Category: Cucina

Getting hungry

Carie pointed me to Bob Heffner’s Pepperoni Roll Page after I enquired about the origin of the fantastic snacks she brought me for my birthday. It’s my kind of food origin story—starting with an Italian baker in West Virginia looking to find a good portable snack food for Appalachian coal miners, and ending with a special federal exemption for the West Virginia bakers who produce them to get around rules about bread and meat products (no, seriously).

Hops? or water?

New York Times: With Great Beer, It’s All in the Rocks (and That Doesn’t Mean Ice). Interesting article on the science of beer formulas. The argument is that geology influenced the development of beer, in the form of the mineral content of the local water, and that (among other conclusions) Irish stouts evolved to the depth of color and flavor that they did because of the local water. To get good “mashing” of the grain—to release enough phosphates from the grain to increase the acidity of the beer to make it suitable for mass production without spoilage—when blended with the local alkaline water, the brewers had to roast the malt until it was almost black.

Interestingly, the article also puts the lie to the claim that the high hop content in India Pale Ales is what allowed them to be shipped from England to India without spoiling. According to Dr. Alex Maltman, professor of earth sciences at the University of Wales, the trick was the water at Burton-on-Trent, which was not only the right pH for mashing the barley but was also rich in sulfides, which acted as a preservative.

What the water doesn’t explain is why the IPA style is hopped so heavily. That, I think, is more art than science. A brilliant brewer must have discovered that the additional hops balanced the extra sugar released by the more thorough mashing of the grain, resulting in a more balanced beer. But hops also contain various resins that help to preserve the beer by inhibiting bacterial growth and polyphenols that act as antioxidants, a point which the NYT article doesn’t address..

Other food stuff

A few goodies from here and there in my food reading:

Tea-smoked chicken and free-range pigs at Boston.com.

New York Times: Hold the Risotto, Make It Fried Rice. Apparently über-Italian cookbook author Marcella Hazan prefers Chinese food when she’s in New York City. The author of this piece says it’s because Marcella first started thinking about teaching cooking classes after an abortive set of lessons with a Chinese chef; it could equally well be because no New York Italian restaurant measures up to Marcella’s famously sniffy palate.

Too Many Chefs: When Life Gives You A Lemon. I think the best thing to do with a single perfect home-grown lemon—if you’re abstaining from cocktails—might be to juice and zest it for a lemon risotto. It doesn’t take much juice to transform a plain old risotto completely.

And not specifically food related, but close: Boston.com: Firm serves sweet brew for de-icing roads. A fine thing to do with residues left over from distilleries, even if the resulting product’s molasses odor might bring back bad memories for North End residents.

Might we see legal shipments of wine to Massachusetts?

New York Times: Justices Pick Apart Ban on Wine Sales From State to State. I’d love to see this quashed, but somehow I don’t see Massachusetts, which doesn’t even have the same liquor laws from town to town, rolling over if the Supremes rule that laws barring buying wine through the mail are illegal. Interesting legal battle, with the 21st Amendment (Prohibition Repeal) being pitted against the commerce clause. Ironically, states’ exemptions that allow local wineries to deliver in-state disembowel the states’ argument that regulations against interstate shipments are necessary to protect minors.

Interestingly, one of the plaintiffs in the New York case, Juanita Swedenburg, is proprietor of a Virginia winery (albeit one I’ve never heard of).

Other commentary: Slate, NPR.

The meal, dissected

As I sit down to make notes after my first Thanksgiving dinner as family head chef, one question runs through my mind: How the hell did Julie Powell make complete and entertaining stories out of cooking meals—for a year? I can barely remember two hours ago when we ate the meal, much less when I started working on it. But giving it the old college try:

First, the menu changed a bit from its original incarnation. I looked at the timing and considered the overall weight of the dishes in the main course, and decided that rather than a risotto we needed something lighter in the first course. Something like Faith Willinger’s Yellow Pepper Soup (as made in the fabulous Florentine restaurant Cibreo). That substitution made, yesterday afternoon I eagerly boiled my brine (as per Alton’s Romancing the Bird special, I used a gallon of vegetable broth, a cup of kosher salt, half cup light brown sugar, a half tablespoon candied ginger, and—my only substitution, on account of running out of black peppercorns and having no allspice berries—a tablespoon and a half of juniper berries) and set it on the porch to cool, then made the soup. The yellow pepper soup is remarkably easy and satisfying: brown chopped onion, carrot, celery, and garlic in olive oil; add peeled potato and seeded yellow bell peppers in chunks together with chicken broth and hot red pepper and cook until the vegetables are soft; blend; and in my case refrigerate for the next day. (An approximation of the recipe is here; the real thing is in here.) That done, I figured, all I had to do was get the turkey into the brine before I went to bed.

Hah. First problem: at 8:30, four hours after cooking the brine, it was still hot—too hot to put a turkey into without inviting salmonella. OK. I sealed two freez-its in Ziploc freezer bags and dropped them into the brine to cool it down. An hour later, the brine was acceptably tepid and I mixed it with a gallon of heavily iced water. And here my troubles began: in the process of getting the ice, I somehow zinged my old back injury. I managed to lever the turkey out of the fridge into the sink; remove the wrappings; lift it into the clean five-gallon Home Depot bucket that had previously received the icy brine; drop the aforementioned freez-its in; and haul the bucket back out to the porch, where I figured it would find an acceptably chilly temperature. How was I to know that this was going to be one of the warmest Thanksgivings on record? (Yes, OK, I could have read the paper.)

Anyway, we started the next morning in the hole, as making the apple pie (Lisa’s suggested dessert, for which I happily scrapped the other offerings) took a lot longer than expected. I took a few minutes while the pie came together (happily without me) to pull the recipes together and plan my order of operations. The chief difficulties were:

  1. I couldn’t start the turkey until the pie was done.
  2. I couldn’t start the stuffing and the brussels sprouts until the turkey was done.
  3. I couldn’t really make the Swiss chard or the green beans—or the gravy—until the turkey was done, either.

So basically that left: get the turkey in the oven; make the stuffing; do a ton of prep work; wait; then dash like crazy at the end. And that’s about how it went. Thankfully Lisa’s mom was an able sous chef beside me every step of the way. I had the Brussels sprouts in their roasting pan, tossed with garlic, par-cooked pancetta, and olive oil, about two hours before the turkey was ready to go. Lisa’s mom had the green beans trimmed and sitting in the steamer, ready to go. But the stuffing was the long pole in the tent. It took forever to get the bread cubed and toasted, and thankfully Lisa’s mom took that and diced onion and celery while I browned sausage, diced and cooked apples, and chopped herbs. Mixed everything together in a great big bowl, splashed in about three cups of chicken broth that I had made last week, and topped it with a generous glug of Calvados. And set it aside. We had time to wash all the prep dishes and eat the soup before the turkey finally came out.

Finally, showtime. Turkey on a cutting board with a groove to rest. Sprouts and stuffing in the oven. Steamer with green beans on the back burner. Sudden panic as I realize I haven’t chopped the onions and sage for the gravy. Manage not to break any skin as I do so and drop it into a pan together with all the rest of the butter on the dish. Pour the pan juices through a sieve into a quart measuring cup. Put the disposable roasting pan over two burners, turn them on, and pour twelve ounces hard cider in to deglaze. Realize that the disposable pan lacks some desirable characteristics for reducing sauce, such as not smoking; turn off the heat, strain the deglazing juices into the quart cup, then throw away the pan. Strained pan juices and cider into the onion, sage and butter, then thicken with flour (and a little arrowroot—my fave for lighter sauces). Voila: gravy.

While this was going on, the green beans steamed and I somehow got the Swiss chard tossed in the garlic and anchovy oil (I cheated and used anchovy paste, which we had, rather than buying whole anchovies). Then we got everything onto the table.

And damned if it didn’t come together. The hot sausage in the stuffing counterpointed the apple in the gravy, the vegetables were excellent—the chard was a surprise hit—and even without much in the way of carbohydrates we were all put into comas after the meal.

Turkey Day approacheth

Lisa’s folks are joining us at our house for Thanksgiving this year, and as the one with nothing else to do but a job search, I’m planning the menu. So far it’s pretty straightforward:

  1. Appetizers:
    • Mixed nuts
    • Assorted cheeses
    • Cocktails
  2. First course: light risotto
  3. Main course:
  4. Dessert…

Ah, and that’s where my imagination fails me. What kind of dessert? Continuing the apple theme, I’m considering broiled apples with maple Calvados sauce, but I think we’d all explode. I also have to figure out what kind of bread, and which light risotto recipe.

Meathead

Lisa has an out of town meeting today, and I wanted to do something special for dinner for her last night. So I turned to that old faithful stalwart, roast lamb. We had picked up a boned leg of lamb from Costco (fabulous bargain: tremendously flavorful New Zealand lamb at about $4 a pound) a few days previously, but I didn’t know what I was going to do with it.

Then I remembered: Julie/Julia. I knew I had gone into transports of ecstasy each time I read about Julie’s cooking one of Julia Child’s lamb recipes from MTAOFC. Now it was time for me to investigate the book. With only an hour before I needed to get the lamb in the oven, I knew I couldn’t do anything that required lengthy marinades, but I wanted more flavor than just a plain roast lamb. So it was herb and garlic stuffing. I chopped parsley, plus some fresh rosemary and thyme from our struggling kitchen plants, diced two shallots, and smashed a clove of garlic, then added salt, pepper, and the curiously specified quarter-teaspoon of ginger. I cut the net holding the meat in place, washed it off, unrolled it, spread the “stuffing” over the inside, re-rolled it and tied it with kitchen twine. Then I popped it in the oven (spraying some olive oil over it in lieu of the basting Julia specifies in the recipe) next to a tray of potato wedges covered with some of the same stuffing.

It was later to the table than I would like. I had to turn the oven up a bit to get the lamb cooked before 9 pm. But with the potatoes and some green beans (steamed, then shaken in the steaming water with some olive oil and sea salt and drained) and a glass of Crozes Hermitage—fantastic.

Alas, Joy thought so too. There was an unnoticed drip from the cutting board onto the kitchen floor, and as our little genteel girl puppy investigated, then started cleaning the floor, she got little streaks of lamb juice all over her head. Hence the nickname. At least she’s proof against the Angel of Death now.

Jones does it again

MSNBC: Mashed potatoes, green beans — in a bottle? Apparently last season’s Turkey and Gravy Soda from Jones Soda Co. was so good inexplicably popular that the company came up with new holiday flavors: Green Bean Casserole, Mashed Potato & Butter, Cranberry, and Fruitcake, as well as returning the original offender.

Oh dear.

Well, pardon me: I need to slip off to our local Target to see if they’re in stock…

QTN™: Brasserie Duyck, Jenlain Bière de Garde

Yep, the French make beer—highly complex and distinctive beer. I don’t think your average Pabst or Bud drinker would denote this fabulous bière de garde as a beer, but it’s accessible to anyone who’s enjoyed Belgian beers. Michael Jackson notes that Duyck’s Jenlain uses pan-European hops (Alsace, Flanders, Germany, Slovenia) and that it’s 6.5% ABV; he doesn’t note the surprising sweetness that greets you on the first sip. The sweetness is matched by the complexity of the nose, which is equal parts orange peel, bready yeast, and caramel, and by the lengthy finish with lingering citrus and spice notes. Not an everyday beer, but then what is?

Hell Night at the East Coast Grill

I entered the East Coast Grill in Inman Square last night just as the Phantom Gourmet was leaving (you could tell it was him because a van with his logo was parked at the curb). At the door: a dish holding round candies that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be Tums. The occasion: Hell Night, a night where everything on the menu, including drinks, has a higher capsicum per cc count than should be legal.

The instigator: my friend Niall, who reported he had wanted to go to one of these since we got to grad school four years ago but always managed to miss it. From this morning, I wonder if he still feels the same way this morning.

As things go, you could still have a good, though spicy, meal at this thing. I got the obligatory insane hot thing out of the way early with a “Hurler from Hell” (an oyster shooter made with habanero-infused vodka). The oyster was indistinct after its bath in the vodka, which was unspeakable. While recovering from that and basking in the incredulous stares of my tablemates and the waitress, I silently pledged to take the rest of the evening easy. That was accomplished by sticking to appetizers. My choices: a fairly sublime raw tuna with jicama slaw and a hot pepper marinade, and a decent plate of baked quahogs surrounded by chorizo sausage. I couldn’t finish the quahogs, less because of the heat than because of the uneasy interaction of the chorizo with the rest of my meal.

I regret to say that it wasn’t the hottest meal I’ve ever had—I’ve eaten in some Indian and Thai restaurants that produced the full cold-sweat, white-faced, ear-ringing effect and last night I only got the sweat part. But to be fair I chose three- and four-bomb food (the scale tops out at seven with the famous Pasta from Hell). It was certainly the best-tasting hot-food meal I’ve ever had.

QTN™: John Harvard’s Provision Ale

It feels odd reviewing a beer that’s been available for less than a week, but I’m not complaining. John Harvard’s Provision Ale is so new, it’s not even on the beer list yet. When we picked a growler of it up a week ago, it was a day old. And it’s impressive. A dark, dark ale, almost black, it has a nose like a stout—malty, almost sweet—but an ale’s mouthfeel—light-bodied, malt balanced out by hops (and alcohol). I’d love to see an ABV or BU measurement on this ale, but I’m guessing both of them are pretty high. This is good stuff, and I hope it enters the regular rotation at the pub.

For more information about the style, check out this Michael “Beer-Hunter” Jackson article on Old Ale and check out the paragraph next to the second pull-quote. Basically, Provision Ales were meant to lay down, hence the high hops and alcohol content.

Reasons for alternative bourbons (or Tennessee whiskies)

Fark pointed out today that Jack Daniel’s has quietly lowered the proof of its flagship Black Label Tennessee Whiskey, from 86 to 80.

I’ll be going out tomorrow to see if there are any of the big bottles left in our local liquor stores—at 86 proof. And I might even sign a petition…

In the meantime, these other fine bourbons and Tennessee whiskeys are still at their original higher proofs:

  • Labrot and Graham’s Woodford Reserve (90.4 proof)
  • Henry McKenna’s (100 proof)*
  • Knob Creek (100 proof)
  • Old Forester (86 proof)*
  • Elijah Craig (94 proof)*
  • Maker’s Mark (90 proof)
  • And, ironically, Jack Daniel’s Single Barrel (94 proof)

* Have not personally tried but have heard they’re good.