Another week, another trip to the farmers market, another six ears of sweet corn. Maybe you’re one of those stolid types that needn’t go beyond the perfection of an ear of fresh corn, boiled and slathered in butter, salt and pepper, but after a few weeks of that routine I’m ready for a change of pace. Now you might suggest I go a week without buying corn, but with a season that lasts only six or so short weeks and a longing that builds up over an entire year, that would just be wrong. But where to find fresh ideas for consuming fresh corn — that was the question.

As a Midwesterner, corn forms a small part of my cultural DNA, but there are other foods that equal or surpass it in significance. For the indigenous people of Mexico, corn played (and continues to play) a much more central role, taking on religious significance. Who better to turn to for corn advice, then? Tamales are one of the more famous corn-based foods of Mexico, but the tamales most of us are familiar with used dried corn. In the state of Michoacán, however, they make uchepos, which are made like tamales but use the husks and kernels of fresh corn. These sweet tamales, complemented by a spicy salsa, are the perfect answer to the midsummer sweet corn doldrums.

Uchepos

Adapted from Diana Kennedy, The Art of Mexican Cooking: Traditional Mexican Cooking for Aficionados (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2008).

• Husks from 5 ears of corn
• Kernels from 5 ears of corn (about 5 cups)
• 2 T sugar
• 2 T unsalted butter, softened
• 2 T sour cream (original recipe calls for natas, creme fraîche or thick cream, but I used what I had)
• 1 t sea salt

The easiest way to prepare the corn for this recipe is to cut through the unhusked corn at its thickest part — just above the base — and then carefully roll off the husks in sheets. This also gives you a nice flat base to stand the corn up as you slice off the kernels.

Line a steamer basket with any husks that are too small to roll uchepos from; set steamer over low heat.

Process half the corn in a food processor until reduced to a pulp. Add the rest of the corn and process until corn forms a loose puree. Add sugar, butter and cream and process to combine. Transfer to medium bowl and stir in salt.

Taking one husk at a time, place a heaping tablespoon of corn mixture near the center.

Fold the sides of the husk together so they overlap and enclose the filling.

Fold the thin, tapered end of this cone up over the uchepo to close the bottom. The top will remain open.

Lay horizontally in lined steamer basket.

Continue doing folding uchepos until a layer covers the bottom of the steamer basket. Place in steamer and cook ten minutes, until just beginning to firm up. Remove steamer basket and fold the remainder of the uchepos, adding them in horizontal layers. When all the uchepos are prepared, place a towel over top of them inside the steamer, then cover the steamer with plastic wrap and place the lid on top. Steam 1 ½ to 1 ¾ hours, until the filling is pretty firm.

Serve uchepos hot with salsa and sour cream.

When I travel — which happens far too infrequently for my taste — I focus on the food. That’s probably not surprising. The problem with falling in love with the food of a place that, due to a lack of funds or time I won’t be visiting again in the near future, is the cravings. Sometimes after barely a week has passed I’m already desperate to be back where I was eating those foods I just can’t get in Minnesota. My coping mechanism is cooking: when the appetites first awakened by travel arise again instead of buying a plane ticket I head to my kitchen and do my best to recreate those foreign flavors at home.

It’s been a year since Martha and I traveled to Colombia and discovered the magic of Empanadas de Pipián. I’ve eaten plenty of empanadas in my life, many in restaurants in in Minnesota, but none like these. Empanadas de pipián have two distinguishing characteristics: first, the texture of their shell. Nobody would ever compare empanadas de pipián to Cornish (or Upper Peninsular) pasties; empanadas de pipián have a crisp, crunchy shell, reminiscent of a hard taco but slightly more yielding. The other unique characteristic of empanadas de pipián is their flavor: peanuts. While some empanadas may feature meat, or olives, or a medley of any number of ingredients, empanadas de pipián taste like peanuts. In a good way. A uniquely Colombian treat.

When a Colombian food jones strikes, the first reference I consult is the brown notebook I transcribed during afternoons and evenings spent in Martha’s Aunt Stella’s kitchen in Cali, Colombia as she prepared the family’s meal and put up with my persistent questions about her technique and ingredients. Stella is my sage for many Colombian foods.

As a resident of Cali, however, Aunt Stella has easy access to the nationally-renowned empanadas fried up at El Zaguán de San Antonio. Being able to drive 15 minutes to eat some of the best empanadas in town (in the whole world, in fact), she didn’t have much reason to make them at home while we were there. So the brown notebook had no recipe for me.

Where the brown notebook fails, the the two volume Nuevo Gran Libro de la Cocina Colombiana (originally published by Círculo de Lectores in 1983 and reissued by Intermedio in 2008) that I bought in Cali usually has some guidance. This cookbook covers a great variety of Colombian dishes, from soups to desserts, and does a good job of treating the regions of Colombia, even in its brief form. The photos are beautiful. But while it contains several recipes for empanadas, El Gran Libro was silent on the subject of those of pipián.

With first-hand experience coming up blank and my published reference of no help either, I had to turn to my absolute last resort when it comes to cooking: the Internet. That might sound odd coming from a food blogger, but my experience of Internet recipes largely mirrors that of grumbling old-media editors: there’s a lot of crap to sift through (all the recipes I post on marthaandtom.com are perfect, of course). There are a few websites whose recipes I will trust outright, but for the most part searching the web for recipes requires sifting through several versions on various websites and then applying a little common sense and experience to try to get something workable. A search turned up several recipes which I used as to develop a recipe for my empanadas (there was a spreadsheet involved, but I’ll spare you).

Empanadas de Pipián

You’ll need:

• 624 g (eh, call it a pound) potatoes, cut into a small dice

Note on potatoes: In Colombia, potatoes are a science unto themselves; there were more varieties of potatoes in the supermarket than I could even begin to wrap my head around. Small potatoes, large potatoes, red potatoes, blue potatoes, purple potatoes; there were even unwashed potatoes with the dirt still on (to be washed at home — some people like them that way). Taking a survey of the entire country would yield even more variety. And all of these potatoes have their specified uses; without a doubt there is some canonical potato for pipián. In the United States though, potatoes is more or less potatoes and we’ve got to take what we can get. I used white potatoes from the Midtown Farmers Market.

• 212 g (~3/4 c) hogao

Hogao is an ingredient in many, many Colombian dishes. In its simplest form — this is how Stella taught me to make it — it is a mixture of chopped onions and tomatoes, cooked to a puree-like consistency. More complicated versions exist; I personally couldn’t resist throwing in some garlic. I took 356 g roughly chopped tomatoes, mixed them with 156 g roughly chopped onion and 12 g (2 cloves) minced garlic and cooked it to the right consistency: maybe ten minutes over medium heat.

• 78 g peanut butter, melted

This probably leaves authenticity purists even more disturbed than the potatoes, but all the recipes call for roasted and ground peanuts (peanuts being the defining characteristic of Pipián); peanut butter saves several steps. I’m not talking about Jif here — our jar of Salt-Free Eastwind Peanut Butter’s ingredient list reads as follows: “Roasted Peanuts.” But Jif would probably be fine too.

• 1 T achiote

To make the Pipián, place the diced potatoes in a saucepan and cover with cold water. Add plenty of salt. Bring to a boil and simmer until the potatoes are just tender; it won’t take long if you’ve diced them small enough. When the potatoes are cooked, drain them well, then mix with the other three ingredients until everything is evenly distributed.

With the filling under control, the next step is to make the wrapper. Empanadas de pipián feature a yellow-corn based masa, for which I used the bag of P.A.N. Harina de Maiz Amarilla Precocida that we brought with us from Colombia. At the time we thought it would be impossible to get in the States and that we’d be out of luck if we needed our empanada fix. Happily, I’ve noticed this product available in many Latin American markets and even Latin American sections of supermarkets, so there is no obstacle between you and perfectly crunchy empanadas.

I followed the instructions on the package, adding a bit of salt to a cup of water, then stirring in a cup of corn flour. It is important to let the dough rest 15-30 minutes to hydrate fully; the dough will be too wet when it’s first mixed; the water hasn’t been fully absorbed by the corn.

When the dough is sufficiently hydrated, it should be divided into balls. I pinched off a ball I thought looked to be the right size and measured it at 34 g; in retrospect these were probably a little too big. But the bigger you make them the fewer empanadas you’ll have to fold together, so it’s worth considering. Anyway, there’s no agreed upon size for empanadas de pipián; in Colombia we sampled some that were little more than folded over tortilla chips, and others that were much more substantial.

Once you’ve completed your ball size deliberations, you’re ready to form the empanadas. The easiest way to do this is with two sheets of plastic — a zipper-lock bag torn asunder, say. Place one ball between the sheets of plastic, flatten it slightly, then roll it out into an even circle using a rolling pin. Remove the top plastic sheet, place a tablespoon or so of filling in the middle of the dough circle, then fold the bottom plastic sheet over itself to close the empanada, pressing the edges to seal them. Carefully peel back the plastic and flip the empanada onto a cornmealed, floured, cornstarched, or otherwise nonstickified sheet. Continue until you run out of dough, filling, or patience.

Heat deep frying oil to 350ºF (you’ll have to use your own judgment on how much oil to use; in my pan 2 quarts made sense). Fry the empanadas in batches of 4 or 5. They are done when they start to develop dark brown spots, which should occur just as your oil recovers to 350ºF, ready for the next batch.

Let the empanadas cool a little (OR THEY WILL BURN YOUR MOUTH) but not too long — they are best fresh. Serve with ají de maní, preferably applied to each bite from a red squeeze bottle.

Ají de Maní

To be honest I wasn’t totally happy with the way this sauce came out; the addition of cilantro (an idea I got from that darn Internet) didn’t do much for the sauce. The basic idea here is a spicy sauce tasting of peanuts with a thin consistency.

• 96 g peanut butter
• 156 g hogao (should probably use much less, but I wanted to use up what I made for the pipián)
• 10 g (1 small) hot pepper
• 10 g (2 cloves) garlic
• 6 g (largish handful) cilantro
• 162 g water
• a pinch of freshly-ground cumin

Process all ingredients in a blender until smooth.

“They just don’t make cocks like they used to.” So laments just about every modern recipe for coq au vin, the venerable French braise of rooster in wine. The story goes that the dish was developed as a way to use the meat of tough old roosters past their prime; only a long braise could break down the serious connective tissue developed from a lifetime of crowing at the dawn, strutting around the yard, getting in fights — in short, acting like a cock.

Nowadays, the poultry we eat goes from eggshell to belly in as little as six weeks; not enough time to develop muscles flavorful enough to stand up to hearty red wine sauce. Recipes attempt to compensate for modern chicken’s relative blandness with modifications: reducing the braising time, using select parts of the bird. But what if instead of changing the recipe to suit the bird, you found a better bird?

The original concept of coq au vin demands a bird that has lived a hard life, working strength and flavor into its muscles as it struggles every day for mere existence. You could ask your butcher or farmer to track down the oldest, meanest bird in the hen yard and deliver it to your table, but such animals are in short supply and someone might get hurt. Or, you could turn to wild birds — game — that live less sheltered lives than today’s chicken. What about, for example, pheasant, which I happen to have in great supply thanks to the generosity of our friends Johnny & Stacie?

The pheasant in question came into my possession deeply frozen. As I was waiting for it to thaw, I created my braising liquid: I combined the better part of a bottle of red wine (California petit sirah from a certain Trader of value-priced wines) with three cups of chicken broth and brought them to a boil, reducing the mixture to about four cups.

After my pheasant thawed I rinsed the bird, removing any errant feathers and being sure to preserve some of the blood for use as a thickener later. I then cut the bird into quarters. If your bird was shot, as mine was, this is a good time to gently massage the flesh, attempting to locate the small balls of lead that brought about the pheasant’s demise. Don’t worry if you can’t find them, though: what your fingers cannot find your teeth surely will!

With pheasant appropriately divided and seasoned with salt and pepper, I proceeded to render the fat out of some chopped bacon (saving the crispy bacon bits for later of course). I then browned the pheasant pieces in the fat and set them aside. Next in the pot went a handful each of chopped onion and celery, and when that was soft a tablespoon or two of chopped garlic, along with a tablespoon of tomato paste. At this point, quite a bit of dark brown sucs had developed, so I deglazed the pan with some of the braising liquid, scraping up every bit of browned deliciousness. I then returned the pheasant pieces to the pot (along with juices) and poured in the rest of the braising liquid. It all spent the next long while gently simmering, slightly covered, until the meat was tender.

It wouldn’t be coq au vin — well, faisan au vin — without pearl onions and mushrooms. Since braising these along with the bird would turn them into an unrecognizable mush, most recipes call for cooking them separately and mixing them in before serving the dish. While you could brown the mushrooms and onions in a pan, I prefer to roast them; maybe it gives them a deeper flavor, but it’s definitely a lot easier. Just toss cut up mushrooms and onions with olive oil, salt and pepper and roast at 500ºF until they are as brown as you like them.

With pheasant starting to separate from its bones and mushrooms and onions a deep golden brown, I stirred everything together (remember those bacon bits?). If your sauce is looking a bit thin, now’s the time to stir in blood (or cornstarch if you’re squeamish). Over olive oil mashed potatoes, it was a rich and satisfying meal; not least because of the deep flavor of meat that had lived a life before it found its way to my plate. Since I’ve never eaten it I can’t say if it’s any better or worse than a wizened old cock, but I’ll take it over a six week chick any time.

As much as I love to cook, I am really not a fan of kitchen gadgets. This is partially out of necessity; our very small kitchen doesn’t have room to store every species of specialized tool for making every conceivable cooking task a breeze. I also have a deep aversion to spending money, so when I walk into the local kitchen store whatever desire I feel is quickly snuffed out by a look at the prices. All that said, I can’t pass up a deal, so when Martha came home from some thrift-shopping with news of old-fashioned, hand-cranked meat grinders for the ridiculous price of $2.00, I made a quick decision: it was time to start grinding my own meat.

“But Tom,” you say, “it’s the twenty-first century. You don’t have to grind your own meat anymore! You can buy it ground in nice little packages from your local grocery. You can even get it pre-pattied for all your hamburger needs!” True, but then how would I get two dollars worth out of this grinder? Besides, there are some real advantages to grinding meat at home. If you’re worried about E. Coli,  grinding in small batches means less chance of mixing in contaminated meat (this always remains a possibility, of course). More importantly for me, by grinding at home I can control what beef gets ground. Specifically, I can grind in a high percentage of beefy, marbled short-ribs. Given the variety of beef cuts available, a grinder can take you way beyond the grocery store options of chuck or sirloin.

Although the pitted cast iron surfaces, wooden handle, and the fact that it was a consumer product made in the USA all suggested to me that my thrift store grinder was quite old, it appears that it was actually in production recently enough to be sold new over the Internet. My particular model was either old and neglected or just neglected enough to require vigorous a scrubbing down.

With a mind to that scrubbing, I fired up the Google to learn about meat grinder care and was surprised and a little disappointed that my meat grinder was actually a Food Chopper — a kind of proto-food processor. The difference seems to be that while meat grinder usually extrude the grind through perforated disks, the Universal Model 2 Food Grinder passes the food through a kind of toothed wheel that screws on to the end of the unit. Different tooth sizes and spacings are used to produce different sized chops. But you can in fact grind meat with a food processor (chill cubes in freezer 30 minutes then pulse), so it stands to reason that its predecessor would work well enough. I set about cleaning it anyway.

With all the parts cleaned and dried, I was excited to cube my beef and get to the business of grinding. For simplicity’s sake I planned to make hamburgers using a beef blend that has worked in the past: about 70% beef short ribs and 30% chuck. For the beef to be caught by the augur of the Universal Model 2, I cut it into 1″ chunks.

The grinding process went very smoothly; I was able to process the 1.5# of beef in under 5 minutes. I did notice two apparent flaws in the design: 1.) the cutting wheel is positioned too close over the base of the grinder, making it difficult to place any kind of tray in a spot where it will collect all of the ground meat and 2.) as I was grinding, I started to notice blood dripping onto the floor out of the place where the handle attached to the augur. Martha acted quickly, putting a plate down to protect our floor, but it seems to me that any blood that is squeezed out by the action of the grinder is blood that’s not going to be making your hamburgers juicy. Still, for a pound and a half of meat, I think we only lost a teaspoon of blood; hardly earth-shattering. This might be remedied in the future by remembering to chill the meat in the freezer before grinding to firm it up. The grind produced by the larger cutting wheel was suitable for hamburgers, though I might have liked it a bit coarser.

How were the burgers? They were good — how could anything involving that much short-rib go wrong? I was pleased not to notice any metallic taste from flaking off rust — we must have done a good enough job scrubbing. Ideally, I would like to do a blind taste-test involving store-ground beef, beef ground in a food processor and the Universal. I am also excited to use the grinder in other applications, especially revisiting my old friend the terrine. Now I just have to figure out where I’m going to put the thing.

When it comes to Spanish bar food, I don’t need much more than a plate full of jamón serrano to accompany a few cañas of beer. But for Martha, there is no better tapa than the croqueta: a deep fried little log of gooey delight (beer doesn’t hurt here either). Always looking for ways to please, and not exactly hating croquetas either, I recently fried up a couple of batches using two different recipes for Martha’s and my own enjoyment.

I made my first batch of croquetas using the classic technique (my base recipe came from Penelope Casa’s Delicioso: The Regional Cooking of Spain). The first step is to make a very thick bechamel: my roux consisted of 6 tablespoons of olive oil and ¾ cup of flour to which I added 2 cups of milk over medium heat. In preparing the bechamel I learned that a lumpy roux that just won’t break up can be remedied with the magic of a food processor, a most satisfying action after 5 minutes of uselessly hunting lumps with a whisk.

Lots of fillings can go in croquetas, but salt cod and cheese are two very popular options. Since we were fresh out of salt cod, I decided to go the cheese route. Obviously, a Spanish cheese  would have been appropriate, but I was not interested in going to the store, so instead I folded a handful of cheap provolone into my cooked sauce with salt and pepper for good measure.

As I mentioned earlier, croquetas are shaped like small logs. But how to give shape to liquid bechamel sauce? The answer is to chill it. Most recipes seem to recommend chilling the bechamel overnight before proceeding. Crunched for time, I got away with just an hour and a half of chilling.

After the bechamel was cold enough to work, I formed pinches of it into cylinders and placed them on a plate. Then, it was time to bread: separate dishes of flour, eggs, and bread crumbs and a fanatical observance of “wet hand, dry hand” rule make this a clean and efficient process. As the croquetas were breaded I placed them on a sheet pan to wait for their date with destiny—a pot full of 350°F oil.

Croquetas don’t take long to fry, just a few minutes until the breading is golden. If they sit in the oil too long, there’s a risk of the filling exploding out of the breading. They are best eaten very hot, washed down with the aforementioned beer.

We also enjoyed a few other Spanish standards: tortilla española, jamón (ok, prosciutto, but what can you do?) and aged goat cheese.

Making these must have given me the croqueta bug, because just over a week later I was hauling out the oil again for another round. This time, though, I used a recipe from the New York Times that was less traditional: rather than a bechamel, these croquetas were based on leftover mashed potatoes (the recipe was originally published in anticipation of Thanksgiving leftovers). It happened that I had a large amount of mashed potatoes left over from Martha’s birthday and this recipe sitting on my desktop for the past year and a half; it was a croqueta perfect storm, really. I made the recipe as described in the Times, again substituting prosciutto for jamón (but really, there is no substitute).

If using leftover mashed potatoes seems too convenient and not a little questionable to you, your suspicions are well-warranted. These croquetas had good flavors and were a good way to use up leftovers, but the heavy mashed potatoes just can’t compete with gooey, creamy fried béchamel. All considerations of time and convenience aside, I’d take traditional croquetas every time. But in any case, there’s plenty of room in our lives for all kinds of croquetas.

And therein lies the real joy of making croquetas at home: if you order them in a restaurant, you can expect three to five to a plate accompanied by a crazy urge to order more. Too much of this can break the bank. At home, relatively cheap ingredients are transformed into enough fried goodness to satiate anybody’s croqueta cravings.

In mid-nineteenth century Italy, as power passed from one faction to another fighting to control the unification of the country, many lower-class people — ever ignored by political elites — resorted to brigantaggio, or brigandage, both as a means of securing a living and a form of resistance against occupiers foreign and domestic. In the United States today, the brevity of the Wikipedia article alone suggests the extent to which this movement has been forgotten. But where memory fades, food can preserve, and as we are talking about Italy it is only appropriate that the memory of the brigantaggio be preserved in its very own pasta shape: cappellacci dei briganti (brigands’ hats).

I discovered this shape while browsing through Oretta Zanini de Vita’s excellent Encyclopedia of Pasta, published last year in English by the University of California Press, which I received from Martha for Christmas. After introductory essays covering the significance of pasta in Italy and the methodology of her research, Zanini jumps into a comprehensive, alphabetically organized listing of pasta shapes, both home and factory-made. Many of the descriptions are accompanied by sketches, although as this is not a cookbook — something the author and translator both insist upon — the level of detail provided is generally insufficient to reproduce the pasta at home. Cappellacci dei briganti did feature a sketch, however, as well as the following description of how to make them:

The flour is sifted onto a wooden board and kneaded long and vigorously with a few eggs, water, and salt. The dough, which should be firm and smooth, is left to rest, then rolled out with a rolling pin into a very thin sheet. An inverted liqueur glass is used to cut small disks from the sheet. Each disk is wrapped into a cone around the tip of an index finger and the edge sealed, then one side is folded back like the brim of a hat. They are air dried and then boiled in plenty of salted water. (64)

Between the distinctive sketch and the intriguing history, I couldn’t help but try to make some brigands’ hats at home.

I started by making my all-purpose pasta dough, using a technique from Cook’s Illustrated. First, I put two cups of flour in the food processor and pulsed it a few times to distribute the flour evenly. I then added three eggs and allowed the machine to run until the mixture was granulated. To finish the dough I add water teaspoon by teaspoon with the processor on until it comes together in a single mass. Then I kneaded the dough a few times, shaped it into a ball, and let it rest in the refrigerator for a half hour. I suspect this method, utilizing a food processor instead of a hundred-year-old flour-soaked board, would be upsetting to Zanini and her sources, but it’s a clean and fast way to produce reliable pasta dough.

When the dough had rested long enough to be workable, it was ready to be divided in quarters and passed through the pasta machine (another gift from Martha, from a few years ago). Using a small wine glass, I cut circles out of the thin sheets of pasta.

The next step, which sounded so easy in the description from the Encylcopedia, required quite a bit of trial and error. Eventually I figured out exactly where to put my index finger — slightly off from the center to get a slanted cone — and how much of the dough needed to be folded over itself in a triangle to form the cone. This is definitely a place where fifty years of pasta-making experience — as opposed to 5 minutes of reading a book — would have paid off.

With a slightly off-center cone to work with, folding the brim of the hat was more straight-forward. The long part of the cone is simply folded up. The only trick to this was initiating the folds with the piece of pasta upside-down; trying to do it from the side resulted in a slightly crushed hat. Although I suppose in the line of duty, a brigand’s hat might get a little out of sorts.

After using all my dough to fill two sheet pans with hats, I boiled them for just under five minutes.

Anybody a little familiar with the Italian ways of pasta knows that at least as important as its shape is the sauce it’s served with. For cappellacci, nothing but a lamb ragú will do. Luckily, Clancey’s was able to provide a beautiful piece of lamb for a slow braise in a sauce consisting mainly of tomatoes canned during the height of the season last August — which tasted mercifully of summer and not botulism.

Though the brigands of Italy are long defeated and perhaps even forgotten, their hats — transformed into pasta and covered in a delicious ragú — deserve to live on.

With the feast of our Lady of Guadalupe right around the corner — tomorrow, in fact — I took the opportunity to become acquainted with one of the most important traditions surrounding this sacred festival: tamales. While I’m an avid tamale consumer, I’ve never actually made them. So when I heard the kitchen at Church of the Ascension would be open last Saturday for anyone wanting to learn the art of corn-filled corn husks, I jumped at the chance.

The bill of fare for the evening included three kinds of tamales: chicken, pork and sweet. The chicken tamales were based on pulled chicken in salsa verde — tomatillos, cilantro, onion, etc. Some of the salsa verde also went into the masa, which otherwise consisted of maseca, lard, chicken broth and seasonings. The ingredients for the pork tamales were similar, except in place of salsa verde there was a salsa roja made from a whole lot of red peppers with garlic and herbs, and in place of the pulled chicken, pulled pork. The sweet tamales had the simplest masa of all, flavored only with a bit of sugar and filled with a prune.

The process for making all of the tamales was essentially the same: place a healthy handful of masa near the top and in the center of a presoaked corn husk, being sure to place the masa on the slightly smoother side (a subtle distinction to this güero’s hands). Stick the appropriate filling in the middle of the masa, then roll the edge of the corn husk over the filling, rotating slighly to form a rough cylinder. Fold up the bottom half of the corn husk and set aside.

Sweet tamales were a little different: before adding the masa, a thin layer of red food coloring is painted on the husk. As the tamales sit and later cook, this coloring soaks through the dough and imbues it with a bright pink hue. In addition to coloring the masa, the food coloring dyed my hands a bright-red. My mentors laughingly told me it would come off with a little bleach.

Watching experienced hands making tamales, I was struck by the differing techniques. Some were very meticulous, carefully spreading masa across the interior of the corn husk, laying the filling in a tight row in the center, then rolling everything so that the meat would be perfectly centered in a row of corn masa. Others took a more industrial approach, quickly plopping down a pile of masa before shoving some filling in the center, rolling, folding and starting another. A few rolled their tamales cigar-style,but others simply folded, ending each one with a firm pat. Regional and family variations abound.

I didn’t stay long enough to see the tamales get cooked, but I heard vastly differing claims as to how long they would need to steam, everywhere from a half an hour to four hours. The deciding factor seemed to be how many tamales one was steaming at once.

Where to get these delicious tamales? The ones I helped make were served at the Basilica of Saint Mary last weekend as part of a cooperative effort between the two parishes. But the official feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe is December 12th, and if you want to be at Ascension (1723 Bryant Ave N) at 5:30 AM for Las Mañanitas and 7 AM for mass, your reward will be delicious tamales and hot coffee. And if you’re not a morning person, there will be a fiesta starting around 4 PM. But with the skills I picked up in Ascension’s basement last weekend, I might just make some all for myself.

My ideal bread—the bread I want to have for breakfast every morning, around my sandwiches at lunch, and to sop up the remains of whatever sauce adorned my dinner—is a crisp-crusted, chewy, open-crumbed bread, flecked with bran. This is the kind of bread perfect with a slice of cheese, some large-grained cured sausage and a big swig of coarse red wine to wash it all down. Rustic bread.

The concept is one thing, the creation of this imagined bread is another. Recipes from cookbooks have their virtues, but ultimately none has been totally satisfactory. Over the past year, I’ve tried to understand the techniques underlying the recipes, to manipulate the variables and create a bread that lives up to my ideal. I experimented with hydration percentages, finding that a wet — but not too wet — dough helped to create the open structure I was after. Next, I tested delayed fermentation to see what effect it had on my breadmaking. Lately I’ve been thinking about how I was mixing the stuff: kneading.

Never impervious to trends, I went through a no-knead phase. The results of the various no-knead recipes I tried (my favorite was Cook’s Illustrated’s No-Knead Bread 2.0) were always very consistent, and actually pretty close to what I was after: big open crumb, slightly sour flavor, crackly brown crust. That was all well and good, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was turning into little more than a bread machine: mix the given amounts of flour, water, salt and yeast, let them rest and bake for the prescribed amount of time, and then poof! bread. It was a good bread but not one over which I felt much ownership of or had any control over. Using the no-knead method, breadmaking felt more magic than craft.

Having rejected not-kneading, I went on a kneading binge. No bread passing through my oven would be kneaded any less than ten minutes, vigorously and by hand. I settled on this method mostly as a sentimental reaction against no-knead — good bread was something you worked for, dammit — but I also had a somewhat technical justification: the repeated working of the dough was helping to create a strong gluten framework that would support the airy internal structure I was after. And sometimes, it did. But I also found that often my kneaded bread would be very fine-textured, lacking the big holes that make me think “good bread.” Rereading Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking to research delayed fermentation, I came across an explanation for what was happening in my kneaded bread:

Kneading also aerates the dough. As it’s repeatedly folded over and compressed, pockets of air are trapped and squeezed into smaller, more numerous pockets. The more pockets formed during kneading, the finer the texture of the final bread. Most of the air pockets are incorporated as the dough reaches its maximum stiffness. (538)

All my diligent kneading may have been making strong gluten strands, but it was also crushing and dividing the tiny gas pockets that explode in the oven into my sought-after holes.

I needed a third way: a technique by which I could strengthen and bond long gluten chains while seeding the dough with large gas pockets. The answer was stretch & fold, a technique which I had first encountered as a way of dealing with extremely wet doughs, but only began to consider seriously as a general technique after reading and baking Samuel Fromartz’s baguette recipe. In stretch and fold, after dough is initially mixed it is allowed to rest for ten minutes. Then, using a bench scraper, the baker stretches the dough into a long strand in one direction before folding it in half over itself. The stretch and fold is repeated in the other three directions (check out this video!). The dough is then rested half an hour before being stretched again. I suppose this process could be repeated indefinitely, but I usually stretch and fold the dough four times over an hour and a half. After the final fold the dough can rest overnight in the refrigerator (I just can’t give up on delayed fermentation) and it is ready to shape, proof and bake.

Stretch and fold has given me impressive results and I have been tempted to say that it is the technique for achieving the bread I am after. But there had been times when I felt the same way about no-knead, and ten minute kneaded dough — those techniques had just fallen out of favor with me lately. To ensure that stretch and fold really was something different (and better) I conducted a head-to-head-to-head kneading technique breadoff.

I started by preparing a 3# batch of 68% hydration dough using:

• 6 oz wild-yeast starter (100% hydration)
• 16 3/8 oz water
• 23 5/8 oz white all purpose flour
• 2 oz whole rye flour
• 1 T sea salt
• 2 t instant yeast

Immediately after mixing to form a shaggy ball, I divided the dough into three 1# balls. One was placed immediately in a plastic bag and left to rest on the counter: this was the no-knead bread. Another I left in the mixing bowl to rest ten minutes (ample resting seems crucial to the stretch and fold technique). I spent that ten minute resting time kneading the third ball of dough, using no additional flour so as to keep the recipes constant.

After kneading I placed the dough in a bag next to the no-knead dough. Because the stretch and fold technique requires the dough sit at room temperature for close to two hours as it rests between stretchings, I left the other two bags on the counter as well so all three dough balls would have the same chance at yeast activity. I followed the procedure as I described above. At the end of the stretching/resting period, all the doughs looked similar, although the kneaded and no-knead doughs appeared more voluminous than the stretch and fold, probably due to their extended rest.

All three bags spent the night in the refrigerator.

Although three 1# dough balls will fit in my oven at the same time, it’s a tight fit and the breads close to the edges of oven tend to burn and grow towards the center. For optimal results, I needed to bake each bread in roughly the same place in my oven: the center of the stone. I couldn’t just pull out every dough ball out of the refrigerator to proof and then bake one at a time. That would give the third-baked far more time to proof than the first. Instead, I staggered the breads, proofing each bread for one hour in a proofing basket then scoring it once down the center and baking for 25 minutes in a 450°F oven with a preheated steam pan bearing 1 cup of room temperature water. True, this meant that the third dough ball would spend more time in the refrigerator than the first and second, but because the cold temperature means nothing happens very quickly, I thought the influence would be negligible. All the breads were baked within two hours.

The first bread I baked was the no-knead, followed by the kneaded bread, ending with the stretch and fold.

As I pulled the breads out of the oven, I was surprised by the extent of the differences. Where the no-knead bread was roughly cracked and browned, giving a very rustic, rough appearance, the outside of the kneaded bread was smooth and uniform.

The stretch and fold bread was similar in appearance to the no-knead but almost a half-inch taller.

The different external appearances were a sign of unique internal structures. The interior of the no-knead bread was familiar: haphazard large holes here and there, largely concentrated on the edges.

The kneaded bread, I was surprised to see, had much larger holes, although it also had large areas of uniform, fine texture. The large air pockets were possibly the result of my technique of forming a loaf; tucking the edges of the dough under it might have trapped large air pockets that were maintained by the strong gluten network.

The stretch and fold bread seemed like a combination of the other two. Although its structure was similar to the no-knead bread, the holes were larger and more evenly distributed. Of the three, here was the closest to the crumb structure I imagined for this style of bread.

But bread was not meant to be looked at; it should be eaten! Would my different techniques result in dramatically different flavors? Although I have been told that mouthfeel (texture) influences perceived flavor, I can say that these differently textured breads tasted essentially the same. All the breads were chewy and substantial, with a deep flavor of grain. I thought that I noticed the crust of the kneaded bread was slightly more chewy and less crispy than that of the other two, but after a few more bites I couldn’t be sure. The stretched and folded bread had slightly more fermented flavors than the other two. Overall, though, once the bread was in my mouth I couldn’t notice a major difference. A blind tasting panel, a more sophisticated palate, or a battery of chemical and mechanical tests would all have helped to better discern the differences. As far as I’m concerned, it was all pretty good.

Looking over the three slices, stretch and fold is the best technique for making rustic bread. Both other techniques yielded good enough breads, but neither could compete with the open crumb and lofty structure of the stretched and folded dough. In some ways, this is also the most involved technique: no-knead bread is over almost before it starts, and kneaded bread takes just ten minutes of intense activity. The act of stretching and folding is not particularly time consuming, but the dough does require attention every half hour for a couple of hours. You can’t just walk away from it. Maybe the technique’s appeal comes back to the sentimental: after working with stretched and folded bread over the course of an afternoon, it feels like I actually did something.

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. This was the second year in a row in which I was cooking in isolation from my extended family in Michigan since relocating to Minnesota. I miss having my whole family together and all their different contributions to the meal. On the other hand, cooking in Minneapolis for a small crowd, I have complete control over the meal. This satisfies the control-freak in me, and also allows a bit of flexibility about how I cook the bird.

The bird in question arrived from Clancey’s Meats & Fish last Monday. I was wide-grinningly excited when our turkey — which had never seen the inside of a freezer — showed up under Martha’s arm; I immediately set about dismembering it. Originally, my plan was to cook the bird whole, in search of that classic Norman Rockwell moment. But after reading Kenji Lopez Alt’s enlightening “Turkey Stuffed Turkey” article I could not resist taking my turkey apart. It just makes so much sense: the legs and the breasts are two different kinds of meat that demand different treatments — they are done at different temperatures — and, best of all, if you cut the legs and breasts off, you have the whole carcass to make turkey stock in advance, to be held at the ready for all your stuffing/dressing and gravy needs.

After dismantling the turkey, I salted the legs and thighs and refrigerated them overnight. The next day, they were ready to confit in a crockpot with plenty of olive oil, bay leaves, thyme, orange zest, peppercorns and juniper berries. Before removing the breasts, I carefully took the majority of the turkey’s skin off in one piece — I think Hannibal Lecter would have been proud. The breasts and skin were reserved for Thanksgiving day. Meanwhile, I roasted the rest of the carcass and boiled it down into stock. The copious amount of bones made available by cutting the turkey apart meant that I got a thick, gelatinous stock.

For reference, a ten pound free range turkey produces about 2 ½# of white meat. I felt like a mad scientist rolling the two breasts together and wrapping them in their own skin per Lopez Alt’s instructions. The technique worked out really well; the meat cooked very evenly and the skin even managed to adhere to the meat, no Activa required. Go figure.

My quest to use all parts of the turkey resulted in the surprise best dish of the evening, a turkey liver pâté. After soaking the turkey’s liver in milk for two hours to leech out some supposed metallic flavors, I sauteed it in butter along with some shallots. This I ground to a paste in my food processor along with thyme, turkey meat left over from the stock, salt, lots of black pepper, some juniper berries and a bit of heavy cream. After baking this mixture in a water-bath in a 300°F oven for an hour I cooled it and refrigerated it overnight. The result was amazing. I have been dabbling in terrines, pâtés and other potted meats for well over a year now. The results, while always pretty good — how can you go wrong with potted meat? — were always missing something, or featuring too much. Either I have learned enough or the stars were just aligning right for this Thanksgiving: the pâté was creamy, rich, slightly gamy and very peppery. Great with mustard, pickled green beans and olives. Not how I’ve usually started off Thanksgiving, but possibly a new tradition!

One can hardly have Thanksgiving appetizers without Thanksgiving cocktails. Martha found the recipe we used on Apartment Therapy: 1½ oz rye whiskey (Wild Turkey, of course), ½ oz triple sec (substituted for clear curaçao), 2 oz apple cider, 1 tsp simple syrup and a couple of cranberries for garnish. Changing every “oz” to “cup” we successfully octupled the recipe with enough for everyone to enjoy two.

As for the rest of the meal, it was more or less what you would expect. Mashed potatoes, stuffing, fresh cranberry sauce, sauteed green beans with lemon, roasted parnsips, carrots and brussels sprouts, roasted turkey breast and turkey leg confit and plenty of gravy to cover it all.

In some ways Thanksgiving is a stupid meal: nobody can make all these dishes perfectly at the same time. We’d be better off focusing on just a couple and having a really great meal. But it’s Thanksgiving, it happens only once a year, and frankly, nobody expects it to be perfect. That’s why there’s gravy.

It’s almost Thanksgiving,which means the various food blogs I read are dissecting every aspect of the annual feast. When the stuffing versus dressing debate came up on Serious Eats, I was taken aback by the certainty with which two authors brushed aside the controversy. First Erin Zimmer, in a post comparing boxed stuffing options, offered the caveat:

Technically this tasting involved “dressings” and not “stuffings” since we baked them in casserole pans, not inside the turkey’s hollowed-out body. And for the record, we’ll probably just keep calling it stuffing.

The next day, in his masterful turkey deconstruction, J. Kenji Lopez Alt was less forgiving:

First things first. Stuffing is what goes inside the bird. Dressing is a seasoned savory bread casserole that is baked separately.

Both authors seem quite confident that there is a clear, defined difference between “dressing” and “stuffing” and that this difference lies in the method of preparation. Growing up, I alway understood “dressing” and “stuffing” to be the same dish, prepared either inside or outside of the bird. I assumed the difference was regional since while my dad’s family always went with “stuffing” my mom’s family, whose cooking showed strong Ohio influences, served “dressing” on Thanksgiving. Since neither Serious Eats contributor bothered to provide references, I decided to do a little digging myself.

Starting as I often do with questions apparently lexicogriphal, I consulted the Oxford English Dictionary (free online access to anyone with a Hennepin county library card — thanks Hennepin county taxpayers!). Stuffing, in the sense we mean it at Thanksgiving (i.e. “b. Cookery. Forcemeat or other seasoned mixture used to fill the body of a fowl, a hollow in a joint of meat, etc., before cooking.”) is first noted in usage by the OED in 1548 and has citations up through the 19th century. This is pretty straightforward and seemingly in support of at least part of the definition of stuffing given above, that is, something cooked inside something else.

And what of dressing? On this the OED is less useful, since while “dressing” has many diverse usages in English, none of them seem to refer specifically to the Thanksgiving dish. The only given culinary definition is much more general, “4. concr. That which is used in the preceding actions and processes; that with which any thing or person is dressed for use or ornament: e.g.
  a. Cookery. The seasoning substance used in cooking; stuffing; the sauce, etc., used in preparing a dish, a salad, etc.” So a stuffing appears to be a kind of dressing, but a dressing could also be a sauce, salt, oil or anything else added to flavor or otherwise prepare a dish. No final word on inside the bird, outside the bird or wherever.

The OED was not going to be of help, perhaps because as an English publication it ignores some uniquely American usages or that as a general work it doesn’t have the space to delve into culinary minutiae. What I really needed was a corpus of texts on American cookery where I could look for evidence of both words. Luckily, my alma mater — Michigan State University — has made just such a body of works available online through the Feeding America project. The MSU library has an excellent American cookery collection; Feeding America makes many of those works available online, both as scanned pages and as transcribed text (a boon for the time-constrained blogger armed with Cmd+F). The books span the entirety of the 19th century, back from 1798 into the 1920s.

Throughout this century of cookbooks, the definition of “stuffing” appears more or less unchanged. It is always used to refer to a forcemeat, breadcrumb mixture, or other preparation used to fill openings in meat, whether the space left by a bone removed from a roast, the cavity of poultry or fish, or the filling for a roulade. We’ve been putting stuffing in our turkeys since at least 1803:

A turkey when roasted, is generally stuffed in the craw with forc’d-meat, or the following stuffing: Take a pound of veal, as much grated bread, half a pound of suet cut and beat very fine, a little parsley, with a small matter of thyme, or savory, two cloves, half a nutmeg grated, a tea-spoonful of shred lemon-peel, a little pepper and salt, and the yolks of two eggs. (Carter, Susannah. The Frugal Housewife: Or, Complete Woman Cook; Wherein the Art of Dressing All Sorts of Viands is Explained in Upwards of Five Hundred Approved Receipts… New York, Printed and sold by G. & R. Waite, no. 64, Maidenlane, 1803)

“Dressing” has a far more interesting history. Up until 1850, the word “dressing” was rarely used as a noun. Instead, cookbook authors used it as a verb roughly equivalent to “preparing.” Hence Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell’s 1807 New System of Domestic Cookery contains instructions for “An excellent Mode of dressing Beef” that consist only of cooking technique: “Hang three ribs three or four days; take out the bones from the whole length, sprinkle it with salt, roll the meat tight, and roast it. Nothing can look nicer. The above done with spices, &c. and baked as hunters’ beef, is excellent.” When dressing does appear as a noun, it is used to refer to salad dressing, as in, “Common dandelion is said to be very good. It may be eaten as a salad with the usual dressing” (Howland, Esther Allen. The New England Economical Housekeeper, and Family Receipt Book. Cincinnati: H.W. Derby, 1845).

Then, in 1850, Miss Beecher published the book that changed the country forever; I’m referring, of course, to Catherine Esther Beecher’s Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt Book: Designed As A Supplement To Her Treatise On Domestic Economy (New York: Harper, 1850, c1846). Here, for the first time in the sample of cookbooks I examined, were references to “dressing” that were essentially interchangeable with what had been called “stuffing”:

Another à la Mode Beef.

If you have about five pounds of beef, take one pound of bread, soak it in water, pour off the water and mash it fine, adding a bit of butter the size of half a hen’s egg, salt, mace, pepper, cloves, half a teaspoonful each, pounded fine.
Mix all with a tablespoonful of flour and two eggs. Then cut holes through the beef and put in half of this seasoning, and put it in a bake-pan with boiling water enough to cover it.

Put the pan lid, heated, over it, and a few coals on it, and let it stew two hours, then take it up and spread the other half of the dressing on the top, and add butter the size of a hen’s egg, heat the pan lid again hot enough to brown the dressing, and let it stew again an hour and a half. When taken up, if the gravy is not thick enough, add a teaspoonful of flour wet up in cold water, then add a couple of glasses of white wine to the gravy, and a bit of butter as large as a walnut. (37,8, emphasis added)

To Roast a Fillet or Leg of Veal.

Cut off the shank bone of a leg of veal, and cut gashes in what remains. Make a dressing of chopped raw salt pork, salt, pepper, sweet herbs and bread crumbs, or use butter instead of pork. Stuff the openings in the meat with the dressing, put it in a bake-pan with water, just enough to cover it, and let it bake, say two hours for six pounds. (45, emphasis added)

Roast Ducks.

Wash the ducks, and stuff them with a dressing made with mashed potatoes, wet with milk, and chopped onions, sage, pepper, salt, and a little butter, to suit your taste. (emphasis added)

The verb is still “to stuff,” but the various animals are being stuffed with dressing! In subsequent cookbooks throughout the rest of the 19th century, the two terms were interchangeable when referring to what gets put inside the meat; some authors favored one or the other, but most used both in the same work, without any concern for any kind of technical distinction between the two. Writing in 1873, Marion Harland doesn’t hesitate to use both terms in the same recipe, in this case for roast turkey. First, prepare a dressing:

prepare a dressing of bread-crumbs, mixed with butter, pepper, salt, thyme or sweet marjoram, and wet with hot water or milk. You may, if you like, add the beaten yolks of two eggs, A little chopped sausage is esteemed an improvement when well incorporated with the other ingredients. Or, mince a dozen oysters and stir into the dressing; and, if you are partial to the taste, wet the bread-crumbs with the oyster-liquor. (Common Sense In The Household: A Manual Of Practical Housewifery. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1873, p. 84)

But on the next line, that very same mixture is a stuffing: “Stuff the craw with this, and tie a string tightly about the neck, to prevent the escape of the stuffing” (Ibid., 85). Either the difference between dressing and stuffing didn’t exist in the pronounced manner presumed by Serious Eats in the 19th century, or authors of cookbooks at that time were not so persnickety about terminology.

Interestingly, the use of “dressing” to refer to a meat filling seems to have peaked during the 1870s. After that, while the word dressing appears even more frequently in cookbooks, it is almost always has to do with salad dressings (but it still is used in the filling sense!). Stuffing continues to be used to refer to “stuffing,” but recipes seem to be less common. Perhaps by the turn of the 20th century Americans were growing fond of lighter eating, trading oyster-stuffed roasts for greens touched with vinegar.

While I think the historical record pretty clearly supports the use of either “stuffing” or “dressing” to refer to the mixture you put inside your Thanksgiving turkey, that only addresses half of the Serious Eaters’ (false) dichotomy. What of “seasoned savory bread casserole that is baked separately,” then? According Zimmer and Lopez Alt, this should always be called dressing.

This question was a little harder to address using the works I examined, either because they didn’t ever prepare such a bread casserole or if they did prepare it it wasn’t called “stuffing” or “dressing.” There are some references to dressings that spill outside of the stuffed meat, as when Stowe, in a recipe for a la Mode Beef, instructs cooks to “spread the other half of the dressing on the top” (Ibid.) of the joint of beef, or when Elizabeth E. Lea explains the when preparing a ham the cook should “fill up the place where it has been cut, and cover the top with the dressing” (Ibid., 17).

But what about preparations of stuffings/dressings done entirely independent of a large piece of meat? The earliest such dishes I found both came from Lafcadio Hearn’s La Cuisine Creole, A Collection of Culinary Recipes from Leading Chefs and Noted Creole Housewives, Who Have Made New Orleans Famous for its Cuisine. (New Orleans: F.F. Hansell & Bro., Ltd., c1885). He gives two stuffing recipes:

OYSTER STUFFING FOR TURKEY

Take three or four dozen nice plump oysters, wash and beard them, add to them a tumblerful of bread crumbs; chop up a tumblerful of nice beef suet; mix together, and moisten with three eggs; season with salt, pepper, a little butter, a teaspoonful of mace, and some cayenne pepper. Roll force-meat into cakes, and fry them. They are pretty laid around a turkey or chicken. (27)

NICE FORCEMEAT, FOR STUFFINGS, ETC.

Take equal quantities of cold chicken, veal and beef; shred small and mix together; season with pepper, salt, sweet herbs, and a little nutmeg, i. e., if intended for white meat or anything delicately flavored, but if meant for a savory dish add a little minced ham, and garlic; pound or chop this very fine (it is well, and saves trouble, to run it through a sausage chopper), and make it in a paste with two raw eggs, some butter, marrow or drippings; stuff your joint, or poultry, and if there is some not used, roll it round the balls, flour them and fry in boiling lard. This is a nice garnish for a side dish. (37)

Both of these “stuffings” can be prepared on the side by frying, and then serve as a garnish or side dish. Not quite a bread casserole, although very close to the now popular muffin-cup stuffings. In any case, Hearn doesn’t think that the fact that the mixture hasn’t been stuffed in something disqualifies it from being a stuffing. Nor does he refer to it as dressing.

Speaking of dressing, Edith M. Thomas advises against overstuffing the fowl with it. Instead,

put less in, and fill a small cheese cloth bag with what remains, and a short time before the fowl has finished roasting, lay the bag containing the dressing on top of fowl until heated through, then turn out on one side of platter and serve with the fowl (Mary At The Farm And Book Of Recipes Compiled During Her Visit Among The “Pennsylvania Germans,” By Edith M. Thomas. With Illustrations… Norristown, PA., Printed by John Hartenstine, 1915 p. 269).

Here dressing is used in the sense that Serious Eats writers would like, but it is also what got put inside the bird. Dressing refers to the mixture, not how — or where — it was prepared.

In examining over 100 years of American cookbooks, I found no evidence for a clear distinction between the terms “stuffing” and “dressing” when referring to the type of dish served with turkey at Thanksgiving. Instead, the terms appear to be interchangeable depending on author preference; most authors used both. This brief survey does not rule out the possibility of regional differences. My sample of books was not large or representative enough to make such a comparison. And, in limiting myself to 19th century cookbooks, I’ve ignored the possibility that the distinction might have arisen within the last century. Maybe future historians examining the Serious Eats archive one hundred years from now will use the posts in question as evidence that in 2009, Americans distinguished between dressing and stuffing (although the fact that the authors felt they had to address the subject suggests that no broad consensus exists). But if you find yourself doubting as you fill the cavity of your turkey with dressing or bake an extra pan of stuffing, fear not! People have been doing it that way for years.