Oh, and to further explain. It sounds to me like you’re just thinking of what’s called a “white roux.” That’s a roux that has the highest thickening power, but no very little to no flavor. It’s just basically and equal mix of fat and flour which you dump in a pan, heat up to dissolve into a paste, and then you’re done. In Cajun and Creole cooking, a roux is used not only for its thickening, but very much for its flavor, too. As the flour browns, it develops a roasted, nutty flavor. The longer and darker you get it, the deeper this flavor. The trade-off is, the more roasted it gets, the less thickening power it has. But for many Cajun dishes, the flavor of the roux is at least as important as its thickening power. Maybe even moreso.
^And the lost thickening power can easily be made up by using okra! (I love okra)
An apple strudel, with layers of buttered pastry that were folded and then rolled out and buttered and fold again, a total of three or four times for a pastry that was eight layers of flaky goodness. Someone else mentioned it above also, but at least it was very good tasting!
Oh man, that just brought back a memory of a stupidly difficult dish I made. I think I’ve blotted it out of my memory until right now.
About ten or twelve years ago, back when I lived in Colorado and had a nice garden, I had a bumper crop of cherry tomatoes. In my area of Colorado, the growing season almost always ended prematurely with a September freeze and/or snowstorm, which was always a real bummer because it would get cold for one day, freeze your garden, and then it was back to blistering hot for at least another month. So one of those was predicted, and here I am with a TON of cherry tomatoes. I knew they wouldn’t make it through the freeze, so I picked them all. I had somewhere around 7 or 8 pounds.
I decided to make salsa out of them. Not fresh salsa, as I knew I couldn’t go through that much before it went bad, but cooked salsa that I could freeze and enjoy throughout the winter.
Now, when I make salsa like that out of big tomatoes, I blanch, peel, and seed them. For normal-size tomatoes, that’s a bit of a job, but not too onerous. I blindly start doing that with my cherry tomatoes.
Do you know how long it takes to blanch, peel, and seed 7+ pounds of cherry tomatoes? I think I spent 2 days doing it.
Never, ever again. I don’t know what I was thinking. It was so much work and so miserable that I just about threw them all away about halfway through.
The salsa was really good. I guess that’s the only saving grace. But I’m never making it again.
Especially when you consider that you need to use a full sized table to pull the dough out to paper thin - I use an old kitchen table that is almost the size of a sheet of plywood when I make it. I have to admit, I have been making strudel for close to 35 years so I don’t actually consider pulling the dough to be difficult, just time consuming. It never occurred to me to consider it difficult. :smack: I watch TV when I am doing it so I don’t get bored. 
Wow. I’m sure with practice and knowledge of how the dough should be, it isn’t hard, but the process looks absolutely miraculous to me. Watching the old Hungarian ladies make it so thin that you can easily read a newspaper through it is witchcraft, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t even know how it’s possible. I tried it once or twice, and I’ve given up hope on ever learning without being taught by someone like you who could show me what I’m doing wrong, identify dough problems, etc. I would love to have the ability to make my own strudel dough.
Gateau St. Honore. Rocked it.
I’ve also made a Galantine, just to see if I could. It turned out fine, though really, it wasn’t worth all the work. It was just… chickeny.
I once made a French apple=custard pie from scratch. It came out very, very well but I never made another. Now that I think about it, I may try it again only I won’t make the crust from scratch.Making the custard and filling was time consuming enough.
Most people either love doing the spun sugar or hate it. Great picture of one. Have you ever made the upside down bowl of spun sugar? [not my work, I detest working in molten lava]
I like doing them, I can usually debone a chicken in about 5 minutes. I find it all depends on the forcemeat you stuff them with. You can do anything from bland to on fire cajun - andouille is great in the stuffing, with a hard core bread in the panade. I like a good extra sour san francisco sourdough.
As a Peace Corps volunteer, I had a lot of time on my hands, a large kitchen, and absolutely no access to processed foods. They say Peace Corps is a good time to learn a hobby, and since Cameroonian food isn’t exactly the most delicious thing around, I took up cooking.
Probably my most complicated dish was our Christmas chicken enchilada feast, starting with a couple live chickens. It was a full day of roasting and grinding peppers, plucking chickens, and rolling out countless tortillas. My homemade lasagne is a runner up- I even had to make the ricotta cheese from scratch.
Mulligatawny is a PITA, has about a zillion ingredients and takes all day, but always turns out great. Real cooked butter cream and sour dough starter from scratch have both defeated me. Multiple times.
So would you do it again?
To be honest, I find repetitive tasks fairly relaxing - kneading bread is a favorite way to burn off annoyance or anger. Immersing myself in detailwork [why yes, I have done 100 bunches of celery in brunoise:smack:] is a great way to pass time.
I will confess, I really do like little complicated dishes hat take lots of time and are way too fancy. There is probably a 12 step program for that [and the hospitality tables are fabulous!] 
The easiest thing is just to get a known starter working, obviously, but if you really want to do it “from scratch”, try using rye flour until you get the starter going, and then work in regular wheat flour. Rye flour just has a lot more microorganisms in it, so it’s a bunch easier to get going.
Yeah, me too. I often relax after a difficult/stressful day at work by cooking, typically something that takes an hour or so to prepare, and I can be somewhat creative with. Weekends are for more complex dishes that might involve new techniques or flavors. But overall, most of the time, cooking is not at all a chore.
For a charity auction, I made a seven layer s’mores cake:
brownie
marshmallow filling
cheese cake
marshmallow filling
graham crackers
fudge filling
cheese cake
fudge filling
graham crackers
marshmallow filling
cheese cake
marshmallow filling
brownie
fudge frosting
Absolutely heaven, but took forever and made enough dirty dishes to fill the kitchen.
You could probably pretty easily replicate the bird’s moistness by just brining it, cooking it at 500 for a little while, and then at a relatively low 300 until your leave-in probe thermometer reads about 150, and then taking it out, tenting it with foil for about 45 minutes to an hour, and then carving and serving.
There’s nothing particularly remarkable about what they do- they cook it high for a while until the skin’s browned and crispy, coat it with some funky paste that’s basically flour and egg yolks, which I’m guessing keeps the skin from burning.
Then they cook it at 325, opening the oven every 15 minutes. I imagine the temp never really gets back up to 325 between bastings in most ovens, so the effective temp is probably 280-300 I’d guess.
I have made a Medieval dish called “Rabbit in Syrup” a lot of unique spices like cubeb, hand made cannolli, and Coq Au Vin.
My pancreas just ran away :eek:
The technique itself isn’t actually all that difficult. There are little things though like figuring the right amount of filling, and to wet the edges for a better seal.
Also, as far as I was taught by my Beijing grandmother, proper dumplings sit up on their own. The ones that lay on its side all lazily, no matter how frilly, are cheap (possibly Japanese) imitations. A good gyoza tastes the same to me as a Chinese dumpling though…