I recently hatched the idea that I was going to start making pizza. Still a young and impressionable food mind, I’m embarrassingly susceptible to trends publicized in the food magazines that I read.

It didn’t seem like it would be that hard. Get the proper equipment, and start baking. And the capital outlay didn’t seem like so much either: just that heavy stone that hangs out on the bottom of the oven.

My first effort took place about a month ago. I didn’t get very far. Not only am I an inexperienced pizza maker, I’m also a novice baker. Specifically, I’d never tried to make dough rise before. And, sure enough, on this first attempt, thanks to general ignorance about the process, I failed to flag a couple of early missteps. The result: my dough didn’t rise. Or at least it didn’t rise enough for my satisfaction. It went into the oven to make some half-decent breadsticks, and the onions I had been melting all afternoon long wound up dressing the pasta.

Undaunted, I tried again yesterday. Making something new is a learning process, right? Who am I to think that I’m a culinary savant? And I did get farther along this time. With a little supervision (thanks, Katy), the dough rose properly. And I managed to equip myself properly for the whole process. I not only had the stone, but I also found a pizza peel in my parents’ basement– essential for getting the pizza on and off the blazing hot stone.

With one caveat. This maneuver apparently requires some finesse. And yesterday, I didn’t have it. I stretched out the first dough (perhaps a little too thin in the center), stationed it on the peel, and distributed my toppings. Next stop, the oven. Well, the wheels got caught in the mud. A thin crust and a poorly floured peel meant that my pie wasn’t going anywhere. I fashioned it into a crude calzone and hoped for better results with the second one.

This time around, I exercised greater caution with stretching the dough, but to no avail. Timidity in flouring the peel led to a similar result as the first time.

But I won’t be stopped in this mission. I got closer this time than I did during my first attempt last month. So, I’m declaring Winter 2009 the season of pizza. I will master it. And there will be pictures in this space.

I can attribute much of the success of tonight’s stew to my choice of braising liquids. This was actually the first time I’d attempted a beer braise- the recipe recommended Stout, but after a half-hearted attempt to find a local-crafted brewed stout that I would want to consume the remaining amount of the six-pack, I resolved to braise using the big bottle of Kasteel Brown I had lying around.

Brown, or Donker as it is labeled, isn’t a wimpy beer. Weighing in at 11% abv, Donker wields an undeniable punch. Both the nose and the palate reveal serious stewed fruits: think raisins and prunes. Cooked for several hours as a braise, the liquid was still assertive. But it didn’t overwhelm the stew, Instead, the beer lent its distinctive flavor, while demonstrating that it could be well behaved when guests are around.

The stew also benefited from the addition of the lardo I procured yesterday. I’ve recently been indoctrinated in the school that argues that fat is crucial in “brokering” the flavors of other ingredients (something that certainly was not news to my tastebuds.) Well, what better fat that cured and seasoned hog back. A couple thin slices, chopped and cooked until translucent were one of my building blocks tonight.

Provencal Daube (in progress)

Does this mark a return to (semi) regular blogging? Quite possibly– a reconfiguration of my working schedule, with a shift to the 9-5 may clear up precious minutes for more frequent updates.Immediately, I just needed to find an activity to distract me from monitoring the simmering progress of the dish pictured above, a recipe taken from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Meat Book.

Fearnley-Whittingstall insists that in cooking stews, “like boiling, simmering involves the rising of bubbles to the surface– but only just. The fewer the bubbles, and the longer the interval between them, the slower, and better, the simmer.”

All well and good, but I’m hoping to eat sometime this evening, preferably before 10 pm. Consequently, I keep tip-toeing over to the stove to inspect the surface of the stew, straining to see one or two bubbles in the brief period of time that I watch, while resisting the urge to intensify the heat, even a tiny amount.

I guess I can always rail at Hugh if it winds up being unsatisfactory. But it smells good, so far.

Get the cardiologist on the line

This cut of beef, pictured above as an integral part of Sunday’s breakfast, is a bit of a mystery. Procured from a Pennsylvania purveyor at the Clark Park Farmer’s Market on Saturday, the “Ranch Steak” is the ideal size for the “steak” half of the classic “steak and eggs” combination. Grass-fed and dry-aged, the steak had a nice degree of marbling. I seasoned it with salt and pepper, cooked it for about five minutes in a pan over medium-high heat, then put it under the broiler to cook the other side, until the steak reached medium rare.

I think this was the optimal method for preparing the steak, and I was certainly pleased with the results. But I wasn’t certain, because the cut of meat is a bit of a mystery. My two most reliable cookbooks for general information, Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything and the 1985 edition of The Joy of Cooking, both provide clear diagrams of a cow and a side of beef, respectively, illustrating the provenance of each individual cut of beef, as well as the preferred method for cooking each cut. But neither book acknowledges the ranch steak. Did I eat some sort of phantom cut of meat? Or does the ranch steak go by a different name?

Luckily, the internet is functioning properly, and Wikipedia also has a nice diagram of a cow. Apparently, I was suckered:

The Ranch steak comes from the chuck cut of a cow, namely the shoulder. Technically it is called a “boneless chuck shoulder center cut steak”, but supermarkets, in an effort to get the patron a better sounding as well as an easier to remember name, dubbed it the “Ranch steak”.

The demands of the market influence small-scale producers too. My local farm evidently followed the lead of the big supermarkets, labeling my “boneless chuck shoulder center cut steak” something more commercially viable.

This labeling also disguised the fact that, at least by the book, the chuck steaks are tough, and best cooked by moist-heat procedures. But my steak, while no filet mignon, was tender enough, both to the knife and my teeth. Maybe this is where the grass-fed beef makes a difference. According to Michael Pollan, grass-fed beef does have less saturated fat and more omega-3 fatty acids than corn-fed beef. And maybe the overall nature of production matters. These cattle were not raised on a massive industrial cattle ranch, but instead on a small farm, where they were presumably pumped less full of drugs and lived a generally more satisfying existence before heading to the abattoir.

All speculation aside, with this particular steak, I will happily flout the advice of the cookbooks and prepare over dry-heat, along with eggs and potatoes, for a lazy weekend breakfast.

I had never actually made a stew before, but a package of burgoo mix received as a gift, combined with a number of people coming by to drink the excess beer belonging to a brewer friend seemed to present a prime opportunity.
For the uninitiated out there, a grouping that included me until several years ago, burgoo (accent on the first syllable) is a stew, born in Kentucky, that requires the inclusion of three types of meat. According to the 1995 edition of The Joy of Cooking,

This thick, long simmered potpourri, a catch-as-catch-can mixture of meats, fowl, and garden gleanings—with squirrel thrown in, in some authentic local versions—has an assortment of Old World forbearers as numerous and far-flung as the Gypsies… But in Kentucky it came into its own as the local solution to feeding the multitudes; it used to be made, in amounts to serve several hundreds, in a huge hog-butchering kettle over an outdoor fire, providing an occasion for great socializing, a “stirring” overnight vigil.

My burgoo fell short of this standard on multiple counts. It may have served a dozen, with enough for several more sitting in the refrigerator as leftovers, but I was nowhere close to feeding an entire village. I can’t decide whether to blame this on lack of ambition or of a huge hog-butchering kettle. While it took seven hours for the stew to cook, there was not even a spark of “great socializing” until the last hour; before then, the cooking was observed by me, and me alone. And most disconcertingly, there wasn’t any squirrel. If any of the butchers in the Reading Terminal Market stocked squirrel, I might have been tempted, but instead I settled for a combination of beef, chicken, and pork.

After simmering almost four pounds of meat in a stockpot half-filled with water for over two hours, until it was tender and falling to pieces, I added the contents of the packaged mix. This consisted of lima beans, some dehydrated vegetables, and an assortment of spices. I went beyond the instructions on the mix, not only adding the prescribed cans of tomato paste, but also contributing some potatoes, carrots, and onions, as well as some Kentucky bourbon-barrel Worcester sauce. These cooked for over four hours, as the lima beans proved recalcitrant to softening . The authenticity of the dish likely also suffered from the absence of okra, but I doubt that the Burgoo Police has any jurisdiction north of the Mason-Dixon line. Authentic or not, I was pleased with the outcome, and the only attendee from Kentucky who could have pointed out the shortcomings happened to be a vegetarian.

This is someone else’s picture. Trust me, the one I cooked looked just as good.

Unlike other American cities like New York, Chicago, and even Ann Arbor, Michigan, Indo-Chinese cooking has apparently not yet caught on in Philadelphia. And that’s a shame.

What passes for Chinese food in North India would be largely unrecognizable to anyone from China (while the same can also be said for much Chinese food in America.) But authenticity aside, this “Chinese”, or Indo-Chinese, food is very popular in urban areas across North India as a form of “fast food.” (I’ve never traveled in South India, so I can’t speak for its footprint there).

Indo-Chinese cooking generally involves prolific use of both the deep-fryer and chilies. While neither of these elements are out of place in Chinese cooking, the Indian enthusiasm for chilies trumps most Chinese regional cuisines, with the exception of Szechwan. The key difference is the other spices and flavorings involved: in Indo-Chinese cooking, chicken or vegetables are also seasoned with ginger, garlic. Then, after deep-frying, they are doused in a spicy-sweet sauce, similar to ketchup. Here, the best option is Maggi chili sauce, available in Indian grocery stores here in U.S., but ketchup will do in a pinch. At the end, Indo-Chinese dishes are garnished with even more chiles, ginger, and cilantro, accoutrements rarely seen in traditional Chinese food.

Americans are slowly catching on to Indo-Chinese, as evidenced by its inclusion as #32 in Saveur Magazine’s 100 list. The issue included a recipe for Gobi Manchurian, an Indo-Chinese preparation for deep-fryer cauliflower that I had consumed frequently in India, though not as frequently as Chicken Manchurian. For a dish largely considered “fast food,” the preparation was complex when I made it a little over a month ago, as the deep-frying was preceded by pureeing, steaming, whisking, and plenty of chopping, while followed by the cooking of the sauce. Still, I was pleased with the outcome, and intend to make the dish again.

But because of the labor-intensive nature of the dish, I’m on the lookout for restaurants in the area that will do the work for me. On a walk in Upper Darby around the 69th Street Terminal this afternoon, I passed an Indo-Pakistani restaurant with a computer-printed sign in the window that read “We Have Indo-Chinese Food.” I went inside, looked at a menu, and didn’t see anything validating the sign.

I then asked the man behind the counter if they did serve any Indo-Chinese. He responded, “We have chicken fried rice…”

I interrupted him: “What about gobi manchurian, chicken manchurian, chicken chili…”

My inquiry was then turned over to the manager, who told me that they no longer have what I was looking for. “I would make six or seven, and only one or two get ordered,” he said. Stymied, I headed out the door. The search for real Indo-Chinese in Philly continues.

I’d be content to eat this seven mornings a week

I’ve only recently admitted New York’s supremacy over Philadelphia in the realm of bagels. For years, a mistaken sense of local pride convinced me that the two were, at the very least, comparable. Too many trips to New York, with mornings featuring bagels from Murray’s and H and H in Manhattan, and most recently Bergen in Brooklyn, must have pounded some objectivity into me.

As a result, I feel little shame about driving fifteen minutes to the edge of the city, at the corner of Haverford and City Line, to a small shopping-center storefront parsimoniously named NY Bagels. While I once might have found such a concession off-putting, I now have no trouble acknowledging that these bagels, even with their foreign title, are the best I’ve had in the region.

Once inside, the bare-bones establishment looks as if it was lifted off a New York street. Racks of fresh bagels sit on one side of the register, with open plastic bins of multiple varieties of cream cheese in a glass cooler on the other side. Predictably weak coffee urns rest on the counter in front of the windows.

I don’t make the trip for the ambience, or the coffee, but instead, the bagels. Boiled before being baked to a golden brown crust, these bagels are puffy but not gargantuan, large enough to fill me up for several hours, but not so big as to invite a sense of gluttony.

Finally, a note on cream cheese: while living for multiple years in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I relied on a ersatz Jewish deli and gourmet foods juggernaut named Zingerman’s, just a block away from my home, for bagels and sometimes cream cheese. The less said about the bagels, the better (apart from the fact that they were “buy six, get six free” on Tuesdays.)

Zingerman’s also offered an “Original Cream Cheese,” made with a “traditional recipe” and “handicraft techniques”, and free of mysterious additives like Xanthan Gum. I have no shortage of enthusiasm for traditional recipes and handicraft techniques, especially with regard to cheese. But “artisanal” just doesn’t taste right to me on my bagel. Give me the supermarket stuff any day. Here, at least, I can count on the name “Philadelphia.”