What Recipes Don't Tell You

Bite into a freshly picked, fully ripe, juicy tomato and you think you are in heaven.

To me, the tomato is a seasonal vegetable (to be exact, a fruit), and I leave it alone when it’s not in season. The imported and hot-house varieties, hard as billiard balls and with not much more flavor, should not be called tomatoes. Off-season I use canned tomatoes—they are harvested fully ripe and processed the same day, retaining flavor and nutrients.

Starting in mid-July, we should all have fresh tomatoes on our table daily.

To have truly succulent tomatoes, you need to buy them either at a farmers’ market or grow your own. Having short shelf life, fully ripe tomatoes are not carried in supermarkets. Don’t let them fool you with the label “vine-ripened.” Once a tomato reaches what’s called mature-green stage on the vine (almost totally green), it will ripen with ethylene gas, but forget about the true tomato flavor. Yet legally it may be called vine-ripened.

Should you grow a good hybrid or an heirloom? I am one of the annual Master Gardeners’ tomato contest judges in my community, and each year I taste over a hundred tomatoes submitted by local gardeners. Some of the hybrids are excellent as well as some of the heirlooms; neither group outshines the other.

Since the tomato is a fruit, it ripens just like a banana or pear does: in a closed paper bag at room temperature, never in direct sun. The paper bag concentrates natural ethylene gas to ripen the fruit. A full-flavored tomato should have a good balance of tart and sweet and a pleasing, not mushy, texture. If too sweet, the flavor is flat—a sprinkling of lemon juice or wine vinegar should help. If too tart, a smidgen of sugar will give it a perk.

Tomatoes have terrific affinity with garlic and basil. Serve slices of tomatoes with a sprinkling of finely minced garlic and chopped basil, a drizzle of olive oil and wine or balsamic vinegar, and sprinkles of salt and pepper. For cooking, use low-juice tomatoes like Roma; if you only have juicy tomatoes, squeeze some of the liquid out or evaporate the excess moisture with cooking.

Our climate is perfect for sun drying those you can’t eat fresh. Slice them thin and dry on a wire rack. Within a day or two they are crackly dry. I place these in the freezer overnight in case insects decided to lay their eggs in them, then store in an airtight container. They keep for years.

Why not OD on tomatoes while they last?

TOMATO EQUIVALENTS

One medium tomato is ½ cup and equals 1 tablespoon tomato paste.

To get tomato sauce from paste, dilute 1 part paste with 2 parts water.

Tomato purée is halfway between sauce and paste in concentration.

Two medium tomatoes weigh ½ pound, yield one cup chopped tomatoes.

A large tomato weighs seven to eight ounces, a medium tomato four to five ounces, a small tomato three ounces.

New York State Assemblyman Ortiz introduced a bill in March to ban all salt in New York restaurants. Chefs, restaurateurs and even the public were up in arms and for good reason: can you possibly enjoy food, any food, without salt? The answer is no; food without salt is bland and tasteless.

Salt is one of our prime flavor enhancers, and using it in moderation has never been found to be harmful for the body. But Ortiz did have a point: virtually all prepared foods are oversalted, snack foods grossly so. Too much salt may harm us (though a UC Davis nutritional scientist claims otherwise—the human body has a wonderful mechanism to purge excess salt).

It is a good idea, nevertheless, to salt your foods with a light hand—a little is good, but a lot is not better. The sodium in salt is necessary to regulate our electrolyte balance; if Ortiz had zero salt in his diet, he would be sick within months and would die soon after.

What kind of salt should you reach for on the grocery shelf? Forget about the more costly sea salt and other specialty salts. All salt is sea salt, all were derived from ocean water even if deeply buried in salt mines (an exception is salt from Great Salt Lake), and all salt is refined before packaging. Sea salt has virtually no benefit over plain, inexpensive granular salt.

Chefs do have what they call “finishing salts” that they sprinkle over some foods as a last touch. Coarse kosher salt is an example—I keep it on my shelf to shake over pretzels, focaccia, and other savory goodies. If I need salt for my popcorn, I grind granular salt in a mortar until fine—that’s popcorn salt. You also need chemical-free salt for pickling and preserving foods and special coarse salt for your ice cream machine.

Home-made ice creams range from barely edible to very good. Technological aids to produce truly creamy ice creams with just the right amount of whipped-in air and very rapid freezing are impossible to duplicate at home but with a good technique, experience, a well-tested recipe and the best ingredients, a home-grown ice cream is sumptuous with zero added chemicals. And it adds an old-fashioned, homey air no commercial ice creams can provide.

Prof. Goff (University of Guelph, Ont., Canada) provides helpful hints to end up with good ice cream at home:

Always use pasteurized ingredients. Raw or partially cooked eggs are no longer safe as they were in our grandmothers’ days. Even though uncommon, the dreaded Salmonella infect an occasional egg yolk. Pasteurize your mix by heating it in a double boiler to 155?F (68?C), then chill it rapidly.

Age your ice cream mix in the refrigerator overnight, or at least for four hours for better whipping qualities that grants good body and texture. Scald and clean every part of the ice cream maker, then cool it. Fill ice cream maker can no more than two-thirds full. Freeze finished ice cream for 20 to 30 minutes before serving.

And if home-made is not your thing, indulge a little and buy a good super-premium brand, allowing small serving portions. Buying the cheapest store brands you are taking home mainly sugar and air.

An ancient Scandinavian recipe, this is so easy and so good that it’s a sin not to make it yourself—even total non-cooks can do it in 10 minutes, provided all ingredients are on hand. Gravlax is a salt-sugar-cured salmon; the ratio of salt to sugar varies by tradition—whether you are in Norway, Sweden or Denmark. In two or three days it is ready to slice.

Fresh dill is best but I also used dry dill weed (make sure you are using whole dry dill weed, not ground, and reasonably fresh) with perfectly good results.

2 lb (1 kg) salmon fillet, skin on if possible but skinless works well, too; if large fillet, cut into two

2 Tbsp salt

4 Tbsp sugar

2 tsp pepper, coarsely cracked

1½ tsp allspice, coarsely cracked

½ c coarsely chopped fresh or 2½ Tbsp dry dill weed

Mix salt, sugar, pepper and allspice, blend in dill. Place salmon on work surface skin side down, rub curing mixture over top surface. If there is more than one fillet, sandwich them with top fillet skin-side up. Use a non-reactive container (glass, ceramics or stainless steel). Cover with plastic wrap, place weight on top to help squeezing extra liquid out (e.g. a bag of beans) and refrigerate.

In about five hours drain liquid that leaked from the salmon. Return to the refrigerator with weight on top and marinate for two days, flipping over two or three times and draining excess liquid from bottom.

Serve thinly sliced.

Keeps for several weeks if refrigerated.

(excerpt from my book What recipes Don’t Tell You)

• High-protein bread flour is best for yeast bread. You may also use all-purpose flour, but the bread will not rise quite as high and may tend to spread sideways. However, if you add gluten flour (available in health food stores and in some markets selling bulk foods) at the ratio of 2½ teaspoons gluten flour to each cup of flour, your bread will be perfect.
• Ideal bread dough should be neither sticky nor dry. Sticky dough tends to spread sideways more than rising, while dry dough is reluctant to rise to its fullest. Adjust the dough with a little more dusting of flour or sprinkling of water.
• Bread made entirely from whole wheat flour tends to be heavy and somewhat dry. The ideal bread with good texture and healthier ingredients is a compromise, about ? white bread flour and ? whole wheat flour. Even adding as little as ½ cup of whole wheat flour to 5½ cups of white flour improves flavor.

Popcorn, with any luck, is the snack of choice in Heaven, next to ice cream and brownies. Popcorn is light as clouds and just as white and it should be considered as one of the vegetables of the day. After all, it is a vegetable, just like corn-on-the cob is. Too bad it is not loaded with nutrients otherwise you could serve it next to mashed potatoes and pork chop as a side vegetable.

The heavenly scent of the popping popcorn is irresistible to everyone and very few Americans are immune to a love affair with popcorn. It grants us a pleasing soft, tender mouthfeel, lovely appearance and a real treat on taste buds especially when the fluff is enriched with a touch of melted butter and a light sprinkling of salt.

What makes popcorn pop

Popcorn is simply a type of corn having two properties that make it pop in intense heat. The first is a little bit of moisture trapped inside the kernel that turns into steam and the second is a tough, protecting skin (called pericarp) surrounding the kernel. Inside the popcorn kernel there is a mass of starch. About 80 percent of popcorn is starch and if you had to live on popcorn, you would die of lack of nutrients.

When you expose the little kernels to very high heat, not only the moisture turns into steam but the mass of starch melts, becomes a viscous liquid not unlike like lava. The tough skin makes serious attempt to hold the inside together but eventually the pressure from the steam, like inside a pressure cooker, becomes too great. The skin suddenly cracks open with a small explosion, and the steam with the hot, liquidy starch escapes. When the starch hits the air, it instantly solidifies into popcorn while the steam flees, condensing as moisture on the walls and lid of the popcorn maker.

A sprinkling of fine popcorn salt and a little butter make popcorn a treat. Don’t buy special and expensive popcorn salt—it is simply a finely milled salt you can create in 10 seconds in a mortar with a pestle.

The star of Hungarian cuisine, Hungarian gulyás recipes have been passed down the generations over many centuries. Originally this dish was made with tough old mutton but later beef was substituted for mutton.
Up the 1970s, gulyás has been a very fatty dish, using less-than-the-best cuts laden with fat. But dietary habits have changed with increasingly more sedentary life style and today’s gulyás is no fatter than a good beef stew.
The recipe below is perfect to my taste (and guests agreed) with great flavor and minimum fat content. Ingredients are readily available (make sure you use Hungarian paprika, if possible, or
Spanish as second best) and within an hour this rich soup should be simmering on your kitchen stove. This has a long list of ingredients but it’s worth the effort.
Make the dish early in the day — as with most soups and stew-like dishes, the flavor improves on standing.

HUNGARIAN GULYÁS
(this recipe is also in my book Tried and True Recipes from a Caterer’s Kitchen)

4 Tbsp vegetable oil

8 oz (225 g or 1 large) onion, finely chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1½ Tbsp Hungarian paprika

1 large green pepper (5 oz or 140 g), chopped

1 large carrot (3 oz or 85 g), peeled, thinly sliced

1 small parsnips (2 oz or 55 g), peeled, diced

1 rib celery, thinly sliced

2½ tsp salt

1¼ lb (570 g) beef, chuck or top round, cut in bite-sized cubes

4 oz (115 g or ½ c or 1 medium) tomato, fresh or canned, chopped, or 1½ Tbsp tomato paste

2 Tbsp caraway seeds, coarsely crushed

1 tsp dry marjoram

¼ c parsley, chopped

5 c beef stock from bouillon cubes or concentrate

1½ lb (700 g) potatoes, peeled and finely cubed

¼ c sour cream (garnish)

soup puffs (recipe below)

1. Sauté onion in half the oil on medium heat in a large, heavy skillet until glossy, add garlic and paprika and continue to brown for a few more seconds. Add green pepper, carrots, parsnips, celery and salt, stir and brown over medium heat, stirring often until vegetables are beginning to color, six to eight minutes. Remove from pan and set aside.
2. Wipe beef cubes to remove excess moisture. Turn the burner to high, add remaining oil to the skillet and brown meat, tossing the cubes into the pan a handful at a time, until all are browned.
3. Combine meat and vegetables in a soup pot, stir in a quarter cup warm water, bring to slow boil, cover and gently simmer for one-and-a-half hours, adding more water as needed.
4. Add tomatoes, spices, seasonings and beef stock, bring to boil, turn heat down to a gentle simmer and continue cooking for 30 minutes.
5. Stir in potatoes and simmer for another 15 minutes.

Soup Puffs

2 egg yolks

5 Tbsp flour

1 tsp salt

1. Beat egg yolks in a small bowl with fork, add flour and salt, stir with a spoon to make a dough. Add water, a teaspoon at a time, to form medium-thick dough. Let dough rest for five minutes.
2. Dust a small cutting board with flour and mound the dough near one edge. Hold the cutting board over the simmering soup, pinch off raisin-sized pieces of dough with a small paring knife or a spoon, and drop them into the liquid. Stick the knife or spoon in the hot soup momentarily to keep dough from sticking to it. When all the dough is in the soup, give the puffs another three minutes to cook. Taste one to make sure it is no longer raw.

Serves six to seven people. You may garnish each bowl of gulyás with a small dollop of sour cream then dust with paprika. Serve with hearty bread.