by Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer on February 17, 2010
Welcome to Wednesday Links. This is our weekly collection of four of the most interesting food links we've discovered in the past week. Enjoy!
Heavy Metal: The Science of Cast Iron
Finally, someone sees through the false information that cast iron is a great conductor of heat. It's just the opposite, which is why we love it: it responds slowly to temperature change and therefore stays hot like no other cookware.
Grant Achatz Recalls His Career-Shaping Stage at El Bulli
Alinea's chef doesn't just know how to cook--he can write, too. An account of inspirational first meal at El Bulli and an argument that "Ferran Adrià is the modern Escoffier."
Technique of the Week
An already-popular new column from Serious Eats investigates cooking techniques in slideshow format, like how to caramelize onions or make clarified butter. Stuffed with demystifying details.
The Hungry Metropolis
Does L.A. have the best food scene in the country because it has the worst urban design?
by Nick Kindelsperger on February 16, 2010
For the past few weeks I've been eating salads for breakfast. I eat huge bowls of mixed greens sprinkled with dried fruits, toasted nuts, and whatever else happens to be on hand. If there is half an avocado in the fridge I'll cut it up and toss it in, same with roasted vegetables, chickpeas, goat cheese, carrots...you get the idea. I eat until I am no longer hungry. It has nothing to do with a diet, nor is it some devious plan my wife concocted to get me to lose weight. At least, I hope not.
I'm eating salads because I dislike most breakfast foods. Sure, I have a soft spot for perfect pancakes and Eggs Benedict, but I'm talking about what most people eat on a daily basis: boxed cereal and pop tarts, the kind of food I'd never dream of eating for dinner, but somehow seems necessary in the morning when I need to hurry up and get to work. Most mornings for the past 15 years of my life have consisted of me just opening a box of cereal.
That changed when I read a book, oddly enough, about ultra-marathoners called Born To Run. The book tries to explain why some people can run incredibly long distances and not get hurt (like, oh, 100 miles), while others (like myself) can't run more than a mile without getting shin splints. The author Christopher McDougall spends most of his time explaining how we should run differently than we were taught (on the balls of your feet, not the heel). But what I really latched on to was that these incredible athletes do all of this activity on a mostly vegetarian diet.
His main subjects, the Tarahumara in Mexico, eat pinole (a flour from crushed toasted maize) and chia (think chiapet), which the author attempts to purchase, before realizing he'd probably get tired of the diet quickly. He consults a nutrionist. She asks, "Have you ever had salad for breakfast?"
It's not the most dramatic part of the book, and the author quickly speeds on to detail his theory on running and the evolution of man. But the breakfast line always stuck with me even as I began to run for the first time in 5 years. It's such a simple thing to add more vegetables to the day. I mean, I already dislike my breakfast routine, so why not give it a shot?
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by Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer on February 15, 2010
by Blake Royer on February 12, 2010
If you're not down with pizza stones, it's time. Bread-bakers and home pizza afficionados praise them for their heat-retaining, moisture-wicking ability to imitate the floor of a brick oven. You put it in your oven and it not only provides a rustic surface to bake the bread on, but it also keeps the heat of the oven steady. Especially when it comes to pizza, that ever-important underside char and blistering (sometimes known as the "upskirt") will only ever come with a stone, which you can get absolutely blazing hot over a long oven preheat.
Awhile back, my pizza stone cracked in half, and I never got around to replacing it. But rather than spending $40 on a slab of stone from Williams-Sonoma on which to bake my pizza, though, you can instead go to Home Depot and cobble it together for a few bucks. Mine, in fact, came out exactly at $2.98.
This discovery was lost amidst the technical aspects of fermentation and gluten-development in my homemade square pizza post last week (even I was confused by the end). It seemed news-worthy enough to merit its own post.
I'd read about people who were cool and did this, eschewing the overpriced piece of stone and visiting building-supply stores instead, where they bought unglazed tiles for pennies. Well, now I've joined them.
After confusing a couple of Home Depot employees and having them look up some specs on a few tiles I found at their store, I was successful. Here's what you need to know.
The tiles have to be unglazed
It is absolutely essential that they are unglazed. A glaze on the tile can contain lead, and when subjected to the heat of the oven, this can transfer to the food you're cooking, possibly into the air.
Quarry tiles is another name for them, and they look like terra-cotta pots
These things are essentially just really cheap tiles often installed in commercial settings or other high-traffic areas. The best way to pick them out is to look for something in the brownish-red hue of flowerpots. These were the only tile in the store that resembled terra cotta pots.
They should be among the cheapest tiles in the store
I've read about them for prices as low as 30 cents. Mine went for a cool $0.45. Six of them line up to make plenty of room (one added advantage is that the surface is a rectangle rather than a circle).
That's it. Though I've just used them once, the worked very well for my pizza, and withstood over 500 degrees of heat for more than an hour of preheating.
Are they as good as the highest-quality tones, like the Fibrament that pizza afficionados rave about? For me, they get the job done and the price is right.
by Nick Kindelsperger on February 11, 2010
Can you make hot sauce at home that's better than stuff from the store? For years I've considered hot sauce to be something you just had to buy in those little glass bottles. I have a half-dozen of them to prove it. Open up my fridge door, and they clank around for a good 15 seconds, announcing that they are ready to be used. And you know what? I like them all. Franks, Tabasco, El Yucateco, Louisiana-Style, Texas Pete, and Sriracha: they are all good. I'll be perfectly honest in saying I didn't have some large hot sauce hole in my life that needed to be filled.
Alas, I can't go back now to those simpler days. Like many of my food awakenings, I have Rick Bayless to blame. For the second year in a row I hosted a New Year's Eve celebration, where I made a big batch of carnitas. I knew I wanted salsa out on the table for snacks, and at the last second I decided to whip up some homemade hot sauce, figuring it would be a nice touch. I consulted Rick Bayless's Authentic Mexican because I already had the book out and the recipe looked simple.
I mindlessly whipped it up, kind of forgetting to taste it as I was going along. It was relatively easy to make, but I didn't grasp it's full power until later in the night when I noticed that people had stopped eating the salsa, and were instead drizzling straight hot sauce onto chips. They were fiends, I worried they were going to drink it straight from the bottle. You know, it was late, and I'll not lie, we had been drinking. But there is no doubting the power of this hot sauce. It is magic.
Let me count the ways.
It's cheap, especially if you live close to Mexican market. It's made with a bunch of pantry items like spices, nuts, chiles, and cider vinegar.
It's quick. As in, maybe 30 minutes of work for a whole bottle.
It lasts forever. With a lid on in the fridge, it will last for a long, long time, thus claims Bayless.
It makes just about everything taste better. Tacos, eggs, salsa, guacamole, sauces, etc...
How can it do this? It's very spicy. This is no watered down version of Tabasco. But it has way more depth than you'd expect from a hot sauce. This comes from the use of both sesame and pumpkin seeds, which both help to soften the blow of the over 50 arbol chiles, while also adding a nice creamy texture.
It's also way more fragrant and haunting than it should be. That's thanks to healthy pinch of cumin, allspice, cloves, and oregano.
This has really changed how I think about hot sauce. I've always kind of considered hot sauce to be cheating. Sure, it delivers a cheap thrill, but there is always that sinking feeling of knowing that if the food had been properly seasoned and spiced in the first place, one wouldn't need the hot sauce. Perhaps I'm prejudiced. Or perhaps I just have visions of college where friends used douse every single thing they could find, no matter if it were tacos or chicken pot pie, in Frank's Red Hot Sauce. I realize, this was a self defense mechanism, usually because the dreck we were served was so bland and boring it needed at least some kind of flavor to get down.
But this is that rare hot sauce that can save bland dishes, while also enchancing properly made ones. This isn't your normal hot sauce. Rick Bayless knows this. "It's the closest you'll get to Tabasco sauce--and it is a lot better." He's right.
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by Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer on February 10, 2010
Welcome to Wednesday Links, our weekly collection of the most interesting food links we've discovered in the past week. Enjoy!
What's the Recipe?
Can you learn to cook from cookbooks? We linked to this article a few weeks ago and this week it's making the blog rounds. Adam Gopnick believes "you can only learn from watching someone in the kitchen."
On Cookbooks
Ruth Reichl does not agree. "We are constantly learning to cook, both by reading cookbooks and by cooking. But the very first lesson for every cook is this: no recipe is ever perfect. That's the point. It's only a meal, and there's always the next time."
Once upon a story - Can you learn to cook from a cookbook?
And Monica Bhide doesn't agree either.
Chefs Cook up Cocktails
Though this article led to the hilarious misunderstanding that Grant Achatz of Alinea would be opening a cocktail bar named "Boom" (full post-game of how it happened on Grub Street) the article is fascinating stuff. Imagine a Sazerac becoming a gelee with "Peychaud bitters made into pudding dots."
by Blake Royer on February 9, 2010
Once we had blanched and peeled the tomatoes we chopped them, strained the seeds, and simmered it for twenty minutes into a simple sauce. Then I made my gastrique, which involved no measuring -- maybe 1/4 cup of vinegar and 3 tablespoons of sugar -- and a quick boil into something thick and syrupy.
I tasted the sauce before adding it, which was fine, clean and simple. And then I tasted it after. The difference was noticeable. Both of the most prized qualities of a good tomato -- sweetness and acidity -- were suddenly brought to the forefront. The sauce went from just fine to something special. It was amazing.
I've toyed with the idea of culinary school for awhile, but never took the leap. I love to cook at home, but I also crave a rigorous, repetitious environment where I build my skills and in the process pay full respect to the craft of cooking. A home cook is one thing, a restaurant chef is another. I've never worked in a restaurant, and have no idea if that sort of life would suit me. But I want to learn more. That's why I recently started a night-time culinary school program here in Chicago at Kendall College. It's a year, and only at night, so my life doesn't have to go on hold while I explore. I really don't know where it'd going to take me, but I'm beyond excited. Here goes!
On the blog I'm hoping to report on some interesting things I've learned. My focus is not comprehensive. I'm interested in little tips and bits of technique that I pick up along the way. The things that separate good cooking from great. I've always thought that cooking well is little things adding up; if you care about each step and pay attention to detail, the food will have to be good. That's just science. And, well, maybe it's also nice to have some tricks up your sleeve.
Which brings me back to the gastrique. The technique at hand, which chef explained briefly during a demonstration for making a simple tomato sauce, is a perfect example. Somehow in five years of writing and researching, I never encountered gastrique. But I'm sort of smitten with it now.
The way it was demonstrated to us (informally, as it wasn't part of the normal recipe) was simple: red wine vinegar in a small saucepan, handful of sugar, then the whole thing boiled down until syrupy and viscous. It took just three or four short minutes. The result was drizzled into a simple tomato sauce, and chef suggested we do the same.
The sauce, which we were making in the dead of winter, was made with fresh tomatoes. To amp up the flavor which winter tomatoes lack in comparison to how they taste in the summer, we used a little tomato paste while sweating shallots and garlic. This helped somewhat. But tomato paste doesn't bring any brightness. Its flavor is deep and rich, but also a bit muddy.
A gastrique is good for lots of other things, too. Traditionally it's used to season sauces for meat, adding punch and depth. Or, it can become a simple sauce on its own, in which case it often has a bit of fruit which softens and gets glazed with the reduced syrup. You often see it employed with duck breast. Anywhere a sweetness and acidity are useful, a gastrique can only help.
In fact, there's a new use for gatriques that has come out of the cocktail vanguard. Rather than just a simple syrup (sugar + water), the complexity of a gastrique is a way for bartenders to play with new flavors.
If it were the middle of summer, I wouldn't bother. But next time you make a tomato sauce, give this a try. It might be that little something to make it shine.
Gastrique Basics
The proportions don't seem to be exact -- Larousse Gastronomique doesn't bother with a recipe, just calling it a reduction of sugar and vinegar. I think that 1/2 cup vinegar and 2 or 3 tablespoons of sugar is a good place to start.
All you need to do is combine them and boil the sauce down until much of the moisture is gone, and the viscosity of the mixture starts to increase. Eventually you'll start to see bubbles getting bigger and stickier, as in the photo above. It shouldn't be as thick as honey, more like a syrup.
by Nick Kindelsperger on February 8, 2010
by Blake Royer on February 4, 2010
Good pizza means good bread. For me, there's just no other way around it. Good bread is the soul of good pizza.
But baking has never been a subject I'm comfortable with. Give me a skillet, some pasta, and a well-stocked pantry and I can improvise countless meals. But if I'm supposed to bake something, I freeze. I immediately picture failure, a leaden cracker or a gummy mess. I hate the confusion of baking, the way it never quite turns out how it's supposed to in the recipe. I hate the way flour gets all over the place. And more than anything else, I hate the conflicting information, recipes never agreeing with each other, and how no matter how long I knead my bread I never get that damn "windowpane" effect that everyone talks about.
But I love pizza. I can buy good bread around the corner, but not good pizza that's warm out of my oven. I love it enough to brave the storm. I've tried to make good pizza in a cast iron skillet, and I've had fun. But I have to admit it's never quite been good enough.
So a couple of weeks ago I theorized about using a simple recipe for focaccia bread as the dough. This focaccia is the only bread that's ever lived up to my expectations. I make it all the time. It doesn't require much investment of time, turns out pretty well, and most importantly, is ready to bake after a couple hours. No waiting around while the dough rests overnight and all that. I figured, why not use this recipe, and I would have delicious pizza the same day I craved it? It seemed to simple. I thought about Sicilian-style pizzas, which resemble foccacia unlike thin brick oven Neopolitian-style pies. Then I set out to see if it would work.
Well, I got my butt kicked. Pizza taught me a lesson. And that is that there are no shortcuts if you want to create something truly special.
But in the process, something unexpected happened. I actually learned a lot about how to make bread. I learned some truly amazing things. And I feel like I have something of a handle on the process now. After diving into a world of unfamiliar terminology, some brain-aching calculations, and a lot of conflicting information, I feel I've emerged with some wisdom.
It wasn't as easy as I thought. But I am happy to report that I've found a method for making pizza that really works. It involves some math, but I've already done the calculating for you. With a scale and a little time, quality pizza is not far away.
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by Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer on February 3, 2010
[Photo by Basil Childers for The New York Times]
Welcome to Wednesday Links. This is our weekly collection of four of the most interesting food links we've discovered in the past week. Enjoy!
The Olive Oil Barons
Awesome story about growing olives and pressing them into oil from a couple of complete amateurs. Who knew that slightly less ripe olives are important for a peppery taste?
Exploring Tokyo Through its Ramen Shops
An experts guide through Tokyo by way of their ever expanding ramen culture.
Design Sponge: In the Kitchen With
If you're a DIY guru or into design, Design Sponge is already daily reading. But if not, the recurring food column, a sort of mini food-blog, is worth checking out. Great stories and beautiful photographs.
Five easy steps to making bad drinks and getting poor tips.
