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Savoir Faire

Savoir faire is a French phrase that might best be translated as “know how.”  In the kitchen, it refers to the ability to complete all the tasks necessary to make a dish.

If a chef or a recipe instructs the cook to sauté something, then the cook with savoir faire needs no further instruction. It’s understood that the pan will be hot, a small amount of fat will be used, and the product will be finished by de-glazing then pan with some liquid to pick up the “fond,” which refers to the browned bits of meat or vegetable stuck to the bottom of the pan.

More than knowledge of specific cooking techniques, savoir faire refers to a broader understanding of how several different cooking techniques can be applied to a several different foods to have them all ready at the same time in order to be served on the same plate. So if a fillet of fish is to be sautéed and served with a savory flan and a green vegetable that’s blanched in boiling water, a good cook will have the flan ready and the water boiling for the vegetables before the sauté is performed. This way, the vegetables garnishes are hot and at their peak of readiness when the
pièce de la résistance is ready to plate.

Home cooks can use this way of looking at a meal to achieve mastery. It is unreasonable to expect that great cuisine will be simple, or that a novice cook can make even simple dishes perfectly on the first try. However, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that with a little practice, anyone can produce great dishes if they apply themselves and pay attention.

This month, we’ll look at two main dishes that incorporate several recipes.

First, consider
Sole Meunière et Flan de Carotte, sautéed fillet of sole with a carrot flan and blanched pea vines.

Next, we’ll prepare Suprême de Volaille aux Duxelles, a breast of chicken with mushroom filling served with a gratin of potatoes and simple, buttered haricot vertes.

 
 

 
Mis en Place

Mise en place is a French phrase that literally means “putting in place.” For chefs, it constitutes the bulk of the work in getting a station, or an entire kitchen ready for service. Equipment is ready; ovens preheated, sauté pans stacked near the stove. Ladles and whisks are clean and ready to grab. Meats are broken down into individual, ready-to-cook portions. Sauces are prepared and held warm in a boiling water bath or “bain-marie.” Vegetables are washed, trimmed and in some cases par-boiled and ready to finish with a quick sauté in butter or a plunge into boiling water. Condiments and garnishes are prepared and placed near the plating station so that they can be scooped or plucked to order.

Home cooks can use the principles of mis en place too.

Start with a menu. Sometimes even the simplest meals can benefit from a written list of the dishes and condiments they contain. The menu leads to a list of recipes. And with the recipes in hand, a cook can make a shopping list and a prep list. These lists, written or mental constitute a plan for your mis en place.

Before you start cooking, consider organizing ingredients by recipe. Put all the ingredients you need for each dish on a separate tray or cookie sheet and as you complete one recipe, put those ingredients away and move to the next recipe. Most recipes can be prepared up to a point and finished just before serving.

In preparing for holiday meals, these advance preparations afford a cook the opportunity to enjoy family gatherings without stressing over too many last minute preparations. If the green bean casserole is already put together and ready to pop into the oven, then there’s no confusing pile of ingredients cluttering the counter. Sweet potatoes can be cut, seasoned and readied for the oven too. Desserts and garnishes for the dessert can and should be prepared a day ahead.

Roasted Diced Yams with Smoked Paprika
West Coast Green Bean Casserole
Cinnamon Ice Cream
 
So Long Gourmet
 

For almost thirty years, I saved old issues of Gourmet magazine -- all of them. I know it’s crazy, but until my basement flooded last year and rendered them unusable, I had almost four hundred issues stacked in milk crates, organized month by month. Januaries here, Novembers there…

 

I started saving Gourmet in 1979 when I was twenty years old. I was working as a cook at ski lodge, and writing short stories on my days off, when a waitress where I worked suggested that I try writing for Gourmet. 

 

“You cook and you write, she said, you should write about cooking. You could travel around the world and write about food,” she suggested. I think this was her gentle way of saying that my short stories weren’t going to cut it. “But first,” she advised, “You’ve got to familiarize yourself with the magazine. Buy a few copies and study them cover to cover. When you understand what kind of stuff they print, you’ll have a better chance of getting them to accept your stories.” 

 

So I followed her advice. I studied each issue and after almost twenty years, and five cookbooks under my belt, I felt ready to submit something. I even imagined at one point that I might become the next Laurie Colwin, a particularly entertaining writer who wrote a column called “Home Cooking.” Unfortunately, the editor, Ruth Reichl wasn’t really interested in my stories.

But with Ruth Reichl at the helm, the magazine became more interesting to me than ever. Unlike previous editors, Reichl seemed to have a finger on the pulse of America’s ongoing “food revolution.” She chronicled chefs efforts to make their restaurants more sustainable; she took readers to organic farms all over the country, and encouraged us to by sustainable products and consider the impact our purchases would have on the people and the communities that produced our food. 

 

Last spring, I was invited to appear on an episode of Gourmet’s Adventures with Ruth, a public television series in which Ruth Reichl travels to various locations around the globe and takes cooking classes. I was to “instruct” Ruth on how to cook fish. We prepared several dishes utilizing a gorgeous 25-pound Copper River King Salmon that we filleted together in the kitchen of Canlis restaurant.

Then, less than a week before Conde Nast, the publishing house behind Gourmet, Vogue, Bon Appetit, The New Yorker, and dozens of other magazines decided to close the magazine in the wake of our current financial meltdown, I interviewed Ruth over lunch at Seattle’s Tamarind Tree restaurant. She was on tour promoting the magazine’s cookbook, Gourmet Today, a splendid collection of a thousand recipes that really do reflect the way we cook and eat today.

A few recipes from the cooking show, the cookbook and the magazine follow.

Salmon Chowder from Gourmet's Adventures with Ruth

Oven Fried Panko Chicken from Gourmet Today

Chocolate Wafer Cookies from Gourmet Magazine 

 
Mushrooms Gone Wild!
My wife Betsy claims that I can never take a walk in the woods without thinking about mushrooms, and she's right. Lab rats, having once pressed a bar to receive a treat, will go on pressing the bar as long as they are able, hoping for another treat. Having once found chanterelles and morels in the bracken along the sides of the trail, I keep an eye to the side of the trail every time we walk through the woods, searching for the savory prizes I know I might find again.

This time of year, I watch for chanterelles. This golden beauty was the first wild mushroom I learned to recognize with any certainty, and it remains my favorite. Finding a patch of chanterelles is like spotting a wild deer. Like that totem animal, these fungi stand for something wild and free.

Several varieties of boletus, easily identified by the spongy undersides of their caps, also catch my eye; the best of these is that great king boletus that the French call cèpes and the Italians call porcini. Until recently, I had never gathered my own porcini. But all that changed last week when I had the good fortune to take a hike in the Cascades with my old friend John Sundstrom, the chef-proprietor of Lark restaurant, and a new friend, Langdon Cook, the author of Fat of the Land. Fat of the Land is a wonderful collection of essays about foraging for food and establishing a life that’s deeply connected to the earth.

With Lang as our guide, we bagged a dozen pounds of chanterelles and five pounds of firm and fragrant porcini. At home, the porcini were rendered into a garlicky sauté to top toasted slices of rustic bread. Some of the chanterelles were incorporated into a pasta dish based on one of Lang’s recipes from the book. The rest will become a forest mushroom risotto.

Cooking with mushrooms has a synergistic quality. The mushrooms themselves are endowed with delightful flavors and textures; but they also enhance the qualities of whatever they are cooked with. Thanks to the presence of certain glutamines, mushrooms have a flavor-building property reminiscent of monosodium glutamate. They may be thought of as umami makers. Try the formulas that follow with mushrooms from the local market or, if you are confident in your own wild crafting abilities, with mushrooms you gather yourself.  

Porcini on Toast
Simply sauteed with garlic in olive oil, porcini provide a wealth of flavor and texture. Top them if desired with a sprinkle of grated Reggiano Parmesan or Grana Padano cheese.

Spaghetti with Chanterelles, Chicken and Cream
A quick saute in butter, then a generous splash of cream gave these chanterelles a sumptuous quality that transcends pasta into a feast.
The dark meat from a leftover roast chicken had a similar texture to the shards of chanterelles when the mushrooms were pulled apart lengthwise.  

West Coast Chanterelle Risotto
Risotto is at once home spun and gourmet. Here, the contrasting textures of chewy short-grain rice and sinewy chanterelles make for a sensory delight. The flavor is amplified by an unlikely juxtaposition of Japanese soy sauce and Italian Parmesan cheese. 

Check out Langdon Cook's Fat of the Land Blog and go buy his book!

 
Too Many Apples! Too Many Pears!
Backyard Apples are at their peak right now. But if you are not fortunate enough to have your own trees or access to your neighbors' trees, don't despair. Local farmer's markets are filling up with apples too.

Follow this link to Neighborhood Farmers Markets.

Sort out the myriad Apple Varieties.

Learn more about Washington Apples.

My Gravenstein apples were late in coming this year and not quite as bountiful as in years past, but I did wake up to dozens of windfalls today. i had been wanting to try out this recipe for Slab Apple Pie and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

Try this Pie!

A bumper crop of pears and an ongoing case of canning fever led me to develop this recipe for the most delectable chutney I have ever tasted. 

Check out this chutney!
 
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