Chews Wise

Really Easy Potato Pizza From Jim Lahey's "My Bread" ... Trust Me, It's Great

By Samuel Fromartz

One of the challenges for a home baker is to try and figure out how to make a great bread once you've tasted it. Like encountering the Platonic ideal, you recognize it, reach for it and try and duplicate it -- and then you fail miserably and often give up.

Jim Lahey, the founder of Sullivan Street Bakery, was like a culinary Plato for me. Every bread he turned out was amazing and no matter how hard I tried I couldn't find a way to make the airy, light, wonderfully tasteful bread at home. To learn more, I actually visited his bakery in New York several years ago and did a story on him. And while he gave me a few generous tips in an interview (and critiqued the sample I had in my backpack), it wasn't enough. I had to learn on my own and like most bread, I later realized success was less about the recipe than the technique.

Lahey, of course, later caused a storm on the Internet with his no-knead bread recipe, courtesy of Mark Bittman. Then, he spun those recipes into My Bread published this past fall, which ranks as a perfect starting point for an aspiring baker.

Less known than his bread, however, are his terrific pizzas, which he also includes in the book. These aren't the round pizzas he serves up at his New York restaurant, Company, but rectangular sheets of exceedingly thin-crust pizza, topped with onions, mushrooms or just tomato sauce. They are sold by the slice in his bakery.

The big secret about these crispy gems? Like no-knead bread they are dead easy and fast to make. For the effort, you get great results. 

A Cook, Not a Foodie, with a Taste for Onions

Among friends, I've been called a foodie because I'm into food and love to cook and bake. But I don't think of myself that way -- I'm not really into following the top chefs, don't watch the food shows on television and am not on a perennial search for the latest hot restaurant. I do enjoy a good meal once in a while, but I'm very careful -- I've had too many experiences where you lay out a big chunk of change for a meal and then wonder what you've spent it on.

I just like food, simply made, that tastes good. So I rate a couple of ethnic places near DC, like Hong Kong Palace, as the most enjoyable places to eat (with the best value), along with a couple of fine dining places, like Palena. But mostly, I've found I like to cook at home. Ingredients can count for 90% of the result. Like the cucumber I picked from the garden yesterday, sliced up and sprinkled with a pinch of salt. Or the Copper River sockeye salmon I recently had the pleasure of eating up in Alaska, fresh out of the water. "With fish like this, the only thing you can do is screw it up," a chef said. Visiting a fisherman's house, we ate the fillets off the grill with a bit of seasoning and not much else. Perfection!

I've thought about this reading Michael Pollan's essay in the Times magazine, "Out of the Kitchen, onto the Couch," which points out that people have forgotten how to cook. Food has become largely about entertainment, rather than engagement. You watch, rather than participate. This doesn't apply to everyone, but it is the story for many. More and more people are buying prepared foods, eating sandwiches, not cooking.

How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.

I take Pollan's point. As an avid bread maker, it's clear to me that most people have forgotten what real bread tastes like, if they've ever had it. But once they do, especially kids, there is an element of shock and awe. Now bread making is viewed as an arcane craft, but once people made bread regularly at home. It doesn't take a lot of time or work (the bread rises on its own). It's just intimidating.

I often tell people interested in baking that you have to make a few bad loaves to learn how to make good ones. In baking though, the bad ones are usually edible. So you eat them and try again. But that applies to anything worth doing. Make mistakes, eat the bad stuff -- if you can -- and do better next time. (Sometimes, mistakes can even turn out quite nicely as they did for Susan at Wild Yeast, when her baguettes became ciabatta). 

You can also make really great stuff easily (and cheaply). That was the point of my previous post on home-made ice tea for 6 cents a glass. Cucumbers with a dash of salt is another. And here's another dead easy recipe, onions with vinegar, from Claudia Roden's The New Book of Middle Eastern Food. It's especially good with fresh onions now in season at the farmers' market.

Bassal bel Khal (onions with vinegar)

2 sweet  onions, red or white

2-3 tablespoons vinegar

1/2 teaspoon salt (or to taste)

1 tablespoon mint (optional)

Peel and cut onions in half. Slice thinly. Place in a bowl and sprinkle with the vinegar and salt. Stir. Cover and let sit for at least one hour. As Roden says, the onions "will become soft, lose much of their pungency and absorb the other flavors." I've made them with the mint and without. Both are good. This dish is especially good with grilled meat or fish or tofu.  (To avoid crying while cutting onions, cut them on a counter next to your stove and turn on the flame. It will burn the gasses that make you tear. Then turn off the flame!)

This isn't about being a foodie. It's about making good, simple, food. 

- Samuel Fromartz

Ice Tea for 6 Cents a Glass, Low-Carbon Too

Did you know the cost of tea in a bottle of ice tea amounts to a few pennies  -- even while the bottle can run above $2 retail? The biggest cost of the product is the bottle itself.

Manufacturing the bottle also consumes more energy than shipping, and if you think about it, you're shipping around flavored water. Take away the bottle, make the tea at home, avoid boiled water and this is what you have: low-carbon ice tea that costs pennies even if you use the highest quality tea.

So what's the recipe?

• 3 tablespoons of loose tea
• 2-quarts tap water (I filter it) at room temperature.
• sprig of mint (optional) 
• syrup (here's a good recipe) or honey (optional) 

1. Put the tea in the container. The exact amount depends upon the kind of tea you use and can vary a lot so experiment, but I've found about 1-1/2 tablespoons per quart is a good starting point. Don't worry if it gets too dark, since it can be thinned out later with more water.

2. Fill the jug with tap water and stir.

3. Let the tea sit 6-8 hours on your kitchen counter.

4. Strain out the tea and put the tea jug in the refrigerator. Add mint if you like.

5. Sweeten with syrup or honey when you pour the tea into a glass with ice. I find it easier to sweeten by the glass, since preferences vary. 

I buy high quality loose teas from Silver Tips Tea, which has a wholesale operation called Eco-Prima that supplies many brands you already know. (They had nothing to do with this post). I've had success with Assam (Organic/Fair Trade)  Makaibari green and Darjeeling tea (O/FT) , Ceylon Kenilworth black tea,  Guranse Estate Nepal (O), which has a nice smokey flavor, and a classic, Moroccan mint. Japanese hojicha, a roasted green tea which I get from relatives in Tokyo, is also delicious. You can find it in Asian markets. It is very smooth and drinks well without any sweetener.

Why not use boiled water? I've found room temperature water makes a less acidic tea, though I've also seen recipes where the tea is steeped overnight in the refrigerator. One note on green teas -- they can be astringent so choose a mellow one like the Makaibari green. Also go easy on the sweeteners. A little goes a long way.

I buy tea in half-pound quantities. For an Assam-Ceylon blend, I use about 1/4 ounce (3 tablespoons) in about 80 ounces of water, which costs about 31 cents. For a 16-ounce glass, it comes out to about 6 cents per glass. The sweetener probably adds a penny. With prices that low, I see no reason to resort to mass market tea bags. Use the good stuff. 

- Samuel Fromartz

A 75th Anniversary: I'll Drink to That

By Clare Leschin-Hoar

As if our current economic woes weren't enough to remind us of the 1930s, this Friday, December 5th, marks the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition. It lasted 13 thirsty years until 1933. That's reason to celebrate -- even if you might be feeling a bit pinched lately.

While I've never had to imbibe in any bathtub gin or homemade hooch, it's exciting to see some of the country’s best bartenders bringing back some authentic vintage-era cocktails made from ingredients like rye, applejack and plenty of gin.

In Boston, cocktail guru Jackson Cannon of Eastern Standard brushed up on his Prohibition history, and has been reviving cocktails like the Jack Rose, El Presidente, The Scofflaw Cocktail and the Monkey Gland in a year-long celebration. It culminates in a roaring Twenties-themed costume dinner and party Thursday night.

Speakeasy's have also sprung up. In New York City, there's cozy PDT, which stands for “Please Don’t Tell”. Don’t know where to find it? Head to hot-dog joint Crif Dogs on St. Marks Place and look for a vintage-style phone booth where you pick up the receiver and press the button. If you measure up, you’re buzzed in through a secret door where bartender Jim Meehan slings era-appropriate cocktails in a low ceiling room.

In Chicago, Violet Hour and their famed bartender, Toby Maloney are where locals go for speakeasy cocktails. At San Francisco’s stylish Bourbon & Branch, patrons can nurse whiskey mash in a room with red velvet walls, or they might hop over to 21st Amendment which is holding a "repealebration celebration" on Friday.

For the aspiring mixologist, here's a couple of recipes below the fold.

 

Talkin' Texas Shrimp (with Recipes)

By Clare Leschin-Hoar

I attended the New World Food and Wine Festival in San Antonio this past weekend, and was able to see first-hand what some of the best local chefs had to offer. As you might expect, there was a slew of tasty Texas beef dishes that had more than a dash of regional Mexican influence. There’s a burgeoning wine scene, so many dishes were paired with local Texan wines too. But what actually grabbed my attention more than once was the Texas white shrimp.

It’s hard (but not impossible) for me to find American wild or farm-raised shrimp here in the Northeast, but in San Antonio, chefs like Moses Cruz of Oro Restaurant and Bar, and John Brand of Pesca on the River have easy access to both sustainably farmed and wild caught white shrimp, which I found to have a sweet yet delicate flavor.

Russ Miget, environmental quality specialist for the Texas Sea Grant Program and the Texas AgriLife Extension Service, says boasts about the sustainability of Texas white shrimp are sound. Shrimp reach sexual maturity at six-months and spawn at least once, and more often twice a year, laying 250,000 to 300,000 eggs each. And while bottom trawling is used, the shrimp boats are fishing off a mud-bottom floor, and are not dragging heavy nets over coral reefs. Bycatch is about three pounds of non-shrimp to every pound of shrimp, but much of it, like crabs, can be used.

Brand especially is a fan of the local wild stuff. “Unlike a lot of farmed shrimp from overseas which can be frozen and refrozen many times, this shrimp is frozen only once, on the shrimp boat, with the heads still intact, and it’s a bit sweeter like the sea. The flavor is so good, you don’t have to fuss with it much,” he said.

We agree, and tapped the chefs for a couple of recipes for you, because we know what it’s like to scramble for that showy holiday appetizer. And if you're searching for a mail-order source, this list of Texas Shrimp suppliers has several that sell retail.

Recipes below the fold

And the Winning Tomato Is....!

I don’t fess-up to this very often, but being a food-writer really has its perks. This was definitely one of them. I got to squeeze, smell and taste some seriously stellar tomatoes. That big boy up top was an entry in the heaviest category at the 24th Annual Massachusetts Tomato Festival where I was judging.  (The actual winner in that category was a gnarly 3.23 pound Striped German grown by farmer Jim Ward.) 

I love their names almost as much as I love eating them – Black Prince, Striped Germans, Big Zak, Supersweets and Green Zebras. They sound like million-dollar racehorses, and for some local Massachusetts farmers, the bragging rights are nearly as good.

But here in New England, the weather’s been fickle. By now, we’d normally be up to our elbows in flavor packed tomatoes, but it’s been too cool and wet. Farmers I’ve spoken with say there are plenty growing on the vines, but they’re just late to ripen, or worse, are suffering cracks from too much rain. I’m just hoping that this week’s forcast of sun means I’ll be doing some canning by Sunday. If not, I’ve got a couple of recipes on the following page worth trying from Jamie Bissonnette, chef de cuisine at KO Prime here in Boston. 
–Clare Leschin-Hoar