Pok Pok

This was a great dinner courtesy of Pok Pok. Maybe I should say 'inspired by', because I did a lot of veganizing and lazifying to the very precise recipes.

It's a cucumber salad in the style of papaya salad, with coconut rice and grilled eggplant salad. We also had (not pictured) some flavored tofu with this -- I was inspired by the recipe for Khao Man Som Tam (papaya salad with coconut rice and sweet pork). The combination of the cucumber salad, rice and sweet tofu was superb -- I kept making myself perfect little bites with a bit of each on my fork. The coconut rice in particular was the best version I have ever made: the secret is coconut cream instead of milk, and a bit of sugar. (Who'd have thought adding extra fat and sugar would make something taste better?)

For veganizing, I replaced fish sauce and dried shrimp with a healthy dose of toasted and ground tua nao. I didn't have a mortar and pestle for the cucumber salad, so I just bashed everything a bit in a bowl.

Hazelnut dacquoise

I made this hazelnut dacquoise to go into a fancy cake. These two layers were sandwiched into the middle of a vanilla cake, layered with a cooked vanilla frosting. (I think a mousse would be better, but this cake was for a frosting-lover.)

I used my recipe for meringue, and added some ground hazelnuts. (I was inspired by this recipe for peanut dacquoise.) I think I might've overbaked them a bit -- next time I might do closer to an hour rather than an hour and a half. In the finished cake, the dacquoise tasted fantastic and added a really interesting texture. It didn't soften as much as I expected -- this is where I think that baking for a shorter time might help. Anyway, overall the verdict was: delicious!

UPDATE: Bake for 1.5 hours, then turn off the oven and leave them in there until completely cool / overnight. After being in the oven overnight, they had started to soften slightly. Once in the cake, layered with frosting/mousse, they softened completely. Perfect!

Dacquoise:

120 g water
100 g caster sugar
pinch of cream of tartar
vanilla
2.3 g versawhip 600k
1 g xanthan gum
1.2 g agar powder
1 cup hazelnut meal

1. Mix everything but the vanilla and hazelnut in a pot and bring to the boil. (I seem to remember some problems with clumping, so hit it with the stick blender if need be.)
2. After it's boiled for a little bit (activating the agar), take it off the heat and add vanilla.
3. Whip the mixture (using a stand mixer) until you have a thick foam. It should form a large blob on the whisk when you lift the mixer head.
4. Fold in the hazelnut.
5. Draw circles the diameter of your cake on parchment paper, and split the dacquoise mixture accordingly. I was making a small cake (about 18cm/7 inch), and made two circles. The dacquoise spreads out as it cooks -- you end up trimming them to get them back to the right size.
6. Bake at 130 C (275 F) for at least an hour. When they are done, they should have taken on some colour, and will be dry to the touch but still soft. [UPDATE: Bake for 1.5 hours, then leave to cool in the turned-off oven.]
7. Let them cool. Trim to the appropriate size. Eat all the offcuts.
8. Layer into your cake with frosting/cream/mousse. Let it sit for a while before you serve -- the idea is that the frosting softens the dacquoise a bit, making it deliciously chewy.

Unphotogenic

I couldn't get a good photo of this ice cream, but I want to write about it so I don't forget it. It's a great compromise that pleased both ice cream eaters in our household: peanut butter and chocolate ice cream with peanut butter cookie dough and cocoa nibs.

The chocolate-peanut butter ice cream is from The Perfect Scoop, but I replaced the half and half with soy milk, and added just a touch more sugar. It ended up really rich and creamy, so the original version must be insane. The cookie dough and peanut butter pleased one of us. The chocolate, the cocoa nibs, and the fact that it was peanut butter cookie dough rather than boring old chocolate chip, pleased the other one.

The ice cream contains just sugar, soy milk, peanut butter and cocoa powder. I am thinking that I might replace the peanut butter with hazelnut butter next time, for gianduja.

Jackfruit carnitas

Courtesy of the new Hot Knives book, jackfruit carnitas:

I dehydrated the jackfruit (in my new dehydrator!) for about 2 hours, then smoked it (in the stovetop smoker) for about 25 minutes. (The recipe actually called for a long, slow smoke on an outdoor grill, but I don't have one.) Then it went into an ancho and chipotle chile sauce inspired by the Hot Knives recipe. This is definitely the way to go with jackfruit: the dehydration step gives it a great texture, and readies it for soaking up the sauce.

Here's the dehydrated and smoked, and then torn-up, jackfruit before it went into the sauce:

Lemon meringue pie, again

I love experiments where you can eat the data.

 

I've almost perfected my meringue recipe from last time.

This is a small batch: it made enough to cover 3 ramekins. I think if you double it it would be enough for a pie.

60 g water
50 g caster sugar
pinch of cream of tartar
vanilla
1 g versawhip 600k
0.5 g xanthan gum
0.6 g agar powder

1. Mix the water, sugar and agar in a small pot and bring to the boil.
2. Put the cream of tartar, versawhip and xanthan in the bowl of a stand mixer. Add the agar mixture and whip with the whisk attachment. Add a little bit of vanilla extract.
3. Whip the mixture until you have a thick foam. When you lift the mixer head, the whisk should have a big blob of meringue in it. It should be thick enough to just stick there, not dripping off.
4. (You could put it on your pie at this point, but here's what I did.) Cover a baking tray with parchment paper, then make meringue circles the right diameter for the ramekins. Put the tray under the grill for a minute or two, watching closely because they brown fast.
5. Put the browned meringues in the fridge or the freezer. If you serve them straight out of the freezer the foam is slightly firmer, and I find the cooler temperature pleasant. Out of the fridge they are perfectly acceptable, just slightly less firm.
6. Place the chilled meringue on top of your lemon pie (or ramekin) to serve.

Note: I bet it would work if you put all of the ingredients into the pot in step 1.

Burgers

I've been really into veggie burgers recently. I combine mashed beans (usually black eyed peas) and rice (Sri Lankan red keeri samba rice, which is short grained and fluffy), various random things for flavour (smoked paprika? soy sauce? vegan worcestershire? finely chopped onion?), chia seeds and or ground flax seed, and vital wheat gluten. Then, fry or bake. I really like the crisp crust that you get with a rice based burger.

Smoked dates

On pizza. Yes!

This is the dough from last time, defrosted. (Incidentally, I won't be doing this again. The dough was terrible: hard to handle and didn't have much oven spring. It might have overproofed.) It's topped with homemade tomato sauce, kalamatas, smoked dates, homemade melting mozz.

There will be more smoked dates on pizza in this house.