Tag: kosher salt

Categories
The Book Vegetables

187. Roasted Spiced Sweet Potatoes p.584

The recipe

I served these sweet potatoes along with Lillie’s North Carolina Chopped Barbecue , and they were a lovely accompaniment. I should have though about the colour palate of our dinner before pairing sweet potatoes and barbecue, the plate was a little orange. You may eat with your eyes first, but the important bit is what happens when you put it in your mouth. On that score these potatoes did very well.

The Good: These sweet potatoes are delicious, simple, and in most other contexts very good looking. A child could make them, you just cut sweet potatoes into wedges, toss with ground coriander, fennel, oregano, red pepper flakes, kosher salt, and oil, and roast for 40ish minutes. It’s an unusual combination of spices, but they worked unexpectedly well together.

The Bad: Wedges are a popular food shape because they’re easy to cut, but they cook very unevenly. The thin edges of the sweet potatoes started to dry out before the interiors fully cooked. This was less of a problem with smaller sweet potatoes, but with any bigger onces I’d try a more uniform shape. I’d consider using a baking sheet you don’t like much for this dish because there was a lot of burned on spices and oil that were difficult to get off.

The Verdict: This recipe was a winner, it was simple, delicious, and took less than ten minutes of my time. Roasted sweet potatoes are always a treat, I love how the exterior puffs up and blisters while the interior melts into a decadent mash. The spice mixture was very present, but didn’t overwhelm the natural goodness of the sweet potatoes. These would be good any time of the year, but I think they’d be exceptional as part of a not-so-traditional Thanksgiving. My Dad loves to scandalize the family by messing with classic Thanksgiving dishes, and this recipe would really fit the bill.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

183. Georgian Pork Stew p.485


The recipe

The Georgian Salsa called ajika, which I blogged about last time totally blew me away. This pork stew uses a lot of the same flavours, and integrates the ajika as an important ingredient, so predictably, I like it a lot. The stew uses some unusual ingredients including summer savory, corriander seeds, fenugreek, and dried marigolds, but nothing I had too much trouble finding.

I really like it when The Book pushes my limits and asks me to try new and different things, but I simultaneously curse The Book for sending me running all over the city trying to find exotic components, and damn them for not using the unusual ingredients that I have easy access to in their recipes. They have to draw a fine line between authenticity and simplicity in designing these recipes, and no matter where they make their stand someone is going to be upset. In general I’ve got to give them credit for striking a fairly good balance, or at least what seems like a good balance to someone living in a major metropolitan centre with easy access to a specialty shops. I imagine trying to do this project in Smalltown USA with nothing but a Megamart at your disposal would be a challenge. From my perspective getting to crush up flowers and put them in my dinner was good fun, but it might be a deal breaking frustration for other cooks out there.

The method for this stew is a little bit unusual. You begin by adding cubed and seasoned pork shoulder to a covered pot without any oil, then turning the heat to high and letting the pork steam for 10 minutes, only stirring it once. I read that instruction about five times because it sounded so unsual, but it worked, the pork released juices and steamed instead of burning or sticking as I feared it would. After 10 minutes the lid is removed and the pork juices are allowed to evaporate, still over high heat. Once the liquid is gone, oil is added and the meat is sautéed until well browned. While that’s going on you make a paste of garlic, summer savory, and salt, which is added to the browned meat and cooked for a minute. You then grind corriander and fenugreek and add them along with chopped red onion, and marigold and cook for a few minutes. A cup of water is added, and stew is braised for an hour. Once the meat is tender fresh cilantro, Georgian salsa, and pepper are stirred in. The stew is served with more of the ajika on the side, and with pomegranite seeds sprinkled on top (which I never got around to).

I don’t think the steam-before-you-sear technique did good things to my pork. I can see this sort of technique working well with a really fatty and tough piece of pork shoulder, but my relatively lean supermarket pork didn’t survive the process very well. The meat gives up a lot of it’s moisture, which evaporates before the meat is browned. The expectation is that the moisture would re-penetrate the meat during braising, and that there would be enough fat in the meat to keep it moist. That didn’t happen for me, the meat gave up it’s moisture, and never really got it back. Nothing is quite as frustrating as a dish that simmered for hours, but somehow ends up dry.

Other than that fairly major complaint the dish was excellent. The flavours were absolutely spot on. The ajika is amazing, and the additional herbs really brought the dish home. The sauce was irresistible, I’m willing to admit that I went at the sauce with a spoon while pretending to put it away in the fridge. I’m convinced that a better piece of pork would have allowed this technique to work, and deliver succulent meat along with the incredible sauce. If you’re using bog-standard grocery store pork I’d recommend skipping the steaming step, browning and braising should be sufficient to tenderise the meat without driving all the moisture out.

Had the pork worked out this would be a no brainer for a five star rating. Dry pork is a fairly major flaw, so I should penalize it heavily, but all said and done I still really enjoyed this meal, and can’t bear to give it less than a

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

113. Rosemary Focaccia p.606


The recipe is the same as this one, but linked recipe forgets to list the water and salt for the dough in the ingredient list (they are in the recipe description).

I should start off by saying that this was absolutely delicious. It didn’t rely on rare ingredients or novel taste experiences to get there. It went with the straightforward combination of fresh baked bread, so much olive oil that drizzling is not an option, and enough salt to make it crunchy. This is the same tried and true combination that keeps the deep-dish pizza places of the world in business. You know that this is a Gourmet recipe and not a special from Pizza Hut because the focaccia doesn’t have a ring of cheese baked into the crust.

The recipe starts with a simple yeast dough, with some olive oil added in. It’s mostly kneaded in a stand mixer, then finished kneading by hand. Once the dough is coated in more oil and it’s been left to rise for 1 1/2 hours, it’s pressed into a baking sheet, covered with plastic wrap, and allowed a second rise. Obviously this second rise requires the addition of more oil, but this time it’s used to lubricate the baking sheet and plastic wrap. After the second rise it’s time for, you guessed it, more oil. This time the oil is mixed with chopped rosemary, and poured over the bread. There is so much oil at this point that the recipe directs you to make indentations in the bread for the oil to pool. Then the bread is sprinkled with sea salt, and baked at 425 ’till it’s golden. When it’s ready the bread needs to be inverted to get it out of the baking sheet. I’d do this over some paper towel because even the absorbent power of bread is overwhelmed by the amount of oil in this dish.

The focaccia was excellent, the bread was moist, with some chewiness, but a nice crumb and texture. The crust, both top and bottom, were wonderfully golden. The rosemary was fantastic, and really allowed to shine as the sole aromatic. If you serve this to friends they’ll beg you for the recipe, don’t give it to them. It would be like telling a kid about Santa. The bread doesn’t hold up well overnight. It’s not great cold, microwaving killed everything good about it, and rewarming in the oven didn’t to it justice. It’s best to get a crowd together and polish the whole thing off in one go.

The recipe uses a truly unconscionable amount of olive oil. The ingredient list calls for just under 1/2 a cup (7 tablespoons) of oil, to 5 cups of flour. But that doesn’t count the “generous” lubrication of the dough ball during the fist rise, or the baking sheet and plastic wrap during the second. I suspect the total is closer to 3/4 of a cup. That’s 1400 calories at 120 cal/tablespoon. We had the focaccia along with yesterday’s kale and chroizo soup for dinner, and certainly didn’t feel like we’d eaten lightly.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

95. Rye Crispbread Crackers with Pepper-Dill Crème Fraîche and Smoked Salmon p.38

The recipe

This is a funny recipe, it’s a play on the old standby of lox and cream cheese on pumpernickel. In this version you bake your own crackers, use dill infused crème fraîche, and dress them up with fresh dill and orange zest. I’ve never made crackers before, and my first experience suggests it’s exactly as pointless an activity as it seems. The recipe waxes on about how great the crackers are, and how they really make the dish. If that’s the case why is this recipe in the hors d’oeuvres section? They have a perfectly good Breads and Crackers section.

The crackers are made with a yeast dough using both white and rye flour, kosher salt, and toasted caraway seeds. The dough is allowed to rise, rolled into thin sheets, and allowed a brief second rise before baking. The final texture was unusual. It wasn’t cracker crisp, it wasn’t bready soft, it was crunchy on the outside, and tough and chewy on the inside. I wasn’t impressed with the final texture at all, and I actually had to gnaw through a couple of them. My sister, who was appalled at the amount of time, effort, energy, and cash recipes from The Book seem to require, quite liked the crackers. She felt that if you were going to go to the bother of making your own, at the very least they should be softer than boxed crackers. I felt that if they’re called rye crispbread crackers the least they could do was to be crisp. The flavour was very nice, the caraway seeds added a lot, but frankly these things just weren’t worth it.

The crème fraîche layer had a structural issue. The crème was mixed with chopped dill, salt, and pepper, then added to the crackers. Unfortunately, crème fraîche is barely gelled when it’s scooped out of the container. Stirring in the other ingredients moved it back to the liquid side of things. It was prone to running off the crackers, and onto people’s laps. Not exactly ideal in a finger food. Once again the flavour was good, but the texture was off. Maybe a combination of crème fraîche and sour cream, or cream cheese would have provided the richness and flavour, while staying where I put it.

The flavours in the dish were right on. The crackers were delicious, rye and carraway are old friends. The dill and crème fraîche played well with the smoked salmon, and the orange zest set the whole thing off, making it lighter and brighter, and cutting some of the oiliness of the fish and richness of the crème. I also thought these appetizers looked great, despite the odd dribble of crème fraîche. Unfortunately the texture of the crackers left a lot to be desired, every grocery store has much better substitutes for hardly any money and no effort. The rest of the dish was pretty standard fare, the crackers were the make or break aspect of the dish. In this case they didn’t break easily enough.