A Bachelor's Weblog to Urban Cooking where speed and simplicity comes before taste!

From the recipe archive. Happy New Year!

Being a quintessential Swiss dish, cheese fondue conjures up images for me of alpine ski huts, deep snow and 20°F weather. Well, we don't get much snow or cold weather in the California central valley, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy a good fondue party.

The trick to a successful fondue (other than the obvious one of having wonderful people around with whom to share it) is to ensure that the cheese dipping sauce stays smooth. Cheese has a propensity to get stringy or to "seize up" into clumps, the fat separating from the proteins. Food science author Harold McGee suggests several things in his book On Food and Cooking to ensure a perfect fondue.

Well-aged or moist grating cheeses work well in sauces. Don't heat the cheese beyond its melting point, cheese tends to ball up at higher temps, and don't let the cheese cool down too much before serving, as it tends to get stringier and tougher as it cools. Don't over stir the cheese, doing so will encourage stringiness. Coating the grated cheese with a starch such as flour or corn starch will help stabilize the sauce. Also,

The combination of cheese and wine is delicious but also savvy. The wine contributes two essential ingredients for a smooth sauce: water, which keeps the casein proteins most and dilute, and tartaric acid, which pulls the cross-linking calcium off of the casein proteins and binds tightly to it, leaving them glueless and happily separate. (Alcohol has nothing to do with fondue stability.) The citric acid in lemon juice will do the same thing. If it's not too far gone, you can sometimes rescue a tightening cheese sauce with a squeeze of lemon juice or a splash of white wine.

Continue reading "Cheese Fondue" »

Perhaps you too have noticed an odd, pale green, oblong is-it-a-fruit is-it-a-vegetable in your market and wondered what the heck it was, or what you could make with it. Actually I've known the name of it for a while&#8212chayote; one sees them often in Mexican markets out here, and Whole Foods carries them. But it wasn't until a friend thrust one into my hand with the challenge "it's good, I'd love to see what you make with it" that I actually set out to cook one.

Continue reading "Chayote with Tomato and Green Chile" »

From the recipe archive

We almost always have puréed sweet potatoes or garnet yams with our Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Usually we just bake them, scrape out the insides and mash them with a little butter and brown sugar. My father found a wonderful recipe in an old issue of Bon Appetit which includes grated orange peel, lemon juice, cinnamon, allspice, and nutmeg, spices that you would normally find in a hot mulled cider. The spices give the yams a wonderfully festive holiday accent.

Continue reading "Holiday Spiced Sweet Potatoes (Yams)" »

We came across this baked polenta recipe in an old Bon Appetit issue, and used up the last of our garden basil to make it. The recipe comes from an article on a unique Tuscan farm, Spannocchia, a working farm "eco" retreat, noted for its artisanal salumi. The casserole was delicious, and the farm looks even more intriguing. I love the idea of being able to hang out in a Tuscan kitchen taking cooking classes for vacation, don't you?

Continue reading "Polenta Casserole with Fontina and Tomato Sauce" »

If you have only one oven in your kitchen, any Thanksgiving side dishes you prepare generally need to be made on the stovetop, as the turkey is taking central stage in the oven. Here is a simple butternut squash side that you can easily do on the stove. The trick to this dish is browning the butter before adding the squash, so that the squash absorbs some of the complex and wonderful browned butter flavors, before it too is browned.

Continue reading "Butternut Squash with Browned Butter and Thyme" »