Butterflied a leg of lamb, seasoned it, tied it up, and roasted it on a spit over coals made from a live fire. Served with red onion slices, mint leaves, parsley, and a sauce of yogurt, garlic, mint, and cucumber. Made little sandwiches with freshly baked cibiatta. Drank with a nice glass of Shiraz. Perfect meal for a warm summer evening.
I can’t believe how delicious this bread is, made with leftover dough from the pizzas I baked the other day – thin crispy crust, soft-silky crumb, and a light-buttery flavor.
This made an extremely simple lunch – but deeply satisfying: coppa, salami, and butter.
Hubert Keller’s new book, Burger Bar: Build Your Own Ultimate Burgers, has just landed on my desk. Despite my resolution to buy no more books (I already own enough for several lifetime’s of meals), my mouse finger, without my permission, pressed the Amazon one-click purchase button. It has been grounded for a week. Maybe it will think twice before pulling that stunt again.
So I have a deal with myself: if a new cookbook should land on my desk as a gift or due to accidental mouse clicks, I have to get rid of one of the old books in my collection. This time the choice was easy – a Mexican cookbook from England. Dreadful recipes. Not sad to see it go.
Anyway, expect to see many future burger posts. Love burgers.
What happens if you create a broth from shrimp shells and then use the broth for poaching jumbo shrimp for cocktails. And then you freeze that broth and use it for poaching the next batch of shrimp? And what do you think it will taste like 10 years and a few hundred pounds of shrimp later? Intense and unlike anything I’ve ever tasted. The idea came from a Mark Bittman recipe in Cook’s Illustrated back in July/August 1997. I continue to use this broth for poaching, but I also use a little bit here and there to add a deeply satisfying brininess to other seafood dishes.
Today we had spaghetti with crab based loosely on a recipe from Reed Hearon’s Rose Pistola Cookbook. This recipe calls for fresh dungeness crabs and uses the cooking liquid from the crabs in the sauce. All I had was a can of Costco crab (very good wild stuff from, of all brands, Chicken of the Sea). About 1/4 cup of the ultra-concentrated shrimp broth was all that was needed. My taste buds are is still singing.
On a similar note, I have a batch of chicken poaching broth that is several years old. It’s been through maybe 40 or 50 cycles and gets better and better each time. I very, very gently poach the chicken until just done – no more. Full of flavor and juicy, it makes a great light meal.
Best pizza crust ever today. Natural starter from Isle of Ischia, Caputo 00 Pizzeria flour, 24-hour room-temp fermentation and proof, sub-minute baking time, sub-second eating time! There could have been fewer toppings for my taste, but this pie was part of a monthly challenge at pizzamaking.com:
There are three things I use as a measure of my own skill in the kitchen. These items seem simple, but require more than a little skill to cook perfectly :
Probably the most difficult of these for me has been the pie crust. I’ve gone through just about every recipe I have found to get the perfect crust: tender, flakey, and flavorful. I’m still not there, but the best success has come from the Cook’s Illustrated version which uses vodka!! We’re going to have a bumper crop of fruit this summer (if the rains keep up), so I decided to use some peaches I put up a few years ago along with some strawberries that were getting long in the stem. I used two big bottles of peaches.
One was preserved in rum sauce that made this pie especially delicious. I brought up the idea of serving it with some vanilla ice cream, but my wife played the “gilding a lily” card, which always wins. I wanted it to cool a bit, but I NEVER win that one either.
New York City. 1964 World’s Fair. No idea why I was standing in a long line at the Belgian Pavilion. All I remember is a paper plate appeared in my hands with the largest waffle I had ever seen topped with whipped cream and strawberries. And permanently seared into my memory was this mélange of flavors and textures.
Later on I would try to reproduce this experience with a standard waffle maker, but the results did not live up to expectations. It was only a few years ago that I bought a waffle maker capable of cooking the thick, large-holed variety that I finally reconnected with 1964.
I use the KitchenAid Pro Line Waffle Baker
I like the recipes from Dorie Greenspan’s Waffles: From Morning to Midnight especially for the batter. She has all kinds of batter variations beyond the basic ones:
The book has a number of interesting toppings and ideas for “dinner” waffles, but to fill a whole book (this one has over 200 pages), Greenspan has really to had to reach and many of these creations just don’t work for me such as “Smoked Salmon and Dill Waffles”. Anyway, today I made some basic Belgian waffles with whipped cream and strawberries. Here is a little video:
Mangoes account for 50% of all tropical fruit produced worldwide. Mangoes account for 50% of my diet this time of year (you can look it up in Wikipedia). Easily enjoying this luscious seed can present a dilemma – getting as much juicy pulp into your mouth without getting millions of those thready fibers stuck in your teeth.
One option is the Oxo Good Grips Mango Splitter
Although it it a member of the “single-purpose gadget” category, the mango fork reigns supreme for eating a whole mango:
Here is a little movie I made about the use of the mango fork:
One of the very best books about bread, Brother Juniper’s Bread Book
Struan is not merely bread – it is bread that reperesents the essence of bread, which is one of the great analogies of life itself…
Perhaps this an overstatement, at least until you work on this recipe and gain a better understanding and appreciation of it and adapt it to your vision. In the final product all of the ingredients come together for an effect that is greater than the sum of its parts – not just in terms of taste and texture, but also in the symbolism of its components.
In my version, I use the following ingredients:
Artisan bread flour
Honey
Polenta
Wheat bran
Brown rice
Rye flakes
Buttermilk
Sea salt
Brown sugar
Natural starter culture (Russian)
You might think this would be a heavy, dense loaf, but nothing could be further from the truth – it is light, and soft, and slightly sweet. When baking, the house is filled with an intoxicating aroma that forms an important part of the experience.
Made 4 baguettes, 1 epi, and 1 boule today from a batch of dough started 4 days ago. No commercial yeast, just natural starter culture from Paris. Room-temp ferment, a few days in the fridge, room-temp proof. Lunch consiisted of smoked chicken salad on baguettes. Mid-afternoon snack was some bread slathered with good butter, a slice of Serrano ham, a slice of Emmenthaler cheese. I could bake every day!