RogueChef
“It IS all about the TASTE”
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Bacon Caramels
Spoken prior :
Sarah Hepola, on Salon.com, suggests that eating bacon in the modern, health-conscious world is an act of rebellion,
“Loving bacon is like shoving a middle finger in the face of all that is healthy and holy while an unfiltered cigarette smolders between your lips.”
Evidently my eldest has a true rebellion going on, with the latest being bacon caramels.. Sweet, salty, soft and crunchy with a hint of smoke from the bacon. But as a 1/4 oz bite of this goes for upto $6.00, I’ll look to making my own.
Perhaps I’ll use my own double or triple smoked bacon. (Bacon that has been cold smoked, rested and then smoked again.) If one does not have access to these things, a slab of bacon, thick cut and brushed with liquid smoke is a passable substitute.
We know bacon makes everything taste good, just like bourbon, bacon and bourbon will make linoleum tiles taste wonderful. (Depending on the amount of bacon and bourbon.) So for that extra roguechef twist, a bit of bacon, a bit of bourbon, and some of my roasted pecans, to round out the taste / texture experience.
Wikipedia says:
Caramel candy is a soft, dense, chewy candy made by boiling a mixture of milk or cream, sugar, butter, vanilla essence, and (more common in commercial production) glucose or corn syrup. It can also be made with chocolate. It is not heated above the firm ball stage ((250 °F), so there is almost no caramelization. This type of candy is often called milk caramel.
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Peach, Strawberry Crumble
Crumble:
In a crumble, the fruit is baked under a crumbly topping, usually made with flour, butter, and sugar, and sometimes oats, nuts, and spices.
All that said, I still think of a crisp when you say a cobbler. The difference in my mind is the fruit used and the time of the year your make it.
As for today’s post I’ll hazard the slings and arrows of culinary fortune and look at another late summer fruit.
With all the late summer stonefruit arriving and the last bit of the berries still producing berries, it is time to look at the wonderful fruit combination of peaches and strawberries. The sweetness of the peach, and the sweet tang of the strawberry coaxed out into a luscious syrup with a combination of brown and white sugar, topped with a sweet and crisp crumble topping.
This is a simple desert that will take all of 10 minutes (excluding baking), to prepare
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Coconut Cake with Lemon Icing
It is sooo hot, but I sooo want cake, and I am NOT buying the chemical laden garbage one finds in the local mega mart. Besides, I want something that tastes better than the wrapper… I suppose I’ll need to brave the slings and arrows of my stove…
Cake is a form of food, typically a sweet, baked dessert. Cakes normally contain a combination of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter or oil, with some varieties also requiring liquid and leavening agents. Flavorful ingredients like fruit purées, nuts or extracts are often added, and numerous substitutions for the primary ingredients are possible. Cakes are often filled with fruit preserves or dessert sauces, iced with buttercream or other icings, and decorated with marzipan, piped borders or candied fruit.
I love fruit based cakes, with mashed / crushed cherry, banana, hard fruit sauce, (apple, pear, etc), but one serious favorite is coconut cake. Most people just add coconut flakes to a white cake and call it a day, but I am the rogue chef.
What if, for a liquid I used coconut milk, and added replaced 1/2 the vanilla extract with coconut extract, then just for extravagant indulgence, added a lemon sour cream drizzle for icing.
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Peach Cobbler, Grunt or Buckle
As I’ve said before:
I love my green grocer, I hate my green grocer, they know exactly what I am trying to do , even when I don’t.
As an example, my last trip in I was shown some very peaches, I am a huge fan of these, but was unwilling to consider possibilities, at least until the temperatures come down, until the proprietor started talking about peach cobbler…
Cobblers:
Deep-dish fruit desserts in which sweetened fruits (fresh berries or apples are the traditional choices) are topped with a biscuit dough before baking.
A subvarity of cobbler is the buckle or grunt
Varieties of cobbler include the Betty, the Grunt, the Slump, and the Buckle. Grunts, Pandowdy, and Slumps are a New England variety of cobbler, typically cooked on the stove-top or cooker in an iron skillet or pan with the dough on top in the shape of dumplings—they reportedly take their name from the grunting sound they make while cooking. A Buckle is made with yellow batter (like cake batter), with the filling mixed in with the batter.
Crisps:
In a crisp, the fruit is baked under a crumbly topping, usually made with flour, butter, and sugar, and sometimes oats, nuts, and spices.
All that said, I still think of a crisp when you say a cobbler. The difference in my mind is the fruit used and the time of the year your make it.
As for today’s post I’ll hazard the slings and arrows of culinary fortune and look at another early summer fruit.
When early summer fruit starts arriving, I have to make a buckle. It is a simple and rustic dessert recipe, you can use any kind of fruit that is around, the ingredients are pantry staples and it freezes fabulously. When I make buckles, I usually make two, one to serve and one to keep in the freezer for a quick thaw and serve desert. Blueberries, raspberries, cherries, peaches, apricots, nectarines, all are delicious in a buckle.
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Fruit Syrups for Drinks / Ice Pops / Snow Cones
One of the things that tell me summer has hit Manhattan, is the presence on every other corner of a man with a HUGE saddle shaped block of ice, a ice plane, and bottles of fruit syrup. For the minimal price of a dollar he will scrape out a cup of ice, dump it into a cone cup, and add a drizzle of fruit flavored syrup.
Is it sanitary? Your guess is as good as mine. Is it COLD? Oh, YES!. Is it REFRESHING? YES!. Is it just what you need on a hot humid day after a trip on a subway with no AC? ABSOLUTELY!!!
Now we can do this at home, expect those flavored syrups are kinda hard to come by. So IF we sort out how to make them, we have the keys to all kinds of snow cones, icee’s, fruit spritzers, fruit teas, and possibly a sorbet or so…
Simple syrup is the real heart to the best cold homemade beverages. Once make the syrup, you can add any fruit juice and create your own special summertime drinks.
There are several thicknesses of simple syrup and they have different uses. but for the purpose of this post will work with a thick simple syrup, a ratio of 1 part water to 1 part sugar, and is the basis of cold drinks.
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Meatless Mondays – Bananas Foster Pudding
Once again, I’ve bough fruit, and while most of it has been devoured, some of it has not been eaten as a whole, and will have to be disguised in some way to ensure its consumption.
Banana pudding is a dessert common in the Southern United States, generally consisting of repeated layers of sweet custard, cookies (usually Vanilla Wafers) and sliced bananas placed in a dish, baked and served, sometimes with whipped cream or meringue on top. I’ve built this in parfait glasses, scooped on to a plate / bowl, in individual bowls. One tip is to give the banana slices a bath in lemon juice to stop enzyme actions that turn them dark and slimy in minutes.
The real trick is to make the custard yourself and add that special rouge chef twist, bananas cooked and coated in a run / banana liquor and brown sugar sauce. (AKA Banana’s Foster)
On overiew of constructing this desert is as follows:
- Cook custard
- Layer cookies, custard, banana’s
- Add cream topping
- Chill
- Serve
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Drunken Cherry Ice Cream
It’s hot, it’s fresh fruit season, I found a sale on jumbo eggs, and I have several pints of heavy cream in the fridge…
Sounds like Ice Cream, but not just any ice cream, some thing rich as in a custard based “french style”, and those tend to be sooo rich and smooth, something with a real fruit punch, like lots and lots and lots of berries, and of course the basic rogue chef twist …
Maybe something to extend the luxury, perhaps macerate the berries in a really good bourbon, or perhaps some way to intensify the vanilla taste, like vanilla sugar in the custard base ….
Background
Ice cream can be made with just cream, sugar, and a flavoring (usually fruit) is sometimes referred to as “Philadelphia style” ice cream. Ice creams made with eggs, in the form of a cooked custard, are “French” ice creams. This mixture is stirred while cooling to prevent large ice crystals from forming; the result is a smoothly textured ice cream.
An overview of this operation:
- Prepare Vanilla Sugar
- Make Custard
- Prepare Mix in’s
- Fold Mix in’s into Ice cream
- Turn Ice Cream
- Harden Ice Cream in freezer for an hour
- Eat, and die of pleasure
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Cherry Buckle
And the war begins…
As one can imagine, the moment I say a {BLAH} is {yadda, yadda, yadda}, my loyal fan club bombards me with quotes, definitions, examples, recipes, cooking implements, and the kitchen sink. Why did I think my post on Blueberry cobblers would be any different…
Cobblers:
Deep-dish fruit desserts in which sweetened fruits (fresh berries or apples are the traditional choices) are topped with a biscuit dough before baking.
A subvarity of cobbler is the buckle or grunt
Varieties of cobbler include the Betty, the Grunt, the Slump, and the Buckle. Grunts, Pandowdy, and Slumps are a New England variety of cobbler, typically cooked on the stove-top or cooker in an iron skillet or pan with the dough on top in the shape of dumplings—they reportedly take their name from the grunting sound they make while cooking. A Buckle is made with yellow batter (like cake batter), with the filling mixed in with the batter.
Crisps:
In a crisp, the fruit is baked under a crumbly topping, usually made with flour, butter, and sugar, and sometimes oats, nuts, and spices.
All that said, I still think of a crisp when you say a cobbler. The difference in my mind is the fruit used and the time of the year your make it.
As for today’s post I’ll hazard the slings and arrows of culinary fortune and look at another early summer fruit.
When early summer fruit starts arriving, I have to make a buckle. It is a simple and rustic dessert recipe, you can use any kind of fruit that is around, the ingredients are pantry staples and it freezes fabulously. When I make buckles, I usually make two, one to serve and one to keep in the freezer for a quick thaw and serve desert. Blueberries, raspberries, cherries, peaches, apricots, nectarines, all are delicious in a buckle.
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