Category: Uncategorized

A bite of the past, in present tense

Monday, Aug. 14, 2023

When I was a kid in New York about 60 years ago my grandmother in the Bronx bought crescent-shaped cookies that were gently crisp and had a licorice-y taste. They were Stella D’oro anisette toasts, made in the Bronx then, probably not far from where my grandparents lived. They were heavily advertised on the radio.

I didn’t know from cantucci, which is what Italians call the crescent, twice-baked cookie we call biscotti; I just liked them. My grandparents had them with coffee, I with milk and even though they weren’t particularly exotic or expensive, I only had them in the mornings at my grandparents’ apartment, usually while my grandmother listened to “Rambling with Gambling” on WOR.

Stella D’oro anisette toasts are still made, although no longer in New York and three owners later. A couple of years ago I thought about them again when my wife, Janet, was served an anisette cantucci with her coffee at a restaurant in Cape May, N.J.

“I can make that,” I said when she declared how much she liked it. Here’s a link to my favorite recipe, from Sally’s Baking Addiction, probably my favorite resource for sweet things: https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/chocolate-dipped-almond-biscotti/

It’s a vcry easy recipe and has the additional advantage of being quite low-fat for a cookie, using only a half-stick of butter and a tablespoon of oil for 18 cookies. Sally doesn’t like anise, but I do, so I find that adding a tablespoon of anise extract or a couple of tablespoons of Sambucca will give the licorice-y flavor I like.

When made correctly they’re very crisp — hard, even, asking to be dunked in coffee — and not overly sweet. Follow the recipe and you’ll do fine. Two instructions I sometimes ignore, and am always sorry when I do:

  • Wait 10 minutes after the first bake before slicing the logs into the cookies before the second bake. If you don’t wait long enough the cut sides will crumble under your knife.
  • Don’t slice the cookies more than one inch thick. If you do, the sides of the cookies will be brown before the insides are completely cooked and they won’t be crisp.

The website recipe calls for a chocolate dipping with additional finely chopped almonds. Chocolate doesn’t do much for me and I’d rather avoid the extra 50 calories, so I usually skip that.

Even my first attempt came out very well, the sign of an easy and well-written recipe!

We freeze them, taking them out for company or liberating one when the spirit moves. They take well to experimentation — some folks like to put raisins, dried cherries or chocolate chips in them and I’m sure there are recipes for chocolate biscotti, which I’ve seen in bakeries.

I’ll take mine this way, or plain vanilla, even omitting the almonds if I feel too lazy to toast and chop them. Either way it’s a great cookie, easily made and even though it’s only reminiscent of the Stella D’Oro Anisette Toast I loved then, it’s still a sure-fire way for me to get back to my grandmother’s table where I sat so many years ago.

Syrup, The Cowboy Way

There is the right way, the wrong way, and sometimes the cowboy way — a shortcut that one uses for expedience or necessity.

I like to have simple syrup in the refrigerator for cold drinks, and especially for Old Fashioneds and mint juleps. But making it the right way tries my patience.

I know that to make either drink properly you’re supposed to muddle the sugar with the flavoring — bitters for the Old Fashioned, mint for the julep — but the sugar never dissolves completely. Or maybe I just don’t have the patience to do it right, it could be that, too.

Either way, I use syrup. A teaspoon of syrup into the Bourbon and bitters and your Old Fashioned just needs ice and garnish.

And I even make the syrup wrong, probably, but it works perfectly, I like it and it’s easy and so I’m going to tell you how to make it in case you don’t already know.

The way you’re supposed to make simple syrup is to heat the sugar in the water until it dissolves. Then you have to wait for it to cool and then you can put it in your container and into the fridge.

I don’t have the patience for this.

I just throw two parts sugar — I like raw, but you can use white — and one part water into the blender and let ‘er rip at the highest speed. Let it go for a good minute and then check to make sure everything’s dissolved. If it needs another 30 seconds in the blender, go ahead.

Then you pour it into a squeeze bottle or whatever you’re going to use, and you’re done.  I always use two parts sugar to one of water, because I like the viscosity that even a little of it gives to a drink. But one-to-one is fine, too, if that’s how you like it.

And if you don’t have a blender, you can even make syrup by putting your sugar and water into a covered container and shaking it really hard for two minutes, letting it sit for a minute, and then shaking it again for 30 seconds. This is too much trouble for me, but I’ve done it.

The blender trick also works for mint syrup, but here especially any purists who might come across this post will scoff, and I will scoff with them — it’s not the Right Way.

Still, it works and it tastes really good.

You just take a fistful of mint leaves, throw them in the blender with your two parts sugar and one part water and let it rip for a minute or two, maybe less in a Vitamix, until it looks like you couldn’t strain anything out of it in even the finest cheesecloth. Put it in your squeeze bottle or whatever and you have mint syrup.

It looks like cloudy green sludge, I warn you. But it tastes great — fresh mint and sugar. It keeps for a long time in the refrigerator and it’s good in tea, too.

I realize that aside from the proportions of  two parts sugar to one part water, which makes a product that’s twice as concentrated as true simple syrup, I haven’t told you how much mint to use. The answer is that I haven’t found that it matters too much. I’ve used maybe a cup of leaves to two cups of sugar, and twice that much, and they were both sweet and minty.

So try it, and even if you live in Bucharest or New York City, you’ll still be making something very useful and tasty the cowboy way.

First Bacon!

This week's science project: Home-cured bacon!
This week’s science project: Home-cured bacon!

We’re getting ready for this year’s Salute to Meat. About 35 guests are coming and we’ve got home-dry aged steaks, KC- and Memphis-style St. Louis ribs, smoked briskets and burnt ends, pulled pork, kielbasa and lamb on the menu. But I’ve been wanting to cure and smoke my own bacon and so that’s what I did this week.

I got 11 lbs. of pork belly at my favorite butcher in Philadelphia, then cured it with Morton’s TenderQuick salt, brown sugar, maple syrup and some cracked black pepper. I cut the belly in half and stuck it in two, 2-gallon bags and put it in the fridge, turning it every day.

What you see above is half of the slab. I’m pretty pleased, although next time I think I’ll add more syrup and smoke it harder.

After 7 days I smoked them on the Big Green Egg at 200 degrees direct (one on a raised grid since they were too big to fit at the same level). I used hickory chunks. They were up to temp in less than three hours

Meat Raoul

When we lived in Boston, Janet and I would throw big dinner parties for her fellow Kennedy School students, and most of them featured a large beef rib roast. On seeing one of these beasts, one of Janet’s friends said, “I feel like I’m eating Raoul,” making a reference to an ’80s movie.

Since then we name all our big rib roasts Raoul and like the kings, increment them with Roman numerals. I dry-age them in our downstairs refrigerator for between 21 and 28 days, although I’ve gone up to 45, with pretty good results.

This is Raoul XXXII when we first brought him home from Costco on Dec. 1 for our New Year’s dinner, so he spent a month in the fridge.

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He weighed about 19 lbs. and was the first bone-in rib roast I’ve aged. I put him on a rack and then, because I recently read about how putting salt underneath the beef can help it, I dumped a bunch of kosher salt on the sheet try, which I usually just line with aluminum foil.

I don’t think the salt helped, and I won’t do it again, but I don’t think it hurt, either.

For the science and detailed technique I refer you to J. Kenjy Lopez-Alt’s outstanding article on the subject at Serious Eats. Lopez-Alt reminds me a lot of Alton Brown before he turned into a jerk, and his recipes, science labs and other pieces there are all excellent.

I’ve tried aging meat several ways: in special bags that are sold for this purpose, wrapped in paper towels, wrapped in cheesecloth and just naked on the rack. Bare on the rack has worked well for me, although I would like to raise the humidity in the refrigerator.

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Anyway, this is what Raoul XXXII looked like when he came out of the fridge after 30 days: That grid is the mark from the rack he was on.  He looks all dried-out and gross, but all he needed was a little trim.

He finished up at about 16 1/2 pounds, having lost about a pound of water during the month, and the rest in trimming on the leathery, dried-out portions. I left more fat

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on than I usually do, because I was roasting Raoul XXXII whole, and I usually cut the roasts into very thick steaks, about 2 1/2 pounds each.

Here he is, trimmed, tied and ready to roast. I cut the ribs almost off, leaving an inch or so connected to make carving easier but still allowing me to roast him whole.

I roasted Raoul on the Big Green Egg, starting at 200 degrees at 1:45 p.m. on New Year’s eve, aiming to pull him off at 128 degrees internal. My plan was to then run up the Egg to 700 degrees or so to crust the outside.

I later raised the grill temperature to 225 and then 250 when it seemed I was going to run out of time. When the internal temperature was only 125 at 9:45 I pumped the Egg up to 400 degrees and pulled Raoul when he was at 130 degrees. This very blurry picture tells the story after I cut the first servings.

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The color might be a little off in this picture. He was a perfect medium-rare in the center, but a little more done on the edge than I like, and that’s because I took up the heat — if I’d pulled him at 128 as I had planned and then put him back on for just a couple of minutes when the Egg had hit 700 degrees, it would have been a perfectly uniform pink just about to the very edge.

Taste was good, with a little of the funky, metalic, cheesy flavor that you want from aged meat, and he was extremely tender. We still have a few pounds of him left, which we plan to freeze this weekend. The rib bones are on the menu for tonight, roasted again with some barbecue sauce.

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The Big Green Egg

Almost ready for action

In the late ’90s I got tired of replacing gas barbeque grills every couple of years. So I bought a charcoal grill and smoker called the Big Green Egg and have never looked back.

It’s ceramic, about 140 lbs., and made in Atlanta, and shaped like an egg. It flips open at its middle and will sear steaks at 750 degrees or so (I’ve gotten it a lot hotter) and it will hold 225 degrees for 24 hours to cook whole briskets.

The grill is guaranteed for life, and on those occasions when the charcoal grate would break (it used to be ceramic and could eventually crack; now it’s cast iron and indestructable), the dealer would just replace it, no questions asked.

So why am I on my third?

Well, I couldn’t bring it with me when I left Massachusetts for center-city Philadelphia, so gave it to my father, who later gave it to my brother. And after Philadelphia, the one I bought in upstate New York went to a friend of Janet’s when I moved to Boston, just before we got married.

So now that we have a house and a back yard again, I have the third and I hope, the last. Spatchcocked chickens are going on it in about an hour.

Maiden voyage

I know it’s about the technique, not the equipment, but when we saw this Le Creuset on a really deep discount at an outlet (first quality, but discontinued color) we decided to splurge a little.

A new pot is like a science experiment

Today it’s on its maiden voyage, cooking a braised pork recipe we like.

Janet’s cooking it, and I’m hovering. Well, not looking over her shoulder, exactly, but from my seat in the living room I see her pick up a whisk.

“You can’t use that,” I say. “You’ll scratch the bottom.” She puts down the whisk for a wooden spoon.

Can you use metal tongs? I look it up. Yes, if you’re careful.

Is it browning correctly? Vegetables and wine pick up the brown bits on the bottom? Yes, and yes.

How will it clean up? When it’s dry, will I put the little rubber clips back on so that the top doesn’t scratch?

Just thinking about it is exhausting. Jeez, if I’d ever had kids I’d probably be a grease spot by now.

Time to start cooking

Like everyone else I know, I’m tired of the snow and cold. I haven’t cooked anything on our Big Green Egg since December and the beef I like to dry-age in our refrigerator is tender but lifeless when I cook it indoors.

It’s supposed to get warmer this weekend and maybe enough of the snow will melt by midweek so that I’ll be able to throw a chicken on the Egg. In the meantime, it looks like braised pork tonight and lasagna with fresh egg pasta tomorrow.