Tag Archives: capers

Ensalada de Pulpo con tomates ahumados (Octopus Salad with smoked tomatoes)

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The variety of textures is pleasing on the tongue, and the variety of ingredients ensures that each bite will be slightly different from the one on either side. I think of this as a summer salad, but even though I’m making it in mid-September, summer is still in full swing in Los Angeles (save for the ever-shortening daylight hours).

INGREDIENTS

1.33 lbs / 600 g octopus, cooked and chopped
1 medium bunch fresh parsley, chopped (leaves only — well, mostly)
2 stalks celery, minced
1 orange, zested (zest only)
1 bottle (12 oz. / 340 g) marinated red peppers, diced
1/2 red onion, quartered, sliced thin, and macerated
2 tbsp / 20 g bottled capers, drained
2 dozen smoked and roasted cherry tomatoes, optional
vinaigrette dressing to taste
coarse or flaked sea salt to taste for finishing

DIRECTIONS

I bought my octopus already cooked, but if you don’t have a store that carries such, cooking octopus is pretty easy (cooking it well, however, is perhaps a little more difficult).

[I will be posting a technique for cleaning and cooking octopus in the Instant Pot® in the next week or 10 days. ]

Most of the work here is cleaning, chopping, and mixing. If you have a Microplane zester, it will make short work of the orange. You can substitute lime, lemon, or grapefruit zest if an orange isn’t handy, but I think orange suits it best.

Macerating the onion entails soaking it in red wine vinegar (or plain old white vinegar if you must) and a pinch of salt for about an hour. During that time, the purple/red of the onion will lighten considerably, and the onion itself will lose some (but not all) of its bite. After the hour is up, you can drain and rinse the onion before adding it to the salad. [You can dress the salad while the onion is macerating; it’s better when the dressing has had a little chance to mingle and be absorbed.]

As for the vinaigrette, I went super simple: 1 part red wine vinegar to 3 parts olive oil, and a teaspoon / 2.5 gm of ground black pepper. I didn’t want to get too fancy, because I didn’t want to overwhelm our cephalopod friend. That said, since there are so few ingredients in the dressing, I made sure to use a really good olive oil. If I’d had access to the appropriate Gegenbauer vinegar, I would have used that, but my remaining sour cherry vinegar wasn’t right for this recipe.

I happened to have roasted and smoked cherry tomatoes taking up space in the fridge, and they were a welcome addition, but by no means crucial. You could use regular cherry or grape tomatoes, or none at all.

Pop the whole lot in the chill chest and refrigerate for at least an hour before serving. This will make an opening salad for 6-8, but the bride and I made it our main course, and polished off about 2/3 of it. We’ll finish up the rest tomorrow because, well, seafood.

And as for summer, I’m gonna hang on to it until reality intrudes, and I have to trade my rosé for a single malt, and my light-filled salads for soup.

 

 

 

 

Summer Vegan Bean Salad I

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Bless you, Steve Sando.

Summertime, and the livin’ is… damn sticky, for the nonce, in Southern California. And there’s another heat wave coming. The last thing I want to do is to, say, sit over a pot of saffron risotto for an hour. I’d like something cool, and refreshing, and clean, and if I were able to subsist on gin and tonic or Croma Vera Albariño, well, I’d probably do that. My doctor might suggest some other course; I bet she’d be just fine with this one.

The first trick to any bean salad is — duh — great beans. I’ve long extolled the virtues of Rancho Gordo’s heirloom beans, and that’s where I started. The bride and I are particularly fond of their Royal Corona beans, which are kin to the Gigandes plaki, often spelled as yigandes, used in the great Greek meze served under an expansive canopy of tomato sauce and often accompanied by Feta cheese and bread. Rancho Gordo founder Sando is something of a bean whisperer, and cultivates heirloom beans all over the world, working with local farmers at fair prices. He is a hero, full stop.

The second trick to a good bean salad is a balance of flavours and textures. No one wants a limp bean any more than they want a wet noodle — and I mean that literally and figuratively. When I knew I would be building off a base of Royal Corona beans, I compiled a culinary dance card of prospective partners, seen below. Since this is a really adaptable bean, I knew I could go off in several directions, but not all at once. So: I decided to make it Vegan. I knew sun-dried tomatoes and marinated red bell peppers would be part of it for colour and taste and texture. Then it was a matter of filling in gaps. Celery for crunch. Capers for salt and tang. Slivered almonds for more crunch. Macerated red onion for a little assertiveness, but not too much, hence the maceration. Scallions and parsley for herbaceousness and colour. Fresh thyme for extra aromatics. There were some herbs and oil in the sun-dried tomatoes, and I decided to use them rather than rinse them off, and finish off the salad dressing as needed.

NOT “5 Livered Almonds.” The pen was malfunctioning.

This is truly a salad that can be assembled by an elementary schooler, as soon as she can be trusted with a knife (and has the upper body strength to open vacuum-packed bottles, or can inveigle someone to do it for her).

Macerating the onion in this case consists of dicing it and dropping it in a bowl with enough water to cover it, dumping in a glug — that’s a technical term — of some sort of vinegar, and about .5 cup / 170 g of sugar, then stirring it up and setting it into the fridge for an hour or so, to blunt the onion’s sharpness. It’s not quite a quick pickle, but it does temper its aggressiveness.

As for the beans, I made them in my Instant Pot®. Rinsed them, covered them with water, and set the pressure on high for 25 minutes with a natural release. You can soak them overnight if you wish, and cook them in a trad soup pot (I do this in winter, just for the atmosphere), but I was shooting for fast results. I drained the cooked beans and rinsed them with cold tap water, then dumped them in with the already macerating onion to cool them down some more. Kilotonnes of options here, feel free to follow your path.

Give it a bit to mingle flavours, and you may or may not want to top it with a vinaigrette. As it turned out for me, just a few drops of great old Balsamic vinegar and a sprinkling of black sea salt flakes (the flakes were black due to charcoal; they weren’t from the Black Sea) finished it off nicely, even on the second day.

Summer Vegan Bean Salad I
Serves 6-8 as a main course, with extras

INGREDIENTS
1 lb. / 454 g dried Rancho Gordo Royal Corona Beans, hydrated and cooked
24 oz. / 680 g (2 bottles, 12 oz./340 g each) marinated red peppers, drained
25-30 capers
3 large stalks celery, diced
1 red onion, diced and macerated (see note above)
1 bunch scallions (10-12), sliced
1 cup / 60 g chopped fresh parsley
1 tbsp / 2.4 g fresh thyme, finely minced
16 oz. / 454 g julienned sun-dried tomatoes in oil (using the oil)
.75 cup / 85 g slivered almonds

Next go, we may find room for some of those other ingredients on the dance card, plus cucumber, jicama, nopalito, or something else!

Incidentally, if you’re not wedded to the Vegan thing, bacon & bleu cheese, prosciutto & Parmesan, or even chicken & chevre could be welcome additions.

One final and sad note: As I was writing this, I learned that the Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer Jonathan Gold died. He was as much a part of this city’s cultural life as Jim Murray or Jack Smith; he was the culinary literary equivalent for this city of the likes of Mike Royko or Studs Terkel or Herb Caen. He is simply irreplaceable, and his passing at 57 is too soon by decades. I cannot begin to imagine how much our lives will be impoverished by his absence.

http://www.latimes.com/food/jonathan-gold/