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Oct. 18th, 2008 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI finished watching The Hanging Gale, a delightful (not really) and engaging (really) movie about the Irish Potato Famine. It's a BBC miniseries thing, courtesy of Netflix.
The thing about this Irish Potato Famine movie is that I kept rooting for the Irish and kept wanting them to win. (On the whole, the Irish lost big time during the Irish Potato Famine.) It's kind of like watching Cool Hand Luke and wanting Mr. Newman's character to get away. (He doesn't.)
If you're up for a not-very-happy movie with lots of pretty irish people and fairly good irish accents, though, it's got a lot of that. I wish the guy who played the land agent for the British estate holder was a better rider, though. (He's the guy on the grey horse and he just doesn't ride convincingly.)
On using up eggs. I have a dozen eggs that I bought, thinking I was going to eat them. I have not eaten them yet, however, and they are going to go bad on me in about a week. The eggs, helpfully, say "Use before Oct. 27" on their shells. Given the rate at which I have been not-eating them, and barring any miraculous eggvanishment from my fridge, I wold have begotten myself to October 27 with a full dozen of the damn things. Food costs money, as you are all aware, and Wasting Food is Wrong.
So, I am making eclairs.
Eclairs are rod-shapedgram-negative bacteria pastries made with choux pastry. Choux pastry is made of butter, eggs, flour, water, and milk. (No cabbages are involved even though "choux" is French for cabbage.) Choux pastry, one batch prepared according to the Joy of Cooking recipe, uses four eggs. It goes like this: In saucepan, put 1/2 cup each of water and milk. Add chopped up whole stick of butter. Bring to a solid boil. Dump in 1 cup flour. Stir vigorously until you have a smooth paste. Cook the paste a while. Remove from heat, let cool 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add four eggs, one egg at a time, stirring each egg in completely before adding another egg. Paste should be smooth and shiny.
Once the paste is made, you put it into a pastry bag (if you have one) or into a ziplock bag (gallon size preferred. Quart size is a little small.) if you don't. Pipe out through a tip (if you have a pastry bag) or through a hole cut into the corner of the ziplock (cut smaller than you think you will need.) to make like 4" rods on a piece of parchment paper on a cookie sheet. Bake at 400 (preheated) for ten minutes, then at 350 for another fifteen or twenty. Then, poke a hole (I use a chopstick for this.) in the end of the rod of pastry (If it were a penis, you'd be putting this hole where the urethra goes.) and turn off the oven and let the pastries sit in there to dry out inside for a while. The instructions say you'll get like eight or ten. I got six, which apparently means I'm a size queen. Oops. My bad.
ANYWAY. Four eggs down, but we're not done yet.
While you are baking your eclairs, you can productively occupy your time by making the pastry cream that goes inside the eclairs. If you're prompt about things, the pastry cream will be done before the eclairs are done baking. Pastry cream: Put 1 & 1/3 cups of milk into a saucepan on medium-low. Bring it gently to a simmer. Meanwhile, get 2 Tbsp. of flour, 2 Tbsp. of corn starch, four egg yolks, and 1/3 cup sugar. Put those ingredients in a bowl and whisk the lot until it's light and fluffy. (Whisk some more, you lazy slug. Srsly, get that whisk moving or your pastry cream won't come out... Gosh, this post just fucking writes itself, doesn't it?) When your milk is simmering, you're ready to test your coordination. Pour a very small stream of hot milk out of the saucepan into the egg mixture. Use your non-dominant hand for that part. With your dominant hand, whisk the egg mixture so that the hot milk doesn't kill it by curdling your egg yolks. Keep doing this, slowly, until about a third of the hot milk is in the egg stuff. (This is called tempering the egg yolks but if I wrote "temper the egg yolks" then the people who really need to undertake this sort of home cookery would be spooked and would not try it.) Then, put the pan with the hot milk back on the stove, dump the egg mixture into it, and whisk. Cook on med-lo heat, whisking, until the stuff is (a) thick (b) smooth and (c) trying to boil. Cook about 45 to 60 seconds after it starts boiling. Remove from heat, add some vanilla (half to 3/4 of a teaspoon. I usually just eyeball it.) and whisk. Chill for later.
So, four MORE eggs used up because I have no earthly use for four egg whites by their lonesome selves. I threw the egg whites away. (No, I am not ever going to make an angel food cake from fucking scratch. Also not going to eat scrambled egg whites *by themselves* because I eat my scrambled eggs, on the rare occasions when I eat them, with bacon. There's no point taking away egg yolks and then having bacon with the scrambled whites. That's like turning down your hot secretary because you're going to go have sex with your wife's sister instead -- it's not the sort of thing you can score as a win.)
That's eight eggs out of a dozen gone. Pretty effective use of eggs, isn't it? I'm impressed with me, anyway.
Once your eclair shells are cool and your filling is also similarly cool, you can put the filling in the eclair using a pastry bag, teleportating the stuff in there, or slicing off the top of the eclair and spooning the stuff in that way. It's a choice of aesthetics, really. For me, having cream filling all the way through is more important than having the thing be in one piece. I'm a slicer, I am.
After the eclair has been filled, it should have chocolate stuff on the top of it. This is an important part of eclairs, for me, so I looked up what Joy had to say about the chocolate stuff. Joy says 6 oz bittersweet chocolate plus 6 tbsp water plus (later) 6 tbsp butter. Right. I think I can do that. I don't think I need to do quite *that much* of that, but we'll see if it scales using the tiny 70% lindt bars that I picked up at the Sheetz this evening in preparation for the eclair project. (This was kind of last minute or I'd have better chocolate to work with. Says here that the given recipe makes about 1 cup. I do not need 1 cup of chocolate stuff to put on six eclairs, even six *big* eclairs. Pity the chocolate stuff doesn't use any eggs...
The thing about this Irish Potato Famine movie is that I kept rooting for the Irish and kept wanting them to win. (On the whole, the Irish lost big time during the Irish Potato Famine.) It's kind of like watching Cool Hand Luke and wanting Mr. Newman's character to get away. (He doesn't.)
If you're up for a not-very-happy movie with lots of pretty irish people and fairly good irish accents, though, it's got a lot of that. I wish the guy who played the land agent for the British estate holder was a better rider, though. (He's the guy on the grey horse and he just doesn't ride convincingly.)
On using up eggs. I have a dozen eggs that I bought, thinking I was going to eat them. I have not eaten them yet, however, and they are going to go bad on me in about a week. The eggs, helpfully, say "Use before Oct. 27" on their shells. Given the rate at which I have been not-eating them, and barring any miraculous eggvanishment from my fridge, I wold have begotten myself to October 27 with a full dozen of the damn things. Food costs money, as you are all aware, and Wasting Food is Wrong.
So, I am making eclairs.
Eclairs are rod-shaped
Once the paste is made, you put it into a pastry bag (if you have one) or into a ziplock bag (gallon size preferred. Quart size is a little small.) if you don't. Pipe out through a tip (if you have a pastry bag) or through a hole cut into the corner of the ziplock (cut smaller than you think you will need.) to make like 4" rods on a piece of parchment paper on a cookie sheet. Bake at 400 (preheated) for ten minutes, then at 350 for another fifteen or twenty. Then, poke a hole (I use a chopstick for this.) in the end of the rod of pastry (If it were a penis, you'd be putting this hole where the urethra goes.) and turn off the oven and let the pastries sit in there to dry out inside for a while. The instructions say you'll get like eight or ten. I got six, which apparently means I'm a size queen. Oops. My bad.
ANYWAY. Four eggs down, but we're not done yet.
While you are baking your eclairs, you can productively occupy your time by making the pastry cream that goes inside the eclairs. If you're prompt about things, the pastry cream will be done before the eclairs are done baking. Pastry cream: Put 1 & 1/3 cups of milk into a saucepan on medium-low. Bring it gently to a simmer. Meanwhile, get 2 Tbsp. of flour, 2 Tbsp. of corn starch, four egg yolks, and 1/3 cup sugar. Put those ingredients in a bowl and whisk the lot until it's light and fluffy. (Whisk some more, you lazy slug. Srsly, get that whisk moving or your pastry cream won't come out... Gosh, this post just fucking writes itself, doesn't it?) When your milk is simmering, you're ready to test your coordination. Pour a very small stream of hot milk out of the saucepan into the egg mixture. Use your non-dominant hand for that part. With your dominant hand, whisk the egg mixture so that the hot milk doesn't kill it by curdling your egg yolks. Keep doing this, slowly, until about a third of the hot milk is in the egg stuff. (This is called tempering the egg yolks but if I wrote "temper the egg yolks" then the people who really need to undertake this sort of home cookery would be spooked and would not try it.) Then, put the pan with the hot milk back on the stove, dump the egg mixture into it, and whisk. Cook on med-lo heat, whisking, until the stuff is (a) thick (b) smooth and (c) trying to boil. Cook about 45 to 60 seconds after it starts boiling. Remove from heat, add some vanilla (half to 3/4 of a teaspoon. I usually just eyeball it.) and whisk. Chill for later.
So, four MORE eggs used up because I have no earthly use for four egg whites by their lonesome selves. I threw the egg whites away. (No, I am not ever going to make an angel food cake from fucking scratch. Also not going to eat scrambled egg whites *by themselves* because I eat my scrambled eggs, on the rare occasions when I eat them, with bacon. There's no point taking away egg yolks and then having bacon with the scrambled whites. That's like turning down your hot secretary because you're going to go have sex with your wife's sister instead -- it's not the sort of thing you can score as a win.)
That's eight eggs out of a dozen gone. Pretty effective use of eggs, isn't it? I'm impressed with me, anyway.
Once your eclair shells are cool and your filling is also similarly cool, you can put the filling in the eclair using a pastry bag, teleportating the stuff in there, or slicing off the top of the eclair and spooning the stuff in that way. It's a choice of aesthetics, really. For me, having cream filling all the way through is more important than having the thing be in one piece. I'm a slicer, I am.
After the eclair has been filled, it should have chocolate stuff on the top of it. This is an important part of eclairs, for me, so I looked up what Joy had to say about the chocolate stuff. Joy says 6 oz bittersweet chocolate plus 6 tbsp water plus (later) 6 tbsp butter. Right. I think I can do that. I don't think I need to do quite *that much* of that, but we'll see if it scales using the tiny 70% lindt bars that I picked up at the Sheetz this evening in preparation for the eclair project. (This was kind of last minute or I'd have better chocolate to work with. Says here that the given recipe makes about 1 cup. I do not need 1 cup of chocolate stuff to put on six eclairs, even six *big* eclairs. Pity the chocolate stuff doesn't use any eggs...
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Date: 2008-10-19 02:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 02:48 am (UTC)I could have used the egg whites for seven minute icing, but I didn't have a cake handy to ice.
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Date: 2008-10-19 05:36 am (UTC)I was thinking about the stuff you make for pavlova, which is exceedingly good with cream, and sharpish fruit puree, or soft fruit, like blackberries or raspberries.
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Date: 2008-10-19 10:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-19 11:16 am (UTC)For other interested watchers: The Irish gaelic parts are not subtitled. Unless you speak Irish gaelic, you get to stare at the screen going WTF for those parts, kind of like the English did to the Irish in the movie. Mostly, it's in English, though.
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Date: 2008-10-19 11:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-20 01:55 am (UTC)