Cooking

Always start with the WHY.

A delicious bowl of Vietnamese beef rice-noodle soup.

Here is my first bowl of homemade beef pho, a Vietnamese soup, and it was DELICIOUS!

Like many Asian soups it’s traditionally eaten with a spoon and chopsticks, although to be honest this is a Chinese spoon and Chinese chopsticks.

But . . . how did the journey start?

Beef is expensive in Switzerland, in my view almost prohibitively so. But . . . if you are willing to buy very large portions at stores aimed at restaurateurs, you can get some terrific deals. So I started with 2.5 kg of Rinds-Entrecôte that I bought at a Swiss wholesale supermarket called Aligro, This piece cost around CHF 50, which seems like a lot of money, but I reckon I get get at least 10-12 meals from this amount, if not more, making it far less expensive than any meat I could find at the supermarket.

I then loaded a few thick slices of this into my new Ninja Foodie Multikocher, which is a combination air fryer, slow cooker, steamer, high pressure cooker. Since I have a small kitchen, my thinking here is that I could drastically reduce my cleaning needs – and so far, this has been indeed true. It is much easier to cook a wide range of things and clean up, than by using pots and pans and an oven, which no matter how careful I am, always seems to leave drips and drops and splatters on my cooktop.

I added water, an onion, two large broccoli stalks, plus authentic Vietnamese flavoring,

This is what it looked like after slow cooking for 12 hours.

I next assembled the ingredients – to be honest, many more ingredients than I’ve ever found when I was in Vietnam, but nevertheless tasty things:

Interestingly, the Swiss don’t have much of an appetite for some of these things, so I purchased the cilantro leaves at a Turkish supermarket, along with the exotic peppers. The rice noodles are from Thailand, not Vietnam.

And after adding them all together, we arrive back at the beginning.

A delicious bowl of Vietnamese beef rice-noodle soup.

It’s a big mystery that I want to clear up someday: why they sell metal cans of clams in the US, and the clams are chewy and firm; whereas in Europe you get little bottles of clams, and the clams are soft and squishy.  Different clams? Different ways to prepare them?

I guess the key point is you can’t really prepare a good bowl of clam chowder without chewy clams.  So, whenever I get back to the States, it is always a treat if I can bring back a can with me – or, in this case, my parents sent me a can in a package mailed to Switzerland.

Many people use a flour-based rue to add thickness to clam chowder, but I prefer to use the natural starch in potatos.

So, I started with some very firm mashed potatoes,

To be honest, if you want canned soup, there is probably no better spot on Earth than in the US to get it – even the smallest supermarket will have literally dozens of varieties – but . . . it is not very good.

If you want truly gourmet-level canned soup, then Germany is where you want to be.

I added this to thicken up some gourmet shrimp soup that I bought in Germany,

I then added both a tin of chewy clams from the US, plus two tins of crab meat from France. At least, at once point in its lifecycle it was crab meat – what comes out of the tin is more like a crab paste because it’s broken into so many tiny pieces:

I wanted a bit more liquid than I had, so I added some instant white asparagus soup,

Finally, I added about two pounds of frozen shrimp (not shown) and four large pieces of fresh salmon, two of which are shown here:

I cooked this at 60 C for about 20 minutes, the idea being to very gently cook the salmon, so that it stays moist and soft, not firm and chewy.

Herbwise, I added Thymian and a bit of black pepper, plus a very generous dose of Worcestershire sauce.

And this was the result, a truly delicious bowl of something very akin to New England Clam Chowder,

As usual when I cook, I made enough for around 7-8 meals.

This wasn’t just any shrimp and broccoli; it was my shrimp and broccoli, cooked in a new pot that I purchased at the Aligro wholesale market in Zürich.

Well, I don’t know if the word instant is the right word, but you can buy pre-cooked venison in a venison sauce, so you just need to heat it up.  A single package is quite expensive as CHF 20, but I was able to divide it up into three separate meals:

I really like the way this snap turned out. I know there are professional food artists that make money by photographing food – and they have all sorts of tricks such as spraying them with fine mists of different chemicals to get that ideal, mouth-watering sheen. Here I did nothing of the sort – just pointed and shooted.

First things first, this is Turkish tea, as it is drunk, on the left. It is always served in a tulip-shaped tea glass, but nobody seem to know the history of this tradition.

The tea shown on the left is obtained by partially filling the glass with a small portion of a very, very strong amount of the tea that has been steeping for at least 30 minutes:

But how do you steep tea for so long and still keep it warm?  Here is the secret, my new Bosch Turkish tea cooker:

 

And here you can see it in action. The top glass kettle is made to hold a large portion of tea and let it steep for a long time at temperature, because it sits directly over a heated amount of hot, pure water below, that is then used for diluting the tea to the desired strength in the tulip-shaped tea glass:

This was not just any black bean soup. This was my black bean soup, that I cooked myself, with real black beans and fresh, salty cabanosi sausage that I bought in Germany.

Idea from a friend of mine in the UK: chicken breast (Poulet) that I butterflied and pounded even thinner, wrapped around a tiny piece of sausage (Nürnberger Bratwurst) and including thin slices of cheese (Emmenthaler Käse) in the roll (Roulade), finally wrapped with slices of ham (Vorderschinken). I then wrapped it very tightly in aluminum foil, and baked at 220 C for 30 minutes:

The amazing thing is that, after baking, it retains it shape very firmly, almost like the more well-known Fleischkäse.

Not sure how the pro’s do it, but this seems like a common sense way to me:

Just like a thermonuclear weapon concentrates a lot of power in a small package – so does this little bottle of what I call thermonuclear chicken broth:

I had occasion to create this several months ago, having much earlier watched a YouTube video about 18th century cooking, in which cooks would often reduce soups until they were near solids, in order to allow them to be more easily stored and transported.

I was confronted with the situation that I had around 6 liters of chicken broth, plenty of near obsolete onions, garlic, and ginger – so I created a delicious chicken stock, then reduced it at very low heat over a six hour period, finally obtaining two jars of this – I call it my thermonuclear chicken soup.

It’s easy to use. This little jar, when thawed, is easily enough for 6-8 bowls of chicken soup. Just add any frozen vegetables I have at hand. No reason to add chicken – if I had chicken, I’d made fresh chicken soup!

Gołąbki is a Polish word that is pronounced galumpki, and it means stuffed cabbage. My grandmother used to make galumpki – it’s been a long time since she passed away, but I can still remember how it tasted.

Since then I have been on a personal quest to re-create that taste sensation I remember so well. I try, and I try, and I try – and I always fail.

This is the storyboard of my latest failure.

Ground beef, contained sauteed onions and garlic, various spices, and uncooked long-grain rice. The idea is that the rice is a filler, and as the meat slowly cooks so does the rice, by soaking up all the meat juices:

Then you roll each one into a blanched cabbage leaf, like a little burrito:

The rolled, stuffed cabbage leaves are then layered into an oven-compatible pot, sitting on top of a layer of cabbage leaves:

Forgot to take a snap, but I then covered the cabbage rolls with a jar of speghetti sauce, and I topped it with enough chicken broth so that each cabbage roll was under about 1 centimeter of liquid. Then I covered it, and cooked it at 175 C for around 90 minutes:

Here’s what it looked like after the cooking. Note that I had a little extra meat that I felt was insufficient for an entire role, so I added it to the mix in hamburger form. Turned out to be a great idea, since it fell apart and helped flavor the sauce:

And here’s the finished product. well minus the sauce which I left in the pot. In fact I did not eat any of them, but rather placed them in bags, covered them with their own portion of the sauce, and froze them:

Lessons learned:

1) Another failure. Tastes great, but not like my grandmother used to make

2) Even after blanching the cabbage leaves were very thick. Next time I intend to blanch, separate the leaves, then cook them until they are softer

3) Adding some meat to the sauce was very effective

I failed, again, but I will keep on trying!  I think my grandmother would expect no less of me.

As you can see, not an artistic snap, not an interesting subject, and no crazy stories to tell.

Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose.

I thought this might turn out interesting and artistic, but it most certainly did not.

I chopped it up into small pieces, added it to some carbonara sauce, and let it cook at very low temperature for about 30 minutes. The broccoli imparted a really nice flavor to the sauce.