Pasta with Asparagus, Lemon and Goat Cheese

A wonderful spring dish that's impossible to resist!


Ingredients

2 cups penne
1 bunch asparagus
1 lemon
goat-cheese

black pepper
sea salt

Recipe

The "sauce" in this recipe doesn't really need to cook. All you need is a large bowl to mix everything in.

Cut the delicate tops of the asparagus and set aside. Quickly strip the woody bits with a knife. Cut at a steep diagonal angle into thin spears, and set aside separately.

With a peeler, zest the lemon and keep the strips.

Bring the heavily-salted pasta water to a boil. In a colander, dunk the diagonal asparagus spears for about 3 minutes. Then, toss in the delicate tops for only about 30 seconds. Fish out, and put them in a large bowl.

Cook the pasta until al dente.

Meanwhile, cut the lemon strips extremely fine and add to the cooked asparagus in the bowl. Toss in the goat cheese. Add in about 1/2 cup of the pasta water (which should be boiling) and stir it until it makes a thick sauce.

Toss in the pasta when done. Squeeze the leftover lemon all over it, and toss. Serve with lots of black pepper on top.

Better Living through (Pastry) Chemistry

One of tricks that works when using fine corn flour as dough (think masa not ground corn) is that freezing the dough allows you to roll it out without the dough splitting up.

This is one of those great tricks that can be learnt from the pastry world where the traditional mechanism of wheat gluten is basically out of bounds.

Keep the dough cold enough and you will be able to roll it out without gluten.

Incidentally, this is the "secret" behind classically made Japanese soba as well which are made with buckwheat flour which doesn't contain any gluten. You need cold water.

This is also the "secret" behind well-made makke di roti. Cold water to prevent the dough "sticking" while you slap the stuff directly on to the grill.

The key word here is cold.

Early Riser

Waking up before the sun is overrated.

When the CC got to the farmers' market at 8:00am, they were barely unpacking. After a fruitless (!) 20 minutes pondering the silence of New York, he finally got his goodies.

Asparagus, spring onions, and eggs.

Spring is finally here!

Kabocha Risotto with Fried Sage and Pine nuts

This is just an epic recipe and exemplifies what is best about understanding the science of food. It combines Italian and Japanese elements in a transparent way so that what you get is much much greater than the sum of its parts.

You can make the broth and the risotto with minimal effort. (You may skip the instructions for making the "broth" if you already have some but this recipe shows you how to get away with making it "on the fly".)

But first, you must be aware of this particular culinary trick.

Secondly, you can streamline the ingredients and the pots so that there is very little wastage of either time or effort.

The important thing to note about kabocha is that unlike butternut squash, it doesn't need to be peeled. The skin is thin and edible and delicious. What you need to do is scrape it with a peeler to get the hard bits off. The Japanese adore this particular technique because it renders the squash with alternate dark and light green colors which is visually quite appealing.

Follow the instructions closely, and be amazed at what you can achieve on a weekday when you are "exhausted".

Ingredients

1/2 kabocha
1 large red onion (diced very fine)
4 cloves garlic (diced very fine)
1 cup arborio rice
16-18 sage leaves
4 tbsp pine nuts

4 cups dashi

1 cup parmigiano-reggiano
salt
pepper

Recipe

First, soak the konbu in 5 cups of cold water. Let it sit for 30 minutes or so while you do some prep and/or enjoy a nice glass of wine.

The onion and garlic can be pulsed in a food processor. Just make sure that you don't purée them.

Heat the oven to 350°F and roast the pine nuts for 7 minutes. Set aside.

Cut up the kabocha into large pieces. Don't get too technical. Rough shapes are fine. Also, cut up a little bit of the kabocha into neat little diced pieces. Set aside.

Bring the water to a boil. Pull the konbu off just before it boils otherwise it will taste bitter. Toss the large kabocha pieces in. Let it simmer for 10-12 minutes at high heat to get the squash to soften. When done, blend the mixture in the pot, and keep at a very low simmer.

Meanwhile, heat some olive oil in a pot. When hot but not smoking, toss in 6-8 of the largest sage leaves. Let them fry for about a minute and fish them out and set aside on some paper towels to absorb the oil.

In the same oil, toss in the onions and the garlic. Fry for 6 minutes or so until they are colored but not caramelized. Toss in the rice and fry for a bit. Add the salt and black pepper. Just before the broth, toss in the neatly diced kabocha pieces and fry for a bit.

Now comes the standardized risotto procedure. Toss in the blended kabocha broth and stir. Toss and stir, toss and stir, toss and stir.

Finally, the mantecura. Put in the parmigiano-reggiano and stir well.

When done, garnish the risotto with the fried sage leaves and the roasted pine nuts.

Asafoetida

Depending on who you ask this is either the stinkiest of stinky spices or the most wonderful smell ever.

De gustibus non disputandum est.

What is clear is that this seems to be the grandchild of the legendary silphium which has long since vanished into extinction.

The plant is legendarily stinky. When the CC bought pure asafoetida in India, he packed it in four, count 'em four bags of plastic, and an air-tight plastic case, and he could still smell it. He was terrified that it was not going to make it through customs but the cold weather in the airplane cargo at 30,000 feet seemed to do the trick.

When fried, which is how it's supposed to be used, it smells sublime. It's like a combination of leeks, onions and garlic. That's why we put up with the stinkiness. That's why the Romans did too, and no less an authority than Garciá de Orta defended it vociferously.

The love-hate affair is quite clearly expressed linguistically. The French call it merde du diable (= devil's shit.) Even the English name channels the "fetid" part from Latin.

What you get commercially is laced with wheat flour. It would be a stretch to call this adulteration since there is a method to the madness but it's still not the real deal.

The real deal is priced more like a precious metal than a food ingredient, and there's a reason that connoisseurs adore it. It just smells great (and it's an excellent anti-flatulent to boot!)

It's almost impossible to make people "switch camps". Either you love it or you don't.

The clerk who sold some to the CC in Spain of all places, was like, "What do you see in this? It smells awful." His boss, who was clearly knew better said, "Ignore him. This stuff is amazing. I love it."

Which camp are you in?

What Nonna can learn from Obaasan!

The recipe for spaghetti with clams is justifiably a classic.

However, there's a subtle way in which it can be improved, and we have the Japanese to thank for that.

The classic Italian (or French) way is to dump all the clams in, toss in some wine, and let them steam. Fish them out as they open, and then reduce the broth to get it to its logical clamminess.

The classic Japanese way improves on this in many many ways. It's subtle and it works because it interleaves the two steps to make it all better.

The CC first learnt about this trick when he was making asari gohan — an elementally simple dish of clams served over rice. Very simple and eminently suitable for a day when only a simple home-cooked meal will do.

When he first read the instructions, he was a little mystified but decided to follow them anyway. The logic of the procedure jumped out with such immense force that he realized rapidly that it would enable him to take his Italian clam recipes to the next level.

The trick is very very simple.

Instead of steaming the clams all at once, we are going to steam them in batches. Typically 3-4 batches depending on the number of clams. The idea is that each batch not just steams in the previous clam's broth but that the broth reduces at the same time so that there is very little wastage of time. What seems at first like "taking longer" is actually a very clever way of combining the two steps. Each batch steams, opens up, and releases the juices. Meanwhile the next batch steams while the previous clam broth reduces itself.

The moral must be that even Italian grandmas, as talented as they are, have something to learn from the rest of the world.

Historic Scientificity : The Anti-Farting Gambit

If you look at Indian food, you will notice a preponderance of cloves, cinnamon, black pepper, etc.

Why were these adopted?

The first principle, as always, is basic economics.

They grow abundantly on the Indian sub-continent and hence, they are extraordinarily cheap. So cheap that the Romans used black pepper as ballast on their ships sailing homewards. If all went well, you got a lot of black pepper. If your ship got caught at sea in a storm, you could toss the stuff overboard, and not suffer terribly because it was so cheap.

The second, which is a lot subtler, is that they are all carminative agents (anti-flatulents.) When eaten with lentils, they inhibit the bacteria that line the intestinal walls from generating gassy flatulence.

Obviously, the Indians learnt this by trial and error, and the "technology" has been passed down ever since. Most use this but few understand why.

The most effective are cloves, cinnamon, garlic and asafoetida. The second tier is made up of ginger, turmeric, and black pepper.

There is a related herb in Mexico called epazote which is traditionally added to black beans for the same reason.

Read carefully, and you'll notice that almost all of the "greatest hits" of Indian food are featured. What's missing, of course, is coriander, cumin and cardamom but not everything has to be functional. Some of it is just pure pleasure.

That's why the born-today vegans are basically fucked. They don't understand the functional component of how to make a successful lentil dish. You can't just boil that stuff and call it a day. You need to spice it right to make it both tasteful and functional.

Skill is required in almost every sphere of cooking even if you decide to follow some arbitrary rules, and this skill determines whether you toot through your rear horn all day or not.

Toodles and toots!

Nasi Lemak

Indonesian Meal

Making nasi lemak with the traditional ikan bilis, sambal chicken, and all the other fixins.

Pictures to follow.

Dhansaak

This is a traditional recipe of the Parsis, almost always served along with paatra ni macchi at a wedding.

The recipe is long and complicated, and is going to take the better part of a day. However, only those that have eaten the real deal can appreciate why the CC loves it made the traditional way.

The title literally means "wealth (=dhan) of vegetables (=saak)", and as you can expect from the title and the context, it consists of a rich stew of lentils, cooked with vegetables, and meat (traditionally lamb but frequently goat), served alongside with a spicy caramelized rice. There are traditional accompaniments — a cucumber-tomato raita and/or kachumber (diced cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions with salt), and fresh slices of salted cucumber and carrots.

The ingredient list is long so the CC will break it up into its functional components. The CC will try and indicate what actually makes the dish the dish, and what parts are frequently substituted by local fresh vegetables, etc.

The spices are absolutely critical (do not deviate!)

A quick note about the spices. They are really a combination of two spice mixtures in a 3:2 ratio. If you're just making this recipe, you can combine them because they follow the same procedure (roasting + grinding) but just be aware that they really are two logically different spice mixes that just happen to be combined in this specific recipe.

(Yes, this is anal-retentiveness of a superlative nature. Deal with it!)

Please read the instructions. If you read them carefully, you can streamline the recipe. In the modern day with modern equipment, you will not need to spend all day in the kitchen. However, that requires more than a little attention to detail.

There is nothing like this in the literature — caramelized rice with heavily spiced lentils and lamb with the occasional complimentary hit of sweetness from the pumpkin and carrots.

Routine recipes are all fine and dandy but this one is for the betterment of your soul.

Magic awaits!

---

Ingredients

Lentils

1/4 cup vaal (absolutely critical!)
1/4 cup whole masoor (brown french lentils — also absolutely crucial!)
1/4 cup toovar (pigeon peas.)
1/4 cup whole moong

Meat

1 lb lean lamb (cut into bite-size pieces)
1 cup yogurt
1/2 cup cilantro leaves
2 tbsp garam masala
4 tbsp ginger-green chilli paste

Vegetables

1 tiny pumpkin (chopped coarsely — traditional)
2 eggplants (chopped coarsely — traditional)
1 carrot, etc. (chopped coarsely — seasonal)
2 tomatoes (chopped coarsely — seasonal)

Fresh Spices

1 large red onion
2" ginger
8-10 Thai green chillies (substitute by 5-6 serranos)
1 tbsp turmeric

Spices

Dhansaak Masala

1 stick cassia
2 tbsp coriander seeds (critical!)
1/2 tbsp cumin seeds
8 dried red chillies
1/2 tsp poppy seeds
1/4 tsp cloves
4 green cardamom
1 black cardamom (badi elaichi)
1/2 tsp caraway seeds (shahi jeera)
1/2 tsp fenugreek
1 tsp black peppercorns
1 strand mace
1 tsp dagad phool
1 tsp naag kesar

Parsi Sambhar Masala

1 tsp chilly powder
1/2 tsp turmeric
2 tbsp mustard seeds
1 tbsp fenugreek seeds
1/4 tsp cloves
1 star anise
1 tsp black peppercorns
1/4 stick cassia

Garnish

1/2 cup cilantro leaves (chopped fine)

Other

oil
salt

Rice

1 cup basmati rice
2 large red onion (cut into thin half-moon rings)
1 stick cassia
6 cloves
10-12 peppercorns
6-8 tbsp brown sugar
2 cups water
salt

Recipe

Wash and soak the four lentils overnight in an excess of water. The excess is necessary since they absorb a lot more than you think they will.

For the meat, blend the ginger and green chillies with the cilantro leaves, and toss with the lamb, yogurt and garam masala. Refrigerate overnight or at least for 6-8 hours.

In the morning, drain the water from the lentils. Re-soak.

If you have a pressure cooker (highly recommended!) toss the lentils in with some water, and salt. Pressure cook for no more than 10 minutes. Set aside.

Please be aware that the vaal and the toovar are going to "decompose". This is part of the point of the recipe. The "stew" portion, if you will.

(If you don't have one, cook them until the hardest two lentils — masoor and moong are edible. Roughly 60 minutes.)

Meanwhile, chop the fresh spices (ginger, green chillies, onion) in a food-processor. They should be coarsely chopped not ground to a paste because you need to fry them. Set aside.

Heat a dry skillet on medium-heat till it's hot. Dry roast all the spices — the trick is to toss them in order of size, and add the next batch before the previous is well-done. This is a skill, and needs some experience. You could just roast each one separately but that wastes more time. Make sure you don't burn the poppy seeds.

Put them in a bowl, and allow them to cool. When cool, grind to a fine powder in a coffee grinder. Set aside.

First, make the lamb.

Heat some oil in a skillet. When it shimmers, toss in the lamb pieces straight out of the marinade into the oil. The yogurt will look very disturbing interacting with the oil. Ignore this. Keep adding the lamb with the yogurt coating, and letting it cook with the oil. Slowly, toss in the rest of the marinade. Roughly 6-8 minutes in, you will notice that the lamb is well-done, and there's a lovely brown slurry in your skillet. Set the whole thing aside.

Heat some oil in a stock pot. When it shimmers, add the onion-ginger-green-chilli paste, and fry languidly. When it's fried but not caramelized, toss in the vegetables and fry for a bit. Add the lentils. Mix together, and let it heat up. Add the spices. Then the lamb and the sauce.

Let it all simmer together at very low heat for at least 15-20 minutes. The lentils must be "melting" but the vegetables must still retain their identity.

Now, we make the rice.

Fry the onion half-moon rings in some oil. When limp, add the sugar, and coat and let it cook till they are nicely caramelized. Toss in the spices, and the rice, and let the caramel and oil coat the rice grains. Add in water to let the rice cook, and let it cook at a medium-low heat covered till the rice is done.

Serve the rice along side the stew garnished with cilantro leaves.

Spam : Redux

Just a quick note that ads and other spam are not allowed on this blog.

This blog has been receiving increasing spam of the form:

Hey, love your recipe for X.

Link to Business.

The CC is quite clearly never going to make a freakin' penny out of blogging so he might as well keep it "purist" and "ol' school" as opposed to the bling-bling, ad-driven, lets-pretend-that-clicks-matter, lets-link-to-twitter-facebook-mobile-phone school.

The blog gets plenty of traffic as the records show. There's just not a breathless fanboi element which suits the CC just fine.

The CC doesn't want to be forced to moderate comments since that slows things down — not that there are many comments but still! — but he may very well be forced to.

Apologies to those who subscribe to the comment updates as email!

Water

There are three properties of water that make it unique.

Every single one of these properties is used in every single cuisine so it helps to understand how things work.

Water is a polar molecule.

Water may be H₂O but the two hydrogen atoms are attached at a 109.5° angle. This polarizes the water molecule because there is more positive charge on one side (H₂⁺) rather than the other (O^-.)

This means water can dissolve polar molecules. Specifically, any salt.

Most importantly, the salts will be split into their ionized components when dissolved because the positive ions will be attracted to the negative portion of the water molecule (O^-) and the negative ions to the positive portion (H₂⁺.)

Water has a very high boiling point.

Water is a very small molecule. However, compared to molecules of its size, it has an absurdly high boiling point. This is due to its polar nature. Water molecules naturally attract each other and it's quite hard to separate them. That's also why the phase transitions (ice → water, water → steam) take so much heat.

Water has a very high specific heat.

This just means that water can hold a tremendous amount of heat i.e. it has a high thermal capacity.

Heat is just the average energy of motion of a molecule.

This is a tricky point so it requires some explanation.

Whenever a molecule is symmetric, its bonds restrict a certain degree of vibration along the bonds because too much movement would break the bonds.

So a linear molecule is restricted in its motion along the line. If you had a molecule symmetric in two directions, its motion would be restricted in the plane but it could still rotate along both axes.

Water is so asymmetric that all three rotational degrees of freedom are possible as well as vibrating along both bonds, and perpendicular to them, and none of them break up the molecule so it can absorb energy to "spin" in three directions, and "vibrate" in three as well. Hence, it can absorb a lot of energy to "move".

Most importantly, it's the smallest molecule that has this property.

Soba with Miso

This is a classic example of Japanese nabemono which are "one pot" dishes.

nabe (pot) + mono (food) = nabemono "one-pot food"

Which tells you right away that it's for regular consumption, and relatively straightforward.

One of the important things to note about this format is that it is endlessly malleable. This is the criterion by which cultures save themselves from boredom. Once, you get the knack of it, and the rules of the washoku which seem to arise from both an aesthetic and a nutritional perspective, you can shuffle this stuff endlessly and not repeat yourself in a year.

The dish may seem to have a lot of ingredients and it may "seem" complex but it really is not. You could assemble it fairly easily with about twenty minutes of effort. It will take about an hour in real time but you can spend most of it with your feet up with a glass of wine if you so choose.



Ingredients

4 cups dashi
tofu
1 carrot (cut thin at a steep angle)
1 cup spinach
8-10 shiitake mushrooms

2 tbsp miso paste

2 scallions (sliced at a steep angle)
hijiki (soaked cold for 30 minutes)
wakame (soaked cold for only 5 minutes)

2 eggs
mirin
soy sauce
rice vinegar

soba

Recipe

First prep the egg. Mix the egg with 2 tbsp mirin, 1 tsp soy sauce and 1/2 tsp rice vinegar. Make a very thin omelette on medium-low heat and set aside.

When cool, roll it tight and slice it into thin rounds.

Assemble the ingredients in a pot — tofu, carrots, spinach, shiitake mushrooms, soba. Heat the dashi with some mirin and pour it over the mixture. Bring to a low boil. After about 10 minutes, turn off the heat. Stir in the soy sauce (to taste) and the miso.

Do NOT boil after adding the miso.

Serve with the scallions, hijiki and wakame as toppings.

No, it isn't!

We already know that Indian cookbooks screw up the translation of "lemon". They really mean lime which is what is actually used.

They also screw up the translation for tej which is frequently translated as cinnamon.

There's only one problem.

What you really get is cassia not true cinnamon. Admittedly, they are related but the distinction is real. In most of the world, what is actually called cinnamon is really cassia (since it's cheaper) so perhaps a relabeling is in order?

Worst of all, what gets translated in Indian cookbooks as "bay leaves" is anything but. If you start using true bay leaves à la Mediterranean in your Indian food, you are doomed.

The etymology gives it away. They are tej patta in Hindi (quite literally: leaves of cassia.) That's what you need. And that's why rice flavored with tej patta is a totally different beast from rice flavored with the bay laurel leaf.

The CC is a fan of all of the above but one must keep the ingredients correctly and precisely defined.

Rice Bran

Bet you didn't know that the rice bran had a tiny amount of fat in it from which can be extracted oil. It's frequently labelled as "rice oil" but it's really from the bran.

It has a very high smoke point being devoid of solid material, and has a neutral flavor. Hence, it's very much preferred in Japanese cooking since they harvest a ton of rice to begin with.

Rice bran (nuka) is a big thing in Japan. It's used to make a super turbo-charged, on-steroids version of sourdough except in the form of pickles (nukazuke.)

These pickles require a lot of love. They need to be turned daily twice a day so that they don't spoil. Supposedly, the pickles are insanely good, and like good sourdough the base material basically lives on forever but anything that requires love twice a day is way more commitment than even the CC can manage.

Edible German Food

There is only one thing that's wonderful about German food. It's called marzipan.

They really do it better than anyone else. Yes, it's only almonds and sugar — how hard can it be, etc.? So why do all other attempts suck, huh?!?

A friend was visiting recently from Germany. She asked what the CC wanted as a gift, and the answer was "lots of marzipan."

And he got it.

Nabemono

Howto: Poach Fish

All poaching is the same idea. Cook the object in the presence of aromatics in a suitable broth.

While fish may be poached in anything from tomato broth to chicken broth, one of the ways to do it well is to add a cup of white wine to the poaching liquid, and slowly bring the liquid to boiling.

The reason is simple.

Alcohol has a far lower boiling point than water. It boils at 78°C as opposed to water's 100°C.

Because fish poaches so quickly, the temperature will not rise above 78°C and you will not overcook the fish.

The same technique works for eggs as well.

Cooking Myths (Part 3)

Another cooking myth is that bread is done when you pull it out of the oven.

As any good baker would know this is patently false.

This is a simple consequence of the classical heat equation (bet you weren't counting on partial differential equations showing up on this blog, huh?)

Heat flows from stuff of higher temperature to that of lower temperature.

In the oven, heat flows into the bread because the oven is hotter than the dough.

As you pull the bread out of the oven, the heat starts flowing out of the bread into the ambient air. Frequently, the very center of the bread may be cooler than its surroundings, and heat will keep flowing towards it as well. Consequently, the bread is still "cooking", and experienced bakers know to hold themselves away until the bread equalizes with the temperature outside.

Experienced bakers know that good bread will "crackle" as it cools down. The bread is contracting from being cooled and the strands of gluten are snapping as the bread contracts. Which releases even more aromatic molecules of smell.

That's what makes fresh bread irresistible but you must resist for a while before the bread has cooled down. (Otherwise, you get to eat a lumpy doughy mess.)

It's one of the sad truths of life — instantaneous gratification is a very bad thing in the world of fresh bread!

Arto der Haroutunian

A uniquely intense writer who was an architect, really wanted to be a musician but loved food so much that he became a cookbook writer.

He was Armenian but the family lived in Syria and Lebanon, and moved to post-war England with all its deprivations and seventh-rate produce.

It is easy enough to scoff about ingredients in these food-crazy times but dial back about half a century and life was not so easy. You could forget about zucchini and arugula, and fenugreek and fresh turmeric might as well have been fantasies for the average cook.

It was in this environment that the author wrote these books.

He was a polymath and the intensity leaps off every page. The cross-connections between cuisines are made entirely organically (and correctly!) and the sheer encyclopaedic knowledge shines through.

The cookbooks are primarily concerned with the Mediterranean but they leap as far ashore as Mongolia and India when the logical connection between dishes is needed.

The author died tragically young but he authored twelve cookbooks only four of which are easily available.

You can't go wrong with any of them, and these days you will no longer have to make any substitutions. (The author is careful in stating the original first, and the substitution second. It's only the substitutions that make the books dated.)

This is home cooking of the most elevated kind. There are no duds here!!!

And most of all, the author's intense engagement with every aspect of the cooking process both physical and intellectual shines through.

What more could one ask?