Tapas 1754: Saint-Félicien Blini with White Truffle 2010-2011

There are quite a few recipes in the elBulli 2005-2011 catalog that specify the Thermomix. Most of them involve some sort of "croquante" (or "crispy") that exists as part of a Snack or Dessert. But sometimes there are recipes with an instruction like this:

Warm the milk to 37° C...

Anyone who owns a Thermomix will immediately recognize that number. It's the lowest temperature the Thermomix can produce when warming something. Well, this is one of those. We're dealing with a ridiculously expensive ingredient in white truffle, but heck, it's the holidays...

First I made the brioche dough. It's pretty normal, flour, milk, yeast, a little sugar and salt and a load of eggs and butter.

Warm milk to 37° C to dissolve sugar and yeast. Just set it to 37°/Stir.

Add flour and knead. This phase will actually strain the Thermomix a little. There's not much liquid in there.

Add eggs, knead until smooth, add salt and knead until it comes together.

Add butter in chunks and knead until fully combined. This part took about 4 minutes.

Into an airtight container and the dough rests overnight in the refrigerator. This whole phase took about 20 minutes.

Next Day (of course it takes more than one day, this is elBulli!)

Roll the dough into a log, slice off 15 gram pieces and roll into balls

Minor digression...

Sigh. Here's one of the many typos in these books. The recipe is for four servings. The instruction reads:

Cut into 4 x 15 gram pieces.
Shape into 10 balls.

This sort of copy and paste typo is all over the books. They're almost always obvious (as this is), but come on Phaidon. Find a cook who can read English and Spanish and do some copy editing eh?

Back to the recipe...

The dough recipe makes way more than needed so I cut it into reasonable segments, vacuum sealed 'em, and popped 'em in the freezer for future use since there are a couple other recipes that use this brioche.

Now I came to a problem. I need to ferment the balls at 32° C for 3 hours. I don't have a dedicated fermentation chamber but I do have an immersion circulator. So I just popped the dough balls into an airtight container and floated the whole thing in 32° C water.

After Rising

The brioche balls then steam (at Varoma temp of course) for 14 minutes. Then back into their container and the 'fridge to cool.

Finally - the fun part.

The recipe calls for pressing the Saint-Félicien through a sieve and putting it into a piping bag, but for four blini that's way too much work. In any case, my cheese was perfectly smooth already.

Then I sliced each brioche blob partway through and pulled out a little to make room for the cheese.

A spoon of cheese of cheese and they're ready for the griddle. I greased up my little sandwich press and popped the "blinis" in for a couple minutes.

Ready to eat!

I topped each one with a few grams of sliced truffle and it was time to eat.

How it tastes: Heaven on a plate. If you can snag white truffles this is a must make. Hey, they're cheap this year.

Equipment and Ingredients

The Books: El Bulli 2005-2011 - Yes, freakin' expensive. Check with your local library - they may well be "in the system" and available to be reserved.

Thermomix
A scale that measures in grams

Saint-Félicien Cheese - a soft to oozy cow's milk cheese readily available at any decent cheese shop.
White Truffle (Tuber magnatum) - available seasonally October through December or so.