A Few Breakaway Wines

Our little wine project out in Bolinas has exceeded our wildest expectations. We started out three years ago with a plot of land and a single (used) barrel of Dry Creek merlot buried under some pine trees. We’d occasionally thief some out, taste it, have a fun day in Bolinas, and wait till the gods told us to bottle it, which we did, last year. The experiment went so well and we enjoyed it so much that, the next year, we upped it to five barrels — three of syrah and two of sauvignon blanc. Each barrel contains 60 gallons, or roughly 300 bottles (25 cases) of wine.  But don’t get too worried about my liver: I have two partners!

We bottled most of the syrah and all of the sauv blanc, and I must say: they’re really delicious.  Even more important, it’s been an absolute blast. We bought the crushed grape juice from trusted growers and just let it do its thing in the cool and groovy climate of Bobo.

There’s something wildly satisfying about popping open a bottle with our regular meals, yet one more piece of the overall food picture in place, alongside herbs and flowers from the yard,  meat from the whole animals we buy from (again) trusted farmers/ranchers, veggies and fruits from, yet again, farmers we like. It’s gratifying beyond description to be fortunate enough to eat and drink in this manner.

If anyone out there is considering making a little wine on a very small scale . . . do it!

Great Bread in Five Minutes? Not Quite, But Close

I often find that, after coming home from a  long trip, I want to start making a few really basic things: stock and a subsequent big batch of soup, a fresh batch of salts and toasted spices, and . . . bread. Somehow it’s important to fill the house with aromas to really let me know that I’m back.

I’ve been rather smitten with a somewhat recent cookbook purchase called Artisan Breads in Five Minutes a Day, by Hertzberg and Francois. The title refers not to the total time required to make a loaf of bread, of course; it refers to the really wonderful “nudge” of making a big batch homemade dough, refrigerating it, and slicing off a pound here and there to shape and bake whenever the fancy strikes. Once the initial labor of making the dough, letting it rise, punching it down, etc. is accomplished, great fresh bread is a short step away. It works. And the main reason it works is that pre-mixed, pre-risen, high-moisture dough keeps in the fridge for a long time. As a bonus, it’s no-knead, the yeast doesn’t need to be proofed, and you don’t need a starter or sponge. It’s about as low-fuss as it’s possible to be, yet it yields fantastic results. My kind of project!

I don’t always have bread dough in the fridge, of course; I still buy plenty of La Brea whole grain, Tartine country loaf, Brickmaiden wheat, and anything from Della Fatoria. But if I’m in the kitchen with a few extra moments and a small surplus of energy,  I make an effort to whip up a quick five-pound batch of dough. It’s really not hard at all.

My favorite bread so far in the book is the broa, or Portuguese corn bread. It has a supercrunchy exterior, yet the interior is chewy and really corny. It makes brilliant toast.

It’s rare that I bother to write out exact instructions for a dish, but since bread is notoriously hard to wing, here it is, with a few minor adjustments that have improved it for me. I don’t think Hertzberg and Francois will mind. Give it a try.

~~~

Broa (Portuguese Corn Bread)

Makes two two-pound loaves, or four one-pound loaves. The recipe is easily doubled.

• 3 cups lukewarm water

• 1.5 tablespoons granulated yeast (1.5 packets; I buy mine in bulk from the local hippie store, and just keep it in a jar in the fridge)

• 1.5 tablespoons kosher salt

• 1.5 cups stoneground cornmeal (I use fancy-ish polenta, medium grind, but regular old cornmeal probably works fine)

• 5 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (I use King Arthur, purchased at Trader Joe’s)

• Cornmeal for pizza peel and dusting the top

~~~

1. Mixing and storing the dough: Mix the yeast and salt with the water in a 5-quart bowl, or a lidded (not airtight) food container

2. Mix in the remaining dry ingredients without kneading, using a spoon, a 14-cup capacity food processor with dough attachment, or a heavy-duty stand mixer with dough hook. If you’re not using a  machine, yo may need to use wet hands to incorporate the last bit of flour (I just use a sturdy wooden spoon).

3. Cover (not airtight), and allow to rest at room temperature until the dough rises and collapses, approximately 2 hours.

4. The dough can be used immediately after  the initial rise, though it is easier to handle when cold. Refrigerate in a lidded (not airtight)  container and use over the next 10 days.

5. On baking day, dust the surface of the refrigerated dough with flour and divide the dough into two pieces, one of which goes back in the fridge for later. Dust the piece with more flour and quickly shape it into a ball by stretching the surface of a the dough around to the bottom on al four sides, rotating the ball  a quarter-turn as you go. Allow to rest and rise on a cornmeal-covered pizza peel for 40 minutes.

6. Twenty minutes before baking time, preheat a baking stone to 450F, with the stone placed on the middle rack. Place an empty broiler tray on any other shelf that won’t interfere with the rising bread.

7. Just before baking, sprinkle the loaf liberally with cornmeal and slash a cross, “scallop,” or tic-tac-toe pattern into the top, using a serrated bread knife. Leave the cornmeal in place for baking; tap some of it off before eating.

8. Slide the loaf directly onto the hot stone. Pour 1 cup hot tap water ito the broiler tray, and quickly close the oven door. Bake for about 30 minutes, until deeply browned and firm. Smaller or larger loaves will require adjustments in baking time. Allow to cool a bit before slicing.

Jumpstarting Your Ruts

We’re saying our goodbyes to Amsterdam, surely among the most livable places I’ve ever been. There’s nothing like a month in a new place to “reset” the brain’s habitual patterns, to see the world in a totally new way.

I had quite a bit of free time to read in Amsterdam, which is my definition of pure luxury. Two books, both on the wild and woolly frontiers of contemporary neuroscience, really stood out: Rapt, by Winifred Gallagher, and The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge. There is so much interesting news coming out of neuroscience that it makes one’s head spin (or, actually, remap!), but one common finding in both books is the brain’s ability disrupt old patterns by creating new ones, through sheer repetition. This is something that everyone knows intuitively: do something enough times, and it becomes second nature.

Think of your brain as a snowy hill, to use the metaphor of Doidge. There are lots of ways to go down the hill, but the more you follow the same path, the deeper those tracks become, and the stronger the tendency to take the same route every time. Deep ruts make it hard to go any other way after a while. If the rut is a good habit (brushing and flossing before bed, for example, or exercising regularly), that’s good — you reinforce your good habit every day. But if the rut is bad — and you can name your own bad habits here — or it’s something you want to change, it can take a monumental effort to get out of that rut. The answer, says Gallagher and Doidge, is to not try to break old unwanted habits, but simply to form new ones, which will supercede the old ones through sheer use. Plastic brains can consciously form new habits/tracks, and THEY will become dominant over time.  It’s a self-enforcing mechanism.

As I was reading I couldn’t help but think about cooking, and ruts. Forming good habits in the kitchen (keeping knives sharp, keeping your work area uncluttered and very clean, using equipment you really like, regular shopping at good markets/having good ingredients around, etc.) makes you want to cook. They are conscious nudges, habits that just make it easier. Cooking, once it becomes enjoyable and stress-free, automatically replaces bad habits like eating heavily processed foods (often because you’re too ravenous to do anything else), outsourcing your palate to industrial food concerns, eating on the run, in the car, grabbing whatever purely as fuel to brute one’s way through the chaotic and perhaps neurotic day.

DECIDING to eat better, to cook better, is, of course, the necessary beginning, but it’s the conscious use of attention to change your daily habits that counts most. It might start with deciding to have something tasty and healthy for breakfast, even if it means getting up a few minutes earlier and retraining yourself to feel hunger in the morning (if, for example, you never eat breakfast). Or it might mean prepping  something simple the night before to have for lunch the next day, something wholesome and good. Dinners, too, can be very simple affairs, starting with some good salads and some new good ways to cook vegetables.

It took me a long time for me to figure this out, but once I did, it just kept reinforcing itself. The secret to cooking well is to do it often.  And to tweak it to your own particular taste, not that of cookbook authors, tv chefs, or anyone else!

If anyone has good “nudges” that make you want to cook more, please speak up!

~~~

(The photo is a baba ganoush (cooked and then pureed eggplant, with spices) made for us by my friend (and very talented cook) Basile at his lovely home in Amsterdam. It had a sublimely creamy texture, with plenty of smoke from the garnish of smoked paprika. )

The Green Market, Dutch Style

 The Noordermarkt in the Jordaan is essentially the Dutch version of San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza FM, with bicyles. People flock to the market, conveniently located just a leisurely five-minute stroll from our flat, from all over Amsterdam, and indeed from outlying cities and town as well. It’s a real social scene, so much so that a book (in Dutch) was just published about it. 

Highlights are the cheeses, grains, organic meats (lots of unusual cuts, including a super-pounded schnitzel; I started off cooking it the standard way, but somehow couldn’t avoid breaking away by giving it a cumin/couscous crust, and deglazing the pan with pomegranate molasses, purchased from the local friendly Turkish market), freshly made crepes (wow), and breads. Dutch bread is really quite insipid (voluminous, airy breads seem to be the standard), but these breads were exceptional, so we’ve been stocking up every Saturday.

We inevitably had a coffee and a slice of appeltaart at nearby Cafe Winkel; everyone seems to conclude it is possibly the best in the country, and I’m inclined to agree. It was our very first food in Amsterdam, thanks to the lovely Tatjana, who not only picked us up from the aiport, but who brought us there as soon as we landed at the flat.

Alas, we’ll miss it this Saturday, since we’ll be camping in Kroller-Muller (with umlauts over the o and u) and cycling around the national park there.  More on that soon, I hope!

Amsterdam Is Embedded in My Neurons

What could I possibly add to the world’s paeans to the beauty and wonders of Amsterdam? The city’s allure is almost violent; it grips you immediately and doesn’t let go. It seems to force the recollection of some deep place within my brain and body, almost on a molecular level, of some long-forgotten realities of long ago. It’s easy to imagine what life must have been like centuries ago because the Dutch prefer to keep all of that alive through the preservation of their architecture and streets, through life on the canals, and through their emphasis on the good life of time spent in cafes, lots of vacation, and in making every space as cosy and inviting as possible.

Our building is a wonder, a 1650 beauty with a sunny and inviting courtyard, where everyone seems to hang out with their books, computers, newspapers, snacks, and drinks. We’re not going to want to leave! My beverage of choice is a cold Westmalle Trappist double ale, without a doubt my favorite beer on earth. They’re cheap and dangerously available at the local market.

We’ve had one terrific meal (at a place called Divan, a Turkish place in the Jordaan) and a host of eh ones, though the organic bounty at the Saturday farmers’ market (more on this, plus some photos, in the next post, after Saturday) is everything a bay arean could hope for. I’ve been cooking regularly but focusing on things that don’t require lots of knifework; it’s amazing how attached I’ve become to comfortable, sharp knives!

Some sad chicken news, alas: all four became sashimi for a predator, most likely a fox, shortly after we left for Holland. Something dug a little tunnel and came up from underneath. We’re sad about it. All those gorgeous eggs will have to wait.

The Coop!

A whopping two days before leaving for Amsterdam, we finished the coop! “We” meaning 80 percent Delia, 20 percent Eric, with huge assists from Dave and Peter.

The chix seem really happy. I’m loving just chucking cooking scraps and watching them go nuts.

And the view from above:

Any other urban chicken farmers out there? I can’t wait for the eggs, which should start coming, to the tune of 4 or 5 per chicken per week (we have four chickens), sometime in July.

More updates from Europe, so stay tuned!

Let’s Kill the Recipe: Baked Eggs, Breakaway Style

When I started writing this blog, I really didn’t want it to be about recipes. There are twenty jillion recipes on the net for every conceivable dish. What I really wanted to convey, instead, were ideas and techniques, so that the reader need  not fuss about quantities and ingredient lists. It’s much more valuable to think about an idea, and then, somehow — and this is the tricky part for many, but I prefer to think that everyone reading this is perfectly capable of pulling it off — to make those ideas and techniques your own. It’s much easier to remember notions as opposed to data.

With that in mind, consider the baked egg. The idea is to use a small vessel — preferably a small cast iron pot like that shown above, but you could use a ramekin or anything else that’s roughly four to six ounces in capacity — to bake a small quantity of chopped vegetables topped with a few eggs. I’ll often root around the fridge for some kind of liquid to “bind” the veggies together, typically a dollop of Greek yogurt plus some stone-ground mustard, or maybe a drizzle of leftover salad dressing, soft tofu, or, if nothing else, a drizzle of olive oil and vinegar.

Cheese may or may not be involved. Same with meat.

You then stick it in a preheated oven (375 F) for 15 or 20 minutes (check it often after 15), until the yolks are barely set.

In today’s version, it was shallots, carrots, and kale, all diced finely, that went into the bottom of the pots. I had an extra egg white sitting around, so that got whisked with some mustard, pulverized shiitake powder (for umami) and mango chutney, which then got poured/spooned over the veggies. A few tablespoons of chopped ham (from our incredible Berkshire we got a few weeks ago) were arranged along the sides of the pots, forming a nice little chute to plop in three beautiful eggs (courtesy of Lucelle). A few shavings of Dubliner cheddar on top, along with freshly ground peppercorns and a pinch of matcha salt finished it off.

Three espressos later, I was ready to take on the world!

Give it a try — let’s see what kind of wild combinations we can come up with.

Demystifying Knives — You Only Need Two!

The other day I stressed the importance of developing really good knife skills. Now, by “really good” I don’t mean training for a career in food carving; I merely mean getting supercomfortable with the knives you have and use on a regular basis so that you can get meals on the table with just minutes of prep time.

For too many years, I kind of made do with crappy knives. I guess I believed that great cooking was within reach even if all you had was a butterknife. I still think that’s true for certain situations — you find yourself in a borrowed cabin, say, and you’re determined to make a good dinner — but, ever since I’ve used good knives, and kept them sharp, I’m sold on the pure beauty and joy that they can bring to everyday life.

Lots of  cooks have knife sets. Many of you know that I’m not much of a believer in sets of anything, and this most definitely includes knives. Ask a set owner how many of the several dozen knives are used regularly, and the inevitable answer seems to be “two.” I agree with them. I have a few more, mainly because I can’t bear to throw them out, but 95 percent of my prep involves just two knives.  Professional chefs obviously need more than two, but I’m guessing that an overwhelmingly large percentage of us home cooks can cook just about everything we’ve ever wanted to with just two.

Both of the knives shown above are Japanese, but it really doesn’t matter where they’re from. You should have a large (I like six inches) chef’s knife/santoku, and a small paring knife. That’s it. But both should be really good quality. You can probably expect to spend at least $100 on the big one, and $50 on the small one. But they’re the last knives you’ll ever need.

On Sharpening

So how to keep them really sharp?

Lots of people take their knives to a professional to be sharpened; plenty of farmers’ markets these days even have mobile sharpening dudes. I really can’t recommend that route, for the sole reason that the powerful grinders they use really take off a LOT of metal. Go to them often enough and you wind up with knives that look as if they’ve had 30 percent haircuts! Besides, who wants to pack up the knives, schlep them someplace, and pay for this destruction?

I think I’ve tried every method of knife sharpening, including purchasing ceramic knives that allegedly don’t need sharpening at all. In fact, they do, and Kyocera’s solution — to box them up every once in a while and send them to Kyocera for professional sharpening — borders on the absurd; they’re great while they’re sharp though.

The best solution I’ve found is a diamond-surfaced stone, shown above. It has two sides of diamond coating: one rough and one finer. Superdull knives need the rough side, but reasonably not-dull knives work well with the finer side. Three to four strokes on each side of the knife gets them razor sharp.

You’re not quite done yet though — now just glide it up and down a sharpening steel (which would more accurately be called a honing steel, since that’s what we’re doing here) to remove the tiny burrs created by the diamond, and you will have scary-sharp knives.

On Grip

Most cooks grasp the handle of a knife, but my friend Charles Haynes showed me a method that we both believe is superior, and that offers far greater control. Move your entire hand about an inch UP the handle, toward the blade, and grasp the handle where it meets the blade, with your thumb and forefinger, and gently squeeze it. Use your other three fingers to grip the handle, but keep relaxed about it. It’s a lot like “choking up” on a baseball bat. It may sound strange, and perhaps feel awkward at first, but I urge you to try it. You’ll soon see that it becomes like an extension of your hand; it will give you confidence and remove the fear of hurting yourself. Knife slips become far less common because control is radically increased.

It’s also important to use your knives tactilely, not visually. If you rely on the fingers of both hands to do the work, you can proceed literally blindly and not worry about hurting yourself, because when your fingers talk to one another, they don’t miscue.

This is how it’s done, assuming you’re right handed: hold whatever is you’re cutting–be it an onion, a carrot, piece of meat, or whatever—with your left hand by pointing your fingertips toward the middle of your palm. Imagine that you’re imitating a cat, claws drawn—that’s the shape you want for your left hand. Now, holding the knife as described above, tap the flat, broad side of the blade against the first knuckle below your fingertips, to let your left hand “know” where the knife is.  There is virtually no chance of slicing off a fingertip if you do this—it takes the fingertip out of the equation entirely. Feeling the broad side of the blade against your left knuckle, you can now slice and dice with impunity without even looking, since you’re now proceeding by touch (i.e., feeling the blade against your knuckle), not by sight. It never ceases to alarm and amaze my friends and cooking students who watch me do this, and who tend to rely on their eyes to not lop their fingertips off. This “claw” method, along with the “high grip” method of grasping the knife, can be learned in just a few minutes, and will provide a lifetime of vastly increased pleasure and safety in using really sharp knives.

The hands do a lot better when they operate on their own, without much bossing around from the eyes or, especially, the brain. Try focusing your awareness into your hands, and letting them figure out the best way to chop something.

On Slicing

Most people use a knife like a hammer—they bring the knife straight down on a piece of food, and rarely use a sawing motion. I find that the combination of sawing and hammering is the best; it lets the sharpness of the knife do most of the work. There is also a palpable pleasure in feeling, through the fingers of your right hand, the feeling of really sharp metal glide through something.

Your left hand is the guide. If you want really thin slices of something, you barely, almost imperceptibly, move it. If you want thicker slices, you’ll move it more.

One last, if obvious, point: don’t use your precious knives for ANYTHING other than preparing food. Don’t open packages, don’t use as a screwdriver, don’t cut Styrofoam, don’t cut thread.

Anyone have any tips I haven’t covered?

Administrivia — Please Resubscribe! (plus: we got chicks!)

Lordy, my tech wounds on this site have reached rather deep. Many of you have received emails from me, requesting that you resubscribe (via email or via rss). But for anyone reading this who hasn’t resubscribed, and who would like to, please do so! The links are to the upper right, just above my photo. I’d love to bring all the old Feedblitz people over to the new software, so come on, please.

Other breakaway news: we got four chix! They’re now quite a bit bigger than they look in this photo; they grow like little monsters. We somehow built a coop — pix of it soon. I am the original neanderthal carpenter, so it’s a total miracle it got built, but we got some crucial help from our superfriend and wonderneighbor, Dave Harp (that link includes of a photo Lucelle, the ubergardener, chicken sensei, and cook I’ve written about before; she’s married to Dave).

The middle two are aurecana chickens, the kind that lay the green/blue eggs, and two are vanilla brown crankers. We can’t wait! Look like the due date for the first batch is August. My egg habit is about to go out of control.

We leave for Holland next week. I’ll be chronicling the adventure here, so stay tuned! But I have a few posts queued up in the meantime, so stay tuned for those as well!

And welcome back to the fold, my little stray breakaway flock!

:^)

A Quick Bowl of Umami

Umami is my siren.

It’s pretty much constantly singing out to me, beckoning me with come-hither beams from god knows where. I manage to slip in elements of umami into almost every meal, but occasionally I have to just max it with an umami blast.

Today’s lunch break from painting — don’t even ask! — required such a blast. I had on hand, as I almost always have on hand:

• dried and pulverized shiitake
• dried and pulverized dried tomato
• parm
• onion

So far so good.  I also had:

• ultrafresh smoked ham (from my recent pig)
• a good hunk of butternut squash
• a few sweet peppers
• jalapeno
• citron marmalade bubbling away on the stove

Cube up the squash and dice the onion and off to the races.

It’s times like these that knife skills come in really handy. Is there any skill more useful in a kitchen? Hundreds of hours of relentless practice, like hundreds of hours of anything, can make you really good at it. It’s really, really important to have one good knife that you love/cherish/take great care of. If you’re ever going to splurge on any one piece of kitchen equipment, let it be a good knife. Perhaps a short essay on how I deal with my knives might be of interest, so I will queue up a post on that anon.

Winter squash (i.e. my butternut) cooks quickly once it’s chopped up small, so I was able to finish the dish in about five minutes of high heat in a hot wok. For yet more umami goodness I sprinkled the dish with umami salt, and finished it off with fresh oregano and ham tossed with a spoon full of citron marmalade. With crackers and a glass of the house sauvignon blanc.

Fortified to paint some more!