The Secret Sauce

This is a do-over from a blog from February 2020. Boy did our world change over the following year. As the world starts to get vaccinated let’s hope it isn’t too long before we can get the Secret Sauce working again.

For me, the Secret Sauce is getting together with good friends with good food and good wine. When you can get those three together, you are sure to have a great time.

We had a great sauce (see recipe below) and the Secret Sauce working in February 2020. Lucien and Ela Vendome visited Memphis from Poland and we took advantage of the opportunity to reconnect with a few old friends from Kraft Food Ingredients. Lucien Vendome, Mike Taylor, Jody Driver, Pam Gray and I got together along with our significant others. It was a perfect forum to tell a few of our favorite stories:

Mike Taylor, Lucien and I were driving from Frankfort Germany to Reims France several years ago. I am driving and struggling to stay awake. To keep a conversation going, I asked my car-mates to describe what their mothers cooked for meals on a daily basis.

Lucien growing up in the south of France, started with: The day would begin with a baguette and confiture…

Mike growing up in east Texas, started with: We had beans and then we had beans and if times were really good we had beans and tamales…

As the French would say “Viva La Difference!”

Jody Driver and I were at the IFT trade show quite awhile back. Jody did a masterful job of managing and enormous enterprise-wide effort. One year I can remember her being 9 months pregnant with her son Gregory (Now 25) and sneaking off to a quiet corner of the booth to sing Happy Birthday to her then 3-year-old daughter Lindsey.

Pam Gray was always our style guru. Back in the day when Manolo Blahnik shoes were all the rage, Mike Strauch and I would have an annual over/under bet on how many pairs of shoes Pam would bring to the week-long IFT event.

The over/under was 12 and the safe bet was the over

The KFI Team back in the day

The meal we had Thursday night was a lot of fun. The old joke is: How do you cook for a world renown French Chef…You let them cook. Lucien and I have been cooking together for years. When it comes to sauces, he is the master and our meal this week was All About The Sauce!

Le Menu

Entrée

Citrus Melon Napoléon

Le Plat Principal

Rack of Lamb Provençal
Pommes Frites
Haricot Verts

La Sauce

Roasted Garlic a la Vendome

Dessert

Peach Cobbler A La Mode with Raspberries

(Note: Citrus, Melon Napoleon)

Le Plat Principal – Rack of Lamb, Pommes Frites and Haricot Verts

Lucien and I doing the “Culinary Shuffle”

The KFI Alumnus…Pam, Jody Lucien, Mike & Paul

Click here to watch the Culinary Master At Work

Roasted Garlic Sauce A La Vendome

Lucien called it a simple sauce. I counted over 15 ingredients and close to 7 processes. Of course, for Lucien it was simple, but the flavor was amazingly complex. By layering in flavor with:

Sautéing the mirepoix with herbs
Reducing the stock, wine and base with tomato paste
Roasting the garlic
Sautéing the shallots
Adding the roux
Condensing with immersion blender
Top noting with mustard and butter

The lesson is that with repetition, even the most complex task becomes simple. The sauce was magical and the evening, with its Special Sauce was memorable

If you enjoyed this blog and similar other stories/supper club lessons follow me on Facebook and Twitter and subscribe to get future blogs at www.impromptufridaynights.com/blog and check out my book Impromptu Friday Nights a Guide to Supper Clubs. Published by Morgan James Publishing and available through most channels where books are sold.

Bread! Bread! They Cried And The Curtain Came Down With A Roll!

Apologies for the old joke. It was one of my father’s lines. I just couldn’t help myself. When I would go work with dad as a kid, many would comment how much I looked like my father and he would say: “We all have a cross to bear”. If he only knew…

With the pandemic, it is really easy to get frustrated on what we CAN NOT DO. The truth is that there is quite a bit that we can do to socialize with a group of friends over a glass of wine and a bite to eat. After we had a trial Virtual Wine Group session, someone asked about a Virtual Baguette class for an expanded Wine Group via zoom.

We had a great time making and breaking bread. Zoom is a wonderful technology and we are all getting better at using it. It can be a bit chaotic, but the baking class did seem to work out well. I even had my dad who passed away in 1995, talking to me. Dad taught a college speach class for years. One piece of advice from dad really payed off. MAKE SURE YOUR AUDIO VISUAL TOOLS WORK BEFORE YOU START. I don’t think that dad would have been real good with Zoom, but a little dry run certainly helped me to work out the kinks. I had planned to have two devices connected to Zoom with my MacBook connected with a slideshow and my iPhone being used to be the primary video tool. My dry-run before going live taught me that the 2 devices would create audio feedback. Hence, I went with one device and it is safe to say, I was the only one aware of the shortfall. The participants got quick glimpse of the slides and a link to this blog for the real detail. Susan did a great job of capturing the pictures used in the following.

Remember when people told jokes? My dad was a great joke teller, but he ruined lots of great jokes by cleaning them up. Some times a good “F” bomb makes a joke. I did have a really good clean joke to share, but the politically correct police pulled it because it mentioned a piece of anatomy. While I won’t share it here, I will share it with anyone who asks. PLEASE ASK down below in the comments and I will share it with you.

ENJOY THE SLIDE PRESENTATION

Click here for the Baguette Recipe

If you enjoyed this blog and similar other stories/wine group/supper club lessons follow me on Facebook and Twitter and subscribe to get future blogs at www.impromptufridaynights.com/blog and check out my book Impromptu Friday Nights a Guide to Supper Clubs. Published by Morgan James Publishing and available through most channels where books are sold.

A special thanks goes out to the Berrys for providing the featured photo and the McMahons for providing the group with a Charcuterie plate. We started the session with all 7 participants making a pesto, olive oil and balsamic dip together. After the class we all enjoyed the fruits of our labor and a fun virtual conversation.

Making Friends (With Baguettes and Pizza)

How to make friends and influence people? Give them free bread…

(Free Baguettes offered to Residents of Dogwood Grove in Germantown TN)

Good things can come from a bad situation. The pandemic has disrupted the supply chain in supermarkets around the world. In Memphis, you can’t find yeast or bread flour.

So I went on Amazon and ordered $15 worth of yeast. The good news is that it arrived in 2 days. The bad news is that I have a 10 year supply.
I found bread flour at Costco and it is cheap. The bad news is it comes in a 50 lb. bag for $13.

The really bad news is that if we start eating the level of carbs that bulk buying of flour and yeast could support, we would be as big as a house. The easy answer is to make some new friends. Giving away pizza/focaccia dough and baguettes to people in our neighborhood was an obvious answer. (To me at least)

In our neighborhood my grilled pizzas have developed a reputation, so I started out offering free pizza doughs via our neighborhood Facebook page. Pizza dough is easy to make if you have made it 100 times. It is very challenging for the inexperienced. Baking is much more exacting than other culinary endeavors. With baking, you need to be very careful to measure your ingredients exactly or you can have a disaster. Most recipes come in volume measurements (cups and teaspoons). Really good baking recipes will provide both volume and weight measurements. I can make pizza doughs in quantity much more consistently using my digital scale.

Dealing with yeast can be daunting as well. I worked with baking experts from Nabisco and they taught me that yeast is a living being and subject to lots of variation. My sister who is a great cook told me: “My history with yeast dough is not good. I make hockey pucks”. She spends summers on the Canadian border, but that is not good.

The free pizza doughs were a big hit. I made a couple dozen doughs and got lots of nice feedback. I even sold a few books. Neighbors made some great looking pizzas and more than a few nice focaccia’s. But we still had 45 lbs. of flour and 9.5 year supply of yeast.

The second phase of our making friends effort was giving away free baguettes. (To residents of Dogwood Grove in Germantown TN) It turns out that pizza and baguette doughs are identical. With a little testing and finding an old baguette pan that my brother in law Bobby gave me 20 years ago, I have been making a really tasty baguette

Baguette Recipe (Click here for printable version)

Ingredients

5 cups flour or 684 grams
Additional flour for dusting
2 cups plus 2 tablespoons water or 502 grams
3 teaspoons yeast
2 teaspoons kosher salt

Instructions

In a large bowl combine the dry ingredients (flour, salt yeast)
Whisk vigorously to insure a good blend
Add water and using a large spoon and scraping device blend the dry ingredients and water together to form a well-blended rough dough
Cover the bowl with a towel and set aside in a dry place that is not drafty
Let the dough rise for at least one hour or until the dough doubles in size
Scrape the dough out onto a working surface that has been dusted with flour
Work the dough into a large ball and the cut into 4 equal pieces
Roll the 4 pieces into 4 balls
Set the balls into a large plastic container with a lid
Place the sealed container with 4 dough balls into the refrigerator over-night
The next day place a dough ball on a small towel that has been sprinkled with flour and shape the dough into a 15-inch cylinder
Rap the cylinder in the towel and place in a dry warm place
Repeat the process to create a second cylinder the same way
After letting dough rise for 35 minutes place the 2 onto a perforated French baguette pan
(I have a two slotted baguette pan, so I work in batches of two)
Place a pan of water in the bottom of the oven
Pre-heat the oven to 475 degrees
With a sharp knife, score the top of your dough cylinders with 4 slanted cuts
Sprinkle the top of the dough with a dusting of flour
Bake for 23 minutes or until the baguette is a dark brown (The color is a matter of preference. I like mine darker and crunchy)
Remove allow to cool for a few minutes and serve warm
Note: They can be stored at room temp, in the refrigerator and frozen. To reheat place a room temperature baguette into a 350 degree over for 10 minutes.

(Declan likes his Gramp’s baguette)

What is a better way to host a wine group gathering than have them walk into the house that smells of baguettes baking? While wine group social gatherings are limited now with the pandemic, we are making friends and getting new recruits for our wine groups when things return to normal.