Carnitas

Dedicated to Misslice

It goes like this.

Try to identify which unlabelled jar holds ancho chillis, out of the numerous varieties from Casa Iberica and Victoria Street that have accumulated in the cupboard.

Find the right chilli with the help of Google Images.

Place in grinder, grind, sniff curiously at its strangely figgy aroma, sneeze and weep copious tears for a long time.

Preheat oven to 180C and spend a scant ten minutes preparing hunks of pork shoulder (oh yeah, salt it the day before) for a four-hour braise according to David Lebovitz’s excellent recipe.

 Straight up, or the next day, prepare or otherwise gather together refried beans, guacamole, salsa, sour cream and tortillas. Eat with carnitas.

That’s all.

Lemon meringue pie

Pâte sablée: difficult, crumbly and messy, and a sore trial for one who may be described as all of the above – and who therefore favours completeness, coherence, truth and resolution in all things, apart from the occasional novel and film and blogpost. But enough about one, and back to the pastry.

It crumbled when slices were cut out, and kept on crumbling as it was eaten. But all that crumbliness made sense in a feisty texture that made all other pastries seem orderly variations on damp cardboard. It was buttery-biscuity-crisp, yet soft and light at the same time.

This was a Dorie Greenspan recipe from Baking (and can be found on her website); she advised against rolling due to the pastry’s fragility, and as one deprived of a marble worktop, I could get behind the suggestion to press it into the tart tin instead. But I was at a loss at the instruction ‘Don’t be too heavy-handed – press the crust in so that the edges of the pieces cling to one another, but not so hard the crust loses its crumbly texture’ (p444). In trying for a middle ground between firm, even coverage and heavy-handed crushing of the pastry’s crumble, mine was thick where the bottom of the tin met the fluted sides, and tapered to patchy thinness around the edge, and was anyone’s guess in the middle.  

I made a mistake in tin choice – the lemon tart I was following called for a fluted tart tin, but I was adding a meringue layer just because I was intrigued by the idea of using the back of a soup spoon to form little spikes, and so I should have used a pie dish with gently graduating sides and made life a lot easier.

One positive discovery was about sifting icing sugar, an activity I don’t love. I was trying to push rocks of the stuff through with the back of a spoon and not having fun when I had the fairly obvious idea of treating the sifter as a mortar and introducing a pestle to it. It turned out to be a brilliant idea, and I offer it up gratis to the portion of the world that hasn’t thought of it already.

The lemon cream was from a recipe Dorie named ‘The Most Extraordinary French Lemon Cream Tart’ and that wasn’t hyperbole. The lemon filling differs from the usual lemon curd in that the butter (all 300g) is held back from the lengthy and arm-destroying whisking over the water bath, then added once the mixture has cooled for ten minutes and gone into a blender – hence becoming something more like an emulsion, and lighter and silkier in texture. 

Mine might have been silkier again if I’d strained the lemon zest out, but I left it in, thanks to Dorie’s re-thunk post and the new Microplane superfine zester that is the light of my life and the threat to my knuckles.

 I made a quick meringue that Dorie included with a key lime tart recipe, but was perhaps a little too quick with both the eggwhite beating and the baking in the oven – it was edging towards work time. A pity to rush the last stage of a process that had taken three days – crust sans baking one night and into the freezer, lemon cream the next, and finally baking and putting it all together before work. But the spike-creation was fun.

 

 Dorie says to serve or refrigerate; I did both, and refrigeration’s the better way to go. The first slice I cut out looked like this. Later ones were more upstanding.

Lemon sablés

Sablés are plain and buttery, like a lighter shortbread, and are just the thing sometimes when baking must be done for the sake of one’s sanity, yet there’s not a lot of time or desire to spend on anything involved and complicated. I’d made chocolate and green-tea versions before, but never these sablés au citron from Dorie Greenspan’s Paris Sweets.

I don’t pull out that book often enough for my own good. It presents well-tried recipes from various Parisian cafes, Pâtisserie Lerch in this case, and everything I’ve ever done from it – burnt-butter financiers, sablés Korova (reborn as the famous World Peace Cookies in Baking) – has been simple and pleasing.

I might have gone on about this before, but Dorie’s recipes are so meticulously detailed and clearly explained in terms of expected outcome that they’re a pleasure to follow and hard to stuff up. She’s one of those writers whose recipe books can be read like novels, especially this one with all its Parisian backstory and diminutive size.

This recipe’s a classic slice-and-bake, dough mixed together in moments, formed into logs and refrigerated until needed – the zesting took the longest to do of any one stage, but that clean, sharp lemon-oil aroma that floats up is worth a few minutes. Before baking, the logs are painted with an egg-yolk wash and rolled in sugar, which gives them a crystally, crunchy edge. And that’s it – simplicity in a biscuit.

Of course, it should be that simple, but my oven let me down as usual – the biscuits around the edges of the tray gained the slight goldenness I wanted for all of them, but most were pale and their texture not as good. And my logs never form perfect circles, as noted before, and this time I really wanted them to be like buttery coins. I'm sure it’s because I am deprived of a marble benchtop. 

But they were good with tea anyway, all fifty of them, and in terms of baking-lite as relaxation, sablés are it and a bit. 

Beginnings

Beginnings of a week rich in lemon-based things, if at all possible. 

 Beginnings of kimchi courtesy of David Lebovitz, which I hope will ferment enough in my wintry kitchen to use in Orangette's kimchi fried rice before much longer. I know appallingly little about Korean food, and this took my fancy over the weekend. 

After soaking chopped-up wombok in salted water overnight it was very easily thrown together, and it was only afterwards when I began to read through the 65 comments on David's post that I noticed how many foodie-oriented people were saying they’d never have the balls to attempt fermented cabbage. I make no claim to possessing an undue number/amount of balls, so I found this a bit unnerving after my slapdash preparation – what’s expected to happen? A home-brew-type explosion, or a poisoning à la the first episode of The Borgias where it’s curtains for Derek Jacobi? 

Two days later, I see no bubbling in that giant swing-top jar, and it still just pongs of garlic and chillies, but maybe I’m doing it wrong.

 Beginnings of a new era for The Guitar Teacher and his love affair with XO sauce. After yet another Victoria Street source petered out, he was forced to face facts and get self-sustainable and make his own. I can only try the stuff at a ratio of a thousand-to-one in congee, but it seemed XOey enough for me. Though not very red.

Wienerstübe cookies

These are Austrian. They are coal-black, chocolate, black-pepper cookies – buttery, crunchy and spicy.

Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies pp128­–9

These are every adjective Maida came up with above, and a damn easy slice-and-bake besides. The mixture can be thrown together while you’re waiting for a pasta to cook, rolled up, and put in the fridge for later. Or in the freezer, for that matter. Then whenever you feel like an elegant chocolate biscuit with your afternoon espresso or mug of Moccona, whichever the case may be, slice a good few off and bung them in the oven. They have a mouth-warming array of spices that set off the cocoa, and they’re about a million times better than a Chocolate Ripple.

1 ½ cups plain flour

1 ½ teaspoons baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

¾ teaspoon cinnamon

¼ teaspoon allspice

½ teaspoon ground black pepper

Pinch cayenne

¾ cup dutch-process cocoa

180g unsalted butter

1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract

1 cup sugar

1 egg

Sift together the dry ingredients.

Cream the butter, add the vanilla, sugar and egg and beat well. On a low speed, gradually add the dry ingredients, mixing only enough to blend.

Tear off a couple of pieces of baking paper about 40cm long. Distribute half the dough on each, shaping into a long, even sausage by rolling in the paper. There is no way I know of to be able to get this perfectly tubular, so I go for a squarish result instead by flattening each side on the bench. Refrigerate the snakes in their paper for at least two hours.

Preheat oven to 190C. Unwrap one of the snakes and cut into 6mm discs. 

Place on a tray lined with more baking paper – a centimetre or two apart is enough.

 Bake for 10–12 minutes. 

Lemon walnut wafers

These are semisoft with a tart lemon flavor—an old-fashioned cookie from Florida.

Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies, pp 45–6

It had been a sorry while since any biscuits were baked. And to my horror and despair, when the time was finally found to bake biscuits, Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies was nowhere to be seen. I could see the empty space between its chronologically-ordered sisters of Maida’s prolific late-70s period. I searched high and low. I checked that I hadn’t put it in the fridge. I blamed The Guitar Teacher, one of his students and the estate agent in that order, as the only souls to darken our door in the last fortnight.

‘It’s probably fallen down the back of the cabinet,’ TGT suggested, unhelpfully, as it was clearly impossible that such a hefty tome could fall down there.

‘What utter codswallop,’ I said dismissively, or words to that effect. ‘Anyway, it’s too hard to drag that great thing out to have a look.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll just grab the torch, shall I?’

Lo and behold, there it was, caught in the web of cords from the stereo, its little Post-it flags waving. You didn’t see that coming, did you, dear reader? A happy ending! Albeit one with some degree of egg on my face! I can’t help feeling that a happy ending makes this tale a tad flat and pointless, as it would Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, and I have no idea how I got onto them, so without further ado, to Lemon Walnut Wafers.

1½ cups plain flour

½ teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon kosher salt (Because I have bought some now, so often do recipes call for it. Does it differ from Saxa? Don’t ask me. But you could probably use whatever salt you like, really.)

Generous pinch ground ginger

120g unsalted butter, left out to soften if you manage to plan ahead. Me, I zapped it in the microwave for 10 seconds.

1 cup sugar

1 egg plus 2 egg yolks

1 lemon, zest and juice

60g walnuts, roughly chopped

Preheat oven to 180C.

Sift together flour, baking powder, salt and ginger and set aside.

Cream the butter by electric means (or hand – I don’t wish to exclude you, Alida Irwin), then add sugar and beat well. Add the egg and yolks, beating until the mixture is light and fluffy. On a low speed (you just stir normally, AI), gradually add sifted dry ingredients, mixing only until smooth. Mix in the lemon zest and juice and the walnuts by hand.

Blob rounded teaspoonfuls of the mixture onto baking-paper-lined trays, at least an inch apart (Maida recommends two inches, but I have a puny oven and meagre trays, and the biscuits didn’t spread far). It’s a sticky mixture and the blobs weren’t prettily rounded, but they sorted themselves out in the baking.

Bake for 20 minutes, or until the tops spring back when lightly pressed. Maida says, ‘These cookies will not brown on the tops, but there will be a thin brown edge.’ As always, she recommends reversing trays to ensure even browning, and, this time, I would have done well to follow this instruction – as it was, the front row had browned on their peaks while the rest were fish-belly pale.

Cool on racks. Do I even need to mention that?

As I suspected, these bore no more relation to wafers than this blog does to tragic nineteenth-century realism. They tasted pleasingly lemony, but were  US-style soft and cakey; a bit more browning and crisping all over would have been an improvement rather than something to avoid. One to file away for the false-teeth years, which are not, after all, so far off. Or perhaps I should refer to those as the naked-gums years – with all signs pointing to my generation not being able to afford housing in retirement, dentistry probably won’t be on the cards either. We could end up living out a Russian novel after all.

Chocolate Amaretti Torte

Every blogger with even the slightest inclination towards cakeal matters must have blogged about Dorie Greenspan’s Fifteen-Minute Magic Chocolate Amaretti Torte by now. I found it in Baking, but when googling to see how others went with it, it seemed that everyone in the world had made it and saw that it was good. I would like to add my voice to the chorus of torte celebration, if I may, now that I’ve made it at least five times. 

It’s elegant, dark, grown-up and rich, and you’d never know that the cake part really is put together in fifteen minutes, albeit with the help of a food processor. There’s a little more to it than that – such as the later preparation of the chocolate ganache and the almond cream, which is listed as optional but should be considered absolutely compulsory.

The only departures I take from Dorie’s recipe is that:

• I toast the slivered almonds before they go in the food processor, as I often do with almonds; 
• I add a splash of Amaretto to the ganache, and sometimes to the cream, although this time I used Pure Almond Extract from Sur la Table, yes I did, because it's a pungent revelation after a lifetime of Queen’s almond essence; 
• I encircle the perimeter with the remaining whole amaretti biscuits* so that each slender cake slice has a high-domed, crunchy bit of delight on its widest end.

 *Unless there’s something else to be done with them; crushed up over icecream they’re fabulous, or over pumpkin and sage risotto. And in that case the torte has more toasted slivered almonds sprinkled around the edge instead, as it was in this case – as you can see in the appallingly bad photo that was all I had the opportunity to take before it was snaffled from under the very iPhone lens.