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.

Feijoada portuguese style

This is a very heavy meal, ideal for a Sunday lunch with friends and family. It does not make sense to make a proper feijoada for just a few people - unless you want to freeze the leftovers!

I start this on a Friday night if I want to serve it for Sunday lunch.

Ingredients for about 8 people:

• 700 g pinto beans or similar
• 1 pig's trotter and the meatier portion above the trotter (~1.5 kg in total). Ask the butcher to slice it half lengthwise, and then to cut it in ~5 cm long portions crosswise. You won't be able to do this at home.
• 1 pig's ear
• 1.5 kg pork spare ribs, also cut in small portions (as if for stewing)
•  500 g pork belly, a thick slice of about 7 cm cut in two portions
• 1 chouriço -- this is a Portuguese smoked pork meat sausage (~275g)
• 1 morcela -- this is a Portuguese blood sausage (~300 g)
• 1 farinheira -- this is a Portuguese smoked sausage that is made out of flour and pork fat (it tastes way better than it sounds) (~150g)
• 4 bay leaves
• one 800 g tin of whole tomatoes
• 3 large onions
• 4 garlic cloves
• 3 carrots, peeled and sliced into 0.5 cm rounds
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Olive oil.

On Friday night, pick the beans of stones and other impurities; place them in a large bowl and wash them thoroughly in cold water. Fill the bowl with cold water and let the beans soak overnight. Wash all the pork meat (not the sausages) in cold running water and place them in a large tray. Make sure there are no hairs in the meat. If there are, burn them with a lighter and scrape the skin with a sharp knife. Salt the pork belly and pig's trotters quite heavily, and more sparingly the ribs and the ear. Cover the tray with cling film, and put it in the fridge overnight.

On Saturday morning, remove the water from the beans, cover the bowl with cling film and put it in the fridge until you are ready to boil the beans. Wash the meats to remove all the salt and put them also back in the fridge.  I typically boil the beans at night. 

You should need two large pots to boil the beans. Divide the beans between the two pots and try to divide the different types of meat also. Cut the chouriço in half, peel and cut one onion in half, and place each of the halves in each pot. The morcela will have to go to one the pots because you should not cut it in half. Cover the contents of the pots with cold water, add a slug of olive oil and a bay leave, and bring to the boil. Scum the foam, and let it simmer until the beans are cooked. This should take about an hour, but it depends on many factors, and you may need to add more water. Notice that no salt is added, as the sausages and the other meats will have plenty of salt; notice also that the farinheira does not go into the pot at this point. Monitor the beans and meat closely: if you notice that the ribs are cooked before the beans, remove them from the pots and keep simmering.

Once everything is properly cooked, remove the meats and sausages from the pots, and let them cool. When they are cold enough to handle, cut them into bite sizes, making sure that you keep the different types separated. This will make it easier to divide the meats between the two pots when we cook the feijoada. Slice the chouriço in ~1cm rounds and reserve. Do not cut the morcela in rounds. Put all the meat back into a large clean tray, and place it in the fridge. Keep the beans in the cooking liquid. If it's warm outside, place the beans in the fridge until you're ready to cook.

Come Sunday morning, we cook the feijoada. In each of the two pots, put a generous slug of olive oil, one diced onion, 2 minced garlic cloves and one bay leave. Cook on medium heat until the onion starts to colour. Next, add half the tomato tin, crushing the tomatoes with your hand and removing any hard bits. Lightly season with salt and pepper. Let this cook until a nice tomato sauce forms. You can add some of the cooking liquid along the way and also more olive oil if needed. Meanwhile, pierce the farinheira in several places with a toothpick, and gently boil it for 15 minutes in a small pot with some of the cooking liquid. Reserve this cooking liquid.

Once the sauce is cooked, add the meats and the carrots, the beans and some cooking liquid, enough to almost cover the content of the pots - you should use preferably the cooking liquid used to boil the farinheira, but it will typically not be enough. Carefully mix everything with a large spoon. The pots have then to simmer until all the flavors meld, about 1/2 an hour. Check for salt and pepper, and be ready to add more of the cooking liquid along the way.

When you are ready to serve, warm the farinheira and the morcela in some of the cooking liquid. Slice these sausages into ~1 cm rounds and put them on a plate to serve alongside the feijoada. It is typically served with a simple lettuce salad and some white rice. 

It's not a very pretty dish to look at - hence no photos - but it sure is delicious!

Homemade Yogurt

This is how we make yogurt at home. It's really simple and the yogurt we get is creamy and very tasty. You need a small jar of plain yogurt to start the process. The best quality possible, of course. From that initial culture of bacteria, we could in theory produce as much yogurt as needed simply by using a small portion of each batch to inoculate the next one. In practice, it seems that this does not work if you start with a commercial yogurt, only if you use a heirloom yogurt starter culture. With commercial yogurt you get away with 5 or 6 batches of yogurt before you need to restart the process with store bought yogurt. We can't attest to this theory as we never did so many uninterrupted batches.

Here's what we need:

- 1 liter of full fat milk
- 1 plain yogurt
- 1 one liter kilner jar
- thermometer

and how you do it:

- this is an overnight process, so it's best to start it the night before you need the yogurt. Put the milk in a pan and slowly heat it to 85 degrees centigrade. Use a whisker to stir the milk so that it does not stick to the bottom of the pan. Let the milk cool to 43 degrees centigrade either naturally or by placing the pan inside a bowl of cold water. Whisk the milk to speed up the process. Once it reaches that temperature, vigorously whisk in a couple of tablespoons of plain yogurt. Transfer the milk to the kilner jar. It may be a good idea to put some hot water in the jar beforehand to warm it up, and then throw it way before adding the milk. The idea is that you don't want the milk's temperature to considerably drop below the 43 degrees centigrade mark once it comes in contact with the jar. Close the lid and tightly wrap an old thick sweater around the jar. Place the jar inside a cabinet or some other place where it will not be disturbed. The next morning, it should look like the picture below. Put it in the fridge and enjoy it plain or mixed with honey or homemade jams!

Pizza party

Here's how we go about cooking some damn tasty pizza. It's far from perfect -- for perfection you need a much hotter oven -- but it's quite fun to do it and the result is good enough.

We make the dough with the help of a bread machine. It's not a big deal to make it by hand, but this way not only we keep the machine from gathering too much dust but it's also much cleaner to do it this way.

For the dough for two pizze (the plural of pizza), we need

• 300 g of flour
• 1/2 tsp of yeast
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 tbsp of olive oil
• 1 tsp of salt
• 200 ml of water

and it takes 45 minutes to make this amount of dough in the machine, so we must plan ahead. At the end of the cycle, remove the dough from the machine and tip it onto a lightly floured surface, kneed it to remove the air bubbles, and let it rest, covered with a tea towel, for about 20 minutes.

When it comes to the toppings, here's what we did this last time:

• mozzarella, one 200 g ball per pizza, minced
• 1 small tin of peeled whole tomatoes (400 g) (enough for 3-4 pizze)
• cherry tomatoes, washed, dried and cut in half
• rucola, washed and dried
• mushrooms, stems removed and sliced very thinly  (say, chestnut mushrooms)
• good quality prosciutto, thinly sliced
• cooked ham, thinly sliced (for the kids)

but in the past we have also used tuna fish (with oregano and olives), blue cheese, anchovies etc. The key is to go light on the toppings, otherwise the pizza will become soggy.

The tomato sauce is made by blending the tinned tomato with a stick blender, seasoning it with salt, pepper and olive oil. Make sure to use only the tomato and not any of the liquid. You want the tomato sauce to have very little water. Have all the topping prepped before you move on the to next step.

Heat the oven to the highest temperature possible, and do this well in advance. We do this by setting the heat to come from both the top and the bottom of the oven, and by turning on the convection.

Next, with the help of a rolling pin, your hands, extra flour and plenty of patience, roll out the pizza disks. It does not harm to let the disks rest for  a few minutes. Lightly oil the pizza pan and place the disc on it. We use a pizza pan very similar to the one bellow, and it works out ok.

With the help of a spoon, spread a thin layer of tomato sauce over the disk, then sprinkle on the mozzarella evenly. Add anything else except for the ham, prosciutto, cherry tomatoes and rucola. Those toppings should be added to the pizza immediately as it comes out of the oven.

Before putting the pizza in the oven, you can add a sprinkle of coarse salt, a slug of olive oil, which can be massaged in the outer crust of the pizza for a better golden look, and pepper.

Put the pizza in the oven and monitor it closely. It takes about 7 minutes for it to cook. The outer crust should be a light golden brown and the cheese should be bubbly.

The fact that the oven is never as hot as it should be results in a pizza crust that is a bit soggy. That's one of the reasons why we should go easy on the amount of toppings we put on the pizza; mushrooms, for instance, are mostly water...