Maximum Flavor: Recipes That Will Change the Way You Cook (17 page)

SMOKING

Smoke has a rich and layered flavor that, when added carefully, can enhance the inherent flavor of food. It multiplies the umami effect, naturally making smoked foods more savory and delicious. While smoking was originally used more as a preservative, today it is more about adding flavor. Smoking is clearly one of America’s favorite pastimes. Though we love the flavor of smoke, rest assured that if it is not to your taste you can eliminate it from any of the recipes in this book. But we encourage you to try them as written because there are times when smoke can make everything taste just a little bit better, and that’s what great cooking is all about.

Low smoldering flames create the best environment for smoking food. There are relatively inexpensive stovetop smokers readily available in most big-box stores and online. There’s the Smoking Gun, a handheld device made by a company named PolyScience that allows you to inject smoke into a closed container like a covered pan or a zip-top bag and cold smoke just about anything. And let’s not leave out the surprisingly wide variety of backyard smokers you can choose from, from manual to automatic, in sizes large and small.

If you’re just starting out, you can rig your own stovetop smoker using a large roasting pan: Set a disposable aluminum pan in the bottom of the roasting pan and add a layer of wood chips or shavings. There is some debate about the wisdom of soaking your chips; truthfully, we don’t bother with it. Set a stainless steel rack over them. Put food directly on the rack, or put it in a smaller, shallow pan and set that on the rack. Cover the roasting pan tightly with foil. Set it on a burner over medium-low heat and smoke for the desired time period. If you want to cold smoke ingredients, put them in a stainless steel pan set over a layer of ice and refresh the ice periodically as needed.

We have found that an outdoor grill is also the perfect tool for rigging an outdoor smoker, using disposable pie tins to hold wood chips or whatever else we may be using to generate the smoke. Put the wood chip material into the pie tin and put the tin directly on the grill grates. When it begins to smoke, put the ingredients to be smoked into a separate container in the grill and close the lid. Open the vents for some airflow and to help the wood chips smolder and smoke. If you’re using a charcoal grill you can scatter a few wood chunks among the coals. For cold smoking, which flavors food without cooking it, set the grill on low and put the ingredients to be smoked in a container set over an ice water bath so they stay cool while in the grill. Generally speaking, cold smoking is best when it is done at temperatures ranging from 70° to 90°F (21° to 32°C). For long cold smokes, change the ice regularly and/or smoke for multiple shorter periods, refrigerating the ingredients between smokes to keep everything at optimum temperatures.

Once you’ve played with the technique, you can decide whether or not you want to invest in some of the smoking equipment mentioned above. Consider yourself forewarned, though: Smoking is addictive.

POTATO GRATIN

THERE’S A SPECIAL SYNERGY THAT OCCURS WHEN YOU COMBINE
thinly sliced potatoes, onions, seasoned milk, and cheese and cook them long and slow. A potato gratin is so simple that you may wonder why we included a recipe for it. The proportions here are spot-on, so you can use it as a base technique with dozens of different variations. The 2½ cups of liquid can be dairy or stock or juice; in one of our favorite variations, we infuse milk with toasted onion solids to make an onion soup gratin. The same goes for the cheese: Gruyère is the classic, but you can use anything from Pepper Jack to Brie with delicious results. We like to serve this gratin as the main course of a meal, because the real problem with great potato dishes is that they are usually served on the side and we never get to eat as much of them as we would like.

SERVES 6 TO 8 AS A MAIN COURSE

2¾ cups 720 grams
whole milk

½ cup 120 grams
crème fraîche
,
homemade or store-bought, or heavy cream

2 large
eggs

¼ teaspoon 0.5 gram freshly grated
nutmeg

1 teaspoon 6 grams
fine sea salt

½ medium
onion

4 large
russet potatoes,
peeled

10 ounces 285 grams
Gruyère cheese,
freshly grated (about 2½ cups)

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). Butter a 3-quart (2.8-liter) gratin dish.

In a large bowl, combine the milk and crème fraîche. Whisk in the eggs, nutmeg, and salt. Use a mandoline to thinly slice the onion and potatoes directly into the bowl of milk. Mix gently with your hands to blend and coat. Take half the onions and potatoes and spread them evenly in the bottom of the prepared gratin dish. Add half of the cheese in an even layer on top. Add the remaining onions and potatoes, making sure the top is smooth and even. Pour any remaining liquid into the dish, top with the remaining cheese, and cover with foil.

Bake for 1 hour. Remove the foil, rotate the gratin dish, and cook until the top is a deep golden brown, about 30 minutes. Serve hot.

FRENCH FRIES

IT SEEMS THAT EVERYONE CHASES THE PERFECT FRENCH FRY.
Our technique is to soak them in salted water and then steam them in the pressure cooker to hydrate the starches and gelatinize them before a final frying round. This produces perfectly cooked potatoes encased in a thin, crisp outer shell. A sprinkling of salt is all you really need to finish them off.

SERVES 4 AS A SIDE DISH

6⅔ cups 1,500 grams
water

2½ tablespoons 45 grams
fine sea salt,
plus more for seasoning the fries

6 large
russet potatoes

Rice bran oil
or peanut oil, for frying

In a large bowl, combine the water and salt and stir until the salt is dissolved.

Peel the potatoes. Square off the top and bottom of each potato and then trim a small slice off the bottom of each one so that it lies flat on the cutting board. Cut the potato into ⅜-inch-thick (1 cm) planks. Lay each plank flat on the cutting board and cut lengthwise into ⅜-inch-wide (1 cm) batons. Put the potato batons in the bowl of salt water and let them soak for 2 to 3 hours.

Drain the potatoes and discard the water. Put the potatoes in a bowl that fits easily inside your pressure cooker. Put 2 inches (5 cm) of water in the cooker and set a small rack inside. Put the bowl on the rack and cook at high pressure for 5 minutes. Let the pressure dissipate naturally. Remove the lid of the pressure cooker and immediately remove the potatoes from the bowl and lay them out on a wire rack to cool to room temperature, about 30 minutes. (If you leave them to cool in the bowl they will stick to each other and to the bowl.) Refrigerate the potatoes, uncovered, for up to 6 hours, until you are ready to fry, or cover when completely cold and refrigerate for up to 24 hours.

Preheat the oven to 250°F (120°C).

Fill a large pot with 2 inches (5 cm) of oil and heat it to 400°F (205°C). Put about one-quarter of the potatoes in the oil and stir them with a metal spider skimmer. The temperature should drop to about 375°F (190°C). Cook the potatoes until they are a deep golden brown on the outside and cooked through, about 5 minutes. It’s important to cook these potatoes all the way through or they will steam as they cool and lose their crisp texture. Transfer the fries to a wire rack and season generously with salt. Put the rack with the fries into the warm oven while frying the remaining batches. Serve hot.

LEMON ROASTED POTATOES

WHEN WE ROAST OUR POTATOES, WE NESTLE THEM INTO A BED
of onions and lemons. The flavors slowly penetrate the spuds, and the lemons and onions soften and caramelize into an almost marmalade-like texture. Toss in chopped rosemary at the very end and the heat from the baking pan is enough to release the natural oils and cause it to perfume the entire dish. Just a few ingredients, used to their best advantage.

SERVES 6 TO 8 AS A SIDE DISH

2 pounds 3 ounces 1,000 grams
new potatoes

1 medium
yellow onion

2 small
lemons,
preferably Meyer

1 teaspoon 6 grams
fine sea salt

1 teaspoon 5 grams
olive oil

⅔ cup 150 grams
unsalted butter

1 teaspoon 1.5 grams chopped fresh
rosemary

Preheat the oven to 425°F (225°C).

Set a stovetop steamer over medium heat. Add the potatoes. Adjust the heat to maintain a gentle simmer and steam the potatoes until tender when pierced with a cake tester, about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, halve the onion through the root end so that there is a piece of core at the end of both halves holding the layers together. Cut off a small slice at one end of each lemon so that you just expose the inner fruit. Use a mandoline or sharp chef’s knife to thinly slice the onion and lemons, discarding the uncut end of the lemon, any seeds, and onion cores when you are done. Mix them together with your hands in a medium bowl and season with the salt.