Fresh Chutney with Brie

ChefLive

Chef Jerry Gruber

Fresh Chutney with Brie

A brie of cheese that’s going to be hot from the oven and I’m going to make a homemade chutney for it. So, this is our brie and we’re going to unwrap it and then just want to kind of take a little loose right at the sides. I mean you can eat that and not everybody likes it. Then we’re going to put in a little plate and we’re going to put in the oven in a minute.
Now, it doesn’t melt fast. We have 400-oven so you don’t want it to be completely runny but you want it to be soft.

So, in the meantime, what I’m going to do is start a little chutney sauce and the first thing we want to put in our little chutney is some garlic. I have a little trick with the garlic, if you take the whole head of garlic like this and put it in the plastic bag and then if you just pound it like this. Take your frustration out on this garlic. Beat it up and what will happen it all separate and if you heat it long enough and then a lot of the paper leaf will become unwrap so all you have to do is you just take your hand in the bag and then we just pull out some garlic just like this.

And then for storage you just zip your Ziploc like that and again you put right it in the refrigerator. The paper doesn’t get all over the counter. It doesn’t all over the floor. It’s much easier way to do it.

Now, there’s a lot of ways to cut garlic. A lot of people like to cut it with the back of their knife so you kind of squeezing it. A lot of the people like to use the front of their knife and they cut it like this or you can take it and use the flat of the knife like this and you just crush it like this. This is my way that I like to do it and some of the essence is already coming out of it a little bit. And we just dice it up real nice.

I will put a little fire under a pan, get it started. I remember we always want to start with a hot pan because if you cook any kind of vegetables, any kind of any thing and the pan is not hot, you just put in there the oil or anything else in the pan it’s going to kind of steam it and what we want to do is sauté it. There’s a big difference between steaming and sautéing. This can cook real slowly because we don’t want to burn them.

Now, we have some lovely strawberries here. What we’re going to do is we just kind want to take the seeds off them. This is my lovely assistant Chef Jennifer and she is a real chef and it’s wonderful.

I also have some pineapple chunks here too so I’m going to put this pineapple in here. You know in chutney you can use any kind of fruit you want. The most basic chutney that everybody sees everywhere is mango chutney because mango is the most popular fruit in the world more than apples, more than oranges, if you take more oranges and you make orange or something. It’s mangoes. It’s used in more countries by more people and more mangoes than any other fruits so that’s kind of interesting. Well, if you didn’t know about mangoes it’s probably the best tasting thing I’ve ever ate as far as the fruit.

There are some melons that are pretty good too, crunches and cassavas, all those exotic melons but mangoes are wonderful, papayas, too but papayas are nearly as widespread as mangoes and I think there’s like six or eight different varieties of mangoes that are available. And now we’re going to put it all a little bit.

Then after putting it you see they get a little soft. They’re good as nice because it adds a little more texture and I want you to again it’s all about textures. It’s about flavors and textures. Sushi, the whole thing is all about the textures. We want to get a little bit of crunchy texture in our chutney.

We’ll just chop them and wrap. Now, with your cutting board I always remember to put something under, put a wet rag or a wet paper towel as long as it does not slide. This is where you cut yourself. It’s as if you’re cutting where it happens to slide. So, that’s another little trick always put something under it. And whatever is under this you should start to clean up.

Then we’ll add some more strawberries to it. Turn it up a little bit. Now, I’m going to deglaze the pan in a minute and deglazing the pan means that we put a little alcohol in it to get all the goodness under the bottom of the pan because all the good stuff usually sticks to the bottom, the best flavor. So, we’ll cook this a little bit.

Now, you also put some fresh herbs in it if you like either a cilantro or basil. So, we have a little basil tree here. This is my favorite. This is my little girl and if you water this every day it will last for weeks and it’s wonderful that it puts fresh life in your kitchen. It’s just I can tell you how good fresh herbs are. When you use dry herbs it is not the same. You just don’t get the same essences. You don’t get the same flavors.

What I want to do is called chop and add. You just kind cut it up, just very fine. You don’t want it to chop it too much because you don’t want to let go of good essence out of it. So, what we’ve done is just kind of chop and add a little bit. We’ll put a little bit and always kind of add the herbs last because they kind of lose their essence if you put them in too soon.

I like to deglaze the pan just a little bit from these a little bit of brandy. Now, you want to let the liquor burn off because you don’t want the actual alcohol. You just want a little heating essence, a little heating flavor in it. This is just plain old ginger. We’re going to put a little ginger in. You can smell it a little bit now.

Now, this is balsamic vinegar. This is sweet vinegar. I always adjust it even when you’re making your salad dressing use balsamic. It works better. So, we’re just going to put a little oil then, honey and now this is just Clover honey. We’re making it just sweet and sour of chutney so a little sour with the vinegar and then a little sweet with the honey, making the best.

And now I want to put the brie in the oven because we wanted to start melting maybe 3 to 5 minutes. It’s not going to take much time at all. Now, we need just a little bit of salt so let’s salt it a little bit and a little pepper. Now, with your pepper always buy the pepper here with a pepper corns because then you know it’s fresh because you’re grinding it yourself. You buy at store at shelf pepper it could have been there for six months or a year.

In fact, the good suggestion if you go to your spice cabinet you haven’t gone through it in six months, take everything and toss it and then start all over again because after six months the spices tend to get a little stale. They lose their potency and then for the rest it will cost you a teaspoon or two teaspoons, if it’s old spices you’re going to have to use two or three times as much and you can’t really calculate it. So, it’s cheap enough and don’t buy spices in bottles. Get the cheap kind in the package and keep your old bottles and refill them because you pay $3 for the bottle a dollar for the spices.

So, all the supermarkets have the spices that are ready to go in the little plastics, get those. This is starting to look good. This is very close. I’m going to taste this first and make sure it’s okay. It’s a little soft and a little better. I’m going to put a little sugar in here because I just tasted it and it’s just a little sour. So, what you do to get just kind of a little balance, if it’s a little too sour you put a little sugar. If it’s a little too sweet you put a little lemon juice or a little vinegar in it and so that counterbalances it.

But I think it’s going to be just perfect. You see how it’s bubbling this way. It looks so pretty. Let’s clean our plate up just a little bit. I want some of the cheese to show so we’re going to put around it like this. Our plate is nice and sizzling and we’ll put a little bit over the top like this.

Now, this is our Chef Mary’s chiffonade so we’re going to take some of this pretty chinffonade of basil and just kind of put it around, put a little on top because again we’re going to eat with our eyes first then we’re going to smell then we’re going to taste it. So, it has to look nice. No matter what it is if it doesn’t look good no one’s going to eat it. They’re going to go, “Oh what is that?” and you’re going to say, “Oh, that looks nice” but they won’t eat it.

So, here’s a little crown for it and voila we have a baked brie with our homemade fruit sauce.


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