Out-Chef Chef Boyardee!

How can anything tasty fit in those itty-bitty things? I almost never order filled pastas at restaurants. Growing up eating dim sum and xiao long bao I’m used to a large ratio of filling to wrapper. Comparing shiu mai to a dinky tortellini is like comparing…something really juicy and delicious and pork-filled to something that isn’t. A menu item like Asiago pumpkin ravioli always sounds yummy and flavorful, but inevitably it just tastes like a wad of pasta because of a paucity of filling and too-thick pasta. Mozza gets it right The exceptions – like Mozza Osteria’s Fresh Ricotta & Egg Raviolo, whose filling includes an entire oozy egg yolk – are reminders that the problem with most filled pastas is in the execution, not the concept. So when I make ravioli, I don’t mess around. I don’t make them obscenely large or overstuffed but I don’t want people to say, “Uh, I think I can taste the mushrooms.” Fillings-wise, I’ll occasionally do the ricotta-based ravioli. It’s ricotta, some Parmesan, a pinch of nutmeg, sometimes parsley, and then whatever sexy foodstuff I have in mind: minced mushrooms, roasted butternut squash, chopped prosciutto, ground meat, etc. But I’m more inclined to fill it with just the sexy foodstuff. I’m a big fan of braised meats in ravioli, like shredded short ribs, or I’ll do seafood. Last night, it was crab. I’ve steamed and shelled my Dungeness crabs before, but it’s a huge pain in the ass. I have to drive a ways to get the live ones, then I have to go through the ordeal of cooking the poor little things and then it takes me a good hour to shell two crabs. It’s so much easier to walk down the street to Trader Joe’s, grab a one pound can of Chicken of the Sea claw meat and pop it open. Plus, it costs less than half as much and tastes almost as good. Blue swimming crab ain’t no Dungeness and its sustainability is in question, but we can't all be Alice frickin' Waters. I forked up the crab, added some green onions, red pepper, lemon zest and a little egg white, which probably isn’t necessary but I had it leftover from the salad dressing. And that’s it. I suppose it really doesn’t matter how you season it so long as the crab is good. Some sort of vegetable is helpful to add texture.Make sure it's the refrigerated kind I’ve retreated to my Asian roots and used gyoza wrappers for my ravioli many times but last night I was feeling show-offy and brought out my pasta roller. I had that thing for a couple years before I actually used it. It seemed like such a messy headache. But it’s actually a pretty easy and forgiving process. And my mess factor was greatly reduced once I got a pastry scraper. If you don’t have one, you should get one. Remember Steve Buscemi’s leg in Fargo? I’m no pasta expert and there are probably a thousand better instructions for making it but here’s how I do it. The basic ratio is 3 large eggs for every two cups of flour. You make a little well in the flour, crack your eggs in it, mix it with a fork while doing a mad dash to keep egg goo from dripping out the well and onto the floor. Eventually, you get a doughy ball that you start kneading to incorporate the rest of the flour. It’ll be hard and rough looking but that’s fine.Cut it in fourths (with your trusty pastry scraper) and start feeding it one of the fourths into your pasta machine (set at 1, the widest setting). It’ll come out ugly, but after you fold it and re-feed it, it will knead into something smooth and manageable. At that point, you feed the pasta through the machine a successively higher numbers on your pasta machine. By the end, you should have a long, wafer thin ribbon of pasta. For once, not cut with a dog food can Time is of the essence as the pasta will dry out and crack within a few minutes so you should have your filling close at hand. I use a pastry ring whose diameter is half the width of the pasta sheet but I’ve also used empty soup cans, dog food cans or whatever works. I lay out a strip of the pasta, put out spoonfuls of filling on the bottom half, using the pastry ring to space them apart. Then I wet the pasta around the filling with water (not egg wash) and fold the top half over. Press to seal the ravioli and cut ‘em out with the pastry ring. At this point, I take each one to check the seal and ensure there’s no air in the ravioli. Air pockets are bad. Then I layer the ravioli with parchment paper and store them in the freezer to keep them from getting mushy. If you store them for longer than a couple hours, make sure they're in an airtight container or they'll dry out and crack. Two cups of flour should make around 60-70 ravioli, which should match a one pound can of crab. Let them eat kibble I rarely sauce ravioli with marinara because tomatoes are pretty dominating. Browned butter is delicious but in small doses. I usually stick with broths or cream sauces so that the flavors in the filling can stand out. For the crab ravioli, I sautéed some shallots, added some cream and saffron, cut it with a little white wine, and cooked it until it turned yellow and fancy. I suppose you could strain it but I think the orange saffron strands are cool looking plus it lets everyone know that you used the real thing. Note the exquisite and rare saffron stamens Boiling the ravioli is a critical step. Once you put them in boiling water, you want to make sure it doesn’t boil violently or your ravioli will rip. A slow bubble works just fine. It should only take a couple minutes and then you plate, sauce and garnish. Or...open a can of this.

On Authenticity

I have a subscription! During a summer dinner for friends I served gazpacho. It was a warm evening and I had tons of tomatoes, so it seemed like the perfect starter. It’s pretty simple: you chop tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onions and a bit of garlic, then add some vinegar and olive oil and mushed up bread and tomato juice. Give it a two second pulse from the hand blender et voilà. One of the more cosmopolitan diners looked at the chunky soup and said, “Oh, so it’s not real gazpacho.”

True Andalusian gazpacho is mashed in a mortar and pestle (or at least a blender). It’s smooth and velvety; not like my coarse, vulgar slop. The thing is, I knew my soup wasn’t authentic and I even thought about introducing it with that caveat. But I didn’t because I don’t need another reason to be labeled a “foodie,” a.k.a. “food-douche.” I served it all chunked up because that’s the way my mother made it from some Sunset magazine recipe when I was a child. And I prefer it that way. It has texture. Each bite has a different ratio of tomato to cucumber. It looks more appetizing than the pink, pasty appearance of the “authentic” version. The current Sunset recipe but back in the '70s it was chunky. It was! Yet it still irked me that I was called out on my bastardization of a venerated Spanish tradition. Stuff like that bugs me all the time. Like how when I mention my affection for Abbot's Pizza, die hard New Yorkers will scoff, “They use bagel flour in their dough. It’s not real pizza.” To which I say, “It still tastes better than 95% of the pizza that I ever had in Manhattan. So suck it!” Maybe I don’t say those exact words, but I’ve thought them.

I've never eaten lutefisk nor have I wanted to Why is authenticity so damned important? I suppose it’s a connection to history, just like chunky gazpacho connects me with my childhood. But if not for culinary innovation, we’d still be eating charred meat, nuts and berries. At some point, we have to acknowledge that sous vide whitefish, a modern preparation, tastes better than lutefisk, a preserving method involving lye that dates back to the 16th century. Not surprisingly the editor of Cook's Illustrated There is a limit to bending tradition. If you read Cook’s Illustrated, you’ll know what I’m talking about. This is this pedantic culinary bi-monthly where they supposedly show the better way to cook. Their mission is, “to test recipes over and over again until we understand how and why they work and until we arrive at the best version.” Their definition of the “best version” is based on some borg-ian concept where they measure the amount of time it takes for a vinaigrette to separate. Their recipe held its emulsion for a whopping 1 ½ hours! But…can’t you just shake up the dressing right before you pour it? Who takes 90 minutes to eat a salad?

If you don't use unbleached organic parchment paper, it's not true en papillote This past spring they presented their improved version of cooking en papillote, a method where you bake vegetables and fish in a paper wrapper. The crack staff of Cook’s Illustrated contends that aluminum foil seals better than parchment paper and that the recipe works best if you parcook vegetables beforehand. But the whole point is that it’s a quick and easy way to cook fish with a dramatic presentation. If you have to cook the vegetables beforehand and serve it in foil, you’re spending too much time to serve what looks like a fancy TV dinner. Their complaints of too much juice or slightly undercooked vegetables are what I consider to be the characteristics of the dish.

Fold it in half and crimp the edges tightly in a semi-circle Basically you create a bed of small chopped vegetables for a lightly seasoned fish fillet upon which you add a little butter or olive oil. You wrap it in some parchment paper and cook it in a 375º oven for 20 minutes and then put it on a plate. Everyone oohs and aahs as they unwrap their gustatory gift. Maybe the kale is a tad crunchy or the zucchini juices accumulate on the plate but it still tastes really good and you only spent 15 minutes preparing the thing.

This was just for me on a Tuesday night so it's not as sexy looking as it could be So what’s my point? I dunno. Don’t make such a big deal of things? I mean, I have respect for authenticity and tradition; I’m more likely to buy a raw milk Brie de Meaux than some Wisconsin cheese product called “Bree.” But I’m also a huge fan of Rouge en Noir, a Sonoma cheesemaker who makes a perfectly delicious Brie that’s often cheaper than its Frenchy counterparts.

I’m also grateful to the nerds. I do get some value out of Cook’s Illustrated. They’re the dorks who will make scores of batches of biscuits to find out the perfect ratio of butter to lard. They are like the not-quite-as-smart cousin of Harold McGee who doesn’t know quite when to shut up. You kinda take the basic concepts from them and then tune out all their extraneous efficientizing bullshit. So, yeah. That’s where I stand. Thoughts? Anyone? Anyone?