Cook Offs & Williamsburg & Winter January 2010
Celery Root Potato Quiche with Parsnip Custard in Beef Tallow Pastry – a.k.a The Winner!
The butcher at the Meat Hook lit up a little when I asked if he had beef tallow. The Meat Hook is Brooklyn’s newest purveyor of farm-raised meat and center of carnivore culture. It’s a joint venture between the Brooklyn Kitchen and the minds and cleavers behind Marlow and Daughters, and best of all, it’s only a few blocks from my apartment. Obviously, this was the place to look for a hunk of beef fat. I wanted it for making a pie crust, I explained to the butcher. “Rendered or unrendered?” he asked.
This wasn’t the first time I’d used animal fat in a pastry dough. A few years ago
the New York Times ran an article by Melissa Clark that compared crusts made with various combinations of butter, beef fat, lard, duck fat, and shortening. It sang high praises for the beef fat version. Inspired, I made an apple pie with a crust that was half butter and half beef suet, and I remember being happy with the results.
I thought of that crust again this past week while dreaming up a recipe for the pie contest at K&M bar here in Williamsburg, a benefit for BK Farmyards. I wanted to
make a seasonal quiche — ‘seasonal’ at this time of year meaning, of course, root vegetables. I had on hand a big bag of potatoes and a bulb of celeriac (a.k.a celery root), and I wanted to add parsnips too, but not simply as roasted parsnip chunks mixed into the filling (though I’d this recently done with good results). I thought instead of stirring parsnip puree directly into the eggs and cream that make up the quiche’s custard. This trick, I imagined, would make a heartier pie, and enhance the dusky flavors that I like in winter dishes.
And hence my idea for beef fat in the crust. The subtly darker flavor, described by
Melissa Clark as “rich and slightly meaty, though not identifiably beefy” would boost those hearty winter flavors as well. I opted for the unrendered beef fat, which I supposed would taste richer.
Actually, what I got was probably suet, not tallow — tallow is the rendered stuff. I was definitely working with an unrefined product – it had veiny red flakes and other odd bits in it that I did by best to cut out or cut around. If you’re squeamish about handling meat, particularly meat with suspiciously unidentifiable parts, this stuff isn’t for you.
This time around I didn’t bother using half butter – I simply substituted the beef fat, cut into small cubes, one-for-one in place of the butter in my favorite pastry recipe. It went into the food processor with flour and salt, and
after a few spins of the blade it was cut into the familiar pea-sized pieces. The fat didn’t assimilate itself into the flour in quite the same way that butter does — even after moistening it with cold water and giving it a rest in the fridge the dough was still pretty crumbly and not terribly easy to work with. I had to muscle it a bit in order to hold it together and roll it out. I feared this would make the dough tough in the end but fortunately it didn’t. I might suggest using half butter though, if you don’t like
fighting with powdery pie dough.
For my quiche filling I roasted two small parsnips with a clove of garlic until they were soft, then pureed them, garlic and all, with half-and-half until very smooth. To this I added enough additional half-and-half to bring the mixture to 2 cups, then whisked in 3 eggs. Meanwhile, I cut 3 medium potatoes and 1 medium celery root into thin slices and blanched them briefly in boiling salted water. I then transferred them to a skillet in which I’d sautéed 4 or 5 sliced shallots, cooked the mixture until the celery root began to brown slightly, and flavored
it with chives, thyme, and lots of salt and pepper.
Into the pre-baked, beefy pie shell I spread a layer of shredded gruyere cheese and topped it with the potato mixture. I then carefully poured the parsnip custard over it and baked until firm. The finished quiche was rich and flavorful, slightly sweet from the parsnips and with a bit of brightness from the celery root. A real winter pie.
And a prize-winning pie! The judges awarded it
first prize in the savory pie division. One of them told me I’d scored a few extra creativity points for using beef fat in the crust. I’m glad he liked it, and I’m glad to have such a good source nearby for the stuff. And I’m glad to finally be living in an era when cooking with beef fat meets with such high approval.
“What is that thing?” The members of Paisley Farm’s winter CSA were lingering at DBA bar in Williamsburg Brooklyn, where they’d each just picked up a box of potatoes, carrots, beets, onions, squash – the first CSA pickup of the winter season. Sitting on the table in front of us, among pints of Six Point ale and mugs of bourbon-laced hot cider, was a long, pale, and… well… phallic-looking root. None of the guesses we threw at it seemed right. It wasn’t a parsnip. It wasn’t a potato. Some kind of turnip maybe? Finally we gave up, finished our drinks, donned our hats and gloves and hoisted our boxes of vegetables into the January cold.
a daikon radish. Karol, who coordinates the Williamsburg CSA pickup for Paisley, was relieved to have this thing identified, but knew she needed to share this information quickly with the rest of the CSA members. “Your challenge now,” she said to me, “is to find some use for this daikon, and post about it on Dave’s Kitchen.” I accepted the challenge. Honestly though I had no idea what to do with this thing.
latter. My first thought for Karol’s Daikon Challenge was to create some kind of banh mi-inspired dish – a salad of watercress topped with pickled daikon matchsticks, perhaps, with a side of cilantro-spiced pork meatballs. Using the daikon merely as a garnish, though, or even as a salad-topper, wasn’t likely to use up very much of it, and I had a vision of a hundred half-used daikon radishes moldering in the crisper drawers of a hundred CSA members. No, I’d have to look deeper to find a dish that puts this odd root onto center stage.
name: mooli. Mooli, it seems, is a Hindi word for ‘radish’ (sometimes appearing as ‘muli’ or ‘moolangi’), and it’s found surprisingly often in the indices of Indian cookbooks or on Indian recipe websites.
The recipe is quite simple: cook a chopped green chili (I used a jalapeno) in a small amount of hot oil, then add equal amounts of diced daikon and potato, with ground coriander and tumeric. Stir to combine, lower the flame, cover and cook for 10 to 12 minutes. I was not using a non-stick skillet, so I added just a tablespoon or so of water to keep the mixture from sticking. Unfortunately I didn’t have the radish greens the recipe called for, so I simply did without (though when I make this again I might add chopped spinach or kale to make up for them)
and turmeric. I served the aloo mooli with Mark Bittman’s
Recently, I threw a holiday dinner party and served what I thought to be a traditional holiday menu: roast beef with jus, mini Yorkshire puddings, dauphin gratinee (a.k.a. scalloped potatoes), mushrooms cooked with chestnuts and roasted brussels sprouts. I splurged on a good cut of beef – a New York strip roast. When the dishes and empty wine bottles were cleared I found that, happily, there was a good-sized chunk of it left. As planned.
of rye bread.
mushrooms and some onion in the leftover roast beef jus. Stir in thin slices of the beef just long enough to warm them – being careful not to allow them to cook any further. Pile this juicy mixture onto some thick slices of grilled bread. Top with cheese and give it a quick run under the broiler. Serve open-faced. Delicious.
op-quality cut of roast beef lying around very often? Nor homemade roast beef jus for braising liquid? There should be a every-day version of this sandwich too. It’d need to use less extraordinary ingredients: sliced roast beef from the supermarket deli, say, and plain ol’ beef stock. The flavor wouldn’t match the Holiday Dinner Party Leftovers version, but then I wouldn’t have to wait until my next diner party to enjoy it.
In Brooklyn this week the temperatures dropped below freezing for the first time: Winter is here. It means the last of my seasonal favorites will disappear from the farmers markets, and I’ll be subsisting on root vegetables until ramps, rhubarb, asparagus and strawberries reappear in May. But it also means it’s the time of year for the hearty, bracing cold weather fare I love: hot soups, casseroles, peppery, flour-thickened, fortifying stews, and of course chili. Chili’s good year-round, but for me it goes down especially well on cold fall and winter days. It’s food to eat while watching snow fall through a frosted kitchen window.
— having a batch on hand in the fridge gives you the starting point for any number of quick dishes. There’s the
certainly
chorizo left over from this summer’s hot dog cookoff and chicken leg-and-thigh quarters left from god knows what. I also found some farmer’s market sweet corn that I’d put up in August. I began to notice a pattern as all those ‘c’s added up, and so I went with it: toasted cumin seeds, minced cilantro, and diced carrot went into the pot as well. The chili had a deep red color from the chorizo, and a satisfyingly hearty flavor from the chicken, which I browned directly in the rendered chorizo fat, fricasee style. With a pack of tortillas, a chunk of cheddar cheese, a ripe avocado and a carton of eggs, this batch of chili kept me going all week. Now, if we could only get some snow.
It was not my day to take the prize last Saturday, at the McCarren Park Greenmarket winter squash pie cookoff. The laurels went instead to my friend and esteemed colleague Jane Grenier. Her masterful hazelnut-topped butternut-squash adaptation of Epicurious’
own creation didn’t play nearly so well with the pie-loving crowds. It was a delicata squash custard layered atop chocolate granache. I dreamed up the recipe one day at work while eating leftover pumpkin pie and a chocolate bar simultaneously. It was good, I
thought, and if chocolate and pumpkin can be combined in
And to give some bite to the squash custard layer I added orange peel and lemon juice. It may yet be a prize winning pie – I’ll find out this weekend when I enter it into the
hand, though its exact recipe is still being formulated in the Dave’s Kitchen test labs. The lovely Karol Lu, decorated veteran of the Brooklyn Cookoff scene, will also be there, as will Jane Grenier, whose tarte tatin was a hit at last month’s Greenmarket apple pie contest. There’ll be other contestants besides, and we’ll be pulling out the stops to make some delicious pies. Come out and try ‘em!
surprising from someone who’s been at it only for a year. He’s a Yale-trained artist, and when he returned to Fishkill a couple of years ago (he’d visited here throughout his childhood) it was to paint, not to farm. However, it happened that the farm manager they’d hired didn’t work out, and they couldn’t find a qualified replacement, so Josh stepped in to run things. To prepare himself for the job he went for advice (and sometimes even for equipment) to other knowledgeable, environmentally conscientious growers like Steve Clark of
farms, particularly organic farms, lost their entire crop of tomatoes and plowed under many of their other crops besides, because of the tenacity of Julia and her crew the farm brought a steady flow of produce to the market, including a good number of tomatoes. And in the orchards they’re currently enjoying a good crop of apples as well.
wet, relatively cool climate is particularly hospitable to the fungus that causes scab. “Even the really devout ecological growers, intensely managing a couple of acres with compost or rotations of animals in the orchards will still spray at least several times a year.” At Fishkill, Josh sprays sulfur, the most commonly used organic fungicide, to combat scab. And he uses Surround, a spray made from a kaolin clay, to deter insects. The clay-based spray is completely non-toxic (it works by simply gunking-up the legs or mouth parts of insects that would otherwise damage the fruit), but it leaves a white reside that customers often mistake for a harmful chemical.
externally-determined set of practices that may or may not be best for his farm. Organic pesticides can, in fact, be more toxic than their conventional alternatives, and given the fact that organic growers often have to spray more frequently, they can be, cumulatively, more environmentally disruptive.
orchard, where their manure will not only fertilize the trees but will also help to decompose the fallen leaves, where the worst diseases overwinter.
David Sherman, the market manager, suggested that I pay Fishkill Farm a visit and write about them, as I’d done
becoming Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury in 1934. FDR himself, as Fishkill’s website
under the direct oversight of the family. Josh Morgenthau, Henry’s grandson, has taken over management of the farm, is working to revive the farm and move it toward organic and sustainable growing practices. Along with its 40 acres of apple orchards, Fishkill now produces peaches, pears, cherries, plums, berries and a wide range of fully organic vegetables. The farm continues to sell apples to the wholesale market, but today also sells directly to customers at a number of farmers markets and through a robust pick-your-own business.
drive up the Taconic. Fishkill is in the eastern Hudson Valley about ten miles east of Beacon, an hour and a half north of Brooklyn. It lies just off the northern slopes of the Hudson Highlands – the Appalachian Trail passes by only a few miles to the south – and low, outlying mountains surround the farm in all directions. At the end of the farm’s long driveway is the cheery, bright red building that houses the farm market. The market is the center of the farm’s pick-your-own business, and is also well stocked with cheeses, jams, and other products from farms and business in the area. It sits on a low hilltop, with the farm’s orchards and vegetable gardens spread around and below it.
Meet Greenmarket farmers, nosh your way through some of Brooklyn’s finest farmers’ markets, and go on a fun bike ride with Time’s Up Environmental Group and Greenmarket!
Concord grapes are in season here in the Northeast, and their aroma in the booths at the farmers markets is close to intoxicating. So when I was invited to participate in an apple pie bake-off at the McCarren Park Greenmarket in Greenpoint, I could only think whether I might be able to make an apple pie that incorporated these gorgeous purple grapes. I was sure I remembered somewhere seeing a recipe for Concord Grape & Apple Pie. On Epicurious? No. In one of my cookbooks? Nope. Finally I
seeds. Not wanting the tedium of de-seeding a pound of grapes, she opted to leave them in, not minding the bit of crunch they added to her pie but realizing also that not everyone would enjoy them. In my Google searches for apple-grape pie recipes, though, I came upon a
making berry sodas. First you pinch the thick purple skin to squeeze out the surprisingly green pulp inside. The skins are set aside in a bowl, while the pulp goes onto the stove. It’s simmered down for a few minutes until it’s soft, then strained through a sieve. The seeds are tossed, and the strained hot pulp is stirred back into the reserved purple skins.
process of separating and then recombining the purple skin and the green fruit made me think of what making wine must be like. These definitely were not your ordinary, thin-skinned seedless supermarket grapes.
shell, I dotted it liberally with butter (this step is important: I forgot this step for one pie and it failed to set. It was tasty, but very runny). Then I covered it all with a top layer of pastry dough, into which small slits were cut to allow steam to escape while baking.