The potato salad I grew up on was “creamy”,[1] that is, dressed with mayonnaise. While I remember that dish fondly, I now make a very different type of potato salad, one closer to those I ate in Austria.
The single biggest challenge in making potato salad is having well-cooked potatoes that still hold their shape, and the most important factor in this regard is the variety of potato used. It must be a waxy, yellow-fleshed variety. North American varieties like Yukon Gold are okay, but there are some European varieties, like Linzer Delikatess, that are quite simply made for German potato salad. They have the proper smooth, creamy mouthfeel, and a roughly cylindrical shape that means they slice into … Continue reading.
…I was gladdened to find, at last, hard scientific evidence that lettuce is an unsuitable food and that a craving for lettuce is evidence of a diseased brain.
-from Jeffrey Steingarten’s essay Brain Storm
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.
-Ecclesiastes 3:1
For many chefs there is a discrepancy between what they want to serve and what will please their customers. As a chef I want to take seasonality seriously, but in most restaurants the owners and clientele find it unacceptable to not offer a green salad, even in the dead of winter. I deeply resent this.
Don’t misunderstand me: I like green salads. They’re refreshing. Personally, I like … Continue reading.
There are many compelling reasons to never buy salad dressings from the grocery store:
You almost certainly already have the ingredients in your pantry to make a good dressing.
A good dressing can be made in less than 90 seconds. Actually you can make enough dressing for a few weeks in 90 seconds.
There are weird things in store-bought dressings, like calcium disodium EDTA and acetylated monoglycerides. They also usually contain a good deal of sugar or glucose-fructose; not necessarily a bad thing, but a fact of which many people are unaware.
Invest is some quality oil and vinegar, then never buy a Kraft dressing again.
The simplest dressing to make at home is vinaigrette, which is a French diminutive … Continue reading.
I’m starting to research the plants in our yard more thoroughly. This is the first of several “Plant Profiles” I hope to write.
Prunus tomentosa
“Prunus” means plum (think: prune), and “tomentosa” means densely hairy, referring, I think, to the leaves. This shrub is native to the far east, notably the Himalayas, China, and Japan. “Nanking” is the old roman-alphabet word for the Chinese city now transliterated as Nanjing.
As a fruit tree the Nanking is very much inferior to other sour varieties like Evans and Carmine Jewel. While the fruit is merely adequate, the plant has some striking ornamental qualities. The mature wood is a lustrous red roan. When young the shrubs are a bit twiggy and awkward, but … Continue reading.
For the last two or three years Button Soup has been largely about animals. Pigs, especially. It must seem that I eat pork chops and sausages every night. In reality I don’t consider myself a voracious meat-eater.
That being said, I do find animals pretty easy to understand. They really are all the same: cows, chickens, pigs, and aardvarks. All mother-animals and father-animals reproduce more or less the same way, a way very familiar to us humans. The baby-animals eat food and grow up and reproduce similarly, and if you cut their throat they die and you can eat them. I know there are exceptions to some of these statements, but really animals are easy.
The brisket is a special cut of meat: I think it’s the toughest, fattiest cut of meat in common usage in western cooking.
The brisket is actually a pair of muscles, called the flat and the point in common parlance, on the breast of the cow, between the two forelegs. These muscles sustain a good deal of the weight of the standing cow, and therefore contain a remarkable amount of connective tissue.
It takes ages to cook brisket. Don’t get upset about this. On the plus side, it is a low-effort process.
Even if you’ve never had brisket before, you will know when it is done cooking and ready to eat. If you poke the meat it yields to your … Continue reading.
English muffins make the best toast: much crispier than standard pullman loaves, but not overly-crunchy like rustic artisan loaves. I think there are at least four reasons for their toasting superiority:
The dough is enriched with a small amount of sugar and fat.
The way they are shaped, as individual pucks instead of slices from a loaf. A typical slice of bread is cut from the interior of a larger loaf, so the two sides are from the soft, interior “crumb” of the bread. When you cut and toast an English muffin, one of the surfaces of each half used to be the exterior crust of the bread, making a crispier piece of toast.
This is one of those “probably more than you wanted to know about…” posts, but when one plant has a hundred names, I’m always curious for an explanation.
A cold-hardy bush that produces delicious, anti-oxidant-rich berries of striking colour and interesting shapes as early as June, the haskap has captured the attention of a diverse group of obsessives: gardeners, nutritionists, chefs, and linguists, to name a few.
Haskaps are native to several far flung regions in the northern hemisphere, and most often found in or near bogs in boreal forests. They go by a dizzying number of names, some of which are described below. For clarity’s sake, the plant we are discussing is Lonicera caerulea. There are four notable … Continue reading.
Malt has an amazing flavour, one that sits at the nexus of sweet and savoury: its aroma simultaneously evokes caramel and green grass.
Outside of brewing, one comes across malt in odd, far-flung corners of the culinary world. It is somewhat common in bread baking: in the form of malt extract and maltodextrin it is sometimes added to bagels and pretzels. It is used a lot in modernist kitchens. The Copenhagen landmark Noma uses maltodextrixin to make an edible substance that looks like topsoil (yum). I’ve never seen the recipe, but I’m confident that Milk Bar in New York uses some form of malt in their famous cereal milk ice cream. And of course there are malted milkshakes, which everyone … Continue reading.
I’ve been doing some all-grain brewing this spring. After the mashing process the malt has given up all its caramel earthiness to the wort, and you are left with several pounds of spent grain, or draff.
There are lots of ways to use this stuff up. Commercial breweries commonly sell or give draff to farmers as livestock feed. It can also be composted so long as you have lots of other, greener compostable material to balance out the mixture.
Draff is also commonly baked into bread. Realistically the home brewer will not be able to bake enough bread to use all of the spent grain – the bulk of mine still ends up in the compost heap – but it’s … Continue reading.
The personal website of Edmonton chef Allan Suddaby
