Seasonal
Spring Salads: Fiddleheads and Favas
Myth: a salad doesn’t have to be seasonal to be great. It just has to be well-made and well-designed. Like a Caesar of whole leaves dressed lightly with a fresh light dressing of crushed anchovies, garlic, olive oil, and maybe an egg. Or a beet salad with a dollop of yogurt or crème fraiche, and dill. I’d happily eat those year round.
Still, perfect, seasonal ingredients guarantee a great dish, regardless of its crafter’s skill. Finally, it’s springtime, which means a lot of weird-looking sprouts, shoots, edible flowers, and so on. Fiddleheads, with their tightly coiled stalk reminiscent of a bike wheel, may be the oddest. Like a crummy musical, the taste is far less interesting than the appearance, but springtime salads are about subtle flavors, light dressings, and an almost food-styled beauty.
We used fava beans which, like fiddleheads, are subtle in flavor, which is why a few cloves of garlic confit and a light grain mustard vinaigrette boosts the whole dish and makes it a perfect spring salad. Frisee, tasteless, but beautiful, adds a nice touch, but feel free to wander the yard and pull up weird (hopefully safe) shoots. All in the name of a spring salad.
Fiddlehead and Fava Spring Salad
Serves 2
1 cup fiddleheads
1 cup fava beans, shelled
1 bulb garlic, peeled into individual cloves
2 tablespoons grain mustard
medium handful frisee, trimmed of green
olive oil
salt and pepper
- Bring a pot of salted water to boil and blanch the fiddleheads and favas, about 2 minutes. Refresh in cold water, peel the skins from the fava beans, and reserve both.
- Add the garlic cloves to a small pot and cover with olive oil by about an inch. Place over very low heat and cook for about 1/ 2 hour. The garlic should be meltingly soft and lightly colored but not brown. If it’s bubbling too much, lower the heat. Remove from heat and let cool then Strain the oil and reserve for another use. It’s very handy.
- For the broken mustard dressing, whisk the mustard with 1/3 cup olive oil in a small bowl and season with salt and pepper. It won’t be fully emulsified.
- Finish the salad by tossing the vegetables with the vinaigrette very gently. Divide among plates and arrange three cloves of garlic confit inside each portion as well as a light drizzle of the dressing.
Celery Root Souffle
Truth be told I’ve never eaten a soufflé. In terms of food trends, it’s hard to tell which comes first, restaurant owner, chef, or patron; but for some reason restaurants stopped serving them and people stopped eating them. They’ve always been considered a luxurious item for the diner and an intimidating recipe for the home cook. Not a great recipe for longevity.
And yet, there’s not reason not to make one, or at least give it a shot. We own an extremely fancy three-set cookbook series called simply Egg, Vegetables, and Potatoes. It’s French, a fact that’s apparent from page 1. In Vegetables, a bunch of chefs pick a vegetable and come up with a dish featuring said veggie. The dishes range from Red Rhubarb Tart (sounds good), to Swiss Chard Pie (sounds good), to Spider Crabs in Cherry Belle Radish Jello, with a Pistou of Radish Tops (sounds not so good).
I was most struck by the recipe for celery root soufflé. As is usually the case with dishes that catch my eye, it’s simple and true yet creative. Not an easy feat. In this case, I was most impressed that the guy baked it in its own shell, a gutsy move for a Frenchman, I thought.
At heart, a soufflé is puffed egg whites with some sort of flavoring: spinach, chocolate, cheese, and so on. But the legend is founded more on the puffing, rather than the flavoring, which is why it makes sense to cook it (when possible) inside its original setting (a hollowed lemon, turnip, or celery root). If you’re going to the trouble and trying to impress, why not go the extra mile and bring over a steaming celery root soufflé, arising like a nuclear cloud FROM ITSELF.
And so here’s the recipe for celery root soufflé served inside a celery root. A caveat: the book is fancy, I mean really fancy, as in I doubt they stooped to do a lot of recipe testing. This I figured out after the first try. It makes a lot of extra filling, which, logically, I poured into ramekins for a few extra soufflés. They didn’t rise, which was either the fault of the recipe, or something I did wrong, technically or morally.
Either way, the result is quite good and maybe worth buying an extra celery root, scooping out the flesh for another purpose and filling it up with soufflé base. The result is dramatic-a puffed symbol of luxury mushrooming from the insides of the humble, knobby celery root. And how can you dislike a plateful of irony?
(NOTE: as I said above, this makes a ton of filling, but you should buy an extra celery root, hollow it out, use the filling for something else, and spoon in the excess.)
Celery Root Soufflé (from Vegetables, by 40 Great French Chefs)
Serves 2
1 large celery root (about a pound)
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 egg yolks
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
pinch freshly grated nutmeg
6 egg whites
salt
1. Preheat oven to 375.
2. Cut off the bottom of the celery root to make a base and then slice off the top third. Using a spoon (you may need the assistance of a paring knife), scoop out the flesh from removed top and bottom, leaving about ½ inch on the sides and bottom. Steam the flesh.
3. Puree the steamed celery root in a food processor, adding the butter a little at a time, along with the egg yolks, mustard, nutmeg, and salt. Pour into a bowl.
4. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks and fold into the celery root puree
gently.
5. Spoon the mixture into the celery root (you’ll have extra-see NOTE), and bake on a tray for 40 minutes.
Broccoli Soup w/ Raw Garnish
Consider soup. Specifically the tortilla soup at La Esquina. More specifically, the tortilla soup just handed to you by the delivery guy. The bag stamped with the restaurant’s logo, the thick, wasteful pile of paper napkins and plastic spoons. The insulated white, lidded paper cup, the whole thing wrapped tightly in plastic to prevent spillage.
I usually use a fork to prick a hole in the plastic, then slip in the handle, slide the whole thing off and delicately, very delicately, remove the lid. And slurp with the provided spoon, which is flexible and deep-bowled. If ever there were a case of supreme packaging this is it. Finally pried open, what earlier smelled of nothing but warm paper emits a cloud of steam that will curl your toes.
The smoky smell precisely mirrors the broth, which I suspect is made with a touch of dried chilies. Tomatoes, lime, chilies, corn, oil, come through in a magical blend. I try to fill each spoonful with broth, a bit of shredded chicken, avocado, fried, still crisp tortilla strips, and bits of those chilies.
To me, this is soup at its best: a rich broth with plenty of suitable garnish. Which is why matzoh ball soup-a bowlful of barely flavored water interrupted by a dense white softball-is so infuriating. If you’re looking for a good, brothy soup, go for high quality wonton or ramen, with their tasty broths and multiple garnishes.
Proper soup-such as the aforementioned tortilla-has to be carefully layered and interesting, otherwise it’s just a bowl of liquid. Which is why excessively thick clam chowder is so tragic-its clams and garnish wrecked by a heavy hand of flour.
Pureed soups-a personal favorite-are especially tricky, as they should taste of the central ingredient without smacking you over the head. Spinach soup is the perfect example. A bowl of pureed spinach tastes on the order of iron filings, hence the need for potatoes, onions and carrots. Less potent veggies such as cauliflower and broccoli can be left on their own, but I like a touch of leek for a little extra, varied taste.
I could go on, for soup is a world of its own, the only food to command its own Soup Nazi. And in true Soup Nazi fashion, I demand one rule only: season 3 times, beginning, middle, and end. Do so at the end and you’ll have a potful of salty soup.
As for garnish, a neat party trick with pureed soups is to snip elegant and uniform raw bits of the eponymous ingredient and lay them on top before serving. Not only does this add a bit of crunch, but it identifies the soup in a playful, catering kind of way.
I’ve asked La Esquina for their recipe, but they refused. An entirely appropriate response. Just ask the Soup Nazi.
Broccoli Soup
Serves 6
1 large sandwich or hero roll torn into ½ inch pieces
olive oil
1 leek, light green and white part only, washed and sliced
1 rib celery, sliced
1 medium carrot, peeled and sliced
1 bunch broccoli, a few large florets reserved on the side for garnish
1/3 cup heavy cream
salt and pepper
- Make the croutons. For speed, I broil, but oven roasted at 300 or pan fried work fine. Either way, toss with plenty of olive oil in a bowl and season with salt and pepper. Cook on a tray until lightly browned. Remove and reserve.
- Prepare the garnish: using a paring knife, snip the reserved large florets into tiny, ¼ inch florets. Reserve in a bowl.
- Heat ¼ cup olive oil in a large heavy pot over medium heat. When hot, add the leek, celery, and carrot and gently cook, stirring, until soft but not browned, about 10 minutes. Season lightly with salt and pepper.
- Meanwhile, chop the broccoli into a bowl, and, using a paring knife, peel the fibrous stems, chop the insides and add to the bowl. You should have about 6 cups.
- Stir in the broccoli, add water to cover by a few inches (about 8 cups depending on the pot), season again with salt and pepper. Bring to a simmer and cook until tender, about 20 minutes.
- Using a ladle (you could use a slotted spoon, but you’ll need a ladle anyway so why dirty an extra utensil), transfer the veggies to a blender, tipping the ladle each time to drain off the liquid into the pot. Add a few ladlefuls of broth to the solids in the blender. DON’T OVERFILL, no more than 2/3 full or you’ll be scraping the stuff off the walls.
- Puree to soup consistency until you’ve run out of solids. Err on the thick side as you can always add more broth. While the machine is running, pour in the cream and re-season for the third time.
- Pour back into the (rinsed) pot and serve dotted with 4 or 5 of the tiny florets and croutons.
When a Radish is a Beet
A culinary degree prepares you for being a chef about as much as a B.A. in chemistry prepares you to be a neurosurgeon. It’s a lesson soon learned when thrown (literally) into the fire in a professional kitchen and berated for being too slow or being too fast or burning something or leaving something in the wrong place committing a host of seemingly insignificant errors.
Part of this is kitchen culture, but most is due to the intense and, frankly, unrealistic pressure to push food out the doors to an ungodly number of hungry diners. The lone way to prevent nervous meltdowns is to turn the cooks into a smooth engine whose parts (the staff) work in synch. When you think about it, it’s a miracle a basket of bread gets to the table.
However, culinary school does serve one purpose (other than bankrupting its students): it gives one a semi-official imprimatur, a certificate of admittance into the food fraternity. You can wander through the food world with a sense of belonging. Whether or not you know anything is a different question. Is someone with a B.A. in English a better reader than the guy you last sat next to on the subway?
Anyhow, for us, culinary school is many moons ago, and I like to think we know what we’re doing. We cater parties; we keep up with trends and the rest. We’ve learned to sift through the mountains of food junk out there (overhyped restaurants, bad and overpriced greenmarket produce) and pick out the best (Kalustyan’s the spice guy, our Vietnamese market on Mosco Street), compiling a pretty solid understanding of what to do with what’s available.
We deal with Pino our fantastic neighborhood butcher, and look for the best ingredients around.
And yet, a gardener I’m not. We live in New York City for chrissakes. My idea of recreation is trying desperately not to get hit by Jersey drivers edging greedily towards the Holland Tunnel. Once we grew basil the windowsill until an attack of aphids forced us to bag them up and bring them downstairs to Alphonso who mans the garbage room. I could garden indoors, but prefer an unobstructed street view and sun access. This is New York, after all.
And so we come to beets and radishes. This month we’re on the Cape. Blackberry bushes surround the house much like Gingko trees carpet the upper east side. A cute line of grape vines runs up the hilly lawn, and a fruit tree in the back drops something green and weird that looks like a lime.
It’s a nice bike ride over back roads lined with trees and open meadows. The other day we biked to the Wellfleet farmers’ market and snatched up a nice bunch of radishes for our summer staple salad of radish, cucumber, and sour cream. Sliced paper thin on the mandolin, they were pretty discs of red and white concentric circles, which, tossed with the cukes, made for a lively bowl. It seems we had lucked out on some eccentric, beautiful radishes.
Until the mandatory tasting when we discovered our lovely radishes were, in fact, lovely beets. Some variety whose deviously cute interior was engineered to fool the shopper and wreck his radish cucumber salad.
Having already photographed, posted, and labeled as radishes a pic of these cute bulbs with their candy cane cross sections, I knew someone out there in food nerddom would catch the grave error and I was right. “Aren’t those Chioggia beets?” burst the tweet. “Of course, I wrote, our mistake.”
You learn something everyday, but some things aren’t necessarily worth learning. Yes, it’s a cute little beet, but I tried it, and a thin slice tastes just like a thin slice of your average red beet. It’s nice to discover the Chioggia beet, but I’d rather craft a great short rib recipe or understand curry leaves or figure out the recipe for the steamed shrimp and coconut pudding at Co Ba.
Culinary school opened the door to the food world, a place I’m happy to inhabit. But I’m not a gardener and never will be. And I’m cool with that.
When a Radish is a Beet
(radish?)
A culinary degree prepares you for being a chef about as much as a B.A. in chemistry prepares you to be a neurosurgeon. It’s a lesson soon learned when thrown (literally) into the fire in a professional kitchen and berated for being too slow or being too fast or burning something or leaving something in the wrong place committing a host of seemingly insignificant errors.
Part of this is kitchen culture, but most is due to the intense and, frankly, unrealistic pressure to push food out the doors to an ungodly number of hungry diners. The lone way to prevent nervous meltdowns is to turn the cooks into a smooth engine whose parts (the staff) work in synch. When you think about it, it’s a miracle a basket of bread gets to the table.
However, culinary school does serve one purpose (other than bankrupting its students): it gives one a semi-official imprimatur, a certificate of admittance into the food fraternity. You can wander through the food world with a sense of belonging. Whether or not you know anything is a different question. Is someone with a B.A. in English a better reader than the guy you last sat next to on the subway?
Anyhow, for us, culinary school is many moons ago, and I like to think we know what we’re doing. We cater parties; we keep up with trends and the rest. We’ve learned to sift through the mountains of food junk out there (overhyped restaurants, bad and overpriced greenmarket produce) and pick out the best (Kalustyan’s the spice guy, our Vietnamese market on Mosco Street), compiling a pretty solid understanding of what to do with what’s available.
We deal with Pino our fantastic neighborhood butcher, and look for the best ingredients around.
And yet, a gardener I’m not. We live in New York City for chrissakes. My idea of recreation is trying desperately not to get hit by Jersey drivers edging greedily towards the Holland Tunnel. Once we grew basil the windowsill until an attack of aphids forced us to bag them up and bring them downstairs to Alphonso who mans the garbage room. I could garden indoors, but prefer an unobstructed street view and sun access. This is New York, after all.
(beet)
And so we come to beets and radishes. This month we’re on the Cape. Blackberry bushes surround the house much like Gingko trees carpet the upper east side. A cute line of grape vines runs up the hilly lawn, and a fruit tree in the back drops something green and weird that looks like a lime.
It’s a nice bike ride over back roads lined with trees and open meadows. The other day we biked to the Wellfleet farmers’ market and snatched up a nice bunch of radishes for our summer staple salad of radish, cucumber, and sour cream. Sliced paper thin on the mandolin, they were pretty discs of red and white concentric circles, which, tossed with the cukes, made for a lively bowl. It seems we had lucked out on some eccentric, beautiful radishes.
Until the mandatory tasting when we discovered our lovely radishes were, in fact, lovely beets. Some variety whose deviously cute interior was engineered to fool the shopper and wreck his radish cucumber salad.
Having already photographed, posted, and labeled as radishes a pic of these cute bulbs with their candy cane cross sections, I knew someone out there in food nerddom would catch the grave error and I was right. “Aren’t those Chioggia beets?” burst the tweet. “Of course, I wrote, our mistake.”
You learn something everyday, but some things aren’t necessary worth learning. Yes, it’s a cute little beet, but I tried it, and a thin slice tastes just like a thin slice of your average red beet. It’s nice to discover the Chioggia beet, but I’d rather craft a great short rib recipe or understand curry leaves or figure out the recipe for the steamed shrimp and coconut pudding at Co Ba.
Culinary school opened the door to the food world, a place I’m happy to inhabit. But I’m not a gardener and never will be. And I’m cool with that.
Vodka w/ Fresh Lime and Mint
The cocktail. It’s a mysterious thing. A concoction in a glass mixed by a guy behind a barrier who fiddles with bottles and beakers and measurers and a variety of tools. You’re at his mercy, for once the drink passes over the bar and into your hands the situation is irreversible. You can’t pick through the lima beans or fork out the anchovies.
Which is why, if we’re at Aurora Soho I get the pomegranate martini. Anywhere else, including home, I play it safe and get a vodka tonic. Or, if I’m feeling extra daring, switch over to gin. Hence my avoidance of hip cocktail bars with their $20 drinks and Frankenstein hybrids, booze equivalents of genetically crossing my cats with my kid.
Apotheke, whose website claims 500 bottles of liquor and 250 cocktails, is just such a place. The site also has a link to its location, often a tipoff to a high exclusivity quotient. It is, in fact, quite remote, on Doyers Street, which, if we didn’t live sort of nearby, I’d never recognize. Doyers is one of the tiniest, curviest streets in Chinatown. It’s by Confucius Plaza, if that means anything to you. The cocktails are, I imagine, equally remote, and maybe one day I’ll wander in and tell you about them.
Rather than staring at a drink coated with egg white and licorice powder, I’ll stick to something simple, a good rule, I think, when mixing drinks for guests. Most people like at least 10 or so cocktail ingredients and since-as I’ve said above-you can’t exactly extract an unwelcome ingredient, it’s a good idea to stick to those. Anyway, especially in summer, who doesn’t like a nice cold, simple drink? But though we can agree on the basics, we’re not always united in certain things: alcohol level, acidity, etc. So the following is less recipe, more guide, to an easy summer drink. And you don’t need a map of Confucius Plaza.
(NOTE: if you have a shaker, all the better, just strain the drink when you pour. If not, use a wooden spoon to hold back the solids.)
Vodka w/ Lime and Mint
Makes enough to make 2-3 people happy but not comatose
1 cup sugar
2 cups water
1 lime, quartered, each quarter cut in thirds
½ bunch mint leaves
1 cup freshly squeezed grapefruit juice (2 grapefruits)
1 cup vodka
plenty of ice
- In a small pot heat sugar and water, whisking till sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat and let the syrup cool. Refrigerate.
- Add the lime and a cocktail shaker, pitcher, or whatever you have lying around. Muddle vigorously until the leaves are crushed and the lime pieces are completely broken down.
- Add a bunch of ice, 1 cup of simple syrup, the juices and vodka and stir till very cold.
- To serve, put enough ice in the glass so it sticks out above the rim. Pour nearly to the top and serve.
Summer brunch-preserved cherries
A restaurant menu is like an anagram. Ingredients are shuffled, puzzle-fashion, from dish to dish, facilitating smooth and quick service. It’s often said the test of a chef is if he can he make a perfect omelet. Equally important, he should be a good Scrabble player.
This is especially necessary when it comes to pricey perishables. Those parsnips, tossed in olive oil, salted, and roasted to a rooty candy? Glance over at the next table; there they are, pureed with cream and butter, peeking out from underneath a braised short rib.
Brunch is the ultimate mix and match meal. Brunch dishes tend to be fatty, sweet, salty, and confined to homey tastes. It’s a time to splurge rather than strain the mind choosing between cod and calf’s liver or lamb curry and four types of dal. Hence the heavy use of a a limited number of ingredients: eggs, bread, etc.
Still, there’s brunch and there’s brunch, and the Barbuto version is exceptional: frittatas, strawberry and ricotta filled crepes, fontina and pancetta panino, spaghetti carbonara, poached eggs on crusty bread with a small salad.
Untangle the menu, you’ll discover the same 5 or 6 items woven throughout. The same wonderful caramelized onions melted into the fontina on my panino show up in the spinach frittata. The same fontina oozed like a warm blanket over the charred brick oven pizza. Not to mention the crusty bread and arugula salad, which lands on every table and plate in one form or another.
Behind the scenes lies a truly utilitarian universe. Celery trimmings, onion peels, meat and fish scraps: all chucked into a vessel for stock, sauce, flavored oils, preserves, and so on.
It’s possible to construct a similar, miniature, larder at home: condiments and sauces which cut down on food cost and complement a variety of foods.
Only three people occupy our apartment, one of whom is 3 ½ and likes to dress up as Buzz Lightyear, leaving two normal (sort of) inhabitants. Pots of relishes, pickles, preserved lemons, oil-packed vegetables, multiple varieties of salt, etc. would wither and die a sad, moldy death.
One or two such items, however, prove nearly as useful as the caramelized onions in Barbuto’s brunch kitchen. Especially if seasonal, as they pair with other timely items. Right now, cherries are everywhere; preserved, they can be spooned into a small bowl and served with cheese. Or heated and arranged around slices of roasted lamb. The liquid alone can be reduced to a glaze, brushed on grilled meats for a last minute sear. Or dunk those meats and poultry into the liquid and marinate a few hours.
Toss a few cherries with vinegar and stick them in a jar. Follow your tastebuds and play around with combinations, which is a lot easier than mastering Scrabble.
Preserved Cherries
Makes 1 quart
½ cup sugar
1 cup balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
2 sprigs thyme
1 pound cherres, pitted and halved
- In a small saucepan combine all ingredients except cherries and bring to simmer, stirring to dissolve sugar.
- Pour liquid over the bowl of cherries. Let cool, pour into a container, cover and refrigerate for up to 2 weeks.
Crispy Pulled Pork w/ Ricotta
Sometimes genius comes in the tiniest of packages. You could be Joyce, write Ulysses, reinvent the novel, and confuse generations to come. But I’m a fan of tweaking (not that kind). Martha Stewart might tie up brownies in a bow or stick a painted acorn on a box. If that’s tweaking, more power to her. Culinary tweaking is more my style.
I’m talking the onion soup at Balthazar. In place of croutons they add a spoonful of toasted, buttered breadcrumbs. At Aurora Soho, the beets in the beet salad are cut in irregular shapes.
Mel’s Diner in LA (see our sushi post) crisps its fragrant, herbed corned beef hash on the flattop. In Brooklyn, Applewood does the same with its fantastic pulled pork. Courtesy The New Brooklyn Cookbook, we recreated the Applewood pork at home, to tasty results.
The Applewood recipe is quite simple: braise the shoulder in wine and stock, serve in a bowl with the reduced juices. They add a few ricotta dumplings, but to simplify, we topped with a couple of ricotta dollops, which dissolve into the sauce.
Because it’s so simple, follow the directions and try to use great ingredients, i.e. good pork, preferably homemade stock, a decent white wine, and fresh ricotta. Most important, sear the pork prior to finishing with the sauce. We’ve all had a pulled pork sandwich, a delightful product. Crisping the meat lifts the dish immeasurably, balancing the soft ricotta and braising juices with slightly caramelized meat.
Crisp Pulled Pork w/ Ricotta (adapted from Applewood via The New Brooklyn Cookbook)
Serves 4
2 ½ pounds pork shoulder in one piece
¼ cup olive oil
1 medium onion, small dice
1 carrot, small dice
2 ribs celery, small dice
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 cups dry white wine
2 quarts homemade chicken stock or unsalted prepared broth
½ bunch thyme, preferably tied with butcher’s twine, plus 2 tablespoons chopped
thyme leaves for garnish
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1 cup whole milk ricotta
salt and pepper
- Preheat oven to 325
- Season pork well with salt and pepper. In a large pot heat half the olive oil on high to near smoking. Sear on all sides until browned, about 10 minutes. Remove to a plate.
- Turn heat down a bit, add veggies and tomato paste and cook until lightly browned, about 10 minutes. Add the wine and boil hard until nearly dry.
- Return pork to pot along with thyme. Pour in stock. Cover with a circle of parchment paper, then the pot lid. Bring to a simmer and place in oven until meat is falling apart, about 3 to 4 hours.
- Remove meat to a large bowl and reserve. Strain braising liquid through a fine mesh strain into another pot, discard veggies and thyme bundle. Boil until reduced by half. Season well. When meat is cool, shred with two forks.
- When ready to serve, heat the remaining olive oil in a large pan over medium high heat. Add the pork, spreading in the pan. Sear on one side five minutes until crisp, season well with salt and pepper.
- Add reduced juices, scrape the pork from the bottom and toss gently.
- Using tongs, divide pork among 4 bowls and spoon juices liberally over and around. Top with dollops of ricotta and sprinkle with chopped thyme.
Beet Farro-It’s Cold Outside
If you read cookbooks from 40 years ago, you’ll notice they have one thing in common: the food is often unappealing. The desserts are probably fine: carrot cake and apple pie haven’t changed. But in general, the recipes are-not unexpectedly- dated.
In his giant New York Times Cookbook, Craig Claiborne tackles Chinese food, turning out a chapter of sad stir fries. I’ve been skimming James Beard’s Theory & Practice of Good Cooking, and the recipes seem fine, but leave you with a nagging feeling that something is a little off. His sautéed burger looks acceptable. But when you read the headnote, and his prescription for how to avoid burgers from sticking to the grill-slip an ice chip in the center-you start to worry. If I wanted a watery burger, I’d eat it in the shower.
Not that Beard does a lot of sautéing. Like a lot of cooks back then, the broiler is near and dear to his heart. We like it for last minute browning and cooking thin items. It also cuts down on dirty pans. However, Beard’s broiler is a central facet of his kitchen, down to the broiled scallops. Sticking a scallop under the broiler doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. Unless you hold them in your palm an inch away from the blazing heat, they won’t brown well. Scallops need a hot pan and about 2 minutes on each side.
He cooks gnocchi with a cup of instant farina rather than flour, a mixture which, if I had an Italian grandma, would probably give her a stroke. Of course, most of the recipes contain massive quantities of butter. Especially the vegetables. Braised fennel 5 tablespoons butter; braised celery 4 tablespoons butter; braised lettuce 4 tablespoons butter.
Forty years ago, we wouldn’t have posted (printed) this farro recipe. Farro and other grains are relatively new here, there’s no butter just olive oil, and the beets are folded into the farro rather than being a side dish. It calls for just 2 or 3 main ingredients, but it’s of the times, when, ironically, we’ve learned that, often, simpler is best.
Beet Farro
Serves 4
3 medium beets
¼ cup olive oil
2 tablespoons minced shallots
1 cup farro
2-3 cups chicken stock
2 tablespoons thinly sliced scallions, white and light green parts only
salt and pepper
- Preheat oven to 400. Wrap beets tightly in foil and roast until tender, 1 to 1 ½ hours. Remove and when cool, peel the skin and chop. Puree in a blender or food processor with 1 cup of the stock. Reserve.
- Warm the 2 tablespoons of the oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add the shallots and sweat until translucent with no color. Add the farro and mix well, coating with the oil and cooking until it smells nutty, 3-4 minutes.
- Fold in the beet mixture until incorporated. Bring to a simmer and cover, lowering heat a bit and stirring occasionally so the beets don’t scorch.
- The farro will take about 25 minutes. After 10 or so minutes it may appear dry in which case add stock along the way. The end result should be slightly thicker than risotto but still pourable.
- Divide the farro among the plates, garnish with scallions and drizzle with remaining 2 tablespoons olive oil.
