How do you overcome that food failure to find success?

Press on.

And ask for help if you need it. That’s how I got over that hurdle. It’s a frosting recipe that has kicked my hiney for years. Well, no more of that.

This is about my success, which pleases me, and also about how you can find your own success. Then the next one.

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It’s 2024. That’s not news now, but this is the first show of this new year.

Pretty much for the duration of this podcast, I’ve made the point that procedure matters.

I was a guest on Mike Maharrey’s GodArchy podcast a few years ago and we talked cooking. I am pretty sure even on his show I mentioned procedure as the thing that makes or breaks a cook’s efforts. I cited the much-used line in Escoffierr prepare in the usual manner.

Any cook who knows what that means already understands what those 5 words mean. They mean to use the experience you, as the cook, have gained over many efforts to make that same dish or dishes cooked in the same way and apply that to this.

Restaurant cooks have their own lingo and it can change from place to place depending on the crew and what is on the menu. Any cook familiar with the jargon knows exactly what’s expected and how to execute that task.

I’ve even kinda beat up on chef and recipe authors who don’t provide good procedures. I’m pretty certain the reason so many people insist they can’t cook or bake is at least from crappy procedures.

And so it is with this recipe I am going to tell you about.

But first, a story.

Marcel Proust wrote volumes of books. Maybe the single best-known passage was the short paragraph about a Madaline cookie and the spectacular ability of food to make the eater travel through time to the best memory of that food. For the character in Proust’s book that simple, well-executed cookie transported him to his childhood. Such is the power of food.

My wife’s grandmother was, by several accounts, an amazing cook. I never met her. My wife’s birthday cake from granny was a white cake with fudge icing. So, of course, years ago I was tasked with making that cake. What wasn’t then known to me was the immense power this memory had.

Even then I was decorating cakes and doing pastry work. Icing a cake. How hard can that be? Ha ha ha.

Fudge icing, at least this one, is a cooked sugar icing. Then the hot compound is placed in the mixer bowl and slowly paddles to let out some of the heat.

Now, here’s the first thing. If you’ve ever iced a cake, there’s a superior chance that the icing you used was at least room temperature. It is room temperature in those tubs at the grocery store and buttercream icing has to be room temperature. So does cream cheese icing. This is icing so it must be room temperature based on all my previous experience.

There’s a note on this recipe that reads the icing may need to be thinned a bit with heavy cream to make it spreadable. So I added cream. Way more than a half a cup. And it spread but was far far far from what the memory expected.

I don’t remember if I did that for our first year together. We will celebrate our 20th anniversary this year and I’ve not yet gotten this right for her birthday.

I am going to read the recipe. It’s short. See if you hear where some pitfalls might be. I’ll also tell you it is a photocopy of a typewritten recipe using all caps.

(read recipe)

Beat until creamy—what is that author’s definition of creamy?–and to the right consistency. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is that?!

One daughter had her birthday recently. She asked for a white cake with fudge icing. There was the expected chortle from my wife. Of course, I agreed. I love my daughters and will certainly attempt fudge icing. After last year’s fondant iced cake, this should be easier. She wanted a fondant cake when she was 3 or 4 and I put her off. She remembered every year until it was time.

I was determined to get this right this time. I checked the YouTube. Holy crap. Fudge Icing was an avalanche of hits. Fudge icing southern style. Hardly any fewer hits. That’s not gonna help. None of them seemed to be exactly mine and if they aren’t this then they don’t help.

As a last resort and with a three-hour time difference I texted my mother-in-law. I even sent her a short video of the icing in the bowl asking if that was how it was supposed to look. It was.

Epiphany number 1. The icing is hot, or at least pretty darned warm, when it goes on the cake.

There was only 1 epiphany but a few insights. The icing goes from just right to fudged up in about 2 seconds. No kidding. It goes from yeah, I can spread that if I work kinda quick to an asphalt machine can’t move that fudge.

I did it. When I presented my wife with her piece she agreed that was as close as I’ve ever gotten. I’ll take that as a victory. Between at least a dozen fails and an amped-up memory of what was, that might be all I can expect. And, this year she’ll get her white cake with fudge icing for her birthday.

Insight number 1 is to make at least a batch and a half. To call this icing is to compare it to all the other icings you know. It isn’t like anything you know. Probably. You can coax and goad buttercream to move a bit here or there. Fudge icing sets up fast and sits right down and ain’t goin’ nowhere. You ain’t coxing that no how no way.

After 40 or so years of working with food, I’m still learning. And, procedures matter.

I know this was written by someone who knows for others who know. It was not intended to end up in one of my recipe binders. It was not meant for a chef who doesn’t know what the usual manner is for this cooked fudge icing.

It’s good. Real good. Sweet as can be but fun to eat. If you like to pick out the cake part first and leave the icing for last, this will cooperate completely. And with some ice-cold half and half, or milk, it’s a few moments of childhood all over again, even for the guy who didn’t have this as a kid. My birthday cake preference was angel food cake with chocolate icing. I doubt very much my mother made this fudge icing.

If that Proust Madeline cookie reference seems obscure to you, perhaps the movie Ratatouille will help. The food critic, Ego, at the end of the movie, eats ratatouille and we move to his mind and see him as a child at the kitchen door and his mama feeding him a bowl of ratatouille. I had one customer, 1, tell me the bouillabaisse reminded her of her childhood. You can’t ever plan to do that, but it was the best possible compliment I could have.

There’s nearly a year ahead of us so go make food memories and be kids again.

The Escoffier Series continues with Chapter 11: Cold Preparations

This is, in my opinion, the Crown Jewel of Classical cooking. I adore making and eating galantines and pâtès. There’s some skill involved, but anyone can pick it up. Patience is the key and the rewards are worth the effort.

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The Escoffier series continues. Chapter 10, as I mentioned in the last series episode is almost one page. The title is Composit Entrees, and included in composite entress are Croutsades, hot pies, timbales, tourtes, and vols au vent. Croustades are in the appetizer portion. Escoffierr lists three ways to make them. Basically, they are a shell, most commonly of pastry, placed in shaped molds, docked, blind baked, and cooled. Then, you fill the shells with stuff. Also possible, and more challenging, are rice croustades and Duchess Potato croustades.

To be as confusing as possible, Escoffierr mentions that there is yet one more way to make a croustade which, quickly, is to make the desired shape from a slice of sandwich bread, carve a cavity into the fried bread consistent with the shape of the bread, fry the bread, fill the cavity with some forcemeat, cooked in a slow oven. When it is cooked, the main course is served on top of the croustade. It’s a super fancy crouton.

Escoffier does offer at the top of the paragraph that these kinds of croustade have fallen into disuse.

The other important detail of hot pies is the pastry and the filling are cooked together at the same time. The sauce is made from an essence of the main ingredient. And, just to remind you why cooks hate this book, the process of making the pastry includes this line. A note that he called some kinds of dough paste, or at least that’s how it translated. “make into a paste in the usual manner.” Well, if that isn’t enough to make the uninformed swear of baking, I don’t know what else will.

Chapter 11 is short. 11 pages. What’s concealed in those procedures is no shortage of skills to take the craft of what is called garde manger to high heights. This chapter included galantines, some various pies, and terrines, more appropriately called pate au terrine, which differentiates pate en croute au terrine, which are almost only now called pate en croute, which is in pastry, and the chapter ends with some dressings and salads.

I’m not going over all of that here. It’s too much. The skills involved in making one galantine cover pretty much all a cook will learn in the kitchen. Butchery skills and forcemeat skills and cooking skills and flavor contrast and compatability are the big brush strokes.

The work of the chef garde manger is challenging and slow to ensure an excellent product. It was by far my favorite class to teach in culinary school because the precision necessary, and the effort to achieve that excellence could be intense. The single most challenging activity is passing the forcemeat through a screen to ensure a smooth finished product and remove all the sinews. It is not fast or effortless. One student walked into the bake shop shaking his hand and complaining how it was sore from passing the forcemeat. What he seemed to expect was sympathy. What he got was chuckles of amusement and fake pity. That class had just finished garde manger and every single student knew exactly what his hand felt like and not one of them had a moment of pity or empathy.

The forcemeat, a somewhat unfortunate term, is the raw, smooth puree of meat and fat. Escoffier has more than a few procedures for forcemeats, each varying for the intended use or primary ingredients.

We can make the process a bit easier by finding two standard recipes for nearly any situation calling for a forcemeat to make a pie or pate.

The kind to grind consists of the Main ingredients, let’s say chicken, 50% of that weight in pork butt, Escoffierr would say veal in some cases, and 20-30% of the total weight, chicken and pork, in pork fat. Pork fat and meat are pretty neutral and allow the flavorings and the primary ingredient to come through.

The second kind is done in the food processor. It is called a forcemeat mousseline and is smoother than the previous forcemeat.

The ingredients are primary meat, generally white meat or almost any fish, bread to bind, heavy cream, and egg whites. The basic procedure is to puree the meat in a food processor until smooth, add the bread, and crusts removed, puree till smooth again, add the egg whites, puree until homogenized, and then pulse in the heavy cream. Season with salt and pepper and flavor with spices and/or herbs and that’s it.

That’s it he says.

The hard part is pushing that mass of stuff through a screen, just like the metal screen on windows.

To make a galantine is to follow this basic procedure. Bone the chicken from the back. There are two ways to do this. Remove only the skin first then remove the meat second or remove the meat and skin as one thing and remove the carcass. In both cases, the goal is for the whole of the chicken skin removed and free of meat. The skin is laid out with the sternum area vertical, on a piece of cling wrap, on the counter.

The leg meat is pretty sinewy and very challenging to pass through a screen. The breast meat is good for forcemeat, but also good to slice and sear and place as garnish inside the forcemeat. The tedious thing to do, and actually saves time, is to remove tendons from the legs first before you make your forcemeat.

The fast explanation is to cut one chicken breast into long uniform-ish pieces, season, and sear them on all sides. Make a forcemeat from the rest of the meat. Place some forcemeat on the middle of the chicken skin, arrange the breast garnish and other garnish—Wait, what!–and cover with forcemeat and repeat until the forcemeat is used. You’ll have a mound of forcemeat and garnish on the middle of the chicken skin. Using the plastic wrap, fold one side of the skin over the top of the mound then the second side is folded over.

Now comes the sorta challenging part. Grasp both ends of the cling film and roll the galantine on the countertop to tighten the galantine and force it into a round shape and push everything toward the middle. Not too much rolling. Tie both ends with a short piece of butcher’s string and tie the galantine with 4 or 5 pieces of string to help keep the shape.

So far so good, right?

Poach the whole thing in chicken stock, well-salted water is fine, until done, which is 145° F. Instead of removing the galantine from the liquid while everything is hot, cut the heat off. If you are on electric burners, also slide the cooking vessels to the cool side of the stove. It will easily continue to cook 15 to 20 degrees, which is our target range. One detail Escoffierr doesn’t mention is the galantine will probably float. So, a wire cooling rack or two to keep it submerged helps. Now, the next part, the galantine might scorch if it’s pressed too much on the bottom of the pan, so take care and maybe also put a cooling rack in the pan, too.

Here’s where home cooking and restaurant cooking are different. In a restaurant, the entire cooking contraption will be placed in a walk-in to cool down. A galantine is today for tomorrow at least. Never today for today.

In all the years I’ve made galantines never once did I press it. I asked my chef friend if he ever did that and he did not. A terrine will get pressed to compact the contents and make a nice presentation and eating experience. Pressing something intended to be round risks it no longer being round.

A galantine can be made of any bird. The effort and reward for a chicken galantine or duck galantine and a quail galantine are not the same. If you’re going to make one, make it big enough that the finished product justifies the effort.

As to that other ganish part. There’s nearly no limit to what other garnishes can go in galantines. Color is good with flavor and pistachios are popular choices. Dice dried apricots or dried fruit of almost any kind is a good choice. Any meat that is added should at least be seared. Chicken livers or foie gras or mushrooms or truffles are nice additions and almost any herb mix or spice combination works.

Contrasts are nice. Venison garnish in a chicken galantine opens up some stronger spice flavorings, particularly lavender leaves and juniper.

Service for Escoffierr would include diced aspic of the principle ingredient, so chicken consomme, and something tart such as good pickles and or mustard. Toast points are certainly a good accompaniment.

As we continue chapter 11, we’ll cover meat pies. Now that winter is here, that seems a good thing to learn to make. They are tasty and make good lunch the next day. If you are familiar with a Pasty, it’s basically the hand-held version of a meat pie.