Recently in Methods and Techniques Category

When a method works consitantly, I find I don't like to deviate from it. For example, I roast chickens at 425 degrees without basting, and am inherently suspicious of recipes that ask me to do otherwise. I cook bacon in the oven, burgers in my cast iron skillet, and salmon in a hot pan, flesh side down until crisp, then flip it and finish in (the apparently ubiquitus) 425 degree oven. I like my salmon about medium inside, and I've cooked it this way enough that I can sort of sense when it gets there, rarely letting it coast to well-done.

A few weeks ago, I came across some wild salmon with flesh so moist and pink, so well-marbled, it seemed unfortunate to subject to blistering hot stainless, too harsh, like slapping a kitten. I rembered a lovely dish I had last summer at Plouf where the salmon was poached in olive oil and served with succotash. It highlighted the salmon's buttery texture in a way I was anxious to emulate.

I poked around a little, looking for information on how to correctly oil-poach fish. I settled on the manner Anna Hesser describes in Cooking for Mr. Latte. She tells you to pour olive oil to almost cover the fish, put it over low heat, and to spoon warm oil over the top of the fillet once it begins to cook. She says it is almost impossible to overcook this fish. Ha-hah. My results were less ideal.

I want to make excellent salsa, not just chopped or pureed tomatoes and onions in a bowl, but a truly nuanced condiment. I seek that elusive balance of chunk and puree, the perfect level of chili heat that lingers but doesn't overwhelm, the ideal acidity. My results have been mostly good, but I'm not happy yet.

I can't explain why it matters to me so much. Stephen is more or less content with (shudder) Pace extra chunky from a jar. He enjoys and appreciates the good stuff, but he probably wouldn't seek it out. To me, most salsa from a jar tastes mostly like jar. It tends to be either insipidly bland or membrane-searingly spicy, have an either watery or slimy texture, and a processed taste that I just can't stomach. I like the Rick Bayless Frontera Grill salsas, but they're kind of hard to find, to expensive to be a regular purchase, and frankly, a little thin to be ideal.

So I persevere, with my eye focused even more eagerly than usual on tomato season. I'm definitely developing some tricks. Charring (as in the above Roasted Tomatillo and Tomato salsa) under a broiler or in a hot cast iron skillet is helpful, particularly when the tomatoes aren't yet perfect. It also always makes tomatillos and chilies more succulent. I seed the tomatoes then chop them and the tomatillos roughly. Then I drain everything, lightly sprinkled with salt and placed in a strainer, like a mad woman. Getting rid of those excess juices has an almost magical effect on the texture and the intensity of the flavor. Also, I've found that I like to puree 1/2-2/3 of the tomatillos and tomatoes, as well as all of the garlic. I finely chop the remaining tomatos and all of the onion, drain it a little more, and mix everything together. I haven't yet achieved salsa zen, but I'm on my way. If I could only figure out the correct chili to tomato ratio, I'd be almost there.

It was recently brought to my attention that, although I mention roast chickens all the time, I've never actually given a recipe. I'll seek to remedy that shortly, but first, I should mention something of my history with the dish. I more or less taught myself to cook through experimentation and hours spent watching Graham Kerr, The Frugal Gourmet and, Great Chefs every day after school. By the time I was thirteen, nearly every meal prepared in our house had passed through my mostly untrained hands.

As I got older, I began to apply myself with more direction, attempting to master specific dishes and techniques. In college, I wanted to learn to roast chicken. I began by researching the topic, and was thrown into confusion by the masses of contradictory information. To baste or not to baste? Breast up or breast down? Low oven or high oven? There seemed to be very little agreement, so I assumed that it must be tremendously difficult to produce an edible bird.

Jamie Oliver's The Naked Chef helped to change my mind. Now, it can be argued that Mr. Oliver is almost a parody of himself, too cute and too buoyant to be taken seriously. Whether or not this is true, I still love his books. I actually cook from them regularly, sometimes a rare thing with important, glossy chef books. He focuses less on recipes, times and temperatures, and more on tasting, poking and not taking the whole thing so seriously. He convinced me that roasting a chicken didn't have to be stressful, and much of my own technique is borrowed from him. I'll give both my favorite roast chicken and later the slightly simpler flavored, lower effort version.

There are plenty of things taught in culinary school that when you get in the working kitchen make you go, phfff, I can't believe they told me to do it like that at school! When you're working you see there's almost always a hundred different ways to do one job to the same end--you learn which is best for you by watching others, by playing around.

But here's something I stick by hating in school: making choux pastry by hand. Incorporating the eggs to the stiff, wet dough, one by one, till the dough was smooth and stretchy again may have given me, for a few months, the toned arms of an ambi-dexterous tennis player, and sure there was a certain satisfaction in piping it out with burning, twitchy muscles--but it hurt! And it took a long time. And kitchen aids are such wonderful things...

Unfortunately, I don't have a kitchen aid. Or a Kenwood for that matter.

And? And Glyn has been talking about eclairs for the past few days with such zest, that I've fixated on them. They're everywhere, on the fridge, at work, in every cook book I open... I can only think of a proper tea with eclairs baked that day, mmm! So? So I'm going to do what I thought I'd never have to do again, make a choux pastry by hand. Thank you Chef John and Chef Christophe, for locking away the equipment and strengthening my arms with a thousand pastry creams, genoises, choux batters, and meringues. Here goes.

Choux pastry is pretty underappreciated if you ask me. When made well, the airy golden puffs can be built into a pyramid of caramel, sliced and filled with savoury cheesy goodness or plumped up with a mixture of pastry cream, whipped cream, or butter, then iced. They will steam, rise, and brown into whatever shape you pipe or drop them. They will bake or fry, and even if you are forced to shape like ridiculous cream filled swans, they will still be tasty. Also, they're not that hard to make, and probably require no grocery shopping to get started. Plus they freeze well all piped out and unbaked if you make too much. This tray of unbaked eclairs, gougeres, and religieuses will come in handy next week, when your boyfriend's parents come to visit...So don't be scared. Flex.

Choux is a classic recipe, so there are a thousand of them out there. It's almost one part butter/flour to two parts eggs to two parts water, with slight variations of course. Today I'm testing out doing exactly this proportion as so many recipes I've seen are very nearly this proportion. Either way, they're all made basically the same way: start with a base of liquid--sometimes just water, sometimes a mixture of milk and water--my old pastry chef claimed adding milk made egg wash obsolete. I'm not sure how that works, but we did try making the dough both ways, and it's true.

When you're baking a thousand eclairs everyday for Harrods , you'll try anything to save time and skip a step. Of course, when baking one tray at home, a single step doesn't cost you a half hour but only a minute or two. But for Chef Christophe, I still replace a fifth of the water with milk and skip the eggwash. The choux gets golden without it and it doesn't add flavour so why bother? Also, I use salted kerrygold butter but still add that pinch of salt, and sometimes add about a tablespoon of sugar to flour.

240 ml water
60 ml whole milk
150 g butter
150 g flour
250-300 g whole eggs
pinch salt

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and get your ingredients scaled out. Melt the butter and water together in a saucepan. Once boiling, whisk in the flour. Now get rid of the whisk and switch to a paddle, like a firm spatula, and keep the mass moving until it becomes a dough that holds together and doesn't stick to the sides of the pan, this should just take a couple of minutes. Take off the heat and allow to cool slightly in a large round bottomed bowl (or if you're lucky, the kitchen aid). Very gradually, beat in the eggs, waiting each time to properly emulsify the egg before adding more. Beat the crap out of it. Seriously.

You want it smooth, shiny, slightly elastic, but drippy. Confused? In French, of course, there's a term for the texture you're looking for, bec de canard. It means that if you lift the whisk, a "beak," a strand that falls in the shape of a beak will form. It looks like a duck's beak, I guess. In some cases, like if you've cooked your water/butter/flour mix for too long and too much water has evaporated, or if your flour is old and dry, you may need to add a bit more egg than the recipe calls for, to get the beak. And in some cases, you may not need to add all the egg you've scaled out, it all depends on the texture of your dough.

Eventually, you'll get there. Put the dough in a piping bag, then using a round nozzle, pipe small lines or rounds of choux onto parchment, giving them room between each other to grow. If you're egg washing for colour, and I'm certainly not, now is the time to do it. Bake for about ten minutes. They should be coloured a medium brown on the outside by now, but it's also important that you're able to pick one up and, well, check that it's bottom is golden, dry and firm--as bottoms should be. If it isn't then the pastry isn't cooked through enough and won't hold its' filling properly--just put it back in at a lower oven, 300 degrees, to dry out a bit.

Set them aside to cool, then store in an airtight container until your filling's ready and it's time to fill, which also means time to eat. If you're making eclairs yourselves, I suggest not filling and glazing until you are just about to eat them, that way the pastry stays crisp and delicious.

(Chicken with Tiny Potatoes and Mustard, before the mustard)

I didn't always love chicken thighs. I wanted them to be a cheaper alternative to boneless, skinless breasts. Instead, they insisted on being blatantly misshapen, oddly grayish, fat-streaked chunks. They sauteed for crap. I didn't like them, and even though they cost about three dollars less per pound than breast, I still wasn't going to buy them. How naive I was.

I didn't understand that the dark meat and bits of fat have their purpose. Lurking within that unattractive lump of meat is meltingly tender secret potential. What I didn't know those first few times I cooked them was that chicken thighs, like any other dark, tough, marbled, ugly, riddled with connective tissue piece of meat, respond well to low and slow cooking.

In recent years, I've done better. We eat chicken thighs frequently, and I've never gotten over a slight feeling of wonder at their transformation. They go into the pot ugly and chewy and emerge rich, soft, and full of flavor. And they cost so much less than chicken breasts, I get to enjoy them, and enjoy feeling thrifty to boot.

Remember when I mentioned the beautiful fond my Le Creuset makes?

Braised Chicken with Tiny Potatoes and Mustard
(serves about 3)

6 chicken thighs with bones and skin
1 head of garlic, cloves peeled
2 carrots, sliced
About 18 tiny potatoes, an inch in diameter, or larger new potatoes cut into 1-inch chunks
1 cup white wine
1/2 cup low-sodium chicken broth
8-10 sprigs thyme
2 sprigs rosemary
2 bay leaves
2 tablespoons olive oil
Flour, for dusting
1/4- 1/3 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon dijon mustard
1 tablespoon whole grain mustard
Juice of 1/2 lemon

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Remove the skin from the thighs, season with salt and pepper, and dredge in the flour, tapping off the excess. Heat a 5 1/2 quart (or there about) Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add the oil and saute the thighs until they are deep gold, about 5 minutes per side. Adjust the heat (or even pull the pot off the burner) if the bits on the bottom of the pan look like them may burn.

Remove the thighs and set aside. Turn the head down to about medium and add the garlic cloves; saute briefly until they begin to color. Deglaze the pan with the chicken broth and wine, scraping up all the brown bits. Add the carrots and herbs and tuck the thighs back into the pan. If necessary, add a little more broth to bring the level of liquid halfway up the sides of the thighs.

Put the potatoes into the pot on top of the chicken. They will sort of roast rather than braise. Put the lid on the pan and cook in the oven for about an hour and twenty minutes, or until the chicken is very tender.

Remove the pan from the oven. Fish out the more obvious herb stems and bay leaves. You may notice that the garlic cloves have sort of melted into the sauce. Stir the mustards, cream, and lemon juice. If the sauce looks thin, put the pan on the stove over medium-high head for a few minutes to let the cream thicken it. Season with salt, pepper, and more lemon juice if necessary.

The finished dish.

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The dreary weather persists. Wet feet are all the rage, or at least the inevitable result of leaving the house. The other result, at least around my place, are rich, slow-cooked dishes that warm the tummy and fortify against the rain. I have simmered, stewed, slow-roasted, and braised until I worry that my Le Creuset Dutch oven may collapse from exhaustion.

And let me, for a moment, sing the praises of that very extraordinary cooking vessel. Nothing is better suited for gentle, moist cooking than enameled cast iron. Its smooth interior is pleasantly stick-resistant, yet it develops truly superior fond when meat is browned in it. The lid fits tightly, sealing in moisture, and the dense, heavy cast-iron absorbs the heat and releases it back into the food with consummate care. Its cheerily colored exterior brightens up even the grayest winter day. Chicken thighs and cubes of pork shoulder emerge tender and infused with flavor. My enameled cast iron Dutch oven is one of my most useful, most prized tools in my kitchen. Indeed, it was an investment, but since I fully expect my heirs to fight over it at my funeral, I believe it was totally worth the price.

Stephen and I had a rare day off together today. We lounged, snacked and cuddled in our pajamas. Tonight I made a rich Bolognese sauce that simmered for about two hours. It smelled so good I expected my neighbors to knock on the door, hoping for a taste. The recipe follows (with the standard caution that I'm not always great at exact quantities). Expect more of my recent slow-cooked creations in the days to come.

Rigatoni with Bolognese Sauce

1 pound ground chuck
1/2 pound ground pork
3 slices bacon, diced
1/2 cup finely chopped celery
1/2 cup finely chopped carrot
1 medium onion, finely chopped
4 cloves of garlic, minced
8 ounces cremini mushrooms, chopped
1/2 ounce dried porcini mushrooms soaked in about 3/4 cup boiling water, finely chopped with 1/2 of the liquid reserved
1 cup milk
1 cup red wine
1 14.5 ounce can diced tomatoes
2 1/2 cups tomato puree (no salt added is best)
1 cup low-sodium chicken or beef stock
1 generous teaspoon each dried thyme and oregano
2 bay leaves
pinch dried red pepper flakes
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1 1/5 pound rigatoni

Heat a heavy Dutch oven over medium-high heat and add the ground chuck and pork. Season with salt and pepper and cook until all the pink is gone. Drain the meat in a colander and set aside. Turn down the heat to medium and cook the bacon until it starts to get crisp. Add the onion, celery and carrot to the bacon fat. Sprinkle lightly with salt and saute about 10 minutes until the vegetables are very soft and starting to turn golden. Add the garlic and cremini mushrooms and saute until the most of the mushroom liquid has evaporated, about another 5-10 minutes.

Return the meat to the pan, add the thyme, oregano, pepper flakes, bay leaves, and a few grinds of pepper. Add the milk and cook until most of it has evaporated. Next add the wine and also cook until almost dry. Pour in the diced tomatoes, tomato puree, stock, the reserved porcini soaking water, and add the cinnamon and nutmeg.

Bring to a boil and simmer, stirring occasionally, about two hours or until the sauce is very thick. Stir in the cream and balsamic vinegar, taste for salt and pepper. Cook the rigatoni and toss it all together. Garnish with chopped basil or parsley and grate on some parmesan.

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It seems fitting after an inspiring morning of reading about precisions that I should have so much trouble making the simplest of things at work that I've made a thousand times before: pate de fruit. Pate de fruit seems like a natural evolution from early fruit and sugar preserves, jams, and jellies, the most basic of French confections--I remember buying them as a treat from our Saturday markets in La Ferte along with candied orange peels and coffee macaroons, and eating them in the backseat on the ride home.

They're often served as a petit four after the meal--a fruit puree sweetened and set with pectin so that it has a slight, soft chew, like a piece of firm jam, then cut or moulded and covered in granulated sugar. We make all sorts of flavours at work: litchi, quince, lime, raspberry, apricot, but it was a strawberry recipe I attempted--and failed.

It's not only embarrassing when one fails at simple things--I was glad that the kitchen was quiet and there was barely anyone to witness my mess--but it's a complete waste of prep time before service. I made two attempts, making two different mistakes.

First batch: I whisked constantly, but allowed the gas flame to curve around the back of the pot and lick the edge. And so the edge of the pot burned. If this happens, don't worry, just change pots quickly before you start to scrape the burned fruit into your mix, and turn down the flame so it's just under the pot and not around it. This batch is O.K, though I lost a little mass in the first pot, which meant it wouldn't quite fill the frame I'd set up for it. This means I'm not yielding as many pieces as I should be, that's bad. Note, an induction stove, if you have one, is a good safe way to cook the pate de fruit.

Second batch: I added the sugar in small amounts. But not small enough. The mixture cooled down too fast and started to set in the pot. By the time I "poured" it onto my framed silpat, it was strange and lumpy and needed to spread with a palette knife to smoothen out. Needless to say, that batch was trash.

So, even the simplest of experiments can feel something like wearing a pair wings glued together with wax.

There are many pate de fruit recipes--some use thermometers, some use time, and some use a sugar concentration measurer-but the basic format of all the recipes I've followed is generally the same: one begins with either fresh fruit, cooked down and passed through a tamis, or frozen puree, melted down. To this, a combination of pectin and sugar is added. And finally, some lemon juice or citric acid, and maybe some booze.

Harold McGee lists three things to set a pectin when making a jam: add a large dose of sugar, whose molecules attract water molecules to themselves, thus pulling the water away from the pectin chains and leaving them more exposed to reattaching to each other. Second, boil the mixture to evaporate water and bring pectin chains even closer together. Third, increase acidity, which neutralises electrical charge and allows the aloof pectin chains to bond to each other into a gel. Most pate de fruit recipes involve all three steps but use commercial powdered pectin. Pectins vary, as does the acidity of the fresh or frozen fruit, so keep this in mind when changing fruits or pectins or acid and using the same recipe. Boiron, who makes a lot of high-end fruit purees, has a great chart of pate de fruit recipes for all of their fruits.

Once the pectin is added to the fruit mixture, it's important to keep it above 80 degrees and moving so that it doesn't start to set too early. This means adding the rest of the sugar in your recipe in small additions and giving the mixture time to get hot again before adding more--adding it in too large of batches will cause the temperature of the whole mass to drop quickly, setting the pectin in lumps that will not melt back down again even if you get the mixture boiling.

Once the mass comes to temperature, or time, or sugar concentration, acid is usually added and the whole thing is poured out and allowed to set overnight. A thin coating of granulated sugar will make the surface less sticky and easier to work with. At work we cut it on a guitar, a clever set of wires that cuts anything of the right texture into perfect strips or squares, but a knife will work too, or pouring them into heatproof moulds to begin with and then just popping them out the following day. Or just forget about the whole thing, break your piggy bank, and order them on-line from Fauchon...

It is so very fulfilling to make stock. First off, it gives you an excuse to feel all wise and thrifty and safe chicken bits in your freezer rather than wastefully throwing them away. Then it gives you an excuse to use up all the chicken bits that are clogging up your freezer, thus cleaning out the freezer itself and basically making something from nothing.

Not to mention the fact that since it takes literally all day to make stock, you have a fantastic excuse to sit on your arse all day without feeling lazy. You aren't lazy, you're very busy making stock.

Then the fact that your house smells just luscious the whole time. Five hours in, you have to restrain yourself from dipping your face into the stock pot and coming up with a chicken wing in some kind of dangerous, meaty version of bobbing for apples. Although I should note that it can sometimes be a little depressing, when, at the end of the day, the house has smelled good for seven hours and there isn't anything to eat. I recommend throwing another chicken in the oven (remembering to save the bones when you're done!) so that you don't starve to death as a result of your stock-making.

And finally, when all those hours pass, you end up with a freezer full of liquid gold. You save money (not to mention sodium; even the best stuff tends to be crazy salty) over buying the canned stuff. Plus it tastes so good. It has richness and body from the gelatin in the bones, a color somewhere between amber and very good German hefewiezen and heaps of chicken-y flavor. And, perhaps best of all, making stock gives you a great reason to make delicious dishes that require it. For me, that almost always means risotto, something I plan to do this week. Stay tuned!

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