Last Minute Risotto

I got a phone call a few hours before class was to begin -- the freezer had stopped functioning sometime over Spring break, and was at about 100 degrees when discovered. Our large pot of extra-concentrated chicken stock (and the lovely fat that rose to the surface) was now a bacteria cesspool, having easily been in the danger zone for what could be a week. I suggested to my supervisor that he go purchase a few gallons of sodium-free chicken broth and a pint of either chicken or duck fat.

The fat was a no-go, so I decided to simply eliminate the kasha varnishkes recipe this time around. However, when I checked in the groceries about 30 minutes before class, there was no farro, a grain kinda central to the Farro & Sausage dish...not an easy ingredient to source at the last minute. On top of that, with 90+ degree unseasonable Spring weather, was not expecting a big student turnout. I suggested to my supervisor that we cancel, but he politely declined and suggested subtly it was up to me to pull something out of my butt....so....

Today is grains. We had the ingredients to do a simple pilaf using long grain rice, need at least one more recipe. Got all the other components of the farro & sausage.....sausage, fennel, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, stock....in the cupboard, found a couple of boxes of arborio rice: risotto! The risotto method is something that is very hands-on, and can repurpose the main farro ingredients....but I have no written recipe for the students to follow. I guess they're going to have to be real cooks, and wing it by vibe, under my tutelage....

Only three students presented themselves, making it much more possible to teach a hands-on method without a recipe. A brief lecture about what a grain is (the combination dried fruit/seed of a cereal grass) and what they are (wheat, corn, oat, rice etc), the parts of the grain (inedible husk on the outside, the bran that makes brown rice brown and has vitamins and fiber, then the starchy endosperm, then the core germ, where the rest of the vitamins and the fat is. An explanation of long grain versus short grain (light fluffy separate grains vs starch sticky grains) got us into the hands on of making a simple rice pilaf.

We made the rice pilaf with long grain Thai jasmine rice, sauteing onion in butter, sauteing the rice, covering with stock in equal amounts, adding a few herbs, then baking covered for 20 minutes. I thought it came out perfect - firm with nice chew, fragrant and flavorful, but all the students agreed that it was too tough and tasted too mild. Oh well.

To work without a recipe, I made the three students mise everything and have everything in front of them before starting -- they could not start, as they had no instructions in front of them to jump ahead. Chopped onion, chopped fennel, hot Italian sausage crumbled and browned, pound of Parmesan grated, 1 cup of arborio rice measured, sautiors and wooden spoons and stock at the ready.

We set up four pans, and basically had the three students do as I did. Olive oil in the hot pan, enough to just sloosh around to get the bottom wet. When it shimmered, throw in a fist of onion and a fist of fennel. Move around until translucent and smelly, a little salt to get it moving. Toss in one cup of white wine from a measuring cup, as pouring directly from the bottle is a fire hazard. Start stirring constantly as you toss in cup of rice, blast heat. When the wine has been evaporated/absorbed by the rice, add about a cup of stock and stir until rice is almost dry. Repeat adding stock by the cup and stirring until the grains of rice are tender enough, and a starchy sauce has formed from starch coming out of the rice and the stock. This took about 25 minutes. When we got it where we wanted, turned off heat, threw in about 1/4 pound of grated parm and about 4 oz of marscapone, and 1/2 pound of the browned sausage. Stir to completely combine, taste and season with salt and pepper. Serve immediately.

No real measurements, just looking at how your food behaves and cooking until done. One student was impressed by how it looked like rice pudding and added a bit of powdered sugar to hers, another student burned her onions and fennel a little, and her risotto had a reddish-brown tinge. The cooked wine sent a fennel-onion perfume through out the building and we had a bunch of staff stop by to compliment the students on something smelling wonderful.

Surprisingly, all three students were gaga over the risotto, eating large portions and asking, "Can you order this in a restaurant?" among other things.

Next week, making pizza for about 50 staff and parents....

Student's Choice/End of Semester

To close out the semester, the students suggested what they wanted to make. One said pork dumplings, another said fried calamari, the third suggested brownies, to which I steered to the next step up in elegance: flourless chocolate cake. One three students suggesting 2 appetizers and a dessert does not a meal make, so I rounded it out with a dish I wish I had hit up on grains day: risotto.

First up was making the cake. Flourless chocolate cake was trendy a few years ago, but now that everyone has taken a crack at it, people have recognized it for what it is: an extra dense brownie that doesn't have much chew.

FLOURLESS CHOCOLATE CAKE

Yield: 16 small serving

Semisweet chocolate 4 oz
Butter ½ cup
White sugar ¾ cup
Cocoa powder ½ cup
Eggs, beaten 3 each
Vanilla bean, scrapings 1 each

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Grease an 8” round springform pan, dust with cocoa powder.
2. Melt chocolate and butter in a double boiler. Remove from heat, stir in sugar, cocoa powder and vanilla.
3. Stir in eggs. Pour into prepared pan.
4. Bake in preheated oven for 30 minutes. Let cool for 10 minutes, turn out onto a wire rack and cool completely.

This is a VERY chocolaty and rich dessert, requiring something to compliment and mute it's strength. Vanilla ice cream (which I made at home and brought in -- not enough time and not enough equipment to make it at school) is a nice, straightforward companion, but a fruit sauce is also pretty classic.

RASPBERRY SAUCE

Yield: 2 cups

Raspberries 1 pint
White sugar ¼ cup
Orange juice 2 tbsp
Cornstarch 2 tbsp
Cold water 1 cup

1. Combine raspberries, sugar and orange juice in a saucepan. In a separate bowl, whisk cornstarch into cold water until smooth. Combine cornstarch mixture into the sauce pan, BTB RTS
2. Simmer for 5 minutes or so until the desired consistency, constantly stirring. Note: sauce will thicken further as it cools.
3. Puree in blender. Pour through fine metal sieve. Serve warm or chilled.


Fried calamari is as simple as simple can be. I didn't really do any deep frying in class because it doesn't take much skill or talent to do it -- monkeys run the deep fryers at fast food restaurants. But if we were going to do it, I'm glad it was squid -- I got a student to take whole squid and take them apart. And unlike somethings, calamari only needs a minute in the fryer. Our first few batches came out perfect, but the last was a flop -- the temp of the oil dropped, and instead of coming out light and crisp, the last calamari came out heavy, greasy, overcooked and nasty. Mistakes are a learning opportunity.

FRIED CALAMARI

Yield: 16 small appetizer portions

Peanut oil 1 gallon
Squid, tubes & tentacles 2 lbs
AP flour 1 cup
Plain cornmeal 1 cup
Salt to taste
Ground black pepper to taste

1. Place oil in appropriate vessel. Bring to 375˚, measuring with fry thermometer.
2. Combine flour and cornmeal in a mixing bowl.
3. When ready to fry, in small handfuls, dredge the squid in the flour and cornmeal mixture and shake off the excess. In batches, gently lower the squid into the hot oil. Cook for 1 minute. The squid will not be browned, but lightly golden in color. Remove the squid and transfer to a cooling rack turned upside down set over a newspaper-lined sheet pan. Season with salt and pepper, as desired. Repeat until all of the squid is cooked. Make sure to check the temperature of the oil before each batch to ensure it is 375 degrees F. Serve immediately.

Dumplings at their core are meatballs wrapped in dough. In this case, a Chinese-style pork dumpling involves pureeing the pork to make a mouse, spiked with a variety of Asian flavors like ginger, scallion, garlic, sesame, soy sauce and rice wine. We didn't have time to make the dough, but the premade goza wrappers were pretty good.

The dipping sauce was made on the fly, mixing ingredients from the recipe (soy sauce, sesame oil) and spiking it with a bit of vinegar.

PORK SHAO MAI

Yield: 60 dumplings

Pork, ground 2 lbs
Gingerroot, minced 3 tbsp
Scallions, mostly green, minced 4 each
Rice wine 1 tbsp + 1 tsp
Soy sauce 1 tbsp + 1 tsp
Sesame oil 1 tbsp + 1 tsp
Egg white 4 each
Cornstarch 3 tbsp
Fresh water chestnuts, fine dice 2 oz
Thin round dumpling skins 60 each

1. Hand mix pork, ginger, scallion, rice wine, soy sauce, sesame oil, egg white and cornstarch. In batches, place mix in a food processor. Pulse to mix further, then puree.
2. Once the entire batch in pureed, fold in the water chestnuts. Chill until ready to use.
3. Place approximately 2 tsp of the filling in the center of a wrapper. Bring sides up and push/pleat sides together so that the dumpling has an “Empire waist” and some of the filling pushes out the top. Place the shao mai on a cookie sheet and cover with a damp cotton towel until you are ready to steam them.
4. Place enough water into a wok or pan so that it comes up to inch below the steamer basket. BTB. Open the steamer and arrange the dumplings in the steamer basket with space between them. Steam until meat is cooked through, about 5 to 8 minutes. Serve immediately with dipping sauce.

Risotto is a very interactive method. Once you have sauteed the aromatics and the rice andcooked off the wine, it's all about stirring while adding small portions of the liquid, to bring out the starch in the rice to make that thick sauce between the grains. Finished with lots of fatty things, it doesn't take a lot of add ons (in this case asparagus) to make a loud flavor.

CHICKEN ASPARAGUS RISOTTO

Yield: 14 servings

XV OO ½ cup
Onion, medium, dice 2 each
Garlic, minced 1 tbsp
Asparagus, peeled, diced 2 bunch
Asparagus spear tips 2 bunch
Rice, Arborio 3 cups
White wine 1 cup
Chicken stock, hot 16 cups
Butter, cold 8 tbsp
Parmegano-Regiano, grated 1 cup
Mascarpone 17.5 oz
Parsley, minced 3 tbsp
Chicken breasts, large dice 6 each

1. Sautee cubed chicken until medium rare. Set aside. Deep fry asparagus spear tips for 1 minute in 375˚ oil, set aside.
2. Heat oil in a large rondeau, add onion and asparagus, sweat until translucent. Add rice and cook until toasted and opaque, 3-4 minutes.
3. Add wine and cook until alcohol smell dissipates.
4. Add 1-2 ladles of stock at a time until absorbed, constantly stirring. Keep adding ladle by ladle, absorbing fully each time, until all is gone.
5. Remove from heat. Add butter, cheeses and parsley. Stir 30 seconds. Season. Add cooked chicken. Garnish with more grated cheese, parsley and fried asparagus spears.

And that was that. My wife and child came to the school, a few extra staff joined us, and rather than do family-style, I did some plating with the students, using garnishes to decorate appropriate sized portions.

After eating and clean up, I thanked the students, and told them that they were better than the other 7 students who dropped out over the semeseter -- in their professional lives, just being consistent and showing up will be a large part of what proves them to be successful, more than the flakes and the fakers.

There was some talk of starting a new semester in March, perhaps twice a week -- we could get through a lot more recipes and methods, and drill much deeper into theory and directed experimentation. So until then, have a happy new year!

Grains and Rice (Sausage is a grain!)

Today's brief lecture was about rice, but Chef C's forte is not lecture, so no need to bitch about it here. Suffice to say, rice is the #1 staple crop that keeps mankind alive, and if we were studying how man eats and cooks and not from a very French angle, there would be a lot less meat and diary in our kitchen and a whole lot more rice.

Again, we divvied up the recipes. Speedy and Chef Jr took on the Farro & Sausage, 2nd Language Girl took on the Quinoa Salad, Round Head took on the Wheatberry Salad, and I assisted the last two by making the vinaigrettes for both then whipping up a dead simple rice pilaf. RH was unfocused and confused, not quite listening to me and attempting to duplicate others' agendas; I had to kind of snap at him a little, catch his eye, and repeat several things about his recipe, like, "RH, the wheatberries need to soak for an hour. Now." There is no point in doing mise THEN soaking for an hour -- of course something that needs to sit still for an hour can be set up first, but he just wasn't prepared with his recipes.

Pilaf is ridiculously simple. Sweat onion and garlic in fat in a sauce pan. Through in long grain rice to coat. Add a sachet (cheese cloth baggy) of aromatics and chicken stock, season, cover and simmer till dry. Despite scorching a little on the bottom and wasting some rice, it tasted light, bold and a much bigger cleaner taste than any pilaf mix my momma used to make me. Through on some chopped cilantro for a counter point, flavor-wise and visual. Yet another dish I would of taken huge pleasure in making for my mom.

I assisted CJ and Sp in the farro dish. Farro is a weird grain From Wikipedia:

Emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccon), also known as farro especially in Italy, is a low yielding, awned wheat. It was one of the first crops domesticated in the Near East. It was widely cultivated in the ancient world, but is now a relict crop in mountainous regions of Europe and Asia.

Kinda looked like puffed wheat when cooked, but firmer. I slit open a bunch of Italian sausages and mashed the loose meat up to brown and caramelize. The final dish, chicken-stock based, had red beans that went nicely with the sausage chunks and matched nicely with the chunky firmness of the grain.

Last part of class was risotto. According to Chef C, risotto is one of the benchmarks of how well you can judge a cook -- if a cook can't do good risotto, cook ain't no good. Risotto is labor intensive and calls for judgement and feel. In a restaurant, a simple risotto will be made 90% of the way, then cooled on large sheet pans. When ordered, a serving is plopped into a pan with hot stock, then finished with whatever flavoring and garnishes the final recipe calls for.

Risotto starts similar to pilaf, but used short grain rice, which has a higher starch load. Sweat the onion (cut smaller than rice grains) in fat, coat the rice. Then you add white wine and reduce to dry. Add small amount of stock while stirring constantly, until it is 2/3 dry, then add another small amount of stock. For 1 cup of rice, we used four cups of stock, took me about 20 minutes to incorporate. Once as the right tenderness, finish -- I used grated parmesan, marscapone cheese, parsley and salt. It tasted quite rocking, and Chef C agreed.

I chatted a bit about risotto with Chef C, about how he does it at home, what pan he uses, etc. He said for the most rocking risotto (and he's made it at restaurants all over NYC, from Blue Hill to Per Se!) the best flavoring method is to add a purée at the stage where all the stock is incorporated, then garnish. I just made asparagus risotto the other day, adapted from a Batali recipe for squash risotto, but there was no call for a purée. If I had puréed the blanched asparagus then mixed it in, abd then garnished with small little slices and finished with the deep-fried tips, MAN, it would of been SO much better. Chef C said eh, Batali is not so much a chef as much as a star. I had to agree, as I suspect Chef C just greatly improved on Batali's cook book recipe.

Tomorrow there is no school, as our classroom is being used by an afternoon class who is taking the whole day to prepare for their graduation dinner, a grand buffet. On Monday starts a few day of method review, where we will be mixing up grilling, braising, roasting, frying and poaching.

ADDENDA

Came back to school after hanging out with friends in Brooklyn for a 3 hour knife-skills seminar with a cute little old wizened chef instructor who I kind of wanted to put in my pocket and take home. Like many chefs, he started out trying to be all hard-ass and shouty, but once we got into it, he clearly loved teaching about how to handle a knife and more specifically, loved teaching. It was a pleasure to be in his presence for 3 hours and probably got the most out of this seminar than any other yet. Unfortunately, I think he ruined me for my fancy home knife set. I have a very pricey set of Globals that may have to go on E-bay (or be regifted!) when I get the set of categories he introduced me to.

AM SNACK: 5:15am, small handful of dark chocolate pistoles, hunger 2/5

Starting to adjust sleep schedule to wake up at 3am on Saturday. Really felt the need for a kick when I woke up.

BREAKFAST: 6:30am, good granola with good milk, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5

AM TASTINGS: 10:30-11am, bowl of simple rice pilaf, small bowl of marscapone risotto, bite of farro & sausage, bite of wheatberry salad and quinoa salad, 1.5 bowl, hunger 4/5

The rice pilaf was simple but between the sachet of aromatics and the chicken stock, was fabulously clean and simple and tasty.

PM SNACKS: 2:30-4pm, small bowl of farro & sausage, 5 whole wheat crackers with hummus and olives, black and white cookie, 1.5 bowls, hunger 4/5

Over at Corinna's house and a few of her friends, I brought over all my school products. We really enjoyed the farro & sausage, but how can you go wrong with lots of good stock and fresh Italian snausage?!

PM SNACK: 8pm, cheese and bread, peanuts, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5
At the knife workshop

DINNER: 9:30pm, 1 slice streetza, .75 bowl, hunger 4/5
I knew I'd be in danger of binging if I didn't eat anything. Stopped by the place on the corner of A and St. Marks, remembered the last time I ate pizza there was the night my mother died. A bit of a flashback. What I wrote a few years ago:

When she died I had to take her wheelchair home, so I left my bicycle locked up in front of the hospital. After midnight, with B sleeping, I got up and wandered out of the house in sweatpants, slippers, a sweater and keys - probably the first time I've neglected wallet and cellphone. I walked down Grand Street, abandoned and quiet. In an empty lot, a little stray kitten poked it's head out. I stopped, kneeled, and said to it, "If you come out and need me, I will name you Edna and take you home with me." It scurried away, and I scurried away, too. Walking up Avenue A, people were exiting bars, loudly enjoying their drink and each other.

Across from Tompkins Square, between 7th and 8th streets, a couch put out for the trash was on fire, belching oily smoke. I popped in to the pizza shop on the corner of St. Marks, then crossed to the park to watch the impromptu bonfire with my slice. A minute later, a city-services car pulls up, a man gets out and pops open the trunk. He takes out a small fire-extinguisher, and in seconds the fire disappears in a 'pffffft!' of puffy white mist. I kept walking. Close to 12th street, fire engines tear down A sirens-blazing. On 14th, it's abandoned again, until I get close to the hospital. Hospital staff coming and going, eating in the 24-hour restaurants. My bike is there. I consider riding around for a while, but the sweat pants and slippers aren't conducive, and the hot pizza starts to recede against the cold.

EVENING SNACK: 10pm, 3 spoonfuls of peanut butter, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5