How My Cooking Has Changed : part 1
"Don't take shortcuts!", chef Bryan Polcyn urges the crowd at Barbara Lynch's Butcher Shop as he nears the end of a sumptuous 3-hour demo/banquet/book signing of Charcuterie
This is the silent but essential difference between cooking for joy and being a pro. In the professional kitchen, everything is about speed because everything is about cost: food cost, labor cost, turns. Pros need to take every edge and every shortcut they can get away with. But they must not take any shortcut that will be caught, a shortcut that will reveal that this dish was hurried or cheapened or careless.
Cooking at home, cooking because you want to cook, shortcuts are something else entirely. Doing things right can make sense, even if nobody will know. Your kids may not care whether the shallots were rough minced or brunoised or just run through the Cuisinart. But you'll know. Like that medieval stonecutter, you know what's in back of the food, you know whether the prep was right.
And that's why you're in the kitchen tonight, and not in a restaurant or grilling a steak out back on the Weber.
You're doing this because you want to. Don't take shortcuts: that's not why you chose to be here.
How My Cooking Has Changed : part 2
I started to cook one hot Pennsylvania summer, living above the movie theater on Chester Road with Thorsen and Bayer, because everyone was supposed to take a turn. None of us knew much. I made spaghetti and steak and stir fried chicken.
The Joy of Cooking saved the day, though not the soft-shell crabs.
I taught myself the basics in graduate school, in a terrible Joseph Sert kitchen. I had a pot and a pan. I gave bring-your-own-fork dinner parties. I made twice-boned duck from Julia Child and Kung Pao chicken from Joyce Chen.
About two years ago, I think, my cooking changed. I've been cooking more, and cooking differently.
What changed? And why? It's a long story. I think I'll explore it in a series of posts. They'll be collected by a Tinderbox agent (which you can find here with RSS here), so if you're entering late you can easily catch up.
How My Cooking Has Changed : part 3
I happened across Sally Schneider's A New Way To Cook
But while Joy of Cooking is a vast collection of recipes, A New Way To Cook is trying to explain a much smaller core of ideas, expressed in the form of recipes with variations. We have, for example, a core recipe for "braising small fish" or "rustic fruit tart", and then examine a host of ingredients that we can add or subtract -- and the changes that these additions and subtractions will require. In the fruit tart, for example, we might use apples or pears or strawberries (less water, more flour, add rhubarb) or blueberries (try a little thyme) or raspberries (even frozen -- add more flour because they're wet) or reconstituted dried apricots. It's all the same idea.
And that's a powerful idea, especially because a generation of home cooks raised to respect recipes can easily forget how forgiving food can be. Some things (baking) must be measured and timed, but tasty ingredients are bound to taste good whatever you do.
Schneider also recognizes that a generation of US cooks have grown up with a weird, religious antipathy to fat, which became to us what unclean foods were to our ancestors. But fat is also one of the things that makes food worth eating. It can make you crazy.
Schneider solves this brilliantly: fat's just an ingredient. An expensive ingredient. You aren't going to eat lots of fat, so you've got to make it count: you want the fat you eat to be the tastiest, freshest, most wonderful fat you can get. Schneider has you hoarding the fat from your duck, to be doled out carefully over weeks or months for cooking potatoes. You use less fat because you'll run out, and you really enjoy the fat you use.
How My Cooking Has Changed : part 4
Speed is perhaps the biggest change in the way I think about cooking.
I used to think that speed was incidental, a nice side-effect. If you worked fast, perhaps you could get out of the kitchen and back to work a few minutes faster. But speed is not a side-effect: efficiency is its own inner game, and speed is its own reward.
When you're cooking at home, you can afford to go to the pantry twice, or four times. At worst , if you're really inefficient, dinner might be a few minutes late. Who cares? Will anyone notice?
It doesn't matter that no one will notice. Efficiency is aesthetic, a challenge in itself. Do things right, you'll stay out of the weeds. Get everything you need; you save steps, you get more done, you think ahead.
Last weekend, we had a nice Sunday supper with an asparagus and mushroom sauté, a salad of roasted organic beets and home-smoked salmon, duck confit with buttermilk mashed potatoes and savory cherry compote, and roasted peaches topped with fresh blueberry sauce steeped with fresh thyme. The best part: I managed to stay entirely out of the weeds. No hurry, no worry. I don't think I've ever managed dinner for company without a few dandelions.
Thinking ahead -- working hard in the kitchen to save steps and time and to do things that need to be done correctly and not to do anything that doesn't need to be done -- is its own art, the inside game of cooking. It clears your mind. It keeps you from worrying about the office, or your upcoming conference, or your checkbook.
You're here because you want to be. You're cooking something good. Everything is in place. You're not in the weeds, you're not doing 360's at the range, you're not burning the potatoes today. You've got other things to do.
How My Cooking Has Changed : part 5
Saving dishes you didn't finish generates leftovers, and leftovers are usually dull. First, the food was usually better the first time. Second, you just had that! It was a treat the first time, but the second time is repetition.
But saving labor-intensive intermediate products -- stocks and braises and sauces -- gives you a nice launching pad for easily turning out something new. Often, that can be something small and luxurious that would be too costly or too difficult to undertake for its own sake. Instead of leftovers, you get a second special meal.
Last Sunday, we had duck confit with savory cherry compote and basil mashed potatoes. Last night, I had one leg of duck confit left from last Sunday night's feast. Now, duck confit takes a few hours to make; it's not something you whip up for a Thursday night dinner, especially not when you spent an extra hour at Eastgate coding a new Tinderbox feature.
Of course, this last leg was left because it was the scraggliest and least presentable. So I boned the leg, coarsely chopped the meat, and heated in a dry non-stick pan for about fifteen minutes.
I took two corn tortillas and toasted them quickly in another dry skillet. Brushed each with a little hoisin sauce. Sprinkled them with chopped scallions, and then with the duck.
Yum.
How My Cooking Has Changed : part 6
Sometimes in the kitchen, the right kind of speed is slow.
I've begun to set aside longer blocks of time devoted to cooking. With my schedule, this blocks have to be scheduled weeks, maybe months in advance. But I've had good luck with Sunday mornings at the market and afternoons in the kitchen.
Last week, I indulged in a brand new terrine mold, and today I've been working through what Charcuterie
I chickened out of the veal terrine, which left me with two pounds of stewing veal. So I've got a pot of Patricia Wells' veal stew going as a background task. That includes two pounds of carrots, sliced into thin rounds. Oh, my aching wrist.
I used to be a chemist, and this sort of systematic kitchen work takes me back to the lab. I often found lab work dull, when you come right down to it. There was always too much glasware to watch and too many beakers that weren't yet boiling. Yet sometimes I miss those cyclooctatetraenes.
Spending time with a long preparation that offers a good return on the investment -- stock, say, or even demi-glace -- is a pleasant break from wrestling with the code and balancing the books.
Ed Ward has a lovely paen today to the therapeutic effects of spending a little bit too much for dinner in Paris.
Monsieur had opened the front door and was standing outside on the sidewalk. What, I asked him, was that potato thing? "Gallette Lyonnaise," he answered. "Potatoes, onions, bacon. You put it on the plate to look like a cake, which is why the 'gallette.'" "And the potatoes make it Lyonnaise," I said. "Exactly." The air was cool and bracing. "You are at a hotel?" he said, pointing down the hill. "he hotel," I said, pointing up the hill. "Ah, rue Lafayette," he decided. I didn't disabuse him. He extended his hand. "Well, my friend, thank you very much. Come again." I told him I would and he went back inside. I started the climb to the firetrap I was going to call home for the night.
Closer to home, I made a nice dish the other night. I sauteed two shallots in olve oil, and added a couple of cups of wild rice. After a couple of minutes I added a half cup of white wine, and let it reduce, and then two cups of water. While the rice cooked, I small-diced some artisan kielbasa, sauteed, and drained it. Then I diced some really nice little organic carrots and browned them lightly in olive oil and butter. As the rice was nearly done, I added everything along with a few dried cherries and plenty of baby spinach, stirred, and served with a nice Chilean sauvignon blanc.
I stopped in Savenor's to get a chicken. Lately, Michael Ruhlman has convinced me that roast chicken needs to be brined, and that’s enough of a production that I’d rather get a really good chicken.
So I pulled into the 15-minute parking space in front, and left with a chicken, two huge lamb shanks, an artisan sausage, and a hanger steak.
As I handed over the contents of my wallet, the cashier mentioned that this was also her favorite steak. “Do you grill it?” I asked. “Or pan-sear it?” She broils it, after marinating it in oil and vinegar and Italian spices.
Now, this didn’t grab me at first, but I could use a different rub and I have a big pile of Penzey’s Italian Herbs that I bought in a delusionary fit and seldom use. So, I rubbed the hanger steak all over with kosher salt, fresh pepper, sugar, and ground ancho chile, and then coated it with lots of the dried herbs. Onto the grill! I'm not completely sure that the herbs helped the flavor, but they made the kitchen smell wonderful.
Memo: buying the grill on the Wolf range was a big win.
- cream of asparagus soup (improvised from some aging chicken stock, some aging asparagus (Linda and I both bought aspargus and we hadn’t even used up what we already had on hand), an onion, some roasted garlic, cup of white wine, and finished with a half cup of cream and some parsley)
- hanger steak
- gratin of fennel, onion, and potatoes
- salad
We had a bottle of a cheap red Bordeaux chosen at random from a pile of cheap young Bordeaux at Fresh Pond (2005 Chateau Tour De Pic, and very drinkable it was), and a sip of one of Dr. Loosen’s lovely dessert Rieslings for dessert.
Last night after work, I had a small problem. Earlier in the week, I'd stopped by the wine store, and they were tasting this interesting white Bordeaux (Chateaux Villa Bel-Air Graves 2002) that has tons of oak and malolactic fermentation and was only $12. So I grabbed some.
This wine may be impeccably French, but it could drop by Veronica Mars' for lunch with the girls and nobody would know that it was an exchange student. But what do I know?
Except when I got to the cash register, the wine actually was $21. Oh well. I got a couple of bottles anyway. We'd had half a bottle on Wednesday, so I wanted to cook something that would go well with the remaining half.
Also, since preparations for CAQDAS and Tinderbox Weekend UK are in full swing, it was already late. So I needed something that was fast, easy, could be made with ingredients on hand.
- Preheat oven to 350°F. Lightly butter a baking disk.
- Strew the baking disk with a diced shallot.
- Slice mushrooms to cover the shallots. (Next time, I might dice them for a quick and dirty duxelles. But slicing is fine). Don't skimp; plenty of mushrooms.
- Split a banana. Lay bananas across the mushrooms.
- Layer some fish filets on the bananas. (I used tilapia)
- Split a vanilla bean, scrap out the seeds with a sharp knife, and rub on the fish. Then sliver the beans and nestle amongst the mushrooms.
- Add a little wine. I didn't want to use that lovely Graves for cooking, so I grabbed 1/4c of madiera and a little vermouth. Season the fish with salt and pepper.
- Cover with some lightly-buttered parchement. Bake for 20-25 minutes. Serve. (I reduced the sauce first, but you don't have to)
You say, “Banana?” I got the idea from the cook on the Amazon trip, who used either banana or plantain in a fish braise. Which? Couldn't find out. I tried banana, since it was handy; if the answer was really “plantain”, I figured the banana would tell me. It held up surprisingly well to 25 minutes in the oven; when finished, it was sweet and roasted and savory but not mushy.
You say, “Vanilla?” That idea came from Catalina, in Sydney. But it coordinates with the Amazon spirit of the thing.
What was missing? It needs a chewy green. Maybe kale? Or baby bok choi? But good!
A previous flirtation with duck ham had gone astray. It tasted just like ham, so what's the point?
Last night, I wanted to build out my duck confit a bit. So, I made a bed of mesclun drizzled with a little sherry vinegar, and placed a nice, hot and crisp piece of confit on top. Two small pear slices along side, and three slices of duck pastrami. (Two duck breasts, cured in sugar, brine and pink salt for 36 hours, coated in toasted black pepper and coriander seed ground coarse, and then smoked for about 2 hours over pecan)
- salad of duck confit, duck pastrami, mesclun and pear
- hanger steak, carmelized onions, mushrooms
- grilled baby artichokes, balsamic peppers
- pecan pie
Aside from the confit, an all-American meal. (You could quibble about the artichokes, but the peppers are pretty much a 19th century relish.)
- tart with spring onions, applewood smoked bacon, sheep's milk cheese, and ricotta, on puff pastry
- homemade onion soup, with surprising quantities of onion sweated for 2.5 hours, then cararelized and deglazed four times with water and twice with sherry.
- braised short ribs of beef
- homemade clementine ice
- chocolate tart with pecans
The tart is a bit fussy but it's a keeper. The jury is still out on the onion soup, which really needs to be great since it (a) consumes 6 cups of precious homemade stock and (b) all that sweating and caramelizing and deglazing is a lot of trouble, Mrs. Pedicaris. I thought it was underseasoned the first time, Linda thought it was salty, and I'm having a tough time with my croutons. But it was oniony, anyway.
The homemade ice (juice, a little syrup, tossed in the freezer and stirrer occasionally) is a win. It's a nice idea from Alice Water's nice new book about The Art of Simple Food
Last week, I roasted a whole leg of lamb. It was on sale at the store, I needed to cook something, and I wanted leftovers. It was good. So were the leftovers. But there was still a lot of lamb left over, and my steady lunch slate of roast lamb sandwiches is not making inroads.
So, I took the remaining 1,5 lb. of meat and chopped it into bite-size chunks and put those in a large sautée pan with just a little oil. While they gradually heated, I roasted 6 cloves of garlic in a hot dry skillet for 15 minutes, and toasted four largish dried pasillas (stemmed and seeded) for maybe 20 seconds a side in the same pan. The pasillas went into some water for a 30-minute soak, and the garlic cooled and waited to be peeled.
Then, I threw the peppers, the garlic, and about 1/2c of the soaking liquid into the blender with some pepper and cumin seed. Much whirling, then straining. The sauce goes onto the lamb. I wanted 2c of stock to add to the lamb at this point, but (shame!) I'm out of stock. "Water will do!" says Michael Ruhlman. So water it was, and it did fine. Also throw in a peeled, cubed sweet potato. Simmer for about 40 minutes.
If you were starting from raw lamb pieces, I'd just brown them well before adding the sauce, and simmer an extra 30 minutes or so before adding the sweet potato.
Then, add some honey. About 1/4c, maybe a bit more. Mix well. You want it to be sweet, but just barely sweet. Give it another stir, toss in some fresh cilantro, and make tacos with the lamb, some home-made guacamole (since a container of guacamole at the museum of fruits and vegetables was $11!), some sour cream, and some raw onion. Very nice with a Magic Hat #9!
It's an interesting dish (adapted from Bayless): distant memories of the Alhambra with a strong Indian accent.
With everyone talking about the glories of veal stock, I realized my reserves of stock were just about exhausted. And so, with 7 pounds of really nice veal bones from Savenor's, I embarked on a stock weekend.
You don't have to make a big tsimmes, as Ruhlman recently reminded us. Grab 3 lb of bones, roast them if feel inclined, toss them in a pot, fill it with water, and leave it uncovered in a 180° oven for a few hours, Easy as pie. You can add mirepoix, you can add a sachet, you can do all sorts of stuff. You don't have to. Nobody will take off points.
Innovations this time: the pot was uncovered throughout, and I let it simmer a little more aggressively than usual. I also let it go for five hours before adding the mirepoix (roasted onion, carrot, and celery) and tomato, where previously these went in from the start.
I borrowed two ladles of veal stock for dinner, to make a nice mushroom sauce for the roast chicken. Hot pan, olive oil, shallots. Mushrooms. Deglaze the roasting pane with the veal stock; add to the mushrooms, reduce. Serve.
- Roast chicken with mushroom sauce
- Oven-roasted asparagus
- Chocolate bread pudding with bourbon sauce
The entree made a really nice plate.
The bread pudding, incidentally, was a big win, and easier than pie. Whole wheat supermarket bread, 6 oz. of really good bittersweet chocolate, some cream and sugar, a couple of eggs and an egg yolk. The dessert sauce is butter, sugar, whiskey, and nutmeg; simmer until dissolved, then whisk in a beaten egg and simmer 'til thick.)
The only bad news is that, after the sauce tonight, I only managed 32oz of stock. Ouch. But there's still the remouillage tommorrow.
Day two: take the bones and vegetables from yesterday's stock out of the refrigerator, fill the pot with cold water, and do it all over again.
I've never tried remouillage like this before; it sounded like cheese paring. But the ten hours of simmering on Saturday left me just 32oz of stock — very strong, rich, gelatinous stock to be sure, but it's still just four cups. So, once more into the breach.
And it worked nicely; nothing more added, and it still came out rich and flavorful. I took 3 or 4c for dinner and still had a quart and a half to freeze
- watercress soup, with toasts and gentleman's relish
- red snapper, poached with onions, mushrooms, and garlic
- leftover chocolate bread pudding with southern whiskey sauce
This was also my first encounter with the Super 88 fish counter, which looks very promising. Many tanks of live fish, and lots of fresh fish I've never tried.
I've had my eyes on this Rick Bayless recipe
But this turns out to be really easy, and good.
We begin with an tinfoil roasting pan that we're going to nestle between the coals of our Weber grill. But, instead of using it just to catch and discard grease, we fill it with three very nice carrots (diced), a biggish white onion (small diced), a few Yukon gold potatoes (large diced), , about ten cloves of garlic (peeled) and about a quart of water.
Over this bowl of soup-to-be perches a lamb shoulder roast. Salt it really well before it goes on the grill. At either side we have hot coals, and some soaked hickory chunks. The whole thing is covered and the fire is kept on the low side of moderate, and it all goes for a couple of hours. My fire was excessively moderate, and so it was like three hours. You're taking the lamb shoulder all the way to well done -- 170°F or so. From time to time, add water to the pan, and add coals to the fire.
When the lamb is done, you take it off the grill and let it rest for twenty minutes. Then you pour the soup and vegetables into a pot, rush it into the kitchen, separate out the fat (there is less than you'd think), add about 3/4T of salt, one minced chipotle, and a handful of chopped cilantro.
And so you can sit around the fire and sip cups of this really tasty, smoky soup, eat hunks of this tasty roasted lamb (I made a bowl of tomatillo-chipotle salsa which played the role normally played by barbecue sauce), and drink lots of beet.
Harold McGee has a blog, and explains why white pepper sometimes develops nasty flavors. Short version: they ferment away the fruit and keep the seed, and when you ferment barrels of fruit outdoors in the tropics, sometimes things get out of hand.
Eric Ripert, simultaneously, blogs about why he likes white pepper. Meanwhile, Ruhlman's reminding us that chilli peppers are spelled with a double 'l' (a borrowing from Nahuatl.
Still too early for corn, but not too soon for serious grilling!
- cedar planked salmon (marinated in dill, herbs de Provence, lime, and white wine)
- barbecued baby-back ribs (marinated 150 min in brown sugar, extra cayenne, cloves, garlic, allspice, soy sauce; roasted in foil for 90 minutes; cooled, grilled 30 min over hickory while basting with the boiled marinade)
- red cabbage, onion, peanuts
- deer-tongue lettuce salad
- raspberry fool
- a chilled bottled of Wrongo Dongo (a Spanish red, and very nice too once it had time to breathe)
I'm going to have a weekend in Paris in September, in transit after WikiSym. Oh, the possibilities! I'm tempted to plan nearly every meal. This is madness.
But what do you think? Email me.
After a tricky day of family web design and home sysadmin, I wanted to keep dinner fast and simple. Fortunately, I had a skirt steak that I'd been marinating. So, dinner was no production:
- grilled skirt steak (rubbed with a paste of minced garlic, ancho powder, brown sugar, cider vinegar and marinated overnight)
- burnt vidalia onion and fresh cilantro relish (salt, pepper, sugar, wine vinegar)
- Clotidle's homemade pistachio gelato (substituting cream for mile and 1T brown sugar for the agave (!) syrup)
The gelato is a nice example of a cooking principle: if you don 't have the equipment, just do it. I don't have an ice cream maker. Did that stop me? No! I just mixed the ingredients, cooled them on the counter, stirred them, cooled them more in the freezer, stirring occasionally. By dinner, the cream was nice and thick and cold.
Next time, I'll cut back a little on the limoncello, and perhaps I'd serve this with a bit of crunchy pastry or maybe candied nuts and orange zest.