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Flour, egg, milk

                                                                                                                Photo by Donna T. Ruhlman
So I’m working hard to finish up a cookbook I’m writing and have decided to throw some popovers in there because they are just too cool.  This slack batter of flour, egg and milk goes into a little cup into a very hot oven and a half hour later, poof!, a transformation as dramatic as popcorn.  It puffs for the same reason, the steam, the same element that puff gougeres as well.  Delicious and so, so easy. 

Mix together 1 egg, 1/2 cup of milk, 1/2 cup of flour, and a 1/2 teaspoon of salt, pour it into a popover mold or ramekin that has some melted butter in it and cook at 450 till done.  You could serve a popover with beef.  Yorkshire pudding is this very batter (or a similar one, people can and should argue with my proportions for Yorkshire), cooked in piping hot beef fat, but a popover would work with any meat.  It’s soft as a Parker House roll.  You don’t have bread but want to serve some with dinner? Make a few popovers (the above quantities will only be enough for two or three portions).  You could top it with compte or reggiano and serve as a canapé (like a gougere).   It’s delicious for breakfast with diced apples, of course, serve dusted with powdered sugar and a little crème fraiche.  And it would work great as a dessert (not unlike the gougere cousin, the profiterole), served hot, dusted with cinnamon sugar, with warm ganache and ice cream.

The popover represents what’s so fun about cooking—causing a great transformation with the simplest ingredients.

Elements of Cooking: Shoemaker

Shoemaker: Kitchen slang for an untalented cook.

While The Elements of Cooking is personal and opinionated and not without its omissions—where is levain, for instance, muddle, and wok, one of the most useful cooking vessels known (I love woks but stay away from the non-stick variety)?—but there is now at least one entry that I think I've gotten wrong.  I'm grateful here to be able to amend it.

I was in Napa last week to begin work on another cookbook and I, like Alex Witchel, ate at the restaurant Ad Hoc for three nights running, an unalloyed delight (I share Michael Bauer's affection for this spot in Yountville which serves a single menu, which changes nightly, to all customers).

On the last night, I ate with the restaurant's impressive chef de cuisine, David Cruz, who took issue with my definition of shoemaker.  To call a fellow cook a shoemaker is a not-uncommon put down in kitchens.  But talent or no talent was not the point, Cruz said.  Shoemaker indicated someone who didn't care, who, in the heat of service, simply slapped food on a plate, wanting only to get the night over with, to get the food out the door and go home.  This indeed is what a shoemaker is, and I'm grateful that Cruz made the distinction.

UPDATE:  Eater LA didn't just link to this post, they actually identified a chef NAMED Shoemaker.  I never considered the possibility!  He's now the chef of Bastide, on Melrose.  That's like being a dentist named Hurtz.  The guy who gave my wife an epidural was named Dr. Stork, which was cute until Donna's screams came. I bow to Chef Shoemaker.  The work is hard enough without having to overcome what has surely been incessant ribbing from his colleagues.

UPDATE 5/8: This keeps getting better!  Chef Cruz has alerted me to an actual dish, Chicken Scarpariello, chicken shoemaker style (chicken with sausage), a cleaned up version of which he has put on the Ad Hoc menu.

Yellow

                                                                                                               Photo by none other than Donna
In huge and enthusiastic support of Barbara and her Taste of Yellow 2008, and the Lance Armstrong Foundation and Livestrong Day.

My Favorite Kitchen "Gadgets"

Thanks for all those great comments on using or not using scales.  It’s a hopeful trend.  It got me thinking about useful kitchen tools, just as Ed Charles, Australian journalist and blogger, has been inspired by The Elements of Cooking to consider his own kitchen and not what is useful but what isn’t and asks people to name their least useful kitchen tool.

I’m not the first to suggest that a tool that has only a single use is just as useful in the garbage as it is in your drawer.  A mango slicer, please.  An egg separater—Jesus, an egg separator!  We are born with the perfect egg separators, right at the end of our arms!  Why would anyone be moved to invent one? Sarah on Ed’s blog said her “pie maker” was the most useless thing in her kitchen.  Another commented that they love their pie maker.  What is a pie maker?!  I’ve never heard of a pie maker.  I use my egg separators to make pies! (Google search: sunbeam pie maker, at right.)

I was sure I had some useless crap stored in a box in the basement but no—I don’t have a single useless gadget any more.  I even threw out those ridiculous corn cob shaped corn holders my mother puts in my Christmas stocking every year.  I only have practical gadgets, so I took a picture of them.  Were I forbidden to use any one of them, I would be cranky indeed.  Were I to go stage in a kitchen, I’d feel pretty confident that if I had these items, I could get just about anything I needed done.

                                                                                                                        Photo NOT by Donna
My favorite kitchen gadgets:
From right to left, big knife and little knife, rubber spatula, wood spoon with flat edge, fish spatula, microplane, instant read thermometer, Sharpie, sauce whip, string, fine mesh strainer, two spoons, measuring spoons, peeler, heavy side towel for grabbing hot things, and, the most important tool in the kitchen, kosher salt.

Comments welcome: be brief: single most valuable and single least valuable kitchen gadget.

post script 4/30: many people have noted their affection for tongs and wondered how this tool could not be pictured here. I have one good sturdy set of tongs that hang from the bar to the left of the hood and i use them all the time. But i don't think they should be considered an essential kitchen tool. I know most cooks will disagree and I understand why.

Elements of Cooking: Scale, Scaling

                                                                                                                                    Photo by Donna
Scale (noun):  A good digital scale is an important kitchen tool because it provides the most accurate way of measuring ingredients, which is especially critical in baking.  A tablespoon of different brands of salt have different weights but an ounce of salt will have the same impact no matter the type or brand.  Flour and other finely powdered ingredients measured by the dry cup can vary in weight as well.  A scale is recommended for any serious kitchen.

Scale (verb): To scale means to weigh—for example, “Scale that dough into 10 ounce portions for small baguettes.”

This scale is one of the most important tools in my kitchen.  It not only ensures constency, it makes putting together ingredients simple.  You know how much easier it is to measure 8 ounces of shortening as compared to one cup?  Here, I'm measuring ingredients for bread dough that I've been making a lot of recently.  If I were making cookies, I could put the shortening or butter right in there with the flour.  I was corresponding recently with a cook who weighed a cup of his flour and it was 3 ounces.  A cup of flour can weigh as much as 6 ounces.  If he measured four cups and I measured four cups, I'd have twice as much flour in my bowl.

But I don't know how much a part a scale is of the home kitchen. Many of the people who read this blog are serious home cooks.  I'm working on a book now that relies a lot on the weight of ingredients, and I'm very curious to know what people who care about cooking think about scales.  Do you own one?  Why or why not.  Do you use it?  If so how?  If not why not?  I suspect a lot of it is because almost all the cookbooks out there use volume measurements so you don't need one.  Here's the scale I use.  But there are lots to choose from and start at about $25.  Key attributes are digital, measures in grams and ounces, and can measure at least 5 pounds or so.

Blymire's Veal Stock

Carole Blymire, the force behind the French Laundry at Home blog, tackles French Laundry veal stock.  I have, of course, professed my devotion to this nectar of the cooking gods, and am delighted to see someone else write about it so well (notice the excellent ice bath to cool the stock quickly).  I'm sure most of the readers here are aware of FL at Home, but if you aren't, well worth checking out on a regular basis.

Carbonara

                                                                                                                         Photo by Donna T. Ruhlman
After posting a gorgeous fatty piece of cured mangalitsa belly I thought I should say how it first went to use.  The other day I asked Donna to have lunch—one of the true pleasures of working from home.  The house is clean and doesn't thrum with kid energy but most important, we're not exhausted as we would be if we waited till the end of the day, so we can actually talk to one another about  things that matter to us, reflectively and leisurely.  I don't want to spend more than 20 minutes or so actually cooking--a spinach salad with lardons, warm bacon fat and shallot dressing with a poached egg, or the above carbonara, which Donna clicked off before we sat down (she'd been shooting custards for me all morning so she was all set up). Carbonara is perhaps my favorite pasta, yet another variation of the bacon-and-eggs pairing, the simpler the better--don't be snobby about the bacon cut ("Guanciale is the ONLY kind we use," etc.--good smoked bacon is excellent) and keep the frills like peas out of it.  I think the only truly critical point is that you must use freshly grated reggiano.  The fat is the pleasure in this mangalista bacon, so I wanted to use it all, tossing the strips of belly and all the rendered fat with the hot pasta, pouring the cream-yolk mixture over the hot pasta which lightly cooks the sauce, tossing in some freshly grated reggiano, and finishing with chopped flat-leaf parsley.  Serve it with a crusty baguette and a big zinfandel. Any couples out there with kids I cannot recommend highly enough having lunch with your partner, in your home, in the middle of the week, on a regular basis.

Best Foie Gras Ever?

Eduardo Sousa, a farmer in the Extremadura region of Spain is, according to chef Dan Barber, raising geese that bear the best foie gras the chef's tasted.  The critical part of the story, though, is that Sousa does not force feed the geese.  He apparently lets their inclination to gorge themselves, once required for migration, take care of the fattening and simply makes sure they have all they want—nuts, olives, etc., but no corn.  This suggests of course that farmers who force feed their geese and ducks are simply controlling what the ducks would do naturally and that the folks who want to prohibit the production and sale of foie gras on the grounds of animal cruelty have one less leg to stand on.
    I never thought they had any leg to stand on if they argued only that the practice of gavage were inhumane but were happy to buy boneless skinless chicken breast and beef tenderloin from America’s meat factories.  The foie gras farms in the United States, notably Hudson Valley Foie Gras, tend to be models of humane, safe, small-scale farming. Here’s Bourdain’s excellent account of the no rez trip to the farm.
    But Barber’s story (first reported last week in Lancaster Farming and which I read via A Hunger Artist), is a good one nevertheless.  Barber said this foie gras was the best he’d ever eaten and that the experience was revelatory, “the best culinary experience of my life.”  Repeat: the best culinary experience of his life.  Are we likely to taste any of this at Blue Hill anytime soon?  Not likely.  When Barber asked about buying Sousa’s foie gras, Sousa, clearly a quirky farmer, replied, “Chef’s don’t deserve it.”
    So enough with chefs banning foie from their meat-filled menus (clearly a marketing-driven decision, at best--and nothing wrong with that, but let's call it what it is), and enough with city counsel grandstanding and the like to legislate its ban (most recently defeated in Maryland).  And thanks Dan Barber for another great story.

(Skawt's comment reminded me of this hilarious exercise in human discomfort and stupidity. thanks again to delgrosso.)

UPDATE: credit due
Dan Barber’s story was a originally part of broader talk last month at NYU’s Experimental Cuisine Collective on the connection between flavor and animal welfare, namely the idea that the better an animal is treated during its life and the less stress it endures at slaughter, the better the flavor it will have, a common sensical idea that may be impossible to prove.  The Sousa story was one of his examples.  Katherine Hobson wrote about Barber's talk in a US News & World Report blog and Joseph Erdos wrote about it on his blog.

Elements of Cooking: Cure

                                                                                                           Photo by Donna T. Ruhlman
Cure: 1) To cure means to preserve.  Almost always, it’s salt that cures food, often followed by a secondary treatment, such as cooking (bacon, usually hot smoked) or drying (salt cod, prosciutto).  2): The salt mixture* used to cure meats, which can contain sodium nitrite, sugar, and other seasonings. Cures can be dry (salt and seasonings) or wet (also called a brine).  A “dry cure” should not be confused with dry curing, which indicates that a food has been cured with salt and then hung to dry in order to preserve it.
                                                --  From The Elements of Cooking

Curing your own meats (which is no more difficult than marinating a steak) is one of the cook's greatest tools, capable of elevating inexpensive cuts to new levels of flavor and texture.  We don't need curing know-how in order to stay alive as we once did, but we still use these techniques for the extraordinary flavors and textures they create.  When Heath Putnam generously sent me a sample of mangalista hog belly (above), I immediately wanted to cure it to give it great flavor and to take advantage of it’s extraordinary fat.  Notice the gorgeous layering of fat and meat .  This belly was liberally coated in a basic dry cure (2 parts salt, one part sugar, and some pink salt*), put in a plastic bag with some thyme, smashed garlic, crushed bay leaf, brown sugar, nutmeg, cracked black peppercorns, and refrigerated for a week.  I then cooked it in a 200 degree oven to 150 degrees internal temperature.  The nitrite in curing salt is responsible for keeping the meat pink, gives it its distinctly piquant, bacony flavor (and also prevents botulism, should I have chosen to smoke it, an excellent option; I could also have let it dry cure for a week or two, hanging it from a pot-hook in my food snob kitchen to intensify and enhance  the flavor, but I was too hungry and eager to taste it).

The fat is exquisite, really picks up the flavors of the cure, and is the true pleasure of this amazing cut of the mangalista.  The knees go a bit wobbly from pleasure.

*Pink salt, or curing salt, is a salt containing a small amount of nitrite; it’s generically called pink salt because it’s dyed pink to prevent accidental consumption, and is sold under various brand names.  Potassium nitrate, saltpeter, was used for dry-cured sausages but has been replaced by sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate (the latter is for dry-cured sausages) because of their consistency and reliability.  I buy mine from butcher-packer.com for a buck-fifty, which will last me more than a year.  (See my book Charcuterie for the basic dry-cure and other curing recipes.)