Author: KC

I'm a graduate student in Montreal. I spend most of my time studying drug addiction using brain imaging techniques. I'm also a foodie, exploring the culinary world both in and out of my kitchen.

Categories
Sauces and Salsas The Book

131. Pesto p.889


The recipe

I’m so happy I made this pesto. I went up to the market, and paid a nice lady twelve dollars for an enormous bucket full of perfectly fresh and amazingly fragrant basil. I got my bounty home and I was ready to go into industrial pesto production mode. Unfortunately I’d forgotten that a bushel of basil was going to require a lot more pine nuts than I had on hand to turn into pesto. My neighborhood isn’t lacking for bulk food stores, but it would seem everyone else had the same weekend project as I did. There wasn’t a pine nut to be had, except at the mysteriously overpriced store-of-last-resort. My precious basil was wilting on the counter at home, so I sucked it up and paid saffron prices for my pine nuts.

I got home, and I was finally ready to start. But I discovered that my beloved food processor had died on me. I use an inherited Robot Coupe processor, that has to be at least 25 years old. It’s a little the worse for wear, but it’s always worked perfectly. I love its simplicity, only one blade, and a switch, controlling pulse and stay on modes, that’s it. It has a very solid motor, a decent sized bowl, and no superfluous gimmicks. I wasn’t ready to give up on my workhorse of a processor just yet, so I did a little jury rigging. After disabling the safety feature that prevents the blade from spinning without the top on with the eraser off the back of a pencil I was good to go. I’m convinced that I’ll lose a finger to the machine, and I’m mildly terrified of it, but I’m keeping it for now.

Thankfully I was able to get to the recipe without any further setbacks. The pesto is very straightforward, and much like every other food processor pesto recipe in the world. You add garlic to the running processor, then add pine nuts, Parmigiano-Reggiano, salt, pepper, and basil leaves, then chop it up and add olive oil in a slow stream with the motor running ’till it’s nearly smooth.

I planned on freezing most of my pesto so I omitted the cheese (as per the recipes recommendation), and froze the pesto in ice cube trays. I now have two big Ziplock bags full of pesto in the freezer. I’ve been making giant batches of pesto for the last few years and I absolutely love having it on hand. It’s an integral ingredient in my pizza sauces, and I think of it as a security blanket for uninspired nights when I need to cook quickly. I just toss pasta with a cube of pesto, and a bit of pasta water, top with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and black pepper and I’m eating within 20 minutes.

If you’re planning on making pesto ice cubes I’d recommend going to to dollar store and getting a separate set of ice cube trays for the purpose. I used our everyday trays, and despite a thorough wash is hot soapy water I could swear my G&T tasted of basil.

This is a very standard, solid pesto recipe, it goes a little heavy on the oil, but is otherwise great. It’s actually a bit hard to know if I followed the recipe properly. It calls for 3 cups of loosely packed fresh basil leaves, but what exactly does that mean? I know we North Americans like our recipes in cups and spoonfuls, but in this case a weight measurement for a dry ingredient wouldn’t kill them. I’ll happily convert ounces to decent metric units, but please give me a halfway precise estimate of how much basil this recipe calls for.

I’m very happy with the way this pesto turned out, it freezes wonderfully, and I’ve been enjoying it a little at a time. Right now it’s just a nice treat, but by mid-February having summer-fresh pesto on hand is going to be a critical weapon in the fight against the bleak winter dreariness. I’d highly recommend that everyone devote one day in late summer to making a giant batch of pesto, and enjoying the fruits of your labour all winter long.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

130. Pasta with Tomato and Basil p.206


Unfortunately there’s no recipe for this one.

This is a recipe for September. It has only a few ingredients, and they’re available year round, but the rest of the year it’ll be a pale imitation of itself. This incredibly simple pasta sauce starts with browning garlic slices in olive oil, then adding chopped tomatoes and basil branches and simmering for 20 minutes. You then stir in basil leaves, season with salt and pepper, and toss it with fettuccine.

It could not possibly be simpler, so it comes down to the quality of your ingredients. I’m sure making this with canned tomatoes, Chinese garlic, and greenhouse basil would taste pretty good, but you’ll miss the whole point. My favourite part about this recipe is its sense of time and place. In late August and September the tomatoes are abundant and deliriously flavourful, basil is growing like a weed, and freshly dug garlic is just turning up at the markets. During this perishable moment all the ingredients for this recipe are at their peak, and they’re practically being given away. I feel it’s my duty to try to use up as many of them as I can, and ideally to do as little to them as possible.

I thought this dish was just wonderful. It managed to capture the essence of late summer on a plate. The tomatoes broke down, but kept their just-picked flavour. My garlic was so fresh it was next to impossible to peel, and the pungent basil left me reeling. The fettuccini drank up the sauce, and took on its flavours. Finished with a bit of Parmigiano-Reggiano, and a grind of pepper I just couldn’t have asked for a better meal.

My dining companion thought it was good, but nowhere near as earth-shattering as I did. Whether it was the recipe, or my state of mind that day, it struck me as a near perfect dinner. It might deserve a full five mushrooms, but I’m going to deduct a half-a-mushroom for instructing me to peel the tomatoes, which seems like a total waste of time for a rustic casual pasta dish like this. Also, since it didn’t move my dining companion, I can’t in good conscience give it full marks.

Categories
The Project

Double Digits

Check it out! I’m 10% of the way through The Project. Just 1164 more recipes to go.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

129. Posole: Pork and Hominy Stew p.486


Epicurious doesn’t have a recipe for this one, but one of the posole recipes I found on there looks great, and might address some of my concerns with this dish.

I was really excited to make this. My dining companion came home raving about the posole at Le Jolifou, a great Montreal restaurant which specializes in Mexican inspired Québécois dishes. A couple of weeks later we looked through The Book, and tried its take on posole. I can safely say that this recipe didn’t live up to Le Jolifou’s exacting standards.

Posole is a Mexican stew, which usually features pork and chiles and always features hominy (confusingly also called posole). This was my first experience with hominy, which are corn kernels that have had the outer hull removed by soaking in an alkaline solution. This is a really cool example of ancient food chemistry. At some point someone decided to boil their corn with a handful of ashes from the fireplace, and found that the corn tasted better and the family was healthier. The treatment makes the corn kernels more digestible, more nutrients become available, and it’s nutritionally complete enough to be a staple food. Without this process people surviving on corn will become malnourished and develop pellagra. Europeans brought maize back from the new world, but didn’t treat it, and pellagra became widespread. I’ve idly wondered what the difference between polenta and grits was for a while, and now I know. Polenta is made from untreated corn meal, while grits are made with treated corn meal, simple, but it wasn’t obvious. If you’re looking to geek out on more food science check out the Wikipedia page on this process, called nixtamalization.

Despite my affection for hominy, this posole wasn’t great. It’s simple to make, just soak pasilla and guajillo chiles in water, then run them through the blender with oregano, salt, cumin seeds, pepper, garlic, tomato, and onion. You then simmer cubed pork shoulder in this sauce for an hour, add canned hominy, and continue to simmer for half an hour more. The stew is served with any combination of radishes, onion, cilantro, lettuce, chiles, lime wedges, and tortillas or tortilla chips.

The sauce has some very nice flavours to it, and I love pork braised with chiles, but the texture wasn’t great. I’m not really sure what happened, but my pork cubes ended up tough and dry, swimming in a thin sauce, with a huge amount of hominy. I would have preferred a thicker chunkier sauce, perhaps leaving the tomato and onion out of the blender, or mashing some of the hominy would have helped to thicken it up. I also would have preferred to shred the pork into the sauce. I found the chunks too big, and not amazingly flavorful. The recipe calls for three 15 oz cans of hominy, which should really be reduced to two. The other recipe I linked calls for 26 cloves of garlic, the version in The Book calls for only one. I’m not sure if I’d up the garlic quite so drastically, but I’d seek out a happy middle. The hominy itself was really interesting, it has a very unique chewy texture, which I liked. I’m not sure I’d really want to eat a whole lot of it at one sitting, it reminded me a bit of the tapioca balls in bubble tea.

As with most stews the posole improved with age. By day three the pork had soaked in more flavour, and softened, and the whole dish was more cohesive. It was perfectly edible, and even enjoyable, but my dining companion’s stellar dinner out had really built up my expectations for this posole, it just couldn’t live up to them.

Categories
Breakfast and Brunch The Book

128. Streusel-Sour Cream Coffee Cakes p.645


Unfortunately there’s no recipe online.

The Book has a deep and abiding affection for streusel-toppings. I suspect that if the cooks at the Gourmet test kitchen leave their batter alone for too long, they’ll find that Ruth Reichl has snuck in and covered it in streusel. I don’t particularly have anything against streusel toppings, they add a nice textural contrast, but they tend to be very sweet. If the underlying baked good didn’t already have 30% more sugar than it needed, that could be a nice addition, but here it struck me as trying to gild the already candied lily.

The recipe starts by blending brown and white sugar with flour, salt, and butter. The streusel topping is made by separating out some of this mixture and working in cinnamon, additional butter, more brown sugar, and chopped pecans. A mixture of sour cream, egg, egg yolk, vanilla, baking soda, and orange zest is incorporated with the remainder of the flour-sugars-butter mixture, then divided up into 18 muffin cups, topped with the streusel, and baked.

There are a lot of things I liked about this recipe, but as is often the case The Book went overboard on the sugar (1 3/4 cups of sugar to 2 1/2 cups of flour). The cakes were rich, dense, and moist, with a soft slightly elastic texture. The orange zest in the cakes was an excellent touch. The topping was double extra sweet, but I really liked the complexity the pecans and molasses in the brown sugar brought to the cakes. I wish that the recipe had less sugar, and more nuts. Keeping the nuts out of the cake batter highlighted them and broke up the uniformity of the muffin. Unfortunately the streusel topping had a habit of falling off. Next time I’d be more careful about pushing the topping down into the batter.

This recipe is found in the Breakfast and Brunch chapter, but these cakes might work better with afternoon coffee, or as a dessert. They were a bit much for breakfast. I brought these over to a pot-luck brunch, to positive reviews, but they didn’t really do it for me. The next day I had one with an unsweetened espresso, and found I liked them much better. The concept and flavours are solid, and the bitter coffee provided some much needed contrast.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

127. Barbecued Chile-Marinated Spareribs p.490

There’s no recipe for this one.

These ribs are dead simple, but they take some forethought. The ribs are simmered in water for an hour, then marinated in sauce of New Mexico chiles, ketchup, garlic, cider vinegar, brown sugar, salt, tequila, vegetable oil, ground cumin, and ground allspice for the next eight hours. Half of the sauce is used for the marinade, a quarter to baste during cooking, and the remaining quarter as a dipping sauce at the table. A little more than an hour before dinner the ribs come out of the fridge and warm to room temperature, then they’re transfered to a grill over low flame for 35 minutes. They’re basted with more of the sauce for the last 15 minutes of grilling time, then they’re rested for a few minutes, and served with the remaining sauce.

The barbecue sauce was simple and delicious. It filled its three roles admirably, it was salty enough to penetrate deeply as a marinate, sweet enough to turn to glowing caramel on the grill, and the uncooked dipping sauce’s raw edge complimented and contrasted the cooked sauce on the ribs. I was very happy to find a barbecue sauce that has a good deal of complexity, and shows some restraint with the sugar. I often find that restaurant ribs are sticky pork candy without much going on beyond slightly spiced ketchup. The bit of the tequila in the dipping sauce was a nice touch, of course bourbon wouldn’t be out of place either.

I’d make the sauce again without hesitation, and slather it on pretty much anything destined for the grill. Unfortunately I don’t think the hour-long simmer did the ribs any favours. They were wonderfully falling apart tender, but I think they gave up a lot of their flavour to the water that went down the drain. I wonder if steaming the ribs, then reducing the steaming liquid and adding it to the sauce would have brought more of the porky goodness to the plate? I preferred the texture and flavour of the meat from the Chinese-Hawaiian “Barbecued” Ribs where they were slowly roasted in the oven. I can’t really see why that technique wouldn’t work with this sauce, and it’s probably worth a test.

Both of those recipes use the word barbecue without actually grilling anything low and slow. I don’t really understand why The Book avoids a long grill over offset heat? Even with my gas grill with few soaked hardwood chips for smoke, I’d bet that basting the ribs with this sauce for a few hours would result in some pretty good barbecue.

I was actually happy with the way these came out, but they could have been even better. The cooking technique literally threw the baby out with the bathwater. They still tasted very nice, but it was primarily the delicious sauce that came through. The pork was there, but not nearly as prominent as it deserved to be.

Categories
Soups The Book

126. Mexican Corn Soup p.87


There’s no online recipe for this one.

I just don’t know about summertime soups. The Book has dozens of cold soups based on fresh sweet fruit and vegetables. I can’t say that they appeal to me very much. In part it’s the dissonance of cold soup that bugs me, but I’m not even a huge fan of hot soups. When I ask myself what I feel like eating, the answer is almost never soup, especially not in August. For a cold soup, this was fine, but I won’t go out of my way to make it again.

You start by sweating garlic, onion, jalapeños, carrot, and celery with cumin, coriander, salt and pepper. Then stock, water, and both corn kernels and cobs are added and simmered. The cobs are discarded, and the soup is puréed in the blender. Once the soup has cooled to room temperature, some whole cooked corn kernels are stirred in along with roasted red bell peppers, cilantro, and cayenne.

A significant amount of effort went into building flavours for this soup, and they were well balanced and subtle, but they faded to the background almost instantly. I picked up the ingredients for this recipe a few days before I got around to making it, and by then the dew-kissed market-fresh corn I’d chosen wasn’t looking as lively as I would have liked. If I’d had really stellar corn maybe the other flavourings’ camouflage act would have been a positive, and I’d be going on about them not getting in the way of the corn ambrosia. As it was my corn could have used a bit of help.

I had leftovers of this soup for a few days, and it was much better on day three than in the beginning. A footnote to the recipe suggests that you can make it up to a day in advance, but I’d ignore that and give it at least two days to come together. We at this soup as our main course with a chunk of baguette and a simple salad. The soup just wasn’t interesting enough to anchor a meal. It might work as a first course, or better yet as an appetizer soup shooter. Those first couple of bites were good, so why not just stop there?

There wasn’t anything spectacular about the soup, but it wasn’t bad either. I used all the leftovers for lunches, instead of letting it moulder in the back of the fridge. It was solidly average. If I made it again I’d add more jalapeño and less cayenne. More of the jalapeño’s fruity complexity would have been welcome, instead of the straightforward cayenne heat. Stirring in a bit of sriracha chili sauce on day two or three improved matters.

Every summer I feel guilty about not eating enough amazing Quebec corn, especially when you can get a dozen ears for a dollar. Making corn soup seems like a great way to use up that summer bounty when you can’t face another ear of corn on the cob. Unfortunately I forget that I’m replacing the problem of the twelve ears of corn staring at me from the vegetable drawer, with five liters of left-over soup.

Categories
Poultry The Book

125. Chicken with Cornmeal Dumplings p.373


The recipe

I had The Book for a while before I started The Project, and this was one of the recipes I used regularly before The Book and I got serious. Making it again emphasized how much The Project has changed my cooking style. The biggest difference is that I actually read the recipe this time around, and it came out much better.

You start by breaking a chicken down into serving sized pieces, browning them, and then simmering them with white wine and shallots ’till the pieces are cooked through. Meanwhile you put together a dumpling dough with flour, cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda, salt, pepper, butter, chives, parsley, and buttermilk. The chicken is moved to the oven, and the juices left in the skillet are fortified with stock, cream, salt, and pepper. Once this gravy is simmering the dumplings are gently dropped in and allowed to cook for about 15 minutes, then it’s time to eat.

This time around the cooking went well, there wasn’t anything too tricky about it. In previous attempts I’ve managed to really mess things up. The biggest lesson I learned is that the cooking vessel the recipe calls for really is important. In the recipe all of this happens in a deep 12 inch heavy skillet, I don’t have one of those (but if Santa got my letter…), so I used to make it in a 5 quart pot. It seemed like a pretty decent substitution at the time, but I was wrong. Getting the dumplings right depends on the depth of liquid they’re simmered in, too deep and they disintegrate, or raft together into one super-dumpling. This time I used a 10 quart oval dutch oven, which has a similar surface area to a 12 inch skillet, and things worked out. The other lesson I’ve learned is the difference between a simmer and boil. Previously I had my gravy boiling away, and the bubbles tore my dumplings to shreds, a gentle simmer with just the occasional bubble reaching the surface is the way to go. I’m kind of amazed that I made this recipe about five times trying to get it right, and I didn’t pick up on what I was doing wrong.

My previous attempts also fell prey to my undiagnosed culinary dyslexia.I constantly mix up shallots and scallions, I have the hardest time keeping them straight. They’re very different, but it’s a coin toss as to which vegetable I’ll imaging when I hear one of those words. I’m embarrassed to say that I have the same problem with elevators and escalators, weird eh? Long simmered scallions turn kind of yellow and gross, I wouldn’t recommend the substitution. Some practice with The Book has made me sensitive to my neurological condition, so now I double check that my shopping list corresponds to the ingredient list.

My standards for what constitutes a successful recipe have also changed over the course of The Project. In the pre-Project days this came out reasonably well a couple of times, and I was quite impressed by it. I still love the dumplings, and I’d be happy to make them again and again, but the chicken is lacking, and the whole dish is bland. I’ve ranted about chicken skin and wet cooking methods several times, and it was just as unappealing here as in every other dish. The chicken is poached in white wine and shallots, which is fine, but the addition of another herb would be nice, maybe thyme, rosemary, or tarragon. The chicken gives up flavour and interest for the sake of the dumplings, and it’s almost a fair trade. The dumplings have an excellent texture and flavour, they pull in loads of chicken flavour, and have a wonderful buttermilk tang. They’re absolutely the highlight of the dish. I’d rather skip the whole chicken making part of this dish, and just make the dumplings in a stock based gravy. The chicken would be better served by being simply grilled, then served along with the dumplings. Doing something about the beige on beige colour pallet would be nice too.

Maybe I’m being a bit unfair. This dish is a Southern classic, but I have no clue what it’s supposed to taste like. I don’t have any reference point, so I’m probably trying to turn this dish into something it was never meant to be. Using a chicken like this allows a little bit of meat to be stretched into a hearty meal, so there are perfectly good reasons for recipes like this to have developed. And, Its blandly fatty simplicity is what comfort food is all about, but it’s not really my thing these days.

Pre-Project me liked this dish because the dumplings are awesome, but also because it’s essentially a one pot dish, it’s quite inexpensive, not too hard, and it makes good leftovers. Present day me doesn’t mind working a little harder, spending a little more, or using a few more dishes (much to my dining companion’s chagrin) for a better dish. I agree with my former self about the dumplings though.

Categories
Pies, Tarts, and Pastries The Book

124. Berry Tart with Mascarpone Cream p.777


The recipe

I was impressed with this tart, it’s very simple, beautiful, and delicious. I’m not fond of precious pastry bag tricks, or marzipan statuary on my desserts. I prefer the natural good looks of fruit, or decoration that’s an extension of the dessert making process. I tend to bake cakes, dust them with icing sugar, and call it a day. In large part this is because I’m not fond of icing. I’ll often eat the cake out from around the icing if it’s too sweet. I’m OK with whipped cream based icings, and some butter creams, but super-sugared toppings like penuche just aren’t my thing. The beauty of a summer tart is the casual elegance, it’s effortlessly gorgeous, and usually looks and tastes better than a tortuously composed winter-time confection.

The recipe was very simple. It starts with Sweet Pastry Dough, rolled out between sheets of wax paper, and baked with pie weights. It’s filled with a whipped mixture of mascarpone, cream, and sugar. It’s then topped with strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries which have been coated with marmalade and berry liqueur. As I mentioned in the write-up for the dough, I had some problems getting it to roll nicely, but it was still quite tasty. The mascarpone cream was excellent, it added body and richness with a very subtle tang, and not too much sweetness. The berries were allowed to carry the dish, they provided the bulk of the sweetness, a nice boozy accent, and all of the visual appeal.

My only complaint with this recipe are the instructions for the berries. They’re put in a bowl, covered with melted marmalade and liqueur, and gently stirred together. I did my absolute best to stir very very gently, but the delicate blackberries and raspberries suffered for it. Next time I’d put the berries on the tart and drizzle them with the glaze. You might not get as thorough a coating as you’d like, but it’s a real shame to damage perfect summer fresh berries. Incidentally, the recipe calls for a dark berry liqueur like blueberry, blackberry, or creme de cassis. I was convinced we had creme de cassis the back of the liquor cabinet somewhere, but it turns out that belonged to an old roommate. I used Grand Marnier instead, and it was delicious. No doubt Grand Marnier is sweet, but it’s got a much more pronounced Cognac edge than many other fruity liqueurs. I welcomed that firey addition to the tart, while a more syrupy liqueur might have pushed it in the wrong direction.

I was extremely happy with this dish, it was simple, delicious, and seasonal. It hinges on amazing fresh berries, I don’t think a winter time replication with frozen fruit would work out. I’m watching giant fluffy snowflakes drifting down outside my window right now, and it’s making me long for the amazing bounty of fruit I got to enjoy in August. This is a quintessential summer tart, a thousand variations are possible, but I could happily stick with this version for the rest of my life too.

Categories
Pies, Tarts, and Pastries The Book

123. Sweet Pastry Dough p.791


The recipe

I should state at the outset that I’m a pastry neophyte. Before I started The Project, I think I’d made two pies in my life. Sure, I baked stuff in pie shells, but I always picked up the Tenderflake pre-made ones, and figured it was good enough. I don’t really have a knack for pastry, but I’m working on it. This is the inaugural entry for the Pies, Tarts, and Pastries chapter of The Book, so hopefully my pastry skills will improve as I work my way through it.

This pie dough is a sweetened and butter based. It gets used in all sorts of other recipes in The Book. I definitely prefer a sweetened dough for dessert pies and tarts. My mother is a rolling pin virtuoso whose pies always turn out perfectly, but she uses the same lard based dough for all her recipes. We have tourtière (a spiced meat pie) every Christmas, which I adore. I particularly like the way the crust is infused with the meaty filling’s flavour. However, when summer comes around and she starts baking up fruit pies using the same dough, I can’t help but imagining the taste of the meat filling along with the crust. Tourtière innards and strawberries aren’t destined to be the next great taste sensation. She recently started adding sugar to her dough for sweet pies, and it made a world of difference. Somehow a little sugar gets rid of the yuletide association, and the pies become pure summer.

The ingredients and method for this dough are pretty standard, combine flour, sugar, and salt, then blend butter in until you’ve got pea sized lumps in a sandy mixture. Then egg yolk and a bit of water are incorporated, until the dough barely holds together. The dough is then divided up, smeared once with your palm, and refrigerated for an hour.

I had some trouble with rolling this dough out. I’ve made it twice, the photo above is the most recent attempt. You can see the scraps to the left, which were probably 40% of the pie dough. I had a really tough time getting it to roll out evenly, and small cracks at the edges developed into big fissures as I was rolling. It was actually fairly easy to work with, and I think my problems were a matter of technique rather than the recipe. The first time I made it was much more of a fiasco though. I made it in late August, on a day with 95% humidity, and it didn’t go so well. Here’s a photo of the crust after baking. 123_sweet_pastry_dough_p791_bad_attempt.jpgYou can see that I had to do a lot of patching before I even got the dough into the oven, and small cracks I’d missed developed into chasms once baked.

The flavour of the dough is excellent, but the texture isn’t ideal. Butter doughs are usually tender, but not flaky. Using a mixture of lard or shortening with butter should give a flavourful dough with great texture. The Book’s Basic Pastry Dough takes this approach (without sugar), and I’m looking forward to trying it. This dough was perfectly fine, it tasted good, and the texture was totally acceptable, but I don’t think it’s the definitive sweet pastry dough. Perhaps as I make and remake it for all the recipes that call for it I’ll get the technique down. For now it’s very serviceable, and I’m content to keep using it.