My Marx Foods's Iron Foodie 2010 Entry, My Twist On Chenna Poda, Indian Cheesecake.

                                       

   When I was told that I was to be one of 25 Iron Foodies, I was excited. I ran around telling my friends and family. I was gonna be an Iron Foodie. I was gonna get a mystery box from Marx Foods and I was going to create a signature dish from whatever they sent me. Wow! All those months of watching Chopped wouldn't be going to waste. I'd told Alan I was working when I was watching, now I wouldn't be a liar. It was all for a good cause. I'd finally get my chance. Then I got scared. What the hell was I going to do?? What had I gotten into? What was going to be in the box? The rules stated that I had to use 3 of the 8 ingredients included. I couldn't wait to see what I'd been sent.
    The box arrived right on schedule.

  I ripped it open.

   There it all was, Tellicherry Peppercorns, Maple Sugar, Dulse Seaweed, Fennel Pollen, Smoked Sea Salt, Aji Panca Peruvian Chiles, Bourbon Vanilla Beans, Dried Porcini Mushrooms. There was my dilemma, what to do? What to make? Hot or cold, sweet or savory, mild or spicy?  A lot of possibilities flashed through my head but I couldn't settle on any one thing. I knew I had to get moving on whatever it was. I was going to cook and I gave myself until Thanksgiving to make up my mind. I read. I did research. I decided that I'd go with the sweet.
   I wanted to make it an Indian sweet but one that I'd never fixed before. Then I had it. Cheesecake. And not just any cheesecake, but the only cheesecake made in India, Chenna Poda from the state of Odisha. It turns out that cheesecake originated there about 50 years ago when a baker left some cottage cheese in a partially warmed oven. The next morning bingo! Cheesecake! I also decided on cheesecake because this is the time of year when all of us are involved in a lot of dessert fixing. Cheesecake always looks great on any Holiday table.  As a matter of fact I think cheesecake looks great almost anywhere! I also wanted to create a recipe that would be a bridge between the type of cooking I do most of the time (Indian) and a very familiar dessert for most people.
   I decided to make some chenna cheese for the filling. Of course I had to put my own spin on this cheesecake, so I thought I'd make it with a chocolate, chili, graham cracker crust with the aji panca chilis I'd been sent. I'd use the bourbon vanilla beans from the box to flavor it and the maple sugar as a sort of brulee topping. I would caramelize. I would buy a torch! I was excited! I was going to make

Indian Cheesecake With A Chocolate Chili Graham Cracker Crust and a Brulee Top

 
   The first step involved making the Chenna Cheese. If you don't want to try making your own chenna cheese (it's pretty easy just click on the link above for directions) Ricotta cheese makes a great substitute.
  Of course I use only the most sophisticated method in my cheesemaking. Note the high tech equipment.

   Once the paneer cheese was made, it was one quick step to turn it into sweet chenna cheese. All that was needed was to add :
2 tsp of sugar
1 tsp of flour

Then knead until the chenna is soft and pliable.

Place it in a bowl along with 2 packages of cream cheese.

 

Now for The Crust.
Seed and toast 1 large Marx Foods Aji Panca Chili Pepper. Put the pieces into a spice grinder until you have a fine powder.

    In a food processor mix
1 pack of graham crackers
1 Tbs of Valhrona cocoa powder
1/4 cup of melted butter
1/2 cup of sugar
the ground chili powder

 

Press the ground-up crumb mixture into the bottom of a greased 8 inch springform pan.
Put the pan with the crust into the freezer for 30 minutes to set. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Now for The Filling.
All filling ingredients should be at room temperature.
In a large bowl beat together 2 packs of room temperature cream cheese along with 1 cup of chenna cheese and 1 cup of sugar.

Beat for about 2 minutes until it's nice and smooth.
 Blend in:
1 egg yolk
2 Tbs of flour

When that's blended, add 4 more whole eggs.

Scrape in the seeds from one Marx Foods Bourbon Vanilla beans.

Blend for another 3 minutes or so. Don't over beat.
Take the pan from the freezer, set it on a cookie sheet. Pour the batter into the pan.

Put the cheese cake in the middle of the oven. Note: To prevent cracking, place a bowl of water on the rack below the cheesecake.

 Bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes, then lower the heat to 250 degrees and bake for another 1 and 1/2 hours.  The cheesecake is done when it feels firm to the touch and yet the center is still a little jiggly.

Place on a cooling rack for one hour.
Okay, now here's something I learned the hard way. This cheesecake has to rest in the fridge for at least 6 hours before you can eat it. Overnight is better.
 Waiting was hard, but boy was it worth it.

 The next day unmold the cheesecake.

Now for the final touch. Before serving, sprinkle the top with Marx Foods Maple Sugar.  Ignite a culinary torch and slowly moving it over the surface of the cheesecake but not touching it... melt the maple sugar.

Or if you haven't got a culinary torch, you can always go old skool with a salamander.
Heat it on the stove till it's red hot, then hold it over the sugar till it melts.

 As soon as the sugar has set for about 5 minutes or so, have at it!

    The cake was amazing. The combo of glazed maple sugar, chilies, and vanilla bean was delicious.
In India this cheese cake doesn't have a crust. In fact it's baked more like a flan with the sugar on the bottom of the pan, batter on top and then upended for serving. Making the cake the way I did crosses it with the version of the cheesecake we're all more familiar with... plus you get to play with a blow torch!
   I want to thank the great folks at Marx Foods and Foodie Blogroll for giving me a chance to compete in the Iron Foodie 2010 competition. I hope when voting opens on the 7th you'll give me a vote. I loved my box of goodies and can't wait to do more experimenting with the ingredients I haven't used yet.

After Your Turkey Day Leftovers...Sugar Cookies

    Not everybody does Pumpkin Pie for Thanksgiving. Around our house the tradition is to serve a Beehive Cake. One reason we do this is because Pumpkin Pie has never been one of my moms' favorites and my relatives won't even touch my homemade Mincemeat Pie... even though there is no meat in it. They just don't like the way it sounds. When we were living in LA full time, I always made Mincemeat Pie and Pumpkin Maple Pie for Thanksgiving. We usually had anywhere from 20 to 30 people at the house and none of them turned up their noses at Mincemeat.
   In Northern California my family has always served Beehive Cake for Christmas and Thanksgiving. It's a cake that seems indigenous only to this area (really) and there never seem to be any leftovers.
   Which brings me to the subject of sugar cookies.
   Since Thanksgiving is usually a family holiday at our house, we love to invite friends and neighbors over the day after for whatever treats might be left over.  Sometimes they bring things too,  and it turns into a day-after Foodie Swap Meet. The question I'm always faced with is what's for dessert???? This year I know what I'm serving. Sugar Cookies!
   How did I come to bake these?? Well, a few weeks back I was invited by the Culinary School at Baltimore International College, to try out one of their recipes in my own kitchen and write about how it worked out. Since the holidays were upon us, I decided that what I needed more than anything would be some cookies.  And since I'm not a huge cookie baker (Indian cuisine does not really feature cookies) I decided what better recipe to try out this time of year than one for Sugar Cookies.
   Cookies have never been a happy memory in my house. Growing up, my mom always made butter cookies which could also double for skeet shooting targets. Seeing how these turned out most likely warped me, because nothing makes me more nervous than cookie baking. I'm cool with cakes, and pies are fine, but just don't wave that cookie sheet in my face. I'll freak out.
   Not that I'm a total cookie virgin. There are basically two types of cookie that I make. Oatmeal raisin and biscotti. Beyond that, it's a total crap shoot as to how they'll turn out. This I thought, would be the perfect test for their recipe. If my cookie-challenged skills could turn out decent sugar cookies, I'd feel safe passing the recipe along. So BCI sent me a stipend to cover my cookie making costs and the experiment began.
   I printed out the cookie recipe. Hey wait a minute, some of this stuff is written in ounces. How many ounces is a cup of flour??? I asked Lord Google and in a minute had my translation and I was good to go. I was on the unbuttered chute to cookie town:

Sugar Cookies

I assembled my ingredients.

 In a large bowl I  mixed :
 1 stick of butter cut into little pieces

 With 1 and 1/4 cups of sugar. I creamed them together well with my mixer.

 So far so good. I added in:
 1 egg

  1/4 cup of milk

 1 tsp of vanilla extract and I blended it again till everything was smooth and well combined.

 So far, so good.
 Now for the delicate part. I added in:
 2 and 1/2 cups of cake flour
 1/2 tsp of baking powder

 This was mixed in by hand. The secret of these cookies as it turns out, is not to over mix.

Now comes the scary part. As a child I used to watch my mom roll her cookie dough into logs. This usually meant that hard doughy poker chips would follow. I have to admit, the log part brought back childhood cookie trauma. Okay I thought, here goes nothin'.
I sprinkled a little cake flour out and rolled a nice glob of dough into a log.

Hey, it worked! I am rollin' dough. I rolled the logs into waxed paper and made little cookie dough firecrackers.

   Just a note here. You can make bigger logs than this depending on the size you want your cookies to be. I decided to make little 2 bite size cookies, mainly because I don't trust my rolling skills (no comments from the peanut gallery please) but now I know I can make larger ones.
   I put the dough logs into the fridge to firm up and chill out. This recipe left me with about 4 small cookie sized logs of dough.
  After about 3 hours I preheated the oven to 350 degrees.
I took the dough logs out of the fridge and started slicing them.

 I laid them on an ungreased cookie sheet and flattened them a bit with my hand.

I sprinkled them with some pretty pink sugar crystals and popped them in the oven for about 20 minutes. Let me tell you I was scared. After my Floating Island experiment, I was prepared to be baking these cookies for about three days to get them right. But to my surprise after 20 minutes in the oven, this is what I got!

 Sugar cookies!!! Wheee! I was thrilled. Alan who'd been photographing the entire process thought he'd better step in and taste them "for safety sake." He kept on tasting them for a good 15 minutes.  We stacked them, and since "he touched them" of course he had to eat them... just to be sanitary.

   Here's his reaction.

 Needless to say he is a happy camper.
This recipe gave me about 40 sugar cookies. Thanks to the Baltimore International Culinary College for giving me this opportunity to work out my "cookie issues".

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

   All around the US of A today, people are cooking. The same thing is going on at our house. I'm doing a Tuscan style pork loin in a mustard crust roasted on a bed of fresh herb branches, polenta in clay with a porcini mushroom ragout, green beans and pearl onions sauteed with my own home cured bacon, a pear and arugula salad with shaved Parmesan cheese, those biscuits, Muhummara and flatbread and a Beehive Cake for dessert. 
   Many people like to cook and eat and watch football today. At our house it's a little bit different.
 Today is the National Dog Show direct from Philadelphia.

Patsy has been glued to the TV all morning. After all She is a former show dog... Best Bitch at the Phoenix Dog Show 2006....Best Bitch at the Rogue River Valley Dog Show 2006. 

Here is Patsy "standing pretty" with her handler... (this was before we knew her) back in the day. Here's Patsy now as she awaits Thanksgiving dinner.

 Even though the glory days are behind her and she only sometimes "stands pretty," she has a lot to be thankful for today... and so do we.

For Chocolate Lovers Only...Flourless Chocolate Cake With Pomegranate Sauce.

     When I was planning my POM Wonderful dinner, the question of dessert was something I worried about a lot. Recovering from dental surgery, I found myself cruising around the internet while planning the menu, just in case I was chosen. I was intrigued by a classic dessert, Floating Island. This Victorian era stunner consists of a soupy sort of creme anglaise pudding with little meringues or sometimes one big meringue floating on the top... ergo the Float in Floating Island. I was planning on doing this dessert with a saucy dash of pomegranate sauce. Oh, I was feeling saucy alright. I was on two different antibiotics, vicodin and a diet of Ensure and here I was signing up to make this insane dessert that I'd never even had. What's wrong with this picture? Try everything.
   Then I was selected as one of 100 people chosen to host a POM Wonderful dinner. Things got real serious, real fast. I thought I'd better give a little more thought to my dessert plans.  First of all, what did I know about Floating Island outside of a few Mary Poppins books I'd read as a kid and a late 19th century cookbook I'd once gotten my grubby mitts on? Zilch, zero, zip. After all it's not like it's something anybody finds on a menu anywhere anymore. I decided if I was going to serve this dish, I'd better like attempt it first. Like a dress rehearsal. The results? You be the judge.
 Here are my meringues floating in simmering milk. Talk about the Floating Islands of Lost Souls...

 But wait! It gets better! Here I am fishing them out.

   To put this in Broadway terms... my dessert closed out of town. After spending three days simmering and steaming meringues I decided to change my plans.
   I was looking for something that would go beautifully with the gorgeous pomegranates the POM Wonderful people had sent me. I decided on a rich, dark, flourless chocolate cake. I'd run across a recipe from Williams-Sonoma that looked perfect. Now I 'd never made one of these either, but I sure as hell have eaten it and I loved it. It turned out to be a lot easier than I thought it would be... no rehearsal necessary.

Flourless Chocolate Cake

  Here's what I did:

     I started with an 8 inch spring form pan. It turns out I'd bought one of these a few years ago, tucked it away in a cupboard and had forgotten all about it. Who knew?
     Take the 8 inch pan and grease the sides and bottom with butter.

     Then  cut a piece of parchment paper to fit the bottom of the pan, and place it inside.

Grease the paper with butter.

Sprinkle it with a bit of flour then tap the excess out.

The pan is ready.
Meanwhile preheat the oven to 375 degrees and while it's heating up, it's time to prep the base of the cake.
Chop up 8 oz of bittersweet chocolate.

  Just a note here about the chocolate. You can use any sort of bittersweet chocolate you wish, but I always find that the better the chocolate, the better the flavor. I used Valhrona chocolate for this cake.
 Cut 1 stick of unsalted butter into pieces.

Mix the chocolate and butter together in large bowl set over a pan of simmering water. Stir them together until they're melted.

 When everything is melted together, set it aside to cool for a bit.
Seperate 4 eggs. Make sure they're cold right out of the fridge.

 In a small bowl mix the egg yolks with:
 1 tsp  of instant coffee dissolved in 2 Tbs of water
 1 tsp of vanilla extract
 Whisk them together until they're just blended. The pour the yolk mixture into the chocolate mixture and blend it all together.

 Now for the egg whites. Mix the egg whites with 1/4 tsp cream of tartar. Using an electric beater
set on medium, beat them together until it's all foamy and the cream of tartar is blended in. About a minute.
 Turn it up to medium high until you have soft egg white peaks. About 3 minutes or so.
 Add in 1/4 cup of sugar a bit at a time. Beat until the egg whites are shiny and stiff.

Fold the shiny stiff egg whites into the chocolate cake base until everything is combined.

 Pour the batter into the prepared pan, smooth the top of the cake and bake until the cake puffs up. The top should be firm and if you wiggle the pan a bit it juggles in the middle. It should take about 20 to 25 minutes.

 

Set the pan on a wire rack to cool for about 30 minutes.

 The cake will sag a bit in the mid section... but don't we all?
 After about 30 minutes, run a thin knife around the rim of the pan and pop the sides. Let the cake continue to cool for another hour or so.

   Now for serving the cake. Slip a thin knife or spatula under the cake and slide it onto the serving platter.

   Prepare the Pomegranate Sauce. This was the one hold-over from the failed Floating Islands. I figured if the sauce would be good on that, it would be killer on a rich dark moist flourless chocolate cake. So I went for it. Here's what to do:
   In a small pan or pot mix together
  1 cup of POM Wonderful pomegranate juice
  2 Tbs of sugar
  2 tsp of cornstarch
 Mix all of this together  over a medium heat until it thickens and starts to bubble.

   To serve the cake, ladle a pool of pomegranate sauce onto the plate.
 Place a slice of cake into the center of the pomegranate sauce.
 Top the cake with a dollop of unsweetened whipped cream and scatter some fresh pomegranate arils over the cake...

And enjoy.

So if you're looking for a change this Thanksgiving from the usual pumpkin pie, let them eat cake!