Pan-Roasted Carrots

Intrigued by the title, I was browsing through Think Like a Chef byTom Colicchio the other day and came across his recipe for pan-roasted carrots. The sheer simplicity of this dish inspired me to do my own version.

Chef Colicchio calls for 16 peeled and trimmed carrots, salt and pepper, 4 sprigs of rosemary, 1 tablespoon of butter, and 4 teaspoons of honey. Sounds delicious, but I want a little less sweetness, so I use balsamic vinegar, and less of it. I also object to peeling the carrots, because I don’t want to lose all the flavor and nutrients in the peel. I also skipped the pepper, but freshly ground white pepper would be a nice addition.

Start with nice carrots, by which I mean carrots that are of about the same size, are straight, and hopefully are fresh from a garden. Wash them, and optionally peel them. Make sure to dry the carrots to avoid splattering.

Preheat a large fry or sauté pan over medium heat with a generous amount of extra virgin olive oil. When the pan is ready, add the carrots. Every so often over the next twenty minutes or so, turn the carrots so that the whole carrot is roasted.

When the carrots look like they’re done, add a spear or two of fresh rosemary. Continue cooking and turning the carrots for another five minutes or so. Then add a tablespoon of butter and drizzle them with balsamic vinegar.

As the butter melts, turn the carrots to coat all the way around with butter and balsamic. Much of the butter will remain in the pan, and the rosemary is really only there to perfume the carrots. The balsamic darkens the caramelization and adds its own sweetness. Remove the carrots from the pan to a serving dish and sprinkle liberally with Fleur de Sel.

These things are so good I eat them as a snack!

Technique: Egg Pasta Dough

I have home-cured bacon. How can I not make a carbonara sauce? But first, I need some pasta to put it on.

If you’ve never made egg pasta, it really isn’t as hard as you might think. It may not be as easy as Mario Batali makes it look on Iron Chef America, but it’s easy nonetheless.

The recipe is about as simple as it can get: one egg and ½ cup of flour per portion. I find it’s best to add a portion for the table, so if you have four for dinner, make five portions. That way you have an abundance.

You can make it in a bowl if you wish, or mix it with a mixer. I prefer to use a fork and just make a mess on the counter since the counter is going to get messy anyway.

The type of flour isn’t particularly critical. All purpose flour makes excellent pasta, as does any other flour. My preference is about 1 part semolina flour to 2 parts all purpose flour. Semolina flour makes pasta nicely toothy, but too much semolina is really hard to work unless you’re using a high-power pasta machine. Many dried pastas are made with 100% semolina flour.

To roll out the dough, I generally use the Kitchen Aid pasta roller set. Manual pasta machines work well, but you need to be able to clamp them to the table or counter or you’ll never be able to roll out your pasta. You can also roll out the dough by hand, but be prepared for some serious rolling time.

To get started, roughly measure the flour. Honestly, if you’re close, you’re just fine. No precision required here. Then add the eggs.

Start breaking up the eggs with a fork, and pull in flour from the edges until you realize that you aren’t making any more progress. Then clean off the fork and knead the dough by hand until it all comes together and you can form a nice ball of pasta dough. It’ll feel a bit rough. Cover that ball and let it rest for at least fifteen minutes. If you want to let it rest longer, use a damp towel to cover it.

When you’re ready to roll the dough, divide it into whatever number of finished portions you’re making. Using one portion at a time, roll it out.

The first pass through the pasta machine doesn’t seem to do much, but that’s okay. Just use flour liberally, keep folding the dough into thirds or quarters, and pass it through the rollers again.

After several passes through the rollers the texture and color will change. The dough becomes lighter in color and begins to feel silky. That’s when you start to adjust the setting on the roller to make the pasta thinner. With the Kitchen Aid attachment I generally get to 5. The same setting on a manual machine isn’t as thin, but it’s about as thin as I ever manage to get the dough.

The goal is to be able to see your hand through the dough. Sometimes it tears. If it does, just fold it up, back the roller up one setting, and continue rolling. If the pasta feels a bit sticky, dust it with flour.

When you’re satisfied that your dough is silky smooth and pale enough, it’s time to cut or shape it. The sheets you’re making are perfect for lasagna, ravioli, or even tortellini.

If you cut the pasta you’ll want to hang it somewhere to let it dry a bit. Those handy bars around counters that you thought were for towels are actually built-in pasta dryers! Be sure to clean and flour them liberally.

There are two things I’ve never seen explained in pasta recipes that can cause disasters. The first is that cut pasta can re-fuse itself if you don’t separate the strands rather quickly and flour them liberally; the resulting lump can be unpleasant. The second is that you really only want to let it dry a few minutes before moving it from the drying rack to a sheet pan. If you happily let the pasta hang on that handy rack it will shatter when you try to get it off and put it in the pot. Trust me, I’ve done it. The best flour for dusting the finished pasta is white rice flour, but all purpose flour works fine.

When you’re ready to cook the pasta, be prepared because it cooks much faster than dried pasta. You should salt the water to the point that it tastes like the Mediterranean Sea, but never use oil. Also, the water must be at a rolling boil and the pot must be large.

Add one portion of pasta to the water. As soon as it floats to the surface it’s done. Very thin pastas can cook in 30 seconds; the fettuccine made for this post took about 2 minutes. Use tongs to pull it out, or if you have one, cook it in a pasta basket.

Once you’ve made fresh egg pasta you’ll be reluctant to buy dried pasta again, and you’ll find that most “fresh” pasta you can buy just doesn’t measure up. There’s a bit of investment to get going, but you will not regret it once you’ve tasted your first homemade pasta.

Bacon

Mmm, bacon. I need some bacon for the BLT From Scratch Challenge, and I’ve never cured meat before, so it’s time to do a test.

For this first bacon I used the recipe and method in Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It. There are excellent recipes in Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie and The Paley’s Place Cookbook by Vitaly Paley. I’ll try both eventually.

For this recipe you’ll need to get some curing salt, sometimes called “pink salt,” Prague powder, or Insta-Cure #1. Don’t confuse this pink salt with actual pink salt from Australia or the Himalayan Plateau. Curing salt includes salt, sodium nitrate, sodium nitrite, and other ingredients, and is commonly dyed pink to make it visually different from regular salt.

Bacon Cure

½ cup sugar
1 tablespoon blackstrap molasses
2 tablespoons kosher or sea salt
1 teaspoon curing salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

Rinse, trim, and dry one hunk of pork belly of about 2½-3 pounds so that it’s rectangular. Then mix the cure ingredients together and rub it into the pork belly on both sides and along the edges.

Put the belly into a plastic bag if you have one big enough, or into a glass dish that will hold it and cover with plastic wrap. Put into the refrigerator to cure.

Every day for the next week, massage the juices that have accumulated back into the meat and turn it over. If it still feels squishy anywhere after a week, continue to cure for another day or two. Then you’re ready to smoke or roast the bacon.

For this first batch I roasted the bacon in a 200°F oven for about 2 hours until the interior temperature reached 150°F. Then I brushed genuine liquid hickory smoke on both sides and let it cool.

This was my first home-cured bacon and I will never buy bacon again. It’s just plain silly to buy that which can be made so easily and so very much better than store-bought.

Chicken and Veal Stew

I needed a meal for four. I had chicken for two, veal shanks for two, and absolutely no desire to go to the store. A look into the pantry revealed potatoes and carrots. I had what I needed for a stew!

The first step was to braise the veal shanks. A braise will be successful if the meat is dredged in seasoned flour, then browned before beginning the actual braise. There’s nothing fancy here, just some salt and freshly ground pepper in flour. Be sure to leave air around each piece while browning, even if you have to do it in stages, as in this case.

It isn’t strictly necessary to use aromatics, but I really like to melt some mirepoix to make an extra rich broth. I didn’t have celery, so I used carrots, onions, and red capsicum (bell pepper), better known as the Cajun trinity. I just cooked the trinity in some extra virgin olive oil until the onions were starting to look translucent.

You really need wine and stock for a good braise, although stock alone will work fine. I had some wild mushroom stock left over, and a goodly stock of dried wild mushrooms to make more. I put the shanks into the pan and added hot stock until it was about halfway up the shanks. This went into a 350°F/175°C oven, uncovered, for about three hours. After an hour or so, I turned the shanks over, and turned them back about two hours into cooking.

At this point I needed the oven to make bread, so I finished the stew on the stovetop. It would have worked just as well in the oven.

While the braise was working, I skinned two chicken leg quarters and visited the herb garden for rosemary, thyme, and parsley. The rosemary and thyme were wrapped in a scrap of cheesecloth and secured with a food-safe band–kitchen twine would have worked fine.

After the shanks had cooked to the point that the meat fell off the bone, I removed the veal bones and added the chicken quarters along with more stock and the now-reconstituted dried mushrooms used to make it, three cloves of garlic, and the herb packet.

I cooked this, covered, at a simmer until the chicken meat literally fell off the bones when I picked them up with tongs. At that point I added baby red potatoes, quartered yukon gold potatoes, and carrots. I continued cooking at a simmer until the potatoes were done.

Then I strained the liquid into another container and degreased it. Meanwhile the pot went back onto the stove with wine, which was reduced by one-half, then more stock, and finally the degreased juices from the braise and simmer. At this point I tasted the sauce, and added a bit of salt and pepper. Notice that this was the first and only seasoning, other than the small amount of salt and pepper in the flour used for dredging.

Cooking slowly for more than five hours extracted a lot of flavor from the veal and chicken bones, as well as from the meat. Wine has some sodium in it, and reducing the stock and juices concentrated the flavors. Thus, only a small bit of salt and pepper was needed. The parsley isn’t there just for looks. A bit of  minced parsley adds a subtle fresh note that really finishes a dish.

Turned out that I made too much. No one seemed to complain about having this stew two days running, and yes, it was better the second day!

Salmon en Papillote

Cooking en papillote is an easy do-ahead preparation that is virtually foolproof, and it’s a fabulous way to impress guests! Children also enjoy being able to rip open the little present you’ve left on their plates.

Start by removing the pin bones from the fish if it has any. Lay out a sheet of parchment paper. Visually divide the sheet in half, then center the fish in the middle of one half. For this dish, I used a salmon fillet. Season the fish, then add whatever vegetables you wish to serve with it. In addition to salt, I used fresh dill and thinly sliced lemon. For vegetables I used red bell pepper and green beans. The whole was topped with some caramelized onions and about a tablespoon of butter to make a sauce.

Fold the parchment in half and crimp the edges. I find that simply crimping and tucking as I work my way around works fine. Sometimes it takes an extra fold or two to get the package to hold together. Carefully slide the packet onto a baking sheet. If you’re making this ahead of time, put it in the refrigerator until time to cook.

When you’re ready to eat, slide the baking sheet into a medium oven and cook until done. You won’t be able to check for doneness, so be sure you have a good idea how long the fish will take. The salmon fillet I used needed 12 minutes. Remember that when cooking en papillote you’re partially steaming what you’re cooking, so things cook faster. It’s better to stop too soon with fish than to overcook, so err on the side of shorter cooking times. Besides, things keep cooking for awhile in the packet because of residual heat.

Carefully place the packets on plates and serve. Your guests will tear open the packet to release a wonderfully aromatic steam and find everything inside is cooked just right with flavors that are distinct, yet with notes from the other items in the packet.