Ingredient: broth

Lemon Risotto

(the unexpected risotto)

It was probably early two thousands, and together with a friend we managed to crash a fancy graduate lunch in a fancy restaurant in Napoli (Zi Teresa), that was only intended for the close family and teachers of this other friend of ours. The family was clearly not super happy about our presence, but we made friends with a couple of teachers. For the first time I had Lemon Risotto. It was good, but not exceptional. While we were dining, and commenting on it, the very Professor that discussed my friend’s thesis, leaned towards me, and in a complicit tone said: this one is made with butter, which together with the lemon gives it a bit too much of a cream cheese feeling. You should try with an egg yolk instead, it’s much better.

The professor was absolutely right, and I never had the chance to thank him, so here we go: thank you professor, that was a good tip.

Created with Sketch. 30 min cooking + 30 for making the vegetable stock Created with Sketch. 2

Ingredients

  • for the vegetable stock
  • 1 potato
  • 1 stick of celery
  • 1 onion
  • 1 carrot
  • for the risotto
  • 1 onion
  • olive oil to taste
  • 160 grCarnaroli rice
  • 150 grwhite wine
  • 1 lemon
  • 1 egg yolk
  • parmigiano to taste

Directions

Preliminary notes:

  • in a perfect world everybody should be able to have access to the Amalfi coast lemons, the most beautiful and intense lemons ever, but since most of you readers don’t live in the south of Italy, well, I’m sorry. Try to find the most beautiful and fresh and expensive lemon, because lemon is key here.
  • you can choose to use or not use the parmigiano in the end, I like both versions.

  1. Start by making the vegetable stock: throw one potato (peeled and halved), one stick of celery, one onion (peeled and halved) and one carrot in a pot of salted water, and let it cook for 30 min. You can do this in advance, but the stock must be hot when you start making the actual risotto.
  2. In a different pot on medium/high heat, pour a couple of tablespoons off olive oil, add the onion finely diced, and let it sauté for 5 minutes.
  3. Add the rice and stir it continuously. Let it toast for a couple of minutes, the rice will develop a hard surface, which will slow down the cooking process a bit, adding to the final creamyness. Add the white wine and keep stirring until it evaporates.
  4. Finely grate the peal of the lemon, and then squeeze out the juice. Add half of the peel and half of the juice to the pot, stirring again and again.
  5. Now you can start adding the broth: again, stirring the rice continuously, add a first ladle of stock and keep stirring until the stock is consumed: you have to be quick with the next ladle of broth or you will burn everything.
  6. Repeat point .5 until the rice is cooked, about 15/20 minutes in total. It’s important that the final risotto is on the firm side. Please don’t all a lot of stock all together, we want the starch to come out of those grains a little at the time to make the risotto more creamy.
  7. Take the pot off the heat and finally add the rest of the lemon peel and juice, the parmigiano (if you want to), and the egg yolk: be very quick to stir in the egg yolk. If you let it sit there for too long without stirring, you will end up with an unpleasant taste of cooked egg.
  8. Feel free to add some black pepper, freshly chopped parsley, and some more greated lemon peel.

 

Bouillabaisse with Aioli

(it's French soup!)

Bouillabaisse is a French soup. I know, fancy! That is the extent of my knowledge about Bouillabaisse. It is very, very good though. I’m just saying that there might be stuff in the recipe that is deeply disturbing for those of you with a profound historical and cultural connection to Bouillabaisse. If that is the case, I hope you will be able to enjoy it anyway. Hopefully it won’t be like for those dudes who thought that the new(ish) Ghostbusters movie ruined their childhood because it cast women. But maybe it will? Maybe someone’s childhood will be ruined because I am suggesting you to put some crushed tomatoes in a Bouillabaisse? Food and words are powerful things.

A little bit about the actual recipe. Three things are vitally important. 1) Do your own broth. 2) Don’t overcook the fish. I will get to how how to avoid overcooking in the instructions. And 3) … ok, two things are vitally important.

The base of the soup is as it is with most soups; a great broth. I really like shellfish broth, so I often use one made from shrimp shells, but any seafood-based broth is good. Besides the broth, what gives the soup its character is the mix of fennel, orange, saffron and white wine. I also think tomato goes really well with all this which is why I put some crushed tomatoes and tomato puré in mine.

It is really quite spectacular. I don’t mean my version but just… in general. Bouillabaisse is quite spectacular. To the instructions!

Created with Sketch. Roughly 2-3 hours Created with Sketch. 5

Ingredients

  • For the soup
  • 50 gceleriac
  • 120 gfennel
  • 150 gonion (one large onion)
  • 60 gcarrot (one or two depending on the size)
  • 200 gcrushed tomatoes
  • 300 gwhite wine
  • 25 gbutter
  • 0.5 gsaffron
  • 10 gtomato puré (a spoon full)
  • The juice from one orange (should be 0.5-1 dl juice)
  • The peel from 1/2 an orange
  • 300 gcod
  • 300 gsalmon
  • 200 gshrimp
  • For the aioli
  • 2 egg yolks (30-40g)
  • 200 grapeseed oil (2 dl)
  • 10 gmustard
  • 1 clove of garlic
  • Some vinegar, salt and pepper to taste
  • For the broth
  • The shells from the shrimp
  • 2 large onions
  • 2 carrots
  • Some celeriac
  • Some fennel
  • A couple of bay leaves, salt and pepper to taste

Directions


So. Lot’s of ingredients but I promise: not complicated at all.

  1. Brine the fish. This is very optional but I really think brining is great for fish. What’s brining? Well it’s simply putting something in salty water. This gives more juice to the fish (or meat) and a nice natural saltiness. Dissolve 50-60 g of salt in 1000g (1L) of water and let it cool down (use 1/3 or something of the water to dissolve the salt by heating it on the stove, then mix that with cold water). Cut the fish into pieces (approximately 3 x 3 cm) and put it into the brine. Put it in the fridge.
  2. Put the oven on 250 C and peel the shrimp (save the peeled shrimp for later). Spread the shells across an oven plate and put it into the oven for about 10 minutes. The shells should become white, not burnt.
  3. Bring two (2) liters of water to a boil. Cut the veggies into pieces and put them in. Add the grilled shrimp shells.
  4. Put the bay leaves in with som pepper and let the broth simmer for at least an hour, more if you have the time. It should reduce to half the initial volume. Salt to taste at the end (if the broth is nice and salty in the beginning it will be horribly over-salty when reduced).
  5. Pour the broth through a sift to remove the veggies, pepper corns (if you’re using that) and bay leaves.
  6. When the broth is finished, chop the celeriac, carrot and fennel into small cubes and finely chop the onion (note: not the cooked vegetables from the broth).
  7. Put the butter  and some oil in a big pot on medium/ high heat. Fry the chopped up vegetables for 10 minutes. After 5 minutes, put in half of the saffron, all of the tomato puré (10 g/ a spoon full), the peel from half an orange and stir.
  8. Pour in the broth, the wine, the juice from the orange, the crushed tomatoes (200 g) and bring to a simmer.
  9. Put in the other half of the saffron and add salt and pepper to taste. This is the finished product so taste and adjust a lot of times. Use salt/ sugar/ vinegar to get the balance exactly as you want it.
  10. Now turn the stove off, put a lid on the soup and let it rest on the (now off) stove plate.
  11. Make the Aioli. Aioli is mayonnaise with some garlic so it’s real easy (here’s our recipe for plain ol’ mayo including video). Mix the egg yolks with the mustard, some vinegar, salt, pepper and one finely chopped (or pressed) clove of garlic.
  12. Whisk intensely (or use an electric mixer, immersion blender or other appropriate machine) while carefully (ok, not that carefully) pouring the oil into the mix. As always, balance with salt/ pepper/ vinegar or lemon, at the end. If you’re only whisking by hand, the Aioli will be a bit “fluffier”or less dense, than if you do it with a kitchen mixer or immersion blender. I like the consistency you get with an immersion blender.
  13. Now take the fish (in brine) out of the fridge and sift away the brine.
  14. Put the fish and peeled shrimp into the soup and let that rest for about 5 minutes. The after heat from the soup will cook the fish perfectly. Just to be completely clear: you DO NOT need to cook the fish in boiling/ simmering soup, the after heat is enough. The soup is still 80-90 C and fish like cod and salmon is best when around 50 C in the center of the pieces.
  15. Serve with a generous dollop of the Aioli, some bread and a bit of fresh herbs.

I really love this dish. And it’s really nice if you’re hosting a dinner party. If you prepare the broth, the fish (by putting it in brine, which you can do the night before if you want) and Aioli beforehand, you can really do this from start to finish in less than 30 minutes.

Bon appétit!

Duck Breast with Orange Sauce

(ducktales)

I’ve kinda always been baffled by how much chicken breast Swedes eat. Chicken is great and all, I mean… except for the breast. It is always, ALWAYS overcooked which makes it papery dry, flavorless and completely uninteresting. It can be great, but that really demands a pretty good chef I feel.

So wasn’t this supposed to be about duck? Well yes. Since I’ve started eating duck more frequently I’ve been equally baffled, but the other way around. Basically, no one is eating duck, but compared to the bland chicken, the duck breast is amazing! How to describe it…? It has a certain gamey (duckey) flavor that I guess some people do not like. It’s very meaty as bird meats go and the breast is very tender and juicy. Kind of a mix of dear and chicken maybe, with more fat (from the skin).

Anyway, more people should eat duck is what I’m trying to say. And stop eating so much chicken breast, it really is settling for mediocrity.

This recipe uses a mix of pan frying and sous vide cooking. The pan-frying gives wonderfully crispy skin and the sous vide ensures just perfect meat. Sous vide is a great technique when you’re cooking meat and you really want it to come out a certain way (and really… when don’t you want that?). A sous vide machine is basically a water bath with a thermostat and a timer. It allows you to immerse the meat (sealed in a vacuum bag) in water at an exact temperature for an extended time. So instead of cooking the meat at a high temperature (e.g. against the bottom of a frying pan) and trying to time it so that the core of the meat is juuuuust right, with sous vide, you cook the meat at the temperature at which you prefer the meat to be eaten at, but for a long time. Thus the meat comes out perfectly throughout the entire piece, instead of being overcooked at the surface and perfect in the center.

It’s pretty easy to achieve kinda almost the same great result with only pan-frying, keeping tabs on the core meat temperature with a cooking thermometer.

The duck and orange sauce is a classic coupling and fit really well together. I haven’t found a side that I fell really completes the dish though. This time I went for roasted potatoes, orange braised fennel and fried kale. I really liked the fennel and kale but kinda botched the potatoes, which put me of them as a concept a bit. If you have a favorite side dish to go with duck, please let me know, I’m on the hunt for a favorite 🙂

Special Equipment

  • A sous vide apparatus
  • A vacum sealer
Created with Sketch. 3 hours (of which 2-2.5 hours is waiting) Created with Sketch. 5

Ingredients

  • For the duck
  • 700 gduck breast (usually two pieces)
  • 50 gbutter
  • 50 gsalt
  • Some rapeseed oil for frying
  • For the sauce
  • 300 gorange juice, preferably fresh pressed (circa 5 oranges)
  • 100 gwhite wine
  • 200 gvegetable broth
  • 25 gsugar (2 table spoons)
  • 15 gcorn starch (1.5 tables spoons)
  • A bit of butter

Directions

  1. If you have the time: put the breasts in brine overnight, or a couple of hours before starting to cook, if that’s what you have. Dissolve 50-60 g of salt (ca 1/2 dl) in 1000 g (1L). Let the solution cool and then put the meat in the brine (the salty water). Brineing makes the meat more juicy and gives it a nice saltiness.
  2. Make broth. Cut some carrots, onion and fennel and put in boiling water. Add salt, pepper and bay leaves and let boil for at least two hours.
  3. Cut slices across the skin of the breasts with a sharp knife. This will make the skin more crispy when you fry it. Some might say you should “clean” the meat from tendons and stuff (on the “inside” of the breast/ the non-skin-side), but I really don’t mind them so I usually don’t.
  4. Put the butter in a pan on high heat with a sip of rapeseed oil. When the butter starts to brown, fry the breasts skin side down for about two minutes, while continuously scooping the butter from the pan and pouring it over the meat. Take the meat from the pan but do not throw away the butter, you’ll use it later.

  5. Seal the meat in a vacuum bag and put it in the sous vide machine (I can really recommend this one, it’s great and doesn’t take up a lot of space). If you did not brine the meat, salt both sides before putting into the vacuum bag.
    Cook for at least two hours, three if you have the time, at 54 degrees C (medium rare). Oh, and by the way: you can put whatever in the bag with the meat. If you want more even orange-taste in the dish, put in some orange peel. Like rosemary and thyme? Throw some in there.
  6. Now for the sauce: Grate 1/2 of one orange and squeeze the juice from all of them (circa five oranges should give you 3 dl).
  7. Put the starch in a bowl and pour in the broth (2 dl) while whisking. Add the wine, the orange juice, the peel and the sugar while whisking. Put the mixture in a pan, bring it to a boil and them let it simmer for 20 minutes. This should make for a quite “thin”/ runny sauce. If you like it thicker, add a bit more starch in the beginning.
  8. Add about a table spoon of butter to the sauce and you’re done.
  9. When the meat is done bathing take it out of its bag and put the frying pan (with the melted butter from before) back on the stove on high heat. When the pan is hot, put the breast in, skin side down and repeat step 4: Two minutes on high heat while scooping the melted butter over the meat. Then remove the breasts from the pan and let them rest for five minutes.
  10. Make thin-ish slices. Serve with the sauce and a nice side dish. Bon appetite!

Shrimp and Saffron Risotto

(let's try this without the ketchup)

Risotto is just the best thing. I know that now. However, when I was younger (probably well in to my twenties actually) I thought risotto was… something other than it is. At home, it was more akin to fried rice, with some chopped ham or chicken and quite commonly: a mix of peas, corn and paprika (this one!). In the school diner risotto was a weird, gooey meat ragu type thing with rice in it, that for some reason always tasted aggressively sweet. Like really ketchupy sweet. Most likely explained by them putting a LOT of ketchup into it. Actually… thinking about it: growing up, the combination rice and ketchup was a strangely frequent occurrence.

So let’s just get some things straight about what risotto actually is. It’s rice, and it can be any type of rice. Most commonly though, it’s a type with quite large grains that release starch when cooked in a way that creates a wonderfully creamy texture. It’s broth, it’s wine (usually white) and almost always cheese (usually parmigiano). So what’s up with that rice? Well, it has to do with the chemical composition of the starch. Here’s some science stuff from Serious Eats:

“Rice contains two molecules that make up its starch content, amylose, and amylopectin. Generally speaking, rices with a higher proportion of amylopectin to amylose will tend to soften more completely and thicken their sauce more strongly. All risotto starts with a short- to medium-grain form of rice high in amylopectin. It’s the exact ratio of amylose to amylopectin that determine the final texture of your rice and sauce.”

In Sweden, you tend to see three type of grains meant for risotto: Arborio, Carnaroli and Avorio. Arborio has the largest grain and creates the most creamy result. Carnaroli gets you a firmer result and Avorio even more so (I tend to really like Avorio). Obviously, what dish you’re preparing can guide the type of rice, but make sure to try them all to see which you like best in various situations.

This is my favorite kind of run-of-the-mill risotto recipe and it’s real easy to make.

Ingredients

  • For the risotto (including shrimp and garnish)
  • 330 grisotto rice (in this recipe, I use Arborio)
  • 0.3 lwhite wine (3 dl)
  • 80 gparmigiano reggiano
  • 1 lshrimp broth
  • 800 gunpeeled shrimp
  • 1 handfulfresh parsley
  • 1 yellow onions
  • 0.5 gsaffron
  • 50 gbutter
  • 30 golive oil
  • For the broth
  • salt and white pepper corns
  • roasted shrimp shells
  • 3 yellow onions
  • 3 bay leaves

Directions

This recipe is for 4-5 people. Generally, some 80 g of rice equals a big portion. From start to finish this should take circa 1 hour and 30 min, if you’re starting from scratch.

A couple of things are really important when making risotto in general and this one specifically.

The first, and this is imperative, non-negotiable: do the broth yourself. This is just how I feel. Sure, in a pinch you can maaaaybe use one of those reduced broth-on-a-bottle things but never ever use broth cubes to make risotto. Never. They have an aftertaste, an off-flavor that’s really noticeable. So that’s what I think.

Secondly, always buy shrimp with the shells (frozen are fine) and do not rinse the shrimp with water after you’ve pealed them as that just flushes so much taste down the drain.

And hey, one more note: use a nice dry wine, not to sweet.

So about those shrimp:

  1. Preheat the oven to 250 degrees C. Put a big pot of water on the stove. While you wait on the oven to get warm and the water to come to a boil: peel the shrimp.
  2. Spread the shrimp shells (not the shrimp) on an oven pan and when the oven is ready, roast the shells until pinkish white (about 10 min). Image is showing the shells before roasting, sorry about that… I’ll try to remember to update it in the future.
  3. Peel three of the yellow onions, cut them into quarters and put them in the boiling water with the bay leaves, some salt, pepper corns and when they’re ready: the roasted shrimp shells. Why roast the shells you ask? Well, it gets yummier. But why? I’m embarrassed to say: I’m not quite sure and haven’t been able to find anything really useful about it either (please tell me if you know). Let this mix simmer for at least some 30 minutes or so. And by the way, you can put other stuff in the broth. Celery, parsnip, carrots? Go to town!
  4. While waiting on the broth (there’s a whole thing on what’s important when making broth. We’ll do a thing about it at some point I’m sure),  put some butter and olive oil in a pan and take it up to medium heat. Dice the last onion finely (not important that it’s that fine) and put it in the hot pan.
  5. When the onion has turned clear, add the rice.
  6. After a couple of minutes raise the heat somewhat (to 8-9 on a 12-point-scale) and then pour the wine into the pan.
  7. Taste the broth to make sure that it’s salty, shrimpy sweet. It should a bit less salt than you want the end product to be (you can always adjust the salt level upwards later. Too much salt however? Well… you’re kinda stuck with that).
  8. Add a couple of deciliters of broth and start stirring continuously. Why are we stirring? Well, it’s to dissolve the starch into the liquid, allowing for the creamy end result. You don’t have to stir all the time though, but make sure to do it regularly. Adjust the heat to create a light simmer in the pan.
  9. So I listed 1L of broth in the ingredients list but I don’t find it very useful to give an exact volume. It differs with the grain type, the brand and how much you stir. The important part is to continuously add scoops of broth until the rice is almost done. This should take about 20 minutes. Taste both the liquid and the rice when you’re getting close to the 20 minute mark.
  10.  When the rice is just about done, i.e still a bit hard but almost eatable, you should try to adjust the consistency to be runny, quite a lot runnier than you want the end product to be (it will set due to after-heat and further stirring). Grate the parmigiano, put it in with the rest and stir.
  11.  Add the rest of the butter in cubes (should be about 30 g left) and finally: the saffron. Take the pan off the heat and stir.
  12. So this is really the practice-makes-perfect part of the whole shabang. The consistency should at this point still be less firm than how you want to serve the risotto and the rice should be ever so slightly more al dente than how you want it to be eaten. It continues to cook when resting off the stove, which it should do for about 10 minutes. Stir it every couple of minutes. Regarding the consistency I think (and this is mostly a preference thing) that the end result should be such that when you put a scoop of the risotto on the plate, it slowly expands out towards the edges of the plate under the weight of its own pressure. If you (after letting it rest) think that it’s to firm, just add some broth and stir.
  13. Heat a pan to medium/high heat with olive oil. Put one or a couple of garlic cloves in with the oil for a bit. Quickly fry the peeled shrimp (about 30 seconds) and take the pan of the stove. Do this in batches if the shrimp fill up the pan. You want them to be fried, not boiled and too much shrimp = too much water in the pan = boiled shrimp.
  14. Put some risotto on a plate. If you want it to spread nicely over the plate you can punch the underside plate with your palm a couple of times.
  15. Top it off with the fried shrimp, a splash of lemon juice, some black pepper and chopped fresh parsley. Fucking awesome.

…and then put a generous amount of parmigiano on top right, YES! Right..? Nope. Sorry.

I have conferred with my Italian colleague and: no parmigiano on seafood. The gods’ll get piiiiissed.

But hey, maybe you’re just not that religious? You do you.