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All the Difficult Hours and Minutes

by Jane Hirshfield

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It all started with corn on the cob.

I must have been a Depression child in another life, because I can’t bear to throw away corn cobs. They make a brilliant corn broth, simply by filling a pot with water and adding three or four cobs (to be clear, I mean already-eaten cobs, with no corn kernels on them, or cobs that have been shaved; you can use some of the shaved kernels in the soup), and simmering for an hour or so, though the result is even tastier if you make the broth in a pressure cooker. I often throw in a few dried shiitake, maybe a dried apricot or two, possibly a cut-up carrot if I’m feeling energetic.

But what made this broth really special is what happened next. I was planning on having a simple udon dinner; just for  fun, I thought I’d up the umami quotient quite a bit by adding a drizzle of fish sauce, soy sauce, and Bragg’s amino acids (this hippie crap is my new umami-in-a-bottle), and simmer it down a bit while the udon cooked in a separate pot (the reason for the separate pot: cooking udon throws off tons of starch in the cooking water, and I didn’t want my beautiful corn umami broth sullied with starch). I picked a few kaffir lime leaves off the tree and tossed those into the broth as well, to give it some brightness.

Meanwhile, I sauteed some starburst squash, red onion, a small amount of young ginger, corn from one shaved ear, and a carrot. It all went into warmed up bowls, and got topped with turmeric chips.

I think I could eat this soup every day.

Green papaya remains mysterious to many of us. Why would anyone eat unripe fruit? Won’t it be astringent, bitter, and cause stomach aches or worse?

With some fruits all of that might be true, but for papaya, no. Is there a difference between green papaya and regular papaya? No — green is just unripe; it turns yellow, and sweet, after a while. But seriously, why eat unripe papaya? Because it has a fantastic, slithery, snappy texture, and tends to absorb whatever flavors you toss at it. It seems especially at home with citrus and chiles, which is what I’ll describe below.

But before describing how it was made, a word about prepping the papaya. Choose a firm, young-looking one; it shouldn’t look tired and old (which, alas, seems to be a common way of presenting them, at least at many of the Chinese markets around that routinely stock them). First, peel it with a vegetable peeler. Then slice it lengthwise and, using a spoon, scrape away the seeds. Slice each half again lengthwise, and proceed to shred the fruit via your favorite method. I find that a cheese grater works well, but I’m just as likely to begin slicing like mad with a sharp knife. You want thin strips, as in the photo above.

If it’s a young, lithe papaya, the seeds will be white-ish. If it’s middle aged or older, the seeds will be black, and the flesh will be slightly more yellow than its younger brethren. We can still happily eat an older one, it just won’t have the snappy texture of its youth. The always-informative Andrea Nguyen has an excellent little primer on green papaya here. She says that the slimy slippery dewy enzymes (papain) that the fruit gives off when prepping it make for a great exfoliant/facial, so you can give that a shot as you practice your knife skills in prepping the rest of the salad.

There is one extra somewhat fussy step you must do before proceeding to build the salad though.  Place the shredded papaya in a colander, and liberally sprinkle with kosher salt (Andrea and Vietnamese culinary tradition call for sugar here as well,  but I omit it). Let it sit for a few minutes, as you would salted eggplant, to draw out as much moisture as possible. Though it sounds counterintuitive, rinse the papaya with running water to rinse the salt away, transfer it to a clean tea towel, bunch up the corners, and squeeze the hell out of it. You want to wring as much moisture out as you can, so that the fruit will absorb, sponge-like, whatever flavors we’d like to inject into it.

Transfer the papaya to a bowl, and fluff it up a bit with your fingers to liberate it from the dense squeezy shape of the towel. Then add the following and gently mix with your hands:

• several limes, zest plus juice
• drizzle of oil (I like using walnut oil)
• drizzle of agave nectar, or your preferred sweetener
• handful of sliced radishes (I’ve used watermelon radish here, but any radish will do)
• jalapeno, de-seeded and de-veined, then sliced thinly
• habanero, manzano, or other fruity insanely spicy chile, de-seeded and de-veined and sliced thinly
• small piece of sweet bell pepper, any color, julienned
• at least a cup of mixed herbs — try Thai basil, mint, and parsley
• pickled ginger, chopped
• chopped nuts on top for extra crunch — I like pecans here
• edible flowers, just to make it pretty (pansies are used above)

This salad should be SPICY. In that sense it’s probably more like a som tom (Thai spicy green papaya salad) than a Vietnamese one. Supergreat in hot weather.

It occurs to me that, as much as I’ve talked about salt in the past few years, I’ve never really laid out a totally coherent/comprehensive post dedicated to this ingredient many of us take for granted. Forgive me for the length, please – but I would like to get all of this on table, so to speak.

There are essentially three types of culinary salt:

• iodized table salt (the familiar round canister)
• kosher salt, and
• sea salt. Some distinguish a fourth type, fleur-de-sel, but it’s really just a kind of sea salt, so we’ll make do with these three.

A fourth category of salt, the blended finishing salt, or flavored salt, is especially important to breakaway cooks. More on that below. But first things first.

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Iodized Table Salt — The Enemy of Good Food

In every country on earth, salt is the most widely used ingredient, and for good reason: it makes food taste a lot better. But its proper use is kind of tricky. Proper use of good salt will make an average meal exceptional. Conversely, the use of iodized table salt in otherwise good food can turn a potentially fantastic meal into a grim one. The Salt Institute, which is kind of like the Rand Corporation of the salt world, says that about 70 percent of salt sold in the United States is iodized table salt.

Eons ago, I was one of the “salt is salt, bugger off” crowd who passionately believed that any differences in taste of various salts are purely in the mind of the taster, that the taste buds/neuroreceptors can’t tell the difference, and that the people who buy $12 little canisters of fancy French sea salt are being hoodwinked.

And then I woke up: iodized table salt is not only unhealthy – processed foods are LOADED with it — it just ruins food. It makes food taste hot, and nasty. It also tends to melt and go into solution in a general sense, salting the dish in toto,

Yes, I realize that iodine deficiency was a big health problem globally for a long time, and that’s why it’s added to table salt, but iodine deficiency is just not a problem for most people today; we get plenty of iodine through eating fish, dairy products, eggs, seaweed, and many more common items. There is no reason to consume salt that’s been sprayed with potassium iodate solution (which functions as a stabilizer) if you’re not worried about developing goiters. Table salt also contains anti-caking compounds (prussiate of sodium) to make it pour easily. These additives prevent table salt from absorbing water from the air, which is why it acts the way it does.

The net effect of table salt is nastiness. It makes everything taste like processed food.

So table salt is out, for all purposes.

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Kosher Salt — The Workhorse

The second type, kosher salt, has a much larger surface area/grain size than table salt does. It is harvested like table salt – i.e., by shooting pressurized water into salt deposits, capturing and evaporating that solution, and then collecting the salt crystals that remain – but kosher salt crystals are then raked, which give them much larger crystalline structure. These larger crystals absorb blood from slaughtered animals better than table salt does. And since Jewish dietary laws require blood to be extracted from meat before eating it, it became “kosher” salt.

For early stage cooking, I usually use kosher salt. It lacks the mineral notes of sea salt, but the oversized crystals are good for pinching with your fingers; they fall on food like little snowflakes. Because they have a surface volume many times larger than table salt, they don’t taste as “salty” as normal compact table salt does. It’s tasty, fun to work with, and dirt-cheap: you can get a large box of it for a dollar or two. It is the absolute workhorse of the kitchen.

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Sea Salt — Our Special Friend!

Type three, sea salt, is simply evaporated seawater. It contains all kinds of trace ingredients, and is generally les dense than table salt. It tastes like the ocean. All of the expensive fancy salts you see in a well-stocked market are sea salts. Many contain signature elements: Hawaiian sea salt, for example, actually contains clay; Indian black salt contains significant quantities of sulphur. Sel gris, by far my favorite type of salt, is a delicious, grey colored, large-crystalled salt, typically from Brittany, France.

I’ve done my share of blind salt tastings on finished food, and the results have been overwhelmingly conclusive: sea salt makes food taste better. Part of the attraction seems to be the trace amounts of other sea stuff that clings to it (notes of seaweed, maybe, or just a general “oceany” feel to it). But another major benefit is textural: the larger, crunchier crystals provide localized salt bursts that make food wake up and shine in your mouth. Larger crystals, resting atop the finished food, remain a separate component, not unlike an herb or piece of citrus zest.

For finished food, it’s sea salt. I keep two small ceramic bowls of it next to my stove. One is sel gris, and the other is a whiter, Mexican sea salt that has smaller crystals and that doesn’t taste quite as oceany. There is something satisfying and aesthetic about reaching into a bowl and pinching the exact amount you want. I never use salt shakers — they don’t make the holes big enough to accommodate my salt, and I have more of a “feel” for how much salt should be used by touching it with my fingers.

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Blended Finishing Salts / Flavored Salts

I also keep a half-dozen or so blended salts near the stove, each in its own little pretty ceramic bowl. Why do I bother blending salt with something else? Because you can achieve wonderful, symphonic flavors with them with virtually no work.

These blends couldn’t be easier to make – you simply add about a ¼-cup of sel gris to about a teaspoon of your ingredient of choice, and pulse it a few times in a cheap electric coffee grinder. Why sel gris? Because it has a very high water content. When you blend sel gris with some other ingredient, the resulting flavored salt is intensely vibrant both in color and in taste.

Typically, I have on hand:

• matcha salt (ceremonial, superfinely powdered green tea)
• lavender salt
• tangerine salt
• smoked paprika salt
• kaffir lime salt
• saffron salt

The color palettes and flavor profiles of these six salts are, I think, exquisite. They can turn the most ordinary of dishes – poached eggs, steak, a block of tofu, grilled chicken, corn-on-the-cob – into sublime taste sensations, with no work other than simply pinching some and sprinkling it on. This is my kind of cooking!

If you take away just one thing from this website and from my books, let it be this: good salt is your friend! It can elevate your cooking from the predictable and  mundane into something lofty and invigorating.

Well the maestro has done it again. Michael Pollan has a lovely screed in last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine called “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch: How American Cooking Became a Spectator Sport, and What We Lost Along the Way.” For anyone perplexed at the massive rise of viewers of the Food Network, and how it can be that jillions of people are more interested in watching cooking than actually doing it, and how this rise has paradoxically coincided with the rise of fast food and the “home-meal replacements” sold at supermarkets, it’s a must read.

Among other gems, Pollan writes:

• We learn things from watching these cooking competitions, but they’re not things about how to cook. There are no recipes to follow; the contests fly by much too fast for viewers to take in any practical tips; and the kind of cooking practiced in prime time is far more spectacular than anything you would ever try at home. No, for anyone hoping to pick up  a few dinnertime tips, the implicit message of today’s primetime cooking shows is, “don’t try this at home.”
• So-called fancy food has always served as a form of cultural capital, and cooking programs help you acquire it, now without so much as lifting a spatula. The glamour of food has made it something of a class leveler in America, a fact that  many of these shows implicitly celebrate. Television likes nothing better than to serve up elitism to the masses, paradoxical as that might sound.
• The Food Network has helped to transform cooking from something you do into something you watch — into yet another confection of spectacle and celebrity that keeps us pinned to the couch.
• I suspect we’re drawn to the textures and rhythms of kitchen work, too, which seem so much more direct and satisfying than the more abstract and formless tasks most of us perform in our jobs nowadays. The chefs on TV get to put their hands on real stuff, not keyboards and screens but fundamental things like plants and animals and fungi; they get to work with fire and ice and perform feats of alchemy.
• In countries where people still take cooking seriously, they also have more time to devote to it.
• When we let corporations do the cooking, they’re bound to go heavy on sugar, fat, and salt; these are three tastes we’re hardwired to like, which happen to be dirrt cheap to add and do a good job masking the shortcomings of processed food. And if you make special-occasion foods cheap and easy enough to eat every day, we will eat them every day. The time and work involved in cooking, as well as teh delay in gratification built into the process, served as an important check on our appetite.

And as a bonus, here’s a conversation with Pollan on yesterday’s Fresh Air, talking about the article. Check it out!

Dearest breakaway cooks,

I’ve lately been a convert to the Palm Pre. I like it better than the Iphone for three chief reasons: it feels better in the hand, it has a way cheaper plan, and you can open tons of apps simultaneously on Sprint’s fat pipe with no slowdown in speed. The only downside to the Pre, from what I can tell, is that the number of outside applications is pathetically small. The Iphone is several orders of magnitude better for outside apps.

So why in the world am I talking about this in this space?

Well, I’ve been looking over the food-related apps on the Iphone, and they’re pathetic. I’m thinking that a breakaway app might actually do well. I’ve got some ideas on things I’d want to include, but I’d love to hear from you on things you’d like to see on a phone, things you’d actually use, and wouldn’t mind spending a buck on. If any of you are an Iphone or Pre user and would download a breakaway app from me, what kinds of things would be useful to you?

Because I don’t want to put these ideas into the public sphere just yet, I would REALLY appreciate it if you could email with your ideas and opinions, and not write them in the comments below.

I’m excited to enter the mobile space! I also have some exciting news of a Vook edition of the Breakaway Japanese Kitchen that will come out soon, but more on that later. Thanks everybody.

I got a HUGE — on the order of 15 pounds — bag of tomatoes at the end of the market in San Rafael last week for five bucks.  “Fill up your canvas bag for $5!” shouted the man who wanted to go home empty, so I felt obligated to help him out.

The flavor was good, but not eye-poppingly so, which could only mean one thing: I would replenish my stash of dried tomatoes. Or, more accurately, semi-dried tomatoes.

It’s amazing how a little heat — 200 degrees — can concentrate flavors. A tomato with slightly above-average taste can turn into a flavor monster just by slicing it, putting it on a parchment-paper-lined baking sheet, and slow-baking it for two to three hours. You could continue the baking and get *really* dried tomatoes, the ones that get superhard and then need to be resoftened, either by steeping in olive oil (which does give you a magnificently flavored olive oil) or by reconstituting in hot water. But why bother with the extra step? Why not just take them out when they’re semi-dry and easy to chew and even easier to cook with?

This batch got a rather special treatment, however. I decided to up the umami quotient (even though dried tomatoes are already loaded with umami) by dusting them with pulverized shiitake powder, kosher salt, and pepper. Wow, do they hit all the salivation buttons! I just keep them in a glass jar, with a lid, in the fridge; they’ve lasted a few months in the past using this method, but these umami bombs are so good I suspect they’ll disappear rather quickly.

Some of the tomatoes get a little harder than others. With the harder ones, I just whirred them in the spice grinder with some sel gris for a perfect (and beautifully colored) new umami salt. Made a quick omelet this morning with some of the semi-dried ones, along with greek yogurt, chives, fresh basil, and tomato salt, and man oh man we were the happiest campers on the block, though a few cups of Blue Bottle coffee espresso and a hunk of Acme herb slab didn’t hurt the mood either!

If you’ve got some extra tomatoes, do give this a shot. And please report back with what you do with them!

“Oyako” in Japanese means, literally, “parent-child.” You have to love a language that describes a dish of chicken and egg this way. Oyako-donburi is a classic Japanese homestyle dish that sautes/braises chicken slices and some veggies in dashi, to which an egg is added, and the ensuing medley is served over hot rice. But why not make a parent-child soup with udon, especially if most of the ingredients are ready to go?

This was a fun, quick soup. I had roasted some chicken thighs the night before, so instead of just chucking the bones, after dinner I put them into a pot along with a carrot, water, and some bay leaves, and simmered it all, covered, for a few hours over very low heat. The resulting stock was rich yet light, and needed no defatting (thank god).

So the next day I just simmered a few sliced carrots, some leftover chicken, and chard leaves in the stock, cooked some udon (in a separate pot — udon throws off too much starch to be cooked IN the stock) and made a very tasty, very light lunch. The coup de grace was a perfect backyard egg (from neighbor Joy) cracked into it at the last moment, and some chopped chives. The silouette in the photo is Delia slurping hers down.

The lesson, if there is one: don’t throw away random chicken bones! Just chuck them in a small pot, fill with water and maybe some bay leaves and whatever vegetable you have, and simmer away till it reduces a bit. You’ll have a light and tasty broth for soup the next day.

I’ve been liking quick soups of late. Does anyone have any favorites they’d like to share?

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!

Have a happy 4th, everyone.

 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!