With the advent of the 2008 harvest, time both expands and compresses—long hours of crush work and not enough time for errands, groceries, and leisurely dinners.
Dan and I have certain basic dishes that we always fall back on during harvest. Risotto, pasta and bruschetta sauces are our diehard favorites.
We love risotto for nights when we need something healthy, satisfying and comforting. Once you’ve made a basic risotto successfully, you will never need to look at a recipe again. The technique is simple and ingredients can be scavenged from the garden or vegetable crisper. We’ve included a basic recipe for risotto, but we also want to share a few simple tips for making risotto the Dover Canyon way.
Risotto
Risotto is an Italian rice dish made by slowly stirring hot chicken, beef, or vegetable stock into rice, generally the small, round arborio rice. The result is a creamy, soul-satisfying glop to which you will add condimenti—vegetables, herbs, and possibly cream or cheese. Although the dish is amazingly simple, you will want to start with a high quality arborio or carnaroli rice. Grocer-discount brands of arborio are tasteless and never really soak up the broth (maybe the rice is fossilized) resulting in a dusty, gritty texture. So a good quality arborio makes all the difference. We order enough to see us through harvest from A.G. Ferrari Foods.
Browning the rice
Toss a cup of risotto rice into a large frypan and toast over medium heat until light brown. This gives the end result a richer flavor and a nice toasted color. Browning also seals the exterior of the rice, which helps it to absorb broth without losing texture.
Cooking slowly
This is not a dish for the impatient. Rushing the cooking process results in tough, crunchy, basically very nasty risotto. This is for evenings when you still have an hour of work on the computer, and your domestic associate wants a hot bath before dinner. It takes 45-60 minutes to make risotto, although the actual cooking time for the rice is 20-30 minutes. You’ll want to give yourself a little more time for dicing, sautéing and enjoying a glass of wine.
After the rice is browned, set it aside and sauté white onions, garlic, or a mirapoix in olive oil. If you have time to caramelize the onions, the resulting risotto will taste like candy for grownups. Add the browned rice back into the deliciously melted vegetables, and then begin adding broth, a cup or so at a time. It’s a myth that you have to stir it every minute, but because the rice does absorb broth quickly, you need to check it every 5-10 minutes.
Leave out the cream
Many risotto recipes call for the addition of rich cream and cheese at the end. Who needs it? A pearly rice infused with chicken broth and melded with onions, peppers, seafood, and sausage doesn’t really need anything else. This is why it’s important to toast the rice and patiently caramelize onions or sauté garlic before starting the simmer. The resulting flavors are rich and satisfying.
Experiment with vegetables and seafood
Risotto is a great dish for that bottom-of-the-vegetable-crisper night. We’ve used green and yellow squash, every color of sweet pepper, sausage, shrimp, scallops, white onions, garlic, broccoli, leeks, and spinach. Chicken and sausage should be cooked or sautéed ahead of time and added toward the end, along with fresh vegetables. It’s fun to play with combinations, and some ingredients do beg for just a little Parmesan-Reggiano at the end. However, risotto is not a dish to wait patiently on the shelf until you have just the "right" ingredients, so pull out that arborio rice whenever you want a warm, satisfying meal.
Pasta
Pasta is a staple in our household. How can you not have a whole shelf devoted to good semolina pasta? It’s quick and easy, can be topped with anything, packed in a tub for the kids’ school lunch, makes an instant midnight snack, doesn’t smash the other groceries in your bag, doesn’t have an expiration date, and is really, really cheap.
We have our own way of doing pasta. We like it fresh, hot and relatively undisguised by sauce. Sauce and toppings are important, but a well-cooked pasta is such a soul-satisfying art food (look at all the shapes!) that we like the pasta to be as important as the other ingredients.
Don’t overcook
First of all, it’s way too easy to overcook pasta. Eight to twelve minutes is adequate for even the heaviest cut of pasta. When you remove pasta from the stove, do not let it sit in its cooking water; drain it immediately or it will continue to cook in its retained heat and turn mushy while your back is turned.
The rinsing dilemma
As a youngster, I always heard that you should rinse away the "starch" with cold water. Several decades later, someone pointed out to me that pasta is starch. If you’re going to eat pasta, why are you washing away a little starch dust with chilled water that makes your pasta cold? Now that I’m grown up, I completely ignore that advice. I like my pasta hot.
However, if you’re going to make a cold pasta salad, or if you need to set the pasta aside while preparing other dishes, then it does become important to rinse the pasta in cold water. If you dump it into a bowl or colander while it’s still hot, it will continue to cook in its own retained heat and become limp and overcooked. If you’ve inadvertently cooked it a little too long, throw some ice cubes in the strainer as well, and attempt a cryogenic halt.
Heating plates
If the pasta is done but you’re not ready to serve it, warm your dinner plates in the oven or microwave. (Oven heat is retained longer.) If your pasta is lukewarm, that’s okay—just spoon it onto a warm plate, make sure your sauce is hot when you spoon it over, and it will taste delicious.
Don’t mix the noodles and sauce
One night in the middle of crush, with lots of people hanging around "helping," Dan endeavored to make linguine, and a pasta sauce of sausage, tomatoes and herbs for our crowd of onlookers. In the meantime, he was also operating the forklift, crusher, and press, and trying to keep his five-year-old son from climbing up on the equipment and getting chopped to pieces.
The kitchen smelled great. He had sautéed onions, peppers, and garlic, added fresh chopped tomatoes from the garden, and some high-quality sausage. The linguine was done, rinsed, and set to the side. His sauce was quietly simmering, waiting for an auspicious dinnertime. However, a guest decided that Dan had too much to do, and she took matters into her own hands. She dumped the linguine into the sauce, stirred it thoroughly, turned off the heat and left it. By the time we paused for dinner at ten o’clock that night, Dan’s delicate linguine was mush and the pasta sauce tasted like cereal.
Pasta is beautifully versatile and very forgiving of schedules, if you allow it to be itself. Keep the pasta separate. Spoon it artistically onto a dinner plate. Cover it with a rich, aromatic sauce. Give your guests a rotary grater filled with hard Parmesan cheese, and offer a small bowl of fresh, shredded basil leaves.
Bruschetta
We call this freeform version of garlic-infused olive oil bruschetta (pronounced broosh-ket-ta) only because we don’t know of any other Italian term that really describes it. Traditionally, bruschetta is an olive oil, tomato, and garlic condiment served on slices of toasted baguette. We’ve taken it beyond the traditional parameters by throwing in whatever our garden gods bestow upon us—broccoli, yellow fingerling squash, tomatoes, asparagus, and herbs.
The beauty of this combination, aside from crisper-raiding possibilities, is rich aroma, colorful presentation, and versatility. Basically, you’re just sautéing vegetables in olive oil and garlic. Bruschetta can be served over meat, potatoes, pasta, eggs or even toast.
Don’t get the oil too hot
Never get impatient with olive oil. The idea is to let flavors infuse into the oil, not to force the oil to cook other ingredients. Warm the olive oil and garlic over very low heat while chopping other ingredients. Olive oil is surprisingly seductive. Even if you forget to turn on the stove at all, it will still absorb some of the flavor of your garlic or herbs.
Don’t burn the garlic
Garlic turns sweet and soft as it’s sautéed or baked, but when pieces of garlic turn brown, they shrink and become tough and bitter. If you’re sautéing chopped garlic in olive oil, err on the safe side and keep the heat very low, or even off. It doesn’t take long to sauté small pieces of garlic. If you need to leave the room, move the pan away from the heat until you return. Warm olive oil will continue coaxing out that garlic flavor without a lot of effort.
Chop the vegetables you’ve chosen into small, bite-size pieces, and add them to the oil just five to ten minutes before you are ready to eat. Mushrooms can be added early—they will absorb some of the cooking oil, but then release oil and moisture as they soften.
Stir everything attentively and sauté until all the vegetables are soft, but still brightly-colored.
Put tomatoes in last and just heat through
Roma tomatoes are the best choice for a bruschetta-style sauté. Other tomatoes are too juicy and release copious quantities of watery juice into your bruschetta. Think of serving hot, tomato-flavored water over your pasta and you’ll get the idea. Romas are a mealy, thick-skinned tomato bred for making tomato paste, which makes them perfect for a quick sauté. If you would like to use heirloom tomatoes, cut them in half first and scoop out any soft interior and excess juice. Cut the tomatoes into small, bite-size chunks and throw them in at the very end of your sauté. Heat through quickly (even romas release some juice) and serve your bruschetta immediately.
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