07.31.08
Posted in Uncategorized, chinese, cooking, food, how to, ingredients, non-casein, non-dairy, original recipes at 1:23 pm by Hanne Blank
I did a sort of scary thing last week, namely, I improvised a Chinese dish using a rather non-Chinese primary vegetable, the beet. It turned out well, so today I reenacted it, made a few measurements, and took a few pictures so I could share it.
Now, I am a big fan of beets, and so is my Belovedary, so I figured that even if it didn’t taste very Chinese it would probably be edible, and pleasant to us. But I spent a little while thinking about it, and doing my best to think through the properties of beetroot from a Chinese culinary perspective, and here is what I decided:
To the qualities sweet, dense, fibrous, and resilient I decided it would be good to add fibrous, bright, and hot in the form of ginger, and slippery, smooth, and pungent in the form of onion. (It’s no accident that these are often paired with beets in non-Chinese cooking, too!) I chose pork for the meat because it was what we had, and pork is also the fallback meat of Chinese cooking so it made sense from that perspective as well. Pork also has an enthusiastic affinity for sweetness that some other meats (seafood and beef especially) can lack. To ground it and bring it all together, I chose brown bean sauce, which is made from the lees of the soybeans fermented to make soy sauce, thinned with Chiankiang vinegar, a dark brown/black rice-based vinegar with a taste a lot like the more familiar grape-based balsamic vinegar.
The lineup of ingredients. Left to right, bottles: chiankiang vinegar, brown bean sauce, rice wine, soy sauce. On cutting board, clockwise from upper left: beets, onion, pork, garlic clove, ginger root.
Wok-cooking beets posed a problem. Because beets are so dense and fibrous, they take a fair amount of cooking, more than most vegetables that are traditionally wok-cooked. But I needed to be able to stir-fry them, with a minimum of needing to leave the beets sitting around for long periods in the wok, and I really didn’t feel like pre-cooking (although blanching small pieces would certainly have been another option, it was one I did not want to take).
Chinese cooks usually solve these kinds of cooking time problems via the expedient of knifework, and so I did the same, and simply peeled and julienned the three beets.
For the ginger, I thought a little trompe l’oeil was in order. Beets stain everything, and since it was obvious from the get-go that everything coming out of my wok tonight was going to be red, I figured it would be an amusing thing to have the ginger be visually indistinguishable from the beets. So I julienned a five-ounce piece of fresh ginger, making sure the pieces were of roughly similar size to the beets. As is probably obvious, ginger, in my house, is sometimes a vegetable, not just an aromatic flavoring. Those with Ginger Fear, be advised.
I wanted to highlight the slippery, smooth, yielding texture of the onions as a contrast to the firmness of the beets. I peeled and halved them, then sliced them pole-to-poleways into slices that were thin but not paper-thin, the better to have the heat of the wok soften them quickly, but so they’d still retain some tooth.
The pork I sliced against the grain into thin slices and marinated in 1 Tablespoon Xiao Xing wine, 2 teaspoons soy sauce, and a crushed garlic clove (this, to the Chinese tastebuds, clarifies the taste of meats, and almost all meats are marinated before cooking in some mixture involving wine/liquor, soy, and either ginger or garlic).
Last, I stirred together two Tablespoons of brown bean sauce and the same amount of Chiankiang vinegar and set it aside.
As the last step before I started cooking, I made sure my mise en place was all ready to roll… and then I fired up the wok and stopped taking pictures, because you can’t stir-fry and hold a camera at the same time.
I stir-fried the beets and ginger together, on the principle that the hardest vegetables go into the wok first. When the beets were getting to the crisp-tender stage and didn’t taste raw any more (this took about 3-4 minutes of cooking, I would guess), I put in the onions and tossed them well. The onions gave off some liquid which helped steam the beets and ginger quickly, and about two or three minutes later I removed the vegetables to a dish and reheated the wok to cook the pork.
Cooking meat separately, then adding it back into cooked (or mostly-cooked) vegetables is another classic Chinese technique. It is usually only with shellfish that the meat is added to the stir-fry wok when the vegetables are still in it. This makes a lot of sense: meat and vegetables require different cooking times, and meat also releases a lot of water when it cooks. Both the difference in cooking time and the additional water can ruin vegetables, so it is quite useful to do them separately.
Many recipes call for pre-cooking the vegetables until they are almost, but not quite, to the point of doneness that is desired, then cooking the meat, then adding the vegetables to the meat when the meat is 95% cooked, briefly stirring the two together to heat everything up evenly and finish the cooking process, then tossing with whatever flavoring or sauce finishes the dish. This allows the meat juices to become part of the dish without adversely affecting the cooking or the condition of the vegetables.
This is what I did tonight, adding the beet mixture back in when the pork had all become opaque and whitish. Then I poured in the brown bean sauce that I had prepared earlier, tossed it to combine everything properly, and we were done. To finish the dish off, I tossed in a small handful of cilantro leaves. You could use very finely diced green onion, if you prefer. The point of these little last-minute additions, in Chinese cookery, is to add color, a little bit of textural contrast, and brightness of flavor.
It was very tasty. The ginger masquerading as beets is very successful, both surprising (hey, that’s not a beet!) and a good partner with the beets, the heat of the ginger making the beets more exciting and the sweet earthiness of the beets standing up just fine to that amount of ginger. The onions were voluptuous. The sauce was tangy and salty and savory.
A plus: it turns the rice in your bowl BRIGHT RED! Which is exciting, and in a Chinese context, meaningful, as red is the color of happiness and prosperity and success.
Ingredients for Ruby Pork with Three Roots
- 3 medium beets
- 1 largish onion
- about 5 ounces by weight fresh ginger root
- about 4 ounces boneless pork (I used pork loin because that’s what I had, use a lean cut)
- 1 clove garlic
- marinade for pork: 1 crushed garlic clove, 1 T Xiao Xing wine or sherry, 2 t soy sauce
- sauce for dish: 2 T brown bean sauce, 2 T Chiankiang vinegar
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07.21.08
Posted in american, cooking, desserts, food, fruit, how to, ingredients, kitchen learning, original recipes at 8:08 am by Hanne Blank
I can’t be the first person who has wondered why the “forbidden fruit” of the Garden of Eden has always been assumed to have been an apple. I mean, apples aren’t exactly native to the Fertile Crescent. But more to the point, I think that if one takes as writ that the no-no-berry was an apple, it may mean that one has never properly reveled in the seductive virtues of cherries. Not that apples aren’t wondrous things. They are (and believe you me you’ll hear about them plenty when apple season rolls around). But really good fresh cherries, well… they’re just a whole different mouthgasm.
It may be that I inherited my love of cherries from my maternal grandmother. She is, in fact, the reason I started canning cherries every summer. She loves cherries, and especially sour or “pie” cherries, enormously, and eats them with huge enthusiasm in virtually any form: fresh, frozen, dried, canned, in syrup, as jam, as ice cream, whatever she can get her paws on. When she was younger and I was quite a bit younger still, she always seemed to have home-canned cherries on hand because she put some up every summer during the brief window when they were at their best. But by and by we both got older, and she eventually stopped canning as her house got emptier and her kids’ and grandkids’ lives got busier, and, I suspect, as she got to feeling less willing and able to haul around big pots of bubbling fruit and spend hours ministering to huge steaming cauldrons, glass jars, and a thousand and one jar lids.
Knowing how much she loved cherries, my mother and I would always try to remember to take her a big jar of Greek cherry preserves when we visited her — the Greeks use tart enough cherries, and not too much sugar, the way my grandmother prefers her cherries. But really, boughten is never quite the same as home-canned, and you can’t get the people at the factory to tailor the amount of sugar in the syrup to be precisely the way you like it. So I took it upon myself to become my grandmother’s canned pie cherry connection. Every summer but one since then, a year when the cherry harvest was very poor due to drought, I have canned cherries and given about half of what I can to her.
A few years ago, she acknowledged my cherry-canning role in her life by giving me her old, well-used cherry pitter, a 1950s-era piece of German engineering that does an admirable if not completely comprehensive job of knocking the stones out of pound upon pound of cherries. It’s a lot quicker than stoning them with a hairpin, which is what I do when I’m pitting only a pie’s worth of cherries, and having a pitter saves me untold repetitive stress injury when I’m stoning more than the five cups required for a pie. As it did this weekend, when my Belovedary and I went out to Larriland Farm, our favorite of the regional you-pick farms, and picked close to 35 pounds of pie cherries for the annual cherry jubilee.
This, I should note, is not even the whole of it. This plastic container will house an entire bundt cake with room to spare, but it’ll only hold about 25 pounds of pitted cherries and their juice. We had to put the rest in a separate container.
The first thing I did with my cherries, however, was not to can them. Instead I heeded nature’s call and made a pie.
It was very very hot and humid, near a hundred degrees, and so of course my pie crust refused categorically to behave despite having been chilled in the refrigerator for a bit. It kept going to pieces the instant I tried to move it to put it in the pan, so I decided to fall back to the eternal piemaker’s default position: slapping the broken pieces of rolled out crust into the pan as it was possible, pressing the overlapping edges together so it wouldn’t leak too much, and generally doing a yeomanly job of working with what you have to work with. I have had to learn to call the results of such pie crust shenanigans “rustic,” you see, for despite the inherent untruth in claiming that any farmwife worth her salt wouldn’t laugh her nipples off at the idea that she’d ever lower herself to serving (let alone photographing and putting on the internet!) a pie whose crust looked like it had had an interaction with the business end of an outboard motor, lots of people seem to have been decieved into thinking that “rustic” necessarily means that things are a bit unfinished, rough around the edges, or downright ragged, and furthermore that this represents an added bonus of “authenticity” and “realness.” I have in point of fact been in bakeries where a “rustic” apple galette cost twice what the presumably urban apple pie did, despite the fact that they were basically the same damn dessert and the “rustic” version took less skill and expertise to create, what with not having to trim or crimp the piecrust and all.
I have, as may be obvious, some issues with this. On the other hand it lets me smile when I serve a pie that is rather less pretty than I would ideally prefer, and have my guests ooh and ah over it, so I suck it up and claim rusticity.
If you would also like to claim rusticity — although honest, it usually doesn’t behave so badly, and won’t if your kitchen is cooler and less humid than mine was — my basic recipe for a slightly sweet double-crust pie crust (for a 9 or 10 inch pie plate), which I use for fruit pies where the fruit is slightly tart, is as follows:
Sweet Pie Crust (double crust for 9-10 inch pie)
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
4 Tablespoons sugar
10 Tablespoons butter or vegan margarine (I like Earth Balance, do not use tub margarines, though, as they have too high a liquid content), diced and very cold
10 Tablespoons solid vegetable shortening (e.g. Crisco), diced and very cold
5 Tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons ice water
Stir the dry ingredients together. Cut in the two fats with two knives (if you are seriously old-school, which I am not), or a pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal. Add the water a tablespoon at a time, incorporating it with a fork and using a folding motion. Since the water content of flour varies, it may come together before you have added all the water. When it comes together, keep working the dough with your fork to incorporate as much of the rest of the dryish mixture as you can that way without using your hands (the heat from your hands liquifies the butter, which impairs the texture). Only if you absolutely have to should you use your hands to press/knead in the remaining bits of fat/flour mixture.
Cut it in slightly uneven halves (one “half” should be a little bigger than the other), shape into discs about 5 inches diameter, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 20 minutes or so to let the dough hydrate evenly and to re-chill the butter. When you go to roll it out, the bigger half is for the bottom crust and the smaller is for the top crust. If you have left it in the fridge for more than about a half an hour you will need to let it warm up for 5-10 minutes before you roll it or it will just crumble and you will be sad.
Of course, now that you’ve got the crust made, you might as well fill the pie, right? Fortunately fresh fruit fillings go together quickly, assuming you’ve already prepped the fruit. Since we’d already done our pitting, making the filling was (if you’ll pardon my saying this) easy as pie. There are plenty of ways to make cherry pie filling, but this is mine, a slight variation on my grandmother’s version.
Filling for Cherry Pie
5 slightly heaped cups fresh pitted tart cherries, juice drained off
1 cup sugar
5 Tablespoons Minute Tapioca
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
1/4 teaspoon (or so) nutmeg, freshly ground preferred
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Toss fruit with sugar, tapioca, and flavorings/spices. Let stand about 10 minutes before filling pie crust. Stir again to thoroughly distribute sugar etc. before filling the pie crust.
Note: if you do not have Minute Tapioca, but do have regular pearl tapioca, just put 6 T of pearls in your blender jar or (clean!) coffee grinder and whiz until it is mostly powder with only a small percentage of tiny pieces. That’s all Minute Tapioca is anyway, really, is tinier pieces of regular tapioca.
I know that some people like to thicken their pies with flour or cornstarch, but I have never found them as reliable or as clear-tasting as tapioca. Do be aware that tapioca thickens, in part, as it cools, so pies will still bubble over sometimes, and will also still be runnier/juicier when they are warm than when they are cool. If you like a firmer pie filling, then by all means wait until the pie is completely cool.
Because we’d also gotten blueberries at the farm, and I was heating up the oven for cherry pie anyway, I decided also to make a blueberry pie. It was a little rustic, too.
My blueberry pie filling is slightly different to my cherry pie filling.
Filling for Blueberry Pie
6 cups fresh blueberries, washed, cleaned, and dried
1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar, depending on sweetness of the blueberries
5 Tablespoons MInute Tapioca
1 teaspoon ground dried lemon peel or the zest of 1/2 fresh lemon, minced fine
1 teapoon ground cinnamon
juice of 1/2 fresh lemon, strained
Toss berries with sugar, tapioca, and spices/zest. Add lemon juice and toss again. Pour directly into pie crust (does not need to stand).
These pies, with tall glasses of iced tea, served as a truly decadent lunch for us and for our friends who came over in the afternoon to share in some canning. They’d made a sour cherry compote that they wanted to put up, and we, of course, had a fairly large quantity of cherries to process. (And for anyone clucking their tongues at the thought of people eating pie for lunch, I’m just sorry for you that you’ve evidently never had the chance to eat fresh warm homemade fresh fruit pie as a meal, because if you had, you wouldn’t be making that face. Which you should probably stop doing before it freezes that way and you have to go through the entire rest of your life looking like someone just took a shit on your carpet. I’m just sayin’.)
And so we did. The large jars are quarts, the small jars with the white caps are twelve-ounce jars, and the small jars with the gold caps are pint jars. My grandmother gets all the small jars of cherries. The darker jars at the right end of the counter are the cherry compote jars. Plus there were almost three quarts of cherry juice left over, but I didn’t bother canning that, just poured it into refrigerator jars… and into me, and my Belovedary, and our guests, over ice.
Come February or so, when I am going a little insane because there just isn’t any fresh fruit in the market worth eating that hasn’t been shipped 10,000 miles (and I’m sorry but I just have problems eating supposedly “fresh” food that is better-traveled than I am), I will be able to head down to the cellar and come up with a couple of jars of cherries and, if I so choose, make myself a pie in the middle of the winter. Or possibly I will do exactly the same thing that my grandmother does with the jars I give to her, and just sit down, pop off the lid, and eat them with a spoon.
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07.17.08
Posted in allergy, cooking, food, food allergies, health, ingredients, non-casein, non-dairy at 4:54 pm by Hanne Blank
A handful of years ago now, I realized that something was amiss with my gastrointestinal tract. Namely, it had stopped being willing to deal with dairy products. I assumed that the commonplace thing had happened and that I had somehow managed, despite a lifelong adoration of all things cheesey and ice-creamy, to become intolerant of lactose, the sugar found in milk.
Realizing that preaching tolerance is about as effective in regard to one’s internal organs as it is in regard to Klansmen, I stocked up on lactase enzyme tablets. Surely they would allow me to resume my regularly scheduled program of manchego, St. Marcellin, Maytag blue, mozzarella di bufala, halloumi, and all their friends and relatives. Alas, this was not to be. I tried, I really did. I tried hard. Even in light of ample, even vomitous evidence that the damn lactase tablets weren’t doing a damned thing, I kept trying, so loath was I to lose my ability to enjoy all the milk products I had always loved.
For about a year, I experimented as much as I could stand to with continuing to eat dairy products. It was, in hindsight, pretty miserable. But I did it for two reasons. First, I was trying to figure out what it was to which I was reacting, which was pretty clearly not lactose, since I had the same reactions when eating low-lactose dairy foods like aged cheeses as I did when eating high-lactose ones like custard, and in either case the lactase enzyme pills didn’t help. Second, I was culinarily desperate. Dairy products occupy such a whopping niche in Western cookery, from the handful of grated parmesan sprinkled over pasta or the few tablespoons of milk used to get proper consistency in a buttercream frosting all the way to the yogurts, sauces, puddings, custards, quiches, and grilled cheese sandwiches which, without dairy, simply would not exist. I wanted not to be allergic to dairy because I liked to eat it, sure. But I also wanted not to be allergic to dairy because frankly, from the perspective of negotiating the kinds of dishes that form the center of most people’s (and most restaurants’!) culinary repertoires, not being able to use dairy products was a little bit like being asked to hang wallpaper with one hand tied behind your back.
I had had some experience with non-dairy cooking, as it happened. During my vegetarian years, I spent a portion of that time either partially or wholly vegan, mostly out of a misbegotten assumption that veganism would make me ascetically thin. (This theory, I must note, was straight out of a diet book my parents had when I was growing up, the rather whackadoo Did You Ever See A Fat Squirrel? by one Ruth Adams. It had yet to dawn on me that unless they’re fried in animal fat, French fries are completely vegan, ditto every fruit pie known to womankind if the crust is made with vegetable shortening rather than butter… etc. It had also yet to dawn on me that not only had I seen no shortage of fat squirrels, especially ’round about Octoberish, but that there was actually no very good reason that a whole foods diet would necessarily make anyone thinner in any case. But I digress.) I was not precisely terrified of the prospect of dairy-free cooking, since I knew full well I could do it and enjoy it, but I was afraid of losing so many options.
In particular I was afraid that if I couldn’t eat any dairy products at all, I would be virtually unable to eat in restaurants, or eat any prepared foods. Dairy products are used in a lot of foods where you wouldn’t expect to find them, after all, or where they haven’t got a starring role and so one doesn’t always think to recall that they’re there: the butter used in the pan to saute the mushrooms for an omelette, for instance, or the whey protein used to improve the texture of a sausage, or the tiny quantity of grated cheese in an Italian-style vinaigrette salad dressing. If I were truly allergic to all dairy, I’d have to at the very least be suspicious of virtually every prepared food that crossed my path, read labels obsessively, and eschew lots of things I would otherwise enjoy.
As it turns out, that’s what I have to do. As my intrepid experimentation, done at the cost of not a few days and nights spent deepening my appreciation of that modern miracle known as the flush toilet, ultimately proved out, the allergy that I had developed was not to lactose at all, but to casein, the protein found in milk. Furthermore, it rapidly became apparent that not only was I allergic to the form of the casein molecule found in cow’s milk, but also, if somewhat less so, to its analogues in sheep’s milk and goat’s milk and, hélas! even water buffalo’s milk. Even a small quantity of the stuff introduced to my system impels my body to propel it right back out again posthaste via whatever portal seems quickest.
Addio, mozzarella di bufala! Khairete, halloumi! Adiós, manchego! Auf wiedersehen, Emmenthaler! Hang loose, Ben & Jerry! Ou sont les fromages d’antan?
Interestingly, this doesn’t mean that all dairy products are out of the picture for me. Just almost all of them. Clarified butter, also known to the world of Indian cooking as ghee, doesn’t bother me because it has had its milk solids (proteins) removed. Butterfat on its own poses me no problem. Similarly, I can tolerate small quantities of heavy cream or high-quality butter, as long as I don’t try to eat too much or too often. They’re mostly butterfat, with very little protein, so it’s something I can negotiate within certain parameters.
But that’s it. For about four years now, that’s been the extent of my dairy-eating capability. For those of you who eat dairy, think about this seriously: it changes your entire cooking and eating life.
No dairy means, among other things, no pizza, unless you make a cheeseless one yourself, or are lucky enough to find a pizzeria that offers vegan “cheese,” which by the way does not so much melt as simply give up hope, and which in any event is impossible to confuse with actual cheese. It means virtually never being able to order so much as a salad in a restaurant without interrogating your server as to the presence or absence of cheesey comestibles hiding amongst the verdure, and rarely having restaurant salad dressing options beyond oil and vinegar because there are too many “vinaigrettes” that hide a stealthy payload of cheese. You can’t even order a hamburger without worry, because while the burger itself may not be problematic, you never know whether the bun it’s served on contains some form of the Evil Cowjuice (and many do). You give up most Italian food unless you cook it at home, and all Italian restaurants. Ditto for Indian (all that yogurt and paneer). And French (butter, cream, cream, cream, cream, and cheese). And Eastern European or Russian (cheese and sour cream). And Tex-Mex (see above). And Mexican (again). And even good old-fashioned American diners are off the list, because good old-fashioned American food is pretty much a juggernaut of dairy products from start to finish. With care and a sympathetic server, admittedly, you can work around the menus in many places, but your risks of poisoning by stealth dairy are still high. The allure of east Asian restaurants becomes magnified out of all proportion, simply because when you are eating in a cuisine that has no tradition of using dairy products, you can order a meal — anything you want! off the whole entire menu! unthinkable! — without having to wonder whether you’re going to spend all night breaking the land speed record for the 20-yard dash to the loo.
And that’s not all. Luncheon meats and sausages must be carefully label-checked if you cannot consult directly with the person(s) who made them, since whey protein and sodium or calcium caseinate are both popular additives to these products, so forget about ordering that deli sandwich even if you’re sure the bread won’t bite back. While you’re at the deli, you can also forget about ordering any of those salads with the creamy mayonnaisey dressings, since in some cases they also toss in a bit of sour cream. Commercial bakeries are generally no longer places you can patronize, either, although I have discovered that some of the really old-school working class bakeries are reasonably safe because they can’t afford to use butter and so use the cheaper vegetable shortening. Kosher pareve bakeries are an even better bet, since kosher law mandates that pareve foods contain neither meat nor dairy.
While we’re at it, bear in mind that you can now forget about sharing the goodies your co-workers bring in to the office at the holidays, or enjoying a piece of cake at your niece’s birthday party (even without the ice cream it is likely to contain milk and/or butter), or noshing on wine and cheese… or even chips and dip for the most part… at a party. To make socializing even more awkward, every dinner party invitation you accept must now be accepted with an accompanying demand on your host or hostess that the meal be prepared not according to the whims of the cook, but to the dictates of your despotic digestive system. You should also bear in mind that not everyone will believe you that you’re really allergic to what you say you’re allergic to, and that some self-anointed experts will, in addition to supplying you with a more than ample supply of dubious advice about how their sister’s brother-in-law’s wife’s manicurist’s daughter’s pediatrician said such-and-so would cure food sensitivities “and she did it and it worked just like that,” also encourage, nay, insist, that you “just have a little bit” because clearly, this “food allergy” of yours is something you have invented in order to be a Delicate And Unique Snowflake™ and is not a real condition at all.
But I digress.
The point is, it is difficult not to be able to eat things that the vast majority of people in your culture can happily eat. Not impossible, surely, but difficult. Which means that learning how to adapt my cooking and eating to my inability to eat dairy products has been a highly educational process. (It also accounts, in part, for my enthusiasm for Chinese cookery.)
In future weeks, I’m planning to talk more about this here, and to share some of the better recipes that I have come up with for dairy-free foods that fill niches I once thought unfillable without the use of some kind of dairy product: a creamy salad dressing, a pasta dish with a richly creamy sauce, a “buttermilk” dark chocolate cake, even a popcorn topping that tastes (no lie) like it has Parmesan cheese in it, and so on. These aren’t necessarily vegan recipes (some use eggs, meat broths, etc.) but they can all be made vegan if needed or desired. What they are, not to put too fine a point on it, are recipes that help people like me who are passionate cooks and enthusiastic diners cope with a humdinger of a dietary limitation.
They are also delicious.
And maybe, just maybe, they’ll help some other folks out there who, like me, have found that they can no longer eat dairy foods. Or the host/esses who suddenly find themselves confronted with needing to cook for us.
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07.16.08
Posted in Uncategorized, cooking, desserts, food, mediterranean, middle eastern at 9:07 am by Hanne Blank
The only thing I have ever found wanting about baklava is the fact that typically, a serving of baklava is one tiny honeyed diamond, which is frankly just not enough baklava. I adore baklava. It is an utterly magical food, capable of reversing not only my normal aversion to things that are sticky but also my low frustration threshold with foods that too easily self-destruct into their component parts. It is flaky and crispy and dense and chewy and nutty and sweet and flowery all at the same time, which makes baklava kind of like the Leatherman multitool of desserts.
Baklava is traditionally served in tiny pieces alongside coffee or tea, which makes perfect sense since it is so intensely sweet and makes such a fine complement to the astringency and bitterness of coffee or the tannins of tea. One should not, it is implied, actually need more than a tiny bit of baklava in order to be satisfied. Sometimes this is even true.
But sometimes it is not. Particularly if you are a passionate baklava eater. Which I most definitely am. But how to come by sufficient baklava, and particularly sufficient really good and worthwhile baklava, to have the chance, at least once in a while, to eat as much of it as pleased me? The options seemed limited: find an apartment near a good Mediterranean bakery, marry a Persian pastry chef, or learn how to make it myself.
I chose option #3.
Learning to make baklava was a bit of a revelation. The thing about baklava is that it’s actually really easy to make, assuming you have access to prepared phyllo dough sheets. These are now pretty readily available in supermarket freezer cases, so much so that I have been able to find them even in places like Moses Lake, Washington, and Chester, Vermont. The rest is just mechanical: making a syrup, preparing the filling, perhaps melting some butter, and layering a hell of a lot of very thin sheets of dough, each painted with butter or oil. It is, from the standpoint of the actual technique required, easier than most other desserts.
There is, of course, some art to it, not just a tolerance for the repetitive motion of layering, painting, and filling. (Which tolerance, I grant you, has to be pretty substantial, because you spend about an hour on those tasks for a single 9×13 pan of baklava.) The art, by which I mean making and spicing the syrup and filling, learning to space the layers of filling evenly through the pastry, and, most difficult of all, learning how to score and slice baklava without inducing a hull breach, takes some time and some trial and error to master.
The art is also where regionalism and ethnic tradition express themselves. Persian baklavas tend to be filled with pistachio and spiced with Silk Road flair, cardamom and cinnamon and clove, orange flower water, scented honeys. Azerbaijani baklavas, on the other hand, often feature both almond and pistachio, sometimes in distinct layers, and a saffron-laced syrup. Turkish baklavas are often made with almonds only, and lots of lemon and cinnamon. Greek baklavas are commonly made with walnuts, lemon juice, cinnamon, and rosewater.
For my recent housewarming, whose menu was on a pan-Mediterranean theme, I made two baklavas. The first I made in a classic Persian mode, with a syrup of honey and sugar spiced with cardamom and clove and finished with orange flower water, and a pistachio filling with cinnamon and cardamom. It turned out beautifully.
For the second one, though, I decided to branch out. I asked my houseguests, who had come in early for the housewarming, what kind I should make. Greek? Azeri? Turkish? Opinions were divided. Then it dawned on me that I didn’t necessarily have to stick to the known. What about pecans? I had a sufficient quantity in the pantry. But pecans are a very American nut. It didn’t seem quite right to force them into the role of walnuts in a Greek-style baklava, although I imagine I could’ve done so and it would’ve tasted fine.
I rummaged through the pantry, the freezer, the fridge. And suddenly it came to me: why not an American baklava? I had a can of frozen concentrated apple juice in the freezer, and a quart of Grade B maple syrup in the cupboard. I had lemons and cinnamon and nutmeg and cloves and Jamaican allspice and mace. I had brown sugar to add to the chopped pecans. I had butter and phyllo.
Shortly thereafter, I had a pan of fresh, deliciously fragrant American Baklava. Just out of the oven, it smelled like the apotheosis of apple pie. Served up, it was delicious, if wetter than I had hoped — I tried to compensate for the high water content of my syrup (1 part apple juice concentrate to 2 parts maple syrup) by cooking the syrup down some, but it proved not to be enough — and most importantly, my houseguests raved about it. In the mouth, it both was and wasn’t what you would immediately recognize as baklava: the textures all said baklava, but the flavors said something else… not quite apple pie, not quite pecan pie, not quite maple sugar candy. But it was definitely delicious.
I plan to tinker with the recipe some, although probably not until September when it cools down some, as running the oven during high summer in Maryland is not my favorite thing to do. Once I get the syrup problem nailed (I think the answer may be to use dry maple sugar), I will be posting the recipe here, in the hopes that a few of you will be willing to serve as recipe testers.
I don’t expect American Baklava to enter the pantheon of Great Baklavas of the World, but it is tasty and impressive as any baklava, and intriguingly different as well, and perhaps it will even appeal to some of those for whom the flavors of flower waters and honey are offputting barriers to enjoying more traditional sorts. A girl can dream.
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07.15.08
Posted in cooking, food, how to, ingredients at 7:51 am by Hanne Blank
Friends, there is a lot of crappy hummus out there in the world.
You have your Hippie Hummus, which is the consistency of indifferently mashed and lumpy potatoes, is usually dreadfully underseasoned and entirely unsalted, and in its bland muckiness also manages, by dint of the grit introduced by undercooking and lack of skinning the chickpeas, to be a character-building exercise. One feels as if one must be accruing merit for the World To Come, at least nutritionally speaking, because normally only things that are very very good for you and eaten only for that reason are so entirely unpleasant to eat.
You also have what I refer to as your Protestant Supermarket Hummus, which, ever since hummus became trendy enough to be sold in grocery stores and subsequently a cheap appetizer and party-food staple, generally tastes reminiscent of wheatpaste mixed with spackle, finished with a zesty flourish of fake lemon juice made from recycled batteries, with a (ma)lingering mouthfeel that is partly greasy and partly fibrous. If it makes you feel like a dog with a mouthful of peanut butter, it is Protestant Supermarket Hummus. (Yes, yes, I’m sure your personal supermarket has hummus that is utmost ambrosia. Mine never have. Not even the expensive ones.)
Protestant Supermarket Hummus also has its own archipelago of outliers, almost all of them also unpleasant. This unfortunate constellation may be best characterized as Hummus Fusion Surprise! Not unlike Protestant Supermarket Bagels, Protestant Supermarket Hummus, once taken over by massive factory production and aggressive marketing and the need to drive ever-bigger amounts of prepared foods-company profits, has been diversified — often quite dubiously — in directions that would be unrecognizable to native members of the culture in which the food in question originates. Chipotle-scallion hummus is to hummus bi tahini, in other words, as the squishy-soft, green-dyed St. Patrick’s Day bagel is to the proud, shiny, robustly-crusted bread rings on which the babes of the Ashkenazim have for centuries cut their milkteeth.
Once in a while you will also encounter Subtraction Hummus, which subtracts the ingredients that God clearly intended for hummus to have, namely tahini and olive oil, in favor of making the hummus “low fat”. Instead, dubious substitutions are made, such as adding broth instead of tahini, and permitting only a miserly dribble of oil. This is flat out wrong for two reasons. First, it is entirely contrary to the whole point of hummus, which is to fill you up with cheap, easily digested, tasty complex carbohydrates and delicious nutritious plant oils, or, to put it another way, tahini and olive oil are things God clearly intended that hummus should have because any God I am willing to recognize doesn’t like it when poor people who have little other than chickpeas to eat end up starving to death for lack of calories and dietary fat, dammit. Secondly, Subtraction Hummus is wrong because low-fat hummus, while it has potential industrial uses as a mildly abrasive polishing compound, is not something you really want in your actual mouth.
Some will also have encountered Sadistic Hummus. This hummus, while made with reasonable quantities of both oil and tahini is nevertheless painful or even impossible to consume due to the quantity of extremely acrid (perhaps sprouting, or just rancid) garlic that is added to it. This sub-par, sinus-scarifying, chrome-blistering garlic is present in Sadistic Hummus in quantities measured in the international unit of measure known as the “metric shitload.” The effect is such that merely opening the lid of the bowl in which Sadistic Hummus has been stored constitutes chemical warfare. I like garlic as much as the next girl, and possibly quite a bit more, given how much of the stuff (I peel a pint container of cloves every couple of weeks for convenience) I go through in the average fortnight, and I still say that garlic should be about love, not about getting hurt, and when the garlic makes you cry it is time to reconsider your relationship. Trust me, hummus eating in its native habitat is not something one does to prove one’s masculinity, and adding more garlic than should be allowed by international treaty does not, in fact, make it “authentic.” Only inedible.
Every once in a while, though, you are fortunate enough to encounter decent hummus. Really good hummus is, at the very least, smooth, unctuous without being overwhelming, and savory without losing its satisfying creamy starchiness. As a puree, it should be just at the edge of being liquid: one should not, unless it is fresh out of the refrigerator, be able to consider serving it with an ice-cream scoop. Nor should it hold that shape as it comes to room temperature even if you did, as both olive oil and tahini are liquids at room temperature, and thus any good hummus will revert to its delightfully, reassuringly creamy paste texture when it comes to the temperature at which it should be served. It will have a handshake acquaintance with good, fresh, sweet hardneck garlic, but the garlic should never have been allowed to manhandle the mixture. There will be enough fresh, fruity, floral lemon juice that the lemon flavor flirts with you. And of course there will be the nuttiness of sesame, from the tahini, and the peppery fruitiness of good olive oil, and a bit of salt to tie everything to the dependable ground of the chickpeas.
That is Decent Hummus.
Beyond and above decent hummus, there is Virtuous Hummus. Virtuous Hummus is all of the above, only silkier and subtler and even better. Decent Hummus will get eaten at parties, to some extent, but you will end up taking about half of it home. Virtuous Hummus will be rapaciously devoured, and if there are leftovers, they’ll be minimal. When people eat Decent Hummus they go “oh, yum, hummus,” and spoon some more onto their plates with a pleasantly anticipatory smile. When people eat Virtuous Hummus, they go into raptures while simultaneously scooping it directly into their mouths: “Oh my God this is so good” mumbled blissfully around a mouthful.
It is thus entirely defensible and reasonable to want to attain not only Decent but actually Virtuous Hummus. Fortunately it is also not too difficult. But as is often the case with such deceptively simple recipes as hummus, Virtuous Hummus is not so much something for which there is a recipe as something for which there is a general procedure and a handful of secrets, and after you have learned those, you simply have to experiment until your hummus makes that subtle, yet incandescent leap from decency to virtue.
The procedure: Hummus is not rocket science. It is a puree of cooked chickpeas, tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, some chickpea cooking water, and salt. A food processor is key, unless you have arms of cold rolled steel, the patience of a bodhisattva, and a big mortar and pestle, which you probably don’t. You can get the basics from any crap recipe for hummus: puree the chickpeas with liberal quantities of tahini, oil, and lemon juice, then add a judiciously small amount of garlic, some salt, and a little of the chickpea cooking water (or the liquid from canned chickpeas if you use them for convenience). Plop it on a plate, drizzle it with a little more olive oil, grab your pita bread or your crudites, and dig in.
This, of course, tells you pretty much nothing. Proportions are important, as you may guess. My usual cooking method being “throw things into the pot until it looks right, then taste it, and if it isn’t right, throw more things into the pot until it is right,” I cannot give you exact quantities. Nonetheless, the approximate proportions, to a drained 15-ounce tin of cooked chickpeas (I like the Goya brand, they are very good and always well cooked), are a third to a half-cup of tahini (depending on its thickness and oiliness) and an approximately equal volume of oil, the juice of one large very juicy lemon or two smaller stingier ones, and a single large (or two small) clove of raw garlic mashed to a paste with a quantity of kosher salt about the same volume as the garlic clove. You may need to add a little of the cooking water depending on the degree to which the chickpeas were cooked, the thickness of the tahini, or indeed just personal taste regarding texture, and if you add it a tablespoon at a time and puree it in thoroughly before you add more, you shouldn’t go too far wrong.
You want, naturally, the best tahini you can lay hands on. If it tastes bitter, even slightly, don’t use it: tahini goes rancid with appalling enthusiasm when it goes. Likewise avoid anything that is produced by use of chemical solvents. You want machine ground or milled tahini, something that should be indicated on the label, and it should have a nutty, slightly sweet, flavor reminiscent of other nut or seed butters. My favorite brand currently is the Turkish Yörük brand tahini, which is dependably fine in both taste and texture.
You also want a good olive oil, assertive but not one of those crazy expensive private reserve sorts of olive oils that is really intended for a starring role on bread or pasta where you can taste it all by itself. Use whatever you find tasty, but make sure it’s fresh.
Similarly, your garlic and your lemons need to be of good quality. If your lemon juice comes out of a bottle, it is neither Decent nor Virtuous and should be discarded as the impostor that it is. This is doubly true if it comes out of a fruit of the genus Squeezyfruitus improbabilus, var. plasticus. Also, please be aware that friends don’t let friends use pre-minced or pre-crushed garlic that comes in jars. It tastes of sulphur and hopelessness and has had all its vivacity surgically removed. Seriously, it is just not that much work to peel and chop one or two cloves of garlic before you toss it in the food processor. And although I would hope I wouldn’t need to say this, I am going to say it anyhow: no, garlic powder is notan appropriate substitute in this instance.
So that’s the procedure and some advice on ingredients. Which leaves us with the secrets.
Perhaps the most important hummus secret I know, as once imparted to me by the octogenarian Lebanese grandmother of a friend, is first to skin your chickpeas. “Only sluts,” she informed me seriously, “make hummus without skinning their chickpeas.” I was skeptical at first, but having had ample opportunity to compare slutty hummus and what I suppose is chaste and morally upright hummus, I concur that it makes a big difference.
Skinning can only be done with cooked chickpeas. If you cook your own chickpeas, cooking them until some of the skins start so slough off and float to the top of the pot on their own helps let you know that the chickpeas are getting cooked well enough for skinning them to be possible. Ignore the nobly-meant but pig-ignorant advice of some cookbooks which will tell you to skin your chickpeas by putting them in a big bowl, filling the bowl with water, and rubbing your hands through the chickpeas until the skins all float off. You’ll be at it all day and there will still be a lot of chickpeas sitting in their jackets laughing at you. Alas, the truth is that chickpeas must be skinned one by one, by gently pinching them so that the pea itself slips out of its jacket. This is a bit tedious but oh well, that’s life for you, so get a friend to help you, or else put on a movie or an audiobook and make the best of it. (I note for the record that this is the reason that I always make large batches of hummus. If I am going to go to all that trouble I may as well not have to go to all that trouble again anytime too soon.)
The benefit of skinning the chickpeas is that it vastly improves the texture, and some people believe the taste as well. With the skins gone, there are no little gritty-feeling bits of that fibrous outer hull to impede the satiny smoothness of your hummus. You can get an idea of the difference by simply eating two cooked chickpeas one after another, one skinned, and one not, and paying attention to the textures in your mouth.
This leads us to our second secret, also in pursuit of smoothness and texture, and that is to keep pureeing the mixture even after it appears to the eye to be thoroughly pureed. As anyone who has ever made a bisque without aid of a chinois can tell you, the tongue can easily detect tiny solid particles in substances that seem, visually speaking, to be a completely smooth mixture. The result of an insufficiently pureed hummus is a lumpy or gritty texture in the mouth, and sometimes also chalkiness resulting from little chunks of chickpea or little garlic landmines due to similarly insufficiently small bits thereof. I typically puree the hummus until it is visually “done,” then puree it for another three minutes or so, and then taste-test it to make sure that it is smooth enough.
Related to this is the third secret: looser is better than thicker. Hummus that is too thick won’t puree properly in a food processor because it can’t move around easily. It won’t be drawn down to the blades by the vortex created by the turning blades, which means that only the hummus that starts out near the blades is likely to get adequate processing. Remember that at room temperature, hummus should be approximately the consistency of cake frosting, soft and yielding but capable of forming peaks and valleys if you drag the back of a spoon over the top of it. But also remember that in pursuing the optimal texture, tahini and olive oil pack more flavor and texture than the cooking water from the chickpeas can. I generally prefer to correct the texture of hummus by adding more tahini or olive oil first, then tasting it, and only if I think I may be about to err on the side of imbalanced flavor or undue oiliness do I thin with cooking water.
Secret Four is, likewise, a texture secret, but it is one that is also a taste secret: hummus should be served either at room temperature or slightly warmed. Both olive oil and tahini, when refrigerated, turn into solids. Aggressive refrigeration, and a reluctance to let such a “convenience food” come up to room temperature when all one wanted was a quick dip into the hummus tub for a snack, is one of the reasons that Protestant Supermarket Hummus is often so terrible, tasting of so little and having such an unpleasantly mealy texture. There are — and as much as I disdain most non-homemade hummus at this point, I have to confess this — some Protestant Supermarket Hummuses that aren’t all bad (Trader Joe’s makes one that I actually enjoy) as long as you let them warm up first.
This is crucial for any hummus, really, and the reasons are simple: fat carries flavor, and solid fats are less appealing than liquid or semi-liquid ones. Heat makes most flavor compounds more available to us as tasters, as well, which is why cold soups, ice creams, and the like must be more aggressively sweetened, salted, or spiced to taste like they are as intensely flavored as hot or even merely room-temperature versions. There is, in other words, a reason we don’t eat raw bacon, yet delight in smearing our toast in the bacon grease left on our breakfast plates, why that bit of fat at the rim of your steak tastes fantastic when it’s hot from the grill but tastes flatly awful the next day when it’s just been taken out of the fridge as leftovers, and why cold gravy is so miserably unfulfilling.
Secret Five is perhaps the most important one of all: let hummus be the simple food it is. Made well, hummus is so satisfying and nourishing, comforting and at the same time complex enough that it feels like real food and not just pap. It is suave and tasty enough, in its natural state, to be part of an elegant meal or to impress party guests. You simply do not need to gild the gold, nor paint the proverbial lily. If you must get fancy with your hummus, the traditional tarting-up methods are best: a slosh of olive oil, a sprinkling of sweet powdered paprika or fresh chopped parsley, or perhaps a scattering of hot just-toasted pine nuts. Leave the crazy mix-ins to the ice cream people and the wasabi-kumquat-garam masala fusion crap to those with fewer functioning taste buds and less in the way of common sense. Virtuous Hummus, or even merely Decent Hummus, is just fine on its own, and that, as they say, is virtue indeed.
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