I obviously prefer home made food, but that doesn't mean I don't care about processed and other ready made food. This is the stuff that's feeding America, and somone ought to pay attention. Here, for example, you can see my brief thoughts about C2 cola, and here my review of the sugar free baby ruth.
The target of my eating this week has been 7-Eleven's relatively new "gourmet" sandwiches, called "Big Eats Deli". They claim to be made with artisanal bread, fresh meats, and interesting cheeses. In an area where one local bakery sells a single sandwich for $8.25, 7-Eleven has come into the market at between $2.99 and $3.49. That's the good news.
And the sandwiches aren't appalling either. The basic offerings, such as smoked turkey & Jack cheese on Wheatberry bread, are perfectly serviceable - made relatively close by in Brockton with ingredients as advertised. No, the supposed southwestern mayonnaise wasn't that exciting, and the bread had generally gone a bit gummy, but I've had worse sandwiches at places purporting to serve sandwiches. That 7-Eleven is matching even some sandwich shops is pretty impressive.
And as much as it worries me to say this, the Mediterranean Style Turkey with Pepper Supreme spread is actually decent. Like, I'd have it again. The tomato and basil bread was fresh and tasty, there was some sort of tapenade (yes, I'm serious), and the pepper sauce was an interesting mix of bell peppers and some sort of cheese. No, I wouldn't pay any more than $3.50 for it, but at that price it's a pretty good deal. If you're hungry and desperate, 7-Eleven has moved into the market with at least one relatively impressive offering. Go for it.
4/05/2005
So, we'll discuss the propriety of following a post about killing your co-ethnics with a trivial post on italian bread at some time in the future. For now, if you're interested in a few photos of the ciabatta process, click here. Click here for the finished product only. My apologies for the crap-tastic pictures.
Baking bread is one of the real pleasures of cooking. It's hardly an observation original to me, but the idea of combining flour and water and getting something at once so delicious and fundamental is inspirational. On top of that, I've recently had my bread baking itch re-activated by two encounters - first, by a reader who contacted me with news of their successful baguett-ery, and second, by a federalist society member with whom I spent half an hour talking ciabatta on Friday night. Armed with a quarter pound of sopresetta to eat with the end product, I settled down for some serious baking today. The results were delicious.
This ciabatta is my preferred "Italian" bread. Sure, focaccia as made around here is nice, but it also tends to be heavily oiled. Since in all cases I prefer breads that include nothing but flour, water, yeast (or other leaven) and salt, the ciabatta I discuss below is a perfect foil for my other gluttonies.
The conventional wisdom is that baking requires exact measurments. To some extent, this is right - cakes are particularly fickle things. But I'm always frustrated by recipes for bread that rely more heavily on measurments than feel - the experience of kneading bread connects you so closely to the food that "feel" is necessarily central. Who hasn't cracked a smile at that transformational moment when pizza dough, say, turns from a granular amalgamation of some disparate ingredients to a smooth, gluten rich, bread dough?
As noted by the recipe's orginator (Rose Levy Beranbaum of The Bread Bible) the overriding feel of ciabatta is wetness. Unlike that pizza dough I discuss above, it should never coalesce, but should remain wet, hardly coherent, throughout. It should always be sticky - so sticky, in fact, that kneading by hand should be minimized in favor of an oiled spatula or stand mixer. This is important, because if the dough is too dry, you'll get a dense, unappetizing loaf rather than the airy ciabatta you expect. If the proportions the recipe gives don't give you wetness, due perhaps to the humidity in your house, or the age of your flour, add a little more water. Especially with bread, reality trumps the recipe. Having said all that, a recipe is a good starting point, and I offer one here.
1. Three days before baking, prepare the biga (called a poolish when you're making french bread). For this recipe, combine .5 cup of good, unbleached, white flour (i.e, King Arthur) with .25 cups of water, some yeast, and salt. Mix well, and let rise outside for 6 hours before placing in the refrigerator to develop flavor.
2. On the day of baking, combine a scant cup of flour with a little yeast. Mix well, then add some salt (I'm told that this makes sure the salt doesn't kill the yeast). Add the biga, and half a cup of water. Mix well - as I say above, it should be quite wet. Adjust if not wet enough, and knead or mix for ten minutes until strands of gluten develop, and the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Remove from bowl and place in an oiled, covered, pan to triple in size.
3. Remove risen dough from pan, shape into a sort of slipper, and dot the dough with your fingers to make a series of depressions. This will spread the dough out. Then, with the palms of your hands, push the dough back into its distinctive slipper shape - this will create the characteristic lines on the top of the dough when you invert it.
4. Invert the dough into a prepared (i.e, lightly oiled) baking tray. Cover, and let rise for two hours. Sift a very little flour onto the top. In the last half hour, pre-heat the oven at 500 F. Also, place a cast-iron or other oven safe skillet on the floor of the oven.
5. When the dough has risen to about 1.5 inches in height, pour a cup of ice into the skillet on the floor of the oven (believe it or not, my freezer doesn't work so I had to run to 7-Eleven to buy a superfluous "Gulp" filled with ice) and put the tray with the bread on a baking stone, if you have one. The ice is there to mist the oven - essential for a crisp, crunchy, crust.
6. Bake for five minutes at 500 F, and then lower to 450 F for another 15 minutes. Remove when brown (and when it sounds hollow knocked on the bottom), and let cool on a rack. Slice, and enjoy.
Baking bread is one of the real pleasures of cooking. It's hardly an observation original to me, but the idea of combining flour and water and getting something at once so delicious and fundamental is inspirational. On top of that, I've recently had my bread baking itch re-activated by two encounters - first, by a reader who contacted me with news of their successful baguett-ery, and second, by a federalist society member with whom I spent half an hour talking ciabatta on Friday night. Armed with a quarter pound of sopresetta to eat with the end product, I settled down for some serious baking today. The results were delicious.
This ciabatta is my preferred "Italian" bread. Sure, focaccia as made around here is nice, but it also tends to be heavily oiled. Since in all cases I prefer breads that include nothing but flour, water, yeast (or other leaven) and salt, the ciabatta I discuss below is a perfect foil for my other gluttonies.
The conventional wisdom is that baking requires exact measurments. To some extent, this is right - cakes are particularly fickle things. But I'm always frustrated by recipes for bread that rely more heavily on measurments than feel - the experience of kneading bread connects you so closely to the food that "feel" is necessarily central. Who hasn't cracked a smile at that transformational moment when pizza dough, say, turns from a granular amalgamation of some disparate ingredients to a smooth, gluten rich, bread dough?
As noted by the recipe's orginator (Rose Levy Beranbaum of The Bread Bible) the overriding feel of ciabatta is wetness. Unlike that pizza dough I discuss above, it should never coalesce, but should remain wet, hardly coherent, throughout. It should always be sticky - so sticky, in fact, that kneading by hand should be minimized in favor of an oiled spatula or stand mixer. This is important, because if the dough is too dry, you'll get a dense, unappetizing loaf rather than the airy ciabatta you expect. If the proportions the recipe gives don't give you wetness, due perhaps to the humidity in your house, or the age of your flour, add a little more water. Especially with bread, reality trumps the recipe. Having said all that, a recipe is a good starting point, and I offer one here.
1. Three days before baking, prepare the biga (called a poolish when you're making french bread). For this recipe, combine .5 cup of good, unbleached, white flour (i.e, King Arthur) with .25 cups of water, some yeast, and salt. Mix well, and let rise outside for 6 hours before placing in the refrigerator to develop flavor.
2. On the day of baking, combine a scant cup of flour with a little yeast. Mix well, then add some salt (I'm told that this makes sure the salt doesn't kill the yeast). Add the biga, and half a cup of water. Mix well - as I say above, it should be quite wet. Adjust if not wet enough, and knead or mix for ten minutes until strands of gluten develop, and the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Remove from bowl and place in an oiled, covered, pan to triple in size.
3. Remove risen dough from pan, shape into a sort of slipper, and dot the dough with your fingers to make a series of depressions. This will spread the dough out. Then, with the palms of your hands, push the dough back into its distinctive slipper shape - this will create the characteristic lines on the top of the dough when you invert it.
4. Invert the dough into a prepared (i.e, lightly oiled) baking tray. Cover, and let rise for two hours. Sift a very little flour onto the top. In the last half hour, pre-heat the oven at 500 F. Also, place a cast-iron or other oven safe skillet on the floor of the oven.
5. When the dough has risen to about 1.5 inches in height, pour a cup of ice into the skillet on the floor of the oven (believe it or not, my freezer doesn't work so I had to run to 7-Eleven to buy a superfluous "Gulp" filled with ice) and put the tray with the bread on a baking stone, if you have one. The ice is there to mist the oven - essential for a crisp, crunchy, crust.
6. Bake for five minutes at 500 F, and then lower to 450 F for another 15 minutes. Remove when brown (and when it sounds hollow knocked on the bottom), and let cool on a rack. Slice, and enjoy.
Will's not the only one in a huff about Roper, though a little time has dampened all that to mere dismay. Still, last night I needed comfort food of sorts. Though I've got nothing against the macaroni & cheeses of the world, my taste in these cases does often run to the simpler side of French cooking. So, a picture of my veal cutlet is here, and the mushrooms and onions in cream here. Recipes below the fold, along with a brief note about why the veal cutlet is an escaloppe de veau and not a wiener schnitzel (as served at Figlmuller) or milanese sort of cutlet. I'll discuss the propriety of eating veal in my "What I'm Eating this Week" post, when I get to it.
Escaloppe de Veau - just pound a small veal cutlet to soften (though not too thin, I think), and then dip first in flour, then egg, then bread crumbs made from a good left-over loaf of white bread. Richard Olney says that the first coat of flour risks gumminess, but I haven't found that to be too dangerous. This, incidentally, is a French escaloppe de veau rather than its Austrian or Italian equivalents because wiener schnitzel is fried in lard, and Milan is in Italy's band of butter. Otherwise, they're the same thing.
Mushrooms and onions in cream - this is basically a classic french gratin, but I've added mushrooms. Boil some small onions in water for 15 minutes, remove from skins once cool, and put in a casserole with some sliced onions. Pour over enough cream to cover, roughly, and put in the oven at 350 F for 50 minutes. Flavoring can vary (nutmeg is thought authentic), but I used dried thyme because that was all I had. Yum.
Escaloppe de Veau - just pound a small veal cutlet to soften (though not too thin, I think), and then dip first in flour, then egg, then bread crumbs made from a good left-over loaf of white bread. Richard Olney says that the first coat of flour risks gumminess, but I haven't found that to be too dangerous. This, incidentally, is a French escaloppe de veau rather than its Austrian or Italian equivalents because wiener schnitzel is fried in lard, and Milan is in Italy's band of butter. Otherwise, they're the same thing.
Mushrooms and onions in cream - this is basically a classic french gratin, but I've added mushrooms. Boil some small onions in water for 15 minutes, remove from skins once cool, and put in a casserole with some sliced onions. Pour over enough cream to cover, roughly, and put in the oven at 350 F for 50 minutes. Flavoring can vary (nutmeg is thought authentic), but I used dried thyme because that was all I had. Yum.
I'm working on a paper about geographical indications, and the history of the struggle between the United States and Europe on protecting local products such as Roquefort, Champagne, etc. Here's an exchange between Jon Dudas, an official in the Commerce Department, and representative Bob Goodlatte of Virgina:
MR. DUDAS: And Roquefort cheese has been registered and protected in the United States since 1953. Registered and certainly could have been protected under a common law before that. And you point out, parmesan cheese is generic in the United States, but parmegiana reggiana is a protected geographical indication.
REP. GOODLATTE: Is that a brand of parmesan cheese?
MR. DUDAS: It's a type of parmesan cheese that comes from a region in Italy.
And Goodlatte is the guy in charge of Congress's negotiations on this issue? Flurgggh!
MR. DUDAS: And Roquefort cheese has been registered and protected in the United States since 1953. Registered and certainly could have been protected under a common law before that. And you point out, parmesan cheese is generic in the United States, but parmegiana reggiana is a protected geographical indication.
REP. GOODLATTE: Is that a brand of parmesan cheese?
MR. DUDAS: It's a type of parmesan cheese that comes from a region in Italy.
And Goodlatte is the guy in charge of Congress's negotiations on this issue? Flurgggh!
As you can see here, I've been thinking recently about the taboo against eating dog. It's a more baffling question than it initially seems. There's a voluminous food history literature about the taboo against pork in jewish and islamic cultures, for example - and after rightly discarding the idea that ancient peoples somehow knew about modern pathology (and therefore avoided pork), or that jews developed in countries where pigs won't live, the best anthopological work concludes that the pork taboo was a way to set the adopting peoples apart from their surroundings. Other taboos are equally well explained - Christians in the middle east, for example, don't eat camel because the local muslims do.
But why don't we eat dog? It's not a sacred animal, and our aversion is shared by a lot of people, I think. To get some expertise on the question, I turned to Frederick J. Simoons' excellent Eat not this Flesh, a descriptive survey of what the author calls "food avoidances" throughout history. The book, incidentally, is generally fascinating - Simoons is a careful and interesting historian, and the various structures people have erected to facilitate their religions and castes, sometimes wholly against rationality, are startling.
On the subject at had, Simoons has no truck with the idea that we avoid dog eating because dogs are domesticated animals in faithful service to their master - indeed, Simoons notes that dogs were probably domesticated precisely for their flesh. Moreover, other animals are just as domesticated, but we do eat them. And besides that basic intuition, Simoons has no real answer - historically, most cultures have thought dog to be a poor meat, but they've eaten it. Modern western and American cultures are almost alone in strict rejection.
So here's a far-fetched potential answer. Prof. Warren, of Bankruptcy fight fame, has argued recently that Bankruptcies are on the rise because women are now in the workplace - before, the wife could always go to work when the family fell on hard times. Now, when crisis hits, the woman is already working, so there's no reserve fund. Similarly, maybe dog was the reserve fund of the European populace. As Simoons points out, Europeans did eat dog - but only during sieges, and droughts, and other disasters. I've personally seen special "siege" recipe books written in Hugenot France during the reign of Louis XIII. Dog, in other words, was avoided because people wanted to make sure there was a food beyond reach when things turned bad - a protein food that would be available at the last, terrible, exigency.
But why don't we eat dog? It's not a sacred animal, and our aversion is shared by a lot of people, I think. To get some expertise on the question, I turned to Frederick J. Simoons' excellent Eat not this Flesh, a descriptive survey of what the author calls "food avoidances" throughout history. The book, incidentally, is generally fascinating - Simoons is a careful and interesting historian, and the various structures people have erected to facilitate their religions and castes, sometimes wholly against rationality, are startling.
On the subject at had, Simoons has no truck with the idea that we avoid dog eating because dogs are domesticated animals in faithful service to their master - indeed, Simoons notes that dogs were probably domesticated precisely for their flesh. Moreover, other animals are just as domesticated, but we do eat them. And besides that basic intuition, Simoons has no real answer - historically, most cultures have thought dog to be a poor meat, but they've eaten it. Modern western and American cultures are almost alone in strict rejection.
So here's a far-fetched potential answer. Prof. Warren, of Bankruptcy fight fame, has argued recently that Bankruptcies are on the rise because women are now in the workplace - before, the wife could always go to work when the family fell on hard times. Now, when crisis hits, the woman is already working, so there's no reserve fund. Similarly, maybe dog was the reserve fund of the European populace. As Simoons points out, Europeans did eat dog - but only during sieges, and droughts, and other disasters. I've personally seen special "siege" recipe books written in Hugenot France during the reign of Louis XIII. Dog, in other words, was avoided because people wanted to make sure there was a food beyond reach when things turned bad - a protein food that would be available at the last, terrible, exigency.
Back when I was tangentially involved with the cashew business (during college vacations), I never quite worked out why we had to wear goggles to extract the nut from its hard shell. The story was that you would go blind if you didn't, but I thought that was silly. It's a nut - how is it going to make you go blind? Anyway, the Oxford Companion to Food answers my question:
"The nut is not easy to extract. The tissue between its two layers of hard shell contains strongly irritant substances, cardol and anacardic acid. This tissue has medical uses, including burning off warts, an indication of its great corrosive power. The usual way of treating the nut is to roast it whole, driving off the irritants and making the shell brittle enough to crack without crushing the contents".
Oh.
"The nut is not easy to extract. The tissue between its two layers of hard shell contains strongly irritant substances, cardol and anacardic acid. This tissue has medical uses, including burning off warts, an indication of its great corrosive power. The usual way of treating the nut is to roast it whole, driving off the irritants and making the shell brittle enough to crack without crushing the contents".
Oh.
About two weeks ago, I noted that putting together a dinner party is hard work. Will seems to have put in a ton of effort yesterday. But in the Weekend Financial Times, Lucy Kellaway writes about serving her (extremely prominent) guests deep-frozen chicken kievs, an avocado with olive oil, and processed Vienetta ice-cream cake. The theory, I take it, is that people don't care about the food if they're laughing and talking.
Afterwards, she emailed all the guests and asked what they thought. The reaction wasn't that positive to the food, but most agreed that they hadn't really noticed. My favorite comment? One guest noted that she and her husband had a 'somewhat disturbed night' afterwards, as a result of the kiev. Alas.
My sense, incidentally, is that some parts of dinner can be creditably bought (cakes, bread, salamis and other cured meats), and others really need to be made by hand. Chicken Kiev is in the latter group. Especially if you mean the kind that cost 99 pence frozen.
Afterwards, she emailed all the guests and asked what they thought. The reaction wasn't that positive to the food, but most agreed that they hadn't really noticed. My favorite comment? One guest noted that she and her husband had a 'somewhat disturbed night' afterwards, as a result of the kiev. Alas.
My sense, incidentally, is that some parts of dinner can be creditably bought (cakes, bread, salamis and other cured meats), and others really need to be made by hand. Chicken Kiev is in the latter group. Especially if you mean the kind that cost 99 pence frozen.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an article on finding a good roast chicken in the city. It's a good article, and I'll certainly keep it in mind when I eventually move to New York. But the article's implication that one wouldn't, say, roast their own chicken really annoyed me in a way. Yes, roast chicken is time intensive, in that the thing has to roast. And yes, prices of pre-roasted chickens have dropped to almost equal the high end of raw chickens. Nor is roasting your own chicken necessarily traditional - in fact, in Beirut it's been common since my dad was a kid to send a single unfortunate out to get some farooj, the delicious fire roasted chickens of the lebanese capital, and some fresh bread for ravenous devouring at home (drowned in garlicky yogurt and tahini sauce, and served with tart assorted pickles).
But despite all these arguments in favor of buying your chicken pre-cooked, the home roasted chicken has a lot to be said for it. Of course, you have control over how it's stuffed and flavored. You tend to get a better quality of chicken for the same price if you do the work yourself, and you also get the detritus of roast chicken to use at home - the roasting juices for gravys and potatoes. And as for the time and effort, there's really very little active work in roasting a chicken - once you've flavored and seasoned the bird, all you have to do is put it in the oven and wait. And that wait is leavened by the delicious, permeating, smell of a good chicken, and herbs, and onions and garlic, and the pleasant fug of (unwaxed) lemon. As for the result itself, if you're a fan of the chicken's skin and juicy meat, the home product is much superior. Even if the roasted chicken is right outside your apartment, as tends to be the case in Beirut, the skin is never as crispy, nor the breast as juicy, in even the five minutes it takes to ferry the meal home.
Anyway, the article spurred me to roast a chicken, which I hadn't done for a few weeks then. The pictures start here, but my discussion is below the fold.
1. If you can afford it, get a good chicken, defined as an organic or free range bird of some size. I used a Whole Foods organic chicken that weighed about 4 pounds, and that was certainly enough for a week of eating. Some people wash their chickens before roasting. I suppose it might make sense, but if so, make sure to dry it throughly. There's nothing worse then soggy skinned chicken.
2. Dress the chicken. This, for me, involves olive oil, salt and pepper (remember to rub these things inside too), and a half lemon and thyme stuffed up its bum (to steal a phrase from Nigella Lawson). Somewhat bizarrely, because I happen to like chicken breasts flavored heavily with thyme, I stuff absurb amounts of the herb between the skin covering the breast and the meat. This is probably wrong, but I like the result.
3. Put the chicken in a roasting tray. Mine has a little griddle which holds the chicen above the tray, and also incidentally keeps it relatively compact. If you don't have such a thing, you can go ahead and truss the chicken, tying its legs together, to ensure more even cooking. Or not. The world won't end if you don't.
4. Put the chicken in the oven at 350-400 degrees for about an hour and a half for a 4 pound chicken. I'm told the rule is something like 20 minutes per pound, with half an hour thrown on top. As you can see from the pictures, I intervened halfway through to add some boiled potatoes, which get fattily roasted in the chicken dripping.
5. When it finishes baking, let the chicken rest, then carve. Eat warm that night, and then cold in sandwiches, salads, and other delicious manifestations all week
But despite all these arguments in favor of buying your chicken pre-cooked, the home roasted chicken has a lot to be said for it. Of course, you have control over how it's stuffed and flavored. You tend to get a better quality of chicken for the same price if you do the work yourself, and you also get the detritus of roast chicken to use at home - the roasting juices for gravys and potatoes. And as for the time and effort, there's really very little active work in roasting a chicken - once you've flavored and seasoned the bird, all you have to do is put it in the oven and wait. And that wait is leavened by the delicious, permeating, smell of a good chicken, and herbs, and onions and garlic, and the pleasant fug of (unwaxed) lemon. As for the result itself, if you're a fan of the chicken's skin and juicy meat, the home product is much superior. Even if the roasted chicken is right outside your apartment, as tends to be the case in Beirut, the skin is never as crispy, nor the breast as juicy, in even the five minutes it takes to ferry the meal home.
Anyway, the article spurred me to roast a chicken, which I hadn't done for a few weeks then. The pictures start here, but my discussion is below the fold.
1. If you can afford it, get a good chicken, defined as an organic or free range bird of some size. I used a Whole Foods organic chicken that weighed about 4 pounds, and that was certainly enough for a week of eating. Some people wash their chickens before roasting. I suppose it might make sense, but if so, make sure to dry it throughly. There's nothing worse then soggy skinned chicken.
2. Dress the chicken. This, for me, involves olive oil, salt and pepper (remember to rub these things inside too), and a half lemon and thyme stuffed up its bum (to steal a phrase from Nigella Lawson). Somewhat bizarrely, because I happen to like chicken breasts flavored heavily with thyme, I stuff absurb amounts of the herb between the skin covering the breast and the meat. This is probably wrong, but I like the result.
3. Put the chicken in a roasting tray. Mine has a little griddle which holds the chicen above the tray, and also incidentally keeps it relatively compact. If you don't have such a thing, you can go ahead and truss the chicken, tying its legs together, to ensure more even cooking. Or not. The world won't end if you don't.
4. Put the chicken in the oven at 350-400 degrees for about an hour and a half for a 4 pound chicken. I'm told the rule is something like 20 minutes per pound, with half an hour thrown on top. As you can see from the pictures, I intervened halfway through to add some boiled potatoes, which get fattily roasted in the chicken dripping.
5. When it finishes baking, let the chicken rest, then carve. Eat warm that night, and then cold in sandwiches, salads, and other delicious manifestations all week
I fancy myself a pretty decent cook, overall. The food I make is tasty, and even if not, I know enough about it to sound like a snot, if nothing else. But clearly, one of the things I'm missing is the real, basic grounding a young chef gets at culinary school - the knife skills, the tedious work in perfecting the great mother sauces and doughs. In a lame attempt to fix some of my deficiencies, I bought a copy of Jacques Pepin's La Technique a few weeks ago - a definitive textbook of basic, classical, cooking. My goal is to learn the book to the extent I can - and I'll post my first efforts at any one technique, and hopefully spare everyone the follow-ups.
So, I decided to start this process with pommes cocottes - normal potatoes cut by paring knife into little ovals. The pictures of the raw product - in all their lopsided glory - are here. The potatoes blanched and fried in butter are here. The musings of a spatially challenged clutz trying to carve potatoes into ovals are below the fold.
1. the idea, as Pepin explains it, is to cut a large potato into quarters, and then "turn" them into little ovals. My fundamental take home message from this is that you literally do need to turn them - carving a little bit from each face before rotating the potato ever so slightly counter-clockwise in your palm to repeat. A lot of the bad results you can see in the picture are from efforts where I tried to carve an oval out of the quarter potato - tried to see an oval, to identify the two tips and carve towards them. It doesn't work. Just trust the technique - turning produces ovals. I don't know how.
2. The other thing I'll have to think about as I continue to practice this technique is wastage. I've heard that wasting food, and bits of food, is the bete noire of a restaurant. And yet, the pile of potato scraps my efforts produces was enormous, given that I only cut into two potatoes at my first go. Could any technique endorsed by Pepin possibly waste so much potato? I'm aware that potato scraps are great for vegetable stock, but even so - clearly, as I get better with this, the wastage should decline as well.
So, I decided to start this process with pommes cocottes - normal potatoes cut by paring knife into little ovals. The pictures of the raw product - in all their lopsided glory - are here. The potatoes blanched and fried in butter are here. The musings of a spatially challenged clutz trying to carve potatoes into ovals are below the fold.
1. the idea, as Pepin explains it, is to cut a large potato into quarters, and then "turn" them into little ovals. My fundamental take home message from this is that you literally do need to turn them - carving a little bit from each face before rotating the potato ever so slightly counter-clockwise in your palm to repeat. A lot of the bad results you can see in the picture are from efforts where I tried to carve an oval out of the quarter potato - tried to see an oval, to identify the two tips and carve towards them. It doesn't work. Just trust the technique - turning produces ovals. I don't know how.
2. The other thing I'll have to think about as I continue to practice this technique is wastage. I've heard that wasting food, and bits of food, is the bete noire of a restaurant. And yet, the pile of potato scraps my efforts produces was enormous, given that I only cut into two potatoes at my first go. Could any technique endorsed by Pepin possibly waste so much potato? I'm aware that potato scraps are great for vegetable stock, but even so - clearly, as I get better with this, the wastage should decline as well.
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