With all the preparations for the 2nd annual family house party in full swing, I tackled the ''P's".
Fresh off my mousse mistakes, I decided to separate the great Mocha Buche de Noel into sections. This is first of all necessary, as the mousse needs to be frozen, the soufflé pastry needs to cool and all these layers need to not fall apart inside or outside of your freezer, and second of all good for my self-esteem. The pastry seemed by far the least intimidating step.
The idea for a Buche de Noel is you make a baking sheet of chocolate cake (in a low-fat chocolate cookbook this becomes a soufflé pastry to keep it light), a baking sheet of chocolate mousse (the good recipe for bittersweet truffle mousse rather than the dreaded mocha mousse), unpeel the chocolate layers from their respective baking sheets, roll them up, wrap it all in a meringue layer and stick it in the oven for 4 minutes like a Baked Alaska. The effect is one of frozen mousse inside, warm maringue coating outside, and the meringue looks like the bark of a tree, a Christmas tree, or "buche".
Cocoa Soufflé Pastry:
eggs, separated
vanilla
sugar
cream of tartar
cocoa
jelly-roll pan (the baking industry's money-grab item - it's only a baking sheet with a lip, as most have anyway)
This recipe from Alice Medrich's Low-Fat Chocolate Cookbook certainly got off on the wrong foot when no length of beating was suggested. In the last recipe I had undertaken, the dreaded mocha mousse, she was so adamant that under no circumstances should the beating time of 3 minutes be cheated, but here she did not say a peep? Well I beat it for 3 minutes and hoped there wasn't a third recipe somewhere hiding in the book which read "Actually, you never want to beat for 3 minutes as the egg yolks will turn white, become very scared of chocolate, and never, ever fold correctly, resulting in unsuccessful Christmas parties".
I had decided to make the pastry layer thinking it would be a nice break from mousse, but no, soufflé is just like mousse in the egg white/yolk separating, beating, and folding EXCEPT there's no need to make sure they get to 160 degrees because it's going to be safe no matter what once it's in the oven. Oh hurray! Soufflé now seems easy to me. The hardest part was after:
1. Beating the egg whites to soft peaks (still a bit of a guess) on MEDIUM speed,
2. Adding the remaining sugar, increasing the beating speed to HIGH until stiff but not dry (again, hope and a prayer),
3. Folding some of the egg whites into the yolks and then everything back into the whites after sieving the cocoa on top
you have to make sure the whole thing does not collapse as you fold and finally spread into a baking dish lined with aluminum foil. I've had a few too many soufflés collapse in the oven on me and if this happened, the buche de noel would be a little non-cylindrical, probably resulting in the mousse oozing out the sides. Not a bad thing, necessarily, as it would be the most delicious tree sap created since maple syrup, but no so good when trying to surround it, eventually, with meringue.
Well it didn't implode. The middle didn't sink. My self-esteem would last one more day until the next mousse-making.
On to easier tasks, or so I thought...
Polenta Diamonds
I doubled a recipe for polenta from Bonnie Stern's Heartsmart Cooking
10 cups of milk or water (I did a mix)
4 cups of cornmeal
salt
pepper
white truffle oil
Seems simple, and it was. Bring the water/milk to a boil, add salt and pepper, whisk in cornmeal. Reduce heat to low and let cook for 30 minutes, stirring. Remove from heat and stir in truffle oil. I cooked it and stirred and poured it into baking dishes to cool. In Northern Italy polenta is everywhere. It's served as a porridge, with more liquid to cornmeal ratio, and then the leftovers harder up, some of the liquid evaporates, and are grilled, fried in butter, or baked into a cornbread-like consistency to be topped with other ingredients the next day. Kind of in the same way you take stale bread and turn it into bread pudding, or toss leftover dried-out rice into a soup. So my concept with the polenta was to cool it in pans, leave it to dry out and cut it into the diamond shapes you see everywhere in bars in Milan, and top it with:
1. Goat cheese spread and Wild Mushroom Sauté (and a version using a lactose-free feta)
2. Moroccan Cooked Tomato Salsa topped with scallions
(This worked well with the "layer" theme of the party), but the polenta did not dry up. Even after baking it for 20 minutes it stayed mushy inside, like a pancake that won't cook through. With assistance, I tried frying them in butter, only to come to the conclusion that the butter was used to make overly dry polenta softer after, not to make soft polenta harder. The outsides solidified but the second you move them from the pan they fall apart. It was still delicious, but you can't have layers if everything squishes together, and messy finger-food at a party is a recipe for disaster, and labour-intensive cleaning, neither of which are good.
So the polenta got left for two days to see if anything could be evaporated. In the end I think we baked all ten cups of it twice, tried frying 1/4 quarter or it and left the left to be scooped up with a spatula. It actually worked out alright. Instead of cutting the pieces individually, the diamond-shapes were made with a knife as guides for party-guests to try to scoop, and then each diamond was topped with a mound of the salsa or cheese and mushrooms. The colour contrast between the two layer toppings was beautiful and the diamonds weren't so mushy by the party.
Oh, for the white truffle oil, I did splurge and go to a specialty store. White truffle oil is olive oil infused with truffle, a mushroom. It's all very chi-chi, yes, and I'd never tried it before. It gave a woodsy-flavour to the cornmeal and is a nice touch as long as you don't overpower it with salt.
The Moroccan Cooked Salsa was so easy to make! Five ingredients:
Red peppers
olive oil
A head of garlic, separated into cloves and finely chopped
4 jalapenos
3lbs plum tomatoes or 3 cans drained and chopped
You broil the red peppers until their skins are black, let them cool and peel the skins off of them. This is not so fun sometimes. If they broil unevenly then all the skin doesn't blacken, and it's kind of hard to remove it all. Two tricks are to cut the peppers so the skin is equidistant from the broiler so it blackens evenly, and once broiled, leave them to cool in a plastic bag. I think this makes it easier to remove the skins though I'll admit I don't fully understand.
12 cloves of garlic? Seriously? It cooks down so it's not too strong. This is not raw garlic. Honestly, in the end, you don't really taste the garlic. The jalapenos you do taste, and feel, though. Dicing four jalapenos should be done in kitchen gloves. One is bad enough but four stays in your hands, can cause irritation, gets in your eyes, and generally overwhelms your kitchen. Also, don't skimp on the oil when you sauté them with the garlic or they'll smoke up your entire kitchen. Cook these a few minutes, add the tomatoes and cook 20 minutes. The taste would be completely different if you use fresh tomatoes, but it's December in Newfoundland, so you can get mush better quality from canned. Just don't add any extra salt in the end when the recipe says "salt to taste". I don't care if you're addicted to sodium, the extra salt would add nothing.
After 20 minutes add the reserved roasted peppers, which have subsequently been skinned and diced, and cook 15 minutes more. Also delicious on toasted or un-toasted baguette, instead of mush polenta.
2 dips down, 1 to go.
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