Sunshine in a bowl

Easily made by hand

Watch for Salmonella

I’ve always enjoyed the culinary chemistry of emulsions and today really got to work on my technique with a variety of sauces, including Hollandaise and its derivatives.  If you have a whisk and a bowl you, too, can be a kitchen scientist and make your own mayonnaise: 

• Whisk 1 tsp mustard into one egg yolk.

• Ever so slowly, drop by drop at first, add 1 c. canola oil to the yolky stuff, whisking just as fast as you can.  Watch as yolk and oil come together and thicken from their liquid states into something more solid than either part individually.  (I’m sure there is a metaphor here that I could use to get rich by inspiring corporate citizens to work as a team.)

• Once fully combined, add salt to taste and 1.5 tsp of vinegar or lemon juice.

• Smear on a sammie and enjoy.

I’m no snob - I agree that when you bring out the Hellman’s, you bring out the best mayo on the market, but nothing is as good as homemade.  And while I wouldn’t feed a week old bowlful of it to a newborn or slip a pint of it into an elderly person’s metamucil, the Salmonella thing was insincere.  If you use the mayonnaise in a day or two there isn’t a health risk.

Try it and impress your friends!

I am a member of what is turning out to be the first generation born since the invention of the steam engine whose overall lifetime earnings will average less than our parents’ earnings (thanks for the legacy of debt, piggy little boomers!). 

But today I surpassed my parents on one front.  Today I became a grown up.  Today I made the best tomato sauce I’ve ever tasted.  (Sorry, mom, and know for sure that yours is still my favorite.) 

There are as many different tomato sauces as there are people who make tomato sauce, and its improvisational flexibility is one of the reasons most taste wonderful.  Mom’s, for example, is intensely tomatoey, a little spicy, and tangy with cheese, which made our kitchen table a popular dining destination for friends when I was growing up. 

The secret to today’s sauce is in using good brown veal stock, and simmering the sauce with pork bones.  The results are meaty velvet.  The whole affair is pretty simple and doesn’t take long at all once you have the ingredients.  If you want to see the recipe, click here.

There is in the background, bubbling away.  In the foreground is Sauce Allemande, one of the many derivative sauces we made from yesterday’s mother sauces. 

After 4 teams created 9 sauces each, for the first (read: messy) time, there was an awful lot of dishwashing to be done.  We clean most by hand as the only machine is a high-speed sanitizer that can fit a teacup and two straws.  Someone did manage to cram a few cutting boards in for a cycle, and as OK was unloading them I began to load more in. 

So that he didn’t grab the unsanitized ones in that I was putting in the back, I (innocently) warned him that I was “coming in from behind with something dirty”. 

He looked up, smiled and said, “That’s the second time I’ve heard that today”. 

Needless to say I’m tickled to have a raunchy friend in class.

Today we began practicing mother sauces.  While learning to make these properly is important (and fun!) and comparison tasting the results of my classmates’ efforts was fascinating, pictures of sauces are really dull.  So no photos today.

We created:

• creamy Béchamel, made with white roux and scalded milk
• chicken Velouté, made with blond roux and a light chicken stock
• Espagnole, made with brown roux, a brown stock and mirepoix
• Glace de Viand, brown stock reduced until it is a thick syrup, technically not a mother sauce but a foundational element in sauce making and REALLY decadent when salted and smeared on a piece of french bread

Somewhat bland these are (they are usually used as a base to which other flavor elements are added), they are the cornerstone of French cuisine, and “it is the sauce that distinguishes a good chef”.

In a classroom-dynamic development, Chef S. placed us in random teams, and while OK and I were on the same team, MK was sent to another group.  Sad, but it is interesting to work with new people, and I can always use practice playing well with others. 

Part the First
In class we covered a variety of “Mise en place” skills.  For those who don’t speak French, MEP translates to “setting stuff up before you start actually cooking a meal”. 

We covered some things I was familiar with but I learned a new trick for getting the skin off of roasted peppers.  Rather than put peppers into a paper or plastic bag to steam (the steam makes it easier to remove the charred skin), put your charred pepper in a bowl and cover with a paper towel.  The towel captures the steam, and then can be used for easy rubbin’ to get the skin off likity-split.  No more gobs of skin in the drain and all over your hands! 

We also prepared roux, that equal-parts-butter-and-flour staple used to thicken sauces and stews.  Roux is cooked, as opposed to beurre manie, which is just butter and four kneaded together (also useful for thickening, but less fragrant and only good in small doses, as without cooking it you get too much flour flavor.)  I’m an old hand at white roux (which is cooked for a couple of minutes), but this was the first time I’d made blond or brown roux (they darken as they cook longer). 

Part the Second

So, you have met my two class chums: OK (the guy from Oklahoma who it turns out is actually from Dallas but who will be known as OK as it is a suitable nickname for he is such a jolly guy; also, he tends bar at a club that has “Tighty Whitey Wednesdays” where he serves up cocktails in his Y-fronts, which places him in the “top three” most interesting occupations list, of people I know) and MK (who is the gently {i.e. undefensivley or without self-consciousness} artsy gal, and who has scathing wit that she keeps under a mild-mannered wrap in class).

The three of us made a date for this afternoon to practice some of the skills we have covered in class.  We bought some truly rank tilapia - at $1.99 a pound, no loss for going uneaten and a clear example of all the things we are to avoid in buying fresh fish (cloudy eyes, brown gills, spongy flesh, stanky smell) - and some hens and butchered away in MK’s cute, ample kitchen in Williamsburg.  It was moderately educational and lots of fun to spend time dissecting our classroom experience to date.  We also used our bacon bits leftover from our “rendering bacon” lesson of this morning in a tasty lunch salad.

Intermission

76 degrees of pure East River sunshine.  Spring has arrived and I was so excited I tacked on an extra mile to my run, resulting in a flush that solicited a comment from a helpful passerby that “damn, girl, you red AND fine”.

Part the Third

When I was a business girl I had the pleasure of lunching at a number of divine restaurants, and as a Scandanaviaphile, Aquavit was always a special treat.  One visit I ate nettle risotto that was so special that the color and taste memory have haunted me for years.  To coincide with the publication of his new African cookbook, Aquavit (and Riingo and AQ Cafe) chef Marcus Samuelsson held a demonstration at school this eve.  

He spoke of his hope to create a pan-African restaurant (shorthand, what Tabla is to Indian cuisine) as his next project.  He prepared a rack of lamb with a berbere crust and mango couscous, shrimp piri-piri, and most memorably, a tuna-fied twist on the Ethiopian standard Kifto,  which was the most fantastic thing I’ve eaten in recent memory.  If I could marry a dish, I’m pretty sure that this warm, spicy, coriander-laden tuna tartare and I could be happy together.  

Part the Fourth

My cousin and her girlfriend, both chefs on Cape Cod, are in town for a couple of days and I was able to meet them for a drink while they ate dinner.  They totally razzed me for my uncalloused hands, until they got distracted by bickering over whether the girlfriend’s lamb was domestic or from New Zealand.  Many chefs are bullies.

Today’s lamb lesson ended our introduction to butchering.  I nicked my hand 5 times, literally broke a panicky sweat while deboning the shoulder, and finally, came to terms with the knowledge that I don’t have a heretofore unrealized genius for meat fabrication.  I am not like Sam the butcher bringing Alice the meat.

Fact: If you butcher lamb all morning, you will smell like lamb until you bathe and change your clothes. It is worth it, because the results are gloriously tasty.

Did you know that nestled in its abundant fat, lamb has glands that strengthen its gamy flavor?  They are easily removed; they look like little clams with a jellied consistency and can be sliced right out along with the excess fat.  Don’t get me wrong - I like the barnyard flavor of lamb, but taking the glands out lets the meat’s other flavors shine through.  Try it for Easter!

Today we continued butchering, taking this:

And whittling it into a bucketful of this: 

I thought my shoulder roast was particularly fetching, so captured it for you here:

I’ve received a couple of complaints about the anatomy-class tone of this week’s photos (hey wimps:  after Monday’s lamb class, we’re on to less gory fare), but I figure that the pork, un-organy as it is, is sanitized enough for general consumption.  I’m sparing you a close up of the rabbit, but if you want to see it, look here. 

I got really excited when during her lecture Chef S. touched on the miraculous qualities of lard.  Pies with flaky crusts!  Charcuterie benefitting from preservational power of fat!  No animal used for meat receives the same cultish loyalty and affection - sometimes verging to swine chauvinism - than does the pig.  Check out The Grateful Palate for some inspired pork rhapsodies and fantastic bacons.

In recent years heritage pork - such as Berkshire, with its dark, marbled meat that stays juicy when cooked - has become more available and I think it has made the word a better place.  Visit either Momofuku location for a deliciously affordable taste of a variety of porks including Berkshire, or order some heritage pork from Heritage Foods USA for soulful home cooking.

A note on the term “fabricate“: contrary to what has been suggested by a couple of folks, I am not making this term up.  Really, every industry has its own jargon, and butchers have been fabricating meat far longer than marketers have been leveraging anything, so accept it. 

You “fabricate” a piece of meat in the sense that you take a huge animal lump (consisting of fat, muscle, sinew, fat, bones, silverskin, more fat, and other whitish bits) and whittle it into a fabric of only muscle and a bit of fat and bone (called a “primal”cut), with which you can then cook up something tasty.  I swear, with all the gobs of stuff surrounding untrimmed meat, you wouldn’t recognize it as anything you’d eaten in the past.  So, we’re making the fabric of meat as the shopper and eater know it. 

We cut a saddle of veal today.  (Logically enough, the saddle is the part of the animal where, if you were inclined to mount and ride, you would put the saddle.  You know, so your calf ride would be comfy.)  It was very difficult and the first time I’d felt frustrated in class.  I need more practice slicing off the sinewy whitish bits (fat comes off pretty easily), but even if I could afford to lug home a slab of untrimmed flesh, with two inches of counter space (literally) in my “kitchen”, I’d be reduced to trimming on the floor, and I’m sure I’d slice off a finger. 

Within the saddle was a kidney:

You must admit, the lobes come together in an elegant, tidy package.  I think they are sort of cute.  Chef S. roasted one with our veal loins and tenderloins.  I agree with her that it would have been better grilled so that the outside crisped up and the insides remained juicy; as it was the meat was a little dense. 

As for the taste: mostly it tastes of overcooked liver.  The last time I had kidney was the first time, in a beef and kidney pie in Brighton, while waiting for a ferry to France, a million years ago.  I liked it fine but then, as now, struggled to detect the “faint tang of urine” that whets Leopold Bloom’s appetite for breakfast.  Is this because I have eaten veal kidney, and not mutton kidney?

Come summer, I’ll grill one with a crust of salt and pepper and report back on flavor improvements.

In the latter part of class we fabricated the loin and tenderloin muscles of a big bull into roasts, steaks and mignons.  These are tender cuts from the back of the animal, and I’m more of a flavorful/tough than a delicate/tender gal on the whole, but I had seconds of the deliciously roasted results.

Did you know that the quality grades of beef (prime, choice, select, standard) have nothing to do with saftey inspection or even toughness/tenderness, but instead refer to the overall marbling (fat distribution within the muscle)?  Because it is the marbling that gives the meat its flavor and moisture, more marbling = higher quality grade. 

We started class by preparing a white stock from yesterday’s chicken bones, and it ended up pretty tasty:

8 lbs chicken bones; 1 large onion, 1 large carrot, 2 stalks of celery, diced; 1 sachet d’epices (see Shellfish Soup for definition/instructions)

Cover bones in 5 - 6 quarts water, bring to a boil and simmer for ~2hours.  Add mirepoix (fancy french for the onion carrot and celery mix) and simmer for another 30 minutes.  Add sachet and simmer for another 30 minutes.  Strain and store in the fridge for 4 days or the freezer for a month or so.  Freeze in pint containers or an ice cube tray for easy use in risotto or mashed potatoes or the like, that way you don’t have to defrost a whole quart.

Basic, indeed, but holding off on adding the veg until the end really made a difference in quality.

Waldemar and Nadia hosted a cheese tasting at Vin Noir this evening.  We had five tasty cheeses, the standout being Montenebro, a rich, complex goat cheese made outside of Madrid (sitting at about 8 o’clock on the plate above).  We tasted each cheese with an acidic Loire white, an Austrian red (which was a crowd pleaser, and which I enjoyed with the Bleu D’Auvergne [4 o’clock, above], but which on its own smelled to me of durian and petrol) and the standout beverage of the evening: La Meule, a sage-infused blonde ale from Switzerland.  I LOVED this beer.  It is superfragrant, nice hops and has fine, ample carbonation.  I’ll be on the lookout to find it in retail. 

What made this tasting especially fun were the high spirits of the hosts.  Waldemar and Nadia are very knowledgeable cheese pros, but they encourage interesting conversation and appreciation from all cheese skill levels.  Like me, Nadia has a corporate background; she left Finance to devote herself to cheese a few years ago and I was inspired to chat with someone who had made this kind of leap successfully, and with so much joy.