The Real Thing

I am not obsessed with accuracy. I don't always go by the book. I do not dress in period costume and go to renaissance fairs. I won't always follow the rules. I don't stay in the lines, nor listen to my mother, nor walk the straight and narrow, nor pay much attention to the instructions.

This does not mean I am an anarchist. I simply wanted to give a general sense about my lackadaisical attitude towards “getting it right.”

Now I'm going to attempt to reconcile this attitude with my great love of cooking foods in manner that could be called “historically accurate.” On the surface, the above two might seem diametrically opposed.

You see, I love reading about how different dishes were prepared over time. I enjoy the historical context, for sure, but I am enamored, for example, with the idea of preparing some of Carême's meals precisely the way he did for Napoleon, and I would love to host an ancient Roman feast based closely on Apicius' cookbook. Not only that, but I am curious as to what a “real” nicoise salad consists of, according to the people of Nice, and likewise want to know the proper ingredients in Beef Stroganov and thus make one correctly. I insist that any such replication be as accurate as possible, a seeming contradiction to my prior assertion of laziness.

What saves me then, from hypocrisy? Well, a fine distinction, I suppose. Namely, that my facination in historical accuracy is not nit-picking but a genuine interest in how things were once made. I want to know, before modern chefs sunk their teeth in, what the real thing looked like. Once I have satisfied this curiosity I am in no way opposed to interpretations. For example one of my favorite desserts – tart tatin – was classically made with shortcrust pastry, while most modern versions are made with puff pastry, a vast improvement.

All this nosing around in old cookbooks and reading up on regional specialties has it's advantages. Every now and again I get back to basics, cook a dish the way it was meant to be done, and have a bloody revelation.

Specifically I'm thinking of that Italian restaurant favorite, Spaghetti Carbonara. Outside of Rome, where it was invented sometime around the second world war, the ingredients read something like this: pasta, bacon, eggs, parmesan, cream, and pepper. Inarguably, when put together they make a delicious dinner.

A little reading reveals that the Carbonara, according to Romans, should consist of pasta, guanciale, eggs, parmesan, and pepper. Note two key distinctions: guancale (salt-cured pork jowl) in place of smoked bacon, and the omission of cream. Curiosity compels me to try the original.

Leaving the cream out is easy, finding guancale is not, as it is not produced in any quantity outside of Italy. Not to be deterred, I made my own.



It took a couple of months of dry-curing, but it was worth the wait. Sweet, salty, MEATY, fatty, not smokey at all. When cut into small chunks and crisped up, each little bite of guancale is a tiny explosion of savory-sweet pork fat and chewy, rich, cured flesh. It's not that this is better than bacon, it's just nothing at all like bacon, and using it changes the dish considerably. The end result is a lovely balance of salty cheese, rich egg, sweet pork, and the bite of pepper.



I am so won over by the characteristics of cured pork jowl I don't think I'll ever make carbonara without it again.

This is, after all, The Real Thing.



The addition of water helps prevent the eggs from scrambling when they hit the hot pasta and the hot pan, so that each noodle is coated with a thick, silky sauce.

2 eggs, room temp, lightly beaten
1 Tbsp warm water
100g guanciale (see below), 1 cm dice
50g parmesean, grated
freshly ground black pepper
200g dried spaghetti

Pour a teaspoon of olive oil into a small, cold pan and then toss in the diced guancale. Place the pan on low heat and cook slowly until much of the fat has rendered out of the meat and the cubes are lightly colored and crisp. Remove from heat and keep warm.

Lightly beat the water and eggs together.

Meanwhile, bring a large pot of heavily salted water to a rolling boil. Cook the pasta until it is al dente and strain.

Return the hot pasta to the pot and place it over medium heat on the stove. Working quickly, tip in the guanciale and all the rendered fat, the eggs and water, and half the parmesean. Stir vigorously until the eggs thicken a bit and form a sauce. Remove from heat, season to taste with black pepper, and serve with the remaining parmesean on top.

Note that I didn't mention salt. Your guancale is likely to be quite salty, as is the parmesean; make sure you add these two things before you add any additional salt.

This brings me to a second point: for those of you who add mountains of parmesean to your pastas – try a bit more salt. It's most likely that the meal you are eating is not meant to taste solely of cheese (after all, it is a condiment). Very often a pinch of salt will satisfy that need-more-parma-itch.

Guanciale
1k pork jowl (2 medium jowls)
300g salt flakes
300g sugar
2 cloves garlic, cracked
1 tsp black peppercorns, lightly toasted
6 sprigs thyme

Mix all ingredients, except pork. In a glass dish just large enough to hold the jowls, spread half the salt mixture. Press the jowls into the dish and cover with the remaining mixture. Cover and refrigerate for one week, turning the jowls over every second day. The salt will pull moisture out of the meat forming a brine that will cure the pork.

After one week, check the jowls. The meat should be quite firm and no longer feel raw. If it is still soft in places, leave in the brine for a few additional days.

When the meat is ready, remove it from the brine, rinse off the salt and spices, pat it dry, wrap it in muslin or cheese cloth, and hang it in a cool, dry place for at least three weeks. Over this time the meat will dry a bit and become quite firm, but not hard (a sign it has been hung in too dry of an environment). Given the right conditions, this meat can be hung for quite some time and improves with age.

Loose Lips

If loose lips sink ships, what does loose meat do?

Ever since I moved to Australia I have found myself in the position of clearing up some misconceptions and mysteries about America. As I am a chef, most of the material I find myself dealing with involves food. Admittedly, I can't answer all the questions (Why do you guys eat cheese out of a can?” and “What exactly is miracle whip?” etc.). On some topics, however, I can offer a bit of wisdom. For example, there is a general belief here that Monterey Jack is the name for the ubiquitous dyed yellow cheddar cheese, and no one here understands why Americans eat so many peanuts (thank you George Washington Carver).

One question I am repeatedly asked goes like this” “What the hell is a 'loose meat sandwich'? Rosanne, on T.V., owned a loose meat sandwich shop and it sort of sounds disgusting.”

I have to explain that it's a sandwich made of loose ground beef and is a favorite in parts of the mid-west where it was invented. As for sounding disgusting, well, sure, it does have a pretty unappetizing name. I grew up west of the “loose meat belt” and therefore ate and loved sloppy joes – essentially loose meat in a spicy tomato sauce – so I can't tell people much more about loose meat sandwiches.

It did get me thinking about pulled pork, or BBQ as it is sometimes called the the south of the States. Now listen residents of Iowa, I know that pulled pork is not the same as loose meat. Please don't send me angry letters, either of you. It's just that in Australia BBQ is as much of a mystery as loose meat. Besides, since I know how to make pulled pork, and Aussies love bbq sauce, I figured it was a good introduction to the whole "loose" genre.



Originally I had a bit of an issue with pulled pork recipes, or rather, the method. I couldn't believe that in all the recipes I looked at, not one called for the browning of meat or cooking of the onions first. I was dumbfounded. How, in god's name, how could anyone just put raw meat and vegitables into a pot and cook them in a sauce? Every braise I have ever done begins with the searing of meat and sweating of vegetables; it's the step where a great deal of the flavor comes from. I'd never heard of such a thing.

Wait. Something about raw onions, cubed, unseared meat, slow cooking, shredding... Oh. Rillettes. Rillettes! They are one of my favorite meat preserves and are made thus: Place cubes of raw meat in a cooking vessel, add uncooked shallots, garlic, spices, stock, and duck fat. Cook slowly until the meat begins to fall apart. Remove the solids from the liquid, shred with two forks and moisten with the cooking fats/liquid. Voilà! Rillettes.

It might as well be the cooking method for pulled pork. I wonder if the dishes are related.



2 k pork leg, boneless cut into 4 or 5 large pieces.
1 medium onion, chopped
½ c ketchup
½ c cider vinegar
¼ c packed brown sugar
¼ c tomato paste
1 Tbsp sweet paprika
1/3 c worcestershire sauce
2 Tbsp yellow mustard powder
1 ½ tsp salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
½ tsp ground fennel seeds
1 clove garlic
1 sprig thyme

Put all of the ingredients, except the pork, into a large roasting dish or pot and mix together. Add the pieces of meat and turn to coat. Cover and cook either in the oven at 160ºC or on low heat on the stove top for a few hours until the meat is nearly falling apart.

Remove the meat from the liquid with a slotted spoon and, using two forks, shred into long fibrous bits. In the meantime, simmer the sauce uncovered to thicken slightly. Add some of this reduced sauce to the shredded meat to moisten it. Adjust seasoning.

Serve on buttered buns with vinegary hot sauce on the side.

Be sure to reserve the job of shredding the pork for your favorite member of the household (go on, admit it, you were thinking “that's me!”) as it is the most deeply satisfying of tasks. There is something both soothing and thrilling about destroying one thing to enable the creation of something better.

Cheating

I can't stand sugar. Hate it. Despise it. Sure, it has it's place in desserts, but that's not what I'm talking about. I get very angry when sugar is used in savory cooking. I don't even want the bloody stuff near my coffee, much less in my sandwich bread. White sugar in particular is the worst. When something savory is sweetened with cheap, banal, white sugar, it tastes the same: cheap and banal. Maybe, maybe, if you make a deep caramel first, then possibly you might get away with paring it with a gamey meat dish. Probably not.

Sadly, I know too many chefs who use sugar in tomato sauces, soups, stocks, dressings, and whatever else they find in need of a boost. Call it “sugar cheating.” It's not just chefs either. Read the ingredients of the next jar of pasta sauce you buy at the grocery store, sugar is pretty high on the list. How many recipes in your collection call for a tablespoon of sugar?

Let me be perfectly clear, I am not against sweetness in savory foods. Pasta sauces aren't supposed to be all tomato-acid bitter, and the salts in cured meats need to be balanced by a rich sweetness. I will admit, adding sugar is, at times, warranted. Most chutneys, for example, call for sugar, but dark brown or smoky demerara yield superior results to that of white. However, these exceptions are few and, as a general rule, you shouldn't be adding sugar to your cooking.

How then, is one to sweeten foods without adding sugar? Through the skilled control of temperature and ample application of patience.

Many of the savory foods we eat are filled with natural sugars. It is my job as a chef (and yours as a cook at home) to coax them out. These sugars - in onions, carrots, celery, wine, vinegar, even fish and meat - have deeply complex flavor profiles, and once you grow accustom to them in your foods, you're tastebuds will be able to spot “sugar cheating” at first bite.



Chef's call the process of drawing out these naturally sweet flavors “caramelization.” Technically, the word is a scientific term which applies only to certain chemical reactions in food, and is differentiated from other browning of food reactions (such as bread and meat) by a lack of interaction with amino acids. However, in practice, the terms “to color the food,” “brown the food,” and “caramelize” are all interchangeable in the kitchen. Let's not get bogged down in technical details.



All you really need to know is that, in general, “low and slow” is good for vegetables, and “searing” is better for most meats. Carrots and their ilk need time over moderate heat for their sugars to develop. Meats, on the other hand, require high heat, as they taste best when seared, as apposed to boiling in their own juices, where the temperatures are not high enough to brown the meat. Done properly, both caramelized veggies and meats yield a roasty, complex, rich, full-pallet sweetness that, frankly, beats the living bejesus out of anything made with white sugar.

Any chef who can't do this is either incompetent or lazy, or both.

Let's practice.



Braised Ox Tail Cannelloni with Parsnip Puree and Ox Tail Jus

O.K. I know there are a lot of instructions here, but this isn't really that difficult. If you learn this method, you can apply it to all your braises. The result here is a rich, savory, meat-filled pasta with a sticky, salty, sweet jus. It is well worth the effort. This should make about 5 servings.

1 ox tail, jointed (ask your butcher do do this for you)
1 carrot, peeled
1 onion, peeled
1 stick celery
4 cloves garlic, peeled
1 sprig thyme
1 bay leaf
beef or brown chicken stock
100 ml red wine

Begin by cutting your vegetables into large chunks (see first photo above). Cut the onion into quarters, and cut the carrot and celery on a diagonal to increase their surface area; we'll be using this greater surface area to our advantage: the greater the surface area, the greater the carmelization. Crack the garlic lightly with the heel of your palm. Have all of these at the ready.

Heat a heavy-bottomed pan on high heat until it is very hot. Working quickly, sprinkle the ox tail segments with salt and pepper, pour a couple tablespoons of oil into the hot pan, and lower the meat piece by piece into the pan using tongs. It may not all fit at once; don't over-crowd the pan.

This is your first opportunity to practice caramelization. You need to adjust the temperature in the pan so that the meat is sizzling, not boiling in it's own juices, but at the same time, cooking slowly enough to brown evenly and render out some of the fat. This will take some time. Periodically turn the pieces of meat so that each side is slowly browned. When caramelized on all sides, remove the meat to a deep roasting dish which is just large enough to hold all the meat, and repeat if you were unable to cook all the meat at once.

When all of the tail segments have been browned, have a look at the bottom of your pan. You should see a bit of oil/fat and bits of meat and cooked meat juices – the “glaze” - stuck to the bottom. This glaze is tasty and we want it in our braise. The next step uses the vegetables to remove it from the bottom of the pan.

Keeping the pan on the same heat, pour off all but about 3 tablespoons of the fat. Toss in your veggies and stir with a wooden spoon. This is your second chance to practice. The carrots, onions, celery, and garlic have a high water content. As they start to cook, this water comes out, boils away, and in the process removes the glaze from the bottom of the pan. Take extra care during this step to keep the temperature high enough to cook, but not to burn; burnt is bitter.

Cooking the vegetables will take longer than it did to brown the meat, so be patient. Eventually the celery will begin to break down a bit, the onions will fall apart and become soft, and the carrots will take on a a dark, orange-brown color, but will not soften completely. The mixture may start to stick to the bottom again as the vegetables cook, so frequent stirring and scraping are required to prevent any burning. When they are done, the veggies will have a very sweet, rich, roasted aroma.



At this point you can add the thyme and bay and cook for a minuet or so more. Next, pour the red wine over the vegetables, bring it to a boil and let it reduce by at least half. As the wine boils, scrape the bottom of the pan with your wooden spoon to loosen any remaining bits of the glaze. Transfer the contents of the pot to the baking dish with the ox tail.

Fill the remaining space in the baking dish with stock, cover with foil or a tight-fitting lid and cook in a slow oven (160ºC) for 3-4 hours. When the meat is ready it will come away from the bone easily when pulled with tongs.

Remove the braise from the oven and let cool. When it is cool enough to touch, remove all the meat from the sauce and pick the meat from the bones, making sure not to include any of the sinew (of which there is a great deal). Strain the liquid into a pot, bring it to a boil, and reduce it by at least half, until it is a thick and sticky jus.

Pick through the solids you have strained out for any extra bits of meat. Remove the carrots, crush or chop them, and fold them into the meat mixture. Ladle a bit of the reduced sauce into the meat mixture so that it is moist, but not wet, and then season to taste. Cool.

To make the cannelloni, bring a large pot of salted water to the boil. Cook the cannelloni for half the time suggested on the box and then drain and cool immediately in cold water. Using a spoon or a piping bag, fill the pasta tubes with the meat mixture. Wrap bundles of two or three cannelloni (depending on how many you want in a portion) in several layers of cling film, making sure you form a tight seal. The cannelloni will keep like this for several days in the refrigerator.

To serve, fill a steamer with water and steam the packets for 10 minuets. Alternatively, if you don't have a steamer, you can set the cannelloni in a colander over boiling water, covered with a lid, for the same amount of time. Gently unwrap and place on top of parsnip purée (see below) and top with a ladle of the hot, reduced jus. Garnish with parsnip chips (below, optional).

Parsnip Purée

2 parsnips, peeled
50 g butter

Remove the top from the parsnips and cut into roughly 2 cm chunks. Cover with lightly salted water and simmer until soft, about 10 – 15 minuets. Drain, reserving the liquid, and place in a blender or food processor. Blend until smooth, adding enough of the reserved water to form a thick purée. With the blender on high, drop in small cubes of the butter one at a time, allowing each to be incorporated before adding the next.

This is where you get to try out one more method of drawing out sweetness which I have not yet mentioned. Taste the parsnip purée. Now, add a bit of salt and taste again. Sweeter? It's like magic.

Parsnip Chips (These are optional, but add a nice crunch to the meal.)

1 small parsnip, peeled

Using a vegetable peeler, create long strands of parsnip until all that is left is it's core. Deep fry these strips at 180ºC for no more than a minuet. They should be golden and will crisp upon cooling. Drain on paper towels and salt lightly.

On Odd Leftovers

When you cook often, as I do, you tend to gather a rather large number of odd ingredients; foodstuff purchased to make a particular dish and then left to languish with the others of their kind in the dark recesses of your refrigerator or pantry. As an exercise in frugality, I have been making an effort to use up some of these orphaned ingredients. Let me give you an idea of what I have to work with.

A partial list of the contents of my fridge: 1 jar of kumquat and lime marmalade, shrimp paste, beer, half a jar of mayo, 4 different kinds of mustard, capers, tandoori paste, kimchi, various vegetables and heads of lettuce, a half dozen fruit preserves, tamarind paste, mustard fruits, a variety of pickles, hoisin sauce, candied ginger, anchovies, thyme and apple jelly, a Christmas pudding, tomato paste, mango chutney, half a kilo of dark couverture chocolate, gherkin relish, mint jelly, maple syrup, duck fat, pork fat, 1 kilo of ghee, miso paste, fish sauce, and a couple of things that have grown furry and can no longer be identified. Call in forensics.

A partial list of the contents of my pantry: soy sauce, chipotle peppers, bulldog sauce, lychees, 3 open bottles of worcestershire sauce, 4 types of hot sauce, 7 varieties of vinegar, pasta (lots of pasta), panko, sambal, dried shitake mushrooms, white beans, dried and glace fruits, red lentils, a (what's the collective noun for spices? Gaggle? Clutch? Clutter?) clutter of spices, several kinds of nuts, evaporated milk, condensed milk, coconut milk, long life milk, powdered milk, popping corn, rice paper, brandied cherries, 5 types of sugar, polenta, organic flour, plain flour, whole meal flour, self-rising flour, rice flour, corn flour, and acorn flour.



Hmmm... acorn flour. This is a leftover from my very delicious acorn mont blanc project. I initially became enamored with the idea of eating acorns when I was quite young. While visiting my Grandparents in Cincinnati, I was fascinated with the little nuts which fell from the tree in their backyard. Oak trees do not grow well in arid Wyoming where I grew up, so I found the acorns, with their shiny shells and little caps, to be quite exotic. I managed to collect a small bucket (competition with the local squirrels was intense) and was playing with them when my Grandfather joined me.



When he was my age, I was told, his father made acorn pancakes on autumn mornings. He remembered fondly the sweet, nutty flavor but, sadly, had no idea how to make the acorns, which are quite bitter, edible. No one else in the family knew either, so I was left to play and, eventually, relinquish the nuts to the squirrels.

Now, thanks to the magic of the world wide intraweb (hints on how to process acorns), a little help from James Beard (basic waffle recipe), and a bit of trial and error, I can finally, 25 years later, try acorn pancakes, or, rather waffles, as my waffle iron is also languishing in the pantry.



Acorn Waffles

1/2c flour
1/2c acorn flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp salt
1 Tbsp sugar
1 egg, separated
2 Tbsp melted butter
1/3c milk, warm

Preheat your waffle iron. In a small bowl, stir together the dry ingredients. In a mixing bowl, mix the egg yolk, butter, and milk. Stir into this the dry mixture until just wet - over mixing makes chewy waffles. In a separate bowl, whisk the egg white until stiff peaks form, and fold into the rest of the batter. Use immediately. This should serve four people, possibly more as the waffles are surprisingly filling.

Upon eating these dense, nutty waffles, it occurs to me that chestnut flour would work well, with much the same effect. Buying a bag of chestnut flour (good Italian delis will stock small bags of it) sure is easier than processing acorns.

On Failure

Babe Ruth. Baseball legend. He played in the 10's, 20's, and 30's, mostly for the Yankees. During his career he stepped up to the plate 8,399 times and, famously, hit 714 career home runs, a record that stood until 1974. He is still third on the all-time home run record list. This is not why I admire the Great Bambino. Rather, what I find most impressive is his strikeout record: 1330, nearly twice that of his home runs. It's not chadenfreude; I just like the fact that more often than not, he was swinging. When you always take a shot, you're bound to fail some of the time.

I often have to remind myself of this in the commercial kitchen. We prepare and serve a considerable amount of food in a day. I easily serve more meals to customers in a working week than many people would cook at home in a year. It follows then, that over time, I probably make more mistakes than a home cook does in a lifetime.

Take burns, for example. My arms, from the elbow down, are a map of singed flesh in various stages of healing and scaring. At one point they were so blistered and scabbed that the barista at my local coffee shop, who only seconds earlier had been chatting and joking with me, upon spotting my arms, set my macchiato on the counter and backed away, hands half raised in a don't-touch-me-you-junkie-leper gesture. Chalk up my propensity to pan-sear myself to eight stove-top burners, a 300º C oven, hundreds of smoking-hot pans daily, and the law of averages.

A bit of damage to my hands and forearms hardly counts as failure, I'm aware. Therefore, I'm going to let you in on a secret: chefs ruin a lot of food. A LOT. I mean metric shitloads. We've often got several things on the go at once and it's pretty easy to forget about the tray of fennel roasting in the oven. Combine this with higher-than-home-cooking temperatures and a general lack of sleep and it doesn't take long to tally up a bit of destruction. While all ruined food is accidental (chefs hate wasting food), sometimes we ruin things through out-right error (as opposed to mistakes), whether it is lack of skill, misstep, or attempting a new technique.

It's when I have a cluster of these accidents that I feel most like a failure. That's when I think of Babe. I could, guaranteed, make no more cooking mistakes if I decided to stop cooking. Since, obviously, I'm not going to do that, I'll keep plodding along through the burning flesh and burning snapper, knowing that as long as I do so, the next great achievement is as inevitable as the next failure.

So, hey, get out there and swing.



I'll give you a failure-cum-success and an outright success: my two attempts at making apple cider (hard apple cider for those of you in the states).

My first attempt at cider began with the first apples of autumn here in OZ. I purchased about 10 kilos of them and ran them through our industrial-strength juicer. I filtered the juice, added a packet of ale yeast, and off it fermented. After a week or so I bottled it and put it away for a few weeks.

Before starting I'd read that sometimes the wild yeast on the skins of apples can cause cider to go sour. Because of this, it is recommended that you either skin the apples or add sodium metabisulphite to the juice to kill off any wild yeast present. I did neither. The result? Sour cider.

I kept the bottles of undrinkable cider stored away for a month or two not knowing what to do with them. That is until I found this at the bottom of a vinegar bottle:



A vinegar mother. This ghostly little blob is not some foetal alien life form nor is it a supernova remnant but a colony of acetic acid bacteria that turns alcohol into acetic acid – vinegar. I filled a large jar with some of the sour cider, plopped in the mother, covered it with with a cloth (it needs oxygen) and left it in a dark, warm place (hello water heater closet!) for a couple of weeks. The mother sinks to the bottom when it has stopped working, but you can use the vinegar at whatever strength you want. Just taste it from time to time to see how it is going.



To pasteurize and strengthen the finished vinegar, I simmered it until it was reduced by about half, and then sealed it in jars. Yum.

In the meantime, I tried again to make cider. This time, hoping to avoid the wild yeast issue altogether, I purchased about 12 litres of preservative-free apple juice. Mix in ale yeast and ferment away. After a slow ferment (2 weeks) I bottled. Another few weeks until the taste test...



This stuff is great. Sprightly, very dry, with a hint of sweetness, and great apple aroma. My only complaint is that I can taste the yeast. Perhaps this will drop off with a bit of age, but I think I will use wine yeast next time instead.

Let's drink to f-ups!