Fabada Asturiana

Fabada is a rustic Spanish bean and sausage stew. Pretty straightforward really, particularly if you invest in one of the ready-made fabada kits that Xixón Café sells at their meat counter. As you can see, they pack in the beans--fabas, a special Spanish variety not on the Publix shelves--a thick slice of Serrano ham, a couple links of chorizo and a link of morcilla de Burgos (a pork blood sausage with a lot of rice in the filling). There's a bit more to a proper fabada than that. They really ought to include the saffron and paprika, I think. Also, those beans about double in volume during an overnight soak so that sausage to bean ratio is a bit skimpy. I scrounged in my freezer and came up with a slice of ham hock and a couple more chorizo links--one Spanish, although a mass market brand, and the other of indeterminate South American ancestry. I really should improve my freezer labeling habits.

Anyway, after soaking the beans, I threw them into my slow cooker along with the Serrano ham, a few cloves of garlic, half an onion and half a green pepper. A lot of recipes didn't include these but you've got to have some vegetables. Those that did include them didn't agree on whether to chop and sauté them or just throw them in whole. I split the difference. I added a cup of stock and enough water to cover, about four more cups.

That simmered for a couple hours until the beans showed signs of tenderness. (An aside here: there was an article in the New York Times recently recounting a Mexican recipe that dispenses with soaking the beans and adds salt at the start and ends with tender beans after just two hours of simmering. It goes against all my experience but the author says it turned out fine. That author isn't Harold McGee so there's no explanation of why it turned out fine when we've all dealt with beans that have stubbornly refused to cook. Maybe I'll do some experiments myself.) Then I pricked the sausages with a fork so they wouldn't explode when cooking and added them to the pot along with good-sized scoops of sweet and smoked paprika and a pinch of saffron.

After another 45 minutes of cooking, the beans were tender and the sausages cooked through. I removed the sausages and ham and sliced them up. Some recipes don't simmer the sausages with the beans; instead they slice and fry them and add them at the last minute. That would add extra flavor to the meat while robbing it from the broth. I'd rather go the other way.

I had hoped more of the liquid would have boiled away at this point--fabada's supposed to be a thick stew, not soup--but it hadn't so I removed as much as I could and boiled it way down on he the stove top. I mashed the beans up a bit, as most recipes call for, returned the concentrated liquid and the meat, seasoned to taste with salt and pepper, topped with a little parsley and served.


Fabada is typically served with cidra and crusty bread, but I haven't got either today. For the cider I'm substituting a bottle of a spicy light ale and for the bread, a second bottle.

I've made my share of bean and sausage pots and this is certainly one of them. The variety of sausages is nice, I'll give it that. And the lack of heat in the spiciness is an interesting angle on the dish. It is quite tasty, but it's beans and sausages, of course it's tasty. Otherwise, fabada is rustic and hearty and perfect for the sort of cool evening Miami doesn't provide so often. I got pretty lucky to cook this just as the cool spell hit.

These beans have a pleasantly light and complex flavor. I wonder if the slow-cooker's low even simmer made a difference, or if it's the type of bean or if it's just that I've for once bought something other than whatever junk the supermarket has. I'll have to give those trendy heirloom beans a try and see if they can match this quality. I may have just ruined myself for the normal version of yet another staple. It gets inconvenient and expensive being a snob.

Albondigas

Sometimes when I come across an interesting recipe I decide I want to make that dish, research a bunch of variations and then come up with my own version. But sometimes I'll notice that I've got everything I need for the recipe in the house and skip all that and just make it.

I found a link to this recipe on TheKitchn.com, but it was a link to a link to a reposting of a recipe from a cookbook so all the context and explanation was missing. That should have been a warning sign, but I guess I wasn't in a mindset to be warned. I didn't look at variations and didn't even look at the context. I just thought: "I didn't know albóndigas had oatmeal in them." and went ahead with it. As you may know, they don't. This recipe is from Almost Meatless, a cookbook by Joy Manning and Tara Mataraza Desmond, where they switched out bread crumbs and reduced the amount of meat. The oats add bulk and absorb flavors. If they had left it at that then I may well have tried the recipe even if I had done my due diligence; it's a clever idea. But they made a bunch of other changes that I don't get. I'll explain later, but first the recipe.

Albóndigas
- serves 4 to 6 -
from Almost Meatless by Joy Manning and Tara Mataraza Desmond

Ingredients:
1/2 cup steel-cut oatmeal
1/2 cup loosely packed fresh cilantro leaves, chopped plus more for garnish
4 cloves garlic, minced (about 2 tablespoons), divided
1 chipotle in adobo sauce, seeded and chopped into a paste
4 teaspoons ground cumin, divided
2 teaspoons ground coriander, divided
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/2 pound ground lamb
2 teaspoons olive oil
1 small onion, cut into 1/4-inch dice (about 1 cup)
1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes
1 cup water
Juice of 1 lime

Procedure:
1. Mix together the oatmeal, cilantro, half the garlic, the chipotle, 2 teaspoons of the cumin, 1 teaspoon of the coriander, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon pepper in a bowl. Gently work the lamb into the mixture, distributing it evenly. Form balls out of tablespoon-size scoops of the mixture and set aside.

2. Heat the oil in a Dutch oven or a large pot over medium-high heat. Add the onion and saute for 5 minutes. Stir in the remaining garlic, cumin, and coriander, cooking for an additional 30 seconds. Add the tomatoes and water and stir to combine.

3. Bring the sauce to a simmer and add the meatballs. Simmer partially covered for 45 minutes.

4. Season the sauce with salt and pepper to taste, squeeze the lime juice over top, and serve with extra chopped cilantro.






From all the oats floating around the bowl, it appears I've suffered critical meatball failure during simmering. The meatballs that remain are crumbly which isn't too surprising considering the chunky bits they're made of and the lack of binder. Most every other albóndiga recipe has an egg in there. I think maybe the recipe was expecting little broken bits of oats instead of the big chunks in the McCann's brand oatmeal I used. I probably should have chopped my cilantro finer; that can't have helped. I suppose I could break up the rest and call this chili.

I'm a bit disappointed that I'm not getting more lamb flavor here. There's a bit of anonymous meatiness in there, but mainly it's all tomato, cumin, cilantro and less chipotle than you'd expect, but I did use a small one. Frying the meatball before simmering, which most Spanish albóndigas recipes do, would have helped. So would using more strongly flavored beef or pork which are far more common.

I wonder; what with the chipotle, cilantro and lime; if this is a take on a Mexican meatball. The cumin, coriander and lamb are typical of the Moorish origins of the tapas version (each of those isn't unheard of in Mexican cooking, but they're a very Mediterranean combination). Even if all the spices were Mexican, the tomato sauce is very much a Spanish element. It all just seems incoherent and, for me, it doesn't really work.

Incoherence aside, it's not actively unpleasant to eat. Not high praise, but that's all this dish is going to get.

CSA week 13 - Sort-of-Spanish carrot top soup

I started with this recipe for Tuscan carrot top and rice soup, but made one change that led to another and another and eventually ended up over in Spain.

Ingredients
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, minced
2 small carrots, diced
1 stalk celery, diced
1/2 cup diced ham
1/2 cup diced Spanish chorizo
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
salt and pepper to taste

3 new potatoes, diced
1 can chickpeas, drained
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika

6 cups chicken broth
1½ cups carrot tops, chopped

1. Heat the oil in a large, heavy-gauge soup pot. Saute the onion, carrots, celery, garlic, ham, chorizo bay leaf and thyme for 5 minutes over low medium until the onions are soft and translucent. Add the salt and pepper, potatoes, chickpeas and the thicker bits of the carrot stems. Cook for another 2 minutes. Pour in the broth, and bring to a boil.

2. Cook for 10 minutes or until the potatoes are almost tender. Add the carrot tops, mix well, and cook for 10 minutes more. I also added an egg to poach, but that's my thing so you should just roll your eyes and move on. You might want to include tomatoes, but I find the combination of them with the smoked paprika tastes muddy. A good idea with a different sort of paprika, though.

3. If you're not going to add an egg (and if you don't want to poach, a chopped hard-cooked egg would be nice) finish off with a bit more olive oil instead. And if you left out the meat earlier, you could blend some of the solids to thicken the broth, but I figure the pork products would gum up the works so I skipped that.

The result is a respectable if not extraordinarily distinguished bowl of soup. There are no jarring discordancies of flavor, but it's not one of those refined perfect combinations either. I found that as the carrot tops cooked to a pleasant texture, their distinctive flavor faded. It seeped out to give the broth a distinct carroty note, but there's enough else contributing that you won't call it carrot soup in a blind taste test. You would probably call it tasty, though, so good enough.

That's two in a row where I've buried the CSA ingredient under a bunch of other flavors. It'll be three when I do the kale-wrapped sticky rice. I'd best put that off until later in the week then and do the Mexican whatever or the tatsoi stir-fry next.

CSA week four - Radish tortilla española

Now here's something a little more original than the dishes I've been posting about recently.

I've been considering what to do with all those radishes and reading up on roasted radish recipes. One webpage said that when roasted radishes lost their bite and became more like little potatoes. That matched my recollections from cooking radishes last year and I starting thinking about how I could use radishes if I treated them like potatoes. I can't reconstruct my thought processes but I somehow had the notion that they'd go well with eggs so I thought I'd try substituting them into tortilla española. My Miami readers already know what that is, but for Kat, my mom and whoever else is out there, it's basically a thick omelet layered with sliced potatoes that's common in tapas bars all around Spain. Wikipedia has a pretty good description if you want more details.

There are lots of regional variations (none including radishes as far as I can see) that vary the thickness and what other ingredients you might put in. Some include spinach so I thought I could include the radish tops. Onions, garlic and peppers are common so I added those too.

Here's my mise en place. I thickly sliced all of the radishes minus a few I already noshed on. Half the radish tops had yellowed to unusability at this point but I think I've got a good amount left. That's about a quarter of a large onion, one large clove of garlic and one large Serrano pepper, seeded, as I'm out of bell pepper.

The first step was to fry up the radishes in copious olive oil. I wanted them soft, not browned so I kept the temperature to medium and salted them. When they got most of the way there I added the onion, garlic and pepper and kept cooking until the onion had just a bit of bite left. Then I added the radish tops, stirred them in until they wilted and removed everything to a bowl to cool down. I wanted to keep as much of the oil in the pan as possible so I drained them in a strainer over the pan before they went into the bowl.

The radishes at this point have lost almost all of their bite, as predicted, and taste somewhere in the region of potatoes and turnips. It's still recognizably radish but only if you had the idea of the possibility already in mind. The texture is like a fried waxy potato: soft, a little chewy. I'm surprised there are almost no fried radish recipes other than daikon cakes as they're really quite good even if they've have lost some element of their essential radishness.

As the mixture cooled I salted and peppered to taste and added some pimenton and fresh thyme, both good Spanish seasonings. I needed the mix cool so it wouldn't start cooking the eggs prematurely. To get the layered effect the fillings are mixed into the eggs before they go into the pan and there needs to be enough eggs so each piece is nicely coated and floating separately. I figured four eggs (plus a couple Tablespoons of water) should be sufficient. That's not a lot for a pan the size I'm using so my tortilla is going to be on the thin side as these things go.

Most recipes don't go into much detail on technique at this point, but it's a bit complicated to get things to work out right. The goal is a fluffy texture, cooked all of the way through and browned on both sides. That means starting with the temperature way up high to puff up the eggs and keep it from sticking, turning the heat down to let the inside firm up before the outside burns and turning it back up to brown the outside.

Then comes the flip. In Spain you can buy special plates just for this, but I managed with what I've got on hand and only burnt myself a little. The technique is to put the plate on top of the pan, somehow hold them together as you flip it over rotating the top away so if any hot oil comes out it won't come flying towards you, put the plate down, lift the pan up and put it back on the heat and then slide the flipped tortilla back in for its final browning. It turns out that putting the plate down is the tricky part, at least when you don't realize you'll be needing to do it beforehand. Oh, and clearly, cast iron isn't the best choice for all of this. My non-stick paella pan with a high curved rim and handles on both sides is nearly an ideal choice, particularly with the big oval dinner plates I've got that fit over it nicely. If only the handles were a bit more insulated.

It only took a few moments to brown the other side and the tortilla slid easily out onto my cutting board. This dish is best served warm or cold, not hot so I let it sit for a little while before serving a wedge it garnished with green olives and accompanied with the traditional olive-oil-dressed tomato salad.

Maybe I haven't had a really good tortilla española, but I think radishes are a distinct improvement on potatoes in this dish, particularly when served cold. They retain a pleasant texture where potatoes get mealy and their flavor both adds character most potatoes don't have and blends very well with the egg. Even if you didn't want to go to the minor trouble (and risk of injury) of a tortilla española, fried radishes would make a fine filling for an American-style omelet. I'm rather puzzled that nobody (at least nobody on the Web) seems to know this. Maybe it's just me? Could somebody please try this and confirm it's not just me? If it is, I apologize for wasting your radishes.

Migas de pan - a second try

I've got about half a big loaf of bread left over so I thought I'd take a second crack at migas. There are a few things I figure I did wrong the first time around.

First, I went overboard with the olive oil. No need to drown everything, particular as the sausage is going to release some fat itself.

Second, I mistook it for a stir fry and cranked up the heat in a way Spanish chorizo and bread crumbs both don't react well to.

Third, I cut the bread crumbs too small so by the time they were crisp on the outside they were crisp on the inside too which is not good.

Finally, I worried too much about what was or wasn't supposed to go into it. This time I improvised a little and didn't concern myself with a proper traditional Central Spanish recipe.

So, this time, along with the chorizo I added some southern-style uncured garlic sausage. Garlic sausage is universal and southern and Spanish styles aren't a huge distance apart. I also added some shrimp and jamon serano after the sausages, onion and pepper had spent a couple minutes over medium heat.

I prepared the bread crumbs by tossing them with a bit of olive oil, salt, pepper and pimenton and letting them soak it in while the other ingredients cooked. On a whim I added half a can of chickpeas in with the bread crumbs. That must be traditional somewhere in Spain. I gave them around seven minutes in the pan before mixing all the other stuff back in and letting it cook for one more minute to let the bread soak up some of the accumulated juices.

And finally I served it topped with some chopped roasted peppers. I skipped the egg this time mainly because I seem to have used the last egg I had some time earlier this week.

The results are much improved. I pulled the bread a little quick so only a few bits crisped up, but it is softened up from staleness and soaked with flavor so no biggie. And the garbanzos are a good contrast in texture with their firm bite.

Big benefits from cutting back on the oil as I can actually taste the vegetables this time around. And since the meat isn't all shriveled up and dried out, each retains its own specific flavor contributing to the whole. The shrimp particularly are a nice addition with their sweetness balanced against the smokey saltiness of the rest of the dish.

It's not perfect; for one thing I cut the bread crumbs too big. The result is more panzenella than pilaf and I think the second is what I'm aiming at. Also, I forgot the tomatoes. It could use tomatoes. As for the egg, I dunno. It really didn't need any more fat, but the egg yolks would have bound it together a bit. I'll add an egg to a leftover serving and see how it goes.

Overall a respectable result and a pretty good dinner. I think it went well enough that next time I might experiment with flavors and do a non-Spanish version. I have a vision of a breakfast migas de pancakes I kind of want to try but I don't have all the details worked out yet.

Migas de pan con huevos

I'm always on a lookout for recipes using stale bread. No matter how good the bread I bake is (and recently it's been pretty darn good) I can only eat so much and I usually end up with at least a heel slowly petrifying beyond edibility. Recipes for day old bread aren't uncommon; four day old bread is harder to find a use for.

So, I was watching the first episode of travel/food TV series Spain: On the Road Again and saw a demo of a fried-rice-like dish called migas that used bread crumbs for the starch base. A little poking around on-line turned up a Tex-Mex version that uses torn up tortillas and a wide range of Spanish versions. The type I'm making is a Central-to-Northern Spanish variety.

There is some variation on how to prepare the bread crumbs, which I think stems from varying assumptions on what sort of bread you're starting with and how stale it is. Light and fresh loaves can just be chopped up and tossed into the pan, but older, denser loaves like the country loaf I baked last week need to sprinkled with water, tossed with salt and pepper, and left to soften for up to 12 hours. This week's high humidity has kept my leftover bread soft so I discarded the iffy bits, chopped up the rest, sprinkled it with a couple handfuls of water and left it to absorb for an hour. I didn't use a whole lot of water as the bread needs to absorb plenty of fat later on.

The version I saw on TV added only garlic and chorizo and garnished with roasted red peppers and green grapes. Other recipes I found add onion and peppers along with other types of Spanish cured pork to the fried bits and a fried or poached egg to the garnish. Luckily, I've been stocking up on good quality Spanish ingredients. I've got the right sort of chorizo, roasted red peppers and pimenton all imported from Spain and some good quality jamon serano of unknown origins. My olive oil is Italian but it'll have to do.

Traditionally, migas is cooked in a special pan that looks like a cross between a paella pan and a wok. Turns out I've got one. I've always called it a flat-bottom wok, but it's a migas pan. Who knew?

Also, traditionally, I'm pretty sure the cooking method is to fry up the mix-ins, add the bread crumbs, fry some more, garnish and serve. I'm going to use the slightly more complicated fried rice method so the mix-ins don't get over-cooked. This, like fried rice, and the risotto I made a couple days ago, is a toss-in-the-leftovers dish so I'm not fretting about exact how much of what I'm using.

I set my heat to medium high and first into the pan is plenty of olive oil (half extra-virgin, half plain-old so I get some flavor and a decent smoke point too), followed by the garlic, onions and peppers. A few minutes later when they're golden but not brown they come out.





Next in are the chorizo and jamon serano. If I had a Spanish-style bacon, I'd also add that. A couple minutes of frying renders out the fat and gets the meat crispy around the edges. Out they go.


And then the bread bits along with a spoonful of pimenton. I have about 2 1/2 cups of bread here. I found that my latest loaf cubed too tidily so I tossed in some bread crumbs I had saved from previous loaves too rough things up. You want the results to be crisp on the outside but chewy inside--not quite croutons. That took around seven minutes for me (although I kept cooking a little longer). When it looks about ready everything else goes back in and tossed to combine. Then out into a bowl. I drained a little remaining unabsorbed grease which I used to quickly fry an egg. The Spanish style is to heat a 1/4 inch of oil on pretty high heat so the egg white bubbles and crisps and a bit of basting cooks the yolk.

The egg and some chopped roasted red peppers go on top. My bread started pretty dark so the bread crumbs don't look quite right. If you're starting from white bread, you want a bright gold color from the absorbed olive oil with a reddish tinge from the pimenton.

I found the results to be flavorful but heavy and greasy. Better than it looks in the picture, though. One problem is that I overcooked the bread crumbs a bit. And I think a lighter white bread would have been a better starting point. I've made some really fabulous croutons from that sort of bread before so I know what this could have been. Here's what it's supposed to look like. Also, my vegetable ratio was too low. I can see real promise here, but today's version didn't fulfill it. I'll have to try again.

Triple garlic Spanish-style shrimp

This is an elaboration on a Cook's Illustrated recipe for gambas al ajillo tapas. Traditional gambas al ajillo is made by poaching shrimp in garlic oil, but, as usual, CI tosses out the traditional method as too difficult and unreliable and instead develops convolutions to approximate it.

I kept their three-way garlic technique but I added elements to bolster it into a main dish. I cut their recipe in half so this should double well if you want to serve more than two.

1/4 cup pancetta, diced
7 medium garlic cloves, peeled
1/2 lb large shrimp, peeled and deveined (tails on or off is up to you)
4 Tablespoons flavorful extra virgin olive oil
1 bay leaf
1 dried chile, broken
1 1/4 teaspoon fine-grained salt (adjust for flakes of kosher or sea)
1 teaspoon sweet smoked paprika (optional. You might substitute plain paprika or a broken up dried pepper.)
1 medium tomato, diced (good quality and quite ripe by preference)
2 Tablespoons flat leaf parsley, roughly chopped
1 large scallion, finely sliced
1 teaspoon champagne or sherry vinegar


1. Finely mince or crush one garlic clove. Toss with shrimp, one Tablespoon olive oil, 1/4 teaspoon salt and maybe some red pepper flakes if you'd like a bit more heat. Marinate shrimp at room temperature for 30 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, cook pancetta over medium-high heat in an 8" non-stick pan until browned and crispy. Remove pan from heat and remove pancetta to a bowl. Either leave ~1 Tablespoon rendered fat or discard and replace with a Tablespoon of olive oil. If you're going to do that, feel free to substitute in jamon serano or prosciutto.


3. Smash two garlic cloves. Add to pan with two Tablespoons olive oil. Return pan to medium-low heat. Cook, stirring occasionally until garlic is crisped and a light golden brown, 4-7 minutes. Remove pan from heat and remove garlic to small bowl. Save garlic until you've stopped reeking from all the garlic from this dish. When you need another dose grind up the browned garlic in a mortar with a little salt and olive oil or butter and spread on toast.


4. Thinly slice 4 cloves garlic. Return pan to low heat and add garlic, bay leaf and chile. Cook, stirring occasionally, until garlic is soft and translucent, 4-7 minutes. Turn down heat if it starts to brown; turn it up if it doesn't sizzle. Increase heat to medium-low and add shrimp (with marinade) in a single layer. Cook until top side of shrimp starts to show a little pink, about 2 minutes. Flip shrimp with tongs and cook for another 2 minutes. Remove shrimp to a bowl.

5. Turn heat up to high. Add tomato and smoked paprika. Cook briefly until tomato begins to break down to create a sauce, 1 to 2 minutes. Stir in parsley, scallion, pancetta, shrimp and vinegar. Cook until shrimp is cooked through, no more than 30 seconds.

6. Serve immediately with hearty fresh-baked (or at least fresh-toasted) bread.


The dish turned out very nicely. Even with the added ingredients, all the trouble with the garlic was worth it. It infuses both the shrimp and stands up to the tomato and herbs in the sauce.

A citrusy and flinty white wine would be the obvious pairing, but I tried a Belgian-style white beer and was quite happy with the match.