My February contribution to Dessert of the Month Club... the sexiest combo I could think of: dark chocolate + salted caramel

I am determined to work my way through everything on this list.

I think I'm off to a good start considering I've only been here a few months. My favorites:

Lula: I kind of moved to Logan Square to be close to this place. The dinner is a little spendy ($25 entrees) but completely worth it. Brunch is awesome too, if you go early enough to avoid the 1-2 hour wait.

Hot Chocolate: Miss Katie is over there slaving away so you know it's good.

Fox & Obel: They gave me a job. So +2 points for them.

Floriole, Hoosier Mama, and probably some of the others: Grads of my program (along with Mindy of Hot Chocolate and Doug of Hot Doug's), so they need your business to pay off their outrageous student loans.

and then of course there's Alinea, with their $150 tasting menu (and that's the cheap one). I have it on good authority that this place is a "total mindfuck" and maybe I'm a chump but I'M SORRY BUT I JUST HAVE TO GO.

On Friday a bunch of my classmates went to a plated dessert demo here in Chicago...which I am still kicking myself very very hard for missing.

One of the things the chef showed them how to do, and WHY DIDN'T I EVER THINK OF THIS BEFORE, is "roast" (aka caramelize) white chocolate.

Basically you take a bunch of good-quality white chocolate and put it in the oven on a sheet pan covered with parchment... 250 degrees or so. Check and stir it often (every 5-10 minutes) and as the chocolate melts and continues to cook the sugar and milk sugars in there will caramelize and turn a nice golden brown.


hastily-snapped pic of the chocolate in the oven

Then when it's done you can use it wherever you would use white chocolate... temper it and use it for candies, make a ganache, etc. It tastes like a very sweet caramel, maybe a little much by itself but I bet you could find some tasty things to pair it with to tone down the sweetness. David Lebovitz has a fabulous blog post about making it, if you want more in-depth explanation.

I'd been wanting to go to Hot Doug's since I got here, but somehow had never gotten around to it. Lots of things suddenly seem pressing when you have piles of work staring you in the face, though, and so at about 3:00 on Saturday, when Rosy and I were sick of staring at our computers, we decided we couldn't go another day not having eaten there.

For those of you who don't know, Hot Doug's is sort of the ultimate in Chicago hole-in-the-wall places...a tiny place in a rando building on California that serves fancified hot dogs. It's particularly famous for having a foie gras hot dog, which was on the Chicago episode of No Reservations and which also got Doug a nice fine (or so I hear) for continuing to serve it when the city outlawed foie gras a while back.

Anyway. I don't really eat meat but my food curiosity usually trumps my pseudo-vegetarian-pescatarian-whateverism, and besides they have a veggie dog, so we got in line to wait. (The line on Fridays and Saturdays, when they have duck fat fries, usually snakes around the block.)

And we waited. And we waited. Dudes, if you're trying to check out this place, wait until it is above freezing at least. Waiting outside for an hour when it is freaking fifteen degrees outside is miserable and pointless (duh, I guess, but you know, once we had committed...). Go in the spring, go on a weekday (the duck fat fries aren't anything special in my opinion), go prepared for an unimaginable level of food coma, and you will leave satisfied.

But take your vegetarian friends to Earwax, for god's sake, that veggie dog was a piece of rubber.




I can't believe I'm admitting I ate this... "saucisson alsacienne": sausage with grilled onions, creme fraiche, and camembert.


Duck fat fries... meh.

I am probably the last person on Earth to try these (much like I only discover bands 6 months to a year after everyone else), but if by chance you have not had the following parties in your mouth, you need to change that:

UMEBOSHI
Japanese pickled plums, salty and sour. I had heard of these as health food tonic (an umeboshi a day! good for your liver! cleans out toxins!) but had never actually EATEN one until the other day. My very smart friend Rosy tells me these are a traditional filling for onigiri. I had the paste wrapped with cucumber in a maki roll and it pickled my mouth, which I mean in the best way possible.

CARMENERE
A varietal they thought was wiped out by some plague or another, til everyone was like, HEY WHY IS THIS MERLOT FROM CHILE SO GOOOOOD? and some scientist was like, HEY DUDES IT'S NOT MERLOT, IT'S THIS 200 YEAR OLD VARIETY OF GRAPE NO ONE THOUGHT EXISTED ANYMORE. If you're trying to buy some, I like Root 1 because their label has a rad design (aside from the small caps) and it's tasty and under 15 bucks.



I will be enjoying these flavors while listening to Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, xx, and other albums which hip people are already bored with.

I realize I haven't reported anything on school since it started last week-- in part because after a full day of making things and then another couple of hours working on my food portfolio, I'm pretty much over whatever recipes we've been working on; but also because I'm growing new eyes for this stuff but not the skills to match them yet. And now when I look at the pictures of my imperfect cakes I start getting that twitchy feeling that was previously reserved for really poorly kerned type or crooked picture frames.

Pastry chefs have a reputation for being the weird, neurotic, perfectionist OCD types of the culinary world (not unlike, say, graphic designers...ahem). And while it's been pretty obvious since birth that I lean towards this personality, erm, quirk, judging by the number of pep talks my chefs have had to give my class on the subject of "don't give yourself a coronary, you'll get it eventually," it's not just me who wants to flip the table when the chocolate seizes.

So it is with great restraint that I don't delete pictures of things that haven't come out perfectly. And if you promise not to judge my heavy-handed caramel application or my inconsistent rosettes or the piece of cooked egg that ended up in my creme anglaise... I'll share a few things we've been working on:


The beginnings of a strawberry cake with vanilla bavarian cream


Dobos torte (five layers of sponge cake with chocolate buttercream, topped with a final layer covered with caramel and cut into triangles)


Strawberry charlotte

PS: if you know anyone in Chicago that likes cake, send them my way. Seriously. Jesus. I need to get rid of all this cake.

The best thing about living in Chicago is that there is always an opportunity to do my two favorite things in life: complain about the weather; and talk about food.

Other people here love this as much as I do. They love it so much that they host indoor farmer's markets all over the city in winter so they can gather to talk about horrible, horrible weather and delicious, delicious food AT THE SAME TIME.

It was at one of these markets that I met Kris Swanberg who makes nicecream, awesome local handcrafted ice cream made in small batches with organic ingredients.

Backstory: I like to stalk the people who sell baked goods and desserts at farmer's markets and submit them to the following: "YOU MAKE SWEETS! I LIKE SWEETS! I QUIT MY JOB TO GO TO PASTRY SCHOOL AND NOW I MAKE SWEETS TOO! HOW DID YOU GET STARTED MAKING SWEETS? DID I MENTION I GO TO SCHOOL AND MAKE SWEETS?"

Usually they're very nice and polite and talkative and put up with me; sometimes it's a little more like, hey lady, you're eating all my samples.

Kris was the former, so while I ate up all her free ice cream we chatted about how she got started. She offered to show me a little about making ice cream, I offered my free labor, and a few weeks later I was separating eggs in the kitchen space she rents from a nearby bakery, where we cooked custard and talked about office jobs and school and earl grey ice cream.

So long story short, I have yet another dessert addiction which brings my total daily consumption of sugar up to, oh, 100% or so.

If you live in Chicago you can buy nicecream at the Green Grocer, Provenance Food & Wine, the Dill Pickle, and lots of farmer's markets around. My favorite is the cinnamon and spice, it's got just a little cayenne or something in there and it's soooo delicious. Plus I helped make it :)