Am I allowed to post about something that I didn't prepare at all? I mean I did absolutely nothing to alter the state of the food. I brought it, or rather them, home, cracked them open and ate them. Raw. Practically alive. I did add some black pepper and a bit of lemon, does that count for something? It's certainly not cooking.
I'm talking, of course, of oysters. Salty, slimy, fishy, metallic, tangy, quivering on your tongue, excitingly delicious oysters. I managed to pick up some particularly tasty ones at the Sydney fish markets recently. I bought a half dozen deeply curved, little pacific oysters called Kumamoto, named for the bay in Japan where they originate. This particular variety is farmed extensively in the American northwest, but they are only beginning to be available in Australia.
Before moving to OZ I'd never eaten a raw oyster, though I think oyster chowder was a pretty common diner-counter meal for me. I can't get enough of them now, but I am a bit picky about which ones I eat. I like a smallish, firm oyster, with a clean taste of the sea. I look for ones with deep shells – ones that remind me of the shape of the Opera House. Never buy oysters in the summer months, as they are spawning and their flesh goes creamy and soft. A good fish monger will tell you which varieties are spawning. In general I find that cold water oysters have a crisper flavor.
Most importantly, buy unshucked oysters, and get yourself an oyster knife. I always watch in horror at the fish markets as the professional shuckers open their oysters under running water. This, no doubt washes away all those annoying broken bits of shell and what not, but this is done at the expense of all that mouth-wateringly salty oyster juice that is swirling down the drain. Oysters treated this way have half the flavor of freshly shucked ones.
Ask someone at your local fish market to teach you how to shuck. If they don't know, never buy an oyster from them again; they've been buying in pre-shucked oysters. What's so bad about that? Oysters are alive until you shuck them; crack 'em open and the “bad oyster clock” starts ticking. Shucking is one of those simple tasks where the effort is dwarfed by the satisfaction. With a little practice, you'll be a pro. Let's eat.
Oysters Naturale
Open your oysters, carefully retaining their juices. Pick out any bits of broken shell. Smell each oyster. They sould have an aroma like sea mist. You'll know a bad one when you sniff it. Top them with a bit of cracked pepper and a squeeze of fresh lemon.
On Not Cooking
On Unpleasant Memories
Today, a story.
I was recently preparing one of my favorite dishes, coq au vin, and, while trying to remember how long it had been since I'd last cooked it, recalled one of those kitchen moments I'd much rather forget.
Coq au vin is French poverty food at it's best. It is a simple country stew meant to be made with an old rooster; a tough, chewy, dry bird. This is slowly cooked with some bacon, a bit of onion, and a few mushrooms, all in red wine until the meat is tender and succulent. Like most French poverty food, the dish has been elevated to fine cuisine – modern versions call for young, fat hens, rich French reds, eshallots, and morells – an expensive mushroom that has a delicate smoky flavor and a firm, spongy texture.
I can't fault those ingredients, but I must admit I love the simple version. I find a dish where a combination of so many cheep ingredients becomes a deeply satisfying, special experience to be nothing short of magical.
I had all of these things in mind when I visited my parents a few years ago. It was my first trip home to the States in over two years, and my wife and I were coming for Christmas. To celebrate the occasion I wanted to cook a warm, filling, family meal that everyone would enjoy. We bought a lovely, large boiler of a hen, a handful of button mushrooms, half a dozen pearl onions, a small slab of spec, and the cheapest bottle of red we could find.
A home I broke down the chicken: drumsticks, thighs, wings, breast. I roasted up the bones and made a simple brown stock. I lovingly peeled and halved the onions, gently brushed the mushrooms clean.
The plan was, as with all braises, to season and brown the meat, remove it from the pan, and then lightly brown the vegetables and render some of the fat from the spec. In order to get good color on the meat, one must start with a blindingly hot pan so that when the meat makes contact it does not cool the pan significantly. If the pan cools too much, the juices from the cooking meat simmer, boiling the meat rather than searing it, and the result is a chewy, gray, flavorless chunk of protein.
I was not about to let this happen. My pan, my parent's pan, actually, a wide, stainless steel, heavy bottomed, chrome-like thing of beauty, was hot. Stinking hot. I had the chicken pieces to the left of the stove on a plate, seasoned and ready to go. Spec, onion and mushrooms in separate bowls behind. Olive oil in a jar to the right.
I poured the oil into the white-hot pan, turned for an instant to grab the first two pieces of chicken, and the oil ignited.
I don't know if you've ever had the pleasure of experiencing an oil fire. They start with an air-sucking “WHUMP” and, once going, enter a sort of positive feedback loop, where the heat from the fire causes more oil to reach burning point, which increases the flame, which increases the heat, which causes more oil... you get the idea. I know a fair deal about how oil fires act. I've started several. They happen often in commercial kitchens, so often that recently, when our entire six burner stove top burst into flames, we all stood back, arms crossed, and calmly asked each other “What do you think we should do now?”
I wish I had that sort of decorum standing at my parents' stove. Instead, I momentarily froze, watching the flames first lick and then curl around the tiny extraction fan that extends over their oven. When I snapped to, my panicked jabbing in cupboards and drawers for the pot's lid did little to assure my family that all was, in fact, under control. When I did find the lid and smother the flames I was greeted with a giant wave of the other endearing feature of an oil fire: choking, putrid smoke.
Burning oil smells like a combination of melting plastic and smoldering hair, and my covered pot was emitting the stuff in EPA-violating volumes. I, afraid I was gassing my entire family, rushed the pot out the back door, down the steps and plunged it deep into the snow.
I stood there, stocking-clad, adrenaline-mad, listening to the pot scream and hiss as it nestled into the snow bank, in a sort of disbelieving shock. Sure, fires happen. Admittedly, I didn't handle the situation perfectly, but it could have been worse. The house was still standing; no one was hurt. The pot was going to need a good clean and might not ever be quite as shiny, but it wasn't destroyed. All of these things I could deal with.
What kept me standing with my back to the house long after the pot was cold and the smoke had cleared was one thought revolving in my rattled head, like a mantra : “I do this for a living. For a living. I do this for a living.” And I knew that some time, soon, since the sun was setting and it was beginning to snow, I would have to go back in and face my parents, who must by now have decided I was the most incompetent chef in the world.
We all had a good laugh about it over dinner, especially since it was the second time I'd started a kitchen fire at my parents' house in the same week (I'll tell you some other time). Thankfully it was tasty, otherwise it would have been a lot of unnecessary drama. Still, I'm sure no one remembers the meal quite like they do the pre-dinner show.
This time around my oil didn't quite reach flash point, even given the distraction of embarrassed recollection. Lucky, too, because I've no snow available in which to extinguish the pot.
Something about this photo makes me think about continental drift. Of great masses sliding past one another, ancient secrets being subducted, new ones bubbling forth, all around the dinner table.
This dish is technically a daube – a type of French stew that is in a broth rather than a thickened sauce. Hence, no instructions for reducing the sauce or adding flour. It's meant to be soupy.
Coq au vin
1 chicken, broken into legs, breasts, wings, and bones
200g mushrooms, buttons, flats, portabello, whatever, cut to equal size
10 pearl or pickling onions, peeled and halved
100g spec or salt pork, cut into 1 cm cubes
1 clove garlic, peeled
1 bay
1 sprig thyme
300ml (approx) cheap red wine
Start by making a bit of chicken stock. Preheat oven to 200º C and roast the chicken bones on a tray until brown. Remove from tray, add a splash of red wine to the hot tray, using the wine to scrape loose any stuck on bits. Place the bones and the contents of the baking tray into a small pot. Cover with cold water and simmer 1 hour. Strain, discarding solids. You should have roughly 1 cup of stock.
Alternately, you can buy chicken already broken down and ask the butcher for some bones to roast for stock. Easier still (but not quite as good) you can just buy some chicken stock.
Reduce oven to 160º C.
Place a heavy-bottomed, stainless steel pot large enough to hold all ingredients onto high heat. Season the chicken pieces and, using a little olive oil, brown the meat on all sides. Remove from pan. Reduce the heat, add the bacon, cook for a minuet, then add the onions, mushrooms, garlic, thyme, and bay leaf. Lightly brown, stirring occasionally.
Return the chicken to the pan along with the stock and enough red wine to just cover. Put a tight-fitting lid on the pot and braise in the oven anywhere from 1-3 hours. Check the meat periodically by pulling on the drumstick bone gently. When it feels as though it is pulling away at the thigh joint, the dish is done. Adjust seasoning and serve with mashed potatoes or rice or pilaf or bread or whatever you've got.
One more thing. I've heard popular chefs and T.V. cooks parroting the phrase “never cook with a wine that you would not drink.” While this is a noble sentiment, it is neither practical nor is it often practiced. I've not yet worked in a restaurant (and I've worked in a few fine-dinning joints) where we cook with anything but big casks of cheap red and white. Trust me here, save the good stuff for drinking.
Recipe Amnesia
I've mentioned a couple of times in this blog that I know quite a few recipes by heart. They are usually things that I cook often enough to know exactly what ingredients, in what quantities, and precisely when they are added, like a chemical formula. Others I remember in the same way in which I recall poetry – the first line recalled prompts the next, so that “Twas brillig,” and “200g flour” spur my memory in exactly the same manner.
I have a terrific memory for recalling dates and details, menus and mistakes, people and pastries. That said, I have huge blind spots. Blank memory bits where I am completely incapable of the vaguest recall. It's as if my brain, at random, forms no connections with certain facts, events, people, histories, and they go tumbling into some inner-cranial singularity, destine to vanish forever in a blip of cosmic rays.
Someone will say “remember so-and-so?” Uh... “She worked with you at blah-blah.” Ummm... “Brunette. Short. Glasses. Came to drinks with all of us at the such-and-such.” Nope.
As disturbing as this is, the professional equivalent is even more unnerving. Now and again I completely lose a recipe. My brain fails to hold onto even the barest of information about a preparation method or a dish. Try to reproduce the meal, and I come up with nothing but fuzzy mental outlines of the end product and Columbo-like guesswork as to how I got there.
Worse still, there are a few bits of culinary wisdom upon which I never seem to be able to get a firm grip, no matter how often I encounter them. I find myself looking up or practicing these particular recipes and methods again and again. As soon as I've completed the task, I forget how it's done. The whole process leaves me feeling a bit like the damaged guy in “Memento.”
For example, every time I pickle gherkins (little cucumbers, or just “pickles” in the States) I promptly forget how I've done it. I suppose it has something to do with the long lead time; six weeks from cooking until they are ready to eat. The great interval does not encourage recollection. Besides, if, a month and a half later, the end result tanks, who wants to remember the recipe anyway?
Still, this post is my attempt at recording at least one version of gherkins that turned out well. I scribbled down the ingredients as I threw it together, and now, nearly three months later (forgot they were in the fridge), upon tasting I've discovered they are pretty bloody good. 
Try not to ask me too many questions about exact details, as I'll have to make something up. No one wants that.
500 g pickling gherkins
500 ml water
175 ml vinegar (white, cider, or white wine)
2 tbsp sea salt flakes
1tbsp pink peppercorns
1tsp mustard seeds
1sm clove garlic, peeled
2 spring onions, most of the green tops removed
Wash the gherkins gently and then soak them in cold water for at least three hours. Drain.
Combine the 500 ml water with the vinegar and salt. Boil 3 min.
Meanwhile, sterilize a pickling jar large enough to hold all the gherkins. Pack them in tightly. Stuff in the garlic, spring onions, peppercorns, and mustard seeds. Pour the hot vinegar solution over to cover and seal. Store in the fridge* at least six weeks.
*Sure, a pickle is a preserve, but we're not heat-treating these. That means we get a crispy pickle, but that we can't be sure nasties wont grow. Refrigeration helps reassure us all. The warm loving embrace of the fridge. If that makes any sense.
Leave it Alone
(One Hungry Chef is a year old this week!)
Some foods should not be messed with. These are dishes who's ingredients work together in certain ratios to produce a delicious final product. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for innovating. I can't read a recipe without wondering what items I might substitute or quantities I might alter. New flavor combinations and new dishes arise from such experimentation. Neither is this about hanging on to tradition. Cooking a dish the same way over and over simply because that's how they've always been made is not something I find interesting. I'm not desperately resisting change. I am, however, adamant that certain, simple dishes should not be tampered with.
I'm thinking specifically of guacamole. Avocado, lime, onion, a chili, coriander, possibly a tomato, and salt. Don't mess with the ingredients. Together, in roughly the correct quantities, they make something magical. Start adding other flavors, and, well, you're only botching a good thing.
By way of cautionary example, the “guacamole” I recently saw in a jar listed avocado as the 5th or 6th ingredient, at about 6%. Listen people, I don't know what the hell was in the other 94%, but I can guarantee it wasn't guacamole.
Perhaps we should consider implementing AOC-style laws for everyday food products. It would then be illegal to call a parsley and peanut paste “pesto,” as so often happens. “American cheese slices” would be called “processed whey and other byproducts with a plethora of artificial stuff.” And no longer will a blend of hydrogenated oils, sour cream, onion powder, soy lecithin, tartaric acid, green No. 3, and a hint of avocado be labeled “Guacamole.”
Go forth, all you irate, internet, chip-dipping hippies, and write angry letters, smash bottles, form mobs, or, better, stop buying the fake stuff and make yourself some real guacamole.
Guacamole
2 large, very ripe avocados, preferably the haas variety
1tsp roughly chopped white onion
¼ tsp roughly chopped serrano chili
1 Tbsp roughly chopped coriander
1 lime
sea salt
Using a molcajete (a coarse mortar and pestal – go buy one) crush the onion, chili, and coriander with a generous pinch of salt. Add to this the flesh of the two peeled avocados. Mash it all up and squeeze a generous amount of lime juice over the top. Mix well, adjust seasoning, and crack open a bag of tortilla chips.
Happy Cinco de Mayo!
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