Category: Recipes

Toss out your Teflon pans!

In a recent NY Times article, Chef Andrew Zimmern points out the chefs never use Teflon pans, because they don’t need them. These non-stick pans are safe and work fine UNTIL the coating starts to disintegrate or is overheated. In both of those cases, you are then exposed to the poly-fluoro alkyls (PFAS) that have been found to be quite toxic “forever chemicals,” meaning that they don’t break down in the environment, but remain there more or less forever. And of course, the manufacture of Teflon spreads this problem quite broadly.

When my last Teflon pan started to crumble a few years ago, I tossed it and bought a ridged sort of Henkels pan from Costco that claimed to be nonstick. It wasn’t.

But here’s the thing. As Zimmern points out, your cast iron skillet really is pretty much non-stick and utterly durable. I have two such cast iron pans, about 10” and 12” diameters. They were my mother’s and she took good care of them. In fact, those pans are nearly centenarians!

Last weekend, I made my usual bacon and eggs using my 10-inch pan (probably an inside diameter of 9 ½ inches. The results were outstanding! These pictures show the 10-inch pan. We could cook 4 eggs in te 12-incher.

I cooked the bacon as usual, using medium to medium/high heat, and let to pan cool down a bit to medium/low. I like my eggs basted rather than over-easy, so I spooned the bacon fat to cook the tops.

And now, the important test. Did the eggs stick? Not at all. They slipped easily onto my spatula and onto my plate. Another time, I make an egg sandwich with a single egg using just a dab of butter, and it too cooked without sticking.

So forget your 1950s Teflon pan and just use your mom’s cast iron pan, or buy one yourself.

Cleanup? Swirl the pan in hot water, perhaps with a dish brush, and dry it with a paper towel.

Do you have to be careful of using soap? Not at all. These pans wear “like iron.” In fact, we once absent-mindedly ran one through the dishwasher, and with just a swish of oil to re-season it, it was good as new (or old).

Chicken saute with garlic and hollandaise

This delicious, but fairly simple, recipe is derived from one by Julia Child in MTAOFC vol1. We make it as a “company dish” all the time, and the results are really impressive, considering you can make it in half an hour or so. In our latest variation, we decided to use only dark meat, since it is considerably juicier. If you use a whole chicken, you add the white meat later in the cooking process so it doesn’t dry out.

A heavy duty 10” or 11” skillet with a lid.
¼ lb butter (one stick)
2-3 lb of chicken legs and thighs, skin removed.
1 tsp thyme
1 tsp basil
¼ tsp fennel (ground or seeds)
Salt and pepper
3 cloves unpeeled garlic
2/3 cup dry white wine
2 egg yolks
1 Tb lemon juice
1 Tb white wine
2 Tb fresh basil or parsley (or both), chopped finely

Combine the basil, thyme and fennel and mix together. If you are using fennel seeds (which are ore common), you can crush them with the other two spices using a mortar and pestle or in a good blender or food processer.
Remove the skins from the chicken, dry them off and sprinkle the spice mixture over the tops. Add salt and pepper
Heat the butter in the skillet over medium heat until it’s foaming.
Add the chicken piece and the unpeeled garlic cloves. Cover, and cook over low to medium heat for about 8 minutes.

Turn the chicken pieces, baste them with the butter, sprinkle with spices and salt and pepper, and cook covered a few more minutes until the chicken has reached 165˚ F.
Remove the chicken from the pan to a warm plate, and cover it to keep warm.
Mash the garlic cloves with a wooden spoon and remove the peels.
Add the white wine, and boil it down over high heat until it has been reduced by half.
Meanwhile, put the egg yolks in a small saucepan, and beat until sticky. Add the 1 Tb of wine and lemon juice, and mix together.

Then, beat in the butter and wine mixture from the cooking pan a Tb at a time, to make a thick, creamy sauce. Be sure to include the garlic.
Whisk the sauce over low heat to thicken it.
Then mix in the chopped basil and parsley.

In theory, you should be able to serve the chicken at this point, perhaps with rice, and this creamy sauce.

But hollandaises can be persnickety and there is a non-trivial chance that the sauce will separate or curdle while it sits there. Fortunately, this has a quick fix.

Put 1-2 Tb if dry white wine in a small mixing bowl and slowly beat in the curdled sauce, a tablespoon at a time. This will result in a smooth, stable sauce you can serve with pride.

Serve the chicken on a platter and pass the sauce in a dish or gravy boat.

Enjoy this fabulous meal!

Ice Cream Sodas on a hot day

Remember ice cream sodas? No? Long before there were ice cream scoop shops, there were soda fountains, where they made a lot of more elaborate ice cream dishes, including ice cream sodas.

They are cold and refreshing. I remember stopping at Isaly’s in Columbus before I delivered papers on my paper route. Ice cream sodas were only 25 cents, and in June (Dairy Month) they were half price!

I watched and talked to them and can tell you every detail of how to make this really refreshing dessert. For these pictures, we bought some real soda glasses and long spoons, but you can use any tall drinking glasses.

The recipe

2-3 Tb chocolate or strawberry syrup
1 Tb whipping cream, or a squirt from your whipped cream aerosol can.
Ice cold soda water
2 scoops of ice cream
Whipped cream for topping
And, a cherry

Start by putting the syrup in the bottom of each glass. We used 2 Tb of chocolate syrup and a bit more strawberry syrup. Squirt about a tablespoon or more of whipped cream into the syrup, to make flavoring for the soda water. Stir the cream into the syrup.

Pour cold soda water into the syrup mixture about half-way up the sides of glass. Mix carefully so it doesn’t foam up tooo much.

Add 2 scoops of ice cream to each glass. We used chocolate for the chocolate soda and vanilla for the strawberry soda. Use a spoon to push the ice cream down into the soda water. If the soda and ice cream don’t come right to the top of the glass, add a little more soda and carefully mix it in.

Top with whipped cream and a cherry.

An ice cream soda actually improves if you let it sit a couple of minutes: some of the soda freezes on the surface of the ice cream, giving you some crunchy, fizzy frozen soda water. Serve right after that brief pause.

Happy summer!

Cacio e pepe made simpler

As we explained in our previous article, cacio e pepe is a beloved Roman dish made of pasta, pecorino romano cheese, some pasta water and pepper. We explained the research of Giacomo Bertolucci et. el., who determined that most recipes don’t have enough starch in their pasta water to prevent the cheese from clumping. Instead, they proposed added some cornstarch or potato starch solution to the cheese before adding it to the hot pasta.

This approach worked very well. However, food scientist Nathan Myrhvold, the author of the food scientists’ bible, Modernist Cuisine proposed another solution. He suggested adding some sodium citrate to the cheese mixture, which serves to emulsify and stabilize the cheese and also prevents the dreaded clumping.

Well, sodium citrate is easily available online and in cooking stores, and is well known for it uses in making smooth cheese sauces. Just to reassure you, citric acid is the sour taste in citrus fruits such as lemons, limes and all the related fruits, and you can get sodium citrate by mixing lemon juice and baking soda. But since you can get a pound of it (probably a lifetime supply) for around $10 and have it delivered the next day, why bother?

Our recipe

• 240 g pasta (about half a pound, 8.4 oz)
• Water to cover the pasta in a wide, shallow pan.
• 160 g pecorino cheese (5.6 oz)
• 2 tsp sodium citrate (11 g).
• Freshly ground pepper

1. Grate a little more than the 160g of pecorino cheese in a food processor. Save the excess for sprinkling on top. You can use a cheese grater if you don’t have a food processor.
2. Bring the water for cooking the pasta to boil in an open, flat pan wider than the length of the pasta, and cook until al dente. Be sure to test the pasta’s doneness, as it will take longer than the suggested 10 minutes, since the small amount of water will reduce the heat of the boiling water.

3. Scoop out around half a cup of pasta water about a minute before the pasta is done. Add the sodium citrate to this water and stir to dissolve.

4. Mix the citrate pasta water with the grated cheese.

5. Lift the pasta out of the cooking water into a serving bowl.
6. Stir in the cheese mixture a little at a time. Add more pasta water if it is too thick. We ended up adding almost another half cup. The cheese shouldn’t clump at all.
7. Grate pepper into the cheese and pasta and stir it in.
8. Serve right away. This makes enough for two hungry people.
9. Serve with a side salad with homemade blue cheese dressing.

How to make sodium citrate at home

We know that lemon juice contains 1.44g of citric acid per ounce.

1. Weigh out 7.6 grams of lemon juice and 14.3 grams of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate). This will give you about 11 g of sodium citrate (2 tsp).

2. Slowly pour the lemon juice into the baking soda and stir. The mixture will foam up as it expels carbon dioxide.

3. When the foaming subsides, your paste containing your sodium citrate is read to use. Stir it into the pasta water and add to the cheese just as above.

The chemistry behind these measurements

Citric acid has the structure

You can also write it as

HOOC-CH2-C(OH)(COOH)-CH2-COOH

Or compactly but confusingly as C6H8O7.

Each of those COOH groups represents a carboxylic acid. Note that there are three of them and we have to neutralize all three.

The molecular weight of citric acid is 192.12 g/mole. Since our 2 tsp of citric acid weighs 11g, we need 11/192 or 0.057 moles of citric acid. Sodium bicarbonate, NaHCO3 has a molecular weight of 84 g/mole, and .057 x 84 is 4.8 grams to make .057 moles. However, since there are three COOH groups, we need three times that much, or 14.4 g of baking soda.

When you mix the lemon juice with the baking soda it foams as carbon dioxide gas is released:

C6H8O7 (aq)+ 3 NaHCO3(s) = 3 CO2(g) + Na3C6H5O7(aq)

The resulting mixture still contains some lemon oil that you may taste slightly in the resulting pasta dish.

Make your own buttermilk (and biscuits)

We described the characteristics of buttermilk in our previous article. Most important is that it is more acidic than ordinary milk and that helps things like pancakes and biscuits rise nicely when they interact with baking powder and baking soda.

You can make your own buttermilk substitute by simply adding a tablespoon of white vinegar to milk to acidify it. It really works very well as you can see in the video below.

To summarize:

Buttermilk

1 cup milk (whole or 2% or skim all work)
1 Tb white vinegar

Biscuits

2 cups flour
1 Tb baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
6 tb unsalted butter
1 cup buttermilk (about)

Bake at 450˚F for 10 minutes.

The battle of the buttermilks

I first tasted buttermilk at my grandmother’s house in Lincoln, Nebraska. My mother and I had taken the train from Columbus out to Lincoln to visit her family there. I was probably 10 or 12 years old. I came in from playing with my cousin Steve, climbing trees and the like, to find that they were going to make pancakes with buttermilk. I tasted the buttermilk and didn’t like it much. “But,” they said, “wait till you taste the pancakes. They will be like you poured a lot of butter into them!”

And, yes, the pancakes were very good indeed.

Some years later, when I started collecting recipes, I got that buttermilk pancake recipe from my mother’s sister, Elsie, and have saved it ever since. Since it was originally my grandmother’s it is probably over a hundred years old, and was probably made from real buttermilk. Here it is:

2 cups flour
2 eggs
2 tsp baking powder
1 Tb sugar
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt

As a memory guide, Elsie pointed out that you can summarize the recipe as 2-2-2-1-1-1/2.

Mix dry ingredients and add buttermilk until you get a “thickish batter.” Cook in a large cast-iron pan or a griddle. Turn the pancakes when they start to show bubbles.

Buttermilk was originally formed by allowing the milk to stand to separate the cream allowing it to ferment a bit. Then, after churning, they let the buttermilk ferment and thicken. But once centrifugal cream separators were developed, you didn’t have to let the cream set and begin to ferment before churning the butter. So, another way to make buttermilk was developed, where they took part skim milk and added the same bacteria that were found in fermenting the original buttermilk. These were usually Lactococcus lactis and Leuconostoc citrovorum. This was called “cultured buttermilk” and is commonly found in the US, where there is little original buttermilk available.

I have been making excellent pancakes using Friendship Buttermilk for over 20 years. But recently, our local market dropping the Friendship buttermilk, offering only Kate’s Buttermilk. You can still buy it at ShopRite and at some Stop and Shops.

So, it seemed like a good idea to compare the two. We made up two identical batches of dry ingredients and eggs, and added buttermilk to each until we reached a “thickish batter” stage. We initially cooked 4 pancakes on each time on our Presto griddle. But recognizing that the griddle’s heating was uneven and measurement of each pancake aliquot was difficult we then simply put one carefully measured ¼ cup of batter on the griddle from each recipe, and placed them close together so they would have the same cooking temperature.

The result:

The pancake on the right, made with Friendship cultured buttermilk, clearly rose higher than the one made with Kate’s buttermilk. We would assume then that the Friendship buttermilk is slightly more acidic and reacts with the leavening more that the Kate’s recipe did.

How did they taste? We tasted a slice of each pancake without any added butter or syrup. The Friendship pancake had a rich buttery-milky flavor, but the Kate’s pancake was quite bland, with no distinct flavor at all.

So, how do the two buttermilks themselves taste? Not surprisingly, the Friendship buttermilk tasted more like buttermilk. The Kate’s just tasted sour. No real butter-milky flavor at all. So, we are sticking with the Friendship for our pancakes. An experiment with biscuits showed similar differences in rising as well.

Sorry to say, despite all the positive press Kate’s has gotten, we found it quite disappointing.

Making blue cheese dressing

Blue cheese dressing is really easy to make, and a lot tastier than packaged dressings. It only has 3 main ingredients, and perhaps three or four possible additions. Here’s our recipe, culled from several we looked at. We adjusted the flavor a bit using the additions, and you can do the same. Just taste the dressing and decide if it needs any more enhancement.

¼ cup sour cream
¼ cup mayonnaise
2 oz blue cheese
1 Tb chopped Italian parsley or celery leaves
1 tsp white vinegar
Dash of Worcestershire sauce
¼ tsp garlic powder
(buttermilk)

Start by mixing the sour cream and mayonnaise in a small bowl and add the blue cheese. Using a wooden spoon, press some of the cheese pieces against the side of the bowl to dissolve them and give the dressing more flavor. Mix in the parsley.

Taste the dressing. It would probably benefit from the tartness of white vinegar, Add the vinegar, and taste again.

If you think it needs a bit more edge, add the Worcestershire sauce.

Taste again. If it still seems a bit bland add half the garlic powder, and the rest after tasting again.

Feel free to experiment to get the taste you prefer. The proportions above lead to a nice, tangy sauce. If you like it a little thinner, stir in some buttermilk. We liked it the way it was.

You can get a more full-bodied flavor by using Gorgonzola over plain blue cheese. But in any case, you have made up your blue cheese dressing in about a minute. Enjoy it.

Buttery crusted chicken pie

We have written several times about making a chicken pot pie using an Instant Pot. Briefly, you steam the chicken under high pressure for 15 minutes, and then cut the meat off the main pieces and refrigerate it and toss the bones back into the pot with the backs and wings, add 4 cups or so of water, a leek, carrots and celery and pressure cook for 30-40 minutes more to make the chicken stock.

Then making the stew itself amounts to cooking some carrots and celery pieces in butter for 10 or so minutes until soft, sauteing a few mushrooms in butter in a large pot, adding veggies and making a flour-butter roux and slowly adding broth from the pot until you have a nice thick gravy. Then add a little cream for richness and throw in the chicken meat. Then you bake it to make a pie.

If you make biscuits and put them on top of the chicken stew, it’s a pie or chicken ‘n’ biscuits. If you make biscuits and serve the stew over the biscuits, it’s chicken a’la King. And if you put the stew into little casseroles and top with a puff pastry crust, it’s a chicken pot pie for sure!

But what if you want a pie with a nice flakey, buttery crust? Well, this doesn’t take a lot of time except that you really must chill the pie dough for an hour to keep the butter from melting prematurely. The rest is easy.

You can find a bunch of buttery piecrust recipes by a simple search, and they all more or less require 2 sticks of butter, salt and 2-1/2 cups of flour and some ice water. But there are some differences. The important advance in ideas about butter crust came from a relatively recent article by Kenji Lopez-Alt in Serious Eats. In it, he theorizes that the flakiness of piecrusts come from fat coating the flour, rather than the other way around. And, that you should coat the flour with fat and then add the rest of the flour to interleave flour and butter in the crust. This works really well. One writer, writing for Inspired Taste, explained this recipe quite clearly.

Making the piecrust

½ lb (2 sticks) very cold unsalted butter, cut into little cubes
2-1/2 “scant” cups of flour (see below)
1 tsp Kosher salt
6-12 Tb ice water
(for dessert pies add 1 Tb sugar)

The real trick here are those scant cups of flour. One way to achieve it, is to spoon the flour into a measuring cup and then level off the cup with a table knife. That means you have to repeat this 3 times: 2 for the cups and one for the half cup.

A better way is to just weigh the flour out, and forget all that spooning. If you just scoop flour out into your measuring cup, the flour will weigh just about 5 oz or 142 g. If you sift the flour, 1 cup will weigh about 120g. But if you use that spooning technique, you will have only about 112 grams in a cup. This is about 4 oz instead of 5. So, it really is a scant cup.

But instead, why not just weigh it to start with? Let me note that I use King Arthur flour which may be more or less dense than some other flour, But the weight will still be what you use.

Use a food processor

The easiest way to make this crust is in a food processor. If you don’t have one, you can use a pastry blender for about a minute instead. I did it both ways. They both work fine.

Add 168 g (1-1/2 scant cups) of flour to the food processor (or bowl).
Add the salt (and sugar if a dessert) and pulse or stir briefly to mix.
Lay the cubes of very cold butter on top of the flour and mix it in by running the food processor for around 15 seconds. You now have the fat coated flour. You should be able to pinch some together and have it hold its shape. Lacking a food processor, just work the butter into the flour with a pastry blender.
Add 112 g more flour (another scant cup) and pulse for a few seconds to mix the buttery flour with the new flour. (Or mix with a fork or pastry blender.)

Turn the flour mixture into a bowl and sprinkle ice water over it, starting with about 6 Tb of water. Mix together with a fork or rubber spatula.
Keep adding tablespoons of ice water and mixing until you can press the dough together in the bowl with your spatula and it will hold its shape. Depending on the flour and the humidity, this may take 12 or more tablespoons of water. In a warm kitchen in warm weather, you may have to refrigerate the dough during the ice water mixing process.
Take the flour out of the bowl and mound it into a ball. If it crumbles, put it back in the bowl and work in a little more icewater.
Cut the ball in two, press each one into a thick pancake, wrap with plastic wrap (or use a zipper bag) and refrigerate for at least an hour. The dough will keep for several days, and you can freeze if you want to.

When you are ready to make the pie, take the dough out of the refrigerator and let it warm for a few minutes. Preheat the over to 375˚ F (206˚ C).
Then place it on a floured surface or pastry marble and press it slowly across the dough with a rolling pin until it begins to give. Then start rolling it out until the dough is wider than your pie pan. Fix any cracks by pinching them together.
Then fold the dough into quarters and lift it into the pie pan and arrange it with the extra dough hanging outside the pan. Don’t cut it off yet.

Pour the chicken stew into the pie pan, roll out the top crust and lay it on top of the pie. You may not need all the stew. Freeze the rest for another pie later.
Fold any extra dough from both crusts under the top crust and then go around and pinch the border to look a little decorative.
Cut a couple of long slits in the pie and put it in the oven.
Bake for 15-20 minutes, until the pie filling is bubbling. Serve hot.

You will have made a delicious, flakey, buttery piecrust that your diners will love. Serves 3-4 people.

Sage apple sausage

You can make your own breakfast sausage in just a few minutes and get just the flavor you want. In our version, we leave out the common onion, garlic and hot peppers, which are great in dinner sausages but overpower eggs or pancakes. Instead we add a bit of apple to the sausage, which adds moistness and an interesting accompanying flavor.

We mix the spaced together in a mortar and pestle that we liberated from our chem lab decades ago, but you can easily buy them online. Lacking one, you can chop the spices together with a knife on a cutting board, or use a blender.

1 Tb dried sage
1 Tb dried thyme
1 tsp fennel seed
1 tsp brown sugar
1 ½ tsp Diamond Crystal kosher salt.
1 lb ground pork
1 tart apple, peeled and cored

Mix the dry ingredients together in a mortar and crush them with the pestle, until the spice blend is uniform.
Using your hands and/or a wooden spoon mix the spices into the ground pork in a medium bowl.
Mince the apple pieces by hand or using a food processor and mix the apple into the pork mixture. You may not need all of it.

Use a ¼ cup measure to scoop out the amount of meat for each sausage.
Cook the sausages on a 375˚ F griddle for 4 minutes per side. Press them down so they are flat. You might want to set a timer to keep from over cooking them and drying them out. The sausages are done when the internal temperature is around 145˚ F.
Keep the sausages warm while you prepare the pancakes or eggs to go with them.

This doesn’t take much longer than cooking frozen sausages, and the flavor is really terrific! Form all the remaining sausages into patties and freeze them in layers, separated by wax paper in a plastic freezer container. Makes about 1 dozen good-sized sausages.

Spaghetti alla Nerano

Nerano is a charming Italian fishing village south of Naples on the tip of the Sorrento peninsula, just across from Capri. It is here the Spaghetti alla Nerano was invented in the 1950s. Stanley Tucci introduced flocks of American fans to this classic dish in the first episode of his “Searching for Italy” series, And recently the New Yorker published a definitive recipe for this fabulous dish. We tried it a couple of times and have some suggestions to make it work a little better.

While the ingredients are just spaghetti, zucchini, cheese and maybe a pat of butter, there are some details in the recipe that make it work so well. First of all, the zucchini slices are deep fried, not pan fried, and you want them to get quite brown, nearly burnt to develop the flavor in an otherwise pretty tasteless vegetable.

Confronted with the need to thinly slice three or four zucchini, we resorted to our Cuisinart food processor, using the 2mm slicing disk.

Probably the most important thing about this dish is assembling while everything is still hot, so the cheese will melt. In professional kitchens. Two people assemble this dish. We’ll tell you how we did it with only two hands below.

The basic ingredients are:

3 medium zucchini
8 oz spaghetti
Deep frying oil: sunflower or canola
2-4 oz grated cheese (Parmegiano Reggiano or Provolone del Monaco or Caciovavallo)
1 clove garlic, minced
1 bunch basil leaves, cut up
Pat of butter

Grate the cheese in a food processor, and remove to a bowl
Slice the zucchini into thin, uniform slices. We used a 2mm slicing disk.
Deep fry the zucchini slices, until quite brown. For 3 zucchini, we divided them into 4 batches for frying.
Put the zucchini on paper towel on a plate to let them drain.

Bring a couple of quarts of salted water to a boil and add the spaghetti all at once, stirring with a pasta fork to make sure it submerges.
Heat the zucchini and garlic in a skillet.
If your spaghetti requires, say, 4 minutes to cook, scoop out a cup of pasta water around the 2 minute mark.
Put about 10% of the zucchini in the bottom of a medium bowl, stir in a handful cheese and add hot water to help melt the cheese into a creamy sauce.

As soon as spaghetti is about done, lift a little out of the boiling water and mix it into the bowl. Do not drain the spaghetti: it will cool too quickly, just lift it right out of the hot water.
Then in several layers, add zucchini, hot spaghetti and cheese and stir, adding more hot pasta water when you need it. The zucchini and cheese tend to clump together, so this layered mixing helps distribute it throughout the pasta. You may not need all the spaghetti. But when you have mixed all the zucchini and cheese with some of the spaghetti, stop and arrange the mixture on a serving plate.
Top with a pat of butter and the basil leaves and serve right away.

You can serve this as a main dish or as a side dish. Here we illustrate a side dish serving with a few meatballs to make the meal. You will be amazed at how good this simple meal can be!