Roasted Garlic and Onion Soup

This is a peasant recipe. Simple to make, yet complex in its flavors.

The best part is that you have to neither peel the garlic nor the onions.


Ingredients

1 head garlic
6 red onions
1/3 cup flour
4 cups broth (or water)

1/4 cup chopped parsley

olive oil
sea salt
black pepper

Recipe

Cut the garlic in half, and the onions in half as follows. Don't bother to peel.

Drizzle a sheet with olive oil, and lay them face down on the olive oil. Roast in a 350°F oven for roughly 45 mins.

Pop them out, and pop out the garlic and onion shells with a paring knife. They are soft and sticky, and hot so this step is the trickiest portion.

Drop them in a soup pot, and heat it to medium heat. There is plenty of olive oil in them so no need to add any more. Add the flour, and fry languidly till it is light-brown (Maillard reaction.)

Add the broth, salt and plenty of black pepper, and heat on a low flame. A lot of impurities will come to the top. Skim, baby, skim.

Blend the liquid with a blender.

Then turn the heat up, and cover and bring to a rolling boil.

Top with the chopped parsley, and serve with crusty bread.

Detrending Trends

There seems to be a deplorable trend among cookbooks published by "author-scholars". They are increasingly being made in a coffee-table format.

Firstly, the CC doesn't possess the above vaunted table. Secondly, these things are heavy. Thirdly, if they weren't so excellent, one would just ignore them but they are indeed outstanding.

But you can't cook out of them. You can't even haul them around, and you certainly can freakin' forget about reading them in bed. (Yes, the CC does that.)

This is a trend, and a terrible one at that!

Happy New Year!

May all your walnuts be covered in rosemary, and served with stilton. May your soufflé's and doughs rise, and your tomato-paste lift your spirits!

Pan Grattato

One of the great tricks of Italian cooking, is fried breadcrumbs seasoned with spices. Sounds ordinary but it adds both a crunchy texture, as well as acts as a flavor carrier. It allows you to gussy up the simplest of dishes, and make them exotic.

The idea is simple enough. Breadcrumbs are neutral in taste, and yet they absorb flavors. They also turn crunchy when pan-fried in butter or oil.

The variations are endless as you might assume. It's best to make them in small batches, and they will last for about a few weeks kept in an air-tight container.

Spaghetti with Clams (topped with anchovy-red-chilly pangrattato.)

Latin-Asian Fusion

Normally, the CC is not big on the whole fusion thing but when done well, it can be amazing. This is at a restaurant near the CC's house.

Corn Soup
Seared Pepper-Tuna with Cilantro-Basmati, and Orange Dressing

Designer Milk

From the New York Daily News: Buying breast milk online.

Need breast milk? It's only a click away.

Online forums like OnlytheBreast.com and EatsonFeets.org allowing moms who make more breast milk than their nursing babies need to sell it.

At OnlytheBreast.com, which describes itself as "a community for moms to buy and sell natural breast milk," instructions are offered on how to ship, pump, freeze and store breast milk. Ads for buyers and sellers appear on the site.

"Super Mom," advertises frozen breast milk for $3 an ounce with a minimum of 16 ounces, and the cost of overnight shipping.

John Steinbeck, eat your heart out!

David Mamet on Christmas Traditions

(Source: Tablet Magazine.)

Japanese Food Confusion

While shabu-shabu which is onamatopoeic meaning swish-swish, refers to Japanese hot pot where you dip the vegetables, thinly-sliced meat, and seafood in hot broth, and consume it, shabu itself is slang for heroin.

Best not to confuse the two.

Keys to Good Cooking

The CC received the latest Harold McGee book as a gift, and he started reading it right away. Clearly, the CC's friends know what will make the CC salivate.

Strangely, the book felt awfully flat. It started seeming like a (absurdly) well-researched book but without any context. A newcomer encountering this book would be hopelessly lost, and the experienced cook would find it to be a parade of the obvious.

The CC was a bit dejected at this point since he is a big fan.

Then, he came across the following paragraph, and his heart lept with joy:

My father likes his hamburger rarer than rare — "Wave it near the grill," he would say — and he regularly suffered for it. Ground meats are among the foods most frequently contaminated with harmful microbes. When he moved close enough for me to cook for him, I told him that I would take care of his hamburger habit, and developed a way to prepare the meat to ensure its safety even when it's barely cooked (see p. 240). Ever since, both of us have been able to relax and enjoy our burgers without a second thought.

The CC loves his steak tartare, and the like. What followed on page 240 was so unbelievably obvious, and yet so elegant and unique that it's a total surprise that this is not more known.

As far as the CC was concerned, the book was redeemed, and Harold McGee can now be reinstated to his pedestal.

The "solution" which is totally obvious is:

Buy beef of excellent quality where the interior is unlikely to be contaminated.

The exterior will always be contaminated since microbes and fungus are in the air all around us.

Microbes are killed by boiling water.

Insert the steak in boiling water for 30-60 seconds to kill the external microbes.

Immediately dunk in an ice-bath to stop the cooking (= rare beef.)

Do what you will to get your beef rare (burgers, tartare, etc.)

Consume immediately.

Quelle elegance!

Saturday Morning

Nothing like some soft scrambled eggs (low heat, folks, extremely low heat) with some oregano pesto.

Stupidity Index

Cauliflower Risotto (Risotto al Cavalfiori)

Lust is not easy to portray on a blog but this recipe deserves it.

That it's made out of "winter" ingredients makes it one of the worst portrayals of lust in the repertoire so why not indulge the CC for a change, and trust his judgment?

Parallelization is essential to success here if you plan make this on a weekday. Basically, the cauliflower needs to get in the oven first so that it can start roasting while you chop the rest of the stuff, and do the pangrattato (breadcrumb topping.)

Also, this is one of those cases where a non-stick skillet is your best friend. Of course, you can also go ahead and fry the topping which would be both be super-indulgent and traditional.

Homemade stock is a plus here but you could get away with just water but it won't be the same. The CC recommends that you make a quick dashi while the cauliflower is roasting.

A food processor and blender will make quick work of a few steps if you let it. It's a lot faster than the mortar and pestle, and as you will see, quite irrelevant to the final result.

Just for the record, the CC used a mortar and pestle on a weekday. It takes all kinds to inhabit the world ...


Ingredients

1 head cauliflower (cut into florets)
3 leeks (chopped very fine)
2 cups arborio (or carnaroli rice)
2 sprigs rosemary (finely chopped)

4 cups stock
2 cups water
salt
pepper
1 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano

1/2 cup breadcrumbs
4 anchovies (preferably in salt "prepped".)
2 dried red chillies

1/2 cup pine nuts

Recipe

Toss the cauliflower florets with olive oil, salt and pepper. Roast in a 400°F oven for 35-40 minutes until lightly browned.

Meanwhile, chop the leeks.

Dump the breadcrumbs, anchovies, and red chillies into the food-processor and process. Roast the mixture on a skillet in olive oil, and set aside. This is the pangrattato topping.

While the cauliflower is roasting, roast the pine nuts on a skillet until lightly browned. They are there for texture, and protein.

Take half of the cauliflower, add 2 cups of cold water, and the rosemary and blend to a fine paste.

(Why is the water cold? Because with the hot cauliflower, you will get to blend it quickly without dealing with the blender's heat-explosion. Only people who have never blended will fail to understand this subtle point.)

Keep the stock warm at a barely visible simmer.

Now, make the standard risotto. Fry the leeks, fry the rice, alternately add the hot stock, and the cauliflower paste. Towards the end dump in cauliflower, and the rosemary.

Last but not least, the mantecura. Mix in the parmigiano-reggiano.

Serve with the roasted pine-nut and pangrattato.

The Story of Curry Powder

Everyone who's not completely demented about cooking knows there is no such thing in Indian cooking as "curry powder".

Yet, this yellow-looking vaguely Indian-ish powder is a global phenomenon showing up everywhere in menus from the finest French restaurants to Japanese fast-food ones serving kare raisu — curry rice that is gloppy, disgusting, and the staple of Japanese businessmen everywhere!

It should be noted that the fastidious Japanese with their ethic of purity and order eat this extraordinarily sloppy dish that would never show up on a kaiseki menu. And the main ingredient is an extraordinarly gaijin thing known as "curry powder".

So what's the story anyway? How did "curry powder" (which doesn't even exist in India) become French and Japanese? Why are there "curry ramen noodles"? Why are there Singaporean "curry noodles"? Which Frenchmen first served "curried cauliflower soup" and "curry vinaigrette"?

To answer this question, we're gonna have to rewind the clock and examine the mores of the 19th century. And we're gonna find that the people behaved, quite unsurprisingly, like people at any other time and place.

In short, they craved novelty.

And once novelty was provided, an equivalent market opened up to serve the novelty at the cheapest possible price, or to phrase it in modern lingo, they "commoditized the consumption".

There are virtually no cultures that don't appreciate novelty. Once novelty is provided, instantaneously the influence becomes "indigenized" - converted into the "native" framework of cooking. This is as true of tomatoes in Italy as green peppers in Thailand as potatoes in India. None of these are native to any of the regions (they are all "New World".)

The short story is that with the rising power of the British Empire in India, it became fashionable to serve all things "Indian". Queen Victoria, the Empress of India, was photographed wearing stereotypical "maharani" regalia. She even went as far as to appoint an Indian khidmatgar (servant), Abdul Karim, who rose to be her chief confidant. Poems were written (see here) and balls held in London where the guests dressed up in "Indian" costume and ate "Indian" food.

Needless to say, the British East India company did everything it could to market this phenomenon. When men go mad, avenues open up to supply them with the very objects that they need to go mad with so that profits can be made.

Enter "curry powder" — marketed to busy housewives so that they didn't need to concern themselves with the details of the "very foreign, very difficult" yet "deeply desired, and exotic" cuisine.

Unsurprisingly, the cheapest stuff correctly marketed turns out to be a monster hit. Same today as in the 19th century.

Commercial curry powder consists of the four cheapest ingredients in Indian cuisine -- coriander, cumin, fenugreek and turmeric (the latter giving it its yellow color while the fenugreek carries the characteristic bitter edge.)

That it spread to France from Britain should come as no surprise to anyone. Les rosbifs have always exhibited more than a little cultural fascination for "the Frogs" (ditto for the reverse.)

But the fastidious Japanese?

Kare raisu singlehandedly fails every Japanese culinary norm. Unsubtle, pungent, oil-based — the muddy yellowish sludge poured over rice could not be less Japanese. And yet, it's to be found in every train station and shopping district. It's chowed down by locals at lunch like it was going out of fashion. Irony of ironies, it's one of the most-requested "home-cooked" dishes in Japan.

How did this inauthentic powder turn Japanese?

The answer, of course, is the East India Company that nakedly peddled this powder all through the West and the East. Imported verbatim from the British idea of the dish, one can clearly see echoes of the dish in the 1872 Seiyo Ryōri Tsu ("Western Cooking".) The recipe is nearly identical to modern concoctions.

However, that explains the origin of the dish but not its overwhelming popularity. For that, you must look at the dish itself. It's warm, cheap, soothing, hearty, filling — all qualities that the Japanese have traditionally respected as an agrarian society must. Cheap sustaining fare that fuels the working masses. Does that or does that sounds Japanese?

The origins aside, the brute fact is that "curry powder" is global. Has been global for more than two centuries now, and authencity be damned, quite delicious.

Curry Cauliflower Soup

Ingredients

1 head cauliflower (cut into florets)
1 red onion (diced loosely)

1 tbsp curry powder

olive oil
sea salt
black pepper

Recipe

Toss the cauliflower florets with olive oil, salt and pepper. Roast in a 400°F oven for 30 minutes until lightly browned.

Fry the onion at a low heat for 10 minutes. Toss in the cauliflower, water, and curry powder and purée.

Roasted Brussel Sprouts with Spicy Sriracha

If you love spicy stuff, you'll go crazy over this.

This is the whole package -- nutritious, easy to make, spicy, umami-laden, complex, addictive.

(Source: here, and here.)

Ingredients

2 lbs brussels sprouts (halved)
oil

4 tbsp fish sauce
2 tbsp water
2 tbsp sriracha sauce
3 cloves garlic (crushed)
2 limes (juiced)
1 tbsp brown sugar
2 tbsp vinegar
1/2 cup mint (chopped)

Recipe

Toss the brussel sprouts, with oil, and salt and roast at 400°F for about 20-25 minutes until lightly browned. If you remember, this is Maestro Maillard in action.

Meanwhile, mix together the rest of the dressing. Toss with the sprounts and serve over rice.

Spaghetti with Clams

This one here is a classic.

It's also easy enough to make on a weekday, and eminently parallelizable so take careful notice.

(The recipe below feeds two so up the quantities proportionately.)



Ingredients

spaghetti (depending on hunger)

18 clams
1 red onion
4 cloves garlic
1/4 cup italian parsley (finely chopped)
herbs (rosemary, thyme, sage -- finely chopped -- whatever you have really!)
2 cups white wine

sea salt
black pepper
olive oil

Recipe

Bring the pasta water to a boil.

Meanwhile, in a heavy pot, bring a tiny bit of olive oil to a simmer. Add the clams, fry quickly, and add 1 cup of the white wine, and 1 cup of water. Cover, and let steam for 4 minutes.

The second cup of wine is for the chef.

Meanwhile, chop the onions and garlic finely.

After 4 minutes, open the pot. Remove each clam with pincers as it opens so as not to overcook.

When all the clams are open, and removed, filter the clam water through a cloth or paper towels into a bowl. Clams frequently have sand so this step is not skippable.

This clam water is the source of magic in this recipe!

Shuck the clams (or not.)

Add the spaghetti to the water. Let it cook until al dente.

Fry the onions and garlic languidly in the olive oil (6-7 minutes.) Add the filtered clam water, and reduce over high heat.

Toss the spaghetti, clam sauce, clams, herbs and parsley, and serve with lots of black pepper.

Dashi

The making of dashi is the foundation of Japanese cooking.

It is to Japanese cuisine what veal stock is to French cuisine. In fact, it is so fundamental to the very grammar of traditional Japanese cuisine that it can be safely said that there can be no Japanese cuisine in its absence.

However, its importance looms even larger in a multi-cultural universe.

Dashi is a umami rock-star.

Master it, and you can give a little more ooomph to all foods from Italian to Indonesian. (In fact, this is the "secret" to the success of many professional chefs. All they ever did in life was to add a ladle of dashi to their sauces, and suddenly they were "jeniuses" - yes, with the less common "j"-spelling.)

Well, you can be one too. But, first you must learn the basics of Japanese tradition.

The classic dashi begins with konbu -- also spelt kombu because in Japanese, the pronunciation is in-between the "em" and the "en" sounds -- and katsuobushi.

Konbu is a seaweed that is absurdly potent in umami flavor. When you buy it, it will look like it has a patina of whitish dust over it. Do NOT wash it under any circumstances. That patina is the source of the umami.

Katsuobushi is dried skip-jack tuna which is another rich source of umami. Most likely, the supermarket version will be the pre-sliced, paper-thin, pale-brownish-pink stuff but the real stuff is like an elongated rock-hard block of wood. It lasts forever, and has to be shaved fresh on an inverted wood-plane -- katsuobushi kezuriki. (Needless, to say, the CC heaps scorn on the supermarket one but it's not bad in a pinch.)

Both ingredients are dry, and will last forever in your pantry.

Classical Japanese technique calls for making two broths -- ichiban dashi and niban dashi -- quite literally, the first and second extractions.

Ichiban dashi is a clear, golden-hued, light stock with a delicate flavor meant for clear soups.

Niban dashi is a darker-hued, robust-flavored, all-purpose stock to cook with.

The recipe makes a little over 4 cups of each. The CC frequently doubles the recipe if needed. If you only need the more robust version, you can just skip the intermediate steps but make sure you understand all the details below.

There are many many other styles of dashi -- niboshi dashi with dried sardines, dashi made with shiitake mushrooms, entirely vegetarian versions made for Buddhist temple cuisine (shōjin ryōri), etc.

It's a world unto itself.

Ingredients

4 cups water
a 5" piece of konbu
3 handfuls of katsuobushi (two initially, one for later.)

Recipe

Soak the konbu in 4 cups of water at room temperature for 30 minutes. Heat the water until just before it starts to boil. Remove the konbu, and set aside. If you don't remove it before the water boils, the broth will taste bitter which you don't want.

Bring the water to a boil. Turn off the heat. Add about 1/2 cup of water to cool it down, and toss in two handfuls of the katsuobushi. If the water is too hot, it will be cloudy which is aesthetically unpleasant. (Note the similarity to classical French stock-making.)

Strain the liquid with a cheesecloth. Under NO circumstances press down on the solids which would also cause the broth to be cloudy.

The liquid is ichiban dashi.

To make niban dashi, add the solids and the retained konbu to four cups of water. Bring to a boil. As soon as it boils, turn off the heat, add an extra half-cup to cool it down, and add the extra handful of katsuobushi to it -- oigatsuo -- "chaser" katsuo. Steep for 3-4 minutes.

Filter with a cheesecloth but this time wring to extract the maximum flavor from it.

You have niban dashi.

Wild Rice with Cranberries, Pomegranate with Orange-Walnut Vinaigrette

Food as Character

Food is character.

There's no getting away from it. It defines us. It strips naked completely what we would like to have hidden.

One can tell more about a person from what they will or won't eat, conditional on their background, than all the degrees, documents, and recommendations that they trot out.

If you want to learn about a person, watch them at dinner.

Observe how they hold their fork, and ask them what they feel about eating animal innards, and you will quickly strip them emotionally naked. Observe their inward or outward delight (or lack thereof) to a perfectly executed dish, and you will learn more about them than by asking a thousand questions.

Food is character.

Great writers have noticed this forever. When Edith Wharton describes food, she is not describing the food as much as the society that would make such food, and the elements of the society that would eat it. Food becomes the barely neutral turf on which the anxieties of society play.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in his one and only, wondrous novel Il Gattopardo observes his characters, and in turn, has them observe each other through the medium of food.

If you've never heard of Lampedusa, or his only novel, the CC urges you to seek it. Most people's knowledge of Lampedusa comes from the eponymous, and equally wondrous Visconti movie.

The Prince was too experienced to offer Sicilian guests, in a town of the interior, a dinner beginning with soup, and he infringed the rules of haute cuisine all the more readily as he disliked it himself. But rumours of the barbaric foreign usage of serving an insipid liquid as first course had reached the notables of Donnafugata too insistently for them not to quiver with a slight residue of alarm at the start of a solemn dinner like this. So when three lackeys in gold, green and powder entered, each holding a great silver dish containing a towering macaroni pie, only four of the twenty at the table avoided showing pleased surprise: the Prince and Princess from foreknowledge, Angelica from affectation and Concetta from lack of appetite. All the others (including Tancredi, I regret to say) showed their relief in varying ways, from the fluty and ecstatic grunts of the notary to the sharp squeak of Francesco Paolo. But a threatening circular stare from the host soon stifled these improper demonstrations.

Good manners apart, though, the aspect of these monumental dishes of macaroni was worthy of the quivers of admiration they evoked. The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded, were but preludes to the delights released from the interior when the knife broke the crust; first came a spice-laden haze, then chicken livers, hard-boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken and truffles in masses of piping hot, glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suede.

The beginning of the meal, as happens in the provinces, was quiet. The arch-priest made the sign of the Cross and plunged in head first without a word. The organist absorbed the succulent dish with closed eyes; he was grateful to the Creator that his ability to shoot hare and woodcock could bring him ecstatic pleasures like this, and the thought came to him that he and Teresina could exist for a month on the cost of one of these dishes; Angelica, the lovely Angelica, forgot little Tuscan black puddings and part of her good manners and devoured her food with the appetite of her seventeen years and the vigour given by grasping her fork halfway up the handle. Tancredi, in an attempt to link gallantry with greed, tried to imagine himself tasting, in the aromatic forkfuls, the kisses of his neighbour Angelica, but he realised at once that the experiment was disgusting and suspended it, with a mental reserve about reviving his fantasy with the pudding; the Prince, although rapt in the contemplation of Angelica sitting opposite him, was the only one at the table to notice that the demi-glace was overfilled, and made a mental note to tell the cook so next day; the others ate without thinking of anything, and without realising that the food seemed so delicious because sensuality was circulating in the house.

Oh, The Horror, The Horror!

Today, while idly searching the web, the CC came across recipes for "no-rice risotto".

Really people?!?

Heck, even the Italians have experimented with variations with barley and spelt (and generally treated the results with various degrees of horror) but seriously?!?

No-rice in risotto which quite literally is etymologically related to rice?

Next up: roasted chicken minus the roasting or the chicken.

Precision and Nutrition

If you want to have complete control over the texture of your vegetables, and the CC knows you do, you should steam them not boil them.

You get the added benefit that the nutrients are not lost to the water.