10.01.08
Posted in Books & Publishing, arrrrgh, cookbooks, desserts, food, how to, non-dairy, reviews, vegan at 8:11 am by Hanne Blank
I’ve got nothing against Jeff Rogers, author of Vice Cream: Over 70 Sinfully Delicious Dairy-Free Delights, although it does bear saying that his self-chosen sobriquet, “The Naughty Vegan!” is, in a word, twee.
Nor do I have anything against the idea behind his book, namely, that people who do not wish to consume animal dairy products, for whatever reason, might nevertheless enjoy a frozen dessert that wasn’t an ice or a sorbet. In fact, I heartily agree.
But I do have a number of problems with this recipe book.
First off, there’s the title. I will skip, for the moment, a discussion of why I find the invoking of terms like “vice” and “sin” in relation to food to be problematic and merely point out that if one is so devoted to clean living that one is capable of considering vegan desserts made (as instructed!) with all-organic ingredients and nary a speck of refined sugars to be “sinful,” one is perhaps living an overly-virtuous life.
Second is the fact that there are, in essence, only two recipes. All the “over 70″ variations are nothing more than ringing the changes on the two methods. Further, the two methods themselves differ only the slightest bit, in that the “raw” recipes use dates as sweetener instead of the “cooked” maple syrup called for in all the others. It is only out of courtesy that I can bring myself to say they are even two methods, rather than a more accurate one-and-a-half. Whether you find it admirable or infuriating that someone managed to parlay a recipe and a half — and not even a particularly challenging or difficult-to-derive recipe-and-a-half at that — into a book deal is entirely a matter of perspective, and heaven knows mine has oscillated to and fro all evening.
Nevertheless, the recipes are there, and therein lies the third problem: whoever edited this book should be keelhauled. I got the strong impression, reading it, that whoever was assigned to edit the book over at Celestial Arts (an imprint of Ten Speed Press) back in 2003 or so had never been inside a kitchen in his or her life, and had certainly not bothered to test any of the recipes.
Interestingly, the poor editing doesn’t show much on first browse. The copy is clean and the recipes are presented clearly. But when you begin to read with the intent of actually preparing (I’d say “cooking,” but for the fact that none of these desserts is cooked, meaning that the author has completely ignored the family of frozen desserts that use a custard base) one or two, the problems bob to the surface like clots of wheatgrass scum in an inadequately-mixed smoothie.
On the surface, the recipes seem very simple. The recipes consist of nut milks, prepared with either juice or water, some sweetener, and either fruit or flavorings in the form of extracts or spices. They rely heavily on the use of a blender and/or a juicer, not only to puree fruits and other flavorings, but also to generate the nut milk to be used as the base.
Let me say that again: to generate the nut milk to be used as a base. This book was published in 2004. Does anyone else see the problem here? Nowhere does Rogers discuss the use of prepared nut milks–which have been readily available since well before he wrote the book–in making vegan frozen desserts, nor does he even acknowledge their existence except for canned coconut milk, which he grudgingly acknowledges will do in a pinch. Also, while I appreciate the fact that Vice Cream does not rely entirely upon soy milk, the fact that it is mentioned nowhere in the book is an issue that, like a number of others, makes me think that Rogers did not approach his task as a cookbook writer — which is to say as someone aware of and capable of explaining the technical and material scope of his project and where it fits in to the larger culinary picture — but primarily as a chronicler of things he had done in his own kitchen that happened to work out well. Sadly, he did not have an editor perspicacious enough to query him on these issues, or to just encourage him to get a blog instead of attempting an actual book, which frankly would’ve been a lot more appropriate to the material.
While we’re on the subject of Things A Halfway Competent Cookbook Editor Should Have Caught, beware the paragraph Rogers includes on non-nutritive sweeteners for these desserts. Rogers recommends the use of stevia for sweetening without adding sugars in order to make diabetic-friendly and low-GI-friendly desserts. Fine as far as it goes; as it happens I am a big fan of stevia so was glad to see it featured. Rogers then fails to address the fact that stevia is produced in both liquid and powder forms, and in the liquid form, that both glycerin- and alcohol-based solutions are available, and that these variations are going to pose different challenges to creating a final product that performs well in terms of taste and texture. Most bizarrely of all, Rogers does not even hint that there could be a major texture problem with stevia-sweetened creams, which rather boggles the mind given that he is calling for recipes that ordinarily include a cup of maple syrup to be sweetened, instead, with one and a half teaspoons of a dry powder. That’s rather a lot of liquid to have just vanish from a frozen dessert and expect to have it turn out in anything like the same texture as the original recipe.
Similar lack of testing shows, and even more blatantly, in Rogers’ suggestion that brown rice syrup “may work well” when mixed with other sweeteners. Yes, it may. So might agave nectar, or malt syrup, or crystalline fructose, or for that matter the sweet sweet nectar of generosity and kindness that courses through my veins and that has so far kept me from using obscenities in writing this review. But again, I expect more from a cookbook than a hand-wave and a “well, hey, this might work.” Mr. Rogers, if you’re reading this, you may be a stalwart person, a charming conversationalist, and a dab hand with a Champion juicer, but you’re a crap cookbook writer, and you can tell your editor I said so.
While we’re on the sweetener subject, let’s talk about maple syrup. I like maple syrup. I like it a lot. I cook with it frequently. But it has a rather particular and specific flavor of its own, even when very cold. To have it feature in every single one of the non-raw recipes seems like… oh, I don’t know… no, wait, I do: culinary laziness. In some of the recipes, like the chai, or (of course!) the maple walnut, it seems like just the thing. But I can’t be the only person who saw it in a recipe for peppermint ice cream and involuntarily made a face. Maple syrup simply isn’t the best sweetener in every conceivable case. Even if one doesn’t want to attempt honey (not vegan to some) or refined cane sugar, there are numerous other sweetening options, some of which I mentioned in the previous paragraph. For that matter, why not explore other maple syrup options? For instance, how about using the more strongly-flavored Grade B syrup in places where a stronger maple flavor would be desirable? What about crystallized maple sugar, which has a very alluring texture? The All Maple Syrup All The Time regime is lazy and dull, and the All Honey Date All The Time regime in the “raw” portion of the book isn’t any better.
While I’m here, I just have to say a word or two about one particular paragraph in the front matter. On page 12 of the edition I am looking at, there’s a short paragraph about durian. Just as durian itself is a humdinger of a fruit, this is a humdinger of a paragraph:
“…[durian is] shipped to the United States frozen, so you may find it in the freezer section. Durian is a large, thorny, hard-skinned fruit containing four to five sections of fleshy fruit, each enclosing several large seeds. A seven-pound durian will yield about two and a half pounds of edible fruit. When the fruit is ripe and at room temperature, you can pull apart some of the thorns to create a tear in the skin, exposing the fruit within. Be careful as the thorns are sharp and can cut skin. You can also cut the durian open with a knife, which is a little safer. Be warned that durian is also called “stinky fruit.” It has a very distinctive odor, sometimes mistaken for natural gas.”
Where to begin? First of all, in many major cities (very much including Seattle, where Rogers lives), durian is in fact available fresh. But let us suppose that frozen durian is the only thing available. How long does it take to thaw one out? Should it be thawed at room temperature or in the refrigerator? Does the texture change markedly if it has been frozen, and if so, does this affect how one might handle it for a recipe? You certainly won’t find out from Rogers, who leapfrogs straight from dragging this deep-frozen sea mine of a tropical fruit home from the nearest freezer section to having a ripe durian at room temperature. Which he then proceeds to indicate can be pulled apart, at some risk to life and limb, before making the concession that one could conceivably use a knife.
What is that about? I mean, aside from patent idiocy? You can render a watermelon into pieces by dropping it from a height, too, and portion out servings of tuna noodle casserole by sticking your bare hand right into the bubbling hotdish, but most folks prefer to avoid unnecessary injury and mess and use the utensils that were developed specifically for the purpose of performing such tasks. You know, like knives. Which would certainly be the first thing I reached for if I had occasion to try to dismember something that weighed as much as a sack of potatoes and was sufficiently spiky that it would do nicely as a projectile weapon.
Those of you who have encountered the durian in the flesh may also concur with me that the warning about the smell comes a bit late in the game and is, in fact, almost criminally understated. This is a fruit, after all, that has been banned from public transit, airplanes and airports, and some hotels in the countries (like Malaysia) where it is grown, and these are countries where large numbers of people actively enjoy eating it. I have eaten durian, both fresh and frozen, and in various preparations, and I quite like the flavor. But even I cannot help but concur with Richard Sterling, who writes “…… its odor is best described as pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock.” There is a Malay saying that durian “smells like him, but tastes like her.” This is, you begin to comprehend, not a fruit to be approached in a casual sort of way, unless one lives not only alone, but without any neighbors within, say, a half a mile.
And after all this, how much durian pulp is actually required to make the Coconut Durian flavour of raw “vice cream”? A whopping one and a quarter cups. God alone knows what Rogers assumes the hapless vegan is going to do with the remainder of an extremely large and, at best, rather difficult fruit. For this, and his many other sins, including neglecting to mention that the same markets that sell whole durian fresh or frozen also often have the frozen pulp available in smaller quantities much more amenable to experimentation, I have but one recommendation:
Divide surplus durian pulp into two cardboard takeaway food containers. Seal them up, but not too thoroughly.
Send one to Jeff Rogers.
And send the other to his editor.
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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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07.15.08
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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07.08.08
Posted in cooking, food, how to, kitchen learning at 5:22 pm by Hanne Blank
Tonight I am going to be giving a wok lesson to my friend and wonderful houseguest, A. She is a brilliant and inventive cook in her own right, experienced and adventurous and technically adept, the kind of person who, walking through a fish market with you, will point to some particularly nice-looking whole fish and comment that she’s always wanted to make “that dish where you make a whole steamed salmon and replace the scales with scales made of cucumber.”
This makes her both a perfect person to whom to give a wok cooking lesson, and a very daunting person to whom to give a wok cooking lesson… because you know she’ll actually be trying to use the information you impart, which means you’d better get it right and present it in a way that is useful.
Thus I am writing down a few notes, so that hopefully the salient things I wish to impart to her about using the wok will be at the forefront of my mind in an hour or so when we meet up in the kitchen. On the theory that these notes might be useful to some of you (or that those of you more experienced and knowledgeable than I might have things to add or clarifications to make).
Notes On The Wok Itself
- The wok is concave for a reason. It concentrates heat and makes it easy to keep food moving. One may stir-fry in a flat-bottomed pan, and indeed some people prefer to, but it is considerably more difficult because the food simply does not move around in the vessel as gracefully or easily.
- Woks have three basic zones when in use. The very bottom of the wok, the portions where the flame actually kisses the metal, is hottest and is where you do 90% of your cooking. The next 2-3 inches up the sides of the wok are hot, but not as much so as the bottom center. They are a good place to let tougher foods, or larger pieces of foods, sit for a bit if they need longer cooking times. Finally the upper edges of the wok are the coolest part of the wok. They are a good place for things to rest if you don’t really want them to cook too much more but you do want them to stay hot, for instance, while you prepare a sauce in the bottom of the pan. Pay attention to these three zones of the wok while you cook and you can take good advantage of the temperature differentials. (I am particularly fond of finishing/thickening sauces in the bottom of the wok while the cooked solids stay hot on the wok walls, ready to be combined back into the sauce as soon as the sauce is ready.)
- Because the bottom center is where the heat is best, you want to pay attention to how much food is in the wok at any given time so that there is only so much food in the wok as will effectively be cookable in this bottom center portion of the wok. The right volume of food can be tricky to gauge, at first, with vegetables whose volumes reduce greatly during cooking, particularly mushrooms and leafy greens.
- Try not to use soap on your wok. A very stiff-bristled brush plus boiling water will get most things off of an even moderately well seasoned wok. After using your wok, clean it, then put it back on the heat to dry it. After the water has cooked off the surface, rub the wok all over (inside and out) with a few drops of vegetable oil (not nut or olive oil, the smoke points are too low) using a paper towel, then heat it until it just smokes, then turn off the heat and let it cool.
- To season a new wok, first wash the hell out of it with dish soap and very hot water to get rid of machine oil. Then roughly chop a large bunch of chives and stir-fry them in ample hot vegetable oil or lard until they are very well cooked. Discard the chives, and wipe the wok clean with a paper towel, wiping off all but the faintest trace of oil, but making sure that you wipe that sheen of oil over the entire wok, inside and out.
- Try not to let a wok sit for a lengthy period with liquids in it, and particularly not acidic liquids. As with cast iron pans, this can harm the season on the pan and may lead to rusting. If you do end up cooking highly acid liquids in your wok or letting it sit for a while with liquid in it, be sure that when you clean it, you dry it and oil it as above to protect the metal and restore the season.
Preparing Ingredients for Wok Cooking
- Prepare all ingredients and all sauces prior to beginning wok cooking. Wok cooking goes quickly. You don’t have time to wash and pare and chop and marinate and such while you are cooking. (No, really. I mean it.) Mise en place is not just a good idea, it’s the law.
- Ingredients, when chopped, should be of pieces of roughly the same size so that the cooking time for any given piece is approximately the same.
- Irregularly shaped pieces of chopped ingredients are often easier to stir-fry than uniform slices, as uniform slices often stick together along their cut sides.
- Strategize your mise en place according to cooking times. For instance, bok choy stems take longer to cook than the leaves, so if you cut the bok choy so that you have chunks of stem and pieces of leaf, put the leaves in the bottom of the bowl of uncooked bok choy, and the stem chunks on top, so that you can easily add the stems first so they can have extra cooking time. And so on.
- Place ingredients near the wok in the order in which they are to be cooked, if at all possible. Mushrooms take longer to cook than spinach leaves, for example, so if you are using them both in one dish, put the mushrooms closer to the wok because you’ll be adding them to the wok first.
- A cup or bowl containing broth or water, and a second cup/bowl containing a thin paste of cold water and either cornstarch or potato starch are invaluable, both for adding liquid to dishes that require it for optimal cooking and for creating or thickening sauces.
Wok Cooking Method Tips
- Always add cold or room temperature oil to a hot (just at the point of smoking) wok. Don’t add oil or food to a cold wok — it will spatter and it will stick. Heat the wok and then pour the oil in a circle around the walls of the wok about halfway up.
- Bring the oil up to heat before adding the food. How to tell how hot your oil is? Simple, stick an unvarnished bamboo chopstick tip in it. You can gauge the hotness of the oil by how rapidly bubbles form around the tip of the chopstick. The more bubbles, and the faster they appear, the hotter the oil. Alternately you can drop in a single small piece of minced ginger (not garlic, garlic burns too easily) or green onion and gauge from the intensity and rapidity of the bubbles that form around that.
- Aromatics are almost always added to the oil first, before any other food. In Chinese cooking this most often means ginger and/or garlic. Add the aromatics and stir them around in the oil briskly. Many cookbooks will tell you to cook the aromatics just until the scent blooms; I feel that this is a little conservative and prefer to cook the aromatics a few seconds more, until they begin to color. If you are not yet adept with the wok, stick with the scent cue, but eventually I encourage you to experiment with the color cue to see which you prefer. I find that the flavors develop more with the additional few seconds of heat.
- The stirring is just as crucial as the frying when you are stir-frying. Particularly when you have just added food to a wok, keep it moving in order to coat all the pieces as evenly as possible with the hot oil that will cook them. This is particularly crucial with things that soak up oil like mushrooms and eggplant, but is nearly as important with other ingredients, because the hot oil starts the cooking process and you want the individual pieces of food to all be cooked as simultaneously as possible.
- Stir-frying, dry-frying, and deep-fat frying in woks are all optimally done at very high temperature, the hotter the better without burning oil or food. This can be difficult to achieve on Western stoves, which lack the BTUs or the burner shape to optimally heat most woks. Two things that help keep the heat high are to be unafraid of getting the belly of the wok into the actual flame (don’t worry, it won’t hurt it) and to keep the amounts of food in the wok on the small side. Cooking in multiple smaller batches, if necessary, helps a lot, particularly with deep-fat frying.
- Do not be afraid to let residual heat finish cooking a dish for you. Particularly with delicate leafy vegetables, fish, and shellfish, all of which suffer badly with overcooking, it is almost always wisest to cook them until they are almost, but not quite, done, trusting that the carryover heat from that hot hot wok will finish the job for you as you put the food into a serving dish and get it to the table. It will. Thickened sauces, or particularly oily ones (some Chinese dishes are sauced solely with the highly-flavored oils/fats generated by their cooking process) will trap more heat, and keep it on the surface of foods, than more watery pan juices, whether they are rendered by the heat (like the liquid that renders from most vegetables when they are cooked) or added, like soy sauce, vinegar, etc. It is worth bearing in mind when considering how effective the residual heat will be and how much further it will likely cook the food.
Those are the basics. Some of it I learned by trial and error, some by reading, some by talking to Chinese cooks. I am really not that much more than a toddler in the grand scheme of Chinese cookery, given the intense, involved, detailed realm of expertise and knowledge that is the gastronomy of China, so there is quite a lot that I freely admit I really don’t know (yet!). But I do know that armed with the above information, a wok, and a bit of willingness to experiment, you can learn to cook pretty darned creditable, if not necessarily fancy, Chinese dishes at home.
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