Strawberry Festival

I eat primarily by the season, so that means strawberries come for me only once a year. It’s such a short window, but when they arrive it’s the best thing in the world. At this time of year their taste is stunning. A strawberry that’s ripe in its season is faintly musky, obscenely scarlet and mesmerizing without the sharper sweetness of the off-season varieties. In a season this brief, I’ve learned to appreciate every last berry that enters this kitchen. It becomes a very fun sport to see how many ways I can spin use out of them. Most often, I slice them into a bowl of milk for breakfast. I’ve made strawberry sorbet, smoothies, and muffins, but the scarlet couronne goes to this Strawberry Mascarpone Tart that I made with my friend Julienne last week.

 

You may have seen this before on the April cover of Gourmet. I wanted to make it then, but I had to hold out until Portland's berries came into full blush. It was worth the wait. It’s a winner, a stunner, all of the highest compliments you can pay. It was so good that I didn't really have the time to properly photograph it. Julienne and Kai were really kind to wait as long as they did to dig in. The mascarpone filling features a nuttiness that cuts the sweetness of the strawberries, and it's all rounded out by a little zingy lemon zest and a drizzle of port-based syrup. We ate it on its own for dinner. Wouldn’t you have done the same thing?

STRAWBERRY MASCARPONE TART w/ PORT GLAZE

Adapted from Andrea Albin's recipe in Gourmet Magazine

I love the wine-y note of the glaze, reminiscent of strawberries with a drizzly of good balsamic vinegar. The crust and no-bake filling are a snap to make.

INGREDIENTS FOR TART SHELL:
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
Rounded 1/4 tsp salt
7 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1 large egg yolk
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
3 tablespoons cold water

INGREDIENTS FOR FILLING:
1 1/2 lb strawberries (about 1 1/2 qt), trimmed and halved lengthwise*
1/3 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup ruby Port
1 lb mascarpone (about 2 cups)
1/4 cup confectioners sugar
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon grated lemon zest
3/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

DIRECTIONS:
1. First, assemble the crust. Blend together flour, sugar, salt, and butter in a bowl with your fingertips or a pastry blender (or pulse in a food processor) just until mixture resembles coarse meal with some roughly pea-size butter lumps. Beat together yolk, vanilla, lemon juice, and water with a fork, then drizzle over flour mixture and stir with fork (or pulse) until mixture comes together.
2. Gently knead with floured hands on a lightly floured surface until a dough forms, then gently knead 4 or 5 times. Press into a 5-inch disk. Place in center of a 10-inch fluted tart pan and cover with plastic wrap. Using your fingers and bottom of a flat-bottomed measuring cup, spread and push dough to evenly cover bottom and side of pan. Prick bottom of tart shell all over with a fork and freeze until firm, about 10 minutes.
3. Preheat oven to 375°F with rack in middle.
4. Line the tart shell with foil and fill with pie weights or dried beans. Bake until side is set and edge is pale golden, about 20 minutes. Carefully remove foil and weights and continue to bake until shell is deep golden all over, about 20 minutes more. Cool in pan, about 45 minutes. This can be done a day ahead, wrapped tightly in plastic wrap and kept at room temperature.
5. Stir together strawberries and granulated sugar in a bowl and let stand, stirring occasionally, 30 minutes. Strain in a sieve set over a small saucepan, reserving berries. Add Port to liquid in saucepan and boil until reduced to about 1/4 cup, 10 to 15 minutes. Transfer to a small bowl to cool slightly.
6. Meanwhile, whisk together mascarpone, confectioners sugar, lemon juice, zest, vanilla, and a pinch of salt until stiff.
7. To assemble the tart, spread mascarpone mixture evenly in cooled tart shell, then top with strawberries. Drizzle Port glaze all over tart.

* If your strawberries are very ripe, like mine, let them sit in the sugar for 10 minutes instead of the 30 called for in this recipe, or else they'll get rather mushy. Or do as I did, reserving half of the strawberries for the sugar to help make the syrup, leaving the others au naturel to be strewn atop the tart just before you drizzle the glaze on top.


Yields 8 servings, best eaten the day it's made.

Madeleines with Orange Flower Water Glaze

In Paris, everyone raves about the delicate, pastel macarons at Laduree. They’re worth a trip halfway around the world, for sure, but if I have the time I prefer to linger in the salon for a cup of café au lait and a mini-kugelhopf. The kugelhopf are just as expertly light as the macarons, but the icing on the cake (literally) is the orange flower water syrup that the kugelhopf are dipped in after they come out of the oven.

As Americans, we certainly love our sweets syrupy (Vanilla Latte, anyone?), but we don’t typically do perfume-y. The French are not shy about floral-accented confections. There’s an alchemical switch that flips when you’re in a strange new place and experiencing a foreign flavor for the first time. This is exactly why I love to travel. If I’d been back at home and taken my first perfumed bite of kugelhopf, perhaps I would have been more quick to dismiss it as something that tasted soapy. Wrapped up in the flutter of a new city, the orange flower water hit as a taste of something distant and new. Something I never would have gotten to experience if I hadn’t come all that way. Now, I can’t even smell the stuff without thinking first of France. It is forever burned in my brain, instant and inextricable.

I bought a bottle of orange flower water at May’s store, Nationale, a month or two ago. I had intended to go home and put it to use immediately, but like most intentions, it was left on the shelf and soon shoved out of sight by a jar of almond butter. I found it last week when I was in need of a staycation. I don’t have a kugelhopf pan (nor did I have the patience that day to work with yeast), but I did recently acquire a madeleine mold. Why quibble over the particulars? It was the orange flower water that I wanted. Yes. 

Orange Flower Water-Glazed Madeleines

Adapted from David Lebowitz’s recipe

This recipe for buttery madeleines is based on one featured in David Lebowitz’s new book (which is a great read, by the way!) and the directions are not to be trifled with, but once you try them, you won’t feel you’ve wasted one minute in their preparation. Some will scoff at his inclusion of baking powder in the batter. Madeleine purists wouldn’t dream of using it, but I like the little humps the pop up as they’re baking, and baking soda is a reliable way of ensuring they rise.

INGREDIENTS FOR THE MADELEINES:
3 large eggs, at room temperature
2/3 cup granulated sugar
1/8 teas. salt, rounded
1 1/4 cup flour
1 teas. baking powder (optional)
1 Tbs. finely grated orange zest
1 teas. orange flower water
9 Tbs. unsalted butter, melted and cooled to room temperature, plus additional melted butter for preparing the molds

INGREDIENTS FOR THE GLAZE:
3/4 cup powdered sugar
1 Tbs. orange flower water
2 Tbs. orange juice

DIRECTIONS:
1. Brush the indentations of a madeleine mold with melted butter. Dust with flour, tap off any excess, and place in the fridge or freezer for at least 30 minutes.
2. In the bowl of a standing electric mixer, whip the eggs, granulated sugar, and salt for 5 minutes until frothy and thickened. Remove the bowl from the stand, and rest on the counter on top of a wet dish towel to help steady the bowl.
3. Using a strainer, sift the flour and baking powder over the wet batter. Using a spatula, fold the flour mixture into the wet batter every so often.
4. Add the orange zest to the cooled butter, then dribble the butter into the batter, a few spoonfuls at a time, while simultaneously folding to incorporate the butter. Fold just until all the butter is incorporated.
5. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour. The batter can be chilled up to 12 hours ahead of baking time.
6. To bake the madeleines, preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
8. Plop enough batter in the center of each indentation to fill it 3/4’s of the way. Don’t spread it around, or else the humps will not rise.
10. Bake for 8-9 minutes or until the cakes just feel set. If you’re using the baking powder, this will take maybe 2 or three extra minutes for the cakes to just feel set.
11. While the cakes are in the oven, make the glaze. Using a whisk, combine the sugar, orange flower water and orange juice in a small bowl until all the sugar is dissolved.
12. Remove from the oven and tilt the madeleines out onto a cooling rack. As soon as they're cool enough to handle, dip each cake in the glaze, turning them over to make sure both sides are coated and scrape off any excess with a dull knife. After dipping, rest each one back on the cooking rack, scalloped side up, until the cakes are cool and the glaze has firmed up.

Yields 24 madeleines. Store uncovered or in a container for up to three days. They’re best when eaten the day they are made.

Garlic Scape Pesto with Basil

I know I must come off as something of a culinary Francophile, but when it comes to everyday eating, I instinctively take a page from the Italian perspective. Pesto is the very best of Italian ingenuity: take something at its peak, like the garlic scapes that make their debut in farmer’s markets and gardens right around now, and do as little as possible to disrupt their already miraculous flavor. What I love about pesto, besides the bare-minimum of effort it requires, is that it tastes like summertime. It’s the verdant color, the anise aroma released by the basil piqued by the subtle heat of garlic. It reminds me of fresh-cut grass in the backyard, or a day at the beach. I can’t always rightfully explain foodie-synergy, but it just isn’t summertime without pesto.

The recipe I use is so easy that it’s likely you already have something similar. It takes 5 minutes to put together, can hold up in the fridge for two to three weeks, and keeps me cooking in the kitchen without having to flip on the stovetop. I can’t think of anything as annoying as toiling over a hot oven when the thermometer hits 90 degrees.

The scape is the tender young stem of the garlic, which eventually straightens and blooms. Unlike the sharp taste of raw garlic cloves, the garlicky-ness of the scape is mild and sweet. There’s a number of ways I like to use them, but my favorite method is to grind them into pesto with a few handfuls of extra-fragrant basil. A few pulses in the food processor, and it’s pesto crostini, pesto in potato salad, pesto on grilled black cod filets, pesto just about everywhere.

Garlic Scape Pesto w/ Basil

This pesto is easy to put together and highlights the sweet, bright garlic flavor of the scapes. When making a pesto, I prefer to make a chunky paste and thin it out as needed (with pasta water and the like). I use it with pasta, salads, or on top of broiled fish. This would also be amazing with parsley in place of the basil.

Ingredients:
2 cups fresh basil leaves, loosely packed
2/3 cup roughly chopped garlic scapes
1 clove garlic, peeled
2 Tbs. pine nuts
2/3 cup grated parmesan cheese
4 Tbs. unsalted butter, softened
2 Tbs. olive oil
pepper, to taste

Directions:
1. In a food processor, roughly chop the basil leaves, pine nuts, garlic scapes and clove. To this mixture, add the parmesan, butter, and olive oil. Pulse until smooth, about 30 seconds. Season with pepper to taste.
2. Yields about 1 1/2 cups of pesto. Store in airtight container in the fridge for up to two weeks, or two months in the freezer.

Hazelnut Sable Cookies w/ Cacao Nibs & Dried Figs

I’m obsessed with the sable cookies that show up with coffee after a meal. At the tail end of a recent LePigeon sojourn, my best friend Rachael and I were presented with a near perfect crème brulee. The bronzed sugar-crust was paper-thin and gave the obligatory snap! when struck by our spoons, giving way to a warm vanilla custard that was simultaneously spicy and not-too-sweet. As if this weren’t already enough, at 10’o’clock on the plate was a demi-tasse of espresso pot-de-crème (restraint is not a word that comes to mind when describing a meal at LePigeon). Everything was great, but I was most elated to see the chocolate wafer beside the pot-de-crème. Actually, I would have been a happy camper with just the cookie. It was perfect: a little bit salty, barely sweet, and most importantly, bite-size. We had just polished off a rabbit-eel terrine and a revelatory duck confit. Did I need another helping of cream on top of all that? No. Just the cookie, please.

I’m always concerned that as I get older I’ll develop some weirdly garish affection for feline art. I’m pretty sure one of the common afflictions is a sudden appreciation of all things tiny. It started when my mother gave me a set of miniature colanders for my birthday and I didn’t shudder, but instead thought “awwww, how cute. TINY!” Strike me down now, almighty! It’s only downhill from here.

This tiny-obsession extends to more than just useless kitchen appliances. I’m infatuated with amuse-bouches. I like itty-bitty egg cocottes. When my old co-workers at Flour were rhapsodizing over the mammoth heart-stopping sticky-buns, I made a point to snap up any of the fruit tartlets that were banished to the mistakes-shelf. My biggest complaint about pastries in Portland isn’t that portions are too small, but that everything from the croissants to the muffins are way too big. Sometimes, I just want a little something sweet. A taste-teaser, if you will.

The recipe for these cookies is a mutation of a citron sable by Clotilde DuSoulier, but it is absolutely my favorite version yet. Last night, I went to a BBQ and towed a batch along for the ride. Think of these as a spiffed-up slice-and-bake take on a Sandie. Hazelnuts, my big weakness, are a natural match with figs and cacao. I love using toasted cacao nibs in place of chocolate because of the added woodsy nuttiness that emerges without sacrificing the chocolate overtones. The chewy figs add a surprising texture to the buttery cookie, acting as the crown on an already jam-packed punch. Of course, the variations here are endless. You could sub in chopped pecans, white chocolate, pistachios, dried cherries or plums. My only rule here is that all good things come in threes.

Hazelnut Sable Cookies 

w/ Cacao Nibs & Dried Figs

Adapted from a recipe by Clotilde Dusoulier

Sable cookies freeze very well, and this recipe’s yield is hefty because I like to bake off about half and save the remaining dough for another day. It comes together quickly in a food processor, or you can go about it more leisurely, mixing everything together in a bowl with a fork. I like a good salty bite to my cookie, but if you’re not a fan of the salty-sweet combo, reduce the salt by half. If you use a food processor, be sure not to add the hazelnuts, cacao, and figs until after the dough has begun to come together, or they’ll get chopped into oblivion.

Ingredients:
2 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
2/3 cup granulated sugar
1 1/2 t.  sea salt
3/4 cup plus 2 Tbs. chilled unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
2 egg yolks
2/3 cup chopped hazelnuts
1/3 cup toasted cacao nibs
1/3 cup chopped dried mission figs

Directions:
1. In a food processor or a large bowl, add the flour, sugar and salt. Pulse or whisk to combine. Add the butter to the dry ingredients, then pulse for 30 seconds or incorporate by hand using a pastry blender. Once the dough has a loose, granular texture, add the egg yolks, chopped hazelnuts, cacao nibs, and dried figs. Pulse or knead on a floured surface until a thick ball of dough forms. If the dough is too dry, add a little bit of ice-cold water, a teaspoon at a time. Conversely, if it is too sticky and pliant, add a tablespoon of flour.
2. On a floured surface, dump out the dough. Knead the dough into a ball, and cut the ball in half. Roll each half into a log, about 1 1/2-inch in diameter. Wrap in parchment paper or plastic wrap and chill in the freezer for at least a half hour.
3. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silpat. Take a log of dough out of the freezer, unwrap, and slice in 1/4-inch rounds with a sharp knife. As you go, rotate the log by a quarter of a turn after each slice. This will help retain a round cookie shape. Place the slices of dough onto the baking sheet, spaced by 1/2 inch.
4. Bake for 10-12 minutes, until the edges turn slightly golden. Transfer to a plate or cooling rack.

Yield: about 3 dozen cookies. Keeps a week in an air-tight container. Dough keeps for a month in the freezer.

*If you're having trouble finding cacao nibs, you can always purchase them through Taza. (Just make sure they're not the chocolate covered ones, although those are very good, too!)