In the Hands of A Chef: Cooking with Jody Adams of Rialto Restaurant

476 Pages·2010·3.25 MB·English

by  Jody Adams

In the Hands
of a Chef
COOKING WITH JODY ADAMS
JODY
ADAMS and
KEN
RIVARD
FOR OLIVER AND ROXANNE
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Introduction
Starters and Small Bites
Stocks and Soups
Salads
Four Vegetable Starters, 23 SIDES, AND A FEW THINGS FOR THE
PANTRY
Pizza, Tarts, and Crostatas
Mostly Pasta, WITH A TASTE OF GNOCCHI, POLENTA, AND RISOTTO
Seafood
Poultry
Beef Veal, Pork, Lamb, and Game
A Mile in a Chef’s Shoes
Desserts
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Sources
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
The shortest route I know to human happiness is cooking. The
immediacy of mincing garlic, stripping kale, or searing fresh sea
scallops takes me away from my ordinary cares and, however briefly,
narrows my responsibility to just the radish or the sprig of rosemary in
front of me. The vivid red appeal of a fresh tomato sauce is a kind of
satisfaction in itself. As a chef with a restaurant to run, I’m aware that
the bottom line is my customers’ satisfaction with the food that appears
on their tables. But as a cook, especially a cook at home, these other
pleasures are as important as the consumption of the meal. They’re a
kind of built-in bonus that comes with “handmade” food.
Cookbooks these days seem less and less inclined to celebrate this
essential truth. One type of book offers an antidote to our overscheduled
lives, promising to compress kitchen time to the minimum. Another
tempts (or overwhelms) us with elaborate restaurant-style preparations
and presentations. This book argues for a third category—artisanal home
food. Good food made from scratch. This category finds its inspiration in
regional cooking, mostly European, in the type of dishes that used to be
prepared for family dinners. Although some of the recipes in this book
are both fast and simple. I’m announcing my intention up front: to
seduce you into spending more time, not less, in your kitchen.
The distinctive feature of artisanal cooking is its being handmade, of
taking fresh raw ingredients through a series of steps to a finished state.
With everything from sea urchin roe sushi to Mexican duck fajitas
available in grocery stores today, artisanal cooking is clearly no longer a
necessity, but some of us choose to do it anyway. Some aspects of
experience are worth keeping in your own hands, and few are as hands-
on or as immediately satisfying as cooking. This book is an invitation to
place yourself in my hands and, I hope, experience why I’m so
passionate about my particular patch of territory.
None of the recipes in these pages belongs to the juggle-four-oranges-
in-the-air-while-fanning-the-squabs-with-your-foot school of cooking.
When you need technique, I explain what to do. When you need to know
how something should look or taste, I tell you. Many of the recipes do
require some time, if not necessarily your constant attention. But when I
ask you to invest time in a dish, there is always a reward in the depth of
flavor.
Each of these recipes is something we do at my house, even if from
time to time a more elaborate variation of the dish is served at Rialto.
Although this is not a restaurant cookbook, it does contain a chapter of
signature preparations, “A Mile in a Chef’s Shoes”—including, most
notably, Soupe de Poisson and Roasted Marinated Long Island Duck with
Green Olive and Balsamic Vinegar Sauce. These are far and away my
most frequently requested recipes. You can make them in your own
kitchen, with less effort than you might think. You are, presumably,
already a passionate eater; my goal is to turn you into a passionate cook.
The Kitchen in My Head
Like every cook, I’m the product of a constellation of culinary influences
—my mom, cooking classes, numberless cookbooks, memorable
meals, travel, work experience, and the chefs who employed me. Even
after I became a chef, with the freedom to explore my own instincts, it
took a few years before everything I’d learned shook itself into some
kind of coherence: what I call “the kitchen in my head. “ The practical
result is that I have great confidence in my food. I love what I cook,
whether at work or at home.
Most of my cooking life has revolved around a fascination for high-
quality ingredients and figuring out the best ways of handling them.
Although as a child I accompanied my mother on infrequent trips for
baked goods or chicken at Italian shops on Federal Hill in Providence,
these were exhilarating exceptions that proved the rule—most food came
prepackaged, from the supermarket. It wasn’t until I was a teenager,
living in England during one of my father’s sabbaticals, with
opportunities for travel to France and Italy, that I came to see an
alternative to the supermarket model. In addition to the Oxford market
with its stalls of vendors, there were the butcher shops with enameled
trays of freshly killed rabbits, gleaming livers, and the occasional calf’s
head. It soon became something of an obsession with me to visit markets
wherever we traveled. When we returned to Providence, my mother and
I began shopping regularly on Federal Hill. To this day, museums drain
me after an hour or two, but I can wander through farmers’ markets all
day and return home with my finds, energized for cooking.
Part of the allure of ingredients (and, by extension, markets) for me
is simple sensual pleasure. Stacks of leeks, white, bulbous, and gleaming,
bundled red and white radishes, and the circus-tent stripes of delicata
squash all grab my eye as I pass by. Purple-top turnips beg to be lifted,
hefted, and judged heavy or light for their size; a flat of local
strawberries or tomatoes stirs the same thing in me that used to be
reached only by a new box of crayons, a visceral urge to touch and smell
before using.
Noting variations in the color and heft in turnips, rutabagas, and
celery root is practical as well as aesthetic. Visual and tactile differences
between the same vegetables offer clues to water, starch, and sugar
content, which affect how you cook them. Summer garlic is sweet and
forgiving; if you turn your back on winter garlic, it burns. A turnip that
feels light for its size will taste bitter and may have a spongy texture. In
my cooking classes, I’ve found that home cooks who are already familiar
with technique are often surprised to see how much their food improves
when they apply a little more attention and discernment to choosing
their ingredients, regardless of whether the ingredient is a Hubbard
squash or a chicken leg.
As a restaurateur, I know the vendors and in many cases the actual
producers of the particular raw ingredients I buy. When you know the
people growing or harvesting your ingredients, you treat the ingredients
with greater respect. I’ve squished through the Wellfleet tidal flats where
my friends Patrick and Barbara Woodbury devote themselves to raising
perfect clams: they can tell the health and quality of a clam with a
simple tap. In thirteen years of business with them, I have never had so
much as a clam with a cracked shell. How could I not treat their clams
with respect (and ensure that my cooks do the same)? With the
resurgence of farmers’ markets across the country, it is now possible for
home cooks to form the same type of relationship with vendors that until
recently had been the exclusive domain of people in the food business.
With the Federal Hill neighborhood and its Italian markets only a
short drive from my house, and the immigrant Portuguese neighborhood
also close by, it was probably fated I’d learn cooking technique by
studying Europe’s regional cuisines. Regional cooking is really no more
than the collective knowledge of the people who live where particular
ingredients are most accessible. This usually means home cooks, because
that’s “where the rubber meets the road” in terms of culinary experience
—the family dinner table. What works sticks around, and becomes part
of the local cooking tradition. Technique enters the picture for me not as
something isolated, valued in itself, but as a series of steps that arise in a
particular place with local ingredients. My first exposure to technique
came through the regional food of Italy, later followed by that of France
and Spain, and eventually the farther reaches of the Mediterranean. First
comes the what—the ingredients—then comes the how—the way of
making the most of ingredients. Technique is all about distilling
knowledge of what works into steps that I can reproduce at home or
teach in classes or do at Rialto. The process of searing seafood, for
example, is much more understandable when it’s embedded in the story
of how people in Normandy like to treat their scallops. Seen this way,
technique and ingredients are partners, dependent on each other, in a
dance that transforms raw ingredients into a finished dish.
For the first part of my career, as the chef of Michela’s in Boston, I
specialized in carefully researched dishes based on regional Italian food.
This had the obvious advantage of giving me, a new chef, a framework.
When writing a menu, for example, and thinking about new seafood
entrées, I had someplace to go. Instead of having to ponder the
terrifyingly open-ended question of, “OK, let’s see, we need a few fish
dishes—what can I do?” I could take a page from the experience of
cooks in Tuscany or Puglia. But over time, I found myself less and less
bound to the idea of reproducing dishes exactly as they might be cooked
in their place of origin. By the time I left Michela’s, I had come to regard
regional cuisine as a resource (one among several), a library of
particular techniques and ingredient combinations that might be visited
for inspiration. What about all the wonderful ingredients indigenous to
New England—and not found in France? I am grateful for my grounding
in regional cuisine, perhaps the way a jazz musician appreciates his
classical training—it all gets put to use. But my cooking now, at Rialto,
is looser. I rely on my instincts more (that kitchen in my head). I’m
willing to let my cooking be inspired by dishes I’ve tasted while
traveling, but not dominated by them, and I always try to take my first
cue from what’s best in the markets accessible to me. Who knows where
my instincts will take me? Probably France or Italy or Spain, but some
items on my menu found their inspiration in Tunisia or Guatemala—or
just around the corner in Maine.
How to Use This Book
Cooking isn’t magic—except to those who can’t cook. Success may not
be instant, but it is almost always certain, especially with practice.
Every recipe in this book has been tested at least twice, once by me and
once by my friend and recipe tester Pam Krueger. Pam is not a culinary
professional, she’s a home cook, and as we worked our way through this
manuscript, she encountered many new taste combinations and more
than one unfamiliar technique. When she didn’t understand a recipe, we
rewrote the recipe to answer her concerns; we talked about potential
pitfalls and how to avoid them, and we tried to incorporate as much of
this information into the recipes as possible, often testing recipes
another third time. In the course of this process, we discovered a few
guidelines for increasing your chances for a happy experience in the
kitchen.
This book is about my taste and experience, the places my hands and
palate naturally go, and I encourage you to follow me there—even if it’s
not your first instinct. The idea of a particular dish is often more
forbidding to home cooks than the actual preparation or taste of the dish
itself. For instance, there is a recipe for Rabbit Soup with Garlic and