Comfy Alex, Cozy Food

Alex's Day Off with Alex Guarnaschelli

Comfy Sunday Brunch

Deluxe Coffee Cake

Homemade Butter

Omelet with Fines Herbes

White Mushrooms and Spinach

Raspberry and Lime Brunch Cocktail

As tough as Alex can be on the chefs on Chopped, she’s quite easy on her viewers on Alex’s Day Off, as she gently guides us through recipes that the home cook can easily accomplish. They may be simple, but each step is perfectly executed and THAT is what I appreciate about this show.

Alex is making brunch today.

She starts by making her own butter!!! (Does she serve this in her restaurant?) She whisks together 2 1/2 cups of cream and a cup of sour cream. (She notes in the recipe to use an all natural sour cream.) Alex puts the mixture into the KitchenAid and beats it on a low speed for awhile.

The milk solids are going to separate from the liquids, she tells us, and she’s going to wind up with butter and its by-product, which is buttermilk. Wouldn’t the same thing happen without the sour cream? I guess that makes it tangy.

Alex moves on to her coffee cake. For the topping, she melts 5 tablespoons butter and mixes together toasted walnuts, pecans, flour, sugar, cinnamon (which she sifts), light brown sugar and salt. She breaks it all up with her hands.

I love the aside that Alex adds when she’s talking about the nut topping. She’s visualizes the cake coming out of the oven…all golden and puffy with the crunchy topping. She picks off a piece of the topping and puts it into her…

Hold on! This is sounding rather racy. Alex gives us a naughty smile.

I really like her and I LOVE the Food Network manicurist, who is doing a great job. Her hands are more than camera-ready. Beautiful hair and makeup too, by the way.

Alex mixes melted butter into the topping mixture and spreads it out on a tray. She refrigerates it. I wonder why. Is it going on the BAKED cake?

Back to the HOMEMADE butter, Alex shows us the buttermilk in the bottom of the bowl. She drains it and gathers the remaining butter up in cheesecloth. She squeezes it gently to get rid of any additional liquid (the buttermilk) and then submerges the entire cheesecloth-wrapped ball into an ice bath.

Alex lifts it out the ball of butter and unwraps it. “I’m going to pop it on the table, kind of innocently, like, oh by the way, I just happened to whip up some HOMEMADE BUTTER.” She obviously expects our friends and family to rave. I certainly would.

For the coffee cake batter, she creams butter and sugar together and then cracks two eggs into a little bowl and beats them in separately.

Alex says sifting the dry ingredients incorporates them better AND aerates them. She sifts flour with salt, baking power, baking soda and flour. Next she measures out some of the homemade buttermilk and mixes it with some yogurt. She adds the dry and wet ingredients alternately to the creamed butter mixture.

It goes into a buttered 9 by 13 glass baking dish. She spreads it gently…the same way she talks to us. The topping goes on now, but WHY did she refrigerate it? Does that make it clump together more, even after baking?

Alex makes sure to put some extra topping in the corner, so she can fulfill her breaking-off-a-piece-of-the-topping fantasy when it comes out of the oven. It bakes for 40 to 50 minutes at 350º F.

Alex makes an herb syrup for a raspberry spritzer. She has ½ cup of water boiling on the stove and she adds ½ cup superfine sugar and then shuts off the heat. She adds mint leaves and just leaves it to infuse. Remember this for a fabulous iced tea. Add TONS of mint in that case.

Alex layers ¾ cup of sugar and 2 pints of raspberries in a tall pitcher. She keeps 1 pint of raspberries for garnish. She pounds the raspberries with the sugar, muddling them with a wooden spoon (I think it was a spoon). She adds ¼ cup fresh lime juice to the raspberries (to brighten the flavor), strains the syrup in and refrigerates the pitcher.

The coffee cake comes out of the oven and Alex tests it with a knife. She takes a “TINY” scoop from the corner and covers her tracks. I'm really liking her. I wonder if she has any tips for covering up the hole left by eating a quarter of a layer cake. What about a half a container of Edy’s caramel fudge?

To serve with an omelet, Alex quarters white button mushrooms and adds them to a hot cast iron skillet with some olive oil, garlic, thyme and salt. (MC says not to add the salt until the mushrooms are browned.)

I don’t think I need to describe how she makes toast. Oh wait, she’s slicing a beautiful loaf of sour dough bread quite thick, which will never fit in the toaster, so she’ll do it in the oven.

Alex adds some Marsala to the mushroom pan. She pulls it off the heat and then “pops” it back on and cooks it off.

The garlic cloves and thyme get picked out of the pan and, after turning off the heat, Alex adds some fresh spinach leaves.

For the omelet, Alex chops A LOT of chives, tarragon and parsley. She breaks 3 eggs (one-handed) into a bowl and whisks them with a fork. She tells us not to waste our energy overbeating, to save it for eating. I’m with her. She adds a tablespoon of water. GOOD! No salt?

Commercial.

She takes out the toast and tucks it into a towel to keep warm. She adds coarse salt and freshly ground pepper to the homemade butter. She tastes the mushrooms. Yum.

Alex adds a few drops of hot sauce, Worcestershire and salt to the eggs. She pours them into the hot pan. She stirs the eggs and then swirls the edges around. She adds the herbs. (Not all of them, but still A LOT.)

Alex finishes her omelet in a slightly untraditional way (to me, at least), but actually it’s neater. She folds in a third of the omelet towards herself and then she folds over the other third to envelope the herbs. She tilts it out onto the plate.

It’s less wide than usual, because it’s folded in thirds, not halves. And it looks less baveuse than I like it, but I bet it’s good. The mushrooms go on the plate, the toast gets buttered. She tastes everything. Loves it.

Alex fills up the chilled raspberry and mint syrup pitcher with champagne. She places raspberries in a champagne glass and pours herself a cocktail. Hmm, I AM liking that.

BTW, Bobby Flay (mwwwahhh!) is her executive producer, but I feel as if the concept and execution of the show is all Alex.

There was nothing I didn’t like. There were no loud voices or jerky movements, just the calm assurance of a professional showing us how it’s done. I would visit Alex’s kitchen anytime.

Lofty Cooking with Alex Guarnaschelli

The Cooking Loft with Alex Guarnaschelli

Break the Rules Breakfast
Candied Bacon
Date Compote with Fresh Pears
Sourdough Pancakes
Crustless Quiche

I wonder if this is what Ina would be like as a teacher in an actual class. Alex Guarnaschelli, who is also the chef of Butter, is very skillful and knowledgeable, just like our Barefoot friend. And she has the same easy way about her that makes her very watchable. Today she's cooking breakfast and the recipes sound fantastic.

Alex starts with sourdough pancakes. She opens 2 packets of yeast and pours them into a bowl. She measures out 2½ teaspoons of yeast and explains how the water should be warm in order to “wake up” the yeast. If it’s too hot, it will kill it; too cool and it won’t do its job. It should feel warm to your hand, but not hot.

I like her method here. I learned a long time ago that NO MATTER what the recipe says, you should always “proof” the yeast, which just means doing exactly what Chef Alex is doing – adding the warm water (and often sugar, but not today) to the yeast and letting it sit to make sure it’s working. If after 10 minutes you have a bowl of scummy looking water and no bubbles, throw it out and start again with new yeast.

Alex doesn’t tell us this, but if you are new to this, use a thermometer for the liquid the first few times, so you can get a sense of the correct temperature – 110°F for active dry yeast or 120°F for Rapid Rise Yeast. (Some folks believe you have to make other adjustments when substituting Rapid Raise for the regular stuff. My yeast baking isn’t so precise that I worry about it.)

There ARE a few things that I could do without in this half hour cooking show. Do we really need to be introduced to each of the students? Do we really care that Brian “loves one-pot meals” and “wants to refine his palate a little more”?

They all seem perfectly nice, but, to be honest, they’re just taking face time away from Alex.* It reminds me of Back-to-School night when, instead of your kid's teachers telling you why they give 3 hours of homework a night and why they don’t teach spelling anymore, they go around the room and have each person say what his or her favorite color is. Waste of time and useless.

Chef Alex pours 3½ cups milk into a saucepan, remarking that you should really measure it. It never occurred to me NOT to. She adds 3 tablespoons of butter to the heating-up milk. She shows the yeast again, which has started to “bloom”.

Let me repeat, even if your recipe says to throw the dry yeast into a bowl with the flour and salt and then mix in the liquid, don’t do it! Take some of the warm liquid (1/4 cup for every envelope of yeast) and proof it. Don’t waste all the other ingredients and your precious time trying to rise dough that has dead yeast in it...although, here's an interesting way to deal with unrisen dough.

Alex measures 2¼ cups of flour and whisks that into her yeast mixture with 2 tablespoons sugar. Why didn’t she add part of that to her yeast while it was proofing? THIS is where those students could come in handy…to ask questions, but none of them asks anything particularly intelligent.

The butter is completely melted in the milk and Chef Alex tests the heat. She whisks half of the milk into the batter and then the other half. She covers the bowl with plastic wrap and leaves it to the side.

She moves on to the crustless quiche. I’m not sure if I agree with her point that it’s hard to make a quiche crust, but I like the idea of the quiche without the extra calories of the crust.

Alex takes out beautiful leeks. Let’s see how SHE cleans them. She cuts off the root and most of the dark green part. She splits them down the middle and cuts straight across in 1½ inch lengths. Okay, NO, that still leaves on much of the dark green, tough outer leaves at the top.

I learned to cut the tops off leeks as if you were sharpening an old fashioned wooden pencil with a knife. You cut in sharp angles, leaving a pointed top to the leek. That gets rid of the tough outer leaves and keeps the tender light green ones. You cut them in half lengthwise and rinse them really well. Then you chop them as desired.

Chef Alex takes her pieces of leeks and submerges them in a bowl of cold water and stirs them around. That STILL leaves a lot of the dark green pieces that will NEVER soften, no matter how long you cook them.

The leeks are dried off in a tea towel and they go into a skillet with melted butter, salt and pepper. She cooks them for a minute of two.

She cracks her eggs on the edge of the cutting board. Sorry, I hate that, I don’t want egg stuff lying on my cutting board even for a minute. (I use a table knife to make a single decisive strike in the center of the shell on the equator and that does the trick.)

Chef Alex assigns different tasks to her students. They crack 8 eggs, grease a tart pan and deal with the different cheeses for the quiche. (I have mistyped this word EVERY single time. The last time was “quickie”.)

Alex continues cooking the leeks and then spreads them out on a baking sheet to cool them. They go into the fridge for awhile, so their heat won’t scramble the eggs.

She adds 2 cups of milk and one cup of cream to the eggs with goat cheese. That gets whisked together with a little Worcestershire and hot sauce. She spoons the leeks onto the bottom of the baking dish and pours over the egg mixture. The quiche goes into a 400°F oven for 20 to 25 minutes. Halfway through it gets topped with sliced brie.

Chef Alex uses Ina’s trick of cooking her bacon in the oven (not on a rack, though), but she takes it one step further. She sprinkles over black pepper and light brown sugar, which produces a candied effect. (Maple syrup would be good too.) She covers it with parchment paper and then places another baking sheet right on top, so the bacon comes out flat. She cooks it at 350°F for 15 to 20 minutes.

Trivia Question: Who can tell me which Top Chef contestant won a challenge with a maple bacon garnish?**

Alex takes out the quiche and tops it with the brie slices. I’m not sure I like the way that looks. It goes back into the oven.

She places the pancake batter on the counter. It’s bubbled and is all fluffy. She whisks in two additional eggs with 1½ teaspoons salt. Why is she adding those now? She doesn’t add the salt early on, she says, because she doesn’t want to impede the yeast rising. And the eggs? (You add the eggs into a brioche dough before it rises.) The eggs give the batter more body, which doesn't really answer the question.

Alex starts by making the test pancake. She ladles a spoonful into the center of a cast iron skillet. The class makes a compote of sliced pears (with the skin) and dates. They flip the pancakes. Those don’t look like “test” pancakes, they look perfect.



She adds the pears and dates to a pan with butter and a little honey and cinnamon.

She removes the quiche. I definitely do not the look of the brie on top.



I would prefer shredded gruyère, maybe sprinkled over in straight lines to make a few stripes on the top.

The pears and dates have cooked down magnificently.



I have never had that combination and I think it would work beautifully. Alex adds lemon zest at the very end and a squeeze of lemon for freshness. Great ideas.

Chef Alex plates the pancakes with a dollop of the pears and dates and a touch of sour cream.



She removes the bacon from the oven. Wow, that “bacon candy” looks fantastic.



They serve themselves and sit down to eat. Alex cuts the quiche. She says she doesn’t miss the crust. I have a much better idea for the top - sliced tomatoes. Arranged on the top, they would give a gorgeous color.

I don’t love the concept of this show, but I think that Alex has a lot to teach us. Her recipes are wonderful (except for that homely brie on top) and would be very tasty additions to any cook’s repertoire.

*There are some shows that would be vastly improved with this technique. If Sem-EYE Homemade could be all introductions of random people, we’d have much less muck being made and that would be all good.

** It happened on The Elements episode. Lisa was the winner, as part of Team Fire, and was responsible for the bacon in Grilled Shrimp with Pickled Chili Salad, Deviled Aioli and Miso Smoked Bacon. Padma and Ming agreed the dish was “amazing”.