So the CC posted on his Instagram a suitably random post about how even vegetable-hating kids love the CC's mac-n-cheese. Lo, to his surprise, there was an inundation of requests for the recipe.
The recipe will be provided but since chez CC we tend to be of analytic bent, let's back up a little and ask ourselves a few questions.
Why is what the CC doing working for kids?
Why exactly?
Here are the claims:
[1] Kids are irrational.
[2] Kids won't eat anything green.
[3] Kids hate vegetables.
These are empirical observations that can be backed up in spades. The CC is not going to contest these observations and concerns. They seem to be real.
They are also demonstrably false as the CC's recipe would contest. After all, the CC is working empirically in the real world against a real set of kids and it's working great!
So let's back up one more time and ask why is this even happening?
Why?
There are two plausible answers - one evolutionary and one cultural.
Evolutionarily, all bitter flavors are banned. There's a very good reason for this. Bitter flavors generally speaking correspond to alkaloid poisons. It takes a very sophisticated palate to start appreciating bitter flavors in vegetables — okra, eggplants, broccoli, kale, spinach, brussels sprouts — even beer and wine!
Culturally, basically kids will eat whatever you shove in their face. Shove enough spicy food slowly amped up and they will learn an appreciation for spicy flavors. Shove bland food in their face and they'll only eat chicken nuggets.
So now we're ready to proceed — kids will eat complex flavors as long as you keep the vegetables on the "sweeter" side and the flavors "familiar".
Both of these words are basically garbage - "sweeter" is all relative - if you roast brussels sprouts properly, they'll turn "sweet" and of course, and as the Greeks might've told you in 3rd century BCE, all of "familiarity" is in the eye of the beholder.
So now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's proceed.
What we're gonna do is pick vegetables that kids perceive (falsely) as sweet and we're gonna cut them into small enough pieces so that they don't stand out (very chef-like) and we're gonna go back to the two classical evolutionary devices — carbohydates and fats.
We're also going to the use full panoply of French and Italian classical cooking devices to make a superior meal — yes, that means understanding bechamél and sauce Mornay. Escoffier to the rescue!
Hey, think of the kids!!!
You wouldn't expect otherwise with the CC and yet, not so hard. Also, it's eminently available for assembly ahead of time. Just pop it in the oven later.
Ingredients
(serves 6)
2 cups macaroni
2 tbsp butter (no substitutions!)
4 cups whole milk (no substitutions!)
4 tbsp flour
2 cups gruyère
2 cups parmigiano-reggiano
1 large zucchini (diced)
1 large carrot (diced)
1 cup french beans (diced)
1 cup broad beans (slivered)
1 cup fava beans
1 cup peas
1 cup cauliflower florets (cut as small as realistic)
1 cup celery (skin shaved and then diced - skin shaving is not optional!)
fresh rosemary/sage (slivered finely - optional)
salt
pepper
panko (Japanese-style bread crumbs)
Recipe
Cook the macaroni in heavily salted water until done. Depends on your brand. Roughly 12 minutes.
Make the bechamél. Heat the butter in a pan. Add the flour and let it "cook" until it is golden. Immediately add the milk. Let it cook completely till it thickens.
(What is really happening is that the milk proteins are denaturing.)
Add the salt and pepper. Add the rosemary/sage (optional.) Taste and adjust. Don't forget the cheese will add extra salt.
Toss in the vegetables one at a time in the order of "hardness" - first the carrots, then the french beans and broad beans, then the fava beans, then the cauliflower and zucchini and celery - finally the peas.
Add the cheese to turn the bechamél into what is technically called sauce Mornay — you can do it at the same time as adding the macaroni. Toss it all together.
Layer in a baking dish. sprinkle heavily with the panko breadcrumbs all over.
The next step depends on your baking dish.
If you have a shallow baking dish, preheat your oven to 350° F. If it's deep (like the CC's), preheat to 400° F.
Cook the dish covered for 25 minutes. Cook uncovered so that the surface crisps for about 10-15 minutes. Check towards the end because there's a tendency of burning.
Serve with a crisp salad (for the adults).
Showing posts with label technique. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technique. Show all posts
Sunday, September 9, 2018
Saturday, August 4, 2018
Shave the Celery!
Celery is a completely misunderstood vegetable mostly because people get the technical details wrong.
To fully appreciate it, you must shave it. Take the skin off. No different than a carrot (and not particularly hard either.)
After that, you get a very different vegetable. Very aromatic, even elegant, one that is completely worthy of a first course in a fine French meal.
Ingredients
(serves 4)
8 celery stalks (the best you can find - preferably celery hearts)
1 cup chicken stock (substitute by vegetarian dashi)
salt
pepper
cream
vinegar
mustard
Recipe
Skin each celery stalk using a potato peeler. Be careful because the tops are likely to break when you do that.
Cut each stalk into halves.
Poach the stock in the broth with the salt and pepper for about 8 minutes until the stalks are tender. Pull them out.
Mix the cream, vinegar, mustard with extra salt and pepper like a vinaigrette. Add water. It should be reasonably liquid. Poach the celery stalks into that and refrigerate.
This is best made the day before.
Serve as a first course.
To fully appreciate it, you must shave it. Take the skin off. No different than a carrot (and not particularly hard either.)
After that, you get a very different vegetable. Very aromatic, even elegant, one that is completely worthy of a first course in a fine French meal.
Ingredients
(serves 4)
8 celery stalks (the best you can find - preferably celery hearts)
1 cup chicken stock (substitute by vegetarian dashi)
salt
pepper
vinegar
mustard
Recipe
Skin each celery stalk using a potato peeler. Be careful because the tops are likely to break when you do that.
Cut each stalk into halves.
Poach the stock in the broth with the salt and pepper for about 8 minutes until the stalks are tender. Pull them out.
Mix the cream, vinegar, mustard with extra salt and pepper like a vinaigrette. Add water. It should be reasonably liquid. Poach the celery stalks into that and refrigerate.
This is best made the day before.
Serve as a first course.
Thursday, October 5, 2017
Three-Culture Octopus
The CC briefly worked at a job whose main redeeming feature was the absolutely killer Korean grocery store across the street. The store was always crowded any time of the day or night with the stock continuously being refreshed since it was small in that New York-kinda way.
One of the "features" was that they almost always had baby octopus for purchase and it was extremely cheap. (It was frozen and then thawed but given the rather tough nature of octopus in general, this was a feature not a flaw.)
This recipe pulls out all the stops from three cuisines to make a completely elegant meal.
The CC generally serves it with a vegetable-heavy side dish like mixed vegetables in vinaigrette but he's also served it with a cauliflower gratin successfully. You could also make a great pasta out of it.
What are the tricks?
First make a light dashi. In this, dump carrots, onions and black peppercorns à la française and poach the baby octopus until tender.
(You can store the octopus in the fridge after this for a few days after this step. It allows you to scale. Never let it be said that CC doesn't adore convenience like the rest of the world!)
Finally, stir-fry it with anchovies and tomato paste quickly at the last minute and serve.
Why do the tricks work?
Firstly — umami.
Secondly, the poaching with carrots and onions gives it this sweetness that is not possible just otherwise. (It also allows you to scale effortlessly. As easy to cook for eight as it is for two.)
Finally, the anchovies and tomato paste add even more umami to the mix.
Ingredients
(serves 4)
16-20 baby octopus(es)†
1 small piece konbu
1 small carrot
1 small onion
1 tbsp black peppercorns
salt
1 anchovy
1 tbsp tomato paste
olive oil
Note: Frequently, the octopus is called to be poached using red wine. The tannins in the wine definitely give it a specific taste and structure and the wine-water azeotrope lowers the boiling point in the fish-cooking style. However, the CC finds the final product to be less flexible as far as adopting it to different ideas afterwards so he skips it.
Recipe
Heat up some water with the konbu. Right before it comes to boil, remove the konbu (otherwise it will turn bitter.) Add the carrots, onions, black peppercorns, and salt, and bring to a simmer.
Add the baby octopus and cook until tender. Roughly 25 minutes. The CC sometimes stops it early if he wants the octopus to have more of a bite. (This really is personal preference.)
Fish out the octopus and set aside.
(You can filter the broth and store it for later use. Discard the solids.)
Heat up some olive oil in a skillet. Add the anchovy and fry for a bit. Add the tomato paste and fry until it gives off an aroma. Add the octopus and fry for about 3-4 minutes. Serve.
† The plural of octopus is octopuses or since it's derived from the Greek — octopodi. It is not under any circumstance octopii since it's not a Latin word (like radius) but a Greek one. Thank you!
One of the "features" was that they almost always had baby octopus for purchase and it was extremely cheap. (It was frozen and then thawed but given the rather tough nature of octopus in general, this was a feature not a flaw.)
This recipe pulls out all the stops from three cuisines to make a completely elegant meal.
The CC generally serves it with a vegetable-heavy side dish like mixed vegetables in vinaigrette but he's also served it with a cauliflower gratin successfully. You could also make a great pasta out of it.
What are the tricks?
First make a light dashi. In this, dump carrots, onions and black peppercorns à la française and poach the baby octopus until tender.
(You can store the octopus in the fridge after this for a few days after this step. It allows you to scale. Never let it be said that CC doesn't adore convenience like the rest of the world!)
Finally, stir-fry it with anchovies and tomato paste quickly at the last minute and serve.
Why do the tricks work?
Firstly — umami.
Secondly, the poaching with carrots and onions gives it this sweetness that is not possible just otherwise. (It also allows you to scale effortlessly. As easy to cook for eight as it is for two.)
Finally, the anchovies and tomato paste add even more umami to the mix.
Ingredients
(serves 4)
16-20 baby octopus(es)†
1 small piece konbu
1 small carrot
1 small onion
1 tbsp black peppercorns
salt
1 anchovy
1 tbsp tomato paste
olive oil
Note: Frequently, the octopus is called to be poached using red wine. The tannins in the wine definitely give it a specific taste and structure and the wine-water azeotrope lowers the boiling point in the fish-cooking style. However, the CC finds the final product to be less flexible as far as adopting it to different ideas afterwards so he skips it.
Recipe
Heat up some water with the konbu. Right before it comes to boil, remove the konbu (otherwise it will turn bitter.) Add the carrots, onions, black peppercorns, and salt, and bring to a simmer.
Add the baby octopus and cook until tender. Roughly 25 minutes. The CC sometimes stops it early if he wants the octopus to have more of a bite. (This really is personal preference.)
Fish out the octopus and set aside.
(You can filter the broth and store it for later use. Discard the solids.)
Heat up some olive oil in a skillet. Add the anchovy and fry for a bit. Add the tomato paste and fry until it gives off an aroma. Add the octopus and fry for about 3-4 minutes. Serve.
† The plural of octopus is octopuses or since it's derived from the Greek — octopodi. It is not under any circumstance octopii since it's not a Latin word (like radius) but a Greek one. Thank you!
Tuesday, October 3, 2017
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 19, 2017
How to Make Better Parathas
The CC once bought a large number of books online through a fairly shady Delhi-based bookseller on Abebooks. He wasn't even sure that the books would arrive.
They did however.
One of these books was something called "Indian Bread Basket".
The book seemed slightly dubious even back when the CC ordered the book. It was published in 2000. However, there's no publisher by that name and there's no publisher by that address if you search online. Even the author's name seems to be fake. Seems to be ghost-written. Interestingly, the design was done by some firm which has an address and that seems to be fake as well. They even have emails which are the Indian equivalent of a shady "hotmail" address. Either fake or long since defunct.
None of this would matter but the book itself is pure gold (even Sharbati gold - to indulge in a little paratha-based humor!)
It has a few amazing tips for parathas which the CC will share. (If you don't know how to make them, the CC is not going to go there. You will have to do your homework yourself.)
[1] It is much better to use rice flour rather than wheat flour to roll out the parathas. It's lighter and doesn't stick to the dough.
How did the CC not know this? This seems to be a "standard trick". When he asked around, he got big fat DUH's all over the place.
[2] In order to make tomato juice to knead dough with, take four tomatoes, put them in a blender and strain.
This the CC can guess. It's umami except he's never seen this trick before. Kneading with tomato juice. Totally freakin' works!
[3] Flour should be kneaded at least 30 minutes in advance so that the preparations turn out softer and smoother.
This the CC knew. It's ol'-school. It's just time for the protein (gluten) to unwind when the water hits the flour.
[4] Parathas should be roasted (baked) on both sides first and only then should they be fried in ghee.
This the CC did not know but it totally makes sense. It allows for uniform cooking because they are cooked through and only afterwards are they pan-fried.
This ain't no Delhi Paranthe-wali gali style paratha's where they deep-fry them in a vat of ghee but they will definitely improve your technique!
They did however.
One of these books was something called "Indian Bread Basket".
The book seemed slightly dubious even back when the CC ordered the book. It was published in 2000. However, there's no publisher by that name and there's no publisher by that address if you search online. Even the author's name seems to be fake. Seems to be ghost-written. Interestingly, the design was done by some firm which has an address and that seems to be fake as well. They even have emails which are the Indian equivalent of a shady "hotmail" address. Either fake or long since defunct.
None of this would matter but the book itself is pure gold (even Sharbati gold - to indulge in a little paratha-based humor!)
It has a few amazing tips for parathas which the CC will share. (If you don't know how to make them, the CC is not going to go there. You will have to do your homework yourself.)
[1] It is much better to use rice flour rather than wheat flour to roll out the parathas. It's lighter and doesn't stick to the dough.
How did the CC not know this? This seems to be a "standard trick". When he asked around, he got big fat DUH's all over the place.
[2] In order to make tomato juice to knead dough with, take four tomatoes, put them in a blender and strain.
This the CC can guess. It's umami except he's never seen this trick before. Kneading with tomato juice. Totally freakin' works!
[3] Flour should be kneaded at least 30 minutes in advance so that the preparations turn out softer and smoother.
This the CC knew. It's ol'-school. It's just time for the protein (gluten) to unwind when the water hits the flour.
[4] Parathas should be roasted (baked) on both sides first and only then should they be fried in ghee.
This the CC did not know but it totally makes sense. It allows for uniform cooking because they are cooked through and only afterwards are they pan-fried.
This ain't no Delhi Paranthe-wali gali style paratha's where they deep-fry them in a vat of ghee but they will definitely improve your technique!
Saturday, February 18, 2017
Green Peppercorn Pickles
The CC is not the sentimental type and he's certainly not the rhapsodising type but if there ever were something to send him into a Proustian "madeleine" moment, it would be these pickles.
What are they?
Fresh green peppercorns that have been pickled with just salt and lime.
A good friend of the CC's used to eat them with yogurt-rice. He couldn't cook if his life depended on it (still can't!) so these were "a lifeline for kitchen failures and the lovelorn". Bit of a harsh judgment on the CC's part.
Back to the peppercorns.
Only going to work with fresh peppercorns which are hard to find. Ideally, you would use just salt but you need lime to get the pH of the liquid down to the right level. The lime does not participate in the final product as a taste since the canning process neutralizes it.
If you're going to make truly great steak au poivre or the classic Thai green fish curry with green peppercorns (พริกไทยอ่อน), these be the peppercorns that you want to use. In a wondrous world, you'd have fresh peppercorns all year around but it's not a wondrous world. We can just make it a little more wondrous with food technology.
Ingredients
(based on your canning jar size)
500 grams green peppercorns
8 tbsp sea salt
4 limes (juiced and passed through a sieve)
water
Note: Canning jars come with a sealant. The sealant is activated when inverted in boiling water.
Recipe
Wash the peppercorns really carefully. Set aside.
Bring water to a boil. Dump the bottle inside and fish it out. You are just sterilizing the bottle. In this bottle, drop the peppercorns, the salt and the lime juice. Add enough cold fresh water to top off the jar.
Add the sealing mechanism and seal carefully. Gently put the bottle upside-down in the boiling water. Bring to a boil and let it boil for about 5-6 minutes.
Fish it out and let it sit.
Takes about 2-3 weeks to pickle. Once you open the bottle, you must keep it in the fridge. Use a clean fork/spoon to fish out the pickles. Add more salt and water to cover them when you do so.
What are they?
Fresh green peppercorns that have been pickled with just salt and lime.
A good friend of the CC's used to eat them with yogurt-rice. He couldn't cook if his life depended on it (still can't!) so these were "a lifeline for kitchen failures and the lovelorn". Bit of a harsh judgment on the CC's part.
Back to the peppercorns.
Only going to work with fresh peppercorns which are hard to find. Ideally, you would use just salt but you need lime to get the pH of the liquid down to the right level. The lime does not participate in the final product as a taste since the canning process neutralizes it.
If you're going to make truly great steak au poivre or the classic Thai green fish curry with green peppercorns (พริกไทยอ่อน), these be the peppercorns that you want to use. In a wondrous world, you'd have fresh peppercorns all year around but it's not a wondrous world. We can just make it a little more wondrous with food technology.
Ingredients
(based on your canning jar size)
500 grams green peppercorns
8 tbsp sea salt
4 limes (juiced and passed through a sieve)
water
Note: Canning jars come with a sealant. The sealant is activated when inverted in boiling water.
Recipe
Wash the peppercorns really carefully. Set aside.
Bring water to a boil. Dump the bottle inside and fish it out. You are just sterilizing the bottle. In this bottle, drop the peppercorns, the salt and the lime juice. Add enough cold fresh water to top off the jar.
Add the sealing mechanism and seal carefully. Gently put the bottle upside-down in the boiling water. Bring to a boil and let it boil for about 5-6 minutes.
Fish it out and let it sit.
Takes about 2-3 weeks to pickle. Once you open the bottle, you must keep it in the fridge. Use a clean fork/spoon to fish out the pickles. Add more salt and water to cover them when you do so.
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
Sopa de Almejas (Clam Soup)
There is this wonderful Peruvian restaurant in Connecticut that the CC has been visiting for more than a decade. It makes a killer sopa de almejas.
Since the restaurant is a bit of a hike for the CC, he always ends up ordering the soup — rather than the other possibly amazing dishes — and he's never disappointed. It's served with some bread (at best, average) and some amazing homemade aji criollo.
However, it's the soup that really sings and the CC has been trying to reproduce it ever since.
At long last — it only took a decade — he's untangled the various strands and made it for himself, and it's exactly as killer.
There were several hidden problems that needed to be solved. One was that the soup came with this emulsified broth with a very deep taste. Inside it were placed four or five rather large clams. Finely chopped cilantro was sprinkled on the top. The broth had no solids but it had an intense flavor. There was a reasonable amount of oil in the broth like all restaurants. However, this turned out to be a red herring. There were more important things at play.
Some things were really obvious. There was a lot of tomato purée in the broth. There were the deep notes of black pepper. It was clear it was some kind of fish broth. It also had a very deep cilantro flavor that could not be coming from the tiny amount of stuff sprinkled on top.
The other clue was the price point on the menu. It was one of the cheapest items, and the serving was large enough for a very good lunch. Now, clams are rather cheap on the Eastern seaboard but they're not that cheap so that means the ingredients inside the broth had to be cheaper. (The CC considered the possibility that they were using commercial clam juice but the taste of the broth had a subtle fresh flavor so it didn't seem very likely.)
Other clues. The clams were served on the half-shell and were very juicy. They could not have been cooked with the broth, and they were too plump to have been sitting in there for too long.
Two other important clues.
The dish always took a little longer to serve than other dishes (when the CC went with friends) and the surprising one — the broth was served piping hot. It was served almost at boiling point (close to 90-95°C.) When the broth cooled down, the soup didn't taste as good. Clearly, the temperature mattered greatly.
Peruvian cuisine is the ultimate mashup — besides the indigenous Incan origin, it's had Spanish, Italian, Chinese, West African and particularly Japanese influences.
It was clear that the broth had tons of umami but once again the price-point was critical. They may have been using MSG but it was being done with a light hand.
The critical insight is that this was a cheap restaurant surviving on very low margins. Nothing could be wasted. There were shrimp on the menu and they were clearly buying them whole. The broth was being made with the shrimp heads and the shells. They are the source of the resonant thumping flavor. Also, the broth clearly had onions and garlic and tons of black pepper and cilantro. However, after the broth being made, it was being filtered and solids pressed and tossed out. Then the clams were being shucked, and cooked in the broth, and whole thing brought to the table piping hot. They were also generous with salt.
Why did the temperature matter?
The CC is not completely sure but it seems plausible that the bitter notes of the cilantro and the pepper were dominating at lower temperatures. When hot, you just got the heady hit of the salt and umami from the broth and the tomatoes.
Sopa de Almejas
Note 1: The clams that the CC gets are the standard East Coast clams. The giant ones are easier to find up in Connecticut, Massachusetts & Maine. This doesn't matter as much. They were definitely using local stuff not Manila clams, etc.
Note 2: The salt in this recipe is really crucial. You need to add a teeny bit more than you think completely rational. The CC added salt to the boiling broth until it tasted "correct". It was a lot more than he expected. It will not be the same without.
Note 3: Unless you have shrimp heads and shells in your freezer, the clear substitute would be dried shrimp. You will also need some kombu unless you plan to add MSG. Not going to work otherwise.
Note 4: As ridiculous as this sounds, it's better with crusty bread that has been wrapped for about 6-8 hours in foil so that it goes just slightly limp from the exhalation of the moisture from the starch. The CC is perfectly aware that this is anal retentiveness† of the highest order.
Note 5: The broth really needs to be at a boil. The CC is not kidding.
Ingredients
(serves 2)
1 dozen clams
2 tbsp oil
1 small onion (diced fine)
6-8 cloves of garlic (chopped)
4-6 tbsp tomato purée
1 piece kombu
1/4 cup dried shrimp
1/4 cup dried anchovies (if you have them)
1/3 cup diced cilantro (stems and all)
3 tbsp coarsely ground black pepper
4 cups water
salt
finely chopped cilantro leaves (to serve)
Recipe
First make the dashi.
Bring the water to the boil with the kombu. Right before the water boils, remove it and discard. If you don't do this, the broth will turn bitter. Toss in the shrimp and anchovies and let it boil for about 7-8 minutes. Skim the nasty froth that comes on top. Strain and keep the liquid. Discard the solids.
Heat up the oil. Fry the onions and the garlic until golden. Add the tomato purée and fry for a bit. Add the dashi, cilantro, salt and black pepper and bring to a rolling boil. Cook for about 6-7 minutes. Turn off the heat and let it steep for 10 minutes or so. Strain the broth pressing down on the solids to extract as much of the broth as necessary. Discard the solids.
(If you have two pots, the dashi can directly be strained into the second step. It will save you tons of time.)
Steam the clams with either the broth or some water. As they open, remove them and shuck off the half-shell. You can also just shuck them and store if you don't want to serve them with the half-shells.
Filter the clam broth with some paper towels. Clams are generally very gritty. Add this clam broth to the other broth.
Bring the broth to a rolling boil. Check for salt. You may need more.
Pour the broth over the clams. Add the cilantro on top. Serve at once with the crusty bread.
† This can't be entirely surprising for a recipe that was a decade in the making.
Since the restaurant is a bit of a hike for the CC, he always ends up ordering the soup — rather than the other possibly amazing dishes — and he's never disappointed. It's served with some bread (at best, average) and some amazing homemade aji criollo.
However, it's the soup that really sings and the CC has been trying to reproduce it ever since.
At long last — it only took a decade — he's untangled the various strands and made it for himself, and it's exactly as killer.
There were several hidden problems that needed to be solved. One was that the soup came with this emulsified broth with a very deep taste. Inside it were placed four or five rather large clams. Finely chopped cilantro was sprinkled on the top. The broth had no solids but it had an intense flavor. There was a reasonable amount of oil in the broth like all restaurants. However, this turned out to be a red herring. There were more important things at play.
Some things were really obvious. There was a lot of tomato purée in the broth. There were the deep notes of black pepper. It was clear it was some kind of fish broth. It also had a very deep cilantro flavor that could not be coming from the tiny amount of stuff sprinkled on top.
The other clue was the price point on the menu. It was one of the cheapest items, and the serving was large enough for a very good lunch. Now, clams are rather cheap on the Eastern seaboard but they're not that cheap so that means the ingredients inside the broth had to be cheaper. (The CC considered the possibility that they were using commercial clam juice but the taste of the broth had a subtle fresh flavor so it didn't seem very likely.)
Other clues. The clams were served on the half-shell and were very juicy. They could not have been cooked with the broth, and they were too plump to have been sitting in there for too long.
Two other important clues.
The dish always took a little longer to serve than other dishes (when the CC went with friends) and the surprising one — the broth was served piping hot. It was served almost at boiling point (close to 90-95°C.) When the broth cooled down, the soup didn't taste as good. Clearly, the temperature mattered greatly.
Peruvian cuisine is the ultimate mashup — besides the indigenous Incan origin, it's had Spanish, Italian, Chinese, West African and particularly Japanese influences.
It was clear that the broth had tons of umami but once again the price-point was critical. They may have been using MSG but it was being done with a light hand.
The critical insight is that this was a cheap restaurant surviving on very low margins. Nothing could be wasted. There were shrimp on the menu and they were clearly buying them whole. The broth was being made with the shrimp heads and the shells. They are the source of the resonant thumping flavor. Also, the broth clearly had onions and garlic and tons of black pepper and cilantro. However, after the broth being made, it was being filtered and solids pressed and tossed out. Then the clams were being shucked, and cooked in the broth, and whole thing brought to the table piping hot. They were also generous with salt.
Why did the temperature matter?
The CC is not completely sure but it seems plausible that the bitter notes of the cilantro and the pepper were dominating at lower temperatures. When hot, you just got the heady hit of the salt and umami from the broth and the tomatoes.
Sopa de Almejas
Note 1: The clams that the CC gets are the standard East Coast clams. The giant ones are easier to find up in Connecticut, Massachusetts & Maine. This doesn't matter as much. They were definitely using local stuff not Manila clams, etc.
Note 2: The salt in this recipe is really crucial. You need to add a teeny bit more than you think completely rational. The CC added salt to the boiling broth until it tasted "correct". It was a lot more than he expected. It will not be the same without.
Note 3: Unless you have shrimp heads and shells in your freezer, the clear substitute would be dried shrimp. You will also need some kombu unless you plan to add MSG. Not going to work otherwise.
Note 4: As ridiculous as this sounds, it's better with crusty bread that has been wrapped for about 6-8 hours in foil so that it goes just slightly limp from the exhalation of the moisture from the starch. The CC is perfectly aware that this is anal retentiveness† of the highest order.
Note 5: The broth really needs to be at a boil. The CC is not kidding.
Ingredients
(serves 2)
1 dozen clams
2 tbsp oil
1 small onion (diced fine)
6-8 cloves of garlic (chopped)
4-6 tbsp tomato purée
1 piece kombu
1/4 cup dried shrimp
1/4 cup dried anchovies (if you have them)
1/3 cup diced cilantro (stems and all)
3 tbsp coarsely ground black pepper
4 cups water
salt
finely chopped cilantro leaves (to serve)
Recipe
First make the dashi.
Bring the water to the boil with the kombu. Right before the water boils, remove it and discard. If you don't do this, the broth will turn bitter. Toss in the shrimp and anchovies and let it boil for about 7-8 minutes. Skim the nasty froth that comes on top. Strain and keep the liquid. Discard the solids.
Heat up the oil. Fry the onions and the garlic until golden. Add the tomato purée and fry for a bit. Add the dashi, cilantro, salt and black pepper and bring to a rolling boil. Cook for about 6-7 minutes. Turn off the heat and let it steep for 10 minutes or so. Strain the broth pressing down on the solids to extract as much of the broth as necessary. Discard the solids.
(If you have two pots, the dashi can directly be strained into the second step. It will save you tons of time.)
Steam the clams with either the broth or some water. As they open, remove them and shuck off the half-shell. You can also just shuck them and store if you don't want to serve them with the half-shells.
Filter the clam broth with some paper towels. Clams are generally very gritty. Add this clam broth to the other broth.
Bring the broth to a rolling boil. Check for salt. You may need more.
Pour the broth over the clams. Add the cilantro on top. Serve at once with the crusty bread.
† This can't be entirely surprising for a recipe that was a decade in the making.
Saturday, July 4, 2015
Vegetables
Vegetables are bland in flavor. There, the CC has said it.
Before a lynch-mob comes marching in, hear me out.
Vegetables are diluted in flavor by the water in their cells. So is meat, for the record. Hence, the concept of "aging beef" which allows the water to escape and making the meat more intensely "meaty".
There are a standard set of tricks across the globe to make vegetables more "vegetable-y" but since chez CC, we tend to be of the analytic bent, let's dig in further. We're also going to go further into domains not imagined by all these vegetable cultures.
All world cuisine relies on one or both of these tricks:
Before a lynch-mob comes marching in, hear me out.
Vegetables are diluted in flavor by the water in their cells. So is meat, for the record. Hence, the concept of "aging beef" which allows the water to escape and making the meat more intensely "meaty".
There are a standard set of tricks across the globe to make vegetables more "vegetable-y" but since chez CC, we tend to be of the analytic bent, let's dig in further. We're also going to go further into domains not imagined by all these vegetable cultures.
All world cuisine relies on one or both of these tricks:
- Dessicate the vegetables to make them more intense.
- Dessicate the vegetables and then replace the lost water in the cellular structure by more "interesting" stuff.
There is no "third destination".
There are three standard ways of dessicating vegetables — roasting, frying and sun-drying. Each is standard across the globe although the CC would argue that frying is a cross between [1] and [2] in that it replaces the water with a light coating of fat which is irresistible to the human tongue.
Now, that you understand this, you will realize how bullshit the verb insaporire ("to infuse with flavor") in Italian actually is. You're doing nothing of the sort. You're dessicating the vegetables by pan-frying them for a long time. No flavor is actually being "infused' because nothing is entering the system. You are pulling water out and the flavor is already present in the amazing vegetables to start with.
Yet, the Italians are onto something important. Pan-frying the vegetables does indeed intensify the flavor and this is the criticism that the CC would lay on the modern world and it's "fast food" concepts. You need to be slow and fry them languidly on a low heat for longer you think possible. The CC routinely catches himself trying to speed up before the analytic brain kicks in and says, "ten more minutes, mofo!" and the food is always the better as the Italians would have it. A great minestrone would have the vegetables pan-fried for the better part of 30 minutes.
The greatness of sun-dried vegetables should be obvious. So should be the concept of fried vegetables — everything from pakoras and tempura to fritto misto.
They are all precise ways of dessicating vegetables.
(Now, you understand why kale chips work, right?)
Once you've dessicated the vegetables, you are can re-infuse the cellular structures with other stuff. Everything from spices to meat and fish broths. The genius of Indian vegetarian cooking can be encapsulated in the fact that they combine steps [1] and [2] in one neat step. The vegetables are dessicated at the same time infusing them with the taste of intense spices. You see the same logic in an Italian minestrone which relies on vegetables being dessicated via pan-frying and reconstituted in an intense tomato broth. (Before the discovery of the New World, the Romans used meat broth to the same effect but the tomato is both cheaper and more intensely umami.)
Armed with this analytic conceit, we're no longer constrained by the arbitrariness of culture. If you want carrots to be more intensely "carrot-y" then dessicate them at a really low temperature and then reconstitute them in carrot juice!
In fact armed with this trick, you can make zucchini taste of meat or tomatoes or whatever you please.
The vegetable world is your oyster!
The greatness of sun-dried vegetables should be obvious. So should be the concept of fried vegetables — everything from pakoras and tempura to fritto misto.
They are all precise ways of dessicating vegetables.
(Now, you understand why kale chips work, right?)
Once you've dessicated the vegetables, you are can re-infuse the cellular structures with other stuff. Everything from spices to meat and fish broths. The genius of Indian vegetarian cooking can be encapsulated in the fact that they combine steps [1] and [2] in one neat step. The vegetables are dessicated at the same time infusing them with the taste of intense spices. You see the same logic in an Italian minestrone which relies on vegetables being dessicated via pan-frying and reconstituted in an intense tomato broth. (Before the discovery of the New World, the Romans used meat broth to the same effect but the tomato is both cheaper and more intensely umami.)
Armed with this analytic conceit, we're no longer constrained by the arbitrariness of culture. If you want carrots to be more intensely "carrot-y" then dessicate them at a really low temperature and then reconstitute them in carrot juice!
In fact armed with this trick, you can make zucchini taste of meat or tomatoes or whatever you please.
The vegetable world is your oyster!
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
The Adaptation & Appropriation of Dishes
The CC really wanted to include this article under that of The Naming of Dishes but there was a lot more to be said about this subject than just the naming portion so he decided to spin it off into its own little post.
The world has always been global.
We've had traders and merchants traveling the seas trading across countries and continents. It's not uncommon even today to find Roman coins in India when land gets dug up for some new project. The largest collection of gold artifacts in the world was discovered in Surigao in the Philippines in 1981 as part of an irrigation project. Its connections to ancient India of the 10th century is quite well established (Source: Ayala Museum.)
Along these trade routes flowed something else besides spices, grain and gold — recipes and techniques for recipes.
The most famous of these routes is undoubtedly the Silk Road over land but equally important were the three sailing routes. One across the Mediterranean from Alexandria (modern-day Egypt) hopping counter-clockwise, hugging the coast, all the way to Rome and also from Cyrene (modern-day Libya) and Carthage via Alexandria to Rome. The other was the route from the modern-day Gulf of Eden hugging the coast of the modern-day Middle East all the way down the western coast of India to Calicut (modern-day Cochin). And finally the extension of this route around the southern tip of India hugging the eastern coast of India to Burma and from there on to Thailand, Indonesia and the far East.
The most powerful of impulses that the traders appealed to was that of the "exotic". Anything remotely exotic is lapped up by any population as long as it is not too far off from their own conception. Whether these are colorful clothes or dishes or spices hardly mattered to the traders just as long as it could be sold for a profit.
Not knowing anything about a foreign culture — remember travel was hard before the last 75 years or so — local dishes with some exotic ingredient are just the ticket for a sharp businessman with a marketing strategy.
Exoticism sells. Nobody from emperors to laymen are immune.
This is not just a theory. We have evidence.
Queen Victoria was crowned the Empress of India in 1876 and the British went crazy over "anything Indian". There were "Indian-themed" parties and "Indian food" marketed by the East India Company. This is also the birth of the infamous curry powder — a non-existent concept in Indian cooking. This powder marketed globally is now ubiquitous in such far-flung places as France, Thailand, Singapore and Japan all thanks to the marketing of the East India Company.
In the 1950's and 1960's there was a worldwide craze of "Hawaiian". Needless to say the folks from Italy and India and Vietnam or even most of the United States for that matter had never been to Hawaii but "Hawaiian Salad" was all the craze globally. The exotic element was pineapple. Take a typical salad with a mayo-based dressing and toss in some pineapple to get the afore-mentioned dish. Needless to say this had about as much to do with Hawaiian cuisine as chalk has to do with cheese. There were "Hawaiian cakes", "Hawaiian cocktails", you name it! All with pineapple. It was all marketing, of course. (Yes! The "Mad Men" had their hands all over this. We have the ads to prove this.)
The relatively recent movement towards "authenticity" is not more than about 30-40 years old. Sure there were pioneers even in the 1930's towards an honest and detailed assessment of global cuisine but its mass adoption is a relatively recent phenomenon.
This trend towards exoticism isn't relegated to dishes. Ask yourself if you really know what entrée means. It means "appetizer" in French from the verb entrer — to enter. Same goes for hors d'oeuvres which means "first course" in French but has taken on the meaning of "appetizer" in English. (Appetizers would be des toasts — "nibbles" in French.) Clearly some things got lost just getting across the English Channel and if that's the case, you can just imagine how much got lost when recipes migrated longer distances in older times.
Every culture appropriates dishes. Whether it is the Sicilian adaptation of Arabic eggplant recipes or the Malaysian appropriation of Indian recipes (roti canai — canai probably comes from Chennai but the concept is, quite likely, from Kerala), or the Japanese versions of "spaghetti" and "ma po tofu", it's universal. You also have wholescale adaptations like the Hakka-originated "Indian-Chinese cuisine". Not to mention chop suey and the like which are American adaptations of Chinese dishes.
Italian cuisine is a particularly special case. There's the Italian-American branch but that, at least, can be understood as the reaction of new immigrants to a foreign land and its native resources. What no Italian would recognize is Japanese "spaghetti napolitan" (sic) or Filipino "spaghetti" (made with banana ketchup!) or even Indian "masala spaghetti".
It's lost in translation but why?
To truly master a cuisine, you must first internalize its grammar. And every cuisine has an unmistakable grammar. A set of rules, techniques and ingredients that work in a specific set of combinations and in a very narrow context (historically) to create a meal. Only after you know this grammar backwards and forwards can you truly break free into true creativity. Science helps.
Needless to say, mastering different grammars is insanely hard work. It's far easier for cooks to get a superficial understanding of some foreign cuisine, just use the local grammar of cooking instead of mastering a foreign one, and make something vaguely in that style. It would've been even more the norm in older times since travel and authenticity were so hard. In time, the dish gets appropriated into the local cuisine and becomes "native".
So how does one distinguish incompetence at rendering a foreign cuisine from a slapdash effort from a deliberate rethinking/reworking?
The answer lies in a similar one from the world of art.
In order to break the rules, you first have to understand and master them.
Not many people know that Picasso was a master draftsman and painter. His early paintings where he copies the classical works and even the Impressionists and out-flanks them are not well known. It's only after complete mastery of older techniques that that he broke new ground both aesthetic and technical. The same goes for Matisse.
It always pays to master different grammars. Picasso "borrowed" shamelessly from African art, and almost all painters of that era borrowed extensively from Japanese art. So it goes with any artistic endeavor.
The bias should be towards mastery of grammar and technique. The "going beyond" follows as a natural consequence.
The world has always been global.
We've had traders and merchants traveling the seas trading across countries and continents. It's not uncommon even today to find Roman coins in India when land gets dug up for some new project. The largest collection of gold artifacts in the world was discovered in Surigao in the Philippines in 1981 as part of an irrigation project. Its connections to ancient India of the 10th century is quite well established (Source: Ayala Museum.)
Along these trade routes flowed something else besides spices, grain and gold — recipes and techniques for recipes.
The most famous of these routes is undoubtedly the Silk Road over land but equally important were the three sailing routes. One across the Mediterranean from Alexandria (modern-day Egypt) hopping counter-clockwise, hugging the coast, all the way to Rome and also from Cyrene (modern-day Libya) and Carthage via Alexandria to Rome. The other was the route from the modern-day Gulf of Eden hugging the coast of the modern-day Middle East all the way down the western coast of India to Calicut (modern-day Cochin). And finally the extension of this route around the southern tip of India hugging the eastern coast of India to Burma and from there on to Thailand, Indonesia and the far East.
The most powerful of impulses that the traders appealed to was that of the "exotic". Anything remotely exotic is lapped up by any population as long as it is not too far off from their own conception. Whether these are colorful clothes or dishes or spices hardly mattered to the traders just as long as it could be sold for a profit.
Not knowing anything about a foreign culture — remember travel was hard before the last 75 years or so — local dishes with some exotic ingredient are just the ticket for a sharp businessman with a marketing strategy.
Exoticism sells. Nobody from emperors to laymen are immune.
This is not just a theory. We have evidence.
Queen Victoria was crowned the Empress of India in 1876 and the British went crazy over "anything Indian". There were "Indian-themed" parties and "Indian food" marketed by the East India Company. This is also the birth of the infamous curry powder — a non-existent concept in Indian cooking. This powder marketed globally is now ubiquitous in such far-flung places as France, Thailand, Singapore and Japan all thanks to the marketing of the East India Company.
In the 1950's and 1960's there was a worldwide craze of "Hawaiian". Needless to say the folks from Italy and India and Vietnam or even most of the United States for that matter had never been to Hawaii but "Hawaiian Salad" was all the craze globally. The exotic element was pineapple. Take a typical salad with a mayo-based dressing and toss in some pineapple to get the afore-mentioned dish. Needless to say this had about as much to do with Hawaiian cuisine as chalk has to do with cheese. There were "Hawaiian cakes", "Hawaiian cocktails", you name it! All with pineapple. It was all marketing, of course. (Yes! The "Mad Men" had their hands all over this. We have the ads to prove this.)
The relatively recent movement towards "authenticity" is not more than about 30-40 years old. Sure there were pioneers even in the 1930's towards an honest and detailed assessment of global cuisine but its mass adoption is a relatively recent phenomenon.
This trend towards exoticism isn't relegated to dishes. Ask yourself if you really know what entrée means. It means "appetizer" in French from the verb entrer — to enter. Same goes for hors d'oeuvres which means "first course" in French but has taken on the meaning of "appetizer" in English. (Appetizers would be des toasts — "nibbles" in French.) Clearly some things got lost just getting across the English Channel and if that's the case, you can just imagine how much got lost when recipes migrated longer distances in older times.
Every culture appropriates dishes. Whether it is the Sicilian adaptation of Arabic eggplant recipes or the Malaysian appropriation of Indian recipes (roti canai — canai probably comes from Chennai but the concept is, quite likely, from Kerala), or the Japanese versions of "spaghetti" and "ma po tofu", it's universal. You also have wholescale adaptations like the Hakka-originated "Indian-Chinese cuisine". Not to mention chop suey and the like which are American adaptations of Chinese dishes.
Italian cuisine is a particularly special case. There's the Italian-American branch but that, at least, can be understood as the reaction of new immigrants to a foreign land and its native resources. What no Italian would recognize is Japanese "spaghetti napolitan" (sic) or Filipino "spaghetti" (made with banana ketchup!) or even Indian "masala spaghetti".
It's lost in translation but why?
To truly master a cuisine, you must first internalize its grammar. And every cuisine has an unmistakable grammar. A set of rules, techniques and ingredients that work in a specific set of combinations and in a very narrow context (historically) to create a meal. Only after you know this grammar backwards and forwards can you truly break free into true creativity. Science helps.
Needless to say, mastering different grammars is insanely hard work. It's far easier for cooks to get a superficial understanding of some foreign cuisine, just use the local grammar of cooking instead of mastering a foreign one, and make something vaguely in that style. It would've been even more the norm in older times since travel and authenticity were so hard. In time, the dish gets appropriated into the local cuisine and becomes "native".
So how does one distinguish incompetence at rendering a foreign cuisine from a slapdash effort from a deliberate rethinking/reworking?
The answer lies in a similar one from the world of art.
In order to break the rules, you first have to understand and master them.
Not many people know that Picasso was a master draftsman and painter. His early paintings where he copies the classical works and even the Impressionists and out-flanks them are not well known. It's only after complete mastery of older techniques that that he broke new ground both aesthetic and technical. The same goes for Matisse.
It always pays to master different grammars. Picasso "borrowed" shamelessly from African art, and almost all painters of that era borrowed extensively from Japanese art. So it goes with any artistic endeavor.
The bias should be towards mastery of grammar and technique. The "going beyond" follows as a natural consequence.
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
The Potato Chronicles
Have you ever had an experience where you ask yourself why something so obvious is so completely unknown?
The CC is going to discuss roasted potatoes and French fries and what they have in common.
It's a well-known fact among connoisseurs of the humble potato that the best way to fry it is in various versions of animal fats. Goose fat, duck fat, chicken fat and horse fat. Expensive but mind-blowingly awesome.
What also makes the perfect fry is that the surface is crispy and brown (tastes come from the Maillard reaction) and the insides perfectly soft and creamy. It's the contrast that makes it work. Here's a refresher to the science.
The potato has been a staple in many cuisines once the New World was discovered. It rapidly spread across the globe. Roasting it aside the meat which shed its fat was a common and delicious idea.
The innovation which surprised the CC last night was simple. Instead of letting the potato roast, the chef took a medium-sized potato, peeled it, sliced it vertically into thin sections that were still attached at the base — leaving the potato whole — and roasted it. It's simple knife-work. This thin slicing meant that the edges of the potato were completely crispy while the insides were completely creamy. The potato was clearly roasted with some goose fat and served with the roasted goose giving the dish a coherent feel.
It's such a simple idea and yet so radical.
The CC is going to discuss roasted potatoes and French fries and what they have in common.
It's a well-known fact among connoisseurs of the humble potato that the best way to fry it is in various versions of animal fats. Goose fat, duck fat, chicken fat and horse fat. Expensive but mind-blowingly awesome.
What also makes the perfect fry is that the surface is crispy and brown (tastes come from the Maillard reaction) and the insides perfectly soft and creamy. It's the contrast that makes it work. Here's a refresher to the science.
The potato has been a staple in many cuisines once the New World was discovered. It rapidly spread across the globe. Roasting it aside the meat which shed its fat was a common and delicious idea.
The innovation which surprised the CC last night was simple. Instead of letting the potato roast, the chef took a medium-sized potato, peeled it, sliced it vertically into thin sections that were still attached at the base — leaving the potato whole — and roasted it. It's simple knife-work. This thin slicing meant that the edges of the potato were completely crispy while the insides were completely creamy. The potato was clearly roasted with some goose fat and served with the roasted goose giving the dish a coherent feel.
It's such a simple idea and yet so radical.
Saturday, November 1, 2014
The Lynchpin of Logistics
The role of logistics in cooking is axiomatic to trained chefs but it seems to be unknown, unheard of, and unrecognized by regular folks cooking daily meals.
Let us first define the goal. It would be to make nutritious, interesting meals daily, or at least, most evenings. This is what chefs do daily in exchange for money. The home cook tries to do it and, more often than not, fails. The blame is placed on the our harried lives and the "demands on modernity" never mind the fact that we have more instruments (blenders, food processors, dishwashers) that do all the hard work for us than in the bad old days of yore.
The failure can be attributed to the failure of logistics or to put a positive spin on it, the secret to success in the culinary arts lies in logistics.
Great cooking on a regular sustained basis is closer to mobilizing a military campaign than it is to the airy-fairy world of recipes, tastes and thoughts. Creativity, knowledge and technical mastery all play a role but these are pre-requisites in almost any domain of human endeavor. The logistical aspect of cooking gets short shrift from most, particularly cookbook writers, who assume that the audience will pick it up by practice and osmosis.
Importantly, this skill is not ethereal vapor. It's objective and it can be taught and one gets better at it just like the classic Carnegie Hall joke. ("How do you get to the CC's kitchen? Practice, practice, practice.")
There is a skill to the logistical aspect of things and the CC could walk into most people's kitchens and gauge their culinary ability within a minute or two just by observing the organization of their pantry and tools. There would be no role for conversation. A simple cursory observation would do the trick.
The biggest juggling act that a cook must master is managing the pantry.
One of the problems of juggling a pantry is that you must "know yourself". You need to be absolutely crystal clear about your strengths and weaknesses, your desires and hatreds and more importantly, the loves and hates of your target audience. (All cooks have an audience whether it's the paying kind or the not-so-much-paying family and friends variety. If you want to get really technical then all cooking has a serious element of theater in it as well. We, the cooks, are performers.)
Mastering your own pantry and knowing its contents is hard work. It requires you to juggle a ton of variables — long-term stuff (pickles, preserves), frozen stuff (vegetables, preserves, sauces), fresh stuff (herbs, vegetables, meat, etc.)
This is painstakingly difficult work and its complexity must not be underestimated. The price of failure is clear. You toss the waste out but if you want to keep this to a minimum then you must juggle this information either in your head or via a spreadsheet.
You can easily appreciate how important this aspect is in a professional kitchen since it is first and foremost a business. Any wastage accrues directly and negatively to the bottom line.
Planning is also needed in the shopping aspect of things. If you want the best and you want it on a budget then you must juggle all the various ingredients and their locations and their costs. This is something that needs to be learnt and is particularly true of most places in the world that still have separate grocers, butchers and fishermen. (New York is one of the few places in America along with older cities like Boston that still have these supply chains still intact.)
Remember the comparison with military campaigns? The CC was not kidding.
The military has always considered this aspect to be of importance. Now you too can appreciate what Napoleon meant when he said that "an army marches on its stomach" and why the role of quartermaster has always been performed by a relatively senior officer.
The same level of planning goes for the actual execution of the dish. Professional cooks always have a mise en place — French for "putting it in place". All the ingredients are neatly chopped up, arranged and organized in bowls so that the actual cooking is swift and mistake-free. This is particularly important for dishes that require ingredients to go in at a rapid pace e.g. Chinese wok cooking where speed is of the essence and there is no time to dilly-dally with chopping and the like.
Planning extends to cleanup as well. Great home cooks clean as they go and for those with dishwashers, stack as they go. The same goes for professional kitchens where the space is not only cleaned during the execution of dishes but there's also a final cleaning at the end of the night where everything is scrubbed down. Most good cooks will have a clean workplace before the first dish even hits the table.
Traditionally, these skills were under the purview of a course in "Home Economics" since the relationship between money and logistics has always been very clear. This was considered so important that the English classic "Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management" has never been out of print since 1861 (although it has been revised by successive generations to keep up with the times.)
The book represents everything that is positive about Victorian England — its progressive, rational, Enlightenment-seeped nature. The preface by Isabella Beeton says it best:
This is never going to be a popular subject because there is no "market" for this. Could you imagine a modern-day book that teaches you how to shop for food or how to organize your pantry? Even worse, are we talking about a Japanese pantry or an Indian one since the needs are so different? What if you wanted multiple pantries like the CC?
The greater your ambition and the wider the net of your daily cooking in terms of multiple cuisines, the larger the role of logistics looms. If it's hard enough to cook a single cuisine daily then it is even harder to manage the pantries of multiple cuisines with conflicting demands and juggle everything so that nothing goes to waste.
Somewhere somehow these skills have gotten lost in the modern shuffle but they are absolutely critical if you want to make amazing food on a regular basis.
To blatantly rip off Napoleon, "a great chef marches on his† organization."
† No sexism is implied. As any legal textbook might tell you, "his" includes "hers" as well as "theirs".
Let us first define the goal. It would be to make nutritious, interesting meals daily, or at least, most evenings. This is what chefs do daily in exchange for money. The home cook tries to do it and, more often than not, fails. The blame is placed on the our harried lives and the "demands on modernity" never mind the fact that we have more instruments (blenders, food processors, dishwashers) that do all the hard work for us than in the bad old days of yore.
The failure can be attributed to the failure of logistics or to put a positive spin on it, the secret to success in the culinary arts lies in logistics.
Great cooking on a regular sustained basis is closer to mobilizing a military campaign than it is to the airy-fairy world of recipes, tastes and thoughts. Creativity, knowledge and technical mastery all play a role but these are pre-requisites in almost any domain of human endeavor. The logistical aspect of cooking gets short shrift from most, particularly cookbook writers, who assume that the audience will pick it up by practice and osmosis.
Importantly, this skill is not ethereal vapor. It's objective and it can be taught and one gets better at it just like the classic Carnegie Hall joke. ("How do you get to the CC's kitchen? Practice, practice, practice.")
There is a skill to the logistical aspect of things and the CC could walk into most people's kitchens and gauge their culinary ability within a minute or two just by observing the organization of their pantry and tools. There would be no role for conversation. A simple cursory observation would do the trick.
The biggest juggling act that a cook must master is managing the pantry.
One of the problems of juggling a pantry is that you must "know yourself". You need to be absolutely crystal clear about your strengths and weaknesses, your desires and hatreds and more importantly, the loves and hates of your target audience. (All cooks have an audience whether it's the paying kind or the not-so-much-paying family and friends variety. If you want to get really technical then all cooking has a serious element of theater in it as well. We, the cooks, are performers.)
Mastering your own pantry and knowing its contents is hard work. It requires you to juggle a ton of variables — long-term stuff (pickles, preserves), frozen stuff (vegetables, preserves, sauces), fresh stuff (herbs, vegetables, meat, etc.)
This is painstakingly difficult work and its complexity must not be underestimated. The price of failure is clear. You toss the waste out but if you want to keep this to a minimum then you must juggle this information either in your head or via a spreadsheet.
You can easily appreciate how important this aspect is in a professional kitchen since it is first and foremost a business. Any wastage accrues directly and negatively to the bottom line.
Planning is also needed in the shopping aspect of things. If you want the best and you want it on a budget then you must juggle all the various ingredients and their locations and their costs. This is something that needs to be learnt and is particularly true of most places in the world that still have separate grocers, butchers and fishermen. (New York is one of the few places in America along with older cities like Boston that still have these supply chains still intact.)
Remember the comparison with military campaigns? The CC was not kidding.
The military has always considered this aspect to be of importance. Now you too can appreciate what Napoleon meant when he said that "an army marches on its stomach" and why the role of quartermaster has always been performed by a relatively senior officer.
The same level of planning goes for the actual execution of the dish. Professional cooks always have a mise en place — French for "putting it in place". All the ingredients are neatly chopped up, arranged and organized in bowls so that the actual cooking is swift and mistake-free. This is particularly important for dishes that require ingredients to go in at a rapid pace e.g. Chinese wok cooking where speed is of the essence and there is no time to dilly-dally with chopping and the like.
Planning extends to cleanup as well. Great home cooks clean as they go and for those with dishwashers, stack as they go. The same goes for professional kitchens where the space is not only cleaned during the execution of dishes but there's also a final cleaning at the end of the night where everything is scrubbed down. Most good cooks will have a clean workplace before the first dish even hits the table.
Traditionally, these skills were under the purview of a course in "Home Economics" since the relationship between money and logistics has always been very clear. This was considered so important that the English classic "Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management" has never been out of print since 1861 (although it has been revised by successive generations to keep up with the times.)
The book represents everything that is positive about Victorian England — its progressive, rational, Enlightenment-seeped nature. The preface by Isabella Beeton says it best:
I must frankly own, that if I had known, beforehand, that this book would have cost me the labour which it has, I should never have been courageous enough to commence it. What moved me, in the first instance, to attempt a work like this, was the discomfort and suffering which I had seen brought upon men and women by household mismanagement. I have always thought that there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife's badly-cooked dinners and untidy ways.We can excuse Mrs. Beeton for her sexist assumptions which were typical of her time but the progressive sentiment of "teaching the skill of household management" jumps out with etched clarity.
This is never going to be a popular subject because there is no "market" for this. Could you imagine a modern-day book that teaches you how to shop for food or how to organize your pantry? Even worse, are we talking about a Japanese pantry or an Indian one since the needs are so different? What if you wanted multiple pantries like the CC?
The greater your ambition and the wider the net of your daily cooking in terms of multiple cuisines, the larger the role of logistics looms. If it's hard enough to cook a single cuisine daily then it is even harder to manage the pantries of multiple cuisines with conflicting demands and juggle everything so that nothing goes to waste.
Somewhere somehow these skills have gotten lost in the modern shuffle but they are absolutely critical if you want to make amazing food on a regular basis.
To blatantly rip off Napoleon, "a great chef marches on his† organization."
† No sexism is implied. As any legal textbook might tell you, "his" includes "hers" as well as "theirs".
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
Golden Beet & Beet Greens Soup
This is the ultimate meta-recipe for a simple
soup based on the barest minimum of ingredients.
The modern-day conception is unmistakably French although soups of this nature undoubtedly floated all around Europe before the codification of national cuisines in the 19th century.
They rely on only a handful of ingredients for flavoring and they can be tailored to both the seasons and the occasion. The soup can be made limpid and elegant or hearty and robust using just a few tricks.
The recipe at its heart is simple. Onions and/or related alliums — leeks, garlic, shallots are sautéed in olive oil till they are golden. Then water (or a clear broth) is added and the mixture brought to a boil. To this are added some vegetables which are cooked until tender. The vegetables (typically root vegetables) add their own flavor to the broth. At the last minute, finely chiffonaded greens are added and the soup is taken off the heat and served.
The recipe is so extraordinarily simple that naturally the CC needs to explain it in copious detail.
Simplicity frequently belies an underlying deep complexity.
The allium family, of which onions are a member of, are rich in volatile sulfur compounds. This is what causes their pungency and all the tearing. Only a small amount of molecules make their way to your eye but it's enough for you to start crying. It's a defense mechanism to prevent them from being eaten by animals but, of course, we humans figured a work around.
Cooking.
The flavor is coming from the sautéeing of the alliums. The sulfur compound that causes the tearing (1-propenyl sulfenic acid) converts in the presence of heat into another compound (3-mercapto-2-methlylpentan-1-ol) that is strongly present in meat broth. This is perceived to our tongues in the presence of salt as a very strong savory flavor. We're using alliums but our tongues and stomach are screaming "MEAT!!!".
This is why many cuisines worldwide use onions as the base of any recipe. It also shows how strongly the evolution of our tongue and diet has relied on meat, the last few thousand years of modern-day vegetarianism notwithstanding.
The addition of vegetables to this broth increases the savory quotient and results in an intensely flavored broth. The greens add complexity, nutrition, textural and visual interest.
The vegetables are almost always paired with their corresponding greens. Beets and beet greens. Turnips and turnip greens. Carrots and carrot fronds. Potatoes and dandelion greens (weeds). You get the idea.
This recipe is clearly a peasant recipe that got refined and passed upwards into the nobility. It's origins clearly betray the fact that it was meant as a recipe that doesn't waste anything. You use the beets and the greens that come up with the beets. The entire plant and no wastage. Something that should appeal to the present "back-to-the-past waste-not-want-not" movement.
Heft can be added in one of four different ways:
For the record, the CC once made the lightest alternative for his mom as part of a three-course lunch and he was greeted with, "I want a second helping."
This is a meta-recipe that clearly belongs in the Pantheon of the Greats.
Ingredients
(serves 2)
2 small golden beets with greens attached
2 onions
1 head spring garlic
3 cups water
sea salt
black pepper (lots!)
1/2 cup white beans pre-cooked (optional)
4 slices stale bread (optional)
1/2 cup parmigiano-reggiano (optional)
Recipe
Note 1: The recipe is made with golden beets because it respects the "clean" broth look that this recipe entails. The water has a light golden color. Regular beets would work but they would color the broth pink. The recipe has a clear limpid texture even though that's not obvious in the picture above.
Note 2: For a more elegant presentation while adding heft, make some parmesan toasts.
Separate the beets from the greens. Cut out the central stem of each frond retaining just the leafy green part.
Peel the beets and chop into flat medium-thick rings.
Chop the onions into quarter rings. Chop the garlic into slivers.
Sautée the onions and garlic in some olive oil at medium heat. Add the black pepper. When they are golden (but not colored) add 3 cups of water and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down. Add the beets and beans (if using) and let cook covered for about 6-7 minutes at medium heat until the beets are done.
Taste the broth for salt and add as much as necessary.
Once more bring the mixture to a rolling boil. Add the greens and turn the heat off. Let them sit for 1 minute.
Serve at once over bread (if using) with parmesan (if using).
The modern-day conception is unmistakably French although soups of this nature undoubtedly floated all around Europe before the codification of national cuisines in the 19th century.
They rely on only a handful of ingredients for flavoring and they can be tailored to both the seasons and the occasion. The soup can be made limpid and elegant or hearty and robust using just a few tricks.
The recipe at its heart is simple. Onions and/or related alliums — leeks, garlic, shallots are sautéed in olive oil till they are golden. Then water (or a clear broth) is added and the mixture brought to a boil. To this are added some vegetables which are cooked until tender. The vegetables (typically root vegetables) add their own flavor to the broth. At the last minute, finely chiffonaded greens are added and the soup is taken off the heat and served.
The recipe is so extraordinarily simple that naturally the CC needs to explain it in copious detail.
Simplicity frequently belies an underlying deep complexity.
The allium family, of which onions are a member of, are rich in volatile sulfur compounds. This is what causes their pungency and all the tearing. Only a small amount of molecules make their way to your eye but it's enough for you to start crying. It's a defense mechanism to prevent them from being eaten by animals but, of course, we humans figured a work around.
Cooking.
The flavor is coming from the sautéeing of the alliums. The sulfur compound that causes the tearing (1-propenyl sulfenic acid) converts in the presence of heat into another compound (3-mercapto-2-methlylpentan-1-ol) that is strongly present in meat broth. This is perceived to our tongues in the presence of salt as a very strong savory flavor. We're using alliums but our tongues and stomach are screaming "MEAT!!!".
This is why many cuisines worldwide use onions as the base of any recipe. It also shows how strongly the evolution of our tongue and diet has relied on meat, the last few thousand years of modern-day vegetarianism notwithstanding.
The addition of vegetables to this broth increases the savory quotient and results in an intensely flavored broth. The greens add complexity, nutrition, textural and visual interest.
The vegetables are almost always paired with their corresponding greens. Beets and beet greens. Turnips and turnip greens. Carrots and carrot fronds. Potatoes and dandelion greens (weeds). You get the idea.
This recipe is clearly a peasant recipe that got refined and passed upwards into the nobility. It's origins clearly betray the fact that it was meant as a recipe that doesn't waste anything. You use the beets and the greens that come up with the beets. The entire plant and no wastage. Something that should appeal to the present "back-to-the-past waste-not-want-not" movement.
Heft can be added in one of four different ways:
- Broth instead of water.
- Cooked beans which add more protein.
- Soup poured over stale bread.
- Sprinkling of parmesan on top (more umami.)
For the record, the CC once made the lightest alternative for his mom as part of a three-course lunch and he was greeted with, "I want a second helping."
This is a meta-recipe that clearly belongs in the Pantheon of the Greats.
Ingredients(serves 2)
2 small golden beets with greens attached
2 onions
1 head spring garlic
3 cups water
sea salt
black pepper (lots!)
1/2 cup white beans pre-cooked (optional)
4 slices stale bread (optional)
1/2 cup parmigiano-reggiano (optional)
Recipe
Note 1: The recipe is made with golden beets because it respects the "clean" broth look that this recipe entails. The water has a light golden color. Regular beets would work but they would color the broth pink. The recipe has a clear limpid texture even though that's not obvious in the picture above.
Note 2: For a more elegant presentation while adding heft, make some parmesan toasts.
Separate the beets from the greens. Cut out the central stem of each frond retaining just the leafy green part.
Peel the beets and chop into flat medium-thick rings.
Chop the onions into quarter rings. Chop the garlic into slivers.
Sautée the onions and garlic in some olive oil at medium heat. Add the black pepper. When they are golden (but not colored) add 3 cups of water and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down. Add the beets and beans (if using) and let cook covered for about 6-7 minutes at medium heat until the beets are done.
Taste the broth for salt and add as much as necessary.
Once more bring the mixture to a rolling boil. Add the greens and turn the heat off. Let them sit for 1 minute.
Serve at once over bread (if using) with parmesan (if using).
Sunday, July 6, 2014
Rouz Jerbi (Riz Djerbian, Tunisian Spinach Rice)
This is one of the strangest yet most awesome recipes that the CC has seen.
When the CC first encountered it he was mystified. Wouldn't 50+ minutes of steaming turn the vegetables into mush? Was he getting something wrong?
No, he was just forgetting something.
Rice is deeply hygroscopic.
It will absorb moisture like nobody's business so you need to store rice in a humidity-free environment. In fact, it is so hygroscopic that if you ever drop your cellphone inside water and it doesnt' work, first dry it out and then put it inside a sealed bag filled with dry uncooked rice. Chances are it will work in a few days.
The CC has given this advice to quite a few people and they were just baffled. The CC argued, "What do you have to lose? A few cups of cheap rice, right?" Right down to the last man and woman, the smartphones have come back to life. One friend whose young daughter had mastered the art of grabbing his smartphone and throwing it in the toilet particularly appreciated the CC.
Science. It works, bitches!
The recipe is from the island of Djerba in Tunisia. The CC has provided the French spelling as well since Tunisia was a French Protectorate and you are more likely to encounter the dish under that name.
In this recipe, a mélange of dry rice, spinach, parsley, vegetables, chickpeas, optional meat, and a ton of spices are steamed for about 50 minutes. The rice does most of the absorption (including the liquid given off by the spinach and vegetables) and what you get is a perfectly steamed mixture that is intensely flavored and smells magical.
The dish can be extremely spicy but you can control the heat with the amount of harissa that you add to it. It has a slow burn.
It's not a hard dish in the least. You could do the prep in 30 minutes but you will need to endure two phases of steaming with by a precise interlude where you turn everything over and recommence.
Just think two de-stressing cocktails because minus the prep and the tiny amount of the interlude, you're not exactly working very hard. Even the prep is easy.
A steamer works perfectly here but the CC improvised since he has none in his apartment. The recipe is quite forgiving.
You absolutely need a long-grained rice. Short varieties are not going to work in this dish.
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups long-grained rice (e.g. basmati)
2 large onions (chopped fine)
4 cloves garlic (chopped fine)
1 large potato (cubed into large pieces)
1 large carrot (cubed into medium pieces)
1 large tomato (chopped into fine pieces)
1 cup cooked chickpeas
1/2 cup peas
2 large bunches of spinach (chopped into fine slivers)
1 large bunch parsley (chopped fine)
chicken/lamb/beef ‐ (optional) ‐ cubed into small pieces
1/2 cup tomato paste
1/3 cup olive oil
1-2 tbsp. harissa
4 tbsp. coriander seeds (roasted and ground fine)
1 tbsp. caraway seeds (roasted and ground fine)
1 tbsp. turmeric
2 tsp. red chilli powder (or to taste)
Recipe
First, toss the rice with the tomato paste and olive oil and mix thoroughly. The goal is to coat the rice with the oil to make sure that each grain remains separate. This is the aesthetic hallmark of Arab cuisine which you will see everywhere from Northern Africa to Iran to India.
Then you just add all the ingredients in a large bowl and mix them thoroughly.
The mixture must then be steamed in a tightly-sealed steamer for about 25 minutes. At that mark, you must pull it out into a bowl, very gently mix everything together and steam it again for about 20-25 minutes. (Add more water to the bottom if necessary.)
The length of the second steaming depends on the age of your rice. The older it is, the less you will need to cook it.
Rouz Jerbi
When the CC first encountered it he was mystified. Wouldn't 50+ minutes of steaming turn the vegetables into mush? Was he getting something wrong?
No, he was just forgetting something.
Rice is deeply hygroscopic.
It will absorb moisture like nobody's business so you need to store rice in a humidity-free environment. In fact, it is so hygroscopic that if you ever drop your cellphone inside water and it doesnt' work, first dry it out and then put it inside a sealed bag filled with dry uncooked rice. Chances are it will work in a few days.
The CC has given this advice to quite a few people and they were just baffled. The CC argued, "What do you have to lose? A few cups of cheap rice, right?" Right down to the last man and woman, the smartphones have come back to life. One friend whose young daughter had mastered the art of grabbing his smartphone and throwing it in the toilet particularly appreciated the CC.
Science. It works, bitches!
The recipe is from the island of Djerba in Tunisia. The CC has provided the French spelling as well since Tunisia was a French Protectorate and you are more likely to encounter the dish under that name.
In this recipe, a mélange of dry rice, spinach, parsley, vegetables, chickpeas, optional meat, and a ton of spices are steamed for about 50 minutes. The rice does most of the absorption (including the liquid given off by the spinach and vegetables) and what you get is a perfectly steamed mixture that is intensely flavored and smells magical.
The dish can be extremely spicy but you can control the heat with the amount of harissa that you add to it. It has a slow burn.
It's not a hard dish in the least. You could do the prep in 30 minutes but you will need to endure two phases of steaming with by a precise interlude where you turn everything over and recommence.
Just think two de-stressing cocktails because minus the prep and the tiny amount of the interlude, you're not exactly working very hard. Even the prep is easy.
A steamer works perfectly here but the CC improvised since he has none in his apartment. The recipe is quite forgiving.
You absolutely need a long-grained rice. Short varieties are not going to work in this dish.
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups long-grained rice (e.g. basmati)
2 large onions (chopped fine)
4 cloves garlic (chopped fine)
1 large potato (cubed into large pieces)
1 large carrot (cubed into medium pieces)
1 large tomato (chopped into fine pieces)
1 cup cooked chickpeas
1/2 cup peas
2 large bunches of spinach (chopped into fine slivers)
1 large bunch parsley (chopped fine)
chicken/lamb/beef ‐ (optional) ‐ cubed into small pieces
1/2 cup tomato paste
1/3 cup olive oil
1-2 tbsp. harissa
4 tbsp. coriander seeds (roasted and ground fine)
1 tbsp. caraway seeds (roasted and ground fine)
1 tbsp. turmeric
2 tsp. red chilli powder (or to taste)
Recipe
First, toss the rice with the tomato paste and olive oil and mix thoroughly. The goal is to coat the rice with the oil to make sure that each grain remains separate. This is the aesthetic hallmark of Arab cuisine which you will see everywhere from Northern Africa to Iran to India.
Then you just add all the ingredients in a large bowl and mix them thoroughly.
The mixture must then be steamed in a tightly-sealed steamer for about 25 minutes. At that mark, you must pull it out into a bowl, very gently mix everything together and steam it again for about 20-25 minutes. (Add more water to the bottom if necessary.)
The length of the second steaming depends on the age of your rice. The older it is, the less you will need to cook it.
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Sinigang na halaan
This is a Filipino meta-recipe.
You can have Sinigang na X where X can be a large variety of different kinds of meats and seafood. The three classic versions for the X would be pork, chicken and bangus respectively.
A word about bangus (milkfish). It's a fish that was traditionally found in the sea but can grow in brackish water. It's one of the older examples of aquaculture — at least 800 years old in the Philippines. The fish are bony — very bony and it's a skill to eat them.
Sinigang is a sour clear broth with one or more sources of meat and/or seafood, a ton of vegetables, and one souring agent. There is a purity of flavor coming from one very clear-cut souring source which neatly dovetails into the umami of the broth from the meat/seafood.
It is traditionally eaten with rice. The rice is frequently topped with fried garlic and/or fresh scallions but these are all details.
There are traditional recipes but there are clearly two dimensions to the dish — what meat/seafood you choose and what souring agent you choose.
Filipinos love sour food. This is a necessity forced by a tropical climate and a few millennia of no refrigeration turned into a cultural trait. It's one of the few ways to preserve food in a tropical climate so that there is no wastage. There is a difference though. The souring agents are cooked through. It gives them a "rounded mellow" flavor rather than the aggressive hit of acidity that you would get without cooking. There has to be enough sourness to wake up the taste buds but not so much as to make it pucker and inedible.
The list of souring agents is endless — vinegar made from all sorts of sources (coconut, palm, sugarcane, pineapples, etc.), tamarind, calamansi, kamias, santol, green mangoes, green guava, star fruit, green pineapples, even leaves of various plants, etc. This list barely even scratches the surface of this subject. The Philippines probably has the longest list of souring agents of any culture that the CC knows about.
Needless to say the souring agents are not substitutable for each other. It does matter whether you are making a sinigang with a hearty ingredient like pork or delicate ones like seafood. Santol which has an astringent tannic component would be most inappropriate for a seafood sinigang while almost all delicate fruit-based versions would work wonderfully.
There are also some classic touches about the choices of vegetables in a sinigang — a starchy root (taro, banana hearts or "New World" potatoes), some "green protein" typically long beans, and some greens in many many different forms — everything from sili (chili leaves) to bok choy, kang kong, and malunggay. Needless to say once tomatoes were discovered and transferred to the "Old World", they became irresistible additions for reasons we have covered on the blog before.
The ingredients are rotated with the combinatorial game that we have talked about extensively on the blog — you will see corn, carrots, radishes, eggplants and all kinds of other vegetables in there. There's a pairing bias though. You see lighter vegetables with seafood and more aggressive ones like eggplants with meat which makes logical sense based upon the palate profile.
Make no mistake though. The star is the sour broth.
One last word about the use of Filipino-style fish sauce called patis. It's basically the same concept as the Roman garum or the Thai nahm pla but it's arguably different. The CC would have no trouble distinguishing it in a blind tasting. You could substitute but it won't be the same.
Just like in Thai recipes, you don't add salt to the dish. The salt comes via the addition of the patis. Additionally, for this recipe with clams, they will give off plenty of salty liquid. Traditionally, the patis is always added towards the end where you can control the level of saltiness. (It also adds substantial umami to the dish.)
This makes a perfectly good soup even in the absence of rice which is heresy as far as the Filipino world is concerned but the CC can live with that.
After all this long explanatory buildup, this is not a difficult recipe. It's what Filipino moms make when they are too lazy to make something. It's really so simple as to defy its excellence.
Sinigang na halaan
Ingredients
1 large onion (sliced)
1" ginger (chopped thinly)
2 pieces ginger (chopped thinly)
1 chili (sliced lengthwise - optional)
2 small tomatoes (chopped into large pieces)
24 clams
2 cups tamarind water (read below)
2 cups water
1 lotus root (cut into 1/3" slices)
2 cups long beans (sliced into 2" pieces)
4 pieces baby bok choy (tough bottom parts cut off)
2 sprigs chili leaves (sili leaves)
patis (to taste)
vegetable oil
Recipe
Note: Various markets (Filipino, Indian, Thai) carry frozen "green fruits" and both fresh and dried tamarind. They are perfectly excellent in making the various sour broths because the textural component is not important in the least.
First make the tamarind water. Heat up 2 1/2 cups of water with tamarind pods and bring to a boil. Simmer for 10 minutes. Let it sit in the cooling water. When it has cooled down, separate the water from the pods using a strainer. Discard the solids. Retain the tamarind water.
Heat up the oil in a sturdy pot. Add the onions, ginger, garlic and chili (if using) and fry for a bit till soft. Roughly 6 minutes.
Add the tamarind water, the water and bring to a boil. Add the lotus roots and let cook for 3 minutes. Add the long beans and let cook for 4 minutes.
Add the clams. Let them cook till they open. Roughly 8 minutes.
Turn off the heat.
At the very end, add the tomatoes, the bok choy and the chili leaves and let them sit for a few minutes to wilt. Add the patis to taste.
Serve immediately with rice (or not.)
You can have Sinigang na X where X can be a large variety of different kinds of meats and seafood. The three classic versions for the X would be pork, chicken and bangus respectively.
A word about bangus (milkfish). It's a fish that was traditionally found in the sea but can grow in brackish water. It's one of the older examples of aquaculture — at least 800 years old in the Philippines. The fish are bony — very bony and it's a skill to eat them.
Sinigang is a sour clear broth with one or more sources of meat and/or seafood, a ton of vegetables, and one souring agent. There is a purity of flavor coming from one very clear-cut souring source which neatly dovetails into the umami of the broth from the meat/seafood.
It is traditionally eaten with rice. The rice is frequently topped with fried garlic and/or fresh scallions but these are all details.
There are traditional recipes but there are clearly two dimensions to the dish — what meat/seafood you choose and what souring agent you choose.
Filipinos love sour food. This is a necessity forced by a tropical climate and a few millennia of no refrigeration turned into a cultural trait. It's one of the few ways to preserve food in a tropical climate so that there is no wastage. There is a difference though. The souring agents are cooked through. It gives them a "rounded mellow" flavor rather than the aggressive hit of acidity that you would get without cooking. There has to be enough sourness to wake up the taste buds but not so much as to make it pucker and inedible.
The list of souring agents is endless — vinegar made from all sorts of sources (coconut, palm, sugarcane, pineapples, etc.), tamarind, calamansi, kamias, santol, green mangoes, green guava, star fruit, green pineapples, even leaves of various plants, etc. This list barely even scratches the surface of this subject. The Philippines probably has the longest list of souring agents of any culture that the CC knows about.
Needless to say the souring agents are not substitutable for each other. It does matter whether you are making a sinigang with a hearty ingredient like pork or delicate ones like seafood. Santol which has an astringent tannic component would be most inappropriate for a seafood sinigang while almost all delicate fruit-based versions would work wonderfully.
There are also some classic touches about the choices of vegetables in a sinigang — a starchy root (taro, banana hearts or "New World" potatoes), some "green protein" typically long beans, and some greens in many many different forms — everything from sili (chili leaves) to bok choy, kang kong, and malunggay. Needless to say once tomatoes were discovered and transferred to the "Old World", they became irresistible additions for reasons we have covered on the blog before.
The ingredients are rotated with the combinatorial game that we have talked about extensively on the blog — you will see corn, carrots, radishes, eggplants and all kinds of other vegetables in there. There's a pairing bias though. You see lighter vegetables with seafood and more aggressive ones like eggplants with meat which makes logical sense based upon the palate profile.
Make no mistake though. The star is the sour broth.
One last word about the use of Filipino-style fish sauce called patis. It's basically the same concept as the Roman garum or the Thai nahm pla but it's arguably different. The CC would have no trouble distinguishing it in a blind tasting. You could substitute but it won't be the same.
Just like in Thai recipes, you don't add salt to the dish. The salt comes via the addition of the patis. Additionally, for this recipe with clams, they will give off plenty of salty liquid. Traditionally, the patis is always added towards the end where you can control the level of saltiness. (It also adds substantial umami to the dish.)
This makes a perfectly good soup even in the absence of rice which is heresy as far as the Filipino world is concerned but the CC can live with that.
After all this long explanatory buildup, this is not a difficult recipe. It's what Filipino moms make when they are too lazy to make something. It's really so simple as to defy its excellence.
Sinigang na halaanIngredients
1 large onion (sliced)
1" ginger (chopped thinly)
2 pieces ginger (chopped thinly)
1 chili (sliced lengthwise - optional)
2 small tomatoes (chopped into large pieces)
24 clams
2 cups tamarind water (read below)
2 cups water
1 lotus root (cut into 1/3" slices)
2 cups long beans (sliced into 2" pieces)
4 pieces baby bok choy (tough bottom parts cut off)
2 sprigs chili leaves (sili leaves)
patis (to taste)
vegetable oil
Recipe
Note: Various markets (Filipino, Indian, Thai) carry frozen "green fruits" and both fresh and dried tamarind. They are perfectly excellent in making the various sour broths because the textural component is not important in the least.
First make the tamarind water. Heat up 2 1/2 cups of water with tamarind pods and bring to a boil. Simmer for 10 minutes. Let it sit in the cooling water. When it has cooled down, separate the water from the pods using a strainer. Discard the solids. Retain the tamarind water.
Heat up the oil in a sturdy pot. Add the onions, ginger, garlic and chili (if using) and fry for a bit till soft. Roughly 6 minutes.
Add the tamarind water, the water and bring to a boil. Add the lotus roots and let cook for 3 minutes. Add the long beans and let cook for 4 minutes.
Add the clams. Let them cook till they open. Roughly 8 minutes.
Turn off the heat.
At the very end, add the tomatoes, the bok choy and the chili leaves and let them sit for a few minutes to wilt. Add the patis to taste.
Serve immediately with rice (or not.)
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Bacterial Overload
Recently the CC went to one of those outdoor street fairs where there was a pickle stand. They were also selling some of the pickled juice blended with tomatoes as a "Bloody Mary Mix". The vendors kept apologizing and warning clients who wanted to buy it that it was not pasteurized.
And the CC was completely nonplussed, "So it has come to this?"
It doesn't need to be pasteurized!
There is a fundamental lack of understanding by people who work in food about our relationship with other bio-agents and particularly the organisms that we are deeply symbiotic with namely bacteria.
At this point in time, advertising agencies have basically convinced consumers that bacteria are "evil" but nothing could be further from the truth.
The standard mechanism of cultivating bacteria in the lab is creating something called a "culture". Basically, a swab of bacteria are grown on a substrate and then examined under a microscope. Based on this, it was estimated that something like 1% of a human mass was actually bacteria. Little did people know how wrong this estimate turned out to be.
In the early part of the 21st century, the price of DNA sequencers fell precipitously. What used to be an expensive tool became dirt cheap. Scientists had the entirely brilliant idea of not measuring bacteria by mass but by what percentage of DNA of our body was made up of bacteria. Turns out the answer is between 90-99%.
Remember the two estimates are of different things. One is by weight and the other is by percentage of DNA that is non-human. They are different things but the latter estimate is clearly the more important.
To put it differently, we humans exist for the benefit of the bacteria not the other way around. Of course, we are extraordinarily symbiotic with them. We provide them the food and they provide us both protection by repelling all the "bad bacteria" and do significant portions of body work for us.
In fact, the bacteria on your left and right hands are completely different.
So why did the earlier scientists get it so wrong? How can the estimates be so off?
You should be able to guess the answer. Not every bacteria can grow in the "culture". In fact, they can only survive in that localized environment inside the body that they have adapted to.
The answer is even more complex. There's no such thing as "good" or "bad" bacteria. It's contextual. You move the "good" bacteria from the right spot where they are supposed to be into the wrong spot and they will become "bad" bacteria. The context is completely important.
The bacteria that we are the most symbiotic with is a family called lactobacillus. Every time, you eat yogurt, eat or drink miso, eat pickles, cheese, kimchi, drink beer or wine, you are basically consuming them in vast quantities. They do the fermentation for us, and in turn, they repel other harmful bacteria for us. We are completely reliant on them.
So now maybe you can guess why the pickled juice blended with tomatoes did not need to be pasteurized?
The lactobacilli would repel any invader which there are not that many of to start with because of the acidity of the environment. The lactobacilli are the rare family that has adapted to the acidic environment thanks to their symbiosis with us.
Fermented foods have a long history of being considered "good for you". It was just an empirical observation over large swathes of human history in vastly different regions and contexts but they all came to the same conclusion.
Only in the 21st century is science able to actually dissect how all these various extraordinarily-complex mechanisms actually work.
But the CC's point is a lot larger. How have we gotten to a point where the most basic food interaction is fraught with anxiety? The answer is that Madison Ave. has made you paranoid.
The CC never relies on the expiration dates for milk. Just smell it. It's pretty obvious. Sometimes it will go bad before the expiration date!
The same goes for fermentation and fermented products. They work in a complex way and made correctly will last forever. Experienced picklers never throw out the juice. They use a cup of it to start off the next batch because it has the complex blend of bacteria all ready to give the next batch the right start.
Pickling is one of the greatest achievements in food technology. Just remember that for most of human history, humans were food deprived. Our modern calorie-rich environment is an extraordinarily recent development barely 50 years old. Pickling was the trick that allowed humans to store food for the winter. It also gave variety and complexity to their diet and the symbiotic relationship with the bacteria made for healthier humans.
The CC hopes that this explanation convinces people not to think of bacteria as "evil" but our necessary partners in the game of life. We need them; they need us. We can't actually function without them.
So the next time you're at the fair eating a pickle-on-a-stick, you should not think to yourself "Ooh! crunchy cucumber", you should really be thinking "Ooh! Tons of bacteria with a side helping of crunchy cucumber!"
And the CC was completely nonplussed, "So it has come to this?"
It doesn't need to be pasteurized!
There is a fundamental lack of understanding by people who work in food about our relationship with other bio-agents and particularly the organisms that we are deeply symbiotic with namely bacteria.
At this point in time, advertising agencies have basically convinced consumers that bacteria are "evil" but nothing could be further from the truth.
The standard mechanism of cultivating bacteria in the lab is creating something called a "culture". Basically, a swab of bacteria are grown on a substrate and then examined under a microscope. Based on this, it was estimated that something like 1% of a human mass was actually bacteria. Little did people know how wrong this estimate turned out to be.
In the early part of the 21st century, the price of DNA sequencers fell precipitously. What used to be an expensive tool became dirt cheap. Scientists had the entirely brilliant idea of not measuring bacteria by mass but by what percentage of DNA of our body was made up of bacteria. Turns out the answer is between 90-99%.
Remember the two estimates are of different things. One is by weight and the other is by percentage of DNA that is non-human. They are different things but the latter estimate is clearly the more important.
To put it differently, we humans exist for the benefit of the bacteria not the other way around. Of course, we are extraordinarily symbiotic with them. We provide them the food and they provide us both protection by repelling all the "bad bacteria" and do significant portions of body work for us.
In fact, the bacteria on your left and right hands are completely different.
So why did the earlier scientists get it so wrong? How can the estimates be so off?
You should be able to guess the answer. Not every bacteria can grow in the "culture". In fact, they can only survive in that localized environment inside the body that they have adapted to.
The answer is even more complex. There's no such thing as "good" or "bad" bacteria. It's contextual. You move the "good" bacteria from the right spot where they are supposed to be into the wrong spot and they will become "bad" bacteria. The context is completely important.
The bacteria that we are the most symbiotic with is a family called lactobacillus. Every time, you eat yogurt, eat or drink miso, eat pickles, cheese, kimchi, drink beer or wine, you are basically consuming them in vast quantities. They do the fermentation for us, and in turn, they repel other harmful bacteria for us. We are completely reliant on them.
So now maybe you can guess why the pickled juice blended with tomatoes did not need to be pasteurized?
The lactobacilli would repel any invader which there are not that many of to start with because of the acidity of the environment. The lactobacilli are the rare family that has adapted to the acidic environment thanks to their symbiosis with us.
Fermented foods have a long history of being considered "good for you". It was just an empirical observation over large swathes of human history in vastly different regions and contexts but they all came to the same conclusion.
Only in the 21st century is science able to actually dissect how all these various extraordinarily-complex mechanisms actually work.
But the CC's point is a lot larger. How have we gotten to a point where the most basic food interaction is fraught with anxiety? The answer is that Madison Ave. has made you paranoid.
The CC never relies on the expiration dates for milk. Just smell it. It's pretty obvious. Sometimes it will go bad before the expiration date!
The same goes for fermentation and fermented products. They work in a complex way and made correctly will last forever. Experienced picklers never throw out the juice. They use a cup of it to start off the next batch because it has the complex blend of bacteria all ready to give the next batch the right start.
Pickling is one of the greatest achievements in food technology. Just remember that for most of human history, humans were food deprived. Our modern calorie-rich environment is an extraordinarily recent development barely 50 years old. Pickling was the trick that allowed humans to store food for the winter. It also gave variety and complexity to their diet and the symbiotic relationship with the bacteria made for healthier humans.
The CC hopes that this explanation convinces people not to think of bacteria as "evil" but our necessary partners in the game of life. We need them; they need us. We can't actually function without them.
So the next time you're at the fair eating a pickle-on-a-stick, you should not think to yourself "Ooh! crunchy cucumber", you should really be thinking "Ooh! Tons of bacteria with a side helping of crunchy cucumber!"
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
No, This is Not a Restaurant!
Many a home cook is dazzled by the sparkling execution of amazing dishes in restaurants and then they find themselves slightly disappointed when they try to recreate it at home.
Quelle surprise!
A restaurant is a professional enterprise whose goal is to make money in exchange for fine food. Your home is where you need to make food daily. There are significant differences between the two kitchens.
Firstly, there's just a question of simple energy. Unless you have a professional range stove at home, there is no way you are pumping out the BTU like that of a professional kitchen. You need power. Real power. Power that makes it hard to breathe in the heat. Most restaurant kitchens are insanely hot. So fuggedaboutit. You don't have it. Just enjoy the meal when you go out and forget about reproducing it. Certain dishes are impossible to cook at home.
Secondly, only someone who has never gone behind the scenes at the finest of professional restaurants would assume that they grind pepper out of the ludicrous pepper grinders. It's all pre-ground. The salt and pepper is sitting in large bowls which they can use to toss by the handful. And they do toss by the handful!
The single biggest difference between a restaurant and "home cooking" is that a restaurant uses vastly more salt. The CC believes that most people go for it under the rubric of "indulgence" which a spirit of abstemiousness prevents at home.
The same is true of the "fresh" spices. Pre-chopped. So are almost all of the ingredients. It's all pre-prepped and sitting in a refrigerator including the fish. Particularly the fish.
Thirdly, the idea that they are going to whip up a five-course meal for you at the drop of a pin is beyond ridiculous. Of course, it's all fuckin' pre-made. The sauces are pre-made. Everything is. How do you think you get a dish on your plate that takes hours to make within minutes?
Fourthly, it's only the last step of the execution that is left to the kids. And yes, they are kids. They are in training in the kitchen. Yes, they may have talent but no famous chef has ever made your meal not unless you are a billionaire.
Ironically, it's the third fact that cuts two ways and there are two separate lessons that one may learn from it.
The easiest way for a great home cook to compete with a restaurant is to offer meals at dinner parties which rely on speed of execution. Last minute speed where reheating would kill the product. A fancy restaurant can't compete simply because of the economics. (Incidentally, when you have great meals in Madrid, Rome, Istanbul, Mumbai and Singapore, this is the trick. The restaurants run in cheap rent districts. They are playing this game.)
The second more pragmatic version is that you need to learn what can be made ahead of time. This is crucial to greatness in the home kitchen.
So go ahead. Say it already. Liberate yourself.
No, this is not a restaurant. This is entirely different!
Quelle surprise!
A restaurant is a professional enterprise whose goal is to make money in exchange for fine food. Your home is where you need to make food daily. There are significant differences between the two kitchens.
Firstly, there's just a question of simple energy. Unless you have a professional range stove at home, there is no way you are pumping out the BTU like that of a professional kitchen. You need power. Real power. Power that makes it hard to breathe in the heat. Most restaurant kitchens are insanely hot. So fuggedaboutit. You don't have it. Just enjoy the meal when you go out and forget about reproducing it. Certain dishes are impossible to cook at home.
Secondly, only someone who has never gone behind the scenes at the finest of professional restaurants would assume that they grind pepper out of the ludicrous pepper grinders. It's all pre-ground. The salt and pepper is sitting in large bowls which they can use to toss by the handful. And they do toss by the handful!
The single biggest difference between a restaurant and "home cooking" is that a restaurant uses vastly more salt. The CC believes that most people go for it under the rubric of "indulgence" which a spirit of abstemiousness prevents at home.
The same is true of the "fresh" spices. Pre-chopped. So are almost all of the ingredients. It's all pre-prepped and sitting in a refrigerator including the fish. Particularly the fish.
Thirdly, the idea that they are going to whip up a five-course meal for you at the drop of a pin is beyond ridiculous. Of course, it's all fuckin' pre-made. The sauces are pre-made. Everything is. How do you think you get a dish on your plate that takes hours to make within minutes?
Fourthly, it's only the last step of the execution that is left to the kids. And yes, they are kids. They are in training in the kitchen. Yes, they may have talent but no famous chef has ever made your meal not unless you are a billionaire.
Ironically, it's the third fact that cuts two ways and there are two separate lessons that one may learn from it.
The easiest way for a great home cook to compete with a restaurant is to offer meals at dinner parties which rely on speed of execution. Last minute speed where reheating would kill the product. A fancy restaurant can't compete simply because of the economics. (Incidentally, when you have great meals in Madrid, Rome, Istanbul, Mumbai and Singapore, this is the trick. The restaurants run in cheap rent districts. They are playing this game.)
The second more pragmatic version is that you need to learn what can be made ahead of time. This is crucial to greatness in the home kitchen.
So go ahead. Say it already. Liberate yourself.
No, this is not a restaurant. This is entirely different!
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Plating Tricks
One of the more clever tricks that a talented home cook can learn from chefs is the idea of layering things on a plate beneath the main dish.
It's easy enough to sprinkle stuff on top but doing so beneath where it lies invisible involves a little bit of understanding. This is a technique that can only work for dishes that are more or less constructed in the French manner. It wouldn't work for Chinese cooking, for example, which has an entirely different aesthetic in terms of serving.
When we eat something, we inevitably press down (knives + forks) or we scrape (spoons). Either way you are literally touching and pressing down against the bottom of your plate. Compare with chopsticks where you lift away from the plate.
The idea then is that you can subtly enhance the flavor in ways that are entirely unobvious.
For example, you can put a dry powder at the bottom of a plate on which you serve a salad. The powder if suitably dry and crunchy will not only adhere to the greens as the fork presses down but hit the tongue first because of the way the salad is eaten. You will get a "hit" of a crunchy nature that constrasts with the salad.
A similar related idea is that of a gastrique served beneath meat and seafood dishes. It's a sweet-sour reduction that will adhere to the meat as you cut it. (Pressure on the fork; knife does the work.)
It's theatrical magic but entirely simple once you understand the trick that makes it tick. It's a pretty general concept only limited by your imagination. Two ideas are presented below for your delectation.
Almond Breadcrumbs
Ingredients
12 blanched almonds
1/3 cup breadcrumbs
salt
Recipe
Roast the almonds in the oven at 350°F for about 12 minutes. Make sure they don't burn. Chop fine.
Process the almonds, breadcrumbs and salt to a fine powder in a coffee grinder or a food processor.
Orange Gastrique
Ingredients
1 cup orange juice
2 tbsp. vinegar
salt
Recipe
Combine and reduce at medium high heat until thickened. Be careful that it doesn't burn.
It's easy enough to sprinkle stuff on top but doing so beneath where it lies invisible involves a little bit of understanding. This is a technique that can only work for dishes that are more or less constructed in the French manner. It wouldn't work for Chinese cooking, for example, which has an entirely different aesthetic in terms of serving.
When we eat something, we inevitably press down (knives + forks) or we scrape (spoons). Either way you are literally touching and pressing down against the bottom of your plate. Compare with chopsticks where you lift away from the plate.
The idea then is that you can subtly enhance the flavor in ways that are entirely unobvious.
For example, you can put a dry powder at the bottom of a plate on which you serve a salad. The powder if suitably dry and crunchy will not only adhere to the greens as the fork presses down but hit the tongue first because of the way the salad is eaten. You will get a "hit" of a crunchy nature that constrasts with the salad.
A similar related idea is that of a gastrique served beneath meat and seafood dishes. It's a sweet-sour reduction that will adhere to the meat as you cut it. (Pressure on the fork; knife does the work.)
It's theatrical magic but entirely simple once you understand the trick that makes it tick. It's a pretty general concept only limited by your imagination. Two ideas are presented below for your delectation.
Almond Breadcrumbs
Ingredients
12 blanched almonds
1/3 cup breadcrumbs
salt
Recipe
Roast the almonds in the oven at 350°F for about 12 minutes. Make sure they don't burn. Chop fine.
Process the almonds, breadcrumbs and salt to a fine powder in a coffee grinder or a food processor.
Orange Gastrique
Ingredients
1 cup orange juice
2 tbsp. vinegar
salt
Recipe
Combine and reduce at medium high heat until thickened. Be careful that it doesn't burn.
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Technical Artistry
At its broadest level, the art of cooking is split into three broad categories - cooking, bread-making, and pastry.
It's routinely mentioned that the pastry-making is a science but the remaining two are arts. Ever wonder why that is the case?
Let's digress since the CC loves digressions (particularly when they shed light on the subject via metaphor.)
Many moons ago when the CC was but a wee lad, he studied chemistry. Inorganic chemistry was all moonlight and madness but organic chemistry was systematic and staid. It took twenty further years to figure out why this was the case and the answer is obvious as all answers, in hindsight, routinely are.
Organic chemistry consists of studying just three molecules (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen) which have the advantage of being "light" (meaning: the quantum mechanics is particularly simple.)
(You can add in the rest - nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, etc. but it doesn't change the basic fact.)
So it's simple because it's a highly restrictive system. The interactions are easy to understand and model.
Compare with inorganic chemistry (100+ fuckers!) with complex quantum interactions and you've gotten yourself a mess.
What does this have to do with cooking?
Everything as it turns out.
Pastry-making consists of manipulating just four variables - flour, eggs, milk†, sugar. The products are complex but the interaction can be modeled almost perfectly. Even better, the products are regulated so you know exactly how much fat and water there is in the milk and you can weigh the flour, eggs and sugar. There is total control.
Compare it with cooking - you have almost no control. The ripeness of roughly 200+ ingredients varies, the meat and fish vary in complex ways, and the water content of vegetables changes with the seasons.
Bread-making, at least classically, is the same. You have no control over the starter (= combination of yeast + bacteria.) Plus, it changes seasonally with the temperature and humidity.
So you must improvise even though you know the rough path of the score.
Pastry-making is score-driven. Cooking needs basic routine and technique but is ultimately improvisatory.
Cooking is jazz, baby!
† Milk includes milk-related products like butter, cream, cheese, etc.
It's routinely mentioned that the pastry-making is a science but the remaining two are arts. Ever wonder why that is the case?
Let's digress since the CC loves digressions (particularly when they shed light on the subject via metaphor.)
Many moons ago when the CC was but a wee lad, he studied chemistry. Inorganic chemistry was all moonlight and madness but organic chemistry was systematic and staid. It took twenty further years to figure out why this was the case and the answer is obvious as all answers, in hindsight, routinely are.
Organic chemistry consists of studying just three molecules (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen) which have the advantage of being "light" (meaning: the quantum mechanics is particularly simple.)
(You can add in the rest - nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, etc. but it doesn't change the basic fact.)
So it's simple because it's a highly restrictive system. The interactions are easy to understand and model.
Compare with inorganic chemistry (100+ fuckers!) with complex quantum interactions and you've gotten yourself a mess.
What does this have to do with cooking?
Everything as it turns out.
Pastry-making consists of manipulating just four variables - flour, eggs, milk†, sugar. The products are complex but the interaction can be modeled almost perfectly. Even better, the products are regulated so you know exactly how much fat and water there is in the milk and you can weigh the flour, eggs and sugar. There is total control.
Compare it with cooking - you have almost no control. The ripeness of roughly 200+ ingredients varies, the meat and fish vary in complex ways, and the water content of vegetables changes with the seasons.
Bread-making, at least classically, is the same. You have no control over the starter (= combination of yeast + bacteria.) Plus, it changes seasonally with the temperature and humidity.
So you must improvise even though you know the rough path of the score.
Pastry-making is score-driven. Cooking needs basic routine and technique but is ultimately improvisatory.
Cooking is jazz, baby!
† Milk includes milk-related products like butter, cream, cheese, etc.
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Flavor Infusion
Have you ever had a watery soup with only one or two ingredients that was absolutely delicious? Did you ever wonder how they managed to get it infused with so much flavor? Did you suspect them of using broth?
You'd be wrong.
It is possible to bring out a vast array of flavors from just a few vegetables and water but you need to know a few tricks first.
The Italians call the technique insaporire – to infuse with flavor.
The first and the hardest part is that you cannot hurry the process. Time is the secret to success here.
The second is that you need to actually drop the vegetables in the "correct" order. The order is actually based on water content something that you will not learn from an Italian nonna's, who know these things instinctively, but since you and the CC aren't of a certain age yet, we resort to science.
The vegetables must be fried in order of least water content to most water content. Onions, leeks, garlic come first, followed by root vegetables like carrot and potato, followed by celery, followed by cooked beans, followed by mushrooms and leafy vegetables come last.
The last part is that you actually need to fry the leafy vegetables not just cook them. They have a ton of water so they need to be both blanched and wrung dry. (The broth can be preserved and added back to the soup when the time of frying is over.)
This really really matters. You cannot hurry the process nor short-circuit it.
What is really happening here?
When you fry vegetables languidly at a medium-low heat, you are basically allowing Maestro Maillard to work his magic.
When you add the water, you are just transferring the rich flavor from the surface of the vegetables to the broth. It allows you to interleave two steps into one and more importantly, do it in an economic manner – something that has always been important in the kitchen.
There are generalizations on this technique. You could use a ton of vegetables. That's what a minestrone really is. Or you could add greens. Or bung in an anchovy. Or a little diced pork. Or some raw shrimp right before serving.
However, the technique of slow frying to build the flavor remains the same.
Let's showcase this with a classic summer recipe.
Ingredients
2 leeks or spring onions (thinly sliced)
1 zucchini (sliced into half-moons)
1/2 cup white beans
2 sprigs rosemary
1 sprig sage
sea salt
black pepper
1/2 cup parmigiano-reggiano
Recipe
Cook the beans with 1 sprig of rosemary and some sea salt. Drain and set aside.
In a medium vessel, heat up some olive oil. When it shimmers, add the leeks and turn the heat to medium-low. Let it cook languidly for at least 10 minutes. Make sure they don't brown. Add the black pepper.
Add the zucchini and let it cook languidly for at least 10 minutes till the zucchini is limp but not falling apart. It may be browned in places which is fine.
Add the beans and cook for an additional 5 minutes.
Add the water and bring to a boil. Serve at once topped with the parmigiano-reggiano and additional black pepper. Crusty bread works its charm here.
You'd be wrong.
It is possible to bring out a vast array of flavors from just a few vegetables and water but you need to know a few tricks first.
The Italians call the technique insaporire – to infuse with flavor.
The first and the hardest part is that you cannot hurry the process. Time is the secret to success here.
The second is that you need to actually drop the vegetables in the "correct" order. The order is actually based on water content something that you will not learn from an Italian nonna's, who know these things instinctively, but since you and the CC aren't of a certain age yet, we resort to science.
The vegetables must be fried in order of least water content to most water content. Onions, leeks, garlic come first, followed by root vegetables like carrot and potato, followed by celery, followed by cooked beans, followed by mushrooms and leafy vegetables come last.
The last part is that you actually need to fry the leafy vegetables not just cook them. They have a ton of water so they need to be both blanched and wrung dry. (The broth can be preserved and added back to the soup when the time of frying is over.)
This really really matters. You cannot hurry the process nor short-circuit it.
What is really happening here?
When you fry vegetables languidly at a medium-low heat, you are basically allowing Maestro Maillard to work his magic.
When you add the water, you are just transferring the rich flavor from the surface of the vegetables to the broth. It allows you to interleave two steps into one and more importantly, do it in an economic manner – something that has always been important in the kitchen.
There are generalizations on this technique. You could use a ton of vegetables. That's what a minestrone really is. Or you could add greens. Or bung in an anchovy. Or a little diced pork. Or some raw shrimp right before serving.
However, the technique of slow frying to build the flavor remains the same.
Let's showcase this with a classic summer recipe.
Ingredients
2 leeks or spring onions (thinly sliced)
1 zucchini (sliced into half-moons)
1/2 cup white beans
2 sprigs rosemary
1 sprig sage
sea salt
black pepper
1/2 cup parmigiano-reggiano
Recipe
Cook the beans with 1 sprig of rosemary and some sea salt. Drain and set aside.
In a medium vessel, heat up some olive oil. When it shimmers, add the leeks and turn the heat to medium-low. Let it cook languidly for at least 10 minutes. Make sure they don't brown. Add the black pepper.
Add the zucchini and let it cook languidly for at least 10 minutes till the zucchini is limp but not falling apart. It may be browned in places which is fine.
Add the beans and cook for an additional 5 minutes.
Add the water and bring to a boil. Serve at once topped with the parmigiano-reggiano and additional black pepper. Crusty bread works its charm here.
Monday, May 13, 2013
Frying
This January, one of the CC's friend's mother got burnt while trying to fry something. She was not hurt. It was more distress than trauma, thankfully.
Since we here at this blog tend towards the analytic bent of mind, it behooves the CC to explain what went wrong.
Let us take a quick detour into what cooking actually does. Cooking transforms substances that may or may not be edible in their raw form into edible ones in the presence of heat†.
The mechanism of heat transfer matters of course.
If you boil something, by definition, the temperature at the surface of the boiled object can never go higher than the boiling point of water (= 100°C.) With both baking and frying, you can go to temperatures that are a lot higher.
There is a second technical difference. When you boil something, you can't really "lose" water. The cellular structures may burst and release water but you have water all around you. There's nowhere for the water to go. Comparatively, in both baking and frying, the water content of the burst cells is lost in the form of steam.
Once you understand this, you begin to realize why baking and frying have a lot more in common than is obvious. This is why many "low-fat" cookbooks substitute baking for frying.
It's a buncha bollocks though.
They are emphatically not the same — a proposition that is trivially verifiable by simple tasting. The CC doesn't believe that anyone in the entire history of mankind has ever mistaken a deep-fried food for a baked one and vice-versa, claims to the contrary not-withstanding.
Why would that be?
In baking, you are using air to transfer the heat. In frying, you are using hot oil.
The oil enters the surface of the burst cell and stays there. Ditto for the air. You can blot the oil out using paper towels but you can never remove it completely. The fat has flavor and the CC seriously doubts that anyone has ever confused the taste of fat with that of air.
To recap so far, frying is a precise mechanism of dessication (= removing moisture from food) in the presence of high heat with oil as the medium of transfer.
Now, let's dig into the precise mechanics. We will use the humble potato chip as the example.
When you put a chip into the fryer, the cells on the surface are heated to a temperature that is a lot higher than 100°C. The water in the cells heats up, converts to steam and expands; it bursts the cellular wall structures which are not rigid enough to hold it in, and enters the oil. Oil and water are immiscible and so the steam rapidly exits by rising to the surface.
The bubbles you see when you add food to hot oil is steam escaping the system.
After all the water is gone, you have a solid suspended in a medium of high heat but with no water to give up. This is the second phase and it works exactly like baking. You have a hot surface and a solid and you get a classic Maillard reaction going.
This is why you need to fry "past the point of the bubbles". This is also why there is similarity between baking and frying in the first place. (The difference, of course, is that a small amount of oil has entered the burst surface cellular structures in frying.)
Everyone with the CC so far? Onwards we go!
What happens to a more complex object? An arancini, for example. (Leftover risotto with a surface of egg and breadcrumbs.)
A large object cannot heat up very quickly. This is just Laplace's equation in practice. The surface rapidly turns crisp while the interior stays "moist" because the temperature never hits the steam point.
Experienced Sicilian housewives make "large" arancini whereas johnny-come-lately's try to dry out the rice. They are not playing the same game. (You can easily figure out the losers.)
Welcome to the platonic ideal of frying!
The surface must be crisp but the interior still moist since that is what humans desire.
This is also why fried foods are best eaten fresh. Laplace's equation tells you that the interior will continue to cook even when you pull the object out of the fryer because the surface is still at a very high temperature and air is a terrible conductor of heat. The heat is mostly going inwards. The interior temperature eventually hits 100°C; it generates steam and the fried object turns "soggy".
What happens when you have a very small soggy object possibly with some air pockets?
The outside has crisped up and the object is small enough that the interior has hit 100°C so steam is being generated. The air pockets expand dangerously and the pressure makes the object burst. The internal water hits the oil along with the burst air and you get an explosion of dangerously hot oil.
That is what happened to the CC's friend's mom.
If you fry a small object in hot oil, you must as a matter of necessity compress it using your hands to have absolutely no air pockets. You also need to control the size v/s moisture. It's a pretty subtle game.
Amateurs need not apply. Demonstrably, experience without theory means nothing.
To sum up, experienced chefs do one of the following:
Once you understand this, the tricks start making sense.
Ever wonder why potato chips stay crispy for days but fried food turns "soggy"?
The chips are so thin they have given up all their moisture but traditional fried food still has a ton of water in it.
Ever wonder why you are told that the oil must be piping hot before you fry anything?
The answer is that the interior shouldn't heat up. You want the surface to dessicate and Maillard-ify (to invent a verb) but the interior must not hit 100°C.
Every wonder why experienced chefs "double-fry" french-fries after sticking them in the fridge after round one?
Once you pre-cook and stick in the fridge you have done two things. You have dessicated the surface and cooled off the fries. When you drop them the second time in boiling oil, you get the crisp surface but the interior which is now quite cold will not hit the steam point. The fries will be crisp on the outside and moist on the inside.
There is no magic. There has never been magic. There will never be any magic.
Technique has always mattered at the highest level but what really matters is the science behind the technique.
† Raw spinach is technically poisonous. You'd have to eat a lot to find out though.
‡ e.g. arancini.
§ e.g. french fries.
Since we here at this blog tend towards the analytic bent of mind, it behooves the CC to explain what went wrong.
Let us take a quick detour into what cooking actually does. Cooking transforms substances that may or may not be edible in their raw form into edible ones in the presence of heat†.
The mechanism of heat transfer matters of course.
If you boil something, by definition, the temperature at the surface of the boiled object can never go higher than the boiling point of water (= 100°C.) With both baking and frying, you can go to temperatures that are a lot higher.
There is a second technical difference. When you boil something, you can't really "lose" water. The cellular structures may burst and release water but you have water all around you. There's nowhere for the water to go. Comparatively, in both baking and frying, the water content of the burst cells is lost in the form of steam.
Once you understand this, you begin to realize why baking and frying have a lot more in common than is obvious. This is why many "low-fat" cookbooks substitute baking for frying.
It's a buncha bollocks though.
They are emphatically not the same — a proposition that is trivially verifiable by simple tasting. The CC doesn't believe that anyone in the entire history of mankind has ever mistaken a deep-fried food for a baked one and vice-versa, claims to the contrary not-withstanding.
Why would that be?
In baking, you are using air to transfer the heat. In frying, you are using hot oil.
The oil enters the surface of the burst cell and stays there. Ditto for the air. You can blot the oil out using paper towels but you can never remove it completely. The fat has flavor and the CC seriously doubts that anyone has ever confused the taste of fat with that of air.
To recap so far, frying is a precise mechanism of dessication (= removing moisture from food) in the presence of high heat with oil as the medium of transfer.
Now, let's dig into the precise mechanics. We will use the humble potato chip as the example.
When you put a chip into the fryer, the cells on the surface are heated to a temperature that is a lot higher than 100°C. The water in the cells heats up, converts to steam and expands; it bursts the cellular wall structures which are not rigid enough to hold it in, and enters the oil. Oil and water are immiscible and so the steam rapidly exits by rising to the surface.
The bubbles you see when you add food to hot oil is steam escaping the system.
After all the water is gone, you have a solid suspended in a medium of high heat but with no water to give up. This is the second phase and it works exactly like baking. You have a hot surface and a solid and you get a classic Maillard reaction going.
This is why you need to fry "past the point of the bubbles". This is also why there is similarity between baking and frying in the first place. (The difference, of course, is that a small amount of oil has entered the burst surface cellular structures in frying.)
Everyone with the CC so far? Onwards we go!
What happens to a more complex object? An arancini, for example. (Leftover risotto with a surface of egg and breadcrumbs.)
A large object cannot heat up very quickly. This is just Laplace's equation in practice. The surface rapidly turns crisp while the interior stays "moist" because the temperature never hits the steam point.
Experienced Sicilian housewives make "large" arancini whereas johnny-come-lately's try to dry out the rice. They are not playing the same game. (You can easily figure out the losers.)
Welcome to the platonic ideal of frying!
The surface must be crisp but the interior still moist since that is what humans desire.
This is also why fried foods are best eaten fresh. Laplace's equation tells you that the interior will continue to cook even when you pull the object out of the fryer because the surface is still at a very high temperature and air is a terrible conductor of heat. The heat is mostly going inwards. The interior temperature eventually hits 100°C; it generates steam and the fried object turns "soggy".
What happens when you have a very small soggy object possibly with some air pockets?
The outside has crisped up and the object is small enough that the interior has hit 100°C so steam is being generated. The air pockets expand dangerously and the pressure makes the object burst. The internal water hits the oil along with the burst air and you get an explosion of dangerously hot oil.
That is what happened to the CC's friend's mom.
If you fry a small object in hot oil, you must as a matter of necessity compress it using your hands to have absolutely no air pockets. You also need to control the size v/s moisture. It's a pretty subtle game.
Amateurs need not apply. Demonstrably, experience without theory means nothing.
To sum up, experienced chefs do one of the following:
- Pre-dessicate the object either naturally or artificially.
- Fry a largish object with a dry surface and wet interior‡.
- Fry a small object with a dry surface and wet interior which has no air pockets naturally§.
- Fry a small object with a dry surface and only barely moist interior which has no air pockets by design at a much higher temperature (= faster.)
Once you understand this, the tricks start making sense.
Ever wonder why potato chips stay crispy for days but fried food turns "soggy"?
The chips are so thin they have given up all their moisture but traditional fried food still has a ton of water in it.
Ever wonder why you are told that the oil must be piping hot before you fry anything?
The answer is that the interior shouldn't heat up. You want the surface to dessicate and Maillard-ify (to invent a verb) but the interior must not hit 100°C.
Every wonder why experienced chefs "double-fry" french-fries after sticking them in the fridge after round one?
Once you pre-cook and stick in the fridge you have done two things. You have dessicated the surface and cooled off the fries. When you drop them the second time in boiling oil, you get the crisp surface but the interior which is now quite cold will not hit the steam point. The fries will be crisp on the outside and moist on the inside.
There is no magic. There has never been magic. There will never be any magic.
Technique has always mattered at the highest level but what really matters is the science behind the technique.
† Raw spinach is technically poisonous. You'd have to eat a lot to find out though.
‡ e.g. arancini.
§ e.g. french fries.
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