The story behind the piece Mozart suposedly "stole" from the Sistine Chapel Choir's secrecy

 Today is Ash Wednesday, so the 46-day (40 if you don’t count Sundays) season of Lent begins today. And especially to Catholics, that means one thing is back: one of the pieces of music with the most urban legends around it. Most of these urban legends have to do with Mozart, the Pope at the time, a visit to the Sistine Chapel, this piece, and a supposed prohibition on ever writing down the score outside the Chapel. They’re just myths, but they do have a point: Mozart’s memory for music—even up-to-9-part Renaissance polyphony that lasts 12 minutes—was incredible. 

The piece has three basic ideas, and three ensembles in one, with one idea per ensemble. The first idea (belonging to Choir 1) is a setting of the first half of Psalm 51:3. Choir 1 has (in modern times) 2 sopranos, and one each alto, tenor, and bass; and in the original, one soprano, one alto, 2 tenors, and one bass.

That same melody will be (slightly) altered each time this idea returns. What strikes me most about Idea 1, each time I hear it, is just how beautifully Allegri manages to move between so many related keys—G minor, B-flat major, F major, C minor, and D major—while keeping our proverbial eyes glued to G minor (seeing everything else in relation to it), going to those other keys, but never taking us out of the context of G. Even the final cadence of the idea, to D, fits that context, since D remains the V of G minor. 

The second idea is the simplest. Off-stage, or off-screen, a single man—a tenor—chants a very simple phrase that hardly ever leaves a D, except to cadence. Because it is so simple, there is very little to be said about this, in terms of analysis, except to observe the similarity of the style of these ideas with the style in which a priest or deacon may chant certain parts of the Mass in modern times, if they so choose.

The third idea is the most famous—and the reason that sopranos might curl into balls and cry when this piece is programmed. This third idea has so much fame (and sopranos are so scared of it) not because of how it was written originally in the 1650s, but, funny enough, because of an error made more than a century later when an English guy was copying down the music to use in a textbook to explain this style, called “falsobordone” in Italian sources (or “fauxbourdon” if from French sources). It applies very simple harmonization to otherwise plainchant melodies, changing harmonies very infrequently, creating (the illusion of a) drone; this is where the “false drone” (that is what “falsobordone” means in Italian) name comes from. For some reason, while copying it down, the author transposed all the rest of the idea given to Choir 2 up by a fourth and thus was born the infamous high C. 

The liturgical context in which this piece was (and still is) performed is worth examining as well. The Catholic custom is to use a 15-candle candelabra on evenings of the last Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday evenings before Easter. The candelabra starts each service completely lit, and after one Psalm is sung and a prayer is said, one of them is turned off, working from the outside (bottom) toward the center (top). After the last (top, center) candle is extinguished, there is a loud noise, then it is relit, another prayer is said, and the candle is extinguished again, and the service is over. Which Psalms are used, in which order, is generally well-established, without much choice or leeway, and, traditionally, Ps 51 is always last—meaning the Tenebrae often ends with this work. 

As you listen, pay attention to how the 3 different groups (the two choirs and the off-stage tenor) interact, passing verses and melodies between them, and to how the texture changes between falsobordone plainchant and very rich polyphony. 

Here's an excellent recording to get started with: 

Happy listening!

Carnitas

Carnitas—Spanish for “little meats”—are an iconic dish from Mexico that every home cook should have in their repertoire. Looking only at the time commitment involved, carnitas can seem intimidating, but I’m here to show you that, with proper planning, anyone can properly cook carnitas with very little active time.

Carnitas, very basically, are pieces of pork shoulder marinated and slow-roasted, then pulled, cubed, or shredded, and then fried, whatever presentation is chosen. The traditional recipe calls for several quarts of melted lard and water, but I have come up with a method that is easier, safer, and much less calorie-dense, and thus much more approachable to the average home cook. (Although, for anyone who wants the original recipe, it would call for the pork to be submerged in a mixture of water and lard together with oranges and spices. The pork will braise in the water while it gradually evaporates, and then fry in its own fat—the lard—once the water is gone.)

This recipe needs at least 48, if not 72, hours of prior planning, almost all of which will be necessary but inactive time. Days before you want to make your carnitas, go out and buy a bone-in pork shoulder (also called a Boston Butt); this roast will probably be somewhere between 8 and 12 pounds, bone included. You’ll also need 4 to 6 navel oranges for a roast that size. Don’t forget a few bay leaves as well! The combination of the flavors of pork, oranges, and bay leaves is the signature touch of the carnitas!

Zest, then juice, all the oranges into a container large enough to hold the roast and collect any drippings. (I like my 8-quart Dutch oven for such a task.) Add a tablespoon of soy sauce, and an equal quantity of water as there was juice to the marinating container. Do not discard the spent orange halves; place them in the marination container. Liberally season the roast with salt, pepper, and the dried herbs of your choice, which might include any or all of the following: oregano, dill, thyme, basil, garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, chili flakes, and, of course, the aforementioned bay leaves. Season more heavily than you think you need to: the Boston Butt is a very large cut that needs to be seasoned well.

Now, turn your focus to the onions. I like using at least 1 yellow onion per orange. Find the stem end—the end opposite the root—and cut it off, creating a flat surface. Stabilize the onion on that flat surface with the root facing up and cut down, separating the onion into two halves. Peel off the skin and the outermost layer. Then, cut the onion into strips about an inch wide, almost fully separating, except where held together by the root. Finally, cut the root off. Repeat this process for each of your onions and place them with the marinade and the roast. Make sure the onions get some of the seasoning too—massage the seasoning into the pork and the onions by hand to ensure even coverage. Cover all this and place it in the refrigerator for 2 to 3 days.

Salt will draw out a significant amount of liquid from the onions and the oranges by osmosis over the several days that the pork is marinating, so at the end of the marinating process, there will be significantly more liquid than before. This is exactly what we need. On the day you want the carnitas, preheat your oven to 300 Fahrenheit. Once the oven has come up to temperature—a deliberately low one at that— uncover the roast and place it in the oven for 3 and a half hours.

After 3 and a half hours separate the pork from the onions, oranges, and sauce in the pan. Transfer the pork to another plate to rest. Discard the oranges and return the sauce to the heat in a different, smaller pan, initially over medium-low. Gradually reduce the sauce by at least half.

In the meantime, cube, shred, or pull the pork off the bone. Then coat the bottom of the original braising vessel in a thin film of oil—I use avocado oil when I sear— and sear the carnitas, probably in batches, until a good crust has developed by means of the Maillard browning reaction. If you have space in your freezer, save the bone; it will keep for several months and can become the foundation of a great pork stock. 

Sear as much as you can at a time without overcrowding the surface of the pan, keeping all the pork in a single layer. Crowding the pan so much that the pork stacks into multiple layers will steam rather than sear it, and no new crust will form, and anything that might have formed will be dissolved away.

Once the pork has all been seared, combine it with the glaze which has been reduced, so that the glaze thoroughly coats the pork.   

Carnitas are especially commonly served as the protein in tacos, and that was indeed our first application of choice when I prepared this recipe a few weeks ago. Because carnitas are so rich, it is quite a good idea to pair them with something acidic to cut the richness of the pork. For this reason, pairing pickled onions with carnitas is very common. I have already covered how to pickle onions on this blog, so I’ll simply leave a link to that post here.

New York Times Ginger-Garlic Chicken

A few months ago, my mom showed me a new recipe that had caught her eye from the New York Times cooking section. Having looked through that recipe, and having had it prepared for me before preparing it myself for my family several times since then, I've come up with this recipe inspired by the original from the newspaper. 

Our first order of business: equipment. Readers who also happen to be avid watchers of Joshua Weissman or Uncle Roger might think I'd recommend that the rice in this dish-- particularly because it's Asian-- should be cooked in a rice cooker. I don't have one, so I just use a small saucepan. 2 1/2 or 3 quarts is totally fine. (But if you have the Zojirushi, of course, use it!) I will make 2 recommendations about the rice, though, precisely because this is an Asian dish:

1. Wash your rice several times, until the liquid comes out clear and 
2. If at all possible, make the rice ahead of time, chill it, and use it 24 hours after it was prepared, just like you would do for fried rice.

I will admit, in the interest of full culinary transparency, that I can't always follow Step 2. Even when I can't follow Step 2-- you might not plan dinner that far ahead either-- I recognize, and you should too, that Step 1 is absolutely non-negotiable. The secret to good quality Asian-style fluffy rice is the removal of the free starch coat on the outside of each granule of rice by washing the rice until that coat is gone and the washing water runs clear, rather than an almost milky white in the beginning.

Now for a note about cooking methods. I'm not sure if this comment refers to an adaptation my mom made, or to a comment by the original designer of the recipe, but the first time I heard about the recipe, I was told it would be a good idea to cook the rice and the chicken in the same pan, at the same time. If this, in fact, came from the original recipe, let me be so bold as to say that that piece of advice should be thoroughly and permanently disregarded because the way one cooks rice and the way one cooks chicken for this recipe are fundamentally incompatible with one another and thus they must be cooked separately. 

It would be a good idea, if you have the time and planned ahead, also to marinate the chicken for a day. In a pinch, ginger-garlic paste from a jar or tube will work, but I always process my own. While we're on the subject of the chicken, let's discuss the cuts to use. The breast can work, but I always prefer the thigh for two reasons: first, dark meat is much more forgiving over high heat than white meat. Second, you can save the rendered chicken fat from the thighs and use it to either help flavor the rice or to cook the greens-- or use it for something else entirely.

Especially if you choose breast, marination, even for 30 minutes, is essential. For our family, we usually make 2 breasts, and with that, I usually go with about an inch and a half of ginger and 4 to 6 garlic cloves. Peel the garlic, and use a spoon to remove what you can of the skin from the ginger; if there's some skin left, don't worry. Then throw the ginger and the garlic-- and the greens of a bunch of scallions, if you have them-- into a food processor and process the alliums into a paste. If you like the heat they provide, you can add some red pepper flakes to the paste. 

Cut the chicken into about 1-inch pieces. Liberally coat the chicken pieces with the marinade. Leave the chicken marinating for at least 30 minutes, and up to a day.

When it is finally "go time," make sure you have set mise en place. I have mentioned "mise en place" dozens of times here already, but for any new readers: get everything you need within your field of view and no further from you than arms-length away. Portion out all the ingredients into individual containers, and wash, peel, and cut whatever you need. Have everything "in its proper place" before you ever turn your stove on. Most critically: 

1. The chicken should be readily accessible
2. The rice should be available
3. You should have soy sauce nearby
4. You should have one bunch of the leaves of collards, spinach, turnip greens, mustard greens, or something similar washed and chopped, with the stems cut into coins
5. Whisk together a slurry of 2 tablespoons each water and corn starch

For final assembly, I like to work out of my 8-quart stainless steel Dutch oven, starting over about medium-high heat. The bottom of the cooking surface should be coated in a thin film of good cooking oil (that is not olive, and especially not extra virgin olive). Once the oil shimmers, the marinated chicken should go in, and be moved around constantly to prevent charring or burning. We want good color, but no burning and this is how we will replicate the traditional "wok hei" flavor experience despite not having a wok or wok burner.

Once the chicken has good color, but is not quite all the way cooked through, transfer it to a plate momentarily. Even with the constant motion, there should've still developed a considerable fond on the bottom and sides of the Dutch oven by this point. There will be plenty of moisture in the greens you have chosen, so the natural release of that moisture should be enough to deglaze that fond. If not, add water about an ounce at a time until you can deglaze. Lower the heat to medium-low and allow the greens to wilt down. Turnip, mustard, and other greens are very similar to spinach in that when cooked, they lose a lot of volume very quickly, so start with more than you think you need, and know that you'll end up with less than you probably thought you would. 

Return the chicken to the Dutch oven, together with the slurry. While European dishes have sauces either thickened by reduction by time, or by a roux (butter and flour), Asian dishes instead generally opt for a 1:1 mixture of cornstarch and water. Stir. Add the rice. Stir again to coat the rice in the first iteration of the sauce. Add soy sauce to taste (both to increase the amount of the sauce and to be the only real source of salt for the whole dish). Stir again. If the sauce has become too loose, add more slurry, and if it has become too tight, more soy sauce. 

Serve, optionally garnished with sesame seeds. 

Level up your experience with corn on the cob with this one easy trick!

Sweet yellow corn, at least here in the American South, is a staple summer vegetable-- and most people aren't getting the maximum flavor they could out of this most ancient of cultivars, so this new recipe aims to change that. We will spare no expense and not be particularly calorie conscious because our goal in this recipe as in all of them is to maximize flavor, even if this maximization makes the recipe slightly more time-consuming, more expensive, or requires the use of more dishes.
The first incarnation of this recipe for corn on the cob wasn't mine at all but is due to a friend whom I've known for more than 15 years, who, when we were growing up and happened to have corn on the cob at my house, would spread butter on the cob and add extra seasonings to it while still hot.

Many years later, I started to prepare corn in a two-phase method which surely was an homage, at least subconsciously, to what I remember her doing when we were growing up together.

Perhaps the most common way the average American eats sweet corn is off the whole cob. I'm not looking to change that. I'm just looking to argue that the way we prepare that corn is almost always merely an acknowledgment that corn is a blank canvas for flavor, but that's all. The average American acknowledges that the canvas exists, but does nothing with it, at the expense of tremendous variety in experiences of flavor and texture.

The solution, I have found, is certainly not one I would have recommended to have been undertaken by the elementary school children we once were but this is something that is perfectly safe for those children's parents to prepare, and for anyone to eat. The trick is to cook the corn twice.

What I've seen most often, at home, at the schools we grew up attending together, and at the colleges I attended in person, was the corn left whole on the cob was most often boiled and served; with no butter, no seasonings, nothing else.

The first cooking step will be in boiling water, but not until the corn is done. Rather, boil the corn for about 5 minutes, take it out of the boiling water, and drain the pan that previously contained the water and the corn.

Throughout the process of boiling the corn, some of it starch will have been released into the water, so when you throw away the water in the pan, you may notice it's not perfectly clear. That is nothing to worry about.

Over medium heat in the same pan in which the corn was boiled, gently melt 3 tablespoons of butter and add an equal quantity of your preferred cooking oil; we cook regularly with olive and avocado, and for this application, I tend to prefer avocado, because the olive we have is all extra virgin, and as I've noted in other recipes, extra virgin olive oil can go rancid, damaging the flavor of whatever it is cooking, when the oil is exposed to higher temperatures,

Once the butter has melted, but before it has browned, allow your favorite mix of dry herbs and spices to bloom in the fat. This spice mix is entirely customizable, with one exception. I don't typically advise seasoning the boiling water for almost anything-- corn, pasta, or anything similar-- so I will require that at a minimum, that spice mix be salt and pepper.

Blooming simply means that the fat-sensitive aromatic compounds stored in those spices will become activated due to the heat of the pan and the contact with the fat. To prevent issues caused either by the fat getting too hot or by the spices burning, make sure to keep the spices and the fat moving fairly constantly.

Once the spices you have chosen have become aromatic, after about 30 to 45 seconds, place the corn in the fat.

Now here, there are two different schools of thought just as there are two schools of with steak: turning nearly constantly or turning only once. Regarding corn specifically, I tend to be of the opinion that turning constantly gets better results than turning only once and adjusting the temperature down, never up, from medium, as needed.

Turning more frequently more completely and evenly covers the corn in the flavored fat, and allows more constant monitoring of the color progression of both the corn and the fat, allowing for better temperature control.

After about 2 minutes, pull out the corn and enjoy, being mindful that the corn is very hot: oil gets much hotter than water.

If you're particularly inspired by the Mexican street food classic "elote" in your choice of spices, then perhaps you might want to garnish with some Oaxaca or other crumbly cheese.

Fond: the home-cook's completely underutilized secret weapon to more flavorful food

Watching content from great restaurant chefs like Gordon Ramsay, or great cooks for the home like Adam Ragusea, and perusing the comments, I have gotten a sense over the years that there is one question that comes up much more often-- and is much more important-- than any other asked by aspiring home cook: "Your recipe seems like it would be so flavorful, and you look like you're enjoying your food so much, so why am I doing everything you're asking me to, but not getting the same results?" specifically when that kind of question is asked in the context of a meat or poultry dish.

The answer is in a single word: "fond" (pronounced in English exactly like "I am fond of [thing]"). The term comes from the French word for "stock" (but for this thing, the French use the word "sucs" meaning "juices"). Why the French needed to invent a new word for the thing we borrowed, or why we English speakers chose to borrow this word and not the one the French actually use, I'm not sure. In English, however, the word refers to sticky, meaty residue left on the pan by the searing process which is very often left unused-- and discarded by the dishwasher-- by the average home cook.

There are two candidates for the biggest possible improvement the average home cook could make to their meat and poultry dishes: using fond well, and seasoning well.

I want this to be a very practical article, so pull it up on your iPad, or wherever you read my work in the kitchen, and have it at the ready as you do what I ask, live. And leave it bookmarked so you can come back to it because the best way to get better at the skill I want to teach here is to practice many times.

There are two possible courses of action that can be taken, and this article will cover both: creating a pan-sauce mounted with butter or creating a glaze thickened only by time.

Either case begins the same way: by thoroughly drying and appropriately seasoning the exterior or whatever cut of meat or poultry you'd like to practice with. Here's a tip to get the best possible sear on anything: add a thin film of oil to a cold pan, and lay in the seasoned chicken, beef, pork, etc. Then, let the protein tell you when it's done searing on that side. Meat goes through four stages during searing: the very beginning, getting stuck to the pan, releasing when properly seared, and getting scorched. It takes practice, but flip the protein over early in stage 3 for the best results, both for the protein and the sauce we're trying to build. Further, when you flip it over, put it back down in the same spot in the pan.

Sear the other side, and then finish the protein however you want: butter-basting, etc.

Allow the protein to rest on a serving platter (i.e., not where you cooked it). Let's turn our attention to the now-empty pan. If there's a considerable amount of fat (especially if there are also aromatics, like sprigs of herbs or cloves of garlic) in the pan, pouring out the fat with those aromatics over the protein would be a pro-level idea.

If the protein was seared correctly (flipped over in stage 3 on the first side, then moved to gentler heat when the second side likewise was at stage 3, maintaining that gentler heat until the desired doneness), then there should be a considerable amount of fond stuck to the bottom and sides of the pan. NEVER THROW THIS AWAY BY WASHING IT AWAY IN THE DISHWASHER.

Return the pan to the stove over medium-low heat and deglaze it with your liquid of choice: depending on the protein and how it was seasoned, this could be anything from stock (beef, chicken, vegetable, duck, veal, or any other) or water, to beer and wine, or in some rare cases, even grape, cranberry, prune, or orange juice. Whatever liquid you choose, remember that its flavor as a sauce will become much more concentrated than if you were to drink the liquid as the liquid normally exists because a lot of volume will be lost in the reduction process. Adding this liquid to the pan should cause any flavor particles that might be stuck to the pan to dissolve into the liquid you just added, and what doesn't dissolve immediately can be helped by scraping the bottom and sides of the pan with a wooden spoon or similar implement. If, after adding some liquid and scraping, you still see anything undissolved, add more liquid and scrape again, and stay in this loop until there is nothing else stuck to the pan.

You have two choices at this point: either you will have par-cooked (cooked almost all the way, but not entirely, so that they can finish in this sauce) some vegetables like green beans or broccoli, or you will have gotten to this point wanting to make a pan-sauce.

Let's say for now that you want to make the vegetable side dish: if that's your plan, then transfer the par-cooked vegetables into the sauce and stir, letting the sauce thicken into a glaze coating the vegetables, adding only a tablespoon of water at a time if you think you might be close to burning anything. The time it takes to reduce the sauce to a glaze without burning it should be enough both for the protein to rest and for the vegetables to be ready since they were par-cooked.

If, however, you want to turn the fond into a pan sauce to be served on top of the protein, follow the following instructions. Deglaze as before, but then reduce the deglazed liquid by half over medium-low. Once the liquid has been reduced by half, switch to a whisk, and incorporate, tablespoon-by-tablespoon, anywhere from 4 to 8 tablespoons of butter. Butter is a natural emulsion of fat, water, and some flavor compounds; failing to whisk will break this emulsion, and will cause a fat slick to develop on the top surface. (Such a presentation is sometimes desirable in Indian cuisine, but never in French or Italian cooking.) Of course, scale this up or down based on how much fond you have, and how much pan sauce you need. Check for seasoning, adjust if necessary, and serve alongside your protein of choice.

Brazilian Dairy-Free Two-Layer Chocolate Birthday Cake

The following is a dairy-free chocolate cake that my family has enjoyed for years. The cake, a Brazilian dessert staple, definitely requires some technique, but it's doable. (When we want a cake just to have something sweet, without such a special occasion, we typically bake another Brazilian staple which is much simpler, requires the absolute minimum of gadgetry, and has the advantage of freezing well; that recipe will be coming up in a future post, and when it goes live, I'll link to it here)

We probably make this harder than it needs to be because, for all the equipment we have, we don't have multiple 9x13 dishes. The fact that we only have one 9x13 means that whenever we prepare this cake, we're required to get it out of the 9x13, cut it in half parallel to the counter, fill it, and put it on the platter or other surface from which we intend to serve it. Getting this to work is by far the most difficult part of this recipe, which you can easily circumvent if you have two 9x13s. If you do, then simply take each pan's contents out, trim the bottom as necessary, frost between the layers, stack, apply a top coating of icing, and serve. 

This cake begins as so many others do by preheating an oven. The recipe that we use in my family is my grandmother's take on a traditional cake, and this is more or less a translation of that recipe into English with my own commentary explaining why certain steps are going to be taken. The range in which this recipe was developed has five different oven temperature settings-- 1 is the hottest, and the oven can reach up to about 500°F; 5 is the coolest, and that's probably around about 240° or so Fahrenheit. You can't actually set the temperature of the oven like you can at the oven at our house in suburban Atlanta-- we have control up to a degree from about 160 to 550 °F, whereas the original oven only really has control up to the 40 or 50° Celsius range within which you want to bake or roast. This is why the original recipe asks for setting #4 plus or minus 40°; the bottom bound of gas setting #4 is 180° C. Converted to Fahrenheit, that's 356. (The top bound is 210° C, which is 410° F, so the only real guarantee in the original oven is that it'll bake somewhere between 356 and 410, requiring more testing than here in the US.) In the US, where we have degree-by-degree control, we've translated that to mean 360° Fahrenheit (even for American-developed recipes that call for cakes to be baked at 350°).

This is a good cake for any readers who might be lactose intolerant because it's dairy free. Instead of using butter to bring fat and moisture to the cake, the recipe calls for oil to achieve those same ends. At least since the beginning of the pandemic, we've been baking with avocado oil-- and contrary to what a lot of us assumed when we started with this, there's no avocado taste in places where we don't want an avocado taste, so cooking with avocado oil in this context is absolutely fine, even though I imagine the original recipe was probably developed with something like canola, and that definitely works. Just don't use olive, especially not extra virgin olive oil (because it can go rancid at high temperatures).

The cake calls for six eggs which are to be separated: whites beaten to stiff peaks and yolks creamed with sugar, oil, and a mixture of water and chocolate which we'll deal with later.

Beat the whites to stiff peaks and reserve them in one bowl. In another bowl, beat the yolks together with 3/4 of a cup of your chosen oil and two cups of white sugar. (You will need to beat the whites to stiff peaks before working with the yolks. Going in that order, you do not need to clean or change out your beaters in between the different phases of the egg.) Add to the yolk bowl one tablespoon of baking powder. This, together with the air incorporated into the whites by beating them into stiff peaks will provide the leavening the cake needs.

The original recipe doesn't call for this explicitly, but my grandmother used to do this, and I'm much worse at separating eggs than she was, so I do this, and I'll recommend that you do as well: of course, you need a bowl for the whites and one for the yolks. But her system, which I've now adopted, is to use two bowls for each: one for the current (white/yolk) and one for all the separated (whites/yolks). She was probably more concerned that an egg would be spoiled, and she didn't want to spoil the whole batch with a bad egg. I'm not so concerned with that, but I do know I'm much more liable to break a yolk and ruin my chances at a clean separation, so I follow her technique anyways. Crack the whole egg into the small white bowl. Transfer this particular yolk into the small yolk bowl. If the separation succeeds, transfer this yolk into the big yolk bowl, and this white into the big white bowl. If the separation fails, put all of the contents of the small "white" bowl (that is now temporarily a small yolk bowl due to the contamination) into the big yolk bowl, and clean the intended small white bowl. Neither white bowl can have any yolk contamination, nor can the beaters, eventually.

In fact, I lost an egg for that very reason while preparing the cake that inspired me to write this post. That's totally fine! If you break the yolk while cracking the egg or during the separation, just abandon the separation, and put the whole egg in the yolk bowl. Egg yolks can have egg whites in them, and they will still cream well with fat and sugar. But egg whites can't have egg yolk in them, or the unfolding of the protein structure required to beat the whites into stiff peaks will be much harder, if not impossible, to achieve.

(A quick aside, because these are the things that I like to communicate in these recipe posts: baking soda is a base-- if you look on a pH scale, it will be higher than that of water which is neutral. Baking powder includes baking soda, some sort of acid, and a buffer preventing action between them, which is usually corn starch. I'm not sure what the buffer is or what precisely the acid is, but it's important to know that those three components are in baking powder. When an acid and a base are allowed to come together by the buffer, they form water and release gas. When you're not using baking powder and it's just stored in your cupboard, it's stable because of the action of the buffer keeping the acid and the base from interacting with each other. But once you put the baking powder into a batter and add heat to that batter in the oven, the buffer deactivates and allows the acid in the base to come together, and when they do, they perform their neutralization reaction. The gaseous products of the neutralization, plus the vaporization of extra water we'll add later will provide the leaving for the cake.)

While beating the eggs start a kettle boiling 2/3 of 1 cup of water. In a third bowl, combine a total of 2/3 of a cup of Nesquik and cocoa powder. One cup is 16 tbsp, so in theory, if you wanted to combine the Nesquik and the cocoa powder in equal proportions, you would add 16 tsp of each to 2/3 of a cup of boiling water.

"Cream" together the oil, yolks, and sugar, and to that add the chocolate slurry and 2 cups of all-purpose flour. (I have placed that into quotes because the traditional meaning of that instruction is to combine eggs, butter, and sugar, not eggs, oil, and sugar, but the process is otherwise the same.) Then, fold in the whites with a rubber spatula. Take care to deflate the whites as little as possible -- some deflation will inevitably happen-- but fold in the whites thoroughly enough that no streaks remain visible.

Then, either place half of the batter into one 9x13 and half into another 9x13, or place it all into one 9x13 if that's all you have. Bake the cake(s) until a fork comes out clean.

If you have one cake, get it out of the 9x13 in one piece, invert it onto a cutting surface, and cut the cake maintaining your knife parallel to the cutting surface into a top half and a bottom half. Separate the two halves.

If you have two cakes, pick one to be the top half and one to be the bottom half. The top of the bottom half may have risen unevenly, creating a dome. If that's the case, trim the top of the bottom half so that the top of the bottom half is parallel to the bottom of the bottom half.

What scares me the most about this recipe isn't the eggs-- handling a separation that didn't work out is easy enough, as described above-- it's this step because cutting and moving slabs of cake in and out of large dishes hoping they don't disintegrate in transport (even just a foot or two) and ruin presentation is certainly the most nerve-wracking experience I have in a kitchen on a regular basis.

Once you have your cake halves -- however you got them-- mix together a blend of one cup of water and 2 teaspoons of Nesquik. Dock both halves of the cake: that is, make hundreds of tiny holes on the surface of the cake with a fork, almost as if the cake were to look like a Graham cracker (with the caveat that a Graham cracker's holes go all the way through it, and the holes in the cakes certainly should not).

Once the cake halves have been docked, make a filling (and icing) from chocolate, powdered sugar, 12 ounces of heavy cream, and 1 stick of butter. Adjust the chocolate quantity to change how dark you want it to be (and how bitter you want it), and adjust the sugar to change how sweet you want it to be.

Place the docked bottom half on the intended serving plate, then spread half of the frosting over the bottom half. Place the top half on the frosted bottom half, and spread the rest of the frosting on the top half.

Optionally garnish over the top frosting layer with chocolate sprinkles or chips.

Chill overnight and serve.

In defense of the salad: a guide to the vast improvement of the home-cook's salad-building

Over the last few months, I haven’t spent nearly as much time cooking, but I’ve been able to redirect all the energy I would have otherwise spent cooking into thinking about recipes. So here I am, back to the blog! And for my triumphant return to the blogosphere, as we approach the beginning of summer, there doesn't seem to be a better return topic than the salad.

As long-time readers will know, the pandemic changed my relationship with the kitchen. Before the pandemic, I very rarely exercised any creative freedom in the kitchen, instead, almost exclusively, I did what I was told to do to realize someone else’s creative vision. But new working and studying arrangements (from home) changed all that; thus, the blog was reborn as a repository of my work in our home kitchen. Sandwiches made from cold cuts with some kind of leafy green became the near-exclusive dinner fare around here. Naturally, with 3 people in the house, we go through a lot of greens, having made so many of those sandwiches. And having so much access to so many greens, I've been thinking about the right way to assemble a salad quite a bit. 

When I want a salad, either as a snack, or to replace the dinner sandwich, or as an entirely different meal, I almost never follow a recipe. Even lacking a formal recipe—if you want one of mine, may I suggest you read my take on the Caesar—there are a few principles anyone can apply to construct a balanced and even craveable salad. I am here to completely destroy the notion that eating a salad is a punishment for someone who has had unhealthy food, or that it is something that is only done by people on a diet would eat—or any other negative opinion one may have formed by casting too wide a net against the salad.

Before we get started, let me clarify I’m referring to salads intended to be eaten as whole meals, not unlike the ones that Brian Lagerstrom (check out his YouTube here) termed his “Big Ass Salads.” The premise of Brian’s series is that these salads are meant to be full meals, not just be eaten alongside a full meal.

The outline of a “Big Ass Salad”—or any salad you would create if you followed my advice, contains several components:

1. The base
2. The protein
3. The mix-ins
4. The dressing

Each of these plays a vital role in making a salad a truly enjoyable meal. Let’s look at each one in turn, to see how to maximize flavor from each, such that the salads we create are much greater than the sum of their parts.

The most vital part of the salad isn’t a surprise: most of the volume of the salad is the base. We’ll use them for 2 purposes: first, because they’re rich in all kinds of different vital nutrients; and second, as delivery systems for the other 3 components. In this article, the base will be some kind of leafy green, but feel free to experiment with grains like couscous, quinoa, farro, or something similar!

The two most commonly sold varietals of lettuce, at least here in the United States, are romaine and iceberg. Romaine is the classic “salad” lettuce, for a reason: it has good texture, it provides good volume, and it effectively transports non-lettuce parts of your salad to your tastebuds. Depending on what you decide to build your salad with, this could be the perfect green. Iceberg, on the other hand, is best either shredded or in a wedge salad. This article isn’t covering wedges, but I may put one out in the future.

There are, however, less common varietals of lettuce that may be just as good or even better than the classic Romaine: Boston Bibb, Little Gem, and so on. These, in general, are harder to find and may be more expensive than Romaine, but if you have them in your area and want to make the investment, subbing them in when you would otherwise use Romaine would absolutely be a good idea. Depending on your dressing, you may also want something completely different, like a spring mix, arugula, or spinach. Play around with what you want in the salad and how you want it dressed and see how each of those combinations pairs with your choice of base. As you think about what to combine with, consider the pH of your dressing—more on that later—and how easily your base of choice wilts. Romaine can certainly hold up to an acidic vinaigrette, but maybe not something as delicate as arugula.

A note about the processing of your base: If you go with a leafy green base, depending on where you’re reading this from, it may be common practice that whoever picked your greens washed them (sometimes more than once) before you bought them. If so, do not wash them again. If your salad hasn’t been washed, wash it thoroughly yourself, and then put your salad through a salad spinner: the centripetal force applied to the lettuce in the inner basket sends the water on the leaves to the outer container, leaving you with dry lettuce after just a few twists of the handle. The point remains this: if you’re using leafy greens, make sure they’re dry.

Similarly, if you go with a grain base, I have a warning for you as well: make sure your grains have cooked and cooled before proceeding to the assembly phase. Do not proceed to the assembly phase with warm or hot grains, or this will generally adversely affect the texture of your dressing, and thus of the salad in general.

Including some kind of protein in your salad is always a good idea. That could be anything, depending on what you like or have available to you. For readers who aren’t vegetarian, try grilled (in the American sense) or pan-seared chicken breast, perhaps a flank steak, or even a high-quality salmon filet. If you are vegetarian (and even if you aren’t), maybe try adding some shaved parmesan: buy a small piece of a wheel of parmesan, and then shave the cheese with a vegetable peeler into your salad. If you want to go the shaved-cheese route but can’t find good parmesan, grana padano or pecorino romano are great alternatives. If you prefer a crumbling cheese, try to find a good feta, bleu, or young cotija. (The younger your cotija cheese is when you buy it, the more it’ll behave like feta; the older it is, the more it’ll behave like parmesan.

The salads that inspired this article have no set formula because they come from whatever I have available that I know would work well together. As an exercise in culinary creativity, I would encourage you to look through your pantry or refrigerator and put together a salad using only what you have available. Here are just a few items I recommend putting into a salad: peppers (raw, roasted, or picked), red onions (not white or yellow—they’re too strong raw), olives (any color), raisins, carrots, cherry or grape tomatoes, broccoli, broccoli rabe, broccolini, apples, squash, and peaches. Choose from these—or whatever you like—any combination that you have available to you, and that works well on its own, with the base, and with the dressing.

The final component is the dressing. There are two main sources of fat common in dressings: pure oil, and mayonnaise. You may choose to only use one, or to use both, depending on your preferences. If you go with a mayonnaise-based dressing, I recommend that you follow the procedure found here to make your own from scratch. Be advised, though, that homemade mayonnaise-based dressings don’t keep as well. Homemade mayonnaise-based dressings should be used within 48-72 hours, whereas homemade dressings made exclusively from oil keep much longer: 7-10 days in the fridge.

Let’s suppose you chose, for the convenience of the longer shelf-life, to go with a pure-oil dressing. In that case, your choice of oil is an important one: this is not the time for the best olive oil you can find. Were you to use an expensive extra-virgin oil, the procedure I will recommend that you use to assemble the dressing would render the oil, and thus the whole dressing, very bitter, thus losing all the things that make that oil such a great one. Lighter olive oils are more processed by the manufacturer and less flavorful (so less well-suited to be a finishing oil like extra virgin olive oil) and probably less healthy than extra-virgin oils, but the processing done at the plant will have removed the compounds that the dressing-making process would destroy in the extra-virgin oil which would make the extra-virgin oil taste very bitter when it went through the process we will use to make our dressing.

Preparing the dressing is just as much a string of choices as putting together the salad. When it is possible to make more of something at once without losing quality, I always do so and always recommend that my readers do the same. I will give ratios, but the precise quantities will be left for the reader to decide: scale this up or down for however many salads you want to make. Just like when you bake a cake, you mix the wet ingredients and the dry ingredients separately, and then combine them, there’s a similar procedure for making oil-based salad dressings. Here, though, there are 3 groups: things that like water, mustard, and things that like oil. Mustard will serve as our binder: together with the physical force we will apply to the ingredients, the mustard will hold everything in a stable emulsion. (Recall that an emulsion is a liquid that is the result of two other liquids that don’t like to come together, doing so in a way that is thicker than either original liquid.)

The hydrophilic phase of the dressing can be the vinegar of your choice. I have made plenty of vinaigrettes from balsamic, red wine, and apple cider vinegars, but champagne, white wine, sherry, or rice vinegars would also work well. Combine this with a teaspoon per portion of the mustard of your choice. If, for example, you want to make a honey mustard vinaigrette, now would be the right time to add the honey. Give this a cursory mix with a whisk or a fork. Once roughly incorporated, get ready to start adding oil. Depending on whom you ask, the procedure I am about to give will either be the only way to ever make a dressing (and the other school of thought is completely incompetent and should be ashamed of showing up in a kitchen), or a total waste of time (and the first school of thought doesn’t know how to be efficient, one of the core principles of the kitchen, so they too, for a different reason, should be ashamed to show their faces in a kitchen owing to their complete inefficiency).

Using either an immersion/stick blender or a whisk, start adding oil to the vinegar-mustard mixture as slowly as possible: literally, a drop at a time, especially if you’re using a whisk. Otherwise, the emulsion will not form, because the vinegar and mustard will be too flooded with oil to, on a molecular level, put themselves between the micro-globules of oil and create a network trapping the oil, thus building the emulsion. Running the immersion blender, or whisking, constantly with one hand, begin adding the oil to the dressing. As you have added more oil, add more oil faster. Keep adding oil until you have enough dressing, running the immerse blender or whisk the whole time. Generally, you should start with about 1 part vinegar-mustard for every 3 parts of oil you plan to add. Once emulsified, season with salt, freshly cracked black pepper, and the dry herbs of your choice. Stir with a spoon (herbs, salt, and pepper won’t affect the emulsion or lack thereof of your dressing.)

Assemble your salad—sans dressing—in an airtight container and place your dressing in another airtight container and add ice packs or other suitable materials to a lunchbox to keep everything cool if you plan to take your salad to school or work for lunch. Place the dressing in a separate airtight container and combine them when it is time to eat. Alternatively, if you have made more than a single serving of dressing, transfer everything to a bottle from which to pour out either however much you want directly into your salad for immediate consumption, or into an airtight container for later combination with the salad for consumption later in the day. It will have been because of this—the final assembly at lunchtime of the salad—that in the beginning, I warned you about making sure your greens were dry and/or your grains were cool: because if not, your dressing will not properly coat the contents of your salad.