Читать книгу A Girl and Her Pig - April Bloomfield - Страница 12

Before you go headlong into the recipes, I’d like to tell you why they are the way they are. Here I take you through a few of my idiosyncrasies, from the way I think when I cook to the admittedly obsessive measures I take with common pantry staples, and that I urge you to take as well. But, so you don’t think I’m a complete nutter, I’ve given you alternatives whenever I can stomach them.

AT THE MARKET

Please buy great ingredients. I insist on it in my kitchen, and I’m quick to have a fannywobble if the parsnips are spongy or the greens have begun to go limp at the edges. If what you’re planning on cooking with doesn’t look nice at the market, alter your dinner plans. Talk to your butcher or fishmonger and make it clear that you’re after the best he’s got. Or order in advance – sometimes that’s the best way to be sure that you’re buying tasty proteins at their prime. Set your standards high: you might not always meet them, but you will always be better off in the end. Low standards are easy to meet, but the food you’ll end up with isn’t always good to eat.

Once you’ve found a great product, get to know it. Taste it raw and as you cook, but first give it a sniff and a good look over. Touch it. The more you do this, the sharper your intuition will become. You’ll understand why, for instance, there’s no need to peel young carrots and why I urge you to choose fresh sardines with skin that sparkles. That’s a good rule of thumb, actually: choose ingredients that sparkle, whether literally or not.

AMOUNTS

I don’t like precision. Converting cups to grams and measuring out tablespoons of chopped parsley does my head in. It feels odd, unnatural, and it’s not how I cook. After all, one carrot or tomato is not the same as another. So you don’t want to be inflexible, like a machine. If you open up a pumpkin and it looks a little different than usual, you might have to treat it differently too.

Yet you can’t have a cookbook without recipes, and you can’t have recipes without measures, so, in the end, I’ve provided amounts and weights for ingredients I never thought I’d quantify. But where it made sense, I kept the measures called for casual, using handfuls and glugs rather than teaspoons. Use these quantities as guidelines, and use your intuition too.

FINDING THE BALANCE

One summer while I was working at the River Café, I learned a lesson that really stuck. I looked on as Rose Gray, one of the chefs, made ribollita, the Tuscan bread soup. In the winter, we had added a smattering of chopped canned tomatoes to contribute a little acidity. Now it was summer, and we had a glut of ripe, fresh tomatoes. I watched Rose add them with a freer hand. Fresh tomatoes are more delicate, so you have to add more to get the same effect. But just because you have a lot of fresh tomatoes doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still add them judiciously. What you’re after is balance. Finding balance is about understanding a dish’s harmonious potential, the place where all the flavours achieve a sort of equilibrium. Each bite should make you want to take another.

Lemon juice is a lovely example of the principle of balance. Of course a dish should never be so lemony that your face scrunches up like a Muppet’s as you eat it. But neither should lemon play the same role in every dish. Sometimes lemon’s bracing acidity refreshes your palate, as in my Fried Pig’s Ear Salad (see recipe, here). Other times, lemon just adds brightness, barely perceptible as lemon but vital to encouraging your next eager bite, like in Brussels Sprouts with Pancetta and Juniper Berries (see recipe, here).

You must give thought, too, to proportion. A salad with too many walnuts or a sauce with too many capers is like a Sunday with too many free hours – you stop appreciating the pleasure they provide. I think about that when I cook. Put just enough sweet cubes of carrots in a soup, and you won’t have to search too hard to find one, but when you do, it’ll still give you a little thrill. Always keep in mind why you’re adding what you’re adding. In Radish Salad (see recipe, here), for instance, is the dish about the radish, the cheese, or the combination?

This may all sound a bit tedious. Yet it’s how simple food becomes exciting food. And while each recipe in this book aims to guide you towards that elusive place where a dish is in perfect balance, no recipe can account for, say, tomatoes that taste less sweet than you might like or lemons that aren’t as tart as usual. Ultimately, the balance is up to you to find.

CUTTING VEGETABLES

In this book, I often ask you to cut vegetables such as carrots and fennel into pieces. What I don’t mention, for fear of sounding too fussy, is that I typically prefer to cut vegetables into oblique pieces: angled ones with pointy, tapered edges. They’re more elegant than clumsy chunks and more rustic than perfect cubes. If you’re up for it, here’s how to do it: take, say, a carrot, halve it lengthwise, and set it flat side down. Cut the first piece on a diagonal, then continue slicing into irregular pieces, sliding the carrot back and forth with your other hand between each cut. Keep it up, making sure the pieces are more or less the same thickness.

PLATING

I’m not much for pomp on the plate, for presentation that says, ‘Look how pretty!’ But I do think that if food looks beautiful, people are more excited to eat it. To that end, with most recipes I give suggestions that more or less amount to this rule: don’t serve food in a big, dense lump. Rather, assemble the ingredients so there’s a little air flowing between them and any supporting players are scattered here and there among the stars of the dish. I like food to look as if the arrangement were almost accidental, as if it all dropped from above and happened to pile elegantly on the plate.

INGREDIENTS

HERBS

Because there are few things worse than chomping down on a tough stem, I typically remove any thick, woody stems from herbs. But I don’t discard the thin stems close to the leaves, which are sweet and tender. When I use parsley and coriander in salads, for example, I often pluck sprigs into little lengths, a few inches long, that I once learned are called pluches. Herb pluches provide a different experience in each bite than just the leaves would. And a little advice: always chop fresh herbs just before you use them.

OLIVE OIL

Get yourself a bottle of really good extra virgin olive oil, and use it with abandon. Both a cooking fat and a seasoning, olive oil might be the only ingredient I use as often as Maldon salt. I’ll drizzle some over soup at the last minute, add it to bean cooking liquid, or lash it onto slightly charred rustic bread for a snack or side, among a thousand other uses. At home I like to keep a nice mild oil and a peppery one around.

CHILLIES

Halfway through writing this book, I started to fret that every recipe had chillies in it. Then I realised that’s quite okay. The food isn’t spicy – for me, adding chillies, whether dried or fresh, is about adding another layer of flavour, rather than scalding your tongue.

I mainly call for two types of chillies. The first are dried pequin chillies, lovely little things, each one barely bigger than a grain of rice. I love their bright flavour, but if you must, you can substitute red pepper flakes, as long as you replace the jar often so you don’t end up using stale, flavourless ones. For every crumbled pequin chilli I call for, you can swap in a pinch of red pepper flakes.

The second type is Dutch chilli, a slender fresh red chilli that’s about the size of your index finger and a bit spicier than a jalapeño. If you can’t find it, use any long, red, moderately spicy chilli.

SPICES

There’s nothing like buying whole spices and toasting and grinding them yourself. These simple steps amplify their flavour and fragrance. Here’s how to do it: put the spices in a small pan and set it over medium-high heat. (If there’s more than one spice in a recipe that requires toasting, I like to do them separately.) Toast, shaking the pan frequently, until the spices smell really sweet and inviting, anywhere from 2 to 4 minutes. Remember that it’s less about precise timing than it is about feel – rather than toasting them for 1 minute and 33 seconds, keep a close eye on the spices and take a whiff every now and then. After they’re toasted, use your mortar and pestle or spice grinder to reduce them to a powder.

GARLIC

The garlic you get in the shops is often a bit old, with little bright green germs growing inside or, if you’re really unlucky, peeking out. Whenever I’m chopping garlic, I slice peeled cloves lengthwise and flick this green bit out if I see it. If you don’t do this, it won’t ruin your dish (though the garlic may turn a blue-green colour), and it won’t kill you, though it won’t make you stronger either.

ANCHOVIES

In some of my dishes, anchovy makes its presence known. In others, it’s a bit sneaky, contributing a salty umami quality, the source of which your friends might not be able to identify. Whatever their role, I always use whole salt-packed anchovies of the best quality I can find. Sure, you have to fillet them yourself, but it’s quite easy. Plus, they last forever in your fridge. If you must, however, you can substitute the oil-packed kind as long as they’re top quality and you gently wipe off the oil from the fillets before you use them.

Filleting Salt-Packed Anchovies

Rinse the anchovies one at a time under cold running water, rubbing them gently between your fingers to get the salt off. Put them in a small bowl and add just enough water to cover. After about a minute – if you soak them for too long, they’ll lose their umami quality – give them another quick rinse.

To fillet the anchovies, hold an anchovy under cold running water. Pull off the loose muck near the head and at the belly. Rub the outside to remove any remaining salt or hard bits. Keeping the anchovy under the water, gently work a fingertip along the belly to start to separate the fillets. Gently pull the fillets apart – this should be easy, especially once you get the hang of it. Drape the now-boneless fillet over the edge of a bowl to drain. Pinch the backbone and gently pull it away from the second fillet; discard it. Put the second fillet next to the first, and do the same with the rest of the anchovies.

POTATOES

I almost always rinse my potatoes after I chop or peel them, to wash some of the starch away. Doing so helps prevent potatoes from discolouring, keeps mashed potatoes from becoming gluey and sticky, and is just generally a good practice. Here’s how I do it: give the peeled potatoes a rinse under cold running water. Add them to a good-sized pot, run more water over them, and pour it off; repeat if necessary until the water runs clear.

TOMATOES

Nothing gets me grumpy like rubbish tomatoes. You know the kind – bland, crunchy, and paler than my English legs. You don’t want to go near a fresh tomato in the winter. And even when you use lovely ripe tomatoes, you should still be fastidious about them, trimming away any pale or hard bits you might spot inside.

I’m equally persnickety about tinned tomatoes. I urge you to buy the best quality you can. Any brand of good quality tinned tomatoes you find to be consistently bright in flavour and deep red throughout is a keeper. I also always mean for you to drain off the liquid they come in (unless you’re buying those fantastic but expensive jarred tomatoes packed in clear liquid). I find the liquid tastes artificially sweet and salty. Finally, I trim off any horrible bits: yellowish patches, skin, and the tough ‘eyes’. I suggest you do the same.

In several recipes, I call for fresh tomatoes to be blanched and peeled. Here’s how to do it: bring a large pot of water to the boil. Use a knife to make a shallow X through the skin in the bottom of each tomato. Working in batches of tomatoes of similar size, carefully plunge them into the boiling water and blanch for 20 seconds for larger tomatoes, about 10 seconds for small ones. Transfer them to a big bowl of ice-cold water. Drain them and pull the skin off the tomatoes. You can gently scrape them with a knife to loosen any stubborn skin. Cut out the tough core, unless you’re working with cherry or grape tomatoes.

BEANS

Buy the freshest dried beans you can find. The idea of ‘fresh dried beans’ might sound like a contradiction, but many of the dried beans you find on supermarket shelves have been dried for so long that they take forever to cook and never achieve the same lovely texture as fresh dried beans. You can identify old beans by looking for bags where lots of beans have begun to crack and split. But your best bet is buying from a reliable source, a brand or shop that has sold you nice beans in the past.

MALDON SALT

When people ask me to name my favourite ingredient, I think about fresh beans and ramps, artichokes and parsnips, tomatoes and Parmesan, but in the end I always go with Maldon salt. Made by a 200-year-old company, the clean-tasting, delicately crunchy flakes of salt are carefully gleaned from the Blackwater River estuary in Essex. I use it to season just about everything, whether at the last minute, so as to preserve a bit of the salt’s crunch, or earlier on. Really, the only times I prefer sea salt are for seasoning meat (a sprinkle of Maldon crystals would tumble right off) or salting pasta water or a brine (who can afford Maldon salt for that!). That said, if you don’t have it on hand, another flaky sea salt will do.

BREAD

Filone, a crusty Italian loaf with an airy crumb, is my bread of choice. But if you can’t find it locally, you can substitute any bread with similar qualities when you make the following:

Breadcrumbs

When I call for breadcrumbs, I mean stale bread (two days or so old) pulsed in a food processor until it’s coarse (about the size of lentils) or fine (slightly larger than grains of sand), depending on the recipe. If you don’t have stale bread, you can replicate the texture by popping the bread into a low oven for a bit, until it’s slightly dried out but hasn’t coloured.

Toast and Bruschetta

The crunch and heft of toast and simple bruschetta provide perfect contrast to countless dishes, including many in this book. To make toast, I like to grill or griddle slices (about 1cm thick) of crusty rustic bread until they’re crunchy on the outside, but not dry and brittle. To make bruschetta, rub one side of each toast liberally with a raw clove of garlic, drizzle with good olive oil (ideally a grassy, peppery oil), and sprinkle with Maldon or another flaky sea salt.

Croutons

I make croutons from stale rustic Italian bread, the crust removed, with a light, hole-riddle crumb, for Caesar Salad (see recipe, here) and Roast Chicken with Tomato-and-Bread Salad (see recipe, here). The toasting process is the same, but I like croutons of a slightly different shape for these recipes. For the Caesar, I tear enough of the crumb to make two generous handfuls of irregular bite-sized pieces. For the bread salad, I tear the crumb of a large loaf into long strips of different lengths. It’s nice for them to be about the same width (2.5cm), so they toast evenly.

To make the croutons: spread the bread pieces on a tray in one layer and bake them in a 200°C/400°F/gas 6 oven, shaking the pan and tossing the pieces now and then, until they’re golden brown and crunchy all the way through, 10 to 15 minutes; they shouldn’t give at all when you squeeze them. Keep a close eye on them to be sure they don’t get too dark.

EQUIPMENT

MEAT MINCER

I’m a big fan of mincing my own meat. It gives you control over the cuts of meat you use for burgers and meatballs. It also lets you be sure that the minced meat you cook with hasn’t been overworked, which can make the results dense and unappealing. I have the proper mincer at the restaurants, but you can buy a mincer attachment for your stand mixer. Before you mince, I suggest you pop the meat and the mincer attachment into the freezer until the edges of the meat go crunchy. Several recipes in this book ask you to mince meat along with other ingredients, like breadcrumbs and herbs. I suggest that you make the effort and do it yourself, but sure, you could ask a nice butcher to do it for you.

MORTAR AND PESTLE

I’d trade all the fancy blenders and mixers in the world for a granite mortar and pestle. I use mine often for pounding toasted spices to a powder, smashing garlic to a paste to make aioli, and much more. You can get by without one – whizzing spices in a grinder, chopping and scraping ingredients to a paste on a cutting board with a chef’s knife – but nothing else is quite as satisfying.