Random Cuisine | Desserts, Comfort Food, Inspirations, Recipes

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Lemon Bars with Sweet Pie Crust

The art of making pie crusts seem to be a tedious job among many home cooks. One would rather buy the frozen one instead of making it from scratch to save up time. I recalled the moment that I opened my first cookbook, the first thing that I wanted to do is to make pie crusts from scratch. Still a newbie in baking, I basically winged the recipe hopefully it turns out okay. At that time, I didn't know why butter must be very cold, why use less than 1 tablespoon of cold water to assemble the dough, why the dough must not be overworked. Unfortunately, I didn't follow properly the recipe, and the crust was hard as rock. After a few more attempts, I decided to give myself a break and get back to it when I have more confidence in my baking skills.

With time, I found out about other types of pastry crusts which does not require such meticulous care likepâte sablée and sweet pastry crust (pâte sucrée). These crust can be made all in one bowl with an electrical mixer. The end result is a sweet, buttery and tender crust, ready to be used for any creamy and fruity pies.

What gotten me in baking desserts as well as the launch of this blog is the success of my first ever baked dessert - lemon bars. The combination of the tartness and tanginess of the lemons and the buttery pastry crust makes it so irresistible. This recipe is much simpler than the one previously published and also has less fat. To get the most flavours out of the lemon, consider adding lemon zest, a tip that I learned when I competed in Recipe to Riches with my Blueberry-Lemon Crisp recipe.

Makes about 12-16 bars
Crust recipe adapted from Joy of Baking
Preparation Time: 30 mins
Refrigeration Time: 30 mins
Baking Time: 35 mins
Chilling Time: 1 hour
Printable Recipe

Ingredients

Sweet Pastry Crust
3/4 cup butter, softened
1/3 cup white sugar
1 egg, beaten
2 cups flour, sifted
1 pinch salt

Filling
5 eggs
5 lemons, juiced with 2 tsp of zest
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup plain yoghurt or sour cream

Icing sugar

Procedure

1. In a large bowl, beat butter until creamy. Add in sugar and beat until light and fluffy.

2. Gradually incorporate beaten egg while whisking. Add in the flour and salt, beat until it forms a dough-like texture.

3. Flatten dough and wrap it in plastic and refrigerate for 30 mins until firm.

4. Preheat oven to 400F.

5. Transfer dough to lightly butter and flour 13'' x 9'' baking pan. Press dough onto bottom and up the sides of the baking pan, about 1/4-inch up. Prick bottom dough with a fork.

6. Bake for 5 mins. Reduce oven temperature to 350F for 15 mins until golden brown. Remove from oven, let it cool.

7. Meanwhile, prepare filling. In a medium bowl, beat eggs, lemon juice, zest, sugar and yoghurt.

8. Pour filling to the baked dough.

9. Bake for 15 mins until firm. Do not overbake as the filling may crack. Cool completely and refrigerate until well chilled.

10. Sprinkle with icing sugar and cut into bar sizes. Serve.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Turnip Cake - Lo Bak Go

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Chinese New Year is one of these holidays that my family celebrates religiously in which we adopt Chinese traditions and superstitions. This is the holiday where I look forward to share with you my mother's recipes. I have to admit that I still haven't perfected the art of making Chinese New Year sweet treats or savoury cakes. This is also the time of the year where I have sweet treats with my colleagues, especially my Chinese friends who either of their parents can't make traditional home-cooked dishes or can't afford to go back home to see their parents. I'm quite fortunate to spend quality time with my family.

Days before the New Year, it is somewhat a tradition to exchange sweet baked goods with family friends. These sweet foods symbolize sweet life for the New Year. You are welcome to have a look at my past Chinese New Year recipes like Fa Gao (Prosperity Cake) and Nian Gao (Chinese New Year cake). We have received quite an abundant amount of baked goods this year, here are a few Chinese treats that I haven't shared with you in the past:

Pai Char/Qiao Guo - Flattened and twisted deep fried bean curd dough with black sesame seeds.

You Jiao - Deep fried sweet dumplings commonly stuffed with coconut and peanuts, these resembles like a purse which means fortune.

Turnip cake or daikon cake is one of the first dishes that most people would associate with Chinese New Year. This is my all-time favourite savoury cakes. Once cooked, they are soft filled with a generous amount of julienned turnip with a bit of dried shrimp and Chinese sausage to add a hint of saltiness. With the leftovers, we pan fried them until golden to give a slight crunch on the outside but still soft in the middle.

As usual, my mother never gives me the exact quantity to her recipes. She mostly eyeballs her recipes. One tip for a good turnip cake is the ratio of turnip to rice flour must be 6 to 1. For every pound of rice flour, one must use about 6 lbs of turnip.

Makes 2 8-inch sized cakes

Preparation Time: 10 mins

Cooking Time: 10 mins

Steaming Time: 25 mins

Printable Recipe

Ingredients

Filling

1 long turnip (about 6 lbs), julienned

1 lb ground pork or pork loin, thinly cubed

1/4 cup dried shrimp

1/2 cup pickled cabbage

2 celery stalks

2 Chinese sausages

Flour Mixture
1 pack (1 lb) plain rice flour
about 5 cups warm water
1 tsp salt

Chopped green onions for garnish

Procedure

1. Thinly chopped dried shrimp, pickled cabbage, celery stalks, and Chinese sausages.

2. In a skillet, add julienned turnip and 1/2 cup of water, enough water to cover the bottom of the skillet. Heat over medium-high heat, cook turnip until soft, about 5 mins.

3. Add in pork, chopped dried shrimp, pickled cabbage, celery stalks, Chinese sausages. Cook for 5 mins until pork is fully cooked.

4. Meanwhile, prepare flour mixture. Combine rice flour with warm water. Add in salt. The mixture should be liquid, not thick or gooey. It should thinly coat the back of a spoon similar to a custard or a thin béchamel sauce. Add in 1/2 cup of water if necessary.

5. Transfer turnip filling with its liquid to the flour mixture, mix until combined. Lightly oil two 9-inch round cake pans. Fill batter to the cake pans.

6. Steam for 25 minutes or until firm. Garnish with green onions.

7. Slice cake into rectangles. Serve warm.

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Bonne année lunaire!

Happy Chinese New Year!

May the year of the Dragon brings you and your family good health, wealth, happiness and prosperity.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Nutella Chestnut Brownies - A 3-Ingredient Recipe

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A while back, I wrote my experience about Deepavali. After publising that post, I have been told that some members of the Malaysian and Singaporean Student's Association are addicted to brownies and printed all my brownie recipes. I was trying to recall when was the last time I published my last brownie recipe. In fact, there are only two brownie recipes on this blog: Macadia Nut Brownies and Butterscotch-glazed Brownies. Both were published in 2009.

I was figuring out if brownies can be made with a minimal number of ingredients in case I received a last minute dinner party invitation or days that I just don't feel like baking, and cleaning the dishes afterwards. Making these Nutella brownies require only 5 mins of your time and three ingredients only. Well, four ingredients if you add some crunch to your brownies like walnuts or chestnuts. All you need is one bowl, one parchment paper, and a baking pan.

These brownies are dense, chewy and chocolatey. Whip up a batch of these brownies in no time for your next party dinner. You won't be disappointed.

Makes 12 brownies

Preparation Time: 5 mins

Baking Time: 12-15 mins

Printable Recipe

Ingredients

1 cup Nutella

2 eggs

3/4 cup flour, sifted

1/2 cup roasted chestnuts, coarsely chopped (optional)

Procedure

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Align parchment paper on lightly oil 8''x8'' baking pan.

2. In a mixing bowl, whisk Nutella and eggs until smooth.

3. Slowly incorporate flour. Mix in chestnuts.

4. Transfer mixture to prepared baking pan. Bake for 12-15 mins until it passes the toothpick test.

5. Let it cool. Cut into squares. Serve.

Monday, January 2, 2012

Perspectives for 2012 - Top 7 recipes of 2011

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Now that 2011 comes to an end: it is the time to reflect back on our past and figure out what new paths to take for 2012. By experience, doing the same thing over the years usually leads to boredom and lack of motivation. We need to enrich ourselves with new knowledge and new activities. To keep one motivated is to set a time-frame to realize long-term and short-term goals. In this case, what are my food-related goals? What am I planning to cover on this blog for 2012?

My main goal is to understand this age old question: what makes a dish irresistibly delicious? It is all about building flavour profiles to your protein with aromatics, herbs and spices than just adding salt and pepper. But how do you build flavour profiles? You can't just put any ingredients. A recently published article (Flavor network and the principles of food pairing) that Rebecca from Chow and Chatter posted on her Facebook fan page caught my attention. As a scientist, I love to put my mind into a scientific article and understand it carefully. Here is a chart from the article which represents the flavour network.

A flavour network of ingredients that are most used in recipes. Prevalence represents the occurrence of the ingredient over 56,000 recipes analyzed and shared compounds are the number of shared flavour compounds between two ingredients.

To summarize the article, the researchers have studied over 56,000 recipes through all major recipe websites such as allrecipes.com and epicurious. Each ingredient contains a number of predefined flavour compounds. North Americans are likely to use ingredients which share a high number of flavour compounds known as food pairing. Find below a video of Heston Blumenthal trying out an odd combination - blue cheese and chocolate.

Unlike East Asia, they are less likely to use ingredients that share the same flavour compounds. These dishes are about the perfect balance of sweet, sour, salty and spicy flavours. Overpowering one ingredient can make the dish unpleasant or missing the feeling that you can't stop eating it.

As a long-term food-related goal is to have a better understanding of the use of spices and herbs. The flavour network diagram will prove helpful for flavour combination.

So what are your food-related goals?

I will end this post with my top 7 recipes of 2011, each has its own special characteristic.

1. Hummus with a touch of parsley - my all-time favourite spread for my toasts in the morning.

2. Lentil Gardener's Pie - This vegetarian version of Shepherd's pie has converted some meat-eaters into flexitarians or even vegetarians.

3. Lamb Meatballs with Cilantro Raita - Irresistible, flavour-packed with herbs and spices. These will be a sure hit for your next dinner party.

4. Jerk Seafood - Spicy and saucy. You might end up sucking out every ounce of flavours out of these seafood.

5. Marble Rum Chocolate Banana Cake - Play a tasting game with this cake. There are more ingredients than meets the eye.

6. Shrimp Pad Thai - The perfect balance of salty, spicy, sour and sweet flavours in this popular noodle dish.

7. Roasted Root Vegetables - Simple ingredients with a simple recipe makes a good side dish.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Christmas Dinner 2011

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Even though I have a two-week break from research, it seems that I need to keep myself busy. My mind was set to write a holiday card message to my long-distance family and spend some quality time with friends and family.

Recently, my research group produced a sample out of carbon atoms that has the shape of a snowflake. In science terms, it is called a fractal. The dimension of the sample is about the diameter of a human hair. My colleagues had this idea of having this sample as an image for a custom-made (or limited edition) holiday card. I found this idea so neat that I brought the image to a print and copy centre, and make a few holiday cards out of it.

With my photography skills improving, I have been posting less frequently food that are made by my friends during cooking meetings. I felt that the quality of these pictures are not up to par mainly due to composition and improper lighting, also I'm used to take food pictures in my "studio". I used to publish quite a lot of recipes when I started this blog. These meetings are still very active, cooking together twice a month, and it has been running for over 3 years now. The cooking group is still expanding, attracting new graduate students to join us. If my three original officemates and I haven't started this cooking project in Fall 2008, this blog would not exist and I probably would not have so many great friends made along my graduate studies. The name Random Cuisine surprisingly still holds over the years.