By Justin Fox

Why every American kitchen should have a spätzle maker

One day back in November I ordered a Berkshire pork loin roast (a little over two pounds) from the nice people at FreshDirect. I seemed to remember a previous such roast being a little dull, so I placed it the night before in my basic Thanksgiving turkey brine: salt, brown sugar, peppercorns, allspice, cloves, rosemary and thyme. And, you know, water.

I realize that it would be helpful if I gave the proportions, at least the salt-to-water proportions. I think it was something less than a cup of salt in two quarts of water, but don't hold me to that. In any case, it was probably slightly too much salt, although nobody complained. I brought the brine to a boil, let it cool, then stuck the pork in it overnight in the fridge.

The next evening, I browned the pork on every side I could, with some butter, in a frying pan over medium-high heat. Then I set the frying pan aside and put the pork on a rack in a roasting pan in a 250-degree oven and left it there for a while. Maybe an hour-and-a-half?

Then I set about making spätzle, which I thought would be good with a pork roast. There had been a Kurt Guttenbrunner recipe in the Times in September for "Spaetzle With Corn, Peas, Braised Rabbit and Tarragon." The crucial excerpt:

For the spaetzle:

Salt

2 cups all-purpose flour

Freshly ground black pepper

Freshly ground nutmeg

2 large eggs

1/2 cup heavy cream plus 5 teaspoons

1/2 cup quark or fromage blanc or cottage cheese

Extra virgin olive oil.

and then this:

4. For spaetzle: place a large pot of lightly salted water over high heat to bring to a boil. Place flour in a large bowl and season to taste with salt, pepper and a pinch of nutmeg. Add eggs, 1/2 cup cream and quark; mix well. When water boils, press dough through a spaetzle maker directly into water. As noodles float to top, remove with a slotted spoon and transfer to a bowl. Mix with a bit of olive oil. Set aside.

The Dining section with this recipe had been sitting in our newspaper stack for a while, and I guess I had recently looked through it. I noticed that it called for quark, which before it became a subatomic particle was the German version of ricotta/cottage cheese, and sure enough they sell the stuff at Zabar's. I didn't notice the part about a "spaetzle maker" until I was already starting to mix the ingredients, so I improvised on that.

I initially tried to mix with a whisk, which got me nowhere. So I switched to the beaters and that worked but was messy. I then used a cheese grater to cut the dough into spätzle. It was a huge mess. I'd say maybe half the dough actually made it into the boiling water. But that half tasted really good.

Part of what made it taste so good was a cream sauce, which I made like this: I looked at the pan in which I had browned the pork, and there didn't seem to be quite enough pork residue in there. So I cooked some chopped-up bacon in it too. Then I took out the bacon bits, and poured out most of the grease.

Then, I turned up the heat, and poured in some Barbancourt four-year-old dark rum (maybe a half cup?), mixed in a bunch of dijon mustard (maybe two tablespoons?), and cooked this down to a sizzling couple of tablesppons. After which I poured in a cup or so of cream, which I let sizzle down for about 10 minutes. That was the sauce. (If you don't have Barbancourt rum, bourbon or brandy would suffice; most other dark rums wouldn't, because they have a weird ammoniac taste that you wouldn't want in a cream sauce. I do recommend Barbancourt rum, though, because it's really good and because I think we should all do what we can to support the Haitian economy.)

The accompaniments were a salad, which included those bacon bits, and a beet, grated and sauteed in butter, with a little lime zest and lime juice added at the very last second. (The recipe's in The Gourmet Cookbook).

Anyway, it all tasted really good. So good that I've been getting requests for the recipe, which I am only now getting around to posting.

Also, I asked for a spätzle maker for Christmas. And I got one! (They apparently cost only $8.95 at Zabar's.)

So after Christmas I made spätzle again, this time mixing the dough in the Cuisinart and using the spätzle maker. Sadly, I put the spätzle maker together wrong, and made another mess (see photo).

The black rubber part is supposed to go on the bottom, not on the top. Since then I've been able to figure that out, and make lots and lots of spätzle. Also, I've used ricotta, which is a lot easier to find in stores other than the magical Zabar's, instead of quark, and it seemed to work just fine.

Brine, beets and watermelon radishes

I came very close to embracing an incipient Thanksgiving foodie trend this year and spatchcocking the turkey, as instructed by the Washington Post. But I lost my nerve at the last minute, partly because all the references to spatchcocking I found on the Web other than the Post story described it as a preparation best suited for grilling (it involves slicing through the backbone so you lay the bird flat). Plus the bird (from the Depaola truck at the Union Square greenmarket) was small enough to fit easily in a pot in the fridge. So I went again with what is becoming a pretty conventional Thanksgiving practice (we've been doing it for almost a decade) and prepared a brine.

I put in a bunch of kosher salt (can't even remember now if it was 1.5 cups or 2.5), brown sugar, peppercorns, allspice, cloves, rosemary and thyme, and brought it all to a boil.

After letting the brine cool down I poured it into the pot with the turkey in it, and didn't make too much of mess. About 20 hours later I pulled the turkey out (and did make a mess) and put it on its side on a rack in a roasting pan. I roasted it on that side at 400 degrees for 27 minutes (seemed like a good number), flipped it and roasted it on the other side for 27 minutes, then turned the oven down to 350, set the turkey breast side up and put some sweet potatos, parsnips and turnips under it, then poured in some turkey broth and white wine. It probably cooked about 90 or 100 minutes like that. I may have turned the oven down to 325 at some point.

It was the first time I had ever cooked a turkey without once consulting a cookbook. And it was good, really good. In past years I've sometimes overbrined. This year the turkey was moist with a hint of the herbs from the brine, but not soft or overspiced. In fact, I'm going to grab a hunk out of the fridge right now.

Okay, that's done. The rest of the menu consisted of smashed potatoes, a really great soup of sweet potatoes and other root veggies that Mrs. By Justin Fox made a few weeks ago, green beans tossed in Dijon mustard and anchovy past.

And then there were the sweet potatoes, which I guess were redundant given the soup but we didn't want to do without. I was initially thinking of slicing them into french-fry pieces and, well, frying them. But there wasn't an appropriate pot available, so I altered a recipe for grated beets that we've been eating a lot of lately (it's from the Gourmet Cookbook).

I grated two sweet potatoes together with one beet, fried 'em up in a skillet with butter like hash browns, then added a little grated lime zest and lime juice at the last minute.

It's better with just beets.

Finally, the salad.

The beautiful watermelon radishes and multicolored carrots were from a really sweet little veggie stand at Union Square near the north entrance to the subway station. I made a dressing of orange juice and shallots and mustard. But it just wasn't very good. It looked great, though.

It was this picture, in fact, that inspired my to write here for the first time in months and months. Not that it's such a great picture, but the salad was beautiful. Plus, the rest of the family (including in laws) is in the next room working on the annual gingerbread house, which this year is a gas station. I said I was going to get to work on the book (I have a cleaned-up manuscript due Dec. 17), and this procrastination opportunity was just too good to pass up. Happy (post-)Thanksgiving!

Sea robin advice from an expert

This blog is now one of the world's foremost online sources of culinary information about sea robins. Seriously, type "cooking sea robin" into the Google and my previous post on the topic shows up--today at least--in fourth place. As such, it's been getting some traffic from sea robin aficionados, one of whom sent me this informative e-mail:

First thing, you got ripped. 5 dollars? Then again after spending 50 bucks on a party boat to catch a few fluke means the few sea robins I took in actually cost more than that ... but anyway, you have to fillet them and deep fry the fillets. They are quite good, but you will still have a few smallish bones that come out easily after cooking. Only a big one will get you decent fillets, it takes a skilled hand to fillet a smaller one. ... People still look at me funny when I take a few sea robins home for dinner. They are aesthetically ugly fish (though divers seem to think they are beautiful) but no uglier, my wife contends, than any flatfish ... perhaps that's why no market ever developed for them.

The sea robin debacle, or, not all junk-fish experiments succeed

This is a sea robin. At least, that's what Captain Rick called it last Friday. A friend who stopped by as I was getting reading to cook it said that, when she fished off Shelter Island as a kid, her dad referred to such things as "garbage fish."

Rick sells lots of perfectly normal fish (filets of tuna, flounder, etc.) at his stand at the 97th Street Greenmarket. But that kind of stuff costs real money, and is kinda boring, so I'm usually drawn to his little bin of whole fish. I've bought lots of excellent porgies from him, and the week before I had gone for the butterfish. This time the weirdest thing in the bin was the sea robin, so I bought it. For $5.

I asked Rick what to do with the thing. He said to cut off the tail and bake it. So I cut off the tail:

I then followed a recipe for monkfish tail in the no-longer-All-New Joy of Cooking (1997 edition), stuffing the thing with chopped garlic and basil and Maldon salt:

I roasted it at 450 degrees, initially just with oil and then with some Vinho Verde thrown in.

It was a bust, which is why I took no pictures of the finished product. It didn't look good. It didn't taste good. The kid, who will eat porgies all day, didn't like it. The wife didn't like it. I didn't like it. The mix of flavors was just wrong. Maybe I overcooked it. Or undercooked it. But I don't think that was the problem. Luckily, I had also made a nice salad and cooked up some couscous and Fresh Direct lamb sausage. But still, it was a bust.

I think the fish might taste fine in a thick, creamy sauce. A sea robin etouffee. Except that it's got lots of little bones which would make such treatment difficult. So this week it's back to porgies or butterfish. Or maybe even tuna.

Butterfish and land shark

Someday soon, I hope, my digital media empire will consist of the Curious Capitalist at Time.com, a site/blog (probably at this address) promoting my book, and a food blog produced with others (I'm talking about you, Gina). But I haven't gotten around to making that happen yet. Which means this still doubles as a food blog, because I think posting recipes on my Time.com blog would be just too self-indulgent.

And since I cooked butterfish for the first time Friday night, it seems imperative that I share the experience here. I bought them from Captain Rick, who catches fish off the Hamptons and sells them at, among other places, the Friday Greenmarket on 97th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus. He sold me six of the little things (for $4, I think) and told me to "lance" them. I took that to be a euphemism for cleaning them, which is itself a euphemism for pulling their guts and organs out. But it was an easy enough process with the little butterfish that I guess lance is as good a word for it as any. Anyway, here they are, post-lancing:

And here they are a couple minutes later frying in peanut oil:

Cooking them in a cast-iron skillet was a mistake. I figured it was the best alternative to teflon, which I don't really like to use plus our one teflon pan is too small for six butterfish anyway. But the skins came right off the fish and bonded in a deep and lasting way with the cast iron. (I was able to get them off eventually, but it took a whole lotta scrubbing.) Here's what the fish looked like afterwards:

The garnish was chopped garlic and ginger fried in a little peanut oil, to which I added some toasted sesame oil and soy sauce after the the frying was done. When I first tasted the fish in the pan I wondered if maybe the garnish was overkill, because the fish really did taste like butter. But after eating a couple of the things I wanted all the flavor I could get because eating plain butter is actually kind of boring. All in all it was a big success, except perhaps esthetically. Oh, and those fish have an awful lot of tiny bones.

Captain Rick also talked me into buying a couple pounds of sand shark filets. When I announced this at the P.S. 163 book sale down the sidewalk, somebody asked, "land shark?" The name stuck.

I kept the land-shark-prep pretty simple. I just rubbed some oil and salt and pepper on it, broiled it, then served it with anchovy butter. It's really rich, and we could have done with far less fish for three adults and a kid. So on Sunday I made myself shark salad out of the leftovers. It was okay, but there's a reason why you can't buy cans of Wolverine of the Sea at the supermarket: Shark doesn't make nearly as good a salad as tuna does.

Swiss chard pizza

This little slice, part of the amuse bouche, was actually the least flavorful element of a spectacular meal consumed at Telepan last night. But it was made with Swiss chard, and therefore deserving of mention.

The highlight of the evening? Maybe when the sommelier described the wine he was pouring with Allison's foie gras (yes, we're evil) "the veal stock" of whatever varietal it happened to be.

But back to the chard. I think the message here is that things go best when the chard stands alone. Well, not alone. Sauteed onions help.

No chard or services were received in exchange for this post.

Swiss chard without bacon

One of the first posts in this blog was a recipe for Swiss chard cooked with bacon. The other day I noticed that it was actually getting some traffic from Google, so I searched on the phrase "Swiss chard bacon." My post was 9th in the list of results, just ahead of a recipe from Yahoo! Food.

Just now, though, I typed "Swiss chard" (sans bacon) into the Google search box. My post comes in 46th. Clearly, I've got some work in to do in my quest to become the world's most trusted source of Swiss chard information.

Happily, I've got a new Swiss chard recipe to share, without bacon this time. The inspiration was a recipe in Alice Waters's Chez Panisse Vegetables cookbook, which I looked through down at the in-laws' over Thanksgiving and I now want for Christmas. (Does Santa read blogs?)

We had a dinner party last night with a guest who eats no pork, so I decided it was time to try bacon-free chard. Remembering that Alice's recipe included onions, chard, and not a whole lot else, I chopped up most of a yellow onion and cooked it in olive oil for a few minutes in a big frying pan. When the onion bits were soft but hadn't yet begun to brown, I added a couple bunches of chopped-up chard. I cooked it briefly at medium heat, turning and stirring the chard regularly until the leaves were slightly wilted. Then I turned the heat down to low, covered the pan, and more or less forgot about it for an hour.

Before serving it I stirred in a tiny pinch of Maldon salt, on the assumption that all foods are improved by Maldon salt (there's an article in a recent Food and Wine or Bon Appetit, also perused down at the in-laws' and as best I can tell not available online, that recommends sprinkling the stuff on ice cream). But that may not have been necessary. The chard was meltingly tender and slightly sweet, its wonderful flavor no longer competing with the smoky bacon. This is, I think, the way Swiss chard is meant to be consumed.

Blogrolling in our (lunch) time

I wrote about the great new food blog Midtown Lunch a few weeks ago in The Curious Capitalist. Now I've been profiled as the Midtown Lunch'er of the week.

My age is listed as 28, I think because the previous week's Midtown Lunch'er (not sure what that apostrophe's about, but it's how Mr. Midtown Lunch writes it) was that age. Beyond that it's all true.

Spinach

I wrote a Curious Capitalist post about spinach last week. I didn't have anything major to say, but I'd come across a cool blog post on the subject of the current spinach problems, and I wanted to write something that wasn't about corporate governance. Plus, I really like spinach.

In the post I mentioned my favorite way of preparing the greatest of the leafy vegetables. So I was thinking that, in these spinach-deprived times, it might be nice to share the details. The recipe is originally from Cucina Fresca, by Viana la Place and Evan Kleiman, which I'm pretty sure is the first cookbook I ever owned. But I've made some elaborations and alterations.

You start with a nice dirty bunch of spinach (that is, not one of those precut, prewashed bags that carry E. Coli and don't taste as good anyway). You wash it and wash it and wash it, remove the stems, then let it dry for a while. There's no need to chop it up unless the leaves are really huge.

Then, in a nice big frying pan, you start cooking up some anchovy fillets in olive oil. The easiest way to do this is with anchovies in a tin--use an entire tin. But the best-tasting anchovies I've had come in Agostino Recca brand jars. Half a jar is about right for one spinach bunch.

Cook the anchovies over a pretty low flame with a few tablespoons of olive oil. As the filets start to disintegrate, add a couple of cloves of garlic. You can either chop them up or put them through a garlic press, I think this is one case where pressed garlic is actually better. Let this mixture simmer until the anchovies have disintegrated completely. Add more olive oil if the mixture starts looking a little crusty.

Now it's time to put in the spinach. Turn the burner up to medium, then throw the spinach in. Keep flipping it and stirring it so it cooks evenly. Once it's all wilted, you're done. No need to cook it any longer. You can eat it right out of the pan, or at room temperature.

Meanwhile, until spinach is in back in stores, try swiss chard.

The efficient market in West Village restaurants

When we lived in London in 2000 and 2001, it took a while for us to figure out how to find good restaurants. The London Zagat guide was alarmingly unreliable. Just looking in the window wasn't much help, either. Great-looking, packed restaurants often served near-inedible food. Finally we bought a copy of the Time Out Guide to Eating and Drinking—whether it was recommended to us or we just happened upon it in a bookstore, I don't know—and our lives were transformed. If the Time Out Guide said a restaurant was good, it was good. (Later we found the Guide Michelin to be equally reliable, but mainly just for higher end fare.)

Forward to earlier this week, when we went out for dinner in the West Village two nights in a row (the Boy was with his grandparents). First we ate at Fatty Crab, a cool-looking cubbyhole of a Malaysian restaurant on Hudson Street. We got there so early that there was no wait for a table, but that soon changed. (See the photo at left for how things looked outside the restaurant when we left.) And the food was transformatively good, if artery-hardening (the fatty duck and the pork rind and pickled watermelon salad were highlights). The waiter was wonderful, and talked us into getting a bottle of Pinot Auxerrois that matched our meal perfectly. In other word, the crowds were a good indicator of quality. Fatty Crab has also gotten gushing reviews, too, so it's not really a case of crowds vs. experts. But still, let's give New Yorkers some credit here.

The next night we tried the Spotted Pig on Greenwich Street, which has also gotten lots of positive press, plus a Michelin star. We didn't get there until around 7, and were told the wait would be an hour. So we left and headed over to Greenwich Avenue to a restaurant called Good, which Time Out New York had said was "closer to great." No wait there. After sitting down in the mostly empty room we realized it was the same space that once housed Campo, a vaguely South American restaurant that really was close to great. It turns out Good is owned and run by the same guy who ran Campo, Steven Picker, but on the evidence of our meal everything but the mixed drinks is at best mediocre, and the service clueless. This time the experts said go (a brief search turned up one other positive review), but the lack of crowds was the better indicator of quality.

So what's the point of all this other than to snidely imply that New Yorkers are more culinarily sophisticated than Londoners? Just that the answer to the great question of whether crowds or expert individuals know best is it depends. The experts at London's Time Out were clearly better at discerning quality than the mass of Londoners, but in New York the crowds agreed with or outdid the critics—or maybe just noticed a decline in quality that had yet to set in the last time the critics visited Good. It's also possible that the real point is that while restaurant-hopping in the West Village I took a photo of that (Anglophile) store where the cat named Molly got stuck inside the wall, and wanted an excuse to post it.