Yes, the local strawberries are in!

Like the very first peas or raspberries you picked yourself, you don’t want to mess with them much. Just give a quick rinse and eat right out of the container. Then once you’re happily reacquainted with the flavor of berries that didn’t arrive on a refrigerated truck from thousands of miles away, it’s time to think about other ways to enjoy them. For me, that means ice cream.

It’s been a revelation to cook from—freeze from?—a book we published last year, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home. Jeni’s flavors are surprising, and her unique no-custard method results in an unusually silky texture for homemade ice cream. Her technique is a little like alchemy. But, stubborn purist that I am, for those first berries I go back to a traditional recipe using nothing more than cream, milk, eggs, sugar, and a squeeze of lemon. (Strawberries are low in acid, so the lemon helps the flavor pop.) If the berries are great, the ice cream is great. If the berries are ok, the ice cream is still great. You know, it’s ice cream.

Strawberry Ice Cream

Basic ice cream timing applies: put cannister in the freezer the night before. Make the ice cream base the morning of the day you want to eat it. Churn the ice cream hours before you want to serve it. So, here’s the recipe:

Using a double-boiler or the bowl-over-a-simmering-pot-of-water substitute, slowly heat 1-1/2 cups of whole milk to a gentle simmer. In the meantime, whisk together two eggs and two egg yolks

with 3/4 cup of sugar. When the milk is hot, mix 1/4 cup of it into the egg mixture, then slowly incorporate the egg mixture into the milk—in case you’ve not cooked custardy things before, the idea is to stabilize the temperature between the warm milk and colder eggs so that the egg mixture doesn’t curdle. Return the milk-egg mixture to pot, and cook, stirring constantly, until it’s thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon. This can take up to 15 minutes, but in my experience 5 is more like it. When thick, stir in 1-1/2 cups cold heavy cream to the custard, strain into a bowl, then cover and refrigerate until thoroughly chilled, 2 hours or more. Right after you’ve put the base in the refrigerator, prep the berries: clean one pint of fresh strawberries, slice thinly,

and mix in a bowl with the juice of 1/2 a lemon and 2/3 cup of sugar.

Refrigerate for two hours or more. Now you’re ready to make the ice cream. Set up the machine, pour custard into the cannister, then crush the berry mixture slightly…

and add to the custard.

Let it whir!

Once the ice cream is thick and frozen,

transfer to a container, sampling along the way,

then cover the ice cream directly with a piece of parchment paper, and put on the lid and return to the coldest part of the freezer until you’re ready to serve.

Enjoy!

P.S. This recipe works just as well for blackberries and fresh peaches, using the same quantities of fruit, sugar, and lemon juice.

A few notes about strawberries: Ripe strawberries are highly perishable; they spoil quickly, with mold seemingly coming out of nowhere. That’s why local berries are generally superior in flavor to the supermarket varieties, which are underripe when picked to withstand the long journey. Just look at the sliced berries in the photo above—they’re red and soft through and through, with none of the whitish, woody core of commercial berries. Wherever you’re buying the berries, look for fruit with a uniform color—darker is generally riper—and vibrant calyx (i.e., the leaves). To store, lay the berries on a baking sheet lined with a paper towel, and keep on the counter. Berries should only be refrigerated as a last resort, when they’re overripe. Trim the leaves and rinse lightly just before using.

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Burying the Lede

post no. 79

25 May 2012 2 comments

We hosted our twelfth Sharing the Table in the middle of May. It was a vegetarian meal—for twelve, in a nice bit of symmetry. These dinners, especially the vegetarian ones, always test our skills as menu planners. It’s so much easier to construct a meal around a piece of meat or fish.

A theme helps, and this time we had the obvious one of Spring. May, in the northeast, in the greenmarkets, is an interesting time of transition, a brief gap between the very ragged end of last year’s harvest of root vegetables and hardy, wintered-over brassicas, and the first tender glimpses of the abundance to come. It’s a time of many fleeting, often wild ingredients, including ramps, fiddleheads, asparagus, stinging nettles, green garlic. Also just arriving in stores, though from farther afield, are artichokes and fava beans.

There’s one other important spring ingredient, one that’s almost magical: the morel. And after perusing a favorite cookbook, Think Like a Chef by Tom Colicchio, I had our main course, a pasta dish featuring one of his “trilogies,” three ingredients that grow together, in this case the spring threesome of ramps, asparagus, and morels. Clara and I returned to our secret spot and dug a generous bunch of plump ramps. The first Jersey asparagus was in the markets. And morels…well, not being a mushroom hunter, I headed off to Eataly, where cases from the midwest were arriving twice a day to meet demand.

Here’s our menu:

Fresh Garbanzos in the Style of Edamame • Chunky Fava Bean and Green Garlic Puree with Garlic Toasts • Tears of the Prophet Cocktail

Stuffed Braised Artichokes with Aioli

Spring Greens and Fiddlehead Salad with Toasted Hazelnuts and Dried Cherries

Baked Free-Form Ravioli with Ragout of Ramps, Asparagus and Morels

Chocolate Budini mit Schlag • Dr. Henderson’s Remedy

We had a great evening, with such an interesting and really lively mix of guests. We denounced Jon Corzine, and later sang Dylan songs—a first. But, as always, I sat down the next morning, and thought critically about the meal. Slowly I am accumulating a list of lessons and rules, and the takeaway from STT #12 was “Don’t bury the lede.” Those morel mushrooms were rare, wild, and impeccably fresh. They spoke to me precisely because they were a delicacy, and I obsessed about finding them. And they were expensive. But by the time we got to that dish—deep in the meal, after the bites with cocktails, after a round of prosecco and white wine, a strongly-flavored first course and a salad—it was clear that it didn’t matter. They were just one more element in a sauce, overshadowed by the showier presence of homemade pasta. Really, they could have been cultivated shiitakes from the supermarket and served just as well.

Not that it’s about money, or even rareness per se. It’s really about the ingredient, and in this case they were hidden. Cook and learn.

Our charity was Montclair’s Human Needs Food Pantry. And our great friend and wonderful photographer, David Fitzgerald, was a guest and took control of the camera. Below are a few photos. The rest are on Flickr.


 

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Sharing the Table XI

April 30, 2012

In the midst of a demanding stretch at work, when it was impossible to think about anything Ingredients, we hosted our latest Sharing the Table. It was good to get back into thinking about food as something other than what’s easy and quick for dinner tonight. The whole world changed since our bistro-y meal in [...]

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Scrape. Scrub. Rinse. Repeat.

March 11, 2012

Recently we were visiting friends, a family of four, and Paula, the mom, cooked a delicious dinner of falling-off-the-bone ribs, a French potato salad she was trying for the first time, even a key lime pie. We’d been out sightseeing all day and ate like trenchermen, and afterward everyone pitched in and cleared the table. [...]

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Sharing the Table Turns One

February 13, 2012

So, we went around the calendar. We hosted our first Sharing the Table last March, and this past Saturday, our ninth. That’s twelve months, with no dinners over the typically busy summer. What did we learn? People really like a dinner party! Guests enter awkwardly, and leave bestowing hugs and warm handshakes. People like supporting [...]

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Rapscallions

February 8, 2012

My father was an onion eater. Raw onions on sandwiches, on hamburgers, on salads. Diced and piled on the side with a plate of franks and beans. On dark bread, with chicken livers. Folded into a peculiar lunch dish he made for himself, sour cream and vegetables, which was what it sounded like: a bowl [...]

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Second Chance Greens

January 29, 2012

The other night I took my oldest son to Momofuku. He’d been to Momofuku Ssam before, but not the original noodle bar. I couldn’t wait for him to try the ramen. See, I said, watching with a particular kind of pleasure as he tasted the food, as the look on his face changed with each [...]

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Radicchios Are Red

January 11, 2012

We eat with our eyes first, the saying goes. But of course we also shop with our eyes. We reach for the vibrant orange bunch carrots, the satsuma with its glossy dark leaves attached, the exotic green zebra-striped tomatoes. Lately, as I’ve been photographing ingredients as well as cooking them, the beauty in food has [...]

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The Lovely Bones

December 18, 2011

  We had Thanksgiving this year with friends, a lovely shared meal, and as we were packing up to leave I asked our host if he had any plans for the turkey carcass. It was a big one, originally an eighteen-pounder, most of the meat already carved off, and I had the feeling that it, [...]

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Sharing the Table

December 13, 2011

We started Sharing the Table—dinner parties for charity—at the end of last winter as a way to explore ingredients, cook for old and new friends, and do it all for a good cause: everyone who comes makes a donation to a food charity. This past weekend saw the seventh and last of our dinners for [...]

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