DORIE GREENSPAN

Mortars & Pestles Aloud: Hear All About Them on Splendid Table

A few months ago, when I wrote about my mortar and pestle, there were lots of wonderful comments and an outpouring of love for the truly ancient tool. 

Well, we weren't the only ones with mortars and pestles on our minds.   My friends at Splendid Table called to say that they, too, were thinking about the duo and wanting to talk about them.  And so, because who would ever miss the chance to talk to Lynne Rossetto Kasper, Splendid Table's host, about anything, you can hear us chatting mortars and pestles this weekend or you can listen to the podcast.

As always, when I'm on the show I get to share the airwaves with Lynne's regulars, roadfoodies, Jane and Michael Stern, and her special guests.  This week it's Steve Jenkins, a.k.a. Mr. Cheese, and cookbook author and southern-food scholar, Jean Anderson.

Hope you enjoy the show -- I did.

The Big Cheese: Rodolphe Le Meunier in Tours

 

Cheese is a tricky business no matter how you slice it.  While the paean has it that cheese is the highest achievement milk can hope for, the reality is that first you’ve got to have good milk.  And, like everything else about cheese, the milk is a partnership between man and Mom Nature.  It’s Mother N who provides the cows, goats and sheep who’ll give the milk and, since she’s also responsible for the grass the animals will eat, the taste of the milk is her doing as well.  After that, it’s us humans who turn the milk into cheese, an ancient process that’s deeply respected in France, where it’s often pointed out that you could eat a different cheese every day for a year and still not have made your way through the country’s offerings. 

 

Except in the case of fresh cheeses, which are eaten within days of being made, newly made cheese is only a faint, faint whisper of what it is meant to be and what (if all goes well) it is capable of becoming.  To bring the cheese to perfect maturity – or, put another way, to see that it lives up to the potential Mother Nature and the cheesemaker gave it – you need an affineur, the expert who ages the cheese.

 

In some cases, the affineur might be the cheesemaker, but often it’s the cheeseseller, and in France, where being an affineur is an important craft, a cheeseseller who does his own affinage will announce it proudly: his sign will say Fromager-Affineur.

 

Recently, when I was traveling with Maison de la France in the Loire Valley, a region unparalleled for goat cheese, I met a young cheeseseller/affineur who is one of the country’s best, having gained the title of MOF, Meilleur Ouvrier de France (best artisan in France).

 

Rodolphe Le Meunier, once dubbed the Zidane of fromagers (Zidane was probably France’s greatest soccer star and a national hero), earned his stripes (as an MOF you’re entitled to wear blue, white and red stripes on your collar) in 2007 by passing a blind tasting; a jury tasting of his cheeses; a theoretical written exam; an oral exam; and a cutting test in which he had to slice a series of cheeses to perfect weight, size and form.  He also had to create and serve a dish based on cheese – he made a mousse of Langres with spices.

 

Although he learned his craft from his family, like so many young chefs, winemakers, farmers and producers, he’s found a way to use modern technology to recreate centuries-old traditions.

 

Walk into Le Meunier’s “cellars” and you’ll find yourself in a large, cold space that could double for an operating room.  Gone are the romantic stone caves with their iffy humidity.  In their place are perfectly controlled refrigerators, each set to the exact temperature, humidity and ventilation levels needed for each type of cheese.

 

 

For sure, push-button control has made a part of the affinage process easier, but none of the buttons can determine when a cheese is at its most sublime.  For that, you still need people as knowledgeable as Rodolphe Le Meunier.

 

And to give us a taste of what it means to age a cheese to perfection, he cut a piece of Comte from July 2005.  Comte is a firm, pressed cheese from the Jura that is sweet, fruity, nutty and, when it’s as old as this one was, speckled with little grains that could be mistaken for salt, but which are casseine (a protein).

 

 

Aged Comte is one of my favorite cheeses and one we usually serve at Christmas and New Year’s with either Savignin or Vin Jaune, both wines from the Jura.  This one was exceptional!

 

If you live near Le Meunier or are visiting Tours, lucky you, you can go straight to the source.  Or, if you’re in Paris and want to nibble on Le Meunier’s work, you can find his cheeses at his friends’ shops, Dubois (47 Blvd. Saint Germain, Paris 6) and Quatre’homme (62 rue des Sevres, Paris 7), both fromagers/affineurs and MOFs.  If you’re nowhere near France, you can still get a hunk of something wonderful from him through the magic of two-day delivery.  Finally, if you’re just curious about Le Meunier and his cheese, you should go to his site, Fromages en Jazz (did I mention that he’s also a musician?).  In fact, you should go there even if you don’t love cheese – it’s got great stuff.

Clarified Butter French Supermarket Style

I'm fascinated by supermarkets (I know you're not surprised) and always make them one of my first stops when I land in a new place.  I feel I can really get a bead on a place by wandering a market's aisles, particularly the ones where the convenience foods are stocked.  Naturally, in France, convenience foods include cassoulet (in a tin or jar), foie gras, microwavable dinners from famous chefs (if you can't get into le Grand Vefour, maybe one of Guy Martin's dishes will make you feel better), rolled-out ready-to-go all-butter pastry and this beurre de cuisson, or cooking butter.

The label says it doesn't blacken and it won't, because what it really is is clarified butter, butter with the milk solids (the stuff that burns) removed.  (Ghee, which is used in Indian cooking, is like clarified butter but, because more or all of the water has been cooked away, it can be kept at room temperature.)  Clarified butter is a chef's staple, an ingredient that helps keep the delicacy and finesse of sauted foods intact.  Now that I've found this butter, I've added it to my ritual carry-homes along with the seawood and salted butters of Jean-Yves Bordier.

Of course, you can make beurre de cuisson at home.  Start with unsalted butter cut into small pieces (and start with at lfew sticks - it doesn't pay to put in the effort for a couple of  spoonfuls).  Put the butter in a saucepan over low heat and gently, gently melt it.  Continue to cook the butter until there's foam on top, a milky white layer on the bottom and, in between, the clear butter you're after.  (How long you need to cook the butter will depend on how much butter you've got - be patient, it can take about 30 minutes.)  Remove the pan from the heat and carefully spoon off the foamy top layer and discard.  Spoon the clarified layer into a clean container and keep it well covered in the fridge; toss away the solids that remain in the pan.

It's not hard to clarify butter, but it is just fussy enough to give you another reason to envy the French and their markets.

Back to (Chocolate) School with Valrhona

On Monday, when all the little ones were heading back to school, I went to class too – chocolate class.  The class was a Valrhona Chocolate seminar called The Cultivation of Taste and my classmates were a pretty swell group.  Among the 70 or so people who played hookey from work to learn more about chocolate and to taste Valrhona’s new crus were the cookbook author Rose Levy Beranbaum, Judiann Woo and Raina Bien of the go-to website Pastry Scoop, Chocolat Moderne’s Joan Coukos, Alexandra Leaf of Chocolate Tours of New York, and my tablemate for the afternoon

Michael Laskonis, pastry chef at Le Bernardin and 2007 James Beard Outstanding Pastry Chef of the Year.

It’s not easy to keep a room full of opinionated professionals quiet for three (count’em) hours, but that’s what Pierre Costet, Valrhona’s Chief Cacao Sourcer (I almost wrote sorcerer)

And Vanessa Lemoine, their Sensorial Analysis Manager, did.

Speaking in French (there was a simultaneous translator on hand) and working in tandem, Pierre and Vanessa led us through the growing, fermenting and drying of cacao beans, the intricacies of finding and working with growers and the science – and pleasure – of tasting. 

There was way too much for me to recap reasonably, so I’ll just hit a couple of the highlights.

Cultivating Cacao and Cacao Growers:  As Pierre was talking and showing us pictures of the cacao growers he works with in South and Central America, the Caribbean Islands and Africa, I was struck by two things:  the startling contrast between where chocolate starts, i.e. the rustic plantations and simple fermentation and drying facilities, and where it ends, i.e., the world’s most luxurious boutiques; and the similarity between cocoa and coffee.  Then, in yesterday’s New York Times, there was a long and thoughtful piece about coffee and the similarities were reinforced for me. 

The Difference Between Odor and Aroma:  While we English speakers think of odor as something unpleasant and aroma as something delicious, Vanessa Lemoine made a completely different and extremely interesting distinction between the two.  When you bring something to your nose and smell it, what you smell is the odor.  Odor is direct.  However, when you are eating something, you are also smelling it, but indirectly or retronasally.  What you smell through the post-nasal route is aroma.  According to Vanessa – and I’ve heard and read this before – 90% of the information you get about what you eat and drink is gotten through your nose.

FiveTastes And Maybe One More:  This is my favorite news flash.  As you know, our tongue can distinguish sweet, salty, acidic and bitter tastes, as well as umami, which is a very complicated taste found most notably in protein foods.  Now, according to Vanessa, there’s the possibility that our tongues have a sixth taste receptor and what it tastes is licorice!  (As many of you know, I’m a licorice lover, so you can be sure that I’ll be finding out as much as I can about this and reporting back to you.)

How to Taste Chocolate:  Here are the seven steps to getting a full picture of the chocolate at hand: 

1) look at it so that you can appreciate its color (and its sheen – if it has been properly tempered, it will have a shiny finish);

2) bring it to your nose so that you can smell its odor;

3) break it and listen for a crisp snap (another sign of good tempering);

4) put it in your mouth to assess its texture;

5) let it melt in your mouth by pressing the piece of chocolate against your palate with your tongue;

6) distinguish the aromas, which usually come one after another and often in this order – the volatile aromas, the fruity and floral aromas, come first; they give way to the warmer aromas, those of roasting and spice; and finally the heavier aromas, aromas of toasted nuts, camphor and woods, come in; and

7) while you’re appreciating the chocolate’s aroma, you taste it, and with most chocolate what you taste at the start is acidity, which makes you salivate, and then bitterness, which is a persistent taste and an important chocolate flavor. 

And, after you’ve tasted one chocolate and want to taste the next, you should clear your palate with flat water and crustless bread – the crust (we’re talking about a loaf with a significant crust) has too much flavor and it will interfere with your tasting.

Having been instructed on how to taste, we began to taste, starting with two chocolates that Valrhona is just releasing:  Abinao, a strongly flavored, toasty, roasty chocolate with long-lasting tannins and a very high cacao content, 85% (I loved it); and Tainori, a Dominican Republic chocolate with 64% cocoa and a kind of tang, which Vanessa referred to as freshness (from the camphor flavor) and likened to the flavors you get from a sucking candy. 

Then we tasted another chocolate that I really liked, Alpaco, which was so interesting because it had the same cocoa percentage as Tainori, but was much stronger in chocolate flavor, proof once again that you can’t buy chocolate by the numbers.  With chocolate, it’s about where the bean came from, how it was fermented, dried and roasted and how the beans were blended.  (It really sounds like wine, doesn’t it?)

Finally, we tasted Palmira, which is a 68% chocolate, but which was completely different from all the other chocolates in the panel.  Palmira is made from extremely rare porcelana beans and it is a single-estate chocolate, meaning all the beans come from one estate, Plantation Palmira near Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela.  I really liked this chocolate, which seemed warm and toasty and a little spicy and all-around lovely.  (Lovely was the word I wrote in my tasting notes, even though it wasn’t one of the “approved” descriptors.)

Our reward for being such good students was five chocolate desserts made by Derek Poirier, a Valrhona chef who teaches and trains pastry chefs in the US and Canada, and Yann Duytsche, a former Valrhona pastry chef, now chef of Dolc par Yann Duytsche in Barcelona.  Some of the desserts came from Duytsche’s new book, Sweet Diversions, some were based on recipes from Valrhona's L’Ecole du Grand Chocolat and all used what Valrhona calls Grand Cru chocolates.

Here’s the box of desserts we were each given

The five cubes in the line up were:  Coca Nibs Foam; Alpaco Sacher; Abinao Hot Chocolate (with a brioche beignet); Tainori Jelly (a light agar-agar mousse); and an Araguani Cube Cake.

As I walked home, I kept thinking that if school were always this interesting – and delicious – there’d never be an attendance problem.

Sardines: Not so much on this side of the pond

My friend Kerrin just sent me this photo.  It was taken in a hypermarche, a super-big supermarket, outside of Paris and my guess is that, had Kerrin had a wide-angle lens, she could have shown us an equally long wall of canned tuna too.  Even in the not-so-big Monoprix grocery near my apartment in Paris, the selection of canned fish is generous enough to keep you in that aisle for a while, reading labels and deciding among sardines with hot peppers, mustard, lemon or basil, smoked or not, whole or filleted.  I always keep a stack of sardine cans in the pantry, they’re my rainy-day emergency munch, perfect for when I’m on deadline and glued to my computer.  A squeeze of lemon, a couple of slices of tomato, a little salad and some bread and butter and all is right with the world.

The last time I was in Paris, I brought a few cans of sardines back with me

because, while I can get pretty much anything in New York, including these really good Portuguese sardines

the selection at my local Stop&Shop in Connecticut is not great.  And, last night I discovered that it’s about to become even less not-great.  See these cans of Bumble Bee sardines? 

I picked them up last night for 50 cents a can because the store is discontinuing them. 

I guess we’re not a sardine-savoring society in these parts, but it made me sad.  Here’s a food, a real food, that’s inexpensive (even when it’s not on sale), high in protein, iron, calcium and precious omega-3 fatty acids (the stuff we’re all supposed to have a couple of times a week), and it’s going off the shelves. 

I didn’t notice any discontinued signs in the chips department. 

Dutch Parrano: How cool?????

Yesterday, following the advice of a cheeseman at Fairway, I bought this wedge of Dutch Parrano, a cheese I’d never had – actually, a cheese I’d never heard of.  My plan was to serve it, along with olives, sausages and salted almonds, with drinks before dinner, then I completely forgot to pull it out of the fridge.  (Also forgotten was the fennel and apple salad, but that’s another story.)

We just drove up to Connecticut and I thought I’d cut up the cheese so we could munch it while making dinner.  On first taste it seemed like a perfectly pleasant - okay, not distinctive - cheese, but I must have underestimated it big time because, according to Fairway's description of my purchase - are you ready for this? - I had bought: 

                        “The hippest cheese in New York.” 

Hip.  Hip.  My cheese is hip!  I'm dying to know:  Is Dutch Parrano hip where you live? 

Licorice, Again: Combos Odd and Odder

Because I love black licorice you can be sure I couldn’t pass up this little novelty from La Grande Epicerie, Paris’s swankiest supermarket.  What you’re looking at is chubby barrels of softish, fairly sweet black licorice dipped in fairly sweet Belgian milk chocolate and imported from England (the company’s name is Cocoa Deli).  Unfortunately, neither the chocolate nor the licorice was primo quality, so the candies weren’t terrific.  But the combination, odd as it is, is not dismissable.  It’s funny, I think if the chocolate were softer and more luscious (the way it looks to be in the picture on the bag) and if the licorice were little more licoricy, the combo might actually be a breakthrough.  Of course, it would remain odd, but it would be odd and winning.

And, while we’re on odd, here’s another offbeat match-up: Sauvignon blanc and black Panda Licorice from Finland.  Because this idea came from smart and talented Martha Holmberg, food editor of The Oregonian, I’ve got high hopes for it.

(Actually, writing this I realize I’ve probably lost my touch as a reporter – why didn’t I ask Martha how she ever came to put these two things together?  It’s not exactly evident, as the French say.)

Well, the Panda is ready to roll and the wine is chilling in the fridge.  And, just to prove that I think the duo has promise, I’m going with a good wine:  a South African sauvignon blanc from Mulderbosch in the Stellenbosch region.  I’ll report back.

Two Hours Later:  I can’t figure out why, but Martha is right:  it’s a really good combination!  The most characteristic flavors of both the licorice and the wine seem to be intensified - you get more anise, more grapefruit.  It’s kind of fun, but also kind of esoteric.  I don’t think the combo is likely to replace gougeres and Kir as my favorite aperitif this summer, but I can see it as a Sunday afternoon snack – it would go great with a crossword puzzle.