Of Tagines, Cuban Cuisine, and the Vagaries of Pasta

I've been trying to do more non-political writing lately.
Here's one of the results (most of which could have been
seen first, if you're so inclined, at my little food site,
http://clark.dallas.tx.us/).


Of Tagines, Cuban Cuisine, and the Vagaries of Pasta
By Kendall Clark

A Sublime, Pseudo Tagine

As for guilt-free reveling in carnivorous gustatory pursuits, I'm screwed.
About three years ago I read and was convinced by the ethical arguments
about meat-eating, primarily Peter Singer's. I eat accordingly.

But I am a weak, weak man.

Which means I occasionally falter, about once a month. Sometimes I feel
guilty about this, sometimes I do not -- it depends on whether the meat in
question is, say, free-range chicken, or whether it's conventionally raised
pork; whether it's the byproduct of very little or of a lot of unnecessary
suffering, respectively. Being an almost-total vegetarian reduces the amount
of avoidable suffering caused by my diet, so I try not to let the guilt go
too long when I falter. Thirty years of meat eating makes an impression.

So much for disclaimers.

My most recent transgression consisted of a (pseudo, I suspect) Moroccan
tagine, or a stew of bone-in (free range Bell & Evans) chicken breast,
saffron, ground almonds, and cilantro. Of greater interest than a stewed
chicken dish is the subtle, warm flavor combination: cilantro, almonds, and
saffron. The vegetal brightness of cilantro; the rich, buttery fatness of
the almonds; and saffron's antiseptic, slightly medicinal bite. Let's call
it clean complexity.

The tagine itself is idiot-proof. I browned in olive oil two skin-on chicken
breasts -- which the butcher cut in half again -- in a big Le Creuset
enamelware pot. After removing these pieces, I sauteed a mirepoix -- fine
dice of equal parts carrot, onion, celery -- in the drippings and a bit more
olive oil, until soft, then added a healthy pinch of saffron, about half a
cup of veggie stock, and half a cup of finely-cuisinarted almonds. You want
almond dust, not almond butter. I returned the chicken pieces and braised
gently for 45 minutes.

After removing the chicken I reduced the braise liquid by about 30%, keeping
it on the soupy side. Plating the dish was simple. About half a cup of
basmati rice goes down in a big, warmed pasta bowl, in a half-assed timbal
arrangement. A piece of chicken breast goes over the rice, a ladle-full of
the reduced braise liquid goes over the chicken, and a handful of
rough-chopped cilantro leaves get strewn around. Just pretend your a
line-chef, and it's your first day at Nobu. I finished with a splash of
peri-peri sauce, since I didn't have any harissa left. Harissa is a Moroccan
sauce or paste made of roasted red bell peppers, hot chilies, coriander,
olive oil, garlic. If you serve it over a piece of roasted fish -- say,
Chiliean sea bass or red snapper -- people will jump out of windows for a
taste.

After the first alchemy, transmuting base ingredients into something
unexpected and new, there's a second: using the results of a cooked dish as
the starter for another one. In a word, leftovers...

So I had a good deal of the braising liquid left, and there was no way I
could toss out something that turned out so well. And I needed a pasta dish
for our (which means Hope and me) Sunday Sopranos ritual.

After passing the braise liquid through a food mill, I reduced it with a bit
of stock, toasted garlic, some heavy cream, and a bit of butter. I paired it
with Rustichella's strozzacavalli pasta -- sort of a spiral buccatini --
which holds tons of sauce. I finished this with more cilantro leaves and
Parmesan shavings. The result is probably the best
make-it-up-as-you-go-along pasta dish I've done this year. I can't recommend
this Moroccan triumvirate -- cilantro, almonds, saffron -- enough.

Piquet, Piquet, Piquet!

I grew up in Houston, which has its advantages. Often I'm nostalgic for
tastes of my childhood. One disadvantage is that I'm insanely picky about
Tex-Mex food.Most of it, even in Dallas, isn't up to my standards, and in
places like North Carolina or Maryland, it's plain awful. One advantage is
that I'm very interested in every kind of national or regional food from
Central and South America and the Caribbean.

Which brings me to Cuban food: or, more accurately, to my brother-in-law,
Tulio, and his family, especially his 2nd (or is it his 3rd?) cousin's Cuban
restaurant, Cafe Piquet. The first time I ate there it was a strip-mall-dive
with a cultish following mostly among Cubanos, the great majority of whom
were the owner's extended family, near as I could tell.

Cafe Piquet has moved into a better location, on Bissonnet, near the in-town
suburb, Bellaire. When I ate there this summer it was excellent. We had
croquetas and tamales to start; the pork croquetas were delicate and very
porky at the same time. My brother in law always has the same dish, puerco
fritas con tostones; the pork looks terrible but is very tender and juicy. I
had the bisteca empanizado -- a breaded, fried steak, considerably lighter
than the "native Texas" version, served with lime or lemon wedges in place
of a gravy.

I have found bisteca empanizado hard to make at home. The cut of meat is
crucial. I've used what my local michoacana calls "beef milanese". For which
you need a very large pan, the oil has to be very hot, but not too hot. And
you need enough of it so that the meat is totally immersed. This presents
some difficulty, even for the determined home cook. My guess is that you
really need a professional-quality deep fryer to get it just right. Bisteca
empanizado just won't work paneed. The bread crumb and egg coating is so
delicate that the out-gassing steam from the cooking side steams the coating
off the uncooked side.

On the Saturday I ate at Piquet they were serving congri, i.e., red beans
and rice, rather than black beans. Good, but not my favorite. (Apparently
there is or was some kind of regional split in Cuba between red and black
beans. Castro apparently doesn't like black beans. Or maybe that's just
another bit of myth-making from the right-wing Cuban community in Miami?)

Piquet's picadillo -- the easiest Cuban dish to make at home -- has the
right proportion of raisins and olives to ground beef and rice. I may be
biased toward it since, having learned picadillo from my sister, I've
learned it 4th or 5th hand from the same person who taught it to the chef at
Piquet. The other entrees I've had at Piquet (though most of these were at
the old location, not the new fancy one) are boliche (a stuffed eye of round
roast), ropa vieja (a kind of roast beef hash stew -- a great dish to do at
home in the pressure cooker), vaca frita (fried beef), and the higado a la
italiana (Liver Italian style).

I must say something about Piquet's desserts. My sister has been making flan
in the pressure cooker for years, and it's good, but we can't figure out how
Piquet makes its flan so caramelly. The flan's custardy body is unusually
darkly caramelized, while retaining a delicate texture. I've tried to
reproduce this effect when cooking flan at home in the pressure cooker by
cooking it for a longer time in order to get that caramelized milk flavor.
But the result, while caramelly, loses the delicate texture. (The next
technique I'll try is to cook the custard in a double boiler very slowly to
develop the milk-sugars, before cooking it in the pressure cooker. Who
knows.) Piquet's dolce chef has obviously sold her soul to the devil in
order to perform such leche-sucre alchemy...

Which brings me to Piquet's tres leches (Three Milks) cake, made by a
Nicaraguan woman. Tres leches, as far as I know, isn't a Cuban dessert but
is either Nicaraguan or El Salvadoran. Tres leches is the sort of dessert
that's so rich it can take away your breath and make your insides ache. At
some point after I left Houston in 1989 a tres leches craze swept the dining
scene. My guess is that Piquet departs from Cuban cuisine because so many
Anglo diners in Houston know and favor tres leches. What distinguishes
Piquet's version from the average tres leches is that it's served very
chilled -- they pull it out of the little fridge unit in the corner only
after you order it -- and super-saturated with cream, yet the cake retains a
lot of structure. My sister's child with Tulio, Abby, an unbearably cute and
smart 2nd grader, is the only person I've seen eat an entire piece of
Piquet's tres leches by herself, the little scamp.

I'm proud to be associated with Cafe Piquet, even in a small, attenuated
way. My other connection to the Houston food scene is absurd. Apparently my
mother's mother dated Tony Vallone -- Houston's premier restaurateur:
Tony's, The Grotto, and La Griglia -- at some point just before WWII. Even
more absurd, my other sister had a brief, teenaged fling with one of
Vallone's grandsons, whom she met by chance one summer on a Galveston beach.

Elemental Alchemy

When I eat out I want to relax, not worry about my posture, my twee table
manners, or whether I overpaid for the wine. The more I cook at home, the
less satisfied I am by the quality of food at the casual places in my part
of Dallas -- from Deep Ellum to Lakewood, from Columbia Avenue to Lover's
Lane.

There's a place very nearby, "Scalini's", a typical neighborhood Italian
spot. I never mistook it for fine food, but the pizza is acceptable, the
lasagna isn't bad, the atmosphere is perfect. Scalini's has two problems.

First, the menu and the wait staff confuse capellini and spaghetti. Not only
is this annoying, it's absurd to serve, say, a plate of meatballs with angel
hair pasta. And when I've asked, "can I get spaghetti instead of angel hair"
-- since, after all, the menu says "spaghetti with marinara sauce" -- I'm
invariably told, "no, but you can get it with linguine or fettucini". Sigh.

Second, al dente isn't a suggestion, it's a requirement. Life is too short
to eat overcooked pasta.

Under the kind tutelage of [1]Lidia Bastianich -- perhaps the finest Italian
chef in the US -- I've been learning to prepare one simple dish, spaghetti
aglio y olio, that is, spaghetti with garlic and oil. I love this dish
because I love pasta and garlic. I love it because it's elemental,
alchemical cooking at its finest. Pasta, parsley, garlic, olive oil,
pepperoncini combined to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

I recommend using the best dried spaghetti and olive oil you can afford. I
prefer [2] Rustichella D'Abruzzo, about $5 for a box, and [3] Laudemio
Frescobaldi.

Spaghetti aglio y olio requires taking a bit of care. First, use enough
pasta water in the condiment: 1 and 1/2 cups is just right for a 1.1 pound
box of Rustichella. You'll think it's too much water, but it isn't.

Second, cook the pasta about 90% of the way to al dente; then remove it from
the water, drain, and add to the condiment -- which is 8 sliced (not
crushed!) garlic cloves carefully toasted in a generous amount of oil, pasta
water, a head of chopped flat-leaf parsley, and pepperoncini to taste -- for
about 90 seconds of additional cooking. If you remove the pasta from the
boiling water when it's done, it will be overdone by the time you've let it
cook in the condiment.

Third, use a lot of parsley and prepare it properly. Parsley like cilantro
and leeks tends to be dirty, needing several dunkings in cold water to
remove sand and grit. Then pick the leaves from the stems and chop them
thoroughly -- at this point, if I were a real food writer, I would say,
"save the stems for making stock". Let's not kid each other: I'm no more a
food writer than you are the kind of person who saves parsley stems to make
stock. People who save parsley stems to make stock read David Rosengarten,
Alain Ducasse, or Madhur Jaffrey. Last, serve the pasta immediately in
large, warmed bowls -- I fill a large container with hot water and let the
serving bowls rest there till it's time to eat. Or just run them through
your dishwasher for a few minutes.

If you've taken some care, the star is the pasta: you should be able to
taste its semolina, and the texture should be as interesting to your teeth
as the taste is to your tongue. A few repetitions of this little gem, and
you'll have a hard time eating halfhearted pasta again.

 References:
   1. http://www.lidiasitaly.com/
   2. http://www.rustichella.it/
   3. http://www.cybercucina.com/ccdocs/products/FL2009-01.html



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Posted on Monkeyfist at http://monkeyfist.com/articles/827