Author Archives: Renate Valencia

Chicken al mattone, or “under a brick”

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Mattone in action

Mattone in action

The most delicious chicken dish in the universe is chicken al mattone, or chicken under a brick.  If you cook lots of chicken then I would purchase a mattone, which is a two-piece affair:  a shallow terracotta dish – kind of like a cazuela, but with shorter, straight sides and glaze on the inside only.  Piece #2 is a teardrop-shaped terracotta weight.  You use this contraption on the stovetop to cook a butterflied, oiled and seasoned bird by pressing it into the shallow pan with the heated weight.  You will wind up with highly flavored meat and crispy skin.  Honestly, you won’t believe how good this chicken turns out.  Clearly there is something to cooking in clay that is more than the sum of its parts.

Chicken in a mattone ready to cook

I honed a recipe that works with pieces and uses only a few ingredients.  Here’s what you do:  Wash and dry a whole butterflied chicken or pieces and set aside.  Put the mattone press (the top part) into a cold oven and set the heat to 375 F.  Wait about 10 minutes.  Place the mattone base on your burner with medium heat.  No need to use a flame tamer, but I guess you can if you want to.  Immediately pour in about 1/3 cup of good olive oil and sprinkle in a handful of dried oregano, some ground black pepper and kosher salt.   No need to use fresh oregano because the cooking method opens up the dried version fine.  When the oil is hot, put in the chicken – skin side down.  If you have a whole chicken you’ll crowd the pan, which is fine.  Strew some oregano and S & P on top of the chicken and drizzle on a bit of olive oil.  Remove the press from the oven with a good mitt and place directly on top of chicken, pressing down firmly but not with enough force to knock your range over.  You get the idea.  Turn down the flame so you maintain a little sizzle but not too much; a smidgen over low should work.  When it comes time to take the chicken out of the pan, first remove the press and set it on a wooden board or some other surface that is not cold.  Remember, a rapid temperature change will cause clay cookware to crack!  Test the temperature of each chicken piece with an instant-read thermometer to make sure it is done.  As of this entry you want 165 F., but be sure to check current requirements with the USDA often, since they change.  The chicken will stick to the bottom of the pan, so use a straight-sided spatula of some ilk to loosen it before you scoop it out.  This process can be fairly intense but if you are patient and work under the skin with some oomph and a slight back-and-forth motion, you’ll get it out intact.  I place the pieces on a huge platter of spring mix and then spoon the drippings, which are so good this dish should be illegal, over the top.  The warm “dressing” is all that is needed on the salad.  I serve this with some rice and roasted peppers, which I’ll give you the recipe for tomorrow, I promise.  Notes:  If you want to butterfly a chicken, take a good set of kitchen shears and make one continuous cut along each side of the backbone starting at the pope’s nose and ending at the top.  Then open the chicken up and press it down (with the skin side facing up).  Plunk that long backbone in the freezer for congee or stock.  If you don’t want to get a mattone, use any clay dish (glazed on the inside) with sides that may be used on the stovetop as the base, and a few clean bricks for the press.  Some people wrap the bricks in foil, but I do not.  When I first buy the bricks I wash them well and then bake for quite some time to clean and sterilize, and then wash them thoroughly after each use.  You won’t get the same results but the dish will still be tasty.  If I don’t want a mess, I crimp foil under the base of the mattone all the way around as I place it on the stovetop so I have a “wall of foil” around the whole setup.  When I have the press on, I then tent the affair by placing a sheet of foil on top.  The cooking chicken can still breathe (you don’t want it airtight) but it provides a little more heat for the chicken to cook through while keeping all the spritzing oil at bay.

Chicken cooked in a mattone - under a brick

Rainbow trout

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The troops have been hankering for rainbow trout, so we had them today.  I picked up four fish (cleaned) at Costco and served them whole.  This is an easy dish to make and delicious but it can be a mess if you don’t have a large griddle or sauté pan since the head and tail will hang over the edges and flour will get all over.  Wash and dry the fish well on the outside but only slightly on the outside, salt the inside and then dredge in salt and peppered flour.  I use a half sheet pan for this and leave them on there until they go into the pan.  Get out your largest stick-free sauté pan and heat up some olive oil.  When it’s nice and hot but not an inferno, put in a knob of butter.  Gently lay in a fish and brown it — watching the heat so it does not burn.  Turn it over with long tongs after about 5 minutes and brown the other side.  Slide a large spatula (a commercial one is good for this kind of thing) under the fish and move to an oiled sheet pan, leaving room for any others you want to put on there.  Do not use the tongs to take the fish out of the sauté pan because it will break.  Before you fry another fish make sure the oil in the sauté pan is not burned.  If it is, pour it out and wipe with a paper towel when cool enough and start with fresh oil and butter.  When you have all your fish on the sheet pan place in a 375 F. convection oven and bake for 15 minutes – if you have fish that are about a pound or so each.  If you have small fish you’ll need very little bake time.  Apply good judgment here.  If you have a sauté pan that is able to house a couple of fish with no overhang, there is no reason to finish them in the oven.  After you turn the fish over and brown side #2, simply turn down the heat, tent some foil over the pan, and cook for 10 minutes or so and serve.  I  find this recipe the best since this is a mild fish and you want to bring out its goodness without a lot of overpowering ingredients.  We eat them with a squeeze of lemon.  The bones are not too bad on a rainbow trout, but try to eat any whole fish by sliding the meat down from the backbone on the side facing you.  When done with that side, pull off the entire backbone and eat the side left on your plate.  There is a little meat you can get from the tail, and be sure to eat the cheek meat and whatever else you can find in the head before you discard it.  The skin is the best part of a fried trout – enjoy it!  Debone meat for your smaller kids, but know that if you get them used to this kind of preparation they won’t know from a fish stick and this is what they’ll want when they get older.  While there is no one, but no one, who is as good with fish bones as my mother, my son, Matthew, now 21, can hold his own because he has been eating whole fish all his life.

Free chicken sammies at McDonald’s today

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Free Southern Style Chicken sandwiches at McDonald’s until 7:00 p.m., today only.  The catch is that you have to buy a medium or large beverage – but not the sweet tea, since it’s being promoed at a dollar.  Funny how getting something for free at a fast food establishment always involves the purchase of a beverage, no?  Well, not really.  Anyone in the restaurant business knows that the mark-up on soft drinks is usurious.  In Berkeley, where Matt and I went to check out the free grub, it cost us each $1.65 for the soda.  The key point here is that this new product is a knock-off of the Chick-fil-A, a hugely popular sandwich in the Southern states. Chick-fil-A, the name of the chain restaurant, is also the name of its signature sandwich, I think, but they do serve other things.  We are talking a deep fried piece of chicken breast on a steamed bun dressed with pickles and butter.  I though the McDonald’s version was pretty good, but I leave it to the fanatical Chick-fil-A devotees to set us straight.  The bun was soft and sweet – what they call a “regular bun” and the one you find around those lame basic hamburgers.  The chicken piece was not huge, but fine, and moist and fairly thick for its size.  Had I not read it, I would not have known about the butter.  A bit of quick research tells me that Chick-fil-A uses no trans fat to fry, so it has it over Mickie Dees there.  When you look into the trans fat situation on the McDonald’s website it is not easy to get exactly what you need since there is quite a bit of what seems like misdirection, but I figured out (from the ingredients section) that both the bun and fried chicken contain trans fat (i.e., partially hydrogenated oil) and that, for most of the USA, each sandwich has 1.5 grams of trans fat.  This total trans fat number came from the nutritional information.  It is not clear how much of the trans fat is attributable to the frying oil vs. the bun, unfortunately, nor is there anything (unless I missed it) about what kind of oils, specifically, they are using to fry various items.  When I did a global search to find out what the deal is in terms of reducing their use of trans fat in general, I found this:

Frequently Asked Questions About McDonald’s USA Food & Nutrition

Q: What is the status of the trans fatty acid reduction at McDonald’s?

A: Reducing, and where possible eliminating, trans fatty acids from our fried menu items continues to be a priority at McDonald’s. Our goal is to provide our customers with significantly reduced or 0 gram TFA fried products that meet their expectations for taste and quality. We are pleased that we’ve identified an alternative oil which thousands of customers say produces the same great taste in our Fries. McDonald’s ability to achieve broader distribution of the alternative oil is now based upon availability of supply. We’ll keep you posted on our progress. Meanwhile, we continue to provide TFA information in all our nutrition information materials, including our Web site, in-store nutrition brochures, trayliners, and now some product packages.

I am soooo glad that McDonald’s has “identified an alternative oil.”  Had they asked me years ago, I would have suggested several oils, including Canola.  Gee, I wonder why it has taken them so long?  Do you think money has anything to do with it?  I guess we’ll all be in better shape when they get that “supply” issue worked out.  Do you think that whatever they’ve done has been proactive or reactive?  I’m also confused.  It’s looking like the only thing that gets fried in this alternative oil is French fries, and that the only places it is in use are where McDonald’s has been legally required to change their ways.  Doesn’t that conflict with the idea of “broader distribution” being “based upon availability of supply?”  I’m not being sarcastic here — I really cannot figure this out.  Do they only use it where they are forced to?  Do they not use it elsewhere because there is not enough of it?  Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Also, what is the “alternative oil?”  Is it something like Canola oil?  Is it a blend of good oils?  I hope it’s not a substance they are producing in their lab somewhere, but I have my fears since I would think they’d tell you what it is if it’s not scary.  When will the government force these rich bastards (and not only at McDonald’s) to use better oil, period?  Incredible that California is behind the trend here.  Back to our regularly scheduled chicken sandwich.  I would give it a go if you need to get that fix on, and it’s nice to have a sandwich choice that isn’t slathered with unidentifiable sauces and piled high with a bunch of other crap, like iceberg lettuce, that does nothing but get all over when you open the wrapper.  I hate that!  Oh, yeah:  the McDonald’s in Berkeley now sells another Southern favorite, sweet tea, and was offering samples.  I would be surprised if it lasted around here because it is unbelievably sweet. 

The most important news, though, is that the California Supreme Court legalized gay marriage today, striking down laws that declared it unconstitutional.

Tie-dye glaze for cakes

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bundt cake with tie-dye glaze

Steven’s birthday and Mother’s Day today, resulting in efficiency or someone being “screwed,” and I would say that this is Steven, since he has to share his special day with a lesser event.  He requested some sort of pound cake so I made that with strawberries and whipped cream.  I gave the cake a tie-dye glaze, in honor of Steve’s childhood in the 60’s and 70’s.  This is easy.  You need:  food coloring kit; lemon juice; confectioner’s sugar; 6 glass custard cups (or other cups that won’t absorb the colors); a fully cooled pound cake.  Place your cake on a large piece of foil or a sheet pan.  Mix 2 cups of confectioner’s sugar with a little lemon juice.  Add more lemon juice until you have a very thick glaze.  If the glaze is too thin it will dry transparently on the cake and all this will have been for naught.  Divide your glaze evenly among the custard cups.  Make red, yellow, blue and green, which are the colors that come with basic food coloring sets, by adding a couple of drops of color to each cup of glaze and then mixing with a teaspoon.  Make orange with some red and yellow.  Make purple (and this is a must) from red and green.  Using a clean spoon, spoon the purple glaze on the top of the cake, at intervals, so it runs down both sides and so you wind up with four or five strips of purple.  Do this with the other colors, one at a time, on the clean parts of the cake, overlapping now and again for a tie-dye effect.  Allow icing to harden completely before moving.  Cakes like this are good served with basic strawberry topping, which you can make by washing, stemming and cutting up strawberries (to your liking, i.e., sliced or quartered), and tossing with a good dose of sugar and a few drops of lemon juice.  Cover with plastic wrap, pop in fridge, and in a few hours you’ll have strawberries in syrup to serve over cake slices.   The cake and fixin’s were a big hit – especially with Berry, who kept a close eye on the operation.

Berry the akita wanting cake on Steve's birthday

R.I.P., sourdough starter

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live sourdough starter 2006

I forgot to mention that my sourdough starter died.  Sourdough starter is a good thing to have on hand if you like to make homemade breads.  My starter was cultivated using only wild yeast, meaning I did not add any commercial yeast at the beginning.  I’ll be making more soon and will chronicle the process on the blog, as well as care and feeding.  In memory of my fine starter, I have a photo to the right that shows how active it was when it was alive.  One of the wonderful things you can make using a starter is English muffins; all you need is a good sourdough bread recipe.  After the final rise of the whole dough just cut it into small pieces, form the muffins and set them on sheet pans that have been sprinkled with coarse cornmeal.  Cover with cloth and let them rise a bit.  You then “fry” them (both sides) in cast iron pans that have been sprinkled liberally with coarse corn meal.  Bring the pans up to decent heat and then keep them on a very low flame.  You want to cook the muffins through as they brown and not wind up with burned muffins that are raw inside.  If you want perfect circles, form them initially using metal rings, but I think free-form muffins are better.  These muffins will taste so much better than store-bought, and you will blow your family and friends away, since the recipe for English muffins is a mystery to most people.  Split with a fork and toast, then spread liberally with good butter and perhaps a little peach jam.

english muffins in pans