What are the most difficult recipes involving the most steps?

How about trying to make candy?? It takes quite a few steps and if you don’t do it just right it doesn’t come out well. Pinoche is one that is quite difficult. Our family makes all types like fudge, peanut brittle, toffee, chocolate covered jellies, and some harder ones in which the names escape me. If you go to google and type in “candy recipes” you can find quite a few!

Do you want difficult, or do you want time-consuming? They are not necessarily the same thing.

Making a light flaky piecrust is difficult, and takes a lot of practice, but it’s not especially complex – you just have to do the right things as quickly as possible. Or, to follow on @RedPowerLady‘s suggestion, divinity fudge requires perfect timing and perfect temperature measurements but can be done in about half an hour if you have the skills.

Making sourdough bread is time-consuming, since it can take weeks, but it’s not terribly difficult. Croissants can take a day or so, between the rolling out and rising.

And there’s always working your way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Tagines can be complex with many steps.

I would agree with redpowerlady, making candy can be difficult because of variables in temperature, moisture, and the moisture content in the ingredients. Timing is everything and you have to use a very good kitchen thermometer.

However, if you are looking for most difficult, try roasting a baby pig. They are very cute and so it is difficult to think about eating the little cuties: Here’s a recipe: http://chubbyhubby.net/blog/?p=499

You also might want to check out making a french stew. I have a friend that cooks her stew for 3 days. Also, Vietnamese Pho can be very difficult especially the beef kind. Please continue your search for wonderful difficult recipes. Since i’m your roommate i hope i’ll be lucky enough to have some leftovers!

Some Chinese recipes such as Peking (or I guess it’s now Beijing) duck are very complicated and delicious. Check out a good Chinese cookbook like The Key to Chinese Cooking by Irenr Kuo.

On the dessert side, I’d nominate the Gateau St Honoré. It’s a French classic, named after the patron saint of pastry cooks because it incorporates so many elements of the pastry cook’s repertoire (and probably because a prayer or two might be necessary to pull it all off).

You start with a thin base of puff pastry (feuilletage), pipe a ring of choux paste around the edge to create a rim and bake. You also make several small puffs from the choux paste and fill these with pastry cream. You cook sugar to a caramel, and dip the top of each of the puffs in it, then use caramel to glue the puffs all around the choux paste ring. Next you make a Creme Chibouste out of italian meringue and pastry cream, and pipe big mounds of this into the center of the ring.

Looks like this when (if) you finish.

Just get a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child. That should keep you busy! :D

@Harp I think we need a demo!

And find Julia’s recipe for Navarin printanier in MtAOFC, Four different cuts of lamb and the necessity to shape all raw potatoes to 2½” long with rounded edges. That simulates the French oval potato, which grows only in France. (Typical).

I see from your profile that you “like eggs and chocolate”, so let me offer just one more ridiculously complicated culinary project:

Empty the contents from some brown eggs by carefully chipping a 3/8” diameter hole in the large end, inserting a straw, stirring the contents, and blowing through the straw to force the liquid egg out. Wash the shell by filling with water, shaking and emptying several times. Then sterilize the shell in a hot oven for several minutes.

Temper some dark couverture chocolate (I won’t explain tempering here; there are tutorials on the web). Fill the shells with chocolate and immediately empty them, again by blowing the chocolate out with a straw. A layer of chocolate will remain coating the inside of the shell. Allow this to set (praying to St. Honoré that the chocolate’s properly tempered, because if it’s not, you’re screwed).

Now make a praline paste. Removing the skin from half a pound of hazelnuts. In a heavy copper pan, melt a quarter pound of sugar and cook it to a very light caramel. Add the nuts and stir until the nuts are well roasted and the sugar is well caramelized. Pour this mixture out onto an oiled tray and let it harden. Break it up with a hammer into small chunks and run it through a food processor to get it as smooth as possible.

Take about half a pound of this praline paste and stir in two ounces or so of melted chocolate (I prefer a mixture of dark and milk for this). Then temper this blend of praline and chocolate, rewarming it just until it’s lump-free. Pipe this mixture into the egg shells, leaving just a very small gap at the hole. Cover this gap with a dab of tempered chocolate.

Allow the finished eggs to rest for a day (they don’t need refrigeration).

The cool thing about these is that to eat them, you tap the shell as you would for a hard-boiled egg, then peel away the real shell (it will release easily if you tempered the chocolate properly). You’re left holding a perfect chocolate egg, filled with the yummy praline. Guaranteed ooohs and aaahs.

@Harp : OMG.

@Harp oooooh!

@Harp I want one. Now.

Back, ladies…

Have you tried making beer, wine, or other fermented beverages? Those are long and time-consuming (not to mention fun)!!

Nice! @La_chica_gomela beat me to it.

Black Forest cake.

@Harp So with the praline paste—I guess it is french to use hazelnuts, but what if you do it with pecans, American style? Would that significantly change the flavor, do you think? I may have to try that some day. Maybe make a pecan praline filling for—a pastry cup? Chocolate cup? Something easier than the egg, anyway.

It sounds like you could use the same method to add a couple more layers of different kinds of chocolate before you fill it with the praline cream. Perhaps dark, milk, white. Is there another kind of confection that acts similarly to chocolate?

@daloon Yeah, there’d be a big flavor difference with the pecans, I think. Pecans lose a lot of their delicate flavor with roasting, in my experience, and in making a praline paste the nuts get really roasted. The French sometimes use almonds instead of hazelnuts, or a mixture of the two, but even almond praline paste is not very interesting, Hazelnuts respond amazingly to roasting (unfortunately, the American hazelnut has much less character than the European variety; barely the same nut).

In looking over the nut-to-sugar proportion I gave in my description above, I see that I called for too little sugar. The actual proportion should be 60% nut to 40% sugar.

You could layer various chocolates, yes, but I don’t think that it would be pleasant to end up with a thick armored shell of chocolate that you’d have to gnaw through to get at the praline. There are compounds commonly called “confectioner’s coatings” that are meant to taste and act like chocolate, without the hassles of tempering, but I don’t think they taste good at all, and I don’t believe they would set hard enough to release crisply from the eggshell.

Wow. I’m really impressed with the chocolate egg concept! Thanks!

Harp: You get The Harvard Lampoon’s Prize for the most exhaustive, exhausting, overly-inventive typically French Approach to the Culinary Arts. Or perhaps that should be
The Pritzker Architecture Prize

And shouldn’t the finished product be kept under a Victorian Glass Dome, like a Fabergé egg?

This was actually one of the simpler things we did in Paris for Easter. We also did huge, very elaborate, one-of-a-kind chocolate egg sculptures worth hundreds of dollars.

This guy, Oriol Balaguer, does some great Easter stuff. I humbly cede my Pritzker Prize to him.

@Harp: Those are edible, right? They are similar to the sand paintings that the Tibetan monks do, only to erase them after they are completed.

Yep, all chocolate. You do learn quickly not to form attachments to your pieces. Exactly like the sand paintings, in fact.

@Harp; Oriol let you lick the pans, spoons and pastry tube attachments, at least? (Milo has just hauled in mouse #37…gotta go and deal.)

Try a Timpano. It has lots of steps since you have to cook all the ingredients that go into it first. It’s the centerpiece dish in the film “Big Night”. Batali has a recipe somewhere on the web for an even more complicated version.

Or perhaps try pot au feu. This dish has so many steps, it takes two days. I made it once and Carlos was fond of calling it “pot of food”.

Good luck!

@gailcalled: Mandalas

The best recipes require not steps, but understanding. So walk before you run. If you’ve already walked, look at a lot of things Grant Achatz and Ferran Adria have done.