Posted by johngl
My very first look at the now legendary French cooking encyclopedia, Larousse Gastronomique, was really quite interesting. In it, the recipes are written in paragraphs, not in the more modern ingredients and method manner. It was really weird then to see a single recipe written as: one recipe of this, one recipe of that, and one recipe of some other thing. Combine and serve.
Looking up the other recipes, you might find that the first recipe you needed started out with hunting down a sea turtle. In my book, that is a real deal killer. Still, there are things that, if you are really into cooking, should probably be prepared in advance as to make the execution of the final dish not quite as daunting.
Sofrito, caramelized onions, and guajillo pepper powder are the pantry items I am going to cover today.
In one of these dishes (guess which one!), I began with over 12 pounds of tomatoes, over 4 pounds of onions, a whole head of garlic, and some olive oil.
Oh. My. God. What’s this? Canned tomatoes?
Yep. I am getting damn tired of spending tons of money on fresh tomatoes that hardly have any taste. I’ve found that canned tomatoes not only save me the work of scalding and peeling, but actually taste better.
If you guessed sofrito, you would be correct. Buy yourself a cigar.
Sofrito in Spanish, soffritto in Italian, sofregit in Catalan or refogado in Portuguese are similar but different sauces made with tomato and onion which have been cut into small pieces and slowly cooked in olive oil until they get gooey (yes, a very technical cooking term). They are used as bases for sauces and ingredients in other dishes and can take hours to prepare.
Hours?
Well, yes. That is a lot of tomatoes to scald, peel, de-seed, chop, and cook into a gooey mass. Since I don’t have anyone that I can order to do it, and most glorious spousal unit would probably stab me with my own knife if I suggested she do the grunt work, I have to do it myself or find a few short cuts. Even so, it still takes a while to de-seed 12 pounds of tomatoes, canned or not. Those really are whole tomatoes in there.
I cut out the part where the stem used to be attached, cut the tomatoes in half, then scooped the seeds into a big bowl (saving the juice). About 50 tomatoes later, I was done. Oh, and I saved the juice from the can, too. That gets combined with the strained juice from the de-seeding operation and reduced to a thick sauce.
Now peel and chop those four pounds of onions and get a quarter cup of olive oil heated in a large pan. Onions cook down a lot…
That is only two pounds in there.
I let them cook down a bit, then added the other two pounds, cooked that down a bit, then started adding the tomatoes.
Eventually, all the tomatoes, the reduced juice (done in a separate pan), and the finely chopped head of garlic wind up looking a bit like this:
And about 3 hours later, it had, ever so slowly, cooked down to a deliciously gooey mass.
Yep, over 16 pounds of ingredients cooked down to about a quart of goo. Along the way in the cooking process, I added things like two different kinds of flame roasted chile peppers (both of which were roasted, dried, ground, and packaged by yours truly), some pequin powder (grown, dried, ground, and packaged by yours truly), and salt (mined, ground, and packaged by…someone else).
I loaded said tasty goo into some containers and popped it into the fridge for use later.
I will be using this sofrito (actually, sofregit) as a base for our second annual 4th of July paella fest next week.
Now, for the second pantry item: caramelized onions.
Those beauties are over a pound each. Just peel and halve them…
then just slice them up (come on, work on the technique!)…
and then chop them.
I then dropped these into a preheated pan lubed up with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. I also hit them with a little salt to help extract the moisture.
I like doing these at a low heat for a longer period of time. I think it makes them a little sweeter. And let me tell you, these Vidalias (from the town in Georgia) cook down to almost a jelly-like sweetness.
Over three pounds of onions cooked down to about a cup of sweet and sticky onion goo. I put this into a jelly jar and popped it into the fridge. I’ll use it with anything from tacos to steak. It’s always ready when I need a tablespoon of something sweet and tasty.
Next up, guajillo chili powder!
These peppers have a deep-red flesh and posses an almost raspberry type scent. They are large (guajillo means “big pod”) and mild in flavor, with just a touch of heat (rating 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units). Mostly used to make make sauces, I tend to mix the ground flakes with cumin for an awesome meat rub.
To get them ground to the proper consistency, it takes a few steps. First, the peppers need to be de-stemmed and de-seeded.
When reasonably fresh, these peppers have the texture of a soft leather and when you cut them open and lay them out flat, it is easy to get out nearly all of the seeds. A few strays here and there won’t matter. If you try this, one thing you are sure to notice is the fruity scent these beauties give off.
They have lots of seeds.
I cut up the now clean pepper pods and put them in a small food processor…
for their first round of chopping. They come looking like this:
This is a far cry from a usable powder. Round two puts them through a spice (or coffee) grinder.
When I use this in a rub, I’ll mix a few tablespoons of this with kosher salt and whole pepper corns then run it through the spice grinder again to get it down to a nice powder. This though, gets scooped into a jelly jar, labeled, then popped into the pantry.
I’ll also use this as-is in chili, soups, sauces, even spaghetti sauce. It adds amazing depth to the flavors.
So now you know a few of my cooking secrets. Though there was no sea turtle hunting required, these three recipes still take a bit of time. Its one of those delay of gratification things: its all worth it in the end when you don’t have to make ‘em up from scratch.
Funny. Just today I was making caramelized onions and thought that this was a process and it deserved its own blog post. I wanna know where you got that fancy mind reading device of yours!
Great cooking minds just think alike is all