Kabocha squash gnocchi

We got an orange Kabocha squash at the farmers market, roasted it, then turned it into gnocchi served with pesto. It came out rather well.

Sauced with pesto and served

The Kabocha's like a small pumpkin which comes in deep green and orange varieties; ours was orange, which they say is the sweetest, akin to sweet potatoes. We cut it into wedges (with a heavy cleaver), seasoned with EVOO, grated ginger, a touch of cayenne and a little salt, and roasted until it was tender. It would have been a fine side dish -- just like that -- but we decided to push our luck and make gnocchi.

Now, the best gnocchi I ever made was after a night of carousing: when I came home, more than a little tipsy and famished, I riced a microwaved potato, added an egg and just the right amount of flour to make the lightest, most silky gnocchi we've had at home -- sadly, I've never been able to repeat that level of excellence.  We've also made gnocchi with squash, but most varieties are so wet you have to add a lot of flour to get them to cohere and they turn out leaden. What could go wrong this time? Happily, it worked well.

The proportions here were dictated by how much squash pulp I had after running it through the food mill; I added flour at a 1/3rd ratio, then added more until it barely held together. This amount made 4 dinner portions.

450 g      Roasted Kabocha squash (roast first, mill, measure)
1          Egg, beaten
150-200 g  Flour, start at the low end, add until it holds

Run the roasted Kabocha through a food mill. The skin is thin, so don't bother peeling, the mill will shred it finely enough.
Add the Egg and combine well.
Add the lower amount of the Flour in stages so you don't make it too stiff and it combines well.
If it's still very soft, add more Flour but keep it as loose as you can.

Take about a quarter of it, roll it out on a lightly floured surface into a snake about 1cm diameter.

Roll out a snake using just enough flour so it doesn't stick; note the butter pat on the left

Realize that pasta will expand quite a bit as it cooks; our thicker snakes resulted in gnocchi that were a bit larger than I'd have liked.
Cut into about 2cm segments.
Roll each with the tines of a fork to create groves; we have an ancient wooden grooved butter pat that acts like an actual gnocchi board.

Rolled and shaped with the grooved butter pat

Cook in salted water until the inside is no longer floury; most recipes say "until they float" but if your gnocchi are large like ours were, the insides may not be done yet. We needed about 5-6 minutes.

First batch (2 servings) boiling, second batch waiting

Toss in heated sauce. The classic is browned butter and sage, but we used a pesto made from arugula we grew.

Toss gently with warmed sauce, serve

1000 Layer Duck Fat Potatoes

Irene found this and suggested I'd like it because it seemed even more fussy than Hasselback Potatoes or even Francis Mallmann's Potato Dominoes. The recipe in Food and Wine magazine didn't match the photos accurately, but their video helped.

Fine crackly outer shell, creamy insides

We chose Yukon Gold potatoes for their creaminess, rather than the dry floury russet or waxy red varieties. We had a bunch of beautiful clear duck fat we rendered when making duck confit sous vide; it was already well-seasoned from the confit and smelled great, so we didn't add salt later. We probably could have used less fat if we'd cut our slices thicker, since there would be less surface area. We didn't have an 8x8-inch pan, so we used a bread loaf pan that's a bit larger then 8x4-inch, and dropped the potato amount to fit.

1360 g   3 pounds  Yukon Gold Potatoes
 120 ml  1/2 C     Duck Fat, slightly warmed so it's liquid
         1 Tbs     Salt (if your fat isn't pre-seasoned)
                   Oil for frying

Line the pan with a parchment sling so you can remove the potatoes, and extend the paper over the sides enough to cover the top.
Peel the potatoes.
Slice thinly on a mandolin: the recipe's desired 1/8th inch was too thick for their photos, but we probably cut ours too thin -- we really could read a newspaper through them when coated in duck fat.

Slice thin: ours were too thin, 1mm is probably about right

Mix thoroughly with the Duck Fat, coating both sides.

Coat all surfaces in liquid duck fat

Layer the sliced Potatoes into the pan on the parchment; this was tedious with our super thin slices.
Top with any remaining, now-starchy duck fat.

Layering was tedious with such thin slices

Wrap the extended parchment over the top, cover with foil and press it onto the surface.

Bake at 150C/300F for 2-3 hours, until a wooden skewer pierces them easily (remove the foil to test).

Remove foil and add a same-sized pan, press down and add weights to compress the potatoes.

Refrigerate overnight compressed like this.

Weight the top to compress the layers

Remove top parchment, turn out, remove remaining parchment.
Cut into 3cm or 1-inch towers: I used a 4x8 grid since that's the approximate dimension of our pan.

Put pieces on a parchment-lined baking sheet, cover with cling film and freeze overnight.

Potato towers waiting for the freezer

Maybe not 1000 layers, but it's a lot!

Deep fry the still-frozen towers in 190C/375F oil about 5 minutes until deep golden to brown and crunchy outside; don't crowd the oil or the temperature will drop too much -- 10 seems about right; try to prevent the towers from sticking together, but don't break them apart.
Place on paper or paper towel, sprinkle with coarse salt.
Serve immediately.

Served with brined, roasted chicken, end-of-season cauliflower

The crunchy exterior was delightful, the interior very creamy from the Yukon Golds.

Next time: slice the potatoes a bit thicker, 1mm sounds right; this will allow us to use less duck fat, and speed assembly, but hopefully give a more textured outer crunch. Decrease the oil temperature a bit so they don't darken quite so quickly.

Chou Farci: stuffed cabbage

This was enjoyably meticulous to make and turned out really well. It would be a fine component of an Alsace meal. The recipe came from Art of Eating magazine number 88 in 2011. It serves 4 generously, and can be cut in half as we've done in the photos below.

Served with L’Abbaye de Saint Bon-Chien, Swiss country beer

I think it could use a higher cabbage-to-meat ratio, as it's pretty rich; we've sometimes added a little chili and lemon zest to brighten it up a bit. Don't bake in a high-sided dish or it will take forever to cook.

700     g       Pork Shoulder (1/4 fat to 3/4 lean), very cold
12      g       Salt
                Black Pepper
        hint    Nutmeg
1       clove   Garlic, finely chopped

Grind together the Pork, Salt, Black Pepper, Nutmeg, Garlic. Chill. If you're lazy, you can use prepared sausage, without the skin.

2               Onions, finely chopped (about 250g)
                Lard or fresh-tasting Olive Oil
1       head    Savoy Cabbage (about 1Kg)
2       large   Eggs, very cold
125     gr      White Breadcrumbs
large   handful Chopped Parsley
                Salt
                Pepper
6       slices  Pork Belly or Bacon
500     ml      Chicken Stock
1-2             Ripe Tomatoes, peeled, seeded, chipped

Sweat onions in a little fat until translucent but uncolored.

Discard tough outer leaves of cabbage; remove and discard central core.
Remove 12-15 outer leaves, carefully keeping them intact.

Carefully separate the leaves

Place each face down and carefully cut away the protruding portion of the rib to make it flush with the rest of the leaf.
Blanch in salted water until tender, 4-5 minutes; plunge into cold water and drain well.
Slice remaining cabbage into narrow strips; blanch, cool, drain.

 

Combine onions, sausage meat, eggs, breadcrumbs, parsley in large bowl.
Season with salt and pepper. Knead well until mixed.

Of the 15 leaves, reserve the 4 smallest.
Lay the rest flat with concave side up.
Take half the stuffing and divide it among the large leaves, placing on each, according to its size, an approximately plum-sized piece. Pat out stuffing until it reaches within about an inch of the edges of the leaves.

Pork mixture added to leaves before spreading
Squeeze the water from the blanched cabbage strips and mix with the other half of the stuffing. Grease the bottom of an approximately foot-wide baking dish and place the smallest remaining leaf in the center, concave side up. On it place the stuffing-cabbage mixture and shape into a grapefruit-sized ball. Re-create the shape and appearance of the cabbage by first covering the ball with the remaining 4 small plain leaves, making sure the ribs rise from the bottom.

Add the stuffed leaves, one by one, starting with the smallest, distributing them evenly all around the ball's surface, stuffing-side in, and pressing firmly into place.

Place bacon or pork belly slices onto cabbage, radiating from the center down the sides like spokes of a wheel.
Pour Chicken Stock around cabbage to a depth of about 1/2 inch (1 cm)

Everything's better with Irene's bacon

Bake stuffed cabbage in a 325F (165C) oven until center reaches about 165F (73C), about 45-60 minutes. If the liquid evaporates below 1/4 inch (1/2 cm) add more stock (or water) to pan. Baste the cabbage once or twice toward the end of cooking.

Just out of the oven

Transfer the cooked cabbage to a warm serving dish. Pour the jus from the cooking vessel into saucepan, deglazing with a little water if necessary. Add tomato and boil briefly until reduced to thin but not watery sauce. Taste and season with salt, strain.

At the table, cut the cabbage into pie-shaped slices and spoon sauce over them. 

Radiccio and Prepared Chorizo variation

One evening, we threw together a variation of this with what we had in the house, a big head of red Radiccio, and four pieces of Mexican Chorizo; instead of stock, we used a can of industrial lager someone left in our fridge. And you know, it came out really well!  The weights of the ingredients were cut about in half. 

So if you're in a rush, give it a go!

Sous Vide Cod Pil Pil

We may have discovered something new: you can make Pil Pil with plain cod, not just dried bacalao.

Previously, we'd used sous vide to minimize the oil and effort required for Pil Pil, the magical hollandaise-like emulsion. Every Pil Pil we've seen (and eaten) uses dried salted bacalao, preserved cod. We speculated that the mysterious emulsifying agent was within the fish skin, and that we might be able to develop the emulsion with fresh cod. Finding cod with skin on proved difficult but we found skin-on cod steaks at our local Korean supermarket.   We cooked it as before, with oil and some garlic in a sous vide bag, dropping the temperature to 65C/150F from the 78C/172F we used earlier.

Cod Pil Pil with truffled sunchoke risotto

Sure enough, the sous vide bag had some of the white emulsifying liquid in it, and this time the fish was beautifully moist and flaking apart in large chunks.  As before, we separated the liquid from the oil, whipped it with a mesh strainer until it started thickening, and drizzled in some of the oil from the sous vide bag until we developed a sauce. We added a bit of lemon to thin and brighten it, and adjusted with salt, and served it with the cod.  Really quite excellent.

429 g     Cod steak, fresh, with skin, portioned
250 ml    Extra Virgin Olive Oil
  4 clove Garlic, slightly crushed
  1       Chili Arbol
  1 pinch Salt

It can help to chill the oil before trying to vacuum seal the bag, but since we don't really care about the "under vacuum" part of "sous vide" as we're essentially low-temperature poaching, you can just seal carefully.

Cod, oil, garlic, chili in sous vide bag

Add the ingredients to the bag, seal, and cook sous vide at 65C/150F for 30 minutes. 
Drain the oil and precious white liquid into a tall narrow container.
Let settle a bit and suck out the white liquid that settles to the bottom with a turkey baster.
Whip that in a low temperature skillet with a mesh skimmer until it starts to thicken a bit.
Drizzle in some of the oil until the emulsion builds, then add more until you have as much as you like. 
Adjust density with lemon juice and water, season with salt.  
Serve on Cod.

What we learned

Pre-cut the portions of cod since they're quite fragile after cooking.
Fresh skin-on cod works as well as preserved salted and dried bacalao.
Lowering the temperature to 65C does release the emulsifying elixir.
We can add lemon and salt without breaking the emulsion.

Next Time

Salt the cod flesh a bit before adding to the bag.
Reduce the oil to just enough required for our portion of emulsified sauce, so we have none left over, maybe 50ml (3 Tbs).
Try dropping the temperature even further, to 57C/135F so it doesn't quite fall apart; hopefully, we'll still get the white emulsifying liquid.

Suspicions

Perhaps it's not the cod, or the cod skin that's the emulsifier; we've had success with Mahi Mahi. Is it possible the emulsifier is in fact the garlic cloves in the sous vide bag? We know garlic is a weak emulsifier from our delicious egg-free Toum.  Try without garlic some time.