The Escoffier Series, Chapter 13, Vegetables and Farinacious Products continues
It’s slow going but good work. We move into a few more vegetables, including mushrooms, which could be a whole book, and how to prepare mostly any mushroom well.
Also discussed is the basic process to make a good vegetable puree. For Escoffier, what seems plain has a few added steps which do make the ordinary better.
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The Escoffier series continues. We’re still a few episodes away from the chapter conclusion and 4 chapters from the book’s conclusion. Desserts is coming soon enough and that’s gonna be fun.
Last week asparagus was discussed. I overlooked telling you about what to shop for in the store. I did post two photos on the Patreon page for last week’s episode, one of green asparagus and one is the Argenteuil kind with the light purple coloration.
What I didn’t mention was to look at the stalks and tips. The stalks should be firm and solid, not withered and wrinkled. The tips are the main reason to eat asparagus. If the tips are broken off, keep looking. Worse than broken tips are rotting tips. Yes, that’s gross, and yes, grocery stores sell that. Rotting tips are a deeper green color and soft and squishy. Literally, the asparagus is rotting. They smell like lawn clippings.
If the tips are firm and intact but you see small pieces poking out from under the little leaf thing on the tip, that’s an old asparagus starting to produce the branches that make the seeds. It’s not inedible. It will have a stronger flavor than the younger version. I do not prefer the older asparagus because it is past its prime.
Moving on.
We ended with Carrots Vichy last time. Celery is next in the French alphabetical order. Also listed in celery is celeri rave, also called celery root or celeriac. That’s plain enough except it’s also a trick. The celery root in the store will produce celery stalks, just not like the kind we are used to buying. The celery stalks we buy are pretty bland. The celery from celeriac is potent and bitter. Escoffier braises the tender, light green celery by first blanching them for about 15 minutes then finishing “in the usual manner for vegetables” in a light stock until they are tender. The other celery preparations are the same procedures for cardoons, which I didn’t discuss. Cardoon preparations start with procedure 3997.
I’ve discussed celery root before. I love this vegetable. It has a pure celery flavor which is milder than the green stalks we buy in the produce section. It can be sauteed or pureed. It is compatible with nearly all flavors. Julienned and sauteed with a bit of caramelization and butter is about as simple and as good as it gets. Serve that with a grilled steak or a strong stew.
One other preparation for celery root is pretty common for Escoffier: puree. There’s kind of a lot of purees in Classical French cooking.
Depending on the thing, celery root in this case, some vegetables need starch added to give them structure. Cauliflower and celery root and celery are three such vegetables.
there is a process to making a good pureed vegetable. Cut them small and in uniform pieces for even cooking. Bring to a boil and simmer in well-salted water. When they are tender, drain them and pass through a sieve. A what? Here’s where we have an upper hand. A food mill. What Escoffier means is to pass the vegetable through a screen. Some of us have a plastic-handled strainer with what looks like a window screen. That’s what he means. The chief issue is most of those tools aren’t made for the force and pressure of passing vegetables through. It is possible to do; I do it. I also use a food mill. Either is fine. The food mill might be better since it is unlikely to break and need replacing.
The make-or-break point for pureed vegetables is after it is pureed. It needs to be dried out. Most veg have a lot of water and the process of pureeing releases a lot of it. Drying can be done by spreading the puree into a thin layer and drying it out in the oven or in a pan on the stovetop on low heat. The stovetop is my preferred way to dry vegetables since it’s faster and I have instant control and observation of the process.
steam will be quick to release when the pan gets hot. As the water comes out, the steam amount decreases. Also, the sound changes to a higher pitch and the veg might start to stick to the pan. That’s done.
Escoffier assumes at least one thing about the reader: there’s a fully stocked kitchen. The next step is to add “one third the quantity of stiff mashed potatoes.” Escoffier does that often enough. To do this procedure, you need to have already cooked something else, potatoes or a sauce, to finish. That’s one reason people hate Classical French cooking. That’s also a good reason to read the procedure. The procedure is about 60 words and takes over an hour to achieve.
60 minutes seems like a long time. Maybe it is. Getting that done takes no real effort from you after the potatoes and celeriac are cooking. Prep the rest of the meal. There are things to do during that time to get the meal done at mostly the same time.
That process of drying the veg works also for simple mashed potatoes. I’ll go into detail about that when we get to potatoes.
Next up are mushrooms. He starts with cepes, or porcini, depending on your familiar term. They are the same and sometimes called King Boletes. Depending on where in the world you are, cepes are starting soon. Here in the PNW, that’s the case for us. My friend found one last year on our morel hunting.
Cepes by any name are often dried. The fresh version doesn’t last very long, so drying extends that a great deal.
Cepes can be grilled or sauteed. In nearly all cases cepes should be sliced into half-inch thick slices. Mushrooms are quite porous and will take a good amount of oil on the cut surface. Brush the cut side with oil or melted butter, season, and grill.
I’m not a big fan of grilling cepes or other actual wild mushrooms since the juices run off. I prefer to capture them in the pan to allow them to reduce and retain that flavor.
If you only cook mushrooms one way, do so with whole unsalted butter, shallots and/or garlic, and fresh chives. Salt and pepper, of course.
You can add any fresh mushrooms to the pan used to sear protein, steak or chicken or fish. Add a touch of butter and cook the sliced mushrooms over medium-low heat so you don’t caramelize the pan drippings before the mushrooms start to cook and release their water. That water will deglaze the pan which is releasing the flavor. At that point, add the shallots or garlic, cook until you smell the aroma, add some stock consistent with the protein or cream, and allow to reduce to a sauce.
There are a few wild mushrooms most everyone can find. Cepes, chanterelles, morels, Shaggy Mane, Hen of the Woods and a few others I can’t think of just now. Don’t guess. Foraging wild mushrooms requires specific knowledge. If you aren’t sure, forage at your grocery store.
Button mushrooms can be small or large. The large ones can be stuffed with practically anything. Sausage filling seems pretty popular. Crimini are just the small versions of portabella. For portabella mushrooms, scrape the gills off with a spoon and add to the compost pile. There’s not much there to eat. The cap can be stuffed which is really more like putting a pile of stuff on top. The stems can be a touch woody. When they’re diced and sauteed they are fine. Cook them to be an ingredient in the portabella stuffing.
One tip for stuffing cap mushrooms, button or Crimini, is to bake the stemless caps stem side down on a wire rack at 350° for about 10-12 minutes. The goal is for some of the water to drip out. After you remove the mushrooms from the oven, they’ll continue to drip water. The main purpose is to extract that water so two things happen. The filling stays in the now pre-shrunken cap and the flavor increases for less water. Doing this requires a bit more planning and the results are worth the effort.
Nearly all mushrooms are made better with fat. Butter or bacon fat or heavy cream. One of the best appetizers we made at the Governors’ Club was a lump crab meat and chanterelle appetizer on a puff pastry vol au vent. We, the chef and I, took a break to go to a local park in the spring and pick buckets of chanterelles. That was an amazing appetizer. If you don’t have puff pastry and don’t want to make it, a good white bread round crouton toasted crisp in clarified butter will do very nicely.
Morels can be stuffed. It takes a bit of effort since the opening is generally pretty small. A pastry bag with a small tip is required so the mushroom doesn’t break. Bake the stuffed morels in a nearly finished sauce, expecting that some of the water released from the mushroom will thin the sauce a bit. It may be necessary to put the sauce on the stovetop to reduce it gently. Escoffier would say to remove the mushrooms, reduce the liquid, season and add a knob of butter, add the mushrooms back, stir to coat, and serve over a nice crouton of bread. My suggestion is to leave the mushrooms in the sauce, reduce the sauce quickly but carefully–yeah, right–and finish with a knob of butter and serve over that crouton or in a vol au vent.
That seems like enough for now. The next Escoffier episode will start with chicory, which we know as endive. It’s a bit of a big family which includes escarole, one of my favorites. If I remember I’ll tell you about a salmon dish we made with that. You might have also said Italian Wedding Soup to yourself and you would be right.
