Canistel coffee coconut custard pie

This is a variation on a Minimalist sweet potato pie recipe. I particularly liked the addition of coconut milk which I thought would blend nicely with the canistel.

The original recipe used a cracker crust but I wanted to try a vodka crust instead. Vodka pie crust, if you're not familiar with it, is a recipe that came out of Cook's Illustrated a few years back. The vodka adds moisture that doesn't promote gluten formation so you end up with a wet dough that you can hand press into the pie pan without worrying about overworking it. Then the vodka evaporates away and you end up with a flaky tender crust without all the hassle. I was fairly happy with the results with the caveats that a) it's so wet it slumps if you try to blind bake it and I wish someone had made a note of that in the recipe and b) either my pie pan is a weird size (and now that I've measured it, I think it is) or the recipe makes rather too much dough for the two crusts it says it makes. I didn't care for the thick crust but other folks liked it. Maybe it's just me.

One other thing. I've made variations on this pie twice. The first time I used 14 ounces of lúcuma pulp and the second time pulp from three canistels which was more like 10 ounces. Either works, but adjust the number of eggs: four for 14 ounces, three for 10. The original recipe calls for 2 medium sweet potatoes which isn't really helpful in pinning down the amount. Oh, and lúcuma is a close cousin of canistel that's popular in Peru and Chile.

Enough ado, here's the recipe.

Ingredients:
2 Tablespoons ground coffee
1/2 cup water
3 or 4 large eggs
1/2 - 3/4 cups sugar, adjusted for the sweetness of your fruit [light brown if you'd like, but it makes the results taste more like pumpkin pie than canistel]
1 cup coconut milk
spices to taste [I used 1 teaspoon cinnamon and 1 teaspoon allspice but I could have used more.]
1 large pinch salt
pulp from 3 or 4 canistels
1 pie crust

0. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

1. Add the coffee to the water in a small pot. Bring to a boil, turn off heat and let steep for 10 minutes.

2. To a food processor or blender add the eggs, sugar, coconut milk, spices and salt. Strain in the coffee. Blend until well combined. Add the canistel. Blend until smooth.

3. Pour mixture into pie crust and bake for 40 to 50 minutes until it is mostly set but the center couple inches are still a little jiggly.

Right [minus the coffee]:



Slightly overcooked:


Again, right [minus coffee]:


and slightly overcooked:


The textures of both are very smooth and the crust came out nicely tender. The second is overcooked, so it's not meltingly creamy. The first pie had a much lower fruit to egg ratio and came out a little starchy. I've made the ajustments to the recipe so yours should come out just right.

The second pie came out a lot more mild after baking than the mixture was raw, which I should have expected given my experiments with baking canistels. Still, the flavors are all still there. It starts with the canistel up front, maybe a hint of coconut and finishes with a bitter hit of coffee. It could use an extra quarter cup or so of sugar, but that's hard to tell going in. It tasted just fine raw so make it a bit sweeter than you think it should be. The combination of coffee and canistel works really well and is, I'd like to point out, my innovation, although I'd think it an obvious one for any pastry chef with any experience using canistels. It's really easy too, so well worth a try.

CSA week ten - Thai canistel and radish omelet

OK, I recognize that this one is going to require a bit of justification.

First off, I had a leftover roasted canistel from last week that I was looking for ways to use. You may recall that I mentioned that it tastes rather like pumpkin which would explain why I was searching for savory pumpkin recipes. A technique I use while trolling around the web for recipes is to pair the ingredient I'm hoping to use with various proteins and cooking styles and seeing what pops up. In this case a search for "pumpkin and stir fry" turned up a couple of southern Thai recipes for pumpkin and egg stir fries. Who knew that was a thing?

As for the radishes, when you thinly slice them and fry them until they're browned around the edges they lose their peppery bite and take on a lovely savory/sweet flavor that goes well with eggs. I've substituted them in for the potatoes in Spanish tortillas before with quite good results so why not try them here too?

So I fried up a handful of thinly sliced radishes and a couple links of lop chong in a little peanut oil until both were nicely browned.

Removed them and fried the canistel until it was browned too. That went rather more quickly than I expected; it looks burnt, but it just tastes caramelized.

Returned the radish and sausage, squirted on some fish sauce and then added three beaten eggs and a handful of chopped cilantro.

My attempts at omelets generally fall apart at this point. It ended really more scrambled eggs. Ah well. But that just made it easier to serve over a bowl of rice with a bit more fish sauce and sriracha to taste.



I know this isn't terribly plausible, but I think it works. Both the canistel and the radish have been transformed. The canistel is more like roasted squash while the radish is savory/sweet without a hint of bite. Both flavors are enhanced by the saltiness and umami of the fish sauce. The radishes taste nothing like the Chinese sausage, but they both have similar savory/sweet balances that work well together. The eggs add richness and tie everything together. But the real standout here is the canistel with sriracha; the combination creates a lovely sweet heat that definitely merits more exploration. Give it a try and see what you think.

CSA week seven - Canistel meatballs

Back in this post, where I made a meatloaf using overcooked carrots and turnips, I wondered how a meatloaf using canistel might work. The texture of the wad of mushed-up overcooked root vegetables was pretty similar to the texture of roasted canistel so I suspected that that aspect would work, but what about the flavor? In the comments, Russell expressed skepticism, but also mentioned trying pumpkin meatloaf.

It was a good comparison. Roasting canistel brings out its nutty pumpkiny flavor elements, leaving a mild sweetness and, at least this time, a slight bitter aftertaste, probably from the fruit being a little under-ripe--but just a little--they were squishy-ripe, not gooshy ripe.

There are actually a fair number of pumpkin meatloaf recipes out there so I was fairly confident the canistel would work. But no point in wasting a lot of food unnecessarily; best to start the experiment with a small batch of meatballs and go from there.

I roasted two canistels, sprayed with olive oil and lightly salted, at 350 degrees for a half hour, but I decided to only use one for this recipe.

I ran that canistel through the food processor, skin and all, to reduce it to a paste. To it I added:
1/3 pound ground pork
1/3 pound ground beef
1/2 small onion
1/4 green pepper
1/2 stalk celery, all three very finely chopped
1 handful breadcrumbs, and
1 sizable dose of Milwaukee Ave. Steak Seasoning from Spice House

I mixed that all together and rolled out balls about 1 1/2-inches across which I shallow fried for 6 minutes with a flip half way through. I had my usual trouble getting the temperature right, but a thick crust helped the meatballs hold together so even the slightly overcooked ones had their virtues.



They turned out really pretty well. Texturally, the canistel holds the meatballs together, but not quite as well as I would have liked. I should have cut a few minutes off the roasting to leave them a little moister. Or added an egg or maybe replaced the spices with chipotle peppers.

Flavorwise, the mild sweetness of the canistel balances with the smokey pepperiness of the spice mix similarly to how barbecue sauces do. The pumpkiny flavor of the canistel pairs well with the meat and the smoke. It worked; I ate up the whole batch without hesitation. So, if you don't know what to do with your canistels or haven't liked the sweet preparations you've tried, roast them and substitute them into pumpkin recipes. It'll probably work.

CSA week 12 - Canistel-molasses custard pie

This is an adaption of this sweet potato pie recipe. Beyond just a straight substitution of the canistels for the sweet potatoes I baked the canistels for a half hour at 350 first. Last time I cooked canistels I was struck by how they changed their texture, lost a lot of sweetness and developed a richer more savory flavor. Then I just ate them but I think they'd make good ingredients after that processing too. I'm writing this as I cook and I can smell them baking now. The smell is more toasty than sugary which I suspect is a good sign.

The canistels, after baking, are just what I was looking for--the sweetness is mellowed and deepened with more complex flavors and the flesh has firmed up into something easier to work with. This is, I recognize, an odd unintuitive reaction but canistels are odd unintuitive fruit.

They went into the food processor with:

* 1/2 cup brown sugar, firmly packed

* 1/2 cup molasses

* 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

* 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

* 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

* 1/4 teaspoon salt, and

* 1/4 teaspoon vanilla

I didn't remove the canistel's skin since a) that's really difficult at this point and b) the skins are pretty tasty, particulary the crispy edges.

The mix was too thick to blend well so I departed from the original recipe by adding 1 cup of milk and processing for several minutes to smooth it out before adding the 3 eggs. Those I just mixed in briefly. The end result still isn't perfectly smooth, but good enough for government work.

I used a store-bought frozen pie crust since I decline to slave over a homemade crust and waste it on this cockeyed experiment of a filling. The packaging said to not defrost and I'm taking its word on that. So, into a 375 degree oven for 20 minutes with foil around the edges and then 30 minutes with the foil off until a knife inserted halfway between the center and the edge comes out clean. And I mean totally clean. I pulled my pie out when there was still a few tiny drops of moisture on the knife and it's just barely set. It could have used another five minutes.

But despite that, it came out light and creamy. Some structural difficulties as you can see, but nothing a stint in the refrigerator couldn't cure. The molasses and spice flavors are strong, but you can identify the canistel if you concentrate and know what you're looking for. It's good, but I feel like if I were on Iron Chef they'd take points off for not highlighting the secret ingredient. Maybe light molasses or corn syrup would let it show through a little more. Or skip the pre-cooking although I'd be surprised to see the pie set successfully if you do. It's not excessively sweet; instead it has that complex bittersweet flavor you expect from molasses-based pies. If you like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like.

CSA week six - Broiled canistel with avocado mayonaise

If you've been searching for a palatable canistel dish don't get your hopes up too high here as this is more of a science experiment than an actual recipe. If you have been searching you've probably came across the serving suggestion of canistel with salt, pepper, lemon and mayonnaise. I don't know about you, but to me that sounds entirely appalling. And yet I didn't have any better ideas and it's not like it's going to waste a lot of other perfectly good ingredients so I thought I'd see what I could do with it.

Another experimental element today is pictures taken with the proper camera I've finally bought. I rather expect picture quality to get worse for a while until I figure out what I'm doing with the thing.

Let's start with the avocado mayo. There are a fair number of avocado mayonnaise recipes out there but they generally fall into two categories, either glorified avocado purees or standard mayonnaise with some avocado blended in. What I'm doing here instead is using the fat in the avocado to substitute for the vegetable oil in a standard mayonnaise recipe. I don't usually go to science blogs for my recipes, but that's where you'll find this one; it's from a blog called Adventures in Ethics and Science.

I whisked an egg with the juice of one lemon and some Dijon mustard to act as an emulsifier. Then I blended that with half of a Monroe avocado. The result was too thin and tasted mostly of mustard and lemon so I added another quarter avocado and gave it a full minute in the food processor. Now it's got the right creamy texture and is starting to take on that distinctive light tanginess of actual mayonnaise mixed with the avocado flavor. Not bad at all, but I'll have to make some tuna salad to make a really fair judgment. There's still a bit more mustard flavor than I'd like, though, so next time I'll have to use a chemical emulsifier instead.

Step two is the canistel. Beyond soups and pies the only cooking instructions I found for canistel were to "lightly bake". I have no idea what that means. I decided to broil it instead to a) see if it would melt, catch on fire, explode or what and b) see how it tastes with a bit of browning.

I cut my two canistels in half, pried out the seeds, scooped out the seed pods, sprinkled them with a bit of salt and pepper and drizzled with a little olive oil. Since I'm experimenting here I thought I'd try some additional flavors. The canistel soup recipe we got in the newsletter is flavored with Chipotle adobo sauce which I happen to have handy so I spread a little of that on one canistel half; The second I brushed with a jerk marinade; The third with a tamarind chili sauce; and the fourth I left plain as a control.

I neglected to time how long they spent under the broiler. I just waited until they started smelling cooked and the sauces had dried into glazes. They didn't brown as well as I had hoped but the bits that did got crispy and caramelized so they're going closer to the heating element if I do this again.

The broiled casinstel didn't do anything alarming to my disappointment. It firmed up and dried out to a texture somewhere between russet potato, winter squash and Play-Doh. It was better than that makes it sound and it sure beats the gritty pudding texture it has raw. On the other hand, it definitely needed the mayo to moisten. Interestingly, the peel, which you wouldn't want to eat raw, is of a piece with the flesh cooked so there was no point in not eating it whole. The flavor has become milder, losing the sickly sweetness and now isn't too far off from a yam. The avocado mayo is a nice accompaniment. Probably better than real mayo I think.

As for the sauces:
The adobo pairs nicely with the canistel and goes with the avocado mayo too.
The jerk not so much.
The tamarind chili sauce is pretty similar to the adobo and works well with the canistel but clashes a bit with the avocado mayo.
The plain needed something so I added some Pickapeppa sauce. The fruity tanginess marries with the canistel and isn't bad with the mayo, but it feels incomplete. I think it needs meat. But that's usually my reaction to Pickapeppa sauce. I think there's the start of a full dish there that I'll work on if I get more canistel.

So, overall I've had better dinners, but that could have gone a lot worse. If you're at a loss as to what to do with your canistels and/or avocados, it's worth a try.