Pasta al Limone

 This week’s recipe is from Sicily, not Rome, and yet you’ll see so many similarities to the process I laid out in our Roman Pastas series. Sicilians are famous all over the Mediterranean for their citrus crops, especially their lemons. Accordingly, pasta al limone has been an instant hit from the moment of its inception.

I mentioned several times throughout the previous series that a keystone of Roman cooking was to source only the best ingredients and to use them well and simply to create something so much better than the sum of their parts. This is also completely applicable to the cuisine of an island a few hundred miles to the south, in Sicily. It is important to remember that by no means is Italian cuisine monolithic, but that nevertheless, the same basic fundamentals apply to food from any region.

This pasta recipe is one of the fastest I’ve ever put up here on the website. It comes together in the amount of time it takes to boil the water and cook the pasta, very similarly to cacio e pepe.

In fact, think of this as a derivative or descendant of cacio e pepe. Recall that for basic cacio e pepe, a pasta is boiled, a paste of pasta water, pepper and pecorino is made, and then the two are combined until emulsified with extra reserved pasta  water. We will follow the same basic steps, and our only modification to this process will come in how we deal with the stars of the show here, the lemons.

Before we get to the specifics on this simple recipe anyone can make—even on the tightest of budgets—let’s talk citrus. As a note to any Brazilian or otherwise Lusophone readers: My family originally comes from Brazil, and so I know that in Portuguese, there aren’t distinct words for “lime” and “lemon” as there are in English. In Portuguese, we differentiate yellow from green by the location which we add to the generic word that means both “lime and lemon.” If a fruit is a “Sicilian lemon,” then it’s a “lemon” in English; if it’s a “Tahiti lemon,” then it’s a “lime.” For any readers from the Lusophone world, this recipe is meant to be made with the former, not the latter. And for those of us in the US or elsewhere where a distinction exists between generic “lemons” and “Meyer lemons,” this recipe is meant to be made with the former; Meyer lemons are sweeter than regular lemons, possibly as a result of crossing regular lemons with oranges or clementines to create the Meyers. That extra sweetness in the Meyers won’t work with this dish, so make sure to get the best regular lemons you can find.

The lemon will be the star of this recipe, so don’t be shy with it. Wash, zest, and juice 2 whole large lemons. Be careful to only scrape off the outermost yellow part. That yellow outer layer is almost entirely natural yellow pigments and scented oils which together make lemons very aromatic, all of which we want to make use of in our final dish. That layer, however, is very thin, and directly underneath it is the much thicker and far more acidic layer of white pith. Generally, don’t get any—or get as little as possible—of the pith when zesting citrus of any kind (oranges, limes, lemons, grapefruits, etc.). Either before zesting or between zesting and juicing, roll your washed lemons against your countertop or another flat surface. Doing so weakens or even pre-ruptures some cell walls inside the lemon, thereby making juicing easier later, and increasing yield at that point.

We will also make use of fresh mint to balance out the acidity in this dish. Fresh herbs like mint and basil bruise very easily when hacked at indiscriminately with a knife.

Place 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil in a wide, shallow pan, and as the oil warms, place the zest into the oil together with a few leaves of mint taken directly from the plant, without any chopping or tearing. There are several compounds in both mint and lemon zest which are (only, or in some cases, more) soluble in oil versus water. When the oil becomes noticeably aromatic, turn off the heat and remove the mint leaves.  

Cook 1 pound of a long, dry pasta according to the manufacturer's instructions to al dente doneness. When 3 minutes remain, reserve 1 ½ cups of pasta water. Grate 1 cup of pecorino Romano or Parmigiano Reggiano and combine it with the juice and zest of the two lemons juiced and zested earlier. Take 2 tablespoons of that pasta cooking water and combine it with the cheese and lemon juice and zest so that a thick paste forms. Season this paste liberally with black pepper, just as one would make cacio e pepe.  

From here, the process is identical to cacio e pepe. Drain the pasta once it is al dente, and combine it with the aromatic oil, the cheese-zest paste, and thin and emulsify the sauce by gradually adding pasta cooking water and tossing. Garnish with black pepper, Parmigiano Reggiano, lemon zest, and fresh mint leaves.
   

Pasta al limone, as prepared by Vincenzo's Plate

(Photo Credits to Vincenzo and his team) 

Spaghetti Aglio e Olio

Today, we’re going back to basics with spaghetti aglio e olio, a Neapolitan pasta with a family twist. Everyone should have this simplest of pasta dishes in their repertoire. It tastes great, it’s cheap, and its ridiculously easy, so even a beginner cook (even a kid, with proper supervision!) can make this without much of a fuss.

Aglio e olio is so simple, and yet so flavorful. This will, quite possibly, be the shortest recipe I’ve ever written. Bring a gallon of water to a boil in a large, lidded pot. When the water comes to a boil, put in a pound of high-quality spaghetti or another long pasta. Cook that according to the package’s instructions, reserving a cup of the cooking water into a heat-proof container at the halfway mark.

Finely chop 3 large cloves of garlic. Coat a sauté pan with about 4 tablespoons of olive oil—enough to generously cover the whole surface of the pan. Be more generous than you think you should be since this oil will form the bulk of your sauce. Fry the garlic until aromatic. Zest and juice one lemon into the oil, being sure to catch any seeds. Lightly season the oil with salt and pepper, bearing in mind that more salt (from parmesan) will be coming later.

Once the pasta has cooked according to the manufacturer’s instructions and drained into a colander, place the pasta into the lemon-garlic-oil sauce, and start stirring. Keep stirring, and slowly stream in your pasta water. Go slowly to avoid splattering. (This step and the draining of the pasta—getting rid of a gallon of boiling water—are steps that require not just supervision but hands-on help from an experienced adult if a kid is making this.) Use as much or as little as you need to form a glossy, emulsified sauce. 

Garnish the pasta with parmesan. Serve.

Our family twist is that we serve this alongside sauteed broccoli; the fact that we sauté the broccoli in garlic-infused oil (separately from the sauce, but with the same intentions of infusing the garlic into the oil) brings a nice unity to the dish, and the cooked-through-but-still-somewhat-crunchy broccoli provides not only a good color contrast (yellow/green) but also a nice texture contrast against the pasta.

This pasta truly is a work of genius. Don’t embellish it too much; let it speak for itself. That something so simple can be so good truly is one of the marvels of proper authentic Italian cuisine.

Sauce Hollandaise

Hollandaise sauce is at the same time a classic, made ubiquitous in diners by its presence in Eggs Benedict and an enigma, its status questioned by recent revelations uncovered by Alex. More on that second point later. For now, though, let’s get right into the mother sauce that might not be one. Mother sauce or not, it’s a classic, and classics deserve to be made properly.

Let me start out by recognizing just how intimidating Hollandaise can be. In my pieces explaining the way to make the other sauces which were thickened by various colors of roux, you read “DO NOT STOP WHISKING” at least once in each of those recipes. This will be no exception. I’m serious. It’s so important, I’ll say it again now, and then yet again another time later on. When you’re making Hollandaise, DO NOT STOP WHISKING.

Hollandaise is an emulsion of egg yolk, clarified butter, and lemon juice. Emulsions, as discussed in the piece about mayonnaise, are when two substances that shouldn’t normally combine do combine because either by physical force, or by the addition of another substance, or both, they are held together. The reason I have said so many times that you CANNOT STOP WHISKING is that doing so would irreparably break the Hollandaise emulsion. A broken emulsion creates tiny pieces (the size of a grain of rice, if that big) of cooked egg yolk floating around in a pool of clarified butter. There is no way to recover from this. If this happens, throw it away, clean your pan, and start over.

First off, addressing the ingredients. Butter normally contains three things: milk protein solids, water, and fat. Clarifying the butter separates the components by density; skim off the solids and evaporate out the liquids until only fat is left. This pure butterfat is “clarified butter.” This ingredient is one of the cornerstones of sauce hollandaise.

Next, an important point about equipment. Hollandaise requires the use of a double boiler. This is not a special piece of equipment per se, but rather the combination of several common kitchen tools for a specific purpose. A double boiler simply is a bowl placed over the opening of a pan with simmering water underneath. This more gently cooks whatever is in the bowl.

 
To prepare a hollandaise, begin with the egg yolks and lemon juice in a bowl, and set that bowl over a double boiler. Whisk constantly to aerate the sauce and to pasteurize the eggs without scrambling them. DO NOT STOP WHISKING. To that last point, I cannot overstate the importance of keeping the water underneath the eggs only at a simmer; if the water boils, the eggs will coalesce, and an emulsion will be impossible. As you whisk and the eggs cook very gently in the double boiler, the extra air you introduce by whisking and the cooking process should significantly lighten the color. Lemon juice is mostly water, and clarified butter is all fat. Naturally, fat is less dense than water; the egg yolks’ protein matrices will hold these components together.

As the eggs begin to lighten and take on more volume, slowly stream in clarified butter. DO NOT STOP WHISKING. Once all the clarified butter has been incorporated and the emulsion complete, take the sauce off the double boiler, season with salt and cayenne, and serve immediately.

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

Pan-seared salmon in lemon-garlic-brown butter sauce

The following recipe was developed (as were most of the others I've posted so far) in the middle of the quarantine of 2020-21, due to the coronavirus. Unintentionally, this recipe also happened to be perfectly suitable to the dietary constraints of the season of Lent-- though I first came up with it months after Lent 2020 had ended.

Catholics 14 and older are required to fast from the meat of warm-blooded animals (i.e., no beef, pork, turkey, chicken, etc.-- but fish is OK, and so are broths and stocks, even made from otherwise-impermissible meats) on at least 7 days of the year. These days are Ash Wednesday (the day on which Lent begins, which is 40 days, not including Sundays, before Easter) and every Friday of Lent (between Ash Wednesday and Easter, six in total). Only on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday (the last Friday before Easter), Catholics who have already turned 18 but who have not yet turned 60 must also fast-- that is, limit themselves to one large meal and two smaller ones which together don't equal or exceed the "large" meal. This recipe satisfies both the fasting and abstinence requirements, so it's perfect for Lent!

Remove salmon filets from packaging and be sure to dry as thoroughly as possible. I recommend that skin-on, deboned salmon fillet pieces or steaks be used for the best presentation (whether you like to eat the skin or not, leaving it on while this fish cooks helps the structure stay intact). If you must use skinless fillets or steaks, do so, but be particularly careful to follow this step; surface moisture is the enemy of the structural integrity of fish cuts, especially those without skins holding them together. 

Zest, then juice, one lemon. Combine zest, juice, and 1/2 tsp water. Reserve.

Coat salmon fillets in seasoned flour (salt, pepper, dry dill, garlic powder), shaking off excess as necessary. Coat the whole piece of fish, but don't leave too much excess on the fish. If too much excess exists, it will burn and thus damage the flavor of the fish and its accompanying sauce. 

Brown about 2-3 Tbsp unsalted butter in a saute pan. This should smell nutty, but not burned. If the butter burns, throw it away, clean your pan, and start over. The butter will form the foundation of the sauce which will flavor the fish and it will be the fat in which the fish will be cooked, so it is important that the flavor of the butter not be burned. If the butter burns, the burned flavor will overpower anything else that flavors the fish. This motion will also begin the emulsifying process. 

Once the butter is browned successfully, add about an equal amount of olive oil to the pan, and gradually increase the heat. This step is necessary because the olive oil is much colder than the butter or the pan, so its addition will lower the temperature of both of those things. However, especially at high heats, the milk solids in already-browned butter can go from aromatic to burned in seconds, so be sure to keep the butter and oil moving (but do so safely) so as to not scorch anything. 

When the pan is back to its original temperature (after dropping and coming back up when the cold oil went in), add the fillets skin down. Do not touch them for four minutes. Leaving the fish undisturbed for the entire period is crucial; it allows the fish to cook evenly, it allows the Maillard browning reaction to take place, and it guarantees the best presentation because the fish will not be broken apart. 

After four minutes, using tongs and/or a fish spatula, turn each fillet, doing everything possible to keep the fillet in one piece. Again, this is done to ensure the best presentation and to ensure even doneness. 

Add the reserved lemon juice-water-zest to the pan, initially pouring into a part of the pan not contacted by the fish. Cook for another four minutes, basting the fish with the sauce now formed in the pan (lemon juice, lemon zest, water, oil, butter) continuously over that period. Take the fish off the heat and flip it over, back to skin-down orientation. Rest for 2 minutes, then serve. I typically serve the fish on top of a bed of couscous prepared to the manufacturer's instructions.  


If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

 

Signature Dish

Every chef—even a home chef—needs a perfected signature dish. The recipe you’ll find below is mine, but you’ll notice one component of a typical recipe is totally gone: the measurements. That omission is entirely intentional. Early in the quarantine, we were under because of the Coronavirus, in either March or April 2020, I had a ton of chicken thighs in my home fridge and I didn’t really know what to do with them. This recipe, which I’ve prepared pretty much every time we’ve bought large quantities of chicken thighs since then was born out of the quarantine—a time when I was fairly limited in what I could use and what or when I could restock. My philosophy in the kitchen is this: “The best chef is not the one who follows a written recipe the most correctly but the one who produces the best results without any recipe at all.” I haven’t included many measurements here (other than the intentionally vague “pinch,” “dash,” and others) because one of my firmest convictions as a home chef is that the average home chef doesn’t know how to cook without a recipe—by coming up with ideas and tasting and adjusting through the course of assembling a dish. If every home chef in America knew to taste food and what to look for in the intermediate steps of cooking, so many more people would realize their great untapped potential and in doing so, would realize that cooking is not a task or a chore, but an incredibly fulfilling activity—if done with good technique. Good technique will yield good results. If nothing else, let this be a lesson in tasting and proportional cooking.

In some sort of bowl (I like the largest circular-ish Pyrex bowl I can find in my kitchen, which holds 7 cups), combine about equal parts of three different acids (I like balsamic and red wine vinegars, plus the zest and juice of some citrus, usually lime and/or orange). Whisk lightly to combine. These things just need to mingle, so it’s perfectly acceptable to go easy on the whisking at this point. Whisk in about the same amount of reduced-fat homogenized milk as any one of the acids. Again, here, it’s okay to whisk lightly. Now, whisking quickly, stream in about 3 times as much liquid oil as there are (total) acids and milk in the bowl. Oil doesn’t like the acids or the milk (because the milk is mostly water and the oil doesn’t like water), so the two will try to stay separate from each other; whisking constantly and adding slowly will essentially “make the molecules hug each other” in such a way that they won’t separate. Basically, you need to get the fat cells in the oil of your choice (again, use a liquid oil like olive or canola, not a solid one like coconut) into units that are as small as possible—in the best case, just one molecule— which are surrounded by and attracted to the water molecules. The chemistry of water allows us to create this “molecular hug” just by whisking long enough and adding in the oil slowly enough. Here, whisk vigorously. An unbreakable emulsion has been achieved when the fat particles are small enough as to be invisible to the naked eye and thus small enough to be held in suspension in the other liquids.

Technically, what this step does is it creates an emulsion, a mixture of two things that chemically don’t like each other but which are held together either by physical force (applied by whisking) or by each bonding to one side of something that both things are attracted to. (This is why people like to put eggs in meatballs: the eggs not only add protein, but they bring together elements of the meatball which chemically repel each other per se, but are both attracted to the egg, so they can be held together if they hold on to the egg—the egg thus gives the meatballs the structural integrity they need not to fall apart too soon.) Every good marinade has four components: fat, acid, spices, and salt. Whisk in spices. I’ve always used smoked and sweet paprika, basil, oregano, thyme, dill, garlic powder, bay leaves, fresh-cracked black peppercorns, and salt. Especially if you’re inexperienced in the kitchen, I recommend using Kosher salt. Kosher salt has the advantage of being coarser than normal “table salt” that isn’t Kosher, so it’s easier to see how much you’re actually salting something if you use Kosher salts rather than non-Kosher. I recommend having tasted the marinade at least three times by now: when only the acid, the milk, and the oil have gone in; after everything but the salt has gone in, and after the salt has gone in, adjusting what you already have in the bowl at each round.

Move this out of the container in which it was built into a container whose lid’s area is big enough such that the container could reasonably hold all the chicken in as close to a single layer as possible. If there are some spices left over in the container where the marinade was built, use some water to loosen the spices and pour them over the chicken. Close the chicken container, and shake it for a few seconds, just long enough to get the marinade moving around and coating all the pieces of chicken. Leave this in a refrigerator for at least 12 hours, but no longer than 48. Any longer than 48 hours and the acid in the marinade will actually begin to “cook” the chicken rather than just tenderizing and flavoring it.

Once ready to continue, after no less than 12 but no more than 48 hours of marination, move the chicken into enough baking dishes so that they all lie flat in one layer. If you have any more than 4 thighs on an average-sized baking pan, you will need more than one. Preheat an oven to 375 Fahrenheit (190 Celsius); once the temperature has been reached, place the thighs on the same level rack of the oven, and leave them there for an hour. Transfer the marinade into a sauté pan (something that’s wide, has a lid, and has sides that are maybe 2 inches tall), and let it come to a boil, reducing by a third. At this point, the sauce is safe to taste, so you should do so for likely the fourth time in this process.

While the chicken is roasting, it will release two things that together can only be described as “culinary gold.” The first is some of the juices from the chicken—don’t worry, this always happens, no matter how you cook chicken, and this chicken will still be particularly moist. The second is “schmaltz”—that is, slowly melted, flavored chicken fat. Move the chicken onto a separate plate and reserve it. Transfer all the schmaltz from all the roasting trays used into the pan where the sauce is being assembled. Whisk to combine—try to start emulsifying the sauce, but don’t be alarmed it stays separated; in fact, it won’t be until the next ingredient is added.

Cook one pound of some sort of long pasta—I like fettuccine with this recipe—to one minute short of the manufacturer’s instructions. Time the pasta so that it is drained as close to at exactly the same time as when the chicken comes out of the oven and the schmaltz is added to the sauce. Drain the pasta and reserve momentarily. Add anywhere from 2 to 3 heaping tablespoons of sour cream to the sauce and whisk until emulsified. You should not be able to distinguish the schmaltz from the marinade or the schmaltz-marinade from the sour cream. Once everything is thoroughly incorporated, the schmaltz does not appear separated, and there do not appear to be any visible white specks of sour cream in the sauce, it has been properly emulsified. Check for seasoning, adding salt and/or freshly ground black pepper as desired.  Bring drained long pasta into the sauce and stir or toss to combine. Serve chicken atop pasta, garnishing with as much grated Parmigiano Reggiano and/or pecorino romano cheese as desired.

 If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!