Monday, October 20, 2008

Rosie Cooks From The French Laundry.

As you recall, we have a bushel of sweet potatoes, so I turned to The French Laundry cookbook for ideas. For Monday night's supper,I prepared sweet potato agnolotti with sage cream, brown butter, and proscuitto. I started Sunday by making creme fraiche - just a cup of heavy cream, a tablespoon of buttermilk, and I like to add a bit of lemon juice. Leave it out, covered, at room temperature overnight, and the next day, you have a nice, rich, thick creme fraiche. Refrigerate it. It's like sour cream, only better.
Here's my creme fraiche 24 hours later.
I cut off the ends of three sweet potatoes.
Added butter and wrapped in foil. While my potatoes baked for about 90 minutes, I prepared my squab spice.
Top left is black peppercorns. Bottom middle is cinnamon stick, coriander seeds, and cloves. Top right is the mixture for quatre epices: cloves nutmeg ginger pepper
Here's the cinnamon stick, coriander seeds, and whole cloves.
Here's the quatre epices mixture with ground cloves, ground nutmeg, ground ginger and freshly ground black pepper. A lot of recipes call for white pepper, but I didn't have any. I don't think the integrity of my dish suffered any by this substitution.
Peppercorns.
I broke up the cinnamon stick, and heated it along with the cloves and coriander seeds until the kitchen became quite fragrant.
Then I added in the rest of the spices.
Swirled around a bit. My signature action shot.
Then I ground everything up in my Magic Bullet.
And here's my squab spice.
Oh crap. Wouldja jes look at what I found in my spice drawer. Rosie slaps forehead. I could have saved myself so much time and trouble had I but known.
Please bear with me throughout this recipe. I know it looks like I'm skipping all around, but this is the order in which I made the dish. Here, I'm frying up a bit of bacon which will go into the sweet potato mixture. Now, on to my pasta dough.
Flour, egg yolks, whole egg, olive oil, milk.
Make a well in the flour.
Then add the wet ingredients using your fingers to break up the eggs, stirring to keep the eggs within the well and to let them pull the flour into the mix.
And you end up with this sad little messy mass.
Ah ... The magic of kneading.
Keep on kneading and you end up with a satiny-smooth dough. Total kneading time was about 30 minutes. Keller recommends at least 10-15 and when you think you're done, knead for an extra 10 minutes. The dough is ready, Keller says, when you can put your finger through it and the dough wants to snap back into place. If it doesn't snap back into place, then when the dough rests, it will collapse. Wrap the dough in plastic and let rest 30-60 minutes before rolling. You can make the dough a day ahead, refrigerate, and let it come to room temperature before rolling.
The dough cannot be overkneaded. This was after the extra 10 minutes. It's even smoother and more silky. While the dough was resting, I prepared the sweet potato filling.
After about 90 minutes in a 350 degree oven, the sweet potatoes are ready and smelling sweet and buttery, and divine. Slice the taters lengthwise and peel off the skin.
Add butter to the taters.
Add the squab spice to taste. I found out I really liked the taste and flavor of the squab spice, so I kept adding it in. Squab spice needs to be frozen to keep longer.
Mash the sweet potatoes, butter, and spices.
Add salt to taste, and stir in the bacon bits.
My dough is now ready for rolling.
I'm a bit apprehensive about rolling, so I just stare at my little portion of dough for a while.
Finally, I start. I let the dough go through the widest setting several times.
My machine has 7 different settings. I get to number 4 and stop there.
And here's my nice sheet of pasta dough, ready for filling.
This is my third attempt. Notice I'm improving. On the second attempt, I threw caution to the wind and decided to go to setting number 5. Not a good idea. The pasta tore, I tried kneading it again, and running it back through, but it was not cooperating at all, so I just had to toss it. On my third attempt, I was full of confidence, and quickly rolled off this nice pasta, stopping short of setting number 5. I piped the sweet potato mixture on top.
Next, I pulled the bottom edge of the pasta over top of the filling and sealed.
I went down the length of the pasta, pinching at one-inch intervals.
Next I went down the sealed edge with my pie crimper/fluter.
I sliced through where I had pinched.
I placed the little pillows on a cornmeal-dusted baking pan and set in the freezer.
Here's a close up of the filling. And the reason I used the fancy pastry tip is because this was the biggest one I had to allow the bacon bits to extrude.
Thankfully, I improved with practice. Not perfect, but I'm getting there.
Next, I start my on my sage cream sauce.
I went out to the garden and picked a nice handful of sage leaves.
The larger leaves, I blanched in boiling water for 2 minutes.
After blanching, I plunged the leaves in ice water, drained them, and squeezed out all moisture.
The smaller leaves, I fried.
And drained them on paper towels.
I julliened some proscuitto and fried it up a bit and drained it next to the fried sage. Next up, buerre monte. Now, what is buerre monte? Regular butter, in its solid state, is an emulsification of 3 components: butter fat, milk solids, and water. When you melt butter, these 3 components separate. With buerre monte, you heat a tablespoon of water, gradually add butter pats to it, whisking throughout, and you can melt the butter while maintaining the emulsification.
I had 1/2 cup of buerre monte to which I added 1/2 cup of creme fraiche.
Whisk the buerre monte and creme fraiche together.
Next, I chopped up my blanched sage leaves in my mini-processor.
And added in the beurre monte/creme fraiche mixture.
Sage cream sauce. Oh, but this is good stuff.
Sage cream sauce with fried sage leaves and proscuitto.
Here, I'm making my brown butter. Just heat the butter on low.
Continue heating.
Until it turns a nice brown and you can smell the nutty flavor.
Swirl around a bit and keep warm.
Here's my panful of stuffed agnolotti.
I brought lightly salted water to a boil, then added in my agnolotti and cooked for about 4-5 minutes.
On the left is my skillet of heated sage cream, in the middle by agnolotti, on the right my browned butter.
After draining the pasta (I certainly didn't want to dilute that delicious sage sauce.), I added it to the sage cream sauce.
I plated the agnolotti with the sage cream and poured some browned butter over top.
Next, a sprinkling of proscuitto on top.
I wish you could smell this.
And the fried sage goes on. Here's another plating. Yeah, I know I just plated one. But this is just sooo good, Imonna plate another.
Agnolotti with sage cream sauce.
Browned butter gets drizzled over.
Proscuitto.
Fried sage leaves.
This is a definite keeper - of foodgasmic proportions. Best thing is, I have a bunch of agnolotti left over in the freezer. Screw the sweet potato casserole for Thanksgiving, I'm having sweet-potato stuffed agnolotti. OK, I'll probably have the casserole too. I know the kids will want to pick off the marshmallows.
Definitely a plate-licker.
I encourage you to try this dish. It's a delightful combination of tastes and flavors and textures that I really hadn't experienced before. Yes, the recipe has a few steps, and might take more than 30 minutes, but go for it. You will truly be rewarded for your efforts. And something I've never understood about pasta. I've made homemade pasta before - just flour, water, eggs. But good golly, the difference in taste between homemade and store bought is amazing. Plus homemade cooks in half the time. While I go think about this conundrum, you please think about trying this wonderful pasta. Check here for Carol's version. Her agnolotti are prettier than mine. I need to work on that. And that would be Carol of French Laundy At Home fame.

6 comments:

Marilyn said...

Wow. Just wow. Rosie, take a bow now. (Oops, didn't mean to rhyme!)

Anonymous said...

I second marilyn's comment. It looks absolutely fabulous. Sooooo, you're thinking about making this again for Thanksgiving?

Anonymous said...

I may have to alienate every member of my family and come down there for Thanksgiving.

Anonymous said...

That was me above.

Unknown said...

Curses!!!

I've been toying with trying this for Thanksgiving (I'm the "Sweet Potato Dish Bringer"). I may have to investigate to see if the Italian grocery that is two blocks from me does pasta sheets, since I don't think I can invest in a pasta machine or KA pasta attachment (especially if I wanna get that stinkin' cordless food warmer).

Sigh. Looks like my day before Thanksgiving just got a little busier.....

Anonymous said...

nice!