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.