Food Blogging: Rigatoni alla Genovese

Pasta alla Genovese

Type: Italian
Difficulty: Easy
Non-Standard Ingredients: None
Grade: C

I'd never made la Genovese before, but prompted by a posting on reddit, I decided to give it a shot.  I stuck with the most traditional recipes I could find, looking for that authentic taste, and I think I'd have liked it better if I'd moved away from the traditional a bit.

For my taste, it's kind of bland and way to sweet.

My partner said she thought it was pretty good, but that she preferred a more savory sauce herself. Our kid said he thought it was OK in his "I'm being very polite" tone of voice, and then asked me not to make it again.  Unfortunately he's quite picky so that wasn't a surprise. How a pair of foodies like us wound up with a picky eater is a mystery.

My hope had been that, like all the people singing the praises of la Genovese say, the simplicity would make things amazing.  Either my palate is too unrefined, or I did something wrong, or it just plain isn't the sort of thing I like.  I'm leaning towards the last option.

Make no mistake, it wasn't bad.  I just felt kind of meh about it.  If I were to make it again I'd add rosemary maybe, or perhaps oregano and basil, maybe some tarragon to go with the onion. Something.

It is not a short recipe.  Total cooking time is around six hours, but your involvement is about 30 minutes of prep and occasionally stirring.  Not a great meal for a weeknight, but you can make it on the weekend and still get in your reading or Netflixing or gaming or what have you.

You begin with a mirepoix, or at least the carrot and celery parts of a mirepoix, because you'll be adding plenty of onion very soon. I used a rib of celery and a carrot, some recipes called for two celery and two carrots but most called for one so I went along.

Then the meat, in my case 2.8 pounds of bone in shoulder roast, nice and fatty, bone for extra flavor, and all in all a good choice of meat for a long braise, which is basically what la Genovese is.

I cut it into bite sized chunks, browned it, then added the carrot and celery, also the bones and all the meat I couldn't cut off the bones.

dang that's a lot of onions

That's 7 large yellow onions, one onion short of 5.5 pounds, six thin sliced and ready to go the seventh left for scale in the photo then sliced and added to the bowl.

They filled the pot, almost to the brim. Slapped a lid on, gave it stir every now and then, and an hour later it looked like this:

Why no, I didn't add any liquid, that's all onion and meat juice.

After letting it cook for a total of five hours or so, removing the bones and pulling all the cooked meat off I could, and then letting it gently boil down with the lid off to get a bit less watery, it looked delicious.

The recipes all said a big cylindrical pasta was best, so I went with rigatoni.  Mixed the pasta with the sauce, plated, and the result was indeed a lovely looking dish of pasta.  I added Parmesan, the real stuff not that nasty crap from Kraft, per the recipe, before I ate, but took a picture of just the sauce and pasta.

And it was.... ok.  Obviously a lot of people like it, but as I noted earlier I found it a bit meh, and too sweet.  I knew it'd be sweet, you can't cook down 5.5 pounds of onions for hours without getting a sweet result, but I was unprepared for how almost cloyingly sweet it was.

Again, it wasn't bad.  I just didn't care much for it.  Which is a shame, because I love onions, and really wanted to like it.  Oh well, I may make a less traditional batch with some herbs and spices added someday.

Full Recipe:

2.8 pounds of fatty beef with bone in, or 2 pounds of leaner boneless beef.
5 to 7 pounds onions
1 rib celery
1 carrot
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Rigatoni or your favorite large cylindrical pasta

Thin slice the onions, this will take a while, there's a lot.  If you have a mandolin that'd be the quickest and most dangerous way to get the job done.

Cut the beef into bite sized cubes and brown with a touch of olive oil in the pot, including the bones if you've got bones.  Once browned, add the carrot and celery, saute for a moment, then reduce heat to medium add the onions.  All of them.

Add salt and pepper, then lid and allow to cook for ten or fifteen minutes before stirring for the first time.  Lid again, and give a stir every fifteen or so minutes for the next four to five hours until cooked into a delicious mass with the onions mostly dissolving into delicious oniony mushy goodness.

Once cooked to mush, remove the bones, pick off any meat left on the bones and reintroduce to the sauce, and discard the bones.

Remove the lid and allow to boil down until it thickens, depending on how watery your onions were, how tight your lid was, etc this could take anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour.

Prepare your pasta ever so slightly al dente, once it is finished mix with the sauce.  I used a pound of pasta and found it to be not quite enough, I had sauce left over.

Plate, add a healthy sprinkling of fresh grated Parmesian cheese, and broil util the cheese is nice and melty.

You're finished!

Food blogging: Okonomiyaki, the best way to eat cabbage that exists

Type: Japanese

Difficulty: easy

Non-Standard Ingredients: 2 from any Asian market

Grade: B

Okonomiyaki means "whatever you like fried up", you can put just about anything into okonomiyaki as an extra, but there are some basics that don't change.  It's essentially a savory batter with a bunch of cabbage and green onion mixed in along with your optional ingredients, and then cooked kind of like a pancake with thin strips of pork belly on the bottom.  You top it with a sauce called, boringly enough, okonomiyaki sauce, most people also add mayo.  Its simple and good, and as it says in the title the best way you'll ever find to eat cabbage.

There's two main types of okonomiyaki, I just described Kansai (or Osaka) style, which is the type I like best and the only variety I'd recommend trying to make at home.  Hiroshima style is a lot more complicated to try to make at home and involves layering lots of stuff together rather than mixing it up from the start.  

Despite living in Japan for a semester and knowing more about Meiji Era Japan (1868-1912) than anyone who didn't actually get a degree in East Asian history should, I really don't care for most Japanese food, though there's very little I actively dislike there's also not much that really makes me excited.

There are some Japanese dishes that are excellent, sushi may well be one of the best food inventions ever, and no one ever has anything bad to say about miso soup.  But to me most Japanese cooking is a bit like the less inspiring variety of American midwestern cooking.  It's generally sort of sweetish and bland and boring.  There are several exceptions, Japanese dishes I absolutely love, but for the most part I'm kind of meh about Japanese cooking.  

Okonomiyaki is one of the exceptions.  It is just plain good, and oddly new.  As nearly as anyone can tell, it didn't exist prior to WWII, and may have been invented due to the post-war shortages of rice.

In Japan you mostly encounter it at fairs or restaurants, but it's dead easy to make at home.  Most of the ingredients can be found at any American grocery store, and the stuff you can't find at most American grocery stores can usually be found in even the smallest and less well stocked Asian grocers.

Mind, as long as you're headed to your local Asian grocery anyway, you might as well get some other stuff while you're there because Asian grocers are filled with many amazing, awesome, and delicious things.

This recipe makes either two large servings or three medium servings.

Ingredients From An Asian Market That You MUST Have:

You cannot make okonomiyaki without these two things:

Dashi stock.  HonDashi is usually what you'll find both in your local Asian market and in Japan, it's a powder that looks a bit like baking yeast, a small jar should cost less than $3.  If you really feel like it you can try to make your own from kombu seaweed and bonito flakes, but I've never thought it was really worth it.  Until you know what dashi should taste like, just use the powder.  Dashi is the root of almost all Japanese cookery.

Okonomiyaki sauce.  The brand you'll most likely find is Otafuku, and it is good stuff.  Restaurants in Japan often have their own house secret sauce, but I'm not an okonomiyaki restaurant and neither are you so just buy some from the store.

Optional Extras from an Asian Market:

This stuff is kind of nice to have but not actually necessary.

Kewpie brand mayonnaise, has a somewhat different flavor from American mayo

Aonori, ground up seaweed, makes a nice topping for the okonomiyaki and some other dishes

Bonito flakes: super thin shavings of smoked dried fish, traditional topping for okonomiyaki and quite tasty

Miso you're there anyway, miso soup is bloody delicious, might as well grab some and have it too!

Pickled, shredded, ginger, there's two kinds: gari which you get with sushi and comes in pale pink thin slices, and beni shoga which is radioactive neon obviously fake red and comes in julienned shreds.  You want beni shoga for this.  

If you really, really, feel like it you can try to find naga-imo, Japanese mountain yam, if you do you omit the potato starch from the recipe and grind up a couple tablespoons of naga-imo into a sort of slimy sticky stuff that adds extra body to the batter.  I've never found naga-imo at a low enough price I thought it was worth it.

Ingredients From Any Grocery Store:

1 cup flour

2 tablespoons potato starch

1 teaspoon baking powder

2 eggs

4 cups chopped cabbage

12 or so green onions, fine sliced on the white end and chopped to about 1/2 inch pieces on the green end

6 strips bacon (or uncured pork belly if you want to be more traditional) cut into 1/2 inch or so strips.

How to cook it:

Measure 2/3 cups of water and add about 3/4 tablespoon of dashi powder, that's a bit strong for soup but perfect for okonomiyaki.  Stir until dissolved.  Congrats, you now have dashi stock.

Mix the flour, potato starch, and baking powder in a large bowl.  Crack in the eggs, and add the dashi stock, and mix with a spoon or whisk until well blended and smooth.  No need for a hand mixer or stand mixer.

Chop your cabbage into somewhat smaller than 1/2 inch pieces, you're looking for bite size here, and mix that into your batter.

Chop the white part of the green onions into very thin slices, and the green part into roughly 1/2 inch long pieces.  Mix that into your batter.

Heat a large pan or skillet over medium heat until it's about right for making pancakes.  Add a touch of cooking spray then put 1/2 or 1/3 of your batter/cabbage/green onion glop.  

Smoosh it flat and round until its only about 1/2 inch thick.  Put bacon pieces on top.

Cover with a lid and let cook for three to four minutes, until the bottom is golden. 

Flip, you may need two spatulas for this step.  Now your bacon is on the bottom and cooking away merrily.  Cover and cook for three to four more minutes.

When the bottom is cooked and your bacon all nice and done, remove from a pan and plate.  Start your next one right away then decorate the first.

Top with stripes of okonomiyaki sauce, mayo, and (if you got it) aonori and bonito flakes.

Eat.

Extras:

That's a very basic okonomiyaki.  You can add whatever you like to the basic batter and cabbage mix.  In Japan you usually see octopus or shrimp, but also chicken, sometimes beef, more pork, tofu, extra veggies (zucchini shredded thin is nice), okonomiyaki is all about what you want to add so add whatever sounds good.