Fun with Squid.

Good stuff, again — with only one error to report. The timeline has you make the gazpacho 45 minutes ahead of time, while the recipe tells you to do it at least two hours ahead.

So watch out.

The first course threw me, I ended up with much too much sharpness/bitterness from the garlic. He has you bring the cloves up to a boil, and then has you shock them; he tells you to repeat that two more times. I only did it once again, and in neither case did I let the water come to an absolute complete boil. So watch that part (and do take out any green sprouts in the center of the garlic). I ended up diluting my original batch with another batch of gazpacho, and it was passable. Otherwise I’d imagine I’ll stick with the recipe from The French Laundry Cookbook.


Second course — the squid. I bought a 3lb box of whole frozen calamari, and went from there — substituted Better Than Bullion fish stock for the homemade, and got my picada and sofftio from the freezer (again using the basic building blocks from the front of the book.) I only used half of the picada called for, thinking that might tame the weird saffron overload that I’m having with the original picada recipe. Cutting back seemed to work. Otherwise the recipe is fine, the stock-to-rice ratio is once again, dead on. There was an issue with the squid ink: I found the ink sacs in the squid and reserved them, and basically pressed them through a sieve into the rice when called for. If you immerse the bottom of the sieve with the ink sacs you can pretty much “wash” the ink from the sieve into the rice. There wasn’t really enough to give it the black effect, so if you really want the dish to look like the picture you’ll have to source some jarred ink. Cleaning the squid themselves was pretty tedious, and while the tentacles clusters looked neat on the plate, it took about an hour and a half to process the little devils. So unless you have the time for a couple hour lab on squid anatomy (The Joy of Cooking tells you exactly how to process the squid) it’s probably way easier to just get some frozen squid tubes from the butcher at the local grocery.

The dish tasted pretty good — seafoodie tasting, but without the grit of clams.

Dessert was a no brainer, just use a spoon to sprinkle the chocolate, or the shavings will pretty much instantly melt on your fingers. Also, I didn’t use nearly as much chocolate as was called out. Pretty neat dessert.

Good stuff.

Cooking Ferran Adriá’s The Family Meal — The Errata

Another good set of dishes, with just a few caveats.


I’m pretty sure the nation collectively forgot how to cook somewhere about 1963, when pimento cheese and pineapple upside-down cake began to be the far reaches of culinary science — that only your Swedish grandmother knew about. I only discovered how to make a béchamel sauce last year; it never ceases to be shocking how much you can do with just a couple of ingredients, and just a little bit of technique.


flour + butter + milk + technique = kick-ass cream sauce. Just add your favorite flavoring/cheese/whatever and you’re good to go. 


Adriá has you build a béchamel sauce here, flavored with nutmeg, and what seems to be a classic onion-studded-with-cloves device. For the sauce, I scaled his proportions for six down from 75, (the proportions for the flour and and butter are WRECKED in the book) and they seemed to work. The only odd bit was calling for only ONE clove stuck in the onion — that seemed weird. The problem with the merciless recipe errors in this book, is that I don’t know if it was supposed to be a subtle flavoring or just a recipe screw up — I used three instead. The other bit was boiling the cauliflower for EIGHT minutes, and not indicating to shock it when you were done. I had my florets a little on the big side, and three minutes was just about right. You couldn’t cut some of the stems with a fork, but they weren’t raw either. Eight minutes would probably reduce it to mush, but I didn’t experiment to test my hypothesis. I used salted water, and rinsed the cauliflower in cold water to stop the cooking process. Once you put them under the broiler for 5 minutes or so, they warm back up nicely. Really, really, really good.


The pork ribs — I punted and used pre-made sauce. The water called for seemed a little much, and the time: TWO hours, ended up being THREE & A HALF before the ribs started looking like the picture, and the meat began falling off the bone. Not much to report here.


The final course was genius — again just a simple syrup and some basic flavoring. The bananas and lime syrup was amazing. One of those fool-proof, bullet-proof, go-to recipes that everyone needs.


Pretty good.

I completely blew off the first two recipes, and screwed up the rice. How do you screw up a Guacamole recipe — the translators got dangerously close to doing it. Also, a little El Bulli crept into the dessert here, more on that in a second.

Surely most people have a rough idea on how to make guacamole, and I did try following the recipe — which isn’t too far off — but consulting someone like Rick Bayless or Lourdes Nichols might be better. Not crucial though, if you follow the recipe you’ll get a rough approximation.

As a big fan of Molé, I have learned how to make it from scratch, so I blew off the chicken recipe, thawed out some brown molé I had in the freezer, poured it over about 10 skinned chicken thighs in a large Cruset, then put that in the oven — covered — at 275F for a couple of hours, then took the lid off and rendered it down at 350F for about an hour. Otherwise, you can use the molé concentrate called for, just be sure to warm it gently in the microwave or you’ll bend your measuring spoon trying to get the paste out of the jar. There’s nothing to this part, you’re just braising the meat in a kick ass sauce. Also, don’t forget to serve it up with some fresh tortillas. Just wonderful.

If you want to blow your mind, get a copy of Rick Bayless’s Authentic Mexican Cuisine, and do the Mole Problano de Guajolote recipe. It KILLS. Do not skimp, substitute or subterfuge the recipe in ANY way, and you will be shocked at how good it is. Also, it has something like 28 ingredients — can’t say enough good things about that.

For the rice, I screwed up by putting it in a rice cooker, which turned it into sticky building material — great tasting — but building material all the same. Again, the liquid to rice ratio was right on the money for serving 6 — had I cooked it uncovered in a wide pan, as shown. Really good.

For the dessert, a little of the El Bulli zaniness crept in: crushed menthol candies (Halls cough drops) over a lemon infused water mellon madness — very, very odd, but very good. The “menthol candies” callout threw me until I flipped a bag of Halls over, and read that the only active ingredient in Halls cough drops is Menthol. So there’s no danger of sprinkling crushed expectorant over your dessert.

Very good.

Cooking Ferran Adriá’s The Family Meal — The Errata

What a riot. The only thing that saved this, between my screwups and the comic levels of recipe errors, was dessert. Also, there’s a reason you’ve never had Whiting.

This meal is another where you need to reach back into the front of the book and make one of the several “building block” sauces. This time it was Romesco sauce. Thinking ahead — on my last trip to New Sagaya in Anchorage, I bought a bottle of premade, just in case. The problem is finding Choricero pepper paste — sure, go ahead and google that — hard to find and harder to quantify it for a substitution. I went with Zergüt “Roasted Red Peppers.”

Unfortunately for me, the recipe errors in the Romesco recipe were like a Three-Stooges routine.

There are recipe errors in this book, but nothing like this: the Romesco sauce recipe errors culminated in the quantities for the 4 1/2 gallon batch, where it calls for FOUR AND A HALF GALLONS of Choricero pepper paste. I know Ferran Adria is good in the kitchen, but surely even he obeys the law of conservation of matter. Also, I’ve been relying on the larger batch callouts, and double checking the small batches by using a calculator and scaling things down by hand. This left me with nothing to go on in the pepper paste category. The smaller batch was mystifying as well. The smaller batch is 1 1/2 gallons — 192 ounces — but it calls for 84 ounces of sherry vinegar. That’s nearly half the volume of other ingredients — I used half of what was called for and it was still runny enough (too runny judging by the pictures) to have to add more bread. Also, the batches scale 1:3 but the bread scales from 3 3/4 pounds to 2 — just barely 1:2.  Crazy. It tasted a little zingy, but was in the same hemisphere as the premade, so I served both.

Other than that, I didn’t get the potatoes and onions quite done enough, but it was “okay” with the sauce.

Next, the Whiting. I had to substitute fillets for the whole fish, but even when it wasn’t freezer burned and mealy, it tasted liked nothing, with a garlic gruel sauce. I wouldn’t bother, it was horrible.

For dessert, the rice pudding was great, and the ratios of liquid to rice — again — were spot on. I cut the “for 20” quantities in half, served eight, with only one small bowl left over. Also, “steeping” means bringing the milk just under the boiling point, I guess that lets the flavors of the zest and cinnamon out.

Far out.

EDIT:

The  Romesco sauce recipe from Jonathan Waxman’s recent book Italian, My Way has a ratio of EVO to vinegar as 5:3. That would probably come very close to fixing that recipe. Instead of 10 1/2 cups of vinegar, use just under 1 cup. 

Decimal place error?

Cooking Ferran Adriá’s The Family Meal — The Errata

Pretty good meal, some new flavors, and it had been quite some time since I had had duck of any sort.

First course, only a couple substitutions: a half-assed sake for the Shaoxing rice wine — don’t know if that affected the dish. Also, for the Shichimi togarashi spice, I had to make my own, going from the proportions from the Cook’s Thesaurus (foodsubs.com) website:


Combine equal parts szechuan peppercorns, sesame seed, hemp seed, poppy seed, dried orange peel, crushed roasted nori, and crushed dried hot chile peppers. 


Also, for some odd reason I couldn’t find egg noodles ANYWHERE, so I opted for chow mein. EDIT: (the long type that you boil, NOT the hard, short, fried type that you buy ready to eat)

Other than that, just mix everything up, don’t overcook your noodles, and you’ve got a great dish, maybe just a little salty, but nothing hairy.

For the second dish, I had to buy a couple whole ducks, and break them down. I’m not certain how cheap ducks are in Spain, but it was $50 for two ~seven pounders. Ouch. Breaking them down was not unlike taking apart a chicken. I took off the wings, then the legs/thighs, and then took kitchen shears to run up the sides, and separate the breast assembly from the back. It’s a little tricky once you reach the pulley/wish bone area, but once separated, if you flip the breast over you can reach in with a small, sharp knife, and take out the wishbone — this helps when you fillet the individual breasts off the bone.

The recipe calls for the Chimichurri sauce made in the early “building blocks” part of the book. If for some odd reason you need the 1 3/4 gallons, whatch out for the Sweet paprika quantity, there is a typo that should read 3 1/2 TABLEspoons. I actually cut the recipe for the 14 cups in half. It was good.

For the duck, everything worked, except that you really need to get the meat up to the room temperatureish range, or it’s going to end up being a little too rare. Make sure you score the skin (breaking through it, and just to the meat)  and let it rest as indicated. The Chimichurri was great with the duck, I’m having it for breakfast with a fried egg.

The pistachio custard was simple, no surprises, just follow the instructions, and keep stirring. My rechargeable Cuisinart hand blender (they SUCK — don’t buy one) was not up to the task of getting the nuts broken down, so I poured the mixture into the Blendtech and fixed it. My only complaint is the portions were a little small, but maybe we aren’t meant to oink out on the dessert.

Great stuff.






Cooking Ferran Adriá’s The Family Meal — The Errata