DORIE GREENSPAN

Rainy Day Salad

My husband, Michael, couldn’t resist this Siamese-twin tomato at the Lyme Farmers Market this week (it would have been a perfect match for the boomerang eggplant I bought the week before, but that had already become caponata)

Then, having bought it, he went back to New York, leaving me to tackle the double-headed monster on my own, which I did with one of my favorite knives

The knife (so elegant), made in Japan by Kyocera, has a ceramic blade with microscopic serrations that slice through tomato skin and soft tomato pulp effortlessly and neatly – the skin never tears and the fruit never goes ragged. 

Once I had separated the twins, I tasted the tomato to see if it was worth continuing.  The answer: yes!  In fact, the tomato was so good that I dashed out into the pouring rain to get some basil from the garden. 

With a tomato this good, less is just enough, so all I did was cut it into chunks, sprinkle it with fleur de sel and splash it with great olive oil.  Then I added some sliced plums, an idea lifted from a salad Dan Barber, the remarkable chef, had made at the remarkable Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

With a hunk of bread and good butter, it was the perfect lunch, made perfecter by the fact that I was alone so, when I finished the salad, I could drink the luscious tomato “soup” that had accumulated in the bottom of the bowl.  It certainly brightened a gray, rainy day.

Blueberry-Peach Cobbler on Serious Eats

This week's Baking with Dorie recipe on Serious Eats is Blueberry-Peach Cobbler.  It's simple, delicious and messy - just as it should be.  Enjoy!

Cooking in a Cocoon: Salmon and Tomatoes en Papillote

When I first learned to fold a parchment paper circle into a half-moon turnover in which I could cook just about anything en papillote, I cooked just about everything en papillote and thought that if I kept it up, I’d not only be among the healthiest-eating citizens in the land, I’d also earn the right to call myself an origami master.

Then, just as quickly as I became infatuated with this way of cooking, that’s how fast I put it on the back burner and moved on to the next thing.  I don’t know why I was so fickle and I certainly don’t know why I gave up on something so terrific.  But my papilloteless days are behind me.  The little packets have made a comeback chez moi and now it’s all anyone can do to stop me from whipping up a pouch and tucking something in it.

Almost anything - meat, fish, fowl, fruits and vegetables - can be neatly arranged in a tightly sealed cocoon of parchment or foil (so much easier) and gently cooked - kind of by roasting, more kind of by steaming - with little or no fat and almost no effort.

The principle here is to combine the "main ingredients" or a mix of mains (for instance, a chicken cutlet and some vegetables) with some herbs, spices or aromatics, so that as the ingredients cook, they are infused with flavor and fragrance.

The method works like a charm for individual servings - there's little better than being presented with a papillote and having the pleasure of opening it at the table, so you get that first perfumed puff of steam - but you can cook a whole fish in a packet or even all the fixings for a shellfish stew.  (And, of course, any recipe for one serving, like the one below, can be multiplied endlessly.)

These days, I often make it really easy on myself by crafting the cocoons from non-stick aluminum foil.  They don't look as elegant as parchment, but they seal super-tight with just a a quick pinch.  And there's a lot to be said for quick on a school night.

Here's a recipe for salmon and tomatoes en papillote.   You could do this same recipe with cod, monkfish or bass, or you could opt for a chicken cutlet.  And you could swap the tomatoes for zucchini or flat beans or cobless corn or any combination that appeals to you.  Naturally, the choice of herbs is up for grabs, too.  The only thing to keep in mind is that all of the ingredients should cook in the same amount of time.

Before tucking them into the packet, I rolled the grape tomatoes around in a skillet with a little hot olive oil to concentrate their flavor, but it's completely unnecessary. It was a day when I had plenty of playing-around time, which is also why I put the fish on a small parchment circle and then wrapped it in a foil pouch - again, a completely unnecessary step, but I thought it looked prettier and I had time for pretty.

SALMON AND TOMATOES EN PAPILLOTE

Makes 1 serving

2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil (more to taste)

4 grape tomatoes

About 6 basil leaves

One 5-ounce filet of salmon (skinless or not)

1/4 lemon

1/2 spring onion or 1 scallion (optional), finely sliced

1 sprig thyme

Salt and freshly ground white pepper

Center a rack in the oven, preheat the oven to 475 degrees F and have a baking sheet at hand.  Cut a piece of foil that is large enough for you to lay out the ingredients, lift up the edges of the foil and seal the packet with an inch or two of air space above the fish.

If you want to "sear" the tomatoes, warm 1 teaspoon of the olive oil in a small skillet, then saute the tomatoes just until their skins are wrinkled and bubbly, about 3 minutes.

Working in the center of the piece of foil, make a bed of basil leaves, keeping 1 leaf aside.  Sprinkle the leaves with a little salt and pepper, put the salmon over the leaves and season it with salt and pepper too.  (If the salmon has skin, lay it skin-side against the basil.)  Put the tomatoes on one side of the salmon and grate the lemon's zest over everything.  If you're using the spring onion or scallion, scatter the pieces over the fish and tomatoes.  Give the salmon a squirt of lemon juice, then cut two thin slices from the lemon and put them on top of the fish.  Top with the last basil leaf and the sprig of thyme; moisten with olive oil.

Seal the packet, making sure it's airtight and that there's puff space between the fish and the top of its cocoon.  Put the packet on the baking sheet, slide the set-up into the oven and bake for 10 minutes, if you like your fish pink and slightly jiggly in the center (great for salmon); bake 2 minutes longer if you want your fish better done.

You can either put the packet on a dinner plate and open it at the table, or  open the packet in the kitchen and arrange the ingredients on a plate.  If you plate the fish, you might want to finish the dish with a little minced basil or some snipped chives.

Bake With Me on Serious Eats

Starting today, and for every Thursday forever after (or at least for a long while), I’ll be posting a recipe with tips and a story on serious eats.

To kick off the series, there's a recipe for one of my favorite strawberry tarts.  It’s so simple that even first-time bakers can make it - yes, even if you’re a crust-coward, you can do this one. 

I hope you’ll make it and let me know!

Greenskeeping

I know, it looks a little weird, kind of like a terrarium for lettuce, but it's really a little bit of low-tech genius.  It's a terrific trick I learned from Michael Newburg, who grows the best, best greens at his Falls Brook Organic Farm.  Put your fresh greens in a big plastic bag, gather up the neck, blow a little air, aka carbon dioxide, into the bag, then seal it up quick.  If your greens are perfectly dry and really fresh (when Michael brings his to the Lyme Farmers Market, they’re only two-hours old), they’ll stay bright, firm and flavorful for at least a week like this.  The only problem is the amount of space the puffed-up bag takes in the fridge – but scrambling for a few extra cubic-inches of room on the shelf seems a small price to pay for greens that stay great from market day to market day.

French Chocolate Brownies

Julia Moskin’s got a terrific story about Brownies in the Dining section of today’s New York Times and I’m delighted that she’s included my recipe for French Chocolate Brownies.  I’m crazy about these brownies and love the story of how they came about.

The first time I made the recipe I was in Paris, preparing dinner for friends and thinking I was making a fondant for dessert.  Fondant, a creamy chocolate cake, is one of only a handful of sweets the French make for themselves at home.  I made my fondant in a square pan (not usual, but not so far-out) and added rum-flamed raisins (again, not usual, but not heretical either).  I cut the cake into squares and got the following reaction when I brought it to the table:  “Ooh, brownies – splendide!”

Fondant? Brownies?  Who was I to argue?  Maybe my friends assumed that if an American was offering them a soft, thin, crackle-topped chocolate cake cut into squares, it had to be brownies.  It didn’t really matter to me.  I liked the recipe in Paris and I liked it just as much when I re-tested it in the States.

Because Julia Moskin is a brownie-purist – she’ll allow nuts, but that’s the limit on add-ins – she understandably clipped the raisins from the recipe.  Without raisins, the brownies are a creamy, profoundly chocolaty tender treat; with them, they’re all that with a touch of exoticism tossed in.

If you want to add raisins to the brownies, here’s how to do it:

RUM-FLAMED RAISINS, for French Chocolate Brownies

(Adapted from Baking, From My Home to Yours)

1/3 cup raisins, dark or golden

1 1/2 tablespoons water

1 1/2 tablespoons dark rum

Put the raisins in a small saucepan with the water, bring to a boil over medium heat and cook until the water almost evaporates.  Add the rum, let it warm for about 30 seconds, turn off the heat, stand back and flame the rum.  When the flames have died, set the raisins aside until needed.  Right before you’re ready to put the brownie batter in the pan, fold in the raisins.

Friands from Oz, Financiers from France

I recently got an email from a food friend asking if I knew anything about Australian friands.  I was pretty sure I knew zip, but I was intrigued by the word because I knew it in French.  Kind of.  I knew the word friandise, which refers to a small delicacy – think petit four – and I thought I knew the word friand as another name for a financier.  I planned to do a little research, but before I could pull down a single book, I found Australian friands in the May issue of Bon Appetit.  I felt just like I did when I was a child, when as soon as I’d learn a new word, I’d see it or hear it.

In fact, the Bon Ap recipe was for a small cake that was clearly related to the French financier, one of my all-time favorite pastries.  I love everything about financiers, from their history and their name, to the way they’re made and the way they taste.

The financier is a pure-bred Parisian, having been created in the late nineteenth century by a pastry chef named Lasne, who had a shop on the rue Saint-Denis near the Bourse, the city’s stock exchange.  Lasne had a bead on his clients:  he knew that they were rich, discriminating and always in a hurry, so he designed his little unglazed cookie-cake so that it could be eaten without a knife, fork or spoon and without risk to suit, shirt or tie.  It was an early and classy form of fast food.

Financiers are as rich as the bankers they were named for.  They’re made from ground almonds, sugar, unwhipped egg whites, flour and an enormous quantity of melted butter, which is cooked until it is golden brown.  And, in keeping with the theme, the cakes were originally baked in rectangular pans, so that they ended up resembling ingots.

These cakes are sweet, tender and beautiful in their simplicity.  They have a nutty flavor from the browned butter and are perfect, served without any accompaniment or fuss, with coffee or tea. 

And they’re amenable to additions. They’re great with berries (not strawberries, because they’re too watery) and they’re happy to be made in whatever molds you have available.  You can make them bigger (I’ve made 8-inch round financiers, glazed them with ganache and called the dessert a torte) smaller, boat-shaped, square or round. 

Actually, for years, before I invested in rectangular financier molds, I made the pastries in mini-muffin pans and pressed a sliver of fruit into the batter.  Maybe I was Australian in another life because, as near as I can figure it, friands from Oz are made in small mini-muffin-like pans and usually have fruit in the batter.

If anyone from Australia wants to weigh in, I’d love to hear from you.

In the meantime, here’s a recipe for a classic French financier, one I learned to make from Parisian pastry chef/bread baker Jean-Luc Poujauran.  Feel free to play around with it or even to Australianize it.

FINANCIERS

Adapted from Paris Sweets, Great Desserts from the City’s Best Pastry Shops

Makes 12 cookies

1 1/2 sticks (6 ounces; 180 grams) unsalted butter

1 cup (200 grams) sugar

1 cup (100 grams) ground almonds

6 large egg whites

2/3 cup (90 grams) all-purpose flour

Put the butter in a small saucepan and bring it to the boil over medium heat, swirling the pan occasionally.  Allow the butter to bubble away until it turns a deep brown, but don’t turn your back on the pan – the difference between brown and black is measured in seconds.  Pull the pan from the heat and keep it in a warm place.

Mix the sugar and almonds together in a medium saucepan.  Stir in the egg whites, place the pan over low heat, and, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, heat the mixture until it is runny, slightly white and hot to the touch, about 2 minutes.  Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the flour, then gradually mix in the melted butter.  Transfer the batter to a bowl, cover with plastic wrap, pressing it against the surface of the batter to create an airtight seal, and chill for at least 1 hour.  (The batter can be kept covered in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.)

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C).  Butter 12 rectangular financier molds (these were tested in 3-3/4 x 2 x 5/8-inch [10 x 5 x 1-1/2-cm] rectangular molds that each hold 3 tablespoons), dust the interiors with flour and tap out the excess.  Place the molds on a baking sheet for easy transport.

Fill each mold almost to the top with batter.  Slide the molds into the oven and bake for about 13 minutes, or until the financiers are golden, crowned and springy to the touch.  If necessary, run a blunt knife between the cookies and the sides of the pans, then turn the cookies out of their molds and allow them to cool to room temperature right side up on cooling racks.

Very Verrine: Dinner in a Glass

What you’re looking at is the leftovers from yesterday’s lunch.  They don't look so bad, do they?  The original was just a salad – romaine, celery, tomato, scallions, carrots, raisins, tuna and a mustard vinaigrette – but when I couldn’t find a storage container and grabbed a jelly jar instead, the remains of the day started looking better.

My salad-in-a-glass was expedient, but these days – and for the past few years – chefs in Paris have thought long, hard and super-creatively about presenting their precious products in glasses and the results have been stunning.

Today, you can go to a restaurant and get a little amuse bouche in a slender vodka glass or an elaborate dessert in a slimmed-down lowball and in between be served an app in a glass, vegetables in a glass and maybe even a glass-enclosed pot-au-feu.  It’s a certified trend. (See the recent article in the LA Times; recipes included.)

The first meal-in-a-glass that I can remember (aside from my mom’s chocolate Slim-Fasts or my own sundaes, which weren’t meant to be meals but could have been) was some time in the late-90s at Petrossian in Paris when Phillippe Conticini was the chef.  My friend Nick Malgieri and I had a multi-course meal there in which every dish was served in a glass with custom-designed flatware – all of it long-handled – and the whole event finished with each of us being served a tray of desserts.  I don’t have the best memory, but I think we both had five glasses and each glass had eight elements (or maybe we had eight glasses, each with five different layers).  It was a wow meal and it wore out our brains – so much to taste; so, so, so much to think about. 

Nowadays, these kinds of dishes, called verrines, after the glasses they’re served in, are everywhere in Paris, especially in pastry shops.  At Pierre Herme’s they’re an art form – no surprise, I know. 

I’m not thinking art this weekend, but I do have glasses galore...

Jellied gazpacho?  Crab-avocado salad?  Seared scallops, mango salsa and a scallop ceviche to finish it?  Hmm – could be beautiful in the martini glass.  Layered beef tartar? That might be great in the snifter.  Actually, just a few tablespoons of chopped beef, a teaspoon or so each of chopped onions and salty capers and an adorable quail egg as the topper, would be a perfect hors d’oeuvre in that shapely glass that I’ve never used for anything but short flowers.  I could get into this.

Rugelach: Three Stories and a Recipe

This is a tri-part post on a cookie that merits a triple dose of attention:  rugelach, cookies (really pastries) made of cream-cheese dough, spread with jam and nuts (and often raisins), cut into wedges and rolled up to resemble mini croissants.

Part I: Making them

When I was a kid in Brooklyn, there were three bakeries: One had the best bread; another (Ebinger’s) had a famous Black-Out Cake; and the third had the greatest cookies, among them, rugelach. 

In our house, where my mother neither cooked nor baked (she did and still does use the oven as a breadbox), rugelach were always bought from bakery #3 - it never occurred to me that they could be made at home.  Then one day, I caught my mother-in-law in the act of rugelaching. 

I watched her, awestruck, asked for the recipe and made the cookies in my peanut-sized kitchen soon after.  (Click here to read the story and get the recipe.)

In those days, my major baking tools were a mixing bowl and wooden spoon and they're what I used to make the dough.  Hand mixing is still a fine way to make this easy dough, but nowadays I use a food processor, which mixes the dough in an instant and keeps it cool and supple.

Here are a few tips for making the dough:

• Take the cream cheese and butter out of the refrigerator just 10 minutes before you’re going to use them – they should be still cold and only a tad soft.  (If you’re making the dough by hand, the cream cheese and butter should be softened until they’re spreadable.)

• Give the dough a leisurely chill in the fridge before rolling it out.  Two hours is a minimum chill, overnight is even better.

• Roll the dough out on a lightly floured work surface.  This is an easy-rolling dough, so you’ll ace it first time out. 

• Warm whatever jam you’re using until it liquefies, then cool it a bit; you don’t want the hot jam to melt the dough.

• Chop the nuts and fruit for the filling.  The rugelach themselves aren’t very big and the dough is thin, so the filling should be generous but not super chunky.

• The best tool for cutting dough is a pizza wheel; second best is a sharp chef’s knife.

• Refrigerate the cookies after you’ve assembled them – they’ll hold their shape a lot better if you bake them when they’re cold.

• Under heat, the butter in the dough and the jam and cinnamon-sugar in the filling are exuberant bubblers and dribblers, so use a lined baking sheet.  This is a perfect job for a silicone baking mat or nonstick aluminum foil.

Part II: Making them ahead

The assembled cookies freeze perfectly (I prefer to freeze them unbaked) and it's a good thing they do because my mom, who had been in for the weekend, was dreading her flight back to Florida and I hadn't had a minute to make her anything that might sweeten the trip. Happily, there were rugelach in the freezer. 

While she was packing, I pulled out the frozen cookies,

brushed them with egg wash, sprinkled them with sugar, then baked them – no defrosting necessary.

They were still a little warm when I tucked them into her carry-on bag. 

Part III:  Re-making them

Last December, I had a rugelach-making fest with Michele Norris, a host on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, in her Washington, DC kitchen.  We made the cookies (click to listen to us baking), had a lot of fun, and then, as we were cleaning up, Michele asked what else she could do with the dough. I’d always thought of rugelach dough as dough for making rugelach, but I tossed out the fact that it’s sugarless and said that it would probably take to bunches of fillings.

In an instant, Michele, a very creative cook, was off and running and thinking of savory ideas – savory as in ham, cheese, bacon, dried tomatoes, hot-pepper jelly and on and on and on.

In the more than 30 years that I’d been making rugelach, I’d tweaked the recipe – I added chocolate, changed the jam – but I’d done nothing major and certainly nothing as radical as taking the pastries from sweet to savory or as serving them with cocktails or soup instead of coffee or tea.

Since Michele spun these terrific ideas, I’ve made chutney rugelach and tapenade rugelach and I’ve got a goat cheese rugelach in my head and some thoughts about riffing on a pissaladiere.  My mother-in-law may have introduced me to making rugelach, but Michele made me rethink them. 

I’m going to be making savory rugelach over the weekend and maybe you'll be rugelaching too – if you noodle with the fillings, let me know what you do. 

So that you don’t have to scroll, here’s the recipe again.

Fish Flipping Made Easy

There are so many things that can make me happy in the kitchen and a perfect tool is one of them.  I love when I can grab just the right thing for a job, an act that entails:

• Knowing just what the right thing is;
• Having it; and
• Being able to put my hands on it the instant I need it.

Given that I’ve got oodles (shorthand for hundreds) of kitchen tools and gadgets, that they’re divided among three kitchens and that I’m neither the neatest nor the most organized person in the world, when all the tool-elements are aligned, it’s an excellent day.

Fortunately, when I need the right spatula for turning and lifting delicate fish (or omelets, chicken breasts, veal scaloppini or something that’s being sautéed), it’s always a happy day because I’ve got flexible spatulas in each of my kitchens. 

Here’s the one that lives in New York:

The spatula’s slightly wedged shape, thin blade and flexibility (bend it and it will give) make it easy to maneuver in tight spaces – think of it as the sports car of spatulas – while its shape is cradling and its slotted spines allow excess liquids to fall back into the pan.

The first time I saw one of these was when I was working in Daniel Boulud’s kitchen.  (Until Food Network chefs started flipping them around, they were rarely seen in public.)  Of course, I ran out and bought one as soon as I hung up my apron. 

If you’re in a store, buying one is simple:  you just point to the spatula of your choice.  The problems start when you try to stock up online – the tool is variously called a flexible spatula, a slotted spatula, a chef’s spatula, a flexible slotted chef’s spatula, or even a flexible slotted French chef's spatula. Aaarrgh.

Just to get you started, here are a few sources for the many-nomered always-dependable spatula:

• You can get a Wusthof slotted spatula (that’s the one in the picture) for about $40 at Chefs Catalog; it’s pricey, but you’re only going to buy it once in your life – there are no moving parts to wear out;

• You can pick up a Lamson and Goodnow Chef’s Slotted Turner (I’ve got one of these too) for $25 at their online store (or at amazon, where the more expensive ebony-handled turner is a better buy);

• And then there’s the new kid on the block:  Mario Batali’s Soft Grip Slotted Fish Turner, made of nylon and ringing in at an easy-to-take $8 on amazon. 

I’m not sure that nylon has the support of metal, but for 8 bucks I’ll give it a test drive. Unless you know something I should know ...