Mammee Apple and Almond Tart

Encouraged by a successful pineapple coconut tart, I thought I might try another recipe from Sophie's tarts book (1). With pineapple and coconut as its main ingredients, that recipe was rather tropical to begin with. This time, I thought would use one of Sophie's more traditional recipes, but with local fruit and local flavors.

From Marie Denise's stand at the market in Basse Terre, I purchased a large abricot pays, or mammee apple (2). Abricot pays translates simply as 'local apricot.' It is almost always comic when comparing the 'original' fruit and its local namesake since there never seems to be much in common - one characteristic at most. The mammee apple is round and somewhat larger than a grapefruit. The skin is tan to dark brown in color, dry and hard. It peels off easily with a knife to reveal a beautiful deep orange flesh.

The color is similar to an abricot...or to a mango, or to acorn squash. The flesh must be cut away from the large round pit, a wet and messy procedure that recalls emptying a pumpkin of its seeds. The pit fits nicely in the palm of the hand like a ball of thin string pressed tightly together with great force. Cut into small pieces, the glistening fruit resembles some unknown precious stone.


The fruit smells curiously like royal jelly. It has no particular taste. But it slides slippery soft and sweet down the throat.

I decided to use Sophie's recipe for pear and almond tart (tarte aux poires et aux amandes). Two mammee apples and rum replace the can of pears in syrup and the pear liqueur.

Ingredients:
1 shortcrust pastry
2 mammee apples
100g crushed almonds
100g softened salted butter, cut into small cubes
1 egg
20g slivered almonds
2cl rum

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C. Roll out the shortcrust pastry over the tart pan. Gently press the pastry into the bottom and sides of the tart pan. Set aside in the refrigerator.

2. Peel the mammee apples. Cut the flesh away from the pit. Cut the flesh into thin slices.

3. In a medium-sized bowl, mix the sugar, butter cubes, crushed almonds, egg and rum.

4. Spread the crushed almond mixture in the bottom of the tart. Lay the mammee apples slices over the mixture. Sprinkle the top with the slivered almonds

5. Bake for 30 minutes.

I hadn't realized how large the pit was, and had only purchased one mammee apple. So my tart was a bit lacking in fruit. The tart was still edible of course, but the small flavor of the fruit was a bit overwhelmed by the quantity of tart. I am certain that bigger taste could be achieved with more fruit.

When cooked, the fruit wrinkles a bit like a raisin. I didn't find the wrinkles incredibly attractive, and so I would recommend mixing the mammee apples into the almond paste before pouring the entire mixture into the tart pan. I don't believe there is a technical reason behind laying the pear slices on top of the almond paste. And since the deep orange color is quite strong, it would still show up nicely underneath the paste.



(1)
Dudemaine, Sophie. Tartes et Salades de Sophie. Geneva: Éditions Minerva, 2004.



(2) Mammee Apple

Plantain Flour

Recently, I discovered plantain flour in the supermarket. I wasn't looking for it, but the colorful label caught my eye. Even though plantains are a staple in Antillais cuisine, plantain flour doesn't seem to be. After turning it over a few times I added it to my grocery cart.

Mostly, I was thinking about my mother. After a lifetime of eating wheat and wheat products, my mother discovered that she was allergic to wheat about a year ago. Its not a serious allergy, she can allow herself to eat wheat occasionally, but its preferable for her to avoid it. Giving up pasta and bread was not easy, but it was certainly easier thanks to a wide range of rice- or soy-based products found in Asian food stores.

Could plantain flour provide another wheat flour alternative?

Somewhat surprisingly, I wasn't able to find much information online. With the seemingly exponential increase of wheat and gluten allergies, I simply assumed that plantain flour would be one of many proposed alternatives, along with chickpea flour, soybean flour, fava bean flour, etc. Still, I was able to find some interesting tidbits:

*****

The Post-Harvest Compendium, an initiative of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, has an interesting page on post-harvest operations for the plantain, including the production of plantain flour. Here is a description of how plantain flour is made:

Unripe plantain is traditionally processed into flour in Nigeria and in other west and central African countries. This traditional technology is equally present in Amazonian Bolivia. The preparation method consists of peeling of the fruits with the hands, then cutting the pulp into small pieces, and air drying them for few days. The dried pulp is then ground in a wooden mortar or a corn grinder. The flour produced is mixed with boiling water to prepare an elastic pastry (alama in Nigeria and foufou or fufu in Cameroon) which is eaten with various sauces. The colour of the flour obtained is more or less dark due to the action of browning enzymes. Some improvement of this traditional method, by blanching the plantain pulp at 80°C for 5 minutes and cutting them into round pieces, [...] followed by draining and drying in a drying oven at 65°C for 48 hours or in the sun for some days resulted in the production of a more or less whitish flour. Plantain flour containing 10 percentage of residual humidity and hermetically packed in plastic sachets can be kept for many months without deterioration of its qualities.

The passage goes on to describe various end products, such as fritters and cakes.

Plantains may be staples in many African countries, transformation of plantains into other products seems relatively new. In an issue of African Journal of Biotechnology (1), Nigerian researchers report on the use of wheat and soybean/plantain composite flours. The purpose of the study is to find an alternative to wheat flour bread, whose consumption is steadily rising in the country. As an imported product, wheat is expensive, and so efforts are being made to find alternatives that utilize locally grown produce. The researchers found that plantain supplemented breads had "comparable sensory and nutritional qualities," but required a high proportion of wheat flour to be able to rise.

Another Nigerian study sheds light on the reasons why the use of plantain flour is not widespread (2). They conclude that plantain flour would have to sell for almost twice the price of imported wheat flour in order to be profitable. This clearly illustrates the challenges of introducing a product that competes with wheat. Because there would be both economic and social benefits to weaning Nigeria off imported wheat, the authors of the study recommend government subsidies to encourage the production of plantain flour and plantain four products.

*****

Anyway, I thought I would start with something simple: crêpes. I used my sister Js recipe for crêpes, which calls for regular wheat flour. I substituted the wheat flour with plantain flour 1 for 1.

3 tablespoons plantain flour
3 teaspoons sugar
1/3 cup milk
1 egg
pinch of salt

The flour is somewhat ashen when compared to regular wheat flour. The seeds in the plantain are not removed and so add black specks to the flour. Plantain flour also has a different odor; it smells slightly sweet, oddly sour. Otherwise, it seems to look and feel quite the same.

The crepes turned out well. Crepes lend well to the substitution because there is no rising action required. There was no particular banana taste.

I'd like to try some other recipes, but I'm a bit reticent to find myself with some soggy, mushy mess. The packaging includes a recipe for a cake, but calls for a mixture of plantain and wheat flour. I also found a recipe for plantain flour pancakes on the website for Barry Farm, a producer in Ohio that carries a wide selection of wheat flour alternatives. Its been a long time since I had pancakes, my last box of pancake mix finished months ago. I think I'll give the plantain pancakes a go*. Its got a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

* I made plaintain pancakes two weeks later.


(1) Olaoye O. A., A. A. Onilude, O. A. Idowu. "Quality characteristics of bread produced from composite flours of wheat, plantain and soybeans."African Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 5, No. 11, 2 June 2006, pp. 1102-1106 (here)

(2) Ogazi, P.O. and K.G. Vaidya. "The Place of Plaintain in Bakery Products Production - Economic Aspects." ISHS Acta Horticulturae 123: VI African Symposium on Horticultural Crops. (here)

Pineapple Coconut Tart

I have been keen to try making some tart recipes from Sophie Dudemaine's Tartes et Salades de Sophie (1). Sophie had had a runaway success with her first book, Les Cakes de Sophie in 2000 and Tartes was her second book, published 4 years later. I hadn't heard of her until almost 6 years after she had published her first book, and by then she was a veritable one-woman corporation with a an entire series of books, a cooking program, tied sponsorships, etc. For that reason, she has been called the French Martha Stewart. The comparison is certainly a marketing gimmick because their styles are complete opposites. Whereas Martha introduced perfectionist cuisine and homemaking to an American public, Sophie does the exact opposite. Sophie introduced French cooks to easy and original recipes. I highlight original because the French are quite rigid in their ideas of food, and Sophie has said that when she first started making and selling cakes, customers were very wary of trying anything except the classic cake recipe of ham and olive (2). She also isn't afraid to use shortcuts in the interest of time and economy; for example, she often uses canned fruits in her sweet recipes, and uses pre-prepared pate feuilletée. She writes in her introduction that she would like to make her recipes accessible, and so takes into account the possibility that not all her readers can purchase fresh ingredients, or have the time to spend hours prepping in the kitchen.

Anyway, with my new electric oven, I am finally able to bake to my heart's delight. I had a bit
of trouble at first since my electric oven heats from the top (unlike a regular oven, which heats from the bottom). I made a few tarts, savory and sweet alike, which turned out with uncooked bottoms. I've now worked out that I must prebake the tart crusts, especially since I use a very pretty, but slightly thick, ceramic Geneviève Lethu tart dish.

This recipe stuck out because of its principle ingredients - it seemed very Antillais. Sophie's recipe calls for a small can of pineapple slices and packaged grated coconut, which is in line with her philosophy of easy cooking. However, I would have felt somewhat ridiculous in using imported packaged pineapple and coconut. It is not simply a question of taste, but a small gesture to support the economic and ecological benefits of eating locally.


Of course, replacing ingredients in recipes is always a tricky matter, and in my case, not always successful (3). But, I'm always ready to give it a shot and hope for the best.

I bought a medium-sized pineapple and a coconut from the market. Marie-Denise's husband was kind enough to remove the coconut flesh from the shell - an operation, he informed me, often resulting in serious injury in the hands of tourists. I'm not a tourist, but close enough!

I was worried that the coconut might be difficult to grate, and had therefore intended to delegate the job to M. But, he was not around when I began and so, I ended up doing it myself. To my relief, it grates much like a carrot, with the brown skin a bit tougher but all together possible with my flabby arms. While I was grating the coconut, I ate one of the end bits and I was surprised by the taste. I suppose I expected the taste of coconut icees in the summer, or candied slivers from chinese new year's. Instead, it tasted rich and oily and ... not sweet. I thought about the last time I had a fresh piece of coconut, and realized that I couldn't remember. Perhaps never. So strange, I thought, to have lived so long and to have eaten coconut, but not having ever eaten coconut at all.

Its a bit the same with pineapples, actually. I had my first taste of fresh pineapple when I was 18 (!). I was an undergraduate college student working in a campus brasserie that had fresh fruit smoothies on the menu. I prepared my first pineapple before ever having tasted one. I must have prepared a dozen before I finally secretly slipped a piece in my mouth. It was a revelation, that piece of pineapple.

Back to the recipe. In the end, I ended up using about half the pineapple. I could have piled on all of it on top of the tart, but was afraid that the juices might overwhelm the tart and spill over, especially since freshly grated coconut is less dry than pre-grated coconut. As instructed by Marie-Denise's husband, I froze half of the coconut for future use, and grated the other half for my tart. I ended up using less than half for the tart (4).

The pineapple coconut tart turned out extremely well, and is my first baking success here. Certainly the fresh coconut, speckled brown, makes for less pretty presentation, but the taste is clean and not overly sweet.








(1)
Dudemaine, Sophie. Tartes et Salades de Sophie. Geneva: Éditions Minerva, 2004.





(2) As quoted in her bio (in english), l'internaute.

(3) I tried making an apricot tart from the same book using mangoes. The entire thing ended up in the garbage.

(4) What do do with any remainder shredded coconut? Drizzle a bit of olive oil, and sprinkle on some salt and freshly ground pepper and you have a nice little salad. It only seems strange because we associate coconut with sweet - coconut cake, pina coladas, etc. Even savoury dishes with coconut are usually salty-sweet. But there is nothing inherently sweet about a coconut. Try it!

Galette des Rois: La Fève, 2

Mathematically, it makes sense that M. should find the second fève as well, since he eats the lion's share of the galette. I guess he is my king, after all.



The fève is a cow. But, seeing as it is somewhat smaller than the donkey, it may be more accurate to call it a calf.

Galette des Rois, 2

I know what I said in a recent post about my life not being simply cake-filled holidays. Though, I do admit that there is an above average incidence of cake.

Here is the galette de rois, original frangipane, that I've been waiting for:


It is absolutely perfect. When I slipped it out of its paper bag, my fingers crushed the flaky crust. I stuck the knife into its dense heart and pulled the knife outwards. As my knife came closer to the edge, I could feel the denseness give way to airiness. That sound of air escaping. And finally, the knife cut through the edge, with flakes of pastry showering down.


M. and I ate it in silence, giving it the reverence required.

Galette des Rois: La Fève

This morning I awoke to find more than half of what had remained of the galette gone. Seeing that M. has gone about it with a furious efficiency exceeding my expectations, it was with some surprise that I found the fève sitting in the sink with the mornings dishes. It was a surprise also because its unfamiliar form had initially led me to believe some horrendously large bug, or some small frog had died in my kitchen sink. Recovering from my irrational and disproportionate fright, I could see that the fève is a charming little donkey.

Galette des Rois

Above, la galette des rois, complete with paper crown.

This past Sunday was Epiphany Sunday. There is some religious connotation, but what is far more interesting is cake that is associated with it: la galette des rois (or king's cake), a puff pastry cake filled with frangipane.

La galette des rois forms one of my first experiences of France. I had arrived in France just after new year's for my first stay. My 'host mother' made her own galette - from scratch - with almond powder that she bought from the bakery and which she brought home in a small brown paper bag. Her 'secret' was that she added a few drops of fleur d'oranger (orange blossom water) to the frangipane.

The galette is meant to be a festive cake. Aside from its tastiness, the galette is a game. The baker inserts a broad bean (called a fève) into the frangipane before baking. When the galette is served, whoever receives the part with the broad bean then becomes King for a day. S/he gets to wear the crown ... and gets to treat everybody to the next galette. To be sure there is no cheating, the youngest person in the room gets underneath the table and shouts out who should receive the part that's just been cut. A nice history of the galette in France can be found here. Over the years, the broad bean has been replaced with porcelain and then, plastic, figurines. These figurines are still called fèves, and vary from boulangerie to boulangerie.

Our local boulangerie sells the traditional frangipane galette des rois, but also sells galette with local flavors: coconut, guava, banana (if I remember correctly), and chocolate. I really love the traditional galette, but wanted to take advantage and try a local flavor. I picked guava. Miracle of miracles, the puff pastry was still somewhat crispy, despite a full day of torrential rain.

Above, a slice of guava galette des rois.

The filling is actually composed of a thin layer of frangipane, topped with a thicker layer of guava. Unfortunately, the guava is a bit too sweet for me.

There isn't much excitement around who will get the fève. Either I will get it, or M. will get it. Either way, M. will buy the next galette des rois. The only question remaining is what sort of fève it will be. Stay tuned...

PAUL Christmas Logs, part 2

We finally purchased our PAUL Christmas log - a little late for Christmas, but just in time for gaining a few extra kilos. Heres to starting the new year off right!

We chose La Mokatine - almond spongecake soaked in coffee punch, covered with coffee buttercream, the top sprinkled with little bits of nougat. It was more expensive than I thought: €29 for a log serving 6. The log we bought at the local boulangerie, which was about the same size as the PAUL log, was only €16. Though, I will note that the spongecake for the local boulangerie log was a bit dry.

I'm afraid the picture doesn't do it justice. I am not a photographer, and I take my pictures with a point-and-shoot Canon PowerShot. But, I assure you, it was quite tasty!

Bûche de la St. Sylvestre

Stopping by to pick up a baguette, I was dazzled by the array of new year's eve logs on display at the boulangerie. Ah, yes, here, the logs are not just for Christmas, but the entire holiday season up until new years. And, why not, when they're so tasty?


Above, a chocolate log with a chocolate ganache layer, filled with apricot / passion fruit mousse, covered with dark chocolate icing.

What a tasty way to bid farewell to 2008 and to welcome 2009!

Almond Croissant

As if it were not enough that the local boulangerie makes a triumphant baguette. Here is their almond croissant:

I assumed it was just a croissant with slivered almonds on top. But, its much more substantial as it is filled with frangipane, a sort of almond paste - I love suprises like that! The tips were crisp and flaky (no mean feat on this humid island), and the middle soft and a bit chewy from the almond. And since its a chilly 26°C (79°F) at sundown, I had my almond croissant with a lovely cup of Mariage Frères christmas tea, a gift from this holiday season.

Eating Well

As I mentioned in a previous post, our local boulangerie in Trois-Rivières makes an excellent baguette. Here, the baguette is consistently good. The only stipulation is that you must clearly ask for a baguette that is 'bien cuite,' or well cooked, since some customers apparently like their baguette on the soft side (why, I haven't the foggiest). Today's baguette was absolutely marvelous, having been bought while still warm. It was the perfect color, the perfect crustiness, a triumph, I think.


Above, the triumphant baguette. Below, a detail.


Otherwise, we stopped by the market in Basse Terre. We haven't been there in a long time, and so also had to stop by Marcellia's stand to restock on rum. M. chose a red currant punch, which is, along with coconut punch, the traditional punch of the season. Technically, the red currant punch is not exactly a true punch since it is not a masceration of red current berries, but a mixture of red currant syrup plus rum. M. also picked up two bottles of shrub to send to family in France for Christmas. Shrub is rum infused with the peel of an orange (or tangerine, or clementine) plus a good amount of sugar. Beyond these two main components, other ingredients may be added according to personal tastes, vanilla and cinnamon being the most popular.


The more I dine in other people's homes, the more I realize that everybody 'makes' their own alcohol. Its not just people who are from Guadeloupe, or have Antillais roots, but even recent expats. M.'s got a little booklet of traditional creole recipes, including one for shrub. It sounds pretty delicious, and I've convinced him that we ought to try our hand at making our own.

PAUL Christmas Logs

PAUL bakery is one of my favorite things about France. Surprisingly, it was not as the French say, un coup de foudre. I fell in love - madly, deeply in love - with each loaf of bread, tart, pain au chocolat...and of course, the macaroons (1). To imagine that I looked upon PAUL's pistachio macaroon with suspicion!

Above, the line spilling out of a PAUL bakery in Cannes. Whenever I could, I bought the family bread from PAUL.

Since, I take every occasion to eat at PAUL, especially since there is no PAUL in New York.
Every time I am in France, of course - Aix, Paris, Cannes, Nîmes, including Orly airport, once, while making a connection for Italy - and twice in Miami (once walking up Lincoln Road, and then once on the way back down Lincoln!)

I was pleased to discover, then, that Guadeloupe has its very own PAUL. Two, in fact. One at Bas-du-Fort, and the other in the commercial zone of Jarry. Unfortunately, both are too far to make our local boulangerie (though, the boulangerie where we buy our bread in Trois-Rivières sells an excellent baguette, supposedly one of the best in Guadeloupe). We make special trips to the PAUL in Jarry when we want to buy something for a special occasion.

I am looking forward to stopping by next week to pick up a Christmas log. Hardly sounds appetizing in English, but I assure you, these logs are more than edible:

Above, from left to right: la Tout Choco, la Framboise Nougat, la Fondante, le Chalet
(pictured at the top of this post, la Pain d'Épices; not pictured from the selection, la Mokatine)
Click on the image for a larger image.

I haven't quite decided which one I want. And, for almost €20, its too expensive to have one of each. Whichever one I choose, though, I am certain it will be delicious. Not quite Christmas in New York, but a nice consolation prize.

(1) What's a macaroon?: "One of PAUL’s best-loved treats, these heavenly macaroons are very special. Our soft Valencia almond biscuits are sandwiched with smooth butter cream filling and come in five mouth-watering versions: Chocolate, Coffee, Praline, Vanilla and Pistachio."