Month: July 2007

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

51. Spaghetti Alla Carbonara p.221


The recipe

This was delicious, but then anything with this much cheese and pancetta had better be. I didn’t have the heart to go out and find guaniciale (unsmoked cured hog jowl), maybe that makes me less hard core that I should be, but the pancetta worked wonderfully. This was very easy to prepare. The fat from the pancetta is rendered, and used to brown the onions. The white wine is then added and reduced to make a sauce, the cooked spaghetti is tossed in, and a mixture of eggs, parmigiano-reggiano and pecorino romano, salt, and pepper is stirred in after the pasta is off the heat. The spaghetti partially cooks the eggs, which gives the sauce the half-thickened super smooth texture that makes Carbonara what it is.

There were two main problems with the recipe as written: water, and salt. The only liquid in here is a 1/8 cup white wine (after reducing) and the eggs. The pasta was wonderfully saucy for the first minute after it was tossed, then it got thirsty and all my sauce was gone. Adding some of the pasta water would have solved this problem, and tossing my plate with a bit of it rescued my dinner. The other issue is salt. The dish has got 5 Oz pancetta, and more than a cup of parmagiano and pecorino. The pasta is cooked in salted water, and a bit of salt is thrown in at the end for good measure. The saltiness of the meat and cheeses can vary wildly, and top producers seem to have less salt than the cheaper brands. Either the folks at Gourmet keep salt licks in their desks, or they had access to less salty ingredients than I did. It wasn’t inedible, but I woke up parched in the middle of the night.

There’s a little note at the bottom of the recipe about eating eggs that aren’t fully cooked. I suppose there is a real risk of contamination, and I’m certain that the people at The Book have lawyers to make sure notes like that get in there, but where’s the joy? As a young healthy person I get to feel invulnerable and poo poo warnings like that. I’m certainly willing to take the one in several thousand odds of food poisoning to eat less than fully cooked eggs, meats, and fish. It’s a risk I understand and am willing to take. Unfortunately it’s not a risk I’m allowed to take in a restaurant anymore. No more medium rare burgers, and maybe I’ll never get to try sous-vide. How long before hollandaise is gone (not that I’d mourn it’s passing actually)? What about a runny yolk for my toast? I worry that these things I love will just become unavailable, or I’ll have to sign a waiver to order off the “irresponsible” section of the menu. What is the world coming to? Why in my day…. grumble, grumble… snore.

Other than those little complaints, it really was a delicious dish. Despite all the cheese and pancetta, it wasn’t nearly as heavy as the Carbonara you’d get from the local Italian joint. In fact there’s no cream in here at all. The texture was also much lighter. Once I’d added a bit of water the strands of pasta were flavorful, and well coated enough not to stick, but not swaddled in the overwhelming amounts of sauce you sometimes find. With the salt and water caveats in mind this can be a great dish, the recipe as written gets slightly lower marks than what it can easily be changed to become.

Categories
The Project

A 50th Recipe Perspective

With the writeup of the 50th post, it’s time to take a look at how things are going. There are 1293 recipes in the book, and in the past 127 days I’ve blogged 50 of them. At this rate I’ll be finished on July 7th 2016, that’s assuming I can keep my cooking ahead of my writing. I’m working on ways of speeding things up, but I’m enjoying the process so what’s the rush?

Things were getting a bit unwieldy when looking through the archives, so I’ve gone back and tagged each recipe by chapter to make things easier.

More stats and musing behind the cut.

Continue reading “A 50th Recipe Perspective”
Categories
The Book Vegetables

50. Winter Vegetables With Horseradish Dill Butter p.526

This version of the recipe makes three times as much as The Book’s, and recommends steaming the veggies for two thirds of the time.

Parsnips, turnips, and Brussels sprouts, horseradish, and dill all in one recipe? My goodness gracious, it’s almost too good to be true. The parsnips, turnips and Brussels sprouts are steamed together, while potatoes and carrots are steamed in another pot. Then everything is tossed with a horseradish dill butter augmented with a hit of cider vinegar.

I admit I cheated a bit and cooked the veggies wrapped in tin foil on the grill, but steaming is steaming right? The biggest trick with the recipe is to get all the veggies to be done at the same moment. For example, by the time my potatoes were finished, the carrots were overdone, and while the Brussels sprouts were still crisp, the turnip was a bit mushy. This is probably my fault, I don’t think I followed the recipe very precisely when it came to cutting the veggies. For example, the carrots are to be cut diagonally into 1 inch long pieces, but the parsnips were supposed to be 2 by 1 inch sticks. They’re pretty much the same shape, so I cut them into pretty much the same size chunks. The nice people at Gourmet spent quite some time experimenting with different vegetable geometries to get this right, I’d recommend taking their advice and not going it alone.

This recipe stars often overlooked and under appreciated winter vegetables, presents them beautifully, and plays up their fundamental bitter nature. I love that the recipe resists the temptation to sweeten, or add cream. The carrots and potatoes keep this from being too bitter, all the while celebrating the joys of roots. The horseradish boldly adds a tangy punch of heat, in fact I could have happily added more. The use of dill makes me think of the dish as Eastern European, and brings romantic notions of hearty Ukrainian farm families fending off the winter’s chill to my mind.

I really enjoyed the flavours and concepts here, but the execution was a bit trickier than the recipe led me to believe.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

49. Lemon Bars p.691

No recipe for this one. But they were so good I can’t help but giving you the recipe and them a five mushroom rating.

FOR CRUST
2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 sticks cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2 inch pieces

FOR FILLING
3 large eggs
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons heavy cream
1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon salt

Confectioners’ sugar for sprinkling

MAKE THE CRUST: Put a rack in middle of oven and preheat oven to 350F.
Pulse together four, sugar, and salt in a food processor just until combined. Add butter and pulse until mixture resembles coarse meal. Press dough onto bottom of an ungreased 9-inch square baking pan. Bake until golden brown, about 20 minutes.

MEANWHILE, MAKE THE FILLING: Whisk together eggs, granulated sugar, flour, heavy cream, zest, juice, and salt in a bowl until combined.

BAKE THE BARS: When crust is baked, rewhisk lemon mixture and pour onto hot crust. Bake until just set, about 16 minutes. Transfer pan to a rack to cool.

Refrigerate bars, covered, until cold, at least 4 hours. Before serving, cut into bars and sprinkle with a thick layer of confectioners’ sugar.

I’m sure we’ve all eaten a million lemon bars, some insipid, some inspired. We all know the bad ones with their mushy oily crusts, and super sweet lemon topping that’s either sloppy pudding, or a Fruit Roll-Up. Worse is the health-food version with a cardboard dry crust that crumbles if you look at it, and artificial sweeteners. My ideal lemon bar is built on really good shortbread, where good quality fresh butter is a must. The topping should be a sweet-tart just set lemon custard that’s thick enough to stay in place but avoid gumminess at all costs.

This bar lived up to that ideal quite nicely. All of the shortbread recipes in The Book seem to come out beautifully, and this one was no exception. The lemon topping balanced the tart acid of the lemons with just enough sugar, and added zip to the smooth egg and cream custard. Add a bit of powdered sugar and it was good to to.

In making this recipe I learned the value of measuring your baking dish. It calls for a 9 inch square, and I grabbed something significantly larger without thinking it though. I spread the shortbread out on one half of the pan and baked it. When it came time to pour the liquid custard on top of it I realized I had a problem. I attempted to rig up a shield wall out of aluminum foil to keep the filling on the shortbread, but my wall breached during baking. I ended up with a deep pool of filling on one side of the sheet pan, and much less filling on the shortbread than I would have liked. It was still totally delicious with half the filling, and I can only imagine that it would have been better had I not messed up.

Lemon bars, you’re the second recipe in a row to earn your five mushroom rating. Kudos.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

48. Island Pork Tenderloin p.475


This recipe from Epicurious includes the tenderloin recipe from The Book, and a bonus salad.

This was an incredibly easy and delicious way to prepare a pork tenderloin. It took almost no forethought because it’s based entirely on pantry staples. Chances are I wouldn’t even have to go out to get the tenderloins. I’m liable to have a couple in my freezer at any given time because they vary so wildly in price. Sometimes you can pay $13 per loin, and then have them go on sale for $3.50 the next week. Steaks are like that too, but it always puzzles me.

The pork is browned with a dry rub of salt, pepper, cumin, chili powder, and cinnamon, and then covered with a brown sugar, garlic, Tabasco mixture and roasted. The browning opens up the flavours of the dry rub, and then the brown sugar coating melts into a spicy garlic glaze. The glaze helped keep the pork juicy and tender, and added deep molasses and caramel flavours. I was worried that it would end up too sweet (1 cup of brown sugar for 2 tenderloins), but it didn’t end up tasting candied at all.

This disappeared within minutes of putting it out, and got rave reviews. I loved that the recipe provided big flavours and an attractive presentation for hardly any time effort or energy. Island Pork Tenderloin, you’ve earned your 5 mushrooms.

Categories
Grains and Beans The Book

47. Cuban Black-Beans p.267

No recipe for this one.

These beans were fine, completely middle of the road fine. They’re pretty standard soaked black beans with a bit of bacon, green pepper, cider vinegar, and a bay leaf added. The effect of these added flavours was very subtle, so subtle you might not notice them at all. I tried them again a couple of days later, and the flavours were a bit more pronounced, but they could still slip under the radar.

That said, beans aren’t really meant to be the star of the show most of the time, and these were a perfectly good accompaniment to the pork tenderloin I served them with. They had a fairly good texture, with a bit of resistance left to them. Some of the beans broke down and thickened the cooking liquid. They might have been better if they ended up with a little more liquid, but I didn’t want to add water right at the end.

I know nothing about Cuban food, but I certainly wouldn’t have guessed Cuban if you’d asked me to guess the origin of the recipe. There aren’t a heck of a lot of Cuban restaurants around here, so I don’t have an opportunity to compare this to any gold standard. If you’re looking for a straightforward black bean recipe that won’t get in the way of anything else you’re serving you could certainly do much worse than these beans. I wouldn’t expect anyone to write home about them though.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

46. Eggplant Caviar p.11

No recipe this time, but honestly you’re not missing all that much.

I think this came out to be less than the sum of it’s parts. Essentially it’s broiled eggplant, sweated onions, garlic, and green pepper mixed with fresh tomatoes, lemon juice, sugar, salt, and pepper. All good stuff up to this point, but it all went for a spin in the food processor, and came out a mushy unappealing terra cotta.

The idea is to chill this for a few hours and then serve it with crackers or baguette. In this regard the texture was way off, it had tiny chunks in a soupy liquid destined to slip and slide. Its texture was wrong in the same way that store bought salsa can be wrong. If it had been completely smooth and thickened it could have worked well, if it had been left chunkier with something to bite into it might have been nice. As it was all the ingredients lost their individual identities, but didn’t really meld into a flavour partnership. Bland, watery, and ugly was the take home message of this dish. I had 12 hungry people in my living room devouring anything put in front of them, but there was plenty of this left at the end of the evening.

A day or two later I cooked down some the remainder and used it as a pizza sauce. It worked remarkably well in that incarnation. Eggplant, tomato, and onions all have a lot of water in them, I think the water either had to be left in the cell structure of the vegetables, or cooked out. Food processing it just left is soupy and uninspiring.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

45. Hummus with toasted pine nuts, cumin seeds, and parsely oil p.14


The recipe

I made this for one of The Boys going away parties. He’d just finished his Ph.D. and was heading off to a very fancy post doc in the states. I was throwing a party in his honor, and I wanted to make things he would like. I think I did alright in pleasing him, but I totally forgot that his girlfriend is allergic to garlic, and couldn’t eat even one of the dishes I’d prepared. I apologized at the time, but I’ll say it again. I’m sorry.

I love hummus as party food. It has all the virtues of a good crowd pleaser; it’s intensely flavored, can be dipped with anything your heart desires, it neatly avoids almost all dietary restrictions, it’s substantial, and it costs pennies to prepare. The only downside to hummus it that it’s oatmeal like appearance doesn’t make for the greatest visual impression. Here a very basic hummus recipe is given a face lift with a rather attractive topping of pine nuts, cumin seeds, and drizzled parsley oil. The nuts also add a nice texture and bursts of flavour, giving you a little something to look forward to in every bite. The vibrant green of the oil really set the dish off. That colour happens to have been attained with parsely. Maybe it’s not so useless after all? That might be going too far.

I think this dish is being added to my repertoire of party standards. It’s a way to take the ubiquitous bowl of hummus at college parties along with you into the adult world.