in the breville: matcha green tea ice cream









in the breville: matcha green tea ice cream


I’ve been writing a lot lately about healthy living, but as I’m a firm believer in the saying, “everything in moderation,” here’s a nice, fatty post for you this week.
The best ice cream I’ve ever had was in San Francisco. Let me preface this by saying gelato is different from ice cream—in a nutshell, gelato has less fat and churns at alower speed, thus has less air incorporated into it (read the more in-depth explanation of ice cream vs. gelato from Serious Eats)—and I’ve definitely had some amazing gelato in Italy. I’m also not referring to the ice creams I can find in supermarkets across America (Lord knows I love Ben & Jerry’s). Today, I’m talking about ice cream shops I’ve discovered during my travels or even strolling around my hometown of Houston.
In my 2011 trip to SF where I ate my way through the Bay, a friend who loves food as much as I do took the hubs and me to Bi-Rite Creamery, a little ice cream counter inside the Bi-Rite Market. Who knew a bunch of grocers could produce ice cream so heavenly?
The first flavors I’d tried on my initial trip to Bi-rite were salted caramel and honey lavender. The salted caramel, which is one of their most popular flavors, was all right to me, but their honey lavender blew my mind. It was the first time I’d tasted lavender in ice cream, and it wasn’t overwhelming as I’d expected. This made me run home to Houston and immediately come up with my own honey lavender recipe, which you can find in my cookbook, Recipes from My Home Kitchen.
During our last visit to SF, it was a beautiful sunny day, and my friends and I’d just finished lunch. We decided to wash it down with some dessert, so we walked to the nearest Bi-Rite Creamery, and I had the roasted banana. Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey is one of my favorites, so I knew I’d like banana flavored ice cream. We went up and down the aisles of Bi-Rite, licking our cones, when my hubster, John, exclaimed, “Bi-Rite has an ice cream cookbook!” Of course we bought it.
Breville is a sponsor of my Canadian cooking show, ”Four Senses”, and as a token of gratitude after we wrapped filming the first season, they’d sent me a lovely new Breville ice cream maker. Before this, I’d been churning my ice cream in a little Cuisinart, which worked fine, but it required me to pre-freeze the bowl which took up valuable freezer space, and if I forgot, well, I’d be SOL until tomorrow. This Breville ice cream machine, however, has a built-in compressor which means no pre-freezing necessary: just turn it on, and give it a few minutes to bring the container down to proper temperature. And then ta-da! Just pour in your custard straight from the saucepan (no cooling down with an ice bath even necessary!), and you’ve got soft-serve ice cream in less than an hour. (I freeze mine for at least four hours afterwards, though, because I like a “bite” in the consistency.)
Now with this Breville, making ice cream has never been easier. Every little bit helps when you’ve got friends coming over all the time asking if you’ve got any homemade flavors in the freezer.
We’ve made Bi-Rite’s Earl grey ice cream twice and, this past weekend, churned a quart of green tea. The best green tea ice cream I’ve had came from a 7-11 in Hakone, Japan, but maybe this is the second best. It’s better to use matcha green tea powder because it’s more concentrated in flavor due to the fine milling process, and thus translates into ice cream better than, say, simple green tea leaves. I used the matcha green tea from Costco, which I drink on a regular basis. The ice cream turned out a tad sweet for my preference, but incredibly delicious nonetheless. Below is the recipe with the sugar tweaked to my liking. I also made the amazing discovery of sprinkling the scoop with furikake–a Japanese rice seasoning made of seaweed, sesame seeds, and fish flakes–which gives the luscious, sweet, slightly bitter green tea a dose of salty umami. It was AMAZE-BALLS. But don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself. If the Blind can Cook it, you can too.
Do you make ice cream at home? Which are your favorite flavors? Which machine do you use?

Recipe: Matcha Green Tea Ice Cream
Notes: Adapted from Bi-Rite Creamery’s recipe. You’ll need an ice cream machine, such as the Breville Smart Scoop. And I hate wasting, so use those leftover egg whites as a face mask or in an egg white omelette (not the tastiest, but definitely healthy, which makes up for this green tea ice cream you’re about to devour).

Ingredients

  1. 5 egg yolks
  2. matcha green tea powder of 4 tea bags from Costco or 1 tbsp matcha green tea powder
  3. 5/8 c granulated sugar, divided
  4. 1.75 c heavy cream
  5. 3/4 c 1% or 2% milk
  6. 1 pinch kosher salt
  7. furikake for garnish


Instructions


  1. In a stand mixer with whisk attachment, mix together egg yolks, 1/4 c granulated sugar, and the matcha green tea powder. Whisk until well combined.
  2. In a small saucepan over medium heat, stir together cream, milk, salt, and remaining 3/8 c sugar until sugar is dissolved. Be careful not to boil the mixture or it will curdle, make a mess, and possibly burn.
  3. While mixer is on medium speed, very slowly add 1/2 c of the warm cream mixture into the egg mixture. It’s important to go slow to “temper the eggs,” or bringing the eggs timidly up to the same temp as the cream so as to mix without cooking (unless you like chunks of scrambled eggs in your ice cream). Slowly pour another 1/2 c of the warm cream mixture into the stand mixing bowl, and whisk until just incorporated. Turn off mixer and pour the contents back into the saucepan while stirring with a heatproof rubber spatula.
  4. Heat custard over medium heat, stirring frequently, until it thickens and coats the back of the spatula, approx 1 to 2 min more. Remove from heat, strain through a chinois or fine mesh sieve into a container. Now if you have the Breville Smart Scoop like me, pre-cool the machine according to manufacturer’s directions, and get straight to churning. But if you have a machine that won’t cool the base automatically, cool the container in an ice bath. Once fully cooled, cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hrs or overnight.
  5. When ready to churn, first put the container in which you’re going to store the ice cream into the freezer. Then churn the ice cream base in the ice cream machine according to manufacturer’s directions.
  6. Once done churning, you can enjoy it right away if you like the soft-serve consistency. But if you’re like me and prefer a more al dente texture, transfer the ice cream to the pre-frozen container, leaving 1/2” room from the top for expansion. Cover and freeze for at least 4 hrs. When serving, sprinkle some furikake on top of the scoop. YUMMY.
Preparation time: 5 minute(s)
Cooking time: 10 minute(s)


Blind chef Christine Ha guest of Lunar New Year event



By Greg Morago

February 3, 2014 | Updated: February 3, 2014 10:51pm

Marie D. De Jeséºs/Staff
Christine Ha, a Houstonian is the winner of the third season of the MasterChef and the author of the cook book, Recipes from My Home Kitchen: Asian and American Comfort Food. Ha is collaborating with the Asia Society Texas Center for a party on February 6 to celebrate the Lunar New Year. Monday, Jan. 27, 2014. ( Marie D. De Jeséºs / Houston Chronicle )
When last we caught up with "MasterChef" Christine Ha in May, she had foodies in a tizzy over her announced plans to open a Houston restaurant.
Those plans have been placed on the back burner, but Ha hasn't slowed down. In fact, she's had a very busy year filled with multiple projects of the culinary kind.

And this week, another: Ha is teaming with Boheme Cafe and Wine Bar chef Rishi Singh on a tasting menu for the Asia Society Texas Center Young Professionals' Lunar New Year celebration on Thursday. The menu will include Vietnamese egg rolls with pickled vegetables and tangerine nuoc mam cham (fish sauce), "Longevity" lobster lo mein, tropical fruit salad and Lucky Bubbly, a sparkling wine with fresh ginger, orange and pineapple juices.
Ha is the special guest for the event and will be interviewed in a question-and-answer session by KHOU anchor Lily Jang.
For those in attendance, it will be a chance to hear what the blind chef (her website is theblindcook.com) who won Season 3 of "MasterChef" has been up to.
Here's what Ha had to say when we talked with her last week:

On life after "MasterChef":
Houston native Ha was the first blind contestant on the Fox cooking show, which she won in September 2012, taking home a $250,000 grand prize and a cookbook deal. Her cookbook, "Recipes From My Home Kitchen," was published in May. Since the show, she said she's been recognized while traveling and often deals with strangers approaching her. "At first it was difficult for me because I'm visually impaired. But now I'm adjusting to it," she said. "The most rewarding thing is being able to hear from people that my story has inspired them to try harder to battle their depression, learn to cook, learn to have hope from unemployment or death of a loved one. I hear a lot of those stories."
Ha said she suspects people share their stories with her because she shared her struggles on TV. "I've been very vulnerable about letting all of America know my life story," she said. "Because they feel they know me, they're able to tell me their stories. It takes a lot of courage and I really admire that."
On a new cooking series:
Last week AMI, a Canadian cable channel, launched a new food show, "Four Senses" starring Ha and Carl Heinrich, the 2012 winner of "Top Chef Canada." The 13-episode series unites blind and sighted chefs in the kitchen for cooking segments and tips and tools for independence in the kitchen.
The show is an example of how entertainment can welcome the visually impaired into pop culture, she said. "We describe what we're doing. It's very verbal," she said. Example: instead of saying, "Look how the meat is browning," the co-hosts describe it. "This is how it smells, sounds and feels," she said. AMI, which stands for Accessible Media Inc., says it serves the more than 5 million Canadians who are blind, partially sighted, deaf, hard of hearing, or mobility or print restricted.
Ha said she hopes "Four Seasons" will be syndicated in the United States or that the producers will make an American version.

On a new book:
After making the New York Times best-seller list with her first cookbook, you'd think Ha would quickly follow up with another recipe compilation. Wrong. But she is writing; her next book is going to be a memoir. Ha said her book, which she hopes will be published next year, will explore the parallels in her life in the year she began losing her sight and her mother got cancer. "Honestly, this was something I was working on before I went on the show," she said.
Ha earned a master's degree in creative writing from the University of Houston in May. While defending her thesis, one of her professors suggested her memoir be titled "Second Sight." Ha said she hasn't decided on a title.

On her own Houston restaurant:
Last year on a television appearance to promote the new season of "MasterChef," Ha and restaurateur Joe Bastianich (a "MasterChef" judge) announced that they completed a business plan to open a restaurant in Houston. Though it made foodies lather, the restaurant project, while not dead, is very much on hold. Ha said she hasn't been able to devote much time to the restaurant proposition because she's been too busy making celebrity chef appearances, doing pop-up projects, writing and even going on a MasterChef Travel Tour to Vietnam in October.
"There are really good opportunities now I don't want to pass up," she said, adding that she still has collaborators for the project. "But it's something that has to wait a bit while I pursue other things."
Ha said the main reason she's waiting to open a restaurant is that she wants to devote much attention to it. "I'm a perfectionist. I care how it will be run," she said.

On the Lunar New Year celebration:
Ha said the Asia Society Texas event will include noodles "for longevity," eggrolls because "they represent gold bullion," five-fruit salad in keeping with Vietnamese tradition where five fruits are typically offered at a family altar to honor ancestors and a sparkling drink with citrus, which represents good luck.
Her own Vietnamese family celebrates Lunar New Year, full of symbolism and tradition. Ha said she'll be eating a Lunar New Year cake of sticky rice with pork and mung bean inside, wrapped in a banana leaf. It's called banh tet, she said adding that her late grandmother made many to give to family and friends. "I'm still trying to figure out her recipe," she said. "Some people like to eat them with sugar or soy sauce or fry to make it crunchy. I'm a traditionalist, so I just eat it straight up."
The event
Asia Society Texas Center Young Professionals will host Lunar New Year Leo Bar featuring "MasterChef" Christine Ha.


 http://www.accesshollywood.com/


Potato Bacon Footballs


Posted on October 4, 2014 by

Season small peeled parboiled potatoes with salt and black pepper, wrap in bacon and bake in a hot oven until bacon is crisp. Dust with more pepper and serve as an appetizer with cole slaw and a light Pilsner. This is a great tailgate recipe.
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Magnolia Fruit

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Grist Mill

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The Angel Susan

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The Edible South: A Review


Posted on September 30, 2014 by

If you care about the culinary history of America, then The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region by Marcie Ferris is a necessary addition to your library. The scope of this work, its scholarship and its pervasive voice of authority provide a much-needed center of gravity for the study of Southern foodways as well as a panoramic portrait of the society and culture of the South through the lens of an essential element: food.
The quality of Ferris’ scholarship is undeniable, but The Edible South can in no way be described as bridging a gap between academic and popular writing. It is a thoroughly academic work, insightful of course, but calling it approachable is a stretch as well. This is not a book you pick up lightly and not without a solid grounding in American history, otherwise you will soon find yourself awash in a sea of dates and names, events and entities. In her introduction (following four pages of acknowledgements) Ferris states that The Edible South is an examination of “visceral connections” involving the “realities of fulsomeness and deprivation” and the “resonance of history in food traditions”, an “evocative lens” into the various aspects of Southern culture and society. The text is peppered with phrases such as “culinary exceptionalism”, “cultural conversation”, “historical interaction”, “Jim Crow paternalism” and “racial balkanization”, thoroughly saturated with information (as well as footnotes) and for the most part unrelentingly didactic, an almost incessant record of racism and misogyny, poverty and oppression in one of the most fertile regions of the globe. The narrative is occasionally gruesome: the slaughter and cannibalization of a young pregnant bride at Jamestown; the torture of a slave by being suspended with a piece of pork fat over an open flame; and the rats, cats and dogs prepared for the table during the siege of Vicksburg in addition to constant accounts of hunger, malnutrition and want, evocative to be sure, but far more often of the darker aspects of the human condition.
Ferris is vigorous and precise, as befits a writer intending to inform if not to say instruct. While she professes a passion for food, this passion is rarely evident in her prose; instead, it shines forth in her scholarship, which as noted is astoundingly thorough. The key word here is information, and The Edible South is informative on almost every level, but this is a social history (as opposed to political or economic history), focusing on the experiences of everyday people, resulting in “a ‘History from the Bottom Up’ that ultimately engulfed traditional history and, somehow, helped to make a Better World” (Paul E. Johnson). The emphasis is on race relations, gender issues, inequality, education, work and leisure, mobility, social movements and the character and condition of the working class. This is to say that food is a raison for her larger agenda, which is an examination of the social history of the South itself. While Ferris says that her approach is not encyclopedic, the result is undeniably, mind-bogglingly comprehensive. The bibliography is exhaustive, beginning with three and a half pages of primary source materials from archival collections in fifteen cities spanning fourteen states (including Michigan, Massachusetts, Ohio and the District of Columbia), followed by forty pages of secondary sources. Somewhat surprisingly, Ferris mentions Zora Neale Hurston only in connection with the reproduction of her folk tale “Diddy Wah Diddy” (1938) in Mark Kurlansky’s excellent work, The Food of a Younger Land (2010), disregarding her longer non-fiction works. I should hope to find some agreement by noting the glaring omission of Wilbur Cash’s The Mind of the South (1929). While not genre-defining—John Egerton’s Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987) defined the genre—The Edible South is authoritative and comprehensive, an indispensable reference.
The academic institutionalization of Southern food is if nothing else thorough. Southern foodways studies have kept university presses rolling in recent years: Andrew Haley, an assistant professor of American cultural history at the University of Southern Mississippi, was awarded the 2012 James Beard Award in the Reference and Scholarship category for Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880-1920, another product of the University of North Carolina Press; this past October, the University of Georgia Press issued The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South, edited by John T. Edge, Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt and Ted Ownby; and this August the University Press of Mississippi released Writing in the Kitchen: Essays on Southern Literature and Foodways edited by David A. Davis and Tara Powell with a forward by Jessica B. Harris.
edible south photo 1Given the narrow scope of this field, overgrazing seems imminent; one could get the impression that this glut of scholarship is evidence that the academic maxim of “publish or perish” is still solidly in place. While these works are undoubtedly conceived for those who are deeply interested in the culinary history of our nation, the general popularity of such publications must be called into question. That being said, The Edible South has been included among the Southern Independent Booksellers Association’s 2014 Summer Okra Picks, along with Chris Chamberlain’s The Southern Foodie’s Guide to the Pig: A Culinary Tour of the South’s Best Restaurants & the Recipes That Made Them Famous, Beautiful at All Seasons: Southern Gardening and Beyond with Elizabeth Lawrence (by Elizabeth Lawrence) and Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good: The New Mitford Novel by Jan Karon. Other recommendations are sure to follow.
After reading The Edible South, some are likely to be left with the bitter aftertaste of an eviscerated region in an age of information. The apartness of the South is what brought about its distinctive culture, but the old demonic genius loci of Dixie has been exorcised by a new orthodoxy embracing secular capitalization and academic hermeneutics, where icons are relics and texts are subjected to a democratized version of the Scholastic method. A bell jar has descended, but life goes on, people will be people, and while by academic standards Southern culture has become a global phenomenon, for better or worse it remains rooted south of the Mason-Dixon Line, where a pork chop is still more often than not just a pork chop.

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The Peanut Bin

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Pick it up, smack it, rub it down …

barbecue sauce lowes mike green
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Autumn Bouquets

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Chelsea Clinton at Millsaps College

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Fred Smith at Choctaw Books

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Mississippi Bananas 2

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Autumn Farmers’ Market

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Rock Cornish Racket


Posted on September 24, 2014 by
The follies of genius are unavoidable, unpredictable and if we’re lucky just quirky. Victor Borge was a genius. While my standards might be modest (I think Jim Henson was a genius too) enlightenment and entertainment are always qualifications, and in that Borge shined. During his heyday Borge performed the world over, but he maintained a homestead in New England where he raised Rock Cornish game hens. I suspect he was probably amused with a business that marketed miniature chickens; just imagine him asking why the Rock Cornish game hen crossed the road with a nice little keyboard riff. At any rate, Nora Ephron (the Rona Barrett of food writing) remembers that “every Rock Cornish game hen in America used to come with a little tag with Victor Borge’s name on it.”
Now, I just hate to disillusion you all, but despite its heroic name a Rock Cornish game hen is nothing more than a little chicken. Poultry is big business, and millions are spent on developing and maintaining the most productive, disease-resistant and appealing varieties. The best all-around industrial chickens are either big and fast-growing or smaller and long-laying. I suspect that at some point avian agronomists were frustrated to discover that pesky genetics prevented chickens from growing only so much so fast and from ovulating only so often; otherwise we’d have Rhode Island Reds the size of collies dropping half-gallon eggs all over Stone County. (The emus didn’t work out.)
With size as a limit, the chicken scientists bent under the thumbscrews of marketing by taking another tack: Tyson Foods developed the Rock Cornish game hen in the mid-60s by cross-breeding big, fast-growing but rather spindly Plymouth Rock cocks with smaller Cornish hens, which have short, thick legs and broad, muscular breasts. The resulting variety has a briefer growing span–ten days less to the slaughterhouse than the 40-day Rocks (birds grow fast; imagine if you had been chased out of the house when you had just learned how to run). Since they were developed for meat, their egg-laying capabilities are inconsiderable (too bad, right?).
Tyson marketed the game hen as an upscale product targeting people willing to pay more for something different. And it worked. Calling it a “game hen” added to its cachet, since it suggests a mix with a pheasant, a quail, a partridge or some bird with similar snob appeal. Borge, who himself had a high-brow profile, was probably enrolled as a celebrity sponsor, though I still maintain that the eccentricity of the product itself was a great draw for him personally. Yet despite my affection for the Great Dane who bridged the gap between Oliver Hardy and Stravinsky, to me the most effective marketing strategy for game hens is that they’re wrapped up just like cute little teeny-tiny turkeys.
Having said all that, let me add that game hens should not be shunned on account of their corporate hatching; they’re good birds, if you know how to cook them. Buy the smallest ones you can, one to a person, thaw thoroughly, trim and clean. Rub inside and out with oil, a little salt and pepper and whatever other seasonings you like (garlic and sage are always good), then roast on a rack in a slow oven until the legs are loose. In the meantime, prepare wild rice and sauté a few trimmed chicken livers per person. Serve a single hen on a nest  of wild rice, livers to the side. Baby limas, wilted greens and a bit of sour cream round out the menu.

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