Fermented hot sauce

Food fermentation is an utterly fascinating topic; the book by Sandor Katz ---The Art of Fermentation---, and the author himself are a reflection of that fact.

If you like spicy stuff, you haven't got a single excuse not to try this. Find some hot peppers, preferably organic, cut them open, get rid of the stems and of most of the seeds, pack them inside a glass jar along with a few skinless garlic cloves which you have previously crushed. Cover with slightly salted water - preferably seat salt - and make sure all solids are completely submerged in the brine. Cover the jar but keep in mind that some gas will be released as a consequence of the natural fermentation process: if the seal is airtight, the jar might explode.

I let the peppers ferment between September 15 and September 29. Then, I've separated the solids from the brine, reserved the brine, and used an immersion blended to patiently obtain a puree. I've added some of the brine to ease the process. Then, I've sieved the puree, using a silicone spatula to separated the sauce from the skins and seeds, which were discarded.

The jar with the sauce has been sitting in the fridge and I've used its contents whenever possible. The color is absolutely beautiful, almost unnatural. The sauce is spicy, but no unbearably so. Commercial hot sauces have this vinegary aspect which is tiresome. This sauce has some acidity --- again, a byproduct of fermentation --- but not overwhelming. 

All and all, a very enjoyable hot sauce, brighter than anything I've tasted. The peppers I have used are probably malagueta chilies, but it's never easy to identify these things if they are not grown from certified seeds. There where a couple mature Poblano peppers thrown in as well. The brine is still in a glass jar inside the fridge, and I am sure that I'll come up with a few ways of using its contents....

Caldeirada

Caldeirada is a Portuguese fish stew. Every coastal area, at least in the western world, will probably have a version of this dish. Even in Portugal there are many declinations. Fishermen would cook this stew on board of the ship with whatever fish was plentiful.

This is the way I do it at the peak of the summer, when tomatoes are ripe and full of flavour. If that's not the case, good quality tinned tomatoes are a much better solution than bland and tasteless supermarket "tomatoes". I choose not to put bell pepper in my caldeirada. This will be considered an heresy by most. I find that the bell pepper overpowers everything else, and surely masks the flavour of the most important ingredient, the fish, which should - and is - the centre of this masterpiece. The recipe is very simple, it's basically a set of guidelines. The freshest and highest quality ingredients and patience are key to achieving the best results. And then, no matter what, the result is always very satisfying.

For 4 people:

- 1 kg of caldeirada mix. This will vary with the season, daily and depending where you are in Portugal. It will often consist of monkfish, skate, pata roxa (a variety of shark - no kidding), moray, conger, sometimes tuna - which I find not to be appropriate -, and whatever is plentiful on that day.

- 1.5 kg of potatoes, peeled and sliced 1 cm thick

- 1 kg of tomatoes, preferably peeled, or a 400g tin of good quality tomatoes, sliced

- 4 or 5 garlic cloves, sliced

- 2 onions, cut in half and then thinly sliced

- parsley, a bunch

- olive oil, salt and freshly ground black pepper

-  a glass of white wine, beer or even water.

Find a pot which will fit all the ingredients tightly, almost to the top. If you have the time, sprinkle the fish with coarse salt and let it stand for half an hour or so. Then, start layering the ingredients, starting  with onion, potatoes and tomatoes, and season each layer with olive oil, salt and pepper. Add also parsley and the slices of garlic. Then the fish. The last layer should be of tomatoes, potatoes and onion. A glass of whatever liquid goes in. Put the pot on the stove, medium-low heat. Put the lid on and let it very slowly cook. Quite a bit of liquid will form. Open the lid as few times as humanely possible and under no circumstance should you try to stir the pot with a spoon. The most you can do is gently shake the pot. Once the potatoes are done, i.e., once you can pierce them with the tip of a knife, turn off the heat. Wait for 10 minutes and dig in. You will need an off-dry white wine, good quality bread and a simple salad of lettuce, tomatoes and cucumber (if in season).

Rice vermicelli

No matter what others on the interwebs may say, this is the way to obtain rice vermicelli (the 0.5 mm thick ones)  that are nice and cooked but not soggy:

• boil enough water to completely submerge the noodles;
• put the noodles in a large pot;
• wait a couple of minutes (because we don't want really boiling water) and add the water to the noodles;
• use chopsticks to move around the noodles and loosen them;
• once the noodles are flexible but retain some bite, they are cooked -  3 to 4 minutes;
• drain the noodles using a sieve and thoroughly (and I mean thoroughly!) rinse them under cold running water in the sink;
• put the noodles in your salad spinner and get to work: spin and throw the water away - do that until no water (or almost no water) gets spun;
• put a saucer upside down in a bowl so that if any water collects at the bottom, it won't touch the  noodles;
• add the noddles to the bowl and let them air dry a bit;
• voilà!

I  used them for bun cha and for fresh spring rolls, but there are many other possible uses for this canvas.

Vietnamese adventures

This is still a work in progress but I will keep at it because it is ideal for a dinner party with friends: Vietnamese grilled pork with rice vermicelli and herbs/vegetables (Bun Cha), and Vietnamese fresh spring rolls (Goi Cuon). I've never been to Vietnam and have only been two or three times to a Vietnamese restaurant, so this is just me reading, watching videos, and trying to make something that tastes good - not claiming any sort of authenticity.

My source for the Bun Cha is a Saveur recipe which I have made a few times already: Grilled Pork with Rice Vermicelli. I followed that recipe to the letter, except that I use pork tenderloin, which I thinly slice and then grill on a cast iron grill pan, and, when it comes to the herbs, I don't have access to Vietnamese herbs or even mint that I think can be included in this dish. I also cook a larger quantity of rice vermicelli - about one pound for two people - and note that we also need cooked noodles for the spring rolls.

For the fresh spring rolls I followed this recipe: Goi cuon and accompanying youtube video. [Incidentally, this youtube channel (Helen's Recipes) seems to be an excelent resource for Vietnamese food.] Again, I followed this recipe almost to the letter, except that I boiled the shrimp in a vegetable both and then peeled it. I used the smaller rice paper (16cm), but I can see how the 22 cm can be a better choice. Assembling the rolls is a bit tricky, and the ratio of vegetables/herbs to shrimp/pork belly is something that is fun to play with.

All in all, fun to make and fun to eat - to revisit in the near future.

Tomato jam

This jam may seem odd to many people, but it's quite common in Portugal and I grew up eating the homemade version of it. To Italians, tomato jam is simply an aberration; Americans are used to a version that, at least to me, is laden with vinegar and too many spices, so that in the end it tastes nothing like tomato...

I've made this jam many, many times, and for the past 4 or 5 years I've cooked it in the heat of the summer in the Algarve using fruit I've bought from the same vendor at a particular farmer's market we frequent. Making this jam is a way of preserving the bright colors, the intense heat, the beach, the sun, all of those wonderful things inside a jar.

My tomato jam has two particularities: I like to keep the seeds in, and I like to keep the fruit as whole as possible. I think it makes the jam prettier and tastier, meatier in a way. The jam basically consists of thick petals of tomato swimming in a glistering jelly that has a few freckles here and there - the seeds.

Here's the drill. You will need:

• 3 kg of roma tomatoes or any other variety that has a lot of meat and minimal juice and seeds. The tomatoes should be ripe but neither soft nor mushy. If you're going through all this work, go ahead and buy the best tomatoes you can find;
• sugar - with ripe and sweet tomatoes I go with 60% of the weight of the prepared pulp;
• one lemon - again, the most aromatic you can find, preferably organic;
• one cinnamon stick.

The first thing you must do is prepare the tomatoes. For this you need several bowls, a sharp knife, water and ice. 

Start by washing the fruit in cold running water. Using the sharp knife, make a small cross at the end of the tomato opposite to the one that attaches to the peduncle. Try to make this incision as shallow as possible, piercing only the skin of the fruit. Fill a large bowl with the cut tomatoes and pour boiling water over them, making sure that you cover all the fruit. Wait for a a couple of minutes and test one tomato: if the skin comes right off without much effort, they are ready. Transfer the tomatoes to another bowl that has cold water and ice. This is meant to stop the cooking and is not really essential here. Transfer to another bowl once the tomatoes are cold enough to handle, that way you can reuse this bowl of cold water for the next batch. Peel the tomatoes and place them in a bowl. Repeat as many times as needed to have all the 3 kg of tomatoes peeled. In my case, it was only two times.

The next step consists in trimming the tomatoes, discarding all the unripe bits. I do this by cutting  the tomatoes in half lengthwise, trimming the hard and/or green parts, and then cutting each half in half again lengthwise. Do this over a bowl so that you collect the juice and seeds.

Weigh the fruit. I did this twice this summer and strangely got both times exactly 2 kg of prepared fruit  from roughly 3 kg of tomatoes. 

As I already said, I usually go for 60% of the weight in sugar. Add this sugar to the tomatoes in a large pot, slowly bring to a boil, and then reduce to a slow simmer. In this first stage, you want to slowly stew the fruit until it is cooked. By adding the sugar at the beginning we are making it harder for the fruit to brake down, hence making sure it keeps its shape.

Once you see that the fruit is stewed, add a long strip of lemon peel - the best way of obtaining this is using a peeler, that way you minimize the amount of white pith attached to the peel -, the juice from half that lemon and one cinnamon stick.

Bring the heat to high and stirring often let the jam boil until it reaches the setting point. You check for that by pouring one spoon of jam on a dish that you have kept in the fridge. Return it back to the fridge and if the jam forms a skin after it cools down it means that it has reached the setting point. What I try to do is cook the jam as little as possible in order to keep the flavor of the fruit and its bright color.

The next step is to jar the jam. From this amount of fruit I typically get 5 180 ml jars plus a bit for eating at the time.

I have jarred tomato jam, and other jams, using mason jars with new lids, but I have also reused jam jars. In both instances, I have in some cases processed the jars in a water bath for about 5 minutes and in some other cases I have skipped that step. Spoilage, or at least the appearance of some mold, has occurred regardless of the approach. In the case of the mason jars, head space seems to be a really critical variable. Besides that, using clean utensils and pouring hot jam into hot jars seems to do the trick. But that should be the subject of another post.

Miso Soup - sort of...

Here is a quick fix for when we are craving a noodle soup with an Asian twist:

Ingredients (serves 2 for a meal):

- miso paste (at least 4 Tbsp, whichever kind you prefer)
- 4 kombu pieces (15-20 cm long each)
- 1 medium carrot
- 1 small zucchini
- 1 small leek - white part only
- two handfuls of spinach leaves
- 1 thumb-size piece of ginger
- chinese egg noodles (2/3 of a 250g is a tad too much)
- 8 cups of water

Put the 8 cups of water in a pan and add the kombu. Let it soak for 1/2 hour. Heat the pan slowly and let it simmer for 10 minutes or so. Do not boil. Remove the kombu and reserve. Reserve the broth - this is what's called the dashi, and this is simplest kind of dashi there is!

Meanwhile, prepare the vegetables: peel the carrot, cut it lengthwise in half and each half in half again. Cut each of the four sticks into 2 cm  pieces crosswise. Do the same with the zucchini (but don't peel it). Cut the leek diagonally into 1cm rounds. Peel and mince the ginger. Slice two of the pieces of kombu after washing them thoroughly to remove the slime.

Coat the bottom of another pot with a tablespoon or so of oil. Turn on the heat and when the oil is hot add the ginger and the leek. Let it slowly fry until the ginger releases its fragrance. Add the rest of the vegetables (but not the kombu) and fry for 5 minutes on low heat.

Add the reserved stock to the fried vegetables. Bring it to a slow boil. Let it cook until the vegetables are mostly cooked but retain a lot of bite. Turn off the heat and add the noodles, the spinach and the sliced kombu. Cover the pot after you've made sure that the noodles are untangled. Let the noodles become soft.

Put a few ladlefuls of hot stock in a bowl and add the miso paste. Start with 4 tablespoons. Mix the miso paste into the hot broth. With the help of a sieve, return the dissolved miso paste to the pot and mix well. Taste. If needed, add more paste. I also add a few drops of sesame oil. Serve hot, but after adding the miso paste never bring the broth to the boil again. Serve in deep bowls, eat using chopsticks and a a spoon. Loud slurping is a must!

Simple and very satisfying. The variations are endless, these are just guidelines…

Edits:

• This may need salt, depending on the amount of miso you add, and also the kind you miso you use. Dark soy sauce or fish sauce are possibilities for adjusting the salt.
• Soaked dry shiitake mushrooms are an excellent addition here, so are green onions and cubed tofu.
• Another possible variation is the type of noodles you add; we've used glass noodles and it was fun.

Olives

We harvested a few pounds of olives with the purpose of trying our hand at curing them. When you start reading about how to cure olives, you quickly realize that there are many methods to do that and many conflicting sets of instructions. An interesting fact that I had never thought about is that olives are actually a fermented food, they become palatable through fermentation. Olives used to be a very important source of nutrition; curing them was also a way of preserving them and making them available year round.

The olives we picked are of a variety called galega, which is Portuguese for Galician. It's a Portuguese variety which is quite small and naturally high in acidity, making it ideal for the curing process that we are going to attempt: the brining. They weren't quite ripe yet, most were half back-half green: 

We sorted them, picking the leaves and stalks and discarding any that were short of perfect, ie, any that were bruised or had rotten spots. We then put them in a 3-liter  glass Kilner jar, which became full up to the shoulder. Perfect amount, just out of luck. Of course, our harvest was larger, but we gave some away to family so that they could have a go at this as well. We washed the olives carefully inside the jar, avoiding bruising the fruit, and then added a 6% salt solution - ie, 6 grams of coarse sea salt per 100 ml of filtered water. We needed 1.2 liters of brine to cover the olives completely. To make the solution, we put the salt inside a large plastic bottle, added the water, and then vigorous shook the bottle until the salt was completely dissolved. To prevent the olives from coming in contact with oxygen, we put a piece of cling film on top of the brine and made sure that it was fully submerging the olives. The glass lid went on top of the jar, but without the rubber and metallic fastener. The slow fermentation will produce carbon dioxide and alcohol, so it is not a good idea to fully seal the jar unless you release the trapped gas once in a while. The jar is now in our pantry, away from direct light, and we'll wait patiently and monitor how it develops. Anything we do to the olives will be registered here.

Edit 1: as the olives ferment, the cling film will rise with the gases produced. We have to/should press down on the cling film to free that trapped gas and prevent the olives to come in contact with oxygen.

Edit 2: at some point, the jar starts smelling like olives (which is a sign things are working) and the water will become cloudy. We decided at day 20 to strain the olives, clean then with some filtered water in a colander, wash the jar with some dishwasher liquid, and add a fresh 1.2 liter 6% salt solution to the jar with the olives.