Fruit Salad

The CC just adores the name mostly because it totally lies about the underlying subject — well, maybe not about the "fruit" part — but this ain't no bloody salad!

This Indian dish has so much amazing science and trickery inside of it that it's worthy of the slipperiest of slippery gods. (Oh, Agni! Oh, Loki!)

What is it?

Fruits in a milk reduction with complex spicing.

When stated like that, it sounds so boring which it totally is not. It's a masterpiece of complex chemistry with that assured magician's sleight of hand which veers it towards genius.

One day the CC returned to his apartment where his roommate greeted him sheepishly, "I'm sorry. I ate it all. I couldn't resist."

The CC knew even back then the kinda effect this dessert has on people so he just said, "Why don't you go shopping? We'll make it again, and we'll make a party of it on Friday?"

And we partied.

He grilled the steaks, his girlfriend (now wife) cooked the rest of the meal, and the CC had already spent his time earlier reducing milk for dessert. We were poor graduate students but we had a blast.

How does it work?

You reduce whole un-homogenized milk until it resembles a thick soup. You add cardamom, saffron, and slivered almonds. Then you cool it down till it's really ice-cold. You add fruits in a bowl, pour the soup all over it and eat it.

When the CC added the citrus fruits to the bowl, the roommate yelled, "It's gonna curdle." Logical thinking but dead wrong! That's the magic trick.

When the proteins are denatured and the final product ice-cold, the citrus doesn't have enough time to make the milk curdle. Eat it right away or GTFO, as the kids might say these days.

The more variety of fruits you add the better. The CC prefers apples, oranges, pomegranates. You may prefer something else. Go nuts!

(The citrus fruits must be peeled. The tannins in the skin have a higher probability of making it curdle.)

What's the problem?

It's hard work. It's an insane amount of work specifically since the kinda burners that we have in apartments are rather puny.

All you're doing in the most important step is "reducing" milk i.e. you're removing the water from the milk and simultaneously denaturing the proteins.

This is one of the truly rare cases where the CC is going to talk about specific equipment. You are best off with a enamel-coated cast-iron pot — something like a Le Creuset.

There's a reason for this. The CC grew up with this dish. It took hours and hours and hours and hours of stirring. It always does. Back in the day, the CC thought that having a book would be an antidote which was logical until he dropped the book into the flames and the house almost caught on fire. Not so great after all.

What's so great about the enamel-coated iron pot is that it heats the milk uniformly.  From the sides as well as the bottom. The milk bubbles away at a uniform rate. You stir occasionally and try not to worry too much.

You'll worry anyway.

You want the milk to reduce by half. It'll change color because the water goes away and the bright white milk turns cream-colored.

The CC wants to point out that most Indian desserts involve reducing milk into various levels of submission. When looked at in that light, this is the easy end of the spectrum!

Ingredients

(serves 6)

2 gallons whole milk
sugar

6 cardamom pods
saffron
1/4 cup slivered almonds

1 orange - segmented, skin peeled
1 apple - cut into cubes
1 pomegranate - seeds separated

Note 1: The product itself is not amenable to storage but the milk mixture absolutely is. You can make more and just pour it over the fruits right before serving.

Note 2: When you serve it, it's great if you can chill the bowls ahead of time. It's not strictly necessary but it's nice.

Recipe

Heat up the milk in a pot. When it comes to a boil, reduce the heat and start stirring. Keep stirring. This is gonna take the better part of two hours or so.

Add the sugar to taste. The CC prefers less but your tastes may vary.

Keep stirring.

Seed the cardamom pods and crush them to a powder in a mortar and pestle.

The milk should reduce by half and the color changed from bright white to almost cream-colored.

You didn't miss the memo about keeping on stirring, right?

When reduced by half, add the cardamom powder, the saffron, and the almonds and take off the heat. When it has cooled down, stick it in the refrigerator till it is ice cold.

Put the fruits in a bowl. Pour the milk mixture all over it. Serve at once.

The Fickleness of Chili Peppers

Ever wonder why you have trouble reproducing that amazing dish featuring chili peppers that you had elsewhere? Ever wonder why there is such a proliferation of different kinds of peppers both spicy and sweet and everything in between?

The answer is actually quite complex.

Peppers which definitely came from South America are rather complex objects. They are incredibly sensitive to what the French might call terroir.

The soil matters; the amount of sunlight matters; the temperature of the warm day versus the cool night matters a lot. In short, they are rather fickle little things.

Take the same strain and plant it in two different places — warm Louisana as opposed to cooler Oregon, just to take two places at random and you will get diametrically opposing results from the same plant. Even the same strain in the same location will differ from year to year because the weather is variable.

That's just one of the problems.

They've also had a solid five centuries to spread all over the world. The different sub-species were pushed not only by natural selection but also cultural selection into the hundreds of varieties all over the globe. (Contrast with oranges which are completely ancient but there aren't that many sub-species of oranges out there even with all the human-controlled cross-pollination.)

This is the reason that some of the magnificent dishes of Sri Lanka really cannot be reproduced elsewhere. Even if you got the seeds, you don't have the weather.

It's the same reason that Hungary keeps a really tight lid on one of its products — Hungarian paprika. You will get arrested if you try to steal the seeds and smuggle them out. They did smuggle them successfully and tried to reproduce them in Oregon. All the efforts failed. The climates might be "similar" but they are not similar enough. The soil certainly isn't.

The same goes for the different varieties of Spanish paprika.

The story of Tabasco which is a product of Louisiana follows the same pattern. They've had a limited amount of success reproducing it in Mexico but it wasn't easy. (The story of Tabasco is rather fascinating since it has all the elements of a financial thriller — competitors, corruption, patent laws, politicians, bankruptcy, questionable tactics, possible illegality, etc.)

All to protect a brand that, truth be said, the CC is kinda fond of.

It's actually rather hard to get the truly great peppers of Peru. Even in New York. Only the dozen or two of so most-commonly used peppers actually proliferate. The most common ones are probably more "robust" than the other strains.

What it does mean though that if you want to eat truly great peppers, you'll just have to go to the source.

It's good to reminded from time to time that travel matters and  that "variety truly is the spice of life."

Radicchio Salad

Simplicity itself, and the perfect way to brighten up a winter's day.


Ingredients

1 head radicchio
1 orange (split into two)
1/2 cup walnuts
1 Meyer lemon
3 tbsp walnut oil
3 sprigs mint
gorgonzola (diced)

sea salt
pepper

Recipe

Wash the radicchio, and slice into thin slices.

Roast the walnuts at 350°F for about 10 minutes. Cool.

Split half the orange into slices. Slice each into half.

Juice the lemon, the other half of the orange, and make a vinaigrette with the walnut oil, sea salt and pepper. Mince the mint, and mix with the vinaigrette.

Toss all the ingredients together.

Wild Rice with Cranberries, Pomegranate with Orange-Walnut Vinaigrette

India : Day 5 : Post 3

Glorious golden oranges!

Lemons, Limes, Oranges

Why is this picture here?

Because it's cool, and because we all need a touch of surrealism in our life!

Will you be my ... Clementine?

A cross between the sweet orange and the Mandarin, they are easy to peel and generally seedless. They appear in the markets around the New Year and into February-ish.

Dee-lish-ishly dee-lish but they perish quickly.