de allium sativum: on garlic

I think about garlic quite a lot, but these days it is on my mind constantly. I have a friendly if insistent reminder in the upper reaches of our old rickety garage: many bundles of this season’s garlic hang from the rafters, waiting for the right moment to be put in the soft ground. I watch eagerly as the rain and cold of our northern California winter approaches. I typically wait until after the rain begins, and the earth is soft and friable, and the garlic likes it. It’s easy to plant then, and I don’t have to water. This next week or two might be the time to think about planting.

I began growing garlic a long time ago. I used to plant masses of it, and I still grow enough that some people think I’m a little wigged about it, but I’ve toned it down in recent years. I’m never sure anymore, but I think I harvest about 140 or 150 heads, something like that. I give a good amount away as special gifts, for seed and eating alike. I keep about 20 per cent back for planting. Mainly, it’s just pleasant to do. I love when I have it hanging about, drooping down from the ceiling, a few heads sitting in the mortar; or earlier on, when the plants are still in the ground, slowly developing their subterranean heads, waiting to shoot up their curly necks.

Garlic belongs to my trinity of favorite foods, along with artichokes and wild fennel. Fortunately, all three thrive in our climate. We have lots of artichokes in our garden – the gorgeous purple ones whose seed I brought back from Italy – but garlic goes so far and lasts so long, if stored well. It can uplift so many dishes. It is a  pillar of my kitchen.

There are many versions of garlic soup, but I think my favorite one, made in the spring with new garlic pulled from the ground when the head just begins to form its individual cloves, but just barely. The garlic is simmered in a dreamy, delicate chicken broth, paper-thin slivers of new garlic floating inside it, thin so the soup doesn’t have to cook for long. In the middle sits a single, whole, soft, sweet head of the same roasted new garlic. I peel back the papery outer skin, trim the stem short, and remove the roots. I place the heads side-by-side in a shallow ceramic dish, splash in some water, sprinkle with a little salt, a few drops of olive oil, cover carefully, and roast at 350ºF until completely soft. When done, I place a head, turned golden from its time in the oven, in the middle of a pasta bowl, ladle in homemade chicken broth, and grate a little parmesan over it. I invite friends.

If you have a farmers’ market near you, the garlic sold by top-notch organic farms such as River Dog, Full Belly, and Catalan is great for planting. They all sell purple varieties, and their garlic is very similar to each other’s. The advantage to buying from a seller rather than from a farmer’s market is the selection of varieties. I especially like Filaree Farm in Washington state, but that may be because I bought my first organic garlic seed from them. It’s kind of late now to find seed garlic, but you might be able to scrounge some up somewhere. However, quality is important, so don’t buy just anything anywhere.

Garlic falls into two groups, soft neck and hard neck. I prefer to plant hard neck. Its subspecies is ophioscorodon, which means, “snake neck,” because of its curling, snake-like scape, or shoot. I love the red varieties of the French Rocambole group, with 8-10 larger cloves, and the Purple Stripes, that have slightly smaller cloves, but the are so many lovely ones – Persian, German, Russian, Romanian, Georgian, Armenian – you can indulge almost any whim you wish to.

Garlic likes soft, rich soil fairly high in nitrogen. If you plan ahead, plant a leguminous cover crop such as peas or fava beans, and turn the plants in 3 or 4 weeks ahead of the garlic, after you’ve harvested the pods. You can mulch the plants to keep the soil moisture even, if you wish.

Planting is simple and easy. Gently break apart the cloves the day you plan to plant them, or at most the day before; the cloves dry very quickly once they’re broken apart, and that’s no good. You want perfect cloves to plant. Choose the cloves that have the largest basal plate, the little, flat side that was directly attached to the roots. A larger basal plate produces a larger head. (You therefore want to select for large basal plates over a few seasons, so you produce exquisite, large heads.

Plant the cloves pointed end upward, flat end downward; the roots grow from the basal plate. Space the cloves in rows about 18 inches apart, every 6 inches or so, 2-3 inches deep in the soil. If you’ve timed it right, you won’t have to water until late spring, and then only every week or two, depending on the dryness of the soil, shade, wind, etc. Take care with your watering, though, as too much water will cause the garlic to rot or have poor storing quality, and too little (making dry soil) will produce small heads.

As it matures, the hard neck plant will send up its scape, which is what carries the flower seeds in a structure called a bulbil.  Bulbils can supply seeds for planting, but they produce very small heads, and it takes several seasons to get large, usable heads, so it’s much easier to plant good quality cloves. It is best to cut the scape after it has made a loop or two, so the plant’s energy goes toward bulb rather than seed production. When the leaves begin to dry, stop watering. Leave the garlic in ground another few weeks. Check the bulbs for readiness by carefully scraping back some of the soil around it, and feeling about for formed cloves. You can see them, too. If they’re ready, dig them carefully with a spade or pitchfork, loosening the soil around them, then pulling the plant carefully free. If they’re not ready, give them another couple of weeks.

After you harvest, tie the garlic in bundles and hang in a coolish, dry, ventilated place. It will keep for a long time. Be sure to save some for next year’s crop!

Here’s what to do with the scapes:

Cut them into 3 or 4-inch pieces, steam until tender, sauté them in olive oil for a few minutes, squeeze on a bit of lemon, grate reggiano or pecorino on top, and wow! 

Stevie Parle and Dock Kitchen

Stevie Parle is one of the terrific people I met during my London sojourn, and one of the few I got to know. He is the owner and chef of Dock Kitchen, hidden quietly along the Grand Union canal at Portobello Dock, in north Kensington. I first met Stevie when he attended my pop-up supper club last April at Clare Ptak's shop, Violet, which we had helped her patch together in Hackney, east London. Stevie has just been given the Observer's Food Monthly award for UK Best Young Chef. For me, no one deserves this award more than Stevie, and I wanted to share a little of his celebration here. Pop to the link and you'll see that he's 25, has a new wife, new child, new restaurant, and a great cookbook, My Kitchen: Real Food from Near and Far, that's all him. The book is born from his travels.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/observer-food-monthly-awards-2010

Stevie really gets food, and seasonality, and taste, and delight, but mostly he gets where it comes from intellectually and viscerally, its place and the culture. By that I mean, he understands the heart of a dish, or the heart of an idea, and realizes it on the plate. He and I began talking about about cured meats -- a sure way to my heart -- and I gave him some instruction on getting started making salami, pancetta, equipment, and other stuff. He got that, too. He's a smart, sensitive guy.

For most of my time in London I lived in an area called Maida Vale, also known as Little Venice, that sits at the confluence of Regent's Canal and the Grand Union Canal, just behind Paddington Station. The London canals are part of an elaborate network of waterways built in the 18th century for transport of commercial goods. The canals snake all over London, and beyond, and new, imaginative businesses have -- dare i say -- popped up along parts of this charming yet practical web of channels from an earlier time. It's a nice kind of rebirth. More on that in another post.

If you walk or bicycle westward from my flat a couple of miles along the Grand Union, you come Portobello Dock, where Dock Kitchen is located. Of course, there are no signs, just a gate and door bell, but you can see it from where you stand on Kensal Road, on the edge of north London. It's in a very modern building with a glass façade, but it's unassuming despite its drama. It's designed by the well known architect and designer, Tom Dixon, who shares the compound with Dock Kitchen. This is the restaurant at night:

I dined four times at Dock Kitchen in my six months in London, almost by accident, and cooked dinner at our flat for Stevie and his family, and Claire's husband, Damien. (Claire was in Califorina.) Dock Kitchen is closed Sunday, and one weekend he invited us to a little dinner there cooked by Joe Trivelli, one of the chefs at River Café, who started Dock with Stevie when it was a pop-up in its early days. We sat out on the terrace overlooking the canal, and watched a crane stroll about. It weather was nice but not perfect, but who cared? Good food, good wine, nice company, lots of chatter (even me!). Joe put together something right up my alley: grilled rabbit, spicy sausages, and various pork bits. Joe's food is very simple, very Italian, and very delicious. It was a pleasant get together, and my dear friend April Bloomfield was in town, so I got to chat with her about food and restaurants. It was one of two meals I had with her in London (the other was at Polpo, a screaming, hip new place in Soho). Joe started us out with a fritto that included fried fennel flowers, another way straight to my heart. Here's a picture of it

After that satisfying meal, we took the no.18 bus via Harrow Road back to our flat in Maida Vale. No one on that bus speaks english. It's humbling, and heartening. The English are living on history.

Stevie just finished a refurbish end of August, and we tried to do a pop-up at Dock, but the refurb took longer than expected, ran into September, and in the end the timing was off; he had to finish installing his tandoor and I had to return to the US. But I am happy to have met Stevie and expect he will continue to shake up the London scene in his personal, perfect quiet way. Congratulations Stevie!

respect

In my recent postings about wild fennel liqueur, I failed to mention where I where I first learned about it and how to make it. In November of 2002, I had the opportunity to cook a book signing dinner at Chez Panisse for Vincent Schiavelli, the actor and cookbook author. I had been focused on Italian food for some time and was thrilled to collaborate with him on the menu. Vincent was of Sicilian decent, having grown up in a Sicilian ghetto in Brooklyn, where english was not a necessity, long before Brooklyn was the fashionable place it is today. His first cookbook, Bruculinu America: Remembrances of a Sicilian-American Brooklyn, is about growing up in the embrace of family and a community of Sicilian immigrants, eating Sicilian food, helping his grandmother cook sauce and many other traditional dishes. It's a charming book in which the stories of community and home merge with the recipes, as I imagine they did in his life; these things are always inseparable.

The book we cooked from, his second, is Many Beautiful Things; Stories and recipes from Polizzi Generosa, about his ancestral home, where he had kept house and lived part time. It's a lovely, hand-illustrated book by a lovely man who had an immense sense of history and where he came from, and therefore who he was. At the end of the book he has an entire section about making liqueurs, simple but definitive recipes and instructions that enlightened and excited me. We served wild fennel liqueur as an aperitivo at the dinner, and it was the perfect beginning to a wonderful meal. To his delight -- and mine -- we served coppa I had made. I learned, suddenly at the last minute, that it was incorrect to use fresh sardines in pasta with broccoli, that it had to be made from tinned sardines. We had to rush out and buy some from a nearby Italian deli.

The menu was:
wild fennel liqueur
antipasto: cooked carrot salad; pumpkin caponata; rapini omelette; sweet and sour meatballs; coppa
pasta with broccoli (and tinned sardines)
veal shoulder roast with Marsala
braised artichokes
fried leeks
dessert was almond crostata

Vincent was endlessly charming, generous, and enthusiastic, and we had immense fun cooking for him. He kept in loose touch in the following years, and though he invited us many times over, I never made it to his home in Polizzi Generosa. Vincent was a heavy smoker, and he died there in 2005, of lung cancer, in the home his grandfather had grown up in but had left behind for Bruculinu, America.

We all learn initially from someone else, some inspiration, then go on to develop our own thinking about our craft or art; it's like finding one's own voice. It is important to me to always keep in mind where I came from, who my mentors are, and to give them the respect and recognition they deserve. Deserving is a difficult idea -- how does one come to deserve something, and how are others to respect that? For me, it's a coming together of understanding, appreciation, and love. That, and remembering who you are. People sometimes to forget who they've learned from, and where they've come from. Without that, you can't know who you are. I always try to keep these notions in the forefront of my mind. I always say, no new food has been cooked in two hundred years. (That doesn't mean it hasn't been improved upon!) I think about that every time I cook. I explain to young cooks learning the craft of making prosciutto or other dry cured meats, that one stands in a river of tradition that goes back 2000 years.

That is my thanks to and respect for him, both of which he deserves.

homegrown

Home Grown 

One of the forgotten wonders I returned to in California was dry farmed Early Girl tomatoes. None are like them. I will take grievous grief for saying this, but I have almost forsaken heirlooms -- Brandywines (which I saw almost none of upon returning to California), Cherokees, Green Zebras, Stupice, even Marvel Stripes, though I still like in principle Black Prince – for Early Girls. I have been swept away by them. Early Girls have all the splendid qualities one wishes for in a tomato: proper firmness; longevity that keeps them from going soft too soon; deep, concentrated, complex flavor; lovely, rich color; gentle, honest sweetness; no watery-ness. Heirlooms struggle to meet these standards. I understand the charm of heirlooms, and their visual beauty, but if it’s flavor you’re after, there’s really no choice but the dry farmed Early Girls.

I prepared food at home often in London, but it was hot there this summer, so we were eating simple, hardly cooked dishes: a lot of spectacular burrata from La Fromagerie, with ripe, red Italian datterini tomatoes, capers, basil, and barely sweet, aged Greek wine vinegar from the Peloponnesus; sometimes it was with a spectacular pounded caper-garlic-marjoram-olive oil slurry, or Sardinian dried oregano; or it was Salade Niçoise with lots of vegetables and orangey-yellow aioli made from exquisite farm eggs we found at the Sunday morning Marylebone Farmers Market, The Marylebone market was about 30 minutes' walk across town from our flat in Little Venice. We’d cross Edgware Road, where no English is spoken, walk along Crawford Street, quiet on Sunday morning, pass through Paddington Green (which was nowhere near Paddington!), and into the market located in a car park behind Marylebone High Street. The market sold beautiful organic produce, all of it English, all of it within a couple hours’ drive of central London. There’s a lovely, historical narrative about the origin of the Marylebone name, but that’s for a later story.

Lately, I have returned to cooking here at home, something I hadn’t done for a long time. Being away in London for so many months was the true reason, but other distractions have had their influence as well.

It is the most satisfying and wonderful thing to walk out your door and pick what’s for dinner tonight. We grow lovely tomatoes at home in our garden, and lots and lots of garlic, another of my manias, along with wild fennel. My friend Leslie gave me a small jar of perfect, astonishingly fragrant, carefully cleaned coriander seed she grew in her garden, and I add a few of those to the tomatoes, along with a few slivers of garlic from my plot. Or plots. There are several plots of garlic. Mania, indeed.

A recipe, easy as can be

Choose ripe, firm, deep red, dry farmed Early Girls. Remove the stem, leave the skin on, and place the tomatoes stem side down, skin side up, in a shallow roasting pan, casserole, or sauté pan that holds them closely but not tightly; there should be some small amount of space between them. Use stainless steel or ceramic. Drizzle the tomatoes lightly with olive oil – Ligurian oil is especially nice – sprinkle them lightly with sea salt, slip a few halved garlic cloves between the tomatoes, toss in a couple of small dry chilies, and sprinkle in a few coriander seeds. I like to leave the coriander seeds whole, rather than pulverize them, so you get little explosions of flavor when you crush them between your teeth. You can add a few fennel seeds, or herbs, if you wish, but I keep it very simple. Drizzle with a little more oil, sprinkle a little more salt over, and they’re ready to go. I don’t have a wood-burning oven at home – maybe you do -- but I simulate it with my steadfast commercial US Range, cranked up to about 500ºF. I give it 45 minutes to heat up fully.

Roast the tomatoes in the hot oven for 30-35 minutes, until the flesh of the tomatoes is soft and giving, and their skin is blistered and blackened. You will end up with tomatoes whose flavor is concentrated to an even greater degree, awash in a rich, viscous sauce of juiciness, saltiness, and lovely acidity, all melded by the olive oil. Of course the tomatoes are best eaten that day, but they will keep in the fridge, covered, for several days. I’m lazy and often leave them out at room temperature for as long as a day or two. I don’t worry too much about spoilage with this kind of cooked food. It usually gets eaten pretty quickly anyway.

We like them on bruschette, with mozzarella, on fresh or dried noodles with basil and ricotta salata or pecorino sardo, in minestrone with pesto. We ate them tonight with Anson Mills’ terrific Rustic Coarse Polenta Integrale with fresh corn, finished with Reggiano Parmesan and a little sweet butter, just to be sure. Last week we served the tomatoes in fish stew with olives and capers, two weeks before that we pulled off the skins and stirred them into our bouillabaisse. They’re lovely with grilled whole fish and wild fennel. Really, they go well in any dish that calls for delicious tomatoes. This is the wonder of homegrown.

wild fennel liqueur

Wild fennel liqueur or finucchiedda

Wild fennel is a lovely plant that I especially like. It is the flavor of the Mediterranean, especially of Italy, Sicily and Sardinia. Mixed with sage, rosemary, and garlic inside pork belly, it is exact taste of Tuscany; it defines the now well know salami, finocchiona; on fish, you’re transported to Sicily; in the presence of saffron, it will make you dream of Bouillabaisse.

Wild fennel, originally a European plant, has naturalized in northern California and can be found in almost any vacant lot, roadside area, regional park, or parking strip. It covers entire hillsides in Tilden Park. All you need to collect it is a pair of garden pruners. Urban foraging here. The wonderful part of this liqueur is you are given three flavors of fennel: the fronds, the seeds, and the flowers. Taste them separately to see what I mean.

Be sure to collect wild fennel from a clean area, well away from roads, freeways, train tracks, and other places with sooty air. It’s also a good idea to pick neighborhood branches not too close to the ground, as dogs like to pee on these plants in urban areas. But don’t worry about that too much, it washes off.

You’ll need to locate “pure” alcohol, or ethanol. Pure alcohol is the stock-in-trade of distillers and doctors, though it isn’t exactly legal for either of them to sell or even give it to you. “Pure” alcohol isn’t really pure in the strictest sense; it can reach a maximum of about 96% purity, or 186 proof under normal conditions. Since it is extremely volatile (it evaporates really quickly, which is why it feels cool on the skin, and is highly flammable -- no explanation needed), it retains a water fraction to stay stable. That’s the simple explanation. Easier to find and use is high proof grain alcohol, which is up to about 150 proof or 75% alcohol. You won’t get the same degree of extraction, or rather, solubility from lower alcohol spirits, but it still can produce a good if less intense liqueur.

Collect three or four fennel stalks with fronds, seeds, and flowers still on. Cut the stalks into 3 or 4 inch pieces. Rinse them in a few changes of cool water until it rinses clear. Drain well in a strainer and let drip at room temperature for a few minutes, until most of the water has fallen off. 

Place the fennel in a glass container you can cover and pour one liter of alcohol over it. Cover and allow to sit at room temperature for 3 days, away from heat.

On the second day, make sugar syrup by bringing to the boil 1 liter of spring water (don’t use tap water, too many chemicals!). Stir in 665 grams of granulated sugar until it’s completely dissolved. Stir occasionally as it cools. Allow to cool overnight, but do not refrigerate.

On the third day, strain the alcohol through cheesecloth or a gold type coffee filter so there are no bits left in the liquid. Pour the syrup into the alcohol and stir gently. (You may want to add the syrup judiciously, to achieve the exact taste you prefer.) You now have wild fennel liqueur. You can bottle it however you like -- in empty wine bottles, in French jars, in Mason jars -- but don’t use a plastic container. Freeze it overnight before serving. Store the alcohol in the freezer for safekeeping. Serve it over ice, add a little water if you like.

Here’s a little story. While I was in London this past year, it was unusually warm and dry for most of the summer, and I’d kept my windows open from mid-May until end of August. In the last week of my stay it rained in the night. In the  morning I set off for work on foot, as usual. I exited my apartment block, turned right toward the canal, and was suddenly stopped by the heady scent of wild fennel. As I searched behind the manicured hedgerow of Tuscan Blue rosemary to find the source, I realized I hadn’t encountered that enchanting smell since the summer before, in Northern Caifornia. There, hidden well away stood a single, small fennel plant, bending downward under the weight of the water from the night before, its aroma filling the morning air. I had lived in that flat for nearly six months and never noticed the secretive little beauty. It gave a wonderful lift to what was otherwise a somber day.

chickens

thinking about repopulating the long-quiet chicken coop, just for the lovely eggs

vinegar project

Turning 50 gallons of good Howell Mountain wine we didn't bottle into red wine vinegar. by this time next year it should be finished and nicely aged in the two beautiful hand-bound Burgundy barrels to the right

wild fennel, cooking from weeds

collected wild fennel from my secret spot today, to make wild fennel liqueur for sunday's popup, and for wild fennel pollen to last through to next summer, hopefully. it's wonderful to sort through the plants with my pruners, kept in the glove box for this purpose, cutting the stalks and stems in various stages of maturity, bees buzzing about without too much aggravation. if you're peaceful and quiet they don't take much notice of you, even as you steal their vital sustenance. i guess there's enough to go round. it is essential to the liqueur to harvest the stalks at this particular point, when there are several different flavors on the plant: some of the tiny yellow flowers are still in bloom for color and verve; some fully formed seeds for depth of flavor and nuttiness; a few fronds still green and vital for brightness; all given backbone by the thickened stalks. of course, the perfect blossoms are saved for drying in the attic, hooked to the ceiling in brown bags, bottled airtight after you've shaken them free in the bag. the liqueur takes a while, as all preserved foods do, as patience is required with all things of this nature. patience, and as my friend robin says, a steady hand. he means you have to know where you're going when you cook. and he knows.

                                    

Cooking From Weeds: A Dinner for Friends at Bar Jules

Porchetta at Cannard Farm

The Details

Who: A collaboration between me and my friends at Bar Jules

What: A three-course fixed menu in the spirit of Oktoberfest

Where: Bar Jules (609 Hayes St.  SF, CA)

When: Sunday, October 17th at 6pm & 8.30pm

How much: $55 per person, plus wine (cash only, please!)

To reserve: Send an email to cookingfromweeds@gmail.com with your name, phone number, desired seating, and number of people in your party. We take reservations on a first-come, first-served basis, and the seats fill up quickly. Please don't assume your spot is confirmed until you get an email back from us.

in contrast, the ultra-cool of the london hipster aesthetic

another wonderfully colorful shop front

the butcher shop front has got to have the drama of this color

the neighborhood's mainly portuguese on golborne road, at the very top of portobello road (avoid portobello!). golborne road's shops have piles of bacalao in their back rooms, dried beans in giant sacks, dried peppers and chorizo of varying temperatures hanging everywhere -- that's a splendid meal right there! the smells are overwhelming. there's a wonderful bakery called lisboa, to which everyone flocks. go over one street and it's all arabic, where no women are seen in the cafés, just lots of guys sitting around smoking cigarettes and drinking mint tea. it's sort of like being on holiday, in someone else's country.  i guess it is someone else's country. you never know what you'll stumble upon.

absinthe and anisés paraphernalia shop

the never open wine shop

even the cooks take orders!!

a week in paris

my new blog!!

just launched this blog and want to post photos of paris, where i recently ate very well, and of other places and things. ate at one place four times in as many days. thought a blog would be a good forum for me, as i like to talk and tell stories, and sometimes show pictures of what's going on. when i first came to london my friend told me i should write one. i'm not ususally this public, but i'll give it a shot. when i get it figured out i will include links to other things i'm involved with and like. hope all's well with everyone. remember, don't let your ideology overide your palate.