Michael Ruhlman

I've just started reading Michael Ruhlman's The Soul of a Chef. Released a few years ago, it's a kind of sequel to his The Making of a Chef, in which he goes to the famed Culinary Institute of America for a year and writes about his experience. In The Soul of a Chef, Ruhlman returns to the CIA, this time to trail seven chefs as they compete for the CIA's elusive title of "Certified Master Chef".

Man this guy can write. I don't know what it is exactly: his language isn't particularly poetic, his vocabulary isn't evocative or interestingly esoteric, his plots don't have elaborate twists and turns—it's a documentary, after all. But Ruhlman manages to capture the excitement, the frenzy, the tension, the mood-swings in the CIA's kitchens in a way that grips the reader by the throat. I couldn't put the first book down, and I'm equally riveted by the second.

The best thing about the books, for me at least, is that they make you want to cook. And not just cook, but try your utter best to cook well. No home cook should pretend that they can achieve anything like the levels of perfection required of students at the CIA, unless they dedicate themselves full-time to the task. But Ruhlman really makes you want to try, he makes you care about not just cooking things but cooking them right, or at least cooking them as well as you can. I've dipped into my Escoffier a number of times over the years, but it's only while I'm reading Ruhlman's books that I eagerly grab for it and really think about what Escoffier is asking us to do.

If you're looking for inspiration in the kitchen, but not about any particular ingredient or technique, I've read nothing better for the job than Ruhlman's two books. Check them out, if you haven't already.

Stewed Savoy cabbage

Last night's meal was a winner. I had buckets of post-Thanksgiving turkey stock, and I wanted to use some of it sooner rather than later (the rest is in the freezer). I remembered that I'd once braised some cabbage in chicken stock and it had tasted delicious, so I thought I'd try that again, but with turkey stock this time.

What to have with it? Braised cabbage suggests pork to me, so I went for some spicy pork sausages (store-bought, but very tasty), and to complete my emerging Austrian theme I added some boiled potatoes. (I found some purple potatoes, which looked great sliced on the plate next to the bright green cabbage.) I finished it all with a sauce made of reduced vermouth and turkey stock, with some Dijon mustard mixed in. It was outstanding, if I say so myself.

The centerpiece was definitely the cabbage. I'd wanted to braise the cabbage in the oven, like I had done before with the chicken stock, but I found I only had an hour in which to cook, so I simmered it fairly actively on the stove instead. I'm guessing that braising would have allowed the cabbage to develop more depth of flavor, but it was so tasty as it was that I'm going to share my recipe just the way I made it last night.

One last point: the cabbage was Savoy cabbage, and this matters. Savoy cabbage is smaller, curlier, less tough, and milder in taste than regular green cabbage. When cooked through it kind of dissolves in your mouth in deliciously cabbagey chunks, instead of remaining in chewy sheets like regular cabbage. Give it a try if you've never had it.

2 Savoy cabbages, cut lengthwise into quarters
1½ small onions, thinly sliced
1 quart turkey stock
1½ tbsp butter
¼ tsp grated nutmeg
6 peppercorns
1 bay leaf
salt to taste

Heat the butter in a large dutch oven over medium heat, then add the onions and cook until softened, a few minutes.

Add the nutmeg and the cabbage quarters, and turn everything so all the cabbage is well coated.

Add the stock, the peppercorns and the bay leaf, cover the pan, and cook at a slow simmer until the cabbage is fork-tender, about an hour.

Season well with salt, and serve.

How to cook an egg

Eggs are among the most versatile and indispensable ingredients in any kitchen. They're used in sauces, breads, pastries, flans, and pancakes savory and sweet. And, of course, they're great on their own.

Eggs are also easy to cook, in the sense that it's child's play to turn a raw egg into something edible and reasonably tasty. Indeed, I was a young child when I learned to cook my first ever meal: scrambled eggs on toast. But eggs aren't all that easy to cook well. A reasonably cooked egg can make a reasonably tasty snack, or even a meal. But a perfectly cooked egg goes well beyond that. A perfectly cooked egg is wondrous.

I don't claim to be able to make a perfectly cooked egg. But over the years I've come to be able to make what I think of as a very good egg, by picking up tidbits of technique here and there, and, of course, practicing a lot.

Here's how I cook an egg. The techiniques aren't foolproof, and they certainly aren't original to me, but I'm pretty happy with them. Maybe you will be too.

Boiled. Soft-boiled eggs are tricky, since the time needed to cook them varies depending on altitude, water quality, and egg variety and freshness. The following is a guide, and will need to be adjusted to suit your own conditions. Place eggs in a pot, cover with cold water, and bring to a boil over high heat. As soon as the water is boiling, start your timer and reduce the heat to a slow, steady boil (above a simmer but below a rolling boil). After 2 minutes and 40 seconds, remove the eggs from the pot and tap them on the head to crack the shells and let steam escape. Serve. (If making hard-boiled eggs, cook them for about 8 minutes.)

Fried. Heat 1 tbsp butter in a large cast-iron or non-stick frying pan. Crack the eggs into the pan from as close to the pan as you can get, to avoid them breaking in the fall. Cook until the whites are just opaque. For sunny-side up, keep cooking until all the white is cooked. For over easy, turn off the heat and flip the eggs in the pan; as soon as you've flipped the last egg, remove the first one, then the next, then the next—over-easy eggs need only a few seconds on the yolk-side, any more and the yolk will overcook.

Scrambled. Low heat and plenty of butter are the keys here. Melt 2 tbsp butter over low heat in a heavy-bottomed pot or pan. Meanwhile, whisk the eggs in a bowl until they're blended. Pour the eggs into the pan, and immediately start stirring with a wooden spoon. Keep stirring the eggs, scraping any that start to harden along the bottom of the pan. If they start to cook too quickly, remove the pan from the heat until it cools a bit, all the while stirring. (Scrambled eggs should take quite a while to cook, ten minutes or so.) When the eggs are cooked to your liking (some like them runny, some like them hard), season them with salt and pepper, and serve immediately.

Poached. To poach is to cook in liquid below the boiling point, often significantly below it. I like to poach eggs at a relatively high temperature, though. Bring a large pot of water, with a couple of tablespoons of vinegar in it, to a boil. While the water is boiling, crack the eggs into the water. Immediately turn off the heat. Once all the bubbles have subsided, turn the heat on very low. Cook for about three minutes, and either serve or add cold water to stop the cooking. The eggs can be held in warm water for up to about twenty minutes if need be.

Omelet. Melt 1.5 tbsp butter in an omelet pan, preferably non-stick, over medium-high heat. Whisk the eggs until they're fully blended. When the pan is nice and hot, pour the eggs in, immediately stirring vigorously with a wooden fork or spoon. Keep stirring until the eggs begin to set—lumps will start to form, and the stirring action will start to disrupt the shape of the fledgling omelet. Keep cooking over high heat until the surface of the eggs are gelatenous but immobile when the pan is tilted. Season with salt and pepper (and add any filling to the omelet now). Using a spatula, fold one side of the omelet over the other, so that about a third of the omelet remains uncovered. Tilt the pan over the serving-plate, with the exposed part of the omelet resting on the plate, and flip the rest of the omelet over the exposed part, sliding it onto the plate. Serve.

Turkey stock

Yesterday was a day of recovery for me, as I imagine it was for many people across the United States. After as long a lie-in as our fourteen-month-old would let us have, my wife and I spent most of the morning just sitting around the house staring at the huge piles of dirty plates, the charred and greasy pots, the empty wine bottles, and the shreds of turkey shrapnel which covered every available surface in our kitchen.

Then we struck a deal. The wife would watch the kid while I cleaned everything up. Right on.

So a couple of hours later I'm standing in my now-gleaming kitchen, feeling pretty proud of myself. I'm still way too full to eat, but there's a fair amount of the day left. And we'd decided, early on, that no-one was leaving the house. So what to do?

Turkey stock, of course.

I grabbed the largest pot I own, and shoved it on the stove with some coarsely-chopped mirepoix and seasonings, half-filling it with water. While it started to warm up, I hoisted the turkey-carcass onto the counter, and began the tedious task of picking through it, searching for the scraps of meat that would feed us for the next several days. Once I'd amassed a mounding plateful, I gave it up and grabbed the cleaver. A few minutes later, after some ear-splitting sounds of splintering bone (and the occasional cursing from me as a turkey leg went spinning across the kitchen floor), the carcass was in pieces and happily in the stock-pot.

The rest of the day was as pleasant as could be. Me, my wife, and my kid, all playing around and generally doing nothing. But it was doing nothing with a purpose: every twenty minutes or so I just had to pop into the kitchen and give the stock a quick skim, adjust the heat so it was just barely simmering, and generally futz around with the thing. What a glorious day.

Pan-roasted chicken

The wife and I were shopping for Thanksgiving the other day, and we settled the question of who would make the stuffing to serve alongside the turkey. She would: I don't like stuffing, so I have little interest in cooking it. So she announced that she'd need some chicken stock, and went heading off to find some in the canned soup section of the store.

I fell into a panic, running after her and practically frothing at the mouth.

"What are you doing?! I thought you said you needed chicken stock! You can't use that gloop in a can. Do you know how it's made? Take some chicken beaks and feet, and the occasional non-free-range, hormone-infested, animal-diet-fed chicken that didn't pass the quality test to sell on its own. Boil it up with some scraps of vegetables and a ridiculous amount of salt. Add some chemicals to hide the awful taste, and some more salt for good measure. Put it in a can and call it chicken stock, or chicken broth."

My wife rolled her eyes. "OK," she said, "you get me chicken stock for my stuffing."

My task was clear. I had to make a couple of pints of chicken stock before this evening, or I'd be eaten alive. So I grabbed a nice-looking organic chicken and threw it in the cart.

Last night, about an hour before supper, I remembered my commitment. So I hacked up the chicken, reserving the legs and breast and throwing the rest in a stockpot along with a bouquet garni, some aromatics (celery, carrot, onion), and some peppercorns, added water and set it on the stove to bubble. First part of problem solved. But there was still supper to contend with, so I looked at the chicken pieces and wondered what I should do with them.

It took me about a minute to figure it out. If in doubt, I remembered, consult Marcella. So I tried, for the first time, Marcella Hazan's recipe for pan-roasted chicken with rosemary and white wine. It was sublime. Here is the recipe, as far as I remember it (I don't have her Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, where the recipe is to be found, in front of me right now).

1 chicken, cut into pieces (I used two legs, two boneless breasts)
1/2 cup white wine
1/2 tsp dried rosemary (that turned out to be the perfect amount)
1 tbsp butter
2 tbsp vegetable oil (I used light olive oil)
3 cloves garlic, peeled
salt and pepper

Heat the butter and oil in a sauté pan, over medium-high heat, until the froth of the butter begins to subside.

Add the chicken pieces, skin side down, and cook until brown on both sides, about 5 minutes.

Add the rosemary and garlic, and cook until the garlic is lightly golden (about 3 minutes).

Add salt, pepper, and the white wine, letting the wine sizzle for about 30 seconds. (The smell at this point is just fantastic.)

Adjust the heat to a slow simmer and cover the pan, leaving the lid a little bit ajar.

Cook until the chicken is done, 45 mins to 1 hour.

Remove the chicken to a warm serving dish (or plates or whatever), and spoon off as much of the fat from the pan as you can get at. Bubble up the remaining liquid on a medium heat, scraping the bottom of the pan to get all the juicy gooey bits up. When you've hit syrupy consistency, pour the liquid over the chicken pieces and serve.

Quick-stewed zucchini

It's not really the season for zucchini, a variety of summer squash. But it's inexpensive, readily available, and (to my mind) tasty, so I make it quite a lot. The past couple of months I've been using an adaptation of this recipe, which I find tasty and blindingly simple to prepare. One of the best things about it is the zucchini can be cooked in advance and left in their pan, then reheated at the last minute, with no loss (and in fact, I think, a gain) in flavor.

Here's my version of quick-stewed zucchini with sage.

2 zucchini, cut into 1/4" semicircles
3 cloves garlic, peeled
1 tbsp fresh sage, finely chopped
1 tbsp butter
salt and pepper

In a large sauté pan with a tight-fitting lid, heat the butter over medium heat until well-browned, about 2 minutes.

Add the sage and the garlic cloves, and sauté until the garlic is lightly golden.

Add the zucchini, salt and pepper, and toss until well-coated.

Turn the heat down to low and cover. Simmer for about 10 minutes, tossing the pan regularly.

Remove from heat and either serve right away, or keep the lid off so the zucchini don't cook any further.

The starter is dead! Long live the starter!

I came home a couple of nights ago to give my budding sourdough starter a quick feed of flour and water. When I looked up at the jar, my heart sank. Where there once had been a beautiful, frothy, bubbling living liquid, now there was a slimy dark mess with tufts of hairy mold sprouting out of it. My starter is dead, and there's no fixing it.

I think I know what went wrong. A couple of days before I had been overzealous in scraping down the sides of the jar while feeding the starter. I noticed that some of the things I was scraping down were a little dark-looking, as if they'd gone bad, but I didn't think much of it. There must have been some contaminant, the tiny spores of what is now a huge fungus colony, lurking in the jar, just waiting to be scraped into the tasty dough.

Oh well, no big deal. I did what anyone would do in my shoes: throw out the starter, put the jar in the dishwasher, and get ready to try again. This time, I'll be more careful with my scraping, and maybe I'll transfer the starter to a fresh jar after the first few days.

Smoked salmon

Since she knows I'm obsessed with food, my wife often turns to me with the obscure culinary questions that pop into her head from time to time. What's the difference between escarole and kale? What are the non-animal sources of gelatin? Are the brussel sprout and the endive from the same family of plant? Usually I delight in being able to come up with a speedy and accurate answer to her questions. But yesterday I was stumped.

What's the difference between Nova and lox? Not being a native New-Yorker, I had no idea. My wife's theory went like this. Nova is just another name for smoked salmon. Lox sounds a bit like the end of the Scandinavian gravlax (at least when both are pronounced with an American accent), so it must be essentially that: cured, not smoked, salmon.

I didn't buy this theory for a second. But I didn't have an alternative to offer my wife, so she spent most of the day chuckling to herself, and I spent most of the day grumbling.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that my wife was basically right, at least in the sense that Nova is smoked and lox is not. But there's a bit more to it than that. Here's what I've managed to piece together from various sources across the internet. There are some inconsistencies out there, but everyone seems to agree on at least these basic facts:

Nova. Nova is salmon that is cured, usually in a sugar and salt brine, and then lightly smoked. Nova is usually made from Atlantic salmon, which itself is usually from the coast of Nova Scotia, hence the name.

Lox. The word lox comes from the German lachs, which is itself etymologically related to the Scandinavian lax. These words mean "salmon". Lox is heavily cured in a salt brine (and later soaked in water to remove the saltiness), and is not smoked at all.

That's how things should be, at least. But it seems that it's a bit more complicated than that. For one thing, most manufacturers seem to call their Nova "Nova Lox", contrasted with just plain "lox", or sometimes "belly lox" (presumably from the belly of the fish, a significantly more fatty cut).

In any case, whatever people end up calling it, true Nova has a lighter, less salty taste than lox. And Nova is more expensive than lox. Scottish, or Scottish-style, smoked salmon, by the way, is cold-smoked for much longer than Nova, and as a result is smokier-tasting and drier in texture.

So now I know, and by tonight, so will my wife.

Thanksgiving rant

I've had enough. Please stop! It's that time of year, less than a week before the last Thursday in November, when I get scarily close to my breaking point. Everywhere I turn it's turkey this and pumpkin that. I can't take it any more! Why can't everyone—everyone, newspapers, friends, co-workers, the radio, the internet (thankfully I don't have a TV)—just leave me alone to make my Thanksgiving preparations in peace?

My clock-radio woke me up this morning, and as usual I was barely conscious and don't really remember the details, but what I do remember is that the announcer was going on and on and on about some pumpkin-throwing contest somewhere. Firing up the computer I look in on the New York Times dining section, and what do I get? "The Pilgrims Didn't Brine"; "Serving Essence of Pumpkin, Instead of the Annual Pie". Enough already! Why the obsession? I've barely recovered from the Halloween stampede, now it's this, and I know—I dread—what's coming next: plastic reindeer, everything a lurid red and green, and the interminable drone of Bing Crosby wherever I turn.

Don't get me wrong. I like Thanksgiving. It's a good excuse to get really busy in the kitchen, and it's a great time to unwind with family. It's important that these rituals exist. But why, why, does it have to be such a production? Why can't we just enjoy the holiday for what it is: a lot of eating and drinking with our loved ones?

Freezer space

I often read—in cookbooks, on the web, in magazines—about cooks being plagued by overflowing freezers. They write as if their freezer is a place they fear to tread. They open the door to be confronted by a towering mass of ice-encrusted, withering old morsels of food: long-forgotten hunks of bread dough, tiny tubs of pasta sauce saved from a meal long past, various cuts of raw and cooked meats of unknown age, and several unidentifiable creatures lurking in the back. One gets the impression that a significant part of their culinary life consists in battling the freezer, losing the fight to overcome its relentless, crowding spread.

I have the opposite problem. I barely use my freezer. There was a time when I had a healthy rotation of frozen stocks, with trimmings of ingredients bagged frozen for future stocks. That wonderful habit has slipped, and I vow to return to it. But even in those good old days, my freezer was mostly empty. Here's what's in my freezer right now:

Ice-cube trays, full. OK, so these are indispensable. But they're not food, so I don't really count them.

Frozen store-bought pasta. Frozen fresh pasta, that is, although that's something of an oxymoron I suppose. You know, the fresh pasta that comes in packets, I always keep a couple in the freezer, along with a (frozen) tub of store-bought pesto sauce, for emergency meals.

Half a pint of ice-cream. Delicious, but again not food in the relevant sense. (It's not going to be used in cooking.)

A package of curry leaves. These things, indispensable in South Indian cooking, don't freeze well, so I'm just waiting until I can be bothered to throw them out.

Grease containers. When I have excess cooking oil that I want to throw out, I pour it into one of these containers. (Into the sink? No, it clogs it. Into the trash? No, it melts the bag.) I'm supposed to throw the container out when it gets full. I think I have four near-full containers at the moment. Again, doesn't count since I won't use it in cooking.

Frozen peaches. I bought a bag of these a while ago to make a fruit smoothie. Never made the smoothie.

A chickent. I like to roast chicken, but it takes time, which I don't often have. (And when I do have the time, I usually like to cook something more exciting or challenging.) So this guy is waiting for the right moment, which had better come soon given how long the poor bird has been sitting there. This, as far as I'm concerned, is the only ingredient in my freezer that will be used to cook something.

And that's it! I must say, I'm ashamed.

So I have a new pet project. Every so often, I'll cook up a sauce, or a purée, or maybe a vegetable dish, and I'll put it in the freezer. Over time (but not too long, these things are still perishable when they're frozen), I'll have built up a collection. Then, when I cook, I can help myself to one of these lovelies, tossing it in a pan at the last minute, or quickly steaming it up to temperature. So even if I'm in a rush, I'll still have something more tasty than I could usually make in twenty minutes or so.

So the first part of the project is to do some research. Which kinds of things freeze well, and which freeze badly? For example, I won't be keeping fresh tomatoes on ice, since I value taste and texture in my food. But could I freeze a tomato confit? I really don't know. Cooked asparagus probably doesn't freeze well (although I'd like to know for sure). But what about an asparagus purée? I'll start making up a list of things that freeze well and things that freeze badly, and post my findings here. Then I'll cook and freeze 'em, and let you know how it turns out.

Starter, again

It's working!! It's working!!!

I came home tonight to see a frothing, bubbly, chewy wet mess in a jar. (Mmmm...) The starter seems to be very active!

I won't post more on my starter, until I use it to bake some bread. Really. I promise.

Starter update

Well, I've started my starter, as I said I was going to. Following the instructions, I mixed together equal parts (by weight) of organic rye flour and bottled water, and put the mixture in a jar. Now I'm supposed to wait 48 hours before proceeding to the next step.

I don't have a camera, so I can't show you what it really looks like. But when I started it looked roughly like this:



Now, about 43 hours later, it looks like this:



Notice the difference? Me neither.

I'll keep you posted.

Last night's supper: rack of lamb

Lamb is my favorite meat, by a long shot. I love it grilled, stewed, roast, braised, fried. I've never tried it raw, although that's definitely on my list of things to try. The Lebanese swear by it, and those guys know their food.

Last night was a simple, delicious, and quick-to-prepare supper: roast rack of lamb with baby beets and quick-braised butternut squash. The beets were easy and great: boiled, skinned, sliced and topped with feta cheese. (Blue cheese goes better, but I didn't have any.) The squash was good too, the first time I've cooked butternut squash. I cut it into cubes, sautéed it with some shallots, then threw in a bit of water and some sage, covered the pan, and let it bubble for about ten minutes. Good, but it could have used some more sage. (I didn't have any fresh sage, and I was worried about over-using the dried stuff. Too worried, as it turns out.)

But the meal-maker was the lamb. (Cynthia over at Food Migration won't want to hear about it. Poor woman was forced to eat rack after rack of the stuff. Hard life.) The technique is simple, and due in most part to Alfred Portale, from his Gotham Bar and Grill Cookbook. Here it is:

1. About half an hour before cooking, rub the lamb all over with fresh thyme, black pepper, and plenty of garlic. (I used about four cloves for one rack.)

2. Preheat the oven to 400°F.

3. Heat two tbsp of olive oil in a large cast-iron pan over medium-high heat until very hot.

4. Add the lamb, fat-side down, and cook for about three minutes.

5. Transfer the pan to the hot oven. After 8 minutes, turn the lamb over and put back in the oven.

6. After 8 more minutes, pull the lamb from the oven and put to rest on a plate. Deglaze the pan with some red wine and water, salt and pepper to taste.

7. Cut the lamb into chops, pour over the pan-sauce, and serve.

Starter time

I've decided to make my own sourdough starter. (I know, I know, I was supposed to be making mozzarella. But that's now on hold until I get my hands on some raw milk. Thanks to Cooking Diva for the link.) There's something really exciting to me about creating food out of almost thin air: just a bit of flour and some water (and salt when it comes time to making the bread).

I've done it before, with moderate success. But the thing died after a couple of weeks, before I got a chance to use it. So I'm going to try again.

I'll be following the same instructions I followed last time, from Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Bread Bible. But the basic idea is simple: half-fill a jar with organic whole-grain flour and filtered (crucially chlorine-free) water. Cover loosely and wait half a day. Pour out half and add more flour and water. Cover and wait. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. After two or three days, the liquid should have picked up enough wild yeast from its surrounding environment for a culture to have formed. The thing should be bubbly and sour-smelling, rising and falling every few hours as the living yeasts discharge gases after feeding off the flour.

That's the theory, anyway. I'll keep you posted on what actually happens.

Friday Five

It's Friday, so I thought I'd share some cooking tips. What's the connection between Friday and cooking tips? Nothing...it just occurred to me that this might be a good thing to do once a week, and it occurred to me today, and today's Friday, and...whatever.

So here they are, my Friday Five:

Tip 1: When serving them raw, slice tomatoes on the bias. That way the seeds don't fall out.

Tip 2: Boiling a cauliflower? Add a bayleaf, it cuts the smell.

Tip 3: When making an omelet or other egg-based creation, don't add salt until it's nearly done cooking. Salt breaks down the albumen in the uncooked egg whites, making for a less-than-perfect omelet.

Tip 4: When mincing garlic, add a little coarse salt to the chopped cloves. The crystals in the salt help act as tiny little knives, and also stop the garlic from bouncing all over the cutting board.

Tip 5: If you're heating bread in the oven to serve it warm, sprinkle a little water on it first. It will make the crust more crusty.

Sautéed potatoes

I've been cooking seriously for about six years now. I'm not a professional, so I don't mean serious serious cooking. But it's about as serious as a hobby can get. I'm genuinely upset when things go wrong in the kitchen, I'm amazingly excited when they go right. I'm constantly on the lookout for new ideas, techniques, recipes, ingredients. I get dizzy with excitement when I find myself in a good food market. My approach to eating has changed too. I think about the way vegetables have been prepared, about how the different tastes on my plate interact with one another, about the freshness and the presentation of the food. And when I eat something that tastes great—really, truly fantastic—I'm no longer quiet about it. I let everyone around me know what I think.

Anyway, none of that is my point right now. My point is potatoes. Sautéed potatoes. I don't really remember, but I think it might have been the search for the right way to sauté potatoes that first got me seriously interested in cooking. I'd been doing it for years, of course, although I always thought of it as a matter of throwing some sliced potatoes in a pan with hot oil, stirring them around, and dumping them out when they looked done. They tasted fine that way. But I wanted something that tasted better than fine. So I began to read, and to experiment, until I eventually found a way to sauté potatoes that I was happy with. I think I must have tried literally 15 or 20 different ways of doing it, before I hit on one that struck me as just right. It's due, almost entirely, to the legendary Paul Bocuse, from his wonderful book In Your Kitchen. I've just tweaked one or two small details.

2 Yukon gold potatoes
3 tbsp duck fat
3 sprigs fresh thyme
2 cloves garlic
salt and pepper

Slice the potatoes crosswise into 1/8-inch slices. Wash each slice well under cold running water (to remove the starch on the surface) and pat dry with paper towels.

In a large sauté pan, heat the duck fat over medium-high heat until very hot but not smoking. (If you don't have duck fat, substitute clarified butter; if you can't be bothered to clarify butter, substitute 2 tbsp butter and 1 tbsp light olive oil.)

Add the potatoes and the two cloves of garlic (whole, with their skins on), and toss everything around in the pan. Throw in the sprigs of thyme. Sauté for 10 to 15 minutes, tossing often, until the potatoes are a light golden brown. Add salt and pepper to taste, toss again, and serve.

Guacamole

I mentioned guacamole in my previous post, and that got me thinking about, well, guacamole. A quintissentially Mexican specialty, guacamole is an avocado salad or salsa, often (but not always) incorporating chiles and chopped tomatoes.

Everyone has their own favorite way of making guacamole, I suppose, and I'll give you my recipe. But by far the most important part of a guacamole (next to the quality of the avocadoes, I guess) is its consistency. Mix, mix, mix, mix, mix—as most recipes I've found advise you to do—and you'll end up with avocado purée. That's not guacamole. Guacamole has to be chunky and firm. It's not a dressed avocado, of course, there has to be some mixing involved. But what you must avoid is overmixing. Overmix your guacamole and you'll end up with what passes for guacamole in most delis and supermarkets: a pea-soup-like gloop, an embarassment to the name guacamole.

So here it is, my recipe for guacamole. I have no idea how authentic it is. But I guarantee you it's delicious.

2 ripe avocados
1 small tomato, diced
1 scallion, thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
juice of 1 lime
salt, to taste
a few drops of hot chile oil or chile sauce (Tabasco is fine)

Peel the avocados and remove their pips. (Tip: The easiest way to do this is to slice the avocado in half, lengthwise. Then pick up the half with the pip in it, and put it in your left hand (or right hand, if you're left-handed), with the pip facing upwards. With the other hand give the pip a light thwack with the blade of a chef's knife. The knife will embed in the pip, at which point you just give the knife a quick twist and pull, and the pip will come out attached to the knife. Easier to do than to describe.)

Put the avocados in a medium-size bowl, and give them a few rough chops with a fork, breaking them into large chunks. (Don't overdo it.)

Toss in the tomatoes, scallions, garlic and salt, and mix these ingredients in, trying not to further cut the avocados. You'll notice that this is impossible—the avocados, assuming they're ripe, will break up a bit more anyway. That's good, we want that. The key is to mix in the ingredients while trying not to disturb the avocados. That way the avocados will get disturbed just the little bit that we want.

Squeeze the lime juice over the mixture, add the chile oil, and stir again with the fork to incorporate everything. Here you'll see the avocados really start to break down. Stir just enough so that everything is mixed in evenly, and stop. You're done. The gaucamole is ready.

Warm plates for hot food

Over the years I've developed various habits in my cooking. Some of them are bad habits. I throw in salt and pepper kind of indiscriminately, often resulting in an over- or under-salted dish, or in something peppery that really shouldn't be. It's easy to oversalt an omelet, and I usually do. My green salads are usually oversalted as well, while in the summer my fresh tomatoes aren't given nearly the amount of salt they deserve. And peppery guacamole? Ugh—but I serve it time and again.

But I've also developed some good habits, or at least I like to think they're good. Here's one. Whenever I'm cooking on the stovetop these days, I always turn on the oven to its lowest temperature and throw in the plates on which I'll serve the food. This serves two purposes, both of them good ones. First, it means I'll be serving the food onto warm plates, which keeps the food warm for much longer than it would be served onto cold plates. This matters in my family, where it can take quite some time for everyone to get settled down to eat. And second, the warm oven can serve as a holding station to keep parts of the meal warm while I finish off the others. It's only warm in there, not hot (my oven's lowest temperature is 170 degrees), so nothing's going to overcook or dry out. But sometimes we need five or ten minutes after the meat or fish is cooked to finish up on a sauce or a vegetable. The warm oven does the trick nicely.

It's a small point, and an obvious one. But the important part is that it's a habit. When I cook, the oven is on, so if I need a warm oven I always have one. It's one less thing to think about in the kitchen.

Jarlsberg

Every now and then I drift around the internet, browsing at things food-related. And occasionally, very occasionally, something makes me sit up straight in my chair with amazement. This happened just now when I stumbled across igourmet.com's entry on Jarlsberg cheese. Here's what they say:

In Norway, dairy farmers take their cheesemaking very seriously. Jarlsberg is not made on small farms in rural communities, but rather is created in a laboratory setting through a multi-stage, high-tech manufacturing process.

Um...what? How could anyone, let alone someone from a company with the word "gourmet" as part of their name, view this as a good thing about a cheese? I can imagine them continuing...

Are you sick and tired of today's small-producer approach to food? Do you dread another trip to the supermarket only to see, yet again, rows upon rows of home-spun, hand-crafted artisinal cheeses from small farms in rural communities? Well no longer! Buy our Jarlsberg, and we guarantee you that there isn't one drop of artistry in the product you'll receive. This cheese hasn't been anywhere near a farm, let alone a small farm. This is 100% laboratory-produced mass-manufactured processed cheese. Yum!

A new era

So it's official. Fulton Street Fish Market is finally heading to the Bronx. Times change, I guess.

On braising

In the middle of last summer I created, quite by chance, a wonderful dish of braised chicken in red wine. It was by chance because I was cooking under extreme conditions: an unfamiliar poky kitchen in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, a very hungry and impatient family, and just the tired ends of ingredients I'd packed for our week away. For braising equipment I had a beaten-up old frying pan with a piece of aluminum foil for a lid, and an uneven electric stove.

Ingredients: some chicken thighs, garlic, olive oil, dried thyme, salt and pepper, zucchini, and some old broccoli. Oh, and the wine: a bottle of cheap Bordeaux. Since this was our only bottle I sure as hell wasn't going to throw much of it in the pot, so I just used about half a glass.

Technique: Brown the chicken in the oil, about five minutes a side. Remove and drain most of the fat from the pan. Sauté the garlic briefly, with the thyme, then add the chopped vegetables. Give everything a couple of turns, then place the chicken on top, splashing the half-glass of wine over it all. Turn the heat down low, and balance the so-called "lid" on top of the ingredients. Wait as long as your family will let you, about forty minutes in my case, throwing in a few tablespoons of water every now and then to stop the whole thing going up in flames. Serve.

It was delicious. The chicken had turned a deep purple color from the wine, and it fell off the bone in moist, steaming chunks. The zucchini had all about disappeared into the sauce, but the broccoli gave all the crunch that was needed. (There was quite a lot of broccoli, I think.) The sauce itself was perfect: rich, sticky, heady but not at all alcoholic—since we didn't have any bread we literally licked our plates clean. Really a meal to remember.

So the other night I tried to recreate this accidental masterpiece. Oh dear. Roughly the same ingredients, but with carrots and potatoes in place of the broccoli. Plenty more wine (leading to more richness, I thought) since we weren't staring at our last bottle. And the equipment was flawless: a nice gas range and a Le Creuset dutch oven. Disaster.

Well, not a disaster. But definitely not a meal to remember. The chicken tasted so-so, but was a little bit stringy. The vegetables were fine, but didn't taste significantly better than if I'd just boiled them up on their own with a bit of butter and thyme. The sauce was far from rich and sticky, more of a weak, soupy, watery affair. We had plenty of bread, but we weren't too interested in having clean plates this time.

I spent some time yesterday trying to figure out what had gone wrong, and here's what I gleaned from my trusty sources.

Larousse Gastronomique, the culinary bible, taught me (albeit implicitly) that my main problem was the over-wining. Braising, says Larousse, is gentle moist cooking with a minimal amount of liquid. In some cases, it points out, the juice from a few chopped tomatoes is all that's needed. I guess I shouldn't have poured in half the bottle of wine. Larousse also stresses that one should put the vegetables on the bottom of the pan, submerged in the braising liquid, then rest the meat on top. So the meat is effectively being steamed. I had liquid covering most of the meat, with the vegetables lumped over it, gasping for air.

Nigel Slater's Appetite (one of my most trusted sources—"Nigel is a genius," says Jamie Oliver on the back cover, and I think he may be right) was with Larousse in not wanting us to use too much liquid in a braise: about halfway up the meat, he says, and we're to turn the meat every now and then to stop the part above the liquid from drying out.

Everyone I read stressed that the main thing to be careful of when braising is to avoid cooking at too high a heat. Braising is about gentle, slow cooking, using time instead of heat to extract the full flavor from the ingredients. Alfred Portale, in his Gotham Bar and Grill Cookbook (what a great book) really gets worked up on this point, demanding that the braise should never be allowed to boil—what we're looking for is a slow, slow simmer.

After reading all this I looked back in shame at what I had done: half a bottle of wine rapidly boiling all the taste out of the poor chicken. My thinking? Use lots of wine and reduce it in the extreme, for a maximum of flavor. The result? Boiled chicken.

Salad dressing and dressing sald

I usually end a meal with a salad. (Unless I'm having dessert. But that doesn't happen too often, I'm more of a savory guy. If there's time left in the kitchen and room left in my belly, I'd always rather have an extra savory course than a dessert. But that's just me.) My salad is usually a simple affair, mostly because of laziness. A bag of mixed organic greens from a local produce store (really delicious, crunchy, nutty stuff); maybe some chopped or thinly sliced red onion; and often some crumbled feta cheese.

(A side note on feta. The cheese has its origins in Greece, where it is made exclusively from sheep's milk (or occasionally goat's milk), never cow's milk. Due to a recent court decision, non-Greek feta-style cheeses cannot legally be sold as "feta" in Europe. But fantastic feta-style cheeses (I'll just call them fetas, hopefully without offense to my Greek readers) are made in several places. The best, in my opinion, is Bulgarian sirene. It's light, creamy, flavorful, and, like true Greek feta, made exclusively from sheep's milk. I prefer Bulgarian to Greek. France and Israel also produce some fine sheep's milk fetas. I've never had a good feta made in the US (although I've had a decent Canadian one), and I can't stand "feta" that's made from cow's milk, it just tastes all wrong.)

OK, back to the salad. I nearly always dress my salad directly, à la minute, instead of making a separate salad dressing. I find the dressing incorporates better into the salad that way. And I keep my dressings light and simple: some extra virgin olive oil, salt, pepper, and a splash of some kind of acid. Usually I use white wine vinegar, although sometimes I'll use lemon juice, particularly if I'm serving the salad on the plate alongside something that matches well with lemon, like fish or grilled meats. You'll hardly ever see me adding balsamic vinegar to a salad. I find the result nearly always overpowering, the vinegar—so tasty in the right contexts—lending an unpleasant sweetness to what should be a sharp-tasting dish. But again, that's just me.

On the rare occasions when I want a dressing on the side—at a dinner party with fussy guests, say—I'll stick to a classic vinaigrette: olive oil, red wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, sea salt, and pepper. Nothing else. There's some dispute about what proportion of oil to vinegar is correct, three to one or four to one. I take an unwavering stand on this issue: four to one. I find that three parts oil to one part vinegar makes an unacceptably acidic dressing. There should be just enough acid in the vinaigrette for it to emulsify properly and for the oiliness of the oil to be balanced out. Four to one does this, three to one overdoes it.

So here it is, my classic French vinaigrette:

8 tbsp (1/2 cup) extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
2 tsp Dijon mustard
sea salt and black pepper to taste

Whisk together the vinegar, mustard, salt and pepper until combined. Continuing to whisk, add the oil in a slow, steady stream until it is all incorporated. Serve right away, or, if you must, refrigerate covered for up to one week.

Coffee time

I love a good cup of coffee. Good or not, I need a cup (or two or three) in the morning before I do anything. I get mine delivered from Armeno Coffee Roasters. Their website is horribly designed, but their coffee is the very best, and unfailingly roasted to perfection. And it always arrives at my door a day or two after I place the order. I'm not getting a kickback from them, I just want to share the love.

Mozzarella

Some think that Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. (Say what?) But do Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo mozzarella? I'm sure they don't, but that's really not my point. My point is that, I'm told, mozzarella made from anything but buffalo milk isn't really mozzarella. So I confess: I've never eaten mozzarella.

But I've eaten some pretty good faux mozarella, fresh stringy balls made from cow's milk in just the way real mozzarella is made from buffalo milk. Olive oil, tomatoes, fresh basil, mozzarella (OK, mozzarella-like string cheese), balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper. You don't need more of the recipe than that. Fling these wonderful ingredients together in pretty much any way you like, and you've got a summer delicacy.

One day soon I'm going to do something I've been wanting to do for ages. I'm going to make my own mozzarella. (OK, my own faux mozzarella—I'll stop with this now.) With a few exceptions, I'm against making my own anything. I've never had good home-made wine outside Tuscany. I've never had good home-made beer. I've never had good home-made pancetta. (Exception: I make a fantastic Lebanese pickled turnip. It's so easy: segments of baby turnip, a clove of garlic and a few slices of beet stuffed into a jar with some hot vinegar-water solution, left to soak for two weeks. Delicious.) But I figure it would be fun to try the mozzarella, especially because people say it's relatively easy to do.

I'll use this recipe, selected from a few I found on the web. I chose it for two reasons: It was written in a way that suggested that the people who wrote it knew what they were doing; and it didn't talk about putting anything in a microwave. I don't have a microwave, and I don't plan on getting one. And even if I did have one, I wouldn't trust it to make a decent cheese.

But before the fun starts, I need to get my hands on some rennet. I'll check in my local health food store, and if that doesn't work I'll get it from cheesemaking.com. I'll keep you posted.

Purple magic

My wife made a delicious and simple dessert last night. Here it is: Wash and trim a pound of fresh strawberries, cut them into pieces and put them in a bowl. Peel and dice a fresh mango, and add it to the strawberries. Now add the magic, two or three tablespoons (no more) of cassis. Stir well, cover, and leave in the fridge for an hour or two before serving, preferably stirring once or twice more in the interim.

It's all about the cassis, or (more properly) crème de cassis, a blackcurrant-based liqueur from France. Drunk by itself, cassis is, to my palate, a nightmare (although some people swear by it as a dessert wine). It's thick, syrupy, and cloyingly sweet. Not unlike a dose of cough syrup, at least in the good old days when cough syrup had alcohol in it. But when cassis hits fresh fruit it yields a culinary explosion. Strawberries, in particular, taste unimaginably good when adulterated with just a little bit of the purple nectar. Don't use too much. If you do, you'll be eating an overly-sweet alcoholic broth with limp strawberries sloshing around in it. Add just enough cassis to give a healthy slick coating to the berries, with perhaps a quarter inch or so left in the bottom of the bowl. (As the berries marinate, the cassis will be thinned by their natural juices, so you'll be left with more liquid than you started with.)

I always keep a bottle of cassis on hand, in case some fresh fruit finds its way home. You will too, once you've tried it.

Frozen sushi

I love good sushi. The best I've ever eaten was at Sanraku, in San Francisco. A close second was at Nikko, in Seattle. Why do these stand out? The rice was perfect: fragrant, moist, delicate. The seaweed was sensational. Not the usual tasty but chewy green wrapper, but a flaky, dissolve-in-your-mouth, light and airy morsel of freshness. The wasabi was perfect. The ginger was perfect. Each bite just blew my mind.

But what about the fish? It was superb, of course. The highest quality, perfectly cut and shaped. Each morsel was arranged with delicacy and care, the taste of the piece of fish perfectly matched with just the right combination of supporting ingredients.

Yes, but surely the fish must have been incredibly fresh! If you had asked me this morning, I'd have sworn that the fish was the perfection of freshness, pulled from the ocean in the morning, or at most on the day before it was lovingly placed in front of me. And I'd have insisted that the very best sushi restaurants owe much of their success to their chefs' insistence on using only the freshest of fresh fish. If fresh ingredients are a must for any cuisine, surely for sushi, where the fish isn't even cooked, freshness determines almost everything. Right?

Wrong. The fish was frozen. The snapper, the mackerel, the eel—all of it except the tuna—was thawed from a previously frozen lump of fish. And that's because the FDA says it had to be. Section 3-402.11 of the FDA Food Code mandates that, with the exception of tuna, any fish offered for service in raw or partially-raw form must be

(1) Frozen and stored at a temperature of -20°C (-4°F) or
below for a minimum of 168 hours (7 days) in a freezer;

(2) Frozen at -35°C (-31°F) or below until solid and stored at
-35°C (-31°F) or below for a minimum of 15 hours; or

(3) Frozen at -35°C (-31°F) or below until solid and stored at
-20°C (-4°F) or below for a minimum of 24 hours.

Thanks, FDA. It wasn't enough for you to stop me from eating imported unpasteurized cheese (so I can no longer eat any Brie that's worth its name). Now you have to condemn me to eating frozen sushi too.

It has to be hot!

Last night's trout was mediocre. My fault entirely, the fish themselves were fresh and wholesome before they hit the pan. And the Sauce Albert I prepared to match the trout was great: light, creamy, seasoned just about right. But I knew what was wrong as soon as I laid the fillets on the skillet. I was supposed to be sautéing. I don't know what to call the process I put my poor fish through, but it definitely wasn't that.

Here's what it is to sauté something, according to hungrymonster.com:

To cook or brown food on a high heat in butter or oil, or a mixture of the two.

Let me repeat that:

To cook or brown food ON A HIGH HEAT in butter or oil, or a mixture of the two.

My pan wasn't hot enough when I laid in the fish. The fillets spattered a little, but there was nothing like the tell-tale roar of sizzle one expects from a cold fish meeting a properly hot pan. I recovered well enough. I immediately cranked the heat, and left the fish skin-side down longer than I usually would, to allow the skin to get nice and crackly. That worked, after a fashion, but only at the expense of burnt fish around the edges, and overcooked fish at the bottom third of the fillet. They were tasty, to be sure. But I had failed.

I don't know how many times I've heard about how important it is to have a sauté pan nice and hot before starting to cook. And I don't know how many times I've stood and watched a piece of meat or fish wheezing in my luke-warm pan. Never again, I tell you, never again!! We'll see.

Is it the quality that counts?

I've had an idea for a TV show. A cooking TV show, of course. It's kind of like a cross between Iron Chef and, well, I don't know. A sort of reality TV Iron Chef thing.

Here's the deal. Each week, a celebrity chef gets pitted against a regular amateur cook. Someone who likes to cook, who knows their way around a kitchen, who knows the basics, but who doesn't have the experience, the flair, the imagination and all the rest of what makes great chefs great. Someone, I suppose, like yours truly. The task? To cook a small meal, say an appetizer and a main course, in an hour. And then there's a panel of judges to decide whose meal tastes better. Just like Iron Chef.

Here's the catch. Each cook gets the same pile of ingredients to work with, but with a twist. The amateur cook gets the very best ingredients of their kind: the freshest fish, the choicest cuts of pasture-fed meat, freshly-picked home-grown vegetables and herbs, the richest artisinal olive oil—you get the idea. The celebrity chef gets only the kinds of ingredients available at a typical small supermarket in smalltown America: tired fish, hormone-packed acrid meat, hydroponic (ugh!) vegetables, etc.

Who would win? I honestly don't know. Good cooks always talk about how important it is to be working with the very best ingredients. Their art is to take those ingredients and combine them into something sublime, something that takes our breath away it's so delicious. But that art should also work for less-than-best ingredients. You won't get anything sublime, but a talented cook should be able to produce a fantastic meal out of even the crappiest of produce. But would it be as fantastic as something a proficient amateur could make out of perfect goods? I just don't know.

Take an extreme case. Give me a hunk of o-toro and a butter knife, and I'll bet good money I can beat whatever Thomas Keller (of French Laundry and now Per Se fame) can do with a slab of Pathmark's Yellowfin tuna (as long as he's not allowed to add anything else). But with more ingredients in play, the whole thing gets more interesting.

Suppose I'm given a Bresse chicken, some Normandy butter, fleur-de-sel, fresh pepper, young garlic and a bottle of Sancerre. I could confidently make a roast chicken served au-jus that would leave everyone smiling. But what could a culinary genious do with the supermarket equivalent of these things? I'm starting to imagine salt-baked chicken wings, sauteed chicken thighs with garlic confit and white wine reduction, chicken liver pate... But would it taste as good? Somehow I doubt it.

But now ratchet it up. Give me potatoes, carrots, leeks, red wine, seasoning, herbs and some lamb shanks. If they're all of the very highest quality I expect I could make a fantastic lamb braise. But I expect, too, that most good chefs could make something far more imaginative and surprising than that, something really exciting. Now could a great chef make something that tastes better than my braise? I'm starting to think that she could.

Trout Heads

I'm wild about trout. I'm especially wild about wild trout, pulled fresh from a mountain stream, knocked on the head, quickly eviscerated and then flung straight on the grill. A sprinkling of salt and pepper, maybe a quick squeeze of lemon, and wow...one of the best tastes in the world.

But I live in central New Jersey, a place not known for its mountain streams. I'd be truly scared to eat a trout that had managed to survive the stagnant sewers that get called "rivers" around here. So I have to settle for the trout that finds its way to my fishmonger's display case. It's inevitably a bit tired-looking, a bit dull in the eyes, a bit drab. But hey, you would be too after a couple of days on ice. At least it's a hell of a lot better than what passes for "fresh" fish in the supermarkets. (My fishmonger buys his fish from Fulton Street every morning, so it's really about as fresh as you're going to get here in Jersey.)

Tonight, yet again, will be trout night at my house. For the last couple of months I've been serving my trout whole, seared over high heat in a bit of butter and olive oil. That way the skin gets crisp and crackly, adding a welcome crunch to the moist, nutty flavor of the flesh underneath. And I've been doing a lemon-caper butter sauce, spooned over the whole trout right before serving, which complements it pretty well. But tonight I want to try something new. I'll write about it later if turns out especially well (or especially badly, I suppose), but the main difference is going to be that I won't be cooking my trout whole. I'll be filleting them first.

Which brings me to my point. I hate wasting food. It's not so much because of a guilty conscience about all the starving people in the world (I save that for the times I spend silly amounts of money at less-than-perfect restaurants). It's because of a more basic, more primeval dislike of wastage. So what if the fishmonger will fillet the trout for me before he sells it to me, and will happily throw the heads and tails in the trash? I'll have the whole fish, and I don't want to throw the heads and tails in the trash. The fishmonger can waste this stuff if he wants, but I don't care to. I want to cook them.

But how?

Fish heads, it occurs to me, make fish stock. Or, rather, fish fumet, or fish broth. But as everyone knows, fatty fish does not a fine fumet make. And trout is a fatty fish (and therefore delicious). So what to do? I'm not looking for the impossible, a way of making a whole meal out of trout trimmings. I'll be happy if I can find a way to use them to make something else taste just that little bit better.

One possibility is Trout Head Tea. But just the name is so unappealing to me that I'd rather not even think about it. (And the original recipe here uses parrotfish, a relatively lean tropical sea fish. I imagine the taste would be hopelessly different with trout heads.)

So what is to be done? I'm really stumped with this one. Unless I get inspiration on my way to the store, I plan on dedicating the trout heads to the service of science. I'll poach them in water with some mirepoix, a bay leaf, some parsley stems and a few peppercorns. Then I'll freeze the fumet until next time I make one with a leaner fish. And then I'll taste the two of them side by side. I expect to learn, first-hand, why fatty fish don't make for good broth. But maybe, just maybe, I'll be in for an unexpected treat. We'll see.

It all starts here

Well, we're up and running. Or limping, really, since I don't have the first idea yet about how these weblog things are supposed to work. Hey, I'm an amateur cook and culinary fanatic, not a web-savvy computer geek. But it shouldn't be too hard.

Here's the plan. Do a lot of cooking and a lot of eating. (That's the easy part.) Pick the best and the worst of it, and write about it here. Throw in the occasional restaurant review, some musings about random culinary topics, a link or two to things I've scooped off the web, and the result should be something worth reading, at least by someone.

Enjoy, and do let me know what you think.