Russelnod.com

Down a short dirt road in Conway is the home of Annie Cheatham and Ann Gibson, prize-winning canners. In 2006, seven of the 14 items they entered in the Franklin County Fair won ribbons. In 2007, 17 entries produced seven ribbons, including Best in Show. The ribbons hang in their kitchen, a testimonial to their expertise.

Annie Cheatham grew up in a small North Carolina town near Raleigh. Her father gardened, her mother canned, and Cheatham helped both. They also froze produce, storing it in a community freezer at the local plant that produced Smithfield-style country hams. Cheatham still uses some of her family’s recipes.

Ann Gibson’s mother canned and Gibson says she learned to hate it because it was a chore that she had to do. Her dad made jams and they would freeze some food as well, but she didn’t really can until she and Cheatham became a couple. They met in Washington, D.C., where they both worked for the government, and moved here in 1981. Gibson, a sculptor and artist, now works for Berkshire-Pioneer Resource Conservation and Development, a nonprofit. She and Cheatham started Annie’s Garden Store in Amherst in 1990, then sold that when Cheatham became director in 2000 of CISA, Community Involved in Supporting Agriculture, in South Deerfield. Cheatham has since stepped down and is looking around for her next project.

Both women have always been attuned to the connections among growing, storing and eating food. Their garden store sold a line of about 20 pickles, chutneys and preserves, including an orange marmalade with rosemary that I am sorry I missed. My wife was a big fan of Annie’s Garden products and we ate the dilly beans regularly. Cheatham’s work at CISA provided a tight link between local farmers and the community.

Last summer, I wrote an article about freezing foods instead of canning, mostly due to my fear of accidentally poisoning myself and my family. Later, at a CISA event, I learned that Gibson and Cheatham were prize-winning canners, and I decided they’d be an excellent resource in getting over my fear of canning.

So, several weeks ago, over cucumber and Jerusalem artichoke pickles, they walked me through the process. One thing that struck me was their canning records. They have a record of each batch, with notes on recipes, processing times, etc. Often, when I asked a specific question, they’d consult the notebook. The women also swear by “Putting Food By,” by Ruth Hertzberg, Beatrice Vaughan and Janet Greene, calling it their bible. “It has the best explanation of how to do it carefully and properly,” Gibson said. “A great book, well-organized.” They have a stack of other canning books, including the “Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving,” and a dozen church and regional cookbooks that they use for recipes.

One key component of canning is time. “You need to have the time to do it,” Gibson explained. “There’s no way to rush it.” They had about a half-bushel of carrots in their garden that they estimated would take three hours to clean, peel, cut, pack and can. While they are busy during the end of summer and early autumn, the results are impressive. Last year they canned 288 jars. Except for olive oil, balsamic vinegar and wheat flour, they are pretty much able to live on what they’ve canned.

Canning uses heat to kill bacteria and a vacuum to seal them out. Foods that are high in acids, such as most fruits and pickles, can be heated in a water bath to kill bacteria and to create the vacuum. Low-acid foods, such as sauces and salsas, need to be heated in a pressure cooker to achieve the right conditions. I remember reading a story about a very proper maiden aunt who became tipsy after eating several helpings of grape jelly that had fermented while sitting in the pantry. In reality, the most likely outcome of that situation would not have been very funny. “You can’t be cavalier,” advises Cheatham. “Don’t use old mayonnaise jars. And, if the lid doesn’t come off with a nice pop when you go to use it, dump the contents.”

For proper water-bath canning, you’ll need a canning kettle and tongs, and wire baskets for lowering the jars into the bath. Use good Ball canning jars and new rings and lids. Discard any jars that are chipped or use them for dry foods that are not preserved. Don’t reuse the lids, since a used lid might not make a tight seal.

When you are cooling processed jars, they should make a strong popping sound when the lid contracts as the vacuum forms. Also, when you get a jar from the pantry, examine it. A lid with a tight seal should be concave. A lid with a strong seal should also pop when you open it. If something doesn’t seal after canning, you can put it in the refrigerator and use it within a couple of weeks. But with jars that have spent six months in the pantry, anything that doesn’t open with the requisite pop goes into Cheatham and Gibson’s compost heap.

Speaking of compost, not everything has turned out well over the years. Their sauerkraut and kim chee are examples of efforts that were, as Cheatham puts it, “not successful.”

The two have canned almost everything that grows in their gardens, pickling cucumbers, string beans, beets, Jerusalem artichokes, green tomato relish and carrots. They like to make mixed-fruit preserves, combining low-acid and high-acid fruits – strawberries and currants, gooseberries and grapes, peaches and currants – or simply pairing natural combos like blueberries and peaches. They like preserves, which are more like chutneys and are less fussy than jams or jellies. They use a lot of lemon and sugar to bring the natural pectin out. They also include a lot of ginger in their preserves because they like the taste. Cheatham’s applesauce also has a distinctive touch: honey or maple syrup for sweetening and a stick of butter added to the simmering sauce.

The produce from their garden is organic and their blueberries are unsprayed. They only buy organic lemons, grapefruits and oranges for their marmalade since they use the peels. For other ingredients, they are more flexible. They don’t consider organic produce essential, but they do choose produce that has been sprayed only minimally.

Gibson ends our conversation by mentioning that she finds it satisfying to take a quart of canned tomatoes in February and make salsa or soup using other frozen or dried produce from their garden. As I gather my notes and finish off the last of the artichoke pickles, I comment that it’s easy to eat locally in August and September. The hard part is the rest of the year. Annie Cheatham smiles. “If canning was part of your tradition, try again to pass it on. It feels good to be able to provide for yourself in other seasons of the year.”

Originally published, Daily Hampshire Gazette, Friday, August 29, 2008

If all you know of beets is the vinegary purple disks that grace every salad bar in the country, you might be forgiven for thinking poorly of them. In Europe, beets were grown because they kept well over the winter and could be fed to cows, associating them with poverty. But properly cooked, they are a delight, and the new yellow and striped varieties don’t even stain.

I always liked beets, even the pickled variety. My grandparents ate borscht, which is a deep purple beet soup that turns shocking pink once you add sour cream. I have to say that the color turned me off and I never tried it. I haven’t had an opportunity to taste it as an adult, but I’d probably like it.

There are a number of varieties of beets in addition to the deep purple ones you probably know. The sugar beet is an important source of white sugar, second only to sugar cane. Yellow and striped beets are pretty common in farmers markets these days. There is an organic compound, geosmin, that adds an “earthy taste” to beets that is stronger in the non-purple varieties, making the purple ones the best for sweetness.

The most common ways to prepare beets are boiling and roasting. I’ve always boiled them: Cut the greens off the beet, leaving about a half-inch of stem. Wash the outsides well, but don’t peel them or cut off the roots or the beets will “bleed” into the cooking water. Simmer until the beets can be pierced with a skewer with just a slight resistance. This can take between 20 minutes and an hour, depending on the size of the beet and how many you are cooking. Let them cool, then slide the skin off, cut off the ends, and you are ready to go. The skin of a cooked beet can be rubbed off pretty easily. Recalcitrant pieces can be taken off with a vegetable peeler.

As for roasting, virtually every recipe I’ve seen calls for wrapping the beets in foil and baking them for an hour. To me, this is more steaming than baking. Boiling takes less time and doesn’t seem to affect the taste. Just recently, my friend Jess Thomson, a recipe developer and food writer in Seattle, opened my eyes to roasted beets. She cuts the beets into chunks, adds a little olive oil and sherry vinegar, and bakes them in a hot oven for about 45 minutes. They cook nicely, taking on a really good roasted flavor. She doesn’t even bother to peel the beets if they are small and tender. It looks especially appealing if you mix the beets, having an array of purple, striped and yellow pieces. Take a look at her blog, Hogwash, for recipes as well as some acerbic wit.

I’ve also seen recipes for raw grated beet and carrot salad. I tried using striped beets, which did not give a good flavor, so I’d suggest purple beets since they are sweeter. Beet carpaccio is also a popular item on menus these days. Beef carpaccio is thinly sliced raw beef topped with olive oil, arugula and Parmesan shavings. Beet carpaccio takes cooked beets, slices them thin and serves them with a salad and sharp cheese. The thin slices and the garnishes seem the only thing the two have in common.

When you buy beets, they usually come with the greens attached, which is a great bonus. The greens were once sold as red chard (chard, by the way, is a variety of beet that is bred for its leaves rather than its root). The day you bring the beets home, cut off the greens, leaving about a half inch of stem attached to the beet root. The greens are usually gritty so wash them really well and shake them dry. Then wrap them in a paper towel, place them in a plastic bag and put it in the refrigerator. You have a couple of days to cook the greens, either alone or in combination with any of the dozen other greens available this time of year. Saute a clove or two of sliced garlic in olive oil in a large frying pan, then cut the greens into ribbons and add them to the pan with a splash of water. Cover and let steam for 5 minutes, until the greens are wilted. Remove the cover from the pan and let them dry for a minute or two, then serve with vinegar or hot sauce. If you want to get elaborate, add them to a gumbo z’herbes, a green gumbo that typically contains seven types of green. It is traditionally meatless, but a smoked ham hock or some andouille sausage picks the taste right up.

Cooked beets last for a while in the fridge. Add sliced or diced beets to a salad or cook them into a side dish. My daughter-in-law Katie makes a great beet and spinach salad that is richly colored and easy to make year-round. In France, it seems that every open-air market and supermarket has cooked, peeled beets packed in plastic for sale with the other vegetables. They are often used in a salad composée, a plate with small piles of various julienned vegetables, drizzled with vinaigrette.

Two traditional New England beet dishes are Harvard Beets and Red Flannel Hash. Whether Harvard Beets actually originated at Harvard is something for the food historian, but they are essentially cooked beets simmered in a sweet and sour sauce. I used to make them a lot, but no one really liked them so I’ve graduated to an orange sauce that meets with approval. One food historian says that this version is called “Yale Beets” but I think that’s stretching it a little.

To make Red Flannel Hash, chop a mixture of cooked corned beef, potatoes and beets - the leftovers from last night’s boiled dinner - and sauté them together. The beets stain the hash, giving it its name. My friend Jeff, who has spent 20 years eating his way around New England, once ordered Red Flannel Hash only to be served canned hash with beets on the side. When he inquired, the waiter told him they put the beets on the side because they made the hash red.

Beets and orange have a great affinity for each other. I have made recipes that alternate beet and orange slices in a rosewater-flavored vinaigrette and they make a nice presentation. Assemble the salad at the last minute to avoid the beets staining the orange. If you have any orange dust lying around, sprinkle it on some beets, either cold or warmed in butter, for a great flavor.

Recipes:

Jess Thomson’s Roasted Beets

Beet and Spinich Salad

Beets in Orange Sauce

Originally printed Daily Hampshire Gazette, July 25, 2008

I was talking to a friend about salt and perhaps I got a little carried away. My friend, Eric Green Greene, runs Treasure Mountain Mining, a mail order web site and E-bay crystal seller. He asked whether I wanted any halide halite crystals and mentioned that he had a few. I asked him to send me some pictures that I could use and the attached ones are some of what he sent.

On the upper right is a crystal from Argentina (don’t know if it’s that red in real life) [Eric says that it’s shown under short-wave ultraviolet light, so I guess it isn’t that red in real life]. On the left is a Halide Halite crystal from Germany and on the right is are Salt Crystals from California. If your love of salt extends to objects d’art, take a look. Of course, you’ll need a sign: Look, don’t lick.

[I must have gotten carried away because Eric sent me a bunch of corrections. Sorry Eric.]

Mark Bitterman, selmelier (think sommelier for salt), is trying to conduct a salt tasting for 30 food writers, chefs and other culinary professionals gathered for a symposium at The Greenbrier, a West Virginia resort. It’s long after dinner and the writers are in full party mode, making this an extremely difficult audience. But Bitterman smiles shyly and continues his disquisition, waving a bottle of fleur de sel.

As food professionals, we’re all way beyond iodized table salt. Boxes of kosher salt fill our pantries and flavor our recipes. But are we ready to abandon kosher salt, as Bitterman advises, in favor of a good sea salt?

Since this is an improvised tasting, there are no vegetables or bread and butter on which to taste the salt. Instead, a volunteer passes through the crowd, spooning a tiny pile of salt on the side of each attendee’s fist in a manner reminiscent of other parties, a fact not lost on the crowd. A waiter circulates with bottles of water.

As we work our way through the salts, Bitterman describes, and we taste and ask questions. Since most finishing salt comes in larger crystals, one cookbook author wonders, “What about baking?” There is a ground fleur de sel, Bitterman answers. “If you could only pick one salt, which one would it be?” asks an editor. Bitterman points out the Fleur de Sel de Guerande from the Loire-Atlantique region of France.

Try as I might, it’s going to take a far better palate than my own to distinguish the minerals among the various salts. They seem mostly to vary in the shape of their crystals, which affects the intensity of their saltiness.

Bitterman moves on to the specialty salts: Turkish black salt, mixed with a touch of charcoal; smoked salts, dried over smoky wood fires; and an amazing truffle salt, containing small pieces of truffle that have infused the salt with an intense woodsy flavor. “That’s the one for scrambled eggs,” observe several authors almost at once.

Kosher salt is made for kashering, the process which draws blood from meat. It is 100 percent dry and absorbs moisture more rapidly than the moist sea salts. Bitterman recommends avoiding it in favor of a good sea salt. A number of chefs, no doubt thinking of the cases of kosher salt in their pantries and the cost of sea salt, seem reluctant to throw away their kosher stash. However, we all agree that a good finishing salt belongs on the table.

The next morning, I wake with a tongue that feels like the Bonneville Salt Flats and a newfound respect for salt.

Salt, the only mineral we eat in its raw form, is a simple chemical compound, sodium chloride. Both sodium and chlorine are essential for proper body functioning. Our bodies lose salt daily, through tears and perspiration, and we need to replenish it. There’s an old story about 18th-century bread recipes: They did not call for salt, because enough sweat dripped from the kneader onto the dough. In recent years, salt has been linked to high blood pressure and limiting salt intake has become something of a fetish. The culinary writer Jeffrey Steingarten, a contrarian to the last, has cited studies that seem to vindicate salt and instead blame fat and lack of exercise for health problems. Try telling that to Attila the Dietitian, my wife, for whom salt is only slightly less poisonous than arsenic.

Salt is hygroscopic — that is, it draws moisture out of plant and animal tissue. It also slows the rotting process long enough for the bacteria responsible for fermentation to grow, which is why salt preserves foods. Virtually every culture in history has used salt to preserve vegetables, fish and meat and created condiments with high salt content (soy sauce, fish sauce, the Roman garum, to name a few). What would prosciutto, herring, Maryland crab boils, bacalau, kim chee, sauerkraut, pickles, soy sauce or Tabasco be without salt? The Egyptians used natron, a naturally occurring mixture of sodium bicarbonate, sodium carbonate and sodium chloride, in the mummification process, although cut-rate mummies were preserved using only sodium chloride. If you are interested, I recommend Mark Kurlansky’s book “Salt” for a detailed look at its history.

In the earliest days of the planet, moisture washed away the soluble minerals which collected in depressions of exposed rocks. As the oceans formed, water evaporated, but the dissolved minerals stayed. Sodium chloride was among the most common of these minerals, and the oceans became increasingly salty over time. In fact, one method used to estimate when amphibians evolved is to measure the salt content of their blood and calculate when the ocean was that salty.

Sometimes parts of the ocean became blocked and evaporated, leaving salt deposits. Sometimes brine was forced from underground up into cracks in the rock, where it evaporated and left salt domes. Oceans, mines and domes are the sources of most of the salt we use.

The process for making salt from brine is essentially the same everywhere. You find a naturally occurring source of salt water — the ocean, a salt marsh, a brine spring — and evaporate it. As the water is reduced, the salt crystals form on the sides and the bottom of the container. The crystals are then raked into piles and removed.

When salt evaporates in ponds, most of it sinks to the bottom since brine is heavier than freshwater. In France, this salt often picks up traces of clay from the lining of the salt ponds, giving it a grayish color and a mineral taste. This salt is called sel gris, gray salt. Some salt evaporates as crystals that float on the surface of the ponds. This salt remains white and is called fleur de sel, flower of salt.

Much sea salt, such as Maldon salt, is evaporated in a series of basins that use the same principle as a maple syrup evaporator. Early settlers denuded Cape Cod’s forests to make the salt used to preserve codfish until 1776, when John Sears built a salt works that used the sun to evaporate the water. Windmills provided the power to pump the brine into evaporation trays.

Salt mines, which contain a layer of salt from prehistoric sources, are often mined like any other ore. Sometimes the salt is dissolved in water, with the brine then pumped to the surface, where it is evaporated.

AFTER ATTENDING THE TASTING at The Greenbrier, I decided to conduct one of my own. I bought a starter set of finishing salts from Bitterman, who with his wife runs The Meadow, a salt, chocolate, wine and flower shop (www.atthemeadow.com) in Portland, Ore. I added the Hawaiian red salt I’ve been using for a couple of years, plus some other locally obtained sea and smoked salts. My wife set out tiny salt dishes and we spooned out 12 salts, plus slices of cucumber, tomato, and bread and butter.

As we progressed, I served grilled chicken thighs, baked potatoes and salad. For dessert, we had a selection of chocolate-covered caramels provided by some friends in the chocolate business, Cocoapelli Chocolates (www.cocoapellichocolates.com).

The results were interesting. People gravitated toward the French sea salts, especially the Fleur de Sel de Guerande and to the Maldon salt, an English sea salt with large flat crystals. Bitterman had rhapsodized about crunching Maldon salt on a salad or a piece of roast chicken. Previously, the only salt crystals I’d crunched had been on pretzels, not an entirely pleasant experience. I can say that Maldon crystals are much more delicate and that, yes, crunching Maldon salt on a salad or a piece of grilled meat is delightful.

Both the Maldon and a lightly smoked Halon Mon Gold were amazing on the caramels, especially the soft runny ones. See the tasting notes on this blog, Salt Tasting Notes.

The consensus seemed to be that finishing salts do vary enough to make the search for one you like worthwhile. The more fun salts added a nice note to the table.

For mail order, look at The Meadow’s Web site, which offers around 50 kinds of salt, including a slab of Himalayan pink salt that you heat in the oven and cook on directly. Locally, Whole Foods in Hadley has a nice array of finishing salts at the cheese counter and Cooks Shop Here in Northampton also has a good selection (I recommend the Iburi Jio, a heavily smoked Japanese salt).

Some salt-related suggestions:

Never use table salt because it is mixed with aluminum anti-caking agents and the crystals are too small. Use a crystal salt — sea salt, gray salt or, yes, kosher salt — for salting food while cooking or at the table.

Toss shrimp with a tablespoon of salt and let sit for an hour before cooking to revive the sea taste.

Toss salt on grilling chicken or steak for a simple yet powerful flavoring.

Dress a delicate summer green salad with a couple of tablespoons of good olive oil (I use an oil pressed with blood oranges), a splash or two of balsamic and a sprinkling of Maldon salt.

Try various salts on cut tomatoes.

Sprinkle a smoked salt on potato salad or grilled corn.

Don’t omit desserts from the list. My father has always sprinkled salt on his watermelon, and adding salt to chocolate or caramel has become a trendy dessert of late.

Recipes

Ma La Shrimp

Homemade Hot Sauce

Cucumber Salad

Orginally published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, May 30, 2008.

Of course, my inital goals of all six of us tasting each salt in turn, making trenchant observations, and moving on, collapsed early in the tasting when everyone went for the flavored salts and then started tasting randomly. In another life, I will be able to grill chicken thighs and try them with table, kosher, maldon, and sea in order to really taste the differences. I provided a tasting sheet, with a description and places for notes on each salt.

For much much more on salt, see The Meadow.

Thanks again to Cinda and Jonathan, Cocoapelli Chocolates. I especially loved the soft and runny caramels.

Here are some random comments from the tasting:

Ille de Re Sea Salt:

A little bite. “Salter” on tomato than on cuke.

Maldon:

Very powerful flavor.
Smoother, more subtle than the Ile de Re.
Best on tomato. I guess he’s [Mark] right. Strong flavor.

Sel Gris de I’lle de Noirmoutier:

Sharp. Salt with teeth. Stands on top of the cuke. 
Warm, gentle flavor.

Fleur de Sel de Guerande:

Well rounded-all different flavors.
Smoother. More a part of the base than Sel Gris. [melts into it more]

Coarse Hawaiian Red Salt:

More subtle than Alaea. 

Turkish Black Pyramid:

More mono-flavored but quite tasty.
A little sweet.

Halen Mon Gold:

Milts Mild to strong. Develops on the tongue. 

Iburi Jio:

Good on Cucumber. Gets lost on bread.
Smokey and fish overtones

One question still not answered: which is the best salt for a margarita glass? I’m thinking a sel gris, something with a softer crystal and not overly large or coarse grains.

For a more detailed description of the Greenbrier salt tasting, see Ellisa Altman’s piece on Huffington Post.

 At one range, a cluster of students armed with tasting spoons samples the soup. At another, a student is preparing a mushroom risotto. Chef Carol Kelly demos making pastry horns to the three students assigned to dessert. These will be baked around pastry tips, then filled with whipped cream.

 It is 9:30 on a Thursday morning at Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School in Northampton. The class spent yesterday prepping and today the students have been cooking since 8:30, so that the Oliver Smith Restaurant can open at 10:30. Except perhaps for the size of the staff and the watchful eyes of Kelly and another instructor, John Kislo, this could be any restaurant kitchen just before service. What makes this one unique is that the staff is mostly ninth-graders.

Smith Voke, on Locust Street just past Cooley Dickinson Hospital, opened in 1908 as the first vocational school in Massachusetts. In some ways it is a standard high school with the usual complement of academic classes. However, all the classes that would be electives in another school are here given over to 14 shops, ranging from automotive to cosmetology to manufacturing and, yes, culinary arts. Students alternate a week of academic classes with a week of shop. Upon graduation, they earn a high school diploma as well as a certificate of occupational proficiency.

I first learned about the culinary arts program at Smith Voke when my company donated some computer textbooks to the school library and the faculty adviser took me to lunch at the Oliver Smith Restaurant as a thank you. The restaurant, run by the culinary arts department, is open to the public from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays when school is in session. Tuesdays are buffet days; on Thursdays and Fridays there is table service.

The restaurant has its own entrance on the right side of the school, so visitors do not have to sign in at the main desk. The clientele is roughly half staff at the school and half outside guests, including many senior citizens.

Today is not a typical day, Kelly advises me. Last night, the program catered the General Advisory Appreciation Dinner for 115, an event which thanks people in the community who serve as advisers to the various shops. In addition, Nelson Lacey, the culinary arts department’s third instructor, is on a field trip with five students. It is also the first truly sunny day of spring, and no one knows whether this means more customers or fewer. But no matter. As in any restaurant, when the doors open, the food must be ready.

Two students, checking broiling chicken breasts for Chicken Francaise, ask Kislo what the final temperature of the chicken should be. “175?” one ventures. Kislo laughs. “In my day…” He lets it hang. “You’re a little high.” “165?” “Right.”

At the pastry station, a student uses a rubber spatula to clean out a tub of whipped cream. “The reason you’re having such a hard time is that you have a big spatula for a small job,” says Kelly. “If you can work with it, fine,” she says, leaving the student to decide whether to switch to a smaller tool.

“Students come in with the Cinderella view of the profession from TV,” Kelly tells me. “We stress industry standards and what will be expected of them when they graduate. They see how hard it is and it either makes them or breaks them and those that love it, go on.” Kislo is himself a graduate of Smith Voke. He went on to work at Page’s Loft in the former Colonial Hilton Hotel in Northampton, then spent 20 years teaching in the culinary program at Pathfinder Regional High School in Palmer before coming back to Smith Vocational. A large man who looks very much the chef, he leads students through the various preparations, quizzing them on the details.

Everything is prepared from scratch, Kelly tells me. Students make stock. The breads and pastries are all baked in-house.

A little after 10, the action begins shifting to the service area. Students clean and fill the hot table, using masking tape to indicate what the covered pans hold. “How do you spell risotto?” asks a student.

The program uses the National Restaurant Association’s ProSTART curriculum, which includes a management component as well as strictly culinary instruction. Those who stay in the field might continue their studies at local culinary programs like the one at Holyoke Community College or at nationally known schools such as the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., or Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I. Some join the military or simply work in the field. Many spend two years getting their culinary associate’s degree from the expensive schools, then pay in-state rates to earn their B.A. from the department of hospitality and tourism management at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Helping out today in Lacey’s absence is Mark Stockwell, a graduate who is now enrolled at Johnson & Wales and is doing an externship at the Delaney House in Holyoke. He graduates in May and will leave almost immediately for England to spend a year in a Marriott training program.

As the orders come in, Kelly shifts to the dining room, doing double duty with the front of the house and desserts. Kislo oversees the hot dishes as they leave the kitchen. The warm spring weather has apparently sent people outside, meaning that the pace is more leisurely than it had been the previous week, when rainy weather packed the restaurant.

At 11:30, I sit down to lunch. The student who seats me is as friendly and professional as any server I’ve had recently. Once she realizes I drink a lot of water, she makes sure my glass is filled regularly. I order the clam chowder and a beef roulade filled with roasted red peppers and spinach. The chowder has a good flavor and is packed with clams. The beef is spot-on medium-rare, with whole white peppercorns in the stuffing contributing a burst of peppery flavor. The risotto that’s served with the entree has a good mushroom flavor, and the candied carrots are buttery and not overly sweet. The prices are reasonable: My soup is $2, the beef $7.50. Other choices include seafood casserole for $7.50 and a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich for $3.50. Tips go into a fund that is used for student programs.

As I eat, I watch people picking up orders to go. The restaurant tries to offer food that can be made and served quickly to accommodate the schedules of the school’s teachers and other staff members, who are among the regulars.

Originally published Daily Hampshire Gazette, April 25, 2008

In “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” author Jared Diamond advances the theory that civilization takes hold in areas that have plants and animals that can be domesticated. The Fertile Crescent in the Middle East was the home to more of these than any other region on Earth, and one of the first plants to be domesticated there was the chickpea. It’s remained a staple in the Middle East — and many other regions — ever since.
 From the Middle East, the chickpea spread west to Europe and east to India, proving itself adaptable to multiple cuisines. Since it is relatively tasteless, it’s able to take on the flavors of the sauce in which it is cooked. Each region treats the chickpea slightly differently, but all use strong spices and other flavors to boost its appeal. Indian cuisine features dozens of recipes for chickpeas, or channa dal, and most of the Moroccan tagines I’ve seen include chickpeas. Every Iberian cookbook I own has a chickpea and spinach or chorizo combo.

There are two varieties of chickpeas, the desi, which is smaller and green or brown and is thought to be the older of the two, and kabuli, which is the more familiar larger yellowish bean. Nutritionally, chickpeas are high in protein, fiber and trace minerals. Studies show that they help to lower “bad” cholesterol, particularly in combination with garlic, which is a natural pairing. Together with a whole grain, they form a complete protein, making them a good choice for a vegetarian meal. And if that is not enough, I’ve read about Arab recipes for aphrodisiacs made with onions, honey and crushed chickpeas, or camel’s milk, honey and chickpeas. One 16th-century European author recommended that scholars and priests avoid chickpeas because of their aphrodisiac qualities.

After a week of testing chickpea recipes, I have not noticed any of the latter side effects, but there are some recipes that I come back to again and again. It’s easy to keep a couple of cans of chickpeas in the cupboard and some tahini (sesame seed paste) in the fridge, and the two ingredients will allow you to make a number of quick appetizers without much fuss.

Hummus, a mixture of chickpeas and tahini, is pretty simple. Wash and drain two 15-ounce cans of cooked chickpeas and put them in a blender with 3 tablespoons of tahini, a couple of cloves of chopped garlic, and salt and pepper to taste. Blend until smooth. I have found that adding a couple of tablespoons of water thins the hummus to a more spreadable consistency. Spread it on a plate, sprinkle with sweet or hot Hungarian paprika, Cajun seasoning or Old Bay, and drizzle on some good olive oil. Serve with warmed pita bread cut into wedges. It will probably take you longer to clean up afterward than to make the hummus. A quick glance at the hummus displays in your local supermarket will give you some ideas for additions: cilantro, roasted red peppers, sun-dried tomatoes or roasted garlic, for example. I’ve seen one recipe that adds ¼ cup of orange juice and 1 teaspoon of Dijon mustard to the mix.

Another great party food is spiced and toasted chickpeas. Wash and dry a couple of 15-ounce cans of chickpeas and toast them in a skillet for about 15 minutes until they are brown, adding a couple of tablespoons of curry powder or a cumin/coriander mix as they cook. Rachael Ray tosses in some black pepper and grated Romano cheese at the end and shakes until the cheese is melted. Martha Stewart toasts half the mix at a time in a microwave for about 20 minutes, which frankly seems like way too much work for me.

Falafel is another favorite of mine. Essentially fried chickpea fritters, falafel balls are typically served with a chopped salad in pita breads, drizzled with a yogurt or tahini sauce, and doused with hot sauce. You can get falafel in some of the Greek pita stands in area malls, and Rolando’s Roast Beef and Falafel in Amherst also serves falafel sandwiches. They make a welcome change from pizza or hamburgers for a quick lunch.

Falafel is pretty easy to make at home, if you don’t mind a little frying. My wife has an Israeli recipe, from a Mark’s Meadow School cookbook, that uses canned chickpeas with a slice of bread as a binder. They are moist and smooth and taste a lot like the falafel you get from street vendors.

My version below uses dried chickpeas that have been soaked overnight and mixed with bulgur as a binder. They are grainier and not as creamy on the inside, but I like them. I use sriracha hot sauce on mine, but a quick scan of the Internet will produce recipes for a more traditional tomato- and harissa-based hot sauce.

Recipes

Falafel

Yogurt Sauce

Tahini Sauce

Chickpeas with Chorizo and Spinich

This article was originally published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, March 28, 2008.

Homemade stock has much to recommend it. First, you can control the ingredients, removing the fat and omitting the salt. Second, unlike canned or boxed stock, homemade stock has a lot of gelatin in it. This means as it reduces, it thickens naturally, without flour or cornstarch, into a smooth and flavorful sauce. The taste is incomparable. And, if you make it yourself, you can freeze it in small amounts, ready to be defrosted for that “cup of chicken stock” your recipe demands.

Winter is the best time for making stock. Keeping a stockpot simmering all day is something for colder months. Plus, at the end, when it comes time to cool the stock as quickly as possible, nothing beats a convenient snowbank. Believe me, I’ve made stock in the summer and it is a hot and sticky operation.

Making stock is one of those things that separates the timid from the adventurous. Like many tasks in the kitchen, it isn’t especially difficult, just a little time-consuming. Stock is made from bones — beef, veal, chicken or fish typically, often cooked with a few vegetables like carrots, celery and tomatoes. Broth is made from meat. The chicken soup your mother made is broth. Nothing wrong with it, but it lacks the gelatin of stock.

The process is pretty simple. If you are using beef or veal, you roast the bones in a hot (450-degree) oven until they are browned and flavorful. They go into a pot with water and the deglazed contents of the roasting pan. Some recipes call for adding the vegetables and tomato at this point; others wait. I prefer to wait. The ratio is important: 10 pounds of bones to 6 quarts of water makes 2 quarts of stock. Measure. Trust me. Most of my unsuccessful stock experiences involve trying to reduce a too-watery stock. For chicken or fish stock, you typically don’t roast the bones. A good vegetable stock uses mushrooms for a heartier flavor.

The key to a clear stock is to skim, skim, skim. As the stock comes to a boil, a grayish scum will rise to the top. As soon as you hit boil, turn down the heat to a simmer and skim the foam off. You will end up skimming a lot of the fat as well, which is a bonus. Keep skimming until the surface of the stock-to-be is clean. This is why I add the vegetables later in the process. Add them now and you’ll be skimming pieces of carrot or onion with the foam. Never salt a stock while you are cooking it. Since you’re going to reduce it, the salt will get more concentrated than you want.

Simmer the stock. A simmer means that lazy bubbles rise to the surface and break. It is not a boil, where the surface of the liquid is in motion, like the ocean breaking on a rock. Simmer beef and veal bones for up to 12 hours. Simmer chicken bones for four to six. Fish and shellfish stocks are done in under an hour. Add the chopped vegetables and tomato late in the cooking. Interestingly, I have seen recipes for a Chinese white stock that uses pork and chicken bones at a rolling boil. The stock gets white from the dissolved solids, which violates all the French rules.

I have made stock with a lobster pot, but I’d recommend a good heavy pot to avoid scorching the bottom. For straining, you can use a colander, but about 10 years ago, I got a chinois for a birthday present and I love it. A chinois is a metal strainer, shaped like a cone, with tiny holes. You can find one in any cooking store or restaurant supply house. The advantage is that it strains lots of particles, is sturdy and easy to clean, and comes with a stand that makes straining a breeze. They say you can use coffee filters and a colander to strain stock. In my experience, the filters clog after a couple of pints of stock and the process takes forever.

Once your stock is strained, cool it as quickly as possible. Either fill your sink with ice cubes and nestle the pot in the middle or find a convenient snowbank — a big one. Remember that the pot will melt through the snow, so don’t put it in a 3-foot deep bank. Pack some snow around it if necessary. Be careful. You have several quarts of really hot liquid in that pot.

When the stock is cool, it will be a jellied liquid. The fat will rise to the top and solidify. It is easy to remove the fat layer by sliding a knife under it and using a spoon to lift the pieces off. Now, if you are me or Escoffier, you will save the fat for use as a flavorful cooking fat. (Escoffier recommends browning the ingredients for tomorrow’s stock in the fat from today’s stock.) If you are my wife, you will dump the fat into the garbage as quickly as possible. Don’t dump the fat down the drain. It can clog your pipes or, if it makes it out to the street, it will clog the sewer pipes. Instead, put the fat into a container and into your garbage. Another advantage of winter: The stock will solidify in the container, making an accidental spill all that more unlikely.

You’ll probably want to freeze some or all of the stock. I freeze it in ½-cup and 1-cup portions. I typically use it for a sauce, which needs between ½ cup and 2 cups of stock. For years, I used clean muffin tins (the new Silpat plastic ones are great) or plastic cups to freeze the stock. Then, for ease of storage, I’d warm the tin slightly to loosen the frozen cubes, slide the stock out, and return it to the freezer in a zip-lock bag. However, juggling tins full of stock got to be too much. I’d end up spilling some before I got to the freezer and more when I tried to balance the tray on the frozen packages on the shelves. Now, I use small plastic bags, spooning a cup or ½ cup of the jellied stock into the baggie, squeezing as much air out as possible and twist-tying it. I hate the waste of the bags, but it is a cleaner process and you don’t get the freezer burn you get with the frozen stock pucks.

I keep the baggies in a zip-lock bag in my freezer and take out what I need when I am gathering ingredients for the dish. A minute in the microwave (remove that twist tie first) and they are ready.

What can you do with this jellied gold? Use it to make a sauce. It will reduce beautifully, adding a thickness and gloss you can only fake with starch. Cook green beans in chicken stock for a great flavor. A risotto made with chicken or fish stock and garnished with the appropriate protein is a revelation. If you are maniacal, you can reduce a quart of stock to less than a cup of glace. This is a heavily jellied stock that can be cut into cubes and frozen and used to add an intense flavor to any dish. Sort of like homemade bouillon cubes.

Reduce shrimp stock until it is thick, being careful not to scorch it. Whisk in a pat of butter if you like, and some herbs, and pour it over grilled shrimp. The flavor is amazing. Lobster stock can be used in lobster bisque, a cream and sherry-based soup that makes my wife shudder just at the mention of the ingredients. Fish stocks make great bases for a fish soup.

The recipes below are for chicken and shrimp stocks, which are simpler and take less time than a beef or veal stock. The sauce recipes are meant for thin-sliced pork or veal or chicken scallopini. To make chicken scallopini, slice a deboned chicken breast lengthwise into two slices. Place the pieces on a piece of waxed paper sprinkled with a few drops of water. Cover with another piece of waxed paper and pound briefly with a meat mallet or a heavy pot. Cook the scallopini for two minutes on one side over medium-high heat, then flip and cook another minute. Two chicken breast pieces make four scallopini, which is enough for two hearty eaters or four servings as part of a larger meal.

Recipes

Chicken Stock
Shrimp Stock
Marsala Sauce

Originally published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, January 25, 2008.

My article, Into the Fire, about the Italian Food Boot Camp I attended at the Culinary Institute has won the James Peterson Food Writing Passion Scholarship at this year’s Greenbrier Symposium for Professional Food Writers. Aside from the pure gratification of winning, a PDF of the original article appears on their site, photos included. Thanks to Lisa Ekus for steering me in the direction of the Symposium.

When I learned how to make mozzarella awhile back, the chef who was teaching the class started with cheese curds. He heated the curds in hot water, then folded and stretched the softened cheese. The chef said that the curds were available in many supermarkets, including Whole Foods Market.

Afterward, I made a beeline for Whole Foods, where I was informed they were planning to carry the curds — but not yet.

So a few months later a detail about a Cheese Making 101 class that was to be offered locally piqued my interest: ricotta and mozzarella were on the list. Aha! I thought. Who needs Whole Foods? Fresh mozzarella, here I come.

The staff at the Hitchcock Center for the Environment in Amherst, which was offering the class in February, assured me I was going to actually make cheese, not just watch, so I signed up.

My first impression upon arriving was that there was an awfully big crowd there. Forty-four aspiring cheese makers had shown up and one or two additional people arrived hoping someone else would not.

I hadn’t done any research on the instructor, Ricki Carroll of Ashfield, since I prefer to jump into these things without a lot of expectations. Carroll, it turned out, is known as the Queen of Cheese, a claim that would be grandiose if it weren’t pretty much true. She’s been a cheese maker for three decades and through her books, catalogs, classes and Web site has taught thousands of people how to make cheese, including many who have gone on to found artisanal cheese operations.

My fears about a crowded classroom were allayed when we were ushered into a room that had six long tables equipped with cheese-making supplies. Carroll and her assistant had set up a display station with an overhead mirror to give us a clear view of each step that Carroll would demonstrate.

She had us start right in on making curds for a farmhouse Cheddar cheese, since the curds needed some time to form. We added calcium chloride to warm milk while the mesophilic direct set culture — which contains the bacteria that will convert the milk into Cheddar — rehydrated in some water. This type of cheese requires a 60-day aging period and a cheese press of some sort.

While the curds were setting, Carroll demonstrated making queso blanco, a variety familiar to anyone who has had cheese-filled foods at Mexican restaurants. Queso blanco is pretty simple: Heat a gallon of milk to 185 degrees F, slowly add ¼ cup vinegar, raise the temperature to 200 and stir until the milk is completely curdled. Ladle the curds into butter muslin (a tighter weave of cheesecloth) and let them drain for a couple of hours. The resulting cheese is firm and mild-flavored and will take on the flavors of whatever you cook or flavor it with.

If you use citric aid instead of vinegar to coagulate the milk, the result is ricotta. And if you use lemon juice instead of vinegar, you’ll have paneer, the cheese used in Indian cooking. Carroll uses it in stir-fries. I want to work on Ras Malai (paneer balls in rosewater-flavored syrup), my wife’s favorite dessert.

By lunch, our Cheddar was in the cheese press. We had eaten queso blanco and both whole-milk and whey ricotta (made from the liquid left over after the curds are lifted out). The separation of the yellowish whey liquid and white curds was no longer a surprise and we were beginning to be able to distinguish the different curds.

Carroll was using three kinds of store-bought milk, Our Family Farms, Garelick Farms and Mapleline, plus some raw milk brought by one of the participants. The differences in the milk and the various curdling agents created startlingly different flavors of curds. She warned against ultrapasteurized milk, which does not produce a good curd. Most organic milk is ultrapasteurized whether or not it is labeled as such, which makes a local nonorganic milk the preferred choice for home cheese making.

Cheese, which is a way to store milk just as pasta is a way to store eggs, is one of the world’s oldest foods. Most cultures that have animals that can be milked have created some kind of cheese. Over time, each region’s cheese making has been refined and codified.

Milk is a complex mix of proteins, butterfat, water and other compounds, and the goal in cheese making is to remove the water (whey) and coagulate the proteins (primarily casein) into curds. An acid like vinegar, lemon juice or citric acid, or rennet, an enzyme found in sheep’s and cow’s stomachs, is used to coagulate the casein. The resulting curds, which look like soft tofu, are lifted out of the whey. Then they are drained, salted, pressed and, depending on the type of cheese, inoculated with specific bacteria and aged. The different strains of bacteria are a large part of the reason why one batch turns into Cheddar and another into Emmenthaler or Brie.

Controlling the temperature of the milk is another key component of cheese making, since temperature affects how the proteins coagulate and the rate of bacterial growth.

Two of the women at my table said they had signed up for the class following a weekend spent ruining a lot of milk. While an aged farmhouse Cheddar or a ripened Camembert may seem out of reach for the casual cheese maker, the fresh cheeses like queso blanco, ricotta and mozzarella are definitely approachable.

Carroll’s Web site, www.cheesemaking.com, contains recipes, videos, tips and supplies. Essentially, you need a large, heavy-bottomed pot, a thermometer, some cheesecloth or butter muslin, and a coagulant like vinegar (for queso blanco), lemon juice (paneer), citric acid (ricotta and mozzarella) or rennet (mozzarella). All are available on the site. If you are browsing there, you might want to pick up Carroll’s book, “Home Cheese Making,” or her DVD, “Cheese Making 101.”

Carroll and her former husband began making goat cheese on their farm in Ashfield in the 1970s, and started selling cheese-making equipment to offset the costs of their own supplies. This evolved into inventory, a catalog, books, classes, videos, DVDs and the Web site. She has given classes all over the country and in Europe, and observers of the culinary scene say that she can take some of the credit for the recent artisanal cheese movement. In “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” for example, a nonfiction account of eating only local food for a year, novelist Barbara Kingsolver talks about Carroll’s cheese-making class.

In the afternoon, Carroll made three batches of mozzarella, one from Our Family Farms milk, one from Mapleline Farms milk and one from raw milk. The differences were startling. The Our Family Farms batch was the softest and tasted super-fresh. The Mapleline Farms cheese was “squeaky” — so chewy that it literally squeaked when we ate it — and tasted like commercially available mozzarellas. The raw-milk mozzarella was the best, sweeter and more complex. I’d use Mapleline Farms milk for mozzarella balls and rolls, while the others would be better for mozzarella I was going to eat right away.

It is these variations in milk, temperatures, cultures and technique that distinguish various cheeses and cheese makers. Whether or not you make any cheese, the knowledge does give you an appreciation of the art and the science that go into cheese.

The following recipes are adapted from the class handouts and are reprinted with Ricki Carroll’s permission.

Thirty-Minute Mozzarella

Whey Ricotta and Whole Milk Ricotta

Originally published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, March 7, 2008.

Winter is here with a vengeance. With summer months away and a trip to warmer climes just not an option, your only solution is to fill the house with the smells of something delicious. Braising - cooking meat and/or vegetables in a flavored liquid - fills the bill like almost nothing else. Your kitchen is awash in fragrant steam and a comforting aroma seeps into the rest of the house. A braised dish is a perfect Sunday-afternoon dinner, although chicken, fish and vegetables can be braised in an hour or so, making them a good choice for the middle of the week as well.

Braises, soups and stews may seem the same, but there is a difference. For a soup or a stew, you cut ingredients into smaller pieces, submerge them completely in the cooking liquid and keep them submerged. For a braise, you typically use larger pieces and put them in a liquid that comes no more than halfway up the ingredients. As the ingredients simmer, the liquid cooks and tenderizes them, releasing flavors that enliven the broth.

Most of us think of braising meats like pot roast, short ribs, veal or lamb shanks and the like. Certainly most of my favorite braised dishes are beef- or lamb-based. But cooking vegetables in a little liquid, such as the cabbage dish below, gives them a sweetness that other quicker methods lack. Chicken, too, becomes moist and tender, and if the liquid is flavorful, a perfect foil for rice or couscous.

The technique of braising is pretty straightforward. If you are using beef or lamb, you typically select a tougher cut, such as brisket, chuck, short ribs, shanks and so on. Since these are less desirable, they are usually less expensive, offering the double payoff of good flavor and lower cost.

For the best results, brown the meat slowly and deeply. Whether or not you flour the meat, you want to season it with salt and pepper, plus any spices the dish calls for. Heat some olive oil in a frying pan and saute the meat over a medium-high flame. If you are using pieces, don’t dump them in at once. Give the pieces some room; otherwise the meat will steam and turn gray and the dish won’t have as much flavor. Let the meat brown on one side before you turn it. Brown it thoroughly on all sides and remove to a plate. Then add more pieces until you’ve browned all of it.

If your recipe calls for sauteed onions, garlic and aromatic vegetables (carrots, celery, etc.), add them next. For maximum flavor, cook the onions first until they are as brown as you need, then add the vegetables. Stir the bottom of the pot to loosen all those brown bits and incorporate them into the vegetables. I like to add the chopped garlic at the very end and stir it just until you can smell the garlic cooking.

Stock, wine, beer and apple cider are all good liquids for braising. If you use canned stock, dilute it with some water or other liquid. If you use wine, you don’t need to add a $50 Barolo, but do use something you would drink, not the dregs of bottles that have been in your cupboard for months. Deglaze the pan by adding a half cup or so of your liquid. Stand back and let the steam rise, then use a wooden spoon or heat-proof spatula to loosen all those brown bits. Add your meat and other ingredients, pour in the rest of your liquid and bring to a boil. Cover the pot, turn down the heat and let it simmer slowly. A simmer is when small bubbles come to the surface, not a rolling boil. If you like, skim off the grayish foam that collects on the surface for a clearer finished dish.

You can simmer over a burner or you can braise in a 350-degree oven, which is my preference. The oven provides even heat and the ingredients are less likely to stick to the bottom and burn. You don’t have to peek and stir so often, which means you aren’t tied to the kitchen for the whole time. Plus, the heat of the oven will warm your kitchen.

If you are interested in braising, look at Molly Stevens’ cookbook “All About Braising.” She gives a good explanation of the method and covers the topic pretty thoroughly, from vegetables to chicken, fish and red meat. If you are stuck in a pot-roast rut, she includes recipes from Morocco, China and Thailand, as well as Europe and the United States.

Recipes

Braised Lamb Shanks

Moroccan Chicken With Green Olives

Originally published Daily Hampshire Gazette, December 28, 2007 ]

When I told a friend I was writing about artisan bread, she asked what that was. “Any bread you can’t roll into a ball the size of a marble,” I answered flippantly. Actually, I wasn’t too far off. The term is used to refer to bread made by professional craft bakers — not the airy loaves produced by large production-line operations. The loaves contain flour, water, yeast or sourdough, and perhaps a few other ingredients, but no artificial leaveners or chemical preservatives.

Bread has been with the human race almost as long as we have been eating grains. The first breads were mixtures of ground grains and water, baked on hot rocks and unleavened. The discovery that bread could be made to rise, using either airborne yeasts or the yeasts left over from making beer, gave rise (so to speak) to the breads we commonly eat today. From Greek and Roman days, the whiter the bread, the more refined and hence expensive and desirable it was.

The search for whiter bread culminated in the Wonder Bread of the 1950s and ’60s. Pure white, airy, loaded with vitamins to replace those removed in the milling of the flour, and flavorless, Wonder Bread became the symbol of where our culture had gone wrong. The search for good bread began.

During this period, I ate dozens of dense brown loaves that might have been good for me but were decidedly not good to my taste buds. That’s all changed today. Artisan bakeries are springing up in virtually every city and town. The bread may be white or brown, but it is both good for you and tasty.

The artisan breads you’ll find these days have a few things in common. The ingredients are flour and water, a leavener such as yeast or sourdough, and salt. Add-ins may include olives, herbs, cheese, or dried fruits and nuts. Depending on the type of bread, there may be other flours, such as rye, and eggs and seeds. Whether the ovens are gas-fired or wood-fired, the resulting loaves are crusty on the outside and soft on the inside — and they taste like bread.

The chemistry of bread baking is fascinating and complex. Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking,” an indispensable reference for the serious cook, has a complete discussion, including electron microscope photographs of flour and gluten. Simply put, the proteins in wheat, called glutens, form long chains that hold the starches and the gas bubbles produced by the leavening agents. Kneading the bread causes the glutens to form regular chains that trap water and gas which help the dough rise. You don’t want this behavior in pie crusts, which is why you work these as little as possible to make a flaky crust.

In this area, there are the two grand dames, if you will, of artisan baking, BAKERY NORMAND at 192 Main St. in Northampton and HENION BAKERY at 174 North Pleasant St. in Amherst (www.henionbakery.com). Each offers a range of baguettes, country white, wheat and other specialty breads. I look for Henion’s corned rye, a dense rye bread.

In Amherst, there is also the new WHEATBERRY, 321 Main St., whose bread is also available at the CUSHMAN MARKET in North Amherst. In Northampton, HUNGRY GHOST BAKERY at 62 State St. offers wood-fired sourdough bread with serious crust. I especially like their 8-grain bread. I first had BREAD EUPHORIA’s bread at their stand at the Amherst Farmers market; its bakery is at 206 Main St. in Haydenville and is worth a stop. In Easthampton, there is SUNRISE PASTRY SHOP, 42 Cottage St.

And then there is EL JARDIN (www.eljardinbakery.com). The Holyoke-based bakery was started by Nuestras Raices, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable development in Holyoke, and it’s now owned by its former head baker, Neftal? Dur?n. El Jardin bread is available in many locations (Atkins Farms Country Market in Amherst, Serio’s in Northampton, McCusker’s Market in Shelburne Falls, Blue Moon Grocery in Easthampton) and is served at local restaurants, including Chandler’s in South Deerfield and Chez Albert in Amherst. El Jardin has just opened a cafe in South Deerfield at 265 Greenfield Road. The bakery proves that you can bake wood-fired sourdough in commercial quantities without having to compromise.

You typically buy artisan breads unsliced, which keeps the bread fresher. A serrated blade is best for slicing. The trend is for offset bread knives, shaped like Harry Potter’s lightning-bolt scar, which let you slice all the way through the loaf without hitting your knuckles on the cutting board. I have a great offset bread knife from Lamson & Goodnow, but these knives are available everywhere.

Smeared with butter for breakfast or dipped in olive oil at dinner, artisan breads need no other embellishment. The loaves tend to disappear quickly in my house so there is no need to store the bread more than a day. If a loaf does stay around longer, freshen it by sprinkling some water on it and reheating it in the oven. You can also use it for toast. Or you can cook with it. Here are some ideas:

First of all, there’s garlic bread. Toast the slices of bread, and at the same time melt a couple of tablespoons of butter in a small saucepan, adding an equal amount of olive oil. Mince or grate garlic to taste (I use about 7 cloves) into the butter and saute gently until the garlic is fragrant. Add some dried or fresh oregano, marjoram, hot pepper flakes and/or basil. Drizzle or brush the oil mixture over the bread. Top with some fresh-grated Parmesan and bake in a 400-degree oven or broil until the cheese is lightly browned. The same mixture, with less garlic and a little more oil, can be stirred into a couple of cups of bread cubes. Bake the cubes at 400 until they are crisp and use them as croutons in salads or soups.

Italian panzanellas use stale bread cubes as salad ingredients. Dip the bread into water, pat dry, then mix it into a tomato salad and dress with olive oil and vinegar. Add lettuce, cucumbers, onions and herbs to taste. Let the salad sit for 10 minutes or so before serving.

Soaking stale bread in a milk and egg mixture and frying or baking the resulting custard takes many forms. The French call French toast pain perdu, or “lost bread,” a much more poetic name for the perfect use for leftover bread. Challah, a Jewish egg bread usually served on Friday nights, is available in many local bakeries and makes superb French toast. You can vary the basic mixture, which is ½ cup of milk and two eggs, by adding cinnamon, vanilla, nutmeg or allspice. Dip the slices briefly into the mix and saute over medium heat in a little butter.

The recipes that follow use artisan bread as ingredients. I haven’t given any recipes for bread. I’m not a baker and, besides, my goal is to get you to try the artisan breads that are available locally. Bon appetit.

Recipes:

Bread Pudding

Strata With Praline Topping

Bread-Crumb Baked Chicken Breasts

Originally published Daily Hampshire Gazette, September 28, 2007

I’ve received a couple of comments on the Coffee article. Nice to know people care enough to write.

Scott Rao made the following observations: 

1. A proper extraction takes about 20-35 seconds (not the 5-10 seconds I reported).
2. There is no steam involved.  Espresso is extracted by water at 190-204F, depending on the country and style.
3. The “which has more caffeine” issue is seriously complicated.  Suffice to say espresso has less caffeine per serving, but has roughly 5-10x more caffeine per ounce. (not unlike comparing the alcohol content of whiskey and beer.)

 Samuel Masinter, from Amherst College seconded the comments on the length of a pull and the temperature of the water used in the machine. He also commented that my Seattle espresso was probably a ristretto and suggested visiting coffeegeek.com. His comment, “sadly the world of coffee fanatics is, well, crazy,” is well taken. Always nice to hear from the fanatics, at least in the world of food. Thanks.

When I was growing up, espresso and cappuccino were exotic drinks, something you got at the Cafe Remo in the West Village. Later, in Cambridge, I discovered an espresso machine the height of cool, as far as I was concerned in the cafeteria in the Harvard Science Center. And the espresso machine we got as a wedding gift was, for me, the best present in the bunch.

For the last five years or so, it’s been all lattes all the time. Still, you can get tired of so much milk, so last year I went back to cappuccinos. After the 10th cappuccino that was indistinguishable from a latte, I started drinking macchiatos. But it got me thinking: What’s the difference among the three drinks? And where do you go to get a good one?

According to a Culinary Institute of America handout, a macchiato is “espresso ’stained’ with foam,” a cappuccino is “equal parts of espresso, steamed milk, and foam,” and a latte is “espresso and more milk than a cappuccino, generally without foam.” Where does a tall macchiato from Starbucks fit into that classification scheme? What about the leaf pattern a good barista can draw in the steamed-milk foam?

So I put together a Coffee Posse and set out to sample some of the Valley’s offerings. We planned to order a macchiato, a cappuccino and a latte at each place. No sugar. We’d line them up, and work our way from the macchiato to the latte, evaluating the drinks on the basis of taste and adherence to the Platonic ideal, or at least our definition of it. We were looking for a good espresso taste in the macchiato, only a little milk in the cappuccino, and the taste of hot milk in the latte.

We started in Amherst, at RAO’S (17 Kellogg St.; www.raoscoffee.com) and AMHERST COFFEE (28 Amity St.; www.amherstcoffee.com). Rao’s espresso was slightly bitter in the macchiato, and it worked best in the latte. The cappuccino was right on the money and had the tallest foam of any we tasted. In the macchiato, Amherst Coffee’s espresso was less bitter than Rao’s, but lacked a strong coffee finish. The cappuccino was low foam and the latte, which was the best of the three, lacked a hot milk taste.

Our third stop of the day was ESSELON CAFE, where we ran into Scott Rao. Scott had a hand in both Rao’s and Esselon, but is now a private citizen with ties to neither. Esselon offers something called a Flat White, which is between a macchiato and a cappuccino. We included it in our tasting for the sake of completeness. We decided that the macchiato was the best yet, with a slight bitterness and a good finish. The Flat White was steamed froth and a little milk and the best of the three milk-based drinks. There wasn’t much difference between the cappuccino and the latte.

After a not-so-brief discussion with Rao which amounted to a graduate seminar in barista science, we were stuffed with details the amount of suspended material in the various drinks (up to 30 percent in Italian espresso), the length of a pull (between 5 and 10 seconds of steam through the grounds), and the source of most espresso (Brazilian beans). I already knew that espresso contains less caffeine than regular coffee due to the roasting process, but that steaming is a more efficient way of extracting caffeine, which is why espresso has such a kick.

We suspended our investigations while I spent a week in Seattle, for reasons unrelated to the survey. My first macchiato at PEET’S, a San Francisco-based chain, was startling. The espresso was as dark as possible without being burnt, with chocolate-like overtones, absolutely no oil or bitterness, and an intensity that required additional sugar. A lot of suspended solids in that one.

The espresso in Seattle is generally a dark and chocolaty roast. I noticed that the baristas fill the filter head, then pack it down and add additional grounds, which accounts for some of the richness. The cost is about the same as in western Massachusetts, with espresso and macchiato hovering between $1.50 and $2.50 and the cappuccino and latte ranging between $2 and $3.

When I got back to town the Posse resumed its tastings. Our first stop was WOODSTAR CAF￉ (60 Masonic St., Northampton). The macchiato was not as strong as the Seattle blends, and a little oily. The cappuccino was high foam with no milk, with one last little sip of foam to wash down the espresso. Not standard, but good.

At Florence Center’s CUP AND TOP CAFE (1 North Main St.; www.cupandtop.com), each drink was nicely done, despite the noon lunch rush. When I ordered the macchiato, my counter person looked troubled. “Do you want a Starbucks macchiato or a regular one?” She explained that many people were disappointed that Cup and Top’s macchiato is “only” a small cup of espresso with a topping of foam instead of the giant Starbucks’ drink. The cappuccino was a dead-on combination of milk and foam and the latte was mostly milk. The coffee was a little oily, but overall, the espresso stood on its own.

HAYMARKET CAFE (185 Main St., Northampton) doesn’t have macchiato so I compared the cappuccino and latte. The cap was high-foam and the espresso was dark and the most like Seattle’s. The espresso taste came through nicely with the cappuccino, a little less so with the milkier latte.

LA FIORENTINA PASTRY SHOP’s Northampton branch (19 Armory St.) was our last stop. The macchiato was done right, but the espresso was the most bitter of those I tasted. The latte had a good hot milk taste.

There are dozens of other places we didn’t get to. Your experiences will probably vary based on barista and time of day. Unless you’re planning to move to Seattle, your best bet is to find a place that has espresso to your taste and work with your barista to get as much milk and/or foam as you need. And, as far as pastries go, you’re on your own. For now.

Originally published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Friday, September 07, 2007.

In the old days, the canning jars and cooker would be out almost from the first asparagus. Grandmother would make preserves and pickles, and can the fruit and vegetables from her garden. Or so I imagine. My grandmother’s preservation was limited to a mayonnaise jar of roasted green peppers in vinegar and a mixture she called shulatah which consisted of chopped eggplant, onions, carrots and green peppers, simmered in garlic, vinegar and water. She’d bring over a jar every so often for my sister and brother, who couldn’t get enough of it.

In the early years of her first marriage, my wife lived in Texas and Kentucky on an associate professor’s salary. She canned, ground her own flour for whole-wheat bread, even made her own phyllo dough on occasion. The dusty canning jars are still in the basement. I’d like to use them, but frankly, any food preparation that comes with warnings about potentially fatal bacteria tends to make me a little wary. I know that once you’ve done it once or twice, canning is a snap, but it doesn’t fit into my current lifestyle.

Still, in August when tomatoes are falling off the vine, the basil plants are small trees, and the corn is piled three feet high in the farm-stand wagons, it pains me to just pass them by. It’s especially hard to think about late January, when I’ll be using canned tomatoes or roasting hard plum tomatoes just to get some kind of flavor out of them. So, for most of the last 10 years, I’ve frozen enough tomatoes to last the winter and added some other vegetables when I can.

Freezing is pretty simple and pretty safe as long as you follow a few rules. First, you want to freeze foods as quickly as possible. Ideally, you should freeze foods at 0 Fahrenheit or lower. The freezer in your refrigerator is probably not cold enough, especially if you open the door a lot. We happen to have a separate freezer in the basement, which we can set to 0. If all you have is the freezer in the fridge, you should freeze the foods overnight, when you are not going to be opening the door. Second, you shouldn’t thaw and refreeze; if the frozen foods thaw even a little bit at the surface, throw them out. (The USDA says you can refreeze without recooking, but I have always heard differently.) Third, air is your enemy. Put the foods in a zip-lock bag or some other container that you can squeeze the air out of. Freezer burn occurs when the water that sublimates from frozen food meets air and crystallizes. (Sublimation is the transfer of water from a solid directly to a gas.)

Around this time of year, I’ll buy a box or two of plum tomatoes. The books recommend blanching the tomatoes: Cut a small X in the stem end, plunge the tomatoes into boiling water for 30 seconds, scoop them out and dump them into a water bath to cool. The skins slip right off. Then, you slice them in half lengthwise and scoop out the seeds with your finger. The result is beautiful. The flesh can be chopped into tomato concasse, which is the basic tomato product for sauces. Typically, I’m doing this around 8:30 at night after a long day of work, and call me irresponsible, but I don’t have time to do that with 20 pounds of tomatoes. I live with some seeds and skins and, when it is important, I’ll pass the defrosted tomatoes through a Foley food mill.

If you have a lot of heirloom or regular tomatoes, you can certainly freeze those. The food police won’t show up at your door. These tomatoes have more moisture than the plum variety and you may have to account for that in cooking, but the flavor will still be good.

My methods are pretty simple. Most of the tomatoes get washed and chopped into large dice. I fill a baggie with one cup of chopped tomatoes, flatten it slightly, and twist-tie it shut. The flattened bags are easier to stack in the freezer. Over the winter, I pull out a bag or two of tomatoes and add them to my sauces. The occasional roll of tomato skin or the seeds don’t bother me, and, when they do, there is always the food mill.

When I get tired of bagging, I dump the rest into a large pot and simmer them for about 15 minutes or until they are just cooked. I push the tomato sauce through a food mill and pour it into muffin tins (½ cup each) and deli containers (1- and 2-cup sizes) and freeze these as well. I dump them out of the containers into a couple of large zip-lock bags for those times when you want a smooth sauce without seeds or skin. No seasoning, since they could end up in something Southwestern, Mediterranean or Indian, each with different spicing needs.

You can also make your own oven-dried tomatoes pretty easily. Slice plum tomatoes lengthwise and scoop out the seeds with your finger. Lay them cut side up on a cookie sheet lined with aluminum foil and brush with a little olive oil. (Orange zest is a great addition as well. Zest the orange over the tomatoes after they are prepped and on the tray.) Bake in a 275-degree oven for about four to six hours, moving them every half hour or so to keep them from sticking. The tomatoes will get pretty dry, but will still have some moisture in them. Put into a jar and cover with olive oil and store in the refrigerator. Mine get moldy after three weeks, especially if I let the olive oil fall below the tomatoes, so use them up quickly.

Corn is next. You should be overbuying corn each time you get some and freezing the extras.

Blanch or steam the corn before you freeze it to stop the enzymes in the corn from converting the sugar into starch. Plunge the corn into boiling water for about three minutes, or steam it for about six. I have a wok with a metal steamer tray that works great for four to six ears at a time.

Removing corn from the cob is pretty easy. Put a small cutting board in a large roasting pan. Shuck the corn, stand it upright on the cutting board, and slice the kernels off. If you cut too shallowly, there will still be part of the kernel on the cob. If you cut too deeply, you’ll feel the knife hit the cob. After a dozen ears, you’ll have the technique pretty much down. The roasting pan will catch most of the kernels that fly off the cob as you cut. You can run your knife along the cobs to scrape out some corn milk, which is a tremendous flavor enhancer to any corn dish. Don’t freeze the corn milk; use it right up.

Freeze the corn in 1- or 2-cup portions in baggies or some other container that you can make airtight. It is enormously satisfying to serve a succotash or corn pudding for Thanksgiving and casually mention that you froze it in August. It will lose some sweetness, but thanks to today’s modern super-sweet corn, there is some sugar to spare.

Pesto freezes easily and it is the best way to preserve basil. The books all recommend leaving out the salt and the Parmesan cheese before you freeze it. A nice trick is to freeze it in ice-cube trays, then save the little cubes in a baggie. To use, simply defrost as many cubes as you need and mix with grated Parmesan cheese. It loses a little color and some texture and you might have to drain off a bit of liquid. When you dump the pesto onto hot pasta sometime in February, the fragrance of fresh basil will offset any minor color variations. Pesto is also great in minestrone or vegetable soups, where it is called pistou. Put a tablespoon in the bottom of each bowl before you ladle on the soup.

Here are some recipes to use now, or in midwinter.

Corn Maque Choux

Vegetable Soup With Pistou

Mussels With Marinara Sauce

Originally Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, August 31, 2007

Grilling season is upon us. Whether your taste runs to slow cooking a Texas brisket or a Boston Butt roast for eight hours over a wood fire or grilling hamburgers, chicken, or vegetables on your gas grill, you’re likely to be grilling something over the next couple of months. Grilling itself provides some wonderful flavors, but most of us want more.

Don’t be tempted by barbeque sauces, whether store-bought or homemade. Most of them are based on tomatoes and sugar, both of which burn when exposed to direct heat. Barbeque sauces, in my opinion, are best served at the table where they compliment the grilled flavor. For my money, dry rubs and pastes are where it’s at, grillwise.

A dry rub is simply herbs and spices rubbed directly on your meat. Pastes add a little liquid, such as oil or yoghurt, and some chopped garlic, onions, or fresh herbs to the dry rub spices. Either one will add flavor without burning and, if you leave them on for a while, will help to tenderize your meat. Besides, dry rubs are beautiful. Nothing brings out the artist in a cook than the chance to dump some dusky spices onto a plate and roll some meat in them.

Rubs can be as simple or as complex as you want. Start with paprika and black pepper. Add chili powder and cumin for a Texas flavor. Add white and red pepper for a Cajun blast. Add some sweet spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, or allspice for grace notes. Use dried herbs, especially rosemary, thyme, sage, or oregano, to pick up a Mediterranean flavor.

You can get good effects with specialty spice mixtures. A combination of Aunt Cora’s Soulful Seasoning and Grandma Rena’s Rabbit and Squirrel Cajun Spice Mix give chicken a flavor that’s hard to beat. I seek them out in supermarkets and grocery stores when I travel. Look for the ones without MSG, “flavorings,” anti-coagulants, or slick packaging and you’re likely to find some winners. Of course, trying to get another bottle when you run out may entail another visit to Louisiana, Florida, or Paris. Even if you stick to the local markets, you can find mixtures such as Old Bay Spice, garam masalas, Ras el Hanout, or Cajun-style seasonings.

Most rubs tend to be spicy, but keep in mind that only the edges of the meat will be seasoned and the heat will be moderated. Hot Hungarian Paprika has good flavor and moderate heat and I recommend it in place of cayenne. While I don’t normally cook with dried garlic, onion, or ginger, they work well in rubs, since the juices of the meat rehydrate them slightly. I prefer the chunks to the powders because they add a little texture as well as taste.

Combine your rub spices on a dinner plate and swirl them with your fingers until they are mixed. Roll your meat in the mixture until the meat it covered. Whenever possible, leave your rub or paste on the meat for several hours. If you are pressed for time, 15 minutes on a plate on your counter will bring your meat up to room temperature and let some flavor soak in. Time permitting, two hours to overnight in the fridge is best. Let the meat come up to room temperature before you grill it. Zip-lock baggies stack well and are leakproof. If you prefer chicken without the skin, the oil in pastes adds some moisture back into the meat.

A nice touch is to skewer your meat before you cook it. Skewers look good, cook quickly, serve easily, and stretch expensive cuts of meat and fish. Slice the meat, add the rub, and let it sit as long as you can. Skewer the meat just before you cook it. Remember to soak wooden skewers in water for 30 minutes to keep the exposed parts from burning.

You’ll notice that there is no salt in the recipes below. There is a controversy as to whether or not salt draws moisture from grilling meats. I like to serve a small finger bowl of Kosher salt at the table so that everyone can salt to his or her tastes. Kosher salt, like sea salt, comes in bigger crystals than table salt so an equivalent amount of Kosher salt is less “salty” than table salt.

Cooking times vary a lot, based on your fire and your tastes. Cook beef, boned chicken, or skewers over a hot fire and turn once after 3-5 minutes depending on the thickness of the meat. Cook larger cuts like pork tenderloins or chicken with the bone in over indirect heat, and keep the grill covered. Invest in a quick-read thermometer, about $14 in most stores. Stick it into the thickest part of the meat when you think it’s done. 140 is typically medium rare and 165 is well done. Meat will continue to cook as it sits so undercook a large piece slightly and let it sit for 5-10 minutes before cutting and serving.

Originally printed, Daily Hampshire Gazette, June 27, 2003.

Recipes

Cajun Rub

Texas-Style Rub

Sweet Pork Rub

Hacked and Cracked Barbeque Paste

Jamaican Jerk Rub

Riaz’ Mom’s Tandoori Paste
 

Certain smells take you back so strongly, you have to look twice to make sure you are still in the present. Apples ripening on the trees in autumn, fryolator oil and salt air, subway grates and roasted chestnuts each make certain moments live again for me. And then there is the smell of caramelizing onions.

My mother and grandmother both loved to cook chopped onions in oil until the onions were deep brown and fragrant. My mother would cook calf’s liver until it was pink and still juicy and chop it with the onions and a hard-boiled egg in a wooden bowl, using a spring-loaded three-blade chopper. She would sprinkle roast beef with finely chopped onions which would brown in the beef fat, adding crunch and taste to the meat. She made gravy, incorporating the brown bits. The smell of frying onions is the smell of my childhood, coming in from cold November streets to a warm house that smelled of comfort.

Which is not to say that caramelized onions are a thing of the past. I may not eat chopped beef liver anymore, but I still fry onions. They add big flavor while requiring little more than time, some stirring and some attention.

The chemistry of browning is complex. Food chemists talk about the Maillard reaction: using heat to combine sugars and carbohydrates with the nitrogen in amino acids, resulting in 200-odd compounds, each contributing to the final taste. You might as well talk about love as the reaction of various parts of our brains to pheromes. The explanation may be accurate, but it misses the point.

Whether you are using a frying pan and oil or butter, a broiler, an oven or an outdoor grill, browning improves the taste of pretty much everything. Onions, in particular, benefit from browning. Raw, they are sharp and piquant. Sautￇed until they are translucent, the flavor softens, adding a familiar base to dozens of dishes. But browned, they take center stage.

I make a minestrone using caramelized onions as a base when I am not using meat. The rich roasted onions add a depth of flavor to the finished soup. An Indian cookbook taught me the trick of sautￇing rings of onions until they are deep brown and tossing them onto cooked dal (lentils) just before you bring them to the table. Try it. You’ll be amazed at the difference. And these days, with traditional terms being tossed around freely, onion marmalade, which is nothing more than cooked onions with some seasonings, is a condiment and a stuffing for everything from pork tenderloin to chicken.

The process is simple. Slice or chop your onions, put them in a frying pan with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, vegetable oil, margarine, or oil and butter, and cook over medium heat. Pure butter burns easily, but you can use it if you are careful. Stir the onions enough to keep the pieces from sticking to the pan.

Plan on spending 10 to 20 minutes; don’t try to hurry the process. As the onions color, make sure to keep moving them so that all the pieces have a chance to brown. Add a little oil if the pan looks dry.

Pay more attention as the color darkens. Properly browned onions are deep brown with few white spots and no black spots. Black spots mean you’ve burned them and you need to toss the batch and start again.

Speaking of which, if you are worried about burning onions, a good experiment is to set out to burn them intentionally. Just keep cooking them until they burn, and keep watching the pan. You’ll notice the moment when deep brown becomes char. At this point, toss the results on your compost pile, clean the pan and do it again for real. Like anything we’re scared of, going through with it once removes its hold on our imagination.

How does one cut onions for browning? The result depends on the final use. If you are looking for small pieces, chop the onion. If the onions will be a distinct component of the dish, slice them lengthwise or in rings. To peel an onion, slice off the growing tip, stand it up and slice the onion in half through the root end. You can easily peel the skin off. The root end will hold the pieces together while you cut them. If you imagine each half as a clock face, cut wedges at each hour mark. Slice off the root end and you have lengthwise strips. Cut crosswise and you can chop the onion in pieces. The thinner the wedges, the finer the mince or the strips. Rings you can probably figure out on your own.

Browning reduces the amount of onion dramatically. For one dish, start with a large Spanish onion or two large yellow onions in a 12-frying pan. Pile them up - they’ll shrink down. If you make a lot, they’ll keep in the refrigerator and you can warm them up and add them to sandwiches. How long they’ll keep is still a mystery. They never hang around more than a couple of days in my house.

Recipes
Vegetarian Pate

Masoor Dal with Caramelized Onions

Onion Marmalade

Originally published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, October 20, 2006

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two ways to approach any style of cooking. First, you strive for authenticity. Texas chili doesn’t have beans? Then mine won’t either. My grandmother’s chicken soup was the best? Then make it taste like Grandma’s. Once you achieve authenticity, you repeat it endlessly. Why change? You’ve got the best. This is the approach behind classical cuisine. Everyone needs a killer dish or two in their repertoire, something they can rely on over and over.

The other approach is to learn the style and its elements, then incorporate them into your general cooking. Once you learn an etouffee sauce, you can cook all manner of meat, fish, fowl and sausages in the New Orleans style. So what if you can’t get fresh crawfish or shrimps with their heads on and your local andouille just doesn’t taste like the sausage you get in Louisiana? You simply find what is good around you and reinterpret. Clearly you must exercise common sense and good taste, but this is the process by which all regional cooking was developed.

What does this have to do with tapas? Tapas are little dishes usually served in tapas bars all over Spain. One orders a bit of this and that with a glass of sherry or wine, stacking up plates which are totaled at the end of the meal. It is fine way to eat and it lends itself to casual cooking. If you like to cook, and your friends like to eat, nothing beats a tapas party.

However, authentic tapas can be difficult. Angulas in Garlic Sauce, a tapas favorite, requires fresh baby eels, something the local supermarkets tend not to carry. Other, more familiar tapas depend on varieties of seafood of a freshness and variety that is not available in the States, let alone in the Pioneer Valley. Serrano ham, the Spanish cured ham similar to prosciutto, is more costly than the imported Italian variety, when you can even find it. The Manchego and other Spanish cheeses I’ve found mostly come precut and prepackaged.

Clearly, reinterpretation is called for. In the recipes below, I list some dishes that started out as authentic tapas and took a twist. Others are just things I like to cook, which happen to fit into the general Mediterranean theme of tapas. If you’re looking for some good cookbooks on the subject, try Penelope Casas‘ Tapas, the Little Dishes of Spain, Joanne Weir’s From Tapas to Meze, and for a more general approach to small dishes, Martha Stewart’s The Hors D’Oeuvres Handbook. (Say what you like about Martha, the lady can cook and this book is filled with gems.)

You may want to go all out and serve only tapas. You may find that making several tapas followed by a main course suits your style better. Tapas add an air of informality no matter how formally your guests are dressed. I’ve made tapas for four, for 10, and once for a group of 20 women at a Girls Night Out gathering.

When you build a tapas menu, start with something simple to give your guests time to gather. Olives are traditional. Try the small bright green Picholine or Luques, the small black Nicoise, and the oil-cured black olives for a change from Kalamata. The dates and sausage below are perfect for the next course, a tasty little treat that whets the appetite for more.

Next, I like to set out a crostini bar. Put out a basket of baguette slices and three or four dips and spreads. Your guests build the appetizers to their tastes and everyone has something to talk about.

Most people seem to like shellfish. Your choice depends on whether everyone is standing around or seated. If people are sitting, steam mussels or clams with garlic, white wine and parsley or serve boiled unpeeled shrimp with a variety of sauces. If they’re standing, serve peeled shrimp and stuffed clams or mussels. Stuffed calamari, sliced into bite-sized pieces, are also a great tapa. You can make them in advance, then simply heat in the sauce, slice and serve.

Fried food, like fritters or batter-dipped vegetables or seafood, is not something most people make at home, so serving it offers a real treat. You can pretty much deep-fry anything and people will like it. Serving this after the crostini gives you a chance to get the oil hot and prepare the fried foods while your guests are working on the crostini.

Finish with something more substantial, like a grilled pork tenderloin, so people feel like they’ve eaten a meal. Accompany the pork with some quartered red onions marinated in olive oil, skewered, and grilled or broiled. One tenderloin serves three as an entree; you can double or even triple that as part of a tapas menu.

Originally published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Friday, September 03, 2004

Recipes

Roast Red Peppers and Parmesan

Vegetarian Pate

Chicken Liver Pate

Dates and Chorizo

Stuffed Calamari

Cookbooks divide food into two categories: savories and sweets. Savories are protein—appetizers and entrees, meats and vegetables, lunches and dinners. Sweets tend to involve dough. Some claim that savories cooks are artists, improvising freely, while sweets cooks are scientists, measuring everything. This is as true as any generalization, but it did scare me away from making dough.

However, all my recipes for Bolognese Sauce asked for fresh tagliatelle. My family loved pumpkin ravioli and kept asking me to make them. I was not about to buy a pasta machine. (Didn’t Thoreau say, “Beware of recipes that require expensive equipment that you’ll never use again.”) Instead, I researched fresh pasta. I wanted to do the “real” stuff, the pasta that Italian grandmothers have been making for centuries with nothing but a rolling pin and a cutting board. The rolling pin should be long and straight, nothing tapered and not the kind with handles that roll separately. The cutting board should be wooden and as large as you have.

Marcella Hazan had a good recipe—flour and eggs, nothing more. She gave the proportions and a little trick to rolling out the dough. It seemed authentic and it required learning a technique rather than buying equipment. My first batch was stiff and nearly unrollable and looked more like fat Chow Foon noodles when it was cooked. It was, however, tasty, and I was encouraged. Every Sunday night, in preparation for the Sopranos, I made a different Bolognese Sauce and fresh tagliatelle. I could not master Marcella’s technique and longed for an Italian grandmother to teach me the tricks.

In October 2002, during Books and Cooks (a United Way fundraiser in which celebrity chefs cook from their latest cookbooks in conjunction with local restaurants), I asked both Mario Batali, and Lidia Bastianich how they made fresh pasta. Mario shrugged and asked about my machine. “Only a rolling pin and a cutting board” I said. He brightened visibly and started talking. “You give it a little push at the end to stretch it,” he said, demonstrating. “I made two kilos of fresh pasta every day for six months,” he told me, “And then I knew how to make it.”

Lidia had a different technique, but she, too, demonstrated on an imaginary rolling pin. “Always use a wooden rolling pin and cutting board,” she said. “They give the pasta some texture.” Both techniques involved pushing the dough to stretch it once it was rolled thin. Both suggested a teaspoon of oil and salt and adding drops of water until the dough was right.

Success! The oil helped tremendously and my hands finally understood what pushing and stretching the dough felt like. I wouldn’t want to go mano a mano with an authentic Italian grandmother, but I can hold my own. I can whip out a double batch of tagliatelle in a little over an hour of work. And for Thanksgiving this year, I made pumpkin ravioli with a Sage-Butter Sauce.

Originally published, Daily Hampshire Gazette, January 31, 2003

Recipes 

Fresh Pasta

Bolognese Sauce

Alfredo Sauce

Mary DeFelice’s Tomato Sauce