Category: Food

A vintage copper saucepan, circa 1970, that I recently bought on eBay. It was originally sold by Williams Sonoma and is stamped “Made in France.” It probably was made by Mauviel. I believe the French would call it a “sauteuse evasée,” or flared sauté pan.

Last month, I wrote about buying a Lodge cast-iron wok. I have diligently seasoned the wok, and after a month of use I find that it’s hard to make things stick. For example, the wok browns tofu perfectly. The tofu remains slippery and stick-free from the moment it hits the oil until I slide the tofu out of the wok a few minutes later. I am ashamed of having forgotten — if in fact I ever knew — that our grandparents had nonstick cookware. It was called cast iron.

The trick with cast iron is the seasoning. That is a scientific process. A blogger has described this process — and the science of it — here. In a nutshell, a thin layer of oil applied to the cast iron and then heated above the oil’s smoke point will turn the oil into a polymer. Not all oils work equally well. Flaxseed oil is said to be best because it is a “drying oil.” Once I understood that flaxseed is a drying oil, I realized that I was working with the same old-fashioned principle that I applied to the abbey’s floors and woodwork. I rubbed a thin layer of boiled linseed oil on the wood, then I let it dry. Boiled linseed oil is a drying oil. Then I applied more oil, and more again. The wood absorbs the oil, and the oil dries to a hard polymer finish. Over time, the color of the wood darkens into a beautiful, organic, natural-looking finish that (at least in my opinion) cannot be matched by modern finishes. It’s a floor finish that loves paste wax.

But back to the wok. Six times, the wok went into a 550-degree oven with a thin coating of flaxseed oil. Thereafter, if you take care of the wok properly, the seasoning will continue to get better.

Having learned this old-fashionedness with the wok, I gained a new respect for my two iron skillets and my iron Dutch oven. I re-seasoned them. I am coming around to the view (which I will test over time) that I will retire most of my other cookware and work mostly with three types of cookware hereafter:

1. Cast iron, when cooking with oil

2. Corning Visions glass cookware, when cooking with water

3. A tin-lined copper saucepan when I need the superior conductivity of copper

Though clear glass cookware is new (thanks to Corning), ceramics, a close cousin of glass, have been used for cooking for thousands of years. Glass is inert. Corning Visions glassware conducts heat better than you might think. You also can see through it. As for copper, its use for cookware also goes back for thousands of years, much longer than iron. Copper conducts heat far better than any other affordable metal (silver is slightly better).

No cooking surface is perfect. Among the considerations are: How well does it conduct heat? Do foods stick? Is it toxic? Is it easy to break? Since no cooking surface is perfect, it’s up to us to choose what works best for us, or for whatever we’re cooking. During the past fifty to seventy-five years, choosing cookware has been particularly confusing because there were new options such as Teflon, aluminum, and sandwiches of layered metals.

I had been intrigued with the idea of induction ranges. They heat quickly, and it’s said that they adjust up and down as fast as gas. To test induction cooking, I bought an 1800-watt induction hot plate. I have not been impressed. I haven’t found it to be significantly faster than or more adjustable than my modest glasstop range. I will not be trading in my glasstop range for an induction range. There are two reasons, really: I don’t think that induction is that much better; and I’d have to give up using glass and copper cookware including a copper kettle. The quickness of an induction range can easily be canceled out by the poor conductivity of a stainless steel pot.

Cast iron cookware seems to be making a comeback. In the U.S., Lodge now makes most of it. Vintage cast iron cookware now fetches handsome prices on eBay. Griswold cast iron cookware, which has not been made since the 1950s, is said to be the best. Griswold’s superiority, according to collectors, is that it was machine-polished after it was cast, so that the surface is smoother. Lodge, on the other hand, is not polished, probably because polishing it would double the cost. I’ve looked at a lot of Griswold cookware on eBay, but I have not bought any. That’s because the pitting and scraping of age and use seems to make the cooking surface much rougher than new Lodge ironware. And the surface of Lodge cookware gets smoother with proper use.

As for copper cookware, here’s a nerdy article on its benefits and history. The thing about copper cookware is that it must be lined, because too much copper can be toxic. Tin, which is inert, has been traditionally used for lining copper pots. These days, stainless steel is often used. For a number of reasons, I prefer tin, though the tin lining must be treated with respect. Copper pots are very valuable and hold their value. They can be re-tinned. Here’s a link to a company that does re-tinning. Good copper pots are heirloom items.

A good cooking pot becomes a kind of pet. And a really good cooking pot becomes an heirloom.

My usual vehicles for chocolate fixes are 72 percent dark chocolate bars from Whole Foods. Last week, I ran out — a rare occurrence. That left me to figure out what to do with cocoa (which I always have) that would provide a chocolate fix with a minimum of carbs.

The first experiment yielded dry, uninteresting brownies. I realized that, if you reduce the amount of fat and sugar, the brownies are no fun. Then I thought of apple sauce (or apple butter). It was easy to make that connection because my favorite cake since childhood is a chocolate apple sauce cake in which the only liquid ingredient is apple sauce. There aren’t even any eggs in the cake. The pectin in apple sauce is a remarkably good replacement for eggs.

I actually made a recipe:

1 cup barley flour

1/4 cup olive oil

For the flour, substitute whole wheat flour or any flour. Apple sauce or apple butter would work equally well. Honey or even molasses would work as well as maple syrup. Any kind of oil, or even butter, could be substituted for the olive oil.

Mix everything together and pour the batter into an oiled 8-inch baking pan. My brownies needed about 25 minutes at 350 degrees. They’re done as soon as they pass the toothpick test.

I wouldn’t say that these brownies are chewy, exactly. But they’re very moist and satisfying. They’re also cheaper than chocolate bars.

I posted a few days ago about a dessert pumpkin pie with a barley crust. But with more than twenty little pumpkins stored under the stairs that need to be used before spring is over, dessert pies wouldn’t be very healthy, with no one but me to eat them. So here is a quiche-like vegetable pie, with a reasonably low level of carbs as well as fat.

In my previous experiment with barley crust, I used the amount of oil that I would normally use for a wheat crust. That was entirely too much oil for the barley. The crust was too crumbly. This time I reduced the amount of oil by half (to a quarter of a cup for two cups of flour) and made up for it with water. That worked great.

My little pumpkins look so magical that I have a hard time taking a knife to them and eating them. I have to remind myself that that’s why I grew them, and that, left under the stairs, they’d only rot. I do take a portrait each time I use one. Though these are true pumpkins, they’re also like winter squash. So if you don’t have baskets of little pumpkins under your stairs, you could use winter squash for a tarte like this. I used two large stalks of leeks, lightly sautéed in olive oil. The other ingredients are two eggs, some grated Gruyère, and seasonings including a quarter teaspoon of nutmug. The top of the tarte is sprinkled with grated Gruyère and some parmesan.

The dough for barley crust is stickier and more fragile than a wheat crust. I roll pie crusts between sheets of waxed paper. To keep the barley crust from sticking to the paper, I oiled the paper lightly with olive oil.

The tarte was delicious. Many kinds of vegetables can be turned into a tarte. A turnip tarte? Why not. Next time, I’d like to impart a little roasted flavor into the tarte, maybe with some browned onions or shallots. Also, I’ll oil the pie plate next time, to give the bottom crust a bit more crustiness.

Though this tarte looks like a quiche, there is no milk or cream in it. Just two eggs and some grated cheese with vegetables.

The crust is organic hulled barley, which I grind into flour myself.

Portrait of the little pumpkin that was dispatched for this tarte, with a spice bottle for scale

The top of the pumpkin browns because I used the small oven. But the texture of the pumpkin inside is more steamed than baked.

I wrote about Scotch broth here five years ago, and I mentioned that the best soup I’ve ever had was a Scotch broth. It was in Edinburgh, on my first trip to Scotland in the mid-1980s. Though it was a vegetable soup, I might not have known at the time that the stock was based on sheep bones.

With Scotch broth, the broth is everything. It’s the sheep bones, I’m sure, that give authentic Scotch broth its sturdy substance. I’ve never made broth with sheep bones, so I’m always looking for substitutes. It occurred to me that the cooking water from chickpeas might help. I’ve never tried it, but I’ve read that if the cooking water from chickpeas is concentrated enough, it will whip up like egg whites. For this pot of broth, I used about one-quarter chickpea broth, one-quarter pumpkin juice (drained from a baked pumpkin that went into a pie), and one-half water. The barley, which is essential to Scotch broth, also helps with thickening the broth.

I’ve been known to make a slightly reddened Scotch broth with a touch of tomato paste. But the Scotch broth that I had in Edinburgh was green — from split peas and leeks, I’m sure. I went for green on this pot of Scotch broth, and I got the color I wanted.

The ingredients are the stock, barley, dried split peas, some rutabaga (which I believe the Scottish call a swede), onion, carrot, celery, and leeks. The soup needs a long, slow simmer. I added the leeks for the last 20 minutes of cooking.

Pumpkin pie with barley-flour crust

I have written before about my experiments with home-ground barley flour: When is it a good substitute for wheat, and when is it not? Barley flour makes a very good pie crust.

It’s good, I would say, but not perfect. Made with the usual amount of oil, the barley-flour crust is too crumbly. But, particularly for the parts of the crust that stand above the pie and are exposed to the heat of the oven, the tasty toastiness of the barley crust is fantastic. For my next experiment with barley-flour pie crusts, I will reduce the amount of oil in the crust and compensate with water.

Over the next few days, I will eat this whole pie. So I wanted it to be as healthy and low-calorie as possible. I reduced the amount of sugar by half — from three-quarters of a cup to half a cup. It still tastes like a desert. But the reduced sugar actually enhances the pumpkin taste. And the pumpkin taste is very good. I can even imagine a savory vegetable pie based on pumpkin with no sugar at all. These are my organic homegrown pumpkins. I still have lots of pumpkins left from the 2018 pumpkin crop, stored in baskets under the stairs.

Something about the barley taste is very old-fashioned. The taste of toasted barley is so good that I Googled for “toasted barley flour,” thinking that it surely must be a thing. Sure enough, toasted barley flour is a staple of Tibetan cuisine.

The old-fashioned taste of the barley and the reduced sugar produced a kind of austere pie that actually was appealing in its austerity. Pumpkins are a New World food. But if some monks in Gaul in the 13th Century had some pumpkin pie, then this is what I’d imagine it would taste like.

One of my little pumpkins after baking. I’ll scoop out the flesh and give the rest to the chickens.

Fresh-ground barley flour