Golden Diner Pancakes revisited

A week or two ago, the New York Times published a recipe for Sam Yoo’s Golden Diner Pancakes, fabulous, tall pancakes served with a fruit compote and honey-butter syrup and topping. The recipe was quite a hit, based on how often it appeared on social media. You can stand in line for hours at the Golden Diner near the Manhattan Bridge to sample these pancakes, or you can make them yourself.

There are several unique things about Mr Yoo’s recipe (as scaled down for the Times by Genvieve Ko): the most important one is that you “pre-ferment” the flour, yeast and buttermilk for an hour or so, before mixing up the batter. The other thing is that in the Golden Diner kitchen, they cook each pancake in a 7-8 inch non-stick pan, so the pancakes are wider and taller than conventional pancakes.

When we first made them, we used a couple of skillets about the size Ko recommends, and since we were making for a couple of us, we had to make two, and keep them warm while we made two more. This worked pretty well, and they were delicious, but we had a lot of difficulty controlling the heat to keep the pancakes from browning too much.

But we noted that that pre-fermented batter also had developed a lot of gluten stretchiness and the batter was very cohesive. So, we wondered if you could make them on a griddle and cut out a couple of steps (the pans and the warming). This was a great success, and we report on the slightly revised recipe here.

Pancake batter

Pre-ferment ingredients

2 ¼ tsp active dry yeast
1 cup of all purpose flour
1 ¼ cups buttermilk
¼ cup water

Batter ingredients

1 cup all purpose flour
2 Tb sugar
¾ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
2 large eggs
¼ cup canola oil or other neutral oil

Maple-Honey Butter

¼ cup (1/2 stick) Kerrygold butter, softened
3 Tb honey
2 Tb pure maple syrup
¾ tsp fine salt

Maple-Honey Syrup

½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1/3 cup honey
1 ½ Tb maple syrup
1 tsp soy sauce
½ tsp fine salt

Berry Compote

16 oz mixed berries, such as blueberries and strawberries cut up
½ cup sugar
2 tsp cornstarch
1 lemon

First thing in the morning, combine 1 cup of flour and the yeast in a modest sized bowl. Put the buttermilk and water in a pitcher and warm it in the microwave until luke-warm. (This takes 4-50 seconds. We suggest trying 15 second steps until the milk mixture seems lukewarm. Don’t let it get over 100˚F (37˚ C) or you could kill the yeast. Mix the warm milk mixture with the flour and yeast until smooth and cover with plastic wrap and let it ferment for at least an hour. You can make the honey-butter, the syrup and the fruit compote while you are waiting.

Make the maple-honey butter, by mixing the honey, maple syrup and salt into the softened Kerrygold butter with a wooden spoon. We chose KerryGold over the original unsalted butter because it has a lot more flavor. Let butter mixture sit out until you need it, unless you are doing this long in advance. Then, chill it and warm it back up when serving.

To make the maple-honey syrup, combine the butter, honey, syrup, soy sauce and salt in a small saucepan, and heat with whisking until the butter melts completely. Add 1 ½ tsp water and keep whisking until emulsified. Leave the pan on the stove so you can rewarm it before serving.

To make the berry compote, mix all the ingredients in a large cast-iron skilled, and stir and mix while heating. Heat until some of the blueberries pop. Keep the berries in the pan and rewarm before serving.
Heat a griddle to 375˚F. Mix the remaining 1 cup of flour with the sugar, baking soda and salt in a small bowl. In a large bowl, mix the canola oil and the two eggs. Add the pre-ferment batter and mix. Mix in the flour/sugar mixture until no flour is unmixed. The batter may be lumpy and this is OK.
Heat the butter-honey syrup and the fruit compote.

Scoop the batter onto the hot griddle using a rounded half-cup measure. You can make them bigger if you want, but these will be about 6-7 inches each. You can make 4 at once, or 6 at once if you have a bigger griddle. Cook on each side for around 2 minutes.
To assemble, put one pancake on each of two (or three) plates, and pour the maple-honey syrup over them. Spread fruit compote on top of that, and then place the second pancake on top. Again, add the maple-honey syrup and the fruit compote, and top with a rounded spoon of the hone-butter. Serve at once.

These pancakes are a fabulous special breakfast. They may seem to take some time, but you can make the syrup, butter and fruit compote while the batter is fermenting.

So, while this is Yoo’s (and Ko’s) recipe, we make the following simplifications.

We warmed the buttermilk and water in a microwave instead of on the stove.
We used Kerrygold butter in the honey-butter and decreased the butter by half: you don’t need that much for 2 or 3 diners.
We increased the fruit compote to 16 oz. 14 didn’t seem like quite enough.
We cooked the pancakes on a griddle instead of pans.
Ko suggested using two spoons to make little oblong pats of butter to go on top, but this didn’t work as well with the Kerrygold, so we skipped it.

If you have batter left for another day, Kat Lieu says it will keep, refrigerated for a week. She also tried making the large pancakes in a big rice cooker with some success, but only one at a time.

And, if you have any of that honey-butter left, it is great on English muffins!

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!

Sly Bandit — Wilton’s own brew pub

Sly Bandit has been operating in their South Wilton location (14 Danbury Rd) since last summer, and we finally got a chance to visit it last Sunday night. The ground floor is the actual brewery: the pub is upstairs. And yes, there is an elevator.

The beer list changes almost daily: here is the list last Sunday. We tried the Pilsener that time, and will work our way down the list in subsequent visits.

The food menu consists of Shareables like Buffalo chicken and soft pretzels, Flatbreads like Margherita, Spicy Italian and Pulled Pork. These come on triangles of flat bread on a cutting board. You can share them or make a meal of them. This time we had the Buffalo Chicken flatbread ($14), which comes with cheddar and gorgonzola cheese, hot sauce and lime crema. It was terrific, but way more than enough for one.

The main section is called Handhelds (they mean sandwiches) and in addition to a terrific hamburger which comes with fries, presalted with sea salt, they have a Wurst sandwich, a grilled cheese, tacos, fish tacos and salmon. This time we went for the burger ($16), but the Wurst and the pulled pork are calling out for next time.

There are also several salads, two Crockables: mac and cheese and chili and three desserts. We went for the Chocolate Mousse cake ($10.50) this time.

Sly Bandit is a great place to go for a quick meal or an evening. Service is fast and friendly. We’ll be back, and you should give it a try. They are open every night but Mondays. Wednesday through July 2 are Trivia nights, starting at 6:30.

A Taste of Wilton returns

Last night, A Taste of Wilton returned, sponsored by the Wilton Chamber of Commerce, with restaurants and vendors displaying their foods for tasting in the lobby of the very new Riverside apartment building at 141 Danbury Rd. (We swear it wasn’t there yesterday!)

We took quite a passel of pictures of most of the exhibits, and you can see all of them here. There was no printed program or guide and since the exhibits stretched around the outdoor pool area, it would have been easy to miss some of them if you didn’t see people carrying foods you hadn’t seen yet.

We found that there were a number of out of town vendors with really interesting offerings. The one that impressed us the most was Tucker’s Pie Company, a Bridgeport company that makes savory pies (quiches, chicken pot pie, and so forth) for pick up or delivery. They are located just off the Black Rock turnpike at 2931 Fairfield Ave.

The pie that impressed us the most was their Steak and Guinness Pie, and their Caramelized Apple and Fennel Pork Sausage Roll. You need to order a couple of days in advance, but they are worth it. If you are having a larger event, they will ship you boxed frozen pies as well.

Two Roads brewery (from Stratford) was there with several of their beers. We tried their Summer Heaven IPA and found it delicious. Not to be outdone, the Little Pub was also offering their own branded beers.

One big surprise was Mama Hu’s Baked sushi. It is basically packaged sushi you can heat and eat. We tried their spicy salmon and were quite impressed. They have commercial kitchens in Norwalk and Brooklyn, and their products are available at Village Market, Walter Stewarts and Nature’s Temptation (Ridgefield).

Jacob’s Pickles (from the Sono Collection) was offering build your own chicken biscuit sliders, with some tasty looking fried chicken.

But the culminating surprise entry was the appearance of the new Sly Bandit Brew Pub at 14 Danbury Rd. Their display was just a menu and the opportunity for them to prepare a plate for you. But imagine! A Brew pub in South Wilton and we didn’t know it had opened!

Desserts were cookies from The Painted Cookie, Banana pudding from Pressburger (who were offering full single burgers as well) and carrot cake from Marly’s.

You will quickly note that there were far more vendors from outside Wilton that within. Where were our favorite restaurants like Bianco Rosso, Craft 14 and Aranci 67? Not to mention Athithi, Ren Noodle and Dumpling, Cactus Rose and the Red Rooster? Well, it was a great night for those who attended, and while the Chamber said it was sold out, we think they could have sold more tickets as it was never crowded. See you there next year and at the brew pub much sooner!

The Pirates of Why?

The Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Pirates! The Penzance Musical opened April 4th. We saw it last night, April 16, and it will run until July 27. Rather than producing Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance, the producers elected to create a “re-imagining” of Pirates, setting it in New Orleans in 1880. The new dialog and libretto and musical adaptations are by Rupert Holmes, who has extensive Broadway experience, and the orchestrations by conductor Joseph Joubert and Daryl Waters.

The central conceit of this production is described in a curtain speech by two actors portraying Gilbert (David Hyde Pierce) and Sullivan (Preston Truman Boyd). They note that they decided to open Pirates in New York to attempt to obtain a copyright and forestall knock-off productions as happened to Pinafore. (This is true, but it didn’t work out.) They then describe taking Pirates to several cities, ending up in New Orleans which so entranced them they decided to make that Pirates a New Orleans inflected piece. (This never happened, of course.)

Without describing the show at all, you can learn a lot by looking at the orchestra. Sullivan’s orchestra was 2/1/2/1/2/2/2 and strings, or more specifically: 2 flutes (one doubling piccolo), 1 oboe, 2 clarinets, 1 bassoon, 2 French horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, percussion and strings (usually at least 3 first violins, 3 second violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos and one bass viol. That’s 24 and that’s the size of the D’Oyly Carte’s touring orchestra. At the Savoy Theatre, they added more strings for up to 31 players.

The Roundabout’s orchestra is 1 violin, 1 viola, 1 cello, 1 bass,1 guitar/banjo, 2 trumpets, 1 trombone, 1 French Horn, Reed 1 (clarinet, flute, piccolo, saxophone) Reed 2 (Clarinet, flute, oboe, piccolo) 2 keyboards and percussion. That’s 14, but with quite a different profile.

Holmes and his orchestrators has transformed nearly all of Sullivan’s score into a loud, thumping pop-rock up tempo score. While several numbers have blues inflections and one a gospel inflection, the overall effect is much the same throughout. Loud. Most of Sullivan’s witty orchestrations are completely missing.

Holmes also reworked a great deal of the dialog from Gilbert’s witty subtleties to common vernacular. Gilbert took a great deal of care in constructing his dialog, where every word counted. Here is a description of Gilbert rehearsing Pirates in Philadelphia in 1881.

One of the strongest features of this production are the sets. The first act set features two New Orleans style two- story houses with balconies (Ruth enters on one of them) and the houses pull back when the Pirate King arrives on an enormous pirate ship. Beautifully executed.

The show begins with Frederic (Nicholas Barash) singing “Good morrow, good mother” from Iolanthe switching it to “good brothers” and it is in this song we learn of his forthcoming 21st birthday when he will be out of his indentures to the pirates. This is normally given to Samuel, but that character has been cut. This segues to part of “Pour oh pour” that usually opens the show.

Soon after that Ruth (Jinx Monsoon) enters on one of the balconies (to great applause) and eventually comes down to sing an up-tempo version of “When Frederic was a little lad” that explains why she apprenticed him to a pirate instead of a pilot.

Then and only then does the Pirate King (Ramin Karimloo) appear on the pirate ship to make his grand athletic entrance sliding down a rope from the ship, to sing “I am a pirate king.” Somewhere in the rewritten and barely audible dialog that follows, they establish that Frederic will leave the pirates when his birthday arrives at midnight and that the pirates usually let their prey go, because they all claim to be orphans.

Just as the pirates exit, the women’s chorus (all the Major General’s daughters) arrive wearing Victorian puffy dresses from the back, but open in the front to show that they are all wearing blue pedal pushers and high heeled leather boots. The lovely costumes are by Linda Cho, but I am not sure what she was up to here.

“Climbing over rocky mountain” has been revised to “We’re sashayin’ though the old French Quarter” and sung in the same pop-rock style.

Following “Is there not one maiden breast” by Frederic, Mabel (Samantha Williams) finally appears, and rather than a high (coloratura) soprano, she’s a belt mezzo. This puts her at a disadvantage in “Poor Wandering One,” because she obviously can’t sing all those high flourishes Sullivan wrote. It also makes later duets harder because her voice is much the same in register as Frederic’s.
“How beautifully blue the sky” was sadly cut. The pirates appear because they want to “marry” the Major General’s daughters.

Finally, the Major General (David Hyde Pierce) appears, the man with the best diction onstage and the singer whose songs have been least tampered with. His “I am the very model…” is excellent.

The rest of the act carries on much as expected, but where the intermission should have occurred, they add a new song “The ‘Sail the Ocean’ Blues,” based on “We sail the ocean blue” from Pinafore. This ends with the entire cast playing rhythms on washboards, each fitted with a store clerk call bell. Sorry, that is just silly.

The second act opens with the Major General singing the Nightmare Song from Iolanthe, here with the men’s chorus dressed in white carrying out all the actions he dreams. There are musical interludes between the “verses” to get them and their props on and off stage. I could have done without that.

Ruth has been given an extra song: ”Alone and yet alive” from The Mikado. Here I think the intro is beyond Ms. Monsoon, but the main verse has been turned into a blues number that works quite well for her.

We learn that since Frederic was born in leap year, he is not 21 but 5 1/4 . Since the show is set in 1880, that can’t possibly be true. That year was a leap year, so he would be 5 or 6, but not 5 ¼.

“A policeman’s lot” was sung just by the Sergeant of Police (Preston Truman Boyd) and the women’s chorus. They turned this one into a gospel number and this was really delightful.

“With cat-like tread” is very well performed and traditional, but without the missing Samuel solos. “Hail Poetry” becomes “Hail Liberty” but is also well-sung. “Sighing softly to the river” was cut, and the ending was changed. The pirates are not noblemen gone wrong, but are forgiven because “We are all from someplace else,” a version of “He is an Englishman,” performed here with the chorus each waving two blue and white semaphore flags. I felt like an attack of blue and white bats were in the offing.

So, overall, I think they have subtracted a lot more than they added, and the loud thumping rock numbers are rather repetitive. I don’t see any reason to have created this show. If you come to it not knowing Pirates you might enjoy some if it, but the music is pretty much the same throughout and Gilbert’s wit and Sullivan’s artistry are sorely missed.

“Pirates! the Penzance Musical” runs at the Todd Haimes theater through July 27.

Lady Bird’s Buttermilk Pie

I recently received Lady Bird Johnson’s recipe for Buttermilk Pie from History by Mail and had to try it out. This pie was made regularly by their private chef Zephyr Wright in the White House, but the recipe is from Lady Bird’s family.

If you look around the internet for buttermilk pie recipes, you will find quite a number of them, but none of them are at all like Mrs. Johnson’s. The single major difference is that her recipe has you separate the eggs and beat the whites into stiff peaks, and then fold that into the batter. This gives a much lighter pie. I also note that most of these modern recipes incorporate vanilla and/or lemon juice and butter to give the pie a different flavor, while the original Lady Bird recipe has none of them: the flavor is a mild custard with the tang of buttermilk.

This simple recipe comes together in about 5 minutes (plus the piecrust) and bakes for 35 more. Our simple piecrust recipe is here.

• 1 unbaked 9-inch pie shell
• 2 eggs separated
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup flour
• 2 cups buttermilk
• ¼ tsp salt
• Cinnamon for topping

1. Preheat the oven to 350˚ F.
2. Beat egg whites until very stiff.
3. In a separate bowl, beat the egg yolks and add the sugar and mix.
4. Stir flour into part of the buttermilk and mix until free of lumps
5. Add the flour mixture to the eggs and sugar, and add the remainder of the buttermilk.

6. Fold in the egg whites. This works best if you mix in part of the egg whites and then fold in the rest using a rubber spatula.
7. Pour into the pie shell and sprinkle with cinnamon.
8. Bake for 35 minutes.
9. Let the pie cool and refrigerate it. Serve cold, with whipped cream.

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.

Cacio e pepe—cheese and pepper pasta

The classic Italian dish cacio e pepe is just grated cheese on hot pasta served with pepper. The cheese is usually Pecorino Romano (sometimes, misnamed “Romano”) and the pasta can be tonnarelli or spaghetti. Tonnarelli differs only in that it has a square cross section rather than round. And while Pecorino is the preferred cheese, some chefs add up to 30% Parmesan to the Pecorino.

The story behind this seemingly simple dish is that shepherds could carry the dry pecorino (aged sheep’s milk cheese), pasta and pepper and make themselves a hearty meal. Maybe. But despite the fact that this dish has only four ingredients (including water), it is hard to get right in the home kitchen.

In restaurant kitchens, they keep a pot of pasta water boiling, and cook all their pasta in it. Over time, this becomes quite a starchy solution that chefs often use to enhance the mouth feel of sauces. In this dish, that starch content is critical to its success.

When you stir together the pasta, cheese and pasta water, you want the result to be pasta with a creamy sauce. But this depends on there being enough starch in the mixture. If there is too little starch, the cheese is likely to form lumps rather than melting into the sauce.

And, if the temperature is too high, the cheese can go into a gooey “mozzarella phase” instead of dissolving into the sauce.

We read through six or seven different recipes that weren’t a lot different and made it seem easier than it is. Interestingly enough, Lidia Bastianich suggested crushing whole peppercorns under a heavy flat pan rather then grinding the peppercorns, to give big pieces of pepper in the sauce. This is a matter of taste and how much pepper you really want. Babish solved the sauce problem by pouring the hot pasta water over the cheese in a blender. He also adds a bit of butter to the pan where you put the drained spaghetti and after tossing the spaghetti in the butter, he just pours the blended sauce over that pasta. This isn’t quite the same as melting the cheese on the pasta, but it is foolproof.

Research on the phases of cheese

However, the ultimate research on cacio e pepe (Phase behavior of cacio e pepe) was posted on ArXiv by eight physicists who study phases of such liquids. G. Bartolucci, D. M. Busiello, M. Ciarchi, A. Corticelli, I. Di Terlizzi, F. Olmeda, D. Revignas, and V. M. Schimmenti, working at the University of Barcellona, Max Planck Institute in Dresden, University of Padova and the Institute of Science and Technology, Klosterneuberg, Austria participated in studying the phases of the cheese and starch solution. Despite their labs being spread all through Europe, they emphasized that they were all originally Italian, and thus were not messing with someone else’s national dish.

In a nutshell, they determined that if there is not enough starch in the pasta water, the cheese is likely to clump rather than dissolving. They also noted that you should let the pasta cool for about a minute before mixing with the cheese to avoid the dreaded “mozzarella phase.”
So, rather than just using starchy pasta water, they propose making up a warm starch solution to mix with the cheese. We tried this and it works exactly as they described. They recommend potato or cornstarch.

• 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)
• 4 g cornstarch in 40 g water
• Freshly ground pepper

Mix the cornstarch and water and heat it gently until the mixture becomes nearly clear. The mixture will become quite thick and gelatin-like. (This is known as “starch gelation.”)
Grate the pecorino until you have a bit more than 160 g. Save the excess for sprinkling on top. You can use a cheese grater or a food processor.

Mix the starch gel with the grated cheese in a bowl, adding room temperature water as needed to make it moist enough to make a smooth mixture. Add ground pepper to the mixture.
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.
Scoop out around half a cup of pasta water about a minute before the pasta is done.
Lift the pasta out of the cooking water into a serving bowl.

Let the pasta cool about one minute and then begin to mix in the cheese mixture, adding the slightly cooled pasta water as needed. You want to add enough water so that the cheese mixture mostly dissolves in the water.
Add more ground pepper.
Divide the pasta into two serving bowls and top with ground cheese (here you could add Parmesan if you wanted) and more pepper. Serve immediately.

If you have some left over, you can refrigerate it and reheat it in a microwave without the sauce coming apart, as the starch stabilizes it.

Nathan Myrhvold, the author of Modernist Cuisine, has suggested that you might also be able to prevent the cheese from clumping by adding some sodium citrate, suggesting that this anticoagulant might be more more effective than the starch which could blunt the flavor of the the cheese.

Chewy peanut butter cookies

This recipe was the winner of a contest for the best peanut butter cookies. The main ingredient is “all-natural” peanut butter, which is chosen not for any imagined health benefit, but because it is more liquid than conventional peanut butters because the oils are not hydrogenated. Thus, the batter comes together quite smoothly.

• 4 Tb unsalted butter at room temperature
• ¾ cup creamy all-natural peanut butter
• ¼ cup granulated sugar (plus more for rolling)
• 1 cup light brown sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1 large egg yolk
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 cup plus 2 Tb all-purpose flour
• ¾ tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp fine sea salt
• Maldon salt for sprinkling

Preheat the oven to 350˚F
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
In a stand mixer with a paddle attachment, cream together the butter, peanut butter, granulated sugar, and brown sugar until light and fluffy.
Beat in the whole egg and then the egg yolk and vanilla.
In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, soda and sea salt, and then add to the wet ingredients and mix until evenly combined.
Put a scoop of granulated sugar into a mixing bowl. Using a cookie scoop, roll the batter into 1-inch balls and then roll them in the sugar. Arrange a dozen of these balls on the baking sheet, spaced about 2 inches apart.
Bake until they have puffed up and are set on the edges but still somewhat soft in the middle, about 12 minutes.
Remove the cookies from the oven and sprinkle each with a pinch of Maldon salt. Then slide the whole parchment sheet and cookies over to a wire cooling rack and cook the remaining cookies on new parchment sheet.

Makes about 2 dozen cookies.