The Soup Is On

I don’t mean to harp on soup this week, but because of the weather- and an attempt to eat out less (and therefore have to come up with things to make out of increasingly discordant ingredients)- I have been thinking about and making a lot of soup.

People are always asking me for recipes. They ask me for recipes, very often, that I don’t have, because I made something up at my house, or because I made some ancient dish that was passed on to me by my family or friends. This is what I mean when I say that cooking is more than a recipe. Cooking is a body of techniques, and one cuisine is distinguished from another not by recipes and often not even by ingredients: they are distinguished by their methods.

A few days ago, I posted a bit about the way many Italians make soup, that is to say, the technique involved in making such a soup. Tonight, I found myself alone for dinner, with a few potatoes growing eyes on them, and a head of curly escarole, or batavia, about to lose its luster in the fridge. Enter the joy of having stock in the freezer.

When I make stock, I try to make a lot of it. If I have chicken parts or bones left in a smaller quantity, I freeze them so when there’s 4 or 5 pounds of chicken bones (which is quite a bit), I make a lot of stock. Then I freeze it in deli containers, being sure to use a container that tapers towards the bottom. Why? So when there’s frozen stock in it, I can slip it out.

Back to the technique: I put the stock in a pan with some water to begin melting. Once it’s melted, taste it. If the stock is really strong, thin it with water. I tend to make my stock strong and freeze it in pint containers. I washed out the container with water and added it to the pot for a scant quart of liquid.

I cut up some lesser potatoes into chunks and once the stock was simmering, I added them. I cooked these for about 15 minutes or so, then I started the pestata (see link above).

After looking through the fridge, I had found some scallions, some celery, parsley and cilantro (no carrots, sadly). Two smaller ribs of celery, three scallions, a tuft of each herb and two cloves of garlic found themselves in the food processor. After a quick chop, I left the motor running and drizzled in a tablespoon or two of extra virgin olive oil- the only olive oil you should be cooking with, btw- until I had a paste, but not too liquid of one.

That paste then got fried in some more olive oil until it began to color.

I had some crushed up tomatoes in the fridge, so those were added to the pestata to cook a bit before the whole thing was mixed into the simmering soup.

After the pestata, went the escarole, cleaned (in several changes of cold water) and sliced somewhat thinly. This simmers together until the potatoes and greens are quite tender.

If I were serving this soup as an appetizer, I would use rice as a panade, good, short-grain rice like carnaroli. Tonight, I used a piece of bread, mainly because I added a poached egg to my soup, and egg and bread in soup is a winning combination. I toasted a day-old slice of bread and put it in the bottom of my bowl. I cracked an egg into the simmering soup for five minutes, then ladled the soup (egg first) on top of the bread, and sprinkled with some grated parmiggiano cheese, but you could certainly use pecorino romano or sardo or even ricotta salata. Sadly, I was so hungry I ate the egg immediately, but here’s a shot of my second helping, note the bread crust sticking out on the right.

Buon apetito.

Listening: A very powerful interview with Tony Judt on Fresh Air.

Easter Stress

Oh my god, there is so much to do for easter.

I have 5 doughs to percentagize, size, make shopping lists for – not to mention make. I have to work out the wines with Massi…and I have to organize the logistics across 2 cities and three kitchens.

BREATHE.

La Minestra

La Cucina Povera- The Food of the Poor. It was about to be a huge fad, and then people realized they didn’t want to pay ten bucks for bread soup. Surprise.

I’m making soup. I’m making Minestra di Pasta e Fagioli. This is a soup often known in the US as “Pasta Fazool,” because of the Neapolitan word for bean: fasulo. Whatever you call it, soup, pasta and beans are cooked together and separately throughout Italy in many preparations. There are many renditions of this soup in American restaurants and they largely suck, frankly, because they take a french or franco-american approach to an intrinsically Italian soup. They take beans and boil them with chicken stock, add a can of tomatoes and a bag of frozen vegetables. It’s a simmer-and-stir. Many delicate french soups are made this way (minus the frozen vegetables) and it’s a perfectly fine technique- but not for Italian soups.

Italian soups have 2 components  that will set them apart: pestata and pandade. Like everything in Italian, there are many different words that mean the same thing, but here’s what they mean: Pestata (or trito or mirpazza) is a paste of aromatic vegetables and fat- usually pork fat like back fat or salt pork, but could also be lard or olive oil. Garlic, onions, carrots, celery, parsely, rosemary- whatever is appropriate to the recipe (or your mood) are chopped together until very fine, and then the fat is added and chopped in as well (or you can do what I do- use a food processor). This is one of the traditional uses of the mezzaluna you got for christmas five years ago and lost in the back of the pantry. The paste is then fried separately and added to the soup once it’s lightly toasted.

Then there is the panade (or rinforzo) or thickener. In many recipes with beans, which have a natural affinity for them, potatoes are cooked along with the legumes until they’re cooked enough to be mashed, either in the soup pot, or taken out and mashed to a finer consistency and added back in. Bread can act in this role as well, and grains like semolina. Rice is generally not used in this way, since its consistency, like pasta’s, is considered sacred and is added only at the last moment to cook to its optimum point. The point is, unlike a roux or cornstarch, these add body and flavor, not merely viscosity.

And in the spirit of soup’s economy, after dinner which included a potato and radicchio salad, there was a little left, and into the soup that went as well.

I could hear my grandmother calling me a greaseball.

Welcome back.

We are back, and as you can see, we’ve done some remodeling. I can even post photos, look:

P, Secret Agent Gnocchi and Myself

And what’s more, you’ll see your comments more quickly, since I don’t have to wade through comment spam for 30 minutes every time I log in, thanks to Akismet, and other snazzy devices that I may or may not completely understand. The search feature works, the blog looks nicer and we now have the ability to post video and audio — the podcast lives! The blog is also easier for me to use, not that you care, but it means I’ll be able to upload more- and more interesting- content more regularly.

A few ghosts still haunt us:

Link and text formatting on old (2009 and earlier) entries

The old blog was entered in something called markdown syntax. This was a very fast and superior alternative to the text editor in drupal (the old content management system). Unfortunately, now that we’re in WordPress, if we load markdown, we disable other features that we really want to use, so for the time being, old posts are going to look strange and hyperlinks won’t work (although you can see the web address, you’ll just have to copy and paste it). Secret Agent Gnocchi and the Gnomes are working on this, but if this problem is going to be permanent, I will update the text in the more often-visited posts.

WordPress has human-readable URLs

When I post an entry or a photograph, it becomes an entry in a database. Drupal would just number them as they were created, so if you looked in the address bar, it might look like this: http://omnivorousfish.com/node/199. WordPress, however, takes the node’s title into consideration, and the same article’s URL becomes: http://omnivorousfish.com/gnocchi-the-finer-points/. Why do you care? Well, unless you link to or have bookmarks of any specific posts (not just omnivorousfish.com) you don’t care. If you are linked to me and I know about it, I will email you the correct links when I get around to it. If you’re looking for something you had bookmarked, the Search feature actually works now.

Comments prior to July 2009 are gone for the time being.

Yeah, we have no idea WTF happened on this one. They just disappeared. This really stinks, because a lot of the pasta posts had great dialogue in them, not to mention the fact that a lot of blogging luminaries showed up over the years to grace my little site with a comment, and now those comments are gone…and those people may not come back. I’m hoping they’re in an Uh-Huh video somewhere, and will come back in shaky pencil animation.

Older Photos are too wide for the new page format.

Again, this is a migration bug, and really a very minor one. If there’s a photo at the top of an old post, it impinges on the right block. No biggie.

Other than that, we are back on board with a new look and a new commitment to the slaughter of sacred cows in the food world. If you have any questions, please email us at make pasta at gmail dot com.