Spinach, Green Onion, and Smoked
The Darkest Chocolate Ice Cream in the World, Saveur August/September 2011
I feel like I've made quiche a lot lately.
I got home pretty late today, but I realized that this week's recipes basically all call for 3 hour - overnight marinating or brining, giving the quiche the unusual title of fastest possible meal. Note that I skipped some steps in making the quiche-- the first 1 hour in the fridge got abridged to ~20 min in the freezer while I bought more cheese (I thought I bought cheese yesterday, but I couldn't find it anywhere, and sure enough it wasn't on the receipt either. I have no idea what happened. Also, our store has only one type of smoked cheese, and I thought "smoked" was more important than "gouda." Especially since it took forever to even find the gouda). Then, the second 15 minutes in the freezer after putting the crust in the dish was basically just however long it took the oven to preheat. And I didn't cool the crust before putting in the filling. In the end it still took about 2 hours start to finish though.
The crust was unusual for a quiche... I'm used to the simple flour, butter, and ice water (keeping everything as untouched and cold as possible), but this one started with softened butter, milk, an egg yolk, and then the flour got mixed into that. No wonder it needed to cool off for an hour. The short time in the freezer wasn't a good substitute as it turns out, because when I went to roll it out it stuck awfully to the rolling pin and just cracked everywhere. I ended up just pushing it into the dish with my hands. The crust was fine, but I think it's best to just go with whatever crust is easiest, since the flavor is dominated by the filling. The filling in this was so simple, but tasted really good. Maybe from the green onions? Anyway, this was a nice quiche, and unlike last time it didn't overflow, so that was good.
This was not very dark. Or very frozen when it came out... it's pretty nontraditional, with no eggs. Instead, it has cornstarch, corn syrup, and cream cheese. Basically after making the mix last night and letting it cool all day, it seemed like I had just spent a lot of time/dirtied a lot of dishes to make a loose homemade pudding. It didn't firm up so great in the ice cream maker, and instead was like a homemade frosty. Sometimes that happens with the non-custard bases. I'll see what the texture is really like tomorrow.
For some reason the mix didn't get homogenized well. There were some different dots in it, maybe from the cornstarch and also from the chocolate. This ice cream is nowhere near as dark as pictured on the Saveur website, so I wonder if maybe it would be better with a different brand of cocoa powder or something. I thought this would be great with some orange flavoring. I'm kind of curious to try the ice cream base alone or with just a few berries or something, too, because I was curious about the cream cheese etc. but it was all masked in this.
humm, the quiche link didn't work for me. Maybe due to faulty internet connection in Cambria. Sounds good, though. I love spinach and green onions, and never thought of using a smoked cheese for a quiche.
ReplyDeleteGood catch-- I had pasted the URL in twice. It should work now.
ReplyDeleteThe smoked cheese is great. It's a vegetarian-friendly way to get the smokey flavor that bacon would normally bring.