The Sealing of the Pot

The CC received a clay pot as a gift recently.

It was a classic meen chatti (मीन चट्टी - literally: fish clay pot). The first word is from Sanskrit (= fish) and the second most likely from the local vernacular.

Instructions were provided to "season it" but the CC needs to understand what that means so he proceeded down the rabbit hole (as he is wont to do) about what that really entails.

Clay is quite porous as a material. However, it can be fired at high temperatures after which it becomes hard. That's how bricks are made which has been known since at least Sumerian times.

Clay is also an extraordinarily poor conductor of heat.

These combined facts act as an advantage in fish cookery.

The critical point about a clay pot is that no matter how hard you try to heat it in a reasonable time (= less than five hours, for example), it's very difficult to raise the temperature of the interior of the pot to above 70°C^† — which is the outer limit of the temperature that fish proteins denature.

Of course, if you fired the crap out of the pot, eventually it would rise to the temperature of the flame but we're talking cooking here not cremation!

The other critical point is that if you don't raise the temperature beyond the denaturation point of fish proteins, they will stay soft independent of the cooking time. If you held the temperature precisely at a certain point, your fish would stay perfectly tender whether you cooked it for ten minutes or ten hours!

This is how airlines control food, for the record. The temperature is never allowed to get above the denaturation point of the proteins in question — chicken, beef, fish, vegetables, whatever!

The principle of clay-pot cooking is the same as that of sous-vide cooking except that it is being done in an intuitive way rather than formally. It also has a massive advantage over sous-vide in that you can fry or sear the fish and have it cook in the complex juices generated by it. You don't need to worry about the problem of precise timing either which was a useful fact in the frenetic frazzled world of yore unlike modern day times.

There's a price to be paid for this freedom. Nothing comes for free.

The pot is a complex apparatus. If you drop one of your metal pots, it'll get dented. If you drop a clay pot, it shatters and you get to start all over again. (Luckily, they are cheap but that's not the point.)

Poor conduction also goes both ways. It's really hard to raise the temperature and it's equally hard to lower the temperature. A certain boring-ness is required in the usage of a clay pot. You can't just dial the temperature up and down like a metal pot.

Much more importantly, you can't add hot water to a cold pot, or cold water to a hot pot. It will crack. The poor conduction means you cannot have the interior and the exterior at significantly different temperatures.

The seasoning of the pot is really quite simple once you grasp the concepts. You alternate boiling cold water in the pot and toss it out followed by coating it with cooking oil overnight. The water percolates through the pot and mends micro-holes in the clay and the oil conducted via the water generates enough carbon residues to plug the holes. It also generates a non-stick surface at the bottom of the pot over time (exactly like a great cast-iron frying pan.)

There are two fallacies about clay pots and since chez CC, we tend to be the analytic sort, we're going to dismiss them.

The first is that the seasoned clay pot is not porous — it absolutely is! The water inside the seasoned pot has to be going somewhere. It's not evaporating significantly at 70°C^‡ so it must be disappearing somehow. It's evaporating through the porosity of the pot. It's being wicked^§ away.

This porosity created a bit of a problem for the CC in the second round of water seasoning when the pot had been coated with oil overnight. Enough oil/water was being wicked away through the porous clay that the CC's gas flame went a little crazy. It's basically a baby version of a grease fire. It was such a minuscule amount of oil that it posed no risk whatsoever but it was quite unnerving until the principles had been grasped.

The second which is really the flip of the first is the myth that you can't cook in a dry pot without water. You absolutely can as long if you want to raise the temperature above 70°C. You could quite plausibly cook the clay pot to up to 1000° C but the CC really doubts that your puny stove generates enough BTU's for that. (Your oven only goes up to 275°C!)

Remember, if you do amp up the temperature of the pot, you will not be able to add cold water to it. You must either cool the pot down and start over or heat the water to the same temperature and add it. Most cooks do the former not the later since it's too risky.

In fact, many recipes ask you to first boil stuff till the water disappears, take the fish out, and then use the pot just like a frying pan adding the fish back at the last step. (The reverse is also true. Some recipes ask you to use it like a frying pan and then add the fish and warm water a little at a time thus lowering the temperature back down.)

Let's abstract out the principles of the perfectly seasoned clay pot.

[1] With water inside, the temperature will not go above 70°C until the water disappears.

[2] The clay pot is a very poor conductor of heat.

[3] The dry clay pot will allow you to fire it up to 1000°C.

Now that we've grasped the principles, we're ready to roll.

One of the great glories of Mughal cooking is the perfectly cooked daal. This involves the denaturing of lentil proteins and some of these lentils tend to get slimy if the skins split. The clay pot is the ideal apparatus since it preserves the skin perfectly while letting the water and spices to enrich the dish via osmosis but not allowing the lentils to burst.

The truly great dish of Gujarati cooking is undhiyu (ઊંધિયું — literally: upside-down.) The Mughals totally envied this dish! It's a classic mélange of spring vegetables, complex vegetarian meatball-esque preparations, and spices cooked in a sealed upside-down (sic) pot in the dying embers of a fire overnight at low heat. Same logic goes for long-term low-temperature cooking and the denaturing of the proteins.

If you go to North India during winter, you'll find yogurt served in clay pots. The clay pots are being used for two purposes — heat preservation and water-evaporation. Even in the cold temperatures of the North-Indian winter, the clay pots retain the heat of the warm mixture of milk and bacteria^¶ and wick away enough water to make the yogurt rich and delicious.

So this device which is at least 20,000 years old (based on Chinese excavations that date back to 18,000 BC) is truly a magic apparatus. It just requires a little understanding.

We're just the latest in a truly ancient lineage.

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† You can verify this quickly and empirically by sticking a finger for less than a second into the water that has been boiling in the clay pot for an hour. Nothing much will happen. If you stuck your finger in real boiling water for even less than a second, you would get second-degree burns!

‡ The CC will not bore you with the details but roughly speaking in an environment with no air-flow (e.g. your exhaust fan) the evaporation rate is linear in the temperature differential between water and air for temperatures around 100°C. Estimating your house to be about 25°C (80°F), you are only getting roughly 60% of the evaporation of boiling water. The rest of the water has to be going somewhere!

§ You can test this by covering a pot and heating water in it. It will never boil but soon much of the water will be gone.

¶ The clay pots have the advantage of porosity. The yogurt bacteria are sitting in there and they help develop the culture implicitly particularly if you make yogurt every day or week in the same pot. (The clay pots that they use are small. Individual use, one might say, in modern parlance.)

Israeli White Bean Soup

There's an Israeli hole-in-the-wall restaurant that the CC has patronized for more than a decade now.

The owner is a curmudgeon who knows exactly how amazing his food is.

(For US readers: think Soup Nazi from Seinfeld and yes! the CC is perfectly aware of the idiocy and offensiveness of using the term "Israeli Nazi" but that is the only characterization that fits.)

Only two things soften him up — an appreciation for his cooking, and cute chicks, and the latter sometimes doesn't cut any mustard. He once tossed out out two clueless cute giggling girls. Then he turned to the CC and said, "They don't know anything about food."

The CC has always been on the good side but it took time and patience to become an insider. One fine day, the maestro said in a mocking and ironic way, "So you like my soup, eh?"

And that was that. The gates of paradise had been thrown open.

A decade later (yes! it's a slow burn), the CC asked him why his soup was so good and the answer was as blunt as the man, "Everyone knows the recipe. It takes time, and people don't want to spend the time."

The ingredients are humble, the technique is straightforward and there's nothing difficult about it.

People just don't want to take the time.

Ingredients

1 cup white beans

1 large red onion (diced fine)
4 cloves garlic (diced fine)

4 tbsp tomato paste
8 tomatoes (passed through a food mill)

4 tbsp olive oil

salt
pepper (lots!)

Recipe

Note 1: You can't hurry this recipe up. Don't even try. In fact, this is ideal for a slow cooker kind of situation except that since it involves two steps, it doesn't fit the mold of the slow cooker recipes.

Note 2: For most of the recipe, you are doing nothing. It's eminently week-day friendly. Set the timer and forget about it.

Note 3: It is very important to use fresh tomatoes. If you don't have any double down on the tomato paste. Do not use canned tomatoes. The final color of the soup should be a pale orange not a deep red characteristic of tomatoes. The beans are the star not the tomatoes.

Note 4: You may be tempted to add herbs — the dish is very Mediterranean and Israel is part of that Mediterranean culture but be judicious. Less is more here.

Heat up the olive oil in a pot. When it shimmers, add the onions and garlic. Let them cook at a medium heat until they are translucent. Do not let them caramelize. You want the color to be this sublimely clear white.

Add the beans and stir them around. Add 3 cups of water, salt and black pepper. Turn the heat down to the lowest possible setting. Let them cook for an hour. Sample to see if the beans are barely done.

When they still not cooked, add the tomato paste and the tomatoes. Cook for another 20 minutes. The acid in the tomatoes will slow down the cooking of the beans.

Check again that the beans are done. More salt and pepper if necessary. Add more water if necessary. It's a soup after all.

Serve with some pita.

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.

Clam, White Bean & Saffron Soup with Parmesan Toasts

This is a very simple recipe. The CC has seen it made with mussels as well.

The parmesan toasts are simply superb. They would work with most soups.

The advantage of making them is you do get a subtle umami flavoring from the parmesan as you dunk them in clam soup but at no point does it overwhelm the purity of the clam flavor which would be the case if you just added parmesan directly to the soup.

Parmesan Toasts

(yields 8 triangles)

Ingredients

1 1/2 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano
4 slices bread

Recipe

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

On a tray lay out the slices of bread and evenly divide the parmesan onto each.

Bake for about 10 minutes. Be careful that they do not burn. Cut into triangles and set aside.

Clam, White Bean & Saffron Soup

(serves 2)

Ingredients

2 dozen clams

1 small onion (sliced into thin half-rounds)

1/4 cup white beans

olive oil

large pinch of saffron

black pepper

Recipe

First make the beans. Cook them in very lightly salted water till done. Roughly 20 minutes. Reserve the broth. (Do not oversalt the water because the clams are briny and the soup will become overly salty)

Cook the clams with some water. When they open fish them out. Pass the clam broth through a cheesecloth to eliminate the sand. Reserve the clams and broth separately.

In a pot, heat up some olive oil. Add the onions and cook till they are limp but not colored. Fry the cooked beans for a bit. Add the two broths and black pepper. Bring to a boil and let it cook for about 8-10 minutes. Add the saffron at the last minute. Turn off the heat.

Divide the clams into two bowls. Top with the soup. Serve with the parmesan toasts.

Saffron v/s Turmeric

The CC comes across endless references in medieval cookbooks for turmeric as a "substitute" for saffron.

They are nothing alike.

Saffron depends fundamentally on smell. You add it as the last or semi-last step to a recipe with the volatile liquids suspended in warm water or warm milk as it were.

Turmeric has a strongly metallic taste that is sui generis. You wouldn't mistake one for the other in a million years blindfolded in your sleep. It would be like conflating cats and cheese.

It's obvious why one would be substituted for the other. Turmeric is dirt-cheap. Saffron costs more than gold. Even today the CC sees these two being "substituted" and he scoffs.

For the record, saffron is the only spice even today that you need to get from a really reputable source. What you get in the routine markets is garbage. They are hustling you silly.

Saffron is so valuable that there are specialized merchants in Spain, Switzerland, and India — the three prime producers — whose only job is to supply unadulterated saffron. They are banners of quality and you can bet your goddamn economic ass that they charge a premium to do so.

Which is still superior to getting ripped off.

The CC has met plenty of people who think that saffron is not "worth all that" and it's "over-hyped". To which the CC can only respond, you've been ripped off all your life. How would you even know? It's absolutely worth all that from pasta to pastries.

Sad, isn't it?

Even in the age of the internet where everything is everywhere, you need reputation to get the good stuff.

Where is the arbitrage, O Nobel-Prize Winnin' Efficient Markets' Theorists of Univ. of Chicago?

Octopus Salad with Arugula and Cranberry Beans

The CC came across the most excellent octopus in the Korean markets in Queens this week so he had to buy some. There were also excellent fresh cranberry beans to be had so naturally he had to buy that too.

The combination of octopus and beans is a classic all across the Mediterranean everywhere from Spain, the French Rivera, Italy, Greece and further.

The recipe is simplicity itself. Braise the octopus until tender. Use the braised liquid to cook the beans in. Make a fine vinaigrette and toss it all together. The CC served it with some fine focaccia on the side.

Ingredients

8 baby octopuses
1 carrot
1 red onion
12 black peppercorns

1/2 cup fresh cranberry beans
1 cup arugula

1 shallot (finely chopped)
6 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
2 tbsp sherry vinegar
salt
black pepper

Recipe

Octopuses come pre-cleaned these days. All you need to do is cut off the head from the tentacles which are joined by the eye. Each octopus will yield two parts.

Cut the carrots and onions coarsely. Add the octopus, carrots, onions and peppercorns with about a cup of water and bring to a boil. Turn the heat to very low, and let simmer for about 30 minutes till the octopuses are tender.

Pull the octopuses out with tongs and let cool down. Strain the liquid above and reserve.

Add the fresh cranberry beans to the above liquid and bring to a boil. Simmer at low heat until done. Roughly 15 minutes.

Strain and reserve the liquid. (This makes an amazing broth for future use.)

Make a vinaigrette with shallots, olive oil, sherry vinegar, salt and pepper. Toss everything together and serve.

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.)

Noo Yawk, Noo Yawk

Every time you get fed up of this city, it reminds you why you are here one more time.


The CC has just spent the evening with a friend at an absurdly brilliant Mediterranean restaurant.

Right when he was leaving, he chatted with the owner (Bulgarian, if you're curious) who was so happy to talk about food that he not only plied the CC with enough alcohol to set him alight but sent him home staggering loaded with delicacies, and shook his drunken hand at the end of the night.

New York, New York, what else is there?

Ful Medames

Breakfast of peasants. And of champions.

Ingredients

1 cup dried fava beans (soaked overnight)
1 onion (diced into semi-rounds)
2 cloves garlic (smashed)
1 green bell pepper (slivered)
3 tomatoes (diced)

1 tbsp powdered cumin
1 lemon
1/2 cup diced parsley
salt and pepper

Recipe

The notes to this recipe are much more valuable than the recipe (which is "obvious.")

Firstly, you need the small fava beans not the bigger ones.

The soaking of the fava beans also matters. The CC is guessing it has something to do with the age of the dried fava beans.

The CC has made this before, and the recipe was always good. Then, accidentally, the CC was forced to delay making the thing so he rinsed the beans after 24 hours, and resoaked them for another 24, and the recipe totally blew his mind.

Here we go:

First cook the beans in water, and while they cook keep skimming the scum that rises to the top. There will be plenty of "nasty stuff". Depending on the soaking, takes between 40 mins to an hour till they are adequately soft.

The skin of the fava beans will never soften. It's an "added feature" or an "acquired taste" of this particular recipe. Deal.

After that's done, in a separate vessel, fry the onions and the garlic at medium low heat. Then fry the bell peppers. Then add the cumin, salt, pepper and tomatoes. Finally the fava beans lightly crushed. Heat for about 10 mins or so.

Right before serving, mix in the lemon juice and the parsley.

Another trick is to split the bell peppers into two piles, and add some at the end thus getting two textures from the same ingredient.

(And just for the record, the pita below was home-made.)

Ful medames

Pita Problems

Well, the CC decided to make fresh pita and ful medames (pictures and recipes later) for breakfast.

The first pita was an unmitigated disaster. Not even a mother could love this one.

What to do, what to do?

Dough on the counter. Continue or abandon, and go buy commercial ones?

Bravely, the CC forged ahead.

The rest of the dough made picture-perfect pitas. Go figure!

The CC wonders if there's a moral but he can't think of any.

Sumac

Sumac is a Mediterranean spice with a sharp tart flavor. Do not confuse it with "poison sumac" (commonly found in the US.)

The berries are like tiny "flying saucers", and are best ground fresh. Sprinkled over raw onions, or hummus, or even baked on fresh bread, it is delicious. (Use it where you would add fresh lemons.)

On Bouillabaisse

Right after she gives the recipe, the lovable Paula Wolfert had something to say in her book "Mediterranean Cooking" on why one could never make a true bouillabaisse in America.

1. For a true bouillabaisse, people will tell you that it must be made in sight of the Mediterranean and, at the very least, cooked within 100 kilometres of Marseilles. There are even purists who proclaim that the water in the soup must be taken from the fishing grounds off Cacalaire. The fact that this air and these waters are now polluted is, to the fanatic gastronome, utterly beside the point.
   
   
2. For a true bouillabaisse, as I noted above, you need rascasse. A scorpion fish is hideous and you should touch it unless its poisonous fins have been removed. A variant, Heliconlenus dactylopterus, is found in North American waters but fishermen ususally toss it back.
   
   
3. For a true bouillabaisse you need a base broth made from at least a hundred tiny Mediterranean rockfish and clam juice simply won’t do.
   
   
4. Finally, no matter what you do there will be some silly snob who will say “This is a rather nice fish soup, my dear — but, of course, NOT a true bouilabaisse.”

Langoustines

Also known as the Norway Lobster. A denizen of colder waters which you may have encountered under the Italian name of scampi.

It's quite delicious grilled, and in the spirit of Halloween, be sure to eat the salty succulent meat near the head and the eyes.

Don't be un Americain, as they say in France.