Off the Bone

Winter puts even the best-intentioned cook under undue strain. Should she wish to cook in season and in season only, and should she live in the North-East, she has to resign herself to turnips and parsnips, carrots and beets, cabbages and cauliflower, and hardy apples for desert. I love all of these things, in most manifestations, but they do not make good lunches. A perfect lunch is often quick, bright and perky. Winter vegetables are better at soft, warm, and comforting, unless one is willing to munch on a raw carrot and consider it lunch. This writer is not.

As always, some of the best lunches make themselves. I started off hungry, and prowled my pantry, emerging with a red bell pepper. It was an impulse buy from a rather crappy local grocery that sometimes, inexplicably, gets some good-looking produce. That pepper was indeed good-looking.

The spirit of a raw carrot lurking in the background, I cored and sliced it, still not quite knowing what I’d do with it. Because one can rarely do wrong with garlic, I peeled and smashed a clove, and tossed it in a small sauce pan with some olive oil. The pepper went in as well - what else could I do with it? - and the whole thing cooked tentatively for a few minutes until the thought of another unseasonal ingredient popped into my head - cherry tomatoes! In they went. After a few minutes, some salt, pepper, a drop of soy sauce, and a spoonfull of ricotta cheese, there was my lunch, like a knight in shining armor - full of color and flavor, resting triumphantly on a toasted whole-wheat muffin.

* The result, minus soy sauce, actually resembled letcho - an East European pepper-and-tomato stew, which also features some onions and is cooked, I believe, until the peppers are fully soft. I ate - or, rather, refused to eat - only the sort that came in jars and was imported from Bulgaria or Hungary. Perhaps it should go on my list of foods to be reevaluated.

My first loaf of bread is out to see the world! It is now part of a thank-you present for the wonderful people who gave us a Kitchenaid for Christmas, packed in an elegant black cake box lined with parchment paper. It is the best loaf I’ve made so far, and I was almost sorry to see it go. I did cut off one small crust to test how it came out - it was crackly and wheaty and flavorful, with well-aerated crumb.

Now that I know that I’m doing something right, here’s the procedure.

There are five ounces of starter in my fridge at all times. It is a much stronger starter now, and responds reliably to feeding. When I plan to bake, I take it out and double its weight - 2.5 oz flour and 2.5 oz tepid water - and let it sit at room temperature for about sixteen hours. In warmer climes, or better-heated houses, it would take much less time, but we are graduate students, and keep the temperature at 60 degrees at night to save on gas. When I wake up in the morning, the starter is light and airy and at least twice the volume it used to be. I mix half of it into a sponge - 8oz flour and 1 1/4 cups water - and let that sit until I get home in the evening. Often it expands by the time I’m back. I add another 1/4 cup of water, 11oz flour, and 1.5 tsp kosher salt, mix it all together, and knead until it feels right.

The first rise takes about three hours, the second, after the loaf had been shaped - from one to two. I put the loaf next to my radiator, first in a covered bowl and then inside an inflated plastic bag, and cover both - radiator and loaf - with a big towel, creating an 80-degree spot in my 66-degree apartment.

It bakes at 500F (reduced immediately to 400F when the bread goes in), with a bowl of water inside the oven creating steam. In the first 15 mintues, it more than doubles in volume. It’s done in about 40; often I have to cover the top with a piece of foil to prevent it from browning too much in the last ten minutes.

I have figured out that the dough must be shaped gently after the first rising, to avoid degassing it too much, and that it must be slashed quite deeply before going into the oven to prevent it from cracking in the most unsightly way (mine detaches itself from the bottom crust). I’m amazed how well it works. I have browsed through bread baking books, and the amount of stuff I don’t know or don’t do quite right is staggering. Fortunately, my starter seems to be sturdy and forgiving, so I think we’ll just plod along in this fashion until I learn more.

Sometimes I think about moving somewhere other than my current neighbourhood, but then I think about my butcher, and sanity returns. I can move when he retires. The Upper West side has Fairway, and the Lower East has Chinatown, but in order to walk to a butcher of anything like this quality, I’d probably have to pay two thousand a month for a SoHo shoebox so I could get to Florence Meat Market (which I’ve never actually tried, but am taking to be good on faith).

Mario is about the size of a side of pork, and the texture of guanciale. He keeps a soapbox behind his display case, which he has to mount in order to hand you your meat. He’s also got a big nose, and wears a black fisherman’s hat, and I’m tempted to ask if he was ever a plumber. His sons, on the other hand, are all pretty much the size and shape of a side of beef, and they all have shaved heads and neat goatees. The only way to tell them apart, as far as I know, is by size. There’s large, larger, and largest. The walls behind the counter are covered with pictures of grandspawn, some clearly mailed over from Italy. Every time I go in – every single time – there will be three people in the shop. Mario, one of his sons, and a different random guy who looks like an old Italian sailor. It’s that kind of place.

Though it’s called Mario and Sons, Mario clearly never taught his sons anything, and is trying to make up for lost time. I’ll tell Mario what I want, and he’ll jabber at his son in grouchy Italian. The son will look clueless for a moment, go to one of the three freezers, and pull out the Wrong Thing. Mario will slap the worthless bugger, who will wince and look hurt, and dive into the freezer himself, and pull out the Right Thing (the difference between the Wrong Thing and the Right Thing is usually imperceptible to me). He’ll give the son a chance to redeem himself by preparing my cut properly, but then the son will somehow mess up while unwrapping the meat, and Mario will loose another irate volley, cursing the woman who brought such weakness into the family line, the fact that he can no longer sire a more suitable heir, and the very presence of a Chinaman in his shop. I assume.

Some butchers caress their meat, some work with an intensity bordering on rage, so much so you almost expect your steak to be black and blue by the time they hand it over. Mario is an enlightened stoic by nature, and simply expects the meat to obey him. His movements are almost callous, made in the full confidence that a particular interaction of steel and meat will have a particular effect. But he obviously understands cooking – all truly good butchers have to - so perhaps there is poetry underneath all that crust, like sweet white fat beneath prosciutto rind.

The last time I went in, I made the mistake of asking too many questions. All I said was, “Mario, do you have lamb neck?”
“I have everyt’ing.”
“Lamb neck?”
“Everyt’ing – you want lamb, I have. You want veal, I have. You want pork” and at this point he reaches over the counter and grabs my arm “I have. I have chops, I have shoulder,” he’s jumped off the soapbox and is pulling me towards the walk-in, which, coincidentally, is also the general direction in which the three butcher blocks, knives uncounted, and bandsaw are. “I have butt, I have leg, I have loin.” He opens the walk-in, and shoves my head in. “You want lamb? This is lamb.”
He’s grabbed an entire side of creature, hanging by the freezer door. There are four others right behind it. “This is veal. This is pork. And there – beef.” Two whole steers.

I prefer to visit with Stakhanovite, because he charges based on his mood, and she charms him. I’d post a picture, but I’m afraid he’ll never let me in again if I bring a camera into his shop.

Mario and Sons Meat Market
Metropolitan Avenue at Graham Avenue, Williamsburg
Take the L to Graham Avenue. The station is at the junction of Graham and Metropolitan. Mario is 2 blocks down Metropolitan, in the direction away from the White Castle.

Like all fundamentally simple foods, risotto has an air of mystery, perhaps because it is foreign and requires constant stirring. (It works for polenta, too!) Serious cookbooks treat risotto with respect bordering on reverence, filling pages with painstaking description of technique, subtle signs one mustn’t miss, minute mistakes one mustn’t make, and breathtaking paeans to the finished product. They are practically literature. Read them. You’ll absorb something, draw inspiration and fear of risotto gods from the rest, and figure out your own perfect risotto through practice.

This winter, sweet risottos made their way into our cooking repertory. I am not talking of chocolate risotto - although it is delicious – but of butternut squash, peas, fennel, snowpeas and apples, and risottos that are meant to be the main dish. They are very pretty – orange and green and the beautiful cream of rice – mild, comforting, and full of flavor.

I don’t use recipes for my risottos, guessing the amount of liquid I’d need per measure of rice (it’s more than seems right), and not sweating anything else. One of the key things with sweet risottos, we have learned, is to let them be sweet. Don’t use things that are distinctly savory – garlic and thyme – feel free to be generous with onions, and use sweet butter instead of olive oil, if your conscience permits. There should also be plenty of filling, and the fillings you’d use for sweet risottos would go in last – either already cooked (squash, fennel), or raw and chopped however fine you like. You can toss in some parmesan in the end or leave cheeseless and simply add salt and freshly ground black pepper. Butter and black pepper is one of the best taste combinations on earth.

And yes, you do have to stir it constantly.

Making bread from flour and water is like waiting for your wife to give birth. Probably more nerve-wracking, if anything, because you usually have experts in attendance for that, whereas with bread, all you have is a horribly imprecise and sometimes outright inaccurate set of instructions from a supposedly respectable cookbook (which I will not name, since it generally is pretty good), and the assistance of several hundred thousand well-intentioned websites on the subject.

This is like trying to be an obstetrician with nothing more than a Galenic text on the subject and a half-smashed uncle telling you about the time he helped his friend’s sow give birth. With sound effects, and demonstrative hand gestures.

The amount of emotional energy you can invest in a lump of flour and water (with a bit of potato, it’s apparently like steroids for yeast) is remarkable, especially since I’m barely touching the thing myself. It’s really quite like fathering a child – I said to Stakhanovite that we should try making bread the hard way, she said yes, and then I let her do all the work.

We feed the starter every morning, at breakfast. As I make coffee, Stakhanovite measures out flour and water and stirs it into the bowl. I take a sip of coffee, then I check on the starter. I count the bubbles on its surface, for they are portents of mighty single-celled organisms astir within its lightless depths. I sit down and pretend to do some work, but it’s hard when my mental energies are devoted to willing the yeast to be fruitful and multiply. The tension creates the urge to stretch, so I stroll around the room and check on the starter again. I have no idea what I’m looking for, but counting the bubbles is somehow reassuring. This continues until Stakhanovite eventually bops me on the head and forces me to sit down, so she can go check on the starter herself. We’re still like that, almost a week after first mixing the thing. On this scale, we’re approaching a commitment on the scale of having a goddamn baby. I read descriptions of starters which have been in use for twenty years, and suddenly that analogy doesn’t seem so funny.

We tried showing our starter yeast porn – our brioche, made with commercial yeast. Lots of volume, but no soul. Presumably depressed, that first batch of starter failed to start, and our first loaf had the reassuring solidity of a club. Perhaps it wasn’t old enough to handle that kind of thing yet. Our second loaf was better – pleasantly dense, even – and our third loaf is rising as I write. I need to go check on it now.

For the last three days, Eclectician and I have been eating our own sourdough bread. We toasted it and dipped it in garlicky olive oil. We spread liver pate on it. We smothered it with homemade apple and cranberry jam and even dipped it in hot chocolate. It is lovely. It’s a still-flawed kind of lovely, flavoured with exhiliration, sense of magic, and the promise of better loaves to come.

Growing a starter seems to be a simple thing. One mixes unbleached organic flour with water, hoping that some of the wild yeast that naturally lives on weat is still there. One gives it mashed potatoes – because even yeast likes mashed potatoes. One then waits for bubbles and feeds one’s new microscopic pets with fresh mixture of flour and water, which provides both nutrition and yeasty reinforcements. Yeast likes sugar, warmth, and, it seems, water, goes dormant when its cold or when it runs out of food and is killed by heat.

Life, of course, is more complicated. Even in conditions that seem perfect to us, bubbles fail to appear, vigorous froth runs out of steam in the middle of the night before it can be harnessed into a loaf, the sponge sits limply, and a ball of dough takes its sweet sweet time to rise, keeping us up into the ungodly hours. Like too many other things in life, starters take time to mature and become effective and reliable. (Unlike too many other things in life, one can mail-order an already well-behaved starter - or put one’s existing starter “on hold” in the fridge.)

We are waiting and learning – from personal experience, and from the numerous sourdough-related websites. At some point we will surely get a book. At quieter moments, we ponder the fact that we already know more – but somehow also much less – about yeast than generations of French farmers had understood. Mostly we just worry and hope.

Food for friends – roast leg of lamb, roast potatoes, green beans and carrots. Comfortable, classic stuff with which we could feed eight people well while actually talking to them, as opposed to spending all our time cooking for them, food to drink with. A good way to see off the old year.

I did the desserts, as usual, and also made chicken liver pate and brioche, which made a heart-stoppingly good starter. Dessert consisted of a woolly mammoth and a mile high jam sandwich, and a quite lovely and unexpected squash pie.

Woolly mammoth actually has a somewhat more dignified name, but there are only so many things you can call a dessert which is essentially a mound of chocolate (and air – the air is important, because that way you can tell yourself it’s really mostly air you’re eating). It emerged from its mould somewhat reluctantly, causing the Queen of Leaves (provider of the pie) to point and go “oooh, a woolly mammoth!” or something similar. The light was too poor for a picture, but it was shaggy, and more or less mammoth coloured, because of a misadventure while making the mousse. The chocolate, to my eternal shame, seized, and thus, instead of the usual, supposedly sophisticated taupe, the mousse was mammoth coloured and felt entertainingly like mint chocolate chip ice cream. I actually liked the feel of it so much that future chocolate mousses will may well include chopped chocolate, to achieve something of the texture without the accompanying embarrassment. The lesson here is that there’s a reason you add your chocolate to the pate a bomb rather than the cold whipped cream when you make your mousse.

The mile high jam sandwich was a huge, round, be-streuseled brioche, with an inch of homemade cranberry-apple compote in the middle. Brioche is where two of my great loves – bread and butter – meet. I love how it looks like dessert, how it calls up bakery windows, and noses pressed against the glass. A little egg wash is a wonderful thing. The jam sandwich brioche resembled nothing so much as a moonscape (or, as my mother would suggest, my dad’s complexion), but the one for the pate was one of the prettiest things on the table. It doesn’t take much to beat chicken liver pate, though, especially when you were too lazy to de-string the livers first, and are rewarded with what look like clusters of liver grapes, covered in more liver, in the pate.

The recipe this time came from Pierre Herme, and produced an airy loaf with almost insubstantial crumb. It was bread, certainly, with distinct gluten walls (other, richer recipes produce something that is almost cake-like, no matter how much you knead), but bread stretched so thin and light you could barely feel it in your mouth, bread which looked like dessert but tasted yeasty and savory and sustaining. And buttery, of course, but the point is that other brioche tastes of butter first and everything else second. Pierre Herme goes on to stuff his with a combination of pastry cream, buttercream and whipped cream, but Stakhanovite refused to let me do that, and so ours had to settle for our compote, whose gorgeous rhubarb pink colour didn’t compensate for its complete lack of saturated fat.

There was something irresistibly breakfasty about the end result, perhaps due to the brioche being the colour of scrambled eggs and sunshine. Half the cake wound up being New Year’s breakfast, and I think it was the happier half.