I follow Michael Ruhlman on Twitter, and recently noticed that many of his retweets contained the #charcutepalooza hashtag. A quick search turned up this page, which explains that Charcutepalooza is a year-long series of monthly challenges in which a different technique from Ruhlman’s Charcuterie is used. Although I had already missed the January and February challenges – duck prosciutto and bacon – I asked to be included as a participant, based on my prior efforts with the same duck prosciutto, bacon, and guanciale.
Yesterday I heard back from Cathy Barrow, one of the co-creators of the challenge:
Great that you’ve made these items already! Of course, we’re hoping you’ll make them again, and then share the recipes for using the charcuterie. Check out all the Ruhls here: http://www.mrswheelbarrow.com/charcutepalooza/the-ruhls-2/. Thanks for joining the meatwagon!
So I’m in, and preparing for the March challenge, which is brining a brisket to make corned beef. It shouldn’t be difficult, and it will be ready in time for St. Patrick’s Day. I’m still coming to grips with having to make more bacon, prosciutto, and guanciale, but somehow I think I’ll survive.
Be sure to check out the site; it’s listed in my blogroll (to the right). And if you think you’re up for it, try out a challenge of two. I’ll report back on March 15th.
I don’t go through winter vegetables as quickly as I do summer fare, so I can usually wait out bad weekend weather before braving the winter farmer’s market. It also helps when the huge piles of snow in the parking lot (I don’t have the luxury of walking two blocks at this time of year) finally disappear, because few things are meaner than Somerville yuppies in their BMW SUVs fighting for parking spaces.
I found baseball-sized watermelon radishes ( I seemed to be the only customer in the entire market who knew what they were), chiogga beets, some Cortland apples, a large daikon, parsley, and more rainbow chard.
I satisfied our need for meat and carbs with smoked pork chops and more breakfast sausage patties at Stillman’s, more cranberry granola from Cook’s Orchard, Vermont cheddar bread, a half dozen Island Creek oysters, and OMG fresh cider doughnuts which disappeared as soon as this photo was taken. The oysters were the first course for last night’s dinner, the bread and sausage were this morning’s breakfast, and the rest of the haul will disappear by the end of the week.
This was gong to be a straightforward post about my first attempt at making sausage, but I realized that I was engaging in Urban Homesteadingâ„¢, a term that is the center of a ridiculous trademark infringement claim by the Devraes family of Pasadena, California. They have been sending DCMA takedown notices to online groups using what they claim is their trademarked term, even though there are many instances of prior use. Who knew that all of my canning and curing, – even my home cooking and baking – Â were criminal acts? I was Urban Honesteadingâ„¢ before they were, so I magnanimously offer up my prior claim to the world at large. You’re welcome.
When I first moved to my neighborhood, I spent a lot of time walking around and checking out all of the local stores. I discovered Capone Foods right away, but noticed that there was no sausage available. Al, the owner, explained “You can get sausage down the street. We have an agreement: I won’t sell sausage, and they won’t sell cheese.”
“Down the street” turned out to be Candelino’s Market, a run-down Italian grocery that had seen better days. They did make their own sausage, prepared by signore Candelino himself. His grandson eventually took over, using the family sausage recipe, but he couldn’t keep the store from failing. After a respectful mourning period, Capone’s began selling excellent sausage, preventing me from having to settle for the junk sold in supermarkets.
My first attempt at curing required the purchase of sodium nitrate, which I obtained from The Sausage Maker. That put me on their mailing list, which in turn resulted in the quarterly arrival of a catalog full of materials that could be used for producing meat in tube form. The power of suggestion finally got to me, so, armed with my trusty copy of Charcuterie, I set about to violate the terms of the Capone-Candelino treaty.
I had all the ingredients in the Belm Utility Research Kitchen and the Deep Storage Facility: four pounds of pork butt (cut into one-inch dice), a pound of pork back fat (cut into one-inch dice), forty grams of kosher salt, thirty two grams of sugar, twelve grams of minced garlic, sixteen grams of toasted fennel seeds, six grams of ground black pepper, sixteen grams of sweet paprika, 185 milliliters of ice water, and sixty milliliters of chilled red wine vinegar.
I tossed tossed the meat and fat together with all of the dry ingredients and put them in the fridge. It’s vital that everything is as cold as possible; it prevents the fat from smearing into the meat.
Sausage is stuffed into hog casings, which are packed in salt for long-term storage.
I has to measure out about ten feet of casing and soak it overnight in cold water to remove the excess salt and make it pliable. That required my teasing out a single strand from this mess, a process not unlike unraveling yarn:
After an overnight soak, the casing was ready.
I set up my grinding station, which consisted of my KitchenAid stand mixer with a pre-chilled grinder attachment, a metal mixing bowl set in a bowl of ice, and the “pusher,” which would be used to push the meat into the grinder.
I started grinding and pushing, and, sure enough, cold ground pork came out the other end. (It worked much better with raw meat than it did with cooked pumpkin.) I had to stop once to clear some sinew out of the grinder disc, but after that the grinding went smoothly.
I removed the grinder, attached the mixing paddle, and mixed the ground pork, water, and vinegar together until the mixture was sticky.
I chilled the mix, cleaned out and reattached the grinder – which would now be used as a stuffer, and turned my attention back to the hog casing, which I had to thread onto the stuffing tube. You would think that an adult male would have some experience with this process, but no amount of prior prowess prepares you for threading twelve feet of tubing onto five inches of shaft. She Who Must Be Obeyed suggested keeping the tube submerged and full of water, this had the effect of inflating the casing, which was soon bunched onto the tube. (How did she know to do that? I won’t ask.)
The tube was attached to the end of the grinder  (minus the cutting die – the internal screw would push the filing into the casing), the casing was tied off at the free end, and we began stuffing. She Who struggled mightily to force the ground pork into the grinder, but was soon thwarted by a poor design choice: the “pusher” didn’t fit the feed tube tightly enough, resulting in meat overflowing out and up the tube. Since I was taller and would have more leverage, we switched positions: I fed the meat into the stuffer, and She Who handled the sausage. We got He Who Will Not Be Ignored to take this photo:
Once we figured out the timing, the rest of the stuffing didn’t take very long. In about half an hour we had a tray full of sausage and an entire day’s worth of sexual innuendo.
I measured out and twisted the sausage into six-inch links:
I separated the sausage into six-link bundles, froze two of them, and put the other two in the fridge. One batch became that evening’s dinner, the next batch was cooked with red wine and porcini mushrooms and served with polenta cakes.
It took about four hours from start to finish, but a lot of that time was fiddling with the stuffer. When – not if – I do this again, She Who has already approved the purchase of a professional stuffer, which will speed up the process.
When I told my mom that I had made sausage at home, she told me that her mother (one of a generation of Urban Hometeadersâ„¢) made sausage two or three times a month. I may not ever make that much, but I have many possibilities to consider. The next time I’ll try something smoked, which will make my Polish/Austrian better half happy.
* “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” Commonly misattributed to Otto von Bismarck, but first stated in print by John Godfrey Saxe in The Daily Cleveland Herald (29 March 1869).
Boiling gets a bad rap as a cooking technique. It’s too easy to over-boil something and wind up with mushy vegetables and tasteless meat, which is the usual condemnation of British food. But in the hands of an attentive chef like Fergus Henderson, gentle boiling can infuse food with subtle flavors, as seen in this recipe.
I started with a small chicken and a lot of aromatics: a whole peeled onion, a head of garlic (skin still on), two peeled carrots, two chopped celery stalks (I included some of the leaves from the innermost stalks), two bay leaves, a bundle of thyme and rosemary, and about a tablespoon of black peppercorns. The recipe also calls for ten leeks – two for the stock, and the rest for serving – but I used seven: six for serving and one plus the trimmed tops for the stock.
I placed the chicken and all of the ingredients except the six trimmed leeks into a pot and covered it with cold water.
I brought the pot to a boil, covered it with a lid, and turned off the heat, leaving the chicken to poach as the pot cooled. While I waited, I assembled the ingredients for the aïoli: two and a half cups of olive oil, the juice of two lemons, two egg yolks, and twenty heads of garlic.
Henderson’s aïoli recipe uses a food processor. The garlic and a pinch of salt is turned into a paste, the egg yolks are added, then the oil is slowly added. The final emulsion is flavored with the lemon juice. I started with the food processor, but never got the emulsion to form. According to the recipe in Ratio, the yolks should have been combined with a bit of water (or even lemon juice) before adding the oil, so I added some water to a bowl and slowly whisked in the split emulsion until I had a thick aïoli.
While the aïoli rested in the fridge, I returned to the cooled pot of chicken. I removed the bird,
strained the stock, and returned it (reserving some for the leeks) Â to a clean pot. I brought the stock up to a simmer and added the chicken back to the pot, where it simmered for thirty minutes.
During the last ten minutes of cooking, I boiled the leeks in the reserved stock.
I assembled the accompaniments for the dish: Maldon salt, the aïoli, and some toasted bread slices.
To serve, I put some chicken pieces on top of the leeks, added a splash of the chicken stock, spooned aïoli over the top, and garnished with a sprinkle of salt.
You might be thinking “big deal, boiled chicken,” and you’d be wrong. The chicken was moist and perfumed with the aromatics, the leeks were sweet and giving, but not too soft. The aïoli, however, is what elevated the dish from mundane to sophisticated. The lemony, garlicky contrast it provided had She Who Must Be Obeyed and I dolloping huge spoonfuls on top of the chicken and the bread. As Henderson said in the introduction to the recipe:
This may sound complicated, but it is actually quite simple and emphatically worth it.
And as an extra bonus, I now have three quarts of chicken/leek stock and another cup of aïoli in the fridge. FTW!
When I began cooking for myself, someone bought me a subscription for a set of 60 Minute Gourmet recipe cards. Every month twelve cards would arrive, each bearing a new recipe, with each set attempting to maintain a balance between mains, sides, and desserts. I kept them in the complimentary box that shipped with the first installment, but ignored the sorting tabs provided, opting instead to keep the most-used cards at the front.
I learned that the cards reprinted recipes from a New York Times column of the same name, which were also collected in two paperback volumes (now collector’s items). I bought the books, canceled the subscription, and chucked the cards. After all, they had meals that took an entire sixty minutes. Who has time for that? I can barely sit through thirty minutes of Rachel Ray.
I was reminded of the old cards when I unearthed an envelope of recipes cards that She Who Must Be Obeyed had rescued from her mother’s basement. Dating from 1973, The Complete Family Recipe Cardâ„¢ Series Collection envelope contained a dozen cards with some seriously unappealing photos. While they don’t hold a candle to the culinary outrages documented by James Lileks in his Gallery of Regrettable Food, I scanned them and reproduce them here with a few comments.
The first card, seen above, provides information on the back about How Much Meat To Buy:
Nutrition: To stay healthy, each family member should have a minimum of 4 to 6 ounces of meat or meat alternate daily, which may be served at any meal. However, most people want more.
Individual Appetite: Active men and teen-agers usually desire more meat than children under ten.
Accompaniments: If the meal includes soup and several vegetables, less meat is necessary. Gravy or sauce extends meat flavor, too.
Time Available: Larger cuts take more cooking time, but leftovers may be used another day with little further cooking.
Storage Facilities: If you have a freezer, stock up. Have meat cut in meal-size portions before freezing to hasten thawing time.
However glaringly wrong most of those assumptions might be, that last item predicted the existence of the Belm Utility Research Kitchen Deep Storage Facility. Time travel!
Green Pepper Round Steak, served over rice. The peach pie is a suggested dessert.
Shepherd's Pie. This one is a bit off-putting, due to the use of mashed sweet potatoes
Almond-Baked Halibut. The limes and the baked bananas make it exotic.
Three Pineapple Salads: Pineapple-Mint Bites, Pineapple-Strawberry Boats, and Tropical Fruits on the Half Shell. All that's missing is a scorpion bowl and Martin Denny playing in the background.
Japanese Spiced Barbecue. The chicken is Japanese because it's cooked with soy sauce and ginger. Also, more pineapple, this time with kumquats.
Sausage and Spanish Rice. Faux paella and chorizo.
San Francisco Bean Salad. Caned green beans with fresh mushrooms, onions, and bacon. Proof that bacon does not make everything better.
Turkey with Noodles. And tomatoes. And cheese. And mushrooms. Cornbread on the side, and a molded Waldorf Salad!
Baked Eggplant a la Grecque. Stuffed with lamb, green peper, onion, and MSG. This recipe is unique in the set, in that it is attributed to "the Kitchens of Dorothy Taylor."
Muffin Melt. Burgers, kinda. With chili sauce, and cheese on top of the bun.
Barley Casserole. "Helpful Hint: It may be practical to prepare this recipe in two smaller casseroles to use for smaller groups."
These cards were stored in a box in a cool basement, so we can’t attribute the photographic awfulness to fading or degradation. The food was supposed to look that way. However, despite the snarktastic comments, I want to point out that very few of these recipes use canned ingredients, which, for 1973, is a major achievement. The cards are also organized into categories, which are reproduced on the back of the envelope:
Although I suspect the “International” offerings might be weak, at least they acknowledge the existence of vegetarian fare.
They offered to save you from kitchen drudgery:
The cards presented here were part of Series 5 out of a total of fifteen. If we assume that card 160 (Barley Casserole) was the last in this series, then there were at least 480 cards in the complete set, but more likely double that amount.
And, like every good recipe card collection, it came with file boxes:
This final bit of information also provides a possible explanation for how we came into possession of the cards. Either this set was offered as a free promotion at a local supermarket, or my mother in law bought the set out of curiosity. Not seeing any recipes she liked – and I assure you she never would have cooked any of them – she filed the set away, where it gradualy migrated to the basement and became part of the geologic strata that would eventually be revealed decades later as the result of flooding.
That’s not a bad hypothesis, considering that they’re culinary fossils.
With the Patriots out of the running for the Super Bowl, our annual get-together became more of an opportunity to hang out and eat while two teams named after American corporations battled it out in the background. I opted for something less traditional than chili, burgers, or buffalo wings, choosing instead to serve pork buns and the Momofuku chicken wings.
As David Chang explains:
This is the world’s longest recipe for chicken wings. Sorry. But they’re very, very good chicken wings.
The day before the game, Â I cut the tips off of twenty wings, then separated the larger sections at the elbow joint. I measured out a cup each of sugar and kosher salt.
I added the sugar and salt to two quarts of lukewarm water, stirred to dissolve, then added the wings. I refrigerated the brine bucket for six hours.
I browned the wing tips over medium-hiugh heat until they were deeply colored, then added the liquids, scraping the fond off the bottom of the skillet. I brought the liquid to a boil, then simmered for forty minutes.
I also prepared pickled chiles, because what’s a Momofuku recipe without its sub-procedures? I used long hot peppers since Thai bird’s-eye chiles weren’t available. I measured out a cup of hot tap water, half a cup of rice vinegar, six tablespoons of sugar, and two and a quarter teaspoons of kosher salt.
I combined the water, vinegar, salt, and sugar and mixed until the sugar dissolved. I poured the brine over the chiles, which I had halved and packed into a quart jar.
I placed the pickles in the fridge and returned my attention to the wings. After brining, the wings are supposed to be cold-smoked, something I might have been able to pull off with my barbecue smoker in the current freezing weather. The suggested alternative is to add two strips of bacon in the next step, but I had an even better idea. Since the wings were about to be confited, why not add some of the smoky bacon fat I keep in the Deep Storage Facility? I packed the wings into a small casserole, then warmed up a quart of home-rendered lard and a cup of bacon fat.
I poured the fat over the wings, making sure they were all submerged, then set the pot in a 180°F oven for half an hour.
I cooked the garlic in a few tablespoons of the wing fat, added the tare and simmered the mixture for about ten minutes, then kept it warm on the stove.
I removed half of the wings (I was only cooking for four due to a few last-minute cancellations) from the fat and let them drain on a rack set over a baking sheet. The rest went back into the fridge. To cook the wings, I set two cast iron skillets over medium-high heat for a few minutes until they were hot.
A Brief Digression About Seasoning Cast Iron
You might be thinking “There’s a lot of sugar in those wings, I’ll bet they form an indestructible crust as soon as they hit the hot pan. It will be a nightmare to clean.” I though the same thing, but approached this step with no fear because I had a secret weapon: cast iron pans re-seasoned with a new method. I read about it in the most recent Cook’s Illustrated, but the source is this blog post by Sheryl Canter.
She gets some of the chemistry wrong, but her basic premise is sound: If you use an oil that maximizes polymerization at high temperatures, you will create a nearly non-stick coating on your pan. After a week of applying a thin layer of flaxseed oil and baking it into my pans, I had to conclude that she was right. Look at this pan:
Do you see how shiny that surface is? That’s after seven coats of flaxseed oil. Here’s a close-up of the bottom surface:
Nothing was going to stick to that.
Final Assembly
I added ten wings to each ripping-hot pan, using a bacon press to weigh the pieces down. I waited four minutes, until they were deep brown, before flipping them over.
I moved the finished wings into a metal bowl, added the sauce and pickled chiles, and gave everything a toss before garnishing with the scallions.
How did they taste? How do you thing any meat would taste after being brined, smoked, confited in pork fat, and then fried? They tasted freakin’ awesome!, or so He Who Will Not Be Ignored told me. I though they were moist, spicy, salty,and sweet, with some heat from the chiles and more meaty depth from the sauce. I wish they had been a bit crisper, but it was a minor quibble.
He Who Will Not Be Ignored did not forget that there was still half a batch of uncooked wings waiting in the fridge, so a few days later I made the rest, this time tossing them in homemade buffalo sauce – another request from He Who.
I may have hit on something with these bacon buffalo wings. I may make them again by deep-frying them instead of using a skillet. Because what can’t be improved by deep-fryng?
And now I have a quart of pork/chicken/bacon fat waiting in the Deep Storage Facility. Maybe I’ll use it to make fries…
Illness, snow shoveling, and massive cooking projects have conspired to keep me from summarizing last year’s food experiences until today. So without further ado, I present my best of 2010, following the same format as last year’s post.
Cookbook
Ideas in Food, by Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot. It came in just under the wire with a December 29 publication date, but there’s no doubt in my mind that this will be my go-to cookbook this year. I’ve already made the aero chocolate and apple and cheddar risotto; I’m looking forward to trying the rest of the recipes.
Ideas in Food, by Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot, is the blog that gave birth to the book. Alex and Aki use it as their online notebook, where they keep a record of their food experiments. This is where I learned about the six-minute risotto technique that supersedes the seven-minute method they published in the book.
Runners-up:
The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. It’s not a stand-alone blog, but by all rights it should be. This regular feature on the Serious Eats site shows what happens when you let an MIT-educated cook investigate his obsessions. From recreating Shake Shack burgers to coming up with the beer cooler sous vide method, nothing stops him until he gets it right. Rumor has it that this year will see the publication of the Food Lab cookbook. I can’t wait.
No Recipes by Marc Matsumoto. Marc cooks by the seat of his pants, then writes up the recipe later. He succeeded at making ramen noodles where I failed spectacularly, reason enough to check him out.
Cooking Show
Cook LIke an Iron Chef. I never would have discovered this show if I hadn’t been driven to the newly-launched Cooking Channel by the dearth of anything watchable on the Food Network (other than Good Eats, the only show still worth watching). Iron Chef Michael Symon improves on the typical stand-and-stir format by dealing with a new “secret ingredient” each week and enlisting help from members of the audience. His no-nonsense approach is a refreshing alternative to the usual chirpy, vapid “personalities.”
Runners-up:
None.
Recipe I’ve Cooked
Degustation de Porcelet. Three days in the making, this reset the bar for technical difficulty, involving pig butchery, sous vide cooking, and working with transglutaminase. And it tasted damned good, too.
Runners-up:
Momofuku Ramen. Another three-day effort that included a massive failure, but still worth the effort for that final bowl of porky deliciousness.
Boeuf Bouruignon. I managed to refine one of the oldest recipes in my repertoire and have it become the best version yet.
The 100% Homemade BLT. Nothing tastes as good as a dish in which you made every component yourself.
Single Restaurant Dish
Egg Caviar, Jean Georges, New York. Some dishes are classics for a reason.
Cucumber Gin and Tonic, Journeyman, Somerville. A simple idea, presented as a palate cleanser, but one I missed when it was replaced on the menu. I still plan on replicating this dish myself.
Complete Restaurant Meal
Jean Georges, New York. My birthday present to She Who Must Be Obeyed. The classic tasting menu was a tour through the dishes that put chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten on the culinary map. They may no longer be new, but they are still untouched for inventiveness and taste.
Runners-up:
Bouchon, Beverly Hills. Perfect soupe à l’oignon, perfect steak frites, perfect bistro food from Thomas Keller.
Journeyman, Somerville. Not our first visit on opening weekend, but our second, a few weeks later. We’re still thrilled to have a restaurant of this quality just a block away from Chez Belm.
Educational Opportunity
This is a new category this year, one I hope to repeat as I continue to learn more about food and cooking.
Ideas in Food, Cambridge seminar. Are you seeing a theme here? It began with this seminar, my introduction to hydrocolloids, transglutaminase, and liquid nitrogen techniques. Most of the notes from this series got incorporated into the book, but not all. This is where I leaned to make bacon-wrapped skirt steak.
Runners-up:
David Chang, Harvard University lecture series. A look inside the head of the endlessly inventive creator of the Momofuku restaurants.
Much to my surprise, while reviewing last year’s posts, I realized that this category began with the saga of my audition for MaserChef. May future entries in this category be less painful.
I have always had a love/hate relationship with risotto. It wasn’t a staple in my family’s Italian-American kitchens, but when I discovered it later, it became one of my favorite dishes. I love eating risotto, but I hate cooking it. Consequently, I have always been on the lookout for ways to shorten the amount of time needed to tend the rice and stock mixture, and to cut down on how often stock needs to be added and stirred in.
Gordon Ramsay’s method requires you to par-boil the rice for ten minutes before spreading it out on a sheet pan and cooling it until cooking time. It doesn’t dramatically cut down on the cooking time, but it does consistently produce decent risotto. Figuring out how to prep risotto and then finish it a la minute has been the downfall of many a busy chef, with the most recent victim being Tre Wilcox on Wednesday’s episode of Top Chef. Tom Colicchio was not happy with Tre’s version:
Unfortunately for Tre, he wound up creating something that many people think risotto is supposed to be. About 15 years ago, for whatever reason, people tried to mold risotto into a ring stand. This is simply wrong. Risotto should be soupy. If you go to Italy, you’ll be served it that way; ditto, a good Italian restaurant here. Tre’s risotto wasnt even creamy. The starch should go into the stock and the risotto should run on a flat plate and not hold its form at all. Furthermore, risotto continues to cook and harden further after you stop cooking it, so you need to be even more careful when cooking it to make sure it’s creamy. And, finally, the flavors should be integrated into the dish, not heaped on top of it, as Tre’s were. Tre made a dish he didn’t understand, and we couldn’t give him a pass for the fact that he was taught incorrectly. Both the texture and the flavors were way, way off.
Anthony Bourdain arrived at the same conclusion, albeit more colorfully:
Which brings us to Tre. There’s a horrifying scene early in the great Stanley Tucci film, Big Night, where a customer in the dining room of a very fine Italian chef, complains about her seafood risotto. “It’s just… rice!” she gripes, before asking for a side of spaghetti and meatballs. I saw the film in a roomful of chefs and you could hear the collective gasp, the wince of pain, as that theater full of professionals who understood risotto felt – in their bones – the familiar agony of this basic misunderstanding of what should be one of the world’s most sublime dishes. Simply put, risotto is about the rice. Expensive arborio rice, whose subtle textures and flavors need to be nurtured, cherished and respected. A good bowl of risotto is never overcomplicated with too many ingredients or garnishes. It is never buried in seafood or vegetables or mushrooms or even truffles. It is always – and forever — first — about the rice. One of the most famous seafood risottos, from an island off Venice, has no seafood in it at all – just its extracted essence, delicately, delicately coaxed into broth. Attention must be paid constantly during the cooking process, first toasting the individual grains (in most cases) on the bottom of the pan, then slowly, gradually, feeding in small amounts of broth, stirring constantly to incorporate it. When finished it should be soft – and almost porridgy, but with each distinct grain still possessing a bit of bite. It should lay flat on the plate. Never sit up in a mound. To cook Italian food well, one needs to have eaten good Italian food. And I can only guess that Tre has never eaten a good risotto. There is no shame in this – as most risottos in most American restaurants – even some well regarded ones – are criminally screwed up. One of the most common transgressions is by the “genius” chef who sees risotto as a medium or delivery system for some clever and expensive garnishes – and I suspect Tre has been subjected to more than a few of these both as a diner and during his training. His mentors did him a disservice here. He made a very flavorful vegetable garnish (a lot of it) and buried his risotto with it. He did not cook the risotto correctly – at all. It was thick, gluey, and closer to cement than one of God’s Own Primi Piatti. In a field of offenders, it was quickly agreed by the judges whose screw-up was most egregious. By his admission, he just didn’t know. While an understandable lapse for most, not so for a Top Chef. It was with regret that the judges sent Tre packing. An accomplished and talented professional, I have no doubt at all that the next time I see him, he will be making excellent risotto.
I cringed when I watched Tre get the axe, and I winced as I read Colicchio and Bourdain savage the dish because I knew they were describing the shortcomings of my own risotto. Fortunately for me, I had already found a nearly foolproof solution to the problem of perfect risotto, courtesy of Alex and Aki at Ideas in Food. Their recently-released cookbook has a seven-minute risotto recipe that requires a sous vide pre-cook of the rice, however, a more recent blog post reduced the cooking time to six minutes (not that I was sweating the extra time), but – more importantly – eliminated the sous vide step altogether. A simple two-hour pre-soak in cold water was all the rice needed, with the addition of aromatics for seasoning during the soak.
I tested the method with a simple risotto made with chicken stock and minced preserved Meyer lemon, and was very happy with the result. Emboldened by my success, I turned my attention to the Apple and Cheddar Risotto recipe from the book.
I began with a pound of sharp Cheddar cheese cut into chunks, a halved head of garlic, and two sliced medium onions.
I wrapped them in cheesecloth and added them to nine and three quarters cups of apple cider in a pressure cooker.
Yup, the pressure cooker is a new tool, something I’ve never used and had a bit of unease about trying for the first time. Pressure cooker technology has changed since I saw my grandmother’s beast steaming and rattling on her stove; new models have all kinds of failsafes and quieter valves.
I cooked the contents at high pressure for five minutes, then let the pressure dissipate on its own. I discarded the bag, then strained and cooled the resulting stock overnight. The next day I skimmed the cheddar fat off the top and reserved it for another use (scrambled eggs, browning french toast).
On the day I made the dish, I placed 500 grams of arborio rice in a bowl with enough water to cover and set it in the fridge for two hours.
I diced and rendered eighteen ounces of bacon, strained and reserved the fat, and drained the pieces.
I added seven cups of the apple-Cheddar stock in a pan and brought it to a simmer. While it heated, I drained the rice and patted it dry, diced two medium onions, grated ten ounces of sharp Cheddar, and diced three jalapeños after removing the ribs and seeds.
I cooked the onions in the reserved bacon fat over medium heat until they were soft and translucent. I increased the heat to medium-high, added the rice, and stirred until the grains were evenly coated with fat.
Here’s where the leap of faith occurs: I dumped in all of the stock at once and brought it to a boil, stirring to keep the rice from sticking. I lowered the heat but maintained a gentle boil.
For the first five of the six minutes, I was sure I had nothing but rice soup, but then the mixture gelatinized.
It’s at this stage that I usually made my risotto mistake: it looks too soupy, so I cook it until more of the liquid is absorbed. But by the time I add cheese and butter to finish it, the risotto goes stiff. This time I trusted the instructions, and at the six minute mark I added the grated cheese, bacon, and jalapeños.
I stirred for one more minute, turned off the heat, and let everything rest for an additional minute.
I plated it with the crisp-braised duck legs and was pleased to see the risotto spread across the plate. As for the taste, how could you go wrong with classic combinations like cheese and bacon or cheese and apple? The heat from the jalapeños, along with the tart cider, matched perfectly with the richness of the duck.
I no longer fear risotto now that I have this method to fall back on. Try it yourself, you’ll be surprised at how easy it is. And the next time you see a “cheftestant” on a cooking show screw up a risotto, you can smirk and tell your companion “I would never make that mistake.”
I don’t know what surprised me more: learning that Mark Bittman will no longer be writing his Minimalist cooking column for The New York Times, or learning that he had written 700 columns over the course of thirteen years. He will continue with a recipe column in the Sunday magazine and will also write pieces on the politics of food and food production for the Opinion page, but his entertaining weekly recipes and videos have come to an end.
Until those recipes are compiled into a book (I would hope and assume), I’ll work on cooking some of his favorites. I decided to start with his Crisp-Braised Duck Legs. How could I resist this description?
If I were you and could get my hands on duck legs (my supermarket routinely sells them, but you might have to try a specialty store), I would make this dish as soon as I had the time – it’s that good. The vegetable flavor is intense, the textures are near-perfect and the technique is foolproof. It is a grand seasonal dish, the kind you would gladly eat at a neighborhood bistro, were you lucky enough to live near such a place.
I had four duck legs and two cups of duck stock in the Deep Storage Facility, so I thawed them out and got ready to make a simple but tasty weekend meal. In addition to the legs (trimmed of excess fat, which I later rendered and saved) and stock, I diced a half pound of carrots, three celery stalks, and one leek. I crushed and peeled six cloves of garlic and set aside six sprigs of fresh thyme.
I seasoned the legs with salt and pepper, then browned them in a skillet over medium heat.
I removed the legs from the pan, poured off (and saved) almost all of the rendered fat, and added all of the vegetables and thyme. I browned the aromatics over medium-high heat, adding a bit more salt and pepper.
I returned the legs to the pan and poured the stock around the edges. After spending al that time getting the skin crispy, I didn’t want to soak it with stock.
I placed the pan in a 400°F oven for half an hour, then lowered the heat to 350°F for another half hour or so, until the legs were tender.
I plated a leg with some of the vegetables and spooned some of the pan juices around it. If t wasn’t so late, and we weren’t starving, I would have strained off the liquid, defatted it, and reduced it slightly to make a more intense sauce. As it was, I had a pretty pltae:
The vegetables still had some bite and texture, with the leeks and garlic providing a bit of sweetness to offset the rich duck leg. The skin was perfectly crispy and the meat underneath was moist and tender. This was one of the better duck dishes I have eaten. I plan on keeping a supply of duck legs in the Deep Storage Facility just so I can make this when the whim strikes.
And the other item on the plate? It’s apple cheddar risotto, the subject of my next post.
Sources
Duck legs: La Belle Farm
Duck stock: Belm Utility Research Kitchen Deep Storage Facility
Today I discovered another supposedly fun thing I’l never do again: standing on my side roof and shoveling show off it to prevent structural damage. I no longer have any place to put more snow, so if you’d like some igloos and snowmen, come and grab all you want – some assembly required.
A similar blizzard two days before Arisia wound up having a profound effect on the food delivery schedule for the weekend. In addition to all of the food we cooked, there were beverages and perishable items that had to be delivered as well. Coordination of those deliveries was managed by the quartermaster, who had shopping lists from us telling him what we needed. Unfortunately, the beverage delivery from PepsiCo and the bread & dairy delivery from Sysco were both delayed due to the blizzard, which would leave us scrambling to get everything set up in our prep areas in time to start feeding people.
Room With A View
The Staff Den was set up in one of the hotel’s larger suites, consisting of a main room
and a kitchenette, where most of the food prep would happen.
By the time I arrived on Thursday afternoon, a few of the chairs had been moved out and each of the walls had been lined with a row of tables. One of the Arisia refrigerators had been moved to the kitchenette, which also had a mini-fridge under the counter closest to the door.
There had been another delivery to the room, one that would be both a blessing and a curse over the course of the weekend.
A Visit from the Bread Fairy
One entire wall of tables was covered in boxes of bread, pastries, and fruit: all gifts, I was told, from “the Bread Fairy.” This person, whose actual name is Vicki, works at the Brookline Food Bank. She spends her days traveling around the Boston/Cambridge area collecting food from establishments that are required to dispose of day-old but otherwise perfectly good food items. All of the bread was day-old rejects from Iggy’s Bakery and Whole Foods, most of the pastries were from Starbucks, and the fruit was also from Whole Foods.
Later that evening Vicki showed up again with a truckload of containers of cut fruit and boxes of pre-made sandwiches, all again from Whole Foods. The fruit lasted us all weekend but took up a lot of refrigerator space; the sandwiches, which were mostly vegetarian offerings, provided us with more variety during our lunch and diner service.
We had bread, bagels, and pastries for breakfast, artisan loaves for lunch and diner, cookies throughout the day, and all for free. The only problem was that we had too much bread, so much that we barely had rom to store it. At one point we considered re-enacting the catapult sequence from El Cid, but we lacked the necessary artillery. Our diners did appreciate the variety if not the abundance.
Fight the Power
By Thursday evening we had the Staff Den set up with a microwave in the kitchenette, four crock pots on the table just outside, and a beverages and cold items setup on the tables opposite. The routine, as had been established in previous years, would be to place a crock pot liner in a large plastic bowl, empty a zip-top bag of frozen food into it, and microwave it in five minute bursts – stirring in between – until the food was hot and ready to serve. The liner (just a big heatproof bag) would be transferred to a crock pot set on low, which would keep things hot. In addition to being efficient, this method also meant we wouldn’t have to wash out the crocks every time we heated up different food.
People started arriving for breakfast on Friday morning at 8 AM, during which time the kitchen staff (i.e., me) would start heating things up to be ready for lunch, which would start at 11 AM. It was a good plan, with one fatal flaw: running four crock pots, two fridges, and a microwave simultaneously resulted in a power failure on that circuit. A quick consultation with the hotel engineers made us rethink our layout. Although it would be a bit more inconvenient, the tables on the opposite wall became the new home for the crock pots, a solution that worked for the rest of the weekend.
The Hand That Feeds
We discovered a second flaw in our plan: although some of the frozen food – like the beef barley stew and the tomato sauce – could be reheated in about fifteen minutes, the denser foods – both varieties of chili and the chicken stew – took almost half an hour to come up to serving temperature. We tried to bring a second microwave on line, placing it just outside the kitchenette, only to discover once again that the circuit couldn’t handle the load. For Friday, we were always trying to catch up to demand for hot food, a problem that was exacerbated by having many more people visit the Staff Den than we had projected.
Busy staffers had about fifteen minutes to get to the room, eat something, and then run back for the next shift. If the only remaining hot food was the vegetarian offering, they’d eat that instead, leaving the vegetarians with nothing hot to eat. We kept the room stocked with a constantly renewed supply of sandwich fixings while I worked the sole microwave harder than a fast food wage slave at the lunchtime rush. Continuing the movie analogies: “The sentries report Zulus to the south west. Thousands of them.”
We managed to survive Friday, and by the time we shut down at 11 PM we had a few ideas for keeping up with the demand. We set all four crock pots to low, lined them, and filled them with frozen blocks of food. By the morning they were thawed and hot when we brought them back into the kitchenette until lunchtime. This gave us enough of a lead in heating up food to keep us just barely ahead of the demand, which grew even larger as the weekend progressed. Word had gotten around that we were serving stuff worth eating.
You may have noticed by now that there are no additional photos. I didn’t have a spare moment to take any, nor did the rest of the staff. The rest of the weekend became a blur of microwaving, dishwashing, cleaning, resetting tables, and not enough sleep. At the height of the frenzy, Tamar, the pro chef mentioned in Part 2, tried to cheer me up by telling me “I once had to cater a dinner party for 200 with only two toaster ovens and a hot plate.” Very uplifting, but she didn’t offer to help. She knew better than to get involved.
I won’t bore you with any more details, but when we finally shut down Staff Den on Monday morning, we took a few minutes to work out the daily attendance figures. These numbers don’t reflect unique individuals, but rather a raw count of how many people entered the room each day:
Green Room total headcounts:
Friday, 7 p.m. to 11 p.m.: 236
Saturday, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.: 489
Sunday, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.: 486
Monday, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.: 212
Staff Den total headcounts:
Friday, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.: 400
Saturday, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.: 574
Sunday, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.: 471
Monday, 7 a.m. to 11 a.m.: 139
Look at those numbers again. We fed between 400 and 600 people over the weekend. As Rose stated in our report: “We fed and caffeinated all those people. We feel pretty awesome about that.”
“I Only Am Escaped Alone To Tell Thee”
I survived my greatest cooking challenge with my sanity reasonably intact, if somewhat battered. Rose and Josh are stepping down from running Green Room and Staff Den, which means that I won’t even consider the possibility of running them myself. That, and the threat of divorce from She Who Must Be Obeyed if I so much as consider the idea, will keep me away in the future.
Taking on the quartermaster job, on the other hand, could be interesting. Running a central supply repository instead of distributing food across two kitchens would be much more efficient. And that level of efficiency has a certain appeal…
has a seven-minute risotto recipe that requires a sous vide pre-cook of the rice, however, a 
