I became a newlywed in June, 2001. I got married a little later in my life than did many of my contemporaries and, as a result, I was set in my ways and almost certainly a pain in the ass to live with for that summer. My wife, who is the same age as me, was a once-divorced mother of one, so I spent that summer learning to live with not one person but two, one of them being a nine year-old boy. Also, we’d adopted two dogs from a shelter. Every party living in that house, including the dogs (who had been taken to a no-kill shelter by a family who liked the dogs just fine but couldn’t abide their constant barking), had experience living with someone else. Everyone except me, of course. Sure, I’d had roommates but, as anyone who has ever had a roommate and lived with a romantic partner will tell you, in terms of experience, the two are about as far apart as watching Pop Warner football and interstellar space travel. Other than some shared financial burden, you really don’t have to communicate with a roommate if you don’t want to. And, unless you are a “roommate with benefits,” I suppose the fights lack a certain electricity without the added component of sex.
So, I spent the summer of 2001 learning to live with a wife, a boy and two dogs. This was not an entirely easy transition for me. Living alone as long as I had made me finely attuned to “my stuff,” and how it was to remain untouched by anyone except me. I still struggle with this impulse and my wife will comment about how I am “turning this into a ‘my stuff’ thing” if I am being uncharitable to the 18 year-old man about to head off to Americorps and who has replaced the nine year-old boy who was the ring-bearer at my wedding.
Don’t misunderstand me, I am not the only one who had to make adjustments. In fact, I’m not sure who had to make more or more difficult adjustments; me for the reasons referenced above or my new so-called "blended" family who had to become accustomed to sharing a residence with this possessive, slovenly dude who didn’t necessarily understand what was normal for a nine year-old boy, having not been one in decades and having never lived with one. At the time I was sure that it was me who was more put upon. “Hey, they’d been to my house a kajillion times before I married them (yes, I viewed it as marrying both of them, not just her); they knew what they were getting into. I was ALWAYS in control of the TV when they came over.” Of course, I was wrong. Way wrong. They had to make more and bigger adjustments. They’d already had a life without me. They didn’t need me, but they wanted me. My adjustments involved my own selfishness and how to make sure that particular beast was sated. Their adjustments involved making charitable allowances for me acting the role of selfish jerk. They were the ones who seem to have arrived at the understanding that they’d accepted me in their lives and that I must have been worthy, despite the fact that for a period of time I kept trying to live my life as if I was the only one in it who mattered. Thank god they had the patience to let me work out the kinks in my marriage legs.
Still, when tomato season rolled around, late in the summer of 2001, I was a jittery newlywed. I was happy to be married but wondering why I couldn’t be alone more often. I’d been an incredibly lonely bachelor before I met my (then-future) wife and I certainly wasn’t lonely anymore, but I kept thinking that there must be some way to find a happy medium, some way to enjoy these people who lived in my house (yes, I am ashamed to admit that I occasionally thought of it that way) but still be alone when I wanted and also to maintain dominion over MY stuff.
It was with that backdrop that my wife’s cousin got married. Well, I imagine her cousin probably didn’t think of it that way at all, but that’s how I, narcissistically, thought of it. As my wife and son (I don’t really care for the term stepson and never have although I am forced to use it on occasion) were both students, they were able to travel, with my mother-in-law to the wedding. The wedding was to be held far enough away that it qualified as real travel. As school was not yet in session, they both had the wherewithal to go for a whole week and enjoy the offerings Colorado in August presented. I, however, was employed and, having taken off a fair amount of time for my wedding and honeymoon, couldn’t really make the trip with them. Secretly, I was glad. They’d be gone for a week and I could go back to a short vacation in the bachelor’s dream life mythology I’d mysteriously invented for myself (but never actually experienced) after I got married. No, there wouldn’t be women. But there could be wine and song, couldn’t there? I could stay up late all week if I wanted to. I could watch what I wanted on the television. I could follow the in the footsteps of George Costanza and eat a block of cheese the size of a car battery. I could drink what I wanted at whatever bar I chose every night. I was looking forward to that week, let me tell you. The only things that would need my attention during my family’s absence were the dogs and the garden in the back yard.
The funny thing about gardens in August is that they tend to explode. From May to late July you get a steady but not ridiculous stream of vegetables and you’re okay with it. You make some salads, you sauté something, you eat well. But in July it’s like you have a horn of plenty in your back yard. Every morning you see fully developed cucumbers that you swear weren’t there yesterday. Every evening a bumper crop of tomatoes that were hard green that morning have gotten to the peak of ripeness and beg you to pick them or lose them. I have never understood this phenomenon but it hit me hard the week my family went on vacation.
Suddenly my bachelor’s paradise was ass-over-teakettle. I had to do something with this incredible stream of tomatoes for which I could only blame myself and my inability to stop overplanting. I took boxes of veg to the office but my co-workers were satiated by Tuesday morning. I ate massive salads. I took vegetables to my new neighbors who had welcomed us only a few months before. And still the tomatoes kept coming. What are you supposed to do when you have the house to yourself and want nothing more than to have a steak, a steak sandwich or something involving big meat while you watch kung fu movies? Is it too much to ask that in addition to dominion over my television that nature bend to my will as well?
So, my week in bachelor’s paradise was spent “putting up” (as my grandmother called it) tomatoes. I’d seen my mother do this when I was a kid and I called her for advice. Canning didn’t seem all that difficult. I read The Joy of Cooking, an older edition as the current ones have taken out most everything to do with canning and preserving, and I went to the hardware store and bought a pressure canner, jars, lids, everything I’d need to create glistening jars of tomatoes to keep in my basement for the upcoming winter. Some bachelor I turned out to be. From steak and hunks of cheese to a task considered (wrongly) by many to be the most housewifely of all. My wife thinks I am a Depression-era housewife in the body of a Gen-X man in terms of my refusal to throw anything away and I have to say she has a point. I hate throwing stuff away and there was no way I was going to lose those tomatoes. So, I started canning. And I kept canning. And I developed a real sense of purpose while I was doing it. The thing is, canning is pretty boring. It’s also hot and sweaty. Add in the real but minuscule danger of botulism and you start wanting to do other stuff with those tomatoes. So, I looked up a recipe for ketchup which I then tweaked the hell out of. That was the best ketchup I have ever had. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I could duplicate it here as it was a mad scientist dash through my spice rack and hours and hours of constant low-level simmering and stirring because the tomatoes I used weren’t plum tomatoes with relatively low moisture, but were a mix of beefsteak, Brandywines, cherries and whatever else the garden was yielding. I have tried to duplicate that ketchup and have come close, but I haven’t nailed it and so I’m not going to try and tell you how to make it.
What I will share with you, though, is my discovery that week of roasted tomato soup. I recall thinking of this recipe that hot sweaty week when I figured “what the hell, this kitchen can’t get any hotter. Why not use the oven?” I’d seen something similar on a television show for a tomato sauce and adapted that technique here. Roasting tomatoes drives off a lot of the water and concentrates and caramelizes the tomatoes, making a soup with an especially vivid tomato punch. And even though I had at least one steak that week, this soup was the best thing I ate.
Roasted Tomato Soup
Take your tomatoes and core them. This will work with any amount of tomatoes and you need only adjust the proportions of your other flavors to get them how you like. Cut them at least in half cross-wise and gently squeeze out the seeds and pulp. Some people say that the best, most essential flavor of the tomato is in those seed pods and they have a point, but I don’t like the seeds in the finished soup. Leave them in if you want. If your tomatoes are especially large, you might want to cut them into quarters. Put them in a bowl and toss them with olive oil to coat and sprinkle the liberally with salt (about 1 teaspoon per pound of tomatoes) and put them all in a roasting pan or rimmed cookie sheet. Now take one or two whole heads of garlic (use more if you like a lot of garlic, use less if you don’t) and cut them in half. Rub the cut garlic side with olive oil as well and put that in the pan. Now, take some fresh basil (left on the stalk if possible) and bury that basil underneath the tomatoes (the idea is to keep the basil from drying out or burning but still leaving its flavor with the tomatoes). If you have some parsley or other soft herbs, you can treat it the same as the basil if you like. Now, put the pan in a moderate-to-hot (I usually go 350 but 400 would work too) oven and walk away for at least an hour. Depending on the juiciness of your tomatoes, an hour may not be enough. You don’t want to dry out the tomatoes completely but you want to drive off a lot of excess water and concentrate the tomato flavor. Ideally, you don’t want a lot of free liquid in the bottom of your pan but when the tomatoes still look juicy but a bit caramelized around the edges, that’s when I take them out.
From here, how you may your soup into actual soup is up to you. I have used a food mill and I find that it does a great job of removing the skins and any seeds you may have missed (as well as making the soup the perfect consistency), but my food mill is a pain in the ass to use and it isn’t usually my go-to option. You can use an immersion blender, but I have a little trouble getting the skins fine enough that I don’t notice them. I usually use a blender of a food processor with this but the down side, especially to the blender, is that it whips a lot of air into the soup and it takes away that deep, candy-colored red of the soup into something a step closer to the canned cream of tomato soup I was given with grilled cheese sandwiches as a child. If you want to remove the air, put your soup into a saucepan and add a little water to loosen it and then gently simmer until the water you added is boiled off and the soup has returned to its previous sin-colored red. Anyway, make sure you put in all the tomatoes and squeeze the roasted garlic into your instrument if pureeing. I usually leave the basil out because its flavor has leached into the tomatoes, but you can toss it in as well. If you use a food processor, it’s very easy to get this soup completely smooth, but I actually prefer that it have a little texture. Make it how you like it. After you have pureed your soup through your means of choice, into a bowl with it and generously drizzle with your best olive oil. If you want, take some fresh basil and finely chop it into super thins shreds (what chefs and “foodies” call a chiffonade) and sprinkle them on top.
Afterword
About half way through Tomato-nee-Bachelor Week I was sitting down and enjoying a bowl of this tomato soup. I was sweaty and my back hurt from all the time I had been spending on my feet. Precious little kung fu had been watched. I had MY stereo playing MY music at full blast when something amusing occurred to me. I have no idea what it was. I’m the type of guy who tends to recall my own jokes (which is not a nice thing to admit or one of my better qualities, but it’s true), but that one has escaped me because very quickly after I made that joke to an empty house (MY empty house), no one was around to laugh at it. And I was just a little saddened by that fact. When Amy and Will came home a few days later, I was very happy to see them. And I still am happy to see them every day. I still get little blips of solitude, but the desire to act like a jackass has largely disappeared over the years and I find myself gladdened by that news and by the knowledge that it was those two (and my daughter, born three years into our marriage) that have made me worry much less about my stuff.
Originally Published in Open Salon
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Friday, July 30, 2010
As Mary Bailey Said "Salt, So Your life May Have Flavor!"
Here is the thing about tomatoes this time of year. They are the best thing ever. This is a universally known fact. Even people who don't necessarily care for tomatoes realize that summer tomatoes are the best tomatoes. The thing is, even the most perfect tomato needs at least one thing (and, typically a couple more) if you want to maximize that deep, juicy summer goodness. That thing? Salt. Right now there are purists gasping for air, hypertensives who have been living on reduced sodium diets are angrily denying that any adulteration, let alone something so overused as mere salt, only serves to bastardize the flavor of those tomatoes that have been sitting on the vine, getting a tongue bath from the sun and waiting only to be picked and eaten and are one of nature's perfect foods. The thing is, I know I'm right. And if they're being honest, they know I'm right.
I don't say any of this to taunt people who have to avoid, for one reason or another, salt on their tomatoes. If you have learned to live without salt on your tomatoes, please don't relapse on my account. I am well-aware that salt is overused in the American diet and, truth be told, I could probably could stand to cut down on my own sodium intake. But some things need salt, dammit. A good piece of beef, hell, the best piece of beef will only get better if it is appropriately salted. Potatoes, that starchy root that has actually fed entire nations is just not so good without salt.. Tomatoes are like that. When I was a kid my parents had a garden and they would let me go out and pick and eat anything I wanted. One of my favorite things was to pick a fresh, red tomato, still warm from the midday sun, and eat it like hand fruit right there in the garden. And as great as it was, it only got better when my dad suggested that I take the salt shaker out to the garden with me and salt the tomato as I took bites. It was in that garden, as a ten year-old, that I really started learning about making salads. It was there that I learned that salt really makes tomatoes better. It was tomatoes and cucumbers from that garden that taught me my first lesson in honoring great ingredients by treating them simply but well and relying on the ingredients to make the impact on your tongue.
Like some of my other posts here, I can't really provide a good recipe so much as some suggestions on how to treat your ingredients and make something delicious. You will probably like your salad different than I like mine and I already see that others have posted their own tomato salad recipes. I post this less to compete with very good recipes and more to give suggestions on how to maximize the bounty of whatever summer tomatoes you are able to get.
Start with some really beautiful tomatoes. You want them at the peak of ripeness. If you are feeling extra fancy, as I sometimes tend to do, blanch them and peel them. The peel makes them harder to cut, harder to chew and it disrupts the silky succulence of the flesh of the tomato. This is a strictly optional step but, as I have aid, the tomatoes you get this time of year are worthy of the honor of a little extra trouble. And peeling them is simple, if a bit time consuming. All you have to do is get a pot of water boiling and drop in your tomatoes for about thirty seconds. Scoop them out and drop them into a bowl of ice water. Leave them there until you've blanched them all and had them cool in the ice bath. Scoop them out yet again and cut out the core with a small, sharp knife. From here, the skins of the tomatoes should slip off very easily. As you peel the tomatoes, cut them into wedges. You probably want to cut each tomato into eight evenly-sized wedges, but if your tomatoes are really large or pretty small, you might want to adjust the. The point is that your salad should be composed of tomato pieces that are all approximately the same size. By the way, this salad is even better if you are able to find heirloom tomatoes of different colors.
After you have all your peeled tomatoes cut into pieces, salt them liberally but not overwhelmingly. I prefer to use kosher salt for this step but if you only have table salt, it can work at this stage. How much salt is too much is a kind of tough question to answer. I'd say a very rough parameter is 1-2 teaspoons for a pound or so of tomatoes, but you'll have to develop a feel for it. The thing is, most of this salt is going to go away anyway. Even if you are kind of heavy-handed with the salt, this “recipe” is very forgiving.
And here is why. Don't put those tomatoes in a bowl. Put them in your colander and then sprinkle the salt over them. Put the colander in a bowl and then allow the tomatoes to drain for awhile. And hour so is good. When you come back, you will see liquid in the bowl. What you've done is drain off some of the water in the tomatoes. While the salt has seasoned them, it's also served to concentrate the tomato flavor. That water can be discarded although I like to put it in the fridge, chill it and mix it with vodka for a refreshing tomato water cooler. Do as you wish.
Now that you have seasoned tomatoes, the best thing you can do is treat them simply. Put them in a bowl and add some finely chopped “soft” herbs. I like a nice chiffonade (very finely sliced/shredded) of basil, some finely chopped chives and a few fronds of dill that have also been chopped up. Maybe you like parsley, cilantro or chervil. Add what you like but I would caution you against harder herbs like thyme and rosemary; while the flavors might be good, those herbs are pretty tough and hard to chew and they will disturb the texture you are trying to achieve. You will also want to add some allium, the botanical family that includes garlic, onion, shallot and the like. My preference is to use red onion and/or maybe a little sweet onion like Vidalia. Cut it finely into super-thin half-moon slices and separate them. If they taste super strong of onion, rinse them in a strainer under cold water for a bit to tam the onion-y bite. Me, I like onion and dressing the salad will calm them down enough for me. Another great member of the allium family to use here is shallot. They're oniony too, but much milder and don't need to be tempered with a cold rinse. Into the pool with them. Grind in some black pepper. Now, gently toss these wedges of summer so that everything is evenly mixed.
At this point your salad is almost finished. All it needs is some good acid and some silky, buttery olive oil. These ingredients are simple, but they are critical to your finished salad. For the acid, you can use vinegar or you can use lemon juice. But don't make the mistake of using bottled lemon juice. These tomatoes deserve fresh-squeezed lemon juice. If you use vinegar, the salad calls for the best vinegar you can get. Don't use plain white vinegar and avoid apple cider vinegar too. My preference is for red wine vinegar, but white wine and champagne vinegars works just as well. I would caution you to avoid “flavored” or “herbed” vinegars. There is nothing wrong with those products, but they can sometimes taste a little funky and the point here is that you are flavoring your salad your way. Why would you go to so much trouble to customize your tomato salad and then use garlic vinegar? If you want garlic, just mince some and add it yourself. I'd also suggest that balsamic vinegar, while tasty, will produce a muddy-looking salad that won't be so appealing to look at. I've never used so-called “white balsamic,” but that might be an option. In the end, the only rule is that there isn't a rule. If you like garlic-and-orange flavored white wine vinegar, who am I to argue with you. If you love the taste of balsamic vinegar to the point that you don't care how the salad looks, you don't need my permission, but you have it anyway. Hell, if you enjoy the flavor the malt vinegar they use at Long John Silver's, I won't judge you or tell anyone.
Finally, add olive oil. How much you want will depend on the type of acid you add and how much you use, but a 2-1 or 3-1 ratio (oil to vinegar) usually works pretty well for me. Olive oil is not where you want to skimp. Use the good stuff. Full-flavored, thick and green. This is what makes your salad luxurious. Again, as we've discussed, you want to honor those tomatoes. Do it by using the best ingredients you can. My olive oil of choice is Nunez de Prado from Spain. I find it to be thick, unctuous, fruity, grassy and everything I want in an olive oil. Again, you should do what you like. Gently swirl on the olive oil and stir your salad. Now, taste it. It might still be underseasoned, but I'd bet against it. If it IS underseasoned, now is the time to judiciously add a bit more salt, but this time don't use the same kosher or or table salt you used before. Try using a “boutique” salt like fleur del sel or maybe Maldon sea salt. These salts have larger and more irregular crystals which will have a tougher time dissolving in the salad, meaning you will get a nice salty crunch when you chew your tomatoes. If you do add a “finishing salt,” do so at the very last second so that you can help avoid dissolving the salt in the dressing.
I know I've set you up to go to a lot of trouble to make a simple dish. The thing is, even though you can get “tomatoes” all year-round, these tomatoes are different than the so-hard-they're-crunchy winter tomatoes you can get at the megamart if January. These tomatoes are a treat every bit as special as a truffle. Even if they're easier and cheaper than those truffles, they deserve to be treated like the gift they are.
I don't say any of this to taunt people who have to avoid, for one reason or another, salt on their tomatoes. If you have learned to live without salt on your tomatoes, please don't relapse on my account. I am well-aware that salt is overused in the American diet and, truth be told, I could probably could stand to cut down on my own sodium intake. But some things need salt, dammit. A good piece of beef, hell, the best piece of beef will only get better if it is appropriately salted. Potatoes, that starchy root that has actually fed entire nations is just not so good without salt.. Tomatoes are like that. When I was a kid my parents had a garden and they would let me go out and pick and eat anything I wanted. One of my favorite things was to pick a fresh, red tomato, still warm from the midday sun, and eat it like hand fruit right there in the garden. And as great as it was, it only got better when my dad suggested that I take the salt shaker out to the garden with me and salt the tomato as I took bites. It was in that garden, as a ten year-old, that I really started learning about making salads. It was there that I learned that salt really makes tomatoes better. It was tomatoes and cucumbers from that garden that taught me my first lesson in honoring great ingredients by treating them simply but well and relying on the ingredients to make the impact on your tongue.
Like some of my other posts here, I can't really provide a good recipe so much as some suggestions on how to treat your ingredients and make something delicious. You will probably like your salad different than I like mine and I already see that others have posted their own tomato salad recipes. I post this less to compete with very good recipes and more to give suggestions on how to maximize the bounty of whatever summer tomatoes you are able to get.
Start with some really beautiful tomatoes. You want them at the peak of ripeness. If you are feeling extra fancy, as I sometimes tend to do, blanch them and peel them. The peel makes them harder to cut, harder to chew and it disrupts the silky succulence of the flesh of the tomato. This is a strictly optional step but, as I have aid, the tomatoes you get this time of year are worthy of the honor of a little extra trouble. And peeling them is simple, if a bit time consuming. All you have to do is get a pot of water boiling and drop in your tomatoes for about thirty seconds. Scoop them out and drop them into a bowl of ice water. Leave them there until you've blanched them all and had them cool in the ice bath. Scoop them out yet again and cut out the core with a small, sharp knife. From here, the skins of the tomatoes should slip off very easily. As you peel the tomatoes, cut them into wedges. You probably want to cut each tomato into eight evenly-sized wedges, but if your tomatoes are really large or pretty small, you might want to adjust the. The point is that your salad should be composed of tomato pieces that are all approximately the same size. By the way, this salad is even better if you are able to find heirloom tomatoes of different colors.
After you have all your peeled tomatoes cut into pieces, salt them liberally but not overwhelmingly. I prefer to use kosher salt for this step but if you only have table salt, it can work at this stage. How much salt is too much is a kind of tough question to answer. I'd say a very rough parameter is 1-2 teaspoons for a pound or so of tomatoes, but you'll have to develop a feel for it. The thing is, most of this salt is going to go away anyway. Even if you are kind of heavy-handed with the salt, this “recipe” is very forgiving.
And here is why. Don't put those tomatoes in a bowl. Put them in your colander and then sprinkle the salt over them. Put the colander in a bowl and then allow the tomatoes to drain for awhile. And hour so is good. When you come back, you will see liquid in the bowl. What you've done is drain off some of the water in the tomatoes. While the salt has seasoned them, it's also served to concentrate the tomato flavor. That water can be discarded although I like to put it in the fridge, chill it and mix it with vodka for a refreshing tomato water cooler. Do as you wish.
Now that you have seasoned tomatoes, the best thing you can do is treat them simply. Put them in a bowl and add some finely chopped “soft” herbs. I like a nice chiffonade (very finely sliced/shredded) of basil, some finely chopped chives and a few fronds of dill that have also been chopped up. Maybe you like parsley, cilantro or chervil. Add what you like but I would caution you against harder herbs like thyme and rosemary; while the flavors might be good, those herbs are pretty tough and hard to chew and they will disturb the texture you are trying to achieve. You will also want to add some allium, the botanical family that includes garlic, onion, shallot and the like. My preference is to use red onion and/or maybe a little sweet onion like Vidalia. Cut it finely into super-thin half-moon slices and separate them. If they taste super strong of onion, rinse them in a strainer under cold water for a bit to tam the onion-y bite. Me, I like onion and dressing the salad will calm them down enough for me. Another great member of the allium family to use here is shallot. They're oniony too, but much milder and don't need to be tempered with a cold rinse. Into the pool with them. Grind in some black pepper. Now, gently toss these wedges of summer so that everything is evenly mixed.
At this point your salad is almost finished. All it needs is some good acid and some silky, buttery olive oil. These ingredients are simple, but they are critical to your finished salad. For the acid, you can use vinegar or you can use lemon juice. But don't make the mistake of using bottled lemon juice. These tomatoes deserve fresh-squeezed lemon juice. If you use vinegar, the salad calls for the best vinegar you can get. Don't use plain white vinegar and avoid apple cider vinegar too. My preference is for red wine vinegar, but white wine and champagne vinegars works just as well. I would caution you to avoid “flavored” or “herbed” vinegars. There is nothing wrong with those products, but they can sometimes taste a little funky and the point here is that you are flavoring your salad your way. Why would you go to so much trouble to customize your tomato salad and then use garlic vinegar? If you want garlic, just mince some and add it yourself. I'd also suggest that balsamic vinegar, while tasty, will produce a muddy-looking salad that won't be so appealing to look at. I've never used so-called “white balsamic,” but that might be an option. In the end, the only rule is that there isn't a rule. If you like garlic-and-orange flavored white wine vinegar, who am I to argue with you. If you love the taste of balsamic vinegar to the point that you don't care how the salad looks, you don't need my permission, but you have it anyway. Hell, if you enjoy the flavor the malt vinegar they use at Long John Silver's, I won't judge you or tell anyone.
Finally, add olive oil. How much you want will depend on the type of acid you add and how much you use, but a 2-1 or 3-1 ratio (oil to vinegar) usually works pretty well for me. Olive oil is not where you want to skimp. Use the good stuff. Full-flavored, thick and green. This is what makes your salad luxurious. Again, as we've discussed, you want to honor those tomatoes. Do it by using the best ingredients you can. My olive oil of choice is Nunez de Prado from Spain. I find it to be thick, unctuous, fruity, grassy and everything I want in an olive oil. Again, you should do what you like. Gently swirl on the olive oil and stir your salad. Now, taste it. It might still be underseasoned, but I'd bet against it. If it IS underseasoned, now is the time to judiciously add a bit more salt, but this time don't use the same kosher or or table salt you used before. Try using a “boutique” salt like fleur del sel or maybe Maldon sea salt. These salts have larger and more irregular crystals which will have a tougher time dissolving in the salad, meaning you will get a nice salty crunch when you chew your tomatoes. If you do add a “finishing salt,” do so at the very last second so that you can help avoid dissolving the salt in the dressing.
I know I've set you up to go to a lot of trouble to make a simple dish. The thing is, even though you can get “tomatoes” all year-round, these tomatoes are different than the so-hard-they're-crunchy winter tomatoes you can get at the megamart if January. These tomatoes are a treat every bit as special as a truffle. Even if they're easier and cheaper than those truffles, they deserve to be treated like the gift they are.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
I Don't Like Eggplant!
I don’t like eggplant. This is a grave concern to me. As someone who thinks of himself as a “food guy” (I’m still not sure how comfortable I am with labeling myself a “foodie” or, maybe more pretentiously, a “gastronome”), eggplant is one of those things I know I should like. I’m not exactly happy with the fact that my palate seems to have a few blind spots that I just can’t quite get myself past, despite some subconscious understanding that I must be missing out. Another thing I just really don’t much care for: Mayonnaise (unless I make it myself and even then only in exceptionally sparse amounts). I’ve tried to like eggplant, honest. I’ve had ratatouille, eggplant parmigiana, pickled eggplant and god knows what else and I just can’t quite get there. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not repulsed by eggplant. It’s not one of those things that makes me shudder convulsively while I try to gag it down as I fly to the land of the rising gorge. No, I just don’t really like it, although I can (and will) eat it politely if it’s served to me.
All that being said, if you join a CSA, as I did last summer, you are almost guaranteed to get eggplant. And, if you are thrifty (or, as my wife thinks of me, a Depression-era housewife in the body of a Generation-X male), you will want to find a way to use that eggplant. So, if you are a thrifty food guy with a load of eggplant you don't really want, you’re in a bit of a rut. The answer is baba ganoush. Some of you will no doubt think that this is a cheat, that this masks the flavor of the eggplant to the point that it almost isn’t eggplant anymore. You may have a point, but I would argue that eggplant, like tofu, is actually a blank canvas upon which you can paint any flavors you want. Which, I suppose, begs the question of why I don’t like those other eggplant dishes, like ratatouille, that also serve to highlight other flavors and take away the focus on eggplant. My answer: I don’t know.
Anyway, to me, baba ganoush is a combination of Mediterranean flavors that I dearly love and, when faced with a box of eggplant and a desire to use them, one does what one can. When made well, baba ganoush is a lovely swirl of smoky, tart, unctuous, nutty, garlicky goodness that will serve eggplant lovers as well as eggplant dislikers with equal ease.
Unfortunately, I don’t really have a true recipe for baba ghanaoush. I have a list of ingredients and urge you to get out your food processor and start figuring out the rough proportions that you like and want to emphasize. To overcome the lack of a recipe, what you should do is add small amounts of ingredients until you get the harmony and balance right for your own palate. If you add small amounts of stuff and keep tasting as you go, you won’t overdo it with any one ingredient and you will have a lovely dish to eat while enjoying the summer months, ideally with a cold drink and a warm patio.
Start by taking a couple of eggplants and poke holes in them with a fork. You don’t need to puncture it everywhere, but you want to allow steam to escape while the eggplants cook. If you don't puncture them, they will explode and that doesn't help anyone. Put them on a hot grill (you can do this in the oven but you won’t get the smoky flavor) and turn them until they blister and collapse. Take them off the grill and put them on a wire rack to let them cool until you can handle them. Take off the charred peel (don’t rinse them under water) and if you have an especially seedy eggplant, try to scoop out some of the seeds, but don’t worry about it too much. Put the eggplant flesh in a colander and evenly sprinkle a teaspoon or two of salt over it and let the eggplant drain awhile. Throw away the liquid that comes off the eggplant and throw the eggplant into your food processor. Now, squeeze in the juice of a lemon and pour in a couple of tablespoons of really good quality olive oil. Add a close of abused garlic (I abuse mine with a microplane grater because that is the way, in my experience, to amp up the garlic flavor the most, but you can mince it, put it through a press or just chop it as fine as you like.). Add some a couple of spoons of tahini (sesame seed paste, some people will tell you to substitute peanut butter if you don’t have tahini. I will tell you to go to the store and buy tahini.) Sprinkle in some salt. Now blitz it to smooth in your food processor. I will guarantee that, based on the loosey-goosey parameters I’ve laid out here, this will taste out of whack. But you will probably like yours different than I like mine. I prefer a lot of garlic and lemon and to go light on the tahini. You might like a lot of olive oil. As we have never met, I can’t really tell you how you like your baba ganoush. All I can tell you is to adjust those flavors, slowly, to get it how you like it. Once you get it where you want it, get some pita or pita chips and start eating. As I may have mentioned, I don’t really care for eggplant yet I have made this dish for myself and had it as an entire meal and felt as if I were dining like a king.
Now I’m going to learn to love mayonnaise.
(originally published in Open Salon)
All that being said, if you join a CSA, as I did last summer, you are almost guaranteed to get eggplant. And, if you are thrifty (or, as my wife thinks of me, a Depression-era housewife in the body of a Generation-X male), you will want to find a way to use that eggplant. So, if you are a thrifty food guy with a load of eggplant you don't really want, you’re in a bit of a rut. The answer is baba ganoush. Some of you will no doubt think that this is a cheat, that this masks the flavor of the eggplant to the point that it almost isn’t eggplant anymore. You may have a point, but I would argue that eggplant, like tofu, is actually a blank canvas upon which you can paint any flavors you want. Which, I suppose, begs the question of why I don’t like those other eggplant dishes, like ratatouille, that also serve to highlight other flavors and take away the focus on eggplant. My answer: I don’t know.
Anyway, to me, baba ganoush is a combination of Mediterranean flavors that I dearly love and, when faced with a box of eggplant and a desire to use them, one does what one can. When made well, baba ganoush is a lovely swirl of smoky, tart, unctuous, nutty, garlicky goodness that will serve eggplant lovers as well as eggplant dislikers with equal ease.
Unfortunately, I don’t really have a true recipe for baba ghanaoush. I have a list of ingredients and urge you to get out your food processor and start figuring out the rough proportions that you like and want to emphasize. To overcome the lack of a recipe, what you should do is add small amounts of ingredients until you get the harmony and balance right for your own palate. If you add small amounts of stuff and keep tasting as you go, you won’t overdo it with any one ingredient and you will have a lovely dish to eat while enjoying the summer months, ideally with a cold drink and a warm patio.
Start by taking a couple of eggplants and poke holes in them with a fork. You don’t need to puncture it everywhere, but you want to allow steam to escape while the eggplants cook. If you don't puncture them, they will explode and that doesn't help anyone. Put them on a hot grill (you can do this in the oven but you won’t get the smoky flavor) and turn them until they blister and collapse. Take them off the grill and put them on a wire rack to let them cool until you can handle them. Take off the charred peel (don’t rinse them under water) and if you have an especially seedy eggplant, try to scoop out some of the seeds, but don’t worry about it too much. Put the eggplant flesh in a colander and evenly sprinkle a teaspoon or two of salt over it and let the eggplant drain awhile. Throw away the liquid that comes off the eggplant and throw the eggplant into your food processor. Now, squeeze in the juice of a lemon and pour in a couple of tablespoons of really good quality olive oil. Add a close of abused garlic (I abuse mine with a microplane grater because that is the way, in my experience, to amp up the garlic flavor the most, but you can mince it, put it through a press or just chop it as fine as you like.). Add some a couple of spoons of tahini (sesame seed paste, some people will tell you to substitute peanut butter if you don’t have tahini. I will tell you to go to the store and buy tahini.) Sprinkle in some salt. Now blitz it to smooth in your food processor. I will guarantee that, based on the loosey-goosey parameters I’ve laid out here, this will taste out of whack. But you will probably like yours different than I like mine. I prefer a lot of garlic and lemon and to go light on the tahini. You might like a lot of olive oil. As we have never met, I can’t really tell you how you like your baba ganoush. All I can tell you is to adjust those flavors, slowly, to get it how you like it. Once you get it where you want it, get some pita or pita chips and start eating. As I may have mentioned, I don’t really care for eggplant yet I have made this dish for myself and had it as an entire meal and felt as if I were dining like a king.
Now I’m going to learn to love mayonnaise.
(originally published in Open Salon)
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
I Don't Need No Stinking Recipe
This was a blog entry I wrote for a sort of contest at Open Salon. I wrote it with this blog in mind. Sorry for the time between posts but a new job will do that to you.
I don’t have a recipe for stew. This is despite the fact that one of my absolute most favored winter meals in the whole world is a rich stew that has gently braised until a formerly tough piece of beef chuck has taken on a silky tenderness that gently but convincingly reminds me that winter and hearty red wines were made so I’d have an excuse to cook beef stew. Despite not having a recipe, I cook stew once or twice a month, at least and it never comes out exactly the same way twice. I follow recipes, but with stew it’s more a technique than a recipe and I still have a few things I have learned that always taste good in my stew. On the surface, beef stew is easy to make. And while making a bad beef stew is certainly easy, making a middling one isn’t too difficult either. But if you take your time, have some care with your ingredients and follow a few simple rules, you can make great beef stew and you won’t need a recipe either.
Rule #1. Brown food tastes good.
I didn’t come up with that saying. I totally ripped it off from Mario Batali’s sous chef Anne Burrell. But it’s worth remembering. Brown your meat. Good browning is not, as I used to think when I was first learning to cook, dumping a lot of meat in a sort-of hot pan and moving it around until it turns grey. If you want to get your meat BROWN, you need a searingly hot pan, you need dry beef and you need oil. Get your stewpot on your stove and put a couple of tablespoons of oil in it. Try to avoid extra-virgin oil because at high temps, like you need here, the good qualities of the oil all burn off. Use “pure” olive oil or canola.
Before you turn on the heat, take a chuck roast and cut it up into one-inch cubes. Don’t use “stew meat” of undetermined origin that is already cut into differently –sized pieces in your market. You don’t know what you’re getting and the pieces aren’t going to cook at the same rate. Cut that roast into cubes and blot them well with paper towels before seasoning with salt & pepper. A lot of cooks will flour their meat before browning it, but to me that always seemed like they were getting brown flour. Yes, the flour acts as a thickener but we’ve got that covered anyway. Now, crank up the heat and wait until the oil almost starts to smoke. It will shimmer on you. By the way, do not use a non-stick pan for this; a non-stick pan will brown the meat but it won’t allow you to develop what the French call a fond which is the dark-brown caramelization of the meat on the bottom of the pan. And you want that fond. Anyway, once the oil is shimmering, get your beef into the pan in one layer. And make sure that layer has plenty of space between the pieces of beef. It’s that space that helps the meat brown. Overcrowding your pot leads to steaming and steaming is an enemy of caramelization. Do not rush this step. Do not get all fussy and constantly turn the pieces of meat to check them. It will take 30-60 seconds for that one side to brown. If you try and lift it too soon, the meat will probably stick to the pan; this is good because it means you are working at the right temperature. If it sticks, don’t force it; the meat will let go of the pan when it’s ready. When it’s ready to turn, go ahead and turn it and make sure every side is browned. As the pieces brown, take them out and put another in and keep doing this until it’s all been browned.
A brief word about browning. A lot of people really don’t know what browned meat looks like. I’m going to help you with that. Browned meat looks like a well-cooked (not necessarily well-done) steak off the grill. You know how a good steak has a dark brown crust on the outside? That’s what you’re after. Again, do not rush this step.
While waiting for your meat to brown, why don’t you make yourself useful and peel 4-5 big fat carrots and a similar number of Yukon Gold potatoes? You will need them. But before prepping that veg, cut a big onion into medium dice and smash and chop three cloves of garlic? Take one more small onion and cut off the ends and remove the peel and then stick two whole cloves (the spice, not garlic) into the onion. If you have browned the beef well, you will have a nice brown coating inside your pan. Well done! That coating is going to be one of the most important things to the flavor of your finished stew. Now, get all the oil out of the pan and put another fresh tablespoon or so in there and get it back on heat and toss in the chopped onion with a pinch of salt. This is going to “deglaze” your pan. It will dissolve all that caramel-y coating and make your stew taste so good you will want to hit somebody. Move the onions around and let them soften but not get brown.
Which brings me to rule #2: Maximize Your Umami.
You can look in the interweb for the definition of “umami” and learn all about glutamates and such. Let me just keep it simple: Umami basically is what we sense as being “meaty.” There are a lot of sources of umami (aside from meat) and I have devoted my life as a home cook the last year or two trying to figure out how to maximize this flavor/sensation. Some sources of umami are: Anchovy fillets; tomatoes; mushrooms; soy sauce, red wine and vegemite. There are a lot of places you can get “umami” (even MSG), and I try to use every single one of them (except MSG). Using these ingredients will maximize the soul-soothing beefiness of your stew without unloading a truck of MSG into the pot. Here is what I like to do: Take two anchovy fillets and chop them up and mash them with a fork into a paste. Don’t worry, I promise you won’t taste anything fishy in the final dish. Mash up the anchovy with a tablespoon or two of tomato paste and then mix THAT up with your smashed/chopped garlic. After your onions have gotten translucent, dump in the anchovy mixture and stir it around the pot until you smell the garlic. That should be about 30 to sixty seconds. This mixture will also stick and brown the bottom of your pot. Don’t worry about it.
As you can see, we have already added two of our umami sources to our stew: the tomato paste and the anchovy. We still need to get in all the others. For the mushrooms, I like using dried mushroom as they are the most concentrated. Get some dried mushrooms. I like porcini but any will do. Rehydrate them in hot water before you start cooking and about now drain them and squeeze out the water. Chop the mushrooms and toss them into the pot. Save that rehydrating water!
Rule #3: Water’s only purpose in cooking is to dilute.
I once saw a cooking demonstration by the great Paul Prudhomme and he said that anytime water is added to anything you are cooking, it is added for the purpose of diluting something or making it thinner. This is true when you are making stock or baking and it is certainly true when you make stew. Chef Prudhomme’s point was that you should never add water if you can add a liquid that will impart more flavor and accomplish the necessary dilution. Applying this rule to your stew is easy. Never add water. If you need liquid, add stock, wine, beer, tomato juice or whatever else comes to your mind. Not vodka. You already have some liquid from rehydrating those dried mushrooms and it has more umami, so gently add it making sure to not pour in the grit from the mushrooms. Add your beef to the pot as well as any juices that are in the bowl where you were holding it. Now add a tablespoon of soy sauce (more umami!) and a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce (more umami yet again!). Now, add some chopped canned tomatoes (Yep. Umami!). I prefer the Pomi brand from Italy. They’re already chopped, they come in a cool box like milk did when you were in grade school and they do not use calcium chloride in processing the tomatoes so they fall apart in the stew. You want the tomatoes to be a back note in the stew and not up front, but use whatever tomatoes you have. Just make sure they’re chopped up pretty fine. Now, add a cup of (umami-laden) red wine (I like cooking with Syrah because it’s not overly oaked if you’re buying cheap enough wine), 2-3 cups of beef broth (I usually use canned) and the carrots, tomatoes, potatoes as well as a quarter cup of chopped parsley and a the chopped leaves of two sprigs of rosemary and four sprigs of chopped thyme. Toss in a couple of bay leaves. Stir everything and taste the broth. Bear in mind that these flavors will become more concentrated as everything cooks. Maybe you need to add some salt & pepper. Maybe you want a little more wine or broth because the stew seems too thin. How should I know? Add what you think it needs
Rule #4: Secret Ingredients Rule.
Cooks everywhere have little things they add to their dishes. I will share two of my favorites to add to beef stew. The first is vegemite (also available under the brand name Marmite). Vegemite is loaded with umami. It’s very salty and you don’t need to add a lot. In fact, to me, vegemite seems a little funky on the back of my palate when eaten straight. But if you take a fat teaspoon of vegemite out of the jar and dissolve it in your stew, you will be adding a huge flavor wallop.
Second secret ingredient: preserved lemon. I have fallen in love with the exotic flavor of preserved lemon. I can’t explain why I love it as much as I do but I always have a jar of them around that I made following Mario Batali’s ridiculously simple recipe (easily Googled, I'll bet). Take two quarters of a preserved lemon and chop them into a paste. Stir that into your pot. Trust me on this ingredient. No one will place it (unless they have a ridiculously good palate like my wife), but it will set your stew apart from every other beef stew on the planet save the one I will be making this weekend.
By the way, you should endeavor to come up with your own secret ingredient.
OK, almost done. Taste your dish again and again as you make it. By now you will have a good idea what you want it to taste like. Adjust the seasoning again.
Rule #5: Don’t cook this with direct heat.
If you cook this stew on your stove over direct heat, you will regret it. It will scorch, it will burn. You will be sad. You can’t ever get the heat low enough to avoid burning and still have high enough heat to gently break down the fibers of that tough cut of meat. So put it in the oven. What you’re doing here is braising the meat anyway and the meat doesn’t care if it’s bubbling away on the stove or surrounded by gentler heat in the oven. I set my oven for 250 at the most and let it cook for at least three hours, but you might be able to go to 275 if you’re in a hurry. But if you have more time, 225 will make you happier in four hours, I’ll bet.
Rule #6 Thicken Judiciously.
A beef stew should be thick but not pasty. Given the loosey-goosey parameters I’ve set forth here, I have no idea exactly how much thickener you will need. So I make a roux with equal parts butter and flour and when it’s time for dinner I slowly add enough roux to get the stew where I like it. I find this is easier than adding flour at the beginning and then trying to thin it at the end or, worse, trying to thicken an already cooked stew. I freeze my leftover roux by the tablespoon and always have plenty available.
Rule #7: Eat Well.
I know I’ve dropped a lot of words on you here and if you’ve made it to the end, thank you. But my point in doing so is not to intimidate. Ignore my prolixity because a good beef stew is truly a heart-warming dish made to be shared with your family and a bottle of cotes-du-Rhone. Oh yeah, stir in some frozen peas while the dish is still very hot and then serve.
I don’t have a recipe for stew. This is despite the fact that one of my absolute most favored winter meals in the whole world is a rich stew that has gently braised until a formerly tough piece of beef chuck has taken on a silky tenderness that gently but convincingly reminds me that winter and hearty red wines were made so I’d have an excuse to cook beef stew. Despite not having a recipe, I cook stew once or twice a month, at least and it never comes out exactly the same way twice. I follow recipes, but with stew it’s more a technique than a recipe and I still have a few things I have learned that always taste good in my stew. On the surface, beef stew is easy to make. And while making a bad beef stew is certainly easy, making a middling one isn’t too difficult either. But if you take your time, have some care with your ingredients and follow a few simple rules, you can make great beef stew and you won’t need a recipe either.
Rule #1. Brown food tastes good.
I didn’t come up with that saying. I totally ripped it off from Mario Batali’s sous chef Anne Burrell. But it’s worth remembering. Brown your meat. Good browning is not, as I used to think when I was first learning to cook, dumping a lot of meat in a sort-of hot pan and moving it around until it turns grey. If you want to get your meat BROWN, you need a searingly hot pan, you need dry beef and you need oil. Get your stewpot on your stove and put a couple of tablespoons of oil in it. Try to avoid extra-virgin oil because at high temps, like you need here, the good qualities of the oil all burn off. Use “pure” olive oil or canola.
Before you turn on the heat, take a chuck roast and cut it up into one-inch cubes. Don’t use “stew meat” of undetermined origin that is already cut into differently –sized pieces in your market. You don’t know what you’re getting and the pieces aren’t going to cook at the same rate. Cut that roast into cubes and blot them well with paper towels before seasoning with salt & pepper. A lot of cooks will flour their meat before browning it, but to me that always seemed like they were getting brown flour. Yes, the flour acts as a thickener but we’ve got that covered anyway. Now, crank up the heat and wait until the oil almost starts to smoke. It will shimmer on you. By the way, do not use a non-stick pan for this; a non-stick pan will brown the meat but it won’t allow you to develop what the French call a fond which is the dark-brown caramelization of the meat on the bottom of the pan. And you want that fond. Anyway, once the oil is shimmering, get your beef into the pan in one layer. And make sure that layer has plenty of space between the pieces of beef. It’s that space that helps the meat brown. Overcrowding your pot leads to steaming and steaming is an enemy of caramelization. Do not rush this step. Do not get all fussy and constantly turn the pieces of meat to check them. It will take 30-60 seconds for that one side to brown. If you try and lift it too soon, the meat will probably stick to the pan; this is good because it means you are working at the right temperature. If it sticks, don’t force it; the meat will let go of the pan when it’s ready. When it’s ready to turn, go ahead and turn it and make sure every side is browned. As the pieces brown, take them out and put another in and keep doing this until it’s all been browned.
A brief word about browning. A lot of people really don’t know what browned meat looks like. I’m going to help you with that. Browned meat looks like a well-cooked (not necessarily well-done) steak off the grill. You know how a good steak has a dark brown crust on the outside? That’s what you’re after. Again, do not rush this step.
While waiting for your meat to brown, why don’t you make yourself useful and peel 4-5 big fat carrots and a similar number of Yukon Gold potatoes? You will need them. But before prepping that veg, cut a big onion into medium dice and smash and chop three cloves of garlic? Take one more small onion and cut off the ends and remove the peel and then stick two whole cloves (the spice, not garlic) into the onion. If you have browned the beef well, you will have a nice brown coating inside your pan. Well done! That coating is going to be one of the most important things to the flavor of your finished stew. Now, get all the oil out of the pan and put another fresh tablespoon or so in there and get it back on heat and toss in the chopped onion with a pinch of salt. This is going to “deglaze” your pan. It will dissolve all that caramel-y coating and make your stew taste so good you will want to hit somebody. Move the onions around and let them soften but not get brown.
Which brings me to rule #2: Maximize Your Umami.
You can look in the interweb for the definition of “umami” and learn all about glutamates and such. Let me just keep it simple: Umami basically is what we sense as being “meaty.” There are a lot of sources of umami (aside from meat) and I have devoted my life as a home cook the last year or two trying to figure out how to maximize this flavor/sensation. Some sources of umami are: Anchovy fillets; tomatoes; mushrooms; soy sauce, red wine and vegemite. There are a lot of places you can get “umami” (even MSG), and I try to use every single one of them (except MSG). Using these ingredients will maximize the soul-soothing beefiness of your stew without unloading a truck of MSG into the pot. Here is what I like to do: Take two anchovy fillets and chop them up and mash them with a fork into a paste. Don’t worry, I promise you won’t taste anything fishy in the final dish. Mash up the anchovy with a tablespoon or two of tomato paste and then mix THAT up with your smashed/chopped garlic. After your onions have gotten translucent, dump in the anchovy mixture and stir it around the pot until you smell the garlic. That should be about 30 to sixty seconds. This mixture will also stick and brown the bottom of your pot. Don’t worry about it.
As you can see, we have already added two of our umami sources to our stew: the tomato paste and the anchovy. We still need to get in all the others. For the mushrooms, I like using dried mushroom as they are the most concentrated. Get some dried mushrooms. I like porcini but any will do. Rehydrate them in hot water before you start cooking and about now drain them and squeeze out the water. Chop the mushrooms and toss them into the pot. Save that rehydrating water!
Rule #3: Water’s only purpose in cooking is to dilute.
I once saw a cooking demonstration by the great Paul Prudhomme and he said that anytime water is added to anything you are cooking, it is added for the purpose of diluting something or making it thinner. This is true when you are making stock or baking and it is certainly true when you make stew. Chef Prudhomme’s point was that you should never add water if you can add a liquid that will impart more flavor and accomplish the necessary dilution. Applying this rule to your stew is easy. Never add water. If you need liquid, add stock, wine, beer, tomato juice or whatever else comes to your mind. Not vodka. You already have some liquid from rehydrating those dried mushrooms and it has more umami, so gently add it making sure to not pour in the grit from the mushrooms. Add your beef to the pot as well as any juices that are in the bowl where you were holding it. Now add a tablespoon of soy sauce (more umami!) and a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce (more umami yet again!). Now, add some chopped canned tomatoes (Yep. Umami!). I prefer the Pomi brand from Italy. They’re already chopped, they come in a cool box like milk did when you were in grade school and they do not use calcium chloride in processing the tomatoes so they fall apart in the stew. You want the tomatoes to be a back note in the stew and not up front, but use whatever tomatoes you have. Just make sure they’re chopped up pretty fine. Now, add a cup of (umami-laden) red wine (I like cooking with Syrah because it’s not overly oaked if you’re buying cheap enough wine), 2-3 cups of beef broth (I usually use canned) and the carrots, tomatoes, potatoes as well as a quarter cup of chopped parsley and a the chopped leaves of two sprigs of rosemary and four sprigs of chopped thyme. Toss in a couple of bay leaves. Stir everything and taste the broth. Bear in mind that these flavors will become more concentrated as everything cooks. Maybe you need to add some salt & pepper. Maybe you want a little more wine or broth because the stew seems too thin. How should I know? Add what you think it needs
Rule #4: Secret Ingredients Rule.
Cooks everywhere have little things they add to their dishes. I will share two of my favorites to add to beef stew. The first is vegemite (also available under the brand name Marmite). Vegemite is loaded with umami. It’s very salty and you don’t need to add a lot. In fact, to me, vegemite seems a little funky on the back of my palate when eaten straight. But if you take a fat teaspoon of vegemite out of the jar and dissolve it in your stew, you will be adding a huge flavor wallop.
Second secret ingredient: preserved lemon. I have fallen in love with the exotic flavor of preserved lemon. I can’t explain why I love it as much as I do but I always have a jar of them around that I made following Mario Batali’s ridiculously simple recipe (easily Googled, I'll bet). Take two quarters of a preserved lemon and chop them into a paste. Stir that into your pot. Trust me on this ingredient. No one will place it (unless they have a ridiculously good palate like my wife), but it will set your stew apart from every other beef stew on the planet save the one I will be making this weekend.
By the way, you should endeavor to come up with your own secret ingredient.
OK, almost done. Taste your dish again and again as you make it. By now you will have a good idea what you want it to taste like. Adjust the seasoning again.
Rule #5: Don’t cook this with direct heat.
If you cook this stew on your stove over direct heat, you will regret it. It will scorch, it will burn. You will be sad. You can’t ever get the heat low enough to avoid burning and still have high enough heat to gently break down the fibers of that tough cut of meat. So put it in the oven. What you’re doing here is braising the meat anyway and the meat doesn’t care if it’s bubbling away on the stove or surrounded by gentler heat in the oven. I set my oven for 250 at the most and let it cook for at least three hours, but you might be able to go to 275 if you’re in a hurry. But if you have more time, 225 will make you happier in four hours, I’ll bet.
Rule #6 Thicken Judiciously.
A beef stew should be thick but not pasty. Given the loosey-goosey parameters I’ve set forth here, I have no idea exactly how much thickener you will need. So I make a roux with equal parts butter and flour and when it’s time for dinner I slowly add enough roux to get the stew where I like it. I find this is easier than adding flour at the beginning and then trying to thin it at the end or, worse, trying to thicken an already cooked stew. I freeze my leftover roux by the tablespoon and always have plenty available.
Rule #7: Eat Well.
I know I’ve dropped a lot of words on you here and if you’ve made it to the end, thank you. But my point in doing so is not to intimidate. Ignore my prolixity because a good beef stew is truly a heart-warming dish made to be shared with your family and a bottle of cotes-du-Rhone. Oh yeah, stir in some frozen peas while the dish is still very hot and then serve.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
I Would Rather Sit On A Pumpkin And Have It All To Myself, Than Be Crowded On A Velvet Cushion
Because I have a five year-old daughter, Halloween is a big deal in our house. While Hope, my daughter, has gone “trick-or-treating” (I use the quotation marks because for her first year or two, we dressed her up in a costume and took her to be photographed by adoring grandparents) every year of her existence, only last year did she finally, really, get to wander a neighborhood after dark and beg for candy. And now she is in kindergarten and it’s an even bigger deal.
Because of a variety of reasons, our home has become inundated with pumpkins. Hope’s after school care class went to a pumpkin patch about a week ago and every kid brought home a pumpkin. Fortunately, Hope brought home a sugar pumpkin, although I don’t know whether it was her choice or that was the pumpkin she was given. Additionally, our CSA this year had pumpkins for two or three weeks. Finally, Hope’s teacher is using Halloween as an occasion to teach math skills and as a result asked each kid to bring in a pumpkin so they could do something called “pumpkin math.” We were under strict instruction to bring in a whole pumpkin, not carved into a jack-o-lantern and not too big for the kids to carry themselves. After class was done with pumpkin cipherin’, we got back our gourds.
The result is a lot of pumpkins. I had to do something with all those pumpkins as I hate to waste them and Hope kept demanding that we do something with them. I have learned that roast pumpkin is one of the most useful things to have around. If you treat the pumpkin right, it will return to you almost 100% edible goodness.
There are a few things you can do with a raw sugar pumpkin. By the way, big pumpkins, the kind used to make jack-o-lanterns can actually work this same way, but they won’t be as sweet and, depending on your final recipe, you may need to adjust the amount of sugar you add. One thing you cannot do is use a jack-o-lantern you carved and left on your doorstep as something to eat. Once you are finished with your jack-o-lantern, the only really useful thing you can do with it is compost it.
While the possible recipes for cooked pumpkin are too numerous to mention, your options in getting the pumpkin to a state you will find edible are pretty limited. You can roast them or you can steam them. I’ve never tried steaming them, but I hear it works well enough but given the amount of pumpkin I am dealing with, I wanted simplicity more than almost anything. And roasting is as simple as you can get.
In my experience, there are two ways of roasting a pumpkin: whole or in pieces. They each have their benefits but I usually go with whole. As far as pieces go, the way you do this is to use your biggest, sturdiest chef’s knife and cut the top off the pumpkin as if you were making a jack-o-lantern. Scoop out the insides (seeds and pulp) cut the pumpkin into large-ish sized pieces, cut off the outer skin however you can and roast them, lightly oiled if you like, on a baking sheet in a moderate oven until the pieces are soft enough to be pierced with a fork. Take your pieces and get them baby food smooth with the aid of a food processor (or, if you’re a masochist, a food mill) strain them and, voila, you have pumpkin puree.
The advantages to doing it this way are, as I see them, twofold. First, dry roasting them tends to drive off much of the water in the pumpkin. This concentrates the flavor of the pumpkin and also helps make sure that you won’t have watery pumpkin pie or loose pumpkin cookie batter, if those are the things you decide to do with your cooked pumpkin. The other advantage is that the pumpkin seeds are still viable if you’d like to try and grow your own for next year. I learned this on accident a few years ago when I threw a bunch of pumpkin “guts” in my garden thinking they’d compost over the winter. Imagine my surprise the following spring when I found pumpkins growing in there but completely forgetting that I’d planted them. I had initially thought that I had some weird mutant cucumber plant volunteering in that space (pumpkin and cucumber leaves look very similar).
Anyway, the downside to roasting your pumpkin in pieces is that you require a very sharp, sturdy knife, the pumpkin is hard to cut and you have to do a lot more work. Which is why I have learned to roast them whole, While you will kill the pumpkins seeds in the process and you have to take some extra steps to get rid of excess water, those items are a small price to pay in exchange for skipping the dangerous knife work.
The most important thing about roasting a whole pumpkin is to make sure you put some holes in it to allow steam to escape. I cannot s tress this enough. Failure to do this will lead to an exploded pumpkin and that is no good. So, take a cooking fork (the kid with two sturdy tines) and poke eight or ten holes around the top of the pumpkin. Make sure the holes go all the way to the hollow center of the pumpkin. If you don’t have a fork long or sturdy enough to poke the holes, use a strong, sharp knife and cut eight slits around the top of the pumpkin. Don’t connect the slits; you just want to create a way for the steam to vent.
Now, put the pumpkin into a heated (let’s say 325° Fahrenheit, shall we?) oven. You will want to either put the pumpkin on a rimmed sheet or put it right on the oven rack with something underneath the catch any liquid that comes out of the pumpkin. Now leave it. Depending on the size of your pumpkin, it could be done in 45 minutes but it could take much longer. The last pumpkin I roasted took about an hour. The way to test for doneness is to insert a fork (again, a really long one) or knife into the pumpkin. When it goes in easily enough for you to realize that the pumpkin is very soft, it’s finished. Turn off the oven and let everything cool down. You can let the pumpkin cool in the over or on a counter, as long as it’s on a plate or stays on that rimmed sheet you used when you roasted it.
When it’s completely cool (which will take awhile), you’re ready to process. The way I do it is to simply start tearing the pumpkin apart with your hands. Take off the stem and throw it away. Pull the pumpkin apart and scoop out the seeds and pulp. Set those side for another use. Start breaking the pumpkin into chunks. If your pumpkin is roasted well enough, you won’t even need a knife for this, although a large spoon is helpful in removing the seeds. After the pumpkin is broken into chunks, peel the skin off or scrape the pumpkin from the skin using your hands or a spoon.
As you finish a piece of pumpkin, drop it into your food processor. When you have finished cleaning and peeling the entire pumpkin, blitz the bejesus out of it in your food processor. You want to get it really smooth. Scrape down the sides of the work bowl a couple of times to make sure you get it as smooth as can be.
At this point you have pureed pumpkin as good as any canned pumpkin you will find in the store and you can substitute what you’ve just made for canned pumpkin in any recipe. By the way, this is NOT pumpkin pie filling. “Pumpkin pie filling” has pumpkin processed in a similar fashion, but it also has sugar, spices and, likely, dairy and/or eggs. You can make pumpkin pie with your fresh-processed pumpkin, but you will need a recipe that uses pumpkin and not canned pie filling.
I know what you’re thinking. You are wondering about that part about excess water that we got rid of using the method where we roasted in pieces, aren’t you? Well, the way you deal with the excess water in this pumpkin is also pretty easy. All you need is a fine-mesh strainer and a bowl over which to place it. Dump the pumpkin into the strainer and place the strainer over the bowl. Just let it set there for a few hours. I usually do this on the countertop, but it would probably be smarter to do it in the fridge just to make sure you don’t get any icky bacteria. After it’s strained for awhile, you will see a fairly decent amount of orange water in the bowl below. Throw this away. Your pumpkin is now ready for use.
If you don’t need the pumpkin immediately, put it in a freezer bag (one “regular-sized” sugar pumpkin usually fills up a one quart freezer bag in my experience) and throw it in the freezer. It will keep and you can use it for Thanksgiving pumpkin pie.
I know I’ve written a lot of steps here and I’m sorry. But please don’t be put off by my wordiness. I promise you that this is an easy way to use pumpkin and that when your kid starts bringing home pumpkins and demands that they be used rather than thrown away, you will be glad you know how to do this.
My favorite way to use pumpkin is not in pies or cookies. My favorite is pumpkin soup with Thai flavors. I have no idea whether this is anything close to authentic, but I can tell you it’s tasty and easy and you can use the pumpkin you just processed or, if you don’t have any, use canned pumpkin. This isn’t really a recipe so much as a technique and one you can adjust to fit your personal preferences quite easily.
Sauté some finely chopped onion and minced garlic in a bit of oil. Just get the onion to be a bit translucent. If you like heat, add it in the form you like. Crushed red pepper is a good choice, but so is chili oil, sriracha sauce and finely chopped chili (Thai bird chili is a good one here). Be careful with how much chili you add because you can’t take it out if it’s too hot. If you have any lemongrass, add one split stalk (leave it in large pieces because you will want to remove it later) and add it too. Add some minced or grated ginger and let everything get nice and aromatic. Now add your pumpkin and stir to combine. Add a can of coconut milk (not “cream of coconut) and squeeze in a couple or three limes. Stir to combine. Add enough chicken stock to think it to your desired consistency. Taste the soup and correct the seasoning with salt and pepper. Let it simmer gently for 10-15 minutes to really extract the flavors of the ginger and lemongrass. Take out the lemongrass stalk and discard. Now you can puree your soup in a blender or with an immersion blender, but this step is totally optional and if you grated the ginger and the garlic and onion are very finely chopped, you won’t notice anything. Serve in bowls and garnish the soup with hopped cilantro, a chiffonade of Thai basil and a couple more lime wedges. This is one of my favorite soups and I hope you like it too.
Thanks for bearing with me through this very long and overly detailed post. I promise they won’t all be this long!
Because of a variety of reasons, our home has become inundated with pumpkins. Hope’s after school care class went to a pumpkin patch about a week ago and every kid brought home a pumpkin. Fortunately, Hope brought home a sugar pumpkin, although I don’t know whether it was her choice or that was the pumpkin she was given. Additionally, our CSA this year had pumpkins for two or three weeks. Finally, Hope’s teacher is using Halloween as an occasion to teach math skills and as a result asked each kid to bring in a pumpkin so they could do something called “pumpkin math.” We were under strict instruction to bring in a whole pumpkin, not carved into a jack-o-lantern and not too big for the kids to carry themselves. After class was done with pumpkin cipherin’, we got back our gourds.
The result is a lot of pumpkins. I had to do something with all those pumpkins as I hate to waste them and Hope kept demanding that we do something with them. I have learned that roast pumpkin is one of the most useful things to have around. If you treat the pumpkin right, it will return to you almost 100% edible goodness.
There are a few things you can do with a raw sugar pumpkin. By the way, big pumpkins, the kind used to make jack-o-lanterns can actually work this same way, but they won’t be as sweet and, depending on your final recipe, you may need to adjust the amount of sugar you add. One thing you cannot do is use a jack-o-lantern you carved and left on your doorstep as something to eat. Once you are finished with your jack-o-lantern, the only really useful thing you can do with it is compost it.
While the possible recipes for cooked pumpkin are too numerous to mention, your options in getting the pumpkin to a state you will find edible are pretty limited. You can roast them or you can steam them. I’ve never tried steaming them, but I hear it works well enough but given the amount of pumpkin I am dealing with, I wanted simplicity more than almost anything. And roasting is as simple as you can get.
In my experience, there are two ways of roasting a pumpkin: whole or in pieces. They each have their benefits but I usually go with whole. As far as pieces go, the way you do this is to use your biggest, sturdiest chef’s knife and cut the top off the pumpkin as if you were making a jack-o-lantern. Scoop out the insides (seeds and pulp) cut the pumpkin into large-ish sized pieces, cut off the outer skin however you can and roast them, lightly oiled if you like, on a baking sheet in a moderate oven until the pieces are soft enough to be pierced with a fork. Take your pieces and get them baby food smooth with the aid of a food processor (or, if you’re a masochist, a food mill) strain them and, voila, you have pumpkin puree.
The advantages to doing it this way are, as I see them, twofold. First, dry roasting them tends to drive off much of the water in the pumpkin. This concentrates the flavor of the pumpkin and also helps make sure that you won’t have watery pumpkin pie or loose pumpkin cookie batter, if those are the things you decide to do with your cooked pumpkin. The other advantage is that the pumpkin seeds are still viable if you’d like to try and grow your own for next year. I learned this on accident a few years ago when I threw a bunch of pumpkin “guts” in my garden thinking they’d compost over the winter. Imagine my surprise the following spring when I found pumpkins growing in there but completely forgetting that I’d planted them. I had initially thought that I had some weird mutant cucumber plant volunteering in that space (pumpkin and cucumber leaves look very similar).
Anyway, the downside to roasting your pumpkin in pieces is that you require a very sharp, sturdy knife, the pumpkin is hard to cut and you have to do a lot more work. Which is why I have learned to roast them whole, While you will kill the pumpkins seeds in the process and you have to take some extra steps to get rid of excess water, those items are a small price to pay in exchange for skipping the dangerous knife work.
The most important thing about roasting a whole pumpkin is to make sure you put some holes in it to allow steam to escape. I cannot s tress this enough. Failure to do this will lead to an exploded pumpkin and that is no good. So, take a cooking fork (the kid with two sturdy tines) and poke eight or ten holes around the top of the pumpkin. Make sure the holes go all the way to the hollow center of the pumpkin. If you don’t have a fork long or sturdy enough to poke the holes, use a strong, sharp knife and cut eight slits around the top of the pumpkin. Don’t connect the slits; you just want to create a way for the steam to vent.
Now, put the pumpkin into a heated (let’s say 325° Fahrenheit, shall we?) oven. You will want to either put the pumpkin on a rimmed sheet or put it right on the oven rack with something underneath the catch any liquid that comes out of the pumpkin. Now leave it. Depending on the size of your pumpkin, it could be done in 45 minutes but it could take much longer. The last pumpkin I roasted took about an hour. The way to test for doneness is to insert a fork (again, a really long one) or knife into the pumpkin. When it goes in easily enough for you to realize that the pumpkin is very soft, it’s finished. Turn off the oven and let everything cool down. You can let the pumpkin cool in the over or on a counter, as long as it’s on a plate or stays on that rimmed sheet you used when you roasted it.
When it’s completely cool (which will take awhile), you’re ready to process. The way I do it is to simply start tearing the pumpkin apart with your hands. Take off the stem and throw it away. Pull the pumpkin apart and scoop out the seeds and pulp. Set those side for another use. Start breaking the pumpkin into chunks. If your pumpkin is roasted well enough, you won’t even need a knife for this, although a large spoon is helpful in removing the seeds. After the pumpkin is broken into chunks, peel the skin off or scrape the pumpkin from the skin using your hands or a spoon.
As you finish a piece of pumpkin, drop it into your food processor. When you have finished cleaning and peeling the entire pumpkin, blitz the bejesus out of it in your food processor. You want to get it really smooth. Scrape down the sides of the work bowl a couple of times to make sure you get it as smooth as can be.
At this point you have pureed pumpkin as good as any canned pumpkin you will find in the store and you can substitute what you’ve just made for canned pumpkin in any recipe. By the way, this is NOT pumpkin pie filling. “Pumpkin pie filling” has pumpkin processed in a similar fashion, but it also has sugar, spices and, likely, dairy and/or eggs. You can make pumpkin pie with your fresh-processed pumpkin, but you will need a recipe that uses pumpkin and not canned pie filling.
I know what you’re thinking. You are wondering about that part about excess water that we got rid of using the method where we roasted in pieces, aren’t you? Well, the way you deal with the excess water in this pumpkin is also pretty easy. All you need is a fine-mesh strainer and a bowl over which to place it. Dump the pumpkin into the strainer and place the strainer over the bowl. Just let it set there for a few hours. I usually do this on the countertop, but it would probably be smarter to do it in the fridge just to make sure you don’t get any icky bacteria. After it’s strained for awhile, you will see a fairly decent amount of orange water in the bowl below. Throw this away. Your pumpkin is now ready for use.
If you don’t need the pumpkin immediately, put it in a freezer bag (one “regular-sized” sugar pumpkin usually fills up a one quart freezer bag in my experience) and throw it in the freezer. It will keep and you can use it for Thanksgiving pumpkin pie.
I know I’ve written a lot of steps here and I’m sorry. But please don’t be put off by my wordiness. I promise you that this is an easy way to use pumpkin and that when your kid starts bringing home pumpkins and demands that they be used rather than thrown away, you will be glad you know how to do this.
Pumpkin Soup With Thai Flavors
My favorite way to use pumpkin is not in pies or cookies. My favorite is pumpkin soup with Thai flavors. I have no idea whether this is anything close to authentic, but I can tell you it’s tasty and easy and you can use the pumpkin you just processed or, if you don’t have any, use canned pumpkin. This isn’t really a recipe so much as a technique and one you can adjust to fit your personal preferences quite easily.
Sauté some finely chopped onion and minced garlic in a bit of oil. Just get the onion to be a bit translucent. If you like heat, add it in the form you like. Crushed red pepper is a good choice, but so is chili oil, sriracha sauce and finely chopped chili (Thai bird chili is a good one here). Be careful with how much chili you add because you can’t take it out if it’s too hot. If you have any lemongrass, add one split stalk (leave it in large pieces because you will want to remove it later) and add it too. Add some minced or grated ginger and let everything get nice and aromatic. Now add your pumpkin and stir to combine. Add a can of coconut milk (not “cream of coconut) and squeeze in a couple or three limes. Stir to combine. Add enough chicken stock to think it to your desired consistency. Taste the soup and correct the seasoning with salt and pepper. Let it simmer gently for 10-15 minutes to really extract the flavors of the ginger and lemongrass. Take out the lemongrass stalk and discard. Now you can puree your soup in a blender or with an immersion blender, but this step is totally optional and if you grated the ginger and the garlic and onion are very finely chopped, you won’t notice anything. Serve in bowls and garnish the soup with hopped cilantro, a chiffonade of Thai basil and a couple more lime wedges. This is one of my favorite soups and I hope you like it too.
Thanks for bearing with me through this very long and overly detailed post. I promise they won’t all be this long!
Welcome to my Blog!!
I intend for this blog to be about one of my passions: Food. More will be coming and I hope you will stick with me and that you like what you see.
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