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”.
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.
