pasta

Spaghetti Napolitan

maki — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:44:34 +0200

Continuing my yohshoku mini-marathon, here’s the infamous Japan-ized pasta dish called Napolitan or Naporitan. (Japanese doesn’t have an L or R sound, which is why Japanese people often mix them up when speaking Western languages.) As far as I know, there’s nothing remotely Neapolitan about Napolitan, except for the use of spaghetti. It is made with a creamy ketchup-based sauce, and has the salty-sweet flavors that Japanese people love.

According to Wikipedia Japan (Japanese link), Spaghetti Napolitan was invented shortly after World War II, by the head chef of the hotel in Yokohama that was used as the U.S. military headquarters by General Douglas MacArthur. He allegedly got the idea from the spaghetti and tomato sauce eaten by the U.S. troops. Over the years the recipe was tweaked, using ketchup instead of the tomato puree in the original recipe for example, since the latter was hard to come by for most Japanese people at the time. There are some Napolitan recipes calling for crushed tomatoes or tomato puree, but using ketchup is, as odd as it may sound, the more ‘authentic’ way.

To make Spaghetti Napolitan that is as ‘authentic’ as you might get in Japan, you’ll want to cook the spaghetti a minute or two over the al dente stage. Up until pretty recently (say the last 20-30 years or so), Japanese people preferred their pasta to be soft, like other noodles they were used to like soba, udon or Chinese style noodles (and as Chinalily commented here, the ‘soft pasta’ preference is seen in other Asian countries too.) You can even cook the noodles in advance and then re-heat them in the pan, something that purist Italian cooks would gasp in horror at but is the standard way of dealing with Japanese style noodles. Do remember that this is an adaptation by one culture of the food of another to suit existing tastes.

I have to admit, I hadn’t made Napolitan in years. I’m more used to the Italian style al dente pasta now. But I made this for Sunday lunch, and found it surprisingly tasty - it brought back all kinds of memories of my childhood.

Recipe: Spaghetti Napolitan

For two rather generous servings:

150g / about 5 oz. dry spaghetti (no. 8 thickness)
4 wiener sausages or frankfurters
1 large sweet pepper (here I used 1/3rd each of red, yellow and green pepper for color)
5-6 button mushrooms
2 Tbs. butter or light cooking oil
1 medium onion
Salt and pepper
1/2 cup ketchup (Heinz is what I used)
2 Tbs. Bulldog tonkatsu sauce
2 Tbs. heavy cream

Boil the spaghetti while you’re cooking the other ingredients in plenty of salted water. Cook it a minute or two beyond the al dente stage for authenticity, or stop at the al dente stage if this bothers you.

Slice the onion, pepper and mushrooms thinly. Slice the sausages in thin, diagonal slices (you can cut them into octopus shapes and the like if you’re entertaining the kids).

Heat up a wok or large frying pan with the butter or oil or a combination. (Using lard here would make it closer to the original version.) Sauté the onion until transclucent, then add the peppers and mushrooms and sauté until it’s all limp. Add the sausage slices and sauté until lightly browned. Season lightly with salt and pepper.

In the meantime, combine the ketchup, Bulldog sauce and cream in a small bowl.

Drain the spaghetti once it’s cooked. Add to the pan. Add the sauce mixture and toss well to combine.

Serve immediately, optionally topped with plenty of grated cheese, and/or a dash of Tabasco.

Kids love this - at least, Japanese kids do.

Notes

If you don’t have Bulldog sauce, use steak sauce and add about a teaspoon or so of honey.

You can use ham or bacon instead of the wieners (or in addition to).

Canned mushrooms are often used in this, but that’s where I draw the line.

Napolitan, the original Wafuu pasta

I’ve written here previously about wafuu pasta, pasta with Japanese ingredients and flavors. I think it’s safe to say Napolitan was the original wafuu pasta - even though it uses Western ingredients, the dish as a whole was adapted to Japanese tastes of the time. (The kind of wafuu pasta that are on this page were developed much later, probably in the 1970s, and use actual Japanese ingredients such as tarako (salted cod roe) and natto (fermented soy beans).

Wafuu Pasuta (wafuu pasta): Japanese style pasta

maki — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:25:48 +0100

The word wafuu may sound like someone trying to say yahoo and not quite succeeding, but it actually means “Japanese-style” in Japanese.

Italian style pasta has been popular in Japan since the post war period. In the beginning it was served with Italian, or at least Western European, style sauces, but some time in the ’70s or so people started to experiment with Japanese flavors. Essentially, things that are usually eaten with white rice were mixed into or put on top of spaghetti and other pastas. These are known as wafuu pasuta or wafuu supagetti (say these out loud and you’ll know what they are), and became popular on the menus of Japanese cafés (kissaten) and the like.

There is at least one restaurant in the U.S. that I know of that has a couple of wafuu pasuta dishes on their menu - Basta Pasta (warning: icky Flash-only site!), in New York. They don’t really go far enough in my opinion though. If you love Japanese flavors you’ll probably love wafuu pasuta too.

Most wafuu pasuta recipes are very quick and easy to make, so they are great for quick dinners. Incidentally, to achieve a more Japanese texture cook the pasta about a minute or so longer than you might otherwise, so it’s a bit past al dente. Japanese people generally prefer softer pasta.

Following are three of my favorite quick and easy wafuu pasuta dishes.

Tarako and ponzu capellini

Tarako is salted cod roe. It can be eaten uncooked in its soft state or cooked until it separates into tiny little balls. You may only have encountered cooked tarako in furikake or as onigiri fillings, but the real thing is much better of course. In its uncooked state it has a rich, rather unctuous texture - and the flavor of concentrated salty fish egg. The ponzu cuts through the richness a bit.

To make this dish, mix together 1 pair (two pieces) of tarako with the membrane removed with 1 to 2 tablespoons of softened butter. Mix this well with about 2 cups of hot capellini (angel hair pasta) until the pasta is thoroughly coated. Mix in about 2 teaspoons of ponzu vinegar, and finely chopped green onions. Serve topped with more chopped green onions.

Since this pasta is very rich, I prefer to serve it in small portions as an appetizer on its own.

For a spicy version, use mentaiko instead of the tarako. Both should be available, often frozen, at Japanese groceries.

Hijiki and dried shiitake mushroom spaghetti

This dramatic black and white pasta has no added fat. But it has lots of carbs of course. The hijiki and shiitake are both full of fiber and umami.

Rinse and then soak about 3 tablespoons of dried hijiki (here I have used mehijiki (hijiki shoots)) and two dried shiitake mushrooms in warm water until they are softened and swelled. Sliver the shiitake cap, removing the stem. Cook them in a cup of the soaking liquid, 2 tablespoons of soy sauce, 2 teaspoons of sugar and 1 tablespoon of mirin while you boil the spaghetti. Toss into the hot spaghetti and sprinkle with some 7-flavor pepper powder (nanami tohgarashi).

To make it even healthier, use whole wheat, soy or other alternative spaghetti.

Natto, shiso and green onion spaghettini

Natto lovers will love this pasta dish, and natto haters will, well, hate it. The combination of warm pasta and natto really brings out the distinctive odor and flavor of the fermented soybeans.

Mix a regular sized packet (50g) of natto well, until the sticky strings form. Add 1 tablespoon of soy sauce, the mustard pack if the natto came with one, a handful of chopped green onions and a big handful of shredded shiso leaves (use parsley or shredded nori if you can’t find shiso). Toss with hot spaghettini and top with more shiso. Optionally add a little sesame oil.

Sticky, smelly and fragrant goodness! However, I recommend you don’t use grated cheese on this, because natto and cheese combine in a very unsettling way.

There and Back Again: My Perfect Spaghetti Bolognese

maki — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:00:24 +0200

I love pasta in many guises, but when it comes to ultimate Comfort Pasta, there is nothing that compares to a spaghetti bolognese. By spaghetti bolognese, I mean spaghetti topped with a rich, ground-meat and tomato based sauce. No fancy ragu or such. I don’t think it’s that authentically Italian, but I don’t really care. It’s one of my favorite cool-weather dinners.

Once upon a time, I had what I thought was a perfect recipe for spaghetti bolognese. Then, about a year ago I lost my way. After a year of bewilderingly off-target bolognese, I’ve found my way back.

I blame Heston Blumenthal for messing with my head. (Disclaimer: I am otherwise a big fan of Mr. Blumenthal.) Last year, he tackled spaghetti bolognese on his In Search of Perfection television series (and in the book of course), and came up with a “perfect” version. The perfect Blumenthal version of spaghetti bolognese is, naturally, extremely complicated, but compared to the other “perfect” versions of various popular dishes it seemed to be the most doable. So, we (note the plural: it required a team effort) tackled it, piece by piece. It does help in life to have an almost equally food-obsessive partner for such quests.

It took us 3 full days to accomplish, starting from the pre-ordering of the meaty oxtails at the butcher counter (it’s not a commonly used cut here), finding the perfect spaghetti, ripe tomatoes in December (yes, I know) and the final slow cooking of the sauce. And the result?

It was good, yes, but perfect? Neither of us was sure. But yet it had flashes of something great in there; the meatiness of the gelatinous oxtail, the unctuous richness. So, we embarked on a long journey of trying to tweak that recipe. We tried different meat combinations. (Turkey is a definite no.) We experimented with bacon, chorizo, various sausages, salami. We tried less or more of the vegetables, canned tomatoes alone or fresh alone.

All were interesting, but I still felt off kilter. Then, the other day I made bolognese more or the way I had made it for years until the Blumenthal experiments - and, it was just about perfect.

Mind you, it’s probably because my criteria for a perfect bolognese are different from the great chef’s, as I explain below. And some of the ideas gleaned from the Blumenthal version and the ensuing experiments did creep in, making the sauce even better. In any case, I’m now happy that this is my Perfect Spaghetti Bolognese. I can now move on to perfecting other things.

Defining my Perfect Bolognese

I prefer my bolognese to have a rich, deep taste of tomato, wine, and meat. I also like the meat to be ground quite finely so that you get an integrated ‘meat sauce’, rather than ‘bits of meat suspended in a sauce’.

The experiments with cured meats convinced me that I don’t like cured-meat flavor or smoke flavor in the sauce, but a little bacon is added for richness.

I like the sauce to be rich, but not swimming in fat (a pronounced feature of the Blumenthal version).

It’s key to let the sauce cook for a very long time - minimum 3 hours after the preparatory stage - in a thick-walled pan, ideally a Le Creuset or similar.

The only pasta to use is a robust, dried spaghetti. The kind we use all the time now is substantial and rough textured, as you can see from the picture. That rough surface absorbs sauce in a very satisfying way. It costs almost twice as much as Barilla spaghetti, but is worth it. (If you are using Barilla or other mass-produced line though, I’d go for the spaghettoni rather than spaghetti.)

(For readers in Switzerland, this is the Spaghetti alla chitarra from the Migros Selection line.)

Things I liked and didn’t like about the Blumenthal version

The Heston Blumenthal bolognese is described in great detail in his first book, but also appears on this page. There’s another one on The Times web site, which is quite different.

Mixing fresh and canned tomato is a great idea, as is adding some cream - though I used butter instead, for that dairy unctuousness.

Long cooking, of course, is a good thing, though his version takes 9 hours.

The oxtail meat idea was interesting, but obtaining and then cutting the meat off the fiddly bones is way, way too much work - and ultimately, I felt, not quite worth it. It’s also quite expensive here in Switzerland. For the gelatinous quality I use some veal in the meat mixture instead.

His version was too sweet for me for some reason. I also didn’t like the star anise addition at all - this may have added to that sweet flavor somehow. I do like adding star anise to many meat dishes, especially pork, just not this one.

There was also too much added fat overall, which cause a very substantial oil slick to appear on the surface of the sauce.

I’ve always used red wine in bolognese, and he used an ‘oaky Chardonnay’. I prefer the robust red wine.

Recipe: My Perfect Spaghetti Bolognese

For the sauce:

The meats:

450-500g / 1 lb top loin or chuck
225-250g / 8 oz veal breast
225-250g / 8 oz. pork shoulder
100g / 3 oz non-smoked bacon or pancetta or speck, chopped fine

(Note that the beef and pork should be rather marbled, not very lean, if you need to use other cuts.)

Have all of the meats (except the bacon, which you’ll chop yourself) twice ground by the butcher, or grind it yourself (use a grinder or a food processor) until fairly fine but not a paste. If using a food processor, it helps to cube the meat and then half-freeze the cubes first. You can buy already ground meat if you prefer, but it should be not too lean as well.

The vegetables:

2 cups finely chopped onion
2 large cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 cup finely chopped celery
1 cup finely chopped carrot

Other stuff:

About 1/4 cup light olive oil
1 cup (250ml) red wine such as a Barbera or a Côte du Rhone (but I usually use whatever is handy, as long as it’s robust it’s fine)
1 large can (800g) canned tomatoes, the tomatoes smashed up (do this with your hands or in the food processor)
2 Tbs. tomato paste
4 cups peeled and chopped fresh tomatoes, seeds and all (If in the dead of winter, use another can of canned tomatoes instead)
2 bay leaves
Crushed dried or (preferably) fresh chopped rosemary leaves
Dried thyme
Dried oregano
Grated nutmeg
About 2 Tbs. butter, more or less to taste
Stock (veal or beef preferred) or water
Salt and pepper

And…the pasta etc.:

Spaghetti or spaghettoni, cooked al dente
Butter to toss with the spaghetti
Freshly grated Parmesano Reggiano (freshly grated Grana Padano is acceptable)

Equipment needed:

a heavy pan - I use an enamelled cast iron pot
large frying pan or sauté pan
Recommended to have: a food processor.

Heat up the olive oil in the heavy pot over medium heat. Toss in all the chopped up vegetables, then lower the heat to about midway between low and medium. Sauté the vegetables over the low heat, stirring occasionally, until it’s limp and very lightly tan.

In a large frying pan, sauté the ground meats until browned, and add it all into the pot. Deglaze (add a bit of the stock or water to the hot pan, scrape off the bits ) the frying pan and add that to the pot too.

Add all the other ingredients except the butter, water and salt and pepper. (The amount of herbs you add really depends on your taste. I like to add quite a bit of chopped fresh rosemary, about 2 tablespoons, because I have childhood memories of happily chewing on bits of rosemary leaves in my mother’s spaghetti bolognese. Add about a teaspoonful of the herbs and several grindings of the nutmeg, then taste after a few hours to see if you want more.)

Bring up the temperature until it’s bubbling, then lower the heat to ‘low’ and simmer, stirring up from the bottom of the pot occasionally, for at least 3 hours, preferably 4 or longer. Add a little stock or water whenever it starts to dry out too much. (You may also do this in the oven, but I prefer to do it on the rangetop and have just a tiny hint of burnt flavor in there.)

At the end of the cooking process, take out the bay leaves, stir in the butter, and add salt and pepper to taste.

This makes a lot of very rich sauce. About 1/2 cup is enough I think for a plate of dinner-portion spaghetti (allowing about 100g or 3 1/2 ounces dry weight per person). Portion and freeze the rest - it freezes beautifully.

To enhance the flavor, toss the freshly cooked spaghetti with a knob of butter prior to ladling on the sauce. Optionally top with freshly grated Parmesano Reggiano, or Grana Padano.

The only thing to serve with this is a green salad with a sharp vinegarette.

Notes

While the oil slick on this sauce is not as pronounced as the one that appears on the Blumenthal version, it is impressively deep. You can scoop some of this off if it scares you. (I would scoop off the excess oil prior to adding the butter…which may seem illogical, but you’ll be taking out ‘other’ oils and adding in butter flavor.)

You can also ‘stretch’ the sauce by taking a cupful and adding 1 small can (400g - about 8 oz) of crushed canned tomatoes. Adjust the salt and pepper. Sometimes I prefer this less-rich version.

Or, you can add one cupful to 1 cup of cream…for a very rich creamy sauce indeed.

Adding some sauteed mushrooms enhances it too.

The sauce as-is is perfect for layering in lasagna, stuffing cannellini and such, paired with a perfect Bechamel.

Don’t ruin it by covering it with pre-powdered cardboard ‘parmesan’. If there’s one thing I’ve learned while living in Switerland it’s that mystery cheese products taste really, really bad compared to the real thing.

Finally, in case you are wondering, spaghetti bolognese (also known as ‘spaghetti meat sauce’) is very popular in Japan. It has to be one of the most universally loved dishes in the world, no?

(Somewhat different and lighter pasta.)

Mac and cheese from a box? Not even with cute bunnies

maki — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 08:47:30 +0100

Rebecca Blood has a great post summing up the recent minor brouhaha about a popular ‘quality’ mac and cheese brand that originated with article in Salon magazine, vs. the standard of the genre that comes in a blue box. Rebecca focuses on the actions of the CEO, specifically his comments on a post on megnut, which are funny in the way he assumes that people will just take his marketspeak at face value.

As I have written about before, I detest mac and cheese from a box. I have tried the bunny package mac and cheese more than once, lured by its promise of better flavor then the blue box, less additives and so on. (And the bunny lured me too. I adore bunnies.) Each time I have been disappointed. No matter how ‘quality’ they may claim it to be, cheese simply is not designed to come in foil pouches or in pre-powdered form.

The other issue with a food like mac and cheese is, it really doesn’t fit well into a modern eating lifestyle, should you choose to try to eat healthily most of the time. Even using skim milk (!) a serving of the bunny mac and cheese contains 280 calories. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather spend 280 calories on something tastier than packaged mac and cheese.

Incidentally, this general philosophy has lead me to cut out most of the pre-packaged food that I do like also, like instant ramen and ravioli-in-a-can. I had to face up to the fact that a pack of my favorite instant ramen would cost me 420 calories and is loaded with all kinds of things I’d rather not eat, and that fresh ravioli actually is better than the soggy kind in a can. While I’m not saying all pre-prepared packaged foods are bad, a lot of them are a quick road to consuming a lot of calories for not much pleasure.

But back to the mac and cheese. For me, mac and cheese is something that is worth making an ultimate version of, but if you or your family must have that cheese-pasta thing quickly, there are many ways to make it quick too, such as this very popular recipe on Elise’s Simply Recipes.

Produce: Mushrooms, on the wild side

maki — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 16:57:11 +0200

One crisp day in the fall when I was about 12, my cousins and I went for a foraging hike in the forests of the Okuchichibu mountains with our Aunt Naoko. (Relatives of another aunt had a farm there.) We were looking for wild rakkyou (a kind of wild onion), fuki (coltsfoot), and whatever wild mushrooms we could find. We found plenty of rakkyou, but had no luck with mushrooms, until we suddenly came upon a clearing full of brown caps. They were big, luscious shiitake mushrooms, growing on rotted logs.

"Wow, can this be real?" we asked ourselves. "Is this really wild? Doesn't it belong to someone?" I don't know why the fact that they were growing on sawed logs didn't tip us off, but somehow we assumed - Aunt Naoko as well as us kids - that they were wild, and proceeded to pick more than half of them.

Later on, the relatives at whose farm we were staying got an angry phone call from a neighbor. Those shiitake were indeed being farmed. Oops. I think my aunt settled it by paying for what we'd picked...it couldn't have been cheap, because the four of us came away from that clearing with a big bag full each. They were sure delicious though!

I'm not sure if the memory of that afternoon is why I love mushrooms so much. When I say wild mushrooms, I'm talking about mushrooms that are not the old, boring white button mushrooms, even though some of the 'wild' mushrooms are cultivated, especially shiitake. Some of the mushrooms you'll see at the markets right now are gathered wild - fall is the perfect time for them, when the weather turns cool and moist.

There many different kinds of mushrooms, and the variety depends on where you live. The photo here is a sampling of the mushrooms available at the "mushroom man" stall at the Wednesday market in the Zürich main station. You may recognize the brown capped shiitake (top left) and bright yellow chanterelles (top right). The big sliced ones in the bottom right are wild porcini, called Steinpilz here, and the big, white one on the left is an oyster mushroom or Krauterseitling (pleurotus eryngii). In the middle is a mixture of thin, delicate mushrooms that are just called wild mushrooms. They are similar to the chanterelles in texture.

The method of cooking depends on the texture of the mushroom. Meaty, substantial mushrooms like mature porcini or the gigantic 'puffs' you can get in some places can stand up to grilling and frying, but delicate chanterelles will fall apart if you cook them too long. If you're doing a mixed mushroom dish, start cooking the meatier varieties before the thinner ones, or slice them thinly. Instead of slicing mushrooms, it can also be fun to just shred them apart with your hands.

I like to cook mushrooms in two ways: Japanese, and European. With Japanese methods you don't add any fat. European methods usually require quite a lot of butter or oil, but it's worth it of course. The better or more fragrant the mushroom, the simpler the method used to prepare them.

Cleaning mushrooms

Ideally you do not want to wash mushrooms at all, and do not ever soak them. If you must wash them, do so under running water, and immediately dry them off. The more delicate the mushroom, the more they will be damaged by water-washing.

I like to clean them gently with a moist and well-wrung out kitchen towel, and I cut off any impossibly dirty bits, like the root end of maitake mushrooms.

Mushroom foraging

Don't, unless you really know what you are doing. Many mushroom picking courses are offered around this time of year, and can be great fun (though dress warmly - you will get very cold).

Recipes

Some of my favorite mushroom recipes are already on the site:

Mushroom rice, or kinoko takikomi gohan - mushrooms are marinated briefly then cooked with rice. Fat free! (ok, you get some calories from the rice.) We tried this recently with spelt instead of rice, and it was really good.
Mushroom lemon soup - made with wild mushrooms, this is much better than the version with button mushrooms.
Melange of mushrooms soup - A lot of cream in this, and totally worth it.

Japanese style steam-baked mushrooms

This is my mom's favorite way to cook mushrooms, and it's almost ridiculously easy.

An assortment, or just one variety, of mushrooms, such as shiitake, chanterelles, maitake (hen of the woods), etc.
Soy sauce
Sake
Sansho pepper (if you can get it)

Pre-heat the oven to 400°F/200°C. (You can also use a toaster oven for this.)

Clean the mushrooms; cut off any tough or dirt-filled stems. (You'll need to do this for big shiitake and maitake, but not for chanterelles).

Shred or slice any thick, meaty mushrooms. I like to keep shiitake and chanterelles whole, and just shred maitake up into chunks.

Place the mushrooms on a large sheet of aluminum foil.

Sprinkle with sake and soy sauce - about 1 tablespoon of each for two large handfuls of mushrooms - and toss. Sprinkle with sansho.

Wrap the mushrooms up in the foil, and seal around the edges. Place in the oven and bake for about 15 minutes.

You can also make individual serving size packs which can be opened up by each person. The wonderful aroma that wafts up into your nostrils when you rip into the pack is amazing.

Mushroom pasta

Again, this is very very simple, but that's really the best way to enjoy mushrooms when they are at their best. The subtle sourness of the crême fraiche really accentuates the mushroom flavor. You can add some freshly grated Parmesano if you want, but try it without first.

If you can afford it, try this just with chanterelles.

1 pack fresh fettucine (8 oz or 225g)
10 oz / 250g (or so) wild mushrooms, ideally chanterelles
1 tsp fresh thyme leaves, or dried thyme
2 cloves garlic
2 Tbs. unsalted butter
3 Tbs. crême fraiche
Salt and pepper

Start boiling the water for your fresh pasta.

Finely slice the garlic. Start sautéing them in the butter in a pan, until they turn tender.

Clean and slice or rip apart your chosen mushrooms.

When the water has come to a full boil, toss the mushrooms into the pan, toss rapidly over high heat, until it all starts to wilt and brown and emanate a wonderful smell. Add the thyme, and the crême fraiche. Season with salt and pepper.

In the meantime, put the fresh pasta in the boiling water - it should cook in a couple of minutes.

Drain (a little moisture should still be clinging to the noodles), and add to the pan with the mushrooms. Toss well and serve immediately.

Masterchef challenge day 8: Seared tuna, arugula and basil linguine

maki — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 22:37:43 +0100

It's day 8, and the end of week two of MasterChef. The ingredients were:

Tuna steak
Fresh basil
Fresh (?) linguine
Potatoes
Olives
Parmesan cheese

Potatoes, again! This week potatoes have been in the list every day. I decided to go with the linguine instead - I was missing pasta anyway.

There are quite a lot of ingredient notes for this dish, but it's really quick to assemble.

For this dish you do need sushi-grade, or very fresh, tuna. In my opinion cooked tuna should only be seared, and should be raw in the middle as it is here. Do not ever cook tuna through so that it's turns all white. Otherwise you might as well use canned tuna and save your money! I do like canned tuna, but it's quite a different beast from the fresh tuna. (Luckily Migros City in Zürich usually has some very fresh tuna, especially on Fridays when I actually made this meal. Migros is the biggest supermarket chain in Switzerland.)
Garlic with tuna might sound strange, but grated raw garlic actually goes very well with tuna, bonito and similar raw or just-seared fish. My stepfather actually prefers to eat his maguro sashimi with a little grated raw garlic instead of wasabi. If you prefer though, you can use just wasabi, but go easy on it!
The voiceover on the show said "fresh" linguine, but they showed a picture of what looked like regular dried linguine. Since I had a box of linguine already, that's what I used. I think that dried pasta stands up better in a salad.
I used a pack of baby arugula leaves that I had and needed to be used up, but you could also use any kind of slightly peppery but tender leaves, such as mizuna, cress, or escarole.
Dried wasabi powder is available in Japanese or Asian food markets. You can also get readymade wasabi in a tube, in which case use 2 teaspoons. (or save the huge lump of wasabi that comes with takeout sushi for this.)
Ponzu is a citrusy soy sauce based sauce that you can find in Japanese or Asian markets. (It is also, I fear, currently rather 'trendy'.) It makes a nice change from regular vinegar for salad dressings. Lemon juice mixed with soy sauce can be substituted, but it will taste different.

I really loved the fresh flavors of this dish. I might cut up the tuna into cubes the next time though.

Unused ingredients were olives (though if I had some really fresh ones I might have chopped them up and added them), Parmesan cheese, potatoes.

Seared Tuna Pasta Salad

For 4 servings:

About 225g / 8 oz piece of sushi grade tuna (maguro, or the lean red part)
200g / 8 oz dried linguine
3 Tbs soy sauce
2 whole garlic cloves
1 1/2 tsp. dried wasabi powder
about 120g / 4 oz baby arugula leaves, or other peppery small salad leaves
10 fresh basil leaves
3 Tbs. Ponzu
1 Tbs. olive oil
Salt for cooking the olive oil

Put a pot of water to boil to cook the pasta.

Grate the garlic. Add droplets of water to the dried wasabi powder in a small bowl until it becomes a paste. Combine both with the soy sauce, and pour over the tuna. Marinate in the refrigerator for at least 20 minutes.

Wash the arugula leaves and basil leaves. Chop the basil roughly.

In the meantime, cook the linguine in salted water. When the pasta is done, drain and then toss aggressively in a bowl with a little olive oil, the arugula, basil and ponzu. (The aggressive tossing is to cool it as rapidly as possible while you're tossing! Just don't hit the ceiling. Also, the arugula and basil will wilt a bit from the heat of the pasta, but that makes it a bit tastier, in my opinion.) Taste it at this point and add a little more ponzu if you like (remember then when the pasta is chilled, the flavor will diffuse a bit.) Spread out as flat as you can in a container that would fit in your refrigerator, and put it in there to cool as rapidly as possible. (Note, if you aren't trying to make this all within 40 minutes, just cool to room temperature then put it in the refrigerator until ready to serve.)

Heat up a grill pan or a nonstick frying pan. Take the tuna out of the marinade, and quickly sear it on both sides. Cut the tuna into thin slices, or into cubes.

To serve, put a little mound of the pasta on each plate, and place the tuna on top. Pour any remaining marinade over the tuna.

Forget the diet Macaroni and Cheese

maki — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 04:20:16 +0100

[Update]: Via Yoko's blog, I got to the recent Slate article about a New York Times article (unfortunately already archived so you'd have to pay to read it) about macaroni and cheese. That recipe apparently used no bechamel. I know that bechamel is a pain in the ass to make, but really, it's worth it. As the Slate article quoting the NY Times article says, a mac and cheese is "Nothing more than tender elbows of pasta suspended in pure molten cheddar, with a chewy, golden-brown crust of cheese on top." This recipe produces exactly that. Maybe we should start campaigning for someone to produce canned bechamel...

I have a sneaky fondness for a lot of pre-prepacked, definitely not-gourmet foods...canned ravioli in tomato sauce, frozen fish sticks, instant ramen, canned corned beef, Marmite...the list goes on and on. There is one pre-packaged food that I detest though: boxed macaroni and cheese.

What makes boxed mac and cheese evil? It's that horrible powdered "cheese" sauce. It has an acrid undertone and a slighty grainy texture, and the most popular kinds have that neon-yellow almost chartreuse color to it that is quite revolting.

But the worst thing about packaged mac and cheese is that it has somehow given people the misconception that a real mac and cheese is quick and easy convenience food. I beg to differ. While you can have a quite edible cheesy pasta (dump a knob of butter, maybe some cream, and a ton of grated cheese on hot pasta), a real mac and cheese is occasion food. Its preparation, while not difficult, involves quite a few steps and takes a long time. Also this is really what we call around our house "fuck the diet" food (I've cleaned it up a tad for the title of this entry though!)- high fat, high cholesterol, high carb, high everything. My general theory on eating is, if it's high-(bad things) you want the very best version that you can get. Don't waste all those calories on inferior versions.

The characteristics of a really good macaroni gratin (as it was known when I was growing up in Japan) or mac and cheese are that it should have a gooey, unctuous, cheesy inside, topped by a crispy, intensely cheesy crust. This version fulfills those requirements. Serve with a plain green salad. You will not need anything else, unless it's a good red wine. Be prepared to compensate with spare eating for days afterwards. To my mind, this is the perfect thing to serve at a casual dinner party with close friends.

Note that this makes a lot of mac and cheese. You can serve it at a party (it would serve 8 to 10 hungry people), or freeze the leftovers, cut into portion-sized pieces and wrapped individually. It heats up nicely in the microwave, filling the house with that gorgeous cheesy smell every time.

Assemble the components of the mac and cheese in this order.

Make the bechamel - you can do this a day in advance.
Start the water boiling for the macaroni.
Heat up the bechamel, and add the cheese - you don't want this to boil though, or the cheese will turn a bit grainy.
In the meantime, cook the macaroni, and heat the oven to 180°C / about 350° F.
Mix the macaroni with the cheese sauce, and put in the baking pans. Top with grated cheese.
Bake for 45 minutes.

For the Sauce Mornay (cheese sauce)

8 cups of Bechamel sauce
450g or about 1 lb (I refer you to the title of this entry...this is not diet food) of grated aged Gruyère cheese. I know that Cheddar is traditional, and you can use an aged, non-dyed version if you wish, but Gruyère makes it truly heavenly.
Tabasco sauce

Plus you will need an additional 3 cups or so of grated cheese - a mix of your main cheese plus Parmesano Reggiano, or a Grana Padano, would work great. And last but not least, 1 box (500g, or 1 lb) of small elbow macaroni.

Prepare the bechamel following these directions. While still hot, stir in the cheese and add a few drops of Tabasco. Taste and add salt and pepper as needed.

In the meantime, cook a box of elbow macaroni (1lb or 500g) until just a bit before al dente stage - it should still be a bit chewy, since it will continue to cook and soften in the sauce.

Mix the cooked and drained macaroni in the cheese sauce. You will notice that there is the sauce to macaroni ratio is quite high - this is because the macaroni absorbs some of the moisture from the sauce while baking, and accounts for the unctuous texture you will taste later.

Pour the mixed pasta and sauce into baking pans. To avoid spillage, the pans should not be more than 2/3rds full, so you may need more than 1 pan. Top with the cheese reserved for topping - don't be shy. You can add breadcrumbs (panko) if you want extra crunch.

Bake in the preheated 180°C / 350°F oven for about 45 minutes until the top is a golden brown. At this point your whole house will be filled with that golden-cheesy smell. Take out of the oven, and let stand for at least 5 minutes before serving.

Note: if your guests are the type that think an all-cheese main dish is somehow lacking, add some uncooked chicken breast pieces to the bechamel a couple of minutes before you add the macaroni. This turns this into a chicken and cheese macaroni gratin, suitable for the carnivore.

Wild garlic ravioli

maki — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 23:43:57 +0100

(Yes, more round food!)

Last April I wrote about a local speciality of sorts, wild garlic, or bärlauch, pesto. It's a type of garlic that only appears in the forests in the spring. We still have about 15 cm / 6 inches of snow on the ground here, which isn't really that usual for mid-March. So spring still feels rather distant.

But today for lunch I had this bärlauch-filled ravioli that is available for for at limited time from Migros no less. (Migros is the dominant supermarket chain in Switzerland.) Wild garlic is milder than garlic cloves, and more garlicky than chives - it's sort of of like nira or Chinese garlic chives, but a bit different. It's really delicious, and tastes like spring.

Wild garlic pesto

maki — Mon, 12 Apr 2004 18:53:00 +0200

I've mentioned our local organic farm where we buy our eggs several times before. They also sometimes sell some locally produced food items. We spotted this wild garlic, or bärlauch pesto the other day and had to try it. (Ironically it turns out it's made by one of our neighbors who lives across the street.)

Wild garlic grows in some forests, and it's said that cows love it so much that they break away from the herd to make their way into the forest and munch on this spring delicacy. People even claim that the butter sold in spring has a faint garlicky flavor because of this. I've never been able to detect that...but maybe I'm not buying the right brand of butter.

Anyway, this pesto was quite assertively redolent of garlic, with some onion-like flavor too. It's sort of like a cross between chives and Chinese garlic, or nira. Besides the wild garlic, it had olive oil and ground pine nuts and almonds in it. I had it on hot pasta with some grated cheese (Spanish Manchego, since that's all that was in the refrigerator), and it was quite delicious.

I'm not sure we have wild garlic in the woods around here, but I may try to emulate this pesto with the chives growing in the garden.

mmm, anchovies

maki — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 09:33:00 +0200

I love anchovies. I can't get enough of them. They are the perfect salty flavor enhancer, on pizza, pasta, and so many other things. One of my favorite pizzas is a simple margarita base (that's tomato sauce and mozzarella), with calamata olives and anchovies.

Yet when I tell some people about my love for that little salty fish, they shudder. "Eww, anchovies!" they say. I think the people who hate it because they've had ones that have been out of the can for too long. It does get rather strong when it's sort of dried out and stale. Of course, to anchovy fans, the stronger the better sometimes.

The salty-fishy taste is quite universally favored as a base flavor. The Romans used to have a fermented fish-and-salt sauce, called garum. This was made by salting and then fermenting the insides of fish in a vat for several days. This sounds rather disgusting to modern ears, until you realize that it seems rather similar to Vietnamese nuoc mam, or Thai nam pla - addictive, salty/fishy sauces that add just that right "hidden flavor" to so many things. (There is also a Japanese version of this type of fermented fish sauce called shottsuru.)

Back to anchovies though. There are good and bad anchovies. Good quality canned anchovies are smooth, not sort of flaky and bony. Shop around for a good brand. Incidentally, I don't really get anchovies rolled around capers. Capers are best preserved in brine, and anchovies are best I think preserved in oil. They can fit very well together when married into a sauce or so, but those itty rolls of a single anchovy fillet wrapped around a single caper - that I do not understand.

If you are a real anchovy fan you'd like them straight, for example draped over boiled egg slices in a salad, or on top of a pizza. Otherwise, you can try using them as a flavoring first. The anchovy-ness can be tempered with lemon juice, or garlic.

Here then follow two recipes using anchovies as a main flavor. One is for a simple spaghetti with anchovies, lemon, garlic, hot red peppers and pine nuts. The other one is for a tuna, anchovy and caper spread that's great on toast.

Spaghetti with anchovies and lemon

500g / about 1 pound of spaghetti (I like no. 7, or Spaghettoni)
1 50g can of flat anchovies - or two, if you want
1 large lemon
4 cloves of garlic
1/2 cup of pine nuts
1tsp or more of red pepper flakes
olive oil
freshly grated Parmesano Reggiano, or Grana Padano (optional)

Cook the spaghetti in salted water to the al dente stage. While it's cooking, chop the garlic and sauté in olive oil. Toast the pine nuts gently in a dry frying pan.

Add the anchovies to the garlic and oil. It will spit at you vigorously, so be careful. Smoosh up the anchovies with your spatula. Squeeze the juice from the lemon into the pan. Add the red pepper flakes, and some black pepper. You shouldn't need to add salt, since the anchovies are salty enough.

Add the just cooked spaghetti to the sauce. Add the toasted pine nuts and toss vigourously. Sprinkle with cheese at the table. If you like, add some Tabasco to give it even more heat.

Tuna, anchovy and caper spread

1 small onion
2-3 cloves garlic
2 100g / 3 1/2 oz cans of tuna packed in oil
extra virgin olive oil
1 50g can of flat anchovies
3 Tbs capers
Salt and pepper

Roughly chop the onion and the garlic. Drain the tuna.

Put the steel cutting blade in the food processor and add the onion, garlic, tuna and the can of anchovies, oil and all. Process until very smooth. Add a bit of extra virgin olive oil if necessary to make a smooth paste.

Take out of the food processor, and salt and pepper to taste. Stir in the capers.

This is very good on hot toasted bread, It also makes a very good pasta sauce - just add a little more olive oil, or some lemon juice, to make it a bit thinner, and toss with hot pasta.