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.

Roasted Marrow Bones with Parsley Salad

The CC has been craving to make this recipe ever since he ate it at a restaurant a few years ago. It took a while to source the marrow bones and a little longer for the weather to get cold enough to make it.

The recipe is based on one that Fergus Henderson re-popularized. It's a complete classic and deserves to be so. It's also completely straightforward and will make your cooking seem fancier than it is if you serve it at a dinner party. (If you scarf it down by yourself, which you very well might, this blog is a judgment-free zone.)

The killer step is the combination of the French way of serving (with fleur de sel) and the English way of serving (with a tart parsley salad) both on toasted crusty bread. The English and the French ways are fairly related since La Manche is not very wide and the Norman Invasion is now more than a millenium old.

Ingredients

(serves 4)

Marrow Bones

8 marrow bones

Parsley Salad

3 cups parsley leaves
1 large shallot (sliced into paper-thin quarter-rings)
2 tbsp salt-preserved capers (de-salted, chopped)

1 tbsp champagne vinegar
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp mustard

black pepper (lots!)

fleur de sel (to serve)
toasted crusty bread (4-6 per serving)

Notes

[1] It's very rich so a little goes a long way. Two bones each per serving works very well although three each with some extra toast would make a nutritious complete meal.

[2] The salad is best assembled at the last minute and it needs to be tarter than the usual salad so go with a 1:2 ratio of vinegar to olive oil rather than the traditional 1:3.

[3] The capers need to be preserved in salt not vinegar.

[4] The tiniest dab of mustard actually gives a faint background taste that is really great.

[5] The CC rebelled against the original recipe which finely dices the shallots. Extremely fine quarter-rings give it a much more refined texture which contrasts the salad against the rich creamy marrow.

[6] The first step in the recipe is entirely optional. It's very chef-y and it is aesthetic in nature not functional. Skip it if necessary.

[7] The timing of this recipe crucially depends on whether you start with thawed bones prepped or frozen bones. The times and the size of the bones matter greatly. Chez CC, we serve as they get ready, the sizzling bones are always coming out on time. Sharing works wonders.

Recipe

If you are going to prep the bones, dump them with ice into a bowl with two tablespoons of salt and cover with cold water. Every three hours, drain the water which will be bloody and repeat the process. Four times and you will have immaculate white bones and there will be no more blood in the water. This step is really aesthetic. You can roast the frozen bones directly. The blood will turn black when roasted. (Chefs are control-freaks about precision so this step really helps because the bones are now thawed and can be controlled precisely.)

Preheat the oven to 450°F.

Make the toast and set aside. Slice a baguette on the bias and let it toast in the oven. Depending on the slice size, it should be 4-5 minutes.

Clean the bones and make sure they are absolutely dry. If they are short you can put them vertically, with the flat sized down. Otherwise lay them horizontally. Don't sweat this.

Roast in the oven for 25 minutes. It will take 45 minutes if they are frozen. The marrow will be quivering like jelly and slightly puffy when it's done.

Meanwhile, assemble the parsley salad. Make the vinaigrette. Toss the salad.

Serve the roasted marrow bones with the parsley salad, toast and fleur de sel on the side. Eating is a matter of topping the toast with whatever combination your heart desires.

Mung Beans with Caramelized Onions & Nigella Seeds

This is a truly superb dish. It is apparently one of the most loved recipes at the Çırağan Palace in Istanbul and this version comes courtesy of Silvena Rowe.

It's a masterpiece of textural contrast so do follow all the steps as mentioned down to the last step.

The salad is on the bottom right. (Remaining recipes to follow.)


Ingredients

1/2 cup mung beans

2 small onions (sliced fine)
3 shallots (sliced fine)

1/4 cup olive oil (your regular)

3 tbsp olive oil (your finest)
6 tbsp. red wine vinegar
2 tbsp. finely chopped parsley
1 tsp Dijon mustard

sea salt
black pepper

8-10 sun-dried tomatoes (chopped)

1 tbsp. nigella seeds (toasted)

Recipe

Cook the mung beans for about 30 minutes until tender. Be careful not to overcook them. You want a little bit of crunch. Drain and set aside.

Toast the nigella seeds lightly in a skillet. Be careful since they will burn easily. Set aside.

Heat the regular olive oil in a large skillet over low heat. Add the onions and sautée for 20-25 minutes until they are soft and lightly golden. Do not let them caramelize. Add a tbsp. of water if they seem to be cooking too quickly.

(Note: the onions are cooked but the shallots are not! The textural game is important.)

Combine the fine olive oil, shallots, vinegar, parsley, mustard, sea salt and black pepper to make a fine vinaigrette.

Toss the vinaigrette with the mung beans and the sun-dried tomatoes. Top with caramelized onions and the toasted nigella seeds.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

Vinaigrette

Most of the time, vinaigrette in restaurants sucks. The only time the CC has seen it perfectly made was, ironically, in a Japanese soba joint.

Just let that seep in for about six seconds.

This is about the most iconic of sauces. It's so easy to make that you'd have to spend energy, effort and earnestness to screw it up. Six-year olds do it with panache (and instruction.)

Let's start at the very beginning - a decidedly good place to start.

Vinaigrette is an emulsion of oil and acid to which are added salt, possibly other spices, and possibly an emulsifier.

Oil and water are immiscible. They will never mix because all oils are non-polar molecules and water is polar in nature. Hence in order to get them to mix, you need to provide energy in some form. That's what the whisking is all about. You are injecting energy into the system which translates into kinetic energy for the molecules which then thrash about like crazy and go nuts like teenagers in a mosh pit which is what an emulsion really is.

(And yes, in case you were wondering, the CC's mind does actually think like that.)

If you leave an emulsion by itself, over time, it will separate out into its components. This is because through Brownian motion the molecules are joshing about all the time and the polar molecules seek out other polar ones and the nobody cares too much about the non-polar ones which aggregate by default.

(Insert standard high-school prom joke here.)

Which brings us to:

An emulsifier is an agent that helps stabilize the emulsion. There are various mechanisms by which it works and the CC knows that if he talks about kinetic stability, what little audience there is would vanish like teenage kids when the cops show up so let's just say there are two main emulsifiers that you need to know about — mustard and egg yolks.

Vinaigrette is basically O/W or (O + S)/W if you really want to go down the rabbit hole.

(And yes, in case you are wondering, the CC went down that particular rabbit hole a long time ago.)

Now that we've gotten that out of the way.

There's a standard formula for vinaigrette. We have a few thousand years of experience on this subject collectively so it's a well-oiled (sic) and well-understood problem. Except that the restaurants missed the memo.

The broad formula is straightforward: 3 parts oil to 1 part acid by volume, salt to taste.

Do not deviate from this unless you really know what you are doing.

The variations occur along three different dimensions:

1. Different kinds of acid:
• Vinegars
• White wine vinegar
• Red wine vinegar
• Champagne vinegar
• Sherry vinegar
• Balsamic vinegar
• Fruit vinegars
• Apple
• Cherry
• (the list is endless)
• (the list is endless)
• Juices of tart fruits
• Lemon
• Lime
• Seville orange
• (the list is endless)
• Other souring agents^†.
• Raw mango juice
• Tamarind
• Bilimbi juice
• (the list is endless)
2. Different kinds of oil:
• Olive oil
• Walnut oil
• Hazelnut oil
• Almond oil
• (the list is endless)
3. Spices
• Pepper
• Mustard
• Shallots
• Herbs
• Rosemary
• Sage
• (the list is endless)
• Cheese (yep! being treated like a spice)
• (the list is endless)

There are three meta-rules that need to be respected:

1. [ Law of Awesomeness ] Both the vinegar and the oil need to be superb. (Idea is simple: the sauce is naked so you need to have fragrant stuff.)
2. [ Law of Cheapness ] If you have an overpowering ingredient (e.g. balsamic vinegar, mustard, rosemary, etc.) then use ingredients that are excellent but are inexpensive.
3. [ Law of Simplicity ] At best one or two ingredients need to shine. Everything else needs to be in the background.

That's all there is to it. Why this is so hard is beyond the CC.

(We haven't talked about the salad but the CC promises to remedy that in a few posts.)

The CC will close with a classic French vinaigrette.

Ingredients

1 shallot
2 tbsp red-wine vinegar
6 tbsp olive oil (use your absolute best!)
1/2 tsp Dijon mustard
pinch of salt
large pinch of pepper

herbs

Recipe

Dice the shallots really fine. Chop the herbs really fine if you are using.

Mix everything together and whisk like the devil. If you are making larger amounts, you can just put it in a jar and shake it like a castanet player.

Incidentally, a food processor does the job superbly. This is one of those rare cases where it may even be superior to the traditional ways.

---

† Why some enterprising chef has not taken the myriad (and endless!) souring agents of Filipino cuisine and not turned them into amazing vinaigrettes is beyond the CC. One surmises that most chefs are not intellectual in nature.

Vinaigrette of the Gods

Three simple things - fig vinegar, hazelnut oil, and kala namak (Indian black salt.)

Yes, yes, you can thank the CC later!