Create delicious dishes like a pro.
As a child, famed pastry chef and TV personality Gale Gand used to cut through the yards to visit her friend Lauren Shay whose Grandma Lily made this incredibly moist, irresistible chocolate marble cake. Gand tried to get the recipe from Lauren’s mom, Florence, but she wouldn’t share it. When Gand became a professional pastry chef, she tried to recreate it, but never quite attained the taste and texture she remembered.
“I tried to get this recipe from Florence for 40 years,” Gand said. “I told her the only sure way to have eternal life is to pass down a family heirloom recipe. I even talked about it in an interview in the paper to try to apply gentle pressure to give it to me. I badgered her, her husband, Art, her children, her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren, hoping one of them might crack – no luck. Then finally on my wedding day Florence shared it with me as my wedding gift.” (It turns out the secret was the shredded coconut!) Now the recipe will live on along with the memory of Florence, who passed away while Gand was writing her cookbook, “Gale Gand’s Lunch” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) in which this recipe and loving tribute appears.
Gand, this beloved James Beard award-winning pastry chef of the Food Network’s hit show, “Sweet Dreams,” which aired for eight years, has eight cookbooks to her credit and was founding partner and executive pastry chef of the award-winning Michelin-starred TRU in Chicago.
Gand studied silver and goldsmithing in college, uniquely preparing her for a career in pastry, she says. “Pastry making involves exactly the same fine and large motor skills. The only difference is one is edible and one is not, and with pastry you make a lot more friends.” While in college, Gand took a job as a waitress at a beloved restaurant she couldn’t afford because employees got free meals. “One night one of the line chefs didn’t show up, and they threw an apron on me and said, ‘You can cook now.’ I was absolutely terrified for five or six seconds. In the seventh second, I experienced a weird sense of calm. I had found my calling. I was speaking a language I was completely fluent in but don’t remember studying.”
What does it take for a novice chef to make it in this competitive field? According to Gand, while passion drives success and fulfillment, there’s a lot of truth in that old saw: If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
“A lot more people are entering the field, but that doesn’t mean they’re coming out the other end,” she noted. Her first advice is to wear comfortable shoes. “It’s hard physical work with long hours on your feet. People think, that must be so fun. Do it for fourteen hours and then we’ll see how fun it is.
“I was raised with eastern European women who baked and expressed their love and affection for you through food. That’s part of where my love of sharing food with others comes from, but that takes you only so far,” she said. While cooking schools teach the fundamentals, she cannot stress enough the importance of working in a real kitchen. “Make sure you can handle the intensity and that you really love it,” she advised. “If it’s just sort of fun for you, you won’t last. When you open a small restaurant like I did, you’re there every day. There’s a whole bigger picture you don’t learn in school. Today you’re expected as a chef to understand food costs and labor costs on top of being well media trained and know how to manage others. I love egg whites and what happens when you’re beating them with sugar, but it’s so much more than that today.”
Food TV has turned chefs into rock stars, turning cooking, once the tedious province of the beleaguered housewife, into highly profitable commercial entertainment. And one of the most successful is cooking sensation and esteemed restaurateur Bobby Flay, whose “Beat Bobby Flay” has been bringing in the ratings for 12 years. One chef competitor Flay invited for a throwdown was Tel Aviv native Einat Admony, chef-owner of New York’s Balaboosta restaurant and Yalla Falafel (eight locations) in Northern California. According to Flay, Admony is the queen of falafel. And he should know. He was once her boss at his Spanish-styled restaurant, Bolo. In fact, Admony’s crunchy fried chickpea street food once won New York magazine’s coveted “Best Falafel” title. The story of this battle of the falafel is memorialized in “Bobby Flay’s Throwdown!” (Clarkson Potter), which offers more than 100 recipes from the winners and losers with their back stories.
Flay consulted chef Muhammed Rahman of Kwik Meal, a famed street cart in New York City, who advised him to soak the chickpeas overnight rather than cooking them and then to grind them with the spices. “Form and deep-fry – check. It sounded easy enough,” he writes. “Right? Wrong!”
Flay asked Admony to taste his. “She liked the flavor, but not the texture,” he recalled. “The problem, she told me, was that I formed my falafel by hand, which automatically made them on the dense side. She has a special instrument to mold her falafel, making them as light as a feather.”
Flay was shocked when the judges preferred his version. “It’s not that we didn’t think our falafel was good,” he said, “but we knew it wasn’t great, and Einat’s was.” So Flay did something he had never done on the show before or since – he awarded Admony the win. “Winning or losing is honestly not important to me. The show is more about showcasing the great food of my competitors and sometimes stepping outside of my comfort zone to learn new dishes.”
Lily’s Marble Cake
1 cup (2 sticks) salted butter, at room temperature
2 cups sugar
4 large eggs
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
A pinch salt
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup whole milk
1 1/3 cups sweetened shredded coconut
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
1. Butter and flour a tube pan. Preheat oven to 350˚F.
2. In mixing bowl fitted with paddle attachment, cream butter until light and fluffy. Add sugar and continue to mix well. Add eggs one at a time and beat.
3. Stir baking powder and salt into flour. Add vanilla to milk. Alternately add milk mixture and flour mixture to batter. Continue mixing at medium speed for 5 minutes (beating a long time is important here.) Remove 1/3 of the batter, and stir in cocoa powder. Stir coconut into remaining golden batter.
4. Pour golden batter into pan; then spoon chocolate batter around. Draw a knife through batter to marble the chocolate batter into golden batter. Do not stir. Bake until a toothpick inserted into center comes out dry, 1 hour and 15 minutes. Let cake cool in pan and turn out. Serve in slices or wrap in plastic wrap for later. This cake is even better the second day and keeps for up to a week.
Source: “Gale Gand’s Lunch” by Gale Gand
Einat Admony’s Falafel
Yield: 38
Serve falafels in pita with chopped cucumber and tomato, fresh parsley and yogurt.
2 cups dried chickpeas
1 small onion, coarsely chopped
1 clove garlic, coarsely chopped
1 cup coarsely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves
1/4 cup coarsely chopped cilantro leaves
2 fresh mint leaves, chopped
1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
1 1/2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
Vegetable oil, for deep drying
1. Put chickpeas in large bowl, add water to cover by about 2 inches, and refrigerate overnight.
2. The next morning, drain chickpeas and toss with onion and garlic. Run mixture through medium blade of meat grinder. Toss chickpea mixture with parsley, cilantro, mint, salt, pepper, cumin and coriander and run through grinder again.
3. Heat 4 inches oil to 350˚F in large pot over medium heat. Using a tablespoon, shape falafel mixture into balls and fry, adjusting heat as necessary, until browned, about 3 minutes. Drain on paper towels.
Source: “Bobby Flay’s Throwdown!” by Bobby Flay
Jlife Food Editor Judy Bart Kancigor is the author of “Cooking Jewish” (Workman) and “The Perfect Passover Cookbook” (an e-book short from Workman), a columnist and feature writer for the Orange County Register and other publications and can be found on the web at www.cookingjewish.com.
