Chocolate Eclairs

So I go through all the trouble of making amazing prime rib last week, and what do my guests say after they devour the roast beast?  "What's for dessert?"  What ungracious....

Now I'm put on the spot.  I sarcastically jab back, "What do you want?  Creme brulee?"  They say, "Yes."

Well now I'm up a creek...  Julia Child, don't fail me now...  So I turn to Julia's quintessential work on French cooking and lo and behold, there's a recipe, however it calls for heavy cream and all I have is whole milk.  I figure I'll give it a shot.  We ate sweet scrambled eggs.  They didn't taste ba'ad (that's bad with two syllables, which means it wasn't good either).

A week later, while my lovely wife was at work, I asked her if she would like me to have dinner ready for her when she got home.  She quaintly replies, "No thanks, I packed a dinner, but dessert would be lovely.  Why don't you try creme brulee again?"  Pfft... the nerve.

I turn back to Julia and try to decipher where I went wrong.  I start scratching my head and my brain doesn't like where things are headed, so I turn the page and see the recipe for "creme patissiere", also known as custard filling.  I look at it and it actually involves boiling the sauce... like you want this to happen.   Note:  If you boil what is supposed to become creme brulee, you get sweet scrambled eggs.  I figure I'm pro at this.

Custard filling, what has custard filling?  Eclairs.  Deal.  How do I make the pastry?  A quick google search finds me a recipe involving boiling water and adding flour to that.  I figure this must be ridiculous, so I turn to the book entitled Ratio by Michael Ruhlman.  It calls for a similar tactic.  Boiling, right.  I'm good at that.  We can do this.

The last step is the chocolate sauce on top.  Do I need gnoche?  sauce?  hershey squirts?  Wait... that's gross...  I decide to modify a recipe I used for iced Christmas cookies this winter which would harden slightly as the cookies dried.  Alright.  I think I'm ready.

The pastry:  Pate a Choux
(you must say this with a terrible Americanized-French accent)

According to Mr. Ruhlman, 2 parts water : 1 part butter : 1 part flour : 2 parts egg.

Preheat the oven to 450°F

Combine the following and bring to a boil

one cup water
half cup butter
half tsp salt

Over low heat, add one cup flour while rapidly stirring to form a batter-like substance.  This should take about a minute.

Remove from heat and cool for two minutes, then transfer this mess to the food processor.

Add one egg at a time while pulsing the food processor until incorporated for a total of four eggs.

Transfer this mess to a ziploc bag and cut off a corner to turn it into a pastry bag.  Or use a pastry bag if you have one.

On parchment paper, pipe out whatever size pastry you would like.  I did about 3" across pastries, which seemed to work well enough.  Place this in the oven and bake for ten minutes.  After ten minutes, reduce the heat to 350°F and cook for another twenty minutes.  Pastry complete.  On to the filling.

Creme Patissiere a la Julia Child
(This must be said in the soft-pallet high-sigh for which Julia is so famous)

Rinse out the food processor, it's getting some work done.

Blend five egg yolks and one cup of sugar until "the ribbons" form - it turns pale yellow...

Add in a half cup of flour and blend until incorporated

Heat up two cups of milk in the microwave to boiling in a pour-able vessel - whenever I heat milk in a pan, I get skin on the bottom unless I stir it constantly - too much work...

With the processor running, slowly pour the hot milk into the egg mixture.  You don't want to scramble the eggs...

Get out a heavy bottomed, non-teflon pan and put it over medium heat.  Pour in the mixture and begin whisking.  You must continue to whisk, and whisk, and whisk.  This will go on until it begins to boil, and then you must whisk for two minutes more.  All in all, it's a lot of whisking.

One this is complete, add one Tbs of butter and one and a half Tbs of vanilla extract and whisk until smooth.  Many other flavors can be added at this point, but I kept it simple.

Let it cool for twenty minutes in the freezer before trying to put it in the pastry.  It will thicken a little.

Now to get it into the pastry.  I don't know how the pros do it, but I put the custard in a small ziploc bag, inserted a straw in one corner, and taped around the opening.

It worked fairly well, though I'm guessing there's a better way to accomplish it.  This is how I did it, so go fly a kite if you don't like it.

Fill up a pastry with custard.  Enough Said.

The Chocolate Icing by Tim
(this must be said in a very low voice, trust me)

I don't have exact amounts for you, so I'll guess.

Let's try
one cup of powdered sugar
half a cup of powdered chocolate
two Tbs of milk

Whisk this all together... you're favorite

Add a quarter Tsp of vanilla extract
one Tbs of light corn syrup

Whisk some more

Taste and adjust

Drizzle on top of your custard filled pastry and enjoy.

Eat well.

Maybe Hershey squirts weren't so far off...

Prime Rib

To those of you who bemoan my ability to syndicate my thoughts and culinary forays, you shouldn't be reading this, so you only have yourself to blame.

To those of you who checked back frequently for my latest kitchen adventure, you shouldn't have.  There must be something else more productive you can do with your time.  

Now if you're my wife, and are referring to this because I am absent and would like to make a delicious piece of meat that the chefs at Ruth's Chris would drool over, you've come to the right place.

Condensed Recipe

• Preheat oven to 250° F
• Place standing rib roast on wire rack on a pan
• Brush canola oil to cover the meat
• Salt and pepper to cover the meat.
• Place meat in the oven. Check temp every hour.  Heat until internal temp is 120° F.
• Remove meat from oven and cover with foil.  Reset oven temp to 500° F.  
• Wait 15 minutes and put the meat back in the oven for 10 minutes to make a crispy crust.
• Remove meat and cover with foil.  Wait 20 minutes, carve and serve.

My senseless ramblings

I started using Alton Brown's recipe for Dry-Aged Standing Rib Roast.  After reviewing it and seeing things about terracotta pots, I decided to dial back the complexity of the recipe.  Also, the only real issue I have with the recipe is that it produces almost no drippings.  If you are hoping to eat it with the au-jus described in the recipe, good luck. Maybe the size of my roast didn't lend itself to creating enough fond?  I just used some beef boullion and red wine.  That being said, the issue of not having drippings may be moot.  (if you are concerned that I may have misspelled the word "mute", please see moot vs. mute)  The meat didn't need any juice added back to it, as it all stayed in the roast.

So here goes my version.

Get yourself a standing rib roast -- the best cut of beef out there.  I'm right, don't argue.  (I'll probably contradict myself some day in the future, but that's part of the fun)  If you're going for prime rib as the main focus of your meal, I would plan on about 16 oz per person.  My roast was 4 pounds and that fed myself, my wife, my son and my friend (who I think ended up with a 24 oz cut - he said he was hungry).  

I "dry-aged" mine for a day, because I wasn't really thinking ahead.  I'm not sure exactly what this does.  I just googled "dry aging beef" and it came up with this.  Something about enzymes and moisture -- I'm sure that's all well and good, but I tried this recipe without the 24 hour age and with - both turned out awesome.  Maybe I will actually try the 72 hour aging process at some later date and redact this recipe.   

I turned the oven on to 250° F and while it warmed up, I prepared the meat.  For cooking and prepping I stuck a cooling rack in a cookie sheet.  I have used this in other recipes, and it seems to keep things nice and crisp instead of soggy.  I used a brush and some vegetable oil (Alton recommends canola as it has a higher smoke point) and coated all sides of the meat -- you'll need this as all the moisture on the surface will be gone and the salt and fresh cracked pepper will have nothing to stick to.  As you can see from the photo, the amount of salt and pepper depends upon the size of the roast.  You should use enough to produce a thick layer of crunchy, salty, peppery deliciousness.  Using the rack while you season it is also beneficial, as when you rotate the meat, you don't leave any on the plate/platter/cutting board you would have otherwise used.

Into the 250°F oven goes the beast.  At this low temperature, I believe Mr. Brown's use of a terracotta pot in order to evenly distribute the heat to be excessive.  However, later on I think it's merits may be shown.  I do not own a probe-thermometer, which can be left in the roast for the duration of cooking.  However, I have a regular meat thermometer and I checked the temperature of the meat every hour.  At this temperature, the 4lb beast seemed to rise about 50° per hour.  Once the internal temperature reached 120°F, I removed it from the oven and covered with foil. 

Now off the oven goes to 500°F.  It'll probably take about 10-15 minutes for the oven to sufficiently heat itself up.  I believe the pot apparatus would be useful at this point.  Upon reviewing the episode, when I pulled the beast from the oven, it did a fair amount of smoking, while Alton's did not.  Maybe that's Hollywood magic, maybe it was vegetable oil instead of canola, or maybe it was the pot keeping the heat evenly distributed.  I'm not really sure, but the smokiness subsided quickly and there seemed to be no off-tastes.  

10 minutes in the oven and a nice, crispy crust had developed.  I removed it, tented it with foil and then let it rest for 20 minutes, while I got the rest of the sides put together.

As far as the au-jus goes, I made 2 cups of beef stock and combined that with a cup of red wine and the bit of drippings I got from the pan.  Nothing to brag about, but it had a little bit of flavor and went well on top of the mashed potatoes.  It looked like Mr. Brown did a 10 pounds roast, perhaps enough fond was produced by that much meat to make a decent amount.

To the table it went with a bit of horseradish sauce, a glass of wine, glazed carrots and mashed potatoes.

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