Login | Register

Dear friends, tonight’s Tale Out of Eureka Springs comes from the journal I kept while I was there, an effort to document everything I was making in that nifty kitchen.  Without further ado...

I made a vegan lemon curd last week.  Part of my demo will involve the preparation of three different lemon curds:  a low-fat one from Sally Schneider, no butter, one egg, one egg white and gelatin to make up the difference; a “regular” one from Sherry Yard, three eggs, four egg yolks, half a stick of butter; and a rich one from Pierre Herme, not quite as many eggs but 3/4 pound of butter.  In discussing this with the Colony staff, the assistant director and the maintenance guy, both of whom are vegans, asked me if it would be possible to prepare a vegan curd.  Because Jan and Sean are lovely and kind people, I did not share with them the questions that came to mind, questions that in the books-on-tape version would be voiced by Lewis Black.  “A vegan version of something primarily made of butter and eggs?” I said I would see if it could be done.  Lo and behold, I found a vegan website in the U.K. that had a recipe for vegan lemon curd.  Odds my bodkins.  12 ounces of sugar (yipes), the juice of 4 lemons, 4 ounces of vegan margarine, 4 eggs’ equivalent of egg replacer.  I went to the health food store and bought the marge that Jan recommended, and a box of something called En-Er-G egg replacement. 

The recipe basically tells you to cook everything together for 20 minutes, and to use a vegetarian gelling agent, like agar agar, if the mixture doesn’t thicken.  I am not practiced enough at using agar agar.  My experience with it reveals a substance that gells very, very gently, and then overnight hardens aggressively, turning your fussed-over and cossetted vegetarian custard into a Spaldeen ball, or a Pensey Pinky eraser.  I decided to just try it as written, no worries about the thickener; if all else fails, I thought, we’ll just call it lemon sauce.

Since the lemons were small, I used 6.  Weighed out the sugar.  Weighed out the marge, which is as probably as close to butter you will get as a vegan, but which to me tasted like nothing but salt.  Read the packet directions on the egg replacer, 4 tablespoons powder, 4 tablespoons water.  The resultant mix looked like frothy egg whites, or, more accurately, like meringue powder, that staple of cake decorators. Watching all this stuff melt together, it hit me that there was nothing in here to give it much color.  There was a pale, pale yellow from the marge, but not enough to offset the white of the egg replacer, or the general beige tone that the sugar conveyed on the lemon juice.  At least it will be lemony, I thought, from the lemon juice.  And at least it will be sweet, from the 3/4 pound of sugar.

Twenty minutes later, we did indeed have something lemony and sweet, and thick enough to be called curd.  We also had something grainy, thanks, I’m guessing, to the starches in the egg replacer meant to emulate the behavior of egg white.  Left exposed to air, the top surface developed a palpable crackle, again, much like the way icings made with meringue powder do, when your teeth hit that thin surface of sugar, only to break through it and sink into intense sweetness.  I wonder if more lemon juice would have made the difference, or maybe some lemon zest grated into it.  I wonder if I will need to add agar agar after all, to offset the additional liquid from the lemon juice.  I wonder if this is a lost cause I’m embarking on.  I know that Jan and Sean were thrilled when I came down to the office bearing my pot of vegan lemon curd, pleased and happy that I had made the effort for them.  I have no idea whether it tasted good to them or not.

I made another curd for me and the other writers, a traditional one from Sherry Yard’s recipe in The Secrets of Baking, on Thursday.  I was going to use it for shortcakes, but I ran out of time to make biscuits, so I whipped some cream, folded the curd into the cream and gave it one more good beating into something that was a bit more liquid than whipped cream but a little fluffier than pudding.  Forrest and I ate it for dessert, piled gently into bowls, laced with fresh raspberries.  This is a bright, bright yellow curd, although I can’t tell if it’s bright from the yolks of the eggs of the Araucana hens kept by the guy who sells those eggs to Bill’s Pharmacy [yes, dear friends, I bought my eggs at the pharmacy, and yes, there will be elaboration on this in a future post], or if it’s from the butter from Hosanna Hills Farm, where the cows are fed on pasture rather than on grain and hay.  When you cook the eggs and lemon juice and sugar to 160 degrees, the mix assumes the consistency of sour cream and the whisk just begins to leave tracks.  When you pull this mix off the stove and whisk cool butter into it, you can begin to see it thicken even further; you can see its future as a spread for your toast, or a filling for your lemon tart.  This is a curd you don’t have to figure out.  It just is.

A sidenote:  Because so much of the baking here has been a combination of the eggs from Bill’s and the butter from Hosanna Hills, I don’t know what the answer is when people say (as they said tonight about the brioche) “what makes it so yellow?  is it the butter or the eggs?” I’m sure it’s both, but we’ll see, won’t we, when I test the other bread recipes, the eggless one and the 2-egg one.  Either way, it makes me think of the article reprinted on the Hosanna Hills website, where they explain that the color of the butter is the result of pasturage, and that as a result, your baked goods will assume a color not seen since your granny’s day.  Now I know why the Hesses are so dissatisfied with what we’re eating.  The thought of eating Land O’Lakes ever again is laughable.  Even the French Normandy butter I buy at Rosario’s, which is delightful butter, seems a pale imitation of this stuff.  I think of the line from Something Happened, the list of the flavorless food on which we are feeding, the observation that 250 million people eat every day never knowing what real food is.  “That’s what Paradise is...never knowing the difference.”

Below:  The famous eggs from Bill’s, the famous butter from Hosanna Hills Farm, a piece of regular supermarket USDA Grade AA unsalted butter, for comparison & contrast’s sake.  Not to belabor the point, but as you look at that butter, just remember that there is no annatto or other coloring agent in the farm butter.  It all depends on what the cows are eating, and it varies from batch to batch.  In the four weeks I was there, I have seen this butter in shades of brilliant yellow, rather like buttercups, and in shades of near orange, almost—dare I say it?—egg-colored.  How does it taste?  That is for another time, another post.