Baccalata: Glory to Cod in the Highest

For our little group’s most recent soiree gastronomique I proposed the theme of baccalà, or cod that has been transformed by the process of salting, storage, and desalting into something different and distinctly better than the rather bland, white protein favored for fish and chips (and rather little else). I also volunteered to procure the main ingredient for whomever wanted, and that turned out to be the event’s biggest challenge. It may be easy over there in Europe—just toodle on in to your local epicerie—but here in land of sliced bread it ain’t so easy. After a couple of chowhound inquiries, a few phone calls, and a mad rush-hour dash from San Diego to Harbor City I finally got some from a Spanish sausage company (where I couldn’t resist also buying some chorizo and pricey-but-worth-it Bellota ham).

For a Saturday night dinner party, I started soaking the fish in fresh, cold water on Tuesday evening, keeping things in the fridge and changing the water once every 24 hours or so. Tasting the water when you change is a good way of telling how much more you need to desalt—when the water is just mildly saline after the baccalà has been soaking in it for a day then the fish is about ready to use. I have overdone it with the desalting before, and the results are not so good. Friday morning I divided the fish three ways: Giusy needed quite a bit for her baccalà alla vicentina, Veronique needed less for a brandade, and I needed even less for either the quenelles or the salgadinhas, but since I was making two dishes I made sure to keep enough.

Here are the four baccalà dishes.

Quenelles: This is basically a classic fish dumpling usually made with pike. I substituted cod, of course, and ground about 300 grams of uncooked baccalà (desalted) into a pasty mass, then ran the paste through a food mill to remove any stringy matter. Added a pinch of white pepper and put this away for later.

The other part of these quenelles was a choux dough: 1 stick (½ cup) butter and 1 cup water, brought to a boil and to which I added 1 cup of flour. Stirring continuously the dough gets very solid and greasy and pulls nicely away from the side of the saucepan. Transferring that to a glass bowl, I then added three eggs, one at a time. This part is kinda fun. The mixture gets all slimy and lumpy after each egg is added but it soon turns smooth and the dough gets stickier with each egg. I let this cool to room temp until it was time to add the fish. [But see Karen's recipe on this blog if you want to make cream puffs.]

My take on quenelles is to mix the fish paste with the non-sweet pate choux in about a 40-60 mix (40% fish)—no need to be too precise. The fully mixed fishy choux dough then gets formed into the quenelle shape (do this with two tablespoons as you drop them into the simmering liquid--I used a court bouillon with chinese chives, parsley and oregano) and poached until they puff and float for a minute or so. I like to transfer the poached quenelles into a baking dish with a light tomato sauce on the bottom, and bake them for a bit longer—they get even puffier and lighter and develop a more interesting texture than only-poached quenelles.

So anyways, I thought the cod quenelles were pretty good, though I think they come out better with fresh fish. I also overbaked them a bit, hoping that they would puff out more. Oh well, they got eaten.

Salgadinhas de bacalhau e ervilhas: This is my take on a standard croquette made throughout Spain and Portugal--my brilliant innovation is the addition of peas, which was inspired by a conversation with my distant Brazilian cousin Pamela.

After prepping some of my aliquot of fish for quenelles, I poached the rest and flaked it (getting rid of the darker parts) and added a nice handful of frozen peas. Boiled some potatoes, ran them through a ricer, added a splash of heavy cream. I also had a sofrito with onions and garlic cooked down in some bacon fat, and I added that to the potatoes. When the potato/sofrito mixture was cool, I adjusted salt to taste and then added two eggs, the cod/pea mixture. The breading was good ol' Japanese panko crumbs.

You can form and bread these guys a couple of hours ahead of time, but make sure to fry them shortly before serving. I have the oil heating at around the time guests arrive and fry them (not too awkward in this group) while we drink. Put the quenelles in one oven while the other cooks warm their dishes in the other oven. More drinks (and I'm starting to sound like Trevor). It's terribly nice to hang with cooks. Anyways, the salgadinhas were good, though I do think that croquettes are generally neither horrifically bad nor insanely good. Being fried and crunchy and potato-ey, they were the preferred cod dish among the F1, who were all in my son's room playing Wii games while the rest of us blasphemed away (yes, lots of Cod jokes) in the kitchen.

Brandade de morue: Veronique (yes, a real French person) made this lovely dish, also based on baccalà and potatoes but working very nicely as a spread on crusty bread. Here's her recipe:

1 lb of baccalà, 1 lb of potatoes, sage, laurel leaves, thyme, warm milk, olive oil, garlic, black pepper

Poach the fish with the thyme, laurel and sage for about 10 min. Boil or steam the potatoes and cut them in pieces. Put in a blender with 2 cloves of garlic, and pepper. Blend well and add warm milk (about ¼ cups and olive oil until you get a smooth puree but not liquid; taste it as you go as you do not want the olive oil to dominate. You can also add a little bit of heavy cream if you want. Top with grated Swiss cheese and put in the oven to warm up and broil. Enjoy!

Baccalà alla vicentina con polenta: Giusy (yes, a real Italian person) made this, and it was excellent.

Cut the desalted baccalà into smallish pieces. Thinly slice up some onion (however much you want) and cook it down with some good olive oil until it's transparent. Add a couple of desalted anchovy fillets to the onion and keep it going on for about five more minutes, then turn off the fire and add some chopped parsley. Coat the baccalà with flour and spread them out in a glass baking dish. Spread out the sofrito over the fish pieces and pour in some whole milk, just enough to cover the fish. Top with grated parmigiano reggiano, salt and pepper (don't go crazy with the salt). Drizzle on a nice dose of olive oil, and cook this all in the oven (covered with foil presumably), at 250°F (125°C) for 3-4 hours. This dish is best if prepared a day in advance.

For the polenta, heat up a stick of butter (½ cup) with ¼ cup of olive oil in an amply-sized pot, and add three cloves of garlic (minced), salt, pepper and a healthy pinch of Italian seasoning (which here means a mix of dried basil, oregano, marjoram, and sage). After the garlic has cooked a bit add 2 cups of milk and 3 cups of chicken stock, and just when it come to a boil (i.e. before the milk curdles), add 2 cups of corn meal in a thin stream, stirring continuously and taking care not to get burned by the splashy bubbles of hot polenta. This will get pretty thick by the time the cornmeal is fully cooked, and that's the time to add ½ cup of grated parmigiano. Buon appetito. [translation by Jeff]

Giusy's take on polenta is quite different from mine—where I use salted water she uses an elaborate mixture of milk and chicken broth, butter and olive oil and dried herbs. This adds considerable flavor and makes a polenta that is lighter and better able to keep a nice texture for some time after being made and transported—an important consideration when you're taking polenta to someone else's house. She also insists that her dish is not a brasato, although I really like the thought that this is an example of how one can be perfectly secular while still braising Cod.

We also had the contribution of wine and a cheese platter from Claudia (yes, a real German person) and Mary (yes, a real Scottish person), who normally cooks, though their kitchen was under repair (another good reason for having a basement instead of building your house on a friggin' concrete slab!). Morgane, Veronique's daughter provided a chocolate torte. Giusy also brought a Pugliese dish of mashed fava beans and greens (should be puntarelle, a kind of chicory, but she could only find baby collards). I added a pavlova with zabaglione-tinged whipped cream.

Tortellini al brodo

February in the French Alps means snow. Lots of snow. A week of continuous snowfall. Snow means chilly weather. The best remedy for chills is my Northern Italian grandmother's: soup! Many people find soup boring, but in our household we love soup, or zuppa or minestrone or minestra... but then Italian soups are full of yummy things, like pasta!
Tortellini are always a treat, so put them in soup and it's a sure to be a success. It's also a very simple & quick recipe.
Usually I make my own broth from a chicken carcass (or beef, lamb, fish), celery, carrots, onion, garlic & laurel (add whatever other vegetables are in the fridge) and I do occasionally add homemade tortellini (on the rare occasions that there are leftovers). Broth keeps 5 days in the fridge & freezes well, so I automatically make some when I have the ingredients. However, commercially available broths can be substituted when in a rush, as well as the tortellini.
Just bring the broth to a boil, add the tortellini, simmer until cooked (al dente). Serve with grated parmesan.

TIPS: Use dried tortellini (as they tend to absorb liquid so will over cook), preferably with a meat filling.

CACIUCCO ALLA LOMBARDA

This started out as a caciucco alla livornese, a hearty fish stew from Livorno, but then I realized that I've never actually eaten caciucco or even been to Livorno, though I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted this stew to taste like. I have had triglie alla livornese—red mullet stewed in a tomato base—which I liked a lot, and my very Swiss-Milanese grandmother-in-law noted to me that while the triglie were good, the little bony dudes were a lot of work, and the caciucco was something that she liked a lot more. She was not known for liking to work very hard for anything.

So although Adri is a hard worker, she somehow inherited Nonna Elsa's appreciation for boneless seafood, and although I actually doubt that any real caciucco has ever been so carefully relieved of bones, this is the way it would need to be for tonight's meal. Oh, and Adri really likes clams, too, so I'm buying some of them as well. [Weather and tides won't let me go looking for wild ones today.]

The impetus for this little idea was a brace of scorfani (scorpionfish) that I brought home from a wintertime fishing trip. Lo scorfano basically cries out "make soup," and it isn't just me who thinks this. There's no ingredient more indispensible for any European-style fish stew (from zuppa di pesce to bouillabaisse) than some kind of scorpionfish or poisson rouge. The flesh is excellent on its own, but the stock made from the bones and head is simply the very best fish stock possible.

I began by gutting and thoroughly rinsing the three scorfani (plus one treefish—a bonus catch), from which I then cut completely boneless fillets. Clean heads, bones, and skin went into a pot and the fillets into the fridge. To the fish in the pot, I added cold water, salt, a handful of slightly smooshed garlic cloves, and put this on gentle heat to simmer for about an hour. After that, I strained out the stock through a colander, and then through a fine-mesh strainer.

This fish base is enriched with a tomato mixture, which started as a sofrito (I use the Spanish spelling of this word, just to frustrate my spouse) of olive oil, onions, garlic and a small potato that's been diced, to which I added a box of diced tomatoes and let reduce for a bit, then added it to the fish stock and then blended things somewhat with my new wand-type blender. Tasted it—rich but a bit tame, so I added a teaspoon of a paste made from peperoncini from Calabria—this is basically a sambal oelek with an Italian and not Asian flavor. At this point I've got a red stew base that is rich in flavor and somewhat thickened by the potatoes in the sofrito. But more potatoes are needed for the stew, so a couple more are cut into bite-sized chunks and simmered in the pot for a few minutes.

While the second round of potatoes are cooking, I wrestled with the clams. I got littlenecks, which are pretty large clams, and my plan was to open them and put them in at the last minute with the fish. But damned, these things were clammed shut, and I couldn't get my knife in between the valves. Only one thing to do—cook them until the adductor muscles detached from one of the shells and the clams started to open. This added time to the prep, but this is still better than having the clams with their massive shells in the caciucco. Anyways, once I got the clams out of their shells and added them and the scorfano fillets to the stew, the potatoes were very tender.

After about four minutes (the time it took to set the table and call in the spouse for dinner) the soup was ready.

Meatloaf (Italian version)

Meatloaf can often evoke groans, but this recipe, handed down from my grandmother, has the opposite effect. Grandma made this for us kids & would improvise with whatever was in the fridge in terms of the filling (you'll see!).
Usually I serve the sauce from the meatloaf with pasta and the meat seperately, Italian style.
TIP: ALL meat must be taken out of the fridge at least 20 minutes (room temperature) before cooking.

1 lb ground beef
1 egg
4 tbsps bread crumbs
4 tbsps chopped parseley
4 tbsps grated parmesan cheese
salt & pepper
1 hard boiled egg
2 slices of ham, salami....
1 small onion
1 medium carrot
1 glass red wine (optional)
12 oz tomato sauce

In a large bowl, mix ground beef, raw egg, breadcrumbs, parsely & parmesan. Salt & pepper to taste.
On a flat surface, make a ball with the mixture, make a hole in the center.
Wrap the hard boiled egg in the cold cut.
Place in the center of the meat mixture then press the ground beef around it & make an oval form.
Cut the onion in four.
Chop carrot.
Sauté onion & carrot in olive oil or butter in a deep pan.
Add meatloaf, lower to a medium heat.
When it browns on one side turn gently with the aide of two utensils.
When the loaf is browned on all sides, add a glass of red wine.
Cook down the wine, then add the tomato sauce.
Simmer about 30 minutes.

Serve the sauce with pasta & parmesan cheese.

Zucchini pasta-pasta alle zucchine-Chris & Karen's recipes

The following is my friend Chris' recipe, as she sent it in. Chris is a former caterer, with better credentials than me, so I never hesitate to add her contributions!

I just sent my zucchini pasta.
Madolin sliced Zucchini sauteed in olive oil, until starting to caramelized.
Capellini, pasta water, Salt Pepper and a little more olive oil to taste.
No garlic, no cheese. Just that.
It is lovely. .........So a no brainier, and a fast feast.


Zucchini pasta was a huge trend in Italy about 20 years ago, I remember eating variations of the dish all summer. This is my preferred version, made with saffron & served with spaghetti. My mother also adds a little heavy cream at the end & will serve it even with other types of pasta. Both of us have served the sauce on gnocchi.

When purchasing zucchini, select the smallest & firmest as they are the most likely to be sweet.

1 small zucchini per person
1 medium onion
1 tsp saffron (or to taste)
olive oil
fresh grated parmesan cheese

Put on the water for the pasta or gnocchi.
Cut the zucchini in thin slices or chunks, depending on the type of pasta or gnocchi.
Slice onion.
Sauté in a large saucepan with olive oil until golden, adding a few extra tbsps to make a sauce.
Just before the pasta or gnocchi are cooked, add the saffron & stir until evenly distributed.

Drain the pasta or gnocchi but leaving a few tbsps of water. Keep some of it on the side.
Add to the saucepan and stir. If too dry, add a few tbsps of pasta water or some heavy cream (like mom!).

Serve immediately, with grated parmesan.

Eggplant Parmesan-melanzane alla parmigiana

Another of my grandmother's recipes. As a child, this was one of my favorites. It has become a staple in my home as the kids & hubby would eat this once a week, if I let them. As with all Italian cuisine, there are regional variations....

Like most traditional recipes, this should be made ahead of time, even the day before, as it adds to the flavor!

I make a variation of this dish by substituting zucchini for the eggplant.

TIPS:
Preparation: Eggplants are a summer vegetable, one I usually purchase at the local farmer's market. In winter I must purchase them in supermarkets & they tend to be a bit bitter. In which case, before frying I salt the eggplant to get the bitterness out. Simply slice the eggplant as thinly as possible, place in a collander & cover with salt. Preferably weight it down. Leave to sit for at least 1/2 an hour. The slices will seep water out, so throw that away & pat them dry. By salting them, the eggplants will also soak up less oil.

Frying: Select a heavy pan with at least a few inches up the sides. Pour in a generous amount of oil as you should never add to it while frying. The oil should be HOT, kept at a steady temperature trhoughout. Do not add ingredients until the boil in the oil. Do not over fill the pan, leave a reasonable amount of space among the food slices. By following these simple steps, the food will soak up less oil & will cook more quickly.

3 large eggplants
16 oz fresh or prepared tomato sauce
1 fresh mozzarella
1 garlic clove
fresh grated parmesan cheese (non of that freeze dried sawdust!)
olive oil
oil for frying
salt & pepper

Prepare eggplant. Even if not salting, pat it dry & set aside.

Preheat oven to medium temperature.

Heat oil in large frying pan.
Add as many slices of eggplant as possible.
Fry until golden, then scoop them out with as ittle oil as possible. Set aside on a plate covered in papertowels to soak up extra oil.

Meanwhile, heat a few tsps of olive oil in a pot.
Add a whole clove of garlic.
Add tomato sauce (a basil leaf if available).
Let simmer while frying eggplant.

Cut up the mozzarella in cubes. Set aside.

Layer the eggplant slices on the bottom of a pyrex or ceramic oven dish.
Thinly cover with tomato sauce, then mozzarella, sprinkle with parmesan, salt & pepper.
Repeat layering until all ingredients are used up.
Sprinkle extra parmesan on the final layer.
Bake in oven until crisped, about 40 minutes.

I usually serve this with spaghetti, using the sauce from the eggplant on the pasta but eating the dish seperately.