The Secret’s Out
September’s Bon Appetit promises you will “Cook Like a Chef” with “Secrets and Recipes from America’s Top Spots.” I was intrigued. Who doesn’t want to know special chef secrets? Not me!
Sometimes, though, cooking like a chef doesn’t make sense. Chefs have huge industrial kitchens, supersize appliances, yards of counterspace, and produce food in volumes impractical to anyone who doesn’t run an orphanage. How many of Bon Appetit’s Top Secrets work for the home cook unwilling to spend hours or millions on a meal?
This one’s easy – it’s a steak cooked in a salt crust (same way you’d cook a salt crusted fish). Sure, you use a lot of salt, but at $1.99 a box, that doesn’t put too much strain on the wallet.
While the idea of poaching a fragile pasta to protect it during cooking makes plenty of sense, soft egg ravioli is not the ideal way to practice the technique. Without truffles, or with the substitution of truffle butter or oil, this recipe is pretty cheap, until you count the cost of your personal time and anguish. Making ravioli is not easy, making ravioli around a raw egg may make you insane. One of my culinary school instructors made this dish for us and even he, a former chef at Le Cirque, needed a team of assistants to assemble the pasta. If you’re going to try this one, plan on devoting your entire weekend and buy at least 10 cartons of eggs.
Duck-Fat Belgian Fries
I love duck fat. Looooooove it. It makes everything taste richer and better. When I cook with duck, I save the fat in little jars and use it later to add that ducky flavor to sautéed vegetables, pasta, more duck, etc. Even when I’m saving my duck fat religiously, I never have more than a few tablespoons hanging around. This recipe calls for four cups of duck fat (about $20 worth at Dartagnan). You really need to love your fries to make that kind of investment. It just might be worth it.
Whole Roasted Game Hens with Grits and Wild Mushroom Sauce
The secret to this recipe is a good smear of herb butter under the skin of the hen. Heck yea! This trick is cheap and quick. With a little creativity, you can create a variety of flavored butters to augment the flavor of your bird. Ginger garlic butter is by far my favorite, but the possibilities are endless. Pesto butter? Walnut mushroom? Roquefort? Just throw butter and your favorite secret ingredient into the food processor, or mix with a spoon in a small bowl. You can freeze larger batches and use them as needed.
The secret here is the “Porkapalooza.” By using four different types of pork in this recipe, you get a far greater piggy experience. This trick is not only a flavor booster, but a great way to use all the parts of your animal. Duck fat, chicken livers, bone marrow – toss ‘em in!
Pan-Seared Sea Scallops with Lentils, Bacon, and Cider Reduction
Although this seems like a delightful recipe, I’m not sure what the big secret is. Bon Appetit describes it as “high-wire balance” and the “juggling of contrasting flavors,” but I don’t get the mystique. Still, who doesn’t love bacon, and this recipe sounds pretty easy.
The secret to this funky variation on a Caesar salad is the 37 cloves of garlic blanched six times and pureed into a spread. Awesome. Especially if you have young children you can trick into peeling the garlic for you.
Truffled Red Wine Risotto with Parmesan Broth
I can’t argue with adding extra cheesy flavor to anything, and this seems like a great way to use up cheese ends, although it does mean one more scary bag of scraps lurking in the back of your freezer.
Spiny Lobster in “Crazy Water”
The trick here is to par boil your lobster, cut it in half, and finish cooking it in a pan. As long as it’s done flopping around before I take it out of the water, this trick is fine by me.
Chili-Smoked Prawns with Barbecue Hollandaise
You can smoke these prawns right in your own kitchen, using wood chips and a big skillet. Much cheaper than investing in a smoker, but would your entire house/apartment smell like smoked prawns for the next month? I don’t know if I’m willing to risk it.
Minestrone of Late-Summer Vegetables
For me, vegetable stock is no big secret, it’s what you use when you have vegetarians coming over for dinner.
I’ve always wanted to try one of these recipes where Coke is the secret magical ingredient. The big drawback to this recipe is that after you sauté the pork for a few minutes, you deep fry it for an hour and a half. Is that right? An hour and a half? That seems like an awfully long time to stand watch over a pot of blazing hot oil. I’d try this one only if I had a culinary school student intern to monitor the deep fry thermometer for me.
Don’t get me wrong, I love these recipes. I want my food magazines to branch away from the “quick and easy weeknight meals” and give me some fantasy and glamour, and these recipes do it perfectly. Still, you won’t find me investing in 8 gallons of duck fat any time soon.
