New Year's Party

It's that time of the year again and the CC is hosting his annual party again after a hiatus of a year.

Four cheeses from Bobolink Dairy
Baguette
♦
Chilli-topped Parmesan Biscuits
♦
Candied Walnuts with Rosemary and Lavender
Almond-stuffed Medjool Dates sautéed with Lavender & Sea-Salt
♥
Champagne

Happy New Year!

Tools

No discussion of the culinary sciences can be complete without mention of the role of tools.

Tools are the foundation of any well-organized kitchen, and similar to the pantry, they depend on your needs, desires and wallet.

The goal of any tool in the kitchen is to make the chef's life easier. (This is not the general definition of a "tool". For example, weight-lifting tools are there to make your muscles work harder not make things easier.)

What tools you need fundamentally depend on the three things stated already — what you cook, how ambitious of a chef you are, and how much you are willing to spend.

If you live in New York, you have a fourth constraint — the size of your kitchen and storage space.

None of these four are trivial problems.

What you cook changes as you age. It's just a function of learning new things. You think you know who you are and then you fall madly in love one more time. It's the permanent escalator of new things and with that comes the permanent escalation of what you want out of your kitchen.

If you think you are immune to this, why not take a moment to reflect on what you used to make versus what you make today? Nobody, let's repeat, nobody is immune.

Ambition is a easy target to mock. The CC scoffs at the days when he considered stuffed omelettes as "ambitious". And so it goes. We are "learning types'. We learn new things and we can effortlessly knock that off which moves us on to bigger and brighter desires.

Budgets belong to brute-force reality but never before in history has so much equipment been available for so little. It's just a function of technology and productivity. And it will get cheaper!

Space is the real constraint for most people. Ruthless practicality drags us down to the ground even as our florid fantasies take flight. Even then we are "innovative" types and we figure out new ways to squeeze out extra space out of our limited floor space. (Experienced cooks will be nodding their heads here while Johnny-come-lately's might end up scratching their's.)

Good tools are critical to the cooking experience. They make life simple by doing mundane tasks either faster or better. While it is possible to function without them, they are the critical lynchpin that makes things efficient or easy. They make it possible to make gourmet meals at the drop of a pin in the evening when you are tired.

Good tools are like your helpful friends. You know every quirk, every twist, every angle of their very being. You can handle them without even thinking.

Good tools fit effortlessly into your hands. It's the first sign of excellence when you upgrade a tool which is superior to one that you have already owned. You are not just upgrading the tool but upgrading your ambition as well.

The CC has already traumatized countless friends and relatives by exclaiming that their kitchen was "like going camping" so his insensitivity and ruthlessness are well-known and well-traversed territories. In fact, he just prefers to travel with his own tools because that's what experienced people do.

Moving on though.

There are no "ideal tools" and even more importantly no such thing as an "ideal kitchen".

After tons of descriptions of her "ideal kitchen", Elizabeth David confessed that her "real kitchen" fell short. Remember that this is a woman at the top of her profession who could build any kitchen she wanted and in spite of that didn't manage to.

The dream of the perfect tools and the perfect kitchen is a mesmerizing chimera that can never exist for the simple reason that it would require us to be perfectly omniscient about our ever-changing desires and perfectly unchanging against the reality of our ever-learning selves.

It would also require all future technology to come to a perfect standstill.

What's left then is the imperfect present with three constraints — knowledge, ambition and budget.

Japanese Meal

For the celebration of a special friend's birthday dinner.

Bottom left:

Sautéeed scallops in miso-glaze reduction.

Left placement:

Miso Soup.
Asari Gohan (あさりご飯).

Down the center plate:

Fresh wasabi (わさび).
Pickled cucumber.
Pickled jellyfish with hijiki, ginger & cucumber.
Pickled burdock (ごぼ).
Fresh seaweed salad.

Bottom right:

Scallop Sashimi.

Right placement:

Symmetric placement of left.

Kookoo Sabzi

This is not a difficult dish but it requires effort. The CC assumes that everyone understands the difference between the words "difficult" and "effort".

Ideally, this dish needs a buncha Jamie's in the house all shredding the greens to precise effect. In their collective absence, you'll just have to shred them yourselves (or get a personal Jamie to do it — you do have one, don't you?)

The goal is an almost insane amount of fragrant greens all held together by just the barest amount of egg. This is an "inversion" of the frittata which features eggs as the main ingredient. Here the eggs are just there to hold everything together and they are cooked to a dark brown. The greens, barberries and nuts are the stars not the eggs. We are clear on this concept, aren't we?

It's best served with a sweetish side salad — Green on Green — there's a hit album in here!


Ingredients

All the cup measurements are after the chopping. This means that, yes, there's almost an insane amount of greens but we were clear on that, right?

2 cups Italian parsley (finely chopped)
2 cups dill (finely chopped)
2 cups chives (finely chopped)
1 cup cilantro (finely chopped)
1 cup mint (finely chopped)

4 tbsp. dried fenugreek

1/2 cup.barberries (zereshk)
1/2 cup. walnuts (chopped)

2 tbsp. flour
2 eggs — keep an extra egg or two around.

saffron
milk

salt
black pepper

Recipe

Note: Most recipes online call for turmeric not saffron because the latter is very expensive. However, there is no substitute. Use the real thing. This is for the betterment of your soul.

(The recipe was traditionally served at Nowroz — the New Years' Day because of the obvious metaphor between greens and prosperity.)

Preheat the broiler.

Heat the milk gently. A microwave works great as long as you don't let the milk spill over. Dissolve the saffron in the milk.

Beat the eggs with the flour, saffron, milk, salt and pepper. Add all the greens.

The CC has found it practical to add an extra egg if the mixture looks too stiff. It's very hard to predict this given the variability in the moisture of the greens and the size of the eggs. The mixture should barely hold together.

In a skillet, heat up some oil at medium-high heat. Add the mixture to the pan and cover. Cook for about 12-16 minutes.

At this point you can either flip the omelette or just put it in the under the broiler like the CC does. The top will turn beautifully golden and green.

Let it sit for about 5 minutes. (Yes, this matters and if you don't know why then you really need to read this.)

Slice and serve.

The Flair Factor

Have you ever said to yourself, "That person over there is a great cook." without tasting a single morsel?

A great cook bears the unmistakable stamp of a balance between extreme fussiness and extreme flexibility. These are the absolute flying banner heralds of a confident and experienced cook.

No thyme at the market, no problem. We'll just toss in some sage leaves. Missing some mirin, no problem. We'll add some sugar and some saké.

No eggplants, non-negotiable! We'll switch to a different dish instead.

No casserole, no problem. We'll just roast in this pan over there. No mortar and pestle, no problem. We'll just crush it in a different way.

Thirteen ingredients and seventeen steps, non-negotiable! Just do them in the order and stop fidgeting, for cryin' out loud.

If this sounds familiar then you know somebody like that already.

It is this intense focus and yet seemingly effortless adaptability that makes cooking seem so difficult to those not initiated into the process.

What does "sautée for a short time" mean? What constitutes "short" as opposed to "long"?

Two or three eggs. When would you pick two as opposed to three?

Salt to taste. What happens if it's raw meat and you can't taste it?

None of this makes any sense to an amateur who has yet to understand the internal logic that makes it all tick. However, like all things it's based in the only thing that makes any sense — experience and an intellectually-considered experience at that.

Cooking requires an adaptability to a changing landscape. No two ingredients that you buy are going to be the same or even similar. Things change with the seasons and much more importantly, you never dip into the same pool twice as a person because your very being is changing as you evolve in your experience. You are learning as you go along.

This is not exclusive to cooking.

Experienced musicians behave the same way. So do engineers. So do costume designers for the theater. As do the very best military generals and the finest surgeons.

This is a general characteristic of excellence in any field that requires adaptability based on field conditions that are variable and changing.

There is only one way to get from here to there. As the saying goes, the way to Carnegie Hall is "Practice, practice, practice."

It's rooted in experience but what matters is intellectual richness. The more you push yourself outside your comfort zone and grab new experiences, the richer you are for it. Even if you have absolutely no interest in Japanese cuisine, understanding its principles will enrich the flair with which you make Italian food. That's because you bring a brand new set of skills to the table (sic).

Great cooks are nerdy, by definition. They are continuously reading books to learn what they don't know yet. Almost every single one reads books about food in bed.

And paranoid. They always think they have missed something even though they have most likely not.

And intellectually curious. They revisit an old favorite that they could make in their sleep but they analyze it as if they had never seen it before in their lives to bring their new experiences to bear on it.

Naturally the goal of it all, when all is considered and done, is to don your ascot and say to your guests in a nonchalant manner, "Oh, that's just something I threw together."

That would be the flair part.

Lamb Tagine with Apricots, Dates & Almonds (Mrouzia)

Let's face it, chez CC, we are crazy but not insane. There is a massive difference. We recognize the limits of our ambition.

This dish is a classic of Moroccan cooking and it is great in winter. It needs to be made in a tagine ideally. The lamb is organic, the almonds were peeled by hand, the dates are authentic. The pita, however, at the right comes from Astoria. As we said, we're crazy but not insane. We can't do everything.

This is a rich winter dish. It takes time, effort and excellence of ingredients. Ironically, it's not hard. You throw everything into the tagine and then the dish makes itself while you enjoy a soothing drink.

It's medieval-ness should be obvious. The combination of meat and nuts, sweet and savory in the same dish gives it away on the first reading.

Ingredients

1 lb lamb (cut into chunks)
1 large carrot (cut into large chunks)

1 onion (diced fine)
2 cloves garlic (minced)

1/3 tsp. dried ginger
1 stick cinnamon
2 tbsp. ras el hanout

1/3 cup blanched almonds
1/3 cup dates (pitted and quartered)
1/3 cup dried apricots

6 cups water

butter

pinch of saffron
salt
pepper

Recipe

In a tagine, heat up some butter and fry the onions and garlic. Add the lamb but fry it just for a minute. Add everything except the saffron and let cook at a low heat until tender (roughly 40 minutes.)

Add the saffron. Stir and serve.

Black Salt (Kala Namak)

There are many things in life that are acquired tastes.

Nobody was ever born liking beer (bitter because of the hops) or liking either red wine or tea (astringent and bitter because of the tannins.) Every culture has a characteristic item (or ten) that you are going to have to come to terms with if you really want to enjoy the food.

Japanese food has natto. Indian food has kala namak.

(Chinese has all the gristly bits but that's for a different post.)

Kala namak is just salt which contains a number of impurities including greigite (Fe₃S₄) and sodium sulfate (Na₂SO₄.)

It was traditionally fired in a kiln with charcoal but no air and the reductive process created multiple sulfides which gave it the characteristic smell,. The greigite gives it the characteristic black/violet color (which changes to mauve when ground up.)

The CC cannot sugar-coat this part. It smells like rotten eggs or the sewer. We associate this smell with dirt and rottenness because of the hydrogen sulfide produced by the salt in the presence of air. (You may remember the smell of hydrogen sulfide from your chemistry class.)

However, a vast number of Indian recipes would simply be incomplete without this ingredient. It forms a crucial lynchpin in the sweet-savory-spicy-salty spectrum. The smell and sour taste is inimitable.

The CC has increasingly seen chefs use it in restaurants. Most notable was as a topping on a foie gras terrine. The smell was unmistakable and the salt cut through the fat perfectly as was intended.

Breakfast for Twelve

How do you make breakfast for a horde of hungry hungover guests? Especially if you happen to be hungover yourself?

The tricks are as simple as time. Everything needs to be simple except for the piping hot coffee which should be manageable even by the borderline criminally insane.

It even works for the non-hungry non-hungover times when you are just feeling a bit lazy. Quick pop in the oven and this stuff is ready before the animals start pawing at the breakfast table!


Cheesy "Shirred" Eggs with Tomato Paste

(Everything here is for one unit so you can just multiply by the number of servings. It scales effortlessly.)

Ingredients

1 oven-proof ramekin

1/4 dried-out bread slice
2 tbsp. tomato sauce

1/4 cup shaved blue-cheese
1/4 cup shaved parmigiano-reggiano

finely minced herbs (rosemary, oregano, sage)

2 eggs
salt
black pepper

Recipe

Everything in this recipe is about the assembly as would be logical for something that needs to scale.

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Put the bread at the bottom of the ramekin. Top with the tomato sauce.

Mix the cheeses, herbs, eggs, salt and pepper. Whip till finely mixed. Top the ramekin with the mixture.

Put in the oven for 12-15 minutes. You will need to check at the 12-minute mark. The CC's oven tends to run a little cooler so it takes a little longer. Yours will be different by definition. So just check and you can adjust the last few minutes. The top should swell noticeably like a soufflé and be golden.

Smashed Chickpea Sandwich

The CC is not normally into celebrity chef-style recipes but this one is absolutely smashing.

It's from Tom Colicchio's 'wichcraft, and it's an absolute masterpiece in its simplicity, excellence and the fact that it can be made ahead of time.

The original is literally soaking in olive oil but you can go easy on that. However, this is the place to use your finest not the generic stuff. Incidentally, the filling works fine just by itself. It's something you can just eat from the container all day long.

Bookmark this one. The CC personally guarantees that it will rock your world!


Ingredients

2 cups cooked chickpeas
1/2 cup black olives (thinly sliced)
1 red onion (finely diced)
1/2 cup parsley (finely minced)

lemon zest (from 1 lemon)
juice from the same lemon

1/3 cup olive oil (your finest!)
salt
black pepper

Recipe

Smash the cooked chickpeas with a potato masher. You want a broken mixture not a puree.

Make a vinaigrette out of the olive oil and lemon. Mix everything together. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Colored Cauliflowers

Recently more and more of the colored cauliflowers have started showing up at the farmers' market so the CC started doing some research on them. They are genetically-modified cauliflowers.

The CC is not afraid of the genetic modification because it has been going on forever. The "organic granolas" put scare-quotes around the "genetic" part but it's part of our legacy. We've been doing this since the birth of agriculture. Cross-breeding to get sweeter varieties or more hardy ones or ones that are more resistant to various pests and fungi.

Carrots were not originally "orange". They were cultivated specifically to appeal to the Dutch House of Orange and in return they became the "Royal Vegetable". They were also markedly sweeter which explains why they became the dominant variety.


The story of the colored cauliflowers is as varied as their colors:

The orange cauliflower was a genetic mutant first found in Canada in 1970. It was crossbred using conventional cross-breeding techniques at Cornell University until it now finds its way into the mainstream. The orange comes from beta-carotene — the same compound that gives carrots its characteristic color and which is absolutely necessary for humans to produce Vitamin A.

The purple cauliflower was a similar mutant found in Denmark in the 1980's. Same idea of cross-breeding. The purple comes from anthocyanins (also found in raspberries, blueberries, grapes, red wine, olives.) They are water soluble so if you want to preserve the color, you will need to gently roast it not boil it or steam it. It has a very characteristic smell when you cut into it and it's a lot milder in flavor than the others.

The green one is a cross-breed between broccoli and cauliflower. There is also the Romanesco cauliflower but that's a different breed.

A classic recipe is presented for your benefit.

Pasta with Cauliflower, Anchovies, Raisins, Pine Nuts & Saffron

Ingredients

2 cups rigatoni (or penne.)

1 head cauliflower (separated into medium-sized florets)
1 large red onion (chopped)
1/2 cup pine nuts
1/2 cup raisins
6 anchovies (preferably salt-cured)
2 tbsp tomato paste
1 tsp saffron

olive oil

sea salt
black pepper

1/3 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano

breadcrumbs


Recipe

Toast the breadcrumbs and set aside. Toast the pine nuts until golden. Be careful not to burn them. Set aside.

Heat an oven to 400°F and roast the cauliflower florets for 15 minutes.

Heat the olive oil at medium heat. When shimmering, add the onions and fry for a further 7-9 minutes. Add the tomato paste, and the anchovies and fry. The anchovies will "dissolve" as they fry. Add a cup of water, the raisins, sea salt, and black pepper, and let cook at low heat.

Meanwhile make the pasta until al dente. Drain.

The cauliflower mixture should be just slightly on the wet side. If dry, add some more water.

Toss in the saffron, cauliflowers and the pasta, and mix thoroughly.

Serve with the parmesan and roasted breadcrumbs on top with extra black pepper to taste.

The Pantry

The secret to success in the kitchen is to have a well-stocked pantry.

Pantries come in all sizes from dorm-sized entities to ones more resembling the running of a small-sized military operation so it is necessary to understand where you lie on this scale.

There are three variables at play — method, money and madness. Let's examine them in reverse order because that would be the methodical thing to do.

Philosophers through history have pointed out with tedious and wearisome regularity that madness is relative. What matters is the intensity of your cooking habit, the regularity of company showing up to partake, and the depths of your obsession. The CC is pretty clear that on a scale of 1 to 10, his dial goes all the way up to 11 (but that was obvious, right?)

Money is a subtle point and one not routinely discussed in polite company. You do not have to be rich to have a large pantry (but it helps.) What is more important that you have a sufficient amount that you can juggle a complex operation and keep renewing ingredients as they run out which they will. It helps if you live in New York or London because of the insanely well-stocked ethnic markets which are dirt-cheap but the Internet allows you to source far and wide with consummate ease at this point.

(On a historical digressive note, this is something that an upper-class Englishman could do with consummate ease pre-World War I — source top-quality ingredients from across the world — he used the telephone. The First World War destroyed the aristocracy and their elite tastes and the Depression and the Second World War laid utter waste to it. It's taken us 60 years to get back to where some were albeit with a much larger degree of democratization.)

Method, of course, is the magic that mediates between money and madness. Here tastes differ so you will have to define it for yourself. It matters what cuisines you routinely cook. The CC's tastes run to French, Italian, Indian, Japanese and Thai (in alphabetical order) with liberal elements of Greek, Mexican, Persian and Sichuan thrown into the mix but yours might differ.

De gustibus non est disputandum. (in this case, quite literally!)

The list conceals more than it reveals. Each of the first three (French, Italian, Indian) constitute of tons of regions with a variety of ingredients to juggle and this requires a level of complexity that is quite deceiving when it comes down to one sentence.

So you need to source your "stuff", stock it regularly, juggle it all correctly to make sure nothing gets wasted or destroyed and cook daily to enjoy it all!

Thanksgiving

Champagne with Pomegranates
♥ Bruschetta with Spicy Roasted Squash, Onion Jam & Blue Cheese ♣ Duck Confit with Spicy Pickled Raisins & Pomegranate Seeds
Frisée Salad
Duck-fat Roasted Potatoes with Rosemary
♦
Almond-stuffed Dates with Rosemary & fleur de sel
♠
Chocolate

Let's Bolt Out of Here

Have you ever had a lettuce and it was slightly bitter?

It's been "bolting".

No, the CC is not making this term up. It seems to be standard terminology in the horticultural world.

Bolting is the plants' attempt to produce seeds, flower and reproduce.

Once plants have bolted, there's no going back because it's just a fact that they just want to flower and reproduce whereas we want to eat them. They turn bitter because it's a first-line defense against predators including humans who most certainly are exactly that.

There's a general tendency of humans to buy larger produce. More bang for the unit buck and all that but you'd be better served to pick smaller varieties that haven't yet bolted out of town.

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.

R.I.P. Marcella

One of the doyennes of Italian cooking, Marcella Hazan has passed on.

Anybody who has cooked from any of her books know her almost personally. The harrying tone, the quest for perfection, the quiet disappointment when the ingredients are not up to the mark and the absolute insistence that there be a feast on the table most nights no matter what the ingredients or circumstances.

Her recipes substitute freely but hold on the Platonic ideal. Ignorance is not tolerated and idiocy even less so.

You can clearly hear the unique voice of a woman who smoked to beat the band and preferred Scotch to wine and yet had a most impressive palate.

As a teacher, she understood indolence and the time pressures of modern life, and like a grandmother, indulged her wavering students.

When you are unable to get good fresh tomatoes, rather than cook with watery, tasteless ones, it's best to turn to the dependable canned variety.

Even when fresh porcini -- wild boletus edulis mushrooms -- are available, the dried version compels consideration ...

And possibly the most accurate (and liberating!) statement about pasta of all time:

There is not the slightest justification for the currently fashionable notion that 'fresh' pasta is preferable to factory-made dry pasta. One is not better than the other, they are simply different... They are seldom interchangeable, but in terms of absolute quality, they are fully equal.

But not too indolent!

She tried "again and again" to square the principles of Italian cooking with microwave. Happily, all her attempts were utter failures.

You'd learn more about cooking vegetables from her almost twenty pages of detailed notes than any class or even in a professional kitchen. Her recipe for chicken with two lemons (plus salt and pepper, nothing else!) is a legend.

There are darker sides too. She was oddly uncurious about the science of food — a most shocking revelation about someone with a doctorate in natural sciences and biology. She intuited the role of mushrooms in what we now call umami but only understood it late in life. There are odd generalizations and superstitions. Explanations call upon experience rather than something more fundamental in nature.

However, these are all quibbles.

What mattered most of all is that her recipes have a tendency to be magnificent successes. The hit ratio is the highest of all the cookbooks that the CC has ever owned. "Let's look up Marcella" is practically a cliché around this household.

The CC definitely owes her a debt of gratitude and it's a pity he never met her. She will definitely be missed.

Ciao bella!

Hellas! Tragœdia

It would be quite hard to see the effect of the Greek collapse (and resulting Depression) in the canyons of Wall St. but it can easily be seen in the Greek stores in Astoria.

There is a wonderful store called Titan Foods. It's one of the largest Greek supermarkets in New York.

The collapse of the Greek economy has taken out a large portion of their supply chain. The CC having gone to this store for more than ten years can easily see the impact that it is having on the market.

Normally, the store would be groaning under the weight of all kinds of Greek goodies but you can see the strain.

Still the CC came back with some anchovies packed in salt, spanakopita, karidopita (walnut cake), taramosalata, yogurt, sheep-milk feta, and other assorted ingredients.

Ginataang Hipon

This is a superb Filipino dish. The CC has already written about it before.

Like all cuisines, it lives and dies upon the excellence of its ingredients.


Ingredients

2 fresh bamboo shoots
1/2 lb long beans (chopped into 2" segments)
1 cup corn
1/4 cup chilli leaves

2 cups coconut milk
2 tbsp patis

16 fresh shrimp (peeled)

Notes about ingredients

You can find fresh bamboo shoots and long beans at any Chinese grocery store. You can find the chilli leaves at a Filipino store or you can just pick your own if you have a chilli plant.

Patis is Filipino-style fish sauce. Use the Thai nahm pla as a substitute but be warned that they are similar but not the same. (The CC can effortlessly tell the difference in a recipe!) If all fails, bung in a crushed salted anchovy because that's what the fish sauce is actually doing.

Use frozen corn if it's not summer. These days coconut milk comes from a can. The CC would rather you make your own but do what you have to.

Fresh shrimp is non-negotiable.

Recipe

NOTE: You don't need salt in this recipe because of the patis. Just taste it and add some if needed.

The bamboo shoots must be sliced really thin using a mandoline.

Combine the shoots, long beans, corn and coconut milk and heat gently for about 10-12 minutes. Be careful because if you boil the coconut milk it will curdle.

Add the shrimp and chilli leaves and cook for just under a minute.

Serve with rice.

Little House on the Prairie

It's that time of the year again.

Thirty-five pounds of tomatoes (!) slowly cooking down to make tomato paste and sauce.

February holds no terrors any more.

Court Bouillon

It's French for "short broth" as in broth that is cooked for a short amount of time and it's the kind of thing that separates truly committed cooks from rank amateurs.

The idea is simple. Simmer a bunch of aromatic ingredients for a relatively short amount of time (compared to making real broth) so as to get a light delicate flavorful liquid.

You would see this most often used to poach fish but you can use it for a variety of uses including making a béchamel that will knock your socks off.

The effort required to make it is minimal and the results disproportionately amazing.

The recipe is far from set in stone. You can twist it and turn it in many directions based on what you want to achieve but the basic rules stay the same - a mass of aromatic vegetables and spices are cooked in water and wine for a "brief" bit and then filtered. Fennel seeds work wonders with fish. You can add cloves or garlic if you want a spicier broth. There is considerably leeway here.

The word "brief" deserves an explanation. Classical stock-making takes a few hours and even with the advent of the pressure cooker as we have seen still takes a lot of effort. By comparison, this is brief. Roughly 30 minutes.

In this hectic age of ours, this may seem like an eternity in what is but a prelude to the real recipe but you can have a nice de-stressing glass of wine while the broth makes itself.

An important point for lazy cooks (aren't we all?) — you don't need to peel the carrots or the onions. Just wash them and chop them quickly. You aren't going to be eating them and the skin adds flavor to the product. Win-win as they say.

Ingredients

1 onion (finely chopped)
1 carrot (finely chopped)
1 stalk celery (finely chopped)

1 cup white wine
3 cups water

1 tbsp. black peppercorns
1 tsp. fennel seeds
3 bay leaves

1 sprig rosemary
stems of parsley (if you have them)

salt

Recipe

Dump all the ingredients in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and let it simmer for about 20 minutes. Skim any foam that comes to the surface. Strain through a fine mesh retaining the liquid.

Early Morning Haul

The CC was up at the crack of dawn to haul back the goodies like a pack mule.

Corn, onions, garlic, zucchini, sweet peppers, clams, cod, tomatoes, more tomatoes, basil, sage, rosemary.

Tomato-Fest

A friend's going away party. Naturally, it's tomato-time!

Prosciutto with Medjool dates
♥
Purple Russian tomatoes with olive oil & fleur de sel
♥
Pasta with anchovies, cranberry beans & tomato sauce

Bon voyage!

Sharks on the Subway

Various news media report: Shark found on New York subway.

The hyperbole continues:

A dead shark has been discovered on the subway in New York City, transport officials have confirmed. The unlikely passenger, about 1.2m (4ft) long, was found under a row of seats on a Queens-bound train.

Isvett Verde, of Brooklyn, New York, who took a photo of the shark, said she noticed that the empty carriage of the N train "smelled extremely fishy" when she boarded at 8th Street.

"It's hard to be surprised as there are always crazy things happening in this city, but even that was a bit much," she told the BBC.

Any good chef would know that it's a spiny dogfish.

It's edible, plentiful and some passenger was probably carrying it back home. The CC has eaten it at plenty a Venezuelan restaurant in Queens but "sharks on the subway" is so much more sensational.

BORING!!!

Pistachio Soup

This unusual soup is an Iranian Jewish recipe.

It's best served cold and it's even better the second day. You can make it elegant and smooth or leave it with a slightly grainy texture. Both are delightful.

The best part is you can make it ahead of time, and when a heat wave strikes like in New York right now, there's nothing like an ice-cold slurp of deliciousness to cool you down.

A couple of warnings:

The soup's tastes and textures do not come "alive" until the last step so you are likely to go WTF on the CC until the end. Have faith and carry on!

The soup is "rich" so a small portion goes a long way.

Since the CC is the CC, he can't help but point out a few things.

Note the use of nuts and sweetness in what is essentially to modern palates, a savory dish. The medieval origins of this dish are really extraordinarily clear.

The CC's dinner companion noted that the dish tasted "Indian". The CC was forced to point out that much that is considered "Indian" is not Indian at all. The Persians cast a long shadow on not just Indian cuisine but India as a whole.

The Mughal emperors imported not just chefs but also mercenary soldiers from Persia. Indian classical music is a clear outgrowth of Persian models of the same (although, in all fairness, they did take it much much further!) In fact, a significant portion of modern-day Hindi vocabulary is nothing more than your routine Persian vocabulary.

This characteristic use of sweet and savory with a heavy usage of nuts is a hallmark of Persian cuisine and this dish exemplifies it completely.

On a separate note, what makes this recipe "Jewish"? It's just a recipe, right?

The answer is that the recipe can easily be made pareve if necessary. (Just use water instead of stock.) There is a rich tradition in Judaic recipes from Spain, Morocco, Iran and India that are basically vegetarian or so close that their substitution makes little difference.

The medieval Judaic cook loved flexibility at her dinner table as much as her modern-day counterpart. The easiest way to serve your guests is to develop a repertoire of recipes that can bend to the rules of  kashrut without breaking them!

There's a learning lesson if ever there was one.


(Source: Yotam Ottolenghi.)

Pistachio Soup

Ingredients

1 2/3 cups raw pistachios
1 leek coarsely chopped
4 shallots coarsely chopped
1/2" ginger coarsely chopped
1/2 tsp roasted ground cumin
4 cups chicken stock (use water if you're vegetarian - vegetable stock will NOT work!)

1 cup juice of Seville orange

OR

juice of 1 small lemon
1 cup orange juice

2 tbsp. butter
sea salt
black pepper

Recipe

NOTE: Please read the instructions carefully. There are clear steps and they matter.

Pour boiling water over the pistachios and steep for 1 minute.

Pour 4 tbsp. of the same boiling water over the saffron and let it steep.

After a minute, rub the pistachios under running water to get rid of the skin. You will not be able to get rid of all of it but do your best. This matters if you want the color of the soup to not be a dull brown. If the color doesn't matter, you can skip this step.

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Roast the pistachios for 8 minutes. Be careful. They have a tendency to burn. Reserve a few for the garnish.

Heat the butter in a pan. Add the leeks, shallots, ginger, cumin, salt and pepper and fry languidly on a medium-low heat for about 12 minutes. Add the stock and the pistachios and bring to a simmer. Add most of the saffron liquid and let cook at a low heat for about 20 minutes.

Blend the soup with a hand blender until quite smooth. (This was hard. If you blend it again the next day, you get a much more refined soup.)

Take off the heat. Add the lemon and orange juice.

Serve with a drizzle of the saffron liquid and the reserved pistachios.

The Dark Side of Pastoral

The genre of food writing both memoir and cookbook are the last gasp of the Pastoral.

The pastoral is the genre of art, literature or music which depicts rural life as lived in harmony with nature preferably according to the seasons. It's heyday was in the Romantic era late into the Industrial Revolution. The revolution had created a massive upheaval and migration from rural to urban centers. It also created massive wealth through increased productivity.

It was possible then for an urban aesthete to romanticize the myth of the unsoiled countryside clashing violently with the notably apparent grime of urbanity and thus mythologize the past.

If you find yourself thinking that this resembles a massive number of books in recent time about the "joys" of farm life, you would be entirely correct.

There is a book published recently by a woman who married a Japanese farmer, and the book is spectacular, of course, but the CC was a little puzzled that she could afford a modern house with fancy equipment in rural Japan. A teeny-tiny little dig beneath the surface, you find out that she made her money running an English school.

The book is selling a fantasy.

The blunt truth is that there is very little money to be made in farming. The reason is simple. It requires minimal skill. Any farmer in rural Africa or Asia can do the job so there's a ton of supply and only a fixed demand which goes up only slowly as populations rise.

There is an exception naturally. As any good economist would tell you that it consists of having a high demand and only limited supply. In this context, it would mean selling a unique product that nobody else produces.

This explains the rush for obscure heirloom tomatoes, varieties of eggplants, herbs, etc. The CC should also mention the existence of Sembikiya in Japan where "perfect" fruit is sold akin to jewelry (with prices to match!) These are luxury items and can easily sustain a livelihood.

Of course, you could always be a "gentleman farmer" as can be seen in the books of Jane Austen but the wealth has always been obtained from somewhere else. The farm is a consumption item not one of production, and the consumption comes attached with the genuine pleasure in consuming a superior product.

So as Ricardo might have understood it, you might as well out-source the problem, and consume the finest produce, meat and seafood that other people can procure or produce better than you unless you happen to be skilled at its production which case the CC would appreciate an invitation!

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.

Early Summer Zucchini-fest

Zucchini ribbon salad with radish, cherry-tomatoes, & pine nuts on a bed of shaved beets (rosemary & sage vinaigrette) ♦ Zucchini Soup with spring onions, white beans & beet greens ♦ Zucchini Gratin with thyme & Greek basil — Sautéed fiddlehead ferns

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.

Cooking Myths (Part 3)

This one's a doozy because it goes against all logic.

Apparently, when you steam mussels, clams or oysters, the ones that don't open should be discarded.

This defies science and logic.

Dead clams are obvious to spot. They are open and they stink. In fact, a closed clam is a healthy one because it's still alive.

When you steam them, you are in fact, killing them.

Clams, oysters, mussels – they don't possess a nervous system like mammals that feels pain so for all those vegetarians given to furious and fervent anthropomorphism, this is not unlike steaming spinach. You are killing the spinach too when you steam it and it too feels no pain!

The ones that don't open are the healthiest of them all since they are resistant. A few additional minutes of steaming always does the job.

So people prefer tossing out the best clams for the dubious ones? Sounds pretty fuckin' irrational to the CC!

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.

Describing Food

From Joyce's The Dead:

A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table, and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin, and beside this was a round of spiced beef. Between these rival ends ran parallel lines of side-dishes: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam, a large green leaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle, on which lay bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds, a companion dish on which lay a solid rectangle of Smyrna figs, a dish of custard topped with grated nutmeg, a small bowl full of chocolates and sweets wrapped in gold and silver papers and a glass vase in which stood some tall celery stalks. In the centre of the table there stood, as sentries to a fruit-stand which upheld a pyramid of oranges and American apples, two squat old-fashioned decanters of cut glass, one containing port and the other dark sherry. On the closed square piano a pudding in a huge yellow dish lay in waiting, and behind it were three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals drawn up according to the colours of their uniforms, the first two black, with brown and red labels, the third and smallest squad white, with transverse green sashes.

The Economics of Food Blogging

The blunt truth is there is not much money to be made writing food blogs. You do it as a labor of love and have a day job that pays the bills.

That's why it's so shockingly obvious when a former food blogger goes "rogue".

They start advertising specific products or specific items. Which is truly bogus.

If you want to make truly great food then you need top of the line items. That is hardly surprising. However, it is not true that you need a specific top of the line item. There is enough competition in any field that as long as you have a really good supplier, you will do extremely well.

Incidentally, there's not much money to be made doing "food trucks" either. That's why most "food truckers" sell the truck the moment they get the first book deal.

With such blunt truths, the CC doesn't envision a ton of advertisement revenue in his future. If he earns even a single penny, he will scan it and show it to the world.

Sopa de Lima

This is a superb one-pot meal. It's from the Yucatán region and resembles the classic tortilla soup except that it has different spices and the strong tang of limas - similar to but not the same as the easily available Persian limes.

The classical dish calls for both gizzards and liver so this is definitely a "simplified" version.

Ingredients

Tortilla Chips

6 corn tortillas
1 cup "neutral" oil (corn or rice)

Sopa

1 1/2 cup chopped white onion
4 cloves garlic (minced)
1 habañero chile (minced)
2 tbsp oil

1/2 tbsp ground cloves
1/4 tbsp ground cinnamon
1 tbsp dried Mexican oregano

6 cups chicken stock

1 cup canned crushed tomatoes

1 1/2 lbs chicken thighs (with the bone)

1/2 cup lime juice
2 avocados (chopped)
cilantro (chopped with stems)

Recipe

The tortillas are for making chips. You can also buy these ready-made if you have access to good ones. If not, you must dry out the tortillas overnight, cut them up and fry them in the oil till crisp. Drain on paper towels.

Heat up the 2 tbsp of oil. Fry the onions until translucent about 5 minutes. Add the garlic, habañero, cloves and cinnamon and fry for a few more minutes.

Add the peeled chopped tomatoes, the stock, oregano and chicken. Bring to a simmer and reduce the heat to a low simmer. Cover and cook for about 75 minutes till the chicken is cooked through.

(Just to point out that most recipe writers are bollocky bitches and bastards, most suggest a 20-minute simmer. It took more than 60 minutes to get the thighs to be tender, and there was nothing remotely special about the CC's chicken.)

Pull out the chicken using a pair of tongs. Shred it with a fork and toss the bones away. Add it back to the pot. Add salt to taste and some of the lime shells. Cook for 10 more minutes. Fish the lime shells out.

Add the lime juice just before serving.

Serve garnished with the fried tortilla chips, chopped avocados and cilantro.

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:

• 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.)

There are no other choices.

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.

A Simple Bengali Meal

Naked Lunch

There are many many Italian recipes that rely not only on precise timing but the absolutely best of ingredients.

That's because they are naked.

They barely consist of an ingredient or two and would easily be spoilt if the timings are off. Also, unlike a lot of recipes they are not "salvageable". A mistake is the same as guaranteed failure. In fact, they are frequently given as a test to budding chefs to see how well they cope with pressure in the kitchen.

However they are far from difficult.

They are shockingly easy if you understand the logic and get a good grasp of the timing and they are best enjoyed with a glass of excellent wine at a solitary lunch away from all pressures (like serving food to other people.)

Easy except for the pressure of timing, of course!

The recipes come from all over Italy. Butter dominates in the North. Olive oil in the South. There are passionate arguments on both sides and much heat is generated but not enough light so the CC will skip these meaningless arguments in favor of the recipes themselves.

What is common to all of them is the logic of pasta making and the excellence of the ingredients — kinda obvious given that there are so few to start with.

Boil the heavily-salted water. When it comes to a boil, add the pasta (almost but not always dried for dishes of this nature.) Get the timing right. Start making the sauce at precisely the right time so that the pasta will be ready in time for the sauce. Add a ladleful of the pasta water to the sauce (which is how the salt gets into the sauce.) Toss everything together and serve at once.

It's like a dance relying on perfect timing.

Spaghetti Alio e Olio (Roman)

Ingredients

6-8 cloves garlic (minced)

chopped red chilli pepper (optional)

6 tbsp olive oil
black pepper
chopped parsley

Recipe

Sautée the garlic in olive oil at low heat till golden. Be very very careful as it has a tendency to burn. (= FAIL!)

Add a splash of the pasta water, a generous amount of black pepper, and the spaghetti. Toss everything together.

Spaghetti Cacio e Pepe

Ingredients

2 tbsp "fat" (butter or olive oil)
1 clove garlic (smashed)

1/2 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano
4 tbsp black pepper
1 tbsp chopped rosemary

Recipe

NOTE: the amount black pepper is not a mistake. The name means "cheese and black pepper" and if you desire black pepper then black pepper it shall be!

Heat up the butter or olive oil. Add the garlic and let cook gently until golden but not burnt. (= FAIL!)

When the pasta is done, add everything else with some pasta water and toss together.

Pasta con Burro e Salvia

Ingredients

4 tbsp butter
10-12 sage leaves

1/2 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano

Recipe

NOTE: This recipe is best with fresh pasta because the butter brings out the rich taste of the eggs in the pasta.

Heat up the butter and let it cook at low heat until it is golden but the milk fat solids have not burnt (= FAIL!)

Toss in the sage leaves and fry for a few seconds. More and they will burn. (= FAIL!)

Toss in the pasta, the cheese and some pasta water if needed and serve at once.

The Love of Ripe Tomatoes

(Source: 完熟トマト.)

Cooking Myths (Part 3)

It sometimes surprises people to know that a tightly-packed refrigerator or freezer is actually much more energy efficient than a loosely-packed one.

It shouldn't be so surprising. Air has almost no thermal capacity. We've discussed that in the context of an oven but the same principle applies to a freezer.

The things that keep the insides cold are actually the walls and the food and beverage items.

That's why a packed freezer will stay cold for a long time during a power outage.

So if you have a packed fridge like the CC, you can pat yourself for being more energy-efficient.

Octopus Salad with Arugula and Cranberry Beans

The CC came across the most excellent octopus in the Korean markets in Queens this week so he had to buy some. There were also excellent fresh cranberry beans to be had so naturally he had to buy that too.

The combination of octopus and beans is a classic all across the Mediterranean everywhere from Spain, the French Rivera, Italy, Greece and further.

The recipe is simplicity itself. Braise the octopus until tender. Use the braised liquid to cook the beans in. Make a fine vinaigrette and toss it all together. The CC served it with some fine focaccia on the side.

Ingredients

8 baby octopuses
1 carrot
1 red onion
12 black peppercorns

1/2 cup fresh cranberry beans
1 cup arugula

1 shallot (finely chopped)
6 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
2 tbsp sherry vinegar
salt
black pepper

Recipe

Octopuses come pre-cleaned these days. All you need to do is cut off the head from the tentacles which are joined by the eye. Each octopus will yield two parts.

Cut the carrots and onions coarsely. Add the octopus, carrots, onions and peppercorns with about a cup of water and bring to a boil. Turn the heat to very low, and let simmer for about 30 minutes till the octopuses are tender.

Pull the octopuses out with tongs and let cool down. Strain the liquid above and reserve.

Add the fresh cranberry beans to the above liquid and bring to a boil. Simmer at low heat until done. Roughly 15 minutes.

Strain and reserve the liquid. (This makes an amazing broth for future use.)

Make a vinaigrette with shallots, olive oil, sherry vinegar, salt and pepper. Toss everything together and serve.

Fish Stock

The art of making stock has always been tied with the art of frugality. This is true in cultures across the globe — everything from French and Italian to Japanese. It's the art of actually extracting the maximum amount of goodness from the spare parts so as to not waste them.

This is particularly true in the case of fish stock since it has an exceptionally short shelf-life. Ideally, fish stock is best made fresh and consumed quickly.

Fish stock has always been made from the "unwanted" parts that still preserve a strong amount of both fish flavor and the proteins.

Classic dashi is basically a precise fish stock but the CC has talked about that extensively so we'll skip it this time and talk about the more classical French version.

If you look online, they talk about making fish stock with cod or monkfish. Have you seen the price of any of these lately?

These people are not just foolish; they are positively retarded!

Fish stock is made with any non-oily fish with the spare parts if you will. The heads, the tails, and everything else. (Incidentally, you can preserve these things in the freezer if you don't plan to make it right away. The CC almost always has prawn shells in his freezer.)

Here's a short list of things that make amazing fish stock:

• Fish heads and tails.
• Prawn shells.
• Lobster shells.
• Dried anchovies.
• Dried niboshi (煮干し).
• Dried shrimp.
• Maldive fish flakes (basically same as katsuobushi.)
• Clam juice and clam muscles.
• Scallop muscles (finely chopped.)

The short version is waste-not-want-not. The only detail is that dried fish should be boiled for no more than roughly 8-10 minutes before the stock turns bitter. (You can reduce the stock a second time later if you want a more concentrated stock.)

The recipe below is "generic". You can add different spices if you like. For example, the CC frequently adds fresh parsley which since it comes from the carrot family tends to accentuate the sweet carrot flavors. Also, a judicious addition of fennel is a nice touch. However, these are all details to the basic skill that you need to know. So here goes...

Ingredients

1 onion
1 stalk celery
1 large carrot

olive oil
black peppercorns
salt

"fish" (from above)

Recipe

Dice the onions, celery, carrots really fine. Fry in some olive oil they are soft. About 8 minutes. Add the peppercorns and salt and fry for a bit. Add water.

Bring to a boil and let it cook for about 20 minutes. Skim as the oil and impurities come to the top.

Add the "fish" and let cook for no more than 8-10 minutes. You will need to skim one more time.

Pass the mixture through a sieve lined with a cheesecloth.

Yogurt Updates

No post seems to have generated the sheer amount of comments and updates as the yogurt post just a few days ago.

Speaking of which, ladies and gentlemen, could you please post your comments publicly so that everyone can share?

You know who you are. Don't make the CC shame you.

Here's the best of the list:

[1] 2% organic milk works best.

CC: Experimentally verified and confirmed!

[2] If you have a pizza stone, pre-heat the oven to about 200°F for about 2-3 hours. If the stone is on a different shelf than the container, it will ensure that the oven stays warm at the desired even temperature of 180°F even in the coldest winter.

CC: DUH!!! Simplicity itself. How obvious in retrospect.

[3] If you want a thicker yogurt without the fat, add in some milk powder when boiling the milk.

CC: Not tried but makes complete sense.

[4] If you want "Greek yogurt", you must drain the fresh yogurt in a cheese cloth for about 6-8 hours.

CC: Yep! and the drained whey is muy muy delicioso! Do not waste.

Chestnut Risotto

Simplicity of effect often takes considerable complication of means.

A chestnut risotto is basically starch over starch. Admittedly chestnust does have protein content but the mouth-feel is that of a chewy starchy product.

In order to not bore the palate with a monotonous texture, you must break it up.

The recipe consists of three parts — preparing the chestnuts, preparing a chestnut broth and making the actual risotto.

The complications make for a dish that is both rich in taste and texture.




Ingredients

2 lbs raw chestnuts

1/2 cup shallots (finely chopped)
1 cup carnaroli rice
3 cups broth (use dashi otherwise)

1 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano

olive oil
4 tbsp rosemary (finely chopped)

sea salt
black pepper

Recipe

Please note the simplicity of the ingredients. The complexity comes in how they are manipulated.

Score the chestnuts with a knife with an X mark. Roast in an oven heated to 350°F for about 15 minutes.

While they are still warm, you must peel them. It's hard sweaty work and they don't peel as well when they cool down so your fingers are likely to feel the burn.

Inevitably, some of them will  be moldy. You must discard these.

Separate the chestnuts into whole ones and partial ones. Cut the whole ones into quarters and set aside.

Blend the partially broken ones with the broth. You may need to add some whole ones if there are not enough partial ones. Don't worry about blending them fine. Strain the broth from the now broken pieces.

These broken pieces act as the uneven textural interest. Put them away to let dry for a bit. (They need to be dry since they will get pan-fried later.)

Now, we prepare a standard risotto. Keep the chestnut broth just under boiling on a separate heater.

Fry the shallots in the olive oil. When limp (about 8 minutes), add the rice and let it fry for a bit. When the rice is translucent and coated with oil, you will be able to see the white rice kernels. Add he broken chestnut pieces and sautée for a bit (about 3-4 minutes.)

Add the whole chestnut pieces and the rosemary.

Now make the risotto. Alternately add the warm chestnut broth, and keep stirring till all the broth is used up and you get a creamy textured wet risotto.

Add the parmigiano-reggiano and serve at once with tons of black pepper.

Sansai Soba (山菜そば)

It's relatively easy to make this when you can source the mountain vegetables in winter.

They are found the fresh section but they come packed in relatively alkaline water. They must be thoroughly washed multiple times before they can be used. The above set up may sound horrible but the CC was shockingly surprised at the excellence of the vegetables. They maintained their textural crispness which was quite amazing.

Japanese cuisine seems to be intimidating but like any other codified cuisine, it relies in practice on a standard set of tricks. These tricks are so general that you can use them to elevate your Italian, Indian or Thai cuisine to the next level once you understand the thrust of the tricks.

This leads up to a fairly general point. In order to get "inside" a different cuisine, you must master its internal grammar. And there is always an internal grammar. You have to use your powers of empathy to enter into an entirely foreign mindset. What lies there will frequently revolutionize your thinking because it will cause you to unlearn all the accreted prejudices of your own life so far.

Enough philosophizing, O CC! How about the recipe, eh?

This is a classic winter one-stop shop. It relies on the precision of individual execution but it's completely straightforward.

The vegetables and the fishcake are simmered in the dashi. (We've talked about dashi being the foundation of Japanese cuisine here.) The soba are cooked until al dente. The whole thing is combined in a bowl with some nori (seen on the right hand side to give textural interest) and many Japanese would happily top it with furikake (although the CC didn't do it.)

Also, this is a relatively more "purist" recipe. The soba means that you are looking for a more "clean" taste. Had the CC been using the relatively prosaic udon, he would've happily added in some miso to get more of that umami. Tradition dictates a cleaner taste for the spare soba.



Ingredients

4 cups dashi
2 tbsp mirin
3 tbsp soy sauce
1/2 tbsp rice vinegar

2 cups mountain vegetables
soba
6 sheets of nori
1 kamaboko (fish cake)

Recipe

Cut the fish cake diagonally into elliptical disks.

Simmer the fish cake and vegetable in the dashi with the mirin, vinegear and the soy sauce.

Meanwhile, separately cook the soba until al dente. It must have a bite. Drain immediately and cool in an ice bath.

Add the soba to individual bowls. Top with the dashi, vegetables and fish cake. Serve on the side with the nori sheets cut into triangles.

Making Yogurt

Making yogurt is so straightforward that the CC is surprised it's not more commonly known. When the CC was making it, two separate people commented on the fact the milk will get "spoilt".

Well, DUH!

Yogurt is spoiled milk. So is cheese for that matter. So are miso, kimchi, and all other sour pickles. It's the precision of the spoilage that matters not the fact that it's "spoilt."

Good grief.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, yogurt doesn't come from the supermarket. It's spoilt milk and it's important that it be "spoilt" in the right way.

Over millenia, we as a species are symbiotic with a class of bacteria known collectively as lactobacilli. (Literally, milk-bacteria.)

We co-exist and they do wonderful things for us in our guts. That's why antibiotics make you feel so queasy at the end of the dose. They wipe out all the bacteria in our body and we can no longer digest anything that well. (Incidentally, a lot of what we consider "digestion" is being done by the bacteria in our gut not by humans but's that for a different post.)

Anyway, making yogurt is dead straightforward. The only hard part in winter is setting it in a warm enough place.

Ingredients

4 cups milk
1/2 cup active yogurt

Recipe

Heat the milk in a non-reactive pan until it comes to just under a boil. You are both killing all the other bacteria present in the milk and changing the proteins to be more receptive to making yogurt.

Cool the milk down to about 110°F (just above human temperature.) The old wives' method is to see if a finger inserted in the milk is comfortable or not. Above this temperature, you will kill all the bacteria introduced later.

Add the yogurt and whisk it into the milk. You are basically doing a precise "spoilage".

Let it sit in a warm spot for about 8 hours. It takes less time in summer and a little longer in winter.

Refrigerate and repeat.

Comeback

Every blog needs a comeback and now that the CC is back, he's shelling ten pounds of peas that he bought.

Beans, Good Ol' Beans

Everyone here knows that the CC is crazy about them (both fresh and dried) and that he adores them with a passion only rivalling his love for anchovies.

However, how many know that the famous Roman surnames are actually derived from beans? (Possibly, their families made their fortunes in the bean agricultural trade.)

Cicero is derived from chickpeas (modern-day Italian: cece/ceci.) Fabius refers to fava beans (modern-day Italian: fava/fave.)

Lentulus should be self-evident, and Piso refers to peas (pisello/piselli.)

Little Cute Brussel Sprouts

"They were ready for their closeup!"

What's Good for the Goose!

From Johann Jacob Wecker's Eighteen Books of the Secrets of Art of Nature (1660) comes a most unusual recipe.

It's how to roast a goose alive and eat it in that condition.

The last line of the recipe is the pièce de resistance!

(Hint: the character ſ is the modern day "s".)

Source: Link.

To roſt a Gooſe alive 

Let it be a Duck or Gooſe, or ſome ſuch lively Creature, but a Gooſe iſ beſt of all for thiſ purpoſe, leaving hiſ neck, pull of all the Feather from hiſ body, then make a fire round about him, not too wide, for that will not roſt him: within the place ſet here and there ſmall potſ full of water, with ſalt and Honey mixed therewith, and let there be diſheſ ſet full of roſted Appleſ, and cut in pieceſ in the diſh, and let the Gooſe be baſted with Butter all over, and Larded to make him better meat, and he may roſt the better, put fire to it; do not make too much haſte, when he beginſ to roſt, walking about, and ſtriving to fly away, the fire ſtopſ him in, and he will fall to drink water to quench hiſ thirſt; thiſ will cool hiſ heart and the other partſ of hiſ body, and by thiſ medicament he looſneth hiſ belly, and growſ empty. And when he roſteth and conſumeſ inwardly, alwayeſ wet hiſ head and heart with a wet ſponge: but when you ſee him run madding and ſtumble, hiſ heart wantſ moyſture, take him away, ſet him before your Gueſtſ, and he will cry aſ you cut off any part from him and will be almoſt eaten up before he be dead, it iſ very pleaſant to behold.