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Emily and Melissa Elsen’s Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book (Grand Central Life & Style, 2013) is organized by season, the theory being that the best pies are made from seasonal ingredients (or, I suppose, those ingredients that keep well … Continue reading
My TiVo recently recorded a rerun of the PBS series America’s Test Kitchen called “A Modern Take on Pizza and Grilled Cheese” (#1404). I was already planning to bake some bread, and grilled cheese sounded like a nice alternative to the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches I had been having rather too often lately. On TV, the recipe for “Grown-Up Grilled Cheese Sandwiches with Cheddar and Shallot” was presented by Bridget Lancaster; I knew that everything on the show appeared in Cook’s Illustrated magazine — usually the previous year — so I checked my back issues from 2013 and found the original writeup, by Lan Lam, in the September/October issue (p. 24).
Their recipe calls for a “hearty white sandwich bread”; I had oatmeal-whole wheat sandwich bread, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. The bread slices they used in the TV version were a bit larger than mine, which is not surprising (see my previous post), and the crumb a bit finer, but these are not supremely important differences.
In order to make a grilled cheese that uses flavorful, aged cheese — in this case, a 12-month-old sharp cheddar — the first step is to make a fromage fort using the cheddar, a small amount of Brie (pâte only — no rind), and a couple tablespoons of white wine or (my choice) vermouth. Nowhere in the writeup or the TV episode do they actually use the words “fromage fort“, but if you’ve ever visited the cheese department at Whole Foods, it’s very often on display there (they make it to use up ends and small, less-saleable pieces of cheese). This is pretty easy to do in the food processor with all ingredients at room temperature. In addition to the usual ingredients, most of a minced shallot is also added to give some additional flavor. To punch up the toasted sides of the bread, they also make a compound butter with Dijon mustard — I left a few tablespoons of unsalted butter on the counter overnight so that it would be soft enough. The butter is applied to the outside of the sandwich, and the fromage fort is spread on the inside, then the whole thing is cooked on a preheated skillet until well browned on both sides.
The result? Well, it sure looks good:
The recipe makes four sandwiches, but only two at a time. I put the second half of both cheese and butter into the refrigerator to save for another time (although just how I’m going to get them to room temperature in time for a weekday dinner I haven’t figured out). I ate both sandwiches for lunch, which as it turned out wasn’t the best choice nutritionally, but I hadn’t yet done the computation. (Now I know and I’ll only be having one at a time.)
I’ve never been a huge fan of grilled cheese, at least not made the traditional way (with plastic “process cheese food” rather than actual cheese). This is one that I would happily make again.
I have computed this exclusive of the bread, since the nutrition details for bread vary greatly from one recipe to another. You’ll want to use a fairly firm bread that can stand up to the heavy butter and cheese application without squishing down to nothing or disintegrating into crumbs, and then count that separately in your nutrition calculations.
| Serving size: 1/4 recipe, plus bread | |
| Servings per recipe: 4 | |
| Amount per serving | |
| Calories 330 | Calories from fat 252 |
| % Daily Value | |
| Total Fat 28g | 43% |
| Saturated Fat 18g | 91% |
| Trans Fat 0g | |
| Cholesterol 89mg | 30% |
| Sodium 435mg | 18% |
| Potassium 39mg | 1% |
| Total Carbohydrate 2g | 1% |
| Dietary fiber 0g | 0% |
| Sugars 1g | |
| Proteins 15g | 31% |
| Vitamin A | 19% |
| Vitamin C | 0% |
| Calcium | 38% |
| Iron | 1% |
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I’ve now recovered from my two consecutive vacations (a long one to South Florida and a much shorter one to Long Island and New York City), so as promised it’s time to resume my regular posting on this blog — … Continue reading
I just got back from nearly two weeks of travel and am now decompressing. Expect my regular posting schedule to resume next weekend. Maybe some day you’ll actually get to see my pictures from the longer of the two trips (I didn’t take my camera on the short trip to Long Island, so no pictures to share).
I’m about to leave on vacation, and there’s always a bit of concern to use up perishable items that might not still be edible by the time I get back home and am ready to cook again. In this case, because I made that tasty vegetarian chili last week, I had most of a tub of sour cream left over, and experience has taught me that — despite what you’d think — sour cream actually has a tendency to go off before I manage to use it. This is perhaps because, other than chili, there aren’t a whole lot of recipes that use small — or even moderate — quantities of the stuff. I have plenty of recipes that call for a quarter cup, say, and a few that call for multiple cups, but I only found one in my cookbook library that would use almost exactly what I had.
The cookbook in question is The King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook — for a long time, simply the King Arthur Flour cookbook. Now it has been superseded to a great degree by newer cookbooks, both three thick volumes from the company and numerous other bakery cookbooks, not to mention Web sites too numerous to mention. But it’s occasionally still good for something, in this case a coffee cake recipe that can use sour cream, yogurt, or buttermilk depending on what you have on hand and how much fat you want in the end product. Apparently it was in the company’s files for a long time and later reformulated to allow this flexibility; in any case, it calls for nearly a pound of flour and quite a lot of baking powder in addition to three eggs, but not so much butter as I would have expected. There’s a “topping” — almost but not quite a streusel — made from nuts, brown sugar, and spices. I put “topping” in quotation marks because two thirds of it actually goes into the cake itself, as a thin layer in the middle and also on the top of the cake (which becomes the bottom when inverted, although perhaps I misunderstood the directions).
In the spirit of getting rid of things before they spoil, I used all India Tree dark muscovado in this recipe where brown sugar is called for; I had to heat it up in the microwave to loosen the nearly solid block of sugar. I found the batter to be quite stiff — often an issue when I use the Wallaby brand sour cream I usually prefer as a condiment, as it has less water than other supermarket sour creams — and it was very difficult to get it into the tube pan in even layers to allow the insertion of the “topping”, and I made no effort to swirl them together. The recipe calls for adding the remaining third of the “topping” after turning the baked cake out of the pan; I put it on the “top” — which was the bottom during baking — but in retrospect think I should either have re-inverted the cake, or else baked it with the “topping” on the bottom of the pan.
Overall I’d rate this coffee cake as a “meh”. While everyone at work seemed to like it, I didn’t think particularly highly of it, and it has a very high calorie load (nearly 400 kcal when sliced in 16 pieces). I might try it again with fat-free buttermilk to see if that makes it any better, but I have a feeling the issues with it are more than just the dairy ingredients — and there are plenty of other coffee cakes and tea breads to try first. The obligatory photo:
I’ve created a new “Recommendations” page calling out the recipes that I recommend particularly highly. (This is just a summary of the other pages under the “Recipes” menu.)
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I’m not a fan of a lot of vegetarian fare: all too often the major flavors, especially the protein sources, are things I don’t care to eat. That goes doubly for vegan food, since without eggs and dairy many of … Continue reading
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Usually when I do one of these recipe posts, I try to follow the original procedure as closely as possible — especially for bakery. But in this case — from Diane St. Clair’s The Animal Farm Buttermilk Cookbook (p. 188) … Continue reading
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If it seems to you like I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year baking from just a handful of cookbooks, you’d be right. Leaving the same books in a pile on one’s dinner table can have that … Continue reading
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I’m always on the lookout for recipes that will give me reasonably low-calorie lunches and dinners, because my diet doesn’t leave a lot of room for thousand-calorie meals. (Alternatively, I’m always on the lookout for reasonably low-calorie meals so I … Continue reading
