Parmesan

October 16, 2014 Cheese

Butter and Sage Gnudi

I’m such a lucky gal, I’m so lucky to have a Hubby who likes to cook as much as I do. Normally it’s curry (and he makes fabulous curry), but he was recently captivated by Jamie Oliver’s gnudi recipe. He likes the combination of multiple cheeses, and lemon particularly. So lucky me, he undertook the two day task as earnestly as I would have done. Don’t let the fact it’s a two day recipe put you off, you really need the drying out time to allow the gnudi to set-up.

Ingredients (for 3-4 portions):

500g best-quality ricotta
50 g Parmesan cheese
½ whole nutmeg, for grating
Zest of one lemon
fine semolina, for dusting

Method:

Put the ricotta into a bowl with a pinch of sea salt and black pepper, then finely grate in the Parmesan and a few scrapings of nutmeg, along with the lemon zest. Beat it together, then have a taste to check the balance of seasoning is right – you want the nutmeg to be very subtle.
Generously cover a large tray with semolina, then roll the ricotta mixture into 3cm balls, rolling them in the tray of semolina as you go until really well coated. You should get around 20 gnudi from this amount of mixture. Shake and cover really well with the semolina and leave for 8 hours or preferably overnight in the fridge (don’t cover the tray) – the semolina will dehydrate the ricotta, giving the gnudi a lovely fine coating.
The gnudi will only take 3 minutes to cook, cook them in 2-portion batches to take care of them. Shake the excess semolina off 2 portions-worth of gnudi and cook them in boiling salted water while you melt a large knob of butter in a frying pan on a medium heat and pick in about 10 sage leaves to crisp up. Remove the crispy leaves to a plate and scoop the gnudi directly from the water into the frying pan, adding a spoonful of the cooking water. When the butter and water have emulsified, take off the heat and grate over a layer of Parmesan, add just a few drops of lemon juice, then toss together. Serve in warm bowls straight away with an extra grating of nutmeg and Parmesan and the crispy sage leaves, while you get on with the next batch, wiping the frying pan clean between batches.

Notes:

Do not place the gnudi in boiling water – bring it to the boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer, carefully put the gnudi in, so that they don’t break up
The size of Jamie’s gnudie is a little too big, in our opinion, we think they should be about half the size.
Jamie doesn’t include the zest of a lemon in his recipe, though he did on the TV episode. Hubby included the zest, and we do think it’s necessary, to offset the richness of the ricotta
In his new book, My Perfect Pantry, Geoffrey Zakarian has a gnudi recipe with mushrooms – that looks amazing!
They are quite rich, but they’d make an amazing starter… We’re already trying to work out combinations… It would seem sensible to have a category of variations that were light and herby, others that were meaty and full of depth, like the mushroom, and others that might include spices and a little heat… Think of it as your new pasta..

October 13, 2014 FrontPage

Crusted pumpkin wedges, with soured cream

This dish is from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty, and he’s quickly becoming my go-to chef… Though I still blog meat and fish dishes, I’m increasingly eating vegetables, and you can guarantee his recipes still pack enough punch to make up for that. For some reason, an onion squash has appeared in my kitchen… No doubt one of the children has spotted it somewhere, and convinced that halloween is on the way, coerced Hubby into buying it. Little do they know it’s just become my supper… Well, after all, they can always buy another… Though the recipe calls for a larger squash than mine, it still tastes magnificent.

Serves 4

Ingredients:

700g pumpkin (skin on, or any other squash)
50g Parmesan, grated
20f dried white breadcrumbs (panko in my case)
6 Tbsp finely chopped parsley
2½ tsp finely chopped thyme
grated zest of 2 large lemons
2 garlic cloves, crushed
60ml olive oil
120g soured cream
1 Tbsp chopped dill
salt and white pepper

Method:

Preheat the oven to 190ºC/Gas Mark 5. Cut the pumpkin into 1cm thick slices and lay them flat, cut side down, on a baking sheet that has been lined with greaseproof paper.

To make the crust, mix together in a small bowl the Parmesan, breadcrumbs, parsley, thyme, half the lemon zest, the garlic, a tiny amount of salt (there is salt in the Parmesan) and a little pepper.

Brush the pumpkin generously with olive oil and sprinkle with the crust mix, making sure the slices are covered with a few millimetres of the coating. Gently pack the mix down a little.

Place the tin in the oven and roast for about 30 minutes or until the pumpkin is tender: stick a knife in one wedge to make sure it has softened and is cooked through. If the topping starts to darken too much, cover loosely with foil.

Mix the soured cream with the dill and some salt and pepper. Serve the wedges warm, sprinkled with the remaining lemon zest with the soured cream on the side.

Notes:

If you have a combination of herbs you prefer, do feel free to use them. On my counter I had chervil, parsley, dill and thyme, and as I like that aniseed hit, I went with that
It would have been nice to use a larger squash to give a larger surface area, but the onion squash worked perfectly well. It also has the advantage of having a delicious skin when cooked
The smell of the garlic and lemon, as soon as this hits the oven, is ridiculous. It’s worth doing as a side-dish for that alone, your kitchen will smell amazing… For vegetarians, this is enough of a dish to satisfy your taste-buds
We dressed ours with a little extra-virgin olive oil, and some lemon juice

November 14, 2011 Journal

Truffles and Potatoes…

For many years I’ve read one particular Roux recipe with a combination of awe and longing*. The recipe involved carving a hollow into a potato, into which you would insert a truffle. The potato would then be put back together again to be cooked – when ready it would be sliced into 1/8 ths, a little like a boiled egg. I looked at the photo – I could smell the truffle, I knew what a fantastic combination it would make, but I certainly didn’t have a truffle big enough lying around to make this dish – I would have to dream about it for a while…

Fast forward several years and I was given a lovely little truffle as a gift. In additional to scenting some risotto rice (which is an essential part of having a truffle – that, and scenting eggs for the best scrambled eggs ever!), I looked again at the Roux recipe. I concluded it just wouldn’t work unless you were able to be incredibly generous with the truffle – it’s really something you’d need to be able to give to someone individually, or at most to share with one other person. Perhaps that’s just being greedy, but as a generous host, I just don’t feel that I could divide it up between many people :0( So. How to achieve the same results on a much more meagre quantity of truffle?

I thought in the first instance I would try it as a Pommes Anna… There are two quite closely related dishes which produce very different results. In my head Pommes Anna was the creamy gratin, in which layers of finely sliced potato are layered in a dish and covered in a creamy sauce. Of course that’s a dauphinoise gratin, from the Dauphiné region of France. Pommes Anna is simply layered potato with butter, which results in a crisp potato gratin. So, approaching the dish with the wrong process in my head, I layered fine slices of (cooked) potato a little le creuset dish with layers of black truffle and a thickened cream. The result was absolutely delicious, especially when you lift the lid and receive a waft of truffle scent – amazing…

This summer I noticed that Mister Truffle had English summer truffles on his web site, and I thought it would be fun to try them, especially as they are a little cheaper than winter truffles. I ordered a fairly large truffle, and the lovely Mr Truffle very generously sent me an enormous one. Now we were talking! I’d ordered it for a celebratory dinner I was cooking for friends and family, and I thought I would scale up the size of my gratin this time. Whilst the flavour of the creamy dish was lovely, I thought the crispy Pommes Anna would suit the nature of a truffle better, and not swamp the truffle with too many other flavours. So, armed with my huge truffle, I began layering fine layers of raw potato and truffle into a dish, dotting each layer with butter.

The final dish looked fabulous – I brushed the top of the gratin with some truffle oil, and the scent as you ate the dish was amazing. I also warmed the truffle trimmings in the butter before lining the dish, and this increased the scent-load.

I still look at the Roux recipe with longing, but I’m not sure in this economic climate that one could really use truffles in this way. With winter Alba truffles running at £2,900 odd per kilo – truffles remain a rare extravagance. Indeed, at a recent dinner in Ducasse they were charging £36 per plate for tiny quantities of Alba truffles. However if you want to try small quantities of truffle, Mister Truffle will sell you from as little as 1g. If you buy an white truffle though – absolutely don’t cook it like this – it should be finely shaved over a dish at the last possible moment.

* Recipe is from: