Tomato sauce, one of the official members of the haute five since Auguste Escoffier’s interpretations of the mother sauces, is one of those most basic and most necessary to conquer. It is the underlying source of so many beautiful dishes. If you can make a good tomato sauce, you are well on your way towards delicious pastas, pizzas, soups, and myriads more.
If you are still buying your tomato sauce in a jar, this recipe is a must for you. Have you ever tasted that stuff right out of the jar and actually liked it? DIY it and not only can you make it perfectly to your tastes, but perfectly suited to your meals as well. So, that’s what we’re going to do.
Good tomatoes are naturally quite sweet, but leaving them in a can gives them tartness as time progresses. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s something to keep in mind later when we balance the flavors. First of all - and this should be obvious – a tomato sauce can only be as good as its tomatoes. That’s why I rather heartily demand that you find Italian canned tomatoes and accept no substitutes. The Italians know how to take care of their tomatoes. Oftentimes, those canned tomatoes are better than what I can get fresh locally, so don’t think badly of them just for being in a can. Also here’s a tip – don’t be fooled by labels advertising “Italian-style” tomatoes, check for the “prodotto in Italia” – make sure that they’re actually tomatoes grown in Italy.
The tartness in the canned tomatoes has to be balanced, but with what? You might think of adding sugar as a sweetener to combat the sourness, but I prefer to use that tartness to our advantage rather than counter-attack against it like it’s some kind of bad flavor. Garlic, and the richness that garlic contains, will do most of the work for us here. Frying the garlic in the pan a bit before adding your tomatoes is just what gives a great balance to the sour notes within.
The other trick is using whole tomatoes. If you want a really smooth sauce, feel free to blend and strain it after making, but make it first. I’m convinced this creates a richer something, and the tinny flavor seems less infused in the tomatoes packed this way. You can add anything to this either during or after it has been created to make it fit your style, so give this a shot.
To me croutons are, more than anything else, a way of preventing food waste. Take old, stale bread (not molding, just stale) and cut it up into small pieces to remake it into something that you would want to eat. Throwing away bread is such a shame.
The other thing that’s nice about croutons is that, since they are fully dried, they have a long shelf-life if you store them in an airtight container. The other route you could go with stale bread is to make breadcrumbs, but I’ll cover that some other time. Basically you just throw it in a blender. Like I said though, I'll cover it later.
You can flavor these any way you want, and it’s a great opportunity to use up some of those dry herbs you’ve had lying around since you got them in that gift set five years ago. The method I show here is the baking method, but actually you can successfully make croutons in a frying pan if you don’t have the time to bake them off. If you’re storing them for a long time, however, I prefer baking them because it more evenly dries out all of the moisture from inside.
Like I said in the video, croutons are great with soups and salads, but that’s news to exactly zero people out there. Here’re some other ideas that you may not have considered – toppings for chicken bakes, gratins, and casseroles. Bread puddings. Pie toppings (replace the herbs and spices with sugar!). Snacks for dip. The list goes on, and I’m sure you can come up with many more. I’d love to here about your creative ideas for croutons, too, so give this one a try!
Nothing says, "I wasn't invented in the country that my name says I was invented in" like writing a country's name into the title of a recipe. The history behind the French Dip goes way back to America in 1908. Or maybe it was 1918. It's hard to say, since the exact date is debated. The reason for this shroud of mystery lays in a double-claim over who originally invented the sandwich -Cole's Pacific Electric Buffet, orPhilippe The Original. Both restaurants are long-standing establishments in the Los Angeles area.
Not only the restaurant, but the claims themselves also change quite a bit. Some say it was a police officer, while some say a fireman, who came in for a bite. While hastily trying to get this customer a sandwich, according to some, the cook accidentally dropped the sandwich into a pan of meat drippings. Alternatively, the customer asked if the sandwich could be dipped because of a problem with soar gums. Whatever the case, all the stories agree that the result was so popular that patrons were back for more in no time at all. Nowadays, you can find these slightly soggy, beefy wonders just about anywhere, at diners or even at fast food chains.
To my mind, French Dips are the quintessential soup and sandwich combo - simple, hearty, and filling. Despite its name, this is old school American fair. This isn't something I'd want to overdo by getting too complex. Meat, onions, and a nice spread on a French roll is as far as I want to go with this. Don't be fooled by my picture there, those tomatoes and that spring of dill were only needed for the photo-shoot. Not that they were bad, but they were definitely superfluous.
One thing I like to do, as you'll see in the video, is poach the beef in water for a minute or two. This does two things for me. It gets the meat tender and starts it off cooking, while also flavoring the water and making the start of a nice beef stock. The next step is to slowly simmer a bunch of onions in there and complete the soup.
In the video, I used a homemade barbeque sauce that was great, but feel free to use whatever is handy. Simple mustard, as long as it's good mustard, would work fine for the spread too, but when I'm really feeling fancy I like to upper class it a bit by mixing it with some cream cheese and maybe a little oil. You could easily start adding things like garlic or spices, and they would be delicious, but refrain from doing so. We're keeping this one simple, it's a lesson in restraint. Let the meat speak. After all, this sandwich was born with the idea of dipping meat into meat juice.
Sautéing or braising chicken breasts in a fry pan has got to be the easiest and quickest way of preparing a meat-based meal, but I’m surprised to find how many people still have trouble with this. I’ve prepared a few pointers to make the process a bit more clear and get you on your way to happier, healthier breast-feeding.
These chicken breasts were reserved for cooking from a previous post on chicken stock. Check that out if you want to learn more about stock creation.
The two biggest concerns around the breast appear to be knowing when it is properly cooked through, and what to do about seasonings and flavors. The second concern starts first. Think of flavors in advance and you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble – better than the scenario where the thing’s already in the pan and you realize too late that you didn't plan the next step.
This goes back to the idea of mise en place, the French way of saying don’t have the things you want to use in an inaccessible pantry back cupboard. Keep things you use frequently handy, and get the things you want to cook with out and ready before cooking. It’s a simple idea but it makes things go much more smoothly.
This time around we’re keeping our recipe very simple, but you can work in all kinds of things after getting this down. Of course the vegetables here can be switched out with others of your choice. The lovely thing about what we're doing here with salting the vegetables a bit while cooking is that this will end up making its own sauce, by drawing the vegetable juices out. That just sounds delicious already right? Say it with me now - vegetable juices.
The Procedure:
In the video, I previously had poached these breasts in water to help create a chicken stock base. You can poach in boiling water for about 1 minute if you like, but if you have the time, you might as well turn that water into a chicken stock since you're already off to a good start.
Salt and pepper your breasts – both sides – and rub in bit of oil with maybe an herb. That's plenty right there, but I put it on a plate of sliced onions for some more flavor, since I wanted to cook onions anyway.
Get your frying pan hot on high heat, and then lower to medium heat.
over a bed of onion slices for a nice addition
Add your oil, wait a moment for it to get hot as well.
Place in your ingredients starting with the hardest ones, like carrots. You don't have to cook these for so very long, just a minute or two is fine.
Make some room in the middle, and place your chicken in the pan skin-side down – away from yourself in case of oil splashes – and listen for a sizzle (and make sure it’s there). I reiterate - if there is no sizzle, the pan has gotten too cold. If you just leave it on medium the whole time this shouldn't be a problem.
Keep on medium and don't walk away from the frying pan too much, chicken doesn't take that long. This is key - do not move the chicken around. One flip is what we want, so leave it and only check to see if there's that golden color on the skin.
When the skin has gotten nice and golden, turn it over. It should only take 2-3 minutes per side, but chicken breasts vary in thickness so that's only a rule of thumb. When the chicken is done, take it out of the pan (or it’ll keep cooking) and put it on a plate to rest. One note, if you cover the pan with a lid like I do towards the end of the video here, the steam will cook the chicken from all around, so it'll stay juicy.
There are two methods for confirming that the chicken is cooked through. One is to use a meat thermometer – internal temp should be 74 degrees C or 165 degrees F. The other is to cut open the thickest part and confirm that there’s no pink meat. Once you cook a lot of these, a third option opens up and that’s to check by feel, the spring-back of the chicken when you poke it. By the way, I've noticed the look-and-see method only works for chicken breasts, for other meats it’s better to have a thermometer around.
And oh yeah, this is a chicken breast, don’t throw the skin away. That’s the best part! If you’re that worried about the extra calories, well, just don’t be worried. You’ve already gone lean by going chicken, right? Who would want to get rid of that crispy golden deliciousness?
Ingredients from the video
two chicken breasts SKIN ON
1 onion sliced
1 stock broccoli
1 carrot
2 big tomatoes diced
white wine or flavorful liquid (stock etc.)
herbs (thyme and sage here in the vid - you could also use dried if that's all you have, you poor thing)
If chicken soup is for the soul, then a good chicken stock is the basis of that spiritual healing. Another on the list of things that are a million times better fresh but that most of us rarely find time to make, this is one that is just integral to so many ways of cooking, and it’s great to have on hand. If you want to know where that rich, full flavor that you just can’t quite place is coming from in that expensive restaurant dinner, it’s the stock.
I follow the freezer-pack method, in which you freeze all of your stock in ice cube trays and then store the cubes in freezer bags for later use. I like this because you can use the stock cubes as measurements, and you can throw them right into a hot pan for instant satisfaction. Whatever you do – and you are bound to have heard this by now – don’t buy those bouillon cubes. That’s fools’ gold, a cubed kitchen trap hemorrhaging salt that’s sure to make your lovely dish unpleasant. In fact, when making stock let’s just leave salt out of the equation entirely.
Remember, we’re not making broth, it’s stock. It’s an ingredient, like salt is an ingredient. Since you don’t salt things for taste until the end of the cooking process, you want to avoid upping the salinity of your ingredients, which will only cook down and become more concentrated – hopefully not concentrated-ly salty.
In the video, I use a couple chicken breasts to flavor the stock, but reserve them for another recipe. You can see that recipe here.
There’s an unavoidable part at the end of making a stock when every home chef (professional chefs having long lost their empathy for ingredients) feels bad about throwing out the used up vegetables. As hard as it is to come to terms with, those onions and carrots simply don’t have anything left to give.
If you’re really thrifty, you could use them in compost, but otherwise bite the what-a-waste bullet and toss them. It may seem like a pity, but the soul of that celery has been transferred to that liquid heaven in your pot.
It’s probably difficult to take an unbiased stance on the topic of hunting whales for whale meat. It is a reality however, that in certain places, like Japan (and where else?), whale has been hunted and eaten for hundreds of years. During the restoration after the war, whale hunters supplied the impoverished population with thousands of tons of whale meat to bolster food stocks.
MacAurthur, as it happens, encouraged this practice – possibly because it was a cheap source of food, and also possibly because excess whale oil was then taken back to the United States and Europe, where it was used in the making of many things from lamp oil to soap. In fact, it became such a main source of food that only a few years after the war, over fifty percent of the meat eaten in Japan was whale meat. It’s since the end of the war that whale meat became a staple of school lunch, and even though it lost its popularity as Japanese consumers were able to afford pricier meats, asking around I’ve noticed most people remember having eaten whale at school growing up.
The loophole - if you want to call it a loophole - that Japanese whalers have operated on since the International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling in 1986 is a provision that allows countries to catch a certain number of whales for scientific research. The meat from these scientific catches is then distributed for sale and eventually reaches grocery stores and restaurants. Mm, science meat.
Because this is a very sensitive topic to a lot of people, I’ve tried my best to remain neutral, but you can probably pick up my bias anyway. For those of you that live under the “don’t fry it until you try it” mantra, I will just say this – I have eaten whale. A sashimi plate of it was pushed upon my nose under the pretext that it was a cut of beef served rare.
Upon eating the first bite, the old man who had invited me to try it burst out uproariously, “It’s whale! Haha!” I protested that he might have considered a method other than deceiving me into eating it, his words: “What are you, Green Peace?”
Eki, in Japanese, means train station. So the eki bento, or ekiben, is the train station bento box. At stations all around the country, quick bento lunches can be bought right on the station platforms before boarding a long train home, and the Shinkansen bullet trains – equipped with flip-down trays and roomier seating - are the best trains on which to put this practice to use.
But, coming back from my trip to Kanagawa and Tokyo - which ended up being predominantly a culinary excursion - I decided to finish my time with an upgraded ekiben, something the station platforms wouldn’t be able to supply.
Like many train stations in Japan’s larger cities, Shin-Yokohama station is connected to a network of shops and a basement-level food court, although the term food court gives the wrong impression. Laid out like the jewelry section in a department store, vendors sell freshly made bentos of all kinds – whether sushi, chili shrimp, or cob salad. The price is a bit steeper down here, where they charge per hundred gram, but the quality is high. As you can see here, I went with some maguro tuna sushi and an assortment of tasties like marinated squid, hijiki salad, and salmon roe over noodles.
Put together with some Yebisu white silk beer it cost me near 25 bucks, but all in all, this high-speed picnic made the trip back a lot more comfortable.
On a drive way out to Karuizawa in Nagano prefecture, I noticed the air getting cooler and cooler as we climbed through the mountains. The snow had nearly all melted away off the Karuizawa ski slopes by the time we got there, but the sakura cherry trees were still in full bloom. Having watched the flowers drop off those trees in my more tropical (well, tropical enough to have a few palm trees, anyways) town of residence a full month before, it was refreshing to see. But that wasn’t the main attraction for driving out into the middle of nowhere.
No, Karuizawa, wouldn’t you know it, is a well-known shopping destination. Fueled by the money pouring from a community of wealthy vacationers and retired salary men with a penchant for golf, this sprawling country club and shopping mall serves all the world brands names that you would expect – Burberry, Chloé, Dunhill, The Gap.
But it wasn’t hand-bags and suit jackets I was looking for. Down the streets and beautifully flowered lanes heading away from the mall, Karuizawa opens itself to the specialties of its region – honey, jam-making, and hand-carved wood furniture.
The beauty of these shops was the free samples! Bins of crackers lay out, with sample spoons for the testing and trail of every imaginable type of jam or honey. Fig jam, chestnut tree honey, blueberry and rum jelly. Barely avoiding a diabetic overdose, I munched my way through dozens of shops in search of the perfect cracker bite. I found it in a raspberry and red wine jam that became the purchase of the day. Kudos Karuizawa, now I just need some cheese.
Miko priestesses dance at a Kamakura shrine to gagaku music
dango roasting over a grill
Visiting Kamakura, an ancient temple site that has long been a standard omairi locale for the Japanese, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I have already been to Todaiji and the Daibutsu, so the famous (although very slightly smaller) giant Buddha in Kamakura is a local next step.
Still, while the temples are in fact quite beautiful, there are so many of them and they are of a similarity such that looking at them one after the other is, well, tiring to say the least. There's only so much walking through gates and admiring of chrysanthemum flowers that anyone can take before their stomach starts grumbling.
sweet sake manju steam buns
Fortunately I happened across a section of town that offered hot food and treats from street-side stalls. Dango, dumplings made from sweet rice flour and skewered before roasting, are a specialty of the region.
I also enjoyed the soft fluffy texture of sake manju – steamed buns made with sake and sweet adzuki bean filling – on a bamboo bench while watching the crowds mill about shopping for trinkets and snacks. The three flavors pictured, from the left, were yomogi, kokutou brown sugar, and mochi rice. Yomogi is a Japanese variety of mugwort, but it's not nearly so bad as that sounds. Think of it as a leafy and faintly flavored kind of an herb. In Japan, it's mostly used as a kind of natural food coloring, although it does impart a nuance of vegetative flavor to the steam bun. I munched on sweets and snacks for a bit longer before deciding that my stomach was telling me it was time for something more substantial.
Lunch led me to sausages. Thick, bratwurst-like sausages with local craft lager from Enoshima. A German experience is not exactly what I was expecting out in a rural and old-school-traditional Japanese town, but it was good nonetheless.
And it had the biggest line in front of its stall. I guess times do change.
Quiz time! Here's some mystery meat for you - something I'm guessing not all of you have given a try yet. Or seen sold as food.
Ok ok, here's a hint - what's four-legged, hangs out in the desert, and has one or two humps on its back, varying by region? If you answered anything other than camel, you were totally wrong! It's totally camel.
double the hump for double the flavor!
I got this in a seal-pack from a friend who claims it's common eating back home. It was heavily salted, but rather palatable. I would say it tastes a lot like kangaroo, but since that may not be very helpful to some of you as a description, I will say it was similar to a fat-free and somewhat coarser lamb shank.
We had it pan fried with a simple stir-fry that utilized the vegetables around the house at the time. By the way, back home for my Uighur friend is a city in the Xinjiang region of China, an area of what used to be the Silk Road. Apparently camels are used not only for packing, but raised as we raise cattle as a source of food.
It was a first for me, and I'll be sure to ask what kinds of recipes camel tends to be used in!
believe it or not, there is cod in there under the foam sauce
White, firm, and clean tasting, cod has remained one of my very favorite fish. I do have a bias however - it seems that I have a Newfoundland cod fishing heritage on my mother’s side. Donning oil slicks and bundling over stormy waves in the foggy waters of the Grand Banks, some distant relative fought and struggled with these fish in what I imagine was an epic battle that would have put The Perfect Storm to shame.
Meanwhile I get mine down at the fishmongers. Unfortunately the cod I have to work with in Japan is Pacific cod - what they used to fish off the Banks was Atlantic cod. You can’t taste the cold water of the Labrador Current in the Japanese varieties, but it is - for the purposes of cooking - the same fish.
We are making a point of creating two different but balanced flavors. The cucumber is vinegared to give it a refreshing sour tang, and the fish with its foam sauce is an herbaceous and rich companion to it. We want it so that by eating the cucumber it makes you want to eat the fish, and vice-versa. The rice vinegar could be replaced with apple or wine vinegar, but I recommend against balsamic for this recipe because there's too much flavor going on there. Additionally, while the extra step takes some more of your time, soaking the cucumber slices overnight can make a really nice pickle for the wrap.
First off, get some rice going. White is fine but I prefer to throw in some herbs while it's going to flavor it up. The fish: salt – both sides! – of your square-cut fillet and set it aside while you peel your cucumber. Take your peeler and take as thick a slice off the side of the cucumber as you can. Make four of these slices per fillet, and chop up the rest of your cuke in as haphazard a way as you choose.
George Clooney in The Perfect Storm
Throw these guys into some salted water and add to it about 2 shot glasses (50ml) of vinegar. Let them soak while you make the fish.
Back to our fish. Drain off any juices from the fish that may have collected from your salting. Pat dry. In a fry pan over low heat, add a small amount of not-olive oil (something less flavorful, like grapeseed oil) and add the fish. As it begins to whiten you’ll see a line coming up the side of the fillet. When it gets around halfway, turn the fillets over and add the remaining chopped cucumber.
Just before you feel that it's done, take it off the heat. Don't overcook this one! If you have nice fresh fish, please consider leaving the center soft like you would with a steak. You'll thank yourself that you did. Just after taking it off the heat, evenly sprinkle a small amount of vinegar – I like rice vinegar here as well – to calm the flavors. The heat remaining in the pan will warm the vinegar and brighten its flavors.
You'll also probably want to make a foam sauce - it goes frighteningly well here. I'll talk more about foam sauces in another post. If you don't want to take the time, don't worry - it'll still be excellent without.
Pat dry your cucumber slices. I use a form to shape the rice, but you could use an old soup can or an upside-down cup. Make it into a cylinder and wrap the cucumber slices around it. Put the fish fillet up on top there and drizzle your foam sauce over if you're using it. Or as an option to that you could sprinkle an additional small amount – the goal is not a puckered face, so be sparing – of your vinegar after plating if you like. Simple and elegant.
If you are still buying your tomato sauce in a jar, this recipe is a must for you. Have you ever tasted that stuff right out of the jar and actually liked it? DIY it and not only can you make it perfectly to your tastes, but perfectly suited to your meals as well. So, that’s what we’re going to do.
