Or five or six.

[Warning for the faint of -- ahem: scores of undoubtedly cute little chickens, ducks, and guinea fowl gave their lives for this post.]

For the last edition of Choice Cuts, we screened the Jules Dassin short of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” So obviously, I had to cook some hearts.

My favorite meatmongers at Dickson’s Farmstand Meats (now permanently brick-and-mortared at Chelsea Market) happened to have three bags of various bird hearts for me. However, they were also mixed in with gizzards and livers, so I spent an hour or two picking through the sacks, rinsing and sorting.

I fried them in butter, as per Fergus Henderson, deglazed with a little vincotto, and put those chewy, saucy little hearts on toast. Sprinkle with parsley, serve, rinse, repeat.

Our most recent edition of Choice Cuts was all about La Serenissima, and in that city of canals, one eats a lot of fish.

I somehow failed to get any pictures of the baccalà mantecato, but our token Venetian confirms that it holds up to the standard. Eating whipped salt cod on grilled polenta is like wrapping your tongue in a Snuggie (that’s a good thing), and the dish is actually pretty easy to put together. It just requires a little forethought — the cod needs a few days of soaking so you can keep all your teeth (and your mixer can keep its motor intact).

Sarde in saor, on the other hand, is a giant pain in the ass. Not only because the dish requires several days to complete, but because it turns out filleting sardines is not really as easy as the internet would make it seem. (Corollary: Filleting sardines to feed 20 is no fun.) But I love this dish, whose name is Venetian for “sardines in flavor” or “sardines in tastiness” and very apt.

Filleted sardines get a roll in some flour and then are deep fried.

Meanwhile, onions get stewed for a while in vinegar with raisins and pine nuts.

Alternate layers of onions with sardines in a big (ideally ceramic) vessel. Cover it and leave it in the fridge for two or three days.

Mangia. And then hunt down a fishmonger or friend skilled in filleting for next time.

Dear readers, let’s collaborate on a timely recipe.

All I have right now is a name. It’s called Nobel Surprise.
What is it? And what’s the surprise?
It’s probably based on something Norwegian and famous.
An autumn dish, like cardamom cake with pear baked inside.

Perhaps there is a touch of Kenya? Cloudberry wienerbrød, served with changaa-spiked whipped cream?

Maybe it’s not a dessert.

Maybe it’s an appetizer. It’s a teaser, suggesting magical things could happen later in the meal. It’s tasty, sure, but like a dish at El Bulli, the hype about Nobel Surprise sometimes gets out of control, and stratospheric expectations can’t always be met.

What do you think Nobel Surprise is?

UPDATE 10/17/09:
So that you know I’m serious about Nobel Surprise, I’m throwing out the first (and maybe the only) serious option: I made some cardamom milk cake last night and drizzled dark chocolate on it. The dark chocolate is the surprise, of course. Maybe it should’ve been milk chocolate, but I don’t like milk chocolate (and I hope you don’t think I’m bi-racist for saying it).

OK, I admit it. This whole thing was just an excuse for me to make dessert…

I can’t remember the last time I made a layer cake with icing. Maybe never. I prefer to leave these things to the experts. Cakes are not a cakewalk. Especially not in Santa Fe, at 7,000 feet above sea level. So when called upon to bake one for a dinner party, I refused at first.

I was happy to cook anything on the stovetop, but I wasn’t going near the oven. At which point, my friend Sarah revealed a book that got me over the fear: Pie in the Sky, by Susan G. Purdy.

Purdy realized that all the rules of thumb she’d found for baking at high altitude were inconsistent at best. In the mountains, evaporation happens faster, and leavening of any kind is more effective because of the lower air pressure. So, for example, to make a cake you have to increase your oven temperature so that your cake’s structure will “set” earlier, before the cake overexpands or dries out. But a temperature adjustment isn’t enough. You still need to decrease the amount of leavening. You also need more liquid to keep the cake from drying out. But now that you’ve added more liquid, if you don’t add extra flour your cake won’t be able to hold its structure and will fall. It’s a multivariate problem, so the exact adjustments are elusive and have made high altitude baking a real pain in the ass, until now anyway.

Purdy gathered a hundred of her favorite recipes for baked goods and traveled from her home at sea level to test kitchens in four locations: Boone, NC (3,000 feet), Denver, CO (5,000 feet), Santa Fe (7,000 feet), and Breckenridge, CO (10,000 feet). At each place, she iteratively adjusted every recipe until they came out right.

So the resulting book is like five cookbooks in one. The ingredients list for each recipe in the book is a grid, with a column for each altitude. Made in Santa Fe, the 7,000 foot version was fantastic. One of the better cakes I’ve ever tasted, and definitely the best cake I’ve ever made. So here’s the recipe:

First, a spreadsheet of ingredients for the chocolate buttermilk cake.

You’ll need two 9-inch cake pans, parchment paper, and a mixer.

1. Get your eggs and butter out if you haven’t already, get the oven warming up with the rack in the correct place, and butter the bottom and sides of each pan thoroughly. Line the bottoms of the each pan with a circle of parchment paper and add a second layer of butter on top of the parchment paper.
2. Chop the chocolate and melt it in the microwave on high: 30 seconds; stir; 15 seconds; stir; repeat in 15 second increments, stirring each time until the chocolate has just melted. Set aside.
3. Mix together, then sift the flour, baking soda, salt, and nutmeg in a medium bowl and set aside. Sifting is super important, don’t skip this!
4. Now, let’s get the batter going. In the work bowl of an stand mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until well blended. Scrape down the bowl and add the vanilla and the eggs, two at a time. Mix well to blend, then scrape down the bowl again.
5. Turn the mixer back on, on the lowest speed. Add 1/3 of the flour, then 1/3 of the buttermilk, alternately, until everything has been combined.
6. Fold in the chocolate and stir until well combined.
7. Divide the batter into the two pans, and smooth the top. Bake for the appropriate time for your altitude. The cake should be springy, and a cake tester should come out clean. Just barely. If it’s not done after the minimum time, you’ll be surprised by what two extra minutes in the oven will do.
8. Set the pans on wire racks and let cool for 10-15 minutes, then run a knife around the edge of each cake layer to release them, and invert the cake. Remove the parchment and let the layers cool completely on the wire racks before icing.

For frosting, melt 8 oz of 70+% chocolate in the microwave, combine with 1 cup heavy cream, and put it in the fridge for 30 minutes or so. You’re basically making a ganache. Mix with an electric mixer until you’ve reached a good icing consistency; you may add more cream if you need to thin it out. Ice the cakes, and serve!

Soup season is officially open, and I’ve been exploring water-based soups this year. Mostly because I don’t have the time and energy to make stock (not that it requires much), and I’m not buying stock at the supermarket because it isn’t very good, it’s expensive, I think it’s a waste of food transportation energy, and the supermarket I’m shopping at doesn’t sell meat anyway, so my choices are mushroom, vegetable, or nothing.

It’s amazing how flavorful nothing can be. With a little added fat and umami of course. You see, you can’t just salt your way to success with water-based soup. You need some kind of base, probably some variant of a mirepoix along with a bunch of fat. I don’t know where I heard this recently, but fat is flavor. So, preferably you’ll want a couple kinds.

Plus you’ll want a balance of umami (which, really, is what stock is all about), salt, and acid. Example one: this delicious west african peanut soup from Bittman. Fattened up with grapeseed oil, chicken fat, peanut butter, and peanuts. Tomatoes lend the umami and acid. Sweet potatoes and kale make for a good textural balance. Wow, it’s so damn good.

Example two: red lentil soup with lemon, which has graced this blog in the past, perhaps more than once. The recipe calls for stock, but this one works well with water. You need another flavor dimension beyond the olive oil/tomato paste/lemon troika to drive it home, though. A cup of grated parmesan at the end works well, in lieu of salt. And a dollop of yogurt upon serving takes it to the top.

So, that’s what I’ve got. If you have any other water-based soup secrets, I’d love to hear them…

That was 2008.

This was 2009:

This year, more than half our toaster hook-ups dried up, there was no dessert portion of the evening, and we overcompensated on the lettuce front, but we had Tim’s mayonnaises, more of the best tomato jam ever, Don’s bacon bourbon Old Fashioneds, and 25 pounds of bacon, with representation from (drumroll, please):

Allan Benton / Madisonville, TN
Pleroma Farm / Hudson, NY
Mountain View Farm / Jackson, NY
Bradley Farm / New Paltz, NY
Jeffrey’s Meat Market / New York, NY
Char No. 4 / Brooklyn, NY
Los Paisanos Meat Market / Brooklyn, NY
some Polish butcher (double-smoked!) / Brooklyn, NY
me (pork belly from Fleisher’s / Brooklyn, NY

Can’t wait for 2010.

So I’ve been in Santa Fe for a couple weeks. According to the American Lung Association, this area has some of the cleanest air in the country. It’s right up there with Duluth, and the difference in palpable. First, smells seem to carry much further around here. I smell piñon and ponderosa pines, I smell desert sage and honeysuckle and russian olives. And this time of year, there’s the smell of roasting Hatch green chiles all around town.

Right now they are overflowing at every supermarket anywhere near Hatch, New Mexico. They are sold out of trucks by the side of the road and at the farmers markets. They are usually sold fresh and roasted on the spot with huge gas-fired roasters. The grocery stores have roasters out front, and customers line up with 30 or 40 pound burlap sacks full of chiles in their carts. I’m still trying to figure out what people do with all those chiles when they get home, but apparently they freeze really well.

Hatch chiles in the roaster (photo by mrccos)
Karl and I got a huge ziplock bag of roasted Hatch chiles and ate them with everything. They’re about as versatile as tomatoes, and so far I have enjoyed them most in salad or paired with one other ingredient. Almost any ingredient.

Roasted Hatch chile with a boiled egg. Great combo. There are many other varieties around here, too: Big Jim, Red “Bullshorn”, Padrón, Chimayó, Shishito, but Hatch seems to be the most famous.

“Red or green?” is an FAQ around town. This is what red looks like, on enchiladas with nixtamal, beans, rice, and lots of queso, at Cafe Castro:

This is green, on Karl’s tacos:

And there is a third option: christmas. Here it is at Harry’s Roadhouse, on blue corn enchiladas:


Sopapillas at Cafe Castro. Deep fried puffy dough pockets, served with honey on the side. These are not dessert, they’re served with the meal (instead of chips and salsa). I think it plays an important role, because everything starts to kind of blend together on the plate after a while.

At The Shed, we got big portions of really excellent red chile pork enchiladas, which are served with the standard sides and, surprisingly, garlic bread on the side (again, instead of chips & salsa). It provides the textural contrast that the chips and salsa usually bring, but with a flavor that doesn’t feel like more of what’s already on your plate.

This is the meal where I finally understood what red chile sauce really is. It’s dark red and brooding and subterranean and more umami than spicy. It has more in common with mole than with salsa. It’s fantastic.

on the offhand chance that anyone’s interested, i thought i’d put up a link to a post i wrote about brunch in central square. feel free to send me suggestions of places i’ve egregiously overlooked.

I have a tendency to make the most unassuming dishes in the most time-consuming, overwrought way. I figure that the more attention you pay to every step and aspect of making a dish, the better it’s going to be ultimately.

Also, perhaps owing to my Midwestern origins, I like to make shit BIG. I usually put my chicken pot pie in a big 8-quart rondeau, but at the latest Choice Cuts, our numbers called for something bigger. No, for this occasion, I brought out the 16″ x 13″ x 3″ All-Clad roaster.

Which conveniently can roast the two chickens required for the pie with ample room left over. (The missing legs were lunch.) And even more conveniently, the fond and residual fat and juices in the pan were critical in taking this pie to the next level, so no need to wash after roasting. The chickens were picked and shredded.

I had already cooked most of the vegetables the day before. In an effort to clear my fridge of the last couple of CSA hauls, in here there are a few onions, four leeks, ten carrots (regular and white), 1.5 bunches of celery, a couple of pounds of potatoes, and zucchini. The peas came from the Greenmarket — I got them last spring and shucked and froze them. I drained most of the liquid from the pan after roasting the chickens to use in

the white sauce. Which also benefited from some duck and chicken stock cubes that were taking up too much room in the freezer. And butter. Lots and lots of butter.

Once the filling was mixed together, all that was left to do was make the biscuit topping. For full coverage, the pan required four times my standard biscuit recipe.

I’m never going to blow any minds with chicken pot pie, but that’s not what it’s about, is it?

Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?

At my CSA pickup on Saturday, I was psyched to see that not only were we getting six pounds of peaches, pears, and plums, but that the plums were just like the ones that grow in the Langhe, where I used to live in Italy. Called ramassin there and Italian prune plums here, they’re especially good for putting up or for turning into a pie with the last few peaches from the previous week’s CSA share.