Fresh Basil, Tomato, and Mozzarella Salad

Fresh basil and tomato are best at the peak of summertime because the compounds that give them great flavor require warm weather. Try this classic combination when you’re able to get good tomatoes. (And if you’re adventurous, make your own mozzarella cheese; see page 433.)

Toss in a bowl and serve:

Notes

• There’s no wrong ratio of basil to cheese to tomato. Hold back some of each ingredient, take a look at the resulting salad, and toss in more of whatever you think will make it better. The only thing to be careful with is the salt; once there’s too much in there, it’s hard to fix.

• How to slice the tomatoes and cheese is also up to you. Try thick slices of tomato and cheese, alternating in layers on the plate. Or slice the tomato and cheese into bite-size pieces to be served in a bowl.

• Try making this twice, once with conventional breeds of tomatoes and a second time with heirloom tomatoes, to see the difference it makes.

Fennel, Portobello Mushroom, and Parmesan Salad

Fennel bulb, also known as Florence fennel, is a cool-weather item, typically harvested in fall or early winter, before any serious winter weather. This simple salad is a great combination of flavors. Make sure to slice everything as thinly as possible and to use high-quality Parmesan cheese and balsamic vinegar.

Toss in a bowl:

Serve by transferring a handful of the mix onto a plate. Drizzle a small amount of balsamic vinegar on top and optionally sprinkle with pomegranate seeds or toasted pumpkin seeds.

Note

• The best way to separate the seeds out of a pomegranate fruit is under water in a bowl. Slice the fruit in half, drop the halves into a large bowl full of water, and then use your fingers to break open the various compartments and separate the seeds. The fruit’s white, inedible, fleshy part (called the mesocarp) will float, while the seeds will sink.

Springtime Lettuce Soup

Lettuce soup was a surprise for me, especially as I’ve never seen it while eating out. Lettuce soup has a succulent taste similar to broccoli soup and is somewhat reminiscent of Vichyssoise, a potato, leek, and onion soup. If you’ve ever had a CSA share (see page 124) and ended up with 8 heads of lettuce at the beginning of spring, this soup is a great use for them.

In a large saucepan over medium heat, melt 2 tablespoons (30g) butter or olive oil. Add:

Sauté the onion and potato for 5–10 minutes. Add:

Bring to a simmer and then add:

You can use other greens—arugula, pea shoots, spinach—based on what you have on hand. Stir the greens in, cooking a few minutes until they’re tender. For a creamier soup, add 1 cup (240 mL) whole milk or ½ cup (120 mL) cream.

Remove the saucepan from the heat and allow it to cool for a few minutes. Purée the soup either by using an immersion blender or by transferring it to a blender and processing it in batches. Add salt and pepper to taste, and optionally add other spices, such as coriander or nutmeg. Serve either warm (try sprinkling a cheese like cheddar on top) or chilled (top with a spoonful or two of sour cream and fresh chives).

Winter White Bean and Garlic Soup

In a bowl, soak for several hours or overnight:

After soaking them, drain the beans, place them in a pot, and fill it with water (try adding a few bay leaves or a sprig of rosemary). Bring the water to a boil and simmer the beans for at least 15 minutes. Strain out the water and put the beans back in a pot (if using an immersion blender) or in the bowl of a food processor.

Add to the pot or bowl with the beans and then purée until blended:

Notes

• Don’t skip boiling the beans. Really. One type of protein present in beans—phytohaemagglutinin—causes extreme intestinal distress. The beans need to be boiled to denature this protein; cooking them at lower temperatures (e.g., in a slow cooker) will not denature the protein and actually makes things worse. If you’re in a rush, use canned white beans; they’ll have already been cooked.

• Variations: try blending some fresh oregano into the soup. Toss some bacon chunks on top or grate on some Parmesan cheese as well. As with many soups, how chunky versus how creamy to blend the soup is a personal preference.

Summertime Gazpacho Soup

Gazpacho is a Spanish treasure chest of tomatoes and raw vegetables, blended together and served cold—perfect for warm summertime meals. There’s really no wrong combination of ingredients, as long as they’re all full of flavor.

Purée, using an immersion blender or food processor:

Transfer the puréed tomato to a large bowl. Add:

Stir to combine. Adjust salt to taste and add ground black pepper as desired.

Notes

• The weights in this recipe are for the prepared ingredients (i.e., after removing seeds, trimming stems, or soaking).

• If you prefer a smooth gazpacho, purée all of the ingredients at the end. Or add a portion of the veggies, purée, and then add the remainder to achieve a partly smooth, partly chunky texture. It’s all about your preference!

• Gazpacho is a dish that relies on fresh ingredients that invariably have differences in flavor. There’s no mechanical or chemical reason for these quantities to be written as they are, so add more of this, less of that; whatever you like to suit your tastes. Try expanding this recipe to include other ingredients such as hot peppers or fresh herbs.

• Grilling or broiling the corn and bell pepper adds a smoked flavor to the soup, due to the chemical reactions that take place at higher heat, as we’ll discuss later in this book. You might find you prefer a “raw” version of this soup. Or, if you really like the smoky flavor, try adding some liquid smoke (see page 403) to amp it up.

How to Peel a Tomato

I have a friend whose boyfriend tried to make her a surprise dinner involving tomato soup, but he didn’t know how to peel tomatoes. She came home to find her guy frantically trying to use a vegetable peeler on the tomatoes, to no avail...

To peel tomatoes, drop them in boiling water for 15–30 seconds, pull them out with tongs or a mesh spider, and then just pull the skins off. You can cut an “x” shape into the skin before blanching the tomatoes, although I find the skin on some varieties will pull back regardless, as long as the water is at a full rolling boil. Experiment to see if it makes a difference!

Fall Butternut Squash Soup

Fall, with its harvest and bounty of squash and gourds, is my favorite time of year for seasonal cooking. Treat this recipe as a starting template and add seasoning and other produce as garnish.

Purée in a food processor or with an immersion blender:

Notes

• As with the gazpacho recipe, the weights are for the prepared ingredients and only rough suggestions. So, prepare each item individually. For the squash, peel and cube it, then coat it with olive oil, sprinkle it with salt, and roast it in the oven at a temperature around 400–425°F / 200–220°C until it begins to brown. When you go to purée the ingredients, hold back some of the squash and some of the stock, taste the purée, and see which you think it needs. Want it thicker? Add more squash. Thinner? Add more stock.

• This soup by itself is very basic. Garnish it with whatever else you have on hand that you think might go well, such as garlic croutons and bacon. Or top it with a small dab of cream, some toasted walnuts, and dried cranberries to give it a feeling of Thanksgiving. How about a teaspoon of maple syrup, a few thin slices of beef, and some fresh oregano? Chives, sour cream, and cheddar cheese? Why not! Instead of purchasing items to follow a recipe exactly, try using leftover ingredients from other meals to complement the squash soup.

• If you’re in a rush, you can “jump-start” the squash by microwaving it first. Peel and quarter the squash, using a spoon to scoop out the seeds. Then, cube the squash into 1–2” / 3–5 cm pieces, drop it into a glass baking pan that’s both oven and microwave safe, and nuke it for 4–5 minutes to partially heat the mass. Remove the squash from the microwave, coat it with olive oil and a light sprinkling of salt, and roast it in a preheated oven until done, about 20–30 minutes. If you’re not in a rush, you can skip the peeling step entirely: cut the squash in half; scoop out the seeds; add oil and salt; roast it for about an hour, cut side down, cooking it until the flesh is soft; and use a spoon to scoop it out.

To cut thick gourds such as squash and pumpkins, use a large chef’s knife and a mallet. First, slice off a thin piece of the gourd so that it lies flat and doesn’t roll, then gently tap the knife blade through the gourd.

Tim Wiechmann and Linda Anctil on Seasonal Inspiration

Tim Wiechmann is the chef and owner of T.W. Food in Massachusetts.

How do you go about planning a dish?

I start with the ingredients—they all have to be in season. I came up with a dish that was made with leftover cheese from the Pyrénées. Black cherries and beets are in season, so how can I dress up a beet salad? In the Pyrénées, they have cherries with sheep’s milk cheese. Most of my stuff comes from cultural things, from traveling all over and having a sound grasp on food in Europe. I study what people make from all over—they do this here, they do that there. And these things are done for thousands of years. I try to have a knowledge of these things and then I just look at my own ingredients here, and I draw them together.

My menu is actually really difficult. Everything goes through a rigorous, precise set of cooking parameters. With certain preparations, time and temperature are everything. Observation is critical, as is getting experience in knowing what looks good. If you’re cooking an onion, it changes color over time. There are certain stages where you want to pull it because the bitterness increases as the caramelization increases. Onions in a tall pot will sweat differently than onions in wide pot. In a tall pot, they release their own water and cook evenly because the water doesn’t disappear. We have specific pots that are good for certain things—sweat the onions in this pot; don’t use that pot—but a new cook will just grab any pot.

How do you know if something is going to work?

You just try. When you start to play the piano, you don’t know where the notes are. You have to have the technique, then you can think about putting the notes together. If I hit this note, then I’ll get this sound; if I want onions to be sweet, I’ll caramelize them. The technique follows the knowledge. I keep a log of my own recipes and times for each thing. How long to put cherries or apples in a bag and cook in the water circulator—that comes out of experience.

My big thing I always say: “Get into it and go for it.” Every time you cook something—even if you burn it and it goes in the trash—it’s not a failure, it’s just: next time I’m not going to burn it.

For Tim’s roasted beet salad recipe, see http://cookingforgeeks.com/book/beetsalad/.

Linda Anctil is a private chef in Connecticut.

How do you think about the visual experience of food?

I approach food as a designer, but because it is food, it also has to function. Ultimately, it has to taste good. Sometimes, I’m inspired by an ingredient, a season, a shape, or a color, but inspiration can come from anywhere. I always try to include an element of surprise, whether it’s visual or stimulating to other senses.

Nature is a constant source of inspiration to me. I went out to the garden to pick some sage last winter, and I had the scent of conifers from my Christmas tree on my gloves. The smells became intermingled in my mind and, suddenly, conifers became something I could use as an herb. It inspired a whole series of dishes that I put together using the flavor of conifer. I did one where I layered lots of different textures and flavors together, culminating with my video “The Winter Garden.” I think it was probably my most abstract or conceptual dish that I’ve put together, but it really captured that whole feeling of being outside on that one day with the ice and the snow and the frost and the smell of conifers. I was the only one who ate the dish in the end. I enjoyed it a lot. It was a very personal expression to me.

Do you have any suggestions about how to think about presenting food?

Keep an open mind. Pick up a piece of fruit and imagine that you were an alien on this planet who had never seen it before, and experience it through that lens. How does it look to you? What does it smell like? What does it taste like? What can you do with it? Think outside of the box and enjoy the journey! You can look at any artist or chef’s food, and you’ll realize it’s a personal expression of who they are. It’s telling a story about that person’s experiences. That’s a wonderful aspect of cooking.

To watch one of Linda’s videos, see http://cookingforgeeks.com/book/winterdish/.

PHOTOS OF LINDA ANCTIL AND WINTER GARDEN PROJECT USED BY PERMISSION OF LINDA ANCTIL.

Fish Tacos with Pickle and Strawberry Relish

I began this chapter with the conundrum of how to combine pickles, strawberries, and tortillas—a combination of ingredients that doesn’t entice one to race off to the kitchen. But what if we had access to a supercomputer that could chew on the possibilities? IBM’s research project, Chef Watson (http://www.ibmchefwatson.com), does exactly this, and has proved to be enticing enough to merit its own cookbook, Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson (Sourcebooks, 2015). I take this development as proof that either computers are taking over the world or one no longer needs a pulse to land a book contract—possibly both.

Chef Watson is a curious creation, based on analyzing co-occurrence of ingredients in its database of recipes (currently, some 9,000 recipes from Bon Appétit) and chemical compound similarity between ingredients. When not constrained too much—say, starting with eggs and chocolate—the suggested recipes make sense and are just quirky enough to inspire. Making brownies with a cup of Gruyère cheese instead of butter? The cheese will provide the necessary fat, and cream cheese in brownies isn’t unheard of. With more constraints—pickles, strawberries, and tortillas—the recipe suggestions go from quirky to weird. Even so, the results are still insightful; in the case of these three ingredients, most of the suggested recipes include fish and take the form of tacos. Strawberries happen to share a number of odor compounds with tomatoes, and knowing this, it’s easier to see how the combination could work!

In a small bowl, create the taco topping by mixing together:

Set the topping aside.

Prepare ½ pound (~250g) fish or seafood such as halibut, tuna, or crab by cutting it into large chunks, 1–2” / 3-5 cm. Coat the pieces in breadcrumbs, mixing ¼ cup (~20g) panko crumbs or breadcrumbs with ½ teaspoon (2g) sea salt and then dredging the pieces of seafood in the crumbs.

In a frying pan over medium heat, melt 2 tablespoons (30g) butter. Once the butter has just begun to brown, add the fish pieces. Cook for about 2 minutes and then flip the pieces, continuing to cook and flip them until the fish is cooked and the breadcrumbs are golden brown and toasted.

Serve by placing a taco shell or tortilla on a plate and then topping with a spoonful of the fish and a smaller spoonful of the topping. Squeeze a slice of lime on top.

Gail Vance Civille on Learning Flavors

PHOTO USED BY PERMISSION OF GAIL VANCE CIVILLE.

Gail Vance Civille is a self-described “taste and smell geek” who started out working as a sensory professional at the General Foods technical center and is now president and owner of Sensory Spectrum, Inc., in New Providence, New Jersey.

How does somebody who is trained to think about flavor, taste, and sensation perceive these things differently than the layperson?

The big difference between a trained taster and an untrained taster is not that your nose or your palate gets better, but that your brain gets better at sorting things out. You train your brain to pay attention to the sensations that you are getting and the words that are associated with them.

It sounds like a lot of it is about the ability to recall things that you’ve experienced before. Are there things that one can do to help get one’s brain organized?

You can go to your spice and herb cupboard and sort and smell the contents. For example, allspice will smell very much like cloves. That’s because the allspice berry has clove oil or eugenol in it. You’ll say, “Oh, wow, this allspice smells very much like clove.” So the next time you smell them, you might say, “Clove, oh but wait, it could be allspice.”

So, in cooking, is this how an experienced chef understands how to do substitutions and to match things together?

Right. I try to encourage people to experiment and learn these things so that they know, for example, that if you run out of oregano you should substitute thyme and not basil. Oregano and thyme are chemically similar and have a similar sensory impression. You have to be around them and play with them in order to know that.

With herbs and spices, how do you do that?

First you learn them. You take them out, you smell them, and you go, “Ah, okay, that’s rosemary.” Then you smell something else and you go, “Okay, that’s oregano,” and so on. Next you close your eyes and put your hand out, pick up a bottle, and smell it and see if you can name what it is. Another exercise to do is to see if you can sort these different things into piles of like things. You will sort the oregano with the thyme and, believe it or not, the sage with the rosemary, because they both have eucalyptol in them, which is the same chemical and, therefore, they have some of the same flavor profile.

What about lining up spices and foods—for example, apples and cinnamon?

You put cinnamon with an apple because the apple has a woody component, a woody part of the flavor like the stem and the seeds. And the cinnamon has a wood component, and that woody component of the cinnamon sits over the not-so-pleasant woodiness of the apple, and gives it a sweet cinnamon character. That’s what shows. Similarly, in tomatoes you add garlic or onion to cover over the skunkiness of the tomatoes, and in the same way basil and oregano sit on top of the part of the tomato that’s kind of musty and viney. Together they create something that shows you the best part of the tomato and hides some of the less lovely parts of the tomato. That’s why chefs put certain things together. They go, they blend, they merge and meld, and actually create something that’s unique and different and better than the sum of the parts.

It takes a while to get at that level, because you have to really feel confident both as a cook and getting off the recipe. Please, get off the recipe. Let’s get people off these recipes and into thinking about what tastes good. Taste it and go, “Oh, I see what’s missing. There’s something missing here in the whole structure of the food. Let me think about how I’m going to add that.” I can cook something and think to myself, there’s something missing in the middle, I have some top notes and I have maybe beef and it’s browned and it has really heavy bottom notes. I think of flavor like a triangle. Well, then I need to add oregano or something like that. I don’t need lemon, which is another top note, and I don’t need brown caramelized anything else because that’s in the bottom. You taste it, and you think about how you are going to add that.

How does somebody tasting something answer the question, “Hey, if I wanted to do this at home, what should I do?”

I can sit in some of the best restaurants in the world, and not have a clue what’s in there. I can’t taste them apart, it’s so tight. So it’s not just a matter of experience; it’s also a matter of the experience of the chef. If you have a classically trained French or Italian chef, they can create something where I will be scratching my head, going “Beats me, I can’t tell what’s in here,” because it’s so tight, it’s so blended, that I can’t see the pieces. I only see the whole.

Now this does not happen with a lot of Asian foods, because they are designed to be spiky and pop. That’s why Chinese food doesn’t taste like French and Italian food. Did you ever notice that? Asian foods have green onions, garlic, soy, and ginger, and they’re supposed to pop, pop, pop. But the next day they’re all blending together and this isn’t quite so interesting.

This almost suggests that if one is starting out with cooking, one approach is to go out and eat Asian food and try to identify the flavors?

Oh, definitely. That’s a very good place to start, and Chinese is a better place to start than most. I’ve had some Asian people in classes that I’ve taught get very insulted when I talk about this, and I’m like, no, no, no, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way Asian food is; it’s spiky and interesting and popping, and that’s not the way classic European food, especially southern European food, is.

In the case of classic European dishes, let’s say you’re out eating eggplant Parmesan, and it’s just fantastic. How do you go about trying to figure out how to make that?

I would start identifying what I am capable of identifying. So you say, “Okay, I get tomato, and I get the eggplant, but the eggplant seems like it’s fried in something interesting, and not exactly just peanut oil or olive oil. I wonder what that is?” Then I would ask the waiter, “This is very interesting. It’s different from the way I normally see eggplant Parmesan. Is there something special about the oil or the way that the sous chef fries the eggplant that makes this so special?” If you ask something specific, you are more likely to get an answer from the kitchen than if you say, “Can you give me the recipe?” That is not likely to get you an answer.

When thinking about the description of smells, it seems like the vocabulary around how we describe the taste is almost as important.

It’s the way that we communicate our experience. If you said “fresh” or “it tasted homemade,” you could mean many things. These are more nebulous terms than, say, “You could taste the fried eggplant coming through all of the sauce and all of the cheese.” This is very, very specific, and in fact, “fresh” in this case is freshly fried eggplant. I once had a similar situation with ratatouille in a restaurant. I asked the waiter, “Could you tell me please if this ratatouille was just made?” The waiter said, “Yes, he makes it just ahead and he doesn’t put all the pieces together until just before we serve dinner.” When people say “homemade,” they usually mean that it tastes not sophisticated and refined, but that it tastes like it had been made by a good home cook, so it’s more rustic, but very, very well put together.

Is there a certain advantage that the home chef has because he is assembling the ingredients so close to the time that the meal is being eaten?

Oh, there’s no question that depending upon the nature of the food itself, there are some things that actually benefit from sitting long in the pot. Most home chefs, either intuitively or cognitively, have a good understanding of what goes with what, and how long you have to wait for it to reach its peak.

You said a few minutes ago, “We need to get off the recipe.” Can you elaborate?

When I cook, I will look at seven or so different recipes. The first time I made sauerbraten, I made it from at least five recipes. You pick things from each based on what you think looks good, and what the flavor might be like. I think the idea of experimenting in the classic sense of experimenting is fine. Geeks should be all about experimenting. What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen? It won’t taste so great. It won’t be poison, and it won’t be yucky; it just may not be perfect, but that’s okay. I think when you do that, it gives you a lot more freedom to make many more things because you’re not tied to the ingredient list. The recipe is, as far as I’m concerned, a place to start but not the be all, end all.