Sunday, October 28, 2012

Brutti ma buoni: Comice pears and almond cookies

 
This week we celebrate an ugly duckling dessert and more generally the way that many of the best tasting things at the market are blemished or misshapen.  We all know that many fruits and vegetables have been bred for sturdiness, shelf life, and looks.  The heirloom tomatoes or apples we are so excited to find at the market often announce themselves by their thin skins, cracked or seamed surfaces, bumps and bruises.  For the heirloom seeker, what was once a consumer turnoff becomes the attraction.  “Ah, that’s a fruit that has not been bred for looks,” we think, reaching for it.  And more often than not, the heirloom delivers with its depth and complexity of flavor.  The ugly duckling reveals itself to be a swan.

Among our favorite such fruits at the market are the comice pears from Ratzlaff farms.  They don’t last long.  When they first arrive, they are rough-skinned and lumpy and reasonably tasty—especially if left out on the counter for as much as a week.  Each outing at the market they look a bit worse and taste a bit better.  By now, they are mottled, plump, dripping with juice and bursting with flavor.  Their skins manage to be both susceptible to nicks and bruises and gritty and a bit bitter.  If we are feeling ambitious and persnickety, we peel the pears, letting the juice drip over the salad or yogurt they are about to grace.  But we gobble them up with their skins as well, enjoying the contrast of silky and resistant, sweet and slightly bitter.

While the pears don’t need any embellishment, the Italian almond cookies called Brutti ma Buoni, or “uglies but goods” make the perfect partner.  Pears and cookies share an appearance that belies their deliciousness (although we wouldn't really call either ugly), complementary flavors, and local availability.  We draw our recipe from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.  Long ago we started toasting the almonds that went into the cookies, although Marcella does not.  One of our mothers, a great baker and exacting teacher, insists that nuts used in baking (and most other cooking) should always be toasted first to deepen their flavor.  She is even known to ask suspiciously “did you toast these nuts?” and, trust us, you never want the answer to be “no.”  But for the market shopper it is possible to pump up the flavor of these cookies and appease dear Mama without any extra effort.  How seldom that is the case.  The trick is to use the deeply flavored Cabral Family farms dry roasted almonds.  With their skins on and their interiors roasted a dark brown, these almonds magnify the flavor and improve the appearance and texture of the cookies.  The result—a cookie with no flour or gluten and no dairy—is a wonderful keeper and a crowd pleaser.  In a further tribute to Mom, we keep them in a tin box, as she did and as did her mother and aunts before her.  She hated to part with a tin box, stockpiled the sturdy ones, and inspired her descendants to covet and hoard tin boxes as well.  If you want to keep cookies crisp, the tin box has no rival. 

Brutti ma Buoni or Piedmontese Almond Cookies
11 ounces of Cabral Family farms dry roasted almonds (Marcella calls for skinned, blanched almonds)
1 cup plus 3 tablespoons granulated sugar
4 egg whites (we use ones we’ve frozen from all that pasta making this summer)
Salt
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract (we must boast that we use an extract we made out of vanilla beans bought for a song at Vanilla, Saffron imports in San Francisco and soaked for months in vodka)
Butter for smearing the cookie sheets

Marcella says this makes 55-60 cookies but for us it’s more like 30.
1)   Preheat the oven to 300 degrees
2)   In a food processor, pulverize the almonds with the sugar or chop them very fine and combine with the sugar, or smash almonds and sugar in a mortar and pestle
3)   Whip the egg whites with a pinch of salt until they form stiff peaks.  This is very easily done in a standing mixer but can be done with a hand beater as well.
4)   Fold the beaten egg whites into the almond and sugar mixture and add the vanilla extract.
5)   Smear two baking sheets with butter.  Scoop up about 1 tablespoon of the batter for each cookie.  This is a great time to use a small cookie scoop if you have one.  Otherwise you need to use two spoons, one to scoop up the batter and the other to push it off onto the pan.  Keep the mounds of batter at least 1 inch apart as these cookies spread out.  As Marcella explains, “don’t worry if they seem shapeless:  Their Italian name means ugly, but good; they are expected to be very irregular.”
6)   Bake on the middle racks of the oven for about 30 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through.  Spread them out on a cooling rack.  When they are completely cooled, store them in a tin biscuit box. 
Marcella expressly recommends the tin box, but we were way ahead of her. 

Monday, October 22, 2012

Kitchen alchemy: Fall vegetable panade


Even a touch of coolness in the air tempts us to undertake more time-consuming and heat-producing kitchen tasks and to whip up comforting dishes that make use of fall produce.  As a consequence, we decided to make some chicken stock and a panade—a bread and stock concoction resembling stuffing or a custard-less savory bread pudding.  We’ve written in another post about “bountiful stock,” especially a stock made from stew hens when they’re available at the market.  The stock we just made might more properly be called “scarcity stock,” as we make it entirely from things that might otherwise be thrown away.  Like edible compost, this stock is a very satisfying form of alchemy, gold made out of garbage.

Over the last few months, we had been stashing the carcasses of all the Chowdown Farm chickens we roasted in the freezer.  They all went into the stockpot, along with a parmesan rind or two (also archived in the freezer), and some tired carrots and celery from the back of the fridge, an onion cut in half, a crushed clove of garlic or two, and, to strike a different note, some fresh rosemary, thyme branches, and bay leaves from the garden.  After bringing it to a boil and skimming it, we simmered it on low heat for a day.  We then chilled it, skimmed off the fat, and stored it in the freezer in small containers.  Chilling it makes it much easier to handle this wonderfully flavorful stock, which turns gelatinous. 

Because we were working with a backlog of chicken carcasses, we produced more stock than we really had room to store in the freezer.  So we were faced with the happy challenge of choosing a dish that would use some up.  We first learned about panade from Judy Rodgers’ splendid Zuni Café Cookbook.  We often make one of her panade recipes at Thanksgiving in place of stuffing.  The panade we made drew on what we learned from Rodgers and combined it with a panade recipe from the Tartine Cookbook, which uses milk in place of the stock.  Naturally, we were all about the chicken stock.   But you can also use vegetable stock or milk in this recipe. 

This simple dish showcases vegetables that are at their best right now at the market:  kale (or another dark, leafy green), cauliflower, butternut squash, and leeks.    

It also uses a hearty bread.  We prefer whole wheat levain, either from Village Bakery at the market or Acme breads at the Co-op.  For cheese, we list fontina and we used the Fontina Vera Aosta from the Co-op.  You can use anything that will melt and that has a flavor punch. 
 

We finished the panade with some grated cheese.  For this, we adapted a trick we learned at the Findlay Market in Cincinnati years ago.  The woman ahead of us in line at a cheesemonger requested “cheese ends.”  When we asked her what she would do with them—in an instance of the snooping, asking, learning, and teaching that make it such a pleasure to shop in a local market—she said she used them in her macaroni and cheese.  She went home with a very motley assortment of bits and pieces of various cheeses and an expression that conveyed her eager expectation of the mac and cheese they would produce.  And we went home with a commitment to mixing it up when it comes to cheese.  So for this panade, in the spirit of using things up rather than throwing them away, we put every stray bit of hard cheese we had in the cheese bin into a food processor and sprinkled it on top in the last phase of cooking.  It was delicious and the unintelligible identity and untraceable origins of the cheese topping just made it more so.

Fall vegetable panade

For the panade, you need a heavy, ovenproof pot (about 5-quart size), preferably with a lid.

3 tablespoons olive oil
2 leeks, white parts only, chopped
About 6 cups chicken stock (you can also use vegetable stock or milk)
Salt
About 3/4 a loaf of day-old country bread, in big cubes
1 small butternut squash (about 1 pound), peeled, seeded and cut into cubes
1 bunch black kale or Swiss chard, center stems removed
1 small head cauliflower (about 1½ pounds), trimmed and cut into florets
½ pound fontina cheese, thinly sliced or cubed
A little hard cheese to grate on top?


1)    Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Melt 2 tablespoons of the oil in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the leeks and sauté until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the stock and perhaps salt it lightly if it’s homemade and you haven’t added a lot of salt.  If you are using store bought stock, don’t salt!  Bring to a boil and then remove from the heat.

2)  Lightly and quickly saute the kale or chard in a bit more oil, just to soften it.

3)    Cover the bottom of the casserole with cubes of bread. Arrange the squash cubes in an even layer on top of the bread and pour in 2 cups of the stock. Put in a layer of some of the fontina cheese.  Then put in another layer of bread cubes.  Top with the kale and the rest of the soft cheese. Arrange the cauliflower florets over the kale. Press down on the ingredients to compress them. 

4) Pour the remaining stock over the top of the whole casserole, but stop adding it when the level is about even with the top layer of cauliflower.  You want the cauliflower to stick its head above the soupy sea. Cover the pot with a lid or aluminum foil. Bake for 30 minutes. Uncover and sprinkle the top with the grated cheese. Return to the oven uncovered and bake until the liquid is absorbed and reduced and the cheese has melted and browned, 30 to 40 minutes. This is delicious when it is wet and almost like a bread soup, but it is even better if you bake it long enough to dry it out so that it holds together.  Serve immediately or let cool and refrigerate for up to 3 days. Leftovers reheat well either in the casserole or in individual slices on a baking sheet. This is one of those dishes that, like love, just might get better the second time around, in this case because it develops wonderfully crispy edges.  This is also a good choice if you need something you can make in advance.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Pasta with Zucchini in the Style of Campania

Zucchini is the first vegetable either of us remembers really liking as children.  Yet precisely because it can seem so unobjectionable and homely, zucchini often doesn’t get much respect.  Notorious for its superabundance when in season, its very bounty can make it seem burdensome.  When we lived in Ohio, a neighbor would sometimes leave a paper bag of huge zucchini at the door, ring the bell, and then nip away.  We inevitably suspected that the stealth was a strategy to prevent us from refusing the gift.  There is a suburban legend that the reason one should always lock car doors in summer, even (or especially) in small, relatively crime-free towns (like Davis), is because otherwise someone will leave a bag of zucchini on the seat. 
Of course, people try so hard to offer their too too-abundant squash not just because they have so much of it, but also because, after all, it's just too good to waste.  More than once, a trip to Italy taught us to see zucchini anew and to try different takes on that summer staple, zucchini pasta.  
Some years ago we had a dish at a little restaurant in Montalcino, in Tuscany, of butterfly pasta, cooked squash, garlic, basil, and a generous amount of pecorino fresco, a soft, fresh sheep’s milk cheese from Tuscany that is available at the Davis Co-op.  The more widely-known pecorino romano is an aged version of a similar cheese.  With this dish, we learned about something that we’ve come to refer to as “the restaurant pause.”  In the restaurant in Italy, we could see the pasta being finished in the pan with the cooked vegetables and herbs.  It was then plated, and small pieces of the cheese (which is too soft to grate) were sprinkled on top.  We could see the chef putting the plate on a shelf just outside the kitchen for the waiter to pick up.  In the tiny, busy and hot restaurant, with one waiter striving his best to serve every table, the plate of pasta waited for perhaps two minutes or so on that shelf; and when it arrived at the table the cheese had melted perfectly on top.  It’s not a liquid cheese sauce, but a sort of lovely light lattice of melted cheese on top of the cooked butterflies.  In most recipes, of course, one is told to serve pasta “immediately,” but this recipe makes a positive virtue out of the inevitable (small) delay between cooking a dish and getting it in front of your guest.
This summer we were in Campania, the region in the middle of Italy whose capital is Naples, where the local specialty is often claimed to be spaghetti with zucchini.  We certainly ate it constantly when we were there.  Usually it’s just squash cooked in olive oil and tossed with spaghetti and grated pecorino romano.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but neither is it particularly memorable.  In one tiny restaurant near Positano, however, the pasta was dressed in a rich green sauce with flecks of brown.  As we ate, we speculated that they had added cooked bacon or ham, or perhaps a glug of sweet cream, to pureed squash.  But when we asked our waiter (part of the family that ran the restaurant), he wagged his finger and said “no, no” and then explained what they did as best he could.  Only when getting home and reading around a bit did we also learn that one of the secrets of this recipe is a variety of squash known as romanesco, which by a happy chance was turning up at Fiddler’s Green at the Davis Farmers Market just as we were experimenting with this dish.  The flesh of this variety has a creamy texture that is part of the secret of this dish — along with, truth be told, a rather generous amount of butter.

Romanesco Squash from Fiddler's Green Farm
Anyway, the recipe below is our best shot at synthesizing what our friendly waiter told us in Campania and a few other recipes seen elsewhere. In this version, we juiced it up a little further by adding some basil and chopped zucchini flowers, since the latter happened to be available.  The basil doesn’t do much, so feel free to omit it, but it does amp up the green color somewhat.  We’ve also included a method for plating the spaghetti that we noticed everyone doing in Italy.  


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Spaghetti with Romanesco Zucchini in the Style of Campania
5-6 medium romanesco zucchini squash, scrubbed, trimmed and sliced medium thinly
Olive oil for frying
1 lb dried spaghetti
5 tbs butter
about one cup of grated parmesan cheese
¼ cup basil leaves, sliced into thin ribbons (a chiffonade)
1 basket of zucchini flowers, trimmed and sliced thinly (optional)
Fry the zucchini slices in olive oil at medium heat until soft and beginning to brown a little.  It will take at least two rounds of frying.  (We’ve found that zucchini tends to get bitter if you get it really brown.  What you’re aiming for here are pieces that are soft, spotted with brown, but retaining some of their green color and just beginning to fall apart.  Remove from pan to a plate and reserve).
 


All the rest of the dish gets done when you finish it, which, unfortunately, has to be right when you want to serve it.

To finish and serve
Bring a large kettle of generously salted water to boil.  Drop in your spaghetti, and stir vigorously until it is boiling again.
Put the butter in a separate pan big enough to fit the whole dish.
When the spaghetti has cooked about half of its time (check your package of spaghetti, but usually around 4-5 minutes), take one cup of the pasta water and add it to the pan with the butter and turn the heat to high.
When the butter-water mixture comes to a boil, add the reserved zucchini.
Now, still at high heat, stir the zucchini mixture vigorously, allowing the pieces to fall apart, until you have a kind of rough puree.  It should take a good two minutes or so.  When it starts to look the way you want it, turn the heat down or off; but this is a game of inches, measured against your pasta in the kettle. 
When the spaghetti is still a little underdone, drain it (reserve another cup of pasta water just in case), and add it to the pan with the zucchini.  Stir vigorously as the pasta absorbs some of the liquid.
Add 1 cup of grated parmesan cheese, and salt and pepper. Continue to fold the pasta into the sauce until it has the right consistency.  If it looks watery, cook a little longer to dry it out; if it seems dry, add a little more pasta water.
(Just before calling it done, gently fold in the basil and the chopped flowers, if using.)


Take a large fork, and gather a goodly bit of the spaghetti, turning it into a spiral in a large ladle.  Put one generous spiral of pasta on each plate. 

 

To be really honest, this dish seems to us to have so successfully distilled the earthy taste of the squash that, as the old saying goes, a little goes a long way.  But this is an absolutely wonderful pasta served in small amounts as part of a three-course Italian dinner, following some kind of light antipasti and preceding a meat course, perhaps one of Bledsoe’s wonderful thick pork chops.