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A chicken in every pot

Sunday, August 26, 20120

Roast chicken, fondant potatoes, broccoli

Buenos Aires Herald
On Sunday supplement
Food and Wine

As winter slowly crawls towards its finale, replete with a constant assault of water falling from the skies, our thoughts here at home turn towards warming, comfort food. I’ve covered one-pot sort of meals here in this column with a look at lighter takes on classic local stews like locro and lentejas, but what about a non-stew sort of meal?

One of our favorite dishes, and when it comes down to it, not just for colder weather, is roast chicken. Whether we leave it whole and roast it in its glory, or spatchcock it, “mariposa” style, as it were, and broil or grill it, or, simply pan roast it, already cut into serving pieces, it forms the centerpiece of a tasty and simple meal to prepare, and one that we repeat time and again throughout the year, with variations only as to its accompaniments.

For this week’s column I’m going the route of the “fondant” method – classically used for root vegetables like potatoes, it’s an extraordinarily simple and completely satisfying way of achieving delicious results with minimal effort. At its simplest, you brown the potatoes or whatever you’re cooking, add some stock and throw the whole thing in the oven and cook until done. And, given that we’re using a very small amount of stock, using a “cube” is perfectly acceptable here. As friends from the other side of one or the other of the oceans might say – this is the perfect “chicken and two veg”.

Pan-Roast Chicken, Potatoes & Broccoli

4 serving pieces of chicken (or more, as you like)
4 small to medium potatoes
1 large head of broccoli
100 ml olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
3-4 sprigs of rosemary or other aromatic herb
3 garlic cloves flattened (skin and all)
200 ml chicken or vegetable stock (from a cube is fine)
salt and pepper

Preheat your oven to medium high heat, 200°C. Get a large skillet, preferably cast iron (it just works better), heated up over a medium flame. Peel the potatoes and cut in half, or slices, or whatever shape makes you happy. Separate the broccoli into florets.

When the skillet is good and hot, add the olive oil – this is a place to use a more basic olive oil, not your fancy and expensive extra virgin sort – and, yes, other vegetable oils are fine if you don’t have the olive. Season the chicken pieces with salt and pepper, place them skin side down into the hot oil – make sure it’s good and hot, that will help prevent the chicken from sticking. Now season your pieces of potato and place them around the chicken, with one surface flat on the pan.

Add the butter, garlic and the herb sprigs and just let them much about in there. The butter will help the chicken and potato brown, but won’t burn over the higher heat because of the oil. Cook until the chicken and potatoes are nicely browned on the underside, then flip them over. Here’s where it gets really easy. Pour in the stock, toss the broccoli into the skillet as well, just letting it nestle in around the chicken and potatoes. Stick the whole skillet into the oven.

Walk away. Really, walk away I tell you. Leave it for 15 minutes. Go set the table, watch the news, check your Facebook page, send a tweet “roast chicken and two veg for dinner – what are you having?” Come back, remove the skillet, serve as is, or move all the various components to a big platter or plates. Pour a glass of wine. Enjoy!

We often like to top this with a nice salsa verde, which is basically a pesto (we’ve covered that in past columns) without the cheese and nuts – into the blender with some fresh herbs like parsley, mint, rosemary, a couple of garlic cloves, a couple of anchovies (don’t worry, they’ll disappear and just provide some salt), a spoonful of capers, a dried chili, the juice and zest of a lemon, and about 100 ml of olive oil. Blend, or pulse, for just long enough to thoroughly chop everything without turning it into a smooth puree (or do, it’ll still taste as good).

A series of recipes and articles that I started writing for the Buenos Aires Herald Sunday supplement, Food & Wine section, at the beginning of 2012. My original proposal to them was to take local favorite dishes and classics and lighten them up for modern day sensibilities. We’re not talking spa or diet recipes, but at the very least, making them healthier in content, particularly salt, fat and portion size. As time went by, that morphed into a recipe column that, while emphasizing food that is relatively “good for you”, wasn’t necessarily focused on local cuisine. At the beginning of 2013 I decided to stop writing for them over some administrative issues, but it was fun while it lasted.

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Buenos Aires Herald, Newspaper articles

The 110 on TVP

Sunday, August 12, 20120

Vegan Lahmajoon

Buenos Aires Herald
On Sunday supplement
Food and Wine

You have that friend who’s a vegetarian, you know the one. Always going on about seitan and tempeh and quorn and tvp. You nod and smile as if you actually know what those are and then promptly excuse yourself, rush off to the nearest parrilla stand and order a vaciopan “extra jugoso” just to recover your inner balance and put everything right in the world. You know that, perhaps, you ought to be eating two or three fewer chorizos per weeks, but they’re just so darned good, and the idea of “meat substitute”, well, that’s a conversation best left for, well, never.

But, we’re going to have it anyway. You’re all grown up now, you can handle it. And today we’re going to tackle “tvp”, or “textured vegetable protein”. We’ll set seitan, or wheat gluten, to the side because here you either have to make it yourself or for the most part trek to Barrio Chino to buy it; tempeh, a sort of fermented version of tofu, is near non-existent; and quorn, a mushroom based fake meat has yet to hit this riverbank. But, tvp is all around us, you can find it in virtually any dietetica, where it goes by the monikers soja texturizada or carne de soja.

It sounds like something industrial, and when it comes down to it, it is. Somewhere, in an evil factory, someone is taking mounds of soybeans and extracting all the soybean oil from it, leaving behind a high protein, fat free, soy flour. Someone else is taking that flour and heating it up and pressurizing it, and then extruding it… yes, I used the word extruding early on a Sunday morning, and forming granules or strips or chunks of what sort of looks like a golden colored packing material. All sounds really appetizing and gets you revved up to run to the dietetica right now, doesn’t it?

But here’s the thing – we eat all sorts of things that go through processes like this, and the cool thing about tvp is that it’s basically just 100% high protein soy – high protein like 50% by weight. It’s a completely blank, tasteless canvas, and is flavored by rehydrating it in whatever liquid you choose – most often something like a good soup stock, but you can use your imagination, where it takes on that flavor. From there, it can be used as a meat substitute.

Now, we’re going to start with the easy one – the granules – which basically, when rehydrated in a nice, dark, roasted vegetable stock, looks like ground beef. And that’s how we’re going to use it today. We’re going to make our very lahmajoon (or any of various other similar spellings), those lovely little open faced empanadas arabes that we find all around the town.

Lahmajoon – Armenian “Pizzas”

165 gm all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons olive oil
approximately 175 ml warm water

2 garlic cloves
1 medium onion
1 small green pepper
120 gm TVP in granule
240 ml of warm vegetable stock (or water)
170 gm tomato paste
4 plum tomatoes (canned are fine here)
10-12 sprigs parsley
½ teaspoon ground cumin
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
Salt and pepper
Lemon wedges, to serve

Mix dry dough ingredients together in a bowl, add olive oil and mix well with your fingers or a fork until it resembles wet sand. Add water, a little at a time as needed, to make a smooth dough – soft but not sticky. Knead a few minutes, then form into six equal size balls, then let rest for 15 minutes. Roll out into individual rounds. Heat the oven to 200°C.

Rehydrate the TVP in the stock until it has absorbed all the liquid – about 5 minutes. Finely chop the onion, garlic, parsley, green pepper and tomatoes. Add the TVP, tomato paste, cumin, cayenne, and salt and pepper and mix well – you can even pulse all this in a food processor if you prefer. The consistency should be wet and pasty, like a thick spread. And, spread a layer of the mixture onto flour rounds all the way to the edge. Bake directly on the oven rack for 8 to 10 minutes, or until the edges are browned and the filling is cooked through. If they begin to inflate in the oven like a pita bread, or pan arabe, pop them with a fork from the top. To serve, squeeze some lemon over the top and eat.

A series of recipes and articles that I started writing for the Buenos Aires Herald Sunday supplement, Food & Wine section, at the beginning of 2012. My original proposal to them was to take local favorite dishes and classics and lighten them up for modern day sensibilities. We’re not talking spa or diet recipes, but at the very least, making them healthier in content, particularly salt, fat and portion size. As time went by, that morphed into a recipe column that, while emphasizing food that is relatively “good for you”, wasn’t necessarily focused on local cuisine. At the beginning of 2013 I decided to stop writing for them over some administrative issues, but it was fun while it lasted.

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Buenos Aires Herald, Newspaper articles

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In the salmon’s layer

Sunday, August 5, 20120

Two Salmon Lasagna

Buenos Aires Herald
On Sunday supplement
Food and Wine

The common definition these days of a pescetarian seems to be “a vegetarian who eats fish”. That’s not in accord with the Vegetarian Society – the coiners of the term vegetarian back in 1847, who point out quite rightly that fish are not vegetables, they are meat. They may not be red meat, they may not be poultry, but they are, quite simply and graphically, animal flesh. Still, the common definition cited in the first sentence seems to pop up more and more – at my restaurant I constantly get request from “vegetarians” who tell me that fish and shellfish are just fine.

Of course, I also get some who tell me that they’ll eat a bit of bacon, or perhaps a sausage, or even a chicken wing were it to show up on their plate. “Vegetarian” it seems, is simply a moniker many adopt to make a claim to better dietary practice, regardless of reality.

One of my favorite go-to dishes is one that I came up with many years ago for some visiting fish eating friends who also were trying to lighten up their lives and asked me to avoid pasta… and also rice, potatoes and bread. A gut-wrenching experience for someone trained by Jewish bubbes and Italian nonnas.

But I got over it and whipped up this “lasagna”, with slices of white eggplant standing in for the noodles. When you get right down to it, it’s really just more of a hot terrine of sorts, sans any kind of gelling agent to hold it together, and I’m sticking with my lasagna claim. It’s a quick and easy dish to whip up and a crowd pleaser for the pescetarian set. And of course, if you want to throw in a layer or two of noodles, some cheese, or some bechamel sauce, who am I to say no?

Salmon & Eggplant Lasagna

500 gm fresh salmon
2 large eggplants (white ones if you can find them)
1 large bunch of fresh basil
6 plum tomatoes
250 gm black olives, “Greek” style
Approximately 1 cup olive oil
4-5 sprigs of fresh oregano
1 tablespoon capers, rinsed
2 cloves garlic
3 anchovies
salt and black pepper

Slice the salmon into 1 cm thick slices. Slice the eggplants into slightly thinner slices. And, slice the tomatoes into thin slices. Pit the olives. Now you’re ready to start cooking.

In a large frying pan, saute the eggplant slices in a little olive oil a few at a time (just enough to cover the bottom of the pan) with a little salt and pepper. Keep the heat fairly high as it will help prevent the eggplant slices from absorbing too much oil. When the slices are lightly golden on both sides, set them aside to drain on some paper towel.

In a blender mix the pitted olives, the leaves from the oregano, capers, garlic and anchovies and blend with just enough of the olive oil to give yourself a smooth paste – a tapenade. Taste and adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper – you probably won’t need much, if any, salt.

Lightly oil a 20 x 30 cm baking dish and place a single layer of the eggplant, covering the bottom – they can slightly overlap, not a problem – aim to use a third of the slices in this layer. Top that with a layer of the sliced salmon and a layer of basil leaves. Then place a second layer of the eggplant, again using about a third of the slices. Top that with the tomato slices and coat generously with about half of the tapenade (olive puree). Finish off with the last third of the eggplant slices, sprinkle with a little fresh pepper, and then cover the baking dish with foil.

Bake in a hot oven (180°C) for 30 minutes. Then remove the foil and turn the oven up to broil and cook just a few minutes more to lightly brown the top. Remove from the oven and let it sit a few minutes, then cut into portions (this should make roughly six, depending on how hungry you all are) and serve, topped with the remaining tapenade and basil leaves. Accompany it with a nice green salad and some of that fresh bread you made from last weekend’s column, and you’ve got yourself one delicious pescetarian dinner.

A series of recipes and articles that I started writing for the Buenos Aires Herald Sunday supplement, Food & Wine section, at the beginning of 2012. My original proposal to them was to take local favorite dishes and classics and lighten them up for modern day sensibilities. We’re not talking spa or diet recipes, but at the very least, making them healthier in content, particularly salt, fat and portion size. As time went by, that morphed into a recipe column that, while emphasizing food that is relatively “good for you”, wasn’t necessarily focused on local cuisine. At the beginning of 2013 I decided to stop writing for them over some administrative issues, but it was fun while it lasted.

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Buenos Aires Herald, Newspaper articles

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The big panino

Sunday, July 29, 20120

Ciabatta

Buenos Aires Herald
On Sunday supplement
Food and Wine

We always have fresh bread around the house. Sometimes we buy it from a local bakery, but more often, it’s just something that one or both of us make every other day or so. No cultural offense intended, but the miñon that is ubiquitous on tables throughout Buenos Aires has, bluntly, the texture of a medicinal cotton ball and a flavor not much different. It amazes me, and many of my friends, that a culture so based in the history of its Italian and Spanish ancestors can mass produce such a pale imitation of the staff of life.

One of my favorites, for many uses, though especially for sandwiches (and those of you who read my blog know that I’m a sandwich fanatic), is the ciabatta, or “slipper bread”. In classic form it’s somewhat flatter than a more rustic Italian loaf, mostly due to being a very wet, soft dough, and, also is generally pinched in towards the center, almost hourglass shaped. In short, looking a bit like a bedroom slipper. The form maybe important in some presentations but isn’t key – it’s the process of making and working with a wet dough that gives this bread its unique texture.

There are two versions of the bread, one made with a starter, essentially a sourdough, the other a more “quick bread” style – and I’m going to hit you up with the latter because who among us has time to spend on making starters and all that? Now and again for a special occasion, you know? I also recommend using a mixer with a paddle attachment (rather than dough hook) – you can certainly make this bread by hand but it requires an inordinate amount of work.

Ciabatta – Slipper Bread

220 gm bread flour (000 or better yet, “harina aglutinada”)
80 gm semolina flour
300 ml warm water
1 packet dry or half cube (25 gm) fresh yeast
2 teaspoons (10 gm) salt
1 teaspoon (4 gm) sugar

In the bowl of your mixer place the warm water, sugar and yeast, give it a quick stir and leave it for a few minutes until the yeast is bubbling away. Add the flours and salt. Fit the mixer with the paddle attachment – this dough is very wet and what you need to do is beat a lot of air into it. Start the mixer slow until it is all combined – the texture will be like a thick pancake or crepe batter.

Turn the speed up to fairly high and let it go for approximately 10 minutes. By this point the gluten will have developed sufficiently that the texture will be something like marshmallow. Turn the speed down to medium and continue for another 5-6 minutes (you can, if you like, switch to the dough hook at this point, particularly if it seems like the paddle is having trouble kneading the dough) – until the dough more or less starts to “climb” up and wrap itself around the paddle or hook.

Place the dough in an oiled bowl, lightly cover with a kitchen towel and leave in a warm place to double in volume. Remove from the bowl, split the dough in two (or more if you want to make small sandwich breads), and spread each half out in a rough disk on a floured surface – don’t flatten it too much, just stretch it out to about 25-30cm across. Starting from one side and using a pastry scraper or spatula, roll the dough up from one side to the other, then place on an oiled baking sheet. If you want to make the traditional form, use a large round cutter, or scissors, and cut an arc out of each side. Cover with the towel again and leave until doubled once more.

Bake in a very hot oven (200°C or more) until browned and crisp on the outside and it should sound hollow when you tap on it. Rotate the baking sheet once or twice during the cooking so that if your oven doesn’t heat evenly on all sides the bread will cook more evenly. Remove, leave to cool, slice and enjoy.

One of our favorite things to do with one of these big loaves is treat it almost like a pizza – we slice it in half horizontally, brush it with olive oil and stick it under the broiler to get golden. Then we top it with a mix of olive oil sauteed vegetables – zucchini, eggplant, tomato, onions, peppers, chilies, olives, and perhaps a little finely chopped prosciutto (jamón crudo), some salt and pepper. We pile those on the two halves of the bread, top with a good melting cheese – cuartirolo is a favorite – and a grating of parmesan, and stick it back under the broiler to lightly brown. Makes a fantastic dinner!

A series of recipes and articles that I started writing for the Buenos Aires Herald Sunday supplement, Food & Wine section, at the beginning of 2012. My original proposal to them was to take local favorite dishes and classics and lighten them up for modern day sensibilities. We’re not talking spa or diet recipes, but at the very least, making them healthier in content, particularly salt, fat and portion size. As time went by, that morphed into a recipe column that, while emphasizing food that is relatively “good for you”, wasn’t necessarily focused on local cuisine. At the beginning of 2013 I decided to stop writing for them over some administrative issues, but it was fun while it lasted.

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Buenos Aires Herald, Newspaper articles

Mmmm… No, Chef

Saturday, July 28, 20120

Did I like the book, did I not like the book? That’s the question. And I have mixed feelings about it. The book – the latest chef bio to hit the shelves, came with, as most of them do, a ton of hype, that follows on the opening of chef Marcus Samuelsson’s latest restaurant, Red Rooster, in Harlem. I have no doubt that were I back in NYC I would have been hit with a whole lot more of that hype, so given as much as I got online I can only imagine. But that goes with book publishing these days, tends to be the responsibility of the publishing house and/or agent, so doesn’t particularly add or subtract from my expectations.

I don’t have any wonderful Marcus stories to share. I met him once when he was chef at Aquavit and a friend of mine was manager there. At the end of a delightful dinner my friend introduced me to him as a colleague, a former chef now working as a sommelier and manager (at the time for the short-lived American Renaissance) – I got a smile, a handshake, a “nice to meet you”, and he moved on to whomever else was in the room. No big deal. He seemed shy, and, timing-wise, he’d probably very recently become the chef, following the sudden and unexpected death of the chef and mentor he’d come to the restaurant to work with.

And, to be honest, I never really knew much about him. We didn’t move in the same restaurant circles, so I don’t think we ever ran into each other again. Until the book promotions started I didn’t know about the whole “Ethiopian orphan adopted by a Swedish couple, raised in Sweden, etc.” story. If you’d have asked me where he was from, I’d have said, “I don’t know.” So, the story was intriguing.

So is the book in many ways. Much of it really is a heartwarming tale that follows him through his childhood and on into his formative years as a chef, on to various successes, some failures, and to where he is now. The book is reasonably well written (co or ghost-written by a friend of his, author Veronica Chambers), but isn’t going to win any awards for literary style. Knowing the restaurant business gave me an appreciation for what he went through, particularly in those formative stages, and also for the politics and intricacies of later working in the New York scene. A bit of name-dropping of the other chefs he’s met along the way, for good and bad, but that’s to be expected in a book like this. For those things, I liked the book, and the story.

But there were some things that struck nerves. First off, by the end of the book, I was so ready to chuck it across the room (other than it’s on my tablet, not a print version, so that’s just not a good move) if he one more time launched into how tough it was for a black man to become a celebrity chef because of all the prejudice he encountered. I have no doubt he did – although many of the examples he uses strike me more as seasoned chefs dismissing him for being green rather than black, but I wasn’t on the spot to witness the encounters. And no doubt they were formative as to his character, but the constant repetition begins to come across as “poor little me” whining.

The same also lost some credibility with me in regard to other minority groups. He makes little, if any acknowledgement of how difficult it is for pretty much any minority to get ahead in the restaurant business, which in the U.S. is a very white male dominated, culture. On a personal level I could only laugh out loud at his assertions, that the restaurant business is completely welcoming of gay men and women. He even provides examples of his “fabulous gay” (really, straight men should never use those two words together, actually, they should never use the first word at all) employees – a waiter, a food-runner.

Yup, working the “front of house” and being gay practically go hand in hand sometimes in NY. But in the kitchen? I’d say that in my life, the kitchens of NYC restaurants were probably the most homophobic places I’ve ever been, and that includes stints in EMS, security work, even a year and a half in ROTC. And that’s in a place like NYC, it’s far worse in much of the rest of the country. As one chef I used to work for was fond of uttering, “vegetables work in the kitchen, fruits work in the dining room”. Let’s just say that one’s gone on to be a well-known face on television who thankfully has outgrown that phase of his life.

And, gee, the other minority I belong to (I told you it struck a personal nerve or two) gets a mention when he talks about cooking a state dinner for the Obamas – he makes a point of that he not only brought in other Swedes and African Americans, but “some Jews” into the White House to cook with him.

The last thing that really struck me was, and I’m sure it does other readers, and a spoiler alert here, was his abandonment of a woman he got pregnant and who had a daughter. Not complete abandonment mind you, he lets us know, because after he told his parents, his mother took on handling his financial responsibility for that daughter and demanded that Marcus pay her back on a monthly basis for that… something that continued for fourteen years before he finally had the guts to meet that daughter (he gives a list of excuses all related to being busy with his career), a scene that while it takes up a chapter of the book, he glosses over almost as if he’s done something noble by going and meeting her. Why, we even find out later on (since she doesn’t come up again) that he invited her to his wedding down the road.

He then doesn’t include her, nor the mother who raised her (and who in essence let him get launched in his career by not demanding that he marry her and stay in Austria, nor help her care for their daughter), in his acknowledgments at the end of the book – where he makes it a point that “family” is all important – even acknowledging his biological father’s other children, whom he never met until well into his adult life when his sister tracked down that their father, in Ethiopia, was actually still alive and he wasn’t the orphan he’d always thought he was.

He makes a point at the end that much of the book involved revisiting people, places and feelings that were painful or difficult for him to remember or explore. He doesn’t seem to get that some of the pain might be that of other people around him, and that he bears some or all responsibility for that. Those things tell me a lot about the character of the man, if not the chef, and in the end, despite all the good parts of the book, leave me thinking, I just don’t know if I recommend it.

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Books (Reviews)

Cook gently and carry a pink stick

Sunday, July 22, 20120

Gatuzo a la Vasco

Buenos Aires Herald
On Sunday supplement
Food and Wine

A couple of weeks ago I promised you a gatuzo a la vasca recipe. I try not to make idle promises, so somewhere down below we’re going to get there. But let’s start with gatuzo. It’s a fish that, if you frequent your local seafood market, you’ll see laid out in fillets, often with the spine still attached. It goes by one of two names here, gatuzo which would lead one to think something cat-like, or palo rosado, “pink stick” (and not to be confused with the pez palo, a completely different fish), which is eminently descriptive, because once you trim off the bones and fins and all that, it’s pretty much what you’re left with – a somewhat long rectangle of pink fish flesh.

So what is it? It’s a shark. A small shark belonging to the “smooth-hound”, “ground shark”, or “hound shark” family, Triakidae, just to get all scientific on you. While some species within the family can grow up to 1.5 meters long and weigh in at around 13 kilos, the particular species we see here, Mustelus schmitti, doesn’t surpass about 90 centimeters, and in casual moments in those scientific circles, is known as the narrownose smooth-hound. It was “discovered”, officially – though obviously locals were long familiar with it – in 1938 by one Stewart Springer, a norteamericano shark expert. Mustelus, by the way, means weasel – so now we’ve got local names implying cats (and there is a whole different family of catsharks), and Latin classification implying hounds (which might include the whole family of dogfish) and weasels. One could be forgiven for giving it up as a non-starter and just buying a piece of salmon, you know?

Now wait a minute – what about the whole shark thing? You know, the campaigns against fishing for sharks, the anti-finning movement, all that. It is indeed an issue – but the primary one is that of either by-catch when fishing for other species, or the practice of finning and then tossing the sharks back in the water without their fins, left to die. In fact, the former was a serious issue here in Argentina, enough so that from 2004 until 2008 fishing for gatuzo and the use of certain types of nets was completely banned (which is interesting, because I don’t recall the local shops not having the fish available, so clearly it wasn’t being enforced). Since 2008 an “artisanal fishing” system has been in place that limits the places, methods of fishing, and types of nets used, as well as size of fish allowed to be kept for consumption. This has resulted in the regrowth of a once threatened population, and the some 200 tons of the shark that are caught and sold here and overseas each year now represents a small fraction of the numbers that exist. So, one of the sharks that, at least for now, can be consumed with clear conscience.

Palo Rosado a la Vasca (Basque-style Pink Stick)

4 150-200gm palo rosado filets or other firm-fleshed white fish
1 large red bell pepper, julienned (cut in long thin strips)
1 large onion, finely julienned
2 large potatoes, peeled and diced in 1 cm cubes
2 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
240 ml of white wine
3 tablespoons chopped parsley
2-3 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon sweet paprika
salt and white pepper

Boil the potato dice until just barely soft, drain. Meanwhile, cut the various vegetables, and make sure you removed the spine from the fish filets – one nice thing about working with sharks, they don’t have bones other than the spine. Saute the onions, garlic, and pepper strips in half the olive oil until limp. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Coat the bottom of a baking pan or cast-iron skillet with the remaining oil. Place the fillets in the pan and sprinkle with half the paprika and parsley, along with a bit of salt and pepper. Cover with the cooked potatoes (you could also go with thinly sliced rather than diced if you prefer). Cover with the onion and pepper mixture. Sprinkle the remaining paprika and parsley over the top and pour the wine over the whole thing. Place in a 180°C oven and cook for 15 minutes until the fish is cooked through and the top of the “casserole” is just lightly browned. Serve and enjoy!

A series of recipes and articles that I started writing for the Buenos Aires Herald Sunday supplement, Food & Wine section, at the beginning of 2012. My original proposal to them was to take local favorite dishes and classics and lighten them up for modern day sensibilities. We’re not talking spa or diet recipes, but at the very least, making them healthier in content, particularly salt, fat and portion size. As time went by, that morphed into a recipe column that, while emphasizing food that is relatively “good for you”, wasn’t necessarily focused on local cuisine. At the beginning of 2013 I decided to stop writing for them over some administrative issues, but it was fun while it lasted.

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Buenos Aires Herald, Newspaper articles

Red, White and delicious all over

Sunday, July 15, 20120

Fagottini di radicchio

Buenos Aires Herald
On Sunday supplement
Food and Wine

I’ve mentioned before that I often hear people asking about not just what one unusual vegetable or fruit is, but what to do with it. At my little neighborhood verdulería the proprietor takes great pains to call other customers over and ask me to explain what to do with one or another that he’s gotten in stock. Sometimes I think he goes and looks for something different just to see if he can trip me up – thankfully so far I’ve been able to hold my own in the recipe challenges.

‘Tis the season and all that, he’s recently gotten in all sorts of lovely winter vegetables, particularly things like cabbages and endives and the like. One of my favorites of the genre is radicchio, those glowingly beautiful heads of maroon and white leaves. Now, 99% of the time when I see them used in restaurants, they’re simply used in salads, providing a little bitter note and color in contrast to the sweetness and variegated green-ness of various lettuces. While delicious there, that wouldn’t be much of a recipe.

The interesting thing is, that like many other hearty vegetables of similar sort, that bitterness is tamed and changed by cooking – roasting and grilling are particularly good and bringing out the hidden sweet notes and tamping down the bitterness. Radicchio also pairs beautifully with nuts – walnuts and hazelnuts are personal favorites, and also with fruits in the family of pears, apples and quinces.

Let’s take a quick moment to just note what radicchio is – it’s a member of the chicory family – the same family of vegetables whose roots are dried and ground and added to coffee in many parts of the world to soften the bitterness of the brew. Ironic, no? The family includes radicchios (of which there are several types), chicory itself, endives – and not just the “Belgian” endive or witloof that we think of in its torpedo shape of pale green and white, but also frisée and escarole, which are both endives as well. Radicchio’s two most common varieties are the Chioggia – the globe shaped, cabbage like version that most of us are familiar with and which is the only one found here in BA, and the Treviso, which is shaped like a Belgian endive, but decked out in maroon and white colors.

So, on to the cooking, and my version of a favorite dish from the Veneto to tempt you into trying out a head of this little used vegetable….

Fagottini di Radicchio – Radicchio Pies

8 hojaldre (puff pastry) style empanada rounds
1 small head of radicchio (roughly 150 gm)
1 shallot, finely chopped
200 gm cuartirolo cheese
1 pear, diced small (½ cm)
12-15 hazelnuts, toasted and coarsely chopped
1 egg
2 tablespoons milk
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper

Rinse and chop the radicchio, removing the hard core, and saute in a pan with oil, shallots, salt and pepper until the radicchio is just wilted. Remove from heat and let cool.

Empanada rounds are typically about 12 cm. You’ll need four of approximately that diameter. Take another four and cut out rounds using a cookie cutter of about 8 cm. Butter 4 ramekins that are 8 cm in diameter (you can adjust here – if you’ve got slightly smaller or larger ramekins, just adjust the dough diameters to fit) and line with the larger dough rounds, covering the bottom and up the sides. Divide the radicchio between the ramekins and then top with the pear dice and chopped hazelnuts. Divide the cheese in four equal parts and mold into a round and press down over the filling. Classically you’d also add a slice or two of white truffle just under the cheese, if you have a good quality white truffle oil, you could add just a drop or two at the most to the pear and hazelnut mix.

Beat the egg with the milk. Cover the filling with the smaller rounds of dough and press down to pack tightly. Fold in the outer edge of the bottom round and pinch together to seal well. Brush the surface with the egg wash and bake in a 200̊C oven for 15 minutes, until the dough is golden brown and puffed.

Remove from oven and tip each fagottino (“bundle”) out carefully (two oven mitts are a good idea here), brush the sides with more of the egg wash and return to the oven on the same baking sheet to brown the sides well. Serve hot or warm as an amazing little dinner party appetizer.

A series of recipes and articles that I started writing for the Buenos Aires Herald Sunday supplement, Food & Wine section, at the beginning of 2012. My original proposal to them was to take local favorite dishes and classics and lighten them up for modern day sensibilities. We’re not talking spa or diet recipes, but at the very least, making them healthier in content, particularly salt, fat and portion size. As time went by, that morphed into a recipe column that, while emphasizing food that is relatively “good for you”, wasn’t necessarily focused on local cuisine. At the beginning of 2013 I decided to stop writing for them over some administrative issues, but it was fun while it lasted.

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Buenos Aires Herald, Newspaper articles

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Go fish

Sunday, July 8, 20120

Baked whole fish

Buenos Aires Herald
On Sunday supplement
Food and Wine

It’s a common refrain to hear that porteños don’t eat or like fish. And there are certainly fewer in the way of seafood restaurants in this city than those serving up the national beef. No question some of that is the long standing gaucho mystique and tradition of the open range and great hunks of meat cooked up over open flame. But part of it is based on decades or longer of a simple lack of supply of good quality fish and shellfish to the capital.

Until not that long ago a fish would find itself caught somewhere off the southern coasts, ranging from Mar del Plata down to Ushuaia. From there it was plopped unceremoniously atop a bed of ice along with a number of its brethren, a crate of iced down fish got shoved into the back of an unrefrigerated truck and a driver drove from hundreds or thousands of kilometers to BA in a manner that would make a local colectivo “pilot” jealous. Still, it could take a day or two to get here, get processed through the Mercado Central, and distributed to retail outlets – by then, the chances of freshness were dimming rapidly.

But recent years have seen the implementation of refrigerated and/or frozen transport in controlled containers and trucks, and even crates of the best of the catch showing up in the belly of aircraft arriving from points south. With that, and a general tendency towards a more varied and perhaps even healthier diet, fish is showing up more and more on menus, and in more and more homes, as a choice for dinner.

Now, you can pick up your typical fillet of one fish or another at any local fish store, and perhaps we’ll get to some interesting ways to prepare one or another of those. In fact, I feel a gatuzo a lo vasco coming on in a future column. But for the moment, I wanted to look at a classic local preparation of pescado al horno relleno – oven-baked stuffed fish. It’s a simple dish, a whole fish is butterflied open, sprinkled with sauteed onions, scallions, salt, pepper and thyme, then it’s closed back up, topped with bread crumbs and lemon juice, and classically, and, to my mind unfortunately, served up with “abundant white sauce”, along with, perhaps, a vegetable pudding of carrots or squash.

Until we get to that heavy bechamel it’s all sounding fairly delicious, but there’s something about a heavy, floury, milk based sauce ladled over a fish that sounds like we’re just trying to cover up the fact that it’s a fish on the table. Even the French are not as enamored of bechamel as the Argentines are. So here’s one of my favorite whole fish preparations – easy to make, fresh and vibrant flavors.

Baked Whole Fish

6 garlic cloves
1½ teaspoons salt
2 fresh red or green long chilies, seeded
1 large tomato, peeled and seeded
3 tablespoons tomato paste
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
—–

¼ cup olive oil
salt and pepper
1 whole sea bass (approx. 6 pounds, or slightly over 2 kilos), scaled, gutted and cleaned
Cilantro for garnish

First the fish – “sea bass”. How do we find one here? There are several options in the bass family that will work well for this dish – corvina, mero or chernia would be my first choices.

Preheat oven to 180°C. In a small dry pan lightly toast the cumin seeds until they start to smell aromatic and pop a little. Remove from the pan and slightly crush them. Make a paste of the first six ingredients in a small food processor, blender, or even a mortar and pestle.

Rinse and pat the fish dry with paper towels. Cut three slits in the skin across the fish on both sides, coat with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Lay it in a baking pan and coat well with the paste mixture (on both sides). Bake for one hour, approximately, until done. Serve on a platter with a handful of cilantro leaves scattered across it. This can also be done with the fish filleted and laid side by side in the pan, though the baking time will be considerably less – just bake until the fillets are cooked through but not dried out – roughly 15-20 minutes.

And ditch the white sauce.

A series of recipes and articles that I started writing for the Buenos Aires Herald Sunday supplement, Food & Wine section, at the beginning of 2012. My original proposal to them was to take local favorite dishes and classics and lighten them up for modern day sensibilities. We’re not talking spa or diet recipes, but at the very least, making them healthier in content, particularly salt, fat and portion size. As time went by, that morphed into a recipe column that, while emphasizing food that is relatively “good for you”, wasn’t necessarily focused on local cuisine. At the beginning of 2013 I decided to stop writing for them over some administrative issues, but it was fun while it lasted.

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Buenos Aires Herald, Newspaper articles