Tomatoes By The Twos And Threes

 There's a phenomenon that's happening right now involving tomaottes.Maybe because it's the height of their season or there's so many of them right now. It seems that there are many dishes requiring two and three types of tomatoes.

I discovered this a week ago when I was trying to use up leftover grape and vine ripened ones . Both kinds looked ripe and juicy so why not combine them in a salad with some fresh basil and olive oil? It turned out to be a good combination, The smaller variety gave the bigger ones sweetness while the larger vine ripes brought a full bodiedness to the salad.A more colorful variation .  is using the Japanese black cherry tomatoes many groceries are selling right now. Combine these with what's called rainbow tomatoes (usually cherry tomatoes in orange,yellow and bright red hues) for a colorful end of summer dish. To make it more refreshing you could add watermelon chunks. Another idea is adding some kind of cheese whether feta or provolone.For a more Provencale flavor think about adding capers and anchovies or tuna to the salad too. A panzanella  or bread salad using different kinds of tomatoes is another tasty summer side or even lunch. Tear up a fresh loaf of Itlian bread or a baguette , toss in the mix of tomatoes and douse with a good glug of olive oil. Season with salt and pepper and a sprinkling of torn freshly picked basil leaves.It's actually the easiest dish to make on a too hot day.

Can a combination of tomatoes be used in hot dishes! Yes! There is a recipe in tomorrow's New York Times Sunday Magazine that has Chef Eric KIm's sauce recipe. This looks like a good one, not just for the summer but for the cooler months ahead.He takes a mix of plum, cherry, grape and Campari tomatoes and transform them intoa silky sauce. Campari tomatoes has a high  sugar level and low acidity ,a perfect foil for the others.  All are coarsely chopped and then sauteed in olive oil and garlic .Cook  until the mix bubbles steasily. Salt is added and then the tomatoes are simmered over a medium heat. This will takes forty minutes until the tomatoes break down and then the sauce is sieved into a big bowl. Doing such rids the sauce of the skins and seeds,Repeatedly scrape the pulp agsinst the strainer to release more juice The sauce is then poured over spaghetti that's been cooked in the Dutch oven.It's stirred until every strand is coated. Tomato chutney is another dish you could make with two different kinds of tomatoes, It's an Indian side dish ususally cooked with a wide variety of spices.Most recipes call for one kind of tomato but you could add some grape or cherry ones for a sweetness that tempers the fieriness. Another idea is taking Campari and heriloom tomatoes and combining them in a tomatoes Provencale where they're sauteed in garlic and oil and topped with generous amount of breadcrumbs.

Combining toamtoes in cold and hot dishes is becoming popular. It's a great way of emphasizing the fruit's sweet and vegetal flavor. Try them in any combination for a tasty dish.

Savory Sweet Dishes For The New Year

 Rosh Hashanah will be here in another week and it's time to think about dishes. Any holiday , this year, will be weighted. It has been a bad year so far. What can we do to sweeten the new one. The answer comes in the form of recipes that expertly balance sweet with savory, in a way a hopeful wish for the months to come.

Melissa Clark and Joan Nathan have come up with two very different yet appropriate ways  to bring in the New Year. Their recipes were featured in yesterday's New York Times Food section and are perfect savers for many years to come. Ms. Clark dedicates her A Good Appetite Column to the new craze of sheet pan cooking. She combines chicken with roasted plums and onions, an interesting way of combining sweet and savory. Keep in mind to get softer plums , ones that will release a lot of juice for moisture. You can use peaches , nectarines or pluots, again so long as they can produce enough juice.Ms. Clark recommends also using a slight squeeze of lemon for some acidity but not too much.Add a drizzle of honey because plum skins can be tannic or sour. The bird does have to be marinated a few hours before cooking. Flavorings include toasted fennel seeds along with allspice , fresh thyme springs and hot pepper flakes, the last used for zing. As for the onion, used a sliced red one. Everything is placed on a sheet and popped into a 425 degree F oven for about 30 to 45 minutes. You can garnish with flaky sea salt and more herbs.

Joan Nathan gives the more traditional tsimmes, a stew made of beef, carrots and sweet potatoes. The dish is originally German then Yiddish coming from the words zum essen meaning a big fuss. The original recipe included parsnips and turnips. It has since been adapted by Yiddish cooking and Americanized with the addition of sweet potatoes, brown sugar and cinnamon. Ms. Nathan has the sweet potatoes and even carrots for sweetness along with chopped prunes.Using the last means no extra brown sugar or honey in the recipe. For the meat she recommends using bone in flanken or flanken style ribs. You could also use  three pounds of English cut short ribs. She also suggests subbing in  the white Japanese yams for the American ones. For seasoning there's bay leaf and freshly ground black pepper. The flanken needs to be cooked the day before , in a Dutch oven with the bay leaf.It's cooked in a 350 degree F oven with eight cups of water for an hour, then removed from the heat. Let it cool overnight in the fridge. The next day, remove the congealed fat with a slotted spoon , and add the veggies and prunes, Bake covered for another hour and then remove the lid. Keep in oven until the potatoes are cooked, the meat is tender and the water is reduced. Season and serve with fresh, chopped parsley.

Making sweet dishes for the new year means a year full of sweetness. Hopefully this will be true.It's a time to start fresh leaving the sadness and bitterness of the previous year behind.

The Perfect Sourdough

One of the most tastiest and most photographed  breads out there is the sourdough. What's not to love about this tangy loaf that's perfect just with butter or as the base of a sandwich? Now home bakers are taking it on, trying to create the perfect bread. All you need is a  good starter and a lot of time.

Claire Saffritz, a contributing editor to Bon Appetit Magazine, wrote this interesting article, and how to for yesterday's New York Times Food section. Sourdough is one of the hardest and possible the most difficult of breads. As she states "It's not just flour, water and yeast but time and temperature too." Regular bread making, using an oven, is time consuming, but making sourdough is days consuming. Carve out three days for the whole process. She recommends starting on Friday for fresh from the oven loaves on Sunday. You're also going to need a lot of equipment, from a glass mixing bowl to an Instant read thermometer.Then there's the fancier stuff such as bannetons, bread proofing baskets. a serrated knife and a large Dutch oven. Unlike other breads , sourdough requires parchment paper too. Then there are the ingredients - a mature starter (get it online or from friends and family), white bread flour along with whole grain rye or spelt flour.Then there's rice flour for dusting. Luckily, Stop & Shop and WHole Foods carry the flours  - although you can buy all of them on line.

After all this , then there is the process. It's feeding or refreshing your starter on Day One, then letting it sit out at room temperature. A second feeding is needed once the starter doubles in size. Day Two requires mixing the dough and letting it rest, otherwise known as the autolyse process.  This will take anywhere from thirty minutes to a couple of hours. The next step is the floater test. Drop a small spoonful into a bowl of room temperature water.It's ready when it floats (along with a dome of sudsy bubbles appearing on the starter's surface. If it sinks, let it sit for another thirty minutes. If it's ready then combine the dough and starter. Use your one hand to mix the dough while the other rotates the bowl. assess the dough and then add salt. It's then mixing and performing what's known as the windowpane test in which some of the dough is stretched and rolled out. It should be membrane thin with light shining through it. Then there's  more prep, folding and pre-shaping the dough.  The shaping baskets are then prepared with a dusting of white and rice flours combined. The sourdough is then proofed, first outside the fridge and then inside it overnight. Day Three is the actual baking day It's baking it in a Dutch oven at a fiery 500 degrees F. Prepping the dough requires dusting it with flour and gashing it with a knife or razor blade. Halfway through the temp is dropped to 450 F. The result is a crusty, tasty loaf with a tender crumb.

Perfection takes a lot of work. Creating a flawless work is not just a lot of work but time. If you have it, do it. Make  that Instagrammable loaf of bread.

The Best Yogurt Homemade

The perfect yogurt should be thick and creamy. There should be a definite tang that works well in both savory and sweet dishes.Where to get this kind?At home. The best kind is the artesenal, straight from your kitchen sort. All it takes is a starter and your favorite brand of milk.

Priya Krishna, grew up with  perfectly made and cultured yogurt and made it the subject of an article for today's New York Times Food section. Yogurt is a big part of the Indian cooking tradition and most immigrants bring over a starter culture when they move to the States.It's used in a variety of different dishes,mostly savory.It is a staple of South Asia because it holds up so well.It's in the cooking of every section of the area, from the vegetable heavy foods of Gujarat to the light gravies and biryanis of Sindhi food in Pakistan. Yogurts are never store bought. They're made at home without all the fancy yogurt makers. The most important part is the culture.It's two bacterias, lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus.Their function is to ferment the lactose or milk sugar to produce lactic acid.The increase in this reduce the milk's pH and causes the milk to clot or form a soft gel. It can be bought at Amazon and Wal-Mart however these won't make for a good tasting yogurt. The starters have to be taken off other starters, whether from family or friends in the community. It does cement bonds in the Indian community.

Is the milk just as important. That can vary. Some swear by certain brands, some don't care, as they just place special emphasis on the culture.Ms Krishna supplies a recipe from her cookbook,Indian-ish (Howard Mifflin Publishers 2019)that she wrote with Ritu Krishna All it takes is four cups of organic whole milk and 1/4 cup of full fat yogurt with live active cultures. She recommends checking the ingredient list  however if you know someone with an active culture then definitely ask them for  some.First add 1/4 inch of water at the bottom of a Dutch oven. This will prevent the milk from sticking when cooked. The milk is almost boiled and then cooled until it goes down to 135 degrees F. As the milk cools, smear the bottom of a one quart lidded glass container with the starter yogurt.Ms.Krishna suggests a dab , not smearing the whole bottom. When the milk has cooled to the proper temperature  whisk in the remaining yogurt. Stir until completely mixed and then pour into the container. Leave the lid on loosely to allow the air to escape.. Place the jar in an unheated oven with the oven light on for one hour. You can tell when it's done when it jiggles like Jello.Some batches can take up to five hours to set. It  will last for four to six weeks.

The best yogurt is the one straight from the kitchen. Make it to day and then experience its' tart , creamy lushness. It's an easy cook

Sous Vide Made Easy

The sous vide method of cooking can either excite chefs or scare them.Yet, it's a really simple way of having thoroughly cooked meats and vegetables.it's also a great cooking technique of sealing in flavor. It's something all home chefs should embrace.

Brian X. Chen wrote about them in yesterday;s New York Times Food section.This is a first for him because he usually writes about new tech gadgets . A sous vide is a kind of kitchen one, although not so new.It was invented in 1799 by Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford and brought back into the cooking world in the 1960s, thanks to frozen food companies. Restauranteur George Paulus was the first chef to use it in his famed Troisgras Restaurant in the mid Seventies.. Since then it's become a restaurant staple which can intimidate a home chef.There's really nothing to fear.It's a pretty simple method of meat being sealed in a bag and placed in hot water as a cylindrical  gadget circulates hot water and the bag around for thorough cooking..Another turn off is the fact that the cooking method takes too darn long!.A piece of meat can take anywhere from an hour to a day to cook. The end result though is worth it . Many home chefs may also be leery about the sous vide price, usually between $200 to $300 hundred dollars however it does pay itself off.It's the price of a microwave or a good emulsion blender.

Sous vide cooking is easy , Mr. Chen had a pictorial for pork or beef roast with his article but directions are easy to follow. He recommends using a 3 to 5 pound chuck roast or boneless pork shoulder. The meat should be trussed with cooking twine. Tie it around its' midsection, leaving one inch spaces. The meat can be preseared in a Dutch oven using vegetable oil.Afterwards place the meat and two sprigs of rosemary inside a one gallon freezer bag. Fill a large pot halfway with water. Attach the sous vide and set it to140 degrees for the pork shoulder for medium doneness 130 degrees for the beef chuck which will turn it medium rare. Submerge the bag when the water reaches the desired temperature.  Remember to seal the bag as airtight as possible. Once the bag is submerged, it has to cook for twenty-four hours. Add more water if it starts boiling off When done ,remove the meat from the bag and transfer to a cutting board. The juices can either be discarded or used for a gravy. For a nice crust season steak on both sides with salt and pepper. The pork can be rubbed with brown sugar Heat in a cast iron skillet with vegetable oil. hen they start to smoke add butter and herbs for flavoring.

A sous vide should be considered a home chef's best friend.It's a great gadget to for cooking roasts for a tender , melt in your mouth texture Its a great addition to any chef's arsenal of gadgets.