cake testing, yet another batch of ice cream

Today I went to the Berkeley Farmers Market. It was interesting. Someone gave me blueberries (I think it's the same people who do the Ferry Building market) and they were different. Which is to say, they weren't really like Maine blueberries, which is what the reference point should be. It's possible they just really weren't all that ready to be picked yet, because they weren't very sweet. They rolled around kind of funny in my mouth, more tart than sweet, less like something I think of as blueberry and more like something strange.

While buying up carrots and onion for my excellent dinner, I was persuaded to buy some lovely looking basil from Full Belly Farm, as well as a bunch of lemon verbena. And I noticed they're actually selling lamb's quarters. Making a profit off their weeds. Seeing that made me nostalgic for farm living, and coupled with the blueberry interaction I pouted for the East Coast for a little while.

When I got home, I stripped the verbena leaves and infused a milk-cream mixture for ice cream base, to be made and possibly churned tomorrow. I used the veggies for a really excellent dinner courtesy of one of Rick Bayless's cookbooks. Chicken thighs with pickled jalapenos, onions and carrots. The colors were kind of flat, adn it smelled rather strongly of vinegar, so I was unenthused, but the food turned out to be great. Not perfect chicken, but damn good chicken. The broth was all oily and fatty, the veggies were tender. I'd only used oregano, allspice, salt and pepper but with the jalapenos it was all very spicy and flavorful in a nice, organic way. I picked two thighs apart. They were really well with the crispy skillet-fried zaatar potatoes I made. I ate until I was stuffed and happy and then I set about cleaning my room.

I also whipped up a batch of the troublesome polenta cake, using half semolina and half polenta. This cake was on the menu twice at Sonsie during my tenure there and I'm not sure where my boss got it, only thatit always gave him--or me--a lot of trouble. In his blueberry version, we could never get it out of the pan. In the orange version, it also sucked getting it out of the pan, but the cakes were shriveled and anemic looking and generally ugly. Here is the 9 inch polenta-semolina cake, a hybrid. I spent so many days stirring that pot of milk over the tiny range in the prep kitchen, getting in everyone's way while I waited for the flour to thicken. Now I like my version better. It's grittier, and when unadorned almost breakfast-like. I'm serving it, currently, with anise cream and candied rhubarb but I can see re-introducing it with blackberries or stewed stone fruits. I like how it cracks in the center, how serious it looks while baking, big belly puffed up before falling. It's an eggy, light cake with an unexpected corn grit, and it isn't very sweet. It's a good basic for something a bit unexpected, a bit homey. It's incredibly moist and goes well with loads of things. For some reason Michael always paired it with panna cotta but I really don't think I'd do the same.

Semolina Cake, Revised
2 c. milk
1 vanilla bean
1/2 c. sugar
3 heaping T semolina
3 heaping T polenta
3 eggs, separated
2 oz. butter, soft

Bring milk + vanilla to boil. Stir in sugar, semolina and polenta and cook over high heat until mixture thickens considerably. Best if it pulls away from the side of the pan in a clean motion. Remove from heat and temper into egg yolks. Add butter. Cool over ice bath. When cool, whip the whites and fold these into the batter. Pour into 9 inch pan and bake at 350 for 45 minutes or until tester is clean.

puff pastry magic

palmiers at last

Tonight I had to make quick puff pastry, since I promised a french friend a mille feuille. Ugh, puff pastry. Of course I have not made it since culinary school, but the 6 turns, the rolling out the dough...my arms ached at the memory. However, a french meal and all I have to provide are pastry cream and puff...so not a bad bargain.

I find Cheffy's quick puff pastry recipe, head to the store, dawdle, realize I have to FREEZE the butter in chunks, do so. By the time I start it's 7:30 and my head's off in the clouds because of the GQ article on the Ferry Building. Which is funny, and over the top. Not only does the FB "enlighten," "enthrall," "nourish" san franciscans, it also "[is] a testing ground for a radically different way of dining." Read your May GQ and see, I kid you not. More on the FB later. So, head in the clouds, I throw my ingredients in the kitchen aid and go back to check the recipe because I feel like it's weird there's no sugar in the puff. Dash back to the other room when I hear the sounds of the paddle thwacking the dough around.

I'm glad I've become attuned to those sounds. Milk about to boil. Dough coming together. The sort of sounds that are not sounds at all to those who don't cook and I mean professionally.

first turn, cold butter

Rescue the dough, begin to roll it out with huge holes of butter since that's what the recipe says and I know it will work. After two or three turns the butter's been worked in.

I love the feel of dough. It's so sexy. How it goes from being cold and riddled with butter holes to how the butter gets mixed in, the dough calls out for flour, more flour, the dough tells you what it needs if you know how to listen to it, if your hands know how to read it right.

third turn, no butter

"


Six turns. No wait, Five. But I've turned the oven on to 400 for the puff, only I'm supposed to drop it down to 350, and I don't know what the purpose is, what the heat does, and Cheffy's recipe tells me I don't need to rest the dough before using but David Lebovitz's (which I'm checking for the baking time) does say to rest it and I'm breathing out through my nose in short little bursts, heaving my body onto the silky dough, trying to roll it thinner, wider, better, wielding the edges of my french rolling pin to get it rectangular, working the edges out, making it nice. Losing my mind with the heat.

Five turns, and before the last fold I cut a large swatch to save for palmiers.

Sixth turn, bake off, freeze a good quantity of the puff.

Roll out the palmier dough one last time in sugar. Cut palmiers, dainty Maura-sized ones. Freeze some and bake six, so that there will be a breakfast surprise for the roommates.

Food is desire. Food is love. Food is exhausting yourself for others. When you haven't eaten or slept properly. When you yourself live on scraps of staff meal, dumpstered vegetables, cheese quesadillas with a splash of lime because you've exhausted the salsa, the zaatar, the avocado.

In insatiable, Gael Greene expresses wonder that anyone could term a food item better than sex. But the night of profiteroles, eating Claudia Fleming's salted caramel ice cream straight from the machine, before freezing, we both said sex was irrelevant.

Two hours start to finish and I have palmiers to eat nad bake off later, puff to bake later and puff for my napoleon, and flour all over my pants and righteous body exhaustion.

But the FB, the Ferry Building. I knew from the Chow discussion it was coming, but I didn't expect to see my boss in the teaser when I opened it up. Or the pastries I bake off at five am. I really wouldn't have thought Frog Hollow would be such a feature of the article--maybe because it's next to Boulette's Larder and everyone loved Boulette's. Miette is reduced to a tiny picture and a mention of its macarons. Probably the only thing worth getting except for the graham crackers which I liked. I wonder what Meg and Caitlin are thinking of their poor placement. Recchiuti and Scharffen Berger aren't mentioned at all, really.

I had lunch at Out the Door today. Five Spice chicken with vermicelli. It was good, fresh. The vegetables tasted fresh. The meat was moist, spiced but not too spicy. It was good. Clean. Though my favorite Vietnamese food still is from Poughkeepsie, which is bizarre, who would have thought that my first exposure to red chicken, lemongrass chicken, vietnamese curry tofu and so on, would be so irreplacable.

The FB, do you think it's a temple of food, as Richman claims? I do. I love the Ferry Building. I love coming at it from all angles of the city, how it calls you down Market. I love how people come together, tourists or local, how the FB makes the happy. I love using the second floor restrooms and spying on people. I love my job. I love watching the red-haired chef open up Boulette's in the morning, that I'm not the only one working at dawn. I love the Bay Bridge view. Sunrises.

My life changed in one day and that day began at the Ferry Building, in fact with breakfast from Frog Hollow, and when I was so sick of Sonsie , in my deepest longings all I wanted to do was come here, work with organic bakers, hang out in the FB, and figure out my relationship to food. And here I am. I'm just not used to sharing my temple.