Your second step........ The pissaladière (or the pizza ancestor).

Hi there,

This next  recipe will bring you to discover Two new tips 'cause you already know the technique  of "Dough 2** ".We saw it last week in the Dark  Ganache Chocolate Tart.

 So , we shall discover how to cook softened onions in order to use them later on.The purpose of simmering  the onions like a kind of jam will make them more tender and the strong smell which burns your eyes will disappear to reveal the real flavor of the onions. This technique named "cooking 3" is very useful when you deal with strongly flavored veggies / fruits or very long to tenderize.

This is a key  for your  chutneys  or onion soups for exemple...

So ....Let's go!



 "Dough 4" :The pizza dough  *  

INGREDIENTS for 2 PIZZAS( or pissaladières)

• White flour           425 GR (1,5 OZ)
• Olive oil               5 CL ( 0,17 OZ
• Table salt              8 GR  (0,3 OZ)
• Brown sugar         4 GR (0,15 OZ)
•  Water                   35 CL  ( 12 FL OZ
• yeast                      8 GR (0.3 OZ)
• garlic , oregano ( just a little bit)

Technique:

1. To begin with , pour the water ,the yeast and the brown sugar  in a jar and mix well. This step is important and can be done even a bit earlier in the day  so the yeast becomes active. Yeast is a sort of mushroom that needs water and food ( sugar ) to develop.                                                                                                                                                                                                             INFO: Never leave yeast and salt in contact , it would lead to the sudden death of the yeast !!!May be does it give you an answer to your  previous missed yeast risen doughs?                        
2. Sieve the flour  in a preparation bowl  , add salt ,  olive oil  and if you wish to give extra flavors to your pizza dough  :Add crushed garlic and oregano( some cooks pour a dash of viandox as well).                                                                                                                                                        
3. Mix all this very well and add  your sourdough (Yeast-water-sugarmix). Keep on mixing until your have a homogeneous ball of dough.                                                                                                    
4. At this step , your dough won't make it because it's not elastic at all. In order to rise properly your have to knead the dough until you get  an elastic dough. When the kneading process is ok , you will notice that your dough doesn't stick anymore neither to your fingers nor to the bowl. Notice that the kneading action is working on the gluten and is the key for an elastic dough. If the dough sticks to your hand , do not add flour , just knead a bit more...                                                                             
5. You've sweated a bit and you're proud of your first pizza dough; leave it in the bowl  and sprinkle just a bit of flour on top. Cover the bowl with a cloth and leave the dough rise at room T°C (20 -30 °C is fine --70 - 90 °F)  it swells to the double     .This operation may last 1 to 2 hours according of the yeast quality and surrounding temperature.                                                                                                                                                                                                         The fact of being elastic doesn't allow   the Co2 bubbles produced by the working yeast  to escape from the dough. As bubbles cannot escape , they just grow .......leading the dough to rise itself. 

                                                              

"Cooking 3":"jam like" simmering for the onions  *

First thing, you will have to peel  1,5 kg(3,3 LBS )of  onions and slice them . This technique was seen already in my september post named "How to safely use your chef's knife step by step".Once you're done,you can cook the onion jam.

1. In a cooking pan , bring  8 cl ( 2,5 FLOZ) olive oil to medium heat and the aim of this technique is to cook the onions very slowly without any brown color . Leave it for an hour or so simmering and mix regularly to avoid the pot to burn.
2. After that time you will have some  blond jam like onions , which become really good and sweet. Season  your preparation and leave aside.    Easy , no?                                                     For an onion soup  you would proceed the same way....Some French people add a bit of tomate or tomatoe paste in the jam , don't be surprised if you find this out in other recipes......

"Dough 2" :rolling  a dough  *  check our last week 's post "the dark ganache chocolate tart".
          So roll your dough like you would for a tart , round shaped  at pizza size. Remember you'll have to nice pizzas with this amount of dough.....Set the pizza dough on a non-sticking baking dish and we are almost ready...

1. Just spread your onion preparation on the pissaladière , add anchovy fillets in a fishnet pattern, few black olives , sprinkle some oregano . Notice we don(t use any cheese in this recipe).The cheese was added later on by the italian cooks.                                                                                        
2. Bake in a very hot oven (250°C -480°F)for about 20mn and you're done.

Enjoy....

the next step ..... the french pissaladière

Coming very soon....

the dark ganache chocolate tart...Yummy!

Hi guys,

As promised , we are going to take a look at a simple and very nice tasting tart . The recipe is very , very easy and we'll have the opportunity to study 4 basic  important  techniques :


Dough 1 : the  tart dough*
Dough  2: rolling a dough and setting in the mould **
Cooking 1: Pre-baking an empty dough *
Cream  & mix 1: elaborating a dark chocolate ganache *


Concerning the  tart dough techniques (making, rolling , cooking), once mastered, you will be able to realize any sweet tart you wish. For the ganache , same thing; this cream is very common and it is included in tons of  pastry cakes.



Let 's go for the dough:    "Dough 1 technique"

INGREDIENTS : 1 TART SERVING 8 PAX

• 250 GR (9 OZ) flour
• 125 GR( 4,5 OZ)  unsalted butter
• 10 GR (0,4 OZ) caster sugar
• 1 egg yolk
• 5 GR (0,16 OZ OR 2 pinches) table salt
• 5 CL (1,5 FLOZ) cold water 

TECHNIQUE:

1. Sieve the flour on your working surface
2. cut your butter in small pieces
3. with the tips of your fingers , start mixing butter and flour until you get something looking like yellow sand . This is important in order to have a correct mixing later.

1. Then, shape a kind of well with this sandy mix
2. Inside the well , add the egg yolk, sugar, salt and the very cold water ( very important , i'll tell you why later).
3. With the finger tips of one hand , start making circle moves in the middle of the well and with the opposite hand push a bit of flour mix toward the center.

1. Once the flour is mixed , is it now very important that you mustn't knead the dough!!  Once the flour is wet , the gluten get in action with the kneading and your dough will definitely become too elastic ! The result would be that you couldn't roll it properly.
2. Instead , just spread the dough on the table exactly like you would spread butter with the hand. Set you dough in a ball and make 1 more spread. This action will (allowed twice)properly mixes the ingredients without allowing the gluten to enter in action. your dough is ready!!
   
   
   
   

1. Now you have to control if the consistance is ok...Just pinch the dough with two finger ....If the dough breaks that means you have to add a bit of water otherwise it will break during the rolling phase. If the dough doesn't break appart when you pinch it , that means no further problems for rolling it.
2. Wrap your dough ball in a plastic film and leave it for 30 mn in the fridge( to avoid the even small gluten action ). By the way, the purpose of the cold water in the dough is to a avoid the sticky gluten action.

----------------

As your nice dough is cooling down, you will now prepare your dark chocolate ganache: Cream & mix 1 technique.

and noww....Action!

After those few posts , you know now that every single recipe is made of a selection of two or three  techniques out of  300.

In every future post , I'll decipher a recipe in techniques , exactly as I did with the Veggie quiche.

Every recipe will teach you one or two techniques with an allocated number . Afterwards , every new recipe will be refer to its number.

The purpose of this site is to provide you a kind of   French Cooking Techniques Directory.

In a matter of a year or so , you may refer to this blog to find the techniques you need for a particular recipe.

For the very first posts , we will focus on the simplest tips and then we'll go crescendo until we reach the most difficult  and delicate skills.

The easiest will show  the  "*"sign , the average difficulty tips will show the"**"  and the most delicate ones will show the "***" sign.

Last thing for today , but not least, a good dish has to highlight  and mix minimum two different textures ( cripsy and creamy for example) and match  properly two or three flavours. If you take a closer look at the famous chef's best masterpieces , you will identify those principles.


So , on the next posts , we'll start with  easy sauces, doughs, cooking modes, etc....  Keeping in mind our goal : mastering the tools .....

See you soon!

The right approach of recipes.

Here we  go...

As I wrote  earlier in my presentation, to make the job easy for you starting today, we shall take a little moment to find out the hidden basic techniques  in the recipe you want to execute.

This is how it works , with the alphabet  every word is at your reach !!!

Cooking is exactly the same; with the more or less 300 basics , every single recipe can be done which makes cooking  suddenly more simple; they work as benchmarks.

When I 'd been studying at the catering school , we had 120 recipes to know by heart which  included those 300 tips. So now , 25 years later, i can still remember most of them and they appear in every single recipe.

The best way for you to understand is a real example for sure.

Let's go for a veggie quiche ( vegetable tart)...what are the techniques i have  to isolate?

1. the dough
2. the salty set custard mix
3. the veggies

For number 1 , I think , most of you already know how to make  a tart dough , right? You can even buy it in the supermarket!  Number one wasn't that hard, was it?

For the number 2:  The "set" salty custard, mix only milk, cream, eggs  & seasoning  .... and you're suddenly able to make all the quiches you might dream at!

Number 3: peeling and cutting the veggies ( safe slicing is shown on my last post already), then "sweat"  them ( one of the basic techniques to be posted ) in a bit of oil or butter .
Not sauteed but just softened,  the aim is to make the vegetable sweat their inner juices in order to reveal their best taste.

And take 5 minutes to assemble the parts of the recipe , bake the quiche ( while reading or whatever...) and you're are done!


For your next quiche :

• you can use  mushrooms , blue cheese ,  seafood  or what you feel.
• put herbs in your dough?
• add some curry or tomatoes to the custard mix???

In fact , they are all done the same way . You can now make hundreds of different quiches.

Starting now , you can decipher every single quiche recipe and like a chef , add what you feel like to reach a interesting texture and flavor combination of your own.

That's how famous chefs do ......  

So damn easy!