La Famille, French Patisserie in Taichung

In the interest of showing off Taichung's versatility, it's repertoire if you will, I present La Famille.  Like many other countries, the Taiwanese take their cues from the French when it comes to upscale consumerism.  La Famille showcases French-style pastries and is quite popular here in Taichung.  I think it's definitely a see-and-be-seen type of joint.  That being said, the pastries are really good and I think it deserves to be thought of as much more than a simple social outing. 

First, for those of you who might try to find LF, here's the sign and front facade.  Please note that it is very busy on weekends and you might have to wait to get a table.   If you aren't the patient type, takeout is always an option. 

Here's a picture of the pastry case/ordering area.

And this is the seating area on the first floor.  It looks small, and it is, but there are 2 more floors of seating above the ground level. 

Now that I got that out of the way, let's talk pastry!  I got there a little early so the pastry case was only about 75% as diverse as usual but here are some of your options:

From l-r, pear tart, apple tart and I dunno. 

From l-r, lemon tart, I dunno, berry millfeuille

from l-r green tea tart (filling is like a green tea ganache for lack of a better description), black tea infused chocolate tart with candied citrus peel (arguably my favorite)

Here are a few closeups of today's purchases:

from l-r, pear tart, lemon tart

from l-r black tea infused chocolate tart, green tea tart

Eagle eyed readers will notice that invidual tarts are about 110NT per piece.  This is very pricey by Taiwanese standards.  110NT can easily buy you an entire meal but it's still only about 4USD.  Not bad at all. 

Anyhow, here's the wrap-up.  Go to La Famille if you have a sweet tooth and don't want to eat anything with red bean paste in it.  The tarts are pretty darn good and they have a nice selection of tea/coffee.  Here's where you can find it:







Mixed Fruit Crisp

Boy, I've never blogged from my office computer so don't blame me if this sucks. I need a dual-core processor to properly do this, see?

Keith, this one is for you. Recipe is taken from The New Best Recipe.

I made a double recipe which fits nicely into a 9x13 baking dish.

INGREDIENTS

Topping

3/4 cup AP flour

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

pinch of salt

1 stick of butter cut into 1/2 inch cubes

1.5 cups of chopped nuts...I used walnuts...feel free to use whatever you have on hand.

Filling

3 lbs (or so) of cut up fruit--i used approximately 3 lbs of nectarines/apricots (post-chopping weight) and 1/2 lb of boysenberries

zest of 2 lemons

3-5 tablespoons of lemon juice (use your taste buds)

1/3 to 2/3 cup of sugar (again, use your tastebuds...if your fruit isn't very sweet, add a bit more sugar...if you over did it on the lemon juice, add sugar to compensate)

(Advanced move...I made a corn starch slurry with the lemon juice to help thicken the filling...feel free to do the same if you so wish)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.

Whisk together flour, sugar, spices and salt. Add cubed butter and, using a pair of knives, "cut" the butter until it is pea-sized. If you're lazy, just squeeze the butter and flour/sugar mixture until it's totally homogeneous. Nobody will know the difference. Mix in the nuts until evenly distributed. Refrigerate the topping for at least 15 minutes.

Process the fruit. If you're using stone fruit, please make sure you're not an idiot like I am and don't buy clingfruit. Freestone, please. At any rate, you just want chunks of fruit. See picture:

Toss the fruit with the lemon zest, sugar and lemon juice.

Distribute the chilled topping over the fruit:

Place crisp into oven. Bake for about an hour.

Serve! It's great warm or room temperature. Great with whipped cream or ice cream. It's a winner.

Time-15 minutes of active work, an hour of baking time.

Cost-Depends on where you buy your fruit. If you buy organic nectarines from the farmer's market, it'll cost an arm and a leg. Say, anywhere from 3-15 bucks total depending on food cost.

Strawberries for Supper

Strawberries are one of those foods which are seasonally dependent. Sure, you can find them year round at your local Safeway but those tasteless, cotton-filled impostors should be avoided at all cost. I went to the farmers' market and picked up a pint of summer strawberries and, in my opinion, the only thing better than strawberries and cream is strawberry shortcake. For supper, I made my own strawberry shortcake free-form plate. Just mix and match the components and make your mouth happy!

A yummy and fun dinner...If this is what it is like to be a vegetarian, I might convert. :-)

Click the picture to learn about each component:

Citizen Cake

Citizen Cake. Click the picture for a larger, annotated image. Some macadamia nuts scattered about. Really good dessert. All the flavors melded together perfectly. I wouldn't have minded if the chef had created a more inventive/interesting plating but it all tasted good. Tasted even better with a glass of vin santo!

Tartine Brownies

So, I'm back with another "I'm trying to learn how to bake" post. It's humbling to think that millions of Girls Scouts can chef up a batch of acceptable brownies and I'm pulling out my hair trying to figure out where I went wrong. Damn you, Girl Scouts of America!!! I will infiltrate your ranks and steal your chocolicious secrets!!!!! To be fair, half of the brownies are great. It's just that the center of the batch seems significantly undercooked but I'm getting ahead of myself.

This recipe also admits to yielding a slightly fudgy brownie. I don't like fudgy brownies. In fact, I find brownies pretty tricky. They can be neither too cake-y nor overly fudge-like. It's a fine line.

This recipe is from Tartine.

Obligatory picture of ingredients.

Preheat oven to 350.
Buttered pan, am using an 8x8 so I had to cut the recipe down:
Butter, in grams:
Bittersweet chocolate, in grams. Am sticking with Ocumare:
Melt butter:
Add chocolate, set aside to cool:
Measure out 80 grams of flour:
Sift and set aside:


Sugar, 217 grams:
Add three eggs:
Also add a teaspoon of vanilla extract. I surrounded the bowl with a wet towel...makes whisking easier because there's less slippage.Whisk until "mixture falls in a wide ribbon." I have no idea what this means so I made a video:

Does that seem about right? Clueless here.

Add the melted chocolate/butter:
Fold with a spatula. Cool marbling action:
Add in the flour and fold. At this point, I guess it's brownie batter. Here's a video of what it looked like...George says that I sound like a complete psycho in this video...I can see where he's coming from:

Looks about right, I guess.Scatter with nuts. I used walnuts.Bake until the "top looks slightly cracked and feels soft to the touch, about 25 minutes." I baked mine for 25 minutes and I guess it looked cracked and felt soft.
Cool.

At first, I thought the brownies were a success because I had a bit from the edge:
They look good, right?
However, I got deeper in and the center was problematic. I've taken a picture and annotated it (click the picture to view a large version):
So where did I go wrong? Not enough time in the oven? I assume that might be it but the edges were cooked so do I leave the brownies in the oven for a longer time and run the risk of overcooking/burning the edges to insure that the middle is cooked? ARGHHAHASETHLSGHL:WETHIL:W#TQ:GHIL:!!!!! Stupid baking.

Time- About 1 hour
Food cost:
Chocolate- $7.00
Butter- $0.50
Eggs- $0.50
Incidentals/Nuts- $1.00
Total- $9.00...servings, unknown.

Chocolate Pots de Creme

I have a four New Years Resolutions.
1. Exercise 5 times per week.
2. Learn about wine.
3. Divest myself of useless possessions.
4. Improve my baking/pastry skills.

1. I will be shocked if I accomplish this. I'll settle for four times a week. Anything less and I'll consider it a failure.
2. This has been easy so far.

Case of wine from Kermit Lynch.

Educational resources.

In addition, I've also created a MS Word document which will serve as the base document for my wine tasting notes. You can click here to take a look. I'm also looking to start an informal wine tasting group...maybe 3 or 4 like-minded individuals who want to get together to drink and educate ourselves. So, uhh, if you're in the Bay Area and reading this, lemme know.
3. This has also been going well. I went through my bookcase and just started grabbing books that I'd never really used. Put up a post on Craigslist and people have been coming over to root through these books. I hope to do something similar with my clothes/shoes...however, i will probably just give those to Goodwill...seems less embarrassing than having people come over, sort through my used clothes and see how unfashionable I am.
4. I am going to try to bake or make dessert once a week. This should help me overcome my fear of pastry. In addition, most ladies love chocolate, right? I figure these posts will help my single, male readers. Umm, and myself. Yah, no reason to lie.

So here we go. Chocolate pots de creme. This recipe is pulled straight out of Tartine. I am making a half-recipe.

Obligatory picture of the ingredients, easy...only five....:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Closeup of the chocolate:
Chocovic is the company...it's based in Spain. Their chocolate bars are based on single-origin cocoa beans, that is, all the beans were grown in one region of the world. Ocumare is from Venezuela. This chocolate is a PHENOMENAL deal. $2/bar at Trader Joe's. Give it a try.

Chop the chocolate and set aside. This represents one 2.82 oz. (80 gram) bar of bittersweet chocolate:
Set up a cooking contraption...you want a baking dish which is deep enough for the sides of 6 oz ramekins to be 3/4 submerged. Fill the baking dish half-way up with boiling water (displacement should bring the water level up to the desired 3/4 level) and place in the oven. Make sure to remove the ramekins before you place the dish in the oven. Here's what I used:
Set-up a double boiler. This is easy. Just fill a pot with some water, a few inches worth, and place a mixing bowl on top. Pot with water:
Mixing bowl in the pot. The point is to heat up the water in the pot and use gentle steam heat to melt the chocolate.
Add the chopped chocolate . Let it melt...stir a few times if you need to. Set aside the melted chocolate.
Heat up 11 oz of heavy whipping cream (a little under a cup and a half), a pinch of salt and 1.5 tablespoons of sugar. Bring it to just under the boil.
Incorporate the hot cream with the melted chocolate. Mix well and set aside:
Take four eggs and separate the egg yolks from the whites. Place in a bowl and mix well. Bit by bit, add the hot milk/chocolate mixture into the eggs. Mix it well. At this point, I strained the mixture to make sure there weren't any weird chunks or anything in there.

Ladle the strained chocolate/cream/egg mixture into your ramekins. Fill them 80% full. Take the ramekins and place them into the water filled baking dish which should already be in the oven.
Cook. Recipe says to cook for 20-25 minutes. For me, it was about 22 minutes. The recipe says that you're looking for the edges to look firm and set but the middle to still be a bit jiggly. The pots de creme will continue to cook while out of the oven and will set as they cool. If you cook them until they're firm, they'll be overcooked.

At this point, pull the ramekins out of the oven/water and set aside to cool:
Serve at room temperature or chill in the fridge. Chilling the pots de creme gives you a dramatically different texture from room temperature pots de creme. I'm not sure which I prefer...they're both good, just different.

If you like, serve with softly whipped cream.
These things are really delicious. However, they're also REALLY rich. Very decadent. Good chocolate flavor. Very creamy. Great texture. Would make again.

Time- Took me a stress filled 40 minutes...20 minutes of actual work, 20 for cooking This recipe is actually really easy, I just needed to do a better job of visualizing the recipe. I should have taken more time when I did the recipe read-through.

Food cost---you might have noticed that I started with four ramekins but ended up yielding only three...not sure what happened.
Chocolate- $2 bucks
Cream- $2 bucks
Eggs- $0.75
Incidentals- $0.03
Total- $4.78/ $1.60 per ramekin. Totally worth it.

Gentlemen, start practicing for Valentine's Day.