Blowfish on Bay Celebrates Its First Birthday

Boy, it's tough to figure out this sustainable seafood thing! I've just spent half an hour surfing the Monterey Bay Aquarium's SeafoodWatch site trying to figure out whether I feel good about saying I think the sushi at Blowfish is very, very nice.

I was there tonight for a one-year anniversary party (i.e. a PR event), and my shortest answer to my own question is: well, sort of. A lot of the traditional sushi fish, like hamachi (yellowtail), are generally off the sustainable menu board. Blowfish serves hamachi, but they also serve the less common and much more sustainable hiramasa (yellowtail kingfish).

Their Albacore tuna comes from BC, which makes it a recommended choice. I'd have to ask a lot more questions – not possible at the crowded event I just attended – in order to find out whether their salmon and various other menu items are saintly or sinful. Since it's so very hard to know, perhaps I should simply say what I thought of the food and recommend that prospective diners take along a smartphone equipped with the SeafoodWatch app (available for Android and iPhone) to help them choose the most sustainable items on the menu.

There are two Blowfish outlets. The one on King Street (as I was told by a better-informed guest) is more for pre-club noshing, while the 333 Bay Street location caters to the after-work bank-and-business crowd. It's a place to be seen, and they have a fancy cocktail list. I tried samples of several offerings from their winter food menu, as well as a few that will be turning up on the spring/summer menu come the end of April.

On the current menu were, as you see above, "Binnaga-Maguro", morsels of BC white (Albacore) tuna seared ceviche-style and mounded with finely diced tomato, cucumber, avocado and a little bit of cilantro on a taro chip ($6 for two). I thought they were just delicious, to be honest, though splurgy. Another current offering is "Orange and Black" (pictured at the top), a plump strip of salmon served as a sushi roll with a mango slice, avocado, orange and black tobiko (flying fish roe) and a yuzu drizzle ($13 per roll). The salt-sweet blend was very pleasant.

From the spring/summer menu I tried big almond-crusted rings of calamari with a Dijon-wasabi tartar sauce. The crispy nuts offered a delicate, non-oily crunch to the beautifully cooked squid. There was also duck in a lemongrass and miso reduction served with oyster and honey mushrooms and Japanese mountain potato (pictured above). The mixture was enjoyably chewy with a nice sweet earthy flavour.

Also being passed around were tasty deep-fried and battered eggplant gyoza (dumplings) with a citrus-vinegar dip; I don't know whether these will be part of the regular menu. Then there was "Sushi Pizza", a very spicy tartare of tuna with green onion and jalapeño pepper served on a chewy crispy-rice pillow.

Desserts (pictured above) were nice but not as exceptional as the savouries: coconut cream mousse with a chocolate torte coin (right) and yuzu meringue with blueberries in a crunchy little tart shell (left). There were also cocktails on offer, but I was told these drinks weren't on the regular menu, so I didn't see any point in tasting them.

I'm glad to have had a chance to sample items from the Blowfish menu. It certainly is a cut above the ubiquitous $12 ten-piece sushi lunch special. The fish seemed fresh, and the restaurant offers unusual items prepared in fresh ways. I don't have a nice enough wardrobe to count myself as belonging to their target market, but I can appreciate that it's offering good quality food in pleasant surroundings for habitual Bay Street denizens.

Local food? Not really. Sustainable? Possibly. Tasty? Unquestionably.

Secrets of Historic Cake Baking: It's All in the Emulsification

There's a lame Victorian joke that occasionally turns up on that little slip of paper inside a Christmas cracker: "Why do you say the baker is a cruel man?" "Because he beats the eggs and whips the cream." With very slight alteration, you could turn it into a sort of baker's koan: "How do you know a good baker? He beats the eggs and whips the cream enough."

For some reason this week, everywhere I went, people kept telling me in one way or another that when you're baking a cake, you really need to spend a lot of time creaming the butter and beating the eggs. When I got to Fort York this morning to start the section of historic cook training that relates to cakes, it all came together in what I might call (to keep the Buddhist metaphor going) a sort of baking satori.

In historic cooking of the period we're covering (roughly 200 years ago), cake recipes required that the eggs be first separated and then beaten; yolk and white separately. This point is often left out of the instructions; it was assumed that all cooks knew it.

Today, we are likely to beat egg whites for meringue or angel food cake (as in this photo, where beaten egg whites are being combined with superfine sugar). We know that they do best in a copper bowl, and that we must be very careful not to get any oil or egg yolk into them. We are aware that they may be beaten to the point of creating soft, wilting points, or until they form stiff, dry, shiny peaks.

If you're doing this by hand, it takes time. The lemon cake recipe we were using suggested beating the whites "for an hour". With a modern metal whisk, it can take less time, but still not much less than about 20 minutes. It can be grueling; we took turns.

These days, we seldom give the yolks the same treatment. In this photo, my pal Gillian is beating egg yolks; they will go from bright orange to very pale yellow, and expand to perhaps four times their original volume before they will be combined with the whites and other ingredients. This stage also takes a long time, and, like the whites, cannot be done ahead of time. Eggs once beaten must be used at once or rebeaten, we were told today, and if they are rebeaten, they will never reach their previous level of sublimity.

Then there's the butter. I used to think "creaming" the butter meant mixing it until it warmed up enough to be pliable. Now I understand that the process of creaming butter is more like whipping cream. The butter will turn quite pale, and increase in volume substantially when it is properly creamed; this should be done before it is combined with other ingredients.

The baking cups (above) are filled with the batter for "Little Fine Cakes", which required beaten egg whites to be combined with beaten egg yolks, finely creamed butter and sugar. The texture of the finished cakes was remarkably tender. I suppose you could carry out the same steps more easily with a rotary beater or stand mixer, and perhaps you would achieve the same result.

But I'm not sure.

150 Best Cupcake Recipes by Julie Hasson – Book Review

My sister's gonna kill me when she gets home from Detroit. That's because the floor of her kitchen is currently boobytrapped with thousands of tiny multicoloured candy sprinkles. The round ones. You can't see them; they roll away when you try to sweep them up, and they cause surprising discomfort when you step on them.

I could try to blame my 9-year-old niece, whose technique for cupcake decorating somewhat resembles the approved method for broadcast sowing a crop of wheat. But I was the responsible adult, so I don't think I'd get away with it.

The occasion for this minor catastrophe was a test of one of the kid-friendly recipes in the newly released cookbook 150 Best Cupcake Recipes (Robert Rose, 2012) by Julie Hasson, a Portland chef who runs a food cart and has already authored several cookbooks. This one is actually an update of her 2005 125 Best Cupcake Recipes; it includes an extra 25 vegan recipes. (She recently posted one of them on her blog, a yummy-looking Vegan Creamsicle Cupcake with Vegan Fluffy Vanilla Cream Frosting.)

Although some would say cake pops and macarons are the in mini-desserts these days, I am one of those who believes cupcakes have never been either "in" or "out". Like cardigans and three-speed bikes, they're a perennial classic. We chose an intriguing twist on the standard cupcake, baked in a flat-bottomed ice cream cone. It's one of the recipes in a section devoted to child-pleasing options.

The cake is a basic white cake, and the icing is vanilla. Both are sensational. ("The icing even tastes like ice cream," said Tara. "Well it has a ton of cream in it," I said.) Except for the minor challenge of keeping them from tipping over, the ice cream cones worked like a charm. Hasson says to fill each cone three-quarters full, and I was worried about over-filling, but in the end I could have put more batter into each one.

I think these would be a great birthday party idea. Because of the tippiness, however, you wouldn't want to put candles in them and then carry them on a tray unless your idea of toddler birthday entertainment includes a rain of flaming cupcakes. One detail not noted in the book: any drop of batter on the cone will turn dark brown. If this bothers you, either be very neat when you fill the cones, or use the batter to draw simple pictures or write people's names on the cones.

Sprinkles aside, a successful outing, and I think the book's a keeper for anyone who likes baking cupcakes.

Heirloom Tomato Seedlings 2012

 

I couldn't help myself. I really did plan not to start any tomatoes this year, because it's a big commitment, but after my historic cook buddy Mark handed me some heirloom seeds he'd saved from the Fort's garden last year, I broke down.

I'm trying my last remaining citron melon seed (doing my part towards trying to propagate an older food crop that's not often planted these days), as well as one zucchini and six tomato varieties: Red Cherry Bomb and Garden Peach from Fort York, both recommended by Mark; Roprecco Paste, Heirloom Beefsteak, Paul Robeson and Jeff Davis.

At this point, it's all about the imagination, because there are so many things that could go wrong for these little fellows before they have a chance to fruit in July. But we shall see what we shall see.

Preserving by Pat Crocker - Book Review

It's with a sense of humility that I introduce Pat Crocker's jam-packed (pun intended) book Preserving (HarperCollins 2011), which runs over 500 large-format pages, lavishly illustrated with Crocker's own lush photos. And, by the way, although she claims she was trying to show images of real food made by real people, as opposed to food-stylist fantasies, some of her page layouts are gorgeous enough to frame – like her shot of translucent multicoloured citrus slices.

I've been coveting Preserving since it came out last summer, and had the great good fortune to win a copy as a door prize at Mad for Marmalade a couple of weeks ago. What you need to know about this book is that it's written by a thorough culinary professional who understands food safety and recipe development completely. A self-described "culinary herbalist", Crocker has authored numerous books about herbs, juices, vegetarian cooking and other topics. (Are you beginning to get the picture?) 

Preserving is divided into seasonal sections; the text in each is arranged according to the produce in season. For each fruit or vegetable, Crocker gives a plethora of information, including a discussion of the various types available and what each one is good for, appealing flavour combinations, and instructions for peeling, chopping or otherwise dealing with the tricky and unusual ones. The types of preserving under discussion include not only canning, but freezing and drying as well.

There are also, of course, lots of recipes; generally several for each type of produce. These include both preserving instructions and recipes for using the preserves once you've made them. Crocker also provides full processing times – with variations according to altitude – for many types of food in jars. The recipes include all the basics, from strawberry jam to dilly beans to marmalade to tomato sauce. There are instructions for making ingredients like candied peel, preserved lemons and Chinese Five Spice. There's also plenty of less standard fare, like carrot jam, garlic scape relish and cinnamon-scented parsnip pear jam.

In short, if you had to be marooned on a desert island with only one book about putting food by, Preserving could be that book. And you'd have a lot of fun looking at the pictures while you were waiting to be rescued.

EduBite Seminar Series at George Brown's The Chef's House

The Chefs' House (215 King East) is the student-run training restaurant of George Brown College's culinary program. Over the next few months, it's presenting a really interesting new series of free one-hour seminars that are open to the public. Each "EduBite" Seminar begins at 3 p.m. Reserve ahead via email or phone at 416-415-2260. Here's the schedule:

• Thursday, March 22, 2012 – "Wines of Tuscany" with importer Drew Innes of Brunello Imports
• Thursday, April 5, 2012 – "All About Cheese" with Fromager Scott McKenzie
• Thursday, April 19, 2012 – "What's New in Wine" with George Brown Sommelier and Professor Adrian Caravello
• Wednesday, May 16, 2012 – "Organic Meats" with Cynthia Beretta from Beretta Farms
• Wednesday, May 23, 2012 – "All Fired Up!: BBQ Ideas" with Chef Naz Cavallaro
• Thursday, June 7, 2012 – "Growing Tomatoes"
• Thursday, June 21, 2012 – "Honey Tasting: How Sweet It Is!" with George Brown Chef School Director John Higgins (pictured above)
• Thursday, July 5, 2012 – "White Wine Tasting" with Marc Bolduc from Cave Springs Winery in Niagara
• Thursday, July 26, 2012 – "Hooked on Fish" with a local supplier

Baking Experiments with Stirling European Style High-fat Butter

So here's the deal. Stirling Creamery, which is an artisanal Ontario dairy that has received international recognition for the quality of its butter, is the first in Canada to launch an 84% butterfat butter, called Stirling European Style Butter Churn 84.

The butterfat content of butter is regulated in Canada, so we are used to cooking with butter that's no more than 80% butterfat. I have been told that, when it comes to butterfat, every percentage point makes a difference. Frankly, you had me at butter, but when I was offered a half-pound sample, I was curious to find out whether I'd be able to tell the difference between an 8o% and an 84% butter in baking.

So last Sunday at a historic cooking session at Fort York, I and co-baker Catherine collaborated on test batches of "Jumbles" (above left) and "Shrewsbury Cakes" (right), two simple butter-sugar-flour-egg cookies. We made two batches of each, which were baked with the same recipes, precisely the same ingredients, the same weather conditions and the same trays and oven. The only difference was that half the cookies used regular Canadian butter from a different company, while half used the 84% Euro-style.

Now, they tell us that the antique recipe for Shrewsbury Cakes yields such a wet, sticky dough that it can't be rolled. However, when I tried to use the 84% butter in the much-tested modern version of the recipe (which has more flour), the dough was so dry I feared it would not hold together. I let it rest briefly before rolling it, and it produced a lovely texture, but I suspect the antique recipe is predicated on a higher-butterfat butter (which of course is less liquid).

What else did we notice? Well, the Stirling butter was much yellower, so we had no difference spotting which dough was which by eye. When all the cookies were baked, we tasted some ourselves and passed others out to Fort York visitors. Universally, all preferred the high-butterfat cookies. There was a big difference in texture: the high butterfat gave a much firmer fabric, but it's still yielding and tender. I think there was also a taste difference, but the nice texture was what everyone remarked on.

The wonderful Olliffe butcher shop (1097 Yonge at Summerhill) carries Stirling European Style Butter Churn 84. I have not yet learned where else it's being sold. It costs $9 per half-pound packet, so it's a splurge. However, following my historic biscuit experiment, although I wouldn't buy it just to spread on toast, I believe it's something that any serious baker will enjoy experimenting with.

Apple Jelly from The Cook Not Mad

The book generally credited as the first-published Canadian cookbook is The Cook Not Mad, or Rational Cookery, which was published in Kingston, Ontario in 1831. Really, it's an almost exact reprint of an American book; nonetheless, its baking, preserving and general cookery instructions (as well as numerous households tips for things like how to get rid of bedbugs) document Canadian practices of the time – and perhaps quite a bit earlier.

As part of my ongoing training as a historic cook at Fort York and my membership in the Culinary Historians of Canada, I'm going to be attending an evening about reading historic recipes. Everyone who attends is invited to bring a sample of something made from the book.

I decided to go with something that's right in my wheelhouse: apple jelly. The main thing this recipe (No. 171) illustrates is how much instruction is left out of recipes of the past: this one omits almost all the steps. Elegantly simple, it reads simply: "Apple Jelly. Pare and boil your apples to a pulp, strain, to a pint put a pound of sugar."

I used ten each of Macintosh (a good old variety) and Empire apples (about 5½ pounds). Since the recipe says nothing about peeling, I simply quartered them and and heated them in a big pot with a minimal amount of water (about a cup) in the bottom to keep them from browning before they started to release their juices. I boiled them a bit too long and hot, so I got less juice than I might have after the pulp had hung overnight in cheesecloth. The yield was about 1½ pints, so I added 1½ pounds of sugar and cooked them to the setting point, skimmed and jarred the lot. The final result was a pretty-looking two pints of jelly.

Of course, this is the wrong time of year to make apple jelly, as they lose pectin in storage. However, the drips on the cooking pot (the first outing for my excellent new Maslin pan, by the way) indicate that the set will be just fine. I look forward to seeing what other people will bring; it could be anything from "Soft Cakes in little pans" to "A Whitpot pudding" to "Oysters fried" to a full calf's head dressed "Turtle fashion". Yum!

150 Best Vegan Muffin Recipes Book Review

You can keep your macarons and your cake pops; I'm a muffin girl at heart. When I was living in my first real apartment (Ottawa, circa 1985), I used to beguile the evening hours stockpiling double batches. Since I didn't have a big supply of baking equipment, I was always short of bowls, and used to mix them up in my wok, in large Tupperware containers... in short, in any likely vessel.

I like my muffins simple, too. Corn, cranberry, apple and banana are my favourites to bake. In a café, I'd be partial to anything with berries, lemon or ginger. But I'm willing to expand my horizons, so I was intrigued when a review copy of Camilla V. Saulsbury's 150 Best Vegan Muffin Recipes (Robert Rose, 2012) turned up in my mailbox. Saulsbury, you may recall, is the author of Piece of Cake!, not to mention numerous other books on muffins (more than 750 recipes!), cookies, puff pastry, cakes and so on. She also has a gluten-free muffin book.

I'm not myself particularly drawn to the vegan lifestyle, except insofar as it espouses the preparation of delicious concoctions featuring beans and lentils and veggies. When a vegan friend once pointed out to me (with delight) that Oreos were perfectly vegan, the whole movement lost a little of its lustre for me. But I do see the point, and since lots of people are sensitive to dairy products, a vegan muffin book seems like a valuable addition to the vegan cooking library.

Saulsbury divides her recipes into five sections: her "Top 20" (classics like Lemon Poppyseed, Apple and Pumpkin); wholesome, fruity muffins for breakfast; sweet, spicy, nutty and chocolate-filled muffins for coffee time; savoury muffins for lunch or dinner, and "global muffins", which include muffin-shaped takes on international desserts like sachertorte, rugalach and trifle.

Many (though not all) call for dairy substitutes like soy or almond milk and margarine or vegetable oil. Saulsbury's introduction contains an informative rundown on the vegan pantry, including (new to me) a very clear explanation as to whether sugar counts as vegan or not. If someone simply wishes not to eat anything containing animal products, she says, all sugar is fine. However, animal bone derivatives are used in sugar refining, so anyone wishing to avoid all foods whose production process uses animal products will need to seek out sugar that is specifically labelled as vegan.

The list of recipes is ingenious. Whereas some are pretty straightforward interpretations of standard muffin recipes that leave out animal-based ingredients, others are a little more adventurous. Quite a few use root vegetables like potatoes or fruit like dates or bananas for some of their structure. Others use nuts, seeds and unusual grains like the Ethiopian teff flour. I imagine that Saulsbury must have spent some time wandering around looking at food and thinking "Could I make a muffin out of that?"; for example, she actually includes a tabbouleh muffin in the mix.

I've already tested one of the recipes, and I can see a few more that I'd like to add to my regular muffin repertoire. So I'm not going vegan all the way, but maybe some of my baking will be heading in that direction in the future.