Rosemary and Pinenut Ice Cream Bar with a Goat Cheese and Balsamic Truffle

This past Sunday was Mother’s Day and to me Mother’s Day suggests breakfast in bed and chocolates. Since there was really no way to provide the first, I designed a dessert around the second; however, because chocolate is a staple of desserts, I wanted to make the flavors unusual or at least interesting. I started with the idea that I wanted to make an ice cream candy bar and then chose a rosemary, buttermilk ice cream for its earthy, herbal attitude and tangy-ness. After that was decided the rest of the flavors and textures fell into place.

The construction of candy bars is very important. The textures need to go from the softest on the top to the hardest on the bottom. Why? The most important reason is that, if they don’t, then the middle will squirt out when you bite into the bar.  A second reason is that there needs to be something at the bottom stiff enough to keep the bar from bending in the middle. Following this principle, the bottom layer of this candy bar was a flaky, crumbly, shortbread cookie. Stacked on this base was a caramel and toasted pinenut crunch and the buttermilk, rosemary ice cream. This stack was topped with a deep, dark, salted chocolate ganache.

The truffle that accompanied this candy bar was a luscious mixture of milk chocolate, barn-yardy goat cheese and balsamic glaze that was coated in white chocolate and topped with just a little bit of strawberry powder. The swirl on the plate is a whiskey caramel. Which I liked the idea of because whiskey can be nutty and earthy which seemed like a good combination with a dark caramel but I think it may have been a little too potent.

I’m sorry that the picture of this dish is from a birds eye view, I think most of the beauty of this dish is getting to see the layers but I hope you can see the point. Overall, the dish appeared to be well received and perhaps in the near future a version of it will make the regular dining menu.

Star Anise Doughnuts filled with Orange Cream and served with a Malted Milkshake

This week started out with a very different plan for Sunday Supper, but when Saturday arrived, the plate hadn’t moved from “interesting” idea into stellar reality and so the idea had to be benched. At that point getting something delicious made was far more important than being innovative or gastronomically original. Making doughnuts seemed an easy back-up plan because they are a people pleaser and can be fried off early and reheated to order. I tried to make them a little more interesting with the flavorings. (For those of you who have never eaten star anise (floral, licorice flavor) and orange together then you should try it in some form. When the intensity of each is right, it tastes a bit like a fireworks display in your mouth.) No problem, all the components can be made the same day and are not technically challenging; therefore, this should be something I could easily throw together on Sunday in time for the servers’ tasting at 5:30.

I hope that everybody who reads this enjoys train wreck stories because I am not looking forward to when summer really hits NYC because nothing is easy in a hundred degree kitchen. It wasn’t until 3 pm on Sunday that I began to put together the doughnut dough. Doughnuts are an enriched dough, enriched with both butter and milk, which means that one must always be vigilant to ensure proper incorporation. Unfortunately, it was a hot day and the kitchen was stifling.  I couldn’t get the butter into the dough properly;  instead of smushing into the dough, the butter was melting, making the dough impossibly sticky. I will admit to 2 minutes of panic during which I wondered what my back-up plan to my back-up plan was before I picked up the entire mixer, grabbed extra all-purpose flour and moved into the manager’s office, which has an air conditioner. Eventually I got the dough to cooperate  but not before I added as much extra flour as I dared and frustrated the rest of the kitchen staff by cutting the doughnuts in the walk-in.

All is well that ends well, right? The doughnuts were delicious, light and fluffy. The flavoring was everything I could have asked of it and was well complemented by the malted milkshake. It may not be the most beautiful or innovative dessert but as far as I am concerned: I’m glad it was a people pleaser.

Chocolate semifreddo with tamarind meringue, citrus salad and green tea ice cream

It is starting to get warmer here but with just enough winter left to keep the popsicles and air conditioners at bay. In the dessert world this means a transition period between the heavier desserts based on chocolate, nuts and dried fruits of winter and the lighter more refreshing desserts we crave in the summer. Therefore, this week’s dessert combines a super, rich, frozen, dark chocolate mousse with things that make it feel lighter. The green tea ice cream is custard based and thus creamy and cool, cutting the richness of the chocolate. Tamarind meringue is added for crunch and visual appeal. Tamarind comes from a seed pod that grows all over the tropical belt and is both sweet and sour in flavor. The sourness of the tamarind was added to the crunchy meringue to balance the inherent sweetness of the meringue. The citrus salad is composed of ruby red grapefruit, orange and lemon slices which were cut down so as not to overwhelm the plate with their size and stored in simple syrup until service. The simple syrup kept them fresh and juicy and tempered their acidity, making them both a colorful garnish and a foil to the denseness of the chocolate. I felt this was a successful dish as all the components worked together as I intended them to and its visual appeal and color palate had the servers calling it the “fruitloop” plate all night.

At the restaurant where I work, Sundays are a special day. In an effort to get people to come out on one of the slowest nights of the week, we offer a special 5-course tasting menu, called Sunday Supper. This is a menu devised by the kitchen staff and is unique every week. The dishes are based on our food heritage, things that we read about and want to try, or whatever other inspiration we find in our daily life. The official website says Sunday Supper is ” an opportunity for the kitchen to explore new ideas and ingredients and a chance for our patrons to experience new dishes not on the regular menu.”

I am in charge of the last course: dessert. My boss has given me almost free reign as she considers this kind of innovation and experimentation to be a good way to allow young cooks to develop their own philosophies and styles. Obviously my ideas need to be pre-approved and she reserves the right to veto and change things if they don’t meet standards but for the most part these my desserts. My attempts at deliciousness. So, feel free to follow along week to week and leave comments and suggestions because I would love to know what you think.

So, I have left the farm. The last few weeks were kinda crazy as summer began to hit us hard and the due date for school work loomed. I would, however, feel remiss if i didn’t finish your farm education. Therefore, this is a brief introduction to cheese making. ok it’s really not so brief. sorry
Jonathan has developed eleven different kinds of cheeses and while some of them overlap in production methods, they are all unique and have startling differences from each other and any other cheese with only small variations in techniques. A brief understanding of the cheese-making process is required for understanding the subtleties of differences in the cheeses.
There are six main steps of production. The milk comes into the vat, and we quickly begin changing the lactose in the milk to lactic acid using acidified whey. Eventually we add animal rennet that causes the milk to coagulate to a thick-pudding consistency. When the milk is fully set, we cut the curd into small cubes and allow the desired amount of whey to drain out over time, using agitation and, occasionally, heat. When the curd is ready, it is put into molds and allowed to sit for 24 hours during which the molds are flipped at least three times to encourage the whey to drip out. The following day, the cheeses are unmolded, salted and then they sit in front of a fan which wicks moisture away from the surface of the cheese for another day. On the third day the cheese is usually dry enough to put into the cheese cave to begin the aging process.
I classify the cheese into four categories: soft curd, medium curd, firm curd and pressed curd. The best way to understand curd is by thinking of it as lots of balls of cheese solids filled with whey. The whey is always going to come out of the ball of the curd; when it comes out is what determines the texture of the cheese. So, for a wet curd cheese, after cutting the curd into cubes the curd is only stirred once or twice before putting it in the molds. Therefore, there is a lot of whey in the curd and so when it comes out the milk solids are basically laminated in the mold. On the opposite side of the spectrum are the dry curd cheeses. For these cheeses we use extended time and agitation to force the whey out of the curd until the curd is almost dry, and then we put it in the mold. This means that the curd holds its structure in the molds forming a crumblier cheese. The semi-soft cheese is exactly that, a cheese that is between crumbly and laminated. The pressed cheeses are made with dry curd and after being placed in the molds they are pressed for at least 24 hours to get all the whey out.
Aging is a complex process that has many variables. How the curd is placed in the molds is crucial to the eventual flavor of the cheese as well as the texture, but the other things that are also important are the size and shape of the cheese, the length of aging, and the amount of salt. It will be easier to understand these differences using specific examples. Amram is our smallest cheese. It is made in a cylindrical mold about 4 inches tall and 4 inches across. These are filled with wet curd, salted minimally, and aged usually exactly to the minimum legal aging limit for cheese made from unpasteurized milk of 60 days. Jean Louis is our largest cheese it is also made in a cylindrical mold except this mold is about two feet high and one foot in diameter. This large mold is filled with very dry curd, salted generously and aged four months or longer.
These differences produce enormous differences in flavor and texture. The Amrams are so small and soft that they frequently don’t make it to their 60 day legal limit, because they just melt through the cracks of the aging rack; however, when they do make it, they are incredibly gooey and rich, with a slight earthy taste. By contrast, Jean Louis is crumbly, because of the large structure of the curd, and has a citrusy, buttermilky flavor, due to the size of the cheese: it is so big that the interior of the cheese does not completely cool for about two days and so the curd continues to acidify.
We salt the cheese the day after the curd goes into the molds for two reasons, the initial reason is that salt is attracts the water in the cheese and pulls it out. During this initial stage some of the salt also melts into the interior of the cheese. By the third day, the salt has helped the cheese create a rind that is the perfect environment to attract the cheese molds we want to grow on the rind as part of the aging process. Unlike some cheese production facilities, here at Bobolink we do not inject or spray our cheeses with mold, because it is unnecessary; cheese mold is in the air, everywhere. Most molds cannot tolerate the presence of salt, but cheese molds have evolved with cheese and have developed a tolerance for salt. So, the salting is very important for keeping out the molds that we don’t want and for encouraging those we do. Returning to the example of the Jean Louis and the Amram, it is clear that salt also greatly affects the outcome of these two cheeses. The Jean Louis is so big that the salt is not absorbed evenly throughout, so the mold that begins to grow on the outside sends down roots to the areas that are not as salty because even though they tolerate salt they prefer cheese without. This is another reason that the Jean Louis tastes like it does, and why it needs more time to ripen. The Amram is salted with a salt shaker very gently, but because the cheese is so small, the salt has no problem working its way throughout the cheese, and so there are no unsalted parts for the mold to seek out.
The other cheeses that Jonathan makes fall between these two on the spectrum of Bobolink cheese. There is Drumm which is half a Jean Louis in size but is made with medium wet curd. It can either be really wet and soft or semi soft, depending on how it ages. There is Baudolino which is made in the Drumm mold, but is made with half the curd. Baudolino is almost invariably gooey and stronger in flavor. Pyramids are made in small triangular molds that start out upside down and are only flipped once when they are salted. They are made with dry curd and have nice textural differences that depend on position within the triangle. These are sometimes buried in grape must, which gives them a fruity aura; because of the grape must they are dubbed Zinn cheese. Endgame is a variant of Jean Louis made at the end of the milking season, and then allowed to age so much that it falls over. This is one of our strongest and “stinkiest” cheeses. It also has some of the most interesting complexities. Frolic is made as an alpine cheese, which gives it some flavors associated with Swiss cheese. For this one, the curd is heated which causes the curd to give up the whey faster and results in a stiffer wall on the curd. In this way the curd is forced to the size of a corn kernel, and then it is pressed for 24 hours while in the molds. This makes for a harder cheese. Foret is made by washing the frolic in Belgian beer. We also have a cheddar. Cheddaring is a process of kneading salt into dry curd and then pressing it in the molds. We make the cheddar in 40 pound blocks and then cut them down to 10 pounds to age them. We age our cheddar for at least a year and it comes out tangy, smooth and sharp. We also have extra reserve cheddar which is aged for two and a half years and is amazing. Rye flour naturally grows blue mold and so for our blue cheese we grow blue mold on some of our rye bread and then grind the bread very fine and mix it at a 50/50 percent ratio with salt and mix this into curd. We make Drumm, Jean Louis, and pyramids into blue cheeses.
These techniques for cheese making are in no way revolutionary. Instead of being innovative for the most part they are a return to the traditional methods: clean, unrefrigerated, raw milk, slow fermentation, no chemicals, and no additions of preservatives, additives or molds. Essentially, the reason that Bobolink cheese is so good is because we allow the cheese and the environment to work their magic with minimal human innovation. See it is easy.