Clams & chorizo

These clams were a big hit the other night. They were fresh and tender and super sweet, pretty much the perfect appetizer for four people to share.

If you're like me, though, a dish like this is really about only one thing: dunking bread in the broth. So make certain to have plenty of the crusty stuff on hand should you decide to give this a go.

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees F. Saute a large onion, 6 garlic cloves, two celery stalks and some hot pepper in olive oil until softened. I used a very large black iron pan here, but any pan that's oven-safe will do.

Add around a quarter pound of diced chorizo. I used cooked Spanish chorizo here.

Add some fresh herbs (thyme and marjoram here), freshly ground black pepper and a quart of stock. I used some of the homemade shrimp stock I had in the freezer but any light stock will be fine. Turn the heat up to high.

Let the stock reduce by around half.

While the stock is reducing clean your clams thoroughly to get rid of any sand or grit. I used three dozen medium-sized clams here.

Add the clams to the pan and place into the oven uncovered. I used the outdoor wood oven this time, as it was fired up to cook several other things that evening.

As soon as all the clams have opened, which shouldn't take more than a few minutes, you're ready to go. Either set the hot pan out where people can scoop out their clams or go the safer route and transfer to a large serving bowl.

Either way the clams will wind up in a few individual bowls like this one. We were four people on this night and so we each got eight clams as an appetizer.

Oh yeah, there wasn't any bread leftover either.

The good butcher

I once had a butcher in Portland. His name was Jarrod. The man made my life better.

A few days ago, while on a road trip through Maine's lake regions, I noticed a message from Jarrod in the email box. This surprised me as we had never communicated in this manner before. We talk at his counter, sometimes in the walk-in when he wants to show me something special. Never like this.

"I am no longer at the Rosemont Market," Jarrod My Butcher wrote. "I'd love to catch up and chat. Here's my number."

Six hours in the saddle of a vibrating motorcycle had wrecked havoc on an already aching back, but the pain that shot through me at this moment had a far more profound impact.

A man needs a good butcher in his life. And I no longer had one.

I'd only seen Jarrod a week ago. I had asked if he had a pork shoulder that I could prepare in the wood oven. He said that he did, but not the kind that I like. A good butcher knows what you like. Mine knew that a good pork shoulder — to me — had the bone in and the skin still attached. Jarrod had a bone-in shoulder, but its skin had already been removed.

"I think I can fix you up," he said with the kind of enthusiasm a man must possess in order to be a good butcher. "Come back later."

Just as promised, Jarrod My Butcher fixed me up. By carefully tying a slab of pork skin to a beautiful nine-pound, bone-in shoulder.

Which I seasoned with salt, pepper, and a touch of fennel pollen.

And stuffed with fresh herbs from the garden.

Scoring the skin every couple inches is the way to go, I think. Better for basting, and the cooked skin is easier to cut up and eat.

In a deep roasting pan went celery, whole (slightly crushed) garlic cloves, bay leaves, some thyme, like that.

The pork sits on top of all that and then two cups each of white wine and chicken stock are added. Cover in aluminum foil before placing in the oven.

Speaking of which, this is a slow-roasted deal we're talking about here, and so the oven temperature should be around 200 to 250 degrees F.

Every 20 minutes or so be sure to baste the roast.

You can see that there's a lot of liquid in the pan, even after more than six hours.

At around the six hour mark remove the foil. Then, when the roast is pretty much done to your liking, crank up the temperature to around 450 degrees so that the skin has an opportunity to crisp. This should only take half an hour, if that.

This baby was in the oven around 8 hours total.

And was one of the moistest, tenderest pieces of meat that I ever ate.

Grazie Jarrod!

My Butcher.

Salt-baked whole fish

There are fishes buried under there. Three of them. Branzino, if you must know, a type of bass that came from the Mediterranean Sea.

They are encased in a mountain range-like mass of kosher salt. More important, I am pretty certain that these fish are the moistest that I have eaten.

They were baked for about 20 minutes in this wood-burning oven, but any oven will do. The temperature only needs to be in the 400 F range. 

The full recipe is below, but this is what you will see after cracking open the salt crust once the fish is cooked.

And if you enlarge this pic you will see how moist the flesh turned out to be.

I had always meant to try this cooking method but was somehow convinced that it would be too big a production. It wasn't, I swear. The only downside, if you want to call it that, is the large amount of salt you'll go through, which does add to the dish's cost.

Other than that, it's a major cool method of preparing a super moist fish. Dramatic, too, if you're out to show off for your friends. (Speaking of friends: Yes, Fred, this might work with one of those big-ass stripers you show off on FishTales from time to time. I'd just cook it longer. And maybe buy more salt. And a giant-sized pan.)

Salt-baked whole fish

Recipe

2 whole 1 lb. fish, cleaned and gutted (branzino is what I used)

4-6 lemon slices, cut crosswise

4 rosemary sprigs

1/3 cup chopped parsley

2 or more 3-lb. boxes of kosher salt

Cold water as needed

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Pour a 1/2-inch layer of the kosher salt onto a baking sheet.

Set both of the fish on top of the salt and stuff each one with the lemon, rosemary and parsley.

In a bowl, pour about a box of the salt, then mix in a little cold water, enough to moisten the salt just enough to hold it together. Don't make it wet; the idea here is that you'll be molding the mix around the fish to create a thick crust.

Pile the salt onto the fish and form a mold around them. If the salt mix isn't enough to cover the fish completely make some more mix with the leftover salt.

After the fish are properly coated place them in the oven for 20 minutes.

Break open the salt crust, remove the fish and serve whole or filleted, whichever you prefer. You could also drizzle some olive oil or further season the flesh if you like. I didn't. The branzino were plenty flavorful just as they were.

Hooked!

Things are not always as they appear.

For example, and contrary to appearances, I am not a fisherman. In the twenty or so times that I have been fishing in my life, only once has a fish managed to wind up on a lure that was in any way associated with me. You're looking at it. A striped bass, of indeterminate weight and size; a beauty, my fishermen friends assured me at the time.

As you can see, the bass and I are on a lovely little island off the coast of Maine, just outside of a cabin that I used to like going to quite a lot but no longer. You might also have noticed that it is a beautiful summer's day, the kind of day that can shield a Mainer's thoughts from the winter that is coming.

All in all, one very fine afternoon in the northland. Made more so by the merciful end to a long and frustrating run of failed fishing expeditions spanning (literally) decades.

But here is what you do not see.

There is the thrown and broken beer bottle, of course (a full one if memory serves). And the newly reddened blue shirtsleeve, made so by the blood flowed out of my newly mangled right hand. Oh, and let's not forget the writhing-on-the-grass-in-excruciating-pain display that I so generously staged for the local island dwellers. Yes, that was fun.

So far as I know no pictures exist of any of those things. But would you really want to see that poor bass struggling to break free of the hook lodged inside its body so that it could just get back to what it was doing before I came along? Would you like to witness the moment when the fish jerked so quickly that all those dangling hooks not lodged inside it went piercing straight through one side of my hand and back out the other?

It wasn't pretty. I haven't held a fishing rod in my hand since. And, though I probably consume a lot more seafood than the average bear, I haven't eaten a striper either.

So, what are we doing here then?

The plan, you see, was to head over to my local fishmonger, pick out a couple whole stripers, douse them in plenty of extra virgin and a few fresh herbs, and quick roast them at about 650 degrees in the wood oven out back of the house. A simple enough plan, and one that might finally put the whole messy matter of this bass and me to rest. (It wasn't. At rest, I mean.) Hell, I even made it to the fish market and scoped out the talent. Not nearly as big and meaty and beautiful as my striped bass, but nice.

Except that after way too long a time pacing around the store (long enough for a very nice couple from New Jersey to mistake me for a person who worked at the fish market), I decided to not go through with it after all.

I'm not going all soft on you here. Creatures large and small, from land and sea, are no safer from my desires than they were before. It's just the stripers that appear to be. I caught one. It caught me right back. We're even. I'm just not as determined to get back on the winning side as I thought I was.

Maybe it wasn't just the fish hook that got inside me that day.

Oh, and I stopped by the butcher on the way home from the fish market. The oven was already fired up, and I had promised some people a special meal. I couldn't just come home with a fish story, could I?

The bread from Genoa

I think we need a bigger oven.

Because no matter how much of this stuff I make it never is enough.

This stuff is called farinata, a baked good made of chickpea flour. Depending on who is baking it, farinata could resemble a flatbread (dry and crisp) or a focaccia (puffed out and moist) or even a pancake (more dense).

Unless you travel to places such as Italy or France, it is unlikely you have come across farinata. And depending on where you travel, it goes by different names. If you are in Sicily, for instance, and you happen upon a street vendor in Palermo selling slices of panelle from his cart, you have found yourself a fritter made of chickpeas. In Tuscany, look for cecina, and in France, socca.

It is in Italy's Liguria region where farinata is enjoyed. And, believe me, it is enjoyed quite a lot. The first time I tasted farinata ("made of flour" is basically all it means) was in Genoa, on the Ligurian Sea, credited as the place where the bread first appeared. Strolling by myself one afternoon (killing time while a certain companion was having a lie down, no doubt) I noticed a line of people outside a bakeshop and joined them without even knowing what I was waiting for. Fifteen minutes later and I was at the counter, feeling brilliant for having secured a place in line.

The Ligurians use two ingredients in their chickpea flatbread that you will not much find elsewhere: onion and rosemary. They add them into the batter, but I've come up with a slightly different method: I put a layer of onion in the pan, then pour in the batter and sprinkle the rosemary on top. This may not sound like such a big deal, but if you did a side-by-side comparison you'd see that there is a difference, largely because the sizzling-onion layer at the bottom introduces a somewhat sharper flavor.

The traditional method of making  farinata is in a wood-burning oven. As luck would have it, I happen to have one of those on the brick patio out back.

The full recipe is below, but here's the entry into the Inferno. I use a 14-inch, well-seasoned black iron pan, which does a swell job with this dish.

After about ten minutes, at 650 F or so, this one was done.

Slice it up like a pizza and you're ready to roll.

Perhaps you see now why I might require a larger oven?

Farinata

The recipe

2 cups chickpea flour (garbanzos and chickpeas are the same)

2 tsp salt 

2 tsp freshly ground black pepper 

2 cups lukewarm water

4 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 onion, sliced thin 

Fresh rosemary

Plenty of olive oil for the pan

Sift the flour and add in the salt, pepper and water

Whisk until smooth, then add the 4 tablespoons of olive oil (consistency should be thin, like heavy cream or half and half, no thicker; when in doubt err on the thinner side)

Cover and set aside (I let it sit a few hours at room temperature, but it's not necessary)

Preheat oven at 500 F (higher if you can; I do it at 600 or better in the wood oven), then preheat the pan long enough for it to come up to oven temperature

When the pan is hot pour in plenty of olive oil (enough to coat the bottom entirely and then some) and the onion and return to the oven

After a minute or so pour in the batter and sprinkle rosemary on top, then return to the oven

Cook until completely firm, then let cool a couple minutes before slicing

Serve warm

Being Stephen Lanzalotta

I am not a baker.

But, you may be aware, I have this cool new wood-burning oven in the backyard, and I just had to give it a try.

Thing is, the idea was to evaluate the oven's bread-making abilities, not mine. And so rather than bumbling through a dough recipe I'd be unfamiliar with, I headed over to the most gifted bread/pizza maker in town and procured a blob of his dough.

Note to local readers: It's Lanzalotta's, from the bakery out back of Micucci, the same dough used for the Sicilian Slab and the Luna bread.

Note to everybody else: Save the indignation over copping out on the dough prep for somebody who cares. I already know I'm a spaz with the yeasty, floury stuff. Why torture myself?

Soon as I laid eyes on the blob I knew I was in good hands. It smelled swell enough to eat, and felt like a wet cloud of puffy, doughy goodness.

Did I mention the new pizza peels I bought? The wood one's for sliding stuff into The Inferno.

And the metal one's for taking stuff out.

I laughed. I cried.

Then I ate the whole freaking thing.