Poulet poché sauce Suprême (Whole poached chicken served with a white creamy sauce)

Sauce suprême. Sounds hard. It’s not. It’s basically a velouté with cream. I already learned about velouté when I made Sole Dieppoise. All I needed now was cream.
After 40+ cups of stock lately, I feel like a pro, and that’s basically how this recipe starts. I put a whole chicken in a pot to poach, along with the regular aromatics (carrots, onion studded with clove, and a Bouquet Garni). The stock from the poaching is used in the sauce.

To start the sauce for the chicken, you make a blond roux, which is a butter and flour mixture cooked just long enough to eliminate the taste of raw flour without coloring the mixture. Then, the stock is added and cooked until smooth and flavorful. Finally, the cream is added and brought to a simmer. A bit of salt and pepper round out the sauce. Some Suprême sauces also have mushrooms, which I think would be a great addition.

Recipe

from Le Cordon Bleu at Home

For the chicken and stock:
1 4½ pound whole chicken
2 medium onions, each studded with a clove
about 2 carrots, chopped
1 Bouquet Garni
salt and pepper
water to cover

For the sauce:
2 tablespoons butter
¼ cup flour
2½ cups chicken stock
1 cup heavy cream
salt and pepper

In a large soup pot, put the chicken, onions, carrots, and Bouquet Garni. Cover with water. Bring to a simmer and skim. Simmer for about 1½ hours. Remove the chicken and tent while you make the sauce.

For the sauce, melt the butter. Add the flour and cook for 1-2 minutes. Slowly stir in the stock and whisk until smooth. Simmer for about 15 minutes. Then, slowly add the cream, and bring to a simmer. Simmer for another 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

Tasting Notes
This is a basic dish for supper. I had to add a lot of salt and pepper to make this dish flavorful. Poached chicken, as well, doesn’t have much flavor, but the stock it poaches in does. This makes the sauce critical. Next time, I would like to try it with mushrooms.

. . . . . . . . . .

Running total: $408.23 + $22.96 = $431.19

Butter used so far: 4 pounds, 32 tablespoons

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Tuesdays with Dorie—Florida Pie

Florida is famous for its key lime pie, and in 2006 it became the official state pie. Key limes were grown in Florida before a hurricane in 1926 wiped out the crop. Now, key limes come from Mexico and a more hardy Persian lime is grown in Florida.

Key limes are smaller and more tart than regular limes. They have a lighter and thinner green skin (yellow when ripe) than the more common lime. Here’s a link to a picture of a ripe key lime with two Persian limes.

Since key limes are so small, they don’t have much juice. This means you have to squeeze a lot of key limes to get 1 cup of juice! Thankfully, I have a food processor!


Bottom
Although some key lime pies use a pastry crust, Dorie’s recipe calls for a graham cracker one. What could be simpler? She even suggests buying one, but since they’re so simple to make, I wanted to make a homemade version.

On top of the crust is a layer of coconut and cream that’s been reduced to a delicious syrup. I’m a coconut fan, so the more coconut in a dessert, the better! A long time ago, I travelled to Papua New Guinea and visited a small island off the coast of Madang where a young school boy shimmied up a tall coconut tree in his barefeet to retrieve a fresh coconut as a snack for us to enjoy. It was the best tasting coconut I’ve ever had.

Middle
Three ingredients make up the key lime part of this dessert: sweetened condensed milk, lime juice, and egg yolks.

History says that there were no cows in Key West in the good ol’ days, so canned milk was the only dairy product available. Evaporated milk is not the same as sweetened condensed milk‑the key word being “sweet”. In both, water is removed from the milk. But, about 40% of sweetened condensed milk is sugar. It is a thick, yellowish color often used in caramel, toffee, and fudge (and Dulce de Leche).

Top
A Swiss meringue with coconut folded in converts this tart into a pie (a tart is topless!). Sometimes whipped cream is used instead, and is so much easier than the fickle meringue.

This Swiss type of meringue is characterized by heating the egg whites and sugar on the stove to melt the sugar and then whisking with a mixer until cool and doubled in volume. When you heat the eggs on the stove, you must constantly whisk them so that you don’t get sugary, scrambled eggs (as I did in attempt #1). Also, you should take the eggs off the heat when they reach 130˚F (or as Dorie says “hot to the touch”). Meringue is best put on your pie as soon as the pie is cool. Meringue waits for no one and will separate if ignored (as I found out with attempt #2).

After finally getting some meringue on these mini pies, I threw them into the freezer, melted some chocolate, and then dipped the frozen pies into the chocolate (à la Dairy Queen). Adding more sweetness to this already sweet dessert seemed like a good idea, and one that might make it more like the Mounds bar Dorie talks about in her introduction to the recipe! You could also brush the bottom of the crust with chocolate instead, but you’d miss out on the photo opportunity!

Playing around: Dulce de Leche
In my reading, I found out that the popular Dulce de Leche that keeps popping up in posts from food bloggers is actually sweetened condensed milk that’s been cooked for hours to form an even sweeter milk that’s caramel-like. I was able to find a jar of Dulce de Leche at my local grocery store, but I also wanted to try making it. It didn’t sound hard. Just put an unopened can of sweetened condensed milk into a pot of water, cover the can with 3-4 inches so that it’s completely submerged, and boil for 4 hours, making sure the water always covers it so that it doesn’t explode! Then, cool on a rack. Sounds easy enough.

The homemade version was thicker and not as sticky as the store-bought one. It had a nicer, nuttier, full flavor. I then tried replacing the sweetened condensed milk with the Dulce de Leche in this Florida Pie, and it turned out great. Tart and sweet all at once.

I also crushed chocolate covered wafers for the crust instead of using a graham cracker crust.


Topped with whipped cream (because I wasn’t about to attempt meringue #4) and some flaked, toasted coconut, and it was ready to be served to the sweetest tooth in town.

Recipe

You can find the recipe for Florida Pie at this blog Dianne’s Dishes or in the book Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan. To see how the rest of the TWD group fared with this week's recipe, click here and then click on each blogger!

Tasting Notes
This is another sweet dessert, but the tartness of the key limes is a welcome reprieve. The Dulce de Leche version was good too--sweeter and more tangy. Another winning recipe from Dorie.

Recipe for Next Week (May 20)
Traditional Madeleines on pages 166-168 chosen by Tara of Smells Like Home.

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The Most Extraordinary Fresh Limeade

Weekends are a time to kick back, sit on the deck, and sip some lemonade or limeade with friends and family.

The only hard part about this drink is squeezing the juice from the limes. This time, I used key limes which have about a teaspoon of juice in each, so I was squeezing for awhile. You could also use lemons or regular Persian limes.

Key limes are smaller than regular limes. They are a lighter green (yellow when ripe), thinner-skinned, and more tart than a regular lime.

Key lime, Meyer lemon, Regular lemon tower

Recipe for The Most Extraordinary Fresh Limeade

2 cups water
1 cup sugar
1 cup lime juice (or lemon juice), freshly squeezed

Melt water and sugar until it boils. Remove from heat and cool. Stir in the freshly squeezed lime juice. Chill.

In a glass, pour 1 cup lime juice mixture and 1 cup water. Serve with ice.

Happy Mother’s Day!

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Sauce tomate (Tomato sauce)

This class of stocks and sauces has taken me so long to get through. But, this is the last sauce for this class, and I’m ready to try using these stocks in more sauces in the coming weeks.

I made a tomato sauce earlier, called Portugaise sauce. I’m still not sure what a Portugaise sauce is, so if any of you readers can help me out, I’d appreciate it. Here is a slightly different tomato sauce using four different types of tomatoes: red, orange, yellow, and black.

Black tomatoes, which range in color from dark purple, deep brown, and bluish-brown, date back to the early 19th century, come from the southern Ukraine, and have a sweet flavor. I also used some red, orange, and yellow tomatoes in this sauce for variety.

Watch a Pro
Here's a video of Giada de Laurentiis making tomato sauce.

Recipe

from Le Cordon Bleu at Home

Serves 4

Prepare the tomatoes concassée (score, core, blanch, peel, de-seed, and chop).

Prepare a Bouquet Garni. Mince the shallots and garlic.

Melt the butter and sauté that shallots for a minute or two. Add the minced garlic and cook for about 1 minute making sure it doesn’t burn. Add the diced tomatoes and the Bouquet Garni. Cook down for a bit. Season with salt and pepper. Serve with pasta.

Tasting Notes
This tomato sauce is delicious, and only gets better with time. We had it with pasta, and everyone enjoyed it. It tastes fresh and garlicy. Definitely a keeper recipe.

. . . . . . . . . .

Running total: $403.81 + $4.42 = $408.23

Butter used so far: 4 pounds, 30 tablespoons

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Yesterday Rocked!

First, an award
I am so pleased to have won my first DMBLGIT (Does My Blog Look Good In It) award. It was hosted by Sara of Ms. Adventures in Italy and judged by Sara and some other amazing bloggers: Helen of Tartelette, Robyn of The Girl Who Ate Everything, Sara of The Kitchen Pantry, and Susan of Food Blogga.

For Originality

What is DMBLGIT? Jennifer of Bake or Break describes it as a friendly monthly competition among food bloggers. Each food blogger can submit one picture from their blog for the given month. All of those pictures are reviewed by a panel of judges, who score each picture in three categories: edibility, aesthetics, and originality. The host then compiles the scores to determine the winners. There are three overall winners for those photos with the highest point totals in all three categories combined. Also, there are winners in each of the three categories.

Check out all the winners and entries here. I feel honoured to be in the company of such amazing food bloggers and photographers.

Next month’s DMBLGIT is being hosted by Habeas Brulee. To find out more about DMBLGIT, check out this site.

Second, a milestone
Yesterday, I also had my 10,000th visitor. At the time, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to find out who it was, but through the amazing technology of Statcounter and the coincidence of someone to leave a comment around that time (albeit in their own blog responding to a comment I had left!), I was able to determine it was the Food Rockz Man from a very cool blog called Food Rockz. I will be sending along a little box of treats as a thank you. I’ve only been food blogging since January, but I’ve been obsessed with food for a lot longer than that! Food does rock.

Happy blogging!

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