“HEAT” ir linguine su moliuskais

Bill Buford “Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook,Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany”

Ar skaitėte Bill Buford “Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany”. Jei neskaitėte, tai labai labai rekomenduoju. Nuostabi, puiki knyga; gryniausias malonumas visiems turimiems pojūčiams. 

Skaitymui aš laiko beveik visai neturiu, tai skaitau valgydama pusryčius, per Jono smuiko pamokas, laukdama, kol užvirs puodas, arba 2-ą valandą nakties; vistiek dar nespėjau visos perskaityti, bet tikrai ne todėl, kad knyga nuobodi. Knyga nuostabi, tik gyvenimas nekokybiškas. O iliustravimui įdedu kelias citatas ir receptą į temą.

Visiems linkiu gražaus savaitgalio.

Aušra

 “In one corner was the ornery pasta monster, a bubbling hot water machine, obscured by steam. In the other corner was a grill, a steel square of yellow-blue flames. In between were three cookers in a row, each with an oven, turned up to five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. It was a lot of heat. I was standing next to Andy and could feel it. When I stepped closer, as when I peeked over to see how dish was being put together, I felt the heat with much more intensity – a hit of heat, like a cloud, both a physical fact (it was in the roots of my neck hair) and an abstraction. But it was real enough: a hot wall, even if invisible, and I was happy to be on the other side.”

“The line cooks were moving so fast I couldn’t follow what they were doing. Orders were coming in on the ticker-tape machine, a long paper stream, one after another, Andy calling them out, and, without my knowing when or how, I became aware that everyone had increased the speed of their preparations. There was a new quickness in their movements, an urgency. At the end of the evening,  I wouldn’t be able to say what it was I had seen: blur and food being tossed in the air and radically different ways of being – an aggressive forthrightness as cooks dealt with the heat and fire, long flames flaring out of their pans, and then an artistic-seeming delicacy, as they assembled each plate by hand, moving leaves of herbs and vegetables around with their fingers and finishing it by squirting the plate with colored lines of liquid from a plastic bottle, as though signing a painting. It amounted to what? Something I didn’t understand. I could have been on Mars."

“As I stood there, I heard a voice, a tiny one, coming from a little man residing in the back of my brain whom I’d always regarded as Mr. Commonsense. Mr. Commonsense, who also had not gone to cooking school, was telling me that I didn’t want to stick my hand into the bottom of a very hot gigantic pan, so hot it was spitting oil, did I? Of course not. So, as I made to set my ribs inside, I dropped them just before they reached the bottom. The ribs landed. They bounced, splashing in the hot oil, which then seemed (in my mind, anyway) to roar up the length of one of the ribs, leap off the end and explode, enveloping my knuckles. The pain was remarkably intense, and my skin responded immediately by forming globe-like blisters on the tender area between the back cuticle end of the fingernail and the first knuckle. Four of them, one on each finger. These globes were rather beautiful, not unlike small jewels.

Okay, so I learned something that I’m sure every other person in the world already knew: hot oil was not for splashing in, bumpy landings strongly not advised. I had forty-six more ribs to go, and these, I concluded, would be eased down into the bottom of the pot. But there was a problem. The jewel-like globes at the ends of my fingers were now extrasensitive to heat, and the closer I brought them to the hot bottom of the pot, the more they protested. An extraordinary thing then happened: just as I was about to lay down another rib, my fingertips, like little pets that had gone lose from their leash, ran off on their own and dropped the rib. Once again, it bounced. Once again it was a splash. And once again hot oil roared up the bone, leapt off the end, and exploded, enveloping, this time, not my knuckles but the shiny jewel-like blisters that were on them. Blisters on blisters. At the time, I had only one thought: to remove myself from the source of pain. I became airborne. I shot straight up, ramming my maimed knuckles into my crotch (no idea why men do this – do we expect to find comfort there?) and howled. By the time I landed, I was surrounded by several Mexican prep chefs, staring at me with compassion but also with a clear message: You, señor, are actually very stupid. Cesar handed me his tongs. Use these, he said.”

“A butter sauce is an emulsion. “Emulsion” was another term I incompletely understood, although I knew enough to know that I was creating one when I added butter to broth to make a meat sauce at home. This is what happens. You’re told to prepare an order of tortelloni (“Tort!”). You drop eight pieces into a basket bobbing in boiling water. For tortelloni, that’s about three minutes, but you can leave them in for much longer. To prepare the sauce, you take the pan (from the shelf above your head), scoop out some butter (from a container against the wall), and plop it in. As at all stations, your hope is never to move your feet. You then tilt the pan over the pasta machine and scoop up some of the hot water. Next, you add a flavor, an herb or citrus: orange zest for the tortelloni (or five sage leaves for the lune, or five scallions for the mezzalune – something strong but simple). You take the pan, which now looks pretty disgusting – a pool of cloudy pasta water, a lump of butter melting along the rim, some desiccated orangey twigs – and put it on the flattop and swirl. You check the basket in the pasta cooker: a few tortelloni have risen. You go back to the pan and swirl it. The contents have changed. With the heat and the pan movement, they are a yellow-orange soup. You recheck your basket: the tortelloni are floating. You go back to the pan and swirl it again – almost ready, looking like a custard. But three more orders come in, you deal with them, and by the time you get back to the pan, just thirty seconds later, the liquid is mottled: still a sauce but a diseased one, very ugly, not something you want to eat. It is now broken. To fix it, you give the pan another tong flick of water (or perhaps a few tong flicks, until one lands) and return it to the flattop, and with one miraculous swirl the mottled texture melts away.

This is an emulsion: an agreement between two unlike elements (butter and water), achieved by heat and motion. If you get it slightly wrong – as when the sauce starts to dry out, destroying the balance between the fat and the liquid – the unlike elements pull apart and break up. Sometimes, during slow moments, I deliberately let my sauce get ugly, so I could witness its snapping back into condition with a small flick of water, like an animated chemistry lesson.”

**********

“The satisfaction of making a good plate of food are surprisingly varied, and only one, and the least important of them, involves eating what you’ve made. In addition to the endless riffing about cooking-with-love, chefs also talk about the happiness of making food: not preparing or cooking food, but making it. I found, cooking on the line, that I got a quiet buzz every time I made a plate of food that looked exactly and aesthetically correct and then handed it over the pass to Andy. If, on a busy night, I made, say, fifty good-looking plates, I had fifty little buzz moments, and by the the end of service I felt pretty good. These are not profound experiences – the amount of reflection is exactly zero – but they were genuine enough, and I can’t think of many other activities in a modern urban life that give as much simple pleasure.”

**********

“Mark, having cooked up a large quantity of linguine for its regular six minutes and thirty seconds, emptied it into a pan of New Zealand cockle-clams, sloppily dripping lots of that starchy water on them in the process, a big wet heap of pasta on top of several dozen shellfish. He swirled the pan, gave it a little flip, swirled it again, and then left it alone so that it could cook, bubbling away, for another half minute. Then he took a strand and tasted it. He gave me one. It was not what I expected. It was no longer linguine, exactly; it had changed color and texture and become something else. I tasted it again. This, I thought, was the equivalent of bread soaked in gravy. But what was the sauce? I looked at the pan: the cockle-clams had been all closed up a few minutes earlier, and as they cooked their shells had opened, and as they opened they released the juices inside. That’s what I was tasting in this strand of linguine: an ocean pungency. “It’s about the sauce, not the little snot of meat in the shell”, Mario told me later. “ No one is interested in the little snot of meat!”

Most pasta dishes are about the pasta, not the sauce (the mere condiment): that lesson had been drilled into me over and over. But here, in this strand of linguine, I had discovered a dish that wasn’t about the pasta or the sauce; it was about both, about the interaction between them, the result – this new thing, this highly flavored noodle – evocative of a childhood trip to the sea”.

Bill Buford “Heat”

Linguine su moliuskais

2 šaukštai alyvuogių aliejaus

3 šalotiniai česnakai (arba 1 vidutinis svogūnas)

6 skiltelės česnako

1/2 stiklinės balto vyno

1 skardinė (~200 ml) konservuotų moliuskų savo sultyse

450 g linguine

1 kg moliuskų

30 g šalto sviesto

Saujelė šviežių petražolių lapelių

Šviežiai maltų juodųjų pipirų

Druskos

Smulkiai supjaustykite šalotinius česnakus (arba svogūną), smulkiai sukapokite česnaką, susmulkinkite petražoles, švariai nuplaukite moliuskus. Sviestą supjaustykite į mažus gabalėlius.

Didelėje keptuvėje ant vidutinės ugnies pakaitinkite aliejų, pakepinkite svogūnus ir česnaką, kol suminkštės ir lengvai apskrus, maždaug 4 minutes. Supilkite vyną, konservuotus moliuskus ir moliuskų sultis ir virkite, laikas nuolaiko pamaišant, kol padažas šiek tiek sutirštės, maždaug 3 – 4 minutes.

Tuo pat metu dideliame puode užvirinkite didelį kiekį stipriai sūraus vandens, sudėkite makaronus ir virkite, kol makaronai bus beveik išvirę: išorė suminkštėjusi, bet vidus dar kietas ir baltas.

Virtuvinėmis žnyplėmis (arba specialiu ilgiems makaronams skirtu kiaurasamčiu) išgriebkite linguine ir dėkite į keptuvę su padažu. Su makaronais į keptuvę pateks ir vandens, kuriame virė makaronai. Ant makaronų sudėkite nuplautus moliuskus. Keptuvę uždenkite ir virkite dar maždaug 5 minutes, kol moliuskų geldelės atsidarys. Nukelkite nuo ugnies. Suberkite smulkintą sviestą, smulkintas petražoles, užbarstyke maltų pipirų, viską išmaišykite, patikrinkite, ar netrūksta druskos, ir iškart tiekite į stalą.

Linguine with clams

2 tablespoons olive oil

3 shallots (or 1 medium onion)

6 garlic cloves

1/2 cup white wine

1 can (6 – ounces) baby clams in own juice

1 pound linguine

2 pounds clams

2 tablespoons cold butter

Handful of fresh flat-leaf parsley

Salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Finely chop shallots (or onion), garlic and parsley, scrub clams, cut butter into small pieces.

In a large pan heat oil, cook shallots and garlic on medium heat until soften and slightly golden, about 4 minutes. Add wine, canned baby clams and their juices, stir and cook until slightly reduced, about 3 – 4 minutes.

At the same time bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add linguine and cook until almost done: the outside is soft but the inside is still hard and white. Using kitchen tongs or a special pasta spoon take out linguine and put them into a pan with the sauce. This way some of pasta water will get transferred into a sauce. Place scrubbed clams on top of pasta, cover the pan with a lid and cook for about 5 – 6 minutes, until shells open. Remove from heat. Add pieces of butter, minced parsley, ground pepper, stir, check for saltiness and serve right away.