Pineapple Mint Shave Ice

Pineapple and Mint are best mates. This is a fantastic dessert for summer when fresh mint and pineapple are both in season!

Similar to my post yesterday on Shokubi, Pineapple Li Hing Mui Shave Ice, I was intending to make a pineapple mint sorbet, but it turned into a granita or Hawaiian Shave Ice.

It was still a little tasty, but when frozen it was rock hard! If you let this dish sit out for about 10 minutes, it gets softer and much easier to serve and eat! You can also scrape it straight out of the freezer if you are looking for more of a shave ice texture.

This was a super simple recipe to follow, as long as you have an Ice Cream Maker. We received a KitchenAid Ice Cream Maker Stand Mixer Attachment as a wedding gift, and it worked wonderful!

I am still experimenting with it. A few plausible theories I have as to why it didn't come out right:

1. I didn't have enough sugar in the mix. The pineapple had natural sugars in it,  that this would be enough sweetness. I had tasted the mixture before freezing and after freezing, and it was plenty sweet. I had added only 2 tablespoons of sugar to this dish. By contrast, when I was making a Lemongrass Mint sorbet a few months back, I had added 1.5 cups of sugar to 1 cup of water.

So for the same volume of liquid, 1.5 cups of sugar is going to give you a very soft sorbet, and 2 tablespoons is going to give you a very hard granita. The hypothesis I am arriving at is that the sugar is providing a textural element as well, making it softer somehow. Perhaps the sugar is prevents the liquid element from forming ice crystals, making it softer.

2. I didn't seep or boil the liquid.  When I made a Lemongrass Mint sorbet a few months back, I had seeped the flavor elements (mint and lemongrass) in boiling water with sugar for 20 minutes. This allowed the flavor to infuse into the liquid. Obviously, the heat released some natural oils in the lemongrass, and possibly the mint. Maybe by heating the liquid and then adding the sugar, the sugar dissolved into the mixture, changing itself structurally. Any chemists out there who can help me confirm this hypothesis?

3. The pineapple is making the dish too chunky. Somehow the pineapple is interfering with the formation of ice crystals, making the whole thing hard. I don't know the science behind this...Any readers out there chemists? I am experimenting with blending the pineapple in the food processor, then squeezing out the liquid with a cheesecloth. This will impart the flavor of pineapple. Then after everything has gone through the ice cream maker, I add back in a few spoonfuls of the pineapple.

In any event, I found that if I let this granita sit outside the freezer for about 5-8 minutes, the ice crystals loosen up and it is easier to spoon out. Either way, it tastes good.

I will give the recipe for what I did, and then make recommendations for how I would improve the recipe for next time.

This granita, as it is, also works wonders as a base for mixed drinks. Like a Pineapple Mint Mojito!

Ingredients, Initial Run (what I did)
Pineapple, cut and cored, 3.5 cups
Fresh Mint Leaves, 1 large handful, washed
Sugar  2 tablespoons

Procedure, Initial Run (what I did)
Place your ice cream maker's bowl and paddle in the freezer and let it freeze completely (at least 24 hours).

Cut your pineapple into cubes, as outlined in my blog post Cutting a Pineapple. Cut and remove the core. You can either toss the core or makes something else with it. I place my cores in a glass jar with vodka and make pineapple infused vodka!


Add the Pineapple, mint leaves and sugar to a food processor. Blend until smooth.

Set up the Ice cream bowl and paddle on your KitchenAid (see my blog post Lemongrass Granita to learn how to set up your KitchenAid Ice Cream Maker).


Churn for 7-12 minutes on speed 1. Remove and pour into a plastic container. Freeze.

The texture of this batch wasn't as hard as the Pineapple Li Hing Mui Shave Ice, but it was still not smooth at all. It was still rather hard, and I needed to let it sit outside the freezer at room temperature for 5-6 minutes, before serving it. 

Ingredients, 2nd Run

Pineapple, cut and cored, 3.5 cups
Fresh Mint Leaves, 1 large handful, washed
Sugar  1.5 cups
1 cup boiling water

Procedure, 2nd Run
Place your ice cream maker's bowl and paddle in the freezer and let it freeze completely (at least 24 hours).

Cut your pineapple into cubes, as outlined in my blog post Cutting a Pineapple. Cut and remove the core. You can either toss the core or makes something else with it. I place my cores in a glass jar with vodka and make pineapple infused vodka!

Add the pineapple cubes to your food processor and blend until smooth. Strain the pineapple through a fine sieve or cheesecloth. Discard the solids or place the solids in a glass jar of vodka to seep for flavored vodka. Keep the liquid portion in a separate bowl.

In a separate bowl, add sugar and boiling water. Stir till the sugar is dissolved. Add the liquid pineapple and give it a good stir again. Place a kitchen towel over the mixture and let seep for 20 minutes.

Cool.

Set up the Ice cream bowl and paddle on your KitchenAid (see my blog post Lemongrass Granita to learn how to set up your KitchenAid Ice Cream Maker).

Churn for 7-12 minutes on speed 1. Remove and pour into a plastic container. Freeze.


Ingredients, 3rd Run
Fresh Pineapple, cut and cored, 3.5 cups
Fresh Mint Leaves, 1 large handful, washed
3 cups sugar
1 cup of boiling water

Procedure, 3rd Run
Place your ice cream maker's bowl and paddle in the freezer and let it freeze completely (at least 24 hours).

Cut your pineapple into cubes, as outlined in my blog post Cutting a Pineapple. Cut and remove the core. You can either toss the core or makes something else with it. I place my cores in a glass jar with vodka and make pineapple infused vodka!

Add mint, sugar and the pineapple to a large bowl. With your hands or a large pestle, squish the pineapple and mint into the sugar, breaking up the pineapple and releasing some of the pineapple juices and mint oils. Let the mixture sit for 10 minutes, allowing the pineapple to release some of its juices. Add the boiling water. Stir until the sugar is dissolved. Cover with a kitchen towel and let seep for 20 minutes or until cool.

Strain the mixture with a colander, separating the solids from the liquids. Place the liquid portion into the refrigerator.

Take the solids parts and place in a food processor. Blend until smooth.
Strain the now liquid pineapple with a cheesecloth, adding the liquid portion to the other part. Use the solid portion to flavor vodka or throw away.

Cool the mixture and run through an ice cream maker, as outlined above.

I am tempted to say the third one will give the best consistency in terms of texture, but it will have the most sugar! Shokubi Readers, why don't your try making a batch and let me know how it turns out! Either post on my blog (see bottom of the page) or give me a holler on my Twitter account.

Happy cooking! (And eating!!)

Plum Pie

 There is a season for plums, and that season is summer! 

These plums were screaming out to me "pick me pick me" so I couldn't resist. 

Adding some cardamon sugar to the plum mix really helps to bring out their flavor. 

This pie is delicious with ice cream! 

Ingredients

recipe for 1 tart or pie dough

plums, around 10, cut and pitted

Cardamon sugar

Melted Butter

Freshly whipped cream from heavy whipping cream, vanilla ice cream or cardamon creme

Pyrex Glass Pie Plate, 9 1/2" x 1 3/4"

"Roul'Pat Small Countertop Roll Mat"

Procedure

Preheat oven to 400 F. 

Cut the plums into dice and place into a bowl. 

Sprinkle cardamon sugar on the plums and mix the sugar into the plums. 

Roll out your pie crust on a pastry roll mat and place into a greased pie pan. 

With a pastry brush, gently brush melted butter on top of the entire crusts, including the sides. 

Sprinkle some cardamon sugar on the bottom of the pan in the crust. You don't want to sprinkle the sugar on the sides of the pie, because they will be exposed and both the sugar and the cardamon will burn!  By pouring the plums on top of the sugar, the sugar will mix in with the plum and juices. 

Pour the plums on top of the pie crust. The plums will be really liquidy from the sugar you added previously. Don't worry about it, it will burn off in the oven. 

Fold over any pie crust. You can also make a lattice crust if you want to. 

Apply another brushing of melted butter on the pie crust. 

Lower the temperature of the oven to 375 F.

Bake for 1 hour, or until the crust is cooked and turns a delicious golden brown. 

Remove from the oven and let the pie cool on a cooling rack. 

As the pie is cooling, apply another layer of melted butter to the crust and sprinkle the cardamon sugar 

on the crust. 

Serve with freshly whipped cream or ice cream! 

Cherry Rhubarb Pie

We participate in a CSA called Farm Fresh to You, located in Capay, CA. These guys are great! They deliver us fresh fruit and vegetables to us once every two weeks. Supporting local farmers is so important, and the fruit and vegetables are far tastier and fresher than anything you can get at a supermarket. One of the added benefits is that you don't get much choice with what you get with every shipment. This forces you to try new foods and new recipes. We got rhubarbs in our weekly box and I was inspired to make some sort of rhubarb pie. Fortunately, we got a bunch of fresh cherries at the Lakeshore farmer's market, so it seemed the perfect union to make Cherry Rhubarb pie.

This was my first time making Cherry Rhubarb pie, and my first time cooking with Rhubarb (I know, I am such a newbie!). I have had a slice or two of Rhubarb pie at the Petaluma Pie company, in Petaluma, CA, which was quite tasty and the inspiration for this dish.

I scoured the internet and found an excellent recipe for Cherry Rhubarb pie on a food blog called Not Eating Out in New York . The only difference is that I used my own recipe for pie dough, and I replaced cornstarch with tapioca flour, which was quite a nice choice!


This was also my first time making a lattice crust-the pretty criss-cross pattern on the pie. I thought it came out pretty good! What do you think? Based on the size of my pie pan, after making my lattice crust, I had left over dough. I used that dough to make Strawberry tarts with rose syrup and cardamon!


Ingredients
Double recipe for Tart & Pie Dough
1 lbs rhubarbs (about 1 1/4 cup chopped), sliced into 2 inch pieces (about 1 Rhubarb stalk)
1 cup of cherries, pitted and sliced (plus any extra juice from the cherries)
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons tapioca flour (or substitute cornstarch)

Preheat oven to 400 F.

Roll out one of the pie dough discs and place into a greased pie pan. With a pairing knife remove any excess dough that is having over the edge of the pie pan. You want the crust flush with the rim of the pan. Add any extra dough to the second dough disc.

In a large bowl, mix the rhubarbs, cherries, sugar, salt and tapioca flour.

With a pasty brush, brush some melted butter all over the crust, on the bottom and sides.

Pour the mixture on top of the rolled out pie dough in the pie pan and spread it out evenly. Lower the temperature of the oven to 375 F.








For this pie, there will be a lot of liquid from the cherries and rhubarb, which will get really hot and want to ooze out of your pie. You could theoretically just pop another rolled out pie crust on top of the pie, but it wouldn't be as tasty. There will be a lot of liquid and moisture oozing from the rhubarb and cherries. By making a lattice weave crust, you will let that extra moisture exit the pie without oozing. A lattice weave is that criss cross dough shape that you see on pies at farmers markets, in magazines etc. It looks complicated, but it is actually rather simple and it looks really beautiful!

Making the Lattice Crust
Roll out the second pie dough disc.

Cut the dough into wide strips. Because your pie dough is in a rough circle, you will have some pieces which are longer than others. This is a good thing!

Place your longest strip down the center of the pie. Place two more strips to both the right and the left of that center piece. The strips closer to the center should be longer than the strips to the outer end.














Starting with the strips on the outer edge, gently fold the strip over itself in half. Repeat with every other strip, so you are alternating between a long strip and a folded over strip like this:














Next, take a long strip and place it down the center of the pie, ontop of the strips you just laid down.
















Take the two or three strips that are folded and lay them down on top of the center strip.

Now, this time you will want to place a vertical strip down to the right of the center strip. Repeat the same process, but this time fold every other horizontal strip over to the left.
















Now place a vertical strip to the right of the center vertical strip and unfold the strips that you had just folded over, this this:















Continue repeating the same process, but this time place the vertical strip to the left of the center strip. If you have more room, continue the process, placing one strip to the far right and far left of the pie. You should have something that looks like this. Take your thumb and press together the ends of the strips into the pie crust.  Gently brush the lattice crust with some melted butter.












Place the pie on a baking sheet with parchment paper. This is really key because you might have some of the cherry and rhubarb juices ooze out of the lattice crust.

Place the baking sheet with the pie on the middle rack and bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes at 375.
Remove from oven and place on a cooling rack for at least an hour before eating.

Mom's Cheese Cake

This is a family favorite! I love this cheesecake, it has the right balance between sweet, tart and sublime! This is my mom's recipe and it is absolutely fantastic! She makes it as a sheet cake, so there are plenty of pieces to go around!

I find this cake stands on its own, you really don't need any additional sauces for it. If you want to get fancy, you could put boil a few strips of lemon in syrup or sugary water for a few minutes to give it a bit more zing! Or you could put a few fresh strawberries on the cake. Or make a strawberry rose sauce and drizzle that over the cake. Or fresh blueberries...the possibilities are endless.

The only addition that I made to my mom's recipe is that I added some cardamon to the crust, which gave it a wonderful flavor!

Crust
2 cups graham crackers, crushed
1 stick melted butter (1/4 lbs or 4 oz)
Cardamon (optional)

Filling
3 eight oz packages of cream cheese, room temperature
5 eggs, room temperature
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
dash of salt

Topping
1 pint sour cream
5 tablespoons sugar
1 tsp vanilla


Crust
Mix graham crackers and melted butter and press into the bottom of a 9x13 inch pan, making sure to cover the whole pan.

Preheat oven to 350.

Cream Cheese Filling
Remove cream cheese and butter from refrigerator and bring to room temperature.

Once the cream cheese and the butter have come to room temperature, cream with an electric mixer until smooth. I made mine with the Kitchen Aid Electric Mixer, which worked wonderful!

Add eggs, one at a time, making sure to beat the eggs into the batter thoroughly, before adding the next egg. You want to have this mixture be extremely smooth, so I usually let the Kitchen Aid go at it for several minutes.

At first the cream cheese will stick and clump around the mixer. Don't worry about it and let it keep on mixing! You can periodically scrape off some of the cream cheese from the wires and add it back into the mix.


After a while the batter should look something like this. Once it gets to this consistency, add the sugar, vanilla and salt and beat until well blended.
















Assembly
Pour the cream cheese filling onto of the graham cracker crust and spread evenly. Use a gentle hand, because you don't want the spatula to touch the crust, otherwise the graham cracker crust will get into and mix with the filling. You will be putting frosting over this layer, so if some gets mixed up, its not the end of the world (see the bottom right corner to see where I messed up!)









Pop in the oven and bake at 350 for 35 minutes.
Remove from oven and cool for 5 minutes.
Increase the oven temperature to 450 and wait till the oven comes up to temperature. 
















Topping
While the oven is heating up to 450, beat sour cream, sugar and vanilla until well blended. Set aside.






















After 5 minutes of cooling, spread the sour cream topping evenly on the top layer of the cake. See, it takes care of that little mess we had at the bottom right corner!

Bake an additional 5 minutes at 450.







The finished product should look relatively smooth:















I usually will let it come down to room temperature and pop it in the fridge to serve cold.

Tart & Pie Dough

This recipe is for 2 10 oz balls of dough. It can easily halved or doubled as needed.
It really helps to have a pasty mat, as it makes cleanup much easier. I had a trusty pastry mat which I purchased in Hawaii of all places at a store called Executive Chef!  Its made by a company called Demarle, and the product is called RoulPat. Its fantastic because you can roll your dough out, and transfer it to your pie pan and then any extra flour you have on the pad you can just put back into the till. Its great and cleanup is a snap!







Ingredients
1/2 cup ice cold water
2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt (omit of using salted butter)
12 tablespoons cold butter (1.5 sticks) cut into small 1/4 inch cubes

Work the butter into the flour with your fingers. Your fingers warmth will help warm the butter just enough to help it mix. Leave some of the butter in large, irregular pieces. This should take only 1 or 2 minutes.

Pour in some of the water. Take a fork and press the butter into the flour and water. The dough should form clumps. As the dough forms clumps, mesh them together with your hands. Try not to overwork the dough.











Divide the dough in two. Form into 2 balls, and wrap each in saran wrap.















Compress and flatten each ball into a disk. Let rest in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour.









After 1 hour, remove the dough disk from the refrigerator and let sit for 20 minutes, until the dough begins to soften.

Start to roll the dough with a rolling pin. Keep guilding the rolling pin from the center, as opposed to rolling it back and forth. Give the dough a quarter turn every now and then.

Place the rolled out dough in a greased pie pan or tart pan. Be careful not to tear the dough.