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.