Wizard Recipes

Members of the mousse clan are creamy-sweet, velvet-smooth concoctions that we savor by each spoonful in gastronomic delight. They are pudding-like with no pastry base or topping and no flour other than as thickener.

The clan includes the familiar and homey puddings and custards, the stylish, elegant mousses, the less familiar creams (or crèmes), the old-fashioned fools, whips and the culinary tour-de-force, sweet soufflés. Although their preparation ranges from simple to difficult, they all satisfy your sweet tooth like nothing else.

Who is who

Puddings and custards are based on milk (or cream), eggs and sugar in varying combination as well as flavorings. The thickening agent is egg. Recipes may also call for flour, starch or gelatin to ensure a firmer structure. Although these thickeners are not essential, they reduce the chance of failure in case your eggs turn out scrambled instead of thickener.

There is a subtle difference between custard and pudding. Usually anything thickened with eggs only are called custards, while puddings also contain another thickener. The basic preparation for both is the same and both used to be more popular than they are today.

They are easy to prepare, nutritious and inexpensive, and institutions often served them to save on labor. When cheap instant pudding powders appeared on grocery store shelves, they made home preparation remarkably easy. Just stir the powder into water, heat and you have instant dessert. Today bakers still serve them as informal everyday desserts, though less frequently.

Gelatin desserts are also in this category.

Creams and mousses are closely related and similar to custards and puddings in consistency. Creams (the French call them crèmes) are heavy cream and flavorings whipped together without any thickeners.

Mousses are whipped cream and flavorings with added gelatin to give a firmer structure. If there are eggs in the mousse, they are not for thickening but for extra flavor. Some recipes fold in beaten egg whites for a cloud-like texture. Mousses today are especially fashionable desserts.

Fools and whips are always fruit based desserts. In case of fools (originally a British term of endearment from where the name came), you fold sweetened whipped cream into puréed or finely chopped fruits, while whips use a similarly prepared fruit with sweetened beaten egg whites folded into them, instead of cream.

Both are best when cold. Fools are uncooked but whips may be baked before serving. Just as easy to prepare as creams and mousses, they can also be just as impressive and delicious. For some reason they are not nearly as popular as mousses.

They are particularly good summer desserts when plenty of fresh, good-flavored fruits are in season, especially berries. Their frosty, refreshing chill is a welcome sight on a hot summer dinner table. Let’s not forget the most spectacular member of this family, dessert soufflés.

They demand far more preparation, attention and expertise than fools or puddings, but the basic ingredients are similar: mostly eggs and flavoring, often with milk and possibly flour or starch. The ingredients and their exact proportions are critical. So is the way you whip the egg whites, and the technique for making the basic sauce, as well as the temperature of the oven and bake time. Presenting a perfect soufflé as a finale to any meal is like serving a piece of art.

You make soufflés in two basic steps. First, you carefully cook and thicken an egg yolk based custard-like sauce. Add the flavorings after the sauce reaches the right consistency. The second step is to beat the egg whites to a soft-peak stage and fold the foam into the sauce. Pour the mixture into a vertical-sided soufflé mold and bake. Heat expands the beaten egg white, just like in a cake but the soufflé’s structure is especially unstable.

Soufflés can easily double, even triple in volume in the oven. Insert a paper collar around the inner edge of the soufflé mold to give support to the baking batter that rises above the edge of the dish. Otherwise you will end up with a giant mushroom shape with a large flat cap. Remove the collar just before serving.

When to remove the finished soufflé from the oven is also crucial. Pull it out a few minutes too soon, and you and your guests can watch your marvelous creation deflate before your very eyes.Leave it in two minutes too long and you end up with something that beginning to taste like a dry omelet thickened with sawdust.

Soufflés don’t hold well. You must serve them straight out of the oven, so you must keep the guests on schedule. To serve this masterpiece for maximum effect, place it on the table, cut into pieces and served while everyone is watching. An alternative is to bake soufflé in individual soufflé dishes. Either way, soufflé is best fresh. They don’t store well till the next day.

For all the time and effort you put into them, the risk of total disaster is high. Baking soufflés is for brave and experienced cooks but the results are spectacularly rewarding. Prudent cooks have a back-up dessert when baking soufflés.

You cannot easily duplicate ideal storage conditions for potatoes in your home so don’t buy more than what you can use in a few weeks. Thick-skinned potatoes keep longer than the thin-skinned varieties.

If stored above 50°F (10°C), potatoes begin to sprout, which makes them flabby and more susceptible to decay, even though most storage potatoes are chemically treated to delay (but not stop) sprouting.

If you store them in your refrigerator, potatoes turn sweet and taste unpleasant. Here is what happens. After harvesting, the still-living potatoes continue to breathe and to convert their starch to sugar at a slow rate, the way they naturally do. When you quickly cool them to refrigerator temperature, potatoes slow their breathing rate (because breathing slows at cooler temperature), but the reaction that converts starch to sugar continues at the same rate.

They cannot use up the sugar fast enough, it accumulates and refrigerated potatoes taste too sweet. The sugar converts back to starch if you return the potatoes to room temperature, but the process doesn’t reverse completely.

Because of the increased sugar, refrigerated potatoes are particularly poor choice for frying. The sugar caramelizes in the hot oil, the potatoes tend to burn and become bitter.

You should store potatoes under well-ventilated conditions so they can continue to breathe. That is one reason why the plastic bags in which they are sold always have little breathing holes.

For long-term storage, add an apple to the potatoes. The presence of apple preserves potatoes longer in firm, healthy conditions and discourages sprouting. Apple gives off ethylene gas and alcohol while it breathes that suppress sprout formation.

Cooking potatoes is one of the first thing a new cook learns. Not much to it but keep in mind a few points:

¨ use just enough water to cover (to leach minimum of nutrients)

¨ salt the water, otherwise you leach the natural salt from the potatoes and they taste flat

¨ don’t overcook or undercook, so keep testing with the point of a knife or skewer; cooking time is around 15 minutes for diced potatoes but varies with your location and how large the dices are. Average-size whole potatoes cook in about 30 minutes, large ones 45 minutes.

When baking potatoes, don’t cover with aluminum foil unless you like soft skin. In foil potatoes steam instead of bake. But oiling or greasing the skin before baking promotes browning and crispy skin. Pricking the skin with a fork or knife before baking is also a good idea to prevent a possible explosion in the oven that could happen if the potatoes have tough skin and the built-up steam inside cannot escape. It makes quite a mess in the oven.

French frying is a messy operation even with a home deep-fryer but properly-made French-fried potatoes are delicious. In deep-frying you reduce the high moisture content of potatoes from the original 78 percent to about 2 percent.

The moisture turns to steam in the hot oil, desperately trying to escape while spattering oil everywhere, creating a mess. As bubbles of steam burst when emerging from the surface of oil, they produce a small hissing sound. All the bursting bubbles together act like an orchestra to create that pleasing sizzle with its anticipation of that heavenly deep-fried taste.

The steam escapes first from the hottest part of the potatoes, the surface which is in direct contact with the hot oil. Then, as the center part of potato gets hotter, moisture starts turning to steam that escapes through the outside part. Eventually not much water remains in the potato and the sizzling dies down.

The outward pressure of escaping steam keeps the oil from seeping into the potatoes, but the steam also cools their surface to prevent burning (evaporating water cools, like your skin after coming out of the pool). When most of the moisture has boiled off, the potatoes become vulnerable to burning but also start absorbing more oil.

Oil temperature is critical. If the oil is too hot, the surface of the potatoes burn before the inside is properly cooked. If the oil is too cool, the escaping steam doesn’t have enough pressure to keep excess oil out of the potatoes. The correct deep frying temperature is 375°F (192°C).

Unless you have a thermometer or a thermostat on your deep-fryer, there is no easy way to judge that. Various home methods, such as browning a certain-size bread cube in so many seconds that some cookbooks suggest, are not accurate enough when oil temperature should be preferably within 15° of the ideal. For that reason the results of home French-frying is not often as satisfying as French-fried products in a good fast-food joint.

The best method of deep-frying potatoes is the two-stage method. In the first stage you cook the potatoes in oil at a lower temperature, 325°F (161°C), until they are limp but not brown, about 3 to 4 minutes. In this stage the oil is hot enough to gelatinize starch, in other words, to cook the potatoes. In the second stage the already cooked potatoes quickly brown at 375°F (192°C).

The five types of dry heat cooking are:

¨ broiling or pan-broiling

¨ sautéing

¨ deep-frying

¨ stir-frying

¨ roasting (baking)

Dry heat cooking methods use high heat and little moisture. Cooking is not entirely dry, as the name implies, because all meat have plenty of moisture that contributes to the cooking process.

Since extra moisture is not welcome because it reduces the high cooking temperature, it is always a good idea to wipe the seafood thoroughly with a paper towel just before cooking or, if fried with breading, before applying the coating.

The hottest heat in dry cooking method is grilling (barbecuing) and broiling. To avoid sticking, brush the surface of the grill or broiler pan with a film of oil, and for added insurance, do the same with the meat.

The intense heat (with some help from the brushed-on oil) rapidly browns the surface of your meat. By the time you cook the inside, the surface color is a deep caramel brown or, if you’re not careful, charcoal black.

Never turn the meat more than once either on the grill or under the broiler. This keeps handling to a minimum and produces attractive grill marks. Determine the time to cook one side, set your timer and don’t even peek until the time is up. Quickly flip the piece over and set the timer again. Now you can get ready to check the internal temperature.

When you are grilling smaller pieces, skewer them. Keep heavy work gloves near the grill to turn skewered meat.

A quick and easy way of cooking meat is pan-broiling, which is similar to grilling or broiling. To pan-broil meat, place it in a heavy preheated skillet over medium heat. Cook the meat directly on the hot surface without water or oil, turning only once.  This is an excellent way for preparing steaks and ground meat patties. Some cooks sprinkle salt in the pan before adding the meat to prevent sticking.

Initially the meat may stick a little, but if you detach it from the pan right away, the fat and juices from the meat keep it from sticking again.

Sautéing, deep-frying and stir-frying all use oil. Sauté meat in small amount of fat on strong heat. Sautéing is easy, not messy, very quick and the meat absorbs a minimum of fat.

Keep the pan in constant motion for even browning and to avoid sticking. If you are planning to serve the meat with a sauce, you can use what’s left in the pan as a base-the highly-flavored oil   with some deeply-browned food particles and possibly some juice.

Deglaze it by adding a little wine or stock, even water. The liquid dissolves the particles and within a minute you have it cooked down into a sauce.

Deep-frying and stir-frying are both high-heat methods. The difference is in the amount of oil you use-plenty for deep-frying, just enough to cover the bottom of the pan or wok for stir-frying.

Food absorbs more fat in deep-frying than in any other cooking method, but if you do it properly, you can reduce fat absorption. Deep-fried food of any kind is wonderful but home deep-frying is messy.