Deep Brown. How You Get There Matters

The Maillard Reaction and Caramelization are what give foods a golden brown color, flavorful aromas, and deep satisfying taste. These reactions are just a combination of simple sugars and heat. If there are amino acids and protein present, it’s Maillard; if it’s just sugar is Caramelization. Both reactions are a combination of time, temperature, and moisture, and elicit new and complex flavors and aromas.

Grilled meat. Pan roasted fish. Sweet roasted carrots. French Fries. Tarte Tatin or just Caramel anything.

When I say deep brown, I’m not just talking about the quality of the color, I’m referring to the browning process. Superficially torching the surface of food is not enough to create a meaningful Maillard reaction or caramelization (unless it’s a Creme Brûlée). Restaurants use sous vide machines to produce consistent doneness, and blowtorches like the Searz-All to create quickly occurring Maillard reactions because of the sheer volume they have to produce. These technologies produce consistency and quality, but a skilled home cook shouldn’t be bound by such shortcuts.

The real beauty, flavor, and texture from a perfectly browned food comes from all of the other great cooking conditions and techniques employed. The reactions that everyone are chasing is the expression of a sound process, not a superficial finishing move. It’s alchemy, it’s cooking.

It’s the difference between diligently exercising and eating right for a year, as opposed to 8 minute abs classes and butt implants. The work pays off, you feel better, and EVERBODY can tell.

Let’s look at a few examples in the real world of what I’m talking about:

1. Giant bone-in Ribeye- I like to heavily season with salt and pepper, grill, and roast over hardwood charcoal and smoke with rosemary and thyme. Flip, char, burn the edges, take off, put back on. Spend time perfecting the crust and sometimes painting marinades for up to 20 minutes. Real exposure to wood, smoke and different heats. During colder months a cast iron pan, aromatics, and butter basting are a great substitute. Its time, care, and attention that makes the difference.

2. Pommes Anna (Crispy potatoes)- Clarify your butter or you will cheat the process. It’s more important to brown the potatoes than the butter. Butter will brown very quickly even if the potato is still raw. Don’t take the shortcut, clarify the butter, and give your potatoes some more time to develop. Give your main ingredient a chance to transform. It’s the difference between a Michelin starred restaurant dish and hash browns. This type of thinking is why I “Grill In the Cold” (An entry in the Daily Cooking section).

3. Sweets like Tarte Tatin and Granola- These recipes have some combination of main ingredients, fat, and sugar. Make sure to caramelize, toast, and brown the main components, not only the added sugars. A deeply caramelized apple is so much different than a barely cooked one tossed in a caramel sauce. I have a small granola company Knusprig that’s philosophy is based on this principle. Uncovering hidden flavors inside of ingredients through careful and meticulous toasting and sifting. No cheap additions or sweeteners.

Japanese eggplant. Slow careful browning. One of my favorite pictures

The Overlap

Maximizing Vegetables In The Oven

An oven is a closed environment at a constant temperature; oven cooking is passive cooking. Your only real variable is time. Ideal for baking, but for savory cooking? Almost.

The French Laundry Cookbook has a great chapter titled, “The Importance of Rabbits”. Thomas Keller recounts a hellish time learning to kill, butcher, and prepare rabbits for roasting. After all of the work and insanity of harvesting rabbits for the first time, he gave the impression he’d do everything short of climbing into the oven with them to ensure they were cooked perfectly. That hit me like a brick, and it’s always stuck with me. And I don’t mean just the broader principles of respecting your ingredients and being attentive, but the idea of babysitting your food as actively as is physically possible as it cooks. Obviously nobody’s climbing into a hot oven, and experienced cooks know that constantly opening and closing the oven door to make adjustments isn’t an option either. All of the preparation and manipulation for oven- and broiler-bound foods has to be done up front. I call my technique THE OVERLAP.

The Overlap is simply a way to prepare food for cooking by adjusting its spacial relationship to other items, as well as seasoning and oiling. The way that you can jump in the oven with your food is in your imagination and experience. What are zucchini slices under a broiler at 8 inches doing at minute 1? or minute 5? The answer to that is 1-steaming and 5-burning, but it is important to think about this for anything you put in an oven. I’ll use thinly sliced zucchini as a test case to illustrate most of the concepts I’m talking about…

Slice zucchini “cardboard thin” and turn on the broiler to high. Line a sheet tray with parchment paper or a Silpat. Season the parchment paper with olive oil, salt and pepper. Lay out the slices overlapping by 1/4 in an exact geometric manner. Season with salt, pepper, and olive oil. Lightly drag a pastry brush across slices trying not to disturb your pattern. Leave a 1/2 inch of space at the edge of the tray. The reason for the overlap is to manage the burning. If the slices were all separate they wouldn’t have the protection of the steam from their neighbors and would shrivel and burn too quickly. But if they overlap too much, they will just steam and overcook before getting color. Now lets recap what this configuration is meant to produce. It won’t be rearranged or the tray shaken. The preparation is done. This pattern is going under a broiler on the second highest rack. The objective is to get charred “grill” flavor from the top side, and the deeply satisfying slow cooked flavor from the bottom side. 3 separate 3 minute trips under the broiler will accomplish this. Give the tray a minute or 2 to rest in between broilings, or the whole thing gets a little out of hand and too violent. Play around with this. Ovens by design can all have the same temperature depending on equipment, but broilers are much different and you may have to adjust according to your power. Char the topside more than you would normally, and you will probably sacrifice the outer 5 percent to burnt. Remember that the entire bottom side will be soft and completely uncolored, so you can be aggressive with the amount of char on the topside. Let this rest for at least 5 minutes, like cookies. If you are lucky, the little bit of starch has been distributed around and lightly glued the slices together and they will behave like tissue paper. This will give you some interesting plating options. This technique is great for capturing the effect of this starch. When you grill the violence of the water bubbling out obliterates the starch and you just have mush after a few minutes. If you simply sauté zucchini pieces the starch gets lost in all of the water that comes out, and never gets to reform as a crispy thing. What we have done under the broiler with the Overlap is to coax out the starch and then let it settle back on the surface. Giving texture and helping the color.

On a side note: even though it looks pretty to serve ribbons of raw zucchini, don’t do it. They aren’t cucumbers. Deal with the starch. The Overlap is your solution.

Malleable perfect zucchini slices

Roast your Bones, Drink the Marrow

Bone broth. Those two words are everywhere. Bone broth is magic. Trendy. It has untold alchemical powers. You can buy powdered bone broth at Whole Foods. I first heard of it when Marco Canora was trying to save Hearth after his rent got jacked up. He started selling Brodo in a window attached to the restaurant, and although it sounded great to me, and to my friend who told me about it, I didn’t have much hope for its commercial viability. Boy was I wrong.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. There is another name for bone broth that every cook on the planet knows: Stock. Or a stock with a few things added to flavor it. Stock is Day 1 in culinary school and most restaurant kitchens. Stocks are the flavorful liquids that really separate most restaurant cooking from home cooking. Compared to properly made restaurant stocks, even the best store bought stocks can’t compete. Don’t fall prey to the down homey nostalgia of chicken stock made from the whole chicken boiled in water like Grandma used to make alongside her dumplings. Unless that is REALLY what you want.

Consider this simple 3 step method for making chicken stock:

1. Cut a whole chicken into 3 inch pieces.

2. Roast the pieces.

3. Simmer in water with aromatics.

If you do these steps thoughtfully and carefully you’ll produce a stock better than anything store bought and most restaurants. I’ll elaborate.

The first thing you’ll notice is that we are using an entire chicken, and not just the bones. Using 3 inch pieces of chicken means that the thighs and drumsticks will be cut in half, and the bigger pieces will be broken down, effectively exposing bones, meat, and skin to browning during the roasting process. In place of the simmering step of this process I suggest using a pressure cooker for a better flavor extraction and yield. When you reduce your stock in a pot on the stove you are concentrating flavor by evaporating water, but water isn’t the only thing leaving the building. Those delicious aromas wafting through your kitchen? Thats the smell of flavor being carried out of your stock and into the void. A pressure cooker’s sealed environment extracts maximum flavor without letting any of it escape. And you can always choose to boil, reduce and concentrate later if you like.

Octaves and the "Ring"

Everybody knows about the sweet, sour, salty, bitter, spicy and even the more esoteric umami. What I am interested in is the underlying filtering and evaluating system of taste. The one that judges and organizes flavors. Not just sweet, sour, salty, etc.. but good, bad, harmful, healthy, and satisfying ancient associations. Real evolutionary type stuff. How long do sensations like this stay with us, and how do we remember them?

A popular trend with some chefs is to play with the nostalgic power of food. I read about menu descriptions of food that purports to transport and connect the diner to their childhood food memories. Do I care if it smells like fall or a campfire in this restaurant? Cool as it is to serve a caramelized pumpkin tart on a bed of autumn leaves to evoke nostalgia, It feels a little gimmicky and manipulative for a restaurant experience.

What I find much more interesting is the marriage of a very few flavors from just a few ingredients—and getting out more than the sum of their parts. Some flavor bounced avant garde tasting menu, that allowed me to time travel into my past and smell my grandfather’s summertime grill is cool, but there more sophisticated and relevant flavor experiences to be had.

When I approach an ingredient I think about all of the different flavors it has in its various states. Raw, barely cooked, grilled, burned, slow cooked, boiled, etc. I think a good analogy is a musical octave. Same instrument, same note, slightly different expression. An amazing plated dish from somewhere like Alinea is like a symphony. Different instruments, notes, techniques, and surprises coming together to form a beautiful sensory experience.

More simply, let’s play the SAME instrument. Evoke an intense, memorable, and third synergistic flavor variation of the pleasing “RING” you hear when the same note 2 Octaves apart is struck simultaneously. Sweet, slow roasted carrots paired with a slightly acidic, vegetal raw carrot juice sauce, for instance. The combination of both creating a new, fundamentally pleasing tone.

Here is a slightly more complex example. Grilled lobster, its with bright flavors of salt, lemon, herbs, and butter, is a perfect dish and it stands on its own. But consider also a deep, sweeter slow cooked lobster broth with shallots, white wine, tomato, and garlic. Paired successfully, these dishes can elevate one another. In Southampton during lobster season I made a fresh egg pasta dish using the broth to make a sauce, and garnishing it with the grilled meat. Not cooked together, put played perfectly together as foils. Elevating. The ring.

Doing Cookie things...

In the first post of my Daily Cooking blog I told the story of some Blueberry Cookies. Daily Cooking is dedicated to the interesting and unexpected things that I find cooking at work. The posts are meant to be short, easy to read and write. Any bigger concept will be in this Big Ideas section. At the end of the ordered list of ingredients I suggested to “Do cookie things to this”…

This is what I mean. I hate recipes. I don’t like reading them, I don’t do well following them, I forget them immediately. It seems like my cooking brain works through intuition, experience, and muscle memory. So I’m always looking for a bigger “model” or template to apply to any larger concept. The variables can change, but the ratios of the template recipe provide a framework.

When I’m thinking about cookie recipes, I want to find a universal ratio to the ingredients that I can adjust according to taste, season, etc. If you like crispy, less flour. If you like cakey, more flour. Sweet, crunchy, soft, chewy are all variables in my master formula. Here is what i’ve come up with through my years of fighting to not pull out the tsp, TSP, 1/3c,1/2c, measuring instruments.

• 1 stick BUTTER (cold, room temp, melted)

• 1 cup SUGAR (white, cane, brown, coconut, honey, maple syrup, etc..)

• 1 large EGG

1.5 cup Flour (AP, cake, almond, coconut, etc…)

1 tsp (eyeball) Baking Powder, Soda, Vanilla, and SALT!!!

1 cup Optional Additions- Chocolate Chips,Nuts, Granola, Dried Berries, etc..

Butter and sugar get creamed in a mixer first. The fancy French term is Blanchir. Make white and lighter colored. You’ll see. Medium high speed until its as light and fluffy as it will get. Then the egg. Repeat beating. Then everything else on low until just combined. Barely combined!!!

Chill in fridge for 30 minutes for best results, chill your sheet tray too.

Measure these out and pay attention. Practice eyeballing it. Play around with shapes and sizes

375*F for 10 minutes works for almost all cookies

Rest on tray, cool on rack. Serve immediately. Time proximity to service is half of the battle. Be brave, it’s easy.

Summer Cherry Tomato Sauce- A New Way

Long Island Cherry Tomatoes are incredible in August-- sweet like candy. I see 5 or 6 varieties at the markets, but everybody goes crazy for Sungold, a perfect orange sphere with a sweet and floral taste. The skin is great too. They’re perfect by themselves. An accent of salt maybe, but that’s it.

I wanted to use them for more, but every time I would cook them and remove their skins the resulting sauce was too sweet for any savory or pasta dish. And I hated removing the skins because the skin’s flavor is so concentrated and critical to their overall taste. I wanted the flavor of the skins without the skins themselves (leaving them in would make for a terrible texture). What follows is my solution.

• Halve the tomatoes and place into a sided pan.

• Olive oil, butter (optional), salt, pepper, and or red pepper.

• 1 minute on stove at high heat

• 3 minutes under broiler at highest setting and height

The skins should be black and blistered. The water inside will have protected them from burning too much. This 4 minutes is all of the cooking they needed. Any more and the fresh, green, floral notes will be gone leaving them too sweet.

• Pour into a large-holed colander over a saucepan

• Remove as much liquid as possible from the tomatoes by pressing them into the colander with a spatula. Set the skins aside.

• Pour the liquid through a fine mesh strainer which should catch the seeds and any skins that made it through

• Use the spatula to give the seeds the same treatment you gave the skins, push like crazy against strainer until the seeds are dry, their surrounding gel capsules passed through

• Add olive oil, and maybe a little butter, salt to taste, and pepper if you like

The purpose of the 2 step straining process is to isolate the seeds from the skins so you can push the small gel capsules that surround them through to the final product. The thickening quality of that gel is what will give the resulting sauce a great texture and viscosity.

• Undercook your pasta by one minute, and drop it into the sauce

• Add olive oil and cook on low 1 minute

• Serve with more oil, pepper, parmesan, and herbs if you like

The brightness of these amazing tomatoes will remain, and the texture of your sauce will be velvety and smooth.

Simple pasta with little neck clams. Perfect briny balance

Mushrooms

Mushrooms aren’t vegetables. They are their own kingdom. They can taste meaty, but they aren’t animals either. They build their cell walls out of Chitin. The same substance that crabs and insects make their shells and exoskeletons out of. To unlock the nutrition of mushrooms you need to cook them. Interestingly the techniques that make mushrooms edible and nutritional, are the same that enhance flavor. This really is not the case for vegetables and meats.

I think mushrooms in all forms are the most interesting things to cook. They take techniques. They require knowledge, attention, and experience. You can’t depend on a recipe to get them right. They are the flowering bodies of a living organism. My favorite flavors that emerge from mushrooms come from out of nowhere. For example, spongy, boring, and scentless Royal Trumpet mushrooms can smell exactly like freshly baked, yeasty bread when cooled properly. Then they turn into bacon. If you like, you can pickle them and have pickled bacon bread!

I’m fortunate that I only have a small amount of people to cook for compared to most restaurant chefs. I can make tiny batches and give a lot of attention to the cooking of mushrooms. Even the best restaurants in the world have systems and techniques that have to be developed for a bigger scale. I have the luxury of being able to focus on a single sauté pan of mushrooms, and adjust my technique as I cook.

I learned my favorite technique for pulling flavors out of these types mushrooms at my first job out of culinary school. The name of the restaurant was RM and we had a lot of great cooks there, including a talented young executive chef Matt Accarino. The technique was used for Black Trumpet mushrooms, but it works for most exotic mushrooms.

Video of this technique coming soon, but the recipe is in Daily Cooking (Black Trumpets…) The recipe that follows applies to most exotic mushrooms.

The first thing you need to do is to start exposing more of the mushroom’s surface area. The more torn, sliced, and exposed surface, the better. It shouldn’t be too small or thin because it needs some time and a lot of heat to make happen what I want to happen. If it is too small or thin, it will burn before it gets there.

The trick here is the high heat needed to toast and brown. Have your pan HOT and DRY. Oil won’t be able to handle the initial heat necessary to toast the mushrooms. Medium/High heat for about 2 minutes. Dry and flat mushroom surfaces in a pan like this will SQUEAK. Just like basketball shoes on a court. Press them lightly with the back of a flat wooden spoon or spatula and you will hear it. When the mushrooms start to brown, toast, and smell nice, add a little oil. I like to use grapeseed because it is neutral and has a high smoke point. Give it a little toss and move around. Drop in some fresh thyme sprigs and some grinds of black pepper. Don’t add salt yet because it will pull out a bunch of water that will stop the browning process. Add a little more oil, another toss/move, and now add salt. When I add salt I actually think about eating these mushrooms, look at them, and then add the correct amount. The water will come out of the mushrooms and violently “boil”. After about 10 seconds I pull the pan off of the heat and splash it with good Jerez sherry vinegar. Let all of that evaporate (do NOT flame) and add a nice amount of extra virgin olive oil. Spread the mushrooms on a tray or plate and let them rest to room temp. Adjust salt.

Matsutake getting a little color

Zucchini

I bought this zucchini at the Green Thumb Farmer’s Market in Water Mill last July. When I cut it in half cross wise the above happened.

This liquid is slightly starchy and a little bit slimy. Rub it between your fingers. This stuff is the reason I don’t like raw zucchini, it leaves a weird taste and feeling in your mouth. But I want to keep the freshness and zucchini intact and get rid of that starchyness.

Grilling vegetables is a great way to cook during the summer, but its tricky. The idea of it often surpasses what actually hits the plate. Like most things, food 20 seconds off of a grill has a special quality. It’s a mixture of burned, hot, smoky, salty, etc.  Unless you are running to the table and instructing your guests to immediately eat, this magic is usually lost with the chef. Most of the grilled vegetables I’ve ever had look cool, remind me of that moment right off of the grill, but are kind of soggy and not that great.  What causes this is partly the reason they are so attractive during the summer. They are full of flavor, aromas, and lots of this starchy water. I needed to find a way to keep some of this starchy water, but not all of it. I wanted a grilled zucchini that would keep its smoky charred grill flavor 5, 10, and 30 minutes after it was served. Family style platters that last. 

The skin of the zucchini is what keeps its moisture in. Even the cut side seals itself a little bit when you slice it. To counteract this, I alternately peel the skin and score the cut surface when I’m cutting a zucchini squash or zucchini lengthwise. If you are cutting crosswise then you don’t have to do the scoring.

This allows for the right amount of evaporation, and it cooks the starchy liquid. Depending on the thickness of your cuts you will have to adjust heat, time, and directness of your gas or coals. As you practice more with this you will be surprised how much char you can put on your zucchini without burning them. Even the ones that look burnt can be balanced nicely with lemon juice or vinegar.

I’m always trying to balance flavors on a menu, dish, and ingredient level. If you are only serving zucchini for lunch the zucchini itself will need to be balanced. If you are serving it with something sweet or creamy like ricotta or burrata, you can char it more. I’m always trying to put myself in front of the food at the table, because that is where it is going. It’s not going to stay in front of me in the kitchen looking pretty for pictures, it’s going to have to be moved from a platter onto a plate, and then cut into bite sizes. This sounds obvious but it’s something that gets overlooked a lot.

Zucchini is green stuff, sugar, starch, spongy stuff, and water. My job is to bring out the sugar through charring. While removing most of the water, converting the starchy and trying bring out and preserve the green flavor. Salt and heat bring out the water and the natural flavors.

My favorite way of cooking zucchini and yellow squash solves this problem and amplifies all of the qualities I like. The recipe is in the post in Big Ideas titled “The Overlap”. Its a great technique that applies to a lot of other vegetables. It produced the picture below. A perfect mix of the best zucchini and squash dishes. Charred, slow cooked, crispy, soft, sweet. It’s great.