Friday, April 26, 2013

Marcella Hazan's Homemade Tagliatelle and Ragù alla Bolognese

It's been a pretty crazy couple of weeks both for the Boston area and me personally (in a day job sense - thankfully nothing to report in the marathon bombing sense), but things seem to be settling back down so I can joyfully resume regular food blogging.

Homeade Tagliatelle and Bolognese

Anna's had a pasta machine as long as I've known her, but except for some great (and time consuming) Thomas Keller agnolotti it hasn't really been broken out of its box very often. Part of this is due to the fact that I think dried pasta is perfectly fine most of the time, and when we want something like filled pasta we can just buy it from a great place up the street and keep it in the freezer... but I think a larger part is simply that I've been a little intimidated by my conception of the process. The aforementioned agnolotti was made entirely by Anna, and any time fresh pasta has been made it's pretty much been her deal... but on a recent weekend while she was up in Maine I decided to make a pot of sauce and try my hand at pasta making.

The following recipes are all adapted from Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.

Ragù alla Bolognese

You're going to want to make the sauce first... probably on a separate day because it's pretty time consuming. Granted, it's relatively hands off cooking, but I still wasn't in the mood to break out the pasta machine after a full day of sauce making. The recipe that follows is a double batch of Mercella's bolognese with a few adaptations for the home cook. Most people would cook this in a big Dutch oven... though I personally prefer my straight sided saute pan... but for either the key is the balance of volume to surface area. With something like a saucepan, with its comparatively smaller surface area, you are going to be noticeably slower in the multiple evaporation steps.

Marcella Hazan's Ragù alla Bolognese

Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 6 tablespoons unsalted butter
  • 1 medium onion diced (about 1 cup)
  • 6 stalks of celery diced (about 1 1/3 cups)
  • 4 medium carrots diced (about 1 1/3 cups)
  • 1 1/2 pounds meatloaf mix (i.e. equal parts chuck, veal, and pork... or just chuck if you prefer)
  • Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
  • 2 cups whole milk
  • 1/8 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
  • 2 cups dry white wine
  • 1 28 oz can of crushed San Marzano tomatoes

Directions

  1. Heat oil, butter, and onion in a pot on a burner set medium. Cook and stir onion until translucent. Add chopped celery and carrot. Cook for 2 minutes more, stirring the vegetables to coat them well.
  2. Add meat and season with a large pinch of salt and a few grindings of pepper. Break up the meat and stir well, cooking until the beef has lost its raw, red color.
  3. Pour in the milk and let simmer gently, stirring occasionally, until it has bubbled away completely. This can take anywhere from 1 to over 2 hours, so be patient. You don't want to turn the heat up too high or you'll scorch your sauce.
  4. Add the nutmeg and then pour in the wine and return the sauce to a simmer. Let it bubble along, stirring occasionally, until the wine has evaporated. Once again this can be time consuming but it should be significantly faster than the milk... about an hour.
  5. Add the tomatoes and return the sauce to a simmer once again. Here you want it to be barest of simmers... you might even want a flame tamer if you are working on a gas stove. Simmer like this for 3 hours, stirring occasionally... and don't be afraid to throw in a 1/4 cup of water if it looks like the sauce is drying out.
Pasta Machine
So once you have your sauce all ready it's time to make the pasta. I was surprised to find that making pasta is not a technically difficult or a particularly time consuming thing to do... but it's still likely you won't be 100% happy with your first effort. Why? For me it was because... apparently... nobody seems to have thought to standardize the settings on pasta machines. So somewhere between the thinnest and thickest settings (even this range varies from machine to machine) is what you want and you are only going to be able to find that by luck or experience. I made two batches on my machine which numbers its settings from 1 (thinnest) to 7 (thickest) and didn't quite get it right either time... once too thick (4) and once too thin (2) so now I know I want the third setting for my next batch of tagliatelle. In both cases the pasta was still quite delicious, but you are probably going to want some dry pasta on hand just in case you are disappointed with your early efforts.

As far as ingredients go... we actually have 00 pasta flour on hand because we're annoying food people who care about this sort of thing (note we also have 00 pizza flour which is totally different)... but Marcella says you don't really need anything other than all purpose and I suspect she is probably correct. The basic ratio she calls for is 1 cup of flour to 2 large eggs for 3/4 of a pound of pasta... which translates somewhere from 3 to 6 portions depending on whether you are thinking of main course or appetizer size or something in between. If you are confident in your pasta making then I would double it (i.e. 2 cups of flour and 4 eggs) since you can let leftovers dry naturally and keep them for weeks... but otherwise it probably makes sense to work in small batches until you get the hang of it.

If you are OCD about baking things (like me) and prefer weights then just weigh the eggs and use 1 to 1.5 times as much flour.

Cutting Tagliatelle

Not to insult all the wonderful Italian grandmothers out there, but one tip I will give you is that dumping your flour onto the counter, making a well in said flour, and then pouring eggs into it is a great way to end up with eggs on the floor. Just do it in a bowl... I promise I won't tell anybody.

Otherwise the progression is to combine your flour and eggs together until well mixed. You don't want the dough to be sticky, so be prepared to add more flour (especially true if you are using 00 flour and aren't doing things by weight since it weighs less per cup than all purpose) as you mix. Marcella says you should be able to poke your finger into the dough and not have it come out sticky.

Then you knead for 5-10 minutes until velvety smooth (possibly adding more flour if it is too sticky). After you let it rest for 30 minutes or so under a towel or plastic wrap you are ready for the pasta machine.

Multiply the number of eggs you used by 3 and divide your dough into that many pieces (i.e. 6 pieces for 2 eggs and 1 cup of flour). You'll need lots of free space from this point forward, so clear off some counters and or tables and put down clean dish towels. These pieces are going to get quite long, but note that you can always hang them over the edge of the counter.

Tagliatelle Birdsnests

Now you just set your pasta machine to the widest setting and run a piece of pasta dough through. You'll get a rectangle about this big. Fold it into thirds... like you are folding a letter (does anybody even do that anymore? might need to find a new analogy)... then feed the narrow end through the pasta machine. Repeat this process a couple of more times before moving onto the next piece of dough.

Once you've run all of your dough through the widest setting, simply turn the setting down one notch and run each piece of dough through again (don't do the letter folding thing though). From here on out things are pretty quick, though the dough gets progressively more unweildy because of its length... you just turn the setting to the next narrowest and then run through each rectangle of dough a single time. Here is what the dough looks like after the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th pass. As mentioned above I've basically settled on settled on using setting #3 (5th pass) on my machine for tagliatelle but unless you have an "Al Dente" pasta machine (and pasta preferences similar to mine) you are going to have to figure out what setting you prefer by trial and error.

Cutting tagliatelle must be done by hand... just fold it up over itself use chef's knife to cut 1/2" wide strips(see picture). You need to let them dry a bit before you cut or otherwise the strands will stick together... but you don't want to wait until they are too dry or the pasta will crack when you cut it. One option for cutting is to roll up all the pasta dough stips together which will speed things up, but since 2 strips works out to once serving I just cut them in stacks of two and then, after separating the individual strands, piled them into little bird nests to dry. Note that while they will last for weeks once dried completely (24 hours) they do become quite fragile so be careful storing them.

How long they take to cook is determined by how thick and how dry the pasta is... fresh thin pasta can be done in 2-3 minutes but thicker and drier pasta tends to be more like the boxed kind and takes on the order of 5-10 minutes.

Totally worth doing... don't be intimidated by pasta making like I was! Just remember that it's only flour and eggs, so it's not like you are going into the poor house if you need to start over.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

A Little Busy

No food post this week due to a conference coming up this weekend where I have one figure done for my poster that I present Sunday afternoon. Somewhat stressed.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Canal House Cooks Every Day: Pork in an Easy Red Mole

Pork in New Mexico Chile Mole with Cornbread
This is another recipe out of Canal House Cooks Every Day, and while the weather is nicely turning towards spring, farmers' markets haven't opened up yet in the Boston area... so I'm not quite ready to do 50 asparagus recipes or whatever we're supposed to do when you get a 70 degree day in April. Personally I'm of the opinion that chili is great any time of year, so if you're not starved for spring time recipes... and maybe a little tired of reading about the ramps you can't get yet... then please keep reading.

This is a very straightforward recipe... just pork butt stewed in a simple red mole sauce for a couple of hours. I think most people assume that a mole sauce has to have five different kinds of chilies, six kinds of nuts, and twenty other crazy ingredients... but that is not necessarily the case. Certainly for a special occasion you'll likely want to go to that effort for your turkey in mole poblano, but you can also make simple "everyday" moles that come together quickly. This particular red mole only calls for one type of chili and one type of nut to go with raisins and pretty typical dried spices, so it might not even require anything you don't already have in your pantry.

I've modified this recipe in two ways to make it a little simpler and quicker, and (I hope) better. The first change is to sub in New Mexico chilies for the guajillo chilies called for in the original. The flavor difference between the two is pretty modest, and dried New Mexico chilies are available in practically every grocery store in New England... whereas guajillos require a trip to a specialty spice shop or an internet order. If you've got easy access then, by all means use them. The second change is one championed by Kenji over at Serious Eats... browning only one side of your meat. You can read his reasoning in his recipe for Carne Adovada, tl;dr is that browning brings flavor but it also causes moisture loss and tougher meat, so the best of both worlds is simply browning one side. This provides the material benefit of flavorful and tender pork, but also saves you a ton of time when you are browning in batches.

Note that this dish renders a lot of fat, and as awesome as pork fat is you are probably going to want to get rid of most of it before serving. One solution is to simply have the stew the next day, as spooning off the fat of a completely cooled and refrigerated stew is pretty easy. Another way is to use a gravy separator.

Pork in an Easy Red Mole

Ingredients

  • 12 dried New Mexico chilies
  • 5 cups hot chicken stock
  • 1/3 cup blanched almonds
  • 1 tbsp ground cumin
  • 1 tbsp dried oregano
  • 2 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 10 black peppercorns
  • Salt
  • 1 cup raisins
  • 3 cloves garlic
  • 4 tbsp vegetable oil
  • 6 lbs boneless pork butt or Boston butt, cut into 1-inch cubes
  • 3 medium onions, sliced
  • Pepper
  • half-bunch scallions, chopped
  • Large handful cilantro leaves, chopped

Directions

  1. Tear off stems of the dried chilies and shake out the seeds. Heat a heavy skillet over medium heat. Toast the chilies in the skillet, pressing them down with tongs and turning once or twice, until they are fragrant and turn a slightly darker shade, 30-60 seconds. Transfer the chilies to a medium bowl. Pour 2 cups of the hot chicken stock over the chilies and set them aside to soak until soft and pliable, about 30 minutes.
  2. Toast the almonds in the skillet over medium heat, stirring frequently, until pale golden brown, 6-8 minutes. Transfer to a plate to cool completely. Add the cumin, oregano, cinnamon, and peppercorns to the skillet and toast the spices over medium heat, stirring until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Transfer to a small bowl to cool. Finely grind the almonds with 1 tsp of salt in a food processor or blender. Add the chilies and their soaking liquid, along with the toasted spices, raisins, and garlic, puree to a smooth paste.
  3. Heat the remaining 2 tbsp of oil in a heavy large pot over medium heat. Working in batches, brown the pork on one side, about 2-3 minutes per batch. Transfer the meat to a bowl as it browns. Add the onions to the pot and cook, stirring often, until soft, about 5 minutes.
  4. Return the pork and any accumulated juices to the pot. Stir in the spice paste. Add 2 cups of the stock and season with salt and pepper. Bring to a simmer. Cover the pot and simmer the stew over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, until the pork is tender, 2-3 hours. Add a little more stock to the pot if the stew begins to dry out. Serve the stew garnished with scallions and cilantro.

Sunday, April 7, 2013

Blanching Almonds: Easier Than You Think

Blanching Almonds
Blanched almonds are simply almonds with no skin... which, when you think about roasted almonds where the skin seems basically painted on there, doesn't even seem theoretically possible. Or like you'd be hunched over a bowl scraping off almond skin with your fingernails or something.

Fear not! It is seriously a super easy technique that can save you some money.

Pour boiling water over raw almonds and let them sit for a minute (no longer or they won't stay crisp) and then drain and rinse with cold water. You'll notice that the skins have all shriveled up and pulled away from the almond The skins pop right off with just a little squeeze. I was seriously shocked at how easy it came off. Finished a cup in like 15 minutes even with boiling the water. Great for when you can't find blanched almonds or when you simply want to save some money (raw almonds are much cheaper than blanched or slivered).

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Canal House Cooks Every Day: Leg of Lamb and Creamy Potatoes

Leg of Lamb and Creamy Potatoes
So this is what I made for Easter... a roasted leg of lamb and potatoes simmered in cream. It was a sort of a spur of the moment decision, as I was just paging through Canal House Cooks Every Day on Saturday, trying to figure out something seasonal to cook, when I noticed "Hey, wait, it's Easter!" (Obviously I'm not very religious and past the age of chocolate bunnies) An afternoon of shopping later and I had a 5 lb bone-in leg of lamb... which is a lot of meat (and money) for a household with only one meat eater, but leftover lamb is really awesome. One of the few foods that is just as good (or better) cold.

Leg of Lamb After

I feel kind of dumb that I didn't think to sous vide the thing, but in the end, since this was the first dish I made from this cookbook it's probably best that I tried it out exactly as written. I'm not going to post the recipe since a) who really needs a leg of lamb recipe the week after Easter?, and b) as I said, I did it exactly as written with no modifications. The basic idea though, was to cut little slits in the leg and stuff them with a garlic anchovy paste. Then roast it on a rack over some coffee (yes coffee) at 350 F for about an hour and a half (for medium rare an internal temp of 130 degrees F). The use of coffee here is the brilliant bit... that's what you end up making your gravy from, and I gotta it was some of the best gravy I've ever made. You can't taste the coffee in it, but it really does add a depth and complexity I've never achieved just from pan drippings. Anyway, the whole thing turned out pretty great, but you can see here why I sort of wish I had done it sous vide:

Leg of Lamb Being Sliced

The interior looks to be a perfect medium rare, but a pretty large area of the meat is cooked to medium... which is fine, as it still quite good cooked to that point, but if I had done it sous vide it would be a perfect pink all the way through.

I should mention the potatoes before bringing this post to a close, as I've never really made potatoes like this before. Essentially it's just 8 russets cut into one inch chunks and stick of butter that is simmered in 4 cups of half and half for an hour. Pretty rich obviously, but I suppose not much more so than mashed potatoes... which is kind of what these are. Unmashed mashed potatoes. Pretty good stuff, but next time I'll cut the recipe in half... though I think just taking an immersion blender to the leftovers would make a pretty good potato soup.

So I've only made two things out of Canal House Cooks Every Day, but so far I'd say it's a pretty good cookbook... obviously you know the pictures are incredible if you've ever been to their blog... but I'll try to cook some more out of it to get a more thorough impression.