Pasta 101: Linguine and Clams

One of my mom's all time favorite dishes is Linguine and White Clams, and I have to say that I whole-heartedly agree. Linguine and Clams (or as Rosetta Stone tells me: "Linguine alle Vongole") is one of those quintessential Italian dishes that you find everywhere. The problem is that many home and some restaurant versions are fraught with errors that really subtract from what could be a great food experience. What are these problems you ask? Many home versions lack the flavor of restaurant dishes, as they have the Too-Much-Pasta-to-Sauce syndrome. Okay, you order this dish at a restaurant, only to find it so drenched in oil that you they should probably be serving it with Lipitor crushed up on top rather than grated parmesan.

So where to start with making this dish successfully at home? The clams, of course. I always say that, like how Inuits have something like 40 different words for different types of snow, people from my home state of Rhode Island have at least 5 different words for clams. You have quahogs (no, it's not just where The Griffins live), steamers, little necks, cherry stones, and a whole variety of other types of clams. Most of these are not appropriate for use in Linguine and Clams, so be careful. You want the "littleneck" variety - clams that tend to fall on the small side of Clamdom. At this size, they are sweet and not too chewy (unlike their quahog cousins... er... older brothers). About one pound will be enough for two people, however I like to "augment" the amout of clams. We'll get to that in the body of the recipe.

Next you want to assess your pasta situation. How many people are you serving? I generally make all my dishes for two - and if I'm eating alone I have some for lunch or dinner the next day. That leaves us with less than half a pound of pasta. I would say somewhere between one quarter and one third of a one pound box is fine for two people. Balance is key, too much pasta and you may as well not even bother making clams to put on top of it in the first place, too little and nobody is full after they eat... and you probably won't have a back-up pasta if that happens.

So the dish is called Linguine and Clams, so what else is there? Well, olive oil for starters. I usually buy a really fragrant one from Trader Joe's called Martinis' Kalamata Extra Version Olive Oil, but if there's no Trader's in your area Colavita generally makes a good product and is widely distributed. Try to buy something that smells like olives and cut grass. If it doesn't, save it for what I like to call "industrial" uses: oiling my cast iron and wooden cutting board. Store your oil out of the sunlight, as this will make it go rancid faster. I used to make the mistake of trying to be pretentious and storing high-quality olive oil on a counter where everyone could see it. It worked, however when it came to everyone tasting it, the oil was sub-par. Plenty of garlic is a cornerstone of this dish. I find lately that garlic from the farmers market tastes more...I don't know... "garlicky" than the ones from the store. It's up to you. I still use store garlic when the farmer's market's not around. You'll also need fresh parsley, preferably Italian Flatleaf. I've been growing this parsely nearly every year since childhood, it's extraordinarly easy to grow and you'll always have just the amount you need available for use. The plastic packages at the grocery store are usually too much for one recipe, then by the time you get around to needing more... you know. Some people like chili flakes in this dish, feel free to add them in along with garlic. Now, the moment you've all been waiting for:

Linguine with White Clam Sauce (Linguine alle Vongole)

• 1/2 pound pasta. Please do not use whole wheat brown pasta in this recipe. There's an inherent wrong-ness to it when used in classic Italian dishes, and you're really not saving that many carbs by picking it over regular varieties.
• About 3-4 tablespoons of olive oil.
• 2 medium or large cloves of garlic, minced.
• One small onion, or half of a medium sized onion, diced. Any type of onion you have on hand is fine.
• (optional) One or two teaspoons of chili flakes.
• Liberal amounts of fresh ground black pepper.
• One pound of littleneck clams with shells, scrubbed clean.
• One can of chopped clams (we've always used Snows), drained.
• A handful of chopped fresh Italian Flatleaf parsley.

Start boiling the water right away. Waiting for water to boil is always the big hold up. You can use liberal amounts of salt in the water if you'd like. Nearly every television/celebrity chef puports the notion that all Italians use insane amounts of table salt in their pasta water. While this does have a mild impact on flavor, it also promotes hypertension. In this recipe, the clams are salty enough. I usually skip salting the pasta water. While you're waiting for the water, get the garlic and onion nice and golden over medium-high heat in the olive oil. Add black pepper and chili flakes at this point too - their flavors will infuse into the oil and that's a good thing. Start the linguine boiling, you're going to want it on the hard side of al dente, as they're going to keep cooking later on.When their just golden, add in the raw clams (shell and all) and the canned clams, give it a stir, lower the heat to a little on the low side of medium and cover the pan.

After about 10 minutes, check the clams. The majority of them should be open. If any are still shut well past their peers, throw them away. There is such a thing as a bad clam. This is where the right way to make this dish differs wildly from the standard American way. Do not drain the pasta in a colander. I repeat: do not drain the pasta in a colander. Get a pair of tongs and take the pasta out of the boiling water and put it directly into the pan with the simmering clam sauce. Give it all a swirl and let it simmer for about another 5 minutes or so - long enough for the pasta to finish cooking to a perfect al dente state. Toss the parsley onto the finished dish and you're done. I serve it hot right out of the pan because I'm lazy. You can add the parsely after you've transferred it to a serving bowl if you're trying to impress someone. There. Not as hard as they make it look over at that Italian place, huh?

Cookware Special Seminar: Heirloom Cast Iron

Somehow, we have rural medicine to blame on this one.

Back during my rural medicine rotation in November 0f '07, I cooked for the other five medical students at this remote clinic site in Whoknowswheresville, Pennsylvania. I used cast iron for the first time, and it was badass. In the intervening two years, I would always swing by the pot and pan isle of what ever chain department store I happened to be in. It usually ended up only being a short visit due to a 1) lack of cast iron in stock on the part of the store and 2) a lack of capital on the part of my bank account. I eventually broke down and bought a preseasoned cast iron dutch oven. I will admit, it's care was a little bit more than I expected, but I use it constantly for roasts, soups, polenta, really any application that fits the size of the pot both on the stovetop and in the oven.

Flash forward to these past two weeks. First, I went to visit my parents. They are Italian, so I always leave their house with more stuff than I showed up with. During the visit in question, I left with one 4 quart cast iron chicken fryer and two long, shallow edge baker/broilers. They weren't in the best condition. My girlfriend catches wind of this, and offers me her late grandmother's cast iron 4 quart fryer and two skillets. Feast or famine, folks. I went to having no cast iron pans to having SEVEN in the course of 2 weeks. Most of them severely needed attention (Fig. C.1)

Figure C.1 - Cast Iron after lots of soap, and 20 some-odd years in a basement.

Before I would be making some badass corn bread or paella or something, I had some work to do. I did a lot of research, and some trial and error. Here is what I came up with:

Tony's Foolproof Method for Restoring Heirloom Cast Iron Cookware

This whole process takes up about half a day, so have other stuff around the house planned, as your oven will be on mostly the whole time and therefore poses a fire hazard.

1. 
   
   Examine your new old cast iron. If there is too much black stuff caked on, or if there are spots of rust, proceed to Step 2. If you're just skeeved out by using someone else's pans, proceed to the next step. If your new old pan has a non-crusty black layer on it, and you don't care what other people have been eating, proceed to Step 7.


2. 
   
   Place your pots and pans upside down in your oven and set it to automatic clean mode. This will get pretty much everything but the rust off of your pans. It will also take like 3 hours, so get a book or a video game or something. Depending how much crap is on your pan, there will be a lot of smoke. Open some windows and fire up some fans.


3. 
   
   Using a stainless steel scouring pad, scrub the crap out of the pan. Once the rust is off, you should see bare gray iron staring back at you. This is good. Dry them off with a rag you don't care about ruining, but is clean enough for you to use on a pan you'll eventually be eating with.


4. 
   
   Put the naked pans right-side-up into the oven at 325 Farenheit for 10 minutes and make sure they're dry. Any water left on the pans will cause more rust, and you'll be back to step 3.


5. 
   
   Once dry, rub a medium layer of solid cooking fat onto the hot pan. I use Crisco, because I'm poor. I have read of other people using rendered (read: left over after cooking) bacon fat, lard or any number of other solid-at-room-temperature fats. Put your greasy pan back into the oven, up side down again and let this first layer of "seasoning" bake on for one hour. "Seasoning" in this sense does not mean tasty things like black pepper or sage or Zesty Italian. It is just a layer of fat that keeps your pan from rusting and food from sticking to your pan while cooking with it.


6. 
   
   After one hour in the oven, take the pan out and repeat steps four and five once or twice more to get a good base of seasoning on the pans. After 2-3 coats of seasoning, it's okay to transition to vegetable oils for any baked-on seasonings you use. Avoid olive oil, as it has a relatively low smoke point, unless you enjoyed airing out your house in Step 1. After at least two coats, your pan should have a fine black finish to it (Figure C.2).


7. 
   
   After each use, scrub the pan with a stiff-bristled brush. I use a bamboo brush I bought in some kitchen store in Vermont that I can't find the website too. Plastic bristles are fine too. The important thing is to NEVER USE SOAP, unless you want your pans to look like Figure C.1. After scrubbing, dry thoroughly with a dish towel (mapine!). Rub the inside of the pan with a thin coat of vegetable oil while it's still hot from the water. It's safe to use olive oil here, as the smoke point doesn't matter. You're not going to heat the pan again until next time you cook with it. If there is a lid, put a piece of paper towel between the lid and the pan when you store it, and keep the lid a little off kilter from the pan. The seasoning needs air to be able to drift by.

Figure C.2 - Cast iron after Tony's Fool Proof Method for Restoring Cast Iron Cookware
Class dismissed.

Tony's Food 101: Mushroom Risotto

Risotto and I have a long history. Despite growing up in an Italian household, I never had risotto growing up (or polenta, for that matter, but that's a whole different story). Fast forward to my college years - my roommate and I in our first apartment away from our parents, cooking dinner every night and forcing our other two roommates to clean up after us, in the name of nutrition and cuisine. My mom, ironically, had sent me a recipe for risotto out of our local Little Italy's newspaper. My roommate and I decided to take it for a spin, however, it turns out that this particular ride was sort of a lemon. There was a single typo in the ingredients list: one cup of red wine. This aberrant cup of wine wasn't included anywhere in the instructions portion of the recipe. Was it put there accidently? Were we supposed to drink the wine while cooking the rice? Was it supposed to say "white wine"? Although not one of the great mysteries of the modern world, we were still confused by this inclusion. We put the red wine in the recipe anyway, unsure as really where it even fit in to the order of how to make this stuff. We ended up with a huge pan of tasty purple rice, that our other roommates absolutely refused to touch. We did our own dishes that night.

My next risotto memory happened maybe 5 or 6 years after the first. I'd had my entire senior year of college and four years of medical school to right the wrongs of the purple risotto and come up with my very own mixture of add-ins. I was on my very first date with my girlfriend, and some how (right, "some how") I started talking about food. She asked me what I usually made, I said I leaned towards Italian because of my heritage. She asked for examples, I offered risotto. She'd never had it before. Needless to say, over a year later we're still together. She'll tell you it was my home-made salsa that sinked it for her, I think it was a little dish of creamy, savory rice, cheese and mushrooms.



Mixed Mushroom Risotto

- One or two cloves of garlic, depending on your tastes, chopped fine.
- One large white or yellow onion, chopped fine.
(optional) One quarter to one half of a bulb and stalks of fennel (a.k.a. anise), weird frond-leaf things removed.
- A few glugs of olive oil.
- A generous pat of unsalted butter.
- A pinch of salt.
- As much fresh ground black pepper as you, your significant other, your children or your guests can stand.
- One cup of Arborio rice. I've used Carnaroli, however I was unilaterally unimpressed compared to mostly any Arborio I've used. Carnaroli is too long of a grain for this dish.
- Half of a little grocery store tub of sliced white button or baby bella mushrooms, washed THOROUGHLY and diced. Nobody likes dirt in their risotto.
- Either one grocery store tub of shiitake mushrooms, diced,
OR- one of those little packages of mixed fresh wild mushrooms (usually shiitake, enoki and portabello),
OR- assorted dried mushrooms that I usually buy at Ocean State Job Lot but you can sometimes find at asian markets and rarely at Trader Joes, reconstituted per package directions, diced and water they've soaked in reserved,
OR- assorted fresh actually wild mushrooms, like from your yard, but only if you're an accomplished forager or an old school Italian like my dad, also diced,
- 1 cup of white wine that you should plan on drinking with the meal.
- 6-8 cups of chicken (or veggie stock) warmed up. If you're a vegetarian (I'm not) and you don't like your local canned/cartoned vegetable stock (I don't), feel free to use the flavorful liquid left over from soaking the dried mushrooms - especially the shiitakes. You'll have to add a little salt to make up for what's missing in the stock.
- About 1/2-3/4 cup non-hard Italian cheese. I usually use Fontina, but lately I've been on a kick where I use Trader Joe's Italian Truffle Cheese. It has black truffle in it, which enhances the whole mushroom theme of the dish (and tastes awesome). Either shred this with a grater, or cut it up into small cubes.
- An equal amount of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. Use the real thing, folks. Save the green can for... well... you should probably just throw the green can away. It's gross. The best stuff has the words "Parmagiano Reggiano" written in little pin holes in the rind.

Okay. Mix your aromatics (garlic, onions and maybe fennel) with the oil and butter and sweat over medium heat. When a recipe author tells you to sweat something, they mean put it over the heat until little beads of moisture form, but nothing has turned brown yet. Maybe a little golden, but not definitely not brown. Add in the rice. Yes, into the hot pan with oil and no liquid. This is how you make every risotto, not just mine. Allow the rice to cook until the sides of the rice are clear and the very middle is still white. Now add in all of the mushrooms, and then the wine. Stir frequently, allow the rice to absorb the wine. Once things are relatively dry again, add in a cup or two of stock. Allow it to absorb. You will repeat this step more times than you think possible. After about 4-5 cups, just add in one half a cup at a time. Do this until the rice cannot absorb any more liquid. Once you've reached this stage, the rice should have a creamy texture from all the starches it's let out during cooking. Feel free to taste it, the rice should have just a little bit of hardness to it. It should not be mush. If you've added too much liquid, not to worry. Just let the rice sit for a couple of minutes and the excess liquid will cook off and maybe absorb a little more than you thought it would. Last but not least, stir in your cheeses. The rice should already be creamy before any dairy is added, the cheese is more for flavor than texture. If you have any left after your meal (you may not, trust me), risotto makes mean left overs. I won't even get into the sweat-shop-style labor that goes into the best way to eat left over risotto: arancini. I'll save that for another posting.

I actually just made this for dinner last night, but I forgot to take pictures. Sorry folks!

Sandwiches 101: The Stacked Italian

This is a sandwich I made up for entry to a Trader Joe's recipe contest. It didn't win, but it's still a solid lunch or snack. Pardon the annoying "TJ's" everywhere, the contest rules required using 3 or more Trader Joe's products.

The Stacked Italian

This is a quick recipe for two slider-sized sandwiches, and is easily scale-able for a crowd.

Two TJ's Ciabatta Rolls

One TJ's Ovoline Mozzarella Ball

Six slices Daniele/Daniele Black Peppercorn Salami - found in the refridgerator section of your local TJ's

One TJ's Organic Slicing Tomato

Two teaspons TJ's Olive Tapenade

Preheat the oven to Bake 350, and toss in the ciabatta rolls. Place the salami slices on a pan and turn to medium/high heat. The salami will puff up in the middle, let out a lot of oil and become crispy. Turn once and continue to fry to desired crispiness. Slice the tomato and mozarella into 1/4 inch rounds. Remove the rolls from the oven, slice horizontally and place a teaspoon of olive tapenade on the top half of each. Alternate slices of tomato, fried salami and mozarella on each sandwich evenly and top with the tapenade'd roll-top to desired stack height. Serves two as a snack, one as a meal.