Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

141. Roasted Red Pepper and Eggplant Dip p.10


The recipe

I served this dip along with the tapenade from the other day, and was similarly underwhelmed. This dip had a bland, mushy flavour, that didn’t really do much for anyone. I mentioned that the tapenade was overpowering, and this helped thin it out. Unfortunately, “dilutes tapenade” is one of the better things I have to say about this dip.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with the ingredient list here. You could probably make a fine dip with eggplant, red pepper, olive oil, garlic, lemon juice, jalapeño, salt, and pepper. Unfortunately the cooking instructions sabotage the goodness of these ingredients. Basically you roast eggplant and red peppers, remove the skins, and purée the flesh with the rest of the ingredients. You then transfer the purée back to the stove top, and simmer it for another 20 odd minutes to get rid of excess water.

Roasting the eggplant and red peppers sounds like a good idea to me, but the recipe falls apart from there on. You end up taking all of these pungent aromatic ingredients, garlic, lemon juice, jalapeño, and extra-virgin olive oil and killing them by simmering them. Raw garlic and chiles work wonderfully in dips, and I don’t see any need to cook them at all. If you want to mellow the harsh edges, then consider building extra flavours by roasting the garlic cloves, or at least mincing and browning in oil. Garlic cooked with wet methods takes on an unpleasant kind of metallic taste, and gives up the sharp potency and fruitiness of it’s raw form. The jalapeño would similarly benefit from some dry heat to bring out the smokiness. Cooking extra-virgin olive oil and lemon juice is just insanity, uncooked they’re complex and full of layers and interest. Heat them beyond a certain point, and the lemon juice is just an acid, and your nuanced grassy, fruity, olive oil becomes indistinguishable from canola.

What kills me about this recipe is that the murder of all those flavours is totally unnecessary. You could easily make a purée of just the eggplant and red peppers, simmer that, and then add the rest of the ingredients. The texture was one of the highlights of the dip though, smooth, silky, and nicely emulsified, so it’s probably worth getting rid of at least some excess water.

The recipe says that the dip needs to come together in the refrigerator for at least a day. I served it about 6 hours after making it, and was disappointed by it’s blandness and lack of personality. I figured it just needed to rest longer, but it was still going nowhere and doing nothing for me by the second day. I eventually got rid of the leftovers by integrating them into a pizza sauce.

I should say that my dining companion liked this dip, and enjoyed that it mostly tasted like eggplant and red pepper, with a mild background of other flavours. I’m definitely biased towards big bold flavours in a dip, and I missed them. Subtle dips can stray too easily over into baby-food territory, which is not for me. The Epicurious reviews suggest that this is a love it or hate it recipe, so our disagreement isn’t unusual. This recipe has the makings of a nice dip, but at least to my palate it was a failure.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

137. Ratatouille p.586


The recipe

Everyone, or at least everyone who cares about food, has a stockpile of formative food memories, often centred on parents and grandparents doing things the way they’d always been done, or traveling experiences where the zeitgeist of your food universe is overturned by a brand new culture. The list of culinary luminaries who trace their food awakenings back to a summer trip to France is longer than I’d care to count. So it should come as no surprise that my thirteen year old self came home from a month long stay with a family near Lyons with a different perspective on food, and in particular ratatouille.

I don’t think I took nearly as much advantage of my time there as I should have, I mostly sulked, pittied myself, and felt homesick. I was an awful house guest, and I was convinced I was being punished. But, my hosts graciously put up with this insufferable Canadian brat, and exposed me to some wonderful things that I wasn’t ready to appreciate. Fifteen years later I can still taste most of the meals we ate, and the idea of staying in a four hundred year old farm house, surrounded by rolling pastures, creaky old barns, and tiny streams sounds wonderful. I wish I could go back and gather snails off the rocks in the field after a rain for escargot in garlic butter, and the weekly farmers market wouldn’t seem like the painful drudgery it did at the time. I owe that family a huge debt of gratitude, and an apology.

I did appreciate most of the food experiences at the time, the rich creamy yogurt was unlike anything I’d ever eaten, the impeccably cured sausages were a revelation, and of course the cheese. I also started to come around on very rare steak. The biggest change was the idea that vegetables could good enough to crave, and not just an afterthought to be gotten out of if at all possible. Ratatouille was the catalyst for that change. A nice older couple who had helped to organize my trip invited us over for lunch in the back garden, where we ate ratatouille, baguette, and nibbled on olives. At first I was puzzled by the lack of a meaty main course, but soon I couldn’t have cared less. The ratatouille was unbelievably good, and I just couldn’t understand why. My mother had made it before, and I was way to smart to fall for her hiding veggies in a stew trickery, so I turned my nose up at it. But this ratatouille was a completely different being, it was insanely flavourful, and multi layered with each element distinct, but contributing to the whole. There were tomatoes, garlic, peppers, onions, zucchini, eggplant, that were more fresh and explosively flavourful than I could ever have conceived of them being. That meal filled me with a sense of profound contentment, connectedness, and peace. Thinking back that euphoria probably had a lot more to do with the Champagne and Beaujolais they let me drink, but one way or another my perspective on ratatouille had been changed. I asked the old man what the secret was, and he told me about herbs de provence, so I brought a big bag home to try to get my mother to recreate it. Of course, my mother had herbs de provence, the secret was really in the incredible produce that went into the stew, and a lifetime spent honing the technique ’till his ratatouille was as good as it could be.

The Book’s ratatouille doesn’t live up to the old man’s, but it at least recalls it. The Book uses a very odd method, the recipe starts by making the tomato sauce with peeled (I didn’t bother) seeded and chopped tomatoes, sliced garlic, parsley, and basil leaves. While the sauce simmers, onions, bell peppers, zucchini, and eggplant are individually browned, then added to the tomato sauce and allowed to simmer for an hour. This batch browning of the veggies does a nice job building flavour, but it’s a huge pain, and it takes a whole whack of oil. I liked the added complexity, but there really was much more oil than necessary. I think you could get a similar effect by tossing the veggies with a more reasonable amount of oil and spreading them on cookie sheets and running them under the broiler for a few minutes. I was also surprised by the lack of herbs de provence, usually that herb blend is de rigueur for ratatouille. The basil only strategy turned out to be quite delicious, but I did miss the other flavours. My favorite ratatouilles have quite distinct chunks of vegetables, which retain some of their original texture, while softening into a cohesive blend with the others. Here, everything got a bit too soft, and I wonder if it wouldn’t have worked better to simmer it for less time, but let it sit in the fridge for a day or two before serving it.

I made this ratatouille twice within a few weeks. I was very well pleased with my first attempt, and decided to bring a second batch to a large family affair. The second attempt just didn’t live up to the first one, and I can’t explain why. The first batch went over pretty well with my dining companion, and some friends I served it to, but the second was largely ignored at dinner. That inconsistency is kind of worrying to me, I have no clue what factors I varied in my second attempt, but it just didn’t have that special something. My first try was very good, and could have been excellent with a few tweaks, however the inexplicably mediocre second attempt will keep me from giving this a great rating.

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

21. Olive and Eggplant Spread p.11


the recipe

This was a great appetizer, it’s basically a tapenade cut with roasted eggplant. I love eggplant, and I love olives, together they’re even better. Eggplant dips naturally tend to turn out a kind of grey-brown that’s not the most inviting. The olives helped it turn a delightful shade of purple with a nice lustre. Also, a straight ahead tapenade can be a bit too much olive, even for olive lovers. Using eggplant cut the intensity and made this very affordable. I’d say this was the best of both worlds. I like that all the saltiness of the dip came from the olives and capers, no need to add more.

The result here had loads of olive flavour, with the almost meaty background of the eggplant. It worked well as a dip, which I find nicer than having to spread a thin layer as you would with a more potent tapenade. This was a really solid recipe that I’d happily make again.

Categories
Sandwiches & Pizzas The Book

17. Grilled Eggplant Sandwiches With Lemon Aioli, Feta, and Mint p.182

the recipe

I sextupled this recipes and brought two sheet pans full to a picnic in the parc. They were devoured within seconds. I’m not sure if this was because they were scrumptious, or if my audience of hungry students wasn’t too discerning. I though these were OK, without being anything special. I think my expectations may have been a bit high. I was hoping for a very Mediterranean result, with feta, olive oil, garlic, lemon, eggplant, and mint. Somehow the mayonnaise in the aioli overwhelmed the other flavours, and the result was a bit bland. The mint did come through nicely.

I didn’t have access to a grill for these so I broiled the eggplant slices. Grilling might have added a nice smokiness, but the problem here didn’t lie in the eggplant. Toasting the buns I put them on would have been nice too. The recipe calls for a baguette, but for feeding a crowd rolls made more sense.

If I made these again I’d up the garlic and lemon juice, and use the best quality feta I could get my hands on. There really isn’t a lot of mayonnaise in here, but I think I’d try to cut it even further (would it still be an aioli? that’s a question for the ages). While this was better in theory than in practice, it wasn’t at all bad. In fact I’d make it again.