Pears poached sous vide with ginger

I saw this quick post on Aki and Alex's blog, and it sounded easy and seasonal. Ginger and pear is a good combination. We served it with Point Reyes blue cheese, candied walnuts and port.

2 Bartlett Pears
1 thumb-sized piece of fresh Ginger

2 small slices intense Blue Cheese like Point Reyes
2 small handfuls candied Walnuts

Peel the pears then slice in half (extra points if you can retain a slice of stem in each half); add to sous vide bag.
Grate ginger to extract juice, retaining the fiber; add to bag.
Seal bag, cook sous vide at 83C/180F for 1 hour; chill and fridge until ready to serve.

Pull out the pear halves and put each on a plate.
Top with a bit of the Blue Cheese, garnish with candied Walnuts.
Serve with port.

Bacalao with Idiazábal cream sauce; spinach, pine nuts, prunes

We had this combination of bacalao and Idiazábal cheese -- a surprising combination -- at Restaurant Fonda in the opulent Hotel España in Barcelona; its stuck with me, so we tried to recreate it. Turned out well, but we have some work ahead of us if we're going to have the finesse their chef had.

I searched for this combination of ingredients and it turns out it's not uncommon; we based our dinner on these two recipes, both of which used the classic combination of spinach with pine nuts as a base. The substitution of prunes for typical white raisins was a welcome addition.

2 x 130 g Bacalao loins, without bones, desalted over night in water
    100 g Olive Oil, frozen
1 clove   Garlic, sliced thin
1         Chili pepper, sliced

 25 g Idiazábal cheese
 30 g Cream, heavy, 40% fat

100 g Olive Oil
      Salt
 20 g Pine Nuts
 50 g Prunes, sliced
300 g Spinach

Freeze the Olive Oil so it won't get sucked into the vacuum sealer, add it with the Bacalao loins,  Garlic and Chili in a sous vide bag and cook 20 minutes at 55C/135F. Hold until ready to plate.

Grate the Idiazábal cheese fine and add to Cream, heat very gently until melted together.

Toast the Nuts in Oil and Salt until starting to brown, add Prunes and sautee a little, then add Spinach and cook down. Hold until ready to Plate.

Open the bag and strain the liquid from the Bacalao.
Plate the Spinach mixture, lay on the Bacalao loins, then sauce with the cheese cream, and garnish with the cooked chili and garlic (warning: the garlic will be fierce, as it's not really cooked).
Serve.

This worked pretty well: the spinach base was a classic combination, the bacalao stood up to the cheese sauce. Next time, however, we might want to take more care of the cheese sauce as it had a grainy texture -- this might have been due to too-quick heating, or maybe I just need to strain it (although that will be difficult with such a thick intense sauce).

Fideuà #2: Squid, Ham, Spaghettini

For a more traditional Fideuà than before, we broke up spaghettini. Using liquid from cooking octopus gave it a fantastic depth and richness. This improvised dinner was short on measurement but long on taste.

The finished dish

I used 225 g / 8 ounces spaghettini we had on hand. To break it into short pieces, I put them into a large ziptop bag, rested this on a towel, and whacked it about every 5 cm / 2 inch with the back of a cleaver. This worked pretty well: good breakage and no pasta sprayed across the kitchen.

Spaghettini, mostly broken into short pieces

We like the Catalan habit of combining shellfish and pork, so I used squid tentacles and some ham cut into fork-friendly pieces. The protein probably added up to 225 g / 8 ounces.

Mis en place by the side of the BBQ

I knew I wanted to toast the spaghettini but figured it would be finicky to remove from our paella pan later, so I started sautéing everything else first. Olive oil is traditional but I had some lovely bacon fat lying around that would amp the ham flavor. In a paella pan on the barbecue, I first sautéed a diced onion, several shaved cloves of garlic, and some diced small tomatoes from the garden. I then added the ham and squid. My fire wasn't as hot as I expected, so rather than browning well, the veggies and squid released a fair amount of liquid: this turned out to be a good thing. I pulled out the solids and poured the flavorful liquid into separate bowls.

Next, I added some more bacon fat and my broken spaghettini. I stirred this around until it started browning a bit, and getting a little aromatic. I used this opportunity to further break the now-fragile strands into smaller pieces with my stirring spatula.

Pan roasting the noodles in bacon fat

I then added the reserved liquid and maybe a cup of juice we'd saved when we cooked octopus sous vide; it was enriched with some roasted red pepper liquid from the previous cooking and had a great aroma.  This cooked a while until the spaghettini started becoming pliable, at which time I added back the meat and veggies, and topped with a gremolata of minced orange peel and parsley. It smelled divine.  When the spaghettini was al dente, I added a sprig of rosemary, covered with foil, and let it rest enough for the pasta to finish cooking.

For service, we portioned it out and topped with a fiercely garlicky toum (my new favorite condiment) and a squirt of lemon juice. It was pretty excellent.

Served with toum and lemon juice

There were some strands of spaghettini that didn get completely cooked; I expect that they were so long that they never got immersed in the broth.  I recall the fideuàs I've had around Barcelona had a slight crunch to the noodles, perhaps they finish over a very hot flame to develop a crust, a socarrat; maybe they finish under a broiler to crisp the top. We'll work on these next time.

Toum: fiery garlic sauce (without eggs)

This crazy intense garlic sauce is like a mayonnaise or aioli but contains no eggs which are typically used to emulsify those classics.  It's become a staple in our kitchen, good on paella, potatoes, vegetables, grilled octopus, and shockingly good on pizza. It's easy to make in a food processor.

A strong stable emulsion, without any egg

We had squid with a fiery garlic sauce that was blindingly white at a small Sicilian place, Caffe Sport, in San Francisco decades ago; that flavor and color have stuck with me to this day. We've tried to create it with various aioli in Catalan, Spanish, and French styles. The French ones use egg, which gave a yellow color and diluted the flavor; Jose Andres does the classic Spanish prep, crushing garlic in a mortar and pestle and adding oil drop-by-drop; we've tried it, only to have it break when we finished 30 minutes later.

We found a Lebanese garlic sauce called "Toum" that sounded right: lots of garlic, plus oil, salt and a bit of lemon juice -- no egg.  We whipped one up based on the Serious Eats recipe, which was similar to many others we found.  Garlic is whizzed in a food processor with some salt to break it down, releasing the juices that contain the weak emulsifier, then oil is added very very slowly to establish the emulsion, then alternate lemon juice and oil to finish. 

When you've finished the sauce, don't be tempted to add (say) more lemon juice and whiz it up again: the emulsion will break when you turn on the processor.  The garlic should be fresh: old or frozen or processed won't set up as a stable emulsion. You can rescue it by whizzing an egg in the empty processor then drizzling in the broken Toum, and it will taste fine: but it's cheating with the egg, and doesn't have quite the pure garlic burn: it's an aioli. 

The flavor is a bit shocking right after making it, but it softens with time. We keep it in the fridge but it might be stable without refrigeration: unlike eggs in mayo, none of Toum's ingredients requires being chilled. We've substituted Sherry Vinegar for the Lemon and it came out very well for a Spanish dish we were serving. 

Makes almost 500 ml [16 ounces] of sauce. 

 75 g   2.5 oz   Garlic heads, peeled (see technique below)
  6 g     1 tsp  Kosher Salt
 30 ml    2 Tbs  Lemon Juice
350 ml  1.5 C    Oil, Canola (neutral flavored)

Ingredients assembled

Put the garlic heads into a metal mixing bowl and cover with another. Shake violently: the heads will break apart, the paper will start separating; pull out the peeled cloves and repeat a couple times until all coves are peeled. This takes just a few minutes.

Garlic after first shake in mixing bowls

Add Garlic and Salt to food processor and process to break down garlic and release internal emulsifiers as much as possible; you may want to scrape down the sides a bit.

Garlic (lots of it) and coarse Salt to break it down

Drizzle the Lemon Juice in so that it provides liquid to turn the garlic into more of a paste consistency, scrape down once or twice; it should be mostly mush, with some garlic bits.

Not quite broken-down enough yet, scrape and process a bit more

Slowly drizzle in the Oil -- my processor top has a feed tube with a small hole that releases a slow drizzle for just this kind of operation; the sauce should start turning into a rich emulsion in a minute or two, you can hear the change in texture, but I run it for a few minutes and don't bother scraping down during this process.

A thing of beauty: thick and fluffy, and very smelly :-)

Scrape out into serving or storage containers. 
Do try it at its freshest, it's an eye-opener. :-)

In Barcelona with only a mini-chopper

We don't have a food processor here, only a stick blender with a mini-chopper bowl, so we make a smaller batch. Most annoyingly, we can't drizzle the oil through a feed tube, but have to process, open, add a bit of oil, repeat, repeat; it works.  Both The Mediterranean Dish and Serious Eats add the Lemon early to help blend the Garlic and prevent breaking the sauce. Comments in Serious Eats suggest having all ingredients cold to prevent breaking but I haven't tried that yet.

This makes about 300 ml of sauce.

  1 head   Garlic, cloves separated and peeled

  3 g      Salt

  1 whole  Juice from Lemon

200 ml     Oil, Sunflower (or mix of oils)

In the bowl of a mini chopper, process the Garlic with Salt; open and push the chunks to the bottom of the bowl and repeat until it's as mushed as it will get.

Add the Lemon Juice and repeat processing until smooth.

Add a tiny bit of Oil and process.

Repeat until all the Oil is used; you can add larger quantities after the emulsion sets up, but don't rush or it will break; this may take 10 minutes or so.

You should have a fairly fluffy mayonnaise-like sauce.

Fideuà de Ravalistan

Fideuà is a Valencian dish similar to paella but made with pasta. We used thin Pakistani pasta and added Lebanese Toum garlic sauce for a cross-cultural dish as vibrant as El Raval in Barcelona.

This was thrown together with things we had on hand. We started with a  sofrito of onions, padron peppers, and red bell pepper.

We added super-thin roasted Pakistani pasta; apparently the pasta is used as a breakfast during Ramadan.

We broke it up a bit and added fish stock sufficient to cook. We stirred in some corvina fish we'd cooked before the sofrito, and some peas. To finish, we added dollops of Toum, and insanely garlicky mayonaise-like sauce where the only emulsifier is the garlic (no egg).

It was authentic in only in spirit, and tasted great -- bold, rich, and filling -- there were no left-overs.

Creamy Peanut Pralines a la Shirley Corriher

These pralines came out well, with a firm, caramel-like texture, rather than a grainy sugar toothache. We substituted dry roasted peanuts for the pecans and almonds Shirley Corriher uses for Creamy Pralines from her book Cookwise in order to fit a dinner theme we're working on.

As Shirley says, the corn syrup slows the crystallization, but requires a slightly higher temperature to set firmly. Since the peanuts were already roasted and salted, we didn't roast them with butter and salt like she does. I've converted her imperial volume measurements to metric to make it easier for us to reproduce.

250 g  Dry Roasted Peanuts (2 C)

 25 g  Butter (2 Tbs)

235 g  Light Brown Sugar (1 C packed)

155 g  Granulated White Sugar (3/4 C)

 80 ml Light Corn Syrup (1/3 C)

120 ml Canned Evaporated Milk (1/2 C)

  5 ml Vanilla Extract (1 tsp)

Set out two Silpat nonstick sheets, or lightly oiled foil or parchment.

Bring all ingredients except Vanilla to boil, and continue to heat until mixture reaches 115C/240F.

Remove from heat and let rest 5 minutes (our temperature dropped to 105C/221F); add Vanilla.

Stir with a stiff spatula for about 4 minutes until the mixture thickens noticeably, including the center. 

Immediately spoon out onto the Silpats in heaping tablespoon sized dollops. A #70 disher worked well, until the mixture in the pot became too thick as it cooled; I switched to pairs of spoons to scoop out then slide the mixture off the spoon. You might want two people doing this to work more rapidly, one on each Silpat.

Let sit until solid.

Octopus Terrine #2

In Octopus Terrine #1, we added gelatin to capture the juices from the cooked octopus, but we didn't like the texture. This time, we used large legs, strained the juice and wrap the octopus tightly to let it set in its own gel.

We found large Spanish octopus at a restaurant supply store for under $7/pound, usually we see $10/pound and up. It was a good sized beast, costing $55, and we used 4 legs for this. We added  the legs to a sous vide bag with about 1/4 red bell pepper, diced fine; a touch of pimenton; some lemon zest; a little salt and black pepper. Like before, we cooked this at 77C for 5 hours, which is what Chef Steps recommends for "silky but tender".

When done, we strained off the liquid (it makes for an excellent risotto), and were left with legs that were much smaller than they went in; we lost at least 50% by weight. Alternating thick and thin ends of legs, we wrapped them tightly as a cylinder in cling film, then rolled to twist the film as tight as possible. It rested overnight in the fridge to let the internal gel bind the whole thing together.

When we took it out, it was a bit more lumpy -- less cylindrical -- than ideal. As we cut it with a very sharp thin knife, the terrine started coming apart. The texture was excellent, tender but not mushy, a little bounce, and the taste was very enjoyable.

Next time, I'd season and cook the same, but try to find a better way to compress the terrine. Do I really need a spring loaded terrine press like these?