Tapeworm Blog

Butternut Squash Veloute with Parmesan Toast

A great quick and easy holiday soup is the butternut squash veloute I've been making for years. Its fairly straight forward and you can easily substitutute butternut for another kind of winter squash if you prefer.  Veloute refers to the velvety, silky texture of the soup. My special twist is using the rinds of a piece of Parmesan in the soup.

Serves 4 to 6

5 tablespoons butter, divided

1 large and 1 medium onion, thinly sliced

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 3lb butternut squash, peeled, seeded and cut into 1/2 inch cubes

2 tablespoons white wine

800 milliliters chicken stock (or vegetable stock)

1/2 cup heavy cream, plus more for garnish

4 slices baguette or other bread of your choice

Fresh chopped parsley, for garnish

Shredded Parmesan cheese, plus rind

    Make the soup: Place a large heavy-bottomed sauce pot over medium heat. Add the butter until melted. Once melted, add onions, season with salt and pepper and sweat until soft, around 7 minutes.

    Add the squash and stir to combine. Cook until the squash begins to soften around the edges about  5 minutes. Add the white wine and cook until  evaporated, another 5 minutes. 

Add the stock and parmesan rinds. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer until squash is soft, 10-15 minutes. Insert a small knife or a cake tester into a piece of squash. If it falls off immediately, it is cooked through. Remove the parmesan rinds.

Using a handheld mixer, puree the soup until smooth. Add the cream and puree until combined. Reduce heat to low and cover.

Make the Parmesan Toasts: Heat a skillet over medium high heat and add  the remaining butter. Once melted and bubbly, add two pieces of bread at a time and toast until golden brown, about 2 minutes per side. After turning, shred parmesan cheese onto each piece of bread. Remove from skillet and repeat with remaing bread.

To serve: Spoon soup into your bowl. Add the toast to the center. Top with fresh parsely and a drizzle of cream. 

Not To Get All Political....

The treatment of animals and the conditions in which they are raised should be important to all of us. Its horrifying to read stories like this but its important to know where our food comes from and what we're putting into our bodies.

Scary, scary stuff. Click here to read about it

Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back

Since there is so much to catch up on, I'm going backwards before going forwards.

While at Saveur, we collaborated with Outdoor Life magazine, another Bonnier publication, to test and prepare venison dishes for a story and photo shoot.

I had no idea they were also filming us and here is the video and story that resulted.

It's pretty much me and Hunter Lewis, the then kitchen director in most of the shots. 

Above photograph by André Baranowski

Reunited (And It Feels So Good)

 

Hello everyone. Its certainly been a while but I will again be getting back to feeding the tapeworm and sharing with you. 

To start, here is a photograph of some ribs I made. I'm working on the recipe and will share that with you soon. Stay tuned and thanks for reading!

 

Jumping on the Bandwagon: My Vote for Favorite Restaurant of 2010

    I had no desire to be like every other food writer and/or bloggers and come up with a end of the year best of list that is the same as the next.

But after reading an excessive amount of lists that all seemed to feature the same 10-15 restaurants (Torrisi, Lincoln, ABC Kitchen) I had to mention what was probably my favorite restaurant of the last year that did not appear on any of the lists I read, Williamsburg's Walter Foods.

An American style bistro that is consistently delicious, the menu features comfort foods like a perfectly balanced lobster roll, herb roasted chicken, chorizo pigs in a blanket, a short rib burger (below), fresh oysters and raw bar, pan roasted striped bass over lobster panzanella and my personal favorite, an amazingly juicy and tender French dip served with some of the best french fries in recent memory.

Cocktails include thoughtfully made classics like Pimm's Cup, Sazerack or Tom Collins that stand along side classics with a twist such as a Fig Side Car or a Tequila Negroni. 

The atmosphere and staff just meet that perfect place between neighborhood-friendly and trendy- sophisticated (waiters and bartenders wear shirts with bow ties). It is a restaurant that you can easily feel comfortable spending hours in. And if a recent meal during warmer weather in the backyard garden is any indication, they may actually have to ask you to leave.

Turkey Choucroute Garni

    My internship at Saveur magazine has come to an end. During my stay one of the recipes we tested for the Thanksgiving issue (out now) was a variation on an eastern European dish called choucroute garni. A traditional choucroute garni usually consists of saurkraut, potatoes, riesling and a mix of various meat products such as tongue, sausages (such as knackwurst or bratwurst) and bacon. This variation uses turkey in the place of some of the meats, slab bacon and Granny Smith apples. Watch as Hunter Lewis, kitchen director (and my boss) prepares the dish and take a peak inside the test kitchen.

Above photo by Todd Coleman

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Beer Glorious Beer

This Friday, September 24th, NY Craft Beer Week begins. A week to celebrate local beers produced by small breweries. With deals, dinners and events, the festival spans throughout the 5 boroughs. The festival is only in it's third year and last year received lackluster media coverage, let's hope the word gets out this year because it's a great festival to celebrate something we all love.

How it works: For $10 a "passport" is purchased which allows you to try one of three featured beers at each bar for $3.  There are more than 80 bars participating and each bar features beers from breweries such as Captain Lawrence, Brooklyn, Goose Island, Coney Island and Victory.

This festival is not only about drinking beer. It is also about paring beers with food. During last year's festival, then Chef de Cuisine of Per Se, Jonathan Benno, hosted a seven course dinner and instead of wine, every dish was paired with a beer provided by Brooklyn Brewery. They did some really interesting and amazing stuff including "bacon beer." This year, as the festival expands, many more restaurants are taking part. Eleven Madison Park, applewood, Craftbar and Hearth are just a few of the more than 30 restaurants that are offering special "beer menus." Each restaurant will feature a unique menu meant to be paired with beers.

In recent years beer had something of a renaissance. You are more likely to find beers from smaller and lesser know breweries than ever before at bars and even some supermarkets. And speciality beer markets, bars and restaurants are opening more than ever making it easy and effortless to taste and enjoy new and diverse beers. This festival is a clear reflection of that.

There are so many fantastic beers out there too many to mention here. However what I think is probably the best beer I've ever had: Brooklyn Breweries "Blue Apron Ale". A beer I had at Ad Hoc restaurant in Yountville, CA. It is (or was) made especially for Thomas Keller's restaurants. I was lucky enough to try it once and I have not found it since. Was it because I had been wine tasting for hours? Maybe.

 

Here's to hoping you find a favorite during beer week. Time to order another...

Homemade Peanut Brittle

    My email inbox is inundated daily with recipes and other food related information. Serious Eats, Cooking.com, Time Out New York, America's Test Kitchens, etc. all send me multiple emails a day. Usually, I take a quick look and delete them. However, last week, I received an email from Tasting Table with a recipe called "Grandma Frankie's Peanut Brittle" adapted from Melissa Perello (one of Food & Wine's Best New Chefs in 2004) from the Frances restaurant in San Francisco. For some reason I wasn't so quick to delete this one. Probably because I really love peanut brittle and since I have never made it before, it stuck out to me.

So this weekend, I decided to give it a shot. Most of the ingredients are house hold staples; granulated sugar, unsalted butter, vanilla extract, water and baking soda. And the remaining two ingredients, are nothing too extreme; light corn syrup and raw peanuts. Raw peanuts meaning peanuts that have not been roasted or treated already. These may be a little bit harder to find than anything else. Any specialty market, health food grocer or high-end market (such as Whole Foods or Fairway) should carry them.

Here is the recipe:

Ingredients:          2 cups granulated sugar

1 cup light corn syrup

1/2 cup cold water

2 cups raw peanuts

1 teaspoon unsalted butter

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 tablespoon baking soda

Directions: 

1. In a large saucepan over high heat, combine the sugar, corn syrup and water. Bring to a boil and reduce the heat to medium-high. Cook undisturbed until a candy thermometer registers 260˚, about 20 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium-low and add the peanuts. Wait 5 seconds, then give the mixture a brief stir. Continue cooking, swirling the saucepan occasionally to prevent scorching, until the mixture turns deep golden brown, about 3 minutes.

 

2. Remove the saucepan from the heat and stir in the butter and vanilla. Add the baking soda (the mixture will foam) and stir until incorporated.

3. Pour the peanut mixture onto a rimmed baking sheet lined with a silicone mat or parchment paper, and spread into an even layer. Let the brittle stand until cool and hard, about 25 minutes. Break the peanut brittle into pieces and store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to a month.

Recipe notes: Definitely put the sugar, corn syrup and water mixture in the biggest sauce pan you have. Adding the baking soda during the last step, will cause the mixture to foam and almost double in volume. 

I didn't have a rimmed baking sheet to use for this so I used a pyrex casserole dish instead (above). This caused the time that the brittle needed to rest and cool to be much longer than the 25 minutes suggested in the recipe. 

The final product was delicious. I was surprised that there was no salt in the recipe. It seemed like a perfect match for peanuts and would also create a salty caramel brittle. Also, the final product was a little bit wet on the surface and came off on my fingers, which in no way deterred me from eating half on my own.

Saveur Magazine

   

Tomorrow I will be starting an internship in the test kitchen of one of the top food magazines,Saveur magazine. From what I know at this point, the magazine receives recipes from many different sources for each issue. These recipes sometimes need to be tweaked here and there before they are published so that they are appropriate for home cooks and also that they meet the magazines standards. I will be testing the recipes and sourcing ingredients that are submitted and in some cases, multiple times. Obviously, I will know more once I start. But I look forward to sharing the recipes, tips and experience here, to the extent that I am allowed, as I did while at FCI. And although I am not permitted to share the details (I had to sign a confidentiality agreement), I will also be recipe testing for the Amateur Gourmet's cookbook over the course of the next year. If you haven't read his book or blog, I highly recommend checking them both out. Stay tuned!

Eye In the Sky

    Apologies for the lack of entries lately, a lot is in the works. I hope you'll stay with me, many posts are coming. In the meantime, here is something to tide you over. Love him or hate him, Time magazine writer and blogger Josh Ozersky does have access to most every big name chef in New York. In this video from his personal website, Josh sits with Daniel Boulod in his "skybox" office above the kitchen at his flagship restaurant Daniel. With a bird's eye view, Daniel explains how his classic French brigade kitchen works. 

Ozersky has caused quite a stir lately after being called out by Village Voice critic Robert Sietsema about a piece he wrote on Time's blog. Whatever your opinions about that, this video is still pretty damn cool.

    If you're interested in what's being called "Ozersky Gate" here is the low down.Or here.