Feral Cooks

Good food shouldn't be tame

A Dessert Classic: Chocolate Mousse

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Please note that the heart-shaped spoon is my wife’s, not mine.

Chocolate mousse has always been one of my dessert favorites, right up there with a good crème brûlée. If you’re making it, what’s really nice is that it’s easy to make, and doesn’t cost a fortune in ingredients. Just make sure that you use the best chocolate you can find, because great chocolate makes for a better mousse.

I used Food & Wine’s Ultimate Chocolate Mousse recipe, which dates back to one of their issues in 1984. Again it’s super-easy to make, but this recipe has one ingredient that I did skip out of salmonella fears*: raw egg whites. I skipped this ingredient to no ill effect of flavor, though I’m sure it affected the airiness of the dessert.

What you’ll need:

  • 8 oz semisweet dark chocolate, broken into small pieces for easier melting
  • 6 large eggs, yolks separated from whites
  • 3T water
  • 0.25 cup sweet liqueur (I used amaretto)
  • 2 cups heavy cream
  • 6T granulated sugar
  • Whipped cream and shaved chocolate pieces (optional garnish)

What to do:

Start heating the chocolate in the top of a double boiler over gently simmering water. Cook slowly, stirring until melted. Remove from heat and set aside.

Add the egg yolks and 3 tablespoons of water to a heavy saucepan. Cook over VERY LOW heat, whisking vigorously and constantly until the yolks begin to foam and thicken. (If you cook them too fast, you’ll end up with scrambled eggs.) Add the liqueur and continue whisking and cooking until the sauce thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon. Remove from heat and run through a mesh strainer to remove any solids, though there really shouldn’t be if you cook it very slowly. Be patient.

Fold the melted chocolate into the egg/liqueur sauce and transfer this mixture to a large bowl and set aside.

Beat the cream with an electric mixer on high until stiff peaks form. Add 2 tablespoons sugar as the whipped cream nears completion. Because I skipped the next step, which calls for a lot of sugar, I added 3 tablespoons sugar in this step.

Here’s the step I skipped because of the raw eggs: using an electric beater with a whisk attachment, beat the egg whites until soft peaks begin to form. Beat in the remaining sugar and continue until stiff peaks form. Fold into the chocolate/whipped cream mixture.

Spoon the mousse into a bowl and chill well before serving. 24 hours is probably best.

Top with whipped cream and shaved chocolate immediately before serving.

*I’m not usually that cautious about raw eggs, but I have a health consideration when it comes to dangerous foodborne bacteria. If you are concerned about salmonella from raw eggs, you could pasteurize them yourself in a sous vide. I chose not to in this case, and just skipped the raw egg whites.

Pork Fennel Meatballs

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Not sure what to say about these. They’re really good. And easy to make.

There are a few recipes like this on the web, so aggregated the best of the ingredients for this recipe.

For me, the main success was that these turned out actually spherical for the most part, which doesn’t usually happen when I make meatballs.

What you’ll need:

  • About 2 oz raw oats
  • 0.25 cups milk
  • 1 lb lean ground pork, not too lean
  • 1 small onion, small dice
  • 1 clove garlic, crushed
  • 1 egg
  • 1T fennel seeds, ground (freshly ground is best)
  • 0.5t salt
  • 0.25t black pepper

What to do:

Put the oats in a bowl, add milk and mix until milk is absorbed.

Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well, but don’t over-mix. Use nitrile gloves or a spoon, if necessary.

Roll into whatever size meatballs work for you, remembering that the larger they are, the longer they’ll take to cook.

Oil and heat a large fry pan over medium heat. When hot, add the meatballs, letting them gently cook. Turn them occasionally so they brown and cook evenly. Use tongs or your fingers (be careful!) for turning.

Cook until no longer pink in the middle, or until the center reaches 165 degrees F*.

Serve over tomato sauce and sprinkle with Parmesan cheese.

*Note that ground meats should be cooked to 165 degrees to kill any bacteria, which is much more common in ground meats because of the extra processing. Ground beef is an exception, to some degree (no pun intended), but ground beef that is too rare is risky.

Peking Pork Chops

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When browsing through old cookbooks in the library, I ran across a few different Chinese pork recipes that looked really good. One of them was Peking Pork Chops, of which I found a couple of different recipes across two books, and a ton of recipes later online.

As I often do, I chose what I thought were the best-testing ingredients out of a wide variety, along with the most reasonable cooking method. The key to these is to use thin-cut boneless chops that are pounded even thinner. The result is a quick-cooking and tender piece of meat.

By the way, shouldn’t this dish now be called “Beijing Pork Chops”?

What you’ll need:

For the chops:

  • 1.5-2 pounds pork chops (boneless or cut the bones away), cut into 2-inch pieces (see photos). Use thin-cut chops and pound them a bit—with whatever you pound meat with at home—until they’re about ¼-inch thick (or around that thick).
  • 2 large eggs, beaten
  • 1T rice wine vinegar, or sake
  • 2T cornstarch
  • Oil for shallow frying
  • Green or red Thai chilies, seeded and sliced as an optional garnish

For the simmering sauce:

  • 3T ketchup
  • 3T rice wine vinegar
  • 3T water
  • 2T okonomiyaki, takoyaki or Worcestershire sauce (they’re all similar)
  • 2T sugar
  • 1T hoisin sauce
  • 1T sweet chili sauce (for spring rolls)
  • 1T oyster sauce

You can probably eliminate either the hoisin or oyster sauce and supplement it with more of the one you didn’t omit. It wouldn’t drastically alter the flavor.

What to do:

Whisk together the beaten eggs, rice wine vinegar and cornstarch in a medium bowl. These need to marinade for a while, so you can do that in a shallow bowl or use a zip-lock freezer bag. Give them at least 45 minutes to marinade, though an unanticipated change of cooking plans left mine marinating for 1.5 days, and they still turned out great.

After you begin the chops marinating, prepare the sauce by whisking all of the sauce ingredients in a bowl and setting it aside.

Using a large, heavy fry pan, add a little bit of vegetable oil to the bottom and fry the pork pieces in a single layer. This may take a couple of batches, and it takes 2-4 minutes per side at medium heat. Add a bit more oil before each batch. Transfer the cooked pieces to a paper-towel blotter to absorb any extra oil.

Now for the magic part. Return the fry pan to low-medium heat and add the sauce, bringing it to a gentle simmer. Reintroduce the pork and turn each piece to get it well coated with sauce. Gently simmer until the sauce thickens.

Serve hot over rice or Asian noodles.