Recipe: Pizza D’oh!

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Burnt My Fingers

A pizza dough so easy and foolproof, even Homer Simpson could make it.

Ingredients:
2 1/4 tsp dry yeast (1 package)
lukewarm water (total approximately 2 1/4 C)
3 T sugar
1 T Kosher salt
5 1/2-6 c all purpose Flour
3 T olive oil

Method: Allow yeast to proof briefly in 1/4 c lukewarm water in a mixing bowl. Add sugar and salt and 2 C additional lukewarm water and stir till dry ingredients dissolve. Put 5 1/2 C flour in a second mixing bowl and gradually add water mixture, continually mixing with a big spoon. Add olive oil and spoon-mix some more. At this point you should have a shaggy ball of dough which is not too wet and does not leave too much flour on the sides of the bowl; adjust if necessary with more flour or a sprinkle of water. Remove from bowl and knead for several minutes on floured board till it becomes elastic. Put in oiled bowl with cover and let it rise till doubled in size, 2+ hours. Punch down and divide into individual pies; let these rise 30 minutes. Makes 8 individual pizzas.

Comment: What makes this dough foolproof is the large amount of yeast and the use of lukewarm water for a fast rise. You can refrigerate or freeze it just after kneading or after the first rise/punch down, then resume when you want. Recipe from old family friends Richard and Nair Wolf, who say they got it from the defunct Spago restaurant in Los Angeles.

Posted in Baking and Baked Goods, Mains, Recipes | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The beer that dares not speak its name

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Burnt My Fingers
Chosen Spot... the forbidden beer

Chosen Spot… the forbidden beer!

What we have here is an illegal beer. It was brewed for He’Brew under contract at the Olde Saratoga Brewing Company, and when the BATF inspectors saw the label they said it could not be distributed. The brewery could have replaced the labels, but I guess they couldn’t get the old labels off without ruining the beer, so in the end it was destroyed. So to speak. Let’s say it was a pleasant lager that employed premium ingredients for a rounded, slightly fruity taste.

What’s wrong with the label? My guess is the word “think” in the lower right hand corner. (Click on the picture for a larger view to see this.) Alcoholic beverage manufacturers, like vitamin companies, are not allowed to make any health claims about their product. They cannot imply that using this product will alter the consumer in any way. And “think” perhaps crosses the line—which is sad, because it means our bureaucratic Elliot Ness assumes the consumer is NOT thinking at present.

Posted in Drinking | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Can recipes be copyrighted?

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Burnt My Fingers

The U.S. Copyright Office is clear on this point: Copyright law does not protect recipes that are mere listings of ingredients. Nor does it protect other mere listings of ingredients such as those found in formulas, compounds, or prescriptions. Copyright protection may, however, extend to substantial literary expression—a description, explanation, or illustration, for example—that accompanies a recipe or formula or to a combination of recipes, as in a cookbook.

However, Burnt My Fingers thinks it is poor sportsmanship to reprint a recipe without giving attribution to the source that it came from. I rarely invent recipes from whole cloth but I almost always tinker with recipes to get the results I want. Here is the policy I will try to follow in my recipe posts and I’d appreciate it if you would contact me if you think it is off base.

  •  When the recipe is widely available over the internet from multiple sources, I’ll mention that it came from the internet without giving a specific link. The reason is that links change or go dead, individual posters do their own tinkering, and if you don’t want to stop with my rendition you are welcome to do your own sleuthing.
  •  When the recipe comes from a specific source I will give attribution to that source, including a link to purchase the book if it is for sale. An exception will be made for books that are long out of print or recipes of uncertain provenance, such as my brisket recipe.
  •  Some cooking blog authors are very proprietary about their recipes and refuse to allow their recipes to be reprinted, even though I believe they have no legal right to do this. I’ll always try and research the blogger’s preference before publishing the recipe (though not if I’m simply giving a link to another resource). If you are such an author and feel I have done you wrong for any reason, please email chef at burntmyfingers dot com and we’ll fix it.
  • You are welcome to reproduce (and use!) any recipe from Burnt My Fingers, but please provide attribution in text with a (working) link either to the recipe directly, or to my home page.

UPDATE: I found an interesting approach to this at White on Rice, a blog of beautiful food photography that also includes recipes: 

“hello! all images & content are copyright protected. please do not use our images without prior permission. if you want to republish this recipe, please re-write the recipe in your own words, or simply link back to this post for the recipe. thank you.”

 

 

Posted in Something Else | Tagged | Leave a comment

Recipe Forensics

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Burnt My Fingers

Have you ever wanted to figure out the recipe for a dish that isn’t available to you any more? Maybe it’s from a restaurant that went out of business, or stopped offering the item. Maybe you’ve moved away. Or maybe you’re just curious. Time for recipe forensics.

My first stop is the internet. Sometimes you hit it right, as with this recipe which is a close approximation to the dear departed Three-Bean Salad once served at Kentucky Fried Chicken/KFC. I did just minor tinkering with a recipe that is universally available and good.

But, suppose you want Sonny Bryan’s barbecue sauce as served out of their BBQ shack in Dallas where I grew up? There are plenty of links to this one too but the recipe is completely bogus. You will find a recipe that makes an interesting sauce that tastes nothing like Sonny Bryan’s. It includes crystallized ginger and large amounts of fresh citrus juices, ingredients that would have been unlikely to make it into a pit boss’s pantry.

Recipe forensics means thinking like the person who concocted the original recipe. Think about the cooking experience, the ingredients at hand, and the cost factor. Possibly a long ago cook at Sonny Bryan’s might have tasted crystallized ginger but they’re not going to get it from their pre-Sysco supplier and if they do it’s going to be prohibitively expensive, a minor ingredient that doubles the cost of the recipe. Nor would they squeeze dozens of lemons when a gallon jug of vinegar is close at hand.

While we’re in Dallas, another recipe I’ve been trying to duplicate is the sour slaw at the Highland Park Cafeteria. The sour is vinegar, but what kind? I got a very close approximation with a blend including sherry vinegar then I realized this couldn’t be the original recipe. Mrs. Dewey Goodman, the proprietress of the establishment, stopped serving on Sundays because she felt it was sacreligious. You think this paragon would have used a wine-based vinegar?

Posted in Cooking, Eating | Leave a comment

An ode to poundability

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Burnt My Fingers

I once had a private tour of a prestigious Sonoma winery. The proprietress was the former girlfriend of my friend’s nephew, which made the occasion informal. She let us know about an attribute of their products that the vintners like to rate when the tourists aren’t around:poundability. As in, how does the taste and enjoyment hold up when you have more than one glass?

Poundability

A most poundable wine

Not that I’m advocating this, necessarily, and many complex wines demand to be sipped and savored at a snail’s pace or you are committing a crime against the grape.  But you know what I’m talking about here…. we’ve all experienced a red that tastes perky at first sip, but becomes bitter and overly minerally as you continue. Or a white that is pleasant to begin, but gradually fades to something resembling tap water. The opposite of this is the inexpensive Black Box 2008 Cabernet  Sauvignon I have on my shelf this moment which surprises you with a sophisticated chocolate berry nose for such a cheap wine, tastes like a treat, and upholds those characteristics over an extended time. It’s a poundable wine.

Brewers have a similar concept in the “session” beer. Publicly, this is a beer with low alcohol content…. “the beer to have when you’re having more than one.” Mild, easy drinking, lightly hopped beers may be described as session beers as an excuse for their lack of taste and personality, but that doesn’t make them poundable. In fact, a visit to any college bar district (mine is located on Caroline Street, in Saratoga Springs, New York) will demonstrate that when the beer tastes like nothing you don’t notice you are drinking and therefore you may well have more than you should.  (20 light beers with 4% ABV will deliver a payload of 9.6 ounces of alcohol, the equivalent of guzzling better than a pint of Scotch.)

I would say that any true session beer should have enough personality that you want to pace yourself. This doesn’t mean higher alcohol content automatically, although the ingredients used in beer do tend to turn into alcohol or else it tastes like some other kind of beverage, or like food. But there will be a balance. You will notice what you are drinking and you won’t want to drink too fast because you don’t want to miss the flavor and the pungency of the hops. Most decent IPAs fall into this category.

One final though on this subject: a poundable beer or wine is not going to give you a hangover unless you drink so much that you deserve it. Overindulging can always give you a bad morning after, once you have reached the point where you take in more than your body can process. But you are going to feel extra bad if cheap sweeteners have been used to boost the alcohol level (typical of malt liquors) or from cheap wines that use chemicals in processing (I once tasted a wine, at a Basque winery east of Los Angeles, that generated a hangover as soon as you started drinking it).

Here’s to poundability. In moderation, of course.

Posted in Drinking | Leave a comment

Terra Madre Day celebrated by Saratoga Slow Food

Posted on December 14, 2010 by Burnt My Fingers

Yesterday was the local observance of Slow Food’s Terra Madre (Mother Earth) Day, sponsored and beautifully organized and presented in the kitchens and dining room of Schenectady County Community College chef and Saratoga chapter president Rocco Verrigni. I sat in on a mega panel discussion followed by a mega tasting of fare prepared by rising chefs; there were also student presentations and a screening of the short film “Green Beef”.

Chefs and farmers in the kitchen on Terra Madre day

Chefs and farmers in the kitchen on Terra Madre day

The panel discussion featured local farmers (from Saratoga Springs down to the area below the Mohawk River), chefs and restaurateurs discussing their “successes, issues and stories”. Successes for me included clues of how these folks are taking small steps to become commercially viable. Tod Murphy of Vermont’s Farmer’s Diner has the goal of serving local and naturally raised meals at prices farmers can actually afford; he does this by negotiating with farmers a scale larger than boutique/retail/farmers market enterprises and by staying away from steaks. Michael Kilpatrick, a local farmer, described his success in bringing year-round vegetable growing to Saratoga; he is just 23 and I am happy he will be around far longer than me.

Slow Food snail cookies baked by SCCC students

Slow Food snail cookies baked by SCCC students

Michael was one of several to describe an “issue”: it’s difficult to follow the national standards for “Certified Organic” so as a result none of them does it. Kilpatrick Family Farm can’t be organic because they use a sheeting product called Biotelo for their winter mulching and though biodegradable, it’s not organic-approved. Noah Sheetz, executive chef of the governor’s mansion in Albany, described another problem, which is the practicality of coordinating multiple purveyors for poultry, produce, dairy etc. plus having a backup when somebody’s delivery truck breaks down. Sysco, by offering one-stop shopping for quality products, has made it too easy for many kitchens; what’s needed is a Sysco for natural producers.

Chef Christopher Tanner and his meat curing closet

Chef Christopher Tanner and his meat curing closet

The food presentations ranged from a perfect half moon of roasted acorn squash to a groaning board of charcuterie prepared by the SCCC students in Garde Manger II, which has done nothing but make sausage all semester long. Chef Christopher Tanner showed off his curing closet for prosciutto and Westphalian ham, made by stripping the shelves from a wine cabinet and adding an off-the-shelf humidifier. Local students pay just $3533 for learning all this and virtually all of them are offered jobs in the industry at the end of their two-year program.

During the breaks there was plenty of time to talk with local farmers and make new friends along with lists of places to go and dine and find new food near Saratoga. The only bad news is that the season has ended for many of these folks (which is why they could take the day off) so I’ll have to wait for spring for many of my forays.

This post originally appeared on my marketing blog, Otis Regrets… or Not. If you want to read about marketing instead of eating, click here.

Posted in Eating, Something Else | Leave a comment

The sauce that made Mr. Durkee famous

Posted on November 23, 2010 by Burnt My Fingers

THANKSGIVING 2019 UPDATE: I was unable to find Durkee’s this year at any of my local stores so ended up ordering from Amazon for delivery on Friday, in time for turkey sandwiches. Here is an affiliate link if you would like to do the same. It’s a bit pricey but the thought of being without Durkee’s is priceless, in the wrong way.

I was introduced to Durkee’s Famous Sauce as a college freshman at the home of my roommate Reynold. His mother invited a homesick boy into their home for Thanksgiving and I discovered a ritual which included eating leftovers in sandwiches the day after with turkey, cranberry sauce, last night’s wilted salad, reheated dressing and gravy if you wanted it… all served on sturdy bread with a generous slathering of Durkee’s. That day their ritual became my own tradition.

Durkee's jars through the decades. Click for a larger version to read the ingredient lists.

Duke’s Famous Sauce jars through the decades. Click for a larger version to read the ingredient lists.

Durkee’s Famous Sauce is a niche product, literally, that somehow manages to hold onto a sliver of shelf space in many supermarkets year after year. It is a mayonnaise-mustard combination with extra richness that tastes like additional egg yolks… but the effect in a sandwich is more complex than that. It’s the sauce that holds its own when a lot of flavor notes are present. And though I know there are other uses, it is such a perfect partner with turkey (smoked as well as Thanksgiving leftovers) that I have never wanted to venture further.

There is lore suggesting Durkee’s is a traditional American recipe that was served, among other places, in the White House by Mary Todd Lincoln. [There used to be a lively history on the website, but it appears the current owners of the brand have purged most of it. If you’re concerned about Durkee’s disappearing, this copycat recipe looks promising.] But in fact the recipe has been through some changes over the years, as has the provenance of the expensive little jars. During my time the proprietorship has shifted from Burnes Foods of San Francisco (but manufactured in Canada), Tone Brothers of Ankeny IA, and currently ACH Food Companies of Memphis. The ingredient list shows that corn oil has been replaced by soy oil and water has moved ahead of vinegar as the second component with subtle changes in the preservatives further down the line.

By the time I am ready to open a new jar, the old one is either empty or pretty well past its prime so I have never been able to do a head to head taste test. But I do believe that the taste has remained consistent through all these permutations. Hats off to the food chemists… and Thanksgiving leftovers!

This post originally appeared on my marketing blog, Otis Regrets… or Not. If you want to read about marketing instead of eating, click here.

Posted in Eating | Tagged , , | 28 Comments

Cooking in somebody else’s kitchen, Part 2

Posted on July 29, 2010 by Burnt My Fingers

As long as it is on or near a lake or stream, an upstate NY vacation home is called a “camp”. There’s usually some concession to rusticity without really roughing it. In the case of my wife’s camp, it is a stove with only two burners (the others having been destroyed in a flood), a collection of pots inherited from her parents, and country cupboards which not only conceal their contents, but move them around when I am not looking so I can’t find an ingredient at the exact moment I need it.

I am up here with my two boys and I have learned to make weekly specials at the local market my friend; if it is advertised in the flyer they are more likely to actually have it at the lone store in town. Shopping with a preplanned meal in mind: very bad idea.

We tend to make a big pot of something and repurpose it over several days. Chicken Cacciatore (prepared with Mr. Purdue’s bargain leg quarters, not the prissy organic birds we buy “down the line”), carnitas and Texas chili (beans on the side) have figured so far. There is a steady stream of teen and preteen boys through the kitchen requesting hot chocolate, which is a good thing because I found three boxes of Nestle Cocoa in the cabinets, all expiring in 2010. Now looking for ideas to draw down a dozen half used boxes of pasta and 4 bags of lentils; when one wants to be sure something is on hand in camp, one tends to bring it up from the city forgetting one did the same thing last year, and the year before.

I have learned to successfully cook coffee in a stovetop percolator (the secret: don’t use too much coffee, or the water can’t seep through from the top grounds to the bottom) and broil on an ancient gas grill prone to flareups (always have a can of beer in your hand…. that’s to put out any leaping flames).

I look forward to being back in a kitchen where the utensils and equipment will do what I ask them to, and forgotten ingredients are five minutes away, but it is nice to have limitations and learn to stick with them. I am in awe of caterers and “secret kitchen” chefs who work like this every day.

This post originally appeared on my marketing blog, Otis Regrets… or Not. If you want to read about marketing instead of eating, click here.

Posted in Cooking | Leave a comment

Cooking in somebody else’s kitchen, Part 1

Posted on July 26, 2010 by Burnt My Fingers

The past month I’ve been cooking in two unfamiliar kitchens, the first being the San Francisco bachelor/bachelorette pad shared by several friends of my daughter and the second the “camp” belonging to my wife in the Adirondacks.

In San Francisco, my task was to prepare a Texas brisket meal for 60 people for the wedding party. I knew what I was in for and brought a number of key components with me, including my chef’s knife, a stack of aluminum trays and several necessary spices. But there were some things too big to carry on the plane, like the brisket itself and hickory chunks for the smoker (my old one from Phillip Claypool, which had been kindly stored in the back yard of the same SF flat). Chunks were hard since not only are San Franciscans not known for their smoking but in fact there is a city ordinance against open fires; finally I found a small expensive bag at Action Rentals, which also rents cooking equipment.

Brisket, on the other hand, was a major score. Cash & Carry, a restaurant wholesaler, had USDA Choice for $1.57 a pound… a lower price than I’ve ever seen in Texas. They also had an enormous bag of shredded cabbage at the same per-pound price I’d paid for the 10 pounds I’d just shredded myself to make sour slaw, so I added that to the hand truck. I stood in line with several other happy guys sharing hints (but no trade secrets) for what we were going to do with our brisket.

I was prepared for challenges in the prep, just didn’t know what they would be. The beans (to be used for Jack Daniels style baked beans eventually) were precooked in another alien location, the galley kitchen of the “home away” where I was staying with my boys; I used every pot and pan in the place. Back at the flat, the cookspace turned out to be tiny and without a cutting surface so I went out and bought a cutting board, the only outright cookware purchase I made. And I had too many briskets to fit in the smoker so I had to cook them in two batches, making for a 10 am to midnight cooking day. Fortunately the apartment dwellers were away at the formal pre-wedding ball where I was supposed to be; I put in an appearance then scurried back to tend my brisket and I knew the culinary gods were smiling when I was able to carry four trays of dripping brisket down three flights of stairs to my car parked in the towaway zone without spilling anything on my fancy duds.

The meal turned out just like it was supposed to, served the next night to hungry people at a conference center in the redwoods who kept coming back for seconds, which I was happy to be able to offer them. One half a brisket made it through the night and for the rest of the weekend whenever you went into the kitchen at the center (which hadn’t been available to me for prep) you’d see somebody surreptitiously sneaking a scrap out of the fridge. Among them were the renowned caterers who prepared the next night’s wedding feast, high praise indeed.

This post originally appeared on my marketing blog, Otis Regrets… or Not. If you want to read about marketing instead of eating, click here.

Posted in Cooking | Leave a comment

Our salami satisfies everybody (the red sauce topic)

Posted on April 13, 2010 by Burnt My Fingers

I have been trying ever since I arrived in Upstate New York to understand the appeal of the “red sauce place”. This is a neighborhood restaurant that serves a limited menu of Italian-American staples, and many people are passionate about their favorite local spot. To me the food seems one-dimensional (which objectively it is, since the identical red sauce will make its appearance on three or four dishes at your table) and often rather high priced (I’m talking $20 or more for a pasta dinner with a food cost of maybe $4).

Last weekend, I finally got it while enjoying a pressed prosciutto sandwich and an antipasto platter at Mike’s Deli in the Arthur Street Market in the Bronx. Arthur Street, variously called the “real” Little Italy or the “original” Little Italy, is full of strollers all of whom know each other and are happily catching up as they munch on foodstuffs or dart in and out of shops. Our plan (which I recommend) was to fortify ourselves with lunch prior to visiting the Bronx Zoo. We were there before the sit down places opened at noon, so we wandered into the retail market and found Mike’s.

The food was good but not great (once the hunger subsided and I took a look around I realized there are two eating establishments in the marketplace, and Mike’s is the less popular) but what was great was the abundance.  Choose your own pre-made sandwich from a pile higher than your head and they will griddle and plate it for you. Or design your own. Or order a sampler of  the day’s entrees (Veal Saltimbucca, Chicken Marco Polo, Calimari in cream sauce and Linguini with Shrimp) for $6.95. Or…

What sums it up is Mike’s slogan, on the waitress’ t-shirt: Our salami satisfies everybody. That, I realized, is the litmus test of the red sauce place: the delivery of pleasure through food. And abundance has to be at the core of this, because you need plenty of volume if not variety to carry you through a lengthy table experience.

And that is why the upstate red sauce places charge so much. They may not have the best ingredients, they may not have the most imaginative preparations, but they sure do give you a ridiculous amount of food. (Invariably, reviewers who give a red sauce place five stars on Yelp will talk about how they had enough food for another meal the following day.) And in retrospect the taste of the food is mingled with the pleasure of the conversation and maybe a few glasses of wine and ecco, a great red sauce place.

Tomato Pie fresh from the oven at Perreca's in Schenectady.

Tomato Pie fresh from the oven at Perreca’s in Schenectady.

I have written previously about the San Marzano sauce I made from scratch, with organic tomatoes just picked in the fields, using a recipe from Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cooking. It is just one of three basic red sauces in that book, and Tomato Sauce III (a light, briefly cooked sauce with butter and a halved onion that tastes to me like the essence of summer) is a world apart from Tomato Sauce I which I made. Start adding ingredients, to make for example Ragu Bolognaise, and your red sauce repertoire branches out considerably. Which is to say I believe the numerous red sauce places I’ve sampled are coasting.

Tomatoes lend themselves beautifully to canning (so it’s silly that Yelpers who want to disparage a place will carp that “the red sauce tastes like it came out of a can”) and it’s easy enough to make a sauce better than 90% of what I’ve had so far by opening a can of San Marzanos and cooking it down with the addition of some sugar and tomato paste for intensity. The result is pretty close to what they spread on the tomato pie at Perreca’s. It’s 30 miles down the road in Schenectady, but I’ve decided this is my neighborhood red sauce place until something better comes along.

This post originally appeared on my marketing blog, Otis Regrets… or Not. If you want to read about marketing instead of eating, click here.

Posted in Cooking, Eating | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments