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