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Newsletter for January 2005 Your source for what’s cooking at OBW
25 South Indian Alley Winchester VA, 22601 540-662-1455 |
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Happy New Year! I wish all the best for you, your families, and your businesses in 2005.
New Years was a grueling 19-hour day, all of it on my feet, and I am happy just to sit here and type.
In January, we start back with our wine dinners that we halted in October during the winemakers’ busy season. Because of the holidays, we haven’t firmed up the January schedule yet, but will do so in the next week. I will send out an email once we know what the January dinner entails.
Also, look for a new initiative in January called Kids Cook! in which kids come to my house for fun, safe, and age appropriate cooking lessons.
Happy eating!
Ed Matthews, Chef/Owner
Wow! I had no idea that there were so many kids out there who like to cook. The response to my holiday advertising for our Chef for a Day program was overwhelming and I couldn’t believe the number of people trying to sign up 12- and 13-year olds. As a father of two young girls, there is no way that I am going to let children of this age in the restaurant kitchen where they can get cut, burned, and worse. I didn’t even call my lawyer on that one!
But, I realized that we need a safe environment in which kids can cook, have fun, and learn. Thus Kids Cook! was born. Starting in January, I am going to be teaching cooking lessons to kids in my home kitchen on Sunday afternoons, where I can ensure their safety. If you know a youngster who might like to participate, have one of his or her parents get in touch with me at 540-662-1455.
With the New Year at hand, it seems apropos to discuss one of my favorite subjects, sparkling wines. I’ll start with a brief overview of how these wines are made and then discuss some of the more prominent sparkling wines from around the world. Realize that this is a subject that really could occupy several hundred pages in a book, so bear with my obvious skimping on detail.
Culinary Tricks for Home Cooking
Ever wondered why restaurant food is so different from home food? It’s because we take just a little extra time to make things special. Here are ten of my gadgets and tricks to help you easily glamorize your home meals.
What is it? Broccolini
We spend as much time thinking about what vegetables to put on a plate as about what to put in the center of the plate. It irks us when customers don’t eat those vegetables that we have worked so hard to prepare. So, it probably comes as no surprise that we monitor popularity of vegetables with the garbage can test: by seeing how much comes back from the dining room to end up in the garbage can. And when we find a vegetable that doesn’t end up in the trashcan, you know that we have a winner.
Recently, a relatively new vegetable called Broccolini® has dropped in price enough for us to start using it at the restaurant. I’ve eaten it at home for nearly five years. It seems that no other vegetable has generated so many questions in the dining room. “What is it?” everyone asks. Not really knowing, I’ve been saying that it’s a new cultivar of broccoli, which it is, but what a dry answer about a vegetable with a most interesting history.
I set out to find out about Broccolini with my vegetable broker, a guy who’s been in the market for 30 years. When Ralph told me, “Ed, I don’t really know,” I knew I had to dig deeper.
Our story takes us to Yokohama, Japan back in the late 1980s, to Sakata Seed Company who sell 80% of the broccoli seed on the market. Being business guys, they asked how they could expand their market. Broccoli is a cool temperature crop, which restricts its growing seasons and locations. If broccoli could be selected for more heat tolerance, more growers could grow more and Sakata could sell more seed.
Enter gai lan, the Chinese broccoli that we serve from time to time at the restaurant for its big, sweet stalks. Gai lan is a more heat tolerant genetic cousin to standard broccoli, with much tastier and less tough stems. Perhaps a cross of broccoli and Chinese broccoli would give Sakata the heat resistance they were seeking, without losing the essential broccoli nature of the resulting vegetable.
Using traditional hand pollination techniques, Sakata's breeders set out on a quest for a stable hybrid, crossing and recrossing to get the desired characteristics. It took them seven years to arrive at the goal, which they named Asparation, in part for the long asparagus-like stems. The new vegetable is genetically more than three-fourths standard broccoli with six- to seven-inch long stems and a small flowering broccoli-like head.
Now to California. Asparation seeds ended up with two growers for trials, with small family grower Sanbon of El Centro, which uses the Asparation name, and with Sakata’s largest broccoli seed customer, mammoth Mann Packing of Salinas, which coined and trademarked the term Broccolini. What these growers found is that Broccolini is not any less heat sensitive than standard broccoli, and it has particularly demanding water and fertilizer needs. Broccolini can turn bitter and stringy if the rain and weather do not cooperate.
Moreover, Broccolini is expensive to harvest. It doesn’t have an easy-to-cut central crown like standard broccoli. Rather, it has a profusion of side shoots, not all of which mature at the same time. So, it has taken some training of the workers who harvest it to select only the ripe shoots. Add to this that the crop doesn’t ripen consistently across adjacent blocks and you have a difficult to grow vegetable.
Given these difficulties plus the small scale of production, the product is naturally expensive, yet its future looks very bright. Why?
Broccolini has great shelf-life when compared to broccoli: I have no worries about carrying a case across the weekend in our cooler, a major concern when I’m paying twice or three times the cost of broccoli. It’s also completely edible. We merely slip the rubber bands from the bunch, wash the product, and use it. No labor costs—no prep time! And Broccolini makes quite an elegant statement on our plate.
But the number one reason for Broccolini’s success: it passes the garbage can test!
It’s blood orange season now through March and one of my favorite things to do with these red- or pink-fleshed oranges is to make blood orange butter for my vegetables. Blood oranges have sweet, less acidic flesh than normal oranges, with hints of raspberry flavor. Each orange will be a different color or pattern on both the outside and inside. The juice is fairly uniformly dark red, almost wine colored.
This recipe yields one pound of blood orange butter. You may want to scale it down for home use.
Blood Orange Butter
6 blood oranges 1 lb unsalted butter, softened salt to taste
With a zester, zest all six oranges and reserve the zest. Juice the six oranges. Remove the seeds, if any, from the juice and reduce in a non-reactive sauce pan until you have 2-3 tablespoons of blood orange syrup. Let the juice cool. Add it and the zest to the softened butter and stir to mix well. Salt to taste.
At this point, you have several options. Roll the softened butter into a log with a piece of plastic wrap and refrigerate, so that you can slice coins of orange butter à la maître d’hôtel butter. Or, place in a pastry bag to pipe decorative whirls onto plates. Or, melt gently over low flame so that you can drizzle onto food. If you melt the butter, it will separate. Visually a little untidy, but very tasty nonetheless. We generally melt our butter and then toss vegetables in it.
Note about zesters: if you do not own a Microplane zester, go get one. The cheapest place that I know to pick them up is at amazon.com.
Each week I get emails asking me about various cooking techniques and/or using ingredients. Every month in the newsletter, I will publish one or two interesting topics. Feel free to send email if there is some technique or ingredient that you need help with.
This month a customer in the dining room asked me how we roast garlic. When we roast garlic, we roast 5 pounds or more, but the process is the same no matter the quantity. To roast a single head, slice the top off, just so that you open the majority of the cloves. Lay the garlic on a sheet of aluminum foil cut side up, root side down, drizzle with a little olive oil, sprinkle on salt and pepper, and enclose the garlic in the aluminum foil. Place in an oven until soft, 20-30 minutes depending on how hot your oven is. Remove the garlic from the foil and squeeze the cloves out of the husks. Now you have roasted garlic, ready to use.
I’m looking forward to the slightly slower pace in January at the restaurant. We have a lot of maintenance and decorating projects on hold right now. One hint. Look for a remodeled bar this year, complete with state-of-the-art nitrogen dispensing system to ensure freshness of our by-the-glass wines.
The new lunch menu rolls out this week. I created a new Soy and Orange-Glazed Salmon that is fabulous as is Nancy’s Pasta: pasta with shrimp, artichoke hearts, pancetta, and shiitake mushrooms in a garlic butter sauce.
Start thinking sunny thoughts! I’m working on a Caribbean menu for later in the month.
Happy New Year!
Ed
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