Tag Archives: balsamic

Peach Caprese Toasts

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Food blog June 2015-0973If I were a TV chef, this would be one of those dishes I would cook outside. I’d greet you from my back patio kitchen (because of course I’d have one of those, complete with a great beehive shaped brick pizza oven), offer you a virtual cocktail, and commence a cheery narrative about summers in France when I was a kid, or how this particular combination of ingredients speaks to some cherished family memory. The peaches would have come from my backyard tree, I’d delight you by plucking the basil myself from a tiered herb garden right next to the outdoor bar, and obviously the mozzarella would have come from some local artisan selling fresh knobs of it at the local farmers’ market.

Food blog June 2015-0947But seeing as I don’t have an outdoor kitchen, and since I’d be a terrible TV chef (uncoordinated, messy, with a penchant for cooking in ripped jeans), I’ll admit that this lovely little snack emerged because I’m basically obsessed with caprese right now. After the triumphant caprese inspired meatballs of two weeks ago, my brain catapulted into summer, and all I want is fresh produce and grilled everything. Nothing says summer to me like a wide tray of gushing tomato wedges, mozzarella almost too soft to slice, and torn basil. If you add a drizzle of thick, syrupy balsamic, you’d better pour me a glass of wine, too, because I’m staying for a while.

Food blog June 2015-0954Despite the whole Southern California thing, though, I’m not ready to buy tomatoes just yet. Not even at our local farmers’ market (where I shamefully wasn’t locavore enough to look for mozzarella cheese). It’s just not time yet. There is, though, a vendor whose stall is always packed that had a nice selection of stone fruits this week. It seems a bit early for these as well, but when I could smell the peaches from a few feet away, I decided to risk it.

Food blog June 2015-0960Food blog June 2015-0962Though this rarely happens, these turned out exactly how I’d imagined them. Usually I can’t help myself from changing something as I go along, or skipping over or adding a step or ingredient, and it’s hard to stop the universe from offering up its own brand of “help” to produce unexpected results.

Food blog June 2015-0967Not this time. The peaches were juicy, the mozzarella was creamy and perfect, the basil was fresh and crisp, and I didn’t even burn the toast (believe me, that’s an accomplishment). I reduced my balsamic vinegar with a tablespoon of brown sugar, and I may never do it any other way; the sugar thickened it up faster, and it played well with the peaches, eliminating just the edge of the puckering tartness balsamic can have. Obviously, the whole thing went perfectly with a glass of cold, cold, slightly effervescent pink wine.

Food blog June 2015-0968Suggestions: as we were eating these, I was already talking about alternatives. You could, for example, add the cheese 30 seconds or so before removing the toast from the broiler, to start it melting into the bread for a softer end product. You could grill the peach slices, with or without a brush of butter or brown sugar, for a caramelized fruit flavor. You could even eschew the toast altogether and just offer a platter of layered peach and cheese slices with basil tucked in, as you would with a traditional caprese, and serve it up alongside whatever you’d grilled in your outdoor kitchen. Maybe even add in some cucumber slices for extra crunch. And not that it’s likely you’d have leftovers, but if you, say, casually stacked the peach slices and remaining balsamic syrup over a scoop or two of vanilla ice cream, and then you called me, I’d be happy to come and share it with you.

Food blog June 2015-0980

Peach Caprese Toasts
Serves 2-3 (easily doubled or tripled… go crazy!)
Most quantities here are according to your tastes (translation: approximate). Take the basics and do them up the way you like them best. No fuss. It’s summer.
½ cup balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon brown sugar
12 slices of baguette, about ¾ inch thick (French or sourdough)
olive oil for drizzling
salt and pepper for sprinkling
2 small peaches
ball of fresh mozzarella (burrata would also be lovely, though a touch messy)
12 leaves fresh basil

 

  • Preheat your broiler. While it warms, make the balsamic syrup. Pour the balsamic vinegar and the brown sugar into a small pot and cook over medium heat until it comes to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer until the mixture reduces by half, then turn off the heat and let it sit. It won’t seem very thick during the boil, but just wait! It thickens as it cools into a tart, glossy syrup.
  • Spread baguette slices out on a cookie sheet and drizzle them with olive oil, salt, and pepper. You want a fairly even coating of oil for even browning. Broil, watching carefully to prevent burning, until the toasts are golden and crisp on top to your liking. For me this took about 3 minutes. Remove and let cool slightly, OR top each toast with mozzarella slices and broil just another 30-60 seconds until the cheese begins to melt.
  • To assemble, place a slice of mozzarella cheese on each toast (unless, of course, you already did with the melted option). Top that with a basil leaf, then a peach slice. Place on a platter or serving dish.
  • Use a spoon to drizzle on some of the balsamic syrup – I like a thin striped pattern back and forth across the whole thing.
  • If desired, you can also drizzle the top of the toasts with olive oil, and sprinkle with sea salt for a little extra lushness.
  • Serve immediately as an appetizer, preferably with something sparkling to drink.

 

Burrata, cress, and balsamic crostini

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Food Blog September 2014-0558The first week of school has come and gone and went to bed. That being the case, and with a wonderful friend in town, Friday afternoon happy hour was without question the right thing to do. N. and I frequently enjoy a weekend happy hour of some sort, whether that involves a decadent spread, or just a few nubs of cheese and some almost-not-stale-yet crackers with a handful of dried fruit. Either way, there’s something tasty, something to sip, and a breezy deck to sit on.

Food Blog September 2014-0556This week, though, called for something special. I had an alliterative crostini concoction in mind – a brash combination of burrata cheese, broccoli rabe, and a thick drizzle of balsamic vinegar all smeared atop a perfectly toasted slice of baguette. As these things usually turn out, however, ruled by what was on the shelves in the produce section, I had to make an adjustment or two. But I think what I ended up with was just as good – maybe even better.

Food Blog September 2014-0543Food Blog September 2014-0545Food Blog September 2014-0546Let’s talk ingredients. Have you had burrata cheese? Think fresh mozzarella, but then one-up the creaminess and milkiness and melt-in-your-mouthiness, and you’ve got something like burrata. It’s a globe of fresh mozzarella cheese, filled with a mixture of curds and cream. When you cut into one of these fragile little blobs, what emerges looks something like ricotta in texture, but it’s all mozzarella freshness on the tongue. It’s a very sexy cheese, and a smear (don’t even think in terms of slices) atop some well-oiled, well-toasted bread sounded dreamy. I found some in my Trader Joe’s, but I think most specialty or upscale grocery stores – or maybe even your usual haunt with a well-stocked cheese counter – would have it.

Food Blog September 2014-0563Though I wanted broccoli rabe for its bitterness, I settled instead on some upland cress, which I assumed was another name for watercress. A shamefully lazy internet search (read: Wikipedia) has taught me that though they look similar, upland cress is part of the landcress, rather than the watercress, family. I didn’t know there was such a thing. Regardless, either one has the necessary peppery bite to offset the creamy sweetness of the cheese. In a pinch, I bet arugula would work too.

Food Blog September 2014-0560Food Blog September 2014-0549To put it all together, I decided I wanted a play of temperatures. After a liberal bath of olive oil, I toasted thin slices of bread – mine was in the ciabatta family, with its floury crust and moist, springy interior. A gentle smear of burrata on this warm toast, followed by a few sprigs of cress wilted into a resistless pile, all topped with a definitive drizzle of balsamic vinegar. Done. The cheese melts a bit into the bread; the cress and the balsamic and the residual olive oil flavors melding together create a kind of salad component. They are, I hardly need to say, delicious. I couldn’t stop sampling. It’s not just a nice play of flavors, but a good study in textures. I am criminal at over-toasting my bread, and this batch was just on the edge of being servable. But against the softness of the cheese and the pleasingly stringy feel of the wilted greens, the aggressive crunch of extra toasty toast was right.

Food Blog September 2014-0553I’d recommend a light, crisp wine to pair with this; something sparkling would be extra nice. I’d recommend a sun hat and sandals, if you have the option, and a few friends to laugh with. And I’d recommend making a bit more than you think you want, because you’re going to eat it all.

Food Blog September 2014-0557

Burrata, cress, and balsamic crostini
Ingredient quantities are a bit fast and loose here, because your demands for how much cheese, how many greens, and how liberal a drizzle of balsamic may be different from mine. And depending on how many people are clamoring for a taste and what size loaf you’ve bought, you may need more or less bread than I used. What seems most important is that one bunch of cress was enough to top 8 or so slices of crostini.
8-10 thin slices ciabatta or other fresh, artisanal bread
Olive oil, to drizzle and to cook the greens
1 bunch upland cress or watercress (or, as noted above, arugula)
Salt to taste
8 ounces burrata cheese
* Balsamic vinegar, for drizzling

 

  • Preheat your broiler. While it warms, arrange bread slices on a sheet tray and drizzle with olive oil on both sides. Broil until deeply golden. Depending on your broiler, this could take anywhere from 2-5 minutes. Keep a close eye on it. When it is well bronzed and crisp, remove and set aside.
  • While your bread toasts (if you’re a successful multi-tasker), prepare your greens by slicing off the bottom inch or two of stem (there may be an attached root bundle at the bottom too). Warm a teaspoon or two of olive oil over medium heat in a skillet and add the cress with a pinch of salt. Cook, stirring often with a wooden spoon or tongs, until the cress has wilted down but is still bright green. It will have lost much of its crunch, but that’s okay. We are looking for tenderness here.
  • Just like that, we’re ready to assemble. For each piece of toast, cut a wedge of burrata and scoop onto the bread. Be sure you get the outside coating of mozzarella and the creamy curds inside. Top the cheese layer with a few sprigs of cress, then drizzle some balsamic vinegar over the whole thing and serve immediately.

* Note: if your balsamic vinegar is thin, or is more tart in flavor than you enjoy, try this – heat about ¼ cup of balsamic with 2 teaspoons brown sugar in a small saucepan until it simmers. Stir to dissolve the sugar, and allow it to reduce almost by half, so you have barely more than 2 tablespoons. This will thicken and sweeten the liquid, making it more of a glaze. It will still be plenty strong, though, so you’ll only need a little bit for each crostini.

With or Without You

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The organizer of the group I went to Senior Prom with booked us seats at Splashes, a restaurant in a Laguna Beach hotel. When we arrived, all dressed up and feeling ever so fancy, four of our party of six were surprised and distressed to discover that a restaurant called Splashes primarily served seafood.  I was delighted.  Lobster ravioli?  Yes, please!

While the majority of our party waited for their chicken and steak dishes to be prepared, my date received the first course he’d ordered: a caprese salad with balsamic dressing.  It arrived – beautifully arranged slices of bright tomato, quivering mozzarella, crisp basil leaves – and he squinted at it with confusion.  “This is not a salad,” he said.  “There’s no lettuce!”  He ate it – we all did – and thought it was good, but maintained his stance.  To be a salad, a collection of ingredients must include lettuce.  No room for experimentation there.

We were in high school, and it was only the very beginning of the new millennium.  What did we know about creative vegetable assemblages like caprese or tabbouleh or panzanella?  We were babies.  But I will say: though I recognize these popular, now fairly well known varieties of salad as such, in this project Bittman has taught me so much about what a salad can be and how widely the boundaries of its definition can be stretched.  Not a single entry, in fact, on the Salads portion of the project list, includes lettuce.  How pedestrian – how expected – that would be.

“76. Grate apples (red are nice; leave skin on), radish and celery.  Roast pistachios and chop.  Dress all with olive oil, shallots, grainy mustard, red wine vinegar and a pinch of sugar.”

This sounded like an interesting and delicious combination, but like the tomatillo and jicama combination a few weeks ago, it didn’t sound like something you could dig into a big bowl of.  I decided, therefore, to make it more like a condiment, which gave me an excellent excuse to roast a chicken.  Imagine: a steaming, crisp skinned chicken thigh topped with cool, crisp shreds of apple and peppery radish.  Like the lobster ravioli of yore, yes please!

Here’s what I used:

1 large apple (I had a honeycrisp – one of my favorite kinds)

2 stalks celery

4 small radishes

½ cup pistachios, roasted and chopped

Dressing:

2 TB olive oil

1 TB red wine vinegar

1-2 tsp sugar (depends on your taste, the sweetness of your apple, and the sharpness of your radishes)

½ TB whole grain mustard

I eliminated the shallots because, despite their lauded mildness, neither N. nor I find the flavor of raw onions particularly appealing.

During the last twenty minutes or so of the chicken’s stay in the oven, I clattered the pistachios into a small cake pan and put them on the bottom rack so they could toast.  They needed about ten minutes at 350F, and emerged browned and nutty smelling (isn’t that a silly way of describing the aroma of a nut?  Of course it was nutty smelling!  What else could it be?).  I set them aside so they could cool before being chopped and deposited into the salad mixture.

While things were roasting and toasting, I grated up the stars of the salad.  The apple became little ribbons, the radishes paper-thin shreds, and the celery turned into a pile of almost-mush.  But I decided that was okay – celery is such an assertive texture that less of its fibrous aggressiveness would actually be a benefit.

Were I making this again, at this point I would deposit the grated vegetation into a sieve for a few minutes to let the juice drip away, giving the dressing a better opportunity to cling and permeate.  My decision to plop everything right into the serving bowl resulted in slight soupiness – the apple and celery in particular gave off copious amounts of juice.

At this point, you should also chop and add your pistachios to the salad.  After all, you paid money for them and babysat them carefully to prevent burning them in the oven.  But I didn’t.  I forgot about them completely as I whisked up the dressing, tossed it with the salad, then stowed the serving dish on the table so I could have room on my kitchen counter to carve the chicken.

Piled atop carefully carved and portioned pieces of chicken, the little condiment salad warmed and released a delicious sweet-tart aroma that completely belied the bland appearance of our plates.  Though up close you could see flecks of red and green and pink in the salad from the skins of the various ingredients, from any distance it looked like pale meat with pale apple shreds on top, next to a pale pile of barley, which I’d cooked pilaf style as a starchy accompaniment.

The flavor was more like the smell than the appearance.  It was sharp and bracing – just sweet enough, but assertively vinegary.  This worked very well with our chicken because the sweet-sour crunch cut through the fatty moistness of the meat.  Halfway through dinner I sprinkled mine with a palm-full of the forgotten pistachios, and I must admit I liked it better nut free.  N., not a pistachio fan, agreed.

 

Despite how good a sport he has been during the years (years!) I’ve been working to accomplish this project, N. doesn’t like all foods.  I recognize that there is a time for experimentation and excited guesswork, but there is also a time to exclude him from the proceedings.  This understanding led to my original decision to make only the items from Bittman’s list that seemed reasonable.  I haven’t set out to cook all 101 sides; there were a few that just didn’t fit our palates.  However, out of my curiosity and tastes, a few items remained on the list that are just not N.’s cup of tea.  The second salad I made this week was one such dish.

“79. Cook chopped pears in a covered saucepan with a tiny bit of water until soft. Puree, but not too fine. In your smallest pan, boil a few tablespoons of balsamic vinegar with a little brown sugar; lower heat and reduce by half. Spoon the pear sauce over endive leaves and finish with toasted sliced almonds and the balsamic reduction.”

To me, this sounded delightful.  To N., it sounded weird.  So on Thursday, when he had to go back to school for an evening engagement, it became my dinner.  It consisted of:

2 TB sliced almonds

2 ripe pears, peeled and chopped into small chunks

1 TB water

3 spears endive

¼ cup balsamic vinegar

1 TB brown sugar

I must admit: I cheated on the balsamic reduction.  The quantities I listed above are falsified.  But they are estimates you might use.  I happened to have a small container of already reduced, already sweetened balsamic vinegar in my refrigerator from a previous night, and this was the perfect excuse to use it up.  I just microwaved it for a few seconds and it loosened right up from a tar to a pourable, molasses-like syrup.

I toasted the almonds in a dry pan over medium heat, tossing them frequently.  You can’t take your eyes off of these slices for very long.  In the space of twenty seconds, they go from perfectly golden to burnt.  How do I know?  How do you think?

I set aside my overly tanned almonds and added the pear chunks and water to my pan.  Bittman didn’t specify whether the pears should be peeled or not, but pears already have that dubious, potentially grainy texture, and I decided the rough and sometimes gritty skin shouldn’t have a part in this salad.  As the pears – naked, cored, and chopped – simmered and softened, I considered the pureeing instruction and rejected it.  If indeed they were still supposed to be chunky, there were other methods than dirtying my food processor or immersion blender.  I had at them with the potato masher.  This broke them into a chunky puree – some texture remained but they were definitely on the road to sauce-hood.  I turned off the heat and set them aside to cool.

All that remained was to cut and arrange the endive and drape these various accoutrements across it.  I spooned, I drizzled, I scattered, and I served.

This was good, and a nice homage to fall, but it almost read like a dessert salad.  Endive has – to my palate at least – little to no discernible taste.  It is crisp and fun to eat because it has such a capable, interesting shape, but it crunches into water in your mouth and tastes like whatever you pair it with.  In this case, it tasted of earthy mild pears and glossy sweet balsamic reduction.  The crunch of the almonds and the crunch of the endive were pleasantly different: one dry, one juicy.  I ended up scooping dressing, pear puree, and almonds into each leaf and eating them out of hand rather than messing around with all that utensil business.  After all, I was seated at a table for one, and Ted Allen on the TV wasn’t going to judge me.  Besides, I was pairing this salad with shrimp (so delicious: toast mustard seeds and red pepper flakes, sear shrimp, deglaze with dry white wine, sprinkle with parsley, serve), and it’s so much easier to just pick them up by the tails.  No fuss.  Only a little mess.  Easily remedied.  Followed up, just to make it extra indulgent, with a little cup of coconut whipped cream, dried blueberries, and the rest of the toasted almonds.

N. wouldn’t have liked this dinner.  But that’s okay.  Our coupledom doesn’t require identical food preferences as I once thought it might, and I’m happy to take on all the shrimp and coconut in the world on his behalf, paired with pears and endive or not.  Call it a gift.  And in return, he lets me play with my food: not just eating with my fingers, but trusting me in my experimentation because I know what he likes.  That means when I present him with one of my Frankensteinian creations, he might raise his eyebrows, but he’s willing – and usually happy – to give it a try.  A salad doesn’t need lettuce.  What it needs, I think, are the flavors you like and the contrasting textures that make it an adventure to eat.