Text 35760, 117 rader
Skriven 2010-03-12 21:47:00 av JIM WELLER (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av BURTON FORD
Ärende: organic
===============
-=> Quoting Burton Ford to Michael Loo <=-


 BF> "Scrub organic carrots or peel the carrots if they are not
 BF> organic." The author doesn't trust organic much.

Well nice organic carrots are often fertilized with nice organic
horse manure which harbours nice extra-healthy organic microbes.

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     Title: Cooking With Hay
Categories: Misc, Info
  Servings: 4

           hay

A barnyard staple takes a surprising turn in the kitchen.

It's difficult to think of a product more symbolic of agrarian life
than hay. As someone who has spent a fair amount of time tromping
around farms, I've seen quite a bit of it—in barns, bundled in
fields, used in displays—but I'd never thought of hay as a culinary
ingredient. Until now.

Hay is one of the most exciting and unexpected additions to my
pantry in recent memory. It's not a new idea, though: Hay has been
used for centuries in French and Italian cooking, where large cuts
of meat are buried in it and roasted either in the oven or in the
dying embers of a fire.

In this country, hay has traditionally played a supporting role. The
hay-box cooker has been used for more than 100 years, particularly
during World War II as a way to conserve energy. The technology is
simple: Bring a covered pot—preferably heavy metal or ceramic—full
of food and liquid to a hard boil, then transfer it to a box packed
with hay and cover it. The hay keeps the heat in the pot, so in four
to eight hours, the stew will be cooked, sans fossil fuels.

From a practical standpoint, hay makes a great cooking medium,
keeping heat in and diffusing temperature changes. But it's the
flavor that makes hay an extraordinary ingredient to work with. The
taste is sweet and herbaceous, and the aroma is incredible,
evocative of farms, pastures, and spaces vast and green and far
removed from the city.

The idea came from a conversation with my sous-chef. We were trying
to find a new way to cook carrots, and he recalled working in a
restaurant in France where the chef cooked pork with consomme and
hay for hours at a low temperature, until the meat was tender and
the broth an elixir. It seemed like roasting carrots in hay would
yield similarly delicious results, so the next weekend at the
farmers' market, I found myself shoving a gigantic bale of hay into
the backseat of my car.

Back at the restaurant, we used the hay to made a stock. We burned
some of the ends first, to give the stock deeper flavor, then
covered the hay with water and let it simmer for about an hour. We
tossed in young carrots with olive oil and salt, then combined them
with hay and a little hay stock in a heavy enameled-iron pot and
cooked them for about 30 minutes at 300 F, until they emerged tender
and aromatic. It's a simple process that can be done with any root
vegetable.

Hay has made occasional appearances on American menus over the
years. Chris Cosentino, the chef at Incanto, recalls a dish offered
years ago at Red Sage, in Washington, D.C., where leg of goat was
covered with a mixture of hay and clay, then baked—another
traditional European technique. Cosentino, who was inspired to buy
his own hay, first used it to cook a whole leg of pork. His menu
currently features rabbit braised in hay that he serves with nettles
and carrots. “People love the flavor,ö Cosentino says, “and the
aroma is amazing. Every time we pull one out of the oven, you can
smell it across the dining room. It's intoxicating.ö

There's not much to know about cooking with hay. The easiest way to
use it is to throw a little into a stew as it simmers, then remove
it before serving. If you roast with it, you should first soak the
hay in water, then lay it down as a thick bed for the meat or
vegetables. Burning the ends of the hay will give the dish subtle
smokiness and depth. You can cover your main ingredient with the hay
or not; adding a bit of liquid to the pot will ensure that it
doesn't burn.

Most farms and farm-supply stores carry hay, but because you'll use
it in direct contact with food, make sure it hasn't been treated
with chemical pesticides. And beware: Before you place your order,
stake out some serious storage space. A bale of hay is enormous.

At Coi, we haven't made much of a dent in our stash, which means
that there will be hay on the menu for quite a while. So far, we've
infused oil with hay and used it to confit suckling pig, reserving
some of the oil to drizzle into the sauce. We've ground salt and hay
together to make a crust for beets. We've infused it into onion
soup, its presence magically transforming a standard flavor into
something fascinating and delicious. Hay might not be the same
workhorse in the kitchen that it is on the farm, but in my pantry,
hay has found a comfortable second home.

Daniel Patterson is the chef-owner of Coi and a partner at Cane
Rosso.
                          
From: Offal Good
 
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Cheers

YK Jim


... 200 years ago we always used local, organic, seasonal ingredients.

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