parsley oil

It's hard to imagine cooking without parsley. A workhorse in the kitchen, parsley's bright herbaceous flavor lets it go places where other flavors can't. Equally at home in the background or at center stage, it is perhaps most useful at bridging disparate flavors.

In the garden, it's one of the last herbs to succumb to frost, and quick to resurrect in the spring. As a biennial, it's life cycle is limited to two growing seasons, but letting the seeds ripen and self-sow in the second year ensures successive crops.

In my everyday cooking, I can think of few dishes that wouldn't benefit from a bit of parsley and I'll admit that I use it less judiciously than black pepper, whose distinct flavor can easily overwhelm and is often overused as a seasoning. With that said, crushed black pepper and freshly minced parsley make a fine seasoning.

It's so versatile that it's rare that I find myself with leftover parsley. In those instances, I stockpile the stems in the freezer and toss leaves into salads. Or, when there's a considerable amount, I make parsley oil.

Making parsley oil is as simple as pureeing parsley leaves in a blender with oil and straining through a coffee filter. The more oil used, the faster it will strain and the higher the yield, but there will be less flavor.

In spring, the oil is fantastic drizzled on seasonal fare: smashed new potatoes and peas (with a sprinkle of nutmeg), asparagus veloute, roasted fiddleheads, fresh ricotta with honey, and it will make anything that comes off the grill sing. It's also a flavorful medium in which to poach, or confit, fish if you keep the temperature below 50C so the flavor doesn't turn woody. That's where this cuttlefish tentacle was heading, but looking at the parsley root that it was to be served with, it made more sense to place the flavor there. Raw parsley root tastes a lot like fresh parsley, but becomes sweet and earthy when cooked. Gently cooking it in parsley oil and letting it macerate overnight transforms the flavor and color to a bright, beautiful green.

Celebrating the flavors of spring: cuttlefish, parsley root, meyer lemon, and toasted almond gremolata.

butternut squash fusilli

There's an hors d'oeuvre on our fall/winter catering menu that we refer to as "the squash box". It consists of a hollow cube of roasted butternut squash, filled with goat cheese and crushed pistachios. When we serve them inverted and lined up on trays, they appear to be simple bite-sized blocks of squash— the hidden filling comes as a surprise. The squash boxes exemplify the combination of appealing flavor and clean presentation that we strive for in our passed hors d'oeuvres, so naturally, we were pleased by their popularity. But back in the kitchen, they were a real pain in the ass to make.
At first, we hollowed them by scoring 1/4" thick walls with a paring knife, then meticulously removed the centers with a melon baller. This was manageable when making a few dozen, but when the numbers stretched into the hundreds, we had to rethink the process.
Chef Martin is a great thinker, a creative problem solver, and a lover of tools. His first attempt at a solution was to have a square metal die fabricated to score the inner wall. In theory, it should've worked perfectly, but in reality, the metal was too thick and split the walls of the boxes. Undeterred, he pulled out the power tools— specifically, a drill fitted with a Forstner bit. It was a beautifully quick and effective solution to a previously tedious task.
Here's a short clip of Martin in action. Please excuse his parting gesture—apparently, his hands are not a fan of the camera.

Delighted as we were by this streamlined solution and the clean holes, I was more interested in what came out of them: long, coiled ribbons of butternut squash that looked identical to fusilli pasta.
Here's a closer look:

In this by-product of the squash boxes, I saw an elegant alternative to vegetable pasta. But cooking the butternut squash fusilli posed a critical problem. I tried every possible application of heat: wet, dry, slow, fast, but in each instance, just as it passed into a palatably tender stage, they would go limp and lose definition. I knew the solution was somewhere in the folds of my memory, ready to access, but there I failed, too.
Memory is a curious thing. Sometimes it's as direct and linear as a gunshot, sometimes it's like fishing in a labrinth.
I felt a tug on the lure while reasearching nixtamalization for a pickling project. It bit down in my memory of the 2011 Star Chefs Congress. When I reeled it in, at the end of the line were 2 gleaming nuggets of information.
The first was courtesy of Andoni Luis Aduriz, who, in a workshop, demonstrated a fossilization technique where salsify was soaked in a lime (the mineral, not the fruit) solution to firm the surface before cooking. From my memory, his claim that "any fruit with pectin will react with lime to make calcium pectate".
The second nugget was from Paul Liebrandt's mainstage presentation from the later that day. In a similar technique, he used calcium lactate to form a skin on the surface of jerusalem artichoke, allowing it to keep it's shape while the interior cooked to a creamy texture, without loss of moisture.
So, it seemed there were two possible solutions that produced parallel results. One, alkaline and caustic, the other a neutral salt.
I went with the calcium lactate. In the photo below, you can see the results. In the foreground is the squash that soaked in a 1% calcium lactate solution for 2 hours, then air dried, and roasted— tender, but still defined. In the background is the untreated squash roasted on the same pan— limp in comparison.

Solutions, like a great catch, are worth waiting for.
That's an easy one to remember.

butternut squash ✢ black kale ✢ goat gouda ✢ kale stem

citrus in eight courses

Last month, I invited a group of friends to my house for dinner. There was no real occassion for it except that I had a rare weekend off and I wanted to cook a proper meal in my kitchen. Also, my refrigerator was bursting with beautiful citrus that needed to be celebrated.

I planned the meal with the same approach that I would take for a client: taking into account food preferences, what was fresh and available, limitations of time, space, and equipment. The major difference with this meal was that I had the luxury of time to document it by recording recipes and photographing the preparations and presentations.

I thought that I would share the meal with you here in a series of posts, but they grew unwieldy and dragged on forever. Lucky for us, there are more space efficient and visually appealing options for sharing documents. Enjoy.

http://static.issuu.com/webembed/viewers/style1/v2/IssuuReader.swf

Open publication – Free publishing – More chef

confessions of a visual whore

At this time last year our new kitchen was just taking shape. As the first of the cabinets were being installed, a rented dumpster was exiting the driveway with the remnants of our old kitchen, and a large part of my life.

Gutting the kitchen and dining room was cathartic, a feeling that carried over into an overwhelming desire to purge the rest of the house. I spent a week clearing out the cellar and attic, bewildered by the amount of stuff that we (mostly I) had accumulated.

Most of it was irrelevent and obsolete: boxes and boxes of magazines, notebooks, and clippings that spanned a wide range of interests in things that I had once wanted to cook, taste, grow, build, make, paint, learn. I questioned why, if not out of nostalgia, I still held onto them. I told myself, and my family when we moved them from house to house, that those boxes contained my inspiration. But when it takes up that much space, inspiration becomes a burden. It was time to let go.

Truth is, I stopped looking to those boxes when two forces came into play. The first was recognizing that inspiration shouldn't be a burden, it could be as spontaneous and organic as intuition. If you can already see the world in a grain of sand, then inspiration is everywhere, always. That realization was like learning that I could cook without recipes, and go on to teach others to cook as well. Inspiration works that way too. Once you learn how to turn it on, there is no course but to turn it loose. That's why I started this blog, which brings me to the second force: the Internet.

Those of you who remember life before computers, were witness to the revolution. On my first PC I was able to scan images and text and organize them in easy to access files. No more rummaging through boxes. They needed no real estate and would never occupy space in a landfill. Then came the internet, a universe of stimulus and information, and the capability to connect and share in a scope that I never imagined.

Depending on your needs and comfort level, there are a multitude of applications that allow you to connect and share, but few also provide inspiration and the capacity to save and organize. Nothing stimulates my imagination like images and design, I can happily spend hours sifting through visual aggregate sites like stumbleupon, foodgawker, notcot, etsy, and all of the tangental sites I've discovered through them. There are so many talented people making beautiful things that inspire me, that I want to save them all. But inspiration, and obsessing about beautiful things, is an addiction. Wasn't I just replacing those cardboard boxes with an endless column of bookmarks?

I've often fantasized about making a site where I could paste collections of linkable images without the distraction of excessive text. And, because ads are the aesthetic death of websites, there would be none of that. How thrilling it would be to scroll through a page of hand-picked inspiration— my bookmarks in images. I've also fantasized about doing the same with this blog, condensing it to a collection of photos that would link back to the post— a visual archive that didn't require endless scrolling and searching by month.

Someone heard my prayer and invented Pinterest. With 13 million users in just 10 months, there must've been many people on their knees.

To begin using Pinterest, you must request an invitation and be prepared to wait for a week or two. Why? I don't know. Then you download a button to your bookmark bar that lets you pin images to your boards hosted on their site. I was able to archive nearly 300 post photos from PWFW in just a few hours, counting the time spent scrolling down memory lane. I rarely go back into my own blog, let alone others. Pinterest could change that.

http://pinterest.com/foodplayer/playing-with-fire-and-water/

barley salad

Salads, like a wardrobe, change with the seasons. In winter, grains stand in for the leafy greens that are abundant in the warmer months and I look to my windowsill instead of the herb garden for flavor power ups. Fruits and vegetables, the mementos of summer, are culled from jars instead of bins.

The dressings for these salads vary as widely as the components, even within the parameters of a classic vinaigrette: 3 parts oil to 1 part acid. Oils pressed from seeds, nuts, grains, and fruit each possess their own personalities and can be further customised with aromatics. And oils aren't limited to plants— hot rendered animal fats can transform coarse greens and grains into something special.

Acids offer even more variety as they can be made from, or flavored with, almost anything and needn't be restricted to just vinegar and citrus. Sour fruit juices such as verjus, tamarind, passion fruit, crabapple, rose hips, plums, rhubarb, and pomegranate make fruity dressings bursting with sweet, tangy flavors when the oil ratio is lowered to double the amount of juice. Most milk products lack acidic presence, but kefir whey makes a kicky dressing that feels light on the palate with a milky background.

With a wide and varied palette of flavors at hand, your mind and palate will never be bored, and a meal as ordinary as salad, with little effort, can be made extraordinary.

This barley salad was dressed with passion fruit juice, rice bran oil, shallots, and hishio, a type of barley miso. Herbs from the windowsill include mitsuba (Cryptotaenia japonica), saltwort (Salsola kornarovil), and sedum (Sempervivum tectorum). And from the pantry are: burdock ribbons pickled in coconut vinegar, Rainier cherries preserved in umeboshi and simple syrup, and ground cherries (Physalis pruinosa) preserved in sake.

beet roses

If asked, I'd say that the rose is my favorite flower, but my husband knows better than to bring any home today. It's not that roses on Valentine's Day is a cliché… something so classic and eternally beautiful can never be that. I guess my objection is the mass-marketed, factory-farmed, ridiculously-priced aspect. Yet, as symbols of love and romance, they are undeniable. So, while there will be no long-stemmed, hothouse-forced, All-American Beauties in my house today, there will still be roses!

bull's blood beet chips on Couer de Bray (cow)

candy cane beet chips on Bonne Bouche (goat)

microwave beet chips

beets
1 quart water
1 Tblsp kosher salt
olive oil in a mister bottle

Slice the beets thinly on a mandolin so that they are slightly thicker than a credit card. (If your beets are round and you wish to make roses by embedding them in cheese, they will need to be tapered on one end like a rose petal.)
Add the salt to the water (yes, it's a lot of salt, but neccessary for proper dehydration) and bring to a boil. Drop in about a dozen beet slices at a time and boil for about 3 minutes, (adding more water to maintain the level or it will become too salty as it evaporates) or until they become flexible. Remove beets with a slotted spoon and spread out on paper towels. Blot the tops dry with additional towels. Transfer slices to a sheet of parchment paper on a flat, microwave-proof dish in a single layer. Spray the tops lightly with olive oil. Flip them over and mist again. Place beets in microwave and cook on high power for 1-2 minutes, depending on the wattage of your microwave (run a trail with a few beets to confirm the time— they should become crisp within a minute of removing them from oven). Repeat with remaining beets. Store in an airtight container at room temperature.

sashimi rose and a celebration of fermentation

My first batch of shoyu has been brewing for six months now and it's just hitting its stride. I've tended it faithfully, stirring at least once a week and skimming off harmless surface mold as it formed, but for the longest time it was barely more interesting than a pot of bean soup. It wasn't until the end of its fourth month that I noticed a marked difference as the mold quit and the moromi (solids) began congregating on the surface, concealing clear dark liquid beneath. When I stir it now, the aroma is intoxicating in the nuanced complex way of fermented things. Soon, I'll begin filtering small batches to mark its progress and though I don't yet know when it'll be done, I expect it to continue improving with time.

While I wait for the shoyu, there's a fresh batch of mirin to celebrate— and real mirin is a just cause for celebration. I'll restrain myself from a full-on rant about what passes for mirin in the commercial market; you have only to read the list of ingredients and if it begins with glucose and ends with corn syrup, you should wonder why you're being asked to pay four dollars for ten ounces of sugar water. Hon- mirin (true mirin) contains no added sugar, though it is remarkably sweet— the result of koji/rice saccharification. The aroma of hon-mirin is unlike anything else, fruity and floral with a delicate flavor that can be sipped like a fine sake*. In fact, I see great potential for hon-mirin in cocktails and as an alternative dessert wine/spirit. And, an unexpected perk of brewing mirin is the lees— a heady cream that is left after pressing the moromi and before filtering.

The celebration continues with hishio, a hybrid of mugi (barley) miso and lactic-fermented fruits and vegetables. Hishio is made entirely with barley koji that is fermented in water and salt for about a week before adding vegetables (asian pear, cucumber, and eggplant in mine) that are seperately fermented in salt. The loose, miso-type condiment is then fermented in a warm environment and is ready in four months.

In even less time, a lively yuzu kosho can be made in a just over a week at room temperature. This particular batch was made late last year, when piney green yuzu were still available. They were zested with a microplane and blended with the restrained heat of charred, minced shishito peppers and salt. After it fermented for eight days, I blended in the last of the kinome leaves just before my tree went dormant for the winter. I'm sad to see the bottom of my jar come into view as fresh yuzu won't be available again until the end of the year, but I'm equally gratefully for the bounty; a consequence of soil, bacteria, and patience.

(left) mirin: clockwise from top- filtered, lees, moromi
(right) from top- hishio, yuzu kosho

sashimi rose
hiramasa • mirin lees • yuzu kosho puree • strained hishio

* most mirin brewers add water to the rice, koji, and shochu to bring the finished alcohol down to about 14%. I used straight shochu (20%), no water, and can only assume that my mirin comes in at between 17%- 20% alcohol by volume.

salmon pumpernickel leek

A variation of the previous dish with salmon sausage, chocolate rye pumpernickel (in pudding form), micro leeks, and oca.

pumpernickel pudding

50g charred leeks, cooked through
30g pumpernickel bread, trimmed of crusts and crumbled
50g kefir
35g water
20g beer
2g salt
15g neutral oil

Place all of the ingredients except the oil in a blender or food processor and blend until smooth. Slowly drizzle in the oil with the motor running. If necessary, add more oil to thicken, or water to thin. Adjust seasoning.

Oca (Oxalis tuberosa) is a species of oxalis that has long been cultivated in the Andes, where it is the second most popular tuber next to the potato, and more recently in New Zealand. Unlike common oxalis (wood sorrel), oca forms prolific fleshy tubers that can be eaten raw or cooked. In its raw form, they are crisp and moderatly acidic, like an apple without the sugar.

Oca contains fairly high concentrations of oxalates, an organic acid that can lead to kidney stones. Because the oxalates are found mostly in the skin, they can be diminished by peeling, cooking, or by exposing the tubers to direct sunlight for several hours.

Cultivating oca requires a long growing season. To get a headstart, they were sprouted in a bright, moist environment. And now that they're off to a good start they'll go directly into pots, where they'll live until the ground warms up. By late autumn, I hope to have a new crop of these delicious nuggets.

salmon hot dog

There's a virtually untapped world of specialty malted grains made for the beer brewing industry that can be used to add unique flavor to baked goods. Two stand-outs are: smoked barley (gives Rauchmalz its smoky aroma) and chocolate rye (contributes nutty, caramel notes to dark stouts and Porters). Over the past year, I've tested them in everything from laminated pastries* to cookie doughs** with great effect, but it is the realm of yeasted doughs where they seem most at home. The robust complexity that chocolate rye adds to pumpernickel makes the original pale in comparison.

The virtue of making condiments lies in customization and enhanced flavor. Commercially made Dijon mustards taste flat and boring in comparison to the ones you can make yourself. The process starts with shallots and garlic simmered in Chardonnay. The reduced infusion is strained and blended with brown mustard powder, olive oil, and a few drops of honey. Sometimes, I customize it with various herbs and aromatics, but I always let it sit at room temperature for at least 2 weeks to ripen the flavor before storing in the refrigerator, where it will keep for three months or longer. It's a small effort for a big flavor; too big, it turns out, for my delicately flavored salmon hot dog.

Coincidentally, I was working on an orange horseradish*** puree for a pork dish that needed a nudge in the flavor department. A whole orange and peeled horseradish root had been steamed in a pressure cooker with white wine, then the whole lot pureed. Pressure cooking removes the acridity from the horseradish and softens the bitterness in the orange's pith, producing a puree with a mellower flavor than you would think possible from the raw ingredients.

For the salmon hot dog, I punched up the puree by blending it with an equal amount of homemade Dijon, and— because I love citrus with salmon— I added microplaned orange zest. Mixing horseradish with mustard made sense because they both belong to the Brassica family, a simple observation that opened a new pathway to a great condiment.

salmon sausage in leek casing
chocolate rye roll
horseradish orange mustard
kefir fermented daikon
fennel sprouts

* croissants made with smoked barley flour and smoked butter are revelatory.

** see pepper cookies

*** please, no comments about the horseradish root. I only photographed and cooked the thing, Nature did the rest.

salmon sausage

Sausages need a casing.

That conclusion was reached while considering a naked and unappealing cylinder of poached salmon paste. It might've been acceptable had it not been about to be presented as a sausage.

Clearly, it needed a casing. The casing needed to be vegetarian. And with service quickly approaching, it needed to be fast.

Looking at vegetables to encase the sausage, there were two ways to go about it: wrapping or stuffing. Stuffing into a seamless casing was aesthetically preferable, but short of whitling a long, thin tube from a vegetable, there were no quick or easy alternatives that I could think of.

Wrapping, by far, offered the most doable options. Blanched leaves were considered, but rejected for their unwanted color and opacity. Translucent paper-thin sheets (which would have required breaking out the mad knife skillz) of potato, cucumber, zucchini, or daikon seemed the way to go, until a simpler technique involving leeks sprung to mind. The technique, as learned from a chef long ago was as follows:

Trim the top and roots off of a long, fat leek. Cut halfway through the leeks lengthwise and dislodge the outer layers. Blanch, shock, and lay the leek sheets flat. Pipe the filling on the leek sheet, roll tightly around filling to encase, tie ends with string, wrap tightly in plastic wrap, and poach in barely simmering water.

With the leeks trimmed, I made the first cut. It wasn't until I began seperating the layers that I realized my folly: I was making a sheet to avoid making a tube, yet I had cut through a tube to make a sheet.

And that's how the most perfect vegetable casing that Nature could provide had almost eluded me.

salmon sausage

These sausages are a great way to use up trimmings. The flecks of smoked salmon give it a more dimensional flavor, as would the addition of fresh herbs, dried spice, grated aromatics, etc. They can be served hot, cold, or finished in a pan with butter.

2 leeks
500g salmon, cut into chunks and well chilled
130g cold cream cheese, cut into chunks
4g salt
70g smoked salmon, minced and chilled

casings: Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Trim the root end off of the leeks and cut the tops where they begin to seperate and turn green. Drop the leeks into the boiling water and remove after 3 minutes. Using a dishtowel, pull the outer layer of the hot leeks up and over the tops until they're free. If they don't slide off easily, return to the boiling water for another minute or two. Repeat until you have enough casings to hold the filling, about 6- 8, depending on their width and length.
filling: Place the salmon in the bowl of a food processor. Process in short bursts, scraping bowl 2-3 times, until reduced to a smooth paste. Distribute the cream cheese and salt over the top of paste and process again in short bursts, until the cream cheese is no longer distinguishable. Scrape paste into a bowl and fold in the smoked salmon mince.
stuffing: Slide a leek casing over the extension tube of a sausage stuffer, taking care to not tear the leek. Feed the paste through until it fills about 1" of the end of the casing (enough to release air pocket), then tie filled end with string. Continue feeding paste until casing is filled. Remove from tube and tie open end with string. If sausage stuffer is not available, fill casings by piping filling through a pastry bag fitted with a long, wide tip. Or, do it old school (like my mother still does), by forcing the filling with thumbs through a funnel fitted into one end of the casing.
cooking: Drop tied sausages into a 50C water bath and cook for 20 minutes (no bag needed).