I already made kaespaetzle.

January 13, 2018 4:51 PM

I am in need of a fussy recipe that requires lots of time in the kitchen.

I've been on a cooking kick lately where I've been enjoying spending lots of time in the kitchen where the recipe requires lots of prep work or active cooking. I don't know why either, but I've been finding it therapeutic to crank up the radio, dance around the kitchen making something, doing something with my hands and otherwise be cookin'!

What is your best fussy recipe (time-wise I guess?) that fits this bill?

No restrictions (except no scallops or shrimp, all other seafood is welcome) and pretty much a fully loaded kitchen. Just please don't make me drag out the dang pressure cooker because I'm sick of it.

I can also easily get my hands on specialty ingredients because am walking distance to a big box grocery, a local butcher and a ridiculously high end food/wine market that has some obscure things as well as a cheese selection to make anyone cry tears of glee.

posted by floweredfish to Food & Drink (35 answers total)

Cassoulet? Beef [French spelling of Burgundian]?
posted by Huffy Puffy at 4:58 PM on January 13, 2018

This mushroom lasagne is delicious!
posted by Rube R. Nekker at 5:00 PM on January 13, 2018

Lasagne is better and even more time-consuming when you make the noodles yourself.
posted by wryly at 5:04 PM on January 13, 2018

Coq au vin? Make homemade dumplings or noodles with it?
posted by Valancy Rachel at 5:07 PM on January 13, 2018

Tamales? Jiaozi/Chinese Dumplings?
posted by The Toad at 5:09 PM on January 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

Making pasta or gnocchi? If you don't have a pasta roller there are lots of hand-rolled pastas
posted by brainmouse at 5:09 PM on January 13, 2018

Baklava is yummy and requires buttering individual philo sheets
posted by AlexiaSky at 5:10 PM on January 13, 2018 [3 favorites]

You can make (Chinese) (soup) dumplings for hours, especially if you roll your own wrappers.

(on preview, +1 to everyone above)

Also, petit fours? Bake main cake, slice and stack cake, cut into whimsical shapes, buttercream, fondant, and ecorate a few dozen tiny cakes.

These are all in the category of 'do the same thing over and over many times', not 'do a bunch of many different things', though.
posted by batter_my_heart at 5:11 PM on January 13, 2018

Response by poster: I love the lasagna recipe and petit fours suggestions so far - thank you! I won't thread sit but this is sort of the stuff I'm looking for! I've never MADE pasta before!!
posted by floweredfish at 5:18 PM on January 13, 2018

Make a Oaxacan style mole. Here’s a representative recipe, there are many variations. I did this once years ago when I needed a big cooking project and it was roughly equivalent to making a Thanksgiving dinner.
posted by clavicle at 5:28 PM on January 13, 2018 [4 favorites]

The Ivan Ramen cookbook has you going through 43 pages of cookbook in order to make a dish.
posted by ftm at 5:34 PM on January 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

Rich and Creamy Tonkotsu Ramen Broth Recipe (this is crazy, but absolutely worth the effort if you have the time)

Bastila is delicious, but I have not yet tried to make it myself.

If you have someone to feed, what about making a lot of small dishes, for a Mediterranean style maze/tapas/antipasti meal, or for a dim sum type meal? It's such a treat and really fussy to make from scratch.
posted by mumimor at 5:38 PM on January 13, 2018 [3 favorites]

If you really want fiddly dishes, I have to suggest Heston Blumenthal's recipes. Some notable ones are:

Fish and Chips - can't be hard, right? You only have to cook the chips three times and use a siphon for the fish batter. So, let's kick it up a notch.

Chicken Tikka Masala - the recipe takes three days and includes over a kilogram of spices (of which you only use a portion). You make your own mini-tandoor oven to cook the chicken and naan, because... why not? I don't think that's enough for you though.

Chilli Con Carne - another three day recipe with ten different chiles in it, two bottles of wine, and a bottle of Jack Daniel's. Half of the meat in the recipe is used just for the broth to put in the end product. The beans are brined, just because. Sour cream isn't good enough for this, so it's made into sorbet... with dry ice. After this, you'll want dessert.

Black Forest Gateau - you can start making it around the time of the Chilli, with 1.5 kilos of chocolate going into it (aerated with a siphon, of course!). The cake is tedious, but doable with basic kitchen utensils... and then you paint it with chocolate using a paint gun. Because why not?
posted by saeculorum at 5:49 PM on January 13, 2018 [12 favorites]

I’ve made Lithuanian mushroom cookies three times in my life (once as a child helping my grandmother), and last time, I swore I’d never do it again. They don’t have mushrooms in them - they’re a spice cookie shaped liked mushrooms. It’s making them look like mushrooms that’s so time consuming/frustrating. This recipe seems close to mine, but if you use Google image, you can see variations on frosting them. They’re very tasty.
posted by FencingGal at 6:04 PM on January 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

I love fussy cooking sometimes! Some of my favorites have been:
- Croquembouche: fun because you get to make three different components from scratch, then assemble, and you end up with something that looks cool.
- any of the Serious Eats ramen recipes, I liked making this one; it took ages but was very satisfying.
- Chinese dumplings where you make the wrappers from scratch (or even if you buy the wrappers...it's still pretty time consuming putting them together).
- As someone said above, doing a tapas or mezze platter type meal where you make as much of it as possible - I like making my own hummus, babaganoush, tzatziki and maybe even making pita bread or naan from scratch to go with it. That's good because you can store buy whatever you're not interested in trying to make and scale up and down accordingly.
- Making mochi candy - I used a kit. I did not like the taste of this so much, but it's definitely fussy!

I would also recommend the Binging with Babish youtube channel. Some of the stuff he makes gets pretty complicated. I just got his cookbook for Christmas and am excited to get stuck in to some of those recipes.
posted by cpatterson at 6:08 PM on January 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

Seconding Binging with Babish. His recreation of the Timpano from Big Night was what I thought of immediately when I read this. He also did a spin on pigeon pie and Dothraki blood pie for Game of Thrones, and the courtesan au chocolat from Grand Budapest Hotel.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:25 PM on January 13, 2018

Kouign Amanns
posted by soren_lorensen at 7:04 PM on January 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

Those Babish videos seem really perfect for this.
posted by gryphonlover at 7:52 PM on January 13, 2018

Things I would love to eat but don't try to make because I am lazy, easily overwhelmed, and have learned that my strengths lie with simple recipes:

* Baumtorte should really be cooked on a spit, but can be made in a spring-form pan by adding and cooking one layer at a time.

* Crepe cake

* Schichttorte came up in my searches as I was trying to remember the name for baumtorte.
posted by bunderful at 7:57 PM on January 13, 2018

This povitica recipe seemed daunting before I made it. To be honest it wasn't THAT hard but it might scratch your itch to make things that are involved.

Notes: I used a Bundt pan instead of a loaf pan. Spreading the walnut mixture was impossible; I ended up dropping little bits of it as evenly as I could and flattening them with an oiled fork.
posted by lakeroon at 7:58 PM on January 13, 2018

Previously.
posted by sacrifix at 8:16 PM on January 13, 2018

I’m a pretty good and efficient baker but this Julia Child Ruffle Cake was about 15 hours of active work.
posted by littlewater at 8:33 PM on January 13, 2018

Panettone! There's a bunch of waiting around time for the dough to rise, so you could be making other stuff while you wait.
posted by Weeping_angel at 8:41 PM on January 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

My Indonesian granny used to make kueh lapis--a beautiful, delicious, buttery cake with many many thin layers. You have to pour each subsequent layer of batter on top of the last one and broil it, so it is time consuming--takes about two hours total. We all adored it, but my granny didn't make it all that often because it's a lot of work--but she'd do it for Chinese New Year, for example. I have not had it since she passed away nearly twenty years ago, because no one else in the family will make it.

I find it hilarious that the recipe author calls it "Kueh Lapis Legit" because there are a lot of recipes for it out there and some are not the KL I grew up eating most often (some are steamed layer cakes, for example, which I've also had and are good too but not as good as this kind, IMO). So yeah, to me this is the "legit" one!
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 9:49 PM on January 13, 2018

Interesting, it does share some elements of Baumkuchen, but the end result and flavour would be quite different.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 9:50 PM on January 13, 2018

Fleischkuekle is my favorite thing ever, but I only make it once every coupla years because it's such a big production for me. I don't use rubber gloves to handle the meat, or a dough hook, and I seal the edges by rolling the side of a plate around (like a pizza cutter) but otherwise this is pretty much how it's done. Dip in ketchup for maximum awesomeness. I once dated a guy from a small (German immigrant) North Dakota town who had 15 brothers and sisters, and his mom made this for them on the regular. I cannot imagine. Or, as they would say, "Ya, I caaaynt ehmaychin."
posted by LibraryScientist at 10:09 PM on January 13, 2018

Tartine morning buns?
posted by stillmoving at 11:42 PM on January 13, 2018

Beef Wellington is nice and time-intensive.

Make your own pasta from scratch and then make ravioli with it.
posted by the duck by the oboe at 2:17 PM on January 14, 2018

You might like a crepe cake. It's not difficult, but requires a lot of time making the crepes and depending on the filling and topping you pick those could also take time. There are a lot of different recipes, but I've made the lemon one before and it is impressive!
posted by LKWorking at 7:52 AM on January 15, 2018

Schichttorte reminded me of the Great British Bak[e-off | ing Show], which reminded me, of course, of the Charlotte Royale.

Not sure how long it really takes—the competitors had a fixed time to do it—but it’s probably the most iconic challenge from the show.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 8:28 AM on January 15, 2018

I made my own cheese once. You have to watch the milk, and then there is the draining/straining/pressing part, with the salting and everything.
I've only done it the once, but it was fascinating to see just how much milk went into making a relatively small amount of soft cheese.
posted by sandraregina at 8:56 AM on January 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

Things that I've done that take a lot of effort:

-Head cheese. Start with one (1) pig head with tongue, brine overnight, and then simmer in water with some vegetables and other stuff to make a stock. Reduce stock until it gels (do this with a cold plate test just like making jam). Pull all the meat off the heat, peel the tongue, and cut the meat into fine dice. Add flavorings, pack meat in to a mold, then pour the stock over to cover and chill in the fridge until firm. Slice, serve with bread and mustard.

-Ballotine. Start with one (1) whole bird (chicken is most common). Debone the whole bird, leaving all of the meat and skin in tact - start by removing the spine and kind of going from there on the inside. Prepare a stuffing (duxelles is popular). Lay out the stuffing on the meat side of your deboned bird, roll it up, and tie it in to a log. Roast or poach until done.

-Galantine. Similar to the ballotine but arguably more of a pain in the ass. Starting with one (1) whole bird, remove all of the skin in one piece. Freeze the skin, and then scrape the inside to remove fat and glands. Remove all of the meat from the carcass. Using the bones, prepare a stock which will gel with the cold plate test. Grind the meat in to a farce (there are a lot of different flavor combinations available here). Spread the farce over the inside of the (thawed) skin, roll in to a log, and tie. Poach in the stock until cooked through. At this point, you can optionally fit the farcemeat log in to a pan or mold just larger than itself and pour the cooking liquid over it, and then chill in the fridge until set. Serve cold.

What I'm planning to do real soon:

-Choucroute garnie. This is a bit freeform, but is basically a variety of meats cooked with sauerkraut. Starting from scratch, you would need to make your own
1)Sauerkraut
2)Duck confit
3)Sausages
4)Bacon or salt pork
5)Smoked ham hocks
6)Smoked pork chops
posted by backseatpilot at 9:00 AM on January 16, 2018

Tamales
Chicken Kiev
posted by luckynerd at 8:41 PM on January 16, 2018

Actually, this Ottolenghi Chicken with Tarragon Brioche Pudding suits if you make the brioche for it yourself.
posted by the duck by the oboe at 10:15 PM on January 16, 2018

Any of the Indian subcontinent sweets that involve first making paneer or boiling a gallon of milk down to a little puddle of dense, fudgy sweet deliciousness. There's a nice collection of them in Lord Krishna's Cuisine.
posted by jocelmeow at 1:04 PM on January 17, 2018