Sofrito – inauthentic

One of the lovely things about the place where I work is chatting with the counselors and managers as I cook – especially the ones who cook. Which, yes, tend to be the women. But they’re Indian and Russian and South American and Puerto Rican and they share their favorite foods and cooking techniques.

Example – if you’re making a curry, cook the curry powder in oil first, and then add water to open it up. It makes an enormous difference.

Last week, while I was making beef stew, L, whose family is from Puerto Rico, told me she loved making it herself. “But I make it Spanish style.”

I, of course, asked her how to make it Spanish style. And she told me. And the first thing she told me about was sofrito. Sofrito is the basis for much of Latin American cooking. It’s a mixture of aromatics, the equivalent of the carrots onions celery of French mirepoix or the Cajun trinity of onions celery green pepper, or the Chinese garlic scallion ginger. It varies very widely per country, though, and probably varies per family, too.

The recipe L gave me, after consulting with her mother, was WHITE onions, red and green bell peppers (she was very firm on that), garlic, cilantro and racao, which is also known as culantro. This is all blended together. She makes it in very, very large quantities and freezes it because she uses it all the time. It’s cooked and then the rest of the ingredients (including adobo spice and quite specifically white package Goya Sason) are added.

She uses it for chicken and rice and bean and – well, all wet dishes, really.

I decided to make black bean soup for dinner on Monday. Black bean soup is a staple in many parts of Latin America and it always sounded delicious to me. I wanted something spicy and smoky and new, you see.

And I knew this was my chance to approximate the sofrito.

I couldn’t find dried black beans in my relatively small supermarket, so I got my favorite brand of canned – organic, no salt added. I also bought a box of vegetable stock, and something my store calls “rauschfleish” – smoked beef. Most of the recipes for black bean soup I’ve seen called for ham or bacon, so I figured this would add the smoky taste plus some meatiness.

And I bought a large white onion, a red pepper, a bunch of cilantro and a couple of jalopenos. I was going to buy adobo spice, but the jar I looked listed “salt, sugar, curry powder.” So I didn’t bother.

I chopped the onion and the red pepper roughly and diced the jalopenos, being careful of the seeds and veins. These I added to hot oil, before adding a teaspoon of curry powder and finely chopped cilantro. I also added finely chopped garlic. When they smelled good, I put in two cans of beans and then about three cups of stock. I also diced the smoked beef and tossed that in.

I brought it to a simmer and then placed it in a 350F oven for a couple of hours, at which point it looked like this:

I served it with soy sour cream and slices of avocado.

I think the heat from the jalopenos and the cilantro made all the differences. Still not totally authenitic, but so, so yummy.

follow up on the pickles

Nice and crisp, with a lovely little burn at the end, but too vinegary by far. Next batch will have sugar in it to balance the vinegar.

Fast and sour

I’ve been watching a lot of cooking competitions, and a lot of the chefs are serving up pickled vegetables.  Obviously, since they often have less than an hour to cook, there must be a way of pickling vegetables FAST, as opposed to the traditional way which can take months.

That’s what the internet is for.  And google told me that quick pickling is, indeed, a thing.  And it’s easy.  Make a brine (use a recipe or improvise), bring it to a boil and pour it over raw vegetables cut into whatever size you want. You do have to use a heatproof glass container, and the results are good in the fridge for maybe two weeks, tops, and it takes an hour at least for any results, BUT it just sounded dead easy.

And I’m up for anything easy.

Clearly, this is not for preservation – this is not going to be making a brine so dense you can walk on it.  It’s more of another way to prepare vegetables. But I love pickled veggies.

So.  I purchased two one quart wide mouth canning jars, dunked them (along with a salad dressing carafe I bought on a whim) and then got a cauliflower, a quart of cider vinegar and a container of pickling spice. I got the canning jars because they HAVE to be heatproof glass.  And people use them for pickling anyway.  Google said one could use regular pickling spice.  Of course, it also said to use  a recipe but eh.

Got everything home.  Put the entire container of vinegar into the saucepan, along with a little less than two cups of water, about two-three tablespoons of salt and of the pickling spice, plus two dried Mexican pepper pods for a little heat.  Brought it to a boil while I washed out the jars and filled them with cauliflower florets.  When the brine boiled, I poured into the jars over the cauliflower, making sure to get a pepper pod in each jar.  Then I covered them and tightened the covers and let them cool.

After over an hour passed, I took off the covers (the lids of the ring and lid covers vacuum sealed, so I had to pry them off) and tasted a floret from each jar.  They were still hot, but they were crisp and sour, and there was a lovely background of peppery heat in the after taste. I sealed them up again and put them in the fridge.

I’ll taste them again when they’re cold.

Over Easy

So, last Thursday was Thanksgiving. Which I’m sure most of you realized. Which means the main course has to feature a turkey. Well, doesn’t HAVE to. I know of people who eat chicken, or tofurkey, or salmon, or even (whisper) ham. Or you know, a turkey PLUS those options. In the years my husband’s brother avoided meat, I made him fish.

But by and large, we eat a very large bird composed of white meat, which cooks relatively quickly and dark meat, which does not. But it’s all one thing and has to be cooked at right temperature at the same time.

So how do you do this? Well, you can cheat. You can spatchcock it – cut out the backbone and spread the bird open, so it’s less rounded. You can cook it in parts – breast, wings, thighs, legs – until each is optimum temperature. I’ve done this, sort of – last Rosh Hashanah, with a small number of guests, I made a half bone-in turkey breast and two legs and it was perfect. I actually recommend that if you have a leg lover in your house but you don’t want to cook a whole bird.

But this is Thanksgiving and I had a reasonable number of guests, including a mother-in-law who adores turkey, so I had to make a whole, albeit small, one. In fact, it was exactly 11.5 lbs.

I wanted a perfect turkey because of both professional and personal pride. But I’m also dead lazy. I don’t do anything hard, or fussy. Seriously. I mean it.

And trussing and basting and brining and turning? Are FUSSY. Also, basting is silly. You’re pouring liquid over impermeable skin. It may make a nice skin, which is a good thing, but it doesn’t make the breast meat any moister. And stuffing herbed fat (butter, schmaltz, margarine) inder the breast skin will add a lot of flavor and be delicious but will also add, you know. Fat. And even for that, I have a suggestion.

Brining, of course, is silly with a kosher bird, which basically comes pre-brined.

Trussing only makes it look nicer, but you have to deal with the string. That does leave turning.

Turning I do, but not the “put the turkey on a rack and give it a one quarter turn every so often” way, because that’s also fussy.

Here’s the thing. You want the breast to be moist and you also want it to cook at a different rate than the dark meat. Which you want to cook thoroughly because, as I’ve learned from personal experience, undercooked dark meat is disgusting.

So what you do is cook the turkey breast side down for the first interval of cooking. You determine the interval by multiplying the weight of the bird by 14 and dividing by sixty. You want at least half the cooking time upside down – an hour or so on its back should be enough. And cook it low. Look, I like my ovens HOT. I like them over 400F. I like extremes. But for a turkey, I’m following the directions and cooking at 325F. Maybe I’ll crank the oven up high before putting it in, but as soon as it’s in, I’ll lower it down. This gives time for the heat to penetrate without overcooking.

Season the bird. However you like. Stuff garlic or parsley or rosemary sprigs into the cavity, slide lemons and herbs under the skin (or use the flavored fat – but freeze it after you flavor it. Put sliced FROZEN butter or schmaltz or margarine under the breast skin. You could probably cook it right side up then.) Dust it with pepper or paprika. Oil it. Don’t stuff it with stuffing, though. The cavity isn’t big enough and you can make it just fine outside the bird. Really. I promise.

Put the bird directly into the pan (add herbs, though. Onions and carrots if you want, too) breast down. Make sure it’s at 325. Then make your vegetables and your stuffing. How to make the stuffing? Saute onions and mushrooms (if you like them) and any other veggie you like in your stuffing. Add chestnuts or anything else you like. Saute’d sausage, even. Just get them cooked. Add a cup of stock – chicken stock, turkey stock or, as I’ve been doing, veggie stock. Make it yourself or use a good brand of store bought. Let them simmer together. Add herbs – rosemary, parsley, garlic, whatever works for you, fresh or dried. Pepper, too. Add croutons – homemade or a good brand of plain croutons – nothing herby or garlicky. You want to be in control of the flavors. SOAK them with stock. Make them totally soggy. Mix well, put in a baking dish, add more stock, and wait.

About an hour and a half before the end of cooking, turn the bird. I suggest putting plastic food bags over oven mitts and just flipping it, after removing it from the oven. Oil the breast skin and put it back in the oven. If you want to add more herbs or spices or a glaze, go for it. Take it out when it reaches a temperature of 160F. And then let it rest. Cover it in foil if you must. An hour is good. Resting is important. Lets the juices redistribute.

That’s when you put the stuffing in the oven. Add more stock if you need to or turn the oven down even lower.

You will get moist, tender breast meat that carves like a dream and perfectly cooked dark meat. You will also get a moist, flavorful stuffing that has the mouthfeel of stuffing cooked in the bird. With the plus that, if you made it with vegetable stock, your vegetarian guests can eat it, too.

Why? Because cooking it upside doesn’t just let the juices run into the breast, it also protects it from the dry heat of the oven. A rack defeats that. If you use frozen margarine, you keep the breast meat colder for a longish time, and that works as well. I just don’t want to add the extra fat and anyway, it’s fussy.

And I don’t do fussy. So I just turn it over easy.

Knives and Fire: Taste of Asia

Oh, my goodness, I had so much fun tonight. Thursday night, my husband and I went out to dinner. On the way to the restaurant, we passed the housewares store that fronts my old cooking school, and we saw two things – a sign on the door advertising a “Taste of Asia” class for tonight and that it was open. So we walked in. The closed circuit tv showed that a friend of mine was taking a class upstairs, so we watched that until the owner finished his phone call, we asked who was teaching the Asian class.

Sure enough, it was my beloved Chef. And there was one slot left, so I took it. Then we walked upstairs to say hi to our friend – she was taking a knife-skills class – and left for dinner (beef kebabs, btw.)

Tonight, I took a clean apron and wore real shoes instead of the open flats I normally wear, and todays mostly clean jacket, and got on a bus to the Center for Kosher Culinary Arts. Where Chef greeted me with a shout of “Mama Deb!” and an enormous hug.

We made fairly standard Chinese food – egg rolls and spring rolls, dry-fried Szcechuan beef, fried rice, General Tso’s chicken and Korean marinated ribs.

The woman next to me decided that she wanted to make egg rolls and asked me to help her. I wanted to make the beef; Chef thought I should make the beef. I made the egg rolls. Which were basically the best cole slaw EVER mixed with mince chicken and duck, rolled in skins and deep fried. Shredded cabbage, shredded carrots (I got to use a mandolin for the first time. It was fun), slivered scallions, garlic and ginger powder, sesame oil, soy sauce, sugar. Best cole slaw EVER. And then we learned how to roll egg rolls (and blintzes and wrap sandwiches). This is something I’ve never known, either.

And then we deep fried them. In a pot on the stove, using a thermometer to keep it between 320F and 350F. I don’t do that a lot, either. They were delicious.

But, to me, it was so nice for other reasons. I felt respected – by my partner, by Chef and by the owner of the school. They were happy I was there, they wanted me to come again, they knew I was competent, and it felt LOVELY.

All the food was yummy and I loved the szechuan beef, and my egg rolls were delicious, but for once the food was seccondary.

Food Writing: A Rant

I love food writing. I like doing it, but I also like reading it. I’m always good for a nice meta discussion, and food writing combines so many things I enjoy.

So every year, one of the things I always pick up is Holly Hughe’s “Best Food Writing [year].” And every year I, well, devour it. As I did yesterday.

It has the elements I like – discussions of food and of food history. There’s an essay on milk toast with a bonus one for BREAD AND MILK, which is ubiquitous throughout the Louisa May Alcott books, as well as other American domestic/girls’ novels of the time period, but which they NEVER describe because it would be like us describing french toast. For the record, bread and milk is chunks of break soaked in warm milk, sometimes sugared. Like breakfast cereal but much, much soggier. And warmer. And less appetizing.

They also discuss cooks and restaurants and food trends and home cooking vs. restaurant cooking, and there are often recipes. It’s all fascinating to me.

It’s also incredibly marginalizing and frustrating to me. Essay after essay about pork and ham and seafood and meat/milk combinations – and half of them written by or ABOUT Jews, too. Jews PROUD of tossing away their heritage, or so it seems. Or proud of never having had it in the first place. That’s their right and they can believe as they will, but it makes it no less frustrating to me. (Even when I didn’t keep kosher, even when I cooked, ate, enjoyed all those things, I still kinda felt it was wrong. But no one else needs to feel that way.)

Essay after essay about this culture and that culture – Southern,. Indian, California – written by people who were part of those cultures, and the only one vaguely Jewish was about a non-kosher, open-on-Shabbos appetizing store (and not one hint that maybe that might be a problem, mostly because this article was NOT written by anyone Jewish (at least if one can go by last names) and so she wouldn’t realize it. Because, again, the Jewish writers? Running as far from Judaism/kashrut as possible. As if it were something to hide, to be ashamed of.

I’m actually wrong. Jonathan Safran Foer has an essay – about how he’s raising his sons to be vegetarian, and how he was influenced by his grandmother, who wouldn’t eat pork even though she was starving, because if you don’t believe in something, what’s the point? Yay.

That’s the marginalization. And I do understand – I’m a minority of a minority. Why should there be essays about our cuisine, which only consists, really, of taking local cuisines and adapting it to our needs and rules? That there are French and Italian and Mexican and Chinese and Indian and fast food and bar food restaurants that manage to serve delicious (and once in a while, authentic) food despite having to leave out or change vital ingredients? That kosher supermarkets are as stocked with nori and shoyu and exotic spice blends as any other?

Mostly, I suppose, because the assumption is that people AREN’T interested. Also, I suspect, because until recently, there hasn’t been a lot of kosher food writing. Still isn’t, compared to the mainstream, which makes sense. But right now, in newstands in my neighborhood, four or five magazines dedicated to that subject – magazines written for Jewish home cooks that revolve around OUR holidays and needs, but are attempting to break free from kugels and gefilte fish, with glossy photos and step by step recipes. Not many essays, though, except about keeping kosher in Buenos Aires. Nothing that would attract Ms. Hughes’ attention.

So I get that.

The other part, the frustration? Is no one’s fault, but it’s still there. The recipes. I don’t use a lot of recipes when I cook. I don’t like measuring, I don’t like cooking the same thing all the time. I like improvising, tossing things in, seeing what happens. This is not true, because while I don’t use measuring cups or spoons when I do most of my cooking, I still have a reasonable idea the proportions of stuff to use and one pot of meatball soup tastes pretty much like the next.

Anyway, I like READING recipes, because I get ideas from them and because they’re pornography for me. I can taste the food as I go down the list of ingredients and techniques. At least, most of the time. Reading The French Laundry Cookbook, for example, failed. I could not taste any of that food (and I knew I never would, either.)

But I have a decent palate and I ate a fair amount of foods I won’t eat anymore before I started keeping kosher. So I can taste the recipes. And sometimes I think about making them.

And that’s when it gets frustrating. Two quarts of chicken stock and one cup of heavy cream. A ham bone. Six slices of bacon, fried crisp. Dried shrimp. Half a cup of Parmigianno cheese. Sometimes it’s the ingredients when they can’t be left out or substituted for. Sometimes it’s the sheer amount, so a subsitute would make an obvious difference. Sometimes it’s that there would be too many substitutions so I’d end up making an entirely different dish. Whatever – I think the only recipe I can actually make in the latest book is a trout with cilantro-mint chutney. Which sounds entirely delicious, btw. Oh, and I can make the bread and milk AND the milk toast, but that would be a waste of both bread and milk.

It’s seeing them all at once that makes it overwhelming, I think.

Anyway, this has been a rant and thank you for reading.

Meatball Soup

You’ve had a bad day at work. You’re exhausted. And you want comfort food – a nice, meaty soup. Except the only meat in your freezer is ground beef and you live a half-hour’s drive away from the nearest source of kosher meat and you don’t want to move your car anyway because it’s parked perfectly for alternate side.

You do have the ground beef. And carrots, onions and celery for a mirepoix. Even a very large can of crushed tomatoes. And other staples. And it comes to you. Meatball soup. Why not?

Open the can of tomatoes, and pour them into a soup pot with a can of water. Put over high heat. Chop a large onion, or two small ones, and several stalks of celery. Peel the entire package of carrots and slice into coins as thin as you can. Dump that into the pot. Add a lot of garlic and some pepper, and oregano and a bay leaf or three. Add a shot of vinegar, too, or some wine. Let it cook.

You need a pound of ground beef. Lean is best, but use what you have. Add the oregano and the garlic and the pepper, and a handful of matzo meal (or bread crumbs or corn flake crumbs or ground up panko. Even flour if that’s what you have.) And an egg. Mix it with your hands. Roll into tiny – less than one inch – meatballs and drop into the boiling soup. Turn it down to a simmer and let it go. If you do it right, it can take less than a half hour to prep, and it’s ready when everything is cooked – half hour or so.

You can use ground turkey or chicken, but add a little oil to the meatballs. You can leave out the meat, add potatoes or pasta and you have a vegetable soup. Add thyme to the veg soup, and then add fish at the last minute and you have Manhattan fish chowder. Very versatile.

And it’s simmering on my stove right now.

Chicken Stir Fry

Tonight’s dinner was a chicken stir fry. Now, I don’t pretend my stirfries are authentic. They’re not. But they smell of garlic and ginger and scallions, and they taste good, so we’re happy.

The essence of a stirfry is the mise en place because it all goes very quickly once you get the heat on, and you want the heat ON. You don’t need a wok – even my stove with the extra large burner won’t get it hot enough and it’s the wrong shape anyway. You need as big a frying pan as you have – a nice heavy one if you have it, with high sloping sides. You don’t need non-stick, either. But you want that burner high and you will not turn it down.

Get everything assembled first – the soy sauce, some kind you like. Sesame oil. Canola oil. Red pepper flakes. I like spice. Garlic, ginger and scallions. A vegetable, and a protein. Tonight, the vegetable was carrot and the protein was chicken thighs. Can be beef, can be turkey, can be tofu. Can be green beans or sugar snap peas. Can be mushrooms. But they all MUST be fresh. I believe in frozen veggies, but not for stir-fries.

Prepare the garlic, ginger and scallions. Peel an inch of fresh ginger with a spoon. Grate it on a microplane, or mince it finely with a knife. Whack a couple cloves of garlic with a knife or a bowl or a pastry board cleaner. Peel them, and grate them or mince them. Do not press them. If you really want, chop them up with a hand blender or a food chopper on pulse until they’re small but still recognizable. I like my knife – it’s the easiest to clean. In fact, for this, a wipe will do. Slice four or so scallions and cut them, any size you want so long as they’re all about the same size, at an angle. White and green. It’s all good. Put these all in the same bowl.

Peel four or five carrots. Cut them very finely on an angle. Thin is best. Knife is best. Trust me.

Cut the chicken thighs into strips or cubes. I did strips this time.

Get that pan hot. Crank it up. Pour on about a tablespoon of canola oil. Throw in a pinch of red pepper flakes – more if you like. Then toss in the chicken. Toss that around with whatever will survive the heat – a silicon spatula or a wooden spoon, by preference. Love silicon spatulas, by the way. I find them indispensable for white sauce.

When that’s looking more or less cooked, add the carrots. Toss them around. You don’t want them to burn, which is why everything is ready NOW. And then throw in the garlic scallions ginger. Yes, traditionally you add them first, but then they burn. Add them next to last. Really. And then add the sauces. You want about two tablespoons of soy and maybe a teaspoon of oil. Toss it all around.

You’ll notice that it doesn’t use cornstarch. You don’t need it for this. You’re not making a lot of sauce. You’re flavoring the protein and veg.

It will start to smell glorious. That means it’s done. Serve it over rice. I use brown basmati I make in a rice cooker because this way I can go away and not worry about it. I love my rice cooker a lot, and all I use it for is rice and oatmeal.

If you don’t like any of these ingredients, substitute or leave out. Soy can be replaced by salt, sesame oil and red pepper flakes by black pepper. Leave out the ginger or the garlic or even the scallions, or use onions. It’s your food. You don’t want it to taste bad or kill you. But don’t use garlic powder, onion powder or powdered ginger. Fresh or not at all. Unless you have no choice. Just don’t tell me.

Chicken-Green Bean Pasta

I had guests for Shabbos lunch, so I overcooked. I have a container of cholent that will probably go to waste because we don’t like it after Shabbat (and barely like it DURING.) I also have a container of thawed green beans that never got heated up, and a huge number of chicken breast fillets. I could have served a couple of pieces of chicken and the green beans with a side of noodles and the husband person would have been happy. He’s easy.

But why? I put up a pot of salted water for the pasta (whole wheat spirals) and in the meantime, chopped a couple of onions, which I saute’d in canola oil until sweet. Then I added several handfuls of green beans and three diced cooked chicken breasts. Then I added a fair amount of lemon juice, and some oregano, and a little extra virgin olive oil. When the pasta was cooked, I added some ladels of the cooking liquid (starch and salt) to the other pot and drained them. Served the chicken over the pasta – it was nice and lemony, with a Mediterranean edge.

Still have a fair amount of chicken left, though.

Working Cook June 21, 2010

Finally, a full week at work. Haven’t had that in awhile.

Walked in to find Misha watching the World Cup. Tomorrow, he graduates from school (meaning he’s now 21 and that’s it for him.) He’ll be spending his time at the DayHab instead. He had a medical appointment today, though, and they all left shortly after I arrived.

I checked for foods Mendy needed – chicken, gefilte fish and egg salad. I gathered up stew meat and ground chicken from the freezer, and carrots, celery and onions from the fridge, plus a sugar-free gefilte fish loaf from the kitchen freezer.

Started a beef vegetable soup and a pot of salted water for the fish, while defrosting the chicken. Added chopped mirepoix to the soup, plus a can of tomato sauce, garlic, parsley, basil, and bay leaves. I let that simmer on a rear burner, and took about a pound of ground chicken to cook up for Mendy. I also started a pot of brown rice.

I started cooking the rest of the ground chicken (about five pounds) while chopping an onion and batonneting a few carrots. When the chicken finally finished cooking, I moved it to a bowl and used the same pan to cook the veg. When that was cooked, I mixed the two. At this point the fish was done, as was the rice, and I started a pot of water for the eggs.

I pureed the chicken and portioned it out, and then portioned the gefilte fish. Portioned the rice and the chicken saute for the boys, put the soup in the fridge, and cooked the eggs, washing pots, etc, along the way. Made egg salad, portioned it. Cooked a bag of peas.

Made enough chicken saute to freeze one tray.