dessert « (y)our food choices™

Even though the Meyer lemon is considered a winter fruit, we received a bagful of this sweeter version of a lemon, as a gift, a couple of weeks ago and couldn’t resist adding the Meyer lemon to our blog. From just reading the wiki entry, it seems that we owe a debt of gratitude to Alice Waters of Chez Panisse for reintroducing the Meyer lemon into the American diet. Although it seems like every friend of ours with a citrus tree has at least one Meyer lemon tree in their yard, most Americans are unfamiliar with this delightful kin of the common lemon.

The Meyer lemon is a cross between a traditional lemon and either a tangerine or an orange. It comes from China and was brought into the US at the beginning of the 1900’s. In the kitchen, the uses for the Meyer lemon are vast. It can be substituted for the regular lemon for a slightly sweeter, less acidic flavor, or for the orange or tangerine for more tartness.

The skin of the Meyer lemon is probably one of the most fragrant of all citrus. The skin is thin on the fruit and has a soft non-porous touch to it. The culinary uses for the Meyer lemon range from good old lemonade, to adding the juice to brine in preparation for cooking chicken, or adding the juice to olive oil for a vinaigrette, or putting them up as salt-cured preserves to be used as a condiment with Moroccan food. Anything that calls for a lemon, or even an orange, may be substituted with Meyer lemons.

Meyer lemons are high in vitamin C, but they aren’t nutritional powerhouses. You’ll get a small amount of calcium, fiber, and protein from them if you eat the whole fruit. We suggest that you use their delicious juice and zest for their unique flavor and not because of their nutritional value. Eat some leafy greens first to get your vitamins, then you’ll be able to have a Meyer Lemon Meringue Tart for dessert. Everything in moderation. Cheers!

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Meyer Lemon and Honey Curd

2/3 cup fresh Meyer lemon juice
1/3 cup honey
3 eggs
pinch of salt
6 tablespoons butter, room temperature
zest of 1 Meyer lemon

Note: Before juicing the lemons, wash and zest at least one for the recipe.

Place a medium saucepan with a couple inches of water in it over medium heat, bring to a simmer. In a metal bowl that will fit on top of the saucepan, whisk the lemon juice, honey, and eggs together and place over the heated water. Make sure that the water does not touch the bottom of the bowl.

Whisk over simmering water for 4-12 minutes or until thickened. The whisk should leave waves in the custard.

Take the bowl off the heat. Continue whisking the custard and add one tablespoon of butter at a time, making sure to thoroughly whisk the butter into the custard before adding another piece. Whisk the zest into the custard.

Serve warm or pour the custard into a glass storage container and cover the surface with a piece of wax paper or plastic wrap. Completely cool at room temperature before refrigerating.

Optional: For added smoothness to your custard, pass through a fine mesh screen and omit the zest.

Almond Whole Wheat Crust

1-large 9” tart/ 4-medium 4″ tarts/Several small tarts

1/3 cup almond meal
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup whole wheat flour
4 Amaretti cookies, crushed
7 tablespoons butter, softened
2 tablespoons powdered sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon milk
1 egg yolk

Combine the almond meal, flours, and crushed cookies together, set aside.

In a medium bowl with a hand mixer add the butter and the powdered sugar. Mix on low to combine. On low speed add the almond and flour mixture, and salt. Add the egg yolk and milk and stir to combine. The dough will be sticky.

Remove the dough from the bowl and flatten into a disc, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 3 hours or up to a couple of days. The dough can also be frozen for up to 3 months, and thawed when ready to use.

When ready to roll, lightly flour your work surface and roll the dough out to about a 1/8 inch thickness. Gently place the dough into a false bottom tart shell pan and press the dough into the edges of the pan. Press off the excess dough. Prick the dough several times with a fork and place the dough back into the fridge for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 325 degree while the tart rests in the fridge. Place the crust in the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes. For added crispiness of the tart shell, brush the inside of the tart with egg wash (a beaten egg with a little water) after 10 minutes of baking.

Meringue Topping

4 egg whites
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

In a large bowl over a pot of simmering water, heat the egg whites and sugar whisking constantly until the mixture reaches 160 degrees. Remove from heat, add the cream of tartar, and using an electric mixer beat the egg whites until they form stiff peaks.

Assembling the Tart

Pour the cooled curd into the prepared tart shell(s). Top with the meringue and, using a spatula or back of a spoon, push the meringue from the center of the pie to the sides, making large swirls and peaks in the meringue.

Place the pie in an oven set at broil and toast until the meringue is light brown 3-4 minutes, watch carefully, or toast the meringue using a culinary torch.

Lately, we’ve been going coo-coo for coconut flour. Coconut flour is milled from coconut meat after the oil has been pressed from it. It’s used as a substitute in baking and cooking in place of wheat flour to make gluten-free goodies. It’s a low-glycemic flour with a very high fiber content. The saturated fats in coconut oil were vilified during the anti-fat years, but they’ve enjoyed a resurgence in respect due to suspicion the oils in coconut may in fact be good for us.

We’ve decided to begin experimenting with coconut flour because it’s a low-glycemic food. We, like almost everyone in the world, love sweets. We’re all hard wired to want them. But we’re also aware of the many health issues associated with a diet rich in sugar and refined starches (high-glycemic foods) and the effects they have on our health as we age including diabetes and heart disease, just to name a couple. These bad guys are at the top of a list of hundreds of aliments caused by a diet full of high-glycemic foods and deficient in dietary fiber. So we’re trying harder to improve the fiber to digestible carbohydrate ratio with our current food choices. It’s simple! We want our cake, we want our cake to be extremely delicious, and we want it to be reasonably healthy…is that too much to ask?

There aren’t many cookbooks out on the market describing all its uses and most of the google results seem to be linked to gluten free and/or vegan baking resources. So far we’ve had great success with pancakes but the recipe still needs a few more tweaks before we publish it. The recipe that follows was a great success with the help of Gluten-Free Cupcakes, 50 Irresistible Recipes Made with Almond and Coconut Flour by Elana Amsterdam. If you’re looking for something definitive, we recommend Cooking with Coconut Flour: A delicious Low-Carb, Gluten-Free Alternative to Wheat by Bruce Fife, N.D.

Although typically available in health food stores, coconut flour is being stocked on more and more grocery shelves and is widely available on-line. We buy ours from Rainbow Market in San Francisco. Bob’s Red Mill sells an organic coconut flour online and in a number of grocery retailers.

Thanks to all that water-absorbing fiber, baking with coconut flour requires using extra liquid (eggs work especially well) to keep the end product from getting too dry. The effect makes coconut flour a good “volumizer,” so don’t be surprised if your recipes yield more of whatever you’re making.

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Coconut Almond Cupcakes with Ganache Frosting

3/4 cup Almond Flour
3/4 cup Coconut Flour
1/2 cup desiccated Coconut
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 cup agave syrup
4 eggs
1/2 cup coconut milk
1/3 cup coconut oil melted and cooled
1/3 cup yogurt

Preheat oven to 350 degree. Using baking spray, spray each of the 48 individual muffin tins lightly, set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, combine the almond flour and coconut flour with the desiccated coconut, salt, and baking soda. Whisk to combine.

In a medium-mixing bowl, add the agave syrup, eggs, and coconut milk. Whisk together until thoroughly combined. Add the coconut oil and yogurt, whisk again until combined.

Pour the egg mixture into the flour mixture and stir until there are no white streaks of flour.

Using a small cookie scoop, evenly disperse the cake batter among the 48 cupcake tins. Place in the oven and bake for 10-12 minutes, rotating the muffin tins; top to bottom and front to back, after each four minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to cool on a wire rack for 15 minutes before removing from the tins. Place on the wire rack and cool completely, 30-45 minutes, before frosting.

Ganache Frosting

8 ounces good quality dark chocolate, chopped
1/2 pint heavy cream
1 teaspoon instant coffee
pinch of salt

Using a large bowl, prepare an ice bath. In a medium sized bowl, which will fit into the large bowl, add the chopped chocolate. Heat the cream on the stovetop until starting to boil. Add the cream to the dark chocolate along with the instant coffee and salt. Whisk until combined, 20-30 seconds.

Using a handheld mixer, place the medium bowl of chocolate on in the large ice bath bowl. Being careful not to get water into the chocolate, beat the chocolate over the ice bath, starting on low for 2-4 minutes or until thicken and slightly lighten in color. Quickly add the whipped ganche into a pastry bag and decorate the cupcakes.

Do not let the ganache cool or it will firm up right away. If this happens, place the bowl of chocolate over a bain maire to slightly melt the chocolate. Start to beat the chocolate again with the handheld mixer, and place back on the ice bath until the consistency of frosting.