Homemade chicken stock for celebration soup
CHICKEN STOCK
Vegetables
Meat and bones
Herbs and bouquet
Salt
VEGETABLES
Always twice as much onion as carrot
And an equal amount of carrot to celery
That way nothing dominated
The vegetables are the bed
On which you rest the bones
BONES/MEAT
Stock is not ‘bone water’
It includes bones and meat
So, for 1 chicken
1 onion
½ carrot
½ celery rib
BOUQUET/HERBS
12 parsley stems
1 branch thyme
1 bay leaf
(I usually tied them together with
A branch of celery, cut in half)
A pinch of salt
Because some proteins only render in the
Presence of salt, which makes the stock richer
However, not too much salt, or if and when
You reduce the stock, it becomes salty
WATER
When you build your stock/broth
You put the vegetables in first
Put the meat/bones on top
Toss in the bouquet garni
Hold everything in place with your hand
And cover your hand with water
You do not fill the pot with water
And, the reason you put your hands over the bones
When adding water, is to prevent them from floating
And diluting the stock/broth
When the ratio of water to bones, meat vegetables is right
When you refrigerate the stock, it jells
Once the water is in the pot
Add a pinch of salt (1/2 teaspoon per 6 cups)
Bring the water to a boil
Skim off the foam and discard it
Turn the heat to a simmer
And let the broth/stock simmer for 1-1/2 hours
After an hour and a half of gentle simmering shut the heat off
Let it cool
Strain it
Toss away the solids
Let the liquid cool to room temp
Then refrigerate overnight
In the morning the fats will have risen to the top
And solidified
Lift the fat off
Throw it away (or if you’re jewish, use it to cook)
Measure the liquid into 1 quart zip lock bags
And freeze if you can
Otherwise, squeeze air out, and refrigerate
Double bag if necessary
Try not to keep this more than 1 week if refrigerated
It keeps indefinitely if frozen
Reboil if necessary
Be mindful that stock is the perfect medium for attracting bacteria
So don’t leave it at room temp
Re-boil if in doubt
And, if there is the slightest hint of ‘sourness’ toss it
It’s fragile and susceptible
Otherwise it’s delicious
And it’s the basis of your soups
PUMPKIN SOUP FOR COMPANY
Serves 8
½ cup onion in a small dice
½ cup leeks in a small dice
1/3 cup carrot in a small dice
1/3 cup celery in a small dice
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 small pumpkin 1 to 1-1/2 pounds
roasted in a 400 degree oven
until it goes soft – 30 minutes
2 cups good chicken stock
2 cups water, at a boil (more as needed)
Sea Salt
Fresh ground pepper
Garnish:
Goat cheese & herbs, or
Gruyere and whipped cream, or
Olive oil & persillade or,
Foie gras on toast, or
Chicken liver spread on toast, or
A compliment of your own invention
Set the pumpkin to roast first on a baking sheet in a 375oF oven for about an hour, until it collapses. While the pumpkin roasts get everything in place, select a heavy casserole large enough to contain our soup, assemble ingredients and cut vegetables.
Prepare the vegetables in a small dice. Melt the butter in the casserole. When the butter is hot enough it foams, and usually the foam recedes. Add the mix of vegetables, and give it a pinch of salt. Put the cover in place securely so that no steam can escape. Turn the heat to low-ish and let the vegetables ‘sweat,’ or cook slowly 10-15 minutes. Check the pot from time to time to make sure that the vegetables aren’t browning. At the same time don’t work the pot lid so much that all the liquid evaporates, because without water collecting on the bottom of the pan you will burn the vegetables. If the whole process makes you nervous, add a half a cup or so of stock and let the vegetables cook in that.
Vegetables, particularly the fibrous ones, onion, leeks, and celery, need to be cooked through. Because onion is fiber, if it doesn’t break down by cooking, it becomes tough to digest, i.e. you make something indigestible. The best test of doneness is to taste. If the onions are sweet, have no resistance, no crunch, then you are ready to go on to the next step. Give a tiny pinch of salt and proceed to the pumpkin and lock in the flavor of the cooked mirepoix.
When the pumpkin has softened, cut it in half, peel the skin away, scoop out the seeds and discard them. Add the cooked pumpkin flesh to the base of the mirepoix. Add the chicken stock and the water, turn the heat up and bring it to a point where it almost boils; then turn it to a simmer and allow the flavor to steep for 5 minutes.
Liquefy the soup in a blender. Have more boiling water or stock on reserve so that you can thin the soup out as needed to achieve the texture of liquid heavy cream. Season the soup by batches. When the soup has been liquefied and flavored, return it to a clean bowl or pot and keep it warm.
Present the soup in a flat soup bowl. Add the garnish of choice directly into each bowl. Give a final grinding of pepper and serve the soup at once.
Select a red or white wine; the soup will love it. It’s meant to be festive, so it might be great for a holiday.
Things Italian
“What is your favorite shape of pasta?” my friend Marietta would ask her guests as she went around the room asking each person face to face. They would answer earnestly, and when she was done she’d turn back to the kitchen where her decision, already made, was boiling away in a big pasta pot. She would say to everyone, or no one, “Just because I asked you what your favorite shape was, doesn’t mean you’re going to get that. You’ll get the one I like.”
My experience with Italians and Italy is that they have a favorite pasta. They have a favorite everything which perhaps explains why or how their culture has survived longer than any other in Western Europe. Waverly Root wrote that “Italians have given longer continuous conscious intensive attention to the growing of food than anyone else in the Western world.”
I was once in a kitchen where the chef was busy preparing Italian food. The dishwasher, who came from Italy, was peeling potatoes. Without looking up, the chef asked, “Do you think this dish should get ground pepper?” The room went silent for a moment, then the potato peeled answered, “I do not know. My matha she does not do that.”
And so I have learned over time with things Italian that I have my own favorite shape of pasta. It evolved over years of eating pasta in Italy, and noodles in France. I have long since learned that they are not the same thing. Any noodle dish the French prepare will more than likely be delicious, but not Italian. I have only ever had one French noodle dish that I thought might qualify for consideration as Italian in spirit.
Tonight I stood in front of my stove at home. I was hungry and wanted something quick, which is to say I knew there were leftover delicious things in the frigo. I decided I would finish the last of a sauce we’d made earlier in the week of backyard tomatoes. They were not San Marzano tomatoes, but local, and the last of the season. They’d been turned into a sauce and flavored additionally with pancetta, dry porcini mushrooms, and little bits of zucchini. The flavor was sweet from the tomatoes, deep from the porcini, meaty from the pancetta, and had a nice lightness from the vegetables that allowed the olive oil they were all cooked in to participate in the panoply of flavor. Simple, clean, satisfying.
I looked in the cabinet to see what sort of pasta was available. Normally I only have my favorite, but I am to be forgiven if from time to time I allow other pasta shapes in the door. There are orechetti, which I Iove with rapini, flavored with chile flake, moistened with the water they cook in, and anointed with olive oil.
I keep penne, the smaller ones, at all times. For although they are not my favorite pasta, I nevertheless love them sauced with cream, or bechamel parma, Gruyere and cracked pepper; or with a fresh tomato sauce and olive oil.
Tonight however, I reached for a box with large tubes, a shape I don’t think I’ve ever purchased apart from the box sitting on my shelf. It is not a candidate for my favorite pasta, But there it is, and it is from Italy. Italy on the label always lends, if not credence, then an expectation that they will be flavorful and good. I cooked them in salted water for the prescribed time noted on the box. I put the sauce in a small saucepan that I’d set on top of the pan of pasta water to help it come to a boil. The sauce warmed simultaneously.
When the pasta was done, I drained it, put it into a chipped handmade flat bowl for pasta from Italy. It has a beautiful parmesan cream color which displays the pasta to perfection. I drizzled the tubes with olive that gave off its perfume as soon as it coated the naked pasta in the bowl. I spooned sauce over the top, grabbed a glass of wine and sat down, wondering what I had done by not selecting my favorite pasta.
I tasted each tube coated with a little of the delicious sauce and complimented perfectly by the wine. I enjoyed each bite. Half way through I started to measure the sauce if I was going to have enough for the last bit of pasta. I could see the excellent olive oil pooling at the bottom of the bowl, so knew that even if I failed in managing the sauce till the end, I would be compensated by the olive oil. I got reckless.
With each forkful I wondered how it would have tasted with my favorite pasta shape. I found the pasta too thick, too chewy, the shape too big. But it was nevertheless compelling coated lightly with that tomato sauce, or augmented by the chew and flavor of the earthy mushroom, or pancetta. Each bite was a revelation, and left a question; how would this have been with my favorite pasta? I was haunted to the end. That’s how it is when you are not faithful to your favorite.
A good dish, well prepared
I had a great conversation over coffee yesterday with John Taboada of Navarre. He reviewed the recent trip to France when we got to spend about 5 days together with Kristen D. Murray, pastry chef at Paley’s Place. Afterwards, I went on to Gascony to spend a week with students.
The conversation with John was about food experiences each of us had. He arrived in Lyon with a list of places where he wanted to eat. I recalled one of the places on his list. I’d been there with my friend Michel who was friends with the owners. It’s the sort of classic Lyonnais place that serves food to the taste of locals, and makes no concession to what tourists think they want. You watch piles of tripe, innards, and things you no longer see much of, delivered to diners radiant with expectation.
Because the restaurant was filled Taboada didn’t get to eat there. He got a reservation at one of the other places on his list. It had been a typical Lyonnais, chef-in-the-kitchen small place. However, new owners who made it evolve into something more formal and expensive. Formality, he reminded me, is not his style. His own restaurants reflect his thinking. When he arrived and realized what was going on, he walked passed the window, then around the block. He wrestled with the idea of spending a lot of time at a table nicely dressed with linens and all that it implied.
I don’t think it was ever a question for him of not honoring the reservation. When he came to terms with his own formal demons, he also came to terms with his fatigue, his not-so-great hunger, and the fact that he was not going to eat and run, leaving the hosts with the impression that that is what Americans do. He went in, took his table, and settled in for a four-hour dining experience. He ate all of it with great relish.
One course provided the moment of illumination of what great French food is about. He was served a cauliflower flan, garnished with a sauce made from a puree of peas, and accompanied by paper-thin slices of andouillette (chitterling sausages). The simple goodness of excellent ingredients in the flan burst in his mouth. Cauliflower, cream, and eggs, properly seasoned, perfectly cooked. Simple, straight-forward. No exotic playing with some new flavor. The cauliflower was the star. The puree of peas, with the perfume of Spring, transported the cauliflower back in time, and revealed the magic of simple things, well understood.
John braced himself for the andouillette.. He’d worked for a caterer in Lyon years ago and had a lot of opportunity to taste the Lyonnais’ love of innards. He lifted it on the fork and tasted it. It was the real deal, but the way in which it was served made him smile. Yes, there were all those offal-y tastes that were of this place, musky, earthy, barn yardy, but done with a light, contemporary hand. It allowed him to appreciate their role in the dish. He realized that this was Lyonnais food, rearranged for modern tastes. The sausage made so much more sense than a lychee, ground cherries, or whatever new ingredient is making the rounds this season.
He understood that the greatness of French food is its pursuit of pure flavor. The techniques and methods may be more complex and elaborate, but the flavors produced caused him to stop, experience, savor and appreciate.
I told him about being in Marseille with Christine, who as a young French girl, worked for me at my restaurant in San Francisco. She now lives in Marseille and I was seeing her for the first time in five years. She said she wanted us to have a nice lunch at a good table and not just a quick bite of anything. She had selected a restaurant at the old port. We started with fish soup, the kind that you find everywhere in France, and that trace themselves to port towns. This one might go on to be the basis of a Bouillebaisse in a more formal menu. But here, at lunch, it was the soup itself, fresh, simple, clean and lovely.
I ordered the Marmitte, a dish I think of as a sort of fish stew. I didn’t know what to expect. Since we were on the Mediterranean, the closest wine on the list was from Cassis, one of my favorites and the next port town along the coast. The Marmite was composed of pieces of cod, salmon, tuna and sardine. Each was cut about and inch and a half square and had been cooked to perfection separately. They were placed in a big bowl along with three, thumb-sized potatoes perfectly cooked in water with saffron.
The Fish and potatoes were accompanied by a light veloute, prepared to a texture between soup and sauce. The perfection of each element, sauce, fish and potato, revealed itself at once, and married nicely with the wine. The experience of eating this food reminded me of the fact that Josephine Araldo often advocated to her students, “a gourmet dish is a well prepared dish. Period.” The value of simple things, well done, is enduring. Simple perfection is much more memorable than some flashy new thing that appears once, burns brightly (or not), may or may not be imitated, and then evaporates.
Trends are often based on trying to make some new thing go with something ordinary. Madeleine Kamman made me understand that most of it is imitative, and little of it is original, The fact that you might put chocolate in potatoes is not a reason to do it. And, in any case, when the sparkler has burnt and run it’s course, you still need to come back to earth. You need a place to land, or all is for naught.
I remember the excitement of nouvelle cuisine in France and California in the 70’s and 80’s. I also remember the realization that I no longer had any interest in what new thing could be made to go with something I already knew. I just wanted the thing itself. A puree of good potatoes, mixed with good milk, salt and butter, and properly cooked, is perfection. Thanks John, I loved traveling with you.
A new series of classes at the Chef Studio begins January 4th. An 8-week, full time session meets Mondays through Fridays, 9 AM to 3 PM. A second session meets two evenings each week, 6 to 9 PM, plus one Saturday a month. These courses are dedicated to training good cooks. Once a year, we take students to France so they become grounded in the cooking, values and philosophy of French cooking at the source.
The first asparagus (and their stalks)
So there they were; local asparagus from Sherwood at the Saturday farmers’ market. Six bundles of them; four were finger thick, two were pencil sized. I would have taken the pencil sized ones except there were’nt enough for the 12 people I was cooking for.
I lined up the four bundles, moving them like chess pieces closer to me. I reached into my pocket for money, and wouldn’t you know, someone came along, eyed my (as in mine) nicely arranged asparagus, and started to make a move on them. “No,” I began, “these are mine. Those over there are available to you.” We laughed and discussed the merits of thin versus not thin asparagus.
Back in the kitchen, I snapped one to see where the give point on the stalk was then took a nicely sharpened chef’s knife and cut the bundle. I put the cut ends into a bag for recycling, and moved on to trim the next bundles.
I like to prepare asparagus in a straight sided skillet. I add a couple of inches of water, bring it to a boil, toss in salt and then the asparagus. When the water comes back to a boil, I add half a cup of cold water to lower the temperature. The procedure allows the cooking to be gentler on the tips, while the stalks still cook. After the second addition of cold water, I remove one, test its doneness by slicing a small piece from the bottom of the stalk. When they are the way I like them, I stop the cooking. If I’m serving them warm I just pat them dry, and move them to a plate. If I’m going to serve them later, I run them under cold water to stop the cooking.
Having tasted these asparagus, I discovered how vibrant and sweet they were. I could just have eaten them like that. I decided all they’d get was coarse salt and excellent olive oil. As I went for the oil and salt my mind came back to the trimmings I’d set aside. “If the asparagus are this good,” I reasoned, “then those stalks are too good to throw away.”
I washed them, sliced them finger thick, and cooked them in about 1-1/2 quarts of water. I simmered them for 20 minutes or so until they were well over cooked. I put everything in the blender and liquified it. Next I strained the liquid to rid it of all the fibrous stuff. The asparagus water is sitting in the refrigerator waiting to be used to make risotto which I’ll do as soon as get more asparagus to garnish the dish.
WHAT I DID NEXT
Once we figured out how to make a perfect crust I recalled the goat cheese tarts I used to eat in France. The region where I lived produced a lot of goat cheese because, like Oregon, there was good pasturage and abundant ground water. It wasn’t a stretch to think of cooking with it. The French being resourceful cooks had long since taught me how to get creative out of necessity.
I started by blind baking the tart shell, meaning to bake the shell without the filling. The oven is set to 425oF. Foil is flattened onto the tart dough and the edges crimped to keep from slipping down. It bakes for about 12 to 15 minutes until it dries out.
The way to test its doneness is to peel back the foil. When you see steam simply close the door and come back in 5 minutes to test the dryness again. If there is no steam, remove the foil, but if it gives any resistance, close the door and wait 5 minutes. When the foil lifts out easily, leave the tart in the oven, and continue baking till light golden. The dough can’t start to color until all the moisture is gone, so blind baking guarantees that a tart dough cooks and won’t be gummy.
When opening the oven door don’t act like you have all the time in the world. If the oven is at 400-425o and you tale your time checking the cooking, the temperature can drop 50 or 75 degrees. If the dough needs heat to evaporate water and crisp, it’s going to find that difficult if there isn’t enough heat.
While the tart dough blind bakes, prepare the filling. In a utility bowl mash 4 ounces of fresh goat cheese with 2 ounces of softened butter simply with a spoon. Add eggs one at a time, mixing with a whisk. Add a third of the milk mixture, along with about a teaspoon of salt, mixing to make the base homogenous. The remaining liquid will mix easily without lumps.
You want to mix butter into the goat cheese because goat cheese doesn’t have the fat that cow’s milk cheese does. When it cooks, the texture becomes grainy. Feeding it butter gives fat back to the milk that it never had. Fill the tart dough, sprinkle the top lightly with thyme. Put it in the oven, turn the heat down to 375 and set a timer for 20 minutes.
The filling will turn golden, and puff slightly. Poke the side of the pan with your finger to tell if the center is still liquid. If it needs more time tent the tart with a piece of foil, and baked it a few more more minutes.
Since the filling only had 1-1/2 eggs per cup of liquid, don’t expect the filling to set solid like a quiche. The way to judge if the custard was set is to watch the whole custard move as one piece when nudged. When you remove it from the oven it will have beautiful color, have souffled nicely. Ours shimmered as I carried it to the rack to cool. Everyone looked at it with wonder and knew we had something magnificent.
Once it cool to warm, it sets further. As I notched the crust with a serrated bread knife and sliced surgically, everyone held their breath. The filling held. We separated the halves, sliced each half into quarters and served the tart warm.
Everyone admired its beauty, hesitating to lift a fork. Each approached it reverently, and one person said after the first taste, “It melted before it got into my mouth.” The perfume of the thyme scattered on top provided the final delight marrying perfectly with the goat cheese. We served a Viognier from the Southwest of France, goat cheese territory, and experienced pure harmony.
The Chef Studio
