The Passionate Epicure

I am in the middle of The Passionate Epicure, a 1924 food novel by Marcel Rouf concerning a gourmet by the name of Mr. Dodin-Bouffant.

The novel raises an interesting, cross-genre question for me. I don't have The Lord of the Rings in front of me, but I remember that Bilbo is renowned for having a particularly good table. Dodin-Bouffant, in the book, is thought to be one of the foremost gourmands in France, and that reputation is not for writing or speaking about food, but for the food at home, and his discerning taste in wine and produce.

But in neither case does the gourmand in question actually cook any food. Far from it - most of The Passionate Epicure is about the process of replacing Dodin-Bouffant's deceased chef, a process that goes so poorly that Dodin-Bouffant is almost left with what Rouf paints as a terrible choice between the great gourmand donning the whites and cooking himself, or going to the mediocre restaurant in town. So from what precisely does Dodin-Bouffant's culinary reputation emanate? Picking really good cooks? Making exorbitant criticisms of others chefs? Menu design? (as to this last, the only really famous chapter of The Passionate Epicure is an account of a meal served by Dodin-Bouffant to a travelling European prince).

Why am I writing about this? Because, of course, I would like to have a culinary reputation of Dodin-Bouffant's kind, in my own small way. But the modern model of that is of a highly skilled home cook - read, Richard Olney. It intrigues me that for a man, at least, that model is of fairly recent vintage, and it has replaced an odd form of food mastery.

Thoughts

The most interesting thing I read today was the offering memorandum from Milk Thistle Farms, LLC. Food savy New Yorkers will know Milk Thistle as the producer of that excellent but super expensive milk in glass jars at Whole Foods and the Union Square Market. Unable to get traditional bank financing, they are apparently trying to get bond financing from the general public. They have their own counsel, and of course I offer no opinion as to their documents, but I do think they need to be quite careful. When you hold yourself out to the public in this way, danger abounds, and bondholders are not powerless.

Weekend Eats

We had some excellent food at home over the weekend. Some details briefly follow:

- I made french fries with the traditional double frying technique, at 350 F followed by a full drying on a sheet pan followed by a second fry at 375. I think the results were terrific, and I found that the peanut oil I used gave them a great flavor.

- I made a quick hamburger bun for the accompanying burger, though I wish I had actually had eggs. On the other hand, cooking is not always about having all the right ingredients, so I substituted some whole fat milk.

- I tried Bittman's tofu chocolate pudding. It was good, but did not make me forget cream.

- We made margaritas on both Saturday and Sunday at home, with Patron Silver, cointreau* and fresh lime juice. We also played around with increasing and decreasing the lime and cointreau, to see how those changes unbalanced the drink. It was very interesting.

* Yes, margaritas are usually made with triple sec. Cointreau, which I suppose is a kind of triple sec, is better.

- Saturday night I decided to do a little "Chipotle/upscale pseudo-Mexican burrito joint" at home. I cooked pinto beans in water until soft and creamy, and brown rice. I brined chicken thighs for extra juiciness, and then marinated in a dry adobo rub. I made guacamole of good avocadoes, and a fresh salsa supplemented with tinned san marazanos to make up for the poor quality of the tomatoes. The last two items got jalepeno too.

The point to make about this meal is that it could be scaled up very easily for a party. It's no more effort to make half a pound of beans than it is to make five pounds of beans, I think.

Top Chef: Masters

A quick note to laud Top Chef: Masters - judging from the first episode only, won by Hubert Keller, it's a very pleasant, light hearted show. The challenge posed, to cook a three course meal off a hot plate, microwave and toaster oven in a Pomona College dorm room, put these top chefs (and they are top chefs, rather than pseudo top chefs - Christopher Lee especially, who finished in 2nd place, is a New York star) in interesting situations. Keller even ran for the bathroom to refresh his pasta.

All in all, a good laugh.

Weekday dinner - pasta with tuna and capers

I had the opportunity to rush out of my job a little earlier than usual last night, and was so delighted to be able to cook during the week for once. Still, even getting home "early" (i.e., 7 pm) doesn't leave much time too cook before it gets too late to eat a lot. So I opted for one of the fastest meals I know - pasta with tuna, onions and capers.

There's literally nothing to this. Slice onions and sautee on medium heat until golden brown. Add garlic. Add half a can of San Marzano tomatoes. Add good italian tuna (the kind in the jar packed in olive oil). Add good, salted capers. Cook your pasta, add to the sauce and cook until the pasta is done, and serve.

Can you make the same dish with normal stewed tomatoes, normal supermarket tuna, and the capers packed in that odd vinegar brine? Obviously. And it will taste really pretty good. I happen to live in Astoria, and there is an excellent Italian deli at the foot of the train station. So I go there rather than the supermarket when I can. But all of those premium ingredients are just the cherry on top of a dish that's always good.

Having said that, the premium italian tuna I'm talking about is exceptional. Dressed with a little lemon and quality olive oil, it's dinner for two with perhaps a tomato salad on the side.

A puzzle

Here's something I don't understand at all. Why does commercial peanut butter have the same nutritional values (calories and fat, primarily), as peanut butter made of only peanuts?)

I suppose the answer is that the commercial peanut butter producers add oil to equal the fat content of pure peanuts, but it still puzzles me.

Vegetable Stew

This is my version of Jacques Pepin's grandmother's vegetable stew, normally served as a side dish with roast chicken (as I served it) or fish, or with anything else. There really is no technique here whatever - cut up all the vegetables that are the freshest available, drop them into a pot with some olive oil, and cook for a minute. Add flour to make a sort of roux, cook the roux for a minute, and add water. As it cooks, the stew will thicken.

Pan roasted skate with Salad

There's really nothing difficult here. Extremely fresh skate, roasted briefly in a pan on medium heat. It is served with some very peppery watercress that I tamed with fingerling potatoes and olive oil vinaigrette.

Roast Chicken

This is a placeholder for roasted chicken with morels.

Blueberry Tart

This is a placeholder for blueberry tart with creme patissiere.

Birthday 2009

So, yesterday was my 30th birthday - the sort of a milestone best treated with food and drink.

Accordingly, we had lunch at Jean-Georges, not far from my firm at Columbus Circle, followed later by drinks at Death & Co.

Well versed through my reading of various boards in the mysteries of the $28 lunch menu (as everyone says, the best deal in New York), we each ordered a prix fixe, supplemented with a shared foie gras course and a shared dessert. I paired "tastes" (aka 3 oz. pours) of wine with each savoury course.

Before recapitulating the meal, though, I have a sort of mea culpa to make. The last time I visited Jean-Georges was five years ago. While my original post seems to have vanished into the ether, somehow, there is a link to it from another blog. The bottom line is that I didn't like Jean-Georges, and proceeded to badmouth it for the next five years.

It's unclear whether my tastes have changed or matured, or whether JG is somehow better, or what, but my experience yesterday was quite different. As someone at eGullet explained, it's the difference between an awkward summer associate lunch and lunch with your significant other on your birthday. The point, however, is that we thought our lunch was quite wonderful, and at a (for a 3 michelin star restaurant) gentle price.

Some notes follow:

Amuse Bouche: Fresh mozzarella topped with dehydrated pineapple (tasted almost like candy, that), a fritter of peekytoe crab, and a light soup of herbs. This last was refreshing and especially delicious, all fragrant aroma and light flavor.

1st course:

My soup of young garlic with frog's legs is the kind of thing I could eat every day and never tire of. It reeked, if one could possibly use that word of something so civilized, of garlic made elegant, dotted with micro greens. The frog's legs were perfect drumsticks, with the delicate flesh that characterizes frog entirely unobscured. Of course, one could just as easily eat this soup with snails, on a kebab perhaps (dip snail. Eat).

There's not quite as much to say about my fiancee's ribbons of tuna. This was thick ribbons of extremely fresh, raw, tuna, dressed with a cold, spicy, ginger sauce atop avocado puree. Preferable by far to some very expensive sushi we have had in New York in freshness and stridency of flavor. The ginger sauce was magnificent.

Wine: Trimbach Riesling. A dependable, affordable riesling I've had many times before (perhaps $15 a bottle at retail?), and it was as good as ever.

Second Course: We shared the famed foie gras brulee, as I was not in a mood to ingest a full foie gras course, and yet was still unwilling to forgoe it because the foie gras was the main source of my ire five years ago. It is a classic torchon of foie gras, whipped, forced into a cylinder, and poached, but then given sweetness with a crispy creme brulee top, and served with a sharp pineapple meyer lemon jam. On my previous visit, I had been overwhelmed by sweet and fat. This time, we were delighted, and whether it was the exceptional 2003 1er cru Chassagne-Montrachet white bordeaux we drank with it ($12.50 for the 3 oz. pour), which paired exceptionally well with the liver, or the fact that I was in a better mood, or whether simply because I only ate half, my impression of the course was completely different.

Third Course:

I like skate, the fish, very much, and indeed had cooked it at home just a day or two ago (pictures to come, eventually), and so I jumped on the opportunity to order skate with Jean-Georges justly famous chateau chalon sauce, a classic wine reduction lightened in the usual JG style to be almost refreshing. This is a great dish.

My fiancee had veal, cooked just au point, with a veal jus reduction. Nothing surprising here, but still extremely well executed and delicious.

Wine: I have forgotten the wine, other than the fact that it was from Bergerac. A strongly tannic red which softened under the dual sauces to soft deliciousness.

Dessert: We shared "chocolate", which paired a perfectly decent molten chocolate cake with exceptionally good vanilla ice cream and a peppermint broth, which was by far the most interesting part of the dessert. I would eat the broth alone, dotted perhaps with chocolate nibs, in far greater quantity than the other two components of the dessert. It tasted of mint ice cream, somehow, yet uncluttered with the flavors of cream and eggs.

We took a brief pit stop in my office at work, to digest and jabber, and then went off to our second stop for the evening, the ever fantastic Death & Co. on east 6th street. There, after suffering in between two tables of screaming banshees (the one talking in the loudest possible voices about a topic I could not understand, and the others comparing their experiences smoking hashish), we escaped to the bar for our second drinks. There, we met Greg Boehm of Mud Puddle Books, which certainly appears to be the premier republisher of old cocktilian books in America, whose dedication to cocktails is inspiring in the way that a devotee of anything is inspiring. Talking to Greg is like talking to a great baker or cobbler or someone of that sort, all combined with an adventuresome businessman. We also took the opportunity to jabber to the bartender as he made me an Oxacaca Old Fashioned, all peat and smoke, and my fiancee her new favorite drink, a City of Gold Sling. This all led to a discussion of my father's standby cocktail, the Singapore Sling, and how recipes for that drink have shifted and modulated over the years, with changes in taste and even changes in the recipes for gins.

Two terrific tips for ordering in a cocktail bar I gathered last night:

You ought to be able to order something interesting in any bar by specifying either "dark or light" and "shaken or stirred". The first indicates to the bartender whether you want rye or whiskey or light rum or dark, or whatever. The second indicates whether you want citrus or not, as citrus based drinks are shaken. I think I am usually a dark stirred person, though I love orange in my drinks (whether as bitters or as a twist or whatever).

Second, you can always ask a bar tender to make you something from the menu for which he is responsible. As it was explained to me, if the bartender's own drink is on the menu, you're likely to get his or her best effort.

Steak

"It smells a little like a dog"?

{Sniff}

"Yes, but a tasty dog".

That was our conversation on Sunday, as my meat-splurge of the week, a 24 ounce dry aged rib eye from Christos Steakhouse, came off my grill at home. It's true that real dry aging gives meat a bit of a funk, and if you do nothing but inhale, the aroma can be a little heady (like blue cheese or a mushroom, I'd say). But cooked, the flavor is absolutely worth it.

In fact, I'm now more and more convinced that eating a steak in a restaurant is a waste of time, if what you are after is food rather than simply a convivial place to sit. As long as you have a good butcher, or some availability of really good beef (or lamb, or whatever), there is literally nothing more to cooking it than putting it in a pan or a grill on medium heat*, leaving it there for some period, and then flipping for another period of cooking. Sure, if you want, you can get fancy and baste it with butter or whatever else. But when you're dealing with a prime dry aged rib eye, that seems like a waste of time to me. And I'll take my sides over a steakhouse's anyday.

We enjoyed our steak with a $7 bottle of Three Knights merlot from Trader Joe Wine Shop. A very pleasant, drinkable, wine.

* I have given up entirely on the "get the pan/grill piping hot and sear the steak to a crisp" school of cookery (as I foreshadowed here). First, juices do not "seal", no matter how much you char the exterior. The maillard reaction flavors you want, and the thick, crunchy, crust, can be achieved without all the smoke and to-do of a piping hot pan. A medium sizzle does just as well. Second, I can get perfect medium, medium-rare with this technique, with even cooking on both sides of the meat. That's a challenge with the flamethrower technique others recommend. Third, this gives me lots of time to make a salad, while the steak is pan roasting.

** Caveat: I suppose with a thin steak, you'd still want to apply a slightly higher heat, as it might cook before you get it crusty.

Excess

I think Michael White of new hype machine restaurant Marea ought to be a little embarrased to be selling four morels stuffed with shrimp for $21 as an antipasto. Come on.

Hamburgers

We were invited to a family barbecue this past weekend, and I knew that all the Armenian holiday food bases would be covered (i.e., kebabs). But given the nature of the holiday, I decided to take some burgers and a berry tart along as well.

I'll have pictures of both eventually. For now, I'll say that I ground the meat for the burger myself from a mix of choice chuck and hangar steak. I love hangar, and it gave the resulting burgers a deeper less purely fatty taste than chuck alone. They were cooked, obviously, over coals.

The tart was just as simple. I made a quick cookie dough (3 oz flour, 3 oz butter, 2 tB ice water) rolled it out in a square and baked until golden. While it was baking, I made a simple pastry cream, or creme patissiere (any recipe will do, except that I think whole milk is essential). Once everything had cooled, I spread the cookie crust with cream, and covered the whole with semi-tart blackberries. The perfect light dessert.

Pizza

There's little I enjoy more in the world of cookery than making either bread or neapolitan pizza at home.  On Thursday, I started some pizza dough following Jim Lahey's no knead recipe,which is here.   

To be honest, the only difference between his recipe and the one I've commonly used is the long, warm, rising time and the proportion (or ratio, if we're channeling Michael Ruhlman) of water to flour.  Of course, aside from that, how's the play, Mrs. Lincoln? Those are the building blocks of true breads and doughs (i.e., ones that aren't littered with seeds and grains and nuts and raisins). 

The resulting dough is extremely difficult to handle (as Lahey himself says).  It is wet, and shaggy, like a ciabatta left to soak in a light mist.   But it produces some amazing flavor - really amazing flavor.  And yes, as the menu as Co., Lahey's pizzeria, says, "our pies are not always round."

Now if I could only get my oven and stone above 550.  

UPDATE: Yes, the picture stinks.  Blackberry, and it's rotated.  I'll fix it later.

UPDATE 2: Cheese is buffalo mozzarella.  Sauce is canned italian cherry tomatoes, garlic, basil.  None of it cooked. 

Cooking method - on a baking stone in an oven cranked up to the max for an hour prior to baking.  You are trying to duplicate a 900 degree Italian pizza oven, or at least get as close as possible.

The debate

Beyond all the anti-Cheney fear mongering, the debate between the President and former Vice President Cheney is actually very good substantively. One wishes, perhaps, that it had happened earlier.

Per Se

I have a one sided feud with Ezra Klein as it relates to food (see here and here and here and here) which can be summed up with the observation that I think he understands nothing about food or cooking or agriculture or anything at all related to eating. Underneath it all, I suspect it is my jealousy that his (I'm sure deserved) platform in political writing lets him babble nonsensically about food.

Anyway, the latest episode is here, wherein I comment on Klein's ridiculous "review" of Per Se.

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I think people’s problem with this review is not that Per Se can’t be criticized or that it can’t have an off night or whatever. Of course, a $275 meal is to be held to the highest standards, and you are free to dislike a Per Se meal.

The problem with this review is that its criticisms aren’t particularly credible. Sentences like the following, for example, do not build confidence: “My cheese course came with cold potatoes and haricot verts that tasted like something you pick up at Whole Foods and bring to a picnic”.
Well, no. There may well have been something to criticize about that dish, but that the garnishes tasted like something from Whole Foods is probably not it. It is no good to say in response that that’s how it tasted *to you*. If so, then you are either wrong, or someone had snuck me into Per Se to cook that night.

Or how about this sentence: “One of my tablemates complained that my dessert tasted like a car air freshener (I didn’t think it quite that bad — but I thought it bad)”. Again – really? That’s just not a plausible description of a Per Se dessert. It’s like someone writing that cutting taxing (sic) always produces more tax revenue and then being puzzled when people disagree.

Sietsema about Frank Bruni

I asked Tom Sietsema about Frank Bruni in a web chat. I think he's said this before, but here's the exchange in any case:

NYC: As we New Yorkers quiver gelatinously in anticipation of the new New York Times critic, do you have any valedictory words for or about Frank Bruni?

Tom Sietsema: I'm friends with Frank. He's just as funny/clever/smart in person as he is in print, and I'll miss reading his food prose. On the other hand, I can't wait to see what he has in store for us in the Times' Sunday Magazine.

Credit Card Woes

I noticed this article explaining that credit card companies may start squeezing good customers (good, meaning customers who don't use a lot of credit and who pay their bills) in order to recoup profits they're losing by being more fair to everyone else.

I understand the impulse, but this is an extremely stupid idea. Note to credit card company people - those good customers, who have cash for all their purchases but just use credit cards because it is in fact a good deal? Umm, they'll pay with a debit card.

Co.

I took a quick lunchtime trip to Company, Jim Lahey's (of Sullivan Street Bakery) pizza restaurant. I sat at the bar and had a sad little cup of water, as I am busy at work and could not afford to impair myself, and ordered the classic Margarita - tomatoes, basil, buffalo mozzarella.

The pizza is terrific, and like most people I liked the restaurant (Bruni, for example). Most important, the dough is fantastic. But if put to the question, I'd say that Motorino in Brooklyn is better, or at least I enjoyed the pizza more. What I can't tell is whether that's because Motorino has a more generous spirit (Co.'s pizzas are so small as to be a little off-putting) or because I prefered the puffier Williamsburg product, but that's my initial impression.

One pizza is not enough for lunch, although that is what I had. $14 with tax pushes the limits of acceptability.