Baked Stuffed Brie - Brie en Croute stuffed with Cranberries & Walnuts

hello this is chef john from food wishes comm with baked stuff breathe that's right i'm going to show you how to put together what i consider one of the ultimate holiday party foods and that's because to your guests it's gonna look like you put a lot of effort into this i mean anybody can slap a wedge of cheese on a plate and throw some crackers around it but when people see something like this on the table they really know you care and by the way i said looks like you put a lot of effort into this because in reality this is quite easy if you can get past the first step which is to somehow split a very sticky gooey wheel debris in half without distorting it or losing half of it on the knife and for me the best way to do that is with what I call the James Bond villain technique and you'll see why in a second before this we're going to need one whole wheel abri and I'm using the smaller wheel you can do this with the big ones but these are much easier to work with and speaking it easier to work with make sure this is right out of the fridge alright we want this nice and cold and firm and what we're going to do here is take a knife and score the side of the Brie all the way around about an eighth of an inch deep and we do want to make sure we start that cut directly in the center okay and then we'll simply continue until that's been scored all the way around so we really don't need to go too deep just enough to get a string in which by the way is the next step so we're going to take a piece of kitchen string or plain dental floss and go around placing that into our newly made cut oh by the way the reason I call this the Bond villain technique is because in every movie it seemed like someone wanted to do what you're about to see - his neck with a piece of piano wire even though they always had guns and could have just shot them but anyway like I said we're going to go around with the string and then we'll twist it through once like this and then we'll grab both ends of the string near the Brie and simply pull in opposite directions thereby splitting that brie perfectly in half with no mess and no waste check it out and please hold your applause until the end of the video and once our brie has been split it's ready to stuff and because I'm doing kind of a winter holiday themed version I'm going to use some dried cranberries and some walnuts so on one side I'm going to press in about I don't know I didn't measure quarter cup third of a cup of chopped dried cranberries and then on the other side I'm going to do some walnuts which as you can see have been pretty finely chopped and I usually don't do them quite that small but these were left over from our now famous Russian tea cakes video so I decided to use them up but then I did add a few larger chunks because I was having second thoughts and this probably wouldn't be a bad time to mention you could fill these with anything you want I mean you are the dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde what goes inside so pretty much any combination of dried fruit nuts work great in these I've also done savory versions using things like sliced ham or sauteed mushrooms so you do have a lot of options but anyway once that's AB we'll go ahead and place our cranberry side on top if you press those down pretty good most of them should stay in place but the pieces that don't can get shoved back in or of course eaten up to you and then once our brie has been split and stuffed we can move on to the wrapping and for that we're going to use a sheet of frozen puff pastry which of course has been allowed to thaw and we'll place that down on a floured work surface with a little more flour on top and what we'll do is we'll roll that out to about an eighth of an inch thick all right if you roll it too thin it might split open but if it's too thick it might not cook so I think an eighth of an inch is just about perfect which is about what I have right here and at that point let's go ahead and place our brie right in the center and as with all things we wrap in dough you want to make sure you have enough to cover but I can tell just by looking I got a lot of extra so I'm gonna go ahead and trim a little bit off at this point and then before we do get to wrapping I want to give this a little egg wash and just in case you're not familiar an egg wash is nothing more than one egg beaten with like a teaspoon of water and by the way hang on to that we're also going to use it for the outside but anyway we'll go ahead and brush on a little bit of beaten egg and then we will fold it up something like this so I'm going to flop this edge over and then the opposite side and then as we bring those other sides into cover you'll notice we do have a lot of extra so at this point all we need to do is basically pinch off whatever extra dough we think we don't need and that's pretty much it so be careful don't pull off too much we do a total coverage but we also don't want giant chunks of dough underneath so that's looking pretty good right there and then I will flip that over and kind of gently press on the sides and our stuffed brie has officially been wrapped and if we wanted we could just stop right there but of course we want to decorate the top in show-stopping fashion so what we'll do is we transfer that to a pan and brush that all over with our egg wash and then make some kind of cool design with some extra puff pastry and one great tip here for the stuff you're going to use is your design make sure the dough is very very cold when you cut it okay this is almost still frozen but that way you're going to get nice sharp lines and when you do use nice clean cuts for puff pastry that's what really makes it pop up nice and high and even if your dough is semi frozen like mine is here as soon as those pieces are cut they thought very quickly so by the time you're done those should be ready to place on your Brie and for mine I decided to go with the old bunch of grapes design which is my favorite and buy favorite I mean the only one I know how to do I mean when it comes to decorating things I'm more of a Patrick Stewart than a Martha Stewart but having said that even the most imperfect design once baked usually looks amazing so I'm going to do a little piece of pastry for the stem as well as twist one along the top for the volume because vines are kind of twisty and then I'll go ahead and place down my grapes and I'll be using the standard four-three-two-one arrangement and I'm not sure if it makes that big of a difference but I do like to egg wash as I go so like I said I'm gonna start with four Grapes across the top and then we'll continue with a row of three and then two and then we'll finish off with a single grape at the bottom of the bunch and of course we will make sure any dough we're adding gets brushed with egg wash and you know what that does not look too bad and I could have probably should have stopped right there but I decide to try to add a little detail so I used my knife to make a few markings on the vine as well as attempted to roll up some dough into those little curly things which are I think called tendrils I don't know but I'm pretty sure they're not called little curly things and then last but not least we're going to take a fork and do some very shallow scratches in the top of the dough and that's just to hopefully add a little visual interest to the surface so whether you want to mess with this stuff is up to you and this kind of fine tuning is optional and probably not necessary but it is kind of fun and besides who the heck wants to go through life only doing things that are necessary that's not a good system but anyway once we're happy with our design we are totally not ready to bake because maybe the most important step in this procedure is to place our brie in the freezer for exactly one hour before baking alright so this is critical I don't care how hungry you are we're going to pop that in the freezer for one hour after which it's totally okay to bake and I'm not sure why froze this on a Silpat lined baking sheet because I think you really do want to use parchment paper here it is going to brown that bottom better than the baking mat so once our brie has been frozen for an hour and placed on an appropriately lined baking sheet we're finally ready to bake so let's go ahead and place that in the center of a 425 degree oven for about 20 minutes or until it looks like this and what we're looking for is something that's beautifully browned and a little bit of the brie is starting to leak out now I will say I have cooked some of these that have not leaked which is extremely rare so if yours has baked for like twenty to twenty-five minutes and it's nice and brown and it's not running it's probably still ready but that little bit of leakage is generally the visual cue that this is perfect and then we really don't have to let this cool we can go ahead and transfer that onto our serving platter or in my case nicely garnished cutting board and that's it our baked stuffed Brie is done so let me go ahead grab a knife and cut in and see how we did and I've had these before where the outsides brown but the inside was exactly like a cold brie which kind of defeats the purpose is my friend guy might say if it's not runny it's not money so that's exactly what you want to go for gorgeous molten cranberry and walnut studded Brie so that is absolutely perfect and I really should be moving that wedge so you can get a better look but I can't because I have to eat some right now which I'll do with the help of a crispy crunchy crostini delivery system and that really is an amazing bite I mean the way those sweet and sour dried cranberries and crunchy walnuts kind of baked and steamed with that brie inside that buttery crust really does create something very very special and the more you eat the better it looks which I've simulated here by removing and definitely not eating that wedge we cut out and by the way the sliced persimmons were just not for a garnish if you use a variety called foo you know not fubu Fuyu those are the ones you can eat firm and they're very sweet and delicious and makes the perfect base for this but anyway that's it baked stuffed Brie incredibly delicious visually stunning and if you can master that fairly simple Bond villain technique for splitting that brie a very easy thing to make so I really do hope you give this a try soon head over to food witch's calm for all the ingredients and worth as usual and as always enjoy

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 2,057,454

Rating: 4.9323444 out of 5

Keywords: Brie (Food), Baked, Stuffed, Brie en Croute, Cranberries, Walnuts, Cooking, baking, appetizer, holiday, party, chef, john, foodwishes, Recipe, cheese

Id: Tkzz9dW9Yms

Length: 9min 11sec (551 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2015