Sometimes Less is More

I've tried to love it.

I worked, I slaved, I spent days preparing sponges/poolish, dousing my sourdough starter with pineapple juice, taking dough temperatures, checking my gluten to see if it made a windowpane; I rested dough on couches of dusted kitchen towels, I weighed ingredients precisely by grams and ounces, and after a few exercises in painful precision, I have come to a sad conclusion:

Peter Reinhart's "Bread Baker's Apprentice" may be beautiful bread porn, and may be worth the effort for others, but it is not for me.

I've gone back to an old standby... "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day", and the results are good enough that I don't feel the need to do three plus stage doughs, or mess about with sourdough starters from scratch.

I talked to friend with two kids, who said that while he loved the idea of getting complicated, he was too busy to find it worth doing more than the five minute method of mixing dough, and then just taking it ready to rock from the fridge to a peel and into the oven.

You can just have anything you want anytime you want it, with little to no effort.

The results are great. You can buy it here. You won't be sorry.

Semi-Lina bbq

This is quick, this is also dirty.

I might clean this post up later.

I might not.

I will most DEFINITELY come back to give you my means/method/"wisdom"/tricks for making spicy red cabbage coleslaw. It goes so nicely with this. This was the email I sent directly to a good friend, former co-worker, and generally good person whose son was facing cancer surgery and needed pork, apparently. I'm a HUGE fan of bbq'ed pulled pork shoulder, but don't have the smoker or the patience to do it right. With some guidance from the lovely Tyler Florence, here is my heavily adapted method for slaking your pork-ey thirst using just a plain old conventional oven.

BTW, kids, pork shoulder is nearly cheaper than chicken parts, just so you know. For the cost of one or two sandwiches in a local bbq joint (if you live in the city, at least) you can make 10 pounds of meat for sandwiches. Better, cheaper, and if you feel free to disregard all the flavor directives I might have you can make it the way you happen to like the best... which really does make this the best pork sandwich ever.

(N.B.: I have made some changes since I wrote this email... I will edit this post potentially, and soon, to address that... nothing major, nothing life-or-death, but some additional refinements are always good, and always part of my thought process.)

But for now...

Semi-Lina Oven Pork Bbq:

1 whole pork picnic shoulder, about 6-7 pounds, or Boston Butt if you prefer

Dry Rub:

2 tbsps Hot Smoked Paprika (regular paprika works as well)

1 tbsp Garlic Powder

2 tbsp Coarse Salt

1 tbsp Onion Powder

1 tbsp Mustard Seed, ground finely (or 2 tbsp mustard powder)

Black pepper to taste (don’t be shy, & use fresh ground at all costs, tellicherry is preferred)

3 tbsp Dark Brown Sugar (this is a ballpark figure, more sugar will give a darker crust)

Red Pepper flakes, 1/2 tsp to 1 tsp depending on your heat preference

Start with one pork butt or pork shoulder, mine was a “whole picnic shoulder” from the supermarket & was almost 7 pounds. While the cut I used was a bone-in cut, boneless cuts are even easier to work with & it’s your call to go in whatever direction you’d like.

I took the skin off the pork shoulder, I’ve tried it both ways & prefer it skinless for roasting as you wind up with more of the desirable “bark” analog, the crust from roasting for a long time at low temperatures. Also, having made this with a short dry rub marinating time, the bark was far inferior. Rush the dry ru at your own peril.

Take your pork shoulder, skin removed, & prepare the dry rub. Rub the pork shoulder as much as possible, & leave (preferably overnight) to marinate. Even a few hours will be of use, but an overnight in plastic will give it more flavor, & also make a nicer crust on the roast. Removing the skin from a pork shoulder is, to say the least, awfully disgusting. Feels a bit like appearing in "Alive: The Musical!" Tough it out, campesinos. It's worth it.

Put it in a roasting pan, in a 300 degree Fahrenheit oven, & let it go for about six hours. When it comes out, let it rest, remove as much fat as you’d like from the roasting pan, & begin “pulling” the pork. It will come apart remarkably easily. Remove the bones as you go along, & then tear or chop the pork as much as you like. I like some texture left over, but still with a reasonably small average size piece of pork.

As to the saucing, I prefer my pork with a moister, more heavily sauced quality to it. In certain schools of Carolina barbecue, the sauce should be as simple as possible, vinegar with red pepper & a touch of sugar to cut the intensity. I like my pork wholly sacrilegious & am giving you that version here. This begins with a Piedmont style vinegar sauce, which has some tomato, & I’ve added some mustard to it as I happen to like it that way. Omit if you don’t like it, keep it in if you do. Most sauce recipes will call for water in addition to the vinegar, but later steps here make that unnecessary (I’m adding a TOMATO BASED barbecue sauce later. Traditionalists are advised to look away, or possibly lie down until the vapors pass.)

In light of the sweet, inappropriate, tomato-ey addition, I’m using partly white vinegar in this initial sauce. Traditional recipes call for exclusively cider vinegar, but I find with the added sweetness of the preparation that cider vinegar is not strong enough to balance the flavors out in line with what I happen to like. Again, your mileage may vary.

Vinegar Sauce:

3/4 cup White Vinegar

3/4 cup Cider Vinegar

1/3 cup ketchup to start, add more if you like

2 tbsp dark brown sugar

2 tbsp coarse brown mustard, add more if you prefer

1-2 tsp red pepper flakes

1 tsp salt

Fresh ground black pepper, to taste

When adding the red pepper, & the black pepper, bear in mind that these will intensify as they steep, so I’d advise making this a day or three in advance, & then checking it before you serve the pork, to see if you need to balance the flavors with more vinegar (for tang), more sugar (for obvious reasons), or more ketchup (for a buffer of any of these elements.)

I like to serve this in a crockpot on low, add equal amounts of the vinegar sauce & your preferred traditional bbq sauce. This is just my preference, & a guideline. Add enough to give some moisture to the overall preparation.

In a crockpot, you can keep this at serving temperature on low for the duration with no trouble.

I kind of like it served with some very normal coleslaw, and on the cheapest, most guilty pleasure hamburger buns, but your mileage may vary.

Something for the Vegans in the Back Rows

So.

As with the earlier incident involving salad dressing, I have a pompous AND wordy recipe for Red Lentil Soup today. It's vegan, which is a shocking situation for me, but it's just a recipe that happened to turn out that way. I won't let it happen again.

A friend, who's vegan, and bored with her dietary options, had asked about it, and I sent her this write-up...

Red Lentil Soup

2-6 tbsp. Olive Oil

2 Knorr Vegetarian Vegetable Bouillon Cubes

9 cups water

1 ¾ C. Split Red Lentils, picked/culled, rinsed and set aside

1 large onion, chopped reasonably fine

1 medium-large carrot, chopped into a moderately fine dice

3 cloves garlic, crushed/minced

1 tsp. ground Cumin

½ tsp. ground Turmeric

1 tsp. Cayenne Pepper &/or ALEPPO PEPPER

½ tsp.-1 tsp. Ras El Hanout

Salt to taste

Pepper to taste

Lemon Wedges/Fresh Lemon Juice

Time to Cocktails: 15 minutes

Time to Table: 1:30-1:45

Time to plate: 0:10 (give or take, based on your decision on blending and the method you might use.)

Serves: 6

Nutritional Information:

Cost (Not Counting oil, herbs, spices, pantry items):

Roughly $3.00 total, $0.50 per serving

It is summer at the moment, and while Winter always seems singularly appropriate to soup making, and soup eating, we are still going to discuss this now. We are going to be using Red Lentils (which are also referred to as Pink Lentils, and may be known as “Masoor Dal” in the context of Indian grocery stores.) You can find them online, in particular www.kalustyans.com will have them in various degrees of bulk, but at a price. I buy them in bulk at the Flatbush food co-op in Brooklyn, where they sell somewhere around $2.59ish per pound. There is a small discount for members, but that’s the base price. In addition to the flavor, one major advantage of red lentils is that they don’t require pre-soaking, and can go straight into the soup.

One thing to note: when cooking with lentils, they don't precisely "go bad", but as they have been in the pantry longer, they require a different amount of time to cook, so use old or new lentils as you wish, but don't use them at the same time, as the texture will vary between the two bags/batches.

It’s easier than you might think, and it’s one my favorites, and one of my wife’s as well.

Lentils have a very complete mix of protein, and this recipe is very low in fat, and cholesterol. You can check www.nutritiondata.com for the details as you prepare any foods, and while it can be time consuming, it’s one way to tell how your foods stack up when you cook for yourself. If you would like to use regular lentils, I have had reasonably decent luck with that as well, but

Begin putting a 5-plus quart stockpot onto a medium flame. When the pot is hot enough to cause water to sizzle (put a drop on your finger and flick it in, when it hisses, you are ready), add 2 or 3 tablespoons of olive oil, and toss in your onions and garlic. Reduce heat slightly, and sauté the onions and garlic until lightly browned and translucent. Add your diced carrot, and continue to sauté for a few minutes more, reducing heat if necessary to prevent burning.

When the carrots have sautéed for a few minutes, add the water, vegetable bouillon cubes and lentils. Stir lightly to combine the ingredients and prevent the lentils from clumping. Increase heat to high, and bring to a healthy boil. You may add some salt at this time, but err on the side of UNDER-salting at this point in the process, you can always add more, but it is impossible to effectively remove it once you have too much. Furthermore, salt is said to toughen lentils when added before they are cooked.

Once the soup has boiled, reduce heat until the soup is simmering, add in your pepper as needed, along with cayenne, turmeric and cumin. I’m a huge fan of Aleppo pepper (sun-dried flakes) in this recipe in lieu of or in addition to the cayenne… it is a warmer, rounder, less hot pepper than cayenne, & provides a great deal of flavor in addition to purely heating up the palate. You can adjust the amounts based on your own taste, the Cayenne in particular is a personal judgment call. Stir the spices in, and cover at a simmer. Check/stir periodically while it cooks. Simmer for roughly an hour, check the lentils for doneness at that time. If you like a thicker consistency, you may continue to simmer with the lid on or off (removing the lid will speed up the reduction in liquid.) At a low simmer, the soup will hold (with potential additions of water periodically) if you need to prepare other dishes for a meal or seat guests as necessary.

If you have a “stick” blender, here is where it’s extremely useful, and to my own taste the soup is much preferable smoothly blended together. You can also use a regular countertop blender, though it is far more time consuming.

Once the soup is blended, adjust seasonings (chiefly salt/pepper), while bearing in mind that the final flavor will be affected by the addition of lemon to each bowl, or to the entire quantity. Don’t be afraid to season, but be cautious of over-salting. It is best to stop while it seems “not quite salty enough”. You or your guests can always add their own if they so choose.

If you are freezing a portion (or all) of the soup, do not add the lemon at this time. When it is served, either add the lemon at the very end of the cooking, once the heat is shut off, or serve with lemon wedges at each place at the table. You can choose to float some olive oil in the surface of the soup for flavor and aesthetics as well as an added unctuousness, or richness. I have on occasion added a dollop labneh, crème fraiche or plain yogurt on the surface as well, but it is far from necessary.

Serve with warm, crusty bread if desired. This soup will also keep very well in the freezer, simply reheat on low, with a trace of water to start thawing the frozen brick of soup.

-If you are not planning on blending the soup together, you may want to chop the onion/garlic/carrot much finer, to your own taste and preference, probably more along the lines of a brunoise. I always hand blend this soup, but your mileage may vary.

-When preparing the lentils, put them on a light colored plate, and sift through, checking for off-color pieces, or even small stones. Remove anything unappetizing, rinse in a strainer, and leave to add to the soup as needed. Whole lentils, red or otherwise, will require a longer cooking time than split lentils. Also, do not mix newly purchased lentils with ones you have had in the pantry for a longer period of time, as they will cook unevenly due to moisture loss over time.

-Ras el Hanout (there are alternate spellings) is available in specialty markets, and has roots in Morocco. It has an aromatic quality, and is a blend of a huge number of other spices. It means “top of the shop” in the local vernacular, and while you don’t need it, I find it adds a nice depth of flavor to the soup. It is also useful for flavoring couscous and an array of other middle eastern dishes.

-You may decide to use a bouillon other than vegetable, but it is certainly more than adequate to the process. If you are watching your salt intake, consider reducing or eliminating the bouillon included, if necessary. Clearly it significantly improves the flavor, but if salt is an issue, increase the acidity with lemon juice, and you will be unlikely to miss the saltiness. One bouillon cube has 70% of your daily value of sodium, so use your own discretion. I have made this with two or three cubes, generally.

-If you are using regular lentils, be prepared to cook longer than indicated below, and be advised you may also want to check and add water to the soup to keep the lentils from drying out, burning/sticking. Check individual lentils for doneness every twenty minutes or so beyond the first hour.

-A stick blender (also called an “immersion blender”) is incredibly useful for soups, and will come in handy for smoothies, whisking eggs (most have a replaceable set of attachments) and other tasks. The price over-all is not excessive, and when it’s needed I’ve found mine to be indispensible.

-Cost is according to what I’ve paid for this dish most recently, and you may see some variability in price. In this dish I’ve included the cost of all the vegetables, lemon, and bouillon, but I’ve not counted the cost of oil, seasonings, salt or water ;) As with all things, you will have to determine the price point of your own local store.

-Your “time to cocktails” above is roughly the amount of time you need to put in before the cooking process is relatively hands off, though you will need to cast an eye on things from time to time.

-“Time to table” is roughly how long it will be including prep and all other phases of the cooking process until you are ready to serve the dish into plates or bowls. I’m leaving it there as I don’t know how long a walk it is from your kitchen to your dining room.

Sorry for the Hold-Up

This is for T., who was over for dinner and wondered how the salad dressing came together...

Mirin-Miso Miracle Dressing:

You'll need the following base...

8 parts neutral oil (rice bran or grapeseed are you loveliest of heart healthy options...)
4 parts mirin (japanese sweet cooking wine)
4 parts rice wine vinegar (if you like the dressing sweeter, you can substitute mirin for some or even all of the vinegar, but it's not my personal preference, plus vinegar is a calorie free way to add bite and flavor, while mirin is definitely not)
1 part Dijon mustard (more to taste if you like)
*1 part miso paste (red/white to taste)

Once these are combined, add salt and pepper to taste. It's quite important to put the miso in BEFORE adding in the salt, as you otherwise risk over-salting the dressing altogether.

Depending on the density of the miso paste, you might find it useful to add the liquid to the miso a little bit at a time, blending it in, so that you don't have chunks of miso paste floating in the liquid... nasty, and a pain to get rid of.

We keep a few different dressings on the sideboard in the dining room, in old, clear wine bottles... it's the "Re-Use" part of green living, and they are a pretty good size both for mixing and for holding a reasonable volume of dressing close by.

Use less miso, or none at all, but in that case you'll need to increase the amount of salt, and probably increase the mustard portion. That's my own taste talking, but I find it's a bit bland without some added beefing up.

If you want a more hearty and robust version of this dressing, substitute sesame oil for a portion of the neutral oil indicated. Be advised that a little goes a LONG way, you can always add a touch more if you like.

With any dressing/vinaigrette, trust your own palate; if you need more acidity, add vinegar, more sweetness to balance the acidity comes from mirin, mustard rounds out the flavor and emulsifies the dressing (this will keep it from separating back into oil and vinegar in the bottle), and salt tastes, well, salty.

Mussels with Smoked Paprika Aioli

Now for something stolen, changed, and about to be claimed as a bit more of my own.

Chow had a recipe for Broiled Mussels with Sweet Paprika Aioli which I loved the idea of.

This goes to a certain question of eco-friendliness, as the seafood that makes its way onto the American table is often among the worst for fish stocks, or the environment.  Salmon, tuna, and shrimp are disastrous as dining choices, and they are what you inevitably find in supermarkets, and other fish are sometimes incredibly expensive to salve the conscience.

There is hope, though, and it comes in the form of the humble Blue Mussel.  I can hear you now, there are plenty of people who just plain dislike mussels, and my wife was among them.  The chow folks do not lie, this will change the minds of people who don't think they like mussels.  Here's how they find out (or you find out) that there was something you didn't know...

Mussels are farmed, but the farming is done in such a way that there are neglible environmental consequences, and they represent a limited carbon stream: filter feeding, and grown local to the point of consumption, they are a poster child for sound and responsible aquaculture.

Follow the recipe, if you want to follow it start to finish, more power to you.

However, there were a few changes I made, namely the use of smoked paprika, which I've been absolutely in love with recently, and looking for any excuse to use, a bit of ancho chili and chipotle chili powder in substitution, and aioli made from (gasp!) pre-made mayonnaise.

Making your own mayonnaise will be covered in a subsequent post, but for now it's not only a huge headache, it's also possibly more expensive than just using it from the good people at Hellman's.  I hate to admit it, but there are times where I can't compete from scratch, and where I do a worse job from financial and aesthetic perspectives.

The proportions listed for the aioli are reasonably good, but with this you need to follow your own palate above all else.  Much of this process is down to what you happen to like... more dijon?  Less?  More Garlic?  Straight mayo with chocolate chips?  Think WAY out of the box, if you want.

Take it as a template, and with any recipe begin by doing it pretty much from the book once, and then freelancing a bit.  This truth does not obtain for pastry or bread, things that are done inside the oven demand rules, while things done "above the oven" on top of the stove demand flexibility... as the saying goes you are either a cook, or a baker, and this is exactly what they mean by that.  Baking demands measurement, cooking demands some degree of slopping things around and poking things to see if they are done.  I'm not much of a baker, despite the fact that both pieces of cooking so far have involved the oven; don't be fooled, okay?  I think they're on here because they are what I'm weakest at, instead of the other way around.

The time estimates are reasonably accurate, and it is a fair amount of manual prep, but it is tremendous once it's done, and other than opening and stripping the mussels, it's really not too challenging.

Doing this with a pastry/piping bag, if you have one, is probably worth it... you would replace food prep time with dishwasher time, or handwash time.  It's your call, I spooned them this time, but next time will do this with a piping bag and keep the baking sheet cleaner.  I wish I had had parsley on hand, but I didn't let it stop me, don't let it stop you either...

And by the way, I still haven't convinced my in-laws to eat mussels.   My wife, she was brought around to seeing the light, though.

Enjoy!

Okay Class, We'll Start With Recession Roast Beef...

I'm just going to dive in...

You'll get the whole complicated bio later, but the basic premise here is about cooking well, and eating well. The balance I'm trying to strike is a combination of awareness relating to ecological sensitivity in dining, nutrition, health, taste, innovation, in addition to factors of health factor and most importantly the "cheap factor" where possible.

In regard to that last point, I present Eye Round Roast to you all...

This cut is a grocery store special many of us may know from our childhood, if we had a family home that was trying its best to save a bit on a meal, and it comes to you because I personally love a good roast beef sandwich, and am tired of paying the $8/sandwich that is conventional for New York City (just like I always pictured it, skyscrapers and everything).

Eye Round Roast.

It isn't always a good ending when you start telling this story, and mine begins in a supermarket refrigerated section, looking for cheap cuts of meat to make sandwiches in the Naked City.

There aren't actually 8 million stories about this, though every fool has his own way to make Roast Beef.

I had tried (a la America's Test Kitchen, I give you this variant) a version of this process which asked for the hottest possible oven, with a piece of Eye Round that had been left out until approximate room temperature and placed in an oven at roughly 400-500 degrees Fahrenheitfor anywhere from 30 to 40 minutes. The oven was then turned off with the door shut until the internal temperature of the roast reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

First off - as frivolous as it might seem - get a digital thermometer that has a cable that attaches to a probe. I had one that failed in the barbecue, and was replaced with one with a braided steel line around the silicone/wire probe line. It's worth looking for the braided steel: the regular silicone line failed after a single use on the grill.

This digital thermometer has lasted through several oven projects, including our first assembled family turkey. Knowing the number is a very good thing. One day when you're a grandmother, you won't need it, but for now, it helps.

So, Eye Round.

Around $3.50 per pound at the local mega-retailer, and I had tried it with the first method and been rewarded with tough-ish, gray-ish beef.

I would love the link to give credit to the following method, but I have lost it. The basic trick: take a heavy oven-ready pan, let your eye round (of any size) sit out until it starts thinking about being room temperature (mine was still near freezing at the core after a day of thawing in the fridge, so there you have it.)

Set the oven to 225 degrees. Turn that bad boy on. Let it pre-heat. Walk the dog, or read for a bit.

Then, smear the roast with some kind of oil with your bare hands, liberally apply salt and freshly ground pepper (for god's sake don't use pre-ground pepper, okay, you're not homeless) and sear all sides in your oven-ready pan on the stove top. I used my now departed godmother's ancient cast iron pan for this, but take whatever falls to hand. It helps to score the fat portion diagonally with a knife in a crosshatch pattern, to render the fat into the pan. Then, put it in the oven, after turning the burner off, letting the pan start to cool with the flame off, flipping to a less seared side (to prevent scorching) and put the whole thing in the oven.

You should have put the probe in before putting the roast in the oven.

Go back in time and do that, okay?

Now, go and have drinks, or just stand and watch the read-out until it reaches 115 degrees.

Shut the oven off.

Wait some more, until the roast hits 130 degrees, this is for medium rare, I don't know what temperature you demented people want who are looking for well done, as you don't deserve a roast beef sandwich.

Pull that sucker.

Let it rest, in the roasting pan if you like it more well done, or on a plate if you like it a little tiny more on the medium rare side, for about ten minutes.

I feel like I just untied the Gordian Knot of super cheap beef cuts, as it came out like THIS:



It still has some chew, and some texture, but the rest after cooking, and the oven time has left this most healthy, low-fat cut of cheapest beef in the world while not quite fork-tender, at least tooth tender, and when sliced very thinly it is utterly sandwich perfect.

More to follow, and it won't all be Mother Cleaver's Tricks for Cheap Sandwiches for the Beav.

Thanks, and enjoy.