Lamb and Potato Moussaka

Greek Moussaka is usually made with eggplant, sometimes with potatoes; we didn't have eggplants so we went with this potato-only version from The Spruce Eats. It turned out really well: rich, tasty, a little exotic, but ultimately a comfort food. We're adapting it slightly here, all proportions are approximate -- it's not a fussy dish. It does take some time as there are several steps. We used lamb, but you could use beef or a mix. This dish serves four and fit snugly in a small lasagna pan, 11x7x1.5 inches, 1 quart/liter, or two loaf pans. 

I stuck the end bits of the potato in the top just for fun

We had some extra stock, and we didn't want to fry the potatoes, so we took the unusual step of cooking the potatoes in stock topped up with a bit of wine. We then reused the liquid to make a flavored béchamel. Totally unconventional, but tasty. You can just simmer the potatoes in water, and make a plain béchamel with milk, of course. 

We originally made this while away from home where we had no scale, but now we've converted it to metric.

You can swap half of the Potatoes for an equal amount of Eggplant.

Potatoes (and Eggplant):
700 g     1 1/2 pound  Yukon Gold Potatoes (about 5 medium)
500 ml        2 C      Chicken Stock (or Water)

Meat Sauce:

500 g         1 pound  Ground Lamb

  1 large              Onion, chopped

  3 clove              Garlic, minced

  2 medium             Tomatoes, chopped

2.5 cm        1 inch   Cinnamon stick

  2 whole              Bay Leaves

  1 g       1/8 tsp    Allspice (5 pimienta de olor), ground

  3 whole   1/8 tsp    Cloves, ground

  2 g       1/2 tsp    Salt

  1 g       1/2 tsp    Black Pepper

 70 ml      1/4 C      Dry White Wine

 20 g         1 Tbs    Tomato Paste

    1 bunch            Thyme leaves

Béchamel (typically: 1:1 fat:flour, 5:1 milk:flour)

See notes at end about doubling the amount.

 60 g         4 Tbs    Butter

 60 g       1/4 C      Flour

500 ml        2 C      Chicken Stock reserved from cooking Potatoes (or additional 250 ml / 1 C Milk)

250 ml        1 C      Milk

  2 g       1/2 tsp    Kosher Salt

  1 g       1/4 tsp    White Pepper, ground

0.5 g       1/8 tsp    Nutmeg, ground

  1 Egg                Yolk, beaten (optional)

Assembly, Topping:
 as needed             Butter

 15 g       1/4 C      Breadcrumbs, toasted

 40 g       1/4 C      Feta Cheese, crumbled

Slice the Potatoes into 2 mm (1/8 inch) slices and boil until cooked and flexible but not falling apart. We used Chicken Stock and a bit of White Wine instead of Water, just because we had it. Drain and reserve the stock (if using). If you're using Eggplant, slice a bit thicker: I cooked them briefly in the Stock this time but think that was unnecessary. 

Brown the Lamb, and remove meat to plate, leaving fat in the pan.

Cook the Onions (add some Oil if needed) until barely soft, then add Garlic and cook a few minutes more.

Add the remaining ingredients and cook to merge flavors.

Add the reserved browned Meat.

Continue cooking to reduce moisture, until you have a dry meat sauce.

If you used Stock or Stock and Wine, reduce the reserved liquid to 300 ml (1 C).

Melt the Butter and cook the Flour a bit.

Add the Milk and reduced Stock, and continue to cook and stir until you get a smooth thick white sauce.

Remove from heat and stir in Egg Yolk.

Film the lasagne pan with butter to lubricate it a bit.

Layer the half of the cooked Potatoes like shingles, slightly overlapping, to cover the bottom of the pan.

Add half the meat sauce then smooth gently.

Add half the Béchamel and smooth.

Add another layer of shingled potatoes, meat sauce, and Béchamel.

Top with Bread Crumbs and Feta.

Bake about an hour at 180C (350F) until everything's cooked through and a fork or knife can pierce the potatoes fairly easily.

Let cool 20 minutes to let it set.

Cut and serve.

2024-09-04 With Eggplant

I didn't have Lamb, so I made this with a 50/50 Beef/Pork mix. I used about half Potato and half Eggplant. I cooked each separately in a mixed stock I had on hand, but the Eggplant got too soft. 

Next time: 

Consider searing them sans oil in a cast iron skillet, as several Serious Eats comments suggested. 

The Feta we used didn't melt well, consider mixing into the hot Béchamel instead.

2025-02-21 With Eggplant and Potato

We used proportions we had on hand, below, and it made 3x bread loaf pans, each of which comfortably fed 2 people for dinner.

We used 400 g Pork/Beef mix, and about 500 g Potatoes sliced 2mm, and 500 g long Eggplant sliced into 4mm (2mm was too fragile). We cooked the potatoes in the 500 ml Milk with a Bay Leaf (no wine/stock this time), which we then used for the Béchamel; I didn't use the Yolk, and it was fine. We dry-fried the Eggplant on a plancha with a bit of oil to prevent sticking and it gave them an attractive pancake-like brown surface. I had to make a more Béchamel (400 ml Milk) to have enough for the top layer,.

Next time, use 1 liter of Milk to cook the Potatoes; this will require more Butter and Flour, probably double. found it much quicker to assemble when I mixed the Meat Sauce with the Béchamel, but reserve about 1/4 for the final topping.

2025-12-20 Eggplant, Potato, Beef: 2 pans, too soft

This time we had 500 g Ground Beef, 330 g Eggplant (4mm), 330 g Potatoes (2mm), and it was the right amount for 2 loaf pans. I simmered the Potatoes in 500 ml Milk, and dry fried the Eggplant.

Both both lost most of their texture in the finished dish. The potatoes were Patatas para hervir (boil) which seem to cook much more quickly than we'd expect, so next time perhaps skip the pre-cook or use a different kind of potato. Maybe the Eggplant could also have done without the pre-cook. I had to add another 250 ml or so of Milk to give me enough Béchamel with the 60 g Butter and Flour.

Mini Chocoflanes

These chocolate flan desserts are also called "pastelitos imposibles" because the cake portion magically rises to the top of the dish as it cooks (due to expansion making it lighter than the flan above). In fact, it's relatively easy to make. This is an intensely chocolate-y version from Cooks Country February/March 2023. They claim that you must use Cajete instead of the easier-to-find Dulce de Leche due to the latter's density, but that doesn't make sense due to the layering, and is empirically untrue. The hardest part is combining the ingredients for the cake as it's quite dense; the flan is trivial in a blender.

Dulce de Leche on top, then flan, and cake on bottom

This makes six 8-ounce ramekins, or four 12-ounce oven-safe ceramic bowls that are large enough to split between two people; eight 6-ounce ramekins would be a fine size for a single person.

 90 ml          6 Tbs     Cajeta or Dulce de Leche

Cake:

  70 g          6 Tbs     Sugar

  45 g          5 Tbs     AP Flour

 0.6 g        1/8 tsp     Baking Soda

 0.8 g        1/8 tsp     Table Salt

  57 g        1/3 C       Bittersweet Chocolate Chips

  60 ml       1/4 C       Whole Milk

  22 g        1/4 C       Dutch-processed cocoa powder

  37 ml     2 1/2 Tbs     Vegetable Oil

   1 large      1 large   Egg

1.25 ml       1/4 tsp     Vanilla Extract

Flan:

 235 ml         1 C       Evaporated Milk

 235 ml         1 C       Sweetened Condensed Milk

  85 g          3 ounce   Cream Cheese

   2 large      2 large   Eggs

  10 ml         2 tsp     Vanilla Extract

   1 g        1/8 tsp     Table Salt

Heat oven to 160C/325F (convection is fine, too).

Spray ramekins with oil or paint with butter.

Find a lasagna pan or similar, big enough to hold your ramekins in a water bath.

If necessary, heat Cajeta or Dulce de Leche gently in a microwave until spoonable, then add a Tablespoon to each of the ramekins.

Cake:

Whisk Sugar, Flour, Baking Soda, and Salt.

Heat Chocolate, Milk, and Cocoa in a small sauce pan over low heat until melted and smooth, 3-5 minutes; let cool slightly, about 5 minutes.

Whisk Oil, Egg, and Vanilla into chocolate mixture until smooth.

Whisk in sugar mixture and combine thoroughly; this is pretty stiff but it will come together.

Divide the thick batter between the ramekins, trying not to mix into the Cajeta/Dulce too much.

Flan:

Bring 1 quart/liter of Water to boil for the bain marie.

Process all ingredients in a blender until smooth.

Divide flan mixture between the ramekins; this loose liquid probably won't disturb the thick cake batter much.

Add the ramekins to the lasagne pan then fill this pan with boiling water to make a bain marie.

Spray oil or smear butter over a piece of foil and cover the bain marie.

Bake 50 minutes for small ramekins, or 70 minutes for larger ones; you want enough time for the egg to set the flan.

Test that a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean.

Remove ramekins from water and let cool, at least an hour.

Invert the ramekins onto serving plates, and top with remaining sauce from the ramekins.

You can eat these barely cool, and they'll be pretty soft, but they're quite good after being chilled in a fridge where they will firm up a bit.

Bacalao Pil Pil Sous Vide -- in our Barcelona apartment

In our last episode with Bacalao, we found that we could get the "elixir" -- the emulsifier for the pil pil sauce -- efficiently using minimal oil using a sous vide technique, and subsequent experiments showed we could even do this with Mahi Mahi, at lower temperature.

We recently moved to Barcelona, where Bacalao is everywhere, and  restaurants have special machines to agitate the fish in oil to create the emulsion. We brought our first-generation sous vide machine by Sansaire -- even though it only ran on US-style 115VAC 60Hz: we got a step-down transformer to convert Spain's 230VAC to 115VAC, and hoped the 50Hz frequency wouldn't bother the motor too much. 

Tonight's dinner proved a success, using local bacalao and the hacked sous vide setup. We also discovered that using a even lower temperature works, and have suggestions for improvement.

Bacalao with emulsived sauce, served with potatoes and bulbing onions from the plancha

For a previous dinner here, we got some salted, dried bacalao from our local supermarket. The person in front of us got all coveted loins ("Estalvi!",  "saving!"), so we picked up a couple filets. We rehydrated them over a couple nights in the fridge and used half of it for one dinner, and froze the rest which we used tonight. The proportions below are what we had, and what we did; in the epilog, we suggest adjustments.

280 g      Bacalao filets, skin on, hydrated
pinch      Cayenne pepper flakes
2 cloves Garlic, sliced
120 ml    Olive Oil and Corn Oil mix (we ran out of Olive Oil)

Bag everything in a zip-top and place in a sous vide bath at 55C/130F for 30 minutes. I turned and agitated the bag every 5 minutes or so to make sure everything was distributed well.

How embarrassing: 135F, not 55C

Pour the oil and the critical milky white liquid that collected in the bag, the "elixir" (which I believe is a weak gelatin from under the skin of the fish, or at least in its flesh) into a tall glass and let it settle out. Use a turkey baster to pull the milky liquid from under the oil and put in a pan on medium heat.

Keep the bacalao in its bag in the still-hot water bath, with the power turned off, so it stays warm for service.

Use a stock skimmer or similar to whip air into the elixer. This time, mine was quite thin, so I had the heat on our induction cooker high enough to barely simmer the liquid to reduce it a bit. Bubbles begin to form as I whisked air into it, and after a while, I bravely added some of the reserved oil: it started to combine into an emulsion -- success! I continued whisking and adding oil to build the emulsion and developed one as thick as mayonnaise, so I added a bit of lemon juice and wine, and a dash of salt, and finished when I'd used all the oil. 

Thickened emulstion 

Plate the fish, top with emulsified sauce and sliced garlic from the bag, and serve. Some parsley would have helped here.

Results

I was happy to see the milky white "elixir" in the bag after about 15 minutes, but when I poured it into the pan, it seemed really thin. It appeared to be the hydrating water from the bacalao, and I was worried it wouldn't turn into an emulsion. But after bumping up the heat to a bare simmer and continuing to whisk, it did thicken a bit and bound the oil just fine.

The fish was a bit salty, which was a result of under-hydrating the dried bacalao, not this process.

The flesh of the fish flaked, like you'd expect cod to do, but required just a bit more force than I'd like. It was still moist, so reducing the temperature from 60C/140F to 55C/135F was a good move -- and we still got the elixir. 

There was more emulsified sauce than we needed for the fish, and it was quite thick despite thinning with wine and lemon juice. It complemented the potatoes Irene cooked on the plancha quite well, so nothing was wasted.

Next Time

When hydrating dried bacalao, take a sample, cook it, check the saltiness, and hydrate longer if needed; don't over hydrate or it will become bland. Ours was too salty but by this point it was too late to adjust. Our fish mongers will helpfully hector us about the right duration to hydrate and the number of changes of water we need: listen to them, and test for taste!

Keep the cooking temperature at 55C to preserve the moistness, but increase the time from 30 to 45 or maybe 60 minutes to allow it to flake more easily.

Cut the oil for the emulsion in half, 50-60ml should do. The wine, lemon, and salt were fine additions, so keep them, but taste, taste, taste for balance.

Lentejas con Chorizo (Lentils with Chorizo)

This Spanish lentil and chorizo dish is simple, warming, and hearty -- a classic. Recipes range from soupy to stewy; I lean toward a thicker consistency for dinner but don't want to overcook the lentils to the point of being mushy. For this dish, I'm taking cues from Spanish Sabores and Spain on a Fork.

I used brown lentils, but you can use black or green. In this rendition, I had a string of little chorizo balls, so I cut them into attractive hemispheres. We had some vegetable stock in the freezer which Irene simmered with some pork bones that we'd collected to give it some body. We've got rosemary, thyme, and bay growing on the terrace so we've used all three, but you can use any combination of aromatics that you like. The pickled Guindilla chilis just a little spicy, their acidity adds balance to the richness; our Catalan supermarket calls the Bixtos and they're also known as Piparras. If you can't find the Ñora or Choricero, use some Pimenton (Spanish smoked Paprika); the Ñora has a richness of tomato paste combined with the rich tobacco/leather notes of Ancho or Poblano chilis.

Total time about 1 hour; serves two:

125 g       Lentils, dried
600 ml      Stock (pork, beef, chicken, or vegetable)
    taste   Black Pepper, fresh ground
  1 stalk   Celery, whole
  1 sprig   Rosemary, whole for removal later
  1 bunch   Thyme, leave on stem for removal later
  1 whole   Bay Leaf
150 g       Chorizo, sliced into rounds
 15 ml      Olive Oil (a generous glug to prevent fat from burning)
  1 large   Onion, diced
  2 large   Carrots, large slice or dice
1/2         Red Bell Pepper, medium, large dice (72 g here)
  4 clove   Garlic, sliced thin
  1 medium  Tomato, crushed
 20 g       Ñora Pepper paste
2-4         Guindilla Chilis packed in vinegar

I'd suggest doing a mise en place -- measuring your ingredients and chopping your vegetables ahead of time -- so you don't risk overcooking the Lentils.

Rinse the Lentils and check for debris.

Add the Lentils to a pot with the Black Pepper, Celery, and whole aromatic herbs, and cover with Stock, then bring to a low simmer. These take the longest time to cook so give them a head start while you prepare the sofrito.

In a skillet, sear the Chorizo on all sides to render a little fat; continuing to sauté so the sausage cooks through.

In the skillet with the Chorizo fat, add the Oil and sauté the Onions and Carrots until the onions start to brown, then add Garlic and Pepper for a couple minutes, then the Tomatoes. Cover and cook over medium heat until reduced to a paste -- a sofrito -- about 10 minutes.

Add the sofrito and Ñora paste to the Lentil pot and simmer on low until the flavors have combined. Don't let it cook so much that the Lentils get mushy; if there's too much liquid, boost the heat but stir constantly so the lentils at the bottom don't burn. If it starts drying out, add more Stock or water and lower the heat. Taste and adjust Salt. Remove Celery and aromatic herbs.

Serve with the seared Chorizo, and top with some pickled Guindilla Chili peppers; slicing them makes it easier to eat without a knife. A hearty red wine works well with this rich dish.

Local and Seasonal: Rabbit and Rovellons

We've now been living here in Barcelona for a month and are enjoying the many different foods available at grocery stores and markets. At our nearby Bon Preu we picked up some rabbit sausage, and at the delightful Mercat Ninot we found rovellons, a wild mushroom much prized around here.

The sausages are mild and have very little fat, so we we cooked them covered with a little oil and pepper. For the fungus, we carefully cleaned them of their straw and soil, then followed this mushroom-nerd's recommendation to cover with water and boil it off to cook them, then finish with a saute with oil, garlic, and parsley.

We served them simply, with pa amb tomaquet, toasted bread rubbed with garlic and tomato, then a lashing of good olive oil and some finishing salt.

I've only had the rovellons once before, and these didn't seem as flavorful as I recalled, but I may have diluted the flavor with a bit too much water. In the market, they were 60€/Kg, so I don't want to mistreat them. I'll try them again at a restaurant, and want to explore other wild mushrooms we can readily find here.

Arroz Negro in Barcelona

Arroz negro with snails and some frizzante rosé wine on the terrace

Last week, we moved to Barcelona. We've got a lot of legal, financial, and repair work to do, so we haven't had a lot of time to cook (you can follow our adventures, starting with our move-in).  All of our cooking tools are on a ship somewhere between Baltimore and Barcelona, so we're improvising with what came with our apartment. But we can still whip up some dynamite meals. 

A couple days ago, we got some mussels from a local shop, and Irene cooked them with white wine, leeks, and so on -- very simple, very classic. With some country bread it made a good dinner. 

We had some extra flavorful liquid in the pot which we saved: we never through away flavor! I figured we could use it to make paella or something. 

Last night, after fixing things all day, we went out to Can Cargolet for a big pile of snails and a couple bottles of wine (36€=$36 for the entire meal). We couldn't finish them, and -- surprisingly -- they asked if we wanted them "para llevar", to take away; doggy bags aren't common here, but we couldn't let them go to waste.

When we went to the shop (Bon Preu, a rather nice grocery store a couple blocks away), we picked up some Bomba rice for paella, and asked one of the staff where the "tinto de sepia" was; the squid ink was in the frozen section, and was under 1€ for four sachets -- excellent. 

After returning from the urgent care, Irene picked all the snails out of their shells, and I simmered the shells in the mussel stock to extract more flavor. I sauteed 200g bomba rice in some olive oil, added a the strained stock -- reduced to 500ml -- and added the tinta de sepia. After 20 minutes, I added the reserved snails, and dinner was served. Quite a tasty dish, and as Irene says, "using things up". It's very similar to a paella, but looser, and we're not trying to get the crusty socarrat. Definitely worth doing again. 

Pizza for Outdoor Oven Crowd

We built an outdoor pizza oven but we really need about 10 people to make a pizza party worthwhile: it takes about a wheelbarrow load of wood for the evening and 2 hours to heat up. Once going, it runs about 900-1000F, cooking the pizzi in about 1-2 minutes (proper Napolitano style).  When folks are done making pizza, we let it cool, make bread at about 500F, then cool again and put a roast or pot of beans or stew in to cook overnight -- it'll be about 250F the next morning.

I wanted to come up with proportions for pizza dough that would be easy to measure and scale for a crowd this size, and max it out with our equipment's capacity. Here's the math then the final numbers.

Dough hydration (bakers' percentage: mass of water divided by mass of flour) should be 66-70%.

My Kitchenaid stand mixer can handle about 1Kg of flour at that hydration.

TODO: REWORK THE MATH TO START WITH 1660 - 1700g dough in bowl, then divide by an even 12 balls at 138-142g/ball.  If people can eat 2.5 balls, that's 4.8 people per bucket.

I used to figure 3 pizzi per person but we've had a lot of leftover dough, so here I'm backing that out to 2.5 p/p, assuming 142g (5 ounce) uncooked pizzi dough balls per person.

Dough at 66% hydration:

(2.5 * 142g) dough/person = 1 * X flour + 0.66 * X water
355g dough/person  = X * (1 + 0.66) = X * 1.66
X = 355 / 1.66 = 214g
Flour: 1 * X = 214g
Water: 0.66 * X = 141g

Dough at 70% hydration, likewise:

X = 355 / 1.70 = 209g flour and 146g water person

If the Kitchenaid can do about 1Kg flour per bowl, we can get 2.8 people at 355g 66% hydration.
Let's round down the dough balls a bit so we can round up the people to a full 3:
1000g / 3people = 333g/person  is 201g flour and 132g  water per person,
and each person eats 2.5 dough balls, so 333g dough /1.66 = 201g flour and 132g water.
Whew!

I bulk ferment in 2 liter buckets, and this will hold 1000g flour and 66 g water, so for one bucket that feeds 3 people, we get:

1000 g Flour, Caputo 00
 660 g Water, cold (for 66% hydration)
     1 Tbs Yeast
     2 Tbs Salt, Kosher, coarse

I use a low-knead long-rise ferment, so combine those in the Kitchenaid until all the flour is incorporated.
Dump into fermenting buckets and let rise over night for 1 to 3 nights in the refrigerator.
Take dough out of chill about 3 hours before eating time (it takes 2-3 hours to preheat the overn).
Divide and form into dough balls

I'm doing some fuzzy-math here because I don't want fractional dough balls.
If we can handle 1000g flour and 660g water, we've got 1660g dough.
Divide by a nice round dozen and we get 1660g dough / 12 balls = 138g / dough ball.
So make 12 dough balls, each 138g.

I put them on the lid of an under-bed box, and cover with the bottom of the box to keep the dough from drying out. I've seen others putting each ball into separate plastic tubs, but that's a lot of tubs.
Mist with oil and let rise until ready to shape and bake.