Fettuccine Alfredo

Everyone can make pasta with cream, but it takes skill to make pasta with Alfredo sauce because the key is to add the egg yolk to the pasta without making scrambled eggs.

The Seasoned Cook gives a very good class on how to make this:

Follow these instructions in the right order, you can choose how much you add of each ingredient:
1) First cook the pasta and drain it.
2) Add the egg yolk to the pasta and mix it while it's hot (but not too hot because you'll get scrambled eggs).
3) Add the hot cream.
4) Add pepper, Parmezan cheese.
5) Add olive oil.
6) Add parsley

Melanzane: Egg Plant with Tomato Sauce and Mozzarella

The idea of this recipe comes from my brother-in-law. But I modified it a bit to my taste and my ingredients. People also call this a melanzane.

Basically you need:

• 1 Egg plant
• 3 Tomatoes
• Mozzarella (Gruyère works too) 
• Parmezan cheese
• Spices (thyme, oregano, basil, pepper, salt, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon...)
• Ketchup
• Red wine
• Bread crumbs

First you cut the egg plant into long thin slices (2 cm x 8 cm). You stir fry them in a good amount of butter or olive oil, until they get soft and absorb all the fat. Add pepper, salt and spices to your taste. Then put the egg plant slices in a ceramic baking pan. Cover the egg plant layer with a second layer of mozzarella or gruyère. Add some parmezan cheese.

Second, you chop your tomatoes into little blocks, almost tomato concassé. Then you stir fry them at medium heat for about 15 minutes. Add some ketchup and red wine. Spice it up with thyme, oregano, basil, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt and pepper. The most important part is to add sugar here, so that the sourness of the tomatoes will go away. The ketchup will help a little bit here. To get some binding, you can add butter.

Now put the tomatoes onto the egg plant/cheese mixture and add a layer of bread crumbs. Sometimes people add a beaten egg or two to it before baking it, it gives an extra touch. Try it.

Finally put the entire baking pan in the oven at 180 °C for about half an hour.

It was delicious, especially the combination of cheese and tomatoes gave the extra touch to the flavor. One comment though, I had to bake it longer so that the bread crumbs can become crispy. I didn't bake it long enough, because I was afraid the sauce would become dry. But it was just right.

Pasta With Mushroom Cream Sauce

Making pasta is like being a magician. There are so many combinations you can make when making a mushroom cream sauce.

First off you need to select your ingredients. You need pasta, mushrooms, cream (+ milk), white wine and egg yolks.

1) Pasta

This ingredient is the easiest one, just buy some penne or fettuccine from the grocery store and cook it with two table spoons of salt at very high heat. The water needs to boil hard before adding the pasta. Continue to mix the pasta while cooking it. Do not overcook, it should be "al dente". Not too hard, not too soft. Just right. Make sure that your sauce is ready when your pasta is ready, because you need to mix the pasta together with the sauce.

2) Mushrooms

I like to use brown button mushrooms, because it gives a brownish color to your sauce. Just chop them how you like it. I mostly chop them in thick slices, so that it gives off its flavor to the sauce. Then you take a baking pan, add some butter and sautee them at the highest possible heat. You can season the mushrooms with some oregano/basil/thyme/pepper.

3) White Wine

Then add some white wine to cool the mushrooms down. Let the wine evaporate and then you add the cream.

4) Cream

The cream is one of the more difficult parts of the cooking process, because there are different forms of cream. First off, always use heavy cream, meaning cream with a high fat content above 30%. Otherwise your sauce will separate.

You have the following cream products:

• Cream
• Crème fraîche
• Sour Cream

Cream (heavy cream) is the most basic one, it is liquid and has a 35% fat content. The French call it: crème fraîche liquide. It is entirely possible to use heavy cream in your mushroom sauce. Just add the cream to the mushrooms, cook it for a bit, add salt and there you have it.

Crème fraîche on the other hand is going a step further. This is cream that has been made sour by adding bacterial culture. The pH of crème fraîche is about 4.5 which is more sour than heavy cream, which has a pH of 6.6. In France, they call this fermented version: crème fraîche épaisse. Meaning, the thick version of cream. So if you want to a have a bit of freshness in your sauce, you can use crème fraîche. The end result will be a bit more sour.

Sour cream is the same as crème fraîche, with two differences: less fat and more sourness. Sour cream has a fat content of 10% in Belgium and 16% in France. In France they call this: crème aigre. I would not advise you to use sour cream in hot sauces, but you can add this in the last two minutes of your sauce, just at the end to get it more sour to your taste. Normally you use sour cream to make cold dipping sauces. For example: 225 g mayonnaise + 200 ml sour cream + parsley + mustard + onions = great dipping sauce.

For all of these creams above, you just need to add those creams into the mushroom mix and let it cook at a low heat. Add milk to make it more liquid. Do not overcook the cream, otherwise you will get into trouble: separation of the sauce, lumps of protein will emerge. The duration of cooking will determine your sauce texture. I like to have a more liquid texture rather than a thick texture, because it will be too heavy. If you do get lumps (curdling), then you need to remove the sauce from the heat and whisk it firmly to break the protein lumps. Also adding some flour to the sour cream mixture helps because the flour coats the proteins and stops them from collecting together. Remember, sour cream doesn't like heat.

If it's too light in texture, you can add some butter to it. If it's too thick in texture, you can add some milk or cream to it.

5) Egg Yolks

The key ingredient and probably the most difficult one to do right is egg yolk and acts like a liaison for the sauce. The egg yolk(s) can be added to the sauce or they can be added to the cooked pasta. Just make sure you don't overcook the egg yolk. Egg yolk begins to coagulate at 65 °C - 70 °C, while egg white coagulates a 63 °C - 65 °C. So make sure to remove all egg white from your egg to get the best result. Also make sure your paste isn't hotter than 70 °C. Otherwise you will have pieces of cooked egg yolk in it. You will get scrambled egg pasta...

If you decide to add the egg yolk to the sauce, make sure the sauce isn't blazing hot. First mix the egg yolk with some cream to get a liquid egg yolk/cream mixture. This will reduce the risk that the eggs will overcook when adding them to the hot cream sauce. Add the egg/cream mixture when the sauce has cooled down a bit (preferably to 65 °C), otherwise you risk cooking the eggs and you will have tiny pieces of egg in the sauce.

If you decide to add the egg yolk to the pasta, make sure your pasta is wet and at the right temperature. Dry pasta doesn't mix too well with the egg yolk. Also, don't add the egg yolk immediately after you cooked and strained the pasta as you will cook the egg yolk. Just leave the pasta on a plate or bowl for a few minutes and then mix the egg yolk in it. Then immediately add the (not blazing hot) mushroom cream sauce to it.

=> The end result will be a delicious pasta with mushroom cream sauce.

Conclusion:

I have some issues with the end result. First off the sauce was too thick. Next time I'm going to add more milk to it, I want the sauce to be a bit liquid. Second, the sauce was a bit too sour to my taste, it would be better to mix it with some heavy cream to get the pH a bit higher. Third, the wine evaporated immediately, maybe I should add more wine to it and lower the heat more. Next time I will also add sour cream with some flour to prevent the curdling. The egg yolk addition went pretty smooth. It was edible, but there is room for perfection.

Vegetarian Lasagna with Spinach, Tomatoes and Mushrooms

As you know I'm a vegetarian so I don't eat meat, fish, chicken. For those vegetarians out there I will give a delicious recipe for lasagna.

You will need a lot of ingredients:
- lasagna sheets
- butter
- basil
- red wine
- tomatoes
- flour
- white wine
- nutmeg
- spinach
- mushrooms
- concentrated tomato paste
- olive oil
- lemon juice
- thyme
- oregano
- rasped cheese
- parmezan
- mascarpone

First we make the Bechamel sauce, which is basically a mixture of flour, cream, butter, water and nutmeg (optional: white wine). It's pretty standard. Don't add too much flour, or you will have a lot of sauce. Make the sauce thick enough.

And this is how I made the lasagna. Try it yourself!

After having baked it for almost an hour on medium heat, I added the cheese on top of it and let it bake for another few minutes on high heat. This is the result...

Without Cheese on Top:

With Cheese on Top:

Conclusion:

Very good taste, the only comment I have on myself is that the spinach was a little bit darkened because I cooked it for too long. Almost an hour cooking. Next time don't overcook the lasagna! Half an hour is enough.

Bechamel Sauce for Lasagna

A quick and easy way to make Bechamel sauce for your lasagna topping. Just use basic ingredients: flour, butter, cream, nutmeg and water. Season with salt and pepper.

This sauce will be a little bit thicker than usual because it's going to be used for lasagna.

Can't be easier...