Category: Grains and Beans

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Grains and Beans The Book

199. Foolproof Long-Grain Rice p.254

The recipe

Calling this a recipe is a bit of a stretch. It’s one step away from reading “follow package directions”. The ingredients are salt, long-grain white rice, and water. Normally I cook rice by boiling salted water, then adding rice, letting it come back to a boil, then reducing the heat to low and letting it steam for 20 minutes, then a 5 minute rest, off the heat, before serving. The only twist this recipe adds is that after adding the rice you let it boil for a few minutes until steam holes form in the surface, and the top looks dry. It then gets 15 minutes over lowest heat, and a 5 minute rest.

The Book claims to provide every recipe you’ll ever need, and I guess a basic rice recipe is important. The book doesn’t include recipes for plain cooked pasta, or boiled potatoes, but I know enough people who claim not to be able to cook rice that this is probably worthwhile.

The Good: This recipe produces properly cooked rice. The grains were fluffy and separate, soft with a little bit of bite left to them. It’s a simple thing, but poorly cooked rice can be a real disappointment.

The Bad: This technique is ever so slightly more complicated than the dump-the-rice-in-the-boiling-water-and-wait-20-minutes strategy, and I’m not sure the results are any different. Boiling until steam holes appear guarantees that the ratio of water to rice is correct, and if you’re worried about getting the rice just right by all means do this, but I get generally good results with my standard method.

The Verdict: My rice palate is pretty poor, to me, this rice was just as good as what I get by following the instructions on the package. However, the slim percentage of the population who eat rice often enough to have opinions about it, but don’t have a rice cooker, might get some added benefit from this technique.

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Grains and Beans The Book

181. Persian Rice with Pistachios and Dill p.258


The recipe

My parents who spent the last two years in India, have become rice snobs. I don’t know much about rice, or think too much about it. To me it’s a side dish, serviceable, and functional, but not really worthy of notice. My parents however are attuned to the subtle differences in texture, flavour, and aroma that distinguish great rice from the mediocre. I used the same basmati I always do for this dish (I bought a big burlap sack long ago, and I’m still working my way through it) but it came out much better than I could possibly have imagined. This rice was shockingly good, good enough to get me to rethink my whole position on rice.

In this dish basmati is rinsed in multiple changes of water, and boiled uncovered for a few minutes. Then things get weird. The rice is strained and allowed to drain while butter is melted in the bottom of the pot. The rice then goes back into the pot with alternating layers of chopped pistachios and fresh dill. You then poke holes in the layers of rice with with the back of a wooden spoon (to let steam move about?), and let it steam covered both with a kitchen towel and a lid for 30-35 minutes over moderately low heat. You then let it stand for a further half-hour, and serve.

This procedure builts up a crispy and deeply browned crust on the bottom called the tah-dig. The tah-dig is supposed to form a solid layer on the bottom of the pot, which you’re able to get out whole, and then break up and serve on top of the rice. The tah-dig is the most prized part of this dish, so everyone should be allotted his fair share. My tah-dig didn’t stay together, and it just crumbled in with the rest of the rice, so I mixed it in thouroughly to make sure everyone got some.

This rice is just absolutely amazing. It was perfectly cooked, I worried it would be overdone with such a long cooking time, but each grain was whole, and just slightly toothsome. The pistachio and dill flavours permeated the rice, but it was quite a subtle effect, and a delicious one. The grains in the tah-dig were cooked directly in butter, so they were about as overwhelmingly magnificent as you’d expect, with the very deep nuttiness of both browned butter, and roasted rice. I’m having trouble finding words to express how much I liked this rice, it’s really easy to make, and you owe it to yourself to try it.

I served the rice with a spicy Georgian stew on top, which was a mistake. The stew was excellent, and the flavours were complimentary, but this rice deserves to be eaten on it’s own. I can only imagine how wonderful this rice would be with grilled or poached salmon. This is far and away the best rice I have ever had, and I just can’t wait to make it again. It has absolutely earned its five mushroom rating.

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Grains and Beans The Book

111. Wild Rice and Toasted Almond Pilaf p.262

The recipe

I messed this dish up quite badly, so badly I’m not sure it’s fair to count it. The main ingredient is 2 cups of wild rice, without further specification. I’m not a big rice eater, and I’d never cooked wild rice before. I went to the health food store and got two cups of the stuff in the bin labeled wild rice (riz sauvage). What I got was a mixture of rices, including wild. The wild rice grains are the long dark ones in the picture above, and the recipe should have been made entirely of those grains.

The rice is added to a pot of onions sautéed in olive oil, and left to toast for a few minutes. You then add chicken stock and water and simmer it for 1 – 1 1/4 hours. When the rice is ready you stir in some sliced almonds toasted with butter, as well as some salt and pepper. The flavours were pretty good here, nice standard pilaf fare. I like pilaf a lot, and make it often. I usually add mushrooms and diced red pepper, but the pilaf base was solid and tasty. The real problem was the rice. I followed the wild rice instructions with my non-wild rice mixutre and when I checked it after 45 minutes it had turned to gooey gummy mush. It was rice pilaf pudding. That’s to be expected given that I blatantly ignored the instructions, but I’ve decided to include the recipe as an honest mistake rather than a re-do. There are potentially many products labeled wild rice out there, and The Book didn’t help me to clarify the issue. It looks like Teena at the other gourmet project also used a wild rice mix (although she knew what she was doing and cooked it for less time) so I’m not alone in this.

If I’d cooked things properly it would have been a fairly tasty side. It quite subtly flavoured as it was, and the wild rice has a much more pronounced flavour than the other types. I worry that the flavour of the wild rice might have overwhelmed the dish, but I’m not really in a position to make that judgment. My version was mushy and bad, but that’s probably not the recipe’s fault.

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Grains and Beans The Book

101. Cassoulet de Canard p.273


The recipe

This is The Book’s definitive and official cassoulet recipe. I wrote about the Easy Cassoulet recipe a couple of months ago, which skipped steps and cut corners, but still resulted in a very delicious dinner. This adaptation of Julia’s from Mastering the Art of French Cooking takes two days, and goes out of it’s way to find traditional steps for you to follow.

On the first day you soak the beans. But you don’ just soak them. You bring them to a boil and let them sit for 50 minutes. Then you bring them back to a boil, with a bouquet garni, onions, salt, and pork rind you spent the preceding 50 minutes ritualistically rinsing, boiling, and slicing. Then it’s simmer and skim for the next 1 1/4 hours. The beans are then left to cool overnight.

Day one’s activities continue with the skinning, defatting, and shredding of the duck legs, the browning of mutton (I used veal) bones in a whole cup of goose fat, and the caramelizing of onions in that goose fat. The duck, the bones, the onions, and let us not forget the fat are brought to a simmer with bay leaves, stock, tomatoes, garlic, and white wine. After an hour and half on the stove it’s left to cool overnight.

Day two is fairly straightforward. You brown and slice some sausage, and remove the inedible bits from the now cold beans, and the duck mixture. Then the cassoulet is assembled in alternating layers of beans and meat, then topped with bread crumbs and parsley. The recipe calls for a 10 quart enameled cast iron pot, but the biggest one I could get my hands on was 7 3/4 quarts. I managed to get almost everything into the smaller pot, but the full sized pot would have been better. The cassoulet is brought to a simmer on the stovetop, the baked for about an hour until the juices are bubbling up through the crust.

There were a lot of steps, a lot of tricky to source ingredients, and some strange cooking instructions here. It resulted in a rather delicious cassoulet though. I cheated in more than a few places, and messed up in a few others, so I’m not sure the dish came out exactly as it did in The Book’s test kitchens. For the record I had a mix up with the bouquet garni and ended up putting in 15 cloves instead of 5, which really changed the flavour of the beans. I didn’t peel the tomatoes, because I hate peeling tomatoes and I don’t find it’s really worth the effort. I didn’t make beef stock, and I did used the specifically forbidden canned variety. I used a cured garlic kielbasa instead of the fresh garlic sausage called for. I also couldn’t stand the idea of serving the dish with all that goose fat in there, so I removed most of the fat that floated to the top of the meat pot. It was still decidedly rich and fatty, but not nearly as oily as the recipe intended.

That is a long list of cheats, normally I do my best to stick to the recipe as closely as possible, but this time I just wasn’t in the cards. I made the recipe for The Boys on one of our weekend getaways, and I was cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen, with only the equipment I’d thought to bring with me (they don’t cook much, so the facilities are minimal). I couldn’t find some ingredients, some of the steps I just didn’t have time for, and there were a couple of honest mistakes thrown in for good measure. I think the final dish was pretty close to what the original intended though.

In the end the cassoulet tasted great. It was similar to the easy cassoulet, with the duck and sausage flavours predominating. However, the beans in this version were really worth all the effort. They were tender with a bit of bite left to them, and packed with flavour. Unfortunately a lot of that flavour was cloves, but the smoky bacon, and pork belly were there, with the thyme and onions adding a nice backdrop.

The breadcrumb crust was a bit of a letdown. The easy cassoulet had an amazing crust, made by turning the duck skin into cracklings, and toasting the bread crumbs in some of the duck fat and garlic. That topping was just out of this world, whereas the topping on this dish is just there to absorb some liquid. The recipe has you throw away the confit duck skin and its fat, but then add in a whole whack of goose fat. I really didn’t understand the rationale, it seems like an obvious missed opportunity.

This dish was labour intensive, and I don’t think it would have been nearly as much fun without the help of my co-chef Al. Whenever it’s time to make an excessively fatty fat fat dish, I can count on him. I should also thank the other boys for washing the seeminly endless sink-fulls of goose fat coated dishes this produced. Cassoulet is an absolute indulgence, and indulging is much more fun with friends, especially if you’ve had to work for your reward.

I feel that this recipe is one I’ll make again and again, until I get it just right. My first attempt tasted about as good as the Easy Cassoulet, but I’m sure that with practice this recipe has the potential to blow the easy version out of the water. It’s the kind of dish that people perfect and refine over lifetimes, to get just the right texture in the beans, the perfect amount of bacon flavour, the ideal thickened but still runny texture in the juices. Next time I’ll be much better prepared for some of the more obtuse steps, and counterintuitive instructions. I can see some improvements I’d like to make, but overall it was a delicious, and faithful rendition of a very classic dish.

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Grains and Beans The Book

100. Creamy Parmesan Polenta p.265

No recipe for this one, but the proportions are the same as the Basic Polenta recipe, with butter and Parmigiano-Reggiano stirred in at the end.

I’m not really clear on why this recipe needed to be a recipe at all, it could easily have been some optional additions at the bottom of the Basic Polenta recipe. The recipes are identical, except that this one only makes 4 cups, whereas the basic recipe makes 10.

I love that basic polenta recipe, it works flawlessly and doesn’t take much effort. The addition of a bit of butter in this version is a definite improvement. It helps to smooth the polenta out, and amp up the creamy texture. This recipe calls for a lot of cheese, the proportions are 3 cups water, 3/4 cup polenta, and 1 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. It’s a rare day that I say something had too much cheese in it, but honestly you could have cut it in half. I don’t think the second half cup did much to make the dish taste cheesier, it just added a lot of salt. I really like a bit of cheese stirred into my polenta, but this was excessive.

I served this polenta along with the Chinese-Hawaiian ribs from yesterday. They’re both variations on southern classics, what’s better than barbecued ribs and grits? unfortunately both dishes were different enough from the original I was hoping to emulate that they didn’t go particularly well together. The polenta was intensely salty, and the ribs were overwhelmingly salty and sweet. Together they were too much. I think serving this polenta alongside a more mildly flavoured side, perhaps some stewed vegetables, or a pot-roast, would have showed it off to better advantage.

After a night in the fridge the polenta firmed up and set beautifully. I was able to cut the leftovers into a few slices, and crisp them up in a skillet. The outsides of the slices turned a deep brown and formed a crunchy lattice of melted Parmesan. The centre regained all the creamy runniness of the night before. We had them with poached eggs, fresh fruit, and a macchiato. I couldn’t have asked for a nicer weekend breakfast. This second application showed off how good this dish could really be. It just goes to show that making a delicious dish isn’t enough, pairing your foods correctly is just as important.

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Grains and Beans The Book

91. Smoky Black Beans p.267

The recipe

I was happy to find this recipe in The Book. I make my own version often enough because it requires no though, hardly any effort, and costs pennies per serving. I am not a great planner, and I rarely have the wherewithal to think through tomorrow’s dinner and get beans soaking the night before. The Book is full of overnight soaks, chills, freezes, and rises, which is one of the challenges of this project for me. Thankfully this recipe involves absolutely none of that. It uses canned beans, which are probably my favorite kitchen shortcut of all time. Sure they’re 15 times more expensive than soaking your own, but they still only cost 89 cents a can.

The ingredient list is all pantry staples, and the instructions pretty much come down to “simmer all the stuff together”. First you soften an onion in a bit of olive oil, then add some chopped chipotle, two cans of beans, water, orange juice, and a bit of salt. Break down the beans a bit with a potato masher, and let it simmer ’till everything thickens up nicely.

This is pretty much exactly my version of the dish, I usually add beer instead of water, and I hadn’t used the orange juice before. I like the dish mostly because I like the chipotles (I’ve written quite enough chipotle love poetry in the last few weeks, I’ll spare you any more), the beans are an ideal vehicle for chipotle flavours, and pretty much every savory dish starts with sautéed onion, so why not this one? The orange juice was a really good addition the sweetness and mild acidity complimented the chipotles perfectly.

I used these beans as a burrito filling, but they’d be equally good as a stand alone supper if you mixed in some left over pork, maybe topped with a bit of cheese and popped under the broiler. This dish was easy, versatile, forgiving, economical, and delicious. It satisfies a craving for Mexican without spending hours in the kitchen. If you happen to live in a part of the world with a taqueria on every corner, by all means go there. But, for me finding decent Mexican is a challenge. On nights when that’s just not a challenge I’m up for, this recipe is there for me.

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Grains and Beans The Book

80. Broiled Polenta with Tomato Sauce p.266

The recipe

This recipe uses The Book’s Basic Polenta recipe as it’s main ingredient. The basic polenta is a great no-fail staple recipe. Here it’s dressed up by stirring in some cheese, putting it under the broiler, and topping with a very simple tomato sauce.

I served this as part of a vegetarian dinner. It was nicely substantial, and made a good centerpiece for my menu. Very often polenta is served straight from the pot, so that it’s thick but still runny, which highlights the risotto like creamless creaminess. Here the polenta is poured into a baking dish and allowed to cool and set up before it goes under the broiler. This gives it a completely different texture, it ends up gelled and reminiscent of a rice or bread pudding. In this application it seems much more substantial, which is a better base for a sauce. Putting a sauce on a custardy plate of fresh polenta might be a little unidimensional on the texture front.

The recipe calls for fontina to be stirred into the hot polenta. I don’t think I’ve ever used or tasted fontina, and I didn’t use it here. I substituted a mixture of mozzarella and cheddar, and called it good enough. It browned up nicely, and melted seamlessly into the polenta, so it seems like a fair substitution to me.

The tomato sauce was extremely simple, perhaps too simple. The sauce is nothing but softened onions, a bit of garlic, a can of tomatoes, salt, pepper, and a pointless dash of parsley. I’m writing this in August when the local tomato crop is at it’s peak, and it seems like the less you do to them the better everything ends up. I made this sauce in April, using canned tomatoes, when charms of a minimalist sauce aren’t quite as beguiling. I’ve got nothing against canned tomatoes, they’re much more flavorful than the mealy, flavourless, perfectly red, imported California tomatoes we get in April. But, they can’t compare to the hight of summer’s flavour. If you’re going to do a slow cooked sauce based on canned tomatoes I think a bit of flavouring is important. I would definitely have added a bay leaf to the sauce, and thyme or oregano wouldn’t have hurt anything at all, a splash of vodka would bring out those flavourful alcohol soluble compounds in the tomatoes, and a hint of fire from a chile or red pepper flakes wouldn’t have been unwelcome. Once the sauce was finished I tasted it and stirred in some fresh rosemary, which really improved things.

This dish was fine, but a better concept than execution. It started with a really excellent polenta base, but didn’t do enough to it. The addition of cheese and time under the broiler added great flavour and texture, but the lackluster sauce was at best a missed opportunity, and at worst dragged the dish down. There’s a huge amount of room to play and experiment with a dish like this. It’s rare that I accuse The Book of being too simple, or lacking in obscure ingredients, but this is one of those times.

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Grains and Beans The Book

68. Easy Cassoulet p.272

No recipe for this one.

Easy indeed. I’ve made both of the cassoulet recipes in the book now. This is the easy version which can be prepared in 4 hours, plus soaking time for beans. The more authentic version takes 2 days. Both were delicious, and the differences between them were pretty subtle. It’s nice to know that you can get pretty much the full effect of the dish in 1/12th the time.

In more traditional versions lots of effort goes into getting flavour into the beans. They’re soaked then simmered with aromatics, meats, and browned bones then allowed to sit overnight. All of this works to pack as much taste into the beans as possible. It’s a bit of pain, but it does get the flavours in there. In contrast, this recipe soaks the beans without any added flavouring, then quickly simmers them a bouquet garni, tomato paste, and garlic. The beans are not quite as tasty, but still delicious. In this version browned sausage and shredded duck confit are added to the beans. The dish is then covered with a garlic laden topping which uses the duck fat to make make cracklings, and toast bread crumbs. Then the whole things goes into a 350 degree oven until it’s bubbling merrily.

In this versions the beans are not even close to being the star of the show. They’re functional, they soak up a lot of the other flavours, but they’re more or less just there. In the more elaborate version from The Book the beans were a much more central player. The quality of the duck confit and sausage is what will make or break the dish for you. Spare no expense, and travel great distances to find a really good cooked garlic pork sausage. As far as I know the best garlic Keilbasa in Montreal is to be found at Euro Deli (St. Viateur and St. Urbain next to the church). I picked up the duck legs at a little butcher shop on Van Horne (Boucherie France – Canada, 1142 rue Van Horne). She does a brisk business in duck confit, and cassoulet. You can also go enjoy the selection of Nicole Kidman photos she has taped to her fridge. As long as the duck and sausage are up to snuff this will be a no fail recipe.

The bread-crumb topping is hugely flavourful, and was everyone’s favorite part. The cracklings are made by tearing the duck skin into strips and then cooking it with any duck fat that was scraped off the legs. My cracklings never really crisped up, but they were still completely delicious. The bread crumbs toasted in duck fat are absolutely out of this world. Your cardiologist will hate me for recommending this to you, but the topping absolutely made the dish. Because the bread crumbs are so central to the dish, it would be nice to use a top quality baguette if at all possible.

The duck is torn into chunks in this recipe. Frequently the duck legs are left whole and then served on top of the beans, which makes for a dramatic presentation. The tearing strategy worked out well though, more surface area = more delectable duck flavour permeating the casserole.

I served this cassoulet to my brother and his girlfriend. Everyone really enjoyed themselves and the dish. It was rich, hearty, and satisfying. I liked that this version managed to simplify a classic without asking for unreasonable compromises in taste. I think a lot of people avoid making cassoulet at home because it requires so many obscure ingredients, and a fair bit of planning. This version makes it much more accessible, and still results in a delicious dish.

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Grains and Beans The Book

47. Cuban Black-Beans p.267

No recipe for this one.

These beans were fine, completely middle of the road fine. They’re pretty standard soaked black beans with a bit of bacon, green pepper, cider vinegar, and a bay leaf added. The effect of these added flavours was very subtle, so subtle you might not notice them at all. I tried them again a couple of days later, and the flavours were a bit more pronounced, but they could still slip under the radar.

That said, beans aren’t really meant to be the star of the show most of the time, and these were a perfectly good accompaniment to the pork tenderloin I served them with. They had a fairly good texture, with a bit of resistance left to them. Some of the beans broke down and thickened the cooking liquid. They might have been better if they ended up with a little more liquid, but I didn’t want to add water right at the end.

I know nothing about Cuban food, but I certainly wouldn’t have guessed Cuban if you’d asked me to guess the origin of the recipe. There aren’t a heck of a lot of Cuban restaurants around here, so I don’t have an opportunity to compare this to any gold standard. If you’re looking for a straightforward black bean recipe that won’t get in the way of anything else you’re serving you could certainly do much worse than these beans. I wouldn’t expect anyone to write home about them though.

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Grains and Beans The Book

36. Basic Polenta p.264

the recipe

The linked recipe differs from The Books version in the cooking directions. The linked version would have us standing there stirring the polenta for 40 minutes, which is enough to get me to give up on polenta forever. Fortunately The Book’s version is kinder, we’re only asked to stir 1 minute out of every 10 for 40 minutes, leaving it covered when it’s not being stirred.

This isn’t the flashiest polenta in the world, but as the title implies it’s a very solid basic. Restaurant polenta (and grits for that matter) are often an excuse to hide half a pound of butter and a giant brick of parmigiano-reggiano in an unassuming package. All that’s in this basic version is water, cornmeal, and salt. As you might expect the earthy corn flavour is prominent. It’s not as delicious as the dressed up versions, but your waistline will thank you. Because there’s so little in there it’s also very neutrally flavoured, and makes an excellent base for sauces and gravies. I recently served braised chipotle pork-hocks on a bed of this polenta, and I couldn’t have asked for a better combination.

The most important thing about a “basic” recipe is that it work flawlessly. This is a rock solid method. I’ve made whole batches, half batches, and quarter batches, without changing the method at all. It comes out perfectly every time, and making it doesn’t take up too much of mine.