Ingredient: eggs

Black Bean and Portabello Burgers

(lean, mean, bean-machine)

These ones are real companions in our household. When I don’t quite know what to make, I often think: “Eeh, I’ll just do some black bean burgers”. They’re good with oven baked potatoes and bearnaise sauce. They’re great with mashed potatoes and roasted garlic and mushroom sauce (as in the pictures). They’re really good as just… hamburger burgers as well actually.

The black beans, combined with the umami heavy confit onion and portobello mushrooms, give them a really rich and deep taste. Using bread is really good for consistency and the cheese is… well cheese is pretty great.

I like using soy as it together with the rest gives some meaty tones, but I get that that might not be for everyone (to make it more like meat I mean). But from this base-recipe you can basically do whatever. Fresh herbs, chili, spices, you go wild!

Created with Sketch. 1.5 hours Created with Sketch. 6

Ingredients

  • 760 gof black beans (boiled and in liquid, weight including the liquid)
  • 2 (or 3) portabello mushrooms
  • 4 eggs (a bit depending on the size)
  • 100 gcheese (e.g. Gouda cheese)
  • 2 small carrots (80 g)
  • 1.5 yellow onions
  • 3 slices of bread
  • Some tomato puré, mustard, soy sauce, salt and pepper
  • 75 gbutter
  • 3 dloil (rapeseed)

Directions

  1. Start by making the confit onion (which is onion boiled for a long time in oil). Chop the onion (1 yellow onion) into sizes of about 1/4 onion rings. Heat up oil enough to cover the onions (3 dl) to low/medium temperature and let the onion simmer in the oil for about 30 minutes.
  2. While the onion is cooking, chop the portobello mushrooms and put them in a pan with a generous amount of butter (50g), on medium heat. After ca 5 minutes, take the heat down to low, add salt, pepper and the tomato puré (1 tablespoon) and mustard (1 tablespoon). Stir and leave on low heat for 20-30 minutes (turn the mushrooms over now and again).
  3. Tear the bread into small pieces (3 slices in pieces about 1 cm x 1 cm), crack the eggs (4) and stir the eggs and the torn bread together.
  4. Sift away the fluid from the beans and put them in a bowl. Finely chop 1/2 yellow onion, finely grate a carrot (and squeeze out some of the the juice) and mix both in with the beans. Mix together with whatever but not with an immersion blender or mixer. Take a fork or something and stir until some beans have become squished but some are still whole-ish.
  5. Grate the cheese (100 g) and put it in to the mix. Sift away the oil from the confit onion and add the onion and the fried mushrooms.
  6. Now, the trick is to get the texture just right, by adding bread crumbs and/or flour/ potato flour. You should be able to form semi-firm, semi-sticky balls from the mix, but if there’s too much flour/bread/bread crumbs, the burgers get too dry when cooked. Personally, I more often make the mistake of making the mix to firm so try to err on the side of a looser, stickier mixture. More breadcrumbs can always be added in later. When I did these ones I didn’t use any breadcrumbs (or flour) other than the coating (see list item 9).
  7. Use salt, pepper and soy until the mix is to your taste. I usually put a bit of vinegar in the mix, but then again: I fucking love vinegar.
  8. So now the base mixture is done. If you have the time, let it set in the fridge for an hour or so.
  9. Make balls from the mixture and cover them in bread crumbs. Heat up the remaining butter (25 g) and some rapeseed oil to medium-high heat in a pan. Put the balls in the pan and gently push down on them with a spatula. If the consistency is right they should flatten easily (they should flatten slightly but not all the way under their own weight). Fry for about 5 minutes on each side. And you’re done!


These are best about five minutes off the stove, when they’ve settled a bit (become a bit firmer) but are still warm. Fry them the last thing you do before serving up the food.

Black Bean Moussaka

(greek goodness)

Well it’s not just Greek though right? It’s middle eastern, Turkish, Greek kinda. But you know what I mean. Anyway, this might be my favourite vegetarian dish.

Now, some might question why I’m posting a vegetarian version, instead of the meaty original, so let me just clarify: I absolutely adore the meat version. My cousins father was Greek, so a lot of the food in their mother’s (my aunts) house have always been very Greek.

The moussakas I’ve had there have been just… bonkers good.

So why the black beans? Well, my girlfriend is vegetarian and I just couldn’t stand not having moussaka frequently. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that. But then, I just started liking it so much I’m not even sure which one I prefer any more…

So what’s the deal with moussaka anyway? As with many dishes it’s not one single thing. The corner stones of a great moussaka are the spicing, heavy with all-spice and possibly cinnamon (I say yes to cinnamon btw. My aunt says fuck no, so… don’t say no, say maybe, maybe, maybe, as a famous Swedish song goes), fried egg plant, and a creamy, egg-infused béchamel sauce with plenty of parmigiano!

A couple of things are, according to myself, crucially important.

  1. Deep frying the egg plant (and the potato if you choose to include it).
  2. Ample amounts of parmigiano in the béchamel.
  3. Lots of eggs in the béchamel.
  4. Daring to spice the bean stew. I think beans need heavier spicing than meat, so go for it.

Just stick to these and you’ll be ok. And the moussaka will be a lot more than ok.

Special Equipment

  • Deep fryer (you can manage without a dedicated fryer, but it's a bit tedious)
  • Kitchen thermometer
Created with Sketch. 3 hours Created with Sketch. 8 servings

Ingredients

  • For the bean stew
  • 500 grwater soaked black beans (excluding the weight of the water)
  • 1 yellow onion
  • 100 grchampignons
  • 2 clovesof garlic
  • 33 clbeer
  • 1 dlred wine
  • 6 grallspice
  • 3 grpaprika powder (smoked if you have it!)
  • 3 grkoriander seeds
  • 3 grcinnamon
  • 1 grblack pepper
  • 50 grchili sauce
  • 25 grsoy sauce (Japanese style, e.g. Kikkoman)
  • 10 grsriracha
  • Vinegar to taste
  • For the layers
  • 700 grpotato (7-9 medium sized potatoes)
  • 800 graubergines (two big ones)
  • For the egg-béchamel
  • 700 gmilk
  • 70 gflour
  • 40 gbutter
  • 1 yellow onion
  • 100 gparmigiano cheese
  • 5 eggs
  • 3 bay leaves
  • 5 piecesof clove
  • 6 gsalt
  • White peppar to taste

Directions

  1. Chop the mushroom and fry them with som oil in a pan on medium heat. While the mushroom are frying, finely chop the yellow onion and the garlic cloves. Add the onion chop when the mushroom have some color.
  2. Mix all of the spices (and salt) in a mortar. Add them into the pan with the black beans when the yellow onion starts to look a bit transparent. After a couple of minutes, also add the sriracha, soy, chili sauce, beer, wine and 3-4 deciliters of hot water.
  3. Let the mixture reduce on low to medium heat. Stir occasionally. When the consistency is gooey (not watery) but not dry, the bean stew is done! Balance the taste with vinegar and additional spicing to your liking.
  4. Do the béchamel while the bean stew is reducing. Start by putting a big pot on medium heat and adding in the butter. Finely chop the yellow onion and add it to the pot when it’s hot and the butter is sizzling.
  5. Put the flour in a bowl. Whisk about 30% of the milk into the flour, until no flour-lumps remain. Add the rest of the milk while stirring/whisking.
  6. Add the salt, som white pepper, the bay leaves and the clove. When the onion in the pot has softened, pour the milk-mix into the pan.
  7. Turn up the heat. Stir the bottom of the pan continuously with a flat wooden spoon. When the mixture starts thickening, lower the heat to low/medium heat and continue to stir. Grate the parmigiano.
  8. After a couple of minutes on low/medium heat (the mixture should simmer ever so slightly), add the parmigiano. When the cheese has melted into the sauce, take it of the stove and let it rest for 10-15 min.
  9. When the sauce has cooled down a bit of the stove, mix in the 5 eggs.
  10. Find and remove the bay leaves and clove and you’re done!
  11. Now for the tedious part – deep frying the aubergine & potato. Start by cutting the aubergine and potatoes into slices about 0.5 – 1 cm thick.
  12. Heat up a big pot of rapeseed oil (alt. sunflower oil) to 180 C. Make sure to have a thermometer to keep tabs on the temperature. Fry in batches. If you put to much in at the same time, the oil can boil over and/ or drop in temperature too much. When the potatoes/aubergine are golden, take them out of the oil and let them drip in a sieve or put them on paper towels. Wait for the temperature to get back to 180 C before starting a new batch.
  13. When done deep frying, salt the potato and aubergine slices. The level of saltiness should be about the sam as if you would eat them separately (maybe just a hair less). Turn the oven to 200 C.
  14. Cover the bottom of a deep (10-ish cm) oven dish with aubergine and potato slices. Spread a thin-ish layer of bean stew on top of this and then do another layer of aubergine and potato. Continue until you run out of ingredients.

  15. Finally, pour the egg-béchamel on top of all of it.
  16. Bake in the oven on 200 C for circa 30 minutes.
  17. Emerge perfection!
  18. So… now for the, by far, hardest part of this recipe.
    You have to leave the moussaka to rest for about 45 minutes out of the oven before eating. I mean… you really don’t have to, but I IMPLORE you. It is so much better lukewarm than piping hot and there is quite a lot of oil in this one so it stays hot for a good while. So plan for it to rest, you’ll not regret it!

Serve with a nice Greek sallad or maybe even some Tsatsiki!

Popcorn Ice Cream

(how everything started)

So this must be the appropriate place to start, right? My brother first made this a long(ish) time ago. I don’t know, let’s say five years ago (you can find his recipe, in Swedish, here). I think he read about it on a Swedish blog but I’m not really sure. Anyway, it kinda became a thing in our circle. I then decided to do it one of the first times we had Danilo and Maria over for dinner, serving it with something that my father introduced me to: salt and olive oil on ice cream (which he in turn got from some place, probably Mathias Dahlgren actually Jamie Oliver). And it continued to be kind of a thing. It became something fun to serve new people and then annoyingly ask: ”…what do you think it is..? Guess!” (it really is pretty rare that it’s fun when someone asks you to guess, but… I’m naively open to the possibility that it might not always have been annoying).

So why the fuss, you might rightly ask. This just sounds like a hipstery over worked, over hyped, over well… this just sounds like the sorta thing that’s gonna be over pretty quickly, right? Not a thing that becomes something more than a fun (pretentious) little (annoying) thing? Buuuuut, listen, I know popcorn ice cream sounds weird, but the weird part is actually that it’s not weird at all. It’s just a really, really good flavouring for ice cream!

Quite frankly, it’s my favourite ice cream. And despite attempts to find a conceptually appropriate pairing, e.g. coca-cola sauce, I think salt flakes and olive really hold its ground against the alternatives. And you know what? I know it sounds weird, but the weird part is that it’s actually… yeah, you know where I’m going with this. It’s just great.

And so what if all the above makes me look like a bit of a quirky foodie type guy, can’t that just be ok?

Time-wise: if you have a fancy ice cream maker: ca 2 hours. 1.5 hours of prep, ca 30 (eh, maybe 40) min in the machine. Explain fancy! Fancy means active cooling. Cheaper ice cream makers have cooling blocks that have to be frozen in preparation to making the ice cream. In addition, with these machines you normally have to cool the batter before putting it in the machine. With an active cooling aggregate you can put warm batter in the machine (at least the one I have). I do think however, that results improve if the batter is pre-cooled, also in the case of active cooling. So:

If you have an freezing block style ice cream maker: Ca 4 hours. 1.5 hours of prep, 2 hours to let the batter cool down, 30 min (ish, very dependent on the actual machine) in the machine.

Ideally, regardless of machine, it’s preferable to make the batter the day before and stuff it in the fridge overnight.

Let’s get down to it shall we?

Special Equipment

  • You kinda have to have an ice cream maker to make ice cream. You can make it without but even a rudimentary (cheap) one makes a big big difference
  • A cooking thermometer
Created with Sketch. 2 or 4 hours depending on equipment Created with Sketch. 4 Servings

Ingredients

  • 300 gmilk
  • 300 grdouble cream
  • 60 gsugar
  • 80 gegg yolk (4-6 yolks, depending on size)
  • 50 gun-popped popcorn

Directions

  1. Pop the popcorn in a pot. Actually, add just a little bit of salt to the popcorn.
  2. Heat the milk and cream together in a pot.
  3. When the milk-cream mixture reaches a light simmer, take it off the heat and add the popped popcorn. Put this to rest for about 45 min under a lid.
  4. Mix the egg yolks with the sugar. Some light whipping will do.
  5. Sift away the popcorn from the milk-cream mixture. You should be left with ca 5 dl of popcorn-tasting cream-milk. Throw away the mushy popcorn and whisk the popcorn-milk-cream in with the egg yolk and sugar.
  6. Put the mixture in a pot and gently warm it to about 84 degrees Celsius. Stir the bottom of the pot continuously with a whisker or a wooden spoon. The important thing here is to not let anything stick to the bottom of the pot.

    The exact temperature is hotly debated (not really that hotly though…)! Some recipes say 82, others say just below 85. I say 84. The important part is to not let the yolk get to hot. If this happens, the batter gets grainy and taste a lot more like eggs. But don’t worry, there’s a fix! Repeat step 1-5. Easy, no? But seriously, it’s not that hard, just be careful. Start out on a fairly high (stove) temperature but reduce it quickly when the thermometer starts ticking faster. Reduce the heat as the temperature rises so that the temperature of the mixture (ideally) comes to a halt at 84 degrees. Remember to stir. Keep the temperature at 84 degrees for a little while, say 20-30 seconds, before removing the pot from the stove. And if you’re the nervous type, just stop a little bit short of 84.
  7. Let the batter cool down until it’s about fridge temperature. Best practise? Leave it in the fridge over night. This improves both taste and texture of the final product.
  8. Put into the freezer whatever you’re serving the ice cream in. Home made ice cream tends to melt pretty quickly. Serving it in chilled bowls really helps to counter this.
  9. Put the batter in the ice cream maker.

    My ice cream maker stops stirring automatically when the batter is wonderfully creamy*. This usually happens after about 20 minutes, if the batter starts out cool, and the machine then proceeds to freeze the ice cream. At -22 degrees C this can quickly make the ice cream too firm. Leave it in the machine (or put it in the freezer) for just 10 minutes before serving. It should then be firm, but still silky smooth.

 

*My former (cooling block) one, just stopped when it couldn’t manage to stir anymore because of the thickness of the ice cream, which is usually at about the same texture.

Serve in chilled bowls with a sprinkle of salt flakes and some olive oil. It is to be eaten post haste!

And hey, don’t forget to annoyingly ask your guests what they think the flavor is. They’ll love it probably.