Category Archives: Ingredients

Mascarpone Ice Cream

Posted on January 21, 2012 by | Leave a comment

It isn’t crazy that this morning — on the first real snowy morning of the new year, with three inches of snow on the ground, having just come in from shoveling the front steps — I churned two batches of ice cream. It’s not crazy at all. Not in the least. I mean it.

The fact of the matter is that I’ve gotten myself involved in this thing — a winter CSA. During the summer, Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative — the organization from which we get our CSA — offers an excellent vegetable share. We get greens and eggplant, tomatoes, okra, and all manner of other goodies. It’s all very fresh and very healthful. And I’ve talked about this here before.

But there’s a winter option, too, being offered for the first time this year. And because, obviously, they can’t offer quite the array of green vegetables that they do in the summer — because it’s all, by necessity, onions and potatoes and a scattering of hothouse lettuce — they have to do something to make up the difference. So we had a choice about what else we wanted when we signed up for the CSA. And I chose a quart of raw goat’s milk. Every two weeks.

You begin to get the picture about the ice cream, then. Yes?

A quart of raw milk, whatever its animal of origin, is the sort of thing that needs to get used up pretty quickly when it comes into the house. Because it’s not pasturized, or ultra-pasturized, it doesn’t have the shelf-life of grocery store milk. Even refrigerated, it only lasts a week. Tops. It’s oh, so good — so much richer and subtler than grocery store milk. But there’s no way I can drink it all in such a short span. So a couple of servings end up on top of cereal. And the rest has to be preserved. In this case, in the freezer. As ice cream.

Now, I can imagine some of your reactions already: Goat’s milk ice cream? Uck! But seriously, folks. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Goats aren’t like cows. Their milk is less fatty overall, but what fat it has tends to stay in the milk rather than floating to the top as a layer of cream. Which means that it’s richer when you drink it. Sometimes, it’s almost too rich. But that, precisely, is what makes it perfect for ice cream.

So here’s what I did: I made two flavors — mango (from store-bought juice), and mascarpone cheese. The first one, the Mango, is still a bit of a work in progress. It came out well, but there were some technical issues with my ice cream maker, and I don’t want to share the recipe here until I get them worked out.

The second one, though — the Mascarpone — turned out super tasty. With lemon zest and just a hint of vanilla, it’s got sweet, it’s got tangy, it’s got creamy, and it’s got that peculiar richness that makes cheese in ice cream so very good. I’m not going to say that it’s the best cheese ice cream that I’ve ever had. My friend Linda’s homemade ricotta ice cream, made from homemade ricotta, holds that distinction beyond any doubt. But without any eggs, it’s dead simple to do. And served, perhaps, drizzled with some melted Nutella, it’s not a dessert that you or your guests will soon forget.

8 oz Mascarpone Cheese
2 cups Milk
1 cup Heavy Cream
1/2 cup Granulated Sugar
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
Zest of Two Lemons

In a chilled bowl, combine the cheese, cream, and vanilla, and whisk until the mixture is fairly smooth. Then set aside.

In a saucepan over low heat, combine the milk, sugar, and lemon zest, and allow the mixture to come to a simmer (about 190F), stirring occasionally. This should take about half an hour.

Pour the hot milk through a sieve onto the cold cheese-cream mixture. Mix well with a whisk, chill thoroughly, then pour into your ice-cream maker, and freeze according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Cooking, Ingredients, Sweet

Tagged , , , ,

Chicken Stock (From Chicken Feet)

Posted on January 8, 2012 by | 1 Comment

Standing by the counter at Godshall’s Poultry, waiting for my number to be called, I found myself chatting with the woman ahead of me in line. Like me, she had come for stock-making provisions — pieces and parts, cheap bits, to populate her pot. She pointed the poultry man in the direction of the necks and backs, then toward the stripped breast bones. And while he was working on her order, I asked her: Have you tried chicken feet in your stock?

She cringed, and made a little noise of revulsion. Really? Chicken feet? But they’re so — gross.

I told her that they are. A little bit. But that never have I made better stock than when I include a pound or two — or three — in with the rest of my chicken trimmings.

I am a believer that stock should be mostly a matter of leftovers — that one should freeze the carcasses of roasted chickens, then toss them in a pot with mirepoix, herbs, and a tiny bit of salt, and let the whole thing go at a simmer until it’s time for bed. But experience has led me to the conclusion that stock can’t just be from leftovers. The bones of roasted birds past have lots of flavor, but they never have quite enough gelatin left in them to impart the richness — the mouth-feel — that makes using stock in a recipe a step up from water, or wine, or something else. And nothing imparts more gelatin, more richness, than feet.

I chatted with the woman for a while longer, describing to her the Jello-like consistency of my cooled stock, telling her about the wondrous risottos it had made and the squash soup that was just a little ways down the line (this was right before Thanksgiving). And eventually, I guess I wore her down.

Also, she told the poultry man, I’ll have a pound of chicken feet. To try.

She paid for her chicken bits, and turned to go. But before she left, she told me in a most serious tone: Now I’m going to give this a try. And I hope it’s good. Because if it’s bad — I’m holding you responsible.

In all seriousness, though: Chicken feet do look — gross. But they are the world’s best addition to stock. They add body to your liquid without adding too much flavor, which is good, because you want stock to be rich without overwhelming the flavors of whatever you’re cooking. Buying them prevents massive amounts of perfectly serviceable chicken parts from getting thrown away, or processed into McNuggets, or whatever it is they do to the bits that don’t get eaten. And in using them, you are connecting with a culinary tradition that goes back hundreds of years. You are cooking like somebody’s grandmother. And there is nothing inherently cooler than that.

Anyway, here is now you make the stock*

2-3 lbs. Leftover Chicken Carcasses
2-3 lbs. Chicken Feet (you should have about 5 lbs of chicken parts in total, any way you divvy it up)
2 Onions, roughly chopped
2 Carrots, roughly chopped
3 Ribs of Celery, roughly chopped
3 Bay leaves
Fresh Parsley
Dried Thyme
10-20 Whole Black Peppercorns
Salt (just a little; you want to be able to control the seasoning later)

To an eight-quart stock pot, add your chicken parts, onions, carrots, celery, herbs, and salt. Then fill the pot with cold water until it covers all the solids (preferably by an inch or two, though I recognize that that’s not always possible). Heat on the stove on high until the contents of the pot reach about 190F, then turn the stove down to low, and allow to simmer, covered or uncovered, for about six hours.

You may want to stir occasionally, though that isn’t a requirement.

At the end of the six hours, pour your stock through a fine mesh strainer, pressing down on the solids with the back of a ladle to squeeze out any clinging juices. Strain a second time (I do this, but you don’t absolutely have to). Then cool the stock in a water bath and get it into the refrigerator ASAP (important, because bacteria starts growing in chicken stock super quickly).

The next morning, remove the stock from the fridge. The fat should have solidified on the top, and the stock itself should have a gelatinous consistency. Skim off all the fat, then return the stock to the stove, bring it back to a boil, and allow it to reduce until just four cups remain.

Cool the reduced stock (again, in a water bath if you can), then pour into two ice cube trays and freeze. The stock can later be reconstituted for use at a ratio of one cup of water to one cube of stock.

Strictly speaking, reducing and cubing the stock is not absolutely necessary. But it makes having home made stock in the house so convenient that you’ll never want to eat that over-salted store-bought slop again.

Trust me.

* For the record, I am aware that somewhere in the legacy posts I ported over from Livejournal, there is a similar recipe floating around.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Cooking, Ingredients, Savory, Technique

Tagged , ,

Jamón Ibérico

Posted on January 2, 2012 by | 1 Comment

I have, as you may have guessed about me already, a great deal of sympathy for ham obsession. I have myself, on a number of occasions, made the circuit in Philadelphia from the Reading Terminal Market, to the Di Bruno Brothers, to Claudio’s, looking for just the right crudo to pair with scallops, or melon, or whatever the experiment of the week might be. I have sampled five or six types, then settled on two or three, figuring that the ham I didn’t use would undoubtedly find a good home in some other project. Like my lunch. I wouldn’t say that I am an expert. Hardly. Rather, I would call myself an enthusiast for the cured leg of the pig. Because I am, if nothing else, very enthusiastic.

But enthusiasm can be a relative thing. And I think that I didn’t quite understand ham enthusiasm — ham obsession — until I spent some time in Spain.

Ham obsession is a serving of jamón, along side bacon, as part of a nutritious breakfast. It is a slice of jamón laid across a dry split baguette for lunch — because who needs a condiment? It is a ración of jamón at the top of every menu of every restaurant, tapas bar, and cervecería, often offered in several different sizes and levels of quality, for every occasion and every price point. It is a cab driver in Barcelona exclaiming in horror: “You mean that jamónes in the United States don’t have a hoof? But how can you tell whether they’re the [low-end] white kind, or the [premium] black kind? The black ones are so good!”

That kind of outburst — not from a chef or even a foodie — is what I mean by ham obsession. There is a kind of passion for jamón in Spain — a pain-pleasure thing that straddles the border between religion and sensuality — that I as an outsider can’t wholly understand. It is in part a Catholic thing. Famously, after the expulsion of the Muslims and then the Jews in the Middle Ages, pork consumption became a signifier of religious conformity — a sign, to the Inquisition among others, that I, good Spaniard, am not in need of your cruel ministrations.

But it’s more generalized than that, too. There is a kind of ritual about the consumption of jamón: ordering a ración, laid out on a platter in radiating circles; picking out just enough, held between the finger nails, to lay across a wafer of crusty bread; eating it with slow relish, accompanied by a glass of vino tinto, or sometimes café con leche. And there is a kind of delaying of gratification: the sweet suffering of customers at the deli counter or the bar, watching appreciatively as a skilled knifesman painstakingly hand-cuts slice after razor-thin slice, filling that platter at his own pace. No faster.

We could never love ham like that in the United States. We don’t have the devotion. We don’t know how to wait.

And frankly, we don’t really have the jamón. The fanciest pig parts that show up at Di Bruno’s or Claudio’s are good, more ore less. They have some of the creamy texture, some of the subtle flavor. They have some marbling of fat. But the best — at least Spain’s best — rarely leaves the country. Until 2005, the real jamón Ibérico, made from black Iberian pigs who foraged on acorns, was unavailable in the United States. Today, some comes in, but it is prohibitively expensive, and not the highest quality.

While I was in Madrid, I walked into a quality charcuteria — Julián Becerro, where a large number of the photos in this post were taken — and they made this point abundantly clear. I told them that I love jamón at home, and that I wanted to try something that I can’t get in the United States. And the clerks laughed at me. Pick anything in the store, they told me. There is nothing here that you can get in the United States.

And then a clerk walked me over to a wheel of jamónes, legs radiating out, their hoofs in stirrups, where knifesmen were cutting away. He explained to me in very limited English that each leg on the table was a different variety — fed differently, with a different provenance, flavor, and price point. He cut for me some samples, and I understood.

I ended up buying just a few slices of one variety of jamón bellota — an acorn-fed ham that was unlike anything I had tasted before, and certainly unlike anything I have ever gotten at home. In texture, it is silky, oily, fatty — like the best thin-sliced lox, almost like soft wax in a warm room. In flavor, it’s mild and creamy like other hams, but with an intense nuttiness, both sweet and slightly tannic, layered on top of that. It tasted like acorn, I would suggest, in the same way that really fresh milk tastes like pasture grass.

With our slices in hand, Sarah and I made our way from Julián Becerro, a couple of blocks to Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, where we sat ourselves down, tore open the wrapping, and ate the entire package with our fingers. Was it jamón obsession? I think not. Sarah has expressed that, with only a couple of exceptions, she *was not impressed* by a product that is as often very bad — served in stale, pre-packaged sandwiches in museum cafeterias — as it is very good. And even I, by the end of our journey, was wishing that some of the jamón, a little bit of the jamón, could be replaced by a fresh salad or some nice green kale.

But I would suggest that it is sympathy with ham obsession. After two weeks in Spain, eating jamón every day whether I wanted it or not, I don’t have the feeling that I’d like to go without it for a good long while. I don’t need a separation from ham, or time to remember that when it’s absent, I miss it. I like jamón. I am enthusiastic. And while I learned something about it’s relative quality from my time in Spain, I don’t plan to let that spoil my enthusiasm for ham at home.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Ingredients, Savory

Tagged ,

“Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together”: Sweet Potato Grits

Posted on December 26, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Elizabeth is a folklorist, a teacher, and a culinary experimenter with a low boredom threshold.  She and her partner have recently added a giant puppy to their household; he impedes the experimentation, but she loves him anyway.  They live in a large, old house with a small, old kitchen in upstate New York.  Elizabeth blogs at www.breadandhoneyblog.com.

Somehow, I never got around to grits until this winter.  My mother grew up in the South and she loves them; but my father is from the North and he doesn’t.  So the grits of my childhood were infrequent spoonfuls from Shoney’s breakfast buffets; white and wet and bland and, well, gritty.  Forgettable, if not for the dissonance between my Mama’s evident pleasure and the watery puddle creeping towards my French toast fingers.

As an adult, I became a lover of all porridgy foods: steel-cut oatmeal, risotto, polenta, congee.  But not grits — not until, just a little while ago, I was served cheese grits as a side dish at the White Dog Cafe in Philadelphia.  Heavens!  I don’t remember what unremarked entree they sat beside.  But I vividly recall their puddingy, cheddary goodness.  If ever a food was as comforting as a warm nap (or necessitated a warm nap), this was it.

My first couple of attempts did not, alas, achieve that level of homespun glory.  For one thing, I didn’t know anything about how grits should look in the pan, or how a grits-friendly recipe should be shaped.  Once they came out clumpy.  Once, sticky with cheese.  Once: “You put eggs in this?” a southern friend asked in polite astonishment, tasting a cheese-laced, grits-based casserole.  “You don’t need eggs in cheese grits.”  This perfectly paralleled my rice pudding experience, which culminated in the production of an eggy, gelid, baked rice pudding I found so repulsive that I tipped the whole quivering mess into the bin.

I thought I should simplify my approach to grits.  Start with the basics.  But basic grits, in my experience, were boring.  I set them aside for a while, as a puzzle I hadn’t solved.  I put grits in the mental storage locker where I keep the rice pudding and also pumpkin pasta sauce and pad Thai, all culinary challenges I have yet to overcome.  But grits weren’t quite done with me.

Three times in the last month, I stumbled across the very same recipe for Sweet Potato Grits.  It comes from Virginia Willis’ new cookbook, Basic to Brilliant, Y’all, a Southern-flavored, French-influenced collection of dual recipes: one basic, one tarted up for company.  I suspect that the Sweet Potato Grits recipe — and its fancier-pants companion, a grits-based spoonbread — have been distributed for publicity purposes; they certainly offer an enticing glimpse of the potential inherent in Willis’ approach.

As it happened, I was just about to host a brunch whose guests were all Southerners or celiacs (or both), so grits were an obvious choice.  When I mentioned the recipe to a friend and he said, “Two of my favorite foods!  Together at last!” it seemed fated.  I approached the recipe with some trepidation, given my grits experience (or lack thereof).  But did I make it once the week before to try it out?  Of course not.  I got out my heavy-bottomed saucepan on Sunday morning with a trembling hand.  The recipe calls for a cup of stone-ground grits, but I had plain Quaker old-fashioned grits languishing in the back of the pantry, so I used them.  Preparation was absurdly easy: heat the milk, add the cup of grits, whisking, and then the grated sweet potatoes.  Season and simmer for, oh, about an hour.

Actually it took a little over an hour; I consulted with a guest, who poked the orange mess in my saucepan with a wooden spoon and pronounced them done.  “But you can’t overcook grits,” she said, “So don’t worry.”

We finished with a dollop of butter as the recipe indicated, and then I added a swirl of cream because I am convinced that cream improves almost any dish.

The grits turned out saffron-colored, cinnamon-scented, and remarkably fluffy.  The slight sweetness of the potatoes and the hint of pie-type spiciness were just enough to stand in for the indulgent element at a brunch that lacked coffee cakes or cinnamon rolls or other deliciously indigestible gluten-filled brunchable baked goods.

Clean plates are the best compliment.

I don’t brunch often; indeed, I don’t even cook breakfast most mornings, because I’m so far from being a morning person that I’ve been known to set my bathrobe on fire while boiling water.  But now that brunch season is upon us, ushered in by the holidays, I’m pleased to add a new recipe to my repertoire.  These grits meet my need for ease in any morning cookery, and fulfill my dreams of creamy, fluffy, flavorful comfort food.

Perhaps it’s time to tackle rice pudding again.

Virginia Willis’ Sweet Potato Grits

  • 2 cups of water
  • 2 cups of milk
  • 1 cup of stone-ground grits (I used Quaker Old-Fashioned)
  • 2 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and grated
  • salt and pepper
  • 1/4 teaspoon ginger
  • pinch of cinnamon
  • 1 tablespoon butter

Combine the water and milk and bring to a low boil.  Slowly whisk in the grits.  Add the sweet potato and stir.  Season with salt and pepper (and I added the ginger and cinnamon at this point, too).  Lower the heat and simmer, stirring often, until creamy and thick.  (The recipe says 45-60 minutes; your results will depend on how slow your simmer is.)

When the mixture has thickened and the grits and the sweet potato are both tender, add ginger, cinnamon, and butter.  (I added heavy cream, too.)  Taste and adjust for seasoning.  Serve promptly.

Serves 4-6, generously

PS: I ate the leftovers for breakfast this morning, reheated with a bit more cream.  Lovely.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Cooking, Guest Posts, Ingredients, Savory

Tagged ,

The Roxborough Farmers’ Market

Posted on September 16, 2011 by | Leave a comment

As the season draws slowly to a close, you may consider this my thank-you note, or perhaps my sappy sappy love-letter, to my farmers’ market.

Last year, Roxborough had no farmers’ market.  There used to be an Amish farm stand that would set up in a parking lot near the Post Office once a week, dispensing some fresh produce, along with pies and jams and other tasty Amish treats.  But last summer came and went with nery a sign of them.  They had, it turns out, committed some sort of bureaucratic infraction — setting up in the wrong place, or selling without a permit, or something like that — for which the City chased them off.

But the powers that be in our neighborhood fought hard during the off-season.  And come summer of 2011, the Roxborough Farmers’ Market landed in Gorgas Park.

Calling it a farmers’ market, it seems to me, constitutes a little bit of optimism.  Farmers’ markets, in my mind at least, have a cluster of stands, set up to sell produce, along with dairy, eggs, meat, baked goods, and sometimes arts and crafts.  My vision of a farmers’ market looks something like the one in Bloomington, Indiana, which I recognize is a particularly muscular example of the genre, but which I know, too, is not unique.

Our farmers’ market is, in fact, just the one stand, under an awning, that sells fruits and vegetables and a little bit of honey on the side.

But please don’t consider this a complaint.  That one stand is run by the mighty McCanns Farm, whose products are diverse, and beautiful, and more than plentiful enough to fill the market needs of Roxborough shoppers like me.

I don’t want to brag (okay, maybe I do), but I was one of the very first customers to come out and support them.  They were set up tentatively on a concrete patch in the park, because initially, they were barred from the better spots on the grass.  They were selling English peas, cucumbers, and other early-season vegetables at the time.  And I am given to understand that those early days were a kind of experiment — a test of Roxborough to see if they could sustain the business necessary to make selling up here worth their time.  And I am given to understand that we nearly failed.

But then the local reporters came out to take their pictures and write up their human interest stories.  And then the people followed.

Today, as things are beginning to wind down, the McCanns do a brisk business.  I have gone over there at two o’clock to find the geriatric crowd, tottering around the tables, searching for the perfect pear or the crispest pepper.  At three and four, I have found the young-and-hip crowd — men in blazers and hipster glasses, fit women with babies — eying the mix’n'match, pint-for-a-dollar hot pepper bar with thoughtful consideration.  And later on, I have encountered the after-work crowd, eager to get their produce, eager to get home, happy that there is anything there for them at all.

They do potatoes and corn, onions and squash, and the best peaches, strawberries, and sour cherries that I have encountered since I moved here.

As a regular, as somebody who knows their wares and their system, I am greeted these days by the ladies who run the stand, and then pretty much ignored.  They leave me to go about my business, picking out my fruits and vegetables, keeping a running tally of what I owe them in my head.  I think they appreciate that I am low maintenance when they are busy.  And I know they trust me to pay them what I owe.

There are all sorts of politically charged reasons to go out and support your local farmers’ market — the environmental advantages of local and organic (or transitional, or IPM) produce, the economic advantages of keeping your dollars in your community, etc.  But the best reasons, it seems to me, are personal.  I appreciate the good that my farmers’ market does, but I go out there and buy because it is good produce, sold by good people, who care about what they do, and who care that I am happy with what they sell.

I look forward, every week, to seeing the farmers who put food on my table.  And as I said at the beginning of this post, before the season is over, before they pack up for the winter, I wanted to stop for a moment and tell them thank you.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Cooking, Ingredients, Politics

Tagged ,

Industrial Action

Posted on August 16, 2011 by | Leave a comment

My friend Linda is a canning prodigy.  For a couple of seasons now, she has looked out into her vegetable garden, and into the ripening stocks of our local farmer’s markets, and asked: how can we make all this last through the winter?

From peaches and strawberries and apples, she has made jams, preserves, and butters enough to eat, and to give away.  She has canned whole tomatoes, halved tomatoes, and cherry tomatoes, all to good effect.  And this year, she convinced me that I needed to do it too.

Now I’m not really a pro at this sort of food prep.  I made a balsamic fig jam once, and canned it — with Linda’s help.  Although I know it’s my own prejudice, to me canning smacks of industry, of great loud machines, of armies on the march, and (oddly enough) of Napoleon’s Russian campaign.  But Linda, of course, is right.  In order to eat seasonably and sustainably over the winter, canned food is key.  And no canned food is healthier — for us or for the environment — than food we can ourselves.

So Sarah, with her indomitable green thumb (pictured below), grew me a giant load of San Marzano tomatoes.  And Linda, who had her own giant load of tomatoes to can anyway, offered me the use of her stove and her canning equipment, and promised to hold my hand through the process.

There is nothing particularly difficult about it.  Canning, in a nutshell, involves stuffing fruit into a mason jar, shutting the lid, and then boiling it until all the molds, parasites, and bacteria that make food spoil (and make you horribly, disfiguringly ill) have been killed.  The trick, and the most tedious part, is good food prep — getting the food into the shape you want, and following the USDA’s recommendations fastidiously so that you can be as sure as possible that the preservation process has worked.

Linda and I used different methods that reflect our own preferences (and my inexperience at doing this).  She blanched and shocked her tomatoes in order to get the skins off, then cored them, halved them, and left the seeds intact.  I froze and defrosted mine to loosen the skin, I slit them down the middle to remove the seeds, and I tried, as much as possible, to leave the tomatoes whole.  Her method is better for the most part.  Her prepared tomatoes were much prettier, and none of them had turned to a pulpy mush as a result of burst cell walls.  But our goals were the same — to separate the parts of the tomato we wanted to eat from the parts we wanted to discard, and to can only the former.

Compared to the prep, canning itself is a piece of cake.  Linda got two giant pots of water boiling on the stove, and we loaded clean jars with tomatoes, lemon juice, and salt (in USDA-recommended proportions).  We closed each lid, and into the water bath they went, to be boiled for at least eighty-five minutes.

We ended up processing thirteen quarts and one pint of San Marzanos, all told, and we did it all in just over four hours (including prep and clean-up).  The finished jars, just out of their water bath, looked kind of gross — like blood cells separated from plasma.  But I am assured that that is just a temporary condition.  After cooling, they will be shaken up a little bit.  And they will take on the appearance of something you might, ultimately, want to make into sauce for pasta.

As admirable as I find Linda’s devotion to the method, I think that I am not a convert.  There will be no great quantities of jam for me.  No investment in equipment so that I can can green beans, or okra, or make jalapeno relish.  But that is not to say that I will never can again.  I fully intend to take advantage of Linda’s expertise again next year to preserve another boatload of tomatoes for the winter.  And I have some ideas, I think, for some canned treats to give away for the winter holidays.

Heirloom ketchup, anybody?  More fig jam? Maybe even kimchi?

The possibilities are very compelling.

For more information on canning, I would recommend having a look at the classics:  the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, and maybe The Big Book of Preserving the Harvest by Carol Costenbader.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Ingredients, Savory, Technique

Tagged ,

The Unbelievable Nardello

Posted on August 12, 2011 by | 1 Comment

Most of the content I’ve posted here so far has come in the form of recipes.  But it occurs to me that ninety percent of the cooking that I do is recipe-free.  I start with a couple of ingredients that I think would go well together, I cook them up in some predictable way, we eat the results, and more often than not, it is delicious.  The preparation isn’t special.  But while I sometimes like high-maintenance cooking (as evidenced by almost everything else on this blog), I don’t generally think that preparation should be special.  Call me a product of NorCal cuisine if you’d like, but if I had to articulate one cardinal rule of cooking, it would be this:

Use the best, freshest ingredients, don’t do too much, and try your best not to screw them up.

Enter the Nardello Pepper.  This, my fine friends, is the best.  They’re not very common — Slow Food USA, in fact, has listed them as an “endangered” variety.  But they offer an almost-overwhelming fruity sweetness that, when cooked, becomes creamy and complex and unlike any nightshade that I’ve ever eaten before.  They’re not un-pepper-like.  If anything, they are preternaturally pepper-like.  They are more sweet-peppery than the bells, the gypsies, the banana peppers that you usually see around.

I don’t know if they can be found commercially.  I have them because Sarah has been growing them in her vegetable garden since we moved to Philadelphia.  The seeds come from Southern Italy, and were brought to the United States — to Connecticut, specifically — by the Nardello family in the 1880s.  Since 1980 or thereabouts (I am given to understand), they have gotten out and around, and have become increasingly popular with home gardeners.  And even if the pepper itself isn’t found for sale very often, the seeds are widely available, including here, at Seeds of Change, and here at the Seed Saver’s Exchange.

I am the opposite of a gardener, I think, which makes me unqualified to talk about the technicalities of how they grow.  But every year Sarah plants them, and every year we get good yields.  So my impression is that if you want to plant a few, they aren’t that hard to get right.

While I don’t know what to do with them in the yard, though, I know just what to do with them in the kitchen.  These peppers were made to be cooked with onions, to be slathered on sandwiches, or draped over pasta.  And that is what I would recommend.

I would recommend slicing a large onion, and tossing it into a frying pan with olive oil, dried oregano, fennel seed, salt, pepper, and a small can of tomato paste.  Cook until everything (especially the tomato paste) starts to brown, then add sliced Nardellos (along with any other peppers you happen to have).  Cook for perhaps ten minutes more until they have softened, then deglaze with a little bit of water (you could use white wine, but remember Rule Number One), and serve with an extruded pasta like ziti.

I sometimes like to add some sliced-up hot Italian sausage to this mix.  I’ve also added kale, whole tomatoes, cubes of fresh mozzarella, broccoli, summer squashes, and green beans, all with good results.

Nardellos are special.  And if you grow them, that’s a caveat as well as a compliment.  You’ll want to grow some other pepper varieties too, because when you’re friends come around asking for produce, and you won’t want to part with any of these.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Cooking, Ingredients, Savory

Tagged , , , , ,

Red Wet Tofu

Posted on February 12, 2011 by | Leave a comment

So … in my experimentations with making char siu — the Cantonese-style barbecued pork — I stumbled upon this. It’s Chinese red wet bean curd. It is key in a lot of the recipes I’ve found for making the sauce. And it is … *really* unfortunately named.

Although, as it turns out, the name is the least weird thing about this little gem of a find. What it is is tofu that has been fermented in a mixture of sugar, wine, salt, and powdered red rice. It is strongly salty. And a little bit creamy. And it has a kind of alcoholic burn at the end.

Oh, and did I mention that it comes with what looks like little flecks of mold floating in it? I’ve done some poking around on the Internet, and am given to understand that that’s normal. But it’s still pretty weird.

Which is not to say that red wet bean curd is bad. Quite the opposite. I’m actually kind of enamored. I added a couple of cubes and some of the brine to my char siu sauce, and it is definitely an improvement. But I’m pretty sure that it is best left as an ingredient in other, more complex dishes. I also ate a cube, and it was … strong. To say the least. It was definitely tasty, but it left me with a feeling like I had just eaten a clove of raw garlic. It opened my sinuses. And it still feels a little bit like it is burning my stomach.

I’m not sure that I have a real point here, except to showcase an interesting ingredient. I think it’s one that I intend to keep around. And I will *definitely* be on the lookout for other dishes to use it in. Like nuoc mam — Thai fish sauce — I think that this has a lot of potential in a whole array of dishes that need a strong bottom note. I’m thinking, among other things, in European-style dishes that call for things like anchovies and capers.

Any further ideas about what to do with this stuff would be very much appreciated.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Ingredients

Tagged ,