Brasa closes: A letter from Tamara Murphy

You can read about the details here.

A 100-layer lasagna?

Believe it, folks - if you are fortunate enough to visit Del Posto restaurant in NYC, you too can eat this Italian extravaganza. The scoop:

"Three separate departments work on it," he told Slashfood. "One department makes the ragu, one makes the pasta sheets and another assembles it in giant square pans. We butter the inside of the pans and start building in them, alternating the layers of pasta and sauce, which are Bolognese, tomato marinara and a besciamella."

The only tricky part of the whole procedure is the setting process, which Ladner says can be "fickle." Skewers are used to stabilize it while it's hot and a special spatula is used to serve it.

The succulent structure is $30 a serving and also available on special tasting menus (one pricey one includes the pasta being carved and served at the dinner table by Ladner himself)."

via Slashfood

May KTC Event: A Taste of New Orleans

Our recent Kiss the Cooks event transported us directly to New Orleans for a Creole culinary extravaganza. Fortunately for all in attendance, we were able to enjoy the trip sans 99% humidity and sans that funky beer/sweat/vomit/mildew smell that assaults your nostrils you as soon as you set foot within 100 yards of the French Quarter.

Joyce and Jessica had planned an amazing New Orleans-style menu, and we had plenty to do to prepare. We met in the afternoon, and first got started on whipping up a batch of Emeril’s Essence. J&J did not have onion powder on hand for this recipe, so we decided to leave it out entirely and simply augment recipe quantities with fresh onion for the gumbo, which used this herb and spice blend. Even without the onion powder, the flavor was really wonderful, and the balance between the smoky depth of the paprika and the kick of the cayenne was very nicely calibrated.

William, bedecked in purple Mardi Gras beads, was radiant and ready for an afternoon of fun and food…

Meg steamed and shocked some asparagus and then got to work on a lovely Creole salad dressing for our asparagus and crab salad, courtesy of the Bon Ton Café (recipe to follow) Joyce previously visited in New Orleans. The zing of 2 teaspoons of horseradish played perfectly off the sweetness of the crabmeat and was really nice!

Meanwhile, on the other side of the island, our special guests Elli and Henry got right to work chopping onions…and chopping more onions…and chopping more onions…and chopping more onions. When faced with a sudden shortage of measuring cups, Joyce explained to Henry the magic of improvising: This 32-oz yogurt container holds around 4 cups.

 The intrepid duo finally managed to chop their way through the requisite 5.5 cups of onions (!) and took a well-deserved break to rest and recharge.

A veritable panel of Kissers then got started with organizing the mise en place for our 20-ingredient gumbo appetizer. We made a roux, and added some aromatics, along with the Essence, added the fish stock, and got to work on the next steps.

Next up for the gumbo was shucking 2 dozen oysters. All eyes turned helplessly to our resident marine-life expert, Rick. If he couldn’t get us out of this mess, no one could. The idea was not only to force open each stubborn bivalve, but to do so without wasting a drop of each oyster’s precious liquid.

Armed only with a butter knife and a dishtowel, the unflappable Rick got to work…

Voila!

  

Henry tried his hand…

And here’s the final product: gorgeous!

In the meantime, Anne was hard at work cleaning 6 POUNDS of kale to use as a bed for the andouille-stuffed pork tenderloin we’d be serving as our main course.

Then it was time to get started on the andouille-stuffed pork tenderloin dish…

Frank got to work on the stuffing for the pork tenderloin…

Joyce, cool as a cucumber, was not only prepared for the next daunting task at hand, she was also phenomenally stylish in the process…

Joyce fearlessly shoved a sharpening steel into the length of the pork tenderloin, and took on the challenge of stuffing it. The mantra of the moment was from the recipe itself: "The meat will stretch, the stuffing will fit, but it does take patience and effort.”

I think Joyce’s face (don’t miss Rick’s uncontainable mirth!) says it all…

 And here’s a close-up for those of you who just can’t tear your eyes away…

Joyce took a break from the excitement and showed off who she thinks may be a koi – the stubby-nosed guy in the middle here (I think)…

We tied some chicken for those preferring non-porcine vittles…

And gave chicken and pork a stunning sear…

A second cadre of Kissers began working on the Bon Ton Bread Pudding, beginning with the oh-so important step of greasing the pan, which Jessica handled with great relish…

Eggs followed…

And bread…

Then vanilla…

And the secret ingredient…

Meanwhile, back to the gumbo. A pound of shrimp needed to be cleaned and deveined…

And a pound of fish needed to be cut up…

The greens were prepared…

And the pork cooked through…

Bread pudding was baked…

The table was set…

And we were ready for dinner!

It was finally time to serve. Please excuse these horrendously sub-par photos, but here’s Emeril’s gumbo served with rice (My personal favorite, shockingly)…

Which we followed with a super-fresh asparagus and crabmeat salad, which accompanied andouille-stuffed pork tenderloin with rosemary butter glaze, served over braised greens…

And followed by our member-in-absentia Fernando’s favorite, bread pudding…

Of course we had ready accompaniment for such decadent dessert…

Gratuitous cute kitty cat shot, courtesy of Elli…

And of course we can’t leave our dear Rosie out…

So that's all, folks! We'll see you on the 19th at Damian's and Frank's place, post-naked bikers. Woo!

Naughty Roast Chicken

Naughty, maybe, but oh-so-nice! I can't wait to try this! Added bonus: I imagine I am not alone in feeling a thrill of finding a new use for a former uni-tasking object...

via The Kitchn

How much salt in a cup of salt?

WHOA! Here's a fascinating article about why it may be important to weigh it. The author of this article runs out of salt, buys a different brand than usual, and proceeds to oversalt everything. Consistently. So he does a really neat experiment, described below.

So I got out a one-cup measure and a scale, and I weighed similar volumes of Morton’s and Diamond Crystal kosher salts, plus regular table salt, generic coarse sea salt and Malden sea salt from England (included for no reason other than that I think it is the most beautiful of salts). Here’s the outcome, rounded off to the nearest five grams or eighth of an ounce (no, this is not a scientific inquiry):

• Morton’s kosher: 250 grams (8 3/4 ounces)
• Diamond Crystal kosher: 135 grams (4 3/4 ounces)
• Table salt: 300 grams (10 5/8 ounces)
• Coarse sea salt: 210 grams (7 3/8 ounces)
• Malden sea salt: 120 grams (4 1/4 ounces)
• Malden sea salt: 120 grams (4 1/4 ounces)

You can read the entire article here.

That moody shallot jam

OK everyone, I promised William I would post this recipe, which I found in a Food & Wine magazine. The end result was great, but the recipe, as-written, did not give me those results. So, here's the recipe as posted in Food & Wine, followed by my notes. Enjoy!

Shallot Jam

Makes about 1 cup

• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• 4 large shallots, thinly sliced
• 3/4 cup balsamic vinegar
• 1/3 cup light brown sugar
• Salt to taste

In a skillet, heat the oil. Add the shallots and cook over moderate heat, stirring, until softened, about 10 minutes. Add the vinegar and sugar and cook until thick and jam-like, 5 minutes or so. Season with salt.

Shawn’s notes:

I followed the recipe above which I tore out of Food & Wine magazine – it was described as an accompaniment to chicken liver mousse on toast points (Which I haven’t made yet, but doesn’t that sound yummy?).

After cooking the mixture 5 minutes, it wasn’t even close to being thick and jammy, so I just kept cooking. I cooked and I cooked, and I cooked some more, and finally we arrived at what was—I thought—the perfect consistency for a shallot jam. Thoroughly impressed with myself, I packed the savory result into a small jar, set it aside until it cooled, put the lid on tightly and then popped it into the fridge. Later, provoked by a tingle on my tongue upon remembering the tangy delight that I’d earlier put away, I ambled into the kitchen and pulled my jar of shallot jam out of the fridge. Salivary glands well-activated, I opened the jar, and, spoon in hand, I went for it.

Horror of horrors – my jam was no longer jammy. In fact, it was more accurately cement-y. Even worse, cement of the already-dried variety. My previously unctuous dream of a sweet and savory spread had turned into an inedible pot of hard oniony candy. My dreams of sharing my shallot jam delight with my KTC dearies were dashed, and now I was one snack down. What to do, what to do?

I mulled. I shook my fist at the shallot jam. I whined to Fernando. I figured I’d just toss the shallots anyway if I couldn’t think of another way to use them, so I felt up to a gamble. Just then, I remembered the caramelized onions on the second shelf of the fridge which I’d been snacking from for the past several days. Could this be the solution? Turns out, it was.

I added the caramelized onions to a small nonstick skillet, along with a few good turns of olive oil. I chipped the hardened shallot jam into the mix, and let the whole shebang warm and soften together. After a very brief simmer, I re-seasoned with a little more salt and turned off the fire. I left this mix out to cool, and found that, somehow, it didn’t appear to be in a mood to harden back up again. Success!

Moral of the story: I am not a sugar chemistry expert, but I suspect that something happened with my sugar cooking process that made a harder end product than I’d anticipated. Notes for next time, I’d try cooking lower temps and/or less time on the stove. Can’t knock the addition of the onions, though – it was really nice!

April Kiss the Cooks event - Cheese, cheese, and more cheese!

It’s hard to believe that so much time has passed since our last gathering. April’s KTC event was held at Shawn and Fernando’s house, and focused on making cheese. We met at the uncustomarily-early hour of 11am for mimosas and snacks, and after general pleasantries, settled in to discuss our game plan.

Shown here are baked kale chips, tangy Castelvetrano olives, Trader Joe’s delicious-and-surely-nutritious “Macadamias mix Gingerly with Cranberries & Almonds trek mix, beet hummus, and a fabulous shallot and caramelized onion jam (Original recipe here, but I'll post the recipe with my notes in a subsequent post).

Our project for the day? To create three cheeses: A soft goat cheese, a fresh ricotta, and a hand-stretched mozzarella made from fresh cheese curd.

Cheese’s main ingredient? Milk, of course – and boy, we had a lot of milk. We’d purchased 3 full gallons of goat’s milk from the St. John Creamery in Everett, WA (where Shawn and Fernando had the pleasure of meeting a stable-full of kids (the baby goat kind!), ranging in age from 2 days to 2 weeks!). We’d planned on purchasing the cow’s milk from Golden Glen Creamery, and ordered a week ahead at the U-District farmer’s market, but when we arrived, they had no milk for us, no suggestions about a back-up supply, and no apologies for not letting us know they wouldn’t be selling any whole milk. Fuming, we still bought 3 pounds of fresh curd from them (which we’d also pre-ordered and which they’d also forgotten, so we cleaned out their supply and they whined about us leaving them with no cheese curd), but be warned, Golden Glen Creamery – you are dead to us.

We ended up purchasing our cow’s milk from Vashon’s own Sea Breeze Farm, also in the U-District market. That guy didn’t even blink when I marched up and requested 3 gallons of milk, but the market ladies all began to gather around Fernando – he’d carried in a laundry basket to tote our milk, and found himself the focus of way more attention than he typically likes. However, we did glean some mean tips about where to find “the exact same milk” for “a whole dollar cheaper” (that tip from a lady who was flabbergasted at how we planned to drink all that milk before it went bad).

Here’s the cow milk, at the ready to be heated and curdled:


The task at hand seemed daunting, so we made sure to lighten things up before getting started on the hard work. Here’s jolly Joyce juggling:

And speaking of jug…gling…Nice jugs!

Joyce volunteered to be our in-house lemon-juicer, and didn’t flinch when we informed her we would need a minimum of 3 cups of juice.

Meanwhile, we got started heating the cow’s milk for the ricotta. We’d decided that we would make two different batches – one with an addition of heavy cream that used lemon juice as the acid, and another with no additional cream using white vinegar as the acid.

Slowly heating 3 gallons of milk (1.5 gallons in each stockpot!) is a task for the patient, and here you can see we had quite some time to go to reach 165 degrees.

Meanwhile, Joyce was giving that darned lemon press a whuppin,’ and her grand efforts paid off. If you ever wanted to know what two cups of lemon juice looks like, well, here it is!

When we first added the lemon juice to the cheese, it looked a bit like we’d added an egg, sort of stringy and generally yucky looking.

After a few moments, however, the actual curds began to appear—no less appetizing-looking, to be sure, but exciting proof of progress on our cheese-making journey nonetheless.

A few more minutes passed, and the curds continued to set up.

We poured the whey of this half-batch (lemon with added heavy cream) off to drain some of the curds:

Meg brought a cheese mold she had purchased in Greece some years before, and we decided to put it to the test. Essentially a large metal can with slits cut around the sides and bottom for drainage, we poured in the other half of the curds from this batch to drain just like somebody’s YaYa would have done.

Here you can really see how nicely the curds have formed and are draining:

The vinegar batch (made without any addition of cream) had only about half the yield of the other lemony-and-creamy batch, and with much smaller curds. I think you can tell in this photo:

No matter, we tied it up and left it to drain just the same.

Meanwhile, the goat milk was heating for our goat milk cheese recipe, and here, we are almost to 180 degrees.

Once the milk reached temperature, we added our 2 cups of lemon juice…

And immediately began to observe the results as the curd separated from the whey.

After a few minutes, we poured the curds into a giant cheesecloth-lined bowl to drain.

While that was going on, we checked the progress of our ricotta cheese, now a ball of pillowy goodness. If you stare at it long enough, you’ll think you see that caricature of the old lady with the big witchy chin who turns into a beautiful young maiden demurely averting her eyes if you look a different way. Other finds include a guy giving a thumbs-up, a nude back, and a duck.

Lastly, we worked on stretching the mozzarella cheese. We adapted two different recipes: Murray’s (which I found on Serious Eats) and the one I found on Kiss My Spatula. We slowly heated cheese curd by pouring ever-hotter water over it.

Once acclimated to the warmer temperatures, we stretched the curds in very hot water (between 160 and 170 degrees). Our friendly dentist Fernando had hooked us up with a box of nitrile gloves, which was a darn good thing since even with 3 layers of gloves on, that water was REALLY hot!

The idea was to stretch the cheese into twisty ropes, manipulating it enough just to improve elasticity, but not enough to make it tough. Here’s some shots of our first attempt:




Well, hi!

And, well, it actually resembles cheese! Pretty tasty, too!

Fernando and Rick tried (and burned!) their hands as well:


And Shawn finished up, impatiently forming what appears to be a small baby from the giant twisty mass of stretched curd:

In the background, some savory work was going on to create three flavors of goat cheese: garlic, truffle oil, and cumin. I expected the garlic to be my favorite, but loved the truffle variety.

Some of our Kissers ventured out to make ricotta ice cream. We learned two things: the Italian amaro digestive Strega is a “love it or hate it” kind of product, and Shawn’s food processor sounds like a garage-dwelling power tool when you turn it on. We ended up taking the food processor outside onto the balcony to try and mitigate the damage to everyone’s ears. Ice cream was made and put into the freezer.

Meanwhile, we set out to make a tomato sauce (loosely adapted from the Tomato Sauce recipe in the Moosewood Cookbook). Once the sauce had reduced nearly enough for us to stand a spoon up in it, we assembled a fabulous lasagna: our own fresh ricotta and mozzarella cheeses, our delicious homemade sauce, and fresh lasagna noodles from Pasta & Co. Lasagna in the oven, we assembled a simple watercress salad and vinaigrette, and pan-fried some panko-coated goat cheese fritters to serve on top.

Finally, after hours of work, dinner was ready. Look at those anticipatory faces!

The watercress and toasted walnut salad, with goat cheese fritter:

And, our magical lasagna, which made each and every one of us wonder aloud why we never, ever order or prepare lasagna:

Next up, Joyce and Jessica’s place this Saturday for a Cajun-cuisine extravaganza! Can’t wait to see you all!