French Onion Soup Weather

January is French onion soup weather.

I had some homemade beef stock on hand and lots of onions, and it was winter... all perfect conditions for concocting a batch of my famous onion soup. (I don't wish to brag but in my restaurants, we served what everybody called the best onion soup in the world.)

Onion soup is the easiest dish in the world, but unless you start with first-class ingredients, you may as well buy it in a can.

In fact, quality ingredients are so important that since there is no decent French bread available in my village, I had to start by making a batch of baguette -- no kidding.

Here's the recipe:

• Lots of cooking onions - 1 large onion per portion
• Olive oil and/or butter
• Home-made brown beef stock (recipe here)
• Home-made chicken stock, degreased
• Brandy
• Bay leaves
• Salt and pepper
• French baguette bread (recipe here)
• Clarified butter (recipe here)
• Swiss-type cheese like Emmenthaler or Jarlsberg
• Real Parmesan cheese

Slice the baguette into 3/4-inch (2 cm) slices and dry them thoroughly in a 200-degree (100 C) oven. (You don't want to toast it, just dry it.)

Mix the beef and chicken stocks in a separate saucepan and heat them up; keep warm.

Peel onions, slice them in two lengthwise (from root to tip, to get two identical halves), and slice each half thinly along the length.

Heat some butter or a mixture of butter and oil in a large frying pan, add onions and stir and stir until they start to turn golden brown; then add a teaspoonful of sugar and continue frying and stirring until the onions are a deep golden brown. They must not burn. If you're making a lot of soup, do this in batches and transfer each batch to a bowl while you fry the next batch.

Combine all the onions back into the frying pan, sprinkle with a bit of flour and stir around until the flour has browned. Do this on medium heat so the flour doesn't burn. You just need a little bit of flour, just a tablespoon or two.

Pour a splash of brandy and a couple of ladles of stock over the onions, and stir to dissolve the flour and all the brown residue at the bottom of the pan.  Scrape this off well with a wooden spoon, then transfer the whole thing to your soup pot.

Add more beef and chicken stock -- there must be more liquid than onions, about 1/3 more.

Add a bit of salt and pepper, a few bay leaves, and simmer the soup on low heat for half an hour, just to meld the flavours, really, because the onions are already cooked.

The oven should be preheated to 450 F  (225 C) and the rack should be in the centre position.

Heat some clarified butter in a small pan and fry the bread slices on both sides until they are just a nice golden colour.

Taste the soup and adjust the seasoning if necessary.

Ladle the soup into individual ovenproof tureens (or one large one, as in the photo), cover the surface with slices of fried bread, sprinkle grated Swiss-type cheese (not too much, please! This isn't pizza.), and sprinkle a spoonful of real Parmesan if you have any.

Place the whole thing on a cookie sheet or pizza pan or whatever (to catch spills and make it safer to handle when it's ready).

Bake for about 10 minutes, or until the top is like the photo -- brown and bubbly and smelling like nothing else on earth.

Bon appétit!

TIPS & TRICKS

•  VARIATION: This onion soup is very good all by itself, or with a light sprinkling of Parmesan cheese.

• The reason I recommend slicing the onions as described above is that this way you get onion pieces in the soup. If you slice them across instead, the onions tend to dissolve and disappear.

• The size of the pan, the amount of heat, the amount of fat and the amount of onions in each batch must be such that the onions start frying right away, without rendering their water.

• There's no point in using a crock pot for this; the cooking time is too short.

• Only white French-style bread has the right body and flavour for this soup. This is NOT the place for your healthy multigrain sourdough bread -- I know, because I've tried it.

I made the bread too!

Should You Cook Ratatouille in the Slow Cooker?

Visitors to my main ratatouille posting often land there because they're looking for a recipe for cooking ratatouille in the slow cooker.

To quote myself:

I've seen instructions for cooking ratatouille in a crockpot, but what's the point? By the time you've finished sautéeing all the separate ingredients, your ratatouille is about 15 minutes short of being ready to eat!

Reserve your slow cooker for dishes that benefit from a long, slow sojourn at a low heat.

Believe me, mushy ratatouille is not a nice thing, and that's what you'd get if you cooked it in your slow cooker. To retain the freshness of the ingredients, stick to a miminum of cooking.

What Meat Goes With Ratatouille?

The question, "What meat goes with ratatouille?", is the one that readers ask most often.

Well, just look at the ingredients that go into it: olive oil, garlic, peppers, eggplant, tomatoes... don't they remind you of Greece, of North Africa? And what's the meat of choice there?

Lamb, of course!

 Personally,  when I have some ratatouille in the fridge I usually make it my no-meat meal of the day.

I try to have only one meal with meat each day, the other main meal being either a vegeterian soup like soupe au pistou with parmesan cheese on top, or an omelet or frittata with a salad, or an egg salad sandwich on my fabulous homemade multigrain bread with a carrot salad -- that sort of thing. Breakfast is always oatmeal.

I like it plain and cold, or au gratin like in this picture, or in a quiche or over some pasta.

But if I'm going to have my ratatouille with some meat, then for Epicure's sake let it be a couple of lamb chops. Or a slow-simmered lamb stew, yum!

And if it's summer and I'm invited to a steak barbecue (I don't own a barbecue myself, too many mosquitoes around here!), then I'll bring some ratatouille to eat cold, as a chutney... the combination of tastes is simply awesome.

By the same token, it will also go well with just about anything cooked on the grill. The thing to remember is that ratatouille is a strong-flavored dish and it will overwhelm anything bland, so try to pair it with something that will work with it.

If in doubt, try it and let your taste buds decide!

HOW TO MAKE RATATOUILLE

The above taste experiences will only happen if your ratatouille itself is up to it.

If you need some ratatouille recipes, look no further than my previous post, where you will also find several recipes, including a link to the Julia Child ratatouille recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking -- as well as the history of ratatouille.

Bon appétit!

The Horse Mushroom Race: There's A New Competitor!

Horse Mushrooms. Yes, the big one is over 6 inches wide!

The friend with the property for sale called to say more horse mushrooms (agaricus arvensis) had sprung up in the lawn and I should go and get them.

But when I got there, oh horrors, some thief had come and cut off all their heads, leaving all the stems.

My first reaction was, how stupid, there's so much meat in those stalks. My second reaction was, OMG, I've got competition!

I drove around to all my secret horse mushroom places, and the thief had done the same to most of them.

I managed to rescue the ones in the picture above, including that huge specimen.

I hope the thief doesn't like shaggy manes. They should be up soon.

P. S. Mushroom recipes are in this post.

More Wild Mushrooms

My best crop of wild mushrooms usually comes from the lawn of some friends who live about a 45-minute walk away, the perfect distance for a bit of exercise. I have their permission to pick any and all fungi from their property.

Usually, it's horse mushrooms. My favorites. Tasty, easy to identify, and given the right weather conditions, apt to grow to a phenomenal size. 

Like this.


I had just heard that they were selling their property, so this morning I headed over there to see if the latest rain had produced a crop. And indeed it had.

Fearful that some hired person might come and mow down my dinner, I picked all there was. Normally, I would have allowed them to grow a bit bigger. I'm greedy when it comes to horse mushrooms.

This is what I got.

Enough for a large, lovely frittata.

I gave the recipe for preparing and cooking wild mushrooms in this earlier post.

Wild Mushrooms

Shaggy Manes, also known as Inky Caps

I love this time of year. You're out for a walk, and suddenly you spot some white dots on the lawns and you know the wild mushrooms have arrived.

"Do you have a death wish?", asked a friend the other day when I wrote in Facebook that I had eaten some wild mushrooms that I had picked that day. She needn't worry: when I first moved here I asked around but nobody seemed to be eating the wild fungus so I did some research, bought a mushroom guide, and now I only pick varieties that I know are edible.

The mushrooms I pick are not the kind that grow in woods. Heaven knows we have plenty of forests around here, but they're rather impenetrable. I saw some chanterelles in a park in Fredericton once.

This is that day's crop, an assortment of white lawn mushrooms at various stages of maturity. As you can see, they are very close in appearance to the store-bought kind. My favourites are the bumpy ones; they are known as horse mushrooms. They are firmer and they can get as big as a dinner plate!

I ate them all, sprinkled over some fresh yellow beans.


HOW TO PREPARE AND COOK WILD MUSHROOMS

The main difference between these mushrooms and the cultivated kind is their water content. These edible delicacies appear after a good rain, and they're all pumped up with water. That makes it difficult to fry them, but to me that's the best way to bring out their flavor and I don't mind stirring while the extra liquid evaporates -- the aroma is worth the trouble!

I like to cook all my wild mushrooms the day I pick them, and keep them in the fridge, to be added to stews, sauces, soups, vegetables, and so on.

Preparation: Unless you cut them instead of pulling them, there's going to be a lot of dirt so the first thing I do is spread them out and cut off all the dirty ends.

Then I wash them in a large quantity of water. Of course they absorb more water that way but it's essential to give them a good washing -- the condition of the water afterwards confirms this. Besides, who knows if some mouse or other wild creature hasn't peed on them!

An old toothbrush is a good tool for scrubbing away the bits of dirt and grass.

The nice thing about this village is that nobody sprays their lawns, so I don't have to worry about getting rid of pesticides or herbicides. 

I drain them on several layers of paper towels over a wire rack, then wipe them dry before cooking them.

I separate them by color, i.e., the whiter ones (the ones whose gills haven't turned dark brown yet) in one pile and the the darker ones in another. I usually slice them all. Then I dab them with more paper towels, to get rid of more water.

Cooking: I warm some virgin olive oil and fry some sliced garlic until golden brown. I remove the garlic with a slotted spoon, then fry the mushrooms in batches until all the water evaporates and they begin to brown, adding salt, pepper and maybe some thyme. When they're done, I put the garlic back.

If I have enough horse mushrooms, I fry them separately because unlike most of the others, they are firm and dry -- very much like cultivated mushrooms -- and they brown more quickly.

Otherwise, I fry the white mushrooms first, then I start over with the oil and garlic for the dark ones.

The above is only for this type of mushrooms.

Inky caps or shaggy manes (coprinus comatus) (the kind in the first photo) are an October variety, so they weren't the ones mentioned in Facebook. They come back in the same spot every year -- a small park that is part of the Irving compound. (Irving is the company that owns all the oil and cuts all the trees around here.)

Here's a recipe for those, taken from Wild About Mushrooms: the Cookbook of the Mycological Society of San Francisco.  Check out their website

Shaggy Mane Quiche

Serves 6 as a first course

The shaggy mane is a favorite mushroom among mushroom-lovers. The caps liquefy rapidly, so speed is essential in getting them into the pot. One ardent admirer of this mushroom takes a skillet and butter on collecting trips so that the shaggy manes can be eaten where they are found. 1/2 recipe pie crust 5 to 6 bacon slices, cut into 1-inch pieces 1/2 to 1 pound shaggy manes, sliced 4 shallots or green onions, minced 1/2 cup freshly grated provolone cheese 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg 1/4 teaspoon salt Pinch of cayenne 4 eggs, well beaten 2 cups half and half

Prepare the pie crust. Roll the dough out to a 10-inch crust. Line a 9-inch pie pan with the crust. Crimp the edges. In a sauté pan or skillet, fry the bacon until crisp, then remove it from the pan with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels. Discard all but 2 tablespoons of the bacon fat and sauté the mushrooms and shallots until the shallots are translucent and most of the mushroom liquid has evaporated. Spread the bacon over the pie crust. Add the grated cheese, then the mushroom and shallots. Mix the nutmeg, salt, and cayenne into the beaten eggs. Add the cream. Slowly pour the custard mixture over the bacon, cheese, and mushrooms. Bake the quiche in a preheated 350º oven for about 35 minutes or until the custard is set and the top is brown. NOTE: Shaggy manes and alcohol make a toxic combination.

 UPDATE: Since I wrote this post, I have obtained some further information about shaggy manes. Read it here.


WARNING! 

This article is not intended for use in identifying wild mushrooms. DO NOT EAT any wild mushrooms without consulting an expert.

MORE INFORMATION

There is a tremendous amount of information about wild mushrooms on the web, including recipes. There might even be a mycological society or association in your area.

Better yet, get a guide! Amazon.com is a good place to start.

Who's In The Kitchen?

When I visit a cooking site or blog, I always want to know who's in the kitchen. Don't you?

For those who may have been wondering who's the cook in this Cook's Corner, I have begun to put together a bio, a detailed "About Me" page, as it were.

Stay tuned!

Readers' Questions 5

Q. Can I put allspice in my boeuf bourguignon? (From Peoria, Arizona, USA)

A. I think allspice is an excellent spice for beef -- in fact I use it my brown beef stock; it's a trick I learned in Mexico, where I had a superb beef stew in a canteen at a campground in Michoacan. Which goes to show that some of the best food may not be found where we think!

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Q. Can you bake with homemade butter? (From Beltsville, Maryland, USA)

A. Absolutely! However, I would be wary of cooking (frying) with it unless I had washed all the milk out of it because it would burn very easily. Better yet, I would clarify it first. (But don't use clarified butter for baking.)

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Q. What are the best accompaniments for beef bourguignon? (From Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada)

A.  The classic accompaniments are mushrooms and small onions sautéed in butter, and small parsleyed boiled potatoes. Mashed potatoes are just fine and buttered noodles are Julia Child's favorite – and mine. Try them all!

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Q. I would like Julia Child's recipe for crab cakes. (From Mableton, Georgia, USA)

A. I looked in all my Julia Child cookbooks and didn't find a recipe for crab cakes in any of them. That's not because the French don't eat them -- in fact it was at the Grand Véfour in Paris that I had the best crab cakes of my life.

If you'll settle for an American recipe, I have an excellent one from Cooks Illustrated. Click here for the PDF file.

Why Making Your Own French Baguette Is Empowering

No, this baguette is not from the bakery!

COOKING IS EMPOWERING because not knowing how to cook makes us dependent on Kraft and Lever Brothers and the other multinationals we allow to feed ourselves and our families.

I remember how I felt the first time I made my own baguette. Is there anything that seems more impossible to achieve than a real French baguette? Yet all you have to do is follow the recipe, learn from the first few failures, and soon you're making all your own bread, including French baguette.

I also remember the first time I tied my own roast. I was a successful restaurateur yet I depended on the butcher to tie my roasts for me. I would watch as he made a special knot that didn't require a helper to lend a finger to keep it from slipping.

One day I said, "Show me how to do this," and he did, and from then on I was able to make all sorts of elegant packages for my customers. Empowering.

(Curious about this butchers knot? Find out how to tie it here.)

Anyway, you ought to try your hand at making your own baguette. The folks at King Arthur Flour have a real easy and fully illustrated recipe on their blog, Baking Banter.

It's the recipe I used to make the loaf in these pictures, and if I may say so, mine turned out prettier than King Arthur's. (Talk about power!)

An Economical Chocolate Mousse Recipe

A READER from South Africa asks for an economical chocolate mousse recipe.

It's hard to know which of the usual chocolate mousse ingredients are expensive in other countries: Is it butter? Cream? Chocolate? Sugar? Eggs? Vanilla?

Is it the equipment?

It just so happens that my favorite chocolate mousse recipe (which is different from the one in my chocolate mousse cake – though you could certainly use it there) calls for no cream and no butter, and that's just about as economical as you can get, at least on this continent.

As far as equipment is concerned, if you don't have an electric mixer, a whisk will certainly do.

And not only that, but it's absolutely delicious, and it's the one I served in all my restaurants, in little pots. In my San Miguel de Allende (Mexico) restaurant, we used to put a surprise in the bottom – a chocolate-covered coffee bean, maybe, or a mint chocolate candy, or just a small chunk of chocolate. We also played with different liqueurs. Both the liqueur and the surprise changed every week.

Here is that chocolate mousse recipe:

For 5 or 6 small pots

4 or 5 very fresh eggs, at room temperature
1/2 cup plus 1 TB sugar (40 g)
6 squares (6 oz) semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate (180 g)
3 TB strong coffee OR liqueur* OR brandy (45 ml)
1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract

MELT chocolate in top of double boiler; add coffee or booze, stir, add vanilla. Don't stir too much. Set aside to cool to room temperature.

SEPARATE the eggs, putting the yolks in the top of a double boiler or a bowl that fits over a pot with hot water in it. The whites go in a squeaky clean bowl, or in the mixer bowl, for whipping.

ADD the 1/2 cup of sugar to the yolks and beat until light and fluffy. Put over water (the bottom must not touch the water and if the water is boiling, take the pot off the heat). Leave for 3 or 4 minutes, or until lukewarm right through and the sides of the bowl are sticky. (I remember that the latter detail was added by my cook, after she'd made the mousse for several years, as a clue for apprentices.)

MOVE yolk-sugar mixture to an ice bath (a larger bowl with ice cubes and water in it), and stir until cool and thick.

ADD chocolate mixture to yolk mixture, stir well. Make sure it's cool before proceeding with the next step.

BEAT the egg whites until stiff, adding the 1 TB of sugar about halfway through.

STIR 1/4 of the egg whites into the chocolate mixture to loosen it, then gradually fold in the rest of the egg whites with a spatula, in 5 or 6 batches.

SPOON or pipe into individual pots or into one beautiful serving bowl.

SERVE decorated with a dot of whipped cream, an edible flower, a sprig of mint, a dusting of icing sugar – or nothing at all.

REFRIGERATE for at least 3 hours, and preferably overnight. 

ENJOY the compliments!

* Some of the liqueurs we have used include: coffee, orange, mint or chocolate; but a shot of very strong coffee works just as well.

CLICK HERE FOR THE PRINTABLE VERSION (PDF)