Recipe – Jon Is A Geek

3 August 20164 January 2020

Arriving in Rome

We arrived from the airport by cab and checked in to the Hearth Hotel, on Via Santamaura, right next to the Vatican museum gate. A good spot and very handy by foot and Metro to the rest of the city.

A walk about took us to Saint Peter’s Square, and then up to the nearby Jainiculum (Gianicolo) in order to unlock the first of many Respighi achievements, Pini di Roma: III. I pini del Gianicolo. It is one of several hills around Rome, and mostly a public park, with many sculptures and busts of historical Italian figures dotted about.

Later in the afternoon we wandered into Trastevere district, which has lots of art shops and restaurants on either side of old cobbled Roman streets. Along the way we entered Santa Maria in Trastevere, a Roman basilica dating back to the fourth century A.D. Its beautiful gilded ceilings and Cavallini mosaics are a stunning sight.

Gilded ceiling of Santa Maria in Trastevere.

Mosaics by Cavallini in the Santa Maria in Trastevere.

The next day we went on a guided tour around the Colosseum and Roman Forum, and another around the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain (Respighi achievement unlocked, Fontane di Roma: III. La fontana di Trevi al meriggio) and the Pantheon. A big full day, but thoroughly worth it.

The ancient Romans had figured out how to make strong concrete (opus cæmenticium) using volcanic ash. Unlike the modern technique of using gravel aggregate and pouring it into place, they used it more like a mortar, to lay bigger bits of baked clay bricks or rubble together. The Colosseum was built using brick and concrete around 110 A.D. and must have been a beautiful spectacle in brilliant white travertine, and festooned with many marble sculptures and reliefs.

Whilst it did fall into disuse after the fall of the Roman Empire, its current dilapidated state is mostly due to its deliberate dismantling over the following thousand years by builders, who raided its marble statues and outer cladding blocks in order to build other Roman buildings, including much of what is now Vatican City.

The Pantheon is the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, built in 120 A.D. with a diameter of 43 metres. It was built using pumice as the aggregate towards the top, to reduce the load on the lower structure.

Trevi Fountain, Rome.

The Colosseum, Rome.

Inside the Colosseum.

The Pantheon dome from inside.

It is truly remarkable that, despite the Italian peninsula being prone to large earthquakes similar to New Zealand, these buildings are still standing after two thousand years.

Lombardi “Propileo” Cesanese, a good Lazio red.

Along the way we observed that in Rome at least, road rules are mostly optional, and most cars seem to be fitted with broken indicator bulbs. Drivers do stop for pedestrians though, which was a relief. Just around the corner from the hotel was a great restaurant where we could use our colourful Euro beer vouchers to buy great Italian food and local wine, including an IGT red wine from the Lazio region, a Cesanese called Propileo, which has been somewhat hard to track down since. Inevitably, I tried a local dish called Cacio e pepe.

Cacio e pepe

Like many Italian dishes, cacio e pepe (literally “cheese and pepper”) is a fantastic yet deceptively simple dish: pasta served hot straight from the pot with a generous handful of finely grated cheese and black pepper. This restaurant added a squeeze of lemon juice, which makes it exquisite.

Ingredients:

450 g (1 lb) of fresh pasta (spaghetti, tagliatelle)
180 g (6 oz) Pecorino Romano*
40 g (1½ oz) butter
about 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper, to taste
lemon juice to taste (optional)

Bring plenty of salted water to a boil in a big pot and cook the pasta for 2-3 minutes until just tender. Grate the cheese with a fine grater. Melt the butter in a frying pan and fry the pepper for a minute or so. Using tongs drop the cooked pasta into the frying pan with about 100 ml (½ cup) of the hot pasta water, stir to coat well, then dump the cheese on top, and stir until melted. Serve immediately in bowls, garnish with a squeeze of lemon juice and a little more ground black pepper. Match with a good red wine with a food-friendly acidity.

Note: Pecorino Romano is a local Italian cheese made from sheep milk. If required, substitute any good hard salty cheese instead, e.g. Parmesan or a good aged cheddar.

27 July 201527 July 2015

Allergy-free Carrot Cake

Bake this for friends with small persons allergic to nuts, eggs, and dairy.

Ingredients:

4 oz (125 g) dairy-free margarine
6 oz (¾ cup) sugar
4 tsp egg-substitute starch (2 eggs’ worth)
2 carrots
1 inch of ginger
½ cup soy or rice milk
½ tsp baking soda
8 oz (225 g) flour
1 tsp baking powder

Soften the butter, whisk the sugar into it until fluffy and nearly white. Shove the carrot and ginger through a juicer (or fine grater) and add the juice and pulp to the mix with the egg powder, and beat. Add the baking soda to the milk and microwave (30-60 seconds) until frothy, and fold in. Sift the flour and baking powder in and fold gently until just combined. Turn into a greased (with margarine) and floured cake tin and bake at 180°C for 30-40 minutes until done.

Note: I used Orgran egg-replacer, but have a look at the Allergy NZ site for other egg substitution ideas.

30 April 2015

Feijoa Jam

Here’s the recipe for 10 kg of feijoa jam.

6 kg feijoas
500 g stewed apple
300 ml lime juice
extra hot water
4 kg sugar
Lots of jam jars

Halve or quarter (depending how keen you’re feeling) the feijoas into a very large pot. Don’t peel them or scoop them – use the whole fruit. The skin contains the distinctive, beautiful feijoa fragrance, and it should be present in the jam.

Tip the stewed apple and lime juice in, and cook it on moderate heat until the fruit starts to soften. Keep stirring to prevent it caramelising (or burning) on the bottom.

Stick-blend it once the fruit has heated through and has softened, and bring it up to a gentle rolling boil. You may need to add hot water to thin it (if it gloops and spatters big gobs at you, it’s too thick). Simmer it like this for a good 10-15 minutes. Keep stirring.

Tip in all the sugar. Dissolving sugar is endothermic and will cool the mix, and take several minutes on high heat to get back up to a rolling boil. Once boiling, it will take a further 10-15 minutes to get to setting temperature. Keep stirring.

When the jam has reached setting temperature, pour while still hot into preheated glass jam jars, and put the lids on immediately. As the jam cools, it will create a vacuum seal under the lid.

Testing for setting: you can do this with a jam thermometer, and wait until the mix gets up to 104°C. Or, watch for the way it drips off the spoon. If it runs off the bottom edge in one stream, it’s not ready yet; it’s at setting temperature when you get multiple, thicker drips from the spoon. Or, put a knife in the freezer. Drip some small drops from the spoon onto the cold knife and wait for them to cool. If the surface of the drops wrinkle when you prod them with your finger, it’s set.

A note on jars: use only glass jars with quarter-turn metal lids. Save them in a box in the garage for just this sort of occasion! Plastic jars will usually warp when you drop hot jam into them, and also probably contain Bisphenol A. Screw-turn metal and plastic lids won’t seal anywhere as well as quarter-turn metal lids.

29 April 201529 April 2015

Chilli sauce got a little out of control

So this time, I picked 16 kg of late, red jalapeño from Penray Gardens, fire-roasted it, and smoked it.

Along with several kilos of tomatoes and red bell peppers, this was a huge amount of ingredients. Luckily I had help from Shadley, Andrew and Tara in picking, roasting, smoking, chopping, stirring and tasting duties, and a fun time was had by all.

This all went in the pot with much the same recipe as last year (see my previous post). This time I made up a label in Inkscape using some nifty fonts from Font Squirrel, based on a 1920s French wine label.

16 kg red jalapeño from Penray Gardens.

In the Bredenkamp smoker; mine was too puny for the job.

Into the pot, with the onions…

with raisins simmered in vinegar

and several litres of vinegar and lime juice

Batch 2 being made with additional passata.

Labels inspired by a 1920s French wine label

Evil, evil bhut jolokia sauce batch, made from just bhut jolokia chillies.

12 litres (2½ gallons) of hot jalapeño sauce.

Finished!

9 March 201510 March 2015

It’s chilli season again

March always brings ripening red chillies, especially to my favourite market garden up the road. This year’s first small batch of sauce was made with mild poblano chilli, a small amount of very hot manzano chilli, capsicum and de-seeded tomato, all roasted and smoked with hickory, and simmered in vinegar, lime juice, onion, garlic, toasted ground cumin and honey.

Penray Gardens have pick-your-own chillies and capsicums for very good prices, and tomatoes for $2 a kilo. This haul is just under 8 kg (17 lb) of ingredients for around $30, which is good for 3-4 litres (a gallon or so) of sauce. I’ve also got enough bhut jolokia here to make an extremely ferocious hot sauce too.

I have also discovered that my Smokai smoke generator works much better when I undo the nut, pull the back off and clear all the tar out of the air intake. So good in fact, I’ve had some good feedback that this sauce might actually be too smoky, and I don’t want to make the same mistake many NZ craft breweries make with their hops. Sometimes more is not better! I’ll do a post soon about my experiments with smoking food, methinks.

23 April 201423 April 2014

Chipotle sauce

Penray in Otaki have pick your own chillies for $5.95 a kilo at the moment, so I was more or less obliged to take some late season red jalapeño off their hands in order to make chipotle sauce. A true chipotle is a completely dried and smoked red jalapeño chilli, and these are rehydrated in hot water to make a sauce. After a bit of looking online, I took an average and cut some corners, and I seem to have managed a good chipotle sauce with a fair amount of heat, a bonny colour, and a good blend of smoke, sour, citrus and fruity chilli flavours. First, equipment you will need:

A large roasting pan
Mortar & pestle
A smoker
Hickory chips for smoking
A very large jam saucepan, at least 8 litres (2 gallons)
Stick blender

Ingredients (these are approximate amounts, I pretty much made it up as I went along):

7 kg (15 lb) red jalapeño chillies
olive oil
1 bulb of garlic
2-3 large onions
2 tbsp cumin seed
2 tbsp salt
450 g (1 lb) tomato concentrate paste
300 ml (½ pint) juice of lemons and limes. That’s quite a lot; about 5 lemons and 10 limes, probably more
300 ml (½ pint) cider vinegar (other vinegars would probably do)
Lots of boiling water, to stop it glooping and spattering everywhere

Preheat the oven to grill at least 240°C.

Pour all the chillies in the sink, fill it up with cold water and give them a good old wash to get all the mud, insect poo and residue off the outside. De-stem and halve the chillies and place cut-side down in an oven tray. If you have sensitive skin, wear gloves; my arms were rather pleasantly on fire, from fingernail to elbow, for the rest of the day.

Put the tray of chillies in the oven to grill for at least 15 minutes or until the skins are well blistered and just beginning to blacken. (I had to do this step several times… 7 kg is a lot of chillies!)

While this is going on, get the smoker fired up with a few pine cones and kindling, and leave to burn down to form a good bed of embers.

Once the chillies are done, optionally remove the blistered skins (I left some of them on for a bit of texture and colour) and place them on trays in the smoker.

Pile up a load of hickory chips on the ember bed and close the lid on the smoker. Go drink some good wine, and leave chillies to smoke for a good few hours (at least 3 hours if you can manage it), the longer the better. Whenever the smoke starts to die down, get in there with some more wood chips and your best brass player breathing practice. Rinse and repeat for as long as you can be bothered, really.

At some point during the smoking stage, grind the cumin in the mortar & pestle, and finely dice the onions and garlic. In a hot frying pan, dry-toast the ground cumin seed until fragrant, then tip in a bit of oil and sauté the garlic and onion with the cumin, and set aside.

Pull your now gloriously smoky chillies out of the smoker and tip into a truly gargantuan saucepan (I don’t actually have one, so I used two merely enormous saucepans instead). Add the sautéed onions and all the other ingredients, and stick-blend it, adding sufficient boiling water to thin it to a sauce consistency.

Bring it to the boil then simmer it for about 2 hours, stirring as needed to keep the bottom from sticking. It should reduce slightly and thicken. Like any pickle or jam, if it is glooping and spattering everywhere and sticking to the bottom, it is probably too thick; add water.

Once it has reduced and become slightly glossy, transfer it into pre-heated jars and seal immediately. This is where you re-use all those jars with quarter-turn metal lids you kept. These jars are best because unlike plastic lid jars, they will vacuum seal as the contents cool, and won’t leak air over a 2-3 year shelf life.

This recipe made sauce for 13 x 330 ml jars and 4 x 500 ml bottles, which is about 6.5 litres (1½ gallons) altogether.

27 November 201327 November 2013

Paneer Masala

Ingredients:

1 turmeric root
1 clove of garlic
1 2cm bit of ginger
2 chillies
ghee or oil for frying
½ lb (250 g) paneer, cubed
1 tin of tomatoes
1 tsp of ground cumin, coriander, cardamom, cloves, pepper
1 red capsicum, sliced
¼ cup of cream
handful of fresh coriander

Grate the turmeric, garlic, ginger and chop the chillies, add some oil to a pan and fry for 30 seconds, then add the paneer and move it around until it’s browned on all sides (about 3-4 minutes). Throw in the tomatoes, spices and capsicum, and simmer for 2 minutes. Add cream and coriander at the very end and serve immediately on rice.

24 October 2010

Salmon cakes

Here’s how I made yummy salmon fish cakes out of last night’s leftovers.

275 g cooked salmon, bones and skin removed, flaked
275 g leftover potato bake, stovies, frittata etc. (or use mashed potato with a little grated cheese)
1 egg
a little chopped red – e.g. red pepper, chilli
a little chopped green – e.g. fresh herbs, rocket, spinach, green beans
1 tsp paprika and/or chilli powder
salt and pepper
flour

Bung it all in the processor and pulse until combined (but not puréed). Turn into a bowl and fold in enough flour to make a soft, not firm but not sloppy, mix.

For the crumb mix:

2-3 tbsp pumpkin seeds
1 tbsp cumin seeds

Grind to a coarse powder in a processor or mortar.

Roll the mix into patties and dust in a little of the crumb mix. Shallow fry in hot oil until golden. Since the ingredients are already cooked the mix only needs to heat through; they won’t take long! Serve immediately.

27 October 200912 January 2011

Testing steaks

How do you know when your steaks are done? Here’s a handy rule of thumb.

My cousin’s a bit of a chef. Poke the steak with the index finger of your right hand. Now touch the thumb and index finger of your left hand together, and poke the fleshy bit of your palm at the base of your left thumb. That’s rare. Now touch the thumb and middle finger together, and poke the same bit again. That’s medium rare. Thumb and ring finger, that’s medium, and thumb and little finger for well done. (photo to follow)

13 May 200929 October 2009

Beef Stroganoff

Serves 2, Preparation time 30 mins max.
If you’ve got some mushrooms lying around that need eating, this one’s perfect. Even though the earliest Stroganoff recipes didn’t have them, so what? Here’s a hark back to the original, but with mushrooms, otherwise it’s just wrong.

2-3 large brown field mushrooms
oil or lard for frying
12 oz (400 g) beef, sirloin, topside or similar
1 tbsp mustard seeds (or 2 tsp mustard powder)
1 tbsp flour
salt and pepper
1 glass of red wine (and one for the cook)
crême fraiche or sour cream (yoghurt if slimming)

Accompaniment:

3-4 potatoes
8 oz (250 g) spinach
1 tomato, deseeded and diced as a garnish.

Cut the mushrooms into strips and fry in a casserole with a little oil. Cover to sweat for a few minutes. Meanwhile, Cut up the beef into thin strips. Grind up the mustard seeds (or use mustard powder) and combine with the flour, salt and pepper in a bowl, and toss the beef strips in it to coat with the mustard mixture. Fry the beef in a skillet until browned, then add to the casserole. Add the wine to the skillet and stir to pick up the flavours, and pour into the casserole. Add the crême fraiche and stir. Simmer on low for 10-15 minutes.

This should be enough time to slice the potatoes thinly and sauté in the skillet for a few minutes. Add the spinach, cover and sweat until the spinach is done.

Mound the potato mixture in the centre of the plate as a base, and pile the Stroganoff on top. Drizzle the gravy over with a spoon, and garnish with deseeded diced tomato.

Professional!