Ice Cream Part I: Maple Pecan and Bacon

Last week's Foodie Fights was Battle Frozen Dessert! I did not get selected to participate, but it was enough to finally get me off my laurels and make some ice cream, something I've been wanting to do for a long time. So, after rewatching the Churn Baby Churn and Churn Baby Churn 2 episodes of Good Eats, I decided to set off and make Philadelphia style ice cream, (i.e. frozen cream and sugar) which seemed like the easiest type to attempt for my first... attempt.

But what kind? Well, I've always had a love affair with bacon, and lately I've been semi-successfully incorporating it into sweet desserts, so why not ice cream? Another combination I really love is pecans and bacon, and maple and pecans, and guess what? I just so happened to have in the fridge some fresh, B-grade maple syrup my brother's girlfriend made, so I figured it was destiny.

Maple Bacon and Pecan Ice Cream

• 4 cups (1 qt) half and half
• 2 cups (1 pt) heavy cream
• 1 1/2 cups brown sugar
• 1/4 cup maple syrup (B-grade is better for this as it has a richer flavor and is less sweet; whatever you do, don't use maple flavored syrup.)
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp ground clove
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

 Slowly heat all ingredients except the vanilla to 170F (or if you don't have a thermometer, heat it until you see one single bubble), then cool slightly and add the vanilla. Place in an air-tight container and store in the refrigerator. You need it to at least get down to fridge temp, but it will be even better if you keep it overnight.

• 1 1/2 cups (6 oz) pecan pieces
• 2 Tbsp butter
• 3 Tbsp white sugar
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp ground clove
• 2 Tbsp maple syrup

Melt the butter over low heat. Just when it starts to brown add the pecans, stirring often. (This is when the professional chef flippy technique comes in handy; using a spoon just kinda lands nuts everywhere). Cook for about 5 minutes, or until the nuts are well toasted. Be careful as it's easy to burn them, and nobody likes burnin' their nuts! (Sorry, couldn't help myself).

Add the spices and sugar, stirring and/or flipping to evenly coat, then spoon in your maple syrup. Keep everything moving until you have a big sticky mass of pecans and yum, then spread out on parchment paper to cool.

• Bacon!

I used 7 pieces (3.5 oz? I have no idea) maple-cured bacon and it seemed to be the perfect ratio of bacon to non-bacon in the final product. Lay the bacon out on a foil-lined pan and heat slowly (300-ish) until the fat is rendered and it's nice and crispy. The particular brand of bacon I used was sweet but not salty, so I added a healthy pinch or two of salt before baking. Crumble into pecan-sized pieces, then place the bacon and pecans in plastic bags to await ice cream day.

Ice cream day!

Dump your ice cream base into your favorite ice cream maker. Mine's pretty big sized, so if you only have a 1 qt machine you may have to do it in two batches. After about half the time (15 minutes for me) add the pecans and bacon. When it's soft serve consistency (or when your machine (if electric) or slave (if manual) starts making whining noises), quickly (if you're making ice cream it's probably hot outside!) scoop into a freezer-safe container and freeze for a couple hours. Then the best part: eat it!

After scarfing down way too much of this stuff, I found out that it's even better (if you can believe it) covered in chocolate syup. And I don't generally like chocolate syrup.

Enjoy!

After thoughts

 There is one little detail I didn't mention above. When I was heating my milk, it started to look like overcooked cheese soup. Oh noes! Brown sugar (and possibly maple syrup) are pretty acidic, and acids denature milk proteins, causing milk to look like overcooked cheese soup. I did some research on the subject (even finding a nifty food science book on the internet), but don't really know how to avoid this problem. The only thing I found was perhaps if you heat the milk before you add the sugar, the rate of curdling should slow down. But I haven't tried it yet. The final product turned out more than excellent, so it ended up not being a problem. Guess I'll just have to make several more batches and experiment!

Mac & Cheese: The Formula

As a kid I never really liked macaroni and cheese. The stuff in the blue box just never did it for me, and for a long time I thought that's what mac & cheese was supposed to taste like. And then one day I had the real stuff; that was the day my lifespan decreased by a decade or so. But it's probably worth it now that I know the amazingness which is mac & cheese.

Oh and bonus, it's super easy to remember the recipe, since everything is in amounts of 2.

Basic Macaroni & Cheese

• 2 c. macaroni (or any small pasta you have in your pantry)
• 2 Tbsp butter
• 2 Tbsp flour
• 2 c. milk
• 2 c. sharp cheddar cheese

Cook macaroni in salted water until almost al dente.

In the mean time, melt butter in 10-inch oven-safe saute pan (I love my cast iron pan for this), then add flour. Stir for about a minute to cook out the starchy taste, then slowly add the milk, stirring constantly. Let the mixture simmer until it gets thick. Add the cheese, stirring until melted, then season well with salt and pepper (I like lots of pepper). Stir in the cooked and drained pasta, then pop into the oven for about 10-15 minutes. (I also like to add a cup of cheese to the top, but it doesn't fit into my nifty little 2 pattern.) Serves 2 as a meal (...or 1 if you are really hungry) or 4 as a side.

The variations

The great thing about this recipe is it's so easy to adapt. You can use the butter to saute vegetables or meats (mmm.... bacon) then add your flour straight to the sauteed stuff. Proceed along the rest of the recipe as normal. Some combinations I've made:

• Bacon. I guess it's not a combination so much but bacon makes anything better. The first mac & cheese I made myself had bacon and instead of cooking it in the oven I used the smoker. Love.
• Bacon, onion, mushroom: like above, but for the sophisticated pallet. 
• Grilled corn, peppers, onions make a nice summer side dish.
• Hot dogs, chili, mustard and onions make chili dog mac & cheese. Oh. My. Goodness.
• Chorizo, red pepper, onion, cumin, hot sauce, for a mexican flair.

Texas "Pot Roast" aka Fake Brisket

My local grocery store (as I presume most local grocery stores do) likes to sell cuts of meat with random names, forcing the buyer to figure out how exactly to cook it. One cut of meat they used to sell is the London Broil. Luckily, London Broil is actually a cooking method, so it was pretty easy to figure out how to cook this (marinate overnight, grill to medium-rare, slice thin across the grain).

Recently, however, they've started selling something called the Texas Broil. As far as I can tell, it's just a larger cut of the London Broil. The description on the packaging says "Chuck Arm Roast", but last time I checked, cows don't have arms, and the chuck is part of the shoulder.

Chuck is usually a tough meat, calling for the London Broil treatment (cooking it medium-rare keeps it from getting to tough, and thinly slicing across the grain keeps the muscle fibers short, also reducing toughness) or the pot roast treatment (i.e. braising). But that word Texas kept jumping out at me. Texas folk don't care about anything with London in the name, and they certainly aren't going to waste a nice chunk of beef by braising it. Then the idea hit me: smoke it! If I pretend the chuck is a brisket I'll get the tenderness and Texas-ness I'm looking for.

Texas "Pot Roast" aka Fake Brisket

• 1 chuck roast (1.5 lbs)
• 1/4 cup paprika
• 1/4 cup chili powder
• 2 Tbsp. garlic powder
• 2 Tbsp. onion powder
• 1 Tbsp. kosher salt
• 1 Tbsp. cracked black pepper
• 1 Tbsp. sugar
• 2 Tsp. cayenne pepper
• 1 c. apple cider vinegar OR good quality beer
• 2-3 tsp red pepper flakes
• several cups mesquite or hickory chips

Mix together the paprika, chili powder, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, sugar and cayenne pepper until thoroughly blended. Pour about three-quarters of it onto the brisket, rubbing onto every side and into every nook and cranny.

Prepare your smoker or grill for smoking. When it's ready, smoke the steak for at least 6 hours. If you are in a hurry you can get away with 4 hours, and if you have more time it could go up to 8. Mix some of the leftover rub with your vinegar or beer and red pepper flakes, and mop the meat with it about once an hour.

After 4, 6, or 8 hours in the smoker, you will hardly believe this used to be a tough piece of pot-roast. It will be fork tender, smokey, and delicious!

Chocolate Chip Banana Nut Bread

I love banana nut bread. With a passion. I make it so much that I got tired of searching the internet for a recipe every time I had a couple of bananas about to go bad, so a while ago I pulled out my copy of Shirly Corriher's Bakewise and created my own recipe. And it's pretty freaking amazing, if I do say so myself.

Background information

First of all, a little lesson about bananas. Normally when one eats a banana its skin is a nice bright yellow, its fruit is firm and off-white, and it's got a nice banana flavor. These make sucky banana bread. They are about 25%  starch and 1% sugar (by weight), and full of nice healthy cell structures. This make for a tough banana bread that's not very sweet and with an undeveloped, non-homogeneous flavor.

What you want are bananas like these:

Actually, those are a little less ripe than I normally use (you can still see yellow), but I was craving banana bread and couldn't wait any longer. Good clue that your bananas are ripe enough? You try to peel them and this happens instead:

Yeah that's right, it split clean off.

What makes these bananas so different than their out-of-hand cousins? When bananas ripen, their cell walls break down, converting nice firm bananas into squishy puddles of banana guts. As these walls break, their contents spill out, and previously-separated chemical compounds are combined, joining into more and tastier compounds. (Call me crazy, but I tend to find that an overripe banana tastes more like banana than ripe one). Another important change, especially when making cake (technically, banana bread is cake, not bread), is the conversion of starch to sugar. Starches, as we've very briefly touched on before, are long chains of sugars. During ripening, enzymes in the banana break down these long chains into their individual sugars, greatly increasing the sweetness of the fruit, while decreasing the cake-toughening starch. It goes from 25% starch, 1% sugar to 1% starch, 20% sugar (the rest of the sugar is used as energy for the process). Yum!

Enough with the science, onto the recipe!

Chocolate Chip Banana Nut Bread

• 1/2 stick (4 Tbs; 2 oz) butter
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla
• pinch salt
• 3 super duper ripe bananas
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 1/4 cup milk (usually)
• 3/4 cup walnut pieces, toasted and cooled (pecans work as well)
• 3/4 cup regular chocolate chips (lower to 1/2 cup if using mini chips)

I like to follow the basic creaming method for my banana bread,  adding the bananas in between the eggs and flour. For those of you who don't watch quite as much Good Eats as I do, here's the basic method:

• Beat the butter with the sugar over low speed until the butter is basically obliterated and the sugar is nice and fluffy (this is called the creaming step, hence the name of the method).
• Add eggs one at a time, making sure you thoroughly incorporate the last one before you add the next one.
• I like to add my salt and vanilla after the eggs, to insure they are nice and blended.
• Add bananas one at a time; you should have no problems getting these babies to blend.
• At this point you might be saying to yourself "oh noes, why does my batter look terrible?!?!"

• Don't worry about that, you haven't done anything wrong. The bananas just contain too much water, and your emulsion broke. Flour to the rescue!
• Add flour, one cup at a time, and blend thoroughly, but not more than necessary. Some sciency chefs cringe at using power tools here, because it can create too much gluten, causing your bread to be chewy. I don't know if it's the high sugar or if there's something in the banana, but I've never had problems with tough banana bread. Just don't overmix and you should be fine.
• Oh, I also like to add in 1 tsp baking soda as you add each cup of flour. That way it gets blended together and you don't have to go to the trouble of sifting it first.
• If, while adding the flour, the mixture becomes too thick to mix, add the 1/4 cup of milk. I don't usually have a problem and just add it at the end. Very rarely, you won't even need it at all, it just depends on how much moisture your bananas contain. At the end of all this your batter should be the consistency of cake batter.
• Lastly, stir in your chocolate and nuts. Toasting the walnuts is imperative, as it makes them taste so much better

Pour the whole thing into a well-greased bread pan and bake at 300 for 50 minutes. I've found that if you bake it at the traditional temperature of 350, it browns too fast and is hard to cook the middle.



OMG so good


One last anecdote before I go to polish off the rest of this batch. My dad claims he does not like chocolate chips, so one time I made a double batch and added chocolate chips to only half. I noticed to very weird things: firstly, despite his claim, my dad ate more of the chocolate kind than regular, and secondly, the chocolate chip banana bread tasted more like banana than that without chocolate. There must be something in the chocolate that brings out the flavor of banana to a huge degree. Just some food for though.

Savory Smoked Chicken Tart with Shallots and Apricots

See this post for a little background on this dish.

Morning of (or night before) Dinner:

• 1 lb chicken breast, trimmed of excess fat
• 1 shallot, sliced thin
• 3-4 dried apricots, sliced thin
• 3/4 c. good quality soy sauce

Place all ingredients in zip top bag or other water-tight container. Marinate at least 4 hours, or overnight.

Two hours (or more) before dinner:

• 7oz shallots, sliced thin (I just used the rest of my half-pound bag)
• 1 cup-ish dried apricots, sliced thin (I counted out 20)
• 1/2 c. marsala wine
• 1/2 c. balsamic vinegar
• 1 clove garlic, minced (dried is fine)

Place all ingredients in zip-top bag and marinate for at least an hour. Here's a superfluous shot of my sliced ingredients:

Pro tip: If you, like me, are too manly to be seen crying in the kitchen, cut your shallots near an open flame. This won't work if you're crying because you've cut your self; in that case you've got no options but to man up.

Right about now is a good time to start smoking your chicken. I smoked mine for about an hour and a half using hickory wood. If you like a milder smoke flavor, apple or pecan wood work well with this dish as well. As you can see I added the shallots and apricots from the chicken marinade to help keep the chicken juicy and flavorful.

For those of you not fortunate enough to have a smoker, you can grill the chicken along with a foil packet filled with wood chips. If you don't have a smoker or a grill, then have a nice little cry, then cook the chicken in the oven instead.



Mmmm smokey goodness

Yummy Herb-Garlic Crust

• 1-1/2 c. all purpose flour
• 1/2 c. corn meal
• 2 tsp garlic powder
• 2 tsp onion powder
• 1 tsp oregano
• 1 tsp thyme
• 1/2 tsp rosemary
• large pinch salt
• 1/2 c. butter
• 1/2 c. (ish) very cold milk

Disclaimer: if you already know how to make pie crust then don't listen to this part. If you don't know how to make pie crust then say a little prayer before proceeding. It's not at all hard to do, I just never do it and I'm not very patient.

Thoroughly mix together all dry ingredients, then cut in butter until it's nice and pebble-y. Add milk a small bit at a time and stir together. Keep adding until the crust just holds it's shape when pressed together. Flatten into a disk shape, wrap in plastic wrap and put in the fridge for about an hour.

Almost dinner time!!!

• Shallot/apricot mixture, drained of excess liquid
• Yummy garlic-herb crust
• 8 oz. goat cheese, softened
• Smoked chicken breast, diced

Saute your shallot/apricot mixture over medium-low heat. It'll be hard to tell how cooked everything is since they will be stained a nice shade of black, but you want them to soften and for the harsh vinegar smell to mostly dissipate. (Don't test this by sticking your head over the pan and sniffing. A wise man learns from other people's mistakes.)

Meanwhile, roll out the dough on a floured work surface to a nice 1/8th inch to 1/4 inch thickness, in a roundish shape. Mine ended up being too dry, so I pressed it into a tart pan instead. The key to making mistakes is to make it look like you planned it that way. Spread the crust with a thin layer of the goat cheese. If you are having trouble spreading it, warm the crust in the oven for a minute (you did preheat that to 350, didn't you?). Set the cheese on the warm crust to let it melt a bit and it will spread like butter.

Add the chicken next, and top it all off with your shallots and apricots. Pop it in the oven long enough to warm everything through and cook the crust (should be no longer than 10 minutes). It should look like this:


Money shot! The dark color is poor lighting; it wasn't at all burnt.

It's salty, sweet, savory, chewy, crunchy, tangy, smokey, fruity, creamy, and most importantly: total yumsters. Enjoy!