The Three-fold Way with Tomato Broth

Let us first be clear what tomato broth is not. It's not a tomato sauce and it's not a tomato soup.

A soup is a full-bodied dish that could be a meal. A broth is a light flavored memory of the original and is watery and thin but full of flavor. The lines are blurred in the middle but seldom has one been mistaken for the other.

Also since we are all friends here, you can't get from one to the other. A broth is definitely not a diluted soup although you can make an intense soup using a broth because it will, no surprises here, intensify the flavor.

Perhaps the best way is to think of broth is intensely-flavored water that has both nutrients and taste.

Now that the CC has gotten that mini-rant off his chest, it's time to proceed.

Tomato Broth

Ingredients

1 medium red onion (diced very fine)
4 cloves garlic (crushed)

1 lb tomatoes (passed through a food mill)
"seasonings" (rosemary, sage, oregano, etc.)

olive oil
sea salt
black pepper

Recipe

Fry the onion and the garlic at very low heat for at least 10 minutes. Add the tomato purée, salt and pepper and fry for a bit. Let it reduce at a low heat for the better part of 20-25 mins. All the taste comes out of this extreme reduction so deal.

Add the water to dilute it to the required consistency, and let it come to a boil.

This is the point in time you can add "seasonings". Let it simmer on a low heat for 20 mins.

You need to pass the stuff through a strainer to get the broth. Dilute further if necessary.

Tortellini en Brodo

Ingredients

1 package tortellini

2 cups tomato broth

"herbs"
salt
pepper

grated parmigiano-reggiano

Recipe

If you are going to make your own tortellini, more power to you. The CC gets his from Raffetto's. There are limits to his ambition.

Cook the tortellini as per the instructions. Undercook by a minute or so. They will get heated up in the broth.

Meanwhile, bring the broth to a boil. Add additional herbs if needed, salt and pepper to taste. Drop the cooked tortellini and let it cook for a minute. Serve with plenty of grated parmesan and black pepper.

Poached Cod in Tomato-Tarragon Broth

Ingredients

2 cod fillets

2 cups tomato broth
1/4 cup chopped tarragon

salt
pepper

Recipe

Note 1: This is the lazy person's approach to dinner. Of course, you would've needed to have made the broth ahead of time but you do have a freezer, don't you?

Note 2: If you have never poached fish before, add 1/2 cup of white wine. The wine and the water will form an azeotrope and lower the boiling point to about 80°C from 100°C which is where water boils. It's a lot more forgiving if you're a "poached fish" newbie.

Heat up the broth with the tarragon. Add salt and pepper to taste. Poach the cod fillets until they are done. (This depends on the size. They are done when you can pierce them with a knife cleanly.)

Poached Eggs in Tomato Broth

Ingredients

4 eggs
dried out crusty bread

3 cups tomato broth

"herbs"
salt
pepper

Note 1:  This is the greatest "hangover" recipe in the CC's repertoire. After a night of carousing, this is both easy on the stomach and wonderfully nutritive (not to mention it provides the much-needed water element.)

This works the same way as the cod recipe above except you poach the eggs rather than the cod.

You serve it over the crusty bread on which you place the poached eggs and gently pour the broth around it. It's amazing to eat the yolk when it breaks over the bread and the broth.

Poached flounder with baby potatoes, cherry tomatoes & olives in saffron-tomato broth

This is one of the dishes that is extremely simple provided you have the ingredients on hand.

Please read the notes and follow the instructions carefully.

Ingredients

(serves 2)

2 fillets of flounder
8 baby potatoes
12 cherry tomatoes
1/4 cup fresh peas
1/4 cup carrots (sliced into thin batons)
1/4 cup French beans (sliced into 1" length pieces)
1/4 cup black olives

2 cups chicken broth
1/2 cup tomato purée

2 sprigs tarragon (chopped)

large pinch of saffron

parsley (finely chopped)

salt
black pepper

Recipe

Notes:

1. You absolutely need both chicken broth and the tomato purée. The umami is a big factor in this recipe. If you don't have chicken broth then you must either make a quick fish broth, or a Japanese-style dashi. This recipe will not work otherwise. The tomatoes and the broth function in tandem.
2. Tarragon can be overpowering. Use in moderation. Substitute by fennel seeds.
3. Saffron is non-negotiable.
4. Obviously, you can use any combination of vegetables you have at hand but use neutral ones. Cauliflower is great as would be some beans. There is considerable leeway here.
5. You can use any white fish. Cod is great too. Poaching time depends on the fillet thickness.

Bring the chicken broth and tomato purée to a gentle rolling boil. Add salt and black pepper. Add the baby potatoes and cook for 12 minutes. When this happens, foam will come to the surface. Skim it.

Add the cherry tomatoes, peas, beans and olives and continue to cook for 4 minutes.

With a slotted spoon, fish out all the vegetables and put them into two serving bowls which can hold liquid.

Bring the liquid to a boil again. Add the saffron and tarragon. Poach the fish in the liquid till it is cooked through - typically 3-4 minutes per fillet. (The CC had to poach them individually but if you have a large enough pan, you might be able to do both at once.)

Lift out the fish and place it gently on top of the vegetables.

Pour the broth over the fish and the vegetables. Sprinkling of parsley and if desired, more black pepper on top.

Serve with some crusty bread.

Lasagna with Cod & Zucchini

There is no sugar coating this one. This recipe is "heavy".

It's absolutely rock-solid and amazing but the CC only recommends making this if you have like 8+ guests who are dining. Seriously. We're talking small portions because of the sheer heft of this recipe.

This recipe is great for making ahead of time. When your guests arrive, just pop it in the oven and let it bake while you enjoy a nice de-stressing cocktail. It also really helps if you've made the tomato sauce ahead of time.

It's heavy on the prepping time and the oven time so you might want to make it in the waning days of summer when the ingredients are in copious supply and it's not so hot that you want to kill yourself.

Now that the negative juju's are out of the way, this recipe is killer. And heavy. And a heavy-killer!

So onwards and upwards.

There are just five components here all easily available or made in summer — cod, zucchini, tomato sauce, béchamel, and herbs. The CC will not judge you if you use commercial lasagna sheets. In fact, they might even be preferable since it's summer and this is not a delicate dish.

The steps are classically Italian. Waste not, want not. Each step goes back into the previous step to enhance the dish and waste nothing of the flavors acquired so far.

Why not step back right now and try and guess the recipe like a crossword puzzle?



Ingredients

package of lasagna sheets

1 large piece of cod
3 zucchini (cut into large rounds)

4 cups tomato sauce
fresh herbs - rosemary, thyme, oregano

1 cup milk
4 anchovies
1/2 cup flour

2 cups parmigiano-reggiano

butter
olive oil

salt
black pepper

Recipe

Take 1/4 cup of the tomato sauce and add water and bring to a boil. Poach the cod in it till medium done and lift out. Flake the flesh in a bowl and separately strain the broth. Discard the solids and reserve the broth.

Meanwhile reheat the tomato sauce with the fresh herbs. Set aside. It should be thick and glossy so that you can layer it with the lasagna.

Heat up some olive oil in a pan and fry the zucchini. Do it in batches until they are limp and have given up most of their moisture. This is important. If you do not do this, you will have a very soggy lasagna. You can bake it but it's simply not the same. Set aside.

Make the béchamel sauce. Pre-heat the milk in a pan. A microwave works great here. Heat up some butter in a pot. When bubbling, add the flour and let it fry at a medium heat until it is golden in color but not dark brown. Add the anchovies and let it fry a little. Add the hot milk and stir. When the milk is fully denatured, add the fish broth from the cod above and let it reduce to a thick sauce. (If you add it earlier, the milk will curdle.)

Assemble the lasagna. Grease the dish. Add the sheets to the bottom. Layer it with the zucchini, the flaked cod, topped with the béchamel; then more sheets; then with the tomato sauce; then more sheets. Keep repeating the layers until you use up everything. Top with some tomato sauce and the cheese.

Bake covered in a 400°F for 20-25 minutes and then uncover. Bake for an additional 10 minutes till the top is browned.

Classic Fish Pie

Amazing British Food? Surely that's an oxymoron.

Not so fast, my fine friends.

In the 18th century, there was very little difference between English, French and Italian food. If you look at the recipes, and they are almost all from the upper-crust of society who could afford to have servants and cooks and people who actually wrote the recipes down (as opposed to just make them), you will notice a strikingly similar set of palates and techniques. All the variation is just in what modern-day parlance is referred to as "locally-sourced ingredients" — what other choice was there back then?

It's the rise of nationalism in the 19th century and the extreme productivity of the early industrial society that led to a sharp distinction in cuisines. For lack of a better phrase, it was a form of "nationalistic branding". Even then, assuredly British cuisine could hold its own against the rest. After all, this was the richest society on earth. Surely nobody rational can believe that they ate badly, right?

It is also important to note that Britain's primary source of wealth was its Empire. A young stalwart called America was muscling onto its economic terrain using the power of technology — in this case agricultural and transportation technology. Midwestern grain could reach Europe cheaper than anything they could produce there. It was just economies of scale.There was a long slow decline in Britain's fortunes that has been documented extensively.

What laid utter waste to British Food was the Great War — World War I.

It destroyed the aristocracy. It destroyed the wealth, the food sourcing, the elaborate techniques, and the accumulated knowledge. You have to remember that a British aristocrat using the power of the nascent telephone (and canning technology!) back then could source food ingredients from all over the world. It was the proto-typical Internet.

It was all completely annihilated.

After that, between the loss of reserve currency status, loss of Empire and World War II, the culture turned into an economic wasteland with predictable effects on its food.

It took another 60 years to recover.

So the CC is going to argue quite forcefully that people who deride British food are looking at it through myopic eyes. Was it awful for about a century? Emphatically yes, but that's for non-reproducible reasons in what is but a twinkling of an eye in world history which happens to be the same as food history.

So you are going to have to dial back the clock and not just look at a modern-day recipe but what exactly were its antecedents. Once you do, you see the same "fresh herbs" and "fresh ingredients" and "attention to detail" that you see in other places.

What would classical English spicing be? Any herbs that grow in a colder climate. Just remember than the British Isles are nowhere near as cold as Scandinavia because of the warm North Atlantic Drift.

English thyme, parsley, bay leaves, rosemary, rue and mint (which is basically a weed and will grow anywhere). The entire cornucopia of spices imported from India since Roman times (pepper, cinnamon, cloves, etc.) and also from the West Indies (nutmeg, etc.)

The sauces are a little complex and heavy for modern palates but then the same goes for Classical French Cuisine which has fallen out of favor as well. All that can be easily addressed. You can lighten the sauce to make it more amenable to a contemporary audience. It's not even hard.

What's presented below is a classic fish pie.

Note the extensive use of fresh herbs. Note the careful three-part technique upfront before the final baking where each step neatly turns into the next one so that not even the slightest iota of flavor or ingredients are wasted.

How does it work?

In the old days, you would have sourced whole fish, whole prawns, etc. Our modern fillets and cleaned fish waste most of the parts that are used to extract even more flavor into the whole. This is our loss both economic and culinary.

First you use all the "remnants" of the fish (heads, shells, etc.) to make a fish broth (step 1). Then the fillets and the shellfish are poached with milk and fresh herbs (step 2). The fish is separated and the milk is strained and reserved and made into a classic béchamel (step 3) with vegetables and the fish broth and more fresh herbs are added into which the flaked fish will be folded in. Optionally, cheese might be added. (If it is, it's with a light hand. It would be a traditional cheddar which has nothing like the aggressive flavor of a modern-day cheddar. It's very mellow and has insane umami particularly when combined with the fish broth.)

The vegetables would've been "seasonal". People back then were just as bored eating the same-ol'-same-ol' as they might be today. Leeks, carrots, cauliflower, peas, asparagus, spinach, sorrel.

Separately, you make mashed potatoes. The dish is layered with the fish below the potatoes and baked till you get a British gratin. The killer step which so few people bother to do these days is that the mashed potatoes on top must be carefully raked like a Japanese Zen-Garden with the tines of a fork so that when they bake, you get not only a gorgeous presentation but crispy-brown bits thanks to the Maillard Reaction.

In the old days, the béchamel and the mashed potatoes would have had cream in them. It would also have have been presented in a pastry crust for formal presentations. All of this can be "lightened up".

This is technique at the highest level!


Ingredients

1 large piece of cod
12 clams
6 whole prawns (reserve the shells)

1 cup water
1 cup milk

2 large leeks
butter
8 tbsp. flour
1/2 cup cheddar (grated)

1 small carrot (diced)
1/2 cup peas

1 bay leaf
12-20 black peppercorns
parsley

nutmeg
parsley

3 large potatoes
milk
chives

sea salt

Recipe

First make the fish broth. Heat up some water with some prawn shells and let it simmer for about 10 minutes. (If not using prawns, use dried fish or dried shrimp to make a broth. Yes, this is important.)

Filter and retain the broth.

Take the clams and add the above broth to it. Steam them in an open pot until they open. Fish them out. Filter the clam broth through a cheesecloth and reserve. Chop the clams and reserve.

Heat the milk, the bay leaf, some parsley and the peppercorns. Bring to a boil. Put in the cod and let it poach for about three minutes. Fish it out. Put it in a bowl and flake it discarding the skin and bones.

Filter the milk combination discarding the bay leaf, parsley and peppercorns and reserve.

Now make a classic béchamel. Heat up some butter and when it is bubbling, add the leeks and let them cook for a bit. Add the flour and let it cook until light golden. Add the milk combination from above and let it reduce till it is thick. When the milk is denatured, add the broth. Be careful not to add the broth until the milk has denatured otherwise it will curdle. Add the grated cheddar, the remaining chopped parsley, black pepper, grated nutmeg and fold in the flaked cod, prawns, and chopped clams.

Separately, cook the potato in salted water till it is tender. In a bowl, mash it with some milk. Add the chives to this mix. The mixture should be on the thicker side not like traditional mashed potatoes which have more liquid.

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

In an oven-proof dish, layer the seafood in the béchamel sauce at the bottom. Top with the mashed potatoes. With the tines of a fork, rake the surface of the mashed potatoes with deep ridges in an attractive pattern.

Let it bake for 30 minutes till the top of the potatoes are lightly crispy.

Serve with a salad.

Cod in Pistachio & Za'atar Crumbs

Cod is one of the most versatile fish out there. It's light and neutral so it takes on the flavor of whatever it is that you serve it with.

Sadly, for decades it's been overfished so it's gone from being one of the cheapest fish of all times to relatively expensive. Do try and get line-fished cod instead of the generic overfished crap. It really matter. Its flavor is so delicate and mellow that it will quite literally melt in your mouth.


Ingredients

2 fillets of cod

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1 egg, beaten

1/4 cup ground pistachio nuts
4 tbsp. fresh bread crumbs
1 tbsp. za'atar
1 tsp. nigella seeds
salt

1/4 cup olive oil

Recipe

You will need three shallow plates — one with the flour; one with the beaten egg, and one with the mixture of the ground pistachios, bread crumbs, za'atar, nigella seeds and salt combined.

Heat the oil in a large nonstick skillet.

Dredge the cod in the flour, followed by the egg mixture and finally roll in the bread+spice mixture.

Cook for about 2 minutes on each side until golden brown. This depends on the thickness of the fillet. The CC likes it barely cooked so that the interior is still moist.

Drain on paper towels and serve at once with a tart green salad.

Miso-Glazed Cod

This is one of the simplest recipes that the CC has ever provided. It's basically a "shake-n-bake" with fancier ingredients, and definitely what you want in summer time when it's too hot to cook.

The only caveat is that you must prep it a day before.

Prepare a small side-salad (also cold) and you have a simple summer meal.

Ingredients

2 cod fillets

1/3 cup sake
1/3 cup mirin
4 tbsp miso paste
2 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp soy sauce

Recipe

Mix the ingredients together to a paste, and let the cod fillets marinate in it overnight in the refrigerator. (The CC just puts them all in a plastic bag.)

Turn the broiler on. Broil the fillets for 4 minutes.

(If you like you can reduce the marinade in a skillet over high heat and pour over the broiled fillets. This "pan sauce" is amazing!)

Cod with Stir-Fried Pea Shoots, Beluga Lentils & Carrots

Chickpeas & Cod & Clams - Oh My!

Baked Cod with Golden Roasted Potatoes & Thyme

The pairing of fish and thyme is a classic combination all over the Mediterranean. Paired with golden roasted potatoes and a salad, it's a simple superb dish.

If you're wondering if this is not just a variation of this, you'd be right. You can't invent new tricks all the time. This is nothing more than the combinatorial approach to cooking which is the proverbial housewife's savior everywhere from Japan to India to the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

The CC will have a lot more to say about this subject but that's for a later post.


Ingredients (serves 2)

1 large cod fillet.

6-8 small roasting potatoes
4-6 sprigs thyme

olive oil
sea salt
black pepper

Recipe

Preheat an oven to 375°F.

Toss the potatoes with olive oil, sea salt and black pepper. Roast them for 15 minutes. Pull them out and toss again carefully to make sure they don't stick to the bottom. Toss springs of thyme all over them. Roast for another 20 minutes.

Meanwhile season the cod fillet by rubbing it with olive oil. Season with sea salt, black pepper and thyme.

Pull the pan out of the oven. Push the potatatoes aside to one side of the pan. Place the cod fillet gently on the other side and roast for 10 more minutes. Don't overcook it.

A quick salad with a nice lemony-vinaigrette pairs really well with this dish. (The salad above has thinly cut radishes added to give it some crunch and textural complexity.)

Hazelnut Crusted Cod with Roasted New Potatoes

One of the tricks that professional chefs have is to give thematic unity to a seemingly disparate ensemble.

The dish below is an example of that.

The cod has been crusted with a mixture of hazelnuts, breadcrumbs, thyme and lemon zest.

The potatoes have been roasted with harissa, olive oil and thyme.

The vinaigrette for the salad in the background is made with lemon juice, thyme and hazelnut oil.

As you can see there's a clear thematic element of lemon, hazelnuts and thyme running through the ensemble.

There is also a clear visual and methodic disparateness. Textures, colors, cooking methods all separate to provide interest but tied into an integrated whole at an underlying level.

Tapas en España : Part 4

This is squid stuffed with a mixture of cooked cod eggs, onions, and peppers served cold.

This is bacalão (rehydrated dried cod) poached, and served with squid ink, and a hot sauce with peppers.

Pan-Seared Cod with Quinoa, Roasted Vegetables, and Wild Arugula