Artful Vegan Recipe #3- “Morel Caramelized Onion Rolls with Truffled Beet Salad and Pinot Noir Reduction”
At this rate it will take me a year to get through this book! Finally got around to making the third recipe from the appetizer section-”Morel-Caramelized Onion Rolls with Truffled Beet Salad and Pinot Noir Reduction.”
First of all, the wine. I decided to make this recipe on a whim this morning, and happily there is one liquor store in my area that is actually open on Sundays. Stupid PA liquor laws- in any number of less puritanical states I could just go to the grocery store and get my wine. Anyway, I know about as much about wine as I do about trigonometry or the Chinese language, and my usual modus operandi for selecting wine involves looking at all the labels and picking the most interesting or appealing one. Silly, I know. This is what caught my eye this time, and it was actually pretty good. Not that I know enough about wine to distinguish a good wine from a great wine. All I know is if I like it or not.
Here are the ingredients for the pinot noir reduction, the dried morels, the reduction simmering, and the beets cut up. The beets are from the CSA. I was surprised to find that they were stripy on the inside!
I only used 4 morels for the reduction, but rehydrated the rest for the rolls since I couldn’t find fresh ones. I also added some portobello mushroom (which the recipe said would be a good substitute for the morels). When I first went vegetarian, I kind of overdid the portobello thing and I’m not really that enthusiastic about them anymore. I think I ate way too many portobello sandwiches. But they worked out well for this dish. In fact, I wish I had just used portobellos and left out the dried morels. The dried ones were good for lending flavor to the reduction, but just tasted a bit bland in the rolls.
Here are the roll ingredients, garlic browning in olive oil for the mashed potatos, the erstwhile portobello, and the red onions and mushrooms sauteeing. The recipe called thyme, which I (wrongly) assumed I had somewhere on my spice shelf. I substituted marjoram instead. The onion/mushrooms seemed a bit bland, so I added a splash of the pinot noir and some tamari.
Oh phyllo dough! Maybe sometime when I cook with you I’ll remember to take you out of the freezer and let you thaw for the recommended two hours. You might be more cooperative if I treated you better, instead of remembering right when I need you that you are still firmly frozen, and sticking you in the microwave with a little dish of water in an attempt to sort of steam you un-frozen. It worked out well enough I suppose, but was a bit messy and I ended up with lots of little crumbly bits of dough that had to be thrown out.
After the rolls were all wrapped up in the oven, there were still two more things to tackle- the Horseradish Tofu Cream and the Truffled Beet Salad. These were the easiest parts of the recipe so I left them for last.
One thing that is potentially annoying about the recipes in this book is that the preparation of each part is listed separately, instead of taking each step in the order that makes the most sense in terms of prep and cooking time. For instance, the last thing listed in this recipe is making the pinot noir reduction, but it is the thing that takes the longest and it can be started simmering while you are cooking the filling for the rolls. It takes careful reading and thinking about how you’re going to do everything to get through these recipes successfully. If you went straight through it as written, you’d end up with everything prepared and find you still had 40 minutes or more to go for the reduction. In that sense (as well as the general complexity of the recipes and obscurity of some of the ingredients) this is definitely not a book for a beginning cook!
Here are the finished rolls. The recipe called for garnishing with chives, but I forgot to buy those so I just used some scallions and roasted red pepper from a jar instead.
This was pretty tasty overall, but not overwhelmingly impressive or anything. I didn’t really like the horseradish cream too much- it was very lemony/acidic. I even added some extra horseradish but it didn’t help. I think maybe some sort of garlic aioli might be better suited to the dish. I would have liked some roasted asparagus with this. The pinot noir reduction was delicious. The rolls were good but as I mentioned before I wasn’t thrilled with the dried morels. I think a variation with either oyster mushrooms or a blend of wild mushrooms could be interesting. The beet salad was ok. I’m really not a big fan of beets, and I’m still undecided about truffle oil. I did use black truffle oil instead of the recommended white truffle oil, because that’s what I had and that stuff is expensive! I don’t know if there is a significant flavor difference between the two. I’ve read that they’re all made with fake flavorings anyway.