Most complicated dish you've made from complete scratch

Cafe Society
1

What is the most complicated thing you’ve ever made from raw materials?

Mine is lasagna. Completely from scratch.

The day before, I bought a gourd full of slightly sour milk from nomadic milk ladies (I lived a ways away from the nearest 7-11.) I boiled this, let it separate, and hung it overnight in cloth to make a nice batch of ricotta, which I then mixed with garlic and fresh herbs from my garden.

That morning, I mixed flour and egg to make dough, and rolled it flat using an old soda bottle.

Just before dinner, I made a rich sauce from piles of fresh tomatoes and veggies and beef from a cow that was killed that very morning. I assembled it all and stuck it in the oven. I even included a some sundried tomatoes that I dried myself in the desert sun.

Damn it was good! I don’t think I’ll ever have the need or inclination to make lasagna from scratch again, but I felt like I accomplished something.

Tell me your stories!

2

I made a broiled onion and asiago cheese sourdough bread. It took 3 weeks but was the most phenomenal loaf of bread I’ve ever made. I did buy the onions and asiago, I can’t imagine trying to make it from scratch.

Most things I make come out of a fantastically stocked pantry and freezer. I’m discovering cooking and am finding out I like it. Heck, my husband begs me to make curry. Not the package stuff either. From 50 bottles of spices.

3

I made minestrone that had the longest list of ingredients. About 35 different vegetables, homemade stock, the works. It was good! but I don’t know if it was worth it.

Oh, and don’t bother making homemade ketchup. *Definitely *not worth it.

4

Coulibiac. We used the recipe from Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” which as I recall was an adaptation of Escoffier’s recipe. This was in the late 70’s, and as I recall we began preparations around 6:00 and ended up sitting down to eat around 11:00. What a daunting task!

Mind you, I wasn’t cooking solo; it took three or four of us to make the dish. And I was not involved in the delicate task of making the brioche dough.

But it was a smashing success! Turned out just like the photo in the link. In fact, It was so impressive, we took phots of it ourselves before chowing down.

5

I’m going to have to go with butternut squash gnocchi with a sage brown butter sauce… but I have to admit, your lasagna kicks my gnocchi’s ass. :slight_smile:

The gnocchi were made from a mixture of flour, roasted mashed butternut squash, ricotta cheese, eggs and salt/pepper. I rolled, cut and shaped little dumplings by hand before cooking in a pot of boiling water.

Then I made a sauce by clarifying some butter and cooking until toasty brown, which I then used to fry some fresh sage leaves from the garden until crispy. I poured that buttery, sagey goodness onto the gnocchi and garnished with a sprinkling of chopped toasted hazelnuts and a little more fresh sage.

I have to admit that the ricotta cheese and butter were store bought, though, seeing as I don’t have a friendly neighbourhood nomad to buy milk from. I know… lazy, right? :slight_smile:

It was damned tasty, though.

6

I’d have to go with the chicken vilarou. It started with aromatic vegetables in butter, turned into a roux, which was then used to partially cook some chicken. Then the entire process started again, with the old sauce added to the new. The chicken was then egged, breaded, egged, breaded, and deep fried. The sauce was strained, thickened with egg yolks, wined, lemoned, and creamed. While this was going on, some fresh sage was deep fried. At the end it all came together, along with garlic and rosemary roasted red bliss potatoes and a salad.

And then came the creme brulee and the obligatory angioplasty.

To be fair, the wine was not homemade.

7

Probably Turducken, actually. Between carefully deboning the chicken, duck and turkey and making three different kinds of stuffing from scratch including baking the bread and cornbread myself it took over a full day to prepare from absolute start to finish. It was very very good though.

8

Nothing so fancy. Just a Marinara sauce.

Boil the Tomato and Onion in the Tomatoes juices for a few hours, and put all the fresh spices in Basil (I prefer Thai Basil), Oregano, and Rosemary or Bay Leaves and Garlic.

I didn’t make the noodles from scratch or anything.

9

“To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the Universe”
–Carl Sagan

10

French food, probably. I had a great French cookbook and made a lot of things (like French onion soup and sponge cake) from complete scratch.

The soup took about 4 hours to make from start to finish, including making the broth, sauteeing the onions, etc, but wasn’t too difficult. The orange-zest flavored hollandaise I made for asparagus was probably the most complicated, just because it’s so finicky to keep the temp perfect.

All in all, with that cookbook I discovered French cuisine isn’t hard to make, it just takes a lot of patience.

11

I’ve attempted many recipes that involve long lists of ingredients, extended prep times (sometimes days), and a kitchen full of dirty pots and pans for the sake of a bowlful of possibly edible product. Last Thanksgiving, I spent two days making a demiglace that started with four gallons of water, a few pounds of roasted beef bones and a big pile of produce. After hours and hours of reduction, I ended up with about a pint of delicious goo somewhat more complex than two-minute gravy made from an envelope of powdered brown. That was fun.

Most recently, a friend gave me a dolphin (mahi mahi) carcass that magically transformed itself into a seafood-laden cioppino (think Fisherman’s Wharf) from fish head stock, the grilled backbone, a long version of tangy tomato sauce with olives and capers, and a final boost with a succulent variety of finfish and shellfish. I had to empty the spice cabinet and the produce drawer, and pull out all the stockpots for that one. It scored big time, and may never be duplicated.

But probably the most notable culinary adventure was the “Beggar’s Chicken” kitchen challenge, back in the college days, inspired by Jeff Smith, the Frugal Gourmet. Yeah, that guy, before his disastrous fall from grace. His Beggar’s Chicken recipe was the modern-day equivalent of the old Chinese method of roasting a clay-encased chicken in the ground. The hard part was finding the twenty pounds of clay, procured from a neighboring town.

It was a drinking party that looked like a mud wrestling competition. After spicing the chickens and wrapping them in parchment and brown paper bags, we rolled out the clay on the dinette table and encased the birds, artistically scuplting one into a hen, the other, a duck. After the oven-roasting was done, we were so intoxicated and famished that we cracked open and attacked those birds like piranhas devouring a wayward calf, an experience enhanced by the occasional crunch of fired clay. It was some of the worst chicken I’ve ever tasted.

12

I once made a souffle of lobster in sauce a l’americaine from one of Julia Child’s cookbooks. It involved busting up a whole lobster and making a complex sauce out of the carcass tomatoes and cognac, then mixing the sauce and the tail chunks into a classic souffle mixture. It was spectacularly good, but it took awhile to make the sauce and then to make the souffle. I had a couple of cups of sauce left over and put it into the freezer, and my mom threw it out within the week, saying that she thought it was ancient spaghetti sauce. She always disapproved of “fancy cooking”, so I halfway think she did it on purpose.

13

Homemade Worcestershire Sauce, though is way better than the original (even if it does take three weeks to make).

14

I make several foodstuffs that take weeks to prepare, but they’re not necessarily that complicated (stuff like cured meats, homemade bacon, etc.) If that works for you, then a from-scratch BLT with home cured and smoked bacon, home baked sourdough, tomatoes and lettuce from the yard, and homemade mayonnaise would probably be the most complicated.

Lasagna from scratch is a pain in the ass, but, for me, totally worth it. If I make lasagna, it’s always from scratch: spinach lasagna sheets, bechamel, and ragu alla bolognese.

I’ve done various Thai and Indian curries from scratch, and those can be a bit difficult in tracking all the ingredients down. The Indian ones aren’t so bad, since I could stock up on the dry ingredients, but Thai curries tend to have a lot of fresh ingredients. So, once you find all your ingredients and pound them down in a mortar and pestle into a paste, it’s not so bad, but there is a lot of prep work to get to the actually cooking part (which is pretty straightforward.)

What I really, really hate making, though, are homemade stuffed pastas like pierogi, ravioli, or Turkish manti. They are so delicious (especially the manti, stuffed with lamb), but rolling out the dough, stuffing the pieces, pinching them off, rerolling the leftover dough, stuffing the pieces, etc. Luckily, they freeze well, but I absolutely detest making them.

15

Oh, that almost made me weep! It sounds fantastic!

I made croissants. Once. They were good, but not nearly worth the time and effort when I can buy perfectly decent ones from the bakery.

16

Gosh. I made a bunch of soufflés when I was 13 or 14, and I found out years later, some people look on the soufflé as some kind of alchemy. I don’t know if I could do it today.

I make a respectable Pad Thai, and that’s pretty tricky. I didn’t make the rice noodles from scratch, though.

My Chicken Marsala was great the first time. The second time, it was only ordinary.

17

Yep, they’re not so much difficult as you have to do everything right and in the right order, and folks have to be at the table ready to eat it, or it collapses down into a tasty omelet.

Mmm, I haven’t made one in a long time. The last one I made was a relatively easy spinach gruyere souffle. Dang, that was good. I made it because Julia Child had just died and I thought it was an appropriate way to memorialize her. Maybe I’ll make it again soon.

18

I grew a cucumber once. It was tasty.

19

I almost never cook, so I don’t have many feats to choose from. I guess it was my one attempt at figgy pudding with hard sauce. Softened and chopped up the figs, dates and raisins, added liquor (I forget what – it was a decade ago!) and spices, put it in a bowl and boiled it upside down for hours. Then I made the hard sauce, which was the easy part – just add tons of confectioner’s sugar and butter with some vanilla.

Definitely not all that complicated at all compared to lobster souffle or making your own ricotta! But it was still a pain. Turned out pretty yummy, though.

20

Well, chocolate souffles with whiskey truffles inside is probably my biggest public success. Now that I do Cook for Good (cookforgood.com) homemade pizza with homemade crust is totally normal. I went to a whole Chocolate Artistry class at Johnson and Wales to learn how to make truffles and chocolate art pieces. I’d say my personal pride is pie crusts, because of the work that went into actually learning how to do it, not just the actual work of doing it each time. The funny thing is that people are totally impressed when I mention I make yogurt, which is the yogurt’s job.

ETA - those chocolate souffles, by the way, I made 12 of. I got a beautiful thank-you note from the guy whose birthday it was.