"Spice Cabinet: Tins with Spices" by Chris Martino

A: There are really three ways I can answer this question. The first would take up a book: The Complete Book of Spices: A Practical Guide to Spices and Aromatic Seeds, which someone else wrote. The second is grossly simple: practice (also, kind of a jerky answer). The third lays somewhere in the middle, and starts not with spices but with our tongues.

We humans have receptors for five tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savory (first coined as umami by a Japanese chemist, Kikuane Ikeda, according to Harold McGee. Also according to McGee, the term roughly translates as “delicious”). In thinking about food it’s valuable to consider these fundamental tastes and then begin thinking about what kinds of ingredients awaken those taste receptors.

So really, we’re going way past spices here and instead are thinking about how to build flavors. And to do so, we’re going to make a simple tomato sauce.

Start off with one 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes. If tomatoes were in season, I’d recommend fresh ones, but they’re not right now, and the best possible tomatoes at this time of year come in cans. So go ahead and set that can on your counter.

Seasoning
The most important flavor enhancer is salt. I like to use kosher salt because its structure enables it to melt really easily into juicy foods like beef, pork, poultry, tomatoes, apple slices, hashbrowns, even oatmeal. Salt does more than just taste salty. It seasons food and enhances many of food’s natural flavors. Potatoes can taste more potato-y. Even things like bread benefit from a dash of salt. I add at least a pinch to everything I cook. (for a bit more on salt, you can check my salt post, or the essay in Michael Ruhlman’s Elements of Cooking).

So go ahead and set the salt on your counter.

Sweetness
After salt, you can begin building out the rest of the flavors with various ingredients. Sweet is fairly easy: sugar, honey, corn syrup, maple syrup, molasses. All these things can bring a certain sweetness to foods and can be added in various amounts. It’s important to think about each items’ characteristics, however. Corn syrup and sugar will provide sweetness without many other flavors. Molasses, on the other hand, brings a certain depth and smokiness to foods, and honey provides a subtle brightness, especially if you use a honey that carries with it specific characteristics of its source flowers. Orange blossom honey, for example, tends to be slightly more acidic than regular blended honey.

I’m not a big fan of sugar in my tomato sauces, but many people are, especially if they’re fond of Ragu or Prego, which all have some kind of sweetener added. If you really want some sweetness, bring out the sugar, but I’m going to say no at this point.

Sour and Bitter
I tend to think of sour and bitter are related. Each brings a certain brightness to food, though most folks believe sour is more pleasant than bitter. Indeed, “Scientists believe this was once an evolutionary advantage that warned us away from eating plants containing bitter, poisonous alkaloids.”  Each is important, however, to bring a balance of flavors to whatever you cook. In our test-case tomato sauce, the tomatoes themselves are pretty acidic and will bring brightness to the dish on their own.

But let’s say you want to make a salad dressing. You’ll want to start with a good oil and add an additional ingredient for brightness and additional flavors. For example, you could start with three tablespoons of really fine extra virgin olive oil, and a teaspoon of balsamic vinegar, a little salt, a sprinkling of minced shallots, and you have an incredible, well-balanced salad dressing. The vinegar’s acidity helps cut the liven the fatty flavors of the oil and also helps with mouth feel. Lemon juice is another great acid that can be added to dishes to give them a certain brightness or to elevate other earthier flavors. There are a couple of spices I can think of that lend this brightness: cumin and tumeric. Cumin is used in a lost of Latin American cooking and Tumeric is pretty common in a lot of Asian, Indian and Middle Eastern dishes.

In our tomato sauce, we’ll want something to help cut the acidity of the tomatoes and deepen the sauce’s overall flavor. But to do that, we have to get through the rest of the taste spectrum.

Savory (and fat)
Savory tastes are easy to come by if you’re willing to load up on the MSG. You can read about the chemistry behind the taste over on Wikipedia, but the important thing to remember is that savory qualities in food probably have as much to do with mouth feel as they do with taste. And for a good, savory mouth feel, we’re going to need a little bit of fat.

Haul out the extra virgin olive oil. This is going to do a couple things, all having to do with depth of flavor. First, the slight nutty flavor of the oil itself will lend a certain savoriness to the sauce. It will also pick up other flavor molecules from the garlic we’re going to sautee in it (might as well bring out the fresh garlic bulb and set it on the counter), and then will disperse those flavors through the sauce as the oil coats each piece of tomato, forming a sort of emulsion (fat suspended in liquid via some mechanism [an emulsifier]. In this instance, giant pieces of tomato, but in other instances, it might be mustard in a vinaigrette or egg whites in a mayonnaise.)

So, our ingredient list so far:

• 28 oz can of tomatoes
• Kosher salt
• Sugar (if you want to add sweetness)
• Olive oil
• Garlic bulb

Go ahead and get a large skillet or sauce pan and a wooden spoon.

Depth of Flavor
In the section on bitter and sour I talked some about brightness of flavor. I tend to think of taste and flavor as separate. Our taste receptors are fairly limited, but our FLAVOR receptors are complex and finely tuned. Flavor occurs when fundamental tastes blend with specific scents and aromas to produce an overall flavor experience. Part of that experience for me is the depth of flavor found in any dish. Ceviche, for example, often has a very shallow, bright flavor, with many of the flavor elements harmonizing in the upper register of sour and sweet. If you take a look at the basic ingredients list for a ceviche, and think about the individual tastes of each element, the taste profile becomes pretty clear:

• Shrimp or fish (a little sweetness, a little savoriness)
• Lemon or lime juice (sour)
• Cilantro (a little bitter, a little herb or green flavor. Both bright)
• Yellow peppers (a little heat)
• Red onion (a little brightness, a little heat)
• A little garlic (a hint of savory)
• Salt and pepper (seasoning)

We can perform the same kind of analysis on our sauce ingredients and get a good idea of where we stand in terms of flavor balance:

• Tomatoes (their inherent acidity will provide some brightness)
• Olive oil (a little savoriness, a little fat)
• Garlic (a hint of savory, plus a little flavor depth)
• kosher salt (seasoning)

As it stands, we’re going to have a very bright fairly acidic sauce. We’ll have to get some herbs and spices to help counteract that. Go ahead and get some oregano, some black pepper, some paprika and some nutmeg, and set them all aside.

Get cooking
Begin with a good stainless steel or anodized aluminum skillet. Measure in a couple splashes of olive oil (approximately 2 tablespoons, but who’s counting?) and set the stovetop for medium. This sauce recipe is designed to come together in the time it takes to heat water for, and cook pasta, so we won’t be letting it bubble away for an hour on the stove or anything like that.

While the oil heats, prep and mince the garlic. This video provides good, step-by-step instructions:

Add the garlic to the oil and give it a stir with a wooden spoon. Let it sit in there for about a minute, or until some of the garlic just begins to turn golden. This is caramelization and adds richness and depth by chemically altering sugars in ways scientists don’t yet understand(!) and adding a slight smoky flavor. Don’t let it burn! If it does, it’s not the end of the world, but burnt garlic can be pretty bitter.

Once the garlic has browned slightly, add the tomatoes and slowly stir everything together. When it warms a bit, give it a taste. It should taste very bight and very tomatoy. Now go ahead and add two large pinches of salt. Stir it in and give it another taste. Notice the difference? The salt should highlight some underlying flavors which will help equalize the bright, acidic flavor of the tomatoes (it’s from the skin, by the way).

So now what? First, spoon some of the sauce out into two bowls (just a little bit). This is for our experiment. Then shake some of the oregano into the pan (no harm in using dried herbs from the store, especially if you’re just starting out). Maybe a teaspoon’s worth. Mix it in and give the sauce another taste. If it still tastes really bright, shake in another teaspoon of oregano. You should notice something amazing begin to happen. The oregano will lend depth to the overall flavor of the sauce, cut the acidity and lend a certain sweetness and a certain smokiness to the whole affair. In essence, it’s balanced the flavors and made a more appetizing sauce. As a point of reference, go ahead and shake a few specks of nutmeg into one of the bowls you set aside and a few specks of nutmeg into the other. Give them a taste. Notice anything? Make note of how they changed they flavor. If they did it in a good way, then maybe add a bit of one of those spices to your sauce. If they made it taste terrible, then forget I ever mentioned it.

Working well with spices takes a long time. I’ve been cooking for a while, and I still use only five or six spices with any kind of regularity. However, if you think less about specific spices and more about what kind of flavors you want to work with, then you can really begin expanding your cooking repetoire to incorporate not just spices, but all manner of ingredients.

Heat
One thing I didn’t mention in our recipe for tomato sauce is heat. Heat is another flavor element that can add real complexity to a dish, especially when combined with sweet (think Thai dishes, which feature wonderful, complex chilis as well as sweet coconut flavors). Adding heat is usually accompanied by some acid, as many peppers and chilis tend to have fruity undertones. However, heat is one of those things that seems regionally distinct and, in my mind, works best with those dishes we traditionally think of when someone mentions a little fire: Schezwan, Thai, Indian, Mexican, and others, and seems deserving of its own post.

Extra credit
You know how lemon is often added to fish? The acid helps cut some of the fatty flavors that fish can harbor. Get what you made earlier that was pretty acidic? Tomato sauce without oregano. If you wanted to do a bang-up job cooking some flavor-neutral fish (orange roughy or grouper, let’s say), you could put some oil in a pan, get it really hot and sear the fish on each side for about 30 seconds. Transfer it to a non-reactive cooking vessel (a pyrex casserole dish, for example, spoon the tomato sauce over it, and bake it in the oven for about 10 or 15 minutes. Pull it from the sauce, garnish with some sliced black olives and finely chopped chives and you’d have a great and easy fish dish.

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We’ve gone to a mostly vegetarian diet since my daughter declared her new status this past Christmas. It’s been easy in some respects. I put food on the table, we eat it. Not a big deal. But in many ways it’s like starting from scratch. I’m uncertain, don’t know a thing about ingredients or spices, don’t have the confidence in the kitchen I did when cooking with meat. I began to question myself as a cook.

I understand meat. I know what happens to connective tissue when a roast is braised; I know the flavor bacon fat gives to green beans. I can roast a chicken. I even understand some vegetables. I can roast broccoli now without a second thought. Fresh green beans without bacon fat are delicious when boiled fast in salted water. But the rest of this stuff escapes me. I’m in unfamiliar territory.

So now I guess I need to practice. It’s what a person does when he doesn’t know something. It’s what I do, at least. And I’m telling you this because I’d appreciate it if you bear with me. If you want to learn how to cook vegetarian meals, great. Maybe we can stumble through together. If you’re a seasoned pro, even better. Maybe you can leave me some tips in the comments. I think I’ve been stalled (and stalling) on this blog because I felt like I need to be an expert, but really all I need is time in the kitchen.

Tomato Basil Salad with Tuscan Bread (for two)
1 giant heirloom tomato, locally grown
1/2 loaf of excellent, hearty bread cut into thick slices, at least two per person (the garlic in the bread I used imparted wonderful flavor to the meal)
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil (the better the olive oil, the better the dressing)
2 tablespoon balsamic vinegar (again, the better, the better)
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon chopped fresh basil (or less, to taste)
4 tablespoons shaved Parmesan cheese
Fresh ground pepper, to taste

I’d like to be able to say I make my own bread. Some day that might become a reality, but at this point, I still buy my bread at the local supermarket. This weekend I bought a great Tuscan bread infused with olive oil and garlic. We used half the loaf for garlic bread last night, served next to stuffed shells (I just followed the recipe on the back of the pasta box. For the shells, I mean. For the bread I toasted thick slices and slathered them with butter I melted in the microwave.)

The second half I used for lunch:

First, make the dressing. Combine the olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, and basil in a container and shake vigorously. Then slice and toast the bread. While the bread toasts, chop the tomato into bite-sized pieces. On a plate, lay out two thick slices of bread for each person, and liberally scatter with the chopped tomato. Shake the dressing again, and drench each plate. Finally top the tomatoes and bread with shaved Parmesan cheese. It’s really that simple.

The key to this dish is fresh, high-quality ingredients. Here in Florida, spring has arrived in full splendor and glory, so we can get things like heirloom tomatoes. And don’t even ask if the extra expense is worth it. It totally is, as is the inconvenience of having to wait for local tomatoes to come into season. The difference is night and day.

So that’s my first step. That’s the commitment I’m making to vegetarian cooking and to this blog. It’s not going to be fancy, not for a while at least, but the ingredients will be as good as I can get given the time I have, and I’ll strive to make them seasonal.

I swear, it’s just like starting over.

This past Saturday afforded me such luxury, and I took a few selfish minutes to cook up a four-egg omelet for one.  I had a busy day ahead and needed my strength (plus, grilled onions, bacon, and cheddar cheese–I get selfish when faced with pure deliciousness).

Ingredients (serves one, two, if you have a side item)
2 strips of bacon, diced
1/4 medium onion, diced
1/4 red bell pepper, diced
4 eggs, beaten
grated cheddar cheese (to taste, but you’re probably going to want a quarter-cup)
kosher salt
ground black pepper

Note: you’ll also want a good non-stick pan (trust me on this one.  Non-stick pans are perfect for cooking eggs, and this is no exception)

Technique
dice

Method
low heat

First, set out four eggs. Let them warm a bit. Eggs closer to room temperature cook more evenly and more predictably than cold ones. So set out the eggs and brew your coffee. Then place the bacon in a cold skillet and set the skillet on a burner, medium heat.  Let the pan come to temperature.  When the bacon begins to sizzle, let it go for about a minute, then add the diced onion.  Stir occasionally for three minutes or so, then add the bell pepper.  Stir occasionally for another five minutes. You can also use this time to beat the eggs. Once the onion has gone translucent and browned a bit, the bacon has crisped some and the peppers are soft, remove all the ingredients to a bowl.

Place the pan back on the heat and add the eggs.  Leave them be.  If you need to, swirl the pan gently so the eggs cover the bottom completely, then let them cook a while, approximately four minutes.

What to look for: the gentle heat should prevent the bottom from burning.  The omelet will be ready to fill and fold when the eggs on the top achieve a jelly-like consistency in just a thin layer above a pale, custardy layer.  Now it’s time to fill the omelet.

Place 1/3 the filling ingredients near the center of the omelet, but slightly off center and top with half the cheese.  With a rubber spatula, fold over the right third of the omelet, then the left third (or vice-versa, depending).  Working quickly, slide the omelet to a plate and top with the remaining bacon, onion, pepper and cheese.  If you let it stand for another 30 seconds, the eggs inside will heat through and firm up, and you’ll be able to enjoy your perfect omelet with the sun streaming in through the living room windows and the sounds of a house waking into itself around you.

My Granny’s house always smelled of food. Partly it was the old gas oven she used, a massive thing with cast-iron burner covers and pilot lights that filled the kitchen with dry, warm air. I remember bacon grease in a small jar on the back of the stove, and this amazing food smell, not of any dish, but just of food. There, the kitchen seemed a place of sustinence, and whatever your stomach desired could be had, as long as the desire was steak or catfish, some vegetables and a starch (or two starches, if the vegetable was corn). Still, when my family travelled there, mom and dad coaxing our beater Volvo nearly 1,200 miles, and we entered the old farmhouse through the kitchen door, there was always a light on for us, and that kitchen’s warm aroma.

Granny also had a massive vegetable garden for a number of years, probably the first organic gardener my sister and I knew. She grew cucumbers and tomatoes, mostly, and I wish I had an appreciation for tomatoes back then because all who tasted them raved at their deep flavor and amazing mouth feel. I went with her once to a farmer’s market in Lawrence, Kansas. Muscle, mostly. I piled baskets into her trunk and helped her unload them on a table in someone else’s booth. A friend who’d offered to buy the lot then sell them piecemeal. I was fifteen and surly, didn’t care for vegetables and thought the idea of a salted tomato slice on a plate was anathema to all things good and tasty.

How little I knew.

When compared to tomatoes we get in the local supermarkets most of the year, a fresh, ripe tomato is a wonderful thing. Tart and slightly sweet with none of the mealy mouth feel so often off-putting to kids and adults alike. It’s because the off-season tomatoes aren’t bred for flavor or texture. They’re genetically engineered for shipping, with sturdy interiors and thick skin bitter with tannins.

A good canned tomato is better than a bad fresh one.

In her cellar, Granny kept jar after jar of canned and pickled vegetables. Her cucumbers became light, crisp dills, and her tomatoes were preserved for soups and stews. Again, I wish I’d been able to appreciate them.

Farfalle with spinach tomato sauce and goat cheese

Ingredients (serves 4)
8 – 10 ounces dry farfalle

Sauce
2 tablespoons olive oil
6 cloves garlic, minced
29 ounces canned tomatoes, diced, no salt added
1/2 cup white wine
2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar (optional)
Fresh spinach leaves (approx. 20)
Kosher salt
Oregano (dried, in winter)

Fresh goat cheese

Technique
mince
chiffonade

Method
Caramelize
Boil
Simmer

Heat the olive oil in a sauté pan over medium heat. Add the garlic and cook until it just begins to brown, then add the tomatoes and white wine, stir. Increase the heat to medium-high, and when the sauce begins to bubble, reduce the heat to medium-low and continue to simmer.

Fill a stock pot with about four quarts of water. Add two tablespoons of kosher salt and bring to a boil. Add the pasta and set a timer according to the instructions on the package.

Now turn your attention back to the sauce. Add a teaspoon of kosher salt, stir, and taste. It should taste well seasoned, with a certain depth and brightness of flavor, but not salty. Sprinkle a dash of the oregano in the sauce, add the balsamic vinegar if you feel like it, and stir the ingredients together.

Finally, it’s time to chiffonade the spinach leaves and add them to the sauce. Work in batches of five. Stack them on top of one another, roll them up, then slice gently and cleanly through the leaves. Each cut should be about a quarter inch apart.

When the pasta finishes cooking, plate, top with a generous portion of the sauce, and then add a few pieces of the goat cheese. The tart goat cheese provides a wonderful counterpoint to the sweet oregano and spinach and lends the sauce a certain creaminess.

There’s no shame in canned tomatoes. My Granny knew that, and her canned tomatoes made a better choice for her stews than anything that might have come from the store in the dead of winter.

I probably still can’t make a good vegetable stew, fresh tomatoes or no. But an excellent sauce doesn’t have to come from fresh tomatoes. High-quality canned tomatoes produce marvelous flavor and are a much better bet when the fresh tomatoes in the store have been flown in from Chile.

Can people enjoy the simple pleasure of a salted tomato slice on a plate during the off season? No. But during a Kansas winter, would they want to? No, they’d want to stand in a warm, dry kitchen the size of a walk-in closet, faint blue glow from the stove’s pilot lights, the scent of tomato stew in the air. And the kettle on, for hot chocolate. With marshmallows.

To mark the occasion of my daughter’s vegetarian transformation, I wanted to do something special. An appetizer. In the past, we’ve enjoyed the frozen spinach artichoke dip produced by T.G.I. McGuilicutty’s (and yes, I’ve hated myself for it). Why not do something similar? Luckily, I’d seen a close recipe in Rocco’s 5 Minute Flavor. Did I mention how I already hated myself a bit? Don’t judge. It was heavily discounted, and there must be some merit, some universal truth in spending $7.95 on a book that lists at $26.95 by a former chef (he’s just a cook now) who enjoyed one of the most well-publicized and precipitous falls from favor in the public cooking world.

And I tell you this: if there is no other recipe in the whole book, the artichoke dip alone is worth the price of admission.

Ingredients (serves 4)
1 14 oz. can of artichoke hearts, finely chopped (I’m a fan of Virgo. They’re organicish and inexpensive, which is much more than I can say for Progresso)
3/4 cup mayonnaise (the original recipe suggested low-fat or reduced fat, but that doesn’t quite have the same wonderful unctuous mouth feel as the real stuff)
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup parmesan cheese, grated fine
2 tablespoons fresh basil, chopped fine (yes, fresh counts here. I wouldn’t dare use the dry stuff for this recipe)
1/2 cup panko bread crumbs (this is my addition, for color and some texture)
1 fine French baguette

Technique
Mince
Chop, fine

Method
Bake

For the main course, I went with an old standby, spaghetti and tomato sauce with garlic bread.

Ingredients (serves 4, without being piggish)
For the sauce
1 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes, mostly drained
1 8oz can tomato sauce
four garlic cloves, crushed and copped fine
kosher salt
1 teaspoon dried oregano (or more, to taste)
1/4 cup grated parmesan + 1/4 cup grated parmesan held in reserve

For the pasta
1 16 oz package of dried spaghetti (duh)
2 level tablespoons kosher salt

For the garlic bread
3 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 loaf of crusty Italian or cu ban bread, cut in half lengthwise

Technique
Chop, fine
Mince

Method
Boil
Simmer
Broil

A good spaghetti sauce is easy to make. Cook it slow, taste along the way, and add nothing in huge quantities. Use the best ingredients you can (don’t you dare use off-season tomatoes; go for canned), and keep it simple. It’s a formula that’s served me well for a long time, evidenced by this exchange:

Daughter: What are we having for dinner?
Me: Spaghetti and tomato sauce.
Daughter: The stuff you make, or the stuff from a jar?
Me: The stuff I make.
Daughter: Good.

That vote of confidence from a picky eater? It’s a wonder I don’t make the stuff every night.