Simple Chocolate Truffles

This is Pierre Hermé's "black-on-black" truffles recipe. It's simple, it's delicious. What more can you ask for in a chocolate recipe? I have to warn you, though, that making truffles is a messy task. But I can assure you that it's absolutely worth it! Try making them once and believe me, you won't return to the truffles that have months as their shelf-life. You might not be able to stay away from your favorite local chocolatier(s) but those mass-produced, preservatives-laden ones? Forget it!

INGREDIENTS:

Make about 3 dozens

9 oz/260 g good quality bittersweet chocolate (Valrhona Caraïbe recommended), finely chopped

1 cup/250 g heavy whipping cream

3 Tbs/50 g unsalted butter, cut into 4 pieces, at room temperature (it is important to have butter at room temperature)

Good quality Dutch-processed cocoa powder 

METHOD:

Put the chopped chocolate in a heatproof bowl large enough to hold all the ingredients. Make a well in the middle.

In a sauce pan, bring the cream to a full boil, then pour the hot cream into the center of the chocolate. If there is a skin on top of the cream, strain the cream through a fine mesh. Use a flexible rubber spatula to gently stir the cream into the chocolate in concentric circles increasing in size until the ganache is smooth. Let it rest for a minute.

Add the butter piece by piece, stir gently to blend, make sure each has completely integrated before the next one is added. 

Put the ganache in the refrigerator. When it is cool, cover with plastic wrap and chill for at least 3 hours. It can stay chilled overnight.

Put a generous amount of cocoa powder into a bowl. Sift the powder if you see lumps. Place a sheet of parchment/waxed paper on a baking sheet. Scoop about a tablespoonful of the chilled ganache for each truffle, put the dollops on the lined baking sheet. I used a small ice cream scoop for ease but you could just use a spoon.

Dust the palms of your hands with cocoa powder and roll the mounds of ganache between your palms to form rounds. There's no need to make them perfectly spherical, they could be edgy just the way truffles the mushrooms are. Drop each ball into the cocoa powder, roll it around so that it is well coated and then gently toss it between your palm to shake off the excess powder. Once it is finished, return it to the lined sheet. 

This is how they look like, in various stages of doneness:

I made these using Valrhona Caraïbe but with Guittard cocoa rouge so they look a little, well, rouge.

The truffles can be served as soon as they are made or they can be stored in the refrigerator for a day or two, covered and away from food with strong odors. I find that a tin can/box lined with parchment/waxed paper is perfect to keep these.

You could play with adding your favorite kind of pepper powder or finely chopped candied orange peels, or some liquor (adjust the amount of cream to accommodate the extra liquid), or steep peppercorns in the cream before adding the strained cream to the chocolate (PH has a recipe using Sichuan peppercorns). The choices are endless, well, sort of! Have fun making them by yourselves, or with friends and family!

Molten Chocolate Cake

a.k.a Chocolate Lava Cake. This is an extremely quick and easy dessert to make. What's even better is that it's one of those recipes that work for small family, i.e. of size 2. Or if you live by yourself, you can make the batter, bake one, and keep the other for the following day. One last thing, it's sure to please. Well, if a non-vegan is not pleased, you definitely need to check if that person needs Zoloft (or something along that line) instead!

INGREDIENTS:

2 servings

1 egg

1 egg yolk

2 oz chopped good bittersweet chocolate*

2 Tsp sugar

2 Tsp butter, and more softened butter

1 Tsp all-purpose flour

Cocoa powder

Pinch of fine sea salt

*If you can afford, use something like Valrhona. I can't so I settle for Callebaut. 

METHOD:

Preheat the oven to 450ºF.

Mix the flour and salt together.

Grease 2 5- to 6-oz (or 3 4-oz ones)ramekins with softened butter. (Greasing well will ensure your cakes invert easily later.) Coat with the cocoa powder, tap out the excess. You could also use good old all-purpose flour but the cakes will have some white flour spots later. If you are going to sprinkle powdered sugar over your cakes anyway then it really doesn't matter.

In a medium bowl over simmering water, melt the chocolate and butter. Let cool.

In another medium bowl, whisk the egg and egg yolk and sugar until the mixture just turns pale. Add the melted chocolate and butter, mix well. Fold in the flour.

Divide the batter equally between the ramekins. Place the ramekins on a baking sheet and bake for 8-9 minutes, until the outside third is set but the middle two-thirds is still jiggly. You might have to experiment with your oven temperature and baking time as oven temperatures can vary greatly and 30s more could wreck the whole thing. Well, that's an exaggeration, you will still have some chocolate cakes. What you won't get is the oozing goodness. 

Cool the ramekins on a rack for a few minutes. Invert onto plates and serve immediately with vanilla ice cream and some berries, or just powdered sugar, or whatever you fancy. If you do decide to serve with ice cream, let the cake cool down a bit more or it will melt your ice cream very very quickly. But it's hard to wait. I can never be patient enough to wait (hence the messy picture below) knowing what I will get spooning into that small little cake!

Here's what I had:

I served mine over a candied orange wheel and raspberry sauce, topped with ice cream. And please please pardon the terrible sugar decoration, it was a rushed experiment.

The batter can be kept in the refrigerator for up to a day. In that case, let them cool down to room temperature before baking.

Dry Wonton Mee

I can't remember when I first ate this dish. It's probably during my third year in Singapore (we were so poor my friends and I rarely ever ate out during our first two years there). I think I ate it at my school's canteen. NJC's canteen had a few of my favorite dishes and I always got them whenever I managed to get down quickly enough before a long line formed. The left most store served fried hokkien mee on Tuesdays and Thursdays (I think), and the right most store had briyani (whose name I asked my roommate multiple times before I got it) on Fridays. Of course there's always yong tau foo with its forever long line and the noodles store where I could get wonton mee, or sometimes mee pok. 

The concept of dry wonton noodles had been foreign to me. There are places in my hometown that serve wonton noodles too but they were always the soupy type, perhaps because the weather was always cool enough for a bowl of piping hot noodles. Well, I don't know since when this has been one of my favorite dishes to eat. Now, I make it sometimes, trying to duplicate the taste but sometimes I'm more successful than others. And knowing me, when I felt that it's close enough, I was too lazy to put down the list of ingredients that I put in and so I later forgot about it. Those were pre-this-blog days of course. Now, I try to pay attention to what I use, and how much so that I could share with you all. (I'm amazed by my generosity sometimes.)

So here it is:

INGREDIENTS:

2 servings 

2 bundles of wonton noodles (I particularly like one brand that's only sold at a Viet grocery store here) 

12 round wonton wrappers*

6 large shrimps (or about 1/2 per wonton)

3 oz ground pork

2 Tsp chopped chives

1 large clove of garlic, finely chopped

1 Tsp finely diced fresh water chestnuts (or jicama)

1.5 Tsp soy paste**

1 tsp corn starch

Baby bok choy

2.5 cups homemade (or low-sodium) chicken broth

Spring onion, for garnish

2 Tsp vegetable oil

2 tsp ketchup

Hot sauce (to taste)

3 tsp soy sauce

1 tsp oyster sauce

1 tsp soy paste

*These are sold in hundreds (I think) so I normally freeze them and put them out to thaw about 1.5h before I wrap them. You might want to freeze them in small portions if you don't have a family of 10.

**You might wonder if soy sauce is a good substitute. Well, I think soy paste works better because it's less liquidy, and also tastes different.

METHOD:

Clean the shrimps, chop into small pieces, mix with the corn starch and some soy paste. Set aside. At this point, you probably wonder why corn starch is used here. Well, this is how my friend's mom has always made her wontons. Later on, I read somewhere that the corn starch creates a high pH environment which gives the shrimps the "springy" feel just like when you order them at restaurants. Neat huh?

Mix the ground pork, chopped water chestnuts, chives, and garlic. Add freshly ground black pepper and the remaining soy paste. Mix well. 

Scoop about a Tsp of the pork mixture onto a wonton wrapper, add shrimps, wet the edge with water and seal from one side to the other, make sure no air bubbles are trapped.

Bring water to a boil in a tall sauce pan. Blanch the bok choy (these leaves cook very quickly). Remove. Add the wontons and cook for about 5-7 minutes in boiling water. During the last 2 minutes, use a noodle strainer to blanch the wonton noodles. Note that the blanching time varies, depending on what type you get so make sure you check. Remove the noodles when they are al dente. Strain all the water away. Remove the cooked wontons.

Meanwhile, warm the chicken broth. In a bowl, add 1/3 cup of the broth and the last 6 ingredients. Mix well. Add the strained noodles and toss. Season the remaining broth, divide into 2 small bowls, top with chopped spring onion.

Place the noodles on a plate, arrange the wontons and bok choy around it. Serve with the bowl of broth on the side. 

And in the words of Alton Brown, "I bid you good eats!"

Bún Thang

I am at a loss as to how to translate the name of this dish. Bún is basically the general term for any type of round rice noodles, but I actually don't know what thang means. What I know, though, is that this dish originates from the Hanoi. I once had it there but I remembered not liking it at all. So I was very skeptical the summer before last when my friend's mom said that this dish would be on the menu when I visited. To be honest, I was hoping there would be something else I could eat. (I didn't say anything though, that would be too rude.) But as it turned out, I was pleasantly surprised! So I asked for the recipe and what I got was a list of ingredients. Yeah, that's how it works, no measuring, just the experience of making a dish multiple times. 

This dish, unlike phở or bún bò, does not have a lot of herbs or spices so it relies solely on the broth. This means if you are going to make it and you have no time to make a good one, just don't bother making it. Also, the not-so-great feature of this dish is that it does not have vegetables. Some people serve this along with bean sprouts but I don't think the original version has them. It's just a bowl of noodle soup for you to gulp down.

Since last summer, I have tried to duplicate this dish twice but I still don't have precise measurements yet so this really is just a rough guide.

INGREDIENTS:

6 servings

2 lb pork bones

1 boned-in skinless chicken breast

2 oz dried shrimps
2 eggs, beaten
3-4 oz pork roll (available at Viet stores)
1 large yellow onion
1 piece of ginger
1 medium dried squid
Small round rice noodles
Vietnamese mint
Mắm tôm - shrimp paste

METHOD:
Warning: The shrimp paste has a very very pungent aroma. It smells much worse than fish sauce to unaccustomed nostrils but completely mouth-watering to the accustomed ones ;).

Trim the chicken breast to remove as much fat as possible.

Broil the onion and ginger.

Grill the dried squid. It's best to do this over charcoal fire but since I live in an apartment, I use methanol gel instead.

Soak the dried shrimps in warm water for about half an hour.

Bring water to a boil, add the pork bones and bring the water back to a boil for about 3min. Pour the water out, rinse the bones carefully with cold water before returning them back to the pot together with cold water. Bring to a boil for about 5 min and reduce heat, let the bones simmer for about 2h. Use a fine mesh to remove the gunk floating to the top while cooking. In the last half an hour, add the chicken breast, the grilled squid, and the broiled onion and ginger to the pot, cook till the chicken is done. Drain the shrimp water into the broth pot. Season with salt to a somewhat undersalted side if you are willing to try the shrimp paste. Remove the chicken breast, let cool.

Discard the bones, keep the broth. Pork bones tend to have high fat content so what I normally do is make the broth, cool it in the refrigerator overnight so that all the fat solidifies and floats to the top. I then strain then broth through a fine mesh/cheese cloth to remove the fat so I end up with a nice broth without having to consume all the fat.

Bring water to a boil in a different pot, add the noodles and cook for about 3min. Rinse with cold water to stop the cooking and let drain.

Shred the chicken.

Grind the dried shrimp using a pestle and mortar. The texture is better this way but if you are lazy, a food processor does an okay job.

Cut the pork roll into fine strips.

Season the beaten eggs with some salt and pepper, then make the thinnest "omelet" possible. Let cool, roll it up and cut into very thin strips.

Chop the mint finely.

Assemble the bowl: place chicken, shrimp, pork, eggs, and chopped mint over the noodles. For an aesthetic effect, place them in a way that creates color contrast. Carefully ladle the boiling broth over the noodle, serve with some shrimp paste. This is perfect for a cold day!!!

Chicken Drumsticks with Asian Bbq Sauce

This is one of the recipes I keep for those lazy days or when I'm kinda sick of having rice for dinner so I will make this and a salad to accompany it. The problem is that every time I make it, it tastes slightly different because I can't remember what I put in it the previous time. Basically, the sauce is a combination of many different kinds of sauces I have in my kitchen. That said, what I'm going to write down is simply a rough recipe. Go ahead and try it and let me know what you think.

INGREDIENTS:

For about 4 drumsticks

2 Tsp oil

1 tsp five spice

1 tsp each of oyster, worstershire, and terriyaki sauces

1 Tsp hoisin sauce

1.5 tsp sambal oelek (more if you like heat in your food)

1 tsp jam of any kind (I like raspberry)

1 Tsp tarmarind concentrate (found at any Asian grocery store)

2 Tsp chicken stock

1 clove garlic

1 tsp finely minced ginger

Toasted sesame seeds

METHOD:

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Line a baking sheet with aluminum/aluminium foil (unless you absolutely love washing it afterward). Coat the drumstick with the mixture of oil and five spice powder and place them on the sheet. Bake for about 35-40 min, flip the drumsticks half way through.

Meanwhile, blend the rest of the ingredients and cook over low-medium heat until the sauce thickens. If you have too much to worry about, just mix the ingredients together and skip the cooking part altogether. The downside is that garlic burns very easily so you should be careful.

When the chicken is cooked, remove from the sheet, discard the juice. Line the sheet with aluminum foil once again. Arrange the cooked chicken, and brush with the sauce. Broil for about 5-8 minutes till the skin is crispy. Turn twice and add more sauce if necessary.

Remove the chicken drumsticks, toss them in the sauce before rolling over the sesame seeds. Enjoy!