One of the greatest pleasures the table offers is a leisurely couple of hours spent snacking over wine: embracing the Spanish concept picar — just a nibble here and there. For something so delicious and satisfying, a dinner of tapas is also easy to prepare: we already had a chorizo in the fridge from Olympic Provisions in Portland, OR and a quick trip to Surdyk’s yielded a wedge of Chabrin cheese (French, true, but near the border), some Basque-style olives and a bottle of fruity and spicy Spanish wine (2007 Peñascal Tempranillo-Shiraz).

I happened to have a loaf of bread baking in the oven, but it would have been just as well to buy bread. Cured meat, cheese, olives, bread and wine; something about these foods seems very elemental to civilization. It would have been enough to stop at the essentials, but since it was Saturday and Saturday compels me toward more ambitious cooking projects, I also made patatas bravas, my favorite Spanish bar food.

Two hours passed picando with one, two, three glasses of wine is a fine way to spend the evening.

Patatas Bravas

Take whatever quantity of potatoes suits you and cut them into irregular chunks. Peel the potatoes if desired. A recipe I read suggested starting them slow in oil and gradually increasing the heat until they are deeply golden. My own technique was to par-cook the potatoes in boiling water until a fork could just be inserted, then drain and dry them. I then fried them in 350°F oil until they were golden — unfortunately our stove’s rather pathetic BTU output meant this took too long and the potatoes got a bit tough. Probably the best technique is to follow french-fry procedure: blanch the potatoes in 325ºF oil until blond and then finish them at 375ºF. The goal is to have crispy potatoes with creamy interiors. Salt the potatoes after removing them from the oil.

Serve hot with salsa brava and alioli.

Salsa Brava

• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 T olive oil
• 1 ½ cups tomato puree, fresh or canned
• 1 t paprika (pimentón dulce)
• ½ t cayenne
• 1 t salt

Heat the garlic and olive oil in a small skillet over medium heat until the garlic turns golden. Add the tomatoes and fry until the color darkens slightly. Stir in the paprika, cayenne and salt and simmer a few more minutes. Taste for seasoning: the sauce should be slightly spicy and taste clearly of paprika.

Alioli

• 1 clove garlic, minced or pressed through a garlic press
• ¼ t ground mustard
• 1 t salt
• ¼ t black pepper
• 2 t lemon juice
• 1 egg yolk
• ½–¾ c olive oil

Whisk together garlic, mustard, salt, pepper, lemon juice and egg yolk. Slowly drizzle in olive oil, whisking constantly, until desired thickness is reached. Adjust seasoning.

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.

Every Christmas my father prepares buñuelos for the family on the mornings of the 24, 25, and 26 so that all can have their share—no matter their arrival time. A round Colombian cheese bread, buñuelos are made from corn starch, shredded queso campesino, milk, and a little salt and sugar (we first mentioned them here). They are made from a very wet dough, as you’ll see below, and fried to perfection. The dough-balls turn naturally in the hot (but not too hot) oil, and can be helped along with the tap of a chopstick or the end of a wooden spoon. They’ll be firm to the touch when ready to be removed from the oil, and are best eaten warm. As kids we’d sometimes have them with peanut butter and milk. As a lover of sausage biscuits, this year another idea occurred to me…

Enjoyed for the first time today, “Buñuelo Sliders” proved to be a very repetible experiment.

Update: For the recipe, see comments below.

As far as trendy foodie obsessions go, I am more of a pizza guy than a hamburger guy. I’m not as die-hard as some, but I have observed a number of the pizza-nerd pieties: I’ve eaten D.O.C. Pizza Margherita at Antica Pizzeria dell’Arte. I’ve waited two hours in line to try Roman pizza at Da Baffetto. During a short trip to New Haven, I ate at both Frank Pepe and Modern Apizza. I once walked across the Brooklyn Bridge in 100° weather and spent all the cash in my wallet to eat at Grimaldi’s. I have also spent a significant amount of time trying to perfect Neapolitan pizza in my home oven; some of these efforts are documented on this very blog.

Minneapolis, my home of one and a half years, is not known as a pizza city, but I have been pleasantly surprised by the pizza available here. First and foremost there is Punch Pizza, which makes the best pizza I have ever had outside of Italy—possibly even inside of Italy. I have eaten at Punch more times than anywhere else;we are very lucky in the Twin Cities to have not just one  great Neapolitan pizzeria, but a whole chain of them. I have also tried and enjoyed Galactic Pizza, which has the advantage of being close to my house and delivered in electric cars by superheroes.

My preferences in pizza run strongly Italian, but I’m definitely not one of those jerks who doesn’t consider deep-dish to be real pizza (in fact I strongly recommend the deep dish from Little Star in San Francisco). I like to keep an open mind; Dara’s pizza personality test classified me as ANCS-The Different Drummer. Apparently my  ideal Twin Cities pizza comes from Crescent Moon. I have yet to take the Afghan pizza plunge, I do like to try as many different kinds of pizza as I can. With that attitude of openness and thirst for discovery, this afternoon I tried for the first time what I have heard referred to as “Minnesota-style” pizza, courtesy of Red’s Savoy Pizza.

I’ll admit that my decision to try Red’s was largely a matter of convenience; I had been somewhat intrigued by the restaurant after reading a review on Slice, but it was not until they opened a location in the Golooney’s space only a few blocks from my apartment that I decided I would go and try it. I walked there, ordered a sausage pie (for control purposes, when tasting a new non-Neapolitan pizza I order sausage or pepproni, for Neapolitan pizzas Margherita) and after waiting a while I eagerly walked home with a piping hot pie.

Opening the box, I made two observations: one, this pizza was cut into squares. Apparently, that is a Minnesota thing—maybe they wanted make pizza more like bars. The problem with cutting a pizza into squares is that it creates awkward little corner pieces and a number of pieces that don’t have any crust to serve as a handle, necessitating the use of a fork. I was also surprised to see the giant brown spots in the center of the pizza; at first I thought they were some unrequested topping but then realized it was just huge swaths browned cheese.

Crust. If I had to compare the crust of Red’s Savoy’s pizza to any, I’d say it reminded me most of cheap frozen pizza crust. That is not a bad thing; I like cheap frozen pizza. And I’m not saying that it was actually frozen: I saw them tossing the fresh dough. Whatever is in that dough, it produces no puffy cornicione; rather, the crust is cracker thin and quite crispy and burnt on the edge. As one approaches the center, the crust becomes soggier, chewier and more cardboard-like.  Charring was limited to the edge, with the rest of the crust a pale brown. The crust was more of a vehicle for the toppings than an end in itself, but I did really enjoy the crispiness of the edges. I also thought it was overfloured, but I can forgive that because I am myself often guilty of using ample flour to ensure smooth separation of the dough from the peel. Still, raw flour isn’t especially tasty.

Sauce. This pizza is heavily sauced, so much so  that great pools of the stuff are visible on the edges and spill onto the pizza box. That’s okay since the sauce is delicious; very thick and meaty, like a red sauce you would eat on spaghetti rather than a pizza sauce. Its texture at times was almost squishy. It had good flavor: a little cooked-tasting but pleasantly spicy.

Cheese. The first thing to be said about cheese on this pizza is that there is a lot of it. I mean a lot of it. There is so much cheese that it bonds with the box and slips off of the crust as you try to pull a piece a way. There is so much cheese that it forms its own super-layer that is independent of the rest of the pizza. In fact, if there is one thing that seemed to distinguish this style of pizza it is the amount of cheese. As long as the cheese remained warm and gooey it was good and comforting but it became a bit disconcerting as it started to congeal. Must eat faster!

Sausage. The sausage was spicy and had the right amount of grease, which is to say plenty of grease. Red’s puts toppings on top of the sauce and covers the whole thing with cheese, rather than putting toppings on top of the cheese. I favor the latter approach since I think it actually binds the toppings in better (the cheese bubbles up around them). As it was, it was hard to keep the toppings and cheese on top of the crust without using a fork.

From the breakdown above you might get the idea that I didn’t like Red’s Savoy pizza, but actually I thought it was pretty good; definitely a case where the experience of eating it makes it more than the sum of its parts. Red’s Savoy probably won’t unseat Punch in terms of my favorite pizza in the Twin Cities, but I would eat it again. Particularly if I had been drinking. Based on this experience, my overall impression of ‘Minnesota’ pizza is: cracker thin crust, lots of sauce and even more cheese, and squares.

Martha and I celebrated our anniversary at Restaurant Alma last month. Alma is well-liked in Minneapolis and I’m not going to add my voice to the chorus by writing a review; suffice it to say that its reputation is deserved. Instead, I’ll just document our meal for your vicarious pleasure.

Course One: Parmesan Flan and Bison Tartare

I ordered the parmesan flan, which came with artichoke hearts, a kalamata spread, parmesan shavings and maple syrup. I have never had a savory flan before but I thought it was a great way to do flan—biting into the flan I got that perfect creamy texture and a cream flavor but without sweetness; then my mouth was suddenly flooded with the flavor of aged parmesan.  All of the garnishes on the plate are natural pairs with parmesan so I had a lot of fun constructing different bites. Martha’s bison tartare was very subtly flavored (at least from the bite I had) but was well completed by the salad of greens and radish matchsticks that came alongside, adding slight crunch and bite.

Course Two: Beet-Ricotta Ravioli and Black Bean Fritters

Each bite of beet-ricotta ravioli had a light beet flavor that wouldn’t be off putting even to beet-haters. Every other bite also featured the zing of horseradish; my coarse palate would’ve been happy with a much stronger presence for the horseradish but I’m sure the way it was prepared was much more refined. In any case, beets and horseradish is a great idea, as is adding prosciutto, which gave a burst of salt. And I’m just a sucker for ham. The black bean fritters were very reminiscent of falafel, maybe even southwestern falafel.

Course Three: Gently Cooked Trout

Normally I am reluctant to order the same dish as the people I am dining with but the description on the menu and our waitress’s hearty recommendation drew both Martha and me to the gently cooked trout. The trout was not only gently cooked, it was perfectly cooked—very moist and not flaky (when fish gets flaky it is overcooked, in this writer’s humble opinion). It came topped with a red wine reduction and a mushroom sauce that tasted strongly of ham hocks. I was at first a bit surprised by this combination because it seemed like such a hearty sauce would overpower the delicate fish, but as it turns out trout is remarkably earthy itself. The sauce, while definitely hammy, only butted up against the side of the fish without ever overwhelming it. I noticed this kind of restraint in all of the dishes—the cooks at Alma are real masters of subtlety.

Dessert: Marieke Super Aged Gouda

With the dregs of our bottle of cava to finish and no desire to move anywhere soon after such a delicious meal, we decided to order a cheese for dessert. Experience has led me to be skeptical about Wisconsin cheese, but the Marieke Super Aged Gouda was exceptional. It had deep flavor, reminding me more of an aged parmesan than the rubbery, milky gouda you tend to get around here (when your cheese budget is not what it should be).

We left with that feeling of perfect satisfaction that good restaurants are able to impart—not hungry, not full and already wistfully remembering each bite (several glasses of cava probably didn’t hurt our feelings of goodwill). Restaurant Alma is highly recommended.