David Ornstein's Blog: Cooking

The Preserving Series - Class 1

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 05:27:47 GMT

I didn't know why I was so passionate and excited about this class until I recognized the brain malfunction.

I'm not sure it's serious, but it was definitely a malfunction.

You see, I realized that there's a wide range of foods that I've always thought of as atomic. As in, doesn't decompose. As in, you can't break it into parts.

For example, a mustard is really only one thing, right? A salami or salumi the same, right? Sauerkraut isn't really *made*, right?

Now obviously (I hope), I'm not that dumb. But it's more like I was semi-consciously treating things as if this were true. Turns out (Doh!) that it's not. And the first class in the preserving series made that blatantly clear.

Case in point: Peach and Tarragon Mustardo. We made up a batch up this in the first class of the Preserving Series at Culinary Communion. You basically combine peaches, mustard, a bit of herb and some sugars and acids (vinegar and lemon juice)and make something s-u-b-l-i-m-e. I'd say it was something you might buy in a jar at a store but it ain't. It's so much better than that. Nevertheless, I wouldn't have ever really thought of making a mustard. Seems atomic, right?

Wrong!

And the class proceeded down this path. In five hours my five classmates and I made:

Preserved lemons
Home churned butter
Pickled cherries
Pickled chard stems
Funghi Sott'olio - Mushrooms under oil
Dilly grass (pickled asparagus)
Peach and tarragon mustardo
Spiced port mustard
Harissa
Oysters escabeche
Sauerkraut
Duck Prosciutto
Pickled Beef Tongue
Pickled Okra
Pique
Preserved Watermelon Rind

We also made a half-dozen other dishes for lunch. :-)

I want to pause on this last item for a moment.

I have to say, it never would have occurred to me. I can't even begin to add up the total amount of watermelon right I've thrown away in my life. After tasting the results of this wickedly-easy recipe, it almost made me cry to think about it.

Now this doesn't do it justice, of course, which is the challenge of blogging about cooking. Like dancing about architecture, and all that.

You take the rind with almost all of the fruit removed, cut into pieces and boil it in water for half-an-hour to soften the pieces. Then you boil with sugar, apple cider vinegar and a very small amount of cinnamon and olive oils. Eventually the slices become soft and translucent and then you jar them up (those that you don't set aside to snack on immediately, anyway).

This preserving thing is A-OK.

The Preserving Series - The Back Story

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 05:46:32 GMT

I've done a lot of cooking -- for an amateur. At least I think so. I've cooked a lot of things, but there are whole sub-worlds that have seemed out of reach somehow to my subconscious cook-mind. Probably the biggest one of these has been preserved foods. I didn't really realize it until I bought Michael Ruhlman's fantastic Charcuterie book. As I worked my way through this over a few evenings I realized that I could barely imagine cooking even one recipe from this.

I finally settled (for a while, anyway) on a simple place to start: bacon. It sounds like a pretty easy place to begin. Just a bit of pork belly, some cure, some smoke. How hard could it be? We'll just ignore the whole section on botulism and other scary things about Charcuterie. But even this was out of reach. Casual reach, anyway. I didn't seem to be able to find pork belly anywhere here in Seattle. I know I didn't look hard enough -- obviously there are places. But I didn't quite get up the energy.

All of this was pretty tragic, as I love sausages and other preserved yummies. So when I learned about Culinary Communion in Seattle and started browsing through their classes, I was totally jazzed to find a class on Charcuterie. It's a 6-hour class in which you make all kinds of sausages (roughly, anyway). I signed up right away for the class coming about a month later. And then (ugg!) had to miss the class because my wife needed to be out of town and I had to watch the kids (a tradeoff I'd make again any day, by the way).

So I signed up for the next class and went in mid-June. And had such a great time.

I arrived on Saturday morning with about ten other students and we spent the next six hours making sausages. It was really quite amazing. We made close to two dozen recipes, grinding, stuffing, etc. including:

Mexican Chorizo
Chilito
Bacon
Fuet
Spanish Chorizo
Gypsy Salami
Salamini Cacciatore
Coppa-cured Pork Tenderloin
Bratwurst
French Merguez
Soppressata

One of the things I made was the Soppressata (a dry-aged salami that hangs for a couple of months before it's ready). Personally, I love a good Soppressata, so I was excited to make this -- but it was a bit odd knowing it would be months before it was ready. Turns out that it was pretty good when I had some in August, but more about that in later posts.

At the end, we sat down to a feast and enjoyed some of the fruits of our labors. It was interesting as a cooking exercise, though, because we didn't get to enjoy everything we'd made. I'm used to cooking where you cook and cook and cook and then you eat (and hopefully enjoy). But with Charcuterie, of course, only some of what you make (e.g., fresh sausage like Mexican Chorizo) is available for immediate enjoyment. The rest needs to hang out for a while (literally :-)).

Anyway... I was having such a good time in the class that when Gabe (the chef instructor) mentioned that they had a six-week Preserving Series that I was already sold. I knew I'd be doing the Charcuterie piece again (though with more depth), but it also includes pickling, cheese making, Garde Manger, and other magical things. As soon as I could talk to my (loving!) wife (hi, honey) and convince her that it would be OK for me to spend six weeks of Saturdays cooking while she hung out with the kids, I was in...

It's tough to find time to post, frankly. But I have a backlog of pictures and experiences from these classes now, so I'm going to try to post them all. As a start, here are a few pictures from the first Charcuterie class.

New Year's Day Party 2008

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 22:57:24 GMT

We had our annual New Year's Day party again this year. We invited about a hundred people and about half that many showed up. Along with seeing all of the wonderful people who come visit, part of what makes this great is my chance to really have a blow-out cooking experience. For example, here's the menu:

Blueberry-Cream Cheese Tarts
Foie Gras Brûlée
Guinness Stout Ginger Cake
Marinated Olives
Moules Normandes
Onion Soup Grantinée
Chocolate Petits Pots with Coffee "Molecular Caviar"
Orange-Cardamom Shakes
Parmesan Crisps with Goat Cheese Mousse
Roast Beet and Mâche Salad with Goat Cheese and Toasted Walnuts
Shrimp in Garlic-Sage butter
Side of Salmon Slow-Roasted in Dill
Spinach Pie
Kids Casserole

Yum! All made very much from scratch (e.g., the beef stock for the onion soup started four days prior to the 1st). It was really great to build these things up at a leisurely pace. I did about 2/3 of them and my wife did her usual superb job on the others.

I'll be posting over the next couple of weeks with recipes and more about many of these dishes, but for now I'll post some pictures from the prep and the party so you can get a sense of the event...

The Recipes and Prep Lists: These are the (shorthand) recipes and the prep work laid out in the kitchen on the morning of the first. Orange stuff is what's been done do far.

Hovering: This was the assembly station and people were pretty much collected around this area of the kitchen for the whole party.

Prawns with Garlic and Sage: This was good (but not as good as previous times -- the sage wasn't crispy enough this time).

Coffee Molecular Caviar - Trial Run: I've made a number of different kinds of caviar before using spherification, but coffee was new and the process is pretty sensitive to varying ph-levels -- so we decided to try the night before. It worked out nicely. Here's my lovely wife demo'ing some of the equipment.

Coffee Molecular Caviar - Closer Up: Here's a better picture of the caviar.

Orange-Cardamom Shakes: These are so refreshing it's not even funny. Like revenge, they're best served nice and cold. This is prep'ing the milk mixture with the toasted cardamom seeds, oranges, etc.

Blueberry-Cream Cheese Tarts: Making the tarts a couple of days in advance. They freeze really well.

Guinness Stout Ginger Cake: A few ingredients (including molasses in the measuring cup).

The Workhorse: My favorite piece of kitchen equipment. The orange dutch oven on the front is full on onions beginning the five-hour caramelization process to eventually go into the onion soup.

Beef Stock: Bubbling away for 6 hours a few days in advance.

My Son And Somebody's Shoes: Not his :-)

When I get a bit more time, I'll start posts on each of the recipes. If you have a particular one you want to know about, let me know and I'll prioritize that one.

Pesto cream sauce and gnocchi

Sun, 26 Dec 2004 06:20:41 GMT

OK. For years I've been making pesto. One of my favorite dishes. I learned a base recipe from a friend in San Francisco 10-years ago and I haven't changed it since. Very simple:

1 cup of really good parmesan cheese, cut into chunks
1/2 cup of pecorino romano cheese
Put these into a food processor and grind
1 cup of nuts (50/50 pine nuts/cashews is great, but lots of combos work)
Add these and also grind
1 bunch of fresh basil
Add and grind briefly
3-4 large cloves of garlic (depending on taste)
Add and (yup) grind
1.5-2.5 cups of good olive oil
Run the food processor while you're blending the oil in

Anyway, I've been making this for years and tonight we were going to have Pesto with Gnocchi. But I forgot the gnocchi at the store. So we made some up (actually my wife did). Nice and fresh. We'd been meaning for quite a while to try making gnocchi and in celebration of that I thought I'd also try making a creamy pesto sauce (which always seems right for gnocchi). Gosh, just a bunch of heavy cream and mmmmmm....

Cooking... Thomas Keller Style

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 18:45:24 GMT

So, a few years back my wife got a copy of Thomas Keller's The French Laundry Cookbook and I’ve been cooking from it ever since. Aside from being what’s been described as the best food

porn book available (when you see the pictures inside you'll know what I mean: it’s a metaphor!), it’s got some of my favorite recipes: coffee and doughnuts, Maine lobster with creamy lobster broth and mascapone-enriched orzo, Parmesan crisps with goat cheese mousse (see the picture), and so on.

I notice the other day that there’s a new book he’s put out called Bouchon, named for his more bistro-style placve he opened up next to the French Laundry. The book showed up yesterday and I stayed up late reading. Looks gooooood. I’ll try something out this weekend.