Something we gut-wrenchingly miss about Italy: the plentiful celebratory festivals that take place in small towns across the countryside. A typical Saturday in Piedmont would consist of Jonas and me revving up the Alfa to hit the hills in search of a gathering of townfolk united in their reverence for classic Fiat 500’s, white truffles, esoteric antiques, gelato, formaggio, vino, et cetera.  One of our favorites was the Festival delle Sagre, translated that’s the Festival of Festivals.  It takes place in the town of Asti, famous for great wines (Barbera d’Asti, Asti Spumante), horseracing (The Palio), and its close proximity to the heart of the best white truffles on earth, tartufo bianco d’Alba.  The festival is a great place to sample rustic Piedmontese cuisine in a large-format, entirely informal setting.  It is also a great place to drink plentiful amounts of wine poured directly from large glass damigiane (carboys, casks, huge glass vessels used to store wine) and have a sinfully good time.

One of the more memorable dishes on hand at the Festival delle Sagre is carne battuta, which means (now get your mind out of the gutter here) beaten meat.  The longer version, carne battuta al coltello just means beaten with a knife. In other words, you cut up chunks of raw, very high quality beef or horsemeat, then beat it into submission (and tiny little pieces) with a super-heavy meat cleaver.  It’s like the Italian version of the French dish Steak Tartare, only with different flavors.  Typical Piedmontese additions would be lemon juice, olive oil, salt, pepper, and perhaps some herbs. I have seen people add cream as well, though rarely.

In my case, I wanted to top my battuta with a quivering quail egg because I thought it would add a nice, carbonara-like texture to the finished plate.  I started with extremely fresh Wagyu filet mignon cut from the center of the tenderloin and trimmed of any oxygenated pieces just before preparation.  Then I roughly chopped it before going to town with my man-sized meat cleaver. I beat up half a pound of filet so much my arm is sore today, no kidding. Perhaps I am just a big wimp!

Once I had my perfectly beaten cubes, I used a fork to stir in lemon juice (one small lemon for half pound of meat), olive oil-to taste, ½ c of freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano, ½ tbsp chopped fresh oregano, and Maldon salt.  I then plated the battuta using a cookie cutter as a form, topped it with a sous vide quail egg (you could just soft boil too), and sprinkled on some fresh pepper.  I served the battuta with celery and carrot ribbons because they are nice to break up the mouth feel of the meat.  It’s a great appetizer for a more adventurous dinner party, of course you’d want to be sure everyone was ok with raw meat before you wasted all that delectable filet.

exes and oh baby’s, Linda

This Steak Diane recipe means serious business. At the risk of your eyebrows, you will have one of the best meals of your life if you follow it to a tee. If you live in Seattle, you can watch me make it live on tv on the 9am News on Fox channel Tuesday, July 27th as a teaser for my MasterChef appearance later that night. For a more complete account of the entire meal served during a recent Diane affair, please view my guest post currently up on the fabulous blog: www.fivestarfoodie.com.

Foodie Fashionista Steak Diane

© Linda Miller Nicholson of www.SaltySeattle.Com

Serves 2

Note: I use morel mushrooms to give Steak Diane a Northwest feel. You may substitute alternative mushrooms as you see fit seasonally and regionally.  Serve this with roasted potatoes and freshly-shelled peas sautéed in butter for a fast, fashionable and fun gluten-free dinner that dares to impress.

• 1 tsp extra virgin olive oil
• 2 grass-fed tenderloin filets ( I like Painted Hills, available at Rain Shadow Meats in Seattle)
• High quality salt such as Maldon plus freshly ground pepper
• 1 tbsp butter
• 1 medium shallot- minced
• 2 cloves garlic- minced
• 1 tsp chopped fresh thyme
• 14 medium Morel mushrooms, dry-cleaned and halved lengthwise
• 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• ½ tsp dry mustard powder (for truly gluten-free, grind mustard seeds in spice grinder to powder)
• 1/3 c cognac (never pour directly from the bottle to the pan- always pour from measuring cup)
• 3/4 c heavy cream
• 1 tbsp chopped fresh Italian flat-leaf parsley

Heat the olive oil over medium-high heat in a medium skillet.  As the oil is heating, pat the filets dry and season liberally with salt and pepper.  Sear the filets in the skillet, about one minute on each side.  Remove to a plate and reserve.

Turn the heat to medium low and add the butter. Once the butter has melted add the shallot and stir frequently. After one minute add the garlic and thyme. Stir to incorporate, then add the Morel mushrooms, Worcestershire and mustard powder. Allow the ingredients to heat through for one minute, then turn the heat to medium-high.  Tilt the pan away from you and add the cognac to the far end of the skillet.  If you are using a gas burner it will likely light on fire right away, but if not, ignite the alcohol in the skillet with a barbecue lighter.  Stand back (watch your eyebrows!) and let the alcohol burn away.  Add the heavy cream, stir, and then add the reserved filets.  Heat for one minute on each side for medium rare, longer if you like your steak cooked further.  Adjust the seasonings with salt and pepper and serve, sprinkling with parsley on the plate.

I suppose now that the cat’s out of the bag I can let you all in on a not-so-little secret.  I say that since there is apparently a preview currently airing on Fox for Gordon Ramsay’s new show, MasterChef. I haven’t seen this preview, but my facebook denizens are coming forward asking if by chance they can expect to see me on national tv due to a split second sighting of me in this preview. Curious, I asked a few people to describe it. Well folks, it’s not pretty. Apparently in my big tv debut I am a’ cryin’.  The horror. Since I don’t own a television it is unlikely I will actually witness this clip, so I guess that’s a good thing.  At first I was quite perturbed, but now I’m fairly over it, choosing to adopt the all-publicity-is-good-publicity approach.  Hopefully I’m one of those hot-bawling types, but I doubt it.

So yes, come next Tuesday, July 27^th, 2010, you can watch yours truly on MasterChef. I’m only a master of my own shoe collection and a chef for my kind-hearted friends, but it was a fun experience in which to be a part. I met some hugely talented, over-the-top, fabulous people like Charmaine, Kat, Holly, Azmina, & Emme (along with a slew of others without blogs but who are equally as remarkable) with whom I hope to have lifelong friendships, so for that it was certainly worth it.

Casting for the show was quite an arduous process in itself. Initially I created sous vide duck confit three ways to impress the folks judging the Seattle casting call.  I made sous vide purple Peruvian potatoes and homemade sea salt, which serve as backdrop to three aspects of the duck confit.  There was the confit itself, in its elegant, undressed glory flanked by a touch of rendered duck gras on one side, completed by a glistening cube of geleéd mirepoix.  In the Le Creuset cocotte I made a four day cassoulet de canard.  I confited Moulard duck legs in a sous vide water bath for many hours so that their unctuous umami would present itself, then showcased them in a cassoulet where everything was homemade, from the bacon to the stock to the sea salt, which I collect and distill from the waters of the North Pacific Ocean.  Finally as a palate cleanser I composed a salad of homegrown maché and delicate baby carrots that served as foil to marbles of duck confit mixed with my secret recipe quince pureé.  When I finally got the call stating, “Linda Miller Nicholson, pack your Seattle bags!  You’re going to Los Angeles to be a part of MasterChef with Gordon Ramsay, Graham Elliot, and Joe Bastianich,” I was shocked beyond belief.

Once it came time to head to LA for filming, I reprised a slightly different version of these Dungeness crab cakes.  You’ll have to watch the show to see how they were received; all I can share with you is that I required a drill to make them.  So that’s my secret, now back to the regularly scheduled programming of cooking up deliciously esoteric food for this prized, beloved blog of mine. If you happen to catch the show, let me know what you think!

Never one to jump on the latest baking trend, you can imagine my surprise when I found myself unable to shake the concept of engineering a croquembouche.  Let’s start by answering the question, what is a croquembouche.  It’s essentially a tower of profiteroles glued together with caramel, often drizzled in chocolate, spun sugar, or all manner of fancy schmancy décor.  Not my type of thing. I like contemporary solid lines, bold colors, no frills.  So why can’t I get the damn thing out of my head? I’ve been making pate au choux with which to turn into profiteroles all summer, so I suppose architecting the croquembouche was the next inevitable step.  The problem is that I didn’t fully execute my vision since I only baked a measly 21 pate au choux, and what kind of tower can you really construct with only 21 building blocks?  So what that means is that this project is incomplete and must be revisited soon, at a time when I can whip up at least twice that many and construct my dream Barbie mansion from tiny pastry balls.

Knowing myself and my proclivity to take a perfectly good, classic thing and turn it all akimbo, I figured a classic croquembouche just wouldn’t do.  This is when I remembered seeing a method for turning foie gras into Chantilly crème recently.  Why not do semi-savory choux and fill them with goosey-oozy liver-y goodness then drizzle the whole thing in maple-balsamic reduction made to look like chocolate syrup? Yes, genius. Pure, diabolical, evil genius.  I considered not telling my lucky-number-13 guests that they would in fact be masticating goose livers rather than benign cream, but a vegetarian in our midst guilted me into full-disclosure.  I needn’t have bothered warning people, it seems. They well and truly were little bites of The Rapture. People popped them like it was 1974 and they were disco queens slamming back ‘ludes, so I’m pretty sure they needed no introduction after all.

To put the whole thing together I started with a good, sturdy batch of pate au choux.  Whilst my piped lovelies were puffing up in the oven, I contemplated the Foie Chantilly.  I did a bunch of internet research on how to fluff up the foie, and settled on mixing it with heated cream in a food processor for a few moments to sufficiently blend it. Then I passed it through a sieve into a mixing bowl over ice and proceeded to hand whisk it to stiff peaks.  In terms of quantity, for five ounces of foie, I used ¾ c heavy cream, a pinch of salt, and two tablespoons of superfine or caster sugar.  I heated the cream, sugar, and salt together in a heavy saucepan whilst I chopped the foie into ½” cubes and set reserved them in the food processor. Working quickly, once the cream was just nearing the boiling point, I added it to the foie and whirred it for ten seconds. I immediately passed it through the sieve and into the waiting chilled mixing bowl. It’s important to get it cool quickly so that it will whip properly.  I bet a pacojet would have been a really cool toy to employ for the whipping process, but I’ve got an official moratorium on kitchen gadgets here in the Salty Seattle household thanks to my evil husbandJ Once I whipped and chilled my cream and the pate au choux were cool, I piped each pastry full of a sufficient amount of choux using a star tip.  At this point I had savory profiteroles awaiting their drizzled fate.

For the sauce, I simply reduced equal parts balsamic and maple syrup in a small saucepan until it reached the consistency of thick molasses.  I then cooled it and dipped the butt ends of the profiteroles in the syrup to use as a binding agent.  I stacked a meager tower, though mark my words, this is only the beginning. My experimenting is far from finito.  In the meantime, enjoy this mini-tower knowing that I’ve created a monster in myself and I likely won’t stop until I construct a croquembouche the size of Frankenstein. And they make a movie about it.

As a blogger living in the Pacific Northwest, I’ve arrived.  You cannot be a blogger worth her salt and not make mention of morel mushrooms. It simply isn’t permitted. If you were living in Alba, Italy it would be imperative to wax lyrical about the wonders of truffles. In London you’d have to find a way to do a bang-up write-up of bangers and mash.  My friend in South Korea tells me eating small, live octopus is de rigeur for the truly initiated.  Here in the Northwestern part of the United States, it’s morels.

Fried up, chopped up, loved up or served up just about any way you can imagine, morels are the defining marker of a true (forgive the use of the following word) foodie.  They possess several characteristics that make them tres chic to us rain-addled fleece-covered Washingtonians waddling along slug-stomping in our Wellingtons.  First off, they are elusive and seasonal.  Secondly, they grow wild. Third, you typically have to hike to locate them. Fourth, they taste suspiciously of the terroir from which they hail.  And fifth, when you slice them into two hemispheres, each side looks suspiciously like a kayak. Pacific Northwesterners cannot get enough of kayaks.

I jest, I jest, but truly, I do love morels, and I can’t wait every year, for their season to roll around.  Even if you do have to hunt them in mukluks rather than Manolos.  I picked up a healthy handful at the farmer’s market the other day to serve as an appetizer. With morels, simplicity is key to letting the fertile flavor of the mushroom shine.  That’s why I didn’t want to overcomplicate this dish with frills like excessive sauce or even a starch to lap it up. The morels themselves can act as a firm base to balance the rest of the flavors of the appetizer, and yet still steal the show.  In this instance, I pan-fried them and served each half with a sous vide quail egg, a smattering of Parmigiano Reggiano, some homemade cubed bacon, and a touch of thyme.  It has to be my favorite way to eat morels.  If you do this, be prepared to join the clean plate club in about three seconds flat.

Dinners that elicit utter silence in guests are the ones to strive for. When the food takes precedence and words simply do not form in your head, you have achieved something great.  This was one of those meals.

It all started a few weeks ago when an amazing blogger friend stated “You cook the most exotic food. Do you ever just roast a chicken?” I decided to take it as a challenge, because truth be told, I rarely just roast a chicken. Maybe a bit of spring cleaning in the kitchen is in order to appreciate the simple wonders of classic fare.  Fast forward to a few days ago- I found myself on a lazy drive cruising the back roads of the Kitsap Peninsula in search of fresh eggs. Can I just state for the record and for the hundredth time that I desperately want chickens and ducks and I don’t think it’s fair that my evil husband won’t let me keep them on our in-city lot? Stated.  My loose goal was to end up at Pheasant Fields Farm, although I’ve never been before.  I rolled up and was greeted by dozens of friendly free-roaming chickens, who incidentally struck fear into Bentley’s little heart. He clung to my legs like never before but he was so awed he couldn’t walk away.  Come to find out, I had missed by a half hour the slaughter of a whole mess of chickens. If you know me at all you can imagine how disappointed I was to miss such a thing, but I’m told they’ll do it again soon and I’m invited to come participate. Plus, they still had all the equipment set up along with a giant bucket of heads and feet which they graciously gave me to take home and make stock. All that collagen- oh yes, baby!

I was only too happy to take one of the freshly-rigormortisized chickens off their hands along with some duck and chicken eggs right out of the nests. I learned a great tip I wish I had known when I unceremoniously killed my own chicken last fall.  Don’t cook the birds until they are no longer stiff, as rigor mortis causes toughness if you cut meat off the bone while the bird is still in that state. It takes 24-48 hours for the bird to loosen back up, though you’re welcome to brine the bird during that time.  I waited the obligatory two days and meanwhile made a batch of fresh cottage cheese.  I decided cottage cheese noodles would be a perfect accompaniment to simple chicken.  I also had some triple crème languishing in the refrigerator (don’t ask) so I tossed that in with the noodles along with a boatload of my fresh eggs, some thyme, just churned-butter and the cottage cheese.  This was my first experience making the noodles with a pasta machine. I felt a little bit like a sellout since I have hand-rolled and cut them several times a week for as long as I can remember, but I guess that fact in itself justifies a machine.  The noodles sure are nice and uniform, even if they do lack the personality of truly handmade pasta.  I will use the machine in the future but will also definitely retain my hand-rolled technique as well. Another interesting observation about machine-rolling the noodles is that it doesn’t require nearly as much wine. You simply cannot hand-make noodles without regular gulps from a big balloon wine glass in order to fortify your strength. Because you need less strength for machine-done pasta, you don’t encounter near-enough of this happy problem.

Once enough time had passed, I removed my newly-loosened chicken from her brine and fired up the smoker while her skin air-dried.  I figured one little change from roasting the chicken to smoking it really doesn’t make much of a difference to my initial challenge, as it’s essentially just cooking it in an outdoor oven over apple wood as opposed to an indoor one.  Once she was nice and dry and the smoker was nice and hot (I averaged 220° F for 3 hours for a 5.5 lb bird) I trussed her, stuffed her cavity with a bit of thyme, and rained Maldon salt and a touch of pepper over her body.  Because simplicity was the name of the game here, I didn’t want to get complicated with extra rubs, marinades, or god-forbid basting, which doesn’t work well with smoking as it lets too much heat escape.

Once my chicken was nearing completion I tossed the noodle concoction into the oven and whipped together a simple butter lettuce and cucumber salad along with some homemade buttermilk dressing.  I made a jus to drizzle over the chicken by reducing the juices collected from her cavity in a saucepan along with some vermouth and thyme.

The noodles came out, the chicken was carved, salad was served et voila- I can DO simple, damn it! And I’m happy to report it was so simply damn delicious that not a word was spoken amongst five of the most talkative people I know for over 60 seconds.  They resumed their maddening din after they recovered from their delight, but did so with a lingering smile around their lips as they licked the last of the chicken from the glistening bones.

Since time immemorial, mankind has brought his food from a live state to the plate in short order. Sadly, the amazing modern preservation techniques discovered in the last 100 years have had the unfortunate side effect of causing major disconnect between the cock and the coq au vin, or in this case the prawn to the plate.  It is so disheartening when I think of my personal experience with this travesty, I almost feel like chalking up nearly 20 years of my life as “lost years” merely because of lack of awareness and education.

I was a firmly established young California girl when my father got the idea to move his bi-racial city-dwelling family to the Ozarks of Idaho and plop us down on 10 acres complete with horses, cows, ducks, goats and even the odd stork or bullfrog.  The townfolk weren’t entirely standoffish to my black mother and two much-darker-than-me older siblings, but let’s just say we weren’t winning any Idaho family popularity contests.  Consequently my parents tried to make up for my lack of human friends by putting me in primary charge of bottle-feeding a feeble baby cow I named “Slobber.” Slobber and I were fast friends and became inseparable all summer long.  When I returned to California at the end of the summer for a month-long visit with relatives, I cried all the way to the airport over losing my bovine companion.

The day I got home from California, my dad had made a special meal of hamburgers to welcome me home. He proudly asked me if I knew where the hamburgers had come from, to which I excitedly replied “McDonalds?” He said no, and encouraged me to keep guessing. “The store?” Nope. He chose that moment to reveal to me the source of the meal I was eagerly licking off my fingers. “These hamburgers are made with meat that we received from butchering your cow, Slobber.” At first I didn’t understand. The disconnect between animal and food was really so vast to my mind that I really could not fathom meat coming from a living, breathing kind-souled loppy-eared animal I had just said goodbye to weeks previous.  Once the lesson sunk in, it was so overwhelmingly shocking that I vowed never to eat meat again. That vow lasted nearly twenty years and all I can think of now is “what a waste!”

That lesson could have been so meaningful, reverential, important, and yet it was tragic, heart-wrenching and completely off-target for what it was intended to accomplish.  Once I cautiously stepped back into the waters of carnivorousness, I did so armed with education and respect. It is crucial to understand that there is an impact to popping back chicken nuggets like they were kernels of corn, and that impact can be traced back to a single animal.  Eating animals is not something that should be taken lightly, but it is something that we were born to do.  For this reason I feel like I should personally be comfortable with every step of the process from live animal to filleted fish, so I try to trace that process with every piece of meat I eat (yes, I consider fish meat since it is an animal and we eat its flesh).  The process of how animals are butchered for human consumption is not always pretty, but don’t you agree that you should be able to stomach it if you desire the finished product? Out of sight out of mind just won’t work in our global society, as history has shown time and again.

We need to understand these processes in order to determine whether we are okay with accepting them, and for this reason every food chain should be transparent. You should be able to ask your local butcher where he sources his meat, and if you get any response besides the names of actual farms and ranches, know that there is something wrong with the picture (shame on you BILL THE BUTCHER).  Further, I feel everyone should at least witness if not partake in the humane taking of an animal’s life for the sake of our dinner.  If you can’t take it, should you be eating it? I have documented my own experience with killing my own Thanksgiving turkeys, and am constantly educating myself in this realm.  It has had a twofold effect on my. On the one hand I am nearly cured of the squeamishness I used to exhibit around gizzards, livers and the general blood and guts present in any animal slaughter.  On the other, it has caused me to eat less meat.  This is a two-part reaction. First off, I now only want to eat meat that I trust comes from a clean, humane, organic-if-possible (but then, what does that even mean?) source.  Secondly, meat really is a big deal, and it should be treated as such. Americans eat more meat than most other nationalities and yet we are the most disconnected and squeamish about the process.  I tweeted out a picture of some chicken head and foot stock I was making recently and half the responses were along the lines of “ew” and “gross.” I am sure these same people don’t think twice about spearing into a juicy chicken breast, but come on people, isn’t it incredibly wasteful to just leave the whole damn animal by the wayside so you can suck salt off drumsticks and braise breasts in barbecue sauce?

I’m going to step down off my soapbox now, whew, guess I really needed to get all that out. I realize there are a lot of buzzwords going around right now surrounding the “sustainable” “organic” “farm-to-table” “foodie” movement, and I hope my words don’t simply add to the unintelligible din, but THIS SHIT IS IMPORTANT, PEOPLE!  Take responsibility for what you eat.  Ok, enough said.  All that was a preamble for the wacky live prawn experience I had last week.  In Seattle at Mutual Fish you can buy live spot prawns that come from Hood Canal, WA. They are so fresh you can eat them as sashimi, i.e. completely raw.  I had some friends over for the prawn-cooking experience and I’m happy to report that most of them were completely ok with the fact that we would be killing the prawns in order to eat them. I mean, seriously, what is wrong with people who still don’t seem to get that just because you didn’t do it yourself doesn’t mean that they weren’t alive at some point before you ate them. If you feel this way you should be VEGETARIAN.  Practice what you preach.  And eat the whole god-damned animal aka SUCK THE HEADS. In many cultures it’s considered the best part.

I had some help from some amazingly creative people on twitter in coming up with this preparation, which is basically like a Mexican tequila shot version of drunken prawns.  It’s easy. First you put live prawns in a pan (something deep like a Le Creuset bouillabaisse pot works best I learned the second time around since the little buggers jump high) then you douse them in tequila. Let them get a tad drunk and sleepy, then light the tequila on fire. Don’t worry if it doesn’t all burn off- this adds flavor. Obviously higher heat tequilas will burn more.  Next up, douse them in cilantro, oregano, lime juice and enough Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt to cover them completely.  It’s pretty important to use Diamond Crystal Salt because you don’t want to waste a ton of really nice finishing salt on them since you’ll need a few cups. On the other hand you don’t want to use Morton because it is much saltier than Diamond Crystal and imparts a saline flavor on the prawns.  This is a good general kitchen salting rule, by the way.

Toss the now-lidded pot into your oven on super high heat.  Cook for about five minutes (don’t overcook or they’ll be tough) then pull them out and rinse them from the salt.  Reserve some of the liquid to flavor the hominy mixture.

To make the hominy mixture, sauté equal parts celery, carrots & shallot in butter in a dutch oven. Add chipotle in adobo and garlic to taste. Add hominy, chicken stock & tomato. Season with oregano and pepper. To finish the hominy add some of the reserved tequila-prawn liquid to taste. It will be salty, so as you’re adding, test the saltiness of the hominy and stop when you’ve achieved the right flavor balance.

Place a portion of hominy on the plate and surround with cooked prawns.  Squeeze lime over everything.  Put out discard bowls so guests can shell and set aside the exoskeletons, heads and tails as they eat.  Believe it or not, kids love this super-interactive, fun meal, just be sure the alcohol from the tequila has really dissipated if you serve to little ones.  The head-sucking bonus with this dish is that not only are you getting the supposed-best part of the prawn, it also tastes quite a bit like a tequila shot.  Here’s a short video of the prawns being corralled into the too-shallow frying pan. I learned my lesson and used the Le Creuset the next time.  *video not for the faint of heart.

For several years I have had the desire to host a salt-tasting party, I simply lacked the impetus. Until now.  You see, I’ve always felt the salty soiree should have serendipitous timing all around, and that wasn’t possible in days gone by.  For me, everything had to be essential, perfect, balanced.  The food, the guests, the salts, the level of engagement- the whole shebang.  When I finally decided a few months ago that the signs were looking auspicious to host the party, it was a right nice feeling. Right nice indeed, because I’ve been stewing over the concept for so long, there really wasn’t much to settle on.  Except for incorporating some new obsessions in terms of food (can you say sous vide?) and making sure the guest list didn’t go entirely jabberwocky with too many tasters and not enough salt, all the pre-planning was a cinch.

I planned a from-scratch menu deliberately devoid of salt to encourage tasting and pairing. Notables included sous vide custard duck eggs, sliced heirloom tomatoes, no-knead baguettes by Patrick aka best breadbaker in the world, homemade cottage cheese, homemade burrata, a slew of Italian cheeses including a three-milk Robiola and Bra Tenero, jicama, fava beans and honey, sous vide potatoes and beets, and edamame.  Whew, if that wasn’t a salt-less mouthful I don’t know what would be.  I did not forget the dessert category, which consisted of maple caramels, chocolate pavé and triple chocolate truffle tart by Patrick, and four types of ice cream: rhubarb crème fraiche, coffee hazelnut, quadruple chocolate and goat yoghurt maple.

Since many members of the Seattle fooderati scene showed for the 70+ person party, there were countless other notable culinary creations from the likes of Michael Natkin, the man behind Herbivoracious, Jenny Richards of Purplehousedirt, Lorna Yee from The Cookbook Chronicles,  Marc Schermerhorn of the infamous @marcseattle twitter feed, Keren Brown aka Frantic Foodie, and many more.  The lovely and talented Jeanne Sauvage of Fourchickens, brought me a carton of homegrown eggs that I’ve been coddling as though they were babies; I want chickens and ducks so badly I can taste them, but that’s a story for another time.

For the tasting itself, I lined my dining table with over 60 empty vessels and assigned each one a corresponding number.  We created a master list on the Ipad that contained each number, then, when attendees brought salt, they simply chose a vessel, told us the number, and we catalogued each salt into the secret master list.  This way the tasting was truly blind.  I raided my own global collection of salt and filled roughly twenty of the vessels, and once all the guests had proffered their hand-selected salts, we had 63 samples.  I established four categories for the tasting: Best Overall Tasting Salt, Best Blended Salt, Best Pairing-Savory, and Best Pairing-Sweet.  My graphic designer neighbor Cyndy created ballots so folks could cast their votes, and I’ve just tallied the results, which are molto interessante indeed.

Repurposed Aarnio Bubble Chair as Wine Chiller

Before I get to that I want to mention some of the notable salts on display that evening, representing six continents.  Janna Wemmer from Secret Stash Salts brought a dizzying array of her expertly-blended salts, including bloody mary salt, smoked chipotle, and lavender rosemary to name a few.  She is a locally-focused artisan producer of the finest blended salt available in the Pacific Northwest, and her salts should be included in any representational goodie bag of local products.  Local foodie-about-town Traca Savadogo was able to get Mark and Marjorie Fuller of famed restaurant Spring Hill to donate some of Mark’s ancestral Hawaiian red clay sea salt, aged 25 years,  which was one I made sure to sneak a reserve of for later use.  Apparently the aging process sweetens the deal, and I mean that in a literal sense.  The kind folks over at Marx Foods heard about the tasting and donated some perfectly structured Portugese Flor de Sal for our tasting pleasure. I’ve been finishing with this one for a few weeks and am very happy with the crystal structure and depth of character.

Every party is bound to have one jester, and this soiree was not immune.  Our non-food-obsessed neighbor thought it would be quite funny to cart in a salt-lick, which he did with much pride to much snickering.  We had to give it a fair tasting, so we chipped some off the old block and put it in a vessel, much to the chagrin of the poor folks who tasted it.  Oddly, it did receive one vote; some kind soul nominated it in the savory pairing category for its complementary taste with radishes.  Many of the salts travelled here from around the globe, but only a few did so expressly to be tasted at the party.  One such salt was a Waddenzout brought all the way from Amsterdam by Robert and Patrick. I sure hope that one didn’t have any extra Amsterdam-additives in it, if you know what I mean.  Another well-travelled salt came from my amazing friend Emily (Happy Birthday, Baby) who sent over some Korean Bamboo salt from Ulsan, where she is teaching for the year.  Lily and Rodney brought forth a slew of salts from Vancouver BC made by Edible Canada.  Of the twenty or so salts I personally contributed, besides my homemade salt, many of them came from the Portland-based salt boutique The Meadow.  If you think of the most esoteric salt in all the lands and are scratching your head as to where to find it, chances are you’ll find it at The Meadow, which is my go-to salt destination, both online and in the flesh.

Alright, enough of me waxing lyrical about one of the greatest substances on earth- let’s see the results.  The winner in the best overall finishing salt category is the timeless classic, Maldon Sea Salt. It’s crystal structure alone is a thing of marvel; I really believe this salt should be one of the wonders of the world because it comes in the form of little dissolving pyramids. I love other salts equally for different things, but I am not surprised that Maldon unanimously won the grand prize.  There were four salts tied for second place in this category: Trapani Sea Salt, my own sea salt, Secret Stash Salt’s Lavendar Rosemary, and Pangasinan Star.

The winner of best blended salt goes to Black Truffle Sea Salt.  A very close second goes to Secret Stash Salt’s Lavender Rosemary Salt.  Tied for third place here are Evergreen Edible Salt and Wreck Beach Edible Salt.  Best Pairing-Sweet has three salts tied for first place. They are: Murray River Pink Salt, Maldon Sea Salt, and Tahitian Vanilla Salt, all being paired with caramels. In fact, caramels were the favored vehicle with which to sweetly taste salt.  The trickiest category was Best Pairing-Savory.  I think it’s because there was so much food it was difficult to get consistency.  Five salts tied for first place in this category. They are: The Drive Edible on heirloom tomatoes, Tahitian Vanilla on Eggs (maybe these voters had a few glasses of wine?), Sale alle Erbe delle Mar Lunghe (salt with herbs from the long sea) on Patrick’s bread, Haleakala Ruby on heirloom tomatoes, and Murray River on mozzarella and edamame.

these glasses did not stay empty for long

Alright, this was a bloody long-winded post, so I’m going to wrap it up.  It is my goal to showcase the winners in all categories and do some refined tasting with them in a more controlled environment. I’d like to perfect some pairings and suss out which qualities about each of the winning salts made it memorable for tasters.  Expect to see more salt in this space soon, but then, you probably already knew that.  Have a salt-sational day!

all the salts- the morning after

PS- special thanks to Lisa Page Ramey for providing some of the mid-party action shots; there was a lot going on and our camera languished in the corner for much of the evening.

Pierogi are similar to the Italian pastas I am very familiar with making, and yet oh-so-different.  Stylistically, the dough is more like a hybrid between biscuit and pasta dough, for one thing.  With typical tagliatelle, ravioli, lasagna, etc, the dough benefits from extreme manipulation. Biscuit dough (and similarly pie crust), on the other hand, should be touched as minimally as possible in order to ensure an airy texture.  Pierogi dough falls into the latter category in that its texture is better if it’s handled as little as possible, and yet you still have to roll it down to about an eighth of an inch thickness in order to cut rounds in order to form the individual pierog.  Yes, you heard me right, singularly they are pierog, and plural they are pierogi. Yes, you’ve undoubtedly heard American bastardizations including but not limited to perogis, perogies, perogy, pirohi, piroghi et cetera, but the accepted and accurate pluralization and spelling is pierogi.  I’m not sure why I’m going all soapbox on this word- it’s not as though I’m any kind of expert either by birth or experience, I just find it interesting I guess.

Anyway, in my effort to conquer the world of pasta I’ve decided to branch out beyond the land of Italia which I know and love so well into other areas with rich traditions of unleavened dough.  I’ve always admired the standard pierogi in all its cheesy potato glory, though I can’t exactly be trusted to leave well enough alone. Luckily this time the resulting pierogi were unimaginably spectacular, but traditionalists, you’d best turn back now.  Those of you who have read this blog for any amount of time know that I have an (un)healthy obsession with eggs.  I also happen to love tucking them inside dough. Pierogi and eggs are downright meant for one another, though the dumplings are small enough that the eggs must be of the quail variety.  I also decided some shaved raw asparagus would spruce things up a bit and help remind me that it is springtime, after all. It was a good call.

This recipe makes 12 pierogi.  The basic pierogi protocal is make the dough, make the filling, assemble, boil and finally fry.  The first thing to do is caramelize an onion by slicing it and putting it into a lidded dutch oven along with some butter.  Slide it into a 400° oven and don’t fuss with it for an hour.  You can make the dough and soften the potatoes however you see fit (I sous vide them) in the interim.  Once the onion has spent an hour sweating all its troubles away, transfer it to the stovetop and remove the lid.  Deglaze the pot with a generous splash of vermouth and scrape up all the fond that has developed.  Evaporate the vermouth, stir it all together and you have your caramelized onion.

Next, make the dough by mixing all the ingredients in a large bowl, kneading until it comes together, then allow to rest in plastic wrap while you prepare the filling.  Here are the dough ingredients:

Dough

• 2 c flour
• ¾ c sour cream
• 1 duck egg
• 3 tbsp softened butter
• ½ tsp salt

While your dough is resting, combine the cooked potatoes with the filling ingredients (except the quail eggs, salt and pepper) in a food processor and process until smooth.  Here are the filling ingredients:

Filling

• ½ lb Yukon gold potatoes
• 1 c cheddar cheese, grated
• 3 tbsp caramelized onion (or more, to taste)
• ¼ c sour cream
• 1 quail egg yolk per pierogi (in this case 12)
• Salt and pepper to taste

At this point remove the quail eggs from the refrigerator and set a large pot of water to boil.  Divide the dough in thirds and roll the first third out on a floured surface into a rectangle about 4” wide and 1/8” thick.  Using a large cookie cutter or glass (3-4” diameter), cut four rounds out of the first rectangle. You will be making 12 rounds total.  Drop a tablespoon of filling on each round and make a hole big enough for the quail egg yolk in the filling using your index fingers.  Brush each pierog with egg wash to make sealing easier.   Crack egg yolks into each pierogi (it’s ok if some white goes too- it helps bind the pierog) and seal by folding one side of the pierog over the other.  Crimping is optional, but if you want to do it you can do it with the tines of a fork.  In order to ensure even crimping, always place the first tine of the fork in the last indentation you made, like this:

Repeat this process with the remaining dough and move each batch to rest on a sheetpan lined with parchment paper.

Once you are finished filling your pierogi, boil in batches of four in lightly salted water for four minutes.  Remove with a slotted spoon.  Meanwhile, shave several stalks of asparagus and leave the shavings in lemon water to tenderize. Fry the pierogi in butter along with more of the caramelized onion on both sides until they lightly brown. Serve with sour cream and shavings of raw asparagus.