Oops! Seasoning

My fault.

I reviewed last night's post in the clear, bracing, cold, light of today's Polar Vortex morning and found that I had left out some key steps in the recipe.  You gotta season the food.

This should be the guideline.  Any time you are adding another ingredient, you must season it.  I see far too many recipes that say something like "adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper before serving" tagged on the tail end.  That can cause a big problem for a cook, because you are being told to add all the seasoning at one time.  You can easily make a mistake.  Under seasoning can be fixed.  Too much salt or pepper is a disaster.

So, for example, yesterday I put a recipe for pork and red cabbage out there.  I said to season the roast before searing.  Good.  I also should have said that salt and pepper must be added, in small quantities, when you begin to sauté the onions, apples, cabbage and when the roast goes into the vegetables.  You should be constantly seasoning and tasting throughout the whole process.  This way, the flavor is built up over time, only needing a small adjustment, or nothing, before going to the table.  And you are less likely to over season.

Keep a little ramekin of salt next to your stove.  Never use a shaker in you kitchen.  The tops do come off, pouring a ton of salt in that stew you have been working on for hours.  Most professionals use kosher salt as the standard kitchen salt.  It feels good between your fingers and has a clean flavor.  For some dishes, like roasted lamb, sea salt brings out the richness of the meat in a better way.  There is a trend where chefs are using exotic salts, black, Himalayan red, etc.  If you want to do this, use kosher for the main seasoning while cooking.  Do the final seasoning with the more delicately flavored salt as the food is leaving the kitchen.  I never got herb salt.  If I want thyme in my food, I put it in, rather than flavoring a salt with it.  Forget iodized salt with it's brittle flavor.

Fresh ground black pepper is essential.  The same with white pepper.  I keep grinders right by my cutting board and use them constantly, adjusting the grind for specific purposes.  Whole peppercorns retain their flavor.  Indian markets are a good source for fresh, whole peppercorns.  The flavor of pre-ground pepper is essentially flat, having lost it's punch during shipping and storage.  There is a big difference.  This isn't a place to cut corners.

Sorry for problems with yesterday's recipe.  No more late night posts.  I'm still learning how to write up what I do unconsciously, as muscle memory and I'll take more time in the future, making sure that everything is clear before it gets to you.

The Formation of a Chef, and Pigs (pork roasted with apples and red cabbage)

Years in the restaurant biz will teach you that titles mean very little.  I started cooking in Pocono hotel kitchens when I was a kid.  While the food may not have been fancy, those ladies behind the stove blew out a large quantity of good, family style eats for an unrelenting five months a year.  It was impressive.  They had their weekly menu and roared it out of the kitchen.  Later I went to seafood houses, burger joints, grille rooms and corner bars.  In those kind of places, it was rare that anyone would call himself “chef,” because they were just doing journeyman work.  Get it out, make it consistent, give the customer value.

That changed with Philly’s “Restaurant Renaissance.”  For the first time, high quality ingredients were available from the farms in Bucks, Chester and Lancaster Counties.  New kinds of produce from Jersey started making it to the city.  I remember getting fresh basil for the first time in 1983.  Independent folk like Roy, “The Mushroom Man” showed up on our loading dock with a basket, really a wicker basket, filled with fresh mushrooms that he had either picked or grown.  We bought everything he had.  It took months before he gave us a phone number.  It took even longer to find out that his last name was Bjornson.  He was just the guy who came to the back door with fungus.  Mark and Judy Dornstreich were heroes.  On their Branch Creek in Farm in Perkasie, PA they grew the best baby lettuce and herbs.  My favorite thing that I got from them in the early years was miniature leeks.  Beautiful leeks, perfect, no bigger than a scallion that begged to be braised in fish stock and served with seared red mullet and a buerre blanc.  Their peas, always the first of the year, still make me remember why I love spring.

The downside of the new availability of all this good stuff was that few knew what to do with it.  You learn to cook through an extended period of apprenticeship.  With the explosion of new restaurants, the pipeline of quality cooks was sucked dry by the mid 1980s.  Consequently, entrepreneurs read a couple of Jasper White or Alice Waters cookbooks, got a loan from Dad and called themselves Chef, always with a capital “C.”  And always with a worse attitude than the guys who really knew what they were doing.  The most talented French guys insisted that they be simply called cooks.

Everyone had their own “cuisine.”  I don’t know how many people told me that I would have to be completely retrained to learn their technique.  For one guy, who got quite famous, his Thai-French Cuisine consisted of making a traditional French sauce and hitting it with Tabasco and lemon juice.  Even the paté.  Another, a former pastry cook who went yahoo, put on overalls and killed goats in the alley behind his kitchen.  Elaine Tate was the Inquirer’s food critic at the time.  She was a miserable, barely human thing, a former fashion writer, who panned every restaurant that didn’t have Asian food on their menu.  Me, I was running country French places.  Not much room on the menu for wontons and hoisin, so I got slammed every time she came in my place.  In fact, I got fired twice after her reviews.  Witch!

I was in no mood for this.  I had worked with a guy from Maxim’s.  If you play the Kevin Bacon game, I am five steps away from Escoffier and already had my gig down.  We put up with grand egos, slimy investors and paychecks that bounced.  It was tough to put out a quality product when the owner was wacked, snowblind on the Bolivian stuff, completely out of control.  People who ate out at this time always seem to remember what a creative period this was in Philly’s restaurant history. 

Working cooks, well we have a different take.   We saw lots of bad food.  Does anyone else remember grilled rosemary chicken with a strawberry confit?  Salmon skin, fried and dusted with chocolate powder?  The guys on the line, yes it was almost all men, developed a quick way to weed out the pretenders from the real cooks.  First, you had to have a serious recommendation.  You had to have worked with someone that I got drunk with in the very recent past.  Secondly, you had to know how to boil a chicken, one of the most basic things that cooks do and also one of the easiest things to screw up.  Lastly, finally getting to today’s recipe, you had to know how to roast pork. 

Pigs were sent directly from God to humans for our enjoyment, to be honored and savored.  A pork roast was the most common thing served at the staff meal, which was prepared by junior members of the staff.  The 1^st cooks and the chefs were normally too busy setting up the evening mise en place or doing pre dinner shots and coffee.  If that young cook screwed up his peer’s dinner, he might find his prep trashed or his uniforms customized.   Something well prepared and tasty would win accolades and mercy for most of the remainder of the shift.  Here's a typical staff dinner.

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Pork Roasted with Apples and Red Cabbage serves 10

3# pork loin roast

1 medium head red cabbage, chopped

6 large apples, Jonathon or Braeburn, sliced

1 cup onion, diced

1 cup cider vinegar

1 tbs. salad oil

1 tbs. unsalted butter

salt and black pepper

 Trim any excess fat from the outside of the pork roast.  Season with salt and black pepper.

 Heat the oil and butter in a large roasting pan.

 While the pan is heating, deeply core the red cabbage...

 and chop it into 1/2 inch chunks.

 Sear the seasoned pork roast on all sides.

 Roast it for 20 minutes at 400° F.

Peel and core six apples.  Slice them thin, about 1/4 inch.

 Dice the onions, then...

sauté them in the oil and butter.

 Add the apples.  

 Remember to compost the peelings.

 When the onions and apples have cooked down...

add the diced red cabbage.  Sauté the cabbage until it wilts.

Add the cider vinegar.  scrape the bottom of the pan to release the caramelized bits.

 Reduce the oven heat to 350° F.  Return the roast to to the pan.

Roast the pork until it is 160° F.  About one hour.
Remove the roast from the oven.  Rest for 10 minutes.

 

Slice the roast and serve on top of cabbage.

Snowed In (French toast)

Just a brief note, since we are all in the process of being buried in Snowmageddon.  Really, look at all the red stuff spilled all over the Weather Channel.  They’re calling it Winter Storm Janus.  Interesting, Janus is an old Roman god with two faces, looking backward and forward.  Let’s look back, just one day.  What did the supermarket parking lot look like?  Mine was a crazy place, filled with folks desperately grabbing up every loaf of bread, dozens of eggs and gallons of milk, apparently prepping to be snowed in until May.  I’d prefer to look forward.  What should we do with all those provisions?

French toast?  Yep that’s the best thing to do with bread, eggs and milk.  You’re gonna need the calories to shovel away Janus, although everyone I know will be spending the day zoning on X-Box and Netfliks instead of digging out. 

Either way, here’s a good breakfast.

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French Toast serves 4

12 slices of white bread

3 cups whole milk

4 large eggs

1 cup brown sugar

1 tbs. ground cinnamon

1/3 tsp. ground nutmeg

3 tsp. unsalted butter

Whisk the milk and eggs together in a 9 X 12 baking pan.  Stir in the brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg.  Allow the batter to rest for 10 minutes until the sugar dissolves and the spices soak in.

Place 4 slices of bread in the batter.  Do not just dunk the bread, let it soak up the sweet egg mixture.  Carefully, transfer the bread to a hot buttered griddle or large sauté pan.  Cook for about 2 minutes, until the bread looks dry, then flip it over and cook for another minute.  The bread will brown and puff up, soufflé.  Repeat until all the bread has been cooked. 

Serve immediately with butter and real maple syrup.

*You can pour an ounce of rum into the batter if George or CJ (or any other lusty blaggard pirates) are coming over for breakfast.