Braised Swiss Chard
I picked up some Swiss chard at the farmers’ market last week without any real good idea of what to do with it. I guess I’m attracted to colorful, peculiar vegetables that I’ve never tried. Sometimes this is a good thing, other times it leads to disaster. Luckily for the chard, I found a great, simple recipe for preparing it on Elise’s Simply Recipes website. She also says that fresh chard taste much, much better than old. Luckily I had a bunch that looked pretty good.
Swiss Chard Recipe
From: Simply Recipes
Ingredients:
- 1 large bunch of fresh Swiss chard
- 1 small clove garlic, sliced
- 2 Tbsp olive oil
- 2 Tbsp water
- Pinch of dried crushed red pepper
- 1 teaspoon butter
- salt
Directions:
- Rinse off the Swiss chard leaves thoroughly. Remove the toughest third of the stalk, discard. Roughly chop the leaves and stem into inch-wide strips.
- Heat a saucepan on a medium heat setting, add olive oil, a few small slices of garlic and the crushed red pepper. Sauté for about a minute. Add the chopped Swiss chard leaves. Cover. Check after about 5 minutes. If it looks dry, add a couple tablespoons of water. Flip the leaves over in the pan, so that what was on the bottom, is now on the top. Cover again. Check for doneness after another 5 minutes (remove a piece and taste it). Add salt to taste, and a small amount of butter. Remove the swiss chard to a serving dish.
Sour Pickles - Fermented Goodness!
As I hinted at in my last post on pickles, there are two kinds of pickles in the world–those that get their flavor from spice and those that get it from fermentation. The second type are known as sours, or brined, but some of the regular pickles you get from the store are fermented, too.
The basic difference is that with sours bacteria in the pickling liquid creates lactic acid which helps make the liquid acidic. The salt in the liquid helps encourage the good bacteria, and keeps away the bad bacteria. The good bacteria then raises the acid, helping to further keep away the bad.
The other approach is using vinegar to get the acid in there and then other flavors. Both approaches work, but I am a sucker for a good old fashion sour pickle.
Sour pickles can be a little daunting though. You are letting bacteria run wild in your food. That takes a little bit of cooking guts. The truth is that it is no tougher than making refrigerator pickles. People around the world have been fermenting vegetables for eons, so have a little faith in this, but just keep an eye if things seem a bit weird. Bacteria is at work, so there may be scum on the surface but that is normal. Instead look out for pickles that feel slimy or overly soft.
There are two aspects of brining pickles that control the pickling process: temperature and the salinity level. The bacteria that produce the lactic acid do well in a salty environment; lots of other bacteria don’t. However, the saltier the liquid is, the slower the bacteria reproduce. Bacteria also react differently to temperature and reproduce more the warmer it gets. If you work with these two controls you can create an environment that favors the yummy bacteria that you want.
This is my first pickle fermenting experiment in a long time. The results were really good, but a little salty. For the next go around, I am going with a slightly lower level of salt and using a recipe from another DC local. I will follow up with results from that batch. The higher level of salt in the first batch meant that it took longer for the bacteria to do their work. The second batch, with less salt, is moving along a lot quicker. The second batch should be much more sour and have a more pronounced tang.
I got the first recipe from a great website that focuses on fermented food from around the world. The author has a book on it and I think I am going to have to order it. I rewrote the recipe because I skipped a lot of steps and ingredients, so check the original for some additional flourishes.
There is of course lots of information on this subject and I am just scratching the surface. I will keep reporting back as I try more stuff. Here are some additional resources I have enjoyed thumbing through:
Sour Pickles
Note:
There is no easy way to exactly predict how much brine you will need. It is easiest to make a pretty large batch and then make smaller batches if you need a little more. The important thing is to make sure you keep the correct level of salinity. For this recipe it is 1/2 tbs to 1 cup of water, or 1 tbs to 2 cups.
Ingredients:
- 2 lbs Kirby cucumber, unwaxed.
- A good bunch of dill, about half of what comes in a normal supermarket bundle
- 2 cloves of garlic
- 6 black peppercorns
- 3 tbs kosher salt
- 6 cups of water
- 1 large, non-reactive, food safe container which can hold all of this
- 1 plate or bowl which is close to the diameter of the container, used to hold everything under the brine.
- Some sort of cover, or cheese cloth
Directions:
- Wash and scrub the cucumbers. Make sure you remove any remains of the blossoms.
- Mix the salt and water together in a separate container until the salt dissolves.
- Place garlic, dill and pepper corns in the bottom of your container.
- Layer the pickles on top so that they are pretty well packed.
- Pour in the salt brine and then use a plate or bowl to help ensure that all of the pickles are submerged in the brine. None of the pickles should be poking through to the surface. Cover, or use cheese cloth.
- Wait
- Scoop off any scum that floats to the surface. No worries, it is all good.
- Wait
- Sample a Pickle, if it is sour enough, refrigerate the pickles in the brine. It should take 1 to 2 weeks, but could take longer in the winter.
- If you want more flavor then…wait
- Now Enjoy!
Gazpacho de Andalucia
While studying abroad in Cordoba, Spain, I fell in love with gazpacho…a light tomato soup made simply with tomatoes, bread, olive oil, vinegar and garlic. There are many different recipes for gazpacho out there; I got this one from a postcard I found at a little bodega in Spain. This recipe is the real deal…I remember Encarna, my house mother, making gazpacho using just these five ingredients.
Legendary chef Jose Andres makes gazpacho by blending peppers and cucumbers into the mix. Well, I respectfully disagree…I like the peppers and cucumbers as garnish. I love Jose Andres and had the pleasure of meeting him once at his restaurant Zaytinya. He’s amazing! If you have not checked out his cooking show on PBS, Made in Spain, I highly recommend that you do. It’s part cooking and part Spanish adventure. Check out the TV schedule or visit the Web site.
Anyway, back to the gazpacho. This dish is perfect for a hot summer evening–by itself or with other assorted tapas. We made this gazpacho with about 4 pounds of second tomatoes that we got from the farmers’ market. One time last summer when we made this dish, we got about 4 pounds of red and yellow tomatoes. With that many tomatoes, we had to make the gazpacho in 2 batches. So we did one batch of just the red tomatoes and the other of just the yellow ones. We served it in a flat soup bowl with the red gazpacho on one side and the yellow gazpacho on the other. It looked beautiful and tasted amazing! We didn’t get any photos, unfortunately, but we’ll try to replicate it again this summer and post photos. That tomato haul also led to the very delicious Heirloom Tomato Salsa. I can’t wait for tomato season to REALLY begin!
The recipe I use for gazpacho doesn’t have any measurements, so you’re going to have to eyeball it and do a lot of taste testing.
Gazpacho de Andalucia
Ingredients:
- Tomatoes (at least 2 pounds)
- Bread (a good size piece of day-old bread)
- 1 clove garlic
- Olive oil
- Vinegar
- Salt
- Petite diced peppers and cucumber for garnish
Directions:
- Remove the skins from the tomatoes. You can do this by either dropping the tomatoes in hot water for a few seconds and then using a pairing knife to remove the skins or you can chop the tomatoes and press them through a food mill, which will send the juices and seeds (depending on the size of the grate you use) through. Seeds are OK, the only part of the tomato that you don’t want are the skins and core (and any bruised parts, if you’re using second tomatoes).
- Put the tomatoes (either the juice from the food mill or roughly chopped peeled tomatoes) in a blender. Tear off pieces of bread and add to blender. (To give you and idea of how much…we used about 1/2 a baguette for the 4 pounds of tomatoes. But we had to make the gazpacho in 2 batches…so I guess about 1/4 of a baguette per roughly 2 pounds of tomatoes.) Add 1 clove garlic, pressed or chopped. (One clove garlic per batch.)
- Blend until smooth. If it’s too liquidly, add a few more pieces of bread. The texture shouldn’t be to liquidly or too thick, and there shouldn’t be any visual or taste-able bread particles.
- Once the texture is good, add several pinches of salt, a decent amount of olive oil, and a proportional amount of vinegar (several splashes). Sherry vinegar from Spain is the best to use, but a few dashes of apple cider vinegar also helps to bring out the tomato flavor.
- Blend together.
- Serve chilled with petite diced peppers (any color) and cucumbers.
Sugar Plums
Sugar plums are a kind of confection and a delicious variety of plums. I have never tried the confection, but this weekend we picked up a couple handfuls of the plums. They were so ripe, the felt like they were about to burst. Sugar plums are a lot smaller than normal plums and look like a large grape. They were very sweet with a hint of tartness. A++++ Would buy again.
J.K. Adams
J.K. Adams
1430 Route 30,
Dorset, VT
Part of: Vermont 08 - Cheese & Tasty Things Tour
After reading all of the recent posts it may seem like all that Vermont has is cheese. This is completely untrue. They actually have two things–the other is maple syrup. To make lots of maple syrup you need lots of maple trees, which incidentally also make really nice cutting boards.
J.K. Adams is a kick ass cutting board manufacturer located in Dorset, Vermont. Dorset is a bit in the middle of no where but it is worth the drive because these guys are the real deal. You can buy their cutting boards in Williams Sonoma and Crate & Barrel. They also have a great kitchen store at their factory. We…ok, really me…went a little nuts there. I ended up buying two end grain butcher blocks and a great laser etched serving tray.
The story behind the J.K Adams logo is an interesting one. Back in Colonial times, foresters marked the best trees with an arrow, and those trees were used to make ships for the British royal fleet. J.K. Adams uses the arrow logo to symbolize that they, too, use the best wood for their products.
End grain cutting boards are the best kind you can get and will last forever. In normal wooden cutting boards the grain of the wood is perpendicular to the blade of the knife. As you cut things, you also make cuts in the wood. With end grain boards, the wood grain runs parralel to the blade of the knife. Instead of cutting the wood, the knife blade pushes the wood fibers aside. This helps the board last longer. Instead of just having a board of wood lying flat, shorts piece of wood are stacked on end and glued together to form a cutting board. I think I have done a horrible job of explaining this, hopefully the pictures help. The take away is that end grain cutting boards are big honking boards that makes cutting things up fun…and J.K. Adams makes a damn fine board.
The “smaller” board is maple. They stopped making the grain board using maple and have switched to cherry. The cherry wood gives the block more variety in tone, which gives the boards an interesting pattern. The larger board is cherry. We got a great price on the maple one though since it was the last of the old stock.
So besides the 30 lbs of butcher block we bought, we also got a really cool laser etched serving board. They have a number of different designs, all of which look pretty awesome.
One of the cool things about their Kitchen Store is an observation deck where you can watching them making all of the different products. Unfortunately when we visited the production lines weren’t running.
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