to doneness on the grill and then put over romaine lettuce leaves and dressed with a classic Caesar dressing. We made the dressing from scratch and used a bastard version of Tyler Florence's recipe and the recipe Julia Child used in Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home. Because we sort of made it up as we went along I don't feel bad in putting the recipe here:

1 lemon
2 egg yolks
1 garlic glove, peeled
1 anchovy fillet or the equivalent in paste (apparently not used in the original Caesar salad recipe)
1 tsp. mustard (I used the smoother Dijon, but I suppose you could use whole grain)
Several dashes of Worcestershire Sauce
1/4 cup (ish) of Olive Oil
salt and pepper to taste

Combine the egg yolks and the juice from the lemon in a food processor. Add the garlic, anchovy fillet or paste, salt and pepper and the mustard. Blend these together until they are uniform in consistency and the lemon juice is emulsified somewhat. Now with the food processor running drizzle in the olive oil until the consistency is right for a salad dressing. Now adjust the lemon juice, salt and pepper as necessary and add the Worcestershire sauce in a few steps, tasting between each addition until you have the flavor you want. Toss your lettuce, chicken, sausage and grilled "croutons" in the dressing. Enjoy.

-Nick

P.S. As a little aside. In Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home there is a little anecdote regarding Caesar salad by Julia Child, who grew up in San Diego, CA. She and her family visited Tijuana and ate at the restaurant of Caesar Cardini, inventor of the Caesar salad. She gives a wonderful description of how the true "classic Caesar salad" was prepared at the table. This anecdote explains that despite people's misconception that the Caesar salad is a reference to the Roman tyrants, it is in fact an invention of an Italian living in Tijuana, Mexico. Don't believe me? Check out the Wikipedia page. Checking the Wiki page will show you that originally it was Worcestershire sauce and not anchovy that gave the dressing its distinctive flavor. We included both, as well as garlic which was not in the original recipe.