What do you do with sea beans?

A couple of years ago, while visiting friends and relatives in San Francisco, I first heard about sea beans. According to The Food Lover's Companion, sea beans are also known as salicornia, sea pickle, glasswort, or marsh samphire, and according to Margaret Wittenberg’s New Good Food, they are collected fresh during the summer from salt marshes and tidal waters along both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Fresh sea beans recently became available at our local Whole Foods Market, so after wondering about them for a long time, I finally got to taste them. Eaten raw by themselves or in a salad, sea beans are noticeably salty, with a slight fishiness; reading between the lines a bit in the “samphire” entry in The Food Lover’s Companion, it appears that both of these characteristics are enhanced on cooking: “When cooked, salicornia tends to taste quite salty and fishy.”

Not surprisingly, there is no entry for sea beans in my favorite flavor pairing book, The Flavor Bible, by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, but because “salty and fishy” is a description that applies about equally well to anchovies, I looked at the anchovy pairings. Page and Dornenburg’s highest recommendations are for olive oil and garlic, with capers, Parmesan cheese, parsley, and pasta also strongly recommended, followed by red pepper flakes somewhat further down on their list. In fact, these are exactly the ingredients for the relatively simple recipe Midnight Pasta with Garlic, Anchovy, Capers and Red Pepper offered by The New York Times a few months ago. In the recipe given here, I simply substituted the sea beans for the anchovies. Also, the Times recipe calls for ½ pound spaghetti, and I substituted about the same amount of conchiglie, a large elbow-shaped pasta.

Page and Dornenburg’s top two anchovy-paired ingredients – olive oil and garlic – constitute the defining ingredients for the simple, classic Italian pasta sauce “aglio e olio.” Not surprisingly, then, the above recipe is not so different from that given in the Dishesfrommykitchen blog post for “Aglio e olio (with sea bean, asparagus and broccolini),” which also calls for olive oil, garlic, red chili flakes, Parmesan cheese and either parsley or basil. The primary difference between this dish and mine is that I didn’t include the other vegetables, allowing the sea bean flavor to come through more strongly.  Since I love anchovies, this seemed like a good idea; if you don’t, you might prefer the original version with the other vegetables added, although I must say that while the saltiness of the sea beans was quite pronounced, I found that the seafood notes took a distinct back seat.  In fact, my wife, who doesn't like anchovies, tasted the dish and rendered the verdict “not fishy.” On the whole, I found the dish really delicious.

Just as their flavor pairing book didn’t mention sea beans, neither did Dornenburg and Page’s wine-pairing book, What to Drink with What You Eat. Again, substituting “anchovies” for “sea beans,” I was led to recommendations of a rose or dry sherry as the first choice, followed by Muscadet or Sauvignon Blanc. As I was pondering this question – I have a 2010 Basa Verdejo Rueda, a Spanish wine described as “like Sauvignon Blanc in a white tuxedo” – I also happened to go to a wine tasting at Toast, one of my favorite local wine stores. There, I was introduced to Vallformosa Lavina Blanco, a deliciously crisp white wine that is highly recommended with seafood of all kinds. In the end, I had it with a glass of each. After careful consideration, I think the somewhat more acidic Rueda stood up to the saltiness of the sea beans and the red pepper flakes much better than the lighter Lavina Blanco did.





Conchiglie with sea beans, garlic, capers and red pepper



Ingredients:

½ pound conchiglie or other pasta

3 Tbs extra virgin olive oil

4 cloves of garlic, chopped

1 small bunch (about 2 oz.) of sea beans, rinsed

1 Tbs capers, rinsed and chopped

½ tsp red pepper flakes

2 Tbs. chopped fresh parsely

Grated Parmesan cheese

Directions:

1. Cook the pasta according to the package directions in salted water until al dente.

2. While the pasta is cooking, heat the olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add the garlic and cook about a minute. Then, stir in the sea beans, capers, and red pepper flakes and sauté briefly (less than a minute). Remove from heat.

3. Drain the pasta and return it to the pot. Stir in the sauce mixture, mix thoroughly, sprinkle on the parsely and top with grated Parmesan.

4. Serve immediately with a Sauvignon Blanc or other seafood-friendly white wine.

A Most Entertaining Evening

On February 8, I attended an event at the Mark Twain House featuring Denis Horgan, a long-time columnist with the Hartford Courant who is now offering his thoughts on life, liberty, and the pursuit of whatever we pursue online. He has also turned his hand to fiction, and the event at the Mark Twain House included a reception beforehand with wine and some very nice munchies, and a book signing afterwards (the museum gift shop conveniently had copies of his latest short story collection Ninety-Eight Point Six...and Other Stories). I bought a copy that night and haven’t finished reading it yet, but based on the short story he read excerpts from – “The English Aisle,” which I have since read myself – I think I will really like the collection. I had expected the evening to consist mostly of Denis reading from one or more of his works, and I was initially a bit disappointed that it wasn’t that way, but my disappointment quickly abated. Instead, he gave a fascinating talk about his life (he was, for example, born in a taxi in Boston during a Thanksgiving snowstorm) and his somewhat complicated path to becoming a writer, a path that life seemed intent on deflecting him from (for example, during his long newspaper career, those in charge kept wanting him to edit and manage, and it took some persuasion on his part to be allowed to continue writing columns).




Among many other things, Denis discussed the motivation for – and obstacles to – what was originally intended as a novel but ultimately became his recent short story collection (he gives a more detailed account of this in the Preface of Ninety-Eight Point Six). Several of these stories deal with different aspects of identity, and the motivation for them was a real-life identity theft. As is often the case, the truth is stranger than fiction here, because the young woman whose identity was stolen had an extremely difficult time convincing anyone to take the problem seriously: the person who had stolen her identity hadn’t done anything bad with it – she got a job, paid her bills and filed her income taxes (this prompted a letter from the IRS to the original owner of the identity about the two conflicting tax returns she had filed). The story reminded me of an incident from a novel (I believe it was Peter Mayle’s Hotel Pastis, but I can’t find my copy just at the moment, so I’m not absolutely certain), where the protagonist’s significant other had had her credit card stolen, but he waited six months to report it because the thief was spending so much less than she was.



It is clear, both from the two stories of Horgan’s that I have read so far and from the things he talked about at the Mark Twain House, that his years in journalism have served him well, honing his eye for the details that convey so much about his characters. For example, in one of his stories, “The Sound of Shadows,” the main character (Patrick) is trying to straighten out his stolen identity after the IRS has called him about his duplicate tax filing (“Frankly, we don’t care who you are so long as you follow the rules, and the rules say one return from one person not two returns from one person or no returns from any person. Do you see that simple symmetry? It is elegant. Smooth. …”). One of the things he does is call the Social Security offices, where he is ultimately able to speak to an actual person, but it isn’t much help:

“No, you are just mistaken. Because it cannot happen, therefore it did not happen. That’s only logical, isn’t it? How can something happen that cannot happen? …”

This incident is particularly hilarious to me because my wife experienced almost exactly the same conversation when we lived in Switzerland, but in a very different context. We were guests of the university I was visiting, and they provided us with a superbly furnished apartment, one that included everything from bed linens (ironed and folded) to salt and pepper shakers. And a checklist. When the housing people stopped by to collect the checklist, my wife noted that the teaspoons didn’t match, as several of them were a different style from the others, with “SwissAir” stamped on the back. The housing guy was nearly speechless, able only to mumble over and over again, “This is not possible. It is not possible.” After a few moments, he was able to regain his composure enough to collect the offensively “impossible” SwissAir spoons, take them away, and replace them with a new, complete set of “possible” spoons.



As I said, I haven’t finished reading Denis Horgan’s collection of short stories yet, but the two samples I have read so far have left me howling with laughter in places, so I plan to finish it soon and will have more to say about it then.

Margaret Wittenberg’s New Good Food

I recently received a copy of New Good Food by Margaret Wittenberg as a gift, a book that I have admired for some time now, thumbing through display copies when the chance presented itself. As she notes in the book’s introduction, the author is a vice president of Whole Foods Market, so it is not surprising that I discovered it at our local Whole Foods, or that the store carries many of the less common food items she discusses. She begins the book by describing herself as “an intuitive cook” who can visualize how different ingredients play together in terms of flavor, texture, and presentation. She goes on to say (on page ix):

“Although some of my knack is likely innate, much of it I developed through experience, by cooking, observing, listening, and reading.”

The intent of her book is clear: to share this information with others, focusing on a wide range of ingredients that may be very traditional, but not all in the same culture. In just under 300 pages, this book is organized into 13 un-numbered chapters, with the following titles:

• Fruits and Vegetables

• Grains

• Whole Grain and Specialty Flours

• Breads

• Pasta and Noodles

• Beans, Peas, and Lentils

• Nuts and Seeds

• Culinary Oils

• Meat, Poultry, and Eggs

• Dairy Products

• Seafood

• Essential Seasonings

• Sweeteners

Each chapter begins with some general discussion of the topic at hand (for example, the Grains chapter includes a discussion of how much whole grain to prepare: 1 cup of uncooked grain is said to typically feed 2 to 4 people) and most of the chapters conclude with an “Exploring” section that gives brief descriptions of a wide range of ingredient varieties. For example, the section on “Exploring Pasta and Noodles” covers both the familiar, like Italian-style dried pasta, and the more exotic, like pastas made from Jerusalem artichokes, quinoa, and spelt. These descriptions range from a couple of sentences to about half a page. One of the really intriguing short descriptions is that of lotus root soba, a Japanese noodle that is characterized as having “a delicious nutty flavor and aroma similar to that of freshly cooked lotus root.”



One of the most interesting chapters is the penultimate one on “Essential Seasonings,” whose title left me expecting a discussion of spices. While the chapter does begin with four pages on salt, this is not followed by discussions of other “standard” flavoring ingredients like pepper, nutmeg, or tarragon, but instead goes into reasonably detailed treatments of miso, tamari and shoyu, umeboshi plums, and a variety of sea vegetables, including Irish moss, kombu, and sea beans. Besides describing these unusual edibles, the book gives brief but useful cooking instructions. To cook sea lettuce, for example, the book notes that “it’s best to combine it with other ingredients to minimize its slightly bitter taste.” Some of what I regard as more standard “seasoning ingredients” are discussed in the book, but mostly in the earlier chapter on “Fruits and Vegetables,” which devotes about a page and a half to fresh herbs and about four and a half pages to peppers, including tables describing both fresh and dried peppers.



In general, I like this book a lot, in part because of the range of unusual new (to me) foods it describes, including everything from lotus root (which I have seen but haven’t yet had the opportunity to taste) to edible flowers (nasturtiums are described as “sweet, mustardlike”), from teff (a gluten-free whole grain with extremely small seeds) to Tongues of Fire (an Italian bean, said to be a good addition to pasta dishes and soups), from birch syrup (really, from birch trees) to broccoflower (a cross between broccoli and cauliflower; I’m familiar with this one from when I lived in Switzerland: it’s delicious). Just reading through the descriptions makes me hungry and most curious. For example, the umeboshi plums I mentioned above are “made from sour, unripe fruits of the ume tree, which is native to China.” The description (on page 231) goes on to say that these fruits are closer to apricots than to plums (pluots, anyone?) and that their preparation is fairly intricate: they are pickled in sea salt for about a month, dried in the sun, other ingredients are added (dark red shiso leaves), they continue to soak, then they are finally aged in barrels for about a year. In addition, the brine from the plums is sold as umeboshi vinegar to be used as a condiment. Somehow, I have to find these things and try them.



The one potential shortcoming of the book – and this isn’t really a fault of the book, but just part of the challenge of exploring new tastes – is that my favorite flavor pairing book, The Flavor Bible by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg doesn’t have anything to say about a lot of the intriguing ingredients in New Good Food. In some cases, there are enough “near matches” that this isn’t a problem: while The Flavor Bible doesn’t have an entry for “broccoflower,” it does list both “broccoli” and “cauliflower,” so it shouldn’t be too difficult to look for compatible ingredients common to both lists and try them (for example, cheese is highly recommended for both, especially cheddar, Parmesan or goat cheese, as are unsalted butter, garlic, and lemon juice). The more challenging cases are things like sea beans and umeboshi plums, although a careful reading of both books does come to the rescue here. Specifically, in her chapter on “Essential Seasonings,” one reason that Wittenberg includes so many unexpected (to me, at least) “non-spice” flavorings is that she begins the chapter with a discussion of umami. This “fifth flavor” – in addition to the “standard four” many of us learned in school: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter – is commonly associated with things like mushrooms, ripe tomatoes, and cured ham. To this list, Wittenberg adds “sea vegetables, soy sauce, and miso,” and her chapter emphasizes “umami flavoring ingredients.” This provides the needed link to The Flavor Bible, which has an entry on “umami” (page 355), listing everything from anchovies to walnuts, including some of my favorite flavors of all time: aged Gruyere, clams, Asian fish sauce, lobster, oysters, pork, potatoes, sardines, meat-based sauces, dry-aged, grilled steaks, and truffles. (Now, I have definitely got to find some umeboshi plums to try …).

Finally, it is important to note that, while the flavor pairings are less extensive than those given in The Flavor Bible, Wittenberg’s book does include recommended pairings in many of her descriptions. For example, in her description of the gluten-free grain Job’s Tears, Wittenberg recommends ginger, parsley, onions and chives as flavor enhancers. Similarly, it’s good to know that Jacob’s Cattle Beans make “the basis for a simple salad when combined with fresh herbs and a splash of olive oil.” Hmm,…how about rau ram (Vietnamese coriander), the fresh herb described on page 17 as having a “spicy taste and aroma similar to those of lemon and coriander”?



It is clear that this is going to be a fun manuscript to munch my way through.

Brazilian eggplant ratatouille

Recently, a local farm stand had Brazilian eggplants. These were a completely new discovery for me, so much so that I had absolutely no idea what they were when I first saw them. As the photograph below illustrates, they are a beautiful red vegetable, not much larger than an egg (at first, I thought they were some kind of pepper). Someone at the farm stand who was familiar with them told me that they were milder than regular eggplants, and they worked very well in ratatouille.

None of my hardcopy culinary references had anything to say about Brazilian eggplants, and a brief Internet search didn’t really turn up a lot, either, although one “near miss” actually worked out extremely well. This was the recipe for “eggplant and tomato salad” described in Rea Frey's blog Clean Convenient Cuisine.  Her January 14, 2011 post describes the Brazilian-themed Texas de Brazil restaurant chain that grew out of a restaurant in Brazil, formed a U.S. partnership in Dallas, and now has a number of other U.S. locations, including one in Chicago. The post gives a recipe that calls for one large regular eggplant, but we prepared a variation using five Brazilian eggplants instead. We also added some shallots and modified the spices slighlty, replacing the regular paprika in the original recipe with Szeged Hungarian hot paprika. I call the end result ratatouille here because it seems consistent with the definition of this classic French dish given in Sharon Tyler Herbst's Food Lover's Companion:

“A popular dish from the French region of Provence that combines eggplant, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, zucchini, garlic and herbs – all simmered in olive oil.”

She also notes that “the vegetables can vary according to the cook,” and this recipe does that, basically omitting the zucchini and bell peppers. The result was delicious and provided an excellent accompaniment to a three-egg omelet made with Irish bacon, sautéed baby bok choy, and grated Fontina cheese. We served it with a Smoking Loon Chardonnay and it made a fabulous dinner.



Ingredients:

- 5 Brazilian eggplants (approximately one pound in total)

- 1 15 ounce can whole tomatoes

- 1 large shallot, chopped

- 4 garlic cloves, chopped

- 1/3 cup cilantro, chopped

- 1 tablespoon Hungarian hot paprika

- 1 tablespoon ground cumin

- 1 tablespoon cayenne pepper

- kosher salt and ground black pepper to taste



Directions:

- Cut the Brazilian eggplants into cubes, about one inch, and let it rest in a colander for 30 minutes (this is a suggestion given in Rea Frey's post, from Evandro Caregnato, Culinary Director of Texas de Brazil, who notes that it improves the taste of the dish by eliminating some of the eggplant's bitter liquids).

- Heat the olive oil in a large pan and cook the shallots until they are translucent. Then add the garlic and cook until it is soft.

- Chop the whole tomatoes in large pieces and mix them, along with their liquid, into the pan with the shallots and garlic. Add the eggplant cubes, cilantro, Hungarian paprika, cumin, cayenne pepper, ground black pepper and kosher salt.

- Cover and simmer 20 to 30 minutes, until the eggplant is soft, checking periodically and adding water if necessary to keep the vegetables from burning.

Discovering callaloo

Recently, callaloo appeared at our local Whole Foods Market: a leafy green, similar in appearance to Swiss chard, the name alone seemed reason enough to try it. So, we bought a bunch, washed it, removed the thick stalks, tore the leaves into small pieces, and sautéed them in olive oil and garlic. Instantly, they became my wife’s favorite green of all time, and I would have to agree that they were about the best greens I have ever tasted.




Wanting to know more about this newly discovered culinary treasure, I turned first to my two favorite sources of information about unusual edibles. According to Sharon Tyler Herbst’s Food Lover's Companion, The (Barron's Cooking Guide) 3rd Edition, the term callaloo refers to either “the large, edible green leaves of the taro root,” or to “a Caribbean soup made with callaloo greens,” along with a bunch of other ingredients. She also notes that callaloo greens are “popular in the Caribbean islands cooked as one would prepare turnip or collard greens.” In The Penguin Companion to Food, Alan Davidson suggests that the term callaloo applies to a wider range of greens, including in addition to taro, the leaves of various species of malanga, amaranth, and pokeweed, among others.



In The Complete Book of Caribbean Cooking, Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz gives five different recipes for the soup, with three different spellings depending on where it originates: three different recipes for Le Calalou from Gaudaloupe, Martinique, and Haiti; one for Callau from St. Lucia; and finally one for Callaloo from Trinidad. All of these recipes call for their namesake green, along with about ten or so other ingredients, and they all sound delicious to me. Unfortunately, the one other ingredient that all five of these recipes have in common is okra, which my wife absolutely detests. So, it is unlikely that we will be trying the soup any time in the near future.



Because callaloo isn’t commonly available, Ortiz recommends Swiss chard, fresh spinach, or Chinese spinach as possible substitutes. Of course, if callaloo is available, we can reverse her recommendations and substitute callaloo for these other greens. This is essentially what we did the first time we cooked it, finding the sautéed callaloo described at the beginning of this post an excellent accompaniment to grilled salmon. Also, although she doesn’t mention callaloo, Aliza Green has a chapter on “Greens for Cooking” in her book, Starting with Ingredients, where she offers the following points of advice. First, she notes that greens are typically fairly strongly flavored, motivating two common cooking techniques: first, slow cooking is popular both to tenderize them and to mellow out their flavor, and second, they are often paired with garlic, hot peppers, vinegar, or smoked meats that stand up well and balance out their flavor. With callaloo, we found that garlic, salt and pepper worked extremely well, but I am salivating over the thought of adding red pepper flakes and/or a nice smoky bacon. Aliza Green also notes that when cooking with greens – including spinach, which she covers in a whole separate chapter of her book – “a lot goes but a little way:” these greens tend to cook down a lot, so it is important to start with what may look like a much larger bunch than you need. In their book, The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs, Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg don’t mention callaloo, either, but they do devote the better part of two pages to greens, both in general and specific types like collard greens and turnip greens. Their highest recommendations for pairing go to garlic, olive oil, and various kinds of cheese (especially grated Asiago, Jack, or Parmesan), but they also give bacon and other smoked meats consistently high marks.



Finally, when it comes to pairing greens with wine, Dornenburg and Page’s other book, What to Drink with What You Eat: The Definitive Guide to Pairing Food with Wine, Beer, Spirits, Coffee, Tea - Even Water - Based on Expert Advice from America's Best Sommeliers consistently recommends in favor of white wines – especially Sauvignon Blanc – and against reds. Since they also recommend Sauvignon Blanc with garlic and seafood (especially poached or lightly grilled), that’s what we served the night we had our sautéed callaloo with grilled salmon.  It made for one of those meals that linger pleasantly on the tastebuds but, sadly, don't leave anything behind to munch on later.

Brunch in Brooklyn

Last weekend, my wife and I got a spur of the moment invitation from her daughter and son-in-law to join a group visiting one of her friends in Brooklyn. So, we drove over for brunch. It was a beautiful day and neither one of us had ever been there before, so it was kind of an adventure.

Brunch was at the Clover Club and it was well worth the excursion. Our friend from Brooklyn particularly recommended the potato cakes with truffle crème fraiche, and they were almost worth the drive by themselves. The Clover Club also featured a three bacon sampler, ideal for those who can't make up their mind or just want to try a bit of it all: the ensemble included maple, black pepper, and duck bacon.  I think my favorite was the black pepper bacon, but I would happily have any or all of them again.  My wife loves rhubarb and grows it in the back yard, so she got the ricotta pancakes with vanilla poached rhubarb and strawberry curd, which were as good as they sound. She also makes a really great lemon curd - our neighbor requests it regularly - but strawberry curd was an entirely new concept to me.  A quick check of the curd entry in Food Lover's Companion, The (Barron's Cooking Guide) 3rd Edition reveals the usual suspects - lemon, lime and orange curd - but no strawberry.  (This expansion of the known curd universe does get me thinking, though: I bet kumquat curd would be fabulous.)  I had the baked eggs with chorizo and manchego, which were also really delicious, but when the meals were delivered, I was accidentally given the baked eggs with truffles and leeks that one of the other members of our gathering had ordered. Good as mine was – and it was – I did find myself wishing I had ordered what was originally set in front of me: the truffle smell alone had me drooling all the way home afterwards, and it was enough for me to encourage my wife to put truffle salt on the French fries she made the following night to go with dinner. But probably the best dish of the day was the pork ‘n grits that one of the other members of our group ordered: it included cheddar grits, shallots, a sunnyside-up egg, and sourdough toast. All in all, it was a great day, described somewhat more eloquently by our friend Karen in her blog The Bikini Wax Chronicles (see the July 19th post).

After brunch, we went across the street to Stinky Bklyn, a really fabulous little store that features a beer-of-the-month club, sweets and sandwiches, a tremendous assortment of cheeses (including some great stinky ones, of course), sausages of various descriptions, and a lot of other things. Their on-line shopping guide includes 67 cheeses, ranging from abbaye de belloc, a French sheep’s milk cheese, to zamorano, a sheep’s milk cheese from Spain (to avert the risk of allowing two points to determine a line here, I should note that they also have cheeses made from cow’s milk or goat’s milk, along with some combination-based varieties like the Italian toma della rocca, made from all three).  The shopping guide also list somewhat more limited assortments of meats, chocolates, oils and vinegars, mustards, and pickles.  To help understand the similarities and differences between the vast array of cheeses that shops like Stinky Bklyn carry, their website provides a simple breakdown into five basic types. I won’t try to repeat the whole thing here, but I offer the following tidbits to give an idea of both their classification scheme and their entertaining writing style:

Type 1 – “uncomplicated little fellows,” these are fairly young, soft cheeses like Brie, triple creams, and Robiolas



Type 2 – aged longer (6 – 12 months), firmer cheeses like pecorino or manchego



Type 3 – “complex recipe cheeses,” usually at least 1 year old, includes both Gouda and Gruyere



Type 4 – “Stinky cheese! O the sublime washed rind.” This group includes things like Taleggio, and the description notes that “if it smells and has a bright orange crust, chances are you’ve got one of these guys”



Type 5 – blue cheeses like Roquefort and Stilton.

We loved roaming around in the Stinky Bklyn store and we could have easily spent hours there, rummaging among the goodies.  But we had limited time, so in the end we only brought back two culinary treasures. The first one was Red Meck, a raw cow’s milk cheese from Mecklenberg, NY, with the following description on its label: “Gouda or gruyere? Why not both?”, which would seem to put it squarely into the Type 3 class defined above. However you classify it, the stuff is delicious and I wish we had bought more. Our other find was biellese saucisson basque, a superb salami, sliced very thinly, that leaves a most pleasant burning sensation at the back of the throat after you eat a slice. It reminds me a bit of the hottest salami I have ever had, a great find at the indoor market in Tampere, Finland when I was living there.  It was imported from Italy, absolutely firey, and I have never been able to find it anywhere else.  The Stinky Bklyn salami that we did find is great on sandwiches or in omelets, and again, it is clear in retrospect that we didn’t bring back enough. Sadly, neither of these particular delicacies is listed on their website.



I guess it means we will have to arrange another brunch.

Balti spiced chicken with fennel and forbidden rice

Intrigued by the name and description, I recently bought a small jar of Balti Seasoning from Penzeys. According to Alan Davidson’s The Penguin Companion to Food, the term “Balti” refers to both the native cuisine of Baltistan, a region in the far northeast of Pakistan, and a wok-style pan used extensively in the preparation of Balti cuisine. I bought a jar of the spice both because it was something new and different that I had never heard of before, and because it smelled delicious. A quick Internet search suggests that many people have been intrigued by the spice’s magnificent aroma, but – like me – didn’t really know what to do with it (see, for example, "Looking for recipes for Penzeys Balti Seasoning").  One intriguing entry is that from Grace (“Unhelpful bile spewer”), who says, in part:

“I LOVE Indian food, and my absolute favorite dish is Matter Paneer (Peas and Cheese). When I smelled the Balti seasoning at Penzey’s, it smelled just like this dish to me so I had to buy it.”

She goes on to say that she can’t find a recipe for the dish that uses Balti Seasoning, and that she would really like any recipe that uses the spice. Like Grace, I don’t have a recipe, but my wife and I recently made one up that we thought turned out very well, so I have included it at the end of this post.



The seasoning mix itself is described on the Penzeys website, which lists the 18 ingredients that make up the blend. Among other things, this mix includes garlic and fennel, cumin and coriander, cardamom and clove, cilantro, star anise, and charnushka. I’m afraid I wasn’t familiar with this last ingredient, either, but Penzeys also sells this separately, and their catalog entry has this to say about it:

“Tiny, black, smoky flavored seeds found atop Jewish rye bread in New York. Used in Armenia, Lebanon, Israel, and India. Also referred to as black caraway or kalonji, charnushka is used heavily in garam masala.”

Since the Balti Seasoning mix includes both garlic and fennel – and we really like both of these ingredients – it seemed natural to include them in the chicken dish. We made it in a crock pot since we were both busy that day, and that allowed the flavors to blend together quite nicely. We served it with “forbidden rice,” the Chinese black rice that we had seen many times, but had never actually tried – it was a spectacular choice. In Ruth Reichel’s Gourmet Today: More than 1000 All-New Recipes for the Contemporary Kitchen, she gives a recipe for “Black Rice with Scallions and Sweet Potatoes” (page 260), where she notes that, “The stunning color of this rice comes from the layers of black bran surrounding the white kernel.”



We also added one more “secret ingredient” to the dish: mushroom powder. This is something we were introduced to at the fabulous mushroom stand at the Saturday morning market in Oerlikon, Switzerland when we lived there.  You never knew what you would find there.  Our standard order was “ein hundert gramm gemischte” - about a quarter of a pound of assorted mushrooms - that might include every color of the rainbow and just about every strange shape you could think of.  One day, the mushroom guy introduced us to mushroom powder, which we came to love as a flavoring ingredient.  For a long time after we returned to the U.S., we couldn't find mushroom powder anywhere, until we took a culinary excursion to New York and discovered Kalustyan's.  They carry an amazing range of edibles, including mushroom powder, which is available on-line (just follow the links from their main page to “Mushrooms” and look down the list for “Mushroom Blend Powder”).   According to The Ultimate Mushroom Book A Complete Guide to Identifying, Picking and Using Mushrooms--A Photographic A-Z of Types and 100 Original Recipes, by Peter Jordan and Steven Wheeler, mushroom powder is made from finely ground dried mushrooms that can be used in soups, stews, and curries, but should be used sparingly.  We used a bit of it in the recipe below to bring out the flavor of the fresh mushrooms.  To serve, we paired the dish with a Pinot Grigio, which Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page recommend in their book, What to Drink with What You Eat: The Definitive Guide to Pairing Food with Wine, Beer, Spirits, Coffee, Tea - Even Water - Based on Expert Advice from America's Best Sommeliers with chicken (highly recommended), garlic, fennel, and tomatoes, all of which we had included in our recipe.



Ingredients:



2 chicken breasts (i.e., 4 halves)

1 large fennel bulb

1 large leek

4 tomatoes, quartered

1 cup forbidden (black) rice

4 cups chicken stock (2 cups for the rice, 2 cups in the crockpot)

½ pound fresh baby bella mushrooms, sliced

3 cloves garlic, minced

2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons olive oil

½ teaspoon Penzeys Balti Seasoning (¼ teaspoon to sauté chicken, ¼ teaspoon for the crockpot)

¼ teaspoon mushroom powder ( 1/8 teaspoon to sauté chicken, 1/8 teaspoon for the crockpot)

salt and pepper, to taste



Directions:



1. Wash and pat dry the chicken breasts and sprinkle with salt, pepper, ¼ teaspoon Balti Seasoning, and 1/8 teaspoon mushroom powder.  Sauté 3 minutes per side.

2. Put the chicken breasts in the bottom of the crockpot.  Roughly chop the fennel, wash and chop the leek, and add to the crockpot, along with the mushrooms and the tomatoes.  Add 2 cups of chicken stock and the minced garlic.  Sprinkle with the remaining ¼ teaspoon Balti Seasoning and the remaining 1/8 teaspoon mushroom powder, cover the crockpot and cook on low for 6 to 8 hours, stirring the ingredients once or twice near the end of the cooking time.

3. During the last 40 minutes of the cooking time, melt the butter in a sauce pan, add the rice and sauté for a few minutes. Add the remaining 2 cups of chicken stock, reduce the heat, cover and simmer for 30 minutes.