the most ignored kitchen ingredient

 

Some would argue against the characterization of knife sharpening as an ingredient, but I beg to differ.  I’ve recently noticed knife exchanges on foodie websites between visitors and the web master that were either disturbing, or simply disappointing.  I attribute this to a lack of information on the subject, so in my infinite wisdom, I will try to remedy the situation.  I approach this subject from a perspective not familiar to most foodies, home cooks, or even to a great number of chefs – manual DIY sharpening.  I spent 5 years putting myself through undergraduate and graduate courses by peddling man cave sundries at a knife (and shaver) store – part of the Victor Kiam/New England Patriots empire.  Yes, that long forgotten bastion of shopping mall manliness that also sold darts, dull samurai swords, and nose hair trimmers – all laced with testosterone and requiring burliness to browse. 

The Equipment

We worked on commission, and I spent much of my time peddling sharpening stones to browsing patrons by sharping the knife they were carrying – for free.  The primary selling point became how I could easily sharpen a knife by hand on a tabletop diamond stone that could shave the hair from my arm.  The most difficult part was maintaining an unshaven patch of hair on my arm for the demonstration.  I learned in those days the proper angle for holding a knife while sharpening, how to sweep the knife on the stone to uniformly sharpen the knife from tang to tip, and most importantly, how to “finish” the knife on a sharpening steel.  One of the most misunderstood tools in the kitchen, the sharpening steel really doesn’t sharpen, at least not the traditional kind.  The traditional sharpening steel simply knocks microscopic burrs from the knife edge, which makes it slice better.  Eventually, you will need a proper sharpening of your knives.  But most home cooks think that the sharpening steel is all they need, if anything, to keep their knives functioning properly.

A Proper Sharpening

I realize that my grandfather would probably disagree, but I believe the diamond stone is a better tool for sharpening than the traditional whetstone, and with much less mess.  Diamond stones are metal plates with diamond dust embedded in them, and can be quite expensive, since a proper sharpening requires three different stones of varying sizes of diamond dust – let’s call them coarse, medium, and fine.  Instead of oil, the stones use water for lubrication and can be rinsed clean under running water.  In keeping with the diamond theme, I also use a diamond steel on a regular basis, followed by a traditional sharpening steel.  A proper sharpening goes from coarse, medium, to fine on the stones, then to a fine diamond steel and ending with the traditional steel. 

Options

I understand that a proper sharpening takes some practice, and requires a bit of time to be successful, which is probably why most chefs, and not many home cooks ever try it.  A professional chef will typically send out his knives for professional sharpening, which we also did in our retail man cave.  Since those places are difficult to find, another option for the home cook (and professional chef) is the Chef’s choice knife sharpener.  There are various models available at all price points, they have a long successful history, and are almost foolproof.  Look them up on Amazon, along with the DMT diamond steels and sharpening stones.  They may become your most important ingredient too.

we fall

But we pick ourselves back up. Life gets in the way, but it’s not like the fire isn’t burning. If you’re ready for a new sensation, we’ve got some good stuff coming. Back from the depths of vegetarianism and the most peculiar spring I’ve been through in a while, we’re still moving forward. Call it refinement of craft, or just trying to figure out the offshoot direction that we have to take our home cooking, we’re about perseverance. It’s crazy, but this is just a blog about a few people bouncing ideas off of each other, and yet we now have more than 10,000 hits. In broad, short strokes, here’s what we have to talk about:

1. Hot smoking and cold smoking, and how to use it and when.
2. Nashville gets a bunch of press. We’ve been there and sampled it, there’s good, great, but there’s also meh.
3. Foraging and edible plants. We have an interesting experience with edible plants, Noma, and Catbird Seat to share.
4. How do we carry forward the vegetarian momentum? I have a few ideas.
5. The spring grill. More than burgers and dogs. When’s the last time you grilled your salad?
6. The ubiquitous kale. Why you need to know about it.
7. The garden is growing, but it took a while. The virtues of DIY, what we’re growing, and why.
8. Local trends in beer service and consumption. It’s never been better!
9. What to drink with what and when. Rose’ season. What to know, what to look for, and why it was never white zinfandel.
10. With garden comes surplus. Pickling, preservation, use of over/under-ripe veggies. And a word on home gardening.

If you’ve ever read these posts and gotten anything out of them, please respond in comments either on Facebook or on the blog itself. We’ve gotten a few interesting questions, and we’re happy to field any question, no matter how obscure. If we don’t know the answer, we know where to look, or we can try to work it out ourselves. At the end of the day, we’re all about cooking food for our family and friends, and trying to do it better tomorrow than we did it today.

og
/bde

the fallacy of rankings

Our obsession with supremacy makes us do a bunch of crazy stuff, because we crave association with “the best.” I mean, why else are there so many Alabama logos everywhere I look in Middle Tennessee? Surely not all of these people went there.
How often do you get bogged down in looking at Amazon customer reviews? I confess to doing the same, because I fear spending money on an inferior product. Wow, we’ve come a long way, haven’t we? What happened to the days of buying only what you had around you, regardless of the quality? Maybe we’re culturally tired of settling for something when we can have it better.
Which brings me to the point of restaurant rankings and reviews. Who do you trust in this matter? Can you rely on Yelp? Maybe sometimes, but look at what people put on there. Yeah, the videos are pretty funny, but here’s a comment that comes from a 2 star review:
“The hostess was super friendly and helpful – but that was the highlight. The bartender was incredibly rude to our entire party. Total attitude problem – and seemed put out to serve us from the moment we arrived at the bar.”
So because they didn’t like the bartender the whole place gets dinged? Realize also that there’s filtration put on Yelp reviews. They throw out the lows and sometimes even the high ones. But if you don’t know these people, how can you tell if their bad experience will be relevant to you? You can’t.
A number of the reviews are read by the actual owners/management of the establishment. I posted a pretty critical review once and was messaged by the owner of the establishment offering to comp my next meal. I didn’t take them up on it, but did go back on my own dime some time later and regretted it. But that’s me. I have my reasons for why I didn’t like it, and it’s not a one-size fits all.
The fallacy is that there is no “best restaurant.” Just like there’s no “best song ever.” While you need guidance sometimes, you have to use discretion about where you get that information from. There are guides like tripadvisor, Zagat, and Michelin, but how much political influence and money do you think goes into stuff like that? Probably more than we want to know. When you consider that a restaurant’s revenues frequently mirror yelp ratings, how many positives are true positives? Is it OK for an owner or investor to put a 5 star rating?
Your best advice comes from someone that you know and trust that has similar preferences to yours. “They can’t put anything on the internet that isn’t true.” To that I reply, Bonjour.

there they went and got me all addicted

I saw a tv special about these good folks in NYC making their pickles. I, like my oldest son, am a pickle freak. The classic sours are pickles like you wish everyone would make them but can’t. The hotties are interesting and live up to their name in terms of spicy. I’m really interested in checking out the smokra. Or maybe…I need to figure out how to make my own.

maitake mushroom with ginger/carrot sauce

When a fridge clearing experiment goes really well, you remember it. We had some curried carrot/ginger soup that was pretty good by itself. One of the big things I’ve learned this year in the vegetarianism is to stack layers.

Ginger/carrot soup/sauce
4 large carrots, peeled, diced
1/2 large yellow onion, diced
2 garlic cloves minced
1 thumb of peeled ginger cut small as possible
2 tsp of curry powder
Chicken stock*
Heavy cream/butter*
Sherry vinegar, 1 tbsp

In a sauce pan over medium to lower heat, add the veggies, and soften. You’re not looking for color change here.
Sprinkle the curry powder over the veggies and allow it to incorporate a little bit.
The liquid: you have a choice here. You could add coconut milk, and that would be really good. You can use chicken stock and latter augment with butter. You could go the route of heavy cream and dilute either with water, chicken or veggie stock.
Do whatever you want. Make sure it’s seasoned. The point is to turn this in to a sauce as a base for the mushroom part of the dish.

The sauce
Taste it. If you went with more of a lower fat way, add a little butter and to make it look nice, make sure you blend it down until it’s not lumpy. Make it taste like whatever you want, just make sure the carrot flavors come through.

The rest of the dish

The maitake mushrooms are otherwise known as hen of the woods mushrooms. They’re not particularly inexpensive, but man are they good. You’ll pay per pound for these things about what you would for certain meats. Slice them into slabs, and save the little bits that fall off. Sear over high heat with butter or butter/oil mixture until golden brown, and reserve, including the little brown bits. These are the best parts. Also, I like to sneak a little chili flakes and thyme. Thyme and butter always go together.

We’ve done the charred poblano peppers. They’re a good size, usually don’t have that much heat, and make a nice addition to any cooked veggie dish. Cut into strips.

Feta cheese or queso fresco. This is a salty topping to charred peppers that is used commonly in Mexican cooking, goes great with this dish as well.

Sriracha. What can I say? Heat is good.

Assembly
Sauce: you want this to be just thick enough to coat the back of the spoon. You want intensity here, because that’s what separates a soup from a sauce. Soup is dilute, warming, nice. Sauce is POW. Don’t go crazy or else it’ll be inedible. Layer the sauce in the bottom in the bowl.

Stack the mushroom slices and browned bits on top. Poblano pepper strips over that. Cheese crumbles for garnish. Sriracha if you dare. I’ve had many a restaurant dish that couldn’t stand up to this one. This dish is really about balance in terms of texture, colors, flavors, etc. If you want to substitute portabello, button, shiitake, chantarelle, you can easily do that. Instead of sliced peppers, maybe a pepper puree. Maybe even a bacon dashi broth instead of the carrot soup base. This is not an end product.

quinoa and salad

renalmd turned me on to the sweet peppers, most grocery stores I’ve been to have them. Raw, charred, or sauteed they’re pretty good. This builds on textures and flavors, just make up your own variation. The interesting thing about quinoa is the texture it provides to whatever you’re building. They can be a grain filler in bean burgers (another post), but otherwise serve up as a worthwhile veggie addition, especially in an appetizer kinda way.

Cook the quinoa is salted water until just cooked and al dente. You need this texture, otherwise it comes across as a messier looking version of couscous. Remember when the filaments release it’s almost ready. If you cook a little slower, you won’t be as likely to overshoot it.
The rest is as simple as diced cucumbers, minced red onion, and basic red wine vinaigrette, and topped with raw sweet peppers. When you think about salads, it’s more interesting to think in terms of layers and texture. The quinoa is a grain, and if you’re gentle with it, you can use it to provide a bit of crunch. There are no rules to this. Just go to Whole Foods and check out the salad bar. Take familiar combinations and add kale, couscous, quinoa, curry, tofu, legumes, etc. to come up with something great.

more monkfish

Just remember that lentils like tomatoes and curry, monkish likes butter and garlic. The rest is just assembly.

Curried daal with pan roasted monkfish
For the lentils, start with pressure cooker garlic tomato sauce.
If you need a refresher, remember that its:
1 28 oz can whole tomatoes
1 entire head of garlic, peeled
1 whole onion sliced thin
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
about 2 cups of water

Once that goes 20 min, depressurize, and puree it in a blender or use a blender stick.

In a new sauce pan

1 half onion, thinly sliced
tomato sauce
1 lb of red lentils
1-2 tbsp of curry powder
water to cover by about a couple of inches. These things are real sponges and they’ll suck it up quickly.
salt to taste
bring to boil, reduce to simmer. Be really careful to not overcook it which is really easy to do.

Monkfish
If you can find this stuff, you’ll love it. It’s not much to look at, but you’ll get over it once you taste it.

1 large monkfish fillet will feed about 3-4 people. We cooked two of them for four and had a fair amount left over. The kids even ate it.

Strip as much of the membrane off of the tail as you can. You mostly want to avoid using a knife, but you may have to.
Coat with a little oil and salt.
Bring a cast iron skillet to high temperature with a butter/oil mixture, and just as it’s starting to smoke, drop the fish in.
From here, I add another tbsp or two of butter to the pan along with a 3-4 peeled garlic cloves.

Here’s a good trick to cooking fish: continuous basting. If you tilt the pan so that the butter/oil mixture runs down to an area of the pan that’s not directly over the flame, you’ll minimize burning the fat, maximize the browning, and you can put stuff like aromatics in there to flavor the oil. That’s one reason restaurant kitchens smell different from home kitchens, they’re frequently using oil + aromatics to sautee’. As you’re tilting the pan in one hand, use the other to scoop up the butter/oil and continuously pour it over the fish. If the fish still has the skin on it, put the skin side down first, then flip it when it releases. Baste that skin (especially on snapper or bass) and you’ll have something pretty amazing.

Rotate the fish regularly, and pull it off when it looks brown. Monkfish is pretty forgiving, and you can put it on a wire rack/sheet pan combo, then shoot it into a low oven to hold it. For the oven, I’ll typically turn it to 170, then turn it off. If you have a warming drawer, that will work too. If you’re measuring internal temperatures, you probably don’t want to go much above 130, so just watch it.
Once the fish rests, cut into medallions and serve. Remember that butter and garlic are it’s friend, much like lobster, if you want to sauce it with some combination of the two and garnish with greenery, that would be pretty great, too.