Keeping It Simple

I realized most of my posts are about a fairly complicated or time-consuming meal, whether it's smoking meat for half a day or sous vide for two. While I do geek out like that in the kitchen fairly often, it's not really the rule, and I recognize not everyone has the time or equipment to make it happen.

The good news is you can get a delicious, home-cooked meal on the table with minimal effort if you learn some simple tricks and hacks about ingredients and seasonings. The first step is go read Eater's guide to stocking a pantry. Then, beyond "whatever spices you cook or bake with," branch out a little. Recently I've become a fan of sumac (main component of za'atar) and smoked paprika in particular, and turmeric is supposed to be anti-inflammatory and adds zip to almost anything.

With that as a base, I'll share a quick comfort food hack that goes from fridge to table in under a half hour. It's a pasta sauté with some extra protein from tuna and beans, flavored with pesto.

• 1 package small or filled pasta, such as tortellini, rotini, or fusilli
• 1 tbsp. olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 can pinto, kidney, or garbanzo beans (if using dried, soak and cook first)
• 1/2 tsp. za'atar (or pinch each of sumac, oregano, basil)
• 1 tbsp. grated parmesan or pecorino cheese
• 1 can or jar of tuna, preferably in olive oil
• 1/4 c. pesto

Boil pasta for 2 minutes less than directions. Drain and cool with water.

Heat a skillet on medium-high and add a tablespoon of olive oil until shimmering.

Sauté garlic for two minutes until fragrant, add beans and sauté two minutes for pintos or kidneys or five for garbanzos.

Stir in tuna and drained pasta.

Reduce heat to medium-low, add cheese and pesto and simmer an additional minute.

Serve with a medium-dry white or rosé. Since we're in the Mediterranean flavor family, I'd maybe go Greek like this, go a little bigger in Italy (I love all things Sicilian), or a little farther afield to Lebanon, either Ixsir white or Domaine des Tourelles rosé (the last by the case, but sounds like a deal to me). (I'm a big fan of Lebanese wine as well-- those specific recs came from The Independent.)

Buon appetito!

Sous vide chuck roast, as promised

My last post mentioned my first attempt at doing a roast sous vide and promised the recipe, which is adapted from Anova's. Chuck is extremely flavorful but often chewy, so often ground in burgers, and that's especially true for grass-fed, which for health and environmental reasons I buy almost exclusively. (If you're in the NYC metro area, the Lewis Waite Farm CSA normally does monthly delivery for locally, humanely raised meat and dairy.) This makes it ideal for long sous vide, which renders the tough collagen effectively into gelatin. That process requires temperatures of at least 130ºF (54.5ºC), and at least 24 hours of cooking, and longer is better.

Sous vide chuck roast

The meat also benefits from a long seasoning prep in the fridge. I made my own seasoning rub, enough for a 2-1/2 lb. roast:

• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. thyme
• 1/4 tsp. smoked paprika
• 1/2 tsp. garlic powder
• 1/2 tsp. onion powder
• 1/2 tsp. ground mustard

1. Combine, rub on the roast, and refrigerate uncovered overnight.
2. Heat a sous vide water bath to 131ºF for rare, 135ºF for medium-rare, or 140ºF for medium. (If you actually want your roast beef well-done, I don't know what to say to you. Also you're probably reading the wrong blog.)
3. Place the meat in a sufficiently sized Ziploc (or better yet reusable silicone bags from Target or Amazon, if you can find them in-stock), remove the air via water displacement, and seal the bag. (Also, if you're into food and aren't reading J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, you should.)
4. Immerse in the water bath, and cook for 24-36 hours. If you're using the Magic Chef, it has a handy timer.
5. After the timer ends remove from the bag, pat dry, and let rest for 10 minutes.
6. If using the Magic Chef, dump the water, dry the pot, and set to the "sauté" setting or heat a skillet very hot, add a tablespoon of neutral oil with a high smoke point such as grapeseed or avocado, and brown the roast on all sides to form a crust. If you have a torch (haven't gone there yet, but I've been considering a Searzall), you can use that too.
7. Transfer to a platter, let cool a little, slice thin, and... enjoy the f*#k out of it.

Sous vide for dummies

I will presume at least most readers of a food blog are at least aware of sous vide (under vacuum) cooking in a water bath. It's a go-to method for Modernist cooks, as it allows for long cooking at a consistent temperature, which particularly makes cheaper, tougher, but often more flavorful meat as tender as more expensive cuts. Also, as long, lower temperature cooking effectively sterilizes, if you like your meat in the rare zone (in other words, properly cooked), you can have it without worrying about food-borne illness. It's a win-win.
The biggest obstacle to home sous vide used to be the cost and need for additional equipment. Early sous vide pioneers repurposed water baths meant for use in biology labs, at a cost of hundreds or thousands of dollars. You can now purchase circulators for $100-200 at Target and the like, but they still require extra storage plus a big cooking vessel for the water. If, like me, you live in a city, but unlike me don't have a big kitchen you got to design yourself, space is at a premium, and you probably avoid single-use tools costing as much as a new set of cookware. For a long time, I'd sous vide steak on the stove top in a big pot of water with a instant read thermometer, and I'd flash the flame on and off periodically to keep it in the rare (~128ºF/54ºC) range. This was annoying, but as steaks take only 45-60 minutes to cook, it wasn't infeasible.

A perfectly rare burger

For larger, tougher cuts, such as short ribs, chuck roast, or pork shoulder, although the latter I'm more apt to smoke anyway, you want 24+ hours of cooking so all the tough connective tissue (collagen) can render down and soften. I don't know about you, but to paraphrase Rita Rudner, I don't want to do anything fun for 24 hours.
Since I'm also a fan of pressure and slow cooking, I considered the Instant Pot, but I already have a stovetop pressure cooker and an old slow cooker, and the Instant Pot multicookers don't themselves do sous vide. I considered building my own sous vide with a PLC controller (you can find plans in several places), but my current slow cooker is automatic, which wouldn't work. Then for a while I coveted Wolf's multicooker, but I couldn't justify $600 for primarily sous vide, especially when it only gets 3.5 stars.
Enter the Magic Chef, a Home Depot exclusive. At only $60 on sale, it's kind of a no-brainer, and it's also a pressure cooker, rice cooker, slow cooker, and gets hot enough to sauté in. You can set the sous vide cycle for 36+ hours, and I've already used it for steak, burgers (see right), and a 27-hour grass-fed chuck roast (recipe to follow).
There are a couple of caveats: some sous vide cooking, notably eggs, require quite precise temperature control, ±0.2ºF. I haven't tested the precision of this unit that closely, but I'm fairly sure it would be challenging to attain that precision. Aside from frittata, I don't really eat eggs as eggs so it's less relevant, and you'd be unlikely to find something better at this price. Also, it doesn't circulate the water as most immersion units do, but it's well insulated so stirring the water before cooking seems sufficient.
Feel free to purchase via any of the above links. Home Depot rejected my affiliate application so I won't benefit monetarily, but I recommend it nevertheless. Maybe if I get enough traffic, they'll reconsider.

Time to regroup

It's been years, literally, since I last wrote about food. As I have lots of free time while I seek my next role, it seemed a good juncture to get back at it. I enjoyed a wonderful dinner with DW at Leuca in the William Vale Hotel in Williamsburg.
Leuca is a newer entry from megachef Andrew Carmellini's NoHo Hospitality Group. He's got so many venture in NYC now, from The Dutch to Locanda Verde, that it's a wonder he either eats or sleeps himself. I'm personally a fan of his cookbook, and the kitchen at Leuca is doing something right.
First off, I'll say eating at the bar on a Saturday night is a study in service run with military precision. As more customers start to trickle in, our bartender and his colleague are simultaneously pouring and  mixing two or more drinks, checking on our satisfaction, entering tickets, pulling orders, and making it all look like it's programmed in The Matrix. This is a machine but human at the same time. He's also knowledgeable and opinionated about his bar's and the menu's contents and happy to share both without either condescension or annoyance. We felt more educated and excited about the night. My partner, who favors wines on the sweeter side trending to dessert, was immediately offered a suggestion in that spirit with not only no judgment but encouragement to order what she liked.
After selecting our entrees, I asked for the sommelier for some help with the wine list, which focuses on and covers most of the Italian peninsula, much of which I was unfamiliar with. After an informative discussion covering the Etna region of Sicily, Sardinia, and Campania, I branched out to the Mora e Memo Nau Cannonau from Sardinia, a region and wine with which I had little experience. As DW and I were sharing scallops and pork chop, this lighter-style red with a nice balance of mild fruit, tannin, and spice was a great middle ground.
As for the food, wow! The scallops with riso venera (black Venus rice) and caper berries were excellent. The scallops were perfectly cooked with a slice of caper berry atop each and the rice a bit chewy adding some texture. A great meld of flavor and texture reminding me again that scallops done properly are one of my favorite culinary experiences.
As for that pork chop: spectacular. Some combination of grilling, frying and/or roasting left it with a spectacular crust on the outside, then topped with "Stone Fruit Mostardo," i.e. plum, peach, something mustard blend which amounts to the tastiest damned barbecue sauce I've had in ages. The bartender had called this his favorite main on the menu, and yes, I get it. I told him I kind of want a bowl of the sauce to drink, and he agreed. The delicious housemade sesame bread made an excellent vessel for mopping up what was left on the plate. I'm just glad I don't adhere to either Kosher or Halal dietary laws.
And now to dessert, which after processing the disappointment that the actual dessert menu, which has just changed, didn't include the pumpkin cheesecake listed on the dinner menu, we still enjoyed. The standout here was the pistachio cake with olive oil gelato-- the flavor combinations were so unexpected and balanced we didn't want to stop eating.
Our second choice, the budino al ciocolatto (chocolate mousse) with ginger gelato was definitely tasty, but the chocolate was almost too dark and overpowering, especially when we both inhaled the huge dusting of cocoa powder on top. The bottom layer, some crunchy combination of chocolate and hazelnut, was the best part, and while we enjoyed it, we would probably try something else next time.
All in all, we would recommend this place, as the food is definitely delicious, but given the high price points, it's probably best left for special occasions or a group outing focused on drinks and sharing some smaller plates and pastas, which looked good but we skipped this round. We'll most likely be back at some point, probably with more people to share some of the other choices.
Buon appetito!