The new, old-school kitchen tool.

Lewisburg.

We've been eating a lot of Thai food lately, due in part to two (relatively) new nigh-essential kitchen items I wish I'd had long ago: Real Thai: The Best of Thailand's Regional Cooking by Nancie McDermott and a real Thai mortar and pestle. It's an eight-inch-wide, fifteen-pound monster, carved from solid granite:



Here it's filled with a green curry paste, which took less time and effort than in either of my other two mortars.¹ Not that they don't have their uses, but big batches of curry paste aren't their forte. The food processor's not ideal, either; it's okay, but the texture usually ends up chunkier than I'd like.

Besides, this beast really gives you the feeling that you're making something through honest work. I'd picked it up from ImportFood.com, a specialty Thai mail-order website, which seemed to offer the best price, as well as the best shipping rate. As for the shipping, I now know why: they managed to fit it - just barely - inside a US Postal Service Priority Mail Flat Rate box. Judging by the beating that box had taken by the time it arrived on my doorstep, it stretched the capacity of that box to the limit - but at least the mortar's nigh indestructible.

I'm almost convinced I could pulverize gravel in it, should the need ever arise.

Now, don't be fooled by those little cans of red, green, yellow, mussaman, etc. curries in the corner Asian grocery. You know, the ones that look like pet food, with the smiling image of an elderly Thai grandmother on the wrapper? They're not bad, especially if you're pressed for time, but the flavor's essentially one-dimensional compared to the real thing - made from high-quality, fresh ingredients - and they're loaded with salt. You'll probably be adding a fair bit of salt to the rest of the recipe, between the fish sauce, soy sauce, shrimp paste, or whatever else a recipe calls for², so it's not like extra's helping. And I get a kick out of making the most of whatever ingredients happen to be handy.

Sometimes I like to add in a handful of roasted peanuts; other times, I like including some Szechuan peppercorns to get that mouth-numbing ma-la sensation. Chilli peppers will inevitably be whatever's available in season, so summer's the time for green curries, while red curries can wait until the string of peppers in the front window are dry.

Tonight's dinner'll probably be the last of the green curries for a while, as I expect last weekend's frosts put an end to fresh chillis for the year. But it's an opportunity to start enjoying the sweetness of the newly arrived winter squashes as a counterpoint to the chilli fire. Below's a modified version of a traditional Thai green curry paste, much like the one sitting in the mortar above - since some southeast Asian ingredients can be hard to come by - lemongrass and galangal, for example - this is the sort of version I'll end up making.

Green Curry Paste
Adapted from Nancie McDermott

Ingredients:

• 1 tablespoon whole coriander seed
  
• 1 teaspoon whole cumin seed
  
• 5 whole peppercorns
  
• 1 tablespoon finely chopped ginger
  
• 3 tablespoons chopped garlic
  
• 2 tablespoons chopped shallots
  
• 1 tablespoon lime zest
  
• ½ cup fresh green chillis, seeded and coarsely chopped
  
• ¼ cup fresh mint leaves
  
• 1 teaspoon salt
  
• 1 teaspoon shrimp paste

Directions

1. Toast the coriander and cumin seeds in a dry skillet over medium heat until fragrant, about three to five minutes. Shake the pan occasionally to prevent them burning. Set aside to cool, then add to the mortar with the peppercorns and grind to fine powder. Set aside.
   
   
2. Place the ginger, mint leaves and lime zest in the mortar, and pound until broken down. Add the garlic and shallot and continue grinding to create a smooth paste. Add the chillis and continue grinding.
   
   
3. Add the ground spices, salt, and shrimp paste and work until smooth. Use immediately or store, tightly sealed, in the refrigerator for up to a week.

* * * * *

¹The oldest is a small marble mortar that works well, but is small enough that it's really limited to grinding spices. The other's a Japanese suribachi, a ridged clay bowl, that's phenomenal for turning sesame seeds into sesame butter - particularly for fresh batches of hummus - but suffers from the same size limitation as the marble mortar.

²Salty is one of the essential dimensions of Thai cuisine, along with sweet, sour, spicy-hot and sometimes bitter. Even Thai limeade's got a salty edge to it.

Gelatin clarification.

Lewisburg.

Molecular gastronomy: cooking for the gadget- and science-obsessed. Cool, complicated, and making use of anything and everything in the race to be different. So, for the most part, not the sort of cooking any of us do at home.

Exception: gelatin clarification, as explained by Harold McGee in last week's New York Times. It's slow - which is why I'm writing about it nearly a week after the article - but remarkably effective. For example:



On the right, unclarified duck stock. On the left, the same stock after the clarification. Pale, clear, and with a more intense flavor. It's a trade-off for the lack of body, of gelatin, which served as the filter.

So, yes, it works. Well, and without much effort - though I do find that the process works better in a slightly warmer environment than my refrigerator, which I keep cool enough that the stock was quite slow to melt. Things moved along much better once I took to transferring the straining consommé to an insulated cooler with an ice pack, replacing it every so often (and keeping it all in the refrigerator when I wasn't around to keep tabs on it).

Next step: creating consommés out of unusual ingredients. In addition to their uses in cooking - broths, poaching liquids, etc. - they'd be perfect for infusing flavors into new places. Sorbets with flavors beyond fruit juice and infused herbs. Brilliantly clear cocktails - the Bloody Mary, the Bellini - with traditional or new flavor combinations; it's like creating the nonalcoholic equivalent of homemade bitters or vermouth. Breads - from crusty loaves to tender crepes - that don't have to sacrifice texture to get aromas of fruits, nuts, or cheeses. In essence, any place that water would go, there's now an opportunity to add another layer of flavor.

If only I had another refrigerator and freezer.

Chawan-mushi.

Lewisburg.



Custards are neat. I've mentioned it before, but I find the structural potential of egg proteins absolutely amazing. Plus, I really like the flavor of a good egg - it's hard to go wrong with those from local, free-range birds - and the trick becomes thinking of new ways to incorporate them into a meal.

Not that eggs, essentially plain, aren't a regular feature around here. Poached, fried or scrambled, they tend to make a breakfast appearance at least once a week.

Custards, though, are a big step in elegance for minimal effort. Aside from taking extra care and time to prevent them overcooking, they're hardly any more difficult or complicated than scrambled eggs. Crème brûlée always surprises me with its enduring popularity, thought I suspect that it's because people don't realize how effortlessly simple it is. Then again, most people won't take the time or effort to make chocolate-chip cookies.

Dessert custards - the crème brûlée, the flan - are well and good every great once in a while, but they're rich and sweet. Quiche is more to my taste, being a pie and an egg custard all at once. But if I'm not in the mood for making a crust? There's always chawan-mushi.

Chawan-mushi's a savory Japanese egg custard, filled with vegetables and chicken or seafood. Because of the juices and fibrous material in the vegetables, the custard overcoagulates in places and accumulates pockets of the juices. Though this would be a disaster for crème brûlée, as Harold McGee notes, "the Japanese expect chawan-mushi to weep and treat it as a combination of custard and soup." It sounds odd, but is surprisingly good; even the unusual texture remains soft and smooth, with a custard so soft it's nearly liquid itself. And, unlike other custards, it's at its best when served hot.

I have two recipes for chawan-mushi in two different Japanese cookbooks, but they're quite similar. Both use about two cups' worth of dashi to three eggs¹; both feature boiled gingko nuts, shiitake mushrooms and chicken. One also includes shrimp; the other is titled "Egg Custard with Chicken, Shrimp and Vegetables" but doesn't actually have any in the recipe. Granted, it's the one that actually came from Japan, Japanese Home Style Cooking, and it does suffer from the occasional minor translation error. But the recipe's spot-on.

Chawan-mushi
Serves four
Adapted from Japanese Home Style Cooking

Ingredients

• 3 eggs
  
• 2 cups dashi
  
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
  
• 1 teaspoon soy sauce, plus extra for marinade
  
• 1 teaspoon mirin
  
• 3 ounces chicken
  
• Sake
  
• 4 shiitake mushrooms
  
• ¼ cup water
  
• ¼ teaspoon sugar
  
• 8 boiled gingko nuts
  
• 1-inch slice of kamaboko (boiled fish paste)
  
• Mitsuba, for garnish

Directions

1. Mix the salt, mirin and ½ teaspoon soy sauce with the dashi and set aside.
   
   
2. Dice the chicken and sprinkle with soy sauce and sake; let marinate for at least fifteen minutes. Cut the kamaboko into four slices.
   
   
3. Place the mushrooms, water, ½ teaspoon soy sauce and sugar into a pan; simmer until the mushrooms are tender. When done, cut into bite-size pieces.
   
   
4. Whisk the eggs in a mixing bowl, blend in the dashi mixture, and strain through a fine-mesh sieve. Divide the chicken, mushrooms, kamaboko and gingko nuts evenly into four ramekins, and slowly pour the custard mixture overtop.
   
   
5. Steam the custards - either in a water bath or in a steamer basket - for fifteen to twenty minutes, or until set. Garnish with the mitsuba, and serve immediately.

That all sounds well and good, except that I don't often have many of those ingredients around the house. Fortunately, the method is readily adaptable to whatever happens to be handy.

The picture above is of a chawan-mushi made with duck stock and sauteed shiitake mushrooms; I'd been making duck confit and had a lot of carcass left over. Any meat, seafood or vegetable broth would fit the bill perfectly, and any tender - or cooked until so - vegetables or other ingredients would fit well inside. Do be sure to leave enough room for the custard, though - that smooth, soft texture is really a highlight of this dish.

Oh, and one more thing: The Oxford Companion To Food, interestingly, points out that chawan-mushi "is the only dish in the whole repertoire of Japanese cookery to be eaten with a spoon."

* * * * *

¹McGee points out that three yolks per cup of liquid are necessary for a custard to be unmolded; the more eggs per unit of liquid, the firmer the custard. At half that ratio, chawan-mushi is a decidedly soft-textured custard.

The Museum To Summer Produce.

Lewisburg.



Canning isn't exactly at the height of its popularity these days; mason jars show up more commonly as cups at coffeeshops than filled with the overflow of garden tomatoes. But I'm not one who regularly follows popular trends¹ or, honestly, even has a strong clue of what's going on in popular culture.

So I've begun my "museum to summer produce". I recall an article in the New York Times a few years ago, by Matt and Ted Lee, about quick pickling techniques; they noted that they had no interest in recreating that type of museum that their grandmother had painstakingly built every year to put up summer's bounty for winter consumption. They used those same techniques, sans the boiling-water canner, for near-immediate gratification. And I can't argue with that - I've got quick-pickled jalapeños in the refrigerator right now.

But I've also set aside jams. Blueberries, sour cherries, and even a few elderberries are hunkered in the freezer, bound for winter pies and cobblers. Tomato seconds are carefully sealed in jars in the basement, for chili and pasta sauces when it's no longer too hot to let dinner simmer away on the stovetop for hours. Pickles are curing in spices and vinegar brine; for the first time in years, we don't have dill overtaking, so they're garlicky, spicy pickles instead. And a string of cayenne chillis are slowly drying in the front window.



No, it's not the simplest solution, but the effort now helps alleviate the depression of the all-too-frequent supermarket trips throughout the winter. Especially in a small town, where "local" and "organic" are more difficult to come by, even at the peak of the summer season. Perhaps most importantly - this year, when we're essentially off-balance, without the established networks and relationships and personal production that kept us well-stocked in excellent food - it's an opportunity to keep the practice going. No, we won't have enough tomatoes to last all winter, unless we decide to eat significantly fewer than usual. But it's a step, and my skills stay sharper for next year, when we'll be better able to stock up as summer arrives.

And, one of these days, I'll be growing those tomatoes and peppers and such again.

* * * * *

¹No, I don't know anything about any current shows on television - we've been watching old episodes of The Tick, the cartoon version from 1994-1996. I don't know what's playing on the radio these days - I've been listening to John Zorn's Bar Kokhba (1996) and Tom Waits' Closing Time (1973). And I live in a place where the locals^a still consider the jalapeño pepper something of a novelty.

^aIn central Pennsylvania, like numerous other predominantly rural areas, you're bound to be considered an outsider for an alarmingly long time; around here, I'm told it's about thirty years. On the other hand, if you've grown up here, you can move away for twenty years, and still be considered a local. So most of the folks at the University aren't locals; I'm definitely not.