Culinarion:
Hot Oven
If I’m a bit worn out today, it’s because I spent yesterday in the kitchen, making a batch of tomato soup, a boeuf à la bourguignonne, and a dozen dinner rolls. Actually, I wish I knew a recipe the yielded a dozen dinner rolls, but I’ve never seen one; most yield about two dozen, which is far too many. My solution yesterday was to make a loaf from half of the dough. And what do you know? The result is much more like the better store-bought sandwich bread than anything I’ve ever made. Is it the egg? The buttermilk? Interestingly, it takes on a slightly funny flavor when toasted. And using the tall and narrow loaf pan was a mistake. This is bread that wants to be squat.
As for the boeuf… The Creuset dutch oven had been in the oven for about forty minutes when it struck me that the kitchen was too hot. I took out the stew and was dismayed to see that it was boiling. I turned the oven down, from 325º to 300º, just to jigger the thermostat spring, which evidently hadn’t budged when I’d lowered the temperature from 450º. (The 450º setting was for an eight-minute searing of the browned, flour-dusted stew meat.) Of all the times for the oven to fritz out! Happily, I was there and I caught it. But at the end of the cooking time, the results, if not nearly as dire as Julie Powell’s (in Julie & Julia), were pretty dry. What ought to have been 2½ cups of sauce came to just over half of a cup. My improvisation was to stir in a lot of beef broth and about a half cup of cream into the sauce, and boil it down. Reduced, this amplified sauce tasted good but wasn’t very thick. Nevertheless, I decided that I’d fiddled with it enough. The pearl onions and the mushrooms, cooked separately, brightened the stew’s flavor, but the meat — well, there’s no doubting that that meat has been stewed.
The tomato soup remains to be puréed. After spinning in the Cuisinart for four minutes, batches of the soup are pressed through a chinois. I’ll get to it tomorrow… or maybe the next day.