A foray into cooking decapods:
I’ve come to a turning point in my cooking.
As a mostly vegetarian cook (cooking chicken or fish perhaps once or twice in a month), I don’t have to deal with squicky ingredients as a general rule. Although looking back many of the recipes I’ve featured here have involved chicken, my go-to non-Daring cooking is much, much more likely to be a variation of masur dal or chana masala. I usually work two or three rice and bean meals into my grocery lists – and I could go on for months without repeating myself. I like this style of cooking not just because it’s delicious, filling, and cheap, but because I’m a wimp. Dried chickpeas have no fat or bones or gristle or scales or shells to be trimmed away. So when the Daring Cooks came up with pâté for the June challenge, the gauntlet was really thrown down. I wasn’t inspired by the vegetarian tri-colour pâté (combining white beans, roasted red peppers, and pesto), and I was not at all sure that I could handle a liver pâté (nor was I sure that I could convince the fellow to eat it!), but the shrimp and trout pâté seemed challenging yet edible. And then someone mentioned that bánh mì are often made with pâté, and I knew how I was going to meet the challenge requirements.
Our hostesses this month, Evelyne of Cheap Ethnic Eatz, and Valerie of a The Chocolate Bunny, chose delicious pate with freshly baked bread as their June Daring Cook’s challenge! They’ve provided us with 4 different pate recipes to choose from and are allowing us to go wild with our homemade bread choice.
I decided it was time to roll up my sleeves and prove that, grossed out or not, I could peel a shrimp just as easily as I could make bread – in this case, Vietnamese-style mini-baguettes, following a recipe from HomeBaking.
And if this month’s Daring Cooks challenge taught me anything at all, it’s that shrimp have way too many legs. And removing those legs is an icky process. But hey, I can do it. (I’m not going to go this far just yet though. Somebody else deal with the heads!) In the end, I didn’t love the trout and shrimp pâté, finding it simply too rich to want to eat more than a few bites even when worked into a sandwich, but I did a) learn how to peel a shrimp, b) flambé for the first time, and c) try a recipe for a broccoli and nut terrine and make crackers as well. So thanks are due to Valerie and Evelyne!
I followed the challenge recipe for the shrimp and trout pâté fairly closely, but I did make only a half-batch (quantities follow), which was more than enough for two people.
Trout and Shrimp Pâté
1/2 tbsp butter
120 g raw black tiger shrimp, peeled and de-veined (I used about 6 shrimp)
15 ml bourbon
200 g trout filet, skinned and cut into thick chunks
1/4 cup heavy cream
salt, to taste
coarsely ground black pepper
Preheat your oven to 375F – I used a toaster oven, given the small size of the pâté.
In a heavy skillet, melt the butter and sauté half of the shrimp, until pink and cooked through; these shrimp will be used to form a layer in the middle of the pâté, so if they are quite thick it might be a good idea to cut them in half. Remove the pan from the heat and pour on the alcohol, then carefully light it with a match to flambé the shrimp. Allow the flames to die on their own – but have a lid in your hand to smother them if they get out of hand (i.e., don’t be like me!).
Use a food processor to mince the remaining raw shrimp and the trout. Gradually pour in the cream until you have a spreadable, soft, but not liquid mixture.
Butter the bottom and sides of a ramekin. Spoon in half the shrimp and trout mixture, then form a layer with the sautéed shrimp, and finally top with the remaining half of the shrimp and trout mixture. Season with a pinch of salt and a few grinds of pepper.
Bake at 375F for 35 minutes or so, until the pâté is cooked through and firm in the centre.
Vietnamese Mini-Baguettes (from HomeBaking: The Artful Mix of Flour and Tradition, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid)
1 cup rice flour
1 cup pastry flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 cups lukewarm water
1 Tbsp active dry yeast
1 Tbsp wheat malt syrup or 1 1/2 tsp sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
~4 cups all-purpose flour
Makes 8 mini-baguettes (about 17-18 cm long)
Notes: This is a pretty straightforward bread recipe; the only unusual thing (from my perspective, at least!) was the addition of rice flour. I think – though I’m not certain – that this is the source of the bread’s elusive sweetness. I halved the recipe without incident, and got 4 rolls. It’s not anything like a classic French baguette, but it was tasty and stood up well to being covered in mayo and sriracha! I used my stand mixer, but the dough wasn’t terribly wet and could easily be made by hand. Alford and Duguid note – correctly – that these breads dry out very quickly.
Combine the rice flour and the pastry flour in a bowl and set aside.
If using a stand mixer, put the water and yeast into the bowl of the mixer and stir to dissolve the yeast (I just did this step by hand), then add the sugar (or malt syrup) and the rice flour mixture and mix on low speed until all the flour is moistened.
Sprinkle on the salt and 3 1/2 cups of the all-purpose flour, and knead for 3 minutes on low speed. At this point, I found the dough to be a bit stiff and added about 2 Tbsp of water, and then continued to knead for another minute or so. You could also turn it out and knead by hand for another minute.
Turn the dough out into a clean bowl and let it rise for 1 1/2 hours or until more than doubled in volume.
Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and divide it into 8 pieces; roll each piece into a ball and then flatten slightly. Cover the dough balls and leave it for 10 minutes.
Shape the rolls into a tapered cylinder, each about 17-18 cm long; I did this by flattening the dough pieces into ovals and then rolling them up.
Begin preheating the oven to 425F. Place the rolls on a parchment-covered baking sheet and let rise for 30 minutes.
Bake the breads for about 20 minutes. If you have a water-sprayer (which I don’t), mist the breads with water 3 or 4 times in the first 10 minutes of baking – but if you don’t, they’ll still taste good.
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