Chicken and tarragon are a classic combination in French cuisine: Poulet à l’Estragon. In this recipe the chicken breast is seasoned with paprika and served with a sauce made from chicken stock, white wine, shallots, and tarragon. The tarragon sauce was nice, although I may have used a bit too much tarragon as it overpowered the chicken just a bit.
Continue reading “Chicken Breast with Tarragon Sous-Vide”
After the success of the spinach tarts I tried a version with leeks and it turned out great! Leeks and shallots that are cooked slowly can obtain a wonderful sweet flavor and the texture of these tarts is very soft. The tarts are relatively easy to make and quite impressive. You could also serve them in ramekins as soufflés, as the tarts rise dramatically (and also fall dramatically). You could try to beat the egg whites separately and fold them in for even more of a ‘soufflé’ effect. Without further ado, here’s how to make these lovely vegetarian tarts, that could be served as a vegetarian dish by themselves or as a side to either fish or white meat.
Continue reading “Leek Tarts (Sformatini di Porri)”
One of the ideas I got from my new ‘modernist’ friends is to prepare vegetable fondant sous-vide. I tried it with parsnips as a side for the lamb with our Easter dinner, and it turned out great. I had never heard of vegetable fondant, but it seems to be very popular in restaurants in the UK. Root vegetables or potatoes are browned in fat and subsequently cooked in stock. It is relatively simple to do, but quite tasty as both the stock and the browning will add some nice flavor to the vegetable. This technique can also be used for potatoes, celeriac, sweet potatoes, carrots, etc. Continue reading “Parsnip Sous-Vide Fondant”
Risotto with Chard (snijbiet in Dutch) is a humble yet tasty risotto. I parcooked the chard in the stock that I subsequently used for the risotto to capture all of the flavor of the chard. For this risotto I used only the leaves of the chard. If you like, you could also use the stems if you parcook them longer. The two most important things for making a fine risotto are the stock and patience. The stock must be homemade, not from cubes. Patience is needed to stir it for 20 minutes or so, but all that work is rewarded with a very creamy and tasty risotto. Continue reading “Risotto with Chard (Risotto alle Bietole)”
This post is a bit overdue. On March 8, four weeks ago, Italian friends of mine came over for dinner. I had never heard of International Women’s Day (La Festa della Donna in Italy) before, but my Italian friends had enlightened me when we set that particular date for this cena. Mimosa has become the symbol of la Festa della Donna in Italy since the mimosa trees in Italy blossom in the first days of March, and so I decided to surprise my friends by baking a Torta Mimosa for dessert. As you can see, there is a clear resemblance between the cake and the mimosa blossoms. Continue reading “Torta Mimosa”
As I mentioned in my earlier posts this week, Easter is celebrated in Italy by eating egg and lamb. So it was a given that the main course for our Easter dinner would be lamb. To make it even more appropriate for Easter, the sauce of this lamb dish is made with an egg yolk. Abbacchio Brodettato is a lamb dish from Lazio, the region around Rome. Abbacchio is suckling lamb, but any young lamb will do to make this dish. This dish has a very original taste, as lamb is not often combined with prosciutto, lemon, and egg yolk. It works very well and the lamb is very tender. It is almost like eating white meat, and therefore it can be no surprise that a full-bodied oaked white wine is a better pairing for this than red wine. Continue reading “Lamb with Lemon-Egg Sauce (Abbacchio Brodettato)”
Easter is celebrated in Italy by eating eggs and lamb. As a starter for our Easter dinner, I decided to make a sous-vide version of an Italian antipasto called Asparagi alla Milanese. This is simply green asparagus with a fried egg, melted butter and grated parmigiano reggiano. For the sous-vide version I cooked the asparagus sous-vide at 85C/185F for 15 minutes and the eggs 45 minutes at 64.5C/148F. The resulting egg is like a poached egg, but with a very nice texture. The asparagus are tender but firm to the bite with a nice full flavor. If you don’t have sous-vide equipment, you could of course prepare this in the traditional way by poaching (or indeed frying) the eggs and steaming or boiling the asparagus. Continue reading “Asparagus and Egg Sous-Vide”
When you think of lasagne, you probably think of the famous Lasagne alla Bolognese with bolognese ragù and bechamel sauce. There are however more types of lasagne, such as Lasagna alla Napoletana with ragù alla napoletana, meatballs, sausage, and ricotta, or this Lasagne alla Genovese with pesto. I had never made it before but I will definitely make it again as it was delicious and surprisingly light. Lasagne alla Genovese is made with a mixture of pesto alla genovese and bechamel sauce, to which vegetables can be added. In this case I added roasted zucchini, an idea I got from the Italian blog Il Marito Perfetto (the perfect husband). Continue reading “Lasagne alla Genovese”
In Italy, Colomba Pasquale is for Easter what Panettone is for Christmas. Colomba is a sweet bread in the shape of a cross with candied citrus and an almond glaze. It is actually not supposed to be a cross but a dove, since that is what “colomba” means. It takes a bit of good will to recognize the shape of a flying dove. The traditional way of making colomba takes about 24 hours and 5 different rising steps. This recipe requires ‘only’ three, and with a stand mixer it is not a lot of work and just takes time. Continue reading “Colomba Muffins for Easter”
Easter is the celebration of spring, and in Italy this means eating eggs and lamb. Even though it is snowing and Easter is colder than Christmas this year and therefore there is no suckling lamb available yet, I am following that tradition by preparing Abbacchio a Scottadito. This is a piatto tipico from Lazio, the region of Rome. Abbacchio means suckling lamb, and although the dish is still called abbacchio it is more usually prepared with regular lamb. The lamb should be as young as you can find; the lamb I used was 4 months old. Continue reading “Lamb a Scottadito”
On the Adriatic seacoast of Romagna, all kinds of seafood are marinated with parsley, garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice, and then coated with breadcrumbs and grilled or broiled. The marinade gives the seafood a nice flavor, whereas the breadcrumbs help to keep the seafood tender and moist. This recipe is quite similar to ChgoJohn’s recipe for Bacala alla Griglia, which is not surprising since the Marche region where is family comes from is just south of Romagna. Continue reading “Broiled Cod alla Romagnola (Grigliata di Pesce alla Romagnola)”
Freshly made pesto is vastly superior to anything bought in a jar, which is why I never buy pesto and always make it myself from scratch. I’ve always used the ‘modern’ way of making pesto: in the food processor or blender. My Italian blogging buddy Tuttacronaca convinced me to try at least once to make it using the traditional method with mortar and pestle. And so I decided to do a side-by-side comparison. The word “pesto” has been derived from the word “pestle”. Making pesto in the food processor takes only a few minutes, whereas by hand with mortar and pestle it almost requires half an hour of hard work. So it’d better be worth it! Is it? Read on to find out! Continue reading “Homemade Pesto: Man versus Machine”
Coq au Vin was ‘invented’ to turn a tough old rooster into a feast. Nowadays it is hard to find such tough old roosters, and most Coq au Vin is made with chickens that have only lived to be about six weeks old. They do not really require to be simmered for a long time in red wine to become edible, and have a lot less flavor. Coq au Vin is still good anyway. If you are looking for a good Coq au Vin recipe for regular chicken, click here.
After I had discovered a type of free range chicken that is allowed to grow more slowly and thus develop more flavor, which reminded me of my grandmother’s chicken, I was curious how it would work when served as Coq au Vin. My parents were coming over for dinner and they had dropped some hints that they were curious about the “kip van tante Ali” I had found. And so I decided to kill two birds with one stone and prepare that type of chicken sous-vide, served as Coq au Vin. Continue reading “Coq au Vin Sous-Vide”
When I have guests over for dinner, chances are I will cook a 4-course Italian dinner for them (antipasto, primo, secondo, dolce). With such a dinner I always bake this bread. Freshly baked bread is a treat that will impress your guests. It is not a lot of work if you have a stand mixer. Allow about 4 hours from start to ready to slice, but most of that is inactive time. Bread is also great for fare la scarpetta, cleaning every last drop of sauce from your plate with bread. This bread has a great crust and neutral flavor that doesn’t overpower the food. This is the reason why I do not generally bake bread stuffed with sun-dried tomatoes, olives, or the like, because then the bread would play the lead rather than a supporting role. Continue reading “Homemade Italian Bread”
Shawarma (or shoarma as it is called in the Netherlands) is Middle-Eastern way of preparing meat with spices on a vertical spit, which is subsequently served in pita bread with salad and garlic sauce. It is a fast food staple around the world, and not something you’d expect to read about on a foodie blog such as this. Most places that sell shoarma in the Netherlands have their peak hours in the middle of the night on weekends, when people get hungry after having drunk a lot of beer. If you were the owner of a shawarma place and you were serving your fare mostly to customers who are too drunk to care, would you care about the quality of what you are serving? I’ve had such a shawarma sandwich (broodje shoarma) on a few occasions, but never cared much for the soggy, greasy, overspiced and overgarlicked concoction with a taste that lingered way too long. Not surprisingly however, it turns out that if you make a shawarma sandwich from scratch, it is actually outstandingly delicious! And when I say from scratch, I really mean from scratch, including baking your own pita bread. Continue reading “I didn’t know Shawarma could be that good”
According to my butcher, you will live to be 100 if you eat veal on a regular basis. This is not a scientifically proven statement (he bases it on a few people he knows who used to eat veal on a regular basis and have lived to be 100) and since he’s selling the veal his objectivity is questionable. I do like to eat veal though, and it is great with mushrooms.
Fresh porcini mushrooms are very difficult to obtain around here, as they are in many other places around the world. A trick I’ve developed is to soak dried porcini mushrooms in hot water, sauté the reconstituted porcini mushrooms with fresh cultivated mushrooms, and then simmer all of the mushrooms in the porcini soaking liquid to boost the flavor of all the mushrooms. The mushrooms are sautéed with parsley and garlic, which is called funghi trifolati in Italy. Together with the deep fried fennel I posted about yesterday and a good glass of white wine, this makes a great meal for Easter. Continue reading “Veal Rib Eye with Mushrooms”
Fennel is a versatile vegetable that can be prepared in many ways: caramelized, in risotto, braised, as a salad, or deep fried as in this recipe. It has a nice flavor that reminds us of aniseed. The Italian way of deep frying fennel is to parboil it and then deep fry it breaded with breadcrumbs and parmigiano. Finocchi dorati are tender on the inside, crispy on the outside, and the lovely fennel flavor is accentuated. This is great as a side dish to meat such as this bone-in veal rib eye (about which I will post tomorrow). I parboiled the fennel sous-vide, but if you don’t have sous-vide equipment you can simply steam or parboil in water. The advantage of sous-vide is that no flavor is lost and that the fennel will be tender but firm to the bite. Continue reading “Deep Fried Fennel (Finocchi Dorati)”
One of my favorite pies is a Key Lime Pie. It takes a bit of work as you have to make a pastry crust that has to be baked ‘blindly’ before baking it with the filling, but it is worth it. A pie that is almost as good is this very easy Lemon Chess Pie, from RemCooks.com. The texture is like velvet and it has a very nice sweet lemony flavor. I had never heard of a Lemon Chess Pie before. The difference with my Key Lime Pie is that it does not have a separate crust. The crust and the filling are one. This also makes it a very easy pie to make: just blend all the ingredients together, pour them into a buttered pie dish, and bake. It is that easy. Thanks to Baby Lady for this great recipe! When I first saw this recipe, I was surprised at how easy it looked. I tried it, and it turned out great! Of course it is very easy to substitute lemon with lime and turn this into a faux Key Lime Pie as well. Continue reading “Baby Lady’s Easy Lemon Chess Pie”
When I started my blog, it was an easy decision that it would be in English. Almost all of my fellow Dutchmen can read English well, and it would greatly enhance the number of possible readers worldwide. As a side effect I now have blogging buddies from Dublin, Chicago, Dallas–Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Northern California, Rome, London, Adelaide, Colorado, Northern Canada, Seattle, Saint Emilion, etc. but none from my own country. I do have Dutch readers (about 8%, in third place after the USA and the UK) and a lot of them are friends that I already know in real life.
No matter how much fun it is to exchange our recipes, photos, successes, failures and ideas with my blogging buddies, an important aspect is missing from such online friendships: cooking and eating together! This is impractical because of the distances involved, but luckily it has happened and if it’s up to me it will undoubtedly happen again.
Why am I telling you all this and what does it have to do with smoked salmon and sous-vide egg yolk crostini? I’m getting to that. Continue reading “Smoked Salmon and Sous-Vide Egg Yolk Crostini”
All regions of Italy have their own traditional dishes, referred to as piatti tipici. I like to cook my way through Italy by trying piatti tipici from different regions. Coda alla Vaccinara is a typical dish from the cucina povera (poor man’s kitchen) of Rome (Lazio). Oxtail is part of what is called the quinto quarto (the fifth quarter), the less desirable parts of an animal that remain when all the nice parts have been taken. As often with traditional Italian dishes, there are many different versions. I made an elaborate version with raisins, pine nuts, and cocoa powder in the sauce. The sauce can be served over penne rigate or rigatoni, which is called Rigatoni al Sugo di Coda. Continue reading “Coda alla Vaccinara (Oxtail Stewed in Tomato Sauce)”
The inspiration for this dish was provided by Richard McGary’s Salmon Roulade with Cilantro Citrus Pesto on Mango Corn Salsa, but it is quite different. A salmon fillet is butterflied, filled with a basil-lemon pesto, rolled up into a roulade, cooked sous-vide, and cut into slices that are served on haricots verts. Salmon cooked sous-vide to 43C/109F is amazingly velvety, which contrasts nicely with the crispy haricots verts. The round buttery flavor of the salmon is complemented by the fresh taste of the basil-lemon pesto. Continue reading “Sous-vide Salmon-Pesto Roulade with Haricots Verts”
Kung Pao Chicken is a dish I’ve discovered only recently because it is not on menus of Chinese restaurants or take-out places in the Netherlands. ‘Chinese’ restaurants in this country are in fact Chinese-Indonesian, the chefs are mostly trained in the Netherlands at the same school, and the menus of those restaurants are mostly all the same and have been like that for thirty years. I’ve never been to China and am certainly not a connaisseur of Chinese food, but I do know that this is healthy, very tasty, and quite fast and easy to make. Kung Pao Chicken is a stir-fry dish that originated in Szechuan cuisine, containing chicken, peanuts (or cashews), vegetables, (dried) chile peppers, and Sichuan peppercorns. The latter are not actual peppercorns but the husk around the seeds of a type of prickley ash. Continue reading “Kung Pao Chicken”
Due to the increased popularity of horse meat that I already wrote about in my post on Braciole di Cavallo alla Barese, my butcher now displays his horse meat more prominently. This is why I noticed this fine piece of horse sirloin at only half the price of beef sirloin and with better marbling. I decided that it would be a nice idea to try and cook it sous-vide.
I expected that I would be on my own with this, because most of the home cooks that can afford sous-vide equipment sneer at horse meat (or live in a country where it is not very sale for human consumption such as the USA) and so I was not expecting to find much guidance online. Google confirmed that horse sirloin and sous-vide are a rare combination: I only found one post and that was for horse tenderloin and most importantly wasn’t real sous-vide but more of a poorly executed poor-man’s version of it (not even a thermometer was used). Continue reading “Horse Sirloin and Sous-Vide: a (not so) Rare Combination”
All the recipes I could find for lobster risotto did not use the lobster shells to make lobster stock to use for the risotto. They were simply a plain risotto with a lobster served on top. And so I decided to create my own recipe for lobster risotto and it turned out spectacular! I decided to cook the lobster tail sous-vide because that will keep it amazingly tender, but if you don’t have sous-vide equipment you can simply boil the lobster tail as usual and still obtain a wonderful dish. Because live lobsters are not a cheap ingredient this is something for a special occasion or a dinner party where you are looking to impress your guests. This risotto is served with the lobster tail on top, delicious lobster meat mixed in with the rice that has a wonderful lobster flavor from the stock, as well as peas, tomato, and yellow bell pepper for lovely colors. This dish has a nice contrast between the creamy rice and crunchy vegetables. Continue reading “Lobster Risotto Like No Other”
I had invited some Italian friends from Amsterdam for dinner. I thought it would be nice to cook something for them that their grandmother used to cook for them, something that they had fond memories of. My friend Fabio said his grandmother always made meatballs that were outstanding with a bit of lemon. This post is the result of my attempt to make Fabio’s grandmother’s meatballs, without having the actual recipe. Fabio liked them a lot and he was taking lots of pictures. When we were pestering him about taking so many pictures, he said he was going to send them to his grandmother. For the next attempt, we should probably just ask her for the recipe… Whether or not they were close to her original, they were great anyway. Here’s what I did… Continue reading “Fabio’s Grandmother’s Meatballs (Le Polpette della Nonna di Fabio)”
The province of Limburg in the South of the Netherlands is famous for its pies, called “Limburgse Vlaai” in Dutch or simply “Vla” in the local dialect. Vlaai is especially baked or bought for a birthday party.
You may think this looks like an Italian crostata di ciliegie (cherry tart), but the main difference is that a crostata or tart is made using flaky shortcrust pastry (pasta frolla) with 50 grams of butter for each 100 grams of flour, whereas vlaai is made with a yeast dough with only a small amount of butter. This gives the pastry a very different consistency.
There is a big difference between a ‘real’ freshly baked vlaai from Limburg and the industrially produced ones that are available all over the country. Kersenvlaai (vlaai with cherries) is one of the best known kinds. The pastry of the kersenvlaai I remember from my childhood tasted of cardboard. I can still remember the first time I had real kersenvlaai from Limburg, about 20 years ago. A friend of mine from Limburg was visiting, and since Limburg is so far away (3 hours is considered far in this small country of ours), my friend would be sleeping over. His mother had given him a kersenvlaai, bought from the local bakery in Nuth, as a gift for my family. That kersenvlaai was freshly baked and changed my opinion of vlaai completely. It was delicious! It is this kind of kersenvlaai that I tried to bake, and I think I came pretty close for my first attempt. It is fairly easy to do and very tasty, so I urge you to give this a try. You will be glad you did! Continue reading “Limburger Cherry Pie (Limburgse Kersenvlaai)”
The dish with sole and hazelnut emulsion with romanesco we recently had at a fancy restaurant in Amsterdam was not such a big success because the sole was overpowered by the hazelnut emulsion, but it did inspire me to make this pasta dish because it made me realize that hazelnut and romanesco work very well together. Romanesco is an Italian green variety of cauliflower. If you can’t find it, you could substitute with regular cauliflower. A hazelnut emulsion is basically a warm mayonnaise made with hazelnut oil. I was happy with the result, as also in this pasta dish the combination worked very well and it was a nice variety from other pasta dishes that I make. Because of the nuts it is not really needed to eat a secondo of meat afterwards. And it only takes about 20 minutes to make. Continue reading “Pasta with Romanesco and Hazelnut”
I hardly ever use beans and I thought it would be nice to make something with beans for a change. Beans make me think of Mexican food, so I decided upon a Mexican-Style Pork and Bean Stew. I am not a connoisseur of Mexican food, so I do not claim that this is a traditional recipe. Perhaps someone can tell me whether this is even remotely Mexican 😉 For color and variety I thought it would be nice to use five different kinds of beans. Since I didn’t know the cooking times of them, I decided to cook each type separately. This was a bit of extra work, especially since I do not have the space or pots to cook five types at the same time so I had to do this in two batches. It turned out that most of the beans had the same cooking time of one hour. Next time I will probably opt for cooking them all at the same time, even though that may make the flavors less clearly defined. I did not cook the beans and the pork at the same time, because the beans need to boil whereas the pork needs to simmer since otherwise it would dry out. I was pretty happy with the result. Next time I make this, I will use fattier pork with bones such as pork ribs for additional flavor and better tasting meat. Continue reading “Mexican-Style Pork and Bean Stew”
Good quality chicken is often sold as whole chickens. I take off the legs and breast, and use the rest to make stock. When making stock from bones, chefs differentiate between ‘white’ stock and ‘brown’ stock. The difference is that white stock is made from raw or blanched bones, whereas for brown stock the bones are roasted first. Brown stock has a more rich, fuller flavor than white stock. For the best Coq au Vin sauce, it is best to use a brown stock. Since I posted about Coq au Vin the other day, I thought I’d share a recipe for brown chicken stock with you. Please note that I did not include salt in the recipe because it is never a good idea to add salt to stock before you know what you are going to do with it. You may have to simmer the stock down to make a sauce, and then it may end up too salty. Continue reading “Brown Chicken Stock”
Coq au Vin is a prime example of classic French cooking. It is a lot of work, but worth it. “Coq” is French for rooster, and in times when people still ate roosters they were old and thus so tough that they needed to be stewed in wine to make them edible. Nowadays most chicken only gets to live about 6 weeks, so it is not needed to cook it like that anymore. But the flavor of the classic dish is so good that people keep making it anyway. Those old roosters had a lot of flavor, so this dish will benefit from using an older chicken like the one I discovered recently.
I have looked at various recipes online, most of them in French, and noted that they are all very similar. Chicken is browned, covered in red wine and stock, and then stewed until tender. It is served with sautéed mushrooms and braised pearl onions. Since Julia Child has been very important for introducing French cuisine to America, I thought it would be nice to follow her recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She made some adaptations to ingredients available in America, for instance she cooks the chicken only for a short time (because young chickens don’t need that long) and she blanches the bacon before using it (I think this is because bacon in America was — or still is? — too salty).
I believe the key success factors for a good Coq au Vin are: the quality of the wine, the quality of the chicken, the quality of the chicken stock, and cooking the onions and mushrooms separately and only adding them at the end. This will allow the mushrooms and onions to keep their own flavor. If you’ve never made braised onions before, I bet you’ll like them so much that you will make them again. Braised onions are very tender, flavorful, and sweet, and very different from raw or sautéed onions. Continue reading “Coq au Vin”
Stefan's Gourmet Blog 