Kitchen Basics: Spaetzle

Making spätzle is something that I wager most Americans don't have any idea about doing. But they should, because spätzle is a delicious starch that you can make in minutes without having to take a trip to the grocery store using ingredients already on hand.

Spätzle are fine dumplings made from a dead simple batter extruded through small openings into boiling water. They cook in seconds. In short, nothing could be easier.

For years, I had seen references spätzle that implied that you needed a special tool, a spätzle maker, to make them. But when I thought about it, I decided that I had enough tools on hand already, that I did not need to add yet another specialized tool to my arsenal, just to make spätzle. You can see below that I repurposed my potato ricer for the job.

Ditto for the restaurant. It seems that during the winter, we pretty much made spätzle daily. And we never counted a spätzle maker in our inventory. We always put a perforated bottom hotel pan over a pot of boiling water and used a bench knife to force the batter through into the water.

If you don't already have something you can repurpose at home, don't fear. Spätzle makers are inexpensive.

Spätzle Batter Ready to Cook

Spätzle Batter

The batter for spätzle could not be any simpler. The following recipe is based on a cup of flour, which will make enough spätzle to feed two people amply.

2 large eggs

1/4 cup milk

1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt

1 cup all purpose flour

Beat the eggs well, then add the milk and salt and whisk together. Add the flour and whisk until smooth.

This is the basic formula for unflavored spätzle. You can scale it up pretty easily. Just watch the salt as you make a larger and larger batch. We always seasoned it to taste at the restaurant.

One thing to note is that once you start making spätzle, you might find that you want the batter thinner or thicker to work better with your equipment. Add milk by dribbles to thin and flour by teaspoons to thicken as needed.

Many recipes call for flavoring the spätzle. A few grinds of fresh nutmeg are traditional. I've made them with all kinds of flavorings including fresh dill and lemon zest. Once for a hoisin-glazed duck leg and rare grilled duck breast, I did spätzle flavored with orange zest and five spice powder. The sky is the limit as far as flavorings go.

Loading Batter in my Ricer

Spätzle Cooking; Ready to Remove

Drained and Transferred to an Oiled Sheet Tray

The cooking process is easy. Put a small quantity of batter in your maker. Over gently boiling salted water, extrude short dumplings into the water. You may need to slice them off the bottom of the extruder with a knife to get them to drop into the water, but if the batter is thin enough, they should drop in on their own.

When the dumplings float, they are ready to remove from the water. They will float in seconds. You may need to stir them gently if they want to stick to the bottom of the pan. Scoop the dumplings out, draining them well, and put them on an oiled sheet tray. Continue until you use all your batter.

You can make spätzle the day before, but unless you store them spread out on a sheet tray as above, they will stick together unless you toss them in oil. In general, they are best fresh. At the restaurant, we would make them in the late afternoon and leave them on sheet trays to dry a bit. Any leftovers at the end of service went into staff meals.

Kitchen Basics: Prepping Pearl Onions

Although pearl onions are not common in home cooking, we used a lot of them at the restaurant. They are perfectly sized for great restaurant presentations in which you can leave them whole for aesthetic reasons.

To do this requires that you peel them and if you don't know a simple trick, they can be a bear to peel. There's a reason why a lot of produce houses have custom cut divisions that supply already peeled pearl onions in large quantities. They can be labor intensive.

Slice off the Root End

Boil for Two Minutes

Squeeze from the Stem End

Slice off the root end of each little onion. Put the onions in boiling water for two minutes. Remove and cool them to the point where you can handle them. Squeeze from the stem end and the onion will pop right out of its skin. You may need or want to trim the stem end a bit.

Birthday: Perciatelli Cacio e Pepe

Annie had been talking about making me a special birthday meal for about the last month or so. I was extremely excited: is there any better birthday present for a chef than to have someone else cook for him?

I assumed that she was making a pasta dish of some sort or another; after all, what does a full-blooded Italian girl from New York City cook for her man? Pasta is probably our favorite food. It turns out that she got a friend in New York to ship us several pounds of perciatelli/bucatini. Are you surprised that we cannot find such a common cut in our grocery stores? I am not; wine country may be many things, but a hotbed of culinary treasures it is not.

I call the cut perciatelli, from perciare meaning to bore (or pierce), and Ann calls it bucatini, from buco, bone. Both names come from the cut being a long thick spaghetti-like pasta with a hole down the center, like a long bone or a gun barrel that has been bored out. Of all the long pasta cuts, it is hands down my favorite. Thin, effete cuts such as capelli d'angelo are not for me.

Topping Perciatelli Cacio e Pepe with Pecorino

Just before dinner while we were enjoying a glass of Barbera d'Alba Superiore, Ann pulled a bag of perciatelli out of hiding and then pulled a bowl out of the refrigerator. She showed me the bowl of pecorino romano with a large pile of black pepper on it, asking, "What am I making?" Duh! Cacio e pepe!

Perciatelli d'Abruzzo

It's sad that to get a good cut of pasta, we would either have to drive into Portland metro or order it from somewhere. Ann got creative and got it from New York. This particular brand was very good. Ann and I are really pasta connoisseurs (fancy French term for snobs) in that we would rather have no pasta than bad pasta and sadly, there is very much bad pasta on the market.

Mixing Pecorino and Pepper with Cold Water

Ann made the cacio e pepe using a method that I had never seen before until we saw recently a video of it being made in a Roman trattoria where it was the specialità della casa. The chef mixed grated pecorino and coarse pepper with cold water and stirred it into a cream as Ann is doing above. Then, he put the hot drained pasta directly into the pecorino cream and tossed it, as Ann is doing below. Old chef learns new trick.

Tossing the Pasta

I thoroughly enjoyed the pasta and while Ann was busy being super self-critical about the results, I was busy stuffing face. It was delicious. Thank you Pasta Elf! I love you beyond all measure!

The Pasta Elf Herself

Valentine's Day: Raspberry, Chocolate, Blood Orange Bread Pudding

I'm pretty new to the whole Valentine's Day thing. When I was in the restaurant business, it was easily our busiest time of the year. Imagine doing a month's worth of business in a one- or two-day stretch, each table being sat twice a night and served seven courses! It took a week before Valentine's Day to prep for the special menu and it took a week after to recuperate. Besides never being home for Valentine's Day, I was also a zombie. It is still a wonder to me that Ann stuck by me through all that.

This year, I wanted to do something special to surprise her. Because of COVID, going out is not an option. But realistically, because I was in the business and know how stressed restaurants are under the crush of business, I would never go out for Valentine's dinner anyway. Still, I cook dinner every night and so cooking dinner would not really be special. I opted instead to make a special brunch.

Raspberry, Chocolate, Blood Orange Bread Pudding

What was different is that for brunch I made something totally out of left field. We don't eat sweets, fruit aside, and our diet is very low in simple carbs. So naturally, I made a Raspberry, Chocolate, Blood Orange Bread Pudding because that would be the absolute last thing that she would expect from me. And I made it under Ann's nose. She didn't know anything about it until about 45 minutes into its baking when it started to perfume the house. I served it with blood orange segments on top to help cut the sweetness.

A Jam Bread Pudding

This bread pudding was inspired by my mother's mother. When I would visit my grandmother during college breaks, she would sometimes smear slices of white bread with butter and jam and shingle them in the bottom of a pan. She would then pour a custard over the bread and a few minutes later, a bread pudding would emerge from her oven.

The challah-based savory bread pudding that I made for New Year's Brunch cemented for me that soft breads such as the store-bought white loaf bread that my grandmother used do not make great bread puddings. A good bread pudding needs a hearty bread with a good crust. A lot of the charm of a great bread pudding is the contrast of the soft interior with a crunchy crust, something you do not get from indifferent bread.

I bought a good quality focaccia for this bread pudding. I used focaccia because it is the depth of my pan and so I could expose the focaccia crust through the top of the pudding. Assembling the bread pudding on the QT was something of a challenge. Each time Ann would leave the room, I would do a bit more: slicing the bread, spreading raspberry jam on each slice, chopping a block of chocolate, making the orange-vanilla custard base, putting all the ingredients together, and "hiding" the pudding in plain sight in the back of the refrigerator.

I made a quart of custard base: a quart of 2% milk, a splash of vanilla extract, the zest of one blood orange, five eggs, and a scant half a cup of sugar. Initially, the pudding took about half the custard, the remainder of which I put in the refrigerator and used to top off the pudding before I went to bed the night before. In all, the pudding took about 3-1/2 cups of custard base.

Valentine's morning while Ann was brushing her teeth, I put the pudding in the oven. She had no idea what was going on until it was just about done and started making the house smell great.

Mimosa, Crossword, and Ed-Made Valentine's Day Card

It's our morning ritual to have our coffee along with a crossword puzzle from the Sunday New York Times. I left a Valentine's card on the table where we do our crosswords. I always make Ann a card (having never felt that buying a card from the store expresses anything about me except that I was lazy) and this year was no different.

When Ann was upstairs printing the crossword puzzle, I brought in the bird condo that you see in the photo below as another surprise for her. She had expressed interest in having one (along with explicit instructions: "the center has to be red") some weeks ago and I demurred, having already a very long list of woodworking projects on my list.

As I was working on those other projects, I took time and converted scrap lumber to the bird condo for her. It now adorns our back gate.

Bird Condo Above Our Back Gate

Once the bread pudding came out of the oven, I made us some mimosas and we sat down to splurge for Valentine's brunch. As good as this bread pudding was, I'd rather have had a savory bread pudding. Note to self.

Pan-Roasted White Sturgeon alla Piccata

We're lucky here in the Pacific Northwest to have White Sturgeon in both the Willamette and Columbia Rivers; they are pretty amazing gamefish. There are strict limits on fishing for sturgeon as it is a highly protected and regulated population. Small amounts of sturgeon make it into the market and every now and again, I buy a piece as I did this week. Sturgeon is a mild, meaty white fish that lends itself to pan roasting.

Pan-Roasted White Sturgeon alla Piccata

If you have ever broken down a prehistoric-looking sturgeon, you will know that they have really tough, leathery, and inedible skin. At the restaurant, I would remove the skin and the subcutaneous fat layer because people were paying big bucks for presentation, but at home, I prefer to leave the skin on. I think it helps keep the fish moist while cooking.

This 8-ounce portion is about one and a half inches thick, meaning that it is going to take a good long while to cook through. You do not want to cook a thick piece of fish solely on the range top where the surface in contact with the pan would be subject to serious overcooking by the time it was done to the center.

The procedure for a thick piece of fish is to to brown it well on the show side in the pan, flip it, and sear it for a moment, then finish it in the oven. I cooked this portion for about four minutes on medium heat to sear it without setting off my smoke detector, then flipped it for another minute and turned both sides to the pan just to slightly cook them. Then I put it in a hot oven (400F) for 8 minutes and it was just done through to the center.

Knowing when to take it out of the oven is, naturally, the trick to fish cookery. After cooking tens and tens of thousands of pieces of fish, I know instinctively how long a piece of fish will take to cook and which fish take longer and which fish take shorter time to become cooked. Sturgeon really wants to tense when it hits the heat, meaning that it is going to take a relatively long time to cook. In fact, one good way to know when such a fish is cooked is when it has relaxed and released the tension.

A rough guide is 10 minutes per inch of thickness for the fish to be done to the center (as opposed to, say, salmon, that you still want to be a bit less well done in the center or tuna that you just want to color on the sides). At an inch and a half, this piece would take roughly 15 minutes. I cooked it four on the show side, one on the skin side, and roasted it another 8, for a total of 14 minutes. It rested for two minutes while I finished the sauce and it was perfectly done.

Just before I put the fish in the oven, I splashed the pan with white wine and added a large spoon of capers and the juice of half a lemon. When the fish came out of the oven, the liquid was mostly evaporated. I removed the fish from the pan, deglazed the pan with a splash of water, and brought the sauce back down before spooning it over the fish.

And once again, I was reminded how delightful sturgeon is to eat and how lucky we are to have them as a natural resource.

Arroz con Pollo Soup

One of my favorite meals is arroz con pollo, the dish of baked chicken and rice. I made it frequently for staff meals at the restaurant and it is one of my go-to dishes when I want comfort. It's turned cold here in Oregon (heretofore, our winter has been extremely mild as is usual) and that's got me wanting both hot soup and comfort.

I was going to make a salad a couple nights ago, but the weather turned against that, as did Ann, who in rebelling against the salad idea said, "I want soup." In going through the refrigerator, I saw leftover chicken, chicken stock, and diced Anaheim chiles from our Super Bowl chicken chile tostadas.

I started craving arroz con pollo, but with only a few ounces of cooked chicken on hand, I wasn't equipped to make it. But in response to Ann's request, I could make a killer soup from the leftovers that would taste identical to arroz con pollo.

Arroz con Pollo Soup

Soffritto for Soup

I started by warming the leftover chicken, stock, and chiles with a can of tomatoes while I prepped the vegetables for the soffritto: a yellow onion, half a bunch of green onions, a bunch of cilantro, a yellow pepper, a poblano, and eight cloves of garlic. I sautéed all these veg with a big pinch of saffron until the onions started to go translucent. Into the stock pot they went to simmer for a half an hour. I seasoned the soup with salt and sambal oelek (crushed red jalapeños) and then tossed in two big handfuls of rice to cook in the broth.

I would typically make this dish with achiote instead of saffron, but I don't have any achiote. Achiote was very common and cheap on the East Coast where a lot of our immigrants came from the Yucatán, the Caribbean, and other eastern locales where achiote is king. Out west, there doesn't appear to be the demand for achiote and I cannot find it anywhere, hence the saffron. I'm sure I can find it in Portland, but who wants to drive in from wine country and deal with that traffic?

This soup hit all the right notes: arroz con pollo flavor and soup comfort with just the right amount of sinus clearing spice. What a great soup!

Super Bowl: Chicken and Green Chile Tostadas

I have been a lifelong Washington Redskins fan and remember trips to RFK Stadium and later to FedEx Field vividly, especially when playing the big NFC East rivals, the Cowboys, the Giants, and especially the Eagles with their riotous fans. Then came the restaurant with its 80- to 90-hour workweeks and football all but disappeared from my radar. Post restaurant, we became cord cutters with no access to cable TV. And so, for the last 20-plus years, football has not played a significant role in our lives, especially because Ann has no desire to watch.

But year in and year out, we seem to find a way to watch the Super Bowl, if for no other reason than to keep at least some grip on cultural literacy. This year, we happened to have access to CBS for the broadcast and that got us thinking that we should do something a little special, a little bad food-wise to eat during the game.

We kicked around a bunch of ideas when Ann struck on chicken enchiladas. I suggested that perhaps instead we do tostadas because I could bake the tortillas without any oil for tostadas versus frying the tortillas in oil to seal them against the enchilada sauce.

Chicken and Green Chile Tostadas

When I think about chicken in Mexican cuisine, my mind immediately leaps to the juxtaposition of mild white chicken with mild green chiles. It is a food combination that really works for my palate and I just love the way that each ingredient plays off of and dances with the other. So when I was at the store buying the chicken for the tostadas, I also bought a small sack of mild Anaheim chiles to roast. Yes, you can buy them roasted and canned, but the flavor is not there and they are wicked expensive compared to roasting your own.

Torching the Chiles

Char Each Chile and Place it in a Plastic Bag to Steam

Peeled and Diced Green Chiles

I took the chiles outside and fired up my propane torch to char the skin on each. As I finished with each chile, I placed it into a plastic bag so that it could steam. After sitting for a half an hour or so, the chiles were ready to peel. The easiest way to peel them is to rub the skins off under running water.

Charring the chiles with a torch does not cook them in the way that charring them over a gas burner or under the broiler in the oven does. As you can see in the photo above, they are nearly raw and bright green. To cook them further, I steamed them in the microwave, covered in film, for about four minutes on high.

Enchilada Sauce

I decided to keep with Ann's enchilada theme by making enchilada sauce to drizzle on the tostadas. This sauce is nothing more than a little roux with a lot of mild New Mexican ground chile and a bit of garlic powder, ground cumin, and rubbed Mexican oregano, all thinned with a ladle of chicken stock from the chicken that I poached for this meal.

Chicken, Green Chiles, and Chipotle Adobo

I picked the chicken that I had poached the day before and put and ounce and a half of shredded chicken per tostada in a bowl, then mixed in enough of the diced Anaheim chiles to make me happy, about two parts chicken to one part chile, or maybe three to one. Really, who cares?

I seasoned the chicken with salt and gave Ann a taste. She requested some heat to the mix, so I added about three tablespoons of chipotle adobo to the mix, turning it slightly reddish. The tostada mix ended up with just the slightest kick in the back of the throat.

Baked Tortillas

I baked eight tortillas, one sheet tray full, and left them on the counter to cool and finish drying out. (Click here for tostada procedure.) Then when we got hungry, around the end of the first quarter or so, I put some chicken-chile mix on each tostada, drizzled on some enchilada sauce, and topped each with a sprinkle of cotija and a few cilantro leaves. They were really good, giving us the sensation of eating something bad, while really being quite waistline friendly.

The tostadas were the highlight of our day, being much better than the game in which the Chiefs rolled over and played dead, the lousy half-time show, and the lame commercials. This sparsely attended COVID Super Bowl will probably be memorable for being unmemorable, except that Tom Brady, no matter what you think of him, continues to demonstrate why he is the best quarterback that I have ever seen. Unreal that he can continue to perform at his age, just unreal to defy time the way he has.

Pacific Rockfish with White Bean, Arugula, and Piquillo Salad

Pacific Rockfish is the fish that we eat most commonly, being widely available and relatively inexpensive. I use the term Pacific to distinguish it from what folks on the East Coast call Rockfish, the common named for the king of all American eating fish, the Striped Bass. Pacific Rockfish is not a species of rockfish but a placeholder for any fish of the genus Sebastes from our local waters; the State of Oregon lists 43 distinct species of Sebastes on its web site, from Aurora to Yellowtail. All the commercially fished ones are lumped under the label Rockfish at the market. As far as I can tell, there is precious little difference among them in terms of flavor and cooking.

We're kind of in a rut with our rockfish, mainly eating it in tacos, probably because we eat it so often, but also because as a small fish, it doesn't really lend itself to a lot of applications. Partly in response to the rut and partly in response to a couple of rare days of sunny January weather, I decided to do something different with it last week, given that I was able to purchase some decent 6-ounce filets (large as they typically go).

It's no surprise to anyone who has ever cooked with me that one of my go-to spices is Pimentón de la Vera, real Spanish smoked paprika. It has a haunting smokiness that when used sparingly complements a lot of dishes (but, inexperienced cooks beware, when overused becomes bitter, acrid, and overwhelming). I thought to roast the rockfish filets with a coating of pimentón garlic oil to add a hint of both flavors to the delicate fish without overwhelming it.

And because the weather was sunny for a change, I made a salad of cannellini, arugula, and sliced piquillo peppers to serve the fish on. The salad was dressed with a bit of salt and lemon juice.

Pacific Rockfish with White Bean, Arugula, and Piquillo Salad

Pimentón Garlic Oil

To make the pimentón- and garlic-flavored oil, heat a couple tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil over a medium flame with three minced cloves of garlic and cook until the garlic just starts to color. Turn off the flame and stir in a tiny amount of pimentón. I used what fit on the tip of my knife blade, perhaps a quarter of a teaspoon. Cooking pimentón in hot oil is to risk burning it, so add it dead last off the heat. And because it is so assertive, less is more.

Pan-Fried Noodles with Vegetables

In recent weeks, we've taken to celebrating our collective weight loss (about 55 pounds now) on weigh-in days, every Monday, by having a bit of a splurge dinner. The long and short of it is that we allow ourselves a few simple carbs: all stick and no carrot is no fun. This week, it was noodles. We love noodles in any way: in soup as in ramen, wet with sauce such as in lo mein, dry fried as in chow mein, and of course, Italian-style as in spaghetti aglio e olio.

This week, I decided to serve a mound of stir-fried vegetables on a cake of pan-fried noodles, a quasi Hong Kong-style dish. Call it chow mein, pan-fried noodles, or yakisoba as you will. I call it a delicious way to eat a couple hundred calories of simple carbs while still eating a pile of vegetables.

Pan-Fried Noodles with Vegetables

Frying Noodles

It all started by making a stir fry of nappa cabbage, bean sprouts, shiitake mushrooms, snow peas, green onions, garlic, and lots of ginger, with a splash of soy sauce for salt. And while that was cooking, I steamed some wheat noodles briefly in the microwave to limber them up and put them in a large skillet to brown into a cake, flipping halfway through.

And that's it. The vegetable prep takes a while, but the cooking is done quickly. Given that I prepped the vegetables sporadically during the afternoon, dinner was on the table in under fifteen minutes, a win all the way around.