Kitchen Guy

Video: Classic Basil Pesto

Posted by Chef Jim on September 10, 2008  |  Comments Off

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Blog Topic: Seize Your Salad

Posted by Chef Jim on September 4, 2008  |  Comments Off

Okay, I’ve about had it up to here with restaurants and food manufacturers claiming that the white goopy stuff they’re peddling is Caesar dressing. It’s not.

Real Caesar salad dressing is almost clear – maybe with a little brownish yellow tint because there should be an egg yolk and dissolved anchovies, along with some Worcestershire sauce and red wine vinegar.

Do you see anything that’s white – or off-white – in any of those ingredients?

So here’s a relatively brief lesson about the proper way to make a Caesar salad. First, the history of the salad in one sentence: In 1924 Caesar Cardini created the salad at his restaurant in Tijuana, concocting it from ingredients he had on hand. To add a little flair, he prepared the salad at tableside.

Another important fact about this salad: there are no tomatoes in it. Neither does it have onions, cucumbers nor any other type of produce except Romaine lettuce (and a garlic clove, but that has a very special use, that I’ll get to in a moment).

First, to make a proper Caesar salad, you should have a large wooden bowl (not glass, plastic, metal or anything else) in order to employ that garlic clove correctly. The clove is used to flavor the wood, so there is only the hint of garlic in your mouth. If you like, you can clip a small piece off the end of the garlic clove, and then rub the wood to impart the flavor of the garlic.

As for that egg, the original recipe calls for it to be raw, but health concerns dictate that it be coddled. That means that you simply drop the egg in boiling water for just a minute. It’s enough time to kill off anything dangerous that’s been lurking, especially on the shell.

The first tableside Caesar salad I had was prepared at a well-known restaurant in the old part of San Juan, Puerto Rico. The waiter wheeled a cart over to the table with an immense wooden bowl. I watched as he flavored the wood with a fresh clove of garlic. Then, with great flourish, he drizzled extra virgin olive oil down the sides of the bowl, so that it would carry the garlic with it as it collected in the bottom.

This next instruction is designed to help you get past your fear of anchovies. The canned varieties that we see are pungent little fellows, but pulverized to a paste-like consistency, they add a flavor that becomes surprisingly subtle and moves unexpectedly well into the background. Adding all the other stuff – like Dijon mustard, Worcestershire sauce and red wine vinegar – certainly helps in quashing the pungency.

But when you’ve mixed all of those things together, along with some coarse salt, you’ve got a dark liquid, and that’s what real Caesar dressing looks like.

My waiter in San Juan opened up a crisp white kitchen towel to reveal perfect hearts of romaine lettuce, which – again with a flourish – he tore and tossed into the bowl. Then with wooden implements, he tossed the romaine around in the dressing, lightly coating them.

Finally, crispy little croutons were tossed in and freshly grated Parmesan cheese was offered to each diner, as well as cracked black pepper.

The perfect combination of acids and proteins coating cold and crisp romaine is a joy to eat. This is an easy dressing to make, too, because you don’t have to worry about it being a perfect emulsion. But try it and I wager you’ll turn your nose up (the way I do) when you’re offered that cloyingly blah creamy white stuff being foist on us as Caesar dressing.

Here’s my recipe:

1 large egg, coddled
1 garlic clove
4 anchovies
2 small heads of Romaine lettuce washed, patted dry, coarsely torn
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 cup olive oil 3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
3/4 cup croutons
freshly squeezed lemon juice

Place the egg in boiling water for 1 minute and let it sit off the heat while you prepare the rest of the salad.

Rub a large wooden bowl with the garlic clove, coating the bowl with the garlic juices. Drizzle about half of the olive oil around the sides of the bowl, letting it collect at the bottom, then mash the anchovies with a fork until they turn to a paste. Slowly add the rest of the oil, then stir in the Worcestershire, mustard, salt and a little black pepper. Slowly add the red wine vinegar, the egg and then a squeeze of fresh lemon juice.

Stir well, then add the romaine and toss. Add the croutons and Parmesan and toss again. Add freshly cracked black pepper.

Video: Sweet ‘n’ Spicy Baked Beans

Posted by Chef Jim on August 27, 2008  |  Comments Off

The Umlaut Effect

Posted by Chef Jim on August 21, 2008  |  Comments Off

I’m not sure exactly what motivated me to choose taking German over Spanish in high school. It’s a complex language with an extremely complex grammar (although nowhere near as burdensome as French).

And I didn’t know it then, but at the same time a few high school kids who would become very brilliant marketers in the future must have been taking German in high school, too.

This got me to wondering what drives people to buy food and beverage products that have funny sounding names or funny looking alphabetics on the labels? Does anyone honestly believe that Häagen Dasz ice cream comes from a European country whose language uses umlauts? Lest you be mislead, it was created and manufactured in the Bronx and is now owned by Pillsbury.

I’ve seen it with bottled water (the claims about the source of these various brands of water is fodder for another column) and yogurt, among other things. And don’t you just love the brand that spells it yøgürt? (That o with a diagonal line through it is the Danish equivalent of the umlaut. And if you pronounced it they way you’re supposed to, then it would sound like you were saying yeh-geert. Eew.)

Snob appeal is a time-honored marketing technique. How about all of these hair care products commercials on television voiced by people with the most elitist British accents? It took me the full 30 seconds to realize that when the woman said hay-uh she meant hair.

So is this stuff any better than brands without accent marks and other diacritical anomalies?

Well, it depends. In the world of ice cream, the higher the butterfat content, the richer the ice cream tastes. It’s the reason you’ll see lines down the block and then doubled back at frozen custard stands. The aforementioned Häagen Dasz began a trend that its competitors had no choice but to follow. Increase the butterfat and find exotic flavors and flavor combinations. Bless you anyway, Ben and Jerry.

There’s nothing wrong with this. I’m a died-in-the-wool capitalist. But when it comes to food, I’m also a deconstructionist. That’s the way I made my reputation in the television food business – showing folks that restaurant food can be made in almost any home kitchen, with not that many exceptions.

So let’s call an umlaut an umlaut and read the ingredients on the packaging. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that brands without the funny looking letters match the fancy brands calorie for calorie, fat gram for fat gram.

Taste, of course, is subjective, which I suppose makes it somewhat akin to golf – it’s all in your head.

(So maybe if my golf balls had brand names with umlauts I could keep them in the fairway.)

Nevertheless, go ahead and buy what you want. But if you’ve got one of those home ice cream making contraptions and you can whip up Crème Anglaise, then you’ve got the makings of French Vanilla Ice Cream that I’d put up against any umlaut brand any day of the week.

———————–

Crème Anglaise
(Vanilla Custard Sauce)

6 large egg yolks
2/3 cup sugar
2 cups half and half
1 vanilla bean, split*

Whisk egg yolks and 2/3 cup sugar in medium bowl to blend. Place 2 cups half and half in heavy medium saucepan. Scrape in seeds from vanilla bean; add bean. Bring mixture to simmer over medium heat. Remove from heat. Gradually whisk hot half and half mixture into egg yolk mixture. Return mixture to saucepan. Stir over medium-low heat until custard thickens slightly and leaves path on back of spoon when finger is drawn across, about 12 minutes (do not boil). Discard vanilla bean. Cover and refrigerate until cold. (Can be prepared 1 day ahead; keep refrigerated.)

* You may substitute 2 tsp. vanilla extract, but add it just before whisking in the egg yolk mixture.

Video: Jamaican Jerk Chicken

Posted by Chef Jim on August 20, 2008  |  Comments Off

Video: Kitchen Guy’s Chunky Gazpacho

Posted by Chef Jim on August 13, 2008  |  Comments Off

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Fair Season

Posted by Chef Jim on August 7, 2008  |  Comments Off

There’s no business like show business and sometimes that includes appearing at county fairs.

Three shows a day for a couple of days, cooking live (as opposed to my video taped gigs where the editing room frequently saves my bacon, so to speak).

At this particular fair there were no big name bands, no country crooners, no music revival groups. No — just the diving dogs, the racing pigs – and me. Yessirree — show business is my life.

If you’ve ever watched chefs cook live on television you’ve probably witnessed the bizarre phenomenon of people applauding for the addition of garlic or cayenne pepper to a recipe. I’ve never really understood that.

I love garlic as much as the next guy and I use it in many of my recipes. But applauding for it? Well, applaud they did and I must confess, it’s addictive. I then began to wonder: What else can I do to elicit more applause?

When you’re a so-called “celebrity chef,” there are only two kinds of people you encounter: People who know who you are and people who haven’t a clue.

So as much as I enjoyed getting applause for adding garlic to one of the three pans I had going, there were those who attended the fair who thought I was just another food vendor and they wanted to know what kind of cold beer I had for sale.

And then there was this: A little girl – probably no more than nine or 10 years old – saw one of my demonstrations and then saw me having lunch that I purchased from one of the food concessions. So she asked a very legitimate question: “If you’re a chef, how come you didn’t make your own lunch?”

I have a stock answer, because it’s not the first time I’ve been asked. Quite honestly, one of my favorite things is when someone else cooks for me. But I digress. Back to the fair.

This is what I learned: Some people came to see me cook – my foodie groupies. Some came out of curiosity – about a guy they sometimes see on TV. Some were there because there was an available chair (walking a fair can be exhausting). And some came because they thought there would be free food.

But the county health department foiled their plan. One of my other favorite things – the food police – said you can look but you can’t taste.

Video: Fried Green Tomato “BLT”

Posted by Chef Jim on August 6, 2008  |  Comments Off

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Video: Ciambellone – Italian Breakfast Bread

Posted by Chef Jim on July 30, 2008  |  Comments Off

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Video: Phyllo Phruit Phlowers

Posted by Chef Jim on July 28, 2008  |  Comments Off

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