Toby
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Posts posted by Toby
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My understanding is that a dark roux is required for gumbo, and certainly every gumbo I've had in Louisiana has been pretty dark. This is where I've had difficulty -and thanks, Toby, for the Prudhomme tip. I stir and stir and stir and never getting anything which loks much darker than a digestive biscuit. Even John's "golden brown" sounds a little light - will you get a really dark gumbo from that? So eahc of my attempts at gumbo has ended up as a pale - minstrone, indeed - colored soup which I've had to call something else.
Toby: how dark does the Prudhomme roux get?
Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen cookbook has color photos of light-brown roux (the only one not made over high heat -- kind of blonde), medium-brown roux (caramel colored), dark red-brown roux (bitter chocolate), and the black roux (black).
I've only once been brave enough to get it black, usually I'm between dark brown and black. In a sense the high-heat method is like stir-frying -- you have to have everything right there, all ready, don't answer phone, door. I modify his recipe somewhat, I turn the heat down incrementally as the roux darkens; I've never burned it that way, although it takes a few minutes more, but it's all over in 10 minutes.
Prudhomme's first two books -- Louisiana Kitchen and the Prudhomme Family Cookbook -- are extraordinary. Beyond the step-by-step roux instructions, there are recipes for Roasted Duck with Duck Rice and Sweet Potato Eggplant Gravy, Sweet Potato-Pecan Pie, great Banana Bread, coush-coush, Louisiana doughnuts, corn and chicken maque choux, great potato salad, variety of roasted pork.... The only thing I really disagree with him about is his use of converted rice, but the recipes work fine with real rice.
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The best thing about gumbos is that their are almost no rules, except for "first you make your roux." Howard Mitcham in Creole Gumbo and All That Jazz calls the roux the "soul essence of most Creole-Cajun cooking." He says that "some of the things it does are almost metaphysical." Without a roux, it's not gumbo.
When I first started making gumbo, I did a slow-cooked roux that took forever and never got dark enough. Then I read Prudhomme's recipe in his Louisiana Kitchen cookbook -- he does a high heat method that takes him about 5 minutes; I cook it a little slower, about 8 minutes. (His book has very detailed directions.)
Prudhomme says that "light and medium-brown roux are used in sauces or gravies for dark, heavy meats such as beef, with game such as elk and venison, and with dark-meat fowl such as duck, geese.... Dark red-brown and black roux are used in sauces and gravies for sweet, light, white meats such as pork, rabbit, veal and all kinds of freshwater and saltwater fish and shellfish ... black roux are best to use in gumbos because the darkest roux results in the thinnest, best-tasting gumbos." Black rouxs are scary to make, and I cheat a little by cooking the roux until it's very dark brown and then adding the onions and spices and stirring for a minute or two more; by then it's pretty dark. I then turn off the heat and cover the pan for 10 minutes or so before adding the roux to simmering stock. I use a lot of very hot African bird cayenne powder and white pepper, but no black pepper and no green bell pepper.
I used to make gumbo using file powder (once I used okra), but now I just use the roux for thickening. You also need a good, flavorful stock.
I've made seafood (shrimp and crab) gumbo, chicken and andouille gumbo, dried and fresh shrimp gumbo with hard boiled eggs, duck and hot smoked pheasant sausage gumbo, turkey neck gumbo, and rooster gumbo with andouille. For the last few years, the gumbo I make most often is chicken feet and hot smoked sausage (andouille, smoked pheasant or venison) with hard boiled eggs. The egg yolks mushed into the dark, flavorful gravy are luscious. I once made crawfish bisque (which is pretty close to gumbo), but that was a long, drawn out process.
Roux is also the base of dirty rice, but you can also just use leftover gumbo as the base.
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I asked Rick L., the chef at Ilo (and former chef at the River Cafe), how he'd done his fried Ipswich clams when he was at the Cafe. He told me he'd soaked them in milk, and then dredged them in a mix that included johnnycake meal. (There's a similar recipe in Jasper White's Cooking from New England.) Rick served them with aioli, and they were wonderful. The clams haven't been on the menu at Ilo, but as we were talking about them, he got very enthusiastic and said he was going to call his suppliers in New England and try to have them on the menu within a week.
Larry Forgione has a recipe for Ipsich clams in his cookbook, An American Place, and there's a recipe for Gage & Tollner's clam bellies, both fried and broiled, in Molly O'Neill's New York Cookbook.
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... Windfall Farms. I also bought some striking red salad leaves from them, which turned out to be too strongly flavored - almost a citrus flavor. What the heck were they?
Were they amaranth? I got some this summer, didn't like the raw taste, so sauteed them in oil with a little ginger, garlic, dried chile, and they were better. (If amaranth, there's a discussion somewhere about them.)
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What about that rice they use to make sticky rice in Southeast Asia? You could probably get that in Japan, and it might have starchy properties like Arborio. Just a guess.
The rice used for sticky rice in southeast Asia is really a long grain glutinous rice, very narrow. The glutinous rice used in China is shorter and stubbier and might give an approximation. I used to cook something out of Lin's Chinese Gastronomy called "Rich Glutinous Rice" -- you saute scallions in some oil, add soaked dried shrimp, saute, add soaked dried mushrooms and soy sauce and saute, add some sliced pork and a little more soy sauce and saute, and then add the rice and stir until the grains are evenly covered. Then add liquid, bring to boil, cover pan and cook over low heat for about 20 minutes or so. The rice ends up with a similar, but not quite, consistency to risotto.
Carol Fields has a great chapter on rice in Italy in Celebrating Italy. She has a recipe for riso alla pilota (rice in the style of rice winnowers), which is preferably made with Vialone Nano. The method is interesting -- water is brought to a boil, salt added, and then the rice is dropped very slowly through a parchment cone into the center of the pan, with the point sticking up above the water. When the water returns to a boil, the pan is shaken so that the rice spreads over the bottom of the pot, The rice is cooked, uncovered, over very low heat until the water is absorbed, then covered, and left to sit for a while. Then, ground pork tenderloin and pancetta or a soft salami and fresh sausage is sauteed in a lot of butter and some garlic and lots of black pepper. The meats are mixed in with the rice and a lot of grated Parmesan cheese. The texture is different from risotto, but this is completely addictive. (Amounts of fat and cheese can be lowered, but the more fat the better it is.)
Fields also mentions two other Piedmont dishes using arborio -- paniscia, made with borlotti beans, salami and vegetable broth, and panissa using Saluggia beans and meat or bean broth. Essentially, rice and beans.
She also has a great recipe for a one-pot dish of chicken, arborio or carnaroli rice, onions, fresh mushrooms, tomatoes and balsamic vinegar that is a little like arroz con pollo -- the chicken cooks in the same pot as the rice, which slowly becomes risotto.
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When I was a little girl, my father and I used to fish for blowfish at Long Beach, Sag Harbor. When you reel them in, they puff up -- I remember being morbidly fascinated by them, but they were delicious. My mother cooked them exactly as you do. We used to eat them with fresh corn on the cob.
There's a fish stand at the Union Square Greenmarket on Mondays (not sure of other days) that sometimes has blowfish.
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Does Ilo (not a shack) serve them? Their chef was at River Cafe before moving to Ilo -- the ones at River Cafe were wonderful; have they really taken them off the menu? Might any of the other restaurants owned by River Cafe's owner have them?
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Chicken braised with figs, chestnut honey and balsamic apple cider.
Small new potatoes with butter
Marvel striped tomato salad
Ricotta cheese mixed with sugar and rum
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Glad you mentioned the Strauss Family butter. It really is everything butter should be.
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Yuet Lee on Stockton and Broadway(?) in San Francisco Chinatown. Cantonese. Their salt and pepper squid is wonderful; also, village style braised duck.
Edit to get back on topic: This place is beyond casual, maybe go for lunch.
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Thanks for reminding me of this place, Sandra. I haven't eaten there in some time, but I had (I think) the risotto with prosciutto and cheese and it was pretty good. Now that I can actually imagine cooler weather and even winter, it's a good place to keep in mind, especially lunch when shopping on Bleecker Street and neighborhood -- Faicco's (which carries a delicious line of inexpensive dried pasta called Di Nola and also has sausage casings), Florence Butcher, Ottomanelli's, Murray's cheese shop...
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All this talk about the concentrated essence of food minus its usual bulk and texture got me to musing about the ability to “think” in tastes.
... I was trying to decide what to prepare for dinner: a simple stir-fry, a soupy chili, something really queer with a cheese-thickened wine sauce? I realized that I was imagining the taste, tongue, tooth, and mouth feel of each of dish as I thought of it -- not just intellectualizing that I really don’t like jalapeno cheese, for example, but actually, kind of, more or less, sort of tasting it. I’m an adequate cook at best, but this seems a useful trait, and I was wondering whether it’s common, especially among the food-obsessed.
Yes, I've always wondered how that works, particularly in how we understand how our palates work. Is it a computation in our brains of taste memory/experience and imagination/intuition? And how much of this stimulates appetite and/or satisfies hunger?
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Tomato Figs -- this doesn't belong here, but there is the fig association, and the cake recipe would probably be good with real figs instead of the tomato figs.
Tomato figs are an old American recipe for plum (roma) tomatoes -- you scald and remove the skins of 3 lbs. tomatoes; put in a big heavy pan in one layer, strew 1-1/2 lbs. sugar over them and let them sit for a little while until the juices start to run. Then cook slowly until the sugar penetrates and they look clarified, rolling them over to cook evenly, about 20-30 minutes. With slotted spoon, remove from syrup and place on wire rack over baking sheet and put in oven at lowest possible heat. Dry in oven for about 8 hours, turning them occasionally to dry evenly. Pack in jars with layers of sugar in between.
Then, what I do with them is cut a few into small dice and add them to a sort of poundcake (2-1/4 cups flour, 6 egg yolks, 1 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, handful of golden raisins soaked in dark rum, handful of toasted, roughly chopped walnuts, chopped orange zest, a little salt. Cream butter and sugar together, add flour, add egg yolks, raisins, rum, zest; add tomatoes and walnuts; bake in small loaf pan at 325 degrees for about 1-1/2 hours, having brushed top with a little reserved egg yolk.
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The beets, greens and peaches, all from the market were delicious, especially the beets. I can't remember the order in which we drank the wine, except the Ridge was last; we never opened the syrah (good thing, too). The cast iron pans are Griswold, made in Erie, PA, I think the best ever made in U.S. I got them years ago in thriftstores, already seasoned, and they've stayed perfectly seasoned with no special care.
Thanks to everyone (especially Soba, who was a delight to cook with) for coming and helping. It was so much fun.
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The Southeast Asian stores in Chinatown have very heavy clay ones that work great -- they're very deep so things don't fly out at you. Also, the Mexican ones made of volcanic stuff are good, although you have to season them first.
Mortar and pestle is fun to make aioli in, adding oil drop by drop. Also fun to make Thai curry pastes, pounding everything up, or pounding roasted garlic and chiles for salsa.
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Steven, I agree with you about the quality of Zito's and Parissi's breads, except for the lard/prosciutto bread. (D&G used to make proscuitto rolls and also cheese rolls that were so wonderful.)
I lived in Northern California for a long time. At first, in the late 70s, early 80s, there was no good bread, and I was forced to learn to bake my own. But then I found Acme bread, which is just a beautiful bread, particularly the levain. Also, Tassajara (before it was bought up, or whatever happened to it) used to make a wonderful potato bread. And yet, no one there ever could do a good prosciutto or lard (tortano, I think is the name) bread. Il Fornaio did one on the weekends that was pretty good (they also do (did?) a very good semolina bread in a great shape), but too polite.
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Sullivan Street filone
Parissi's (Mott betwn Spring & Kenmare) lard bread (also available at DiPaolo's)
Zito's prosciutto bread (like the lard bread but not as dark and oily)
Ecce Panis used to make an Irish soda bread that was great; don't know if they still do
Eli's batard
(D&G made the best bread. I still can't believe they're not there anymore.)
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Yes but with E-Fu noodles you have to deep-fat-fry them, so it's a godawful mess.
Cooking can be messy.
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That procedure is known as: Not worth the trouble!
It's fun to make noodles.
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... E Fu noodles too. They have enough body to not become gluey with the sauce.
Anyone have any ideas about how to make E Fu noodles from scratch?
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Priscilla, large format paperback companion to the PBS series. That's it.
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Toby, thanks for that. Different book than I had--the recipe I followed had chili and garlic and ginger, as I recall. Such a good dish, in many variations.
Maybe it was the recipe in Ken Hom's Chinese Cookery for Cold Spicy Noodles? Sesame paste (or peanut butter), chili powder, garlic, chili oil, light and dark soy sauce, sesame oil, chili bean sauce, ginger, salt and sugar, blended together, not cooked. Tossed with boiled dried or fresh egg noodles, tossed with sesame oil and chopped scallions.
I really have too many of Ken Hom's cookbooks. The one I gave away was sort of a fusion cookbook with recipe for wontons stuffed with goat cheese.
Gumbo
in Cooking
Posted
There's a wonderful story in the old Time-Life book American Cooking: Creole and Acadian (text by Peter S. Fiebleman) about two cooks (also sisters-in-law) fighting over the correct way to cook gumbo (file or okra, meat and seafood, or seafood "maigre"), and having a cook-off, cooking side-by-side and shouting insults at each other all the while.
Fiebleman wrote: "It was a battle that grew out of an important, though often forgotten rule of New Orleans cooking. ... There is no one way to do anything -- or, to put it differently, there are at least 200 ways to do everything. A gumbo is a gumbo in much the way that a snowflake is a snowflake or a fingerprint is a fingerprint. ... South Louisiana cooking is inventive -- it had to be, or it wouldn't have invented itself."