Yet another experience where I live vicariously through my brother: while I’m sitting here watching my ThinkPad overheat in the latest heat wave, my brother has had the opportunity to have dinner made by none other than my pal Amy.

More to come, but I’m simply green with envy.

The 1998 iteration of Butter is an action film with Ernie Hudson (you may remember him as Winston). I’ve never seen it, but it apparently doesn’t involve dairy products.

The upcoming 2011 production of Butter will soon be entering principal photography and will star Yara Shahidi and a couple of warm bodies named Jennifer Garner and Hugh Jackman in a story about orphans and butter sculptures in the American Mid-West. Mmm… compelling.

I can already hear my pal Butter Boy squealing in anticipation. Or not.

It’s pronounced “meal-a”, with the “a” pronounced as it is in “apple”, and it’s essentially a century-old German company whose products are designed by overachieving anal-retentive engineers. Most people know them for vacuum cleaners and dishwashers (the LaPerla is the best on available bar none) but they happen to make other stuff too, like kitchen appliances and laundry machines including a rolling iron platform. It’s all good stuff since their wares are seriously over-engineered for those “just in case” failsafe scenarios.

Miele happens to have a Miele Gallery Showroom in the greater Montreal area now, which is great because it’s entirely dedicated to their products. Since Miele doesn’t have its own retail presence, that means these galleries are designed to just show off the hardware and how the individual items can be installed and grouped together. Sort of a “kick the tires and open the hood” kind of place for high-end appliances but without the hassle of someone flitting around trying to make commission. Neat concept. What’s not so great is the location, since it’s in Laval. Laval I guess is okay. Going to Laval on a weeknight from the southern apple fields? Not fine.

Apart from showcase stuff, the Montreal Gallery does have a fully functional demonstration kitchen available for hire for private functions that happens to be equipped with:

• H4882BP MasterChef Series single oven
• H4892BP2 MasterChef Series double oven
• H4080BM MasterChef Series speed oven
• DG4080 MasterChef Series steam oven (all four of them)
• ESW4822 MasterChef Series warming drawer
• CS1223 I CombiSet Program induction wok unit
• CS1012 G CombiSet Program gas cooktop
• CS1421 S CombiSet Program salamander
• CVA4062 Built-in Coffee System
• DA5000D Classic Series 42-inch island hood
• KF1911 Vi MasterCool Bottom-Mount Fridge/Freezer
• G2832SCi LaPerla dishwasher (did I mention it’s the best dishwasher currently available?)

I got an invitation to the Gallery’s inaugural cooking demo which I thought was pretty cool as I wanted to see how the steam oven and the CombiSets work in a “live” environment (with food and stuff). So what was on the demo menu?

• Mesclun salad with lemon vinaigrette serve with a goat cheese stuffed phyllo
• Salmon and asparagus paupiette, basmati rice with crunchy vegetables and fish stock white butter sauce
• Caramelized bananas with salted caramel and roasted almonds

So what happened? I saw that I generally have better knife skills and overall mise en place: I chopped red and yellow bell peppers. I peeled and trimmed one asparagus shoot. I rolled asparagus in salmon fillets (twice, but others took my paupiettes, leaving me with some less-than-stellar exemplars). I used the induction wok (weird – I don’t normally use a wok, but the CombiSet is fast). I declined using a blow torch on some banana, primarily as I already own a blowtorch and go medieval on a variety of foodstuffs. I plated. I confirmed that I really hate working with phyllo. Really, really hate working with phyllo.

It wasn’t a huge demo of everything the kitchen was equipped with but everything was used except the salamander CombiSet. Too bad, but I got to watch the broiling platform rise up from its base and go back down (whee!).

All in all, a really nice time especially after a pretty harsh drive from the southern apple fields (remember my Road Warrior reference? just like the photo, but in springtime). The recipes were nice if a little tame but they could be adapted to larger gatherings. Except for the phyllo (erk).

Unfortunately, there was a bit of a down side to the evening as I left the Gallery thinking ”dang - I so need that DG4082 MasterChef Series steam oven with the straight door handle.”

The Background: It really was a demo, and I had been searching for ideas for a transportable tiny sandwich which wouldn’t take up too much time and wouldn’t be overly offensive. It’s not everyone who wants to sit down to a squid sandwich or who thinks that anchovy mayo is a great condiment. The idea for a radish sandwich ultimately came from Linda, who had spent part of her year smoking cream to make variations of butter used to accompany radishes. After doing a little bit of research on radishes and butter, which by the way simply reconfirmed my abject lack of knowledge of this French springtime staple, I went to work. Classic pairing…

… of “radishes and butter” begat “radish pintxo” which begat “radish pintxo with banana and Nutella” which transformed and reinvented into an extended exercise with tapioca maltodextrin.

This is an interesting ingredient which arose from the food and pharma industries but which has been used by Ferran Adrià, Heston Blumenthal, Wylie Dufresne and others and transformed into an ingredient common to modern haute cuisine. The maltodextrin nuggets and powder are derived from the work of others, and the techniques can be found in an online collection of hydrocolloid recipes that Martin Lersch maintains on his Khymos blog. The full collection is available here as downloadable PDFs. The radish jell-o? Also not an original idea but one borne out of necessity, so read on.

Radish Jell-o

• 3.5 g Knox gelatin powder
• 10 radishes
• 250 mL water

Why jell-o? Well, there’s always room for jell-o.

Actually, this became a necessity after I decided to add Nutella powder to the demo. The original premise was to serve a radish pintxo with bread, slices of radish, fleur du sel and butter powder, but with the Nutella powder I elected to change the butter powder to butter nuggets. To tone down the crispiness of the bite, something soft was called for and adding a radish extract seemed like a good idea to boost the radish taste since winter radishes are generally watery and mild-tasting. So, radish jell-o.

Grate the radishes with a microplane or a daikon grater. Add 250 mL water and let radish mixture sit 24 hours in refrigerator. Sieve radish mixture through a fine mesh strainer lined with cheesecloth. Push grated radish to extract as much liquid as possible. Transfer radish water into a tall container and let stand for one hour (this will allow some of the finer particles to fall to the bottom). Draw 200 mL radish water from top of container. Bloom gelatin powder in 50 mL radish water. Heat another 50 mL radish water to boiling point and add to gelatin. Mix solution with a spoon to ensure that gelatin has completely dissolved and add remain 100 mL radish water. Sieve gelatin through another cheesecloth-lined strainer into rectangular mold. Let set in refrigerator until ready for use.

Though I do have leaves of gelatin, I elected for Knox gelatin powder because I was running out of time and didn’t have any to spare to work out the ideal formula with leaf gelatin. The little Knox sachets are actually quite variable, as my trusty Tanita fine balance showed that they varied in fill weight by as much as a gram. 7 g appeared to be the amount proposed for 500 mL liquid so to ensure that my radish water would set I went higher and used 3.5 g for 200 mL liquid. This by the way still resulted in a very delicate gelatin, so going up a bit more may be required depending on how firm a gelatin is needed.

This jello provides a very ephemeral taste of radish. It can be added to the assembled pintxo as I did in the original demo to provide an additional boost of radish to the pintxo, or it can stand on its own with the butter nuggets and salt to reinterpret the pintxo. I have also just served it with radishes to have a very clean radish-on-radish bite.

Butter nuggets

• clarified salted butter
• tapioca maltodextrin

Butter nuggets started off as butter powder since I didn’t want to waste too much time in prep. However, when I decided to expand to include a sweet item, the butter powder had to be replaced since butter powder and Nutella powder repeated the same application. I thought about serving straight butter with the radish slices but then there would be no demonstration and the creaminess of butter would not work with radish jell-o. So, another type of “crunch” was required, hence the butter nuggets.

el Bulli has already developed bitter almond oil crumbs as a textural and flavor component and offered up the recipe as an example of how to use their Texturas-brand maltodextrin. The nuggets were developed out of this recipe: 22 g clarified butter was slowly added to 40 g maltodextrin and mixed until the appearance of crumbs.

At least that was about the only part of the Texturas recipe that stayed the same. Because of the physicochemical differences between butter fat and almond oil, some adaptation was required, and the end result wasn’t quite the same.

1. A hand (immersion) blender didn’t work because it kicked up the maltodextrin in spite of the presence of butterfat.
2. A whisk did a better job of incorporating the two but resulted in nuggets and not granules.
3. Heating the nuggets did not make them round; the different melting point of butter caused it to flatten and required a bit of stir-fry technique to keep the mass separated.
4. The resulting material was grainy and did not have an initial crunchy texture until after it had cooled down (at this point, I had nuggets).
5. It tastes more like milk or popcorn topping than it does butter.

Anyway, I think butter nuggets turned out to be a better result than butter crumbs because the larger pieces gave more visual contrast and really did not give away that it was indeed butter in spite of the butter yellow color.

This is also evidence that in many cases people do not listen to me: after I had finished describing the nuggets and what they were made of (butter), my pal Butter Boy started snacking on the nuggets strewn on the board and then said that he thought the skim milk nuggets were rather tasty. As I reminded him that they were butter nuggets, he blurted “oh merde! je suis en train de les manger!”

Nutella powder

• Nutella
• tapioca maltodextrin

This recipe was originally developed and described by Rob and Rachel of the Hungry in Hogtown blog (Torontonians! who’d have thunk?). They’ve been inactive for quite a while though there have been some recent posts regarding food poisoning after experimenting with street food in India. I think their best post was the one where they described cooking a rabbit dish from Ferran Adria’s el Bulli 2003-2004 reference text but you can find the original Nutella powder post here.

The basic “recipe” is a 3:2 proportion between Nutella and maltodextrin but I wound up closer to a 3:1 ratio (75% Nutella, 25% maltodextrin) for the application, possibly due to changes in the manufacture of Nutella since there’s been a whole lot of backlash about its relative nutritive value and fat content. Still, start with the 3:2 ratio and work from there. The only other modification I made to this recipe was to add some Piment d’Espelette to give the powder a hidden kick.

The use of a small food processor is warranted since hand mixing would take too long and the machine will also “fluff” the powder. Rob and Rachel made banana chips to sprinkle onto their Nutella powder, but I didn’t do this because I don’t care for the taste of cooked/processed banana and wanted to have the powder sweeten a slightly underripe banana.

The inane I can deal with because after routinely running the I-76/I-95 carbecue corridor to/from PHL for the better part of 18 months, it becomes an exercise in whether any of the new examples of poor driving are at all surprising. However, the trek to and from the southern apple fields wound up resembling an extended full-throttle Road Warrior-esque experience as everyone switched from transporting children to school to rushing to the malls to complete last-minute shopping. You know you’re in trouble when all routes out from the fields are packed with throngs of adrenalin-laden Montana drivers powering down the asphalt trying to simultaneously beat one another to the access points into shopping galleria parking lots.

Navigating through extended stretches of desperate shoppers does not make for a calm commute and after drives like this, I arrive generally with no time and in no particular mood to make something good like an eight-treasure duck or rafute/buta no kakuni (豚のかくに). Since eating out or getting take-aways get pretty expensive pretty fast, it still comes down to coming up with something reasonable in a limited amount of time. I could have this can of Klik that I’ll have to get around to opening since that’s a “once a year” ritual, but that requires bread and condiments which of course requires a certain amount of planning.

Or I could rummage through the refrigerator and pantry and come up with something else.

This is a fairly free-form recipe and I don’t claim originality since I’m sure I’ve eaten this somewhere.

Ingredients

• 227 g mushrooms
• 1 grey shallot
• 1 clove garlic
• 4 rashers of bacon cut into lardons
• arugula
• unsalted butter
• cream of white balsamic (also known as white balsamic glaze)
• pasta (whatever you like)
• parmigiano-reggiano cheese

Preparation

Finely slice or shred the mushrooms and mince the shallot and garlic. Cook the bacon lardons until the bacon is crispy. Remove the bacon and let drain on a paper towel and retain two tablespoons of bacon fat in the pan. Start cooking the pasta, timing it so that it is ready (al dente) once the sauce is ready.

Soften the shallot and garlic in the pan with the bacon fat, then add mushrooms. Cook mushrooms, and add salt and pepper to taste. Add arugula, toss the contents of the pan so arugula starts to wilt, and add a couple of squirts of cream of white balsamic. Add a small quantity of butter.

Add the cooked pasta to the arugula and mushrooms. Toss the pasta and sauce together. Return the cooked bacon back to the pan and toss contents again.

Service

Plate the pasta (bowl or plate), grate the parmigiano over top, and eat (preferably using utensils).

Photos

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Notes

I made the demo with button mushrooms but I suspect that using pleurottes (oyster) rather than button mushrooms would be a nicer alternative. Then again, if you were Ronny, the mushrooms would just get ixnay’ed.

I guess if you really wanted to, you could also omit the bacon, butter and cheese and use a vegetable oil to transform this dish into a true vegan alternative, but to paraphrase Todd Flanders, that would make Baby J*sus cry.

Flash back to a year ago when I whipped up a Hawaiian pizza because of a conversation over an aversion to tomato juice. Since my “slice of pie” piqued the interest of participants like Dr. McHappy and turned out to be a fun way to end the year, I thought it might be nice to do a repeat this year, though with something perhaps a little less “flyé” that wouldn’t reek of effort. Like a simple finger sandwich. Or a little sweet. Or maybe both seeing as it’s the season to be generous and all.

Unfortunately, not everyone likes the same type of sandwich. The things can be tough to transport if they’re overly complex and there is also the danger of picking the wrong components which would make the sandwich soggy, resulting in an end product that would wind up looking well, gross. After a little bit of thought and given what’s actually available at the grocer, I figured that I could serve a French classic like the radish sandwich as a pintxo. There’s some red in it and it has butter, so that idea was pretty much sold.

The sweet was harder especially as I’m no pâtissier, but I remembered that the original discussion on tomato juice also touched upon Nutella, so I figured I could cheat and just serve some straight out of the jar.

So there you have it: a radish pintxo and some Nutella, though not together.

Radish pinxto

• a baguette, preferably a “ficelle”
• radishes
• fleur du sel
• butter

Slice bread into croutons. Slice radishes and assemble on top of croutons. Top with butter and fleur du sel.

Nutella and bananas

• Nutella
• banana

Spoon Nutella onto banana.

Photos

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Impressions

I love maltodextrin. And the Nutella has Piment d’Espelette as a hidden flavoring.