Cooking Club 21st July 2011

To greet us on this cooking day were some lovely pistachio and chocolate macarons. A macaron is a meringue based sweet biscuit made from egg whites, icing sugar, sugar and ground almonds. The perfect macaron should have a smooth domed top, ruffled edge or foot and a flat base. It should be crisp on the outside, moist in the middle and melt in your mouth. In this recipe, which can be found at,

 http://www.masterchef.com.au/pistachio-and-chocolate-macarons.htm the almond meal is replaced with ground pistachio nuts. Once you have piped the mixture onto baking trays it is important to let the macarons stand for about an hour, or until they form a skin, before baking them. After a few attempts at cooking the macarons it was a decided a slower oven for a longer period of time worked better than the suggested 170 degrees for 10 minutes.The chocolate ganache was "yummo" and the white chocolate adaptation with vanilla bean seeds was even better!
Even though not all of the macarons rose as well as they should have and some were a little over cooked they were still very tasty and I think this would be a great recipe once you perfected the cooking times.

Main course today was salt baked chicken with potato aioli and potato ravioli with braised leeks. Both of these dishes are found at the following links http://www.masterchef.com.au/salt-baked-chicken-with-hay.htm
http://www.masterchef.com.au/potato-ravioli-with-braised-leeks-and-potato-crisp.htm We didn't make all the components in these recipes.
To make the salt crust you combine table salt, rock salt, plain flour (however we only had wholemeal flour), egg whites and water. The dough is rolled into a circular shape and topped with a handful of hay. The chicken cavity is seasoned with salt and stuffed with lemon wedges and thyme before being placed on the hay. The recipe removes the legs and wing tips and uses the legs to make a chicken thigh roll, so we also removed them as we thought it would make it easier to encase the chicken in the crust.

The dough is folded over the chicken and stretched and pinched together until the whole bird is totally enclosed and all gaps are sealed. This was the hardest part of the recipe as the hay kept poking through and making holes in the dough. Possibly the wholemeal flour was to blame for this and our hay was quite thick and coarse as well. The rock salt also seemed to break holes in the dough and I think next time I would just use table salt. We ended up making a second lot of dough so we could fully enclose the chicken.

Finally we had our chicken enclosed and it was into the oven for 40 minutes and then it was left to rest for 10 minutes.

It was a little scary cutting the crust open and wondering if the chicken would be cooked through. The outside meat was fine but the inner pieces did need a bit longer in the oven, this may have been partially because of the thicker crust but in any case I would cook a little longer than 40 minutes if I made it again.

To make the aioli you roasted some garlic, boiled some potatoes until tender and then blended the two together with some egg yolks. Next you slowly added olive oil and vegetable oil and then seasoned with lemon juice and salt and pepper. To taste on its own I found the aioli quite oily in flavour however it worked really well when served with the chicken. The chicken meat was incredibly tender but did not have as much flavour as I thought it might. Of course you also don't get any crispy skin as you would when you bake it.

To make the filling for the potato ravioli you need to bake whole potatoes on a bed of rock salt. You then mash the flesh with some olive oil and salt and set aside. The green colour of the pasta comes from chlorophyll, which is the green pigment found in most plants. To get the chlorophyll for this recipe you blend together spinach and parsley with a little water and some salt. You then boil the puree, skim the green chlorophyll from the top and strain it through a muslin cloth into a bowl which is sitting in a second bowl full of ice. By cooling the mixture quickly you keep the wonderful green colour and prevent it turning brown.
The pasta dough is made from flour, eggs, olive oil, chlorophyll and salt.
To assemble the ravioli you roll the pasta out using a pasta maker, cut into squares, place a thin slice of par boiled potato on the base, pipe some mashed potato on top, place another pasta sheet over the top and enclose the edges well. We added some smoked salmon to some of the ravioli as well to try something different.
The braised leeks are made by cooking diced leeks in melted butter with thyme and salt until softened and then adding chicken stock and cooking until very tender.
You cook the ravioli in rapidly boiling water for 3-5 minutes and serve them on a bed of leeks topped with grated parmesan.
The ravioli was tasty but would be hard to make for more than 4 people as it needs to be cooked in small batches and then served straight away to stop the pasta getting tough. The recipe also has a potato crisp which we didn't make as you needed a potato turner, which we didn't have, to make potato "spaghetti".

For dessert we made a delicious soft hearted chocolate pudding with raspberry cream which can be found at http://www.masterchef.com.au/soft-hearted-chocolate-pudding-with-raspberry-cream-and-honeycomb-chunks.htm We didn't make the raspberry essence or honeycomb. The puddings were made from melted butter and good quality dark chocolate combined with eggs, egg yolks, sugar, vanilla and flour. The batter is cooked in individual ramekins until they are set but still wobbly in the middle. To make the raspberry cream you combine thickened cream, crushed raspberries and icing sugar. To serve you turn the puddings out onto a plate, sprinkle with icing sugar and serve with the raspberry cream. This was a very yummy dessert.
Today was a great cooking day and it was great to try some new ideas.