Ratio: Best Nonfiction of 2009… So Far

Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio continues to astound and amaze me. The book, already in it’s 4th printing following it’s publication in April, just picked up a kudo from Amazon for Best Nonfiction of 2009 (So far).

When he first told me that he was going to write it, I thought it was a great idea. But I figured that it would only sell to professional chefs, culinary students and cooking geeks looking for a way to simplify their cooking and the way they think about recipes. Well, there is either a hell of a lot of people who fit that description or the book has much wider appeal than I’d assumed.

Best Nonfiction of 2009… So Far

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Slow Salami Sunday

I must be more of an idiot than even my 9th Grade math teacher believed me to be. The guy was a former Wehrmacht commando and competitive water skier so you can imagine how convincing his opinions were.

Sunday (6/7) was a beautiful sunny spring day. I had lots of garden related stuff to do: a huge pile of composted mushroom soil to move, shrubs to dig out and replant and a googoplex of weeds to pull. But instead of taking the rational course and spending the entire day out of doors, I spent about a third of it in the house starting a batch of Tuscan salami, taking pictures and writing this post.

Okay, no use beating myself up over doing something that I love to do, I suppose. Here’s what I did today with a description of how I did it.

Step 1) Determine weight of available meat and the weight of the proportion of fat.

I had a bone-in picnic shoulder ham from the supermarket. Since I could not use the bone or skin in the salami, I had to filet and skin it and determine how much meat I had to work with.

After the bone and skin was removed I had 2576 grams (~92 ounces) of meat. I like the salami to be smooth and fatty so I decided to add some belly fat at the rate of 20% of the meat or 504 grams (18 oz). Fatback would have been a better choice because it’s firmer and holds up better during aging (So slap me!).

Step 2) Write a recipe from the master recipe in my secret book of salumi recipes.

Since my secret book has all the data for what percentage of the meat and fat each ingredient should be. All I had to do to work up the recipe was add up the weight of the meat and fat and multiple that number (3125 grams) by the percent value of each ingredient ( Column III in the table below) and determine how much of each thing I needed (Col. II)

Ingredient	Weight (g)	% ingredient	Notes
Meat	2576	1	Grind fine
Belly fat	504	0.20	Grind coarse
Total meat and fat	3125	1
Salt	67.5	0.0216
Instacure #1	8	0.0026
Fennel seeds, whole	15	0.005	Toast them
Garlic, fresh	10	0.0033	Fine mince
Pepper, black	16	0.005	Coarse grind
Red Wine	250	0.08	Dry
Dextrose powder	41	0.013
Bactoferm F-RM-52	1	0.00025	Disperse in water
Water, cold	50	0.016

If I’d been at the farm where we almost always have some lactobacilli rich whey, I’d have omitted the Bactoferm and used the whey to lower the pH instead. Whey is way cheaper to use than Bactoferm and works the same way: the bacteria ferment the meat giving it a slightly tart taste and reduce the nitrate in compounds that brighten the color of the meat and destroy pathogenic bacteria.

After the meat has fermented for a few days in the refrigerator, I’ll grind it. Then I’ll take it to the farm where we have a proper sausage stuffing machine, stuff it into hog or beef casings, tie it off, bring it back home and hang it in the basement. I’ll try to remember t take pictures of the rest of the process and post them here forthrightly.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Recipe Pro-Tool

Michael Ruhlman’s recent post about cookbooks that teach got me thinking about how much I used to love cookbooks. Back when I was a novice cook, books like “The Joy of Cooking,” “The Professional Chef” (the basis of The Culinary Institute of Americas’ “The New Professional Chef”), Henri Pellaprat’s “Modern Culinary Art,” almost anything by Ada Boni and Julia Child and, of course, “Le Guide Culinaire” by Auguste Escoffier and La Scienza della Cucina by Pelligrino Artusi were an important part of my culinary education. Some were goldmines of information about technique (e.g. The Pro Chef, “La Methode” by Jacques Pepin) and recipes while the ones I liked best were backward looking works chosen more for what they could tell me about the history, culture and ideology of European culinary tradition.

Nowadays, I’ve little use for cookbooks. I have a few that I refer to when I need to be reminded of the the name of a dish or the ratio of it’s ingredients, but there aren’t too many things in the western culinary canon that I have to cook (or chose to cook) that I can’t make up on the fly without having to refer to somebody else’s recipe.

That’s about how it should be for a cook I suppose. I mean, is not a big part of the reason we decide to center our lives around cooking so that we can create recipes that reflect our values and tastes? There is certainly nothing wrong with working from recipes written by other people and trying to satisfy our creative drive by say, changing an ingredient or applying a different technique to one or more the steps. But I find building my own recipes more fulfilling.

I don’t usually write recipes unless I am creating them for work and I rarely include the instructions for method unless I’m working on something that is very new to me. Then, if the dish doesn’t come out well and needs refinement I have a precise record of what I did to review.

I write my recipes for commercial production in a form that would probably madden cooks who like to measure liquids and semi-solids volumetrically.

1. Every ingredient is weighed and each weight is expressed as a decimal.
2. All weights are expressed in metric units (mostly grams)
3. All ingredients are expressed as a percentage of the main ingredient to facilitate scaling up and down (called a baker or formula percentage)

Here is an example in the form of a recipe for Chicken Sausage with Ginger and Green Onions

Ingredient	Weight	Percentage
Chicken meat	8636g	1
Salt	121g	0.014
Pepper, black	34g	0.004
Ginger in syrup*	173g	0.020
Green Onions	224g	0.026
Mustard, dry	13g	0.0015
White wine	604 g (~604 ml)	0.070

* Whole unpeeled ginger cooked in simple syrup and ground through the fine on a meat grinder. The ginger has to be cooked if the sausage will sit uncooked for more than a few hours. Otherwise the proteolytic enzymes in the ginger will turn the meat to mush.

I initially made this recipe by weighing small amounts of each ingredient and recording the weights before adding them in. Each time I added something sniffed the mixture to determine if it was properly seasoned. I can usually nail the seasoning of a sausage recipe via an olfactory and visual check but on those occasions where I am unsure I’ll cook up a sample and taste it.

I always salt fresh sausage at a rate of either 14-15g salt per 1000 grams of meat (see note below) depending on the kind of meat being used and the taste characteristics of the other ingredients. The percentage of each ingredient is obtained by dividing the weight of each by the weight of the main ingredient.

The beauty of this kind of recipe is that it makes it very easy to increase or decrease the batch size while keeping the ratio of ingredients consistent and producing a consistent product no matter how much or how little you make.

Want to make more or less? Then enter the new weight of the meat and multiply it by the percent values of the subordinate ingredients and you are done.

The example I gave here is for sausage, but this format works for any kind of recipe. Just pick a main ingredient (It does not have to be the most abundant, it could, for example be the most expensive. Then divide the weight of each subsequent ingredient by the weight of the main ingredient to determine its percentage value.

Finally, one can purchase software that will scale recipes up and down for you automatically. Or you can write the formula recipe into a spread sheet, apply costs and so on. (I’ve done this.) But typing on a keyboard when your fingers are fouled with food is not such a good idea. So writing them out by hand is usually the best way to go.

Note: The previously given rate of 0.014-0.015g salt per 1000g meat was in error and has been corrected to read 14-15g salt per 1000g meat.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Pizza Dough Recipe with Contempt Laden Rant

Earlier I wrote that I’d had enough questions about how I made pizza dough to warrant a post about my recipe. I was planning to post this yesterday, but Blogger was down when I was free to write. So here is the recipe with (apologies to anyone who knows how to use a camera) an illustrative slide show.

About the recipe

The ingredients are listed in the order that they are to be combined. The salt and yeast must be added to the dry flour to assure even distribution. The oil must be added before the water otherwise it will be repelled by the wet dough and the nascent gluten structure and will not be able to do its job of shortening the gluten network and tenderizing the dough.

Cool water -between 60-68 degrees F- is used because gluten forms better at lower temperatures AND I’m almost never in a hurry to proof this dough. I prefer relatively long periods of fermentation at low temperature for most bread doughs to give the yeast more time to produce flavorful compounds and to give the bacteria (which in fresh dough is a minority component of the microfloral community) time to catch up with the yeast.

Although the recipe is written for hi-gluten flour (>13% protein) you could AP flour or Tipo 0 or Tipo 00 flour if you prefer a crust that is less chewy. Sometimes when I’m in the mood for crust that is crispy and does not work my jaw like too much, I will swap out some of the hi-gluten flour for some AP (10 % protein) or other low protein flour.

Never, never, never use any whole wheat or any type of whole grain flour for pizza dough.

Whole grain pizza is a perversion of good taste, an insult to the concept of pizza and a knife-in-the-back to the generations of chefs who have labored to make pizza the way that god and nature intended it to be. If you don’t care about this and still want to make whole grain pizza dough, fine. Just don’t serve it to anyone.

There is a special place in hell for people who feed other people whole wheat pizza, and if you don’t want to find out what that place is like, don’t make it. If you think I’m kidding, go read the Hell (Inferno) section of Dante’s Divine Comedy. You won’t find any description of the region of hell reserved for the makers of whole wheat pizza because Dante understood that it was so awful that no one would buy his book: not even Beatrice! :0

All ingredients are weighed: I have no patience for measuring cups and spoons.

• Hi-Gluten Flour 20.5 ounces/575 grams
• Salt 0.30 oz /9 grams (Approx 1.5 tsp table salt)
• Instant Yeast 0. 10 oz/ 4 grams
• Olive oil 40 grams (approx 3 Tbsp)
• Cool water 380 grams/380 ml/14 ounces/14fluid ounces

1. Combine the flour, salt, yeast in the mixing bowl
2. Add the oil and stir that in with a spatula until it just begins to disappear.
3. Add the water and stir it in with the spatula and let it sit (autolyse) for 20 minutes or so.
4. Knead with the bread hook for 10 minutes (I set the mixer to 4) or by hand until the dough is smooth and shiny. Kneading by hand will require the addition of flour to keep the dough from sticking to your hands and work surface -don’t overdo it.
5. Proof the dough at room temperature for three or four hours (2 rises and “punch downs”).

You could use it for pizza now, but it won’t taste as good as it will if you put it in the refrigerator and ferment it overnight or longer. I usually dump it in a plastic bag and leave it in the bottom (coldest part) of my refrigerator until I’m ready to use it. At other times I apportion it into three masses and place them on a parchment-covered sheet pan which in turn I cover in oiled plastic to prevent the dough from sticking. But mostly I find the latter method too fussy.

I usually pre-bake the dough until it is “set” but not browned because it makes it a bit easier to keep the crust from getting soggy. I dock it with a fork to prevent it from billowing up, and cook it for, I don’t know, ten minutes on stone in an oven preheated to 500 degrees.

If you need a recipe for simple tomato sauce you will find one here.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

The Hitler Vegetarian Cookbook Question

This morning, a friend who knows that I have an unpublished novel about Adolph Hitler’s chef sitting on my hard drive sent me this question from the usenet (?) group rec.food.historic

[Could we write the Hitler Vegetarian Cookbook?]

Surely a lot of the menus for events Hitler attended must survive?
It should be possible to work out how the chefs of the time coped
with his requirements. I’ve never seen an elite/gourmet veggie
cookbook from that period, they all seem to be solidly bourgeois.
He presumably didn’t need to have nut roast alternating with bean
and cheese casserole every night.

I assume that the reason this question is coming up now has something to do with the approach of the Son of the Prince of Darkness’ birthday on April 20. And certainly whoever wrote it does not know -or perhaps fails to acknowledge- that Hitler was only an occasional vegetarian who seemed to be philosophically opposed to eating meat when it suited his propaganda agenda. It also seems likely that Hitler was convinced that a vegetarian diet would correct the gastrointestinal problems that had plagued him throughout his adult life. (You may or may not be amused to know that it has been reported that one of his doctors treated him with e. coli bacteria cultured from Hitler’s own stool. This homeopathic remedy is referred to as Mutaflor and can be purchased today. But it is made, I assume, from e. coli from the guts of someone other than Hitler.)

In the end I suspect that the question is disingenuous and the person who wrote it is not truly serious about wanting to write a “A Thousand Years (Oops! Make that twelve.) of Great Aryan Veggie Recipes.” But the subordinate question about the menus is pretty intriguing. I’m sure such things exist. If any reader of this blog comes across any German or Austrian vegetarian books, menus or recipes from the period of Hitler’s rise (1933) and fall (1945) please let us know.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

The Hitler Vegetarian Cookbook Question

This morning, a friend who knows that I have an unpublished novel about Adolph Hitler’s chef sitting on my hard drive sent me this question from the usenet (?) group rec.food.historic

[Could we write the Hitler Vegetarian Cookbook?]

Surely a lot of the menus for events Hitler attended must survive?
It should be possible to work out how the chefs of the time coped
with his requirements. I’ve never seen an elite/gourmet veggie
cookbook from that period, they all seem to be solidly bourgeois.
He presumably didn’t need to have nut roast alternating with bean
and cheese casserole every night.

I assume that the reason this question is coming up now has something to do with the approach of the Son of the Prince of Darkness’ birthday on April 20. And certainly whoever wrote it does not know -or perhaps fails to acknowledge- that Hitler was only an occasional vegetarian who seemed to be philosophically opposed to eating meat when it suited his propaganda agenda. It also seems likely that Hitler was convinced that a vegetarian diet would correct the gastrointestinal problems that had plagued him throughout his adult life. (You may or may not be amused to know that it has been reported that one of his doctors treated him with e. coli bacteria cultured from Hitler’s own stool. This homeopathic remedy is referred to as Mutaflor and can be purchased today. But it is made, I assume, from e. coli from the guts of someone other than Hitler.)

In the end I suspect that the question is disingenuous and the person who wrote it is not truly serious about wanting to write a “A Thousand Years (Oops! Make that twelve.) of Great Aryan Veggie Recipes.” But the subordinate question about the menus is pretty intriguing. I’m sure such things exist. If any reader of this blog comes across any German or Austrian vegetarian books, menus or recipes from the period of Hitler’s rise (1933) and fall (1945) please let us know.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Model Torta Rustica

Torta: cake or pie
Rustica: from rustico meaning folksy, rustic

When you spend as much time in the kitchen as I have, the stuff that billows up from the memory well often has something to do with food. Such was the case last week as I was trying to figure out what to do with a surplus of pie dough. I could have frozen the dough, but doing that would have required that I remove all of the stuff that was piled on top of the chest freezer which, on Friday, included 5 gallons of stock, my tool box, 50 pounds of turkey, ten pounds of chicken, my camera bag and well, you get the idea. So anyway, I’m staring at the pie dough and then I look over at the big bag of potatoes in the corner of the room and I start thinking about Richard Avedon and then something along the lines of “Damn, I have not made Dorian’s torta rustica in over twenty years.”

My father’s family has been cooking and eating torta rustica, a very simple double crust pie made from lard dough filled with rice or potato or spinach for generations. But the rusitca that I was thinking of was a much fancier version that I was taught to make by Dorian Leigh , (who had posed for Richard Avedon, hence the connection) at her home in Ridgefield, Ct in the early 1980’s.

Dorian’s torta rusitca was a magnificently complicated and delicious construction made from brioche dough and layers of spinach, Gruyere cheese and black forest ham, all baked in a spring form, allowed to cool and then pressed overnight. On the basis of the combination of ingredients alone I would have loved this dish, but what killed me was how it combined techniques from the sophisticated charcuterie I was trying to learn (layering of internal ingredients, pressing under weights to compress air pockets) and by how much the final product reminded me of a geologic stratigraphic section when it was cut. It also did not escape my attention that she had done something that well-heeled chefs have been doing forever: turned a peasant dish into haute cuisine and rendered it’s name oxymoronic.

(What can I say? I’m easily amused.)

So with all this stuff scudding around in my head, I decided to make two torta rustica based on Dorian’s model. Both were filled mostly with potatoes, leeks and Trent’s (Hendricks Farms and Dairy) Gruyere cheese, but one I added a ring of Chicken sausage that I developed for the farm only two weeks ago (It’s seasoned with lemon, thyme and a suspicion of garlic).

Er, ah, I did not write a recipe for this, but if anyone would like a walk-through, just email me and I’ll throw something together.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Model Torta Rustica

Torta: cake or pie
Rustica: from rustico meaning folksy, rustic

When you spend as much time in the kitchen as I have, the stuff that billows up from the memory well often has something to do with food. Such was the case last week as I was trying to figure out what to do with a surplus of pie dough. I could have frozen the dough, but doing that would have required that I remove all of the stuff that was piled on top of the chest freezer which, on Friday, included 5 gallons of stock, my tool box, 50 pounds of turkey, ten pounds of chicken, my camera bag and well, you get the idea. So anyway, I’m staring at the pie dough and then I look over at the big bag of potatoes in the corner of the room and I start thinking about Richard Avedon and then something along the lines of “Damn, I have not made Dorian’s torta rustica in over twenty years.”

My father’s family has been cooking and eating torta rustica, a very simple double crust pie made from lard dough filled with rice or potato or spinach for generations. But the rusitca that I was thinking of was a much fancier version that I was taught to make by Dorian Leigh , (who had posed for Richard Avedon, hence the connection) at her home in Ridgefield, Ct in the early 1980’s.

Dorian’s torta rusitca was a magnificently complicated and delicious construction made from brioche dough and layers of spinach, Gruyere cheese and black forest ham, all baked in a spring form, allowed to cool and then pressed overnight. On the basis of the combination of ingredients alone I would have loved this dish, but what killed me was how it combined techniques from the sophisticated charcuterie I was trying to learn (layering of internal ingredients, pressing under weights to compress air pockets) and by how much the final product reminded me of a geologic stratigraphic section when it was cut. It also did not escape my attention that she had done something that well-heeled chefs have been doing forever: turned a peasant dish into haute cuisine and rendered it’s name oxymoronic.

(What can I say? I’m easily amused.)

So with all this stuff scudding around in my head, I decided to make two torta rustica based on Dorian’s model. Both were filled mostly with potatoes, leeks and Trent’s (Hendricks Farms and Dairy) Gruyere cheese, but one I added a ring of Chicken sausage that I developed for the farm only two weeks ago (It’s seasoned with lemon, thyme and a suspicion of garlic).

Er, ah, I did not write a recipe for this, but if anyone would like a walk-through, just email me and I’ll throw something together.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Xmas Food 2007

So I let my wife talk me into having a party on Sunday for some local friends. “Just do some hors d oeuvres,” she said “don’t make dinner. That’s too much work.” Oy, sure dinner is more work. But don’t think I won’t be cooking every spare minute between now and the first doorbell ring on Sunday.

I don’t mind at all really. I mean, cooking is my reason-to-be. (So what’s to complain about? Nothing, unless I want to give up my reason-to-be I suppose. And what if I did, would I disappear?) Besides, a holiday party gives me an excuse to make things that I do not make on a regular basis but really wish I could. Take creme caramel. I mean WTF? Is there anything easier to make and more grand than a gigantic slope sided cylinder of eggs and milk and sugar? I don’t think so.

This might surprise people who regard me as self-realized, totally conscious, unsentimental and coolly rational guy. But I’m not so sure I know my mind very well.

Witness the book that I used for the creme caramel you see in progress in the slide show below. This book (which actually belongs to my wife) has the only recipe for creme caramel that I will make at home. I’m not sure why I do this, but I think it has something to do with sentimentality because it sure as hell isn’t rational. Sigh.

I’ll take pictures of the finished product and post them later in the week. I can’t really unmold the thing and let it sit because it’ll collapse after a day or so.

Vanilla Extract courtesy of Exclusively Yours Catering -great stuff!

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Xmas Food 2007

So I let my wife talk me into having a party on Sunday for some local friends. “Just do some hors d oeuvres,” she said “don’t make dinner. That’s too much work.” Oy, sure dinner is more work. But don’t think I won’t be cooking every spare minute between now and the first doorbell ring on Sunday.

I don’t mind at all really. I mean, cooking is my reason-to-be. (So what’s to complain about? Nothing, unless I want to give up my reason-to-be I suppose. And what if I did, would I disappear?) Besides, a holiday party gives me an excuse to make things that I do not make on a regular basis but really wish I could. Take creme caramel. I mean WTF? Is there anything easier to make and more grand than a gigantic slope sided cylinder of eggs and milk and sugar? I don’t think so.

This might surprise people who regard me as self-realized, totally conscious, unsentimental and coolly rational guy. But I’m not so sure I know my mind very well.

Witness the book that I used for the creme caramel you see in progress in the slide show below. This book (which actually belongs to my wife) has the only recipe for creme caramel that I will make at home. I’m not sure why I do this, but I think it has something to do with sentimentality because it sure as hell isn’t rational. Sigh.

I’ll take pictures of the finished product and post them later in the week. I can’t really unmold the thing and let it sit because it’ll collapse after a day or so.

Vanilla Extract courtesy of Exclusively Yours Catering -great stuff!

The best sauce in the world is hunger.