Shrimp Creole, Paul Prudhomme Style

"Mmmm.... this is restaurant-quality stuff!"

Whenever we have dinner guests over--especially friends who eat out all the time and rarely cook--I know this is the highest of high praise.

And Chef Paul Prudhomme's Shrimp Creole is one of those "restaurant quality" recipes. It's not an easy recipe, and it's not exactly laughably cheap like many of the other recipes here at Casual Kitchen, but it's still very much worth the slight extra expense and effort--and it's still far cheaper than a similar restaurant meal. If you like spicy, rich food, you won't believe you made something this good with your own hands.


So many people are shocked to find out that a regular person--yep, a person just like you or me--can cook amazing dinners just like this at home. You can.
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Shrimp Creole
Modified from Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen

Ingredients:
2 pounds medium to large shrimp, with shells on
2 1/2 cups, in all, of seafood or shrimp stock

1/4 cup chicken fat, pork lard, bacon fat or Crisco
2 1/2 cups, in all, chopped onions
2 cups chopped celery
1 1/2 cups chopped green bell pepper

4 Tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1 bay leaf
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons white pepper
1 teaspoon cayenne (hot) pepper
3/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 1/2 teaspoons Tabasco
1 1/2 teaspoons dried basil
1 Tablespoon dried thyme leaves

3 cups peeled tomatoes, chopped
1 1/2 cups canned tomato sauce
2 teaspoons sugar

Plenty of cooked rice

Directions:
1) Peel and rinse shrimp, refrigerate until needed, saving the shells to use in your shrimp stock. Chop onions, celery, bell peppers and garlic. Also, bring a medium saucepan of water to a boil, briefly blanch tomatoes, peel, and set aside for later.

2) Heat the chicken fat or other fat over high heat in a large pot. Add one cup of the onions and cook over high heat for 3 minutes, stirring frequently. Lower the heat to medium and keep stirring, until the onions have caramelized* (see below) into a rich brown color, but not burned, another 3-5 minutes.

3) Add the rest of the onions, celery, green peppers and butter. Cook over high heat, stirring occasionally, until celery and pepper become tender, roughly 5 minutes.

4) Add: garlic, bay leaf, all spices, Tabasco, and just 1/2 cup of the stock (basically add everything but the tomatoes, tomato sauce, sugar and the rest of the stock). Cook over medium heat for 5 minutes, stirring and scraping the pan bottom well.

5) Add the tomatoes and simmer for another 10 minutes. Then add the tomato sauce, sugar and remaining 2 cups stock and simmer for about 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

6) Cool and refrigerate if making the sauce the day before (and do not add the shrimp yet!). If serving immediately, turn the heat off and add the shrimp. Cover and let sit for 5-10 minutes, or until the shrimp are just plump and pink and not overcooked. Serve immediately by placing a mound of rice in the center of a plate and ladling a generous portion of shrimp creole sauce around the rice.

Serves 8-10.

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Several recipe notes:
1) I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to make your own stock for this recipe. I know it adds extra steps and time, but it is worth it. Our labor-saving trick is this: we will make one of our typical vegetarian soups or stews earlier in the week, and I'll save all the veggie trimmings from that dish, chuck them in the pot and simmer the stock for a few hours that day. Then, when we buy the shrimp, I'll devein and peel the shrimp one day before I make the sauce and add the shells to the stock, simmering it for another 4-8 hours to give it even more body. You'll have plenty of extra stock left over that you can freeze and use in other recipes, like our Risotto, our Easy Sopa de Lima or our Chicken Marsala. You won't regret it.

2) * Caramelizing the onions is perhaps the single most important process step in the entire recipe. Somehow, this step imbues the entire dish with a soft and sweet flavor:


3) It really helps to have a helper for this recipe, especially one who's sufficiently motivated by the promise of a delicious meal that she'll happily do this recipe's worst prep job: peeling and deveining the shrimp.


4) A word about the fat used in this recipe. Many of Paul Prudhomme's recipes involve the use of a disturbing amount of butter and/or fat. This recipe is not health food, people. Just remember these kinds of meals should be cooked (and gorged on) in moderation. Furthermore, I would not use olive oil as a substitute--it is too likely to smoke during the step where you caramelize the onions on high heat. Be sure to use a fat or an oil that has a higher smoke point.

5) Like many recipes, this dish tastes even better the next day, so if you really want to wow your guests or your family, make this sauce a day in advance, and then when your guests arrive, bring the sauce to a good boil, and then add the shrimp (PS: any sauce that can be made a day ahead of time lends itself very well to dinner parties).

6) Oh, and try to avoid overcooking the shrimp.

7) As I said earlier, this dish isn't laughably cheap--in fact, it might be the single most costly meal in this entire blog. That being said, the aggregate cost of this dish was $20.08, of which $11.48 was the cost of the shrimp. But given that it serves 8-10 quite generously, the cost per serving was still in the neighborhood of $2.00-$2.50. Once again, proof that with a little practice anyone can cook restaurant-quality meals and still eat cheaply at home.

8) Finally, it's hard to believe such an amazing recipe has such a simple list of ingredients. Like I said before, you too can make food like this at home!






Related Posts:
Cookbook Review: Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen
Garden Gumbo Recipe
Shrimp in Tomato Sauce: Middle Eastern Cuisine
Shrimp in Garlic Sauce (Camarones Ajillo)

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Cajun Meatloaf: A Meatloaf Recipe that would Burn June Cleaver's Tongue Off

Coming from a nice suburban WASP family, I've of course eaten my fair share of meatloaf.

Ah, meatloaf. One of the most derided foods of midwestern American cuisine.

But I'm here to tell you that today's recipe is no ordinary meatloaf. This is Paul Prudhomme meatloaf, baby. This is the kind of meatloaf that would burn June Cleaver's tongue off and wilt her bouffant!

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Cajun Meatloaf:
(slightly modified from Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen)

Spice Mix:
2 whole bay leaves
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon cayenne (hot) pepper
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Other Ingredients:
4 Tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
1 onion, chopped
4 stalks celery, chopped
1 green bell pepper, chopped
1/4 to 1/2 cup scallions, chopped
2-3 garlic cloves, either minced or pressed

1 Tablespoon Tabasco sauce (yep, you read that right)
1 Tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 cup evaporated milk
1/2 cup catsup

1 1/4 lbs ground beef
3/4 lbs ground pork (note: you can use 2 lbs ground beef and no ground pork if you prefer)

2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup dry bread crumbs

Directions:
1) Combine the seasoning mix in a small bowl and set aside.

2) Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the onions, celery, green pepper, scallions, garlic, seasoning mix, Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce. Saute on medium-high heat until vegetables begin to soften, about 6-7 minutes. Stir well and be careful not to let the mixture stick to the bottom of the pan.

3) Stir in the evaporated milk and the catsup, and cook for 2-3 minutes more, stirring frequently. Remove from heat and allow mixture to cool (I usually put it in the freezer for 15 minutes to speed up this process).

4) Mix the ground beef and ground pork well in a 9x13 inch baking pan (I use a lasagna pan). Add the eggs, the bread crumbs and the cooked vegetable mixture (don't forget to remove the bay leaves). Mix thoroughly by hand, and then shape the mixture into a loaf that is about 2-3 inches high, 7-8 inches wide and 11-12 inches long. Leave an inch or two of space around the edges of the pan as shown in the picture below:

5) Bake uncovered at 350F for 25 minutes, then turn oven temperature up to 400F and cook for another 35 minutes longer (the extra cooking time at high heat will crisp up the outside of the meatloaf. Delicious!). Easily serves 6.

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Finally, I'll make two very minor modification suggestions for readers out there with tender palates:

1) If you can tolerate some heat, just add 1/2 a Tablespoon of Tabasco, rather than the full Tablespoon.

2) If you really can't stand hot food, leave out all the Tabasco.

Note that in both cases, I'd leave the spice mix alone with its triumvirate of cayenne, black and white ground pepper. Don't be a total wimp.

Mmmmmmmmmmm, Tabasco!

Six Secrets to Save You from Cooking Burnout

You know the feeling: You have to cook dinner, but you sure as hell don't want to. Forget cooking with love. At best, you might obligatorily slap dinner on the table tonight.

Worse, all of your recipes seem tired and old. You're sick of all of 'em.

You're just not inspired in the kitchen.

This is cooking burnout. Everybody faces it from time to time. And yes, even at Casual Kitchen we can get really sick of cooking on occasion.

Fortunately, thanks to quite a few years in my 20s of living alone (thus the only person who was there to cook for me was… well, me), I picked up some trade secrets on the subject that I’m going to share with you today.

Read on, and never let cooking burnout bring you down again!

1) Try out a totally new cuisine…
It would be obvious to the point of worthlessness to suggest to my readers to “try some new recipes and you’ll be less burned out!” Martha Stewart might be able to get away with that, but not me.

The point here is that you are not even close to being in the mood to cook. Telling you to buck up and try some new recipes is like saying “turn that frown upside down” to a person on suicide watch. Less than helpful.

What I’m talking about is doing something much more radical. I’m talking about stretching your palate to experience types of food you’ve never tried before, or never even heard of before, and using those experiences to inspire you.

Have you ever tried Mongolian food? Or Korean? Afghani? How about Cuban food? Or Chino-Latino?

I’m sure foodie readers from major US or world cities could say “yes” (in a bored-sounding voice no less) to all of the above. But that misses the point. There has to be something (or even multiple somethings) you haven’t had before, and that’s what I want you to go out and try. Go to a restaurant that cooks a cuisine you’ve never eaten. Order something unusual as well as something ethnically typical from the menu. And while you’re eating, think about how you might cook something similar, or how it might influence your cooking.

Even if you live in a smaller city, you’ll be surprised by the diversity of food available to you. Take a good look at the restaurants section of your phonebook (I know, how deliciously quaint to use the yellow pages…) or ask any of your ethnic friends or colleagues to recommend a place. Take a quick look at the Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer for more suggestions on how to make the most of a restaurant eating experience. Finally, recall in the Ten Rules that, where possible, we want to patronize owner-operated restaurants rather than chains.

2) …And then teach yourself to cook it.
Once you’ve stretched your palate in somebody else's kitchen, let that experience inspire you to stretch your talents in your own.

How cool would it be to be able to say you can cook Cuban food or Afgani food? Go to your local bookstore or visit Bookmooch.com and find a cookbook and try it out. Again, I am not talking about making just moderately different foods. I want you to get started on a truly different cuisine that makes you stretch your mind. This is what makes cooking a voyage of discovery and a source of new experiences. And you’ll find that it’s the kind of thing that makes cooking fun again.

It was during a particularly bad period of cooking burnout in my life when I picked up Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen. I had to work through my share of cooking intimidation at first, because I needlessly assumed that Cajun and Creole food would be more difficult to make than it really was. But after several batches each of Shrimp Creole, Barbecued Shrimp, Hush Puppies and of course The Greatest Chocolate Mousse in the World, I've gotten pretty good at making this cuisine. Best of all, it cured a bad case of cooking burnout too.

3) Learn to cook something you’ve always dreamed of cooking.
Is there something you always dreamed of cooking but you never really got around to it? For my part, I've always dreamed of making baked bread. And I mean real baked bread, with yeast and everything. So I’ve already decided that the next time I get a case of cooking burnout, I’m going to use that as my excuse to learn how to bake bread.

And if you didn’t think I was obsessive before, you’ll think it now: For the case of cooking burnout I get after that, I’m going to learn how to cook real tamales. I already have the cookbook sitting on the shelf, ready to go.

Clearly, I must be a real tool to plan ahead for my next two cases of cooking burnout.

Seriously though, this suggestion gets to why we cook in the first place. Cooking is at its most fun when it’s a voyage of experience and discovery. What new foods do you really and truly dream of cooking? What do you want to learn how to do? What would be really cool to be able to cook? Even just asking yourself these questions might inspire you a little bit, but the true satisfaction comes from getting into the process of learning and developing new cooking skills.

4) Get a one-year subscription to Bon Appetit Magazine.
I know this suggestion might sound just a bit too metrosexual for some of the men out there, but indulge me. I learned this trick by pure luck back in 1994, when I got browbeaten by some telemarketer into buying a subscription.

But the unexpected benefit was that in that year, I had absolutely zero experiences of cooking burnout. Not one for the entire year. Each month, when the new issue came in the mail, it would flood my mind with a whole batch of new cooking ideas, cuisines and recipes. There were quick and easy recipes, long and involved ones, examples of different types of cuisine, etc. There were always several viable new things in there that would pass the five easy questions and that I would really want to make.

And the subscription turned out to be well worth the money, because I’m still using that single year’s worth of Bon Appetit today, some 13 years (now 14 years) later. Each issue had so many recipes and ideas that it will be years to come before I'll have worked through the inventory.

5) Improve Your Cooking Mechanics.
Get faster at cooking. Learn the five easy questions so you’ll be able to choose easy meals to make. Master prep work. Learn how to find recipes that scale well into double or triple batches. And learn to rely on a group of favorite, easy, heavy rotation meals.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll have seen some of this advice presented in Seven Ways to Get Faster at Cooking. In that post, however, I presented that advice in the context of how to cook when you don’t have the time. Here I’m repeating the advice because it’s even more valuable when you don’t want to spend the time cooking. I encourage you to take another quick look at some of those suggestions.

Let’s say you’re of a mind to obligatorily slap dinner on the table tonight. Wouldn’t life be a lot less painful if you had made a double batch of dinner the other day so that you could just reheat it again for tonight? There’s no better cure for cooking burnout than not having to cook at all. If you can cook any meal much faster or much more efficiently, or if you can scale up a meal and get 2x the food for 1.2x the work, then by definition it will be much less of a pain in the ass to get food on the table when you're just not in the mood.

Note that this isn’t so much a cure for cooking burnout, but more of a tool to minimize your suffering. The more efficiently you can get a meal together, the less you’ll suffer the process when you’re just not up for it. Think of it as a form of pain management.

6) Quit!
No, I don’t mean quit your job--although between you and me, I'm considering making a move myself to getting a job here. And I don’t mean for you to quit cooking forever either. What I am suggesting is that you take a break from cooking for a specific time. Say, one week. Or even two weeks.

For that one or two weeks, eat out or order takeout EVERY night. In fact, you can combine this with tip #1 and try out a few exotic restaurants while you’re at it.

If you are at all used to cooking for yourself, my guess is you’ll get pretty sick of restaurant food if you take this long a break from your own kitchen. You’ll probably start to feel overwhelmed with salt, excess fats and oils--and after several days you’ll probably start to feel loagy and weighed down.

When Laura and I go on vacation for a week we’ll usually treat ourselves to a complete break from cooking. But after five or six days of eating out exclusively, we usually really start to long for our own home-cooked food. Maybe we miss the familiarity of our own kitchen, or we miss being able to control exactly what goes into our own food. Or maybe it's just that creeping, heavy, loagy, I-feel-like-I-need-an-angioplasty feeling you get after eating out too many days in a row.

Regardless of the reasons, the result is the same: after only one week, no more cooking burnout. We can’t wait to get back to our own kitchen.

So instead of waiting until your next vacation, why not create a vacation from cooking the next time you feel cooking burnout coming on? You’ll certainly save on airfare. And best of all, you’ll cure your burnout.

Note that this isn’t exactly what I’d call financially responsible advice--readers of this blog know that cooking at home typically is laughably cheap compared to eating out. But if by using this tip you cure yourself from cooking burnout--and you get back to being happy to cook in your own kitchen--then in the long run this tip can be a big money-saver for you.

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Good luck! I can't promise that you’ll never get sick of cooking ever again. Heck, I still fall into a state of mild-to-moderate cooking burnout on occasion, and I’m the one supposedly giving all the great advice here. But the next time you feel a case of cooking burnout coming on, you should be able to use these secrets to master it, rather than have it master you.

Related Posts:
Using Salt = Cheating
Ten Rules for the Modern Restaurant-Goer
How to Apply the 80/20 Rule to Cooking
How to Tell if a Recipe is Worth Cooking With Five Easy Questions
Eight Tips to Make Cooking at Home Laughably Cheap

Related Links:
Tamales 101: A Beginner's Guide to Making Traditional Tamales*
Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen*
Bon Appetit Magazine

* Full Disclosure: if you purchase any of the items via the links provided, I receive a small affiliate fee. Thank you to my readers for all of your support!

Paul Prudhomme's Barbecued Shrimp Recipe: The Most Glorious Meal So Far This Year

Today I’ll share with you the recipe for Paul Prudhomme’s Barbecued Shrimp. This was unquestionably the most glorious meal I’ve made so far this year.

It passed the five easy questions test with flying colors. It was quite easy to make, with prep time of only about 30 minutes. Best of all, we had an utterly magnificent experience eating it.

A couple of brief introductory comments: The brand of beer I happened to use in the recipe has already brewed up (sorry) a bit of an amusing controversy. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my rule for new recipes to do it one time by the book, so I saw no reason to start imposing my own beer snobbery without first having some context on how the recipe would come out. If anybody wants to do a side-by-side control test of the recipe using different types of beer, go for it. Let me know the results.

Finally, there also seems to be minor controversy on whether this is technically “barbecue” or not. Heck, there are no coals, no broiling, and no cooking over an open pit. Perhaps we can get some barbecue purists to weigh in on this one, but my guess is they won’t consider something cooked in a pan as barbecue.

But man, those are just semantics to me. The recipe was so amazing that Chef Paul could call it anything he wants! I’ll cut him some slack.
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Paul Prudhomme's Barbecued Shrimp
(Very slightly modified from Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen.*)

2 dozen medium-large raw shrimp with shells included (about 1 pound)

Seasoning mix:
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt (yes, we're bending the salt rule here because it's Paul Prudhomme)
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon rosemary leaves, crushed
1/8 teaspoon oregano

1/4 pound (1 stick) butter, plus 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, in all
1 to 2 teaspoons minced garlic
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 cup seafood stock or vegetable stock
1/4 cup beer at room temperature

1) Rinse the shrimp in cold water and drain well. Leave shells on.

2) In a small bowl, combine seasoning mix ingredients.

3) Combine one stick of the butter, the garlic, Worcestershire sauce and seasoning mix in a large skillet over high heat. When the butter is melted, add the shrimp.

4) Cook for 2 minutes, shaking the pan (do not stir), in a back and forth motion. Add the remaining 3 tablespoons butter and the stock, cook and shake pan for 2 more minutes. Add the beer and cook and shake the pan 1 minute longer. Remove from heat.

5) Serve immediately on a platter with a mound of white rice or seasoned rice in the center and the shrimp and sauce surrounding it.
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A few quick extra notes:

• Along with the rice, this dish made exactly enough food for two hungry people with enough left over for a lunch for Laura.
• If you want to double this recipe, the cookbook says you should do it in separate batches. Note therefore that this dish does not scale well.
• Don't ignore the specific instructions to shake the pan back and forth rather than stir (just think James Bond here). When you're working with melting butter, especially in a dish with a high ratio of butter to other ingredients, stirring can cause the oils in the butter to separate out, and it will make the sauce seem oily.

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A Wine Suggestion
I’ll admit up front that this isn’t really the kind of blog you should visit to find painstaking details on wine pairings (at least not until I quit my job and go to sommelier school…!), but this dish will go very well with a light semi-dry or semi-sweet white wine, which will balance the hot spicy flavors in the dish. A Riesling, for example, would be perfect. We knocked back most of a bottle of Seyval from the Hosmer Winery, which is in the Finger Lakes region of New York State (quite good and yet only $10 a bottle!).

Enjoy!

Related Posts:
The Greatest Chocolate Mousse in the World
Paul Prudhomme RULES
How to Tell if a Recipe is Worth Cooking With Five Easy Questions
Paul Prudhomme's Cajun Meatloaf: A Meatloaf Recipe that would Burn June Cleaver's Tongue Off

* Full Disclosure: if you purchase this book using any of the links provided, I get paid a miniscule affiliate fee.

A Can of Bud

Today we've got a special treat: a guest blog post from my wife Laura.

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Can of Bud

by Laura L. Perrin

I got my in-laws bundled up and on the road home to Syracuse this morning. They stayed overnight this week and last, coming and going to Miami out of Newark airport for a week's vacation. Nice folks--I'm really lucky. They even put the futon away and folded all the blankets before I could stop them.

After they headed out I got on the road myself to do my usual Friday morning errands. At the grocery store I'm moving pretty fast down the list until I get to the last item: one can of Budweiser. Hmmm. Now, I remember watching Dan going through his cajun cookbook last night, presumably looking for something good to make for Saturday night. He's used the fried catfish and sole recipes, and made hush puppies, shrimp creole and shrimp ettoufee. Lots of steps and exotic spices--for some reason I think "fancy" when he pulls out Paul Prudhomme, but I guess I have to change my thoughts on that. He's using Bud this time. I even called him at work to see if just maybe he could use the Corona Light we have in the back of the fridge, but no he says, it has to be a basic American everyman beer.

Guess there are drawbacks to having a self-styled chef in the house.

Where DO you get just one can of Budweiser? I have visions of myself pulling a can off the end of a six-pack in some liquor store somewhere, taking it sheepishly up to the register and hoping they won't wonder where the other five cans went. Or worse, having to buy an ENTIRE six-pack just for the one lousy can for this recipe. Now I'm sorry to say THAT would definitely end up wasting away in the fridge.

So with the groceries in the trunk and on my way to the bank, I stop in at Turnpike Liquors hoping the nice man behind the counter can come up with some solution to my dilemma. Without much ado, he points to the chilled single cans of Budweiser in the refrigerated case right by the door. Roaders I guess? And he even agreed with me that some recipes just needed a Bud to make them perfect.

Cookbook Review: Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen

Today I’m going to shamelessly recommend to you one of the best cookbooks I own: Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen.*



I mean, look at this guy! You can just tell he loves food.

This cookbook has been a dream for me because I’ve always loved Cajun and Creole cuisines, but never really had the courage to try to make either in my own kitchen.

I never guessed what an exceptional teaching tool this book would turn out to be. It gave me the confidence to make my own vegetable and seafood stock (silly me--that turned out to be way easier than I expected). It clearly explains how to make roux with really useful color pictures (you’ll have to buy the book to see what I’m talking about), and it gave me an unbelievable meatloaf recipe that would literally burn June Cleaver’s tongue off.

And of course it contains the glorious chocolate mousse recipe I posted the other day.

I’ll caution you that the recipes in here aren’t all that easy. We’re not talking about 365 Ways to Cook Pasta here. Some of them are easy, but many are quite complex and time consuming. For example, the Shrimp Etouffe recipe in this cookbook involves multiple steps, a long list of ingredients--and a disturbingly large amount of butter. It may take you a few hours to make, but the finished product is well worth the effort.

Every one of our friends has literally laughed out loud when we’ve shown them this cookbook. It’s just that the picture of Paul on the cover says so much. Sure, it’s obvious that the guy loves to eat, but what’s so wonderful is the look of pure joy he has on his face while he’s surrounded by all those pies and sausages and meat!

How I came to own this cookbook is kind of amusing. My mother bought it when my parents and I went on a vacation to New Orleans back in 1989.

Now let’s just say that my parents’ palates are tuned for mild food. So when they innocently (and scrupulously) fixed a couple of recipes from Chef Paul’s book, they simply could NOT eat them because they were so spicy.

Thus, this cookbook pretty much disappeared into my parents’ basement bookshelf, where I happened to find it one day. When I asked my mother if I could borrow it, she told me I could keep it!

Try out this cookbook and let it expand your cooking horizons. And stock up on the Tabasco!

* Full Disclosure: if you purchase this book using any of the links provided, I get paid a miniscule affiliate fee. :)

The Greatest Chocolate Mousse in the World

Today I'll share the only chocolate mousse recipe I've found that truly deserves to be called great.

I know we’re approaching Valentine’s day. So rather than doing something utterly unoriginal and buying your sweetheart a box of chocolates, why don’t you whip up a delicious batch of chocolate mousse instead? Best of all, this chocolate mousse recipe is easy--and inexpensive too.

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Chocolate Mousse
(courtesy of Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen* cookbook)
(makes 6 servings)

4 ounces unsweetened chocolate
4 egg whites
1 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup powdered sugar

Melt the chocolate over low heat; use a candy thermometer and try and keep the temperature at about 110 degrees F.

Meanwhile, in a medium-size bowl of an electric mixer, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form (remember the lesson--but please forget the off color humor--on stiff peaks!).

In a separate bowl, beat the cream until frothy, about 1 minute. Add the sugar and continue beating until soft peaks form; do not overbeat. Gently fold the cream mixture into the egg whites, then add the cooled chocolate (heat to 110 degrees if it has cooled below that temperature), and quickly fold it in until well blended. Spoon into a serving bowl, into individual wine glasses, or into individual ramekins. Refrigerate at least 2 hours before serving.

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Wow, what can I say? A simple, easy and inexpensive recipe with just four ingredients. And as a chocolate epicure, I can say confidently that I have never had a better chocolate mousse than this basic recipe.

Next time, I’ll talk about the cookbook that this came from* and why it’s one of the best cookbooks we’ve ever owned.

* Full Disclosure: if you purchase this book using any of the links provided, I get paid an extremely small affiliate fee. :)