The Escoffier Series continues: Vegetables
Rice, tomatoes, and truffles. Two of those seem a stretch to add to a vegetables chapter, but here we are. We’ll cover some basic cooking for rice, which seems always to flummox people.
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Chapter 13 has certainly given us plenty to look at. We’re winding up the veg portion today and then the farinacious products remain.
Escoffier includes rice in the vegetable portion, not the starch portion, which seems at least curious.
Basic white rice is, or should be, pretty easy to cook. Converted white rice is about 2:1 water to rice. Rice cookery can get confusing quickly though. 2 cups of rice is cooked in about 3.5 Cups of water, not 4. 3 cups of rice is cooked in about 5 cups of water, not 6.
Brown rice, wild rice, and black rice are slightly different. Aromatic rices, mostly Basmati and Jasmine, are different again. Since this isn’t a rice episode, those will have to wait.
Escoffier mentions two kinds of rice, Patna and Carolina.
Patna is a long-grain white rice. Longer than what we know of as rice. Most Americans, probably, are familiar with Uncle Ben’s or Mahatma brand white rice. It’s sorta a long oval, cooks nicely into distinct grains, and is what we would call fluffy.
Patna rice is an aromatic rice which means it has a delicate perfume aroma. Not strong but present. Basmati and Jasmine, as previously mentioned, are probably the most popular in the US. Escoffier suggests Patna rice as well-suited for Rice Pilaw, Pilaf to us.
Carolina can be substituted if needs be. Carolina rice is preferred by Escoffier for sweet dishes and salads but does also use Patna for salads. He also identifies the Piedmont variety of rice as suitable for risotto.
Escoffier makes a point to indicate that for certain dishes the Carolina and the Patna rice is to remain unrinsed. Most of us who make rice don’t rinse it so that seems like an odd instruction. The aromatic rices are generally rinsed several times to ensure the excess starch is removed. When I make Jasmine or Basmati, I soak it, drain it, soak it again, drain it, then add the water for the cooking. When I make regular white rice, it just gets added to the buttered, salted boiling water.
The first issue is finding Patna and Carolina rice. They still exist and can be found online and in higher-end grocery stores. Most of us will buy Uncle Ben’s or Mahatma or some other brand of converted white rice.
For risotto, the most popular rice is Arborrio and, in my opinion, is hardly worth buying when there is better rice to be found. I did an entire episode on risotto, culinarylibertarian.com/126. I discuss the various grains and the cooking processes. That’s all I’ve got to say about that.
Rice Pilaf sounds complicated since there’s nothing in the name to explain what’s happening.
Instead of making rice on the stove top, Pilaf has some aromatics in the initial cooking step and it is baked instead of cooked on the stove. It’s a pretty simple dish and here’s how to do it.
Rice Pilaw, procedure 4239, is simple.
Cook 50 grams, 2 ounces, of small diced onion in 50 grams of butter until lightly golden brown in color. Add 250 grams, 9 ounces, of unwashed Patna rice, mixing until the starch begins to make a milky appearance.
Add (Escoffier uses the phrase moisten) with 2 5/8ths cups of white bouillon (water will work), cover with a lid, and cook in a moderate oven for 18 minutes. As soon as it is cooked, turn into another pan and carefully fork in 50 grams, 2 ounces, of whole butter cut into small pieces.
One thing missing is salt. Add salt.
Pilaf will often have the full mirepoix of veggies instead of only onions.
This procedure, cooking the veg first, adding the rice, then the liquid, then covering and cooking, is wildly useful. Add some curry to the onions. Add garlic or chopped chicken livers and gizzards. You can add pretty much anything in that first stage to make the rice dish specific to your meal needs.
Rice cooked this way does take a few more steps and at least one more pan than cooking it on the stovetop and the variety of flavors is well worth adding this to your standard procedures.
When you fork in the butter, be careful how you say that, add chopped salad herbs: chives or parsley or cilantro.
Procedure 4242 shows just that idea. Riz a la Turque reads as so: Prepare the rice as for Riz Pilaw adding approximately 2 grams of saffron to the Bouillon. When the rice is cooked, mix in 150 grams of Tomato Fondue. That sounds fantastic.
Escoffier offers some rice procedures that are just so odd to us I have to mention at least one. The process is to cook then drain the rice and rinse it. Seems odd, yes? Procedure 4238, Riz a l’Indienne reads as so, “Cook 250 g (9 oz) Patna rice in 2 1/2 liters (2 3/4 quarts) boiling water with 25 grams salt.
Allow to cook for 16 minutes from the time the water comes back to a boil, then drain, wash well in plenty of warm water and drain again. Spread on a warmed cloth on a tray and dry for 15 minutes in a warm oven.”
You may notice he didn’t offer a final use. Salads. Cold salads, specifically, is the intended use for rice cooked as such. Notice the absence of butter in the cooking process.
The key takeaway about rice is the pilaf method allows for much more flavor innovation than the stovetop method. You get a better product, too. And, one tip if you are going to add saffron to your rice. Saffron is potent so a little goes a long way. Place a few strands in the palm of your hand and smash them. Sometimes saffron can be a bit M-word, moist for you who didn’t follow that, so you may need to put them on a cutting board and cut them. Drizzle just a few drops of olive oil on them before you cut them. The oil will add liquid surface tension which will help prevent the strands from flying away, especially if the saffron is brittle. The chief reason to use oil and not water is the color from saffron is not oil soluble. If you use water, the color will bleed out onto the cutting board and with it, some flavor. Add the saffron to the veggie part of your pilaf. The heat will release the aroma and open up the flavors so when the water is added you get the most from your saffron.
Salsify is next. I like it. It seems hard to find and not cheap when found. The key things about salsify are these. There are two varieties, black and white. Sometimes it is called viper root or scorsenera. It’s sticky when you peel it. Almost like there’s a sap in it and it makes your hands sticky. Also, it darkens quickly like apples or artichokes. I should be blanched in lightly acidulated water which will stop the browning enzyme. We used to cook salsify at the Governors’ Club in Tallahassee as part of the veg for some dishes. Escoffier offers some baked dishes in cream sauce. It is mild in flavor. In some places, it grows in the lawn as a weed. I have it. The wild variety roots are very fibrous and look more like an underdeveloped parsnip. There’s not much to them compared to the commercial kind. You might see them going to seed and think of them as some giant kind of Dandelion.
Tomatoes, as a veg, are mostly going to be stuffed with something. In nearly all cases the tomato is cut in half, seeds and juice removed, salted, stuffed and baked. There are a few alterations to the process. Sometimes the seeded halves are baked then stuffed and baked again to make the filling hot and then gratineed for pretty.
Escoffier does not write to skin them first. I’ve not been shy about stating I hate tomato skins when they are cooked. In this application the skins are not made better. They do serve at least to help hold the tomato together a bit as it is cooked. The other issue is the tomato meat inside the tomato. He’s not always clear about what to do with that. Leave it or carefully remove it?
In one case he writes to remove the seeds and juice and in another, he writes to remove the insides without damaging the tomato. It seems from my reading the procedure asking for the insides to be removed is to take the flesh out as well. Nearly none of his recipes ask for the inside flesh to be used in the stuffing. That is not a suggestion that it is to be discarded. It is very fine diced and added to anything you add tomato to or salted and eaten as is.
Those tomatoes that are baked can present a problem. You can probably visualize a round tomato stuffed with mushroom Duxelles and diced ham would not necessarily sit nicely on a flat baking dish since it is a round object. Rolling or tipping is very possible. To get around this issue, place some Kosher salt in the bottom of the baking dish and rest the tomato in that. Very little salt, if any, will transfer to the tomato since the skin will be a barrier, and the salt will help hold the tomato in place.
The stuffed tomato idea was a popular-ish item in the 70s with tuna salad or something else inside a seeded whole tomato. Some main course lunch salad, or cottage cheese, inside of a tomato is a good lunch idea. For Escoffier’s use, he’s mostly offering that as an accompaniment to a main course.
He does offer one particular procedure which is distinctly different. He writes, “select some firm medium-sized tomatoes and cut them into 1 cm thick slices. Season with salt and pepper then dip into light frying batter and deep fry in very hot fat as required. Drain, arrange on a serviette on a dish and serve immediately.” Very hot fat is unclear. I would pan-fry them in sufficient fat to cover them. Tomato slices in a deep fryer sounds like a mess of a deep fryer. Very hot might be 375°. I would be cautious about getting the fat hotter than that. That might sound familiar to you.
In the South, they simply took the green tomatoes, made a three-step breading process and you know the rest.
Escoffier’s last vegetable entry is truffles. There may be a few conclusions we can reach here. One, the king had nearly unlimited resources to buy truffles or, maybe more likely, enough people who were hunting truffles for the king. Truffles may have been far more available then than now since, probably, cities were fewer and smaller. What is pretty clear today is not too many people can afford to have truffles as a vegetable.
He offers 5 truffle procedures and in 3 of them, the truffles are whole. One, which uses thick slices, is as much a pipe dream as the rest but sounds amazing. Slice 18 ounces of peeled raw truffles into thick slices and cook gently in 2 ounces of butter and then flamed brandy. At the same time, reduce a cup and a quarter of Sauce Bechamel until very thick, add the cooking liquor from the truffles, a good amount of heavy cream, and 2 ounces of butter. Mix in the truffles and serve in a vol-au-vent case.
Vol-au-vent cases are like cups made from puff pastry.
I said it sounded amazing, and it does. It also sounds expensive.
Mostly, and this is so for as long as I’ve been cooking, truffles were a luxury item used as a garnish in pates or a special ingredient in pasta or risotto dishes and the finishing ingredient in sauces. In some cases, Tornadoes Rosinni, the truffle is sliced as a garnish on top of the foie gras.
There’s more to know about truffles than can be covered in what remains of the time. The easiest distinction is between black and white. It gets more complicated after that. White truffles are a fall product and often sell for thousands of dollars per kilo. It is a rare treat to find them, or work with them, and their flavor is deeply potent and complex. Black truffles have some distinctions which are no longer specific to France. China got into the truffle business some years ago. They are cheaper, smaller, and not quite as potent as the French truffles. They are a very suitable substitute. When I say French truffles, that conceals that there are at least two kinds of French truffles, Summer and Perigod.
You can buy whole truffles online. Urbani might be the most reliable source. Not the cheapest; the most reliable. They have a reputation to maintain as a premier truffle vendor. Amazon has them but I would be cautious about ordering truffles there.
Truffles are an acquired taste. One Christmas my employer took the staff to a restaurant for dinner. Everyone came. The first course was truffle risotto. The dishwasher tasted it and it wasn’t for them. As the busboy cleared and came around, he carried those plates of nearly uneaten white truffle risotto which I happily removed from him, scraped onto my plate, and ate it. There was no way in God’s green Earth I was letting that go to the dishpit.
One last story about truffles which almost always has nothing whatsoever to do with truffles. Truffle oil isn’t truffle oil. Almost never. Even with the wee bits of something at the bottom, truffle oil is almost always olive oil with a concoction from the perfumery to make that aroma. Stop using it.
Okay. That ends vegetables in the vegetable chapter. Starches remains. Of particular note are gnocchi, polenta, and noodles, which would make you midwesterners happy. He means pasta, of course. I just like that he uses noodles.