It is really, really hard to find time to cook for Cooking Eorzea when I have family visiting me. I ended up staying up until almost 2 AM to create the Walnut Bread, getting up for work, working, and then finishing this recipe the day before this week’s column is supposed to go live. I was extremely tempted, to be honest, of missing out on this week’s Cooking Eorzea column…But I missed cooking that much that I chose to sacrifice sleep for it. It’s funny; I often sacrifice sleep to play video games or to talk to friends on the East Coast or to take an overnight plane flight to Walt Disney World or something. It is a whole different matter to know that I am going to be exhausted the next day because I had to stay up far too late to make a loaf of bread. I also have company coming again on Saturday, and that person is staying for two weeks with me. I haven’t figured out quite how to cook around her yet, though I may end up just making a recipe attempt and feeding us both with it.
All that said…I miss sleep, and it is getting harder and harder to go without it as I get older. But if I want to keep cooking with Love, Eorzean Style…then I have to be willing to go without it sometimes.
If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.
Recipe of the Week
This week’s Cooking Eorzea recipe, with a difficulty rating of Easy, hails from the La Noscea region of Eorzea and is…La Noscean Toast!
La Noscean Toast is the fifth recipe out of The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook, and it incorporates the Walnut Bread recipe that I made the prior week. This gives me a second shot at making that loaf of bread, and to make it look nicer than it did last time.
Anyway, here is what this week’s Cooking Eorzea recipe is supposed to look like:
Featured Ingredient of the Week
This week’s featured ingredient for Cooking Eorzea is Maple Cream! I know it was the featured ingredient from last week but hear me out. I thought about how underwhelming the maple cream I used last week was, and how I couldn’t really taste the maple flavor in the walnut bread. As a test for this week’s recipe, I forked over money for a more expensive version of maple cream, and I was shocked at how much better it tasted and how it held itself together better than last week’s maple cream when I opened and used it. I could also even taste it in the walnut bread itself this time.
There is a lesson to be learned in this: sometimes, you gotta use better quality ingredients to make a dish.
My Cooking Attempt
Much like when I previously used the Ishgardian Muffin recipe to make the Royal Eggs and Salmon Muffins recipes, this week’s Cooking Eorzea recipe incorporated the Walnut Bread recipe that I had made from last week. First, here are the ingredients that I used for my second attempt at making Walnut Bread:
After several hours of making this bread, I finally set it out to cool around 2 AM. I had managed to fix the edges of my Walnut Bread by rounding the edges before I stuffed it into the bread pan!
After the bread cooled, I sliced it up and let it rest for about twelve hours so it could dry out some.
Here is a photograph of all the ingredients for this week’s Cooking Eorzea recipe, La Noscean Toast, and you can see the previously made and sliced loaf of Walnut Bread on the side:
First, I added the heavy cream, the coconut milk, eggs, maple cream, sugar, salt, vanilla extract, and amaretto together into a bowl.
I then whisked everything together until the custard was well-blended and the eggs were fully broken up.
I poured the custard into a baking pan…and realized that it was too small and so that it would swallow the bread entirely. I ended up pouring the custard into a second, bigger baking pan in order for it to spread it out a bit more.
I placed the griddle pan on the stove top, let it heat up, and then I greased the pan with some butter.
I took several pieces of the Walnut Bread and let them soak in the custard for 30 seconds. Once my timer went off, I flipped them over and let the other side soak for another 30 seconds.
Once the walnut bread finished soaking, I would shake off the excess custard…
I then placed the slices onto the griddle pan, and I let them cook and brown on one side for four minutes. Once that was done, I would flip them over and let them cook on the other side for another four minutes. Even though the bread was starting to come apart, as you can see in the photo, it solidified itself together as it cooked.
As the first batch was finishing up, I had the second set all ready to go to make even more La Noscean Toast.
And here is this week’s completed La Noscean Toast attempt for Cooking Eorzea, complete with maple syrup and butter!
Afterwards, I tried it out! First and foremost – changing up the maple cream really made a difference. I tried out some of the walnut bread by itself, and the maple flavor really came through within the bread. It turns out that what ingredients you use really do matter.
As for the La Noscean Toast itself? It was absolutely delicious. The griddled custard on the bread really complemented each other, and the butter and maple syrup provided a surprising sweetness to the overall dish that I wasn’t expecting to work as well as it did. The entire dish was really heavy, which wasn’t a surprise based upon the bread that I had made and how dense it turned out to be.
Afterword
This is a Cooking Eorzea dish that I would absolutely make again, if I had the time to make the Walnut Bread. That bread seriously takes hours to prep and create, and it is not something that I can do just last minute. The custard itself was really quite easy to make, and I enjoyed dipping and griddling it on the stovetop. I also would stick with the higher quality maple cream for this dish, as it seriously made a real difference.
Let’s wrap up this week’s Cooking Eorzea column: I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You should check him and his works out over on Twitter.
Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game.
Next Week
Next week, we venture into the Soups section of the cookbook. So, what does that mean?
Lots and lots of seafood as I try my hand at making the Bouillabaisse recipe, complete with lobster tails! It will be something, and I am super glad that the person staying with me is a pescatarian.
What is your favorite HQ ingredient to use? Are you excited for me to finally be leaving the breads section behind?
Let us know in the comments below!
