Adam D. Roberts's Blog, page 19

Popping Over To Portland (with Meals at Clyde Common, Sweedeedee, Aviary, Maurice, Ava Gene’s, and Tasty & Alder)

I’m not sure what the sequence was. Let’s say it was this: we were going to Bellingham, Washington for Christmas (as we usually do) and just before we left, Tom Sietsema, of The Washington Post, ranked the best food cities in America and put Portland in at number one. Since Portland’s in between Bellingham and Los Angeles, it seemed like a good idea to maybe stop over there for a few nights before coming back. I pitched it Craig. He said “sure.” And then the great work began, the work of figuring out where oh where were we going to eat.

Let me come right out of the gate and say that we made a mistake. A big one. We didn’t go to Kachka, despite everyone telling us to go to Kachka, because we really weren’t craving Russian food. And then it was just named one of the best restaurants in the United States on Eater. I guess that’s the price you pay when you don’t heed smart people’s advice.

Also, we didn’t go to some famous Portland restaurants (like Le Pigeon, for example) because they were closed while we were there.

But we made good choices! For example, that first night, we ate where we were staying–the Ace Hotel–at their in-house restaurant, Clyde Common.

If you remember my last trip to Portland back in 2011 (a work trip for my cookbook), Clyde Common is where I ate with my photographer Lizzie. I enjoyed my meal so much there then, and Clyde Common is still considered an iconic Portland restaurant, so this was kind of a no-brainer. My pictures of the food are really bad, so trust me that we really liked what we ate.

The next day, we grabbed coffee at Stumptown in the hotel and then made our way across the street to that most beloved of bookstores, Powell’s Books:

With the weather being what it was while we were there (cold and rainy), Powell’s earned more than one visit from us. You can easily spend all day there, and we did essentially do that on the Tuesday we were there. I loaded up on a bunch of books that I then shipped back home. (Including obscure books I never thought to buy before like Lionel Shriver’s Big Brother and a book of short stories by James Purdy, one of John Waters’ favorite authors.)

From Powell’s, it was off to our first Portland brunch. If you read up on Portland, you’ll quickly learn that Portlanders take brunch very seriously. There were a lot of places to choose from. I decided to defer to Tom Sietsema’s list of Portland faves (since he named it the best food city in the U.S.) and we made our way to Sweedeedee.

It’s a cute little place where you wait in line, order your food, and then you wait for a table. Luckily, despite a 45 minute wait for a table table, two spots opened up at the counter which they nicely gave us right away. My brunch pick was smoked trout with eggs, Yukon gold potatoes, and a flavorful salsa verde:

Craig went for more of a traditional breakfast with bacon, eggs, and thickly sliced brioche:

Neither completely floored us–though everything was so lovingly made–but what did floor us, and what quickly became an essential Portland bite (one you really shouldn’t miss)–was a slice of their salted honey pie (in the foreground):

The pie had two layers: a dark brown layer on top, and then a lighter, but somehow more intense, honey layer underneath–everything lifted up by salt. It was pure heaven. (Craig’s berry pie, which you can see in the background, was pretty good too.)

That night’s the night we should’ve gone to Kachka. We spent the day walking around Portland–down Mississippi Avenue, over to the Southeast where there was another Powell’s (which we also spent time in, we’re nerds)–and then off to dinner at Aviary.

I picked Aviary because it was listed as #5 on Oregon Live’s 101 Best Portland Restaurants, which seemed really carefully researched and written by food critic Michael Russell. Restaurants 1 through 4 were all closed or booked while we were there, so Aviary seemed our best option for Monday night’s dinner.

I absolutely loved the oysters with tomato granite and horseradish (sorry for the blurriness):

And the charred octopus with molten ricotta pudding was a totally unexpected combination that really worked:

But overall, something about the space (very spare and neutral) and the eclecticness of the menu, made it feel like it could exist in any city anywhere. Which isn’t really a knock against it, it just amplifies my view that we should’ve gone to Kachka–which seems much more unique.

Luckily, if uniqueness was what we were looking for, we stumbled upon it the next day when we had brunch at Maurice (see lead picture). What a quirky restaurant. Close to our hotel, and right next to Powell’s, it couldn’t have been more convenient.

Everything about Maurice was adorable. From the hand-written menu, to the four women working there who flitted from behind the counter (where eggs were poached effortlessly on an electric stove) to the dining room, where dainty portions of food were served on precious little plates. This was a restaurant straight out of Portlandia, but a less aggressive Portlandia–like Portlandia as written by Jane Austen.

As much as we loved the feel of the place, and the energy of the staff, the service was painfully slow. Instead of letting it bother us, though, we just leaned into it. After all, it was cold and rainy outside: where else did we have to go besides Powell’s books? So we accepted that it would take a very long while to get our shaved carrot salad with parsley leaves and prunes:

That was light and lovely; as was this dish of small shrimp on toast with beets, written on the menu above as Smobuzl with Skagen (at least that’s how I see it).

The red beets with smoked salmon and pear was a definite highlight:

Look how artful everything is, everything “just so.”

And because Maurice is a bakery, we couldn’t leave without a pastry. I opted for this:

I forget what it was. But I loved it.

And then, before we knew it, it was our last night in Portland. This dinner I was more confident about: Ava Gene’s was named the #5 Best Restaurant in America by Bon Appetit in 2013. (Wow, we were really into #5 restaurants on this trip.) It was also singled out in the Tom Sietsema article and it was restaurant of the year in Portland Monthly, also in 2013. So this seemed like a winner for sure.

And a winner it was. The atmosphere was warm and lovely and it felt very Portlandish to me (whatever that means):

The menu was pasta-heavy, which is always a plus for me. We started with burrata, dates,

marmellata squash, and nuts:

Then Pane with sheep’s milk ricotta, squash, walnuts, chiles, which was weirdly similar but no less delicious:

The star of the show, though, and the BEST THING WE ATE IN PORTLAND (oh yes, all-caps worthy) was this salad of apples, root vegetables, and ricotta:

I can’t tell you how good this was. There was something so beguilingly delicious about it, I had to ask a server for more info about what we were eating. He explained that the thing that made it so good was the olive oil; “Olio Nuovo,” I believe he said it was. Fresh-pressed with lots of green bits still in it, which mixed with the ricotta which mixed with the salad, and it was all so heavenly. I need to get some Olio Nuovo stat.

As for the rest of our meal, it was very good. I enjoyed my fussili with kale pesto, though it reminded me of something I could make for myself at home:

And Craig felt the same way about his pasta, which looks like pappardelle with some kind of ragu:

For dessert, we shared the panna cotta with pine cone syrup:

That pine cone syrup tasted exactly what you’d want a pine cone syrup to taste like. Woodsy, piney, wintery.

It was a great final bite to our favorite dinner in Portland.

On our last day, that Wednesday, we grabbed brunch at Tasty & Alder which came recommended by several friends.

The griddle banana bread with cajeta knocked our socks off:

Salty, sweet, excellent.

But then a service snafu sort of spoiled our brunch. We each ordered the cowboy breakfast which came heavily recommended by the waiter: skirt steak, baked beans, salsa.

Indeed, it was a tremendous plate of food–both in taste and size. Only, despite ordering two, we only got one. So I gave it to Craig and then tried to flag down a waiter to see what was going on with mine. That took some effort, then by the time they put the order in for my Cowboy Breakfast (turns out the waiter never heard me place my order), Craig was pretty much done with his plate. So he sat for a long while we waited for mine to come out. By the time it did, we were pretty ready to go, so I rushed through it. As a nice gesture, though, the restaurant gave us free Brussels sprouts which were indeed tasty (and alder):

And that was pretty much it for our trip to Portland.

Do I think, like Tom Sietsema, that it’s the best restaurant city in the country? Well, without getting myself into too much trouble, I think L.A. is a better restaurant city than Portland right now, at least based on these meals. (Hey, I’m not alone, Bill Addison at Eater says the same thing.) Recent meals at Night Market Song, Cassia, Bestia, and Broken Spanish were all more memorable and exciting than anything we ate in Portland, salted honey pie and Ava Gene’s salad, notwithstanding.

That said, we had a swell time on our three-day jaunt and I’d love to go back to Portland in the spring, when the weather’s nicer and we can experience more of the local bounty–and also more of the outdoorsy stuff. There’s only so much time you can spend at Powell’s.

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Thinking About Soup (In Memory of Gina DePalma)

On New Year’s Day, I didn’t eat a salad, I didn’t hop on a treadmill, I didn’t write the annual letter to myself that I’ve been writing since I read about doing that in some magazine half a decade ago. This year, I grabbed the giant stock pot that sits on top of my oven and put it on the stove. Out of the freezer I pulled a bag of chicken backs that I cut off of chickens in 2015 and dumped them into the humongous vessel along with a whole onion, a whole carrot, a head of garlic cut in half, some bay leaves, peppercorns, and a handful of parsley leaves. I filled it all the way up with water (at least two gallons), turned the heat up to medium, waited for it all to come to a simmer, then turned it to low. Every so often, I’d skim, but for the next eight hours, I just let the chicken stock perk away.

Meanwhile, I took giant white beans from Rancho Gordo (which I’d been soaking since the night before: yes, I thought to do that before going out on New Year’s Eve), drained them, and added them to a separate pot with a carrot, half a yellow onion, a garlic clove, a bay leaf, and enough cold water to cover. Up the heat went, then down to a simmer, and suddenly my kitchen was a regular soup factory: enough stock to make soup for weeks, and enough beans to make several different kinds of soup.

Soup’s been on my mind ever since I heard the news last week that celebrated pastry chef Gina DePalma had passed away from ovarian cancer at the age of 49. I met Gina more than five years ago when she agreed to cook with me for my cookbook. She invited me and my photographer, Elizabeth Leitzell, up to her apartment near the Cloisters and greeted us like old friends, immediately offering us iced tea and sitting down with us for a long chat before we even started cooking.

She quickly opened up about her cancer, which she’d been battling ever since returning from Rome just after winning her James Beard Award in 2009. With a finger, she drew a line down her chest, showing us how they’d cut her open to remove an enormous tumor, telling us how she spent most of her time recovering watching old Lidia Bastianich episodes on TV while eating soup that her mother made for her–a soup that she then eagerly taught me how to make.

[Photo Credit Elizabeth Leitzell]

That soup, which I often cite as my favorite recipe in a book of over 150 recipes, was a Lentil Soup with Sausage and Chard (blogged by Smitten Kitchen) that doesn’t sound like much when you look at the ingredients–sausage, onions, garlic, celery, lentils–but which Gina, channeling her mother, coaxed into such a flavorful concoction, it’s a casebook study in what it means to cook with love. I know that’s cliché, but here’s what that really means in the non-clichéd sense: it means that, at the beginning, Gina sorted through the dried lentils, making sure there weren’t any stones in there. It means that she seasoned at every step, used good quality tomatoes, diced things carefully so they’d look nice when the soup was done. It means that instead of just serving the soup as it was, Gina took the extra step at the end of sautéing sliced garlic in olive oil and stirring that into the hot soup so that it all got infused with garlic flavor. And, as a final gesture, it meant grating really good Pecorino on top of the soup just before serving it. These aren’t the moves of someone who wanted you to have a “just OK” soup experience; these are the moves of someone who wanted you to have an experience that you’d always remember. These are the moves of someone who wanted to hug you with soup.

And hugged with soup is how I felt with Gina in my life. After the cookbook came out, we stayed in touch. Two trips to New York ago, we had coffee and pastries at Bosie Tea Parlor in the West Village. She talked about continuing her chemo, leaving her job at Babbo, the second cookbook that she had just finished. There was hope in her voice, but also trepidation. She really didn’t know how things were going to go with her cancer. But she was so full of life, there at that little table, gossiping about people in the restaurant industry (sorry, my lips are sealed) and just having a grand old time. It was impossible to think of her as anything other than alive.

And, maybe because of that, I didn’t follow up with Gina as much as I should have, after that visit. We, of course, Tweeted back and forth with each other. Every so often we’d exchange a quick e-mail. But I never thought to really check in with her, to see how she was doing, especially when she got so quiet towards the end. But it’s a testament to Gina’s character that when I got myself into trouble last March with a cookbook review that offended quite a few people, she took the time to write me this in an e-mail:

I want to say that I just adore you. You have so much integrity, and are such a GOOD person. You always make me laugh, or at least smile widely. You’ve always made this food world that is twisting me into knots lately, a brighter and more thoughtful place….It seemed the right time to say this. So there you go.

Imagine a person going through what Gina was going through taking the time to reach out to a person who was going through the most minor of minor incidents (and one that he pretty much brought on to himself). Needless to say, that gesture meant so much; it boosted me in a moment when I needed boosting. Like a good bowl of soup.

Which is why, on New Year’s Day, I made soup. A whole lot of it. I have several Tupperware containers of chicken broth in my freezer right now, and a whole batch of pasta fagioli leftover in the fridge. We ate soup, on the first day of 2016, and I thought about Gina, about the legacy that she leaves behind: iconic recipes on the Babbo dessert menu, an essential Italian dessert cookbook that everyone should have in their kitchen, and, most importantly, a legacy of spirit–one that picked people up when they were down and nourished them until they felt like themselves again. The fact that you can do that with food, made lovingly, is a lesson that I’ll always credit to Gina DePalma.

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When Your Friend Makes Sourdough, You Make Cioppino

My friend Toby grew up in Berkeley and whenever we see each other, we talk about all of the things we might cook together one day. It’s one of those conversations that happens over and over again but the plans never materialize, so at a certain point somebody has to say, “OK, are we doing this or not?” Which is exactly what I said last time that I saw him, pulling out my calendar (or, more accurately, my iPhone with the iCal app), forcing Toby to nail down a date. That date was last Saturday and Toby, showing off his Berkeley roots, promised to make sourdough bread from scratch. To which I replied: “Well, I guess then I’ll make cioppino!”

Here’s Toby with his gorgeous loaf of bread:

You’ll be even more impressed when you learn that Toby got the starter for the bread at The Acme Bread Company which is often acknowledged to make some of the best sourdough in the country. Toby’s bread lived up to the hype; it was on my shoulders to make a soup to match.

I scored a recipe from Epicurious, having never made cioppino before. Turns out, it just involves making a flavorful, tomato-based broth and then poaching your seafood in there just enough so that everything is just cooked through.

What made my cioppino great, if I do say so myself, was that I bought the seafood at McCall’s Meat and Fish, which sells real high-quality stuff. In fact, their standards are so high, they weren’t selling any mussels and clams that day because the weather was too hot for the good stuff; so I stuck to scallops, halibut, and white shrimp, which were all beautiful as you can see here. (Don’t yell at me, cioppino purists: I know it’s supposed to have mollusks, but not crappy mollusks!)

As for the base, it had a typical garlic/onion beginning, with the surprising addition of green pepper which definitely added a unique flavor to the affair–might you call it a “grassy flavor”? No, you might not, but I’m trying to describe that flavor in words. It’s sort of what you get with cajun cooking because green peppers are part of the trifecta there. There you go.

And for the rest, it’s tomato paste, red wine, plum tomatoes, clam juice, and chicken broth.

You know you’re winning when you taste the base, after everything’s cooked together for a while, and it tastes real good. If it doesn’t, adjust with salt; because after that, you’re just dropping in your seafood for five minutes and then serving it up.

Look at our happy customers:

The moral of the story is if you have a good loaf of sourdough (preferably made by our friend Toby), there’s only one thing to make and now you know what it is. Cioppino: now and forever.

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Big Fat Coconut Cookies

These days, I don’t worry too much about reinterpreting other people’s recipes. I’m happy just to point you in a direction and say, “Do what they say to do!” Except, in this case, I have one tiny problem. So the recipe that I done made is my friend Deb’s Coconut Brown Butter Cookies. My quibble is that I don’t actually think that you need to brown the butter (!!!). Let me explain.

In my past life as a full-time food blogger, I was quite enamored of brown butter. I made a Vanilla Brown Butter Nectarine Crisp. I made Brown Butter Banana Bread. These recipes are both very good but as I get older and wiser in the kitchen, I’m starting to think that in recipes where there are a lot of other bold flavors, it’s not necessary to brown the butter. My secret suspicion is that we just like to hear “brown butter” when we’re eating something.

Also, if you let something get brown enough in the oven, you don’t need to brown the butter in the first place–you get all those brown, nutty notes anyway. If I’m going to brown butter, I mostly like to do it with things where butter is the star–like when I make pasta with just butter and Parmesan and a little nutmeg, I like to let the butter get brown first. There you really taste it.

Which is all to say, Deb is a hero for nailing the recipe for the City Bakery’s Coconut Cookies. These are really wonderful–you’re going to love them. I’m just giving you permission to skip a step and save the butter browning for whatever browning happens in the oven. You can even still call them “Brown Butter Coconut Cookies,” I promise not to tell a soul.

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Dinner at Orsa & Winston

Confession: we had an amazing dinner on Saturday night at Orsa & Winston here in L.A. and when we left the restaurant, I forgot to ask for a copy of the menu (which changes every day). This is particularly tricky because their website doesn’t feature the menu that we ate and now I have all of these pictures of food and what I remember about them is pretty embarrassing. But you know what? This isn’t an official food blog, this is just my own personal blog, so if you’re mad that I don’t can’t remember things like “nasturtium blossom gastrique” you’ll just have to deal with it! After all, you’ll probably just scroll through the pictures anyway. (P.S. I wrote the restaurant an e-mail asking for the dish names, so when I hear back I’ll repost this post with the menu at the bottom.)

So Orsa & Winston is located next to Bar Ama in downtown; Bar Ama being one of our favorite restaurants, though Craig and I did once get into a fight there because he wanted to just order three raw seafood items for himself because he “wasn’t that hungry” and I ordered the queso and something with beef and he wouldn’t share that stuff with me and I was annoyed. His sister later said that it’s because I’m from a culture where families operate as multi-headed creatures and he’s from a family where everyone’s their own individual. It got very deep. What was I saying?

Oh, so the restaurant has a very reasonably priced $80 tasting menu which may not sound “reasonably priced” when you see that number, but when you see all the food that we got for $80–and also see the quality of everything–it’s a great bargain when compared to fancier places like Providence, etc.

Now for the moment of truth: what do I remember about these pictures? The first bite was a broiled fig and a house-made watermelon sake that was very refreshing.

Then came sliced raw fish–hamachi? I don’t remember–with a habanero jelly that was sweet and spicy. Don’t ask me about the black stuff, just trust that it was good.

Next up was a gorgeous heirloom tomato salad with pluots—a great, unexpected combination.

After that, a gift from the chef (and also the lead picture of this post): milk bread that looked like popovers with incredibly flavorful butter, chicken liver mousse, and radishes. This may have been my favorite bite of the night: slathering the warm bread with all of that fat = heaven.

Although this next course was also a favorite bite of the night—a fresh corn soup with a fish soup combined. Summer explosion and a seafood explosion all at once. I loved it.

Here, a lovely seared scallop with uni on a rice that came all the way from Japan. It’s a certain kind of rice you can’t get here. Please, don’t ask me the name, but I gobbled this up right quick.

Another treat from the kitchen: nectarines with ground hazelnuts and some kind of cheese.

Then, the last savory course: a huge raviolo with a Japanese tomato on top.

After that, a refreshing mix of beets and tomatoes…

Some kind of tapioca pudding with sorbet and cucumbers….

And, finally, an incredibly dense and decadent chocolate hazelnut dessert that tasted like the inside of a candy bar in the best possible way.

Phew! That was tough work—-not eating it, writing about it without a menu for reference. But you got the idea, right? And if you live in L.A., you should do yourself a favor and get thyself to Orsa & Winston stat. It’s the bee’s knees.

UPDATE:

Here’s the full menu, as e-mailed to me by the restaurant.

AMUSE – Amazake soda, caramelized back mission fig, green apple sorrel

1 – Kanpachi crudo, sugarkiss melon jelly, nori

2 – Heirloom tomato salad, pluot, beet pastrami, mouse melon, sake lees dressing

BREAD – Milkbread focaccia, bergamot butter, bone marrow

3 – Mussel & clam chowder, sungold tomato, peewee potato, saffron

4 – Satsuki rice porridge, shellfish béarnaise, snap pea, hokkaido scallop

5 – Egg yolk & ricotta ravioli, momotaro tomato, polenta, braised wagyu beef cheek, pecorino romano

EXTRA – Warabi mochi, strawberry, cherry tomato, beet, saba

EXTRA – Coconut tapioca, lemon sorbet, grapes & melon, vanilla salt meringue

6 – Gianduja bar, malt kinako, chocolate sorbet

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Spaghetti with Crispy Chickpeas and Preserved Lemon

Tom Colicchio’s always like “you didn’t develop any flavor” on Top Chef and most people are probably like “what’s he talking about?” My quick answer is: “He’s talking about making things brown.”

Generally speaking, when you’re cooking something, you want it to turn brown (or, to use a prettier word, you want it to “caramelize.”) What that really comes down to is taking things further than you might otherwise feel comfortable. The hard part is if you take them too far, there’s no going back. So you’ve gotta get in there, hover over the pan, but don’t hover too much–if you stare, you’ll be tempted to stir, and that stops the browning. It’s a delicate dance, developing flavor, but if you do it the right way you can create a dish that’s way more dynamic than it has any right to be–like this dish of spaghetti with crispy chickpeas and preserved lemon.

Riffing on a recipe from the Franny’s cookbook, I drained a can of chickpeas and patted them dry with paper towels. Then I heated about 1/4 to 1/2 cup of olive oil in a large skillet while bringing a big pot of water to a boil for the pasta. When the olive oil was good and hot, I added the chickpeas:

A loud sizzle will happen: don’t be scared. Here’s where you should leave them alone for a few minutes so they turn brown. If you stir, they’ll break up and you’ll have chickpea mush. After about 4 minutes, they had some color:

At this moment, I adde about 4 cloves of sliced garlic and an anchovy which I stirred into the mix:

Here’s where things got really deep and dark and exciting (Tom Colicchio would be proud)–I cooked the mix until the garlic was just golden brown and the chickpeas almost chestnut-colored:

It’s at this moment that you want to stop the cooking so you add about a half a ladleful of salted pasta water (don’t be shy with the salt in the water). There’ll be another loud sizzle! (Oil and water, as you know.) But then you stir the water in, let it evaporate a bit, and set the chickpea pan aside.

This is a good time to drop in your spaghetti. Let it go for about a minute or two less than the package says it should; meanwhile, take a preserved lemon (I bought mine from the Cheese Store of Silverlake) and cut off the rind and chop it.

To finish, turn the heat back on the chickpea pan and when the spaghetti is super al dente, lift it out of the water with tongs and stir into the chickpea mixture, adding some pasta cooking water if the pan is dry. Stir all around with tongs on medium heat until the liquid is absorbed and everything is coated; then add the preserved lemon, stir that in, and finally lots of chopped parsley.

It’s hard to convey how flavorful this was, but maybe it’s not hard to convey when you see how brown everything got in the pictures. See, I’m not lying. That’s the secret to developing flavor–brown food. You could win Top Chef on the premise alone!

So get yourself a can of chickpeas and some spaghetti and get practicing. If you can make those two ingredients taste this good, there’s no telling what you might do. Welcome to Brown Town.

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When A Frenchman Cooks You Dinner

For a while, our friend Cris has wanted to cook us dinner. The fact that we didn’t make it happen immediately won’t seem like a big deal until I tell you that Cris is French. Yes, we had the opportunity to have dinner cooked for us by a French person and we didn’t take him up on it until last week when he and his boyfriend Harry had us over to their Echo Park apartment.

Here’s the thing about having a French person cook you dinner: it’s not about health, it’s not about showing off, it’s about the most important thing you can ask for when someone’s standing behind a stove–and that’s pleasure.

To wit, here’s what Cris made: he took a pork loin and he sliced it thinly. Then he browned it in butter with garlic and when it got some color, he took the pork and the garlic out of the pan and immediately deglazed with half a bottle of white wine. After reducing that for a while, he added (and yes this is very French) three cups of cream. He reduced that by half and then added the pork back in, which simmered in there until it was cooked through, just 10 minutes or so:

Here he is in action (notice how easy he makes it look; he doesn’t even need a spatula, he just uses a fork):

With that, Cris served mashed potatoes which he boiled with a variety of herbs and then mashed by hand with cream (of course) and butter:

And, finally, a beautiful ratatouille that he made by slicing eggplant, zucchini, and tomatoes thinly, placing them like petals in an oiled mold, studding them with garlic and herbs and drizzling them with more olive oil before baking in the oven:

To serve, he flipped them out on a plate making them even prettier:

The finished plate was oh so perfect and oh so French:

It may look kind of simple, but every element was très chic. And that’s the thing about the French, the beauty is in the details. Like, when we had red wine, Cris decanted it:

And the tea he served after the meal, while something he bought at the store, perfectly hit the spot with its combination of citrus and camomile:

I also enjoyed flipping through the cookbook from which Cris got the pork recipe, which was all in French, but I was surprised at how much I could translate just because I’ve seen so many French words on menus over the years:

The recipes were amusing because the most complex dishes–like Coq au Vin Rouge en Gelee–had the tiniest bit of text to tell you what to do. The assumption is that you don’t need your hand held along the way, assuming that you’re French:

I also got a kick out of this book from Cris’s collection:

So thanks Cris for such a special meal–and thanks Harry for your hospitality.

Now it’s my turn and I’ll have to reciprocate with an All-American feast. That’s right, Big Macs and Big Gulps for everyone!

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Chocolate Chip Cookie Hacks

Controversial statement: all chocolate chip cookie recipes are basically the same.

Sure, some are better than others (The New York Times recipe is probably the best one out there) but they’re all different ratios of butter, brown sugar, regular sugar, eggs, vanilla, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and chocolate. And though different ratios will yield slightly different results, in my experience what matters much more than the recipe are the specific techniques you use to make your cookies. For internet purposes, let’s call them hacks and I’ve got six of ’em that’ll work with any chocolate chip cookie recipe and produce consistently good cookies every time.

CCC Hack #1: Use European-Style Butter.

The chocolate chip cookie master in my life is my friend Diana who makes the best cookies I’ve ever had. When I asked her about it, she offered up one major secret about why her cookies are so good: she uses Plugra European-Style butter when she makes them. The higher fat content creates cookies that are richer than your every day cookies. Also, it feels extra fancy to use butter that comes in shiny gold packaging. You’ll see.

CCC Hack #2. Chop The Chocolate Yourself.

Buying a bag of chocolate chips from the store is a loser-move when it comes to making quality cookies. Buy bars of chocolate–I like Ghiardelli 70% bittersweet, but sometimes I splurge on the Scharffen Berger–and use a big chefs knife and chop it into big chunks. Those chunks make the cookies so much more dynamic; sometimes you get a big bite of chocolate, sometimes you get just a sliver. But that textural complexity makes for a major difference in your finished cookies.

CCC Hack #3. Use An Ice Cream Scoop.

Whenever a TV cooking host talked about using an ice cream scoop with a lever to make cookies, I thought “who needs that?” Then I got one and now I can’t imagine making cookies without it. Not only does it ensure that all the cookies will be equally sized, it also just produces really nicely shaped cookies. My strategy is to scoop the dough onto parchment-lined baking sheets, flatten them a bit, and then sprinkle them with salt. Actually that’s another hack.

CCC Hack #4: Don’t Be Shy With Salt.

Some pastry chefs advise doubling the salt in any given recipe, but I wouldn’t go that far. I’ll just say that sprinkling your cookie dough with Maldon sea salt before it hits the oven is a little flourish that goes a long way. The large crystals add another textural dynamic that make everyday cookies feel like Prom Night.

CCC Hack #5. Age the dough.

This comes from that New York Times recipe, and it’s such good advice. If you can, make the dough two days ahead, keep it in the refrigerator, and then scoop it. The cookies will be that much nuttier and take on a caramel-like flavor. If you can’t wait that long, do what I do: make more cookie dough than you need. Scoop the cookies you want to bake immediately onto a Silat-lined sheet (see next hack); as for the other cookies, scoop the dough on to a parchment-lined sheet and then stick that sheet into the freezer. The next morning, pop those raw cookie mounts into a freezer bag and keep them in your freezer for up to a month (or sometimes longer). The cookies will age the way they need to age, but also you can bake delicious cookies whenever you want straight from the freezer. Just pop into a 350-degree oven and bake a few minutes longer than you normally do. This is the secret to my happy marriage.

CCC Hack #6: Use a Silpat.

My final hack is one that I’ve only settled on recently. Normally, I just bake chocolate chip cookies on parchment paper, but I find that with a Silpat sheet, the cookies are more protected from the hot metal and don’t end up as dark on the bottom. Not a major hack, but a nice hack still.

Are you sick of the word “hack” yet? I know I am. But that’s ok, we’ve reached the end of this post. Happy cookie-ing.

The post Chocolate Chip Cookie Hacks appeared first on The Amateur Gourmet.

My Friend Josh

One of the best people that I know is my friend Josh Phillipson. You may recognize Josh’s name because he was the one who urged me to start The Amateur Gourmet in the first place. When I took Craig to Atlanta for the first time, Josh and his wonderful wife Katy hosted us. Josh and Katy have two of the most adorable children you’ve ever met, Lucy and Bea. And last May, when Craig and I got married, Josh and Katy flew all the way across the country to help us celebrate.

Now Josh is facing a battle with cancer, specifically Ewing Sarcoma. It’s an aggressive form of cancer and, despite having health insurance, it’s a very expensive ordeal. And though you don’t know Josh personally, if you enjoyed reading this blog at any point over the past 12 years, I ask that you donate some money to help Josh and his family. You can make your donation and read more about Josh by clicking here.

My Secret Blog

Hi Amateur Gourmet readers, I have a secret: I’ve been blogging behind your back. A few weeks ago, I started a blog using my own name: heyadamroberts.com. The idea is that I still write about food, just much more casually. Also, sometimes I write about not-food things. So far I’ve blogged some Chocolate Chip Cookie Hacks, a dinner that my French friend Cris cooked for us, a pretty killer recipe for Spaghetti with Chickpeas and Preserved Lemon, and a dinner that we had at Orsa & Winston in downtown L.A. There’s also an essay about Penn & Teller’s “Fool Us,” a TV show that I very much enjoy. So come on by and say hello. It’s very low-key; no ads, nice fonts. It’ll be fun.