→ December 5, 2008
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Cookbooks (for Rob from Brighton).

Anyway, Rob asked a question in chat that would have led to a long non-baseball answer, so I offloaded it here:

Hi Keith, any suggestions on good cookbooks for beginners? I’m not looking for recipes so much as I’m looking for basic principles and techniques–the how’s and why’s of cooking.

Here are a few suggestions:

  • Joy of Cooking, 1997 edition. This was my starter cookbook. It’s pretty comprehensive both in terms of included recipes and ingredient descriptions. The more recent edition took out a lot of useful content, unfortunately.
  • How To Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food. Another comprehensive-primer book, one I’ve bought for many friends who told me they wanted to learn to cook. I actually don’t own this one; I tend to only buy genre cookbooks now, like The Cuisines of Spain.
  • I’m Just Here for the Food: Version 2.0. I learned to cook primarily via Joy and from Alton Brown, mostly through his TV show, Good Eats. Food Network shows Good Eats reruns daily, so if you watch those and get this, his first book, you’ll be in pretty good shape.

Feel free to add your own suggestions for Rob below.

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→ December 5, 2008
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Cranberry daiquiris.

Here’s the recipe, since some folks have asked for it. It’s from Bon Appetit’s November 2004 issue, but for some reason, it’s not on epicurious. I made one or two tweaks, including adding the cloves.

Be careful. You can get completely hammered on these rather quickly, and drunk cooks don’t make good turkeys.

1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1 cinnamon stick
2-3 whole cloves
1/2 tsp orange peel
1/2 cup cranberries
1/2 cup light rum + 6 Tbsp light rum
6 Tbsp dark rum
6 Tbsp cranberry juice
6 Tbsp lemon juice

1. Dissolve sugar in water in a medium saucepan over moderate heat.
2. Add the cinnamon stick, cloves, and orange peel and bring to a boil.
3. Add the cranberries and cook until they begin to pop.
4. Cool, discarding spices, and pour into a glass container with 1/2 cup light rum. Chill.
5. Strain liquid, saving cranberries for garnish. Add remaining ingredients to pitcher and chill thoroughly.
6. Serve over ice, garnishing with drunken cranberries.

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→ December 5, 2008
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Cranberry sauce meets cranberry daiquiri.

I’ve never bought cranberry sauce. The stuff in the can is just weird – like Jell-O for grownups. I live in one of the biggest cranberry-producing states in the country. And it’s way, way too easy to let someone else do it.

Cranberries are culinary wonders – they’re very high in antioxidants, and because they’re high in pectin and acidic, they only need sugar and water to form a thick jam or preserve. Yes, what we call “cranberry sauce” is nothing more than cranberry jam or preserves. Of course, no one says you have to stop at sugar and water. If cranberry + rum is good in a mixed drink, why wouldn’t it be good in sauce?

This yields at least three pints, and sometimes as much as a cup over that. You can kick it up further with whole spices – leave a cinnamon stick or some star anise pods or a few cloves in the pot and remove them at the end of the cooking process. For smaller spices like cloves, however, you’ll probably want to tie them in a little satchel of cheesecloth. Finding them in a dark, thick liquid like cooked cranberry sauce is not easy.

Cranberry Sauce with Rum and Chambord

8 cups cranberries, rinsed, checked for leaves/stems
3 cups sugar
1¾ cups water
½ cup dark rum
¼ cup Chambord (raspberry liqueur)

1. Place a small saucer in your freezer. Really.
2. Combine all ingredients in a large, heavy pot or saucepan (a Dutch oven works well) over high heat. Bring to a boil, stirring frequently and occasionally skimming any thick foam off the top. Boil until the mixture reaches 220 degrees, or until a large drop placed on that frozen saucer and placed in the freezer for three minutes comes out solid. (Turn the heat on the stove down while you wait to check the sample in the freezer.)
3. The sauce can be stored in a sealed container in your fridge for at least three weeks, or you can put the sauce up in sealed mason jars if you know how to safely can foods.

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→ December 5, 2008
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Good Eats Baklava.

Last week’s episode of Good Eats, “Switched on Baklava,” was one of his best in terms of delivering real instruction, including:

* How to blanch almonds
* How to clarify butter
* The difference between cassia and true cinnamon
* Working with phyllo dough
* How to make your own rose water (okay, you really never needed to know this, but it was cool)

It’s a welcome turnaround from the season opener, “Oh My, Meat Pie,” handily the worst episode in the history of the show. I was a little shocked to see AB cut into his baklava with a paring knife since the knife’s tip would likely scratch the surface of the nonstick pan, but then again, I don’t see myself making baklava any time soon, since I can’t stand pistachios. Even if you’re like me and don’t ever plan to make the stuff, it was worth watching for a few good cooking tips, especially the part about clarifying butter.

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→ December 5, 2008
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Chicken stock.

A couple of weeks ago, Whole Foods ran a two-week special, selling entire broiler-fryer chickens for 99 cents a pound, which amounted to roughly $4 for an entire bird. Boneless, skinless chicken breasts typically cost at least $4.49 a pound, and since the entire breast of one bird usually runs 1 to 1.5 pounds, it was cheaper to buy the entire bird and butcher it myself than to just buy those boneless, skinless, tasteless breasts anyway.

Of course, when you buy the whole bird, you get the thighs, legs, and wings, all of which have more flavor than the breasts do. You get the giblets, most of which I just put down the disposal, but I suppose you could use them for gravy if you’re so inclined. But the best part of buying and butchering your own chicken is what you get after all of that other stuff is gone: The bones, and bones mean stock.

For each bird, I’d keep the carcass (the bones and bits of meat after all of the “parts” are removed), the wings (not enough meat to worry about and very good for stock-making), and the neck (the one part of the giblets packet that I don’t toss) and stick them in the freezer for the next stock-making day. I also keep parts of various vegetables in a bag in the freezer – the top rings (not stems) and bottom bits of peppers, the white parts of celery stalks, etc. – that are all also stock-worthy. This avoids the expense of buying lots of vegetables just to put them into stock.

(If you’re wondering about that whole butchering-the-chicken part, I’d eventually like to shoot a video I can use here to demonstrate how easy it is. I’ve done it with a timer and I can butcher a chicken into its eight pieces – two each of breasts, thighs, legs, and wings – in about four and a half minutes. That’s under five minutes to get parts that would easily cost you $10 more if you bought them already butchered, plus you get the bones.)

Making stock requires no cooking skill at all other than patience and the ability to not turn your damn stove knobs up to 11. Dump everything in a pot, throw an upside-down steamer basket (preferably a crappy old one – I have one that’s just for making stock now) on top, skim a few times, wait 5-6 hours, cool and store. Nothing in there you can’t do if you have the time.

Anything frozen can go right in the pot without defrosting.

Chicken stock

6 quarts water (the better the water, the better the stock – I buy spring water for this)
1 chicken carcass, including wings and neck
2 ribs celery, cleaned and snapped in half
1-2 carrots, washed well (or just peeled) and cut in half
1 red or green bell pepper, seeded and stemmed, or just various pepper parts
(You can use pieces of hot peppers too. I’ve used jalapeño and poblano pieces before.)
1 medium onion, halved, or half a large onion
2 peeled garlic cloves
A few sprigs of parsley and thyme
2-3 sage leaves
1 bay leaf
1 tsp whole black peppercorns
1 pinch celery seeds
1. Put everything in a stockpot or other large pot capable of holding at least 10-12 quarts. Place a steamer basket upside-down on top of the contents to hold everything under the surface of the water. Bring to a simmer – not a boil, but a gentle simmer – and cook for at least four hours, skimming any scum off the top (every half hour should work). Overcooking it will prevent the liquid from dissolving the collagen in the bones, so take it easy on the heat.
2. When you start to see a thin, clear film on the surface, congratulations – you’ve made stock. That’s gelatin, the thing that distinguishes stock from broth and makes soups taste like soup instead of flavored water. The film will usually appear sometime between the fourth and fifth hours of cooking. I usually let my stock go for another hour or so to make sure I’ve leached all of the collagen out of the bones. Six hours is about the max time you need to do this; if you’re nearing that point and don’t see any gelatin, you probably have your heat on too low.
3. You need to cool your stock quickly. Empty and clean your sink, close up the drain, fill it with ice (two bags should do the trick) and add cold water to fill the sink about halfway. Place a pot or bowl capable of holding at least six quarts in the sink and strain the contents of your stockpot through a fine-meshed strainer into the empty pot. Chill in the ice-water bath until the temperature of the stock drops enough for it to go into the fridge – at least to 60 degrees, and preferably all the way to 40.
4. Chill several hours of overnight. Remove any fat that has congealed at the surface (but don’t discard it – you can cook with it!), portion the remaining stock into containers and refrigerate or freeze. It’ll last in the fridge a few days, but you can keep it for months in the freezer.

You may want to use a bit of damp cheesecloth to strain the last of the stock and remove any dirt or off bits that have settled at the bottom of the pot while it chilled.

You may also notice the absence of one ingredient: Salt. Don’t salt your stock – add salt when you cook with it. If it’s salted, and you reduce it as part of any recipe, you’ll end up with an overly salty finished product. You can add many different herbs, spices, and vegetables, but avoid any members of the cabbage family (including broccoli), which will give the stock a strong and not-desirable flavor. I’ve used mustard seed, cloves, tarragon, and leeks, among other items. Think “aromatics” and you’ve got the idea.

I’ll post some recipes using chicken stock over the next few weeks, but it’s great for basic soups, for moistening stuffing at Thanksgiving, and for reducing and using to thicken some sauces. Any decent cookbook should have soup recipes that start with chicken or some other stock as their bases.

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→ December 5, 2008
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“Grilled” Baby Bok Choy.

Again, just the recipe here.

2 heads baby bok choy, rinsed and roughly chopped (leaves and upper stems)
1 clove garlic, slivered
1 small dried chili pepper
1-2 tsp toasted sesame oil
2 tsp honey
Salt & freshly ground black pepper to taste
Toasted sesame seeds

1. Toss the bok choy in a bowl with all remaining ingredients except the sesame seeds.
2. Place the bok choy mixture in the center of a large sheet of heavy-duty aluminum foil. Fold up the edges of the foil to enclose the bok choy in a packet, crimping all edges to seal it and then poking two or three small holes in the top of the packet to allow steam to escape.
3. Place the packet on the grill just barely off of the heat (somewhere between direct and indirect heat). Grill for 8-10 minutes until the bok choy stems are tender, although you’re going to have to guess at when that is.
4. Open one small end of the packet and drain off any excess liquid. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and serve.

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→ December 5, 2008
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Chocolate-Bourbon Pecan Pie.

I’m a big fan of recipe triangulation. I see a recipe I want to try, but something doesn’t sit right – a method, an ingredient, whatever, there’s something there that I don’t believe will work, and I don’t believe in wasting time or food on poorly constructed recipes. So I find other recipes for the same dish and try to combine them, identifying similarities and isolating the differences, then either picking and choosing methods from all recipes, or just splitting the difference when we’re talking about something like a discrepancy in oven temperature. This recipe for a rather heavenly pie is the result of just such a triangulation. It’s largely adapted from Bourbon and Chocolate Pecan Pie Recipe, with an assist (the heated-filling trick) from the plain pecan pie recipe in Baking Illustrated.

(Next time out, I’m going to see how much chocolate I can stuff into the filling, but I’ve had two requests from readers for this recipe who saw my update on Twitter.)

Chocolate-Bourbon-Pecan Pie

One pie dough for a 9″ pan

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate
3 large eggs
¾ cup dark brown sugar
¼ cup white sugar
¾ cup dark corn syrup
½ tsp vanilla extract
3 Tbsp bourbon
¼ tsp salt
1½ cups coarsely chopped pecans

1. Blind-bake the dough at 375 degrees for 25 minutes, covered in foil and weighted down with pie weights or dry beans or whatever you have that won’t melt at 375. Remove the foil and weights and bake 6-7 minutes more until the crust just starts to brown.
2. Set a skillet with about ½” of water over a burner and bring to a simmer. Melt the butter and chocolate together in a heatproof bowl set over the simmering water. Stir to combine and set aside to cool. Do not overheat or the butter will break.
3. While the pie is baking, take a large heatproof bowl and whisk the three eggs together until frothy (meaning you can see some air bubbles and the mixture’s volume is increasing). Add both sugars and whisk until completely combined.
4. Add all remaining ingredients except the pecans and set over the simmering water (you didn’t pour it out, right?), whisking constantly, until the mixture reaches 130 degrees on an instant-read thermometer.
5. As soon as the pie crust reaches that light golden brown stage, dump the pecans into the filling, then pour the whole thing into the crust. Drop the oven temperature to 300 degrees and bake until the top is cracked and the center is just barely set – it should wiggle when you shake the pie dish, but should not slosh. Start checking it around 25 minutes; mine was done at 30, although my oven holds its temp well because I have a pizza stone and some unglazed quarry tiles on the oven floor.
6. Set on a cooling rack and allow to cool completely before cutting, 2½-3 hours.

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→ December 5, 2008
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Beans: to soak or not.

(Repost)

Man, I hate when there’s no clear answer to a cooking question.

The question is whether or not it makes sense to soak dried beans before cooking. You have three options: Soak overnight in cold water (they’re actually fully soaked after about four hours, but can stay in the water for up to eight hours); soak quickly in one hour by starting with boiling water; or don’t soak and increase your cooking time and cooking liquid.
Here are the arguments I’ve found for and against soaking:

  • Soaking frees up minerals and vitamins in the beans. Beans contain a chemical called phytic acid, which “can form complexes with some minerals and make them insoluble and thereby indigestible,” a process known as chelation. Some phytic acid is destroyed in cooking, but more is removed (an extra 15.4% up front, according to the American Chemical Society) if you soak overnight before cooking.
  • Soaking cleans the beans. Got that from Miss Vickie’s, the best site around for pressure-cooking tips. She says there’s a lot of nasty stuff on the outside of dried beans. I think that a really good rinse should take care of that nasty stuff, and besides, letting the beans sit in water that has absorbed undesirable compounds sounds like a bad idea. But what do I know.
  • Soaking reduces cooking times. It does – by maybe a half an hour. Doesn’t bother me. Might affect people who have office jobs, although I’m guessing you’re still not making two-hour beans on a Tuesday night.
  • Soaking cuts down on “ze tummy music.” I’m pretty sure this is bullshit, but then again, everything gives me ze tummy music, so how the hell would I notice?
  • Soaking means softer beans. I know this is bullshit, because I’ve tried it both ways, and soaking did not help the texture of the cooked beans one iota. You know what helped? Cooking them longer.

Arguments against soaking beans:

  • Soaking leaches out flavor. Well, you have my attention there. Alton Brown has suggested soaking and then using some of the soaking liquid in cooking, although in this season’s red beans and rice episode (a good recipe, BTW), he dispensed with soaking entirely. I have made beans both ways, but I’m usually putting so much other stuff in the pot that I would never notice a 10% flavor loss through soaking. My beans tend to taste like other things, such as bacon.
  • Soaking removes the phytic acid. Yeah, how about that: Phytic acid is an antioxidant. I found a few studies discussing phytic acid’s antioxidant properties, although none seem to argue strongly in its favor. It has been mentioned as a potential anticancer compound, and it definitely plays a role in preventing bean spoilage.
  • Soaking leaches out nutrients. So perhaps we’re even – soaking takes out nutrients but gets the phosphate out of the phytic acid so that the remaining nutrients are more accessible; not soaking leaves the phytic acid but the beans start with a higher nutrient content. I have no idea how that nets out.
  • Soaking is not traditional. I know it’s just a forum post, but this caught my eye: You’re probably all bored to death with my saying this, but I have lived in Mexico for nearly 26 years. I do not know a single Mexican cook who soaks beans. Naturally, YMMV. Rick Bayless, who knows a thing or two about Mexican cuisine, also advises against soaking. Not a nutritional argument, of course.

Usually I can at least offer an opinion based on a preponderance of evidence, perhaps mixed with personal experience or observation, but on this one, I just don’t know. You might have a tradeoff between tradition and nutrition, or between convenience and flavor.

I can only tell you what I do, or what I don’t do: I’ve stopped soaking beans. I never found a cooking benefit, and I was unaware of a nutritional question until shortly before I started writing this post. I did find something interesting in, of all places, Wikipedia – and, oddly enough, it comes from a bona fide academic source:

Probiotic lactobacilli, and other species of the endogenous digestive microflora as well, are an important source of the enzyme phytase which catalyses the release of phosphate from phytate and hydrolyses the complexes formed by phytate and metal ions or other cations, rendering them more soluble ultimately improving and facilitating their intestinal absorption.

That indicates to me that popping a couple of L. acidophilus pills before chowing down on some (unsoaked-before-cooking) beans might help you get the best of both worlds. But beyond that, I’m as confused as ever.

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→ October 16, 2008
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Browned and Braised Asian Carrots.

This is a pretty simple side dish, although it doesn’t scale well because of the sautéing required. You can use other liquids in place of the ginger beer, including chicken broth; you can also add about 1/3-1/2 tsp of butter at the end to turn the glaze into more of a sauce.

½ pound young, slender carrots, peeled and sliced into 3″ sticks
1 Tbsp butter
¼ tsp Chinese five spice powder
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp brown sugar
¼ cup ginger beer
chopped fresh parsley (optional)

1. Heat the butter in a sauté pan (with a lid) until the bubbling stops.
2. Add the carrots and let them brown on one side, approximately 3 minutes. Do not stir.
3. If you’re using a gas stove, turn down the flame. With the lid in one hand, add the salt, spice powder, brown sugar, and ginger beer, and clamp the lid down. Wait a few seconds for the initial violence to stop, then remove the lid, stir once, and put the lid down again. Raise the heat to medium-low and braise the carrots until barely tender, two to five minutes.
4. Remove the lid and allow any remaining liquid to cook away, taking care not to let the carrots burn in a dry pan. Serve with chopped fresh parsley if desired.

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→ October 5, 2008
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Chicken Paillards with Sun-Dried Tomato Cream Sauce

A simple main course that comes together in 20-30 minutes. To make it a little more luxuriant, start by chopping 3-4 slices of bacon and rendering it in the skillet, using the fat to cook the chicken and adding the bacon pieces to the final dish.

1 pound chicken breast, sliced into paillards (scallopine) and/or tenderloins
Flour to coat
2 Tbsp vodka
¼ cup chicken broth
¾ cup heavy cream
2 Tbsp fresh strained lemon juice
3 Tbsp chopped oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes
2 tsp chopped fresh parsley

1. Preheat the oven to 200°.
2. Heat about 2 Tbsp of olive or vegetable oil in a large skillet.
3. Pat the chicken paillards dry. Season with salt and pepper and dredge in the flour, shaking off any excess. Working in batches, pan-fry them for roughly two minutes per side until browned on the outside and just barely cooked through. Hold them in the oven while you prepare the sauce.
4. Drain any remaining fat from the pan and turn off the heat. Deglaze the pan with the vodka, scraping quickly to dissolve any fond, and then add the chicken broth (before the pan goes dry) and boil until reduced by about half.
5. Add the lemon juice, tomatoes, and cream and heat through. Return the chicken to the pan, spooning the sauce over the meat. Top with parsley, season with salt and pepper, and serve with pasta or rice.

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