Chocolate Stout Floats with Bourbon Caramel

Posted on September 7, 2015 by Chelsea

Labor Day deserves to be celebrated. The reason we have not just a three-day weekend this week, but a weekend at all, is a result of the hard work and fighting of workers, federations, and labor unions demanding reasonable working conditions and time off. In many industries, they helped us get fair working conditions. Their efforts should be commemorated.

I think, though, on Labor Day we should treat ourselves more than fairly. We should treat ourselves well. We should celebrate what has been fought for and allow ourselves not an indulgence, but a reward we deserve. After all, we work hard!

real shoes: crucial caramel-making equipment!

In my case, of course, this reward is food. I’m not completely devoted to the Labor Day barbecue tradition (in fact, tonight we are having arroz con pollo), but I do think a special dish is an appropriate method of celebration. Let’s do dessert.

dissolved sugar, rapid bubbling

sugar caramelizing around pot edges

approaching dark amber color; almost time to add the cream.

Like Labor Day, this dessert of just rewards has several origin stories. The first is simple: as I noted here, a few months ago my friend B. asked for my tips on bourbon dessert sauces. One of her attempts involved a bourbon caramel to douse over ice cream, and terrified as I am of the whole boiling sugar thing that is required for caramel, I couldn’t pass up the challenge. I wasn’t quite satisfied, though, with presenting a recipe for caramel sauce enrobing a simple scoop of ice cream. I wanted something a bit more exciting.

The answer came during our summer trip to Oregon. The night of our reunion with our dissertation crew, we had chocolate stout floats for dessert: tooth-achingly cold scoops of vanilla bean ice cream drowning in a bitter fizzing cocoa bath of cold, black beer. With each spoonful, you can moderate the combination, choosing just a fleck of ice cream, or mixing the whole thing into a pale, drinkable swirl. The following day, we repeated the dessert with a new set of friends, and one of them judiciously declared the need to slosh in a shot of bourbon.

Mic drop.

There it was.

So what I have for you today, in celebration of our hard work, is a chocolate stout float drizzled with bourbon caramel. It’s a perfect dessert for a hot day, because though it’s far from light, it’s gloriously cold. You can make the caramel sauce earlier in the day, so by the time your belly is ready for dessert, it will have had ample time to cool (and, if you’re doing the barbecue thing, you won’t have had to deal with the stove for several hours). The ice cream and beer are in lovely, tenuous balance with one another – almost too sweet, almost too bitter – and the just-shy-of-bitter notes in the caramel (which is, after all, almost-burnt sugar), play off of both. The bourbon here is noticeable, especially after the caramel cools down, but it isn’t overwhelming. It’s a light, floral, vanilla note that capitalizes on the toasty flavors already created by making the caramel.

You can serve this in whatever quantities, by whatever process you like. I followed my usual method in considering the caramel and adapted several recipes, but mostly this one, along with several sensible suggestions by David Lebovitz. He’s right – you really do have brave the smoke and the suspiciously-close-to-burning smell of the sugar cooking, lest you end up with something that’s just sweet, not developed and complex. And warming your cream before adding it to the vat of boiling sugar makes good sense for easier integration, but you should still take precautions and wear shoes no matter how hot it is in your kitchen. Boiling sugar burns are serious business.

When it comes to serving, we like to scoop in some ice cream first, then top it up with the beer. As this delicious experiment explains, this nets you a lovely, creamy foam on top, on which you can drizzle as much caramel sauce as you want. The sauce thickens as it cools, so what barely coats a spoon while hot will pour even thicker than maple syrup once it’s had time to chill for a while. The layer that sinks and coats the bottom of the glass makes for a lovely last few sips, too.

Chocolate Stout Floats with Bourbon Caramel Sauce

Makes about 1 cup caramel sauce

Approximately 20 minutes active cook time, plus an hour (or more) for the sauce to cool

For bourbon caramel:

1 cup sugar

¼ cup water

½ cup room temperature or warm heavy cream (helps it incorporate faster)

¼ cup bourbon

½ teaspoon salt

For float:

Vanilla ice cream

Chilled chocolate stout

For the bourbon caramel, stir the sugar and water together in a medium pot that is heavy in weight and light in color (the light color lets you see the color change in the caramel sauce – very important). Cook over medium high heat, stirring, until the sugar dissolves and the mixture becomes clear.
Now, stop stirring. If you have one, use a wet pastry brush to brush down any sugar crystals that have adhered to the sides of the pot so they can melt along with the rest of the mix.
Without stirring, let the melted sugar simmer over medium or medium-high heat until the outside edge starts to darken, about 7-8 minutes. Bubbles will be very fast. It’s important not to stir because you don’t want any unmelted sugar crystals falling in and marring the perfect smooth texture.
As the edges darken, swirl the mixture gently and keep cooking until the whole bubbling pot is the color of dark maple syrup, another 2-5 minutes. The bubbling will slow and thicken, and the mixture will smoke a bit and may begin to smell burnt – don’t be afraid! It really does need to cook to this dark amber color, or the final product will taste overly sweet (besides, as Lebovitz points out, if you do end up burning it, you’ve only lost 1 cup of sugar which, though bothersome, is not a huge financial disaster).
Remove from heat (I mean it!) and, with a whisk at the ready, add both the cream and the bourbon. Stand back! It will bubble up vigorously, and the bubbles will continue to form quite quickly for the rest of the cooking process. Whisk in the salt and set the pot back over medium heat, whisking until the sauce is smooth. Cook for an additional minute, just to ensure smooth texture (and to cook off some of the alcohol in the bourbon!). The sauce will remain thin at this point.
Remove from heat and cool – it will thicken to the texture of cold honey while at room temperature, and even to something more like dulce de leche when refrigerated.
To serve, place a scoop or two of vanilla ice cream in a tall glass. Pour in 6-8 ounces of cold chocolate stout, pausing as needed to avoid overflow. Atop the thick, rich foam that forms, drizzle a tablespoon or two of the caramel sauce and dig in.

Bourbon vanilla pastry cream over pan-roasted stone fruit

Posted on August 17, 2015 by Chelsea

After a few scrapped drafts of this post, both on the computer and in the kitchen, I’ve decided it’s basically a food representation of “To a Mouse” by Scottish poet Robert Burns. Though the title may not ring familiar, it contains perhaps the most famous – or at least well-known – line of his whole oeuvre: “the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley” or, if you’re not adept in 18^th century Scottish diction, “often go awry.”

Things go awry. They just do. In this case, the inspiration, the trial run, the ingredient acquisition, and even the writing itself (there are two previous drafts of this post in my trash can that I never want to see again), all caused enough problems that this post almost didn’t happen.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up to bourbon. Through a conversation with a friend and former colleague on Facebook, I assigned myself a project: she said she’s been experimenting with bourbon dessert sauces, and wanted tips. In particular, she’s interested in a bourbon vanilla sauce that would be good served over ice cream and peaches. There had been texture and thickness and sweetness imbalances along the way, and I was immediately hooked on the challenge.

For the next month I took this sauce through a ridiculous number of mental transformations – at first it was going to be a riff on this nutmeg sauce, then it was going to be more like a caramel, and then it was going to be akin to a crème anglaise, thickened with egg and carefully tempered. Never mind that pouring what is essentially unfrozen, unchurned ice cream over a bowl of ice cream seems excessive.

The crème anglaise plan, though, went awry, as you might have suspected. I crawled out of the kitchen leaving behind a bowl of curdled weirdness that had used up the last few tablespoons of bourbon in the house and refused to think about it for a few days. It wasn’t an eggs scrambling problem. It was a two-fold issue, I think, of poorly managed temperature differences, and the fat in the sauce not getting along with the quantity of alcohol I added.

When I tried again, the sauce had, again, transformed. Now, in a house with limited air movement, during a patch of quite warm weather, as the sun slowly dripped across our roof, sauce seemed too fast-moving. As if echoing my own sluggishness in my appetites, I wanted something thick and smooth to dollop atop a piece of fruit. And I wanted it to be ice cold.

So I ended up with a pastry cream. This is not a sauce, B., even though that’s what you were after. It’s not particularly easy or quick, and it’s almost not even pourable. What it is, though, is rich, and cold, and thick, and strongly bourbon-y (so make sure you choose one you like!), and magnificent draped thickly over whatever stone fruit you happen to have. It’s also a good option for entertaining, because once it has been cooked it needs to chill for a few hours, which makes it very easy to casually slide it out of the fridge, spoon it thickly over a row of grilled or pan-roasted plums, or peaches, or apricots, and sit back down again before your guests really registered you were “making” dessert.

This, then, seems an apropos message for the week before the semester starts up again: things go wrong. They are going to go wrong. And then you have to decide what you’re going to do about it and work it out. So if you’re expecting hiccups, and imperfections, and requisite second takes, you’ll likely be calmer and cooler in the long run. Not a bad state of being in a heat wave or a first week of school. And if we’re being absolutely honest, having a new bottle of bourbon in the house during that week is not a bad state of being either. Just in case.

Bourbon Vanilla Pastry Cream over Pan-Roasted Stone Fruit

Makes 2 – 2½ cups of cream

For the pastry cream:

2 cups half and half or 1 cup cream and 1 cup milk

¼ cup + 2 tablespoons bourbon, divided

Pinch of salt

½ cup sugar, divided

4 egg yolks

3 tablespoons cornstarch

1 tablespoon vanilla

2 tablespoons cold butter

For the roasted stone fruit:

1 whole plum OR ½ a peach OR 2-3 apricots per diner

1 tablespoon raw sugar per diner

Pinch ground black pepper, optional (best on plums, I think)

2 tablespoons butter

To make the pastry cream, heat the half and half (or milk and cream mixture), ¼ cup of the bourbon, 6 tablespoons of the sugar, and the pinch of salt in a small saucepan over medium heat. Bring it to a bare simmer. We don’t want it to reach a full boil.
While the liquid mixture warms, whisk the egg yolks together with the remaining 2 tablespoons of sugar in a small bowl. Beat well until you can no longer feel any graininess from the sugar.
Whisk the cornstarch into the yolk and sugar mixture until all powder is gone and the mixture becomes thick and pale. It will take on a texture like melted ice cream.
When the milk mixture has come to a simmer, remove it from the heat and dribble about 2 tablespoons of it into the yolks, whisking furiously and continuously. This tempers the egg yolks – that is, heats them up just enough so that when they are added to the pot, they will be less likely to scramble.
Now, take a breath and a firm hold on your whisk, and pour the yolk mixture into the pot of milk, whisking continuously. Place the pot back over medium heat and continue to whisk until the mixture returns to a simmer. It will quickly become very thick – a bit like slightly diluted mayonnaise in texture – and take on a glossy sheen. The occasional big, sluggish bubble might emerge.
Once the mixture simmers, remove it from the heat and add in the vanilla, the remaining 2 tablespoons of bourbon, and the cold butter. Whisk continuously until the butter has melted in and everything is combined.
Pour the hot pastry cream through a fine sieve or mesh strainer into a bowl. Stir and push through with a spatula to catch any solid bits of egg or other unwelcome textural imperfections.
Place a piece of plastic wrap directly against the surface of the hot pastry cream (this prevents it from developing a “skin” across the top) and deposit it in the refrigerator until well chilled. The finished product will be approximately the thickness of mayonnaise.
When dessert looms near, prepare the fruit. Cut each fruit in half and twist or cut out the pit. Set halves cut-side up and sprinkle the exposed flesh with the raw sugar, using about 1 tablespoon per serving (so if you’re serving peaches, you might want less fruit per person than if you’re serving apricots. Either way, evenly distribute 1 tablespoon of sugar per serving over the halves of fruit). Sprinkle on the pinch of black pepper, if using.
Heat the butter over medium-high heat in a skillet large enough to accommodate all of the fruit halves. When it sizzles, add the fruit, cut-side down, and let it cook undisturbed for 2-3 minutes, until the sugar is well melted and has caramelized into the fruit.
Flip the fruit over so it is cut-side up and cook another 2 minutes, until the skin wrinkles and tears a bit. This will result in fruit that is warmed through, but still firm to the bite. If you like your fruit softer, cook a few minutes longer or cut into smaller pieces.
To serve, position the fruit cut-side up on a plate, and dollop on a few spoonfuls of the pastry cream. If you go back for seconds, consider letting a friend drive you home.

Photo Friday

Posted on June 26, 2015 by Chelsea

The reflecting light bouncing off the right side of the cake layers was amazing.

Photo Friday

Posted on March 20, 2015 by Chelsea

Playing with editing dark originals.

Dessert. Vanquished.

Grapefruit Bars

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Chelsea

It’s citrus season. The trees are heavy. An amble through my neighborhood right now would send you past oranges, mandarins, tangerines, lemons, and who knows what other hybrids and splices, all sagging on their branches, almost unable to bear their own weight. When we first moved here in the summer of 2012, I couldn’t believe how much fruit was wasted. Who in their right mind could let it just fall to the ground and rot? And yet as I type, my own lemon tree – sequestered away in its little corner of our backyard – is groaning with a load I can’t reach, its thick, sharp tangle of twigs protecting it from an invading ladder.

So when I cast about for a subject to post about this week, you’d think I would have wandered out and reached up, pulling what fruits I could reach down from my own harvest. But lemons aren’t my favorite. Oh I love a fresh, pulpy lemonade. I could eat lemon curd straight out of the jar. And a tiny, hangnail-puckering squeeze into a chicken or a bean dish is almost essential. But if I’m going to celebrate citrus season and its glories, I’m going to go with my favorite: grapefruit.

Sometimes maligned for its stubborn, bitter pith and its curious ability to render certain drugs either useless or too effective, it is my favorite because it is so complex. Sweet, tangy, sour, infernally juicy, it, and not orange juice, is my choice of beverage when I’m sick. I love the smell of the peel under my fingernails. I could eat grapefruit (and have) until my tongue stung and my lips swelled with the tartness.

But if grapefruit is a bit testy as a raw product, it’s equally challenging in a dish. There are (at least compared to other citrus fruits) a paucity of grapefruit dessert recipes out there, which has always seemed like a shame to me. The lovely play of sweet and sour with that beautiful color (I prefer a red grapefruit myself) seems perfect to match with sugar.

Tired of the standard, tried-and-true lemon bar, then, I set out to conquer a grapefruit version. My first time through yielded highly positive results – grapefruit zest and lemon zest in the shortbread crust, just for some extra bright punch, a silky smooth custard layer of pale salmon pink, and a careful dusting of powdered sugar across the top. A few adjustments, a bit less flour, and it would be perfect.

Of course, I didn’t take any photographs of this perfect little bar, because I was only experimenting. Yesterday, when I made the batch to share with you, I learned what can go wrong. You see, the basic recipe for a fruit bar like this is to make a shortbread crust – flour, butter, sugar, a breath of salt and maybe a little flavoring agent or two – and bake it just until it starts to turn a bit golden. Then you let it cool a bit until the butter, now molten, solidifies to make a firm layer. You pour on a mixture of fruit juice, eggs, more sugar, and possibly some kind of thickening agent (cornstarch, in this case), and then carefully lever the quavering thing back into the oven to cook through.

The middle step – letting the crust cool – is important. Yesterday I forgot about that step. Here’s what happens when you don’t: the beautiful, pale pink liquid filling plunges straight down, bursts through the crust, and breaks it up into floating islands of mush. You despair. You yell. You say some words that make you glad the windows weren’t open. Then you put it in the oven anyway, and even though what comes out isn’t exactly what you were intending, it still looks passable and it tastes perfect.

Curiously, as my grapefruit bars baked, the disrupted crust layer floated up above the (apparently) heavier “filling” layer. What came out of the oven looked more like a cake than the bars format I was expecting, but aside from making it a bit harder to cut (the grapefruit filling smooshes out as you press the blade down), they were fairly acceptable. Tangy, sweet, a play of light crunch and velvet curd, and a huff-inducing layer of powdered sugar over the top to keep you from inhaling too fast.

So the directions I’m providing you are what you should do. They will give you the expected format: a layer of shortbread-like crust on the bottom, topped by a thick layer of soft, slightly jiggly essence of grapefruit. Just don’t forget to let the crust cool. Unless you’d prefer, to echo the persnickety challenge of grapefruit itself, my upside down version.

Grapefruit bars

Makes 9×9 inch pan

Crust:

8 tablespoons butter (½ a cup or 1 stick), at room temperature, cut into cubes

½ cup sugar

1 cup all-purpose flour

¼ teaspoon salt

zest of 1 grapefruit (for extra punch in the crust, add the zest of 1 lemon as well)

Filling:

3 eggs