Best Food Writing 2013 (38 page)

           
Transfer liquid to a blender and blend on high speed until smooth and emulsified, about 2 minutes Return liquid and solids back to Dutch oven. Add heavy cream and stir to combine. Reheat until simmering. Season well with salt and pepper. Serve immediately with oyster crackers.

 

 

S
TEP
T
WO
: S
AUTÉ
O
NIONS AND
O
THER
A
ROMATIC
V
EGETABLES

By Michael Pollan

From
Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

Ever since his 2006 bestseller
The Omnivore's Dilemma,
Michael Pollan has become the one food writer most Americans know by name. In his steady evolution from environmental journalist to gastronome,
Cooked
is his most culinary book yet.

S
undays with Samin—our usual day together—always began the same way, with her bursting into the kitchen around three in the afternoon and plopping a couple of cotton market bags onto the island. From these she would proceed to pull out her cloth portfolio of knives, her apron, and, depending on the dish we were making, her prodigious collection of spices. This notably included a tin of saffron the size of a coffee can. Her mom sent her these eye-popping quantities of saffron, which whenever a recipe called for it Samin would sprinkle as liberally as salt.

“I'm soooo excited!” she'd invariably begin, in a singsong, as she tied her apron around her waist. “Today, you are going to learn how to brown meat.” Or make a soffritto. Or butterfly a chicken. Or make a fish stock. Samin could get excited about the most mundane kitchen procedures, but her enthusiasm was catching, and eventually I came to regard it as almost a kind of ethic. Even browning meat, an operation that to me seemed fairly self-evident if not banal, deserved to be done with the utmost care and attention, and so with passion. At stake was the eater's experience. There was also the animal to consider, which you honored by making the very most of whatever
it had to offer. Samin made sure there was also a theme undergirding each lesson: the Maillard reaction (when browning meat); eggs and their magical properties; the miracle of emulsification; and so forth. Over the course of a year, we made all sorts of main course dishes, as well as various salads and sides and desserts. Yet it seemed our main courses always came back to pot dishes, and we probably cooked more braises than anything else.

Much like a stew, a braise is a method of cooking meat and/or vegetables slowly in a liquid medium. In a stew, however, the main ingredient is typically cut into bite-sized pieces and completely submerged in the cooking liquid. In a braise, the main ingredient is left whole or cut into larger pieces (with meat ideally left on the bone) and only partially submerged in liquid. This way, the bottom of the meat is stewed, in effect, while the exposed top part is allowed to brown, making for richer, more complex flavors as well as, usually, a thicker sauce and a prettier dish.

Samin and I braised duck legs and chicken thighs, roosters and rabbits, various unprepossessing cuts of pork and beef, the shanks and necks of lamb, turkey legs, and a great many different vegetables. Each of these dishes called for a braising liquid, and at one time or another we used them all: red wine and white, brandy and beer, various stocks (chicken, pork, beef, fish), milk, tea, pomegranate juice, dashi (a Japanese stock made from seaweed and flaked bonito), the liquid left over from soaked mushrooms and beans, and water straight from the tap. We also made dishes that were not, technically, stews or braises, but were built on the same general principle, including
sugo
or ragù (or ragoût), bouillabaisse, risotto, and paella.

More often than not, the general principle called for a foundational dice of onions and other aromatic vegetables, which I would try to get ready before Samin showed up. And more often than not, Samin would take one look at the neat piles of chopped onions, carrots, and celery on my cutting board (the height of said piles conforming to the prescribed ratio of 2:1:1) and tell me to rechop them, because my dice wasn't fine enough.

“In some dishes, a rough dice like that is fine.” I tried not to take offense, but I didn't think of my neat cubes as “rough” at all. “But in this dish, you don't necessarily want to be able to see any evidence of the soffritto,” she explained. “You want it to melt away into
nothingness, become this invisible layer of deliciousness. So . . . keep chopping!” And so I did, following her example of rocking a big knife back and forth through the piles of diced vegetables, dividing and subdividing the little cubes until they became mere specks.

On the subject of sautéing onions, another operation I wrongly assumed to be fairly straightforward, Samin had definite opinions. “Most people don't cook their onions nearly long enough or slow enough. They try to rush it.” This was apparently a major pet peeve of hers. “The onions should have no bite left whatsoever and be completely transparent and soft. Turn down the flame and give them a half hour at
least.”
Samin had been a sous-chef in a local Italian restaurant where she had sixteen young men working under her. “I was constantly walking down the line, turning down their burners, which were always on high. I guess it's some kind of guy thing to crank your flame all way to the max. But you need to be
gentle
with a mirepoix or soffritto.”

Whether you “sweated” your onions at a low temperature or “browned” them at a higher one yielded a completely different set of flavors in the finished dish, Samin explained. Her ultimate authority on such matters was Benedetta Vitali, the chef she had worked for in Florence, who wrote a whole book about soffritto, called—what
else?—Soffritto.
“Benedetta makes three different soffrittos, depending on the dish—and all of them start with the exact same onions, carrot, and celery. But it can be made darker and more caramelized, or lighter and more vegetal, all depending on the heat and speed you cook them at.” (In fact, the word “soffritto” contains the key cooking instruction: It means “underfried.”)

Spend half an hour watching onions sweat in a pan and you will either marvel at their gradual transformation—from opaque to translucent; from sulfurous to sweet; from crunchy to yielding—or go stark raving mad with impatience. But this was precisely the lesson Samin was trying to impart.

“Great cooking is all about the three ‘p's: patience, presence, and practice,” she told me at one point. Samin is a devoted student of yoga, and she sees important parallels in the mental habits demanded by both disciplines. Working with onions seemed as good a place to develop those habits as any—practice in chopping them, patience in sweating them, and presence in keeping an eye on the pan so that
they didn't accidentally brown if the phone rang and you permitted yourself a lapse in attention.

Unfortunately, not one of the “p”s came easily to me. I tend toward impatience, particularly in my dealings with the material world, and only seldom do I find myself attending to one thing at a time. Or, for that matter, to the present, a tense I have a great deal of trouble inhabiting. My native tense is the future conditional, a low simmer of unspecified worry being the usual condition. I couldn't meditate if my life depended on it. (Which—believe me, I know—is the completely wrong way to approach meditation.) Much as I like the whole concept of “flow”—that quality of being so completely absorbed in an activity that you lose the thread of time—my acquaintance with it is sorely limited. A great many boulders get in the way of my flow, disturbing the clarity of the mental waters and creating lots of distracting noise. Occasionally when I'm writing I'll slip into the flow for a little while; sometimes while reading, too, and of course sleeping, though I doubt that counts. But in the kitchen? Watching onions sweat? The work just isn't demanding enough to fully occupy consciousness, with the result that my errant, catlike thoughts refuse to stay where I try to put them.

One thought I did have, watching the onions sweat before we added the carrots and celery to the pan, took the form of an obvious question. Why is it that onions are so widespread in pot dishes? After salt, I can't think of another cooking ingredient quite as universal as the onion. Worldwide, onions are the second most important vegetable crop (after tomatoes), and they grow almost everywhere in the world that people can grow anything. So what do they do for a dish? Samin suggested that onions and the other commonly used aromatics are widely used because they are cheap and commonly available ingredients that add some sweetness to a dish. When I gently pushed for a more fulsome explanation, she offered, “It's a chemical reaction.” I soon discovered that that's her default answer to all questions about kitchen science. Her second is “Let's ask Harold!” meaning Harold McGee, the kitchen-science writer who, though she had never met him, nevertheless serves as one of the god figures in her personal cosmology.

But what
kind
of chemical reaction? It turns out a comprehensive
scientific investigation of mirepoix remains to be done; even Harold McGee, when I wrote to ask him about it, was uncharacteristically vague on the subject. The obvious but incorrect answer is that the sugars in the onions and carrots become caramelized in the sauté pan, thereby contributing that whole range of flavor compounds to the dish. But Samin (like most other authorities) recommends taking pains
not
to brown a mirepoix, whether by reducing the heat or adding salt, which by drawing water out of the vegetables serves to keep the browning reaction from kicking in. The caramelized-sugar theory also doesn't account for the prominent role in mirepoix and soffritto of celery, a not particularly sweet vegetable that would seem to contribute little but water and cellulose. What all this suggests is that there must be other processes that come into play in sautéing aromatic vegetables besides caramelization (or the Maillard reaction), processes that contribute flavors to a dish by other means not yet well understood.

One afternoon in the midst of slowly sweating a mirepoix, I risked ruining it by doing some Internet research on what might be going on in my pan just then. I know, I was multitasking, failing utterly at the “p” of presence, possibly patience as well. I found a fair amount of confusion and uncertainty about the subject online, but enough clues to conclude it was likely, or at least plausible, that the low, slow heat was breaking down the long necklaces of protein in the vegetables into their amino acid building blocks, some of which (like glutamic acid) are known to give foods the meaty, savory taste called “umami”—from the Japanese word
umai,
meaning “delicious.” Umami is now generally accepted as the fifth taste, along with salty, sweet, bitter, and sour, and like each of the others has receptors on the tongue dedicated to detecting its presence.

As for the seemingly pointless celery, it, too, may contribute umami to a pot dish, and not just by supplying lots of carbohydrate-stiffened cell walls and water to a mirepoix. My web surfing eventually delivered me to an article in the
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry
written by a team of Japanese food scientists and titled, fetchingly, “Flavor Enhancement of Chicken Broth from Boiled Celery Constituents.” These chemists reported that a group of volatile compounds found in celery called phthalides, though completely tasteless by
themselves, nevertheless enhanced the perception of both sweetness and umami when they were added to a chicken broth. Way to go, celery.

Abstracted soul that I am, patiently cooking a mirepoix became much more interesting, or bearable at least, now that I had a theory. Now, knowing what was at stake, I paid close attention to the satisfying sizzle—the auditory evidence of water escaping from the plant tissues—and then, as it subsided, to the softening of the vegetables, indicating that the scaffold of carbohydrates that held the cell walls rigid was breaking down into sugars that it was up to me to keep from browning. I now understood that, even before I introduced the meat or liquid to the pot, the depth of flavor in my braise, the very savoriness of it, hung in the balance of these gently simmering onions, carrots, and celery.

One more scientific fact contributed to my deepening admiration for mirepoix and soffritto, and especially for the onions in them, which this fact single-handedly rendered considerable less irritating. It seems that adding onions to foods, and to meat dishes in particular, makes the food safer to eat. Like many of the most commonly used spices, onions (garlic, too) contain powerful antimicrobial compounds that survive cooking. Microbiologists believe that onions, garlic, and spices protect us from the growth of dangerous bacteria on meat. This might explain why the use of these plants in cooking becomes more common the closer you get to the equator, where keeping meat from spoiling becomes progressively more challenging. Before the advent of refrigeration, the bacterial contamination of food, animal flesh in particular, posed a serious threat to people's health. (In Indian cooking, recipes for vegetarian dishes typically call for fewer spices than recipes for meat dishes.) Purely through trial and error, our ancestors stumbled upon certain plant chemicals that could protect them from getting sick. Onions happen to be one of the most potent of all antimicrobial food plants. That the flavors of such plants “taste good” to us may be nothing more than a learned preference for the taste of molecules that helped to keep us alive.