Union Hill Kitchen

UHK’s Blog

Our Chef’s experimental flan cake.

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Our Executve Chef Alexis, likes to cook with all types of people.

Whether they are professionally trained or home cooks who have command over a certain cuisine.  He is always looking for inspiration

for dishes. While Alexis was in Key West on vacation, his Aunt Olema was in the kitchen with him.  She was showing him how to cook several dishes that she had made in her kitchen for over 30 decades for her exquisite cocktail parties. Olema called it flan cake.  It sounded odd at first to Chef Alexis but it was interesting enough for him to take a closer look at the recipe.  It was a cake batter that was combined with a flan IMG_9417recipe and while the dessert was baking, the cake and the flan would separate and  return to its original state and would look like the photograph above.

A caramel and flan get added to the baking vessel.

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Then the batter is added.

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It is baked in a water bath for about 45 minutes.

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The Chef may put it on the menu come spring for our dinner service. He makes the cake with the classic red velvet batter and scents the flan with fennel. It is actually very good.  Something I have not tasted…. ever!

 

 

Our Chef’s Best Giant Biscuit Recipe

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Biscuits

Comfort food means something different to each person.  If you live in Italy it may mean you enjoy a pasta dotted with pesto sauce, or bruschetta.

For our Executive Chef Alexis, it means ham croquettas .empanadas, or un cafe con leche.

For some who live in the south it might mean corn bread, collard greens, or pimento cheese and crackers.  Regardless of what it is that comforts us as it relates to food, it is safe to say that most people enjoy biscuits.  Some drizzle honey on them or smear a jam or jelly;

Some even cut the biscuit and fill them with enticing meats such as sausage, or ham.  Though there are a few tricks to making good biscuits and if you practice and follow these suggestions, you will be on your way to making great biscuits at home.

Ingredients:

4 cups of flour plus 2 tablespoons (sifted)

2 tablespoons baking powder

2 teaspoons salt

2 tablespoons white sugar

2/3 cup  plus one tablespoon  shortening or you can use COLD unsalted butter

2 cups milk

1 teaspoon of vinegar

 

How to Make:

Preheat oven to 425 F degrees F (220 degrees C)

In a large bowl, sift the flour, baking powder, salt, and the sugar.

Add the shortening combining ingredients with a spoon until it resembles coarse corn meal.  Add  the milk until combined. (The mixture will not be completely combined.  This is how you want it.) Don’t be tempted to mix it anymore. Trust us.

Place dough onto a floured surface  and knead 2 times enough to just combine it.  Roll dough out to 1 inch thick. Cut biscuits with a  2-3 inch biscuit cutter.  Place the biscuits onto an un-greased sheet pan.

Bake the biscuits  for 14 to 16 minutes until the edges are golden brown.

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Some tips from our Chefs:

– Don’t over mix the dough!    When the milk is added, just combine so that the mixture looks like crumbly corn meal.  You don’t need to add all of the milk because on high humidity days you will need less or more depending on your environment. You will have to learn this by testing and trying out the recipe.

– Make sure the shortening or butter is really cold.  If it is not cold it will not rise correctly.

–  You can brush the biscuits with melted butter before or after baking if you desire.

 

 

The Question: Why do we sell out of food?

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We have been asked this question by many of our guests during our busy dinner service.  Our kitchen has limited refrigeration which was designed by intent by our executive chef Alexis.  He designed it this way in order to ensure that every product is as fresh as it can be each day.  We do not have a “walk in” refrigerator that we can store large amounts of meats and vegetables;  For this reason we are encouraged to make everything fresh each day.  Our chefs in the kitchen always plan to have a limited amount of dishes each night in order to control the quality and freshness of what we offer to our guests in our dinning room.

Fenuxe Magazine writes a review on our restaurant

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Thank you Fenuxe Magazine for writing about our restaurant.

 

Read it here

 

 

Happy Holidays from the staff at Union Hill Kitchen!

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This is our first post for December 2013! Just to recap, we have launched our casual lunch service on October 4th 2013. Though we blew electrical  fuses in the restaurant for the first couple of days because of the power we were using in the kitchen, we were still successful in bringing our guests freshly made food. We opened for dinner on December 4th 2013! We have had many of the surrounding community express so much support for us that we want to say thank you to them. So the staff at UHK sends a heart felt thank you!

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Our chef is always reading and studying, that’s what we appreciate about him. This is our Chef in his private library, which none of us have seen yet. 🙂

We have received many questions regarding the menu in the past two weeks and here you will find an answer to some of them.

Our menu will always remain small and focused. The Chef will add pasta, fish, gluten free and vegetarian soon.

Starting immediately, we will open for lunch Tuesday  thru Saturday from 11:30 am to 2:30 pm. Dinner will be Wednesday thru Saturday from 5:30 pm to 9:00 pm.

We will be open New Years Eve for dinner between 5:30 pm – 9:00 pm. Our doors will close at 9:00 and our kitchen will close at 9:15. We will have a small menu for that evening. We are accepting reservations at 770 458 6252. If you get our voice mail please leave a message and we will contact you to confirm your seating.

Our Executive Chef Alexis has lots of fun things in store for 2014. He is currently  working on a strawberry pie for this summer. If you love strawberries, this will be something you need to try. I am not a fan of strawberry but this one tasted like it was summer.

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These are the Chef’s Kentucky ham smoked croquettes. They are fantastic alone and best with his tequila-coffee guava sauce. He uses a Pate a Choux Dough to make the croquette and this is indicative of a snack he had enjoyed as a young Cuban boy growing up in New Jersey. Even people from Miami that are experts in croquettes have hailed this dish as the best croquette they have ever tasted.

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And this is a crostini with Prosciutto crudo, sage brown butter, mozzarella and fried sage leaf. When we tasted it, we were amazed at how these simple ingredients placed together on a toasted bread could taste so amazing. The fried sage leaf is also something we have not seen or enjoyed before. Hopefully this will be offered on our menu soon.

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We hope to see you all this week.