Cake is Style – Pie is Substance
Making a cake means spending time with a spatula. Time better spent making another pie. Cakes are elaborate, more concerned with looks than taste. Cakes have to be stacked, and sliced horizontally, and filled, and sealed, and corrected, and glossed, and creamed, and decorated, and preserved. Go ahead, take a big bite … your cake will look like a warzone. Pie is baked. Period. Take a piece of good old apple pie and the rest just looks better for it.
I usually don’t post recipes. There are many (and I mean, MANY) cook books out there, and chefs … well, we seem to read them for the pictures and then just spend a few hours in the kitchen trying to outdo whatever we thought the whole thing was meant to be.
In this case, however, I cave. And I need you guy’s help. Link this, twitter it, facebook it, friendfeed it, heck – link it from your model train collectors page. Why? Because Satan (in form of one Rachael Ray) has come to take my most beloved snack from me, defiled it with extra ingredients and olive oil, and generally destroyed the beauty that is the Croque-Madame. I trust Google to place me ahead of such tomfoolery and lead future generations into the right, the real, the original, the cool as cool can be, direction.
This deserves an explanation before I dive in. Whether it’s the German “Toast Hawaii”, the British Ham and Cheese sandwich, the American Grilled Cheese, or the Dutch “Tosti” along with variations pretty much anywhere in the world – there is a common ancestor, called Croque. Croques are, for better or worse, the first ever fast food, served since the late 19th century in French Bistros and Brasseries. A Croque sounds easy to make, and is, but its beauty lies in the care an individual chef pays to its ingredients.
There’s a right way to make Croque, and then there’s a wrong way. This here, no excuses, is the right way. It’s the way you’ll have a quick and very, very, tasty snack on your plate in only a few minutes. And the best part – most things in this recipe are kitchen staples, no shopping needed.
Follow me now into the yummy goodness that is Croque-Madame.
You will need (per Croque, I’d make a few and have some friends come over for dinner):
- Two slices of toast or bread (squared off)
- Three slices of either deli ham, jambon du Paris, or any other smoked ham. Those among us with dieatry restrictions concerning pork or the mixing of dairy and meat could, fathomably, leave this out. Just make sure to call it a Croque-Lyonnaise, then.
- One Egg
- Gruyere cheese
- Butter
- Salt and Pepper
- Some Béchamel sauce (below)
Butter the toast on both sides and heat a pan or your griddle. Place the two slices of toast onto the hot surface. Now, while this heats, add the ham onto one of the slices. Between each of the three layers add some gruyere cheese crumbs. I prefer fine grated gruyere, but if you want to practice your knife skills you can also julienne it :).
Place second slice of toast onto toast and ham stack, then flip the whole thing so that the non-toasted (as of yet) side gets some brown. Repeat the flipping 2,3 times, until you have a nicely browned toasted sandwich. While this happens, sunny-side-up your egg. Season it well with salt and pepper. Remove sandwich from griddle, ladle Bechamel sauce on top of your sandwich (careful not to overdo it), then place the egg on top of it. Done.
Béchamel is very easily made. In fact, we’ll go one further and make some Mornay sauce, which is a cheesy “small sauce” derived from Béchamel. It’s what usually went on Croque-Madame in France.
Here’s how:
- Butter
- Flour (all purpose, not the cake one)
- Scalded milk
- Gruyere
- Parmesan
This is a fun one and something to remember, it’s the basis for so many things in modern cooking. First take equal amounts of butter and flour. Heat a sauce pot, melt some of the butter in it, then add some of the flour. Keep adding flour and butter until all of the butter is melted and you have a gooey, flowery, cream. This is called a roux and one of the basic things to know in French cooking. The butter helps incorporate the flour into the sauce without clumping. Make sure not to roast your roux too much. Ideally, it should be pale but not completely white. If you were to roast longer, you’d get “brown roux” which also has a lot of uses.
In any case, now slowly pour the milk into the roux. You will notice I didn’t give you a measurement of how much milk to use. That’s simple, create a creamy sauce. You’ll see it when it’s there. Voila, that’s your Bechamel sauce.
Once your sauce is nice and creamy, bring it to a boil and immediately turn it back to a simmer. Add the cheeses, grated, and slowly whisk the sauce to get all that cheese married to the sauce. Bingo – Mornay done.
If you make more Mornay, you can always use it with some grated cheeses, tarragon, nutmeg, and maybe some breadcrumbs, pour it over pasta and make the best Mac and Cheese you ever had. Oven, 350 degrees, until the top (which you’ll have covered in cheese and breadcrumbs) is nice and toasty brown. Done.
So, here you have it. This is how Croque-Madame is made. Don’t put mayo on there. Please?
Some ideas:
In my work, I tried to make the whole thing perfectly square. I couldn’t find a cutter to make my size square, so I made one myself with food grade steel. Bent it into a square and made one more with rounded bottom edges for my egg. I fry my egg inside one square and use the other to cut the ham and toast into perfect squares. It looks … insane.
Serve toast with mixed green salad with a lemon vinaigrette, toasted almonds, and mandarin orange wedges. The idea here is to add some acidity to the dish which is otherwise very meaty/cheesy.
Your Béchamel sauce will hold for two days in the fridge. Just place some cling wrap right on top of it to prevent a skin from forming. Make the Mornay when you need it from your refrigerated Bechamel.
Resist the urge to squeeze the toast when flipping it. The wooshing and browning is fun, sure, but you want those juices inside, not on your pan or griddle where it’ll turn the toasted sides soggy.
ACME Chophouse, Photo by Scott Beale
Hey, visitors from the Wall Street Journal. Glad you found me (“quit with the nicey nicey” – yupp, I’d sign that). Check the bar to the right for more rants, and leave me a comment if you want…
This article had, at last count, somewhere between 120 and 200 comments. Then Disqus did something and they went away. I’ll definitely try to get them back, in the mean time please do not hesitate to comment (again), I promise to keep your thoughts safe this time.
Michael Bauer reviewed ACME Chophouse and, to quote 7×7, “took it to the killing floor“. Which, all things considered, could be true. Even eaters like me who, generally, tend not to agree with Bauer’s assessments (it would be great for Chefs and bad for the world if everyone had the same taste), think twice when reading his reviews.
So, sure, let’s analyze Bauer. Let’s discuss his assessment. And let’s, as I am sure he’d be the first to point out himself, keep in mind that one man’s half-star could be another’s five-star. Simple as that.
But what I keep hearing about negative reviews, from Mr. Bauer or others, is a different tune. Something sung to the melody of “in these trying times”, or “in an economy like this one”. In other words, it’s not a good idea, some contend, to render a negative opinion and, potentially, killing a fragile operation over it.
I disagree. Especially in these times we need to be massively vigilant. Anyone charging the equivalent of a week’s worth of spending money on a dinner deserves, nay must be subjected to, the most intense of scrutiny. $50 for a rib eye, regardless of its size, is a lot of money. Any restaurant selling it better deliver the full gamut of services encompassed in “hospitality”. Great service, great food, healthy and seasonal, great ambience, and superior ties between those. Above and beyond this, the 2007 attitude of reputation being a great excuse for sloppy service, dismissive or even condescending dealings, average food, and less than perfect venues, is gone. Thankfully.
To quote the very same Michael Bauer on something I wholeheartedly agree about:
Restaurants who haven’t figured out that people come to a restaurant to escape their problems and want to be treated with respect need to go out of business. It’s called the hospitality industry for a reason. Being hospitable should be the number-one goal of any restaurant.
And this extends into food, service, preparation, and pricing. I am the first to advocate for better payment for Back of the House, the first to support local eateries in their quest to make a good buck. But that better come with nothing but the best of the best of services. Restaurants deserve your patronage, you deserve their hundred-and-ten-percent service. Simple as that. And in these “trying times” this is even more so an important aspect than it was ten years ago during the big dot.com rush.
So, let’s quit with the nicey-nicey. Let’s stop excusing short-cuts, let’s quit bailing out mediocre eateries, and start rewarding the creme of the crop, again. Nothing else will work in the long run. Oh, and stop eating badly. Please?
A lengthy post on the many great technical and social sessions and happenings at LeWeb3 will follow shortly. I am about to head out to grab coffee with the insanely cool Ewan McIntosh. This entry is about the politician shoehorn-in issues you might have read about.
As an aside, I believe Loic did a crack job assembling and hosting some of the greats of the Industry. It’s too bad that this accomplishment is overshadowed by “Loicgate” as someone called it.
Is that a dossier in your pocket, or are you just scared to see me?
Following along our trains of thought one more, perhaps the most, unsettling reality about unannounced politicians at conferences like this. When former President Jimmy Carter spoke in front of an audience of 1200, praising the virtues of Habitat for Humanity and car donations to it in New York in August 2003, he began his talk with an apology to the audience. It was, he said, unfortunately unavoidable to require pre-registration during “Orange Alert” times, the CIA and the Secret Service both charged with vetting attendees against terror lists, criminal records, and other governmental information. He also remarked, jokingly, that it’d be hardly a black stain on anyone’s dossier to have met with an aging builder to discuss charity.
Secret Service dossier investigations on “aging carpenter” performances are child’s play, utterly lackluster performances, compared to one of the works of the world’s most efficient and powerful governmental security agencies – the Mossad. Let’s not kid ourselves, a man the stature of Peres doesn’t just “show up” at an event, movements, police contingent, placement of plainclothes and uniformed security detail, snipers (yes, snipers), medial emergency teams, rapid extraction task forces, all that needs time. And it’ll be there. Along with, of course, the – again – world’s most efficient spook agency’s, dossier team.
Regardless of my inclination to be profiled by the Mossad, if I am about to enter a situation where I most definitely will be, I’d like to know in advance. Would knowledge of this have deterred my coming to the conference? Not very likely. Like many younger German Jews in my age bracket I sought out and had correspondence about parts of my family who hadn’t survived the Holocaust with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an organization inextricably linked to Israel’s investigative services. But, by golly, I want to know when I am about to enter any event saturated with guys in dress pants and conspicuously inconspicuous bulges under their jackets.
By The Numbers
During the 2004 election I wrote many a piece. On the economy, on crime, on neoconservativism, on lies, truths, and why I didn’t feel comfortable voting for or endorsing either candidate. Despite all that, despite my curiosity, despite an invitation to, and despite the potential burst in popularity and visits to my weblog had I worn an “Impeach Bush” shirt, I never attended one single conservative rally, speech, or campaign meeting organized by Republican candidates. The reason? Numbers. During the later months of the 2004 Presidential campaign, numbers were the be-all-end-all of the public popularity sledgehammer. To give Bush but one more attendee to slug into the face of the Democratic party or mainstream media, to become one of the “sixty thousand people attended our campaign townhall meetings,” would have meant direct support for Bush in his search for public-at-large acceptance and policy legitimization.
On December 12, 2006, my presence and that of 1300 other technology geeks, social media fanatics, and the usual crowd of talking heads gave legitimization to a political candidate whose politics as far as I understand it, are diametrally opposed to mine. I, and 1300 other conference visitors, gave him a great campaign gift. Remember my words if you hear him use the fact that 1300 members of the technological elite came to see him, against his opponents.
By The Book
Drawing a salary from “the man” has its perks and its rules. One of the more heavily discussed ones, reason for many a disciplinary remark, public outcry, and general discontent was and is the presence of governmental employees at political rallies. And, technically, any teacher, researcher, policy maker, police officer, soldier, IT director, or city planner traveling to a conference on his or her employer’s dime is “on the clock”, drawing a salary, booking said trip internally as anything from ongoing education to research or networking. A quick glance over the events’ attendee list reveals at least four governmental employees – any of which could, after attending a political rally on employer’s dime, face disciplinary charges.
By the By
LeWeb3 is truly an international conference. And one that makes me, at least, hopeful for the future. Outside the main hall, cigarette or beer or water in hand, a Jew and an Arab discuss AJAX, an Irishman and an Englishman have a fag and reminisce about the Goonies and their influence into Britcom development at the BBC, a Frenchman and an Englishman exchange friendly ribbings while the American writes down a fondue recipe he coerced out of the Swiss engineer he met a few hours earlier. They scrape, they struggle, using hands, feet, and any language at disposition. They communicate, converse, discuss, sometimes argue.
Inside, a man, refusing to converse, insisting, for nationalist, separatist, reasons to speak in a language not everyone understands, unwilling to take questions, touts the virtues of HIS lifestyle. Sorry, dude, I’ll take the guys outside any day over your idea of an enlightened future.
Shameless me-time: me on stage, and this blog post (french):
Aujourd’hui, Nicolas Sarkozy a montré une chose : il n’a pas saisi où est la révolution internet. Celle des humains. Il avait l’occasion unique de le faire, d’expliquer, en y mettant la forme, combien les internautes (et pas internet) sont en train de changer le monde. Il s’est contenté de montrer qu’il était d’une autre génération.
And he’s using me as a counter example :)
Update: Ewan (Spence, of Podcast Network and All About Symbian fame) has this excellent post:
Thankfully we still seemed to have made an impact, as we had a good number of people appraoch us after the talk with questions on gmaing, SL, WoW and virtual reality games and worlds. Jonas on stage had made a brief comment to the effect of ‘everyone is different, for example I don’t like French politicians,” which provoked one of the loudest positive reactions from the audience that day. Perhaps Le Meur should have picked up on this rather than his one over-riding concern of getting his friends on stage to further their (his?) political ambitions?
And more:
Even worse, you have the attendees we came to see shorten their speech? No time for the Second Life demo because Sarkozy is coming? The great guys from World of Warcraft have to wrap it up faster then we can read their slides for him? For a man who comes and tells us to impose values on the net? Values of which I’m sure that he and I have a whole different set? A man who’s reading out loud from some notes in front of him when he’s talking about the Internet? A man who’s addressing 36 countries but can’t do it in English? A man who’s giving a speech like he’s addressing his voters and doesn’t have a clue what the audience does?
Tour De Food
