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.

Mocha ice cream with malt balls and warm caramel sauce

Sorry about that last post. I really should know better to try such things and just stick to recipes.

This particular recipe is a remake of one of the first ice creams I made when I got my churn a couple years ago. I've updated it into the Britton style, tweaked it a little and added the caramel which I though would go well with the other flavors.

I started by coarsely grinding 12 Tablespoons of coffee beans. Which was a mistake, I think. I added them to 1 1/2 cups cream and 1 1/2 cups milk, brought the mix to a boil, simmered for a few minutes to cook down the dairy a little, turned off the heat, covered and let steep for 10 minutes. That nicely infused the flavor, but the grounds grabbed on to a lot of the milk solids and I ended up mashing them in a sieve to try to get all the good stuff out. Kind of a pain, not terribly effective and some grounds make it through and back into the pot. Since the ice cream was going to be gritty from the maltballs anyway, I thought it would fly, but if I were to do it again, I'd just crush beans, not grind them.

Once the dairy was infused with coffee, I mixed in 1/2 cup sugar which isn't a lot for 3 cups, particularly with the bitterness of the coffee. I wanted to keep the ice cream on the less sweet side so the malt and caramel would contrast nicely. Once the sugar was dissolved, I mixed 1 Tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon corn starch with 3/4 ounce by weight of Dutch-process cocoa (mainly as an aid to getting lumps out of both) and whisked the mixture into the pot and brought it back up to a boil to thicken up. Finally, I whisked in 1 1/2 ounce by volume of cream cheese (whipped up for easier incorporation) and checked for flavor and texture. It was both too intense and too thick so I thinned it out with 1/4 cup of cream.

The malt balls are the fancy sort from the bulk bin at Fresh Market. I think the chocolate to malt ratio is too high, but they've certainly got Whoppers beat. I wanted irregularly sized pieces so I put them in a plastic bag and whacked them with a crab hammer. That's a couple handfuls. I don't know, 1 1/2 cups?

The caramel sauce is only a sauce since it's warm. It's really just a simple soft caramel. I forgot to write down the amounts I used, but I think it was a half cup of sugar, melted, and then the cooking stopped by mixing in 3 Tablespoons of butter and 1/4 cup cream. I may have added a dash of vanilla too. That's all there is to it.

So I chilled and churned the mix, folded in the malt balls and ripened in the freezer. I haven't got a beauty shot of the final product I'm afraid, so you'll just have to use your imagination. I made it for a baby shower that happened while I was away visiting my mother and I never got to taste the fully assembled dish. I asked for them to take pictures, but nobody did. I tried a little of the ice cream and thought the coffee overbalanced the cocoa flavor, but I hoped the chocolate on the malt balls would compensate. I'm told the ice cream went over well and certainly it was all gone when I got back, but I couldn't get any details about how it tasted from those I asked. You'll just have to use your imagination for that too.

Coffee-crusted pork chops with white chocolate sauce

Here is the second white-chocolate sauce recipe I promised in my last post. Pork is probably a bit more of an intuitive match with white chocolate than salmon. This recipe also came from Cacaoweb and the sauce is made the same way. I'm curious if you can make a savory white chocolate sauce without a roux. I had a hard time filtering out sweet sauces in my searches so I haven't found any other versions to compare. I'll have to do some more sophisticated searching and see what I can turn up.

But for now, here's the recipe:
Pork Chops with Coffee and White Chocolate Sauce

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients
3 tablespoons butter
3 teaspoons all-purpose flour
1 cup broth [chicken I'm assuming]
2 oz (60 g) white chocolate
------
3 tablespoons butter
4 boneless pork chops [no idea why boneless is specified. Mine had a bit of bone on one side and it worked fine.]
6 tablespoons finely ground coffee for dredging [I used a medium roast]
Salt and pepper

Method
Make first white sauce with white chocolate, then cook the pork chops: [Didn't notice this so I cooked the porkchop simultaneously. Didn't seem to be a problem.]

[0. Never cook a porkchop without brining for a half hour or so to improve flavor and texture.]
1. Melt 3 tablespoons butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. When the butter has melted add the flour and mix well.
2. Add broth, stirring constantly to incorporate and cook the flour.
3. Let the sauce cook on low heat for approximately 15 minutes, stir regularly. [As last time, I found the pan drying out a couple times so I added more broth. I used less this time and ended up with a hollandaise-thick sauce as a result.]
4. Add salt to taste.
5. Take the saucepan off the heat and add white chocolate, stir until melted.
6. Melt 3 tablespoons butter in a nonstick pan over medium heat.
7. Season the pork chops with salt and pepper, then dip them into ground coffee taking time to coat both sides thoroughly.
8. Cook the pork chops until done, about five minutes per side. [I found three minutes per side to be sufficient. Maybe my heat was too high.]
9. Serve with rice, mango chutney, fried plantains and/or bananas and white chocolate sauce.


Now this, I really liked. First off, the smell of the coffee and pork sizzling in the butter was surprisingly appetizing, although I suppose I should have expected it. I've had breakfast before and should know full well coffee, pork, butter and salt go together even without the toast and fried egg.

The coffee crust is an earthy counterpoint to the porkchop. It doesn't have near the richness of a brewed cup, of course. It's more like the flavor a chocolate-covered espresso bean, but sweetened by the pork juices instead.

The sauce is quite rich, which is good with the lean pork. The white chocolate is again well incorporated in the flavor of the sauce, only being recognizable in the aftertaste. This time around it has the useful role of subtly marrying with the coffee. It's a combination that works wonderfully, but you can't immediately identify why.

The mango chutney (Chef Allen's Mango Tears which I picked up back at the Mango Festival) adds some brightness to the dish but isn't really necessary. This is genuinely quite good, novel ingredients entirely aside. I could easily see making this again.

Grand Slam Ice Cream

so-called because it contains a cup of coffee, a glass of milk, a waffle with maple syrup and banana, two eggs and three slices of bacon--all the components (more or less) of a Denny's Grand Slam Breakfast.

You knew as well as I that I was going to make a bacon ice cream sooner or later. Straight bacon ice cream is pretty passe these days; it was over a year ago that Michael Symon got dinged for making it during the Next Iron Chef competition. If you look around on-line you see variations like maple-bacon, coffee-bacon, peanut butter-bacon and the like so that next step beyond is well trodden. I needed not just a more complex flavor but some grander idea to make it worth while and so a complete breakfast ice cream was born.

The first thing was to infuse the coffee. I coarsely ground three Tablespoons of coffee beans and added them to 1 cup heavy cream and 1 1/2 cup milk. I slowly heated that to the edge of simmering and then turned off the heat, put on the lid and let it sit for 15 minutes. Not quite boiling means that I don't release the more bitter flavor components in the coffee and get a smoother flavor.

After it was done steeping I strained out the coffee grounds, pressing them to get out all the liquid, and split the dairy into two batches. I wanted to thicken it both with (two) egg yolks and (one) banana but I don't know what it is in the banana that mimics a custard I don't know if it would survive heating and I'm sure that the protein chains that egg yolks thicken with won't survive a spin in the blender. That means two separate operations to be mixed later.

First one's easy, 1 cup dairy plus one frozen-and-defrosted banana blended together.

For the second one I whisked the two egg yolks with 5 fluid ounces of grade A dark amber maple syrup. That amount was determined by what I had on hand but it worked out so I'll leave it as is. Grade A dark is actually an average as I have a bunch of sample bottles of different grades and I mixed some grade B, some grade A dark and the dregs of my big bottle of grade A medium. Once that was smooth I mixed it with 1 1/2 cups of dairy and slowly heated it to 170 degrees whisking frequently to create a custard. I immediately removed it from the pan and cooled for a half hour and mixed it with the banana blend. I noticed that it tasted really good warm which meant it wasn't sweet enough for freezing. So I added a quarter cup of white sugar before chilling it overnight to 40 degrees.

Meanwhile, it was time to cook the bacon. That's three strips for the ice cream and one for me. I preferred method is baking in my toaster oven. Ten minutes at 350 degrees, give the strips a flip, another ten minutes and maybe a bit longer depending on how they're doing. This particularly bacon is thick cut--the extra-nice, extra-fancy, extra-expensive sort from Whole Foods. It's great and I'm never going back to the supermarket stuff--so it took an extra five minutes and maybe could have cooked a bit longer to get really crisp, but I didn't figure it would stay crisp in the ice cream so I didn't want to take the risk of burning it. If it wasn't going into something sweet I would have sprinkled it with brown sugar which candies the bacon up nicely and very tastily.

I also chopped up a frozen waffle. Even if I had a waffle maker I probably would have gone with store bought as I expect they're well-designed for freezing. I used Van's whole-grain Belgian waffles which have a good bit of flavor and a firm texture that Eggo doesn't deliver.

In the morning the mix wasn't noticeably thick, but it did heavily coat a dipped spatula which is what you're looking for in an ice cream mix.

It churned up nicely with a good gradual freezing and a slowly thickening texture. That allows plenty of time for churned in air which helps keep the results from freezing too solidly. I mixed in the bacon and waffle as I spooned out the churned ice cream. No point in pouring the solid bits into the churn where they can get ground up and jam the works. And then into the freezer for ripening.


And here's the final product. Bacon entirely aside, the coffee/maple/banana combination is fabulous. Even my co-workers who picked out the bacon raved about the ice cream. There was a nice synergy of the three flavors straight out of the churn, but after ripening coffee has come to the forefront with the others rounding it out. If you make it, I'd suggest using only two scoops of coffee beans or just mashing up the beans in a mortar instead of grinding them.

There's enough bacon and waffle to get one or the other in most bites. If you get the bacon there are hints of salt and smoke poking through the intense but mellow flavor of the ice cream--which actually works quite well. The ice cream melts away rapidly without much lingering aftertaste so you're left just chewing a piece of really good bacon and/or a not-bad-at-all chunk of whole-grain waffle. The few seconds of overlap as the flavors build and fade in intensity are the best part.

The texture is about as good as I've ever managed: soft, smooth and creamy. I think that's from the fructose in the maple syrup. I could see the mix getting gooey as it froze in the churn instead of just hardening up. The texture of the waffles isn't great--a bit stiff and crumbly--but it's a good contrast and the flavor blooms as you chew it so not too bad. I was afraid it would get soggy, but I think the hearty multigraininess helped avoid that Eggo-esque possibility. Surprisingly, the bacon retains a bit of crunch around the edges with a nice chewy center. There was some concern expressed that an unnamed "some people" might not like the chewiness. Maybe I could have cooked the bacon crisper, but with thick-cut bacon there's a fine line between crisp and burnt and you start to lose flavor as you approach it. Now that I know that bacon retains its texture when mixed in ice cream, I'll probably go with thinner, crisper bacon next time it's an appropriate addition.

Overall, a great success but not a terribly surprising one. Of course all these flavors go together; I'm just presenting them unusually. I think that's a bit less impressive than novel flavor combinations that work out. That's what I'll have to work on next.