Endings and beginnings
January 1, 2008 by Maria
The G3 have been AWOL over the holidays. I’m not sure about the others, but I have no excuse other than there’s been more cooking and eating than writing about eating and cooking going on. Starting on the 15th, when the three of us got together on a snowy night to recreate a Del Posto menu, it’s been non-stop simmering, roasting, braising and even a little baking around here. There’s been butter and cream and red meat and burrata and toasted coconut ice cream with chocolate sauce and a significant narrowing of the arteries and a few extra pounds on everyone in the family except for maybe Nick who never seems to grow.
But now the year has turned and it’s another snowy day. Ann Arbor is under the loveliest blanket of white I’ve seen in several years. Walking in the woods this morning reminded me of all the snow-filled children’s books we’ve been reading lately; the bushes and young trees so laden by snow that they bent into arches over the paths forming a long tunnel of glittering white. Zack-the-dog ran around in great looping circles and buried his nose in drifts and put his rump up in the air and seemed to be under the impression he was a puppy and not a sedate seven year old. Even the girl who had stayed up until 2:30 with her friends, putting in curlers and making music videos, came out of her pre-adolescent sulk to make snow angels and slide down a hill on her snow-panted butt. Then we came home for hot chocolate and macaroni and cheese and scrambled eggs.
It seems like a day for a few recollections and resolutions.
Since the Del Posto dinner (and a word here to anyone who tries the braised beef recipe; we can’t figure out how a six quart pan is supposed to hold seven pounds of meat, a mess of vegetables and three bottles of wine — while we can hardly bear to say it, we think Lidia screwed up. Go for a bigger pan), there was a work dinner with two soups (butternut squash and wild mushroom) and fancy charcuterie. And there was dinner at my mother’s house where I found myself in a slightly bewildered state — and not entirely of my own volition — turning out roast beef, mashed potatoes and creamed onions (Mom’s 1946 edition of the Joy of Cooking, a wedding present in 1950 came in very handy).
Then we came home to the Christmas-birthday fete of scallops with wild mushrooms and polenta (accompanied by a half-bottle of real champagne), duck breast with roasted grapes and creme fraiche, a potato and bacon gratin (with a knock-out bottle of Bordeaux we had been given for Christmas) and that coconut ice cream. Nick was allowed to stay up for the first course. He had already eaten his scrambled eggs and green beans, but I made him a token plate for the ritual of the thing. He squinted at the scallop and declared “I am going to eat that” and popped it into his mouth. Then he stole several more from the rest of us and ate a bunch of polenta. The mushroom however, he immediately disdained, acting upon some atavistic child’s aversion to fungi. One look at it and he shoved it aside. “Don’t want that.” Naomi seconded his opinion, although she good-humoredly obeyed my injunction to “try a bite of everything.” While Nick was carried, protesting, to bed, I cooked the duck breasts to a just-right medium rare that was immensely satisfying to me-who-had-never-cooked-duck before.
There was a lot more, of course. A Molly Steven’s braise of lamb shoulder with fennel and orange and ginger that is worth recommending for the smells that filled the house, but tasted just okay (I suspect if I had marinated it the recommended overnight rather than five hours it would have been more flavorful). There was the discovery that The Produce Station is smoking fish now (and, for that matter, selling a small but interesting selection of mid-priced wine). We sampled an absolut citron smoked whitefish that was very tasty (although cut a little thickly for my tastes). All in all, I have to say, the house has smelled really good the past week.
But this madness must end. It’s time to get simple for a while. In pursuit of that simplicity, I’m trying to restrain my tendency to a long list of difficult to achieve New Year’s resolutions. Culinary-wise, I have pared the list down to four, published here with the idea of generating accountability — and perhaps future posts:
- Finally learn to poach that egg (I know, you’ve heard this before)
- Learn to make a pie/tart crust
- Do more cooking with fish
- Learn about yeast baking
I’m easing into that last (and most terrifying) resolution by returning to the famous no-knead bread. I made this a few times in its blog hay-day when just about everyone was doing it, and it was good, especially warm with butter, but never quite as good as I wanted it to be. The last time, something went terribly, demoralizingly, awry, so much so that I ended up with a great slurp of saturated dough that I had to scrape out of the pan and into the garbage. I put my Dutch oven away in shame. But among the many cooking-related presents that turned up under the tree (and there were many; my loved ones were very kind to me) was a subscription to Cooks’ Illustrated and the first one came this week with a recipe for almost no knead bread and so out came the dutch oven and the parchment paper and it turns out that if you add a little beer and a little vinegar and about 15 gentle kneads after the dough has rested for 18 hours, you get something pretty damn spectacular. The new year is off to a good start.
A special thanks to all who took a chance on our Menu for Hope prize and contributed to raising more than 90,000 dollars to support the school lunch program in Lesotho, Africa. Make sure to check back on January 9th to see if you won. And Happy New Year from the G3 to all our readers — it’s been wonderfully exciting to watch your numbers grow this past year. We look forward to sharing many more culinary adventures in 2008.
And tonight it’s soup. There’s probably a lot of soup in store for January. And no, we will NOT put any of the leftover creme fraiche on it. Well, maybe a dollop.
Hi Maria.
My process of baking the no-knead wat has slowly evolved over the year or so that I’ve been doing it. We’ve had our share of stuck loaves (see below for the fix). The first thing I jetisoned was the dish towel. I could never keep the dough from sticking to it and trying to get the bits of raw dough out of a towel is like pushing on a string. Also, a floury dish towel sitting around the kitchen wasn’t very appealing either.
WRT Cooks, I generally liked the publication when we got it but finally got irritated with their tendency to reinvent the wheel. Their new techniques for doing things often include an oddball ingredient or two or a kooky reordering of steps. I remember years ago reading about their (or, the author’s) discovery of the way to bake perfect (yes-knead) bread; it was to add the water to the flour not the flour to the water. A recent article on perfect pie crusts perscribes the use of a food processor and vodka (though in fairness a friend who’s mother can whip up a pie crust in nothing flat apparently uses a food processor so that wasn’t as crazy as I had first thought).
That said, I like the idea of additions like beer and vinegar and there’s never been any rule in my book that you can’t knead no-knead bread if you’re of a mind to. But last night’s loaf had terrific crust and crumb (with sizeable holes) with zero jostling.
Anyway, here’s my wuite detailed method:
4 cups bread flour (we use King Arthur)
2 cups warm water
1/4 tsp yeast
1 tbl salt
Mix and let sit for about a day, considerably less in warm conditions (though there is the lore that longer, colder rises produce tastier bread).
Add a 1/4 cup of flour and mix well with a spoon until the dough doesn’t stick so much. Also be careful to avoid “fault lines” where you’ve turned a floured surface over on itself. Let 4 year old daughter scrape the remaining dough from the bowl on account of she can’t get enough of the stuff. Take a cookie sheet covered in wax paper and put down a liberal layer of flour and/or some grain such as oat bran. The coarser stuff tends to work better in terms of the wax paper releasing. Remember that this surface will determine the top of your loaf. If you have way too much flour, you’re likely to get pockets of flour on top of your finished bread, though that’s not such a bad thing compared to having the dough hanging on to the wax paper. Now flop out the dough onto the floured wax paper. Before covering with saran wrap, give it a sprinkle on top with flour so that the wrap comes off easily. Also flour around the edges to accomodate the loaf as it expands. I use a glass cheese shaker that can be had at Target for a few bucks. After about three ours of rise time I fire up the oven and pot. These days I’ve been going with 450F. After 15 minutes I peel the saran wrap off and sprinkle the now mostly moist looking loaf top with a liberal coat of flour. [Sidebar: This is a crital point and took me a while to appreciate. I had initially thought that the clean release of the loaf in the pot was due to the pot being really hot. In fact, it is due to the loat being really well floured.] Now I yank the hot pot out of the oven. With a spatual at the ready I pick up the wax paper and bread and flip it into the pot. This ends up being a sort of slow motion pour as the wax paper has no rigidity. I try to get the loaf as centered in the pot as I can. If you’re lucky, the wax paper will just peel away but more often than not I get spots where the dough clings tenaciously and I have to use the spatula to gently separate the two. Now it’s all over but the shoutin’. I’ve been baking for 35-40 min at 450F covered followed by 15-20 min at 350F uncovered. If I’ve floured well, the loaf can be bounced around in the pot, so complete is the release. As it cools, listen for the crust crackling. A friend told me that Julia Child wrote that the crackling is an indicator that you’ve got the crust right.
So that’s how I do it. But to get variants (that are often closer to the NYT original) you can youtube ‘no knead bread.’ I also found a video at the times recently of Bittman and Lahey going through the process. The dude mixes the flour, yeast and salt with his hands!
Some folks obviously get good results using dish towels but I’ll not go back to them. Though I acknowledge that my method consumes about a square foot each of wax paper and saran wrap per loaf and I’m not totally happy with it, it’s been a pretty good performer for me.
-jim
Yeah, the whole dish towel thing got old for me too. One of the things I liked about the CI’s revision is that they use a parchment paper “sling” that can be popped right in the pan. Worked like a charm.
Right now I am finding the engineers at work cooking approach of the magazine endearing and strangely soothing. I like to think about these guys in their lab coats surrounded by a dozen chickens working on the perfect roasting method. And I also wonder a lot about the “testers.” Who are these testers? Like, do they call down the hall “all-y all-y all come free, chicken’s up”? and anyone who’s around comes down for a bite? Or do they recruit people off the street, or what?
Food processor pie crust is all the rage. But in pursuit of my New Year’s resolution, I intend to work by hand.
I tried a parchment paper sling early on but found the crust to be substandard. Maybe I’ll try it again as the dumping of the dough is by far the most stressful step in the process and also risks deflating the risen loaf. In the mean time I added about a tablespoon of cider vinegar to the last batch, just for laughs. Oh, how I laughed.
The CI approach I think is probably a lot like what going to school at the CIA must be like. Very scientific and pragmatic. I was impressed to read all about protein changes in cooking pork that determined how tough or tender the outcome would be. But I doubted their rigor when it came to testing some of their thinking-outside-the-box ideas.
A friend of mine got her dream job at CI a couple of years ago, and from the way she described it to me, it sounded like the “testers” are all the people who work at CI, from secretaries and interns on up. Calling down the hall inviting everyone in for free chicken is exactly what they do. There’s also a giant fridge (or maybe several) where you can take home leftovers from the tests. My friend discovered that the shocking downside of working at CI for someone who loves to cook is that there is so food around that you stop cooking.
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