Saturday, August 25, 2012

Happy Accidents: Spelt Skillet Bread and Two Market Dips


Maybe it was making salads with Milton’s Paradise Lost in mind, but this week we found ourselves thinking of the felix culpa—a propitious mistake or happy accident. The history of food is filled with fortunate errors.  We often wonder about the process by which, for example, various kinds of decay were recognized as producing delicious and long-lasting results, like wine, vinegar, and cheese.  The trick has always been figuring out how to repeat what originally happened by accident so it happens in a controlled and predictable way.  There are also wonderful stories, often of dubious provenance, about the circumstances that led to the discovery of fortuitous combinations of ingredients—a general’s chef whipping up an inspired veal dish during a military campaign, a prostitute cobbling together a pasta sauce from the ingredients in her pantry, or a hotelier figuring out how to feed a crowd with lettuce, stale bread, anchovies, an egg, and some parmesan.  Whatever the truth of the many stories about how certain foodstuffs or recipes came about, most cooks find themselves improvising with what’s on hand and sometimes stumbling upon a winning combination of ingredients.
This week, we are sharing the happy accident of a skillet bread that was supposed to be a pita, as well as two dips to go with it, one a fresh take on eggplant from Marcella Hazan and the other the fruit of memory and the market.
Spelt Skillet Breads
This will make about 6-8 filling skillet breads.
These began with a recipe from the King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking book for Spelt Pitas.  But we first made it at a time when we were also reading Jim Lahey’s My Bread, which pioneered a no-knead method and suggests baking breads in a preheated, covered casserole.   We took the King Arthur recipe, and tried a twist on the Lahey method, cooking the breads in a covered skillet on the stovetop.  The results were delicious—puffed up, soft and chewy, from the steam inside the skillet but also crispy from the hot oil. 
First make a sponge:  Combine 1 cup all purpose flour, ½ teaspoon instant yeast, and one cup warm water in a medium-sized bowl.  Cover and let stand 10 minutes to 2 hours.
Next make the dough:  Sprinkle ¾ teaspoon salt over the sponge. Next stir in 1 ½ teaspoons olive oil.  Then add 1 cup of whole spelt flour (you can get this in the bulk section of the Davis Co-op).  Mix it in well with a fork.  Cover the bowl and leave this in a warm, protected spot to rise for about one hour.  It should double in volume.
[We have made this in a kitchen aid mixer.  We’ve also tried kneading it, as the original recipe required.  We’ve had the best results when we quickly mixed the dough and then left it alone.]
Fry the skillet breads:  Preheat a cast iron skillet, with a tight fitting lid, on a burner over medium high heat.  [Dear reader, we will confess that we have used a small La Creuset casserole for this and that, while the results are excellent, the inside surface of the casserole now looks terrible.  We do not wish to lead you down our own too-much trodden path of unsightly cookware.  So use cheap and indestructible cast iron and avoid regret, at least on this count.]  When the pan is good and hot, add a slick of oil, let that heat up (which it will do quickly), and then use a sharp-edged spoon to scoop up some of the stringy, gooey dough.  Plop that into the pan and cover it.  It will have an irregular shape.  In about a minute, uncover the pan and flip the bread over. Cover again, to cook the other side. 
These breads cook quickly, which is part of their charm.  You will probably need to replenish the oil for each one.  You can hold them in a low oven while you cook the rest.  Leftovers can be popped into the toaster.  You can also keep the dough, covered, in the fridge to cook up fresh ones the next day.
What to serve with these?  And how to use all those eggplants and peppers at the market?
Roasted Eggplant with Peppers and Cucumber
This recipe is from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.  It is lighter and brighter than many eggplant dishes; every ingredient can be found at the Farmers Market; and it keeps well.
1 ½ pounds eggplant, roasted and chopped (see below)
½ teaspoon garlic chopped very fine
½ cup sweet red bell pepper, diced
¼ cup yellow bell pepper, diced
½ cup cucumber, diced
[We use about half each of large bell peppers in two colors and two small, thin- skinned cucumbers.  If your cukes are thick-skinned, you might peel them.  If they have big, watery seeds, remove them.]
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons fresh squeezed lemon juice
salt and pepper
Basically, this is a shop, chop and combine recipe.  But the crucial step is preparing the eggplant.  You can roast it on the grill if you’ve got the grill going (and we’ve found that if you’re taking the trouble to fire up a charcoal grill, you might as well pop an eggplant or two onto the dying embers and leave it to char, poop out, and soak up the smoke.  It can then be served as a simple puree with just olive oil and salt or star in a baba ghanoush).  Hazan recommends charring the eggplant under the broiler or over a gas burner and we have found this works very well.  We washed the eggplants, and plopped them directly onto a gas burner (turned high).  We also roast peppers this way.  You need to watch them closely and use tongs to turn them and wrangle them when they want to roll off.  Keep them on the flame until the skin is charred and the eggplant feels soft and is starting to deflate.  This process takes about 10 minutes.  It might be even faster with smaller eggplants and this is a good use for those.
Place the charred eggplants in a bowl and cover it with a plate.  This helps it steam to insure the flesh is cooked through.
When you can handle the eggplant, pick off the skin, cut off the top, and roughly chop the eggplant.  Place it in a colander over a bowl to drain for about half an hour.  The liquid is flavorful and can be used for something else, but draining the eggplant keeps the finished dish from being soupy.  When the eggplant is no longer dripping, combine it with the other ingredients and serve immediately or reserve the salt, store it in the fridge, and salt just before serving.  We’ve found this to be a real crowd pleaser.
Red Pepper and Feta Dip
Our final recipe this week comes from a memory—of a wonderful array of little dishes at a Greek restaurant in Chicago—and the need to use up a bag of big red peppers we got at the market for a song.  We roasted the peppers as above and reserved some to serve with golden raisins, olives, balsamic vinegar, and olive oil.  But we combined about half of a roasted pepper with half a container of Orland Farms feta cheese (about 4 ounces) and a good glug of olive oil.  In both these dips, the olive oil is a key ingredient so you want to use the good, fresh stuff from the market.  Whirl this in a food processor.  You don’t want this to be too wet so you need to be judicious in adding the red pepper.  This will also set up a bit if you chill it.   You’re looking for a salmon color.  But you can’t really get this wrong.  It’s got three ingredients, all from the Farmers Market.  If you don’t eat it all, it will keep.  And like many simple dishes, the combination of these ingredients transcends any one of them separately.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Summer Salad II: Tomatoes and Peppers Plus

This is the other salad we’ve been making repeatedly in these days of high summer.  We got the idea for this from La Cucina Siciliana di Gangivecchio (the book that also transformed our approach to fried zucchini blossoms).   The authors, Wanda and Giovanna Tornabene, acknowledge that this recipe is not a traditional Sicilian one: it is, rather (to translate literally their Italian title) a “salad of Mediterranean vegetables.”   Fortunately for us, all these grow abundantly here in our quasi- mediterranean climate.   Although this recipe as written is a main-course salad, garnished generously with crispy bacon or pancetta and curls of parmesan cheese, it is also good in a vegetarian version.  What makes it distinctive is the dressing, a sort of thin mayonnaise with hints of herb and anchovy (the latter is very subtle in the finished dressing, so don’t be afraid to use it); and the olives that are slivered rather than just being thrown in.  You can vary the amounts and kinds of the vegetables you use depending on what you have on hand, though the tomatoes are indispensible.  Actually, one might almost think of this as a tomato salad with complicated garnishes.  The result is a festival of varied textures and colors.
Dressing
1 Tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 Tablespoon white wine vinegar
1 Tablespoon fresh thyme or Basil
2 anchovy fillets rinsed
Salt and freshly ground pepper
½ cup olive oil
¼ cup mayonnaise
Combine the first five ingredients in a bowl or blender.  Slowly add the oil, then add the mayonnaise.
Combine in a large bowl:
4 large tomatoes, cut into hefty cubes
1 yellow and 1 red  bell pepper, cored, seeded, and julienned
1 medium cucumber, peeled and diced (we tend not to peel the thin-skinned Persian cucumbers)
2 carrots, grated
20 olives, slivered
1 small bunch arugula or another hearty green

 
Add dressing and toss lightly.  The salad benefits from marinating for a few minutes after you dress it and before you garnish it.  

 Garnish the plated salad(s) with:
¾ cup diced smoked pancetta or slab bacon and
3 ½ ounces shaved Parmesan

Here is the result: summer on a plate.  You can take a moment to appreciate it before digging in. As Milton points out, in Paradise Lost, our surprise guide to salad making, when dinner is a salad, one can pause to chat because there is "No fear lest dinner cool."





Saturday, August 11, 2012

Summer Salad I: Endive and Sugar-Snap Peas with Parmesan-Lime Vinaigrette

-->

One might think that, at least in summer, salad needs no recipe.  
Melissa Clark in the New York Times last week advised readers that the best response to the glut of summer tomatoes is to make a salad freelance.  Our market encourages this kind of cooking as well:  cut up tomatoes in a range of hues and shapes, dress them with olive oil and perhaps a little vinegar, herbs, salt and pepper; perhaps add cheese (Nicasio’s Foggy Morning is a great choice) or whatever else catches your fancy.  This is the hunter-gatherer mode of salad making.  

As herbalist John Parkinson wrote in the seventeenth century, the “usual manner” of making salads is  “to take the young buds and leaves of everything almost that groweth, as well in the gardens as in the fields, and put them together.”   Most of the time we do exactly this, attending to the composition of colors and flavors but thinking of our job, as Parkinson says, as “taking” any of the season's richness that is to hand and “putting it together.”

The composed salad earns its name through a little more attention to what goes in and what is left out and it is here that recipes can be a boon, suggesting surprising combinations of ingredients or dressings with more complexity than oil and vinegar.  This kind of salad makes us think of another seventeenth-century writer, John Evelyn, who devoted a whole book to salad making, Acetaria:  A Discourse of Sallets (1699), elevating it to a high art.  

Sir Godfrey Kneller, John Evelyn, 1687
Evelyn insists that "in the Composure of a Sallet, every Plant should come in to bear its part, without being over-power'd by some Herb of a stronger Taste, so as to endanger the native Savor and Vertue of the rest; but fall into their places, like the Notes in Music, in which there should be nothing harsh or grating:  And tho admitting some Discords (to distinguish and illustrate the rest) striking in the more sprightly, and sometimes gentler Notes, reconcile all Dissonancies, and melt them into an agreeable Composition."  This is a high bar.  Evelyn's ideal salad-maker is Milton's Eve, whom he envisions as a kind of artist drawing on the bounty of Paradise to prepare a meal for the angel Raphael.


Abundance compels careful selection and Eve is intent
What choice to choose, for delicacy best,
What order so contrived as not to mix
Tastes not well joined, inelegant, but bring
Taste after taste, upheld by kindliest change.
While she selects and combines with care,  she "heaps with unsparing hand."   If one remembers the rest of the story, one might find Eve a somewhat ironic guide to choosing produce; but Evelyn has led us to make her our guide. 

In this post and the next, we'll share two recipes that have upped our salad game, one using ingredients that are almost always at the market and the other ingredients of this high summer moment. 

The first recipe comes from Jean-Georges: Cooking At Home with a Four-Star Chef, co-authored by Jean-Georges Vonderichten and Mark Bittman.  Since here we primarily devote ourselves to the pleasures of the so-called “local,” this may seem an ironic or even inappropriate choice.  For Jean-Georges is the very instance of an international “celebrity chief” — the author of five well known cookbooks, including the immensely influential Simple Cuisine, and the chef or proprietor of numerous restaurants around the globe, including his flagship Jean-Georges in New York’s Trump Tower, and other restaurants in London, Vancouver, Las Vegas, and elsewhere.   

In such venues, the same uncomfortable questions to which we alluded in one of our first posts inevitably emerge again.  To speak of food, of cooking, of cuisine (and what is the difference between these anyway?  When does “food” become “cuisine”?  And when does “cuisine” end and mere “cooking” begin?) is inevitably to participate in a global market system, or in so-called “globalization” itself, as Jean George’s own cuisine, which mixes Asian and European flavors, itself seems deliberately to suggest.  Here, we can’t help recall David Cross’s brilliant bit about dining at Jean-Georges in New York, where he tasted the famous dessert in which chocolate cake is topped with real gold leaf — or, as Cross puts it: “tasteless, odorless gold … to eat!  Was there ever a better way to say f-you to poor people?”

As usual, there is no escape from such qualms and questions. But we must confess that our suspicion of celebrity chefs and destination restaurants coexists, uneasily, with a weakness for their cookbooks.  We can’t help liking the book named above, and especially this salad, which is simplicity itself and yet seems unusual in its juxtaposition of unexpected ingredients.  

We’ve previously mentioned California Vegetable Specialties, which grows both red and white endive in Rio Vista, CA, bringing them year round to the Davis Farmers Market (our readers may recall our winter salad of apples, endives and walnuts).  This salad also showcases sugar snap peas from Rancho Cortez in Santa Maria.  (Rancho Cortez has no sign and is listed among the market vendors as Guevara/Cortez/LVL produce.  But they are at the market every week, every season, with a wonderful range of produce, down at the end of the stall near the prepared food and musicians.  In their anonymity and reliability, they are the opposite of Jean-Georges.)  Sugar snap peas are round pea-pods that are entirely edible, like the flatter snow peas: and both are denoted by the memorable French word mangetout.  Here, these two are paired and dressed with a parmesan vinaigrette with the unexpected addition of a little fresh lime juice. 

Endive and Sugar Snap Pea salad with Parmesan Lime Vinaigrette

Trim and peel 8 oz. of sugar snap peas.  (We snap the ends off with our fingers, pulling and removing the strings on both sides.)



Drop into boiling water for about 30 seconds.  They should still be bright green and with a little chew.  Drain and put into a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking.
Dry on a clean kitchen towel or paper towel.  Carefully cut each pea lengthwise on a diagonal, producing long horseshoe-shaped pieces combined with tiny peas.


Trim four endives (it's nice to combine red and green if possible), removing and discarding the core, separating the leaves, and discarding any discolored or tough-looking ones. 





In a blender (or a bowl), combine:

-       2 tbsp champagne vinegar
-       1 tbsp lime juice
-       2/3 tsp Dijon mustard
-       generous ¼ cup grated parmesan cheese

-       about 1/4 cup chopped fresh herbs, such as dill, tarrgon, basil, parsley, or a combination
With the motor running (or while whisking) add slowly:
-       1 ½ tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
-       2 tbsp neutral oil such as canola

Arrange endive on a plate and lightly toss with dressing.  In a separate bowl, dress the cut sugar snap peas, then spoon on top.  Top with a little extra dressing (you’ll probably want to use most or even all of it) and a little more chopped fresh herb.

(You can also spoon the sugar snap salad into individual endive leaves for a finger food.)


The endive pea salad has an appetizing quality that makes it a great starter, giving a rush of contrasting colors, shapes, textures and flavors.