Let’s get one thing straight.

I don’t do this to say I’m a better cook than anyone. I know a couple tricks, and my background gives me a different insight into what goes on with food. I’ve sat through countless demos and lectures by chefs I love and admire, and still found something to cringe at. This isn’t for me to say I know everything about cooking, or can do better than them. This is for me to point my Science & Engineering friends in a different direction (and the non-Science & Engineering peeps). Hubert Keller, for example, is one of my favorite chefs in my hometown of San Francisco, but you’ll still hear him talk about how searing meat “seals in juices.” Wrong. Is he wrong about everything else? God no. He’s still an incredibly talented chef and if he told me that the reason eggs firmed up by frying them in butter was because fairies magically transformed the eggs from liquid to solid, I’d still fry them in butter, but log in my head the fact that heat denatures and rearranges both the proteins AND starches present (yes, there are starches/sugars in animal tissue. Don’t believe me? Go grab a Bio textbook).

My background is Biochemistry and Microbiology. You’ll probably never see me write strictly about that stuff, because I’m either working on something that I want to patent, publish or is just incredibly technical that the only people who would get it are others who may want to steal my ideas. Yes, I’ve had ideas stolen. It’s not pretty. And if you know me, you also know how large I am and how violent I can get. Trust me, I’ve bought many people many wardrobes due to that temper and the strength I am afforded.

What I will do, is break down at the chemical, physical, molecular and cellular level what is going on. Many myths and misconceptions have been handled previously by other writers and scientists, but those myths and misconceptions are still out there. Cheers to men like Harold McGee and Herve This for laying the ground work. Kudos to Alton Brown for shedding a lot of light, but I find his over simplifications gloss over things in an incorrect way. He still does great work, though.

Knives

I know I posted briefly about knives, earlier, but someone asked me earlier what to do if they didn’t have $100 – $200 to shell out for a decent chef knife. If you really can’t afford to invest in a single knife at that price, there is a viable option. Victorinox/Forschner makes a great 8″ chef knife that goes for less than $30. It is a stamped knife, but it is by no means an incredibly cheap knife. It cuts better than anything else you’ll find for the price. In fact, it cuts almost as good, if not better, than the Henckels you see at Macy’s that go for $80-100. Trust me. If you can’t afford a great knife yet, the Victorinox is a viable alternative.

Victorinox 8-inch Chef Knife at Amazon.com

Risotto

If you’ve had dinner at my place, chances are very good that I’ve made risotto for you (your chances go up the more often you’ve sat at my table), that savory and delectable delicacy of Piedmont. A simple dish that for some reason is elevated to levels of near haute cuisine. The very mention of risotto conjures up images of Tuscan countryside, bottles of sangiovese and chianti, black ties and white linen in people. “Fancy” is a word I hear associated often with this staple, nay pillar, of Northern Italian cuisine. And, I suppose it is “fancy” to the dirty water hot dog and roach coach crowd. It’s just that, if you grew up in Piedmont, in Venice, in Milan, the stuff is old hat for you. If your parents or grand parents were from Northern Italy, you probably had the stuff right along with dirty water hot dogs or later in the evening, after you gorged on $1 tacos (cabeza or lengua for me, please) from the taco truck outside of school.

Maybe what goes into the whole mystique of risotto is the labor. Good risotto is stirred regularly. Great risotto is stirred constantly. My friend Kelsey gets regular work outs when she comes over for dinner and I’m making risotto. And that work is key for risotto. In any grain of rice there are two compounds – amylose and amylopectin. Amylose is a long chain of glucose (sugar) with little to no branching. It is hard to digest, but stores cellular energy readily. Great for plants to stockpile during winter dormancy – a long, slow burn until spring arrives. Amylopectin on the other hand is branched, it twists this way and that. Each branch is easily cut up, making it great for fast use. The short grain rice used in making risotto is packed full of amylopectin. And this is key to risotto’s creamyness. Whatever some cockamamie TV chef or home cook will tell you, the amylopectin is not a cell. It does not absorb anything. Instead, in the process of cooking, amylopectin is leached out of the rice. As heat and liquid is applied to the cell membrane and walls of the rice, they burst, releasing their guts out to the soupy world they’re being cooked in. And in those guts are gigantic strands of amylopectin that unravel themselves. As they cook, and join together in the liquid, the multibranched strands get tangled. This tangling of starches is what gives risotto its thick, creamy consistency. And the stirring helps free up more of this starch. As anyone who has ever taken 1st year General College Biology (Bio-130 for my DVC peeps!) knows, the best way to lyse (break) cells is to put them in a lot of liquid and shake vigorously (centrifuge preferred). The constant stirring helps break cells, but not nearly with the totality of a centrifuge. Otherwise you’d end up with a goopy mess that wouldn’t look terribly edible as every cell was destroyed. That or the centrifuge just gives out, catches on fire and sets off the Ansul system in your lab/kitchen. Trust me, that’s not fun.

Risotto al vinno rosso con funghi
2 cups short grain rice (Arborio or other)
1-1/2 cup red wine
1 medium onion diced
½ lb of mushrooms (coarse dice), any
¾ cup of pecorino cheese (or any other hard Italian cheese you like), finely shredded
unsalted butter, a lot
olive oil
kosher salt
black pepper
Italian parsley
6 – 8 cups beef stock

1) Heat an appropriate sized pan on medium heat. When hot, throw in 2-3tbsp of olive oil. Cook the onions until translucent. In a separate pot, heat stock.

2) Once the onions are translucent throw in 4tbsp of butter and allow to melt. Once melted add the rice and stir, covering with oil and butter. Salt. Let toast for 5 minutes.

3) Once the rice has toasted, remove pan from heat and pour in wine. DO NOT POUR THE WINE WHILE THE RICE IS ON THE STOVE! That’s a great way to start a fire. We don’t want to start a fire. When that alcohol hits the hot pan, it will vaporize. If it’s near heat, that vapor will flare up into a nice fireball, quite possibly catching your kitchen drapes, your hair or your clothing on fire. Stir the rice in the wine.

4) Add mushrooms! Let these simmer for a few minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste. Yes, that means tasting something that isn’t ready to eat yet.

5) Add first aliquot of stock to the rice. I have a 1-cup dry measuring cup that works well for this. Find something you like and stick with it. Some use ladels. Some use teacups. Any vessel to move only small portions of liquid from the stock pot to the pan will do.

6) After the first aliquot, you have to start stirring. Maybe not constantly, but regularly. Once the first portion of liquid is gone, stir in the next. And keep going. Taste the rice before pouring in more liquid after the first 4 cups have gone in. If the rice is still dry looking, and hard, keep going until you start to see the rice take on a creamy texture. Taste as you’re going at this point to see if it needs any more salt or pepper. Once the rice is cooked, but still slightly firm (al dente), you’re ready for the final part.

7) Add cheese. Pull off the heat and serve. Mound the cheese on top and start stirring until that cheese melts into the rice.

Congratulations! You’ve made risotto, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as you thought it was, was it?

Hawai’i meets France

This something I’ve wanted to do for a while. Roy Yamaguchi does it better, but I thought I’d try my hand at it. French food? Got that down pat. French technique? Not so much, as I’ve never had the whole formal culinary training, but I do know how to make the four mother sauces and their derivatives. I figure that has to count for something, right? As for Hawai’i…yes, I’m a fan of the food. How can you not be a fan of a culture that can so seamlessly blend together fresh fish (especially tuna) and spam? Yes, spam. I grew up on it. There isn’t a Filipino-American kid that did not grow up eating spam. It’s not as bad as people make it out to be. If you cut it up thin and fry it, it tastes just like bacon. In a pinch, you can substitute spam for any recipe that requires lardons.

Sure, my experience with Hawaiian food has been largely of the mix plate variety, but there’s been more to it than trips to Bay Area outposts of L&L’s. I’ve had the poke, the oxtail soup, lomilomi salmon, and the poi. I love the poi. It’s one of those guilty pleasures of mine. Most people try it and don’t like it, because it’s a bland starch, but I’ll watch them scarf down slices of white bread or plates of just plain steamed rice and I wonder what’s the difference?

It started with the poi, you see. I wanted to make poi, but not poi. I’ve tried my hand at making the taro root paste once before, and while wonderfully delicious with it’s subtle sweetness, the intensity of the entire process gave me a headache. Mashing taro by hand isn’t for me. There is pre-made poi, which I’ve seen at the markets on each visit to the islands, but that’s just a little hard to come by in California, especially as I was making dinner in Sacramento. This city is not the food mecca that my native Bay Area is. I could have probably found pre-made poi in San Francisco or Berkeley, not so in Sacramento. I have a hard time finding veal bones out here (Corti Bros is a life saver). So, I turned in other directions to make a poi substitute. I tried apple sauce thickened with agar, which turned out too much like jello. The guar gum worked, but I blew through my stash of it before I blew through my stash of apples. At some point while trying to figure this thing out, and looking through my collection of texts on everything from Biochemistry to Fluid Mechanics (I’m a scientist, ok? Leave me alone!) I remembered my Top Chef Cookbook, and took a page out of Marcel’s playbook, so to speak. Pineapples pureed with xanthan gum. I could kiss that diminutive Molecular Gastronomist for the idea. Armed with his recipe, I went in search of fish.

My original idea was to take a tuna and sear it, and serve Marcel’s “poi” as a side. But, then I saw the opakapaka side by side with the tuna in the fish monger’s case. Let me just say one thing. I love this fish. It ranks up there with hamachi and tuna for me. I spotted some Pacific White Shrimp as well. Both went into a cooler with plenty of ice as I made my way to the Fremont Park Farmers Market.

There, I spotted eggplant. Lots and lots of japanese eggplants. Seeing as my guests were all Sac State Tennis Club members, I had an idea. For some reason, we’d discussed the film Ratatouille, and I thought I’d prepare for them the confit byaldi that was served as the titular dish in Pixar’s film. Besides, I was having help. It would go great.

Prep work consisted of me cleaning the fish, while I set Jay to the task of making small coins of the eggplants, various squash, peppers and tomatoes. Then carefully layering the coins in a buttered baking dish over sauteed leeks, onions and garlic. Salt and pepper between layers and into the oven (425F). The results, I must say, were pretty darn good.

I set Janelle to the task of making the polenta/grits and frying up the shrimp while I made the poi, chilled it, and started frying up the opakapaka in butter. Unfortunately no picture for the shirmp & grits as the file was corrupted.

AAAAHHHHH!

My bad. Haven’t updated in a while.

Had Finals. Then papers to finish. Then lab work got swamped. I’ve been in the weeds cleaning up another lab’s screw ups.

Will be posting tomorrow or the day after about tonight’s dinner.

- James

Dinner Party #1

Damn it all, still no camera. Sorry.

No, it wasn’t my first dinner party, but it’s the first one I’m writing about here. I’d been asked before to make dinner for people in the tennis club, so I did. The menu was pretty simple and straightforward – ravioli, linguine with an alfredo sauce, salad.

The salad’s a classic staple for me. Pears, arugula, orange vinaigrette. I know what you’re thinking, “Pears don’t hit stores until late June/early July.” And you’re right, but the recent heat wave in Northern California had me go slightly summery with the fresh portion of the menu. The pears were thinly sliced, salted and laid out as a flat sheet on the bottom of the plate. Peppery arugula went on top and the whole thing was lightly drizzled with the vinaigrette to highlight the sugars of the pear and really tone down some of the bitter notes in the arugula.

I made a classic mistake. I ran out of sauce. Well, I didn’t run out so much as let it slowly reduce down and thicken. The alfredo sauce kept simmering down and simmering down. I thought it was too watery at first. I got the thick consistency I wanted, but it meant I had just barely enough to go over the linguine. Now, earlier I said, “linguine with an alfredo sauce.” Most people will wonder, “isn’t that just alfredo?” And I’m going to say, “No.” It isn’t. To say something is “alfredo” means it’s in the style of Alfredo. It’s not the same. Something “alfredo” is very different from an alfredo sauce. Alfredo is just butter and Parmigiano-Reggiano tossed with the hot pasta. Alfredo sauce is that thick, rich, creamy sauce that coats everything. Huge difference in flavors and purpose. In the winter, that Alfredo sauce is going to be awesome because it’s so rich and warm and comforting. In the dead of summer, forget the sauce. Do it up lighter. It’s too hot to eat anything that thick.

The raviolis were my baby, though. 4-1/2 hours of rolling out pasta dough, and filling them with spinach and cheese. Totally worth it.

Alfredo Sauce
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup fine grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
5 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 cup dry white wine
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
black pepper to taste

Melt butter in saucepan. Add heavy cream, cheese, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil and whisk. Reduce heat to simmer, add white wine and let the mixture reduce until thick. The sauce should coat the back of a spoon. Serve as is over pasta or with whatever proteins and vegetables you want.

Alfredo style in comparison would be to add about a stick of butter and 1/2 cup of fresh grated Parmigiano-Reggiano to the hot pasta and mix. Both ways can be garnished with finely chopped parsley.

Pasta dough

4 whole eggs
1 egg yolk
3-1/2 cups flour

I don’t care what kind of flour you use, this is the basic recipe. Find what works for you, though. Mound the flour up and make a well. Add the whole eggs and egg yolks to the well and slowly incorporate flour into the egg mixture while mixing. Once all the flour and egg has been mixed together begin kneeding by hand. If the dough is too sticky, add flour in 1/4 cup increments until it is only lightly tacky. Kneed for 5 minutes and let rest for 25 minutes. Roll dough out to about 1/2 inch thickness and cut.

Spinach and cheese Raviolis
Make above dough.

Yeah, I’m not giving this one to you yet. This shall remain mine for a while.

Equipment rave

Sorry it’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been trying to take pictures of the stuff I prep, but the digital cam I have isn’t so hot. It pretty much looks like the shots I take with my phone. Crappy.

I know I said that to follow this stuff, all you’ll need is a knife and a pan, but there’s some other fun stuff out there that can’t hurt and can make your presentations pop. For example, a fine mesh strainer. Sure, it’s innocuous. It’s a strainer. What more can you want? Well, a good strainer can do several thinks. It can sift dry goods, meaning you don’t have to shell out $15 for a sifter at Macy’s or Bed, Bath & Beyond. It can strain liquids, which is awesome if you want to say…make your own blueberry syrup (2 cups water, 2 cups sugar, 1 package of blueberries, boil, puree, strain)? It can help you clear out all the sediment in homemade stocks or soups. A good strainer is a great friend to any chef, because of its versatility. Heck, you can even decorate with it. Throw in some confectioner’s sugar and tap. No need for those stainless steel dredges that tend to clog up or dump out too much.

The humble squeeze bottle. Sure, you can put ketchup or mustard in there, but wouldn’t you rather use it to mix up your favorite dressing and dispense as needed into your salad bowl? Or to hold that tasty blueberry syrup? You can’t go wrong with one of these, or a couple. They’re all of a buck at your friendly neighborhood restaurant supply store. $2 at Bed, Bath & Beyond.

A good wooden spoon. Dear god. Buy one. You need one. Forget metal spoons/spatulas. Get a good wooden one. The heavier, the better. It won’t snap. If the thing feels like it’s flimsy, it is. Don’t buy it. Find one you could go out and club a baby seal to death with.

Hello world!

At the behest of some of my friends, I’ve decided to start this blog.  It’s mostly about food, but I’ll be injecting anything and everything else I can think of.

To follow this blog and try out some of my suggestions, you’ll need an appetite, a knife and a fry pan.  Any chef knife will do, so long as it cuts, holds an edge and doesn’t mash your tomatoes or bread when you slice.  Forget the sets.  You can do everything with a good chef knife that you can do with a whole set of knives.  Do not order this online.  I repeat, do not order this online.  You want to feel the knife.  Is it comfortable in your hand?  Does it feel awkward?  Will your arm get tired swinging it around for a half hour?  Pick one that’s comfortable.  The knife doesn’t need to cost $160 like some of the really nice Shun knives out there, but don’t go with something that’s $20 at Wal-Mart either.  You’ll regret it as soon as the blade snaps, and you have a shard of punched steel sticking in your eye, causing you to bleed blood and aqueous humor all over the tomatoes you just rough chopped for your ragout.  As for a fry pan, forget the non-stick, calphalon or all-clad.  You don’t need those.  Sure, they look nice, but they’re way too much to start out.  Find your closest restaurant supply store and go in.  Pick out a decent sized stainless steel fry pan (they should not cost more than $40.  If they do, check out this link).  You want your pan to be heavy.  If it feels like you can give someone a concussion if you tapped them with it, you’re good to go.  You have your knife, your pan and your appetite and you’re good to go.

Learn to care for your equipment, too.  Get your knife sharpened professionally ever 3 months.  Please.  Take it to Raley’s if you have to.  They offer complimentary knife sharpening and they’re pretty good at it.  If you’ve got a more expensive knife, don’t take it there.  Find a cutlery shop or ask your favorite restaurant where their chefs and line cooks get their knives sharpened.  Your knife will thank you by cutting much more cleanly as you prep, and your arm will thank you as you do not develop carpal tunnel from having to lean on the knife to get it to go through the boiled potato.